Stephen Baxter - Iron Winter

It was the passenger carriages, though, that caught Avatak’s eye. In Northland such carriages were plain but functional boxes of steel and wood with sturdy windowpanes. They were even heated in winter (and increasingly in the summer too) by pipes through which steam was bled from the engine. The carriages here in Parisa, though, were topped by what looked like dome-shaped tents, covered for now by sooty leathers which boys were cleaning of grime as the passengers arrived. Avatak found the carriage they had been assigned, and clambered through a doorway, pushing aside a heavy flap. The tent was a frame of bent wooden slats heaped with vividly coloured velvet. The floor was covered with a thick carpet, and there were couches to lie on, and trunks to store your luggage and food and drink. The windows were holes in the wall covered with leather panels scraped so thin you could see through them.

Pyxeas smiled at the boy’s marvelling reaction. ‘We will be transported by Northlander ingenuity,’ he said, ‘but on the way we will live in a yurt that the Great Khan in Daidu might not be ashamed of.’ For that, it seemed, was the basis of the design of the shelter, the portable houses of the nomadic tribesmen of the plains of Asia. ‘There was a scheme to build a new caravan line east into the heart of Asia itself, perhaps all the way to Daidu. The representatives of the Khans travelled west to try out the technology.’

‘And so to snag their attention,’ Rina said cynically, ‘the engineers built these fake yurts on the back of caravan carriages, just to make the Khan’s people feel at home. A blatant bit of salesmanship, Uncle.’

Pyxeas was grumpy. ‘One must take the world as it is,’ he snapped back. ‘And anyway it worked. The pan-Asia line would have been built by now if not for the weather, and you and I, Avatak, would be travelling to Daidu in heated comfort all the way.’

Rina snorted.

Avatak, his imagination snagged by the idea of crossing an unknown country in a tent as if he was a Mongol warrior himself, could barely wait for the journey to begin.

It took a full day and night to load up the caravan. Pyxeas’ party spent the final night in their carriage, the three of them bundled up on their couches, separated by partitions of embroidered cloth. The yurt was comfortable, though not yet heated as the engine was idle. They lit their lanterns, and they had a water tank topped up by servants, even a small stove and a food store; it was a home from home, and Avatak enjoyed exploring more of its little gadgets. He slept badly that night, however, such was the racket of the loading.

Not long after dawn the caravan was ready to go. As the great engine built up its head of steam the protective leather shells were stripped off and the yurts were revealed as vividly coloured pods, scarlet and green and purple, studded between the huge grey freight cars. The passengers stuck heads out of doors to see what was going on as servants loaded final bits of luggage into the carts, and engineers checked the strapping of the cargo bundles and the coupling between the carriages, and priests of a dozen faiths blessed the great caravan and those who would ride in it.

The Parisans turned out too, men and women and many grubby-looking children, and vendors selling drink and food and little wooden toy caravans. The departure of such a great caravan was rare enough that it was an event for the folk of the city. Pyxeas told Avatak that more people could travel on a single one of these huge continental caravans than lived in all of Coldland, and Avatak, who didn’t believe everything the sage told him, believed that.

At last there was a mighty shriek of a steam whistle that made the children clap their hands to their ears, and a growl like some huge beast, and the engine clawed its way along the track, the carriages bumping after it. Steam and smoke billowed from the engine stack, and Rina and Pyxeas retreated inside. But Avatak hung out of the yurt as the city receded, and he looked back at the shining curve of the caravan as it followed a great arc of rail across flat, chalky countryside, and the smoke streamed back in the bright air.

Once in motion the yurt was even more comfortable, steam-warmed now they were under way. The first stop came at about midday, beside a small service building in the middle of dried-up farmland. Servants hurried off the caravan and set up a kind of yurt much larger than the rest. This was a kitchen, an eating hall, and soon the passengers were served a healthy meal of fish from Parisa, wine from Greater Greece and pickled eel from Northland. The country around the stop seemed empty enough, but there were guards, a troop of soldiers from Parisa, others from Hantilios. Their officers set up a perimeter and kept careful watch until the caravan was loaded and on the move again.

The caravan moved at a brisk and steady speed. Before the first day was done the nature of the country was already changing, with the chalky densely farmed plain giving way to higher ground grazed by cattle and sheep. Overnight they travelled south down a long river valley. By midday the next day they had reached another town, whose name Avatak never learned — another trading centre, smaller than Parisa and subtly different in character. Here they offloaded some goods, loaded up more, took on coal and water, and pulled away again.

They reached a sea coast and followed the shore eastwards, passing through more cities and towns. Looking out to the south, to the caravan’s right-hand side, Avatak saw the ocean, glistening blue rather than a cold grey like the northern seas, and without ice as far as he could see. Fishing boats sailed from neat harbours, a variety of designs strange to his eyes, with billowing sails or rows of oars like insects’ legs. This was the Middle Sea, Pyxeas told Avatak, itself a great and ancient transport highway. And to the caravan’s left, when the route cut north away from the coast, tremendous mountains loomed on the horizon, capped with white, their flanks streaked with tongues of ice. To Avatak this was a wistful and unexpected reminder of home.

While the mountains were in view Pyxeas peered from the yurt, his rheumy eyes squinting in the chill of the breeze, sketching, making notes, muttering, frustrated at how little he could see. ‘The glaciers are growing,’ he told Avatak. ‘Harbingers of the coming of the longwinter. Any record of their growth is useful.’

‘It is like home,’ Avatak ventured. ‘We have such mountains. The ice, the white.’

‘Of course you do. I saw them. But here the cold mantles the mountain because of altitude rather than latitude. By which I mean. .’

But Avatak wasn’t listening. He had been trying to express his mild homesickness, rather than ask for a lesson on the nature of ice and cold.

‘Oh, do shut that flap,’ Rina complained. ‘You’re letting all the heat out. I don’t know why in the mothers’ mercy you’re carting that Coldland boy along with you. You’re going east, not north. You could hardly choose a less suitable companion. I mean, listen to him. That dreadful guttural language — those words as long as a book! Everybody’s been staring since Parisa.’

‘None less suitable? On the contrary.’ Pyxeas pulled back into the yurt. ‘He is entirely suitable for the role. It’s precisely because this boy is so far from his home environment that he fascinates me so — he demonstrates the suppleness of the human mind. And he is my reserve. Like the second walking stick I have packed in my luggage.’

‘Walking stick? What on earth are you talking about, Uncle?’

But Pyxeas wouldn’t say, and Avatak didn’t know what he meant, and the talk petered out.

The journey had been untroubled save for one mechanical failure, a half-day lost while a split boiler had been welded. But now a new problem arose, with the iron road itself. The caravan was halted and scouts ran ahead.