Iron Winter

75

The Fourth Year of the Longwinter: Midsummer Solstice

Crimm stood on the central mound of the Little Mothers’ Door, looking down on the lone reindeer that padded between the great circular ramparts of the old earthwork. The animal was scrawny, rather bewildered-looking, young, with small, stubby antlers. Finding nothing to eat in these strange curving valleys, clearly lost, detached from its herd, it lowed occasionally, a mournful bellow that echoed from the pocked face of the Wall that loomed over the earthwork.

Crimm could see Ayto and Aranx and the others, fishermen by trade, reindeer hunters for the day, out of sight of the deer around the bend of the walls. The hunters had their spears and nets ready, arrows nocked in their big hunting bows, their faces wreathed with breath-mist. Crimm waved and pointed, silently telling them which way the deer was coming. Equally silently they moved that way.

The day was clear, for once, the sky a deep empty blue. From up here Crimm could see far to the south, the tremendous frozen plain that was Northland, and behind him the face of the Wall was an ice-bound cliff that ran from horizon to horizon. No people could be seen in that long, battered face, but birds moved everywhere, and flapped overhead. Incredible to think that this was midsummer. Somebody had said today was actually the solstice, but most people weren’t counting.

And all around him was the Door, the great earthwork, said to be a survivor of the last longwinter, an age buried deep in Northland lore.

Last year had been the best for the reindeer. Quite unexpectedly they had come pouring down from the north and east in tremendous herds, evidently as lost and confused as human beings were in the changing world. There had been musk oxen too and other beasts, but it had been the reindeer that had caught the imagination of the Wall’s would-be hunters. Their first hunts had been a shambles, hunters who only a few years earlier had been innkeepers or clerks, junior priests or government officials, sliding on ice-crusted snow in leather boots and waving spears made from bits of furniture and kitchen knives.

It had been Ayto, Crimm’s companion from the Scibet, who had come up with a better way. Fishermen had always made their living from hunting, and knew how to think like prey. Ayto watched where the herds had come from. He had a series of bonfires set up along the route, big heaps of rubbish from the Wall, piles of smashed-up furniture and wall panels, kindling made from screwed-up papers and parchments from the Archive. And Ayto had sent out scouts to watch for the approach of the animals. The next time a herd had approached Etxelur the fires had been lit, the hunters had danced and shouted and waved their spears — and the animals, alarmed, had veered in a great mass, heading just the way Ayto had planned, into the maze of frozen-over canals that was the Door. The killing of the trapped, panicking animals had been great.

It had quickly been learned just how much you could do with a dead reindeer. There was the meat, of course, but the skin had endless uses, and you could make tools and clothes-toggles from the bones, rope and fishing line from sinew. For one winter the people of Etxelur had become the reindeer people, and flensed skulls and antler racks adorned the caves on the Wall’s seaward face where people lived now.

The Door had made a tremendously effective reindeer trap. Crimm wasn’t given to thinking too deeply, in his experience it never paid off. But it had struck him that it was almost as if the Door had been designed for just that purpose, and maybe it had been, back in long-gone wintry days.

That had been last year. But this year was different, as the last had been different from the one before. There had been more snow, of course, masses of new stuff that fell and covered the old and, in the spring, once again stubbornly refused to melt. But this year, no more reindeer. Maybe they had gone further south still, in search of summer grass. And the Wall folk, eagerly waiting with their pyres and spears, had seen only a few beasts, including this one solitary specimen. Still, Crimm, from his mound, could see that the moment of the kill was coming, the animal approaching the humans, prey nearing predator, all in silence. Crimm felt his heart beat faster, imagined the splash of blood on the clean snow.

But then his eye was distracted by movement. A black speck crossing the ice, far to the south. For the last couple of years nothing good had come out of the south.

He yelled down to the hunters. ‘Ayto!’

His voice, echoing, startled the reindeer. It looked up, confused. Then it turned and began to run the other way, fleeing from the hunters. Ayto and the rest saw the deer’s white rump as it bobbed away. Some of the men hurled their spears in frustration, even one-armed Aranx.

Ayto glared up at Crimm. ‘You famous idiot. What did you do that for?’

Crimm pointed south. ‘Somebody coming.’

Ayto looked that way, but of course his view was obscured by the earthwork. ‘Who? How many?’

‘Not many. Looks like one cart. A sled, I suppose.’

Aranx, beside him, called up, ‘It’s probably those bastards from the Manufactory.’

‘Maybe,’ Crimm said. But the Manufactory, with its ferocious, jealous hunters and their spears tipped with iron shapes torn from now-useless engines, was east of here, another District in the Wall, not south.

Ayto called, ‘You said a sled. Pulled by men?’

‘I don’t think so. Some kind of animal. Dogs, I think.’

‘Dogs? If it’s dogs, it’s probably not those bastards from the Manufactory.’

‘True enough.’

‘Different bastards, then.’

‘That makes sense.’

‘What do you think we should do?’

They were all looking up at Crimm. He sighed. He had no desire to be the leader of this little community of hunters. He didn’t want to be king, the way the idiotic leader of those bastards from the Manufactory had declared himself King of his District, and Emperor of All the Wall. He had always thought Ayto was smarter than he was. It was Ayto who had found his way out through the Wall to the sea, in the first terrible season. Ayto who had figured out how to trap reindeer. Ayto who had grown into this new world of ice, as if drawing on memories from a very deep past. But just as when they had been nothing but fishermen, Ayto liked to stay in the background, leaving all the decisions, and the mistakes, to Crimm. Well, there was nothing for it.

‘I think we should go greet them. They must have come a long way, after all.’

‘And maybe we can get their dogs,’ said Aranx.

Ayto called, ‘And if they’re not friendly?’

Crimm shrugged. ‘Then it’s the end of their journey.’

‘And we will definitely get their dogs,’ said Aranx.

The Wall had changed utterly since Avatak had last seen it, three years back, when he and Pyxeas had departed for Cathay. The great barrier, streaked with ice and heaped with snow, was not beautiful now, just an ugly growstone core pocked with holes. But it still blocked the horizon, and it was still, undeniably, the Wall, and perhaps the one human monument north of Parisa that would survive the longwinter itself.

Nelo, almost absently sketching the latest panorama, said, ‘There’s somebody watching us. On the ice. See? Three, four, five of them. And they look armed.’

Avatak reined in the team. The dogs, panting hard, jostled and growled, competing for their places in the pack.

Pyxeas pulled his thick fur coat around his skinny body. ‘To be expected,’ he muttered. ‘Diminishing resources, a collapse of population, an uncertain rediscovery of long-lost skills. The community will fragment into tribalism. Of course one must anticipate hostility to strangers.’

Nelo said, ‘But you’re hoping to find scholars here, Uncle.’

‘To be expected,’ Pyxeas muttered again. ‘Expected.’

Avatak murmured, ‘Let’s just not get ourselves speared so close to home.’

The party from the Wall stopped perhaps twenty paces away, five men, anonymous in sealskin jackets and breeches, the clothing crudely cut, to Avatak’s eye at least. Now one of them stepped forward. ‘Are you those bastards from the Manufactory?’ He spoke in clear Northlander. ‘Because if you are you can clear off back there, and tell that clown Omim that if he thinks the hunters of Etxelur-’

‘No.’ Nelo walked forward on the hard-packed snow. He pulled off his mittens to show his hands were empty. ‘We’re not from the Manufactory. We’re from — well, from here. Etxelur. We’ve come home. I’m Nelo.’

The man stared. ‘Rina’s boy?’

‘Are you Crimm?’

The fisherman grinned. ‘Cousin. You’ve been a long time away. Things have changed.’

‘I can see that.’

‘And on that sled — is that you, Uncle Pyxeas? We thought you were long dead.’

Pyxeas grunted. ‘Well, you were mistaken.’

The hunters came closer now, lowering their weapons. One man stared at the dogs, wary, fascinated; one of them yapped at him. ‘We ate all our dogs. Any bitches?’