Iron Winter

31

There were no steam-caravan links from Parisa south to the Middle Sea coast. So the next stage of Rina’s journey was overland, on wagons, carts and carriages. The vehicles had been drawn up a short walk outside town, and as the morning wore on porters with masks over their mouths hauled the travellers’ luggage to the meeting point.

Now the next problems arose, because there weren’t nearly as many carriages as Barmocar had ordered, and even fewer horses. Once again Barmocar raged, but there was nothing he could do. After all, they had no choice but to go on; they were not welcome in Parisa. The locals just shrugged. Most carriages had been broken up for firewood, and the rest were being used to ferry the dead out of the city to huge mass graves in the country. As for the horses, skin and bone themselves, these were the few that had so far been spared the cooking pot.

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.