The Winter Plain

by Jo Bannister

  Shah chewed her lip reflectively. “Listen,” she said, deciding. “There’s something I think he ought to know but I don’t know if he can cope with knowing it now. Can I trust you to judge the right time?”

  “What is it?”

  “Do you know how the king died?”

  Lockwood’s face tightened. “By fire. The Barbarian made a point of telling us.”

  Shah shook her head. “He told you wrong. The king was dead before the flames touched him. He died quickly and cleanly by the grace of a man in the crowd who risked his own life to deal the king a kindly end.”

  After what seemed a long time, during which he stared into white space until his eyes burned, Lockwood blinked and sighed and murmured, “Thank God.”

  “My lord, it was Paul who killed him.”

  Understanding dawned in Lockwood’s creased face. Other emotions also made fleeting appearances there but none endured. Finally he smiled. “Woman, I salute your wisdom and your courage. I shall hold this information until the king is strong enough to handle it. Then he will be as grateful as I am. But I think it’s too soon yet for him to thank the man who killed his father.” A frown wrinkled his seamed brow even more. “What a contradiction that man is. If Harry Jess had seen —”

  “Yes. Time and again he risked his life for Edmund, his father, for us. Only at the last, when failure seemed all but inevitable, did he take steps to ensure that death would not be too protracted. He could have run then, my lord, and left the king to his fate, and in a few months no more would have remained of Chad than there is today. He too needs a chance to heal.”

  Lockwood laid his great ape’s paw on her shoulder and smiled into her face. His eyes were compassionate. “Does he know you love him?”

  Shah gave a quick birdlike shake of the head, eyes bird-bright with sudden unshed tears. “I shall hold that information until he’s strong enough to handle it.”

  But the situation was too stressed, the personalities too volatile, for the quiet time to persist. If the journey had been shorter or easier, perhaps a strained peace might have lasted out to Leshkas. But as it was there was very little chance of the trek reaching completion without Paul and the young king coming to confrontation. The very vastness of the Ice Desert acted like prison walls, turning the travellers in upon themselves.

  The conflagration came five days out and began with Paul plotting a new course, south of west, his all but featureless chart weighted to the ice by his compass, his slide-rule and his knees. Straightening up he remarked to Shah, “If we’d held this bearing much longer you could have met a colleague of yours.”

  “A colleague? I thought I was unique.”

  Paul grinned. “A predecessor, then. You know about Elaine? The last time I was out this way was when I took her back to her Order. She was on a recruiting drive when one of Harry’s raiding parties took her from the caravan. I recovered her for them. It’s a great barracks of a place, Oracle, like a little city, another thirty or forty miles on. We came in from the north that time, though, through the Jedda passes.” He poked the chart with a fore-finger.

  “I think you should ride over and pay her a call while we have supper,” proposed Shah.

  “It’s a long way to ride to look at somebody’s front gate,” grunted Paul, “and that’s all I’d see. They don’t approve of men; no, not even that, they don’t acknowledge the existence of an alternative sex. They had the greatest difficulty hiring me because none of them would see me or talk to me and they didn’t want Elaine to either – notwithstanding the fact that she’d been Harry Jess’s paramour for six months by then.”

  “It does seem to be taking modesty a shade far,” admitted Shah. “Their virtue must be solid gold to need that much protection.”

  “I thought perhaps they considered me an unreasonable degree of temptation,” murmured Paul, folding the map.

  “You? Yes, well, possibly,” agreed Shah, “as you say, they lead a sheltered life.”

  Lockwood was erecting the black tent with powerful, economic use of his great reach. After five days in the desert he had established a correct military routine for the making and striking of camps, during the execution of which even Paul kept out of his way.

  Edmund, having helped unload the camels in a rather desultory fashion, had wandered a little distance from the encampment. Seeing Paul watching him Shah said quietly, “He’s desperately unhappy.”

  As they watched Itzhak, his satchel under his arm, went trotting out to join him, his elongated body as ungainly in movement as a locust. Dark silhouettes against the great whiteness, their heads moved in a conversation which was dispersed by the wind before it reached the observers. Finally Itzhak threw up his delicate hands in a theatrical gesture of despair and stalked back, radiating umbrage.

  Paul stopped him with a hand as he flounced past. “What’s wrong?”

  The poet was angry and upset. “He won’t take his injection. He says he doesn’t need it any more. He says —” Itzhak stopped abruptly, shuffling his feet.

  “Yes?”

  “That – that you want to keep him dependent on you. He said – hurtful things.”

  Shah slipped a comforting arm round his waist. He cast her a moist, grateful smile. Paul relieved him of the syringe. “I’ll see to it.”

  “Make us something nice for supper,” said Shah; as if it could be anything other than caribou stew.

  Casually, a small dark figure easy in and somehow dominating his frigid environment, Paul strolled towards the unmoving youth. “Time for your trip.”

  Edmund’s shoulders set frostily. “What?”

  “The royal hypodermic awaits you.”

  Edmund turned and eyed the proffered instrument and Paul with equal dislike. “I’m taking no more of it. I told that fool Itzhak.”

  “That fool Itzhak cared for you like a mother when nobody else could stomach being near you. He also risked his life for you. Perhaps you don’t remember.”

  “I remember being dragged like a dog in front of my father’s murderer,” flared the king, “and you and that pathetic idiot tripping over one another in your haste to lick his boots.”

  Paul, wondering if that were really the extent of the boy’s understanding, shook his head, half bemused. “That doesn’t matter. This does. Without it you’ll start synthesising the stuff again and be back how I found you a fortnight ago.” He offered the syringe again. “Will you do it or shall I?”

  Edmund took the instrument and looked at it, amethyst against the light, and very calmly fountained the gem-bright liquid into the windy air. “I think not.”

  Paul breathed hard, remembered Shah’s sermon and hung grimly on to his resolution. “In the interests of peace and good fellowship I shall look on that demonstration as a little youthful exuberance. Fortunately, there is more where that came from.“

  “You know where you can stick it.”

  “You’re damn right I do,” snapped Paul, “if I have to sit on your head while I do it.”

  Edmund fell back a pace and his voice dropped venomously. “Lay a finger on me and Lockwood will have your eyes.”

  “Sonny, I’m getting just a little tired of you.”

  Edmund, physically and mentally stressed as he certainly was, threw a tantrum to compare with Harry Jess’s. “Don’t call me sonny! I am a king!”

  “Yeah,” drawled Paul. “But not mine.”

  “If my father were alive —”

  “He’d take you over his knee and spank you, which is what I shall do if I don’t get some cooperation out of you bloody fast. In one degree or another you owe your life to every member of this party, but most of all you owe it to me. Well, that’s all right, I’m being well paid; but if you ever become more trouble to me than a quatro-dimensional navigator is worth I shall dump you on your royal posterior in the middle of this desert and ride away without a backward look. It’s just a matter of bookkeeping. I have no qualms about cutting my losses on an unprofitable contract.”


  “Which is doubtless,” spat Edmund, “why you allowed my royal father to burn when anyone with an iota of courage could have saved him!”

  It was not the challenge to his courage which carried away Paul’s restraint. He had no illusions either about himself or the situation which had met him in Chad, and if he valued anyone’s opinion it was certainly not that of a disturbed and bitter kingling. But nature had never equipped him for the role of philosopher. He responded with malicious honesty.

  “Given a choice I should certainly have opted to save the king and let you dissolve in your own bad dreams. There was no choice. The abject failure of Chad to put up a defence guaranteed the throne a new occupant. But just for the record, it wasn’t the Barbarian’s torches that killed your father. It was me.”

  Another miscalculation: he did not know that Edmund had a weapon until the blade flared under his nose, an evil scimitar-shaped knife that the boy wrenched with a cry from his bulky enveloping clothes.

  “Drop it,” Paul murmured, knowing he would not, knowing that he had goaded the young king at least temporarily beyond the limits of sanity and not caring because he knew that armed with anything slower than a laser the distraught youth was his to take and wipe the floor with.

  Edmund could not reply: words stuck in his throat. He did not know if it was the truth or a lie he was hearing, and in one way it hardly seemed to matter. It was a monstrous thing which raised new daemons in his tormented brain demanding the exorcism of revenge; so he lunged.

  Lockwood, putting the finishing touches to his tent, looked up at the wordless cry carried to him on the wind. He saw the two figures, did not see the knife, saw Paul launch out two fast kicks to Edmund’s wrist and chest that sent him sprawling. Lockwood was moving before he hit the ground. He passed Shah, and she, foreseeing trouble, took off in his wake, leaving Itzhak standing anxiously on one leg, wringing his hands.

  It is doubtful if Lockwood made any attempt to weigh up the situation. He had no need to. For over half a century he had served the royal household; Edmund was the third king whose state and person had been his charge. He had worn the royal livery, carried royal arms and dipped his hands in royal blood. So unquestioning was his loyalty that the obscure provenance of individual quarrels were matters beyond his care or concern. He was a king’s man and he loved the king, but even more than the king he held sacred the concept of loyal service. He would gladly have died for it, and would not hesitate to kill for it.

  His opponent downed, Paul was backing off – he would never turn away from a potential assailant again. Lockwood, arriving like a small tornado, failed to appreciate that too: he saw the king on the ground, gasping, with Paul stood over him and intervened by the most direct means he could essay. He flung one long arm around Paul’s chest from behind, pinning his left arm to his side, and locking his right wrist in the vice of his great hand wrenched his arm up and back to the shoulder.

  Taken completely off his guard, expressions of surprise and the considerable discomfort of racked muscles startled from him, Paul lurched clumsily against Lockwood’s barrel chest; and there the moment froze.

  Shah, a little way back and a little to one side, saw each of the players in the tableau, saw what was coming and was almost fast enough to prevent it.

  Lockwood, holding his man immobile from behind, saw only Paul and imagined he had ended the episode. Edmund swore afterwards that, rising dizzy from his fall, with eyes still unfocused, he too saw only Paul, poised above him with his right hand raised in a manner only explicable if he had a weapon of his own. He surged to his feet, whirling his dagger two-handed, striking in fear and fury. The curved blade, razor sharp, slit the sleeve of Paul’s padded coat with a whisper from cuff to elbow and laid open a corresponding length of the forearm exposed below.

  Before the blood started, Shah gained control of Edmund’s mind and petrified him; but it was already too late so with hardly a pause she released him, feeling as she withdrew the hysterical cocktail of horror and jubilation in his head. She was inclined to believe that it was not until then that he became aware of Lockwood, and Lockwood of him.

  As they stared thunderstruck at the result of their unwitting collaboration, Paul said very calmly, “Lockwood, will you put me down now please?”

  Lockwood gaped with wide, appalled eyes at the blood washing down over Paul’s hand to pool a spreading stain on the hard ice. Finally he stamped the ground, violent with mortification, and stammered out, “Paul, I didn’t – I never – I thought you – I couldn’t see. I didn’t know he had a knife! Edmund!”

  “He struck me.”

  “Edmund, for God’s sake! You stabbed a man while I held him. You have shamed us both.”

  A slow dark flush rose through the boy’s cheeks. His eyes were stubborn. “I didn’t know you were there.” He was a king and a king’s son and he did not apologise for anything; but beneath the proud disdain Shah felt a turbulence of dismay, shame, bitter anger and resentment running like a tide.

  Paul was watching the pair of them quizzically, the king and the general, still locked in the moment of their disgrace; one eyebrow arched, blank-faced, his gold-flecked gaze sliding easily between them, he ignored the flowing blood that drew every other eye as with a magnet. At length his gaze settled on Lockwood. His voice was mellow, equivocal. “Do you want to do something useful?”

  Lockwood nodded. There was pain in his face.

  “Then make sure the king gets his medicine.” He turned away, still with that dearth of expression. It could have been shock, for he was losing blood rapidly from the long wound, but Shah thought as she hastened to fashion a bandage from the hem of her shirt that it was rather a supercilious disdain for all of them and their human failings, as if he had long suspected that they were unworthy of his attention and this but confirmed it.

  The gash was along the outside edge of his forearm, a little below the bone, neatly delineating the limit of his traveller’s tan – evidence that he had been in a place where uncovered skin was not an invitation to frost-bite. It was nowhere very deep, but the blood flowed copiously.

  “It’s a good sign, really,” said Itzhak, bustling up with his medical kit. “A couple of stitches, a dab of salve, a bit of bandage and you’ll be as good as new.”

  “Don’t write a sonnet about it,” Paul said coldly, “do it.”

  Later, when they were alone, Shah – chin on chest, regarding him covertly – asked, “Does this change anything?”

  Paul’s eyes narrowed. His face was drawn and weariness seemed finally to have caught up with him. “In what way?”

  She shrugged. “In any way.”

  “You mean, shall I leave a sick sixteen-year-old boy out here to die because of one more scar I was foolish enough to let him give me? Is that what you expect?”

  “I don’t know what to expect of you. Why did you tell him about his father?”

  “It was the truth.”

  “And what,” she asked with penetrating comprehension, “did truth ever do to you that you should derive such pleasure from barbing it?”

  His eyes from under heavy lids held her in searching scrutiny. Finally he too shrugged, cautiously and lop-sidedly. “I enjoy the irony of wreaking havoc with honesty. Anyone can make trouble with lies.”

  Shah shook her head in despair. “And you wonder that I cannot anticipate you. It would take more than telepathy, Paul, it would take a crystal ball.” She nodded at it. “Will your arm be all right?”

  “It had better be. The closest thing to a hospital in these parts is Elaine’s convent, and they only treat one another.”

  “Itzhak could probably put something on it, if you’re not happy about it.”

  “Like badger offal, you mean? Skunk grease? An exotic salve of fermented bat and ptarm droppings? All Itzhak has in the way of desirable medical accoutrements are his hands; and if this goes sour on me nothing short of penicillin will do any good, and I don’t think that’s been invented yet.”

  Wh
ich extraordinary statement he was content to leave unembellished; or affected to be. Afterwards Shah was not certain if he had let slip the remark carelessly, a reflection of the currently low state of his mental and physical reserves, or if he had decided at last to initiate her into understanding of the greater mysteries. “Paul,” she said, so profoundly mystified that her voice came out quite flat, “what in God’s name do you mean by that?”

  He answered by giving her a history lesson; and though everything he said was utterly strange to her, and much of it was frightening in that gut-level nameless way that things are which combine the alien with the familiar, yet the threads he wove formed a pattern too apposite to be dismissed as fantasy. It was inconceivable when the pieces of the jigsaw fitted so snugly that the picture might be distorted.

  His eyes half hooded, somnolent and focused on the middle distance, leaning his back against a camel saddle, Paul began.

  “There was once more knowledge in the world than there is today; also more people, and more cities, even in the north, and great roads that linked the cities so that a man could travel from one to the next in a day. The people then used their knowledge with wisdom and grace, to take care of one another, to prolong their lives, to give themselves comfort and pleasure, to seek after truth. They had the knowledge to make money, the money to buy time, the time to develop culture. The living was good and the people were one. This was in the golden days, after they grew out of pointing weapons at each other and before the plague.

  “When the plague came everything was different. Everything the people had worked for and created now threatened them – their fine roads that made as nothing the distances between cities; the cities themselves, the throngs of the marketplace and thoroughfare, the great assembly halls and palaces of culture. They died in their millions, city after empty city reeking rotten to the sun.

  “There were in that day scientists who knew the human body as intimately as I know a nuclear power plant, who established that the plague was spread by a micro-organism. They could find neither immunity nor antidote to it, but by identifying its method of contagion they were able to formulate a defence against what was by now a threat to human survival in all the lands of the world.