She wanted to ask Lop-ear about it; perhaps he would understand. But he had already hurried ahead, and she didn’t want to linger alone in this unnatural place; she ran to catch him up.
With the Nest of Straight Lines behind them, they approached the half-frozen sea.
"What I saw must have been about here," said Silverhair, trying to think.
Lop-ear looked around and raised his trunk. "I can’t smell anything."
The two mammoths walked a little way onto the ice, which squeaked and crackled under them. The ice that clung closest to the shore, where the sea was frozen all the way to the bottom, was called landfast ice. It formed in protected bays, or drifted in from the sea. Its width varied depending on how deep the water was. Later in the summer the landfast ice would break free and melt, or drift away with the pack ice.
The pack ice was the frozen surface of the deeper ocean. It was a blue-white sheet crumpled into pressure ridges, like lines of sand dunes sculpted in white. Farther away from the land Silver-hair could see black lines carved in the ice: leads, cracks exposing open water between the loose mass of floes. As the spring wore on, the leads would extend in toward the coast, splitting off the ice floes. The floes would break up, or be washed out to open sea by the powerful current that ran between the Mainland and the Island.
Dark clouds hung over the open Channel, that forbidding stretch of black, open water; the clouds formed from the steam rising from the water.
And on a floe far from the land, she made out a black, unmoving shape.
She trumpeted in triumph. Gulls, startled awake, cawed in response.
"There!" she cried. "Do you see it?"
Lop-ear patiently stared where she did. "I don’t see a thing. Just pressure ridges, and shadows… Oh."
"You do see it! You do! That’s what I saw, floating in the sea — and now it’s on the ice."
It might have been the size of a mammoth, she supposed — but a mammoth lying inert on the floe. All Silverhair’s fear had evaporated like hoarfrost, so great was her gladness at rediscovering the strange object. "Come on." And she set out across the landfast ice.
Reluctantly Lop-ear followed.
As they moved away from the shore, the quality of the sound changed. The soft lapping of the sea was gone, and the ice creaked and groaned as it shifted on the sea, a deep rumble like the call of a mammoth.
The pressure ridges were high here, frozen waves that came almost up to her shoulder. The ridges were topped by blue ice, scoured clean by the wind, and soft snow lay in the hollows between them. The ridges were difficult to scramble over, so Silverhair found a lead and walked along at the edge of the water, where the ice was flatter.
Frost-smoke, sparkling in the sunlight, rose from the black, oily water.
On one floe she found the grisly site of a polar bear’s kill. It was a seal’s breathing hole, iced over and tinged with blood. She could see a bloodstained area of ice where the bear must have dragged the seal and devoured it. And there was a hollowed-out area of snow near a pressure ridge, marked by black excrement, where the bear had probably slept after its bloody feast.
The wind picked up. Ice crystals swirled around her. When she looked up at the sun, she saw a halo around it. She knew she must be careful, for that was a sign the sea ice might break up.
She came to a place where the pressure ridges towered over her. Surrounded by the ridges, all she could see was the neighboring hummocks and the sky above.
She struggled to the top of a crag of ice.
From here she could see the tops of the other ridges, and the narrow valleys that separated them. They looked as if they had been scraped into this ice surface by some gigantic tusk.
And she realized that she had walked farther out to sea than she had imagined, for she found herself staring up at an iceberg.
It was a wedge-shaped block trapped in the pack ice. She saw how its base had been sculpted into great smooth columns by the water that lapped there, and by the scouring of windblown particles of ice and snow. Blue light seemed to shine from within the body of the translucent ice.
Farther from the shore she saw many giant bergs, frozen in, standing stark and majestic all across title sea ice. The ice between the bergs was smooth and flat. Older bergs, silhouetted in the low light, were wind-sculpted and melted, some of them carved into spires, arches, pinnacles, caves, and other fantastic shapes. Perhaps they would not survive another summer. She could see that some of the bergs had shattered into smaller pieces, and here and there she made out growlers, the hard, compact cores of melted bergs, made of compressed greenish ice, polished smooth by the waves.
In the light of the low sun, the colors of the bergs varied from white to blue, pink and purple, even a rich muddy brown, strange-shaped scraps littering the pack ice.
And from this vantage, Silverhair saw the strange object she had come so far to find.
Dark and mysterious, the thing rested on a floe that had all but broken away from the main mass of pack ice. Only a neck of ice, ten or eleven paces wide, still connected the floe to the land.
She scrambled down the ridge to the edge of the floe. Then she hesitated, looking down with trepidation at the narrow ice bridge and the unyielding blackness of the water below. Lop-ear came to join her.
"It’s quite wide," she said uncertainly. She took a step forward, near the center of the bridge, and pushed at the ice with her lead foot. It creaked and bowed, meltwater pooling under her foot, but it held. "If I keep away from the edges it should be safe."
"Silverhair, that’s terribly dangerous."
"We’ve come this far—"
And without letting herself think about it any further, she stepped forward onto the bridge.
One step, then another: avoiding the rotten ice, testing every pace, she worked her way steadily across the bridge.
The water lapped only a few paces to either side of her.
At last she arrived on the floe. The ice there, though bowing a little, was relatively solid. There were even some pressure ridges here, one or two of the ridges as tall as she was.
She turned and looked back to Lop-ear. He was a compact, dark shape on a broad sheet of blue-white ice, and he seemed a long way away.
She raised her trunk and trumpeted bravely. "Don’t follow me. The bridge is fragile."
"Come back as soon as you can, Silverhair."
"I will."
She turned and with caution made her way across the floe.
The mysterious object was, she supposed, about the size of a large adult mammoth. Overall it looked something like a huge, stretched-out eggshell. It was flat at one end, tusk-sharp at the other, and hollow inside. But she could see that the bottom of it was smashed to pieces, perhaps by a collision with the ice.
It certainly wasn’t made of ice.
She reached out a tentative trunk-finger and stroked its surface.
She snatched back her trunk, shocked. It was wood, covered by some hard, shining coat — a coat that masked its smell — but wood nonetheless.
The short hairs on her scalp prickled. Something about this thing — perhaps the short, sharp lines of its construction — reminded her unpleasantly of the Nest of Straight Lines.
There was a cracking sound.
"Silverhair!" Lop-ear’s voice sounded disturbingly remote.
She spun around, and in the light of the already setting sun, she saw two things simultaneously.