3

The Sky Trail

At dawn the world glowed its brightest red. It was as if the dust and the rocks caught the red light of the rising sun and hurled it back with vigor. Even the mammoths’ hair trapped the all-pervasive red light, their guard hairs glowing as if they were on fire. On the plains far below, pools or rivers looked jet black, and the green of life was scattered, irrelevant in this mighty redness.

Icebones longed for a scrap of blue sky.

It was apparent that the mammoths, lacking any better idea, were prepared to go along with the Ragged One’s scheme. Though Icebones felt nothing but dread at the very notion of pursuing the Lost, she had no better suggestion either.

When the light was adequate, the Ragged One simply set off up the flank of the Mountain. The others followed only haphazardly, paying no attention to each other, with none of the calm discipline of a true Family.

Icebones took a place at the back of their rough line.

The Mountain’s slope was shallow, and the mammoths climbed steadily. With their strong hind legs mammoths were well suited to climbing — though descending a slope was always harder, as that meant all a mammoth’s weight was supported by her front legs.

Here and there mosses, lichens and even clumps of grass protruded from cracks in the hard red-black ground. Icebones pulled up grass tufts, wrapping her trunk lips around the thin-tasting goodies. But the grass was sparse and yellowed, struggling for life.

And there was no water to be found, none at all. She could tell from the rock’s deep echoes that the ground-water was buried deep here, far beneath a lid of rock much too thick and hard for any mammoth tusk to penetrate.

The dung of the other mammoths was thin and watery. These mammoths had built up a reserve of fat from the ambiguous generosity of their Lost keepers. But it had clearly been a long time since they had fed properly.

As for herself, Icebones had no real idea how long it had been since she had last tasted the Island’s lush autumn grass. What a strange thought that was… We must find proper grazing soon, she thought.

At length the mammoths reached something new. A line of shining silver stood above the rust-red rock, running parallel to the line of the slope. It stood above the ground on legs like spindly tree trunks.

The line swept down from the humped slope of the Mountain, down toward the hummocked plain below, down as far as Icebones could see until it dwindled to a silvery thread invisible against the red-blue clutter of the layered rock.

Icebones felt cold, deep inside. A thing of clean surfaces and hard sharp edges, this was clearly the work of the Lost.

But the others showed no fear — indeed they seemed curious, and they walked around the skinny supports, probing with pink trunk tips.

The Ragged One came to Icebones. "This is the south side of the Fire Mountain. The sunlight lingers here. You see the green further below, smell the tang of the leaves? The Lost grew vines there. But now the vines are dying."

Icebones asked, "What would you have us do?"

"This is the path the Lost took to the sky," the Ragged One said simply. "We must follow it. That way we will find the Lost again."

Paths worn by mammoths in the steppe were simple trails of bare and compacted earth. This shining aerial band looked like no path Icebones had ever seen. She said starkly, "Perhaps the Lost don’t want you to find them. Have you thought of that? If they wanted you, they would have taken you with them."

The Ragged One growled and clashed her stubby tusks against Icebones’s. "You should crawl back into the cave of darkness you came from. I will lead these others. When we find the Lost we will be safe." And she turned her back on Icebones and stalked away, trunk folded beneath her face.

Icebones, fighting her instincts, trailed behind.

As day followed day, the mammoths climbed the endless shallow slope, following the Sky Trail. They grew still more weary, hungry, thirsty, and their joints ached, the soft pads of their feet protesting at the hard cold rock beneath them. Icebones learned to concentrate on each footfall, one after another, letting her strength carry her upward even when it seemed that there was too little air in her aching lungs to sustain her. The sky above was never brighter than a deep purple-red, even at midday. In the morning there would be a thick blanket of frost that turned the ground pink-white, covering the living things. But as the sun rose the frost quickly burned off, faster than they could scrape it up with their trunks. Even here, life clung to the rock. Grass was sparse, but moss and lichen coated the crimson rock. But as they climbed higher the last traces of ground cover evaporated.

Soon there was only the rock, red and hard and unforgiving. It was as if the land’s skull was emerging from beneath a fragile skin of life.

And the higher they climbed, the more the world opened out.

This Fire Mountain was a vast, flattened dome of rock. A sharp cliff surrounded its circular base, with walls that cast long shadows in the light of the dipping sun. Icebones could follow the line of the strange shining Sky Trail down the slope. It passed through a cleft in that forbidding base cliff and strode on into the remote plain, until it dwindled to invisibility amid the thickening green of vegetation.

The land beyond the Fire Mountain was rough and broken, ribbed with sharp ridges. Though littered with patches of green and glinting with water, it would surely be difficult country to cross.

Further away still, she glimpsed an immense valley running almost directly east. The valley was heavily shadowed by this swollen land of giant Fire Mountains, but it ran to the horizon, vanishing in the mist there.

And to the north she saw a gleaming line of ice, flat and pure. The ice spanned the world from horizon to horizon, and she knew she was seeing an ocean, thick with pack ice: it was the ocean whose presence she had sensed, the ocean that had pooled in the great depression that had shaped the northern hemisphere of this world.

It was a vast landscape of shaped rock, red and shadowed gray, pitted with shallow craters — and only thinly marked by the green of life.

There was nothing for Icebones here.

This is not my world, she thought. And it never could be. Why had she been taken from her home, stranded on this alien ball of rock with all its strangeness, where insane moons careened across the sky? Who had done it — the Lost? What twisted cruelty had caused them to plunge her into this strange madness…?

There was a flurry of movement above her. She stood still, raising her tusks suspiciously.

She found herself facing a goat. An ibex, perhaps. It carried proud antlers, and was coated with thick white wool. Its chest was immense, swelling in the thin, dry air. The ibex appeared to have been digging into a patch of black ice with one spindly hoof.

The goat seemed to be limping. The skin over one of its feet was blackened.

"Frostbite," Icebones said. It was a dread fear of all mammoths. "That goat has been incautious. It may lose that foot, and then the stump will turn infected, if it lives that long."

"No," growled the Ragged One. "the frostbitten skin will harden and fall away, leaving new pink skin that will quickly toughen."

"No creature can recover from frostbite."

"You cannot," said the Ragged One. "I cannot. But this goat can. It is not like the creatures you have met before, Icebones. Just as this is not the world you knew."

Icebones watched the goat hobble away, and she wondered if the clever paws of the Lost had made these disturbing changes, even in goats.

The mammoths approached the goat’s abandoned ice patch. This had been a pond, Icebones found. In places the ice was clear, so that she could see through it to the black mud at the bottom. On the shallow bank around the pond she found dead vegetation, fronds of grass and pond plants, deep brown and frozen to the mud. When she touched the plants she could taste nothing but icy dirt.