The Bull raised his trunk, as if to smell the deep-buried water. He rammed his tusks against the hard, rippled rock, but they rebounded, and he yelped with pain.
"We must find a place where the water comes closer to the surface." She walked down the hillside, pausing to stamp and listen, tracking the path of the underground river.
The others followed, the Bull with eagerness, the rest with incomprehension or resentment, but all driven by their thirst.
She came to a place where a vast pipe thrust out of the ground. It stalked away over the rocky slope on spindly legs, like some immense centipede. The pipe was as wide as three or four mammoths standing side by side, and its surface was slick and white, like a tusk.
The pipe was obviously a creation of the Lost. But its purpose did not interest her — for she could hear water running through it.
She began to probe at the ground just above the pipe. The rock was shattered here; underneath a surface layer of dust there was fine rubble. And, when she dug into this with her trunk, she could smell water.
The Bull could smell it too. "Let me drink! Give me the water!"
Icebones growled. "I am not your Lost keeper, here to nurse you. The water is here, but you must work for it." She trumpeted to the others. "Come, now. Watch what I do."
She bent her head and cleared away surface debris with brisk swipes of her tusks. Then she stood square and began to dig her way into the rubble with her trunk.
The Ragged One snorted skeptically, but the others crowded closer.
Icebones soon grew tired, but she ignored her discomfort and kept digging.
Perhaps half a trunk’s length deep the rubble began to turn into sticky, half-dried mud, and she gratefully sucked out the first droplets of water.
After that the others quickly settled to work around her. They grumbled and complained as they scraped their tusks or caught their sensitive trunk fingers on sharp rock fragments. But the scent of water lured them on, and soon their complaints turned to a murmur of mutual encouragement.
Icebones could sense warmth rising from the ground here. Perhaps that had something to do with the rivers of rock which had gushed from this Mountain; perhaps that deep warmth had kept the underground water from freezing here.
At last Icebones dug deep enough to find soil soaked to mud. She had to kneel on her front legs to reach. With her trunk tip she hollowed out a chamber deep beneath the ground. She let the hole fill with seeping water, which she sucked out in a great trunk load and emptied into her mouth. The water was hot, a little salty, and it fizzed oddly in her throat — but it was delicious.
The others, working less expertly, were slower, but her success drove them on. At length they were all pumping out muddy, brownish water and filing their mouths.
Working together at the rock face was the nearest this strange, fractured bunch had come to behaving like a Family, Icebones thought. She allowed herself to relish this moment of immersion: the shuffling of feet and the scrape of tusk on rock, the soft rustle of the mammoths’ thick hair, and the myriad small sounds, farts and hums and squeals and rumbles, that emanated from the mammoths’ immense torsos as they drank.
When she had drunk her fill, Icebones walked away from the others.
The rock beneath her feet came in layers, she found, exploring it with her trunk: layers of red overlying gray, gray overlying blue, blue overlying black. Here and there this stratified rock was pocketed by craters, huge circular scars.
Perhaps all of this vast Mountain was made up of layer after layer of hardened rock, vomited from the summit over many years.
When she urinated, the rock and dust fizzed and hissed where her water splashed it. She sniffed at this new peculiarity, baffled and disturbed. The very dust was strange here.
She found a steep-sided ridge and climbed it stiffly, the mild exertion making her gasp for air. The ash had drifted away from the top of the broad ridge, leaving hard exposed rock.
Standing on the ridge, she was suspended between purple sky and a land that glowed red.
The flank of the Fire Mountain swept away beneath her. The sun was setting behind her, already hidden by the Mountain — she was looking east, then — and the sky was a stark dome of bruised purple, showing a few stars at the zenith. The Mountain thrust out of the belly of this world, as if some monstrous planetary calf were struggling to be born. And, on the eastern horizon, she saw those other rocky cones, mountains almost as vast, their sunlit faces glowing red.
There was a layer of clouds beneath her. The clouds were tall thunderheads, flat and smooth and black beneath, topped by huge pink-white mounds, and they sailed like icebergs on some invisible sea of thicker, moister air. I really am very high, she thought.
Below the clouds, on the deeper land beneath, she saw swathes of pale green and gray: the mark of life, grasslands or steppe. Raising her trunk she thought she could smell water, far away, far below.
We must go there, she thought, down to that plain. For we surely cannot stay here, on this barren slope.
She could see the giant water-bearing pipe, at the roof of which the mammoths still dug for water. When she climbed a little higher she saw that more pipes thrust out of the bulk of the Mountain and spread around it across the rocky land. They were thin lines that shone pink in the last of the sunlight.
In a way this great structure was magnificent, she thought, the huge shining trunks stretching straight and far, farther than many mammoth trails. But she wondered if that was why this old Fire Mountain had come to life. The Lost were always thirsty for water. Perhaps, like a greedy mammoth who drains the ground beneath her feet, the Lost had sucked away too much of the water which had gathered here, disturbing the Mountain.
Now the light was fading fast, and the immense shadow of the Fire Mountain stretched across the land. Soon she could hear calls, rising from the hidden depths of the landscape, drifting on the thin, cold air. They were clearly the voices of predators — wolves, perhaps, or cats — marking out their killing territories. Though the predators’ calls made her tense and alert, there was something reassuring in the thought that she and her motley band of mammoths were not the only living things in this strange, cold world.
As the light faded further, she heard more subtle sounds: the hiss of wind over mountains and forests and steppe, the deep, subtle murmur of an ocean, the groan of glaciers and the crackling of ice sheets, the murmur of liquid rock within the Fire Mountain, the deeper churning of this world’s hot core. When she stamped her feet, she could hear washes of sound echoing back and forth through the deep foundations of the land.
The sunset and the dawn were the times sound carried best. And so she listened, with every aspect of her being, her ears and belly and chest, to the deeper sounds, the songs of the world. And gradually she built up an image, in sounds and echoes, of the spinning rocky ball to which she clung.
This was a small, cold world. It was made of rock, rock that was hard deep into its being — unlike that other world, the world of her birth, whose rocky skin was laid thin over a churning liquid body, like thin ice on a pond.
But the cold here would suit mammoths, she thought. And the hardness of the rocks made the world’s songs easy to hear.
The world was round, like a ball of dung. But it was a misshapen ball. To the north it was flattened, as if a massive foot had stamped down there, cracking and compressing the rock across half the world. The giant pit made by that stamping was, she sensed, filled with water, a world-girdling ocean. The southern lands were higher, but they, too, had been struck a series of immense, damaging blows. One of those slamming impacts had been so powerful it had punched a great pit into the hide of the world — and the impact had caused a rebounding upthrust of rock here, in the lands beneath her feet. The huge Fire Mountain itself stood over that rock mound.