Iron Winter

38

The travellers came to a wall. It was only sod and earth, about the height of a man, with ditches before and behind. But it straggled off across the landscape, heading vaguely for low hills. Its meaning was clear.

Avatak stared. After all their experiences it seemed absurd to find their way blocked by a work of mere humans. ‘This wall is stupid. You could jump over it! And if I were an invading army I would just go around it, to one side or another.’

‘But this is what Cathay does,’ said Uzzia. ‘Builds walls. There has always been a tension between the nomads of the steppe and the desert, and Cathay with its farms and cities. And over history Cathay has always built walls to control the passage of the nomads, if not to exclude them altogether. Dwarfing even your great Wall, scholar, in length at least.’

Pyxeas, on the back of the mule, snorted. ‘But not matching ours in fitness for purpose. Ask Genghis Khan about that.’

They followed the wall south until they came to a shabby wooden gate. Two soldiers watched as they approached. Wearing the Mongols’ leather armour they were scruffy, dirty, and one had dried soup dribbled down his chest plate. But they had weapons, they were soldiers, and they were manning the wall.

Uzzia went forward to negotiate with the guards. She tried one dialect after another. Their responses were hostile rasps.

She came back to her party. ‘Basically their orders are not to let anybody else into Cathay, not ever again. Because Cathay is full, and there is famine and plague. Orders of the Khan. They speak about incursions all along the frontier. The Khan is sending troops to the north and west to keep down his own wilder cousins. It sounds like it’s a sink of madness out there, where one side builds up a wall only for the other to smash it down again. What this means is that it’s going to be expensive to get past these fellows. Your saving the world is costing me a lot of money, scholar.’

‘Then let me deal with it,’ Pyxeas snapped, impatient. ‘Help me down, Avatak.’ The scholar rummaged in the packs until he pulled out the wreck of his oracle — just the frame, broken open, the little sun and moon snapped off. Now Pyxeas prised at the back of the gadget’s face until a panel popped open, and a small golden plaque fell out into the old man’s hand. Pyxeas handed the ruined oracle back to Avatak. ‘Put this away.’

Then, limping, he approached the guards, who watched him curiously. ‘Here! You fellows at the gate! My name is Pyxeas, scholar of Northland, and no doubt you will recognise this.’ He held up the plaque.

He had spoken in his own tongue. The guards obviously understood not a word. But they stared at the golden plaque, took it, read words inscribed there, their lips moving. They handed the plaque back. They both bowed, murmuring what sounded like apologies, and stood back, opening the barrier as they went.

Uzzia was astonished. ‘How did you do that? Give me that.’ She took the golden disc and studied it.

‘That is my paiza, which is the Cathay word for it; the Mongols call it a gerega. The words are written in Mongol and Cathay scripts. It is a right of passage, a guarantee of safety, given me by the great Khan himself. Not the present incumbent — a predecessor. My colleagues in Daidu requested this, and one of them carried it to Northland for me, some years ago. Are you surprised that I possess such a thing, trader? Are you surprised that I, a Northlander scholar, am held in such esteem, even though I have never visited Cathay before? I tell you they are eager to meet me there, just as I am eager to see them. I suggest we get on with the journey. What do you say?’

She handed back the paiza. ‘Lead the way.’

Once past the wall they came to a substantial community, a sprawling town dominated by another monastery cut into a cliff. In the end they stayed a couple of nights.

The paiza won them food and lodging, in a shabby mud-and-straw hut. The people of the lower town, and, once, one of the monks, brought them food and drink, rather stringy mutton, bitter fruit. Uzzia, urged by Pyxeas, tried to pay, for it was clear these people had little enough of their own. But the townsfolk were evidently terrified by the authority of the Khan and would have none of it.

It was a relief for Avatak to let the saddle-soreness seep out of his thighs. But he found it impossible to sleep indoors, in a box of mud. Something in him was drawn back to the huge emptiness of the desert, and perhaps always would be. So he crept out of the house, to a small kitchen garden at the back, and laid out his roll under the stars.

The second night Uzzia came out to find him there. She crouched over him, her smile shadowed. ‘You’ve got an invitation.’

‘From who?’

‘From the woman in the house next door. Or rather, her husband. I know you’ve noticed her — she’s noticed you.’

Avatak knew who she meant. The woman, a good few years older than him, was taller, stockier than most in this country. She had a strong face with a sly grin, and broad hips, and a bust that was heavy, if not firm. She filled her robes well as she went about her chores.

‘I know how that type appeals to young men like you. An older woman, evidently fertile, knows her way around a bed — seems to draw the seed out of you just by looking at you.’

‘What does she want with me?’

‘What do you think?’

‘But you said, the husband-’

‘It is their way, in this country,’ she said. ‘To invite travellers into the beds of the women. This is a small place and isolated; there are probably people here who will live and die never travelling as far as the next village. This is their way to make babies who are not the cousins of everybody else. Do you see?’

‘Oh.’

‘You would be doing them a favour. You will be asked to leave a token, a present, to prove that the deed has been done.’ She sighed. ‘I remember when you would be asked for a flower, a bit of cheap jewellery. Now they ask for food, which changes the whole nature of the transaction, doesn’t it? But these are harder times. Well. We have the food, or can buy it. What do you say?’

He thought about the woman, and felt a warm pressure in his loins. But he thought of his betrothed, and his lover, in far countries. And he glanced up at the cold, unmoving stars.

‘What’s wrong? Are you missing your betrothed?’

‘Not that.’ He lacked the language to express how he felt. ‘The desert.’

‘Hmm. I’ve seen this before. All right. But better to lose your soul between the thighs of a woman than to the emptiness out there. I will say you’re ill, so nobody’s feelings are hurt. May I give her the food anyway?’

‘If you wish.’

‘Of course in my arms she would explode like a Northlander emptor. But I cannot give her a baby, and, for this one night, that is my deepest regret. Goodnight, Coldlander.’ She bent, kissed his forehead, and passed into the night.

So they moved on, leaving behind fearful guards and wombs not impregnated, and with a fresh horse, new blankets and saddles, and their surly mule trotting behind.

They headed ever east, into the Mongol empire.

Avatak’s feet, and his arse when he rode the horse, noted the better surface of the trail here, a straight and narrow track that arrowed to the east. But Pyxeas bewailed its condition. ‘This is one of the Khan’s post roads. He united his empire, and all of Asia, with roads straight and fast and true so that messengers could cross a continent as fast as a thought crackles through your small head, Coldlander. Look at it now! Covered in dust from this desiccating farmland all around, and with the trees cut down — mighty trees they were, purposefully planted along the route so a rider could never lose his way no matter what the weather — cut down for some peasant’s firewood, no doubt!’

The deeper they walked into Cathay the more densely it was farmed. But workers thin as shadows toiled at dried-up fields, there was only a scattering of green even though the harvest must soon be due, and the bare ground was turning to dust that blew over the roads.

And, in the middle of the farming country, they came upon Mongol camps. These were not princes of Daidu and Karakorum, or traders, or border guards; these were common folk, herders like their ancestors, with their horses and a few cows and fat-tailed sheep. They lived in yurts, battered houses with their door flaps all set to face the sun at midday, like rows of shabby flowers.

The travellers stopped one night, close to an extensive camp. The nomads showed respect for the paiza of the Khan, and the travellers were invited to stay in a yurt, but they declined, wary of imposing on what might be a fragile hospitality. They sat by their own small fire, eating a bit of mutton and sheep’s tail they had been given by the Mongols, and watched the conquerors of the world at play. The adults wore colourful clothes, trousers, tunics and hats. Their children ran around and shouted and fought as children always did. They seemed to have slaves, plenty of them, skinny-looking folk of Cathay who went barefoot. Mostly the slaves cooked and cleaned, but Avatak glimpsed one girl writing something down, as dictated by her owner. As the night drew in the adults gathered in a circle and danced, and sang, and passed around cups of drink and smoky pipes.

Pyxeas grunted. ‘This dancing, the pipes and the strong stuff they seem to be drinking — this is the old culture, when spirit men would talk to their sky god and the ninety-nine junior deities he controlled. The spirits of the deep steppe, coming back again. When times are hard, people go back to what they know best. The Mongols own half the world, but even they are in thrall to the weather.’

He was dismissive. But something in the way the Mongols celebrated their evening reminded Avatak of home, his own people, nomads too. He said nothing.

‘Once they would not have been here at all,’ Uzzia said. ‘They would have driven their herds to the summer pasture in the hills; it must be too cold up there this year. And they would not have camped in farmland at all; this is not the steppe. But the land is so dry — it is as if the steppe itself is shifting south, and driving the people with it. There will be conflict. Probably there is already. The farmers will lose, of course.’

‘And the city dwellers, in the short term,’ Pyxeas said. ‘But in the long term everybody will lose, when the Mongol empire turns on itself. Once, you know, a khan threatened to obliterate Cathay altogether, and use the land to pasture his herds. Perhaps in time to come — and not very far in the future — that promise will at last be fulfilled. But the irony is that nomadic herders will be far better suited to the conditions that will prevail than city folk, than civilisation.’

‘If war is coming to this place we must press on to Daidu.’

‘Mmm,’ said Pyxeas. ‘And will we find safety there?’

In the morning they moved on once more, working their way ever further east, passing towns and villages and more dried-out farmland. They had to use the scholar’s paiza to get past more layers of guards, more walls thrown across the roads, even this deep into the heart of the country.

Gradually the road grew busier, and Avatak noticed that much of the traffic was heading the same way they were, eastward — traders and merchants with wagons full of goods, but an increasing number of ordinary folk, adults with children, old folk riding carts, horses heaped with furniture on their backs, even rolls of carpet. Nestspills, folk from failed farms or imploded towns, all heading, Avatak supposed, in search of the succour of the emperor.

And at last, late one morning, they crested a rise and faced the formidable walls of Daidu.

Pyxeas leaned down from the mule’s back and murmured to Avatak, ‘Coldlander, to reach this place you and I have travelled almost a third of the world’s arc. And we got here before the equinox — just. Quite an achievement.’

Uzzia snorted. ‘Just remember this mule has come almost as far, and he’s not bragging about it. Come now, let’s see if your magic paiza will get us through this last set of gates.’ She gave the mule’s stirrup a tug, and let the animal lead the way towards the city.