Iron Winter
IRON WINTER
NORTHLAND: BOOK THREE
STEPHEN BAXTER
GOLLANCZ
LONDON
Contents
Map
ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
TWO
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
THREE
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
FOUR
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
Afterword
Also by Stephen Baxter
ONE
1
Once the ice sheets had covered continents. The silence of the world had been profound.
At last the ancient ice receded, and life tentatively took back the exposed landscapes. Northland was a neck of land that connected the peninsula the people called Albia to the Continent. As the ice melted and sea levels rose steadily, from north and south the ocean probed continually at the dry land, seeking to sever that neck – only to be defied by the people who had come to live there.
A long warmth followed. Around the world populations rose, cities sparked, empires bloomed and died. But at last, unobserved by mankind, on islands in the far north of the western continents, the snow that fell in the winter began once more to linger through the summer. The ice waited in its fastnesses in the mountains, at the poles. Millennia had passed since its last retreat. Human lives were brief; in human minds, occupied with love and war, the ice was remembered only in myth.
But the ice remembered.
And now the long retreat was over.
2
The First Year of the Longwinter: Spring Equinox
Pyxeas thrust his head and shoulders through the sealskin door flap and into the house. In the dawn light the Northlander’s face was like a raw red moon, haloed by fur. ‘Avatak! Are you there? It’s moving again, the glacier! Can’t you hear it? Come on, come on.’
Avatak, seventeen years old, was lying in a heap of skins and furs with his relatives: parents and siblings and aunts and uncles and cousins. As the cold pushed into the greasy, fart-smelling air of the winter house, his little sister Nona mewled and cried, and uncle Suko grumbled, ‘Close the flap, man!’
But Pyxeas knew only a few words of the language of the People, and when he was excited even they fled from his mind like a frightened seal from its breathing hole. ‘Avatak! Where are you?’
Avatak knew he wasn’t going to give up. And now he could hear the glacier for himself, a distant rumble deeper even than his uncles’ snoring. So he fumbled under the heap of clothing until he had got his fur trousers on over his leggings, and his jacket with its heavy hood, and he crawled towards the door, pulling on his bearskin boots as he went.