Ever Winter

by Hackshaw, Peter

  The room was filled with peacekeepers and those who were high in the king’s favor or debt. All were sat on chairs of different shapes and sizes. The room had been decorated with ice sculptures and fairy lights, some of which worked. The floor had been polished. Hilde was glad it no longer showed any sign of Henry’s blood upon it, which the king had left there for some time after he’d taken her brother’s eye.

  Iris was nowhere to be seen; Hilde had insisted on banning her from attending, and she was relieved that the king had kept his word. She couldn’t have Iris interfering, or spoiling things for her. This was her day, after all.

  Before walking in, Hilde raised a hand to check her hair was in place in the chignon style one of her new servants had set it in. She wore pearls about her neck and ears and on one of her wrists. She truly felt like a queen, as though her very appearance gave her power over all others in the room. And how they looked at her!

  The king sat in his red barber’s chair at the far end of the room, elevated in front of the vista which was shielded only by the curved glass. Frozen waves, the square, and the endless white landscape lay beyond it. Nothing in the frame changed, unless there was a blizzard, or fog. Beside him stood the witch, Catharin, who jittered and shuffled nervously in her furs, awaiting the arrival of the bride.

  Catharin had started referring to Hilde’s sister, Iris, as her daughter. Hilde thought of their argument in her cabin and the spiteful words exchanged between the two of them.

  In the absence of the Canary, the music began with a simple drum and all fell to silence as Hilde took her first steps toward her future husband, who stood to greet his bride where an altar might have been placed.

  Unconventionally, he looked handsome. His mustache had been shaped into something new; waxed with blubber oil and twisted into a carnie. He wore a pure white cotton three-piece suit with a pale pink paisley shirt and matching bow tie, plus a handkerchief protruding from the jacket pocket. Today, the king was more eccentric than lunatic. More relaxed than unsettling. He was one of a kind. All power. Soon to be hers.

  The people in the auditorium were dressed in their usual affairs. Furs and skins. Pelts and ancient factory-made rags and garments. It made the scene even stranger as Hilde reached the king and Catharin on the elevated stage and felt everyone staring at her bare shoulders from behind. Did they envy her?

  “James,” greeted the king, taking Hilde’s hand from Lanner’s. Lanner nodded, smiled nervously at Hilde and backed off into the crowd. The king told Hilde how beautiful she looked and she responded in kind.

  The drum ceased and Catharin took center stage between the couple. She opened a leather-bound book she’d been clasping and pretended to read out loud from it, although Hilde could see that the book was upside down and she was making up the words as she spoke them.

  “Hear ye, blah, blah. We gather here to get these two wedded. ‘Til death do either of. And we shall have a new queen, for our king. Yee haw.” The crowd soaked up Catharin’s words as if they were fine words, poetry even. Hilde had been made aware that weddings didn’t happen often, although children were born frequently by mothers and sometimes daughters.

  “Do you, the king, take Hilde as yours to have, hold and handle for this and that and that and this? Infinity, mighty universe, to the moon and back, always?”

  “I take her,” the king replied, not taking his eyes from Hilde. The crowd made a collective ah noise at this, which seemed to annoy Catharin, as if it was not part of the ceremony. Still pretending to read from her upside-down book, she continued.

  “Now you, young girl, known by Hilde. Will you have, hold and handle the king for this and that and that and this? Eternity, forever, many years ahead beyond the Ever Winter?”

  “I take him,” Hilde said with confidence and leaned forward to kiss the king, who had to bend to meet her lips, despite the lofty heels on her shoes. To a stranger entering the room, the scene would have looked like a couple hopelessly in love, being joined in matrimony. It was what Hilde wanted. The façade.

  “Then with that kiss there shared, you’re king and queen. Of the Favela and the entire planetarium. May the sun warm your faces, blah, blah. Hark the wind at the backs of the angels. So, it is done! Hip, hip, amen.” Catharin slammed the book shut and told everyone to go home whilst they were still cheering. The crowd silenced themselves and filed out of the room as one. There were drams in the square waiting for all and none needed encouragement to exit the palace and commence drinking. The whole thing took minutes from start to finish and Hilde had become queen. Iris would hear about it soon enough.

  Only the king, Lanner, Catharin, Hilde and Omeed remained in the vast room. Catharin sat at a table that had already been set, and the rest followed. The king waited until Hilde was seated before he took his own place at the table. In the center was a platter of oysters, sardines, seal and dog meat, a swordfish and the lobster that had been sharing Hilde’s cabin with her for many weeks. It had been a gesture of affection from the king, to the girl whose family he had ordered the killing of and whose brother he had sent to his end, long ago.

  Omeed used a silver lighter to light the candles that adorned the table and the king raised a crystal glass full of the red grog produced in plastic drums in an alley beside the Birdcage.

  “Before we eat our wedding feast, I would like to raise a toast to my beautiful bride. Queen of this world and now mother to Omeed here, who I consider my son, until we make one of our’n. A good queen can get anything she wants in a place like this. I trust you will be a most excellent queen. I do not wish to replace you soonest,” said the king to his bride, who smiled and held his gaze throughout. Omeed kept his eyes upon his dinner plate, clearly uncomfortable at being sat with the king for a meal and at having a girl younger than him referred to as his mother.

  “I will be mother to Omeed, your son,” Hilde replied, placing her hand on her husband’s as she spoke, “and I will be a strong queen. I would ask for one gift from you on the day of our wedding.”

  “You don’t waste time. I like that. A ‘get to it and cut through all the gristle’ kind of girl. What do you desire?”

  “I thank you, my husband, for bringing me to this place. You’ve made me your queen and I am ever grateful. But Mister Lanner’s presence upsets me. I want his head. Serve it on this table with the lobster if you will.”

  The king laughed long and hard. Lanner let out a series of panicked noises and stuttered words, which made the king laugh even more, joined by Catharin, who cackled and clapped her hands, excited at the prospect of seeing another death up close.

  Omeed remained quiet. He almost seemed disappointed with Hilde and looked upon her curiously, trying to understand who she was.

  “We are well-matched! Mister Lanner! What’s your view on this? Why should you keep your head this day? Is it a good head?” the king asked, finishing the last of his blood drink. But Lanner did not respond. Something had distracted him and he looked out of the glass window in the same way Omeed had stared at Hilde when he was trying to understand her.

  One by one, they all turned to the glass vista. What they saw was a fast-moving, rolling mist, spoiling the scene that never changed apart from whether it was day or night, or presenting blizzard or fog.

  The king stood and walked toward the glass. Hilde followed and stood at his side next to the red barber’s chair, as they had just moments before during their wedding. Together they faced it. What was heading their way.

  “Did you lie to me?” the king spoke softly.

  “My king?”

  He raised his voice then, so suddenly that Hilde was startled.

  “Did you lie? You told me of a yot-boat. You told me of a car. You told me your darling brother had killed that car dead and ruined it, did you not?”

  “I did. Tell you about the car. And he did…” It was Hilde’s turn to stutter now, aware she had quickly fallen from grace and that her husband was a very dangerous man.

  The king grabbed H
ilde by her cheeks and squeezed his hand tight around her chin and jaw, causing her pain. Tears followed quickly.

  “Then did you lie?” he spat.

  “No. I never did lie,” Hilde cried. But it was all too late. Their masks had dropped and it was clear what they were and were not to each other.

  “Lanner. Every weapon in the gunroom; cutter, rifle, spear, gun, grenade launcher. All we got. Find every bullet, every blade. Each man, woman and orfin there is. Arm them up to the hilt of it. War has come. Something ancient this way comes and we will send it back to the olden days with fuck’n wings upon it! Omeed, come with.”

  Omeed did as he was commanded, shooting Hilde a look of pity this time. The king took off his bow tie and jacket and threw them to the floor. He rolled up his sleeves, went to the cabinet and took a set of metal nunchaku from the top drawer. Hilde watched as Lanner ran from the room, triumphant over her once again.

  Before he left, the king turned to Hilde once more.

  “I fear ours will be a short marriage. I wouldn’t blame you if you took your own life this day, for what will happen to you on my return will never be wiped from your memory. I have perfected the art of making others suffer. I will set such an example with you that poetry shall be written for the generations to come, with tales of how you screamed. After hearing your brother’s cries, the very notes that came from him, I’m expecting grand things from yourn.”

  Hilde trembled and felt her legs turn to jelly beneath her. She steadied herself on the headrest of the red barber’s chair and caught a glimpse of herself in the curved glass window. The fallen queen of the Favela.

  Fear is the key.

  Thirty-Seven

  Fury Delivers Landside

  The Duesenberg came to a halt at the foot of the hill, having skirted and weaved through the sieve of holes that dotted the icescape before it. Its engines purred, but otherwise there was a silence about it. The doors did not open. No one spoke from within and no shots were fired at the first adults that had made their way to the foot of the hill. Those closest tried to see inside and make out how many were in the car, but the windows were black and only permitted a view from within.

  Henry had thought about stealth. Stealth and victory. About creeping in the middle of the night. He wished he’d had a rifle that he could’ve learned to shoot from a distance. In the training modules, he’d seen snipers doing damage far from the vicinity of their enemy target. They judged the wind, the distance and the power of their weapons. Every plan that Henry had thought of still ended up with him fighting forty or fifty adults. So, in the end, it made sense to him that the vehicle, his Trojan horse, simply drove straight up to the foot of the Favela to herald the start of a war.

  His temperament must’ve been heeded by someone, as the skies bruised over and rain, not snow, dropped thick and fast, stirred by a sub-zero wind. When had it ever rained that he could recall? What follows the winter? Think! The thaw.

  Bodies filed down the hill toward the purring car that waited with all the patience in the world. Those who hadn’t already loaded their weapons did, and then at a given signal all fired at the Duesenberg, peppering its insect-like shell and the ice around it with slingshot shrapnel and bullets, sending shards of solar panels and blistered bodywork into the air around it. Men and women cursed and re-loaded, slowly, without any skill. Still the engine purred defiantly as it waited for them to ready their weapons once more.

  “Go get!” shouted one of the women.

  The first to reach it was Jared, one of those who had taken the girls from the homestead. He adjusted the peak of his trucker cap so he could see more clearly. Then he readied the large bone club he’d armed himself with, holding it like a baseball bat, ready to take a swing the second a door opened. Several feet behind him stood his partner, Ula, a hefty tank of a woman with an impressive death toll to her name. She held a chainsaw in both hands; a relic that had been oiled and cleaned regularly, but had not been used in many years. It was a simple enough weapon. Lift and point. Swing. Cut and slice. Butcher.

  “Give me some blood, sugar,” Ula shouted at Jared as she pulled the cord on the chainsaw, which started with a splutter and a thick cloud of acrid smoke. The blades spun and the noise, a different tone to the engine of the car, became the loudest sound in the Favela.

  The faces of pauper children peeped out from the hovels lining the lower lanes of the hill; frightened, but excited by the sounds and the arrival of the car. None of the adults told them to hide, or move to safety. None cared for the weak underlings.

  Jared turned toward Ula for the briefest of moments. “Sim, I got this down,” he replied, just as the car window lowered and Panthera leaped out, going straight for the thorax, protected only by the man’s tangled beard that proved no obstacle for the snow leopard’s maxillaries.

  Ula screamed and ran forward as Jared fell, but withdrew as her comrades began firing their slings and guns toward the beast and the car once more. She screamed at her own people to cease so she could have her revenge.

  Henry clung to the face of the cliff, hauling himself over a ledge onto a flat roof halfway between the Duesenberg on the icescape and the square of the Favela above. He had swum the sieve of ice, coming up for air in each hole, just as the seals and their pups did. All had been distracted by the arrival of the car which Hepburn had piloted from within.

  Henry had climbed, finding it easier in some ways than the containers and the hull of the ship. All of the pull-ups and press-ups he had done to condition his arms had paid off. His upper-body strength was notable and he scaled his precipice in no time.

  The first to meet him on the hill was a child, no more than six years of age. The child held a bone that had been sharpened into a blade and stood brave and defiant.

  “Ain’t here to pain you, lad,” Henry spoke quietly. “Adultos only.”

  Without a word, the boy ran back into his shelter and Henry stood alone once more, half-expecting the boy to betray him and come running out with adults.

  The tight lanes of the Favela served as a funnel for the crowd heading for the Duesenberg. Those at the back had lesser weapons, or none at all, but it was their voices that would raise alarm and their numbers that would be his undoing if he were seen.

  Henry climbed onto the roof of a shelter and lay still as bodies passed just inches away from him. There were far more adults than Henry had envisioned and for the shortest time, he felt like a little boy again, like the one he’d just sent into the safety of his shelter. But Henry wasn’t a boy anymore. He’d stood up and fought Erasmus and her warriors, and he’d defeated them. How many strides now stood between him and his sisters? Where was the king? Cowering? Waiting? Plotting?

  He hauled himself up to the roof of another shelter, then used it to scale a little further up the hill before dropping into a deserted lane. A man rushed out of a doorway beside him, eager to join the fracas below, not expecting to be confronted by anyone in the lane. Henry dropped his weapon, not wishing to spill blood just yet and give himself away, but was quick to take the man by the head and snap his neck. The man had no time to register anything, or call for alarm; he just stood with a puzzled look upon his face, staring at the tactical helmet that Henry wore. Henry dragged the body back into the man’s shelter, which was empty, and put a sleeping bag over the body, so it might look at a glance like he was resting. Henry picked up his weapon and continued up the hill. In the next lane, he dispatched two in succession, quickly and quietly, without spilling any blood on the all-white ground. Then he choked a younger, unarmed man until he lost consciousness and dropped at Henry’s feet.

  Henry realized that the firing below had ceased, before it picked up again just as quickly; no order to it at all, just panicked and random. Sporadic. The roof on which he knelt gave him a view of the sieve below and it was then that he saw Hepburn from the driver’s side of the vehicle, walking casually into a hailstorm of shrapnel and a few of the priceless bullets meant to put him down. The pixels on
the android’s faceplate showed confusion and annoyance, but nothing more. His armor had small indents from the shots he had taken, but he was mostly undamaged, having been designed to give aid on the battlefield.

  Ula wielded her chainsaw once more and charged the robot. Hepburn sensed the danger and let fly a low-voltage charge to unarm her. Despite the defensive intent of Hepburn’s parry, the large warrior skidded backward on the ice - more out of alarm than anything else - and impaled herself on the rotating blades of the chainsaw. The saw bored her insides and spun freely within her torso, making a minced carnage of Ula.

  Shouts rang up the hill as many of the men and women that had come to greet the automobile began their hurried retreat back to the square.

  The lanes were winding and narrow, which worked to Henry’s gain. Just as he had used the layout of the MV Greyhound to his advantage when Erasmus and her men had discovered the vessel, this had been his plan in the Favela. Fighting unceasing numbers would tire him and he would certainly fall. With stealth, taking advantage of the terrain around him, he would only ever fight as many enemies as could fit immediately in his path, although he’d need to check that none were hiding in the houses and hovels as he passed.

  All he wanted was to reach Lanner and the king, then to hurt and humiliate them in front of the populace. There would be no mercy afforded to Henry, nor his enemy. It was night, or it was day. And nothing else.

  Like when he’d climbed and jumped from container to container around the stricken ship, Henry used the buildings and walls around him to scale the hill by every means, until he found himself at the very top. He dropped down from the side of a building he had hidden in whilst people with weapons marched both up and down the hill in confusion. To and from danger.