Stephen Baxter - Iron Winter

Kassu saw it. Saw the first strike lay open the King’s chest, splaying ribs wide. Saw Hattusili the Sixteenth, still alive, looking down shocked at his own beating heart, his spilling organs, which looked like any other man’s, Kassu thought, battlefield memories flooding back.

Then the guards were on them, led by Himuili himself, then Zida, and there was a brutal struggle. Arnuwanda went to the aid of his uncle. Kassu would have followed, but an officer snapped an order for him to stay back and help round up the other supplicants, in case there were any more Rus assassins among them.

So it was that Kassu saw his wife in the churning crowd. Saw her, terrified, folded in the arms of the young priest beside her. And saw Palla lift her face and kiss her full on the lips, before wrapping his arms around her and leading her away.

It took until the equinox for Pyxeas to make the arrangements for his epic journey to far Cathay — and, Avatak suspected, to allow his old body to recover from the sea journey from Coldland only months before.

The family, led by Pyxeas’ niece Rina, were opposed to him going at all, and they pressured a doctor, a family friend called Ontin, to tell him he wasn’t strong enough. But Ontin was about as old as Pyxeas, and Avatak thought he secretly envied Pyxeas’ boldness, and he would not stand in the way. After that, Rina, with very bad grace, insisted on accompanying Pyxeas on the first leg of the journey, as far as an eastern city called Hantilios, where, maybe, the old man would see sense and come back home again.

So they got packed up, and there was a day of farewells. Alxa, Rina’s daughter, seemed particularly upset to see him go, as if she feared she wouldn’t see him again.

And then they were gone.

They headed south down the Etxelur Way, and the Wall slowly receded behind them. Then, by canal boat and on foot, they travelled the length of Northland, following tremendous avenues and crossing bridges over wide canals, and Avatak tried to absorb the scale of this tremendous, orderly, sparsely populated country. It was a long, slow journey in itself, and occasionally Rina muttered about alternative ways to cross Northland such as by steam caravan. But it seemed that the scholar wanted to see his country, to cross it on foot as his ancestors had for uncounted generations, one more time before his so-called ‘longwinter’ closed in. After a few days, however, he did relent a little, and allowed Rina to hire for him a horse-drawn carriage, though to use horses was thoroughly not the Northland way.

On the southern coast of Northland they came to a port on the estuary called the Cut, a great wound that ran between the southern shores of Northland and Albia and the northern beaches of Gaira, giving ultimately to the open seas of the Western Ocean. Here they boarded a small boat, booked ahead by Rina, and as part of a small flotilla crossed the estuary and made their way eastward along the Gairan coast to a wide river mouth. Waves broke on a nondescript beach, and marsh and wooded hills could be seen beyond. From here they would sail upriver towards the great city of Parisa.

Inland, the countryside was quite similar to southern Northland and Albia, rolling and green, though even this far south they still saw the odd white splash of remnant winter ice. Gaira was a quilt of ancient nations, mostly Frankish, immigrants a thousand years before, but some older stock. The empires of the Middle Sea with their cities of stone had never come this far north, and so the Gairans’ various cultures had been shaped by local influences, the Northlanders, the farmers to the south — even the other-worldly Albians of their great forest to the west. So Avatak saw a mix of neat farms surrounded by stretches of woodland, and then a swathe of lowland worked and managed as the Northlanders did, and then a town of stone where the natives sold lumber or minerals to merchants from the Middle Sea. But an older history survived; some of these communities were still centred on the circles of mighty stones bequeathed by distant ancestors.

At last they approached Parisa. A Frankish settlement, this was the westernmost city on the Continent, Pyxeas said, a trading conduit for Northland. Here they would board a steam caravan that would take them onwards east in comparative comfort. They had a couple of days and nights before they were to leave. While Pyxeas locked himself away in a rented room with his books and scrolls and calculations, and Rina organised the final details of their onward journey, Avatak wandered around Parisa.

He had never been to a city before, and he was overwhelmed by the size of it, the buildings of smartly cut stone or shabby wattle and daub crammed in side by side on both banks of a languid river, and jammed in even more tightly on a central island. He walked through alleyways walled by shops and stalls and taverns, stepped over open drains running through the cobbles, and climbed rickety bridges to the central island, which was dominated by sprawling temples dedicated to the gods of the peoples who traded here, from the ancient forest gods of the Albians to the enigmatic Jesus Sharruma of the east. People rushed everywhere, or laboured in open-to-the-street manufactories, or noisily sold wares in the many marketplaces. Pyxeas said the name of this place came from what the people who had founded it called themselves, in their own tribal tongue; they were ‘The People Who Worked’ or ‘The Busy People’, and looking around their city Avatak could well believe it. The place was nothing like the orderly, rigidly laid out, sparsely populated communities of lower Northland, or indeed like the tiny fishing villages of Avatak’s homeland. His only comparison was with the crowded communities of the Wall itself. It was as if a District had been cut from that great structure and emptied out, a heap of stone and wriggling people. But the Wall, of course, would have utterly overwhelmed this cramped, smoky, shabby place.

And even here, far to the south of Northland, Avatak saw the mark of winter and the long drought: frosts every clear morning, the late potato crops struggling in the parched fields outside the city.

But Parisa, for all its detail and curiosities and wonders, was only the start of their true journey. Pyxeas warned him not to be too impressed. ‘You’ll forget this ant-hill when you see the mighty cities of Cathay.’

Rina, coldly disapproving of the whole enterprise, said nothing.

The day before their departure they walked down to the line terminus on the city’s eastern side, with hastily hired servants bringing their luggage after them.

Avatak had ridden steam caravans before. In Northland their gleaming iron trails criss-crossed the countryside, north to south, east to west. And then there was the famous Iron Way, the line that ran along the crest of the Wall itself, uniting the far-flung Districts of the Wall and their peoples.

But the great caravan to Hantilios was a different beast. Of course it was like a Northland steam caravan in its fundamentals; much of it was built and maintained by Northland engineers. But it was so much bigger than any caravan Avatak had ever seen. Not one but two engines would haul passenger carriages studded in a chain of rusty trucks full of Albian coal for fuel, and freight carriages, and specialised coaches that looked like engineering shops on wheels. Pyxeas said that though the southern Continent was a crowded and civilised place (‘Somewhat civilised,’ Rina corrected him), and though the Parisa-Hantilios line was a marvel of Northlander engineering, the technical support in these southern lands was sparse, and on the road the engineers would have to rely on their own resources.

The point of the caravan line was of course trade. The Parisa-Hantilios line, the longest in the world to date, had been laid at huge expense to connect two great trading centres: Parisa, a hub for goods passing to and from Northland, Albia, Gaira, and even far Scand; and Hantilios, central to the Continent, which lay on trading routes connecting north and south, west and east. So the bulk of the caravan was freight carriages laden with lumber and coal and tin and gold from Albia, furs and amber from Scand, and barrels of Kirike-fish from Northland itself, all bound for the needy markets of the east.