This was Gallows Howe, the ancient slaying place of the Forestall. Here, according to the legends of the Land, Caerroil Wildwood and his brethren had held their assizes in the long-past ages when the One Forest still struggled for survival. Here the Ravers who had come within the Forestall’ grasp had been executed.
Now moksha Fleshharrower hung from the gibbet. Black fury congested his face, his swollen tongue protruded like contempt between his teeth, and his eyes stared emptily. A rictus of hate strained and stretched all his muscles. His dying frenzy had been so extravagant that many of his blood vessels had ruptured, staining his skin with dark hemorrhages.
As Lord Mhoram gazed upward through the thickening dusk, he felt suddenly tired and thirsty. Several moments passed before he noticed that Caerroil Wildwood was nearby. The Forestal stood to one side of the hill, singing quietly, and his eyes shone with a red and silver light.
At Mhoram’s side, Warmark Troy stirred as if he were awakening, and asked dimly, “What is it? What do you see?”
Mhoram had to swallow several times before he could find his voice. “It is Fleshharrower. The Forestal has slain him.”
A sharp intensity crossed Troy’s face, as if he were straining to see. Then he smiled. “Thank God.”
“It is a worthy bargain,” Caerroil Wildwood sang. “I know that I cannot slay the spirit of a Raver. But it is a great satisfaction to kill the flesh. He is garroted.” His eyes flared redly for a moment, then faded toward silver again. “Therefore do not think that I have rescinded my word. Your people are unharmed. The presence of so many faithless mortals disturbed the trees. To shorten their discomfort, I have sent your people out of Garroting Deep to the north. But because of the bargain, and the price yet to be paid, I have brought you here. Behold the retribution of the Forest.”
Something in his high clear voice made Mhoram shudder. But he remembered himself enough to ask, “What has become of the Raver’s Stone?”
“It was a great evil,” the Forestal hummed severely. “I have destroyed it.”
Quietly Lord Mhoram nodded. “That is well.” Then he tried to focus his attention on the matter of Caerroil Wildwood’s price. He wanted to argue that Troy should not be held to the bargain; the Warmark had not understood what was being asked of him. But while Mhoram was still searching for words, Terrel distracted him. Silently the Bloodguard pointed away upriver.
The night was almost complete; only open starlight and the glow of Caerroil Wildwood’s eyes illumined Gallows Howe. But when the Lord followed Terrel’s indication, he saw two different lights. Far in the distance, Rivenrock’s fiery holocaust was visible. The violence there seemed to be approaching its climacteric. The fires spouted furiously, and dark thunder rolled over the Deep as if great cliffs were cracking. The other light was much closer. A small, grave, white gleam shone through the trees between Mhoram and the river. As he looked at it, it moved out of sight beyond the Howe.
Someone was traveling through Garroting Deep along the Black River.
An intuition clutched Lord Mhoram, and at once he found he was afraid. Glimpses and visions which he had forgotten during the past days, returned to him. Quickly he turned to the Forestal. “Who comes? Have you made other bargains?”
“If I have,” sang the Forestal, “they are no concern of yours. But these two pass on sufferance. They have not spoken to me. I allow them because the light they bear presents no peril to the trees—and because they hold a power which I must respect. I am bound by the Law of creation.”
“Melenkurion!” Mhoram breathed. “Creator preserve us!” Catching hold of Troy’s arm, he started up the bald hill. His companions hastened after him. He passed the gibbet, gained the crest of the Howe, and looked down beyond it at the river.
Two men climbed the hill toward him from the riverbank. One of them held a shining stone in his right hand, and supported his comrade with his left arm. They moved painfully, as if they ascended against a weight of barrenness. When they were near the hilltop, in full view of all Mhoram’s company, they stopped.
Slowly Bannor held up the orcrest so that it lighted the crest of the Howe. With a nod, he acknowledged the Lords.
When Thomas Covenant realized that all the people on the hill were watching him, he pushed away from Bannor’s support, stood on his own. The exertion cost him a sharp effort. As he stood, he wavered unsteadily. In the orcrest light, his forehead gleamed atrociously. His eyes held a sightless stare—a stare without object, and yet of such intensity that his eyes appeared to be crossed, as if he were so conscious of his own duplicities that he could not see singly. His hands clenched each other against his chest. But then a fierce blast from Rivenrock struck him, and he almost lost his balance. He was forced to reach his halfhand toward Bannor. The movement bared his left fist.
On his wedding finger, the argent ring throbbed hotly.
PART III — The Blood of the Earth
TWENTY-ONE: Lena’s Daughter
Troy had called Thomas Covenant’s Unbelief a bluff. But Covenant was not playing a mental game. He was a leper. He was fighting for his life.
Unbelief was his only defense against the Land, his only way to control the intensity, the potential suicide, of his response to the Land. He felt that he had lost every other form of self-protection. And without self-protection he would end up like the old man he had met in the leprosarium—crippled and fetid beyond all endurance. Even madness would be preferable. If he went mad, he would at least be insulated from knowing what was happening to him, blind and deaf and numb to the vulturine disease that gnawed his flesh.
Yet as he rode westward away from Revelwood with High Lord Elena, Amok, and the two Bloodguard, in quest of Kevin Landwaster’s Seventh Ward, he knew that he was changing. By fits and starts, his ground shifted under him; some potent, subtle Earthpower altered his personal terrain. Unstable footing shrugged him toward a precipice. And he felt helpless to do anything about it.
The most threatening aspect of his immediate situation was Elena. Her nameless inner force, her ancestry, and her strange irrefusability both disturbed and attracted him. As they left the Valley of Two Rivers, he was already cursing himself for accepting her invitation. And yet she had the power to sway him. She tangled his emotions, and pulled unexpected strands of assent out of the knot.
This was not like his other acquiescences. When Lord Mhoram had asked him to go with the Warward, he had agreed because he completely lacked alternatives. He urgently needed to keep moving, keep searching for an escape. No similar reasoning vindicated him when the High Lord had asked him to accompany her. He felt that he was riding away from the crux of his dilemma, the battle against Lord Foul—evading it like a coward. But in the moment of decision he had not even considered refusing. And he sensed that she could draw him farther. Hopelessly without one jot or tittle of belief to his name, he could be made to follow her, even if she went to attack the Despiser himself. Her beauty, her physical presence, her treatment of him, ate away portions of his armor, exposing his vulnerable flesh.
Traveling through the crisp autumn of Trothgard, he watched her alertly, timorously.
High and proud on the back of Myrha, her Ranyhyn, she looked like a crowned vestal, somehow both powerful and fragile—as if she could have shattered his bones with a glance, and yet would have fallen from her seat at the touch of a single hurled handful of mud. She daunted him.
When Amok appeared beside her as if concretized abruptly out of blank air, she turned to speak with him. They exchanged greetings, and bantered pleasantly like old friends while Revelwood fell into the distance behind them. Amok’s reticence on the subject of his Ward did not prevent him from gay prolixity in other matters. Soon he was singing and talking happily as if his sole function were to entertain the High Lord.
As Amok whiled away the morning, Covenant gazed over the countryside around him.
The party of the quest rode easily up out of the lowlands of Trothgard. They traveled a few points south of west
ward, roughly paralleling the course of the Rill River toward the Westron Mountains. The western edge of Trothgard, still sixty or sixty-five leagues away, was at least three thousand feet higher than the Valley of Two Rivers, and the whole region slowly climbed toward the mountains. Already the High Lord’s party moved into the gradual up-rise. Covenant could feel their relaxed ascent as they rode through woodlands anademed in autumn, ablaze with orange, yellow, gold, red leaf-flames, and over lush grassy hillsides, where the scars of Stricken Stone’s ancient wars had been effaced by thick heather and timothy like healthy new flesh over the wounds, green with healing.
He was barely able to sense the last hints of Trothgard’s convalescence. Under the mantling growth of grass and trees, all the injuries of Kevin’s last war had not been undone. From time to time, the riders passed near festering barren patches which still refused all repair, and some of the hills seemed to lie awkwardly, like broken bones imperfectly set. But the Lords had labored to good effect. The air of Trothgard was tangy, animate, vital. Very few of the trees showed that their roots ran down into once-desecrated soil. The new Council of Lords had found a worthy way to spend their lives.
Because of what it had suffered, Trothgard touched Covenant’s heart. He found that he liked it, trusted it. At times as the day passed into afternoon, he wished that he was not going anywhere. He wanted to roam Trothgard—destinationless, preferably alone—without any thought of Wards or rings or wars. He would have welcomed the rest.
Amok seemed a fit guide for such sojourns. The bearer of the Seventh Ward moved with a sprightly, boyish stride which disguised the fact that the pace he set was not a lazy one. And his good spirits bubbled irrepressibly. He sang long songs which he claimed to have learned from the faery Elohim— songs so alien that Covenant could distinguish neither words nor sentences, and yet so curiously suggestive, so like moonlight in a forest, that they half entranced him. And Amok told intimate tales of the stars and heavens, describing merrily the sky dance as if he had pranced in it himself. His happy voice complemented the clear, keen evening air and the sunset conflagration of the trees, interwove his listeners like an incantation, a mesmerism.
Yet in the twilight of Trothgard, he disappeared suddenly, gestured himself out of visibility, leaving the High Lords’ party alone.
Covenant was startled out of his reverie. “Where—?”
“Amok will return,” answered Elena. In the gloaming, he could not tell if she were looking at him or through him or into him or in spite of him. “He has only left us for the night. Come, ur-Lord,” she said as she dropped lightly down from Myrha’s back. “Let us rest.”
Covenant followed her example, released his mount to Bannor’s care. Myrha and the other two Ranyhyn galloped away, stretching their legs after a day’s walking. Then Morin went to the Rill for water while Elena began to make camp. She produced a small urn of graveling, and’ used the fire-stones to cook a frugal meal for herself and Covenant. Her face followed the motion of her hands, but her vision’s strange otherness was far distant, as if in the earthy light she read of events on the opposite edge of the Land.
Covenant watched her; in the performance of even the simplest chores she fascinated him. But as he studied her lithe form, her sure movements, her bifurcated gaze, he was trying to regain a grip on himself, trying to recover some sense of where he stood with her. She was a mystery to him. Out of all the strong and knowledgeable people of the Land, she had chosen him to accompany her. He had raped her mother—and still she had chosen him. In Glimmermere she had kissed— The memory made his heart hurt. She had chosen him. But not out of anger or desire for retribution—not for any reason that Trell would have approved. He could see in her smiles, hear in her voice, feel in her ambience that she intended him no harm. Then why? From what secret forgetfulness or passion did her desire for his company spring? He needed to know. And yet he was half afraid of the answer.
After supper, when he sat drinking his ration of springwine across the pot of graveling from Elena, he mustered his courage to question her. Both Bloodguard had withdrawn from the campsite, and he was relieved that he did not have to contend with them. Rubbing his fingers through his beard, remembering the peril of physical sensations, he began by asking her if she had learned anything from Amok.
She shook her head unconcernedly, and her hair haloed her head in the graveling light. “We are surely several days from the location of the Seventh Ward. There will be time enough for the questioning of Amok.”
He accepted this, but it did not meet his need. Tightening his hold on himself, he asked her why she had chosen him.
She gazed at him or through him for several moments before she replied. “Thomas Covenant, you know that I did not choose you. No Lord of Revelstone chose you. Drool Rockworm performed your first summoning, and he was guided by the Despiser. In that way, we are your victims, just as you are his. It may be as Lord Mhoram believes—perhaps the Land’s Creator also chose. Or perhaps the dead Lords—perhaps High Lord Kevin himself wields some influence from beyond his lost grave. But I made no choice.” Then her tone changed, and she went on, “Yet had I chosen—”
Covenant interrupted her. “ ‘That isn’t what I meant. I know why this is happening to me. It’s because I’m a leper. A normal person would just laugh— No, what I meant is, why did you ask me to come with you—looking for the Seventh Ward? Surely there were other people you could have chosen.”
Gently she returned, “I do not understand this disease which causes you to be a—leper. You describe a world in which the innocent are tormented. Why are such things done? Why are they permitted?”
“Things aren’t so different here. Or what did you think it was that happened to Kevin? But you’re changing the subject. I want to know why you picked me.” He winced at the memory of Troy’s chagrin when the High Lord had announced her choice.
“Very well, ur-Lord,” she said with a tone of reluctance. “If this question must be answered, I will answer it. There are many reasons for my choice. Will you hear them?”
“Go ahead.”
“Ah, Unbeliever. At times I think that Warmark Troy is not so blind. The truth—you evade the truth. But I will give you my reasons. First, I prepare for the chances of the future. If at the last you should come to desire the use of your white gold, with the Staff of Law I am better able to aid you than any other. I do not know the wild magic’s secret—but there is no more discerning tool than the Staff. And if at the last you should turn against the Land, with the Staff I will be able to resist you. We possess nothing else which can hope to stand against the power of white gold.
“But I seek other goals also. You are no warrior—the Warward will meet great peril, where only power and skill in combat may hope to preserve life. I do not wish to risk your death. You must be given time to find your own reply to yourself. And for myself I seek companionship. Neither Warmark Troy nor Lord Mhoram can be spared from the war. Do you desire more explanation?”
He sensed the incompleteness of her response, and forced himself to pursue it despite his fear. With a grimace of distaste for the pervasive irrectitude of his conduct in the Land, he said deliberately, “Companionship? After all I’ve done. You’re remarkably tolerant.”
“I am not tolerant. I do not make choices without consulting my own heart.”
For a moment, he faced squarely the implications of what she said. It was what he had both wanted and feared to hear. But then a complex unwillingness, composed of sympathy and dread and self-judgment, deflected him. It made his voice rough as he said, “You’re breaking Trell’s heart. And your mother’s.”
Her face stiffened. “Do you accuse me of Trell’s pain?”
“I don’t know. He would be following us if he had any hope left. Now he knows for sure that you’re not even thinking about punishing me.”
He stopped, but the sight of the pain he had given her made him speak again, rush to answer replies, counteraccusations, that she had not uttered. “A
s for your mother—I’ve got no right to talk. I don’t mean about what I did to her. That’s something I can at least understand. I was in such—penury—and she seemed so rich.
“No, I mean about the Ranyhyn—those Ranyhyn that went to Mithil Stonedown every year. I made a bargain with them. I was trying to find some solution—some way to keep myself from going completely insane. And they hated me. They were just like the Land—they were big and powerful and superior—and they loathed me.” He rasped that word loathed, as if he were echoing, Leper outcast unclean! “But they reared to me—a hundred of them. They were driven—
“So I made a bargain with them. I promised that I wouldn’t ride—wouldn’t force one of them to carry me. And I made them promise—I was trying to find some way to keep all that size and power and health and fidelity from driving me crazy. I made them promise to answer if I ever called them. And I made them promise to visit your mother.”
“Their promise remains.” She said this as if it gave her a deep pride.
He sighed. “That’s what Rue said. But that’s not the point. Do you see? I was trying to give her something, make it up to her somehow. But that doesn’t work. When you’ve hurt someone that badly, you can’t go around giving them gifts. That’s arrogant and cruel.” His mouth twisted at the bitter taste of what he had done. “I was really just trying to make myself feel better.
“Anyway, it didn’t work. Foul can pervert anything. By the time I got to the end of the Quest for the Staff of Law, things were so bad that no bargain could have saved me.”
Abruptly he ran out of words. He wanted to tell Elena that he did not accuse her, could not accuse her—and at the same time a part of him did accuse her. That part of him felt that Lena’s pain deserved more loyalty.
Thomas Covenant 02: The Illearth War Page 42