Iron Winter n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  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?’

  75

  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 th
eir 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.

  ‘I think we should go greet them. They must have come a long way, after all.’

  ‘And maybe we can get their dogs,’ said Aranx.

  Ayto called, ‘And if they’re not friendly?’

  Crimm shrugged. ‘Then it’s the end of their journey.’

  ‘And we will definitely get their dogs,’ said Aranx.

  The Wall had changed utterly since Avatak had last seen it, three years back, when he and Pyxeas had departed for Cathay. The great barrier, streaked with ice and heaped with snow, was not beautiful now, just an ugly growstone core pocked with holes. But it still blocked the horizon, and it was still, undeniably, the Wall, and perhaps the one human monument north of Parisa that would survive the longwinter itself.

  Nelo, almost absently sketching the latest panorama, said, ‘There’s somebody watching us. On the ice. See? Three, four, five of them. And they look armed.’

  Avatak reined in the team. The dogs, panting hard, jostled and growled, competing for their places in the pack.

  Pyxeas pulled his thick fur coat around his skinny body. ‘To be expected,’ he muttered. ‘Diminishing resources, a collapse of population, an uncertain rediscovery of long-lost skills. The community will fragment into tribalism. Of course one must anticipate hostility to strangers.’

  Nelo said, ‘But you’re hoping to find scholars here, Uncle.’

  ‘To be expected,’ Pyxeas muttered again. ‘Expected.’

  Avatak murmured, ‘Let’s just not get ourselves speared so close to home.’

  The party from the Wall stopped perhaps twenty paces away, five men, anonymous in sealskin jackets and breeches, the clothing crudely cut, to Avatak’s eye at least. Now one of them stepped forward. ‘Are you those bastards from the Manufactory?’ He spoke in clear Northlander. ‘Because if you are you can clear off back there, and tell that clown Omim that if he thinks the hunters of Etxelur-’

  ‘No.’ Nelo walked forward on the hard-packed snow. He pulled off his mittens to show his hands were empty. ‘We’re not from the Manufactory. We’re from — well, from here. Etxelur. We’ve come home. I’m Nelo.’

  The man stared. ‘Rina’s boy?’

  ‘Are you Crimm?’

  The fisherman grinned. ‘Cousin. You’ve been a long time away. Things have changed.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘And on that sled — is that you, Uncle Pyxeas? We thought you were long dead.’

  Pyxeas grunted. ‘Well, you were mistaken.’

  The hunters came closer now, lowering their weapons. One man stared at the dogs, wary, fascinated; one of them yapped at him. ‘We ate all our dogs. Any bitches?’

  76

  It was further than it looked to the Wall. Avatak realised that the hunters had spotted them from a distance and had come out to stop them. Once Etxelur had been the kernel of the oldest and greatest civilisation in the world. Now, after a handful of cold summers, strangers were met with suspicion and raised spears. Pyxeas’ dream of finding scholarship surviving here looked foolish indeed.

  At last they came to the foot of the Wall. The wreckage of ruined superstructures stood in snow-covered heaps, reminding Avatak of the tide-cracked ice at the shore of a winter-frozen sea. A rope ladder led up to a shallow ledge in the exposed growstone face of the Wall, and then another ladder rose up past that, and then another, until you could make your way to the roof.

  ‘It’s ladders up and then ladders down the other side, I’m afraid,’ said Crimm. ‘Most of us live on the far side of the Wall now, facing the sea. We only come over this side to hunt.’

  Pyxeas asked, ‘What of the interior?’

  Crimm shrugged. ‘Abandoned. Oh, there may be a few souls left in there feeding off the old stores. We’ve blocked off a lot of the corridors and passageways.’

  Ayto said, ‘To stop raids from those bastards in the Manufactory. Among other bastards.’

  ‘Even I did not think it could be as bad as this,’ Pyxeas said mournfully.

  Crimm eyed Pyxeas, the sled. ‘This is going to take some time. We’ll have to get your goods over in relays. We can hide the sled somewhere — figure out what to do about your dogs.’

  Ayto said, ‘Need to be kept on this side, dogs, where they’re useful. We ought to set up a base over here.’

  Cri
mm nodded. ‘For now, suppose you stay with the sled — Himil, was it? Aranx, you two others, stay with him and start preparing the stuff to haul over. And keep an eye out. In the meantime, the rest of you, come on over. Urnrn, Uncle Pyxeas, it’s quite a climb-’

  ‘And quite beyond me, I’m sure.’ He turned to Avatak.

  With practised ease, Avatak bent, took Pyxeas at the waist, and straightened up with the scholar limp over his shoulder. Nelo helped, throwing a blanket over Pyxeas.

  Crimm grinned. ‘I can help you.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ Avatak said. And so he would be; he and the old man in his charge had been through worse than this together.

  Crimm went up first. He wore heavy mittens and carried a small axe that he used to knock ice off the ladder rungs. When it was his turn, Avatak took care to get a firm grip with hands and feet at each step. He worked his way up, breathing steadily, letting his muscles warm. He had ridden the sled too long, he hadn’t had enough to eat for many days, and he was not in the best condition, but he could do this. Transferring from one ladder to the next was more tricky, trying to support himself on ice-coated, guano-stained ledges, holding the old man securely with one hand while reaching for the next ladder with the other. But he made no slips.

  Pyxeas hung limp, passive, utterly trusting. Perhaps he was asleep.

  They took a break on top of the Wall. Crimm had sacks of fresh water that he passed around. Pyxeas was set down on a blanket; he seemed more exhausted than Avatak.

  The huge sculptures arrayed along the Wall roof, the old monoliths, the tremendous heads of long-dead Annids, the slim spires erected by more modern generations, had mostly survived, though their features were masked by snow. And from here a view of the Northern Ocean opened up. The level of the sea had evidently fallen, but it was still higher than the land, you could see at a glance; the Wall was still serving its most ancient and basic purpose of saving the land from the sea. On the sea itself, a strip of deep-blue water close to the Wall face gave way to thin ice floating in great patches. People were working on the ice, Avatak saw, looking down. One man sat by a mound on the ice that must be a seal’s breathing hole. Further out there was a boat, silhouetted against the brilliance of the white ice behind. These were Northlanders learning to live like Coldlanders, he supposed. Further out still, icebergs, silent and stately as Cathay treasure ships, were trapped in thickening sea ice.