by Jo Bannister
“Cities where there was no infection walled themselves up and refused to admit strangers. No one could come from a place where there was plague to one where there was not. The fine roads crumbled from lack of use: nobody travelled. Global culture ended. Cities turned in upon themselves, the city state was born. The end of communications sounded the death-knell for all the highest sciences: no one city had the manifold skills or resources necessary to maintain them. They had evolved beyond self-sufficiency, and they couldn’t evolve back fast enough.
“The plague wasn’t the only thing that killed people. Then more than now the prime power source for civilisation was nuclear, and when the plants needed the attentions of maintenance crews who were either dead or decimated the situation became critical. So did the power plants. Which is how my profession came to enjoy its singular privilege of free passage. Now that people move around more anyway there’s nothing too special in that, but a hundred years ago, when the contagion was virulent, the nuclear engineer was the only point of contact between city states as insular as islands. He brought all the news a city ever received. He was the only messenger; he came only every couple of years, and even he was suspect – he travelled slowly between cities, alone in the wilderness for weeks at a time, so that if he had contracted the plague it would have incubated and shown itself by the time he reached his destination. God knows how many of my predecessors died that way, alone in the desert, turned away from the gates of the cities they spent their lives serving.
“The rigorous climate of the Ice Desert kept the contagion in closer check here than elsewhere. Here there were survivors of the plague cities, and refugees did not all succumb to disease although many froze or starved to death. From the ranks of the survivors grew bands of outlaws and brigands who gradually drifted together in the far north and were finally welded into a nation as such by Harry Jess.
“The world is become an archipelago, and most of the charts have been lost. Perhaps someone somewhere knows still how to prepare bacteriostatic antibiotics from the penicillium moulds; a surviving caucus of biochemists on the edge of the Dunes, maybe, or a new colony of thinkers evolving even now beside the Pewter Sea. But they too are islands – like the Oracle island and the place where I come from – and I cannot reach them, for we are not ships but driftwood.”
Chapter Three
The next morning the wind was up, new and old snow blowing together in crystal spirals that tore across the fore-shortened landscape. There was no sky that day and hardly any ice, just a modest circle of it with the little camp at its centre and the camels huddled down on knees and hocks on the leeward side.
The rising wind, howling its threnody to the bass accompaniment of the flogging canvas, impressed itself on the travellers even as they slept, and they awoke to the grey surge of the blizzard. Paul spent a short time assessing the force and direction of the wind before announcing that no useful progress would be made against it and the day would be better spent resting themselves and the animals.
It was a very small tent for five people to spend an entire day in. At first they relished the luxury of idleness. Back in the sleeping bags, over-tired bodies which had learned to rise and walk whether they felt so inclined or not now rediscovered ease and comfort and lazy hedonism. They stretched out and enjoyed the unaccustomed inaction, and welcomed the wailing wind as the bringer of good fortune; they talked in low desultory voices of nothing in particular, and from time to time they dozed. But even before midday the novelty was wearing off, weariness yielding to boredom and desert sickness to claustrophobia.
Itzhak returned to the subject of Chad like a man scratching a mosquito-bite. “I wish we could go back,” he said wistfully, pillowing his narrow head on his hand and gazing at the ridge-pole as into space.
“But you know we can’t,” Shah appended hastily, hoping to turn the conversation from these dangerous straits.
“I suppose.” But still the bite itched, and once again that alter ego which ran Itzhak into most of his tribulations gained the ascendancy. It showed in the unexpected challenge of his calm grey eyes. “Was it true, what you told the Barbarian?”
Paul shrugged. “I told him a lot of things, many of them lies.”
“About Chad. Is it really gone?”
“That was not so much a lie as an exaggeration. Chad as you knew it is gone.”
“But there is something left? – ruins, remains, something?”
“Yes.”
“And survivors?”
“Oh yes. It’s amazing what people can live through. They knew what was coming, there was time to get out. They would escape the falling masonry and if they stay away long enough they should also miss the fall-out. It won’t have been massive, not like a bomb.”
“And if they avoided the bricks and the fall-out, whatever that is which is not so bad from an exploding power-plant as from a bomb,” said Itzhak coolly, “how shall they without houses or heat survive in the Ice Desert?”
“As we do.” Hardness edged Paul’s voice. “As the Barbarians do. The Northlanders have created an energetic and expanding culture with no more sophisticated power source than the strength of men and beasts and the fossil fuels they dig out of the ground.”
“Chad is not the Northlands,” Lockwood said, hunched over his knees and seeming to fill the tent. “Our people are city-dwellers, brought up in the sanctuary of strong walls. They know civic skills, and some of them know farming. None of them has any experience of a nomadic hunter’s life.”
“They’ll learn. It’s remarkable how radically you can change your life-style when your life depends on it. They’ll move to the mountains where we spent the first night. There’s game there. They’ll find ways of trapping it. They’ll survive. And in time they’ll rebuild.”
“I should be there leading them,” Edmund said quietly. “I am their king. They need me; they have a right to expect me to be with them.”
“Right now, Edmund, they need you like they need a hole in the head.” Something strange had happened to the king and the engineer. Their attitudes had matured towards respect. “If you went back today they’d give you a messiah’s welcome. They’d throw their arms in the air and shriek and yell and sing you songs, and you’d be quite sure you’d done the right thing. But you would find out that you had not. When they threw their arms in the air they threw away the snares and implements they had devised to tackle their harsh new life, that they would not need if you were bringing back the old one. When they rallied round you to sing and shout they were packing into a greater concentration than the tundra could possibly support. They would sit in a loving circle around you until they died. Scattered in small groups around the mountain they may all survive. Brought together in a poor apology for a court they could not provide enough to keep themselves, and in the end they would faction and fight for what there was and they would die unnecessarily.”
“But that’s not your reason for taking me away,” the king suggested, watching closely.
“No,” admitted Paul, “but it’s none the less valid for that, and it’s still a powerful argument why you should not go back until they can manage without you. As for me – my motives are purely mercenary. Someone you don’t know values your royal house enough to pay me to conduct you to a place of greater safety until the situation out here stabilises.”
“My father would have stayed.”
“Perhaps. He would have been mistaken, but perhaps he would have stayed. But he would have made sure that you came with me. You cannot afford to hazard your life in that way, having not yet ensured your immortality.”
“I shall return, when I am free to do so.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
The wind blew like a mad thing, day and night, and then quite suddenly it had dropped and, striking camp hurriedly, they were on the move again. They made good progress, partly because they were strong from resting and partly because Paul insisted on keeping up a steady pace. He seemed to begrudge the time lost, as if
he had to account for it somehow and was trying to make it up bit by bit. He never pushed them to exhaustion as he had that first wild day, but he never stopped pushing. When they stopped he ate mechanically, eyes on the horizon, or moved restlessly from one camel to the next checking their legs and feet and their eyes.
“We’re damn near half-way to Leshkas,” he grunted when Shah asked why. “That means we’re as far from anywhere as we’re going to be, and makes it a bad time for anything to go wrong with the camels. If one of them starts going lame I want to know about it.”
“And their eyes?”
“Snow-blindness. They shouldn’t be affected but it can happen. Then you have to smear their eyelids with a mixture of grease and ash.”
“My,” said Shah, fluttering her lashes admiringly, “the things a girl can learn from a man.”
“Just remember,” Paul said bleakly.
Oh damn you, she thought in her innermost self, do you suppose I forget anything you say – a word of your voice?
Over the next hours she noticed a curious thing. Each of the travellers was worried about Paul. One by one, discreetly, with studied nonchalance, they sought her out to tell her so.
Edmund was the first. He rode Calipha up beside Shah and slid from her back to walk with her. “We’ve covered some ground today.”
Shah smiled at him. “Are you tired?”
“Me? No,” he answered quickly; then slowly, wryly smiled. “Well, perhaps – in so far as us royals are allowed such vulgar failings. You?”
“Knackered,” she said with feeling.
“What about him?” Like a god or a pernicious disease, there was a tendency to avoid saying Paul’s name.
“You think he confides in me?”
“Is he all right, do you suppose? He’s hardly said a word all day.”
“In contrast to his usual non-stop flow of inconsequential chit-chat, you mean?”
Edmund grinned. “I know, that constant bidding for popularity gets up my nose too. All the same, Shah —”
“I know. We’re very dependent on him.”
“It’s not only that. If it’s his arm —”
Shah linked her elbow through his in an unprecedented gesture of companionship. “That was an accident. I know it was an accident, Paul knows. He got no more than he deserved, he doesn’t hold you responsible. Edmund” – she searched his face – “you do understand about your father?”
His gaze dropped. “Of course. It was a generous act, I don’t know why I reacted as I did.”
“Shock, mostly. Our beloved leader has when roused all the tact and delicacy of a rutting caribou. I should have told you myself, before.”
“You knew?”
“I saw it. It wasn’t an ugly thing, Edmund. It was a swift and dignified death for him, the thought of it need hold no horrors for you.”
Edmund pressed her arm and could not speak.
Itzhak was next. “I don’t much like the look of Paul.”
“Never mind, perhaps you’ll find someone more to your taste in Leshkas,” said Shah.
He looked at her reproachfully. “I’m serious. I think he may be running a fever. It may be something or nothing but I’d like to take a look at his arm.”
“So tell him.”
“I daren’t: there’s nothing wrong with his other arm.”
“What do you want me to do, hold him down?”
Finally Lockwood, purple with exasperation. “That damn fool of an engineer! He’s dead on his feet: if he doesn’t ease up soon he’ll keel over, and where will that leave us?”
“Standing in a semi-circle round a hump in the ice, singing requiem and wondering how to divide two and a half camels between four of us?”
“It’s not funny,” Lockwood said severely. “If his arm is infected things could turn very nasty, for us but more especially for him. There’s precious little in the way of medical facilities out here.”
“No penicillin.”
“What?” The soldier stared at her, angrily, understanding neither her words nor her manner.
“I’m sorry,” Shah said, relenting. “I know you’re worried. We all are. But there’s nothing I or any of us can do. I don’t know if his arm is troubling him, if he’s ill or just out of patience with the lot of us. But one thing I am sure of: he knows what he’s doing. He always does, Lockwood. When it comes to logic he’s in a class of his own. It’s ludicrous for amateurs like us to worry about him, and it would be palpable impertinence to offer our advice. If and when anything needs doing, he’ll know what and he’ll see that it’s done. Paul sick? God help the distemper that takes him on!”
Cheered if perhaps not totally reassured, Lockwood grinned at her and shambled off, his powerful ungainly gait absorbing distance with the same casual disregard as the camels. Shah waited a little while and then quickened her pace slightly to join Paul without, she hoped, seeming to stalk him.
But her strategy was not subtle enough. Without looking up he grunted, “Edmund offered me his camel, Itzhak his medical expertise, and Lockwood an early death and a chilly grave if I don’t immediately take to my bed with a good book or a bad woman. What can you offer to compare with that lot?”
“Well, I’ve no books,” she said lightly.
“I have no luck,” he said, and grinned.
“Seriously,” said Shah. “How is your arm now?”
“It aches some.”
“And you?”
“I’ve felt better. I expect I shall again.”
“Itzhak thinks you’ve got a fever.”
“Itzhak thinks I’ve got a doctor, and he’s wrong about that too.”
And that was where it rested until after camp was made that night. Languishing in the island of warmth created inside the tent by the little stove, idly watching Itzhak hover over the interminable stew as if this pot were in some way different, not boiled caribou but a blank canvas on which to paint unexpected culinary delights, Shah slowly became aware that Paul had been absent for rather longer than it habitually took him to feed and set the camels to rights. She listened and when she heard no sound of him moving about, mild interest yielded reluctantly to concern. With a martyred sigh she crawled over to the low fly and went outside.
They had come upon another outcrop of rock, an island eminence in the white wilderness, and to get out of the wind had pitched the tent in a deep fissure that reminded them all, too forcefully, of their first night out of Chad. The cleft was so narrow that the tent almost filled it; penned in, the camels had wandered a stone’s throw into the rock and were contentedly chewing on their meagre rations, heads low and eyes somnolent. Paul was not with them.
Shrugging her furs around her Shah walked among the rocks. It was middle evening and the sun was still high – in that season it scarsely dipped below the horizon two hours either side of midnight – but nebulous, without strength. A pale pearl in a nacrous sky, it cast a gentle twilight glow over the winter world, compressing its hounds to a milky hemisphere no greater in radius than a man might stroll in a few minutes. Vet within this little world the air seemed preternaturally clear; the rocks loomed sharp-edged from the pale dusk, seeming to distill extra meaning from the strange light, a mystic waiting quality. There was among the rocks almost no wind.
Groping cautiously with her mind, Shah located the brooding consciousness that was Paul and turned her steps towards him. Flanking a group of large boulders she found him standing on the crest of a low ridge ahead, his rather small figure, less well protected than hers, silhouetted against the oyster sky. He was very still. After the initial moment in which she almost called his name, Shah found herself waiting too.
Paul’s arms were folded over his chest and his head was tipped back, the dark hair stirring in the stronger airs above the rocks. He seemed to be looking at the sun. As Shah watched, uncomprehending, his head moved slowly back and forth against the pale heavens and she heard his voice, low and vicious and bitter with futility, murmur down between the boulders like
slow lava. “Damn you,” he was saying, “I didn’t need this.”
Shah did not understand, but the bleak despair in his voice filled her with a cold dread that spurred her up the intervening slope, his name on her lips. Startled, Paul swayed and his head jerked forward as he lurched round looking for her. Then she understood. His arms were not folded on his chest, the left cradled the right which was so swollen that the distortion showed through the cobbled-up sleeve of his jacket.
The face he turned to her was white and hollow-cheeked, undefended. His eyes, too bright and too deep in charcoal-dusted sockets, caught and held her in the mesh of his tattered emotions. Quite without resort to her singular perception Shah shared in his distress, felt the tumult in his breast of despair, disbelief, rebellion, rage and finally fear; felt his pain and the encroaching weakness which he could not stem, and the quick anger which had carried him through previous crises and could do him no possible service now.
Very gently Shah put her long arms round him and, lowering her head, touched her lips to the injured man’s sleeve. “What can I do?”
She felt a ragged sigh escape him; he made no effort to break her embrace. He grew calm in the compass of her arms. “Firstly,” he said, “don’t tell the others we’re in trouble.”
“Oh Paul,” she smiled, “they know. They’ve been plaguing me all day to do something about it.”
“Damn. I hoped – how did they know?”
“They watch you like hawks. All their lives depend on you: that makes their interest personal. But not wholly selfish, either,” she added reflectively, remembering Edmund’s worried eyes, Itzhak’s nervous hands, Lockwood’s purple face.
“And you,” demanded Paul. “Doesn’t your life depend on me too?”
“Yes,” she agreed, meeting his imperious gaze, “but I have an advantage over them in this. My life is not the most important thing to me.”