Icebones

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

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

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

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

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

Flinching, Icebones raised her trunk.

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

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

The sun was swimming in the sky, sliding from side to side and pulsating in size. A line of light darted down from the sun’s disc, co

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

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

5

The Skua

They were in difficult country.

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

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

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

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

The sun was still below the eastern horizon, where the sky was streaked with pink-gray. The other mammoths had fa

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

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

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

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

She felt the hairs on her scalp rise.

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

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

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

The calf, mewling and unhappy, wanted to run to his grandmother, but Breeze kept a firm hold on him with her ski

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

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

"No!"

"It is her right."

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

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

"I can feed him," Spiral protested.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Icebones tasted milk.

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

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

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

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

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

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