Read Iron Winter (Northland 3) for Free Online

learn sufficient about the changing weather to enable us to understand what comes next, for us and the world.’
    ‘There can never be a definitive answer, that’s not in the nature of philosophy—’
    ‘Now you have interrupted the bounty ceremony and carted us all off in here, and the mothers only know what our guests will make of that!’
    ‘You’ll understand why when I tell you—’
    ‘Tell us, then, man! What have you learned?’
    He paused, and considered. ‘Only that we have the answers already. The cause of the dismal seasons we are suffering, as attested across the Continent too. Our ancestors knew it all along
– or rather, they remembered.
    ‘Avatak, give me that scroll – no, boy, that one.’ He took the yellowing scroll, rolled it out, and began to read. ‘In the beginning was the Gap. / The awful interval
between being and not being. / The tension of emptiness caused the creation of an egg, out of nothing. Its shell was ice and its contents were slush and mud and rock. / For an unmeasured time the
egg was alone, silent.’
    His gravelly voice, the familiar text, fixed the attention of everyone in the room. Alxa knew these words, as surely did everybody else. This was the mythos of Northland, the oldest, deepest
part: the account of the earliest days, before history, before the Black Crime of Milaqa, before the heroism of Prokyid who defied the Second Great Sea, even before the exploits of Ana herself who
had founded the Wall.
    ‘Then the egg shattered. / The fragments of its shell became ice giants, who swarmed and fought and devoured each other as they grew.
    ‘Meanwhile from the slush and mud grew the first mother. She gave birth to the three little mothers, and to their brother the sun, and to the earth serpent and the sky thunderbird. The
first mother tended the ice giants as lovingly as her own cubs.
    ‘All time might have ended there, with the first mother and her family. / But for the restlessness and envy of the giants.
    ‘They fought each other for the attention of the mother, and drove off her true children. / At last, sadly but with love, she allowed the giants to destroy her in their wars.
    ‘Enraged and saddened, they threw the sun in the sky, and cast the little mothers into the dark. / Then they made the world from the mother’s body, the land from the bones of rock
and the mud, the sea from her slush blood. / Their sculpting was violent and rough, which is why the world is such a jumble now, with shaved-off hills and valleys too big for the rivers that
contain them . . .’ He skipped ahead. ‘The three little mothers and the sun had stood by dismayed while the giants fought. / Now the mothers spoke to the sun, and together they woke the
shell of ice, and asked her to lift the weight of death from the world. She did so, and the ice sailed into the sky to become the moon. / The three mothers touched the revealed world, and shaped
the wreckage the ice giants had left behind into a living world . . . I think that’s enough.’ He rolled up the scroll. ‘You see? You see?’ He slapped the scroll to emphasise
his point. ‘It’s all – in – here.’
    Rina scowled. ‘What is? By the mothers’ bones, don’t give us children’s stories, man.’
    ‘Children’s stories? Have you heard of Euhemerus?’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Greek philosopher. Or perhaps Hatti. Died a long time ago. Anyhow he believed that our myths are our oldest account of ourselves. They’re not just stories, you see, though
that’s what they teach you in school nowadays. They describe events that really happened. Important events, major, world-changing events. That’s why they were remembered, and
written down, and why they became the strange sort of mass memory we call a myth.
    ‘And any of you could have confirmed the truth of those myths for yourselves, had you gone out in the world and looked , as have I, Pyxeas. If you had learned to read the
great book of the world, as I and some others