Iron Winter

30

Pyxeas and his party, heading steadily east, were in a more varied country now, of arid plains, green valleys, towering snow-capped peaks. Water was more readily had, there was grass for the camels to graze on, and the caravanserai were more frequent, often no more than an easy day’s ride apart. Here the way stations were called robats, in the local tongue, which came from an old word for a rope to tie up your horse. But just as further west, they were like small walled towns where you drove your animals into the shelter of the walls for the duration of your stay.

In the evenings, as Pyxeas studied or slept, Avatak sat shyly in bars with Jamil and Uzzia. Uzzia drank beer and wine and a particularly disgusting concoction that turned out to be fermented mare’s milk, a speciality of the Mongols. Jamil preferred hot tea, and when he wasn’t happy with the local offering he asked for boiling water and used dried leaves he carried with him. As for Avatak, who got drunk too easily, he stuck to watered beer. He listened to conversations in a hundred tongues, about the wealth that flowed through these little communities, from gleaming gems called rubies to the medicines and narcotics made from the produce of the poppy fields which spread wide to either side of the trails across much of this country. There were plenty of blood-chilling tales of bandits too.

In the mornings on they went, part of an ever-evolving caravan, heading always into the morning sun. At each stop the caravans fissured and split, and new trains formed up for the onward journey. Soon they traded away their camels for horses that would be more suited to the high, mountainous country to come, so Avatak was told. The mule plodded on, apparently unimpressed.

The land became more difficult, steeper, arid for long stretches, and their progress seemed painfully slow. Petty problems slowed them further: illness, scorpion bites, brackish water from fouled springs, lamed horses. Much of the summer still stretched ahead, but old Pyxeas was already fretting about the need to reach far Cathay before the autumn closed in.

One morning, crossing a highland at the foot of a mountain, they heard a deep groaning from beyond the eastern horizon, like the bellow of some tremendous animal, punctuated by sharp cracks. They all knew what this was, the locals and traders from experience, and Avatak and Pyxeas from memories of Coldland. Pyxeas was excited by the sound and insisted they hurry ahead.

They came to a glacier, a river of ice pouring down the mountain’s flank. The back of the great ice beast was littered with rubble, smashed-up rock and timber, and relics of human living: wood panels, posts, what looked like a section of fencing. A river of meltwater gushed from the glacier’s snout, littered with ice blocks, washing across the plain below. There were tremendous cracks and groans as the vast weight of ice pushed and jostled, seeking an elusive equilibrium.

Jamil, Uzzia and the other traders laboured to get the horses and their single mule across the meltwater stream. The sun was high, the air clear, the ice gleamed brilliant white, and the frothy water spreading across the plain below was the colour of the sky. Close to the glacier the stream with its ice blocks was impossible for the animals to cross, and the beasts had to be walked downstream to calmer water. There the travellers cast ropes across, clambered through the chill flow themselves, and then began to lead the laden animals one by one.

Avatak felt guilty not to be down there helping them. But Pyxeas had no regard for these petty human struggles; he had eyes only for the grand, cold drama of the glacier itself.

‘Look, boy, can you see how the glacier is born up in that hollow in the mountainside? It flows down this valley,’ and Pyxeas mimed the movement with great sweeps of his arms, ‘grinding and smashing as it goes, ripping away any surface soil, any trees, any living thing, cutting down right to the bedrock and then cutting into that — and then it flows down onto the plain below. And I can see, Avatak, that this glacier’s advance from its mountain root has been fast, and recent. Old glaciers, having retreated, leave behind ridges of rubble, fragments of rock they have smashed up and pushed down their valleys. Where is this glacier’s rubble wall? Gone! A relic of past longwinters, overwhelmed by this fresh advance. And this glacial drama is only the start of it, only the start of the reign of the ice.’

‘Scholar, the people speak of all this. In the robats. You should listen to them sometimes. They live in the valleys, beneath the glaciers. They keep animals, farm. Then comes the ice, and avalanches, and sometimes great floods where the ice makes dams that trap water for a while, and then break. They have to flee. You can see the remains of their homes on the ice itself.’

Pyxeas, faintly surprised, nodded. ‘Yes, yes. Good. But such accounts are merely anecdotal, of course. Well. Let us rejoin our companions.’ He took Avatak’s arm and stood stiffly.