Icebones Read online

  Icebones said, "Watch now, and learn." She scraped at the bare ground with her tusks. Then she picked up a fingerful of grit and ash and dropped it on the grandmother's unresponding flank.

  The mother reached down, picked up a loose rock, and stepped forward to do the same.

  Soon they were all using their trunks and feet to cover the inert body with ash, dust and stones — all save the Ragged One, who stayed on the edge of the group, unwilling to participate, and yet unable to turn away.

  As they worked, Icebones felt a deeper calm settle on her soul. The Cycle said this was how the mammoths had always honored their dead.

  Silverhair had told her of a place on the Island called the Plain of Bones, where the ground was thick with the bones of mammoths — of Icebones's ancestors, who had walked across the land for uncounted generations before her. She wondered how many mammoth bones lay beneath the hard rocky ground of this small new world.

  3

  The Sky Trail

  AT DAWN THE WORLD glowed its brightest red. It was as if the dust and the rocks caught the red light of the rising sun and hurled it back with vigor. Even the mammoths' hair trapped the all-pervasive red light, their guard hairs glowing as if they were on fire. On the plains far below, pools or rivers looked jet black, and the green of life was scattered, irrelevant in this mighty redness.

  Icebones longed for a scrap of blue sky.

  It was apparent that the mammoths, lacking any better idea, were prepared to go along with the Ragged One's scheme. Though Icebones felt nothing but dread at the very notion of pursuing the Lost, she had no better suggestion either.

  When the light was adequate, the Ragged One simply set off up the flank of the Mountain. The others followed only haphazardly, paying no attention to each other, with none of the calm discipline of a true Family.

  Icebones took a place at the back of their rough line.

  The Mountain's slope was shallow, and the mammoths climbed steadily. With their strong hind legs mammoths were well suited to climbing — though descending a slope was always harder, as that meant all a mammoth's weight was supported by her front legs.

  Here and there mosses, lichens and even clumps of grass protruded from cracks in the hard red-black ground. Icebones pulled up grass tufts, wrapping her trunk lips around the thin-tasting goodies. But the grass was sparse and yellowed, struggling for life.

  And there was no water to be found, none at all. She could tell from the rock's deep echoes that the ground-water was buried deep here, far beneath a lid of rock much too thick and hard for any mammoth tusk to penetrate.

  The dung of the other mammoths was thin and watery. These mammoths had built up a reserve of fat from the ambiguous generosity of their Lost keepers. But it had clearly been a long time since they had fed properly.

  As for herself, Icebones had no real idea how long it had been since she had last tasted the Island's lush autumn grass. What a strange thought that was... We must find proper grazing soon, she thought.

  At length the mammoths reached something new. A line of shining silver stood above the rust-red rock, running parallel to the line of the slope. It stood above the ground on legs like spindly tree trunks.

  The line swept down from the humped slope of the Mountain, down toward the hummocked plain below, down as far as Icebones could see until it dwindled to a silvery thread invisible against the red-blue clutter of the layered rock.

  Icebones felt cold, deep inside. A thing of clean surfaces and hard sharp edges, this was clearly the work of the Lost.

  But the others showed no fear — indeed they seemed curious, and they walked around the skinny supports, probing with pink trunk tips.

  The Ragged One came to Icebones. "This is the south side of the Fire Mountain. The sunlight lingers here. You see the green further below, smell the tang of the leaves? The Lost grew vines there. But now the vines are dying."

  Icebones asked, "What would you have us do?"

  "This is the path the Lost took to the sky," the Ragged One said simply. "We must follow it. That way we will find the Lost again."

  Paths worn by mammoths in the steppe were simple trails of bare and compacted earth. This shining aerial band looked like no path Icebones had ever seen. She said starkly, "Perhaps the Lost don't want you to find them. Have you thought of that? If they wanted you, they would have taken you with them."

  The Ragged One growled and clashed her stubby tusks against Icebones's. "You should crawl back into the cave of darkness you came from. I will lead these others. When we find the Lost we will be safe." And she turned her back on Icebones and stalked away, trunk folded beneath her face.

  Icebones, fighting her instincts, trailed behind.

  AS DAY FOLLOWED DAY, the mammoths climbed the endless shallow slope, following the Sky Trail. They grew still more weary, hungry, thirsty, and their joints ached, the soft pads of their feet protesting at the hard cold rock beneath them. Icebones learned to concentrate on each footfall, one after another, letting her strength carry her upward even when it seemed that there was too little air in her aching lungs to sustain her. The sky above was never brighter than a deep purple-red, even at midday. In the morning there would be a thick blanket of frost that turned the ground pink-white, covering the living things. But as the sun rose the frost quickly burned off, faster than they could scrape it up with their trunks. Even here, life clung to the rock. Grass was sparse, but moss and lichen coated the crimson rock. But as they climbed higher the last traces of ground cover evaporated.

  Soon there was only the rock, red and hard and unforgiving. It was as if the land's skull was emerging from beneath a fragile skin of life.

  And the higher they climbed, the more the world opened out.

  This Fire Mountain was a vast, flattened dome of rock. A sharp cliff surrounded its circular base, with walls that cast long shadows in the light of the dipping sun. Icebones could follow the line of the strange shining Sky Trail down the slope. It passed through a cleft in that forbidding base cliff and strode on into the remote plain, until it dwindled to invisibility amid the thickening green of vegetation.

  The land beyond the Fire Mountain was rough and broken, ribbed with sharp ridges. Though littered with patches of green and glinting with water, it would surely be difficult country to cross.

  Further away still, she glimpsed an immense valley running almost directly east. The valley was heavily shadowed by this swollen land of giant Fire Mountains, but it ran to the horizon, vanishing in the mist there.

  And to the north she saw a gleaming line of ice, flat and pure. The ice spanned the world from horizon to horizon, and she knew she was seeing an ocean, thick with pack ice: it was the ocean whose presence she had sensed, the ocean that had pooled in the great depression that had shaped the northern hemisphere of this world.

  It was a vast landscape of shaped rock, red and shadowed gray, pitted with shallow craters — and only thinly marked by the green of life.

  There was nothing for Icebones here.

  This is not my world, she thought. And it never could be. Why had she been taken from her home, stranded on this alien ball of rock with all its strangeness, where insane moons careened across the sky? Who had done it — the Lost? What twisted cruelty had caused them to plunge her into this strange madness...?

  There was a flurry of movement above her. She stood still, raising her tusks suspiciously.

  She found herself facing a goat. An ibex, perhaps. It carried proud antlers, and was coated with thick white wool. Its chest was immense, swelling in the thin, dry air. The ibex appeared to have been digging into a patch of black ice with one spindly hoof.

  The goat seemed to be limping. The skin over one of its feet was blackened.

  "Frostbite," Icebones said. It was a dread fear of all mammoths. "That goat has been incautious. It may lose that foot, and then the stump will turn infected, if it lives that long."

  "No," growled the Ragged One. "the frostbitten skin will harden and fall a
way, leaving new pink skin that will quickly toughen."

  "No creature can recover from frostbite."

  "You cannot," said the Ragged One. "I cannot. But this goat can. It is not like the creatures you have met before, Icebones. Just as this is not the world you knew."

  Icebones watched the goat hobble away, and she wondered if the clever paws of the Lost had made these disturbing changes, even in goats.

  The mammoths approached the goat's abandoned ice patch. This had been a pond, Icebones found. In places the ice was clear, so that she could see through it to the black mud at the bottom. On the shallow bank around the pond she found dead vegetation, fronds of grass and pond plants, deep brown and frozen to the mud. When she touched the plants she could taste nothing but icy dirt.

  Once it was warm here, she thought, even at this great height. But this world has grown colder, and the pond froze, right down to its base.

  The pregnant Cow mewled, "Nothing can live here. This is no place for us."

  The Ragged One rumbled deeply. "We should get on."

  But all the mammoths were weary and agitated. Icebones could smell blood and milk in the pregnant Cow's musky scent. Her sisters clustered close around their mother, reluctant to move further. The Bull stomped back and forth, agitated.

  "This is foolish," said the mother, with a sharp slap of her trunk on the ground. "Enough. We are cold and tired, and it is hard to breathe. We should not climb further."

  The Ragged One regarded them with contempt. She said simply, "Then I will go on alone." And she turned her back and, with trunk held high, stood beneath the shining Sky Trail.

  "Wait," Icebones called.

  The Ragged One snorted. "Will you make me stop? You are no Matriarch."

  Icebones said, "I will come with you. It is not safe for you to go alone. But," she said carefully, "if we do not find the Lost, you will come down with me."

  The Ragged One rumbled, hesitating.

  Icebones took a step forward, trying to conceal her reluctance to continue this futile climb. The others were watching her somberly.

  The Ragged One proceeded up the slope. Icebones followed.

  After a few paces Icebones looked back at the others. Already they were diminished to rust-brown specks on the vast, darkling hillside.

  THEY HAD LONG RISEN far above the sounds of life: the rumbling of the mammoths, the call of birds, the rustle of the thin breeze in the sparse grass. Here there was to be heard only the voice of the Mountain itself. Occasionally Icebones would hear a deep, startling crack, a rattle of distant echoes, as rock broke and fell and an avalanche tumbled down some slab of crimson hillside.

  The Sky Trail, ignoring the toiling mammoths beneath it, strode on confidently toward the still-hidden summit of the Mountain.

  The ground was complex now, covered by many ancient lava flows: this Mountain had spewed out liquid rock over and over. In places the rock flows had bunched into broad terraces, perhaps shaped by some underlying feature in the mighty slope. The walking was a little easier on the terraces, though the steps between them made for a difficult climb, and Icebones did not relish the prospect of the return.

  There were many craters, on this shoulder of rock. Some of them were vast pits filled with sharp-edged rubble, while others were dents little larger than the footfalls Icebones might make in a field of mud. Some of the larger craters were filled with hard, level pools of fresh rock, and rivers of frozen rock snaked from one pit to another.

  Ice had gathered in scattered pocks in the twisted rock face, black and hard, resistant to the probe of her tusks.

  These scattered pockets grew larger until they merged, filling shallow depressions between low ridges. Soon Icebones was forced to walk on ice: hard, ridged, wind-sculpted ice, it creaked under her feet as it compressed.

  If anything this was worse than the rock. On this pitted surface there was no food, no liquid water to drink — nothing but the ice, its deep cold ever willing to suck a mammoth's heat from her. And the air was thinner and colder than ever, and Icebones's lungs ached unbearably with every step she took.

  She heard grunting. The Ragged One was working at a patch of ice with sharp scrapes of her tusks. Her hair, frosted white, stuck out at random angles from her body.

  Icebones lumbered up the slope to join her. To her surprise she saw that a tree had grown there. It had a thick trunk that protruded from the ice, and its branches, almost flat against the ice, were laden with a kind of fruit — a black, leathery berry, broad but flaccid, about the size of a mammoth's foot pad.

  She asked, "Is it a willow?" But she knew that no willow could grow on ice.

  "Not a willow," the Ragged One said, panting hard. "It is a breathing tree. Help me."

  Icebones saw that the Ragged One had been trying to pry some of the broad black fruit out of the ice. Icebones bent to help, lowering her tusks.

  One of the fruit popped out of its ice pit, and the Ragged One pulled it to her greedily. Icebones watched curiously as she used her trunk fingers to pull a plug of a hard, shell-like material from the husk of the fruit, and pushed her trunk into a dark, pulp-filled cavity revealed beneath. The fruit quickly collapsed, shriveling as if thrown on a fire, but the Ragged One closed her eyes, her pleasure evident. Then she cast aside the fruit and began to pry loose another.

  "Is it good to eat?"

  "Just try it," said the Ragged One, not sparing attention from her task.

  On her first attempt Icebones punctured the fruit's skin, and it deflated quickly with a thin wail. But with her second try she got her fruit safely out of the ice. When she plunged her trunk tip into the soft pulpy cavity, she was startled by a gush of thick, warm, moist air. It was unexpected, remarkable, delicious. She closed her mouth and tried to suck all the air into her lungs, but she got a nostrilful of odorless fruit pulp, and sneezed, wasting most of the air.

  She found another fruit and tried again.

  For a time the two mammoths worked at the tree, side by side.

  The Ragged One poked at an empty skin. "The tree breathes in during the day, drawing its warmth from the sun and the rock, and it makes the air thick and wet. And at night the fruit breathes out again. In, out, like a sleeping mammoth — but each fruit takes only one breath a day.

  "The breathing tree was the first tree that grew here. That is the legend of my kind. The breathing tree makes the air a little warmer and sweeter, so that grass and bushes and birds and ibexes and we can live here."

  This meant nothing to Icebones. A breathing tree? A fruit that could make a dead world live...?

  "Your kind? Where are your kind now?"

  The Ragged One's trunk lifted toward Icebones, its mottled skin ugly beneath sparse hair. "Gone. Dead. I am alone. And so are you. I am not like the others. They are all calves of the calves of Silverhair, the last of the mammoths of the Old Steppe."

  Icebones stopped dead. "Silverhair?"

  "Have you heard of her?"

  "She was my mother."

  The Ragged One snorted. "You are her calf? She suckled you?"

  "Yes!"

  "Then where is she?"

  "I don't know," said Icebones miserably. "Far from here."

  The Ragged One said slowly, "Listen to me. Silverhair was the mother of all the mammoths of this Sky Steppe. She was the mother of their mothers, and the mother of their mothers before them... and on, back and back. Silverhair has been bones, dust, for a very long time. So how can she have borne you, who are standing here before me? You must have slept in your box of darkness for an age, squat one."

  Icebones, bewildered, tried to comprehend all this. Was it possible? Could it really be that she had somehow slept away the generations, as calf grew to mother and Matriarch and fell away into death, over and over — as her mother's calves grew to a mighty horde that covered this world — while she, daughter of their first ancestor, had stayed young and childless?

  "If what you say is true," she said, "you must be a daughter of Silverhair too.
"

  "Not me," said the Ragged One, discarding the emptied husk of the last fruit. And she strode on without explanation.

  Icebones felt a deep, unaccountable revulsion toward the Ragged One. But she hurried after her, following the pale shadow of the Sky Trail.

  Within a few steps, all the warmth and air she had garnered from the breathing tree had dissipated, and she was exhausted again.

  ICEBONES MARCHED GRIMLY on through her hunger and thirst, through the gathering pain in her lungs and the aching cold that sucked at the pads of her feet.

  At first she was not even aware that the Ragged One had stopped again. It was only when she made out the other's grim, mournful lowing that she realized something was wrong.

  The Sky Trail had fallen.

  Icebones walked carefully over hard ridges of wind-sculpted ice.

  Although those mighty legs still cast their gaunt, clean shadows over the Mountain's slope, the silvery thread of the path itself had crumbled and fallen. It lay over the icy rocks like a length of shining spider-web. When she looked back down the Mountain's flank she saw how the path dangled from the last leg to which it was attached, lank and limp as a mammoth's belly hairs.

  The fallen Sky Trail lay in short, sharp-edged segments, shattered and separated. When she probed at the wreckage with her trunk it was cold, hard and without taste or odor, like most of what the Lost produced.

  The Ragged One was standing beside a great pod, long, narrow, like a huge broken-open nut. It seemed to be made of the same odorless, gleaming stuff as the Sky Trail itself.

  And it contained bodies.

  Icebones recognized them immediately. The stubby limbs, the round heads and hairless faces, all enclosed in complex, worked skins. They were Lost. And they were dead, that much was clear: there was frost on their faces and in their clouded eyes and opened mouths.

  The Ragged One stood over the silent, motionless tableau, probing uselessly at faces and claw-like paws with her trunk. The wind howled thinly through the structure of the leg towers around her.