The Winter Plain

by Jo Bannister

  Disbelief and tears clouding her eyes, Shah stared mute rebellion. She felt fear now, all right, crawling clawing fear creeping from her belly to her heart up the inside of her spine.

  Paul said only, “She’s probably right,” and made for the door.

  With a wrenching cry Shah detached herself from the spot where she was rooted and threw herself on his arm, wild with distress. He stopped and stared into her streaked face, almost with puzzlement. He shook his head. He touched his fingers to her cheek. Then he swung, a fast back-hander that spilled her across the room. Insensible, she graced the floor like a dropped dress.

  She was not unconscious as long as she should have been. Her urgent mind pressed the need for action on a reluctant brain still reeling from concussion, and her eyes were opening before she was capable of making a rational interpretation of the images they recorded; hence Miriam’s unlikely stance half way up a wall. Shah sighed and the image wavered and slipped out of focus, and when it cleared she saw that what she had taken for the wall was in fact the floor, against which her right cheek was resting.

  “Paul said I was to leave as soon as you woke up,” said Miriam, straightening. “Please don’t struggle, you won’t be able to free yourself. I’ll come back when they’ve gone.” She closed the door behind her, leaving Shah alone.

  Pain throbbed in her head and nausea crept up her stomach and along her throat. She tried to lift her head but could not without the use of her hands which were secured behind her back. Her ankles were also tied. Lying on her side, she tried to lever herself up on her elbow, but she lacked the strength; the strain on her stomach muscles only brought acid surging into her mouth. She coughed it out, wretchedly.

  While she lay vomiting rancidly, the alert and urgent part of her mind stood somehow aloof, watching in despair and disgust and thinking, Damn him, even facing death he’s still plotting, still dictating other people’s actions. Had Miriam stayed she might have got into her mind, obtained her release that way. But Paul had told Miriam to leave when Shah awoke: he was not going to have her dashing up at the last moment for a death row reunion. He would sooner see her buried alive in Oracle, obediently churning out little mechanical clones. Shah had seen no future for herself as a nun, but she fancied the life of a glorified battery hen even less.

  Groping unsteadily with her perception, which was as shaken as the rest of her, she found minds in the great hall below, but though she infiltrated one after another she could elicit no help from them: she felt their excitement, their apprehension and their anger but she was unable to make them respond to her. Her mental cries for help went unheeded.

  She turned her concentration on her bonds, and on the nature of rope. She visualised the myriad fibres tightly twisted, each trapped by and trapping countless others, the integrity and strength of the whole assured by extreme inbuilt torsion. The key to weakening rope lay in untrammelling that twist, easing the pressure. She set her mind against it like fingernails picking at the shreds.

  Itzhak did not know what was happening, but he was well aware that something was. He had been discussing surgical techniques with the priestess who had treated Paul. She went to fetch artery clamps from the next room and did not return. Minutes later a nurse put her white face through the door, saw him alone and patiently waiting, and scurried away, feet tapping a swift tattoo on the hard floor. It was the first sign of haste the poet had witnessed at Oracle.

  Far away down echoing corridors and hollow halls, to the very limit of awareness in the voiceless, breath-abated city, he heard others: hurrying feet, running steps, a slammed door. He waited a minute longer, then set off to investigate.

  Lockwood smelled the horses. The faint sweaty sweet miasma was so diluted by the crystal wind that it should have gone unnoticed in the secret enclave. But Lockwood had smelled it before, that curious heady mixture of animal power and dark angel grace, and that time he lost his army, his city and his king. Now the hairs pricked along his neck like a boar’s hackles.

  Edmund neither smelled the horses nor sensed the men, but he had known Lockwood long enough to recognise in the rigidity of his bent body and the set muscles of his face the emotion he thought he could disguise. Edmund, watching the old warrior with compassion – his flickering gaze, the perhaps unconscious posting of his sturdy misshapen body as a bulwark against the secret door – felt a most curious thing: a sudden lightening as of a weight he had been unaware of lifted from shoulders surprised by their own weariness. His voice was light.

  “What, old friend, are we finally discovered?”

  Lockwood’s eyes bathed him, round with tragedy. “No,” he lied thickly. “It’s nothing. Stay away from the door. There is no one there. Only the wind.”

  Edmund smiled. “No wind ever turned you white, Lockwood; no, nor any Barbarian either, save that you had me to look after.”

  “The Barbarian is dead —” choked Lockwood.

  “There is always a Barbarian. Still, I hope you’re right: I would be happy to have outlived my father’s murderer. Nobody lives forever – perhaps the best any of us can ask is to go after our enemies and before our friends.”

  “The city is strong,” said Lockwood, talking too much and too fast. “They won’t attack Oracle, and they can’t stay out there for long with only what supplies they could carry. All we have to do is wait.”

  “They will attack Oracle,” Edmund said calmly, “because they have come too far not to. And whether or not Oracle is strong enough to repel them doesn’t matter, because these women will give us up to the Northlanders rather than risk their precious pink walls. And I, Lockwood,” he added, finally managing to catch and hold the other man’s eyes, “shall walk out to meet them before they start bargaining for me as for a beast or a sack of grain. I am the last king of Chad: I shalln’t wait to be bartered by women.”

  “Paul,” Lockwood hazarded wildly, “Paul will have some plan to deal with them. He always has a plan. He out-thought Harry Jess; he can deal with this mob. If you go out there now you’ll waste all his work, everything he’s done and been through.”

  “For once – and he may find it as difficult to accept as you do – there is nothing Paul can do. Those men have crossed half the desert for the simple pleasure of killing us. It won’t make them rich and it won’t make them famous, and when they’ve done it they’ll have to turn round and ride all the way back again, and still they think it’s worth it. How can anyone argue with motivation like that? It is vital to their military esteem that two men, a youth, a girl and a eunuch should not be seen to challenge the might of the Northlands and survive. Terror is their main weapon: they cannot afford to have it blunted. If we don’t die, they’ll be the laughing stock of the Ice Desert.

  “Paul can’t save us: he can’t save himself. All the destruction of Chad bought was a taste of freedom for Itzhak, a taste of love for Shah, a lot of worry for you, a lot of pain for Paul, and for me the chance to face death like a king. It’s not much to exchange for twenty thousand people, is it? – though perhaps none of them would willingly trade places with us.”

  He held out his hand. “Lockwood, I have treasured your friendship all my life, and the fates have provided that I may bear it with me to the grave if not beyond. I would not die in better company than this.”

  Too overcome for speech, Lockwood grasped the proffered hand, crushing the still slender fingers in his own bear’s paws; then he dropped on one knee and pressed his weathered forehead to their joined hands. “My true king.”

  “My noble lord and friend,” smiled Edmund, his heart swelling with the crazy contentment of a job well finished. “On your feet now, help me with the door. We have a last walk to take together. If God grants me grace this short while longer I shall not shame you again, nor shall any who sees this end of Chad doubt that it was a great city that raised a goodly people.”

  Harry Jess tugged the scarf away from his ruined face in an effort to focus his eyes on the solitary figure advancing across the ice.
His eyes had not served him too well since the day when, his brain anarchic with drax, he had stumbled into the great hearth in the throneroom of the royal palace of Chad and lain in the stench of his own burning flesh until an opportunist looter, chancing upon him, decided there might be more value in a rescued warlord than a dented orb and pulled him out.

  As the approaching figure grew, so too did the racing in Harry’s veins. His heart hammered in his breast and his great horse, attuned to its master’s excitement, quivered in sympathy despite the toll of the weary miles behind it and shook chaotic music from its jangling bit. The horse did not know what set its senses thus on edge, but Harry knew what galvanised his. Acuteness of vision is only one element in recognition. Harry recognised Paul before any of those with him made out his face. He pushed his agitated horse forward, halting only when his horse’s champing head fretted above Paul’s right shoulder, flecks of froth flying from its jaws.

  Paul said by way of greeting, “I see you got out.”

  “No thanks to you.”

  “Indeed not, I hoped you’d burn.”

  Harry’s voice shook with fury. “I damn well did.”

  Paul eyed him appraisingly. “Lightly toasted, perhaps. I had in mind a little pile of charcoal with a melted crown on top.”

  Harry’s mailed fist clenched on the pommel of his sword; but the blade had hardly risen in the scabbard before he rammed it home again and hauled the black horse back apace. “No,” he said then, half to himself. “You’re not going to goad me into meeting you in single combat. I know my limitations: I’m in no fit state to fight.”

  “Which of us is? You remember that little prince I went to so much trouble to take from you?” Paul said humorously. “He stabbed me. I had to kill him.”

  “Oh, come on!” snorted the Barbarian derisively.

  Paul shrugged. He pushed back the sleeve of his jacket, tore that of his shirt and picked the dressing away from the healing wound. It still looked suitably nasty.

  “Well, well,” Harry remarked after a moment. “Whatever made him do a thing like that?”

  “I told him that I, not you, killed his father. It was no more than the truth, but honesty is not invariably the best policy.”

  Harry was beginning to grin. “But I watched the king die.”

  “You watched his carcass burn. I put a dart in his brain before the flames reached him. While everyone was watching my camel.”

  Harry’s grin split his ravaged face. He shook his head admiringly. “You’re incredible. Work for me.”

  “All right.”

  The Northlander laughed out loud. “So where is the prince?”

  “Out there.” Paul nodded beyond the horsemen. “I couldn’t find the precise spot again.”

  “And Shah?”

  “Inside. The women here will protect her. You’ve lost another concubine to this convent, Harry.”

  “Lockwood?”

  “Also inside. They won’t fight you for him, though.”

  “And – thingy?”

  “Itzhak? Around somewhere.”

  “And the prince?”

  “Dead.”

  “No.”

  Paul sighed and let his gaze wander away. “Harry, you’re forgetting to be afraid of me.”

  Harry’s grin which had been fading now vanished entirely and his eyes flashed hatred. “I was never afraid of you. I was conscious that destroying you could bring the desert states down on my head. But the situation has changed, Paul. Nobody values a nuclear engineer who blows up whole cities.”

  Paul’s eyes came back, rising slowly over the horse and rider and finally fixing him, diamond hard. “What I did in Chad will be done to the Northlands unless you turn that horse around and get that rabble the hell out of my way, now.”

  For a moment fear pricked Harry Jess’s scalp. It was not rational, it was instinctive. Then relief, the relief of a man wakening from nightmare, washed out the anxiety. “You can’t threaten the Northlands. We aren’t a nuclear domain. There isn’t an atomic power-plant from Ragnarök to the Pack Ice. Anyone who wants to avenge you will have to do it my way, with horses and spears and bowmen. And he’ll lose.”

  “You pigmy.” Paul’s voice was low, acid with disgust. “You don’t even know enough to know when you should be scared. Every man with you” – he spoke past Harry to the waiting army, his words resounding now, magnified by the silence and the space, carried by the wind – “has friends and family in the Northlands. It’s their home, and your power-base. If it is destroyed you lose everything. You go back to being a pack of nomadic bandits scavenging on the edge of civilisation. The first decent city you annoy will wipe you out.

  “I can do that. Even dead. Those who avenge me will do it with a volley of detonations that will echo the length and breadth of the Northlands, every one of them dwarfing the Chad explosion. Together they will lay waste your land. If you are there when it happens you will die, all of you; and if you are elsewhere you will not be able to return within your lifetimes. Your province will be a toxic desert for the imaginable future.”

  For a shocked minute Harry almost believed him. He saw in his mind’s eye the ravaged land, the blasted settlements, smelled again the noxious taint of burning flesh. He blanched. Then he managed a shaky laugh. “Hell’s teeth, you lie good. But not even you can convince me you can blow up a battery of non-existent power stations in a province so far from anywhere else that it hasn’t seen an invader in twenty generations. And even if you could, you won’t– not after I’ve finished with you.”

  Paul’s face was without expression. “You can kill me. But you can’t get at those who sent me, and they’ll bomb you to oblivion. They’re not very pleased with you as things stand. They wanted Chad secure and stable under its own ruling family. They sent me to warn you off, Harry. I suppose it wasn’t your fault I arrived too late to save the king, but they certainly blame you for the destruction of Chad, they’ll be extremely peeved if you axe its last crowned head, and if on top of that they find you’ve taken unilateral action to permanently deprive them of my services, I give the Northlands about as much future as a roasted snowflake.”

  Harry was aware of a restlessness in the ranks behind him, an ominous muttering, and he was not sure who it was directed at. He said loudly, “Nobody can get at the Northlands. The whole essence of the place is that distance and the nature of the terrain between it and anywhere else make it impregnable. You couldn’t take an army there – except an army of Northlanders. We know the ways and the pitfalls; we know where the food caches are, where to find fodder for the beasts. Without that knowledge I doubt your paymasters would get up the West Scarp; they certainly wouldn’t get over the Tantalus. The glaciers will bury them deeper than I’ll bury you.”

  “It won’t take an army,” said Paul. “The job will be done in an afternoon, by a handful of men, with weapons that fly at such unimaginable speeds that the whole of the Ice Desert lies within their range; and a great deal more besides. They will fly over the West Scarp, over the Tantalus, over the sulphur marshes, and cover the Northlands with a pox of explosions. A nuclear warhead is a much simpler device than a power-plant, Harry, much smaller and much more efficient in terms of destructive capability. You mount large numbers of them on missiles, point them at your enemy and press a button. Once launched the inter-continental ballistic missile is unstoppable; at least, it is now.”

  Harry Jess looked at him as if he were mad. “You’re mad.”

  “Harry, it’s time you recognised the fact that I know a lot more than you do. What I’m telling you isn’t a figment of my imagination and it isn’t a theory. It’s history: it has already happened. Civilisations of a scale and complexity you couldn’t even dream about have already been and gone, and some of the biggest of them disintegrated in nuclear confrontations. That was long ago, before the plague.

  “We are of the Third Age. The First Age died with the bombs. The Second Age died with the plague. The power-plants are the last re
mnants of the old time; except for the men I work for. Alone of all the people on earth they maintain the nuclear deterrent. And once in a blue, blue moon they use it. I saw them use it once. I saw the results. I know they will use it again if you cross them. They won’t bother to step over you. They’ll flatten you.”

  “I know one thing you don’t know,” said Harry. “That girl you said was safe behind high walls has just come down in a sort of basket thing and is walking across the ice towards you.”

  Paul whipped round. “Shah? For God’s sake, woman, go back!”

  She never paused. Bundled up against the cold in the first cloak she had found, which was by the laws governing such things considerably larger than her own, she strode resolutely amid its flapping, a little like an avenging angel and a little like a line of washing. Harry remembered having her in his head and sweated cold. Paul thought of her lying trussed and safe in Miriam’s office and snarled, “How did you get free?”

  “I unmade the rope.”

  Paul, understanding, nodded slowly. “You’re getting good at this, aren’t you?”

  “Harry —” she said.

  The earl backed his horse hurried steps. “Stay away from me!” Panic wired his voice. “I’m prepared for you, witch-woman. Behind me there’s an archer with an arrow in his bow. If I start acting strange he’ll kill you.”

  “If my body dies while I am in you, Harry,” Shah said, “I shall take you over.”

  The panic grew to terror and still the Barbarian held his ground. “You’re bluffing.”

  “She’s bluffing, I’m bluffing,” said Paul. “You thought I was bluffing when I said Chad would blow up.”

  “You thought I would blow up with it.” Slowly Harry’s hurt reasserted itself, anger pressing even fear into some rear compartment of his mind. Like the rest of them, he had suffered too much to be thwarted now. He touched a gloved hand delicately to his spoiled face. “No, Paul, you’re not talking your way out of this. I’ve followed you a long way and now I’m going to have you: you and her and the boy and Lockwood and the poet.” Raising his voice enough to carry to the rank behind him, without shifting his eyes from the man and woman before him, he said bleakly, “Take them.”