‘Look, boy, can you see how the glacier is born up in that hollow in the mountainside? It flows down this valley,’ and Pyxeas mimed the movement with great sweeps of his arms, ‘grinding and smashing as it goes, ripping away any surface soil, any trees, any living thing, cutting down right to the bedrock and then cutting into that – and then it flows down onto the plain below. And I can see, Avatak, that this glacier’s advance from its mountain root has been fast, and recent. Old glaciers, having retreated, leave behind ridges of rubble, fragments of rock they have smashed up and pushed down their valleys. Where is this glacier’s rubble wall? Gone! A relic of past longwinters, overwhelmed by this fresh advance. And this glacial drama is only the start of it, only the start of the reign of the ice.’

‘Scholar, the people speak of all this. In the robats. You should listen to them sometimes. They live in the valleys, beneath the glaciers. They keep animals, farm. Then comes the ice, and avalanches, and sometimes great floods where the ice makes dams that trap water for a while, and then break. They have to flee. You can see the remains of their homes on the ice itself.’

Pyxeas, faintly surprised, nodded. ‘Yes, yes. Good. But such accounts are merely anecdotal, of course. Well. Let us rejoin our companions.’ He took Avatak’s arm and stood stiffly.

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.