Iron Winter

purposeless wretches off the face of the earth, just so long as they got out of his way.

Just like the nestspills, however, Barmocar and his party were excluded from Massalia. It was fear of the plague, yes, that and a shortage of food. But his party was allowed to pass around the city to the harbour — and here, to everybody’s relief, the ships he had ordered were waiting, at least some of them. Again there was a weary flurry of packing and repacking, a shedding of still more goods, by now endured in grim silence.

Nelo was fascinated by the ships. They were quite unlike the wide-bodied sailing ships of the Northland fishing fleet. These vessels of the Middle Sea were sleek, driven by sails supplemented by banks of rowers, and they had mighty spikes fixed to their prows. They were ships designed to fight on an enclosed ocean that had been an arena for warfare for millennia.

As the ships were loaded, on this summer afternoon in Massalia, on the shore of the Middle Sea, the sky clouded over, and the air grew cold, and Rina watched snowflakes, just a few, fall from the sky.

They left the harbour the next day, at dawn. The wind was low, and they had to take to the oars; the professional seamen Barmocar had hired were supplemented by volunteers from among the passengers.

Cautiously they sailed down the eastern coast of Ibera. On the open sea Barmocar’s soldiers kept an eye out for pirates. At night they put into land at small harbours away from the main population centres. Nobody knew what condition the communities on land were in after years of drought, after the plague. Some slept on the land; Rina, who found the movement of the creaking ship on the slow swell of the sea quite soothing, preferred to remain on board.

One night Rina was woken by a wind off the land that made the ship heave and roll, and the air moaned in the rigging.

When the morning came she found the ship transformed, heaped with red-yellow dust, in the hatches, over the decks, drifting in every corner. The crew, ill-tempered, were shovelling this load into the sea. The dust was due to a storm blowing from the coast, Rina learned. Desiccated farmland, topsoil turned to dust by years of drought and just blown away. The dust had got everywhere, wherever a window or hatch hadn’t been sealed — into your clothes, your hair, in the fabric of the ships’ sails. It took a full day for the little fleet to be dug out.

The journey resumed. After two more days the fleet turned south away from the mainland of southern Ibera, with the crew nervously watching the horizon for pirates. Soon, the word ran around the ships, they would at last come into Carthage. Rina knew her troubles were far from over, but at least this journey with all its trials would end, and she would never have to make such a trek again. She felt an enormous relief, like a physical weight lifted from her shoulders. And she wondered how close her uncle was to his goal.

32

Day by day Pyxeas’ party climbed. The air grew clearer and colder, the sky more blue. The sun felt stronger than ever to Avatak, and he kept his exposed skin covered with Uzzia’s greasy unguents. The ground was bare and hard and rocky, and ice-bound mountains stood around, gleaming a brilliant white in the clear sunlight. In places they followed ridges from which they looked down upon ice-coated slopes, and they could see glaciers pouring into valleys below, every detail clear, the merging ice flows and meltwater streams like models made by some sculptor of plaster and paint.

There were no people up here, no more caravanserai. Yet there was life. Sometimes Avatak glimpsed wild sheep, their coats grey-white, clambering up impossible-looking slopes to get at the sparse tufts of bright green grass. Jamil said there were wolves up here too, feeding on the sheep. And there were rumours of humans, ragged hunters in skins who preyed on the flocks with small bows, but who were timid and secretive and rarely seen. Those locals who had come this way before had their own names for this place. Jamil called it ‘the roof of the world’.

And still they climbed, and climbed. Avatak found his lungs dragging at the thinning air, and the horses laboured. When they stopped, the fires they built seemed to burn only fitfully, and Jamil grumbled that when water boiled it was no more than lukewarm, and spoiled his evening tea. Some of the locals, especially the hard-working bearers, were afflicted with headaches, nausea, giddiness, episodes of passing out.

Uzzia tended to these victims. ‘I’ve seen such symptoms before. Mountain sickness. If you’re used to the high ground it’s not so bad, and best of all is to have been born up here. But if you’re born a lowlander you can suffer. Some of these fellows have probably never come up here before, never dreamed they’d have to, before the advance of one of your master’s glaciers forced them out of their farms, to come labour for us like your mule.’

‘He’s not my mule. He’s his own, I think.’

She laughed. ‘And if he’s a lowlander he’s not showing it.’

Pyxeas had an explanation for everything. He said the sickness was caused by the thinness of the air at altitude, and a lack of a particular part of the air he called ‘the vital air’, necessary for life, and indeed for the sustenance of fires, as experiments had shown. As for Pyxeas himself, he actually seemed to thrive in the thin air. He even took to walking a spell each day, rather than riding. ‘Do you know,’ he said, as he trotted alongside his companions one morning, ‘the worst blight of old age is the constant pain. In your head, in your back, your joints, your bowels — somewhere. Constant, nagging, continual pain. Nobody talks about it, or if they do nobody younger ever listens, but it’s there all the same. Up here, though, my own various aches, my faithful companions for years, are lessened — some of them gone altogether. Make a note, Avatak.’

‘Yes, scholar.’

Still they climbed.

It grew colder. They woke to morning ground frost, and patches of old ice in the shadows of rocks and ridges. Pyxeas was fascinated by this, but fretted. ‘When we try to return, in a year, two years, we might not be able to come this way again.’

Uzzia growled, ‘If we make it to Cathay, we’ll find another way back. But in the meantime, sage — watch your step!’

And there was the silence. Avatak was increasingly aware of it, behind the small noises of the people, their morning coughs, their soft voices, the clink of pots hanging from the mule’s back — a huge silence that stretched to the mountains all around them. It wasn’t just the absence of people. It was the absence of any sound at all. Not even the sound of birds, he realised, not even their caws and cries and songs. Maybe the birds could not fly in this thin air. Pyxeas might be interested in the observation, but he would only make Avatak dig out his journal and write it down, so he kept the thought to himself.

Then they came to a meadow in the sky. It was a high, broad plain, suspended between two looming mountains. A meadow, complete with thick grass and dancing wild flowers. There were sheep up here, fat-looking beasts who fled at the party’s approach. All of this lay under a brilliant blue sky, the green of the grass and the sheep’s pale wool vivid. It was like a dream, Avatak thought; it seemed impossible this could be real, could be here. The horses tore eagerly at the rich grass. Even the mule could barely conceal its pleasure at the lush pasture.

Jamil and Uzzia both knew this place. ‘Here we will stop,’ Jamil said firmly. ‘For two nights, three, while the horses feed, and we rest.’

Avatak could see the wisdom of it. By now the party was much reduced: just the four travellers of Pyxeas’ party, and two other traders, Arabs who had kept to themselves from the beginning of the trek, and six local bearers and guides. They were all exhausted; they all needed time to get used to the air.

Still, Avatak was surprised that Pyxeas agreed to the stop readily. ‘But the timing is good,’ the scholar said. ‘Tonight the eclipse is due. Make sure you have the oracle ready, boy.’

Uzzia, unpacking her own bundles, glanced over. ‘What eclipse?’

Jamil grunted. ‘What is an “eclipse”?’

‘An eclipse is a shadow play. When the world falls into the shadow of the moon, and the sun’s light is blocked out. . or, as tonight, when the moon enters the shadow of the earth, and turns the colour of blood.’ Pyxeas had been in good spirits for days, buoyed up by the thin air. Now it was almost as if he was drunk. ‘A world of shadow, a moon of blood!’ He repeated the words in other, fragmentary languages: Uzzia’s Hatti, Jamil’s Arabic, even in broken phrases in the harsh local argot.

The men working at the horses glanced across at him, and then up at the sunlit sky, uneasy. Jamil, watching,