Stephen Baxter - Iron Winter

‘And it’s going to be as dull as a Hatti funeral,’ she moaned to Nelo, as they filed into the Hall behind their parents and other Northland dignitaries.

Nelo just laughed.

The session was already coming to order, if slowly, and Alxa and her twin sat with their parents behind their distant aunt Ywa. Ywa was Annid of Annids and the speaker of the Water Council, the semi-permanent body that governed Etxelur and Northland. Crimm was here, another uncle, the fisherman who had brought Uncle Pyxeas home from Coldland. Other members of the Council attended, along with senior members of other Houses: the priest-scholars, the masons who maintained the Wall, the water engineers who managed the drainage of the countryside beyond. Dignitaries from the Wall’s many Districts had gathered too, their gowns emblazoned with the numbers and symbols of their homes: Four East, Seventeen West. Only Great Etxelur itself had no east or west designation, no number; Etxelur was the centre, the zero. Before the stage, below the Northlanders, sat the guests in their parties: Carthaginians and Hatti and Muslims and Germans and Franks, even a few Albians, stern and silent. In all there were perhaps fifty people here in this great and ancient Hall. And as they waited for the session to begin, the foreigners, dignitaries in their own countries, showed signs of restlessness.

They were all waiting for Pyxeas.

At last Alxa’s great-uncle came bustling into the Hall, with slates and scrolls of paper under his arm. He wasn’t in the stylised wolf-fur cloak he should have been wearing to mark his membership of his own House of scholars and priests; instead he wore smelly-looking furs that seemed as if they were still crusted with seawater. And he was accompanied by a young man, short, stocky, plump-looking, with a flat, sketchy face and short dark hair. He too was bundled up in a fur jacket and trousers, and he looked uncomfortably hot. He was a Coldlander, Alxa realised; he must have travelled back across the ocean with Pyxeas. The scholar glanced around, squinting, short-sighted, comical with his ruddy face and shock of snow-white hair sticking up around a bald pate. Alxa hadn’t seen him for three years; he seemed a lot older than she remembered.

Everybody was staring. One of the foreigners laughed behind her hand.

‘Oh,’ Pyxeas said at last. ‘Am I late? You should have started without me.’

Ywa stood, her black owl cloak rustling, and indicated empty seats on the stage close to her. ‘Please sit, Uncle. And your, umm, companion.’

‘Where’s the delegation from Cathay? My colleague Bolghai promised me his collated information on the changing mix of atmospheric gases which, which- Well, we won’t achieve full understanding without that. But if he’s not here, he’s not here.’ He looked up at Ywa. ‘Carry on, child, carry on!’

Alxa admired Ywa’s calm in the face of such provocation. She glanced around the room. ‘Welcome to the Distribution of the Giving Bounty. Who would like to approach the Council first?’

The visiting parties each sent up a delegate to speak before the Annids, one after another.

A Frank, from northern Gaira, was the first to speak. He wore a woollen tunic over thick leather leggings, his greying blond hair was worn long, and he had a carefully shaped and combed moustache. He was old for a farmer — more than forty, at least — and Alxa thought his face was oddly slack, like an empty sack, the face of a man once plump. ‘It began with the years of rain,’ he said. ‘Five years back for us, it was — I know it’s been different for some of you, the detail of it anyhow. That first summer we got hailstones the size of your fist that just smashed down our crops. .’ As he spoke, translators from the House of the Jackdaws, the traders and negotiators, murmured into the ears of the Annids. ‘We tried harvesting the grain but it was wet and soft. Even the hay was too wet to be cured. Animals stuck in the mud or drowned, cattle, sheep. Come the next summer our reserves were exhausted, and it rained so hard we couldn’t get the planting done. That was the year the rest of the animals were slaughtered.’ He was a proud man, Alxa could see that. He hated to be standing here begging for help. Yet here he was.

As the Frank spoke, Pyxeas made notes with pen and ink on his lush Cathay paper, muttering and murmuring. The Coldlander lad helped in small ways, handing him paper, fetching him water. Pyxeas was nervous, intent, but he seemed on the edge of exhaustion. Alxa saw his head nod over his papers, the scribbling stylus slowing, until he drifted to sleep — and then he would wake with a start, and an odd barked grunt, and he would turn his head like a short-sighted bird.

‘I’ll cut it short,’ said the Frank. ‘We had hopes for this year. But the winter was from the gates of hell — you know that. We had snow on the ground long after the spring equinox, and even when that melted back the ground stayed hard frozen beneath and you couldn’t get a hoe in it. We ran out of wood to burn! We have pleaded with our gods. We have sacrificed what we can — we have little left to give. My priests say it is only the little mothers of the Northland who listen. So I am here, Annid of Annids. In the past we have come to your aid in your hours of need.’

‘I hear you in friendship,’ Ywa said. ‘Even now we have troops of Frankish warriors patrolling our eastern flanks against incursion of German bandits.’

Rina murmured to Alxa, ‘Just as in the south we have German soldiers kicking out Frankish nestspills, but don’t tell this fellow that.’

Before the man’s dignity, Alxa was faintly repelled by her mother’s cynicism.

Everybody seemed relieved when the old Gairan at last bowed and withdrew. But the next supplicants, more from Gaira, then from the German nations south of the great forest, had much the same story to tell: of years of rain, failed harvests and famine, and now the cold. The dismal accounts began to have a cumulative effect on Alxa. Was nowhere spared?

Now there came a Carthaginian, a worthy of some kind called Barmocar. He was a man of about forty with hair that looked suspiciously deep black to Alxa, and he wore a robe of heavy cloth dyed richly purple, a shade much envied in the fashion houses of the Wall but which remained a Carthaginian secret. Alxa had met Barmocar’s wife, an elegant if arrogant woman called Anterastilis. She wondered what relation Mago was to Barmocar — a son perhaps, or a nephew. The Carthaginians were an empire of merchants who didn’t have kings and princes like other farmer-nations, like the Hatti, say. But just as in Northland, in Carthage family ties were everything when it came to the distribution of power.

And Barmocar spoke, not of rain as in the northern lands, but of drought in the once-fertile plains of North Africa.

‘Years of it. I doubt you can imagine the consequences. The earth itself cracks and dries, and the soil blows away on the wind. The cattle lie in the heat, too listless to brush away the flies swarming around them. And the children too, their bellies swollen, whole communities ravaged by diseases. Yet despite our own privations, we of Carthage ensure that our neighbours do not suffer, if we can aid them. .’

Rina whispered to Alxa, ‘I never liked Carthaginians. Arrogant, bullying and manipulative. I’ve been warned about the sophistry this one’s to come out with. He’ll make a case that Carthage is a great nation, a giving nation, all the while wheedling under his breath for fish and potatoes, so he has it both ways — oh, I can’t listen to this.’ She stood and said loudly, ‘With your permission, Cousin Ywa. Good Prince Barmocar, I am confused.’ Her words were hastily translated into Barmocar’s own thick tongue. ‘This tale of woe you recite — are you here to beg for bounty? Begging like these others, the Franks and Germans and the rest, these “poor rudimentary farmers”, as I have heard you describe them? And a bounty from us, whom I have heard you describe as “a thin godless smear of ignorance and incompetence on an undeveloped landscape”?’