Iron Winter

79

Millennia had passed since the last retreat of the ice. Human lives were brief; in human minds, occupied with love and war, the ice had been remembered only in myth.

But the ice remembered.

And now the long retreat was over.

Once more the ice covered continents. The silence of the world was profound.

Afterword

This book opens in the year AD 1315, according to our calendar, at the beginning of the so-called ‘Little Ice Age’, centuries of cooler and more turbulent climatic patterns in Europe (see The Little Ice Age, Brian Fagan, Basic Books, 2000). It is a useful starting point for the fictional but much more severe glacial epoch depicted here.

The ‘Holocene’, the period of warm climate since the last Ice Age — the long summer that gave civilisation its chance — is in fact the longest stable interglacial warm period in four hundred millennia. And if not for farming, the ice might already have returned. American climatologist William Ruddiman (see Ploughs, Plagues and Petroleum, Princeton, 2007) argues that the main forcing factor in the Earth’s long-term climate changes, changes in the planet’s orbit and axial tilt, should have driven the world to the brink of a new glacial period by now, but this has been offset by humanity’s injection of greenhouse gases, not just since the Industrial Revolution but since the beginnings of agriculture in 6000 BC. As with much of the current debate about humanity’s impact on our climate future and past, Ruddiman’s argument is hotly contested (see ‘The Climate Changers’, New Scientist, 6 September 200S).

In this novel the world collapses into Ice Age conditions in just a few years. This has some basis in reality. Beginning about 12,S00 years ago, the period known as the ‘Younger Dryas’ (named after an Arctic flower) was a relapse back into glacial conditions, triggered when a glacial lake in Canada burst its banks and reached the sea, chilling and diluting the North Atlantic, and forcing a shut-down of the Gulf Stream. Much the same mechanism is postulated here. Recently (see New Scientist, 14 November 2009) scientists from the University of Saskatchewan used a finely grained mud core from a lake in Ireland to prove that during the Younger Dryas temperatures collapsed within mere months, or a year at most.

Bolghai in Daidu (Beijing) precociously studies the properties of carbon dioxide (‘fixed air’), some centuries ahead of similar studies in the West in our timeline, by scholars like Jan Baptist van Helmont, Joseph Black, John Tyndall and Svante Arrhenius.

The names I have used here are primarily chosen for clarity and familiarity.

‘German’ is a name used by Greek and Roman writers, not by the people the term was meant to describe. I have followed the Pinyin system for Romanisation of Cathay names, erring always on the side of clarity. Pyxeas’ journey to the East very roughly mirrors that of Marco Polo in our own timeline, and I have used names from that source (for a recent study see Laurence Bergreen’s Marco Polo, Quercus, 200S). Daidu is on the site of modern Beijing; Quinsai is Hangzhou. I also drew on the memoir of Ibn Battuta, a great Muslim traveller of the period (see Ross Dunn’s The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, University of California Press, 19S6). My Northlanders use ancient Cathay terms relating to the manufacture of gunpowder, which they call the ‘fire drug’ (see Clive Ponting’s Gunpowder, Chatto amp; Windus, 2006). Saltpetre was known as ‘solve stone’.

I have loosely used modern terms for military rankings like ‘sergeant’, ‘general’. Ancient equivalents are often unknown.

In our history Carthage did not survive as an independent power after its famous destruction by the Romans in 146 BC (see Richard Miles’ Carthage Must Be Destroyed, Allen Lane, 2010). I have referred to Carthage by its modernised name throughout, which derives from a Latinised version of the Phoenician ‘Qart-Hadasht’, ‘new city’ (Miles p. 62).

I have used the name ‘Anatolia’ for modern mainland Turkey. The ‘people of the Land of Hatti’ are the great Bronze Age kingdom we know as the Hittites (see Trevor Bryce’s The Kingdom of the Hittites, Oxford University Press, 2005, and his Life and Society in the Hittite World, Oxford University Press, 2002). In our timeline, by 1159 BC, the setting for my Book Two, the central Hittite empire had already collapsed. Its Anatolian heartland later became the centre of the Byzantine empire, and my fictional history reflects something of the Byzantine reality (see Judith Herrin’s Byzantium, Allen Lane, 2007). The Hittites’ ‘Constantinople’ is a rebuilt Troy — an option considered by Constantine I when he moved the capital of his empire from Rome (Herrin, Chapter 1). ‘Greater Greece’ is Italy. ‘Hantilios’ is on the site of Venice. In the Hittites’ pantheon many gods were ‘syncretised’, that is, identified as aspects of each other. Sharruma was the offspring of the Hurrian gods Teshub and Hepat, later syncretised with Hittite gods. The potato blight, which causes famine in my Hittite empire here, caused the similar and similarly terrible nineteenth-century ‘Great Hunger’ in Ireland (see Christine Kinealy’s A Death-Dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in Ireland, Pluto Press, 1997).

My ‘River City’ is the city now called Cahokia, on the flood plain of the Mississippi (the ‘Trunk’). Tiwanaku was near Lake Titicaca in the Andes highland. The ‘Altar of the Jaguar’ is the Olmec city known as San Lorenzo. A provocative recent survey of the pre-Columbian Americas is Charles Mann’s 1491 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).

A recent study of the life of the great sixth-century sage Pythagoras and his heritage is Kitty Ferguson’s Pythagoras, Icon Books, 2010. Pyxeas’ ‘world position oracle’ is loosely based on the Antikythera mechanism. This remarkable gadget (see Decoding the Heavens by Jo Marchant, Windmill Books, 2009, and Lucio Russo’s The Forgotten Revolution, Springer, 2004) is evidence of an advanced mechanical capability among the ancient Greeks — which, in the universe of this novel, led to a precocious development of steam engine technology. The Northlanders’ Atlantic fishing craft depicted here are based very loosely on the sturdy British design known as ‘doggers’, which in our timeline appeared a little later in the historical record, during the seventeenth century (see The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea, ed. I.C.B. Dear, Oxford University Press, 2005).

This is a novel, not meant to be taken as a reliable history. Any errors or inaccuracies are of course my sole responsibility.