CHAPTER ONE
"Drops of blood from millions will be stored in tiny upright jars for his delectation, and his selection will be slow and considered..."
The year was 3370 ASC. Loki III reigns in Shirekeep. It was two weeks before Thorsday, 3rd day of Vanchauslurk. Knowledge of the importance of that date varied. In truth, it was a very significant date, marking the beginning of the Mayernian Epoch. But the counters of the epochs had been driven from Micras thousands of years previously, so that knowledge was unknown. It did not, however, prevent the events that had been preordained from taking place. This is the story of those events.
Oarl did not know that the beginning of the Mayernian Epoch loomed; he did not know the date. He did not know that Loki was Kaiser; he did not know where Shirekeep was. He did not even know that the day had broken. For Oarl, up until the very last moments of his mortal existance, was a member of the nomadic transnational group known only as 'Clingers'. Scientific journals concerning the antarctic circle occasionally included shortened articles by frustrated radical anthropologists who aimed to give these people more exposure (and receive more funding for research), but even that knowledge was limited to a small subset of the international Micran academy, and was generally regarded and scoffed at rather than engaged with.
Those anthropologists grant clingers a variety of lofty-sounding labels and academic appelations, but these really do not concern Oarl, or any of those who follow his way of life. They are not an ethnic or religious group, according to the very few studies ever made on their make-up, consisting of people from all nations that have ever occupied the southern continents and islands. Whole national consciousnesses, entire oral traditions, genetic sub-groups and racial subdivisions exist only within the Clinger demographic, having been wiped out elsewhere. Their one determining characteristic is probably a strong will to survive. They inhabit one of the most hostile habitable environments on Micras, the sort of environment that is described as habitable just to avoid a confusion of terminology: it isn't habitable by any objective standard or theoretical criterion besides the one true test, whether people actually live there. "Live" is perhaps a strong word - they cling. Hence, the clingers of the southern ice shelf.
How the first clingers came to live on the ice is a matter of some debate, but probably the same way humans arrive at any island. A shipwreck with sufficient males and females to see progeny borne out. The environment that the clingers live in has a standardising effect. People arrive on the shelf with constitutions, personal and legal; moral systems, developing and overdeveloped; tastes, mores, and social habits. These are all repressed by a cruel process of natural selection. You must kill, eat, wear, and manipulate whoever and whatever you meet if you want to survive. The weak-willed become tomorrow's dinner for other clingers. Actual pitch-battle violence is uncommon after a few years on the ice, the energy required to kill another person often surpassing the value of their meat, skin, and personal possessions (in order of importance). And yet they somehow survive, and have done for millennia, with their varied practices inherited or imported. Some sing songs, some cannot talk. Some produce children - 'clinglings' - while others kill everyone on sight until they meet a bigger fighter, and then they die or make friends.
There is an annual solar event which tends to destroy those fighters, solitary or in a pack; that is the 2-4 weeks in winter when the sun does not rise. Up to a month of even lower temperatures and the practical impossibility of hunting and foraging mean that a large proportion of those nomads on the ice will die. Hundreds, perhaps thousands arrive each year; lucky they are indeed among their fellows if they land just after this bitter period has passed, and therefore have the greatest stretch of time to acclimatise themselves to the ferocity of the shelf.
Oarl is an unusual clinger because he is a fighter who has managed to survive many cold winters. He stays by the coast; the risk of the ice collapsing into the fatal, freezing sea is weighted against the likelihood of shipwrecks giving a vital lifeline. He was born onto the ice, an only child. His mother starving, she attacked his father in order to feed herself and her son. As the two titans of the young boy's life clashed like two huge glaciers, Oarl gathered everything he could carry and departed, and never turned back. He never stopped running, and circled the antarctic several times before his death. He had visited before the antarctic civilisations that exist, but generally treat clingers with barbaric hostility: the New Empire of the Confederacy of Independent States, Beaugium, and others. He was not interested, and had wasted many hours walking across the ice. He preferred the taste of Alexandrian or Natopian flesh, or Stormarker, and they only came in from the coast. The coastal glaciers were the boards he tread; his audience, the cold stars.
He woke up hungry - a sensation that never dies down - and got out of his bedroll. It took him fifteen minutes to pack all his wraps into his makeshift bag - which also contained some tools and weapons, spare clothes, a spare set of shoes, though the majority was reserved for his stash of non-spoiling frozen walrus meat. Human tended to taste odd after a few weeks; walrus retained its flavour and seemed less likely to cause illness. But he didn't like to use up that meat unless he had to, so he walked a little way up the bank to a view of the floe below. It was a glorious sight to behold, and he let out a short gasp. Penguins! Hundreds of them. He hadn't had penguin for some years. The beauty of penguin was their manner of massing together: it meant that in the event of a full assault, they simply couldn't get away fast enough without crushing some of their fellows and leaving the young behind. Oarl was without doubt, and drew his two makeshift hunting blades. He didn't know what they were, but he knew they were sharp and they could kill. One was an Alexandrian Cavalryman's ceremonial lance, the tip minus most of the pole; the other, a chef's machete used for slicing thick meat quickly that had come from an abandoned shipwreck of Babkhan origin.
Charging at the penguin colony screaming had exactly the desired effect. They poured into the ocean like a river, but in the calamity bashed one another, pushing and shoving because their lives depended on it. Young lagged behind the adults. Oarl hewed as many of the birds as he could, taking care to direct his blows to the largest animals within reach. He did very well out of his raid, and he felt confident about his chances during the upcoming weeks of darkness. For winter was almost upon the clingers, and Oarl could not spread himself out as a group might to cover more territory. He could only run in one direction - forwards - and hope that food would lie before him. So far, it always had.
Two weeks later, that frozen darkness overcame the southern ice. There was no light, only wind and snow. Oarl had found himself the greatest refuge of his life. It was an ice cave just above the shelf that directly contacts the sea. He preferred to be close to the sea, but staying in one place directly on its cusp was dangerous on a continent of breakable ice. But this cave was on the rank of ice just one inland from the frozen beaches: he wouldn't have to walk far to get to water and fish when the sun eventually rose. Until then, little else to do but eat when necessary and wait.
He closed his eyes - little use in the dark - and opened his ears. The howling of the wind was like silence to him. It brought peace, it spoke to his soul in a language he did not understand but to which he was irresistably attracted. He couldn't actually hear the oceans waves from here, but his imagination brought them to mind. He had never gone in the water, as the penguins were free to do. What world lay beyond, he thought, gripping the splintered pole of his Alexandrian lance. He had seen that water kill men in moments. Still, he preferred it to the endless bounds of ice plain that were inland. His heart melted; his face began to smile; he took a bite of penguin, though he wasn't that hungry. He was as happy as he ever had been, in that frozen corner of a deadly continent which was currently smothered in complete darkness.
Almost complete. Oarl's face... there was a sensation. An odd sensation he... could not describe. It was... warmth. Real warmth. The kind of warmth that only exists in the womb for clingers. He was paralysed, struck by the lightning of this mild increase in temperature. His eyelashes didn't sting. His eyelids, though firmly closed, were permitting some light entry into his brain. He creeped them open and there was light at the mouth of the cave. He ran towards it, throwing down the lance; the warmth increased as he approached; and he bore sweet heat upon his face as he beheld the beginning of the Epoch. Even the frozen winds were melted away: a gigantic ball of flame was descending from the heavens. The scale of this flame is impossible to fathom. It was as if another planet, one of flame, were attempting to make love to the planet of ice that Oarl inhabited. His mind was invaded by a sudden force, two voices from somewhere: "The same miscalculation! How is this possible? Always north-west! Just do your best to set us down with comfort. Oh," -- and it was gone.
Down, down it tore, at such a speed and with such force that Oarl was sure it would puncture Micras and destroy it all. His wonder succumbed to fear; he noticed the beads of sweat on the walls of the cave. The ice that supported him was melting. He darted back inside the cave (oh, chill again in those depths - how quickly we get used to warmth) to collect his meagre possessions before running back outside. A puddle was becoming a lake some miles off; it seemed to Oarl the end of the world. So he ran. Only this time, he could not run forwards. So he ran back.