Iron Winter (Northland 3) (27 page)

The storm hit with a tremendous howl. The wind was a chill blast that tried to drag Crimm off the boat, and dug deep through his layers of clothing to his skin, and drove more of those stinging
ice grains into his face, and snow, big fat flakes of it that slapped his cheeks and forehead. The men, the snow sticking to their furs, were like bears, he thought, lumbering in the grey light
through the rushing snow. But the spray was coming up too and freezing where it fell. As the ice formed slick on the deck, you had to take care not to slip.

Ayto shouted something, and pointed upwards. One hand wrapped in the rigging, Crimm leaned back, holding his hood against the wind, and saw that ice was forming in sheets on the main mast, the
furled sail, the rigging. The boat could be capsized by a sufficient weight of ice up there.

Crimm bent, dug in a locker to retrieve an axe, then clambered up the main mast by the rigging and began to hack at the ice sheets. Another man, he couldn’t see who, was doing the same at
the stern mast. His hands were quickly going numb, and he thought of digging out his mittens, but he wouldn’t be able to hold the rigging firmly enough. The boat rolled in a swell, and the
men skidded over the deck. Crimm had to wrap an arm around the main mast and nearly lost his grip on the axe.

And the man at the stern dropped from the mast, slid over the slick deck, fell into the surging water, and was gone in an eye blink.

The storm blew over as quickly as it had come upon them. The crew slumped on the deck, exhausted, their breath billowing before their faces. The air felt much colder than
before the storm had passed, and Crimm could see the residual wet on the deck frosting up. Suddenly they had sailed into winter.

He worked his way around the ship, passing out water bags and lumps of dried fish, and quietly counted the men. Seven of them left, one lost. He organised a couple of them to start pumping out
the bilge, which was awash with icy water.

‘We lost Xon,’ a man called Aranx murmured.

‘Yes. Only sixteen, wasn’t he?’

‘Seventeen.’

‘I’ll tell his mother when we get back.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Ayto said. ‘I play knuckles with the father. The stern mast’s snapped, by the way. That’s the main damage. That and a hundred leaks.’

‘We can lash the mast,’ Crimm said. When they got back to the Wall the other damage would be straightforward to repair; the boat’s construction was planking laid over a sturdy
skeleton, and replacing sections was easy in dry dock.

There was a scraping along the hull, as if they had struck a reef.

Ayto, Crimm and Aranx glanced at each other, and hurried to the rail.

The ice was floating in cakes around them, flat, thick, some of them slushy. The scraping they had heard had been one of the cakes brushing past the stern. The floes looked like lilies on some
dismal, colourless pond, Crimm thought.

‘In this cold that lot is going to thicken quickly,’ Ayto said.

‘We can get through it for now.’ The
Sabet’s
high prow was designed to help it weather heavy seas. It was good at pushing through loose surface ice like this.
‘Break out the oars. If it goes on long enough we’ll rotate the man at the rudder.’

‘All right.’

Soon they had the crew organised, and rowing steadily. Crimm worked the rudder for a time, then tied it up and went to work at the bilge pump.

The grinding of the ice against the hull came more often. Soon it was a continuous scrape, and, labouring in the bilge, Crimm could hear the cracking of floes as the boat rose and fell with the
swell, and the prow came down heavy on the ice.

Ayto called, ‘Rest your oars. You might want to take a look, Crimm.’

Crimm straightened up from the bilge and walked the couple of paces to the rail. The floes were colliding with each other now, rising up over each other, pushing up ridges of crushed material
that quickly refroze. It was a landscape of ridges and mountains, forming before his eyes. There were still leads, open stretches of water, dark stripes between the floes, but further out icebergs
towered, floating hills of ice.

‘We’ve seen this before,’ Ayto said. ‘Further north.’

‘Yes. But never this far south.’

‘No, and not at this time of year. The prow won’t crack stuff as thick as this.’

‘We mustn’t get stuck.’ Crimm glanced around. ‘There are still some decent leads. We can follow that one, to the west, and then maybe there’s a route to the
south.’

Ayto squinted and nodded. ‘We can try it. If not that way, another will probably open up.’

‘You call directions, and I’ll take a turn at the oar.’

‘All right. Tell them to go easy. We don’t want any snapped oars.’

So Crimm worked his oar with the rest, cautious, breaking his pull at any sense of solid resistance, any sound of scraping on the ice. Ayto stood at the prow, staring out, calling directions,
and the men worked or rested their oars accordingly.

‘Hold it.’ Ayto held his hand up.

The men shipped their oars. The boat came to a halt quickly, with a grinding of ice. Crimm got up and joined Ayto at the prow. The lead ahead was still open, but it was narrowing visibly as he
watched.

‘We can’t get any further,’ Ayto said. ‘Sorry. It closed up too fast. I was hoping to make a break for it to that one—’ he pointed to a wider lane further
away, ‘—but it just closed in.’

‘Maybe we can go back the way we came.’ They both retreated to the stern to see. The men at the oars sat slumped, still weary from the storm – frost-covered, their clothes,
their beards, even their eyebrows. The air was truly, bitterly cold now, Crimm realised, the exercise had kept him warmed against it, even though the sun was still high in a misty sky, even though
this was still summer.

When they got to the stern they saw the lead behind the boat was closing up too.

Ayto said, ‘I’m sorry, Cousin, I fouled up, getting us lost in this maze.’

‘There was probably never a way through anyhow.’

‘So what now?’

Crimm was an experienced seaman. His father had brought him up on the ocean; his mother, fond but resentful, said her son had spent more of his boyhood on boats than at home. And at sea, you
learned to keep calm. You tried one way. If that failed, you tried another. And if that failed in turn, another yet.

‘We get out on the ice. Fix up ropes. We go on foot, and haul the ship back until we find an open lead.’

‘Hmm,’ Ayto said. ‘Look how quick it’s closing up. We wouldn’t get far.’

‘So your idea is . . .’

‘We wait. Overnight if we have to. Maybe the weather will relent a bit tomorrow. If the leads open up again we might make a break.’

Crimm thought about that, looking out to the horizon. Everywhere the ice was solidifying, those great ridges thrusting into the air where the floes collided. Even the drifting bergs were getting
frozen into the congealing pack. ‘This stuff doesn’t look as if it’s going to give up any time soon.’

‘Well, it should,’ Ayto said, almost resentful. ‘It’s not even the equinox yet, unless I got too drunk to remember. I say we camp for the night and hope the little mother
of the sky looks a bit more kindly on us in the morning.’

So Crimm gave in. They shipped the oars and set up the mainsail as a makeshift shelter suspended from the main mast. They had a small stock of firewood they carried to warm themselves in the
nights at sea, and Aranx started building a fire out on the ice. Another man broke out dried fish and biscuits for a meal. Another, a Muslim, rolled out his prayer mat on the ice and knelt, facing
east.

Two more of the crew went on a hopeful quest across the ice in search of driftwood for fuel. Ayto called after them, ‘Walk where the ice looks blue. That’s where it’s oldest,
thickest. If you fall in through a crack I won’t be coming after you.’

Crimm walked around the ship, looking for damage to the timbers from the ice scrapes. He could hear the ice around him groaning and creaking as it consolidated. It was an eerie sound, laid over
the silence of the enclosed, hushed sea, and the surface shuddered and lurched constantly.

And then, he actually saw it begin, the boat’s planking cracked and crumpled inward, under the relentless pressure from the ice, giving way with a snapping, splintering noise. The hull
started to tilt.

‘Everybody off,’ he called. ‘Off the ship, now! Grab what you can . . .’

They all got off in time, as the hull crumpled like an empty eggshell. The deck tipped over, and the remaining mast gave way with a snap. It all happened quickly, in heartbeats.

‘So, that’s that,’ Ayto said as they surveyed the wreck. ‘The end of the famous
Sabet.
I’ve heard of this happening. Far to the north, the kind of stories
the Coldlanders tell. Not here.’

‘Well, it’s happened.’

‘We should have seen it coming. We might have hauled her out onto the ice before it closed.’

Crimm asked, ‘What good would that have done? We still weren’t going to be sailing her anywhere soon.’

Ayto nodded. ‘So what now?’

‘Now we go in and grab what we can, and see what’s what.’ He glanced around. ‘May as well build a bigger fire.’

‘We’re going to have to walk home,’ Ayto said.

‘Yes.’

‘Or at least to the edge of the ice, where we might get picked up.’

‘They’ll miss us. Send boats looking.’

‘Do we start today?’

Crimm sniffed the chill air. ‘No. The light will be going soon. We’d be better off camping for the night, sorting out the stuff. We need to carry food, the water. We can make up
packs from the sails. Tents, maybe.’

‘We shouldn’t have—’

‘We shouldn’t have got stuck in the first place. We shouldn’t have been born in a time when
this
happens. There’s no warmth in shouldn’t haves.’

‘True enough.’ Ayto aimed a kick at the splintered wreck. ‘Poor old girl. Come on, let’s get set up before it gets any colder.’

The travellers came to a wall. It was only sod and earth, about the height of a man, with ditches before and behind. But it straggled off across the landscape, heading vaguely
for low hills. Its meaning was clear.

Avatak stared. After all their experiences it seemed absurd to find their way blocked by a work of mere humans. ‘This wall is stupid. You could jump over it! And if I were an invading army
I would just go around it, to one side or another.’

‘But this is what Cathay does,’ said Uzzia. ‘Builds walls. There has always been a tension between the nomads of the steppe and the desert, and Cathay with its farms and
cities. And over history Cathay has always built walls to control the passage of the nomads, if not to exclude them altogether. Dwarfing even your great Wall, scholar, in length at
least.’

Pyxeas, on the back of the mule, snorted. ‘But not matching ours in fitness for purpose. Ask Genghis Khan about
that
.’

They followed the wall south until they came to a shabby wooden gate. Two soldiers watched as they approached. Wearing the Mongols’ leather armour they were scruffy, dirty, and one had
dried soup dribbled down his chest plate. But they had weapons, they were soldiers, and they were manning the wall.

Uzzia went forward to negotiate with the guards. She tried one dialect after another. Their responses were hostile rasps.

She came back to her party. ‘Basically their orders are not to let anybody else into Cathay, not ever again. Because Cathay is full, and there is famine and plague. Orders of the Khan.
They speak about incursions all along the frontier. The Khan is sending troops to the north and west to keep down his own wilder cousins. It sounds like it’s a sink of madness out there,
where one side builds up a wall only for the other to smash it down again. What this means is that it’s going to be expensive to get past these fellows. Your saving the world is costing me a
lot of money, scholar.’

‘Then let me deal with it,’ Pyxeas snapped, impatient. ‘Help me down, Avatak.’ The scholar rummaged in the packs until he pulled out the wreck of his oracle – just
the frame, broken open, the little sun and moon snapped off. Now Pyxeas prised at the back of the gadget’s face until a panel popped open, and a small golden plaque fell out into the old
man’s hand. Pyxeas handed the ruined oracle back to Avatak. ‘Put this away.’

Then, limping, he approached the guards, who watched him curiously. ‘Here! You fellows at the gate! My name is Pyxeas, scholar of Northland, and no doubt you will recognise this.’ He
held up the plaque.

He had spoken in his own tongue. The guards obviously understood not a word. But they stared at the golden plaque, took it, read words inscribed there, their lips moving. They handed the plaque
back. They both bowed, murmuring what sounded like apologies, and stood back, opening the barrier as they went.

Uzzia was astonished. ‘How did you do that? Give me that.’ She took the golden disc and studied it.

‘That is my
paiza,
which is the Cathay word for it; the Mongols call it a
gerega.
The words are written in Mongol and Cathay scripts. It is a right of passage, a guarantee of
safety, given me by the great Khan himself. Not the present incumbent – a predecessor. My colleagues in Daidu requested this, and one of them carried it to Northland for me, some years ago.
Are you surprised that I possess such a thing, trader? Are you surprised that I, a Northlander scholar, am held in such esteem, even though I have never visited Cathay before? I tell you they are
eager to meet me there, just as I am eager to see them. I suggest we get on with the journey. What do you say?’

She handed back the
paiza.
‘Lead the way.’

Once past the wall they came to a substantial community, a sprawling town dominated by another monastery cut into a cliff. In the end they stayed a couple of nights.

The
paiza
won them food and lodging, in a shabby mud-and-straw hut. The people of the lower town, and, once, one of the monks, brought them food and drink, rather stringy mutton, bitter
fruit. Uzzia, urged by Pyxeas, tried to pay, for it was clear these people had little enough of their own. But the townsfolk were evidently terrified by the authority of the Khan and would have
none of it.