And soon the wounded, ill and displaced began to trickle in.
Ontin showed up, carrying his own bag of instruments. A small, pot-bellied, balding man of about sixty, he looked taken aback when he saw the number of cases already here.
More volunteers started to arrive. Rina’s son Nelo came stumbling in, with that cocky young Carthaginian — what was his name? — Mago. Between them they were carrying an injured woman, filthy and in rags, her leg obviously broken; she cried out with every step. But she held a baby against her chest, swathed in dirty cloth. The boys laid the woman down on a pallet, and the well-dressed daughter of an Annid came hurrying over to help her.
Nelo and Mago approached Ywa. They were both panting, soaked from melted snow, their tunics stained with blood. Nelo asked, ‘What can we do to help, Annid?’
She smiled at them. ‘It looks to me as if you’ve been helping already.’ She pointed to Ontin. ‘Do whatever he tells you.’
Nelo nodded. But Mago looked up at the glass roof, uneasily, distracted.
Ontin had been thinking. ‘We need to set up a system. Sort the injured into categories, those who need urgent care, those who can wait, those who don’t need help at all and those we can’t help. You boys can do something straight away for those who’ve been caught by the deep cold, like her.’ He pointed to one young girl, limp on a pallet, pale as the snow itself. Her parents were hovering over her, gently shaking her, trying to get her to wake. ‘Get her parents to cuddle her — body warmth, that’s the thing, until we can get more organised. Run around and do that wherever you see somebody in that condition.’
The young men hurried away. But Ywa heard the Carthaginian muttering, ‘Look up, my friend. That ceiling.’
‘A lot of snow.’
‘Yes.’
‘Never seen it like that before. Covered over. We don’t normally get much snow in Etxelur.’
‘Hmm. Have you ever had the feeling that you’ve lived the same experience twice?’
Ywa said to Ontin, ‘Whatever you need, tell me, and I’ll find it for you.’
‘Thank you. Do you think it’s getting cold in here?’ He walked over to a wall hot-water tap, opened the valve, let it run, and dipped his fingers into the flow. It was obvious it was running cold.
It felt as if the steam caravan had been stuck here for hours. Since the crew had fixed the snowblades, the cabin had lurched forward for a while, and, under way once more, Alxa had started to relax. Then the caravan stopped again, for no apparent reason, and she had nothing to do but sit in the gathering dark. And then off again, and another stop, and off again, and a lurched halt that felt somehow final. Not knowing was the worst part, in a way, that and having no control over her own fate.
It had been a long time since the heating pipes had gone cold. In the end she had swallowed her pride and opened her luggage; she pulled on dirty clothes for extra layers to keep warm, piled a spare coat over her legs, and jammed two hats on her head, a Frankish woollen cap under a big fur bonnet. But still her breath steamed in the air.
And now it was growing darker and darker, and a more intense cold was closing in. She felt as if she was being swallowed. She had a box of small candles in her luggage, and a flint. She set one candle up in a bowl on the seat beside her. The little circle of light showed the heavy flakes that still fell beyond the window, and her own pale face reflected in the small panes of glass. Perhaps the caravan would never move again, she thought. Perhaps the snow would simply bury the rail line, and the caravan, and her, and when the thaw came in the summer the engineers would find her frozen corpse. .
The tugging on the cabin door startled her. Perhaps she had nodded off.
The door seemed to have stuck in place and took some force to shift. It opened with a crack of splintering ice, letting in chill air and a swirl of snowflakes. A burly man carrying an oil lantern clambered up a ladder to the doorway. Aged maybe forty, he wore the uniform of the Iron Way guild, a subdivision of the ancient House of Beavers, the Wall engineers. He held up his lantern. ‘Are you all right, madam?’
She forced a smile. ‘Not exactly. Cold. Bored. Hungry! But alive, as you can see, and keeping myself warm. What’s going on, officer?’
He rolled his eyes. ‘You name it. We’ve got drifting snow in some places. It fell too thick for the blade, and we had to change that for the midwinter design, and in places we’ve had to send the lads out ahead with shovels to clear the line. Then there’s trouble with the boiler, external lines freezing up and splitting. Sorry for the delay.’
‘Don’t apologise. You’re stuck as well. As long as we get there in the end.’ She glanced through the window. ‘Where are we, by the way?’
‘On the Wall. But still well to the east of Etxelur. We’ll get there, miss, you’ll see.’
She frowned. The Wall was inhabited from end to end. ‘But it’s still snowing. What District is this? There must be places we can shelter for the night. Maybe we should disembark and-’
‘We’ll get there,’ he said with some determination. ‘The engines of the Iron Way always get through. That’s what we live by, miss.’ He passed up a glass bottle of water, and, apologetically, a wooden bucket. ‘The latrine system’s seized up,’ he said.
She took the bucket. ‘Keep safe, officer.’
He was already closing the door. Listening hard, she heard his heavy tread through the snow, and then his rap on the next cabin in the line. But if he got a response, she couldn’t hear through the rushing of the wind. After that there was only the cold, and her candle.
She felt a draught. Since the officer had forced the door it wouldn’t fit back in its frame.
Up on the Wall parapet above Engine Seventy-Four, Thux was struggling.
It felt like he’d been out here for hours, and maybe he had been, for it was getting darker and darker. He had a lantern fixed into a prepared socket on the growstone surface, but all he saw by its light was a bubble of snowflakes, flying horizontally. The wind was coming from the north, flat and hard and muscular, and it sucked every bit of warmth out of any exposed skin, out of his cheeks, out of his hands when he flipped back the clever little lids on his mittens to expose his fingers for the finer work. And though the snow wasn’t settling up here, except in the engine’s vents and chimneys, the wind was depositing ice on every surface, on the growstone under his feet, on the pipework and handholds and rungs he had to use to clamber about.
He’d been up here without a break since the engine had first started to struggle. But there was no choice. The vents were the problem, the vents that fed the great engine with the air it needed to burn its fuel, and expelled its excess heat and steam and smoke. The swirling snow was forever clogging them up. Even on the hot chimneys the snow fell and froze in place faster than it could be melted away. So Thux was following a dismal circuit, clambering around the growstone with his pack of tools at his waist, clearing snow and ice from the vents with hammer and chisel and, sometimes, when he couldn’t find any other way, with his mittened hands. He was exhausted, cold to the bone, wet through from snow that had got under his hood and down his collar and melted against his skin. And, when he thought about it, also hungry. He wondered how much longer he could keep this up. He was pretty sure there’d be no relief shift tonight. Every one of the mechanikoi available would be at work somewhere in the Wall’s battered infrastructure. If he gave up and went down he knew that his mother would insist on coming up here to take his place, and he couldn’t have that.
And Engine Seventy-Four couldn’t be allowed to fail, or any of the hundreds of engines implanted along the mighty length of the Wall. Not on a night like this. Up to now they had been winning; he couldn’t hear the engine, such was the howl of the wind and the muffling of his ears by his big fur cap, but he could feel its steady vibration through the growstone, like a beating heart buried within the Wall.