The 1st Chronicles of Thomas Covenant #2: The Illearth War (23 page)

Covenant was tired-his hunger and weakness were plainly visible in the gaunt pallor of his face-but Troy could see that he had suffered no real harm. And his reliance upon Mhoram’s support expressed how little he was a threat to the Lords at this moment. Troy frowned behind his sunglasses, tried not to let his indignation at Covenant surge back up again. As Mhoram seated Covenant, and then walked around to take his own place at Elena’s left, Troy turned his attention to the High Lord.

She was ready to begin now; and as always her every movement, her every inflection, fascinated him.

Slowly, she looked around the table, meeting the eyes of each of the Lords. Then in a clear, stately voice, she said, “My friends, Lords and Lorewardens and servers of the Land, our time has come. For good or ill, weal or woe, the trial is upon us. The word of war is here. In our hands now is the fate of the Land, to keep or to lose, as our strength permits. The time of preparation is ended. No longer do we build or plan against the future. Now we go to war. If our might is not potent to preserve the Land, then we fall, and whatever world is to come will be of the Despiser’s making, not ours.

“Hear me, my friends. I do not speak to darken your hearts, but to warn against false hope and wishful dreams, which could unbind the thews of purpose. We are the chance of the Land. We have striven for worth. Now our worthiness meets its test.

Harken, and make no mistake. This is the test which determines.” For a moment, she paused to gaze over-all the attentive faces in the Close. When she had seen the resolution in their eyes, she gave a smile of approval, and said quietly, “I am not afraid.”

Troy nodded to himself. If his warriors felt as he did, she had nothing to fear.

“Now,” said High Lord Elena, “let us hear the bearer of these tidings. Admit the Manethrall.”

At her command, two Bloodguard opened the doors, and made way for the Ramen.

The woman wore a deep brown shift which left her arms and legs free, and her long black hair was knotted at her neck by a cord. This cord, and the small woven garland of yellow flowers around her neck, sadly wilted now after long days of wear, marked her as a Manethrall-a member of the highest rank of her people. She was escorted by an honor guard of four Bloodguard, but she moved ahead of them down the stairs, bearing the fatigue of her great journey proudly. Yet despite her brave spirit, Troy saw that she could barely stand. The slim grace of her movements was dull, blunted. She was not young. Her eyes, long familiar with open sky and distance, nested in fine wrinkles of age, and the weariness of several hundred leagues lay like lead in the marrow o#” her bones, giving a pallid underhue to the dark suntan of her limbs.

With a sudden rush of anxiety, Troy hoped that she had not come too late.

As she descended to the lowest level of the Close, and stopped before the graveling pit, High Lord Elena rose to greet her. “Hail, Manethrall, highest of the Ramen, the selfless tenders of the Ranyhyn! Be welcome in Lord’s Keep welcome and true. Be welcome whole or hurt, in boon or bane-ask or give. To any requiring name we will not fail while we have life or power to meet the need. I am High Lord Elena. I speak in the presence of Revelstone itself.”

Troy recognized the ritual greeting of friends, but the Manethrall gazed up at Elena darkly, as if unwilling to respond. Then she turned to her right, and said in a low, bitter voice unlike the usual nickering tones of the Ramen, “I know you, Lord Mhoram.”

Without waiting for a response, she moved on. “And I know you, Covenant Ringthane.”

As she looked at him, the quality of her bitterness changed markedly. Now it was not weariness and defeat and old Ramen resentment of the Lords for presuming to ride the Ranyhyn, but something else. “You demanded the Ranyhyn at night, when no mortal may demand them at all. Yet they answered-one hundred proud Manes, more than most Ramen have ever seen in one place. They reared to you, in homage to the Ringthane. And you did not ride.” Her voice made clear her respect for such an act, her awe at the honor which the Ranyhyn had done this man. “Covenant Ringthane, do you know me?”

Covenant stared at her intensely, with a look of pain as if his forehead were splitting. Several moments passed before he said thickly, “Gay. You’re-you were Winhome Gay. You waited on-you were at Manhome.”

The Manethrall returned his stare. “Yes. But you have not changed. Forty-one summers have ridden past me since you visited the Plains of Ra and Manhome, and would not eat the food I brought to you. But you are changeless. I was a child then, a Winhome then, barely near my Cording-and now I am a tired old woman, far from home, and you are young. Ah, Covenant Ringthane, you treated me roughly.”

He faced her with a bruised expression; the memories she called up were sore in him. After another moment, she raised her hands until her palms were turned outward level with her head, and bowed to him in the traditional Ramen gesture of greeting.

“Covenant Ringthane, I know you. But you do not know me. I am not Winhome Gay, who passed her Cording and studied the Ranyhyn in the days when Manhome was full of tales of your Quest-when Manethrall Lithe returned from the dark underground, and from seeing the Fire-Lions of Mount Thunder. And I am not Cord Gay, who became a Manethrall, and later heard the word of the Lords asking for Ramen scouts to search the Spoiled Plains between Landsdrop and the Shattered Hills. This requesting word was heard, though these same Lords knew that all the life of the Ramen is on the Plains of Ra, in the tending of the Ranyhyn-yes, heard, and accepted by Manethrall Gay, with the Cords in her watch. She undertook the task of scouting because she hated Fangthane the Render, and because she admired Manethrall Lithe, who dared to leave sunlight for the sake of the Lords, and because she honored Covenant Ringthane, the bearer of white gold, who did not ride when the Ranyhyn reared to him. Now that Manethrall Gay is no more.”

As she said this, her fingers hooked into claws, and her exhausted legs bent into the semblance of a fighting crouch. “I am Manethrall Rue — old bearer of the flesh of her who was named Gay. I have seen Fangthane marching, and all the Cords in my watch are dead.” Then she sagged, and her proud head dropped low. “And I have come here-I, who should never have left the Plains of home. I have come here, to the Lords who are said to be the friends of the Ranyhyn, in no other name but grief.”

While she spoke, the Lords kept silence, and all the Close watched her in anxious suspense, torn between respect for her fatigue and desire to hear what she had to say. But Troy heard dangerous vibrations in her voice. Her tone carried a pitch of recrimination which she had not yet articulated clearly. He was familiar with the grim, suppressed outrage that filled all the Ramen when any human had the insolence, the almost blasphemous audacity, to ride a Ranyhyn. But he did not understand it. And he was impatient for the Manethrall’s news.

Rue seemed to sense the increasing tension around her. She stepped warily away from Covenant, and addressed all her audience for the first time. “Yes, it is said that the Lords are our friends. It is said. But I do not know it. You come to the Plains of Ra and give us tasks without thought for the pain we feel on hills which are not our home. You come to the Plains of Ra, and offer yourselves to the generosity of the Ranyhyn as if you were an honor for some Mane to accept. And when you are accepted, as the Bloodguard are accepted-five hundred Manes thrilled like chattel to purposes not their own-you call the Ranyhyn away from us into danger, where none can protect, where the flesh is rent and the blood spilt, with no amanibhavam to stem the pain or forestall death. Ah, Ranyhyn!

“Do not flex your distrust at me. I know you all.”

In a soft, careful voice, containing neither protest nor apology, the High Lord said, “Yet you have come.”

“Yes,” Manethrall Rue returned in tired bitterness, “I have come. I have fled, and endured, and come. I know we are united against Fangthane, though you have betrayed us.”

Lord Verement stiffened angrily, but Elena controlled him with a glance, and said, still softly and carefully, to Rue, “In what way betrayed?”

“Ah, the Ramen do not forget. In tales preserved in Manhome from the age of mighty Kelenbhrabanal, we know Fangthane, and the wars of the Old Lords. Always, when Fangthane built his armies in the Lower Land, the Old Lords came to the ancient battleground north of the Plains of Ra and the Roamsedge River, and fought at Landsdrop, to forbid Fangthane from the Upper Land. So the Ranyhyn were preserved, for the enemy could not turn his teeth to the Plains of Ra while fighting the Lords. And in recognition, the Ramen left their hills to fight with the Lords.

“But you — ! Fangthane marches, and your army is here. The Plains of Ra are left without defense or help.”

“That was my idea.” His impatience made Troy sound sharper than he intended.

“For what reason?” A dangerous challenge pulsed in her quiet tone.

“I think they were good reasons,” he responded. Impelled by an inner need to reassure himself that he had not been wrong, he spoke swiftly. “Think about it. You’re right-every time in the past that Foul has built up an army, the Lords have gone to fight him at Landsdrop. And every time, they’ve lost. They’ve been pushed back. There are too many different ways up from the Lower Land. And the Lords have been too far from their supplies and support. Sure, they put up a good fight-and that takes some of the pressure off the Plains of Ra because Foul is occupied elsewhere. But the Lords lose.

Whole Eoward get hacked to pieces, and the Warward has to retreat on the run just to stay alive long enough to regroup and fight the same fight all over again, farther west-closer to Revelstone.

“And that’s not all. This time, Foul might be building his army farther north-in Sarangrave Flat north of the Defiles Course. He’s never done that before. But back then the Giants always kept the north Sarangrave clear. This time” — he winced at the thought of the Giants — “this time it’s different. If we marched an army down to you while Foul was on his way north of Mount Thunder toward Revelstone, we’d be helpless to stop him from attacking the Keep. Revelstone might fall. So I made the decision. We wait here.

“Don’t get me wrong-we’re not abandoning you. The fact is, I don’t think you’re in that much danger. Look, suppose Foul has an army of fifty thousand or even a hundred thousand. How long is it going to take him to conquer the Plains of Ra?”

“He will not,” Rue breathed between her teeth.

The Warmark nodded. “And even if he does, it’ll take him years. You’re too good at hunting-he can’t beat you on your own ground. You and the Ranyhyn will run circles around his troops, and every time they turn their backs, you’ll throttle a few score of them. Even if he outnumbers you fifty to one, you’ll just send the Ranyhyn into the mountains, and keep chipping away at him for God knows how long. He’ll need years to do it. Even assuming we are not attacking his rear. No, until he’s got the Lords beaten, he can’t afford to tackle you. That’s why I’ve been thinking all along that he would come north.”

He stopped, and faced Rue squarely with his argument. The recital of his reasoning calmed him; he knew that his logic was sound. And the Manethrall was forced to acknowledge it. After considering his explanation for a time, she sighed, “Ah, very well. I see your reasons. But I do not like such ideas. You juggle risk for the Ranyhyn too freely.”

Tiredly, she turned back toward Elena. “Hear me, High Lord,” she said in a gray, empty voice. “I will speak my message, for I am weary and must rest, come what may.

“I have journeyed here from the Shattered Hills which surround and defend Foul’s Creche. I left that maimed place when I saw a great army issuing from the Hills. It marched as straight as the eye sees toward Landsdrop and the Fall of the River Landrider.

It was an army dire and numberless-I could not guess its size, and did not wait to count.

With the four Cords in my watch, I fled so that I might keep my word to the Lords.”

The south way, Troy breathed to himself. At once, his brain took hold of the information; concrete images of the Spoiled Plains and Landsdrop filled his mind. He began to calculate Lord Foul’s progress.

“But some enemy knew my purpose. We were pursued. A black wind came upon us, and from it fearsome, abominable creatures fell like birds of prey. My Cords were lost so that I might escape-yet I was driven far from my way, north into the mange of the Sarangrave.

“I knew that the peril was great. Yet I knew that there was no waiting army of friends or Lords on the Upper Land to help the Ranyhyn. A shadow came over my heart.

Almost I turned aside from my purpose, and left the Lords to a fate of their own devising.

But I contended with the Sarangrave, so that the lives of my Cords would not have been lost in vain.

“Over the ancient battleground, through the rich joy of Andelain, then across a stern plain south of a great forest like unto Morinmoss, but darker and more slumberous-thus I made my way, so that your idea might have its chance. That is my message. Ask what questions you will, and then release me, for I must rest.”

With quiet dignity, the High Lord arose, holding the Staff of Law before her.

“Manethrall Rue, the Land is measureless in your debt. You have paid a grim price to bring your word to us, and we will do our uttermost to honor that cost. Please hear me.

We could not turn away from the Ranyhyn and their Ramen. To do so, we would cease to be what we are. Only one belief has kept us from your side. It is in our hearts that this is the final war against Fangthane. If we fall, there will be none left to fight again. And we have not the strength of the Old Lords. What force we have we must use cunningly.

Please do not harden your heart against us. We will pay many prices to match your own.”

Holding the Staff at the level of her eyes, she bent forward in a Ramen bow.

A faint smile flickered across Rue’s lips-amusement at Elena’s approximation of the fluid Ramen salute-and she returned it to show how it should be done. “It is also said among the Ramen that the Lords are courteous. Now I know it. Ask your questions. I will answer as I can.”