Icebones

It was very disturbing to Icebones to walk over new land: land where there were no mammoth trails, no memories in her head, nobody to lead. It was the mammoths’ way to learn the land, to build it into their memories and wisdom, and to teach it to their young. That way the land’s perils could be avoided and its riches sought. That learning had never happened here. And it troubled her that every step she took was into strangeness — and unknown danger.

After a few days they reached the terminus of the Sky Trail. The shining line sank into a kind of cave, a place of hard straight lines and smooth walls. Icebones shrank from it. But the others clumped forward eagerly and explored every cold surface and every sharp straight edge, as if saying goodbye.

They walked on.

Below the Sky Trail terminus, the rock was just as barren and sparse of life as it had been at higher altitude. But Icebones felt her spirits lift subtly, as if the looming Sky Trial, the mark of the Lost, had been weighing on her spirit.

The Bull came to walk with her. His coat was glossy and thick, and he held his growing tusks high. 'Why must we call you Icebones?'

'Because it is my name.'

He thought about that. 'Very well. But why not Boulder, or Snowflake, or Pond?'

'My mother said I was heavy and cold in her womb. As if she’d swallowed a lump of ice, she told me. And so she called me Icebones. A name is part of a mammoth—'

'I have no name,' he said.

'I know.'

'Will you give me a name?'

Intrigued, she asked, 'What kind of name?'

'I am strong and fierce,' he said, illustrating this with a comically deep growl. 'I will be a brave hero, and I will mate all the Cows in the world. Silverhair was brave and strong. Perhaps my name should be Silverhair.'

She snorted her amusement. 'That was the name of my mother. She was indeed brave and strong. But you are a Bull, and you need the name of a Bull.'

'I don’t know the names of any Bulls.'

'The Cycle tells of the bravest and strongest Bull who ever lived. His name was Longtusk. He lived long ago, in a time when the steppe was full of mammoths. He lived alone among the animals, and he even lived among the Lost — for it is the fate of Bulls, you know, to leave their Families and travel far. But then at last he found his Clan and led them on a great journey, to a place where they could live without fear. In the end he gave his life to save them.'

The Bull trumpeted his appreciation. 'I would like to be called Longtusk,' he growled. 'But I am no hero. Not yet, anyway.'

She pondered. 'Your voice is deep and carries far, like the thunder. Longtusk had a faithful companion called Walks With Thunder. Thunder. There. That shall be your name.'

'Thunder, Thunder!' The towering Bull, with his spindly legs and thin, immature tusks, ran after the Cows to tell them his exciting news.

The next morning, the Cow with the spiral-shaped tusks came up to Icebones, trailed, as always, by her smaller sister. The older one said diffidently, 'That fool of a Bull says you have given him a name.'

'He has found his name,' Icebones said.

The Cow snorted. 'I have no need of a name — not from a mammoth. The Lost liked me, you see. They used to admire my tusks and my long hair. Their cubs would brush my belly hairs with their paws, and I would let the older ones climb on my back while I walked.'

Icebones tried not to show her revulsion.

'They would talk to me all the time,' said the Cow. 'Not the way a mammoth talks, of course. They had a funny jabber they made with their mouths, and they didn’t use their bellies or feet or foreheads at all. But you could tell they were talking even so.' She walked oddly as she said this, as if showing off her hair and fine muscles for an invisible audience of Lost. 'So I am quite sure the Lost had their own name for me.'

Icebones stayed silent, watching her.

At length the Cow said, 'But if you were to give me a name — a mammoth name, I mean — what would it be?'

Most mammoth names reflected a deep characteristic of their holder: an attribute of her body, her smell or taste or noise — even her weight, like Icebones’s. Few were to do with the way a mammoth looked: Silverhair, yes, for that lank of gray on her forehead had been such a startling characteristic. But Icebones knew that sight was the most important sense of all for the Lost. And so for this one, the way she had looked in the eyes of the Lost was the key to her character.

'Your name will be Spiral,' Icebones said. 'For your tusks twist around in spirals, the one like the other.'

'Spiral.' The Cow wandered away, admiring her own tusks.

Her sister made to follow Spiral as usual, but she hesitated. 'Icebones, what about my mother?'

It is not my place to name these mammoths, Icebones thought. I am not their Matriarch, or their mother. But if not me, who? She thought of the smell of the older Cow, her tangy, smoky musk. 'Autumn,' Icebones said impulsively. 'For she smells of the last, delicious grass of summer.'

The Cow seemed pleased. 'And my other sister, the one with calf?'

'I would call her Breeze—'

'For her hair is loose and whips in the wind, like the grass on a windblown steppe!'

'Yes.' This little one isn’t so bad, Icebones thought, when she gets away from her foolish sister. 'Will you tell them for me?'

'Yes, I will.'

'And what about you?'

'Me?' The Cow was transfixed, as if she hadn’t imagined such an honor could be applied to her. 'You choose, Icebones.'

Icebones probed at the young Cow’s mouth, and tasted sweetness. 'Shoot,' she said at last, 'for you taste of young, fresh grass.'

The Cow seemed delighted. 'Thank you, Icebones… But what about her?'

She meant the Ragged One, who grazed alone as usual, irritably dragging at grass tufts and willow tips, her rough hair a cloud of captured sunlight around her.

'She is the Ragged One,' said Icebones. 'No other name would suit.'

But the little Cow had already scampered away, after her sister.

They approached the lip of the Mountain-base cliff. The wall was heavily eroded, and very steep — what they could see of it; none of them cared to approach the edge.

At last Icebones found a steep gully that cut deep into the ground. Its floor was strewn with boulders and frost-shattered rubble, as if a river had once flowed there. It would not be an easy route, but this cleft, cutting deep into the rock behind the cliffs, offered a way down to the plains below.

Cautiously, reluctantly, the mammoths filed into the gully.

The rock that made up the walls was gray-red and very hard, its surface covered with sharp-edged protruding lumps, speckled with glimmering minerals of green and black. Moss grew in cracks in the walls and over some of the loose rocks. The wind tumbling off the Fire Mountain’s broad flanks poured through this gap, and mercilessly sucked out the mammoths’ heat. Icebones could hear the rumbles of complaint echoing back from the tall, sheer walls.

A pair of birds flew up and down the gully, graceful, large-winged. Perhaps they were swallows.

The mammoths found a place where the rocky floor was broken by small crevices, which provided shelter for succulent grass clumps and even herbs. The mammoths fell on this feast and ate greedily.

Leaving the feeding mammoths, Icebones came to a broad ledge that led out to the face of the cliff itself. She walked along the ledge, curious, probing at the smooth rock with her trunk… and the cliff face opened out around her.

She realized that looking down from the Mountain’s summit she had had no real idea of the vast size of this cliff. Seen from here, there was only the cliff: a wall of blue-red rock that rose above her and out of sight, and fell away beneath her to a blur of red tinged with gray-green that might have been the ground. There was cloud both above her and below: a layer of pink-gray cirrus far above, and a smooth rippling sea below.

The world was simple: cloud above and below, and this hard vertical cliff face, like an upturned landscape.

She spotted a waterfall, where an underground river burst out of the rock face into the air. But the water fell with an eerie slowness, as if the air was too thick to allow it to pass, and it broke up into myriad red-glimmering droplets that dispersed in the air. This was a waterfall that would never reach the ground, she realized.

…And then it struck her how high she was here, higher than clouds, higher than birds — and how unprotected. Mammoths were plain animals, unused to heights. Vertigo overwhelmed her, and she inched back along the ledge toward the others, and safety.

As they neared the base of the gully, it began to broaden and flatten, its eroded walls diminishing. But its floor was littered with rocks. The mammoths had to work their way past boulders which towered over them, and under their feet was a litter of loose rock, scree and talus that sometimes gave way under an incautious step. But the big rocks were pitted and carved by the wind, and many of the looser small rocks underfoot were worn smooth by wind or water also.

Icebones was the first to break out of the gully, and walk beyond the cliff. She stepped forward carefully, relishing the openness around her. Sandpipers fled from her, screeching in protest.

She found herself walking over dwarf willows, a flattened, ground-hugging forest that crunched under her feet. A red-black river meandered sluggishly across a ruddy plain. Two cranes stood by the river, still and watchful, as many creatures of the steppe habitually were. As she approached a longspur, it sat as still as a stone on its nest of woven grass, watching her with black eyes. She could see the bird’s eggs, which glowed with a smooth pink light.

Away from the river small lakes stood out, purple-black. In the larger ponds Icebones could see a gleam of green: cores of ice that survived from the last winter, and would probably persist to the next.

In the shimmering, complex light, this land at the foot of the cliff was a bowl of life. She saw more willows and sedges, their green vivid against the underlying crimson of the rock. And even the bare outcropping rock was stained yellow or orange by lichen.

It was a typical steppe. It was a place of stillness and watchfulness, for the land was ungenerous. But, unlike the bare wall of the Mountain, this land was alive, and Icebones felt her soul expand into its familiar silence.

She turned and looked back toward the cliff. Its base was fringed by conifer forest. Compared to the mammoths grazing at their bases, these trees grew very tall, Icebones saw immediately: they were slender, but they soared fifty, even a hundred times the height of a mammoth, so that their upper branches were a blur of greenery.

But the trees, huge as they were, were utterly dwarfed by the wall of rock that banded the base of the Fire Mountain.

Bright red, extensively fluted and carved by the wind, the tremendous cliff soared high above the broken ground. The columns and vertical chasms of its face glowed a deep burnt orange in the light of the setting sun. The gully the mammoths had climbed down was a black crack, barely visible.