Longtusk tm-2

by Stephen Baxter

  The thing’s shape was complex, full of holes. It was mostly white, but something dark brown clung to it here and there, around which mosquitoes and flies buzzed angrily.

  It might have been a rock.

  Jaw Like Rock stood alongside Longtusk, swishing his tail vigorously. "I can stand the work," the squat Bull muttered. "It’s these wretched mosquitoes that drive me to distraction."

  Longtusk asked, "Are those rocks heavy?"

  Jaw turned to look at him quizzically. "What rocks?"

  "The rocks they are pulling out of the river bank."

  Jaw hesitated. He said carefully, "Nobody has told you what we’re doing here? Thunder hasn’t explained?"

  "No. Aren’t they rocks?"

  Jaw fell silent, seeming troubled.

  Longtusk found, at his feet, a patch of what looked like mammoth dung. He poked at it and it crumbled. It was dried out, stale, half frozen, obviously old. Regretfully he lifted a few crumbs to his mouth; their flavor was thin.

  Since the day he had been separated from his Family by the fire storm — despite the way the Fireheads had him undertake these jaunts across the countryside — he had never seen a single one of his own kind.

  But the expeditions always headed south.

  He asked Jaw about this.

  "Sometimes there are expeditions to the north, Longtusk," Jaw rumbled. "But—"

  "But what?"

  Jaw Like Rock hesitated, uncomfortable. "Ask Walks With Thunder."

  Longtusk growled, "I’m asking you."

  "It is difficult to work there. It is poor land. The ice is retreating northward and uncovering the land; but the new land is a rocky desert. To the south, plants and animals have lived for many generations, and the soil is rich…"

  He’s keeping something from me, Longtusk thought. Something about the northern lands, and what the Fireheads do there.

  "If the south is so comfortable, why do the Fireheads live where they do? Why not stay where life is easy?"

  Jaw sneezed as pollen itched at his trunk. He slid his trunk over one tusk and began to scratch, scooping out lumps of snot. "Because to the south there are already too many Fireheads. They have burned the trees and eaten the animals, and now they fight each other for what remains. Fireheads are not like us, Longtusk. A Firehead Clan will not share its range with another.

  "Bedrock tried to take the land belonging to another Clan. There was a battle. Bedrock lost. So he has come north, as far as he can, so that his Clan can carve out a new place to live."

  Longtusk tried to understand what all this meant.

  He imagined a line that stretched, to east and west, right across the continent, dividing it into two utterly different zones. To the south there was little but Fireheads, mobs of them, fighting and breeding and dying. To the north the land was as it had been before, empty of Fireheads.

  And that line of demarcation was sweeping north, as Firehead leaders like Bedrock sought new, empty places to live, burning across the land like the billowing line of fire which had separated him from his Family.

  It was to the north that Longtusk knew he must return one day, when the chance arose. For it was to the north — where there were no Fireheads, in the corridor of silent steppe which still encircled the planet below the ice — that was where the mammoth herds roamed.

  The keepers approached Longtusk now. It was time to don his pack gear, he realized gloomily. He was not yet trusted with complex tasks like digging, but he was regarded as capable of carrying heavy weights.

  The pack gear was substantial.

  First the keepers laid over him a soft quilted pad. It extended from his withers to his rump and halfway down his sides. On top of this came a saddle of stout sacking stuffed with straw. It had a split along the back to relieve the pressure on his spine; most of the weight he had to carry would rest on his broad rib cage. And then came a platform, a flat plate of cut wood with four posts in the corners, with ropes slung between the posts to prevent his load from falling off.

  The whole assembly was strapped to him by one length of thick plaited rope which went around his head and girth and up under his tail. To prevent chafing the rope was passed through lengths of hollow bone that rubbed smoothly against his chest.

  And now Walks With Thunder was approaching with his mysterious, complex load, and the stench of decay grew stronger.

  Longtusk became fearful.

  He could see that Thunder’s cargo was rounded, with two gaping sockets at the front. It seemed to have tooth marks, as if some scavenger had worked on it. The brown stuff that clung to it looked like flesh, heavily decayed and gnawed by the scavenger. There was rough skin over the scraps of flesh, and lanks of hair clung, brown and muddy.

  It was bone, Longtusk realized with horror. A bone, to which decaying meat still clung.

  "What’s going on here, Jaw? What is that thing?"

  "Listen to me," said Jaw Like Rock urgently. "It isn’t what it seems…" He laid his trunk over Longtusk’s head, trying to soothe him, but Longtusk shook it off.

  The keepers began to look alarmed.

  The bone thing had the stump of a tusk, broken and gnawed, sticking out of its front. A mammoth tusk.

  "Nobody was killed here," Jaw was saying. "This wasn’t the fault of the Fireheads, or anybody else. It just happened, a very long time ago…"

  Longtusk looked again at the river bank. He saw that the white objects were not rocks, not one of them. They were all bones: thick leg bones and vertebrae and ribs and shoulder blades and skulls, sticking out of the mud, many of them still coated with flesh and broken and chewed by scavengers.

  It was a field of corpses: the corpses of mammoths.

  And here was Walks With Thunder, about to load the great vacant skull onto Longtusk’s back.

  Longtusk swept his tusks, knocked the skull from the grasp of an astonished Walks With Thunder, and smashed it to pieces underfoot.

  He recalled little after that.

  They got him under control, and brought him through the long march back to the Fireheads’ settlement.

  As the day wound to its close, their work done, the mastodonts were allowed to find food and water, and to mingle with the Family of Cows and calves.

  Longtusk did not expect such freedom tonight.

  He hadn’t injured any of the Fireheads. But, despite Thunder’s apologies and urging, he hadn’t allowed the keepers to remount his pack gear or to place any of their grisly load on his back. The other mastodonts, some grumbling, had had to accept his share of the load. As a result he was expecting punishment.

  But now the little keeper, Lemming, faced him. To Longtusk’s surprise, Lemming came close, easily within range of the mammoth’s great tusks. He seemed to trust Longtusk.

  Lemming reached out with one small paw and touched the long hairs that grew from the center of Longtusk’s face, between his eyes. Tiny fingers pulled gently at the hairs, combing out small knots, and the Firehead spoke steadily in his thin, incomprehensible voice. He seemed regretful, as if he understood.

  Now Lemming reached down and loosened the hobbles around Longtusk’s ankles. Then, with the gentlest of taps from his goad, he encouraged Longtusk to wander off toward his feeding ground.

  Longtusk — confused, dismayed, baffled by kindness — moved away from the trees in search of steppe grass.

  The Moon was high and dazzling bright — a wintry Moon, brilliant with the reflected light of ice-laden Earth. It was Longtusk’s only companion.

  Even when he ate, he had to do it alone. He needed the coarse grass and herbs of the steppe, and could tolerate little of the lush leaves and bark the mastodonts preferred. Tonight, though, he could have used a little company.

  Walks With Thunder had apologized for not warning him, and tried to explain to him about the bones in the river bank. It wasn’t a place of slaughter. It wasn’t even the place where all those decomposing mammoths had died.

  Mammoths had been drawn to the river’s water over a
long period of time — generations, perhaps even a significant part of a Great-Year. But a river bank could be a hazardous place. Mammoths became stuck in clinging mud and starved, or fell through thin ice and drowned. Their bodies were washed down the river, coming to rest in a meander or backwater.

  Again and again this happened, the corpses washing downstream from all along the river bank, and coming to rest in the same natural trap, until a huge deposit of bodies had built up.

  Sometimes the river would rise, immersing the bodies and embedding them in mud and silt, and fishes might nibble at the meat. And in dry seasons the water would drop, exposing the bodies to the air. The stench of their rot would attract flies, and larvae would burrow through the rotting flesh. Predators would come, wolverines or foxes or wolves, to gnaw on the exposed bones.

  At last the bodies were buried by silt and peat, and vegetation grew over them.

  But then the river’s path had changed. The water began to cut away at the great natural pit of bones, exposing the corpses to the air once more…

  "You see?" Thunder had said. "Nobody killed those mammoths. Why, they might have died centuries ago, their bodies lying unremarked in the silt layers until now. What’s left behind is just bone and rotting flesh and hair. The Fireheads imagine they have a use for all those old bones — and what harm does it do? The mammoths have gone, their spirits flown to the aurora. Strange, yes, are the ways of the Fireheads, but you’ll learn to live with them. I have…"

  Yes, thought Longtusk angrily, and he ripped tufts of grass roughly from the ground as he stomped along alone, all but blinded by his teeming thoughts. Yes, Thunder, you’ve grown used to all this. It doesn’t matter what happens to my bones when I’ve flown to the aurora; you’re right.

  But you have forgotten you are a Calf of Kilukpuk. You have forgotten how we Remember those who go to the aurora before us.

  I will not forget, no matter how long I live, how long I am kept here. I will never forget that I am mammoth.

  "…Are you in musth?"

  The contact rumble was light, shallow. Close.

  Preoccupied, he looked up. A small mastodont was facing him. A calf? No, a Cow — not quite fully grown, perhaps about his own age. She was chewing on a mouthful of leaves. Her jaw was delicate and neatly symmetrical, along with the rest of her skull, and that chewing, unmammoth-like motion didn’t seem as ugly and unnatural when she did it as when a big ugly Bull like Jaw Like Rock took whole branches in his maw of a mouth and -

  "You’re staring at me," she said.

  "What?… I’m sorry. What do you want?"

  "I want to feed in peace," she growled. Her four tusks were short, Moon white, and she raised them defiantly. "And I want you to answer my question."

  "I’m not in musth."

  "The Matriarch says I must keep away from Bulls in musth. I’m not ready for oestrus yet. And even if I was—"

  "I said, I’m not in musth," he snapped, rumbling angrily.

  "You act as if you are."

  "That’s because—" He tried to calm down. "It’s not your fault."

  She stepped closer, cautiously. "You’re the mammoth, aren’t you? The calf of Primus. I heard them talking about you. I never met a mammoth before."

  Longtusk felt confused.

  What should he say to her? In his short life he had had little contact with Cows outside his immediately Family. If this was a Bull he’d know what to do; he’d just start a fight.

  He snorted and lifted his head. "What do you think of my tusks?"

  She evaded his tusks, apparently unimpressed, and reached out with her slender trunk. She placed its warm, pink tip inside his mouth, startling him. Then she stepped back and lowered her trunk.

  She sneezed. "Ugh. Saxifrage."

  "I like saxifrage. Where I come from, we all eat saxifrage."

  She curled her trunk contemptuously. She turned and ambled away, her hips swaying with liquid grace, and she tore at the grass as she passed.

  Good riddance, thought Longtusk.

  "…Wait," he called. "What’s your name?"

  She raised her trunk, as if sniffing the air, and trumpeted her disdain. "Neck Like Spruce."

  "My name is—"

  "I know already," she said. And she walked off into moonlight.

  2

  The Rider

  All too soon the short Arctic summer was gone, and winter closed in once more.

  During the day Longtusk, seeking food, would scrape aside the snow and frost to find thin grass and herbs, dead and frozen. Sometimes Fireheads would follow him and chop turf and twigs from the exposed ground, fuel to burn in their great hearths.

  The mastodonts, less well adapted to the cold, needed leaves and bark from the trees. But soon all the trees close to the Firehead settlement were stripped or destroyed, and they had to travel far to find sustenance.

  This became impossible as the winter closed in, and the Firehead keepers would come out of their huts to bring feed, bales of yellowed hay gathered in the summer months. Longtusk watched with contempt as the mastodonts — even strong, intelligent males like Walks With Thunder and Jaw Like Rock — clustered around the bales, tearing into them greedily with their tusks and trunks.

  The Fireheads regularly checked the mastodonts’ trunks, eyes, ears and feet. Frostbite of the mastodonts’ ears was common, and the Fireheads treated it with salves of fat and butter.

  During the long nights, the mastodonts would huddle together for warmth, grumbling and complaining as one or another was bumped by a careless hip or prodded by a tusk. And they would regale each other with tales from their own, peculiarly distorted, version of the Cycle: legends of the heroic Mammut and her calves as they romped through the impossibly rich forests of the far south, where the sun never set and the trees grew taller than a hundred mastodonts stacked up on top of each other.

  Longtusk tried to join in with tales of the heroes of mammoth legend, like Ganesha the Wise. But he’d been very young when he had heard these stories, and his memory was poor. When he jumbled up the stories the mastodonts would trumpet and rumble their amusement, nudging him and scratching his scalp with their trunks, until he stalked off in anger.

  But as they talked and listened the younger mastodonts — and Longtusk — were soaking up the wisdom of their elders, embedded in such legends: how to find water in dry seasons or frozen winters, where to find salt licks, and particularly rich stands of trees.

  Longtusk had left his Family at a very young age, and he found he had much to learn, even about the simple things of life.

  There was a time when the toes of both his forelegs and hind legs gave him trouble, the skin cracking and becoming prone to infection.

  Finally Walks With Thunder noticed and took him to one side. "This is what you must do," he said. The mastodont rummaged among his winter-dry fodder and selected a suitable branch. Holding it in his trunk he stripped the leaves away and peeled back the bark, munching it efficiently. Then he took the branch, broke it into four lengths and laid them out in front of him. He selected one piece and, with brisk motions, sharpened it to a point against a rock.

  Then, satisfied with the shape, he began to clean methodically between his toenails, digging out the dirt, and wiping the stick clean.

  "You never saw this before?" he said as he worked.

  "No," Longtusk said, embarrassed.

  "Longtusk, you sweat between your toes. You must keep your toes clean or the glands will clog, causing the problems you are suffering now. It is even more important to keep your musth glands clean." He picked up a shard of stick and, with a practiced motion, dug it into one of the temporal glands in the side of his face. "But you must be careful to use a suitable stick: one that is strong and straight and not likely to break. If it snaps and jams up your gland, it cannot discharge and it will drive you crazy." He eyed Longtusk. "You don’t want to end up like that fool Jaw Like Rock, do you?…"

  When the nails were clean the mastodont blew spittle on them
with his trunk and polished them until they gleamed.

  And so, as he grew, month on month, Longtusk’s education continued, the orphan mammoth under the brusque, tender supervision of the older mastodonts.

  In the worst of it, when the snow fell heavily or the wind howled, there was nothing to do but endure. Longtusk did not measure time as a human did, packaging it into regular intervals. Even in summer, time dissolved into a single glowing afternoon, speckled by moments of life and love, laughter and death. And in the long reaches of winter — when sometimes it wasn’t possible even to risk moving for fear of dissipating his body’s carefully hoarded heat — time slid away, featureless, meaningless, driven by the great rhythms of the world around him, and by the deep blood-red urges of his own body.

  Longtusk secretly enjoyed these unmarked times, when he could stand with the others in the dark stillness and feel the shape of the turning world.

  Longtusk’s deep senses revealed the world beyond the horizon: in the hiss of a gale over a distant stretch of steppe, the boom of ocean breakers on a shore, the crack of ice on melting steppe ponds. And, in the deepest stillness of night, he could sense the thinness of this land bridge between the continents, with the frozen ocean to the north, the pressing seas to the south: surrounded by such immense forces, the land seemed fragile indeed.

  Longtusk was learning the land on a level deeper than any human. He had to know how to use it to keep him alive, as if it was an extension of his own body, as if body and land merged into a single organism, pulsing with blood and seasons. As he matured, he would come to know Earth with a careless intimacy a human could never imagine.

  Once, Longtusk woke from a heavy slumber and raised his head from a snowdrift.

  Snow lay heavily, blanketing the ground. But the sky was clear, glittering with stars. The mastodonts were mounds of white. Here and there, as a mastodont stirred, snow fell away, revealing a swatch of red-black hair, a questing trunk or a peering eye.

  And the aurora bloomed in the sky, an immense flat sheet of light thrown there by the wind from the sun.