Iron Winter n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  Pyxeas’ notes had been soiled and scattered, but were reasonably intact. Avatak saved the scroll on which he had been keeping his journal of the journey, and Pyxeas insisted he make an entry every day. Avatak did abandon his heavy hourglass. The oracle was smashed, but Pyxeas was set on keeping what was left of its case, despite its bulk. Uzzia plucked out a few gears from the oracle’s abandoned carcass, saying she might make a bracelet of them for a favourite niece in New Hattusa.

  So they continued.

  Coming down from the roof of the world didn’t mean the journey got any easier. Now they came to a stretch of terrain that Uzzia called ‘the Desert of No Return’. ‘Except,’ she said, ‘it’s not a true desert, and it must have been given that name by somebody or other who has returned. Make of that what you will.’ Desert or not, it was harsh, bleak country, where the water was sparse, brackish. It was a comfort to Avatak that Uzzia had come this way before, but everything seemed to be changing as the world entered Pyxeas’ longwinter; many of the springs Uzzia looked out for had dried up.

  Still, they passed through some spectacular landscapes. There was a dry valley that cut through layers of rock, crimson and black, heaped up like a stack of paper pages. Pyxeas speculated about the process that must have laid down these layers in the earth, and then cut through them like a knife. But his mind, supported by an exhausted, starved, dried-out, failed body, was a feeble flicker these days. Avatak thought this landscape of dead rock was chilling; he longed for life.

  Uzzia, more practical, said the valley was a good place to shelter. They laid up for two days in the mouth of a dusty cave, and Uzzia and Avatak set traps for the rabbits and strange-looking rodents that chewed on the dry grass.

  They emerged from the desert at a small town by an oasis. Remote as it was, exotic as the people looked, it was a place used to travellers, and it welcomed them briskly and without any fuss. Here they were able to exchange some of their catch for beds for a couple of nights, water, a chance to rinse out their clothing.

  A man who claimed a special understanding of horses looked over their mule, for a price. ‘He’s in good condition — you’ll get a few months out of him yet before he’s ready for the butcher’s hook and the glue man’s pot. But he has a problem with his left front hoof. .’ It was a jammed stone, a thorn. The mule must have been in constant pain for days. Avatak had never known. While they stayed in the town Avatak made sure he visited the mule in its stable, morning and night.

  Then they walked on again. A little way out of town they passed a kind of monastery based in caves in a hillside, with walls of brick and clay set up along terraces. Men, clean-shaven and in dusty orange robes, climbed ladders. Monks, they were, Uzzia said, following the teachings of a god-priest called the Buddha. Avatak had seen some of these in the town. He had thought they were beggars; he had seen them imploring for gifts of food and drink, going from house to house.

  Now the country opened up once more, and they found themselves on a broad, grassy plain — flat and endless, it seemed, stretching to the horizon, though as they walked they would glimpse worn mountains looming.

  ‘This is the steppe,’ Uzzia said as she plodded along. ‘A Rus word. You’re in the very heart of Asia now, the core of the world continent — a place where the writ of even mighty empires like Cathay does not run. And it is this land that has always birthed the savage horsemen. The most powerful of all were the Mongols, under Genghis, the first of the great Khans. Now his descendants rule Cathay itself. You’ll see.’

  Ferocious the Mongols might be, but for now Avatak saw nothing of them. Their progress was slow, though the country was comparatively easy. Avatak insisted on giving the mule time to feed on the sparse steppe grass.

  In an island of lusher, greener country, they came to a substantial city, walled, where green gardens within were fed from springs. This was a place called Lop, Uzzia said. She said they should stay here for seven days to feed, rest and water, to prepare for the next stage of the journey, the hardest stretch yet. The city seemed crowded, a tense, busy place. But Uzzia found them an empty house, and a clean stable for the mule, and vendors soon arrived with sacks of water and wine, hunks of meat, dried fruit and vegetables, pots to cook in.

  Avatak said, ‘I don’t understand how we’re paying. We were robbed — you were, they took all your trade goods. And a mountain of trapped rabbits couldn’t pay for all this stuff.’

  She glanced across at Pyxeas, who was limping around the house lighting oil lamps. ‘I’ll take you into my confidence. I suppose if anything happened to me it would be a shame to waste it.’

  ‘Waste what?’

  She took her quilted jacket from where it hung on a hook by the door. She showed Avatak fine slits in the fabric, pushed her finger deep inside one of the quilt’s little sewn pads, and pulled out a gleaming stone. ‘A diamond,’ she said. ‘And I have sapphires, a few rubies, some bits of jade and agate, silver and gold for small change. .’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘This is the best way, in these turbulent times. To convert your wealth into the most portable form. And the most easily concealed.’

  ‘Lucky those robbers didn’t try to get your jacket off you.’

  ‘That’s been tried in the past, by lads more interested in what’s inside my clothes than the clothes themselves. They end up with slit throats.’

  ‘I have a feeling that whatever Rina paid you back in Hantilios to keep us alive wasn’t enough.’

  She laughed. ‘Well, that’s probably true. Unless of course old Pyxeas does after all end up saving the world, in which case it will all have been worth it.’

  Avatak slept away much of his time in Lop. He did some exploring, but he felt bewildered to be in yet another town, his ears filled by yet another set of unknown and unknowable languages.

  At last he saw Mongol warriors, in the town.

  They were burly men in armour of buffalo hide, layers of fur, and, some of them, elaborate cloaks woven with gold and silk. They wore their hair oddly, with the scalp shaven, and only a fine mask of beard around the mouth and chin. Most of them carried at least one weapon, an axe, a sword, perhaps a small bow — unimpressive, but Uzzia said it was their use of the bow, their arrows shot from the back of a galloping horse with deadly accuracy, that made them formidable above all else. They were nomad horsemen and war-fighters and they were tremendously rich, all these things at once. Avatak thought he could see the story of their success in the way they dressed, in warrior garb adorned with gold and jewels, the way they walked as others cowered out of their way. Avatak didn’t speak to any of them.

  He visited taverns, and drank weak beer, and made conversation with locals and travellers in broken Greek and Northlander. The travellers told tales of tremendous fires to the north, as if all the forests in Asia were burning off, and of streams of nestspills all heading south. When he spoke of this to Pyxeas, the scholar looked mournful, and spoke of friends in Albia, their ancient forest, which must be turning to ash too. Lying awake at night, Avatak sometimes imagined he smelled the smoke of the world fires, and that he heard the whisper from a million throats: ‘South. Go south. .’

  He made his twice-daily pilgrimage to see the mule in its stable. He brushed its coarse coat, and rubbed liniment into its injured hoof. The mule submitted to these attentions in sullen silence, save for the occasional fart.

  The seven days over, once again they bundled up their luggage and loaded the mule. Now they had a horse too, a compact, strong-looking pony purchased by Uzzia. They left the city of Lop with gratitude for its hospitality, but without looking back.

  Within two days they were in a desert.

  This was not like the Desert of No Return, not even like the western deserts they had crossed early in the journey. This was a featureless plain of gravel, dry clay, and a dusty, yellowish sand that tasted salty when it blew into your mouth. At night the stars made a tremendous dome, slowly swivelling towards the dawn. Though it was ferociously hot during the
day, in the morning it could be cold enough to leave a frost that the animals licked from their blankets. Aside from the frost the only water, rarely glimpsed in almost dried-up streams, was brackish; even the horse and mule turned away from it. Sometimes a storm would blow up — wind, never rain — and the sand would take to the air, swirling around them, the particles stinging their faces and eyes, sometimes so violent they couldn’t make progress at all and they had to huddle in the small tent they had bought in Lop. But then the storms would blow away, and they would move on. They would find the wind had scraped away the earth down to a polished bedrock, and heaped the sand up in dunes like waves on an ocean.

  So the next day passed, and the next. Often a day would pass with no landmarks at all, save a shallow dune or two: no mountains looming, no oases. Nothing to see but level sands stretching to the horizon, and the huge sky above. Gradually Avatak lost his sense of time and place, in this land like a dusty tabletop.

  Pyxeas had him keep the journal, scratching in the date, and random observations and speculations. ‘Perhaps this was once a lake, or a sea,’ Pyxeas rasped. ‘A sea that somehow drained away. That would explain the flatness, and the salt. But where are the fish bones, and the wrecks of fishermen’s boats?’ And he would mumble and mutter, and subside back to his habitual state of half-sleep. Avatak did not care where the salt had come from. He made Pyxeas’ notes, but they were another man’s thoughts expressed in another man’s language; with a little practice he found he could ignore their meaning altogether, even as he wrote them down.

  Still they walked, day after day, across a world reduced to its absolute essentials, to land below, sky above. ‘We walk through Pythagorean dualities,’ Pyxeas said. Avatak’s mind seemed to become as big as the sky, as if trying to fill all that empty space above, yet his spirit was diminished, to become a grain of sand as trivial as those under his feet. Was this how it was to die? To shrink into oneself, to shrivel to nothing, to become a dust speck in a universe grand and ancient that would continue without him, indifferent?

  In the dark, during the nights, he would close his eyes and try to shed such thoughts. But he would hear a soft singing sometimes, a low discordant groan, like the calls of tremendous walruses from some far ice floe. Perhaps it was the spirits of those lost in this unending desert. Perhaps it was just a trick of the wind in the dunes. If the others heard it, they did not mention it.

  It was a shock when, late one day of walking, they came upon the oasis. There were houses of mud and reeds, and a few sheep wandering. There were even a few trees, their leaves spindly and green. This didn’t look real to Avatak, as if it didn’t fit into the world.

  Uzzia put her arm around his shoulders. She said they had been walking the desert for thirty-six days.

  ‘And this,’ she said, ‘is Cathay.’

  37

  For fisherman Crimm, the morning hadn’t been so bad.

  Out on the Northern Ocean, the visibility had been good. There had even been a little warmth in the sun, on this supposedly late-summer day. The crew of the Sabet, all eight of them who had mustered, had been reasonably cheerful, despite the ice-cold spray that soaked its way through the thickest furs, despite the endless labour of pumping water from the bilge, and despite the lousy catch of cod, a longer-term worry that gnawed at their vitals as they thought of the coming winter, and their families back in Northland.

  Of course the ice had been their constant companion all day. Scattered floes scraped against the hull, and to the north fleets of bergs sailed on the swell. On the horizon was a band of whitish light that shimmered and glinted: pack ice, solid, unmovable, much further south even than last year, and much earlier in the year too. It wasn’t even the autumn equinox yet! Still, through the morning they had been able to forget about the ice and get on with their work.

  But by midday the floes were closing in around them. The men started arguing about when to give up and put into port.

  Then the fog rolled in, almost without warning, coming on them with overwhelming speed. That was that. They shipped the nets and made for home.

  In a grey cloud they nosed south on a northerly wind. They got close enough to the Northland shore to hear the great steam-powered horns that sounded from the light towers atop the Wall, but they couldn’t see the lights. If Crimm stood high in the prow he could barely make out the big square mainsail, let alone the Wall. You could wreck yourself against the Wall if you came on it blind. They had no choice but to head north again, and wait out the fog. They furled the sails and broke out the oars.

  Crimm glanced over his crew. None looked happy to be rowing. One man, Xon, the youngest, looked withdrawn, fearful. Crimm said cheerfully, ‘Call this a fog? Ayto’s breath is thicker than this, most mornings.’ He got grins in response.

  They emerged at last into the daylight; the fog was a solid bank behind them. But now the northern horizon was greying too, bubbling into an ominous wall of cloud. At a soft command from Crimm they rested on their oars.

  ‘Told you so,’ Ayto said to Crimm.

  ‘Told me what?’

  ‘Should have put in before the famous fog rolled in. Told you.’

  ‘Yes, but in the next breath you said-’

  ‘Anyhow, now we’re stuck out here.’

  The wind picked up again. Loose corners of the mainsail flapped and cracked. Though the sails were furled, Crimm felt the Sabet surge, back towards the fog.

  Ayto raised his hands. ‘And now comes the wind too. You spoil us, o little mother of the sky.’

  The wind gusted, becoming an icy blast in Crimm’s face, hurling particles that stung his skin and eyes, more like frozen sand than water or ice.

  And suddenly, in just a few heartbeats, that bank of cloud to the north rushed down on them, towering high into the sky. It was a storm coming out of nowhere, as fast as the fog had come upon them, or faster. The men didn’t need to be told what to do. They lashed down the nets and their barrels of water and dried fish, tried to make fast the day’s catch, a pitiful heap of immature fish glistening in the bilge, and grabbed lines, bracing themselves.

  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 X
on,’ 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.