The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,76
room. Even Kara's mother had ceased her low-voiced spate of commentary- no mean accomplishment , Gil thought. They were all watching her, puzzled and yet drawn. Historical methodology was not a subject taught at the School of Quo.
"I'm going to backtrack for a minute," she said, "and talk about the weather."
Alwir let out a short, harsh yelp of laughter. "The weather ? Really, this ends all..."
Gil frowned, deeply affronted. "The weather," she repeated. "That's what I've been doing for the last week or so-compiling, as well as I could from the Church chronicles and the books that Ingold retrieved from the library at Quo, a tally of good and bad winters, and as much information as I can about the ice in the north."
"I've never heard such useless-" the Chancellor began indignantly.
"It has a bearing," Gil said. "Believe me, it has a bearing upon the Dark.
"I assume everyone knows that the ice in the north is spreading-very slowly, supposedly. Everyone uses the expression 'as sure as the ice in the north' to mean something that cannot be stopped. But according to Ingold, the ice is moving southward at the rate of several inches a year. Kta and Shadow of the Moon both say that some years it's more than that.
"On the oldest maps of the Realm there's a range of hills called the Barrier Hills, clearly marked, twenty or thirty miles south of the ice. Well, they're just about covered now. The Raider legends speak in their earliest records of how the ice moved back to uncover the Northern Plains, which was their first home. By backtracking the generational lists that I got from Shadow, I'd put that time between twenty-five hundred and two thousand years ago-just about the first time records were being maintained here at the Keep after the Dark Ones had vanished for good.
"Now, the reason we don't have any Keep records much before two thousand years ago is that literacy had fallen to such a low level that few records were kept and records-or anything else flammable that wasn't in use as furniture- ended up being burned. That allows us to date the end of the record-burning period at least approximately-and it falls right around the time of the last retreat of the ice from the Northern Plains.
"But the Times Before weren't cold. In the record crystals you can see that the climate was very warm and that tropical ferns grew in the lagoons around Gae. The people dressed for hot weather, and you can see the kind of bright-colored birds in them that you can only find in the jungles of Alketch now. Minalde's memories-the memories that she, as a descendant of the House of Dare, inherited-are memories of snow and storm, of blizzards burying the Pass-two hundred miles south of tropical Gae! The change was sudden enough that some of the refugees who took shelter in the caves on the north cliffs were still wearing warm-weather clothing and sandals. And I think," Gil said, "that the same thing is happening now.
"You see, the world I come from is much warmer than this one. So when everyone around me has been saying that this is the worst winter anyone can remember, I never knew how much worse it was. But from things I've read- descriptions of life as it was two hundred years ago-I realized that this world was probably warmer even than my own. The novels Alde brought down from Karst describe-pretty accurately, Thoth tells me-costumes that couldn't possibly be worn now-thin silks and muslins. In the novels, most of the people spend much of their time trying to cool off. Even people like Ingold and Govannin, who knew Gae thirty or forty years ago, say the same. Gae's a pretty temperate place now, but Karst was originally a summer resort, a place to escape the heat. They tell me Gae also used to have one hell of a mosquito problem; Aide, Janus, and the Guards who came to Gae in the last five or ten years say that's no worse than anywhere. And now this year, mammoth have been sighted in the river valleys, where they haven't been for seven hundred years. Rudy and Ingold, crossing the desert, were driven underground by an ice storm not seventy miles north of the Plains Road -three hundred miles farther south than any ice storm has ever been reported. Isn't that so, Thoth?"