The Runes of the Earth: The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant - Book One (35 page)

Feigning a confidence which he palpably did not feel, Liand told her, “Here,” and placed her hand on one of the bindings which secured his mount's packs. “Hold here. Somo will support you. The way is not far. In the shade of the cliffs, we will rest.”

Obediently she closed her fingers on the leather. She may have nodded: she could not be sure. Like her legs, her neck seemed to twitch for reasons of its own; but she had gone numb, and its motions lay beyond her awareness.

After that, the instances of effort which had defined her became a blur, and she climbed without recognizing what she did, drawn upward by Somo's strength and Liand's courage; and by the knowledge—the only thing she knew—that she needed to grow stronger.

W
hen she returned to herself, she lay among boulders in the shadow of high cliffs, one near her head, the other a stone's cast from her feet. Far above her, the sky still held the sun, and would for some time yet. But where she lay, a deep gloaming covered her, and all her courage had fallen away.

Liand stood nearby, watching her; making no attempt to hide his anxiety. When she met his gaze at last, he knelt beside her. Gently he put her hand on the throat of a waterskin. Then he reached under her arms to help her sit up.

“First water,” he said as if he knew what she needed. “Then bread. Later I will give you meat and fruit.”

Sitting, she felt cold air tug through the bullet hole in her shirt, noticed its dry touch on her forehead. Her skin was no longer damp. She did not particularly need water. Or she had stopped sweating some time ago—

Perhaps that explained her weakness.

With Liand's help, she guided the waterskin to her mouth, drank a few swallows. Almost instantly, sweat seemed to spring from all her pores at once.

Dehydration, she told herself weakly. Stupid, stupid. She was a doctor, for God's sake; familiar with the effects of exertion. She ought to know better.

“My fault,” she murmured when Liand had helped her drink again. “I forgot about water.” Until she dropped it, the blanket must have heated her; increased her fluid loss. “I'll be all right.”

The Stonedownor looked skeptical. “I am unsure. Our sojourn has only begun. If we are not taken by the Masters, we will face many days more harsh than this one. I fear that you will be unable to endure.”

She wanted to say, You and me both, but refrained for his sake. Instead she indicated the waterskin and asked, “Can we refill this?”

He frowned. “Linden Av—Linden. I have never ascended so far above Mithil Stonedown. I know nothing of what lies before us.” Then, as if he were taking pity on her, he said, “Yet I believe that we will discover streams and springs among the mountains. And snow remains upon the heights. Drink all that you require. Doubtless we will need to ration aliment, but it will be false caution to stint on water.”

“In that case,” she replied, “don't worry about me. I'll get tougher.” She would have to. “And I'll take better care of myself.”

Liand nodded, clearly unconvinced, and turned away to unpack the food he had promised her.

While he did so, Linden looked around for Anele.

To her right, in the direction of the Mithil valley and the South Plains, she found her view blocked by a hill of rocks like a fold in the detritus spilling down the rift. Somehow Liand had urged her high enough up the scree to reach the shelter of a hollow in the scree. Past the rise, she could see only mountains and sky: she and her companions were hidden from the valley. If they had not been spotted before they reached the rift, the Masters would catch no sight of them now.

Of course, she also could not see if they were pursued—

To her left, the broken slope climbed southward into the narrowing cleft; and there
she located the old man. He sat on shards of granite and obsidian several paces above her, his head cocked to one side, blindly studying the cliff opposite her and mumbling to himself.

Linden drank more water and tried to focus her fading health-sense on him.

Physically he looked no worse than when she had first met him: tired, certainly, and ill-fed; but sustained by old stubbornness and Earthpower. He conveyed the conflicting impressions that he had already suffered more privation than ordinary flesh could bear, and that he had reached none of his limits. As for his mental state, she could discern little through the shaded dusk. However, the phases of his madness had apparently stabilized, leaving him in a condition which resembled his partial sanity when she had talked to him among the rubble of Kevin's Watch.

There he had spoken of reading the wreckage of the Watch. In his fractured way, he had tried to tell her what he saw.

He has no friend but stone.

She had no one else who could so much as hint at what had happened to the Land.

Unsteadily she rose to her feet. When she had reached a fragile poise, unsure of her center as she was of her muscles, she picked up the waterskin and carried it to Anele's side, wallowing like a derelict in the troughs of the rocks as she moved.

He did not turn his head at her approach: he might have been unaware of her. As soon as she placed the waterskin in his lap, however, he raised it to his mouth and drank, automatically, without shifting his sightless scrutiny of the cliff.

Stifling a groan, she eased herself to the rocks beside him. A low wind tumbled down the slope, cooling the sweat from her skin. Its faint susurrus covered his voice: she only knew that he spoke because his lips moved. For a moment, she rested, gathering herself. Then she asked softly, “Anele, what do you see?”

At first, he did not respond. She thought that perhaps he could not. His concentration resembled a trance: he might have been bespelled, caught by granite incantations audible only to him. His head hung to one side as if that might improve his hearing. But then he seemed to shudder, and a sad anger reached out to her senses.

“These stones are old.” A flick of his hand indicated the detritus in the rift as well as the cliffs themselves. “Old even by the ancient measure of mountains. They know nothing of
caesures.
Or Masters.” Gradually his voice took on a cadence she had not heard from him before, a rhythm hinting at music and gall. “Rather they speak of great forests filling all the Land. In their hearts they lament the rapine of trees.”

He is the hope of the Land.

Linden leaned close to him; breathed, “Tell me.”

“Their sorrow is no fault of mine,” he replied as if he were answering an accusation so old that its meaning had perished long ago. “That at least I am spared. It is aged beyond antiquity, and they neither forget nor cease to keen.

“Here is written the glory and slaughter of the One Forest.”

The One—? She had heard the name before; but she could not imagine why the stones of the world would remember the transient lives of wood. Nevertheless she yearned for anything he could reveal which might place the Land's plight into some kind of context.

“Tell me,” she repeated softly.

Liand approached over the rocks to offer his companions a little bread, but Anele ignored him. When Linden had accepted it, however, the old man answered her, impelled to words by a threnody in granite.

“It is a tale of humankind and destruction, of defenseless beauty unheeded, ripped from life. A tale of Ravers and
Elohim
and Forestals and sleep, the fatal sleep of long time and unmitigated loss.”

Facing the cliff, Anele let his anger flow. His head leaned, first to one side, then to the other, as though he followed a tune that passed from stone to stone around him.

“Then was not the age of men and women in the Land, and neither wood nor stone had any knowledge of them. Rather it was an era of trees, sentient and grand, beloved by mountains, and the One Forest filled all the Land.

“Its vast life spread from the ancient thighs of
Melenkurion
Skyweir in the west to the restless song of the Sunbirth Sea in the east, from the ice-gnawed wilderness of the Northron Climbs to the high defiance of the Southron Range. Only at the marges of Lifeswallower did the One Forest stand aside, for even in that lovely age evils and darkness seeped from the depths of Gravin Threndor, leaking harm and malevolence into the Great Swamp.

“And in that age, the spanning woodland was cherished in every peak and fundament of the Land, held precious and treasured by slow granite beneath and around it, for the One Forest knew itself. It had no knowledge of malevolence, or of humankind, but of itself its awareness was immense beyond all estimation. It knew itself in every trunk and limb, every root and leaf, and it sang its ramified song to all the Earth. The music of its knowledge arose from a myriad myriad throats, and was heard by a myriad myriad myriad ears.”

Linden listened as if she were ensnared. She moved only to eat the viands Liand handed to her. In the rhythm of Anele's voice as much as in his words, she recognized the Land she loved.

She knew little of the Land's deepest past: even this much of its history was new to her. But she had sojourned in Andelain, her every nerve alight with percipience and Earthpower, and she felt the fitness of Anele's story. It was condign: it
belonged.
She could believe that the Earth's gutrock would remember such things.

At her side, Liand crouched down to listen, caught by wonder; but she hardly
noticed him. For a time she forgot pursuit and black storms. The tale of the One Forest had no bearing on her immediate plight, but she drank it in as if it were hurtloam and
aliantha;
another form of nourishment.

“Yet in those distant years,” Anele related, “neither men nor women had true ears.” His anger sharpened as he continued, as if he had absorbed the passion of the stones. Linden heard his heart in every word. “When they came to the Land, they came heedless, providing only for themselves. And the malevolence within Lifeswallower had burgeoned, as all darkness must, or be quenched. It had grown great and avid, and its hunger surpassed satiation.

“No tongue can tell of the shock and rue among the trees when human fires and human blades cleared ground for habitation. The mountains know it, and in their hearts they yet protest and grieve, but mortal voice and utterance cannot contain it. A myriad myriad trunks, and a myriad myriad myriad leaves, which had known only themselves in natural growth and decay, and which had therefore never considered wanton pain, then cried out in illimitable dismay—a cry so poignant and prolonged that the deepest core of the peaks might have answered it, were stone itself not also defenseless and unwarded.”

Anele clasped his arms around his knees to contain his distress. “Yet men and women had no ears to hear such woe. And even if they had heard it, their single minds, enclosed and alone, could not have encompassed the Forest's betrayal, the wood's lamentation. Only the malice within Lifeswallower heeded it—and gave answer.

“For a time, those who had come to the Land felled trees and charred trunks only because they knew not how else they might achieve space for homes and fields. Thus was their cruelty at first restrained. But their restraint was brutal and brief by the measure of the One Forest's slow sentience. And after those generations, humankind discovered malevolence, or was discovered by it. Then the murder of the trees was transformed from disregard to savagery.

“Hence came Ravers to the Land,” the old man rasped bitterly, “for they were the admixture of men and malevolence, an enduring hunger for evil coalesced and concentrated in transient flesh generation after swift generation until they became beings unto themselves—spirits capable of flesh, yet spared the necessities of death and birth. Thus they gained names and definition, three dark souls who knew themselves as they knew the One Forest, and who aspired above all things to trample underfoot its vast and vulnerable sentience.

“And humankind had no ears to hear what had occurred. Men and women were only ignorant, not malefic, for their lives were too brief to sustain such darkness, and when they perished their descendants were again only ignorant.

“Yet even that renewed and ever renewed ignorance could not spare the One Forest.
Humankind was as deaf to malevolence as to lamentation, and so it was easily led, easily mastered, easily given purpose, by the three who had learned to name themselves
moksha, turiya,
and
samadhi.
Therefore the butchery of the trees swelled and quickened from generation to generation.”