Icebones

'She is bleeding!' cried Spiral. 'She is dead! She is dead!' Her wails echoed from the high rock walls of the valley.

But Icebones could see that Autumn’s small amber eyes were open, and they were fixed on Icebones: intelligent, angry, alert.

Icebones reached down and touched one of the bloody streaks with her trunk. This was not broken flesh. Instead she found a cold, leathery surface that gave when she pushed it, like the skin of a ripe fruit.

'This is a plant,' she said. 'It has grabbed onto Autumn, the way a willow tree grabs onto a rock.' She knelt and leaned into the pit. She stabbed at the plant with her tusk, piercing it easily.

Crimson liquid gushed out stickily, splashing her face. The tendril she had pierced pulled back, the spilled fluid already freezing over.

The plant closed tighter around Autumn, and the Cow groaned.

Spiral touched Icebones’s dirtied face curiously and lifted her trunk tip to her mouth. 'It is blood.'

Thunder growled, 'What manner of plant has blood instead of sap? What manner of plant attacks a full-grown mammoth?'

'She cannot breathe,' Icebones said. 'She will soon die…' She reached down and began to stab, carefully and delicately, at the tendrils wrapped over Autumn’s mouth. More of the bloody sap spurted. But the plant’s grip tightened on Autumn’s body, as the trunk of a mammoth closes on a tuft of grass, and Icebones heard the ominous crack of bone.

At last she got Autumn’s mouth free. The older Cow took deep, gasping breaths. 'My air,' she said now. 'It sucks out my air! Get it off. Oh, get it off…'

Icebones and Thunder began to stab and pry at the bloody tendrils. The eerie blood-sap pumped out and spilled into the pit, and soon their tusks and the hair on their faces were soaked with the thick crimson fluid. But wherever they cut away a tendril more would come sliding out of the mass beneath Autumn — and with every flesh stab or slice the tendrils tightened further.

'Enough,' Icebones said. She straightened up and, with a bloodstained trunk, pulled Thunder back.

Woodsmoke stood with Breeze a little way away from the pit. He trumpeted in dismay. 'You aren’t going to let her die.'

It struck Icebones then that Woodsmoke had never seen anybody die. She wiped her bloody trunk on the ice, then touched the calf’s scalp. 'We can’t fight it, little one. If we hurt the blood weed it hurts Autumn more.'

'Then find some way to get it off her without hurting it.'

Thunder rumbled, from the majesty of his adolescence, 'When you grow up you’ll learn that sometimes there are only hard choices, calf—'

But Icebones shouldered him aside, her mind working furiously. 'What do you mean, Woodsmoke? How can we get the weed to leave Autumn alone?'

Woodsmoke pondered, his little trunk wrinkling. 'Why does it want Autumn?'

'We think it is stealing her breath.'

'Then give it something it wants more than Autumns breath. I like grass,' he said. 'But I like saxifrage better. If I see saxifrage I will leave the grass and take the saxifrage…'

Icebones turned to thunder. 'What else could we offer it?'

Thunder said, 'Another mammoth’s breath. My breath Icebones, if you wish it—'

'No,' she said reluctantly. 'I don’t want to lose anybody else. But what else…?'

Even as she framed the notion herself, Thunder trumpeted excitedly. 'The breathing trees,' they shouted together.

'Get the fruit,' said Icebones. 'You and Spiral. You are faster than I am. Go.'

Without hesitation the two young mammoths lumbered over the folded ice toward the breathing trees, where they clung to the lake’s rocky shore.

Autumn moaned again. 'Oh, it hurts… I am sorry…'

'Don’t be sorry,' said Woodsmoke mournfully.

'It is my fault,' Autumn gasped. 'The plant lay over the pit. It was a neat trap… I did not check… I walked across it without even thinking, and when I fell, it wrapped itself around me… Oh! It is very tight on my ribs…'

'Don’t talk,' said Icebones. Her voice lapsed into a wordless, reassuring rumble. Breeze joined in, and even Woodsmoke added his shallow growl.

Perhaps the pit had been melted into the ice by a stone, Icebones thought. Perhaps the blood weed, driven by some dark red instinct, had learned to use such pits as a trap. And it waited, and waited…

Autumn lay still, her eyes closed, her breath coming in thin, hasty gasps. But Icebones could see that the blood weed was covering her mouth once more.

This blood weed, like the breathing tree, was a plant of the cold and airlessness of the desiccated heights of this world. It was as alien to her as the birds of the air or the worms that crawled in lake-bottom mud — and yet it killed.

'…We got it! We got it, Icebones!' Thunder and Spiral came charging across the ice. Thunder bore in his trunk the top half of a breathing tree, spindly black branches laden with the strange dark fruit. He threw the tree down on the ice, close to the pit. 'Now what?'

Icebones grabbed a fruit with her trunk, lowered it into the pit, and, with a determined squeeze, popped it over the prone body of Autumn.

A little gust of fog bursts from the fruit.

The tendrils of the blood weed slithered over the mammoth’s hair. Autumn gasped, as if the pressure on her ribs was relieved a little. But the weed had not let go, and already the fruit’s air had dissipated.

'More,' said Icebones. 'Thunder, hold the tree over the pit.'

So Thunder held out the broken branches while Spiral, Icebones and Breeze all worked to pluck and pop the fat fruits.

With every brief gust of air the agitation of the weed increased. But they were soon running out of fruit, and Autumn’s eyes were rolling upwards. Icebones growled, despairing.

And then, quite suddenly, the weed slid away from Autumn. With an eerie sucking noise its tendrils reached up, like blood-gorged worms, to the dark breathing-tree branches above it.

'Let it have the branches, Thunder! But keep hold of the root—'

The weed knotted itself around the branches, moving with a slow, slithering, eerie stealth.

When the last of its tendrils had slid off Autumn’s prone form, Spiral and Thunder hurled the tree as hard and as far as they could. The tangle of branches went spinning through the thin air, taking the crimson mass of the weed with it. Its blood-sap leaked in a cold rain that froze as soon as it touched the ice.

3 The Ice Mammoths

They were suspended in dense, eerie silence — not a bird cry, not the scuffle of a lemming or the call of a fox — nothing but bright red rock and purple sky and six toiling mammoths.

There was nothing to eat, nothing to drink.

All of them were gaunt now, their hair thinning. Their ribs and shoulder blades and knees stuck out of their flesh, and their bony heads looked huge, as if they were gaining wisdom, even as their bodies shriveled.

And day after day wore away.

They came to another lake, much smaller. They walked down to it, slow and weary.

This time the water was frozen down to its base. The ice was worn away — not melted, but sublimated: over the years the ice had evaporated without first turning to water. The mammoths ground at this stone-hard deeply cold stuff, seeking crushed fragments they could pop into their mouths.

Around the lake they found scraps of vegetation. But the trees were dead, without leaves, and their trunks were hollowed out, and the grass blades broke easily in trunk fingers, dried out like straw.

Thunder, frustrated, picked up a rock and slammed it against another. Both rocks broke open with sharp cracks.

Icebones explored the expose surfaces, sniffing. There was green in the rock, she saw: a thin layer of it, shading to yellow-brown, buried a little way inside the rock itself, following the eroded contours of its surface. Perhaps it was lichen, or moss. The green growing things must shelter here, trapping sunlight and whatever scraps of water settled on the rock. But when Icebones scraped out some of the green-stained rock with a tusk tip, she found nothing but salty grains that ground against her molars, with not a trace of water or nourishment.

She flung away the rock. She felt angry, resentful at being reduced to scraping at a bit of stone. And then she felt a twinge of shame at having destroyed the refuge of this tiny, patient scrap of life.

The lake was fringed by dried and cracked mud. Walking there, Icebones found herself picking over the scattered and gnawed bones of deer, bison, lemmings, and horses, and they spoke to her of the grisly story that had unfolded here.

But there was hope, she saw. Some footprints in the mud led away from the deadly betrayal of the pond and off to the south, before vanishing into the red dust. Perhaps some instinct among these frightened, foolish animals had guided them the way Icebones knew the mammoths must travel, to the deep sanctuary of the Footfall.

Exploring the mud with her trunk tip, Icebones found one very strange set of prints. They were round, like mammoth footprints, but much smaller and smoother. These creatures had come here after the rest had died off, for bits of bone were to be found crushed into the strange prints. And, here and there, these anonymous visitors had dug deep holes — like water holes, but deeper than she could reach with her trunk.

She noticed Spiral. The tall Cow was standing alone on the ice at the edge of the lake, her trunk tucked defensively under her head. She was gazing at a brown, shapeless lump that lay huddled on the rock shore.

Thunder stood by her, wrapping his trunk over Spiral’s head to comfort her.

Spiral said, 'I was working the ice. I didn’t even notice that at first. It doesn’t even smell…'

That was a dead animal. It was a goat, Icebones thought — or rather it had once been a goat, for it was clearly long dead. It lay on its back, its head held up stiffly into the air as if it was staring at the sky. Its skin seemed to be mostly intact, even retaining much of its hair, but it was drawn tight over bones and lumpy flesh. The goat’s mouth was open. The skin of its face had drawn back, exposing the teeth and a white sheet of jaw bone.

The goat had even kept its eyes. Exposed by the shrinking-back of its skin, the eyeballs were just globes of yellow-white, with a texture like soft fungus.

'It must have lost its way,' said Thunder gently.

'It died here,' said Icebones. 'But there are no wolves or foxes or carrion birds to eat its flesh. Not even the flies which feast on the dead. And its body dried out.'

Spiral prodded the corpse with her spiraling tusks. It shifted and rocked, rigid, like a piece of wood. 'Will we finish up dried out and dead like this? And then who will Remember us?'

'We are not lost,' Thunder growled. 'We are not goats. We are mammoth. We will find the way.'

They stayed a day and a night at the pond, gnawing at bitter ice.

Then they moved on.

They frequently came across blood weed.