Stephen Baxter - Iron Winter

In the end she could not bear to wait for the final departure, the last embrace, the waving from the shore as the ship pulled away. She couldn’t help it, even if it was yet another betrayal. She fled to her office in the city and buried herself in work, until Nelo’s ship had sailed.

The ship out of Carthage took them west, through the strait into the Western Ocean, and then to a Carthaginian port in southern Ibera, at the mouth of a mighty river. The port was working, the harbour crowded with shipping, the town itself bustling. But Avatak, having seen a dozen ports on the way back home on the Arab trader, had learned how to read a town, a countryside. He quickly saw that the ships were bringing in food, armour, other supplies, and they were taking out people, more nestspills, all heading south. The country that had once sustained this port had become a threat to it; the landward city walls were heavily armed against rough camps of nestspills beyond. But that was the country across which they must travel.

They spent three days spending Carthaginian money on what they needed for the next stage. They hired a riverboat to take them deep into the interior of the country, and a troop of the port’s city guard for protection. Their elaborate carriage was loaded on board the boat.

They sailed out beyond the protection of the city walls by night, to minimise the threat from the great band of nestspills, bandits and warlords that surrounded the walls. The weather inland was cloudy, blustery, cold, and it frequently rained, the water pooling on the hard earth. The soldiers from the coast huddled under leathers and gambled over games played with broken bits of bone. Pyxeas spent much of his time working in the little shelter on the carriage, or dozing.

They passed by empty towns on the riverbank, and huge plantations where once olive trees had grown in great numbers.Now it was all gone, the weather too wet and cold for the olives, the people bankrupted, fled or starved. But the land was not barren, Avatak saw; in places swathes of grass glowed green in the rare sunlight. Nelo sketched all this compulsively, on Egyptian paper scraped so thin you could almost see through it.

Pyxeas, on one of his rare ventures out of his tent, nudged Avatak in the ribs. ‘Remember the steppe? One day soon, it may only be centuries, this place will be an ocean of grass too, just as we saw in the heart of Asia. The great-grandchildren of these boatmen and laughing soldiers will be horse-riding nomads, and herds of fleet beasts will cross these plains like the shadows of clouds. I, Pyxeas, predict this.’

Himil looked baffled. ‘I do not question your conclusions, scholar. But how can you know all this?’

The scholar smiled and tapped his temple. ‘From observations of the world — from patterns deduced, and stored in my memory — from understanding the superhuman rhythms of the ice.’

Himil just stared. Then, when the scholar had withdrawn, he turned to Avatak. ‘ You must know what he’s talking about.’

Avatak shrugged.

But Nelo said, ‘I thought he was trying to teach you. I know he’s come up with some big idea about why the longwinter is happening.’

‘Yes. We were on a ship when he said he got it, the final solution. Pirates were smashing in our heads at the time.’

‘Didn’t he tell you?’

‘I stopped listening. It’s all-’ he searched for the word ‘-abstract .’ He found he’d used a Cathay word. He tried again. ‘Not real. Not here and now. Once his learning interested me. In Coldland, there’s nobody like him. But we barely survived that journey from Cathay, and now this. What does it matter what this country will be like in a thousand years from now? Somebody else might be trying to cross it then; it won’t be us.’

‘True enough, my friend,’ said Himil.

Nelo asked, ‘Then why did you stay with my uncle?’

Avatak looked at the old man. ‘For what’s inside him. Not his knowledge, all those numbers. Which is all he thinks there is to him.’

‘What then?’

‘His sadness. At what he saw before anybody else saw it, before a single flake of snow had fallen. Sadness for the world, and all of us who must live in it. Even the generations to come. That’s why I stay with him.’

Nelo considered this. ‘You’re a good man, my friend.’

Avatak shrugged.

They followed the river upstream, travelling roughly north-west for some days, until they came to another large city, far inland. They left the boat here; it returned to the coast, taking the soldiers with it, and they were on their own.

This city was a mere shadow of what it must once have been. It had extensive walls, breached, burned and roughly repaired. Inside the walls whole suburbs looked abandoned, burned out. The country beyond seemed empty, with only a tracery of the walls of abandoned farms to be seen. Avatak wondered, in fact, how the city kept functioning at all.

‘And no dogs,’ Himil said. ‘Have you noticed that? No barking. And no cats. Or cage birds singing.’

‘All long gone into the pot,’ Nelo said gloomily.

There may have been no dogs, but there were horses to be had, scrawny nags at a price that Himil the Carthaginian said was eye-watering. But Avatak knew their money did not matter; it would count for nothing once they got further north, and may as well be spent while there was something useful to buy.

Leaving the city behind they worked their way north-west along the river valley, the companions taking turns to drive the carriage, ride the spare horses, or to walk alongside. After some days they came to another much reduced city straddling the river. From here they turned north, following a good Carthaginian road that crossed higher ground. Although this was early summer it felt markedly colder here than at the coast, and the land seemed even more barren, the towns and way stations burned out and abandoned. Avatak felt exposed without the guard, but there seemed to be no bandits on this empty tabletop of a country, and they made good progress.

They came to yet another city, another shrunken remnant. As they approached they came across a substantial procession forming up at the southern gates, men, women, children and old folk, most on foot, some dragging carts, evidently preparing to take the opportunity of the summer to head south. Avatak silently wished them luck.

At the gate Pyxeas’ party was challenged by a different kind of authority. This, it seemed, was the boundary between the Carthaginian empire and the realm of the Franks, whose power base was further north. Guards at the gates asked for hefty tolls to allow this Carthaginian party to pass. They had some Prankish money, but the Franks preferred Northlander scrip, which made Pyxeas laugh. ‘Just pay the man, Avatak, pay the man.’

North of the city they followed rougher tracks. The country was barren and bare, and grew steadily colder. In places they threaded through broad mountain passes; the mountains were all white-capped, and streaked with the grey tongues of glaciers. When they stopped on scraps of higher ground they would sometimes glimpse structures in the distance, not on peaks but on high plateaux, lines and rings of stone. These did not impress Avatak much until the road took them close to one of them, and the Coldlander was able to appreciate the sheer size of the stones, the vastness of the layout, and the careful precision with which it seemed to have been designed. But even these great sky temples were disused now, and the tracks that criss-crossed the complexes were covered with blown dust.

On they journeyed, descending at last from the higher ground towards the coast. Ibera was a great peninsula, Pyxeas said, with its neck crossed by a tremendous mountain chain — and now, from higher ground, Avatak could glimpse those mountains marching into the distance. They skirted that mountain chain, passing west by the coast of the Western Ocean, and they entered Gaira.