The Wounded Land (20 page)

He might have wandered past his goal; but Linden somehow retained more alertness. She tugged him to a stop, dragged his attention out of the slow eddying sopor of the heat. “Look.”

His lips framed empty questions. For a moment, he could not understand why he was no longer moving.

“Look,” she repeated. Her voice was an arid croak.

They stood in a wide bowl of dust. Clouds billowed from every shuffle of their feet. Before them, two wooden stakes had been driven into the ground. The stakes were some distance apart, as if they had been set to secure the arms of a man lying outstretched. Tied to the stakes were loops of rope.

The loops were intact.

A body’s length from the stakes were two holes in the ground—the kind of holes made by stakes pounded in and then pulled out.

Covenant swallowed dryly. “Marid.” The word abraded his throat.

“He got away,” Linden said hoarsely.

Covenant’s legs folded. He sat down, coughing weakly at the dust he raised. Got away.

Linden squatted in front of him. The nearness of her face forced him to look at her. Her voice scraped as if it were full of sand. “I don’t know how he did it, but he’s better off than we are. This heat’s going to kill us.”

His tongue fumbled. “I had to try. He was innocent.”

Awkwardly she reached out, wiped beads of useless sweat from his forehead. “You look awful.”

He peered at her through his exhaustion. Dirt caked her lips and cheeks, collected in the lines on either side of her mouth. Sweat-trails streaked her face. Her eyes were glazed.

“So do you.”

“Then we’d better do something about it.” A tremor eroded her effort to sound resolute. But she stood up, helped him to his feet. “Let’s go back. Maybe Sunder’s looking for us.”

He nodded. He had forgotten the Graveler.

But when he and Linden turned to retrace their way, they saw a figure coming darkly through the shimmer.

He stopped, squinted. Mirage? Linden stood near him as if to prevent him from losing his balance. They waited.

The figure approached until they recognized Sunder.

He halted twenty paces from them.

In his right hand, he gripped his poniard. This time, he seemed perfectly familiar with its use.

Covenant watched the Graveler dumbly, as if the knife had made them strangers to each other. Linden’s hand touched a warning to his arm.

“Thomas Covenant.” Sunder’s face looked like hot stone. “What is my name?”

What—? Covenant frowned at the intervening heat.

“Speak my name!” the Graveler spat fiercely. “Do not compel me to slay you.”

Slay? Covenant made an effort to reach through the confusion.

“Sunder,” he croaked. “Graveler of Mithil Stonedown. Holder of the Sunstone.”

Incomprehension stretched Sunder’s countenance. “Linden Avery?” he asked falteringly. “What is the name of my father?”

“Was,” she said in a flat tone. “His name was Nassic son of Jous. He’s dead.”

Sunder gaped as if Covenant and Linden were miraculous. Then he dropped his hands to his sides. “Heaven and Earth! It is not possible. The Sunbane— Never have I beheld—” He shook his head in astonishment, “Ah, you are a mystery! How can such things be? Does one white ring alter the order of life?”

“Sometimes,” Covenant muttered. He was trying to follow a fractured sequence of memories. Everything he did was an unintentional assault on the Graveler’s preconceptions. He wanted to ease Sunder with some kind of explanation. The heat haze seemed to blur the distinction between past and present. Something about his boots—? He forced words past his parched lips. “The first time I was here—” Boots—yes, that was it. Drool Rockworm had been able to locate him through the alien touch of his boots on the ground. “My boots. Her shoes. They don’t come from the Land. Maybe that’s what protected us.”

Sunder grabbed at the suggestion as if it were a benison. “Yes. It must be so. Flesh is flesh, susceptible to the Sunbane. But your footwear—it is unlike any I have seen. Surely you were shielded at the sun’s first touch, else you would have been altered beyond any power to know me.” Then his face darkened, “But could you not have told me? I feared—” The clenching of his jaws described eloquently the extremity of his fear.

“We didn’t know.” Covenant wanted to lie down, close his eyes, forget. “We were lucky.” A moment passed before he found the will to ask, “Marid—?”

At once, Sunder put everything else aside. He went to look at the stakes, the holes. A frown knotted his forehead. “Fools,” he grated. “I warned them to ware such things. None can foretell the Sunbane. Now there is evil upon the Plains.”

“You mean,” asked Linden, “he didn’t escape? He isn’t safe?”

In response, the Graveler rasped, “Did I not say there was not time? You have achieved nothing but your own prostration. It is enough,” he went on stiffly. “I have followed you to this useless end. Now you will accompany me.”

Linden stared at Sunder. “Where are we going?”

“To find shelter,” he said in a calmer tone. “We cannot endure this sun.”

Covenant gestured eastward, toward a region with which he was familiar. “The hills—”

Sunder shook his head. “There is shelter in the hills. But to gain it we must pass within scope of Windshorn Stonedown. That is certain sacrifice—for any stranger, as for the Graveler of Mithil Stonedown. We go west, to the Mithil River.”

Covenant could not argue. Ignorance crippled his ability to make decisions. When Sunder took his arm and turned him away from the sun, he began to scuffle stiffly out of the bowl of dust.

Linden moved at his side. Her stride was unsteady; she seemed dangerously weak. Sunder was stronger; but his eyes were bleak, as if he could see disaster ahead. And Covenant could barely lift his feet. The sun, still climbing toward midmorning, clung to his shoulders, hag-riding him. Heat flushed back and forth across his skin—a vitiating fever which echoed the haze of the scorched earth. His eyes felt raw from the scraping of his eyelids. After a time, he began to stumble as if the ligatures of his knees were parting.

Then he was in the dirt, with no idea of how he had fallen. Sunder supported him so that he could sit up. The Graveler’s face was gray with dust; he, too, had begun to suffer. “Thomas Covenant,” he panted, “this is fatal to you. You must have water. Will you not make use of your white ring?”

Covenant’s respiration was shallow and ragged. He stared into the haze as if he had gone blind.

“The white ring,” Sunder pleaded. “You must raise water, lest, you die.”

Water. He pulled the shards of himself together around that thought. Impossible. He could not concentrate. Had never used wild magic for anything except contention. It was not a panacea.

Both Sunder and Linden were studying him as if he were responsible for their hopes. They were failing along with him. For their sakes, he would have been willing to make the attempt. But it was impossible for other reasons as well. Tortuously as if he had been disjointed, he shifted forward, got his knees under him, then his feet.

“Ur-Lord!” protested the Graveler.

“I don’t,” Covenant muttered, hall coughing, “don’t know how.” He wanted to shout. “I’m a leper. I can’t see—can’t feel—” The Earth was closed to him; it lay blank and meaningless under his feet—a concatenation of haze, nothing more. “I don’t know how to reach it.” We need Earthpower. And a Lord to wield it.

There’s no Earthpower. The Lords are gone. He had no words potent enough to convey his helplessness. “I just can’t.”

Sunder groaned. But he hesitated only momentarily. Then he sighed in resignation, “Very well. Yet we must have water.” He took out his knife. “My strength is greater than yours. Perhaps I am able to spare a little blood.” Grimly he directed the blade toward the mapwork of scars on his left forearm.

Covenant lurched to try to stop him.

Linden was quicker. She seized Sunder’s wrist. “No!”

The Graveler twisted free of her, gritted acutely,
“We must have water.”

“Not like that.” The cuts on Nassic’s hand burned in Covenant’s memory; he rejected such power instinctively.

“Do you wish to die?”

“No.” Covenant upheld himself by force of will. “But I’m not that desperate. Not yet, anyway.”

“Your knife isn’t even clean,” added Linden. “If septicemia set in, I’d have to burn it out.”

Sunder closed his eyes as if to shut out what they were saying. “I will outlive you both under this sun.” His jaws chewed his voice into a barren whisper. “Ah, my father, what have you done to me? Is this the outcome of all your mad devoir?”

“Suit yourself,” Covenant said brutally, trying to keep Sunder from despair or rebellion. “But at least have the decency to wait until we’re too weak to stop you.”

The Graveler’s eyes burst open. He spat a curse. “Decency, is it?” he grated. “You are swift to cast shame upon people whose lives you do not comprehend. Well, let us hasten the moment when I may decently save you.” With a thrust of his arm, he pushed Covenant into motion, then caught him around the waist to keep him from falling, and began half dragging him westward.

In a moment, Linden came to Covenant’s other side, shrugged his arm over her shoulders so that she could help support him. Braced in that fashion, he was able to travel.

But the sun was remorseless. Slowly, ineluctably, it beat him toward abjection. By midmorning, he was hardly carrying a fraction of his own weight. To his burned eyes, the haze sang threnodies of prostration; motes of darkness began to flit across his vision. From time to time, he saw small clumps of night crouching on the pale ground just beyond clarity, as if they were waiting for him.

Then the earth seemed to rise up in front of him. Sunder came to a halt. Linden almost fell; but Covenant clung to her somehow. He fought to focus his eyes. After a moment, he saw that the rise was a shelf of rock jutting westward.

Sunder tugged him and Linden forward. They limped past another clump like a low bush, into the shadow of the rock.

The jut of the shelf formed an eroded lee large enough to shelter several people. In the shadow, the rock and dirt felt cool. Linden helped Sunder place Covenant sitting against the balm of the stone. Covenant tried to lie down; but the Graveler stopped him, and Linden panted, “Don’t. You might go to sleep. You’ve lost too much fluid,”

He nodded vaguely. The coolness was only relative, and he was febrile with thirst. No amount of shade could answer the unpity of the sun. But the shadow itself was bliss to him, and he was content. Linden sat down on one side of him; Sunder, on the other. He closed his eyes, let himself drift.

Some time later, he became conscious of voices. Linden and Sunder were talking. The hebetude of her tone betrayed the difficulty of staying alert. Sunder’s responses were distant, as if he found her inquiries painful but could not think of any way to refuse them.

“Sunder,” she asked dimly, “what is Mithil Stonedown going to do without you?”

“Linden Avery?” He seemed not to understand her question.

“Call me Linden. After today—” Her voice trailed away.

He hesitated, then said, “Linden.”

“You’re the Graveler. What will they do without a Graveler?”

“Ah.” Now he caught her meaning. “I signify little. The loss of the Sunstone is of more import, yet even that loss can be overcome. The Stonedown is chary of its lore. My prentice is adept in all the rites which must be performed in the absence of the Sunstone. Without doubt, he shed Kalina my mother at the sun’s rising. The Stonedown will endure. How otherwise could I have done what I have done?”

After a pause, she asked, “You’re not married?”

“No.” His reply was like a wince.

Linden seemed to hear a wide range of implications in that one word. Quietly she said, “But you were.”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

Sunder was silent at first. But then he replied, “Among my people, only the Graveler is given the choice of his own mate. The survival of the Stonedown depends upon its children. Mating for children is not left to the hazard of affection or preference. But by long custom, the Graveler is given freedom. As recompense for the burden of his work.

“The choice of my heart fell upon Aimil daughter of Anest. Anest was sister to Kalina my mother. From childhood, Aimil and I were dear to each other. We were gladly wed, and gladly sought to vindicate our choosing with children.

“A son came to us, and was given the name Nelbrin, which is ‘heart’s child.’ ” His tone was as astringent as the terrain. “He was a pale child, not greatly well. But he grew as a child should grow and was a treasure to us.

“For a score of turnings of the moon he grew. He was slow in learning to walk, and not steady upon his legs, but he came at last to walk with glee. Until—” He swallowed convulsively. “Until by mischance Aimil my wife injured him in our home. She turned from the hearth bearing a heavy pot, and Nelbrin our son had walked to stand behind her. The pot struck him upon the chest.

“From that day, he sickened toward death. A dark swelling grew in him, and his life faltered.”

“Hemophilia,” Linden breathed almost inaudibly. “Poor kid.”

Sunder did not stop. “When his death was written upon his face for all to see, the Stonedown invoked judgment. I was commanded to sacrifice him for the good of the people.”

A rot gnawed at Covenant’s guts. He looked up at the Graveler. The dryness in his throat felt like slow strangulation. He seemed to hear the ground sizzling.

In protest, Linden asked, “Your own son? What did you do?”

Sunder stared out into the Sunbane as if it were the story of his life. “I could not halt his death. The desert sun and the sun of pestilence had left us sorely in need. I shed his life to raise water and food for the Stonedown.”

Oh, Sunder! Covenant groaned.

Tightly Linden demanded, “How did Aimil feel about that?”

“It maddened her. She fought to prevent me—and when she could not, she became wild in her mind. Despair afflicted her, and she—” For a moment, Sunder could not summon the words he needed. Then he went on harshly, “She committed a mortal harm against herself. So that her death would not be altogether meaningless, I shed her also.”