Icebones

by Stephen Baxter

  She stepped forward gingerly.

  Autumn growled, but did not try to stop her.

  Soon Icebones had passed beyond the edge of the land, and she could look down into the depths of the Gouge. The rising sun cast deep pink shadows from the layers of cloud, obscuring the brown-gray ground far beneath. She was standing above the clouds, she thought, and all that kept her from that immense drop was the fragile thinness of the bridge; her stomach clenched, tight as the jaws of a cat.

  At last she reached Spiral. Icebones tugged at her tail until she yelped.

  "You must turn around. We have to go back."

  "I can't," Spiral said, whimpering. The Cow stood rooted as solid as a tree to the thin bridge floor.

  Shoot picked her way back along the shuddering bridge. She slapped Spiral's head with her trunk, and even clattered her tusks against her sister's.

  At last, under this double assault, Spiral, moaning softly, began to turn. Each footfall was as tentative and nervous as a newborn calf's. Step by step, Icebones led Spiral back toward the cliff top.

  They had almost reached the hard, secure rock when there was a harsh trumpet.

  Autumn called, "Shoot!"

  A section of the shuddering bridge had crumbled and fallen away. Icebones could see bits of it falling through the air, sparkling as they spun, diminishing to snowflakes.

  And there was nothing beneath Shoot's hind feet.

  Shoot fell back, oddly slowly. For a heartbeat she clung to the broken edge of the bridge with her forelegs, and she scrabbled with her trunk. Then she slid back, as smoothly as a drop of water sliding off the tip of a tusk. She wailed, once.

  Icebones glimpsed her sprawled in the air, almost absurdly, limbs and trunk and tusks flapping like the wings of a clumsy, misshapen bird. Her fall was agonizingly slow, slow enough for Icebones to hear every whimper and cry, even to smell the urine that gushed into the air around Shoot's legs.

  Then she was lost in cloud, and Icebones was grateful.

  She heard the trumpeting cry of Spiral, and Autumn's answering wail.

  ICEBONES INSPECTED THE CRACK. It was wide, and getting wider as more chunks of bridge structure fell away like sharp-edged snowflakes.

  The Ragged One stood on the far side of the crack, backing away slowly. The damaged bridge was like a great tongue lolling from the remote far side of the Gouge. But as the bridge swung up and down beneath her the Ragged One kept her footing easily.

  "You cannot return," Icebones called.

  "I do not choose to return."

  "You will be alone."

  The Ragged One snorted, and stepped back again as more of the bridge fell away. "I have always been alone. Don't you know that yet?"

  "We will meet at the Footfall."

  "Perhaps." And the Ragged One turned away.

  Icebones watched her recede. For all the tragedy and renewed danger her shrunken band would face from now on, a secret part of her was glad that the Ragged One was gone — at least for now.

  The bridge trembled and cracked further.

  Autumn was still trumpeting, her voice thin and sharp. "The morning is barely begun. But already my daughter is dead. How can this be?"

  The sun rose higher, shining brighter as the blue morning clouds dispersed.

  2

  The Walk Down From the Sky

  BY MIDDAY THE MAMMOTHS had reached the top of the landslide. Subdued, weary, they scattered in search of forage.

  Icebones and Thunder stood at the very edge of the cliff. The Gouge was a river of pink light below them, laced with cloud. The line of the cliff itself was cut back in great scallops, as if some huge animal had taken bites out of it. In one place a broad, deep channel came to an end at the cliff, as if the greater Gouge had simply been cut into the land, leaving the older valley hanging.

  The landslide was a great pile of broken rock that fell away into the depths of the Gouge until it disappeared beneath a layer of thin cloud. The slope was pitted by craters, its scree and talus smashed and compressed to a glassy smoothness. Even this landslide was ancient, Icebones realized, old enough to have accumulated the scars of such powerful blows. This was an old world indeed, old upon old.

  "We should go that way," Thunder said, looking down at a point where the landslide slope looked particularly flat and easy. "And then we can follow that trail." He meant a rough ridge that had formed in the heaped rubble, zigzagging toward the Gouge floor.

  Icebones said, "But I doubt that any mammoths have walked here before." Trails made by mammoths had been proven reliable and safe, perhaps over generations. Mammoth trails were part of their deep memory of the world. But there was no memory here. This "trail" of Thunder's was nothing but a random heaping of rocks. She said at last, "We cannot move from this place today. The others are not ready for such a challenge."

  "But to lose another day—"

  "Your mind is sharp, Thunder. Theirs are crowded by grief. For now, you must continue to study our path. We will rely on you."

  "You are wise," he said, and resumed his inspection of the path.

  That day seemed terribly long — and when it was done, the night seemed even longer.

  Autumn had withdrawn into herself once more. Breeze took refuge in the calf, who blundered about oblivious of the greater tragedy around him.

  Spiral seemed the worst affected.

  At first the tall Cow wailed out her grief loudly. Icebones meant to go to her to comfort her, but Autumn held her back. "This is how she was with the Lost," she said harshly. "When she was hurting, or hungry, or just wanted attention. They would come running to her. We should not go running now. She must bear the burden of what has happened."

  Icebones bowed to the wisdom of the older Cow.

  When none of the mammoths responded, Spiral's wails ceased abruptly. She withdrew from the others, seeking out forage in a distracted, halfhearted manner. Then, after a time, she began to make deep, mournful groans, so deep they carried better through the ground than the air, and Icebones saw salty tears well in Spiral's small eyes. At last she was truly grieving, as a mammoth should.

  And now Autumn came to her, and wrapped her trunk around her daughter's bowed head.

  Icebones, feeling very young, was bemused and distressed by the complexity of the emotions spilling here.

  ICEBONES WALKED TO THE EDGE of the cliff, gathered her courage, and stepped off.

  Rubble crunched and compressed under her front feet.

  Cautiously she stepped further, bringing her back legs onto the rocky slope. The footing seemed good, and the rock fragments slipped over each other less than she had feared. The surface rocks were worn smooth by dust or water or frost, but some of them were loosely bound together by mats of moss and lichen.

  She soon tired, her front legs aching, for it was never comfortable for mammoths to walk downhill. But she persisted, doggedly following the rubble trail Thunder had picked out, listening to the rumbles and grunts of the mammoths who followed her.

  The wall of the Gouge loomed behind her. It was striped with bands of varying color, shades of red and brown, like the rings of a fallen tree. The topmost layer was the thickest, an orange blanket of what appeared to be loose dust. And the wall was carved vertically, marked with huge upright grooves and pillars of rock, perhaps made by rock falls or running water. The grooves cut through the flat strata to make a complex crisscross pattern. Great flat lids of harder rock stuck out of the wall, sheltering hollowed-out caverns that she climbed past. She made out rustles of movement: birds, perhaps, nesting in these high caves.

  This tremendous wall was a complex formation in its own right, she saw, shaped by the vast, slow, inexorable movements of rock and air and water. With its endless detail of strata and carvings and nesting birds, it went on as far as she could see, a vertical world, all the way to the horizon, where it merged in the mist with its remote, parallel twin.

  Now she found herself walking into clouds. They were thin, wispy streaks, and they rested o
n an invisible layer in the air.

  She soon passed through the strange cloud lid, into air that was tinged blue, full of mist. The air was noticeably thicker, warmer and moist, and she breathed in deep satisfying lungfuls of it.

  The mammoths came to a flat, dusty ledge, still high above the Gouge floor. They fanned out, seeking forage.

  Icebones, probing at the ground, found there was vegetation here: yellow and red lichen, mosses, even a little grass. But it was sparse, and the only water was trapped under layers of ice difficult to crack. She knew they must go much deeper before they could be comfortable.

  She prepared to move on.

  But the calf had other ideas. Woodsmoke reached up to his mother's front leg, lifted his trunk over his fuzzy head, and clamped his mouth to her heavy breast. Icebones could smell the milk that trickled from his mouth. When he was done, he knelt down in his mother's shade and slumped sideways, his eyes closing. His belly rose as he breathed, and his mouth popped open, a circle of darkness.

  Time for a nap, it seems, Icebones thought wryly.

  The other mammoths gathered around Breeze and her calf. Autumn lifted her heavy trunk and rested it on her tusks. The others let their trunks dangle before them. Only Icebones, in this tall company, was short enough that her trunk reached the ground without her having to dip her head to reach.

  The mammoths' bodies swayed gently, in unison. Filled with dust, their thick outer hair caught the pink sunlight, so that each of them was surrounded by a halo of pink-white light.

  Immersed in the deep soft breathing of the others, Icebones closed her eyes.

  SHE WAS WOKEN BY a soft, subtle movement.

  Spiral had gone to the limit of the ledge, her foot pads compressing soundlessly. Trying not to disturb the others, Icebones followed her.

  The afternoon air had grown more clear, and now the deepest world of the Gouge revealed itself. The floor was carved into a series of terraces, and broken up by smaller chasms or chains of hills. And in the deepest section of all she saw the pale glint of water. But it was a straight-line slash that ran right down the length of the Gouge, even cutting through what looked like natural lakes and river tributaries. It was no river but a canal: an artifact of the paws of the Lost.

  With trunk raised, Spiral was staring fixedly toward the west. Icebones squinted, trying to make her poor eyes work better.

  Over the green-gray floor of the Gouge lay a fine white line. It crossed the valley from one side to the other, like a scratch through a layer of lichen.

  "It is the fallen bridge."

  "Yes," said Spiral, "and that is where Shoot lies, crushed like an egg. Should we go back and look for her corpse? That is your way, isn't it? The wolves and birds will have taken the meat and guts and eyes by now. But if the bones are not too scattered — "

  "Stop this," Icebones snapped, with all the Matriarchal command she could muster. "You must not think of your sister in death. Think of her."

  Spiral reached forward with her trunk, as if seeking the ghost of her vanished sister. Hesitantly she said, "She was — funny. She was loyal. She always stuck by me. Sometimes that would annoy me. Some of the Lost thought she was cuter than me and would give her attention..."

  "I can see how that would irritate you," Icebones said gently.

  Spiral had the grace to snort, mocking herself. "She followed me. Me. And I betrayed her trust by leading her to her death."

  Icebones groped for something to say. "Sometimes we have no choice about how we act. Sometimes, we cannot save even those we love. That is what the Cycle tells us, over and over." And that hard fact would be the most unpalatable truth of all for these untutored mammoths, if they ever had to face it.

  But Spiral was still distant, wounded, and the Cycle seemed a dusty abstraction.

  Icebones thought, Thunder, Autumn, Spiral: all of them suffused by guilt, agonized by the mistakes they felt they had made. It was because they had always been under the care of the Lost. It was because they had never had to act for themselves.

  Wisdom must be earned, through pain and loss. That was what these mammoths were struggling to learn.

  The mammoths were beginning to stir, blowing dust from their trunks. The calf, revived and excited, bumped against their legs.

  THEY REACHED A NEW, steep slope of loose talus. It was more difficult to climb down, but it delivered them to the warmer, moister air more quickly, and they pushed forward with enthusiasm.

  Abruptly they emerged onto a broad terrace. Stepping forward stiffly, relieved to be on flat ground again, Icebones immediately felt a soft crackle beneath one foot pad. It was the sprawled-out branch of a dwarf birch. Looking ahead, she could see that the ground was littered with patches of open water.

  The mammoths fanned out, emitting grunts of pleasure as they found tufts of grass and clumps of herbs.

  Icebones walked to the crumbled lip of the terrace, and found herself in a strange world.

  The Gouge's mighty walls ran roughly straight, but they were complex even from this perspective, full of great scraped-out bays separated by knife-sharp ridges. Everywhere she saw landslides: rock skirts, sloping sharply, leaning against the walls. In one place, she saw, a giant landslide had swept right across the wide Gouge floor and come washing up against the far wall.

  The walls were so tall they rose up above the clouds. And they were still visible even at the horizon, as if a notch had been taken out of the very planet.

  Thin, high cries fell on her like snowflakes. Peering up, she saw geese flying away from the sun in a vast, crowded formation, skimming through the strip of sky enclosed by the walls. The wall itself was pocked with ledges and pits where birds nested: guillemots, murres, kittiwakes and gulls. The birds flew back and forth against the cliff face, their wings flashing bright against the huge wall's brooding crimson.

  Below the level of this terrace, the steppe-like terrain gave way to a forest of spruce, pine, aspen: cold-resistant trees so tall they seemed to be straining to reach the sky. And beyond them she saw the glimmer of water. It was the canal, the straight-line cut through the Gouge's deepest part. Alongside the canal more trees grew, but these were fat, water-rich broadleaf trees, oak and elm and maple, basking in the comparative warmth of those depths. She glimpsed a sea of shining black washing along the valley — a herd of migrant animals: bison, reindeer, maybe even horses.

  The air over these deeper parts of the Gouge floor shone pink-gold, full of moisture and dust, and the green and blue of water and life overlaid the strong red color of the underlying rock, making a startling contrast. But the thin scraping of life was utterly overwhelmed by the mighty geology that bounded it. And every sound she heard, every rumble that came to her through the ground, was shaped by those tremendous cliffs.

  This was a walled world.

  Woodsmoke came running floppily before her, his fuzzy-haired head bobbing up and down, his trunk exploring the ground as he ran. "Which way? Which way, Icebones? Which way?"

  Icebones peered east, away from the setting sun. Her shadow fled along the ground before her, straight along the Gouge floor, a thing of spindly legs and stretched-out body — just like a native-born mammoth, she thought.

  She scratched the calf's scalp with her trunk fingers. "Follow your shadow, Woodsmoke."

  The calf lolloped away, trumpeting his excitement, and his thin cries echoed from the Gouge's mighty walls.

  3

  The Walled World

  THE GOUGE'S FLOOR WAS carved by lesser valleys and twisting ridges. Lakes pooled, linked by the cruel gash of that central canal. The lakes were crowded with reeds and littered with ducks and geese. Around their shores forests grew, mighty oaks that stretched up so high their upper branches were lost in mist.

  The mammoths would come down to the lakes' gravelly beaches to sip water that was mostly free of salt, even if it fizzed uncomfortably in Icebones's trunk. But the lower ground was softer and frequently boggy, and nothing grew there but bland uninterrupted grass
es, or tall coniferous trees, neither of which provided food that sustained mammoths well. They generally kept to higher ground, where grew a rich mosaic vegetation of grass, herbs, shrubs and trees, providing a healthy diet.

  They often glimpsed other animals: Icebones recognized reindeer, horses, bison and musk oxen, lemmings and rabbits, and she saw the spoor of creatures who fed off the grazing herds, like wolves and foxes. The smaller animals seemed about the size she recalled from the Island. But the reindeer and horses were very tall, with spindly legs that scarcely seemed capable of supporting their weight.

  The long-legged rabbits could bound spectacularly high into the air. But they fell back with eerie slowness, making them tempting targets for diving raptor birds.

  For a while an arctic fox followed the mammoths, sniffing their dung. The fox was in his winter coat, a gleaming white so intense it was almost blue. The fox moved with anxious, purposeful movements over a network of trails, undetectable to Icebones. He was no threat to the mammoths, but the fox was an efficient scavenger of food, a hunter of lemmings and eggs and helpless chicks who might fall from a cliff-side nest. Somehow she found it reassuring to see this familiar rogue prospering in this peculiar landscape.

  But still, though the Gouge was crowded with life compared to the upper plains from which they had descended, on the higher ground they passed lakes that had dried up, leaving only bowls of cracked mud. Even here, in this strange walled world, the tide of life was inexorably receding.

  Icebones inspected one such mud bowl gloomily. It was churned by many hoof marks, and littered with bits of bone, cracked and scored by the teeth and beaks of scavengers. When the water had vanished, animals, dying of thirst, had congregated here to die — and had then provided easy meat for the predators. She tried to imagine the scenes here as adult jostled with adult, fighting for water, maddened by thirst, and the young and old and weak were pushed aside. And she wondered if any of these bits of well-chewed bone had once belonged to mammoths.