Iron Winter n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  And today the Wall’s roof was crowded with foreign dignitaries, here to welcome the party from Cathay, empire of the east. Aside from the women from the Western Continents, here were Hatti priest-warriors, their armour emblazoned with the crossed-palm-leaves motif of their god Jesus Sharruma whose bones were interred deep within the Wall. And Islamic princes, Egyptians perhaps, laden with gold, legs bare despite the chill breeze of this cold northern midsummer. And Carthaginian merchants, a splash of purple in their long robes. The Albians from their forested land stood apart from the rest, their heavy furs and carefully unwashed hair tokens of their adherence to the oldest gods of all. Everything about this moment was stage-managed — even the ranks in which the guests stood, so that no one had mortal enemies on both sides at once. These powerful men and women were dwarfed by the sheer scale of the landscape in which they stood, their talk diminished by the steady churning of the great pumps buried inside the Wall’s fabric. That, of course, was the whole point of bringing the dignitaries up here: to impress them with Northland’s power.

  But the mood was difficult this summer. After yet another year of drought and famine across the Continent, this Giving was no formality, however joyous, but a hard-nosed negotiation over vital food supplies. The weather was odd too, for all Rina dismissed Uncle Pyxeas and his foolishness about worldwide weather changes. There was ground frost in the summer mornings, and a strange drabness in the land: this spring and summer you rarely saw a flower in bloom, or a butterfly.

  And now, on top of all that, the steam caravan was late. For months communications had been disrupted by drought, famine, and petty banditry. But this was yet another thread dangling loose, and Rina did not like dangling threads, and as time wore on she could sense the dignitaries’ impatience slowly growing.

  Now, at last, far to the east, Rina made out a white plume of steam, a caravan like a chain of glittering toys crawling along the track. But even before the caravan reached Etxelur, runners on horseback delivered the message that the Iron Way had brought nobody from Cathay this year.

  ‘Then we must proceed with the Giving negotiations without them,’ Rina murmured to Thaxa. ‘The Mongol princes of Daidu were only a ceremonial presence anyhow.’

  ‘That’s not what Pyxeas says,’ Thaxa pointed out. ‘Your uncle claims that the Cathay scholars have information which-’

  ‘Information, information!’ she snapped. ‘What good is that? Can you eat it? Dried fish, however, you can eat, and that’s what matters. Let’s get these people back inside the Wall before that breeze gets any sharper and they start complaining even more loudly.’ She pulled her tunic closer around her and made for the Carthaginian party, smiling fixedly as she prepared her apology.

  4

  Alxa was faintly surprised to find that one of the Carthaginian merchant princes, called Mago — the man-boy who had been staring at her chest the whole afternoon — knew one of the younger Hatti delegates, called Arnuwanda, a prince it seemed, or some relative of the current King in New Hattusa. And now, while her mother Rina led the other foreigners back into the warmth of the Wall, these princes, restless, bored, wanted some sport. They wanted to wrestle. Apparently they had come up against each other at a royal wedding party in Greece, where such sports were common among the guests, and fancied another crack.

  Alxa spoke about this to her father, Thaxa.

  ‘Go with them,’ he said. ‘Take your brother too. You can keep them out of trouble. And having Nelo around might keep that Carthaginian brute from giving you any trouble.’

  ‘I can handle the likes of him.’

  ‘I’m sure you can. But if you’re to be an Annid, child, you have to learn that the best way to deal with trouble is to avoid it in the first place. .’

  So Alxa and her brother took the princelings down the growstone staircases to one of the better gymnasiums, an airy room cut into the growstone with neatly plastered walls and a large stained-glass window shedding splashes of colour across the wooden floor. Alxa and Nelo sat on a bench as the princes stripped off their finery, showered, and coated their skin with powder. The Carthaginian, Mago, made absolutely sure Alxa could see everything there was to see about his nude body.

  The princes stalked to the middle of the floor. They were both around twenty years old. They faced each other, bowed — and launched themselves at each other. The Hatti got the first break; with his head down he got his shoulders under his foe’s belly and flipped him so he landed hard on his back. But in an instant Mago was up and at his opponent again.

  Alxa murmured, ‘They look so alike, especially without their clothes. Warrior boys, bred for a life of fighting.’

  ‘They’re not quite mirror images,’ Nelo said. ‘Look, the Hatti has Jesus symbols tattooed on his back — the fish, the palm fronds. And the Carthaginian’s the one that’s been drooling over you.’

  ‘Hush. I think they’re talking about us.’

  Between thrusts and throws the princes had started a conversation in Greek, evidently a common language, which they seemed to imagine the Northlanders would not understand. ‘So you like the little girl,’ said Arnuwanda, the Hatti.

  ‘Not so little,’ said Mago. ‘Did you notice the udders? She was looking at my tupping tool, that’s for sure.’

  Arnuwanda snorted.

  Mago rolled on top of his opponent and got his arm across his throat. ‘I suppose the boy is more your sort.’

  ‘Yes. Sure. And I’d do to him what a Roman legionary would have done to your Carthaginian grandmother if we Hatti hadn’t saved the day. .’ And he flexed, flipped, and managed to roll Mago over so he had him pinned face down, if briefly.

  Alxa murmured to her brother, ‘Romans?’

  ‘Some trading post in Greater Greece, I think.’ Nelo shrugged. He produced a block of paper and began to sketch the wrestling princes, in brisk, confident strokes.

  Mago pushed his opponent off, jumped to his feet, and the two closed again with a shuddering crash. ‘So,’ Mago grunted as he worked, ‘what do you think of these Northlanders?’

  ‘What am I supposed to think? They have mountains of dried fish, culled from that ocean of theirs. We have famine. So here we are.’

  ‘They also have the bones of your god Jesus stuffed in their Wall. And His Mother.’

  ‘True,’ Arnuwanda said. ‘They pretend to a moral authority which- Get your finger out of my ear, African!’ The Hatti forced Mago’s arm away from his head by brute force. ‘They pretend to impose peace between warring religions. In fact they draw pilgrims to the relics they have stolen, and milk them of their cash. They are hypocrites.’

  ‘I agree.’ Mago whirled, tried to get the Hatti in an armlock, but Arnuwanda spun away and Mago ended up face down on the floor again. Spitting out dust, Mago twisted his head to speak. ‘And they claim to despise farmers. We’re all “cattle-folk” to them. Yet they hire soldiers from the farming lands, the Franks and the Germans and the others, to keep out the rest of the rabble.’

  ‘Hmm. Well, that might not help them much longer.’ Arnuwanda got one arm free, pinned Mago with the weight of his body, and slammed his forearm down on the Carthaginian’s head. ‘Had enough?’

  ‘Bugger yourself. What do you mean, not much longer?’ Mago twisted with a mighty heave, throwing the Hatti off.

  ‘The Germans and Franks have been hit by the droughts too.’ They came together again — slam, heads down, arms and legs straining, hands slapping for a hold on flesh greasy with sweat. ‘And some of them are coming here. The farmers, I mean, abandoning their dustbowl lands and wandering into Northland. Well, you’ve seen it, there’s plenty of room.’

  ‘Yes.’ Mago snorted with laughter. ‘An empty country. A ghost of a place. The ghost that rules the Continent.’ He turned, dropped onto his back, flipped up his legs, locked them around the Hatti’s neck, and sent him flying.

  ‘Oof!’

  Mago got to his feet, yelled, leapt cat-like into the air, and would have slammed down on the Hatti
— had not Arnuwanda rolled out of the way at the crucial moment, so that Mago came down hard on the floor. ‘Oh, by the bones of Melqart. .’

  ‘Always a mistake to rely on mercenaries, I say,’ the Hatti said. He crawled over to the Carthaginian and drove his elbow into the small of Mago’s back. ‘Had enough now?’

  A horn sounded, distant, carrying.

  Alxa glanced at her brother. ‘The eruptors?’

  ‘Yes. That’s the first call.’ Nelo tucked away his sketches. ‘Come on. Let’s put these two back on their leashes.’

  They walked towards the princes, who broke and stood, panting, sweating, wiping dust and powder from their skins. Mago grinned at Alxa. He said in his own clipped Carthaginian tongue, ‘I saw you watching.’

  She replied in crisp Greek, ‘I saw you lose.’

  Arnuwanda frowned. ‘You understand Greek? You should have had the manners to tell us so.’

  Nelo said, ‘And you should have had the manners not to insult your hosts.’

  Arnuwanda faced Nelo, glaring. He wasn’t as showy as the Carthaginian, Alxa saw, his musculature wasn’t as impressive, or, come to that, his manhood, but the Hatti had a composure, an inner strength, his opponent evidently lacked. And here he was facing down her brother.

  Alxa stepped between the two of them. ‘Let’s be friends,’ she said calmly. It wasn’t good for a student diplomat to get into fist fights with foreign guests.

  Nelo was angry too, but he nodded and stepped back. With a sneer, the Hatti took a towel from his opponent and turned away.

  ‘So you heard it all,’ said Mago. ‘Well, what of it? Anything ring uncomfortably true? The charges of hypocrisy, of greed-’

  ‘Insults cast by the ignorant,’ Alxa said. ‘One thing you were wrong about, though.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘We don’t rely on mercenaries for our protection. Not entirely.’ That horn sounded again. ‘Get yourselves back up to the roof before the third sounding and you’ll see.’

  She walked away, with Nelo, without looking back.

  5

  As the second horn sounded, and the evening of the long midsummer day approached, the three women from the Western Continents who had stood near Rina earlier met in a bar, set in the face of the Wall.

  Walks In Mist had discovered this tavern. It was on the fringe of the Wall District called the Springs, a precise eight hundred paces from Etxelur, a place full of taverns, hostels and, Walks in Mist suspected, brothels. This place seemed respectable enough; built into a terrace in the face of the Wall, it gave onto a balcony overlooking Old Etxelur and the lowland.

  Her friends joined her now, Sabela from the southern continent’s High Country in her robe of llama wool, and Xipuhl from the Land of the Jaguar with her fine steel mirror at her breast. Walks In Mist herself, from the Land of the Sky Wolf, wore her eagle feathers in her hair. Each of them proclaimed who they were in this baffling, crowded place — the centre of the world, if only for midsummer.

  ‘I know it isn’t much to look at,’ Walks In Mist said as the others settled. And she was right; the floor was rough, the walls unfinished growstone. ‘But that’s what I like about it. That and the view.’

  They turned to look out over Northland, a tremendous plain that stretched to the horizon. The sun was low now, the sky a rich deep blue. The marshes and canals shone like ribbons of sky, the old flood mounds cast long shadows, and fires sparked everywhere. At the foot of the Wall itself were tremendous warehouses where even in the gathering dark a steady stream of traffic came and went, and rows of brightly lit shops provided their customers with food, drink, pilgrimage tokens and Giving-day souvenirs.

  Walks In Mist leaned from her chair and ran a hand over the lip of the growstone balcony. ‘Think how old this stuff must be. Think what it’s seen, how much history. And now here we are.’

  ‘Cradled like an eagle chick in the palm of an old man’s hand,’ said Sabela.

  Xipuhl laughed, and the dancing mirror on her chest cast reflections from the candle. ‘You are always the poet of our little gang,’ she said to Sabela. Xipuhl was a little older than the others, and was prone to be the one who did the teasing.

  But Sabela was right, Walks In Mist thought. She did feel cradled here. She always felt safe in Northland, with its antiquity and stability and the obvious physical strength of its great Wall. Why, here they were, three women from across the lands Northlanders called the Western Continents, all of them comfortably speaking in the only tongue they shared — the liquid language of Northland, a tongue that had nothing in common with their own native speech at all.

  The three of them had found each other during the long sea crossing on a huge Northlander ship. Every three years the elders of Etxelur sent a flotilla across the Western Ocean to the Land of the Jaguar to pick up a selection of especially honoured, or especially well-paying, guests from the Western Continents to come to the midsummer Giving. Walks In Mist herself was here for trade; she was one of a delegation from Sky Wolf seeking to expand cotton exports. Xipuhl was part of a formal diplomatic legation from the Land of the Jaguar, and much of her midsummer had been taken up with ‘stuffy meetings with old men in airless rooms’, she had said.

  Sabela was the only one without a job during the trip. It was her husband who was in the business of exporting llama and alpaca wool and other High Country textiles to Northland. Sabela’s people were always honoured in Northland because of historic links; the High Country had given Northlanders the potato, a precious crop which, they said, had enabled their unique culture to survive on the fringe of a continent full of farmers. Of the three of them Sabela was the junior partner, Walks In Mist supposed, and she was a rather vague young woman — her head in the clouds, Xipuhl said, just like the pretty country she came from — but on the ship, she had been the one who had brought them together.

  ‘Well,’ Sabela said now, ‘I think what I’m going to like about this tavern is the drinks they serve. What a selection!’

  The menu was inscribed into the oak surface of the table itself, in the loops and bars of the unique Northlander script. The three women chose drinks from across the eastern half of the planet: Albian ale for Xipuhl, a decent Gairan wine for Walks In Mist, and a fine potato spirit from Rus for Sabela. When the drinks arrived they knocked their cups together.

  Xipuhl said briskly, ‘I imagine the next time we drink together we will be back on the ship, for it’s going to take me the rest of my time to get packed up.’

  Sabela pulled a face. ‘Be grateful you don’t have children. I’ll swear my two support the economy of the local trinket makers single-handed.’ The breeze turned, an oddly chill wind blew in from the west, and they all reacted, shifting, pulling their wraps tighter. ‘It has been a cool summer,’ Sabela murmured. ‘My two have complained about that.’

  Walks In Mist frowned. ‘I’ve heard mutterings about great meetings of scholars, discussions of the turning of the weather. Do you think there’s anything in it?’

  ‘I’ve not much truck for scholars,’ Xipuhl said firmly. ‘Who can know what the future holds?’

  ‘And we’ll not let it govern our lives,’ Sabela said.

  The horn blasted for a third time, announcing the noisy eruptor display that would end the long day of celebration. People started to drift out of the tavern.

  ‘Let’s make a pact,’ Walks In Mist said impulsively. ‘We’ll keep in touch. Let’s meet when the Northland fleet comes again to the West, in three years’ time.’

  Sabela laughed girlishly. ‘Oh, yes — what a lovely idea.’

  Xipuhl grinned. ‘Well, as you are the only companions I’ve found on this trip who haven’t wanted to get some kind of business out of me, I’m for it.’

  ‘And we’ll come back to this very bar,’ Sabela said. ‘And order the same drinks, three years from now.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Walks In Mist, and they raised their cups again and toasted the pact.

  But the breeze gusted once
more. The candles on the tables flickered, and around the bar people pulled cloaks over their shoulders. A few people laughed, and sent mock curses at the little mothers and other gods for their wilfulness.

  ‘That’s if we’re all still here in three years’ time,’ Xipuhl said with morbid humour.

  6

  Alxa stood with her brother on the roof of the Wall, surrounded by a crowd of Etxelur elite in their fancy ceremonial House robes, waiting for the wrestling princes to return to the parapet.

  The sun was near the horizon now, and the day felt markedly colder, as if this were an autumn day, not midsummer. Lights sparked over the face of the Wall below, and in the curving reefs of the lower city. People had gathered on the plain beyond, filling the open spaces and lining the canals, waiting for the show. The crowds always came to the Giving at Etxelur, although this year, Alxa was sure, there were plenty of nestspills, that cruel Northland word, people displaced from their homes by flood or drought, by poverty or hunger or disease, here for handouts rather than celebration.