The Winter Plain

by Jo Bannister

  As the horses stirred forward a humming, grating sound came to disorder the military precision of their advance. The nearest riders clustered at Harry’s flank, staring at the dark archway that had opened where before there had been the uninterrupted wall of Oracle. Two figures emerged, one slight and upright, the other low and massive. Harry grinned tightly. “Had to kill him, did you? Go on, Paul, tell me again how I must believe you because of Chad. Damn it, I bet you blew the place up yourself! Welcome, Your Majesty,” he called. “I see the nomadic life agrees with you – agreed with you,” he amended pointedly. “Well, four down, one to go – I expect he’ll be along in a minute.”

  “I shouldn’t be at all surprised,” Paul muttered despairingly. He could not think what they were all doing. Sure enough, as they watched the lift was winched back up to the bartizan and reappeared a moment later bearing the unmistakable figure of Itzhak, long and thin as rope.

  Paul made a last desperate attempt. “Listen, Harry. All this changes nothing. It’s still between you and me. If I’m lying you can safely kill us all; if I’m not you’ll bring about the destruction of the Northlands and everyone who lives there. That’s what I’m talking about, Harry, total annihilation. Every bomb will flatten everything within half a day’s march of the epicentre. Properly seeded the blasts will clap together like hands. There will be no pockets of lesser damage, no survivors. The firestorms will see to that. Those who don’t burn will suffocate: the fires will suck up all the oxygen. For as long as the holocaust lasts there will be no breathable air in the Northlands. Every living thing will die. All your animals; all your wives; all your children, all your parents; all your friends. And if you go back, all of you.”

  “Cobblers,” said Harry, with conviction. He signalled his men. The line of cavalry bent in a wide ring of muscle and steel.

  Paul whirled round them, stamping in his frustration, still more exasperated than afraid. “Damn you, why won’t you believe? Your really think you’re invulnerable? I’m offering you a chance to save your race. Why don’t you believe me? This maniac is going to write a death warrant for everybody you know and presumably care about. I can’t put it plainer than that. How can I get through to you?”

  “You can’t,” said Shah. She had been watching them – the blank faces, the tired eyes hooded against argument, the hunched shoulders of men wanting to finish their job and go home. “They don’t know enough. Harry’s clever enough to understand but he doesn’t believe you. I can get through to him.”

  Paul eyed her with respect. “You unmade the rope, huh? I never heard that one before. I bet you – could —” His voice trailed off and his eyes sharpened, his gaze flickering from Shah to Harry and back. “Well now. There is a way out of this.“ Fastening Harry he went on, “I have to convince you, right? If you genuinely believe what I say you’ll turn round and ride out of here because the alternative is unthinkable – apart from anything else, imagine what this lot’ll do to you when you get north of the Tantalus and meet a smoking desolation.”

  Harry’s lip curled. “You’re playing for time.”

  “So you say. I can prove what I’ve told you is true. You can see for yourself. Shah will take you into her head and bring you into mine.”

  Three sorts of silence hit him. The dull, utterly uncomprehending silence of two thousand men whose minds could encompass nothing more sophisticated in the way of weaponry than the armour-piercing bodkin. A shocked and deeply apprehensive silence from those who understood the implications of that bizarre invitation. And from Shah herself an equivocal silence, speculative. Paul had an uncomfortable sense of her weighing up not only the feasibility of his proposal but also himself. Finally she said, “Is it possible?”

  “Theoretically.”

  “You know what happened before when I went into your mind.”

  “This time we’ll be better prepared. You’ve learnt a lot. You’re much stronger, defter, more sensitive. And I’ll be ready for you.”

  “This time there’ll be three of us.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like hell there will,” snorted Harry. Alarm ringed his eyes, brought specks of high colour to his pale cheeks and injected a quaver into his voice. Harry felt to be rapidly losing control of the situation.

  “You get no say in the matter.” Paul hardly looked at him; all his attention was on Shah. “Even if you prefer not to know, your men won’t let you disappoint them. After all, they have as much to lose as you, and finding out holds no perils for them – they can afford to be curious.”

  Edmund intervened. “Unless this is considerably less hazardous than it sounds, please proceed no further with it. If my death will suffice to end this bitter farce, so be it. I too am ready.”

  Paul disposed of the interruption shortly. “It would end nothing. If he kills me, my employers will destroy the Northlands; if he kills you and not me then I shall. You’re only the prize, sonny, don’t try to play the game.”

  “Nor,” Shah said sharply, her chin lifting, “is it your decision.”

  For a moment Paul’s eyes contested angrily with her; then he backed down. “No,” he conceded in a low voice.

  “All right,” said Shah. “How do we do this thing?”

  A soldier held Harry’s horse for him to dismount; ostensibly a courtesy, it served equally to prevent the earl riding off in a panic. Chalk-white, with the lost eyes of a man who knew something but not all of what to expect, he joined the man and girl on the ice. There was a brief delay while Itzhak unsaddled Harry’s horse and spread its blanket on the ground, then Paul and Harry and Shah sat down in the ring of horsemen, back to back, their shoulders touching, forming a triangle.

  Shah said gently, “Close your eyes, Harry, and put your head back.” She felt the tremor of his body, then the soft collision of his skull against hers. His hair, long and black like her own, had been worried into tangles by the desert wind. Shah wanted to stroke it, plant a kiss on his white and ruined cheek and coax the nervous rigor from his trembling body. She knew he wanted to kill her, but having him so much at her disposal, under constraint from his own men as well as his enemies, bewildered, frightened and about to be subjected to a monstrous assault, all made her want to mother him. Harry would have been glad to know it. He thought she was going to eat him alive.

  Paul’s eyes were closed too. Lockwood had seen them close and had seen, as lids still translucent from illness slid over night-orbs aureoled with gold, real deep fear. He had seen no fear there as he had throttled the man, long ago it seemed in the mews at Chad, none as they had watched Lockwood’s knife grow red in the fire while Paul talked quietly of severing his arm. Lockwood wondered where the three of them were going that was more terrible than an al fresco amputation.

  Shah went first. To the watchers she seemed only to slip into an easy doze, sitting cross-legged on the horse-blanket with her hands in her lap and her head resting against those of the two men. Harry yielded after a moment’s resistance: a tiny spasm as captured muscles tried to obey the flight instinct, a small gasp of a sigh as that last autonomy was absorbed, and Harry went limp and only stayed upright because he leant against Shah.

  Paul fastened his teeth in his lip and waited, blind face tipped to the sun, for them to come. When they came into his head he bit through his lip and the blood tricked slowly down his chin.

  The first thing he did not understand, except that it looked like a fat arrow. It stood on its nock on more fletchings than an arrow would have, and its pile was pointed but not barbed. It was also much longer than an arrow: Harry did not know how he knew that. It stood on its nock-end in a shaft open to the sky and waited. Harry waited too.

  The fat arrow caught fire. Flame belched between its vanes and billowed up its stocky flank, and the orange glare was such that all the detail was lost. The thing was no more than a scarlet silhouette in an orange firestorm. Harry’s head – except that it was not Harry’s head – rang with an unbelievable agony of noise, as featureless as the gl
are.

  The arrow lifted. Slowly, in a manner entirely beyond Harry’s comprehension, it raised itself up on a growing pedestal of flame, gaining speed as it gained height. A blazing comet of sound and fire, it curved away into the blue dome of the sky. There were no clouds.

  The second thing Harry understood well enough. It was a city. Not a walled city like Chad nor a loose association of settlements like the Northlands but something between the two – a packed nucleus spreading on every side in concentric waves of less and less dense occupation. It was vast, and somehow he was seeing it from above. Around the city, stretching into the dim distance, some of the land was green and some of it was brown. There was no ice. Harry was amazed: he had never seen anywhere with no ice.

  The noise that hurt came out of the sky. It lanced Harry’s ears and bruised his brain, and his eyes flickered patterns across the blue void as he sought the roaring arrow.

  For a fleeting moment of atomic time he saw the thing. It was travelling almost too fast to be seen, plummetting from heaven towards the unsuspecting city, but he saw it because he chanced to be looking in the right direction when the explosion began. The detonation occurred high above the ground, triggered by altimeters which knew the precise height at which the death machine would wreak optimum havoc. Those who had sent it were a precise people.

  When it exploded, of course, it disappeared. Everything did, in a flash of blinding light. Harry disappeared too.

  He rediscovered himself some distance away. He could not see the city. What he could see was a giant roiling cloud, anvil-headed. The cloud was anchored to the ground by a thick turbulent column, its base fed by incredible fires, boiling smoke wreathing up the steam to be sucked into the immense cerebrum – being a Northlander, Harry had no experience of mushrooms. The brain-cloud was tainted by pewter and purple highlights that boiled away to nothing where the edges folded and flowed under. The air rumbled and moaned; sick sounds were wrung from the earth. God and his angels might have wept if they had not roasted in the first atomic bombing, which was some considerable time before this one, or moved away to a nicer neighbourhood immediately afterwards.

  There was to Harry’s eyes a certain Vulcan splendour about the explosion itself. All that sound, all that fury; the monstrous cloud devouring the land and feeding on the atmosphere; firestorms with all the sudden passion of summer thunder that swept and billowed and raised great seething pillars into the sky. But not even a Barbarian could have enjoyed the aftermath.

  Harry wandered the shattered city like a ghost. It was not completely flattened. Here and there a building sturdier than others had left a comer projecting stories high from the devastation, accusing fingers stabbing at the sky whence the terror had come. The sky was no longer blue. It was grey and khaki, shot with livid belts of violet and magenta, and it was low. There was no sun. A shade lay over the land.

  The fingers of masonry, like ruined towers or gantries, rose from a rubble plain. The rubble was flashed and charred, and quite unidentifiable. There was nothing to say what it had been: houses or public buildings or bridges or stores or stables. Now the stones had gone to glass and the glass had melted they were all the same. The whole city was become a vitreous quarry. Of course, there had been things other than stone and glass in the city, but they had not survived even to the meagre extent of adding to the rubble. The organic things and the soft inorganic things had vaporised and the metals had run like water. The metals were there still, congealed in hidden pools beneath the boulders, but here under the epicentre of the blast there were no bodies, not even charred ones, not even ones gone to ash. The cataclysm had been so total that not only were there no living people left, there were no dead ones either.

  Harry travelled away from the heart of the city. The desolation stretched beyond where the city yielded to suburn and beyond where the suburbs yielded to a succession of loosely associated satellite villages that reminded him uncomfortably of home. The degree of devastation moderated with distance, but he had gone a long way before he saw the first bodies. Even then he did not know what they were. They were amorphous, carbonised, ashy hummocks: only when he came on one which freak chance had partially shielded and saw bare legs, hardly scorched, attached to a shapeless grey bundle like the other shapeless grey bundles did he realise that the countless people who had lived here and died here were here still: that the tortured landscape was a crematorium.

  Further on the bodies were more recognisably bodies. The diminishing force of the blast had spared them vestiges of personality: size, sex, fragments of clothing, melted rings on burnt fingers. Some even had faces. He saw one woman hung on a railing whose front was sufficiently undamaged that he could see the expression on her face and whose back was charred to the skeleton. Her expression was one of surprise.

  Yet worse than the dead were the living, when he finally found them. People sporting the most terrible burns and injuries wandered round in a daze, aimlessly, too shocked even to fall down. None of them cried; not the children, not the women. There was no one to cry to: they were all in the same state. Concentric rings of bodily hurt had replaced those of civic structure which existed before the arrow, before the cloud. The geography of the shattered place was echoed in isobars of human ruin.

  And Harry knew, without knowing how he knew, that none of these people would long survive the lost masses of the inner city; that they would all die, soon, and that what would kill them would be not their burns, their flayed skins, or even their blasted sterile world, but something more insidiously murderous – something stalking them silent and unseen, seeping into them unnoticed, an irresistible creeping destruction that had them all fingered. He thought it had something to do with the cloud.

  “Thank God,” a voice said behind him, flat with exhausted passion, hoarse with screaming done. “Thank God you’ve come.” It was the first human sound Harry had heard in this ruined place, and at it he lurched round as if seared.

  It was a woman. She might have been young before the bomb; it was hard to tell. She was dressed in rags of clothes, and rags of bandages bound both hands and one leg.

  “I knew someone would come,” she said in the same flat, ennervated voice. “I knew they’d send help. Look,” she said louder, “I told you they’d send help.”

  Shadows moved around him, furtive shadows of the people they had once been, bent and shuffling, not quite believing in salvation from the infernal chaos, equally unable to turn their backs on the least chance of it.

  The woman said to Harry – or to someone occupying the same space – “I told them you’d come. I knew they couldn’t leave us here to rot. Where will you take us?”

  A voice that was also not Harry’s, that was younger than Harry’s and unsteady with horror, stumbled, “I – I cannot help you.”

  The woman stared at him, uncomprehending, fear and anger leaching in to supplant the vacuum in her eyes. “What do you mean? You must help us. You were sent to help.”

  “No. To – report.”

  The woman seized his arm in the talon grip of her ragged hand. “Report? What will you report? – that you found survivors begging to be taken out of this madness and that you refused them? I don’t know who you are, child, or what you’re doing here, or where you came from; but you’re in better shape than any of us and you’re going to help.”

  “There’s nothing I can do for you. Let go of me. It wouldn’t make any difference. Nothing will make any difference. You’re dead now, only you don’t know enough to lie down. Take your claws out of my arm. Stay back, all of you, keep away from me! Please, I don’t want to shoot you. For God’s sake, have the decency to lie still when you’re killed!”

  And then he was running, with the sound of his own shots and the enraged animal cries of people who had endured too much clamouring at his heels, with his breath sobbing in his throat and the shattered landscape snatching jealously at his undamaged body; and he kept running until he woke.

  Lockwood had helped Paul to his feet an
d now he helped him stand. He was exhausted. Lockwood was again conscious of having witnessed something remarkable and not having understood it. He was glad it was over. He would be happier still when Paul got back to being his usual snide, bad-tempered self instead of hanging on his arm like a man broken by torturers.

  Shah sat cross-legged on the ground, her arms across her knees, unmoving. Her face was buried in her sleeves and she would not look at anyone.

  Harry Jess was back on top of his black horse. He had already given his orders and his army was preparing to move off. Of the three of them Harry seemed to have come through their shared experience with the fewest scars. There was a new depth of knowledge in his eyes and new shadows under them which together added a kind of maturity to his sharp, petulant face. Even the scar-tissue conspired somehow to reinforce an impression of new understanding. “Paul,” he said softly, for the third time. “Look at me.”

  With an effort Paul raised his head, marshalling scant resources so that he leaned against Lockwood instead of being held by him.

  “These people I shall spare,” said Harry, “because of the horror I know will be visited on the Northlands else. But you I shall spare because I cannot think of any more monstrous or more apt retribution than to have you live on with memories like those.

  “In the months ahead, or it may take years, I shall come to believe that you deceived me, that somehow even in the recesses of your own mind you managed to lie – or that perhaps you mesmerised me and I was never inside your head at all. It doesn’t matter that I know now that what I saw was real: my mind will construct an alternative reality in order to protect itself from your truth. She too” – he nodded at Shah, still camped with her back to him – “will sooner or later find some way of blotting out the pictures you fed her.