The Wounded Land (55 page)

Sunder and Hollian seemed tired, as if they had not slept for days; but they were sturdy, with funds of stamina still untapped. Though they knew of the
Grim
, at least by rumor, their relief at escaping Revelstone outweighed their apprehension. They stood and moved together as if their imprisonment had made them intimate. Sunder seemed to draw ease from the eh-Brand, an anodyne for his old self-conflicts; her youth and her untormented sense of herself were a balm to the Graveler, who had shed his own wife and son and had chosen to betray his people for Covenant’s sake. And she, in turn, found support and encouragement in his knotted resourcefulness, his determined struggle for conviction. They both had lost so much; Covenant was relieved to think that they could comfort each other. He could not have given them comfort.

But their companionship only emphasized Linden’s isolation in his eyes. The Raver had done something to her. And Covenant, who had experience with such things, dreaded knowing what it was—and dreaded the consequences of not knowing.

As he finished his meal, he arrived at the end of his ability to support his ignorance. He was sitting near the fire. Memla rested, half-asleep, on one side of him. On the other sat Sunder and Hollian. Four of the
Haruchai
stood guard beyond the tree. Brinn and Cail moved silently around the fringes of the Gilden, alert for peril. Vain stood at the edge of the light like the essence of all black secrets. And among them, across the fire from Covenant, Linden huddled within herself, with her arms clasped around her knees and her eyes fixed on the blaze, as if she were a complete stranger.

He could not bear it. He had invested so much hope in her and knew so little about her; he had to know why she was so afraid. But he had no idea how to confront her. Her hidden wound made her untouchable. So for his own sake, as well as for the sake of his companions, he cleared his throat and began to tell his tale.

He left nothing out. From Andelain and the Dead to Stonemight Woodhelven, from Vain’s violence to Hamako’s
rhysh
, from his run across the Center Plains to Memla’s revelation of the Clave’s mendacity, he told it all. And then he described the soothtell as fully as he could. His hands would not remain still as he spoke; so much of the memory made him writhe. He tugged at his beard, knitted his fingers together, clutched his left fist over his wedding band, and told his friends what he had witnessed.

He understood now why the Raver had been willing to let him see the truth of the Land’s history. Lord Foul wanted him to perceive the fetters of action and consequence which bound him to his guilt, wanted him to blame himself for the destruction of the Staff, and for the Sunbane, and for every life the Clave sacrificed. So that he would founder in culpability, surrender his ring in despair and self-abhorrence. Lord Foul, who laughed at lepers.
At the last there will be but one choice for you
. In that context, the venom in him made sense. It gave him power he could not control. Power to kill people. Guilt. It was a prophecy of his doom—a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That, too, he explained, hoping Linden would raise her eyes, look at him, try to understand. But she did not. Her mouth stretched into severity; but she held to her isolation. Even when he detailed how the seeds planted by his Dead had led him to conceive a quest for the One Tree, intending to make a new Staff of Law so that thereby he could oppose Lord Foul and contest the Sunbane without self-abandonment, even then she did not respond. Finally he fell silent, bereft of words.

For a time, the company remained still with him. No one asked any questions; they seemed unwilling to probe the pain he had undergone. But then Sunder spoke. To answer Covenant, he told what had happened to Linden, Hollian, and him after Covenant had entered Andelain.

He described Santonin and the Stonemight, described the Rider’s coercion, described the way in which he and Hollian had striven to convince Gibbon that Covenant was lost or dead. But after that, he had not much to tell. He had been cast into a cell with little food and water, and less hope. Hollian’s plight had been the same. Both had heard the clamor of Covenant’s first entrance into the hold, and nothing more.

Then Covenant thought that surely Linden would speak. Surely she would complete her part of the tale. But she did not. She hid her face against her knees and sat huddled there as if she were bracing herself against a memory full of whips.

“Linden.” How could he leave her alone? He needed the truth from her. “Now you know how Kevin must have felt.”

Kevin Landwaster, last of Berek’s line. Linden had said,
I don’t believe in evil
. Kevin also had tried not to believe in evil. He had unwittingly betrayed the Land by failing to perceive Lord Foul’s true nature in time, and had thereby set the Despiser on the path to victory. Thus he had fallen into despair. Because of what he had done, he had challenged the Despiser to the Ritual of Desecration, hoping to destroy Lord Foul by reaving the Land. But in that, too, he had failed. He had succeeded at laying waste the Land he loved, and at losing the Staff of Law; but Lord Foul had endured.

All this Covenant told her. “Don’t you see?” he said, imploring her to hear him. “Despair is no answer. It’s what Foul lives on. Whatever happened to you, it doesn’t have to be like this.” Linden, listen to me!

But she did not listen, gave no sign that she was able to hear him. If he had not seen the shadows of distress shifting behind her eyes, he might have believed that she had fallen back into the coma which Gibbon had levied upon her.

Sunder sat glowering as if he could not choose between his empathy for Linden and his understanding of Covenant. Hollian’s dark eyes were blurred with tears. Brinn and Cail watched as if they were the models for Vain’s impassivity. None of them offered Covenant any help.

He tried a different tack. “Look at Vain.” Linden! “Tell me what you see.”

She did not respond.

“I don’t know whether or not I can trust him. I don’t have your eyes. I need you to tell me what he is.”

She did not move. But her shoulders tautened as if she were screaming within herself.

“That old man.” His voice was choked by need and fear. “On Haven Farm. You saved his life. He told you to
Be true.”

She flinched. Jerking up her head, she gaped at him with eyes as injured as if they had been gouged into the clenched misery of her soul. Then she was on her feet, fuming like a magma of bitterness. “
You!
” she cried. “You keep talking about desecration. This is your doing. Why did you have to sell yourself for Joan? Why did you have to get us into this? Don’t you call
that
desecration?”

“Linden.” Her passion swept him upright; but he could not reach out to her. The fire lay between them as if she had lit it there in her fury.

“Of course you don’t. You can’t
see
. You don’t
know
.” Her hands clawed the air over her breasts as if she wanted to tear her flesh. “You think it will help if you go charging off on some crazy quest. Make a new Staff of Law.” She was savage with gall. “You don’t count, and you don’t even
know
it!”

He repeated her name. Sunder and Hollian had risen to their feet. Memla held her
rukh
ready, and Cail stood poised nearby, as if both Rider and
Haruchai
felt violence in the air.

“What did he do to you?”
What did that bastard do to you?

“He said you don’t count!” Abruptly she was spouting words, hurling them at him as if he were the cause of her distress. “All they care about is your ring. The rest is me. He said, ‘You have been especially chosen for this desecration. You are being forged as iron is forged to achieve the ruin of the Earth.’ ” Her voice thickened like blood around the memory, “Because I can
see
. That’s how they’re going to make me do what they want. By torturing me with what I see, and feel, and hear. You’re making me do exactly what they want!”

The next instant, her outburst sprang to a halt. Her hands leaped to her face, trying to block out visions. Her body went rigid, as if she were on the verge of convulsions; a moan tore its way between her teeth. Then she sagged.

In desolation, she whispered, “He touched me.”

Touched—?

“Covenant.” She dropped her hands, let him see the full anguish in her visage. “You’ve got to get me out of here. Back to where I belong. Where my life means something. Before they make me kill you.”

“I know,” he said, because she had to have an answer. “That’s another reason why I want to find the One Tree.” But within himself he felt suddenly crippled.
You don’t count
. He had placed so much hope in her, in the possibility that she was free of Lord Foul’s manipulations; and now that hope lay in wreckage. “The Lords used the Staff to call me here.” In one stroke, he had been reft of everything. “A Staff is the only thing I know of that can send us back.” Everything except the
krill
, and his old intransigence.

Especially chosen
—Hell and blood! He wanted to cover his face; he could have wept like a child. But Linden’s eyes clung to him desperately, trying to believe in him. Sunder and Hollian held each other against a fear they could not name. And Memla’s countenance was blunt-molded into a shape of sympathy, as if she knew what it meant to be discounted. Only the
Haruchai
appeared unmoved—the
Haruchai
, and Vain.

When Linden asked, “Your ring?” he met her squarely.

“I can’t control it.”

Abruptly Memla’s expression became a flinch of surprise, as if he had uttered something appalling.

He ignored her. While his heart raged for grief, as if tears were a debt which he owed to his mortality and could not pay, he stretched out his arms. There in front of all his companions he gave himself a VSE.

Ah, you are stubborn yet
.

Yes. By God. Stubborn.

Acting with characteristic detached consideration, Brinn handed Covenant a pouch of
metheglin
. Covenant lifted it between himself and his friends, so that they could not see his face, and drank it dry. Then he walked away into the darkness around the Gilden, used the night to hide him. After a time, he lay down among the things he had lost, and closed his eyes.

Brinn roused him with the dawn, got him to his feet in time to meet the second rising of the sun of pestilence, protected by his boots. The rest of the quest was already awake. Sunder and Hollian had joined Memla on pieces of stone; the
Haruchai
were busy preparing food; Linden stood gazing at the approaching incarnadine. Her face was sealed against its own vulnerability; but when she noticed Covenant, her eyes acknowledged him somberly. After the conflicts of the previous evening, her recognition touched him like a smile.

He found that he felt stronger. But with recovery came a renewal of fear. The na-Mhoram’s
Grim
—

Memla bore herself as if throughout the night she had not forgotten that peril. Her aging features were lined with apprehension, and her hands trembled on her
rukh
. To answer Covenant’s look, she murmured, “Still he raises it, and is not content. It will be a
Grim
to rend our souls.” For a moment, her eyes winced to his face as if she
needed reassurance. But then she jerked away, began snapping at her companions to make them hurry.

Soon the company was on its way, moving at a hard canter down the path which Memla invoked from the Banefire. Her urgency and Covenant’s tight dread infected the Stonedownors, marked even Linden. The quest rode in silence, as if they could feel the
Grim
poised like a blade at the backs of their necks.

The jungle under the sun of pestilence aggravated Covenant’s sense of impending disaster. The insects thronged around him like incarnations of disease. Every malformed bough and bush was a-crawl with malformed bugs. Some of the trees were so heavily veined with termites that the wood looked leprous. And the smell of rot had become severe. Under the aegis of the Sunbane, his guts ached, half expecting the vegetation to break open and begin suppurating.

Time dragged. Weakness crept through his muscles again. When the company finally rode into the relief of sunset, his neck and shoulders throbbed from the strain of looking backward for some sign of the
Grim
. Shivers ran through the marrow of his bones. As soon as Memla picked a camping place under the shelter of a megalithic stand of eucalyptus, he dropped to the ground, hoping to steady himself on the Earth’s underlying granite. But his hands and feet were too numb to feel anything.

Around him, his companions dismounted. Almost at once, Linden went over to Hollian. The flesh of Linden’s face was pale and taut, stretched tight over her skull. She accosted the eh-Brand purposefully, but then had to fumble for words. “The insects,” she murmured. “The smell. It’s worse. Worse than any other sun. I can’t shut it all out.” Her eyes watched the way her hands clung together, as if only that knot held her in one piece. “I can’t— What’s it going to be tomorrow?”

Sunder had moved to stand near Hollian. As Linden fell silent, he nodded grimly. “Never in all my life have I faced a sun of pestilence and encountered so little harm.” His tone was hard. “I had not known the Clave could journey so untouched by that which is fear and abhorrence to the people of the Land. And now ur-Lord Covenant teaches us that the Clave’s immunity has been purchased by the increase rather than the decline of the Sunbane.” His voice darkened as if he were remembering all the people he had shed. “I do not misdoubt him. But I, too, desire tidings of the morrow’s sun.”

Memla indicated with a shrug that such tidings could not alter her anxiety. But Covenant joined Linden and Sunder. He felt suddenly sickened by the idea that perhaps the soothtell had been a lie designed by Gibbon-Raver to mislead him. If two days of rain were followed by only two days of pestilence— Gripping himself, he waited for Hollian’s response.

She acceded easily. Her light smile reminded him that she was not like Sunder. With her
lianar
and her skill, she had always been able to touch the Sunbane for the benefit of others; she had never had to kill people to obtain blood. Therefore she did not loathe her own capabilities as Sunder did his.