Icebones

storm. Alone.'

'No!' Breeze wrapped her trunk around her fallen calf.

Autumn spoke, and there was a huge, impressive sadness in her voice. 'Daughter, you can bear other calves. Others who will grow strong, and continue the Family… You are more important than Woodsmoke, because of those other calves.'

'Kilukpuk will care for him,' said Icebones. 'If a mammoth dies young, it is easy for him to throw off his coat of earth, and to play in the light of the aurora…'

'There is no aurora here,' Spiral said bleakly.

'Would you sacrifice him, Icebones?' Breeze trumpeted. 'Would you, mother, if this was your calf?'

The moment stretched, the tension between the mammoths palpable.

This was the crux, Icebones knew. And Autumn was the key. If Autumn maintained her resolve, then they would abandon the calf, and go on. And if she did not, they would all die, here in this screaming storm.

Autumn sighed, a deep rumble that carried through the storm. 'No,' she said at last. 'No, I could not abandon my calf.'

And Icebones, with a deep, failing regret, knew they were lost.

Breeze clutched her calf, and her sister came close, both of them stroking and reassuring the calf as best they could.

'I am sorry,' Autumn said, huddling close to Icebones. 'I did not have the strength. It is hard to be mammoth.'

'Yes. Yes, it is hard.'

'We have been toys of the Lost too long…'

'Let us huddle. Perhaps we will defeat this storm yet.'

But she knew that wasn’t possible. And, from the tense, subdued postures of Autumn and Thunder beside her, she sensed they knew it too.

The continent-sized dust storm continued, relentless, cruel, oblivious to the mammoths’ despair.

The dust clogged her trunk and mouth, until she was as dry as a corpse. And still the storm went on, so dense she no longer knew if it was day or night. Perhaps she even slept a while, exhausted, her body battling the storm without her conscious control. I tried, Silverhair. But they just weren’t ready to be a Family — a true Family, able to face the hard truths as well as they easy ones…

No. I was not ready. I have failed.

But it hardly mattered now. After a few days, when they were reduced to scoured-clean bones, nobody would ever know what happened here.

She felt a new, hard form beside her. She turned sluggishly, trying to lift her trunk.

She sensed a stocky body, hair that was dense and slick, crimson against the storm’s dark light.

'You are Cold-As-Sky,' she said, her voice thick with dust.

The other did not reply.

'There is no water here.'

'No,' said the Ice Mammoth, her voice somehow clear through the storm. 'This land is very old. Even the deep-buried ice has sublimated away.'

'But you live.'

'But I live. I carry water in my throat, and in a hump on my back, enough to let me survive the longest dust storm.'

'My trunk is clogged,' Icebones said softly. 'All I can taste is dust. Cousin, give me water.'

Cold-As-Sky ignored her. 'This is the truth of this world. This is how it was before the Lost came here. The planet itself is trying to kill you now. You are meant to die. Jut as we were meant to die. Did you know that?'

Icebones did not reply, wishing only that Cold-As-Sky would leave her alone with her blackness and despair.

But Cold-As-Sky went on, 'It is true. The first of us who awoke found that all the world was like this high, broken plain. There were no soft green things, no pockets of thick wet air to clog the lungs… Only the clean rock and the red sky. And the only water was buried deep in the dust, where it should lie, where it is safe.

'And we were the only living things. We Ice Mammoths, and the blood weed, and the air trees, and the spider-flowers.

'Many calves died, gasping for air as they were born. But we endured. Slowly the trees made the air thicker, and slowly the spider-flowers captured the water. And we Ice Mammoths dug ancient water out of the ground, and broke up the rock with our tusks, and made the red dust rich with our dung.

'You call yourself a Matriarch. I was born knowing that word. And I was born knowing that we had no Matriarch to teach us, to show us how to dig the roots of the breathing trees, or to drink the blood of the weed. We had to learn it all, learn for ourselves. And every scrap of wisdom was earned at the cost of a life. What do you think of that? Where is your Kilukpuk now?'

Icebones, enduring, said nothing; the Ice Mammoth’s voice, low and harsh, was like the voice of the engulfing storm itself.

'The Lost were already here, huddling in caves. They had shining beetles that dug and crawled and crushed rock, and a great tusk in the sky that burned channels into the ground. But we were more important than any of that. We knew it. That is why the Lost made us, and put us here. We broke the land for them. And we had many calves, and we spread—'

'And you changed the world,' said Icebones.

'Yes,' Cold-As-Sky said bitterly. 'Our tusks and our dung made the land ready for creatures like you, with your green plants we could not eat, and your thick wet air we could not even breathe… And with every scrap of land that was changed there was a little less room left for us. Many died — the old and the very young first — and each year there are fewer calves than the last…'

'I am sorry.'

'You do not understand,' Cold-As-Sky said bleakly. 'It was our destiny to die. To make the land, and then die away, leaving it for you.

'But then the Lost flew off into the sky in their shining seeds.

'The green things started to blacken and die. The ponds of murky water sank back into the ground and froze over. The ancient cold returned. The dust was freed, and the world-spanning storms began again. And we touched each other’s mouths, and tasted hope for the first time in memory.'

'And that is why we are dying,' Icebones said.

'This is not your land. If you live, I die.'

'We are Cousins, Calves of Kilukpuk,' Icebones growled. 'You know the Oath. Every mammoth is born with the Oath, just as she is born knowing the name of Kilukpuk, and the tongue she taught us. And so you know that if the Oath is broken, the dream of Kilukpuk will die at last… But enough. I am weary. I have come far, Cousin, and I am ready to die, if I must. Leave me.'

And, as the dust swirled around her, it seemed she drifted into blankness once more, as if letting go of her hold on the world’s tail.

But then something probed at her mouth: a trunk, strong, leathery, cold. And water trickled into her throat.

She sucked at the trunk, like a calf at her mother’s breast. The water, ice cold, washed away the dust that had caked over her tongue.

But then, though her thirst still raged, she pushed the trunk away. 'The calf,' she gasped.

She sensed the vast bulk of the Ice Mammoth move off into the howling storm, seeking Woodsmoke.

5 The Footfall

Icebones breasted a ridge, exhausted, her shoulder a clear icicle of pain. She paused at the crest.

She saw that they had reached a place where the land descended sharply. A new vista opened up before her: a landscape sunk deep beneath the level of this high, broken plain. Within huge concentric systems of rock, she saw a puddle of green and water-blue.

It was a tremendous crater. It was the Footfall of Kilukpuk.

And, even from this high vantage, still suspended in the thin air, Icebones could hear the call of mammoths.

Eagerly, her breath a rattle in her throat, she walked on, step by painful step.

The Family climbed down through crumpled, eroded rim mountains.

On the horizon Icebones made out complex purple shadows that must be the rim walls on the far side of this great crater. They seemed impossibly far away. And the wall systems were extensively damaged. In one place a fire mountain towered from beyond the horizon, a vast, flat cone. The rim mountains before it were broken, as if rivers of rock had long ago washed them away and flooded stretches of the central plain. Further to the east the rim mountains were pierced by giant notches. They were valleys, perhaps, cut by immense floods. Everything here was ancient, Icebones realized: ancient and remade, over and over.

Plodding steadily, the mammoths left the terrain of the rim mountains. They reached a belt of land around the central basin itself, a hard red-black rock, folded and wrinkled into ridges and gullies and stubby isolated mesas.

Icebones could hear the broken song of the ground beneath her, feel the deep shattering it had endured, deep beyond the limits of her perception. But since it had formed, this ancient scar tissue had been crumpled and folded and eroded. Every rocky protrusion was carved and shaped by wind and rain, and dust was everywhere, heaped up against the larger rocks and ridges.

But even here they found stands of grass and struggling herbs and trees, and shallow ponds which were not frozen all the way to their base. Already the bony rockscape over which they had struggled for so long, with its killer weed and breathing trees and distorted, resentful Ice Mammoths, seemed a foul dream, and the habitual ache in Icebones’s chest began to fade.

After many days’ walking over this ridged plain, the mammoths at last reached the basin itself.

Quite suddenly, Icebones found herself stepping onto thick loam that gave gently under her weight. When she lifted her foot she could see how she had left a neat round print; the soil here was thick and dense with life.

All around her the green of living things lapped between crimson ridges and mesas, like a rising tide.

The mammoths fanned out over the soft ground, ripping eagerly at mouthfuls of grass, grunting their pleasure and relief.

This lowest basin was a cupped land, a secret land of hills and valleys and glimmering ponds. Icebones made out the rippling sheen of grass, herbivore herds which moved like brown clouds over the ground, and flocks of birds glimmering in the air. And, right at the center of the basin, there was an immense, dense forest, a squat pillar of dark brown that thrust out of the ground, huge indeed to be visible at this distance.

Here, all the ancient drama of impacts and rocks and water had become a setting for the smaller triumphs and tragedies of life.