Icebones tm-3 Page 12

  But still, though the Gouge was crowded with life compared to the upper plains from which they had descended, on the higher ground they passed lakes that had dried up, leaving only bowls of cracked mud. Even here, in this strange walled world, the tide of life was inexorably receding.

  Icebones inspected one such mud bowl gloomily. It was churned by many hoof marks, and littered with bits of bone, cracked and scored by the teeth and beaks of scavengers. When the water had vanished, animals, dying of thirst, had congregated here to die — and had then provided easy meat for the predators. She tried to imagine the scenes here as adult jostled with adult, fighting for water, maddened by thirst, and the young and old and weak were pushed aside. And she wondered if any of these bits of well-chewed bone had once belonged to mammoths.

  She kept these reflections to herself — but she sensed from Autumn’s reflective silence that the older Cow at least understood this.

  But meanwhile the walking was steady, the weather on the Gouge floor calm, the grazing good. The mammoths gradually became more confident, their bellies filling, and the steady rhythms of life banished their lingering grief over the loss of Shoot.

  The calf helped, of course.

  His scrawny little body filled out, becoming almost burly. His newborn’s hair was growing out, his underfur thicker, his coarser overfur longer. But his hair was still a bright pink-brown, much lighter than that of adult mammoths. He would gallop on stiff legs, leaving an uneven set of clumsy tracks — only to come to a sudden halt, trunk raised to sniff the air, his low forehead wrinkled with concentration. Or he would scoop up loose grass, suck, sniff, blow out dust, and run about as if trying to explore every detail of the ground they crossed. He picked dust and earth and insects from his thickening coat, and with wide-eyed curiosity he would pop each item into his mouth, more often than not spitting it out again.

  He was still dependent on his mother’s milk, but Icebones made sure he was happy to be cared for by the others. Spiral, in particular, relished looking after him — so much so, in fact, that Icebones sometimes wondered if she was growing jealous that he wasn’t her own.

  Though Icebones never spoke it out loud, all of this was a preparation against the dire possibility that Woodsmoke might lose his mother. No mammoth was more vulnerable than a calf without a mother.

  But for now, Woodsmoke was secure and happy, and busy with his exploration of the intriguing world in which he found himself.

  One day the calf began to play with a lemming that had, unwisely, not retreated to its burrow as the mammoths’ heavy footfalls approached.

  "That lemming is not happy," commented Thunder.

  Icebones recalled the Cycle. "No animal likes to be disturbed."

  Thunder rumbled deeply. "You often quote your Cycle. But how do you know the Cycle is true?"

  She noticed he was walking stiffly. He held his head high. And his legs were stiff, as if sore. Everything about him seemed larger than usual. And, she thought, there was an odd smell about him: something sweet, pervasive, sharp.

  He went on, "You didn’t live in the times of long ago when herds of mammoths darkened the steppe. You never met Longtusk or Ganesha or Kilukpuk or any of the rest. Perhaps it is all the murmurings of calves, or foolish old Bulls."

  She bridled at that. No mammoth should speak so disrespectfully of the Cycle, the heart of mammoth culture. But then, she reminded herself, Thunder had been brought up in ignorance. It wasn’t his fault, and it was her role to put that right.

  "Thunder, you must understand that every mammoth alive today is descended from survivors: mammoths who mastered the world well enough to reach adulthood and raise healthy calves, who grew up in their turn. The Cycle is the wisdom of that great chain of survivors, accumulated over more generations than there are stars in the sky."

  "But this is a different place. You say that yourself. Perhaps no mammoths lived here before the Lost brought us. What use is the Cycle to us?"

  "While we live, we must not be afraid to add to the Cycle. Ganesha taught us that, and Longtusk. The Cycle will never be complete. Not while mammoths live and learn. There is completeness only in extinction…"

  But she felt that such comfort, embedded in the Cycle itself, was thin.

  And perhaps Thunder was right.

  This Sky Steppe was itself a part of the Cycle. But whereas the rest of the Cycle was a memory of the past, the Sky Steppe had always been a vision of the future: a glittering, succulent promise of days to come.

  Sometimes, when this small red world seemed so strange, she wondered if perhaps nothing around her was real. Maybe she was living in a moment embedded in the vision of a mammoth long dead — Kilukpuk herself, perhaps. And in that case she was part of that dream too. She was living thoughts, just a concoction of memories and dreams, with no more life than the reconstructed bones of the mammoth on the Fire Mountain.

  But now Woodsmoke brayed and yelled, "I am a great Bull. I will mate you all, you Cows!" His thin cries and milky scent, and the iron stink of the dust he kicked up, were sharp intrusions of reality into her maundering.

  The calf started dancing in a tight circle around the lemming. The little rodent sat as if frozen, clearly wishing this huge monster would go away. Then Woodsmoke made a mock charge, head lowered. The lemming, snapping out of its trance, turned tail and shot across the ground, a muddy brown blur, until it reached a hole and disappeared.

  Woodsmoke’s mother cuffed him affectionately and tucked him under her belly, where the great Bull was soon seeking out his mother’s milk.

  Thunder growled. "That little scrap is mocking me."

  "He is playing at what he will become."

  "But he was threatening a lemming."

  "He has to start somewhere. If there were other calves here, he would wrestle with them and stage little tusk-clashes. It is all part of his preparation for the battles he must wage as an adult."

  Thunder growled again. "Perhaps. But when that wretched calf approaches me, reaching up with his grass-blade trunk to wrestle, I want to throw him out of the Gouge…"

  Suspicious now, she sniffed at the ground over which Thunder had walked, smelling his urine, which was hissing slightly as it settled into the red dust. And she probed at the thick hair before his ears with her trunk fingers. She found a dark, sticky liquid trickling from his temporal gland.

  "Thunder — you are in musth!"

  He rumbled deeply. It was the musth call, she realized. Without understanding it he was calling to oestrus Cows, if any had been here to listen. "I thought I was ill."

  "Not ill." She stroked the temporal glands on both sides of his head. They were swollen. "You are sore here." Gently she lifted his trunk and had him coil it so it rested on its tusks. "That will relieve the pressure on one side of your face at least."

  "Icebones, what is happening to me? I roam around this Gouge listening, but I don’t know what for. The Cows keep their distance from me — even you.

  It was true, she realized. She had responded to his calls without thinking. She said carefully, "Musth means that you are ready to mate. Your smell, and the rumbles you make, announce your readiness to any receptive Cows. The aggression you feel is meant to be turned on other Bulls, for Bulls must always fight to prove they are fit to sire calves. But here there are no Bulls for you to fight — none save Woodsmoke, and you have shown the correct restraint."

  He growled, "But there are Cows."

  "None of us is in oestrus, Thunder," she said gently. "You will learn to tell that from the smell of our urine. None of us is ready."

  She felt his trunk probe at her belly. "Not even you?"

  "Not even me, Thunder. I am sorry." Again she was struck by the fact that she had still not come into oestrus, had felt not so much as a single twinge of that great inner warmth in all the time she had been here. "Don’t worry. In a few days this will pass and you will feel normal again."

  He grunted. "I hope so."

  In fact she suspected that even
if one of the Cows were in oestrus, right here and right now, still Thunder would fail to find himself a mate. He was clearly young and immature, and no Cow would willingly accept a mating with such a Bull. If there were other Bulls here he wouldn’t even get a chance, of course. For his first few musth seasons Thunder would simply be overpowered by the older, mature Bulls.

  He pulled away, grumbling his disappointment. He raised his tusks into the shining sunlit air, and a swarm of insects, rising from a muddy pond, buzzed around his head, glowing with light. "I feel as if my belly will burst like an overripe fruit. Why, if she were here before me now, I would mate with old Kilukpuk herself—"

  "Who speaks of Kilukpuk?"

  Thunder brayed, startled, and stopped dead. The voice — like a mammoth’s, but shallow and indistinct — had seemed to come from the reaches of the pond ahead of them.

  "What is it?" Thunder asked softly. "Can there be mammoths here?"

  Icebones grunted. "What kind of mammoth lives in the middle of a pond?"

  "Kilukpuk, Kilukpuk… How is it I know that name?"

  And a trunk poked up out of the water, and two wide nostrils twitched. It was short, hairless, stubby, but nevertheless indubitably a trunk.

  Icebones stepped forward. The mud squeezed between her toes, unpleasantly thick, cold and moist. "I am Icebones, daughter of Silverhair. If you are mammoth, show yourself."

  A head broke above the surface of the water. Icebones saw a smooth brow with two small eyes set on top, peering at her. "Mammoth? I never heard of such things. Bones-Of-Ice? What kind of name is that?" The creature sniffed loudly. "Don’t drop your dung in my pond."

  Thunder growled, "If you don’t show yourself I will come in there and drag you out. Before I fill up your pond with my dung."

  Thunder’s musth-fueled aggression was out of place, Icebones thought. But it seemed to do the trick.

  There was a loud, indignant gurgle. With a powerful heave, a squat body broke through the languidly rippling water.

  It stood out of the water on four stubby legs. It had powerful shoulders and rump, and a long skull topped by those small, glittering eyes. It wasn’t quite hairless, for fine downy hairs lay plastered over its skin, smoothed back like the scales of a fish. But the whole body was so heavily coated in crimson-brown mud that it was hard to see anything at all.

  It was like no mammoth Icebones had ever seen. And yet it had a trunk, and even two small tusks that protruded from its mouth, curling slightly and pointing downward. And it gazed at Icebones with frank curiosity, its stubby trunk raised.

  More of the hog-like creatures came drifting through the water. They looked like floating logs, Icebones thought, though thick bubbles showed where they belched or farted.

  Meanwhile the other mammoths gathered around Icebones and Thunder — all save the calf. Woodsmoke, quickly bored, had splashed into the mud at the fringe of the pond and was digging out lumps of it with his tusks.

  Spiral asked, "What is it?"

  The creature in the pond said, "It is Chaser-Of-Frogs. I am the Mother of the Family that lives here."

  Evidently, Icebones thought dryly, her dignity was easily hurt. "Mother? You are a Matriarch?"

  Chaser-Of-Frogs eyed Icebones suspiciously. "I do not know you, Bones-Of-Ice. Do you come from the Pond of Evening?"

  She must mean one of the lakes to the west of here, Icebones thought. She said, "I come from a place far from here, which—"

  Chaser-Of-Frogs grunted and buried her snout-like trunk in pond-bottom mud. "Always making trouble, that lot from Evening. Even though my own daughter mated with one of them. When you go back you can tell them that Chaser-Of-Frogs said—"

  Thunder growled and stepped forward. "Listen to her, you floating fool. We come from no pond. We are not like you."

  "And yet we are," Icebones said, drawn to the pond’s edge, trunk raised. She could smell fetid mud, laced with thin dung. "You have tusks and a trunk. You are my Cousin."

  "Cousin?" The glittering eyes of the not-mammoth stared back at her, curious in their own way. "Tell me of Kilukpuk. I know that name… and yet I do not."

  "It is an old name," Icebones said. "Mammoths and their Cousins are born with it on their tongues." And Icebones spoke of Kilukpuk, and of Kilukpuk’s rivalry with her brother, Aglu, and of Kilukpuk’s calves, Hyros and Siros, who had squabbled and fought in their jealousy, of Kilukpuk’s favorite, Probos, and how Probos had become Matriarch of all the mammoths and their Cousins…

  Her own nascent Family clustered around her. The log-like bodies in the pond drifted close to the shallow muddy beach, tiny ears pricked, the silence broken only by occasional gulping farts that broke the surface of the water.

  "I have never heard such tales," mused Chaser-Of-Frogs. "But it is apt. I sink in the mud, as did Kilukpuk in her swamp. I browse on the plants that grow in the pond-bottom ooze, as she must have done. I am as she was." She seemed proud — but she was so caked in mud it was hard to tell.

  How strange, Icebones thought. Could it be that these Swamp-Mammoths really were ancient forms, remade for this new world? Perhaps they had been molded from mammoths, the way Woodsmoke was molding lumps of mud.

  Only the Lost would do such a thing, of course. And only the Lost knew why.

  "You mammoths," said Chaser-Of-Frogs now. "Tell me where you are going."

  "To the east," Thunder said promptly. "We are walking around the belly of the world. We are seeking a place we call the Footfall of Kilukpuk—"

  "You will not get far," Chaser-Of-Frogs said firmly. "Not unless you know your way through the Nest of the Lost."

  Thunder growled, "What Nest?"

  Chaser-Of-Frogs snorted, and bits of snot and mud flew into the air. "You’ve never even heard of it? Then you will soon be running like a calf for her mother’s teat." She sank into her mud, submerging save for the crest of her back and the tip of her trunk.

  Then she rose again lazily, as if having second thoughts. "I will show you. Tomorrow. It is in gratitude for the stories, which I enjoyed. Today I will rest and eat, making myself ready."

  Thunder said, "You fat log, you look as if you have spent your whole life resting and eating."

  Autumn slapped his forehead. "She will hear you."

  Chaser-Of-Frogs surfaced again. "Don’t forget. No dung in the pond. Those disease-ridden scoundrels from Evening are always playing that trick. I won’t have it, you hear?"

  "We won’t," said Icebones.

  Chaser-Of-Frogs slid beneath the dirty brown water and, with a final valedictory fart, swam away.

  4

  The Nest of the Lost

  The ground stank of night things: of roots, of dew, of worms, of the tiny reptiles and mammals that burrowed through it.

  All the mammoth found it difficult to settle. They were deeper into the Gouge than they were accustomed to. The air felt moist and sticky, and was full of the stink of murky pond water. The vegetation was too thick and wet for a mammoth’s gut, and soon all of their stomachs were growling in protest.

  Icebones could sense the deep wash of fat log-like bodies as the Swamp-Mammoths swam and rolled in their sticky water. Not a heartbeat went by without a fart or belch or muddy splash, or a grumble about a neighbor’s crowding or stealing food.

  And, as the light faded from the western sky, a new light rose in the east to take its place: a false dawn, Icebones thought, a glowing dome of dusty air, eerily yellow. It was the Nest of the Lost, of course, just as Chaser-Of-Frogs had warned.

  Autumn, Breeze and Thunder faced the yellow light, sniffing the air with suspicious raised trunks. It pleased Icebones to see that they were starting to find their true instincts, buried under generations of the Lost’s unwelcome attention.

  Not Spiral, though. She started trotting to and fro, lifting her head and raising her fine tusks so they shone in the unnatural light.

  As the true dawn approached, Icebones heard the pad of clumsy footsteps. It was Chaser-Of-Frogs.

  In
the pink-gray half-light the Swamp-Mammoth stood before them, her stubby trunk raised. Her barrel of a body was coated in mud that crackled with frost, her breath steamed around her face, and her broad feet left round damp marks where she passed. "Are you ready? Urgh. Your dung stinks."

  "The food here is bad for us," Autumn growled.

  "Just as well you’re leaving, then," Chaser-Of-Frogs said. "Go drop a little of that foul stuff in the Pond of Evening, will you? Hey! What’s this?"

  Woodsmoke had run around to Chaser-Of-Frogs’s side and was scrambling on her back. He was taller than she was. He already had his legs hooked over her spine, and he was pulling with his trunk at the sparse hair that grew there. "I am a Bull, strong and fierce. What are you? If you are a Cow I will mate with you."

  "Get him off! Get him off!" Chaser-Of-Frogs turned her head this way and that, trying to reach him, but her neck was too rigid, her trunk much too small.

  Autumn stalked forward and, with an imperious gesture, wrapped her trunk around the calf and lifted him up in the air.

  Woodsmoke’s little face peered out through a forest of trunk hair. "I want to mate with it!"

  Chaser-Of-Frogs growled and backed away. "Try it and I’ll kick you so hard you’ll finish up beyond the next pond, you little guano lump."

  "He’s only a calf," Breeze rumbled.

  "I know. I’ve had four of my own. Just keep him from being a calf around me."

  Icebones said gravely, "We saw the lights. The Nest of the Lost. We need your guidance, Chaser-Of-Frogs. Please."

  Chaser-Of-Frogs growled again, but evidently her dignity wasn’t too badly bruised. She sniffed the breeze. "Let’s go. We must keep up a good pace, for there’s nothing to eat in there. But keep this in mind. Whatever you see — there’s nothing to fear."

  And, without hesitation, she set off across the swampy ground to the east.

  Icebones, suppressing her own uneasiness, strode purposefully after her. She could hear the massive shuffle of the mammoths as they gathered in a loose line behind her.