Longtusk

by Stephen Baxter

  Some of the males came at Longtusk with their pointed, blackened sticks, as they hadn't for some months, as if he had brought them threat in the form of this helpless cub. The females were solicitous. As soon as they realized what distress this strange cub was in, they lifted her away from Longtusk and took her toward the hearth. There they stripped away her ragged skins, rubbed grease into her skin, and huddled around her, sandwiching the cub between their own great bodies.

  Willow came up to Longtusk. He rubbed Longtusk's trunk fur affectionately, and Longtusk realized that Willow, at least, thought he had done the right thing—

  Somebody screamed.

  It was one of the female Dreamers, an old woman, her face twisted by an ancient burn. She was pointing at the three of them: the strange female cub, Willow and Longtusk, over and over, jabbering and growling, frightened.

  She sees something, Longtusk realized, chilled. Something about the three of us.

  Suddenly the cave walls, solid rock, seemed to melt away, the Dreamers dispersing like smoke, until there was only the three of them, alone, locked together. She sees the end of my life. She thinks we will die together, we three: the yellow-haired cub, Willow, and me.

  But how can anybody know the future? And what strange fate could make such a thing happen?...

  The old female stumbled away, scared, shouting.

  And there was a howl of outrage.

  Blood was pouring down Stripeskull's foreleg, where a stick protruded from his flesh. With a yell of anger and pain he dragged the stick out of his body, ripping the wound wider.

  This was no simple stick of sharpened wood, Longtusk realized immediately. It had feathers attached to its base — and it was tipped, not by fire-hardened wood, but by a flake of flint, sharpened to a point much finer than any the Dreamers could manufacture.

  And now shadows flitted past the cave, urgent, menacing. Stripeskull threw down the bloody stick and, with a growl of anger, marched to the mouth of the cave.

  Longtusk scarcely noticed. He raised his trunk and tested the air, turning it this way and that, questing.

  Longtusk was electrified. He could smell mammoth.

  6

  The Newcomers

  HE STUMBLED OUT OF THE CAVE mouth to the open air.

  Behind him, from the caves, he heard shouting, raised Dreamer voices. But the noises were small and far away and nothing to do with him. All that mattered was that profound and alluring smell of his own kind: musty fur and dung and even the sharp tang of musth — and, in pulses of deep sound, he thought he could hear huge, heavy strides: many of them, a Family or a bachelor herd, close by.

  It was too much to hope that this was his Family; he knew he was far from their normal pastures. But these strangers would surely help him find his way back to his own. It was as if he had suddenly recalled who he was. How could he have spent so long, an entire winter, huddled in a mouth of eroded rock?

  But the wind was swirling, and it was impossible to tell where the scents were coming from. He crashed deeper into the brush, trunk raised eagerly.

  Before long, at the edge of the river, he came to a place where the stink of mammoths was very strong. He searched until he found a small, compact pile of dung.

  Mammoth dung... perhaps.

  He poked at it with his trunk, raised a fragment to his tongue to taste. It was warm and soft, obviously very recent, and its smell was strong and pungent. But its texture was strange — thicker and more fibrous than the dung of his Family — and he could taste a heavy concentration of wood and bark.

  Mammoths' diets differ, according to individual taste, and what they eat affects the quality of their dung. But Longtusk knew no mammoth whose diet was quite so skewed as to produce waste like this.

  He pushed on.

  He found a place where the trees were broken, the branches stripped of their bark and leaf buds, the ground trampled. Another unmistakable sign: mammoths had fed here — more than one, judging by the scale of the damage.

  ...But, like the dung, the pattern of tree damage was odd. Many of the younger saplings' trunks had been pushed aside, as if by animals who were shorter and squatter than he was. And he saw that bark and leaf buds had been taken extensively, even from above head height. Woolly mammoths will take a little bark and foliage in their diet, but they prefer the grasses and herbs of the open steppe.

  Still he saw no mammoths: not so much as a silhouette glimpsed through the trees, the swish of a tail, or the curve of a trunk. He rumbled, but there was no reply.

  If they were here, whoever they were, why did they not greet him?

  He decided to return to the mouth of the Dreamers' cave. From there he would follow the trail that would take him back up to the steppe. Surely there, on the open plain, he would be able to find the strange mammoths.

  He reached the edge of the trees, close to the Dreamers' cave — and, still in the shelter of the trees, he slowed to a halt.

  Several of the Dreamers had emerged from their caves. But they were not alone.

  CONFRONTING THEM WAS a new group of creatures: standing upright like the Dreamers, but spindly, taller, much less robust.

  The legs of these others were thin and taut — like those of a horse, meant for running and walking long distances. The newcomers had flat, delicate faces and high bulging skulls. They were covered in skins, like the Dreamers, but Longtusk could see that these garments were much more finely worked than the rough creations of the Dreamers. Their paws were delicate and they held things — pointed sticks and flakes of stone — and other, incomprehensible items, like a length of wood tied up with deer sinew so that it was bent over in an arc.

  And they stalked among the Dreamers with arrogance and hostility.

  Longtusk spotted Stripeskull. Blood still stained his shoulder where the strange stick had punctured it. But now the big Dreamer was crouching in the dirt. He was roaring defiance, trying to stand using one of his fire-hardened sticks as a prop — but one hind leg was dragging behind him. And Longtusk saw blood pulsing from a broad gash. He was surrounded by five or six of the newcomers, and they held sticks out toward Stripeskull, threatening him.

  The Dreamer females and cubs had been brought out of the cave, driven like recalcitrant calves by prods with sticks and stones. The females huddled together in a group, surrounded by the newcomers, with their cubs at the center. They seemed bewildered as much as frightened, and their gaze slid over the newcomers that stalked amongst them — as if they were too strange even to be properly visible, as if the Clan was being overwhelmed by a party of ghosts.

  Apart from Stripeskull, Longtusk could see no other Dreamer adult males. Perhaps they were off on one of their scavenging trips — or perhaps they had been driven away, by these cold, calculating others.

  Longtusk watched, fascinated, repelled. He knew what he was seeing.

  He had never before encountered these creatures, these distorted, hostile cousins of the Dreamers. But many of his kind had — and an understanding of the danger they posed was drummed into every young mammoth.

  These were the most ferocious predators of all — more to be feared, despite their frail appearance, than even the great cats — and the only response to encountering them was flight.

  For they had mastered fire itself.

  And they were not content to let embers burn in shallow hearths, like the Dreamers; instead they used fire to drive their way across the land. Perhaps they had even been responsible for the fire which had separated him from his Family. Hadn't he glimpsed slender running forms during his dreadful flight through the smoke?

  He had been wrong before, when he had first encountered Willow. About these newcomers there could be no doubt, and black dread settled on his heart.

  For these were Fireheads.

  One of the newcomers turned and looked directly toward him.

  This one was shorter than the others, with a broad, plump belly that glistened with grease. He sniffed loudly, his small, straight nose twitching
. He was, thought Longtusk, like a fat, overgrown lemming, walking comically upright on two hind legs.

  He knows I'm here, Longtusk thought, hidden as I am among these trees. Or he suspects so, anyhow. He is smarter than the rest.

  Now Willow spotted Longtusk too. He called out and lunged forward.

  A Firehead tripped him with a stick. Willow sprawled, howling.

  One of the females pushed her way out of the group and ran to Willow. Perhaps it was his mother. A Firehead confronted her. She dodged his stick and swung one mighty fist at his long, delicate face. Longtusk heard the unmistakable crack of shattering bone, and the other fell back with a gurgling cry, clutching his face.

  But more of the others joined the fray. They wrestled the female to the ground and pinned her there, a male's weight pressing down on each of her mighty limbs.

  Now, from the mouth of the cave, another emerged. He was dressed in skins, like the rest, but he wore a crown of what looked like bone — from which smoke streamed, as if he carried burning embers cupped in scrapings in the bone. Smoke rose even from his paws, and Longtusk realized he had taken ashes from the precious hearth which the Dreamers had preserved all winter long.

  Seemingly oblivious to pain, this grotesque creature raised his paws to the air and howled a cry of thin triumph. He cast the ashes to the ground, scattered them with his feet, and extinguished them in the trampled mud. The others whooped and danced, jabbing their sticks into the air.

  The Dreamers looked away, bewildered and defeated.

  Burning-head stalked over to the Dreamer female, who was still pinned to the ground. His teeth showing white, he leaned over her. She bellowed and tried to twist her head away. But he came closer, as if to press his lips against hers.

  She hawked and spat at him. He wiped his face and threw strings of greenish phlegm back at her.

  Longtusk was baffled. Was this like a fight among mammoth Bulls for access to females? But it made no sense. Even Longtusk could see that the Dreamer female was not in oestrus. Perhaps the other did not want the female, but only to demonstrate his power and dominance.

  But now the ugly tableau was disturbed. Another was emerging from the Dreamer cavern: taller even than Burning-head, his head adorned by a cap of yellow-white beads — beads of mammoth ivory, Longtusk realized queasily. This one looked oddly frail, his hair a grizzled white, his skin wrinkled and weather-beaten. But he carried the limp form of the yellow-haired cub in his arms.

  The rest, even Burning-head, cringed away from this new one, deferring.

  Burning-head was evidently a powerful figure. But it was obvious that this new male was the true power, like the strongest Bull in a bachelor herd.

  "...What fine tusks you have, cousin. And yet they do you little good if you stand facing into the wind."

  The voice had come from directly behind Longtusk. He whirled, trumpeting in alarm.

  Now the Fireheads knew he was there; they reacted, shouting. But none of that mattered, compared to the massive looming presence suddenly here behind him.

  For it was a mammoth... and yet it was not.

  IT, HE, WAS A MALE. He wasn't as tall as a full-grown mammoth Bull, yet he loomed over Longtusk. He was coated with wiry black-brown hair, shorter and darker than Longtusk's, some of it stained by the gray of age. His back was flat, lacking the fleshy hump of a true mammoth, and he was heavy-set, his chest deep, his limbs and feet broad. And he had broad stubby tusks, heavily chipped and scarred.

  Four of them: four tusks.

  And, strangest of all, Longtusk made out a scar burned into his muscled flank: a strange five-pronged form, burned through the layers of hair and into his flesh, exactly like the outstretched paw of a Dreamer — or a Firehead.

  The other opened his great mouth and roared. A gush of warm, fetid air billowed out over Longtusk, stinking of crushed wood and sap. The not-mammoth's teeth were cones of enamel — not flat grinding surfaces like Longtusk's, but sharp, almost like a cat's cruel fangs.

  Longtusk staggered back. He crashed out of the trees and into the clearing before the caves, in full view of Fireheads and Dreamers.

  There were cries of shock. Panicking, he whirled around.

  All but two of the Fireheads had fallen to the ground before him. The two who remained standing — staring at him open-mouthed — were the strong leader and the grotesque Burning-head. The leader put down his cub and picked up an abandoned stick. This was fitted with a blade of something that glittered like ice. He held the stick up, pointing it at Longtusk.

  In the Fireheads' distraction, the Dreamers seemed to see their chance. Even the female who had been pinned to the ground was free now. Under her lead, the females gathered their cubs and, quickly, silently, began to slip away up the trail that led to the steppe. Willow pulled Stripeskull to his feet, then let Stripeskull lean on him so that he hopped forward on his one good hind leg.

  Willow cast a single regretful glance back at Longtusk, and then was gone.

  But there was no time to reflect.

  A powerful trumpet and a slam of broad feet into the ground told Longtusk that the strange not-mammoth was right behind him. Terrified, bewildered, overwhelmed by strangeness, Longtusk turned, trumpeting. The Fireheads cringed anew.

  The other's eyes were like pools of tar, embedded in wrinkled sockets of flesh.

  "Do you know what that blade is, cousin? It is quartz. A kind of rock that's harder and sharper than almost any other. The old fellow may not look so strong, but he could throw that spear so hard that quartz tip will nestle in your heart." The not-mammoth's accent was strange — somehow guttural, primitive — but his language, of rumbles, trumpets, growls, stamps and posture, was clear to Longtusk.

  Longtusk said, "You are not mammoth."

  "No. But I am your cousin. Don't you know your Cycle? We are all Calves of Probos. I am better than mammoth. I am mastodont."

  The two great proboscideans faced each other, challenging, calculating, rumbling: members of hugely ancient species, separated by evolutionary paths that had diverged twenty-five million years before.

  The three Fireheads were engaged in a complex three-way argument.

  "We call the leader Bedrock," growled the mastodont. "For he is strong and silent as the rock on which the world is built. His cub is called Crocus, for the color of her hair. And the Shaman is Smokehat—"

  "What is a Shaman?"

  Bedrock had the quartz-tipped spear raised to shoulder height, and it was still pointing at Longtusk's heart. But Crocus was pulling at Bedrock's free foreleg and was jabbering excitedly, pointing at Longtusk.

  Meanwhile Smokehat, with his grotesque garb of bone and smoke, was all but dancing with impatience and rage.

  "That Shaman wants you killed. Bedrock is prepared to do it. But his cub seems to think you saved her life."

  "You can understand them?"

  "You pick up a little," the mastodont said wistfully, "if you spend long enough with them. My name is Walks With Thunder."

  Longtusk growled. "And mine is Longtusk. Learn it for my Remembering, mastodont, for I am ready to die."

  "Oh, that isn't the idea at all."

  "What?"

  The mastodont reared up, looming over Longtusk and pawing at the air.

  Startled, angry, bewildered, Longtusk backed away from this terrifying opponent and plunged into the stand of trees.

  HE FOUND THE TRAIL THAT LED to the open steppe.

  He turned back the way he had come and raised his trunk, sniffing the air. There was no sign of pursuit.

  But there was a smell of mammoth — no, it was the sharp, wood-ash stink of the animals he must call mastodont — and, he realized with mounting alarm, it came from all around him.

  He turned again. And there was a mastodont ahead of him.

  Like Walks With Thunder, this was a squat, powerfully built male with four stubby tusks. But he sported a broad scar that ran the length of his face, a scar that all but obliterated the socket of one eye. "Hello
, little grazer," he rumbled. "Welcome to the herd."

  As Longtusk turned once more, trunk raised, he saw and smelled more mastodonts to his left and right, like a line of stocky, hairy boulders: a row of them, all powerful adult males.

  Now, with a drumming of mighty footsteps, the mastodonts marched intently toward him, converging. Every one of them bore the strange scar sported by Walks With Thunder, a Firehead paw burned into hairless flesh. The way they moved together, as if driven by a single mind, was unnerving.

  And, strangest of all, there were Fireheads with them. They carried sticks tipped with curved pieces of bone, which they used to tap the mastodonts on the head or ears or flanks. Some of the mastodonts actually had Fireheads sitting astride their backs, with their long, thin hind legs draped over their necks, feet applying sharp kicks to the mastodonts' small ears.

  Soon the mastodonts were close enough for him to make out what they were saying in their heavy, strange accent.

  "...Well, well. What have we here? Don't tell me it's a grazer."

  "I haven't seen one of those grass-chewers for a long time. I thought they had all died out."

  "It must be a Cow. Look at those pretty-pretty tusks. Any self-respecting Bull would be too embarrassed to wear skinny monstrosities like that."

  "Hey, little grazer! Can I borrow your tusks? I need a pick to clean out my musth gland, and those spindly things are just the right size..."

  He saw that the mastodonts had closed the circle around him.

  The big scarred Bull facing him was being whipped, severely, by the Firehead with him. The Firehead was shouting, a simple, repetitive sound: "Agit! Agit!" It was obvious he was trying to drive the big Bull forward. This Firehead was sapling-thin with a cruel, pinched face.

  The scarred Bull, seeming unaware of the multiple wounds being inflicted on him, swiveling his huge, filth-crusted rump and let out a fart of thunderous intensity. A foul brown spray knocked the skinny Firehead backward, and the line of mastodonts reacted with stomps and growls of amusement.