She walked down the beach and stood at the edge of the Channel between Island and Mainland.
In stark contrast to the dry colors of the late summer landscape, a wide stretch of sea was still white: packed solid by flat ice. Along the shoreline, however, was a wide band of clear water interspersed with stranded icebergs, many of them grotesquely shaped by continual melting and refreezing. Ivory gulls perched on the highest bergs, and beside the smaller blocks lodged on the tide-line ran little groups of turnstone and sanderling. The wading birds pecked at Crustacea among the litter of kelp. The best feeding place for the creatures of the sea was the ice-edge, where the ice meets the open sea. She could see many murres working there, their high-pitched calls echoing as their thick bills bobbed into the water. The cries of the birds were overlaid with the deep, powerful breathing of beluga — white whales, their sleek bodies easily as massive as Silverhair’s, and capped by long, spiraling tusks — and narwal, mottled gray, pods of them cruising the ice-edge or diving beneath the ice itself.
A large bearded seal broke the surface near the coast, regarded Silverhair with large, sad eyes, then ducked beneath the ice-strewn water once more.
To get to the Mainland, Silverhair would have to cross this teeming water-world.
She remembered standing on this shore with Lop-ear — her reluctance even to dip her trunk in the sea, his playful calls to the Calves of Siros.
Once, Longtusk had crossed this Channel to bring his Kin to the Island. It had been a great migration, with thousands of mammoths delivered to safety. But the Cycle was silent about how Longtusk did it. Some said he flew across the water. If Silverhair could fly now, she would.
But on one point the Cycle was absolutely clear: Longtusk himself did not survive the passage.
Today, then, she must outdo Longtusk himself.
Silverhair gathered her courage. She stepped forward.
Thin landfast ice crunched around her feet. The water immediately soaked through the thick hair over her legs, and its chill reached her skin. She could feel the water seeping up the hairs dangling from her belly, and more ice broke around her chest.
She stumbled, and suddenly the water flooded over her chest and back, and forced its way into her mouth. She scrambled backward, coughing, a spray of water erupting from her mouth. But she lost her footing again and slipped sideways, and suddenly her head was immersed.
She fought brief panic.
She stood straight and lifted her head out of the water, opened her mouth and took a deep draught of air. The water felt tight around her chest, like a band of ice.
Dread flooded her. She remembered the stream of runoff that had almost killed her as a calf. She had been so small then, and the stream — which she could probably ford easily now — had been a lethal torrent, no less intimidating than the Channel that faced her now. She longed to turn and flee back to the land, to abandon this quest.
But she knew this was only the beginning.
Deliberately she took another step forward. The ice, cracking, brushed against her chest. She lifted her head back as far as she could go, trying to keep her eyes and mouth out of the water. But at last the water was too deep, and it closed over her head.
The cold was shocking, like a physical blow, so intense it made her gasp.
She forced herself to open her eyes.
The water was gray-green, and its surface was a glimmering sheet above her. She could see floating ice, thin gray slabs of it over her head.
She thrust her trunk through the surface so that it protruded from the water. She blew hard to clear her trunk of water, and sucked in deep lungfuls of clean, salty air. She could feel her chest drag against the heavy pressure of the water, which was trying, it seemed, to crush her ribs like a trampled egg. But she could breathe.
She was floating in the water, submerged save for her trunk, her body hair waving around her. Instinctively she surged forward, dragging at the water with her forelegs, kicking with her hind legs. Soon she could see she was pushing through the clumps of ice that littered the surface, and the air was whistling easily into her lungs.
All she had to do was keep this up for the unknown time it would take to cross the Channel — and overcome the savage current and whatever other dangers might lurk in the deeper water — and emerge, exhausted, onto a beach crawling with Lost…
Enough. She clung to the Cycle: You can only take one breath at a time. Her other problems could wait until she faced them.
On she swam, into the silent dark, alone.
The sun was low to the west, and it showed as a glimmering disk suspended above the water’s rippling surface. She knew that as long as she kept the sun to her right side, she would continue to head south, toward the Mainland.
Away from the coast the pack ice formed a more solid mass, though there were still leads of open water, and holes broken through by melting, or perhaps by seals and bears.
She took a deep breath, pulled down her trunk, and ducked beneath the ice. She would have to swim underwater between the airholes as if she were a seal herself.
She drifted under a ceiling of ice that stretched as far as she could see. A carpet of green-brown algae clung to the ceiling, turning the light a dim green; but in places where the algae grew less thinly, the light came through a clearer blue-white.
And there were creatures grazing on this inverted underwater tundra: tiny shrimp-like creatures that clung to the algae ceiling, and comb jellies that drifted by, trailing long tentacles. She could see that the tentacles were coated with fine, hair-like cilia that pulsed in the current, sparkling with fragmented color.
The comb jellies, unperturbed by the strange, clumsy intruder, sailed off into the darker water like the shadows of clouds.
She approached an airhole. The sunlit water under the hole was bright with dust. But when she drew near she saw that the "dust" was a crowd of tiny, translucent animals. She reached the airhole and her head bobbed out of the water’s chill, oily calm, into the chaotic clamor of light above -
And a polar bear’s upraised paw cuffed at her head.
Silverhair trumpeted in alarm.
The bear, just as startled, slithered backward over the ice floe, its black eyes fixed on this unexpected intruder.
Silverhair panted, her breath frosting. "Sorry I’m not a fat seal for you," she said. And she took another deep breath and ducked back into the sea’s oleaginous gloom.
The going got harder as she headed farther out to sea.
The ice was very thick here, and huge water-carved blocks and pinnacles were suspended from the ceiling. Salty brine, trapped within the ice, was leaking down to cause this strange, beautiful effect. It was like swimming through a series of caves.
She had to swim an alarmingly long way between airholes.
Once, a seal fearlessly approached Silverhair. It seemed to swim with barely a flick of its sleek body — an embarrassing comparison to Silverhair’s untidy scrambling — and the ringed pattern of its skin rippled in the water. The seal studied her with jet-black eyes, then turned and swam lazily into the murky distance.
She neared the ice-edge with relief, for she would be able to breathe continually when she passed it. But there was a great deal of activity here. She glimpsed the white forms of beluga whales sliding in a neat diamond formation through the water. Occasionally there were the brief, spectacular dives of birds hunting fish, brief explosions from the world of light and air above into this calm darkness.
She drove herself on, past the ice-edge, and into open water.
There was no ice above her now, and no bottom visible beneath her, and she soon left behind the busy life of the ice-edge: there was just herself, alone, suspended in an unending three-dimensional expanse of chill, resisting water.