Jag tror att något svar på denna fråga garanterar skydd mot spoilers. Jag uppmanar alla potentiella redaktörer att tänka noga innan de tas bort.
Det finns inget klart svar på detta och det är förståeligt att det kan finnas meningsskiljaktigheter. Det här är mitt tag:
Elethiomel lost the war. And of course by now we know who Elethiomel is.
Här är min rättfärdigande. Jag inser att dessa punkter är öppna för tolkning.
Allmänna poäng
He ran away. He gave up his hostage (which appeared to be the only thing stopping an attack on the battleship).
Vissa citat (från Orbit utgåva 2008, ISBN 978-1-85723-135-9).
Kapitel VIII - p162
He tried to tell himself that, mostly, he'd won. He knew he had, but it was only the moments of defeat, the instants of paralysis that made him really think, and try to join up the weave of his life into a whole. That was when his thoughts returned to the battleship Staberinde and what it represented; that was when he thought about the Chairmaker and the reverberating guilt behind that banal description...
It was a better sort of defeat this time, it was more impersonal.
Kapitel II - p359
He ended up in another lo-tech war, learning to fly (because he knew now that aircraft would always win against a battleship), and flying the frosty vortices of air above the vast white islands that were the colliding tabular icebergs.