The Winter Plain

by Jo Bannister

  Shah was less shocked by his violence than Paul was. His abandonment under provocation of intellectual superiority in favour of physical dominance was a human act, something she understood better than the torrents of clever, angry words which poured from him and over the top of her head. Yet she could have wished the favour unasked. She had no right to make demands of him: she was nothing to him, he owed her no thing save one night’s sanctuary and a few strips of silk.

  Paul was struggling, against the conditioning of a lifetime, with the inexplicable urge to apologise. Looking neither at her nor away, sullen with discomfort, he finally wrung out, “That was unnecessary.”

  It was not the most eloquent apology Shah had ever heard, though it might have cost the most. A man to whom efficiency was more a god than a goal, she doubted if there was a word in his vocabulary more loaded with calumny. She would have smiled at his dismay but for the certainty of wounding him further. Instead she said quietly, “I had no right. I had no right to trespass in your mind, and I had no right to say what I did. Could we perhaps forgive one another?”

  After a moment he nodded, turning away.

  Shah said, “How did I get out?”

  “I fetched you.”

  She smiled. “Just like that?”

  “No, not just like that,” he snapped, rounding on her, ready for anger; then he saw her smile and slowly answered it with a crumpled one of his own. “No,” he said again, more softly. “Not just like that. I don’t know what would have happened to us, you and I, if you’d had to stay in there, but we damn nearly found out.”

  When he felt, with shock, outrage and a deep foreboding, the wormish sensation of another personality in his mind Paul was instantly awake and tried to rouse Shah, without success. She sat sagelike, still and open-eyed and quite impervious. In desperation he clawed at his head, as if he could scratch her from his brain. Then, with the nausea sweeping through his synapses and the pain they said he could not feel shooting down the nerve chains, yielding up all hope of an early relief, he let his useless body collapse in a twitching faint and, quiet as despair, followed her inside.

  “Why did you go so deep?”

  “I was lost,” she explained patiently. “I didn’t know where I was. I thought I was in the desert. I was freezing to death: I had to find some shelter.”

  “But why that way?”

  “I seemed to hear someone calling.”

  Paul too hesitated at the glass curtain, that emotional thermocline which served to protect his innermost ego from a hostile world, and vice versa. But he knew Shah had passed that way from the damage she had done, and from the turbulence within welling to counter the invasion. Whether his brain could produce antibodies, actual or psychological, to deal with the intruder he had no way of knowing, but he was quite sure that Shah would not leave alone and so – reluctantly, shrinking from the almost incestuous contact – he slunk into that roiling region whence all his passion originated.

  There was a hollowness in his eyes as they faced one another across the service chamber of Harry Jess’s nuclear pile. No anger, no pain, nothing: an awful nothing, a pit of self-knowledge. He had made a journey such as no man had made in the history of the world, a voyage no man should have had to make, and though he had both survived and succeeded he had traversed a realm the human mind is not equipped to travel and the experience had marked him.

  Shah said, “I owe you my soul. Was it very bad?”

  To be rejected as a foreign body by your own brain; to be smothered and buffeted, and raged at by a defence mechanism which was never designed to discriminate between inimical and benign trespasses; to feel your strength sapping and your concentration tear under the bombardment, knowing that only strength and concentration stand between you and dissolution; to have to press on when all your instincts, every natural and acquired sense urges you, pleads with you, screams at you to turn and flee, to run as far as you can as fast as you can because no girl ever born was worth this mayhem at once in you and around you; that was bad. But it was private, and anyway incommunicable. He managed a slow, crooked grin, “Not bad,” he said. “Just a bit like screwing yourself.”

  Later, after they had rested, with his arms plunged into the entrails of the machine, Paul said in a low voice, “I’ll teach you, if that’s what you want.”

  Shah stopped, looking at him. “What?”

  “What I can. What I can remember. It’ll be rather like a paraplegic teaching ballet, it’s a long time since I’ve been able to practise and I can’t demonstrate. You’ll have a rotten time: I’ve never taught anybody anything before, I’ve no reason to suppose I have a vocation for it, I shall probably work you unreasonably and shout a lot. But you ought to get some training, a talent for telepathy is too special to go to waste, and if I don’t coach you I don’t suppose there’s anyone else who will.”

  “I’ve hurt you so much already,” whispered Shah.

  Paul glared at her and demanded roughly, “Is that no?”

  “Oh no,” she replied fervently. “No, that’s yes please, you’d better believe it, when do we start?”

  “Now,” he said grimly. “Before I lose my nerve.”

  He was right about one thing: he had no vocation for teaching. He had no patience. He expected her to be able to produce an effect in about the time it took him to describe it, speaking fast and using words she only half understood. He made no allowance for her lack of sophistication, or the fact that – never having shared her facility – she had not the vocabulary to deal with its uses and nuances. He treated her a little like a machine and a little like a mentally defective child; he drove her, ox-like, with the goad of his scorn, unrelentingly, until her brain crawled with exhaustion, so that she escaped from him at the end of each day with relief so profound that Harry Jess’s demands were positively welcome by contrast. Yet she was happy. For the first time in her adult life she was doing what she wanted to do; someone whose opinion she valued treated her – however brusquely – as something worthwhile; and she saw, or rather felt, like a quickening in the air, a prospect of escape. It was a measure of her euphoria that she had all but forgotten, in her new-found relish for the future, the very real and present danger posed by the secret in which she shared.

  She might have worried more if Paul had allowed her the time. He did not. He worked her every moment they were together, either on the pile or on her developing faculties; not infrequently he expected her hands to be engaged on the one task and her mind on the other. Much that he had her doing she did not understand: some of it seemed to have remarkably little value, and some she was already familiar with and mistress of – only he insisted she learn it again his way. As the days passed in the close confines and rancour of the pile, Shah felt her brain stretching.

  Paul set her deceptively simple exercises. “Find Harry.” As she moved obediently towards the door he blew up with overstrained patience and frustration, reminding her that his task was more alien to him than was hers to her. “Dear God, is it a dog I’m training? Where are you going? You can find Harry with your feet nailed to the floor. Use your head, woman! It’s just my luck,” he snarled despairingly, “I finally find a telepath and not only is it female but she’s got sawdust between her ears.”

  When he had finished Shah said, “The throneroom.”

  “What?”

  “Harry. He’s in the throneroom.”

  Paul breathed heavily. “Right. Alone?”

  Shah considered. “No-o-o —”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Soldiers. And – others.”

  “Stay with Harry. What’s he thinking about?”

  The projection of her mind, that she had learned to shape and motivate, went through the stone passages like a ferret. She pushed it out with the front of her brain, with a near physical effort that hurt the muscles of her eyes. Unseen and unsuspected, it quested like a ferret for the scent of its quarry, quickening to a familiar resonance. From the anteroom her projection recognised th
at Harry Jess was upon his purloined throne. Passing through the closed door it homed in on him, aware of an animated background of other minds, some of them known to her, but concentrating on its target. Infiltrating Harry’s mind it saw the small assembly with his eyes, heard its babble with his ears, felt the surging triumph in his breast and tasted the sweetness of vengeance in his mouth.

  Shah frowned. “I don’t understand. What is a blood eagle?”

  Paul knew. He knew not only what it was but also what it meant, that she asked that question now. His face tightened and went hard and the gold flecks flashed in his narrowed eyes, but before she took in his strange expression and before he had chance to explain she found the answer in Harry’s sadistic mind. Accustomed as she was to the Barbarian’s thoughts, this one rocked her. The appalling vision burning in her brain, she turned her face ghost-white to Paul, struggling for words. Her voice was a shocked whisper.

  “He knows about the prince. Paul, he knows everything! They’re all there, in the throneroom: the prince, and Lockwood, and poor Itzhak. He means to kill them all, but the prince – the prince —” She could not finish.

  “I know,” grunted Paul. “The Blood-Eagle.”

  Chapter Six

  In one sense Harry Jess was hardly a Barbarian at all. In the first place he was literate. In the second he thought too much, studied too much, paid too much heed to the past and to the future. In another and very real sense the title fitted him like a glove, because mostly what he thought about, studied and paid heed to was cruelty.

  Familiarity with his people’s history had given him the Blood-Eagle. Its charm for Harry lay not only in its cruelty but also in its baroque selectivity. It was specifically a death for conquered kings. He would have used it for John if he had remembered in time. Now he could employ it on his son and heir. Harry did not suppose a king had to be crowned to qualify: it should be enough that an heir apparent outlive his royal predecessor; anyway, Harry made the rules now.

  Because of the pleasure the Barbarian anticipated deriving from him, Harry regarded the doomed youth almost kindly, finding it in himself to admire defiance from a boy who could barely stand without assistance. A sick sweat filmed his pallid face, and the flesh had wasted from his frame so that blue shadows played between his ribs beneath his rent shirt. Yet he was not altogether unimpressive. If there was fear in his fevered eyes, there was also contempt. His frail body bent from illness, not abjection. Harry thought he would make a good enough death despite his scant years, pegged out in the square with his chest prised open and his lungs spread on the cobbles either side like eagles’wings.

  Nor was he disappointed in Lockwood. He had of course heard of the hunchback who commanded the Chad army: now he saw him Harry could not understand how the man had passed so long unrecognised. He remembered his first intelligences of this cripple, received with amused incredulity back in the chill halls of his Northlands when he began to plot his invasion. He had thought then that either the reports were exaggerated or Chad was idiot-led. Now he could see for himself that Lockwood was indeed extremely crooked; still as an adversary he had proved worthy. Losing his military campaign he had switched to guerrilla activity under the very noses of the new garrison. On his eventual discovery – by the random chance of a soldier with toothache being hustled along to the poet-healer by half a dozen colleagues – it had taken the entire patrol to subdue him: two men had fallen to his knife before the others succeeded in securing his murderous hands to a yoke across his shoulders, by the entirely reasonable expedient of first beating him senseless. He appeared before Harry Jess crucified, hung about with chains and groggy from the blows he had sustained; and Harry still had to fight back an impulse to keep large pieces of furniture between himself and the cripple.

  His respect, however academic, did not extend to his own poet. Itzhak cowered before him, his mouth flapping like a flag in a gale and small terrified sounds and gushing half-formed apologies coming out by turns. Harry thought he had never seen a more disgusting sight and wanted to kick the gaping white face unrecognisable. Then he thought he could do better than that. He would kill Itzhak first, for the pleasure of his panic; then the boy; then, with the reason for his living smeared across the cobbles outside, Lockwood.

  But not yet. First there was the question of coconspirators to be resolved. The gibbering poet was an obvious candidate for the inquisition, but when at a sign from Harry two of his guards laid meaty hands on him Itzhak breathed a tiny shriek, his head rolled back and he was limp in their grasp.

  The men exchanged incredulous looks over the slack figure. “He’s fainted.”

  “What?” Harry leaned forward, menace giving way to irritation.

  “Fainted, my lord. Dead to the world.” They hefted him experimentally. “We never even started!”

  “Ye gods, there’s no backbone in the entire world outside the Northlands,” declared Harry. “Any of my men,” he told Edmund, “would suffer torture in total silence for me.”

  “Those whose duties involve listening to you,” retorted the king, “do.”

  Harry’s pale eyes kindled. “Oh ho, a humorist. Round here, sonny, I make the jokes. The only ones it’s safe to laugh at, anyway. And for gods’sake, stand up straight. Your father was as straight as an arrow after five days with these two.” The guards winced, unhappy to have their failure resurrected.

  The boy drew himself up with more courage than strength and said proudly, “I need no lessons in deportment from a Barbarian brigand with the morals of a stray cur. Nor do I need your assurance that my royal father died like a king.”

  “Don’t be jealous,” Harry said, very softly. “You too shall have a king’s death. Only, before that, you will tell me who aided you.”

  Edmund’s lip curled and his chin jutted. It was, Harry recalled with interest, the exact expression with which King John had greeted his enquiries. Something of an upstart himself, Harry had an eye for tradition.

  Lockwood said, “King Edmund is his father’s son and my student. He will tell you nothing.”

  “In that case,” replied Harry, rising smoothly from the throne and rounding on the crooked man, “before he dies you will tell me who gave him succour. Everything I know about you, Lockwood, assures me that such betrayal lies entirely outside your nature and ethics. Yet you will do this alien thing because no one in the world means anything to you beside this weakly youth, no one’s sufferings are of any weight beside his, and you will sell anyone’s soul – as you would sell your own – to save him hurt. Ah Lockwood, with devotion like yours behind me I could rule half the world!”

  Edmund said, “All you have behind you, Harry Jess, is an army of bullies, compounded by thuggery and motivated by greed. One day soon one of them will put a knife in your back. All you’ll rule then will be six feet or rather less of the tundra, if anybody cares enough to bury you.”

  “And to bury you, sonny, they’ll have to scrape you up with a shovel,” snapped Harry. “Lockwood, name those who aided you or your pretty prince begins the long slow business of dying now, here in this room. There’s a fire in the hearth whose use should not prove beyond the scope of an inventive mind.”

  The king let his eyes travel slowly round the room from which his murdered father had ruled his broken city. When they fell on Lockwood he smiled; when they reached Harry they fixed him coolly. “You see before you those who served me: Lockwood, gladly, because he is my gallant friend and first noble, and Itzhak, against his will, because Lockwood would have killed him else. None other.”

  Harry, noting that Itzhak had revived enough to listen approvingly to this speech, kicked the prostrate poet. “Is this true?”

  “Yes – yes, lord, utterly true,” Itzhak agreed fervently, “he had a knife and would have killed me; naught else could induce me to deny my lord – my gracious lord —” He had hold of Harry’s foot and was trying to kiss it.

  Harry snatched it back with difficulty and some loss of dignity. “No, fool. That no
others were involved?”

  “Yes,” nodded Itzhak, peering anxiously up at the earl’s angry face. “No? What does my lord wish to hear? No! No, it’s a lie, there were others. Many others, scores, hundreds —”

  “I want the truth, you cretin,” yelled Harry. “I shall have it. My fire is a democratic element: it will burn a poet as well as a prince.”

  Itzhak squawked and tried to grovel still lower, which was impossible; the sergeant of the guard, at a sign from Harry, moved towards the hearth, pulling on a glove deliberately; and nicely on cue Paul shouldered open the door and shouted across the room to Harry Jess, “Are you busy?”

  Every sound in the chamber ceased; every eye in the chamber turned on him. It was an effect he rather enjoyed creating, but there was not time to relish it long. “I see you are. Still, my business is more important than theirs.”

  “You’ve done it again,” fumed Harry. “Look, I’m not going to tell you any more. You want to see me, you ask – and you wait until it suits me to grant you an audience. This is my city now.”

  “Not for long, it isn’t. Somewhere along the line, Harry, you’ve managed to upset a clever man, as a result of which you’re going to lose your city, most of your subjects, half your army and quite possibly your life.”

  The silence stretched until it crawled. Harry broke it. “What are you talking about?”

  Paul’s eyebrows twitched a little facial shrug. “When I closed up the pile last night it was fine. When I opened it this morning it had been tampered with. It’s taken me till now to work out what he did. Nothing crude from this lad, no bashing it with a sledgehammer. He knew his way around. He’s disconnected the – oh well, you wouldn’t understand, but the point is that there is now no way to prevent the pile blowing the Garden City of Chad into a cloud of dust and small pebbles three miles high. I’ve managed to slow the process down to give you something over four hours to organise an evacuation. Alternately, leave someone else to organise it, find yourself a fast horse and ride the devil into the wind. That’s what I propose to do.” He turned back to the door.