"But you saved Woodsmoke. You are what you do, Thunder. And so you are a hero." He tried to pull away, so she slapped him gently. "I want you to call somebody now. I cannot, for I cannot stamp… There is a Bull I know. He is far from here, but I hope we will meet him someday. He is called Boaster."
"Boaster?"
"Call him now. Call him as deep and as loud as you can."
So Thunder called, his massive chest shuddering and his broad feet slamming against the ground.
After a time, Icebones heard the answering call washing through the rock. Icebones? Is that you?
"Tell him you are Thunder."
Hesitantly, Thunder complied.
A Bull? Are you in musth? Keep away from Icebones, for she is mine. For myself, though Icebones calls me Boaster, my relatives and rivals, for obvious reasons, call me Long —
"Never mind that," said Icebones hastily. "Tell him what you did today."
Still hesitant, awkward, Thunder stamped out, "I killed a bird."
After a long delay, the reply came: A bird? What did you do, sneeze on it?
Thunder trumpeted his anger. "The bird was vast. So vast its wings spanned this Gouge through which we walk. It descended like a storm and grabbed a calf in its mighty talons…"
While Boaster was listening respectfully, Icebones limped away, leaving Thunder standing proud, telling of his deeds to other Bulls — which was just what Bulls were supposed to do.
But as she withdrew she watched the darkling sky.
6
The Shining Tusk
The character of the landscape slowly changed. The walls became more shallow and broken. It was evident that they were, at last, rising out of the mighty Gouge.
One morning the mammoths found themselves facing a valley that cut across the main body of the Gouge. The valley appeared to flow from the high, dry uplands of the southern hemisphere into the immense ocean basin that was the north, as if from higher ground to lower.
The mammoths clambered down a shallow slope. The light of the rising sun cast long shadows from the rubble strewn on the surface, making the ground seem complex and treacherous.
If walking along the flat ground had been difficult for Icebones, working down a slope like this — where she had to rest her weight on her forelegs and damaged shoulder — was particularly agonizing. And even on the floor of the outflow valley, she found she had to tread carefully: a flat surface layer of dust and loose gravel covered much larger rocks beneath, their edges sharp enough to gash a mammoth’s foot.
It didn’t help that the day seemed peculiarly hot and bright. The rising sun was swollen and oddly misshapen, and the air was full of light.
Icebones knew she should give a lead to the others. But it took all her strength just to keep moving. She plodded on in silence, locked in her own world of determination and pain: Just this step. Now just one more…
She found a small, deep pond, frozen over. Impatiently she pressed on the ice until it cracked into thick, angular chunks, and she sucked up trunkfuls of cold, black water, ignoring the thin slimy texture of vegetation. Soon she had washed the dust out of her throat and trunk, and was trickling soothing water over her aching shoulder.
The others still bore injuries. Breeze nursed the brutal slashes in her back. The calf was fascinated by his wounds, and his grandmother often caught him picking at the scabs that had formed there.
But the one who slowed them down the most was Icebones herself, to her regret and shame.
Thunder stood very still, listening carefully to the deep song of the rocks, as she had taught him. "This is a damaged country," he said.
"Yes." She forced herself to raise her head.
To the north, the valley branched into a series of smaller channels, like a delta. The waters must once have flowed that way. The valley floor was smoothly carved, textured with sandbars that followed the path of the vanished flood. She saw what must have been an island in the flow, flat-topped, shaped like the body of a fish to push aside the water. To the south, where the water must have come from, the landscape was quite different: littered with blocks and domes and low hills, all of them frost-cracked, water-eroded and streaked with lichen, their outlines softened by layers of windblown dust. But many of these blocks were immense, much larger than any mammoth. It was just like the bottom of a huge dried-up river.
All this was drenched in a pink-white glow, and she could feel the sun’s heat on her back. She squinted up, wondering if she would find the sun misshapen again, as she had seen it days before, close to the canal’s terminus. But the light was too bright, and it dazzled her. She turned away, eyes watering.
Thunder said, "There is water under the ground. A great lake of it, trapped under a cap of ice. I can feel it. Can you?"
"Yes—"
"But it is very deep." He seemed excited as his awakened instincts pieced together the story of this land. "Perhaps the water broke out in a huge gush, as the waters broke out of Breeze’s belly when Woodsmoke was ready to be born. Then it flooded over the land, seeking the sea to the north. The water carved out this valley. See how it washed across the ground here, shaping it, and surged around that island… Perhaps the land to the south simply collapsed. If you suck the water out of a hole in the ice on a frozen pond, sometimes the ice will crack and fall, under its own weight…"
Maybe he was right. But whatever water had marked this land was vanished a long time ago. She saw craters punched into the ancient valley floor, themselves eroded by wind and time.
Thunder was still talking. But his words blurred, becoming an indistinguishable growl. The air was now drenched by a dazzling light that picked out every stray dust mote around her.
"I’m sorry, Thunder. What did you say? I am hot, and the day is bright."
But Thunder’s pink tongue was lolling. "It is the sky," he said. "Look, Icebones. There is nothing wrong with you. It is the sky!"
The sun had grown huge — and was getting larger. With every extension of that pale, ragged disc, the heat and the brilliance around her increased. It was silent, eerie, and profoundly disturbing.
There was a nudge at her side, an alarmed trumpet. Icebones made out Spiral, a shimmering ghost in the pink-stained brilliance. "Come away! You are in great danger here. Hurry…!" Spiral began to barge vigorously at Icebones’s flank.
Icebones needed little further urging.
The ground was littered with scree and, unable to see, she stumbled frequently. Her shoulder hurt profoundly, and she felt as if she would melt from the heat. Though she was half-blinded, she could hear as clearly as ever: Spiral’s blaring, the scrape of her foot pads over the loose rock, even the scratchy, shallow breathing of the other mammoths further away.
That flaring sun expanded still further. Eventually it became a great disc draped over the sky, its blurred rim reaching halfway to the horizon.
It was horrifying, bewildering, unreal, a new impossible unreality in this unreal world. The sun does not behave like that. If I am the frozen dream of some long-dead seer, she thought, then perhaps the dream is breaking down; perhaps this is the light of the truth, breaking through the crumbling dream…
But now the heat began to fade, suddenly. There was a soft breeze, carrying the tang of ice. The light, too, seemed dimmer.
Her thoughts cleared, like a fever dream receding. Here was Autumn, a blocky, ill-defined silhouette before her.
"If that was summer," Icebones said, "it was the shortest I’ve ever known."