‘Just think, these are stretches of the Wall’s face nobody’s seen for generations.’
‘What do you think we should do? With everybody in the cistern, I mean. The vents are blocked. We can’t really stay there if that’s going to happen.’
Ayto looked around and sniffed the cold air. Crimm saw there was frost on his roughly cut beard. ‘Bring them out here. Or at least, find somewhere in the Wall closer to the ocean face.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we can find food here.’ He patted his dead seal. ‘Seal, fish. Maybe other animals.’ He glanced at the sky. ‘Spring’s coming, it must be, but the winter’s not done with us yet. Maybe it never will be. If the ice doesn’t clear, we won’t be able to use the wetlands, the forests. But out here. .’
‘The Coldlanders survive, and it’s always winter where they live.’
‘That it is. Maybe folk from the other Districts will find a way out too, if any of them live through the sorting-out. Let them. But they can stay away from here; this is our bit of coast.’ He looked around, at sea, ice, sky. ‘Different way of living, this will be. Makes you feel different just to think about it, doesn’t it?’ He glanced up at the Wall. ‘That’s all gone now.’
‘Civilisation?’
‘Yes. We’ve gone back to an older time, before Ana and the Wall. Back to the ice. That’s how it is here in the north, and soon it will be the same everywhere else. Maybe we’ll have older thoughts. Ice thoughts.’ He poked at his own ribs. ‘Maybe we’ll all start to change shape. We’ll look like Pyxeas’ Coldlander runt. What was he called?’
Crimm couldn’t remember. He found himself thinking of Ywa, months dead now, and he wondered what she would make of this conversation. Of what Ayto was becoming.
He remembered the others, with sharp urgency. ‘We’ve got to get back and sort out that air vent.’
‘Agreed. Come on.’
Arguing, bickering, speculating, they worked their way back into the deep shadow of the Wall.
THREE
48
The Third Year of the Longwinter: Spring Equinox
The ice spilled off the growing continental caps, and gathered in sheets over the open sea. From the mountains too the ice descended, the glaciers flowing down valleys gouged out by their predecessors millennia before. When they reached the lowland the glaciers spread out and flowed together, merging into sheets of ice that covered the ground, covering the traces of forests, farms, cities.
Across swathes of the northern continents, there were few people left to mark the latest equinox.
49
The woman was waiting for Sabela under the Gate of the God of Light.
Situated next to the Exaltation of the Sky Waters, a square-cut pyramid that was the greatest monument in Tiwanaku, the Gate was only nominally an entry to the city. Not attached to any wall, the Gate was the frame of a door that led nowhere. Yet this was traditionally where supplicants came to ask for residence in this holy city, the highest city in all the world, enclosed by its finely cut stone walls and surrounded by raised, carefully irrigated fields of maize.
This was the High Country. The day was bright, the lake, a day’s walk away, was a plane of brilliant blue under the sky, and the snow-capped mountains beyond gleamed. The city was a jewel set in the great mountain chain that stretched down the spine of this southern continent.
And here was this woman, round-shouldered, her clothes layers of grubby rags, a clutch of children around her, the oldest a boy who might have been fourteen, a couple of little girls, an infant in arms, all of them staring at Sabela. One of the girls was labouring, having trouble breathing. Sabela had no idea how old the woman was. Younger than she was, probably. Broken down from toil, child-rearing, and maybe years as a nestspill.
Sabela held out the note she had been sent, written on reed paper, scrawled in a soldier’s hasty hand. It had found her eventually at her mother’s home on the other side of the city, where she had been visiting with the twins. ‘You sent me this? Your name is — C’merr.’ The click in the back of the throat, characteristic of lowlander tongues, was alien to Sabela’s own language.
‘C’merr — yes. And you are Sabela, wife of Deraj.’
‘You claim we offered to take you in.’
The woman frowned, perhaps puzzling at her speech. ‘Yes. Not you. Husband, Deraj.’
Sabela found that hard to believe; Deraj, busy running a wool business that spanned swathes of the highlands and thousands of llamas and alpacas, was not given to making sentimental gestures to unfortunates like this nestspill. Especially not to a grubby, unprepossessing — ugly — woman like this one. Deraj, for better or worse, had always had an eye for beauty. ‘You understand that the city is crowded.’
‘Crowd — yes.’
‘Many people come here for refuge.’ It had been a one-way flow from the lower lands for years. ‘We have no room.’
‘Deraj. He say.’
Sabela said coolly, ‘We never spoke of it.’
‘Deraj say.’
Sabela studied the woman. Her features were nondescript, the tone of her skin hidden by dust and the stains of sweat. ‘Where are you from? Were your family alpaca herders?’
‘No. Fisher folk.’
‘From the river valleys?’
‘Ocean.’
Sabela was shocked. If that was true, it was no surprise the little girl was having trouble breathing; not everybody born by the sea adapted well to the thin air up here. ‘You lost your living there.’
‘Fish died. Years ago. Only one baby then. We moved, and grew beans.’
That would have been in the river valleys, above the coast, marginally richer land where folk grew beans and squash and cotton, in farms irrigated by summer meltwater from the mountain glaciers. ‘And then?’
‘No water. No rain. No rivers in summer.’ Because the summers had got so cold the glaciers stayed frozen, and there was no meltwater. ‘Then more babies. We grew potatoes.’ In the mountain foothills, probably. ‘Not bad.’ She grinned, almost wistfully. ‘Grew fat, one summer. But then, no water. Then came here.’
‘Where’s your husband?’
‘Died. Fighting in war.’
Sabela had no idea which war she might be talking about; the whole region, the mountain country, the coastal strip, even the borders with the forest nations to the east, had been convulsed by raids and petty wars for years. So, after fleeing step by step from her home by the ocean, climbing gradually into the highlands, the woman had ended up here, at the summit of the world, the home of the gods, like so many others.
‘C’merr — I’m sorry for your troubles. But Deraj never said anything to me about you.’
‘Met him in. .’A name Sabela couldn’t make out, so thick was her accent. ‘He came to trade, wool for potatoes. Deraj say,’ said the woman stubbornly. The boy nudged her, whispered something. The woman dug into her grimy coat and pulled out another scrap of paper, handed it to Sabela.
Sabela took it reluctantly; the woman wore skin gloves from which blackened fingernails protruded. When she opened the paper she saw it was a note in Deraj’s handwriting. ‘Why didn’t you give me this straight away?’ C’merr had no reply. Perhaps she was not used to written notes, Sabela thought. It hadn’t occurred to her.
The note was scribbled on a bit of reed parchment that was stained in one corner by what looked like spilled wine. Sabela’s heart sank. Her husband got drunk a lot these days. Much of his export business was with the Sky Wolf nations, to the north, and times were hard there — tremendous forest fires, drought, whole cities buried by dust storms, so the travellers said. And he had a way of making deals when drunk that he later regretted. But the note was in Deraj’s hand, undoubtedly. And it promised C’merr and her family refuge in Tiwanaku as long as they needed it.