Longtusk Read online

THE FIREHEADS STAYED CLOSE to the caves for several days. Crocus sent patrols to the north, east and west, seeking Dreamers. They wished to be sure this land they coveted was cleansed of their ancient cousins before they brought any more of their own kind north.

  Lemming became very ill. His wound turned swollen and shiny. The Shaman, who administered medicine to the Fireheads, applied hot cloths in an effort to draw out the poison. But the wound festered badly.

  At last the bulk of the column formed up for the long journey back to the settlement. They left behind three hunters and one of the mastodonts. The captive Dreamers had to walk behind the mastodonts, their paws bound and tied to a mastodont's tail.

  The hunters were heavily armed, but there had been no sign of more Dreamers since that first encounter. Perhaps, like the mammoths, the Dreamers had learned that the Fireheads could not be fought: the only recourse was flight, leaving them to take whatever they wanted.

  "Since you refused to kill the Dreamer buck," growled Thunder as they walked, "the Shaman has declared you untrustworthy."

  "He has always hated me," said Longtusk indifferently.

  "Yes," said Thunder. "He is jealous of your closeness to Crocus. And that jealousy may yet cause you great harm, Longtusk. I think you will have to prove your loyalty and trustworthiness. The Shaman is demonstrating, even now, what he does to his enemies."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Lemming. The Shaman is letting him rot. His wound has festered and turned green, like the rest of his foreleg and shoulder. That is his way. The Shaman does not kill; he lets his enemies destroy themselves. Still, they die."

  "But why?"

  Thunder snorted. "Because Lemming is a favorite of Crocus's — and so he is an obstacle to the Shaman. And any such obstacle is, simply, to be removed, as the Fireheads remove the Dreamers from the land they covet. The Fireheads are vicious, calculating predators," the old mastodont said. "Never forget that. The wolf's first bite is his responsibility. His second is yours... Quiet."

  All the mastodonts stopped dead and fell silent. The Fireheads stared at them, puzzled.

  "A contact rumble," Walks With Thunder said at last. "From the settlement."

  Longtusk strained to hear the fat, heavy sound waves pulsing through the very rocks of the Earth, a chthonic sound that resonated in his chest and the spaces in his skull.

  "The calf," Thunder said. "The Cows have sung the birth chorus. Longtusk — Neck Like Spruce has dropped her calf."

  Longtusk felt his heart hammer. "And? Is it healthy?"

  "...I don't think so. And Spruce—"

  Longtusk, distressed, trumpeted his terror. "I'm so far away! So far!"

  Thunder tried to comfort him. "If you were there, what could you do? This is a time for the Cows, Longtusk. Neck Like Spruce has her sisters and mother. And the keepers know what to do."

  "The best keeper is Lemming, and he is here, with us, bleeding in the dirt! Oh, Thunder, you were right. A mammoth should not mate a mastodont. We are too different — the mixed blood — like Fireheads and Dreamers."

  "Any calf of yours will be strong, Longtusk. A fighter. And Neck Like Spruce is a tough nut herself. They'll come through. You'll see."

  But Longtusk refused to be comforted.

  Lemming was dead before they reached the settlement. His body, stinking with corruption, was buried under a heap of stones by a river.

  And when they arrived at the settlement, Longtusk learned he was alone once more.

  Neck Like Spruce had not survived the rigors of her birth. The calf, an impossible, attenuated mix of mammoth and mastodont, had not lasted long without his mother's milk.

  The Remembering of mother and calf was a wash of sound and smell and touch, as if the world had dissolved around Longtusk.

  When he came out of his grief, though, he felt cleansed.

  He had lost a Family before, after all. If it was his destiny to be alone, then so be it. He would be strong and independent, yielding to none.

  He allowed Crocus to ride him. But she sensed his change. Her affection for him dried, like a glacial river in winter.

  Thus it went for the rest of that summer, and the winter thereafter.

  7

  The Test

  IN THE SPRING, SEEKING TO FEED the growing population of the settlement, the Fireheads organized a huge hunting drive.

  It took some days' preparation.

  Trackers spotted a herd of horses on the steppe. Taking pains not to disturb the animals at their placid grazing, they erected drive lines, rows of cairns made of stone and bone fragments. The mastodonts were used to carry the raw materials for these lines, spanning distances it took a day to cross. The cairns were topped by torches of brush soaked in fat.

  Then came the drive.

  As the horses grazed their way quietly across the steppe, still oblivious of danger, the hunters ran along the drive lines, lighting the torches. The mastodonts waited, in growing anticipation. It fell to Longtusk to keep the others in order as they scented the horses' peculiar, pungent stink, heard the light clopping of their hooves and their high whinnying.

  The horses drifted into view.

  Like other steppe creatures, the horses were well adapted to the cold. They were short and squat. Their bellies were coated with light hair, while their backs sprouted long, thick fur that they shed in the summer, and the two kinds of hair met in a jagged line along each beast's flank. Long manes draped over their necks and eyes, and their tails dangled to the ground.

  The horses could look graceful, Longtusk supposed, and they showed some skill at using their hooves to dig out fodder even from the deepest snow. But they were foolish creatures and would panic quickly, and so were easily hunted en masse.

  At last the order came: "Agit!"

  Longtusk raised his trunk and trumpeted loudly. The mastodonts charged, roaring and trumpeting, with tusks flashing and trunks raised.

  The horses — confused, neighing — stampeded away from the awesome sight. But here came Firehead hunters, whirling noise-makers and yelling, running at the horses from either side.

  All of this was designed to make the empty-headed horses run the way the hunters wanted them to go.

  The horses, panicking, jostling, soon found themselves in a narrowing channel marked out by the cairns of stone. If they tried to break out of the drive lines they were met by noise-makers, spear thrusts or boomerang strikes.

  The drive ended at a sharp-walled ridge, hidden from the horses by a crude blind of dry bush. The lead horses crashed through the flimsy blind and tumbled into the rocky defile. They screamed as they fell to earth, their limbs snapped and ribs crushed. Others, following, shied back, whinnying in panic. But the pressure of their fellows, pushing from behind, drove them, too, over the edge.

  So, impelled by their own flight, the horses tumbled to their deaths, the herd dripping into the defile like some overflowing viscous liquid.

  When the hunters decided they had culled enough, they ordered the mastodonts back, letting the depleted herd scatter and flee to safety. Then the hunters stalked among their victims, many of them still screaming and struggling to rise, and they speared hearts and slit throats.

  Later would come the hard work of butchery, and the mastodonts would be employed to carry meat and hide back to the settlement. It would be hard, dull work, and the stink of the meat was repulsive to the mastodonts' finely tuned senses. But they did it anyhow — as did Longtusk, who always bore more than his share.

  AFTER THE SUCCESSFUL DRIVE, the Fireheads celebrated, and the mastodonts were allowed a few days to rest and recover.

  But Longtusk noticed the Shaman, Smokehat, spending much time at the stockade, arguing with the keepers and jabbing his small fingers toward Longtusk.

  Walks With Thunder came to him. Thunder walked stiffly now, for arthritis was plaguing his joints.

  Longtusk said, "They seem to be planning another hunt."

  "No, not a hunt."

  "Then what?"
/>   "Something simpler. More brutal... Something that will be difficult for you, Longtusk. The keepers are debating whether you should be allowed to lead this expedition. But the Shaman insists you go."

  "You still read them well."

  "Better than I like. Longtusk, this is it. The test. The trial the Shaman has been concocting for you for a long time — at least since that incident when you spared the life of the Dreamer."

  "I do not care for the Shaman, and I do not fear him," said Longtusk coldly.

  "Be careful, Longtusk," Thunder quoted the Cycle. "The art of traveling is to pick the least dangerous path."

  Longtusk growled and turned away. "The Cycle has nothing to teach me. This is my place now. I am a creature of the Fireheads — nothing more. Isn't that what you always counseled me to become?"

  Thunder was aghast. "Longtusk, you are part of the Cycle. We all are. Forty million years—"

  But Longtusk, the perennial outsider, had spent the long winter since the death of Neck Like Spruce and her calf building his solitary strength. "Not me," he said. "Not any more."

  Thunder sniffed the air sadly. "Oh, Longtusk, has your life been so hard that you care nothing for who you are?"

  "Hard enough, old friend, that the Shaman with all his machinations can do nothing to hurt me. Not in my heart."

  "I hope that's true," said Thunder. "For it is a great test that lies ahead of you, little grazer. A great test indeed..."

  A FEW DAYS LATER the keepers assembled the mastodonts for the expedition. Longtusk accepted pack gear on his back, and took his customary place at the head of the column of mastodonts.

  The party left the settlement, heading north. Though Crocus still sometimes participated in the drives and other expeditions, this time she was absent, and the expedition was commanded by the Shaman.

  Though they followed a well-marked trail that cut across the steppe, showing this was a heavily traveled route, Longtusk had never come this way before. He did not yet know the destination or purpose of the expedition — but, he told himself, he did not need to know. His role was to work, not to understand.

  The Dreamer Willow, enslaved by the Fireheads, was compelled to make the journey too. Willow's clothing was dirty and in sore need of repair, and his broad back was bent under an immense load of dried food and weapons for the hunters. The pace was easy, for the mastodonts could not sustain a high speed for long, but even so the Dreamer struggled. It was obvious his stocky frame was not designed for long journeys — unlike the taller, more supple Fireheads, whose whip-thin legs covered the steppe with grace and ease.

  Over the year since his capture Willow had grown increasingly wretched. During the winter, the female Dreamer taken with him had died of an illness the Fireheads had been unable, or unwilling, to treat. Willow was not like the Fireheads. He had grown up in a society that had known no significant change for generations, a place where the most important things in all the world were the faces of his Family around him, where strangers and the unknown were mere blurs, at the edge of consciousness. Now, alone, he was immersed in strangeness, in constant change, and he seemed constantly on the edge of bewilderment and terror, utterly unable to comprehend the Firehead world around him.

  It was said that no matter how far the Fireheads roamed they had not come across another of his kind. Longtusk supposed that just as the mammoths had been scattered and driven north by the Firehead expansion, so had the Dreamers; perhaps there were few of them left alive, anywhere in the world.

  Longtusk could not release Willow from his mobile prison of toil and incomprehension. But he sensed that his own presence, a familiar, massive figure, offered Willow some comfort in his loneliness. And now, out of sight of the keepers, he let Willow rest his pack against his own broad flank and hang onto his belly hairs for support.

  As the days wore away, and they drove steadily northward, the nature of the land began to change.

  The air became chill, and the winds grew persistent and strong. Sometimes the wind flowed from west to east, and Walks With Thunder told Longtusk that such immense air currents could circle the planet, right around the fringe of the great northern icecaps.

  And sometimes the wind came from the north, driving grit and ice into their faces, and that was the most difficult of all, for this was a katabatic wind: air that had lain over the ice, made cold and dry and heavy, so that it spilled like water off the ice and over the lower lands below.

  They reached land recently exposed by the retreating ice. The ice had scoured away the softer soil down to bedrock, and it was a place of moraines of sand and gravel, rock smashed to fragments by the great weight of ice that had once lain here. There was little life — a few tussocks of grass, isolated trees, some lichen — struggling to survive in patches of soil, wind-blown from the warmer climes to the south.

  The mastodonts became uneasy, for unlike the Fireheads they could hear the sounds of the icepack: the crack of new crevasses, the thin rattle of glacial run-off rivers and streams, the deep grind of the glaciers as they tore slowly through the rock. To the mastodonts, the icepack was an immense chill monster, half alive, spanning the world — and now very close.

  Longtusk knew they could not stay long in this blighted land; whatever the Fireheads sought here must be a treasure indeed.

  And it was as night began to fall on this wind-blasted, frozen desert that Longtusk came upon the corpse.

  At first he could see only a hulked form, motionless, half covered by drifting dirt. Condors wheeled above, black stripes against the silvery twilight.

  A hyena was working at the corpse's belly. It snarled at the mastodonts, but fled when a hunter hurled a boomerang.

  Walks With Thunder was beside Longtusk. "Be strong, now..."

  THE MASTODONTS AND HUNTERS GATHERED around the huge, fallen form, awed by this immense slab of death.

  It — she — was a female. She had slumped down on her belly, her legs splayed and her trunk curled on the ground before her. She was gaunt, her bones showing through her flesh at pelvis and shoulders, and her hair had come loose in great chunks, exposing dried, wrinkled skin beneath.

  It was clear she was not long dead. She might have been sleeping.

  But her eye sockets were bloody pits, pecked clean by the birds. Her small ears were mangled stumps. And Longtusk could see the marks of hyena teeth in the soft flesh of her trunk.

  "She was pregnant," Walks With Thunder said softly. "See her swollen belly? The calf must have died within her. But she was starving, Longtusk. Her dugs are flaccid and thin. She would have had little milk to give her calf. In the end she simply ran out of strength. They say it is peaceful to go to the aurora that way..."

  Longtusk stood stock still, stunned. He had seen no woolly mammoth since his separation from his Family — nothing but imperfect Firehead images of himself.

  Nothing until this.

  "We should Remember her," he said thickly.

  Thunder rumbled harshly, "I thought you were the one who rejected the Cycle... Never mind. Did you know her?"

  "She is old and dead. I can't recall, Thunder!"

  The Fireheads were closing on the fallen mammoth with their stone axes and knives. Walks With Thunder wrapped his trunk around Longtusk's and pulled him backward.

  The Shaman's hard eyes were fixed on Longtusk, calculating, as the Fireheads butchered the mammoth.

  First they wrapped ropes around her legs. Then, chanting in unison and with the help of mastodont muscles, they pulled her on her back. Longtusk heard the crackle of breaking bones as her limp mass settled.

  With brisk, efficient motions, a hunter slit open her belly, reached into the cavity and hauled out guts — long tangled coils, black and faintly steaming — and dumped them on the ground. There was a stink of blood and spoiled food and rot. But there were no flies, for few insects prospered in this cold desert.

  Then the hunters pulled out a flaccid sac that bulged, heavy. It was the calf, Longtusk realized. Mercifully the hunte
rs put that to one side.

  The hunters cracked open her rib cage, climbed inside the body, and began to haul out more bloody organs, the heart and liver and kidneys, black lumps marbled with greasy fat.

  Eviscerated, the Cow seemed to slump, hollowed.

  When she was emptied, the butchers cut great slits in the Cow's skin and began to drag it off her carcass. Where the tough hide failed to rip away easily, they used knives to cut through connective tissue to separate it from the pink flesh beneath. They chopped the separated skin into manageable slices and piled it roughly.

  Then, with their axes, they began to cut away the meat from the mammoth's bones. They started with the hindquarters, making fast and powerful cuts above the knee and up the muscle masses. Then they dug bone hooks into the meat and hauled it away, exposing white, bloody bone. The bone attachments were cut through quickly, and the bones separated.

  When one side of the Cow had been stripped, the ropes were attached again and the carcass turned over, to expose the other side.

  The butchers were skilled and accurate, rarely cutting into the underlying bone, and the meat fell easily from the bones, leaving little behind. They assembled the meat into one immense pile, and extracted the huge bones for another heap.

  When they were done the night was well advanced, and the Cow had been reduced to silhouetted piles of flesh and flensed bones, stinking of blood and decay.

  The Fireheads built a fire and threw on some of the meat until the air was full of its stink. With every expression of relish they chewed slices of fat, bloody liver, heart and tongue. Even Willow, sitting alone at the fringe of the fire's circle of light, chewed noisily on the dark meat.

  Then the hunters cracked open charred and heated bones and sucked hot, savory marrow from the latticework of hollow bone within.

  And at last Longtusk understood.

  "I have seen them devour the contents of such bones at the settlement."

  "Yes," said Walks With Thunder. "They were mammoth bones, Longtusk. Fireheads rarely hunt mammoths. You are a big, dangerous beast, grazer, and the hunters' reward, if their lives are spared, is more meat than they can carry. That's why they prefer the smaller animals for food.