Only the smiths of the North, then and in later years, were left to grieve over what might have been, and the wonders Kunrad might have achieved, if he had only taken heart and let all lesser concerns fall by the wayside, as a true smith should. They wagged their beards sadly over their winecups, debating the flaw that was in him. They never ceased to bewail the lures of women, and power, and suchlike worldly trifles that can so seduce a man from his true path, and make him betray his inborn art.
For any man, they said, might become a hero, a lord of men and shaper of destinies, if the chances were but tossed in his way. But once only in a generation, if then, is born a man who really knows how to shape a mailring.
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Also By Michael Scott Rohan
The Winter of the World
1. The Anvil of Ice (1986)
2. The Forge in the Forest (1987)
3. The Hammer of the Sun (1988)
4. The Castle of the Winds (1998)
5. The Singer and the Sea (1999)
6. Shadow of the Seer (2001)
Spiral
1. Chase the Morning (1990)
2. The Gates of Noon (1992)
3. Cloud Castles (1993)
4. Maxie’s Demon (1997)
Other Novels
Run to the Stars (1982)
The Ice King (1986) (with Allan J. Scott)
A Spell of Empire (1992) (with Allan J. Scott)
The Lord of Middle Air (1994)
DEDICATION
Richard Evans, 1950–1996
In 1979, when I was a young writer nervously setting out to sell my first science fiction novel, Run to the Stars, I was lucky enough to be recommended, by Robert Holdstock among others, to an editor called Richard Evans. This was the dynamic character, I was told, who was discovering and developing new talent among British authors.
I was rather surprised to find this super-editor a quiet Welshman hardly older than myself, a chain-smoker with a nervous, good-natured manner and a rather diffident chuckle. All too soon, I discovered these concealed a cheerfully wicked sense of humour and a razor mind, as he simultaneously praised the book and tore it apart, leaving me both shrivelled and encouraged – no mean feat. In the end he bought it, and we began to meet regularly for long and hilarious lunches, in which just about everything imaginable was discussed; and somehow, although we didn’t like the same music, politics, or even beer, we managed to become good friends.
One subject Richard often returned to was his scorn for a lot of the contemporary fantasy he was offered, Howard rip-offs and clones of Tolkien, which he loved; he was insistent that I should do something in the heroic vein, but different. Well, I said, still tentatively, there were these ideas I had been gassing about – all sorts of historical dark alleys, from the migration theories of Thor Heyerdahl (flawed but fun), Atlantic crossings by the Welsh, the Vikings and others, the peculiar resonances between Norse and Native American mythology, the first arrival of men in the New World, how primitive cultures thought of metalworking as magic, and what if the Ice Ages were a living menace, a bid by elder forces to regain control of the world …
‘Wait.’ said Richard, simply; and very soon after he moved to the firm of Macdonald (now Little, Brown), there came an electrifying phone call. ‘That fantasy novel you were telling me about …’ And so the Winter of the World series was born.
And, when it had been hammered out to Richard’s exacting standards, thanks to him and his equally convivial and sharp-minded associate Toby Roxburgh, I had what many authors only dream about, a generous contract for all three novels. Bringing them to life took fully four years, during which time Richard was immensely supportive, guiding me through the dark ways of production teams, printers, sales and marketing, while keeping a keen eye on the work. Every manuscript came back with sheets of devastatingly sensible and perceptive comments, which often had me tearing my hair and resulted in spectacular arguments, but for which I was deeply grateful.
He was not an obtrusive ‘creative editor’ type, though. I cannot remember Richard suggesting a single idea; his gift, or more correctly his great skill, was making me come up with better ones. He was especially helpful and sympathetic when, during the writing of The Forge in the Forest, my father died very suddenly. He bore the brunt of my occasional explosions when something went wrong. And nobody was more delighted than Richard when throughout the following decade the trilogy sold across the world, in nine countries and eight languages, and hit the bestseller lists in many of them. Britain included.
All this while, of course, he was doing just as much for many other rising writers. Our friendship remained a professional one; he only once visited my house, and I never saw his, or the young family he was so proud of. His work was so harassing he deserved to escape from authors at home. Nevertheless, he was one of the faces my wife and I always eagerly looked for in the crowds at conventions; and when The Winter of the World won the IAFA Crawford Award, the bulk of the prize went on a very large dinner with close friends, and Richard chief among them.
Richard bought most of my later novels, and I moved with him to other publishers. Even when he was not directly involved in a book he would take an interest, and offer advice when asked. When he could not buy one particular book he liked, he was even influential in getting it accepted by another publisher. In the 1990s, he became seriously ill; when he recovered, it is no exaggeration to say that a wave of relief went through the British SF and fantasy field. In summer 1996 I saw him, looking fit and lively, bustling about for his first trip to America since his recovery; and on his return, barely off the plane, he collapsed and died shortly after, aged only 46. He is sadly missed by everyone who knew him, and had cause to be grateful to him; I am only one among many.
He was excited to hear I was returning to the Winter of the World, and looking forward eagerly to reading this book. All I can do now is dedicate it, with deep and lasting gratitude – not to his memory, that feels inadequate. To Richard himself.
Acknowledgements
To the stalwart editorial team, Tim, Colin and Lisa, many thanks for all manner of things; and to Nick Ross and the others in production. To Olavinlinna Castle, Savonlinna, Finland, and its staff (and its mosquitoes) for research assistance. And, as always, to my wife Deb.
Appendix
Of the land of Brasayhal at the time these events took place, its nature and climate, and the then state of its several peoples, such as are set forth in the volumes of the Winter Chronicles called the Book of Settlement, and the Book of Sundering.
The tales of Kunrad, and of his apprentices, appear in the Chronicles mostly as anecdotes and sidelights to the events of the time. It has been necessary to piece them together across two volumes, adding much that later readers would not know, and leaving out what now needs no explanation. This anecdotal origin, though, made the narration more colloquial and less formal than the body of the Chronicles, preserving character and speech in the manner of the time. Voices can be heard, and faces glimpsed, across the gulf, and the winds of Ker an Aruel blow between the pages still. They show us the same land in which Elof was to awaken, and which is described in the Books of Sword and Helm and Armring that tell his story; and yet younger, and less troubled.
Many aspects of that land, its history and peoples are beyond the compass of these stories, and so to those books some further accounts are attached. Much may be found there that concerns this also; of the origins of the Long Winter, and the nature of smithcraft, the languages of North and South, and the Guilds in both lands. Here, though, new things demand new explanations, or in deeper detail; for this tale and this world are seen tho
ugh very different eyes. And however much may be told, or guessed, still more must remain a mystery.
THE LAND
Kunrad and his fellows lived and died some thousand years before the coming of Elof, but to the land, as to the Long Winter, a mere millennium meant little. The narrow western seaboards of Brasayhal were much the same in their fabric and outline. Some seven hundred leagues they stretched from the chill North to the Southern deserts, blasted and impenetrable barrier to any lands beneath the world’s curve; yet at their widest they spanned no more than one hundred and thirty leagues between the summits of the Meneth Scahas, rendered Shield-Range, and the Sea which had uncovered them as the Ice consumed it. They were the thin edge of the blade upon which the Kingdoms of Men in that quarter of the world now balanced; and, for all those men knew, they were alone.
The Long Winter
To the North and South the glaciers had closed in, many millennia since, cold fingers of squeezing fists. This was an Ice Age, though which one the Chronicles treat of remains uncertain. That at least one such earlier age had occurred, in which the fathers of the duergar fled first to the hollow hills opened for them by Ilmarinen, is well established in the Chronicles. There are hints, though, of an earlier still, and other realms whose fragmentary relics could still be found in remote corners of the lands; and the tales of the duergar agree.
It is the image of such ages that the whole world was caught beneath an eternity of cold, an unchanging winter landscape; but this was not so, not even on the strips of half-frozen country that marked the margins of the Ice, that would now be called tundra. The glaciers that clamped tight about the world from either pole had long since halted, seldom further south than the 45th parallel, and until Elof’s day it seemed they would come no further. A great band of land and sea still lay open and free; but within that band their weight had compressed the very weather, so that the climes were crushed closer together, and ran to extremes, with less graduation between them. So the equatorial regions, for all that the icecap lay twice as close, became far hotter, a belt of burning desert. Yet these realms of Ice and fire were the more sharply boundaried, and between them there lay still a temperate zone where life endured, and in which men, and many other creatures, strove to survive.
The Lands of Men
The heart of the continent, where the realm of Morvan had been carved out, lay once again crushed beneath the Ice and shrouded by the vast forests of Tapiau, and the Eastern seaboard was cut off and forgotten. Only the West, shielded by the high peaks of the Meneth Scahas, young, raw and jagged, still offered lands clear for men.
It was the deserts that marked the southernmost boundary of Ker Bryhaine, mirrored at sea by an area of fierce tempest and baking, terrible calms; both, it was said, under the rule of great and secretive Powers. Whether by sea or land, men who strayed into this realm seldom returned. Yet along the desert’s rim broad rivers flowed, making the land more fertile for all its heat, and with careful cultivation great fields and orchards throve. North of this region the climes grew swiftly more temperate, until they achieved the balmy warmth in which the great city of Ker Bryhaine was founded and flourished. No snow ever fell there, and winter was mild and wet; summer was long and easy, and the Ice seemed like a distant dream. Beyond the city the land grew slowly cooler, yet remained warm and fruitful to the northernmost boundaries, the Marchwarden’s realm. Beyond this lay only the barren Debatable Lands, encompassing the Great Marshes; and to the early settlers of the South, themselves of warm-country stock, it seemed that the lands beyond could hardly be worth exploring. Yet it proved otherwise.
The Northlands, for the most part, were only slightly colder than the South, and though the land was more rugged and the soil less rich, in their southern regions life flourished as freely. But once again the compression of climes was very sudden, and towards the north they grew swiftly colder. Like today’s Northlands they suffered bitter winters and fierce summers; yet because they lay along more southerly latitudes, the balance was different. Winters were shorter and less destructive, summers longer, and they were divided by true autumns and springs. The best of Northern climes lay along the coasts, warmed perhaps by ocean currents; yet some of those washed the feet of the sea-glaciers, and bore south the fearsome ice-islands that were their heralds. The coastlands, too, lay further from the winds that blew off the great Ice, and the water that flowed from it. The far North inland, Kunrad’s country, was proverbially chill; wind and water rarely felt warm, even under a high summer sun. North of that, at the mountains’ feet, the land became tundra, beneath whose shallow soil ice lay and never wholly thawed. In places, as at the pass Kunrad came to, this was hardly noticeable; but as the Meneth Scahas spread out into the wider, northward-reaching Nordenbergen, so at their feet it spread out across the high rolling moors of the Starkenfells, unforgiving country where only wild and hardy men dared dwell.
Kunrad’s homeland was healthy enough for the young; but in a long-lived era few achieved any great span. The old marked out their lives by winters.
The Ice
For most men at this time the Ice was barely a presence. Even to Kunrad’s folk, who dwelt some six or seven leagues from its mountain frontiers, it was no more than a rumour, a chill taint on the wind and a cold light below the horizon on winter nights. They knew enough to fear it, and not even their boldest huntsmen or ore-hungry smiths went near it. The courage of those who stayed with Kunrad is all the more remarkable.
That it made an impression is evident from the unusually detailed description of the terrain at the glacier’s foot. It corresponds to many that can still be seen, not least in its abrupt and startling barrenness and sterility. Haldin’s description of how the characteristic rockfield was formed shows that much had been learned in the bleak years around Morvan. The tearing power of a glacier upon solid rock is terrible to contemplate, and its effect upon the landscape, the hollowed-out mountainsides and scooped-out vales, the scarred rocks and scattered debris from vast distances, is awesome to behold even after the passage of many millennia.
Only the colour of the outflow pools is at all unusual. The greenish tinge may possibly result from some mineral such as olivine dolerite, not uncommon in raw granites. It could also derive from some heavy concentration of metallic ore, such as copper, ground out by the glacier’s passage; that would certainly create the unpleasant taste noted, and in sufficient concentration would be poisonous. However, both of these might tend to settle in particles, rather than create a uniform hue. It is possible, therefore, that the green was some strain of algae or other microscopic life, sufficiently small to be ignored by the Ice, or poisonous enough to be of service to it in clearing away all higher forms.
Flora and Fauna
Living things were also much as Elof knew them; but Kunrad’s viewpoint was more limited. His travels, wide as they were, took him mostly through land inhabited, or at least explored, by men, and, save in the Marshes, he encountered less of the era’s more remarkable animal life. Having spent most of his life in a harsh, narrow land, however, he seems to have been deeply impressed by the abundance of nature further south, and not least by the trees. He loved them, and one of his first acts was to replant Yn Aruel where the furnace had burned. The Marshes made an impression of a different kind.
Trees
In Kunrad’s country trees were sparse, with none of the wide evergreen woodlands found nearer the coast. Pines seem to have been dominant, mostly tougher and more thrawn varieties like the whitebark, and even the gnarled bristlecone pine, much commoner then than today. Only in the more sheltered valleys was there some mixed woodland, chiefly aspens, birches, and elms, and a few tall red cedars and other junipers. The sugar maple, or a sweet-sapped relative, also grew there, although none are found so far west today, and also the deciduous redwood Metasequoia glyptostroboides, now gone from the land altogether. There may have been a few evergreen redwoods (probably the coast species, Sequoia sempervirens, since most others had already been wip
ed out by the Ice), but at nothing like their full growth.
Little wonder, therefore, that he was so struck by the redwood forests of southern Nordeney. The original descriptions are detailed enough to name these as probably the giant redwood, Sequoiadendron giganteum, but even larger than present specimens. The ring phenomenon he saw, in which redwood saplings grow up round the stump of their fallen ancestor, is still visible in surviving forests, and in the fossil record. Such ghostly presences testify to trees some ten to thirty per cent broader, if not taller, than the present record. In Kunrad’s day they still dominated the landscape; his impression was that men dwelt among them, rather than the reverse. By Elof’s time, however, the growing population had drastically shifted the balance to farmland, and the woods, though still extensive, existed almost on sufferance. After the fall of the Western Realms and the return of the Sea, they revived somewhat; but never again achieved their primal grandeur.
Coastal redwoods were also common in the north of Bryhaine, the Marchwarden’s dominions. In the low lying terrain around the Marshlands oaks grew thickly, along with hickory, hazel, sycamore and riverine species such as alders, but as the land climbed towards the mountains the redwoods and other evergreens returned. The lake of Ker an Aruel was quite high-lying, among the mountain’s roots, and surrounded by mixed forests which must have seemed like richer versions of those Kunrad was used to, the white and green and yellow of birches against the darker walls of evergreens; the colours of the castle and the Wardenship were green and gold. It may be one reason he felt so much at home there.
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