Iron Winter

these fellows. What I have to say is for your ears first. You and the other Annids — the Water Council. For the ears of Northlanders. Then you can decide what to say to your guests.’

Ywa considered this for a long moment. Then she stood and turned to the delegates. ‘Forgive me. We must withdraw for a private session. We will resume in the morning. I assure you we have taken all you have said into our hearts. In the meantime please enjoy our hospitality. Thaxa, perhaps you could ensure that everything is organised?’

‘Of course.’ Alxa’s father got to his feet with a beaming, inclusive smile; this was what he was good at. ‘Please wait, you will be served refreshments, while I arrange for escorts and guides for all of you. .’ As he hurried from the room, the foreigners, scowling or shaking their heads, got up and began to mill around the Hall.

8

They gathered in an anteroom, much smaller than the formal Hall. Here the Annids and the House elders loosened their formal clothing and stripped off their stiff cloaks, sat informally on benches and chairs, and sipped water and tea brought to them by the servants Ywa summoned.

Only Pyxeas stood, at the centre of the room, with his Coldlander companion at his side. Alxa remembered her great-uncle from the long-gone days of her childhood, a big, beaming, avuncular man who would play clumsy magic tricks, and later he had tried to coax a little scholarship into her head. But looking at the expression on his face now, and having heard so much dismal news already today, she feared what he had to say.

The scholar began speaking even before they were all seated. ‘You must understand how my conclusions remain contingent upon the information I was to have been supplied by the Cathay scholars. Without that-’

Out of hearing of the foreigners, Ywa gave way to her irritation. ‘You went to Coldland with the financial support of the Water Council-’

‘And my travels aren’t done, by the way.’

‘You were given this support on the understanding that you would learn sufficient about the changing weather to enable us to understand what comes next, for us and the world.’

‘There can never be a definitive answer, that’s not in the nature of philosophy-’

‘Now you have interrupted the bounty ceremony and carted us all off in here, and the mothers only know what our guests will make of that!’

‘You’ll understand why when I tell you-’

‘Tell us, then, man! What have you learned?’

He paused, and considered. ‘Only that we have the answers already. The cause of the dismal seasons we are suffering, as attested across the Continent too. Our ancestors knew it all along — or rather, they remembered.

‘Avatak, give me that scroll — no, boy, that one.’ He took the yellowing scroll, rolled it out, and began to read. ‘In the beginning was the Gap. / The awful interval between being and not being. / The tension of emptiness caused the creation of an egg, out of nothing. Its shell was ice and its contents were slush and mud and rock. / For an unmeasured time the egg was alone, silent.’

His gravelly voice, the familiar text, fixed the attention of everyone in the room. Alxa knew these words, as surely did everybody else. This was the mythos of Northland, the oldest, deepest part: the account of the earliest days, before history, before the Black Crime of Milaqa, before the heroism of Prokyid who defied the Second Great Sea, even before the exploits of Ana herself who had founded the Wall.

‘Then the egg shattered. / The fragments of its shell became ice giants, who swarmed and fought and devoured each other as they grew.

‘Meanwhile from the slush and mud grew the first mother. She gave birth to the three little mothers, and to their brother the sun, and to the earth serpent and the sky thunderbird. The first mother tended the ice giants as lovingly as her own cubs.

‘All time might have ended there, with the first mother and her family. / But for the restlessness and envy of the giants.

‘They fought each other for the attention of the mother, and drove off her true children. / At last, sadly but with love, she allowed the giants to destroy her in their wars.

‘Enraged and saddened, they threw the sun in the sky, and cast the little mothers into the dark. / Then they made the world from the mother’s body, the land from the bones of rock and the mud, the sea from her slush blood. / Their sculpting was violent and rough, which is why the world is such a jumble now, with shaved-off hills and valleys too big for the rivers that contain them. .’ He skipped ahead. ‘The three little mothers and the sun had stood by dismayed while the giants fought. / Now the mothers spoke to the sun, and together they woke the shell of ice, and asked her to lift the weight of death from the world. She did so, and the ice sailed into the sky to become the moon. / The three mothers touched the revealed world, and shaped the wreckage the ice giants had left behind into a living world. . I think that’s enough.’ He rolled up the scroll. ‘You see? You see?’ He slapped the scroll to emphasise his point. ‘It’s all — in — here.’

Rina scowled. ‘What is? By the mothers’ bones, don’t give us children’s stories, man.’

‘Children’s stories? Have you heard of Euhemerus?’

‘Who?’

‘Greek philosopher. Or perhaps Hatti. Died a long time ago. Anyhow he believed that our myths are our oldest account of ourselves. They’re not just stories, you see, though that’s what they teach you in school nowadays. They describe events that really happened. Important events, major, world-changing events. That’s why they were remembered, and written down, and why they became the strange sort of mass memory we call a myth.

‘And any of you could have confirmed the truth of those myths for yourselves, had you gone out in the world and looked, as have I, Pyxeas. If you had learned to read the great book of the world, as I and some others have learned. I have seen the shorelines of lakes long vanished. I have seen ridges of rubble strewn across the continents, left by the retreat of great ice sheets. I have seen valleys gouged by long-melted glaciers. And indeed you could have found the truth in our own Archive. We have records going back millennia — not even the Hatti, not even the Egyptians go back as far as we do-’

‘Oh, Uncle!’ Ywa cried. ‘Get to the point. Why did it start to rain five years ago, all across the Continent?’

‘Because the air got cooler. You must know that the air, invisible all around us, is a jumble of gases. It contains vital air which sustains a flame, and fixed air which is produced by a flame, and other inert components. And water! In the form of vapour.’ He glared at them. ‘Come on, come on! I taught too many of you these basic principles; have you forgotten how to think while I’ve been away?’

Alxa said slowly, remembering her lessons as she spoke, ‘When the air cools, it must drop the moisture it holds.’

He pointed at her. ‘Yes! You have it. The abnormal rainstorms themselves were a sign of the cooling of the air. Then as the rain washed out, the currents of the air were deflected — pushed away by the gathering cold in the north — and settled into a new pattern of persistent and dry winds from the west.’

‘Which,’ Ywa said, ‘eventually brought drought to the southern lands. Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Yes. But why is the air cooling, and indeed the world as a whole? The ultimate cause seems clear. .’ He dug out a bit of Albian chalk, and rapidly began to sketch on the plaster wall: a spinning sphere, its axis tilted, swooping on a curved path around a scribbled sun. ‘The earth! The world on which we stand, spinning and sailing through the void in a manner long ago determined by the Greek scholars brought to Northland by Pythagoras, and measured in detail by generations of astronomers. It’s a very precise art, you see; you can measure a star’s apparent position in the sky quite exactly. .’

Crimm the fisherman was a tough-looking man in his thirties. He sat in loose shirt and trousers, arms folded, legs outstretched, and he watched Pyxeas’ performance with a grin. ‘I got this stuff in my ear all the way back from Coldland. You wouldn’t believe he’s talking about sunshine, would you?’

Ywa seemed baffled. ‘Sunshine?’

‘Yes!’ Pyxeas cried. ‘The world’s spin is not unchanging, you see. The axis wobbles and nods, like a child’s top