Iron Winter

41

Avatak learned that the capital of Mongol Cathay had several names, given it by the many peoples who lived and worked here. The Turks called it Khanbalikh, which was a rendering of the phrase ‘city of the Khans’. The folk of Cathay called it Ta-tu, which meant ‘great capital’. The Mongols themselves had adopted the Cathay name, ‘Daidu’.

On the day they arrived, thanks to Pyxeas’ paiza they were escorted safely through scrubby outer suburbs, through gates in a double layer of city walls, and into the city itself — and Avatak, who had seen too many wonders during the long journey, was overwhelmed once more. Daidu was huge, clean, bright, opulent and luxurious. Even the roofs of the lesser buildings, lacquered and glazed, were visions in brightly coloured green and yellow and blue that seemed to float in the air. Thinking about what a Mongol city might be like, Avatak had vaguely imagined a huddle of yurts — tremendous yurts, perhaps, made of expensive felt encrusted with jewels and set on golden platforms, but yurts nonetheless. Uzzia told him that the capital of Genghis himself, the first great conqueror, called Karakorum, had not been altogether unlike that vision. But Daidu was different. Kublai Khan had eschewed his ancestors’ habits of burning down cities, and had built his own to match the best.

They were given three days’ rest before they would have to meet the scholar Pyxeas had come so far to speak to, and a small apartment near the western city wall to rest in. Avatak chose the smallest, plainest room he could find. Even so the couches were so soft he felt as if he was drowning when he lay on them. So he unrolled his own blankets on the carpeted floor, and slept away most of two days.

On the third day he found a sanctuary that would take the mule. It was a place where sentimental and wealthy Mongols retired their favourite ponies. It wasn’t cheap, but Uzzia said she was happy to pay. The mule was dismissive of the whole affair.

On the fourth day they were summoned to the Khan’s palace.

Pyxeas insisted they dress as smartly as they could.

Uzzia had somehow preserved a decent set of clothes through the vicissitudes of the journey, even the robbery. But she stuck to her own style. She wore a tunic and breeches with a wide belt and boots with turned-up toes, the way a Hatti prince might dress in New Hattusa, but she pinned back her hair with a golden comb, and applied cosmetics to her face, a white base with bright red spots on forehead and cheeks. Avatak couldn’t help but stare at the result, and she grinned. ‘I am what I am,’ she said. ‘I am Hatti. I am Uzzia. I like to show both sides.’

Pyxeas and Avatak wore clothes loaned by their hosts. Avatak found himself in a brightly coloured blouse and breeches, and a round felt hat. The material felt impossibly soft against his skin. Pyxeas dressed similarly, but oddly the clothes fit Avatak better. His round Coldlander frame was more like a Mongol’s than Pyxeas’, and the scholar speculated about some ancient relationship between their peoples. Uzzia complimented them both gravely, but Avatak could tell she was laughing inside. As a reminder of who he was, and despite Pyxeas’ protests, he tore a strip of sealskin fur from one of his blankets and tied it around his waist like a belt.

So they were led to the palace.

The palace compound was a city within a city, enclosed within its own substantial walls. Avenues paved with shining mosaics were filled with neat houses, and grand tree-lined ways led from the walls to the central square where the palace itself stood. Avatak spotted a tremendous lake, contained by the walls, formed by the damming of a river; tall, elegant birds waded among reeds.

Ferocious-looking guards at the doors, both Mongol and Cathay-born, scrutinised Pyxeas’ paiza.

Once inside the palace itself they were instructed to remove their boots and shoes, and don soft white slippers to protect the floors, all of which were carpeted. They walked almost noiselessly down a long corridor, and Pyxeas murmured that they must keep their voices down for fear of disturbing the Khan. But Avatak had been told the palace had a thousand rooms, and he thought it unlikely the Khan would be close enough to hear them.

They were brought through a grand set of doors to a tremendous room, so vast that to Avatak it was almost as if he had stepped outdoors. The room was brightly lit by tall windows and by lanterns on the walls, the carpet, brilliant white, was so wide and empty it was like a snow field, and the walls were crusted with vivid paintings, of birds and dragons and lions, warriors and half-naked women. The walls were many times taller than a man’s height, and looking up Avatak saw a ceiling similarly coated with dazzling art.

Much of the floor space was empty. But to the rear of the room was a collection of domes and boxes of clear glass, big structures that towered over the servants that fussed around them, adjusting bits of tubing, peering at instruments, making notes on clay tablets. A man came walking towards them from this assembly, not tall, middle-aged, with the round face, olive skin and tonsured hair of a Mongol. Servants trailed him, eyes respectfully downcast.

Pyxeas hurried forward, his gait clumsy, almost a limp. After enduring such a journey the old man could barely make the last few paces, and Avatak felt a stab of affection for the brave, vulnerable scholar.

‘Bolghai! My dear fellow. It has been much too long, too long.’ Pyxeas grasped the Mongol’s hands in his. ‘Ten years, is it, since you graced us with your presence?’

‘More like fifteen, old chap,’ said the Mongol, grinning.

Uzzia murmured to Avatak, ‘Even here the scholar speaks in his native Northlander and expects to be understood and answered in the same — and he is!’

Pyxeas introduced his ‘dear travelling companions’, and Coldlander and Hatti bowed to the Mongol. ‘My good friend Bolghai, with whom I have corresponded for many years, is one of the finest scholars of his generation — no, Bolghai, do not be modest — and he is a Mongol! A cousin of the Khan-’

‘A rather distant cousin. But Buyantu is kind to me, as you can see from the facilities he grants.’

‘Bolghai is a Mongol prince but educated by the best teachers the court could find, and he has further broadened his mind by travelling far beyond the reach even of the Khans’ conquering armies. All the way to Northland, in fact. The result is a fine intellect.’

‘Fine for a Mongol, you mean.’ For an instant there was tension, before Bolghai grinned.

Pyxeas scolded, ‘Now don’t you go trying to trip me up like that, you rascal. Show me your investigations into fixed air. I’ve come rather a long way to see them.’

Led by Bolghai, who walked slowly to allow for Pyxeas’ pace, they headed towards the cluster of apparatus at the rear of the room.

‘Ah, how I have missed you, scholar,’ Bolghai said, in his lightly accented Northlander. ‘Our talks of this and that, of men and stars, of the fate of the whole world and the precise shape of a grass seed, late into those long Northlander nights. But, as you may know, I have since commissioned some research into the biography of the great engineer Yu, who designed and built flood defences in Cathay some three thousand years ago. There are gaps in his biography, and I have come to suspect that he travelled in his youth — why not? And why not to Northland? Which was a great civilisation even then. I have come to suspect that the design of your mighty Wall could have sprung from Yu’s fertile mind. The similarities are striking when you consider such works as-’

‘Oh, now, you’re trying to provoke me! What a lot of nonsense. It’s far more likely that this upstart Yu came to Northland to study a Wall which was already ancient long before he was born. .’

‘They’re good together,’ Uzzia murmured as she walked with Avatak. ‘Two bantering scholars. Pyxeas needs to make sure he doesn’t go too far, however. Even this Bolghai must have his Mongol pride.’

Avatak was staring up at the ceiling, at a panel where Mongol warriors on horseback shot tiny arrows at a rampaging dragon. ‘What a room this is.’

‘That’s what plundering a continent earns you.’

They came now to the scholar’s facility, and Avatak saw that it was a series of glass-walled compartments — domes, square-walled boxes, some a good deal taller than he was. Tubes of some flexible material led from each box to a complex apparatus of brass and glass, fussed over by attendants.

And in each of the boxes there was something alive, he saw. Something growing. A tray of soil bearing grass shoots in this box; in the next, what looked like wheat; in the next, potatoes; in the next, rice. These boxes were bathed with sunlight from open windows in the walls above. In the very largest boxes there were animals, one to each compartment: a horse, a cow, a sheep — a man, Avatak saw with shock, a small, skinny, youngish man of Cathay, sitting naked on a mat, his eyes averted, bowls of piss and shit beside him. Beside each container was a similarly sized box, quite empty, but fitted with tubes and valves. The largest dome contained a tree, of a kind unfamiliar to Avatak, with wide branches and bright green leaves, growing from a big ceramic pot. A tree, taller than he was, in the middle of this vast room.

Uzzia stared, amazed. ‘By the Storm God’s left buttock, what under heaven is this?’ Then she remembered herself, and she bowed hastily to Bolghai. ‘My apologies, lord. I am a simple trader; I am overwhelmed by this evidence of your mighty learning.’

Bolghai looked amused. ‘Oh, get up, madam. Overwhelmed even though you understand not a jot of it, I suppose?’

Pyxeas snorted. ‘Uzzia, Bolghai is studying properties of the air. We are all at the mercy of the weather, yes? And though I, Pyxeas, and the generations who went before me, have shown that the great cycles of the weather are dominated by astronomy, by the dipping and nodding of the world as it orbits the central fire, it is nevertheless the air that delivers that weather to us. So we study it too.

‘After all, invisible though it may be the air is real; it has weight and substance. You can feel it dragging into your lungs, you can use pumps to evacuate it from a chamber — we all felt its lack up on the roof of the world. And the air is made up of several component parts, which can be separated with sufficient ingenuity. This was first achieved by Northlander scholars. We know there is vital air, an air full of energy, which we suspect is the agent that supports combustion — and indeed the slower fire that burns in our bodies to sustain life. And then there is fixed air. This was first identified by a scholar at Etxelur called Cleomedes, of Greek descent, who studied the burning of charcoal in a closed vessel.’

Bolghai said, ‘The scholars of Cathay have long shared their knowledge with Northland, a tradition I have sought, in my time, to maintain, or rather revive. I with my party was the first to travel to Northland after the conquests of the Great Khans. And, given the importance of the air to the weather which shapes all our destinies, as Pyxeas points out, we have continued its study here. Although Cathay scholars are perhaps of a more practical bent than those of Northland.’

Pyxeas sighed. ‘True, true, but the first Wall-builders would cringe to hear you say it. That’s the legacy of Pythagoras and his Greeks, who could be a bit contemplative.’

Bolghai gestured at his apparatus. ‘We have found ways to measure the presence and concentration of fixed air more precisely. For instance here, you see, the air from this chamber is fed through lime dissolved in water; it precipitates a kind of chalk whose weight we can determine. . The details are unimportant.’

‘Not to me, they’re not!’ thundered Pyxeas. ‘I want to examine every tube and valve, every seal and measuring gauge. Excellent experimental design,’ he said now, walking around the boxes. ‘Can you see it, Avatak? Why these empty boxes, for instance?’

That was easy; Avatak had seen similar set-ups in Pyxeas’ own studies. ‘They are for comparison. A horse in this box, not in that box that’s otherwise the same; you can subtract one from the other to see what difference the horse makes.’

‘Exactly!’

Bolghai said, ‘Of course the emissions and absorptions vary depending on the plant or beast enclosed, and indeed on its conditions — if the horse is agitated or not, resting or exercising, for instance. All these things we can study.’

Uzzia asked, ‘Who is the man in the box?’

Bolghai seemed puzzled by the question. 'Who? Why — he is the subject. I sent specifications to the slavers regarding size and weight and general health. I hope to extend the studies to compare different ethnicities, ages, health conditions — sex, of course. I am not concerned with who.

‘What is most important is the conclusion. Which is this.’ With the air of a showman he walked them past the compartments containing the grass, the grain. ‘Vegetables, plants, trees — as they grow these things absorb the fixed gas from the air. But if they are burned they release that gas again. Whereas animals, from sheep to pigs to men, they release the fixed gas as they breathe. All of this in the processes of their lives, you see — it seems accurate, as you say, Pyxeas, to think of life as a kind of slow burning, animal life at least. Plants and animals, absorption and release-’

‘Yes, yes. And together they shape the atmosphere — and it shapes them. But to what end, what end? And how does this relate to the longwinter? For somehow it must. .’

‘Quite so,’ Bolghai said. ‘To explore that I am also running studies of the physical properties of fixed air. Perhaps that will offer some clues. But the properties are subtle, the apparatus unwieldy and preliminary. Nevertheless I have some first results. We can proceed to that when we’re done here.’

‘Good, good,’ Pyxeas murmured. The two scholars wandered off, talking, debating.

Servants stood by Uzzia and Avatak, heads bent, waiting for instructions.

‘I want to get out of here,’ whispered Avatak.

‘Yes. And I’ve got deals to do. We’ve delivered Pyxeas to his scholar; we’ve done our jobs for now. Let’s go.’