The Winter Plain

by Jo Bannister

  Shah, still staring, shook her head slowly, almost in wonder. Dusk had gathered while they talked, drifting like snow in the defile, piling deep and dense and shadowless among the rocks and dimming the plain, though the weak and fevered sun was yet proud of the horizon. The cloud had grown misshapen, heaps of leprous turbulence buffeting together where the crimson glow of fire now underpinned the destruction rainbow hanging over Chad. The perennial wind had developed a sick and fitful cast.

  Shah said, “I’ll give you this, Paul. You’re the only man I’ve ever heard of who has personally turned the daytime dark.”

  Edmund did not believe; or rather, believing – for following on the events in Harry’s throneroom the terrible dull explosion permitted no other explanation – and not accepting, could not persuade his heart of the truth that his brain and gut already knew, that if he were to back-track across the Ice Desert he would come not to the Garden City but to the fragmentary ruin which took its place when the mushroom blossomed and the earth heaved.

  The abiding weakness which had made the escape such a misery for him now came to his aid. Neither the shock, nor the grief – which was genuine, because he had many friends among those who had died – nor the almost hysterical feeling of indignation at losing his kingdom so soon after gaining his crown kept the lids from falling over eyes still wet nor the chin from dropping on the raging breast. With Lockwood’s cloak thrown over him and Itzhak’s fur hat under his head, twitching and mumbling in febrile dreams, he slept away the long and bitter night. None of his companions slept at all.

  By morning the wind had risen. The omnipresent susurration had grown to the full-bodied eerie wail of a woman keening for a murdered lover, a tuneless dirge that scoured the nerves and threatened to repay murder with madness. The travellers swathed themselves in cloaks and furs, covering their faces up to the eyes. Cocooned in a chill limbo of howling wind and dancing ice-crystals that stole the horizon the little party, heads down, each alone with the grim thoughts they all shared, plodded resolutely westward in time with the swaying gait of the ponderous indefatigable camels.

  An hour before nightfall the wind dropped a little, the note of its threnody falling from the insane to the merely deranged, and Paul called a halt. There was no shelter, they were far distant now from the mountains. Paul swiftly fabricated a small tent within whose rattling walls the travellers found relief from the soul-sapping monotony of ubiquitous, immutable ice. They were ice sick. It filled their eyes, gritty under the lids; its song filled their ears; its cold ran in their veins and in their brains, chilling physically and psychologically. The Ice Desert was a place not meant for men, and after two days their inaptness and inconsequentiality were like actual burdens weighing them down. Depression was the lot of those who ventured into the deep desert. Blue skies kept it at bay. The deliberate gaiety of a large intercity caravan disguised it. Familiarity eventually absorbed and transcended it. But for the mushroom shadow of Chad hanging over the low, wind-tom shelter Paul would have been comfortable and at ease out there in the raging nowhere, but none of the rest of them would.

  The trouble which Paul had to some extent anticipated began, unpredictably, with Itzhak. He was cooking supper over a rod-fired stove, and he looked up pensively and said to no one in particular, “With Harry Jess dead and Chad in ashes, the Barbarians will be away back to the Northlands. We too could go back.”

  No one answered, but there was no question that his remark had passed unnoticed. The king and the commander-in-chief of the vanished city seemed, without moving, to gravitate towards him by the intensity of their regard. Shah was watching Paul, covertly, as she had once watched Harry, waiting for the cat to jump. Recognition of that reversion to stereotype, even in that moment of restrained drama, struck her cold with shock: for if this relationship, of which she had had such high hopes, could degenerate so quickly into a mirror image of the other, perhaps it was unfair to blame Harry for his treatment of her. Perhaps there were natural victims as well as natural tyrants. The revelation, if such it were, paid her in humiliation and despair. Paul, meanwhile, was affecting uninterest in Itzhak’s theory. He was sharpening the stiletto, the assassin’s knife he now wore at his belt beside the slender darts; but the movement was not quite right, there was an uncharacteristic snatch to it; the activity was a blind.

  Apparently unaware of the keen attention he had attracted Itzhak, still stirring, added with a silly grin: “Unless, that is, I was asleep when somebody explained where we were going through this white hell that was so much more desirable than a battered but presumably now quite safe Chad.”

  Paul polished faster, tight-lipped, until the knife flashed wicked gleams up at his drawn face. Lockwood left the stove and, even his bent back crouched beneath the low ridge, moved to squat beside him. “Paul, he’s got a point.”

  “Lockwood, he’s got a flat head.”

  All their conversations went like this now, the older man bitting his warhorse nature to stay reasonable and the younger making no concessions, responding when pressed with skilful cutting barbs of savage thrust but sometimes imperfect aim. Both were under stress: Lockwood’s greater maturity and his experience of operating in a company of men gave him a discipline which Paul, who had never been anything but totally alone and whose intellectual brilliance and ruthless efficiency did nothing to mitigate his essential mistrust of other people, entirely lacked. He had never learned tolerance, which made him scornful of weakness in others and desperately afraid of it in himself.

  Lockwood took a deep breath and said, “Not good enough.”

  Paul’s hand stopped working. “What?”

  “We’re not sheep, Paul. We won’t follow you blindly. There’s no need for this secrecy. Tell us where we’re going.”

  Paul eyed each of them in turn, taking his time, making them feel uncomfortable. He explained, as though to a backward child, “At the moment we’re not going anywhere – we’re fleeing. When it is safe to stop fleeing we shall start going to Leshkas.”

  He succeeded in startling them all.

  “Fleeing —?”

  “Safe —?”

  “Leshkas —?”

  “What in God’s name is there in Leshkas?” demanded Lockwood. “Listen, if you don’t know you should, there’s a certain amount of rivalry between Leshkas and Chad, I don’t know how welcome we’ll be there.”

  “I know what there is in Leshkas,” said Shah, her voice edged. “Another job for him. Another pile, another purse, another city, where he can stock up on the provisions he would have got in Chad if he’d left it standing long enough. Don’t flatter yourself, my lord Lockwood, that our welfare concerns him. He won’t permit us to interrupt the ordered running of his life.”

  Paul frowned at her, uncomprehending. He did not understand her anger when she obviously grasped the situation so well. “You don’t want to stay here, do you? You have to go somewhere. Leshkas is as good a place as anywhere.”

  “Not as good as Chad.” Edmund said stoutly.

  “Not as good as Chad was,” Paul corrected him. “Sonny, you’re going to have to stop referring to the Garden City in the present tense.”

  “Thanks to you.” There were no tears in Edmund’s eyes but the discerning might have detected them in his voice.

  Even Paul softened fractionally. “There will be a time when it’s safe to go back to Chad, but it won’t be for a while yet. I’ll fix you up in Leshkas before I leave. Stay there. Grow up. Then go back and do what your ancestors did: raise Chad out of the tundra. You’ll have more to start with than they had.”

  The boy’s chin lifted. “And if I choose to believe Itzhak, that with Harry Jess gone I should return?”

  “If you choose to believe a poet on the effects of a nuclear explosion you’re a fool and deserve a fool’s death, and if I weren’t being paid to keep you alive I’d let you have it. As it is you’re worth some valuable equipment to me, so I’ll make you a deal. I won’t advise you on iambic pentameters if you
won’t seek a nuclear education from a balladeer.”

  It was shortly after that that Paul went outside to release the horses.

  A diplomatic minute later Shah followed. She found him carefully checking the horses’feet before sending them on their way. Paul registered her presence without looking at her. There was a new guardedness in his attitude that saddened but did not particularly surprise her. He was a man under siege, wary, entrenched, surrounded by unfriendly elements; she was sorry if he had seen her reaction as a particular betrayal.

  She said, “Will they find their way back?”

  “Probably.”

  “To what?”

  “Why should I care?” he snarled. “They’re only horses. I’ve killed anything up to twenty thousand people: what does it matter if a couple of horses survive or not?”

  Shah sighed wearily. “Paul, love. What I think, what any of us thinks, is irrelevant. Chad is something between you and your conscience. It was your decision, now it’s your burden and you’d better get used to carrying it. I don’t know if what you did was justifiable. I don’t think it matters now. Two things matter. Getting this little band of refugees to safety, which you won’t do by antagonising them so much that they’ll walk out on you and die on the tundra. And repairing this special thing of ours before it’s lost to us and to the world. We have to get it together, Paul, on both counts.”

  “What I have to do is my job.” He sounded stubborn but also faintly desperate. “This is my world, Shah. I know how to live in it. They don’t. If they try to exercise their democratic right to individuality out here they’re going to die. I can bring them safe through, but only on my terms, because those are the desert’s terms. Why won’t they trust me? Do they think I don’t know what I’m doing? Or that I want them dead, so that I can chalk up a full house from Chad? Total genocide, is that what they think I’m after?”

  “You make it hard for people to trust you. I know you better than anyone in the world and even I don’t know when you’re lying.”

  “Lying?”

  “Paul, you lie like a trooper! You let me think Harry would be all right and then you killed him. You told me that there would be survivors in Chad: now you tell Edmund it still isn’t safe to return. You wonder why we don’t trust you? We wonder why you won’t take us into your confidence. We’re all on the same side, you know – we have to be. Don’t force us into divisions we can’t afford.”

  “If it comes to that, Shah, where do you stand?”

  “Wrong question. If it comes to that you’ll have failed, and the question is why.”

  He did not reply immediately. When he looked round the half-light found a kind of half-smile on his face. “All right, Shah, you’ve made your point. I never claimed to be easy to live with.”

  “Right enough,” she agreed, “never you did.”

  “All the same, I hear no complaints from my camels.”

  “We’re not camels!”

  “Camels are more useful, more reliable and they don’t talk back.”

  “Maybe.” She grinned vividly. “But people are more rewarding.”

  Well yes, Paul thought, to the extent of a quatro-dimensional navigator; and he looked up guiltily as Shah touched his shoulder, afraid lest she had read the thought, but in her face he found no censure, only a kind of glow that he recognised with disbelief as affection.

  Chapter Two

  He tried. At times Shah could feel him trying, as if it were a physical effort which brought beads of perspiration to his brow. She watched him sideways with baited breath and felt the restraint, and regret, as he let pass opportunities for his peculiarly cutting sarcasm. She had not realised that he derived pleasure from being rude. Slowly, as Paul’s resolution held, Shah began to relax, the tension easing gradually as it began to seem they might complete their journey without further drama. But in her preoccupation with Paul’s volatile nature she had forgotten that her other companions were also human, also under stress, and two of them were new to the business of taking orders. Even as Paul unbent, Edmund stiffened.

  While they were on the move all was well. There was a course to be fixed and followed, camels to manage, sore places and stiff bones to ease and favour. Also, though the Ice Desert was bleak, it was not monotonous; not changeless, though most of its changes were subtle. A shading of the sky from silver through blush-pink to lilac; an interruption of the crazed ice floor where a petrified ice river rippled across its surface, corrugated like the bed of an ancient forgotten sea. Sometimes a mischievous eddying wind plucked at the ice and drew a haze of dancing crystals into the air, so that the camels appeared to wade, their spindly tireless limbs moving mechanically out of sight. Occasionally tall pillars of rock loomed out of the white, black and glinting with frost, towering inexplicably. In the far distance, when the light was right, the travellers could glimpse mountain ranges across their path, dark encampments like waiting armies.

  But the main reason they did not argue on the move was the wind. It had soon lost the sick confusion that followed the explosion, but even in normal times the wind was the most changeable aspect of the Ice Desert. It almost always blew, and always from the west, but within those limits all manner of variation was open to it. Sometimes it blew with a steady strength, without let or deviation, to a constant threnody of sound, for weeks on end, at which times those within city walls did not leave them and those without wrapped themselves in as tightly impervious a bundle of furs as they could devise, leaned into the gale, communicated with handsigns and practised swear-words in their aching, over-pressured heads. Sometimes it blew up into full-blooded storms, with lightning flashes bouncing between the livid roiling sky and the brilliant ice and thunder that rolled across the tundra like cavalry. In his solitary wanderings Paul enjoyed such dramatics; now he craved a smooth passage. Rarely the wind brought snow, in soft silent drifts or driving blizzards, and even Paul did not enjoy those: in the flayed open it was impossible to escape either tile extreme discomfort or the knowledge that it was conditions like these that finally got the better of the desert’s most seasoned voyagers.

  The danger point came when Paul called a rest halt, when sore and disgruntled people slid to the ground tired enough to be bad-tempered and not too tired to fight. Shah forestalled difficulties when she saw them coming. That she held a special position in the party had been recognised from the first. Perhaps it was her sex, and in grown men the shades of small boys doing as their mothers said. Perhaps it was the things she had in common with each of the men – with Paul her perception, with Itzhak her slavery, with Lockwood her caring, with Edmund her youth – so that, intuitively if not consciously, they saw her as a bridge linking their separate states. She did not care why they afforded her this almost diplomatic respect, only that they continued to do so, though it left her feeling buffer-bruised.

  She and Edmund were watching the calf nurse. It spread its knobbly front legs and repeatedly shoved its Roman nose into Calipha’s breast with such force that her front feet seemed momentarily to leave the ground. Her expression was that of a martyred Stoic. The spectators laughed, Shah a little ruefully. She had never had a child, which she supposed in view of all the opportunities meant she was barren, and all the days of her captivity this had seemed a blessing. With the promise of freedom, however, came the shadow of regret. Watching the great quiet cow with the faraway lustre in her eyes, Shah tried to make sense of her own rather woolly feelings. Some primitive envy was tugging at her like a hungry mouth.

  Paul, feeding Emir from the meagre supply of concentrates, noticed the interest his beasts were attracting and thought it worthy of encouragement. “Thirsty?”

  Smiling, Shah nodded at the calf. “Not as much as him.”

  “Her. It’s a heifer-calf.” He took a bowl from one of the packs and, elbowing aside the indignant and protesting baby, drew off a steaming pint from Calipha’s capacious udder. The warm milk, rich and sweet, reminding Shah powerfully of home and childhood, filled her with a
keen nostalgia. She drank deeply and with enjoyment before offering the bowl to Edmund.

  Edmund declined, and seemed disappointed when Paul took the vessel without rancour and drained it himself. Paul gave no indication of having noticed, but Shah felt the shapeless turbulence in Edmund’s mind that presaged trouble; and she thought that even without her special perception she would have been aware of the atmosphere, which meant Paul was trying very hard indeed.

  Hasty in her effort to shore up his sapling tolerance she said, a little breathlessly, “I’d forgotten how good that is.”

  Edmund said, rather coldly, “Is that why you brought along a nursing female?”

  “No,” said Paul, “although it’s a useful spin-off. I brought Calipha because I need her, and the calf because she also needs her. It’s a good way for a youngster to learn desert-craft.”

  “And I suppose we can always eat it in an emergency.”

  Paul regarded him equivocally. “Only after we’ve finished eating you. That calf has a longer pedigree than you have, sonny, and would be a good deal harder to replace. She’ll be the foundation cow for the definitive breed of Ice Desert camel.” He looked up from the feeding calf and found Shah laughing at him and Edmund gone. He shrugged. “So you’ve discovered my secret vice: I breed camels on the sly.”

  She grinned. “Silly breeder.”

  Later Lockwood sidled up to her. “Is there any tactful way you can ask him to stop calling the king Sonny?”

  Shah stared at him, sure he must be joking, but Lockwood scuffed sheepishly and nodded. “I know it sounds absurd, but it’s getting to him. We have to be gentle with him, Shah. He’s lost everything: his father, his city, his people, his self-respect. It doesn’t make it any easier for him that he owes his life to the man who destroyed his state. He needs time to heal, and nothing chafing at the wounds.”