Silverhair heard her own breathing, and the squeak of the ice as it compressed under her feet. She felt small and insignificant, dwarfed by the majesty of her planet.
Owlheart stood alongside her. She was breathing hard after the climb, and her breath steamed around her face, 'Just as the Cycle describes it. From the ice that pools here, the glaciers flow to the tundra.'
'And,' said Silverhair, 'no mammoth has ever gone farther north than this.'
'No mammoth before today.
Silverhair followed the Matriarch’s gaze. She saw that on the northern horizon, the mountains were marked by a notch: another valley scoured out by glaciers. And beyond, she could see blue-gray sky.
'That’s our way through,' said Owlheart.
Silverhair reached the ravine on the far side of the ice bowl, and found herself standing on the creaking mass of another glacier.
She looked down the way she must climb.
The view was startling. The glacier was a frozen torrent sweeping down its valley, turning around a bluff in the rock before spreading, flattening, and shattering to shards. The rubble lines along the length of the glacier made the flow obvious. They ran in parallel, turning together with each curve of the glacier. They looked like wrinkles in stretched skin.
There were even tributary glaciers running into the main body, like streams joining a river. But where the tributaries merged, the ice had cracked into crevasses or shattered and twisted into fields of chaotic blocks.
Despite its stillness she could see the drama of the great ice river’s gush through the broken mountains, the endless battle between the stubborn rock and irresistible ice. Where the mountains constricted its flow, the ice reared up in great whirlpools of shattered, frozen sheets; and frozen waves lapped at the base of black hills, truncated by millennia of frost-shatter. She heard the roar of massive avalanches, the shriek of splitting rock, the groan of the shifting ice, and the sullen voice of the wind as it moaned through the valleys.
It was a panorama of white ice, black rock, blue sky.
The way forward would be difficult yet; she knew they would be fortunate to reach the northern lands without mishap. Yet her spirit was lifted by the majesty of the landscape. Despite her troubles and her pain, she felt profoundly glad to be alive, to have her small place in the great Cycle, to have come here and witnessed
She pressed on, stepping cautiously over the shattered ice.
At first the going, over a shallow snowdrift, was easy. But then the drift disappeared, without warning, and she found herself descending a slope of steep, slick blue ice. And as she climbed down further, the horizon increasingly dropped away from her, suggesting deep ice falls or steep and fissured drops ahead.
Climbing down a glacier turned out to be much harder than climbing up one had been.
At least on the way up she had been able to see the ice falls and crevasses before she reached them; here even the biggest obstacles were invisible, hidden by the ice’s sharp falling curve, until she was on them. With every step she took, her feet either twisted in the melt pits that marked the ancient, ribbed blue ice, or broke through a crust of ice, jarring her already aching joints.
She reached a moraine, an unbroken wall of boulders that lay across her path. The line of debris had been deposited on the surface of the ice by centuries of glacial flow. She picked her way through the boulders, flinching when her feet landed on frost-shattered rock chips.
She came to a place where the ice, constricted by two towering black cliffs to either side, was shattered, split by great crevasses. In the worst areas a confusion of stresses crisscrossed the ice with crevasse after crevasse, and the land became a chaotic wilderness of giant ice pillars, linked only by fragile snow bridges.
She crept through this broken place by sticking close to the cliff to her left side. The ice here, dinging to the rock, was marginally less shattered. In some places she found clear runs of blue ice, which were easier to negotiate. But even these were a mixed blessing, for the ice was ridged and hard under her feet, and it had been kept clear only by the action of a scouring wind — and when that wind rolled off the ice bowl behind her it drove billows of ice crystals into her eyes, each gust a slap.
Then she was past the crevasse field, and the rock walls opened out… and for the first time she could see the northern lands.
It was a plain of ice — nothing but ice, studded with trapped bergs, dotted here and there with the blue of water.
Her heart sank.
The glacier decanted onto a rocky shore littered with broken stone and scraps of ice. She walked forward. This might have been the twin of the Island’s southern coast. The landfast ice was more thickly bound to the ground here than in the south, but she could see leads of clear water and dark steam clouds above them. There was no sign of vegetation, no grass or bushes or trees — nor, indeed, any exposed rock. Nothing but ice: a great sheet of it, over which nothing moved.
A huge floe drifted close to the shore, and, cautiously, she stepped onto it. It tipped with a grand slowness, and she heard the crunch of splintering ice at its edge. The floe was pocked by steaming airholes through which peered the heads of seals.
As she watched, a seal reared out of the water to strike at an incautious diving seabird, dragging it into the ocean. There was a swirl in the water, a final, despairing squawk, and then the seal’s head erupted from the water with the bird’s body crushed between its jaws. Then the seal thrashed its head from side to side with stunning violence, tearing the bird to pieces, literally shaking it out of its skin.
It was not a promising welcome for the mammoths, Silverhair thought.
Some distance to the west, a glacier was pushing its way into the sea ice. The pressure had made the sea ice fold up into great ridges around the tongue of the glacier, and in the depressions between the wind-smoothed ridges, ice blocks had heaped up. At the tip of the glacier there was a sudden explosion, and a vast cloud of powdered snow shot up into the air. The roaring continued, and as the snow cleared a little, she saw that the snout of the glacier was splitting away, a giant ravine cracking its way down the thickness of the ice river, and a pinnacle of ice tipping away from the glacier, toward the sea. It was the long, stately birth of a new iceberg. In the low light of the sun, the snow was pink, the new berg a deep sky blue.
She felt the ocean swell beneath her feet, heard the groan of the shifting ice. The sky was empty save for the deep gray-blue of the far north, the color of cold.
And she knew now that the ocean beneath her swept all the way to the north: all the way to the axis of the Earth.
Owlheart climbed aboard the floe beside her, making it rock. 'It’s a frozen ocean,' the Matriarch said.
'Yes. We can’t live here.'
'I feared as much,' said Owlheart. Her rumble was complex, troubled. 'But…'
Silverhair uncertainly wrapped her trunk around Owlheart’s. She was not accustomed to comforting a Matriarch. 'I know. You had no choice but to try.'
'And now,' said Owlheart bitterly, 'at the fringe of this cursed frozen sea, we have nowhere to go.'
There was a a distant clattering sound, intermittent, carried on the wind. Silverhair turned.
Something — complex, black, and glittering — was flying along the beach from the west. Sweeping directly toward Foxeye and her calves. Sending a clattering noise washing over the ice.
It was the light-bird of the Lost.
17
The Chasm of Ice
The light-bird clattered over their heads like a storm. Owlheart reared up and pawed at the air. There was a stink of burning tar, a wash of downrushing wind from those whirling wings that drove the hair back from Silverhair’s face. She could see Lost — two, three of them — cupped in the bird’s strange crystal belly, staring down at her.
Silverhair and Owlheart hurried back to the shore where Foxeye and her calves waited, cowering.
A faint scent of burning came to them on the salty breeze. The calves, huddling close to their mother, picked it up immediately; they raised their little trunks and trumpeted in alarm.
Silverhair looked along the beach to the west, the way the bird had come. She could see movement, a strange dark rippling speckled with light. And there was a cawing, like gulls.
It was the Lost: a line of them, spread along the beach. And the light was the yellow fire of torches they carried in their paws.
Owlheart rumbled and trumpeted; Silverhair had never seen her so angry. 'They pursue us even
Silverhair wrapped her trunk around the Matriarch’s, and dragged her face forward. 'Matriarch. Listen to me. I’ve seen that light-bird before at the camp of the Lost. It makes a lot of noise but it won’t harm us.
'I will trample them like mangy wolves!'
'No. They will kill you before your tusks can so much as scratch them.
She could see the effort it took for Owlheart to rein in her Bull-like instincts to drive off these puny predators. 'Tell me what to do, Silverhair,' she said.
'We must run,' said Silverhair. 'We can outrun the Lost.'
'And then?' asked Owlheart bleakly.
'That is for tomorrow. First we must survive today,' said Silverhair bluntly.
'Very well. But, whatever happens today—' Owlheart tugged at Silverhair’s trunk, urgently, affectionately.
Stunned, Silverhair watched the Matriarch’s broad back recede.
The coastline was mountainous. Black volcanic rock towered above the fleeing mammoths.
They came to another huge glacier spilling from the Mountains, a cliff of ice that loomed over them. The beach was strewn with shattered ice blocks, and the glacier itself, a sculpture in green and blue, was cracked by giant ravines. The air that spilled down from within the ravines was damp and chill — cold as death, Silverhair thought.
They ran on, the three Cows panting hard, their breath steaming around their faces, the calves mewling and crying as their mother goaded them forward.
The cries of the Lost seemed to grow louder, as if they were gaining on the mammoths. And still the light-bird clattered over their heads, its noise and tarry stink and distorted wind washing over them, driving them all close to panic.
Silverhair wished Lop-ear were here. He would know what to do.
Owlheart shuddered to a halt, staring along the beach. Foxeye and the calves, squealing, slowed behind her.
Silverhair came up to Owlheart. 'What is it?…'
The wind swirled, and the stink reached Silverhair. A stink of flesh.
Strung across the beach was a series of heaps of stone and sand and ice. From each pile, oily black smoke rose up to the sky. The fire came from a thick, dark substance plastered over the stones.
