Silverhair

The Story of Ganesha the Wise

This (said Silverhair) is the story of Ganesha, who is called the Wise.

I am talking of a time many Great-Years ago — ten, twelve, perhaps more. In those days, the world was quite different, for it was warmer, and much of the land was covered in a rich Forest.

Now, in such a world you or I would be too hot, and there would be little for us to eat. But Ganesha’s Family thought themselves blessed.

For Ganesha’s Family, and their Clan and Kin, had lived for a hundred Great-Years in a world awash with heat, and Ganesha had no need to keep herself warm, as you do. And she ate the rich food of the Forest: grass, moss, fruit, even leaves and bark.

If Ganesha was standing before you now you would think her strange indeed.

Though she had a trunk and tusks, she had little fur; her gray skin was exposed to the cooling air all year round. She had little fat on her lean body, and her ears were large, like huge flapping leaves. And Ganesha was tall — she would have towered over you, little Icebones!

Ganesha had two calves, both Cows, called Prima and Meridi.

Everyone agreed that Meridi was the beauty of the Family: tall, strong, lean, her skin like weathered rock, her trunk as supple as a willow branch. By comparison Prima seemed short and fat and clumsy, her ears and trunk stubby. But Ganesha, of course, loved them both equally, as mothers do.

Now, Ganesha was not called Wise for nothing. She knew the world was changing.

She walked north, to the edge of the Forest, where the trees thinned out, and she looked out over the plains: grassy, endless, stretching to the End of the World. When she was a calf, she remembered clearly, such a walk would have taken many more days.

And if Ganesha stepped out of the Forest, enduring the burning sun of that time, she could see where the Forest had once been. For the land was littered with fallen, rotten trunks and the remnants of roots, within which insects burrowed.

And Ganesha could smell the ice on the wind, see the scudding of clouds across the sky.

The Cycle teaches us of the great Changes that sweep over the world — Changes that come, not in a year or two or ten, not even in the span of a mammoth’s lifetime, but with the passing of the Great-Years.

And that is how Ganesha knew about the great Cold that was sweeping down from out of the north, and how she knew that the Forest was shrinking back to the south, just as the tide recedes from the shore.

Ganesha was concerned for her Family.

She consulted the Cycle — which, even in those days, was already ancient and rich — but she found no lesson to help her.

However, Ganesha was Wise. As she looked into the great emptiness that was opening up in the north, Ganesha understood that a great opportunity awaited her calves.

But to take that opportunity she would have to step beyond the Cycle.

Ganesha called her calves to her.

"The Forest is dying," she said.

Prima, squat and solid, said, "But the Forest sustains us. What must we do?"

Meridi, tall and beautiful, scoffed at her mother. "All you have seen is a few dead trees. You are an old fool!"

Ganesha bore this disrespect with tolerance.

"This is what we must do," she said. "As the Forest dies back, a new land is revealed. There are no trees, but there are grasses and bushes and other things to eat. And it stretches beyond the horizon — all the way to the End of the World.

"This land is called a Tundra. And, because it is new, the Tundra is empty. You will learn to live on the Tundra, to endure the coming Cold.

"It will not be easy," she said to them. "You are creatures of the Forest; to become creatures of the Tundra will be arduous and painful. But if you endure this pain your calves, and their calves, will in time cover the Tundra with great Clans, greater than any the world has seen."

Prima lowered her trunk soberly. "Matriarch," she said, "show me what to do."

But Meridi scoffed once more. "You are an old fool, Ganesha. None of this is in the Cycle. Soon I will be Matriarch, and there will be none of this talk of the Tundra!" And she refused to have anything to do with Ganesha’s instruction.

Ganesha was saddened by this, but she said nothing.

Now (said Silverhair), to ready Prima for the Tundra took Ganesha three summers.

In the first summer, she changed Prima’s skin. She bit away at Prima’s great ears, reducing them to small, round flaps of skin. And she nibbled at Prima’s tail, making it shorter and stubbier than her sister’s, and she tugged at the skin above Prima’s backside so that a flap came down over her anus.

Prima endured the pain of all this with strong silence, for she accepted her mother’s wisdom. All these changes would help her skin trap the heat of her body. And so they were good.

But Meridi mocked her sister. "You are already ugly, little Prima. Now you let Ganesha make you more so!" And Meridi tugged at Prima’s distorted ears, making them bleed once more.

In the second year, Ganesha made Prima fat. She gathered the richest and most luscious leaves and grass in the Forest, and crammed them into Prima’s mouth.

Prima endured this. She understood that to withstand the cold a mammoth must be as round as a boulder, with as much of her body tucked on the inside as possible, and swathed in a great layer of warming fat. And so these changes were also good.

But beautiful Meridi mocked her sister’s growing fatness. "You are already ugly, little Prima, and now with your great belly and your tiny head you are as round as a pebble. Look how tall and lean I am!"

And in the third year, Ganesha took Prima to a pit in the ground, left by a rotting tree stump. She bade Prima lie in the pit, then covered Prima with twigs and blades of grass, and caked the whole of her body with mud and stones. There Prima remained for the whole summer, with only her trunk and mouth and eyes protruding; and Ganesha brought her water and food every day.

And as the mud baked in the sun, the twigs and grasses turned into a thick layer of orange-brown fur, which Prima knew would keep her warm through the long Tundra nights. And so these changes were also good.

But again Meridi mocked her sister. "You are fat and short, little Prima, and now you are covered with the ugliest fur I have ever seen. Look at my rock-smooth skin, and weep!"

All of this Prima endured.

At the end of the third summer, Ganesha presented her two daughters to the Family.

She said: "I will not serve as your Matriarch any longer, for I grow tired and my teeth grow soft. Now, if you wish, you can choose to stay with Meridi, who will lead you deeper into the Forest. Or you can join Prima, and learn to live on the Tundra, as she has. Neither course is easy. But I have taught you that the art of traveling is to pick the least dangerous path."

And she had Prima and Meridi stand before the assembled Family.

There was Meridi, tall and bare and lean and beautiful, promising the mammoths that if they followed her — and the teachings of the Cycle — they would enjoy rich foliage and deep green shade, just as they had always known. And there was Prima, a squat, fat, round bundle of brown fur, who promised only hardship, and whose life would not follow the Cycle.

It will not surprise you that most of the Family chose to stay with beautiful Meridi and the Cycle.

But a few chose Prima, and the future.

So the sisters parted. They never saw each other again.

Soon the trees were dying, just as Ganesha had foreseen. Meridi and her folk were forced to venture farther and farther south.

At last Meridi came to a place where Cousins lived already. They were Calves of Probos, like us, but they had chosen to live in the lush warm south many Great-Years ago. They called themselves elephants. And though the elephants recall the Oath of Kilukpuk, they would not allow the Meridi and her mammoths to share their Forest.

All of Meridi’s renowned beauty made absolutely no difference.

As the Cold settled on the Earth and the Forest died away, Meridi and her Family dwindled.

Meridi died, hungry and cold and without calves.

And now not one of her beautiful kind is left on the Earth.

Meanwhile Prima took her handful of followers out onto the Tundra. It was hard and cold, but they learned to savor the subtle flavors of the Tundra grasses, and Prima helped them become as she was — as we are now.

And her calves, and her calves’ calves, roamed over the northern half of our planet.

Ganesha, you see (concluded Silverhair), was not like other Matriarchs.

Some say Ganesha was a dark figure — perhaps with something of the Lost about her — for she defied the Cycle itself. Well, if that is so, it was a fusion that brought courage and wisdom.

For Ganesha found a way for her daughter Prima to change, to become fit for the new, cold world that was emerging from inside its mask of Forest. None of this was in the Cycle before Ganesha. But she was not afraid to look beyond the Cycle if it did not help her.

And now the story of Ganesha is itself part of the Cycle, and always will be, so she can teach us with her wisdom.

Thus, through paradox, the Cycle renews itself…

No, Icebones (said Silverhair), the story isn’t done yet. I will tell you what became of Ganesha herself!

Of course, she could not follow Prima, for Ganesha had grown up in the Forest, like her mother before her, and her mother before that, in a great line spanning many hundreds of Great-Years.

And so — when the Cold came, and the Forest dwindled — Ganesha sank to her knees, and died, and her Family mourned for many days.

But as long as the Cycle is told, Ganesha will be remembered.

15 The Huddle

Silverhair heard the ugly cawing of the Lost.

She turned and looked back along the beach. She could see sparks of red light breaking away from the dim glow of the camp. Evidently they had done with Snagtooth, and were pursuing her once more.

She staggered along the beach. But her hind legs were still tightly bound up, and she moved with a clumsy shuffle. The stolen mammoth skin lay on her back; she could feel it, heavy as guilt.

By the low sunlight she could see the pack ice that still lingered in the Channel, ghostly blue. She could smell the sharp salt brine of the sea; and the lapping of the water on the shingle was a soothing, regular sound, so different from the days of clamor she had endured. But the cliff alongside her was steep and obviously impenetrable, even were she fully fit.

She came to a place where the cliff face had crumbled and fallen in great cracked slabs. Perhaps a stream had once run there.

She turned and began to climb up the rough valley, away from the beach.

It was difficult, for the big stones were slippery with kelp fronds. The ropes that bound her hind legs snagged and caught at the rocks…

Something exploded out of the sky.

She trumpeted in alarm. She heard a flapping like giant wings — but wings that beat faster than any bird’s. And there was light, a pool of illumination that hurtled the length of the beach.

Silverhair cowered. Air gushed over her, as if from some tamed windstorm, washing over her face and back; the air stank like a tar pit.

The source of the beam was a thing of straight lines and transparent bubbles, with great wings that whirled above it. It was a great bird, of light and noise.

The Lost had forgotten Silverhair. They went running toward the light-bird, waving their paws.

Carefully, still hobbled by the ropes on her hind legs, Silverhair limped away toward the heart of the Island.

She found a stream, trickling between an outcrop of broken, worn rocks. The first suck of water was so cold and sharp, it sent lances of pain along her dry, inflamed nostrils. She raised her trunk to her mouth. She coughed explosively; her dry throat expelled every drop of the water. When the coughing fit was done, she tried again. The water seemed to burn her throat as it coursed toward her stomach, but she swallowed hard, refusing to allow her body to reject this bounty.

She used her tusks to get the ropes off her hind legs, and then bathed her wounds. The rope burns had indeed turned brown and gray with poison. She washed them clean and caked them with the thin mud she managed to scrape from the bed of the stream.

She cast about for grass. She found it difficult to grasp the tussocks that grew sparsely there, so stiff had her abused trunk become. The grass felt dry, and her tongue, swollen and sore, could detect no flavor.

Another dry, racking cough, and the grass, half-chewed, was expelled.

But she did not give up. There was a calf in her belly, sleeping calmly, trusting her to nurture it to the moment of its birth and then beyond. If she must train herself to live again, she would do it.

So she found more grass and kept trying, until she managed to keep some food in her stomach.

When she had eaten, she found a natural hollow in the ground. She reached over her shoulder for the skins, and she laid the pathetic remnants at the base of the hole.

She spent long heartbeats touching the skins with her trunk, trying to Remember Eggtusk, and the ancient mammoths from whom these skins had been stolen. But the strange, odorless texture of the Lost lay over the skins; and the way they had been scraped and dried, punctured, and stitched together made them seem deeply unnatural.

There was little of Eggtusk left here.

When it was done she limped around the hollow, rumbling her mourning, and she poked at the low mound of remains.

She longed to stay there, and she longed to sleep.

She could feel her strength dissipating, even as she stood here. She had to return to the Family: to tell them what had become of Snagtooth and mighty Eggtusk, and to help Owlheart with whatever the Matriarch decided they must do.

She turned to the north and began the long walk home.

She was a boulder of flesh and bone and fur that stomped stolidly over the blooming summer land, ignoring this shimmering belts of flowers, oblivious to the lemmings she startled from their burrows. As she walked, the warm wind from the south blew the last of her winter coat off her back, so that hair coiled into the air like spindrift from the sea.

She might have looked sullen, for she walked with her head lowered. But such is the habit of mammoths; Silverhair was inspecting the vegetation for the richest grass, which she cropped as often as she could manage.

But the food clogged in her throat as if it were a ball of hair and dirt. Her dung was hard and dry, sharp with barely digested grass. And the cold, though diminishing as the summer advanced, seemed to pierce her deeply.

Her sleep was fragmented, snatches she caught while shivering against rock outcrops, fearful of wolves and Lost.

The world map in her head was now more of a curse than a blessing. She could imagine the scope and rocky sweep of the Island, sense — from their contact rumbles and stamping — where the Family was clustered, far to the north.

She was just a pebble against this bitter panorama. And her own mind and heart — cluttered with the agonizing memories of Eggtusk and Snagtooth and Lop-Ear, and with dread visions of the Lost and their light-bird, and with hopes and fears for the growing child inside her — were dwarfed, made insignificant by the pitiless immensity of the land.

As the sun wheeled in the sky she felt as if her contact with the world was loosening, as if the heavy pads of her feet were leaving the ground; she was a mammoth turning as light as the pollen of the tundra flowers that bloomed around her.

A storm descended.

A black cloud closed around her. The wind seemed to slap at her, each gust a fresh, violent blow. Her fur was plastered against her face. The ice dust hurled by the wind was sharp, and dug into her flesh. She could see barely more than a few paces; she was driving herself through a bubble of light that fluctuated around her.

The storm blew out. But her strength was severely sapped.

She felt she could march no more.

She stopped, and let the sun’s warmth play on her back.

After the storm, the sky was cloaked with a thin overcast. The sun’s light was diffused, so that the air shimmered brightly all around her, and nothing cast a shadow. The sun, high to the north, shone dimly through the haze, and was flanked by a ghostly pair of sun dogs, reflections from ice crystals in the air.

The shadowless light was opalescent, strange and beautiful.

She wasn’t sure where she was, which way she should go. But she could smell water; there was a stream, and pools of ice melt, and the grass grew thickly.

It was a good place to stay. Perhaps her dung would help this place flourish.

On a ground carpeted with bright yellow Arctic daisies, she sank to her knees. The pain in her legs ceased to clamor. She would feed soon, and drink. But first she would sleep.

She rested her tusks on the ground and closed her eyes. She could feel the spin of the rocky Earth that bore her through space, sense it carry her beneath the brightness of the sun.

But a deeper cold lay beneath, a cold that sucked at her.

Something made her open her eyes.

She saw a strange animal, standing unnaturally on its hind legs, brandishing a stick at her. In its paws it held something that glittered like ice, small and sharp.

She felt a nudging around her body, under her spine and at her buttocks.

Irritated, she raised her head.

A huge Bull was trying to dig his tusks under her belly. By the oozing sores of Kilukpuk’s cracked and bleeding moles, but you’re a heavy great boulder of a Cow, little Silverhair. Come — on — come —

She tried to ignore him. After all, he wasn’t real. "Go away," she said.

But we can’t, you see, child. Another mammoth — this time a massive, ancient Cow who moved stiffly, as if plagued by arthritis — stood at her other side. It isn’t your day to die. Don’t you know that? Your story isn’t done yet. And she tugged at Silverhair’s tusks with her trunk.

Silverhair reluctantly got to her feet. "I’m comfortable here," she mumbled.

You never would listen. Another voice, somewhere behind her. Turning her head sluggishly, Silverhair saw this was a strange Cow indeed, with one shattered tusk and a trunk severed close to the root. The Cow was lowering her head and butting at Silverhair’s buttocks, trying to nudge her forward.

The others, the Bull and the ancient Cow, had clustered to either side of her. They were huddling her, she realized.

Silverhair took a single, resentful step. "I just want to be left alone."

The Bull growled. If you don’t stop squealing like a calf I’ll paddle your behind. Now move.

So, one painful step after another, her trunk dangling over the ground, Silverhair walked on. She leaned on one reassuring flank, then the other; and the gentle nudging of the mutilated head behind her impelled her forward.

And the strange animal that walked upright stalked alongside her, just beyond reach of the mammoths, and his strange sharp objects glinted in his paw.

But it was not over. Still the land stretched ahead of her, curving over the limb of the planet.

Sometimes she thought she heard contact rumbles, and her hopes would briefly lift. But the sound was remote, uncertain, and she couldn’t tell if it was real or just imagination.

She came to a place of frost heave, where ice domes as high as her belly had formed in the soil, ringed by shattered rock. This land was difficult to cross, and there was little food, for nothing could grow here.

One by one, the mammoths who had escorted her fell away: the ancient Cow, the crusty old Bull, the mutilated face that had bumped encouragingly at her rump.

Even the faint trace of contact rumbles died away. Perhaps it had only been thunder.

At last she was alone with the animal that walked upright. It glided alongside her, as effortless as a shadow, waiting for her to fall.

She staggered on until the frost heave was behind her.

She stopped, and looked around dimly. She had come to a plain of black volcanic rock, barely broken even by lichen. It was a hard, uncompromising land, no place for the living.

She kneeled once more, and let her chest sink to the ground, and then her tusks, which supported her head.

Here, then, she thought. Here it ends.

There was nobody here, no scent of mammoth on this barren land: no one to perform the Remembering ceremony for her and her calf. Well, then, she must do it for herself. She cast about with her trunk. But there was nothing to be had — no twigs or grass — nothing save a few loose stones, scattered over this bony landscape. She picked these up and dropped them on her back. Then she reached to her belly and tore out some hair, and scattered it over her spine.

…Silverhair… Silverhair…

A mammoth stood before her, tugging at her trunk.

She pulled back impatiently. "Go away," she mumbled. She had had enough of meddling ghosts.

But this mammoth was small, and it seemed to hop about before her, touching her trunk and mouth and tusks. Silverhair, is it really you? Silverhair… Silverhair…

"Silverhair."

It was her nephew. Croptail. And beyond him she could see the great boulder shape of Owlheart, a cloud of flesh and fur and tusk.

She could smell them. They were real. Relief flooded her, and a great weakness fell on her, making her tremble.

She looked around, meaning to warn Owlheart about the strange, upright-walking animal. But for now, it had vanished.

Foxeye stroked her back and touched her mouth and trunk, and brought her food and water. Owlheart tended her wounds, stripping off the mud Silverhair had plastered there, washing the deepest of the cuts and covering them once more with fresh mud. She laid her trunk against Silverhair’s belly hair, listening to the small life that was growing within. Even Croptail helped, in his clumsy way.

But the little one, Sunfire, was too young even to remember her aunt; the calf stood a few paces away from this battered, bloody stranger, her eyes wide as the Moon.

Later, Silverhair would marvel at Owlheart’s patience. The Matriarch must have been bursting with questions. Yet, as the sun completed many cycles in the sky, Owlheart allowed Silverhair to reserve all her energy for recovery.

Silverhair tried to understand what had happened to her on the long walk home, but even as she tried to recall fragments of it, they would slip away, like bees from a flower.

She did wonder, though, why there hadn’t been a fourth ghost out there helping her: a young Bull with a damaged ear…

At last Owlheart came to her.

"You know you’ve been lucky. A couple of those wounds on your legs were down to the very bone. But now you’re healing. Kilukpuk must be watching over you, child."

Silverhair raised her trunk wearily. "I wish she’d watch a bit more carefully, then."

"How much do you remember?"

"Everything — I think — until those Lost captured me and tied my legs to the stakes. After that it gets a little blurred. Until Snagtooth…"

"Start at the beginning."

And so, in shards and fragments, Silverhair told the Matriarch her story.

When she was done, Owlheart was grim. "It is just as it says in the Cycle. It was like this in the time of Longtusk, when the Lost would wait for us to die, then eat our flesh, and shelter from the rain in caves made of our skin, and burn our bones for warmth. And they will not stop there. They will take more and more, their twisted hunger never sated."

"Then what should we do?" Owlheart raised her trunk and sniffed the air. "For a long time we have been sheltered, here on this Island, where few Lost ever came. But now they know we are here, we can only flee."

"Flee? But where?"

Owlheart turned her face away from the sun, and the ice-laden wind whipped at her fur.

"North," she said. "We must go north, as mammoths always have."

16 The Glaciers

The migration began the next day.

Owlheart allowed many stops, for feeding and resting and passing dung; and when the midnight sun rolled along the horizon, they slept. But when the mammoths moved, Owlheart had them sweep across the tundra at a handsome pace. They ran in the thin warmth of the noon sun, and they ran in the long shadows of midnight.

Foxeye shepherded her calf Sunfire, coaxing her to feed and pass dung and sleep. Croptail strayed farther afield. He would dash ahead of the rest, pawing at the grass and rock with his trunk, and run in wide circles around the group as if to deter any wolves. Owlheart caught Silverhair’s eye, and an unspoken message passed between the Cows. He’s following his instinct. What he’s doing is the right thing for a young Bull. But keep an eye on him; he’s no Eggtusk yet.

It was the height of summer now. The air above the endless bogs hummed with millions of gnats, midges, mosquitoes. The mosquitoes would hover in smoke-like dancing columns before homing in on a mammoth’s body heat with remarkable accuracy, until their victim was smothered by an extremely uncomfortable cloak of insect life. Blackflies were almost as much of a pest as mosquitoes, for they seemed able to penetrate the most dense layers of fur in their search for exposed skin — not just the soft parts, but even the harder skin of Silverhair’s feet. They would stab their mouthparts through the skin to suck out the blood that sustained them, and the poison they injected into Silverhair’s skin to keep the blood flowing freely caused swelling and intolerable itching.

But even the mosquitoes and flies were but a minor irritant to Silverhair, as her strength gradually returned. Mammoths are not designed to be still. Silverhair found that the hours of easy movement, her muscles strengthening and her wounds healing, smoothed the pain out of her body. Even her digestion improved as the steady, normal flow of food and water though her body was restored; soon her dung passed easily and was rich and thick once more.

And as they ran, it was as if more ghosts clustered around her: this time not just two or three or four mammoths, but whole Families, young and old, Bulls and calves, running together as smoothly as the grass of the tundra ripples in the wind. It seemed to Silverhair that their rumbles were merging, sinking into the ground, as if the whole plain undulated with the mammoths’ greeting calls.

But then the ghosts would fade, and Silverhair would be left alone with her diminished Family: just three Cows, one immature Bull, and a suckling infant, where once millions of mammoths had roamed across the great plains.

And so, once again, the Family approached the Mountains at the End of the World.

Sheets of hard black volcanic rock thrust out of the soil. No trees grew here; nothing lived but straggling patches of grass and lichen that clung to the frost-cracked rocks. The last of the soil was frozen hard, as if winter never left this place, and the rock itself was slick with ice.

At last they reached the lower slopes of the Mountains themselves. Rock rose above them, dwarfing even Owlheart, the tallest of the mammoths; Silverhair could see how the rock face had been carved and shattered by frost. The clamor of ice and shattering rock was deafening for the mammoths, making it impossible for them to sense what might lie beyond.

They walked in the lee of the Mountains, until they came to a great glacier. It lay in a valley gouged through the rock, just as a mammoth’s tongue lies in her jawbone. The ice at the glacier’s snout lay in graying, broken heaps across the frozen ground. Beyond, to the north, the glacier was a ribbon of dazzling white, a frozen river that disappeared into the mist of the Mountains; and it seemed to draw the staring Silverhair with it.

Foxeye said, "We shouldn’t be here. This isn’t a place for mammoths. The Cycle says so…"

"There is a way through the Mountains," said Owlheart.

"How do you know?" asked Foxeye.

Owlheart said, "Wolfnose — my Matriarch — once told me of a time when she was but a calf, and the Matriarch then had memories of long before… There was a Bull calf with more curiosity than sense. Rather like you, Silverhair. He went wandering off by himself. He followed a glacier into the Mountains, and he said it broke right through the Mountains to the northern side. Although he didn’t follow it to its end…"

Suddenly Owlheart’s audacious plan was clear to Silverhair. She stood before the glacier, awed. "So this is a path broken through the Mountains by the ice. Just as mammoths will break a path through a forest."

"And that’s where we’re going," said Owlheart firmly. "We’re going beyond the Mountains at the End of the World, where no mammoth has ventured before—"

"And for good reason." Foxeye rocked to and fro, stamping on the hard ground. "Because it’s impossible, no matter what that rogue calf said. If he ever existed. We don’t even know what’s there, land or sea or ice."

For a heartbeat Owlheart’s resolve seemed to waver. She seemed to slump, as if she were aging through decades in an instant.

Silverhair laid her trunk on Foxeye’s head. "Enough," she said gently. "We must follow the Matriarch, Foxeye."

Foxeye subsided. But her unhappiness was obvious.

Owlheart nodded to Silverhair. Her unspoken command was clear: Silverhair was to lead the way.

Heart pumping, Silverhair turned, and stepped onto the ice.

Mammoths do not spend much time on the bare ice, because no food is to be had there; their habitat is the tundra. But Silverhair understood the glacier, from experience and lore.

At first she walked over cracked-off fragments of ice scattered over the rock. But soon, as she worked her way steadily forward, she found herself walking on a continuous sheet of ice. It was hard and cold under the pads of her feet, but she had little difficulty maintaining her footing.

But it was cold. The sun was warm on one side of her body, but the immense mass of ice seemed to suck the heat from the other side of her body and her belly, and she could feel a wide and uncomfortable temperature difference from one side to the other.

She was climbing a steepening blue-white hillside, which rose above her. She enjoyed the crunchy texture of the snow underfoot. Lumps of blue ice pushed out of the snow around her, carved by the wind into fantastic shapes. Here and there, shattered ice lay in fans across the white surface she was climbing. The glacier was a river of ice, seemingly motionless around her, though its downhill flow was obvious nonetheless. Lines of scoured-off rock in the ice surface marked the glacier’s millennial course. The glacier’s shuddering under her feet was continuous, and Silverhair could feel its agonizingly sluggish progress through its valley, and she could hear the low-pitched grind and crack of the compressed ice as it forced its way through the rock, and the high-pitched scream of the rock itself being shattered and torn away.

She came to a place where the thickening ice was split by crevasses. When it flowed out of the mountains onto the tundra the glacier was able to spread out, like a stream splashing over a plain, and so it cracked open. Most of the crevasses followed the line of the glacier as it poured down its gouged-out channel in the rock. But some of them, more treacherous, cut across the line of the flow.

Most of the crevasses were narrow enough to step across. Some were bridged by tongues of ice, but Silverhair tested these carefully before leading the mammoths onto them. If a crevasse was too wide she would lead the mammoths along its length until it was narrow enough to cross in safety.

She looked into one deep crevasse. The walls were sheer blue ice, broken here and there only by a small ledge or a few frost crystals. The crevasse was cluttered by the remains of collapsed snow bridges, but past them she could see its endless deep, the blue of the ice becoming more and more intense until it deepened to indigo and then to darkness.

In some places, where the glacier had lurched downward, there were icefalls: miniature cliffs of ice, like frozen waterfalls. These were difficult to climb, especially where there were crevasses along the icefalls. In other places, where the glacier flowed awkwardly around a rock outcrop, the ice was shattered to blocks and shards by the shear stresses, and was very difficult to cross.

After a time, as the mammoths climbed up from the plain, they encountered fewer crevasses, and the going got easier. In some places the glacier was covered with hard white snow, but in others Silverhair found herself walking on clean blue unbroken ice. The blue ice wasn’t flat, but was dimpled with cups and ridges. There were even frozen ripples here, their edges hard under her feet. It was exactly like walking over the frozen surface of a river.

When she looked back she could see the Family following in a ragged line: Foxeye with her two calves, and Owlheart bringing up the rear. They looked like hairy boulders, uncompromisingly brown against the blinding white of the ice.

She came to a chasm the glacier had cut deep into the mountain’s rock. The mammoths were silent, even the calves, as they threaded through this cold, gloomy passage. Walls of hard blue-black rock towered above Silverhair. She could see scratches etched into the rock, and scattered over the ice were sand, gravel, rocks, even boulders ripped out of place by the scouring ice.

At last the chasm opened out. Silverhair stepped forward cautiously, blinking as she emerged from the shadows.

She was surrounded by mountains.

She was on the lip of a natural bowl in the mountain range, a bowl that brimmed with ice. The mountain peaks, crusted with snow that would never melt, protruded above the ice like the half-buried tusks of some immense giant. The ice was trying to flow down to the plain below, but the mountains got in the way. The glaciers were the places where the ice leaked out. Rings of frozen eddies and ripples, even frozen waves, had formed where the ice pressed against the mountains’ stubborn black rock faces.

The mammoths walked cautiously onto the ice bowl. Nothing moved here but themselves, nothing lay before them but the plain of white ice, black rock, blue sky. But there was noise: the distant cracks and growls and splintering crashes of ice avalanches, as great sheets broke away from the rocky faces all around them, a remote, vast, intimidating clamor. It was a clean, cold, silent place — white, sprinkled with rugged black outcrops, the only smells the sharp tang of ice and the freezing musk of the mammoths themselves.

Silverhair heard her own breathing, and the squeak of the ice as it compressed under her feet. She felt small and insignificant, dwarfed by the majesty of her planet.

Owlheart stood alongside her. She was breathing hard after the climb, and her breath steamed around her face, "Just as the Cycle describes it. From the ice that pools here, the glaciers flow to the tundra."

"And," said Silverhair, "no mammoth has ever gone farther north than this."

"No mammoth before today. Look."

Silverhair followed the Matriarch’s gaze. She saw that on the northern horizon, the mountains were marked by a notch: another valley scoured out by glaciers. And beyond, she could see blue-gray sky.

"That’s our way through," said Owlheart.

Silverhair reached the ravine on the far side of the ice bowl, and found herself standing on the creaking mass of another glacier.

She looked down the way she must climb.

The view was startling. The glacier was a frozen torrent sweeping down its valley, turning around a bluff in the rock before spreading, flattening, and shattering to shards. The rubble lines along the length of the glacier made the flow obvious. They ran in parallel, turning together with each curve of the glacier. They looked like wrinkles in stretched skin.

There were even tributary glaciers running into the main body, like streams joining a river. But where the tributaries merged, the ice had cracked into crevasses or shattered and twisted into fields of chaotic blocks.

Despite its stillness she could see the drama of the great ice river’s gush through the broken mountains, the endless battle between the stubborn rock and irresistible ice. Where the mountains constricted its flow, the ice reared up in great whirlpools of shattered, frozen sheets; and frozen waves lapped at the base of black hills, truncated by millennia of frost-shatter. She heard the roar of massive avalanches, the shriek of splitting rock, the groan of the shifting ice, and the sullen voice of the wind as it moaned through the valleys.

It was a panorama of white ice, black rock, blue sky.

The way forward would be difficult yet; she knew they would be fortunate to reach the northern lands without mishap. Yet her spirit was lifted by the majesty of the landscape. Despite her troubles and her pain, she felt profoundly glad to be alive, to have her small place in the great Cycle, to have come here and witnessed this.

She pressed on, stepping cautiously over the shattered ice.

At first the going, over a shallow snowdrift, was easy. But then the drift disappeared, without warning, and she found herself descending a slope of steep, slick blue ice. And as she climbed down further, the horizon increasingly dropped away from her, suggesting deep ice falls or steep and fissured drops ahead.

Climbing down a glacier turned out to be much harder than climbing up one had been.

At least on the way up she had been able to see the ice falls and crevasses before she reached them; here even the biggest obstacles were invisible, hidden by the ice’s sharp falling curve, until she was on them. With every step she took, her feet either twisted in the melt pits that marked the ancient, ribbed blue ice, or broke through a crust of ice, jarring her already aching joints.

She reached a moraine, an unbroken wall of boulders that lay across her path. The line of debris had been deposited on the surface of the ice by centuries of glacial flow. She picked her way through the boulders, flinching when her feet landed on frost-shattered rock chips.

She came to a place where the ice, constricted by two towering black cliffs to either side, was shattered, split by great crevasses. In the worst areas a confusion of stresses crisscrossed the ice with crevasse after crevasse, and the land became a chaotic wilderness of giant ice pillars, linked only by fragile snow bridges.

She crept through this broken place by sticking close to the cliff to her left side. The ice here, dinging to the rock, was marginally less shattered. In some places she found clear runs of blue ice, which were easier to negotiate. But even these were a mixed blessing, for the ice was ridged and hard under her feet, and it had been kept clear only by the action of a scouring wind — and when that wind rolled off the ice bowl behind her it drove billows of ice crystals into her eyes, each gust a slap.

Then she was past the crevasse field, and the rock walls opened out… and for the first time she could see the northern lands.

It was a plain of ice — nothing but ice, studded with trapped bergs, dotted here and there with the blue of water.

Her heart sank.

The glacier decanted onto a rocky shore littered with broken stone and scraps of ice. She walked forward. This might have been the twin of the Island’s southern coast. The landfast ice was more thickly bound to the ground here than in the south, but she could see leads of clear water and dark steam clouds above them. There was no sign of vegetation, no grass or bushes or trees — nor, indeed, any exposed rock. Nothing but ice: a great sheet of it, over which nothing moved.

A huge floe drifted close to the shore, and, cautiously, she stepped onto it. It tipped with a grand slowness, and she heard the crunch of splintering ice at its edge. The floe was pocked by steaming airholes through which peered the heads of seals.

As she watched, a seal reared out of the water to strike at an incautious diving seabird, dragging it into the ocean. There was a swirl in the water, a final, despairing squawk, and then the seal’s head erupted from the water with the bird’s body crushed between its jaws. Then the seal thrashed its head from side to side with stunning violence, tearing the bird to pieces, literally shaking it out of its skin.

It was not a promising welcome for the mammoths, Silverhair thought.

Some distance to the west, a glacier was pushing its way into the sea ice. The pressure had made the sea ice fold up into great ridges around the tongue of the glacier, and in the depressions between the wind-smoothed ridges, ice blocks had heaped up. At the tip of the glacier there was a sudden explosion, and a vast cloud of powdered snow shot up into the air. The roaring continued, and as the snow cleared a little, she saw that the snout of the glacier was splitting away, a giant ravine cracking its way down the thickness of the ice river, and a pinnacle of ice tipping away from the glacier, toward the sea. It was the long, stately birth of a new iceberg. In the low light of the sun, the snow was pink, the new berg a deep sky blue.

She felt the ocean swell beneath her feet, heard the groan of the shifting ice. The sky was empty save for the deep gray-blue of the far north, the color of cold.

And she knew now that the ocean beneath her swept all the way to the north: all the way to the axis of the Earth.

Owlheart climbed aboard the floe beside her, making it rock. "It’s a frozen ocean," the Matriarch said.

"Yes. We can’t live here."

"I feared as much," said Owlheart. Her rumble was complex, troubled. "But…"

Silverhair uncertainly wrapped her trunk around Owlheart’s. She was not accustomed to comforting a Matriarch. "I know. You had no choice but to try."

"And now," said Owlheart bitterly, "at the fringe of this cursed frozen sea, we have nowhere to go."

There was a a distant clattering sound, intermittent, carried on the wind. Silverhair turned.

Something — complex, black, and glittering — was flying along the beach from the west. Sweeping directly toward Foxeye and her calves. Sending a clattering noise washing over the ice.

It was the light-bird of the Lost.

17 The Chasm of Ice

The light-bird clattered over their heads like a storm. Owlheart reared up and pawed at the air. There was a stink of burning tar, a wash of downrushing wind from those whirling wings that drove the hair back from Silverhair’s face. She could see Lost — two, three of them — cupped in the bird’s strange crystal belly, staring down at her.

Silverhair and Owlheart hurried back to the shore where Foxeye and her calves waited, cowering.

A faint scent of burning came to them on the salty breeze. The calves, huddling close to their mother, picked it up immediately; they raised their little trunks and trumpeted in alarm.

Silverhair looked along the beach to the west, the way the bird had come. She could see movement, a strange dark rippling speckled with light. And there was a cawing, like gulls.

It was the Lost: a line of them, spread along the beach. And the light was the yellow fire of torches they carried in their paws.

Owlheart rumbled and trumpeted; Silverhair had never seen her so angry. "They pursue us even here? I’ll destroy them all. I’ll drag that monster from the sky and smash it to shards—"

Silverhair wrapped her trunk around the Matriarch’s, and dragged her face forward. "Matriarch. Listen to me. I’ve seen that light-bird before at the camp of the Lost. It makes a lot of noise but it won’t harm us. There—" She looked down the beach, at the approaching line of Lost. "That is what we must fear."

"I will trample them like mangy wolves!"

"No. They will kill you before your tusks can so much as scratch them. Think, Matriarch."

She could see the effort it took for Owlheart to rein in her Bull-like instincts to drive off these puny predators. "Tell me what to do, Silverhair," she said.

"We must run," said Silverhair. "We can outrun the Lost."

"And then?" asked Owlheart bleakly.

"That is for tomorrow. First we must survive today," said Silverhair bluntly.

"Very well. But, whatever happens today—" Owlheart tugged at Silverhair’s trunk, urgently, affectionately. "Remember me," she said, and she turned away.

Stunned, Silverhair watched the Matriarch’s broad back recede.

The coastline was mountainous. Black volcanic rock towered above the fleeing mammoths.

They came to another huge glacier spilling from the Mountains, a cliff of ice that loomed over them. The beach was strewn with shattered ice blocks, and the glacier itself, a sculpture in green and blue, was cracked by giant ravines. The air that spilled down from within the ravines was damp and chill — cold as death, Silverhair thought.

They ran on, the three Cows panting hard, their breath steaming around their faces, the calves mewling and crying as their mother goaded them forward.

The cries of the Lost seemed to grow louder, as if they were gaining on the mammoths. And still the light-bird clattered over their heads, its noise and tarry stink and distorted wind washing over them, driving them all close to panic.

Silverhair wished Lop-ear were here. He would know what to do.

Owlheart shuddered to a halt, staring along the beach. Foxeye and the calves, squealing, slowed behind her.

Silverhair came up to Owlheart. "What is it?…"

The wind swirled, and the stink reached Silverhair. A stink of flesh.

Strung across the beach was a series of heaps of stone and sand and ice. From each pile, oily black smoke rose up to the sky. The fire came from a thick, dark substance plastered over the stones.

What burned there was mammoth.

Silverhair could smell it: bone and meat, and even some hair and skin, bound together by fat and dung. One of the stone heaps was even crowned with a mammoth skull, devoid of flesh and skin and hair.

She recognized it immediately, and recoiled in horror and disgust. It was Eggtusk’s skull.

Foxeye was standing still, shuddering. The two calves were staring wide-eyed at the fires, crying.

"We can’t go through that," growled Owlheart.

Silverhair was battling her own compulsion to flee this grisly horror. "But we must. It’s just stones and fire. We can knock these piles down, and—"

"No." Owlheart trotted back a few paces and stared into the mouth of a great ravine in the glacier. "We’ll go this way. Maybe we’ll find a way through. At least the light-bird won’t be able to chase us there." She prodded Foxeye. "Come on. Bring the calves."

In desperation Silverhair plucked at Owlheart’s tail. "No. Don’t you see? That’s what they want us to do."

Owlheart swiped at her with her tusks, barely missing Silverhair’s scarred cheek. "This is a time to follow me, Silverhair, not to question."

And she turned her back, deliberately, and led her Family into the canyon of ice.

Silverhair looked along the beach. One of the Lost was standing on a boulder before the others, waving his spindly forelegs in a manner of command. Silverhair could see the ice light glint from his bare scalp. It was Skin-of-Ice: the monster of the south, come to pursue her, even here beyond the End of the World. She felt a black despair settle on her soul.

She followed her Matriarch into the ravine.

Immediately the air felt colder, piercing even the mammoths’ thick coats. Immersed in ice, Silverhair felt the sting of frost in her long nostrils, and her breath crackled as it froze in the hair around her mouth.

Impatient to make haste, anxious to keep their footing, the mammoths filed through the chasm, furry boulder-shapes out of place in this realm of sculpted ice. The going was difficult; the ground was littered with slabs and blocks of cracked-off ice, dirty and eroded. With each step, ice blocks clattered or cracked, and the sharp noises echoed in the huge silence.

Walls of ice loomed above Silverhair, sculpted by melt and rainfall into curtains and pinnacles. The daylight was reduced to a strip of blue-gray far above. But it wasn’t dark here, for sunlight filtered through the ice, illuminating the blue-green depths.

It was almost beautiful, she thought.

Silverhair heard a clattering. She looked back to the mouth of the chasm. The light-bird hovered there, black and sinister. As Owl-heart had predicted, the light-bird couldn’t follow them here. Perhaps its whirling wings were too wide to fit within the narrow walls.

But on the ground she could see the skinny limbs of the Lost, the smoky light of their torches, as they clambered over ice blocks.

Owlheart had gone ahead of the others, deeper into the chasm. Now she returned, trumpeting her rage. "There’s no way out. A fall of ice has completely blocked the chasm." She growled. "Our luck is running out, Silverhair."

"Luck has nothing to do with it," said Silverhair. She felt awe: she was sure the Lost — in fact, Skin-of-Ice himself — were behind every element of this trap — the burning fat and the skull, the driving of the mammoths into this chasm, and now the barrier at its rear. How was it possible for a mind to be so twisted as to concoct such complex schemes?

Owlheart rumbled, paced back and forth, struck the ground with her tusks. "We aren’t done yet. Listen to me. In some places, at the back of the chasm, the ice lies thin over the rock. And the rock is rotten with frost there, Silverhair. Go up there and dig. See if you can find a way out. If there’s a way, take Foxeye and the calves. Get away from here and join up with one of the other Families."

"Where?"

"Find them, Silverhair. It’s up to you now."

"What about you?"

Owlheart turned to face the encroaching Lost, and their fire glittered in her deep-sunken eyes. "The Lost will have to clamber over my bloated corpse before they reach our calves."

"Owlheart—"

"It will make a good story in the Cycle, won’t it?" The Matriarch tugged at Silverhair’s trunk one last time, and touched her mouth and eyes. "Go to work, Silverhair, and hurry; you might yet save us all."

Then the Matriarch turned and faced the advancing Lost.

Silverhair turned to Foxeye, who stood over her terrified calves. "They’re trying to suckle," Foxeye said, her voice all but inaudible. "But I have no milk to give them. I’m too frightened, Silverhair. I can’t even give them milk…"

"It’s all right," Silverhair said. "We’ll get out of here yet." But the words sounded hollow to her own ears.

"They’ve come to destroy us, haven’t they? Maybe Snagtooth was right. Maybe all we can do is throw ourselves on the mercy of the Lost."

"The Lost have no mercy."

Foxeye said bleakly, "Then let them kill Owlheart, and spare me and my calves."

Silverhair was shocked. "You don’t mean that. Listen to me. I’m going to save you. You and the calves. It isn’t over yet, Foxeye; not while I have breath in my body."

Foxeye hesitated. "You promise?"

"Yes." Silverhair shook her sister’s head with her trunk. "Yes, I promise. Wait here."

She turned and ran, deeper into the chasm.

The ravine became so narrow that it would barely have admitted two or three mammoths abreast, and the wind, pouring down from the glacier above, was sharp with frost crystals. But Silverhair lowered her head and kept on until she found the way jammed by the jumble of fallen ice Owlheart had described.

The blocks here were sharp-edged and chaotically cracked, as if they had been broken off the ice walls above by the scraping of some gigantic tusk. Silverhair stared at the impassable barrier, wondering how even the Lost could have caused so much damage so quickly.

She turned and worked her way back down the chasm. At last she found a patch of blue-black rock protruding through the ice walls. Perhaps the strength of the wind had kept this outcrop free of frost and snow. But the outcrop was some distance above her head.

Below it, on the ground, was a mound of scree — frost-shattered stone — mixed with loose snow and ice.

She stepped forward. The scree crunched and slithered under her feet. It was very tiring, like climbing up a snowbank. Small rocks began to litter the ice floor, broken off the rock face by frost, increasing with size, until she found herself climbing past giant boulders.

A thunder-stick cracked.

Its sharp noise rattled from the sheer walls of the chasm. And now the screams of terrified mammoths rattled from the walls.

Every fiber in her being impelled Silverhair to lunge back down the slope and return to her Family. But she knew she must stick to her task.

She turned and resumed her climb.

When she could reach the rock face, Silverhair dug into the rock wall with her tusks. The rock was loosely bound and easily scraped aside. As Owlheart had predicted, the exposed rock was rotten. Water would seep into the slightest crack and then, on freezing, expand, so widening the crack. Lichen, orange and green, dug into the friable rock face, accelerating its disintegration. Gradually the rock was split open, in splinters, shards, or great sheets, and over the years fragments had fallen away to form the slope of scree below her.

With growing urgency Silverhair ground her way deeper into the rotten rock. Soon she was working in a hail of frost-shattered debris, and she ignored the sharp flakes that dug into the soft skin of her trunk.

But the chasm was full of the screams of the calves, and she muttered and wept as she worked.

Then — suddenly — the wall fell away, and there was a deep, dark space ahead of her.

A cave.

Hope surged in her breast. With increased vigor she pounded at the rock face before her, using tusks, trunk, forehead to widen the hole. The rock collapsed to a heap of frost-smashed rubble before her.

She reached forward with her trunk. There was no wall ahead of her. But she could feel the walls to either side, scratched and scarred. Scarred — by mammoth tusks? How could that be, so deep under the ground?

She felt a breath of air blowing the hairs on her face. Air that stank of brine. Owlheart had been right; there must be a passage here, open to the air. And that was all that was important right now; mysteries of tusk-scraped walls could wait.

But would the passage prove too narrow to get through? She had to find out before she committed them all to a trap.

Scrambling over the broken rocks, she plunged into the exposed cavern. It extended deep into the rock face. There was no light here, but she could feel the cool waft of brine, hear the soft echo of her footfalls from the walls. She pushed deeper, looking for light.

So it was that Silverhair did not see what became of Owlheart, as she confronted the troop of Lost.

The Lost advanced toward Owlheart, and their cries echoed from the walls.

The Matriarch reared up, raising her trunk and tusks, and trumpeted. Her voice, magnified by the narrow canyon walls, pealed down over the Lost, sounding like a herd of a thousand mammoths. And when she dropped back to the ground, her forefeet slammed down so hard they shook the very Earth.

But the Lost continued to advance.

After that first explosion of noise, the Lost had lowered their thunder-sticks and piled them on the ground. Now they raised up other weapons.

Here was a stick with a shard of rib or tusk embedded in its end. Here was a piece of shoulder blade, its edge sharpened cruelly, so huge it all but dwarfed the Lost who clutched it. And here were simple splinters of bone, held in paws, ready to slash and wound.

A chill settled around her heart. For they were weapons made of mammoth bone.

She put aside her primitive fear and assembled a cold determination. Whatever these Lost intended with this game of bones and sticks, this battle would surely take longer — win or lose — than if they used the thunder-sticks. If Silverhair stayed where she was and carried out her orders, they would have a chance.

Now one of the Lost came toward her. He was holding up a stick, tipped with a bone shard.

She lowered her head, eyeing him. "So," she told him, "you are the first to die."

She waited for him to close with her. That thin wooden stick would be no match for her huge curved ivory tusks. She would sweep it aside, and then -

The Lost hurled his stick as hard as he could.

Utterly unexpected, it flew at her like an angry bird. The bone tip speared her chest, unimpeded by the hair and skin and new summer fat there. She could feel it grind against a rib, and pierce her lung.

Staggering, she tried to take a breath. But it was impossible, and there was a sucking feeling at her chest.

Oddly, there was little pain: just a cold, clean sensation.

But her shock was huge. The Lost hadn’t even closed with her yet — but she knew she had taken her last breath. As suddenly as this, with the first strike, it was over.

The Lost who had injured her knew what he had done. He jumped up and down, waving his paws in the air in triumph.

Well, she thought, if this breath in my lungs is to be my last, I must make it count.

She plunged forward and twisted her head. The sharp tip of her right tusk cut clean through the skin and muscle of the throat of the celebrating Lost.

He looked down in disbelief as his blood spilled out over his chest and fell to the ice, steaming. Then he fell, slipping in his own blood.

Owlheart charged again, and she was in amongst the Lost.

She reached out with her trunk and grabbed one of them around the waist. He screamed, flailing his arms, as she lifted him high into the air. While she held him up, another bone-tipped stick was hurled at her chest. It pierced her skin but hit a rib, doing little damage. Impatiently she crashed her chest against the ice wall. There was an instant of agonizing pain as the embedded sticks twisted in her wounds, opening them further, but then they broke away.

She tightened the grip of her mighty trunk until she felt the Lost’s thin bones crack; he shuddered in her grip, then turned limp. She dropped him to the ice.

She longed to take a breath, but knew she must not try.

Two dead. She knew she would not survive this encounter, but perhaps it wasn’t yet over; if she could destroy one or two more of the Lost, Silverhair and the others might still have a chance.

She looked for her next opponent. They were strung out before her, wary now, shouting, raising their sticks and shoulder blades.

She selected one of them. She raised her trunk and charged. He dropped his stick, screamed, and ran. She prepared to trample him…

But now another came forward. It was the hairless one, the one Silverhair called Skin-of-Ice.

He hurled a stick.

It buried itself in her mouth with such venomous power that her head was knocked sideways.

She fell. The stick caught on the ground, driving itself farther into the roof of her mouth. The agony was huge.

She tried to get her legs underneath her. She knew she must rise again. But the ground was slippery, coated with some slick substance. She looked down, and saw that it was her own blood; it soaked, crimson and thick, into the broken ice beneath her.

Now the hairless Lost stood before her. He held up a shard of bone, as if to show it to her.

She gathered her strength for one last lunge with her tusk. He evaded her easily.

He stepped forward and plunged the bone into her belly, ripping at skin and muscle. Coiled viscera, black with blood, snaked onto the ice from her slashed belly. She tried to rise, but her legs were tangled in something.

Tangled in her own spilled, gray guts.

She fell forward. She raised her trunk. Perhaps she could raise a final warning. But her breath was gone.

Within her layers of fat and thick wool, Owlheart had spent her life fighting the cold. But now, at last, all her layers of protection were breached. And the cold swept over her exposed heart.

In a cloud of rock dust, Silverhair burst out of her cavern, back into the chasm.

She was overwhelmed by the noise: the screams and trumpets of terrified mammoths, the calls and yelps of the Lost, the relentless clatter of the light-bird, all of it rattling from the sheer ice walls.

Owlheart had fallen.

Silverhair could see two of the Lost climbing over her flank. They were hauling bone-tipped sticks out of her side, and then plunging them deep into her again, as if determined to ensure she was truly dead.

But Owlheart had not given her life cheaply. Silverhair could see the unmoving forms of two of the Lost, broken and gouged.

Silverhair mourned her fallen Matriarch, and her courage. But it had not been enough. For the rest of the Lost were advancing toward Foxeye and the calves.

And Skin-of-Ice himself, bearing a giant stick tipped with sharpened bone, was leading them.

Foxeye seemed frozen by her fear. Sunfire, the infant, was all but invisible beneath the belly hairs of her mother. And Croptail, the young Bull, stepped forward; he raised his small trunk and brayed his challenge at the Lost.

Skin-of-Ice made a cawing noise and looked to his companions. Silverhair, anger and disgust mixing with her fear, knew that the malevolent Lost, already stained with the blood of the Matriarch, was mocking the impossible bravery of this poor, trapped Bull.

Silverhair raised her trunk and trumpeted. She started down the scree slope. "Croptail! Get your mother. We can escape. Come on—"

The Lost looked up, startled. Some of them looked afraid, she thought with satisfaction, to see another adult mammoth apparently materialize from the solid rock wall.

Perhaps that pause would give her a chance to save her Family.

The young Bull ran to his mother. He tugged at her trunk until she raised her head to face him.

But the Lost were closing, raising their sticks and claws of bone. Silverhair saw one of them break and run to the thunder-sticks at the mouth of the cave. But Skin-of-Ice barked at him, and he returned. Silverhair felt cold. This was a game to Skin-of-Ice, a deadly game he meant to finish with his shards of bone and wood.

Silverhair tried to work out what chance they had. The ground was difficult for the Lost; Silverhair saw how they stumbled on the slippery, ice-coated rock, and were forced to clamber over boulders and ice chunks that the mammoths, with their greater bulk, could brush aside. And once the Family were safely in the tunnel, Silverhair would emulate Owlheart. She would make a stand and disembowel any Lost who tried to follow…

But the shadows flickered, and an unearthly clatter rattled from the ice and exposed rock. She looked up and flinched. The light-bird was hovering over the chasm.

Two of the Lost were leaning precariously out of the bird’s gleaming belly. They were holding something, like a giant sheet of skin. They dropped it into the cavern. It fell, spreading out as it did so. Silverhair saw that it was like a spiderweb — but a web that was huge and strong, woven from some black rope.

And, as the Lost had surely intended, the web fell neatly over Foxeye and her calves.

Foxeye’s humped head pushed upward at the web, and Silverhair could see the small, agitated form of Croptail. But the more the mammoths struggled, the more entangled they became. Sunfire’s terrified squealing, magnified by the ice, was pitiful.

Silverhair started forward, trying to think. Perhaps she could rip the web open with her tusks -

But now there was a storm of thunder-stick shouts, a hail of the invisible stinging things they produced. Instinctively she scrambled up the scree slope to the mouth of her cave.

The fire came from the Lost leaning out of the belly of the light-bird. They were pointing thunder-sticks at her. Bits of rock exploded from the ground and walls.

Down in the chasm, the Lost walked over the fallen webbing, holding it down with their weight where it appeared the mammoths might be breaking free. Skin-of-Ice himself clambered on top of Croptail’s trapped, kneeling bulk. Almost casually, he probed through the net with his bone-tipped stick. Silverhair saw blood fount, and heard Croptail’s agonized scream.

Her heart turned to ice.

…But the thunder-stick hail still slammed into the frost-cracked rock around her. Great shards and flakes flew into the air. She had no choice but to stumble back into her cave.

She trumpeted her defiance at the light-bird. As soon as the lethal hail diminished she would charge.

But she heard a deeper rumbling, from above her head.

A great sheet of rock fell away from the chasm wall above the cave opening. Dust swirled over her. Then a huge chunk of the cave’s roof separated and fell. She was caught in a vicious rain of rocks that pounded at her back and head, and the air became so thick with dust, she could barely breathe.

Still she tried to press forward. But the falling rock drove her back, pace by pace, and the light of the chasm was hidden.

The last thing she heard was Foxeye’s desperate, terrified wail. "You promised me, Silverhair! You promised me!…"

Then, at last, Silverhair was sealed up in darkness and silence.

18 The Cave of Salt

Alone in the dark, Silverhair dug at the fallen boulders until she could feel the ivory of her tusks splintering against the unyielding rock, and blood seeped along her trunk from a dozen cuts and scrapes.

But the rocks, firmly wedged in place, were immovable.

She sank to her knees and rested her tusks on the invisible, uneven ground.

The calves had been captured — perhaps even now they were being butchered by the casually brutal Skin-of-Ice and his band of Lost. What was left for her now?

In the depths of her despair, she looked for guidance. And she found it in the last orders of her Matriarch.

She must seek out her Cousins: the other Families that had made up the loose-knit Clan of the Island, a Clan that had once been part of an almost infinite network of mammoth blood alliances that had spread around the world. Her way forward was clear.

But what, a small voice prompted her, if there were no more Families to be found? What if the worst fears of Wolfnose and Lop-ear had come true?

She tried to imagine discovering such a terrible thing: how she would feel, what she would do.

She would simply have to cope, find a way to go on. For now, she had her orders from the Matriarch, and she would follow them. And besides, she had a promise to her sister to keep.

But first she had to get out of this cave.

With new determination she got to her feet, shook off the dust that had settled over her coat, and turned her head, seeking the breeze.

The cave was utterly dark.

She moved with the utmost caution, her trunk held out before her. Her progress was slow. The floor was broken and uneven, the passage narrow and twisting, and she was afraid she might stumble over jagged rock or tumble into an unseen ravine.

And fear crowded her imagination. Mammoths, creatures of the open tundra, are not used to being enclosed; Silverhair tried not to think about the weight of rock and ice and soil that was suspended over her head.

But the echoes of her footsteps, crunching on ancient gravel, gave her a sense of a passageway stretching ahead of her. And there was the breeze: the slightest of zephyrs, laden with the sour stink of brine, somehow worming its way through cracks in the ground to this buried place.

And the breeze grew stronger, little by little, as she progressed.

But the passageway took her downward.

As she moved deeper into the belly of the Earth, the air began to grow warmer. She heard the slow dripping of water from the walls, felt the channels those tiny drips had carved in the rock at her feet over the Great-Years. She licked the droplets from the wall. The water was cool and only a little salty, but there wasn’t enough of it to quench her thirst.

At first the rising heat was comfortable — preferable, anyhow, to the dry, deathly chill of the ice chasm. Suspended here in the dark, she tried to imagine she was feeling the sun on her back, rather than the soulless, sourceless heat of deep rock.

But soon the warmth became less pleasant. She felt her heart race. She spread her ears as far as they would go, lifted her tail and opened her anus flap, opened her mouth and extended her tongue — all to let her body heat escape into this cloying air.

On she walked, deeper and deeper into the dark, and still the heat gathered.

At last the breeze felt a little cooler, and the quality of the echoes from the tunnel ahead changed. Underfoot the ground sloped, suddenly, much more sharply downward.

She stopped.

She sensed the passage broadening into a wider cave. The mouth of her tunnel was set a little way above the floor of the cave. She extended her head and trunk into the empty space beyond the tunnel. The air felt much cooler, and she dropped her ears and anus flap.

With great care she worked her way down a shallow slope of scree to the floor of the cave.

She was still in complete darkness, but she could sense the great dome of the cave’s ceiling far above her, like the roof of some giant mouth.

The breeze seemed to be coming from the opposite side of the cave. But she felt wary of striking out into the darkness.

So she began to feel her way along the wall.

The soft, gritty rock was extensively scratched and scoured. She ran the sensitive tip of her trunk over furrows and grooves.

They were unmistakably the marks of mammoth tusks.

The scrapings of tusks were everywhere, even — she suspected — higher than she could reach herself. She imagined huge old Bulls reaching high up with their gigantic tusks to bring down fresh rock for their Families.

When she ventured a few paces away from the wall, she found the uneven floor littered with mammoth dung. It was obvious that the whole of this cavern had been shaped by the working of mammoths, over generations. But when she picked up some of the dung and broke it open, it crumbled, dry as dust. It was very old, and it was evident that no mammoth had been here for many years.

She used her own tusk to scrape free pebble-sized lumps of rock from the wall. She picked them up, tucked them in her mouth, ground them to sand with her huge teeth, and swallowed them. The rock’s flavor was deliciously sharp: perhaps born from an ancient volcano, this loose, ash-like rock evidently was rich in salt and other minerals the mammoths needed.

The reason for the mammoths’ presence in the cave was clear. Mammoths need salt and other minerals, as do other animals. But their tongues are not long enough to reach around their trunks and tusks to reach salt-licks, exposed outcroppings of salty minerals. So they dig them up, using their tusks to loosen the earth. This whole cavern system might once have been a simple seam of soft, salty rock into which the mammoths had dug, until at last they had shaped this giant cave and the tunnels that led to it.

Silverhair held fragments of the rock on her tongue, relishing the salty taste and the rich, ancient mammoth smell of the place, as if she were tasting the living past itself. She walked on, surrounded by the workings of her ancestors, obscurely comforted.

At last she came to a heap of scree. The fresh breeze seemed to spill from a hole somewhere above her head. It must be another tunnel.

She clambered onto the scree. Her feet scrabbled to get a foothold in the unstable mass; it took several efforts before she had raised herself sufficiently to get her forelegs over the lip of the tunnel. Then it was a simple matter to pull herself all the way in.

She turned her back on the salt cave and marched on, into the darkness.

She felt the tunnel floor rising. The walls closed around her uncomfortably; if she took a step to either side she brushed against warm rock. But, as she climbed, she felt a delicious, welcoming chill return to the air. The breeze she had followed continued to strengthen.

And, ahead of her now, she made out splinters of green-blue light.

Gradually, as her eyes adapted, she saw that the pale green glow was outlining the walls and floor and roof of her tunnel. She could even make out the larger boulders on the floor, and she was able to press forward with confidence.

At last she came to a new chamber. Like the first she had found, this chamber evidently had been hollowed out by mammoths. But this one was flooded with light. The low rocky roof of this cavern had collapsed. She could see great slabs of rock scattered over the floor, gouged cruelly by the ice, and only spires and pinnacles of rock remained. The cave now was enclosed by a roof of ice.

In some places the ice was smooth and bare. Elsewhere the roof was made of snow, with thick white pillars and balls of ice crusting its undersurface, all of it glowing blue-white. Some of the roof ice had broken off, and chunks of it lay scattered over the floor with the rock chunks. Perhaps this was an outlying tongue of a glacier, strong enough to bridge this hole in the ground, thin enough to let through the light.

But the light was very dim. The sunlight was scattered by the ice and turned to a deep, extraordinary blue, translucent, richer than any color she had seen before. Silverhair wouldn’t have been surprised to see Siros, the water-loving calf of Kilukpuk, come swimming through the air toward her, her legs reduced to stubby flippers.

She worked her way around the gouged walls. Most of the scouring was functional: simple scrapes and gouges, some ending in a ragged scar where a chunk of the salty rock had been prized away. But some of the gouges were strange: small marks grouped in compact patterns that seemed to have been made with a great deal of care. At the base of the wall she found pebbles — and even a chipped-off piece of tusk — that looked as if they had been picked up and used to shape the gouges just so.

As she stared at them, the patterns were somehow familiar.

Here was a simple series of down-scrapes — but, for a heartbeat, Silverhair could see, as if looking beyond the scrapes, a dogged mammoth standing alone in a winter storm, thick winter hair dangling around her. And here, two little clusters of scrapes became a Cow with her calf, who suckled busily.

Then she lost the images, like losing her grasp on a lush strand of grass, and there were only crude gouges in the salty rock.

The markings came from a richer time: a time when there were so many mammoths on the Island, they were forced to dig far underground in search of salty rock; and they were so secure, they had the time and energy to record their thoughts and dreams in scrapings on the walls. It must have taken a Great-Year to make these caves, she thought; but the mammoths (before now, at any rate) had never been short of time.

If only she understood what she was seeing, she thought, she might find the wisdom of another Cycle here — not songs passed down from mother to calf, but messages locked forever in the face of the rock. Lop-ear surely would have understood these images: she remembered the way Lop-ear had scraped at the frost, making markings to show her the Island as a bird would see it. Lop-ear would have been happy here, she realized: happy surrounded by the frozen thoughts of his ancestors.

But all the dung was dry and odorless, very old; and the wall markings were coated by layers of hardy lichen, orange and green, the ice-filtered light fueling their perennial growth.

It had been the scraping of mammoths that had opened up the passages she followed, even the underground caves she had found. Now it was the patient work of those long-gone mammoths that was providing her with a means of escape from the Lost. Had they known, as they dug and shaped the Earth, that their actions would have such dramatic consequences for the future?

Encouraged by the presence of her ancestors, she walked on into the dark, and the gathering breeze.

And after only a little more time, she emerged from a rocky mouth into summer daylight.

The fresh air and the light brought her relief, but no joy.

She clung to Owlheart’s instructions about seeking out help, about joining with another Family, if it could be found. So she began a wide detour toward the southeast of the Island. There was a place she had visited as a calf, many years ago, where the land was hummocky and uneven, and there were many deep, small ponds. Here — held the wisdom of the Clan — even in the hardest winter, it was often possible to smash through the thinner ice with a blow from a tusk and reach liquid water.

And there, she hoped, she would find signs of the other Families of the Clan: if not the mammoths themselves, then at least evidence that they had been there recently, and maybe some clue about which way they had gone, and where she could find them.

If not there, she thought grimly, then nowhere.

But as she worked her way south, still she saw no signs of other mammoth Families.

She walked on, doggedly.

The tundra was still alive with flowers. There were bright purple saxifrages, and mountain avens and cushions of moss campion studded with tiny white blossoms. Silverhair found a cluster of Arctic poppies, their cup-shaped yellow heads turning to the sun; they were drenched with dew from a summer fog that had rolled over them, bringing them valuable moisture. Even on otherwise barren ground, the grass grew thick and green around the mouths of Arctic fox burrows, places fed by dung and food remains perhaps for centuries.

All the plants were adapted to the extreme cold, dryness, and searing winds of the Island. They grew in clumps: tussocks, carpets, and rosettes, and their leaves were thick and waxy, which helped them retain their water.

But already the summer was past its peak.

The insect life was dying back. The hordes of midges, mosquitoes, and blackflies were gone; the adults, having laid their eggs long ago, were all gone, leaving the larvae to winter in the soil or pond water. Spiders and mites were seeking shelter in the soil or the litter of decaying lichen and vegetation.

Birth, a brief life of light and struggle, rapid death. Silverhair sensed the mass of the baby inside her, and her heart was heavy. Would she be able to give her own child even as much as this, as the short lives of the summer creatures?

Through the briefly teeming landscape, oblivious to the riot of color, Silverhair walked stolidly on.

Seeking to build up her strength for whatever lay ahead, she took care to feed, drink, and pass dung properly. Feeding was, briefly, a pleasure at this time of year, for the berries were ripe. She munched on the bright red cranberries, yellow cloudberries, midnight blue bilberries, and inky-black crowberries that clustered on leathery plants. But there was a tinge of sadness about this treat, for the ripening berries were another sign of the autumn that was already close.

After a few days she could hear the soft lapping of water, smell the thick scummy greenness of the life that gathered in the deep ponds of this corner of the Island.

But there was still no sign of mammoth: no stomping, no contact rumbles, no smell of fur and milk.

And at last she came to the place of the ponds, and her heart sank. For she found herself treading on the bones of a young mammoth.

When he died he — or she — must have been about the same age as Croptail. The scavengers and the frost had left little of the youngster’s skin and fur, and the cartilage, tendon, and ligament had been stripped from the bones, which were separated and scattered. Some of the bones bore teeth marks, and some had been broken open, she saw, by a wolf or fox eager to suck the nourishing, fatty marrow from inside.

He must have been dead for months.

She touched the scattered bones with her feet, in a brief moment of Remembering. But she knew she could not linger. For ahead of her, she saw now — between herself and the glimmering surface of the ponds — was a field full of stripped and scattered bones.

She walked forward with caution and dread.

Soon there were so many bones, so badly scattered, it was impossible even to pick out individuals. Still, she could see from their size that most of those who had died here had been youngsters — even infants. As she approached the ponds, the bones were larger — just as dead, but the bones of older calves and adults.

The tundra here was badly trampled, and all but stripped bare of grass and shrubs; even months of growth hadn’t been enough for it to recover. The bones, too, were badly scattered and trampled. She found crushed skulls, ribs smashed and scored with the marks of mammoth soles. And she saw snapped-off tusks, evidence of brief and bitter battles.

There had been little Remembering here, she saw with sadness. It was as the Cycle teaches: Where water vanishes, sanity soon follows.

It was becoming horribly clear what had happened in this place.

As the pressure to find water had grown, so the discipline of this Family had broken down. Probably the youngest — pushed away from the water holes by their older siblings, even their parents, and too small anyway to reach the water through thick ice with their little tusks — had gone first. Then the oldest and weakest of the adults.

The diminishing survivors had trampled over the bodies of their relatives — perhaps even digging through the fallen corpses to get to the precious liquid — until they, in their turn, had succumbed.

It had been a rich time for the scavengers and the cubs of Aglu.

The destruction was not thorough; few of the bones close to the water had been gnawed by the wolves, she saw. But then, there had been no need to root in rotting corpses for sustenance; the wolves had only to wait for another mammoth to fall and offer them warm, fresh meat and marrow.

At last she reached the ponds at the heart of this grisly tableau. The ponds brimmed, their surfaces thick with green summer life, swarms of insects buzzing over their surfaces. Their fecundity mocked the mammoths who must have come here in the depths of the dry winter, desperate for the water that could have kept them alive.

Silverhair realized that, but for the wisdom of Owlheart, her own Family might have succumbed like this.

Silverhair stood tall and surveyed the tundra. The land was teeming with life, the hum of insects, the lap of water, the cries of birds and small mammals.

But nowhere was there the voice of a mammoth.

With these bones, Silverhair knew at last that the fears of Lop-ear and Wolfnose were confirmed. Ten thousand years after Longtusk had led his Family here, there were no more mammoths on the Island. The winter’s dryness had taken the last of the Families — the last but her own.

And now those few survivors were in the hands of the remorseless Lost.

She was alone: the only mammoth in all the world who was alive, and still free to act.

She shivered, for she knew that all of her people’s history funneled through her mind and heart now. If she failed, then so would the mammoths, for all time.

…And yet, hadn’t she already failed? In her foolishness she had ignored the teaching of the Cycle, and had gone to seek out the Lost. By doing that she had made them aware of the existence of her Family — had caused the deaths of Eggtusk and Lop-ear and Snagtooth and Owlheart, and the trapping of Foxeye and her cubs — all of it was her fault.

She sank to the bone-littered ground, heavy with despair.

Alone, desolate, with no Matriarch to guide her — as she’d been trained since she was a calf — she turned to the Cycle.

Mammoths have no gods, no devils. That is why they find it so hard to comprehend the danger posed by the Lost. Instead, mammoths accept their place in the great rhythms of the world, their place in past and future, as Earth’s long afternoon winds through the millennia.

But mammoths have existed for a very, very long time; and, the wisdom goes, nothing that happens today is without precedent in the past. Somewhere in the Cycle lies the answer to any question. Everybody alive is descended from somebody smart enough to survive the past: that is the underlying message of the Cycle. But you must not worship your ancestors. The sole purpose of your ancestors’ existence was your life. And the sole purpose of your life is your calves.

Somehow she felt comforted. Even in this place of death, she was not alone; she had the wisdom of all her ancestors back to Kilukpuk, the growing heavy warmth of the creature in her womb, the promise that her calves would one day roam the Sky Steppe.

And that promise, she realized, could be kept only if Foxeye and the calves were still alive. For it seemed there was no other mammoth Family left anywhere in the world, no other Family that could populate that fabulous land of the future.

In that case, it was up to Silverhair — the last free mammoth — to save her Family from the Lost. She would make her way to the south of the Island, to the foul nest of the Lost. And this time she would enter it, not as a weakened, starved captive, but strong and free. She would destroy Skin-of-Ice and all his works. She would keep her promise to Foxeye and free her Family. And then…

And then, the Cycle would guide her once more into the unknown future.

Treading carefully between the scattered heaps of bones, she resumed her steady march south.

19 The Undersea Tundra

At last, after many empty days, she reached the southern coast.

Once more she tramped along the narrow shingle beach. The sky was littered with scattered, glowing clouds, and the calm, flat seascape of floating ice pans perfectly mirrored the sky. Brown kelp streamers lay thickly on the moist stones.

She moved with great caution as she neared the site of the Lost nest, and listened hard for the clattering flap of the light-bird. Her heart pumped. She knew that her best chance would be to surprise the Lost, to charge into their camp and overwhelm them with her flashing tusks.

But there was no noise save the washing of the sea, no smell save the rich salt brine.

No sign of the Lost.

Her plans and speculations dissipated as she reached the nest site.

The camp was abandoned. Only a few blackened scars on the beach showed where the Lost had built their fires; only a few rudimentary shelters remained to show where the Lost had hidden from the rain and wind.

Silverhair ached with frustration. She had been prepared for battle here, and there was no battle to be had. Her blood fizzed through her veins, and her tusks itched with the need to impale the soft belly of a Lost.

She found the stakes to which she had been pinned for so long, still stained black with her blood. And she found the web of black rope that had trapped Foxeye. Rust-brown calf hair was caught in the web. She held the hair to her mouth.

She could taste Sunfire. The Family had been brought here, then.

There was a clatter of whirling wings. She turned, raised her trunk, and trumpeted her defiance.

The noise was indeed the light-bird. But it was far away, she saw: on the other side of the Channel, in fact, hovering over the Mainland, which was clear of fog and storm at last; its ugly noise was brought to her by the vagaries of the breezes.

She understood what had happened. The Lost had returned to the Mainland, from whence they had come.

There was no sign that the Family had died here; if such a slaughter had taken place, the beach would be littered with bones and hair and scraps of flesh and skin. Then — if they were not dead — the mammoths must have been taken to the Mainland too.

If she was to save them, that was where Silverhair must go.

She walked down the beach and stood at the edge of the Channel between Island and Mainland.

In stark contrast to the dry colors of the late summer landscape, a wide stretch of sea was still white: packed solid by flat ice. Along the shoreline, however, was a wide band of clear water interspersed with stranded icebergs, many of them grotesquely shaped by continual melting and refreezing. Ivory gulls perched on the highest bergs, and beside the smaller blocks lodged on the tide-line ran little groups of turnstone and sanderling. The wading birds pecked at Crustacea among the litter of kelp. The best feeding place for the creatures of the sea was the ice-edge, where the ice meets the open sea. She could see many murres working there, their high-pitched calls echoing as their thick bills bobbed into the water. The cries of the birds were overlaid with the deep, powerful breathing of beluga — white whales, their sleek bodies easily as massive as Silverhair’s, and capped by long, spiraling tusks — and narwal, mottled gray, pods of them cruising the ice-edge or diving beneath the ice itself.

A large bearded seal broke the surface near the coast, regarded Silverhair with large, sad eyes, then ducked beneath the ice-strewn water once more.

To get to the Mainland, Silverhair would have to cross this teeming water-world.

She remembered standing on this shore with Lop-ear — her reluctance even to dip her trunk in the sea, his playful calls to the Calves of Siros.

Once, Longtusk had crossed this Channel to bring his Kin to the Island. It had been a great migration, with thousands of mammoths delivered to safety. But the Cycle was silent about how Longtusk did it. Some said he flew across the water. If Silverhair could fly now, she would.

But on one point the Cycle was absolutely clear: Longtusk himself did not survive the passage.

Today, then, she must outdo Longtusk himself.

Silverhair gathered her courage. She stepped forward.

Thin landfast ice crunched around her feet. The water immediately soaked through the thick hair over her legs, and its chill reached her skin. She could feel the water seeping up the hairs dangling from her belly, and more ice broke around her chest.

She stumbled, and suddenly the water flooded over her chest and back, and forced its way into her mouth. She scrambled backward, coughing, a spray of water erupting from her mouth. But she lost her footing again and slipped sideways, and suddenly her head was immersed.

She fought brief panic.

She stood straight and lifted her head out of the water, opened her mouth and took a deep draught of air. The water felt tight around her chest, like a band of ice.

Dread flooded her. She remembered the stream of runoff that had almost killed her as a calf. She had been so small then, and the stream — which she could probably ford easily now — had been a lethal torrent, no less intimidating than the Channel that faced her now. She longed to turn and flee back to the land, to abandon this quest.

But she knew this was only the beginning.

Deliberately she took another step forward. The ice, cracking, brushed against her chest. She lifted her head back as far as she could go, trying to keep her eyes and mouth out of the water. But at last the water was too deep, and it closed over her head.

The cold was shocking, like a physical blow, so intense it made her gasp.

She forced herself to open her eyes.

The water was gray-green, and its surface was a glimmering sheet above her. She could see floating ice, thin gray slabs of it over her head.

She thrust her trunk through the surface so that it protruded from the water. She blew hard to clear her trunk of water, and sucked in deep lungfuls of clean, salty air. She could feel her chest drag against the heavy pressure of the water, which was trying, it seemed, to crush her ribs like a trampled egg. But she could breathe.

She was floating in the water, submerged save for her trunk, her body hair waving around her. Instinctively she surged forward, dragging at the water with her forelegs, kicking with her hind legs. Soon she could see she was pushing through the clumps of ice that littered the surface, and the air was whistling easily into her lungs.

All she had to do was keep this up for the unknown time it would take to cross the Channel — and overcome the savage current and whatever other dangers might lurk in the deeper water — and emerge, exhausted, onto a beach crawling with Lost…

Enough. She clung to the Cycle: You can only take one breath at a time. Her other problems could wait until she faced them.

On she swam, into the silent dark, alone.

The sun was low to the west, and it showed as a glimmering disk suspended above the water’s rippling surface. She knew that as long as she kept the sun to her right side, she would continue to head south, toward the Mainland.

Away from the coast the pack ice formed a more solid mass, though there were still leads of open water, and holes broken through by melting, or perhaps by seals and bears.

She took a deep breath, pulled down her trunk, and ducked beneath the ice. She would have to swim underwater between the airholes as if she were a seal herself.

She drifted under a ceiling of ice that stretched as far as she could see. A carpet of green-brown algae clung to the ceiling, turning the light a dim green; but in places where the algae grew less thinly, the light came through a clearer blue-white.

And there were creatures grazing on this inverted underwater tundra: tiny shrimp-like creatures that clung to the algae ceiling, and comb jellies that drifted by, trailing long tentacles. She could see that the tentacles were coated with fine, hair-like cilia that pulsed in the current, sparkling with fragmented color.

The comb jellies, unperturbed by the strange, clumsy intruder, sailed off into the darker water like the shadows of clouds.

She approached an airhole. The sunlit water under the hole was bright with dust. But when she drew near she saw that the "dust" was a crowd of tiny, translucent animals. She reached the airhole and her head bobbed out of the water’s chill, oily calm, into the chaotic clamor of light above -

And a polar bear’s upraised paw cuffed at her head.

Silverhair trumpeted in alarm.

The bear, just as startled, slithered backward over the ice floe, its black eyes fixed on this unexpected intruder.

Silverhair panted, her breath frosting. "Sorry I’m not a fat seal for you," she said. And she took another deep breath and ducked back into the sea’s oleaginous gloom.

The going got harder as she headed farther out to sea.

The ice was very thick here, and huge water-carved blocks and pinnacles were suspended from the ceiling. Salty brine, trapped within the ice, was leaking down to cause this strange, beautiful effect. It was like swimming through a series of caves.

She had to swim an alarmingly long way between airholes.

Once, a seal fearlessly approached Silverhair. It seemed to swim with barely a flick of its sleek body — an embarrassing comparison to Silverhair’s untidy scrambling — and the ringed pattern of its skin rippled in the water. The seal studied her with jet-black eyes, then turned and swam lazily into the murky distance.

She neared the ice-edge with relief, for she would be able to breathe continually when she passed it. But there was a great deal of activity here. She glimpsed the white forms of beluga whales sliding in a neat diamond formation through the water. Occasionally there were the brief, spectacular dives of birds hunting fish, brief explosions from the world of light and air above into this calm darkness.

She drove herself on, past the ice-edge, and into open water.

There was no ice above her now, and no bottom visible beneath her, and she soon left behind the busy life of the ice-edge: there was just herself, alone, suspended in an unending three-dimensional expanse of chill, resisting water.

The current here, far from the friction of the banks of the Channel, was much stronger, and she struggled to keep to her course. As she swam on, she could feel the heat of her body leaching out into the unforgiving sea.

As her warmth leaked away, her energy seemed to dissipate with it.

It was as if this infinity of murky, chill water was the only world she had ever known: as if the world above of air and sunlight and snow, of play and love and death, was just some gaudy dream she had enjoyed before waking to this bleak reality…

Suddenly her trunk filled with water. She coughed, expelling the water through her mouth. She scrabbled at the water until she was able to raise her face and mouth above the surface. She opened her mouth to take a deep, wheezing breath, and glimpsed a deep blue sky.

She must have weakened — let herself sink — perhaps even, bizarrely, slept for a heartbeat.

But already she was sinking again.

She continued to kick, but her legs were exhausted. And when she tried to raise her trunk, she couldn’t reach the air. The surface was receding from her, slow as a setting sun.

Waterlogged, she was sinking. And hope seeped out of her with the last of her warmth. She would die in this endless waste of water, she and her calf.

So the Cycle, after all, culminated in a lie: there would be no rescue for her Family, no glowing future for the mammoths on the Sky Steppe.

She found herself thinking of Lop-ear, that first time they had come to the southern coast: how, in the sunshine, he had teased her and tried to goad her into the water, and told her tall stories of the Calves of Siros. If she had shared Lop-ear’s gift for original thinking, was there any way she could have avoided this fate?

…The Calves of Siros. Suddenly, sinking in the darkness and the cold, she had an idea.

She tried to remember the sounds Lop-ear had made when he had called for the Calves of Siros. She had to get it right; she had only one lungful of air, and would get only one chance at this.

She began a low-pitched whistle, punctuated by higher squeals, squawks, and shrieks. The sound rippled away into the black water around her. She kept up the noise until the last wisp of her air was expended.

Not even an echo replied.

She stopped kicking and let the current carry her. She had fallen so far, the surface was reduced to a vague illumination far above. She could feel the ocean turn her slowly around as she drifted with it.

A deeper blackness was closing around her vision. The pain in her empty lungs, the ache of her exhausted limbs, the vaguer ache of the wounds inflicted by the Lost — all of it began to recede from her, as the cold forced her to shrink deep into the core of her body.

It was almost comfortable. She knew this ordeal would not last much longer…

And now a sheet of hard blackness rose from the depths beneath her. Perhaps this was death, come to meet her.

But she hadn’t expected death to have sleek fur, a fluked tail, stubby flippers, and a small, seal-like head that peered up at her out of the gloom.

The rising surface pushed softly against her feet and belly. She could feel a great body swathed in fat, strong muscles working.

Suddenly she was rising again.

She burst into light and air. It was like being born. She coughed, clearing water from her trunk and mouth, and air roared into her starved lungs.

Gradually the pain in her chest subsided. She was still floating in the water, but now her trunk lay against a great black body, and she was able to hold herself out of the ocean easily. Strong tail flukes held up her head, and the skin under her face was rough as bark.

The creature under her was huge, she realized: at least twice her own body length, and covered with the dense black hair of a seal.

A small head twisted back to look at her. She heard squeals and chirrups, alternating low whistles and high-toned bleats. It was speech: indistinct but nevertheless recognizable.

"…See you I. Paddling through water see you I. Recognize mammoth I. Mammoth better swimmer than old sea cow think I. Understand you?"

"Yes," Silverhair said, and the effort of speech made her cough again. "I understand. Thanks…"

The sea cow’s long muscles rippled. To Silverhair’s surprise, a gull came flapping out of the sky and landed in the middle of the sea cow’s broad back. The gull started to peck at the damp hair, plucking out parasites, and the sea cow wriggled with pleasure. "You here are why? Not roll on tundra do sea cows." The sea cow raised her small muzzle and whistled at her own joke.

"I have to get to the Mainland," said Silverhair.

"Mainland? Kelp good there. Mmm. Kelp." The sea cow looked dreamy. "But not there go sea cows. Why? Lost there."

"You know about the Lost?"

"Lost? Find me they if, drag me from sea they, eat my kidneys they, leave handsome body for gulls they. Terrible, terrible."

"I have met the Lost," said Silverhair.

"Think sea cows all gone Lost. Live in seas in south some Cousins. Here think kill us Lost, long time ago gobble up our kidneys Lost. But wrong they. But not Mainland go to I, kelp or no. Stay by Island. On Island no Lost."

"There are now," said Silverhair grimly.

"Terrible, terrible," said the sea cow, sounding dismayed. "Go to Mainland you, why if Lost there?"

"I have to," said Silverhair. "They took my Family."

The sea cow rolled in the water, almost throwing Silverhair off. "Terrible thing. Terrible Lost. Here. Hold on to me you." The sea cow held out a stubby, clawed flipper, and Silverhair wrapped her trunk around it.

The broad flukes beat, sending up a spray that splashed over Silverhair. The sea cow’s broad, streamlined bulk began to slide easily through the water, oblivious to the current that had defeated Silverhair, unimpeded even by the bulk of an adult mammoth clinging to one flipper. Soon her speed was so great that a bow wave washed around her small, determined head.

Her power was exhilarating.

The sea cow pushed easily through the loose, decaying landfast ice that fringed the shore of the Mainland.

Silverhair’s feet crunched on hard shingle.

She let go of the sea cow’s flipper. She stumbled forward up a steepening slope until she had dragged herself clear of the sea. Already frost was forming on her soaked fur, and she shook herself vigorously. Soon the warmth of the afternoon summer sun was seeping into her.

The sea cow used her stubby flippers to haul herself farther out of the water, so her bulk was lying on the shingle bed, her great broad back exposed. She began munching contentedly on a floating scum of brown kelp fronds. She chewed with a horny plate at the front of her mouth, for she didn’t appear to have any teeth. "Kelp. Mmm. Want some you?"

"Thanks — no."

Now that the sea cow was raised so far out of the water, Silverhair could see how strange she looked: a head and flippers much like a seal’s, but trailing a great bulbous body and a powerful split fluke, as if the front half of a seal had been attached to a beluga whale. Out of the water she was ponderous and looked stranded. Silverhair could see why her kind had been such easy pickings for the Lost, before the sea cows had learned to hide and feign extinction.

Silverhair looked back at the dark, sinuous waters of the Channel. "But for you," she told the sea cow, "I’d still be out there now. There forever."

The sea cow’s fluke beat at the water. "Oath of Kilukpuk. Hyros and Probos and Siros. Forgot that you?"

"No," said Silverhair quietly. "No, we haven’t forgotten." And she was filled with warmth as she realized that one of the most ancient and beautiful passages of the Cycle had been fulfilled, here on this desolate beach.

The Calves of Kilukpuk had been separated for more than fifty million years. But they hadn’t forgotten their Oath.

The sea cow rolled gracefully and slid into deeper water. "Stick to tundra next time you. Watch out for Lost you. Good luck, Cousin." Her stubby flippers extended, and she slid beneath the ice-strewn waves.

And Silverhair, her trunk raised and every half-frozen hair prickling, walked slowly up the shingle beach into the land of the Lost.

20 The City of the Lost

Everywhere on this ugly Mainland beach there was evidence of the Lost: chunks of rusting metal, splashes of dirty oil that stained the ice, scraps of the strange loose outer skin they wore. There were structures, long and narrow, that pushed out from the beach toward the water; at the end of these structures were more of the shell-like objects like the one she had seen on the ice floe, on her first encounter with Skin-of-Ice. But where the thing on that ice floe had been damaged, these seemed intact; they floated on the gray water, though some were embedded in the ice. Perhaps they were supposed to ferry the Lost across the water, she mused.

She walked over a line of scrubby dunes at the edge of the beach and reached the tundra. There she found grass and sedge, and even a few Arctic willows; but the ground was poor — polluted by more of the black sludgy oil that had marred the beach — and broken up by long, snaking tracks. There was a stink of tar, and a strange silence, an emptiness that was a chilling contrast to the Island’s rich summer cacophony.

And everywhere there were straight lines, the hard signature of the Lost, the symbol of their dominance over the world around them.

The most gigantic line of all was a hard-edged surface set in the tundra, black and lifeless. It was a road that proceeded — straight as a shaft of sunlight — to the heart of the City of the Lost.

The City itself was the sight she had seen many times from the safety of the headland on the Island: a tangle of shining tubes and tanks, randomly cross-connected, sprinkled with glowing point lights like captive stars. From tall columns oily black smoke billowed into the air, its tarry stink overpowering even the sharp tang of brine.

The City was huge, sprawling over the tundra. It must be the Lost’s prime nest, she thought. And that was where she must go.

She stepped away from the road. She found a place where the tundra wasn’t quite so badly scarred, and there were grass and willow twigs to graze. She deliberately pushed the food into her mouth, ground it up, and swallowed it. She found a stream. It was thin and brackish, but it tasted clean; the cold water revived her strength a little.

She noticed a carpet of lemming holes and runs, and droppings from the predator birds that hunted the little rodents. So there was life here.

And she glimpsed an Arctic fox, the last of its white winter fur clinging to its back. The fox’s coat was patchy and discolored, the nodes of its spine protruding from its back. As soon as the fox saw her, its hairs stood on end. Then the fox dropped its muzzle as if in shame, and slinked away.

Silverhair thought she understood. This creature had abandoned the tundra and had learned to live in the corners of the world of the Lost. But it was a poor bargain. She wondered if, in some deep recess of its hindbrain, the fox still longed for the open freedom and rich, clean silence of the tundra its ancestors had abandoned.

Her feeding done, she passed dung, the movement fast and satisfying. The world seemed vivid around her, ugly and distorted as it was here on the Mainland. If this was to be her day to die, then there would be a last time for everything: to love, to eat, even to pass dung — and at last to breathe. And all of it should be cherished, for death was long.

The rich scent of her own dung filled her nostrils — and suddenly she realized that there was no smell of mammoth here.

The mammoths had seeped into every crevice of their Island. It wasn’t possible to pull up a blade of grass that hadn’t been nourished by the dung of mammoths; mammoth bones erupted from the ground everywhere as the permafrost melted; mammoths had even shaped the tundra itself, by battering down the encroaching trees of the spruce forest.

But that wasn’t true here. When she raised her trunk to the air and sniffed, all she could smell was smoke and tar. And this was the place to which Foxeye and her calves had been brought: the place from which Silverhair must rescue them, or die in the attempt.

Perhaps if Lop-ear were here, she thought wistfully, he might be able to devise some plan, some way to gain an advantage over the unknowable swarms of Lost. But he wasn’t here, and she had no plan. She could only rely on her strength and speed and courage and native intelligence — and the guidance of the Cycle, which had brought her this far.

She walked back to the Lost road. Its hard surface was unyielding under the pads of her feet, and its blackness soaked up the thin rays of the sun, making it feel hot. She recoiled from its strangeness.

But she raised her trunk, every sense alert, and began to walk.

The City of the Lost sprawled across the landscape, ugly, careless, uncompromising. It was a place of huge, rust-stained cylinders, gigantic pipes that sprawled across the ground, smaller tanks and boxes and heaps of strange metal shapes. As she approached the City’s heart, the tallest buildings loomed over her, and she felt a helpless awe at their tall, shadowy straightness — and at the power of the worm-like creatures who had built this place.

But it was a place of waste.

She came to a pile of spruce wood cut into lengths, evidently with great effort — and then abandoned on the ground to rot. And here was a heap of cracked-open cans that evidently had been simply abandoned, piled up without purpose or value. Traces of brown, rotting metal and oil had leaked into the ground, poisoning it so nothing grew here.

The Lost were not like the mammoths, she thought, whose very dung enriched the places they passed…

And suddenly, she encountered her first Lost.

He came walking around one of the buildings, not looking up, his face lowered so he could peer at a sheet he carried. His outer skin was a gaudy blue, and he wore some form of orange carapace, hard and shiny, on his head.

She stood stock-still, her trunk and tusks raised high above him.

His footsteps slowed, halted. Perhaps it was her smell he had noticed — or even the stink of brine that she must have carried from the sea.

He turned, slowly. He lowered his sheet, revealing cold blue eyes.

Silverhair saw herself through his eyes. Perhaps she was the first mammoth he had ever seen. She loomed before him like a fur-covered mountain, stinking of brine, her tusks alone almost as long as his body. Her face was a scarred mask, from which hard, determined eyes glowered.

The Lost yelped, comically. He threw his sheet up in the air, and stumbled backward, landing in the mud.

He scrambled to his feet and ran away along the road, yelling. He turned a corner and disappeared into the complex, shadowy heart of the City. The sheet he had discarded blew toward her feet; she crushed it with one deliberate footstep.

Stolidly she followed the fleeing Lost.

The buildings of the Lost loomed huge and faceless, dwarfing her. The only sounds were her own breathing, the soft slap of her footsteps — and the thumping of some distant metal heart, its low growl deeper than the deepest contact rumble. This place was alive, and she was willingly walking into its mouth.

Suddenly the Lost were here in front of her. Evidently Orange-Head had raised a warning. She was faced by a row of them — three, four, five, emerging from the buildings — and they all looked scared, even though they bore thunder-sticks aimed at her chest and head.

She had known this confrontation would come. She was a mammoth: not a burrowing lemming, a scurrying fox who could hide.

And she knew that from this point the river of time, running to eternity, would split into two branches.

If the Lost chose to pump her body full of the stinging pellets of their thunder-sticks, then she would die here — though she would, she thought grimly, take as many of them with her as possible. But if not…

If not, if she lived and the future was still open, there was hope.

She took a deliberate step forward, toward the circle of Lost.

One thunder-stick cracked. A pellet sizzled past her ear. She couldn’t help but flinch.

But it had missed her. Still she stepped forward.

Now the Lost were cawing to each other. One of them seemed to be taking command, and was waving his paws at the others. One by one, uncertainly, they lowered their thunder-sticks. Evidently they didn’t want to kill her. Not yet, anyway.

Perhaps they had their own purpose for her. Well, she didn’t care about that. For now, it was enough that she still breathed.

She called with the contact rumble: "Foxeye! Croptail! Can you hear me? It’s Silverhair. Foxeye, call if you hear me…"

She heard the thin trumpeting of a frightened calf — a trumpeting that was cut off abruptly.

Her heart hammered. At least one of them was still alive, then.

She moved forward, gliding deeper into the complex of buildings and pipes and smoking pillars. The Lost formed up behind her, their thunder-sticks never far below their shoulders, and they followed her like a gaggle of ugly calves. She called as she walked, and liquid mammoth rumbles echoed from the metal walls of this City of the Lost, and the massive, natural grace of her gait contrasted with the angular ugliness of the place.

She walked right through the City, to its far side. Here she could see open tundra, stretching away. There were more buildings here, but their character was different. These were much rougher structures, some of them so flimsy they looked ready to fall down. Thin smoke snaked up to the gray sky, bearing the sour smell of burned meat. The ground here was churned-up, lifeless mud.

There were many Lost here, some of them emerging from the crude buildings to stare at her, some running away in fear.

And there, in a clearing at the center of this cluster of buildings, were the mammoths. She counted quickly — Foxeye and Croptail and Sunfire — all of them alive, if miserable and bedraggled. Her heart hammered, and she longed to rush forward to her Family. But she forced herself to be still, to observe, to think.

The mammoths were held in two cages: one for Foxeye alone, the other for the two calves. When the calves saw Silverhair approach, Croptail set up an excited squealing. "Silverhair!"

The cages, crudely constructed, were too small to allow the mammoths to move, even to turn around. The cages had thick ropes trailing from their roofs. Silverhair saw how distressed the calves were to be separated from their mother. Silverhair wondered if these Lost knew how cruel that separation was — indeed, that without her mother’s milk Sunfire would soon surely die.

Croptail was still calling. But there was a Lost beside the calves’ cage. He had a goad, which he flicked cruelly through the bars of the cage, snapping at Croptail’s flank.

Silverhair rumbled threateningly.

The Lost looked at her — an unrestrained adult mammoth — and decided not to whip the trapped calf again.

Silverhair approached Foxeye’s cage. Foxeye was standing with her great head bowed, beaten and subdued, her coat filthy. She was burdened by heavy chains that looped around her neck and feet, fixed to stakes rammed into the muddy ground. Silverhair reached through the bars of the cage, and wrapped her trunk around Foxeye’s.

At first Foxeye’s trunk was limp. But then, slowly, it tightened.

"I promised I’d save you," said Silverhair. "And here I am."

"We thought you were dead," Foxeye said, almost inaudibly.

"You were almost right," said Silverhair dryly. "But we’re still alive."

"For now," said Foxeye dully.

Deliberately, slowly, still trying not to alarm the Lost with their thunder-sticks, Silverhair turned and wrapped her trunk around the stakes that bound her sister’s chains. The stakes were fixed only loosely in the ground, and were easy to tug free of the mud.

"Help me, Foxeye."

"I can’t…"

"You can. For the calves. Come on…"

With their sensitive trunk-fingers, the sisters explored the cage. Silverhair found twists of thick wire; the wire was easy to manipulate, and when it was gone, the front of the cage fell away into the mud.

At first Foxeye cowered in the back of her open cage. But then she allowed herself to be led, by Silverhair’s gentle tugs at her trunk, out of the cage.

The Lost seemed surprised by the ability of the mammoths to take the cage apart, and they were arguing, perhaps trying to decide whether to use their thunder-sticks.

Silverhair tugged Foxeye to the calves’ cage. The heavy chains at Foxeye’s neck and legs clanked, trailing in the mud, and as they approached, the Lost who had goaded Croptail ran off.

The calves were not chained up, and Silverhair and Foxeye simply lifted the cage up and off them. Croptail and Sunfire rushed to their mother; Sunfire immediately found a teat to suckle.

Silverhair made sure she threw the cage impressively far before letting it crash to the mud. It collapsed with a clatter of metal, sending more of the Lost fleeing.

She nudged Foxeye. "Come on. We can’t wait here."

Croptail poked his head out from under his mother’s belly hair. "What’s the plan, Silverhair?"

No plan, she thought. I’m no Lop-ear… "We’re just going to walk right out of here. Don’t be afraid."

She turned and faced the Lost. She looked around at their empty faces, their skinny bodies, their dangling jaws. She had the impression that these were not truly evil creatures — at least, not all of them. Just — Lost.

"Listen to me," she said. "Perhaps you can understand some of what I say. I am not going to permit you to take my Family away from their home. And if you try to stop us, I promise you, your families will have to perform many Rememberings."

But the Lost merely stared at her trumpeting, foot-stamping and rumbling, as if it weren’t a language at all.

She turned back to her Family. "Go," she said. "You first, Croptail. That way — out to the tundra. We won’t go through the City again. We’ll make for the shore."

"Then what?" demanded Croptail.

"Just do as I say."

Bemused, frightened, Croptail obeyed. Soon the little group of mammoths was gliding slowly toward the empty tundra.

As they walked steadily, Silverhair stared at the decrepit buildings, the rows of silent, staring Lost. "This is a hellish place," she said.

"Yes," said Foxeye. "I’ve been watching them. I think they want to turn the whole Earth into a gigantic City like this. Soon there will be nothing living but the Lost and the rodents that scurry for their scraps…"

She told Silverhair how the mammoths had been brought here.

After their capture in the ice chasm, they had been brought back to the beach and bound up tightly with ropes and chains. Harnesses had been fixed around them, and they had been attached to the light-bird with its whirling wings — and, one by one, lifted into the sky.

"Mammoths aren’t meant to fly, sister," said Foxeye, and Silverhair could hear the dread in her voice. "The Lost were taken away too. I think the ones who attacked us — Skin-of-Ice and the others — had been somehow stranded on the Island. The light-birds came for them when the storms cleared from the Mainland."

"What do the Lost intend now?"

"They don’t seem to want to kill us. Not right away. They have plenty to eat here, Silverhair; they don’t need our flesh, nor our bones to burn…"

"There was rope fixed to your cage."

"Yes. I think they were going to move us again. Fly us. Perhaps take us far from the tundra. Somewhere where there are many, many Lost, more Lost than all the mammoths who ever lived. And they would come and see us in our cages, and hit us with sticks, for they were never, ever going to let us out of there again."

"Foxeye—"

"I’d have given up my calves," Foxeye blurted. "If I could have spoken to the Lost, if I thought they would have spared me, I’d have given up the calves. There: what do you think of me now?"

Silverhair rubbed her sister’s filth-matted scalp. "I think I got here just in time."

The little group walked steadily onward, through the clutter of buildings, toward the tundra. Silverhair was dimly aware of more light-birds clattering over her head. She flinched, expecting an attack from that quarter. But none came. The birds seemed to be descending toward the City, and some of the Lost who had followed the mammoths were pointing up with their paws, muttering. Perhaps this was some new group of Lost, she thought; perhaps the Lost were divided amongst themselves.

It scarcely mattered. What was important was that still none of them tried to stop her.

Silverhair took one step after another, aware how little control she had over events, scarcely daring to hope she could take another breath. But they were still alive, and free. By Kilukpuk’s hairy navel, she thought, this might actually work.

But then there was a roar like an angry god, and everything fell apart.

A Lost came running forward, face red with rage. In one paw he held a glinting flask of the clear, inflaming liquid. And he carried a thunder-stick, which he fired wildly.

This was a new type of stick, Silverhair realized immediately: one that spoke not with a single shout, but with a roar, and lethal insects poured out in a great cloud. Even the other Lost were forced to scatter as those deadly pellets smacked into the mud, or turned the walls of the crude dwellings into splinters.

The newcomer seemed to be berating the others. And he was turning the spitting nozzle of his thunder-stick toward the huddled Family.

This Lost wasn’t going to let the mammoths go; he would obviously rather destroy them.

He was Skin-of-Ice.

Silverhair didn’t even think about it. She just lowered her head and charged.

Everything slowed down, as if she were swimming through thick, ice-cold water.

She lowered her tusks, and he raised his thunder-stick, and she looked into his eyes. It was as if they were joined by that gaze, as if total communication was passing between their souls, as if there were nobody else in the universe but the two of them.

She felt a stab of regret to have come so close to freedom. But in her heart she had known it would come to this moment, that she would not survive the day.

If Skin-of-Ice had held his ground and used his thunder-stick, he would surely have killed her there and then. But he didn’t. In the last heartbeat, as a mountain of enraged mammoth bore down on him, he panicked.

Even as he made his thunder-stick roar, he fell backward and rolled sideways.

Pain erupted in a line drawn across her face, chest, and leg, and she felt her blood spurt, warm. One of the projectiles passed clean through her mouth, in one cheek and out through the other, splintering a tooth.

The pain was extraordinary.

She could hear the screams of Lost and mammoths alike, smell the metallic stink of her own blood. But she was still alive, still moving.

Skin-of-Ice was on the ground, scrabbling for his thunder-stick. She stood over him.

Again, in the face of her courage and strength, he made the wrong decision. If he had abandoned the thunder-stick he might have escaped. But he did not. He had waited too long.

Silverhair lowered her tusk and speared him cleanly through the upper hind leg.

He screamed, and reached behind him to grab her tusk with his paws. She lifted her head, and Skin-of-Ice dangled on her tusk like a shred of winter hair, and she felt a fierce exultation.

But in one paw he held the thunder-stick. It sprayed its deadly fire in the air. And he kicked; his foot smashed into her forehead, and with remarkable strength he dragged his injured leg free of her tusk.

He fell more than twice his height to the ground.

But then he was moving again, firing his thunder-stick. The watching Lost fled, yelling.

Silverhair charged again.

Skin-of-Ice brought the thunder-stick round to point at Silverhair. But he wasn’t quick enough.

As she reared over him a hail of stings poured into her foreleg. She could feel bone shatter, muscles rip to shreds; when she tried to put her weight on that leg, she stumbled.

But she had him.

She wrapped her strong trunk around his waist and, trumpeting her rage, hurled him into the air. Skin-of-Ice sailed high, twisting, writhing, and firing his thunder-stick. He fell heavily, and she heard a cracking sound.

Still he pushed himself up with his forelegs. She felt a flicker of admiration for his determination. But she knew it was the stubbornness of madness.

She grabbed his hind foot with her trunk. She twisted, and heard bone crunch, ligaments snap. Skin-of-Ice screamed.

She flipped him onto his back, like a seal landing a fish on an ice floe. He still had his thunder-stick, and he raised it at her. But the stick no longer spat its venom at her. She could see that it was twisted and broken.

Skin-of-Ice hurled the useless stick away, his small face distended with purple rage. Her strength and endurance had, in the end, defeated even its ugly threat.

He tried to rise, but she pushed him back with her trunk. Still he fought, clawing at her trunk as if trying to rip his way through her skin with his bare paws. She leaned forward and rested her tusk against his throat.

For a heartbeat, as Skin-of-Ice fought and spat, she held him. She thought of those who had died at his hands: Owlheart, Eggtusk, Snagtooth, Lop-ear. And she remembered her own hot dreams of destroying this monster.

A single thrust and it would be over.

She released him.

"You Lost are the dealers of death," she said heavily. "Not the mammoths."

Still Skin-of-Ice tried to rise up to attack her. But other Lost came forward and dragged him back.

There were Lost all around Silverhair now, and they were raising their thunder-sticks.

She struggled to rise, to use her one good foreleg to lever herself upright. She could feel the wounds in her chest and leg tear wider, and the pain was sharp. But she would die on her feet.

She wished she could reach her Family, entwine trunks with them one last time.

She wondered why the Lost hadn’t destroyed her already. She looked down at them. She saw they were hesitating; some of them had lowered their thunder-sticks.

"…Silverhair. Stay still. They won’t harm you now. It isn’t your day to die, Silverhair…"

It was — impossibly — the voice of an adult Bull.

She turned. A Lost was coming toward her: a new kind, all in white. He held his cupped paws up to his mouth, and he was shouting at the other Lost, making them turn their thunder-sticks away.

"…Don’t be afraid. The Family will be safe. Nobody else will die today…"

And with the Lost was a mammoth, without chains or ropes or any restraints, a mammoth who walked unhindered through the circle of thunder-sticks with this strange, posturing Lost.

It was a Bull, with one limp and damaged ear.

It was Lop-ear.

21 The Calves of Probos

Silverhair walked forward over the soft, marshy ground of the Island.

Autumn was coming. The sun had lost its warmth, and was once more sliding beneath the horizon each night. There was no true darkness yet, but there would be long hours of spectral, indigo twilight before the sun returned. The birches, willows, and other plants had started to turn to their autumn colors: crimson, ochre, yellow, vermilion, russet brown, and even gold. The air was peaceful, musty with the smell of leaves and fungus. But the nights had turned cold, the frost riming the ground. And the ponds had started to freeze again, from their edges; each night’s increment of ice was marked by lines in the ice, like the growth rings of a tusk.

The land was emptying. The first migrating birds were already starting to abandon the tundra for their winter homes to the south: great flocks of swans, geese, and sandpipers. Soon the silence of winter would return to the Island, and the summer’s color and noise would be as remote as a dream.

But this was like no other autumn. For Silverhair knew that the plain was barred to her by the walls the Lost had built around them: glass, Lop-ear had called this hard, clear stuff. And in the distance she could see teams of the Lost moving about the Island’s tundra, on foot or in their strange clattering vehicles.

Silverhair found a rich tuft of grass. She bent to pluck it up with her trunk, but as she tried to bend her knee, her damaged leg rippled with pain. The white stuff the strange Lost had wrapped around her leg — while Lop-ear had been steadily persuading her not to gore him — was still in place, but it was threadbare and dirty, and she could see blood seeping through it.

Still, her leg was healing. There was no denying, the Lost were clever. Not wise — but clever.

She heard a miniature trumpeting, a small rumble of protest. She glanced around. The calves were wrestling again; Sunfire, growing quickly, was almost as large as her brother now, and it was all Foxeye could do to separate them.

After Silverhair’s final battle with the Lost called Skin-of-Ice, the mammoths had been taken back to the Island across the Channel, in one of the peculiar floating metal bergs of the Lost. Then — under the gentle supervision of the Lost — the mammoths had walked north, to this glassy enclosure.

The Family had never been so well fed, so safe from the attentions of predators. But Silverhair knew she would never be comfortable again, for she was living at the sufferance of the Lost.

Even if they had given Lop-ear back to her.

"…Not all the Lost are evil, Silverhair," Lop-ear was saying. "You must remember that. I’ve been observing them, trying to understand. Just as mammoths differ in personality, so do the Lost."

"Lop-ear," she said reasonably, "they tried to kill you."

"The actions of a few Lost don’t reflect on the whole species. The Lost we encountered — Skin-of-Ice and his cronies — shouldn’t even have been here on the Island. They are criminals. They were smuggling the clear liquid we saw them drink—"

"The stuff that makes them crazy."

"They were blown to the Island in a storm. They were stranded here for most of the summer by the storms on the Mainland. They were starving; they can’t graze grass or hunt as the wolves can. They even tried to eat the meat of the ancient mammoths that emerge from the permafrost, but it made them ill. And so when they found us…"

"The Cycle teaches us that the belly of a wolf is a noble grave," Silverhair growled. "Maybe that’s true of the shriveled belly of a Lost too. It doesn’t mean I have to welcome it.

"Besides, it wasn’t their butchery that bothered me. Lop-ear, the Lost tried to kill you for no reason other than a lust for blood. They would have tortured me until I submitted to them like poor Snagtooth, or until I died. How can we share a world with creatures like that?"

"Because we must," said Lop-ear bluntly. "For the world is theirs. You have to understand, there are lots of — groups — among these Lost. And they pursue different goals.

"First there was Skin-of-Ice and his gang of criminals, with their angry-making water, and their need to survive. When the weather broke, the criminals were rescued by another group, the workers from the City of the Lost. And the workers saw an opportunity in us. They didn’t want to kill us or eat us, but they did think they could give us to others of their kind."

"Give us to them? What for? Why?"

"So we could be — displayed," he said. "To great groups of Lost, young and old—"

Just as Foxeye had suspected. "So," Silverhair said bitterly, "the Lost can mock the creatures from whom they stole the planet."

"Something like that, I suppose. But there was another group of Lost, who had been here on the Island long before all the others. They built the Nest of Straight Lines. They kept others away from the Island for years, and they didn’t have any curiosity about what lay in the Island’s interior. They just stayed put and did their work."

"What work?"

"How can I know that? You see, after the time of Longtusk, the Lost thought there were no more mammoths left anywhere in the world. They thought the Island was empty, and that’s why, for half a Great-Year, they didn’t even come looking for us.

"And then there’s another group — I know it’s confusing, Silverhair — the ones who have saved us. And these Lost care about us.

"Somehow they heard that we had been discovered by the criminals. They came here, found me, and saved my life — I tell you, Silverhair, after I got away from Skin-of-Ice I was ready for Remembering, I was eating my hair and speaking gibberish to the lemmings — and then they came to the Mainland to search for the rest of the Family."

"They were nearly too late," said Silverhair grimly.

"That’s true," he said. "With more time the workers from the City of the Lost would have flown the others away — or else killed them. If not for you. You saved them, Silverhair. You saved the future."

"Only to deliver us into the paws of more Lost."

He eyed her. "You still blame yourself, don’t you?"

"If I hadn’t gone seeking out the Lost in that blundering way — if I’d listened to Eggtusk and Owlheart — they might still be alive now."

"No," he said firmly. "The Lost would have found us anyway. They’d already discovered the body in the yedoma, remember. We could no more have evaded them than we could a swarm of mosquitoes, and the mammoths would have been destroyed anyway. What you did gave us enough warning to act, to save ourselves. And besides, these new Lost—"

"These new Lost are different," she said with heavy sarcasm.

"So they are," he said, exasperated. "Watch this." He trotted forward to the glass wall surrounding them, and touched it with his trunk.

The wall shimmered, and filled with light.

Silverhair gasped and stumbled backward.

There was light all around her. A fat sun — brilliant, brighter than any Arctic sun — beat down from a washed-out brown-white sky. The ground was a baked plain, where black-leafed trees and stunted bushes struggled to grow. The horizon was muddied by a rippling shimmer of heated air. There was a smell of burning, far off on the breeze.

This was a huge, old land, she suspected.

Lop-ear was at her side. "Don’t be alarmed. It isn’t real. We’re still on the Island, in the glass box on the tundra. And yet…"

"What?"

"And yet it is real. In a way. The Lost have made this thing, this strange powerful wall, so we could see this place, even smell its dust…"

"What place?"

"Silverhair, this is a land far away — far to the south, where ice never comes and it never grows cold."

A contact rumble came washing over the empty ground.

"Mammoths," she hissed.

"Not exactly."

And now she saw them: dark shapes moving easily on the horizon, like drifting boulders, huge ears flapping.

One of them turned, as if to face her. It was a Cow. She seemed to be hairless, and her bare skin was like weather-beaten wood. She had no tusks. There was a calf at her side.

Behind her a Family was walking. No, more than a Family — a Clan, perhaps, for there were hundreds of them, the young clustering around the Matriarchs, Bulls flanking the main group. Silverhair could hear liquid contact rumbles, trumpets, and high-pitched squeaks; the Earth seemed to shake with the passage of those giant feet.

"They can’t see us," Lop-ear said softly.

"They are beautiful. Perhaps Meridi looked like this."

"Yes. Perhaps."

"Are they real?"

"Oh, yes," said Lop-ear. "They are real. Real — but not free, despite the way it looks. Silverhair, these are elephants."

"Calves of Probos."

"Yes. Just as we are. They are many, we are few. But, despite their greater numbers, these Cousins too are under threat from the expansion of the Lost. But the Lost have protected them, and studied them.

"Look — one Family isn’t enough to continue the mammoths. Despite all we’ve achieved, we would die here on the Island, after another generation, two."

"I know. We need fresh blood."

"And it is our new Cousins who will provide it. I have seen what the Lost are trying to do, and I think I understand. These Cousins are sufficiently like us for the Lost to be able to mix our blood with theirs…"

"Mix our blood?"

"Something like that. The Lost are trying to assure our future, Silverhair."

The big Cow turned away from them. She reached down to wrap an affectionate trunk around her suckling calf, and walked on, the calf scurrying at her feet.

Lop-ear touched the wall again and the strange scene disappeared, revealing the windswept tundra once more.

None of the elephants had tusks, Silverhair noted sadly. They had survived, but they had been forced to make their bargain with the Lost.

"Perhaps these Lost really do mean us well," she said. "But…"

"Yes?"

"But they will never let us go. Will they?"

"They can’t, Silverhair. Earth is crowded with Lost. There is no room for us."

At sunset, the weather broke.

Rain began to beat down, and Silverhair knew it was likely to continue for days. A gray mist hung over the green meadows, and the moisture gave the air a texture of mystery and tragedy. It was beautiful, but Silverhair knew what it meant. "The end of another summer," she said. "It goes so quickly. And winter is long…"

Silverhair knew her story was nearly over.

Skin-of-Ice had done her a great deal of damage. She could feel the deep, unclosed wounds inside her — damage that couldn’t be put right, regardless of the clever ministrations of these new Lost. There was only one more summer left in her, perhaps two. But she had no complaint; that would be enough for her to bear and suckle her calf, and teach it the stories from the Cycle.

She even knew what she would call the calf, such was its great weight in her belly. Icebones.

She knew she could never forgive the Lost for the things they had done to her and her Family. Perhaps it was just as well she would soon take that antiquated hatred to her grave.

For the future belonged to the calves, as it always had.

Lop-ear seemed to know what she was thinking. He stood beside her and rubbed her back with his trunk. "We really are the last, you know. The last of the mammoths."

"All those who had to die — Eggtusk, Owlheart, Snagtooth…"

"They did not die in vain," he said gently. "Every one of them died bravely, fighting to preserve the Family. We will always Remember them.

"But now we have the future ahead of us. And you’re the Matriarch, Silverhair. Just as Owlheart predicted." He rubbed her belly, over the bump of the unborn calf there. "It’s up to you to keep the Cycle alive, and help us remember the old ways. Then we’ll be ready when our time comes again."

"I don’t think I have the strength anymore, Lop-ear."

"You do. You know you do. And you’ll be remembered. Silverhair, the Cycle — our history — stretches back in time across fifty million years. Its songs tell of the exploits of many heroes. But in all that immense chronicle, there is no hero to match you, Silverhair. One day our calves will run freely on the Sky Steppe, and their lives will be rich beyond our imagining. But they will envy you. For you were the most important mammoth of all. Cupped in the palm of history, caught between past and future, your actions shaped a world…"

She snuggled against him affectionately. "You always did talk too much, dear Lop-ear. Hush, now."

The rain lessened, and the scudding clouds broke up, briefly. The setting sun, swollen in the damp air, cast a pink-red glow that seemed to fill the air, and the first stars gleamed.

"Look," said Lop-ear softly, and he tugged her ear.

She looked up. The Sky Steppe was floating high above the moist tundra, a point of light gleaming fiery red. She stared through the glass wall at the ruddy air. It seemed to her that — just for a heartbeat — the red fire of the Sky Steppe washed down over the world, mixing with the sunset.

But then the clouds closed over the sky, and she was looking out at the dullness of the moist, rainy tundra.

Lop-ear was still talking. "…strange name, but the Lost…"

"What did you say?"

"I was telling you what the Lost call the Sky Steppe. For they see it better than we do, Silverhair. They know much about the land there, even about the two moons that follow it. They call it…" And he raised his head to the light in the sky, and shaped his mouth to utter the strange Lost sound.

"Mars."

The sky closed over, and snow began to fall steadily. The Arctic summer was over, and Silverhair could feel the bony touch of another long, hard winter.