First
came the herd-scent of all the other mastodons, anxious but subsiding, but the
personal smell of the matriarch almost too overpowering to stand beside.
Beneath it came the grass scent, acrid and dry and aged by the exposure of a
day. Then the wall of the strange musk-sweat of all the men that I call the
Never-born. Twilight itself comes laden with the mint of evergreens and the
cold of flint. The water of the lake bears its own aroma – silvery and heavy,
with some grass-scent because of the algae it bears. Behind us, the forest was
an odorous cacophony of wary waking deer and scurrying earth-tinged rodents and
the small swift smells of birds which fell, in human terms, like singular
strokes of a brush across a canvas.
“The
mastodons will sleep though the night,” said Jerem Cozak, from atop the
matriarch, “but post their own sentries. Did you know that?”
“There
are many things I do not know,” I said.
He
laughed, then. “I will tell you something no one knows but me. None of this was
written. Tonight I will cleanse my armor by the lake, because when the
matriarch bellowed truly I was terrified.”
“You
mean we could have failed,” I said. “She could have gored you, and a dozen
mastodons gone charging through our ranks. But we would not have succeeded in
any other way.”
“Just
so,” he nodded, and I guessed that he’d been preoccupying me so that I would
not be overwhelmed. Sound came then, as a smilodon snarled, soft and low,
across the lake, away by the edge of the forest on that side, and thirty heads
turned briefly in that direction. The waters of the lake lapped the shore with
quick plashes. The wind waved the grass in soft susurrations. Three different
kinds of birds trilled from the timberline; six sang in the grasses closer to us;
two cried mournfully and dove the waters of the lake. The army of men that I called the Never-born
creaked and clanked in their awkward armor, their voices like the crashing of
stones into a stream. Field mice peeped and burrowed through the tall grass,
but even mastodons could not hear the fox that hunted them, though of course
they smelt it.
“I
have questions,” I said at last. “I’ll not let you leave again.”
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