Portal Jockey - The Tundra

The last people Aislinn had seen had told her that she was in the Land Without End, in such a way that she could hear the capital letters falling into place. Almost two weeks later, she had fully realised why they called it that. For more long, cold miles than she could count, she had walked through the vast conifer forests of the taiga. She had seen nobody, and no sign of warmer weather or any change in the landscape. She was moving north. Some instinct – a gift from her father, perhaps, like her talent for languages – told her it was the right way to go, but that was all she had to go on. It wasn't even like an internal compass, pointing her in the right direction; it just told her to go north, and she'd find what she needed, whatever that was. One spruce tree looked much like the next. Eventually, it became a relief when the taiga slowly petered out and she found herself standing on the southern fringe of a vast, snow-covered plain that seemed to stretch every bit as far as the taiga had. A single moss-covered boulder jutted out of the snow to her left. She sat down on it, unable to do anything but stare out at the blank landscape ahead of her. There was nothing out there. No birds. No foxes. No bears. Nothing at all that she would normally have expected to find in an arctic tundra. Not even a stunted bush. There must be plant life out there somewhere, she thought. Buried under the snow, maybe, but somewhere. And yet that instinct was still telling her to keep walking north.

"Why couldn't I have inherited a power like, I dunno, being able to do this without having to find the portals?" she wondered aloud. "I mean, the language thing's useful, but…"

The wind from the north picked up, blowing flakes of fine, powdery snow into her face. She grimaced and got up off the boulder, checking that her trusty canvas rucksack was still where it should be. Squaring her shoulders, she buttoned her jacket up to her neck, pulled her hat down over her dark hair, and started to walk.

"You know, Dad," she said to the wind and the snow, "if I freeze to death out there, my mum will be really annoyed with you."

After five miles of wading through calf-deep snow, even the murderous unicorn from Greater Sedony would have been a welcome sight. There were animals out on the tundra, weren't there? Musk oxen, polar bears, reindeer – where were they all? She knew they existed in this world; the people who had told her where she was had had their cured hides hanging on a frame outside their hut, and a couple of reindeer tethered in a paddock. Had she wandered into an area devoid of such creatures? Wherever she was, it was not a world she had visited before. She could always tell.

The winter sun, already low in the clear blue sky, was dipping unsettlingly close to the horizon. Aislinn stopped walking, an unhappy realisation occurring to her. If she didn't find shelter before the night really set in, her earlier joke directed at her absent father would become a terrifying reality.

"Another thing you could have passed on," she commented aloud as she unhooked her second-hand, collapsible shovel – a gift from an elderly farmer three portals back, two worlds after she had left Falaranx Stormfeather in the Scytheblade Archipelago. "Arctic survival knowhow." The empty tundra provided no reply. Aislinn sighed and screwed the three sections of the shovel shaft together, socketing the handle and blade on each end. A proper igloo was beyond her tools, but she could construct a rough quinzhee that would get her through the night, at least.

The wind picked up again during the night. Aislinn could hear it howling outside her little shelter, but the packed snow walls were doing their job: 'cosy' was probably the wrong word, especially with the occasional draught that crept in through the airhole in the top of the domed structure, but she was warm enough, curled up inside a reindeer-hide sleeping bag with her hurricane lantern glowing away by her side. She fished in her rucksack and found a strip of jerky, though she wasn't sure what animal it had come from. She gave it a cursory sniff and gnawed off a mouthful, recalling with a smile that her mother had been a vegetarian, and had encouraged her to do the same. Vegetarianism, it turned out, was a luxury that her life did not often allow.

The jerky strip was finished. Sighing, Aislinn extinguished the lantern flame and tried to get some sleep.

The next day dawned bright, clear and still. Aislinn kicked out the entrance hole she had blocked up the previous night, packing up her lantern and sleeping bag by the sunlight, before she demolished the quinzhee altogether with her shovel. There was still nothing to see; just miles and miles of blue sky and white snow, and still the instinct telling her to keep walking. She pulled her scarf up over her nose, and obeyed.

An hour after leaving her shelter, she finally saw something new: a trail of dark marks on the snow. She hurried closer to get a better look. More and more of the marks appeared as she drew nearer.

They were pawprints. Aislinn frowned and crouched down to study them more closely. More than anything else, they looked like wolf prints: roughly pentagonal, with four toes, a pad in the centre, and short claws. The edges were slightly blurred, as if the wolves' paws were heavily furred, the hairs scuffing the sides of each print in the snow. Despite all that, there was something unusual about them: not a single one of the pawprints was less than six inches wide. Aislinn swallowed. How big, she wondered, did a wolf have to be before it left prints that size?

She didn't have to wait long to find out. A mile further on, a high, clear howl reached her ears – from how far off, she didn't know – and dark shapes appeared in the distance, moving quickly towards her. The instinct fell silent; the little urge to keep walking north faded away. Aislinn took a deep breath and reached back for her rucksack. Ever since meeting the unicorn, she had made sure to keep her knife near the top of the bag.

She had expected the wolves. The five huge animals – the largest almost six feet tall in the shoulder – bounded effortlessly across the snow, surrounding her in a circle of fur and fangs. She had not expected the riders.

The biggest wolf's rider guided his mount forwards and leant down from the saddle, inspecting her closely. Was it a he? Aislinn couldn't tell. The rider's face was concealed, with a thick cloth tied over the mouth and nose and snow goggles covering the eyes. They looked like something she recalled seeing in a museum: a rectangle of antler or bone, with a narrow slit cut along the centre. The rider wore a leather jerkin plated with metal, with a thick fur collar the same grey as the wolf's coat, and carried a short spear in one hand. The wolves all wore saddles, but no bridles. The riders seemed to direct them with their knees, sometimes touching the thick-furred necks with their gloved hands if a little extra control was needed.

The wolf's rider straightened up in the saddle.

"How far away are the rest of the People?" he – the voice from behind the mask was definitely male – asked one of his fellow wolf-riders. "I lost track."

"Too far for any of our fenris-wolves to take a second rider," said the other rider, also a man.

"She'll be trampled if she goes to the People on foot, someone who doesn't know how to move with the horde," said a third rider – this one a woman, though she was dressed the same as her male companions. "Hordemasters won't like that."

"I suppose we could kill her," suggested a fourth rider, albeit reluctantly. The other riders made various noises of protest.

"She's not carrying enough on her to make it worth it," said the fifth rider, another woman. She poked Aislinn with the blunt end of her spear. Aislinn warily tucked the knife into her belt and folded her arms. "I mean, if she had some treasure on her, it might be worth it, but…" The rider shrugged. "Looks like the girl herself's worth more than anything she's carrying."

"I can understand you," said Aislinn loudly after a few more minutes of listening to the wolf-riders argue over her value. She couldn't see their eyes behind their snow-goggles, but she was certain that every one of them was now staring at her in astonishment.

The first rider swung himself down from the wolf's saddle and lifted his goggles up onto his forehead, revealing brown skin and dark, near-black eyes narrowed in suspicion.

"I suppose you look a bit like one of us," he said uncertainly, "though you're not dressed like us. What do you think?" he asked his companions.

"Suppose her ancestors could have been left behind one day," said the same rider who had commented that Aislinn was worth more than her belongings. The woman shrugged and looked back over her shoulder. Off to the southeast, a huge, dark shape was moving steadily across the snowfield. "I'll fetch someone with a stronger beast," she said. "You others should get back to scouting."

The man on the ground nodded once and clambered back up into the saddle, gripping the front in both hands and tapping his wolf in the flanks with his heels. In seconds, the little pack had scattered, four of them riding away towards the west and one bounding back towards the huge shape in the distance. Aislinn frowned, weighing up her options. On one hand, these people might be planning to keep her as a slave. It wasn't the first time that had happened – she still had the collar scar on her neck from before she had escaped the last time – but it wasn't an experience she was keen to repeat. On the other hand, these people obviously knew the land. They were probably her best chance of survival out on the tundra, and she couldn't have outrun one of those giant wolves anyway.

The lone rider was returning, followed by a person riding on the back of a truly enormous creature.

It was a massive, thickset, four-legged beast. More than anything else, it resembled a rhinoceros, but even that description didn't really do it justice. Its head was positioned low on its body, in front of a tall, muscular hump above its shoulders on which the rider's saddle was fixed. A single long, thick, tapering curved horn rose up from its forehead. The creature was wearing armour: a metal plate with eyeslits over its face, and a heavy leather caparison with rectangles of metal riveted to it. Overlapping plates ran all the way along its back from its neck to its tail. The peak of its shoulders was two and a half metres off the ground. Its entire body, save its stumpy feet and the end of its snout, was covered in long, shaggy brown fur.

The beast came to a plodding halt as its rider pulled back on the reins, its surprisingly delicate ears flicking curiously forwards. The rider held a hand out to Aislinn. Aislinn took it and let the rider pull her up onto the creature's back. It didn't even seem to notice the extra weight as the rider turned their mount and guided it back the way they had come without saying a word.

There wasn't room in the saddle for two people. Aislinn clung to the high back of the saddle, trying to keep her balance on the armour plates. There was a broad-bladed spear tied to the right-hand side of it, she noticed: a long, heavy weapon with a barb on one side. Summoning her courage, she made a fist and thumped the beast's rider on the shoulder.

"Three questions," she said. "Where am I, who are all of you, and what's this thing we're riding on?"

The rider did not look at her, but they – she – answered nonetheless. "You're in the Land Without End," Aislinn rolled her eyes, "we are the Mammoth People, and this thing," the voice sounded distinctly amused, "is a karkadann named Shieldbreaker."

"Where are you all going?"

"Not entirely sure, myself," said the rider easily. "We all follow Great Lord Mammoth."

Aislinn frowned. "Is that a god? A constellation?"

"No," said the rider, sounding as if she was trying not to laugh. "You'll see."

If it was a title of some sort, it sounded a lot better in the Mammoth People's own language. Tal Ran Mammut.

Shieldbreaker kept lumbering steadily forwards, moving closer and closer to the dark mass in the distance. It slowly became clear that it was not a single large creature – which would have been pretty ridiculous anyway. It was thousands.

Their mount fell into place alongside something big and hairy – not like anything Aislinn had seen before. It plodded along on four legs, resting its weight on the sides of its viciously-clawed forefeet. A person sitting astride its shoulders waved down to Shieldbreaker's rider, who touched the furry brim of her hat in response. Aislinn looked around herself. They were roughly halfway back a vast column of animals. Karkadann and beasts like the huge creature next to them were present in abundance, along with more of the giant wolves ranging along the sides of the horde, bears – some muzzled, but mostly not – and mammoths. Aislinn couldn't suppress staring in awe at the first mammoth that drew close. It was bigger than the elephants she had seen on television and in zoos: taller and heavier, with long ivory tusks that curved more dramatically than those of any elephant. This one was harnessed to a big sledge, piled high with pelts and other supplies. A few people peeked out of a tent pitched in front of the pile. Still more rode on the mammoth's back. A herd of reindeer trotted past, driven by a man riding on the back of a bear. Apart from most of the reindeer and all of the young, like the animal which could only be a karkadann calf, every creature in that huge horde carried a rider. Some, like the mammoths, bore several. A karkadann, as big as Shieldbreaker but bearing no armour, walked past with five people sitting in a frame on its back. Three of them were children.

The big hairy creature next to them, as Shieldbreaker's rider said when she was asked, was called an icewalker, or a vadrog in the Mammoth People's language. She gradually grew less taciturn as the miles dragged on, letting slip bits and pieces of information as they rode. Her name was Laufey Break-Knife; she had trained Shieldbreaker, a bull, since he was a calf; she had three children, the eldest of whom was training their own karkadann, the middle had joined the wolfscouts, and the youngest helped their father with his work as a harness-maker. Her husband and youngest child – a boy – were riding in their family sledge, hauled behind her father-in-law's mammoth. You couldn't be a master tradesman and control a beast, Laufey cheerfully explained. A mammoth or a karkadann needed all your time and concentration to train and control; having a trade as well would cause one or the other to suffer.

From somewhere a long way ahead of them, someone blew four sharp, clear blasts on a horn, two short and high and two long and deep. All along the column, the same rhythm was repeated with drum, horn and pipe, and the horde of the Mammoth People spread out across the tundra. They were no longer all moving in the same direction. Instead, they milled around, finding friends and family among the horde and settling down in little individual campsites. Laufey flicked Shieldbreaker's reins and guided the karkadann over to a dark brown mammoth. The larger beast was hauling a sledge bearing something that looked like a cross between a longhouse and a tent. A man was walking alongside the sledge, leading an adolescent karkadann on a rope. Its horn was shorter and blunter than Shieldbreaker's and it wore no armour, but there was still some powerful muscle beneath the long brown fur. Little by little, the Mammoth People drew to a complete halt. Smoke rose from hundreds of little campfires; thanks to the flames and the huge, furry bodies of the horde's countless animals, the cold Arctic air slowly warmed up until it was – if not exactly hot – at least comfortable.

Laufey swung a leg over Shieldbreaker's back and climbed down onto the quickly melting snow, holding up a hand to help Aislinn down after her before she took Shieldbreaker's reins and led the karkadann over to the sledge. There, she took a rope – a perfectly normal rope, thin enough for the creature to snap easily – and tied it around Shieldbreaker's ankle while she removed his armour and stacked it inside the sledge. The karkadann lay down next to the sledge and went to sleep. Aislinn stared – and stared all the harder when Laufey's son bolted a heavy metal chain around the ankle of his young calf and fixed it to the ground with an iron stake hammered into the soil.

With the warm air and loss of snow glare, people began removing their hats and snow goggles. Aislinn sat down on one of the big sledge's runners and looked around at her new companions. They were a stocky bunch, but in a practical, deliberate way rather than from simple overeating; not unlike the mammoths and karkadann, there was solid, powerful muscle under the fat. Facially, they looked somewhere between Indian and Inuit, with dark hair, dark skin and dark eyes. The wolf-rider had had something of a point. Were it not for her yellow-gold eyes, Aislinn could have passed for one of them in a pinch.

Laufey's husband – a big, quiet man named Brokk – carried an armful of thick furs out of the sledge and laid them out on the ground around the fire, then waved for Aislinn to join them. She swallowed hard and sat cross-legged on a wolf pelt so big it must have come from one of the giant creatures that scouted for the horde. Laufey noticed her brushing her fingers through the thick grey fur.

"Never seen a wolf that size before?" she asked kindly.

Aislinn shook her head. "Not until the scouts found me out there," she said.

"We call 'em fenris-wolves," said Laufey's youngest son, whose name was Tanner. He paused to help himself to a ladle of soup from the communal pot on their fire, splattering the meaty conconction into a wooden bowl. "All the scouts ride fenris-wolves, because they're fast, and they're harder to spot than a mammoth."

"How do you feed all these animals?"

Laufey's father-in-law arrived in time to hear the question. He didn't look old enough to have a grandson in his twenties, at least by the standards Aislinn had grown up with. Perhaps the Mammoth People had their children young. He served himself a bowl of soup and sat down.

"We raid," he said, shrugging. "We hunt. We trade. And we carry a lot of supplies. Nothing's wasted. If a karkadann dies, it feeds the fenris-wolves." He shrugged again. "Even the Heart-Mammoth will feed the flesh-eaters when it dies. No sense letting good meat go to waste."

"The Heart-?"

Brokk scratched the side of his head and spoke up in a soft, whispery voice. "Tal Ran Mammut's mount. It walks at the head of the Mammoth People, and sleeps at our heart when we stop."

"So Tal Ran Mammut is a human?" said Aislinn, raising her eyebrows for confirmation.

"Yes, Tal Ran Mammut is a human," said an unfamiliar voice. Everyone turned around to see a man sitting on the shoulders of a colossal black icewalker. "And one who wishes to meet this stranger the wolfscouts picked up on the tundra."

Laufey got to her feet and hastily wiped soup off her chin. "Ran Vadrog!"

"Well spotted," said the man on the icewalker wearily. He wore his grey-flecked black hair clipped to earlobe-length; his clothing over the course of the day had given him a rather bad case of hat hair. "There's no need for you to leave your meal, Break-Knife," he said when Laufey opened her mouth to speak again. "I can take her to the Heart-Mammoth myself." Aislinn looked uncertainly at her hosts; they all nodded. Ran Vadrog turned his mount and plodded away through the horde, leaving Aislinn to hurry in the icewalker's wake. Suddenly, the word she had been translating as 'horde' – ranlaum – made a lot more sense. This wasn't an army, or not just an army: it was an entire city on the march.

Ran Vadrog did not speak to her as he rode through the huge encampment. He probably assumed she could see the icewalker well enough to follow it. Not, Aislinn admitted, an unreasonable assumption – though it would have felt less exposed to be up on the creature's back, where the Mammoth People would probably still have been staring at her, but wouldn't have got quite as good a view. He still said nothing when they reached a clearing of sorts in the very centre of the encampment. He just tugged on the icewalker's reins, pulling the creature to a halt, and pointed ahead.

Aislinn almost felt as if she had stumbled onto the set of The Lord of the Rings. In front of her was the biggest animal she had ever seen on land – which, given some of the things she had seen on her travels, was saying something.

The mammoth lay on its front, with its forelegs stretched comfortably out in front of it, but even lying down it was as tall as a three-storey house. Standing up, it probably would have been closer to four. It was even bigger than the mammoths she had seen from Shieldbreaker's back, and utterly dwarfed the people gathered around the big fire in front of it. Neither it nor they took any notice of Aislinn as Ran Vadrog rode away on his icewalker, leaving her on the edge of the clearing. She took a deep breath and walked towards the fire.

In front of the Heart-Mammoth's trunk, between its massive tusks, a sort of throne had been set up. In truth, it was a pretty normal chair: just cured pelts fixed over a simple wooden framework, but its position in front of the mammoth told her that it was important nonetheless. The giant mammoth was not that much of a surprise, though it was certainly bigger than she had imagined from Laufey's family and their talk of the Heart-Mammoth. Tal Ran Mammut, however, was.

She was a woman only a few years older than Aislinn herself; late twenties at the very oldest, and certainly younger than Ran Vadrog. Her hair, black like Vadrog's, was tied into a long, thin braid that she had draped over one shoulder, and she was fiddling with the tuft on the end in one hand. Apart from a gold medallion pinned to the centre of the twin belts she wore in an X-shape across her chest, she was dressed no differently to any of the other warriors in the horde. Her trousers and sleeves were bound from knee and elbow to ankle and wrist, securing them warmly over her gloves and boots. Her metal-plated leather jerkin was dyed red, and had a collar made of the same thick, shaggy auburn fur that covered her mammoth. She was the first to spot Aislinn approaching the fire. Her eyebrows rose slightly, and she leant forwards a little, resting her hands on the arms of her chair. One by one, the others took notice and turned, until Aislinn was walking forwards with every one of the eyes around the fire fixed on her.

Aislinn stopped in front of Tal Ran Mammut's chair. For a few seconds, they just looked at each other. Then Aislinn said the first thing that came into her head.

"You're a woman!"

Tal Ran Mammut smiled. "Is it that obvious?" she asked drily. She stood up from her chair and walked towards Aislinn. They were almost exactly the same height. "So you're the girl the wolfscouts picked up on the tundra? That doesn't happen very often."

"So you're a woman leading a massive nomadic horde? That doesn't happen very often."

One of the men reached for a spear. Tal Ran Mammut held out a hand, and he relaxed again.

"Bold words for a stranger wandering the ice alone," she said, still smiling, and sat down cross-legged on a pelt by the fire. "Sit with us."

A couple of people shifted aside to make room for Aislinn by the fire. They all looked curiously at her as she sat.
"I know what your title is," she said once people were starting to relax again. "But what's your name?"

Tal Ran Mammut laughed. "Straight to the personal questions, eh?" she said. "It's Kaisa, and you may use it. Yours?"

"Aislinn."

Kaisa frowned. "You don't look like an Aislinn," she said. "What was your mother's name?"

"Indira."

"And your father's?"

"…Radin."

Kaisa raised her eyebrows. "Were they brought together by the anagram?"

Aislinn had to think for a few seconds before she realised what she was talking about. "Oh! I never – um, I don't think so, no."

Kaisa poked at the fire with a stick. "I became Tal Ran Mammut because my father had no other children. I remained Tal Ran Mammut because since I took the leadership of the People, trade has been better than it ever has and we haven't had a single unsuccessful raid. The Mammoth People have always cared more about results than gender or physical strength. Take Ran Vadrog, for example. He was my father's second-in-command; now he's mine. He rides his icewalker everywhere because he physically cannot walk, but his advice, experience and, yes, skill on the battlefield are all sound, so he remains. So what were you doing out on the ice?"

Aislinn watched her in silence for a few seconds. She had been among the Mammoth People for a good few hours now, and she wasn't a slave yet. That had to count for something. She took a deep breath, and began to talk. Kaisa listened patiently to her story, barely reacting even when Aislinn finished the account of what she could remember of her childhood and moved on to the first portal. She looked interested when Aislinn mentioned the first unicorn she had met, glancing sceptically over at the nearest karkadann for a moment, then clapped her hands sharply together when Aislinn explained about meeting Flix and what she had learnt from the gryphon, including the slightly cryptic mutter of 'stupid blue pussycat'.

"Well," she said cheerfully. "If this homing instinct of yours led you to the Mammoth People, it must mean that we can lead you to your next portal, yes?"

"I suppose," said Aislinn thoughtfully.

"And finding your father would help you to remember the name your mother gave you, even if you prefer 'Aislinn', whether or not he's really a god," continued Kaisa. "Don't see any harm in letting you tag along with the ranlaum for now, although…" She paused, rubbing her chin. "You'll need some better clothes. Ran Kaarib!"

A woman wearing a reindeer-hide cloak stood up, tapping her fist against her breastbone. "Tal Ran Mammut?"

"Aislinn's going to ride with us for a while," said Kaisa, folding her hands casually behind her head. "You know where all the stores are better than I do; send someone to get her some proper clothes."

Ran Kaarib nodded once. "Any particular collar?" she asked, tugging at the collar of her own jerkin – reindeer hide like her cloak.

"Fur type doesn't matter," said Kaisa. "But get someone to dye it blue." She glanced sideways at Aislinn as Ran Kaarib hurried off to find someone to help. "Thought it seemed appropriate, from what you've said."

"Do you want me to stay here?" asked Aislinn. "Or should I go back to Laufey Break-Knife's family?"

Kaisa scratched her eyebrow. "I won't force you to stay," she said, "and Laufey wouldn't object to putting you up…" She grinned. "But between you and me? The view from the back of the Heart-Mammoth is fantastic."