Stephen Baxter - Iron Winter

‘Concerned about what? Where’s my trunk, Avatak?’

‘In the carriage, master. It is safe.’

Nelo said, ‘Forgive me, Uncle, but why don’t you just tell us what it is you have learned? We can at least try to understand. And then, and then-’

‘And then if you have to turf out my stiffening corpse into the snow before Etxelur the message has a chance of getting through? Is that what you think?’ He sounded fretful.

Avatak said gently, ‘Perhaps they will understand a little of it. And it might make your mind easier.’

Pyxeas sat up awkwardly and regarded him. ‘You are wise, Avatak, wiser than I ever was. Very well.’ He beckoned them closer, and began to whisper. ‘It is a great truth that I, Pyxeas, have discovered. But not a complex one. I will tell you the essence of it — you may check my facts and conclusions from the material in the trunk, the presentations I made in Carthage. .

‘It is simply this: fixed air . That is the secret of the weather.

‘I told you, Avatak, that the weather is controlled by the dance of the world around the sun, its nodding axis, its wobbling circuits. So it is — but not by that alone. There is a second factor — well, probably many more we have yet to discover. But the second most important factor, as the results of Bolghai clearly show, is the fraction of fixed air in the atmosphere that we breathe. For if the sun delivers heat to the world, fixed air, you see, traps that heat. The more of it there is, the more the heat is trapped.

‘Bolghai proved too that the living things on the surface of the world affect how much fixed air is present. For a tree, as it grows, will absorb a great deal of fixed air — much more than the scrap of land it stands on, if that land is farmed. And conversely when a tree is burned, or rots away, the fixed air that it consumed in the growing is released again.

‘And that, Avatak, is why the world’s descent into longwinter has been such a puzzle to me. Not the fact that it is happening, but that it is happening now. We should have been in its grip already — and we are not, because of human actions. It is an astonishing thing to say, but it is true. It is clearly proven by an inspection of history, and the detailed records of the weather kept at Northland and elsewhere.

‘Several thousand years ago the world began its slow descent into the next longwinter. But unlike all the previous longwinters before, now the farmers were at work, in Cathay as in the Continent, planting their crops. They worked their way across the Continent from the east, clearing a landscape that had been choked with forest. Do you see?’

‘Ah,’ said Avatak. ‘And all that fixed air in the trees was released.’

‘Yes! And, warmed by all that fixed air, the world did not cool as it should have done. It could not.

‘Now, some two thousand years ago there was a turning point. It came with the failed Trojan Invasion of Northland, which was the high-water mark of the farmers’ expansion across the Continent. In the centuries that followed our cultural influence expanded. In northern Gaira the farms were abandoned, slowly, and the forests regrew. From Albia, where the forests had never died and the old faiths survived, missionaries were sent out to preach the ancient ways of life, all across the north of the Continent.’

Avatak nodded. ‘And again the forests grew. Devouring all the fixed air. And then-’

‘And then the world resumed its descent into the cold — delayed by some centuries, but otherwise just as every long-winter in the past. There you have it — a simple model — the proof is detailed in the papers in the trunk and elsewhere — a simple truth, yet a staggering one: people have held a longwinter at bay, all unknowing, for millennia .’

Nelo seemed unable to believe this. ‘People did this? People shaped the world? We are not gods, Uncle, not ice giants or little mothers.’

‘No. But what each man and woman does, bit by bit, each small intervention, each tree cut down or field ploughed, over enough time, adds up to the sweeping gesture of a god. Do you see?’

Avatak asked mildly, ‘Why did you not tell me this before?’

Pyxeas reached out a hand and grasped Avatak’s wrist. ‘You said it yourself. I heard you, you know. You stopped listening. You came to see my intellectual abstraction as a kind of madness. And in a world like this, perhaps you’re right!

‘And I, I did not mean to disrespect you, dear boy. It is that I respected you too much. For I came to see that you know far more than I ever will about what is important in this world. You are loyal, constant, strong where I am weak. I became embarrassed about my own petty wisdom, my arrogant attempts to “educate” you, to transform you into something else, something like me. What a fool I was! What a wise man you are. And your sort of wisdom will be increasingly relevant in the future, while mine will matter less and less. I hope you can forgive me-’

Again he succumbed to a fit of coughing. Nelo held him until he settled, and slipped into an uneasy sleep.

When he was asleep the three of them looked at each other.

Avatak shrugged. ‘See what I mean? Here we are stuck in a tent on the ice, with nobody within a day’s travel of us, probably. What difference will any of that lot make?’

Nelo smiled. ‘None. Though if he really did see all this coming no wonder he was sad. Anyone fancy a game of knuckle bones before we sleep?’

The Fourth Year of the Longwinter: Midsummer Solstice

Crimm stood on the central mound of the Little Mothers’ Door, looking down on the lone reindeer that padded between the great circular ramparts of the old earthwork. The animal was scrawny, rather bewildered-looking, young, with small, stubby antlers. Finding nothing to eat in these strange curving valleys, clearly lost, detached from its herd, it lowed occasionally, a mournful bellow that echoed from the pocked face of the Wall that loomed over the earthwork.

Crimm could see Ayto and Aranx and the others, fishermen by trade, reindeer hunters for the day, out of sight of the deer around the bend of the walls. The hunters had their spears and nets ready, arrows nocked in their big hunting bows, their faces wreathed with breath-mist. Crimm waved and pointed, silently telling them which way the deer was coming. Equally silently they moved that way.

The day was clear, for once, the sky a deep empty blue. From up here Crimm could see far to the south, the tremendous frozen plain that was Northland, and behind him the face of the Wall was an ice-bound cliff that ran from horizon to horizon. No people could be seen in that long, battered face, but birds moved everywhere, and flapped overhead. Incredible to think that this was midsummer. Somebody had said today was actually the solstice, but most people weren’t counting.

And all around him was the Door, the great earthwork, said to be a survivor of the last longwinter, an age buried deep in Northland lore.

Last year had been the best for the reindeer. Quite unexpectedly they had come pouring down from the north and east in tremendous herds, evidently as lost and confused as human beings were in the changing world. There had been musk oxen too and other beasts, but it had been the reindeer that had caught the imagination of the Wall’s would-be hunters. Their first hunts had been a shambles, hunters who only a few years earlier had been innkeepers or clerks, junior priests or government officials, sliding on ice-crusted snow in leather boots and waving spears made from bits of furniture and kitchen knives.

It had been Ayto, Crimm’s companion from the Scibet , who had come up with a better way. Fishermen had always made their living from hunting, and knew how to think like prey. Ayto watched where the herds had come from. He had a series of bonfires set up along the route, big heaps of rubbish from the Wall, piles of smashed-up furniture and wall panels, kindling made from screwed-up papers and parchments from the Archive. And Ayto had sent out scouts to watch for the approach of the animals. The next time a herd had approached Etxelur the fires had been lit, the hunters had danced and shouted and waved their spears — and the animals, alarmed, had veered in a great mass, heading just the way Ayto had planned, into the maze of frozen-over canals that was the Door. The killing of the trapped, panicking animals had been great.