‘No.’ Ayto walked over to him, his footsteps echoing in the empty space. ‘You’re not thinking big enough, my friend. Listen to me. You heard the rubbish the Annids talked back there. Rations that are going to run out. How they can’t even keep out the Gairans and the Albians and other useless stomachs. How they’re wasting time copying old tide tables onto clay tablets.’

‘What’s your point?’

‘The famous Annids can’t cope. Like you, they aren’t thinking big enough. That’s obvious. This is Northland! That’s what they think. The whole world speaks our language, and accepts our scrip. We won’t be beaten by a few flakes of snow! But we will be beaten, my friend, when the cold closes in and the food runs out. The Annids can’t face it, the reality.’

‘And what’s that, according to you?’

‘When people get hungry enough they’ll rip each other apart, and the Wall.’ He shrugged. ‘You know it as well as I do. And after that there’ll be no food left for anybody, and we’ll all die.’

‘So . . .’

‘We can’t save everybody. So we save ourselves.’

‘In here?’

Ayto glanced around, at the doors leading off from all the walls, the air vent. ‘Think of it as a fortress, like the Carthaginians would build. We bring them in here.’

‘Who?’

‘Our families. Friends, lovers. Whoever we want – up to a limit. We’d have to work out what that limit is. We bring in enough food to see us through the winter.’

‘You mean steal it.’

‘Just our share. Salted fish, dried vegetables, stuff that will keep. And water – we’d have to think about that. Storage tubs, or maybe there’s a working pipeline, if you’re right that this is an old cistern. Firewood. Everything we need to stay alive. And weapons. We establish some kind of perimeter, out from here, in all directions. Barricade it, defend it when they come.’

‘Who?’

‘The starving mob. We fight them off, until they die of cold or hunger.’

‘You’re talking about Northlanders.’

‘Northlanders can grow hungry. And when they do, they’ll behave like everybody else. It’s this or die,’ Ayto said.

Crimm, overwhelmed, felt as if he was having some waking dream, in this dry, echoing place, by the light of the single lamp, talking like this while just a short walk away the Annid of Annids, his lover, was drinking nettle tea and discussing the preservation of old books. But this was Ayto, who always had been a much tougher thinker than Crimm, always the first to call the warning about the coming storm, when the rest wanted to carry on for just a little more catch. Even so . . .

‘It seems dishonourable.’