So the next day passed, and the next. Often a day would pass with no landmarks at all, save a shallow dune or two: no mountains looming, no oases. Nothing to see but level sands stretching to the horizon, and the huge sky above. Gradually Avatak lost his sense of time and place, in this land like a dusty tabletop.
Pyxeas had him keep the journal, scratching in the date, and random observations and speculations. ‘Perhaps this was once a lake, or a sea,’ Pyxeas rasped. ‘A sea that somehow drained away. That would explain the flatness, and the salt. But where are the fish bones, and the wrecks of fishermen’s boats?’ And he would mumble and mutter, and subside back to his habitual state of half-sleep. Avatak did not care where the salt had come from. He made Pyxeas’ notes, but they were another man’s thoughts expressed in another man’s language; with a little practice he found he could ignore their meaning altogether, even as he wrote them down.
Still they walked, day after day, across a world reduced to its absolute essentials, to land below, sky above. ‘We walk through Pythagorean dualities,’ Pyxeas said. Avatak’s mind seemed to become as big as the sky, as if trying to fill all that empty space above, yet his spirit was diminished, to become a grain of sand as trivial as those under his feet. Was this how it was to die? To shrink into oneself, to shrivel to nothing, to become a dust speck in a universe grand and ancient that would continue without him, indifferent?
In the dark, during the nights, he would close his eyes and try to shed such thoughts. But he would hear a soft singing sometimes, a low discordant groan, like the calls of tremendous walruses from some far ice floe. Perhaps it was the spirits of those lost in this unending desert. Perhaps it was just a trick of the wind in the dunes. If the others heard it, they did not mention it.
It was a shock when, late one day of walking, they came upon the oasis. There were houses of mud and reeds, and a few sheep wandering. There were even a few trees, their leaves spindly and green. This didn’t look real to Avatak, as if it didn’t fit into the world.
Uzzia put her arm around his shoulders. She said they had been walking the desert for thirty-six days.
‘And this,’ she said, ‘is Cathay.’
37
For fisherman Crimm, the morning hadn’t been so bad.
Out on the Northern Ocean, the visibility had been good. There had even been a little warmth in the sun, on this supposedly late-summer day. The crew of the Sabet, all eight of them who had mustered, had been reasonably cheerful, despite the ice-cold spray that soaked its way through the thickest furs, despite the endless labour of pumping water from the bilge, and despite the lousy catch of cod, a longer-term worry that gnawed at their vitals as they thought of the coming winter, and their families back in Northland.
Of course the ice had been their constant companion all day. Scattered floes scraped against the hull, and to the north fleets of bergs sailed on the swell. On the horizon was a band of whitish light that shimmered and glinted: pack ice, solid, unmovable, much further south even than last year, and much earlier in the year too. It wasn’t even the autumn equinox yet! Still, through the morning they had been able to forget about the ice and get on with their work.
But by midday the floes were closing in around them. The men started arguing about when to give up and put into port.
Then the fog rolled in, almost without warning, coming on them with overwhelming speed. That was that. They shipped the nets and made for home.
In a grey cloud they nosed south on a northerly wind. They got close enough to the Northland shore to hear the great steam-powered horns that sounded from the light towers atop the Wall, but they couldn’t see the lights. If Crimm stood high in the prow he could barely make out the big square mainsail, let alone the Wall. You could wreck yourself against the Wall if you came on it blind. They had no choice but to head north again, and wait out the fog. They furled the sails and broke out the oars.
Crimm glanced over his crew. None looked happy to be rowing. One man, Xon, the youngest, looked withdrawn, fearful. Crimm said cheerfully, ‘Call this a fog? Ayto’s breath is thicker than this, most mornings.’ He got grins in response.
They emerged at last into the daylight; the fog was a solid bank behind them. But now the northern horizon was greying too, bubbling into an ominous wall of cloud. At a soft command from Crimm they rested on their oars.
‘Told you so,’ Ayto said to Crimm.
‘Told me what?’
‘Should have put in before the famous fog rolled in. Told you.’
‘Yes, but in the next breath you said-’
‘Anyhow, now we’re stuck out here.’
The wind picked up again. Loose corners of the mainsail flapped and cracked. Though the sails were furled, Crimm felt the Sabet surge, back towards the fog.
Ayto raised his hands. ‘And now comes the wind too. You spoil us, o little mother of the sky.’
The wind gusted, becoming an icy blast in Crimm’s face, hurling particles that stung his skin and eyes, more like frozen sand than water or ice.
And suddenly, in just a few heartbeats, that bank of cloud to the north rushed down on them, towering high into the sky. It was a storm coming out of nowhere, as fast as the fog had come upon them, or faster. The men didn’t need to be told what to do. They lashed down the nets and their barrels of water and dried fish, tried to make fast the day’s catch, a pitiful heap of immature fish glistening in the bilge, and grabbed lines, bracing themselves.
The storm hit with a tremendous howl. The wind was a chill blast that tried to drag Crimm off the boat, and dug deep through his layers of clothing to his skin, and drove more of those stinging ice grains into his face, and snow, big fat flakes of it that slapped his cheeks and forehead. The men, the snow sticking to their furs, were like bears, he thought, lumbering in the grey light through the rushing snow. But the spray was coming up too and freezing where it fell. As the ice formed slick on the deck, you had to take care not to slip.
Ayto shouted something, and pointed upwards. One hand wrapped in the rigging, Crimm leaned back, holding his hood against the wind, and saw that ice was forming in sheets on the main mast, the furled sail, the rigging. The boat could be capsized by a sufficient weight of ice up there.
Crimm bent, dug in a locker to retrieve an axe, then clambered up the main mast by the rigging and began to hack at the ice sheets. Another man, he couldn’t see who, was doing the same at the stern mast. His hands were quickly going numb, and he thought of digging out his mittens, but he wouldn’t be able to hold the rigging firmly enough. The boat rolled in a swell, and the men skidded over the deck. Crimm had to wrap an arm around the main mast and nearly lost his grip on the axe.
And the man at the stern dropped from the mast, slid over the slick deck, fell into the surging water, and was gone in an eye blink.
The storm blew over as quickly as it had come upon them. The crew slumped on the deck, exhausted, their breath billowing before their faces. The air felt much colder than before the storm had passed, and Crimm could see the residual wet on the deck frosting up. Suddenly they had sailed into winter.