Iron Winter

74

On the seventh day out of Parisa they ran into a blizzard. The northerly wind was flat, hurling hard, heavy flakes into their faces. Avatak felt the ice build up on his beard, his eyebrows, his skin. He made Nelo and Himil watch each other’s faces, the noses and the cheeks, for the pale white spots that were the first signs of ice blight. Pyxeas stayed tucked up in the tent on the back of the carriage.

A blizzard in summer!

They tried to keep moving. They had dogs now, a team assembled at Avatak’s insistence, to draw them over the ice. At last he had dogs, and could show what he could do! But these were dogs of Parisa, dogs of the city and the forest, not the tough animals of Coldland. They were doing their best, but the wind polished the surface of the ice smooth, the dogs could get no traction, and unless he whipped them they would stop and huddle together for warmth, a squirming mass of fur.

There came a point where the dogs could do no more, and Avatak called a halt. It was not yet noon.

There was no way they could put up their shelters in the blizzard. The three of them, Avatak, Nelo and Himil, had to crowd into the little tent on the back of the carriage with Pyxeas, who had barely been awake for days, lying under a heap of wool and fur blankets. They soon got the fire started on its metal hearth. The tent, securely strapped to the back of the carriage, was stable enough, though the carriage itself, resting on its runners, creaked in the wind. The tent was too small for the four of them, though; Avatak could feel the wet mass of its fabric wall on his back as he tried to pull off his fur boots.

Something disturbed the dogs, and they howled.

Pyxeas stirred. ‘Avatak?’

‘I am here, scholar.’ Avatak took the chance to sit him up gently, and let him sip at hot nettle tea.

‘Umm. . I have been asleep.’

‘Yes. You aren’t well. We think you have had a fever.’

‘Ah. From those mother-forsaken marshes south of Parisa. I remember.’ He frowned, his bony fingers wrapped around his cup. ‘Can I hear dogs?’

‘Yes, scholar. You remember, I bought them in Parisa.’

Himil said, ‘And I said they were mangy curs that must have been weaned on liquid gold, they cost so much.’

‘We are on the ice,’ Pyxeas whispered.

‘For some days now. You have been sleeping.’

‘I slip in and out of the world, it seems. But tell me, the carriage: did the mechanism work well, as the wheels were replaced by runners?’

‘Perfectly,’ said Himil.

‘I would have liked to have seen that. So here we are on the ice, in a sled, with dogs! This is why I brought you, you know, Avatak. Brought you all those years ago from your home across the sea. Because I knew the ice was coming. I wanted a man beside me who could handle a team of dogs, on the ice, for I knew that one day I would need it. And to teach you, boy, to shape your mind, of course, don’t forget that. . Do you think we are in Northland yet?’

‘It is impossible to say. It is some days since I have been able to sight the stars, or the sun,’ said Avatak.

‘You have been keeping the journal, I trust.’

‘Of course. The weather holds us up.’

‘“The weather holds us up.” I could not have summed up the longwinter better myself.’ He laughed, and burst into a fit of coughing.

Nelo crawled around the little tent and held his great-uncle, cradling his head on his own lap, and the old man settled. ‘Ah, thank you, boy, that is warming, that is kind.’

Nelo blurted, ‘You never got your strength back after your trip to Cathay, and now this. I’m concerned.’

‘Concerned about what? Where’s my trunk, Avatak?’

‘In the carriage, master. It is safe.’

Nelo said, ‘Forgive me, Uncle, but why don’t you just tell us what it is you have learned? We can at least try to understand. And then, and then-’

‘And then if you have to turf out my stiffening corpse into the snow before Etxelur the message has a chance of getting through? Is that what you think?’ He sounded fretful.

Avatak said gently, ‘Perhaps they will understand a little of it. And it might make your mind easier.’

Pyxeas sat up awkwardly and regarded him. ‘You are wise, Avatak, wiser than I ever was. Very well.’ He beckoned them closer, and began to whisper. ‘It is a great truth that I, Pyxeas, have discovered. But not a complex one. I will tell you the essence of it — you may check my facts and conclusions from the material in the trunk, the presentations I made in Carthage. .

‘It is simply this: fixed air. That is the secret of the weather.

‘I told you, Avatak, that the weather is controlled by the dance of the world around the sun, its nodding axis, its wobbling circuits. So it is — but not by that alone. There is a second factor — well, probably many more we have yet to discover. But the second most important factor, as the results of Bolghai clearly show, is the fraction of fixed air in the atmosphere that we breathe. For if the sun delivers heat to the world, fixed air, you see, traps that heat. The more of it there is, the more the heat is trapped.

‘Bolghai proved too that the living things on the surface of the world affect how much fixed air is present. For a tree, as it grows, will absorb a great deal of fixed air — much more than the scrap of land it stands on, if that land is farmed. And conversely when a tree is burned, or rots away, the fixed air that it consumed in the growing is released again.

‘And that, Avatak, is why the world’s descent into longwinter has been such a puzzle to me. Not the fact that it is happening, but that it is happening now. We should have been in its grip already — and we are not, because of human actions. It is an astonishing thing to say, but it is true. It is clearly proven by an inspection of history, and the detailed records of the weather kept at Northland and elsewhere.

‘Several thousand years ago the world began its slow descent into the next longwinter. But unlike all the previous longwinters before, now the farmers were at work, in Cathay as in the Continent, planting their crops. They worked their way across the Continent from the east, clearing a landscape that had been choked with forest. Do you see?’

‘Ah,’ said Avatak. ‘And all that fixed air in the trees was released.’

‘Yes! And, warmed by all that fixed air, the world did not cool as it should have done. It could not.

‘Now, some two thousand years ago there was a turning point. It came with the failed Trojan Invasion of Northland, which was the high-water mark of the farmers’ expansion across the Continent. In the centuries that followed our cultural influence expanded. In northern Gaira the farms were abandoned, slowly, and the forests regrew. From Albia, where the forests had never died and the old faiths survived, missionaries were sent out to preach the ancient ways of life, all across the north of the Continent.’

Avatak nodded. ‘And again the forests grew. Devouring all the fixed air. And then-’

‘And then the world resumed its descent into the cold — delayed by some centuries, but otherwise just as every long-winter in the past. There you have it — a simple model — the proof is detailed in the papers in the trunk and elsewhere — a simple truth, yet a staggering one: people have held a longwinter at bay, all unknowing, for millennia.’

Nelo seemed unable to believe this. ‘People did this? People shaped the world? We are not gods, Uncle, not ice giants or little mothers.’

‘No. But what each man and woman does, bit by bit, each small intervention, each tree cut down or field ploughed, over enough time, adds up to the sweeping gesture of a god. Do you see?’

Avatak asked mildly, ‘Why did you not tell me this before?’

Pyxeas reached out a hand and grasped Avatak’s wrist. ‘You said it yourself. I heard you, you know. You stopped listening. You came to see my intellectual abstraction as a kind of madness. And in a world like this, perhaps you’re right!

‘And I, I did not mean to disrespect you, dear boy. It is that I respected you too much. For I came to see that you know far more than I ever will about what is important in this world. You are loyal, constant, strong where I am weak. I became embarrassed about my own petty wisdom, my arrogant attempts to “educate” you, to transform you into something else, something like me. What a fool I was! What a wise man you are. And your sort of wisdom will be increasingly relevant in the future, while mine will matter less and less. I hope you can forgive me-’

Again he succumbed to a fit of coughing. Nelo held him until he settled, and slipped into an uneasy sleep.

When he was asleep the three of them looked at each other.

Avatak shrugged. ‘See what I mean? Here we are stuck in a tent on the ice, with nobody within a day’s travel of us, probably. What difference will any of that lot make?’

Nelo smiled. ‘None. Though if he really did see all this coming no wonder he was sad. Anyone fancy a game of knuckle bones before we sleep?’