Icebones

The Story of the Great Crossing

The Cycle is made up of the oldest stories in the world. It tells all that has befallen the mammoths, and its wisdom is as perfect as time can make it.

But now I want to tell you one of the youngest stories in the Cycle. It is the story of how the mammoths came to the Sky Steppe.

It is the story of Silverhair, who was the last Matriarch of the Old Steppe.

It is the story of the first Matriarch of the Sky Steppe.

It is a story of mammoths, and Lost.

For generations the last mammoths had lived on an Island. Silverhair was their Matriarch.

The Lost were everywhere. But the Lost had never found the Island, and the mammoths lived undisturbed.

No mammoth lived anywhere else. Not one.

But now, at last, the Lost had come to the Island.

Though most of these Lost showed no wish to hunt the mammoths or kill them or drive them away, they kept them in boxes and watched them with their predators’ eyes, all day and all night.

Silverhair knew that mammoths cannot share land with Lost.

But Silverhair was old and tired. She had spent all her strength keeping her Family alive. She was in despair, and ashamed of her weakness.

One night Kilukpuk came down from the aurora. And Kilukpuk said Silverhair must not be ashamed, for she had fought hard all her life. And she must not despair.

Silverhair snorted. "This world is full of Lost. We have nowhere to live. What is there left for me but despair?"

"But there is another world," Kilukpuk told her. "It is a place where there will be room for many mammoths. And mammoths will live there until the sun itself grows cold."

Silverhair asked tiredly, "Where is this marvelous place?"

And Kilukpuk said, "Why, have you forgotten your Cycle? It is the Sky Steppe."

Silverhair knew about the Sky Steppe, of course. She had seen it float in the sky, bright and red — just as her world, which we call the Old Steppe, once floated in our sky, bright and blue. And, indeed, the Cycle promised that one day mammoths would walk free on the Sky Steppe.

But Silverhair was weary and old, for she could not believe even mighty Kilukpuk. She said, "And how are the mammoths to get there? Will they sprout wings and fly like geese?"

"No," said Kilukpuk gently. "There is a way. But it is hard."

It would be the work of the Lost, said Kilukpuk. What else could it be? For the Lost owned the world, all of it.

Calves would be taken from their mothers’ bodies, unborn. They would be put in ice, and sent into the sky in shining seeds, and taken to the Sky Steppe. That way many calves could be carried, to be spilled out on the red soil of the Sky Steppe, as if being born.

The bereft mothers would never know their calves, and the calves never know their mothers.

This was very strange — typical of the Lost’s eerie cleverness — and Silverhair could not understand. "How will the calves learn how to use their trunks, how to find water and food? If they have no Matriarch, who will lead and protect them?"

"That is the second thing I have to tell you," said Kilukpuk. "And this too is very hard."

And Kilukpuk said that Silverhair’s calf — her only calf — would also be taken. For that calf, already half-grown, was to be Matriarch to all the new calves who would tumble from the shining seeds to the red soil. That calf, daughter of the last Matriarch of the Old Steppe, would be the first Matriarch of the Sky Steppe.

"You must teach her, Silverhair," said Kilukpuk. "As I taught my Calves to speak, and to find water and food, and to live as a Family. You must teach her to be a Matriarch, so she can teach those who follow her."

Silverhair spun around and scuffed the ground. "My calf is all I have. I will not give her up. How can I live?"

But she knew that Kilukpuk was right.

Silverhair listened to Kilukpuk’s wisdom. And she passed on that wisdom to her calf. And, when the time came, she gave her calf to Kilukpuk, and the Lost.

For that one sacrifice alone, we know Silverhair as great a hero as any in the Cycle’s long course. For if she had not, and if she had not taught her calf well, none of us alive today would ever have been born.

Even though, as is the way of the Lost’s clever-clever schemes, many things went wrong, and the calf-Matriarch was kept in a box of cold and dark for much longer than she should have been — so long that before she emerged, generations of mammoths had lived and died on the Sky Steppe…

Well, that was how the Great Crossing was made. But the story is not done.

For Kilukpuk taught Silverhair another truth of the Cycle: that sometimes we cannot spare even those we love.

The Crossing was hard and dangerous indeed. And Silverhair’s calf would herself have a dread price to pay for making that Crossing.

That calf’s name, as you know, was Icebones.

1 The High Plains

The land was a tortured wilderness: nothing but blood-red rock, rugged, cracked and pitted, under a sky that shone yellow-pink.

And it was dominated by craters.

The largest of them were walled plains, their rims so heavily eroded they were reduced to low, sullen mounds lined up in rough arcs. The smaller craters were sharper, and when the mammoths plowed their way over rim ridges, their neat circular shapes were clearly visible. In places the craters crowded so close together that their walls overlapped and merged, so that the mammoths were forced to climb over one smooth fold in the land after another, like waves on some vast rust-red ocean.

Icebones listened to the rumbling echoes that the mammoths’ footfalls returned from the distorted ground. She sensed giant rubble lying crammed there. She tried to imagine the mighty blows which must have rained down on this land long ago — mighty enough to shatter rock into immense pieces far beneath her feet, mighty enough to make the rock itself rise up in great circular ripples as if it were as fluid as water.

But the land had been shaped by more than the crater-forming blows. In some places the rock had melted and flowed. Craters had been overwhelmed, their walls buried and their interiors flooded with ponds of hard, cold, red-black basalt.

And water had run here, creating channels and valleys. Some of these cut right through the crater walls and even spilled into their floors. The channels themselves were overlaid by the round stamps of craters, and sometimes cut across by more recent channels and valleys.

Dust lay scattered everywhere, piled up against crater walls or inside their rims and against the larger boulders, streaked light and dark. The dust was constantly reshaped by the wind: each dawn Icebones would peer around as the rocky wilderness emerged from the darkness, startled by how different it looked.

It was as if she was walking through layers of time: everything that had ever happened to this land was recorded here in a rocky scar or wrinkle or protrusion or dust heap.

…Sometimes, toiling across this unforgiving land of rock, thirsty, hungry, weary, sore, Icebones imagined she was old: with eroded molars and aching bones, in a place of moist green, surrounded by calves. Sometimes these waking dreams were so vivid that she wondered if this time of redness and desolation was merely a recollection. Perhaps this was not the vision of a long-dead prophet of the past, but a memory from the unknown future. Perhaps she was that very old Cow, on her last molars, returning to her youth in memory. Perhaps the Icebones she imagined herself to be was only a thing of memory, walking through a remembered land.

But if that was so, she thought dimly, then it must mean she would survive these harsh days, survive to grow old and bear calves… mustn’t it?

Troubled, she walked on, as best she could, waiting for the dream to end, the memory to disperse — for herself to wake up, old and safe and content.

But the dream, or memory, did not end.

So the days wore away on the High Plains, where land and sky glowed red in a great monotonous dialogue.

One day they found a narrow valley where a pool of water had gathered. Trapped under a thin crust of ice, the water was brackish and briny. But it was the first liquid water the mammoths had encountered for days, and they smashed the ice and sucked it up gratefully.

Woodsmoke worked his way along the pond’s rocky edge, exploring the water’s deeper reaches. Suddenly a ledge of eroded rock crumbled beneath him. Rock fragments tumbled into the water, quickly followed by Woodsmoke’s hind legs. He scrabbled at the rocky ground with his trunk and feet, but the crumbling rock offered little purchase. The calf slid into the freezing water until he was submerged save for his head and forelegs.

He trumpeted, his hair floating in the water around him.

The mammoths came running, water dribbling out of their mouths.

Breeze and Autumn fell to their knees beside the calf. They reached under his belly to lift him out with their trunks. Icebones and Spiral hurried to help — but the calf was too heavy to lift out, and it was impossible to get a purchase on his soaked, slippery hair. As they struggled, the calf’s high-pitched bellows echoed from the rocky land around them.

At last Autumn ordered the others back. Carefully she looped her trunk around Woodsmoke’s neck, and drew him toward the pond’s shallower end. When the water was shallow enough for his hind feet to touch the pond bed, he quickly clambered out.

The calf shook himself to rid his fur of stinking pond scum, and his mother hurried close to nuzzle him. But he was frightened and angry. "Why are we in this horrible place? Why don’t we go back to the valley? There was water and stuff to eat…" The mammoths rumbled in unison, seeking to reassure him and persuade him to continue.

Autumn growled to Icebones, "He thinks we were safe in the Gouge. He can’t see that the world is changing, because it has not changed while he is alive. He thinks it will be the same forever."

Icebones, disturbed by the incident, wondered if that was true. What if she hadn’t emerged so suddenly from her mysterious Sleep? What if she didn’t have her memories of the Island and the Old Steppe, of such a very different time and place? Would she even perceive the changes from which she was fleeing — and which had already cost these mammoths so much?

And as the featureless days wore away, and the mammoths grew steadily more weary and cold and hungry and thirsty, darker doubts gathered.

It seemed audacious, absurd, for her to lead her mammoths across this high, silent, dead place. Perhaps it was simpler to suppose that the fault lay in her own head and heart, and not in the world around her. Perhaps she was leading these mammoths — not to salvation — but to their doom.

But then she would think of the dried mud and bones around the ponds of the Gouge, and the wide salt flats that bordered the Ocean of the North. This world was indeed changing for the worse — she was right — and she must continue to confront that truth, and she must gather her strength of body and mind, and work to bring these mammoths to safety, as best she knew how.

One evening, as the dark drew in, Icebones hauled her weary legs up the shallow rim of yet another crater. She was limping, favoring her damaged shoulder, where pain still stabbed.

She reached the summit of a low, eroded rim mountain — and found herself facing a surface so smooth and flat she wondered briefly if it might be liquid water. But her nostrils were full of the tang of red dust. And as she looked more closely she saw rippling dunes, like frozen waves, and sharp-edged boulders littered here and there. There was no motion, no ripple, no scudding wave: this was a lake of dust, not water, and a faint disappointment tugged at her.

Thunder stood beside her. "How strange. The other wall of this crater is buried."

Icebones saw that it was true. The smooth, flat lake of crimson dust washed away to the south, submerging the crater’s far wall. Perhaps this crater had formed on a slope, and had been partly buried when the dust gathered. Further away she saw fragmentary ridges and arcs poking out of the dust field: bits of more drowned craters. But the dust sea did not extend far. Beyond the submerged craters was more of the broken, jumbled, very ancient landscape they had become used to.

She raised her trunk and sniffed the air. It was dry, cold, and it smelled of nothing but iron dust: no moisture, no life. "This raised ridge is not a good place to find water."

"We need rest," Thunder sighed. "Rest and peace, even more than we need food. Let us stay here until morning, Icebones."

Icebones understood: at least here on the ridge no walls of rock loomed around them. Under an open, empty sky, creatures of the steppe could rest easy, if hungrily. "You are right," she said. "We should call the others."

Night fell quickly here. Shadows fled across the broken land, and pools of blackness grew and merged, as if a tide of dark was rising all around them. The stars burned hard in the blackness, not disturbed by a wisp of mist or a scrap of cloud, and the silence stretched out into the dark, huge and complete, as if concealing greater secrets.

A mammoth broke from the group and padded to the edge of the crater-rim ridge. Though Thunder was just black on black, a shadow in the night, Icebones could smell him.

Trying not to disturb the others, who were clustered around the snoring calf, Icebones followed him.

Thunder held his trunk high in the air, peering over the dust-flooded crater. She stood beside him, trunk raised and ears spread, listening.

…And now she thought she heard a thin, high scraping, like the scrabbling paw of some tiny animal, coming from the surface of the dust sea. It was very soft, so quiet she would never have noticed it if not for the high, lifeless stillness of this place. But in the silent dark it was as loud to her as the bark of a wolf.

The scratching vanished.

Then it returned, a little further away.

She rumbled, "Perhaps it is a lemming."

Thunder said bluntly. "No lemming hops from place to place over great bounds as this invisible scratcher does."

The two mammoths waited on the ridge, side by side, as the night wore away, and the invisible scratcher drifted, seemingly at random, around the dust bowl.

And when the first bruised-purple light began to seep into the eastern sky, they saw it.

An immense sac hovered in the air, just above the dust. It was like the skin of some huge fruit. At first it was pitch black, silhouetted against the dawn sky. It trailed a tendril, more pliant than the branch of a willow, that coiled on the ground like the trunk of a resting mammoth. But as the sac drifted, the trailing tendril scraped along the ground, making the scratching noise she had heard.

Thunder said, "Is it a bird?"

"It’s no bird I ever saw. Look, it has no wings, although it flies… I think it is floating like the feathers of a molting goose, or as seeds are blown on the breeze."

"What mighty tree will grow when that vast seed falls?"

Now pale dawn light diffused over the dust pool and shone into the heart of the sac, making it glow from within, pink and gray. The floating thing was made of some smooth shining translucent substance, Icebones saw, but it was slack and loose, like the skin around the eyes of a very old mammoth. And its trailing tendril dragged something knotty and silver across the dust, exploring like a trunk, leaving a shallow trench.

Now that the light was striking the sac it was starting to swell and rise, its surface unfolding with a slow, rustling languor. The silver knot scraped over the dust as the tendril slowly uncoiled.

"Perhaps it rises in the day and flies on the wind," Icebones mused. "And then it sinks at night and scrapes its silver fruit on the ground."

"But it has no bones or head," said Thunder. "It cannot choose where it travels, as a mammoth can. It is blown on the wind. What does it travel for? What is it hoping to find?"

Icebones blew dust out of her trunk. "That we will never know—"

The sea’s placid surface erupted before them. Dunes flowed and disintegrated. A great black cylinder rose, and dust fell away with a soft rustle all around.

Icebones stumbled back, and she made to trumpet a warning. But so profound was her shock at this sudden apparition that her throat and trunk seemed to freeze. And besides, what warning could she give.

The cylinder of black-red flesh, twisting out of the dust, was crusted with hard segmented plates. At its apex was a nostril, or mouth: a pit, black as night, lined with six inward-pointing teeth. Dust was falling into that gaping maw, but whatever immense creature lay beneath the surface seemed indifferent. The great mouth folded around the lower portion of the floating sac. Huge, sharp teeth meshed together with a noise like rock on rock, and the sac’s fabric was ground apart effortlessly.

Then the vast pillar twisted and fell back into the dust. It sank quickly out of sight, dragging half the sac and the trailing cable with it.

There were no ripples or waves. The dust ocean was immediately still, with only a new pattern of dunes left to show where the beast had been. The severed upper half of the sac drifted away, tumbling, on breezes that were gathering strength in the morning air.

For heartbeats the two mammoths stood side by side, saying nothing, stunned.

"It was a beast," said Thunder fervently.

"Like a worm. Or a snake."

"Do you think the Lost brought it here from the Old Steppe?"

"I don’t think it has anything to do with the Lost, Thunder. Did it smell of the Lost — or any animal you know? Did you see its teeth?"

"They were very sharp and long."

"But it had six: six teeth, set in a ring." Just as the footprints she saw in the ancient outflow channel had had six toes. Just as the creatures buried in the rock floor of the Nest of the Lost had six leaves and limbs and petals…

She stepped forward, sniffing the chill, thin mist pooling over the flooded crater. "I think our sand worm was here long before the coming of the Lost." Surviving in the dust, where creatures of water and air froze and died as the world cooled — perhaps sleeping away countless years, as the tide of life withdrew from the red rock of the world, waiting patiently until chance brought it a morsel of water or food… "Perhaps the Lost never even knew it was here," she said.

"If they had known they would probably have tried to kill it," said Thunder mournfully. "We should not seek to cross this dust pool."

"No," said Icebones. "No, we shouldn’t do that."

Now the other mammoths were starting to wake. The dawn was filled with the soft sounds of yawns and belches, and the rumbling of half-empty guts.

Icebones and Thunder rejoined their Family.

2 The Blood Weed

The land, folded and cracked and cratered, continued to rise inexorably. There was no water save for occasional patches of dirty, hard-frozen ice, and the rocks were bare even of lichen and mosses. The sky was a deep purple-pink, even at noon, and there was never a cloud to be seen.

Icebone’s shoulder ached with ice-hard clarity, all day and all night. She limped, favoring the shoulder. But over time that only caused secondary aches in the muscles of her legs and back and neck. And if she ever overexerted herself she paid the price in racking, wheezing breaths, aching lungs, and an ominous blackness that closed around her vision.

One day, she thought grimly, that fringe would close completely, and once more she would be immersed in cold darkness — just as she had been before setting foot on this crimson plain — but this time, she feared, it was a darkness that would never clear.

It was a relief for them all when they crested a ridge and found themselves looking down on a deeply incised channel. For the valley contained a flat plain that showed, here and there, the unmistakable white glitter of ice.

Woodsmoke trumpeted loudly. Ignoring his mother’s warning rumbles, the calf ran pell-mell down the rocky slope, scattering dust and bits of loose rock beneath his feet. He reached the ice and began to scrape with his stubby tusks.

The others followed more circumspectly, testing the ground with probing trunk tips before each step. But Thunder was soon enthusiastically spearing the ice with his tusks. More hesitantly, Spiral and Breeze copied him.

Icebones recalled how she had had to show the mammoths how water could be dug out from beneath the mud. To Woodsmoke, born during this great migration, it was a natural thing, something he had grown up with. And perhaps his calves, learning from him, would approach the skill and expertise once enjoyed by the mammoths of her Island.

Icebones longed to join in, but knew she must conserve her strength. To her shame the weakness of the Matriarch had become a constant unspoken truth among the mammoths.

Alone, she walked cautiously onto the ice.

The frozen lake stretched to the end of the valley. To either side red-brown valley walls rose up to jagged ridges. The ice itself, tortured by wind and sunlight, was contorted into towers, pinnacles, gullies and pits, like the surface of a sea frozen in an instant. Heavily laced with dust and bits of rock, the ice was stained pale pink, and the color was deepened by the cold salmon color of the sky; even here on the ice, as everywhere else on these High Plains, she was immersed in redness.

Soon Thunder trumpeted in triumph, "I am through!"

He had dug a roughly circular pit in the ice. The pit, its walls showing the scrape of mammoth tusks, was filled with dirty green-brown water.

All of them hesitated, for by now they had absorbed many Cycle lessons about the dangers of drinking foul water.

At least I can do this much for them, Icebones thought. "I will be first," she said.

With determination she stepped forward and lowered her trunk into the pit. The water was ice cold and smelled stale. Nevertheless she sucked up a trunkful and, with resolution, swallowed it. She said, "It is full of green living things. But I think it is good for us to drink." And she took another long, slow trunkful, as was her right as Matriarch.

Defying Family protocol, as calves often would, Woodsmoke hurried forward, knelt down on the gritty ice, and was next to dip his trunk into the ragged hole. But he could not reach, and he squeaked his frustration.

Autumn brushed him aside and dipped her own mighty trunk into the hole. She took a luxurious mouthful, chewing it slightly and spitting out a residue of slimy green stuff. Then she took another trunk’s load and carefully dribbled the water into Woodsmoke’s eager mouth.

After that, the others crowded around to take their turn.

When they had all drunk their fill, Thunder returned to his pit. He knelt down and reached deep into the water. Icebones could see the big muscles at the top of his trunk working as he explored. The modest pride in his bearing was becoming, Icebones thought. He was growing into a fine Bull, strong in body and mind.

With an effort, he hauled out a mass of slimy green vegetation. He dumped it on the ice. It steamed, rapidly frosting over. He shook his trunk to rid it of tendrils of green murk. "This is what grows beneath the ice," he said. "I could feel sheets of it, waving in the water like the skirt of some drowned mammoth. I think the sheets are held together by that revolting mucus."

Spiral probed at the mat with her trunk, the tense posture of her body expressing exquisite disgust. "We cannot eat this," she said.

Autumn growled, "You will if you have to."

"No, Spiral is right," Icebones said. "If we are driven to eat this green scum, it will be because we are starving — and we are not that yet." She sniffed the air. It was not yet midday. "We will stay here today and tonight, for at least we can drink our fill."

The mammoths fanned out over the valley, probing at the ice, seeking scraps of food in the wind-carved rock of the walls.

Icebones came to an odd pit in the ice, round and smooth-sided.

She probed into the pit — it was a little wider than her trunk — and she found, nestling at the bottom, a bit of hard black rock. When she dug out the rock and set it on the surface, it felt a little warmer than the surrounding ice. Perhaps it was made warmer than the sun, and that way melted its tunnel into the ice surface, at last falling through to the water beneath, and settling to the lake’s dark bed.

She found more of the pits, each of them plunging straight down into the ice. The smaller the stone, the deeper the pit it dug. Driven by absent curiosity she pulled out the rocks wherever she could. Perhaps the rocks would start to dig new pits from where she had set them down, each in its own slow way. And perhaps some other curious mammoth of the future would wonder why some pits had stones in them, and some were empty.

Close to one valley wall she found a stand of squat trees. They had broad roots, well-founded in frozen mud, and their branches were bent over, like a willow’s, so that they clung to the rock wall. But the fruit they bore was fat and black and leathery.

They were breathing trees.

She began to pull the leathery fruit off the low, clinging branches. She recalled how the Ragged One had shown her how to extract a mouthful of air from those thick-coated fruit. Each charge of air was invigorating but disappointingly brief, and afterwards her lungs were left aching almost as hard as before.

Thunder called her with a deep rumble. He was standing on the shore’s frozen mud, close to a line of low mounds. She left the trees and walked slowly over to him.

The mud was dried and hardened and cracked. She could see how low ridges paralleled the lake’s ragged shore: water marks, where the receding lake had churned up the mud at its rim.

She pointed this out to Thunder. "It is a sign that the lake has been drying for a long time."

"Yes," he growled. "And so is this." He swept his tusks through one of the mounds. It was just a heap of rocks, she saw, with larger fragments making a loose shell over smaller bits of rubble. But its shape had been smoothly rounded, and inside there were bits of yellow skin that crumbled when Thunder probed at them. "I think this mound was made in the lake."

She tried to pick up a fragment of one skin-like flake. It crumbled, and it was dry, flavorless. "Perhaps this was once alive. Like the mats you found under the ice."

"The lake is dying, Icebones. Soon it will be frozen to its base, and then the ice will wear away, and there will be nothing left — nothing but rock, and dried-up flakes like this."

They walked a little further, following the muddy shore.

In one place the lake bank was shallow, and easily climbed. Icebones clambered up that way. The land beyond was unbroken, harsh. But it was scarred by something hard and shining that marched from one horizon to the other: glimmering, glowing, an immense straight edge imposed on the world.

Icebones and Thunder approached cautiously. "It is a fence," he said.

"A thing of the Lost."

"Yes. A thing to keep animals out — or to keep them in."

That made no sense to Icebones. The land beyond the fence seemed just as empty and desolate as the land on this side of it. There was nothing to be separated, as far as she could see.

Thunder probed the fence with his tusk. Icebones saw that it was a thing of shining thread, full of little holes. The holes were too small to pass a trunk tip through, but she could see through the fence to what lay beyond.

And what she saw there was bones: a great linear heap of them, strewn at the base of the fence.

The mammoths walked further, peering up and down the fence, trying to touch the bones through the mesh.

"I don’t think any of them are mammoth," Icebones said.

Thunder said tightly, "The animals could smell the water. They couldn’t get through the fence. But they couldn’t leave; the world was drying, and they couldn’t get away from that maddening smell."

"So they stayed here until they died."

"Yes." And he barged the fence with his forehead, ramming it until a section of it gave way. Then he tramped it flat into the dust.

But there were no animals to come charging through in search of water; nothing but the dust of bones rose up in acknowledgment of his strength.

She tugged his trunk, making him come away.

From the lake came a soft crushing sound, a muffled trumpet.

The mammoths whirled.

Icebones looked first for the calf: there he was, safely close by his mother’s side, though both Breeze and Woodsmoke were standing stock-still, wary.

But of Autumn there was no sign.

Ignoring the pain in her straining lungs, Icebones hurried stiffly onto the ice. "Where is she? What happened?"

"I don’t know," Breeze called. "She was at the far side of the lake, seeing clearer water. And then—"

"Keep the calf safe."

Thunder immediately began to charge ahead.

Icebones grabbed his tail and, with an effort, held him back. "We may all be in danger. Slowly, Thunder."

He growled, but he said, "Lead, Matriarch."

Trying to restrain her own impatience, Icebones led Thunder and Spiral across the frozen lake, step by step, exploring the complex red-streaked surface with her trunk tip.

She heard a low rumble.

She stopped, listening. The others had heard it too. With more purpose now, but with the same careful step-by-step checking, the three mammoths made their way toward the source of the call.

At last they came to a wide pit, dug or melted into the ice. And here they found Autumn.

She lay on her side, as if asleep. But her body was covered with broad streaks of blood red, as if she had been gouged open by the claws of some huge beast. Her face, too, was hidden in redness, from her mouth to the top of her trunk.

"She is bleeding!" cried Spiral. "She is dead! She is dead!" Her wails echoed from the high rock walls of the valley.

But Icebones could see that Autumn’s small amber eyes were open, and they were fixed on Icebones: intelligent, angry, alert.

Icebones reached down and touched one of the bloody streaks with her trunk. This was not broken flesh. Instead she found a cold, leathery surface that gave when she pushed it, like the skin of a ripe fruit.

"This is a plant," she said. "It has grabbed onto Autumn, the way a willow tree grabs onto a rock." She knelt and leaned into the pit. She stabbed at the plant with her tusk, piercing it easily.

Crimson liquid gushed out stickily, splashing her face. The tendril she had pierced pulled back, the spilled fluid already freezing over.

The plant closed tighter around Autumn, and the Cow groaned.

Spiral touched Icebones’s dirtied face curiously and lifted her trunk tip to her mouth. "It is blood."

Thunder growled, "What manner of plant has blood instead of sap? What manner of plant attacks a full-grown mammoth?"

"She cannot breathe," Icebones said. "She will soon die…" She reached down and began to stab, carefully and delicately, at the tendrils wrapped over Autumn’s mouth. More of the bloody sap spurted. But the plant’s grip tightened on Autumn’s body, as the trunk of a mammoth closes on a tuft of grass, and Icebones heard the ominous crack of bone.

At last she got Autumn’s mouth free. The older Cow took deep, gasping breaths. "My air," she said now. "It sucks out my air! Get it off. Oh, get it off…"

Icebones and Thunder began to stab and pry at the bloody tendrils. The eerie blood-sap pumped out and spilled into the pit, and soon their tusks and the hair on their faces were soaked with the thick crimson fluid. But wherever they cut away a tendril more would come sliding out of the mass beneath Autumn — and with every flesh stab or slice the tendrils tightened further.

"Enough," Icebones said. She straightened up and, with a bloodstained trunk, pulled Thunder back.

Woodsmoke stood with Breeze a little way away from the pit. He trumpeted in dismay. "You aren’t going to let her die."

It struck Icebones then that Woodsmoke had never seen anybody die. She wiped her bloody trunk on the ice, then touched the calf’s scalp. "We can’t fight it, little one. If we hurt the blood weed it hurts Autumn more."

"Then find some way to get it off her without hurting it."

Thunder rumbled, from the majesty of his adolescence, "When you grow up you’ll learn that sometimes there are only hard choices, calf—"

But Icebones shouldered him aside, her mind working furiously. "What do you mean, Woodsmoke? How can we get the weed to leave Autumn alone?"

Woodsmoke pondered, his little trunk wrinkling. "Why does it want Autumn?"

"We think it is stealing her breath."

"Then give it something it wants more than Autumns breath. I like grass," he said. "But I like saxifrage better. If I see saxifrage I will leave the grass and take the saxifrage…"

Icebones turned to thunder. "What else could we offer it?"

Thunder said, "Another mammoth’s breath. My breath Icebones, if you wish it—"

"No," she said reluctantly. "I don’t want to lose anybody else. But what else…?"

Even as she framed the notion herself, Thunder trumpeted excitedly. "The breathing trees," they shouted together.

"Get the fruit," said Icebones. "You and Spiral. You are faster than I am. Go."

Without hesitation the two young mammoths lumbered over the folded ice toward the breathing trees, where they clung to the lake’s rocky shore.

Autumn moaned again. "Oh, it hurts… I am sorry…"

"Don’t be sorry," said Woodsmoke mournfully.

"It is my fault," Autumn gasped. "The plant lay over the pit. It was a neat trap… I did not check… I walked across it without even thinking, and when I fell, it wrapped itself around me… Oh! It is very tight on my ribs…"

"Don’t talk," said Icebones. Her voice lapsed into a wordless, reassuring rumble. Breeze joined in, and even Woodsmoke added his shallow growl.

Perhaps the pit had been melted into the ice by a stone, Icebones thought. Perhaps the blood weed, driven by some dark red instinct, had learned to use such pits as a trap. And it waited, and waited…

Autumn lay still, her eyes closed, her breath coming in thin, hasty gasps. But Icebones could see that the blood weed was covering her mouth once more.

This blood weed, like the breathing tree, was a plant of the cold and airlessness of the desiccated heights of this world. It was as alien to her as the birds of the air or the worms that crawled in lake-bottom mud — and yet it killed.

"…We got it! We got it, Icebones!" Thunder and Spiral came charging across the ice. Thunder bore in his trunk the top half of a breathing tree, spindly black branches laden with the strange dark fruit. He threw the tree down on the ice, close to the pit. "Now what?"

Icebones grabbed a fruit with her trunk, lowered it into the pit, and, with a determined squeeze, popped it over the prone body of Autumn.

A little gust of fog bursts from the fruit.

The tendrils of the blood weed slithered over the mammoth’s hair. Autumn gasped, as if the pressure on her ribs was relieved a little. But the weed had not let go, and already the fruit’s air had dissipated.

"More," said Icebones. "Thunder, hold the tree over the pit."

So Thunder held out the broken branches while Spiral, Icebones and Breeze all worked to pluck and pop the fat fruits.

With every brief gust of air the agitation of the weed increased. But they were soon running out of fruit, and Autumn’s eyes were rolling upwards. Icebones growled, despairing.

And then, quite suddenly, the weed slid away from Autumn. With an eerie sucking noise its tendrils reached up, like blood-gorged worms, to the dark breathing-tree branches above it.

"Let it have the branches, Thunder! But keep hold of the root—"

The weed knotted itself around the branches, moving with a slow, slithering, eerie stealth.

When the last of its tendrils had slid off Autumn’s prone form, Spiral and Thunder hurled the tree as hard and as far as they could. The tangle of branches went spinning through the thin air, taking the crimson mass of the weed with it. Its blood-sap leaked in a cold rain that froze as soon as it touched the ice.

3 The Ice Mammoths

They were suspended in dense, eerie silence — not a bird cry, not the scuffle of a lemming or the call of a fox — nothing but bright red rock and purple sky and six toiling mammoths.

There was nothing to eat, nothing to drink.

All of them were gaunt now, their hair thinning. Their ribs and shoulder blades and knees stuck out of their flesh, and their bony heads looked huge, as if they were gaining wisdom, even as their bodies shriveled.

And day after day wore away.

They came to another lake, much smaller. They walked down to it, slow and weary.

This time the water was frozen down to its base. The ice was worn away — not melted, but sublimated: over the years the ice had evaporated without first turning to water. The mammoths ground at this stone-hard deeply cold stuff, seeking crushed fragments they could pop into their mouths.

Around the lake they found scraps of vegetation. But the trees were dead, without leaves, and their trunks were hollowed out, and the grass blades broke easily in trunk fingers, dried out like straw.

Thunder, frustrated, picked up a rock and slammed it against another. Both rocks broke open with sharp cracks.

Icebones explored the expose surfaces, sniffing. There was green in the rock, she saw: a thin layer of it, shading to yellow-brown, buried a little way inside the rock itself, following the eroded contours of its surface. Perhaps it was lichen, or moss. The green growing things must shelter here, trapping sunlight and whatever scraps of water settled on the rock. But when Icebones scraped out some of the green-stained rock with a tusk tip, she found nothing but salty grains that ground against her molars, with not a trace of water or nourishment.

She flung away the rock. She felt angry, resentful at being reduced to scraping at a bit of stone. And then she felt a twinge of shame at having destroyed the refuge of this tiny, patient scrap of life.

The lake was fringed by dried and cracked mud. Walking there, Icebones found herself picking over the scattered and gnawed bones of deer, bison, lemmings, and horses, and they spoke to her of the grisly story that had unfolded here.

But there was hope, she saw. Some footprints in the mud led away from the deadly betrayal of the pond and off to the south, before vanishing into the red dust. Perhaps some instinct among these frightened, foolish animals had guided them the way Icebones knew the mammoths must travel, to the deep sanctuary of the Footfall.

Exploring the mud with her trunk tip, Icebones found one very strange set of prints. They were round, like mammoth footprints, but much smaller and smoother. These creatures had come here after the rest had died off, for bits of bone were to be found crushed into the strange prints. And, here and there, these anonymous visitors had dug deep holes — like water holes, but deeper than she could reach with her trunk.

She noticed Spiral. The tall Cow was standing alone on the ice at the edge of the lake, her trunk tucked defensively under her head. She was gazing at a brown, shapeless lump that lay huddled on the rock shore.

Thunder stood by her, wrapping his trunk over Spiral’s head to comfort her.

Spiral said, "I was working the ice. I didn’t even notice that at first. It doesn’t even smell…"

That was a dead animal. It was a goat, Icebones thought — or rather it had once been a goat, for it was clearly long dead. It lay on its back, its head held up stiffly into the air as if it was staring at the sky. Its skin seemed to be mostly intact, even retaining much of its hair, but it was drawn tight over bones and lumpy flesh. The goat’s mouth was open. The skin of its face had drawn back, exposing the teeth and a white sheet of jaw bone.

The goat had even kept its eyes. Exposed by the shrinking-back of its skin, the eyeballs were just globes of yellow-white, with a texture like soft fungus.

"It must have lost its way," said Thunder gently.

"It died here," said Icebones. "But there are no wolves or foxes or carrion birds to eat its flesh. Not even the flies which feast on the dead. And its body dried out."

Spiral prodded the corpse with her spiraling tusks. It shifted and rocked, rigid, like a piece of wood. "Will we finish up dried out and dead like this? And then who will Remember us?"

"We are not lost," Thunder growled. "We are not goats. We are mammoth. We will find the way."

They stayed a day and a night at the pond, gnawing at bitter ice.

Then they moved on.

They frequently came across blood weed.

It was difficult to spot. The weed gave off little odor, and its blood-red color almost exactly matched the harsh crimson of the underlying rock and dust — which was probably no accident.

The mammoths found bits of bone, cleansed of flesh, in the weeds’ traps, but all such traces were old. Even the weeds had not fed or drunk for a long time. Icebones wondered if these plants could last forever, waiting for the occasional fall of unwary migrant animals into their patient maws.

Icebones came across a new kind of plant, nestled in a hollow. It was like a flower blossom, cupped like an upturned skull, and its tight-folded petals were waxy and stiff. The whole thing was as wide as a mammoth’s footprint, and about as deep. A sheet of some shining, translucent substance coated the top of the blossom, sealing it off. Under the translucent sheet Icebones thought she saw a glint of green.

Cautiously she popped the covering sheet with the tip of her tusk. The sheet shriveled back, breaking up into threads that dried and snapped. A small puff of moisture escaped, a trace of water that instantly frosted on the petals. A spider scuttled at the base of the blossom.

Icebones scraped off the frost eagerly and plunged her moist trunk tip into her mouth. It was barely a trace, but it tasted delicious, reviving her spirit a great deal more than it nourished her body. She picked the flower apart and chewed it carefully. Despite that trace of green there was little flavor or nourishment to be had, and she spat it out.

She called the others, and they soon found more of the plants.

Each plant sheltered spiders, which made the moisture-trapping lids that allowed the green hearts of the plants to grow. So each flower was like a tiny Family, she thought, spiders and plant working together to keep each other alive.

It was Thunder who came up with the best way to use the flowers. He opened his mouth wide and pushed the whole plant in lid first. Then he bit to pop the lid, and so was able to suck down every bit of the trapped moisture. But he had to scrape off bits of spiderweb that clung to his mouth and trunk, and Icebones saw spiders scrambling away into his fur.

Spiral made a hoot of disgust. "Eating spiderweb. How disgusting."

Icebones found another plant and, deliberately, plucked it and thrust it into her mouth. "Spiders won’t kill you. Thirst will. You will all do as Thunder does—"

Suddenly Thunder stood tall, trunk raised, his small ears spread.

The others froze in their tracks — every one of them, flighty Spiral, Autumn with her aching ribs, Breeze with her scored back, even restless, growing, ever-hungry. Woodsmoke, as still as if they had been shaped from the ancient rock itself. Icebones found a moment to be proud of them, for a disciplined silence, vital to any prey animal, was a characteristic of a well-run Family.

And then she heard what had disturbed Thunder. It was a scraping, as if something was digging deep into the ground.

"But," Autumn murmured, "what kind of animal makes burrowing noises like that?"

Thunder said, "There is a crater rim ahead. It hides us from the source of the noise. I will go ahead alone, and—"

"No, brave Thunder. We are safer together." Icebones stepped toward the crater ridge. "Let’s go, let’s go."

The other mammoths quickly formed up behind her. They climbed the shallow, much-eroded crater rim.

Icebones paused when she got to the rim’s flattened top, her trunk raised.

In the crater basin, heavy heads lifted slowly.

Thunder pealed out a bright trumpet. He hurried forward, scattering dust and bits of rock. Icebones, more warily, clambered down the slope, keeping her trunk raised.

Mammoths — at least that was her first impression. They were heavy, dark, hairy creatures, spread over the basin. She saw several adults — Cows? — clustered together around a stand of breathing trees, digging at the roots. A black-faced calf poked its head out through the dense hairs beneath its mother’s belly, curious like all calves. Further away there were looser groupings of what she supposed were Bulls.

As Thunder approached, the Cows lifted their trunks out of the holes they had dug. Their trunks were broad but very long, longer than any adult mammoth Icebones had met before. Their tusks were short and stubby. They huddled closer together, the adults forming a solid phalanx before the stand of trees.

They looked like mammoths. They behaved as mammoths might. But they did not smell like mammoths. And as Icebones worked her way down the slope, her sense of unease deepened.

Woodsmoke had wandered away from his mother. Two calves peered at him from a forest of thick black hair. The adults watched him suspiciously, but no mammoth would be hostile to a calf, however strange. Soon Woodsmoke had locked his trunk around a calf’s trunk, and was tugging vigorously.

Icebones announced clearly, "I am Icebones, daughter of Silverhair. Who is Matriarch here?"

The strange mammoths rumbled, heads nodding and bodies swaying, as if in confusion.

At length a mammoth stepped forward. "My name is Cold-As-Sky. I do not know you. You are not of our Clan."

Cold-As-Sky was about Icebones’s size, as round and solid as a boulder. Her hair was black and thick. There was a thick ridged brow on her forehead, sheltering small orange eyes. She had a broad hump on her back, and when she took a breath, deep and slow, that hump swelled up, as if she carried a second set of lungs there. Her long trunk lay thickly coiled on the rock at her feet. Her voice was as deep as the ground’s own songs.

Icebones stepped forward tentatively. "We have come far."

"You are not like us."

"No," Icebones said sadly. "We are not like you." As unlike, in a different way, as the Swamp-Mammoths had been unlike Icebones and her Family. "And yet we are Cousins. You speak the language of Kilukpuk."

Just as Chaser-Of-Frogs had reacted to the ancient name, so Cold-As-Sky looked briefly startled. But her curiosity was soon replaced by her apparently customary hostility. "We speak as we have always spoken."

Her language, in fact, was indistinct. This Ice Mammoth spoke only with the deep thrumming of her chest and belly, omitting the higher sounds, the chirrups and snorts and mewls a mammoth would make with her trunk and throat. But her voice, deep and vibrant, would carry easily through the rocks, Icebones realized. This was a mammoth made for this high cold place, where the air was thin, and only rocks could be heard.

Cold-As-Sky said now, "You call yourself my Cousin. What are you doing here? Do you intend to steal my air trees?"

Air trees — breathing trees? "No," said Icebones wearily. "But we are hungry and thirsty."

"Go back to where you came from."

"We cannot go back," Thunder said.

Icebones stepped forward and reached out with her trunk. "We are Cousins."

Cold-As-Sky growled, but did not back away.

Icebones probed at the other’s face. That black hair was dense and slippery, and as cold as the rock beneath her feet. She finally found flesh, deep within the layers of hair. The flesh was cold and hard, and covered in fine, crisscross ridges. She pinched it with her trunk fingers. The other did not react — as if the flesh was without sensation, like scar tissue. The trunk itself was very wide and bulbous near the face, with vast black nostrils.

To her shock, Icebones saw that Cold-As-Sky’s trunk tip was lined with small white teeth. The teeth were set in a bony jaw, like a tiny mouth at the end of her trunk.

Cold-As-Sky’s mouth was a gaping blue-black cavern. Even her tongue was blue. Icebones touched that tongue now — and tasted water.

Cold-As-Sky growled again, pulling back. "Your trunk is hot and wet. You are a creature of the warmth and the thick air and the running water." Her immense trunk folded up, becoming a fat, stubby tube. "This is not your place."

Icebones’s anger battled with pride — and desperation. "I tasted water on your lips. Please, Cousin—"

"And you have water," Thunder said, stepping forward menacingly.

Cold-As-Sky snorted contempt, a hollow sound which echoed from the recesses of vast sinuses, "If you want water, take it. Come." And she turned and began to push her way through the solid wall her Family had made.

Wary, Icebones followed, with Thunder at her side.

They came to the stand of breathing trees. Icebones saw that the Ice Mammoths had burrowed into the hard rocky ground at their roots. One Cow was kneeling, her body a black ball of shining hair, and her trunk was stretched out, pushed deep into the ground.

Icebones probed into one of the holes with her own trunk. It was much deeper than she could reach. But, around its rim, she saw traces of frost.

Icebones imagined those strange trunk-tip teeth digging into the rock and permafrost, chipping bit by bit toward the water that lay far, far below. With such a long trunk, Icebones saw, mammoths could survive even in this frozen wasteland, where the water lay very deep indeed.

"If you want water," Cold-As-Sky said, "dig for it as we do."

Now Autumn walked up, grand, dignified, rumbling. "You can see that is impossible for us."

"Then you will go thirsty."

"You have calves," Autumn said harshly. "You are mammoth."

Cold-As-Sky flinched, and Icebones saw that the Oath of Kilukpuk, which demanded loyalty between Cousins, was not forgotten here.

But nevertheless Cold-As-Sky said, "Your calves are not my calves. Your kind has come this way before — a strange ragged-haired one, mumbling—"

Autumn said sharply, "She has been this way?"

Icebones said, "If you will not give us water, will you guide us? We are going south. We seek a great pit in the ground, where the warmth may linger."

"I have heard its song in the rocks." Cold-As-Sky stamped the ground and nodded her head. "You will fall into the pit and its rocks will cover you bones… if you ever reach it, for the way is hard."

"Which way?"

Cold-As-Sky turned to the southeast. Icebones looked, and felt the slow wash of echoes from the hard folded landscapes there.

"I can feel it," Thunder said, dismayed. "Broken land… Great chains of mountains… One crater rim after another… It will be the hardest we have encountered yet."

Autumn said grimly, "The Footfall of Kilukpuk made a mighty splash."

"No matter how difficult, that is our trail," said Icebones.

Woodsmoke had been playing with a calf of the Ice Mammoths, pulling at her trunk as if trying to drag the other out from the forest of her parents’ legs. Now Breeze pulled him away. Woodsmoke looked back regretfully to a small round face, a pair of wistful orange eyes.

Autumn said to Cold-As-Sky, "Why are you so hostile? We have done you no harm."

"This world was ours," growled Cold-As-Sky, her voice deep as thunder. "Once it was all like this. The blood weed and the air tree flourished everywhere, and there were vast Clans, covering the land… Then the warmth came, and you came. And we were forced to retreat to this hard, rocky land, where our calves fall into the pits of the blood weed. But now the warmth is dying, and you are dying with it. And soon I will walk on your bones, and the bones of your calves."

That strange perversion of the rite of Remembering made Icebones shudder. But she said, "We did not bring the warmth. We did not banish the cold. If you are hurt, we did not hurt you. We are your Cousins."

It seemed to Icebones that Cold-As-Sky was about to respond. But then she turned away, and the Ice Mammoths returned to their deep holes in the ground.

Icebones said, "Let’s go, let’s go." And, with one determined footstep after another, she began the steady plod toward the southeast, where distant mountains cast long jagged shadows.

4 The Dust

I know it is hard, little Icebones. But you have walked your mammoths around the world. And there is only a little further to go.

"But that last ‘little further’ may be the hardest of all, Boaster."

Don’t call me Boaster! Tell me about the land…

And she hesitated, for this land was like nothing she had experienced, either in her old life before the Sleep, or even here in this strange, cold world. For this land had been warped by the great impact which had created the Footfall of Kilukpuk itself.

She stood at the head of an ancient water-carved channel. The ground was broken into heaped-up fragments, as if the water, draining away, had left behind a vast underground cavern into which the land had collapsed. But the fallen rocks were very old, heavily pitted and eroded and covered with dust. And when the mammoths dug deeper into the ground they found it riddled with broad tunnels — but they were dry, hollowed out like ancient bones, as if the water that made them had long disappeared.

All around her there were hills, great clumps of them, grouped into chains like the wrinkles of an ancient mammoth. But the mountains were eroded to a weary smoothness, and they were extensively punctured and smashed by younger, smaller craters.

Thunder, his listening skills developing all the time, said he thought that around the central basin there were — not the single chain of rim mountains that surrounded most craters — five concentric rings of mountains, vast ripples in the rock thrown up by the giant primordial splash. Lacing through these rim-mountain chains were vast, shallow channels, apparently cut by water in the deep past. The channels themselves were covered in crater punctures, or pierced by sharper, litter-filled channels.

Around Icebones, the Family was rooting desultorily at the unpromising, hummocky ground. Icebones felt an unreasonable stab of impatience with this little group of gaunt, helpless mammoths.

She thought of the Clan gatherings Silverhair had told her of, when Families and bachelor herds would congregate on great green-waving steppes, so many mammoths they turned the air golden with their shining hair, and for days on end they would talk and fight and mate…

But such gatherings had been even before Silverhair’s time. This starving group was perhaps the only true mammoths in half a world, and Icebones knew she had no choice but to accept her lot.

Boaster rumbled softly, still waiting for her reply.

"It is a very old land, Boaster," she said at last. "And, like an old mammoth, it is ill-tempered when disturbed."

It is an old world, I think, much disturbed by the Lost.

But now Thunder was calling, his voice a deep uncomfortable growl.

"I must go. Graze well, Boaster."

And you, little Icebones…

Thunder was standing on a slight rise, staring to the south, trunk raised. She saw that wind, blowing from that direction, was ruffling the hair around his face. "Can you taste it?"

Peering south, she made out a hard black line that spread right along the horizon, separating the crimson land from the purple sky. The wind touched her face. It was harsh and gritty. She raised her trunk, exposing its sensitive tip. When she put the tip in her mouth she could taste iron.

"Dust," she said. "Like the storm in the Gouge."

"Yes. It is a storm, and it carries a vast cloud of dust. And it is coming toward us."

Icebones felt her strength dissipate, like water running into the dust. No more, she thought: we have endured enough.

"You are alert, Thunder. We rely on your senses."

But this time her praise made little impact, for his worry was profound.

The light grew muddled, as if the day itself was confused. Gradually the wind picked up, blustering in their faces and whipping dust devils before it.

The storm front grew into a towering hall, a curtain that was deep crimson-black at its base and a wispy pink-gray at the top, hanging from the sky like the guard hairs of some vast mammoth. Icebones could hear the crack and grumble of thunder, and the ragged wisps at the top of the sheet of air whipped and churned angrily. It was an awesome display of raw power.

Icebones had decided that the mammoths should not try to move. They were already badly weakened by hunger and thirst and cold. She tried to ensure they rested, gathering their energy, just as the storm did.

The mammoths had nothing to say to each other. They merely stood, bruised, dismayed, waiting for the storm to break on them.

There was a moment of stillness. Even the wind died briefly. Icebones could see her own shadow at her feet.

When she looked up she could see the sun. It shone fitfully through veils of black cloud and dust that raced across the sky, churning and thrashing.

And then the sun vanished, and the air exploded.

Gusts as hard as rock battered at Icebones’s face and legs and neck, and the dust they carried scoured mercilessly at her hair and exposed flesh. It was as if she was in a bubble inside the dust, a bubble that was flying sideways through the air. The sun showed only in glimpses between tall, scudding clouds, and lightning crackled far above her, casting deep purple glows through layers of cloud and dust.

She was immersed in vast layers of noise: the crack of thunder, the howl of the air over the rock, the relentless scraping of the dust. Her sound impressions broke up into chaotic shards. She lost her deep mammoth’s sense of the land, and she felt lost, bewildered.

And — unlike the storm they had endured in the Gouge — this wind was dry, as dry as the dust it carried, and it seemed to suck the moisture from her blood.

The mammoths were around her, and she felt the tension of their muscles as they fought the storm. But she knew she was burning her last reserves of strength just to stay standing against the pressure of the wind.

Autumn was beside her, trumpeting: "It will take half a day for this storm to wash over us, for it stretches deep into the southern lands."

"I did not imagine it could be so bad. If we stay here our bones will be worn to dust…"

"We must find shelter." That was Thunder, his Bull’s growl almost lost in the howl of the air. "There is a crater rim, some way to the south."

"We must try," Icebones said. "But how will we find it?"

"The storm comes from the south. If we head into it, we will find our ridge."

Autumn rumbled, "It is hard enough just to stand. To walk into that horror—"

"Nevertheless we must," Icebones said. "Thunder, you go first. The next in line grab his tail. If anyone loses hold we stop immediately. Thunder, you will not have to lead for long. We will take turns."

Thunder said, "I will endure—"

"We will do it the way I say. And be wary of the blood weed." Trying to project confidence, she trumpeted, "Let us begin. Let’s go, let’s go…"

To break their huddled formation, to expose themselves to the wind, was hard. No matter how she tucked her trunk under her face, no matter how tightly she squeezed shut her eyes, still the dust lashed at her as if it was a living thing, malevolent, determined to injure. The calf was deeply unhappy, trumpeting his discomfort into the wind, continually trying to push his way back under his mother’s guard hairs.

As if from a vast distance she heard Thunder’s thin, readying trumpet cry.

A few heartbeats later, Spiral began to move, her steady footsteps determined, her buttocks swaying. At the end of the line, Icebones, keeping a careful hold on Spiral’s tail, followed behind.

They walked into howling darkness. Icebones could tell nothing of the land around her, smell nothing but the harsh iron tang of the dust that clogged her nostrils and mouth. It was a shameful, selfish relief to shelter behind Spiral’s huge bulk.

Spiral stopped abruptly. Icebones’s head rammed into her thighs.

Icebones felt her way along the line to sniff out the problem.

It was the calf. Wailing, terrified, Woodsmoke had slumped to the ground.

With much cajoling and lifting by the strong trunks of Autumn and Icebones, Woodsmoke finally got to his feet. But Icebones could feel how uncertain his legs were, as weak as if he was a newborn again.

They managed only a few more steps before the calf collapsed once more.

Icebones had the mammoths form up into a wedge shape facing the storm, with one of the adults at the apex, and the calf and his mother sheltered at the rear.

"His strength is gone, Icebones," Breeze cried through the storm’s noise. "He is hungry and thirsty and I have no milk to give him. We must stay here with him until the storm is over."

"But," Thunder growled, "we cannot stay here. This foul dust sucks the last moisture out of my body."

"We can’t stay and we can’t go on," Spiral said. "What must we do, Matriarch?"

Battered by the storm’s violence, blinded, deafened, her own strength wearing down, Icebones knew how she must answer. And she knew that she must test her new Family’s resolve as it had not been tested before.

…But I am just Icebones, she thought desperately. I am little more than a calf myself. Who am I to inflict such pain on these patient, loyal, suffering mammoths? How do I know this is right? Oh, Silverhair, if only you were here!

But her mother was not here. And her course was clear. She was Matriarch. And, like generations of Matriarchs before her, she reached into the Cycle, the ancient wisdom of mammoths who had learned to survive.

"Autumn, Thunder — do you think we could reach the crater rim, if not for the calf?"

Thunder seemed baffled. "But we have the calf—"

"Just tell me."

"Yes. We are strong enough for that, Matriarch."

Icebones said gravely, "The mammoth dies, but mammoths live on."

Spiral understood first. She wailed, "Do you see what this monster is saying? She wants us to abandon the calf. We must go to the crater rim, and save ourselves, while he dies alone in the storm. Alone."

"No!" Breeze wrapped her trunk around her fallen calf.

Autumn spoke, and there was a huge, impressive sadness in her voice. "Daughter, you can bear other calves. Others who will grow strong, and continue the Family… You are more important than Woodsmoke, because of those other calves."

"Kilukpuk will care for him," said Icebones. "If a mammoth dies young, it is easy for him to throw off his coat of earth, and to play in the light of the aurora…"

"There is no aurora here," Spiral said bleakly.

"Would you sacrifice him, Icebones?" Breeze trumpeted. "Would you, mother, if this was your calf?"

The moment stretched, the tension between the mammoths palpable.

This was the crux, Icebones knew. And Autumn was the key. If Autumn maintained her resolve, then they would abandon the calf, and go on. And if she did not, they would all die, here in this screaming storm.

Autumn sighed, a deep rumble that carried through the storm. "No," she said at last. "No, I could not abandon my calf."

And Icebones, with a deep, failing regret, knew they were lost.

Breeze clutched her calf, and her sister came close, both of them stroking and reassuring the calf as best they could.

"I am sorry," Autumn said, huddling close to Icebones. "I did not have the strength. It is hard to be mammoth."

"Yes. Yes, it is hard."

"We have been toys of the Lost too long…"

"Let us huddle. Perhaps we will defeat this storm yet."

But she knew that wasn’t possible. And, from the tense, subdued postures of Autumn and Thunder beside her, she sensed they knew it too.

The continent-sized dust storm continued, relentless, cruel, oblivious to the mammoths’ despair.

The dust clogged her trunk and mouth, until she was as dry as a corpse. And still the storm went on, so dense she no longer knew if it was day or night. Perhaps she even slept a while, exhausted, her body battling the storm without her conscious control. I tried, Silverhair. But they just weren’t ready to be a Family — a true Family, able to face the hard truths as well as they easy ones…

No. I was not ready. I have failed.

But it hardly mattered now. After a few days, when they were reduced to scoured-clean bones, nobody would ever know what happened here.

She felt a new, hard form beside her. She turned sluggishly, trying to lift her trunk.

She sensed a stocky body, hair that was dense and slick, crimson against the storm’s dark light.

"You are Cold-As-Sky," she said, her voice thick with dust.

The other did not reply.

"There is no water here."

"No," said the Ice Mammoth, her voice somehow clear through the storm. "This land is very old. Even the deep-buried ice has sublimated away."

"But you live."

"But I live. I carry water in my throat, and in a hump on my back, enough to let me survive the longest dust storm."

"My trunk is clogged," Icebones said softly. "All I can taste is dust. Cousin, give me water."

Cold-As-Sky ignored her. "This is the truth of this world. This is how it was before the Lost came here. The planet itself is trying to kill you now. You are meant to die. Jut as we were meant to die. Did you know that?"

Icebones did not reply, wishing only that Cold-As-Sky would leave her alone with her blackness and despair.

But Cold-As-Sky went on, "It is true. The first of us who awoke found that all the world was like this high, broken plain. There were no soft green things, no pockets of thick wet air to clog the lungs… Only the clean rock and the red sky. And the only water was buried deep in the dust, where it should lie, where it is safe.

"And we were the only living things. We Ice Mammoths, and the blood weed, and the air trees, and the spider-flowers.

"Many calves died, gasping for air as they were born. But we endured. Slowly the trees made the air thicker, and slowly the spider-flowers captured the water. And we Ice Mammoths dug ancient water out of the ground, and broke up the rock with our tusks, and made the red dust rich with our dung.

"You call yourself a Matriarch. I was born knowing that word. And I was born knowing that we had no Matriarch to teach us, to show us how to dig the roots of the breathing trees, or to drink the blood of the weed. We had to learn it all, learn for ourselves. And every scrap of wisdom was earned at the cost of a life. What do you think of that? Where is your Kilukpuk now?"

Icebones, enduring, said nothing; the Ice Mammoth’s voice, low and harsh, was like the voice of the engulfing storm itself.

"The Lost were already here, huddling in caves. They had shining beetles that dug and crawled and crushed rock, and a great tusk in the sky that burned channels into the ground. But we were more important than any of that. We knew it. That is why the Lost made us, and put us here. We broke the land for them. And we had many calves, and we spread—"

"And you changed the world," said Icebones.

"Yes," Cold-As-Sky said bitterly. "Our tusks and our dung made the land ready for creatures like you, with your green plants we could not eat, and your thick wet air we could not even breathe… And with every scrap of land that was changed there was a little less room left for us. Many died — the old and the very young first — and each year there are fewer calves than the last…"

"I am sorry."

"You do not understand," Cold-As-Sky said bleakly. "It was our destiny to die. To make the land, and then die away, leaving it for you.

"But then the Lost flew off into the sky in their shining seeds.

"The green things started to blacken and die. The ponds of murky water sank back into the ground and froze over. The ancient cold returned. The dust was freed, and the world-spanning storms began again. And we touched each other’s mouths, and tasted hope for the first time in memory."

"And that is why we are dying," Icebones said.

"This is not your land. If you live, I die."

"We are Cousins, Calves of Kilukpuk," Icebones growled. "You know the Oath. Every mammoth is born with the Oath, just as she is born knowing the name of Kilukpuk, and the tongue she taught us. And so you know that if the Oath is broken, the dream of Kilukpuk will die at last… But enough. I am weary. I have come far, Cousin, and I am ready to die, if I must. Leave me."

And, as the dust swirled around her, it seemed she drifted into blankness once more, as if letting go of her hold on the world’s tail.

But then something probed at her mouth: a trunk, strong, leathery, cold. And water trickled into her throat.

She sucked at the trunk, like a calf at her mother’s breast. The water, ice cold, washed away the dust that had caked over her tongue.

But then, though her thirst still raged, she pushed the trunk away. "The calf," she gasped.

She sensed the vast bulk of the Ice Mammoth move off into the howling storm, seeking Woodsmoke.

5 The Footfall

Icebones breasted a ridge, exhausted, her shoulder a clear icicle of pain. She paused at the crest.

She saw that they had reached a place where the land descended sharply. A new vista opened up before her: a landscape sunk deep beneath the level of this high, broken plain. Within huge concentric systems of rock, she saw a puddle of green and water-blue.

It was a tremendous crater. It was the Footfall of Kilukpuk.

And, even from this high vantage, still suspended in the thin air, Icebones could hear the call of mammoths.

Eagerly, her breath a rattle in her throat, she walked on, step by painful step.

The Family climbed down through crumpled, eroded rim mountains.

On the horizon Icebones made out complex purple shadows that must be the rim walls on the far side of this great crater. They seemed impossibly far away. And the wall systems were extensively damaged. In one place a fire mountain towered from beyond the horizon, a vast, flat cone. The rim mountains before it were broken, as if rivers of rock had long ago washed them away and flooded stretches of the central plain. Further to the east the rim mountains were pierced by giant notches. They were valleys, perhaps, cut by immense floods. Everything here was ancient, Icebones realized: ancient and remade, over and over.

Plodding steadily, the mammoths left the terrain of the rim mountains. They reached a belt of land around the central basin itself, a hard red-black rock, folded and wrinkled into ridges and gullies and stubby isolated mesas.

Icebones could hear the broken song of the ground beneath her, feel the deep shattering it had endured, deep beyond the limits of her perception. But since it had formed, this ancient scar tissue had been crumpled and folded and eroded. Every rocky protrusion was carved and shaped by wind and rain, and dust was everywhere, heaped up against the larger rocks and ridges.

But even here they found stands of grass and struggling herbs and trees, and shallow ponds which were not frozen all the way to their base. Already the bony rockscape over which they had struggled for so long, with its killer weed and breathing trees and distorted, resentful Ice Mammoths, seemed a foul dream, and the habitual ache in Icebones’s chest began to fade.

After many days’ walking over this ridged plain, the mammoths at last reached the basin itself.

Quite suddenly, Icebones found herself stepping onto thick loam that gave gently under her weight. When she lifted her foot she could see how she had left a neat round print; the soil here was thick and dense with life.

All around her the green of living things lapped between crimson ridges and mesas, like a rising tide.

The mammoths fanned out over the soft ground, ripping eagerly at mouthfuls of grass, grunting their pleasure and relief.

This lowest basin was a cupped land, a secret land of hills and valleys and glimmering ponds. Icebones made out the rippling sheen of grass, herbivore herds which moved like brown clouds over the ground, and flocks of birds glimmering in the air. And, right at the center of the basin, there was an immense, dense forest, a squat pillar of dark brown that thrust out of the ground, huge indeed to be visible at this distance.

Here, all the ancient drama of impacts and rocks and water had become a setting for the smaller triumphs and tragedies of life.

Woodsmoke ran stiff-legged to the shore of a small lake where geese padded back and forth on ice floes. The mammoth calf went hurtling into the water, trumpeting, hair flying, splashing everywhere. The geese squawked their annoyance and rose in a cloud of rippling wings.

Icebones watched him, envying his vigor.

Woodsmoke, shaking water out of a cloud of new-sprouting guard hairs, ran to Breeze. The calf wrapped his trunk around his mother’s leg, a signal that he wished to feed. Welcoming, she lifted her leg, and he raised his trunk and clambered beneath her belly fur, seeking to clamp his mouth on her warm dug.

Icebones might have left him to die on the High Plains.

Warily she explored her own feelings. Woodsmoke’s death would have left a hole in her that would never have healed, she thought. But she knew, too, that it would have been right — that she would make the same decision again.

Autumn, more sedately, came to Icebones. "It is a good place. You were right, Icebones."

Together they walked back toward the foothills of the high rocky plain. At the fringe of the broad pool of steppe there was a stretch of mud, frozen hard and bearing the imprint of many vanished hooves and feet.

Icebones sniffed the air. "Yes. It is a good place. But look at this. Even here the tide of life is receding — even here, in the Footfall itself."

Autumn wrapped her trunk over Icebones’s. "We are exhausted, Icebones, and so are you. Tomorrow’s problems can wait until we are stronger. For today, enjoy the water and the grass and the sweet willow twigs."

"Yes," Icebones said. "You are wise, Autumn, as always—"

They heard a mammoth’s greeting rumble.

Immediately both Cows turned that way, trunks raised.

It was a Bull. He was walking out of the central steppe plain toward them. He was no youth like Thunder, but a mature Bull in the prime of his life, a pillar of muscle and rust-brown hair, with two magnificent tusks that curled before his face. He towered over Icebones — taller than any of the mammoths of her Family, taller than any mammoth she had ever encountered before her Sleep.

He gazed down at her, curious, excited. "…Icebones?" His voice was complex, like the voice of every mammoth, a mixture of trunk chirps and snorts, rumblings from his head and chest, and the stamping of his feet. But she recognized the deep undertones that had carried to her around half a world.

"Boaster — Boaster!"

Boaster pressed his forehead against hers. Icebones grasped his trunk and pulled at him this way and that. Then she let go, and they roared and bellowed and ran around each other until they could bump their rumps. Then they stood side by side, swaying, urinating and making dung urgently.

He touched her lips, and lifted his trunk tip to his mouth, tasting her. "It is indeed you, little Icebones."

"Littler than you imagined," she said dryly.

"Yes. But I am not." And he swung around, showing her what hung from his underbelly. "There. Isn’t that magnificent?"

She realized, awestruck, that he hadn’t been boasting after all… But she said, "You will always be Boaster to me."

He growled. "You are not in oestrus, little Icebones. Have I missed your flowering? Must I wait? Who took you — not that calf?"

Thunder rumbled. "I am no calf. Would you like me to prove it?" And he raised his tusks, challenging the huge Bull.

But Boaster ignored the challenge. He ran his trunk over the younger Bull’s head to test his temporal gland and his ears. "You need to do some filling out. But you are a fine, strong Bull. Some day our tusks will clash over a Cow. But not today." And, symbolically, he clicked his tusks against Thunder’s.

Thunder backed away, not displeased.

Now more Bulls followed Boaster, fanning out around the Family. Some of them trunk-checked Thunder. "Ah, Thunder. We have heard of you. The great bird killer!" "You are just skin and bones!" "What was it you bested — just a chick, or a full-grown duck?"

Thunder growled and threw his tusks threateningly. "It was a mighty bird whose wings darkened the sky, and whose beak could have cut out your flimsy heart in a moment, weakling…" And he launched into the story of his battle with the skua, only a little elaborated. Gradually the other Bulls drifted closer, at first rumbling and snorting their skepticism, but growing quieter and more respectful as he developed his tale.

Autumn walked up to Icebones. "He will have to defend the reputation he makes for himself. He is not among calves now."

"He is a strong and proud Bull, and he will prosper."

"And there is somebody else who is looking rather proud of herself," Autumn said.

She meant Spiral.

Two of the older Bulls had broken away from the herd, watching each other warily. One of them boldly approached Spiral, trunk outstretched.

Spiral backed away, shaking her head. But she allowed him to place his trunk in her mouth.

The Bull lifted his trunk tip into his own mouth, touching it to a special patch of sensitive tissue there, and inhaled. Immediately he rumbled, "Soon you will be in oestrus. And then I will mate you—"

"I will be the one," said the other Bull. "My brother is weak and foolish." And he nudged his brother with his forehead, pushing him aside.

But now another Bull emerged from the herd, a giant who even outsized Boaster, with yellowed tusks chipped from fighting. "What’s this about oestrus? Is it this pretty one? Ignore these calves, pretty Cow. See my tusks. See my strength…"

Spiral turned and trotted away, trunk held high. The huge tusker followed her, still offering his gruff blandishments, and the younger Bulls followed, keeping a wary distance from the tusker and from each other.

"She has barely met an adult Bull in her life," Autumn said. "Yet she plays with them as a calf plays with lumps of mud. She always did relish being the center of attention."

"But the attention of Bulls is better than to be a toy of the Lost."

Now Boaster was tugging at Icebones’s tusks. She saw sadly that Boaster, too, was distracted by the scent of the imminent oestrus that came from Spiral — that part of him longed to abandon Icebones and her dry belly, to run after the other Bulls and join in the eternal mating contests. But, loyally, he stayed with her, and his manner was urgent, eager.

"Icebones, come. There is something I must show you. Bring your Family. Come, please…"

She rumbled to the Family a gentle "Let’s go," and began to walk at Boaster’s side.

After a time, the various members of her Family disengaged themselves from their various concerns, and formed up into a loose line and trotted after her: Autumn alongside Breeze, who shepherded Woodsmoke, and then came Spiral, still followed by her retinue of hopeful Bull attendants.

The only one who did not follow was Thunder, who was already becoming immersed in the society of the Bulls. Icebones felt a stab of sadness and turned away.

Boaster walked easily and gracefully, his belly and trunk swaying, and his guard hairs shone in the sunlight, full of health. But he walked slowly alongside Icebones, in sympathy with the battered, exhausted mammoth who had come so far.

It took days to walk into the center of the basin.

The land opened out around Icebones. This tremendous crater was more than large enough for its walls to be invisible, hidden by the horizon. Soon Icebones would never have guessed that she was crossing a deep hollow punched into the hide of the world.

It was full of life. Icebones saw the tracks of herds of horses and bison, and the burrowing of lemmings, and the nests of birds. But folds of ancient, tortured rocks showed through the rich lapping soil. And in the stillness of the night, beneath the calls of the wolves and the rumblings of contented mammoths, Icebones could sense the deep fractures that lay beneath the surface of this hugely wounded land.

After a few days the central forest came pushing over the horizon. Soon it was looming high over their heads, a dense mass of wood, topped by foliage that glowed silver-green in the light.

"I don’t understand," Icebones said to Boaster. "Mammoths are creatures of the steppe. We like the dwarf trees that grow over the permafrost — willows and birches… What interest have we in a tall forest like this?"

"But it is not a forest," he said gently.

Now Breeze came crowding forward. "It is not a forest," she said. "Icebones, can’t you see? Can’t you feel its roots? It is a tree — a single, mighty tree!"

Icebones walked forward and peered at the "forest," and she saw that Breeze was right. There were no gaps to be seen in that dense mass of wood. Its single tremendous trunk was supported by huge buttress-like roots. And when she looked up, she saw that the trunk ran tall and clean far beyond the reach of any mammoth, and the tree’s foliage was lost, high above her — lost in a wisp of low cloud, she realized, shocked.

"It is a tree higher than the sky," she said. "All the trees here grow tall. But this is the mightiest of all."

Boaster growled. "If it could talk, it might be called Boaster too — what do you think, Icebones? But this is a special tree. Its fruit draws in air."

"It is a breathing tree." She described the trees they had encountered on the High Plain.

"Yes," Boaster said. "But this is their giant cousin. This Breathing Tree is a mammoth among trees." He touched her trunk. "I know how hard your journey was. But this Tree shows that the mightiest of living things can prosper here… If the Tree survives, so will we."

She moved closer to him and wrapped his trunk in hers. "The journey was hard. But you gave me strength when I had none left."

He pulled away, puzzled. "I inspired you? Come with me." He tugged at her trunk. "Come, come and see."

They walked a little away around the Tree’s vast cylindrical trunk. It was like walking around a huge rock formation.

And suddenly, before her, there were mammoths.

There were huge old Bulls with chipped tusks, bits of grass clinging to the hairs of their faces, giant scars crossing their flanks and backs. And fat, slow Cows, round-faced calves running at their feet. And young Bulls, their adult tusks just beginning to show like gleams of ice in rock folds. And leaner, loose-haired mammoths whose journey here looked as if it had been as hard as Icebones’s.

Around her was the sound of mammoths: the click of tusks, the dry rustle of intertwined trunks, the hiss of their hair and tails — many, many mammoths.

"Can you smell them?" Boaster asked gently. "Can you hear them?"

Icebones was stunned. "Where do they come from?"

"They came from all over this little world. They were abandoned by the Lost, and they were helpless, just as your Family was. If they had stayed in their Lost cages, they would have starved or submitted to the cold — but they didn’t know what else to do.

"But your Family was different. They had you. And when you made your decision to bring them here to the Footfall, I knew I had to follow you, with my bachelor herd. Not that I didn’t have to crack a few tusks to make them see sense…

"And then, with our calls and stamping, we spread the word to all the mammoths who can hear. Some were reluctant to come, some didn’t understand, and some were simply frightened. But none of them faced so hard a journey as you.

"And one by one, Family by Family, they began the great walk, from north, south, west, east…"

"All of these mammoths are here because of me?"

Autumn was at her side. "Because of you, Icebones, Matriarch. Your achievement was mighty. You walked your mammoths around the world. You walked them from the highest place of all, the peak of the Fire Mountain, to the deepest place, this Footfall. It is an achievement that will live forever in the songs of the Cycle."

Weak, overtired, hungry, thirsty, Icebones tried to take in all this — and failed. She wished Silverhair could see her now. She would, at last, be proud.

But there was room in her heart for a stab of doubt. She recalled the fringe of the crater basin, the dried mud there where the tide of life had receded. Could it be that she had drawn these mammoths here on a promise of life and security that, in the end, would not be fulfilled? Perhaps what she had achieved was not an inspiration — but a betrayal.

But now Breeze came trotting up to her, her manner urgent and tense. "Thunder is calling from the edge of the steppe. Can you hear him? Icebones, he says she is coming."

Icebones immediately knew who she meant. And she realized that, whatever her triumph in bringing the mammoths here to the navel of the world, she must gather up her strength for one more challenge.

For, out of the harsh High Plains, the Ragged One was approaching.

6 The Breathing Tree

Icebones — still limping, still favoring the shoulder she now suspected would never properly heal — liked to walk beside the Tree. Around it the air was dense with the life of the long summer. A great misty fog of aerial plankton, ballooning spiders and delicate larvae drifted over the land in search of places to live.

She stroked the Tree’s deep brown bark and listened to the currents of sap that ran within it, considering its mysteries. She sensed how this Tree was dragging heat and water up from the world’s depths.

And, slowly, as she began to understand its purpose, she came to believe that this vast Tree was the core of everything…

It took many days for the Ragged One to cross the Footfall.

And she was not alone. She had entered the crater with a mysterious herd of her own. And as she crossed the plain more mammoths were joining her. A determined force was trekking steadily toward the Tree, and Icebones.

Autumn and Boaster stayed with her, her closest companions.

Boaster said, "You do not have to face this Ragged One, little Icebones. Let me drive her off with a thrust of my tusks." And he dipped his head and lunged at an imaginary opponent.

She stroked his face fondly. She knew that though she was slowly regaining some of her health, she would never be as strong as she had been before. She had left her strength and youth, it seemed, up on the High Plains.

But she knew it was her duty to face the Ragged One.

Autumn and Boaster knew it too, of course.

Autumn growled, "It would be help if we knew what that wretched creature wanted. I’m sure it has nothing to do with being mammoth."

Boaster rumbled, "It is disturbing how many here think back nostalgically to the days when the Lost ran our lives for us. That is why those addled fools follow her."

Icebones said, "But the way of the Cycle is often harsh. Even we, on the High Plains, turned back from confronting the final truth… I cannot blame these others."

She spotted Breeze, who had come into oestrus. She was walking fast, holding her head tall. Her eyes were wide amber drops. She was being pursued by a large, grizzled Bull, his tusks scarred and chipped. Dark fluid leaked from his musth glands and down his face, and he dribbled urine as he walked.

A little further away, two younger Bulls were challenging each other, raising their tusks and shaking their heads. But they both must know that whoever won their battle would not gain access to Breeze while the battered old tusker claimed her.

Breeze and the victorious tusker began a kind of dance. She would walk away, glancing over her shoulder, and he would follow, rumbling. But then he would hold back, as if testing her willingness and desire, and in response she slowed.

Beyond this central pair and the two young competing Bulls was a ring of more males, eight or ten of them — some of them massive, many sporting savage scars and shattered tusks. Further away still more Bulls watched the central couple jealously, standing still as rocks.

The whole circle of Bulls, young and old, was held in place around Breeze, trapped by invisible forces of lust and jealousy and fear.

"It is the consort," Autumn observed. "So the ancient dance continues."

"As it should," Icebones said.

Boaster growled and pawed the ground, his huge trunk swaying. A sad unspoken thought passed between Boaster and Icebones: she had still not come into oestrus, and they both feared now that the dryness at her core would never be broken.

Autumn, oblivious to this, said, "I only wish that Spiral could find some happiness too."

Icebones understood her regret. Spiral had come into oestrus soon after Icebones’s mammoths had arrived here in the Footfall. She was tall and handsome, and the Bulls could tell from her complex scents that she had borne healthy calves before. But though Spiral had attracted an even larger consort retinue than Breeze, in the end she had brayed at her winning suitor and fled, refusing his advances.

"She will come to no harm," said Boaster. "She is proud and difficult, but she is beautiful."

"Ah," Autumn said, rather grandly. "But she wrestles with problems you may not imagine, child…"

"Just as," came a muddy voice, "you big hairy animals can barely imagine the troubles I have."

Icebones turned. A squat creature was waddling toward her, its peculiarly naked skin covered in drying mud. It raised a small stubby trunk.

Icebones limped forward, inordinately pleased. "Chaser-Of-Frogs!"

The Mother of the Swamp-Mammoths looked up at Boaster with small black eyes and burped proudly. Boaster trumpeted, startled, and he backed away from the stubby form.

Chaser-Of-Frogs said, "Without me, you know, these clumsy oafs would be blundering around that Gouge still." She reached up with her trunk and probed at Icebones’s belly. "But your journey was hard too. You are a bag of skin. And," she said more gently, probing at Icebones’s dry dugs, "you have other problems, I fear."

Icebones gave a brief rumble of regret. But she insisted, "What of you, Chaser-Of-Frogs? I thought you would never leave that muddy pond."

"My Family has found a new pond now." She raised her trunk toward a shallow lake nearby.

Icebones heard and smelled more Swamp-Mammoths burrowing gratefully into the muddy pond floor. Their wet backs gleamed in the sun like logs, and their protruding eyes blinked slowly. Mammoths stood around these new arrivals, trunks raised in curiosity, and a clutch of ducks swam away indignantly.

There were perhaps a dozen Swamp-Mammoths in the lake.

Icebones said softly, "This is all?"

Chaser-Of-Frogs said grimly, "We both knew how it would be, Bones-Of-Ice. Most would not follow. Of those who set out, those who died first were the old and the young, our calves… It was hard, Bones-Of-Ice. So hard."

Autumn rumbled, "We faced the same choice — and failed — and our bones would now be scoured by the dust storms of the high plain, our line extinct, if not for good fortune…"

"The mammoth dies, but mammoths live on," Icebones said softly.

But now Boaster stiffened. He was looking to the north, his tusks raised, and he trumpeted.

There was a sound of feet, purposefully walking. And on the northern horizon a black cloud hugged the ground, like the approach of a storm.

Icebones, with deep reluctance, turned that way. When she raised her trunk she could smell a tang of blood and staleness.

It was no storm. It was mammoth: a great herd of them, and they walked through the billowing crimson dust raised by their own powerful footfalls.

Calves ran squealing in search of their mothers. Bulls broke off from their jousting and backed away, grumbling. Even Breeze’s consort circle was broken up.

"It is as if a cloud has come across the sun," Autumn said.

But Icebones stood straight. For, in the lead of the marching mammoths, gray hair flying wispy in the wind, was the Ragged One.

It was time. Relief flooded Icebones.

One more trial, Icebones. Just one more. Then you can rest.

She gathered her strength.

The Ragged One trumpeted, her loose hair wafting around her strange gray-pink face. She was gaunt, her ribs protruding beneath her sparse hair. Her face was scarred, her tusks badly chipped.

"So, Icebones," the Ragged One said, "you survived. And you did not kill any more mammoths on your journey."

Before Icebones could reply, Autumn raised her trunk. "Spiral," she said softly. "Daughter — is that you?"

From behind the Ragged One, Spiral stepped forward, head held high, her beautiful tusks gleaming.

Autumn rumbled her dismay.

Icebones growled to the Ragged One, "Say what it is you want here. And say what you have promised these mammoths who follow you."

"That is simple," the Ragged One said. "I have told them I will bring back the Lost."

Icebones immediately sensed the hopeful, longing mood of the mass of mammoths who had followed the Ragged One — and, to her shock, she even sensed a stirring of doubt in Boaster, who stood at her side.

For a heartbeat she felt giddy, weak, as if she might fall. This was a dangerous moment indeed: a moment that could decide the future of the species, here on this rocky steppe — and all that she could bring to bear was her own failing strength.

Spiral called thinly, "The Lost gave us life, Icebones. What have you to offer us but a jumble of myths, suffering and death — as my own sister died, as we nearly died?"

There was a great rumbling from the mass of mammoths behind her.

"I have nothing to offer you," Icebones said. "Nothing but the truth, and dignity."

The Ragged One snorted contempt. "I cannot eat truth. I cannot drink dignity."

Autumn demanded, "How do you imagine you will call back the Lost from the sky?"

The Ragged One walked up to the giant Breathing Tree. Its mottled bark loomed above her like a wall. Grunting, she slashed at the bark with her tusks.

The gouged wood leaked a blood-red sap.

"I am one mammoth, with a single pair of tusks. But I can cut and slash. And when I am exhausted, another will come and cut after me, and then another, and another… It might take a season, a whole year. But we are mammoths, and we are strong. And we will destroy this Tree, as we can destroy any other."

"You are a fool," said Autumn. "How will that help you bring back the Lost?"

"You are old and your mind is addled," said the Ragged One. "You are the fool. Look at this Tree. Smell it. Hear its roots worming into the earth. Is there another such Tree in the whole of the world? No, there is not. Because this Tree is a creation of the Lost — their mightiest work, destined to outlive the Nests, and the beetle things that toil and burn. And if we destroy the Tree, the Lost will wish to restore it — and they will return."

A wave of excited trumpeting rippled through the crowd of her followers, and the noise was briefly deafening.

Before the Ragged One’s intense anger and determination, Icebones felt weak, like a figure in a dissolving dream. But she knew she must act. "I will stop you."

"And if you try," hissed the Ragged One, "I will kill you."

"Then that is what you will have to do, for I will oppose you to my last breath."

"Why?" Autumn asked. "Icebones, it is only a tree."

"No," Icebones said. "I have thought deeply on this, and I believe I understand the Tree’s true importance — as do you, Cold-As-Sky. Show yourself now."

Out from the crowd beyond Spiral, a squat, rounded form shouldered her way: mammoth, yes, but with a hump and covered in black, sticky hair, and with small feet and tiny pointed ears, and a pair of eyes that glowed orange.

The mammoths around her recoiled, rumbling uncertainly.

"I am here, Icebones," said the Matriarch of the Ice Mammoths. "I followed your Ragged One. I come here despite the thickness of the air, and the stench of water and your fat green growing things…"

Icebones said, "Cousin. You saved my Family on the High Plains. And yet now you seek to destroy a world."

Cold-As-Sky said harshly, "I come not to destroy, but to make the world as it once was."

"I don’t understand any of this," Autumn said.

Icebones spoke loudly enough for every mammoth in the Footfall to hear.

"This one is right, that the Tree is a gift of the Lost — their last gift to this world. But the Lost have gone, and the Tree remains. And now its meaning has nothing to do with the Lost, but with the Cycle — with us.

"When Longtusk led his Family away from the advancing Lost and over the great bridge, he reached a land of ice, where nothing could live. But Longtusk had heard of a place called a nunatak. It was a refuge, a place where heat bubbled from the ground, keeping back the ice, and green things lived, even in the depth of winter. There the mammoths survived."

"These are fables for calves," said the Ragged One sourly.

Icebones walked up to the Breathing Tree and stroked its cut-through bark. "Like Longtusk’s Family, we are stranded in a world of ice. But this Footfall is our nunatak." She stamped her feet, challenging the mammoths. "Listen to the song of the rocks. Feel how the ground is shattered and compressed. This is the deepest pit in the world, where the rock has been pushed far down — so far that the inner heat of the world, which lives beneath the plants and soil and rocks, is close. Can you feel it? Can you hear the mud that bubbles, the liquid water that gurgles?"

There were rumbles of doubt and surprise among the gathered mammoths. Icebones could hear them pawing at the ground, listening for the secret songs that welled there.

"The heat is deeper than any of us could reach," said Icebones. "But the roots of this Tree will reach deeper than any mammoth’s trunk. Even yours, Cold-As-Sky. One day this Tree will draw up the heat of the world. It will breathe rich air, and weep water — and the world will live."

"One day?" Boaster asked wistfully.

"Not yet," Icebones said gently. "This Tree, mighty as it towers over us poor mammoths, is but a sapling. Can’t you tell, Boaster?"

The Ragged One trumpeted desperately, "If we destroy the Tree, the Lost will return."

"No," Icebones said. "You showed me yourself how the Lost abandoned this world. Wherever they have gone, it has nothing to do with us. But if you destroy the Tree, you destroy yourselves — and your calves, and their calves after them." She raised her tusks. "This is the truth. If I am the only one opposed, then you must kill me first."

There was an expectant silence, a forest of raised trunks.

Icebones stood alone. She had done all she could. And so she waited in the thin, high sunlight, with the tang of red dust strong in her nostrils.

The small world spun around her, and heat gathered in her head.

Autumn came to stand behind Icebones.

Breeze joined her.

And even the calf faced the crowd of mammoths, his tiny tusks upraised as if he was ready to take them all on.

"We are your Family, Icebones," Autumn said. "On that long journey, I became We. And now we stand with you."

"And me," growled Boaster, adding his massive presence. Icebones touched his trunk with affection and gratitude.

Chaser-Of-Frogs came waddling up, scattering drying mud. "None of you is as handsome as me. But Bones-Of-Ice taught me we are all Cousins, and she spoke the truth — and that truth saved me. I am proud to be your Family, Bones-Of-Ice. I become We."

Autumn trumpeted, "Spiral. Join us."

But Spiral, standing close to the Ice Mammoths, postured and pranced, as if for an invisible audience of Lost.

But now Thunder emerged from the crowd. He approached Spiral. Another young Bull followed him, unknown to Icebones.

Thunder called, "I recall how it was for you on that distant Mountain, Spiral. The Lost pampered you and praised you — but they took away your calves."

"It is true," Autumn said. "Daughter, you recall the Lost with affection. But in truth they hurt you as no mother should be hurt."

Spiral trumpeted, "Leave me alone — oh, leave me alone!"

The other Bull stepped forward. His tusks, though still immature, were long and smooth — and they made neat curls that were, Icebones saw, an exact match of Spiral’s own. He walked awkwardly up to Spiral. He reached out with his trunk, and probed her mouth and trunk tip and breasts. "But I cannot leave you alone," he said thickly. "Have you forgotten me, mother?"

Spiral stood stiff and silent, eyes wide. Then she cried out, pain mixed with joy, and wrapped her trunk around her son’s face.

Icebones pealed, "This is how it is to be mammoth: mother with calf, Families together, herds of Bulls strong and proud. We have no need of the Lost. All we need is each other. Join me now. Join my Clan."

And, like an ice floe slowly melting, the group beyond the Ragged One lost its cohesion. One by one mammoths broke away from the disciplined mass, to join Icebones and her Family.

Spiral came lumbering stiffly to her mother, her trunk still wrapped tightly around the head of the calf that had been taken from her long ago. Autumn embraced her daughter gruffly.

A massive tusker came up, dribbling stinking musth. He tried to get closer to Breeze, whose oestrus smell was still powerful. Curtly Autumn shielded her daughter from his attention.

A part of Icebones was amused that even now the deeper story of life went on.

Thunder joined Icebones. She nuzzled his mouth affectionately. "Well done," she said. "You have made the difference, I think…"

"I thought it would work," Thunder said softly.

"What do you mean?"

"I thought Spiral might have run off to join that ranting fool. I found the calf two days ago. I thought he might come in useful. So I kept him distracted until now."

Icebones was astonished. "How can you think in such a devious way?"

"Just be glad I am on your side," Thunder said modestly.

Cold-As-Sky snorted. "But what of us, Icebones?" The Ice Mammoths were breathing fast, their blue tongues lolling. To them, Icebones recalled, the thin, clean air of the Footfall was dense and clammy and much, much too hot. Cold-As-Sky said, "If I join you, I die. If the Tree makes your world, it destroys ours."

Autumn turned on the Ragged One. "You see why they followed you? Even these strange creatures cared nothing for the Lost, for your dreams. All they wanted was to smash the Tree, for they understood its importance, as Icebones did. You are a fool — you let them use you—"

Icebones touched Autumn’s trunk to still her.

Thunder said unexpectedly, "But you need not die, Cold-As-Sky."

The Ice Mammoths inspected him suspiciously.

In brief phrases — illustrated with much stamping and growling — he told them of the Fire Mountain, where he had been born. "It is high," he said. "Higher than your High Plains, the highest place in all the world. No matter how hard this Tree breathes, that Mountain’s summit will still be a place of cold and thinness and ice."

Cold-As-Sky said to Icebones, "Is this true?"

Icebones glanced at the Ragged One. "She knows it to be true. We walked to the summit, and saw breathing trees… Yes, you could live there, Cold-As-Sky."

"But it is half a world away."

Now Breeze’s calf stepped forward. "I will lead you," said Woodsmoke brightly. "I have walked half the world. I will show you how."

Breeze cuffed him affectionately but proudly, for he stood tall and determined.

Cold-As-Sky rumbled, and her Ice Mammoths clustered around her.

Then, hesitantly, Cold-As-Sky stepped forward and stood behind Icebones. Her Family followed.

The Ice Mammoths smelled of ice and iron.

At last the Ragged One was left isolated.

It is done, Icebones thought. Her sense of relief was overwhelming, leaving her weak.

"You have defeated me," said the Ragged One bleakly.

"No. We are not Bulls battling over a Cow. There is no defeat, no victory. Be with our Family."

"You don’t understand," said the Ragged One. "You have never understood. I cannot become part of your We."

"That isn’t true—"

"But it is, in a way," said Chaser-Of-Frogs.

"This muddy thing is right, Icebones," said Cold-As-Sky, ignoring Chaser-Of-Frogs’s bristling. "She is mammoth, yet she is not — just as we are.

"I told you we have our own legend, our own memories. We know we were set down on a world where nothing could live — nothing but ourselves, and the blood weed and other plants which feed us. And we recall the first of us all — for those first had no mothers."

Chaser-Of-Frogs said grimly, "I hate to ally myself with one so ugly as this, but our memory is the same. In the beginning there were no mothers. There was no Cow, no oestrus, no consort dance, no mating…"

"Then how did you come to be?"

"The Lost made us," Cold-As-Sky said simply. "They took the bones of mammoths who died long ago, and ground them in the blood of others — remote Cousins called elephants who lived in the warm places. And, out of the mixing, came—"

"Us," said Chaser-Of-Frogs sourly.

"It was not enough for the Lost that they brought mammoths to this place," said Cold-As-Sky bitterly. "They had to make us into things of their own."

Icebones asked, "But why? Why would they do this?"

Autumn growled, "Perhaps they were in musth, and sought to impress their females."

"No," said the Ragged One. "They loved us. They loved the idea of us. This is what I believe. They wanted to remake us, to bring us back from the extinction to which they almost drove us, to give us this new world where there would be room for us to browse."

Autumn walked up to the Ragged One and ruffled her sparse, untidy hair. "If it was love, they loved us too much," she said gruffly.

"And that is why you sought to wreck the world," Icebones said, understanding at last. "That is why you wanted the Lost back so badly. Because they made you."

"Enough," said Autumn. "Give this up. Join us now."

The Ragged One hesitated, agitated, distressed. She reached out to Autumn, raising her trunk — and, briefly, Icebones believed it might be possible.

But then the Ragged One trumpeted wildly. She pushed past the Ice Mammoths and lumbered away.

Icebones made to go after her, but Autumn held her back with her long, strong trunk. In a moment the Ragged One was lost among the mammoths — and Icebones sensed that she would never see her again.

The mammoths began to disperse.

"It is done, Icebones," Autumn said. "The shadow of the Lost is gone at last. This is our world now."

"Yes. It is done…"

And the last of Icebones’s strength drained into the red dust. The colors leached out of the world, and her head filled with a sharp ringing. She would have fallen, if not for the support of her Family.

A watching human would only have seen the mammoths gather, heard nothing but an intense and mysterious rumbling and growling and stamping and clicking of tusks.

She would never have known that the destiny of a world had been tested, and determined.

7 The Dream of Kilukpuk

The Song of Oestrus disturbed Icebones, startling her awake.

She sniffed the air querulously.

It was cold and damp. The sun was dim, or so it seemed to her. Perhaps another winter was coming, though it seemed no more than heartbeats since spring was done.

But then the seasons were shorter on this hard little world. Or were they longer? She could not recall.

Time flowed strangely here, like water, like blood. Sometimes it seemed that her life had fled as rapidly as the fleeting summers, for here she was, suddenly a last-molar, barely able to chew the softest grass anymore, her senses and her memories as eroded as her teeth.

Ah, but sometimes she thought she was young again, young and imagining how it would be to be broken-down old mammoth, here in this green hollow, the navel of the world.

Young dreaming of old age, or dotard dreaming of youth? Perhaps, in the end, it made no difference. Perhaps there was no past or present, young or old; perhaps life was just a single moment, a unity, like a pebble taken into the mouth to ward off thirst, inspected by the tongue from every angle…

Anyhow, whether the world was growing cold or not, she certainly was.

She lumbered toward the Breathing Tree.

Soon she was wheezing with the effort of the walk, and her shoulder ached, never properly healed from its ancient injury. Close to the Tree’s roots, where hot air gushed and warm water flowed, the Swamp-Mammoths had made their wallows. She would find some company there, and perhaps would try a little grass, or even a willow bud. And she would ruminate a while with Autumn. Ah, but poor, stolid Autumn was long dead, and she had forgotten again.

She saw a herd of caribou. They preferred to live out their lives at the fringe of the great forests of warmer climes, but came to the steppe to breed. They crossed a stream, splashing and pawing at the water, so that sunlit droplets rose up all around them. Their movements were hasty, nervous, skittish, like horses.

She found the source of the oestrus call. On a small rise a Bull had mounted a young Cow, laying his trunk over her back and the top of her head, and gripping her hips with his forelegs.

When he lumbered away from her, the Cow’s song was loud, a series of deep swooping notes repeated over and over, rising out of silence then fracturing into nothing. Soon more Cows joined her to celebrate, trumpeting and making urine together, and they reached out crisscrossing trunks to explore the ground, seeking the strong smell of the mating.

But Icebones’s battered old trunk could smell nothing, and the oestrus songs were fuzzy in her hearing — and even her heart felt only the smallest pang of jealousy. She, of course, had never come into oestrus, not once in her long life since she had woken from her strange, half-forgotten Sleep on that remote mountainside. It didn’t seem to matter anymore. Perhaps her heart had grown calluses, like the broken pads of her feet.

She walked on, laboring to breathe, heading for the Tree.

There were mammoths everywhere. They walked steadily through long grass that swirled in their wake. One of them stopped to graze, and the swaying grass fell still at the same time as the rippling of his hair.

There was a sense of stillness about the mammoths, Icebones thought: of meditation, patience, their calmness as solid and pervasive as the crimson rock beneath her feet. All creatures of the steppe knew stillness.

Where the mammoths walked, ground-nesters like plovers and jaegers flew up angrily if they threatened to step in their nests. But snow buntings and longspurs were making their nests of discarded mammoth wool. And in the winters the snow-clearing of the mammoths exposed grass for hares and willow buds for ptarmigans, and the wells they dug were used by wolves and foxes and others, and even now the insects stirred up by the mammoths’ passage served as food for the birds.

It was as it had always been, as the Cycle proudly proclaimed: Where mammoths walk, they bring life. It was right, and it was good.

The mammoths reached out to her with absent affection. But they were strangers to her.

Of course they were. By comparison with their spindly liquid grace she felt like a lump of earth, gray and dull. These were mammoths shaped by this new world. The grass grew from the blood-red dust, and the mammoths ate the grass, so that the red dust of the Sky Steppe coursed in their veins. Changing, shimmering, these new mammoths moved past her like tall shadows, shifting, growing stranger with every new generation.

And none of them were her children, or grandchildren: not one.

Taken from her mother on the Island, she had devoted her life to a quest for Family. Well, she had succeeded. She had built the mammoths into a Family, into Clans. But now the Sky Steppe was taking them away.

…Icebones.

She stopped, struggling to raise her heavy old trunk. The calling voice had been unfamiliar, and it had seemed to come neither from left or right, nor before or behind.

The colors leached out of the world. She felt herself sway.

Icebones. Icebones. "…Icebones."

She looked up. A Bull stood before her — little more than a calf, no taller than she was, his tusks still stubby and untested.

"Woodsmoke?"

"No," he said patiently. "Woodsmoke was the mate of my grandmother, Matriarch. I am Tang-Of-Dust. You recall — as an infant I loved to roll in dust dunes and—"

"Ah, Tang-Of-Dust." But his smell was indistinct, his form in her eyes only a wavering outline. "Always eat the tall grass," she said.

"Matriarch?"

"You are what you eat. That much is obvious to everyone. And the tallest grass dreams of touching the sky, of reaching the aurora. So that is what you must eat…"

Here was a pretty stand of tussock grass. Forgetting Tang-Of-Dust, she bent to inspect it. The tall thin leaves grew as high as her shoulder, rising out of a pedestal of old leaves and roots. Between the tussock clumps burnet grass grew. This sported round red flower heads that swayed gracefully in the breeze. There were other plants scattered more thinly, like ferns and buttercups and dandelions, and many clumps of fungus, some of them bright red or white, their colors a startling contrast to the deep green of the grass.

Just a stand of grass. She couldn’t even smell or taste it. All she could do was see it, as if with age she was turning into one of the Lost. But it was beautiful, intricate, like so much of the world.

She was still herself. She was Icebones, daughter of Silverhair. Nothing would erode that away: the last thing she would retain, even when the world had worn away like her molars.

She said, "He went away, you know."

"Matriarch?"

"Woodsmoke. He was born on the great Migration — did you know that? I suppose wandering was in his blood… At first it wasn’t possible, of course. The world away from the Footfall just got too cold for anything to live. Anything like us, anyhow. But gradually that changed, and off he went. But they say that where his dung fell, grass and trees grew, and the animals and birds that live on them followed. Isn’t that wonderful, Woodsmoke? As if life is spreading out from this deep warm place. He never came back, of course…"

"Yes, Matriarch," the calf said respectfully. But he was growing impatient. "Matriarch, it has changed. In the sky."

She grumbled, "What has changed?"

"The blue star that flies near the sun."

She squinted, compressing failing eyes.

The calf was right, she saw. The familiar blue spark had been replaced by a sliver of silver light.

…And now, quite suddenly, the silver grain winked out — vanished completely, as if it had never been. It small brown companion, abandoned, sailed alone in the sky.

She raised her trunk but could smell nothing, hear nothing. How strange, she thought.

Tang-Of-Dust asked, "What does it mean?"

"I don’t know, child."

"They say that the Lost went there. To the blue light."

"It might be true," she said. And she wondered where they had gone now.

"Some say the Lost were insane. Or evil."

She lowered her heavy head. "No, not evil, not insane… But not like us. In many ways they were arrogant and foolish. But the Lost brought life here. Think of that. We existed a long time before the Lost came, and we will exist for a long time now that they are gone. Theirs was just a brief moment of pain and change and death — but in that moment they gave us a new world. Even if this world is nothing but a dream of Kilukpuk…" She slumped forward, to her knees, and her trunk pooled in the dust. "And, I suppose, by redeeming us, the Lost redeemed themselves. Isn’t that wonderful?"

The calf reached out uncertainly,. "Matriarch. Are you ill?"

Her belly settled onto the dust, and she closed her eyes. "Just tired, Woodsmoke. In a moment we will talk—"

But now there was an explosion of pain in her chest. She gasped and fell forward.

She saw legs all around her, a forest of them, as if she was a newborn calf surrounded by her mother and aunts. That was absurd, for she could hardly be more different from a calf.

She closed her eyes again.

A memory of old age, or a dream of youth? But she tasted blood — or perhaps it was the dry dust of this red world — not a dream, then…

Or perhaps the dream was over.

"Icebones… Icebones…"

Icebones.

She tried to lift her head, to open her eyes, but could not. And yet she thought she saw a mammoth before her: a vast mammoth with dugs the size of mountains, and feet that could stamp great pits in the rock, and tusks like glaciers, and a voice like the song of a world. A mammoth who shone, even though Icebones’s eyes were closed.

Do you know who you are?

"I am Icebones, daughter of Silverhair." That much remained. "I am very tired."

You know who I am?

"Yes. Yes, I know who you are, Kilukpuk."

It’s time to go, little one.

"But my Family needs me."

Now I need you. And Icebones felt a trunk wrap around her head and probe into her dry mouth.

She was lifted up, shedding her body as every spring she had shed her winter coat.

"I am not fit, Matriarch…"

No one is more fit than you. And no one paid a greater price than you. The Lost brought you here, in your Sleep, across a vast gulf. And in that gulf a hard light shines. And you were — damaged.

And Icebones knew Kilukpuk meant her dry womb. "That is why I have no calves."

But every mammoth who lives is your calf. You saved your kind in every way it is possible to be saved: you gave them life, and you gave them back their selves.

"Will there be soft browse? My molars aren’t what they were."

I will show you the softest, sweetest browse that ever was.

"There is no aurora here. Where are we going?"

To where Silverhair is waiting for you. No more questions, now.

The great shining mammoth drew away.

Effortlessly, Icebones followed. And the small red world receded beneath her, folding over on itself until it became a crimson ball splashed with green and blue, before it disappeared into the dark.