by Jo Bannister
Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.
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Contents
Jo Bannister
Strangers
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Travellers
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Survivors
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Jo Bannister
The Winter Plain
Jo Bannister
Jo Bannister lives in Northern Ireland, where she worked as a journalist and editor on local newspapers. Since giving up the day job, her books have been shortlisted for a number of awards. Most of her spare time is spent with her horse and dog, or clambering over archaeological sites. She is currently working on a new series of psychological crime/thrillers.
Strangers
Chapter One
The man with three camels arrived in time to witness the execution but too late to take any part in the events leading up to it. He found a stable lofty enough for his animals and left the cow and calf there with his packs, but the bull he took with him when he returned to the square. Camels seldom percolated this far into the Ice Desert, so that the supercilious sand-coloured creature drew stares even on that frenzied day. Paul used them because they could carry more, faster, over worse terrain than a horse and could be relied upon to fight dirty in a tight corner.
Chad was known as the Garden City in the golden days before the war. A stable monarchy and a democratic council had created between them a city state of such vitality that its people had conquered the desert for miles around, making it blossom with farms and flowers. The hot mineral spring which was the fount of such bounty provided warm homes in the middle of the tundra, irrigation warm enough to penetrate the permafrost, and a perennial source of several chemicals invaluable to an isolated industrialised city.
The mineral spring – an unimpressive thing it was, too, when you went into the well house and looked at it bubbling turgidly from the stained rocks – was the beginning of Chad, the reason the Garden City had survived and thrived when other settlements froze to death in the desert, but real sophistication came to the Chad culture with the development of an energy source to pump the water great distances, purify it, process its minerals and confer other benefits unassociated with the spring. Chad had nuclear power. The man with the camels was a nuclear engineer.
It was two years since Paul was last in the Garden City. Then the war with Harry Jess, earl of the Northlands, was only a distant gathering cloud, a vague anxiety. The king had said, off-handedly, that nothing but wind ever came out of the north, and had professed to take more interest in valves and control rods than the threat to his small, prosperous kingdom. Paul had wondered at the time if the king, who was no mere figurehead, neither witless nor naive, were genuinely unaware of the danger or found it politic to feign unconcern.
And now, two years later, the Barbarian was in Chad. His hordes had turned its gracious, leisurely streets into a running melee. Broken things littered the pavements. Dead bodies piled up in places where the invaders thought it humourous: the courthouse was one, the library another. Most of them dated back a week to the first sacking of the city.
Now the king who had professed indifference towards the menace from the north, having already lost his realm, was about to yield up his life. Nothing Paul knew about Harry Jess suggested he would make it easy.
Holding the bull by a short leash and using the unease provoked by its great loose-limbed body to open a channel for him through the pressing crowd, he made for the centre of the immense square. As long as Chad had stood this square had been its heart, and for the last hundred years the heart of the square had been its ornamental fountain. The statue posing in the bronze bowl, of the ruler who had it made, was tall but lacking any other merit, but its moving waters were both a delight to the senses and a testament to the culture which made streams to flow in the immutable tundra. In the Ice Desert living water was the hallmark of man.
The tall statue was toppled and sprawled in a shattered line across the cobbles. Some of the smaller pieces had already been pilfered, as souveniers or to be hammered or cast into swords and speartips and arrowheads by Barbarian warriors. A greater loss was the sound of the fountain, silenced by the crudely effective means of an axe-blow to the supply pipe. The precious water ran to waste across the cobbles and wet the watchers’feet.
The destruction of the fountain was not wanton, as it might well have been, but a means of adapting the bronze bowl to an end it could not have served full of water. The cauldron was heaped with coals, and amid them the ragged figure of the king was bound to the surviving lower left leg of his deposed ancestor. The tableau left absolutely no room for doubt as to how it would unfold.
The man with the camel knew the king at once, which was perhaps surprising in view of the state of him; but then the whole ambience of the square prepared Paul for what he must see. Also, the king had come through the monstrous trials of the last days into the calm no-mans-land before death, stripped of hope but also of despair; confident that the peace he was about to gain was more desirable than the life he would lose, King John II of the City State of Chad was more recognisably himself than at any time since the Barbarian’s torturers got their hands on him.
From his vantage above the sea of heads John looked his last upon his Garden City, seeing its marred beauty as a reflection of his own and not sorry to be leaving before injury turned to corruption and defeat to degradation. His mind, skimming mosquito-like across the surface of awareness, touched briefly on the Chad of his childhood, his father and brothers; upon his own reign, the advances he had made, the mistakes; upon the ill-fated campaign to resist incursion from the Northlands. The last days had been painful for him not only because of what they had done to him but also because of the rape of Chad. Many, many times he had ridden through this square and seen friends faces, rosy with prosperity. Now he recognised no one, saw only fear on the faces of his people, driven here by the gloating horde, the exits from the square blocked by champing horses and grinning Northmen in bright-studded surcoats. They were right to be afraid: most of them would follow him sooner rather than later, and he had no wish to share their extra weeks of life at the cost of grief and slavery. His death would be quicker than theirs, so perhaps less cruel.
The one thing the king did not think of, as his gaze skated distantly over the scene, was his son. He had spent too many days keeping that thought out of his mind, lest in agony he should betray it, to admit it now. Yet, as someone dropped a torch among the coals with less ceremony than might have been expected, something caught his fading eye to provoke the forbidden thought. It was not Edmund, but it was a young man, someone he knew, someone he once knew watching him through the mounting flames with neither horror nor delight but a kind of cold, clear assurance that made no sense until he realised that the great gravel-coloured bulk beside him was not the f
igment of a fever-dream.
When his eyes and the king’s met across the leaping, climbing flames Paul recognised several facts simultaneously: that the king knew him; that he suspected, at however instinctive a level, the reason for his presence; that he had arrived too late to earn the inertial navigation system even if the quadro-dimensional navigator was still within his reach; and that burning to death was a slow and not very merciful way to go.
The packed square erupted in chaos as the big bull camel bucked and bellowed and spun round, clearing a space for itself by the simple expedient of trampling some people under its spreading pneumatic feet and projecting others, screaming, into still closer contact with their neighbours with a swing of its great woolly quarters. In the free-for-all which followed, with civilians trying to fight their way clear of the rabid beast and soldiers trying to fight their way towards it, almost none of the thousands present saw that the king was dead before the flames hid him from view, his eye pierced through by a slender dart.
Of the few who did, one was a girl attending on Harry Jess as he watched the execution from a second-storey balcony of the royal palace. What distinguished Sharvarim-besh from all the others, including the earl of the Northlands, was the mere accident of her birth: raised far south of Chad, in a caravanserai town athwart the trading routes, she was familiar with the sight of camels and was not distracted by the antics of this one from the historic events being enacted below. So she saw the king die minutes before the crowd believed it witnessed his death.
Sheer surprise made her startle and gasp, and she might have spoken had anyone at all showed signs of having seen the same thing. But not a murmur rose from the mob, while Harry Jess was bent forward over the parapet, enjoying the spectacle of the beast as a comic interlude before the main entertainment which would begin when the fire, unheralded by anaesthetic smoke, reached his vanquished adversary. Shah actually had her hand on his arm to tell him what she had seen, but he shook her off and on reflection she decided she had seen nothing. She had not wanted to see the king burn, and she had no wish to bring down the earl’s vengeance on whoever had taken advantage of the sudden chaos to perform that last service for his sovereign. Travelling with Harry she had seen decimation before: she had no wish to precipitate a fresh massacre here. So she leaned over the balcony with the Barbarian earl, and looked where he pointed and laughed when he laughed, and when he claimed to hear the king’s screams above the cheers of his soldiers and the crump of flames she gave no indication that she knew he was deluding himself.
Later, after the crowd had dispersed, the shocked hush broken only by a few hysterical voices as the satisfied soldiery drove appalled citizens back to their sacked homes, Shah was still with the earl when the new palace guard brought the man with the camel to him.
He came surrounded by blades and touched by none of them. His bearing, as he walked the length of the room, was self-assured.
The sergeant of the guard said. “He injured Ap-Rel.”
He sounded sullen and wary.
“Is that the cretin with the spear? I told him to keep it out of my back but he wouldn’t listen. I think I broke his neck. I certainly intended to.”
Harry Jess had enjoyed his day and was in a tolerant frame of mind; also he felt that the spectacle with the camel was worth the loss of one soldier, particularly Ap-Rel. He was just mellow enough to be intrigued rather than incensed at arrogance on the part of a camel-drover. Arms akimbo, his sparse frame angled forward in a stance more usually assumed by bigger men, with a good humour rather chilling in view of the words themselves, he inquired. “Have you been so long in the Ice Desert that you don’t know who I am, how many people I have killed to get here, how many I shall kill to stay here, and how much it might amuse me to make you one of them?”
Shah’s great eyes blinked wide at the sudden wolfish grin which split the man’s wind-darkened face. His face was as knowingly enigmatic as a temple maks, its deeply graven lines satiric, its gold-flecked obsidian eyes sardonically watchful. It was a cruel face, she thought, as cruel in its subtler way as the earl’s. Physically too he was like Harry, an inch shorter but the same spare frame, wiry rather than muscular. He used his body as a cat does, with awareness and deliberation and with that feline aura of latent savagery. But his mind came as a complete shock. It was nothing like Harry’s, incomparably greater: a sprawling intellect, its boundaries pushed out far beyond her ability to map them, its inner regions dense and complex and so active that she withdrew with a gasp, drawing a sharp glance from Harry and the quirk of a lip from the temple mask. His face gave absolutely no warning of the machine inside his head. The only real thing he and Harry had in common was the anger.
“Yes, I know you, Harry Jess.” Scorn radiated from him. “You haven’t changed much. You used to be a bully, now you’re a tyrant. That’s a change of scale, not of degree. You’ve not got bigger: only fatter.”
Shah stopped breathing. So did the earl, to the point that he started going blue. Then he whispered with conviction. “I shall have you flayed and your skin hung from the ramparts.”
Paul laughed. “You’re not even original. You’ll do nothing, because you’re a coward and if there’s one way you can be sure of bringing every war-machine in the Ice Desert down on your stupid head it’s by harming me. While nuclear power is all that makes the northern cities viable, I’m the safest man on the tundra.”
“You’d better be,” hissed Jess. “Who are you?”
“I’m an engineer. I am in fact, so far as Chad and the other cities of the Ice Desert are concerned, the engineer. I came here to service the king’s pile. It doesn’t matter to me that it’s now your pile, so long as you can pay for the job, but I’d better warn you that without servicing it’ll slump down in about three months’ time.”
“What does that mean?”
Paul frowned, looked round for somewhere to sit and dropped into a chair without waiting for an invitation. “You don’t know much about what you’ve stolen, do you? Look. The valves on the cooling system have a safe working life of 27 months. They’re now two years old. When they fail the coolant stops flowing. The pile generates enough heat to melt the bottom of the callandria containing it and slumps down into the foundations of the city. Chad will lose power, gain irradiation and quite possibly disappear into a morass of suddenly liquid permafrost. That’s three ways to lose your new kingdom, Harry Jess.”
“I remember,” Harry said slowly. “I remember where we met. Your name is Paul.”
“I thought I was going to have to tell you that too.”
“And hers was Elaine.”
Paul grinned at Shah. “Never mind, you got a new one.”
Reaching out hesitantly, Shah found in Harry’s head the familiar, frightening passion. His temper was a devil which rode him and fed him; at its height it had the explosive vigour of an epilepsy. Colder than that was this clear-headed fury, more terrible in its reasoning hatred than all his mindless raging. He said carefully, “I think it will be worth Chad to me to watch you die. A man can do a lot of dying in three months.” Shah could almost taste the savour of anticipation on his lips.
“It’ll cost you more than Chad, Harry. The only barter you can buy my life with is your own. I’m a busy man: I’m due in Leshkas inside the month. Their state, like Chad, depends on an obsolete, overworked, inexpertly run nuclear power plant which is overdue a service. If I don’t get there on time, they’re going to want to know why. When they find that by killing the only nuclear engineer north of the tree line you have condemned their entire culture, they’re going to come after you with a flame-thrower. Nor will they be alone: the other ten cities which will sooner or later perish without me will also wish to mark their disapproval in some positive fashion.”
That he had his faults was undeniable, but the Earl of the Northlands was not stupid. In the decade since inheriting his domain on the never wholly explained demise of his uncle, Harry Jess had welded an impoverished feudal province int
o a fortress and a disordered population into an effective fighting force. He had trained them, armed them, made them mobile with horses, and set forth conquering and to conquer. Now he was rich, powerful, feared far beyond the Northlands; but he was not so powerful as to confound an assault by the combined forces of the desert cities, and neither his wealth nor his reputation would save him from doomed men avenging their own destruction. His fury was not such as to blind him to the engineer’s peculiar invulnerability, nor to persuade him that the satisfaction of killing him would be worth the risk involved. Being rich, powerful and feared gave a man a lot to lose.
So, at least for the moment, Harry Jess owned himself out-manoeuvred and shrugged. “After all, she was only a slave.”
“Not any more.”
“You didn’t keep her?”
“She’s now a high priestess at Oracle. She prays for my soul.”
“That must be comforting.”
“Not as much as the people counting off the days in Leshkas.”
“And then,” Shah told the poet, “he turned his back and walked out. Harry was livid. He snatched a spear off the sergeant of the guard and hefted it over his shoulder. I really thought he was going to throw it. I tried to warn the engineer – I told you, I thought maybe he was a telepath – but he just kept going and Harry seemed to realise what he was doing and hurled the spear into the panelling beside the door instead. The man just grinned at it as he went through. Afterwards Harry did this.” She indicated her eye.
“One day,” prophesied Itzhak, applying salve and powder with deft fingers, “he’ll go too far and scar you, and then he won’t want you around any more.”
“You think I don’t know that? But what can I do?”
“The first thing you’d better do is make sure he never finds out you’re rooting for the opposition.”
