The Power That Preserves t1cotc-3

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  “We will go.” Covenant felt the Giant’s gaze on him without meeting it. “Covenant-ur-Lord-there is no need for you to endure this descent. Close your eyes, and I will bear you as I did from Kevin’s Watch.”

  Covenant hardly heard himself answer, ”That was a long time ago.” Vertigo was beginning to reel in his head. “I’ve got to do this for myself. For a moment, he let slip his resistance and almost fell to his knees. As the suction tugged at his mind, he comprehended that he would have to go into it rather than away from it, that the only way to master vertigo was to find its centre. Somewhere in the centre of the spinning would be an eye, a core of stability. “Just go ahead-so you can catch me.” Only in the eye of the whirl could he find solid ground.

  Foamfollower regarded him dubiously, then started down to the edge of the cliff near the Fall. With Covenant limping in his wake, he went to the rim, glanced down to pick the best place for a descent, then lowered himself out of sight over the edge.

  Covenant stood for a moment teetering on the lip of Landsdrop. The Fall yawed abysmally from side to side; it beckoned to him like relief from delirium. It was such an easy answer. As his vertigo mounted, he did not see how he could refuse it.

  But its upsurge made his pulse hammer in his wounded forehead. He spun around that pain as if it were a pivot, and found that the seductive panic of the plunge was fading. The simple hope that vertigo had a firm centre seemed to make his hope come true. The whirl did not stop, but its hold on him receded, withdrew into the background. Slowly, the pounding in his forehead eased.

  He did not fall.

  He felt as weak as a starving penitent-hardly able to carry his own weight. But he knelt on the edge, lowered his legs over the rim. Clinging to the top of the cliff with his arms and stomach, he began to hunt blindly for footholds. Soon he was crawling backward down Landsdrop as if it were the precipice of his personal future.

  The descent took a long time, but it was not particularly difficult. Foamfollower protected him all the way down each stage of the broken cliff. And the steeper drops were moderated by enough ledges and cracks and hardy scrub brush to make that whole stretch of the cliff passable. The Giant had no trouble finding a route Covenant could manage, and Covenant eventually gained a measure of confidence, so that he was able to move with less help down the last stages to the foothills.

  When at last he reached the lower ground, he took his drained nerves straight to the pool at the foot of the Fall and dropped into the chill waters to wash away the accumulated sweat of his fear.

  While Covenant bathed, Foamfollower filled his water jug and drank deeply at the pool. This might be the last safe water they would find. Then the Giant set out the graveling for Covenant. As the Unbeliever dried himself, he asked Foamfollower how long their food supplies would last.

  The Giant grimaced. “Two days. Three or four, if we find aliantha a day or two into the Spoiled Plains. But we are far from Foul’ s Creche. Even if we were to run straight into Soulcrusher’s arms, we would have three or four foodless days within us before he made sustenance unnecessary.” Then he grinned. “But it is said that hunger teaches many things. My friend, a wealth of wisdom awaits us on this journey.”

  Covenant shivered. He had had some experience with hunger. And now the possibility of starvation lay ahead of him; his forehead had been reinjured; he would have to walk a long distance on bare feet. One by one the conditions of his return to his own life were being met. As he tightened the sash of his robe, he muttered sourly, “I heard Mhoram say once that wisdom is only skin-deep. Or something like that. Which means that lepers must be the wisest people in the world.”

  “Are they?” the Giant asked. “Are you wise, Unbeliever?”

  “Who knows? If I am-wisdom is overrated.”

  At this, Foamfollower’s grin broadened. “Perhaps it is-perhaps it is. My friend, we are the two wisest hearts in the Land-we who march thus weaponless and unredeemed into the very bosom of the Despiser. Verily, wisdom is like hunger. Perhaps it is a very fine thing-but who would willingly partake of it?”

  Despite the absence of the wind, the air was still wintry. Knuckles of ice clenched the rocky borders of the pool where the spray of the Fall had frozen, and Foamfollower’s breath plumed wetly in the humid air. Covenant needed to move to warm himself, keep up his courage. “It’s not fine,” he grated, half to himself. “But it’s useful. Come on.”

  Foamfollower repacked his graveling, then swung the sack onto his broad shoulder, and led Covenant away from Landsdrop along the river.

  Night stopped them when they had covered only three or four leagues. But by that time they had left behind the foothills and the last vestiges of the un-Spoiled flatland which had at one time, ages ago in the history of the Earth, stretched from the Southron Wastes north to the Sarangrave and Lifeswallower, the Great Swamp. They were down in the bosque of the Ruinwash.

  Grey, brittle, dead brush and trees — cottonwoods, junipers, once-beautiful tamarisks — stood up out of the dried mud on both sides of the stream, occupying ground which had once been part of the riverbed. But the Ruinwash had shrunk decades or centuries ago, leaving partially fertile mud on either side-mud in which a scattering of tough trees and brush had eked out a bare existence until Lord Foul’s preternatural winter had blasted them. As darkness soaked into the air as if it were oozing out of the ground, the trees became spectral shapes of forbidding which made the bosque almost impassable. Covenant resigned himself to camping there for the night, though the dried mud had an old, occluded reek, and the river made a slithering noise like an ambush in its course. He knew that he and Foamfollower would be safer if they travelled at night, but he was weary and did not believe the Giant could find his way in the cloud-locked dark.

  Later, however, he found that the river gave off a light like lambent verdigris; the whole surface of the water glowed dimly. This light came, not from the water, but from the hot eels which flicked back and forth across the current. They had a hungry aspect, and their jaws were rife with teeth. Yet they made it possible for him and Foamfollower to resume their journey.

  Even in the cynosural eel light, they did not go much farther. The destruction of the Staff had changed the balance of Lord Foul’s winter; without the wind to hold them, the massed energies of the clouds recoiled. In the deeper chill of darkness, they triggered rain out of the blind sky. Soon torrents fell through the damaged grasp of the clouds, crashed straight down onto the Lower Land as if the vaulting which held up the heavens had broken. Under those conditions, Foamfollower could not find his way. He and Covenant had no choice but to huddle together for warmth in the mud and try to sleep while they waited.

  With the coming of dawn, the rain stopped, and Covenant and Foamfollower went on along the Ruinwash in the blurred light of morning. During that day, they saw the last of the aliantha; as they penetrated into the Spoiled Plains, the mud became too dead for treasure-berries. The travellers kept themselves going on scant shares of their dwindling supplies. At night, the rains came again, soaking them until they seemed to have its dankness in the marrow of their bones.

  The next day, an eagle spotted them through a gap in the grey trees. It cycled twice close over their heads, then soared away, screaming in mockery like a voice from the dead, “Foamfollower! Kinabandoner!”

  “They’re after us,” said Covenant.

  The Giant spat violently. ” Yes. They will hunt us down.” He found a smooth stone the size of Covenant’s two fists and carried it with him to throw at the eagle if it returned.

  It did not come back that day, but the next-after another torrential downpour avalanched the Plains as if the cloud lid over the Land were a shattered sea-Lord Foul’s bird circled them twice, morning and afternoon. The first time, it taunted them until Foamfollower had hurled all the stones he could find nearby, then it slashed close to bark scornfully, “Kinabandoner! Groveller!”

  The second time, Foamfollower kept one stone hidden. He waited until the eagle
had swooped lower to jeer, then threw at it with deadly force. It survived by breaking the blow with its wings, but it flew limping away, barely able to stay aloft.

  “Make haste,” Foamfollower growled. “That ill bird has been guiding the pursuit toward us. It is not far off.”

  At the best pace Covenant could manage on his numb, battered feet, he pushed ahead through the bosque.

  They stayed under tree cover as much as possible to ward against spying birds. This caution slowed them somewhat, but the largest drag on their progress was Covenant’s weariness. His injury and the ordeal of the Colossus appeared to have drained some essential resilience out of him. He got little sleep in the cold wet nights, and he felt that he was slowly starving on his share of the food. In dogged silence he shambled along league after league as if his fear of the hunt were the only thing that kept him moving. And that evening, in the gloaming verdigris of the eel fire, he consumed the last of Foamfollower’s supplies.

  “Now what?” he muttered vaguely when he was done.

  “We must resign ourselves. There is no more.”

  Ah, hell! Covenant groaned to himself. He remembered vividly what had happened to him in the woods behind Haven Farm, when his self-imposed inanition had made him hysterical. The memory filled him with cold dread.

  In turn, that dread called up other memories-recollections of his ex-wife, Joan, and his son, Roger. He felt an urge to tell Foamfollower about them, as if they were spirits he could exorcise by simply saying the right thing about them to the right person. But before he could find the words, his thoughts were scattered by the first attack of the hunt.

  Without warning, a band of apelike creatures came crashing through the bosque from the south side of the Ruinwash. Voiceless, like the rush of a nightmare, they broke through the brittle wood and the eel light. They threw themselves from the low bank and heaved across the current toward their prey.

  Either they did not know their danger, or they had forgotten it. Without one shout or cry, they all vanished under a sudden, hot, seething of blue-green iridescence. None of them reappeared.

  At once, Covenant and Foamfollower started on their way again. While the crepuscular light lasted, they put as much distance as possible between themselves and the place of the attack.

  A short time later the rain began. It fell on them like the collapse of a mountain, made the whole night impenetrable. They were forced to stop. They hunched together like waifs under the scant, leafless shelter of a tree, trying to sleep and hoping that the hunt could not follow them in this weather.

  After a while, Covenant dozed. He was hovering near the true depths of sleep when Foamfollower shook him awake.

  “Listen!”

  Covenant could hear nothing but the uninterrupted smash of the rain.

  The Giant’s ears were keener. “The Ruinwash rises! There will be a flood.”

  Straggling like blind men, thrashing their way against unseen trees and brush, slipping through water that already reached above their ankles, they tried to climb out of the bosque toward higher ground. After a long struggle, they worked clear of the old riverbed. But the water continued to mount, and the terrain did not. Now beyond the rain, Covenant could hear the deeper roar of the flood; it seemed to tower above them in the night. He was stumbling knee-deep in muddy water, and could see no way to save himself.

  But Foamfollower dragged him onward. Some time later, they waded into an erosion gully. Its walls were slick, and the water poured down through it like flowing silt, but the Giant did not hesitate. He attached Covenant to him with a short clingor line and began to forge up the gully.

  Covenant clung to Foamfollower for a distance that seemed as long as leagues. But at last he could feel that they were climbing. The walls of the gully narrowed. Foamfollower used his hands to help him ascend.

  When they reached an open hillside where the flow of water hardly covered their feet, they stopped. Covenant sank exhausted into the mud. The rain faltered to an end, and he went numbly to sleep until another cold grey dawn smeared its way across the clouds from the east.

  At last he rubbed the caked fatigue out of his eyes and sat up. Foamfollower was gazing at him with amusement. “Ah, Covenant,” the Giant said, “we are a pair. You are so bedraggled and sober-And I fear my own appearance is not improved.” He struck a begrimed pose. “What is your opinion?”

  For a moment, Foamfollower looked as gay and carefree as a playing child. The sight gave Covenant a pang. How long had it been since he had heard the Giant laugh? “Wash your face,” he croaked with as much humour as he could manage. “You look ridiculous.”

  “You honour me,” Foamfollower returned. But he did not laugh. As his amusement faded, he turned away and splashed a little water on his face to clean it.

  Covenant followed his example, though he was too tired to feel dirty. He drank three swallows from the jug for breakfast, then pried himself unsteadily to his feet.

  In the distance, he could see a few treetops sticking out of the broad brown swath of the flood. No other signs remained visible to mark the bosque of the Ruinwash.

  Opposite the flood, in the direction he and Foamfollower would now have to take, lay a long ridge of hills. They piled in layers above him until they seemed almost as high as mountains, and their scarred sides looked as desolate as if their very roots had been dead for aeons.

  He groaned at the prospect. His worn flesh balked. But he had no choice; the lowlands of the Ruinwash were no longer passable.

  With nothing to sustain them but frugal rations of water, he and the Giant began to climb.

  The ascent was shallower than it had appeared. If Covenant had been well fed and healthy, he would not have suffered. But in his drained condition, he could hardly drag himself up the slopes. The festering wound on his forehead ached like a heavy burden attached to his skull, pulling him backward. The thick humid air seemed to clog his lungs. From time to time, he found himself lying among the stones and could not remember how he had lost his feet.

  Yet with Foamfollower’s help he kept going. Late that day, they crested the ridge of hills, started their descent.

  Since leaving the Ruinwash, they had seen no sign of pursuit.

  The next morning, after a night’s rain as ponderous and rancid as if the clouds themselves were stagnant, they moved down out of the hills. As Covenant’s gaunt flesh adjusted to hunger, he grew steadier-not stronger, but less febrile. He made the descent without mishap, and from the ridge he and Foamfollower travelled generally eastward out into the barren landscape.

  After a foodless and dreary noon, they came to an eerie wilderness of thorns. It occupied the bottom of a wide lowland; for nearly a league, dead thorn-trees with limbs like arms and grey barbs as hard as iron stood in their way. The whole bottom looked like a ruined orchard where sharp spikes and hooks had been grown for weapons; the thorns stood in crooked rows as if they had been planted there so that they could be tended and harvested. Here and there, gaps appeared in the rows, but from a distance Covenant could not see what caused them.

  Foamfollower did not want to cross the valley. Higher ground bordered the thorn wastes on both sides, and the barren trees offered no concealment; while they were down in the bottom, they could be easily seen. But again they had no choice. The wastes extended far to the north and south. They would need time to circumvent the thorns-time in which hunger could overcome them, pursuit overtake them.

  Muttering to himself, Foamfollower scanned all the terrain as far as he could see, searching for any sign of the hunt. Then he led Covenant down the last slope into the thorns.

  They found that the lowest branches of the trees were six or seven feet above the ground. Covenant could move erect along the crooked rows of trunks, but Foamfollower had to crouch or bend almost double to keep the barbs from ripping open his torso and head. He risked injury if he moved too quickly. As a result, their progress through the wastes was dangerously slow.

  Thick dust covered the ground unde
r their feet. All the rain of the past nights seemed to have left this valley untouched. The lifeless dirt faced the clouds as if years of torrents could never assuage the thirst of its ancient ruin. Choking billows rose up from the strides of the travellers, filled their lungs and stung their eyes-and plumed into the sky to mark their presence as clearly as smoke.

  Soon they came to one of the gaps in the thorns. To their surprise, they found that it was a mud pit. Damp clay bubbled in a small pool. In contrast to the dead dust all around it, it seemed to be seething with some kind of muddy life, but it was as cold as the winter air. Covenant shied away from it as if it were dangerous, and hurried on through the thorns as fast as Foamfollower could go.

  They were halfway to the eastern edge of the valley when they heard a hoarse shout of discovery in the distance behind them. Whirling, they saw two large bands of marauders spring out of different parts of the hills. The bands came together as they charged in among the thorn-trees, howling for the blood of their prey.

  Covenant and Foamfollower turned and fled.

  Covenant sprinted with the energy of fear. In the first surge of flight, he had room in his mind for nothing but the effort of running, the pumping of his legs and lungs. But shortly he realized that he was pulling away from Foamfollower. The Giant’s crouched stance cramped his speed; he could not use his long legs effectively without tearing his head off among the thorns. “Flee!” he shouted at Covenant. “I will hold them back!”

  “Forget it!” Covenant slowed to match the Giant’s pace. “We’re in this together.”

  “Flee!” Foamfollower repeated, flailing one arm urgently as if to hurl the Unbeliever ahead.

  Instead of answering, Covenant rejoined his friend. He heard the savage outcry of the pursuit as if it were clawing at his back, but he stayed with Foamfollower. He had already lost too many people who were important to him.

  Abruptly, Foamfollower lurched to a halt. “Go, I say! Stone and Sea!” He sounded furious. “Do you believe I can bear to see your purpose fail for my sake?”