Read Iron Winter (Northland 3) for Free Online Page A

have learned. I have seen the shorelines of lakes long vanished. I have seen ridges of rubble strewn across the continents, left by the retreat of
great ice sheets. I have seen valleys gouged by long-melted glaciers. And indeed you could have found the truth in our own Archive. We have records going back millennia – not even the Hatti,
not even the Egyptians go back as far as we do—’
    ‘Oh, Uncle!’ Ywa cried. ‘Get to the point. Why did it start to rain five years ago, all across the Continent?’
    ‘Because the air got cooler. You must know that the air, invisible all around us, is a jumble of gases. It contains vital air which sustains a flame, and fixed air which is produced by a flame, and other inert components. And water! In the form of vapour.’ He glared at them. ‘Come on, come on! I taught too many of you these basic principles; have
you forgotten how to think while I’ve been away?’
    Alxa said slowly, remembering her lessons as she spoke, ‘When the air cools, it must drop the moisture it holds.’
    He pointed at her. ‘Yes! You have it. The abnormal rainstorms themselves were a sign of the cooling of the air. Then as the rain washed out, the currents of the air were deflected –
pushed away by the gathering cold in the north – and settled into a new pattern of persistent and dry winds from the west.’
    ‘Which,’ Ywa said, ‘eventually brought drought to the southern lands. Is that what you’re saying?’
    ‘Yes. But why is the air cooling, and indeed the world as a whole? The ultimate cause seems clear . . .’ He dug out a bit of Albian chalk, and rapidly began to sketch on the
plaster wall: a spinning sphere, its axis tilted, swooping on a curved path around a scribbled sun. ‘The earth! The world on which we stand, spinning and sailing through the void in a manner
long ago determined by the Greek scholars brought to Northland by Pythagoras, and measured in detail by generations of astronomers. It’s a very precise art, you see; you can measure a
star’s apparent position in the sky quite exactly . . .’
    Crimm the fisherman was a tough-looking man in his thirties. He sat in loose shirt and trousers, arms folded, legs outstretched, and he watched Pyxeas’ performance with a grin. ‘I
got this stuff in my ear all the way back from Coldland. You wouldn’t believe he’s talking about sunshine, would you?’
    Ywa seemed baffled. ‘Sunshine?’
    ‘Yes!’ Pyxeas cried. ‘The world’s spin is not unchanging, you see. The axis wobbles and nods, like a child’s top spinning on a table. Why the world behaves
this way is not clear. The Greeks were always divided. Some said the whole cosmic apparatus is like an imperfect machine – rattling like a badly tuned steam engine. Others believe that
consciousness suffuses the cosmos; perhaps the earth makes a deferential dance around the sun, nodding and bowing like a courtier of New Hattusa.
    ‘But the why is not important. The question is, what difference does this make to us? And yes, fisherman, the difference is the sunshine. No two years are identical. Because of these
features of the planet’s orbit and spin, in this epoch year by year the world is getting less sunshine – or to be precise, the strength of the sunshine falling on a given spot on
the world, say here at Etxelur, at a particular time, say yesterday, midsummer solstice—’
    Ywa said, ‘So you claim the whole world is cooling.’
    ‘I could tell you that,’ Crimm said. ‘More bergs every year. And the ocean currents are changing too. Any fisherman will tell you. We have to go further and further south to
find the warm water that the cod like. And as for the catch itself—’ He went to his chair, pulled a canvas sack out from underneath it, and produced dried fish. He passed them around
the group. ‘This is all we’re bringing home.’
    Alxa got hold of one, a fish as hard as a wood carving. Sometimes still called by its traditional name of