Far out in the Channel she thought she could see something surface: huge, black, sleek. Then it was gone.
It was probably just a trick of the light.
4
The Monster of the Ice Floe
When they were warm they continued along the beach, in search of the peculiar creatures Silverhair had spotted.
Hundreds of guillemots were arriving on the cliffs above them. This first sign of the summer’s burst of fecundity seemed incongruous on such a bitterly cold morning; in fact, the nesting ledges were still covered in snow and ice. But the seabirds had to start early if they were to complete their breeding cycle before, all too soon, the snow of winter returned. And so the birds clung to the cliffs and fought over the prime nesting sites. So intense were these battles, Silverhair saw, that two birds, locked together beak to bloody beak, fell from the high cliffs and dashed themselves against the sea ice below.
Fast as a spray of blown snow, an Arctic fox darted forward and grabbed both birds, killing them immediately. The fox buried his catch in the ice, and returned to the foot of the nesting cliff in search of more pickings.
From a snowbank high on the cliff a female polar bear, her fur yellow-white, pushed her way out of her den. She yawned and stretched, and Silverhair wondered if it was the bear she had seen before.
The bear clambered back up to her den and sat by the entrance. After a time a cub appeared — small, dumpy, and dazzling-white — and it greeted the world with terrified squeaks. A second cub emerged, then a third. The mother walked confidently down the steep cliff toward the sea while the cubs looked on with trepidation. At last two of the cubs followed her, gingerly, sliding backwards, their claws clutching the snow. The other stayed in the den entrance and cried so loudly its mother returned with the others, and she suckled all three in the sun. Then the bear walked steadily down to the sea ice — in search of her first meal since the autumn — and her cubs clumsily followed.
The mammoths walked around a rocky spur, and they came to the Nest of Straight Lines.
Lop-ear slowed, his eyes wide, his trunk held up in the air, his good ear cocked, alert for danger.
Silverhair was trembling, for this was an unnatural place. Still, she said, 'We have to go on. The strange ice floe, whatever it was, must have come to rest farther on than this. Come on.'
And without allowing herself to hesitate, she set off along the beach. After a few heartbeats she heard Lop-ear’s heavy steps crackling on the shingle as he followed.
In this mysterious place, set back from the beach, a series of blocky shapes huddled against the cliff. They were dark and angular, each of them much larger even than a mammoth. The great blocks were hollowed out. Holes gaped in their sides and tops, allowing in the low sunlight; but there was no movement within.
Lop-ear said, 'Those things look like skulls to me.'
Looking again, she saw that he was right:
'They must be the skulls of giants, then,' she said.
The most horrific aspect of the place was that the whole of it was constructed of hard, straight lines. It was the lines that had earned the place its mammoth name, for aside from the horizon line and the trunks of trees, there are few long, straight lines in nature.
In the center of the Nest there was a great stalk: like the trunk of a tree, but not solid, made of sticks and spars through which Silverhair could see the pale dawn sky. And at the top of the stalk there were a series of big round shells, like the petals of a flower — but much bigger, so big they looked as if a mammoth could clamber inside.
The mammoths peered up at the assemblage of brooding forms, dwarfed.
'Perhaps those things up there are the ears of the giants who lived here,' said Lop-ear, awed.
'But what
'You know what Eggtusk says.'
'What?'
'That this place has nothing to do with giants,' he said.
'Then what?'
And as he spoke the name of the mammoths’ most dread enemy of the past, it was Silverhair’s turn to shiver.
By unspoken agreement they hurried on.
A flat sheet lying on the shingle briefly caught Silverhair’s eye. It looked at first like a broken sheet of ice — but as she came closer, she saw that it was made of wood — though she knew of no tree that produced such huge, straight-edged branches.
There were markings on the sheet.
She slowed, studying the markings. The patterns reminded her oddly of the scrapings Lop-ear had made in the frost. There was a splash of yellow, almost like a flower — or like a star, cupped in a crescent Moon. And beneath it, a collection of lines and curves that had no meaning for her:
She wanted to ask Lop-ear about it; perhaps he would understand. But he had already hurried ahead, and she didn’t want to linger alone in this unnatural place; she ran to catch him up.
With the Nest of Straight Lines behind them, they approached the half-frozen sea.
'What I saw must have been about here,' said Silverhair, trying to think.
Lop-ear looked around and raised his trunk. 'I can’t smell anything.'
The two mammoths walked a little way onto the ice, which squeaked and crackled under them. The ice that clung closest to the shore, where the sea was frozen all the way to the bottom, was called landfast ice. It formed in protected bays, or drifted in from the sea. Its width varied depending on how deep the water was. Later in the summer the landfast ice would break free and melt, or drift away with the pack ice.
The pack ice was the frozen surface of the deeper ocean. It was a blue-white sheet crumpled into pressure ridges, like lines of sand dunes sculpted in white. Farther away from the land Silver-hair could see black lines carved in the ice: leads, cracks exposing open water between the loose mass of floes. As the spring wore on, the leads would extend in toward the coast, splitting off the ice floes. The floes would break up, or be washed out to open sea by the powerful current that ran between the Mainland and the Island.
Dark clouds hung over the open Channel, that forbidding stretch of black, open water; the clouds formed from the steam rising from the water.
And on a floe far from the land, she made out a black, unmoving shape.
She trumpeted in triumph. Gulls, startled awake, cawed in response.
'There!' she cried. 'Do you see it?'
Lop-ear patiently stared where she did. 'I don’t see a thing. Just pressure ridges, and shadows…
'You do see it! You do! That’s what I saw, floating in the sea — and now it’s on the ice.'
It might have been the size of a mammoth, she supposed — but a mammoth lying inert on the floe. All Silverhair’s fear had evaporated like hoarfrost, so great was her gladness at rediscovering the strange object. 'Come on.' And she set out across the landfast ice.
Reluctantly Lop-ear followed.
As they moved away from the shore, the quality of the sound changed. The soft lapping of the sea was gone, and the ice creaked and groaned as it shifted on the sea, a deep rumble like the call of a mammoth.
The pressure ridges were high here, frozen waves that came almost up to her shoulder. The ridges were topped by blue ice, scoured clean by the wind, and soft snow lay in the hollows between them. The ridges were difficult to scramble over, so Silverhair found a lead and walked along at the edge of the water, where the ice was flatter.
Frost-smoke, sparkling in the sunlight, rose from the black, oily water.
On one floe she found the grisly site of a polar bear’s kill. It was a seal’s breathing hole, iced over and tinged with blood. She could see a bloodstained area of ice where the bear must have dragged the seal and devoured it. And there was a hollowed-out area of snow near a pressure ridge, marked by black excrement, where the bear had probably slept after its bloody feast.
The wind picked up. Ice crystals swirled around her. When she looked up at the sun, she saw a halo around it. She knew she must be careful, for that was a sign the sea ice might break up.
She came to a place where the pressure ridges towered over her. Surrounded by the ridges, all she could see was the neighboring hummocks and the sky above.
She struggled to the top of a crag of ice.
From here she could see the tops of the other ridges, and the narrow valleys that separated them. They looked as if they had been scraped into this ice surface by some gigantic tusk.
And she realized that she had walked farther out to sea than she had imagined, for she found herself staring up at an iceberg.
It was a wedge-shaped block trapped in the pack ice. She saw how its base had been sculpted into great smooth columns by the water that lapped there, and by the scouring of windblown particles of ice and snow. Blue light seemed to shine from within the body of the translucent ice.
Farther from the shore she saw many giant bergs, frozen in, standing stark and majestic all across title sea ice. The ice between the bergs was smooth and flat. Older bergs, silhouetted in the low light, were wind-sculpted and melted, some of them carved into spires, arches, pinnacles, caves, and other fantastic shapes. Perhaps they would not survive another summer. She could see that some of the bergs had shattered into smaller pieces, and here and there she made out growlers, the hard, compact cores of melted bergs, made of compressed greenish ice, polished smooth by the waves.
In the light of the low sun, the colors of the bergs varied from white to blue, pink and purple, even a rich muddy brown, strange-shaped scraps littering the pack ice.
And from this vantage, Silverhair saw the strange object she had come so far to find.
Dark and mysterious, the thing rested on a floe that had all but broken away from the main mass of pack ice. Only a neck of ice, ten or eleven paces wide, still connected the floe to the land.
She scrambled down the ridge to the edge of the floe. Then she hesitated, looking down with trepidation at the narrow ice bridge and the unyielding blackness of the water below. Lop-ear
