The Winter Plain

by Jo Bannister

  “But you never will. You’ll have to live with what happened to that city, and your part in it, day and daily for as long as you draw breath. I can’t imagine anything more appalling, or more suitable. You invoked this daemon, Paul. Carry it to your grave.”

  He wheeled the horse and rode quietly and without haste into the glare of the desert, his weary army in pursuit, back the way they had come.

  Chapter Three

  The final phase of the journey seemed to Shah little more than a succession of goodbyes. Tearful goodbyes between her and Itzhak, and hardly less emotional ones between Paul and Calipha. The prince and the poet parted with respect and restrained affection. Paul and Miriam made their farewells warily, cool, each feeling slightly betrayed: there was no animosity because each recognised in the other a mirror image of his own ruthless expediency.

  And again at Leshkas, the shaking of hands and of voices, the promises – sincerely made, never to be kept – of reunions and social calls, the laughter and the wine, the amazed recollections of a recent past that was already a foreign country.

  Accepted as a royal cousin into the palace of Leshkas, Edmund expressed his thanks formally, in a manner befitting a king done service by a commoner. He had the sense not to indulge in a protracted tribute, and only for a moment when his gaze fell and dwelt on Paul’s arm with its livid, puckered scar did his composure flicker. Paul received his citation in uncharacteristically gracious silence and managed a slight bow as Edmund left the chamber with his cousins Leshkas, young men of his own age though smoother, sleeker, as yet unblooded by life. Edmund was growing sleek and civilised too, with every day that passed. In the fortnight it had taken him to service the Leshkas power-plant Paul had seen the easy living and the good companionship round off the sharp edges etched in the king by the desert wind, fill in the hollows carved by the ice and soften the stem lines of face and body.

  Shah had seen it too. “In six months,” she murmured, “he’ll have forgotten. Oh, not what happened, but how it happened, how it felt. When he tells people how closely he shaved death it will be with a kind of surprise, as if he’d forgotten he was there. The scale of it all – how many fought, how many died, how the Ice Desert stretches like a captive ribbon of infinity – will be compressed onto a table-top, for him to mark where Chad was with a salt-cellar and how we came to Oracle with a finger-trace of beer.”

  “And us?” Paul smiled faintly at the door an attendant had closed behind the king. “Will he remember us?”

  “As demi-gods. Heroes. Exaggerated, both better and worse than we were. You bigger, me more beautiful, Itzhak wiser. All of us braver. Oh, and immortal: if he hears that any of us has perished, save in the most epic of circumstances, he will not believe it.”

  “Will he return to Chad?”

  Shah thought about it for a moment. “I doubt it. By the time he can he’ll have made a life here. There are princesses as well as princes of Leshkas: exiled kings are a godsend to remote royal families bored, and loopy, with incest.”

  Paul grinned; then the grin faded. “It was for nothing, then.”

  Shah nearly said, “You saved we five.” She nearly said, “You rid the Ice Desert of the Barbarians.” She thought about saying, “There wouldn’t be much more left of Chad and its people by now if Harry had been left to his own devices.” In the end, though, she just shrugged and said, “What if it was?”

  “Right enough,” he said, heading for the door. “The dead can bury the dead.”

  In the mews, while Paul packed his traps and made ready to travel, Lockwood came to say goodbye. He looked different. Good clothes hid the extent of his deformity. Good food, rest and a return to the kind of civilisation he knew had ironed out the extra kinks born of pushing mental and physical resources to their limits; his hair was oiled and his beard trimmed.

  But he would not forget the rigours of the desert, or the griefs and terrors of the last days of Chad. They were in his eyes, and for the rest of his life there would be nights when he would wake sweating with the memory, and bottles he would share because his story, which was too clamorous to stay untold, was too fierce for sober lips and sober ears. He was a haunted man. His ghosts would not drive him to madness or despair, but they would ensure that a record survived of all that had happened in his vanished city, and all that had followed.

  Now, the gut feelings having faded and the sense of perspective not yet having come, the events too old to be news and too new to be history, Paul could not be sure how much of what he had done had been forced on him, how much he had done for the best and how much from sourer motives. He trusted Lockwood to do as good a job as anyone of despatching the facts to posterity; with perhaps a footnote that the Ice Desert was in these days a domain of gods and devils, and in order to survive it and work it and ultimately tame it men had to carry both within them: the divine spark cupped in the clawed hand.

  For himself, judging without posterity’s vantage, before the dust had yet settled, Paul considered that his success, by which all the rest was justified, was not the rescue of the boy that he was being paid for, nor the discovery of the girl Shah whose mind had already repaid him more than gold, but the removal of the Barbarian from the Ice Desert equation. Given a secure footing in Chad, the Northlanders would have sacked every city on the plain within a generation so that the disparate culture which they comprised, which represented the world’s hope of real progress more than either old men plotting in radiation-proof laboratories or cold women whose idea of evolution was endless replicas of themselves, would in dying have ushered in a new dark age. Paul believed he had forestalled that possibility for the currency of Harry Jess’s reign; and after Harry it could be a long time before the Northlands acquired another overlord of such ambition and ability.

  Lock wood said, “Where will you go?”

  “Back where I came from, in the first instance. I’ve a fee to collect. After that —” Paul shrugged.

  “Other cities? Other lands?”

  “Other worlds, Lockwood. I’m done here. I can manage without an inertial navigator: I’m going to take my ship and run.”

  Lockwood shook his head slowly. He believed everything Paul said but he still did not understand. “And will you come back?”

  “Sure. Any time you’ve got a megalomaniac to stop and you don’t care what it costs.”

  “Should I be able to find you?”

  “I doubt it. I don’t know how to find the places I’m going.”

  There was an interval of silence. “I don’t know what to say to you,” Lockwood confessed then. “I didn’t anticipate this. It was unlikely enough that either of us should walk away from that war, inconceivable that we both should. More than once I expected to see you die; I never expected to watch you pack and leave like this. Damn it, man, I’d as soon bid my right arm farewell.”

  He winced and Paul laughed out loud. “Lockwood, you’re wittering like an old woman. Give me your hand and let that be an end of it.”

  “By God,” Lockwood said thickly, his great paws clasped around Paul’s, “I’ve never given anything more gladly in my life.”

  “Go away before you start crying,” said Paul, propelling him firmly towards the door.

  When they were alone Shah said, “Will they give you your ship?”

  Paul looked surprised. “Yes, I think so. We had an agreement. I’ve been working for that ship for six years: they wouldn’t dare renege.” He thought about it. “No, they would dare, if they stood to gain from it, but they don’t. I’ve just about exhausted my usefulness to them: I think they’ll be glad enough to see me gone. An ion-drive battle cruiser isn’t that much of a price – not to them.”

  “Who are they, Paul?” As soon as she had said it Shah could have bitten her tongue. She had never asked before, deliberately. All she knew of his background was that his people were very clever, clever enough to give him telepathy, and cold enough to rip it back. She had not wanted to remind him of that. Now she had.

&n
bsp; He eyed her appraisingly. “That’s right, I never told you about my employers, did I? – I use the word in the sense that you might be described as employing a utensil.

  “The place where they are has no name. Except among those of us who leave it needs none, and we speak of it to no one; and it has sat there, nameless, unsuspected by the world, for half of time. It is the repository of all knowledge. Cultures come and go, wars flare and die, plagues fester and retreat: the place squats on, unmoved, untouched, seeing everything and feeling nothing. It dates back to that time I told you about, when the world knew more than it does now; perhaps it is even older than that. Its people, if not actually immortal, lead lives so grotesquely prolonged by the sophistication of their medical science that they might as well be. With the capacity for almost infinite lifespan and everything that is known or ever was at their disposal, they have less need for contact with the world even than the women of Oracle. They are hardly of the world at all. They sit in their nameless place and watch, and from time to time if it amuses them they interfere. That’s what I do for them. I am their agent; anyway, one of them.

  “They were worried about Harry Jess, afraid of him becoming so powerful he could give them trouble. They sent me to shore up Chad, or failing that to get the royals to safety: with them out of the way a well-placed missile would end the Barbarian threat and Chad could always be rebuilt. I think, though, they were counting on the king surviving. After he was dead and Chad was gone and Harry Jess was still around, I think they took a fresh look at the whole thing. I believe – I can’t know, you understand, except that I know them – that they decided Edmund would never be the bulwark they needed against the Northlands; they thought about the disruptive effect of an excess king hanging around the Ice Desert with time on his hands and they decided to give him to Harry after all. Harry didn’t track us through the desert to Oracle. He was told. No one knew, except Oracle who had nothing to gain by betraying us and they who always know. It had to be them. Also, it’s their style.”

  Shah was having immense difficulty taking in all he said. Her head was full of questions, but one seemed more important than the others. “You knew they were prepared to destroy Chad? Before you did it, you knew probably someone would?”

  “Probably – yes.”

  “Why didn’t you say?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “Of course it makes a difference,” she cried, exasperated. “You let us think you had razed a living city when in fact it was already doomed.”

  Paul could not see how it mattered. He shrugged and got on with his packing. Emir watched eagerly from his stall. After a fortnight of easy living the camel, like his owner, was itching for the desert again. This night or the next he would sleep under the stars. His head weaved restlessly.

  At length Paul said, “Do you know what I’m going to do, after I’ve got my ship and before I leave this dismal planet?”

  “Before you —?” Shah shook her head and gave up. “What?”

  “I’m going to circle on top of those bloody old men in their bastard technopolis and drop bombs on them. Then I’m going to take out the spires at Oracle.”

  “You are not!”

  “Watch me.”

  “Itzhak may still be at Oracle.”

  “Then he’d better keep his head down.”

  “Calipha and the calf are there.”

  “Not up the spires, they’re not.”

  “Haven’t you done enough damage?”

  “I’m going to finish them, Shah. They made me what I am – literally, my mother was a test-tube and my father was a micro-pipette – now they can finally face up to the consequences of what they do. They’ve already destroyed the world once. They gave it the bomb, and themselves the means of surviving it. They sit in that other-world of a laboratory, invulnerable, playing chess with real people, always sure that whatever the outcome of their game no backlash can reach them. But I can. This world will evolve better without their interference.”

  “And they hurt you,” Shah said softly.

  “They use people like tools. Manipulation is their opium; they are obsessed with power. They stunt the development of a free world.”

  “And they hurt you.”

  “They’re too bloody dangerous to leave lying around!”

  “You’ve a pretty poor opinion of the world, haven’t you, Paul?” said Shah. “Do you really think it needs you for its champion? I don’t know anything about thse chess-players of yours, but I wonder if they’re as influential as they, and you, suppose. Time has an interesting way of dealing with oppressors. They are absorbed. In imposing their will on their subject people they are slowly and subtly drawn into that people, changed and mutated and made a part of them. That’s how the meek inherit the earth: by accepting and enduring and ultimately absorbing those who would conquer them.

  “The place where I was born sits athwart the trading routes, a natural focus for travellers from the pack ice to the Pewter Sea, from the western forests to the great lakes. My town has seen more invaders than the Ice Desert has seen winters: wave after wave of them breaking over our walls and flooding our land. All of them triumph, all of them stay. But the worst of them have not endured for more than a generation. After that the invaders and the people are one, a common stock ready to meet the shock of the next horde. But don’t you see, it’s the land and the people of the land who win through, and though the invaders remain the names of the invaders are lost. The people tame the horde. The world will tame your chess-players if the need arises. You and your battle-cruiser won’t be required. There are greater forces at work.”

  She finished to find Paul staring at her as if she had quietly levitated. She smiled sweetly at him, thinking You’d better get used to it, hotshot, your days of having the last word are numbered. She said kindly, “Tell me about your ship.”

  Paul blinked several times in fairly rapid succession. Then he told her. He said it was a war machine which fought not on the ground or on the sea or even in the air but above the air, in the space between the stars.

  Shah’s eyes twinkled merrily and she suppressed a giggle. “Listen, you, stop taking me for a mug!”

  It was as if Pygmalion’s marble lady had stirred, opened her eyes and started telling him how to chisel. Paul hardly knew how to react. He had no experience of the relationships between free equals and in recent years had got out of the way of having his judgements challenged. He felt his grip on the conversation slipping.

  “Why should I lie? There’s a whole universe out there. The stars are suns like our sun but further away, and many of them have planets supporting people not vastly dissimilar to us.”

  “Paul, you’d lie the hind legs off a donkey but this is your best yet. I claim no particular knowledge of the subject, but every child knows that the stars are mounted on a shell enclosing the world half a diameter out.”

  “Dear God,” he groaned, “now she’s an astronomer. All right, you’ve got all the answers, tell me what lies beyond this shell of stars.”

  She did not even think about it. “Nothing,” she said firmly. “What lies beyond your universe?”

  “Ah,” he said, momentarily discomfited. “Well, nothing, in fact, because the universe is by definition everything there is.”

  Shah was unimpressed. “I don’t see where that gets us. Whether we call it a shell or a universe, we seem to be describing the same thing.”

  “It’s a question of scale. My universe is so vast it can only be explored, a fragment at a time, by supra-light ion-drive ships.”

  “My shell is plain for all to see, doesn’t need exploring and so doesn’t need a lot of complicated and expensive technology that I haven’t got.” She paused. “Why a war machine?”

  “What?”

  “Why a battle-cruiser? I can understand that if you believe in a great star desert out there you might want to explore it, but why the weaponry? If all those stars are suns and all those suns have planets and all t
hose planets have people, you can’t have fallen out with all of them – not even you, Paul.”

  He shrugged. “I’m a mercenary. It’s what I was trained for, what I do best – maybe, what I do better than anyone else. Once I have access to the galaxies I can choose my own battles. Shah, out there whole wars are fought between single ships – massive ships, massively armed, representing the sum of their worlds’technical achievements. Out there wars don’t involve land, cities or civilians, only soldiers. It’s a cleaner way.”

  “It’s still war. Do you really want to make a life around it?”

  Paul thought about it. The terrible grin spread slowly. “Yeah.”

  “You’re immoral.”

  “I know,” he agreed happily.

  Up to the very moment of departure, almost, Shah was not sure he would let her go with him. Her strategy throughout the farewell phase had been to stand beside Paul and say goodbye to the people he said goodbye to; so that in the end, without anything much having been said between them, it was Paul and Shah and the camel who slipped out of Leshkas with the dawn, unheralded, hours before the appointed time, before the hired musicians had tuned their instruments or the throngs gathered to paint the streets with their festive finery. Shah, secretly, was rather sorry to forego the colour and pageantry of a civic send-off and would have liked to wave to Edmund and Lockwood a last time, but Paul hated ceremony and despised merry-making with a passion.

  Copyright

  First published in 1982 by Hale

  This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

  ISBN 978-1-4472-3640-5 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-3639-9 POD