Longtusk

Beyond the advancing wave front, bizarrely, the sun still shone, and the land was a placid blanket of folded earth peppered with trees. Longtusk saw a herd of bison, a black lake of muscle and fur. They looked up from their feeding at the wall of water that advanced on them, towering higher than the tallest trees.

The herd was gone in an instant, thousands of lives snuffed out as their world turned from placid green to crushing black.

And still the water came, that front of gray advancing without pity over the green, spreading out over the land in a great fan from the breached dam, as if trying to emulate the sea from which it had emerged.

…Now, though, the flow began to diminish, and the water surging over the land began to drain away. Longtusk saw that the breached dam had, if briefly, reformed; slabs of ice and boulders, presumably torn from the basin of the trapped lake, had jammed themselves into the breach, stemming the flow, which bubbled and roared its frustration at this blockage.

As the flood waters subsided, draining into shallow pools and river valleys, the drowned land emerged, glistening.

It was unrecognizable.

Where before there had been green, now there was only the red-brown and black of the bedrock. Under the dam, where the water had fallen to the ground, a great pit had been dug out, gouged as if by some immense mammoth tusk, already flooded with water and littered with ice blocks. It was not that the surface of the land had been washed away, a few trees uprooted — all of it, all the animals and trees and grass and the soil that had sustained them had been scoured clean off, down to the bony bedrock, and then the bedrock itself broken and blasted away. Even the hills had been reshaped, he saw, their flanks eroded and cut away. It was as if a face had been flensed, scraped clean of hair and skin and flesh down to the skull.

Mighty rivers flowed through the new cha

And now there was a new explosion of shattered rock and crushed ice. The temporary dam had failed. The water leaped through and engulfed the land anew, immediately overcoming the lakes and rivers that had formed and gleamed so briefly, a world made and unmade as he watched.

Surely this mighty flood would not rest until it had gouged its way across this narrow neck of land to reach the brother ocean to the south, sundering the continents, cutting off the new lands from the old.

And with the Fireheads trapped in the old world, the mammoths would be safe in the new.

But such small calculations scarcely seemed important. Longtusk felt the shuddering of the planet in his bones, a deep, wild disturbance. The Earth was reshaping itself around him, the sea asserting its mighty fluid dominance over the land. Before such mighty forces his life was a flicker, no more significant than droplet of spume thrown up as the water surged through the broken dam.

…And yet he lived, he realized, wondering. They still stood here — the three of them, Willow, Crocus and himself, the Firehead and the Dreamer still clutching his soaked fur.

For a heartbeat he wondered if they might, after all, live through this.

But now Crocus cried out, pointing.

The hillside they stood on was crumbling. Its surface was cracking, falling away into the gray-brown torrent that gushed below. And the exposed gray-black rock was crumbling too, exploding outward, great shards of it being hurled horizontally by the power of the water. Its lower slopes must have been undercut by the flood.

The land itself was disappearing out from under him, faster than any of them could run.

So it is time, he thought.

Willow plucked at his ears. He bent his head, and the Dreamer slid proudly onto his back. Another story was ending here, thought Longtusk: this squat, aged Dreamer was probably the last of his kind, the last in all the world, and with his death his ancestors’ long, patient Dreams would end forever.

Crocus was weeping. She was frightened, like the cub he had once found in the snow, lost and freezing and bewildered. She looked up at Longtusk, seeking comfort.

He wrapped his trunk around her. She curled up in the shelter of his powerful muscles, pulling his long thick fur around her. She closed her eyes, as if sleeping.

…The land disappeared with a soft implosion, startlingly quickly, and there was nothing under his feet.

He was falling, the Dreamer’s legs locked around his neck, Crocus cradled in his trunk. The air gushed around him, laden with noise and moisture.

He could hear the rush of water beneath him, smell its triumphant brine stink as the sea burst across this narrow neck of land, sundering continent from continent.

Is this how it feels to die? Is this how it feels to be born?

Defiantly he lifted his mighty tusks. Milkbreath! Thunder! Spruce!

And then -

7

The Cousins

It was later — much later — before Threetusk truly understood what had happened. And, as he grew older yet, the strange events of those days plagued his mind more and more.

He found her cropping grass with the painful, slow care of the old.

"You look terrible," said Saxifrage, as she always did.

"And, Matriarch or not, you’re just as uppity as when you were a calf and I could lift you in the air with my trunk."

She snorted with contempt. "Like to see you try it now." But she reached up and nuzzled her trunk tip into his mouth.

Her flavor was thin, stale, old — yet deliciously familiar to Threetusk. They had sired four calves together. Threetusk had known other mates, of course — and so, he knew, had Saxifrage — but none of his couplings had given him such warm joy as those with her. And (he knew, though she would never say so) she felt the same way about him.

But Saxifrage was a Matriarch now, and her Family stood close by her: daughters and granddaughters and nieces, calves playing at the feet of their mothers, happy, well-fed and i

Even in this huge and empty new land, birth and life and death had followed their usual round for the mammoths, and Threetusk found the world increasingly crowded by unfamiliar faces. Sometimes he was startled to discover just how old he was: when he tried to kneel in the water of a spring, for instance, and his knees lanced with arthritic pain; or when he grumbled about the smoothness of his teeth — and then recalled they were the last he would ever grow.

He settled in beside her, and pulled at the grass. "I’ve been thinking," he said. "We’re the only ones who recall it all. The crossing. The only ones who were there. To these youngsters, all of it — Longtusk, the refuge, the corridor — is as remote as a story in the Cycle."

"It already is in the Cycle."

"Yes," he said. "And if I knew Longtusk he’d bury his head in a mud seep rather than hear some of the legends that are growing up around him."

"But he was a hero… You know, you never told me the last thing Longtusk said to you. That day when he a

"I’ve been thinking," he said again.

She rumbled, irritated at his evasion. "Bad habit for your age."

"About ice and land bridges and corridors… You see, it isn’t so easy to reach this new land of ours. First you have to cross the land bridge, and you have to get through the ice corridor. You have to time it just right; most of the time one or other of them will be closed, by sea or ice—"