They had almost reached the hard, secure rock when there was a harsh trumpet.
Autumn called, "Shoot!"
A section of the shuddering bridge had crumbled and fallen away. Icebones could see bits of it falling through the air, sparkling as they spun, diminishing to snowflakes.
And there was nothing beneath Shoot’s hind feet.
Shoot fell back, oddly slowly. For a heartbeat she clung to the broken edge of the bridge with her forelegs, and she scrabbled with her trunk. Then she slid back, as smoothly as a drop of water sliding off the tip of a tusk. She wailed, once.
Icebones glimpsed her sprawled in the air, almost absurdly, limbs and trunk and tusks flapping like the wings of a clumsy, misshapen bird. Her fall was agonizingly slow, slow enough for Icebones to hear every whimper and cry, even to smell the urine that gushed into the air around Shoot’s legs.
Then she was lost in cloud, and Icebones was grateful.
She heard the trumpeting cry of Spiral, and Autumn’s answering wail.
Icebones inspected the crack. It was wide, and getting wider as more chunks of bridge structure fell away like sharp-edged snowflakes.
The Ragged One stood on the far side of the crack, backing away slowly. The damaged bridge was like a great tongue lolling from the remote far side of the Gouge. But as the bridge swung up and down beneath her the Ragged One kept her footing easily.
"You cannot return," Icebones called.
"I do not choose to return."
"You will be alone."
The Ragged One snorted, and stepped back again as more of the bridge fell away. "I have always been alone. Don’t you know that yet?"
"We will meet at the Footfall."
"Perhaps." And the Ragged One turned away.
Icebones watched her recede. For all the tragedy and renewed danger her shrunken band would face from now on, a secret part of her was glad that the Ragged One was gone — at least for now.
The bridge trembled and cracked further.
Autumn was still trumpeting, her voice thin and sharp. "The morning is barely begun. But already my daughter is dead. How can this be?"
The sun rose higher, shining brighter as the blue morning clouds dispersed.
2
The Walk Down From the Sky
By midday the mammoths had reached the top of the landslide. Subdued, weary, they scattered in search of forage.
Icebones and Thunder stood at the very edge of the cliff. The Gouge was a river of pink light below them, laced with cloud. The line of the cliff itself was cut back in great scallops, as if some huge animal had taken bites out of it. In one place a broad, deep channel came to an end at the cliff, as if the greater Gouge had simply been cut into the land, leaving the older valley hanging.
The landslide was a great pile of broken rock that fell away into the depths of the Gouge until it disappeared beneath a layer of thin cloud. The slope was pitted by craters, its scree and talus smashed and compressed to a glassy smoothness. Even this landslide was ancient, Icebones realized, old enough to have accumulated the scars of such powerful blows. This was an old world indeed, old upon old.
"We should go that way," Thunder said, looking down at a point where the landslide slope looked particularly flat and easy. "And then we can follow that trail." He meant a rough ridge that had formed in the heaped rubble, zigzagging toward the Gouge floor.
Icebones said, "But I doubt that any mammoths have walked here before." Trails made by mammoths had been proven reliable and safe, perhaps over generations. Mammoth trails were part of their deep memory of the world. But there was no memory here. This "trail" of Thunder’s was nothing but a random heaping of rocks. She said at last, "We cannot move from this place today. The others are not ready for such a challenge."
"But to lose another day—"
"Your mind is sharp, Thunder. Theirs are crowded by grief. For now, you must continue to study our path. We will rely on you."
"You are wise," he said, and resumed his inspection of the path.
That day seemed terribly long — and when it was done, the night seemed even longer.
Autumn had withdrawn into herself once more. Breeze took refuge in the calf, who blundered about oblivious of the greater tragedy around him.
Spiral seemed the worst affected.
At first the tall Cow wailed out her grief loudly. Icebones meant to go to her to comfort her, but Autumn held her back. "This is how she was with the Lost," she said harshly. "When she was hurting, or hungry, or just wanted attention. They would come running to her. We should not go running now. She must bear the burden of what has happened."
Icebones bowed to the wisdom of the older Cow.
When none of the mammoths responded, Spiral’s wails ceased abruptly. She withdrew from the others, seeking out forage in a distracted, halfhearted manner. Then, after a time, she began to make deep, mournful groans, so deep they carried better through the ground than the air, and Icebones saw salty tears well in Spiral’s small eyes. At last she was truly grieving, as a mammoth should.
And now Autumn came to her, and wrapped her trunk around her daughter’s bowed head.
Icebones, feeling very young, was bemused and distressed by the complexity of the emotions spilling here.
Icebones walked to the edge of the cliff, gathered her courage, and stepped off.
Rubble crunched and compressed under her front feet.
Cautiously she stepped further, bringing her back legs onto the rocky slope. The footing seemed good, and the rock fragments slipped over each other less than she had feared. The surface rocks were worn smooth by dust or water or frost, but some of them were loosely bound together by mats of moss and lichen.
She soon tired, her front legs aching, for it was never comfortable for mammoths to walk downhill. But she persisted, doggedly following the rubble trail Thunder had picked out, listening to the rumbles and grunts of the mammoths who followed her.
The wall of the Gouge loomed behind her. It was striped with bands of varying color, shades of red and brown, like the rings of a fallen tree. The topmost layer was the thickest, an orange blanket of what appeared to be loose dust. And the wall was carved vertically, marked with huge upright grooves and pillars of rock, perhaps made by rock falls or running water. The grooves cut through the flat strata to make a complex crisscross pattern. Great flat lids of harder rock stuck out of the wall, sheltering hollowed-out caverns that she climbed past. She made out rustles of movement: birds, perhaps, nesting in these high caves.
This tremendous wall was a complex formation in its own right, she saw, shaped by the vast, slow, inexorable movements of rock and air and water. With its endless detail of strata and carvings and nesting birds, it went on as far as she could see, a vertical world, all the way to the horizon, where it merged in the mist with its remote, parallel twin.
Now she found herself walking into clouds. They were thin, wispy streaks, and they rested on an invisible layer in the air.
She soon passed through the strange cloud lid, into air that was tinged blue, full of mist. The air was noticeably thicker, warmer and moist, and she breathed in deep satisfying lungfuls of it.
The mammoths came to a flat, dusty ledge, still high above the Gouge floor. They fanned out, seeking forage.
Icebones, probing at the ground, found there was vegetation here: yellow and red lichen, mosses, even a little grass. But it was sparse, and the only water was trapped under layers of ice difficult to crack. She knew they must go much deeper before they could be comfortable.