Avatak thought that over. ‘So we’re still in the first of those big cycles.’
‘Yes.’
‘What will happen in the future? When you run out of those big cycles?’
Pyxeas stared at him, and laughed. ‘That won’t happen for a hundred thousand years. But it’s a good question. I dare say we’ll agree on some extension to the system before then. Just remember the date, boy. Remember this day.’
‘Why?’
The scholar looked out at the sea, the glacier, the jumbled ice. ‘Because today is the day I have proved, at least to my own satisfaction, that the longwinter is on us.’
That word was a new one for Avatak. ‘The longwinter, scholar? What does that mean?’
Pyxeas looked at him bleakly. ‘Why, that the world is changing. Death will cut across the continents. Northland must die, Avatak.’
He said this bleakly, simply, and while Avatak still did not understand, he saw that Pyxeas told the truth as he believed it. And now he saw where the sadness within the scholar came from. A sadness for the whole world, which would suffer from a blight none other could yet see.
Avatak said, ‘Then what must we do?’
Pyxeas smiled. ‘Convince others of this. But that will take time. We have work to do, my boy – work, and lots of it! And in the summer we must take our conclusions to Northland, and the councils of Etxelur itself.’
We, he had said. We must go to Northland. Pyxeas had spoken like this before. He seemed to just assume that Avatak would leave his home, his responsibilities to his family – Uuna, to whom he was betrothed – and follow him to an alien country to pursue this strange, lofty project.
Would Avatak go? Of course he would. How could he not? Thanks to Pyxeas, his head rattled with strange ideas and vivid dreams. But it would take some explaining to Uuna, and her mother who had never much liked Avatak anyhow.
And, he thought, if Northland was to die, what would become of Coldland?
The glacier shuddered anew under their feet. Avatak took the scholar’s mittened hand and drew him away from the crumbling edge, and back to the security of the land.
3
The First Year of the Longwinter: Midsummer Solstice
‘The steam caravan is late.’ Thaxa watched the sun, which had already passed its highest point on this midsummer day. He squinted up at the elaborate mechanical clock face built into the light tower over his head, and looked along the gleaming track of the Iron Way, bonded to the roof of the Wall on which he stood with his wife. ‘If the envoys from Daidu don’t arrive, the afternoon is going to be awkward to say the least. And that wretched uncle of yours is late too. At this rate we won’t get the ceremonies done before they fire the end-of-day eruptors.’
Rina tried to hide her irritation at her husband’s fretting. It didn’t help that she was cold too. She tucked her hands into the cuffs of her long-sleeved robe; it was the peak of summer yet there was a chill in the air, and there had been a ground frost when she rose this morning. ‘Try to be calm. You don’t want to alarm our guests.’ Who stood to either side of Rina and Thaxa in a row on this parapet atop the Wall, representatives of nations from across much of the known world, more of them riding up to the roof in the steam elevators all the time. Near Rina, for example, were three women of the Western Continents, strangers before they had travelled, Rina had learned, from different nations and dressed as differently as could be imagined, standing together now like exotic birds of variegated plumages. This was a typical scene in Etxelur, on midsummer day, the world brought together in Northland hospitality. ‘As for Uncle Pyxeas, I’m imagining Crimm is doing his best to bring him back across the ocean. But Pyxeas hardly matters.’