Iron Winter

72

As soon as the epochal deal was done with the Hatti, the party that would take Pyxeas back to Northland prepared for their departure.

Rina tried to help. At least she could do that much, given that she had failed to get the old man to abandon this foolish idea and stay in the comparative safety of the city.

Avatak would go, of course, the old man’s constant companion. As a Coldlander he possessed the skills needed to survive in a world gripped by the longwinter, if anybody could. And, Rina suspected, he was the only man Pyxeas really trusted. Himil wanted to go, which was a surprise. Once a servant to Jexami, he was now a capable young man with enterprises of his own in a much-changed Carthage — and who seemed to feel some loyalty for Rina, because of Alxa. He still had to support his own family. ‘But,’ he said, ‘everybody says the world is shutting down because of the longwinter. I want to see a bit of it while I still can. Something to tell my own kids.’ Rina saw he would certainly be useful in the early stages of the journey; he knew Carthage and its dependencies and allies as none of the rest did.

And then there was Nelo, artist-soldier, who had had enough of Carthage, he said, and wanted to go home. Rina felt it was good for Pyxeas to have family with him on this jaunt — and Nelo, in the course of his time in Carthage, had certainly toughened up.

But Nelo was Rina’s son, her only surviving child.

She could not dissuade him. And, thinking it over, she gave him a special commission — a small case to carry, containing the cremated remains of the Northlanders who had died here in the months and years since the great flight from the north, all she could assemble. They could be interred with their ancestors in the Wall growstone, ready to continue the millennia-long fight against the sea. Thus she discharged her debt to the dying Jexami.

The most basic question was how they were to travel, and by what route. It was clear that Pyxeas could not walk far. Himil the Carthaginian wanted to go by sea, probably sailing north along the shore of the Western Ocean as far north as they could, putting in to surviving ports to reprovision. Avatak the Coldlander wanted to go overland, through the heart of the country, then across the Northland ice all the way to the Wall. They would carry most of what they needed; they would hunt on the way. Nelo had no opinion.

Rina asked around Carthage for advice; this was a city of travellers and traders after all. In the end she talked to the innkeeper called Myrcan — not for the first time, for it was in his dingy bar that she had had one of her last meetings with her daughter, and she had come back many times since, as if in search of the echo of Alxa.

‘People tell me the truth,’ he said. He poured her a cup of wine. ‘Make the most of this, by the way, the last really good vintage we got before the weather turned to shit. Pardon my language.’

‘I’ve heard worse,’ Rina said drily.

‘The truth. Every traveller is expected to file a report with the suffetes. It’s not just scholars who need to know what’s becoming of the world. And when they’ve reported to the suffetes most of them come here, and report to me — or rather, to the best listener in the world,’ and he rapped a fingernail against the neck of the wine flask.

‘Well, I want the truth, as best you have it,’ she said grimly.

‘Then tell your uncle he must travel overland. That Coldlander boy is right. The interiors of the countries are emptying out. This has been going on for years. By now the people have either fled south or to the coast. So if you travel by sea you have these crowded coastal ports full of starving nestspills, and everybody’s out on the ocean fighting for the catch, and you have pirates who’ve got bolder and bolder. Why, I’m told the market for slaves from the west, shipped over to what’s left of the countries in the east, is one of the healthiest businesses in the world.

‘So your son and his party want to avoid all that mucking about. Go across country. That way they’ll only have to deal with a few starving farmers, and wild animals who are as confused as we are. Tell them Myrcan said so. Now, do you want some more of this reasonably priced nectar or shall I stopper it for you to take home?’

From such recommendations, and partly because of all of them it was only the Coldlander boy who seemed to have any idea of how this journey might actually be achieved, the decision was made: overland it would be, after a short sea crossing to the southern shore of Ibera.

The Carthaginian authorities were lavish in funding Pyxeas’ expedition, in a mood of nervous gratitude. Or perhaps the city just wanted rid of him, he joked. So the party gathered equipment and supplies, heavy jackets, breeches, hats and boots made from the fur of seals and bear, meat and fish dried and salted, pickled vegetables in clay pots — and a carriage.

Pyxeas took a great deal of interest in helping Avatak design this carriage. In its initial incarnation it would be a heavy horse-drawn cart with stout iron-rimmed wheels. It would bear a small canvas shelter at all times, so Pyxeas could stay in the warm and the dry while they travelled. Pyxeas even had a metal plate installed in the floor so they could build a fire in the back. But when they had to travel across snow and ice the carriage’s wheels and axles could be detached, and long polished runners exposed so the cart became a sled. Pyxeas had a lot of fun with this, devising little mechanisms whereby the axles could be detached by loosening a few bolts and pulling levers. Rina saw a side of him she had never known before. All her life he had essentially been an old man. This was how he must once have been as a child, a bright boy tinkering with gadgets, just as the scholar would one day try to take apart the mechanisms of the world itself.

Suddenly they were ready to go.

A good crowd assembled by the dock in the great Carthaginian harbour to see them off. Pyxeas’ fame as a scholar had been wide even before his monumental trip to Cathay. Avatak too, a sturdy, exotic-looking young man, was an object of curiosity, though he seemed completely unaware of it. As the small ship was loaded with their goods Nelo made a few last sketches of Carthage’s astonishing harbour, the low light catching the long stretches of docks, jetties and warehouses, the crowd of spectators, and the vendors who, as ever, turned up from nowhere to sell people stuff they didn’t know they needed.

Rina struggled with her feelings. She thought she had lost Nelo emotionally because of the blood sacrifice she had had to make of him, and then she feared she had lost him altogether to the war. Now she was going to lose him again, to the ice, to the longwinter, to Pyxeas’ strange ambitions. Even as she had worked on the preparations, her mother’s heart had been ripped apart shred by shred.

In the end she could not bear to wait for the final departure, the last embrace, the waving from the shore as the ship pulled away. She couldn’t help it, even if it was yet another betrayal. She fled to her office in the city and buried herself in work, until Nelo’s ship had sailed.