Acho que qualquer resposta a essa pergunta garante proteção contra spoilers. Gostaria de pedir a todos os possíveis editores que pensem com cuidado antes de removê-lo.
Não há uma resposta clara para isso e é compreensível que possa haver diferenças de opinião. Esta é minha opinião:
Elethiomel lost the war. And of course by now we know who Elethiomel is.
Aqui está minha justificativa. Eu percebo que esses pontos estão abertos à interpretação.
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Pontos gerais
He ran away. He gave up his hostage (which appeared to be the only thing stopping an attack on the battleship).
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Algumas citações (da Orbit edition 2008, ISBN 978-1-85723-135-9).
Capítulo 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.
Capítulo 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.