An Everlasting Cold

I should have known better. Not got my hopes up, imagining I'd found
the answers to everything. But I always was curious. And I'd learnt
reading from my ma, just as she learnt it from hers. In her day there
was still some use in it. If you found a cache of tinned food, it
helped to be able to make out the labels. Of course they're all gone
now, you can't tell what you've got till you've hacked the tin open,
but I still like to practice on any scrap of print I come across.

So you can imagine how I felt when we broke into the Book Vault. Mind
you, we were disappointed at first, bitterly disappointed. We'd staked
everything on finding food. We'd left our old territory as it became
worked out, following the Old Devil across the ice, looking for some
other likely location. We hadn't much left in the way of provisions by
the time we found one. You can tell where the Old Ones built by the
humps and hollows in the snow. The Dowser found us a good place to dig
(they can sense them somehow, as cavities underfoot), and we sank a
shaft. Terrible hard work it was. The deeper you go the more compacted
the snow gets, till at the finish it's like iron, but what choice did
we have? It was dig or starve.

When we finally broke through we thought we'd hit the jackpot. An
echoing space filled with row after row of shelves, as far as the light
from our flickering lamps could reach. We'd heard of such places,
though not from anyone who'd seen them with their own eyes. Halls
stuffed with treasures of all kinds, and enough food to keep the tribe
going for years. Supermarkets, they were called.

I was one of the first in. I remember going to the nearest shelf and
taking down one of the objects I found there. I knew what it was, even
though I'd never seen one before. Ma told me there'd been quite a few
around when she was a girl, but they'd all been used up long ago.

'What is it?' said Sher, coming up behind me.

'A book.'

The others were following behind, swarming down the rope, peering into
the darkness. We fanned out, searching, the whole tribe, running up and
down between the stacks, calling to each other. In the end we gathered
back at our entry point. No-one had found anything to eat, only books.
Thousands and thousands of books.

It spelt the end for the Old Devil. A chief is only chief as long as he
can keep the tribe fed. Soon afterwards he joined the ancestors, and
the White Devil ruled in his stead. Almost immediately the gods
relented, for we unearthed a store of dried food nearby, which only
needed to be mixed with water. Of course, we had to melt the snow, but
now we found that the discovery of the Book Vault was a blessing after
all, for we had an almost inexhaustible supply of fuel.

The tribe set up camp inside the Vault, safe from the blizzards of the
surface. We cleared a space under the entry shaft, and built our fire
there so the smoke would rise up through it. We sank other shafts. This
whole area must have been a gathering place of the Old Ones, for all
around were the distinctive snow mounds which covered their halls and
dwelling places. Nearly everywhere we dug we found food, or clothing,
or strange artefacts from the Time Before. We settled in, and built our
shrine to the great god, Tesco, and Asda his consort, and after a few
weeks, the White Devil decreed that the tribe was secure enough to
resume breeding.

This was good news for Sher and me. We'd been paired three years, but
you can't keep a child while the tribe's on the move, finding food for
ourselves is hard enough. Two infants already we'd abandoned to the
snows. Now we had a chance to rear one. We made our nest in a corner
between the book stacks, and lined it with scraps of cloth we found in
a nearby excavation. Sher grew sleek as she began to restore the layers
of fat lost during our recent wanderings.

The White Devil had big ideas. She set the strongest in the tribe to
work, driving tunnels through the ice to other buried buildings, so we
could move between them without having to cross the surface at all.
That was where we were most vulnerable, not only to the cold, but also
to other searchers. More than once we'd been driven from a find by
stronger, more numerous tribes. This one, we intended to keep.

One of my tasks, when I was not out foraging, was fetching books from
the shelves to feed the fire. Some of them I held back from the flames
for a while, to read. As I said before, my mother had taught me as a
child, and the Old Devil had not discouraged me. Not all the places we
had dug into in our travels were safe to enter, many a tribe had lost
members by not heeding the word 'Danger'. The White Devil, I was not so
sure of - she tended to undervalue skills she did not herself
possess.

Still, she did not forbid me. In fact, one night as we all sat around
the fire after the evening meal, she saw me smile at the title of the
book I had taken from the pile waiting to be burned, and called me to
her.

There was something about the White Devil which had always repelled me.
Maybe it was her white hair and pale skin, or the little red eyes. She
also was pregnant, and had replenished her fat stores so effectively
that she was almost perfectly spherical.

'What's the joke?' she grunted.

I showed her the gold lettering on the spine of the book. 'It's called
The White Devil.'

She laughed. 'Read me some.'

I opened the book at random. 'I have caught,' I read.
'An everlasting cold; I have lost my voice
Most irrecoverably. Farewell glorious villains.
This busy trade of life appears most vain,
Since rest breeds rest, where all seek pain by pain '

'And what does that mean?'

'I haven't the faintest idea.'

She took the book from me, flipped through it for a moment, then with a
shrug tossed it into the fire. The pages flared, the odd words standing
out before blackening, fading to nothing.

'That's all books are good for,' she said.

The trouble was, she was right. When I was a kid I used to dream of
finding a book. I'd never seen a whole one. Occasionally a scrap of
paper, a torn page, would turn up; a few word of print, an impossibly
coloured picture. We know, from the stories passed down, that once
there was a time, every year, when the snow went away and the ground
turned green, the sky blue. When everywhere was warm. They called it
'summer'. Only the Old Ones sinned, and the world changed.

Long ago, in the time of ma's dad's father, the tribe found a man who
had lived before the Change: the last of the Old Ones. He was ancient,
near death.

The Chief they had then asked him, 'What was it, the sin of the Old
Ones? What did they do, to bring this on us?'

He answered, 'They switched off the atlantic conveyer'.

But no-one knew what he meant.

When we found the books, all those books, I thought, at last! Somewhere
in them, there must be an answer. But it was useless. It's not enough
to be able to read the words, you have to know what they mean. And
somehow, through the years, we had lost the clue. Most of what I read
was gibberish - what did they mean, 'mutually assured destruction',
'gross national product'?
'Switched on'?

Some of the books I could half understand, the ones with the large
print and bright pictures. I did glean some information. For instance,
this was not the first time the cold had come, so maybe one day if
would go, and the summer would come back. But no hint of when. And none
of them told me what I really wanted to know - what was the sin? Why
are we being punished like this?

The only one I found which gave any clue was a thin volume called
'Freeze for Immortality'. It spoke of people before the Change
deliberately freezing themselves, so that could avoid death and live
for ever. Could that be the answer? They had somehow frozen the world
to ensure their own immortality? Could they be lying there still,
somewhere hidden under the ice, waiting for the thaw? When I spoke of
it to Sher she was not impressed.

'If there are thousands of frozen people, why have we never found
any?'

'Perhaps they are all together, somewhere. Plenty of places never been
searched ... '

We were coming back from a foraging trip, Sher and me. A hundred yards
or so from the Vault entrance we sensed something wrong. The snow was
all churned up, we could see splashed of red. As we fled a shot whined
over our heads.

'Yetis!'

It was the worst possible thing that could have happened. The Yeti
tribe was feared everywhere. At some time they'd dug into an arms
cache, now they were the only ones around with weapons. We had thought
ourselves well away from their territory.

'They must have seen the smoke coming from the shaft.'

I felt sick. It was evening, most of the tribe would have been
underground. Trapped. Building our camp in the Book Vault had not been
so clever after all. Sher stumbled and clung to my arm, panting.

'You could go back,' I said. 'They'll not harm you.'

I hoped it was true. A woman carrying a child is an asset to a tribe.
Maybe.

Sher shook her head. 'I stay with you.'

We went on. Night was falling , and the wind was starting to rise,
blowing ice crystals in our faces. How could we survive, without the
tribe?

We halted in the lee of a snow bank. I scooped out a hollow just big
enough to hold us both, and we crept in.

'We're going to die, aren't we?' said Sher.

I held her close, and rested my hand on the mound of her belly.

'No,' I said. 'We may freeze, but we won't die. The Old Ones knew the
trick of it, they wrote it down in a book, they wouldn't have done that
if it wasn't true. One day they will wake. They'll know what to do.
Sleep now, till the thaw comes. The ice will keep us safe till Summer.
Our baby will see grass and running water ... '

She did not answer, she was already asleep.

So, Old Ones, when the ice melts, come and find us. We are counting on
you.