And yet even in this new raw place, there was life.
He picked up a loose rock. He tasted moss and green lichen, struggling to inhabit this unpromising lump: sparse, nothing but dark green flecks that clung to the porous stuff — but it was here. And these first colonists would break up the hard cooling rock, making a sand in which plants could grow. Perhaps one day this would be a bowl of greenery within which mammoths and other animals could survive.
He came up here once a year — but always with Willow as his sole companion. Mammoths are creatures of the plains, and the members of his little Clan were suspicious of this place of hills and ice. And there wasn’t a great deal to eat up here. But Longtusk embraced the stark, silent beauty of this place.
For he knew that these craters were a sign of Earth’s bounty — the gift that had created this island of life and safety, here at the heart of the forbidding icecap.
One night — many years ago — the mammoths had seen, on the fringe of their nunatak, a great gush of smoke and fire which had towered up to the clouds. The mammoths had been terrified — all but Longtusk, who had been fascinated. For at last he understood.
Over most of the world, the heat which drove life came from the sun. But here, far to the planet’s north, that heat was insufficient. Even water froze here, making the icecaps that stifled the land.
Instead, here in the nunatak, the heat came from the Earth itself.
In some places it dribbled slowly from the ground, in boiling springs and mud pools. And in some places the heat gathered until it burst through the Earth’s skin like a gorged parasite.
That was the meaning of the great eruption of fire and smoke they had seen. That was why the land was littered by enormous blocks of black rock, hurled there by explosions.
And the craters — even the biggest of them — were surely the wounds left in the Earth by those giant explosions, like scars left by burst blisters. In this small crater he could actually see where smaller bubbles had formed and partially collapsed, leaving a hard skin over voids drained of rock that had been so hot it had flowed like water.
It was the Earth’s heat which had shaped this strange landscape, and it was the Earth’s heat which cradled and sustained the nunatak.
He left the small craters behind and began a short climb to another summit.
Soon he was breathing hard. But he’d been climbing up here every spring since they’d first arrived, and he was determined that this would not be the year he was finally defeated.
He reached the summit. This rocky height, windswept bare of ice like the crater rim, was one of the highest points in the nunatak, so high it seemed he could see the curve of the Earth itself.
All around the nunatak was ice.
The icecap was a broad, vast dome of blue-white, blanketing the land. The ice was smooth and empty, as if inviting a footstep. Nothing moved there, no animals or plants lived, and he was suspended in utter silence, broken not even by the cry of a bird.
Mountains protruded from the ice sheet like buried creatures straining to emerge, their profiles softened by the overlying snow. The mountains — a chain of which this nunatak was a member — were brown and black, startling and stark against the white of the ice. Their shadows, pooled at their bases, glowed blue-white.
Over the years Longtusk had come to know the ice and its changing moods. He had learned that it was not without texture; it was rich with a chill, minimal beauty. There were low dunes and ridges, carved criss-cross by the wind, so that the ice was a complex carpet of blue-white traceries, full of irrelevant beauty. In places it had slumped into dips in the crushed land beneath, and there were ridges, long and straight, that caught the low light so that they shone a bright yellow, vivid against ice. Here and there he could see spindrift, clouds of ice crystals whipped up by the wind and hovering above the ground, enchantingly beautiful.
The ice was a calm flat sea of light, white and blue and yellow, that led his gaze to the horizon. The ice had a beauty and softness that belied its lethal nature, he knew; for nothing lived there, nothing outside the favored nunatak.
But much had changed in the years — by Kilukpuk’s dugs, it had been forty years or more — that he had been climbing this peak.
To the west he looked back the way they had come on their epic trek, so long ago: back across the fragile neck of land that connected the two landmasses. On the land bridge’s northern side there was a vast, glimmering expanse of water, dark against the ice. It was where he recalled the ice-dammed lake had been.
But that lake had grown immeasurably — it was so large now it must have become an inlet of the great northern ocean itself.
Ice was melting into the oceans and the sea level was rising, as if the whole ocean were no more than a steppe pond, brimming with spring water. And the ocean was, little by little, flooding the land.
Meanwhile, on the southern horizon, there was brown and green against the ice white: a tide of warmth and life that had approached relentlessly, year by year. The exposed land formed a broad dark corridor that led off to the south — and into the new land, the huge, unknown continent that lay there — a passageway between two giant, shrinking ice sheets.
The world was remaking itself — the land reborn from the ice, the sea covering the land — all in his lifetime. It was a huge, remarkable process, stunning in scale.
And he knew that the changes he saw around him would one day have great significance for his little Clan.
He had long stepped back from his role as Patriarch. There had never before been a Patriarch in all the Cycle’s long history, and he had never believed there should be one for longer than strictly necessary.
So he was no longer a leader of the Clan. Still, he had traveled farther and seen more than any of the mammoths here on the nunatak.
And he knew that this nunatak would not always remain a refuge.
Sometimes he wished he had someone to discuss all this with. Somebody like Rockheart, or Walks With Thunder — even Jaw Like Rock.
But they were all gone, long gone. And Longtusk, always the outsider, now isolated by age, was forced to rely on nothing but his own experience and wisdom.
…Willow, on his back, was growing agitated. He was muttering something in his incomprehensible, guttural tongue. He leaned forward, over Longtusk’s scalp, and pointed far to the west.
Longtusk raised his trunk, but could smell nothing on the dry air but the cold prickle of ice. He squinted, feeling the wrinkles gather around his eye sockets.
On the far horizon, he saw something new.
It was a line scratched across the ice. It ended in a complex knot, dark and massive yet dwarfed by the icecap. And a thin thread rose up from that knot of activity, straight and true.
It was too far away to smell. But it was unmistakable. It was smoke: smoke from a fire. And the line that cut across the ice was a trail, arrowing directly toward the nunatak.
On his back, Willow was whimpering his alarm — as well he might, Longtusk thought.
For the signs were unmistakable. After all these years, the Fireheads were coming.
As the sun sank deeper in the sky, the light on the ice grew softer, low and diffuse. Blue-gray shadows pooled in hollows, like a liquid gathering. It was stunning, beautiful. But Longtusk knew that this year he could not stay to see the sunset.
The nunatak’s long dream of peace was, so quickly, coming to an end.