Iron Winter (Northland 3) (54 page)

There came a point where the dogs could do no more, and Avatak called a halt. It was not yet noon.

There was no way they could put up their shelters in the blizzard. The three of them, Avatak, Nelo and Himil, had to crowd into the little tent on the back of the carriage with Pyxeas, who had
barely been awake for days, lying under a heap of wool and fur blankets. They soon got the fire started on its metal hearth. The tent, securely strapped to the back of the carriage, was stable
enough, though the carriage itself, resting on its runners, creaked in the wind. The tent was too small for the four of them, though; Avatak could feel the wet mass of its fabric wall on his back
as he tried to pull off his fur boots.

Something disturbed the dogs, and they howled.

Pyxeas stirred. ‘Avatak?’

‘I am here, scholar.’ Avatak took the chance to sit him up gently, and let him sip at hot nettle tea.

‘Umm . . . I have been asleep.’

‘Yes. You aren’t well. We think you have had a fever.’

‘Ah. From those mother-forsaken marshes south of Parisa. I remember.’ He frowned, his bony fingers wrapped around his cup. ‘Can I hear dogs?’

‘Yes, scholar. You remember, I bought them in Parisa.’

Himil said, ‘And I said they were mangy curs that must have been weaned on liquid gold, they cost so much.’

‘We are on the ice,’ Pyxeas whispered.

‘For some days now. You have been sleeping.’

‘I slip in and out of the world, it seems. But tell me, the carriage: did the mechanism work well, as the wheels were replaced by runners?’

‘Perfectly,’ said Himil.

‘I would have liked to have seen that. So here we are on the ice, in a sled, with dogs! This is why I brought you, you know, Avatak. Brought you all those years ago from your home across
the sea. Because I knew the ice was coming. I wanted a man beside me who could handle a team of dogs, on the ice, for I knew that one day I would need it. And to teach you, boy, to shape your mind,
of course, don’t forget that . . . Do you think we are in Northland yet?’

‘It is impossible to say. It is some days since I have been able to sight the stars, or the sun,’ said Avatak.

‘You have been keeping the journal, I trust.’

‘Of course. The weather holds us up.’

‘“The weather holds us up.” I could not have summed up the longwinter better myself.’ He laughed, and burst into a fit of coughing.

Nelo crawled around the little tent and held his great-uncle, cradling his head on his own lap, and the old man settled. ‘Ah, thank you, boy, that is warming, that is kind.’

Nelo blurted, ‘You never got your strength back after your trip to Cathay, and now this. I’m concerned.’

‘Concerned about what? Where’s my trunk, Avatak?’

‘In the carriage, master. It is safe.’

Nelo said, ‘Forgive me, Uncle, but why don’t you just tell us what it is you have learned? We can at least try to understand. And then, and then—’

‘And then if you have to turf out my stiffening corpse into the snow before Etxelur the message has a chance of getting through? Is that what you think?’ He sounded fretful.

Avatak said gently, ‘Perhaps they will understand a little of it. And it might make your mind easier.’

Pyxeas sat up awkwardly and regarded him. ‘You are wise, Avatak, wiser than I ever was. Very well.’ He beckoned them closer, and began to whisper. ‘It is a great truth that I,
Pyxeas, have discovered. But not a complex one. I will tell you the essence of it – you may check my facts and conclusions from the material in the trunk, the presentations I made in Carthage
. . .

‘It is simply this:
fixed air
. That is the secret of the weather.

‘I told you, Avatak, that the weather is controlled by the dance of the world around the sun, its nodding axis, its wobbling circuits. So it is – but not by that alone. There is a
second factor – well, probably many more we have yet to discover. But the second most important factor, as the results of Bolghai clearly show, is the fraction of fixed air in the atmosphere
that we breathe. For if the sun delivers heat to the world, fixed air, you see, traps that heat. The more of it there is, the more the heat is trapped.

‘Bolghai proved too that the living things on the surface of the world affect how much fixed air is present. For a tree, as it grows, will absorb a great deal of fixed air – much
more than the scrap of land it stands on, if that land is farmed. And conversely when a tree is burned, or rots away, the fixed air that it consumed in the growing is released again.

‘And that, Avatak, is why the world’s descent into longwinter has been such a puzzle to me. Not the fact that it is happening, but that it is happening now. We should have been
in its grip already – and we are not,
because of human actions.
It is an astonishing thing to say, but it is true. It is clearly proven by an inspection of history, and the detailed
records of the weather kept at Northland and elsewhere.

‘Several thousand years ago the world began its slow descent into the next longwinter. But unlike all the previous longwinters before, now the farmers were at work, in Cathay as in the
Continent, planting their crops. They worked their way across the Continent from the east, clearing a landscape that had been choked with forest. Do you see?’

‘Ah,’ said Avatak. ‘And all that fixed air in the trees was released.’

‘Yes! And, warmed by all that fixed air, the world did not cool as it should have done. It
could
not.

‘Now, some two thousand years ago there was a turning point. It came with the failed Trojan Invasion of Northland, which was the high-water mark of the farmers’ expansion across the
Continent. In the centuries that followed our cultural influence expanded. In northern Gaira the farms were abandoned, slowly, and the forests regrew. From Albia, where the forests had never
died and the old faiths survived, missionaries were sent out to preach the ancient ways of life, all across the north of the Continent.’

Avatak nodded. ‘And again the forests grew. Devouring all the fixed air. And then—’

‘And then the world resumed its descent into the cold – delayed by some centuries, but otherwise just as every long-winter in the past. There you have it – a simple model
– the proof is detailed in the papers in the trunk and elsewhere – a simple truth, yet a staggering one:
people have held a longwinter at bay, all unknowing, for
millennia
.’

Nelo seemed unable to believe this. ‘People did this? People shaped the world? We are not gods, Uncle, not ice giants or little mothers.’

‘No. But what each man and woman does, bit by bit, each small intervention, each tree cut down or field ploughed, over enough time, adds up to the sweeping gesture of a god. Do you
see?’

Avatak asked mildly, ‘Why did you not tell me this before?’

Pyxeas reached out a hand and grasped Avatak’s wrist. ‘You said it yourself. I heard you, you know. You stopped listening. You came to see my intellectual abstraction as a kind of
madness. And in a world like this, perhaps you’re right!

‘And I, I did not mean to disrespect you, dear boy. It is that I respected you too much. For I came to see that you know far more than I ever will about what is important in this world.
You are loyal, constant, strong where I am weak. I became embarrassed about my own petty wisdom, my arrogant attempts to “educate” you, to transform you into something else, something
like me. What a fool I was! What a wise man you are. And your sort of wisdom will be increasingly relevant in the future, while mine will matter less and less. I hope you can forgive
me—’

Again he succumbed to a fit of coughing. Nelo held him until he settled, and slipped into an uneasy sleep.

When he was asleep the three of them looked at each other.

Avatak shrugged. ‘See what I mean? Here we are stuck in a tent on the ice, with nobody within a day’s travel of us, probably. What difference will any of that lot make?’

Nelo smiled. ‘None. Though if he really did see all this coming no wonder he was sad. Anyone fancy a game of knuckle bones before we sleep?’

The Fourth Year of the Longwinter: Midsummer Solstice

Crimm stood on the central mound of the Little Mothers’ Door, looking down on the lone reindeer that padded between the great circular ramparts of the old earthwork. The
animal was scrawny, rather bewildered-looking, young, with small, stubby antlers. Finding nothing to eat in these strange curving valleys, clearly lost, detached from its herd, it lowed
occasionally, a mournful bellow that echoed from the pocked face of the Wall that loomed over the earthwork.

Crimm could see Ayto and Aranx and the others, fishermen by trade, reindeer hunters for the day, out of sight of the deer around the bend of the walls. The hunters had their spears and nets
ready, arrows nocked in their big hunting bows, their faces wreathed with breath-mist. Crimm waved and pointed, silently telling them which way the deer was coming. Equally silently they moved that
way.

The day was clear, for once, the sky a deep empty blue. From up here Crimm could see far to the south, the tremendous frozen plain that was Northland, and behind him the face of the Wall was an
ice-bound cliff that ran from horizon to horizon. No people could be seen in that long, battered face, but birds moved everywhere, and flapped overhead. Incredible to think that this was midsummer.
Somebody had said today was actually the solstice, but most people weren’t counting.

And all around him was the Door, the great earthwork, said to be a survivor of the last longwinter, an age buried deep in Northland lore.

Last year had been the best for the reindeer. Quite unexpectedly they had come pouring down from the north and east in tremendous herds, evidently as lost and confused as human beings were
in the changing world. There had been musk oxen too and other beasts, but it had been the reindeer that had caught the imagination of the Wall’s would-be hunters. Their first hunts had been a
shambles, hunters who only a few years earlier had been innkeepers or clerks, junior priests or government officials, sliding on ice-crusted snow in leather boots and waving spears made from
bits of furniture and kitchen knives.

It had been Ayto, Crimm’s companion from the
Scibet
, who had come up with a better way. Fishermen had always made their living from hunting, and knew how to think like prey. Ayto
watched where the herds had come from. He had a series of bonfires set up along the route, big heaps of rubbish from the Wall, piles of smashed-up furniture and wall panels, kindling made from
screwed-up papers and parchments from the Archive. And Ayto had sent out scouts to watch for the approach of the animals. The next time a herd had approached Etxelur the fires had been lit, the
hunters had danced and shouted and waved their spears – and the animals, alarmed, had veered in a great mass, heading just the way Ayto had planned, into the maze of frozen-over canals that
was the Door. The killing of the trapped, panicking animals had been great.

It had quickly been learned just how much you could
do
with a dead reindeer. There was the meat, of course, but the skin had endless uses, and you could make tools and clothes-toggles
from the bones, rope and fishing line from sinew. For one winter the people of Etxelur had become the reindeer people, and flensed skulls and antler racks adorned the caves on the Wall’s
seaward face where people lived now.

The Door had made a tremendously effective reindeer trap. Crimm wasn’t given to thinking too deeply, in his experience it never paid off. But it had struck him that it was almost as if the
Door had been
designed
for just that purpose, and maybe it had been, back in long-gone wintry days.

That had been last year. But this year was different, as the last had been different from the one before. There had been more snow, of course, masses of new stuff that fell and covered the old
and, in the spring, once again stubbornly refused to melt. But this year, no more reindeer. Maybe they had gone further south still, in search of summer grass. And the Wall folk, eagerly waiting
with their pyres and spears, had seen only a few beasts, including this one solitary specimen. Still, Crimm, from his mound, could see that the moment of the kill was coming, the animal approaching
the humans, prey nearing predator, all in silence. Crimm felt his heart beat faster, imagined the splash of blood on the clean snow.

But then his eye was distracted by movement. A black speck crossing the ice, far to the south. For the last couple of years nothing good had come out of the south.

He yelled down to the hunters. ‘Ayto!’

His voice, echoing, startled the reindeer. It looked up, confused. Then it turned and began to run the other way, fleeing from the hunters. Ayto and the rest saw the deer’s white rump as
it bobbed away. Some of the men hurled their spears in frustration, even one-armed Aranx.

Ayto glared up at Crimm. ‘You famous idiot. What did you do that for?’

Crimm pointed south. ‘Somebody coming.’

Ayto looked that way, but of course his view was obscured by the earthwork. ‘Who? How many?’

‘Not many. Looks like one cart. A sled, I suppose.’

Aranx, beside him, called up, ‘It’s probably those bastards from the Manufactory.’

‘Maybe,’ Crimm said. But the Manufactory, with its ferocious, jealous hunters and their spears tipped with iron shapes torn from now-useless engines, was east of here, another
District in the Wall, not south.

Ayto called, ‘You said a sled. Pulled by men?’

‘I don’t think so. Some kind of animal. Dogs, I think.’

‘Dogs? If it’s dogs, it’s probably not those bastards from the Manufactory.’

‘True enough.’

‘Different bastards, then.’

‘That makes sense.’

‘What do you think we should do?’

They were all looking up at Crimm. He sighed. He had no desire to be the leader of this little community of hunters. He didn’t want to be king, the way the idiotic leader of those bastards
from the Manufactory had declared himself King of his District, and Emperor of All the Wall. He had always thought Ayto was smarter than he was. It was Ayto who had found his way out through the
Wall to the sea, in the first terrible season. Ayto who had figured out how to trap reindeer. Ayto who had grown into this new world of ice, as if drawing on memories from a very deep past. But
just as when they had been nothing but fishermen, Ayto liked to stay in the background, leaving all the decisions, and the mistakes, to Crimm. Well, there was nothing for it.