Longtusk

by Stephen Baxter

  The land became steadily more treacherous. They worked their way past moraines, heaps of rubble left by the retreating ice. The rubble was of all sizes, from gritty sand to boulders larger than a mammoth. The moraines were cut through by meltwater rivers that varied unpredictably from trickles to mighty, surging flows, and the rubble heaps were unstable, liable to slump and collapse at any time.

  As they pressed farther, a great wind rose, katabatic, pouring directly off the ice sheet and into their faces. It was a hard time. There was little to eat or drink and every step required a major effort, but they persisted. And Longtusk was careful to encourage his charges to gather as much strength as possible, for he knew that only harder days, if anything, lay ahead of them all.

  At last they encountered the ice itself.

  They reached the nose of a glacier. It was a wall of ice, cracked and dirty and forbidding. Blocks of broken ice, calved off the glacier like miniature icebergs, lay unmelting on rock that was rust-red, brown and black. Tornado-like columns of ice crystals spun across the barren rock in the wind, whipping up small lumps of sandstone that flew through the air, peppering the mammoths' hides.

  This was the terminus of a huge river of ice that poured, invisibly slowly, from the vast cap that still lay to the east.

  The mammoths paused to gather breath, hunted without success for food, and then began the ascent.

  Longtusk picked his way onto the great ice river, stepping cautiously over a shattered, chaotic plain of deeply crevassed blue ice. The glacier was a river of raw white, its glare hurting his eyes, shining under the sky's clean blue. He could see the glacier's source, high above him, at the lip of the ice sheet itself. Where he could he chose paths free of crevasses and broken surfaces, but he could usually find easier ground near the glacier's edges, hugging the orange rock of the valley down which the glacier poured.

  It was difficult going. Sometimes loose snow was whipped up by the wind and driven over the surface, obscuring everything around him up to shoulder height. But, above the snow, the sky was a deep blue.

  At last the ice beneath his feet leveled out, and he realized he had reached a plateau.

  It was the lip of the ice sheet.

  He was standing on a sea of gleaming ice, which shone in every direction he looked, white, blue and green. The ice receded to infinity, flat white under blue sky — but perhaps his poor eyes could make out a shallow dome shape as the ice rose, sweeping away from him toward the east.

  It was utterly silent and still, without life of any kind, the only sound the snort of his trunk, the only motion the fog of his breath.

  He turned, ponderously, and looked back the way he had come.

  This edge of the ice was marked by mountains, heavily eroded and all but buried, and he could see how the glacier spilled between the peaks toward the lower ground. Though locked into the slow passage of time, the glacier was very obviously a dynamic river of ice. Huge parallel bands flowed neatly down the valley's contours. The bands marked the merging of tributaries, smaller ice rivers that flowed into the main stream, each of them keeping their characteristic color given them by the rock particles they had ground up and carried. Where the glacier reached the lower land it spread out, cracking, making the jumbled surface of crevasses he had struggled to cross.

  Everything flowed down from here, down to the west and the lower ground, as if he had climbed to the roof of the world. He was cold, exhausted, hungry, and thirsty; and he was still not confident of surviving this immense venture. But, standing here, looking down on the great frozen majesty of the icecap and its rivers, he felt exhilarated, privileged.

  He turned to face the east, ready to go on.

  He stepped forward experimentally. The ice was unforgivingly cold, seeming to suck his body heat out through the thick callused pads on his feet. It was harder than any rock he had encountered — but it was not smooth. It was choppy, rippled, like the surface of a lake under the wind. But the ripples were frozen in place, and the footing was, surprisingly, quite secure, thanks to those scalloped ripples.

  There is nothing to eat here, he thought dryly. There is no shelter, and if I stay too long I will surely freeze to death. But at least I won't slip and fall.

  He began to walk, and the others followed him. He could feel the ice's flow in his belly, a deep disturbing subsonic murmur as it poured with immense slowness toward the lip.

  THE CAP WAS ONE OF A STRING of great domes of ice that littered the northern hemisphere of the planet. As its center the icecap was kilometers thick, as humans would have measured it, and the bedrock beneath — ground free of life and locked in darkness — was crushed downward through many meters.

  The dome was fed by fresh falls of snow on its upper surface. The new snow crushed the softer layers beneath, forcing out the air and turning them into hard blue ice. The collapsing center forced ice at the rim to flow down to lower altitudes, in the form of glaciers that gouged their way through river valleys and, where the ice met open water, they floated off to form immense shelves.

  The ice was like a huge, subsiding mass of soft white dung, flattening and flowing, continually replenished from above.

  The glaciers' flow was enormously slow — perhaps advancing by a mere mammoth footstep every year. But the icecap was nevertheless shrinking. Less snow was falling on the icecap than it was losing to its glaciers and ice shelves. The cap was inevitably disintegrating, though it would take an immense time to disappear.

  At first, under blue skies, it was exhilarating to be here. But even from the start the icecap was not without its dangers.

  Once, Longtusk walked over a place were the ice had frozen into a thin crust that seemed to lie on deeper snow. When he took a step the surface settled abruptly. He fell — not far, just enough to startle him. And then the crust around him continued to collapse, the cracks spreading for many paces as the surface settled. The crunching, crackling noise of the ice seemed to circle him. It was eerie, like the actions of a living thing in this place where nothing could live, and he was glad to pass onto firmer ice.

  ...Even the light was strange.

  Sometimes, when the sun was low in the sky, there were rings and arcs surrounding it, glimmering in the sky, and even false images of the sun to either side of it, or nestling on the horizon. It was like the blurred multiple images Longtusk would sometimes see when his eyes were wind-battered and filled with tears, so that he had to peer at the world through a lens of water.

  When the nights were clear they were blue, as the moonlight was reflected from the ice. Even when there was no Moon, and only stars shone, the nights would still be bright and blue, so powerfully did the ice capture and reflect even the stars' trickle of light.

  On the third day the sky clouded over, and a white mist descended.

  The light grew bright but soft, the details of the sky and even the ice under his feet hazing. Soon the horizon was invisible and the sky was joined seamlessly to the ground, as if he was walking inside some huge hollowed-out gull's egg. The light was very bright, enough to hurt his eyes, and gray-white floaters drifted like birds across his vision. There was no shadow, no relief, no texture. He could make out the line of mammoths behind him, robust stocky forms laboring across the ice, their heads wreathed in steam. They were the only objects he could see in the whole world, as if they were all floating in clouds, disengaged from the Earth.

  But the mist thickened further still. In this sourceless, shadowless light, even footprints were nothing but thin tracings of blue-white against the greater white of the washed-out world, all but impossible to see with his sore and watering eyes.

  They endured a day and a night in the mist: a night they spent in utter darkness, huddled together against the wind, trying to ignore their own mounting hunger and thirst and the cold of the huge thickness of ice beneath their feet, which threatened to suck every scrap of warmth from their bodies.

  Doubts assailed Longtusk, suspended here in this harsh fog of ice crystals and mis
t. How could he have imagined that he could lead a party on such an impossible undertaking? He had only a fragment of legend to inspire him — only his memory of the flight of the birds to guide him. And in this white-out fog, even his acute mammoth senses were baffled by the clamor of wind and the creak of ice under his feet.

  They were all in distress, Longtusk realized, for mammoths were not built to endure such long treks over such inhospitable terrain without food and water. It was obvious that the journey was taking a heavy toll on poor Splayfoot; she was sinking once more into that ominous half-consciousness from which he feared, one day, she might not have the strength to climb out.

  And Rockheart too was suffering. He was more gaunt and bony than ever, his eyes milky and sore, his tusks protruding from the planes of his face like icicles. He had never looked older. But he wasn't feeble yet, as he proved as he propelled Splayfoot forward with a mighty shove of his forehead at her rump.

  They continued. They had, after all, no choice.

  At last, after another half day, the mist cleared as suddenly as it had descended. The world emerged again, reduced to elementals: a flat white surface under a blue dome, nothing but white and blue and flatness, an empty, stripped-bare land across which the mammoths toiled.

  ...But the landscape was not quite empty.

  The Dreamer Willow walked a little way away from the mammoths, blinking in the sudden glare. He peered into the east, and he pulled a strip of rabbit skin around his eyes to protect them from the sun's glare.

  Then he came running to Longtusk, jabbering in his guttural, incomprehensible language, and pointed to the eastern horizon.

  Longtusk squinted that way. He could see nothing but a blur where the ice merged with the sky. But that meant little; Willow's eyes, like a Firehead's, were those of a predator, much sharper than any mammoth's.

  Nevertheless he felt encouraged, and they pulled forward with increased enthusiasm.

  They smelled it before they saw it.

  "...Water," said Splayfoot, wondering. "It smells almost warm."

  Rockheart, wheezing, walking stiffly, had raised his great scarred trunk. "Growing things. And something else, something sour. Sulfur, perhaps."

  Willow was growing increasingly agitated. His bow legs working, he ran ahead of the mammoths and then back, urging them forward.

  And then Longtusk saw it.

  The mountains, protruding from the ice, seemed to float between blue sky and white ice. Gray-black scree, shattered by frost, tumbled over pure white glaciers — and, etched sharply against the black mountains, he saw pale green stripes that could only be vegetation.

  It was the nunatak.

  Heartened, trumpeting with excitement, he hurried forward.

  UNDER HIS FEET, ROCK BEGAN to push out of the ice and its thin covering of snow. The exposed rock was rust brown, the color of a calf's hair. It was littered with loose snow, which was blown by the prevailing wind into white streaks.

  For a time walking became a little easier. But the long, steady climb up the shallow rise added to their efforts, and soon they were all breathing hard, the young Cows trumpeting their dismay.

  After a time the land began to descend once more. Longtusk found himself walking down a broad, widening valley that curved between rounded, icebound hills. The smooth curving profiles of the hills were barely visible, the blue-white of the ice against the duller white of the sky. But here and there the land was sprinkled with fragments of black rock. The rock made it easier to see the shape of the land around him: the sweep of the valley floor, the tight rounded profiles of the hills.

  He came to a piece of the black rock, lying in his path. He nudged it cautiously with his foot. It was frothy, jet black, and sharp-edged — surely sharp enough to cut through the skin of an incautious mammoth's foot or trunk. He trumpeted a warning.

  Now they left the hills behind and the valley flattened out into a wide plain. There was more rock here, he saw: dark fragments scattered across the plain, half buried by the ice. Here and there the fragments were piled up in low unstable heaps. It was as if some giant creature had burst from the land itself, scattering these lumps of rock far and wide.

  Now the plain of broken rocks gave way to a broader area, smooth flat ice largely free of the rock lumps. Longtusk guessed they were approaching a frozen lake; rock lumps that fell here must have sunk to the bottom of the water and were now hidden beneath the ice layers.

  Cautiously they skirted the lake, sticking to the shore.

  But the land here was no longer flat. It was broken by vast bowls, like immense footprints — not of ice, Longtusk realized, but carved out of the rock itself, and coated by thin layers of ice and snow. The mammoths were forced to wend their way carefully between these craters, calling to each other when they were out of sight of one another.

  Longtusk wondered what savage force had managed to punch these great wounds in the ground. This was, he thought, a strange place indeed, shaped by forces he couldn't even guess at.

  At last he came to a place where the ground was bare of snow and ice. He walked forward warily.

  The ground was warm.

  He walked over a gummy brown-gray mud that clung to his footpads; here and there it was streaked orange, yellow, black. The mud was littered with shallow pools of water and rivulets which ran over sticky layers of gray scum. Where snow lay on the ground, he could see how it was melting into the hot pools and streams, folding over in huge complex swathes.

  In places the water was so hot it actually boiled, the steam stained a muddy gray by particles of dirt, and there was a sour, claustrophobic stink of sulfur. The steam, curling into the air, formed towers of billows and swirls, pointlessly beautiful. In fact it rose so high it blocked out the sun, like a cloud that reached from the ground to the air, and Longtusk shivered in the cold, reduced light.

  He found a place some way from the steaming, active areas. He tasted the water. It was hot — not unpleasantly so — and it tasted sour, acidic. He spat it out.

  Nearby was a place where it wasn't water that boiled but mud, gray-brown and thick. The mud had built itself a chimney, thick-walled, that rose halfway to his belly like some monstrous trunk. The steam here was laced with dark gray dust that plastered itself over the walls of the fumarole. The water had bubbled with a high rushing noise, but the slurping mud made a deeper growling sound, like the agitated rumbling of old Bull mammoths arguing over some obscure point of pride.

  ...And there was life here.

  Lichen and moss clung to the bare rock, and grass, brown and flattened, struggled to survive in swathes over ground streaked yellow by sulfur. The plants were coated with layers of ice — frosted out of the steaming, moisture-laden air — as if the plants themselves were made of ice crystals.

  Curiously he reached down and plucked some of the frozen scrub. The ice crumbled away, revealing thin, brittle plant material within; he crushed it with his trunk until it was soft enough to cram into his mouth. It was thin on his tongue, but nourishing.

  His heart pulsed with hope and vindication. It was a harsh, unnatural place, he thought, a place of steamy claustrophobic heat and rushing noise in the middle of the stillness of this perpetual winter — but this was the nunatak, just as Thunder's legend had promised. He trumpeted in triumph—

  But somebody was calling.

  ROCKHEART HAD FALLEN. The Cows had clustered around him, while Threetusk and Willow stood to one side, awkward, distressed.

  Longtusk hurried down the slope.

  Rockheart had slumped to his knees, and his trunk drooped on the muddy ground. His breath was a rattle.

  "Rockheart! What happened? Why did you fall?"

  His rumbled reply was as soft as a calf's mewling. "We made it, milk-tusk, didn't we? By Kilukpuk's dugs, you were right..."

  And Longtusk saw it. Rockheart — understanding that Longtusk would need his experience, knowing he was too weak for the trip — had come anyway, burning up the last of his energy. He had driven t
he others on until they had reached this island of rocky safety.

  And now he could rest at last.

  Convulsed by guilt, Longtusk picked up Rockheart's trunk. "Rockheart! You mustn't — not now—"

  But it was too late. Rockheart's last breath bubbled out of his lungs, and he slumped to the warm rock, lifeless.

  Longtusk trumpeted his grief, and his voice echoed from the rocky walls of the nunatak.

  4

  The Nunatak

  IT WAS A FINE BRIGHT SPRING morning, one of the first after the long winter. The nunatak was a bowl of black rock and green life under a blue-white sky.

  Everywhere mammoths grazed.

  Longtusk was working on his favorite patch of willow, which grew in the lee of a pile of sharp-edged volcanic boulders. The adults knew he favored this spot, and left the miniature forest for him.

  But the calves were another matter.

  The calf called Saxifrage was playing with her mother, Horsetail, Longtusk's niece. Horsetail lay on her side, her trunk flopping, while Saxifrage tried to clamber onto her flank, pulling herself up by grasping the long furs of her mother's belly.

  When she spotted Longtusk, Saxifrage gave up her game, jumped off and approached the old tusker.

  But her attention was distracted by a length of broken tusk, snapped off by some young male in an over-vigorous fight. Perhaps she had never come across such a thing before. She picked it up and began to inspect it. She grabbed it with her trunk, turned it over, and rubbed it against the underside of her trunk, making a rasping sound against the rough skin there. She put it in her mouth, chewed it carefully, and turned it over with her tongue. Then she threw it in the air and let it fall to the ground several times, listening intently to the way it rattled on the ground. At last she walked over it and touched it delicately with the tender soles of her hind feet.