Stephen Baxter - Iron Winter

Barmocar glared, his face suffused with red.

Ywa sighed. ‘Sit down, Cousin. The man is an ambassador.’

Rina complied. But Alxa could see from the look on her face that she was satisfied with the work she had done.

Barmocar continued, ‘On the contrary, madam. If you had not interrupted me I would have explained that we are here solely to offer what succour we can to our neighbours and allies.’ He smiled, arms open in generosity, and spoke on about gifts and giving.

But Alxa, relatively innocent in this kind of duelling, saw that her mother had forestalled whatever subtle request for assistance he had intended. His humiliation was apparent, as was the barely concealed gloating on the faces of the Hatti, long-time rivals of the Carthaginians. Alxa wondered how many children in Carthage would go hungry because of this nasty little exchange.

Nelo whispered, ‘Good old Mother, she always has had a tongue like a poison dart.’

Still the delegates came forward with their tales of agony, one after another. Pyxeas made endless scribbles, and his pile of notes grew to a heap of papers and slates under his seat.

Only the gruff Albians sat unmoving, massive men in furs of bear hide, neither pleading poverty nor boasting of riches. They were known across the Continent; their priest-warriors travelled the northern lands, through great belts of land that had once been farmland and were now given back to the forest, preaching of the return of the old northern gods. Everybody knew they were all right. These bulky, powerful men were here only to remind the representatives of the starving farmer folk that any attempt to share the bounty of their rich, ancient forest would be met by uncompromising force.

Alxa murmured to Nelo, ‘Remember what Giving days used to be like, when we were little? Races on the beach. Swimming. People coming from all over with exotic fruits and stuff, and all those spicy meat treats we weren’t supposed to eat. Swordfighting and cavalry charges. . Now this.’

Nelo shrugged.

But it was true. The world’s slow collapse into cold, flood and drought and famine, had coincided with Alxa’s own growing up, her own journey into the complicated years of adolescence. Sometimes she wondered if she was just projecting her own mixed-up moods onto the world. But no, the world really had been getting worse, and it was just her bad luck to be growing up in the middle of it.

When the submissions were finished Ywa turned to Pyxeas, and waited.

It seemed to take him some time to notice that the Hall had fallen silent. He looked up at last, stylus in hand. ‘What? Eh? Are we done?’

‘We are, Uncle. Have you not been paying attention?’

‘Well, of course I have, my girl, and you were just as impatient when you were a child,’ he said, rebuking the Annid of Annids, oblivious of raised eyebrows around the room. ‘I take it you’re ready to decide on the allocation of the Giving Bounty this year.’

‘That is why we’re here,’ she said drily.

‘Well, I, Pyxeas, have something to say.’ He glanced around at the banks of foreigners. ‘But not in front of these fellows. What I have to say is for your ears first. You and the other Annids — the Water Council. For the ears of Northlanders. Then you can decide what to say to your guests.’

Ywa considered this for a long moment. Then she stood and turned to the delegates. ‘Forgive me. We must withdraw for a private session. We will resume in the morning. I assure you we have taken all you have said into our hearts. In the meantime please enjoy our hospitality. Thaxa, perhaps you could ensure that everything is organised?’

‘Of course.’ Alxa’s father got to his feet with a beaming, inclusive smile; this was what he was good at. ‘Please wait, you will be served refreshments, while I arrange for escorts and guides for all of you. .’ As he hurried from the room, the foreigners, scowling or shaking their heads, got up and began to mill around the Hall.

They gathered in an anteroom, much smaller than the formal Hall. Here the Annids and the House elders loosened their formal clothing and stripped off their stiff cloaks, sat informally on benches and chairs, and sipped water and tea brought to them by the servants Ywa summoned.

Only Pyxeas stood, at the centre of the room, with his Coldlander companion at his side. Alxa remembered her great-uncle from the long-gone days of her childhood, a big, beaming, avuncular man who would play clumsy magic tricks, and later he had tried to coax a little scholarship into her head. But looking at the expression on his face now, and having heard so much dismal news already today, she feared what he had to say.

The scholar began speaking even before they were all seated. ‘You must understand how my conclusions remain contingent upon the information I was to have been supplied by the Cathay scholars. Without that-’

Out of hearing of the foreigners, Ywa gave way to her irritation. ‘You went to Coldland with the financial support of the Water Council-’

‘And my travels aren’t done, by the way.’

‘You were given this support on the understanding that you would learn sufficient about the changing weather to enable us to understand what comes next, for us and the world.’

‘There can never be a definitive answer, that’s not in the nature of philosophy-’

‘Now you have interrupted the bounty ceremony and carted us all off in here, and the mothers only know what our guests will make of that!’

‘You’ll understand why when I tell you-’

‘Tell us, then, man! What have you learned?’

He paused, and considered. ‘Only that we have the answers already. The cause of the dismal seasons we are suffering, as attested across the Continent too. Our ancestors knew it all along — or rather, they remembered.

‘Avatak, give me that scroll — no, boy, that one.’ He took the yellowing scroll, rolled it out, and began to read. ‘In the beginning was the Gap. / The awful interval between being and not being. / The tension of emptiness caused the creation of an egg, out of nothing. Its shell was ice and its contents were slush and mud and rock. / For an unmeasured time the egg was alone, silent.’

His gravelly voice, the familiar text, fixed the attention of everyone in the room. Alxa knew these words, as surely did everybody else. This was the mythos of Northland, the oldest, deepest part: the account of the earliest days, before history, before the Black Crime of Milaqa, before the heroism of Prokyid who defied the Second Great Sea, even before the exploits of Ana herself who had founded the Wall.

‘Then the egg shattered. / The fragments of its shell became ice giants, who swarmed and fought and devoured each other as they grew.

‘Meanwhile from the slush and mud grew the first mother. She gave birth to the three little mothers, and to their brother the sun, and to the earth serpent and the sky thunderbird. The first mother tended the ice giants as lovingly as her own cubs.

‘All time might have ended there, with the first mother and her family. / But for the restlessness and envy of the giants.

‘They fought each other for the attention of the mother, and drove off her true children. / At last, sadly but with love, she allowed the giants to destroy her in their wars.

‘Enraged and saddened, they threw the sun in the sky, and cast the little mothers into the dark. / Then they made the world from the mother’s body, the land from the bones of rock and the mud, the sea from her slush blood. / Their sculpting was violent and rough, which is why the world is such a jumble now, with shaved-off hills and valleys too big for the rivers that contain them. .’ He skipped ahead. ‘The three little mothers and the sun had stood by dismayed while the giants fought. / Now the mothers spoke to the sun, and together they woke the shell of ice, and asked her to lift the weight of death from the world. She did so, and the ice sailed into the sky to become the moon. / The three mothers touched the revealed world, and shaped the wreckage the ice giants had left behind into a living world. . I think that’s enough.’ He rolled up the scroll. ‘You see? You see?’ He slapped the scroll to emphasise his point. ‘It’s all — in — here.’