The Winter Plain

by Jo Bannister

  “Wait.” The terse authority in Harry Jess’s voice brought Paul to a halt with a jerk that rather surprised him, though it was what he both expected and required. “Do you mean to tell me I’m going to lose Chad because of this damn pile of yours?”

  Paul snorted. “It’s not my pile, it’s yours. In view of the lengths you went to to acquire it, it’s a pity you didn’t guard it better. His father kept it safer than a favourite concubine.”

  Harry looked where he was looking and, startled, back again. “You know the boy?”

  “Of course. That’s Prince Edmund – King Edmund now, I suppose, for all the good it’ll do him. And that’s Lockwood. Was he anywhere near the pile last night?”

  Lockwood, who had listened with increasing agitation to the exchange, could contain his wrath no longer. “You devil,” he exploded, struggling with the rod across his back so that his attendants shuffled around him uneasily, “you worthless, ignoble, treacherous devil!”

  “Shut up!” screamed Harry. He was shaking on his feet and it was hard to say whether fear or fury had the upper hand. “My city’s about to blow up and you stand there calling one another names? Cripple, is this your doing?”

  Lockwood made a visible effort to master his temper, dragging homicidal eyes away from Paul with difficulty. “Given the opportunity to blow something up, Barbarian,” he said in a low voice, “I should have chosen you, not a city of twenty thousand people most of whom I have know all their lives.”

  Paul shrugged. “Well,” he said off-handedly, “I can’t think of anyone else and quite honestly, I feel the topic would be better discussed on the far side of a mountain some three hours’ride from here. Will your sergeant raise the alarm or shall I? The more warning your soldiers get the more army you’ll have left to play invasions with when the smoke clears. There’s always another city.”

  “You’re going nowhere,” snapped Harry; which the sergeant, who had been growing increasingly restless, chose to interpret as a direction to himself. Saluting smartly, he wheeled and went. That, Paul noted with satisfaction, reduced the ungodly to the earl, the double act which had frightened Itzhak into a dead faint, and a couple of rather junior hoodlums by the door. A bit more stirring, he thought, and they too would melt away; and no one would come back once the word was out.

  While Paul was indulging in a cautious gloat, Harry Jess was prowling the throneroom like a frustrated cat. He was, Paul decided, furious rather than afraid. He was an undoubted coward, even a celebrated one, but somehow this massive threat had failed to get through to him. It was as if he simply could not believe that, having got what he had wanted for so long, he could lose it so quickly. Instead of leading the exodus, he was fretting about the coincidence of timing: ultimate victory over the Chad royal family one minute, prophesies of total doom from this ubiquitous engineer the next. Experience on both sides of the arras had taught Harry that coincidence was more usually conspiracy.

  Watching Paul slit-eyed and sideways he enquired, “Did you know the boy was still here?”

  “It was a reasonable assumption,” Paul returned idly.

  “Did you know where he was?”

  “If I’d been looking for him, I’d have started in the palace.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’m a nuclear engineer, Harry. You’re the general of the occupying army. I assumed you knew your job.”

  “Treacherous,” Harry said, thoughtfully and apparently without cause. He went on prowling.

  Paul frowned. He did not like not understanding. He also did not like the time this was taking. “I really am getting rather nervous,” he remarked. “I’m ready to go. I came to warn you: I wasn’t prepared for a full-scale debate.”

  Harry stopped pacing and looked him in the eye, and there was more intelligence in the look than Paul would have chosen. He thought of Shah and he thought hard.

  “You’re not leaving this room,” said Harry, “until I comprehend what part you have played in all this.”

  “You’ve no more time for conundrums than I have,” advised Paul. “Anybody who’s not on his way out of this city in the next half hour has palpably little chance of survival. Chad is a bomb. The city and those left in it will not exist for more than four hours. Those closest to the explosion will be vaporised; they will disappear. A little further away they’ll be burned to carbon. Further away again they may survive the blast but die, after varying periods of time and from assorted effects, as a result of exposure to heat and/or radiation. We have to leave, Harry. Kill these if you want but let’s get out of here.”

  Lockwood lurched again, wordlessly but with such determination that the two guards by him had to hold like grim anchors and Paul fell back apace. Lockwood was not acting.

  Harry was still looking thoughtful. “It’s funny how much he resents you. Any idea why?”

  “None,” Paul said coldly.

  “Treacherous,” Harry said again. His voice was as softly dangerous as new snow on a glacier. “An odd word to use. A term not of abuse but of censure. Treachery is an act against duty, or friendship. And yet he’s a literate man, you wouldn’t expect him to use words loosely.”

  Paul made no reply, seemed hardly to listen. Harry smiled slightly, hungrily, as he warmed to his theory. “So perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps he had a right to expect from you better than he got.” He chuckled, watching Paul impishly; then, denied a reaction, laughed out loud, immoderately, with every appearance of delight. “Dear me,” he said moistly, climbing into his throne, “I don’t know what it is about you that arouses my nasty suspicious mind. But it would explain certain things if we assumed a community of interest between these people and you. Each of them is known to you. Two of them you have worked for in the past, the third supplied you with the drax I never quite believed you needed. Malaria isn’t that common in the Ice Desert. The boy’s a much more likely candidate for a junkie. And you have this almost uncanny knack of turning up at interesting moments.”

  “I read minds,” Paul said, deadpan.

  Harry grinned. “No, what you do is spy. And if you’re a spy, and if your intention is to extract this feeble princeling from my evil clutches, then the panic about the pile is a diversionary tactic and Chad is likely to last for a thousand years. You, on the other hand, are unlikely to last more than a very few days. But they’ll be long ones.”

  Paul’s voice was flat, passionless and deeply convincing. “That pile has gone critical. It will explode. Chad will be destroyed, and those who delay leaving will without any shadow of a doubt die. Unless you want a full-scale mutiny, order your men out now.”

  Afterwards Harry could never describe exactly what happened to him. He started to respond, scornfully, in the negative, when a kind of fog got into his brain and clogged it up and stopped him from seeing what he was doing and hearing what he said. It did not hurt and there was nothing to be frightened of, but when the fog receded and he rediscovered himself sitting on his throne with his head against the padded back he found it had left an icy spot of fear, a chill, in his heart.

  The soldiers were gone. Lockwood, unchained, was rubbing life back into his arms and watching him with a kind of black triumph. The boy was slumped on the window-seat, looking out over the square. Itzhak was blowing his nose, loudly and wetly, on a silk flag of a handkerchief. Near the door Paul and the girl Shah, whom he did not remember arriving, were deep in quiet, angry conversation. Apart from Lockwood’s murderous stare, no one was paying him any attention, which the Earl of the Northlands found very strange.

  “What the hell —” His voice came out a thin treble; Harry coughed it down and started again. “What the hell is going on here?”

  Paul looked up with an air of distraction, frowned and returned to his confab. “Not now, Harry.” It was the most cutting remark the earl had ever heard.

  “Please,” said Lockwood, never taking his eyes off the hunched, defensive figure on the throne. “Please, Paul – can’t I have him? I’d be
forever in your debt.”

  “If you live you’ll be forever in my debt,” Paul said shortly.

  “For the king,” Lockwood said, swallowing. “I owe him vengeance. It won’t take long.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” snarled Paul, rounding on him, “if you ever stop arguing, and if she ever stops arguing, Shah is going to take you down to the mews and using my camels you’re going to escort this king-thing out of here. To enable you to do this in some degree of safety, I propose to stay behind for a short while with a sharp knife at the gullet of this other megalomaniac. As I am not optimistic enough to try holding a corpse hostage, it follows that I require Harry alive until I’m ready to leave.”

  Harry shouted: “When my men get back here —”

  “They’re not coming back. They’re saddling their horses and packing their spoils, and thanking whatever gods they pray to that you sent them away before the urge to join the exodus made them run out on you.”

  “I —?” Harry almost choked on his own indignation. “I did not send them away. I did not.”

  “You think they went because I asked them politely?”

  Shah was watching Harry’s eyes and feeling his distress. Not just the physical fear of being alone and defenceless in a room with five people each having good reasons to kill him, but the mental panic of being unable to account for himself. She remembered the pain he had given her, and the shame, and also the long nights that might have been lonely without him snoring softly beside her, face down, one arm flung across her waist. With surprise she realised she no longer wanted retribution.

  Harry cringed as she approached him. He had heard women could be the worst they were more inventive, and less scrupulous. But when she stopped and gazed into his face he saw no hatred in her jewel-dark eyes, only something akin to compassion, which he did not understand.

  She said simply, without pride, as a statement of fact: “I made you do it. I got into your mind and made you dismiss them.”

  “You – my mind —?” stammered Harry, chalk-faced. “How?”

  “I’m a telepath, I read minds. I’ve been reading yours for three years. This other thing I didn’t know if I could do until today. Paul taught me.”

  Harry shrank further into the throne; he looked stricken.

  Lockwood said, with conviction but to no one in particular, “I said he was a magician.”

  When they had gone, so quietly and carefully that they must have aroused suspicion but for the chaos outside, Harry found something to say but Paul silenced him with a raised hand. Positioning himself at the window he concentrated, as intently as keeping an eye on his hostage would permit, on the clamour and bustle in the square. But no particular hue-and-cry elevated itself above the general mêlée and in due course four figures, swathed in furs and hooded for the desert, with two laden camels and a skittish, leggy calf, crossed the cobbled expanse from the palace compound to the west gate. The great portal stood open and unguarded. The small camel train passed through unchallenged and, veering a point north of the road, moving in the graceful slow-motion silence of a silver dream, faded into the desert. There was no pursuit.

  Harry had in effect been concussed by the manipulation of his brain. He was recovering now, walling up the horror behind courses of anger, indignation, vengeful scheming and cruel anticipation. Such thoughts, he had long ago learned, as well as being pleasurable, suppressed to manageable levels the panic which rose like bile in his throat at any threat to himself. So he stoked his rage and indulged his morbid appetites, and while his blood ran hot his clever head ruled his timid heart and victories fell to him like corn to the hissing scythe:

  Now, alone and unarmed, faced with a man who intended to kill him, survival would be victory enough. Harry pumped hard on the anger pedal. “May I rot in hell if I ever let you within half a day’s ride of another woman of mine!”

  Paul grinned. “It’s not my fault if none of your companions wants to grow old with you.”

  “Is it true she’s a mind-reader?”

  “Yes.”

  “Gods! Is it true you are?” Paul shook his head. Harry, fledgling hope beating a tattoo inside his breast, tried not to register his relief visibly. “All right, let’s talk practicalities. You can kill me, but probably not before I can make enough noise to bring here men who will despatch you, and without you I think those people in the desert will die also. Alternatively, I will keep vigil with you quietly until you are ready to go, and I will give you money and a written authority to get you past any of my soldiers who should challenge you, in return for my life.”

  “All right,” Paul said negligently.

  Harry laughed aloud. “No, I’m not that much of a fool, I shall require an earnest of good faith – else what’s to stop you taking my money and my letter and then killing me?”

  “What’s to stop you giving me your money and your letter and then yelling blue murder?”

  “You’d kill me,” Harry said reasonably.

  “You are so right.”

  “All right,” frowned Harry. “Suppose I give you the money and the letter and you give me a dagger – purely for self-defence, of course?”

  “I don’t want your money, Harry,” said Paul, “and I don’t think any of your soldiers can read. And the only way you’ll get a dagger of mine is between your ribs.”

  “Suppose,” suggested Harry, his agile mind searching desperately for escape, “your friends are already in the hands of my men? With what shall you bargain for them, if I am dead?” When Paul did not answer he went on with growing confidence, “You saw them leaving, you know how many of my soldiers are outside the city. All it takes is for one to recognise Lockwood or the boy, or to think that Shah shouldn’t be leaving with strangers instead of with me, and they are captives again. Maybe it has already happened and they are being held out on the road: my men must expect me to come soon, remember. If I don’t —” He shrugged eloquently. “Anyway, there’s no way you’ll know until it’s too late for you to do anything about it. You could walk into a trap. Unless you take me with you.”

  Paul snorted. “I’d as soon carry a snake in my bedroll.” Yet a distance in his eyes suggested he was thinking about it.

  “I won’t give you any trouble,” urged Harry, “you have my word —”

  There was nothing wrong with Harry’s argument. Had he ended it a sentence earlier it might have carried the day for him. But he was not psychic. There was no way he could have foreseen the effect on Paul that last promise would have. He knew nothing of the man’s past or his particular ghosts, and when the thinking eyes went sharp and cold and frosted over Harry knew that he had almost won his life and now he had lost it, and he had no idea why.

  Paul said only, “Your word is worth nothing,” in a voice that cracked like the pack-ice.

  The world turned perceptibly slower. Harry tried to shrink away but the bloody throne, hungry for another victim, held him captive. He struggled awkwardly to his feet as, flat-eyed, Paul closed with him, his slim blade disappearing between their bodies.

  The voice in his head stopped Paul like a blow to the kidneys. Clutching Harry to him, his stiletto already embarked on its journey from Harry’s surcoat to his heart, the engineer spasmed as if electricuted and his hand jerked, momentarily out of control.

  “Paul. No.”

  For a brief space the two men clung together as if engaged in some clumsy, sombre ritual or dance. Then Harry, sensing opportunity like a rope snaking through fog to a drowning man, not knowing the source of his deliverance but snatching for it with every fibre of his straining body, kicked and struggled with the galvanitic strength of desperation and tore himself free of the murderous embrace and in the scant hiatus before Paul regained command succeeded in interposing the carved back of the substantial timber throne between his person and the winking hungry knife.

  Homicidal thoughts whirled in Paul’s brain. “Get out of my head, woman,” he gritted, p
ain beating in his temples. By effort of will he fought her out of his brain, but by the time he could return his attention to the assassination of the Barbarian earl she was there herself, in the doorway, an amorphous bundle of travelling furs and a calm gaze that transfixed him.

  “Paul, no. I don’t want you to kill him.”

  As he stood undecided, like an animal torn between training and instinct, the knife tight-clenched in his fist, the killing passion slowly passed, intelligence returning to the terrible blank eyes. He said gruffly, “What are you doing here? What’s gone wrong?”

  Shah shook her raven hair clear of her hood. “Nothing. I saw them safely on their way, then came back to wait with you.”

  “I don’t need your help,” he sneered, “or your company.”

  She came forward, closing the door behind her. “Or my opinions either, I dare say,” she said coolly, “but you’re going to get them for all that. I want Harry left alive.”

  “In God’s name, why?”

  “I don’t want any regrets about this, Paul. I want to come with you and be with you and learn from you, and I don’t want him getting in the way. I lived with him for three years. I shared his bed and his food and his campaigns. I never loved him. But if you kill him, his death will stand between us as the living man never could. I don’t want him haunting us. When I think of him, I want to picture him cheated and bitter and alone in his ice-palace in the north, not remember him coughing up his life on the point of your dagger.”

  “Then wait outside.”

  “Inside, outside: what difference does that make to me? Paul, I don’t want to feel him die.”