"Why?"
"Chaser-Of-Frogs grunted. "Who knows why the Lost do as they do?"
Icebones pondered the meaning of the rock. She pressed, frustrated, at the impenetrable surface, longing to touch and smell the ancient plants, to hear the voices of the animals.
Long ago there was life here. There had been trees, and living oceans, and beasts that roamed the crimson lands. But their world died. The oceans froze over and dried up, and the air cooled, and the last rain fell, and the last snow… Now all that was left of them was here, in this rock, compressed flat by time.
Clumsily, self-consciously, Chaser-Of-Frogs turned her back and pawed at the ground, trying to touch the bones with her hind feet.
"You are Remembering," Icebones said.
Chaser-Of-Frogs stopped, panting — used to her lethargic life in the mud, she got out of breath easily — and she looked up at Icebones with her small hard eyes. "Do you think we are foolish?"
"No. I think you are wise."
Chaser-Of-Frogs eyed her. "Bones-Of-Ice, I am done here. I am a poor fighter of wolves. I must go back before dark. You will go on. Just follow the canal."
Suddenly the thought of being without the squat, humorous, courageous Swamp-Mammoth seemed unbearable. Impulsively Icebones twined her trunk around the other’s. "Come with us."
Chaser-Of-Frogs snorted. "What for, Cousin?"
"The world is dying — just as it died before, ending the lives of those buried creatures…" Icebones explained how she was leading the mammoths to the basin she had called the Footfall of Kilukpuk, the deepest place in the world, where she hoped enough air and water would pool to keep the mammoths alive. "Come with us."
"Me?" Chaser-Of-Frogs grunted, self-deprecating. "Look at me. I can scarcely trudge over an ice-flat plain for half a day before I am exhausted. How could I walk around the world?"
"I’m serious—"
"So am I," Chaser-Of-Frogs snapped. "Bones-Of-Ice, I am no fool. I can smell it myself. Every year the line of trees creeps further down the Gouge wall. Every year our ponds shrink, just that bit more. Every year I see more animals migrate one way up the Gouge then come back the other. But look at me, Bones-Of-Ice. I could not contemplate such a trek as yours… Not yet, anyhow. I smell wisdom on you, young Bones-Of-Ice, but you have much to learn. You see, my calves are not yet desperate enough."
"I don’t see what desperation has to do with it."
Chaser-Of-Frogs said bluntly, "A trek to your Footfall pit would kill most of us. That is the truth. And that is why we must be desperate before we accept such suffering."
Icebones was taken aback. "We will help you."
"Why should you? You never knew us before. We aren’t your kind. We aren’t even like you."
"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, connecting it to the ground, like a huge glowing trunk reaching down through the dusty air. She heard a remote sound, deep and complex — like a landslide, or the cracking of a rock under frost or heat.
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 fanned out over a patch of steppe. The only sounds they made were the soft rustle of their hair as they walked, or the rip of grass, and the occasional chirping snore from Woodsmoke, who was napping beneath his mother’s legs.
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.