One Tree (14 page)

“A long time after that, he died. And a long time after
that
, my mother came home. By then, I was too far gone to know anything. Hours passed before she missed us enough to find out the attic was locked. Then she had to call the neighbors to help her get the door open. I was conscious the whole time—I remember every minute of it—but there was nothing I could do. I just lay there on the floor until they broke down the door and took me to the hospital.

“I was there for two weeks. It was the only time I can remember ever feeling safe.”

Then abruptly the quivering of her joints became so strong that she could no longer stand. Covenant’s open stare was a mute cry of empathy. She fumbled to the chair, sat down. Her hands would not stop flinching. She gripped them between her knees as she concluded her story.

“My mother blamed me for the whole thing. She had to sell the goats and the house to the man who was suing my father so she could pay the funeral costs and hospital bills. When she was having one of her pathos orgies, she even accused me of killing her dear husband. But most of the time she just blamed me for causing the whole situation. She had to go on welfare—God knows she couldn’t get a job, that might interfere with church—and we had to live in a grubby little apartment in town. Somehow it was my fault. Compared to her, an eight-year-old in shock was an effective adult.”

The long gall of her life might have continued to pour from her, releasing some of her pent outrage; but Covenant stopped her. In a voice congested with pain and care, he said, “And you’ve never forgiven her. You’ve never forgiven either of them.”

His words stung her. Was that all he had garnered from her difficult story—from the fact that she had chosen to tell it? At once, she was on her feet beside the hammock, raging up at him, “You’re goddamn
right
I never forgave them! They raised me to be another bloody suicide!” To be a servant of the Despiser. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to prove they were
wrong
!”

The muscles around his eyes pinched; his gaze bled at her. But he did not waver. The chiseled lines of his mouth, the gauntness of his cheeks, reminded her that he was familiar with the attractions of suicide. And he was a father who had been bereft of his son and wife for no other fault than an illness he could not have prevented. Yet he lived. He fought for life. Time and again, she had seen him turn his back on actions and attitudes that were dictated by hate. And he did not compromise with her, in spite of all that she had told him.

“Is that why you think people shouldn’t tell each other their secrets? Why you didn’t want me to tell you about Lena? Because you’re afraid I’ll say something you don’t want to hear?”

Then she wanted to howl at him like a maddened child; but she could not. Once again, she was foiled by her health-sense. She could not blind herself to the quality of his regard. No man had ever looked at her in that way before.

Shaken she retreated to the chair, sagged against its stone support.

“Linden,” he began as gently as his worn hoarseness allowed. But she cut him off,

“No.” She felt suddenly defeated. He was never going to understand. Or he understood too well. “That’s not why. I haven’t forgiven them, and I don’t care who knows it. It’s kept me alive when I didn’t have anything else. I just don’t trust these confessions.” Her mouth twisted. “Knowing about Lena doesn’t mean anything to me. You were different then. You paid for what you did. She doesn’t change anything for me. But she does for you. Every time you accuse yourself of rape, you make it true. You bring it into the present. You make yourself guilty all over again.

“The same thing happens to me. When I talk about my parents. Even though I was only eight then and I’ve spent twenty-two years trying to make myself into somebody else.”

In response, Covenant gripped the edge of the hammock, pulled his weakness that much closer to her. Aiming himself at her like a quarrel, he replied, “You’ve got it backward. You’re doing it to yourself. Punishing yourself for something you didn’t have the power to change. You can’t forgive yourself, so you refuse to forgive anybody else.”

Her eyes leaped to his; protest and recognition tangled each other so that she could not retort.

“Aren’t you doing the same thing Kevin did? Blaming yourself because you aren’t equal to every burden in the world? Killing your father in your mind because you can’t bear the pain of being helpless? Destroying what you love because you can’t save it?”

“No.” Yes. I don’t know. His words pierced her too deeply. Even though he had no health-sense, he was still able to reach into her, wrench her heart. The roots of the screaming she had done for her father seemed to grow all through her; and Covenant made them writhe. “I don’t love him. I can’t. If I did, I wouldn’t be able to keep on living.”

She wanted to flee then, go in search of some way to protect her loneliness. But she did not. She had already done too much fleeing. Glaring up at him because she had no answer to his complex empathy, she took a flask of
diamondraught
from the table, handed it to him, and required him to drink until he had consumed enough to make him sleep.

After that, she covered her face with her hands and huddled into herself. Slumber softened the rigor of his face, increasing his resemblance to her father. He was right; she could not forgive herself. But she had failed to tell him why. The darkness was still in her, and she had not confessed what she had done with it.

She did not want to sleep. Afterimages of her father glared across the back of her thoughts from time to time, as if she had looked at that story too closely and had burned the nerves of her sight. She had not exorcised the memory. Rather she had stripped away the defensive repression which had swaddled it. Now her own eight-year-old cries were more vivid to her than they had been for years. She tried to fend off sleep because she feared the hunger of her nightmares.

But what she had done in speaking to Covenant also gave her a curious half-relief, a partial release of tension. It was not enough, but it was something—an act for which she had never before been able to find the courage. That steadied her. Perhaps restitution was more possible than she had believed. At last, she returned to her cabin, rolled over the edge into her hammock. Then the motion of Starfare’s Gem lifted her out of herself along the waves until she was immersed in the width and depth of the Sea.

The next day, she felt stronger. She went to check on Covenant with some trepidation, wondering what he would make of the things which had passed between them. But he greeted her, spoke to her, accepted her ministrations in a way clearly intended to show that his challenges and demands had not been meant as recrimination. In a strange way, his demeanor suggested that he felt a kind of kinship toward her, a leper’s attraction toward the wounded and belorn. This surprised her, but she was glad of it. When she left him, her forehead was lightened by the lifting of an unconscious frown.

The following morning, he came out on deck. Blinking against the unaccustomed sunlight, he stepped through the port sea door under the wheeldeck, moved toward her. His gait was tentative, weakened by incomplete recuperation; his skin was pallid with frailty. But she could see that he was mending well.

The unexpected fact that his beard was gone startled her. His bare cheeks and neck seemed to gleam vulnerably in the light.

His gaze was uncertain, abashed. She had become so used to his beard that he seemed almost young without it. But she did not understand his evident embarrassment until he said in a conflicted tone, “I burned it off. With my ring.”

“
Good
.” Her own intensity took her aback. But she approved of his dangerous power. “I never liked it.”

Awkwardly he touched his cheek, trying with numb fingers to estimate the exposure of his skin. Then he grimaced ruefully. “Neither did I.” He glanced downward as if to begin a VSE, then returned his attention to her face. “But I’m worried about it. What scares me is being able to do something like this so easily.” The muscles of his face bunched in reference to the strictures which had formerly limited the wild magic, permitting it to arise only in desperation and contact with other, triggering powers. “I did it because I’m trying to teach myself control. The venom— I’m so tangled up. I’ve got to learn to handle it.”

While he spoke, his eyes slid away to the open Sea. It lay choppy and cerulean to the horizons, as complex as himself. “But it isn’t good enough. I can make that fire do anything I want—if I hold it down to a trickle. But I can feel the rest of it inside me, ready to boil. It’s
like being crazy and sane at the same time. I can’t seem to have one without the other.”

Studying his troubled tension, Linden remembered the way he had said,
That’s why I’ve got to get to the One Tree. Before I become too deadly to go on living
. He was tormented by the same peril that made him irrefusable to her. For an instant, she wanted to put her arms around him, hug him in answer to the ache of her desire.

She refrained because she was too conscious of her own inadequate honesty. She had told him enough to make him think that she had told him everything. But she had not told him about her mother. About the brutal and irreducible fact which kept her from becoming the person she wanted to be. Worthy of him.

Since the day after the squalls had ended, Grimmand Honninscrave had been wrestling Starfare’s Gem through a confusion of winds, tacking incessantly to find a way eastward across the ragged seas. The Giants labored cheerfully, as though their pleasure in their skill and the vessel outweighed almost any amount of fatigue. And Ceer and Hergrom gave regular assistance in the shrouds, compensating with swift strength for their lesser bulk and reach. But still the
dromond
’s progress was relatively slow. Day by day, that fact deepened the First’s frown. It darkened the knurled frustration which lay like a shadow behind the surface of Seadreamer’s mien. And as Covenant’s health slowly returned, his own inner knots squirmed tighter. Goaded by his fear of venom and failure, by the numberless people who were dying to feed the Sunbane, he began to pace the decks as if he were trying to will the Giantship forward.

But after three more days of tortuous movement, tack after tack through the intricate maze of the winds, the air shifted into a steady blow out of the southwest. Honninscrave greeted the change with a loud holla. Giants swarmed to adjust the canvas. Starfare’s Gem heeled slightly to port, dipped its prow like an eager animal freed of its leash, and began surging swiftly into the east. Spray leaped from its sides like an utterance of the moire-marked granite—stone shaped and patterned to exult in the speed of the Sea. In a short time, the Giantship was racing gleefully across the waves.

To the Storesmaster, who was standing near him, Covenant said, “How long will this keep up?”

Galewrath folded her arms over her heavy breasts, fixed her gaze on the sails. “In this region of the Earth,” she returned, “such freakish winds as we have fled are rare. This blow we name the
Questsimoon
. The Roveheartswind. We will sight Bareisle ere it falters.” Though her tone was stolid, her eyes glistened at the white thrust of the canvas and the humming of the sheets.

And she was right. The wind held, rising so steadfastly out of the southwest that at night Honninscrave felt no need to shorten sail. Though the full of the moon had passed some nights ago, and the stars gave scant light by which to manage the
dromond
, he answered the implicit needs of the Search by maintaining his vessel in its tireless run. The wind in the rigging and the canted roll of the deck, the constant slap and susurrus of water like an exhalation along the sides, made Starfare’s Gem thrill under Linden’s feet. Constantly now she felt the
dromond
breathing through the swells, a witchery of stone and skill—as vibrant as the timbre of life. And the straight thrust of the
Questsimoon
accorded the crew a rest from their earlier exertions.

Their pace gave the First a look of stern satisfaction, eased Honninscrave’s work until at times he responded to Pitchwife’s jests
and clowning like a playful behemoth. Grins took even Sevinhand Anchormaster’s old sorrow by surprise, and the healing of his arm gave him a clear pleasure.

But no speed or Giantish gaiety etiolated Covenant’s mounting tension. He appeared to enjoy the good humor around him, the spray from the
dromond
’s prow, the firm vitality of the wind. At times, he looked like a man who had spent years yearning for the company of Giants. But such pleasures no longer sustained him. He was in a hurry. Time and again, he carried his anxiety across the listing deck toward wherever Linden happened to be standing and awkwardly engaged her in conversation, as if he did not want to face his thoughts alone. Yet he seldom spoke of the memories and needs which lay uppermost in his mind, so near the surface that they were almost legible through the bones of his forehead. Instead, he picked up more distant threads, questions, doubts and worried at them, trying to weave himself into readiness for his future.

During one of their colloquies, he said abruptly, “Maybe I did sell myself for Joan.” He had spoken about such things before. “Freedom doesn’t mean you get to choose what happens to you. But you do get to choose how you react to it. And that’s what the whole struggle against Foul hinges on. In order to be effective against him—or
for
him—we have to make our own decisions. That’s why he doesn’t just possess us. Take the ring by force. He has to take the risk we might choose against him. And so does the Creator. That’s the paradox of the Arch of Time. And white gold. Power depends on choice. The necessity of freedom. If Foul just conquers us, if we’re under his control, the ring won’t give him the power to break out. But if the Creator tries to control us through the Arch,
he’ll
break it.” He was not looking at her; his eyes searched the rumpled waves like a VSE. “Maybe when I took Joan’s place I gave up my freedom.”