Icebones

is deeper than anywhere in the world.'

The Ragged One rumbled suspiciously, 'Where is this place?'

And Icebones described the great pit on the other side of the world — a hole gouged by a giant impact, a blow so powerful it had made the rocks rise up here, on the planet’s opposite side. 'It is called the Footfall of Kilukpuk,' she said, thinking fast. 'And that is where we will go. There will be pasture for you and your calves. There will even be Bulls for you to run with, Thunder, and for you others to mate with.'

The Ragged One brayed. 'And this wonderful place is on the other side of the world? So you have never seen or smelled it?'

It was as if she was articulating Icebones’s own doubts.

But Icebones said firmly, 'I will lead you there.' She raised her trunk, sniffing the air. 'We must walk away from the setting sun. We will keep walking east, and in the end we will reach the Footfall. Let’s go,' she said, as she had heard her mother say many times to her own Family. 'Let’s go, let’s go.'

But the mammoths simply watched her, baffled.

So she raised her trunk and trumpeted, and began to walk east, following the line of the old coast, toward a sky that was already turning a deepening purple.

After a few paces she paused and turned. The three sisters, huddled together, were walking after her slowly, tracking her moist footsteps in the dusty sand. A little behind them came Autumn and Thunder, each still distracted, but submissively following the lead Icebones had given.

But now the Ragged One lumbered up to her. 'You cannot make this rabble into a Family just by saying it. And you cannot make yourself a Matriarch.'

'If you wish to stay here,' Icebones said, her voice a deep, coarse rumble, 'I will not oppose you.'

The Ragged One growled, 'If you fail — when you fail — I will be there to remind you of this day.'

I know you will, Icebones thought.

The wind was rising now. She saw that it was swirling over the pack ice, lifting spray and bits of loose ice and snow into a great gray spiral, angry and intimidating. The scavenging petrels left their bloody meals and rose into the sky, cawing angrily, their feathers stained red.

6 The Ice Beetle

Heading toward the light of the rising sun, they skirted the shore of the giant ocean. There was better forage to be had a little way to the south, away from the barren coast itself, where soil and water had gathered in hollows.

But the landscape, distorted by the volcanic uplift that lay beneath the Fire Mountain, was flawed and difficult. Deep, sharp-walled valleys cut across their path. Conversely, sometimes the mammoths found themselves laboring over networks of ridges that rose one after the other, like wrinkles in aged flesh.

As leader, Icebones was able to impose a rhythm appropriate for a Family on the move. She had the mammoths walk slowly but steadily, all day and most of each night, probing at the ground with their trunks, foraging for grass and herbs and water. At first the others complained, for this was an alien way of life for creatures used to being fed as they needed it. But Icebones knew that this steady progress was better suited to a mammoth’s internal constitution. And when after a few days the others got used to the steady, satisfying rhythm, and food passed pleasingly through their systems, the level of complaints dwindled.

But they were not yet a Family.

A Family was supposed to walk in coordination, led by its Matriarch and the senior Cows, all of them watching out for each other, in case of predators or natural traps like mud holes. This untidy rabble rambled over the broken ground as if they were rogue Bulls, as if the others did not exist, or matter.

Icebones knew it would take a long time to teach them habits that should have been ingrained since birth, and it seemed presumptuous even to imagine that she, young and inexperienced, was the one to do it. But, she reminded herself, there was nobody else.

So she persisted.

Sometimes Spiral would walk alongside Icebones, with Shoot prancing in her wake. The tall, elegant Cow would regale Icebones with unwelcome tales of her time with the Lost, when they had tied shining ribbons to her hair, or rode on her back, or had encouraged her to do tricks, picking up fruit and walking backward and bowing at their behest.

This irritated Icebones immensely. 'You are mammoth,' she said sternly. 'You are not a creature of the Lost. You should not boast of your foolish dancing. And you should not ignore your sister. You should watch out for her, as she watches out for you. That is what it is to be Family.'

'Ah, the Family,' Spiral said. 'But what is there for me in your Family, Icebones? I am beautiful and clever and I smell fine, while you are small and squat. Will a Family stop you being ugly?'

Icebones reached up and tugged at Spiral’s pretty tusks. 'It does not matter what I look like — or what you look or smell like. You will not always be healthy and pretty, Spiral. And someday you will have a calf of your own — perhaps many calves — just as your sister is carrying now. And then you too will have to rely on others.'

For a brief moment Spiral seemed to be listening hard, and her trunk tip shyly probed at Icebones’s mouth. But then she pulled away, trumpeting brightly, and lumbered off, Shoot as ever trailing her eagerly.

They came to a place where enormous valleys cut across their path. The mammoths climbed down shallow banks and worked their way across rubble-strewn floors.

These tremendous channels were littered with huge eroded boulders, pitted and scoured by water and wind, around which the mammoths had to pick their way. Perhaps water had once flowed from the high southern lands into the basin of the north, cutting these channels and depositing this debris. But those vanished rivers must have been mighty indeed. And these huge channels were clearly very ancient, for many of them were pitted by craters, or even cut through by younger channels.

The great age of the land was obvious, the complexity of its formation recalled in the folded rock around them.

They found a flooded crater, a shallow circular lake in a pit smashed into a channel bottom. The mammoths welcomed this easily accessible pool, though they had to break through layers of ice to reach the dark, cold water beneath.

At the water’s circular edge, Icebones found clumps of grass. She would twist her trunk around a clump of stems and kick at its base to dislodge it. After beating the grass against her knees to knock off the dirt, she pushed it into her mouth, and her trunk explored for new clumps as she chewed.

She inspected the ice on the crater pond. Much of it was hard and blue. Mammoths learned about ice. Icebones knew that fresh ice first appeared as a film of oily crystals, almost as dark as the water itself. When it thickened it would turn gray and opaque, and thicken slowly. If it lasted to a second winter it would harden and turn a cold white-blue.

So the ice covering this pool was persisting through the long summer of this strange world. It was another sign that the world was cooling, and the tide of warmth and water and life was withdrawing, step by step.

Spiral lumbered up to her, complaining. 'Icebones, that’s not fair. You are taking the best grass!'

Icebones slapped Spiral’s cheek with her trunk tip — not hard, but enough to sting, and to make the others turn to listen. 'I am the Matriarch,' she growled.' I take the first, and the best. Your mother is next. And then the rest of you. It is the way.' The pecking-order she was striving to teach Spiral was part of every Family’s internal structure — although no mature Family would stick to it rigidly, with food being apportioned according to need.

Spiral grumbled, 'If this is what it means to be in a Family, I would rather the Lost returned.' But she backed away, deferring to Icebones’s tentative authority.

Beyond the flooded crater, the ground began to drop in altitude. Though it was still broken and often difficult to negotiate, the soil was richer here, and steppe plants flourished. There were even stretches of forest, conifer trees so tall they seemed to stretch up to the pale pink sky. And there was plenty to eat now: grass, coltsfoot, mountain sorrel, lousewort, sedge, dwarf birch.

Covering ground that was rich in loam and easy under their feet, their stomachs filling up, the mammoths’ spirits seemed to lift, and they walked on more vigorously.

Icebones noticed that as they got used to the fodder of the steppe the mammoths’ tastes were starting to diverge: Thunder sought out a type of willow with small diamond leaves, while Spiral preferred the sedge. They were starting to forget the rich food the Lost had provided for them, she realized with some relief.

But now Icebones became aware of a dark smudge, like a low cloud, on the horizon directly ahead of her, to the east. And she smelled smoke.

Fire ahead. The mammoths drew closer, trunks raised.

Fire was a natural thing, of course — it could be caused by flowing lava, or lightning strikes — but in mammoths’ minds fire was primarily a thing of the Lost. Where there is smoke, there are the Lost — so went the wisdom of the Cycle.

They walked on, into the thickening smoke.

They came to a shallow crater rim. The smoke was pouring sluggishly into the air from the crater’s belly.

It was an easy climb up the crater wall to its narrow crest. But now the smoke was thick, making their eyes stream and filling their nostrils with its stink. The mammoths were agitated, for the scent of fire sparked deep instincts of fear and flight in them all.

The crater was a big one, surrounded by a ring of eroded hillocks that stretched to the horizon. A bank of smoke hung thick and dense over the crater basin.

And the basin was full of trees: fallen, burning trees, with flames licking ponderously. There were so many that they lapped up against the crater walls, and trunks lay thick on the ground like shed pine needles. But each of these 'needles' was the trunk of a great conifer, stripped of its branches.

Autumn growled, 'We can’t walk through that. We would suffocate in the smoke, or get trapped beneath the burning trunks, or—'

'You’re right.' Icebones raised her trunk, trying to sense the lay of the land despite the distraction of the smoke, and the steady rumble of collapsing, burned-out logs. 'The wind comes this way.' She took a step toward the southern crater rim. 'We will walk around these circular walls. The smoke will blow away from us, not over us.'

'It is out of our way,' the Ragged One pointed out sourly.

Icebones snapped, 'We have no choice. Be careful where you step. Help each other. Let’s go, let’s go.' And without further discussion she set off, following the narrow ridge that ran around the crater rim.

She didn’t look back, but she could tell from their footfalls and rumbles that the mammoths were following her.

The going wasn’t difficult, though in places the rim wall broke up into separate eroded hillocks, and they had to climb through narrow gulches or over crumbled rock. But there was no water to be had on this bare rock wall. Soon the air, hot and dry and laden with the stink of wood smoke, burned in Icebones’s nostrils and throat.

The wind veered and a gust of smoke washed over her, blinding her eyes and flooding her sensitive nostrils, so that she had to work her way over the lumpy ground by touch alone.

When the smoke cleared she saw something moving, dimly visible through the thinning gray veils of smoke.

She stopped dead, trunk raised. She sensed the other mammoths gathering around her, curious, nervous. She could see something shining, like ice, a vast bulk moving. And she could feel how its weight made the ground shudder.

Now it emerged from the smoke.