Icebones

The Story of the Family of Kilukpuk

This is a story Kilukpuk told Silverhair.

Now, as you know, Kilukpuk was born at a time when the world belonged to the Reptiles. The Reptiles were the greatest beasts ever seen — so huge they made the land itself shake with their footfalls — and they were cunning and savage hunters.

In those days our ancestors called themselves Hotbloods.

The Hotbloods were small timid creatures who lived underground, in burrows, the way lemmings do. They had huge, frightened eyes, for they would only emerge from their burrows at night, a time when the Reptiles were less active and less able to hunt them. They all looked alike, and rarely even argued, for their world was dominated by the constant threat of the Reptiles.

The ancestors of every warm-blooded creature you see today lived in those cramped dens: bear with seal, wolf with mammoth.

It was into this world that Kilukpuk, the first of all Matriarchs, was born. If you could have seen her, small and cautious like the rest, you would never have imagined the mighty races which would one day spring from her loins. But, despite her smallness, Kilukpuk was destined to become the mother of us all.

Kilukpuk had many brothers and sisters.

One was called Aglu. Secretive and sly, his blood runs in the veins of all the creatures that eat the flesh of others, like the wolves.

One was called Ursu. Fierce and aloof, she became the mother of all the bears.

One was called Equu. Foolish and vain, she became the mother of all the horses.

One was called Purga. Strange and clever with paws that could grasp and manipulate, he…

Yes, yes, there is a story here, and I will get to it!

Now after the reptiles had gone, the Hotbloods emerged from their burrows. For a long time they were timid, as if they feared the Reptiles might return. But at last they grew confident, and their calves and cubs and foals grew fat and strong and tall.

And by the time Longtusk was born, much later, a time when the ice crowded down from the north of the Old Steppe, there were many bears and horses and wolves, and many mammoths.

But only mammoths, the Calves of Kilukpuk, had Families.

Now at one time in his life Longtusk lived alone, and he wandered the land. Everywhere he went he won friendship and respect — naturally, since he was the greatest hero of all, and even other, stupid creatures could recognize that.

One spring day Longtusk, wandering the land, happened to come by a snow bank. He saw a bear alone, mourning loudly.

Now a cub of Ursu likes to live alone, in caves she digs out of snow banks with her paws. She will spend her winter in the snow, nursing her cubs, until they come out in the spring to play and hunt.

Longtusk called, "What is wrong?"

And the bear said, "My cub has grown sickly and died. My milk was sour, and I could not feed him."

And Longtusk was saddened. But he knew that if a mammoth’s milk soured, she would ask the others of her Family, her mother and sisters and aunts, to suckle the calf for her, and the calf would not die. But the bear lived alone, and had no Family to help care for her cubs.

Longtusk stayed with the bear a day and a night, comforting her, and then he walked on.

In the summer Longtusk, wandering the land, happened to come upon a horse as she cropped a stand of grass. She was mourning loudly.

Now the foals of Equu like to run together in herds, but they have no Matriarch, and no true Family.

Longtusk called, "What is wrong?"

And the horse said, "I was running with my brothers and sisters and our foals when we ran into a bank of smoke. It was a fire, lit by the Lost. Well, we turned and ran, as fast as we could. But we ran to a cliff’s edge and fell — all but me — and the Lost have taken the flesh and the skin of my brothers and sisters and foals, and I am alone."

And Longtusk was saddened. But he knew that if Lost hunters tried to panic a mammoth Family, the wisdom of the Matriarch and her sisters would keep them from falling into such a simple trap.

Longtusk stayed with the horse a day and a night, comforting her, and then he walked on.

In the autumn Longtusk, wandering the land, happened to come upon a wolf as she chewed on a scrap of meat. She was mourning loudly.

Now the wolves run together in packs. But they have no true Family.

Though Longtusk was rightly wary of any cub of Aglu, he approached the wolf. He called, "What is wrong?"

And the wolf said, "We were hunting. My brother was injured and he died. My parents and my sister and my cubs fell on him, and I joined them, and we fought over the entrails we dragged from his stomach. But the meat tasted sour in my mouth, and I am still hungry, and my brother is gone, and I am alone."

And Longtusk was saddened. But he knew that when a mammoth died, her Family would Remember her properly, and those who had to live on were soothed. But when a wolf died he became nothing but another piece of meat between the teeth of his pack.

Longtusk stayed with the wolf a day and a night, comforting her, and then he walked on.

If you are a Cow you are born into a Family, and you live in that Family, and you die in that Family. All your life. A Family must share in the care and protection of the calves. A Family must respect the wisdom of its elders, and especially the Matriarch. A Family must Remember its dead. In a Family, I becomes We.

All these things Longtusk knew. All these things Kilukpuk taught us, and more.

…I know, I know. I have not said what became of Purga, brother of Kilukpuk.

Well, Purga sired clever creatures who climbed and ran and hunted and built and fought and killed. And they became the Lost.

But that is another story.

1 The Bridge

The mammoths spent a night on the lip of the great cliff, huddled under a sky littered with hard, bright stars. Icebones was surrounded by the warm gurgles of the mammoths’ bellies, their soft belches and farts. Sometimes she heard a rustle as Woodsmoke scrambled through belly hair and sought a teat to suckle.

But every time sleep approached Icebones imagined she was back in the maze of rock, and that a lithe black creature, all teeth and claws, was preparing to spring out of the air.

It was with relief that she saw the dawn approaching. Finding a stream, she took a trunkful of ice-cold water and tipped it into her mouth. The mammoths were already drifting away in search of the first of the day’s forage. The place they had stood for much of the night was littered with dung.

Autumn’s wounds still seeped blood that leaked into her ragged guard hairs. Shoot cleaned the wounds of blood and dirt with water, and plastered mud into the deepest cuts.

Breeze encouraged her calf to pop fragments of the adults’ dung into his mouth, for it would help his digestion. But his control of his trunk was still clumsy, and he smeared the warm, salty dung liberally over his mouth. He was growing rapidly. His legs, to which tufts of orange hair clung, were spindly and long, and he was already half Icebones’s height.

Finished with the dung, Woodsmoke trotted from one adult to another, chirping his simple phrases: "I am hungry! I am not cold!" — and, most of all: "Look at me! Look at what I am doing!" Autumn grumbled wearily that it might be better for the nerves of the adults if calves did not speak from the moment they were born. But Icebones knew she didn’t mean it.

Icebones walked to the edge of the Gouge.

The canyon was vast, magnificent, austere. It stretched from east to west, passing beyond the horizon in either direction. Its walls, glowing red and crimson and ochre, were nothing but rock, cracked and seamed by heat and frost and wind. Peering down, she saw gray clouds drifting through the canyon, feathery rafts floating on the languid river of air that flowed between those mighty walls.

The wall beneath her was huge, tall enough to dwarf many mountains. Its face was cut into columns and gullies, carved and fluted by water and wind, the detail dwindling to a dim darkness at its base.

But the Gouge’s far southern wall was a mere line of darkness on the horizon. She imagined a mammoth like herself standing on that southern wall, peering north across this immense feature. To such an observer, Icebones would be quite invisible.

The Gouge’s floor was visible beneath the flowing gray cloud. She made out the ripple of dunes, the snaking glint of a river, and the crowded gray-green of forests or steppe — all very different from the high, frozen plain on which she stood. The Gouge was so deep that the very weather was different on its sunken floor.

Thunder, the young Bull, stood beside her. "The valley is big," he said simply.

"Yes. Do you see? It is light there, to the east, but it is still dark there, to the west." It was true. The morning sun, a shrunken yellow disc immersed in pale pink light, seemed to be rising out of the Gouge’s eastern extremity. Long, sharp shadows stretched across the Gouge floor, and mist pooled white in valleys and depressions. And, as she looked further to the west, she saw that the floor there still lay in deep darkness, still in the shadow of the world. "The Gouge is so big that it can contain both day and night."

Thunder growled. "It is too big to understand."

Gently, she prodded his trunk. "No. Feel the ground. Smell it, listen to it. Hear the wind gushing along this great trench, fleeing the sun’s heat. Listen to the rumble of the rivers, flowing along the plain, far below. And listen to the rocks…"

"The rocks?"

She stamped, hard. "You are not a Lost, who is nothing but a pair of eyes. You can hear much more than you can see, if you try. The shape of the world is in the rocks’ song." She walked back and forth, listening to the ringing of the ground. She could feel the spin of the world, and the huge slow echoes that came back from the massive volcanic rise to the east.

And she could feel how this valley stretched on and on, far beyond the horizon. It was like a great wound, she thought, a wound that stretched around a quarter of the planet’s belly.

Now Thunder was trotting back and forth, trunk high, eyes half-closed, slamming his clumsy feet into the ground. "I can feel it." He trumpeted his pleasure. "The Lost showed me nothing like this."

"The Lost do not understand. This is mammoth."

Growling, stamping, he stalked away.

Autumn walked up to Icebones. She moved stiffly. "You are kind to him."

Icebones rumbled, "He has a good heart."

Autumn walked carefully to the lip of the valley. "It must have been a giant river which carved this valley."

"Perhaps not a river," Icebones said. She recalled how she had stood atop the Fire Mountain with the Ragged One, and had seen how the land was uplifted. "Perhaps the ground was simply broken open."

"However it was formed, this tusk-gouge lies across our path. Can we walk around it?"

"The Gouge stretches far to the east of here. The land at its edge is high and cold and barren. It would be a difficult trek."

Autumn raised her trunk and sniffed the warming air that rose from the Gouge. "I smell water, and grass, and trees," she said. "There is life down there."

"Yes," Icebones mused. "If we can reach the floor, perhaps we will find nourishment. We can follow its length, cutting south across the higher land when we near the Footfall itself."

Autumn walked gingerly along the lip of the Gouge. "There," she said.

Icebones made out an immense slope of tumbled rock, piled up against the Gouge wall, reaching from the deep floor almost to its upper surface. As the sun rose further, casting its wan, pink light, the rock slope cast huge shadows. Perhaps there had been a landslide, she thought, the rocks of the wall shaken free by a tremor of the ground.

She murmured doubtfully, "The rock looks loose and treacherous."

"Yes. But there might be a way. And—"

A piercing trumpet startled them both. The Ragged One came lumbering up to them.

"I heard what you are saying," the Ragged One gasped. "But your trunk does not sniff far, Icebones. There is no need to clamber down into that Gouge and toil along its muddy length."

Autumn asked mildly, "Shall we fly over?"

The Ragged One snorted. "We will walk." And she turned to the west.

When Icebones looked that way she saw a band of pinkish white, picked out by the clear light of the rising sun. It rose from the northern side of the Gouge, on which she stood, and arced smoothly through the air — and it came to rest on the Gouge’s far side.

It was a bridge.

Like everything about this immense canyon, the bridge was huge, and it was far away. It took them half a day just to walk to its foot.

The bridge turned out to be a broad shining sheet that emerged from the pink dust as if it had grown there. It sloped sharply upward, steeply at first, before leveling off. It was wide enough to accommodate four or five mammoths walking abreast.

Icebones probed at its surface with her trunk tip. It was smooth and cold and hard and smelled of nothing. "The Lost made this," she said.

"Of course they did," snapped the Ragged One. "Impatient with the Gouge’s depth and length, they hurled this mighty bridge right across it. What ambition! What vision!"

"They didn’t put anything to eat or drink on it," Autumn said reasonably.

Thunder stepped forward onto the bridge itself, and stamped heavily at its surface. Where he trod, his dirty foot pads left huge round prints on the gleaming floor. "It is fragile, like thin ice. What if it is cracked by frost? This bridge was meant for the Lost. They were small creatures, much smaller than us. If we walk on it, perhaps it will fall."

Icebones rumbled her approval, for the Bull was using the listening skills she had shown him.

But the Ragged One said, "We will rest the night and feed. We will reach the far side in a day’s walk, no more."

Autumn growled doubtfully.

"No," Icebones said decisively. "We should keep away from the things of the Lost. We will climb down the landslide, and—"

"You are a coward and a fool." The Ragged One’s language and posture were clear and determined.

Icebones felt her heart sink. Was this festering sore in their community to be broken open again?

Thunder stepped forward angrily. "Listen to her. The bridge is not safe."

"Safe? What is safe? Did your precious hero Longtusk ask himself if that famous bridge of land was safe?"

"This is not the bridge of Longtusk," Icebones said steadily. "And you are not Longtusk."

The Ragged One stepped back. "I have endured your posturing, Icebones, when it did us no harm. But by your own admission you are no Matriarch. And now your foolish arrogance threatens to lead us into disaster. You others should follow me, not her," she said bluntly.

Autumn, rumbling threateningly, stood by the shoulder of Icebones. "This one is strange to us," she said, "Perhaps she is not yet a Matriarch. But she has displayed wisdom and leadership. And now she is right. There is no need to take the risk of crossing your bridge."

"Icebones gave me my name," Thunder said. "I follow her. You are the arrogant one if you cannot tell this bridge is unsafe." He stood alongside Icebones, and she touched his trunk.

Breeze lumbered toward her mother, her calf tucked safely between her legs. "You are wrong to divide us. This fighting wastes our energy and time."

Icebones rumbled, relieved, gratified by their unexpected support. "Breeze is right. Let us put this behind us—"

"No." The older sister, Spiral, had spoken. "We must finish this terrible journey before we all die of hunger, and before another monster leaps out of the sea or sky or ground to consume us. And the quickest way is to take the bridge."

"It is not safe," Icebones growled.

"So you say," Spiral said angrily. "But it was made by the Lost. What do you know of the Lost, Icebones? They looked after our every need for a long time — for generations — long before you ever came here." And, for a moment, behind the gaunt face and the dirty, matted hair, Icebones saw once again the vain, spoiled creature she had first met. "Shoot? Will you come with me?"

Shoot looked from her mother to her sister and back, dismayed. Then, hesitantly, she stepped up to Spiral.

The Ragged One raised her stubby tusks in triumph. "We will cross the bridge, we three."

"No," Icebones said, gravely anxious. She had not anticipated this turn of events. "We must not break up the Family."

"This is no Family here," said the Ragged One, contemptuous.

"If we stay together we can watch over each other. By splitting us, you endanger us all."

"If that is so, you must drop your foolish pride and let me lead you, like these two."

Icebones rumbled, "I can’t. Because you are leading them to their deaths."

"Then there is nothing more to be said." The Ragged One turned to face the arcing bridge and stalked away. Spiral followed.

Shoot glanced back at her mother, obviously distressed. But she followed her sister’s lead — as, perhaps, she had all her life.

It was another long and difficult night, and it granted Icebones little sleep.

As pink light began to wash over the eastern lands, she walked alone to the edge of the canyon. It was a river of darkness. She listened to the soft chthonic breathing of the rocks beneath her feet, and the gentle ticking of frost, and she strained to hear the rhythm of distant mammoth footsteps.

She called out with deep vibrations of her head and belly and feet: "Boaster. Can you hear me? It is me, Icebones. Boaster, Boaster…"

Icebones. I hear you.

She felt a profound relief, as if she was no longer alone.

We are walking. Every day we walk. The sun is hidden. It rains. We have come to a huge walled plain covered by something that glitters in the light, even the light of this gray sky. There is nothing to eat on it.

"It is ice."

No. It is not cold and there is no moisture under my trunk tip.

She shuddered. "It is a thing of the Lost."

Yes. There is a great beast, like a beetle, which tends it. The beast wipes away the dust on the floor. My brother challenged the beetle. It turned away.

"Your brother defeated it?"

My brother is brave and strong. But not so brave as me. And he is smaller than me in many ways. Much smaller. For example, his —

"I can guess," Icebones said dryly. She told him she had decided to head for the basin she had called the Footfall of Kilukpuk. "But we face many obstacles." And she told him about the Gouge, and tried to tell him of the mammoths’ confusion and dissent.

You think you have problems, he called back. Imagine how it is for me. All the time I slip up in my own musth dribble, and I trip over my long, erect —

"You cannot still be in musth."

Wait until we meet at the Footfall. You will see my musth flow, and you will be awed at its mighty gush. Are you in oestrus yet?

"No," Icebones said, with a shiver of sadness.

Good, came Boaster’s voice, deep-whispering through the rock. It would be a waste. Wait until we meet at the Footfall. I must go. We have found a dwarf willow and the others are stripping it like wolf cubs, leaving none for me. Be brave, little Icebones. We will meet at the Footfall. Goodbye, goodbye…

Icebones stood alone in the chill, bloody light of dawn, listening to the last of his words wash through the rock.

The Ragged One stepped onto the smooth slope of the bridge. She stamped hard on the cold surface, as if testing it under her weight.

The bridge rang hollowly.

More tentatively Shoot followed, and then, at last, Spiral.

Autumn growled, her voice filled with sadness as she watched her daughters walk out into emptiness.

"This is wrong," Icebones said. "Wrong, wrong. Mammoths are creatures of the steppe, and the open sky. They are not meant to hover like birds high above the ground."

But none of the three rebels was listening.

Soon the mammoths had gone so far that they looked like beetles, crawling over the mighty band of the bridge. The sun was still low in the sky, and the three toiling mammoths cast long shadows across the bridge’s smooth, pink-lit surface.

Icebones could hear the deep thrumming vibrations of the bridge as it bent and bowed in response to the mammoths’ weight.

The Ragged One turned. She trumpeted, her voice dwarfed by the Gouge beneath her. "You are wrong, all of you. The bridge will protect us. See?" And she raised her foot -

Icebones trumpeted, "No!"

— and the Ragged One began to stamp, hard, at the shining surface of the bridge.

Icebones heard the cracking long before she could see it. It sounded like pack ice over a swelling sea, or a fragment of bone beneath a clumsy mammoth foot pad.

A spiderweb of cracks spread over the pale pink surface. The whole bridge was quivering, and already slivers of it were crumbling off its edges and falling, to be lost far below.

Autumn trumpeted, an ancient, wordless cry, and she ran forward to the edge of the bridge.

Shoot turned back and faced her sister. "Go back! We must go back!"

But Spiral, last in line, would not move. She stood on the trembling bridge, feet splayed and trunk dipped, as if frozen in place.

"She is terrified," Breeze said. "And if she does not move, the others cannot."

Thunder tossed his head skittishly. "I will go out there. I will save them." But there was terror in the white rims of his eyes.

"Your place is here," Icebones said firmly. "You must protect these others, and the calf. That is your duty now."

He tried to hide his relief. "Yes," he said. "That is my duty."

And my duty, Icebones thought, is to bring the others back — or die trying.

Without thinking about it she stepped onto the cold surface of the bridge. She could feel the deep, dismal resonance of the bridge as it shuddered and shook. The frequent cracks were sharp detonations, carrying clearly to her ears and belly.

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 on 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 grasses, 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.

She kept these reflections to herself — but she sensed from Autumn’s reflective silence that the older Cow at least understood this.

But meanwhile the walking was steady, the weather on the Gouge floor calm, the grazing good. The mammoths gradually became more confident, their bellies filling, and the steady rhythms of life banished their lingering grief over the loss of Shoot.

The calf helped, of course.

His scrawny little body filled out, becoming almost burly. His newborn’s hair was growing out, his underfur thicker, his coarser overfur longer. But his hair was still a bright pink-brown, much lighter than that of adult mammoths. He would gallop on stiff legs, leaving an uneven set of clumsy tracks — only to come to a sudden halt, trunk raised to sniff the air, his low forehead wrinkled with concentration. Or he would scoop up loose grass, suck, sniff, blow out dust, and run about as if trying to explore every detail of the ground they crossed. He picked dust and earth and insects from his thickening coat, and with wide-eyed curiosity he would pop each item into his mouth, more often than not spitting it out again.

He was still dependent on his mother’s milk, but Icebones made sure he was happy to be cared for by the others. Spiral, in particular, relished looking after him — so much so, in fact, that Icebones sometimes wondered if she was growing jealous that he wasn’t her own.

Though Icebones never spoke it out loud, all of this was a preparation against the dire possibility that Woodsmoke might lose his mother. No mammoth was more vulnerable than a calf without a mother.

But for now, Woodsmoke was secure and happy, and busy with his exploration of the intriguing world in which he found himself.

One day the calf began to play with a lemming that had, unwisely, not retreated to its burrow as the mammoths’ heavy footfalls approached.

"That lemming is not happy," commented Thunder.

Icebones recalled the Cycle. "No animal likes to be disturbed."

Thunder rumbled deeply. "You often quote your Cycle. But how do you know the Cycle is true?"

She noticed he was walking stiffly. He held his head high. And his legs were stiff, as if sore. Everything about him seemed larger than usual. And, she thought, there was an odd smell about him: something sweet, pervasive, sharp.

He went on, "You didn’t live in the times of long ago when herds of mammoths darkened the steppe. You never met Longtusk or Ganesha or Kilukpuk or any of the rest. Perhaps it is all the murmurings of calves, or foolish old Bulls."

She bridled at that. No mammoth should speak so disrespectfully of the Cycle, the heart of mammoth culture. But then, she reminded herself, Thunder had been brought up in ignorance. It wasn’t his fault, and it was her role to put that right.

"Thunder, you must understand that every mammoth alive today is descended from survivors: mammoths who mastered the world well enough to reach adulthood and raise healthy calves, who grew up in their turn. The Cycle is the wisdom of that great chain of survivors, accumulated over more generations than there are stars in the sky."

"But this is a different place. You say that yourself. Perhaps no mammoths lived here before the Lost brought us. What use is the Cycle to us?"

"While we live, we must not be afraid to add to the Cycle. Ganesha taught us that, and Longtusk. The Cycle will never be complete. Not while mammoths live and learn. There is completeness only in extinction…"

But she felt that such comfort, embedded in the Cycle itself, was thin.

And perhaps Thunder was right.

This Sky Steppe was itself a part of the Cycle. But whereas the rest of the Cycle was a memory of the past, the Sky Steppe had always been a vision of the future: a glittering, succulent promise of days to come.

Sometimes, when this small red world seemed so strange, she wondered if perhaps nothing around her was real. Maybe she was living in a moment embedded in the vision of a mammoth long dead — Kilukpuk herself, perhaps. And in that case she was part of that dream too. She was living thoughts, just a concoction of memories and dreams, with no more life than the reconstructed bones of the mammoth on the Fire Mountain.

But now Woodsmoke brayed and yelled, "I am a great Bull. I will mate you all, you Cows!" His thin cries and milky scent, and the iron stink of the dust he kicked up, were sharp intrusions of reality into her maundering.

The calf started dancing in a tight circle around the lemming. The little rodent sat as if frozen, clearly wishing this huge monster would go away. Then Woodsmoke made a mock charge, head lowered. The lemming, snapping out of its trance, turned tail and shot across the ground, a muddy brown blur, until it reached a hole and disappeared.

Woodsmoke’s mother cuffed him affectionately and tucked him under her belly, where the great Bull was soon seeking out his mother’s milk.

Thunder growled. "That little scrap is mocking me."

"He is playing at what he will become."

"But he was threatening a lemming."

"He has to start somewhere. If there were other calves here, he would wrestle with them and stage little tusk-clashes. It is all part of his preparation for the battles he must wage as an adult."

Thunder growled again. "Perhaps. But when that wretched calf approaches me, reaching up with his grass-blade trunk to wrestle, I want to throw him out of the Gouge…"

Suspicious now, she sniffed at the ground over which Thunder had walked, smelling his urine, which was hissing slightly as it settled into the red dust. And she probed at the thick hair before his ears with her trunk fingers. She found a dark, sticky liquid trickling from his temporal gland.

"Thunder — you are in musth!"

He rumbled deeply. It was the musth call, she realized. Without understanding it he was calling to oestrus Cows, if any had been here to listen. "I thought I was ill."

"Not ill." She stroked the temporal glands on both sides of his head. They were swollen. "You are sore here." Gently she lifted his trunk and had him coil it so it rested on its tusks. "That will relieve the pressure on one side of your face at least."

"Icebones, what is happening to me? I roam around this Gouge listening, but I don’t know what for. The Cows keep their distance from me — even you.

It was true, she realized. She had responded to his calls without thinking. She said carefully, "Musth means that you are ready to mate. Your smell, and the rumbles you make, announce your readiness to any receptive Cows. The aggression you feel is meant to be turned on other Bulls, for Bulls must always fight to prove they are fit to sire calves. But here there are no Bulls for you to fight — none save Woodsmoke, and you have shown the correct restraint."

He growled, "But there are Cows."

"None of us is in oestrus, Thunder," she said gently. "You will learn to tell that from the smell of our urine. None of us is ready."

She felt his trunk probe at her belly. "Not even you?"

"Not even me, Thunder. I am sorry." Again she was struck by the fact that she had still not come into oestrus, had felt not so much as a single twinge of that great inner warmth in all the time she had been here. "Don’t worry. In a few days this will pass and you will feel normal again."

He grunted. "I hope so."

In fact she suspected that even if one of the Cows were in oestrus, right here and right now, still Thunder would fail to find himself a mate. He was clearly young and immature, and no Cow would willingly accept a mating with such a Bull. If there were other Bulls here he wouldn’t even get a chance, of course. For his first few musth seasons Thunder would simply be overpowered by the older, mature Bulls.

He pulled away, grumbling his disappointment. He raised his tusks into the shining sunlit air, and a swarm of insects, rising from a muddy pond, buzzed around his head, glowing with light. "I feel as if my belly will burst like an overripe fruit. Why, if she were here before me now, I would mate with old Kilukpuk herself—"

"Who speaks of Kilukpuk?"

Thunder brayed, startled, and stopped dead. The voice — like a mammoth’s, but shallow and indistinct — had seemed to come from the reaches of the pond ahead of them.

"What is it?" Thunder asked softly. "Can there be mammoths here?"

Icebones grunted. "What kind of mammoth lives in the middle of a pond?"

"Kilukpuk, Kilukpuk… How is it I know that name?"

And a trunk poked up out of the water, and two wide nostrils twitched. It was short, hairless, stubby, but nevertheless indubitably a trunk.

Icebones stepped forward. The mud squeezed between her toes, unpleasantly thick, cold and moist. "I am Icebones, daughter of Silverhair. If you are mammoth, show yourself."

A head broke above the surface of the water. Icebones saw a smooth brow with two small eyes set on top, peering at her. "Mammoth? I never heard of such things. Bones-Of-Ice? What kind of name is that?" The creature sniffed loudly. "Don’t drop your dung in my pond."

Thunder growled, "If you don’t show yourself I will come in there and drag you out. Before I fill up your pond with my dung."

Thunder’s musth-fueled aggression was out of place, Icebones thought. But it seemed to do the trick.

There was a loud, indignant gurgle. With a powerful heave, a squat body broke through the languidly rippling water.

It stood out of the water on four stubby legs. It had powerful shoulders and rump, and a long skull topped by those small, glittering eyes. It wasn’t quite hairless, for fine downy hairs lay plastered over its skin, smoothed back like the scales of a fish. But the whole body was so heavily coated in crimson-brown mud that it was hard to see anything at all.

It was like no mammoth Icebones had ever seen. And yet it had a trunk, and even two small tusks that protruded from its mouth, curling slightly and pointing downward. And it gazed at Icebones with frank curiosity, its stubby trunk raised.

More of the hog-like creatures came drifting through the water. They looked like floating logs, Icebones thought, though thick bubbles showed where they belched or farted.

Meanwhile the other mammoths gathered around Icebones and Thunder — all save the calf. Woodsmoke, quickly bored, had splashed into the mud at the fringe of the pond and was digging out lumps of it with his tusks.

Spiral asked, "What is it?"

The creature in the pond said, "It is Chaser-Of-Frogs. I am the Mother of the Family that lives here."

Evidently, Icebones thought dryly, her dignity was easily hurt. "Mother? You are a Matriarch?"

Chaser-Of-Frogs eyed Icebones suspiciously. "I do not know you, Bones-Of-Ice. Do you come from the Pond of Evening?"

She must mean one of the lakes to the west of here, Icebones thought. She said, "I come from a place far from here, which—"

Chaser-Of-Frogs grunted and buried her snout-like trunk in pond-bottom mud. "Always making trouble, that lot from Evening. Even though my own daughter mated with one of them. When you go back you can tell them that Chaser-Of-Frogs said—"

Thunder growled and stepped forward. "Listen to her, you floating fool. We come from no pond. We are not like you."

"And yet we are," Icebones said, drawn to the pond’s edge, trunk raised. She could smell fetid mud, laced with thin dung. "You have tusks and a trunk. You are my Cousin."

"Cousin?" The glittering eyes of the not-mammoth stared back at her, curious in their own way. "Tell me of Kilukpuk. I know that name… and yet I do not."

"It is an old name," Icebones said. "Mammoths and their Cousins are born with it on their tongues." And Icebones spoke of Kilukpuk, and of Kilukpuk’s rivalry with her brother, Aglu, and of Kilukpuk’s calves, Hyros and Siros, who had squabbled and fought in their jealousy, of Kilukpuk’s favorite, Probos, and how Probos had become Matriarch of all the mammoths and their Cousins…

Her own nascent Family clustered around her. The log-like bodies in the pond drifted close to the shallow muddy beach, tiny ears pricked, the silence broken only by occasional gulping farts that broke the surface of the water.

"I have never heard such tales," mused Chaser-Of-Frogs. "But it is apt. I sink in the mud, as did Kilukpuk in her swamp. I browse on the plants that grow in the pond-bottom ooze, as she must have done. I am as she was." She seemed proud — but she was so caked in mud it was hard to tell.

How strange, Icebones thought. Could it be that these Swamp-Mammoths really were ancient forms, remade for this new world? Perhaps they had been molded from mammoths, the way Woodsmoke was molding lumps of mud.

Only the Lost would do such a thing, of course. And only the Lost knew why.

"You mammoths," said Chaser-Of-Frogs now. "Tell me where you are going."

"To the east," Thunder said promptly. "We are walking around the belly of the world. We are seeking a place we call the Footfall of Kilukpuk—"

"You will not get far," Chaser-Of-Frogs said firmly. "Not unless you know your way through the Nest of the Lost."

Thunder growled, "What Nest?"

Chaser-Of-Frogs snorted, and bits of snot and mud flew into the air. "You’ve never even heard of it? Then you will soon be running like a calf for her mother’s teat." She sank into her mud, submerging save for the crest of her back and the tip of her trunk.

Then she rose again lazily, as if having second thoughts. "I will show you. Tomorrow. It is in gratitude for the stories, which I enjoyed. Today I will rest and eat, making myself ready."

Thunder said, "You fat log, you look as if you have spent your whole life resting and eating."

Autumn slapped his forehead. "She will hear you."

Chaser-Of-Frogs surfaced again. "Don’t forget. No dung in the pond. Those disease-ridden scoundrels from Evening are always playing that trick. I won’t have it, you hear?"

"We won’t," said Icebones.

Chaser-Of-Frogs slid beneath the dirty brown water and, with a final valedictory fart, swam away.

4 The Nest of the Lost

The ground stank of night things: of roots, of dew, of worms, of the tiny reptiles and mammals that burrowed through it.

All the mammoth found it difficult to settle. They were deeper into the Gouge than they were accustomed to. The air felt moist and sticky, and was full of the stink of murky pond water. The vegetation was too thick and wet for a mammoth’s gut, and soon all of their stomachs were growling in protest.

Icebones could sense the deep wash of fat log-like bodies as the Swamp-Mammoths swam and rolled in their sticky water. Not a heartbeat went by without a fart or belch or muddy splash, or a grumble about a neighbor’s crowding or stealing food.

And, as the light faded from the western sky, a new light rose in the east to take its place: a false dawn, Icebones thought, a glowing dome of dusty air, eerily yellow. It was the Nest of the Lost, of course, just as Chaser-Of-Frogs had warned.

Autumn, Breeze and Thunder faced the yellow light, sniffing the air with suspicious raised trunks. It pleased Icebones to see that they were starting to find their true instincts, buried under generations of the Lost’s unwelcome attention.

Not Spiral, though. She started trotting to and fro, lifting her head and raising her fine tusks so they shone in the unnatural light.

As the true dawn approached, Icebones heard the pad of clumsy footsteps. It was Chaser-Of-Frogs.

In the pink-gray half-light the Swamp-Mammoth stood before them, her stubby trunk raised. Her barrel of a body was coated in mud that crackled with frost, her breath steamed around her face, and her broad feet left round damp marks where she passed. "Are you ready? Urgh. Your dung stinks."

"The food here is bad for us," Autumn growled.

"Just as well you’re leaving, then," Chaser-Of-Frogs said. "Go drop a little of that foul stuff in the Pond of Evening, will you? Hey! What’s this?"

Woodsmoke had run around to Chaser-Of-Frogs’s side and was scrambling on her back. He was taller than she was. He already had his legs hooked over her spine, and he was pulling with his trunk at the sparse hair that grew there. "I am a Bull, strong and fierce. What are you? If you are a Cow I will mate with you."

"Get him off! Get him off!" Chaser-Of-Frogs turned her head this way and that, trying to reach him, but her neck was too rigid, her trunk much too small.

Autumn stalked forward and, with an imperious gesture, wrapped her trunk around the calf and lifted him up in the air.

Woodsmoke’s little face peered out through a forest of trunk hair. "I want to mate with it!"

Chaser-Of-Frogs growled and backed away. "Try it and I’ll kick you so hard you’ll finish up beyond the next pond, you little guano lump."

"He’s only a calf," Breeze rumbled.

"I know. I’ve had four of my own. Just keep him from being a calf around me."

Icebones said gravely, "We saw the lights. The Nest of the Lost. We need your guidance, Chaser-Of-Frogs. Please."

Chaser-Of-Frogs growled again, but evidently her dignity wasn’t too badly bruised. She sniffed the breeze. "Let’s go. We must keep up a good pace, for there’s nothing to eat in there. But keep this in mind. Whatever you see — there’s nothing to fear."

And, without hesitation, she set off across the swampy ground to the east.

Icebones, suppressing her own uneasiness, strode purposefully after her. She could hear the massive shuffle of the mammoths as they gathered in a loose line behind her.

The mammoths followed the bank of the canal. The waterway arrowed straight east, so that the rising sun hung directly over the lapping water, as if to guide their way.

The Gouge here lacked the tidy clarity of its western sections. The walls were broken and eroded, as if they had been drowned beneath an immense, catastrophic flood. The floor terrain was difficult, broken land, littered with huge, eroded rock fragments or covered in steep dust dunes.

But the land close to the canal was leveled: as smooth as the surface of Chaser-Of-Frogs’s mud pond.

"I’ve heard of this place," said Autumn. "Once mammoths were bound up with rope, and made to pull great floating things along the length of this shining water."

Icebones rumbled uncomfortably. She sensed that even Autumn missed something of the certainty of those days, when the Lost ran the world and everything in it.

There was movement on the canal’s oily waters. Thunder backed away from the water’s edge, perhaps recalling the whale that had come so close to taking Shoot in the Ocean of the North.

But this was no whale. It swam over the surface of the water, a massive straight-edged slab. It had no eyes or ears or trunk or feet. Huge slow waves trailed after it, feathering gracefully.

Autumn growled to Icebones, "It is obviously a thing of the Lost. And, look — it has a shining shell, like the ice beetle in the crater."

The huge water beetle drifted to a halt against the canal bank. A straight-edged hole in its side opened up, like a mouth, and a tongue of shining material stuck out and nuzzled against the land. Then the beetle waited, bobbing gently as the waves it had made rippled under it, and its carapace glistened in the dusty sunlight.

Nothing climbed aboard the beetle, and nothing came out of its mouth.

After a time the beetle rolled in its tongue, shut its strange mouth, and pushed its way gently further down the canal. After a time it stopped again, and Icebones saw that once more it opened its mouth, waiting, waiting.

Chaser-Of-Frogs growled, "Every morning it is the same. This water-thing toils up and down the canal, sticking out its tongue. This is the way of things here. Everything you see will be strange and useless. Nothing will do you harm. Come now." She stumped on.

They followed, walking beside the shore of the canal, while the waves of the beetle slowly rippled and subsided.

Soon they approached vast spires, slender and impossibly tall, taller than the greatest tree even on this tall planet. The gathering sunlight seeped into the spires, so they were filled with glowing pink light.

As they approached these glittering visions all the mammoths grew perturbed.

When Icebones looked into a spire she was startled to see another mammoth gazing back at her: a somewhat ragged, sunken-eyed, ill-fed Cow staring back at her from the depths of a glimmering pink pool. The mammoth had no smell and made no noise — for it was herself, of course, a reflection just as if she was staring into a pool of still water. But this "pool" had been set on edge by the strange arts of the Lost, and its strangeness disturbed her, right to the warm core of her being.

Woodsmoke came running from between his mother’s legs, trumpeting a shrill greeting. He ran straight into the shining wall and went sprawling, a mess of legs and trunk. Mewling a protest, he got up and trotted back to the wall. He raised his trunk at the mammoth calf he could see there, and the other calf raised its trunk back. With a comical growl, Woodsmoke tried to butt the other mammoth, only to find himself clattering against the wall again.

He might have kept that up all day, Icebones thought, if his mother hadn’t come to tuck him between her legs again.

"I am bigger than him. Did you see? My tusks were bigger than his. He was frightened of me. He ran away."

"Yes. Yes, he ran away."

There were buildings all around them now, of all sizes and shapes and colors, all characterized by hard, cold straight lines. And there were tall angular shapes, like trees denuded of their branches. These "trees" had a single fat fruit suspended from their top. Many of the fruit had fallen and smashed, but from others an eerie yellow light glowed, perhaps the source of the light Icebones had observed during the night.

The trails between the buildings were littered with red dust, and as the mammoths passed, their feet left clear round imprints. Many of the buildings showed signs of damage, their walls broken by huge rough-edged holes. In corners of the great avenues there were heaps of debris, branches and dust and bones, smashed up and dumped here as if by some great storm. It was evident that this place had been abandoned for some time.

Icebones was aware of Spiral’s growing, silent dismay; she would not find the Lost here.

Suddenly, from all over the Nest, boxy beetles came scurrying.

The mammoths stopped dead, and Breeze trumpeted alarm.

The beetles began to rush from one silent building to another. A mouth would open in the hide of a beetle, and another would open to greet it in the gleaming side of the building, and the beetle would wait — just as the water beetle had waited by the side of the canal. But nothing came to climb into or out of the beetle, no matter how long it waited. At last the beetle would close itself up again and scuttle off to its next fruitless rendezvous.

As suddenly as it had begun, the swarm of beetles thinned out. The last beetles shut their mouths and hurtled off out of sight.

But now another crowd of toiling beetles hurried between the buildings. These creatures sprouted arms and scrapers and trunklike hoses, and they swept at the dust, making it rise in billowing red clouds into the air. But the dust would merely settle again once they had passed.

One toiling beetle scurried after the mammoths. It scraped up their dung and placed it into a wide mouth in its own side, and then polished at the floor until no trace of the dung was left. Thunder went up to the beetle and kicked it so hard that he opened up a new mouth in its side. After that, mewling to itself, the beetle moved only in tight circles, endlessly polishing the same piece of ground.

As the sun climbed higher in the sky, they moved away from the spires and scurrying beetles and reached an open area. This abutted the bank of the canal, and it was surrounded by a half-circle of low structures, like a row of wolf’s teeth. The floor surface here was hard under their feet, and the light glimmered from it, pink and bright.

Suddenly, all at the same instant, the structures snapped open, revealing black, cavernous interiors. And all the mammoths recoiled, for they smelled the greasy stink of scorched flesh.

From nowhere gulls appeared, cawing. They soared down on huge filmy wings and pecked at the small buildings and the floor around them. Icebones even spotted a fox that came padding silently across the shining floor. The gulls cawed in protest at this intruder.

Spiral cast to and fro, nervous, skittish. "It is the smell of food."

"Broiled flesh?" Icebones said. "What kind of food is that?"

"It is the food of the Lost," Autumn said grimly.

Breeze said, "Maybe this is a place where the Lost would come to feed."

"But if that’s so," Spiral said anxiously, "where are they?"

"Long gone," Autumn said. She reached for her daughter.

But Spiral pulled away. Trumpeting, as if calling the small-eared Lost, she ran clumsily from structure to structure.

No Lost came to eat. After a time the structures snapped closed once more, scattering the gulls.

Chaser-Of-Frogs sneezed, and dusty snot gushed out of her trunk. She said brightly, "All this talk of food is making me thirsty. Come. Let us find water." Briskly, she turned and began to plod steadily down the canal bank, squat, solid, determined.

Following the canal, they came to a new set of structures, situated at the base of a broad valley. From all over the valley, fat pipes, heavily swathed by some silvery skin, erupted from the ground and converged on this place.

One structure was an inverted wedge of dull gray. It had grilles along its sides, and it was tipped by four giant tubes from which white steam plumed with a continual rushing noise. Icebones saw that water, condensing from the billowing steam, dribbled down the walls. Chaser-Of-Frogs lapped at this with her trunk.

Icebones did likewise, with less enthusiasm. The water was fine, she supposed, but it was too warm, and it tasted of sulfur and iron, and of something else indefinable — something of the Lost, she thought.

But she was thirsty, and forced herself to drink her fill.

Soon the others joined her and drank with more apparent enjoyment, for they were more used to accepting water from the Lost than she was.

Chaser-Of-Frogs called, "Bones-Of-Ice. Come stand here."

Icebones complied, and, following Chaser-Of-Frogs’s urging, leaned gently against a pipe that was almost as tall as she was. The pipe was warm.

Chaser-Of-Frogs barked amusement. "The pipe contains warm water. The water comes from lodes of warmth buried deep under the skin of the world. And that is what keeps the Nest alive," she said. "You see?"

"Not really," admitted Icebones.

"I do," said Thunder unexpectedly. "Didn’t Longtusk stamp his feet and draw heat from the ground, to keep his Family alive…?"

Now Chaser-Of-Frogs wandered away from the water plant. Grunting, she began pawing at the ground with her forefeet. With clumsy swipes, the Swamp-Mammoth had soon wiped clear a wide area of the floor.

Icebones saw there were shapes embedded in the shining floor. She leaned down to see better, and blew away more dust with delicate sweeps of her trunk.

She saw leaves, stuck inside the shining floor surface. The leaves were gray and colorless, and they lay in thick sheets, one over the other. She stroked the floor with her trunk, but she touched only the hard, odorless floor surface.

"What do you think of that?" Chaser-Of-Frogs demanded proudly.

"They are like no tree I have ever seen."

"Now look over here." Swamp-Mammoth led Icebones to another place, where she swept aside the dust once more.

Here, inside the floor, Icebones saw the shells of animals from the sea — and bones. They were pretty, regular shapes, she thought, sharing a six-fold pattern: six leaves, six stubby limbs, six petals.

Chaser-Of-Frogs said gently, "These are the bones of creatures who lived here long, long ago — before the Lost ever came here. When you die, Bones-Of-Ice, you will be covered by mud and dust that will squeeze you flat. Until—"

"Until I become like this," Icebones said, awed. "Where I was born, the bones of mammoths lay thick in the ground. I thought there were no bones here — just as there are no mammoth trails. But I was wrong."

"These are not the bones of our kind, Cousin. I was not always the Mother of the Big Pond. The Mother before me said that her Mother saw the Lost and their toiling beetles dig this strange bone-filled rock out of the Gouge wall — deep down, at its lowest layers. These squashed animals died long ago, you see. And nothing lived after them, so nothing was laid down over them but bare, dead rock, a great thickness of it. And the Lost took the bony rock and put it here."

"Why?"

"Chaser-Of-Frogs grunted. "Who knows why the Lost do as they do?"

Icebones pondered the meaning of the rock. She pressed, frustrated, at the impenetrable surface, longing to touch and smell the ancient plants, to hear the voices of the animals.

Long ago there was life here. There had been trees, and living oceans, and beasts that roamed the crimson lands. But their world died. The oceans froze over and dried up, and the air cooled, and the last rain fell, and the last snow… Now all that was left of them was here, in this rock, compressed flat by time.

Clumsily, self-consciously, Chaser-Of-Frogs turned her back and pawed at the ground, trying to touch the bones with her hind feet.

"You are Remembering," Icebones said.

Chaser-Of-Frogs stopped, panting — used to her lethargic life in the mud, she got out of breath easily — and she looked up at Icebones with her small hard eyes. "Do you think we are foolish?"

"No. I think you are wise."

Chaser-Of-Frogs eyed her. "Bones-Of-Ice, I am done here. I am a poor fighter of wolves. I must go back before dark. You will go on. Just follow the canal."

Suddenly the thought of being without the squat, humorous, courageous Swamp-Mammoth seemed unbearable. Impulsively Icebones twined her trunk around the other’s. "Come with us."

Chaser-Of-Frogs snorted. "What for, Cousin?"

"The world is dying — just as it died before, ending the lives of those buried creatures…" Icebones explained how she was leading the mammoths to the basin she had called the Footfall of Kilukpuk, the deepest place in the world, where she hoped enough air and water would pool to keep the mammoths alive. "Come with us."

"Me?" Chaser-Of-Frogs grunted, self-deprecating. "Look at me. I can scarcely trudge over an ice-flat plain for half a day before I am exhausted. How could I walk around the world?"

"I’m serious—"

"So am I," Chaser-Of-Frogs snapped. "Bones-Of-Ice, I am no fool. I can smell it myself. Every year the line of trees creeps further down the Gouge wall. Every year our ponds shrink, just that bit more. Every year I see more animals migrate one way up the Gouge then come back the other. But look at me, Bones-Of-Ice. I could not contemplate such a trek as yours… Not yet, anyhow. I smell wisdom on you, young Bones-Of-Ice, but you have much to learn. You see, my calves are not yet desperate enough."

"I don’t see what desperation has to do with it."

Chaser-Of-Frogs said bluntly, "A trek to your Footfall pit would kill most of us. That is the truth. And that is why we must be desperate before we accept such suffering."

Icebones was taken aback. "We will help you."

"Why should you? You never knew us before. We aren’t your kind. We aren’t even like you."

"We are Cousins, and we are bound by the Oath of Kilukpuk."

Chaser-Of-Frogs grunted. "My dear Bones-Of-Ice, you have enough to do." The Swamp-Mammoth waddled away, toward the light of the setting sun. "I’ll tell you what. I will seek out your scent at the Footfall. And if those piss-drinkers from the Pond of Evening get there before me, make sure you save the best pond for me…"

The next morning the Lost-made canal, which had guided them eastward for so long, finished its course.

Icebones stood at its head, before a square-edged termination whose regularity made her shudder. From here the canal arced back toward the west, a line of water straight as a sunbeam all the way to the horizon. She glimpsed the Nest of the Lost. In the uncertain light of the morning, the fruits of the light-trees were glowing in broken rows. Beetles clanked to and fro once more, opening their mouths for anybody who wanted to ride in them, and the food places opened, sending out thick smells of meat and drink for anybody who cared to call. But nobody came, nobody but the gulls.

There was a flash of light, a distant crack like thunder.

Flinching, Icebones raised her trunk.

The sun was buried in a dense layer of mist and blue ice clouds at the eastern horizon, a band of light framed by the Gouge’s silhouetted walls. The sky was clear, the world as peaceful as it ever got. What storm comes out of a clear sky…?

Now there was another flash. She peered to the east, where she thought the flash had come from.

The sun was swimming in the sky, sliding from side to side and pulsating in size. A line of light darted down from the sun’s disc, connecting it to the ground, like a huge glowing trunk reaching down through the dusty air. She heard a remote sound, deep and complex — like a landslide, or the cracking of a rock under frost or heat.

She blinked her eyes, seeking to clear them of water. When she stared again into the sun she could see its disc quite clearly, whole and round and unperturbed.

She lowered her head, searching for grass and water, trying to forget the strangeness, to put aside her deep unease.

5 The Skua

They were in difficult country.

The Gouge floor was crumpled into ridges and eroded hillocks, pitted by depressions where water pooled, and littered with vast pocked boulders. Progress was slow, and all the mammoths were weary and fractious.

The Gouge walls were now further apart and badly defined. The nearest wall was a band of deep shadow, striped by orange dawn light at its crest. And it was pocked by huge round holes, as regular as the pits left by raindrops in sand. Inside the holes the wall surface looked glassy, as if coated in ice.

The holes were surely too regular to be natural. Icebones thought they must be the work of the Lost — though what there was to be gained by digging such immense pits in a rock wall, and how they had done it, was beyond her. Sometimes during the day she made out movement in those huge pits, heard the peep of chicks. Birds had made their nests there, high above the attention of the scavengers and predators of the Gouge floor.

One early dawn, Icebones was woken, disturbed. She raised her trunk.

The sun was still below the eastern horizon, where the sky was streaked with pink-gray. The other mammoths had fanned out over a patch of steppe. The only sounds they made were the soft rustle of their hair as they walked, or the rip of grass, and the occasional chirping snore from Woodsmoke, who was napping beneath his mother’s legs.

She heard the gaunt honking of geese. Sometimes their isolated barks rose until they became a single outcry, pealing from the sky. Now she saw the birds in the first daylight, their huge wings seeming to glow against the lightening sky.

But it wasn’t the geese that had disturbed her.

She turned, sniffing the air. It seemed to her that the light was strange this morning, the air filled with a peculiar orange-gray glow. And there was an odd scent in the breeze that raised her guard hairs: a thin iron tang, like the taste of ocean air.

She looked west, where night still lay thick on the Gouge as it curled around the belly of the world. A band of deeper darkness was smeared across the Gouge floor, and a wind blew stronger in her face, soft but steady.

She felt the hairs on her scalp rise.

Spiral was digging with her trunk under Breeze’s belly. "Let me have him. Let me!" She was trying to get hold of Woodsmoke, who, wide awake now, was cowering under his mother’s belly.

"Get away," Breeze said. "Leave us alone, Spiral…" Breeze pushed her sister away, but she was smaller, weaker. And the calf was becoming increasingly agitated by the pushing and barging of the huge creatures that loomed over him.

Autumn walked to her squabbling daughters, stately and massive. "What is this trouble you are making?"

The calf, mewling and unhappy, wanted to run to his grandmother, but Breeze kept a firm hold on him with her skinny trunk. "Make her go away."

She is selfish," Spiral protested. "He loves me as well as her."

"Enough," Autumn said. "You are both making the calf unhappy. How does that show love…? Breeze, you must let the calf go to Spiral."

"No!"

"It is her right."

Yes. Because Spiral is senior, Icebones thought, watching.

"But," Autumn said, "you must let his mother feed him, Spiral."

"I can feed him," Spiral protested.

Autumn said gently, "No, you can’t. He still needs milk. Come now." Deliberately she stepped between the two Cows, and wrapped her trunk around Woodsmoke’s head, soothing him. And, with judicious nudges, she arranged the three of them so that the calf was in the center.

The two competing Cows stood face to face. They laid their trunks over Woodsmoke’s back, soothing and warming him.

After a few heartbeats, now that the tussle was resolved, Woodsmoke snorted contentedly and lay down to nap, half buried under the Cows’ heavy trunks.

The wind picked up further, ruffling Icebones’s hair. Far above, a bird hovered, wings widespread. Perhaps it was a skua.

She looked to the west again. The light continued to seep slowly into the sky, but she could see that the band of darkness had grown heavier and denser, filling the canyon from side to side, as if some immense wave was approaching. But she could hear nothing: no rustling of trees or moaning of wind through rock.

Autumn joined Icebones. "Taste this." She held up her trunk tip to Icebones’s mouth.

Icebones tasted milk.

"I found it on Spiral’s breast. She stole it from Breeze, to lure the calf." Autumn rumbled unhappily. "Of all of us, I think it is Spiral who suffers the most."

Icebones wrapped her trunk around Autumn’s. "Then we must help her, as much as we can."

Icebones knew that Autumn’s instinct had been good. In a Family, it was not uncommon for a senior Cow to adopt the calf of another — whether the true mother liked it or not. The whole Family was responsible for the care of each calf, and calves and adults knew it on some deep-buried level. But under the stifling care of the Lost these Cows had never learned to understand their instincts, and were now driven by emotions they probably could not name, let alone understand.

But now Thunder came trumpeting. He was breathing hard, his eyes rimmed by white. "Icebones! Icebones!" He turned to face west, his trunk raised high.

That wall of crimson darkness had grown, astonishingly quickly. It filled the Gouge from side to side, and towered high up the walls. And now Icebones could hear the first moans of wind, the crack of rock and wood, and she could feel the shuddering of the ground.

Something hovered briefly before the storm front, hurled high in the air, green and brown, before being dashed to the ground and smashing to splinters. It was a mighty conifer tree, uprooted and destroyed as casually as a mammoth’s trunk would toss a willow twig.

"By Kilukpuk’s eyes," Autumn said softly.

Icebones trumpeted, "Circle!"

The adults gathered around Breeze and her calf. Icebones prodded them until they all had their backs to the wind, with Autumn, Thunder and Icebones herself at the rear of the group.

There was a moment of eerie silence. The ground’s shaking stopped, and even the wind died.

But still the storm front bore down on them. Its upper reaches were wispy smoke, and its dense front churned and bubbled, like a vast river approaching.

Icebones, pressed between Thunder and Autumn, felt the rapid breathing of the mammoths, smelled their dung and urine and milk and fear. "Hold your places," she said. "Hold your places—"

Suddenly the storm was on them.

Perhaps it had something to do with night and day.

The Gouge was so long that while its eastern end was in day, its western extremity was still in night. Icebones imagined the battle between the cold of night and warmth of day, as the line of dawn worked its slow way along the great channel. Was it so surprising that such a tremendous daily conflict should throw off a few storms?

But the why scarcely mattered.

The wind was red-black and solid and icy cold. It battered at Icebones’s back and legs. Dust and bits of stone scoured at her skin, working through her layers of hair and grinding at any exposed flesh, her ears and trunk tip and even her feet.

Now a thick sleety snow began to pelt her back. Soon her fur was soaked through with icy melt, and the cold deepened, as if the wind was determined to suck away every last bit of her body heat. The ground itself was shuddering, making it impossible for her rumbles or stamping to reach the others.

She risked opening one eye.

It was like looking into a tunnel lined by soggy snow, rain, crimson dust and rock fragments that drove almost horizontally ahead of her. She could even see a kind of shadow, a gap in the driving storm, cast by the mammoths’ huge bulk.

She had seen this vast storm approaching since it was just a line on the bleak horizon. How was it she hadn’t heard its howl, or even felt the rumble of its destruction? Perhaps the storm was so violent, so rapid, that it outran even its own mighty roar.

But by standing together the mammoths were defeating the storm, she thought with a stab of exultation. However soaked and battered and cold, they would emerge from this latest crisis stronger and more united as a Family -

There was a noise like thunder, a blow like a strike from Kilukpuk’s mighty tusk.

The world spun around, and she was flying, flying, though the driven snow and the dust. She could feel her legs and trunk dangling, helpless, not a single one of her feet in contact with the ground, lost in the air like poor Shoot. She could smell blood — no, she could taste it.

But there was no pain, not even fear. How strange, she thought.

A wall, dark red and hard, loomed before her.

She slammed into rock. Pain stabbed in her right shoulder.

She slid down the wall to the ground. Hard-edged rock ripped at her belly and legs and face.

And then she fell into darkness.

She could feel cold rock beneath her belly.

She opened her eyes.

She glimpsed a dim sun through smoky dust, and the round shapes of mammoths, their hair licking around them. A gust battered her face, and she squeezed her eyes shut.

But the storm had diminished.

She was resting on her front, her legs folded beneath her, as a mammoth would lie when preparing to die. She tried to pull her forefeet under her, so she could rise. Pain exploded in her right shoulder, and she stumbled flat again, sprawling like a clumsy calf.

But then there was a trunk under her, strong and supple. "Lean on me." Autumn stood over her, a massive silhouette against a crimson sky. "The storm has gone to find somebody else to torment. But you are hurt."

High above Autumn, a bird wheeled through dusty red light.

Icebones tried again to stand. The pain in her shoulder betrayed her once more. But this time Autumn’s strong trunk helped her, and she managed to stay upright, shakily, her three good legs taking her weight.

The mammoths shook themselves and tugged at their hair, trying to get out the worst of the grit and dust and water. The calf, none the worse for his experience, was trotting from one adult to another, his little trunk held up as he tried to help them groom. Icebones saw that crimson dust had piled up where the mammoths had been standing, making a low dune.

The land showed the passing of the storm. Dust and gravel lay everywhere, and new red-black streaks along the rocky ground showing where the winds had passed. Bushes and bits of trees lay scattered. There was even the broken corpse of a small, young deer, Icebones saw, bent so badly it was almost unrecognizable.

She wondered what damage this storm would have done in the Nest of the Lost. Surely no trace of the mammoths’ footsteps in the littered dust would remain.

A shadow arced over the mammoths. Icebones saw that bird still wheeling overhead, wings outstretched. She looked like a skua, hunting a lemming. Perhaps she nested in those great spherical caves in the cliff face. Icebones raised her trunk, but could smell nothing but iron dust and her own blood.

She took a step forward. Pain jarred in her shoulder, making her cry softly.

"Everybody’s safe," Autumn said sternly. "Everybody but you. Your shoulder is damaged. We will rest here, until your healing begins."

"We must reach the Footfall—"

"We cannot reach this Footfall of yours at all without you, Icebones. So we will wait, whether you like it or not."

"I am sorry," Icebones said softly.

"If you are sorry you are a fool. Maybe we should go back to the ponds. I bet Chaser-Of-Frogs was comfortable in her mud, with only the tip of her trunk sticking out into the storm. What do you think…?"

The bird was descending, Icebones saw, curious despite her pain. Her body was stone gray, her beak bluish, and her wings had white flashes across them. She had webbed feet, spread beneath her, pointing at the ground — webbed, with claws.

She was descending, and descending, and descending. Coming out of the storm, unperturbed by the remnant winds.

Coming straight toward the mammoths.

Growing huge.

The calf was alone, grubbing at a fallen tree.

Icebones roared, "Watch out!" She tried to run. Her shoulder seared and she fell sprawling, as if her leg had been cut away. Still the mammoths did not look up. And still Icebones tried to stand, pushing herself forward, for the shadow was becoming larger. "The bird!" she called again. "The bird…!"

A roof of feathers and bone slid over her, rustling, and there was a smell like scorched flesh. She glimpsed a blue-gray beak, and black eyes, flecked with yellow, peered into hers. Those great wings beat once, lazily and powerfully, and air gushed.

Icebones cringed. All the dust-stained mammoths were in the bird’s shadow now, standing like blocks of sandstone.

The webbed feet spread, talons reaching out of the sky. The calf ran for his mother, trunk raised, mewling.

The talons closed. Woodsmoke trumpeted as the claws pricked his sides, and blood spurted, gushing over his spiky hair.

The bird screeched, a sound like rock cracking, as she struggled to lift her prey. With every beat of the wings, dust and bits of rock were sent flying, and the ground shuddered. It was a nightmare of noise and dust, shadow and blood, the stink of feathers.

If the skua succeeded in getting off the ground, she would surely carry the calf away to some high, remote nest, where he would be devoured alive, piece by bloody piece, by a clutch of monstrous chicks. Icebones roared her anguish. But, pinned by her injury to the ground, she could do nothing.

Breeze came rushing in, tusks raised, trumpeting, utterly fearless. She got close enough to swipe at the bird with her tusks, and she grabbed a wing with her trunk. The bird screamed and beat her wings, pulling free, leaving long, greasy black feathers fluttering in the air. A beak the size of a mammoth’s thigh bone slashed down.

Breeze staggered back, trumpeting. Icebones saw that her back had been laid open. The Cow slumped to the ground, legs splayed.

The bird was flapping harder now, and gushes of rock and dust billowed out from beneath her immense, rustling wings. At last she raised the struggling calf off the ground, and was straining for the sky.

Thunder ran forward. He was waving an uprooted bush over his head, his trunk wrapped around its roots. A cloud of red dust flew around his head.

The skua shrieked and stabbed with her beak, for the bush made Thunder look much larger than he was. He hurled the bush at her head and ran trumpeting into the shadow of her wings, slashing his tusks back and forth.

The bird screeched again — and Icebones knew the Bull had reached flesh.

The skua tried one last time to lift herself. But the calf continued to squirm, and Icebones could see Thunder whirling like a dust devil, striking over and over with blood-stained tusks at the soft feathers of the bird’s chest.

At last, with a final angry scream, the bird released Woodsmoke. The calf fell to the ground with a soft impact. The great wings beat, and Icebones saw that Thunder was knocked aside.

But now the bird was rising, diminishing in the sky, becoming a small black speck that wheeled away toward the cliffs.

The calf mewled. His mother rushed to him, uncaring of her own wounds.

They sought shelter under an overhang of rock, a place where no more nightmares could come wheeling down from the sky.

Thunder was sore from heavy bruises inflicted on his flanks by the beating wings of the bird. Breeze’s back had been laid open so badly that the white of bone showed in a valley of ripped red flesh, and Autumn laboriously plastered it with mud. The calf had suffered puncture marks in his side left by the bird’s talons, ripped wider by his struggles to get free. Spiral worked with his grandmother to clean them up for him, and to soothe his wailing misery.

All the mammoths were subdued, bombarded as they had been by the storm and the attack of the bird so soon after. Icebones suspected it had been no coincidence. The bird must prefer to hunt after such a storm, when animals, dead or injured or simply bewildered, were most vulnerable to her mighty talons.

Skuas on the Island had fed on rodents, like lemmings, and the chicks of other birds. There had been nothing like this monster. She recalled the birds she had seen nesting in the cliff hollows — but she realized now that she had totally misjudged their size, fooled by the vastness of the cliff. Perhaps such a cliff bred birds of this immense size to suit its mighty scale.

Icebones felt a dread gather in her heart. Perhaps this is how Kilukpuk felt at the beginning of her life, she thought, when she lived in a burrow under the ground, and the Reptiles stalked overhead. But the mammoths had grown huge since those days. Nothing threatened them, for the mammoths were the greatest creatures in the world…

But not this world, she thought.

As the sun slid down the sky, Icebones limped up to the young Bull. "Walk with me, Thunder. Let me lean on you."

Growling uncertainly, he settled in at her right side, and she leaned her shoulder on his comfortingly massive bulk. When they emerged from the shelter of the rock overhang, Thunder raised his trunk higher. "It is not safe," he rumbled. "The bird has blood on her talons now."

"Yes," she said. "And I cannot run fast. But I have you to protect me. Don’t I, Thunder?"

"I did nothing," he growled.

Standing awkwardly, she wrapped her trunk around his. "You defied your instincts. Mammoths are not used to being preyed upon — and certainly not by a bird, an ugly thing which flaps out of the sky. But you fought her off. You are brave beyond your years, and your strength."

"I abandoned Shoot when the sea beast threatened. I would not walk onto the bridge after Spiral. You saw my fear—"

"But you saved Woodsmoke. You are what you do, Thunder. And so you are a hero." He tried to pull away, so she slapped him gently. "I want you to call somebody now. I cannot, for I cannot stamp… There is a Bull I know. He is far from here, but I hope we will meet him someday. He is called Boaster."

"Boaster?"

"Call him now. Call him as deep and as loud as you can."

So Thunder called, his massive chest shuddering and his broad feet slamming against the ground.

After a time, Icebones heard the answering call washing through the rock. Icebones? Is that you?

"Tell him you are Thunder."

Hesitantly, Thunder complied.

A Bull? Are you in musth? Keep away from Icebones, for she is mine. For myself, though Icebones calls me Boaster, my relatives and rivals, for obvious reasons, call me Long —

"Never mind that," said Icebones hastily. "Tell him what you did today."

Still hesitant, awkward, Thunder stamped out, "I killed a bird."

After a long delay, the reply came: A bird? What did you do, sneeze on it?

Thunder trumpeted his anger. "The bird was vast. So vast its wings spanned this Gouge through which we walk. It descended like a storm and grabbed a calf in its mighty talons…"

While Boaster was listening respectfully, Icebones limped away, leaving Thunder standing proud, telling of his deeds to other Bulls — which was just what Bulls were supposed to do.

But as she withdrew she watched the darkling sky.

6 The Shining Tusk

The character of the landscape slowly changed. The walls became more shallow and broken. It was evident that they were, at last, rising out of the mighty Gouge.

One morning the mammoths found themselves facing a valley that cut across the main body of the Gouge. The valley appeared to flow from the high, dry uplands of the southern hemisphere into the immense ocean basin that was the north, as if from higher ground to lower.

The mammoths clambered down a shallow slope. The light of the rising sun cast long shadows from the rubble strewn on the surface, making the ground seem complex and treacherous.

If walking along the flat ground had been difficult for Icebones, working down a slope like this — where she had to rest her weight on her forelegs and damaged shoulder — was particularly agonizing. And even on the floor of the outflow valley, she found she had to tread carefully: a flat surface layer of dust and loose gravel covered much larger rocks beneath, their edges sharp enough to gash a mammoth’s foot.

It didn’t help that the day seemed peculiarly hot and bright. The rising sun was swollen and oddly misshapen, and the air was full of light.

Icebones knew she should give a lead to the others. But it took all her strength just to keep moving. She plodded on in silence, locked in her own world of determination and pain: Just this step. Now just one more…

She found a small, deep pond, frozen over. Impatiently she pressed on the ice until it cracked into thick, angular chunks, and she sucked up trunkfuls of cold, black water, ignoring the thin slimy texture of vegetation. Soon she had washed the dust out of her throat and trunk, and was trickling soothing water over her aching shoulder.

The others still bore injuries. Breeze nursed the brutal slashes in her back. The calf was fascinated by his wounds, and his grandmother often caught him picking at the scabs that had formed there.

But the one who slowed them down the most was Icebones herself, to her regret and shame.

Thunder stood very still, listening carefully to the deep song of the rocks, as she had taught him. "This is a damaged country," he said.

"Yes." She forced herself to raise her head.

To the north, the valley branched into a series of smaller channels, like a delta. The waters must once have flowed that way. The valley floor was smoothly carved, textured with sandbars that followed the path of the vanished flood. She saw what must have been an island in the flow, flat-topped, shaped like the body of a fish to push aside the water. To the south, where the water must have come from, the landscape was quite different: littered with blocks and domes and low hills, all of them frost-cracked, water-eroded and streaked with lichen, their outlines softened by layers of windblown dust. But many of these blocks were immense, much larger than any mammoth. It was just like the bottom of a huge dried-up river.

All this was drenched in a pink-white glow, and she could feel the sun’s heat on her back. She squinted up, wondering if she would find the sun misshapen again, as she had seen it days before, close to the canal’s terminus. But the light was too bright, and it dazzled her. She turned away, eyes watering.

Thunder said, "There is water under the ground. A great lake of it, trapped under a cap of ice. I can feel it. Can you?"

"Yes—"

"But it is very deep." He seemed excited as his awakened instincts pieced together the story of this land. "Perhaps the water broke out in a huge gush, as the waters broke out of Breeze’s belly when Woodsmoke was ready to be born. Then it flooded over the land, seeking the sea to the north. The water carved out this valley. See how it washed across the ground here, shaping it, and surged around that island… Perhaps the land to the south simply collapsed. If you suck the water out of a hole in the ice on a frozen pond, sometimes the ice will crack and fall, under its own weight…"

Maybe he was right. But whatever water had marked this land was vanished a long time ago. She saw craters punched into the ancient valley floor, themselves eroded by wind and time.

Thunder was still talking. But his words blurred, becoming an indistinguishable growl. The air was now drenched by a dazzling light that picked out every stray dust mote around her.

"I’m sorry, Thunder. What did you say? I am hot, and the day is bright."

But Thunder’s pink tongue was lolling. "It is the sky," he said. "Look, Icebones. There is nothing wrong with you. It is the sky!"

The sun had grown huge — and was getting larger. With every extension of that pale, ragged disc, the heat and the brilliance around her increased. It was silent, eerie, and profoundly disturbing.

There was a nudge at her side, an alarmed trumpet. Icebones made out Spiral, a shimmering ghost in the pink-stained brilliance. "Come away! You are in great danger here. Hurry…!" Spiral began to barge vigorously at Icebones’s flank.

Icebones needed little further urging.

The ground was littered with scree and, unable to see, she stumbled frequently. Her shoulder hurt profoundly, and she felt as if she would melt from the heat. Though she was half-blinded, she could hear as clearly as ever: Spiral’s blaring, the scrape of her foot pads over the loose rock, even the scratchy, shallow breathing of the other mammoths further away.

That flaring sun expanded still further. Eventually it became a great disc draped over the sky, its blurred rim reaching halfway to the horizon.

It was horrifying, bewildering, unreal, a new impossible unreality in this unreal world. The sun does not behave like that. If I am the frozen dream of some long-dead seer, she thought, then perhaps the dream is breaking down; perhaps this is the light of the truth, breaking through the crumbling dream…

But now the heat began to fade, suddenly. There was a soft breeze, carrying the tang of ice. The light, too, seemed dimmer.

Her thoughts cleared, like a fever dream receding. Here was Autumn, a blocky, ill-defined silhouette before her.

"If that was summer," Icebones said, "it was the shortest I’ve ever known."

"This is no joke." Autumn pushed her trunk into Icebones’s mouth. "You’re too hot. Come now, quickly." So Icebones was forced to walk again, in the footsteps of hurrying Autumn.

They reached a tall, eroded rock, crusted with yellow lichen. In its shade there was a patch of snow, laced pink by dust. Autumn reached down, scooped up snow with her trunk and began to push it into Icebones’s mouth.

Icebones lumbered forward and let the cool pink-white stuff lap up to her belly. Mammoths did not sweat, and using frost or snow like this was an essential means of keeping cool. Icebones only wished that the snow were deep enough to cover her completely.

When she felt a little better, she staggered wearily out of the ice. Slush dripped from guard hairs that were still hot to the touch of her trunk tip.

The place where she had been standing with Thunder, bathed in light, glowed a bright pink-white. Threads of steam and smoke rose from the red dust. The stink of burning vegetation and scorched-hot rock reached her nostrils.

Above the glowing ground a column of shining, swirling dust motes rose into the air. It was a perfect, soft-edged cylinder that slanted toward the sun — but Icebones had never seen a sunbeam of such intensity, nor one cast by such a powerful and misshapen sun.

Away from the sun itself, the sky seemed somehow diminished. Close to the zenith, she could even make out stars. It was as if all the light in the world had been concentrated into that single intense pulse.

An overheated rock cracked open with an explosive percussion, making all the mammoths flinch and grumble.

"If we were still standing there," Thunder said grimly, "we too would be burning."

Spiral nudged him affectionately. "And your fat would flow like water, you big tusker, and we would all swim away."

But now the shining pillar of light dispersed, abruptly, leaving dust motes churning, and the intense glow dissipated as if it had never been. When she peered up, Icebones saw the sun was restored to its normal intensity, small and shrunken.

"It is a thing of the Lost," she said. "This great tusk of light that stirs and breaks the rock."

"Yes," said Autumn. "Somehow they can gather the light of the sun itself and hurl it down where they choose. From the Fire Mountain I saw it stab at the land, over and over, carving out pits and valleys."

"Like the canal in the Gouge," Icebones said.

"But now it is scratching the land as foolishly as Woodsmoke trying out his milk tusks. The Lost are gone, and it doesn’t know what to do."

The cloudy deformation of the sun was gathering again, and the light beam was slicing down once more, this time on the higher land to the south, above the escarpment at the head of the valley. Where it rested the rock cracked and melted.

The ground shuddered — a single sharp pulse — and the mammoths rumbled their unease.

Autumn said, "I think—"

"Hush!" The brief, peremptory trumpet came from Thunder. "Listen. Can’t you hear that? Can’t you, Icebones?"

Breeze said impatiently, "I hear the burning grass, the hiss of the melting rock—"

"No. Deeper than that. Listen."

Icebones stood square on the ground, pressing her weight onto all her four legs, despite the stabs of pain in her shoulder. And then she heard it: a subterranean growl, deep and menacing.

"We have to get to the higher ground," she said immediately. They were halfway across the valley, she saw, and the eastern slope looked marginally easier to climb. "Let’s go, let’s go. Now." She began to limp that way, her damaged shoulder stinging with pain.

The mammoths milled uncertainly.

"Why?" Breeze asked. "What are we fleeing?"

"Water," said Icebones. "A vast quantity of water, an underground sea locked into the ground. Like the great flood that once burst across this land, scraping out the valley you stand in. And now—"

"And now," said Thunder urgently, "thanks to the shining tusk, that underground sea is awakening, stretching its muscles. Come on."

At last they understood. They began to lumber across the plain toward the eastern wall, trunks and tails swaying.

The ground above the escarpment cracked with a report that echoed down the walls of the valley, and steam gushed into the air. The vast body of water beneath, vigorous on its release after a billion years locked beneath a cap of permafrost ice, was rising at the commanding touch of the great orbiting lens — rising with relentless determination, seeking the air.

7 The Flood

Though the ground was broken and their way was impeded by half-buried lumps of debris, they all made faster time than Icebones — even the calf, who clung to his mother’s tail.

A giant explosion shook the ground.

Her foreleg folded beneath her. She crashed forward onto her knees, pain stabbing through her shoulder.

From the great scribbled scar inflicted by the tusk of light, a vast fountain of steam gushed into the pale sky. Vapor and debris drifted across the sun, turning it into a pale pink smear.

I’m not going to make it, she thought.

And now dust rained down like a dense, gritty snow. Icebones snorted to clear her trunk, and she tasted the blood flavor of the hot, iron-rich dust.

Suddenly she was alone in a shell of murky dust. And the mammoths were no more than crimson blurs in the distance, fast receding.

She supposed it was for the best that the others had not looked back. She had never wanted to become a burden.

She found herself staring at a rock — staring with fascination, for it might be the last thing she would ever see. It was heavily weathered, eroded, pitted and cracked. Its color was burnt orange, but there were streaks of blue-red on its north-facing surfaces, which had been exposed to sunlight longer. It was made of a lumpy conglomerate, pebbles trapped in a mix of hardened sand.

Pebbles and sand, she thought. Pebbles and sand that must have formed in fast-flowing rivers, and then compressed into this mottled rock on some ocean bed. All of it ancient, all of it long gone.

She ran her trunk fingers over the rock’s pocked surface. She found a series of small, shallow pits, a row of them, each just large enough to take her trunk tip.

…They were footprints, locked into the surface of the hardened rock. She probed more carefully at the nearest print. It had six toes. No living animal had six toes. Now its kind was lost, leaving no trace save these accidentally preserved prints.

She felt a surge of wonder. Despite the noise, her pain, despite the imminent danger, despite the rock’s shuddering, she longed to know where that ancient animal had been going — what it had wanted, how it had died.

But she would never know, and might live no more than a few more heartbeats, not even long enough to savor such wonder.

The dusty debris falling over her was becoming more liquid, she thought, and warmer too. The flood was nearing. The ground shook. She huddled closer to her rock.

But a long, powerful trunk wrapped under her belly.

It was Spiral. The young Cow loomed over Icebones as a mother would loom over her calf. She was coated in red dust, and her guard hairs were already damp.

Icebones said, "You shouldn’t have come back. You’ll die, like me. The flood is coming."

Spiral rumbled, loudly enough to make herself heard over the noise of the water. "Yes, the flood comes… like the tears of Kilukpuk."

Icebones felt weary amusement. "You talk now of Kilukpuk?"

"I’m hoping you’ll tell me more of those old tales, Icebones."

"It’s too late. We can’t get to the bank."

"No. But there is an island, further to the north, that might stay above the waters." She grabbed Icebones’s tusks and began to drag her along the bed of the ancient channel.

Icebones tried to resist, digging her feet into the ground, but the pain in her shoulder was too great even for that.

"You must not do this," she said.

"Icebones, help me or we’ll both drown."

Icebones forced herself to her feet.

To the north, the way the ancient waters had once flowed, the land was covered by scour marks, braided channels, heavily eroded islands, sand bars, the scars left by flowing water. The island Spiral had selected was shaped like a vast teardrop, its steep, layered sides polished to smoothness by ancient floods.

Climbing the island’s crumbling walls was one of the most difficult things Icebones had ever done. The strata cracked and gave way, coming loose under her in a shower of rock and pebbles and dust, and each fall brought lancing pain in her shoulder that made her trumpet in protest. But Spiral stayed with her every step, ramming Icebones’s rump with her head, as if driving her up the slope with sheer strength and willpower.

At last they reached the lip of the wall. With a final, agonizing effort Icebones dragged her carcass onto the island’s flat top. She crumpled, falling onto her knees. The surface was smooth hard mudstone, a fragment of the floor of some ancient sea, she thought.

Spiral stood before her, breathing hard, caked with orange dust, her hair ragged: tall and wild, she was a figure from a nightmare. "You are a heavy burden to haul."

Icebones gasped, "You should have left me."

"Too late for that."

And now, through the murky, sodden gloom, more mammoths approached: Autumn, Thunder, Breeze, the calf.

Icebones growled, "What are you doing here?"

"We are waiting for you," said Thunder. "Did you think we would go on without you? And when we saw Spiral bringing you here—"

Lightning flashed. The mammoths flinched.

Where the sky tusk had broken the ground, dust and steam still gushed, crimson red, and over the towering clouds of dust and steam, lightning cracked. Now water was beginning to pulse out of the ground, stained pink by the ubiquitous dust.

Instinctively the mammoths gathered closer, nuzzling and bumping.

Icebones was surrounded by the rich smell of their hair, and they loomed over her as if she was a calf. She snorted. "Some Matriarch. I did not understand the tusk of the sun. I did not hear the movement of the water under the ground until we were in danger. I am the slowest of us all, and have put you at risk."

Autumn said, "But I understood the meaning of the tusk. And Thunder with his sharp hearing heard the water, and understood, and warned us in time. And Spiral used her strength to save you — just as you have used your strength to aid others of us in the past."

"But the Cycle teaches—"

"Is the Cycle more important than the instincts of the mammoths around you?"

"…No," Icebones conceded.

"So you have not failed," Autumn whispered. "We are Family. We are what you made us. My strength is your strength."

"It doesn’t always work like that," Icebones said grimly. "Sometimes it is right to abandon the weak…"

Autumn pushed her trunk into Icebones’s mouth. "No more lessons."

All the mammoths began to murmur, a deep rumble of reassurance as if to soothe a frightened calf. Their rumbles merged subtly, becoming like the single voice of a vaster creature.

Icebones let her self sink into that comforting pit of sound. She felt her doubts and fears and anxieties dissolve — and her sense of self washed away with them. She was Family: she heard the world through Thunder’s sharp ears, and felt Spiral’s tall strength suffuse her own limbs, and Autumn’s deep knowledge and unknowing wisdom filled her head, and she shared Breeze’s deep love for her calf, who became as precious to her as her own core warmth.

She had never forgotten how bleakly bereft she had felt on that rocky hillside, when she first woke from her unnatural sleep, bombarded by strangeness — alone, as she had never been in her life. But now a new Family had built around her — I had become We — and she was whole again.

With a final shuddering tremble, the ground around the great fracture gave way. Layers of rock lifted like a lid. Angry water spilled into the valley, pounding on the eroded boulders, shattering ancient stones that might not have been disturbed since the world was young.

A wall of dirty, rust-brown water fell on them, hard and heavy.

As the setting sun began finally to glint through the remnant haze, the mammoths separated stiffly. They were cold, hungry, bruised, utterly bedraggled.

Water, turbulent and red-brown with mud, still surged around their island. Immense waves, echoes of the mighty fracture, surged up and down the ancient valley.

But already the flood water had begun to recede. Much of it was draining away through the ancient channels to the Ocean of the North. The rest was simply soaking away into the dust, vanishing back into the thirsty red ground as rapidly as it had emerged. The revealed ground, slick with crimson mud and remnant puddles, sparkled in the low sunlight, as red and wet as skinned flesh.

The very shape of this island had changed, its battered walls crumbled away under the onslaught.

The Lost remake worlds, Icebones thought. But they do not stay remade. Soon the things the Lost have built here, all the bridges and pipelines and Nests and the toiling beetles, will collapse and erode away. And when the dust has silted up even their marvelous straight-edged canal, the ancient face of the Sky Steppe will emerge once more, timeless and indomitable.

The Lost are powerful. But the making of a world will forever be beyond them, a foolish dream.

By the light of a fat, dust-laden pink sunset, the mammoths scrambled down the island’s newly carved sides, and across the valley floor. By the time they got to the higher ground they were so coated in sticky red-black mud Icebones could barely raise her legs.

"What now, Matriarch?" "What should we do?" "Where should we go?"

These questions emerged from a continuing communal rumble, for the voices of a true Family were always raised together, in an unending wash of communication — as if, emerging from consensus, every phrase began with the pronoun "we."

"Thunder, you are our ears and nostrils. Which way?"

He stood straight and still, sniffing the wind, feeling the shape of the world. At length he said, "South. South and east. That way lies the Footfall of Kilukpuk."

"Very well. Spiral, you are our strength. Shall we begin the walk?"

"We are ready, Matriarch."

Icebones made the summons rumble, a long, drawn-out growl: "Let’s go, let’s go."

Gradually their rumbles merged once more, as they tasted readiness on each other’s breath. "We are ready." "We are together." "Let’s go, let’s go."

Icebones strode forward, ignoring the pain in her shoulder — which, since it now affected only a small part of her greater, shared body, was as nothing. The other mammoths began to move with her, their trunks exploring the rocky red ground beneath their feet, just as a true Family should. Icebones felt affirmed, exulting.

But as they climbed away from the valley, and as Icebones made out the high bleak land that still lay before them, she sensed that they would yet need to call on all their shared strength and courage if they were to survive.

…And then, clinging to an outcrop of rock at the fringe of this harsh southern upland, she found a fragment of hair: pale brown, ragged, snagged from some creature who had come this way. She pulled the hair loose with her trunk and tasted it curiously. Though it was soaked through, the hair had a stale, burning smell that she recognized immediately.

The hair had belonged to the Ragged One.