The Second Year of the Longwinter: Autumn Equinox
At the Wall, more snow had fallen overnight, and indeed it was still falling as the morning broke.
Thaxa needed to see Ontin, to ask him to come treat some fishermen caught by the cold. The doctor’s lodge was only a short walk down the Etxelur Way from the Wall, but Thaxa wasn’t going to try it until the snow eased. So he made himself comfortable in the linen shop that fronted his Wall-front home. He told his servant, Moerx, to let the fire in the hearth die down a little. You were always aware of the need to save fuel, even kindling. The shop cooled quickly, and he wrapped himself up in layers, leggings and trousers and waterproofs, a couple of tunics and a heavy sealskin coat, three layers of socks over which he would later pull his hide boots. Then he sat in a window seat in his house’s south-facing wall, and looked out, watching the snow fall.
The house was in one of the most prized neighbourhoods in Greater Etxelur. A modern stone structure backing onto chambers cut into the face of the Wall itself, it directly faced the big, rich estates that in this age encrusted the old earthwork called the Door to the Mothers’ House — and of course, being south-facing, it was blessed with good light for much of the day. Rina had always loved this house. It was a legacy of a favourite uncle and a place she had often visited as a child. She had spent an inordinate amount of time and money on it to make it a home for their two children as they had grown, as well as an establishment suitable for one of the richest and most powerful couples in Etxelur. Yet it had been a lonely place for Thaxa this summer, since his family had gone south.
Well, that had been the deal they had struck back in the spring, he and Rina, during those difficult, sleepless, guilt-ridden nights. She would get the children to safety; he would stay behind and help prepare the Wall and Etxelur and all of Northland for the difficult days to come. That was the deal, a compromise between their primal need to protect their children and their wider duty. Rina was, after all, an Annid. And if the weather didn’t let up next year, if Rina couldn’t come home, then Thaxa would make his own way south to join her. But after the summer they’d had here, and now the horribly early winter, Thaxa was starting to wonder what would be left of the world by the spring, and whether he would ever be able to get as far as Carthage.
And still the snow fell, big fat flakes of it from an eerie sky, a sky that glowed with a kind of silver light. Perhaps it looked so odd because the autumn sunlight was strong; he was used to snow in the low light of midwinter, not at this time of year. He had loved snow as a boy, for it had been rare then. Close to the Wall snow would often not fall at all, for the great bulk of growstone blocked the northern winds, and its heat warmed the land at its foot. Experts like Pyxeas said the Wall created its own weather. Yes, once he had loved the snow, when it was a rare treat. Now he hated it, like the rest of Northland, he suspected. The only consolation was that the chill was never too deep while the snow was actually falling. It was in the clear nights between the snowfalls that the cold really bit deep, and walls could crack and windows frost up and the piss in your night pot would freeze over, and old people and little babies would die in their beds.
Finally the snow relented, the fall dwindling to a few scattered flakes, that odd silvery glow fading from the sky. Thaxa dragged on his boots, checked the bone toggles on his coat, pulled up his hood, stuffed his hands in his mittens, and opened the door. The new fall, about as deep as his kneecaps, came spilling into the house. He kept a snow shovel behind the door, an expensive tool made from the scapula of a deer and an ash pole. He got to work shifting the snow from the doorway, lifting rough blocks of snow on the blade and dumping them to either side. It wasn’t so difficult this time; this particular deposit of snow was powdery, and it was easy to slide in the blade. They were all getting used to the different kinds of snow that could fall depending on minute differences in temperature and the dampness of the air. The worst kind was the slushy wet stuff that clung to your blade; that could be like shifting wet sand. But however it fell, if you didn’t clear it, it would consolidate, setting at last to a layer of white ice over the hard ground, lumpy, hummocky stuff treacherously slick underfoot and hard as rock if you tried to break it up.
As he worked, falling into a now-familiar routine of scoop and throw, scoop and throw, being careful to favour his back, he warmed up quickly, and he loosened the toggles of his coat. Of course many of his neighbours left this sort of thing to the staff, but Thaxa liked to pitch in. For one thing he only had old Moerx as a permanent servant. And besides, this was Etxelur, not a land of princes and rulers like Carthage or Hatti — a land of equals, in theory at least. But he tired quickly, he always did; there was never enough to eat, not even for the husband of an Annid, never enough coal in the engine.
He didn’t have far to dig, however. There were already parties out clearing the Wall Way, the main road that ran along the foot of the Wall, men and women with shovels like his, their voices oddly deadened by the blanket of snow. A team of bony horses, a rare sight in Northland, dragged a heavy blade that cleared great swathes of snow, dumping it in dirty banks by the road, just as it was heaped up alongside all the main drags in Northland. All these people were out working for the state, back-breaking labour in return for a dole of salted fish and perhaps a little frozen peat for the family fire.
He was relieved to see a guard patrol walking slowly along the road, bundled in fur-lined cloaks. Crime wasn’t as bad as it had been, the harsh penalties imposed by the Water Council during the summer had seen to that, but there was always somebody desperate enough to loot an abandoned property for food, firewood, warm clothing, even snow shovels.
When he had cleared a path to the road he put his shovel back in the house, locked the door carefully, and followed the cleared road towards the heart of Etxelur, making for the junction to the north-south Etxelur Way. The Wall itself loomed over him. Ice clung to buttresses and balconies, and gigantic icicles dangled. After every snowfall there were unusual forms, sculpted drifts, shapes strange and unexpected, created by the wind swirling around the Wall’s complex frontage. The world was full of complexity, Thaxa thought, of pointless beauty that came out of nowhere, from falling snow and moving masses of air and a growstone wall. Nelo’s artistic eye might have been caught by these strange winter visions. But there were uglier sights too, great scars in the growstone core where the frost had got into it. It had been a long time since it had been safe to send up repair crews, and even when they tried the growstone wouldn’t mix or set properly in the cold.
He turned down the Etxelur Way, the main route south. This too was being steadily cleared by more bands of workers, slumped, labouring people. There was some traffic on the road, carts laden with ocean produce heading south from the Wall, the usual steady trickle of nestspills coming the other way. They were people. Desperate parents, struggling children, infants in arms. Nestspills.
Beyond the banks of cleared snow, beyond the dense suburbs of the Bay Land and Flint Island, the land was flat and eerily featureless. Northland was a tremendous plain anyhow, and now the fallen snow had erased the detail, with only faint lines where the dykes ran, and clusters of shapeless hillocks that were houses or flood mounds. Even the canals had frozen over and were becoming lost in the snow, and it was rare to see a tree that hadn’t been cut down for firewood.
Not far down the Way he came to the lodge of Ontin, standing on a very ancient flood mound, a modern house with a square floor plan, wooden frame, and steeply pitched roof. Ontin greeted him at the door. The doctor, wearing heavy outdoor clothes but with his boots off, had evidently been out clearing the snow himself. Once inside Thaxa stamped the snow off his own boots. He saw that Ontin’s wife and sons were tending to a family, huddled by the fire, husband and wife, a pair of infants close in age. One child, a boy, had the swollen belly of deep hunger.
‘Here.’ Ontin handed Thaxa a mug of heady Gairan beer. ‘I feel like I need it, though it’s not yet noon.’ He took a deep d
raught himself. ‘What brings you here, my friend?’
Thaxa drank gratefully. ‘Fishermen. A party came in last night. The frost got to them.’ The sea before the Wall had been frozen solid for a long while, few boats had made it out since Crimm had lost the Sabet before the autumn equinox, but the fishermen were going out anyhow, walking out to try their luck at ice fishing.
Ontin nodded. ‘I’ll come.’
Thaxa glanced at the family. ‘They’re from your estate?’
‘Yes, from a wet-house.’ A house on stilts, built on a foundation of boulders and logs sunk into a wetland. ‘You should see it, looks very odd now, stranded high above ground that’s dried out and then frozen — you have to use a ladder to get to the door. When the cold set in, their eel catch died off. .’
In Northland landholding was frowned on as a disreputable practice of farming kingdoms. Here, most of the land was held in common trust, for it was a shared larder for a people who still at bottom relied on an economy of gathering and hunting. But there were instances of temporary landholding for management purposes, for example when a stretch of land needed leadership in developing. After the rainy years had flooded swathes of Northland, some land had been allowed to revert to ancestral wetland, and the people who lived there, like this family, had needed investment and guidance in a way of life that was very ancient, but new to them. That was the job of Ontin, as much a duty as a privilege, for which he was paid a proportion of the land’s bounty. The family would be expected to give up the land on his and his wife’s death; there was no inherited property. But no guidance had been enough for this poor family, it seemed.
‘We had to take them in,’ Ontin murmured. ‘What else could we do? I can treat that one for her hunger, and the other has diarrhoea I’m treating with salt and honey. Thaxa, I’ve seen it before, all over my estate and beyond. The growing season was just too short, just a month or so between the last frosts of spring and the first of autumn.’
‘The dole of salted fish-’
‘Gone in a flash. And all this, Thaxa, within a morning’s walk of Etxelur itself. What is happening deeper in the country? We may never even know.’
Thaxa touched his shoulder. ‘We must do what we can. As you are helping these poor people. Come with me to my house at the Wall this afternoon; I’m having the fishermen brought there for you to see to. And there’s to be a discussion this afternoon on how to cope with the winter.’
Ontin laughed hollowly. ‘Cope?’
‘It will be informal, but under Ywa.’ He smiled. ‘The Annids like coming to me for their meetings, because I make good nettle tea. Stay the night. Forget all this, for a time. We’ll talk, eat, drink, get warm. I think you’ve deserved that much.’
The doctor smiled back thinly. ‘I’ll pass on the nettle tea, though. You have any Gairan ale? For that’s the best, you know.’
‘I’ll lay some in. .’
But Ontin was looking over his shoulder, out of the window, at fresh flurries of snow that fell from a greying sky.
40
They made it back to the Wall, just, through the closing mouth of the latest blizzard.
Despite the storm, Thaxa couldn’t help but glance with pride at his shopfront as they struggled up to it. He was still well stocked with exotic linen and cloth, from Albian wild-cattle wool to Cathay silk and Carthaginian purple, even fine-spun wool from the llamas and alpacas of the lands across the Western Ocean — precious indeed, since trade across the ocean had been sundered by the icebergs. But nobody was shopping today, and the snow was heaped up in banks before the shopfront.
An archway on the left-hand side of the shop led to a courtyard laboriously swept clear of snow, surrounded by a cluster of buildings: a hall to the left, a pantry and kitchens to the right, and the main living quarters at the rear, with parlours, bedrooms, bathrooms, privies, and the household shrine to the little mothers. All this backed onto the Wall, which loomed over the shop. Thaxa’s property actually extended into the Wall itself. There were chambers cut into the growstone, much older, abandoned now, behind the elaborate structures that had been built onto the face — Thaxa himself wasn’t sure what there was back there.
Much of the property was shut up now, for the difficulty of heating it. But a light gleamed in the window of the largest parlour, and Thaxa led Ontin that way.
The parlour was deliciously warm, thanks to a roaring fire in the hearth. Thaxa and Ontin stripped off their heavy outdoor clothing in a small anteroom. They were later than Thaxa had planned. The fishermen were already here, some of the crew of the lost Sabet, Rina’s cousin Crimm, his partner Ayto — and Aranx, who was nursing a badly damaged hand. Ywa was here too, Annid of Annids, sitting close to the fire with Xree, another cousin of Rina and another Annid. Moerx was serving drinks, a hot nettle tea, a speciality of Thaxa’s — hot to banish the cold, and made of nettles as a kind of expression of sympathy for all the ordinary Northlanders who had nothing but nettles to keep them alive. Thaxa smiled easily at his guests. This was what he had always been best at: hospitality, a kind of talent for making people welcome, letting them relax.
Ontin went straight to the fishermen, who sat around a table looking slightly out of place. Aranx held out his hand, wrapped clumsily in a strip of cloth. ‘Got it wet, didn’t I? Another lad fell in a lead, through a crack in the ice. Didn’t notice it was wrong, it got so cold I couldn’t feel it anyhow.’
Ontin carefully peeled back the bandage, to reveal swollen, broken flesh. A stink of corruption filled the room.
‘Sorry, doctor.’
‘Don’t apologise. It sounds as if you were a brave man.’ Ontin took a scalpel from a deep pocket, and began to probe at the damaged flesh.
‘Don’t know about brave. We got old Tabilox out of the water all right, but he didn’t make it back.’
Ayto said evenly, ‘The bravest thing you did, mate, was to go tell his widow when you got back. And his kids.’
‘We miss our boats, that’s the truth. We’re rubbish out on the ice, cutting holes and that. We’ll never be Coldlanders.’
Ywa said, ‘All of Northland appreciates what you are trying to do for us. And you’ve managed to bring home more than a bit of fish.’
Xree smiled. ‘We were talking about you earlier. Of your marvellous return from the dead, so to speak, a couple of months back, when the Sabet went down. I was actually there on the Wall when you showed up. Walking out of the cold, dragging that improvised sled with your injured crewmate and the carcass of that seal, and your families waiting for you at the dock. Remarkable.’
Crimm sounded embarrassed. ‘We didn’t do anything but live through it.’
‘Oh, believe me,’ Ywa said, ‘you did more than that. You brought back a bit of good news, for once, and you’ve no idea how rare that has been over the last year.’
‘But I didn’t bring back my ship,’ he said heavily. ‘Or one of my crew. Or any of the catch, save the little bit we’d been eating ourselves. What kind of achievement is that?’
Thaxa saw Ywa flinch. Crimm backed off, reddening. There was an awkward silence.
And for the first time Thaxa saw there was some kind of connection between the two of them, the Annid of Annids and the weather-beaten fisherman. Well, whatever it was they were entitled to it, and he suppressed his curiosity.
Crimm said gruffly, ‘Anyhow, you’re here to talk about the future, not the past.’
Xree sighed. ‘True enough. The problem’s simple to state. We have to get through the winter.’
‘The issue being-’
‘The issue being too many people, and too little food. .’
As they spoke Thaxa discreetly refilled their teacups. At least you couldn’t accuse his family of consuming more than their fair share. One reason he hosted these meetings was as a kind of polite, unspoken penance for the absence of Rina and the children. Everybody knew they had gone off down south, and had sneaked away in secret. You could see it as a betrayal, or as an example of devot
ion to a wider cause, to leave your home and risk the unknown to reduce the pressure on the Wall’s resources, depending on how generous you felt. But as Rina wasn’t the only one to have fled, the social disgrace he had feared had never materialised, not quite. And people had more to worry about than that.
‘In fact,’ Xree was saying, ‘there are more people showing up all the time, from Northland and beyond, even Gairans, even Albians.’
‘Turn them away,’ Ayto snapped. That won him a few glances of distaste.
‘We try,’ Ywa said. ‘But there are always more. And some have a claim to be let in — some of them have relatives in the Wall. Those we do turn away may simply become bandits and even more of a problem than if we had fed them in the first place.
‘Then there’s the issue of the food itself. There’s more of your salted fish, Crimm, and other comestibles in the storehouses than you might think,’ she said softly. ‘But even so, not enough.’
‘How much “not enough”?’
Xree said, ‘Unless we cut the ration again we’ll run out before the midwinter solstice.’
Crimm nodded. ‘Then you must cut the ration.’
Ywa said, ‘I’ve asked Ontin and the other doctors to come up with recommendations on the absolute minimum people can survive on. We must get as many through the winter as possible, and hope that the spring is kinder.’
Ayto said, ‘And if it isn’t? No, forget that. If we don’t survive the winter it won’t matter. You may have to go further.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘If there’s not enough to go round, stop the ration altogether for some. The very sick, the already dying.’
There was a shocked silence, at another blunt remark from the fisherman.
‘People won’t stand for it,’ Thaxa said instinctively.
‘They may have to.’
‘We have considered such options,’ Ywa said grimly. ‘Believe me. But even if we could make it acceptable — how do you choose, fisherman? Do you cut out everybody over fifty, say? Or the very young, on the argument that their mothers can always have more babies?’
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