Rina relented. ‘Take some of it. One canvas, your best. Your most recent sketchbook, and your earliest. That will go in the trunk. And take a blank book.’

‘What?’

‘And your styluses and crayons. I suspect we’ll be seeing some remarkable sights before this journey is through. Raw material – that’s what you artists are always looking for, isn’t it?’

The steam caravan departed not long after dusk, and travelled through the night.

Rina woke at dawn. She had slept in her seat, huddled under her cloak. She felt stiff, sore, and cold, despite her layers of clothes. The caravan was still moving. Alxa slept, lying on the opposite bench with her head on her brother’s lap and her feet on their single trunk. Nelo had his sketchbook open, and was staring out of the window. When he saw his mother was awake he drew his finger down one of the window’s small panes, and showed her a thin rime of frost under his fingernail.

The caravan rattled through one halt after another as it passed down the track, heading steadily south. The tremendous plain of Northland rolled past, rich, intensively managed, studded by flood mounds and criss-crossed by roads and dykes and canals. It was all but impossible to believe that all this would long have been drowned under the chill salt water of a rising ocean if not for the genius of long-dead Ana and her heroic generation, and the ingenuity and dedication of all those who had followed. And, Rina wondered idly, how would the story of the wider world have differed if not for the saving of Northland?

But had it all been for nothing? For the signs of Pyxeas’ longwinter were visible all across the landscape. Banks of snow in the shaded hollows, even at midsummer. The telltale grey of ice on the wetlands where last year’s reeds, brown and dead, were still frozen in place, and wading birds struggled to feed. Even the leaves on the trees, the oak and alder and ash, were pale and shrunken. In the communities around the caravan’s halts she could see the damage done by the winter, houses of wood and stone smashed in by snow, the stumps of ancient trees hacked down for long-burned firewood.

The eeriest thing was the absence of people. Rina saw houses untended and unrepaired, and no threads of smoke rising from the fires. In one place she saw deer wandering through the big communal hearthspace, nibbling at the thatch of collapsed houses, undisturbed. The deer themselves looked gaunt, their ribs showing. Where were all the people? Gone – south, probably, in flight from the cold, just as she was leaving Northland herself.