“First Woodhelven?” she asked. “How far is it?”
Stave cocked his eyebrow at her abrupt manner. “If our way is not contested, we will near the Woodhelven before midday.”
Linden bit her lip. “Are you sure that we should stop there? Don’t we have enough supplies?”
If the Woodhelvennin needed to be warned of impending hazards, one of the Humbled could perform that task without violating their commitment to preserve the villagers’ ignorance.
Stave shrugged, studying her. “The future is uncertain, Chosen. Soon we may be driven far from our direct road. It would be improvident to neglect an opportunity to replenish our viands.”
“All right,” she muttered unhappily. “But let’s be as quick as we can. Jeremiah needs me.”
“Also you do not forgive,” Stave remarked. “This all Haruchai comprehend. The Ranyhyn await you. And among themselves the Humbled acknowledge that your desire for haste is justified. We will journey as swiftly as we may without sacrificing caution.”
As if his words were a command, Liand and Pahni hurried to wash their pots, bowls, and utensils while Bhapa repacked the company’s bedrolls. At the same time, Branl and Galt surprised Linden by leaping down into the gully. Without a word, they searched the shale and shingle of the riverbed until they found a large pane of slate perhaps two fingers thick on which one or two people could have stood. Lifting it together, Branl and Galt tossed it up to Clyme at the rim of the watercourse. When Clyme had secured his grip on the slate, he carried it out of sight.
To Linden’s perplexed stare, Stave explained. “Though a fertile lowland girdles First Woodhelven, the surrounding hills are barren, as is much of the region which we must traverse this day. While he can, Clyme will bear his stone upon Mhornym’s back. At need, it may ward the old man from Kastenessen’s touch.”
Linden made a whistling sound through her teeth. “That’s good.” She was familiar with the preternatural strength of the Haruchai, but she often forgot just how strong they were. “I’m glad one of you thought of it.”
Repeatedly she had promised Anele her protection—and repeatedly she concentrated on other concerns instead.
Grinning, Liand clapped Stave appreciatively on the back. Then he offered to help Linden clamber out of the arroyo.
When she gained the rim, she found Mahrtiir there with the gathered Ranyhyn. Hyn approached Linden with a look of affection in her soft eyes: Hynyn stamped his hooves imperiously. Clyme had already made a harness of thongs for the slate, set it on his back, and mounted Mhornym. Linden saw now that Mhornym was nearly a hand taller than the other horses, with heavily muscled thighs and a deep chest. Clearly the stallion would be able to bear the added weight of Clyme’s burden.
The chief purpose of the Humbled may have been to guard against Linden, but they also took the task of aiding her and her friends seriously. In this, they resembled the Haruchai whom she had known with Thomas Covenant. For a long time, Brinn, Cail, Ceer, and Hergrom had distrusted her profoundly, but their doubts had not prevented them from warding her with their lives.
When they had become the Masters of the Land, the Haruchai had not ceased to be themselves.
Reassured by that recognition, and comforted by Hyn’s steady acceptance, Linden grew calmer for a while. But when she and her companions were mounted at last, and the Ranyhyn had turned toward the southeast across the sunrise, she had to resist an impulse to urge Hyn into a gallop.
As long as Lord Foul and the croyel held Jeremiah, he might never see the sun again. The Despiser preferred the dark places of the world. And under Melenkurion Skyweir, he had nearly lost Jeremiah. She felt sure that Lord Foul would not take that risk a second time.
Whatever happened, Andelain and Loric’s krill would be the beginning of her search rather than the end.
With the sun like a barrier in her eyes, she felt time drag, leaden with worry. For her sake, however, the Ranyhyn quickened their fluid canter. Mahrtiir sent Bhapa scouting far ahead of the company: Galt and Branl traveled as outriders nearly out of sight on both sides. And gradually the flow of Hyn’s gait settled Linden’s nerves. The mare’s undisturbed rhythm seemed to impose a subliminal equipoise, soothing Linden as though she were being rocked in protective arms. She stopped watching the sun, and so her perception of progress was altered.
Stave and Mahrtiir rode with her. Behind them came Liand and Pahni flanking Anele. And Clyme kept Mhornym close to the heels of the old man’s mount. Pausing only for occasional sips of water, or for a few treasure-berries, the riders made their way around the slopes of low hills, over incremental ridges, and through swales and small valleys punctuated by copses and lone trees like eyots in the slow surge of a grass-foamed sea.
As the sun passed the middle of the morning sky, Linden’s tuned senses caught the first whiff of wrongness.
At first, it was too evanescent to be defined: as elusive as will-o’-the-wisps; scarcely distinguishable from the overarching fug of Kevin’s Dirt. She had no idea what it might represent. But when she glanced around her, she saw Mahrtiir scenting the air. Anele had become restive on Hrama’s back, jerking his head awkwardly from side to side. And both Branl and Galt had drawn closer to the company as if they were tightening a cordon.
Liand turned a puzzled look toward Pahni. But he did not call out to her over the constant rumble of hooves, and she did not answer his gaze.
There: Linden felt the sensation again. It was less an odor than a form of stridulation, as if something cruel had scraped briefly against her percipience, making her nerves vibrate. She was about to shout a question at the Manethrall or Stave when she saw Bhapa ahead of her, racing to rejoin the company as though kresh harried him.
But it was not the musky fetor of wolves that Linden had sensed. It was something darker; something without hunger or intention—and far more fatal.
By touch, or perhaps merely by thought, Stave and Mahrtiir slowed Hynyn and Narunal; and the rest of the Ranyhyn followed their example. The horses were barely trotting when Bhapa rode near enough to report without yelling.
“Manethrall, Ringthane, it is a caesure.” Ramen rigor vied with urgency in his tone. “I have not beheld it, for it lay at the limit of my discernment. Yet I am certain of it. Such evils cannot be mistaken.”
Turning Whrany to pace at Mahrtiir’s side, the Cord continued. “At first, it stood directly before us. But it moves, as do all caesures. For the present, it drifts southward as if borne by the wind, though the wind is from the west. If some caprice does not alter its course, it will not endanger us. Indeed, it may pass a league or more beyond our path.”
“How close did it get to First Woodhelven?” Linden asked. “Can you tell?”
She had stood on Kevin’s Watch when it fell; she and Anele. She groaned as she imagined what a caesure might do to any substance less stubborn than granite.
Bhapa looked helplessly at Mahrtiir. “Alas, I know not. The auras of human habitations are little things on the scale of Falls. I was able to descry the caesure, and to be certain of it, because it is an immense ill. I felt nothing of the Woodhelven.”
“In that case,” said Linden grimly, “I think it’s time to ride hard. The Woodhelvennin might need us. And if they don’t, I want to get past that thing before it can change directions.”
Automatically she dismissed the idea of pursuing the caesure in order to quench it. Doing so would delay her. Each of Joan’s temporal violations was short-lived: she knew that. Otherwise the Arch would already have fallen. If no one—no other force—sustained the Fall, it would soon expend itself and vanish.
The Manethrall and Stave shared a nod. Then all of the Ranyhyn stretched their strides in unison, accelerating smoothly until they raced like coursers into the southeast.
Under other circumstances, Hyn’s vitality and swiftness might have exhilarated Linden. But now her attention was focused ahead. With the Staff, she sharpened her senses and cast her percipience farther, seeking the caesure.
Initially she felt it in small suggestions, innominate flickers of distortion. But soon she was sure of it. She had learned to distinguish between the queasiness that afflicted her in Esmer’s presence and the more visceral sick squirming caused by the proximity of Falls. Esmer made her ill by disturbing her connection with aspects of herself: the impact of caesures ran deeper. On an almost cellular level, they threatened her dependence upon tangible reality.
And a caesure was there, where Bhapa had indicated: ahead of her and to the right, slipping erratically southward. If its heading did not shift, it would not endanger her company. Rather it would carry Joan’s unreasoning violence into the distance until it dissipated itself. And while it lasted, its destructiveness would depend less on the amount of wild magic that Joan had unleashed than on what lay along its mindless road.
With an effort, Linden swallowed her fear of what the Fall might do. The silent acquiescence of Stave and the Humbled assured her that there were no villages or habitations near the caesure’s present course. The Haruchai would certainly have warned her if lives were at stake.
Only one concern remained: First Woodhelven.
Gripping the Staff of Law until her knuckles ached, Linden leaned along Hyn’s neck, silently urging the mare and all of the Ranyhyn to run faster.
A long rising slope blocked the view ahead. It fell away to lower ground on the south: to the north, it mounted toward a rocky tor, rugged with old stone. But along the company’s path the ascent was too gradual to slow the pounding horses. They sped upward over earth that lost its scruff of grass to become an ungiving admixture of flint, crumbled shale, and bare dirt. The hooves of the Ranyhyn pelted debris behind them with every stride. The horses following Linden were forced to space themselves so that they did not run in the spray of jagged pebbles and grit kicked up by Hyn and Hynyn, Whrany and Narunal.
Along the lower terrain, she saw evidence of the caesure’s passage. The ground there was as barren as the slope, but it had a churned look, as though it had been raked by thousands of claws. A stretch of disturbed soil nearly a stone’s throw across led like a crooked road into the south.
God, the Fall was big—
Now Linden spotted what appeared to be a storm around the caesure’s seething column. The sky was free of clouds, uncluttered from horizon to horizon. Nevertheless lightning flared in the distance, crackling around the caesure like a nimbus. The air thickened as if it were crowded with thunderheads; full of theurgy rather than moisture and wind.
She stifled a gasp of chagrin. The Fall was not the only peril. Some power as lorewise and puissant as the Demondim was striving urgently to interrupt or influence the caesure.
Biting her lip, she turned her head away. Stave had said that First Woodhelven occupied a fertile lowland surrounded by bare hills. If it lay beyond this rise, it may have been directly in the path of the Fall.
The crest was near. Already she could see past it to more hills perhaps half a league distant; slopes as barren as the dirt over which the Ranyhyn galloped.
Oh, God, she groaned as Hyn bore her to the top of the rise. Please. No.
Then the Ranyhyn swept over the crest, poured like a torrent down the far side; and Linden saw that First Woodhelven had not been spared.
It occupied a wide, low valley which stretched beyond the tor in the northwest and curved away to the east; a slow crescent of soil made arable by a bright brook and seasonal flooding. As Stave had suggested, the lowland was contained by hills like mounds of shale, dirt, and marl. But centuries of water and overflow had made the bottom of the valley as hospitable as pasturage.
At one time—perhaps as long as half an hour ago—the tree-village must have been extraordinary: a magnificent banyan straddling the stream, sending down tendrils in thick clusters to become new roots and secondary trunks until the single tree formed an extensive grove. Massive boughs by the thousands must have offered their leaves to the heavens, growing between and among each other until they provided abundant opportunities for homes as well as for paths from trunk to trunk. And the homes themselves must have been extraordinary as well, for they would have been fashioned, not of planks and timbers, but of interwoven limbs and branches, and sheltered by a dense thatch-work of twigs and leaves. All along the brook, the crops of the Woodhelvennin would have flourished.
If Linden had seen First Woodhelven before the caesure hit, the sight might have gladdened her sore heart. She would have been so proud of Sunder and Hollian—But she and her companions had not reached the tree-village in time to save it.
Now it looked like a cyclone had torn through it. Ancient trunks as thick as five or six Giants standing together had been shattered; split apart and scattered like kindling. Their oozing stumps were jagged as fractured bones. Broken boughs made a trail of wreckage in the wake of the Fall: rent wood in jumbled clusters resembled the piles of pyres: leaves littered the ground like bloodshed.
After millennia of growth and health, generation following generation, a thriving community had become a catastrophe.
Yet for Linden that was not the worst of it, although the damage cried out to her senses. The tree was only wood. Precious beyond measure, its ruin nonetheless did not communicate the full cost of the caesure. More poignant to her was the condition of the fields—and of the Woodhelvennin themselves.
On either side of the Fall’s path, the fields remained untouched. They had been recently plowed and tended, and wore the fresh vulnerable green of new crops. But where the caesure had passed, it had dragged carnage through the soil, maiming First Woodhelven’s hopes for food; for a future. Raw dirt ached in the sunlight like a weeping gall in the body of the Land.
And all around the calamity of their homes stood the banyan-dwellers, hundreds of men, women, and children milling in shock and dismay, utterly lost.
Among them moved two Masters. No doubt that explained why the Woodhelvennin were still alive: the unblinded senses of the Masters had warned the villagers to gather their families and flee before the Fall struck. And a few horses had been saved as well. But the Haruchai could do nothing to ease the effects, the force and impact, of the disaster. The Woodhelvennin gazed dumbly upon the devastation of their lives, too appalled to think or take action. They did not know how to bear the sheer casualness, the complete lack of purpose or desire, with which their homes and possessions and tasks had been reduced to debris.
Lacking any knowledge of the Land’s history, they had no context for atrocity.
In Berek Halfhand’s camp, Linden had gone without hesitation to do what she could for the victims of his war. This was different. The Woodhelvennin were not wounded: their hearts rather than their bodies had been pierced. With all of her power, she could not make their spirits whole again.
And she had shared no responsibility for the sufferings of Berek’s warriors. First Woodhelven’s razing she could have prevented, if she had insisted on haste hours earlier, when her company had broken camp—
If she had not restored Joan’s wedding band—
She hardly noticed that the Ranyhyn, the whole company, had slowed to a halt on the rise above the shattered grove. A deep rage held her attention.
Roger had said of Falls, Wherever they are at a particular moment, every bit of time in that precise spot happens at once. He had tried to explain why the fabric of reality had not already been irreparably shredded. Since they’re moving, they give those bits of time back as fast as they pick up new ones. In addition, the Law of Time strove to preserve itself. Presumably Thomas Covenant himself fought to defend it. And Joan’s inability to concentrate prevented the caesures from expanding to consume everything. Thus the larger integrity of causality and sequence endured despite the severity of the Falls.
Nevertheless the restoration of Law as the caesure passed contributed to its destructiveness. Every instant of First Woodhelven’s life had been superimposed—and then those instants had been flung back into their natural order. The result was a doubled violation.
In effect, the Fall’s departure did as much harm as its arrival.
Linden concentrated on such things in an effort to control the wild scramble of guilt and sorrow that made her want to rage at the heavens rather than seek some means to ease the villagers. In another moment, she might turn her back on them. She hungered to ride like vengeance after the Fall and rip it out of existence. The eldritch storm surrounding it she would sweep aside. She had stood on Gallows Howe: she yearned to repay savagery with destruction.
“Chosen.” Stave put his hand on her arm as if to pull her back from a kind of insanity. “The fault is mine. I urged caution when you craved haste.”
In response, Mahrtiir made a fierce spitting sound. “Do not speak of fault here, Haruchai. Neither you nor the Ringthane is gifted with foreknowledge. There is no fault. There is only the need of these stricken Woodhelvennin.”
Fault, Linden thought, biting her lip until it bled. Oh, there was fault, and plenty of it. The Manethrall was right: she could not have known. Even Joan, abused and broken, did not deserve blame. But Lord Foul was another matter. Kastenessen and Roger, the Ravers and the skurj and the croyel: the Despiser had aimed them like a barrage at the Land.
“All right,” she said with her mouth full of blood. “I understand. Let’s go see what we can do for those poor people.”
But she did not move. Instead she struggled to suppress her outrage. She needed a moment of clarity, of containment, in which she might regain some aspect of the Linden Avery who healed. That woman had never fully emerged from the depths of Melenkurion Skyweir.
There must be something—
Rubbing the blood from her lip with the back of her hand, she tightened the grip of her heels on Hyn’s flanks; mutely asked the mare to approach the remains of First Woodhelven. But as Hyn began to walk, Galt called sharply. “Linden Avery!”
He rode a short way off to her right, guarding the company from the south. When she jerked a look at him, he announced, “The Fall’s course has been altered. It turns toward us, compelled by some power which we do not recognize. And it moves swiftly. If it does not veer aside, it will soon be upon us.”
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