(Author’s note: What if the climate warmed so much that the only place for humans to survive was at the poles?)
In Vaarsk, they grew peaches against the south wall of every house, where the light pooled longest, and, on the warmest weeks of the year, the children swam in the pole-melt ponds until their fingers wrinkled.
Of course, the town was so far north, every wall faced south. The old maps simply stopped, the cartographers’ ink running out into a white margin some scribe had labeled, generations ago, and so on, warmly.
Nobody could say why it was warm there. That was the first thing Edda learned, and the last thing she stopped asking about.
Her grandmother had a theory involving the breath of something asleep under the ice, exhaling slow and even, the way a person warms a cold room just by living in it. Her schoolmaster had a different theory, full of words like “axis” and “inversion,” drawn in chalk with great confidence and erased the moment a student pressed him on it. The priest said it was grace and left it there. The drunk who slept by the grain house said it was a mistake that no one had yet noticed and that someday the bill would come due.
They were all, Edda suspected, guessing.
What everyone agreed on was the direction of danger. South was wrong. You went south to die, slowly, the way you’d die wandering out onto a frozen lake—except the lake was the whole middle of the world, the so-called waist, where the sun stood straight overhead and burned nothing into life. Travelers who’d gone partway came back changed: cracked lips, a stammer, a habit of looking over their shoulders. They spoke of a band of country where the air shimmered, and the ground gave back no shadow at noon, where it was so bright and so dead that men forgot their own names.
Edda’s brother Tolm went anyway. He was seventeen and certain the explanations were cowardice dressed up as wisdom. “Somebody put us here,” he said the night before he left, “and I want to see how far back the path goes.” He took dried fish, a sun-cloth, and the family’s only good knife, and he walked toward the heat.
He sent letters for a while, carried back by the salt-traders who worked the middle latitudes in the cool months. The handwriting got worse as the distance grew. In the early ones, he described villages thinning out, then huts, then nothing but stone markers, each one older than the last, each one pointing the same way he was already going—as though whoever had come before had wanted very badly to leave a trail, or a warning, and couldn’t decide which.
The last letter was three lines.
It is greener here than they said. The grass starts again. I do not understand. I am going to find out who planted it.
Then no more letters.
⁂
Edda is older now, with peach trees of her own and children who swim in the melt-ponds. The maps still stop at the white margin. The theories still contradict each other at the tavern, lovingly, the way theories do when no one can ever lose the argument.
But she has noticed a thing she tells no one. On the clearest nights, when she stands at the south wall of her house and looks down the long warm slope of the world toward the waist where everything is supposed to be dead, she sees, very faint and very low, a green that is not the green of her own country. A different green. A green that begins exactly where it should end.
She thinks of Tolm finding the grass starting again. She thinks that perhaps the world is not warm at the poles and deadly in the middle but warm everywhere it is allowed to be, in bands, in stripes, in some pattern too large to stand inside and see—that they are not at the top of anything but only on one rung of something and that the dead burning waist is just a wall between one garden and the next.
She has no evidence. She has a faint green light and a brother who walked the wrong way south and did not, she is increasingly sure, simply die of it.
In Vaarsk, they grow peaches against the south wall, where the light pools longest. Nobody can say why it is warm there.
Edda has stopped needing them to.
— END —
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