Icebones

The Ragged One rumbled, hesitating.

Icebones took a step forward, trying to conceal her reluctance to continue this futile climb. The others were watching her somberly.

The Ragged One proceeded up the slope. Icebones followed.

After a few paces Icebones looked back at the others. Already they were diminished to rust-brown specks on the vast, darkling hillside.

They had long risen far above the sounds of life: the rumbling of the mammoths, the call of birds, the rustle of the thin breeze in the sparse grass. Here there was to be heard only the voice of the Mountain itself. Occasionally Icebones would hear a deep, startling crack, a rattle of distant echoes, as rock broke and fell and an avalanche tumbled down some slab of crimson hillside.

The Sky Trail, ignoring the toiling mammoths beneath it, strode on confidently toward the still-hidden summit of the Mountain.

The ground was complex now, covered by many ancient lava flows: this Mountain had spewed out liquid rock over and over. In places the rock flows had bunched into broad terraces, perhaps shaped by some underlying feature in the mighty slope. The walking was a little easier on the terraces, though the steps between them made for a difficult climb, and Icebones did not relish the prospect of the return.

There were many craters, on this shoulder of rock. Some of them were vast pits filled with sharp-edged rubble, while others were dents little larger than the footfalls Icebones might make in a field of mud. Some of the larger craters were filled with hard, level pools of fresh rock, and rivers of frozen rock snaked from one pit to another.

Ice had gathered in scattered pocks in the twisted rock face, black and hard, resistant to the probe of her tusks.

These scattered pockets grew larger until they merged, filling shallow depressions between low ridges. Soon Icebones was forced to walk on ice: hard, ridged, wind-sculpted ice, it creaked under her feet as it compressed.

If anything this was worse than the rock. On this pitted surface there was no food, no liquid water to drink — nothing but the ice, its deep cold ever willing to suck a mammoth’s heat from her. And the air was thinner and colder than ever, and Icebones’s lungs ached unbearably with every step she took.

She heard grunting. The Ragged One was working at a patch of ice with sharp scrapes of her tusks. Her hair, frosted white, stuck out at random angles from her body.

Icebones lumbered up the slope to join her. To her surprise she saw that a tree had grown there. It had a thick trunk that protruded from the ice, and its branches, almost flat against the ice, were laden with a kind of fruit — a black, leathery berry, broad but flaccid, about the size of a mammoth’s foot pad.

She asked, 'Is it a willow?' But she knew that no willow could grow on ice.

'Not a willow,' the Ragged One said, panting hard. 'It is a breathing tree. Help me.'

Icebones saw that the Ragged One had been trying to pry some of the broad black fruit out of the ice. Icebones bent to help, lowering her tusks.

One of the fruit popped out of its ice pit, and the Ragged One pulled it to her greedily. Icebones watched curiously as she used her trunk fingers to pull a plug of a hard, shell-like material from the husk of the fruit, and pushed her trunk into a dark, pulp-filled cavity revealed beneath. The fruit quickly collapsed, shriveling as if thrown on a fire, but the Ragged One closed her eyes, her pleasure evident. Then she cast aside the fruit and began to pry loose another.

'Is it good to eat?'

'Just try it,' said the Ragged One, not sparing attention from her task.

On her first attempt Icebones punctured the fruit’s skin, and it deflated quickly with a thin wail. But with her second try she got her fruit safely out of the ice. When she plunged her trunk tip into the soft pulpy cavity, she was startled by a gush of thick, warm, moist air. It was unexpected, remarkable, delicious. She closed her mouth and tried to suck all the air into her lungs, but she got a nostrilful of odorless fruit pulp, and sneezed, wasting most of the air.

She found another fruit and tried again.

For a time the two mammoths worked at the tree, side by side.

The Ragged One poked at an empty skin. 'The tree breathes in during the day, drawing its warmth from the sun and the rock, and it makes the air thick and wet. And at night the fruit breathes out again. In, out, like a sleeping mammoth — but each fruit takes only one breath a day.

'The breathing tree was the first tree that grew here. That is the legend of my kind. The breathing tree makes the air a little warmer and sweeter, so that grass and bushes and birds and ibexes and we can live here.'

This meant nothing to Icebones. A breathing tree? A fruit that could make a dead world live…?

'Your kind? Where are your kind now?'

The Ragged One’s trunk lifted toward Icebones, its mottled skin ugly beneath sparse hair. 'Gone. Dead. I am alone. And so are you. I am not like the others. They are all calves of the calves of Silverhair, the last of the mammoths of the Old Steppe.'

Icebones stopped dead. 'Silverhair?'

'Have you heard of her?'

'She was my mother.'

The Ragged One snorted. 'You are her calf? She suckled you?'

'Yes!'

'Then where is she?'

'I don’t know,' said Icebones miserably. 'Far from here.'

The Ragged One said slowly, 'Listen to me. Silverhair was the mother of all the mammoths of this Sky Steppe. She was the mother of their mothers, and the mother of their mothers before them… and on, back and back. Silverhair has been bones, dust, for a very long time. So how can she have borne you, who are standing here before me? You must have slept in your box of darkness for an age, squat one.'

Icebones, bewildered, tried to comprehend all this. Was it possible? Could it really be that she had somehow slept away the generations, as calf grew to mother and Matriarch and fell away into death, over and over — as her mother’s calves grew to a mighty horde that covered this world — while she, daughter of their first ancestor, had stayed young and childless?

'If what you say is true,' she said, 'you must be a daughter of Silverhair too.'

'Not me,' said the Ragged One, discarding the emptied husk of the last fruit. And she strode on without explanation.

Icebones felt a deep, unaccountable revulsion toward the Ragged One. But she hurried after her, following the pale shadow of the Sky Trail.

Within a few steps, all the warmth and air she had garnered from the breathing tree had dissipated, and she was exhausted again.

Icebones marched grimly on through her hunger and thirst, through the gathering pain in her lungs and the aching cold that sucked at the pads of her feet.

At first she was not even aware that the Ragged One had stopped again. It was only when she made out the other’s grim, mournful lowing that she realized something was wrong.

The Sky Trail had fallen.

Icebones walked carefully over hard ridges of wind-sculpted ice.

Although those mighty legs still cast their gaunt, clean shadows over the Mountain’s slope, the silvery thread of the path itself had crumbled and fallen. It lay over the icy rocks like a length of shining spider-web. When she looked back down the Mountain’s flank she saw how the path dangled from the last leg to which it was attached, lank and limp as a mammoth’s belly hairs.

The fallen Sky Trail lay in short, sharp-edged segments, shattered and separated. When she probed at the wreckage with her trunk it was cold, hard and without taste or odor, like most of what the Lost produced.

The Ragged One was standing beside a great pod, long, narrow, like a huge broken-open nut. It seemed to be made of the same odorless, gleaming stuff as the Sky Trail itself.

And it contained bodies.

Icebones recognized them immediately. The stubby limbs, the round heads and hairless faces, all enclosed in complex, worked skins. They were Lost. And they were dead, that much was clear: there was frost on their faces and in their clouded eyes and opened mouths.

The Ragged One stood over the silent, motionless tableau, probing uselessly at faces and claw-like paws with her trunk. The wind howled thinly through the structure of the leg towers around her.

Icebones said, 'They have been dead a long time. See how the skin of this one is dried out, shrunken on the bone. If not for the height here, the wolves and other scavengers would surely —'

'They were trying to leave,' the Ragged One blurted. 'Perhaps they were the last. And they died when they spilled out of the warmth of their pod onto this cold Mountain.'

'Where were they going?'

'I don’t know. How can I know?'

'We should Remember them,' Icebones said.

But the Ragged One snapped harshly, 'No. It is not their way.'

The shrunken sun was approaching the western horizon, and its light was spreading into a broad pale band across the sky. The light glimmered from the ice line of the distant ocean, and the tangled thread of the wrecked Sky Trail, and the tusks of the mammoths. Soon it would be dark.

Icebones said, 'Listen to me. The Lost are gone or dead, and we cannot follow them. And we cannot stay on this Fire Mountain.'

The Ragged One growled and stamped her feet, making the hard rock ring.

Icebones felt immensely tired. 'I don’t want to fight you. I have no wish to lead. You lead. But you must lead us to a place we can live. You must lead us down from this Mountain of death. Down to where the air pools, like morning mist in a hollow.'

The Ragged One stood silently. Then she said reluctantly, 'You don’t understand. I am afraid. I have lived my whole life on this Mountain. I have lived my whole life with the Lost. I don’t know how else life can be.'

Impulsively Icebones grabbed her trunk. 'You are not alone. We are all Cousins, and we are bound by the ancient Oath of Kilukpuk, one to the other…'

But the Ragged One had never heard of Kilukpuk, or the vows that bound her descendants, whether they climbed the trees or swam the ocean or walked the land with heavy tusks dangling. She pulled away from Icebones’s touch.

Still suffused by that deep physical revulsion, Icebones nevertheless felt oddly bound to this pale, malformed creature. For all her strangeness, the Ragged One seemed to have more in common with Icebones than any of the other mammoths here. Only the Ragged One seemed to understand that Icebones was truly different — had come from a different place, perhaps even a different time. Only the Ragged One seemed to understand that the world had not always been the same as this — that there were other ways for mammoths to live.

And yet the Ragged One seemed intent on becoming Icebones’s enemy.

The Ragged One dropped her head dolefully, emitting a slow, sad murmur. She was clearly unwilling to leave these sad remains, all that was left of the Lost.

Alone, Icebones trudged further up the shallow slope.