Icebones

The Story of the Language of Kilukpuk

This is a story Kilukpuk told Silverhair, at the end of her life. All this happened a long time ago, long before mammoths came to this place, which we call the Sky Steppe. It is a story of Kilukpuk herself, the Matriarch of Matriarchs, who was born in a burrow in the time of the Reptiles. But at the time of this story the Reptiles were long gone, and the world was young and warm and empty.

Kilukpuk had been alive for a very long time. She had become so huge that her body had sunk into the ground, turning it into a Swamp within which she dwelled.

But she had a womb as fertile as the sea. And every year she bore Calves.

Kilukpuk was concerned that her Calves were foolish.

Now, in those days, no Calves could talk. Oh, they made noises: chirps and barks and rumbles and snores and trumpets, just as Calves will make today. But what the Calves chattered to each other didn’t mean anything. They made the noises in play, or without thinking, or from pain or joy.

Kilukpuk decided to change this.

One year Kilukpuk bore three Calves.

As they suckled at her mighty dugs, she took each of them aside. She said, "If you want to suckle, you must make this sound." And she made the suckling cry. And then, when the Calves were no longer hungry, she pushed them away.

The next day all the Calves were hungry again, and Kilukpuk waited in her Swamp.

The first Calf was silent, for she had forgotten the cry Kilukpuk taught her. And so she received no milk.

And she died.

The second Calf made the suckling cry, but made many other noises besides, for she thought that the cry was as meaningless as any other chatter. And so she received no milk.

And she died.

The third Calf, observing the fate of her sisters, made the suckling cry correctly. And Kilukpuk gathered her to her teat, and suckled her, and that Calf lived to grow strong.

When she grew up, that Calf had three Calves of her own. And all of them were born knowing the suckling cry.

Now Kilukpuk gathered the three Calves of her Calf. She said, "If you ever lose your mother, you must make this sound." And she made the lost cry. And then she pushed the Calves away.

A few days later, the playful Calves lost their mother — as Calves will — and Kilukpuk waited in her Swamp.

The first Calf was silent, for she had forgotten the cry Kilukpuk taught her. And so she stayed lost, and the wolves got her.

And she died.

The second Calf made the lost cry, but made many other noises besides, for she thought that the cry was as meaningless as any other chatter. And so she stayed lost, and the wolves got her.

And she died.

The third Calf, observing the fate of her sisters, made the lost cry correctly. And Kilukpuk gathered her up in her trunk and delivered her to her mother, who suckled her, and that Calf lived to grow strong.

And when she grew up, that Calf had three Calves of her own. And all of them were born knowing the suckling cry, and the lost cry.

And the next generation of Calves was born knowing the suckling cry, and the lost cry, and the "Let’s go" rumble.

And the next generation after that was born knowing the suckling cry, and the lost cry, and the "Let’s go" rumble, and the contact rumble.

And so it went, as Kilukpuk instructed each new generation. Calves who learned the new calls were bound tightly together, and Kilukpuk’s Family grew stronger.

Calves who did not learn the new calls died. And still Kilukpuk’s Family grew stronger.

That is how the language of mammoths and their Cousins came about. And that is why every new Calf is born with the language of Kilukpuk in her head.

Yes, it was cruel, and Kilukpuk mourned every one of those Calves who died. But it is the truth.

The Cycle is the wisdom of uncounted generations of mammoths. Nothing in there is false. For if it had been false, it would have been removed.

Just as the foolish Calves who would not learn were removed, by death.

1 The Awakening

Icebones was cold.

She was trapped in chill darkness. She couldn’t feel her legs, her tail, even her trunk. She could hear nothing, see nothing.

She tried to call out to her mother, Silverhair, by rumbling, trumpeting, stamping. She couldn’t even do that. It was like being immersed in thick cold mud.

And the cold was deep, deeper than she had ever known, soaking into the core of her body, reaching the warm center under her layers of hair and fat and flesh and bone, the core heat every mammoth had to protect, all her life.

Perhaps this was the aurora, where mammoths believed their souls rose when they died.

…But, she thought resentfully, she was only fifteen years old. She had never mated, never borne a calf. How could she have died?

Besides, much was wrong. The aurora was full of light, but there was no light here. The aurora was full of the scent of growing grass, but there was no scent here.

And things were changing.

She had been — asleep — and now she was awake. That had changed.

She recalled a time before this darkness, when she had been with Silverhair. They had walked across the cold steppe of the Island, surrounded by the Lost and their incomprehensible gadgetry, perturbed and yet not harmed by them. She recalled what her mother had been saying: "You will be a Matriarch some day, little Icebones. You will be the greatest of them all. But responsibility will lie heavily on you…" Icebones hadn’t understood.

With her mother, then on the Island. Now here. Change. A time asleep. Now, awake in the dark. Change, change, change.

Everyone knew that in the aurora nothing changed. In the aurora mammoths gathered in the calm warm presence of Kilukpuk, immersed in Family, and there was no day or night, no hunger or thirst, no I: merely a continual, endless moment of belonging.

This was not the aurora. I am not dead, she realized. My long walk continues.

But with life came hope and fear, and dread settled on her.

She made the lost cry, like a calf. But she couldn’t even hear that.

Thunder cracked. Light flashed in sharp lines above and below her. She felt a shuddering, deep in her belly, as if the ground itself was stirring.

She tried to retreat, to rumble her alarm, but still she could not move.

The close darkness receded. Great hard sheets of blackness, like dark ice, fell away. She was suddenly immersed in pink-red light.

And now the feeling returned to her legs and trunk, belly and back, all in a rush. It was like being drenched suddenly in ice water. She staggered, her legs stiff and remote. She tried to trumpet, but her trunk was heavy, and a thick, briny liquid gushed out of it, like sea water.

When her nostrils were clear she took a deep, shuddering breath. The air was cold and sharp — and thin. It made her gasp, hurting her raw lungs. Her weak eyes prickled, suddenly streaming with salty water. But she rejoiced, for she was whole again, immersed in her body, and the world.

But it was not the world she had known.

The sky was pink, like a dawn, or a sunset.

She was standing on a shallow slope. She ran her soft trunk tip over the ground. It was hard smooth rock, blue-red. Its surface was rippled and lobed, as if it had melted and refrozen.

This broad plain of rock descended as far as she could see, all the way to the horizon. She must be standing on the flank of a giant mountain, she thought. She turned to look up toward the summit, and she saw a great pillar of black smoke thrusting up to the sky, billows caught in their motion as if frozen.

Her patch of rock, soiled by her watery vomit, was surrounded by sheets of dense blackness that lay on the ground. When she touched this black stuff, she found it was hard and cold and lacking in scent and taste, quite unlike the rock in its chilling smoothness. And the sheets had sharp, straight edges. It was the crust of darkness that had contained her when she had woken from her strange Sleep, and it filled her with renewed dread.

She stepped reluctantly over the smooth black sheets, until she had reached the comparative comfort of the solid rock. But the rock’s lobes and ridges were hard under her feet, and every time she took a step she had a strange, dream-like sensation of floating.

Nothing grew here: no herbs, no trees. There was nothing to eat, not so much as a blade of grass.

The air stank of smoke and sulfur. The sun was small and dim and shrunken. The ground shuddered, as if some immense beast buried there were snoring softly in its sleep.

I am in a strange place indeed, she thought. Her brief euphoria evaporated, and disorientation and fear returned.

A contact rumble reached her, resonating deep in her belly. She was not alone: relief flooded her.

She turned sharply. Pain prickled in her knees and back and neck, and in the pads of her feet.

A mammoth was approaching — a Bull, taller than she was.

As he walked his powerful shoulders rose and fell, and his head nodded and swayed, his trunk a tangible weight that pulled at his neck. His underfur was light brown, but yellow-white around his rump and belly. His tough overlying guard hairs were much darker, nearly black on his rump and flanks, but shading to a deep brown flecked with crimson on his forequarters. The hairs that dangled from his trunk and chin and feet were paler, in places almost white. His tusks curled before him, heavy and proud. He walked slowly, languidly, as if dazed or ill.

She could see him only dimly, through air laden with mist and smoke. But she could smell the deep warmth of his layered hair, feel the steady press of his footsteps against the hard ground.

He was mammuthus primigenius: a woolly mammoth, as she was.

She didn’t know him.

The two of them began to growl and stomp, facing each other and turning away, touching tusks and trunks, even emitting high, bird-like chirrups from their trunks. The moist pink tip of his trunk reached out and explored her mouth, scalp and eyes. She ran her own trunk fingers through his long guard hairs, finding the woolly underfur beneath.

In this way, touching and singing and listening and smelling, the two mammoths shared a complex, rich exchange of information.

"…Who are you? Where are you from?"

"My name is Icebones—"

"Do you know where the food is? We’re all hungry here."

She stumbled back, confused. He was hard to understand, his sounds and postures and gestures a distortion of the language she was used to, as if he had come from a different Clan, not related to her own. And his manner was strange — eager, clumsy, more befitting a callow calf than a grown Bull.

She realized immediately, He is frightened.

Discreetly she probed the area of his temple between his eyes and his small ears where he would secrete musth fluid, if it was his time. But she found nothing.

"I don’t know anything about food."

He growled. "But you came out of that." He probed at the black sheets around her.

She didn’t know what to say to him.

Baffled, disturbed, she stepped forward, ignoring the continuing stiffness in her legs, and walked down the featureless slope. The Bull followed her, demanding food noisily, like a calf pursuing his mother.

She reached a shallow ridge. She paused there, raised her trunk and sniffed, studying the world.

She saw how this Mountain’s tremendous shadow spilled across the rocky plains below. Looking beyond the shadow to where the land was still sunlit, she saw splashes of gray-green — the steppe, perhaps, or forest. And beyond that she saw the broad shoulders of two more vast, shallow mountains, pushing above the horizon, mighty twins of the Mountain under her feet, made gray and colorless by distance and mist. Close to the horizon thin clouds glowed, bright blue, stark against the pink sky.

There was a moon in the sky. But it was not the Moon, which had floated above the night lands of the Island. This moon was a small white disc, and it was climbing into the smoky sky as she watched — visibly moving, moment by moment, with a strange, disturbing speed. As it climbed, approaching the sun, it turned into a crescent, a cup of darkness, that finally disappeared.

And then the moon’s shadow passed over the sun itself, a dark spot like a passing cloud.

Icebones cringed.

With her deep mammoth’s senses she could hear the songs of the planet: the growl of earthquakes and volcanoes, the howl of wind and thunder, the angry surge of ocean storms, all the noises of earth, air, fire and water. And she could tell that this world was small, round, hard — and strange.

She raised her trunk higher, trying to smell mammoths, her Family, Silverhair. She could smell nothing but the stink of sulfur and ash.

Wherever she was, however she had got here, she was far from her Family. Without her Family she was incomplete — for a mammoth Cow could no more live apart from her Family than a trunk or leg or tusk could survive if cut off the body.

The Bull continued to pursue her.

She turned on him. "Why are you following me? I am not in oestrus. Can’t you tell that? And you are not in musth."

His eyes gleamed, amber pebbles in pits of wrinkled skin. "What is oestrus? What is musth?"

She growled. "My name is Icebones. What is your name? Where is your bachelor herd?"

"Do you know where the food is? Please, I am very hungry."

She came closer to him, curiosity warring with her anger and confusion. She explored his face with her trunk. How could he know so little? How could he not have a name?

And — where was she? This strange place of pink mountains was like nowhere she had ever heard of, nowhere spoken of even in the Cycle, the mammoths’ great and ancient body of lore…

Nowhere, except one place.

"The Sky Steppe. That’s where we are, isn’t it?" The Sky Steppe, the Island in the sky where — according to the Cycle — mammoths would one day find a world of their own, far from the predations and cruelty of the Lost, a world of calm and plenty.

But this place of barren rock and smoky air didn’t seem so plentiful to her, nor was it calm.

The Bull ignored her questions. "I’m hungry," he repeated.

She turned her back on him deliberately.

She heard him grunt and snort, the soft uncertain pads of his footsteps recede. She felt relief — then renewed anxiety.

I’m hungry too, she realized. And I’m thirsty. And, after all, the strange, infuriating Bull was the only mammoth she had seen here.

She turned. His broad back, long guard hairs shining, was still visible over a blue-black ridge that poked like a bone out of the hard ground.

She hurried after him.

Walking was difficult. The hard ground crumpled into folds, as if it had once flowed like congealing ice, and great gullies had been raked out of the side of the Mountain.

Her strength seemed sapped. She struggled to climb the ridges, and slithered on her splayed feet down slopes where she could not get a purchase. The air was smoky and thin, and her chest heaved at it.

She found a gully that was roofed over by a layer of rock. She probed with brief curiosity into a kind of cave, much taller than she was, that receded into the darkness like a vast nostril. Perhaps all the gullies here had once been long tubular caves like this, but their rocky roofs had collapsed.

In one place the ground had cracked open, like burned skin, and steam billowed. Mud, gray and liquid, boiled inside the crack, and it built up tall, skinny vents, like trunks sticking out of the ground. The air around the mud pool was hot and dense with smoke and ash, making it even harder to draw a breath.

Grit settled on her eyes, making them weep. She longed for the soft earth of the Island in summer, for grass and herbs and bushes.

But the Bull was striding on, his gait still languidly slow to her eyes. He was confident, used to the vagaries of the ground where she was uncertain, healthy and strong where she still felt stiff and disoriented. She hurried after him.

And now, as she came over a last ridge, she saw that he had joined a group of mammoths.

They were all Cows, she saw instantly. She felt a surge of relief to see a Family here — even if it was not her Family. She hurried forward, trumpeting a greeting.

They turned, sniffing the air. The mammoths stood close together, and the wind made their long guard hairs swirl around them in a single wave, like a curtain of falling water.

There were three young-looking Cows, so similar they must have been sisters. One appeared to be carrying a calf: her belly was heavy and low, and her dugs were swollen. An older Cow might have been their mother — her posture was tense and uncertain — and a still older Cow, moving stiffly as if her bones ached, might be her mother, grandmother to the sisters — and so, surely, the Matriarch of the Family. Icebones thought they all seemed agitated, uncertain.

Icebones watched as the Cow she had tagged as the mother lumbered over to the Bull and cuffed his scalp affectionately with her trunk… And the mother towered over the Bull.

That didn’t make sense, Icebones thought, bewildered. Adult Bulls were taller than Cows. This Bull had been much taller than Icebones, and Icebones, at fifteen years old, was nearly her full adult height. So how could this older Cow tower over him as if he was a calf?

There was one more Cow here, Icebones saw now, standing a little way away from the clustered Family. This Cow was different. Her hair was very fine — so fine that in places Icebones could see her skin, which was pale gray, mottled pink. Her tusks were short and straight, lacking the usual curling sweep of mammoth tusks, and her ears were large and floppy.

This Cow was staring straight at Icebones as she approached, her trunk held high as she sniffed the air. Her posture was hard and still, as if she were a musth Bull challenging a younger rival.

"I am Icebones," she said.

The others did not reply. She walked forward.

The mammoths seemed to grow taller and taller, their legs extending like shadows cast by a setting sun, until they loomed over her, as if she too was reduced to the dimensions of a calf.

Icebones felt reluctant, increasingly nervous. Must everything be strange here?

She approached the grandmother. Though she too was much taller than Icebones, this old one’s hair was discolored black and gray and her head was lean, the skin and hair sunken around her eyes and temples, so that the shape of the skull was clearly visible. Icebones reached out and slipped her trunk into the grandmother’s mouth, and tasted staleness and blood. She is very old, Icebones realized with dismay.

She said, "You are the Matriarch. My Matriarch is Silverhair. But my Family is far from here…"

"Matriarch," said the grandmother. "Family." She gazed at Icebones. "Silverhair. These are old words, words buried deep in our heads, our bellies. I am no Matriarch, child."

Icebones was confused. "Every Family has a Matriarch."

The grandmother growled. "This is my daughter. These are her children, these three Cows. And this one carries a calf of her own — another generation, if I live to see it… But we are not a Family." She sneezed, her limp trunk flexing, and bloodstained mucus splashed over the rock at her feet.

Icebones shrank back. "I never heard of mammoths without names, a Family that wasn’t a Family, Cows without a Matriarch."

One of the three tall sisters approached Icebones curiously. Her tusks were handsome symmetrical spirals before her face. Her legs were skinny and extended. Even her head was large, Icebones saw, the delicate skull expansive above the fringe of hair that draped down from her chin.

She reached out with her trunk and probed at Icebones’s hair and mouth and ears, just as if Icebones was a calf. "I know who you are."

Icebones recoiled.

But now the others were all around her — the other sisters, the mother, the Bull.

"We were told you would come."

"I am thirsty. I want water."

"My baby is stirring. I am hungry."

The strange, tall mammoths clamored at her, like calves seeking dugs to suckle, plucking at the hair on her back and legs, even the clumps on her stubby tail.

She trumpeted, backing off. "Get away from me!"

The other — the Ragged One, stub-tusked, pink-spotted — came lumbering over the rocky slope to stand close to Icebones. "You mustn’t mind them. They think you might be the Matriarch, you see. That’s what they’ve been promised."

Now the Bull-calf came loping toward her, oddly slow, ungainly. He said to Icebones, "Show us how to find food. That’s what Matriarchs are supposed to do."

I’m no Matriarch, she thought. I’ve never even had a calf. I’ve never mated. I’m little older than you are, for all your size… "You must find food for yourself," she said.

"But he can’t," the Ragged One said slyly. "Let me show you."

And she turned and began to follow a trail, lightly worn into the hard rock, that led over a further ridge.

Confused, apprehensive, Icebones followed.

The Ragged One brought her to a shallow pit that had been sliced into the flank of the Mountain. At the back of the pit was a vertical wall, like a cliff face, into which sockets had been cut, showing dark and empty spaces beyond.

And, strangest of all, on a raised outcrop at the center of the leveled floor stood a mammoth — but it was not a mammoth. It, he or she, was merely a heap of bones, painstakingly reassembled to mimic life, with not a scrap of flesh or fat or hair. The naked skeleton raised great yellow tusks challengingly to the pink sky.

Icebones recognized the nature of this place immediately: the harsh straight lines and level planes of its construction, the casual horror of the bony monument at the center. "This is a place of the Lost," she said. "We should get away from here."

The Ragged One gazed at her with eyes that were too orange, too bright. "You really don’t understand, do you? The Lost aren’t the problem. The problem is, the Lost have gone." She circled her trunk around Icebones’s, and began to tug her, gently but relentlessly, toward the shallow, open pit.

Icebones walked forward, one heavy step after another, straining to detect the presence of the Lost. But her sense of smell was scrambled by the stink of the smoky air.

"Where were you born?"

"On the Island," Icebones said. "A steppe. A land of grass and bushes and water."

The Raged One growled. "Your Island, if it ever existed, is long ago and far away. Here — this is where I was born. And my mother before me — and her mother — and hers. Here, in this place of the Lost. What do you think of that?"

Icebones looked up at the cavernous rooms cut into the wall. "And was a Lost your Matriarch? Did the Lost give you your names?"

"We had no Matriarch," the Ragged One said simply. "We had no need of Families. We had no need of names. For we only had to do what the Lost showed us, and we would be kept well and happy. Look." The Ragged One stalked over to a low trough set in the sheer wall. A flap of shining stone dangled before it, like the curtain of guard hairs beneath the belly of a mammoth. The Ragged One pushed the tip of her trunk under the flap, which lifted up. When she withdrew her trunk, she held it up before Icebones. Save for a little dust, her pink trunk tip was empty.

Icebones was baffled by this mysterious behavior. And she saw that the trunk had just a single nostril.

The Ragged One said, "Every day since I was born I came to this place and pushed my trunk in the hole, and was rewarded with food. Grass, herbs, bark, twigs. Every day. And from other holes in this wall I have drawn water to drink — as much as I like. But not today, and not for several days."

"How can food grow in a hole?"

The old grandmother came limping toward them, her gaunt head heavy. "It doesn’t grow there, child. The Lost put it there with their paws."

"And now," the Ragged One said, "the Lost are gone. All of them. And so there is no more food in the hole, no more water. Now can you see why we are frightened?"

The old one, with a weary effort, lifted her trunk and laid it on Icebones’s scalp. "I don’t know who you are, or where you came from. But we have a legend. One day the Lost would leave this place, and the great empty spaces of this world would be ours. And on that day, one would come who would lead us, and show us how to live: how to eat, how to drink, how to survive the heat of the summer and the cold of the winter."

"A Matriarch," Icebones said softly.

The grandmother murmured, "It has been a very long time — more generations than there are stars in the sky. So they say…"

"But now," the Ragged One said, "the Lost are gone, and we are hungry. Are you to be our Matriarch, Icebones?"

Icebones lifted her trunk from one to the other. The grandmother seemed to be gazing at her expectantly, as if with hope, but there was only envy and ambition in the stance of the Ragged One.

"I am no Matriarch," Icebones said.

The Ragged One snorted contempt. "Then must we die here — ?"

Her words were drowned out by a roar louder than any mammoth’s. The ground shuddered sharply under Icebones’s feet, and she stumbled.

Dark smoke thrust out of the higher slopes of the Mountain. The huge black column was shot through with fire, and lumps of burning rock flew high. The air became thick and dark, full of the stink of sulfur, and darkness fell over them.

"Ah," said the Ragged One, as if satisfied. "This old monster is waking up at last."

Flakes of ash were falling through the muddy air, like snowflakes, settling on the mammoths’ outer hair. It was a strange, distracting sight. Icebones caught one flake on her trunk tip. It was hot enough to burn, and she flicked it away.

A mammoth trumpeted, piercingly.

Icebones hurried back, trying to ignore the sting of ash flakes on her exposed skin, and the stink of her own singed hair.

She met a mammoth, running in panic. It was one of the three sisters, and the long hairs that dangled from her belly were smoldering. "Help me! Oh, help me!" Even as she ran, Icebones was struck by the liquid slowness of her gait, the languid way her hair flopped over her face.

The injured one, confused, agitated, ran back to the others. Icebones hurried after her and beat at the Cow’s scorched and smoldering fur with her trunk.

The others stood around helplessly. The mammoths, coated in dirty ash, were turning gray, as if transmuting into rock themselves.

At last the smoldering was stopped. The injured Cow was weeping thick tears of pain, and Icebones saw that she would have a scarred patch on her belly.

Icebones asked, "How did this happen to you…?"

There was a predatory howl, and light glared from the sky. The mammoths cringed and trumpeted.

A giant rock fell from the smoke-filled sky. It slammed into the floor, sending smaller flaming fragments flying far, and the ground shuddered again. Beneath a thin crust of black stone, the fallen rock was glowing red-hot.

With a clatter, the patiently reconstructed skeleton of the long-dead mammoth fell to pieces.

"That is how I was burned," the injured sister said resentfully.

More of the lethal glowing rocks began to fall from the sky, each of them howling like a descending raptor, and where they fell the stony ground splashed like soft ice.

The mother lumbered up. "We have to get out of this rain of rocks," she said grimly.

"The feeding place," gasped the injured sister.

"No," growled the mother. "Look."

Icebones peered through the curling smoke and the steady drizzle of ash flakes. A falling rock had smashed into the place of feeding, breaking open the thin wall as a mammoth’s foot might crush a skull.

The Ragged One was watching Icebones, as if this was a trial of strength. She said slyly, "The Lost have abandoned us. Must we all die here? Tell us what to do, Matriarch."

Icebones, dizzy, disoriented, tried to think. Did these spindly mammoths really believe she was a Matriarch? And whatever they believed, what was she to do, in this strange upside-down world where it rained ash and fiery rock? Surely Silverhair would have known…

The grandmother, through a trunk clogged with ash and dirt, was struggling to speak.

Her daughter stepped closer. "What did you say?"

"The tube," the old one said. "The lava tube."

The others seemed baffled, but Icebones understood. "The great nostril of rock… It is not far." I should have thought of it. Silverhair would have thought of it. But I am not Silverhair. I am only Icebones.

She waited for the grandmother to give her command to proceed. But, of course, this old one was no Matriarch. The mammoths milled about, uncertain.

"We must not leave here," said the burned sister. "What if the Lost return? They will help us."

At last her mother stepped forward and slapped her sharply on the scalp with her trunk. "We must go to the lava tube. Come now." She turned and began to lead the way. The others followed, the Bull pacing ahead with foolish boldness, the three sisters clustered together. The Ragged One tracked them at a distance, more like an adolescent Bull than a Cow.

As they toiled away into the thickening gray murk, Icebones realized that the grandmother was not following.

She turned back. To find her way she had to probe with her trunk through the murk. The smoke and ash were so thick now it was hard to breathe.

The grandmother had slumped to her knees, and her belly was flat on the ground, guard hairs trailing around her. Her eyes were closed, her trunk coiled limply before her, and her breath was a shallow labored scratch.

"You must get up. Come on." Icebones nudged the old one’s rump with her forehead, trying to force her to stand. She trumpeted to the others, "Help her!"

The grandmother’s rumble was weak, deep, almost inaudible over the shuddering of the rocky ground. "Let them go." She slumped again, her breath bubbling, her body turning into a shapeless gray mound under the ash.

Icebones feverishly probed at the old one’s face and mouth with her trunk. "I will see you in the aurora."

One eye opened, like a stone embedded in broken flesh and scorched hair. "There is no aurora in this place, child."

Icebones was shocked. "Then where do we go when we die?"

The old one closed her eyes. "I suppose I’ll soon find out." Her chest was heaving as she strained at the hot, filthy air. She raised her trunk, limply, and pushed at Icebones’s face. "Go. Your mother would be proud of you."

Icebones backed away. She was immersed in strangeness and peril, far from her Family — and now she was confronted by death. "I will Remember you."

But the grandmother, subsiding as if into sleep, did not seem to hear, and Icebones turned away.

It was the greatest volcano in the solar system. It had been dormant for tens of millions of years. Now it was active once more, and its voice could be heard all around this small world.

And, across the volcano’s mighty flanks, the small band of mammoths toiled through fire and ash, seeking shelter.

2 The Songs of the World

The blazing rocks continued to fall from the sky, splashing against the stolid ground.

The rocky tube shuddered and groaned. Sometimes dust or larger fragments of the inner roof came loose, and the mammoths, huddled together, squealed in terror. But the tube held, protecting them.

The darkness of night closed in. Still the ash snow fell thickly. The cave grew black. The mammoths tried to ignore the hunger and thirst that gnawed at them all.

Sometimes, in the darkness, Icebones heard the others snore or mumble. Icebones felt weariness weigh on her too. But she was reluctant to fall back into the dark, having emerged from that timeless, dreamless Sleep so recently.

She felt compassion for these wretched nameless ones — but at the same time her own fear deepened, for it was apparent that there was nobody here who could help her, no Family or Matriarch or even an experienced, battle-scarred old Bull.

She wished with all her heart that Silverhair was here.

The morning came at last, bringing a thin pinkish light that only slowly dispelled the purple-black of night. But the ash continued to fall, and there was a renewed round of rock falls.

The mammoths were forced to stay cooped up together in the lava tube, bickering and trying to avoid each other’s dung, which was thin and stinking of malnourishment.

By mid-afternoon, thirst drove them out. They had to push their way through ash which had piled up against the mouth of their long cave.

The world had turned gray.

A cloud of thick noxious gas continued to pump out of the summit of this immense Fire Mountain, and a gray-black lid of it hung beneath the pink sky, darkening the day. Ash drifted down, turning the rocky ground into a field of gray smoothness over which the mammoths toiled like fat brown ghosts, every footfall leaving a crater in fine gray layers.

Everything moved slowly here, Icebones observed. As she walked her steps felt light, as if in a dream, or as if she was wading through some deep pond. When she kicked up ash flakes they fell back with an eerie calmness. Even the guard hairs of the mammoths rippled languidly.

Trying to ignore the strangeness, Icebones walked with exaggerated caution. If she must be called a Matriarch, she should fulfill the role. "The ash hides the rock’s folds and crevices," she said. "You must be careful not to injure yourselves." She showed the others how to probe at the ground ahead with their trunks, feeling out hidden traps.

But the Ragged One stalked alongside her, her posture stiff and mocking. "So you know all about ash. You know better than I do, after I have spent my whole life here on this Fire Mountain."

"No," said Icebones evenly. "But I have seen how snow covers the ground. And the dangers are surely alike."

The Ragged One growled. "There," she said. "There are dangers in this place you have never imagined."

Icebones saw that a new river was making its way down the broad flank of the Mountain. It was a river of fire.

Glowing red, it flowed stickily and slowly, like blood. It was crusted over by a dark brown scum that continually crumbled, broke and congealed again. Flames licked all along the length of the flow, and wispy yellow smoke coiled. In one place the flow cut through a frozen pond, and a vast cloud of yellow-white steam rose with a harsh hissing.

Icebones could smell the burning stench of the molten rock river, feel its huge rumble as it churned its way down the slope, cutting through layers of ancient rock as if they were no more substantial than ice. "We were fortunate," she said softly. "If that rock river had chosen to flow a little more to the east—"

"It would have overwhelmed our lava tube," said the Ragged One. "Yes. We would have been scorched, or buried alive, or crushed…"

"It is a shame the rock flow is destroying the pool. We could have drunk there."

The Raged One snorted. "In your wisdom you will find us more water."

Icebones, irritated, walked up the rocky slope. "Very well. Let’s find water."

Reluctantly the Ragged One followed.

Icebones came to an area where the ash was a little less thick. She walked back and forth across the rock, stamping, scraping exposed outcrops with her tusks and slapping them with her trunk, listening hard.

The young Bull approached, ungainly on his oddly elongated legs. "What are you doing?"

Feeling like a foolish infant — she had to remind herself that this towering Bull was only a calf himself — she said, "I’m looking for water."

"There is no water here."

"Yes, there is. But it’s deep underground. Can’t you hear it?"

Comically, he cocked his small ears. "No," he said.

"Listen with your belly and feet and chest." She stamped again. "The ground here is hard and it rings well. And the water that flows deep makes the rock shudder…" To Icebones, the rumble of the deep water was a distinct noise under the frothy din of the surface world, like the far-off call of a thunderstorm, or the giant crack of a distant glacier calving an iceberg.

The Bull raised his trunk, as if to smell the deep-buried water. He rammed his tusks against the hard, rippled rock, but they rebounded, and he yelped with pain.

"We must find a place where the water comes closer to the surface." She walked down the hillside, pausing to stamp and listen, tracking the path of the underground river.

The others followed, the Bull with eagerness, the rest with incomprehension or resentment, but all driven by their thirst.

She came to a place where a vast pipe thrust out of the ground. It stalked away over the rocky slope on spindly legs, like some immense centipede. The pipe was as wide as three or four mammoths standing side by side, and its surface was slick and white, like a tusk.

The pipe was obviously a creation of the Lost. But its purpose did not interest her — for she could hear water running through it.

She began to probe at the ground just above the pipe. The rock was shattered here; underneath a surface layer of dust there was fine rubble. And, when she dug into this with her trunk, she could smell water.

The Bull could smell it too. "Let me drink! Give me the water!"

Icebones growled. "I am not your Lost keeper, here to nurse you. The water is here, but you must work for it." She trumpeted to the others. "Come, now. Watch what I do."

She bent her head and cleared away surface debris with brisk swipes of her tusks. Then she stood square and began to dig her way into the rubble with her trunk.

The Ragged One snorted skeptically, but the others crowded closer.

Icebones soon grew tired, but she ignored her discomfort and kept digging.

Perhaps half a trunk’s length deep the rubble began to turn into sticky, half-dried mud, and she gratefully sucked out the first droplets of water.

After that the others quickly settled to work around her. They grumbled and complained as they scraped their tusks or caught their sensitive trunk fingers on sharp rock fragments. But the scent of water lured them on, and soon their complaints turned to a murmur of mutual encouragement.

Icebones could sense warmth rising from the ground here. Perhaps that had something to do with the rivers of rock which had gushed from this Mountain; perhaps that deep warmth had kept the underground water from freezing here.

At last Icebones dug deep enough to find soil soaked to mud. She had to kneel on her front legs to reach. With her trunk tip she hollowed out a chamber deep beneath the ground. She let the hole fill with seeping water, which she sucked out in a great trunk load and emptied into her mouth. The water was hot, a little salty, and it fizzed oddly in her throat — but it was delicious.

The others, working less expertly, were slower, but her success drove them on. At length they were all pumping out muddy, brownish water and filing their mouths.

Working together at the rock face was the nearest this strange, fractured bunch had come to behaving like a Family, Icebones thought. She allowed herself to relish this moment of immersion: the shuffling of feet and the scrape of tusk on rock, the soft rustle of the mammoths’ thick hair, and the myriad small sounds, farts and hums and squeals and rumbles, that emanated from the mammoths’ immense torsos as they drank.

When she had drunk her fill, Icebones walked away from the others.

The rock beneath her feet came in layers, she found, exploring it with her trunk: layers of red overlying gray, gray overlying blue, blue overlying black. Here and there this stratified rock was pocketed by craters, huge circular scars.

Perhaps all of this vast Mountain was made up of layer after layer of hardened rock, vomited from the summit over many years.

When she urinated, the rock and dust fizzed and hissed where her water splashed it. She sniffed at this new peculiarity, baffled and disturbed. The very dust was strange here.

She found a steep-sided ridge and climbed it stiffly, the mild exertion making her gasp for air. The ash had drifted away from the top of the broad ridge, leaving hard exposed rock.

Standing on the ridge, she was suspended between purple sky and a land that glowed red.

The flank of the Fire Mountain swept away beneath her. The sun was setting behind her, already hidden by the Mountain — she was looking east, then — and the sky was a stark dome of bruised purple, showing a few stars at the zenith. The Mountain thrust out of the belly of this world, as if some monstrous planetary calf were struggling to be born. And, on the eastern horizon, she saw those other rocky cones, mountains almost as vast, their sunlit faces glowing red.

There was a layer of clouds beneath her. The clouds were tall thunderheads, flat and smooth and black beneath, topped by huge pink-white mounds, and they sailed like icebergs on some invisible sea of thicker, moister air. I really am very high, she thought.

Below the clouds, on the deeper land beneath, she saw swathes of pale green and gray: the mark of life, grasslands or steppe. Raising her trunk she thought she could smell water, far away, far below.

We must go there, she thought, down to that plain. For we surely cannot stay here, on this barren slope.

She could see the giant water-bearing pipe, at the roof of which the mammoths still dug for water. When she climbed a little higher she saw that more pipes thrust out of the bulk of the Mountain and spread around it across the rocky land. They were thin lines that shone pink in the last of the sunlight.

In a way this great structure was magnificent, she thought, the huge shining trunks stretching straight and far, farther than many mammoth trails. But she wondered if that was why this old Fire Mountain had come to life. The Lost were always thirsty for water. Perhaps, like a greedy mammoth who drains the ground beneath her feet, the Lost had sucked away too much of the water which had gathered here, disturbing the Mountain.

Now the light was fading fast, and the immense shadow of the Fire Mountain stretched across the land. Soon she could hear calls, rising from the hidden depths of the landscape, drifting on the thin, cold air. They were clearly the voices of predators — wolves, perhaps, or cats — marking out their killing territories. Though the predators’ calls made her tense and alert, there was something reassuring in the thought that she and her motley band of mammoths were not the only living things in this strange, cold world.

As the light faded further, she heard more subtle sounds: the hiss of wind over mountains and forests and steppe, the deep, subtle murmur of an ocean, the groan of glaciers and the crackling of ice sheets, the murmur of liquid rock within the Fire Mountain, the deeper churning of this world’s hot core. When she stamped her feet, she could hear washes of sound echoing back and forth through the deep foundations of the land.

The sunset and the dawn were the times sound carried best. And so she listened, with every aspect of her being, her ears and belly and chest, to the deeper sounds, the songs of the world. And gradually she built up an image, in sounds and echoes, of the spinning rocky ball to which she clung.

This was a small, cold world. It was made of rock, rock that was hard deep into its being — unlike that other world, the world of her birth, whose rocky skin was laid thin over a churning liquid body, like thin ice on a pond.

But the cold here would suit mammoths, she thought. And the hardness of the rocks made the world’s songs easy to hear.

The world was round, like a ball of dung. But it was a misshapen ball. To the north it was flattened, as if a massive foot had stamped down there, cracking and compressing the rock across half the world. The giant pit made by that stamping was, she sensed, filled with water, a world-girdling ocean. The southern lands were higher, but they, too, had been struck a series of immense, damaging blows. One of those slamming impacts had been so powerful it had punched a great pit into the hide of the world — and the impact had caused a rebounding upthrust of rock here, in the lands beneath her feet. The huge Fire Mountain itself stood over that rock mound.

This world was a small, swollen, battered place, she saw, born in unimaginable violence, bruised by ancient blows from which it had never healed.

And the world was dying.

She could hear water freezing over, or flowing into deep basins, or seeping into the ground. She could hear the crack of ice spreading over that vast northern ocean. Even the air was settling out. She could hear its moan as it pooled, cooling, like water running downhill, reaching at last the lowest places of all — like that immense punched-in depression on the far side of the world.

The world was growing cold, and its air and water were shriveling away — and, she supposed, all life with them…

And it was not the world where she had been born. The songs of this small world and the songs of that other place — massive, liquid, alive — were unmistakably different.

But how could that be? How could there be a place here that was not there? It was beyond her imagination.

And — why had she been brought here?

She recalled the Island, her Family. It was as if she had been with them yesterday, listening to Silverhair’s patient account of how, when she was no older than Icebones now, the Lost had found the Island and nearly killed them off, the last of all the mammoths. All her life, Silverhair had told Icebones she would one day be a Matriarch. And she had steadily coached her daughter in the wisdom of the mammoths, teaching her the songs of the Cycle, imparting a deep sense of blood and land…

Yes, one day I will be a Matriarch, Icebones thought. I have always accepted my destiny. But not here. Not now. I am not ready!

But, ready or not, what was she to do next?

She sucked the thin, dry air through her trunk, felt its cold prickle in her lungs, smelled the lingering tang of ash. Alone, longing for the warmth of her Family, she began to sing: "I am Icebones. My Matriarch was Silverhair, my mother. And her Matriarch was Owlheart. And her Matriarch was Wolfnose…"

She called with deep rumbles. She sensed a fluttering of skin over her forehead, the membranes stretched tight over the hollows in her skull that made her voice’s deepest sounds. And she stamped, too, a rhythmic thumping that sent acoustic pulses out through the hard rocky ground.

Icebones. Icebones…

She gasped and turned around, trunk held high. But she was alone.

Her name had come not through the air, but as deep sound through the hard rock of the ground.

She stamped out, "I am Icebones, daughter of Silverhair. Who are you?"

Long heartbeats later came a reply. I am strong and my tusks are powerful. More powerful than my brother’s. Are you in oestrus? Are you with calf? Are you suckling?

Icebones snorted. It was a Bull, then: intent only on rivalry with his fellows and on mating with any receptive Cow — just like all Bulls, who, some Cows would say, are calves all their lives.

"I am not in oestrus. Where are you?"

It is a cold place. By the shore of a round sea. There is little to eat. Snow falls. There are few of us. Predators stalk us.

She raised her trunk and sniffed the air. She could smell only the rock, the thin, dry air and her own dung. There was no scent of Bull — and an adult Bull in musth, dribbling from his temple glands and trickling urine, emitted a powerful scent indeed. "You must be far away, very far."

But my tusks are long and powerful, almost as long as my —

His last word was indistinct.

"And you have no need of a name?"

Names? None of us have names.

She snorted. "I will call you Boaster."

The steppe is sparse. We walk far to graze. Once we were many, like daisies on the steppe. Now we are few.

"We must find each other," she said immediately, rapping her message into the deep rock.

A Family of Cows, with no adult Bulls, could not prosper: without Bulls to impregnate the Cows, it would be extinct within a generation. And likewise an isolated bachelor herd without Cows would soon die, unable to reproduce itself. It was a deeper layer of peril, she realized, lurking beyond the dangers of the fires that belched into the air.

Yes. I am ready for you, Icebones. I have no need to wait for musth. But now his words were becoming indistinct. Perhaps he was walking over softer ground, or a storm on that northern ocean was making the rocks too noisy… Follow the water, she caught… Water and the thick warm air… the lowest place…

And then he was gone, and she was alone again.

The light was ebbing out of the sky now. The sun had long vanished behind the Mountain, and an ocean of shadow was pooling at its base, obscuring those stretches of steppe and forest, turning them gray and lifeless. The stars were emerging through a great disc of blackness that spread down from the zenith toward the horizon, revealing a huge, clear sky.

There was a presence beside her, a trunk pulling at hers. Eager for company, she clung to it gratefully. But she felt sparse, stiff hair on that trunk, and tasted bitterness.

It was the Ragged One. "You must come back. The others want you."

"Why?"

"They want to Remember the old one. As you told them they should."

Icebones told the Ragged One of the Bull she had spoken to.

The Ragged One seemed to understand little. "The Bulls were brought here, to the Mountain, to us. And if one of them was in musth, and one of us in oestrus, there would be a mating. That was all we needed to know about Bulls."

"And you would sing the Song of Oestrus?"

But the Ragged One knew nothing of that. "Once there were many of us. Many like you, many like me. The Lost did not mean to keep us forever. They were making the world, you see. They were covering it with oceans and steppe and forests. One day there would be room for us to roam, in Clans. But then the Sickness came…"

She described a horrific illness among the mammoths. It would begin with blood in urine. Then would come waves of heat and cold, and growths that would sprout from mouth and feet and anus. Finally, after a suffusion of great pain, there would be death.

"And if one caught it, all would fall." She turned to Icebones, growling. "I know you think we have been kept by the Lost, that we are like calves. But we heard the mammoths calling to each other, all over this quiet world, Icebones. We heard the cries of the carnivores too, as they broke through fences no longer maintained by the Lost. We heard their joy at the ease of the kills they made, and later their disappointment at how little meat remained.

"And one by one those distant mammoth voices fell silent.

"Can you imagine how that was? Perhaps you should indeed teach us to Remember. Perhaps that is why you have been sent among us — to Remember all who died."

Icebones was horrified. But she said, "We aren’t dead yet. On this Mountain there is no food, and precious little water. We must go down to the plains."

The Ragged One snorted. "You are a fool. The world is growing cold, yes. Because the Lost have gone."

Icebones was baffled. "Where did they go?"

"They went up, into the sky," the Ragged One said. "And that is where we must go. Not down. Up." She said this decisively, and stalked away stiff-legged.

The Remembering was simple.

Icebones had the mammoths help her dig out the body of their grandmother. It had been scorched and dried by its immersion in the ash. Much of the hair was blackened and curling, and the skin was drawn tight. The eyelids, gruesomely, had fallen open, and the eyes had become globes of cloudy, fibrous material, sightless.

Icebones said, "Watch now, and learn." She scraped at the bare ground with her tusks. Then she picked up a fingerful of grit and ash and dropped it on the grandmother’s unresponding flank.

The mother reached down, picked up a loose rock, and stepped forward to do the same.

Soon they were all using their trunks and feet to cover the inert body with ash, dust and stones — all save the Ragged One, who stayed on the edge of the group, unwilling to participate, and yet unable to turn away.

As they worked, Icebones felt a deeper calm settle on her soul. The Cycle said this was how the mammoths had always honored their dead.

Silverhair had told her of a place on the Island called the Plain of Bones, where the ground was thick with the bones of mammoths — of Icebones’s ancestors, who had walked across the land for uncounted generations before her. She wondered how many mammoth bones lay beneath the hard rocky ground of this small new world.

3 The Sky Trail

At dawn the world glowed its brightest red. It was as if the dust and the rocks caught the red light of the rising sun and hurled it back with vigor. Even the mammoths’ hair trapped the all-pervasive red light, their guard hairs glowing as if they were on fire. On the plains far below, pools or rivers looked jet black, and the green of life was scattered, irrelevant in this mighty redness.

Icebones longed for a scrap of blue sky.

It was apparent that the mammoths, lacking any better idea, were prepared to go along with the Ragged One’s scheme. Though Icebones felt nothing but dread at the very notion of pursuing the Lost, she had no better suggestion either.

When the light was adequate, the Ragged One simply set off up the flank of the Mountain. The others followed only haphazardly, paying no attention to each other, with none of the calm discipline of a true Family.

Icebones took a place at the back of their rough line.

The Mountain’s slope was shallow, and the mammoths climbed steadily. With their strong hind legs mammoths were well suited to climbing — though descending a slope was always harder, as that meant all a mammoth’s weight was supported by her front legs.

Here and there mosses, lichens and even clumps of grass protruded from cracks in the hard red-black ground. Icebones pulled up grass tufts, wrapping her trunk lips around the thin-tasting goodies. But the grass was sparse and yellowed, struggling for life.

And there was no water to be found, none at all. She could tell from the rock’s deep echoes that the ground-water was buried deep here, far beneath a lid of rock much too thick and hard for any mammoth tusk to penetrate.

The dung of the other mammoths was thin and watery. These mammoths had built up a reserve of fat from the ambiguous generosity of their Lost keepers. But it had clearly been a long time since they had fed properly.

As for herself, Icebones had no real idea how long it had been since she had last tasted the Island’s lush autumn grass. What a strange thought that was… We must find proper grazing soon, she thought.

At length the mammoths reached something new. A line of shining silver stood above the rust-red rock, running parallel to the line of the slope. It stood above the ground on legs like spindly tree trunks.

The line swept down from the humped slope of the Mountain, down toward the hummocked plain below, down as far as Icebones could see until it dwindled to a silvery thread invisible against the red-blue clutter of the layered rock.

Icebones felt cold, deep inside. A thing of clean surfaces and hard sharp edges, this was clearly the work of the Lost.

But the others showed no fear — indeed they seemed curious, and they walked around the skinny supports, probing with pink trunk tips.

The Ragged One came to Icebones. "This is the south side of the Fire Mountain. The sunlight lingers here. You see the green further below, smell the tang of the leaves? The Lost grew vines there. But now the vines are dying."

Icebones asked, "What would you have us do?"

"This is the path the Lost took to the sky," the Ragged One said simply. "We must follow it. That way we will find the Lost again."

Paths worn by mammoths in the steppe were simple trails of bare and compacted earth. This shining aerial band looked like no path Icebones had ever seen. She said starkly, "Perhaps the Lost don’t want you to find them. Have you thought of that? If they wanted you, they would have taken you with them."

The Ragged One growled and clashed her stubby tusks against Icebones’s. "You should crawl back into the cave of darkness you came from. I will lead these others. When we find the Lost we will be safe." And she turned her back on Icebones and stalked away, trunk folded beneath her face.

Icebones, fighting her instincts, trailed behind.

As day followed day, the mammoths climbed the endless shallow slope, following the Sky Trail. They grew still more weary, hungry, thirsty, and their joints ached, the soft pads of their feet protesting at the hard cold rock beneath them. Icebones learned to concentrate on each footfall, one after another, letting her strength carry her upward even when it seemed that there was too little air in her aching lungs to sustain her. The sky above was never brighter than a deep purple-red, even at midday. In the morning there would be a thick blanket of frost that turned the ground pink-white, covering the living things. But as the sun rose the frost quickly burned off, faster than they could scrape it up with their trunks. Even here, life clung to the rock. Grass was sparse, but moss and lichen coated the crimson rock. But as they climbed higher the last traces of ground cover evaporated.

Soon there was only the rock, red and hard and unforgiving. It was as if the land’s skull was emerging from beneath a fragile skin of life.

And the higher they climbed, the more the world opened out.

This Fire Mountain was a vast, flattened dome of rock. A sharp cliff surrounded its circular base, with walls that cast long shadows in the light of the dipping sun. Icebones could follow the line of the strange shining Sky Trail down the slope. It passed through a cleft in that forbidding base cliff and strode on into the remote plain, until it dwindled to invisibility amid the thickening green of vegetation.

The land beyond the Fire Mountain was rough and broken, ribbed with sharp ridges. Though littered with patches of green and glinting with water, it would surely be difficult country to cross.

Further away still, she glimpsed an immense valley running almost directly east. The valley was heavily shadowed by this swollen land of giant Fire Mountains, but it ran to the horizon, vanishing in the mist there.

And to the north she saw a gleaming line of ice, flat and pure. The ice spanned the world from horizon to horizon, and she knew she was seeing an ocean, thick with pack ice: it was the ocean whose presence she had sensed, the ocean that had pooled in the great depression that had shaped the northern hemisphere of this world.

It was a vast landscape of shaped rock, red and shadowed gray, pitted with shallow craters — and only thinly marked by the green of life.

There was nothing for Icebones here.

This is not my world, she thought. And it never could be. Why had she been taken from her home, stranded on this alien ball of rock with all its strangeness, where insane moons careened across the sky? Who had done it — the Lost? What twisted cruelty had caused them to plunge her into this strange madness…?

There was a flurry of movement above her. She stood still, raising her tusks suspiciously.

She found herself facing a goat. An ibex, perhaps. It carried proud antlers, and was coated with thick white wool. Its chest was immense, swelling in the thin, dry air. The ibex appeared to have been digging into a patch of black ice with one spindly hoof.

The goat seemed to be limping. The skin over one of its feet was blackened.

"Frostbite," Icebones said. It was a dread fear of all mammoths. "That goat has been incautious. It may lose that foot, and then the stump will turn infected, if it lives that long."

"No," growled the Ragged One. "the frostbitten skin will harden and fall away, leaving new pink skin that will quickly toughen."

"No creature can recover from frostbite."

"You cannot," said the Ragged One. "I cannot. But this goat can. It is not like the creatures you have met before, Icebones. Just as this is not the world you knew."

Icebones watched the goat hobble away, and she wondered if the clever paws of the Lost had made these disturbing changes, even in goats.

The mammoths approached the goat’s abandoned ice patch. This had been a pond, Icebones found. In places the ice was clear, so that she could see through it to the black mud at the bottom. On the shallow bank around the pond she found dead vegetation, fronds of grass and pond plants, deep brown and frozen to the mud. When she touched the plants she could taste nothing but icy dirt.

Once it was warm here, she thought, even at this great height. But this world has grown colder, and the pond froze, right down to its base.

The pregnant Cow mewled, "Nothing can live here. This is no place for us."

The Ragged One rumbled deeply. "We should get on."

But all the mammoths were weary and agitated. Icebones could smell blood and milk in the pregnant Cow’s musky scent. Her sisters clustered close around their mother, reluctant to move further. The Bull stomped back and forth, agitated.

"This is foolish," said the mother, with a sharp slap of her trunk on the ground. "Enough. We are cold and tired, and it is hard to breathe. We should not climb further."

The Ragged One regarded them with contempt. She said simply, "Then I will go on alone." And she turned her back and, with trunk held high, stood beneath the shining Sky Trail.

"Wait," Icebones called.

The Ragged One snorted. "Will you make me stop? You are no Matriarch."

Icebones said, "I will come with you. It is not safe for you to go alone. But," she said carefully, "if we do not find the Lost, you will come down with me."

The Ragged One rumbled, hesitating.

Icebones took a step forward, trying to conceal her reluctance to continue this futile climb. The others were watching her somberly.

The Ragged One proceeded up the slope. Icebones followed.

After a few paces Icebones looked back at the others. Already they were diminished to rust-brown specks on the vast, darkling hillside.

They had long risen far above the sounds of life: the rumbling of the mammoths, the call of birds, the rustle of the thin breeze in the sparse grass. Here there was to be heard only the voice of the Mountain itself. Occasionally Icebones would hear a deep, startling crack, a rattle of distant echoes, as rock broke and fell and an avalanche tumbled down some slab of crimson hillside.

The Sky Trail, ignoring the toiling mammoths beneath it, strode on confidently toward the still-hidden summit of the Mountain.

The ground was complex now, covered by many ancient lava flows: this Mountain had spewed out liquid rock over and over. In places the rock flows had bunched into broad terraces, perhaps shaped by some underlying feature in the mighty slope. The walking was a little easier on the terraces, though the steps between them made for a difficult climb, and Icebones did not relish the prospect of the return.

There were many craters, on this shoulder of rock. Some of them were vast pits filled with sharp-edged rubble, while others were dents little larger than the footfalls Icebones might make in a field of mud. Some of the larger craters were filled with hard, level pools of fresh rock, and rivers of frozen rock snaked from one pit to another.

Ice had gathered in scattered pocks in the twisted rock face, black and hard, resistant to the probe of her tusks.

These scattered pockets grew larger until they merged, filling shallow depressions between low ridges. Soon Icebones was forced to walk on ice: hard, ridged, wind-sculpted ice, it creaked under her feet as it compressed.

If anything this was worse than the rock. On this pitted surface there was no food, no liquid water to drink — nothing but the ice, its deep cold ever willing to suck a mammoth’s heat from her. And the air was thinner and colder than ever, and Icebones’s lungs ached unbearably with every step she took.

She heard grunting. The Ragged One was working at a patch of ice with sharp scrapes of her tusks. Her hair, frosted white, stuck out at random angles from her body.

Icebones lumbered up the slope to join her. To her surprise she saw that a tree had grown there. It had a thick trunk that protruded from the ice, and its branches, almost flat against the ice, were laden with a kind of fruit — a black, leathery berry, broad but flaccid, about the size of a mammoth’s foot pad.

She asked, "Is it a willow?" But she knew that no willow could grow on ice.

"Not a willow," the Ragged One said, panting hard. "It is a breathing tree. Help me."

Icebones saw that the Ragged One had been trying to pry some of the broad black fruit out of the ice. Icebones bent to help, lowering her tusks.

One of the fruit popped out of its ice pit, and the Ragged One pulled it to her greedily. Icebones watched curiously as she used her trunk fingers to pull a plug of a hard, shell-like material from the husk of the fruit, and pushed her trunk into a dark, pulp-filled cavity revealed beneath. The fruit quickly collapsed, shriveling as if thrown on a fire, but the Ragged One closed her eyes, her pleasure evident. Then she cast aside the fruit and began to pry loose another.

"Is it good to eat?"

"Just try it," said the Ragged One, not sparing attention from her task.

On her first attempt Icebones punctured the fruit’s skin, and it deflated quickly with a thin wail. But with her second try she got her fruit safely out of the ice. When she plunged her trunk tip into the soft pulpy cavity, she was startled by a gush of thick, warm, moist air. It was unexpected, remarkable, delicious. She closed her mouth and tried to suck all the air into her lungs, but she got a nostrilful of odorless fruit pulp, and sneezed, wasting most of the air.

She found another fruit and tried again.

For a time the two mammoths worked at the tree, side by side.

The Ragged One poked at an empty skin. "The tree breathes in during the day, drawing its warmth from the sun and the rock, and it makes the air thick and wet. And at night the fruit breathes out again. In, out, like a sleeping mammoth — but each fruit takes only one breath a day.

"The breathing tree was the first tree that grew here. That is the legend of my kind. The breathing tree makes the air a little warmer and sweeter, so that grass and bushes and birds and ibexes and we can live here."

This meant nothing to Icebones. A breathing tree? A fruit that could make a dead world live…?

"Your kind? Where are your kind now?"

The Ragged One’s trunk lifted toward Icebones, its mottled skin ugly beneath sparse hair. "Gone. Dead. I am alone. And so are you. I am not like the others. They are all calves of the calves of Silverhair, the last of the mammoths of the Old Steppe."

Icebones stopped dead. "Silverhair?"

"Have you heard of her?"

"She was my mother."

The Ragged One snorted. "You are her calf? She suckled you?"

"Yes!"

"Then where is she?"

"I don’t know," said Icebones miserably. "Far from here."

The Ragged One said slowly, "Listen to me. Silverhair was the mother of all the mammoths of this Sky Steppe. She was the mother of their mothers, and the mother of their mothers before them… and on, back and back. Silverhair has been bones, dust, for a very long time. So how can she have borne you, who are standing here before me? You must have slept in your box of darkness for an age, squat one."

Icebones, bewildered, tried to comprehend all this. Was it possible? Could it really be that she had somehow slept away the generations, as calf grew to mother and Matriarch and fell away into death, over and over — as her mother’s calves grew to a mighty horde that covered this world — while she, daughter of their first ancestor, had stayed young and childless?

"If what you say is true," she said, "you must be a daughter of Silverhair too."

"Not me," said the Ragged One, discarding the emptied husk of the last fruit. And she strode on without explanation.

Icebones felt a deep, unaccountable revulsion toward the Ragged One. But she hurried after her, following the pale shadow of the Sky Trail.

Within a few steps, all the warmth and air she had garnered from the breathing tree had dissipated, and she was exhausted again.

Icebones marched grimly on through her hunger and thirst, through the gathering pain in her lungs and the aching cold that sucked at the pads of her feet.

At first she was not even aware that the Ragged One had stopped again. It was only when she made out the other’s grim, mournful lowing that she realized something was wrong.

The Sky Trail had fallen.

Icebones walked carefully over hard ridges of wind-sculpted ice.

Although those mighty legs still cast their gaunt, clean shadows over the Mountain’s slope, the silvery thread of the path itself had crumbled and fallen. It lay over the icy rocks like a length of shining spider-web. When she looked back down the Mountain’s flank she saw how the path dangled from the last leg to which it was attached, lank and limp as a mammoth’s belly hairs.

The fallen Sky Trail lay in short, sharp-edged segments, shattered and separated. When she probed at the wreckage with her trunk it was cold, hard and without taste or odor, like most of what the Lost produced.

The Ragged One was standing beside a great pod, long, narrow, like a huge broken-open nut. It seemed to be made of the same odorless, gleaming stuff as the Sky Trail itself.

And it contained bodies.

Icebones recognized them immediately. The stubby limbs, the round heads and hairless faces, all enclosed in complex, worked skins. They were Lost. And they were dead, that much was clear: there was frost on their faces and in their clouded eyes and opened mouths.

The Ragged One stood over the silent, motionless tableau, probing uselessly at faces and claw-like paws with her trunk. The wind howled thinly through the structure of the leg towers around her.

Icebones said, "They have been dead a long time. See how the skin of this one is dried out, shrunken on the bone. If not for the height here, the wolves and other scavengers would surely—"

"They were trying to leave," the Ragged One blurted. "Perhaps they were the last. And they died when they spilled out of the warmth of their pod onto this cold Mountain."

"Where were they going?"

"I don’t know. How can I know?"

"We should Remember them," Icebones said.

But the Ragged One snapped harshly, "No. It is not their way."

The shrunken sun was approaching the western horizon, and its light was spreading into a broad pale band across the sky. The light glimmered from the ice line of the distant ocean, and the tangled thread of the wrecked Sky Trail, and the tusks of the mammoths. Soon it would be dark.

Icebones said, "Listen to me. The Lost are gone or dead, and we cannot follow them. And we cannot stay on this Fire Mountain."

The Ragged One growled and stamped her feet, making the hard rock ring.

Icebones felt immensely tired. "I don’t want to fight you. I have no wish to lead. You lead. But you must lead us to a place we can live. You must lead us down from this Mountain of death. Down to where the air pools, like morning mist in a hollow."

The Ragged One stood silently. Then she said reluctantly, "You don’t understand. I am afraid. I have lived my whole life on this Mountain. I have lived my whole life with the Lost. I don’t know how else life can be."

Impulsively Icebones grabbed her trunk. "You are not alone. We are all Cousins, and we are bound by the ancient Oath of Kilukpuk, one to the other…"

But the Ragged One had never heard of Kilukpuk, or the vows that bound her descendants, whether they climbed the trees or swam the ocean or walked the land with heavy tusks dangling. She pulled away from Icebones’s touch.

Still suffused by that deep physical revulsion, Icebones nevertheless felt oddly bound to this pale, malformed creature. For all her strangeness, the Ragged One seemed to have more in common with Icebones than any of the other mammoths here. Only the Ragged One seemed to understand that Icebones was truly different — had come from a different place, perhaps even a different time. Only the Ragged One seemed to understand that the world had not always been the same as this — that there were other ways for mammoths to live.

And yet the Ragged One seemed intent on becoming Icebones’s enemy.

The Ragged One dropped her head dolefully, emitting a slow, sad murmur. She was clearly unwilling to leave these sad remains, all that was left of the Lost.

Alone, Icebones trudged further up the shallow slope.

The ice thinned. Higher up the slope it began to break up and dissipate altogether, as if she had come so high that even the ice could not survive, and there was only the bare rock. The texture of the rock itself was austere and beautiful, if deadly; it was a bony ground of red and crimson and orange, with not a scrap of white or green, no water or life, not an ice crystal or the smallest patch of lichen.

From here she could see that the eastern flank of the Mountain was a swathe of smooth crimson rock, marked here and there by the black cracks of gullies, or by narrow white threads that were frozen streams. But to the west she saw the white stripes of huge glaciers spilling down toward the lower plains from great bowls of ice.

The ground flattened out to afford her broadening views of the landscape: that gleaming white of ocean ice, the gray-green land below, the Fire Mountain’s twin sisters. The land had been distorted and broken by the vast uplift that had created the volcanoes here. In places the rock was wrinkled, covered with sharp ridges that ran around the base of the Mountain, and even cracked open like dried-out skin. The greatest crack of all, running directly to the east away from the Mountain, was that immense valley that stretched far to the horizon, extending around the curve of the world.

And soon she could see the caldera at the very summit of this Mountain-continent, the crater from which burning rock had so recently gushed. It was no simple pit, but a vast walled landscape of pits and craters. On its complex floor molten rock pooled, glowing bright red. The far side of the caldera was a long flat-topped cliff marked by layers, some black, some brown, some pinkish red. Immense caverns had worn into the softer rock, between harder, protective layers.

It was a pit big enough itself to swallow a mountain.

She stood there, listening to the quiet subterranean murmur of the Mountain. The sky faded to a deep purple and then a blue-black above. In that huge blueness, even though the sun still lingered above the horizon, stars swam. The ground under her feet was red-black, cracked and smashed, as if it had been battered by mighty feet, over and over.

She felt humbled by the immensity of this rock beast. The Lost had stolen the water that had lain frozen in its interior, and by doing so had woken its ancient rage. But the Lost’s puny devices were no more than scrapes on the Mountain’s mighty ancient bulk, the bite of an insect on a mammoth’s broad flank.

She returned, carefully, down the slope to where the Ragged One still stood beside the wreckage of the Lost seed pod.

4 The Descent

The sky was crossed — not by one abnormal moon — but two.

The twin moons climbed rapidly in the daylit sky. But without warning they would wink into darkness, as if entering some huge mouth. Or, just as unexpectedly, they flickered into brightness in the middle of the night sky. One of them, which moved more rapidly, had a lumpish shape, like a rock or a bit of dung, not like a real Moon at all. But the other moon was, if anything, stranger still: just a pinpoint of light, like a meandering star.

The moons were eerie, unpredictable, and utterly strange. Icebones felt disturbed every time she glimpsed them.

It took days for the two of them to climb back down to the other mammoths.

One cold dawn, longing for company, Icebones stepped away from the Ragged One, who browsed fitfully, still half-asleep.

Icebones stamped hard. "Boaster! Boaster…!"

I hear you, Icebones. It is bright day here.

High on this Fire Mountain it was not yet morning. The pinkish light of the dawn had turned the Mountain’s bulk into a deep black silhouette above her, and she could see the spreading plain at the foot of the Mountain as a jumble of shadows, lifeless, intimidating.

This Boaster and his companions must be far away, far around the curve of the world. She felt a twinge of regret. It seemed impossible that she would ever meet her immodest friend.

She said, "It is cold and dry."

Here the land is flat but it is frozen. I am tall and strong, but even my great weight leaves no foot marks, and my heavy tusks will not scratch the ice. Nothing lives. Nothing but the carnivores, who stalk us. Their bellies brush the ground, for the pickings are easy for them in this harsh land… We seek deeper places.

Yes, she thought, with new determination. Yes, that is what we must do.

Boaster said now, Yesterday there was a duel. Neither Bull would back down. One was gored, the other’s head was crushed.

"Were they in musth?"

Yes, both in musth, in deep musth.

With no Cows, the rivalry battles in that isolated bachelor herd were futile, so must be all the more savage. Frustrated, the Bulls were fighting themselves to death.

But now Boaster was saying, Be wary, little Icebones. Even as an infant I was mighty. My calf will weigh you down, like a boulder in the belly. Are you in oestrus yet?

No, she thought. And when she probed that deep oceanic part of herself, she detected no sign that oestrus was near. She felt well enough. Perhaps it was simply not her time.

When I am in musth, my dribble smells sweet. It will make you wonder, before I mount you.

"If I permit you…"

They talked on, as the planet turned.

Icebones and the Ragged One returned, weary, to the group.

It seemed to Icebones that in just a few days the air had grown distinctly colder. And it was clear to all the mammoths that they couldn’t stay here.

But to Icebones dismay the mammoths bickered about what to do.

The mother wanted them to descend from this high Mountain shoulder. Perhaps they should make for the sea, the mother suggested, for there at least they would find water.

Icebones kept her counsel. To descend was in accord with her own instincts. She knew that the seas around the Island had been salty — no use for drinking — but perhaps here the seas were different, like so much else.

The pregnant sister kept apart. Obsessed and worried about the dependent creature growing within her, she had turned inward. The Cow needed the support and guidance of her Family as at no other time in her life. But such support was not forthcoming, for her relatives did not know how to give it.

Sometimes the infant kicked and murmured, and Icebones knew it was enduring bad dreams of its life to come.

Like the Ragged One, the other sisters seemed intent on seeking out the vanished Lost. The older of them — a tall, vain creature with tightly spiraling tusks — demanded they roam around the Mountain. Her younger sister, dominated by the vain one, rumbled eager agreement. It was the younger who had been scorched by the Mountain’s falling rock, and she still bore a pink, hairless patch of healing skin.

As for the Bull, he seemed intent only on adventure. He charged back and forth across the bleak rock slope, trumpeting and brandishing his tusks, in pursuit of imaginary enemies and rivals.

Icebones growled her frustration. In a true Family at a time of decision making, all would be entitled to their say, but all would know their place. A good Matriarch would listen calmly, and then make her decision — or rather, speak the Family’s decision for them.

In a Family everybody knew what to do, from instinct and a lifetime’s training. Here, it seemed, nobody knew their roles, or how to behave. And as Icebones listened to the bickering she heard a deeper truth: without the cocoon of Lost which had protected them all their lives, these mammoths were bewildered, all but helpless, and very, very afraid.

She drew the mother aside. "You must lead them."

The mother raised her trunk sorrowfully and probed at Icebones’s scalp hairs. Her scent was rich and smoky, like the last leaves of autumn. "You want me to be a Matriarch."

"You must make them into a Family. A Family is always there — from the day you are born, to the day you die…" Icebones recalled wistfully how her own mother, Silverhair, had been with her as she grew up, with her for every heartbeat of her young life. "And without a Family—" Without my Family, she thought, I am not complete. She quoted the Cycle. "In the Family, I becomes We."

The mother said wistfully, "We don’t have Families here. The Lost saw to that."

Icebones said harshly, "The Lost are gone now. I saw them up on that mountainside — the last of them, their dried-out corpses. They cannot help you. You are the mother of these squabbling calves. Tell them what you have decided, and then lead them."

The mother seemed dubious. But she stood before the younger mammoths and slapped the ground with her trunk.

The sisters and the Bull turned, rumbling in soft alarm.

The mother said, "We must go down to the lower places. There will be warmth, and grass to eat. We will go to the shore of the great northern sea, and drink its water."

For a frozen moment the mammoths fell silent. The sisters regarded their mother. The Bull pawed the ground and growled softly.

The Ragged One stood aloof, head turned away, the thin wind raising the loose hairs of her back. She said; "Which way?"

Icebones saw the mother was hesitating. It wasn’t a trivial question: Icebones had seen from the summit that this dome-shaped Mountain was surrounded by a scarp of tall, impassable cliffs. But she knew there was a way through.

She stepped up to the mother. As if she was addressing a true Matriarch, she said respectfully, "If we follow the Sky Trail down the Mountain, we will find a way through the cliffs."

The mother, with relief, replied, "Yes. We will follow the Sky Trail. It will be many days’ walk. The sooner we begin, the sooner we will reach the sea." And she stepped forward with confidence.

Grumbling, resentful — but perhaps inwardly relieved that somebody was taking the lead — her daughters fell in behind her. Icebones took the rear of the little line, while the Bull ran alongside, keeping his separation from the group of Cows, as a growing Bull should.

At least we are trying, Icebones thought. And, wherever I die, at least it will not be here, on this dismal rocky slope.

As the little group made its way down the Mountain, following the strange straight-line shadow of the shining Sky Trail, the Ragged One followed them, distant, silent.

The rock beneath their feet was unyielding. Sometimes, when the land was gouged and scarred by ancient flows of molten rock, they had to detour far from the Sky Trail.

The only water was to be found in hollows where rain or snow had gathered. Most of these puddles were frozen to their bases, but as they descended they found a few larger ponds where some liquid water persisted beneath a thick shell of ice. Gratefully the mammoths cracked the ice lids with their tusks or feet and sucked up the dirty, brackish water.

But the taller, spiral-tusked sister complained about the foul stink of the pond water compared to the cool, clean stuff the Lost used to provide for them.

At night, when the shrunken sun had fallen away and the cold clear stars emerged from the purple sky, they mostly kept walking, their trunks seeking out water and scraps of vegetation. They would pause only briefly to sleep, and Icebones encouraged them to gather close together, the pregnant one at the center, so that they shared and trapped the warmth of their bodies.

It was very disturbing to Icebones to walk over new land: land where there were no mammoth trails, no memories in her head, nobody to lead. It was the mammoths’ way to learn the land, to build it into their memories and wisdom, and to teach it to their young. That way the land’s perils could be avoided and its riches sought. That learning had never happened here. And it troubled her that every step she took was into strangeness — and unknown danger.

After a few days they reached the terminus of the Sky Trail. The shining line sank into a kind of cave, a place of hard straight lines and smooth walls. Icebones shrank from it. But the others clumped forward eagerly and explored every cold surface and every sharp straight edge, as if saying goodbye.

They walked on.

Below the Sky Trail terminus, the rock was just as barren and sparse of life as it had been at higher altitude. But Icebones felt her spirits lift subtly, as if the looming Sky Trial, the mark of the Lost, had been weighing on her spirit.

The Bull came to walk with her. His coat was glossy and thick, and he held his growing tusks high. "Why must we call you Icebones?"

"Because it is my name."

He thought about that. "Very well. But why not Boulder, or Snowflake, or Pond?"

"My mother said I was heavy and cold in her womb. As if she’d swallowed a lump of ice, she told me. And so she called me Icebones. A name is part of a mammoth—"

"I have no name," he said.

"I know."

"Will you give me a name?"

Intrigued, she asked, "What kind of name?"

"I am strong and fierce," he said, illustrating this with a comically deep growl. "I will be a brave hero, and I will mate all the Cows in the world. Silverhair was brave and strong. Perhaps my name should be Silverhair."

She snorted her amusement. "That was the name of my mother. She was indeed brave and strong. But you are a Bull, and you need the name of a Bull."

"I don’t know the names of any Bulls."

"The Cycle tells of the bravest and strongest Bull who ever lived. His name was Longtusk. He lived long ago, in a time when the steppe was full of mammoths. He lived alone among the animals, and he even lived among the Lost — for it is the fate of Bulls, you know, to leave their Families and travel far. But then at last he found his Clan and led them on a great journey, to a place where they could live without fear. In the end he gave his life to save them."

The Bull trumpeted his appreciation. "I would like to be called Longtusk," he growled. "But I am no hero. Not yet, anyway."

She pondered. "Your voice is deep and carries far, like the thunder. Longtusk had a faithful companion called Walks With Thunder. Thunder. There. That shall be your name."

"Thunder, Thunder!" The towering Bull, with his spindly legs and thin, immature tusks, ran after the Cows to tell them his exciting news.

The next morning, the Cow with the spiral-shaped tusks came up to Icebones, trailed, as always, by her smaller sister. The older one said diffidently, "That fool of a Bull says you have given him a name."

"He has found his name," Icebones said.

The Cow snorted. "I have no need of a name — not from a mammoth. The Lost liked me, you see. They used to admire my tusks and my long hair. Their cubs would brush my belly hairs with their paws, and I would let the older ones climb on my back while I walked."

Icebones tried not to show her revulsion.

"They would talk to me all the time," said the Cow. "Not the way a mammoth talks, of course. They had a funny jabber they made with their mouths, and they didn’t use their bellies or feet or foreheads at all. But you could tell they were talking even so." She walked oddly as she said this, as if showing off her hair and fine muscles for an invisible audience of Lost. "So I am quite sure the Lost had their own name for me."

Icebones stayed silent, watching her.

At length the Cow said, "But if you were to give me a name — a mammoth name, I mean — what would it be?"

Most mammoth names reflected a deep characteristic of their holder: an attribute of her body, her smell or taste or noise — even her weight, like Icebones’s. Few were to do with the way a mammoth looked: Silverhair, yes, for that lank of gray on her forehead had been such a startling characteristic. But Icebones knew that sight was the most important sense of all for the Lost. And so for this one, the way she had looked in the eyes of the Lost was the key to her character.

"Your name will be Spiral," Icebones said. "For your tusks twist around in spirals, the one like the other."

"Spiral." The Cow wandered away, admiring her own tusks.

Her sister made to follow Spiral as usual, but she hesitated. "Icebones, what about my mother?"

It is not my place to name these mammoths, Icebones thought. I am not their Matriarch, or their mother. But if not me, who? She thought of the smell of the older Cow, her tangy, smoky musk. "Autumn," Icebones said impulsively. "For she smells of the last, delicious grass of summer."

The Cow seemed pleased. "And my other sister, the one with calf?"

"I would call her Breeze—"

"For her hair is loose and whips in the wind, like the grass on a windblown steppe!"

"Yes." This little one isn’t so bad, Icebones thought, when she gets away from her foolish sister. "Will you tell them for me?"

"Yes, I will."

"And what about you?"

"Me?" The Cow was transfixed, as if she hadn’t imagined such an honor could be applied to her. "You choose, Icebones."

Icebones probed at the young Cow’s mouth, and tasted sweetness. "Shoot," she said at last, "for you taste of young, fresh grass."

The Cow seemed delighted. "Thank you, Icebones… But what about her?"

She meant the Ragged One, who grazed alone as usual, irritably dragging at grass tufts and willow tips, her rough hair a cloud of captured sunlight around her.

"She is the Ragged One," said Icebones. "No other name would suit."

But the little Cow had already scampered away, after her sister.

They approached the lip of the Mountain-base cliff. The wall was heavily eroded, and very steep — what they could see of it; none of them cared to approach the edge.

At last Icebones found a steep gully that cut deep into the ground. Its floor was strewn with boulders and frost-shattered rubble, as if a river had once flowed there. It would not be an easy route, but this cleft, cutting deep into the rock behind the cliffs, offered a way down to the plains below.

Cautiously, reluctantly, the mammoths filed into the gully.

The rock that made up the walls was gray-red and very hard, its surface covered with sharp-edged protruding lumps, speckled with glimmering minerals of green and black. Moss grew in cracks in the walls and over some of the loose rocks. The wind tumbling off the Fire Mountain’s broad flanks poured through this gap, and mercilessly sucked out the mammoths’ heat. Icebones could hear the rumbles of complaint echoing back from the tall, sheer walls.

A pair of birds flew up and down the gully, graceful, large-winged. Perhaps they were swallows.

The mammoths found a place where the rocky floor was broken by small crevices, which provided shelter for succulent grass clumps and even herbs. The mammoths fell on this feast and ate greedily.

Leaving the feeding mammoths, Icebones came to a broad ledge that led out to the face of the cliff itself. She walked along the ledge, curious, probing at the smooth rock with her trunk… and the cliff face opened out around her.

She realized that looking down from the Mountain’s summit she had had no real idea of the vast size of this cliff. Seen from here, there was only the cliff: a wall of blue-red rock that rose above her and out of sight, and fell away beneath her to a blur of red tinged with gray-green that might have been the ground. There was cloud both above her and below: a layer of pink-gray cirrus far above, and a smooth rippling sea below.

The world was simple: cloud above and below, and this hard vertical cliff face, like an upturned landscape.

She spotted a waterfall, where an underground river burst out of the rock face into the air. But the water fell with an eerie slowness, as if the air was too thick to allow it to pass, and it broke up into myriad red-glimmering droplets that dispersed in the air. This was a waterfall that would never reach the ground, she realized.

…And then it struck her how high she was here, higher than clouds, higher than birds — and how unprotected. Mammoths were plain animals, unused to heights. Vertigo overwhelmed her, and she inched back along the ledge toward the others, and safety.

As they neared the base of the gully, it began to broaden and flatten, its eroded walls diminishing. But its floor was littered with rocks. The mammoths had to work their way past boulders which towered over them, and under their feet was a litter of loose rock, scree and talus that sometimes gave way under an incautious step. But the big rocks were pitted and carved by the wind, and many of the looser small rocks underfoot were worn smooth by wind or water also.

Icebones was the first to break out of the gully, and walk beyond the cliff. She stepped forward carefully, relishing the openness around her. Sandpipers fled from her, screeching in protest.

She found herself walking over dwarf willows, a flattened, ground-hugging forest that crunched under her feet. A red-black river meandered sluggishly across a ruddy plain. Two cranes stood by the river, still and watchful, as many creatures of the steppe habitually were. As she approached a longspur, it sat as still as a stone on its nest of woven grass, watching her with black eyes. She could see the bird’s eggs, which glowed with a smooth pink light.

Away from the river small lakes stood out, purple-black. In the larger ponds Icebones could see a gleam of green: cores of ice that survived from the last winter, and would probably persist to the next.

In the shimmering, complex light, this land at the foot of the cliff was a bowl of life. She saw more willows and sedges, their green vivid against the underlying crimson of the rock. And even the bare outcropping rock was stained yellow or orange by lichen.

It was a typical steppe. It was a place of stillness and watchfulness, for the land was ungenerous. But, unlike the bare wall of the Mountain, this land was alive, and Icebones felt her soul expand into its familiar silence.

She turned and looked back toward the cliff. Its base was fringed by conifer forest. Compared to the mammoths grazing at their bases, these trees grew very tall, Icebones saw immediately: they were slender, but they soared fifty, even a hundred times the height of a mammoth, so that their upper branches were a blur of greenery.

But the trees, huge as they were, were utterly dwarfed by the wall of rock that banded the base of the Fire Mountain.

Bright red, extensively fluted and carved by the wind, the tremendous cliff soared high above the broken ground. The columns and vertical chasms of its face glowed a deep burnt orange in the light of the setting sun. The gully the mammoths had climbed down was a black crack, barely visible.

So immense was its length that the cliff looked like a flat, unbending wall, marching from horizon to horizon. The cliff was a wall that cut the sky in half, and it was oppressive, crushing: like a wall of time, she thought, separating her from her Family, like death, which would one day part her from everything she knew and loved.

The mammoths stayed at the base of the cliff for a night, grazing and resting.

The sun, easing west, passed over the cliff’s rim not long after midday, and shadows spilled over the ground. The cliff turned purple-red, and the air immediately started to feel colder. Although the day was only half gone — a glance at the bright pale pink sky told Icebones that — here at the foot of this mighty barrier it was already twilight. She noticed now how spindly the conifer trees were, as if they were straining for the light they could never hope to reach.

And in the dawn, with the sky barely paled by the rising sun, the light caught the top of the cliff, so that a great band of orange rock shone high in the sky directly above her. It was like a smeared-out rocky sun, and it actually cast a little light — though no warmth — over the night-darkened plains at the cliff’s base.

It was a relief to walk away from the cliff’s brooding mass, and out of its pool of shadow.

5 The Ocean of the North

The mammoths worked their way steadily northward, seeking the ocean.

The going was slow, for the land, folded and broken, was covered by lobes and ridges and collapsed rocky tunnels, and the mammoths were frequently forced to turn away from their northern heading. Icebones was acutely aware that every diversion lengthened the journey they must complete.

But she was not aware of any change of the season. The last she recalled of the Island it had been autumn — but that fading memory seemed to have no relevance here. The mammoths were not shedding any winter coat, so she supposed it must be late summer or autumn. But she sensed no drawing-in of the nights, no gathering cold. Perhaps even time ran slowly here, slow as falling water, slow as coagulating blood.

The days wore away.

At length the mammoths reached a new land.

It was an ocean of dust: a flat red plain, a line of ice close to the northern horizon, a dome of pinkish sky in which the small sun sailed. Where bare rock was exposed, it was dark and tinged with blue or purple, sheets of it eroded almost flat.

The higher land they were leaving, to the south, curved in a great arc, a coast for this sea of dust. The "shore" was littered with gravel bars and drifts of red dust.

There were structures on this higher ground — blocky, straight-edged shelters that were obviously the work of the Lost.

The mammoths looked around these buildings desultorily. They were boxes pierced by straight-edged holes. Dust had drifted up against the walls of the buildings, and had filtered inside, covering their inner floors with a fine red carpet. The mammoths’ broad feet left shallow cone-shaped tracks in the dust, which flowed quickly back where they had disturbed it. Near the buildings a stand of trees poked out of the bright red ground. They might have been oaks. But they were clearly long dead, their bare branches skeletal and gaunt and their trunks hollowed out, and any last leaves that had fallen had long been buried or driven away by the wind.

The Ragged One had walked a little way further to the north, on to the dust plain. She was probing at something black and ropy on the ground. It was clearly dead, and it crumbled and broke.

"See this?" she said to Icebones. "Seaweed. Once the sea covered all this dust and sand. But now the sea is far away. Look — you can see where the shore used to be."

Icebones made out rippled ridges in the sand, the footprint of the vanished sea.

"And look at this." The Ragged One walked a little deeper into the plain. She came to a set of smooth, rounded shapes that protruded from the dust. She blew on the shapes with her trunk and exposed wood, scuffed and pitted by windblown sand.

"More work of the Lost," said Icebones.

"Yes." The Ragged One dug her tusks under one of the objects and, with a heave, flipped it on its back, sending dust flying. It was like a bird’s nest, sculpted in smooth wood. "The Lost would sit in such things as these, and float upon the water. As was their right. For they made these floating things — and they made the ocean itself, brought the water here to cover the land, brought the fish and worms and even the seaweed to live here. But now the world is drying like a corpse — the water has gone—"

"And so have the Lost."

"Yes. And so have the Lost." The Ragged One ran her trunk tip longingly over the eroded lines of the stranded boat. The red dust had stained the pale ivory of her tusks a subtle, rusty pink.

Icebones felt a sudden surge of sympathy for her. She reached out and wrapped her trunk around the head of the other, ignoring the now-familiar stale stink. "Come," she said. "We must cross this dried-out seabed. If we start, the others will follow."

Briefly the Ragged One closed her eyes, rumbling a kind of contentment at Icebones’s touch. Then, sharply, she pulled away. "Yes. We must go to the water."

Side by side, Icebones and the Ragged One began to plod across the bone-dry plain.

The land remained utterly flat, a beach left stranded by a last fatal tide. When Icebones walked, windblown dust would billow around her, as if dancing in memory of the waters that had once washed over this place.

When she walked over more compact dust or exposed rock, she felt her footsteps ring through the rocky foundation of this ancient sea. And she could tell that this plain, overlaid by the shrunken sea to the north, encompassed the whole top half of this world, a wasteland that stretched all the way to the north pole and down almost to the equator. It was remarkable, enormous, intimidating, and by comparison she was like a beetle crawling across the textured footprint of a mammoth.

If the water was gone, then this had become a sea of light.

Broad, shallow, wave-like dunes crossed from horizon to horizon. As the sun descended, the low light shone brightly from the west-facing slopes of the dunes, and shadows lengthened behind them, so that Icebones was surrounded by bands of shining ochre light. And when she looked at the soft ground at her feet she saw how each dust grain shone gray or red, as if defying the dying of the light.

Here and there rocks littered the surface. Some of the rocks were half buried by dust, and their buried edges were generally sharper than those exposed to the erosion of wind and rain. She learned caution where she stepped, not wishing to cut her foot pads. Sometimes the remnants of living things clung to an exposed rock: fronds of dried-up, blackened seaweed, or small white shells.

The dust was thick and clinging, but it had its uses. All the mammoths were plagued by ticks and lice — Icebones suspected the Lost had groomed them, keeping them clear of such parasites — and she had to show them how to rub dust and dirt into their skin to scrub away the irritants.

It seemed very strange to have to teach a calf’s skills to a tall old Cow like Autumn.

But there was nothing to drink here, nothing to eat. The dust clogged her trunk and throat, sucking out the moisture, making her even more thirsty. The dust stank, of blood and iron.

As they continued to walk steadily north the character of the ground changed. In places the land shone, coated with fine flat sheets of some white, glittering substance. When she tasted this, she found it was salt, another relic of the vanished sea.

Soon her footfalls were breaking through an upper layer of dust, exposing frosty, damp mud, rust-colored. There was water here, not far beneath the surface.

And now there was vegetation, grass sprouting out of the dirty red mud. It was nothing but tough dune grass. But the mammoths, who had eaten nothing for half a day, fell on the wiry yellow stuff as if it was the finest browse.

Gulls hopped among the spindly grass tufts or circled overhead, their caws thin and clear in the cold, still air. Icebones thought the gulls seemed huge — their bobbing heads rose higher than her own belly hairs — much larger than any birds she recalled from the Island.

At last the land sloped down sharply, forming a beach strewn with rust-red gravel and littered with scraps of dusty frost.

The mammoths stepped forward cautiously.

Beyond the beach, just a few paces away, water lapped, black and oily. It was a half-frozen ocean. Here and there ice sheets clung to the beach. Further out floes of ice drifted on the water, colliding with slow, grinding crashes. Some of the ice was stained brown, perhaps where floes had been flipped over by bears or seals, exposing the weeds that crusted their lower surface. Stretches of exposed water made a complex pattern of cracks and scrapings like the wrinkled skin of a very old mammoth, shaped by wind and current. The exposed water was as black as night. Here and there traces of fog and even windblown snow curled tiredly.

Birds wheeled exuberantly. She spied huge-winged kittiwakes, fulmars and jet-black guillemots. Every so often one of them would plunge into the dark water, seeking plankton or cod.

There was more life here, crowded close to this shore, than anywhere else Icebones had seen on this small world.

She heard an angry screeching. There was a bloody carcass on the ice — perhaps it was a seal, or even a bear cub. Petrels soared over it trailing arched wings, their tails fanned out to ward off rivals. Landing on the ice, they tucked their heads right inside the corpse, emerging with their heads and necks gleaming bright red, only their pale, angry eyes showing white.

The light of the pinkish sky turned the ice rust red, the exposed water a deep purple-black. The sea rolled with huge, languid waves, much taller and slower than anything on the oceans around the Island. The ice seemed to moan and wail like a living thing, as, riding the ocean’s tremendous waves, it warped and cracked.

In this setting even the mammoths looked strange, transformed; they were stolid blocks of fur and fat, their tusks shining red-pink, their bodies surrounded by crimson-glowing halos where the sunlight caught their guard hairs.

This was not like the coast of the Island. To Icebones this rust-red shore was a strange and alien scene indeed.

She spotted a bear, swimming through a lead of open water. His head was white as bone, and he cut steadily through the black water, trailing a fine wake behind him. He reached an ice floe and, in a single powerful lunge, pulled himself out of the water, his back feet catching the lip of the ice without hesitation. He shook himself, and water flew off his fur in a cloud of spray.

The bear turned and glared at the mammoths with small black eyes.

His fur caught the light, so that subtle reds and pink-whites gleamed from his guard hairs. Icebones saw that his hips were wider than his shoulders, his long neck sinuous, so that he was a wedge of muscle and power that faced her with a deadly concentration. And he was huge, she saw: much larger than any bear she ever saw off the coast of the Island.

He crossed to the other side of his floe, his great clawed paws swinging, and slid back into the water, silently.

She was in a hunting ground. Her underfur prickled, and she raised her trunk suspiciously.

She stepped down to the water’s edge. A few paces from the sea, petrels had dug their burrows into the unfrozen earth. When Icebones trod on a burrow inadvertently, collapsing it, a soft-plumed adult bird blinked up at her in silent protest.

Icebones let the sea water soak into the long hairs that dangled over her feet. The water itself was cold and sharp.

She sucked up a cautious trunkful and dipped her trunk tip into her mouth. It seemed to fizz, oddly, making bubbles in her nostrils, as if air dissolved in it were struggling to escape.

It was a bitter brine.

And in the air that blew off the face of the ocean, soft but very cold, she could smell salt.

Of course this tremendous world sea would be full of salt, just like the ocean that had surrounded the Island. This Ocean of the North was nothing but sour undrinkable brine, all the way to the pole of the world.

She sensed in their hunched postures that the other mammoths knew this as well as she did. It was as she had expected, but she felt disappointed nonetheless.

As if to put on a brave swagger, the Bull, Thunder, trumpeted and charged forward into open water. Spray danced up around his legs, quickly soaking his fur, and ice crackled against his chest. "Come on," he yelled. "At least we can get rid of this foul dust for a while!" And he plunged his trunk into the water and sprayed it high in the air.

Shoot ran after the Bull into the deeper water, lumbering and squealing. The little Cow stumbled, immersing her head, but she came up squirting water from her trunk brightly. "It’s cold! And it gets deep, just here. Watch out—"

"Thunder. Call me Thunder!" And the Bull rapped his trunk into the water, sending spray over the Cow. Vigorously, Shoot splashed back.

Haughty Spiral stayed close to her mother and sister Breeze, watching the antics of the others with disdain.

Droplets of brine, caught on the wind, spattered into Icebones’s face and stung her eyes.

A flash of motion further from the shore caught her eye. It had looked, oddly, like a tusk — but it had been straight and sharp, not like a mammoth’s ivory spiral. There it was again, a fine twisted cone that rolled languidly through the air. And now she saw a vast gray body sliding through a dark lead of open water, turning slowly. She heard a moan, and then a harsh screech, accompanied by a spray of water. Perhaps this was some strange whale.

The Ragged One came to stand beside Icebones. "The water is foul," she rumbled. "I suppose you will tell us now you always knew it would be like this."

"This is not my world," Icebones said levelly. "I know nothing of its oceans."

The Ragged One growled.

"This is not the time to argue," Icebones said. "We cannot stay here. That much is obvious." She turned, trunk raised, seeking Autumn.

But there was a sharp trumpet from the water.

All the mammoths turned.

Shoot was floundering, hair soaked, struggling to keep her head above the water. Icebones could see the black triangle of her small mouth beneath her raised trunk.

But the trumpet had come not from Shoot, but from Thunder. The Bull was splashing his way out of the water as fast as he could, trunk held high, eyes ringed white with panic.

Now there was a surge behind Shoot, like a huge wave gathering.

Abruptly a mass burst out of the water, scattering smashed ice that tumbled back with a clatter. Icebones glimpsed a blunt head with a smooth, rounded forehead, and that strange twisted tusk thrust out through the upper lip of the opened mouth, on the left side. The tusk alone would have dwarfed Icebones. But even the head was small in comparison with a vast body: gray and marbled, marked with spots and streaks, gray as dead flesh, with small front flippers, and a crumpled ridge along its back. When the whole of that body had lifted out of the water, the flukes of its powerful tail beat the water with great slaps.

By Kilukpuk’s mercy, Icebones thought, bewildered.

The whale fell back into the water, writhing, with a vast languid splash. Shoot was engulfed, and Icebones wondered if she had already been taken in that vast mouth.

But when the water subsided, Icebones saw that Shoot was still alive, gamely trying to swim in the churning water. "Help me!" she called, with high, thin chirps of her trunk.

Without thinking further, Icebones rushed into the water. She ran past Thunder, who stood shivering on the shore. But the Ragged One ran with her.

Icebones slowed when the water reached her chest and soaked into her heavy hairs, and the sea-bottom ooze clumped around her feet. The Ragged One, taller and with longer legs, was able to make faster progress, and she reached Shoot first.

The whale made another run. Water surged. A school of silver fish came flying from the water before splashing back, dead or stunned. Fulmars and kittiwakes fell on this unexpected bounty, screeching.

The Ragged One had wrapped her trunk around Shoot’s, and was hauling her toward the shore. Icebones hurried to the Cow’s rear, half-swimming in the rapidly deepening water, and rammed at Shoot’s rump with her forehead.

The whale lunged out of the water, and that huge twisted tusk was held high above the mammoths, ugly and sharp.

For a heartbeat Icebones found herself peering into the whale’s ugly purple mouth. Its lips barely covered its rows of cone-shaped teeth. Its eyes were set at the corners of the mouth — and, though a dark intelligence glimmered there, Icebones saw that the eyes could not move in their sockets.

In its way it was beautiful, Icebones couldn’t help thinking: a solitary killer, stripped of the social complexity of a mammoth’s life, its whole being intent only on killing — beautiful, and terrible.

The whale fell back.

As they struggled on toward the shore, with her head immersed in the murky, icy brine, Icebones rammed at Shoot’s backside with increased urgency.

But the snap of jaws around her did not come. At last the mammoths found themselves in shallower water, beyond the reach of those immense teeth.

Shoot’s sisters hurried to her and ran their trunks over her head and into her mouth, cherishing her survival. Shoot, shaking herself free of water, showed no signs of injury from her ordeal, though the whale’s teeth must have missed her by no more than a hair’s-breadth.

The Ragged One stood with Icebones by the edge of the suddenly treacherous sea. The whale’s tusk broke the surface and cruised to and fro, as if seeking to lure an unwary mammoth back into the water, and where it passed, sheets of ice were cracked and lifted and brushed aside.

"If the Lost created this ocean," Icebones said, "why would they put in it such a monster as that?"

"Perhaps they didn’t," The Ragged One said. "Perhaps it has cruised the waters of this world ocean, eating all the smaller creatures, devouring its rivals, growing larger and larger as it feeds — devouring until nothing was left to challenge it… A monster to suit a giant ocean. If the Lost were here they would surely destroy it."

"But they are not here."

"No."

"You did well," Icebones said.

The Ragged One slapped the water with her trunk, irritably. Evidently she did not welcome Icebones’s praise. "This is not your world," the Ragged One growled. "Just as you said."

Thunder was strutting to and fro, raising and lowering his tusks, his posture an odd mixture of aggression and submission.

Icebones approached him cautiously. "Thunder?"

"Don’t call me that!" He scuffed the dusty beach angrily. "Shoot was threatened, and I ran from danger. I am not Thunder. I am not even a Bull. I am nothing."

"I know that the heart of a great Bull beats inside you. And you are part of this Family, just as much as the others."

"I have no Family. I was taken from my mother when I was a calf."

"Taken? Why?"

"That is what the Lost do. What does it matter?"

"It matters a great deal. A calf should be with his mother."

"I have no Family" he repeated. "You despise me."

"You followed your instinct," she said harshly. "The mammoth dies, but mammoths live on. That’s what the Cycle says. There are times when it is right to sacrifice another’s life to save your own."

The Bull growled bitterly, "Even if that’s true, you saved Shoot, where I failed."

She reached out to him, but he flinched, muttering and rumbling, and stalked away.

She sought out Autumn. The tall, clear-eyed Cow was standing alone.

"The Bull-calf blames himself," Autumn said. "But I led us here, to this vile and useless sea."

"How could you have known? You have lived all your life on your Mountain. It was a worthwhile gamble—"

"Because I led us here my daughter was nearly killed, and we will all starve or die of thirst. If some new monster does not burst out of the ground to devour us first."

Icebones grabbed her trunk. "You must lead us."

Autumn probed at Icebones’s face. "Don’t you understand? I was the Matriarch, for a few brief days, and I have killed us all." And she stumbled away.

The Ragged One, standing alone by the shore, was remote, withdrawn as ever, still mourning her failure to find the Lost on the mountain summit. Thunder and Autumn were both immersed in their private worlds of self-loathing and anger. Breeze was standing at the water’s edge, lost in herself, her swollen belly brushing the languid waves. Shoot was pursuing her sister, regaling her with lurid tales of her encounter with the monster from the sea, while Spiral trotted haughtily away.

None of them will lead, Icebones realized, dismayed. They will stay here on this desolate beach, sulking or fretting or boasting, as the sun rises and falls, and we grow still more thirsty and hungry.

No, Icebones thought. I am not prepared to die. Not yet.

She drew herself up to her full height, and emitted a commanding rumble, as loudly as she could.

The other mammoths turned toward her.

Silverhair, be with me now, she prayed.

"You will pay attention to me," she said.

A flock of ivory gulls, startled by her call, lifted into the air on vast translucent wings.

She kept her voice as deep and loud as she could — although, before these towering mammoths, she felt small and inferior, a squat, noisy calf.

"You were right in your first guesses, when I emerged from my cave of Sleep. I am indeed a Matriarch. On the Old Steppe, where I lived, I was Matriarch of a Family of many mammoths, despite my youth. I led them well, and I was loved and respected."

The Ragged One said slyly, "If this is so, why didn’t you say so before?"

"I wanted to see if you were fit to join my new Family." She raised her trunk, as if sniffing them all. "And I have decided that you are strong mammoths with good hearts. I am your Matriarch. I will listen to you, but you will do as I say."

Autumn had turned away, and Thunder looked merely confused.

Breeze asked, "What should we do?"

"We cannot stay here. There is no food, and the water is foul. The world is growing cold, day by day. But the air, like the water, flows to the deep places. There is a place, far from here, which is deeper than anywhere in the world."

The Ragged One rumbled suspiciously, "Where is this place?"

And Icebones described the great pit on the other side of the world — a hole gouged by a giant impact, a blow so powerful it had made the rocks rise up here, on the planet’s opposite side. "It is called the Footfall of Kilukpuk," she said, thinking fast. "And that is where we will go. There will be pasture for you and your calves. There will even be Bulls for you to run with, Thunder, and for you others to mate with."

The Ragged One brayed. "And this wonderful place is on the other side of the world? So you have never seen or smelled it?"

It was as if she was articulating Icebones’s own doubts.

But Icebones said firmly, "I will lead you there." She raised her trunk, sniffing the air. "We must walk away from the setting sun. We will keep walking east, and in the end we will reach the Footfall. Let’s go," she said, as she had heard her mother say many times to her own Family. "Let’s go, let’s go."

But the mammoths simply watched her, baffled.

So she raised her trunk and trumpeted, and began to walk east, following the line of the old coast, toward a sky that was already turning a deepening purple.

After a few paces she paused and turned. The three sisters, huddled together, were walking after her slowly, tracking her moist footsteps in the dusty sand. A little behind them came Autumn and Thunder, each still distracted, but submissively following the lead Icebones had given.

But now the Ragged One lumbered up to her. "You cannot make this rabble into a Family just by saying it. And you cannot make yourself a Matriarch."

"If you wish to stay here," Icebones said, her voice a deep, coarse rumble, "I will not oppose you."

The Ragged One growled, "If you fail — when you fail — I will be there to remind you of this day."

I know you will, Icebones thought.

The wind was rising now. She saw that it was swirling over the pack ice, lifting spray and bits of loose ice and snow into a great gray spiral, angry and intimidating. The scavenging petrels left their bloody meals and rose into the sky, cawing angrily, their feathers stained red.

6 The Ice Beetle

Heading toward the light of the rising sun, they skirted the shore of the giant ocean. There was better forage to be had a little way to the south, away from the barren coast itself, where soil and water had gathered in hollows.

But the landscape, distorted by the volcanic uplift that lay beneath the Fire Mountain, was flawed and difficult. Deep, sharp-walled valleys cut across their path. Conversely, sometimes the mammoths found themselves laboring over networks of ridges that rose one after the other, like wrinkles in aged flesh.

As leader, Icebones was able to impose a rhythm appropriate for a Family on the move. She had the mammoths walk slowly but steadily, all day and most of each night, probing at the ground with their trunks, foraging for grass and herbs and water. At first the others complained, for this was an alien way of life for creatures used to being fed as they needed it. But Icebones knew that this steady progress was better suited to a mammoth’s internal constitution. And when after a few days the others got used to the steady, satisfying rhythm, and food passed pleasingly through their systems, the level of complaints dwindled.

But they were not yet a Family.

A Family was supposed to walk in coordination, led by its Matriarch and the senior Cows, all of them watching out for each other, in case of predators or natural traps like mud holes. This untidy rabble rambled over the broken ground as if they were rogue Bulls, as if the others did not exist, or matter.

Icebones knew it would take a long time to teach them habits that should have been ingrained since birth, and it seemed presumptuous even to imagine that she, young and inexperienced, was the one to do it. But, she reminded herself, there was nobody else.

So she persisted.

Sometimes Spiral would walk alongside Icebones, with Shoot prancing in her wake. The tall, elegant Cow would regale Icebones with unwelcome tales of her time with the Lost, when they had tied shining ribbons to her hair, or rode on her back, or had encouraged her to do tricks, picking up fruit and walking backward and bowing at their behest.

This irritated Icebones immensely. "You are mammoth," she said sternly. "You are not a creature of the Lost. You should not boast of your foolish dancing. And you should not ignore your sister. You should watch out for her, as she watches out for you. That is what it is to be Family."

"Ah, the Family," Spiral said. "But what is there for me in your Family, Icebones? I am beautiful and clever and I smell fine, while you are small and squat. Will a Family stop you being ugly?"

Icebones reached up and tugged at Spiral’s pretty tusks. "It does not matter what I look like — or what you look or smell like. You will not always be healthy and pretty, Spiral. And someday you will have a calf of your own — perhaps many calves — just as your sister is carrying now. And then you too will have to rely on others."

For a brief moment Spiral seemed to be listening hard, and her trunk tip shyly probed at Icebones’s mouth. But then she pulled away, trumpeting brightly, and lumbered off, Shoot as ever trailing her eagerly.

They came to a place where enormous valleys cut across their path. The mammoths climbed down shallow banks and worked their way across rubble-strewn floors.

These tremendous channels were littered with huge eroded boulders, pitted and scoured by water and wind, around which the mammoths had to pick their way. Perhaps water had once flowed from the high southern lands into the basin of the north, cutting these channels and depositing this debris. But those vanished rivers must have been mighty indeed. And these huge channels were clearly very ancient, for many of them were pitted by craters, or even cut through by younger channels.

The great age of the land was obvious, the complexity of its formation recalled in the folded rock around them.

They found a flooded crater, a shallow circular lake in a pit smashed into a channel bottom. The mammoths welcomed this easily accessible pool, though they had to break through layers of ice to reach the dark, cold water beneath.

At the water’s circular edge, Icebones found clumps of grass. She would twist her trunk around a clump of stems and kick at its base to dislodge it. After beating the grass against her knees to knock off the dirt, she pushed it into her mouth, and her trunk explored for new clumps as she chewed.

She inspected the ice on the crater pond. Much of it was hard and blue. Mammoths learned about ice. Icebones knew that fresh ice first appeared as a film of oily crystals, almost as dark as the water itself. When it thickened it would turn gray and opaque, and thicken slowly. If it lasted to a second winter it would harden and turn a cold white-blue.

So the ice covering this pool was persisting through the long summer of this strange world. It was another sign that the world was cooling, and the tide of warmth and water and life was withdrawing, step by step.

Spiral lumbered up to her, complaining. "Icebones, that’s not fair. You are taking the best grass!"

Icebones slapped Spiral’s cheek with her trunk tip — not hard, but enough to sting, and to make the others turn to listen. "I am the Matriarch," she growled." I take the first, and the best. Your mother is next. And then the rest of you. It is the way." The pecking-order she was striving to teach Spiral was part of every Family’s internal structure — although no mature Family would stick to it rigidly, with food being apportioned according to need.

Spiral grumbled, "If this is what it means to be in a Family, I would rather the Lost returned." But she backed away, deferring to Icebones’s tentative authority.

Beyond the flooded crater, the ground began to drop in altitude. Though it was still broken and often difficult to negotiate, the soil was richer here, and steppe plants flourished. There were even stretches of forest, conifer trees so tall they seemed to stretch up to the pale pink sky. And there was plenty to eat now: grass, coltsfoot, mountain sorrel, lousewort, sedge, dwarf birch.

Covering ground that was rich in loam and easy under their feet, their stomachs filling up, the mammoths’ spirits seemed to lift, and they walked on more vigorously.

Icebones noticed that as they got used to the fodder of the steppe the mammoths’ tastes were starting to diverge: Thunder sought out a type of willow with small diamond leaves, while Spiral preferred the sedge. They were starting to forget the rich food the Lost had provided for them, she realized with some relief.

But now Icebones became aware of a dark smudge, like a low cloud, on the horizon directly ahead of her, to the east. And she smelled smoke.

Fire ahead. The mammoths drew closer, trunks raised.

Fire was a natural thing, of course — it could be caused by flowing lava, or lightning strikes — but in mammoths’ minds fire was primarily a thing of the Lost. Where there is smoke, there are the Lost — so went the wisdom of the Cycle.

They walked on, into the thickening smoke.

They came to a shallow crater rim. The smoke was pouring sluggishly into the air from the crater’s belly.

It was an easy climb up the crater wall to its narrow crest. But now the smoke was thick, making their eyes stream and filling their nostrils with its stink. The mammoths were agitated, for the scent of fire sparked deep instincts of fear and flight in them all.

The crater was a big one, surrounded by a ring of eroded hillocks that stretched to the horizon. A bank of smoke hung thick and dense over the crater basin.

And the basin was full of trees: fallen, burning trees, with flames licking ponderously. There were so many that they lapped up against the crater walls, and trunks lay thick on the ground like shed pine needles. But each of these "needles" was the trunk of a great conifer, stripped of its branches.

Autumn growled, "We can’t walk through that. We would suffocate in the smoke, or get trapped beneath the burning trunks, or—"

"You’re right." Icebones raised her trunk, trying to sense the lay of the land despite the distraction of the smoke, and the steady rumble of collapsing, burned-out logs. "The wind comes this way." She took a step toward the southern crater rim. "We will walk around these circular walls. The smoke will blow away from us, not over us."

"It is out of our way," the Ragged One pointed out sourly.

Icebones snapped, "We have no choice. Be careful where you step. Help each other. Let’s go, let’s go." And without further discussion she set off, following the narrow ridge that ran around the crater rim.

She didn’t look back, but she could tell from their footfalls and rumbles that the mammoths were following her.

The going wasn’t difficult, though in places the rim wall broke up into separate eroded hillocks, and they had to climb through narrow gulches or over crumbled rock. But there was no water to be had on this bare rock wall. Soon the air, hot and dry and laden with the stink of wood smoke, burned in Icebones’s nostrils and throat.

The wind veered and a gust of smoke washed over her, blinding her eyes and flooding her sensitive nostrils, so that she had to work her way over the lumpy ground by touch alone.

When the smoke cleared she saw something moving, dimly visible through the thinning gray veils of smoke.

She stopped dead, trunk raised. She sensed the other mammoths gathering around her, curious, nervous. She could see something shining, like ice, a vast bulk moving. And she could feel how its weight made the ground shudder.

Now it emerged from the smoke.

A vast boxy shape was crawling laboriously up the side of the crater. It was more like a great slab of rock than any living thing. On its back was a kind of shell, like an insect’s carapace, but the shell was flat and a pale silvery-gray, and it was liberally covered with caked-on dust and dried mud. It would have been big enough for all seven of the mammoths to stand side by side on its back. The beast moved forward, not on legs, but on its underbelly, leaving tracks cut deep in the rock of the crater rim. But those tracks were well worn, Icebones saw. Wherever this strange creature was heading, it had made this journey many times.

"It is like a beetle," Breeze said. "With a shell of ice. An ice beetle."

The ice beetle trailed huge long limbs — far longer but less mobile than a mammoth’s trunk. And in a set of shining fingers it grasped a tree trunk. The tree had been dragged over the dusty plain from a stand of conifer forest. In that forest stood a number of stumps, where trunks had been neatly cut away from their roots.

Icebones could smell, under the dominant stink of the fire, the sap of the tree trunk and the iron tang of the red dust. But she could smell nothing of the beetle, nothing at all.

As the mammoths watched, the ice beetle, in dour silence, hauled the tree trunk up the side of the steep crater wall. Dust rose up in clouds. Then the beetle spun slowly around and let the tree trunk fall into the crater, where the flames would soon reach it.

The beetle, its trunk arms empty, seemed to rest, as if exhausted. Then it roused itself. It swiveled and began to edge its way back down the crater rim wall.

Autumn growled, "Once mammoths did this. Hauling trees from forests to pits in the ground, where they would be burned and buried. Now, it seems, the Lost have stronger servants even than us."

"Perhaps it is like mammoth dung," Icebones mused. "Where mammoths pass, new life sprouts, for our dung enriches the ground. Maybe the Lost — or at least their servants — are working to build the world, to build life. But why does it continue, now that the Lost have vanished?"

"Because it doesn’t know what else to do," the Ragged One said. "Because nobody told it to stop. Because it is mad, or stupid."

"Everything about the Lost is a mystery to us," said Autumn grimly. Spiral made to protest, but Autumn insisted. "We lived with them, and accepted their gifts of food and water. But we never understood them. It is the truth, daughter."

As the beetle passed, Shoot reached out tentatively with her trunk tip and brushed the sharp edge of its carapace. "It is cold. But it is not wet like ice. And it smells of nothing." She sneezed sharply, sending the dust flying. "It is covered in dust." She began to blow at the carapace, ridding a corner of dust, and exposing a clean, shining surface.

Spiral stepped forward and joined her. So did Icebones, without being sure why. They blew away the dust, or, where mud was caked, they picked at it with their trunk fingers and brushed it off.

Icebones noticed that Breeze hung back, distracted, evidently uncomfortable from the weight of her calf.

The ice beetle continued to work its way down the hillside, its great body tipping up clumsily. It did not react to the mammoths’ attention.

When it reached the level ground outside the crater the beetle began to trundle away, back toward the forest. But now its exposed carapace gleamed silver, free of dust and mud save for a few streaks.

"Do you think it’s moving a little faster?" Autumn asked. "Maybe it needs the sunlight, like a flower."

"I never saw a flower like that," Icebones said skeptically.

"True, true."

There was nothing for the mammoths here, nothing but this insane abandoned creature and its endless, meaningless task. Icebones said, "Let’s go." She took a step forward, meaning to climb down from the crater rim.

But, behind her, Breeze gasped. She had fallen to her knees, her stubby trunk lying pooled and limp on the ground. "Help me."

Autumn growled, "It is the calf. It is time."

Spiral turned to Icebones. "What must we do? Oh, what must we do?"

Icebones felt her stomach turn as cold as a lump of ice. "I suppose the Lost helped you even with this."

Spiral fell back, growling dismally, and Icebones felt a stab of shame.

Autumn said, "The Lost were with us always… But there are no Lost here."

Close at Icebones’s side like a guilty conscience, the Ragged One said softly, "If not you, who else?"

Icebones gathered her courage and stepped forward. Breeze, still slumped to her knees, was straining, her belly distended. "You must stand," Icebones said.

"I can’t."

"Help her," Icebones ordered.

Briskly Spiral and Shoot stepped forward. They dug their trunks and foreheads under their sister’s belly, while Icebones pushed at her rump.

In a few heartbeats Breeze had staggered to her feet, but her legs were shuddering. The two sisters stood close to Breeze, keeping her upright with nudges of their bodies. Even Thunder gently pushed Breeze’s rump, rumbling encouragement.

Breeze, panting hard, leaned forward so her back legs were stretched out behind her. Icebones thought she could see the calf moving within its cave of flesh.

Breeze raised her trunk and trumpeted, straining. There was a sudden eruption of blood and water, a stink of urine and milk.

"I can see it!" Shoot called suddenly. "Look! The calf is coming!"

And Icebones saw it too: in a gush of water and blood, two legs had pushed from Breeze’s vagina. Now a small head and the bulk of a little body was squeezed out, wrapped in a clear, shimmering sheet. For a moment it dangled by its hind legs. Then Breeze gave a final heave.

The calf shot out and plopped to the ground.

Shoot and Spiral, suddenly aunts, hurried forward to the baby, which lay wrapped in its blood-streaked sac on the ground.

Icebones stayed with Breeze, who staggered forward. "You must stay on your feet."

"It hurts, Icebones," Breeze said.

"It’s all right. Just a little longer. Push hard, Breeze. Push—"

Now the afterbirth emerged, a sodden bloody lump that fell limp to the ground.

Breeze sighed, eyes closing, and she fell to her knees. Thunder curled his trunk over her protectively.

"The calf’s not moving," Shoot wailed. "Is it dead?"

Icebones pushed past Shoot and Spiral. The calf still lay where it had fallen. "We have to get it out of the birth sac." She leaned and tried to catch the membrane with her tusk tips, ripping and pulling it. "Help me — but do not hurt the calf."

It seemed to take long heartbeats, but at last they had the amniotic sac free. Shoot hurled the bloody sheet away with an impulsive shake of her head.

Icebones leaned forward to the calf, inspecting it — him! — with her trunk tip. He was a bundle of pale orange fur that was soaked and flattened by amniotic fluid. His legs were spindly stalks, his trunk was a mere thread, and his head was smooth and round, as if not yet formed. He was breathing shallowly, his little chest rising and falling rapidly, and his breath steamed around his face.

Icebones wrapped her trunk underneath the calf, and encouraged Shoot and Spiral to help her. Soon they had him set upright on his skinny, trembling legs. His little eyes opened with a moist pop, and Icebones saw they were bright red. But now he threw back his tiny trunk so it lay on his forehead, and opened his mouth.

"Hungry," he said, his voice a thin, choked mewl. "Cold. Hungry. Oh, let me back…!"

7 The Cracked Land

The calf made the suckling cry, over and over, as if he had been taught it by Kilukpuk herself.

"He needs milk," Icebones said. She hurried to Breeze, who still lay on the ground.

Breeze’s eyes were closed, and she was breathing hard, obviously exhausted. "Woodsmoke," she murmured.

"What?"

"That is what he will be called. For when he was born my head was full of smoke…"

"You must come," Icebones said gently.

"Let me sleep, Icebones…"

The calf opened his mouth and wailed, his voice thin and high. "Cold, cold!"

And now, at last, Icebones was at a loss. "Without milk he will die," she said. "I don’t know what to do."

Autumn came forward, her gait stiff. "Let me." And she gathered the little creature in her trunk and guided him forward, pulling him beneath her legs. Blindly, he snuggled at her belly fur until he found the dugs that dangled between her forelegs. Driven by instinct he clamped his mouth to a nipple and began to suckle greedily.

Icebones, astonished, saw thin, pale milk dribble down his cheek. "Autumn — you have milk. But you are not with calf."

"It began when I saw how weak Breeze was becoming. I don’t know why." She eyed Icebones. "You may be Matriarch," she rumbled softly. "But you don’t know everything, it seems."

"I know that you are a good mother," said Icebones. "For you were there when your daughter, and her calf, needed you most."

The calf — Woodsmoke — squeaked his contentment, and Autumn rumbled softly.

It was strange, Icebones thought: just heartbeats old, and yet the calf had already achieved something immensely important, by redeeming Autumn, his grandmother… Perhaps it was an omen of his life to come.

Spiral and Shoot gathered around their mother protectively, rumbling reassurance. Further away, Thunder stayed with Breeze, stroking her hair with gentle motions of his trunk.

It was a moment of tenderness, of contentment, of togetherness.

But Icebones could not help but look east, trunk raised, toward the difficult country that lay ahead — a country through which she would now have to bring a calf, and a weakened mother.

A wind rose, droning through the clefts in the crater wall, drowning out the reassuring rumbles of the Cows.

Further east, the ground rose steadily. The steppe vegetation grew thinner, and any water was frozen over.

Icebones’s chest began to ache as she took each breath, as it had not since she was high on the Fire Mountain.

They came to a land covered by vast pits.

The pits were shallow and rounded, and dust pooled deep in them. They were like footprints around a dried mud hole — but these "footprints" were huge, taking many paces to cross. In some places the pits were overwhelmed by frozen rock flows, as if the pitted landscape had been formed long ago, and then this younger rock poured over it to harden in place.

It was difficult country. But Icebones feared that the terrain further east of here might be more difficult still. Looking that way from the higher ridges, she could see deep shadows and broken walls, hear complex, booming echoes.

And at night she thought she heard the low rumble of some vast animal, echoing from tortuous cliffs.

Difficult, yes. And now they had the calf to consider.

Woodsmoke trotted beside his mother or his grandmother, stumbling frequently. He was still coated with the short underfur from his birth, topped now by a thin layer of pink-red overfur. His back was round, lacking the slope and distinctive shoulder hump he would develop later in life. Though he had been born with the ancient language of all Kilukpuk’s children, there were many things he had to learn. He couldn’t yet use his trunk to gather food, or even to drink. For now he was completely dependent on milk, which he drew from his mother’s nipple with his mouth — the only time in his life when he would use his mouth directly to feed.

The calf slowed them down; there was no doubt about that. They had had to wait several days at the birthing place while mother and calf recovered, and even now the group could walk no faster than the calf could manage.

But Icebones would not have done without him. Woodsmoke was quickly becoming the focus of the group, this nascent Family. He would run from one to the other, ignorant and uncaring of their obscure adult disputes. Only the Ragged One refused to respond to his unformed charms.

His favorite was his aunt, Spiral.

She would lower her trunk and let him clamber on it or pull it. Or she would lie on the ground and let him climb up over her belly, digging his tiny feet into her guard hairs, determined and dogged, as if she was some great warm rock. In her turn, Spiral would forgive Woodsmoke anything — even when he dribbled urine into her fine coat, of which she was so proud.

Icebones was surprised by this; it showed a side of Spiral she hadn’t suspected. Finally, she thought she understood. She sought an opportunity to speak to the Cow.

"Spiral — you’ve had a calf of your own. That’s why you’re so close to Woodsmoke, isn’t it?"

At first Spiral would not reply. She walked along with something of her old haughtiness, head held high, her handsome tusks bright in the cold sunlight. But at length she said, "Yes. If you must know. I have given birth to two calves. Both Bulls. I watched the calves learn to walk, and I suckled them. But soon, when they were no older than Woodsmoke is now, they were taken away." She said this flatly, without emotion.

"They were taken by the Lost? What cruelty."

"They were not — cruel. They were taking the calves to a place that would be better for them." She shook her head, and her delicate trunk rippled. "And when my calves were gone, each time, I was stroked and praised by the Lost, and given treats, and—"

"Where are the calves now?"

"Surely they are dead," she said harshly. "The Sickness killed so many."

"You can’t know that."

"It does not hurt." And she trumpeted brightly, as if joyful. But it was a thin, cold sound.

The little calf came blundering over to Spiral in his tangled, uncoordinated way, seeking to play. But she pushed him away with a gentle shove of her trunk. "I have no need of him," she snapped.

Icebones brought him back. "I know," she said carefully. "But he needs you."

And, tentatively, Spiral wrapped her trunk around the little calf’s small, smooth head.

The pits in the ground became deeper and more fragmented, and began to merge. Soon Icebones was walking through a deepening gully. The walls grew steadily steeper around her, and the floor, littered with broken rocks, tilted downward sharply. Soon Icebones’s front legs were aching, and her foot pads and trunk tip were scratched raw by the hard-edged rocks.

The gully gave way to a more complex landscape still, a place of branching chasms and tall cliffs. It was the cracked land she had sensed from afar, and dreaded.

Icebones found herself walking through a flat-bottomed valley so deep and sheer-walled that she was immersed in cold shadow, even though she could see a stripe of pinkish daylight sky far above her. The walls, steep above her, were heavily eroded. They were made of layers of hard red-gray sandstone and blue-black lava, and here and there they had slumped tiredly into landslides.

In some places the walls had collapsed altogether, leaving spires and isolated mesas, so that she wandered through a forest of rock, carved into eerie, spindly shapes by the endless wind.

In the weak light the mammoths were rounded, indistinct forms, shuffling gloomily. The ground was littered with sand dunes and rock from the crumbled walls, so the going was difficult and slow. They were all unhappy: mammoths were creatures of the open steppe, and it was against their instincts to be enclosed by high walls.

But the chasm was short. Soon it opened out — but only into a branching array of more deep gorges, separated by tall, sharp-edged walls. Icebones stamped her feet and rumbled. But the walls of this increasingly complex maze sent back only muddled and confusing echoes.

The nights were the worst. The stars and disconcerting moons crossed the sky, but the mammoths were stranded in a deep shadowed darkness.

Icebones tried to keep them moving. But because of the calf’s weariness that proved to be impossible, and they were forced to endure the dark huddled closely around Breeze, while her calf napped peacefully in the forest of her legs.

In the darkest night, Icebones heard deep, brooding rumbles. All the mammoths heard it, she thought, but none would speak of it, as if fearful of making it real.

In the daytime Icebones, weary and befuddled, strove to keep moving east.

This maze of chasms was a pattern of grooves cut deep into the land, as if by the claws of some great predator, so that the plain high above their heads was cut into sunlit islands, each separate from the others.

Spiral said, "I have become a creature of the ground like a lemming, able only to peer up at the sunlight above." And her grumble was joined by the others.

It was as if it was somehow Icebones’s fault that they were having such difficulties. It was utterly unfair, of course. But then, she thought gloomily, nobody had promised her that being a Matriarch was anything to do with fairness.

"I will tell you stories from the Cycle."

That met with a general groan.

But Icebones said, "The Cycle is our story — your story. This Cracked Land is difficult. But the Cycle is full of stories of mammoths who faced difficulties, for it is the times of hardship that shape us." And she began to tell them the story of Longtusk. "It is said that when Longtusk was a calf the mammoths roamed free, great Clans of them, all across the northern steppes. But Longtusk’s Family was forced to flee, northward, ever north, for the Lost were encroaching from the south, breeding and squabbling and building…"

The mammoths still grumbled, but the noise was subdued, and suffused by the soft pads of their feet, the growls of their bellies, gentle burps and farts. Even the little calf trotting at Icebones’s side listened intently. Woodsmoke was still too young to understand much of what she said. But he was responding to the rhythm of her language, as she hoped they all would.

The Ragged One continued to keep apart.

"At last," Icebones went on, "the mammoths had nowhere else to go. The land gave way to a great frozen ocean where nothing could live but seals and other ugly creatures. It seemed that soon the mammoths would be overwhelmed by the Lost.

"But Longtusk found a way. There was a bridge of land that spanned the ocean, from one great steppe to another. And, on the far side of the bridge, there were no Lost — only open steppe, where the mammoths could grow and breed and live. So Longtusk gathered the mammoths of his Clan, and said to them—"

Something dropped before her, huge and heavy and dark. It opened a cavernous mouth and screamed. She glimpsed rows of sharp teeth.

Without thinking she lunged forward — she felt the rasp of fur on her tusks, the squelch of soft flesh breaking — and the creature screamed louder yet.

And then, in an instant, it was gone, leaving her with the stink of blood in her nostrils, and the echo of that deadly scream rattling from the walls around her.

She stood there, shaking like a frightened calf.

The mammoths had scattered. The calf had been left alone, and he was turning back and forth, little trunk raised, mewling pitifully. "Scared… scared…"

Icebones said, "We must stay together. That — thing — was probably after the calf."

Spiral was stiff with rage and fear. "Enough of your talk," she said. "The Ragged One is right. This is not your world, Icebones. You did not know we would meet such a creature here, did you?"

"If we squabble it will pick us off one by one." Icebones raised her tusks, which still dripped red blood. "Is that what you want?"

At last Autumn rumbled, "She is right. The calf is probably its main target, for he is weakest, and slowest. Breeze, come to him."

Breeze stepped forward and tucked her calf beneath her legs. Woodsmoke tried to suckle, but Breeze pushed him back. The rest of the mammoths clustered around mother and calf.

"We will go on," insisted Icebones. "This warren of chasms will not last forever. If everyone keeps their trunk high, we will survive."

They were reluctant, fretful, afraid. But nobody had a better suggestion. And so they began to move forward once more. The calf’s mewling was muffled by the legs and belly fur of its mother, and the adult mammoths rumbled uneasily, their deep sounds echoing heavily from the sheer ravine walls.

Thunder walked beside Icebones. "What do you think it was?"

"Perhaps it was some kind of cat. There are stories of great cats in the Cycle — Longtusk himself fought such a beast. Perhaps it has grown fat by destroying everything else living here, like the whale in the Ocean of the North. But I have never seen a cat, for none lived on the Island. Many of the animals mentioned in the old Cycle stories are long gone…"

Icebones saw that the stripe of sky visible far above her head was already fading to a deep orange-pink.

"Soon it will be dark," the Ragged One said softly. "And then we will make a story of our own. Won’t we, Matriarch?"

They came to another branch in the chasm system. This time Icebones faced three intersecting ravines, each sheer-walled and littered with loose rock, each leading only to further complexity — and each empty, as far as she could see.

We must continue east, she told herself. If we don’t achieve that much, everything else is lost. She stepped forward and led them into the central chasm.

There was a bellow. The mammoths stumbled back, trunks raised in alarm.

This time the creature had dropped from above, onto Autumn’s back. The mammoth was pawing the ground and trumpeting. She lifted her head in a vain effort to reach her tormentor with her tusks or trunk.

The creature was only dimly visible in the shadows, but Icebones glimpsed hard, front-facing yellow eyes, that black bloody mouth, and claws that gleamed white and dug deep into Autumn’s flesh, causing blood to well and drip down her heavy hair.

Autumn blundered against the chasm wall. The cat creature yowled its protest. But it was ripped away from her back, its claws leaving a final set of gouges.

Icebones lunged forward, trumpeting, tusks held high.

The cat raised itself to its full height, yellow eyes fixed on Icebones. It was spindly, but its body was a sleek slab of muscle. It opened its huge mouth and hissed. And it leapt with astonishing agility up the chasm wall.

Again the mammoths were left in sudden silence.

"It lives on the walls," Shoot said, wondering.

Spiral had her head dipped, her trunk wrapped over her forehead. "I can’t stand it," she whimpered. "I am so afraid."

Icebones herself was shaken to her core. Mammoths were used to facing predators, but as a creature of the open steppe, Icebones had no experience of threats dropping down on her from out of the sky.

She walked up to Autumn. "Your back is hurt." She probed with her trunk fingers at the slash wounds. The covering hair was matted with blood. "We will find mud to bathe your wounds."

"No," Autumn growled, pulling back. "We must get out of this place before dark."

Thunder said softly, "Which way?"

For a terrible moment Icebones realized that she did not know — the chasm looked identical before her and behind her — she had been turned around several times, and the stripe of pink sky above her gave no clues as to the direction of the sun.

The Ragged One was watching her, waiting for her to fail.

At last Icebones spotted a small heap of mammoth dung, still steaming gently, a few paces away. "That is the way we have come. So we will go the other way — to the east."

Thunder growled, "But that is the way the cat went."

A high-pitched yowl echoed from the chasm walls. The mammoths peered that way fearfully, raising their trunks to sniff the air. "Where is it?" "Is it close?" "I think it came from that way." "No, that way…" But the echoes thrown by the complex walls of the chasm system masked the source of the call — as perhaps the cat intended, Icebones thought.

The Ragged One stood before Icebones. "It can track us by our dung, and our footprints, and our scent. How can we throw it off? You don’t know what to do, do you? You are no Matriarch. You have not told us the truth — not since the moment you woke up inside your cave of darkness. And now you have led us into deadly peril."

Icebones, desperate, her head full of alarm, thought, Not now… But she was tired of strangeness, of unpredictable dangers, of dragging this recalcitrant group across a barren rocky world, of the Ragged One’s unrelenting hostility.

"All right," she said sharply. "You want the truth — then here it is. I am no Matriarch. I think my mother intended me to come here to this place and lead you someday… but not yet. Not until I was grown, and had calves of my own, and had become a true Matriarch. I don’t’ know what happened — I don’t know why I found myself here, now. I don’t want to be here. But here I am."

The mammoths rumbled, tense, unhappy.

Thunder reached to her hesitantly. "You lied? But you named us, Icebones."

She glared at them all. "Yes, I lied. I had no choice. If I hadn’t, you would have died on the shore of that salt-filled ocean."

Autumn’s rumble was tinged with pain. "Enough of this. It won’t make any difference if Icebones is a liar or not if we are all dead by sundown. Which way?"

Two chasms led from this point. One was straight, its walls sheer and clean, but the other was a jumble of rocks.

Icebones snapped, "We go down there." She meant the jumbled, difficult route.

Autumn growled, "Are you sure? The other looks much easier."

The Ragged One said, "What does it matter? Icebones is a fool. The cat can follow us wherever we go."

Icebones said, "You must listen to me. Listen to me because I am Icebones — for who you know me to be, not for who you wish me to be. Go now, that way, as I told you."

Slowly, sullenly, the mammoths began to move toward the more crowded chasm.

But Icebones called Autumn back. "Wait, Autumn. Forgive me." And she dug into the wounds on Autumn’s back, breaking open the clots and covering her trunk fingers with blood.

Autumn bore this stoically. Perhaps she understood what Icebones intended.

As the mammoths filed into the crowded chasm, Icebones set off, alone, into the other, cleaner defile. Where she trod she made sure she left clear footprints in the dust and scattered rock, and even squeezed out a little dung and urine. And she took care to smear Autumn’s blood on the rocky walls.

Then she backed out of the chasm, trying to step in the tracks she had already made.

Just as she reached the junction of the chasm, she heard a cold yowl — glimpsed a black form shimmering over the rock above her head — saw yellow predator’s eyes. The cat hurtled, black and lithe, into the chasm she had seeded, away from the mammoths.

Quickly she ducked after the others. "Try not to drop dung for a while — I know that is hard — and try to be quiet…"

Thunder asked, subdued, "How did you know what the cat would do?"

"I hoped that blood would be a stronger lure than the smell of our waste and hair. The other chasm is long, and it will take a while for the cat to explore it. But soon enough it will know that we have tricked it, and come looking for us once more."

So they proceeded through the shadowed complexity of the chasm, picking their way between huge fallen boulders and over smaller sharp-edged rocks.

Icebones glanced at the Ragged One. But the Ragged One’s posture spoke only of resentment and fury. Icebones knew that in the days to come the dynamics of her little band would be even more difficult, and that a final confrontation was yet to come.

After several more days — dismal days, frightening, bereft of food and water — the mammoths emerged at last from the Cracked Land.

With relief they fanned out under a pale, open sky, over a shallow slope of scree and broken rock. There was even food to be had, tufts of grass and scrubby trees growing in the sudden flood of light.

From here they should go south and east, for that was the direction to the Footfall. But when she looked that way, Icebones saw that the ground ended in a sharp line, much closer than the horizon, as if there was a dip beyond.

Leaving the mammoths to feed, she walked that way. Soon she had reached the break in the ground — and she recoiled, shocked.

It was a sheer drop.

She was on the lip of a chasm. But this immense feature would have dwarfed the mazy ravines through which she had guided the mammoths.

As if scoured out by a vast tusk, it was a mighty gouge in the land. And it was in her way.