The Winter Plain

by Jo Bannister

  Paul looked at her intently, as if concentration could recall his own lost perception. “Alive he’ll come after us.”

  “I dare say you could slow him down.”

  Scowling, Paul turned his attention on the throne, small bits of Harry Jess showing between its carved spindles and crockets. “Quite apart from anything else,” he growled, “the world would be a better place without the snivelling little dog.”

  Beneath his voice and his tone, Shah sensed a sudden lightening of Paul’s spirit, a loosening of tension, and knew that – for better or worse – she had won Harry’s life for him. Still, there was no need to tell Harry yet. She nodded ruefully. “This is hard to deny.”

  Harry, seeming to see his last ally slipping away, cried out to her in despair. “For gods’sake, Shah, you were my woman – you can’t let him kill me!”

  She shrugged. “I don’t think I can stop him.”

  “You must. Shah! Listen, there are two of us. If you get inside his head, I’ll take the knife away from him.” Behind the throne Harry was practically hopping with anxiety. “I’ll make it worth your while, Shah. I’ll make you my queen: what do you say to that?”

  “So it’s to be King Harry and Queen Sharvarim-besh, is it?” mused the girl, laughter dancing in the eyes she turned on Paul. “What can you offer me to compare with that?”

  “Nothing,” he allowed. “Though perhaps I should mention he also tried to buy me off. Admittedly, not with marriage.”

  “If I believed him,” Shah pursued mischievously, “I’d be sorely tempted.”

  “It’s true,” said Harry.

  “However, having lived with the earl for three years I know him to be quite capable of lying, cheating, swindling, murdering and chucking his granny to the wolves at any moment it might suit him to do so, for his convenience or his amusement let alone his life. His promises are of approximately the value and enduring comfort of a spent match. I’ll say this for you, Harry. At least you’re consistently unreliable.”

  Harry stared at her aghast. His lips went on muttering, “It’s true, it’s true,” long after utter hopelessness had filled his eyes. Quite slowly all the strength drained out of him and he sank on his knees behind the throne, his white cheek against unyielding oak.

  “Hold him there,” ordered Paul, leaving the room. Shah stayed where she stood, holding him.

  Paul returned from the banqueting hall with the purple flask Harry had kept in the chest there and a syringe. “You told me Northlanders hadn’t much experience of this stuff,” he reminded Harry as he drew up the amethyst liquid. “Well, you’re about to become the national expert.”

  They left the Barbarian crawling around on the throneroom floor, victim already to a maelstrom of conflicting sensations, not knowing if he had been drugged or poisoned. Aware of Shah’s disapproval Paul grunted, “It was your idea to slow him down.”

  They found horses tethered untended outside an inn and liberated two of them. As they slipped through the west gate, the Ice Desert opening before them like an unfurled silver banner, Paul remarked, “Incidentally, if I find you inside my brain again, I’ll blow your head off.”

  Travellers

  Chapter One

  Edmund’s earliest recollection of the Ice Desert was of men with hawks: dark hawks, for the most part, with speckled silver breasts that flew on scimitar wings in pursuit of fat-bodied game birds flying south for the winter and north to breed. They were white when they passed over Chad, so that on a grey day they disappeared entirely against the pewter sky and the men did not know when to fly their hawks. But on a cloudless day the intense blue carapace above was the perfect foil for their plump snowy bodies and the hawks flashed like blades to the encouraging cries of their excited owners and struck the passing harvest out of the air with casual murderous blows of their talons.

  Edmund’s father led the hawking, an evil-eyed jer perched like a silver column on a black gauntlet. The jer, whose name was Beshaan, was so exquisite and so regally composed that people seeing her for the first time thought her a decoration rather than a working hawk. But the appearance of the first ptarm dispelled all illusions. The stately aloof jer suddenly sat up and took notice. Her great wicked eyes focused keenly on the sky and she flexed her shoulders and clenched her talons purposefully, and shook from her quills a soft, menacing rattle. Launched, her great white wings powered her upwards with a muscular grace that carried all eyes with her. She was a great white killing machine and the king loved her dearly and flew her on every possible occasion. She worked well for him, but everyone else avoided close personal contact with the bird. Edmund knew she had blinded one man and scarred just about everybody who worked in the mews. There was madness in her eyes. But she was a magnificent falcon.

  Most of the nobles flew goshawks and a few of them peregrines. Jers were supposed to be a royal prerogative. No one took the taboo terribly seriously, but it was part of the tradition of a sport that was a rich tapestry of such injunctions and on the whole it was more fun to obey than disregard them. Similarly, a merlin was treated with a certain amount of disdain as a lady’s hawk. Edmund, having first learned to fly a kestrel, had recently been promoted to a merlin, but the elegant little killer was too small to be effective against ptarm and so had been left behind, freeing its young handler to observe. Edmund was about nine years old at the time.

  Perhaps that – having nothing to do but watch – and the novelty together were what made that earliest impression the most enduring. He had other memories of the Ice Desert – a caribou hunt, a journey to Leshkas; finally, most painful, still fragmentary and disturbing, the battle at the West Scarp – and some were more thrilling and most were more important, but for sheer visual impact none of them equalled that arcing of dark birds and white birds across the burning sky, and his father laughing as with wine as he flew the great silver death machine.

  Nothing until this. And anyway the two things were different: the one a tableau, the other an ordeal. In the vivid memory of bright blue and brilliant white, of dark figures dancing tunelessly to an accompaniment of excited, unintelligible male cries, Edmund was a small boy watching. In this silver-grey limbo, so cold it bit, so featureless it seemed like to prove eternal, he was a participant: not even so much like one of the men as like one of the birds.

  The great woolly camels paced tirelessly and without sound across the silver land. Edmund bestrode the cow Calipha, perched atop her load more like extra baggage than a rider. The bull Emir carried both Shah and Itzhak for long periods of time. Paul and Lockwood walked, silently for the most part, with as easy and effortless a stride as the camels. The calf brought up the rear of the little caravan. They were three days’walk west of Chad, except that Chad was not there any more.

  Paul had turned away the horses when they made camp for the second night. Without keep or liquid water they could not subsist in the Ice Desert, and he said he lacked the facilities to butcher them when their reserves were exhausted. Edmund suspected rather that he lacked the inclination; which, in view of what happened the first day, was a paradox.

  Edmund still had not got it straight in his mind. The facts were clear enough, but the enormity of it seemed to confound the senses; or perhaps it was the fever still lingering in his bloodstream that stopped him from seeing it whole.

  After Shah turned back, to Itzhak’s alarm and Lockwood’s discomfort, the two men argued briefly whether to go on, go back or wait. Lockwood won and they went on, because the king’s safety was of paramount importance, because it was what Shah herself wanted, and because Lockwood could beat up Itzhak with one hand tied behind his crooked back. All three were mounted then and they pushed on with as much speed as Itzhak, reluctant to leave Shah, could muster from the unfamiliar camels, reluctant to leave Paul. Lockwood, who had not even Itzhak’s scant experience with the beasts, might have driven them faster but could not keep them straight.

  Edmund was amazed at how quickly the Ice Desert closed in. On the brilliant days of
the hawking and caribou hunts, the tundra glittered across long miles and a horseman could be seen when he was but a black dot on its pristine flank. But today, as if to aid them in their escape, the silver sky and the silver land met and merged and wove an opaque web around them so that the high walls of Chad grew blurry and amorphous and faded into the glimmering haze while the faint confused sounds of the exodus could still be heard within them.

  Paul had given Shah his compass and Shah gave it to Itzhak. Itzhak had no idea what it was or how it worked, but he did know he had to keep the quivering arrow on the N and his camel’s nose on the W.

  After an hour Edmund, chancing to check behind, saw something dark undulating on their trail. The distance, the foreshortening and the ephemeral haze converted the horses’movement into something incomprehensible and quite alien. Itzhak would have urged the camels to greater efforts but now Lockwood called a halt: to greet Paul, if it was him, or meet the Northlanders, if it were them.

  It was Paul and Shah on lathering black horses that snorted and snatched at their bits and smote the ground with ringing iron hooves. Paul waved aside Lockwood’s relieved greeting. In a matter of seconds only he remounted his party – Shah behind Edmund, Lockwood and the poet on the Barbarian horses, himself taking the rein of the now much happier Emir – and, pausing only to recover his compass, led off once more at a steady, mile-eating lope.

  Shah, clinging to Edmund’s waist with determination, hoping vaguely that he too was clinging to something, thought this must be the closest thing to flight which men could aspire to, this smooth swaying pounding progress across the ice. The camel swung its long legs in lateral pairs while its bulky body swayed from side to side and its snake-like neck stretched out low and swinging to help its balance.

  How long the wild flight continued she could not have said; but it ended at last, the beasts easing back into the purposeful, rugged walk, leaving Shah ennervated, trembling with exhaustion, her eyes blind with tears and her face fiery with cold. The horses slowed too. As he passed her Shah saw that Itzhak had his eyes tight closed.

  Soon after that, rising land interrupted the icefield, black rocks frost-splintered, rimed with hoar, looming out of the haze. They altered course a point to follow their contour, Paul checking alternately his compass and horologram. He had not spoken for two hours. His face, when Shah glimpsed it, was dark and remote, uncommunicative. His eyes, narrowed against the wind, were cold and hard and swept through his band of followers almost without seeing them. Once in the headlong flight Shah felt Edmund’s purchase on the swaying beast begin to waver and called for a moment’s rest.

  Paul reined briefly, took in the boy’s condition at a glance and barked back, “I’m not stopping. If he can’t ride I’ll tie him on.” Shah felt Edmund’s wasted body stiffen with resentment. Dear God, she thought in despair, after Paul I’m the best rider here and I haven’t been on a camel for three years. There’s no chance we’ll all be here when he finally stops.

  But they were: Edmund more unconscious than awake, clinging to Calipha’s harness with such tenacity they had difficulty breaking his grasp to lift him down; Itzhak wide-eyed, laughing and shaking all at once; Lockwood merely more dour and crooked than usual; and Shah so sore, and in such places, that much as she wanted to welcome the engineer into her bed and her body, she hoped it would not be tonight that the fancy took him.

  Relieved as she was, Shah could not understand why they had stopped. It made no sense, to plunge recklessly across the hostile ice and then stop short with hours of daylight still remaining. There was no pursuit and though men and beasts alike, with the possible exception of Paul, were dead-beat they could have travelled further at a more reasonable pace.

  Paul did not offer to explain. Their journey ended when he suddenly wheeled the bull camel into a narrow defile, a dark cleft where the flank of the mountain had suffered some ancient cataclysmic injury, and rode until the crowding rock faces leaned too close for continued progress. A narrow white ribbon far above her head was all Shah could see of the sky.

  Paul slid to the ground before his camel settled down, folding on knees and stifles with gasping grunts in which could be detected a note of gratitude. With its head high on its curved neck and its hump decorated with pack and saddle, it looked like a rather ornate coffee-pot.

  “We stay here tonight,” said Paul. “See if there are any caves we can use. Lockwood, we’ll need a fire: there are fuel rods in Calipha’s pack.” Shah watched him with concern and no understanding. Afterwards she told herself she should have known, but like Harry she had put it down to bluff.

  The sound came like a rumbling in the mountain, like an earthquake, startling the camels to their feet and jerking snorts of fear from the timid horses. Inside the cave the five people froze over their Spartan meal as the dust of centuries was shaken from its roof into their stew.

  “What the devil —?” began Lockwood; Paul waved him down, checking his horologram for the last time in the blood-orange light of the fire. “It’s all right. We’re safe here.” He rose to his feet with an effort, no resilience left in him, and with a curiously flat expression moved to the cave mouth and into the defile. “Stay here.”

  Outside he pushed his reluctant body into a run, back the way they had come, to the bottom of the defile. He knew what he would see. It did not matter. He had to see it anyway. The bull camel watched him with lustrous eyes, unmoving, its great bulk primordial as the rocks.

  Eastward across the Ice Desert the sky glowed rose and violet. A dome of flowers spread over the Garden City of Chad, invisible with distance, but above the flowers hung a great evil thunderhead, its roiling heart shot with storms, half as high as heaven.

  Five hours. Many of them would have got out; perhaps most. Those who had the sense to travel into the wind and not turn back until the sunsets toned down in a week or two would survive – unless they froze or starved or killed one another in their panic or – What was the population of Chad? Lockwood said twenty thousand. Perhaps he had killed five thousand of them. Perhaps only two thousand. Oh dear God.

  “Oh dear God, Paul, you did it. You really did it.”

  He started at her voice, low with shock and belated understanding, but did not turn round. “I told you to stay inside.”

  “What?” She stared at his back, fighting to keep control of her voice, struggling to command the rage and grief that welled within her threatening to burst her heart, failing. “You bastard, Paul,” she cried bitterly, wanting to hit him, wanting to hurt him, wanting to make him cry (but if he did not scream he probably did not cry either), “you’ve killed twenty thousand people and you hoped we wouldn’t notice?”

  “Don’t exaggerate,” he said bleakly.

  She gaped. “Well I’m sorry,” she said then, nastily, hating him. “You think one or two may have survived? The prisoners in the city dungeons, perhaps, the odd hermit in the temple crypt? That makes all the difference in the world.”

  “I gave them time to get out.”

  “And somewhere to go to, Paul? Because without their homes and their stores they have no chance. Oh, the Barbarians, yes, they’ll have leapt on their horses and been far away by now – like us. Except poor Harry. But the people of Chad, with no transport, no organisation, no reliable information – how can they survive? You’ve broken their city in a million pieces and scattered it down the wind. Between you, you and the desert, you’ve killed them all.”

  “Poor Harry?”

  “At least he never knew what you’d done to him. But I know, Paul. I told you that dead he’d come between us. You gave me to understand you’d spare his life. Then you drugged him and left him helpless in an empty palace you’d fixed to blow up. Not one of your nobler actions, I feel.”

  “Poor Harry? Shah, have you forgotten what he was?”

  “No. But I’m slowly learning what you are. At least his murder was on a human scale.”

  That one hurt. She had been probing for the sore spot, the place w
here he felt, trying to wrest from him some expression of remorse, of awe, of the terrible grief and guilt she felt and he must feel keener, and that was it. He jerked round as if stung, his dark face flushed, his eyes hollow with resentment.

  “You think I don’t care about those people? You’re right. I can’t afford to care. People always die in wars: too many people, innocent people, but I haven’t so much blood in me I can bleed for all of them. Harry killed one lot getting into Chad, I killed another getting out. I could say I did it for the boy but it wouldn’t be true because if it was going to work a bluff would have served as well as a genuine crisis. I could say I did it for you, but we both know that your freedom is a by-product. No. What I did at the pile was entirely selfish. It was my insurance policy. It was my guarantee that if I could neither talk my way out nor fight my way out I hadn’t more than four or five hours in Harry Jess’s hands to look forward to. I wasn’t prepared to spend a week or more dying.”

  “You preferred to kill twenty thousand people?”

  “Emphatically.” The syllables he pronounced so precisely framed a bitter irony. “The death I gave them was kinder than any Harry would have allowed us. But even that isn’t really the point. Survival is the ultimate instinct. It is most powerful in the most powerful and most pressing in the swiftest. To try and suppress it is counter-productive: when the fittest sacrifice themselves to the less capable evolution turns back upon itself. I have as much right to my life as any man in Chad: more, because I put myself in a position to safeguard it, which they did not. Furthermore, if I lose my life the world loses my skills, which are more important than any they command.”

  “One of you is more important than twenty thousand of them? My God, Paul, if it weren’t for what you’ve done such towering arrogance would be laughable.”

  “Nevertheless, the world would miss me a damn sight more than it will miss all of Chad. What’s one Ice Desert city, self-contained and secluded, more or less? There are plenty of others. With the king safe there may even be another Chad. That doesn’t concern me. I was paid to do a job. By and large I’ve succeeded. What have I to regret?”