Silverhair

This was her summer day; this was her moment. She trumpeted her defiant joy that she was alive.

And at that moment of greatest joy she saw, climbing high in the midnight sky, a splinter of red light: it was the Sky Steppe, where one day her calves would roam free and without fear.

Afterward they stood together, their hides matted, their heads touching.

'You know I will stay with you,' he said. 'I will guard you from the other Bulls until the end of your estrus.'

That was the way, she knew. Mammoths are not romantic, but Lop-ear would protect his mate until the end of her estrus period, when — she hoped — conception would occur, deep within her. Still, she could not help but mock him. 'What other Bulls?'

'I will defend you even from the great Bull Croptail!' He raised his head, so his tusks flashed in the flat sunlight, and he danced before her as if he were about to go into battle with the Earth itself -

There was a sharp sound behind them. A cracking twig.

Mammoths’ necks are short, and they cannot easily turn their heads. So Silverhair and Lop-ear lumbered about, to face behind them.

There was something here, just paces away. Like a narrow, branchless tree, casting a long midnight shadow. Silverhair could smell nothing of it.

It was a Lost.

Now it moved. With raised forelegs it lifted some kind of stick and pointed it at them.

Lop-ear said, 'We must not show it fear. And we must not frighten it. It is only a Hotblood, like us, after all.' He hesitated. 'Perhaps it is injured. Perhaps it is hungry. That might be the meaning of the stick it carries—'

Dread filled her. 'Lop-ear, don’t!'

'It’s what we have come for, Silverhair.'

Lop-ear lowered his trunk and stepped forward. From his forehead resounded the contact rumble.

The apparition took a step back, raised its stick higher. And the stick cracked.

There was a burst of light, a sound like thunder.

It was over in an instant. But that crack of light was enough to show her the strange, hairless head of the creature before her. It was the one she had met on the ice floe, the one she had called Skin-of-Ice.

Lop-ear trumpeted in pain. She turned.

His trunk was raised, his eyes closed. Some dark liquid was gushing over the fur on his chest. It was blood, and it steamed in the cold air.

His hind legs gave way, so that he squatted like a defecating wolf, and his trunk dropped.

She raced to his side. 'What has happened to you?'

But he could not speak. Now blood spewed from his open mouth, dangling in loops from his tongue.

She ran behind him and began to nudge at his back with her head. 'Get up! Get up!'

He tried; she could feel him padding at the ground with his hind legs, and he lifted his head.

But there was another thunder-crack.

Immediately all four of Lop-ear’s legs gave way and he slumped to the ground.

Silverhair staggered back, appalled, terrified. She could not understand what was happening. But she still had Lop-ear’s warmth inside her, and she was drawn back to him.

There was a new sound: a thin, high whoop, almost like a calf’s immature trumpeting.

It was the creature called Skin-of-Ice, she saw. It — he — was holding his thunder-stick in the air above his head, and was yelping out his triumph. And he was standing on the flank of fallen Lop-ear.

Silverhair felt rage gather in her, deep and uncontrollable. She raised herself up on her hind legs, head high, and trumpeted as loudly as she could.

Skin-of-Ice raised the thunder-stick, and it cracked, again and again. Stinging, invisible insects flew around her.

Her mind crumbled into panic, and she fled.

Later she would remember little of what followed. Only flashes, like the light from Skin-of-Ice’s thunder-stick.

Sometimes she was alone, fleeing across a shadowed plain.

Sometimes the Lost pursued her, thin legs working, mysterious thunder-sticks barking.

Sometimes Lop-ear was there. She spoke to him of the future, the plans they had made. She threatened him with the punishment he would receive from Eggtusk if he didn’t get up and come with her back to the Family right now.

Sometimes she saw a caterpillar, motionless on a willow branch. Then a small opening in its moist hide revealed a small set of jaws: it was a larva of some still smaller insect, eating its host alive from within.

Sometimes there was only the stink of Lop-ear’s cooling blood in her nostrils.

And always, always, the image of Skin-of-Ice: how the murderous Lost would look when she raised his soft, wormlike body on the tip of her tusks.

11 The Rhythms and the Lost

The sun wheeled above the horizon, never setting; the endless daylight was pitiless, for Silverhair sought only darkness.

'Silverhair. Silverhair…'

The words were like contact rumbles, swimming through the earth. And when she opened her eyes, unrolled her trunk so she could smell again, she could see mammoths before her: Eggtusk, Snagtooth.

With a part of her mind, she knew that she had tried to find her way north, back to the Family, where they remained on the bleak plain of volcanic rock in the lee of the great Mountains at the End of the World. She recalled the walk only in fragmented glimpses: the clumps of grass she had once grazed with Lop-ear, an old hill whose eroded contours had reminded her of Lop-ear’s slumped carcass.

She tried to focus on Eggtusk’s words. '…You must listen to what I’m saying. I understand how you feel. We all do. But death is waiting for each of us. The great turning of life and death…'

Then the mammoths would float away from her again, like woolly clouds.

'It was the Lost,' Silverhair mumbled. 'The Lost and his thunder-stick…'

But they wouldn’t listen. 'Even the Lost are part of the Cycle,' said Eggtusk. 'Though they don’t know it. We are not like the Lost. Give yourself up to the Cycle, little Silverhair. Close your eyes…'

Silverhair felt the rocks under her feet, as if her legs were burrowing like tree trunks to anchor her to the ground that sustained them all. And slowly, the Cycle’s calm teaching reached her.

She remembered how Wolfnose had shown her the Plain of Bones. She felt the great turning rhythms of the Earth. Her mind opened up, as if she held the topology of the whole Earth in her mind, and she saw far beyond the now, to the farthest reaches of past and future.

Her own long life, in the midst of all that epic sweep, was no more than the brief spring blossoming of a tundra flower. And Lop-ear, the same. Yet they mattered: just as each flower contributed to the waves of white and gold that swept across the tundra, so she and Lop-ear were inextricable parts of the greater whole.

And the most important thing in the whole world was Lop-ear’s warmth in her belly: the possibility, still, that she might conceive his calf.

'…To the Lost there is only the here and now,' Eggtusk was saying. 'They are a young species — a couple of Great-Years, no more — while we are ancient. They have no Cycle. They are just sparks of mind, isolated and frightened and soon extinguished. They never hear the greater rhythms, and never find their place in the world. That is why they disturb so much of what they touch. They are trying to forget what they are. They are dancing in the face of oblivion…'

Silverhair raised her head. She could feel the salt tears brim in her eyes. 'But it was my fault.'

'Lop-ear was much smarter than you are,' Eggtusk said gently. 'You couldn’t have made him do anything he didn’t want to do. Even I couldn’t, and I fought him to prove the point — much as I regret that now, by Kilukpuk’s cracked and festering nipples!'

'But I didn’t even perform the Remembering for him.'

'No. Well, we can’t very well leave him like that.' Eggtusk laid his trunk on her head, and scratched behind her ear. 'Do you know where you are?'

She looked around at the featureless tundra. 'No,' she admitted.

'You’re far from the Family. Far from anywhere. You’ve been wandering, Silverhair. Wandering, but not eating, by the look of you. When you didn’t return, Owlheart sent me to find you. It wasn’t easy.'

'I — thank you, Eggtusk.'

'Never mind that. You must eat and sleep, young Silverhair. For we have a walk ahead of us. Back to the south.'

For the first time since she had lost Lop-ear, her spirits lifted. 'To Lop-ear.'

'Yes.'

'I’m surprised Owlheart let you go.'

'I had to promise we’d come back in one piece. Oh, and…'

'Yes?'

He bent so only she could hear. 'I had to take Snagtooth with me.'

The three mammoths set off at midnight. There was a layer of cloud above, but the pale orange sun hung above the horizon in a clear strip of sky.

Heading south, the mammoths walked slowly, frequently pausing to pass dung and to feed. Despite Silverhair’s urgent wish to return to Lop-ear’s bones, Eggtusk insisted they eat their fill. They were coming into the richest season of the year, the time when the mammoths must lay in their reserves of fat, without which they cannot survive the next winter. As Eggtusk said to Silverhair, 'I’d lick out the crusty lichen from between Kilukpuk’s pus-ridden toes before I’d let you starve yourself to death. What use would that be to Lop-ear, or any of us? Eh?'

So under his coaxing and scolding, she cropped the grass and flowers, and the fresh buds of the dwarf willows whose branches barely grew high enough to cover her toes.