Under the Warm Roof

Nivalis is the name the skytraders gave us, and we answer to it in their books. The roof they mean is the ice — a ceiling of it, old beyond reckoning, so old that we have never thought of the open sky as something we were owed. Beneath it the cold decides everything, and over a length of time we measure in the wearing-down of stone, we learned, slowly, to decide alongside it.

What began as bare survival is long since a country in its own right: glasswork and medicine, water courts and archive houses, schools and freight law, and the long ordinary business of people who mean to keep living where they are. We are not the simple thing an outsider expects to find under ice, and we have stopped being surprised that the expectation comes down the road ahead of every visitor.

These pages are a short way into that life — how we remember, how we keep warm, how we build, what we send up the South Road to the traders, and the one old story we keep at the bottom of all the others and are careful how we tell.