And so, in shards and fragments, Silverhair told the Matriarch her story.
When she was done, Owlheart was grim. "It is just as it says in the Cycle. It was like this in the time of Longtusk, when the Lost would wait for us to die, then eat our flesh, and shelter from the rain in caves made of our skin, and burn our bones for warmth. And they will not stop there. They will take more and more, their twisted hunger never sated."
"Then what should we do?" Owlheart raised her trunk and sniffed the air. "For a long time we have been sheltered, here on this Island, where few Lost ever came. But now they know we are here, we can only flee."
"Flee? But where?"
Owlheart turned her face away from the sun, and the ice-laden wind whipped at her fur.
"North," she said. "We must go north, as mammoths always have."
16
The Glaciers
The migration began the next day.
Owlheart allowed many stops, for feeding and resting and passing dung; and when the midnight sun rolled along the horizon, they slept. But when the mammoths moved, Owlheart had them sweep across the tundra at a handsome pace. They ran in the thin warmth of the noon sun, and they ran in the long shadows of midnight.
Foxeye shepherded her calf Sunfire, coaxing her to feed and pass dung and sleep. Croptail strayed farther afield. He would dash ahead of the rest, pawing at the grass and rock with his trunk, and run in wide circles around the group as if to deter any wolves. Owlheart caught Silverhair’s eye, and an unspoken message passed between the Cows. He’s following his instinct. What he’s doing is the right thing for a young Bull. But keep an eye on him; he’s no Eggtusk yet.
It was the height of summer now. The air above the endless bogs hummed with millions of gnats, midges, mosquitoes. The mosquitoes would hover in smoke-like dancing columns before homing in on a mammoth’s body heat with remarkable accuracy, until their victim was smothered by an extremely uncomfortable cloak of insect life. Blackflies were almost as much of a pest as mosquitoes, for they seemed able to penetrate the most dense layers of fur in their search for exposed skin — not just the soft parts, but even the harder skin of Silverhair’s feet. They would stab their mouthparts through the skin to suck out the blood that sustained them, and the poison they injected into Silverhair’s skin to keep the blood flowing freely caused swelling and intolerable itching.
But even the mosquitoes and flies were but a minor irritant to Silverhair, as her strength gradually returned. Mammoths are not designed to be still. Silverhair found that the hours of easy movement, her muscles strengthening and her wounds healing, smoothed the pain out of her body. Even her digestion improved as the steady, normal flow of food and water though her body was restored; soon her dung passed easily and was rich and thick once more.
And as they ran, it was as if more ghosts clustered around her: this time not just two or three or four mammoths, but whole Families, young and old, Bulls and calves, running together as smoothly as the grass of the tundra ripples in the wind. It seemed to Silverhair that their rumbles were merging, sinking into the ground, as if the whole plain undulated with the mammoths’ greeting calls.
But then the ghosts would fade, and Silverhair would be left alone with her diminished Family: just three Cows, one immature Bull, and a suckling infant, where once millions of mammoths had roamed across the great plains.
And so, once again, the Family approached the Mountains at the End of the World.
Sheets of hard black volcanic rock thrust out of the soil. No trees grew here; nothing lived but straggling patches of grass and lichen that clung to the frost-cracked rocks. The last of the soil was frozen hard, as if winter never left this place, and the rock itself was slick with ice.
At last they reached the lower slopes of the Mountains themselves. Rock rose above them, dwarfing even Owlheart, the tallest of the mammoths; Silverhair could see how the rock face had been carved and shattered by frost. The clamor of ice and shattering rock was deafening for the mammoths, making it impossible for them to sense what might lie beyond.
They walked in the lee of the Mountains, until they came to a great glacier. It lay in a valley gouged through the rock, just as a mammoth’s tongue lies in her jawbone. The ice at the glacier’s snout lay in graying, broken heaps across the frozen ground. Beyond, to the north, the glacier was a ribbon of dazzling white, a frozen river that disappeared into the mist of the Mountains; and it seemed to draw the staring Silverhair with it.
Foxeye said, "We shouldn’t be here. This isn’t a place for mammoths. The Cycle says so…"
"There is a way through the Mountains," said Owlheart.
"How do you know?" asked Foxeye.
Owlheart said, "Wolfnose — my Matriarch — once told me of a time when she was but a calf, and the Matriarch then had memories of long before… There was a Bull calf with more curiosity than sense. Rather like you, Silverhair. He went wandering off by himself. He followed a glacier into the Mountains, and he said it broke right through the Mountains to the northern side. Although he didn’t follow it to its end…"
Suddenly Owlheart’s audacious plan was clear to Silverhair. She stood before the glacier, awed. "So this is a path broken through the Mountains by the ice. Just as mammoths will break a path through a forest."
"And that’s where we’re going," said Owlheart firmly. "We’re going beyond the Mountains at the End of the World, where no mammoth has ventured before—"
"And for good reason." Foxeye rocked to and fro, stamping on the hard ground. "Because it’s impossible, no matter what that rogue calf said. If he ever existed. We don’t even know what’s there, land or sea or ice."
For a heartbeat Owlheart’s resolve seemed to waver. She seemed to slump, as if she were aging through decades in an instant.
Silverhair laid her trunk on Foxeye’s head. "Enough," she said gently. "We must follow the Matriarch, Foxeye."
Foxeye subsided. But her unhappiness was obvious.
Owlheart nodded to Silverhair. Her unspoken command was clear: Silverhair was to lead the way.
Heart pumping, Silverhair turned, and stepped onto the ice.
Mammoths do not spend much time on the bare ice, because no food is to be had there; their habitat is the tundra. But Silverhair understood the glacier, from experience and lore.
At first she walked over cracked-off fragments of ice scattered over the rock. But soon, as she worked her way steadily forward, she found herself walking on a continuous sheet of ice. It was hard and cold under the pads of her feet, but she had little difficulty maintaining her footing.
But it was cold. The sun was warm on one side of her body, but the immense mass of ice seemed to suck the heat from the other side of her body and her belly, and she could feel a wide and uncomfortable temperature difference from one side to the other.
She was climbing a steepening blue-white hillside, which rose above her. She enjoyed the crunchy texture of the snow underfoot. Lumps of blue ice pushed out of the snow around her, carved by the wind into fantastic shapes. Here and there, shattered ice lay in fans across the white surface she was climbing. The glacier was a river of ice, seemingly motionless around her, though its downhill flow was obvious nonetheless. Lines of scoured-off rock in the ice surface marked the glacier’s millennial course. The glacier’s shuddering under her feet was continuous, and Silverhair could feel its agonizingly sluggish progress through its valley, and she could hear the low-pitched grind and crack of the compressed ice as it forced its way through the rock, and the high-pitched scream of the rock itself being shattered and torn away.
She came to a place where the thickening ice was split by crevasses. When it flowed out of the mountains onto the tundra the glacier was able to spread out, like a stream splashing over a plain, and so it cracked open. Most of the crevasses followed the line of the glacier as it poured down its gouged-out channel in the rock. But some of them, more treacherous, cut across the line of the flow.
Most of the crevasses were n
arrow enough to step across. Some were bridged by tongues of ice, but Silverhair tested these carefully before leading the mammoths onto them. If a crevasse was too wide she would lead the mammoths along its length until it was narrow enough to cross in safety.
She looked into one deep crevasse. The walls were sheer blue ice, broken here and there only by a small ledge or a few frost crystals. The crevasse was cluttered by the remains of collapsed snow bridges, but past them she could see its endless deep, the blue of the ice becoming more and more intense until it deepened to indigo and then to darkness.
In some places, where the glacier had lurched downward, there were icefalls: miniature cliffs of ice, like frozen waterfalls. These were difficult to climb, especially where there were crevasses along the icefalls. In other places, where the glacier flowed awkwardly around a rock outcrop, the ice was shattered to blocks and shards by the shear stresses, and was very difficult to cross.
After a time, as the mammoths climbed up from the plain, they encountered fewer crevasses, and the going got easier. In some places the glacier was covered with hard white snow, but in others Silverhair found herself walking on clean blue unbroken ice. The blue ice wasn’t flat, but was dimpled with cups and ridges. There were even frozen ripples here, their edges hard under her feet. It was exactly like walking over the frozen surface of a river.
When she looked back she could see the Family following in a ragged line: Foxeye with her two calves, and Owlheart bringing up the rear. They looked like hairy boulders, uncompromisingly brown against the blinding white of the ice.
She came to a chasm the glacier had cut deep into the mountain’s rock. The mammoths were silent, even the calves, as they threaded through this cold, gloomy passage. Walls of hard blue-black rock towered above Silverhair. She could see scratches etched into the rock, and scattered over the ice were sand, gravel, rocks, even boulders ripped out of place by the scouring ice.
At last the chasm opened out. Silverhair stepped forward cautiously, blinking as she emerged from the shadows.
She was surrounded by mountains.
She was on the lip of a natural bowl in the mountain range, a bowl that brimmed with ice. The mountain peaks, crusted with snow that would never melt, protruded above the ice like the half-buried tusks of some immense giant. The ice was trying to flow down to the plain below, but the mountains got in the way. The glaciers were the places where the ice leaked out. Rings of frozen eddies and ripples, even frozen waves, had formed where the ice pressed against the mountains’ stubborn black rock faces.
The mammoths walked cautiously onto the ice bowl. Nothing moved here but themselves, nothing lay before them but the plain of white ice, black rock, blue sky. But there was noise: the distant cracks and growls and splintering crashes of ice avalanches, as great sheets broke away from the rocky faces all around them, a remote, vast, intimidating clamor. It was a clean, cold, silent place — white, sprinkled with rugged black outcrops, the only smells the sharp tang of ice and the freezing musk of the mammoths themselves.
Silverhair heard her own breathing, and the squeak of the ice as it compressed under her feet. She felt small and insignificant, dwarfed by the majesty of her planet.
Owlheart stood alongside her. She was breathing hard after the climb, and her breath steamed around her face, "Just as the Cycle describes it. From the ice that pools here, the glaciers flow to the tundra."
"And," said Silverhair, "no mammoth has ever gone farther north than this."
"No mammoth before today. Look."
Silverhair followed the Matriarch’s gaze. She saw that on the northern horizon, the mountains were marked by a notch: another valley scoured out by glaciers. And beyond, she could see blue-gray sky.
"That’s our way through," said Owlheart.
Silverhair reached the ravine on the far side of the ice bowl, and found herself standing on the creaking mass of another glacier.
She looked down the way she must climb.
The view was startling. The glacier was a frozen torrent sweeping down its valley, turning around a bluff in the rock before spreading, flattening, and shattering to shards. The rubble lines along the length of the glacier made the flow obvious. They ran in parallel, turning together with each curve of the glacier. They looked like wrinkles in stretched skin.
There were even tributary glaciers running into the main body, like streams joining a river. But where the tributaries merged, the ice had cracked into crevasses or shattered and twisted into fields of chaotic blocks.
Despite its stillness she could see the drama of the great ice river’s gush through the broken mountains, the endless battle between the stubborn rock and irresistible ice. Where the mountains constricted its flow, the ice reared up in great whirlpools of shattered, frozen sheets; and frozen waves lapped at the base of black hills, truncated by millennia of frost-shatter. She heard the roar of massive avalanches, the shriek of splitting rock, the groan of the shifting ice, and the sullen voice of the wind as it moaned through the valleys.
It was a panorama of white ice, black rock, blue sky.
The way forward would be difficult yet; she knew they would be fortunate to reach the northern lands without mishap. Yet her spirit was lifted by the majesty of the landscape. Despite her troubles and her pain, she felt profoundly glad to be alive, to have her small place in the great Cycle, to have come here and witnessed this.
She pressed on, stepping cautiously over the shattered ice.
At first the going, over a shallow snowdrift, was easy. But then the drift disappeared, without warning, and she found herself descending a slope of steep, slick blue ice. And as she climbed down further, the horizon increasingly dropped away from her, suggesting deep ice falls or steep and fissured drops ahead.
Climbing down a glacier turned out to be much harder than climbing up one had been.
At least on the way up she had been able to see the ice falls and crevasses before she reached them; here even the biggest obstacles were invisible, hidden by the ice’s sharp falling curve, until she was on them. With every step she took, her feet either twisted in the melt pits that marked the ancient, ribbed blue ice, or broke through a crust of ice, jarring her already aching joints.
She reached a moraine, an unbroken wall of boulders that lay across her path. The line of debris had been deposited on the surface of the ice by centuries of glacial flow. She picked her way through the boulders, flinching when her feet landed on frost-shattered rock chips.
She came to a place where the ice, constricted by two towering black cliffs to either side, was shattered, split by great crevasses. In the worst areas a confusion of stresses crisscrossed the ice with crevasse after crevasse, and the land became a chaotic wilderness of giant ice pillars, linked only by fragile snow bridges.
She crept through this broken place by sticking close to the cliff to her left side. The ice here, dinging to the rock, was marginally less shattered. In some places she found clear runs of blue ice, which were easier to negotiate. But even these were a mixed blessing, for the ice was ridged and hard under her feet, and it had been kept clear only by the action of a scouring wind — and when that wind rolled off the ice bowl behind her it drove billows of ice crystals into her eyes, each gust a slap.
Then she was past the crevasse field, and the rock walls opened out… and for the first time she could see the northern lands.
It was a plain of ice — nothing but ice, studded with trapped bergs, dotted here and there with the blue of water.
Her heart sank.
The glacier decanted onto a rocky shore littered with broken stone and scraps of ice. She walked forward. This might have been the twin of the Island’s southern coast. The landfast ice was more thickly bound to the ground here than in the south, but she could see leads of clear water and dark steam clouds above them. There was no sign of vegetation, no grass or bushes or trees — nor, indeed, any exposed rock. Nothing but ice: a great sheet of it, over which nothing moved.
A
huge floe drifted close to the shore, and, cautiously, she stepped onto it. It tipped with a grand slowness, and she heard the crunch of splintering ice at its edge. The floe was pocked by steaming airholes through which peered the heads of seals.
As she watched, a seal reared out of the water to strike at an incautious diving seabird, dragging it into the ocean. There was a swirl in the water, a final, despairing squawk, and then the seal’s head erupted from the water with the bird’s body crushed between its jaws. Then the seal thrashed its head from side to side with stunning violence, tearing the bird to pieces, literally shaking it out of its skin.
It was not a promising welcome for the mammoths, Silverhair thought.
Some distance to the west, a glacier was pushing its way into the sea ice. The pressure had made the sea ice fold up into great ridges around the tongue of the glacier, and in the depressions between the wind-smoothed ridges, ice blocks had heaped up. At the tip of the glacier there was a sudden explosion, and a vast cloud of powdered snow shot up into the air. The roaring continued, and as the snow cleared a little, she saw that the snout of the glacier was splitting away, a giant ravine cracking its way down the thickness of the ice river, and a pinnacle of ice tipping away from the glacier, toward the sea. It was the long, stately birth of a new iceberg. In the low light of the sun, the snow was pink, the new berg a deep sky blue.
She felt the ocean swell beneath her feet, heard the groan of the shifting ice. The sky was empty save for the deep gray-blue of the far north, the color of cold.
And she knew now that the ocean beneath her swept all the way to the north: all the way to the axis of the Earth.
Owlheart climbed aboard the floe beside her, making it rock. "It’s a frozen ocean," the Matriarch said.
"Yes. We can’t live here."
"I feared as much," said Owlheart. Her rumble was complex, troubled. "But…"
Silverhair uncertainly wrapped her trunk around Owlheart’s. She was not accustomed to comforting a Matriarch. "I know. You had no choice but to try."
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