"So what?"

"So it’s difficult, but not impossible, for others to make the crossing. Although for now we’re protected by the ocean, there might come a time in the future when the land bridge opens again, and they come pouring across…"

Saxifrage shivered, evidently as disturbed as he was by the notion that the Fireheads might come scouring down this innocent country, burning and hunting and building and changing.

"It won’t happen in our time," Saxifrage said. "And—"

But they were interrupted by a thin trumpeting on the fringe of the gathering. It sounded like a calf — a badly frightened calf.

"Circle!"

Saxifrage’s Family immediately formed a defensive ring around their Matriarch.

Impatiently Saxifrage pushed her way out of the ring, determined to see what was going on. Threetusk followed in her wake.

A calf stood in the protection of her mother’s legs, agitated, still squealing with fright. It was immediately obvious why she was distressed.

The Family was standing at the edge of an open, grassy flood plain. A forest bounded the southern side of the plain. And something had emerged from the fringe of trees on the far side of the clearing.

It might have been a mammoth — it was about the size of a healthy adult Bull, Threetusk supposed — but it was almost hairless. Its skin was dark brown and heavily wrinkled, and it sprouted patches of wiry black hair. Its head was strangely small, and its trunk was short and inflexible.

And it had four short, straight tusks, one pair in the upper jaw, one in the lower.

It was staring at the herd of mammoths, clearly as surprised and alarmed as they were.

"It’s a calf of Probos," said Saxifrage, wondering. "A cousin of the mammoths — like Longtusk’s mastodonts. There have been rumors of creatures like us here: distant sightings, contact rumbles dimly heard. But…"

A young Bull mammoth had gone to challenge the strange animal.

Threetusk struggled to hear their encounter. "His language is strange. I can barely understand him. Gomphothere. His kind are called gomphotheres. We are cousins. But we have been apart a long, long time—"

Saxifrage grabbed his trunk. "Threetusk, don’t you see? This is proof. Your ideas about the bridge and the corridor opening and closing must be right. The way must have opened in the past and let through that gomphothere thing — or his ancestors anyhow. And if the way opened in the past, it will surely open again in the future. Oh, Threetusk, you were right. It won’t happen in our lifetimes. But the Fireheads are coming." She shuddered. "And then what will become of us?"

"…We shouldn’t call them Fireheads," he said slowly.

"What?"

"That’s what Longtusk said to Horsetail and me. On that last day." He closed his eyes and thought of Longtusk. It was as if the years peeled away like winter fur.

We know their true name. They are already in the Cycle. Driven by emptiness inside, they will never stop until they have covered the Earth, and no animal is left alive but them — heap upon heap of them, with their painted faces and their tools and their weapons. They are the demons we use to scare our calves; they are the nemesis of the mammoths. They are the Lost…

Saxifrage said, "Some day in the future the ice will return, and the steppe will spread across the planet once more. It will be a world made for mammoths. But will there be any mammoths left alive to see it?"

The young mammoth’s tusks clashed with the gomphothere’s, a sharp, precise ivory sound. The gomphothere trumpeted and disappeared into the forest.

Epilogue

On this world, a single large ocean spans much of the northern hemisphere. There are many smaller lakes and seas confined within circular craters, connected by rivers and canals. Much of the land is covered by dark green forest and by broad, sweeping grasslands and steppe.

But ice is gathering at the poles. The oceans and lakes are crawling back into great underground aquifers. Soon the air will start to snow out.

The grip of the ice persisted for billions of years before being loosened, it seemed forever. And yet it comes again.

This is the Sky Steppe.

This is Mars.

The time is three thousand years after the birth of Christ. And in all this world there is no human to hear the calls of the mammoths.

Afterword

The picture drawn here of the processes which led to the extinction of the mammoths and other Ice Age fauna is largely based on the careful studies of Gary Haynes and others; see Haynes' Mammoths, Mastodons and Elephants (Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Peter Ward's The Call of Distant Mammoths (Copernicus, 1997). Details of human cultural involvement with mammoths may be found in Mammoths by Adrian Lister and Paul Bahn (Macmillan, 1994). A fine reference on human Ice Age culture is Bahn's Journey Through the Ice Age (Weidenfeld Nicolson, 1994). A good reference on the strange world of the Ice Age, with its land bridges and ice corridors, is After The Ice Age by E.C. Pielou (University of Chicago Press, 1991).

The idea of humans taming mammoths or mastodonts in such ancient times is speculative but not impossible. We have records that elephants have been tamed since 2000 B.C. in the Indus Valley and China, and used in war since 1100 B.C.

A valuable source on Neanderthals and their culture is James Shreeve's The Neanderthal Enigma (Penguin, 1995). It's sadly unlikely that any Neanderthals survived as late as the period in which this book is set. But hominid fossils are hard to find, and much of Beringia is now submerged by the ocean…

Any errors, omissions or misinterpretations are of course my responsibility.

Stephen Baxter

Great Missenden

May 1999