Iron Winter

18

The storm blew itself out overnight.

The next morning the Annids’ priority was to organise teams to dig their way out of the Wall, through snow that lay thick on the roof and was heaped up in deep drifts on the landward side. It took until midday to secure safe access to the roof.

In the early afternoon Ywa and Rina, dressed for the sake of morale in their formal Annid robes, walked up to the parapet. They used a staircase, for the elevators were still out, and would be, along with the heating and running water and other systems, until the mechanikoi could make their repairs to the engines. They emerged into brilliant sunshine, under a clear blue sky. Just here, over Etxelur, the Wall roof had been scraped clean of snow from one face to the other. Further out, Rina could see, only the central track of the Iron Way had so far been cleared; the snow lay heaped up in great banks to either side of the rail. There were no caravans running this morning. Rina saw people plodding through the cleared spaces, dark, slumped shapes in the brilliant light.

‘That sun is actually warm,’ she said now, and she lifted her face to its light. ‘But then it is only early autumn. That will cheer everybody up.’

‘Not the dead or the grieving, it won’t,’ Ywa said tightly. She was drawn, tense, her eyes hollow with exhaustion, and she had a smear of blood on her cheek.

Rina had spent the night huddled in her own apartment in the Wall, simply enduring. Ywa had been out working, trying to stabilise an ever-changing situation, and to save lives. Rina, faintly guilty, realised she had got off lightly But Alxa had not yet come home, and a worm of worry burrowed in her stomach.

They walked to the rim of the parapet and looked out over Etxelur, and Northland. The snow blanketed the land, smoothing out some details but oddly enhancing others, Rina noticed, walls and ridges and gullies picked out by sharp blue shadows. The great waterways, the canals, were plated with ice, shining silver in the sunlight. All over the landscape people were moving, dark huddles trying to force their way through the snow. The snow had drifted in great mounds against the face of the Wall itself, and lay thick on its ledges and walkways and buttresses. From up here the dreadful collapse of the Hall of Annids was clearly visible. People still worked down there, still dug into the bloodied snow.

Ywa said now, ‘What are we to do, Rina? How are we to cope?’

‘We will recover,’ Rina said firmly. ‘The mechanikoi will get the engines started again. We will rebuild. The Coldlanders ought to be a model for us. If they can survive their harsh winters, so can we.’

‘Come, Rina, don’t try to fill me with false hope, that’s not what I need you for. We are not like Coldlanders. We depend on a network of systems, of flows of goods and people. Now all that is disrupted, from the food supply to the drains. Even before the blizzard we were already stretched to the limit. And winter has barely begun, Rina. What if uncle Pyxeas is right that next winter is going to be just as bad, and the next after that?’

Rina said nothing. But now she recalled the advice Pyxeas had given his family. That they must go, flee to the south before the crowd, before it was too late to travel at all. She pushed that thought firmly to the back of her mind, but she knew it would not be forgotten.

‘Mother?’

It was Alxa’s voice, cutting through her thoughts like a knife through soft fat. Rina whirled. A group of battered people, swathed in soaked, filthy clothing, some of them blood-smeared, came limping along the Iron Way track from the east. One separated from the rest and hurried forward, trembling and wide-eyed with exhaustion.

Rina ran to her daughter, who fell into her arms.