Iron Winter

36

Pyxeas’ party descended from the land of ice and high meadows. Uzzia insisted they go slowly, for a traveller used to thin air could be as damaged by a sudden exposure to thicker air as easily as the other way around.

Slowly was all they could manage in any case. Having left Jamil under his cairn on the high desert, there were only the three of them now, the three survivors of the shattered caravan. Or four if you counted the mule. Pyxeas, for the sake of his pride, insisted on walking a few steps every day, but it was only a few steps before he had to be loaded up onto the back of the patient mule. He had never seemed older, never frailer, and his energy in the thin air of the roof of the world was a memory.

What was left of their baggage went on the mule’s back too, and on the backs of Uzzia and Avatak as they marched along. At least they were reasonably equipped. The robbery hadn’t been very efficient, and the panicking thieves had run off leaving a good deal of their own kit behind — clothes, blankets, water sacks, even boots. Avatak had been all for burning this stuff, but Uzzia persuaded him that if another man’s boots might save his life he should take them.

Pyxeas’ notes had been soiled and scattered, but were reasonably intact. Avatak saved the scroll on which he had been keeping his journal of the journey, and Pyxeas insisted he make an entry every day. Avatak did abandon his heavy hourglass. The oracle was smashed, but Pyxeas was set on keeping what was left of its case, despite its bulk. Uzzia plucked out a few gears from the oracle’s abandoned carcass, saying she might make a bracelet of them for a favourite niece in New Hattusa.

So they continued.

Coming down from the roof of the world didn’t mean the journey got any easier. Now they came to a stretch of terrain that Uzzia called ‘the Desert of No Return’. ‘Except,’ she said, ‘it’s not a true desert, and it must have been given that name by somebody or other who has returned. Make of that what you will.’ Desert or not, it was harsh, bleak country, where the water was sparse, brackish. It was a comfort to Avatak that Uzzia had come this way before, but everything seemed to be changing as the world entered Pyxeas’ longwinter; many of the springs Uzzia looked out for had dried up.

Still, they passed through some spectacular landscapes. There was a dry valley that cut through layers of rock, crimson and black, heaped up like a stack of paper pages. Pyxeas speculated about the process that must have laid down these layers in the earth, and then cut through them like a knife. But his mind, supported by an exhausted, starved, dried-out, failed body, was a feeble flicker these days. Avatak thought this landscape of dead rock was chilling; he longed for life.

Uzzia, more practical, said the valley was a good place to shelter. They laid up for two days in the mouth of a dusty cave, and Uzzia and Avatak set traps for the rabbits and strange-looking rodents that chewed on the dry grass.

They emerged from the desert at a small town by an oasis. Remote as it was, exotic as the people looked, it was a place used to travellers, and it welcomed them briskly and without any fuss. Here they were able to exchange some of their catch for beds for a couple of nights, water, a chance to rinse out their clothing.

A man who claimed a special understanding of horses looked over their mule, for a price. ‘He’s in good condition — you’ll get a few months out of him yet before he’s ready for the butcher’s hook and the glue man’s pot. But he has a problem with his left front hoof. .’ It was a jammed stone, a thorn. The mule must have been in constant pain for days. Avatak had never known. While they stayed in the town Avatak made sure he visited the mule in its stable, morning and night.

Then they walked on again. A little way out of town they passed a kind of monastery based in caves in a hillside, with walls of brick and clay set up along terraces. Men, clean-shaven and in dusty orange robes, climbed ladders. Monks, they were, Uzzia said, following the teachings of a god-priest called the Buddha. Avatak had seen some of these in the town. He had thought they were beggars; he had seen them imploring for gifts of food and drink, going from house to house.

Now the country opened up once more, and they found themselves on a broad, grassy plain — flat and endless, it seemed, stretching to the horizon, though as they walked they would glimpse worn mountains looming.

‘This is the steppe,’ Uzzia said as she plodded along. ‘A Rus word. You’re in the very heart of Asia now, the core of the world continent — a place where the writ of even mighty empires like Cathay does not run. And it is this land that has always birthed the savage horsemen. The most powerful of all were the Mongols, under Genghis, the first of the great Khans. Now his descendants rule Cathay itself. You’ll see.’

Ferocious the Mongols might be, but for now Avatak saw nothing of them. Their progress was slow, though the country was comparatively easy. Avatak insisted on giving the mule time to feed on the sparse steppe grass.

In an island of lusher, greener country, they came to a substantial city, walled, where green gardens within were fed from springs. This was a place called Lop, Uzzia said. She said they should stay here for seven days to feed, rest and water, to prepare for the next stage of the journey, the hardest stretch yet. The city seemed crowded, a tense, busy place. But Uzzia found them an empty house, and a clean stable for the mule, and vendors soon arrived with sacks of water and wine, hunks of meat, dried fruit and vegetables, pots to cook in.

Avatak said, ‘I don’t understand how we’re paying. We were robbed — you were, they took all your trade goods. And a mountain of trapped rabbits couldn’t pay for all this stuff.’

She glanced across at Pyxeas, who was limping around the house lighting oil lamps. ‘I’ll take you into my confidence. I suppose if anything happened to me it would be a shame to waste it.’

‘Waste what?’

She took her quilted jacket from where it hung on a hook by the door. She showed Avatak fine slits in the fabric, pushed her finger deep inside one of the quilt’s little sewn pads, and pulled out a gleaming stone. ‘A diamond,’ she said. ‘And I have sapphires, a few rubies, some bits of jade and agate, silver and gold for small change. .’

‘Ah.’

‘This is the best way, in these turbulent times. To convert your wealth into the most portable form. And the most easily concealed.’

‘Lucky those robbers didn’t try to get your jacket off you.’

‘That’s been tried in the past, by lads more interested in what’s inside my clothes than the clothes themselves. They end up with slit throats.’

‘I have a feeling that whatever Rina paid you back in Hantilios to keep us alive wasn’t enough.’

She laughed. ‘Well, that’s probably true. Unless of course old Pyxeas does after all end up saving the world, in which case it will all have been worth it.’

Avatak slept away much of his time in Lop. He did some exploring, but he felt bewildered to be in yet another town, his ears filled by yet another set of unknown and unknowable languages.

At last he saw Mongol warriors, in the town.

They were burly men in armour of buffalo hide, layers of fur, and, some of them, elaborate cloaks woven with gold and silk. They wore their hair oddly, with the scalp shaven, and only a fine mask of beard around the mouth and chin. Most of them carried at least one weapon, an axe, a sword, perhaps a small bow — unimpressive, but Uzzia said it was their use of the bow, their arrows shot from the back of a galloping horse with deadly accuracy, that made them formidable above all else. They were nomad horsemen and war-fighters and they were tremendously rich, all these things at once. Avatak thought he could see the story of their success in the way they dressed, in warrior garb adorned with gold and jewels, the way they walked as others cowered out of their way. Avatak didn’t speak to any of them.

He visited taverns, and drank weak beer, and made conversation with locals and travellers in broken Greek and Northlander. The travellers told tales of tremendous fires to the north, as if all the forests in Asia were burning off, and of streams of nestspills all heading south. When he spoke of this to Pyxeas, the scholar looked mournful, and spoke of friends in Albia, their ancient forest, which must be turning to ash too. Lying awake at night, Avatak sometimes imagined he smelled the smoke of the world fires, and that he heard the whisper from a million throats: ‘South. Go south. .’

He made his twice-daily pilgrimage to see the mule in its stable. He brushed its coarse coat, and rubbed liniment into its injured hoof. The mule submitted to these attentions in sullen silence, save for the occasional fart.

The seven days over, once again they bundled up their luggage and loaded the mule. Now they had a horse too, a compact, strong-looking pony purchased by Uzzia. They left the city of Lop with gratitude for its hospitality, but without looking back.

Within two days they were in a desert.

This was not like the Desert of No Return, not even like the western deserts they had crossed early in the journey. This was a featureless plain of gravel, dry clay, and a dusty, yellowish sand that tasted salty when it blew into your mouth. At night the stars made a tremendous dome, slowly swivelling towards the dawn. Though it was ferociously hot during the day, in the morning it could be cold enough to leave a frost that the animals licked from their blankets. Aside from the frost the only water, rarely glimpsed in almost dried-up streams, was brackish; even the horse and mule turned away from it. Sometimes a storm would blow up — wind, never rain — and the sand would take to the air, swirling around them, the particles stinging their faces and eyes, sometimes so violent they couldn’t make progress at all and they had to huddle in the small tent they had bought in Lop. But then the storms would blow away, and they would move on. They would find the wind had scraped away the earth down to a polished bedrock, and heaped the sand up in dunes like waves on an ocean.

So the next day passed, and the next. Often a day would pass with no landmarks at all, save a shallow dune or two: no mountains looming, no oases. Nothing to see but level sands stretching to the horizon, and the huge sky above. Gradually Avatak lost his sense of time and place, in this land like a dusty tabletop.

Pyxeas had him keep the journal, scratching in the date, and random observations and speculations. ‘Perhaps this was once a lake, or a sea,’ Pyxeas rasped. ‘A sea that somehow drained away. That would explain the flatness, and the salt. But where are the fish bones, and the wrecks of fishermen’s boats?’ And he would mumble and mutter, and subside back to his habitual state of half-sleep. Avatak did not care where the salt had come from. He made Pyxeas’ notes, but they were another man’s thoughts expressed in another man’s language; with a little practice he found he could ignore their meaning altogether, even as he wrote them down.

Still they walked, day after day, across a world reduced to its absolute essentials, to land below, sky above. ‘We walk through Pythagorean dualities,’ Pyxeas said. Avatak’s mind seemed to become as big as the sky, as if trying to fill all that empty space above, yet his spirit was diminished, to become a grain of sand as trivial as those under his feet. Was this how it was to die? To shrink into oneself, to shrivel to nothing, to become a dust speck in a universe grand and ancient that would continue without him, indifferent?

In the dark, during the nights, he would close his eyes and try to shed such thoughts. But he would hear a soft singing sometimes, a low discordant groan, like the calls of tremendous walruses from some far ice floe. Perhaps it was the spirits of those lost in this unending desert. Perhaps it was just a trick of the wind in the dunes. If the others heard it, they did not mention it.

It was a shock when, late one day of walking, they came upon the oasis. There were houses of mud and reeds, and a few sheep wandering. There were even a few trees, their leaves spindly and green. This didn’t look real to Avatak, as if it didn’t fit into the world.

Uzzia put her arm around his shoulders. She said they had been walking the desert for thirty-six days.

‘And this,’ she said, ‘is Cathay.’