Iron Winter

It wasn’t because they were in any way less intelligent than the scholar’s Northlander folk, Avatak had come to see. In most ways that counted, his own father, say, was much brighter than Pyxeas, certainly when it came to the brutal business of staying alive. And the people’s shared memory, stored in the epic songs they sang together through the winter, was detailed and accurate. No, it wasn’t a question of intelligence. It was a question of how you thought about the world — not as a plaything of the gods to be accepted without question, but as a puzzle to be solved. And Avatak was drawn to the way Pyxeas’ mind worked as he challenged this huge, baffling, complex, secretive puzzle, and to the sheer delight the man showed when some small piece of it was resolved, and the world made a little more sense.

So he had worked with the man. Pyxeas had taught Avatak to read and write the way the Northlanders did — how to think. And Avatak had shown Pyxeas how to keep from falling on his backside with every other step on the ice. They were a good team.

But Avatak had glimpsed something darker in Pyxeas. A kind of sadness, he thought. If Pyxeas had family, children, he never mentioned it, but sometimes he reminded Avatak of a grieving, bereft father. Pyxeas himself was a puzzle. And that was the reason Avatak had chosen to work with him.

At last they passed a pinnacle of frost-shattered rock, and their view of the ocean opened up fully. Here Pyxeas stopped, panting, and even he was awed to silence, if only briefly.

The two of them had come here only days ago, but everything about the panorama had changed. Then the glacier had terminated in a mass of dirty, blocky ice that had fanned out into the sea, merging at last with the salty pack ice that littered the ocean surface. Now that whole formation had gone, the grimy blocking mass had vanished, and the glacier as it reached the sea was much thicker, and was truncated by a veritable cliff of blue-green ice from which bergs splintered and sailed away into a chaotic, half-frozen ocean.

‘I knew it,’ Pyxeas breathed. ‘I knew it! The glacier here was blocked in by its own deposited ice, a natural dam. But such was the pressure of the glacier, thicker and faster-flowing than it has been for centuries, that the dam must, at last, give. And when it did, the glacier bounded forward like an animal loosed from a cage — and the result is as you see, tremendous masses of ice dumped into the ocean.’ He was almost breathless with the sheer delight of being proven right. ‘Can you see what this means, boy? What are the implications?’

Avatak watched the icebergs sail away. ‘Trouble for the fishermen,’ he said.

‘Well, yes,’ Pyxeas said testily. ‘But that’s hardly the big picture.’ He made swirling gestures with his mittened hands. ‘Like the ice cap, the ocean and the air above are dynamic systems — huge bodies of air and water that swirl around the world, transporting heat and moisture. Now, what do you imagine is going to happen when all this ice-cold fresh water is injected into the salty currents of the sea?’

Avatak had learned the student’s trick of turning the scholar’s questions back on him. ‘What do you think?’

‘Well, I’m not sure. Nobody is. But. .’ Abruptly the energy seemed to go out of him, and the pleasure, and he sat down. He fished a scrap of parchment out of a pocket. ‘Make a note of the date, boy. Listen now. One. Two. Three. One. Two. One. Two. One. One. Five. Five.’

Avatak mumbled the numbers. ‘That is a date?’

‘In our oldest calendar, the Long Count, yes. We Northlanders have been counting the days, each day, since the year of the Second Great Sea, which is more than seven thousand years ago. Ours is the oldest, and the most accurate, calendar in the world.’ He couldn’t resist a chance to lecture. ‘In the old system we counted in powers of five. And we had no zero, so it’s all a little clumsy. We count in eleven cycles, with the last being a cycle of five days, and the first being a grand cycle of five multiplied by itself ten times.’

Avatak thought that over. ‘So we’re still in the first of those big cycles.’

‘Yes.’

‘What will happen in the future? When you run out of those big cycles?’

Pyxeas stared at him, and laughed. ‘That won’t happen for a hundred thousand years. But it’s a good question. I dare say we’ll agree on some extension to the system before then. Just remember the date, boy. Remember this day.’

‘Why?’

The scholar looked out at the sea, the glacier, the jumbled ice. ‘Because today is the day I have proved, at least to my own satisfaction, that the longwinter is on us.’

That word was a new one for Avatak. ‘The longwinter, scholar? What does that mean?’

Pyxeas looked at him bleakly. ‘Why, that the world is changing. Death will cut across the continents. Northland must die, Avatak.’

He said this bleakly, simply, and while Avatak still did not understand, he saw that Pyxeas told the truth as he believed it. And now he saw where the sadness within the scholar came from. A sadness for the whole world, which would suffer from a blight none other could yet see.

Avatak said, ‘Then what must we do?’

Pyxeas smiled. ‘Convince others of this. But that will take time. We have work to do, my boy — work, and lots of it! And in the summer we must take our conclusions to Northland, and the councils of Etxelur itself.’

We, he had said. We must go to Northland. Pyxeas had spoken like this before. He seemed to just assume that Avatak would leave his home, his responsibilities to his family — Uuna, to whom he was betrothed — and follow him to an alien country to pursue this strange, lofty project.

Would Avatak go? Of course he would. How could he not? Thanks to Pyxeas, his head rattled with strange ideas and vivid dreams. But it would take some explaining to Uuna, and her mother who had never much liked Avatak anyhow.

And, he thought, if Northland was to die, what would become of Coldland?

The glacier shuddered anew under their feet. Avatak took the scholar’s mittened hand and drew him away from the crumbling edge, and back to the security of the land.

3

The First Year of the Longwinter: Midsummer Solstice

‘The steam caravan is late.’ Thaxa watched the sun, which had already passed its highest point on this midsummer day. He squinted up at the elaborate mechanical clock face built into the light tower over his head, and looked along the gleaming track of the Iron Way, bonded to the roof of the Wall on which he stood with his wife. ‘If the envoys from Daidu don’t arrive, the afternoon is going to be awkward to say the least. And that wretched uncle of yours is late too. At this rate we won’t get the ceremonies done before they fire the end-of-day eruptors.’

Rina tried to hide her irritation at her husband’s fretting. It didn’t help that she was cold too. She tucked her hands into the cuffs of her long-sleeved robe; it was the peak of summer yet there was a chill in the air, and there had been a ground frost when she rose this morning. ‘Try to be calm. You don’t want to alarm our guests.’ Who stood to either side of Rina and Thaxa in a row on this parapet atop the Wall, representatives of nations from across much of the known world, more of them riding up to the roof in the steam elevators all the time. Near Rina, for example, were three women of the Western Continents, strangers before they had travelled, Rina had learned, from different nations and dressed as differently as could be imagined, standing together now like exotic birds of variegated plumages. This was a typical scene in Etxelur, on midsummer day, the world brought together in Northland hospitality. ‘As for Uncle Pyxeas, I’m imagining Crimm is doing his best to bring him back across the ocean. But Pyxeas hardly matters.’

‘He’s to address the Water Council about the weather changes he thinks are coming.’

‘For the foreigners the issue at this Giving is dried fish, not maunderings about the weather. Oh, stop fussing and fidgeting, Thaxa! There’s nothing we can do about the Daidu caravan, or my uncle. When there is nothing to do but wait, then you wait.’

‘I do my best to support you, you know,’ he said with only the mildest exasperation at her ill temper.

This was the reality of their relationship, as, at the age of fifty years and nearly thirty years of marriage, they