Strange, he hadn’t thought of old Jaw for years…
"…Baitho! Baitho!"
Fireheads were approaching Longtusk, stepping onto the narrow rim of this worn ice dam. And one was calling to him in a thin, high voice.
On his back Willow hissed, full of hatred and fear.
Longtusk could see them now. There was a knot of Firehead hunters with their thick, well-worked clothing thrown open, exposing naked skin to the warmth of the air. Most of them had held back on the rocky ridge. But two Fireheads were coming forward to meet him, treading carefully over the ice dam, holding each others’ paws.
And beyond the Fireheads, snaking back to the west, there was a column of mastodonts. Longtusk could hear the low rumbles of their squat, boulder-like bodies, feel the soft pound of their big broad feet on bare rock.
Ignoring the Fireheads, he sent out a deep contact rumble. "Mastodonts. I am Longtusk."
Replies came as slow pulses of deep sound, washing through the air.
"Longtusk. None here knows you."
"That is true. We are young and strong, and you must be old and weak."
"But we know of you."
The voices were colored by the rich, peculiar accent of the mastodonts, brought with them all the way from the thick forests of their own deep past.
"Walks With Thunder," Longtusk called. "Is he with you?"
"Walks With Thunder has gone to the aurora."
"It was a magnificent Remembering."
"He died well…"
He growled, and a little more sadness crowded into his weary heart. But perhaps that was all he could have hoped for, after so long.
"Longtusk. There are legends of your courage and strength, of your mighty tusks. My name is Shoulder Of Bedrock. Perhaps you have heard of my prowess as a warrior. I would welcome sharpening my tusks on yours…"
He rumbled, "I regret I have not heard of you, Shoulder of Bedrock, though I have no doubt your fame has spread far. I would welcome a contest with you. But I fear it must wait until we meet in the aurora."
The mastodonts rumbled their disappointment.
"Until the aurora," they called.
"Until the aurora…"
The two Fireheads approached him. One wore a coat of thick mammoth hide, to which much black-brown fur still clung, and it — no, he — wore a hat of bone from which smoke curled into the air. And the other, smaller, slighter, wore a coat that gleamed with the blue-white of mammoth ivory.
The male was Smokehat, of course. The Shaman’s face was a weather-beaten, wizened mask, etched deep by resentment and hatred. The Shaman’s tunic was made of an oddly shaped, almost hairless piece of hide. It had two broad holes, a flap of skin sewn over what looked like the root of a trunk, and its hair had been burned away in patches, exposing skin that was pink and scarred…
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.