Icebones Page 3

  Trying to ignore the strangeness, Icebones walked with exaggerated caution. If she must be called a Matriarch, she should fulfill the role. "The ash hides the rock's folds and crevices," she said. "You must be careful not to injure yourselves." She showed the others how to probe at the ground ahead with their trunks, feeling out hidden traps.

  But the Ragged One stalked alongside her, her posture stiff and mocking. "So you know all about ash. You know better than I do, after I have spent my whole life here on this Fire Mountain."

  "No," said Icebones evenly. "But I have seen how snow covers the ground. And the dangers are surely alike."

  The Ragged One growled. "There," she said. "There are dangers in this place you have never imagined."

  Icebones saw that a new river was making its way down the broad flank of the Mountain. It was a river of fire.

  Glowing red, it flowed stickily and slowly, like blood. It was crusted over by a dark brown scum that continually crumbled, broke and congealed again. Flames licked all along the length of the flow, and wispy yellow smoke coiled. In one place the flow cut through a frozen pond, and a vast cloud of yellow-white steam rose with a harsh hissing.

  Icebones could smell the burning stench of the molten rock river, feel its huge rumble as it churned its way down the slope, cutting through layers of ancient rock as if they were no more substantial than ice. "We were fortunate," she said softly. "If that rock river had chosen to flow a little more to the east—"

  "It would have overwhelmed our lava tube," said the Ragged One. "Yes. We would have been scorched, or buried alive, or crushed..."

  "It is a shame the rock flow is destroying the pool. We could have drunk there."

  The Ragged One snorted. "In your wisdom you will find us more water."

  Icebones, irritated, walked up the rocky slope. "Very well. Let's find water."

  Reluctantly the Ragged One followed.

  Icebones came to an area where the ash was a little less thick. She walked back and forth across the rock, stamping, scraping exposed outcrops with her tusks and slapping them with her trunk, listening hard.

  The young Bull approached, ungainly on his oddly elongated legs. "What are you doing?"

  Feeling like a foolish infant — she had to remind herself that this towering Bull was only a calf himself — she said, "I'm looking for water."

  "There is no water here."

  "Yes, there is. But it's deep underground. Can't you hear it?"

  Comically, he cocked his small ears. "No," he said.

  "Listen with your belly and feet and chest." She stamped again. "The ground here is hard and it rings well. And the water that flows deep makes the rock shudder..." To Icebones, the rumble of the deep water was a distinct noise under the frothy din of the surface world, like the far-off call of a thunderstorm, or the giant crack of a distant glacier calving an iceberg.

  The Bull raised his trunk, as if to smell the deep-buried water. He rammed his tusks against the hard, rippled rock, but they rebounded, and he yelped with pain.

  "We must find a place where the water comes closer to the surface." She walked down the hillside, pausing to stamp and listen, tracking the path of the underground river.

  The others followed, the Bull with eagerness, the rest with incomprehension or resentment, but all driven by their thirst.

  She came to a place where a vast pipe thrust out of the ground. It stalked away over the rocky slope on spindly legs, like some immense centipede. The pipe was as wide as three or four mammoths standing side by side, and its surface was slick and white, like a tusk.

  The pipe was obviously a creation of the Lost. But its purpose did not interest her — for she could hear water running through it.

  She began to probe at the ground just above the pipe. The rock was shattered here; underneath a surface layer of dust there was fine rubble. And, when she dug into this with her trunk, she could smell water.

  The Bull could smell it too. "Let me drink! Give me the water!"

  Icebones growled. "I am not your Lost keeper, here to nurse you. The water is here, but you must work for it." She trumpeted to the others. "Come, now. Watch what I do."

  She bent her head and cleared away surface debris with brisk swipes of her tusks. Then she stood square and began to dig her way into the rubble with her trunk.

  The Ragged One snorted skeptically, but the others crowded closer.

  Icebones soon grew tired, but she ignored her discomfort and kept digging.

  Perhaps half a trunk's length deep the rubble began to turn into sticky, half-dried mud, and she gratefully sucked out the first droplets of water.

  After that the others quickly settled to work around her. They grumbled and complained as they scraped their tusks or caught their sensitive trunk fingers on sharp rock fragments. But the scent of water lured them on, and soon their complaints turned to a murmur of mutual encouragement.

  Icebones could sense warmth rising from the ground here. Perhaps that had something to do with the rivers of rock which had gushed from this Mountain; perhaps that deep warmth had kept the underground water from freezing here.

  At last Icebones dug deep enough to find soil soaked to mud. She had to kneel on her front legs to reach. With her trunk tip she hollowed out a chamber deep beneath the ground. She let the hole fill with seeping water, which she sucked out in a great trunk load and emptied into her mouth. The water was hot, a little salty, and it fizzed oddly in her throat — but it was delicious.

  The others, working less expertly, were slower, but her success drove them on. At length they were all pumping out muddy, brownish water and filing their mouths.

  Working together at the rock face was the nearest this strange, fractured bunch had come to behaving like a Family, Icebones thought. She allowed herself to relish this moment of immersion: the shuffling of feet and the scrape of tusk on rock, the soft rustle of the mammoths' thick hair, and the myriad small sounds, farts and hums and squeals and rumbles, that emanated from the mammoths' immense torsos as they drank.

  WHEN SHE HAD DRUNK her fill, Icebones walked away from the others.

  The rock beneath her feet came in layers, she found, exploring it with her trunk: layers of red overlying gray, gray overlying blue, blue overlying black. Here and there this stratified rock was pocketed by craters, huge circular scars.

  Perhaps all of this vast Mountain was made up of layer after layer of hardened rock, vomited from the summit over many years.

  When she urinated, the rock and dust fizzed and hissed where her water splashed it. She sniffed at this new peculiarity, baffled and disturbed. The very dust was strange here.

  She found a steep-sided ridge and climbed it stiffly, the mild exertion making her gasp for air. The ash had drifted away from the top of the broad ridge, leaving hard exposed rock.

  Standing on the ridge, she was suspended between purple sky and a land that glowed red.

  The flank of the Fire Mountain swept away beneath her. The sun was setting behind her, already hidden by the Mountain — she was looking east, then — and the sky was a stark dome of bruised purple, showing a few stars at the zenith. The Mountain thrust out of the belly of this world, as if some monstrous planetary calf were struggling to be born. And, on the eastern horizon, she saw those other rocky cones, mountains almost as vast, their sunlit faces glowing red.

  There was a layer of clouds beneath her. The clouds were tall thunderheads, flat and smooth and black beneath, topped by huge pink-white mounds, and they sailed like icebergs on some invisible sea of thicker, moister air. I really am very high, she thought.

  Below the clouds, on the deeper land beneath, she saw swathes of pale green and gray: the mark of life, grasslands or steppe. Raising her trunk she thought she could smell water, far away, far below.

  We must go there, she thought, down to that plain. For we surely cannot stay here, on this barren slope.

  She could see the giant water-bearing pipe, at the roof of which the mammoths still dug for
water. When she climbed a little higher she saw that more pipes thrust out of the bulk of the Mountain and spread around it across the rocky land. They were thin lines that shone pink in the last of the sunlight.

  In a way this great structure was magnificent, she thought, the huge shining trunks stretching straight and far, farther than many mammoth trails. But she wondered if that was why this old Fire Mountain had come to life. The Lost were always thirsty for water. Perhaps, like a greedy mammoth who drains the ground beneath her feet, the Lost had sucked away too much of the water which had gathered here, disturbing the Mountain.

  Now the light was fading fast, and the immense shadow of the Fire Mountain stretched across the land. Soon she could hear calls, rising from the hidden depths of the landscape, drifting on the thin, cold air. They were clearly the voices of predators — wolves, perhaps, or cats — marking out their killing territories. Though the predators' calls made her tense and alert, there was something reassuring in the thought that she and her motley band of mammoths were not the only living things in this strange, cold world.

  As the light faded further, she heard more subtle sounds: the hiss of wind over mountains and forests and steppe, the deep, subtle murmur of an ocean, the groan of glaciers and the crackling of ice sheets, the murmur of liquid rock within the Fire Mountain, the deeper churning of this world's hot core. When she stamped her feet, she could hear washes of sound echoing back and forth through the deep foundations of the land.

  The sunset and the dawn were the times sound carried best. And so she listened, with every aspect of her being, her ears and belly and chest, to the deeper sounds, the songs of the world. And gradually she built up an image, in sounds and echoes, of the spinning rocky ball to which she clung.

  This was a small, cold world. It was made of rock, rock that was hard deep into its being — unlike that other world, the world of her birth, whose rocky skin was laid thin over a churning liquid body, like thin ice on a pond.

  But the cold here would suit mammoths, she thought. And the hardness of the rocks made the world's songs easy to hear.

  The world was round, like a ball of dung. But it was a misshapen ball. To the north it was flattened, as if a massive foot had stamped down there, cracking and compressing the rock across half the world. The giant pit made by that stamping was, she sensed, filled with water, a world-girdling ocean. The southern lands were higher, but they, too, had been struck a series of immense, damaging blows. One of those slamming impacts had been so powerful it had punched a great pit into the hide of the world — and the impact had caused a rebounding upthrust of rock here, in the lands beneath her feet. The huge Fire Mountain itself stood over that rock mound.

  This world was a small, swollen, battered place, she saw, born in unimaginable violence, bruised by ancient blows from which it had never healed.

  And the world was dying.

  She could hear water freezing over, or flowing into deep basins, or seeping into the ground. She could hear the crack of ice spreading over that vast northern ocean. Even the air was settling out. She could hear its moan as it pooled, cooling, like water running downhill, reaching at last the lowest places of all — like that immense punched-in depression on the far side of the world.

  The world was growing cold, and its air and water were shriveling away — and, she supposed, all life with them...

  And it was not the world where she had been born. The songs of this small world and the songs of that other place — massive, liquid, alive — were unmistakably different.

  But how could that be? How could there be a place here that was not there? It was beyond her imagination.

  And — why had she been brought here?

  She recalled the Island, her Family. It was as if she had been with them yesterday, listening to Silverhair's patient account of how, when she was no older than Icebones now, the Lost had found the Island and nearly killed them off, the last of all the mammoths. All her life, Silverhair had told Icebones she would one day be a Matriarch. And she had steadily coached her daughter in the wisdom of the mammoths, teaching her the songs of the Cycle, imparting a deep sense of blood and land...

  Yes, one day I will be a Matriarch, Icebones thought. I have always accepted my destiny. But not here. Not now. I am not ready!

  But, ready or not, what was she to do next?

  She sucked the thin, dry air through her trunk, felt its cold prickle in her lungs, smelled the lingering tang of ash. Alone, longing for the warmth of her Family, she began to sing: "I am Icebones. My Matriarch was Silverhair, my mother. And her Matriarch was Owlheart. And her Matriarch was Wolfnose..."

  She called with deep rumbles. She sensed a fluttering of skin over her forehead, the membranes stretched tight over the hollows in her skull that made her voice's deepest sounds. And she stamped, too, a rhythmic thumping that sent acoustic pulses out through the hard rocky ground.

  Icebones. Icebones...

  She gasped and turned around, trunk held high. But she was alone.

  Her name had come not through the air, but as deep sound through the hard rock of the ground.

  She stamped out, "I am Icebones, daughter of Silverhair. Who are you?"

  Long heartbeats later came a reply. I am strong and my tusks are powerful. More powerful than my brother's. Are you in oestrus? Are you with calf? Are you suckling?

  Icebones snorted. It was a Bull, then: intent only on rivalry with his fellows and on mating with any receptive Cow — just like all Bulls, who, some Cows would say, are calves all their lives.

  "I am not in oestrus. Where are you?"

  It is a cold place. By the shore of a round sea. There is little to eat. Snow falls. There are few of us. Predators stalk us.

  She raised her trunk and sniffed the air. She could smell only the rock, the thin, dry air and her own dung. There was no scent of Bull — and an adult Bull in musth, dribbling from his temple glands and trickling urine, emitted a powerful scent indeed. "You must be far away, very far."

  But my tusks are long and powerful, almost as long as my—

  His last word was indistinct.

  "And you have no need of a name?"

  Names? None of us have names.

  She snorted. "I will call you Boaster."

  The steppe is sparse. We walk far to graze. Once we were many, like daisies on the steppe. Now we are few.

  "We must find each other," she said immediately, rapping her message into the deep rock.

  A Family of Cows, with no adult Bulls, could not prosper: without Bulls to impregnate the Cows, it would be extinct within a generation. And likewise an isolated bachelor herd without Cows would soon die, unable to reproduce itself. It was a deeper layer of peril, she realized, lurking beyond the dangers of the fires that belched into the air.

  Yes. I am ready for you, Icebones. I have no need to wait for musth. But now his words were becoming indistinct. Perhaps he was walking over softer ground, or a storm on that northern ocean was making the rocks too noisy.... Follow the water, she caught.... Water and the thick warm air... the lowest place...

  And then he was gone, and she was alone again.

  THE LIGHT WAS EBBING out of the sky now. The sun had long vanished behind the Mountain, and an ocean of shadow was pooling at its base, obscuring those stretches of steppe and forest, turning them gray and lifeless. The stars were emerging through a great disc of blackness that spread down from the zenith toward the horizon, revealing a huge, clear sky.

  There was a presence beside her, a trunk pulling at hers. Eager for company, she clung to it gratefully. But she felt sparse, stiff hair on that trunk, and tasted bitterness.

  It was the Ragged One. "You must come back. The others want you."

  "Why?"

  "They want to Remember the old one. As you told them they should."

  Icebones told the Ragged One of the Bull she had spoken to.

  The Ragged One seemed to understand little. "The Bulls were brought here, to the Mountain, to us. And if one of
them was in musth, and one of us in oestrus, there would be a mating. That was all we needed to know about Bulls."

  "And you would sing the Song of Oestrus?"

  But the Ragged One knew nothing of that. "Once there were many of us. Many like you, many like me. The Lost did not mean to keep us forever. They were making the world, you see. They were covering it with oceans and steppe and forests. One day there would be room for us to roam, in Clans. But then the Sickness came..."

  She described a horrific illness among the mammoths. It would begin with blood in urine. Then would come waves of heat and cold, and growths that would sprout from mouth and feet and anus. Finally, after a suffusion of great pain, there would be death.

  "And if one caught it, all would fall." She turned to Icebones, growling. "I know you think we have been kept by the Lost, that we are like calves. But we heard the mammoths calling to each other, all over this quiet world, Icebones. We heard the cries of the carnivores too, as they broke through fences no longer maintained by the Lost. We heard their joy at the ease of the kills they made, and later their disappointment at how little meat remained.

  "And one by one those distant mammoth voices fell silent.

  "Can you imagine how that was? Perhaps you should indeed teach us to Remember. Perhaps that is why you have been sent among us — to Remember all who died."

  Icebones was horrified. But she said, "We aren't dead yet. On this Mountain there is no food, and precious little water. We must go down to the plains."

  The Ragged One snorted. "You are a fool. The world is growing cold, yes. Because the Lost have gone."

  Icebones was baffled. "Where did they go?"

  "They went up, into the sky," the Ragged One said. "And that is where we must go. Not down. Up." She said this decisively, and stalked away stiff-legged.

  THE REMEMBERING WAS SIMPLE.

  Icebones had the mammoths help her dig out the body of their grandmother. It had been scorched and dried by its immersion in the ash. Much of the hair was blackened and curling, and the skin was drawn tight. The eyelids, gruesomely, had fallen open, and the eyes had become globes of cloudy, fibrous material, sightless.