travel by sea you have these crowded coastal ports full of starving nestspills, and everybody’s out on the ocean fighting for the catch, and you have pirates who’ve got bolder and bolder. Why, I’m told the market for slaves from the west, shipped over to what’s left of the countries in the east, is one of the healthiest businesses in the world.
‘So your son and his party want to avoid all that mucking about. Go across country. That way they’ll only have to deal with a few starving farmers, and wild animals who are as confused as we are. Tell them Myrcan said so. Now, do you want some more of this reasonably priced nectar or shall I stopper it for you to take home?’
From such recommendations, and partly because of all of them it was only the Coldlander boy who seemed to have any idea of how this journey might actually be achieved, the decision was made: overland it would be, after a short sea crossing to the southern shore of Ibera.
The Carthaginian authorities were lavish in funding Pyxeas’ expedition, in a mood of nervous gratitude. Or perhaps the city just wanted rid of him, he joked. So the party gathered equipment and supplies, heavy jackets, breeches, hats and boots made from the fur of seals and bear, meat and fish dried and salted, pickled vegetables in clay pots — and a carriage.
Pyxeas took a great deal of interest in helping Avatak design this carriage. In its initial incarnation it would be a heavy horse-drawn cart with stout iron-rimmed wheels. It would bear a small canvas shelter at all times, so Pyxeas could stay in the warm and the dry while they travelled. Pyxeas even had a metal plate installed in the floor so they could build a fire in the back. But when they had to travel across snow and ice the carriage’s wheels and axles could be detached, and long polished runners exposed so the cart became a sled. Pyxeas had a lot of fun with this, devising little mechanisms whereby the axles could be detached by loosening a few bolts and pulling levers. Rina saw a side of him she had never known before. All her life he had essentially been an old man. This was how he must once have been as a child, a bright boy tinkering with gadgets, just as the scholar would one day try to take apart the mechanisms of the world itself.
Suddenly they were ready to go.
A good crowd assembled by the dock in the great Carthaginian harbour to see them off. Pyxeas’ fame as a scholar had been wide even before his monumental trip to Cathay. Avatak too, a sturdy, exotic-looking young man, was an object of curiosity, though he seemed completely unaware of it. As the small ship was loaded with their goods Nelo made a few last sketches of Carthage’s astonishing harbour, the low light catching the long stretches of docks, jetties and warehouses, the crowd of spectators, and the vendors who, as ever, turned up from nowhere to sell people stuff they didn’t know they needed.
Rina struggled with her feelings. She thought she had lost Nelo emotionally because of the blood sacrifice she had had to make of him, and then she feared she had lost him altogether to the war. Now she was going to lose him again, to the ice, to the longwinter, to Pyxeas’ strange ambitions. Even as she had worked on the preparations, her mother’s heart had been ripped apart shred by shred.
In the end she could not bear to wait for the final departure, the last embrace, the waving from the shore as the ship pulled away. She couldn’t help it, even if it was yet another betrayal. She fled to her office in the city and buried herself in work, until Nelo’s ship had sailed.
73
The ship out of Carthage took them west, through the strait into the Western Ocean, and then to a Carthaginian port in southern Ibera, at the mouth of a mighty river. The port was working, the harbour crowded with shipping, the town itself bustling. But Avatak, having seen a dozen ports on the way back home on the Arab trader, had learned how to read a town, a countryside. He quickly saw that the ships were bringing in food, armour, other supplies, and they were taking out people, more nestspills, all heading south. The country that had once sustained this port had become a threat to it; the landward city walls were heavily armed against rough camps of nestspills beyond. But that was the country across which they must travel.
They spent three days spending Carthaginian money on what they needed for the next stage. They hired a riverboat to take them deep into the interior of the country, and a troop of the port’s city guard for protection. Their elaborate carriage was loaded on board the boat.
They sailed out beyond the protection of the city walls by night, to minimise the threat from the great band of nestspills, bandits and warlords that surrounded the walls. The weather inland was cloudy, blustery, cold, and it frequently rained, the water pooling on the hard earth. The soldiers from the coast huddled under leathers and gambled over games played with broken bits of bone. Pyxeas spent much of his time working in the little shelter on the carriage, or dozing.
They passed by empty towns on the riverbank, and huge plantations where once olive trees had grown in great numbers.Now it was all gone, the weather too wet and cold for the olives, the people bankrupted, fled or starved. But the land was not barren, Avatak saw; in places swathes of grass glowed green in the rare sunlight. Nelo sketched all this compulsively, on Egyptian paper scraped so thin you could almost see through it.
Pyxeas, on one of his rare ventures out of his tent, nudged Avatak in the ribs. ‘Remember the steppe? One day soon, it may only be centuries, this place will be an ocean of grass too, just as we saw in the heart of Asia. The great-grandchildren of these boatmen and laughing soldiers will be horse-riding nomads, and herds of fleet beasts will cross these plains like the shadows of clouds. I, Pyxeas, predict this.’
Himil looked baffled. ‘I do not question your conclusions, scholar. But how can you know all this?’
The scholar smiled and tapped his temple. ‘From observations of the world — from patterns deduced, and stored in my memory — from understanding the superhuman rhythms of the ice.’
Himil just stared. Then, when the scholar had withdrawn, he turned to Avatak. ‘
Avatak shrugged.
But Nelo said, ‘I thought he was trying to teach you. I know he’s come up with some big idea about why the longwinter is happening.’
‘Yes. We were on a ship when he said he got it, the final solution. Pirates were smashing in our heads at the time.’
‘Didn’t he
‘I stopped listening. It’s all-’ he searched for the word
‘True enough, my friend,’ said Himil.
Nelo asked, ‘Then why did you stay with my uncle?’
Avatak looked at the old man. ‘For what’s inside him. Not his knowledge, all those numbers. Which is all he thinks there is to him.’
‘What then?’
‘His sadness. At what he saw before anybody else saw it, before a single flake of snow had fallen. Sadness for the world, and all of us who must live in it. Even the generations to come. That’s why I stay with him.’
Nelo considered this. ‘You’re a good man, my friend.’
Avatak shrugged.
They followed the river upstream, travelling roughly north-west for some days, until they came to another large city, far inland. They left the boat here; it returned to the coast, taking the soldiers with it, and they were on their own.
This city was a mere shadow of what it must once have been. It had extensive walls, breached, burned and roughly repaired. Inside the walls whole suburbs looked abandoned, burned out. The country beyond seemed empty, with only a tracery of the walls of abandoned farms to be seen. Avatak wondered, in fact, how the city kept functioning at all.
‘And no dogs,’ Himil said. ‘Have you noticed that? No barking. And no cats. Or cage birds singing.’
‘All long gone into the pot,’ Nelo said gloomily.
