Iron Winter n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  Alloc was a major port on the eastern shore of the Moon Sea. It was a hub for trading links with Albia; from here timber and furs brought down the peninsula’s great rivers were transported across Northland by roads and canals, and on a shiny new steam-caravan link to the south. Rina had been here many times on Water Council business before. But it had never been so cold, not at this time of year, so close to midsummer, with a nip in the air that felt like it promised a frost.

  As hungry-looking porters unloaded their goods and heaped them up beside the track, Rina got her first look at the caravan Barmocar had spent the winter organising. It was a lot more impressive than the caravan they’d taken from the Wall, with a string of expansive and luxurious passenger cabins, and goods wagons with fuel for the engine and provisions for the long journey. Rina felt a stab of envy, remembering how she had crossed Northland on foot and horse-drawn carriages with Pyxeas last year — but that had been his choice.

  As they gathered by the track Rina recognised some of Barmocar’s party from meetings and social gatherings at the Wall. There were more Carthaginians, nobles from the many small nations of Gaira and Ibera, even a party of Muslim Arabs who must be intending to continue their journey onwards from Carthage across North Africa, or perhaps by boat the length of the Middle Sea. All these dignitaries and their families and entourages had been trapped by the winter weather in Northland, like Barmocar himself. There was a group of soldiers too, tough-looking Carthaginian veterans in their long cloaks and boots and with their weapons strapped to their backs, here for the protection of the travellers, Rina assumed. As soldiers always did, they eyed the women in the group with a kind of lazy calculation.

  Amid this churning polyglot crowd, with the caravan’s engine already venting steam, Rina and the twins stood uncertainly beside their heap of luggage. At last Barmocar himself approached them, trailed by Mago, his slab-of-muscle nephew, who leered at Alxa.

  Rina bowed her head formally. ‘It is a pleasure to see you again.’

  Barmocar was wrapped in an expensive-looking cloak, confident, plump — he hadn’t gone hungry during Northland’s bleak winter — and he had an air of total command. He barely glanced at Rina. ‘You’re late.’

  ‘We had no control over-’

  ‘We’d have left without you. Maybe we still will.’ He strode over to the heap of luggage. ‘Is all this yours?’

  ‘Only the essentials.’

  Mago pushed into the heap. ‘Look, Uncle. There’s furniture in here!’ He shoved boxes off an exquisitely polished table. ‘Nice stuff.’

  Rina winced. ‘That is an heirloom, in my family for generations.’

  Now Mago found Nelo’s stack of artwork. He lifted a canvas, ripped off its packaging of thick paper, and theatrically flinched back. ‘Oh, good, Nelo brought his pictures!’

  Nelo stepped forward, fists bunched. Alxa grabbed his arm.

  Barmocar said, ‘Well, you’re going to have a job fitting all this into your cabin. Which is that.’ And he pointed at the rear of the caravan, to a single battered-looking passenger cart.

  Rina felt her own temper rise. ‘Is this all that the bones of the Virgin Herself bought me?’

  Barmocar shrugged. ‘It was a buyer’s market, wasn’t it? We Carthaginians have always been traders. It’s business, that’s all. Nothing personal.’ And he eyed her, waiting for her response.

  This was only the beginning, she realised. She dug deep inside herself, seeking patience. She was not without resources. Once she got through this bottleneck of the journey to Carthage, she would build a new life, a new position, and then she would wipe the grin off the face of this plump, foolish, cruel man. For now, she smiled. ‘What would you suggest we do with the rest of our luggage?’

  He glanced at the heap of goods. ‘Sell it to the porters, if you can. Dump it. I don’t care.’

  Nelo stepped forward, still fizzing with anger. ‘I won’t leave my paintings.’

  Mago laughed. ‘Then stay here and eat them, Northlander.’

  ‘I won’t leave my work, Mother.’

  ‘Silence. You’re not a child. You can see how things are. If you aren’t going to be any use just shut up. Alxa.’ She hauled a leather trunk from the heap of luggage and opened the buckles on the straps. ‘Help me. Whatever we can fit in here, we take. Nothing else. Clothes, a few sets of everything for each of us. And anything small and valuable. Jewellery — the money bags-’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’ Alxa at least seemed to understand; she started opening boxes and cases, hastily pulling out clothes and other goods.

  There were far more clothes than could possibly fit in the trunk. Well, they could wear some, Rina thought, a few layers each. They might need that during the cold nights of travelling to come.

  Nelo stared at his work, his face ashen.

  Rina relented. ‘Take some of it. One canvas, your best. Your most recent sketchbook, and your earliest. That will go in the trunk. And take a blank book.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘And your styluses and crayons. I suspect we’ll be seeing some remarkable sights before this journey is through. Raw material — that’s what you artists are always looking for, isn’t it?’

  The steam caravan departed not long after dusk, and travelled through the night.

  Rina woke at dawn. She had slept in her seat, huddled under her cloak. She felt stiff, sore, and cold, despite her layers of clothes. The caravan was still moving. Alxa slept, lying on the opposite bench with her head on her brother’s lap and her feet on their single trunk. Nelo had his sketchbook open, and was staring out of the window. When he saw his mother was awake he drew his finger down one of the window’s small panes, and showed her a thin rime of frost under his fingernail.

  The caravan rattled through one halt after another as it passed down the track, heading steadily south. The tremendous plain of Northland rolled past, rich, intensively managed, studded by flood mounds and criss-crossed by roads and dykes and canals. It was all but impossible to believe that all this would long have been drowned under the chill salt water of a rising ocean if not for the genius of long-dead Ana and her heroic generation, and the ingenuity and dedication of all those who had followed. And, Rina wondered idly, how would the story of the wider world have differed if not for the saving of Northland?

  But had it all been for nothing? For the signs of Pyxeas’ longwinter were visible all across the landscape. Banks of snow in the shaded hollows, even at midsummer. The telltale grey of ice on the wetlands where last year’s reeds, brown and dead, were still frozen in place, and wading birds struggled to feed. Even the leaves on the trees, the oak and alder and ash, were pale and shrunken. In the communities around the caravan’s halts she could see the damage done by the winter, houses of wood and stone smashed in by snow, the stumps of ancient trees hacked down for long-burned firewood.

  The eeriest thing was the absence of people. Rina saw houses untended and unrepaired, and no threads of smoke rising from the fires. In one place she saw deer wandering through the big communal hearthspace, nibbling at the thatch of collapsed houses, undisturbed. The deer themselves looked gaunt, their ribs showing. Where were all the people? Gone — south, probably, in flight from the cold, just as she was leaving Northland herself.

  Still the caravan rattled on, rarely stopping, such was Barmocar’s haste to get this long journey done. The cabin did have a privy with a vent to release waste through the floor, and running water from a tap, and a food box with dried meat, scrawny bits of fruit, bread, Northlander dried cod. Rina forced herself to eat every scrap, even the bread, the signature product of the farmers, disgusting, tasteless stuff that every Northlander knew would wear away your teeth.

  They were all weary and feeling none too clean by the time the caravan reached its final halt, at a small port on the southern shore of Northland, at the Cut. Just as last year when Rina had travelled with Pyxeas, here the polyglot party were to embark on a flotilla of riverboats and make for Parisa. Boats were waiting
, but not enough of them, and the transfer was messy and hurried. Now it was the turn of others to shed prized possessions for the lack of room on board, and to fume at Barmocar for his terrible service after extracting such high fees for the privilege of the journey.

  Parisa itself, as they approached along its great river, was much as Rina remembered from last year, but even more crowded. Smoke rose everywhere, and people camped in shacks of rubbish on the quayside. The party was supposed to disembark here and proceed south overland across Gaira to Massalia, a port on the Middle Sea and a Carthaginian dependency. But when the lead ships tried to put into dock they were blocked by a small boat rowed by a team of oarsmen, to Barmocar’s fury.

  A uniformed official stood up in the boat. He wore a thick mask over his mouth, as did the oarsmen. In the argument that ensued, shouted across the river water, it emerged that the Carthaginian flotilla had to make for the island at the centre of the river. There the passengers could disembark, but the ships would have to turn around and leave immediately. None of them would be allowed into the city proper.

  The reason for all this caution was the subject of rumour that swirled around the ships in half a dozen tongues: ‘Plague. It is in the city.’ ‘No, not yet, but they fear it. .’

  Barmocar and his companions argued about how difficult this was going to make life, but it was clear the official wasn’t going to back down. The oarsmen in the boat were armed, and Rina saw troops drawn up on the quayside, all wearing face masks, clearly ready to repel anybody who tried to land.

  So they disembarked on the island. Rina, with her children and their single trunk, had to spend the night in a dusty, empty, cold warehouse, sharing the bare floor with perhaps fifty others, surrounded by snores and farts and the sheer animal stink of people who had been travelling too long.

  In the morning Rina woke early as she usually did.

  She walked outside, breathing air that was fresh and crisp, with a tang of frost — not an unpleasant mix, but it felt autumnal, even though the summer solstice was barely gone. The travellers had been ordered to keep within a perimeter around the dock marked by a crude chalk line scrawled on the cobblestones. Rina walked up to the line now, looking to the south bank of the river. Raised up on an artificial mound very like the flood mounds that studded Northland, she could see a sky temple, rings of massive stones polished until they shone. In the low light of the morning sun priests in white robes walked and bowed and prayed to ancient gods. But other deities were being addressed too. Banners had been set up within the innermost stone ring, showing the crossed palm leaves of Jesus, the star of Islam, even the crescent moon and outstretched finger of Baal Hammon and his consort Tanit, gods of Carthage. A temple of many faiths for this city of traders, and all the gods, she imagined, would be subject to ardent prayers for summer.

  A soldier, patrolling in his face mask and bearing an ugly-looking spear, waved her back, and called something in his own guttural tongue. He looked ill himself; he coughed into his mask, his forehead was slick with sweat despite the cold. She hurried away, back to the warehouse and her children.

  30

  Pyxeas and his party, heading steadily east, were in a more varied country now, of arid plains, green valleys, towering snow-capped peaks. Water was more readily had, there was grass for the camels to graze on, and the caravanserai were more frequent, often no more than an easy day’s ride apart. Here the way stations were called robats, in the local tongue, which came from an old word for a rope to tie up your horse. But just as further west, they were like small walled towns where you drove your animals into the shelter of the walls for the duration of your stay.

  In the evenings, as Pyxeas studied or slept, Avatak sat shyly in bars with Jamil and Uzzia. Uzzia drank beer and wine and a particularly disgusting concoction that turned out to be fermented mare’s milk, a speciality of the Mongols. Jamil preferred hot tea, and when he wasn’t happy with the local offering he asked for boiling water and used dried leaves he carried with him. As for Avatak, who got drunk too easily, he stuck to watered beer. He listened to conversations in a hundred tongues, about the wealth that flowed through these little communities, from gleaming gems called rubies to the medicines and narcotics made from the produce of the poppy fields which spread wide to either side of the trails across much of this country. There were plenty of blood-chilling tales of bandits too.

  In the mornings on they went, part of an ever-evolving caravan, heading always into the morning sun. At each stop the caravans fissured and split, and new trains formed up for the onward journey. Soon they traded away their camels for horses that would be more suited to the high, mountainous country to come, so Avatak was told. The mule plodded on, apparently unimpressed.

  The land became more difficult, steeper, arid for long stretches, and their progress seemed painfully slow. Petty problems slowed them further: illness, scorpion bites, brackish water from fouled springs, lamed horses. Much of the summer still stretched ahead, but old Pyxeas was already fretting about the need to reach far Cathay before the autumn closed in.

  One morning, crossing a highland at the foot of a mountain, they heard a deep groaning from beyond the eastern horizon, like the bellow of some tremendous animal, punctuated by sharp cracks. They all knew what this was, the locals and traders from experience, and Avatak and Pyxeas from memories of Coldland. Pyxeas was excited by the sound and insisted they hurry ahead.

  They came to a glacier, a river of ice pouring down the mountain’s flank. The back of the great ice beast was littered with rubble, smashed-up rock and timber, and relics of human living: wood panels, posts, what looked like a section of fencing. A river of meltwater gushed from the glacier’s snout, littered with ice blocks, washing across the plain below. There were tremendous cracks and groans as the vast weight of ice pushed and jostled, seeking an elusive equilibrium.

  Jamil, Uzzia and the other traders laboured to get the horses and their single mule across the meltwater stream. The sun was high, the air clear, the ice gleamed brilliant white, and the frothy water spreading across the plain below was the colour of the sky. Close to the glacier the stream with its ice blocks was impossible for the animals to cross, and the beasts had to be walked downstream to calmer water. There the travellers cast ropes across, clambered through the chill flow themselves, and then began to lead the laden animals one by one.

  Avatak felt guilty not to be down there helping them. But Pyxeas had no regard for these petty human struggles; he had eyes only for the grand, cold drama of the glacier itself.

  ‘Look, boy, can you see how the glacier is born up in that hollow in the mountainside? It flows down this valley,’ and Pyxeas mimed the movement with great sweeps of his arms, ‘grinding and smashing as it goes, ripping away any surface soil, any trees, any living thing, cutting down right to the bedrock and then cutting into that — and then it flows down onto the plain below. And I can see, Avatak, that this glacier’s advance from its mountain root has been fast, and recent. Old glaciers, having retreated, leave behind ridges of rubble, fragments of rock they have smashed up and pushed down their valleys. Where is this glacier’s rubble wall? Gone! A relic of past longwinters, overwhelmed by this fresh advance. And this glacial drama is only the start of it, only the start of the reign of the ice.’

  ‘Scholar, the people speak of all this. In the robats. You should listen to them sometimes. They live in the valleys, beneath the glaciers. They keep animals, farm. Then comes the ice, and avalanches, and sometimes great floods where the ice makes dams that trap water for a while, and then break. They have to flee. You can see the remains of their homes on the ice itself.’

  Pyxeas, faintly surprised, nodded. ‘Yes, yes. Good. But such accounts are merely anecdotal, of course. Well. Let us rejoin our companions.’ He took Avatak’s arm and stood stiffly.

  31

  There were no steam-caravan links from Parisa south to the Middle Sea coast. So the next stage of Rina’s journey was overland, on wagons, carts and carriage
s. The vehicles had been drawn up a short walk outside town, and as the morning wore on porters with masks over their mouths hauled the travellers’ luggage to the meeting point.

  Now the next problems arose, because there weren’t nearly as many carriages as Barmocar had ordered, and even fewer horses. Once again Barmocar raged, but there was nothing he could do. After all, they had no choice but to go on; they were not welcome in Parisa. The locals just shrugged. Most carriages had been broken up for firewood, and the rest were being used to ferry the dead out of the city to huge mass graves in the country. As for the horses, skin and bone themselves, these were the few that had so far been spared the cooking pot.

  So began another spasm of dumping and repacking. Rina and her children were forced to give up their one and only trunk, and packed up their remaining belongings in bundles improvised from cloaks and sheets.

  With much ill humour, the journey continued. The country was eerily quiet, a landscape of small farms abandoned to the weeds and the crows. All this Nelo sketched assiduously. The road itself, following the bank of a canal heading roughly south-east, showed signs of the winter cold, frost cracks and potholes in the cobbled surface, left unrepaired for lack of workers.

  Towards the evening they came to a substantial town, a mixture of wooden and stone architecture, a local market centre.Again they were not allowed inside the walls, despite Barmocar’s protests. They had to sleep in rough felt tents loaned by the town and erected by Barmocar’s soldiers, and were shown where to find fresh water, and were sold shrivelled fruit at astounding prices. The soldiers, who seemed competently led by a grizzled officer, set up a perimeter and organised a watch rota, helped out by some of the travellers.

  At least Rina and her children had a tent to themselves. But the night was uncomfortable, the ground hard despite the layers of clothing heaped up on the ground under them — and cold, as if under the surface it had never thawed since the winter. In the morning Alxa helped out with brushing and feeding the horses. It was a novelty for her; horses were rare in Northland.