Iron Winter (Northland 3) (22 page)

So began another spasm of dumping and repacking. Rina and her children were forced to give up their one and only trunk, and packed up their remaining belongings in bundles improvised from cloaks
and sheets.

With much ill humour, the journey continued. The country was eerily quiet, a landscape of small farms abandoned to the weeds and the crows. All this Nelo sketched assiduously. The road itself,
following the bank of a canal heading roughly south-east, showed signs of the winter cold, frost cracks and potholes in the cobbled surface, left unrepaired for lack of workers.

Towards the evening they came to a substantial town, a mixture of wooden and stone architecture, a local market centre.Again they were not allowed inside the walls, despite Barmocar’s
protests. They had to sleep in rough felt tents loaned by the town and erected by Barmocar’s soldiers, and were shown where to find fresh water, and were sold shrivelled fruit at astounding
prices. The soldiers, who seemed competently led by a grizzled officer, set up a perimeter and organised a watch rota, helped out by some of the travellers.

At least Rina and her children had a tent to themselves. But the night was uncomfortable, the ground hard despite the layers of clothing heaped up on the ground under them – and
cold,
as if under the surface it had never thawed since the winter. In the morning Alxa helped out with brushing and feeding the horses. It was a novelty for her; horses were rare in
Northland.

It took three days of jolting travel in the carts before they came to the valley of a broad river, leading roughly south. They were supposed to sail down this all the way to the great port of
Massalia. But there were no boats. Barmocar, ill-tempered, betrayed again by his contacts, had to form up the party to continue the journey south by foot and carriage.

Worry nagged at Rina at the thought that the further they travelled the more Barmocar’s elaborate arrangements were breaking down, as if the world itself was steadily failing around them.
Rina, fifty-one years old, had travelled extensively before, across Northland, and in Gaira and Ibera, and, last year, as far as Hantilios with Pyxeas. But she had imagined, deep in her heart, that
on this journey she would travel as she had before, in comfort, in well-equipped cabins in caravans and canal boats and ships, with servants and every luxury. Now here she was with no more luggage
than she and her children could manage on their backs, rattling in rough carts and carriages over foreign tracks, sleeping under a felt tent on cold, hard earth, and not having had a decent wash
for so many days that she probably smelled worse than the horses.

But she held her tongue for the sake of her children. Nelo was sometimes disturbingly quiet, but he was absorbed in what he saw around him – sights such as none had seen in generations,
and recorded with brisk strokes of his crayons. And Alxa was discovering a practical side that was, for the first time, Rina supposed, being given a chance to flourish. For their sake Rina did not
complain, did not question.

Pressing south, they passed village after village in a landscape dense with farms, most abandoned. The towns here were built of stone, the streets set out to rigid grid patterns. This far south
they were entering territory that had once come under the sway of Carthage itself, whose imperial holdings had waxed and waned with the centuries, but whose influence lingered in the older building
stock.

Then, one morning, they woke to a smell of smoke.

Emerging from her tent, Rina saw an orange-grey smudge across the southern sky: a forest fire, and a big one, right across the horizon. They had no road to follow save the track that followed
the river, no choice but to go on and challenge the fire, to walk right through it.

In the worst of it, it seemed as if the whole land around them was ablaze. The terrified horses had to be led by hand, and the people wore moistened cloth over their faces. There were firebreaks
around some of the villages, but others had been abandoned to the flames. Nestspills cluttered the road, people walking alone, families – everybody heading south, ever south. There was no
sign that anybody was seriously trying to challenge the fire.

‘They’ve had drought here,’ Alxa said to her mother, shouting through her mask and the noisy crackle of the flames. ‘That’s what Pyxeas told me. Worse than in the
north. He said we had to expect this. The trees dry out until the slightest spark hits, a lightning strike, and the whole landscape goes up in flames.’

‘Trees grow back,’ said Rina.

‘Pyxeas said it may never be the same. The trees that grew here before may not prosper in the conditions to come – colder, dryer, windier. Maybe pine trees will grow here next, not
oaks and ash.’

‘This far south? Surely not.’

‘That’s what Pyxeas says.’

It must, Rina thought, be terrifying to live inside Pyxeas’ head. To predict such an appalling sight as this world on fire, and to
understand.

It took two days to walk through the tremendous fires, and several further days’ travel along increasingly crowded roads, before they came to Massalia.

The city was a sprawling port with a fine natural harbour and a broad estuary. Here, Barmocar boasted, in this Carthaginian dependency, after a long trek through countries of
savages, he was sure of a civilised welcome.

Rina could see there was trouble here even before they came into the city itself. Beyond the harbour, on the broad face of the Middle Sea, she saw ships standing out to sea, apparently
motionless. Had they been refused permission to come into the harbour? And on land, as they neared the city, the road was packed with nestspills, the fleeing folk evidently so fearful of plague
they kept their distance from their neighbours and wore masks over their faces. It was a whole countryside, Rina saw, draining south towards Massalia.

But the city was closed. The landward side was surrounded by a stout wall, the gates were firmly barred. The wave of nestspills broke against this wall, and the result was a kind of ghost town
of misery, with no provision for food or water, and sewage flowed down improvised gutters. The Carthaginian party cautiously passed through. Barmocar, weary, frustrated, angry, said loudly that it
would be better if the plague came and swept these purposeless wretches off the face of the earth, just so long as they got out of his way.

Just like the nestspills, however, Barmocar and his party were excluded from Massalia. It was fear of the plague, yes, that and a shortage of food. But his party was allowed to pass around the
city to the harbour – and here, to everybody’s relief, the ships he had ordered were waiting, at least some of them. Again there was a weary flurry of packing and repacking, a shedding
of still more goods, by now endured in grim silence.

Nelo was fascinated by the ships. They were quite unlike the wide-bodied sailing ships of the Northland fishing fleet. These vessels of the Middle Sea were sleek, driven by sails
supplemented by banks of rowers, and they had mighty spikes fixed to their prows. They were ships designed to fight on an enclosed ocean that had been an arena for warfare for millennia.

As the ships were loaded, on this summer afternoon in Massalia, on the shore of the Middle Sea, the sky clouded over, and the air grew cold, and Rina watched snowflakes, just a few, fall
from the sky.

They left the harbour the next day, at dawn. The wind was low, and they had to take to the oars; the professional seamen Barmocar had hired were supplemented by volunteers from
among the passengers.

Cautiously they sailed down the eastern coast of Ibera. On the open sea Barmocar’s soldiers kept an eye out for pirates. At night they put into land at small harbours away from the main
population centres. Nobody knew what condition the communities on land were in after years of drought, after the plague. Some slept on the land; Rina, who found the movement of the creaking
ship on the slow swell of the sea quite soothing, preferred to remain on board.

One night Rina was woken by a wind off the land that made the ship heave and roll, and the air moaned in the rigging.

When the morning came she found the ship transformed, heaped with red-yellow dust, in the hatches, over the decks, drifting in every corner. The crew, ill-tempered, were shovelling this load
into the sea. The dust was due to a storm blowing from the coast, Rina learned. Desiccated farmland, topsoil turned to dust by years of drought and just blown away. The dust had got everywhere,
wherever a window or hatch hadn’t been sealed – into your clothes, your hair, in the fabric of the ships’ sails. It took a full day for the little fleet to be dug out.

The journey resumed. After two more days the fleet turned south away from the mainland of southern Ibera, with the crew nervously watching the horizon for pirates. Soon, the word ran around the
ships, they would at last come into Carthage. Rina knew her troubles were far from over, but at least this journey with all its trials would end, and she would never have to make such a trek again.
She felt an enormous relief, like a physical weight lifted from her shoulders. And she wondered how close her uncle was to his goal.

Day by day Pyxeas’ party climbed. The air grew clearer and colder, the sky more blue. The sun felt stronger than ever to Avatak, and he kept his exposed skin covered with
Uzzia’s greasy unguents. The ground was bare and hard and rocky, and ice-bound mountains stood around, gleaming a brilliant white in the clear sunlight. In places they followed ridges from
which they looked
down
upon ice-coated slopes, and they could see glaciers pouring into valleys below, every detail clear, the merging ice flows and meltwater streams like models made by
some sculptor of plaster and paint.

There were no people up here, no more caravanserai. Yet there was life. Sometimes Avatak glimpsed wild sheep, their coats grey-white, clambering up impossible-looking slopes to get at the sparse
tufts of bright green grass. Jamil said there were wolves up here too, feeding on the sheep. And there were rumours of humans, ragged hunters in skins who preyed on the flocks with small bows, but
who were timid and secretive and rarely seen. Those locals who had come this way before had their own names for this place. Jamil called it ‘the roof of the world’.

And still they climbed, and climbed. Avatak found his lungs dragging at the thinning air, and the horses laboured. When they stopped, the fires they built seemed to burn only fitfully, and Jamil
grumbled that when water boiled it was no more than lukewarm, and spoiled his evening tea. Some of the locals, especially the hard-working bearers, were afflicted with headaches, nausea,
giddiness, episodes of passing out.

Uzzia tended to these victims. ‘I’ve seen such symptoms before. Mountain sickness. If you’re used to the high ground it’s not so bad, and best of all is to have been born
up here. But if you’re born a lowlander you can suffer. Some of these fellows have probably never come up here before, never dreamed they’d have to, before the advance of one of your
master’s glaciers forced them out of their farms, to come labour for us like your mule.’

‘He’s not my mule. He’s his own, I think.’

She laughed. ‘And if he’s a lowlander he’s not showing it.’

Pyxeas had an explanation for everything. He said the sickness was caused by the thinness of the air at altitude, and a lack of a particular part of the air he called ‘the vital
air’, necessary for life, and indeed for the sustenance of fires, as experiments had shown. As for Pyxeas himself, he actually seemed to thrive in the thin air. He even took to walking a
spell each day, rather than riding. ‘Do you know,’ he said, as he trotted alongside his companions one morning, ‘the worst blight of old age is the constant
pain.
In your
head, in your back, your joints, your bowels –
somewhere.
Constant, nagging, continual pain. Nobody talks about it, or if they do nobody younger ever listens, but it’s there all
the same. Up here, though, my own various aches, my faithful companions for years, are lessened – some of them gone altogether. Make a note, Avatak.’

‘Yes, scholar.’

Still they climbed.

It grew colder. They woke to morning ground frost, and patches of old ice in the shadows of rocks and ridges. Pyxeas was fascinated by this, but fretted. ‘When we try to return, in a year,
two years, we might not be able to come this way again.’

Uzzia growled, ‘If we make it to Cathay, we’ll find another way back. But in the meantime, sage – watch your step!’

And there was the silence. Avatak was increasingly aware of it, behind the small noises of the people, their morning coughs, their soft voices, the clink of pots hanging from the mule’s
back – a huge silence that stretched to the mountains all around them. It wasn’t just the absence of people. It was the absence of any sound at all. Not even the sound of birds, he
realised, not even their caws and cries and songs. Maybe the birds could not fly in this thin air. Pyxeas might be interested in the observation, but he would only make Avatak dig out his journal
and write it down, so he kept the thought to himself.

Then they came to a meadow in the sky. It was a high, broad plain, suspended between two looming mountains. A meadow, complete with thick grass and dancing wild flowers. There were sheep up
here, fat-looking beasts who fled at the party’s approach. All of this lay under a brilliant blue sky, the green of the grass and the sheep’s pale wool vivid. It was like a dream,
Avatak thought; it seemed impossible this could be real, could be here. The horses tore eagerly at the rich grass. Even the mule could barely conceal its pleasure at the lush pasture.

Jamil and Uzzia both knew this place. ‘Here we will stop,’ Jamil said firmly. ‘For two nights, three, while the horses feed, and we rest.’

Avatak could see the wisdom of it. By now the party was much reduced: just the four travellers of Pyxeas’ party, and two other traders, Arabs who had kept to themselves from the beginning
of the trek, and six local bearers and guides. They were all exhausted; they all needed time to get used to the air.