The Winter Plain

by Jo Bannister

  “We’ve arrived,” she said softly. “Don’t you dare die now.”

  She rode around the wall, that towered sunset-hued eighty feet above her head, and it took her half an hour and confirmed what she had suspected from the first, that the only entrance to Oracle was a hanging bartizan at third-storey level, a crenelated gatehouse stepped out over a dramatic amount of nothing. Even the bartizan seemed at first glance to be pierced by no portal, although Shah realised that was impossible. Then, approaching, she saw and understood. The portal was a hole in the floor of the gatehouse, in which could be discerned the openwork of a large basket gently butting in its dock in the wind.

  Shah’s eyes travelled slowly down the featureless roseate wall and back again to the projecting winch-house. Then she shook her head, confounded. “I may get in there,” she told the camel. “I may somehow get him in there. But frankly, Emir, I don’t see any possibility of getting you in there.”

  Hard against the walls the view of soaring pinnacles and graceful upperworks disappeared and Oracle took on the uncompromising aspect of the fortress it undoubtedly was. Its rosy walls were solid and high and unbreached by any aperture below the level of the gatehouse. Above that level two flights of tiny windows nestled beneath a machicolation but there were no signs of life either at the windows or upon the wall or at the bartizan, Oracle might have been dead for a thousand years, or as many fewer as the winds of the Ice Desert would allow an untended edifice to stand.

  Except that Shah could feel them within, feel the minds humming hive-busy behind the blank facade. Like bees, thought Shah, satisfied with the analogy, multitudinous and active but with a commonality of purpose not found in communities whose members were individuals before they were citizens.

  Starting at the hanging gatehouse, using the projection techniques Paul had taught her, she explored outwards in concentric hemispheres, inspecting the minds she met until she was assured that at least a dozen of those within knew of her presence without, and at least half of them were watching her. She reined the camel beneath the nodding basket and raised her voice.

  “I am Sharvarim-besh, I have travelled far, I am cold, tired and hungry and I seek your help. How may I enter your city?”

  She waited. The silence sent clammy fingers creeping out from the walls, seeming to stifle even the wind in its campaign of stony indifference. Her probing mind felt a tiny shudder of anticipation beyond the wall, nothing more; as if the myriad minds of Oracle were as disciplined in their responses as the hands in their duties.

  She tried again. “I know you’re in there, and I know you know I’m out here. I wish to speak with the woman Elaine.”

  The hum of thinking surged again, more markedly. A high peak of activity somewhere in the group behind the gatehouse suggested to Shah that perhaps Elaine herself were standing listening there, but neither voice nor movement answered her call.

  Growing prickly with irritation she threw back her furs. “If it’s so long since any of you saw a man that you suspect me of being one, I am prepared to divest myself of this admittedly ambiguous attire until there is no doubt left in your minds. But if I do that you’d better get that rat-trap down here pretty damn fast, you’d better have something hot waiting for me inside, and it had better not be stew.”

  She got no further in her disrobement than the quilted jacket under her furs; then with a brief rattle and a whisper of winch the slatted lift began to descend.

  It came to rest on the mirror ice beneath the bartizan, an oblong box about the size of the royal tub in the palace bathroom in Chad. Shah rode Emir up against it and slipped the straps which anchored the pannier at his flank so that it tipped its contents into the crate. “Don’t you go wandering off,” she enjoined the camel as she too slid from his back into the lift; then she shouted, “Haul away,” and the curious conveyance swung free of the ground.

  Survivors

  Chapter One

  A succession of wild thoughts crashed through Shah’s mind as the crate pirouetted and lurched its way up the wall, the silliest and most persistent of which was that at some point someone would realise she was not alone and cut the cable. She expected to emerge in a room full of hefty young nuns sweating round a windlass.

  No nuns, no windlass. When the cable drum finally wound to a halt Shah climbed slowly from the lift with mouth agape and eyes agog. The bartizan was furnished with metal cabinets that hummed and winked and whirred: there were buttons and numbered keys, though no one to press them, and spinning coils and chattering metal jaws gnashing busily away to themselves, and Shah had seen only one thing in her entire life which came from the same world as this and that was the Chad nuclear pile.

  That raised more questions than it answered, but it told her one thing: that whatever Oracle was it was not a secluded order of unworldly nuns leading a tranquil existence of modest simplicity in the Ice Desert. With fear in her heart but also hope, because whoever they were instead of nuns they belonged to the knowledgeable portion of mankind that Paul had spoken of, Shah shrugged her coat and her courage about her and marched into Oracle.

  She was ready for agument, even for violence. She was unarmed except by her special facility, which should prove enough but among people like this who could say? Were they really all women, or was that another well-cultivated deception? Shah came from a world in which people were men and women also ran; by trying hard she could visualise a scheme in which women were the sole authors of a desirable way of life, but her subconscious kept nudging in with the postulation: There must be a man behind it!

  Which is perhaps why, in an effort to bolster her bravery, she pinned before her inward eye the image of Paul stalking into Harry Jess’s throneroom as if he not only owned the place but had returned from a long vacation to find an under-gardener taking liberties with sceptre and orb.

  The bartizan gave onto an awesomely long passage, dimly lit by the occasional high lancet, receding to either side into dark remote distance. The passage was of finely dressed sandstone, red like the curtain wall, plain but perfectly proportioned, and empty. Testing the ether Shah found the greatest concentration of minds directly in front of her, which was confusing as there was neither door nor archway. Arbitrarily she turned left, closing the heavy wooden door of the gatehouse quietly behind her.

  She had hardly gone a dozen paces when a darkened aperture opened in the flanking wall, an arch of shadows framing a flight of stone steps. She could not see where they led, but they took her towards that concourse of minds and away from the sterile passage with its inhuman length and purity of line, which in its very emptiness made her feel exposed.

  Inside the shadow the descending stair made a peculiarly graceful curve, sweeping down and round and opening with a sudden flourish of vaulting masonry, blood-red in the half light, into a cathedral.

  The great chamber of Oracle was built – or carved, as from living rock – on the same Cyclopean scale as the mural passage and with the same fine appreciation of line and proportion as the sweeping stair. It rose, echoing silently, far above her head and fell away from her feet, an amphitheatre of soaring fans supporting an unseen dome, the figured tracery shooting into a darkness broken only and climactically by a lantern light in the very apex of the roof. Sunlight streaming in pale shafts down the still air, an oasis of calm in a windy desert, cast a pool of luminescence in the centre of the great sunken floor and caught in its spotlight, like ghosts frozen in a temporal trap, waiting figures, motionless, watching.

  Shah too, motionless, a dark shape against the greater darkness, waited and watched.

  They were all women: tall slender women of graceful mien in hooded dove-grey robes, standing in the centre of the chamber. They did not move or speak, or look at one another, and though all of them were facing in approximately her direction Shah could not be sure if they saw her or not; but they were aware of her. For some reason she hesitated to probe their awareness, collective or individual, deeper than that; and, at least for the moment, the
need was removed when one of the women spoke.

  “Sharvarim-besh, come down and be welcomed to Oracle.”

  At the foot of the stairs a gallery ran round the great chamber; at intervals around the gallery ramps gave access to the floor. Shah located the nearest and moved into the light.

  The dove-grey hoods, turning imperceptibly, followed her as flowers follow the sun, with that same unforced uniformity. There was nothing regimental about their accord; it seemed more as if their responses were naturally identical, so while the apparently unconscious unison of their movements was disconcerting it was not in itself sinister; like a natural phenomenon threatening no danger.

  The woman who had spoken before did so again. Looking at her Shah seemed to detect signs of authority or rank; not in her garb, which was indistinguishable from that of the others, nor in her demeanour, for they all shared the same bearing of aloof indifference. The deference showed in the grouping of the women. Each was perceptibly apart from all the others, but this woman was afforded a slightly but unmistakably greater zone of isolation by all her companions. She said, “You have made a remarkable journey. You must be fatigued. A meal is being prepared; come, accept our hospitality.”

  “Gladly,” returned Shah, with gratitude but also with caution. She knew how much hinged on her handling of the next few minutes. “Not only for myself. My camel is also weary and in need of refreshment: is there a way it may be brought inside and attended to?”

  “There is a place,” the woman said obliquely. “The animal will be tended.”

  “Also,” said Shah, taking her resolve in both hands and throwing back her head to look the taller woman in the eye, “I need your help for another. You have a hospital, people skilled in the repair of sickness and injury. I need advice, preferably assistance, hopefully supplies of – of – damn it, of a drug whose name I appear to have forgotten.”

  “You have a fellow-traveller? Where is this person now?”

  “Still in the crate.” The woman nodded, as if that explained something that had been bothering her. Shah hurried on, “We rode all night. Oracle was our only chance. It’s a knife-wound that’s become infected.”

  “Who is this person?” interrupted the woman.

  Damn you, thought Shah desperately, you don’t care who he is; the only thing you care to know you’ve already guessed. “His name is Paul. I owe him my liberty, as does another here. Oracle is the only place in this quadrant of the Ice Desert where he can be treated. You cannot turn him away.”

  The least whisper rippled through the gathering. The priestess, if such she was, enquired with studied calm, “You have brought a man here?”

  Despair sparked Shah’s temper. “You’ve nothing to fear from him,” she snapped tartly, “he’s dying.”

  “My dear, we do not fear men. We simply have no use for them.”

  “You had a use for this one when he was well. He risked his life for one of you. You owe it to him to care for him now.”

  “We owe nothing to anyone.”

  “Elaine does, and I doubt she’s such an ingrate as to deny it. Is she here?”

  “Elaine.” The woman paused thoughtfully over the name, as if it savoured of something more than half forgotten. “There is no one of that name here.”

  “Of course there is, she’s a high priestess,” retorted Shah. “But she wasn’t always a high priestess. For a time she enjoyed a less dignified role in Harry Jess’s household; not to put too fine a point on it, a bed-role. Pardon my indelicacy, but you see I too held the interesting post of Barbarian’s whore so I have little modesty left. I was relieved of my duties only days ago, by the same man who rescued Elaine from hers. This time he got hurt. He’s in that bloody hanging basket now: in pain, fevered, only intermittently conscious, his arm badly swollen and possible gangrenous. If you don’t help him he’ll die. And if he dies I shall become extremely unpleasant to have around.”

  “Don’t threaten us.”

  “I demand to see Elaine.”

  “Sharvarim-besh.”

  Shah was suddenly aware that each of the women was looking past her to the gallery; she was turning as the voice said her name. Another tall, slender woman was silhouetted pale grey against the dark stair.

  “I am Miriam, High Priestess at Oracle. I was once Elaine; I am the one you seek. I have had Paul removed to the infirmary. Will you come there with me and tell me what happened?”

  In the ensuing hours Shah came to know the one who had been Elaine and to enjoy her company. She admired her calm practicality, her unshakable dignity, and the rich and subtle shades of mentality and emotion which made up that attractive, intelligent persona. Shah also became acquainted with others of Oracle, but all seemed to lack the undercurrent of human warmth that gave depth to Miriam’s character and conversation. If the difference was due to being bedded three times a week by a bad-tempered little Barbarian, Shah caught herself thinking, there was a case for making it compulsory.

  Lost in the blind heart of Oracle, the infirmary was a complex of interconnecting structures at or below ground level. The main ward carried a low dome on short piers, received no natural light and was painted a paler shade of the dove-grey the women wore. It was empty.

  “We hardly ever use it,” said Miriam. “Since we have little contact with people from outside we don’t get many epidemics, and nothing is more dismal than being sick on your own in a ward full of empty beds. We use the side rooms instead. It saves on heating, too.”

  “How do you heat Oracle?”

  “Nuclear power, of course.”

  “How do you manage without bringing in an engineer?”

  Miriam smiled. “We of Oracle built our power-plant. We need no advice on how to run it. But enough of our domestic arrangements. Here is your friend.”

  The little room was for all the world like Itzhak’s cell in lost Chad, even to the colour and the domed ceiling. Inside, Shah realised, Oracle was all domes, all rounded feminine contours, swelling architecture reflecting female hips and breasts and swelling gravid bellies: an environment of wombs.

  Paul without his clothes on she almost failed to recognise, which in view of her history was absurd. Quiet in the white bed, unconscious or sleeping, his head tipped to one side on the pillow, he seemed smaller than always, frail, the ribs too close under the skin of his bare chest rising to the shortened, stressed metre of his breathing. Drained of its colour his face had also lost much of its desert-beaten texture; translucent as porcelain his cheek held only a firey spot under the bone and his brow, the damp dark hair combed back from it, a heavy dew of sweat. His eyes were closed but for a thin white line under each, his pale lips parted sufficiently to allow a whisper of escaping breath. His left hand twitched mindlessly upon the sheet; his distorted right arm was sandbagged at his side. A fine tube ran an anonymous liquid into a catheter inside his elbow from a dripping inverted bottle above the bed.

  Shah whispered, “Oh Paul,” in a shattered voice and swayed.

  Miriam steadied her and guided her into a chair. “I think you should be in bed too.”

  Shah shook her head. “Not while —”

  “We’ll do all we can for him,” Miriam said gently. “He has a good chance here. You did well to bring him to us.”

  “I wasn’t sure you’d help.”

  “Still you brought him.”

  Shah managed a grin. “I was going to play merry hell if you turned us away.” A thought struck her. “Look, I don’t know if this is a breach of your vows or anything – or if you’d be more comfortable if – well, I mean I can nurse him myself if you’d prefer, if you’ll tell me what to do and give me what he needs.”

  Miriam laughed softly. “We have no fear of men, and we aren’t made uncomfortable by them. It is simply that we find a single sex system more efficient than one of mixed sexes, so we take steps to perpetuate such a scheme of things. Those steps do not include watching someone die of blood-poisoning on our doorstep merely for being the wrong sex �
�� even were it not that I personally owe a debt of gratitude to this particular man. No, we’ll care for him, Sharvarim-besh – and you too, if you’ll let us.”

  “I want to stay with him.”

  “Suppose we make up another bed in here?”

  “Before you go,” said Shah, holding out a hand. “I have another confession. Others of our party will follow us here. They too are —”

  “Men?”

  “All three of them. Well, more or less. The two camels are female,” she added more hopefully.

  Miriam smiled. “They can stay in the mews where we stabled your own beast.”

  “Paul’s, in fact.”

  The priestess’s eyes twinkled. “Not Emir by any chance? I must go down and say hello to him. I remember him with some affection. Well, both of them, actually.”

  The nurse made up the other bed – a proper off-the-floor bed like Paul’s – but Shah did not use it, not until much later. She drew up a chair at Paul’s left side and took his lax left hand in both of hers, and stayed like that almost without moving for the rest of the day and all that long night.

  Two Oracle women were most closely engaged in the fight for Paul’s life: the nurse who was in or near the room constantly and who monitored his condition by frequently consulting a battery of machines ranged behind the bedhead and occasionally looking at the patient, and a priestess who came to administer drugs and take away print-outs from the machines.