Iron Winter (Northland 3) (29 page)

He turned down the Etxelur Way, the main route south. This too was being steadily cleared by more bands of workers, slumped, labouring people. There was some traffic on the road, carts laden
with ocean produce heading south from the Wall, the usual steady trickle of nestspills coming the other way. They were
people.
Desperate parents, struggling children, infants in arms.
Nestspills.

Beyond the banks of cleared snow, beyond the dense suburbs of the Bay Land and Flint Island, the land was flat and eerily featureless. Northland was a tremendous plain anyhow, and now the fallen
snow had erased the detail, with only faint lines where the dykes ran, and clusters of shapeless hillocks that were houses or flood mounds. Even the canals had frozen over and were becoming lost in
the snow, and it was rare to see a tree that hadn’t been cut down for firewood.

Not far down the Way he came to the lodge of Ontin, standing on a very ancient flood mound, a modern house with a square floor plan, wooden frame, and steeply pitched roof. Ontin greeted him at
the door. The doctor, wearing heavy outdoor clothes but with his boots off, had evidently been out clearing the snow himself. Once inside Thaxa stamped the snow off his own boots. He saw that
Ontin’s wife and sons were tending to a family, huddled by the fire, husband and wife, a pair of infants close in age. One child, a boy, had the swollen belly of deep hunger.

‘Here.’ Ontin handed Thaxa a mug of heady Gairan beer. ‘I feel like I need it, though it’s not yet noon.’ He took a deep draught himself. ‘What brings you
here, my friend?’

Thaxa drank gratefully. ‘Fishermen. A party came in last night. The frost got to them.’ The sea before the Wall had been frozen solid for a long while, few boats had made it out
since Crimm had lost the
Sabet
before the autumn equinox, but the fishermen were going out anyhow, walking out to try their luck at ice fishing.

Ontin nodded. ‘I’ll come.’

Thaxa glanced at the family. ‘They’re from your estate?’

‘Yes, from a wet-house.’ A house on stilts, built on a foundation of boulders and logs sunk into a wetland. ‘You should see it, looks very odd now, stranded high above ground
that’s dried out and then frozen – you have to use a ladder to get to the door. When the cold set in, their eel catch died off . . .’

In Northland landholding was frowned on as a disreputable practice of farming kingdoms. Here, most of the land was held in common trust, for it was a shared larder for a people who still at
bottom relied on an economy of gathering and hunting. But there were instances of temporary landholding for management purposes, for example when a stretch of land needed leadership in developing.
After the rainy years had flooded swathes of Northland, some land had been allowed to revert to ancestral wetland, and the people who lived there, like this family, had needed investment and
guidance in a way of life that was very ancient, but new to them. That was the job of Ontin, as much a duty as a privilege, for which he was paid a proportion of the land’s bounty. The family
would be expected to give up the land on his and his wife’s death; there was no inherited property. But no guidance had been enough for this poor family, it seemed.

‘We had to take them in,’ Ontin murmured. ‘What else could we do? I can treat that one for her hunger, and the other has diarrhoea I’m treating with salt and honey.
Thaxa, I’ve seen it before, all over my estate and beyond. The growing season was just too short, just a month or so between the last frosts of spring and the first of autumn.’

‘The dole of salted fish—’

‘Gone in a flash. And all this, Thaxa, within a morning’s walk of Etxelur itself. What is happening deeper in the country? We may never even know.’

Thaxa touched his shoulder. ‘We must do what we can. As you are helping these poor people. Come with me to my house at the Wall this afternoon; I’m having the fishermen brought there
for you to see to. And there’s to be a discussion this afternoon on how to cope with the winter.’

Ontin laughed hollowly. ‘Cope?’

‘It will be informal, but under Ywa.’ He smiled. ‘The Annids like coming to me for their meetings, because I make good nettle tea. Stay the night. Forget all this, for a time.
We’ll talk, eat, drink, get warm. I think you’ve deserved that much.’

The doctor smiled back thinly. ‘I’ll pass on the nettle tea, though. You have any Gairan ale? For that’s the best, you know.’

‘I’ll lay some in . . .’

But Ontin was looking over his shoulder, out of the window, at fresh flurries of snow that fell from a greying sky.

They made it back to the Wall, just, through the closing mouth of the latest blizzard.

Despite the storm, Thaxa couldn’t help but glance with pride at his shopfront as they struggled up to it. He was still well stocked with exotic linen and cloth, from Albian wild-cattle
wool to Cathay silk and Carthaginian purple, even fine-spun wool from the llamas and alpacas of the lands across the Western Ocean – precious indeed, since trade across the ocean had been
sundered by the icebergs. But nobody was shopping today, and the snow was heaped up in banks before the shopfront.

An archway on the left-hand side of the shop led to a courtyard laboriously swept clear of snow, surrounded by a cluster of buildings: a hall to the left, a pantry and kitchens to the right, and
the main living quarters at the rear, with parlours, bedrooms, bathrooms, privies, and the household shrine to the little mothers. All this backed onto the Wall, which loomed over the shop.
Thaxa’s property actually extended into the Wall itself. There were chambers cut into the growstone, much older, abandoned now, behind the elaborate structures that had been built onto the
face – Thaxa himself wasn’t sure what there was back there.

Much of the property was shut up now, for the difficulty of heating it. But a light gleamed in the window of the largest parlour, and Thaxa led Ontin that way.

The parlour was deliciously warm, thanks to a roaring fire in the hearth. Thaxa and Ontin stripped off their heavy outdoor clothing in a small anteroom. They were later than Thaxa had planned.
The fishermen were already here, some of the crew of the lost
Sabet,
Rina’s cousin Crimm, his partner Ayto – and Aranx, who was nursing a badly damaged hand. Ywa was here too,
Annid of Annids, sitting close to the fire with Xree, another cousin of Rina and another Annid. Moerx was serving drinks, a hot nettle tea, a speciality of Thaxa’s – hot to banish the
cold, and made of nettles as a kind of expression of sympathy for all the ordinary Northlanders who had nothing
but
nettles to keep them alive. Thaxa smiled easily at his guests. This was
what he had always been best at: hospitality, a kind of talent for making people welcome, letting them relax.

Ontin went straight to the fishermen, who sat around a table looking slightly out of place. Aranx held out his hand, wrapped clumsily in a strip of cloth. ‘Got it wet, didn’t I?
Another lad fell in a lead, through a crack in the ice. Didn’t notice it was wrong, it got so cold I couldn’t feel it anyhow.’

Ontin carefully peeled back the bandage, to reveal swollen, broken flesh. A stink of corruption filled the room.

‘Sorry, doctor.’

‘Don’t apologise. It sounds as if you were a brave man.’ Ontin took a scalpel from a deep pocket, and began to probe at the damaged flesh.

‘Don’t know about brave. We got old Tabilox out of the water all right, but he didn’t make it back.’

Ayto said evenly, ‘The bravest thing you did, mate, was to go tell his widow when you got back. And his kids.’

‘We miss our boats, that’s the truth. We’re rubbish out on the ice, cutting holes and that. We’ll never be Coldlanders.’

Ywa said, ‘All of Northland appreciates what you are trying to do for us. And you’ve managed to bring home more than a bit of fish.’

Xree smiled. ‘We were talking about you earlier. Of your marvellous return from the dead, so to speak, a couple of months back, when the
Sabet
went down. I was actually there on the
Wall when you showed up. Walking out of the cold, dragging that improvised sled with your injured crewmate and the carcass of that seal, and your families waiting for you at the dock.
Remarkable.’

Crimm sounded embarrassed. ‘We didn’t do anything but live through it.’

‘Oh, believe me,’ Ywa said, ‘you did more than that. You brought back a bit of good news, for once, and you’ve no idea how rare that has been over the last
year.’

‘But I didn’t bring back my ship,’ he said heavily. ‘Or one of my crew. Or any of the catch, save the little bit we’d been eating ourselves. What kind of
achievement is that?’

Thaxa saw Ywa flinch. Crimm backed off, reddening. There was an awkward silence.

And for the first time Thaxa saw there was some kind of connection between the two of them, the Annid of Annids and the weather-beaten fisherman. Well, whatever it was they were entitled to it,
and he suppressed his curiosity.

Crimm said gruffly, ‘Anyhow, you’re here to talk about the future, not the past.’

Xree sighed. ‘True enough. The problem’s simple to state. We have to get through the winter.’

‘The issue being—’

‘The issue being too many people, and too little food . . .’

As they spoke Thaxa discreetly refilled their teacups. At least you couldn’t accuse
his
family of consuming more than their fair share. One reason he hosted these meetings was as a
kind of polite, unspoken penance for the absence of Rina and the children. Everybody knew they had gone off down south, and had sneaked away in secret. You could see it as a betrayal, or as an
example of devotion to a wider cause, to leave your home and risk the unknown to reduce the pressure on the Wall’s resources, depending on how generous you felt. But as Rina wasn’t the
only one to have fled, the social disgrace he had feared had never materialised, not quite. And people had more to worry about than that.

‘In fact,’ Xree was saying, ‘there are more people showing up all the time, from Northland and beyond, even Gairans, even Albians.’

‘Turn them away,’ Ayto snapped. That won him a few glances of distaste.

‘We try,’ Ywa said. ‘But there are always more. And some have a claim to be let in – some of them have relatives in the Wall. Those we do turn away may simply become
bandits and even more of a problem than if we had fed them in the first place.

‘Then there’s the issue of the food itself. There’s more of your salted fish, Crimm, and other comestibles in the storehouses than you might think,’ she said softly.
‘But even so, not enough.’

‘How much “not enough”?’

Xree said, ‘Unless we cut the ration again we’ll run out before the midwinter solstice.’

Crimm nodded. ‘Then you must cut the ration.’

Ywa said, ‘I’ve asked Ontin and the other doctors to come up with recommendations on the absolute minimum people can survive on. We must get as many through the winter as possible,
and hope that the spring is kinder.’

Ayto said, ‘And if it isn’t? No, forget that. If we don’t survive the winter it won’t matter. You may have to go further.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘If there’s not enough to go round, stop the ration altogether for some. The very sick, the already dying.’

There was a shocked silence, at another blunt remark from the fisherman.

‘People won’t stand for it,’ Thaxa said instinctively.

‘They may have to.’

‘We have considered such options,’ Ywa said grimly. ‘Believe me. But even if we could make it acceptable – how do you choose, fisherman? Do you cut out everybody over
fifty, say? Or the very young, on the argument that their mothers can always have more babies?’

Xree said smoothly, ‘In any event, food is only one problem. There’s also the question of heating . . .’

It had been a month since the last of the Wall’s great engines had seized up, of a lack of fuel, of lubricating oil, of damage caused to the piping by the cold. Thaxa knew the first such
engines had been developed by the school of engineer-philosophers founded by émigré Greeks. Those primitive mechanical beasts had solved Northland’s perennial problem of a
shortage of manpower; Northlanders’ numbers were comparatively few, for they did not farm, and they did not keep slaves. But the Wall had become dependent on its engines, and now they had
failed. If the heating couldn’t be restored the Wall might not remain habitable. And in the longer term too, there would be problems out in the country; the whole of Northland was an
artificially managed landscape, dependent on labour: human, animal and mechanical.

Xree and Ywa spoke of efforts to find fuel sources in the Wall itself and its environs. Even the wooden frames of buildings like this house of Thaxa’s might be sacrificed, the inhabitants
taken into the growstone womb of the Wall. The Wall would have to consume itself to stay alive, thought Thaxa.

‘Then there’s the problem of the Archive,’ Xree said.

Ayto looked puzzled. ‘The Archive?’

‘It is rather exposed,’ Ywa said. ‘It is housed in chambers built into the forward face of the Wall. It was done that way, by our predecessors two centuries ago, to provide a
light and airy environment for the scholars to work in. Now we’re working through a programme of moving the Archive back into older housing deeper within the Wall, the growstone
core.’

Xree said brightly, ‘And we’re taking the opportunity to convert some of the more fragile records to permanent forms. On baked clay for instance.’

Ayto leaned forward in his chair. ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing
this
.’

Crimm said warningly, ‘Ayto—’

‘People are starving, freezing to death, dying out on the sea, all over. And you’re worried that your famous Archive might get a bit of damp?’

Xree bristled. ‘The Archive is at the centre of our cultural identity.’

‘Will you have folk eat words?’

Crimm sighed. ‘Take it easy, man.’

Ayto looked at him sternly. Then he said, ‘Can I have a word with you?’