In a cloud of rock dust, Silverhair burst out of her cavern, back into the chasm.
She was overwhelmed by the noise: the screams and trumpets of terrified mammoths, the calls and yelps of the Lost, the relentless clatter of the light-bird, all of it rattling from the sheer ice walls.
Owlheart had fallen.
Silverhair could see two of the Lost climbing over her flank. They were hauling bone-tipped sticks out of her side, and then plunging them deep into her again, as if determined to ensure she was truly dead.
But Owlheart had not given her life cheaply. Silverhair could see the unmoving forms of two of the Lost, broken and gouged.
Silverhair mourned her fallen Matriarch, and her courage. But it had not been enough. For the rest of the Lost were advancing toward Foxeye and the calves.
And Skin-of-Ice himself, bearing a giant stick tipped with sharpened bone, was leading them.
Foxeye seemed frozen by her fear. Sunfire, the infant, was all but invisible beneath the belly hairs of her mother. And Croptail, the young Bull, stepped forward; he raised his small trunk and brayed his challenge at the Lost.
Skin-of-Ice made a cawing noise and looked to his companions. Silverhair, anger and disgust mixing with her fear, knew that the malevolent Lost, already stained with the blood of the Matriarch, was mocking the impossible bravery of this poor, trapped Bull.
Silverhair raised her trunk and trumpeted. She started down the scree slope. "Croptail! Get your mother. We can escape. Come on—"
The Lost looked up, startled. Some of them looked afraid, she thought with satisfaction, to see another adult mammoth apparently materialize from the solid rock wall.
Perhaps that pause would give her a chance to save her Family.
The young Bull ran to his mother. He tugged at her trunk until she raised her head to face him.
But the Lost were closing, raising their sticks and claws of bone. Silverhair saw one of them break and run to the thunder-sticks at the mouth of the cave. But Skin-of-Ice barked at him, and he returned. Silverhair felt cold. This was a game to Skin-of-Ice, a deadly game he meant to finish with his shards of bone and wood.
Silverhair tried to work out what chance they had. The ground was difficult for the Lost; Silverhair saw how they stumbled on the slippery, ice-coated rock, and were forced to clamber over boulders and ice chunks that the mammoths, with their greater bulk, could brush aside. And once the Family were safely in the tunnel, Silverhair would emulate Owlheart. She would make a stand and disembowel any Lost who tried to follow…
But the shadows flickered, and an unearthly clatter rattled from the ice and exposed rock. She looked up and flinched. The light-bird was hovering over the chasm.
Two of the Lost were leaning precariously out of the bird’s gleaming belly. They were holding something, like a giant sheet of skin. They dropped it into the cavern. It fell, spreading out as it did so. Silverhair saw that it was like a spiderweb — but a web that was huge and strong, woven from some black rope.
And, as the Lost had surely intended, the web fell neatly over Foxeye and her calves.
Foxeye’s humped head pushed upward at the web, and Silverhair could see the small, agitated form of Croptail. But the more the mammoths struggled, the more entangled they became. Sunfire’s terrified squealing, magnified by the ice, was pitiful.
Silverhair started forward, trying to think. Perhaps she could rip the web open with her tusks -
But now there was a storm of thunder-stick shouts, a hail of the invisible stinging things they produced. Instinctively she scrambled up the scree slope to the mouth of her cave.
The fire came from the Lost leaning out of the belly of the light-bird. They were pointing thunder-sticks at her. Bits of rock exploded from the ground and walls.
Down in the chasm, the Lost walked over the fallen webbing, holding it down with their weight where it appeared the mammoths might be breaking free. Skin-of-Ice himself clambered on top of Croptail’s trapped, kneeling bulk. Almost casually, he probed through the net with his bone-tipped stick. Silverhair saw blood fount, and heard Croptail’s agonized scream.
Her heart turned to ice.
…But the thunder-stick hail still slammed into the frost-cracked rock around her. Great shards and flakes flew into the air. She had no choice but to stumble back into her cave.
She trumpeted her defiance at the light-bird. As soon as the lethal hail diminished she would charge.
But she heard a deeper rumbling, from above her head.
A great sheet of rock fell away from the chasm wall above the cave opening. Dust swirled over her. Then a huge chunk of the cave’s roof separated and fell. She was caught in a vicious rain of rocks that pounded at her back and head, and the air became so thick with dust, she could barely breathe.
Still she tried to press forward. But the falling rock drove her back, pace by pace, and the light of the chasm was hidden.
The last thing she heard was Foxeye’s desperate, terrified wail. "You promised me, Silverhair! You promised me!…"
Then, at last, Silverhair was sealed up in darkness and silence.
18
The Cave of Salt
Alone in the dark, Silverhair dug at the fallen boulders until she could feel the ivory of her tusks splintering against the unyielding rock, and blood seeped along her trunk from a dozen cuts and scrapes.
But the rocks, firmly wedged in place, were immovable.
She sank to her knees and rested her tusks on the invisible, uneven ground.
The calves had been captured — perhaps even now they were being butchered by the casually brutal Skin-of-Ice and his band of Lost. What was left for her now?
In the depths of her despair, she looked for guidance. And she found it in the last orders of her Matriarch.
She must seek out her Cousins: the other Families that had made up the loose-knit Clan of the Island, a Clan that had once been part of an almost infinite network of mammoth blood alliances that had spread around the world. Her way forward was clear.
But what, a small voice prompted her, if there were no more Families to be found? What if the worst fears of Wolfnose and Lop-ear had come true?
She tried to imagine discovering such a terrible thing: how she would feel, what she would do.
She would simply have to cope, find a way to go on. For now, she had her orders from the Matriarch, and she would follow them. And besides, she had a promise to her sister to keep.
But first she had to get out of this cave.
With new determination she got to her feet, shook off the dust that had settled over her coat, and turned her head, seeking the breeze.
The cave was utterly dark.
She moved with the utmost caution, her trunk held out before her. Her progress was slow. The floor was broken and uneven, the passage narrow and twisting, and she was afraid she might stumble over jagged rock or tumble into an unseen ravine.
And fear crowded her imagination. Mammoths, creatures of the open tundra, are not used to being enclosed; Silverhair tried not to think about the weight of rock and ice and soil that was suspended over her head.
But the echoes of her footsteps, crunching on ancient gravel, gave her a sense of a passageway stretching ahead of her. And there was the breeze: the slightest of zephyrs, laden with the sour stink of brine, somehow worming its way through cracks in the ground to this buried place.
And the breeze grew stronger, little by little, as she progressed.
But the passageway took her downward.
As she moved deeper into the belly of the Earth, the air began to grow warmer. She heard the slow dripping of water from the walls, felt the channels those tiny drips had carved in the rock at her feet over the Great-Years. She licked the droplets from the wall. The water was cool and only a little salty, but there wasn’t enough of it to quench her thirst.
At first the rising heat was comfortable — preferable, anyhow, to the dry, deathly chill of the ice chasm. Suspended here in the dark,
she tried to imagine she was feeling the sun on her back, rather than the soulless, sourceless heat of deep rock.
But soon the warmth became less pleasant. She felt her heart race. She spread her ears as far as they would go, lifted her tail and opened her anus flap, opened her mouth and extended her tongue — all to let her body heat escape into this cloying air.
On she walked, deeper and deeper into the dark, and still the heat gathered.
At last the breeze felt a little cooler, and the quality of the echoes from the tunnel ahead changed. Underfoot the ground sloped, suddenly, much more sharply downward.
She stopped.
She sensed the passage broadening into a wider cave. The mouth of her tunnel was set a little way above the floor of the cave. She extended her head and trunk into the empty space beyond the tunnel. The air felt much cooler, and she dropped her ears and anus flap.
With great care she worked her way down a shallow slope of scree to the floor of the cave.
She was still in complete darkness, but she could sense the great dome of the cave’s ceiling far above her, like the roof of some giant mouth.
The breeze seemed to be coming from the opposite side of the cave. But she felt wary of striking out into the darkness.
So she began to feel her way along the wall.
The soft, gritty rock was extensively scratched and scoured. She ran the sensitive tip of her trunk over furrows and grooves.
They were unmistakably the marks of mammoth tusks.
The scrapings of tusks were everywhere, even — she suspected — higher than she could reach herself. She imagined huge old Bulls reaching high up with their gigantic tusks to bring down fresh rock for their Families.
When she ventured a few paces away from the wall, she found the uneven floor littered with mammoth dung. It was obvious that the whole of this cavern had been shaped by the working of mammoths, over generations. But when she picked up some of the dung and broke it open, it crumbled, dry as dust. It was very old, and it was evident that no mammoth had been here for many years.
She used her own tusk to scrape free pebble-sized lumps of rock from the wall. She picked them up, tucked them in her mouth, ground them to sand with her huge teeth, and swallowed them. The rock’s flavor was deliciously sharp: perhaps born from an ancient volcano, this loose, ash-like rock evidently was rich in salt and other minerals the mammoths needed.
The reason for the mammoths’ presence in the cave was clear. Mammoths need salt and other minerals, as do other animals. But their tongues are not long enough to reach around their trunks and tusks to reach salt-licks, exposed outcroppings of salty minerals. So they dig them up, using their tusks to loosen the earth. This whole cavern system might once have been a simple seam of soft, salty rock into which the mammoths had dug, until at last they had shaped this giant cave and the tunnels that led to it.
Silverhair held fragments of the rock on her tongue, relishing the salty taste and the rich, ancient mammoth smell of the place, as if she were tasting the living past itself. She walked on, surrounded by the workings of her ancestors, obscurely comforted.
At last she came to a heap of scree. The fresh breeze seemed to spill from a hole somewhere above her head. It must be another tunnel.
She clambered onto the scree. Her feet scrabbled to get a foothold in the unstable mass; it took several efforts before she had raised herself sufficiently to get her forelegs over the lip of the tunnel. Then it was a simple matter to pull herself all the way in.
She turned her back on the salt cave and marched on, into the darkness.
She felt the tunnel floor rising. The walls closed around her uncomfortably; if she took a step to either side she brushed against warm rock. But, as she climbed, she felt a delicious, welcoming chill return to the air. The breeze she had followed continued to strengthen.
And, ahead of her now, she made out splinters of green-blue light.
Gradually, as her eyes adapted, she saw that the pale green glow was outlining the walls and floor and roof of her tunnel. She could even make out the larger boulders on the floor, and she was able to press forward with confidence.
At last she came to a new chamber. Like the first she had found, this chamber evidently had been hollowed out by mammoths. But this one was flooded with light. The low rocky roof of this cavern had collapsed. She could see great slabs of rock scattered over the floor, gouged cruelly by the ice, and only spires and pinnacles of rock remained. The cave now was enclosed by a roof of ice.
In some places the ice was smooth and bare. Elsewhere the roof was made of snow, with thick white pillars and balls of ice crusting its undersurface, all of it glowing blue-white. Some of the roof ice had broken off, and chunks of it lay scattered over the floor with the rock chunks. Perhaps this was an outlying tongue of a glacier, strong enough to bridge this hole in the ground, thin enough to let through the light.
But the light was very dim. The sunlight was scattered by the ice and turned to a deep, extraordinary blue, translucent, richer than any color she had seen before. Silverhair wouldn’t have been surprised to see Siros, the water-loving calf of Kilukpuk, come swimming through the air toward her, her legs reduced to stubby flippers.
She worked her way around the gouged walls. Most of the scouring was functional: simple scrapes and gouges, some ending in a ragged scar where a chunk of the salty rock had been prized away. But some of the gouges were strange: small marks grouped in compact patterns that seemed to have been made with a great deal of care. At the base of the wall she found pebbles — and even a chipped-off piece of tusk — that looked as if they had been picked up and used to shape the gouges just so.
As she stared at them, the patterns were somehow familiar.
Here was a simple series of down-scrapes — but, for a heartbeat, Silverhair could see, as if looking beyond the scrapes, a dogged mammoth standing alone in a winter storm, thick winter hair dangling around her. And here, two little clusters of scrapes became a Cow with her calf, who suckled busily.
Then she lost the images, like losing her grasp on a lush strand of grass, and there were only crude gouges in the salty rock.
The markings came from a richer time: a time when there were so many mammoths on the Island, they were forced to dig far underground in search of salty rock; and they were so secure, they had the time and energy to record their thoughts and dreams in scrapings on the walls. It must have taken a Great-Year to make these caves, she thought; but the mammoths (before now, at any rate) had never been short of time.
If only she understood what she was seeing, she thought, she might find the wisdom of another Cycle here — not songs passed down from mother to calf, but messages locked forever in the face of the rock. Lop-ear surely would have understood these images: she remembered the way Lop-ear had scraped at the frost, making markings to show her the Island as a bird would see it. Lop-ear would have been happy here, she realized: happy surrounded by the frozen thoughts of his ancestors.
But all the dung was dry and odorless, very old; and the wall markings were coated by layers of hardy lichen, orange and green, the ice-filtered light fueling their perennial growth.
It had been the scraping of mammoths that had opened up the passages she followed, even the underground caves she had found. Now it was the patient work of those long-gone mammoths that was providing her with a means of escape from the Lost. Had they known, as they dug and shaped the Earth, that their actions would have such dramatic consequences for the future?
Encouraged by the presence of her ancestors, she walked on into the dark, and the gathering breeze.
And after only a little more time, she emerged from a rocky mouth into summer daylight.
The fresh air and the light brought her relief, but no joy.
She clung to Owlheart’s instructions about seeking out help, about joining with another Family, if it could be found. So she began a wide detour toward the southeast of the Island. There was a place she had visited as a calf, many years
ago, where the land was hummocky and uneven, and there were many deep, small ponds. Here — held the wisdom of the Clan — even in the hardest winter, it was often possible to smash through the thinner ice with a blow from a tusk and reach liquid water.
And there, she hoped, she would find signs of the other Families of the Clan: if not the mammoths themselves, then at least evidence that they had been there recently, and maybe some clue about which way they had gone, and where she could find them.
If not there, she thought grimly, then nowhere.
But as she worked her way south, still she saw no signs of other mammoth Families.
She walked on, doggedly.
The tundra was still alive with flowers. There were bright purple saxifrages, and mountain avens and cushions of moss campion studded with tiny white blossoms. Silverhair found a cluster of Arctic poppies, their cup-shaped yellow heads turning to the sun; they were drenched with dew from a summer fog that had rolled over them, bringing them valuable moisture. Even on otherwise barren ground, the grass grew thick and green around the mouths of Arctic fox burrows, places fed by dung and food remains perhaps for centuries.
All the plants were adapted to the extreme cold, dryness, and searing winds of the Island. They grew in clumps: tussocks, carpets, and rosettes, and their leaves were thick and waxy, which helped them retain their water.
But already the summer was past its peak.
The insect life was dying back. The hordes of midges, mosquitoes, and blackflies were gone; the adults, having laid their eggs long ago, were all gone, leaving the larvae to winter in the soil or pond water. Spiders and mites were seeking shelter in the soil or the litter of decaying lichen and vegetation.
Birth, a brief life of light and struggle, rapid death. Silverhair sensed the mass of the baby inside her, and her heart was heavy. Would she be able to give her own child even as much as this, as the short lives of the summer creatures?
Through the briefly teeming landscape, oblivious to the riot of color, Silverhair walked stolidly on.
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