Stephen Baxter - Iron Winter

Rina scowled. ‘What is? By the mothers’ bones, don’t give us children’s stories, man.’

‘Children’s stories? Have you heard of Euhemerus?’

‘Who?’

‘Greek philosopher. Or perhaps Hatti. Died a long time ago. Anyhow he believed that our myths are our oldest account of ourselves. They’re not just stories, you see, though that’s what they teach you in school nowadays. They describe events that really happened. Important events, major, world-changing events. That’s why they were remembered, and written down, and why they became the strange sort of mass memory we call a myth.

‘And any of you could have confirmed the truth of those myths for yourselves, had you gone out in the world and looked , as have I, Pyxeas. If you had learned to read the great book of the world, as I and some others have learned. I have seen the shorelines of lakes long vanished. I have seen ridges of rubble strewn across the continents, left by the retreat of great ice sheets. I have seen valleys gouged by long-melted glaciers. And indeed you could have found the truth in our own Archive. We have records going back millennia — not even the Hatti, not even the Egyptians go back as far as we do-’

‘Oh, Uncle!’ Ywa cried. ‘Get to the point. Why did it start to rain five years ago, all across the Continent?’

‘Because the air got cooler. You must know that the air, invisible all around us, is a jumble of gases. It contains vital air which sustains a flame, and fixed air which is produced by a flame, and other inert components. And water! In the form of vapour.’ He glared at them. ‘Come on, come on! I taught too many of you these basic principles; have you forgotten how to think while I’ve been away?’

Alxa said slowly, remembering her lessons as she spoke, ‘When the air cools, it must drop the moisture it holds.’

He pointed at her. ‘Yes! You have it. The abnormal rainstorms themselves were a sign of the cooling of the air. Then as the rain washed out, the currents of the air were deflected — pushed away by the gathering cold in the north — and settled into a new pattern of persistent and dry winds from the west.’

‘Which,’ Ywa said, ‘eventually brought drought to the southern lands. Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Yes. But why is the air cooling, and indeed the world as a whole? The ultimate cause seems clear. .’ He dug out a bit of Albian chalk, and rapidly began to sketch on the plaster wall: a spinning sphere, its axis tilted, swooping on a curved path around a scribbled sun. ‘The earth! The world on which we stand, spinning and sailing through the void in a manner long ago determined by the Greek scholars brought to Northland by Pythagoras, and measured in detail by generations of astronomers. It’s a very precise art, you see; you can measure a star’s apparent position in the sky quite exactly. .’

Crimm the fisherman was a tough-looking man in his thirties. He sat in loose shirt and trousers, arms folded, legs outstretched, and he watched Pyxeas’ performance with a grin. ‘I got this stuff in my ear all the way back from Coldland. You wouldn’t believe he’s talking about sunshine, would you?’

Ywa seemed baffled. ‘Sunshine?’

‘Yes!’ Pyxeas cried. ‘The world’s spin is not unchanging, you see. The axis wobbles and nods, like a child’s top spinning on a table. Why the world behaves this way is not clear. The Greeks were always divided. Some said the whole cosmic apparatus is like an imperfect machine — rattling like a badly tuned steam engine. Others believe that consciousness suffuses the cosmos; perhaps the earth makes a deferential dance around the sun, nodding and bowing like a courtier of New Hattusa.

‘But the why is not important. The question is, what difference does this make to us? And yes, fisherman, the difference is the sunshine. No two years are identical. Because of these features of the planet’s orbit and spin, in this epoch year by year the world is getting less sunshine — or to be precise, the strength of the sunshine falling on a given spot on the world, say here at Etxelur, at a particular time, say yesterday, midsummer solstice-’

Ywa said, ‘So you claim the whole world is cooling.’

‘I could tell you that,’ Crimm said. ‘More bergs every year. And the ocean currents are changing too. Any fisherman will tell you. We have to go further and further south to find the warm water that the cod like. And as for the catch itself-’ He went to his chair, pulled a canvas sack out from underneath it, and produced dried fish. He passed them around the group. ‘This is all we’re bringing home.’

Alxa got hold of one, a fish as hard as a wood carving. Sometimes still called by its traditional name of Kirike-fish, this was the main produce of the Northland’s fishing fleets, cod caught in masses and quickly salted and dried. It would keep for a year or more, and, easy to transport, was the staple of Northland’s provision of food to the rest of the Continent. But the fish seemed small to Alxa, who had seen fishermen return immense specimens before, some as long as the fishers were tall; this was less than the length of her forearm.

Crimm said, ‘The point is, we’re having to sail twice as far to return half the yield. Before you Annids decide how much to dole out to our continental neighbours, you need to remember that.’

Now the debate on the Giving Distribution started in earnest.

‘We must keep what we have for our own people,’ said one man. ‘If the trends Pyxeas describes continue, if our water courses freeze, if our trees fail to produce fruit-’

Rina shook her head. ‘That’s short-sighted. There are always more farmers than us — and some of them are already here. Nestspills from their failed farmlands in Gaira and the Continent, even from the fringes of Albia. Our guard and the mercenaries might keep some of them out. Far better to buy them off with a little cod than have them come here and consume everything.’

There were many objections to that, and the discussion grew heated.

Pyxeas was growing agitated. ‘You’re not thinking it through. Any of you. You’re not thinking it through .’ But for now, in a swirl of argument, nobody was listening.

The Coldlander boy was with him, silent and stolid. Pyxeas rested his hand on the boy’s arm. The stranger seemed to sympathise with the scholar, over dilemmas he could surely barely understand, and the little scene surprised and touched Alxa. Alxa suddenly felt very sorry for this ancient great-uncle, tortured by the knowledge that was evidently eating away inside him, knowledge he seemed so poor at sharing. She got up and went to him.

Pyxeas looked at her warily, squinting. ‘The light is so poor in here. You’re not Rina, are you?’

‘No. I am Alxa. Rina’s daughter.’ She took his arm and made him sit down, and knelt beside him, holding his hand. ‘Just tell me, Uncle. What is it that we don’t understand?’

He looked at her with a kind of bleak gratitude. ‘That this isn’t some anomaly. Some variation from the norm. These recent seasons of cold and rain and drought. The astronomical calculations prove it. . This is the future. It will get colder and colder. This is inevitable. Maybe you can buy off some of the farmers this season. But next summer, when they come again — what then?’

Still nobody else was listening.

Ywa clapped her hands to call for order. ‘Pyxeas, your contribution has been — umm, invaluable. Crimm, perhaps we can discuss the question of the fish stocks before we must face our guests again, and decide on the bounty we can afford. .’

They began to file out of the room.

Pyxeas, abandoned, collected together the scrolls and slates littering the floor with the Coldlander boy.