Longtusk tm-2

by Stephen Baxter

  "They are not spears," puffed Thunder as he ran after the mammoth, "but arrows. The Whiteskins have bows — never mind, grazer! Just keep your head high when you run. You can take an arrow or two — but not your rider."

  And, as if in response to Thunder’s warning, a small flint-tipped spear — no, an arrow — plunged out of nowhere into Longtusk’s cheek. The pain was sharp and intense; the small blade had reached as far as his tongue.

  Without breaking stride, he curled his trunk and plucked the arrow out of his cheek. Blood sprayed, but immediately the pain lessened.

  Jaw Like Rock was charging past him, the keeper Spindle clinging to Jaw’s hair as if for life itself, his mouth drawn back in a rictus of terror. Jaw called, "Had a mosquito bite, grazer?"

  "Something like that."

  The big tusker trumpeted his exhilaration and charged forward.

  Still the strange Fireheads did not break and run.

  An arrow lodged in the foreleg of Jaw Like Rock. Longtusk could smell the sharp, coppery stink of fresh blood. Jaw screamed and pulled up, despite repeated beatings from Spindle on his back. Jaw knelt down, snapping away the arrow. Then, bellowing with rage and pain, he plunged on.

  Still Spindle continued to beat him and scream in his ear.

  Now they were on the Whiteskins. Mastodonts, Whiteskins and Fireheads flew at each other in a crude, uncoordinated mêlée, and trumpets, yells and screams broke the dust-laden air.

  Longtusk lunged at the Whiteskins around him with his tusks and trunk. But, nimble and light on their feet, they stayed out of his reach. They jabbed at him with their spears and rocks, aiming to slash at his trunk or belly, or trying for his legs.

  Calmly, Thunder called to Longtusk: "Watch out for those knives. These brutes have fought us before. They are trying for your hamstrings. Recall that rhino, grazer. I’ve no intention of carrying you back to the stockade."

  Longtusk growled his gratitude.

  Jaw Like Rock, enraged by pain, feinted at a fat Whiteskin. The Firehead, evading the lunge of those tusks, got close to Jaw with his spear. But Jaw swung his tusks sideways and knocked the Whiteskin to the ground. Then, with a single ruthless motion, he placed his foot on the head of the scrambling Whiteskin.

  Jaw pressed hard, and the head burst like an overripe fruit, and the Whiteskin was limp.

  Through all of this Spindle clung to Jaw’s back, white-eyed, obviously terrified.

  But for Longtusk there was no time for reflection, or horror; for now one of the Whiteskins came directly at him, jabbing with a long spear. He was a big buck, shaven-headed and stripped to the waist, and the whole of his upper body was coated with the acrid white paste. He had a wound on his temple, a broad cut sliced deep into the greasy flesh there — as if made by a boomerang.

  Crocus, on his back, yelled her anger. With a screech like a she-cat, her blonde hair flying around her, she leaped off Longtusk’s back. She landed on the big Firehead, knocking him flat. She raked her nails down his bare back, leaving red gouges. The Whiteskin howled and twisted — and, despite Crocus’s anger and determination, he soon began to prevail, for Crocus’s strength and weight were no match for this big male.

  Walks With Thunder, surrounded by his own circle of assailants, called breathlessly, "Protect her, Longtusk. She’s important now. More than you know…"

  Longtusk had every intention of doing just that, but while the two Fireheads flailed in the dirt, he could easily harm Crocus as much as her opponent. He stood over them, trumpeting, waiting for an opportunity.

  At last the Whiteskin wrestled Crocus flat on her back. He straddled her, sitting astride her belly, raising his fists to strike.

  Now was Longtusk’s chance.

  The mammoth reached out with his trunk, meaning to grab the Whiteskin around his neck…

  The Whiteskin jerked upright, suddenly. His paws fluttered in the air around his face, like birds, out of his control. Then he fell backward, twitched once, and was still.

  Longtusk reached down and pulled the corpse off Crocus.

  He saw immediately how the Whiteskin had died. The chisel that had destroyed the rhino — still stained by the great beast’s blood — had been driven upward into the Whiteskin’s face, through the soft bones in the roof of his mouth, and into his brain.

  The girl got to her feet. She stared down at the creature she had killed. Then she anchored one foot on the Whiteskin’s ugly, twisted face, and yanked the chisel out of his skull. The last of his blood gushed feebly.

  She stepped on his chest and emitted a howl of victory — just as her father had on bringing down the rhino.

  Then she fell to her knees and buried her face in her paws.

  Longtusk reached out his trunk to her. She curled up, pulling the long hairs close around her, as she had as a cub, lost and alone on the steppe.

  The Whiteskins were fleeing. The mastodonts trumpeted after them, and the Firehead hunters hurled their last spears and darts.

  In all, four Whiteskins had fallen. Under the watchful, contemptuous eyes of Jaw Like Rock — whose leg wound still leaked blood — the trainer, Spindle, walked from one Whiteskin corpse to the next, jabbing his spear into their defenseless cooling bodies.

  Walks With Thunder came up to Longtusk. He was dusty, blood-spattered, breathing hard. "I’m getting too old for this. Bedrock came north to find a place to live without war… But the world is filling up, it seems.

  "Now we must attend to business. We must collect Bedrock’s body. And we will walk back the way we came and retrieve the spears that were thrown. Then we will return to the settlement. Now, everything will be different… Jaw!"

  Longtusk looked up in time to see it happen.

  He had heard of this before. A mastodont, cruelly treated by a Firehead keeper, would not lash out in anger. Instead he would bide his time, enduring the insults and punishment, waiting for the right opportunity.

  Now here was Spindle, without his goad, dancing on the bodies of already dead Whiteskins; and here was Jaw Like Rock, calmly watching him, unrestrained, not even hobbled.

  In the very last instant Spindle seemed to understand the mistake he had made. He raised his paws, as if pleading.

  Jaw lunged forward with a single clean, strong motion, a thrust born of experience and training, and his tusk punctured Spindle’s heart.

  5

  The Remembering

  The hunting party returned to the Firehead settlement, subdued, all but silent. They moved slowly, for Jaw Like Rock was forced to walk hobbled, armed Firehead hunters shadowing his every step.

  Walks With Thunder, meanwhile, moving with slow dignity, bore the bodies of Bedrock and Spindle, wrapped in fur blankets. The long nasal horn of the rhino, Bedrock’s last trophy, was laid on top of his body, still caked with dried blood.

  Crocus walked beside Thunder, clutching her father’s cold paw.

  "War," growled Thunder, and he raised his trunk suddenly, as if sniffing the winds of vanished past. "You’ve been lucky to see so little of it, little grazer. Brutal and bloody it is, for Fireheads and mastodonts. They teach us special commands, and put us through mock battles to ensure we will not panic at the furious noise, the stink of blood. And they feed us drinks of fermented grass seed, a powerful potion that drives sanity from the mind, replacing it with a mist of blood…

  "And then comes the battle.

  "It can be magnificent, Longtusk! We charge into the ranks of the enemy, all but invulnerable to their arrows and axes, and scatter their ranks. We stab with our tusks and crush with our feet. If the enemy has never seen mastodonts before they are terrified, awed out of their wits.

  "But it never lasts.

  "As warriors we are clumsy beasts, Longtusk. The Firehead fighters learn to step aside and assail us from the sides, encircling us and separating us, striking with arrows and spears, slashing our trunks and hamstrings, killing our riders.

  "And sometimes — despite the training, despite the intoxicating brews — we reca
ll who we are. Then we panic and retreat, even trampling our own warriors." He closed his small eyes, deep in their pits of wrinkled skin. "I thought I had put it all behind me. Now it is coming again."

  When they reached the Firehead settlement, Bedrock’s body was immediately claimed by the Shaman, Smokehat, who had it brought into his own hut of bone and turf. The Shaman berated the Firehead hunters who had been with Bedrock when he died, and even Longtusk and the mastodonts.

  As for Crocus, she retreated into Bedrock’s hut — hers, now — carrying the rhino horn.

  As the days wore on, Crocus was forced to receive a string of visitors: older males of the Firehead tribe, there to consult, Thunder told Longtusk, about the meaning of the sudden appearance of these other Fireheads, the Whiteskins, on the steppe. But she did not emerge from her hut, refusing even to see Longtusk.

  Longtusk felt bereft. He hadn’t realized how much he had come to rely on Crocus’s companionship, which seemed to fill a need not satisfied even by the mastodonts.

  He threw his great muscles into the work of heavy lifting and hauling, and his companions treated him with a bluff respect. And when he wasn’t working he spent much of his time in the Firehead settlement.

  It was unusual for Bull mastodonts to be allowed to wander without keepers through the Firehead community, but after his long association with Crocus — during which time not a hair on her head had been harmed — Longtusk seemed to be regarded as a special case.

  But he remained the only mammoth in the captive herd, and adults gaped at him or cowered from his immense tusks, and he was constantly followed around by a small herd of goggling Firehead cubs. They collected the hair he shed, and used it to stuff their moccasins and hats and pillows. He learned to endure the perpetual tugs and strokes of the cubs, and he took great care not to step on one of those stick-thin limbs or eggshell skulls.

  Work went on for Fireheads and mastodonts: hunting game for food, building and rebuilding the huts, extending and filling the storage pits for meat and hay — for the cycle of the seasons was not slowed even by death, and the inevitable approach of winter was never far from the thoughts of anybody in the community.

  He watched them butcher a deer. They took its flesh to eat and its skin to make clothing. They even used the tough skin of its forelegs for boot uppers and mittens. They made tools and weapons from its bones and antlers. They used the deer’s fat and marrow for fuel for their lamps, and its blood for glue, and its sinews for bindings, lashings and thread. Gradually the deer was reduced to smaller and smaller pieces, until it was scattered around the settlement.

  Longtusk saw a mother use her hair to wipe feces from the backside of a cub.

  He saw a male take the lower jawbone of a young deer, from which small sharp teeth protruded like pebbles. He sawed off the teeth at their roots, producing a series of beads almost identical in shape, size and texture, and held together by a strip of dried gum. It was a necklace.

  He saw an old male pinch the tiny hearts of captive gulls, seeking to kill them without spoiling their feathers. He skinned the birds, turned the empty skins inside out, and wore the intact skins on his feet — feathers inside — within his boots.

  Endless detail, endless strangeness — endless horror.

  But the Fireheads went about their tasks without joy or enthusiasm. Even the cubs, when they tried to run and play, were snapped at and cuffed. The settlement had become a bowl of subdued quiet, of slow footsteps.

  And Longtusk felt increasingly agitated.

  It was natural, he told himself. Bedrock had been the most important of the Fireheads; his death brought finality and change. Who wouldn’t be disturbed?

  …But he couldn’t help feeling that his inner turmoil was something beyond that. He was aware that his mood showed in the way he walked, ripped his fodder from the ground, snarled at the Firehead cubs who got in his way or tugged too hard at his belly hairs.

  At length, he came to understand what he was going through. He felt oddly ashamed, and he kept it to himself.

  Still, Walks With Thunder — as so often — seemed more aware of Longtusk’s moods and difficulties than anybody else. And he came to Longtusk, engaging him in a rumbling conversation as they walked, fed, defecated.

  "…It’s interesting to see how differently they treat you," Thunder said, as he watched Firehead cubs, wide-eyed, trot after Longtusk. "Differently from us, I mean. You have to understand that you mammoths were once worshipped as gods by these creatures."

  "Worshipped?"

  "Remember when we found you at the Dreamer caves, how they threw themselves on the ground? There is little wood here. Trees struggle to grow on land freshly exposed by the ice. And so the Fireheads rely on the mammoths — especially your long-dead ancestors — for bones and skin and fur, material to build their huts and make their clothing and burn on their hearths. Without the resources of the mammoths, it’s possible they couldn’t survive here at all."

  Longtusk reminded Thunder of the Dreamers, who had lived so modestly in their rocky caves.

  "Ah, but the Fireheads are not like the Dreamers," said Thunder. "They would not be content with eking out unchanging lives like pike basking in a pool. And it is this lack of contentment that drives them on… to greatness and to horror alike.

  "They’ve discarded those old beliefs, I think; now, a mammoth is just another animal to them. But still you hairy beasts seem to be admired in a way they have never admired us, despite our long association with them. Of course that doesn’t stop them from going north and—" He stopped abruptly.

  The north: the old mystery, Longtusk thought, a mystery that had eluded him for years, despite his quizzing of Jaw Like Rock and other mastodonts; it was as if they had been instructed — perhaps by Thunder — to tell him nothing.

  "Going north for what?" he asked now. "What do they seek in the north, Thunder?"

  "I shouldn’t have spoken… What’s this?" Suddenly Thunder’s trunk reached out to Longtusk’s ear.

  Longtusk couldn’t help but flinch as Thunder’s trunk, strong and wiry, probed in his fur until its tip emerged coated in a black, viscous liquid.

  "By Kilukpuk’s mighty dugs," Thunder said. "I thought I could smell it. The way you’ve been dribbling urine… You’re in musth. Musth!"

  Musth — a state of agitation associated with stress or rut; musth, in which this foul-smelling liquid would ooze from a mammoth’s temporal gland; musth — when a mammoth’s body was temporarily not under his full control.

  "No wonder you’re so agitated. And it’s not the first time either, I’ll wager."

  Longtusk pulled away, trumpeting his irritation. "I’m an adult now, Thunder, a Bull. I don’t need—"

  "It’s one thing to know what musth is and quite another to control it. And you’ve picked a terrible time to start oozing the black stuff. In a few days you’ll play perhaps the most important role of your life."

  "What role? I don’t understand."

  "With Crocus, of course. It will be tiring, difficult, stressful — even frightening. Through it all you must maintain absolute control — for all our sakes. And you decide now is the time to go into musth… Oh. Neck Like Spruce."

  Longtusk felt his trunk curl up. "Who?"

  "You can’t fool me, grazer. That’s the name of the pretty little Cow you’ve been courting, isn’t it?"

  "Courting? I don’t know what you’re talking about."

  "Perhaps you don’t. We don’t always understand ourselves very well. It’s true, nevertheless — and now this." Thunder rumbled sadly. "Longtusk, I’m just an old fool of a mastodont. I’m not even one of your kind. And I know I’ve filled your head with far too much advice over the years."

  Longtusk was embarrassed. "I appreciate your help. I always have—"

  "Never mind that," said Thunder testily. "Just listen to me, one last time. You and I — we look alike, but we’re very different. Our kinds were separated, and started to grow apart, more than a thousand Great-Ye
ars ago. And that is a long, long time, ten times longer than the ice has been prowling the world."

  "Why are you telling me this?"

  "While you’re in musth — now and in the future — stay away from Neck Like Spruce. Otherwise you’ll both be hurt, terribly hurt."

  "I don’t understand, Thunder…"

  But Thunder would say no more. Rumbling sadly, he walked slowly away, in search of fresh forage.

  Soon the settlement, without throwing off its pall of gloom, began to bustle with activity. Longtusk learned that the Fireheads were preparing for their own form of Remembering ceremony for their fallen leader.

  Everything was being rebuilt; everything was changing. It was obvious the Remembering of Bedrock would mark a great change in the affairs of the settlement — and therefore, surely, in Longtusk’s own life as well, a change whose outcome was impossible to predict.

  Every surface, of rock and treated skin, was scraped bare and painted with new, vibrant images. And everywhere the Fireheads made their characteristic mark, the outstretched paw. The artist would lay a bare paw, fingers open, against the rock, then suck paint into the mouth and spray it through a small tube and over the paw to make a silhouette.

  The most busy Firehead, at this strange time, was the old male the mastodonts called Flamefingers. He was the manufacturer of the finest tools and ornaments of bone, ivory and stone. Flamefingers was fat and comfortable. The skills of his nimble paws had won him a long and comfortable life, insulated from the dangers of the hunt or the hard graft of the storage pits.

  Flamefingers had an apprentice. This wretched male cub had to bring his master food and drink, cloths for the old Firehead to blow his cavernous nose, and even hollowed-out bison skulls, pots for the great artisan to urinate in without having to take the trouble to stand up.

  Longtusk watched in fascination as the young apprentice wrestled to turn an ancient mammoth tusk — an immense spiral twice his height — into ivory strips and pieces, useful for the artisan to work.

  At the tusk’s narrow, sharp end, he simply chopped off pieces with a stone axe. Where the tusk was too wide for that, he chiseled a deep groove all around the tusk until only a fine neck remained, and then split it with a sharp hammer blow.