Stephen Baxter - Iron Winter

It had quickly been learned just how much you could do with a dead reindeer. There was the meat, of course, but the skin had endless uses, and you could make tools and clothes-toggles from the bones, rope and fishing line from sinew. For one winter the people of Etxelur had become the reindeer people, and flensed skulls and antler racks adorned the caves on the Wall’s seaward face where people lived now.

The Door had made a tremendously effective reindeer trap. Crimm wasn’t given to thinking too deeply, in his experience it never paid off. But it had struck him that it was almost as if the Door had been designed for just that purpose, and maybe it had been, back in long-gone wintry days.

That had been last year. But this year was different, as the last had been different from the one before. There had been more snow, of course, masses of new stuff that fell and covered the old and, in the spring, once again stubbornly refused to melt. But this year, no more reindeer. Maybe they had gone further south still, in search of summer grass. And the Wall folk, eagerly waiting with their pyres and spears, had seen only a few beasts, including this one solitary specimen. Still, Crimm, from his mound, could see that the moment of the kill was coming, the animal approaching the humans, prey nearing predator, all in silence. Crimm felt his heart beat faster, imagined the splash of blood on the clean snow.

But then his eye was distracted by movement. A black speck crossing the ice, far to the south. For the last couple of years nothing good had come out of the south.

He yelled down to the hunters. ‘Ayto!’

His voice, echoing, startled the reindeer. It looked up, confused. Then it turned and began to run the other way, fleeing from the hunters. Ayto and the rest saw the deer’s white rump as it bobbed away. Some of the men hurled their spears in frustration, even one-armed Aranx.

Ayto glared up at Crimm. ‘You famous idiot. What did you do that for?’

Crimm pointed south. ‘Somebody coming.’

Ayto looked that way, but of course his view was obscured by the earthwork. ‘Who? How many?’

‘Not many. Looks like one cart. A sled, I suppose.’

Aranx, beside him, called up, ‘It’s probably those bastards from the Manufactory.’

‘Maybe,’ Crimm said. But the Manufactory, with its ferocious, jealous hunters and their spears tipped with iron shapes torn from now-useless engines, was east of here, another District in the Wall, not south.

Ayto called, ‘You said a sled. Pulled by men?’

‘I don’t think so. Some kind of animal. Dogs, I think.’

‘Dogs? If it’s dogs, it’s probably not those bastards from the Manufactory.’

‘True enough.’

‘Different bastards, then.’

‘That makes sense.’

‘What do you think we should do?’

They were all looking up at Crimm. He sighed. He had no desire to be the leader of this little community of hunters. He didn’t want to be king, the way the idiotic leader of those bastards from the Manufactory had declared himself King of his District, and Emperor of All the Wall. He had always thought Ayto was smarter than he was. It was Ayto who had found his way out through the Wall to the sea, in the first terrible season. Ayto who had figured out how to trap reindeer. Ayto who had grown into this new world of ice, as if drawing on memories from a very deep past. But just as when they had been nothing but fishermen, Ayto liked to stay in the background, leaving all the decisions, and the mistakes, to Crimm. Well, there was nothing for it.

‘I think we should go greet them. They must have come a long way, after all.’

‘And maybe we can get their dogs,’ said Aranx.

Ayto called, ‘And if they’re not friendly?’

Crimm shrugged. ‘Then it’s the end of their journey.’

‘And we will definitely get their dogs,’ said Aranx.

The Wall had changed utterly since Avatak had last seen it, three years back, when he and Pyxeas had departed for Cathay. The great barrier, streaked with ice and heaped with snow, was not beautiful now, just an ugly growstone core pocked with holes. But it still blocked the horizon, and it was still, undeniably, the Wall, and perhaps the one human monument north of Parisa that would survive the longwinter itself.

Nelo, almost absently sketching the latest panorama, said, ‘There’s somebody watching us. On the ice. See? Three, four, five of them. And they look armed.’

Avatak reined in the team. The dogs, panting hard, jostled and growled, competing for their places in the pack.

Pyxeas pulled his thick fur coat around his skinny body. ‘To be expected,’ he muttered. ‘Diminishing resources, a collapse of population, an uncertain rediscovery of long-lost skills. The community will fragment into tribalism. Of course one must anticipate hostility to strangers.’

Nelo said, ‘But you’re hoping to find scholars here, Uncle.’

‘To be expected,’ Pyxeas muttered again. ‘Expected.’

Avatak murmured, ‘Let’s just not get ourselves speared so close to home.’

The party from the Wall stopped perhaps twenty paces away, five men, anonymous in sealskin jackets and breeches, the clothing crudely cut, to Avatak’s eye at least. Now one of them stepped forward. ‘Are you those bastards from the Manufactory?’ He spoke in clear Northlander. ‘Because if you are you can clear off back there, and tell that clown Omim that if he thinks the hunters of Etxelur-’

‘No.’ Nelo walked forward on the hard-packed snow. He pulled off his mittens to show his hands were empty. ‘We’re not from the Manufactory. We’re from — well, from here. Etxelur. We’ve come home. I’m Nelo.’

The man stared. ‘Rina’s boy?’

‘Are you Crimm?’

The fisherman grinned. ‘Cousin. You’ve been a long time away. Things have changed.’

‘I can see that.’

‘And on that sled — is that you, Uncle Pyxeas? We thought you were long dead.’

Pyxeas grunted. ‘Well, you were mistaken.’

The hunters came closer now, lowering their weapons. One man stared at the dogs, wary, fascinated; one of them yapped at him. ‘We ate all our dogs. Any bitches?’

It was further than it looked to the Wall. Avatak realised that the hunters had spotted them from a distance and had come out to stop them. Once Etxelur had been the kernel of the oldest and greatest civilisation in the world. Now, after a handful of cold summers, strangers were met with suspicion and raised spears. Pyxeas’ dream of finding scholarship surviving here looked foolish indeed.

At last they came to the foot of the Wall. The wreckage of ruined superstructures stood in snow-covered heaps, reminding Avatak of the tide-cracked ice at the shore of a winter-frozen sea. A rope ladder led up to a shallow ledge in the exposed growstone face of the Wall, and then another ladder rose up past that, and then another, until you could make your way to the roof.

‘It’s ladders up and then ladders down the other side, I’m afraid,’ said Crimm. ‘Most of us live on the far side of the Wall now, facing the sea. We only come over this side to hunt.’

Pyxeas asked, ‘What of the interior?’

Crimm shrugged. ‘Abandoned. Oh, there may be a few souls left in there feeding off the old stores. We’ve blocked off a lot of the corridors and passageways.’

Ayto said, ‘To stop raids from those bastards in the Manufactory. Among other bastards.’

‘Even I did not think it could be as bad as this,’ Pyxeas said mournfully.

Crimm eyed Pyxeas, the sled. ‘This is going to take some time. We’ll have to get your goods over in relays. We can hide the sled somewhere — figure out what to do about your dogs.’