Thomas Covenant 01: Lord Foul's Bane

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  “You must fight and change this orientation. You’re intelligent creatures—each of you has a brain. Use it. Use it to recognize your danger. Use it to train yourself to stay alive.”

  Then he woke up alone in his bed drenched with sweat, eyes staring, lips taut with whimpers that tried to plead their way between his clenched teeth. Dream after dream, week after week, the pattern played itself out. Day after day, he had to lash himself with anger to make himself leave the ineffectual sanctuary of his cell.

  But his fundamental decision held. He met patients who had been to the leprosarium several times before—haunted recidivists who could not satisfy the essential demand of their torment, the requirement that they cling to life without desiring any of the recompense which gave life value. Their cyclic degeneration taught him to see that his nightmare contained the raw materials for survival. Night after night, it battered him against the brutal and irremediable law of leprosy; blow by blow, it showed him that an entire devotion to that law was his only defense against suppuration and gnawing rot and blindness. In his fifth and sixth months at the leprosarium, he practiced his VSE and other drills with manic diligence. He stared at the blank antiseptic walls of his cell as if to hypnotize himself with them. In the back of his mind, he counted the hours between doses of his medication. And whenever he slipped, missed a beat of his defensive rhythm, he excoriated himself with curses.

  In seven months, the doctors were convinced that his diligence was not a passing phase. They were reasonably sure that the progress of his illness had been arrested. They sent him home.

  As he returned to his house on Haven Farm in late summer, he thought that he was prepared for everything. He had braced himself for the absence of any communication from Joan, the dismayed revulsions of his former friends and associates—though these assaults still afflicted him with a vertiginous nausea of rage and self-disgust. The sight of Joan’s and Roger’s belongings in the house, and the desertion of the stables where Joan had formerly kept her horses, stung his sore heart like a corrosive—but he had already set his heels against the pull of such pains.

  Yet he was not prepared, not for everything. The next shock surpassed his readiness. After he had double-and triple-checked to be sure he had received no mail from Joan, after he had spoken on the phone with the lawyer who handled his business—he had heard the woman’s discomfort throbbing across the metallic connection—he went to his but in the woods and sat down to read what he had written on his new book.

  Its blind poverty left him aghast. To call it ridiculously naive would have been a compliment. He could hardly believe that he was responsible for such supercilious trash.

  That night, he reread his first novel, the best-seller. Then, moving with extreme caution, he built a fire in his hearth and burned both the novel and the new manuscript. Fire! he thought. Purgation. If I do not write another word, I will at least rid my life of these lies. Imagination! How could I have been so complacent? And as he watched the pages crumble into gray ash, he threw in with them all thought of further writing. For the first time, he understood part of what the doctors had been saying; he needed to crush out his imagination. He could not afford to have an imagination, a faculty which could envision Joan, joy, health. If he tormented himself with unattainable desires, he would cripple his grasp on the law which enabled him to survive. His imagination could kill him, lead or seduce or trick him into suicide: seeing all the things he could not have would make him despair.

  When the fire went out, he ground the ashes underfoot as if to make their consummation irrevocable.

  The next morning, he set about organizing his life.

  First, he found his old straight razor. Its long, stainless-steel blade gleamed like a leer in the fluorescent light of his bathroom; but he stropped it deliberately, lathered his face, braced his timorous bones against the sink, and set the edge to his throat. It felt like a cold line of fire across his jugular, a keen threat of blood and gangrene and reactivated leprosy. If his half-unfingered hand slipped or twitched, the consequences might be extreme. But he took the risk consciously to discipline himself, enforce his recognition of the raw terms of his survival, mortify his recalcitrance. He instituted shaving with that blade as a personal ritual, a daily confrontation with his condition.

  For the same reason, he began carrying around a sharp penknife. Whenever he felt his discipline faltering, felt threatened by memories or hopes or love, he took out the knife and tested its edge on his wrist.

  Then, after he had shaved, he worked on his house. He neatened it, rearranged the furniture to minimize the danger of protruding corners, hard edges, hidden obstacles; he eliminated everything which could trip, bruise, or deflect him, so that even in the dark his rooms would be navigable, safe; he made his house as much like his cell in the leprosarium as possible. Anything that was hazardous, he threw into the guest room; and when he was done he locked the guest room and threw away the key.

  After that he went to his hut and locked it also. Then he pulled its fuses, so that there would be no risk of fire in the old wiring.

  Finally he washed the sweat off his hands. He washed them grimly, obsessively; he could not help himself—the physical impression of uncleanness was too strong.

  Leper outcast unclean.

  He spent the autumn stumbling around the rims of madness. Dark violence throbbed in him like a picar thrust between his ribs, goading him aimlessly. He felt an insatiable need for sleep, but could not heed it because his dreams had changed to nightmares of gnawing; despite his numbness, he seemed to feel himself being eaten away. And wakefulness confronted him with a vicious and irreparable paradox. Without the support or encouragement of other people, he did not believe he could endure the burden of his struggle against horror and death; yet that horror and death explained, made comprehensible, almost vindicated the rejection which denied him support or encouragement. His struggle arose from the same passions which produced his outcasting. He hated what would happen to him if he failed to fight. He hated himself for having to fight such a winless and interminable war. But he could not hate the people who made his moral solitude so absolute. They only shared his own fear.

  In the dizzy round of his dilemma, the only response which steadied him was vitriol. He clung to his bitter anger as to an anchor of sanity; he needed fury in order to survive, to keep his grip like a stranglehold on life. Some days he went from sun to sun without any rest from rage.

  But in time even that passion began to falter. His outcasting was part of his law; it was an irreducible fact, as totally real and compulsory as gravity and pestilence and numbness. If he failed to crush himself to fit the mold of his facts, he would fail to survive.

  When he looked out over the Farm, the trees which edged his property along the highway seemed so far away that nothing could bridge the gap.

  The contradiction had no answer. It made his fingers twitch helplessly, so that he almost cut himself shaving. Without passion he could not fight—yet all his passions rebounded against him. As the autumn passed, he cast fewer and fewer curses at the impossibilities imprisoning him. He prowled through the woods behind Haven Farm—a tall, lean man with haggard eyes, a mechanical stride, and two fingers gone from his right hand. Every cluttered trail, sharp rock, steep slope reminded him that he was keeping himself alive with caution, that he had only to let his surveillance slip to go quietly unmourned and painless out of his troubles.

  It gave him nothing but an addition of sorrow to touch the bark of a tree and feel nothing. He saw clearly the end that waited for him; his heart would become as affectless as his body, and then he would be lost for good and all.

  Nevertheless, he was filled with a sudden sense of focus, of crystallization, as if he had identified an enemy, when he learned that someone had paid his electric bill for him. The unexpected gift made him abruptly aware of what was happening. The townspeople were not only shunning him, they were actively cutting off every excuse he might have to go among them.
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br />   When he first understood his danger, his immediate reaction was to throw open a window and shout into the winter, “Go ahead! By hell, I don’t need you!” But the issue was not simple enough to be blown away by bravado. As winter scattered into an early March spring, he became convinced that he needed to take some kind of action. He was a person, human like any other; he was kept alive by a personal heart. He did not mean to stand by and approve this amputation.

  So when his next phone bill came, he gathered his courage, shaved painstakingly, dressed himself in clothes with tough fabrics, laced his feet snugly into sturdy boots, and began the two-mile walk into town to pay his bill in person.

  That walk brought him to the door of the Bell Telephone Company with trepidation hanging around his head like a dank cloud. He stood in front of the gilt-lettered door for a time, thinking,

  These are the pale deaths—

  and wondering about laughter. Then he collected himself, pulled open the door like the gust of a gale, and stalked up to the girl at the counter as if she had challenged him to single combat.

  He put his hands palms down on the counter to steady them. Ferocity sprang across his teeth for an instant. He said, “My name is Thomas Covenant.”

  The girl was trimly dressed, and she held her arms crossed under her breasts, supporting them so that they showed to their best advantage. He forced himself to look up at her face. She was staring blankly past him. While he searched her for some tremor of revulsion, she glanced at him and asked, “Yes?”

  “I want to pay my bill,” he said, thinking, She doesn’t know, she hasn’t heard.

  “Certainly, sir,” she answered. “What is your number?”

  He told her, and she moved languidly into another room to check her files.

  The suspense of her absence made his fear pound in his throat. He needed some way to distract himself, occupy his attention. Abruptly he reached into his pocket and brought out the sheet of paper the boy had given him. You’re supposed to read it. He smoothed it out on the counter and looked at it.

  The old printing said:

  A real man—real in all the ways that we recognize as real—finds himself suddenly abstracted from the world and deposited in a physical situation which could not possibly exist: sounds have aroma, smells have color and depth, sights have texture, touches have pitch and timbre. There he is informed by a disembodied voice that he has been brought to that place as a champion for his world. He must fight to the death in single combat against a champion from another world. If he is defeated, he will die, and his world—the real world—will be destroyed because it lacks the inner strength to survive.

  The man refuses to believe that what he is told is true. He asserts that he is either dreaming or hallucinating, and declines to be put in the false position of fighting to the death where no “real” danger exists. He is implacable in his determination to disbelieve his apparent situation, and does not defend himself when he is attacked by the champion of the other world.

  Question: is the man’s behavior courageous or cowardly? This is the fundamental question of ethics.

  Ethics! Covenant snorted to himself. Who the hell makes these things up?

  The next moment, the girl returned with a question in her face. “Thomas Covenant? Of Haven Farm? Sir, a deposit has been made on your account which covers everything for several months. Did you send us a large check recently?”

  Covenant staggered inwardly as if he had been struck, then caught himself on the counter, listing to the side like a reefed galleon. Unconsciously he crushed the paper in his fist. He felt light-headed, heard words echoing in his ears: Virtually all societies condemn, denounce, cast out—you cannot hope.

  He focused his attention on his cold feet and aching ankles while he fought to keep the violence at bay. With elaborate caution, he placed the crumpled sheet on the counter in front of the girl. Striving to sound conversational, he said, “It isn’t catching, you know. You won’t get it from me—there’s nothing to worry about. It isn’t catching. Except for children.”

  The girl blinked at him as if she were amazed by the vagueness of her thoughts.

  His shoulders hunched, strangling fury in his throat. He turned away with as much dignity as he could manage, and strode out into the sunlight, letting the door slam behind him. Hellfire! he swore to himself. Hellfire and bloody damnation.

  Giddy with rage, he looked up and down the street. He could see the whole ominous length of the town from where he stood. In the direction of Haven Farm, the small businesses stood close together like teeth poised on either side of the road. The sharp sunlight made him feel vulnerable and alone. He checked his hands quickly for scratches or abrasions, then hurried down the gauntlet, as he moved, his numb feet felt unsure on the sidewalk, as if the cement were slick with despair. He believed that he displayed courage by not breaking into a run.

  In a few moments the courthouse loomed ahead of him. On the sidewalk before it stood the old beggar. He had not moved. He was still staring at the sun, still muttering meaninglessly. His sign said, Beware, uselessly, like a warning that came too late.

  As Covenant approached, he was struck by how dispossessed the old man looked. Beggars and fanatics, holy men, prophets of the apocalypse did not belong on that street in that sunlight; the frowning, belittling eyes of the stone columns held no tolerance for such preterite exaltation. And the scant coins he had collected were not enough for even one meal. The sight gave Covenant an odd pang of compassion. Almost in spite of himself, he stopped in front of the old man.

  The beggar made no gesture, did not shift his contemplation of the sun; but his voice altered, and one clear word broke out of the formless hum:

  “Give.”

  The order seemed to be directed at Covenant personally. As if on command, his gaze dropped to the bowl again. But the demand, the effort of coercion, brought back his anger. I don’t owe you anything, he snapped silently.

  Before he could pull away, the old man spoke again.

  “I have warned you.”

  Unexpectedly the statement struck Covenant like an insight, an intuitive summary of all his experiences in the past year. Through his anger, his decision came immediately. With a twisted expression on his face, he fumbled for his wedding ring.

  He had never before removed his white gold wedding band; despite his divorce, and Joan’s unanswering silence, he had kept the ring on his finger. It was an icon of himself. It reminded him of where he had been and where he was—of promises made and broken, companionship lost, helplessness—and of his vestigial humanity. Now he tore it off his left hand and dropped it in the bowl. “That’s worth more than a few coins,” he said, and stamped away.

  “Wait.”

  The word carried such authority that Covenant stopped again. He stood still, husbanding his rage, until he felt the man’s hand on his arm. Then he turned and looked into pale blue eyes as blank as if they were still studying the secret fire of the sun. The old man was tall with power.

  A sudden insecurity, a sense of proximity to matters he did not understand, disturbed Covenant. But he pushed it away. “Don’t touch me. I’m a leper.”

  The vacant stare seemed to miss him completely, as if he did not exist or the eyes were blind; but the old man’s voice was clear and sure.

  “You are in perdition, my son.”

  Moistening his lips with his tongue, Covenant responded, “No, old man. This is normal—human beings are like this. Futile.” As if he were quoting a law of leprosy, he said to himself, Futility is the defining characteristic of life. “That’s what life is like. I just have less bric-a-brac cluttering up the facts than most people.”

  “So young—and already so bitter.”

  Covenant had not heard sympathy for a long time, and the sound of it affected him acutely. His anger retreated, leaving his throat tight and awkward. “Come on, old man,” he said. “We didn’t make the world. All we have to do is live in it. We’re all in the same boat—one way or an
other.”

  “Did we not?”

  But without waiting for an answer the beggar went back to humming his weird tune. He held Covenant there until he had reached a break in his song. Then a new quality came into his voice, an aggressive tone that took advantage of Covenant’s unexpected vulnerability.

  “Why not destroy yourself?”

  A sense of pressure expanded in Covenant’s chest, cramping his heart. The pale blue eyes were exerting some kind of peril over him. Anxiety tugged at him. He wanted to jerk away from the old face, go through his VSE, make sure that he was safe. But he could not; the blank gaze held him. Finally he said, “That’s too easy.”

  His reply met no opposition, but still his trepidation grew. Under the duress of the old man’s will, he stood on the precipice of his future and looked down at jagged, eager dangers—rough damnations multiplied below him. He recognized the various possible deaths of lepers. But the panorama steadied him. It was like a touchstone of familiarity in a fantastic situation; it put him back on known ground. He found that he could turn away from his fear to say, “Look, is there anything I can do for you? Food? A place to stay? You can have what I’ve got.”

  As if Covenant had said some crucial password, the old man’s eyes lost their perilous cast.

  “You have done too much. Gifts like this I return to the giver.”

  He extended his bowl toward Covenant.

  “Take back the ring. Be true. You need not fail.”

  Now the tone of command was gone. In its place, Covenant heard gentle supplication. He hesitated, wondering what this old man had to do with him. But he had to make some kind of response. He took the ring and replaced it on his left hand. Then he said, “Everybody fails. But I am going to survive—as long as I can.”

  The old man sagged, as if he had just shifted a load of prophecy or commandment onto Covenant’s shoulders. His voice sounded frail now.

  “That is as it may be.”

  Without another word, he turned and moved away. He leaned on his staff like an exhausted prophet, worn out with uttering visions. His staff rang curiously on the sidewalk, as if the wood were harder than cement.