Silverhair

by Stephen Baxter

  High above her there was a snow avalanche. It poured down the mountain in a mighty, drawn-out whisper, and for a while she was enveloped in dancing flakes. The wind increased, coming through the towering rock pinnacles that rose above her, a keening lament that resonated in her skull. A whir of ice splinters came scuttling across the rock shelf's surface; with every further step she took, she crunched on crystals.

  This was a noisy place. The cliff faces were alive with the crack of ice, the rustle and clatter of falling scree. Silverhair knew this was the voice of rock and ice, the frost's slow reworking of the upraised landscape.

  Her spirit was lifted. The violence of the land exhilarated her.

  Such was the clamor of ice and rock and wind from this huge barrier that even with their acute hearing, Silverhair's Family knew nothing of the land beyond the Mountains at the End of the World. Not even Longtusk himself had been able to glean the secrets of the lands that might lie to the north. Perhaps nothing lay beyond, nothing but mist and sky. But if this truly was the End of the World, Silverhair thought, there could be no better marker than these Mountains.

  They came to the snout of one of the great glaciers. The glacier was a river of ice, flowing with invisible slowness, its smooth curves tinted blue, surprisingly clean and beautiful.

  The glacier had poured, creaking, down from the Mountains, carving and shattering the rock as it proceeded. But here, where it spilled onto the rocky plain, the pressure on that ice river was receding. The glacier calved into slices and towers, some of which had fallen to lie smashed in great blocks at her feet. Silverhair found herself walking amid sculptures of ice and snow, carved by the wind and rain into columns and wings and boulders, adorned with convoluted frills and laces, extraordinarily delicate and intricate.

  But the land here was difficult. The mammoths were forced to thread their way between the ice blocks and the moraines, uneven mounds of sharp-edged debris, scoured by the glacier from the Mountains and deposited here. The wind was hard now, spilling off the Mountains. It plastered the mammoths' hair against their bodies, and Silverhair could feel it lashing against her eyes.

  At last the glacier itself loomed above them, a wall of green ice and windswept snow.

  Silverhair was stunned by the glacier's scale. The mammoths were the largest creatures in this landscape, yet the ice wall before her was so tall, its top was lost in mist that lingered above, as if reaching to the very clouds. Where the low sunlight caught the ice, it shone a rich white-blue, as if stars were trapped within its structure; but loose fragments scattered over its surface sparkled like dew.

  A pair of Arctic foxes sprinted past, probably a mating pair, their sleek white forms hard to see against the ice; Silverhair heard the foxes' complex calls to each other.

  There was a flash, and thunder cracked; the mammoths flinched.

  "Take it easy," shouted Eggtusk, his trunk aloft, sniffing for danger. "That was well to the south of us. Probably struck in that forest we skirted."

  Silverhair looked that way. There was another flash, and this time she saw the lightning bolt, liquid fire that shot down into the forest from the low clouds racing above. The bolt struck a tree, which fell into the forest with a crash. A steady, reddish glow was gathering in the heart of the forest.

  Fire.

  Now the rain came, a hard, driving, almost horizontal sheet of water, laced with snow and hailstones.

  The Matriarch had to shout and gesture. "We'll climb up toward the Mountains. Maybe we can shelter until this passes. Silverhair, look after Foxeye and the calves. The rest of you help Wolfnose. Hurry now."

  The Family moved to obey.

  ...Save for Lop-ear, who came up to Silverhair. "I'm worried about that fire," he said. "The grasses here are as dry as a bone, and with that wind, the fire could soon be on us."

  She looked toward the forest. The light of the fire did seem to be spreading. "But it's a long way away," she said. "And the rain—"

  "Is hard but it's just gusting. Not enough to extinguish the forest, or even soak the grass."

  Soft, wet snow lashed around them.

  Silverhair looked for the infant, Sunfire. Foxeye was anxiously tugging at the baby's ear. But the calf was half lying on the frozen ground, mewling pitiably. The snow had soaked into her sparse, spiky fur, making it lie flat against her compact little body; Silverhair could see lumpy ribs and backbone protruding through a too-thin layer of fat and flesh.

  She stood with Foxeye, and by pulling at Sunfire's ears and trunk, managed to cajole the calf to her feet. Then Silverhair and Foxeye stood one to either side of the infant, supporting her tiny bulk against their legs. Silverhair could feel the calf shiver against her own stolid legs.

  They tried to move her forward, away from the spreading flames. But the bedraggled Sunfire was too exhausted to move.

  Silverhair looked back over her shoulder anxiously. Fanned by the swirling wind, the fire had taken a firm hold in the stand of trees behind them, and an ominous red light was spreading through the gaunt black trunks. Already she could see flames licking at the dry grass of the slice of exposed tundra that lay between the mammoths and the forest.

  But her awareness of the fire spread far beyond the limited sense of sight. She could smell the gathering stink of wood succumbing to the flames, the sour stench of burning sap, hear the pop and hiss of the moist wood. She understood the fire, felt it on a deep level; it was as if a flame were burning through the world map she carried in her head.

  She knew they had to flee. But she and Foxeye could not handle the calf on their own. She turned, looking for help.

  Poor Wolfnose was turning away from the fire, slow and stately as some giant hairy iceberg, but her stiff legs were unable to carry her as once they had. "I'm not a calf anymore, you know..." But Owlheart, Eggtusk, and Lop-ear were striving to help her. Their giant bulks were walls of soaked fur to either side of Wolfnose, and Lop-ear had settled himself behind her, and was pushing at her rear with his lowered forehead. Owlheart, helping with her mother and trumpeting instructions to the Family as a whole, was even finding time to wrap a reassuring trunk over the head of Croptail; the young Bull stuck close to the Matriarch.

  But that left nobody to help Silverhair and Foxeye with the calf. Nobody — except her aunt, Snagtooth, who stood away from the others, still mewling like a distressed calf over her shattered tusk.

  Silverhair turned to Foxeye and raised her trunk. "Wait here."

  Foxeye, exhausted herself, was close to panic. "Silverhair — don't leave me—"

  "I'll be back." She trotted quickly over to Snagtooth.

  The mud Owlheart had caked over the smashed tusk stump was beginning to streak over Snagtooth's fur and expose the mess of blood and pulp that lay beneath. Snagtooth's eyes were filled with a desolate misery, and Silverhair felt a stab of sympathy, for the wound did look agonizing. But for now, she knew she had to put that from her mind.

  She grabbed her aunt's trunk and pulled. "Come on. Foxeye needs your help."

  "I can't. You'll have to cope. I have to look after myself." Snag-tooth snatched her trunk back.

  Silverhair growled, reached up with her trunk, and grabbed Snagtooth's healthy tusk. "If there was anybody else, I wouldn't care," she rumbled. "But there isn't anybody else." She moved closer to Snagtooth and spoke again, loud enough to be audible over the howling of the storm, soft enough so nobody else could hear. "Are you going to come with me, or are you going to make me drag you?"

  For long heartbeats Snagtooth stared down at Silverhair. Snagtooth was older, and massive for a Cow, a good bit bigger than Silverhair. Silverhair wondered if Snagtooth would call her bluff and challenge her — and if she did, whether Silverhair could cope with her, despite the smashed tusk.

  But Snagtooth backed down. "Very well. But you aren't Matriarch yet, little Silverhair. I won't forget this."

  She turned away, and with evident reluctance made her way toward Foxeye and the slumping Sunfire.

 
Silverhair felt chilled to the core, as if she'd taken a bellyful of snow.

  IT WAS SLOW GOING. The two groups of Family, huddled around the calf and the proud old Cow, seemed to crawl across the hard ground.

  Here and there the snow was drifting into deceptively deep pockets. Mammoths always have difficulty traversing deep snow; now Silverhair felt her legs sink into the soft, slushy whiteness, and it pushed like a rising tide up around the long hair of her belly, chilling her dugs. In the deepest of the drifts she had to work hard with Foxeye to keep the calf's head and trunk above the level of the snow.

  And all the time Silverhair could sense the fire pooling over the dry ground. The snow was having no effect now, such was the heat the fire was generating, and she knew their only chance was to outrun it. She stayed close to Sunfire, sheltering the calf from the wind and encouraging her to hurry — and she tried to contain her own rising panic.

  But now they were brought to a halt.

  Silverhair found herself on the bank of a stream that bubbled its way from the base of the ice and across the rocky land. She could see where the stream was already cutting into the loose soil and debris scattered over the rock, and depositing small stones from within the glacier. The mammoths' deep knowledge of their Island could not have helped them predict they would encounter this barrier, for every year the runoff streams reshaped the landscape. And the stream was wide, clearly too deep to ford or even to swim.

  The mammoths clustered together against the wind, staring at the rushing water with dismay. Silverhair, blocked, felt baffled, frustrated, and filled with a deep dread that reached back to her near-drowning as a calf. It was a bitter irony, for a runoff stream like this was exactly what they had come looking for; and now it lay in their way.

  She found Lop-ear standing with her. "We're in trouble," he said. "Look around, Silverhair. The runoff here. The forest over there, where the fire is coming from. Behind us, the Mountains..."

  Suddenly she understood.

  They had got themselves trapped here, by river and Mountains and forest, as surely as if they had all plunged into a kettle hole.

  Eggtusk approached them. "We can't cross the stream," he said bluntly.

  "But..." said Lop-ear.

  Eggtusk ignored him. "It's not a time for debate. We have to move on. We can't go north; that way will soon take us into the Mountains. So we follow the stream south. The stream will get broad and shallow and maybe there'll be somewhere to cross. That's what Owlheart has ordered, and I agree with her."

  He turned away, preparing to go back to Wolfnose, but Lop-ear touched his trunk. "Eggtusk, wait. Going south won't work. The fire will reach us before we—"

  Eggtusk quoted the Cycle: "The Matriarch has given her orders, and we follow."

  Lop-ear cried, "Not to our deaths!"

  In the middle of the storm, there was a moment of shocked stillness.

  Silverhair, startled, was unable to remember anyone continuing to argue with Eggtusk after such a warning.

  Nor, evidently, could Eggtusk.

  Eggtusk lifted his great head high over Lop-ear; he was an imposing mass of muscle, flesh, and wiry, mud-brown hair. "Any more talk like that and I'll silence you for good. You'll frighten the calves."

  "They should be frightened!"

  Hastily Silverhair shoved her trunk into Lop-ear's pink, warm mouth to silence him. "Come on," she said. Pulling him with her trunk, nudging him with her flank, she led him away from a glaring Eggtusk.

  She felt a deep chill. Lop-ear, with his fast, unusual mind, could sometimes be distracted, a little strange. But she had never seen him so agitated.

  ...And what, she thought with a deep shiver, if he is right? He's been right about so many things in the past. What if we really are just walking to our deaths?

  Still, Lop-ear called. But the wind snatched away his words, and nobody listened.

  7

  The Barrier

  WITH FOXEYE and a reluctant Snagtooth, Silverhair shepherded a trembling, unsteady Sunfire along the bank of the runoff stream.

  Although the depth and ferocity of the central channel gradually reduced, the stream spread further over the surrounding ground, and sheets of water ran over the rock. The cloudy water made the rock slick enough to cause even the tough sole of a mammoth's foot to slip, and several times poor Sunfire had to be rescued from stumbles.

  Meanwhile the storm mounted in ferocity, with gigantic clatters from the sky and startling bolts of lightning and a wind that swirled unpredictably, slamming heavy wet snowflakes into her face.

  And all the time she could sense the fire as it spread through the dry old grass toward them.

  Lop-ear was helping Owlheart and Eggtusk with Wolfnose's cautious progress. But he was still calling to the sky, complaining and prophesying doom. At the moment, the Matriarch and the old Bull were too busy to deal with him, but Silverhair knew he would pay for his ill-discipline later.

  They came to a young spruce lying across the rocky ground near the stream. It neatly blocked the mammoths' path. The little group broke up again. Foxeye, panting and near exhaustion, tucked her infant under her belly-hair curtain. Snagtooth, yowling complaints about her tusk, turned away from the others and scrabbled in the cold mud of the stream bank to cover her wound once more.

  Silverhair stepped forward. She saw that the tree's roots had sunk themselves into shallow soil that was now overrun by the runoff stream; when the soil had washed away, the tree had fallen. The tree itself would not be difficult to cross. They could all climb over, probably, or with a little effort they could even push the tree out of the way.

  But the tree was only an outlier of the spruce forest. Other trees grew here, small and stunted and sparsely separated — and some of them, too, had been felled by the runoff. She could see that a little farther south the trees grew more densely, and she could smell the thick, damp mulch of the forest floor.

  Eggtusk, with Owlheart, came up to her. Eggtusk saw the fallen tree. "By Kilukpuk's gravel-stuffed navel. That's all we need."

  "We'll have to climb over it," said Owlheart.

  "Yes. If we get Wolfnose over first—"

  But suddenly Lop-ear was here, standing head to head with Eggtusk. He was bedraggled, muttering, excited, eyes wide and full of reflected lightning. "No. Don't you see? This is the answer. If we push this fallen tree over there — and then go farther toward the forest to find more—"

  In the flickering light of the storm, the old Bull stood as solid as if he had grown out of the rock. Owlheart and Wolfnose, the two Matriarchs, stood by and watched, their icy disapproval of Lop-ear's antics obvious.

  Eggtusk said, "You're risking all our lives by wasting time like this."

  Silverhair hurried forward. "What are you trying to say, Lop-ear?"

  "I can't tell you!" he cried. "I just know, if we push the trees together, and—"

  "He's going rogue," said Owlheart. The Matriarch lumbered forward and glowered down at the prancing Lop-ear. "I always knew this calf would be trouble. All his talk of changing things. He's more like one of the Lost than a mammoth."

  "Listen to me!" Lop-ear was trumpeting now. He ran to Owlheart, who was turning away, and grabbed at her trunk. "Listen to me—"

  Eggtusk inserted his massive bulk between them. "You don't touch the Matriarch like that."

  "But you must listen."

  "Perhaps you'll listen to this," roared Eggtusk, and he tusked the ground.

  It was a challenge.

  EGGTUSK AND LOP-EAR faced each other, trunks lowered, ears flaring, gazes locked.

  Lop-ear was trembling, and Eggtusk seemed to tower over him, his great incurving tusks poised over his head.

  Bull mammoths have their own society, a society of bachelor herds independent of the Families of Cows and calves controlled by the Matriarchs. It is a warrior society, based on continual tests of strength and dominance. Normally, unless enraged by musth, a young Bull like Lop-ear would never challenge a giant tusker li
ke Eggtusk — or if challenged, he would quickly back down.

  Now Silverhair waited for Lop-ear to stretch his trunk at Eggtusk to show his deference.

  But Lop-ear made no such sign.

  Silverhair rushed forward. "Eggtusk, please. He didn't mean—"

  But Owlheart was in her way, solid as a boulder. "Stay back, child. This is a matter for the Bulls."

  Lop-ear raised his tusks and made the first blow, dashing his tusks against Eggtusk's. There was a knock of ivory on ivory, as if one great tree was being smashed into another.

  The older Bull did not so much as flinch.

  Lop-ear raised his head and again stabbed at Eggtusk's face. This time Eggtusk dipped sideways, so that Lop-ear's thrust missed. Eggtusk brought his massive head down and slammed his forehead against Lop-ear's temple.

  Lop-ear cried out, and stumbled back.

  Eggtusk trumpeted and lumbered forward. Lop-ear turned to face him, both mammoths trying to stay head-on; if either was turned, his opponent could easily knock him down or even stab him.

  Still the rain howled around them, still the lightning split the sky, and still the gathering light and smoke-stink of the fire filled Silverhair's head. She was peripherally aware of the other mammoths: Foxeye's weary disbelief, Snagtooth's disdain, Croptail's childish excitement.

  "I don't want to fight you," said Lop-ear. He was panting hard, and blood was seeping from a wound in his temple. "But if that's what I have to do to make you listen—"

  Wordlessly Eggtusk trumpeted once more and raised his massive tusks. The sleetish rain swirled around them, and water dripped from their cruel tips.

  Lop-ear lunged. Once again Eggtusk sidestepped, and he brought his tusks crashing down on Lop-ear's domed head with a splintering crash.

  Silverhair, horrified, trumpeted in alarm.

  The younger Bull bellowed, and fell to his knees.