It was a face, Longtusk realized — the face of a mammoth, pulled off the skull, the trunk cut away and stretched out so that empty eye holes gaped. And not just any face: that swathe of purple-pink hairless scarring was unmistakable. This was a remnant of Pinkface, the Matriarch of Matriarchs.
This one brutal trophy, brandished by Smokehat, told him all he needed to know about the fate of the mammoths in the old land to the west.
And with the Shaman was Crocus, Matriarch of the Fireheads, the only Firehead in all history to ride a woolly mammoth. Her hair blew free in the slight wind — once fiery yellow, now a mass of stringy gray, dry and broken. Longtusk felt a touch of sadness.
There was a sharp pain at his cheek, a gush of warm blood. He looked down in disbelief.
Smokehat’s goad, long and bone-tipped, was splashed with Longtusk’s blood. The Shaman had slapped him as if he were an unruly calf.
"Baitho!" On your knees…
Longtusk reached down with his trunk, plucked the goad from the Shaman’s paw, and hurled it far into the dammed lake.
The Shaman was furious. He waved a bony fist in Longtusk’s face with impotent anger.
But now a stream of golden fluid arced from over Longtusk’s head and neatly landed on the Shaman’s bone hat. Smokehat, startled, stood stock still. The burning embers in his hat started to hiss, and thick yellow fluid trickled down his face.
There was a bellow of guttural triumph from Longtusk’s back. It was Willow, of course. With surprising skill, he was urinating into the Shaman’s hat.
The Shaman, howling with rage, dragged the hat from his head and threw it to the ground. He jumped up and down on it, smashing the bones and scattering the embers. But then he yelped in pain — perhaps he had trodden on a burning coal or a shard of bone — and he fled, limping and yelling, acrid urine trickling over his bare scalp.
Crocus covered her face with her paws, her shoulders shaking. Longtusk recalled this strange behavior. She was laughing.
Now she looked up at him, blue eyes made only a little rheumy by age, startlingly familiar. She reached out and buried her fingers in the long fur dangling from his trunk. She made cooing noises, like a mother bird, and he rumbled his contentment. The years evaporated, and he was a growing calf, she a cub freezing to death in the snow, a vibrant young female riding his back with unprecedented skill.
But her face was a mask of wrinkles, and he saw bitterness etched there: bitterness and disappointment and anger. Her life — the demands of leadership, the hard choices she had had to make — all of it had soured her.
And her coat was grotesque.
He recalled the simple tooth necklace she had worn when he first found her. But now, as if it had grown out of that necklace like some monstrous fungus, her coat, draped down to the ground, was sewn with many thousands of beads. There were strings of them across her forehead and in a great sheet that followed her hair down her back; there were rows and whorls sewn into the panels at front and back; there were more strings that dangled from her forelegs and belly to the ground, like the long hairs of a mammoth.
And every one of the beads was of mammoth ivory.
Within her suit she shone, blue-white like the ice. But Longtusk felt sure that not all the mammoths who had sacrificed their tusks for this monstrosity had gone to the aurora Great-Years before, abandoning their bones to the silt of a river bank. If the Fireheads had ever respected the mammoths, it was long ago. This coat was a thing of excess, not beauty: a symbol of power, not respect.
The Crocus he had known would never have worn such a monstrosity. Perhaps the girl he had known had died at the moment her father fell to the Whiteskins’ arrow, all those years ago. Perhaps what had lived on was another creature: the body alive, the spirit flown to the aurora.
Now she dug beneath her coat and pulled out a double loop of thick plaited rope. She held it toward him, cooing.
It was a hobble.
It was a hated thing, a symbol of his long submission, and he realized he had been right: she had pursued the mammoths over such immense distances so that she could regain her dominance over him.
He lifted his tusks and roared, and his voice echoed from the curving dam of ice.
Crocus looked up at him, her eyes hardening. Perhaps she intended to call her hunters to put him down, to end once and for all the life of this unruly mammoth.
But it didn’t matter. For she didn’t know, couldn’t know, that his life was already over.
He stamped his foot. The ice cracked.
The surface of the ice immediately crumbled, cracking in great sheets around them. He felt himself fall, his legs sinking into deeper loose material beneath.
Willow tumbled off his back and landed in the soft ice. Crocus fell to her knees, her heavy bead suit weighing her down, old and bewildered.
Longtusk shook himself free of the loose ice and continued to stamp, here at the dam’s narrowest and weakest point.
Compared to the forces here — the weight of water, the power of this huge ice dam — even the strength of a powerful Bull mammoth was as nothing, of course. But what was important was how he applied that strength — for, like Spindle riding the back of Jaw Like Rock, the ice dam was unstable, overloaded by the brimming lake.
And he heard the dam groan.
Worn thin by years of erosion, already under immense pressure from the weight of the water it contained, stress cracks began to spread through its weakening structure, and Longtusk, in the deep senses of his bones, felt the rhythm of those cracks, and changed his stamping to speed their propagation.
There were ripples on the lake. Birds were taking to the air, alarmed.
And on the other side, water began to gush out of the dam’s dirty, eroded face — just a fine spray at first, noisy rather than voluminous; but soon the cracks from which it emerged were widening, the water flow increasing.
Willow got to his feet, and he reached out with a hairy paw to help Crocus. Crocus hesitated, then took it in her own paw. Then the two of them grabbed onto Longtusk’s belly fur.
And so the three of them were locked together, Longtusk realized — Longtusk, Willow and Crocus; mammoth, Dreamer and Firehead — locked together at the end of their lives, just as had once been foreseen by a Dreamer female, long, long ago.
He wondered if they understood what he had done.
The center of the dam collapsed.
Huge slabs and boulders of ice arced into the air, followed by a powerful torrent of water. Suddenly the air was filled with noise: the roar of the water, the shriek of tortured ice. The dam was high, and the first blocks took a long time to fall to the green land below, fanning out amid a spray of rumbling, frothing, gray-blue water. Longtusk thought he saw a deer there, immense antlers protruding proudly from his head, looking up in utter bewilderment at the strange rain descending on him.
The first ice blocks hit the ground, exploding into fragments and gouging out deep earth-brown craters. But the craters lasted only a heartbeat, for when the waters splashed over the earth the land turned to shapeless mud and washed away.
The deer had vanished. He had been the first to die today. He would not be the last, Longtusk knew.
The dam, once broken, was crumbling quickly. Gray-brown water cut down through the unresisting ice like a stone knife slicing through the flesh of a mammoth. And as the breach widened, so the gush of water extended, deepening and broadening. But its violence did not diminish, for the great mass of water pressed against the dam with an eagerness born of centuries of containment. It shot through the breach horizontally, darkening the land before falling in a shattering rain.
Willow was tugging at Longtusk’s fur and pointing back the way they had come, toward the rocky hillside.
The Dreamer was right. It would be safer if they returned there, away from the collapsing ice dam itself.