In her exhaustion, she believed that if she put her task down to rest or sleep, she might give her enemies the time they needed to achieve the Earth’s end.
Finally she had obtained five red threads nearly as long as her hand. That, she decided, would have to suffice. Cloth. A needle. Thread. Now she lacked only a method of attaching thread to her twig.
While she groped for possibilities, she picked up the flask of springwine and drank. For a moment, she blinked rapidly, trying to moisten eyes that felt as barren as Gallows Howe. Then she took her sharpened twig and broke it in half.
The wood snapped unevenly, leaving small splits in the blunt end of her needle.
On her knees, she approached the Mahdoubt.
“Be at peace, lady,” the Insequent said softly. “There is no need for haste.”
Linden hardly heard her. The world had become cloth and thread, a wooden needle and the hanging edge of the Mahdoubt’s robe. When she was near enough to work, Linden laid her few threads out on a stone and examined the woman’s gown until she located a place where her patch could be made to fit. Still kneeling, and guided only by her memories of Jeremiah, she took one fragile thread, wedged it gently into a split at the end of her needle, and began sewing.
As she worked, she held her breath in an effort to steady her weariness.
Her needle did not pierce the fabric easily. And when it passed through her scrap of flannel and the edge of the gown, it made a hole much too large for her thread. But she knotted the thread as well as she could with her sore fingers, then forced her twig through the material a second time.
While she laboured, she felt the Mahdoubt touch her head. The older woman stroked Linden’s hair, comforting her with caresses. Then, softly, the Mahdoubt began to chant.
Her voice was low, as if she were reciting a litany to herself. Nevertheless her tone-or the words of her chant-or Linden’s flagrant fatigue-cast a trance like an enchantment, causing the world to shrink further. Garroting Deep ceased to impinge on Linden’s senses: the raw teeth of winter and the kindly flames of the cookfire lost their significance: darkness and stars were reduced to a vague brume that condensed and swirled, empty of meaning. Only Linden’s hands and the Mahdoubt’s gown held any light, any purpose. And only the Mahdoubt’s chant enabled Linden to continue sewing.
“A simple charm will master time,
A cantrip clean and cold as snow.
It melts upon the brow of thought,
As plain as death, and so as fraught,
Leaving its implications’ rime,
For understanding makes it so.
“The secret of its spell is trust.
It does not change or undergo
The transformations which it wreaks-
The end in silence which it seeks
But stands forever as it must,
For cause and sequence make it so.
“Such knowing is the sap of life
And death, the rich, ripe joy and woe
Ascending in vitality
To feed the wealth of life’s wide tree
Regardless of its own long strife,
For plain acceptance makes it so.
This simple truth must order time:
It simply is, and all minds know
The way of it, the how, the why:
They must forever live and die
In rhythm, for the metered rhyme
Of growth and passing makes it so.
“The silent mind does not protest
The ending of its days, or go
To loss in grief and futile pain,
But rather knows the healing gain
Of time’s eternity at rest.
The cause of sequence makes it so.”
Linden did not understand-and neither knew nor cared that she did not. While she worked, she set all other considerations aside. With her abused fingers and her blurring vision, she concentrated solely and entirely on completing her gratitude; her homage.
But when she came to the end of her thread, and the scrap of her shirt was loosely stitched to the Mahdoubt’s robe-when the older woman removed her hand, ceasing her chant-Linden thought that she heard a familiar voice shout with relief and gladness. “Ringthane! The Ringthane has returned!”
At the same time, she seemed to feel sunrise on her back and smell spring in the air. She appeared to kneel on dewy grass at the Mahdoubt’s feet with the sound of rushing water in her ears and the Staff of Law as black as a raven’s wing beside her.
And she heard other voices as well. They, too, were known to her, and dear. They may have been nickering.
As she toppled to the grass, she fell out of her ensorcelled trance. She had a chance to think, Revelstone. The plateau.
The Mahdoubt had restored her to her proper time and place.
Then exhaustion claimed her, and she was gone.
Chapter Two: In the Care of the Mahdoubt
Linden awoke slowly, climbing with effort and reluctance through the exhaustion of millennia. The years that she had bypassed or slipped between seemed to multiply her natural age; and her attempts to open her eyes, confirm the substance of her surroundings, felt hampered by caducity. She did not know where she was. She had told herself that she had reached the plateau above Revelstone in her proper time. She had believed that, trusted it; and slept. But the surface on which she lay was not fresh grass in springtime. Linen rather than soiled garments covered her nakedness, and her feet were bare. The light beyond her eyelids was too dim to be morning.
And she was diminished, truncated, in some fashion that she could not identify.
Yet she was warm, comfortably nestled. The unremitting clench of winter had released her. Her bed supported her softly. Like her eyes, her mouth and throat were too dry for ease, but those small discomforts were the normal consequences of unconsciousness. They did not hamper her.
For a moment like an instant of panic in a dream, quickly forgotten, she imagined that she had been taken to a hospital; that paramedics had rushed her, sirens wailing, to a place of urgent care. Had the bullet missed her heart? But the deeper levels of her mind knew the truth.
Gradually she recognised how she had been reduced.
Her skin felt nothing except the tactile solace of linen and softness and warm weight. She smelled nothing except the faint tang of wood smoke and the precious scent of cleanliness; heard nothing except the subtle effort of her own breathing. None of her senses extended beyond the confines of her body.
She did not know where she was, or how, or why-she hardly knew who-because her health-sense was gone. She had grown accustomed to its insights. Its absence diminished her.
Nonetheless she was paradoxically comforted by the realisation that Kevin’s Dirt had regained its hold. Now she could be certain that the Mahdoubt had brought her near to her rightful time.
In any case, her benevolent rescuer would not have stranded her earlier than she belonged. Then she would still have posed a threat to the integrity of the Arch. Nor had the Mahdoubt greatly overshot the day of Linden’s disappearance in rain from the upland plateau. She seemed to recall that she had heard Bhapa’s voice announcing her presence. If that were true, then she had also heard Manethrall Mahrtiir and Cord Pahni answer Bhapa’s call.
Surely they would not have awaited her return indefinitely? Not while their choices were constrained by the Masters-and the Demondim. At some point, they would have left Revelstone to rejoin their people, or to seek out a defence against the Land’s foes.
Linden had not been absent long enough to exhaust her friends’ hopes. And she had felt spring in the air—
When she was sure that the Mahdoubt had delivered her to the proper season in the proper year, a few of her numberless fears faded. At last, she allowed herself to remember why she was here.
Jeremiah. The croyel. Roger Covenant. Purpose and urgency.
Heavy with sleep, she raised her hands to confirm that Covenant’s ring still hung from its chain around her neck.
Then she lifted them higher to rub her face. But she was not yet ready to sit up. She needed a moment to acknowledge that she had done Thomas Covenant the shameful injustice of permitting herself to be misled by his son.
She should have known better. Her dead love had earned more than her loyalty: he had earned her faith. Recalling the long tally of her mistakes, she was grieved that she let Roger tarnish her memories of the man who had twice defeated Lord Foul for the Land’s sake.
Grieved and angered.
Jeremiah’s presence had accomplished Roger’s intentions perfectly: it had distorted her judgment, leaving her vulnerable.
No more, she vowed. Not again. She had fallen in with the Despiser’s machinations once. She would not repeat that mistake.
Instead she meant to exact a price for Jeremiah’s torment.
But she was getting ahead of herself. Her night with the Mahdoubt in Garroting Deep had taught her-or retaught her-an important lesson. One step at a time. Just one. First she needed to absorb the details of her present situation. And she had to retrieve her Staff so that she could cast off the pall of Kevin’s Dirt. She would determine other actions later, after her true strength was restored.
Blinking against the smear of nightmares and regret, she looked around.
Strange, she thought. She was in a small room which she knew well enough, although it seemed vaguely unreal, dislocated by the passage of too much time; too much cold and desperation, battle and loss. She lay under blankets in a narrow bed. A pillow cradled her head. A shuttered window in the smooth stone wall above her admitted a dull grey light that could have been dawn or dusk. A doorway in the opposite wall past the foot of the bed held a soft illumination, yellow and flickering, which suggested lamps or a fire. Near her head, a second doorway led to a bathroom.
The chamber appeared to be the same one in which she had spent two nights before Roger and the croyel had translated her out of her time. She remembered it as though she had visited it in dreams rather than in life.
Yet she was here. As if to demonstrate the continuity of her existence, the Staff of Law leaned like a shaft of midnight against the wall at the head of the bed. And in a chair at its foot sat the Mahdoubt, watching Linden with a smile on her lips and gloaming in her mismatched eyes.
When Linden raised her head, the Mahdoubt left her chair, moved into the next room, and returned with an oil lamp and a clay goblet. The little flame, soothing in spite of its unsteadiness, accentuated her orange eye while it dimmed her blue one. The lurid patchwork of her robe blurred into a more harmonious mélange.
“Forbear speech, lady,” she murmured as she approached the bed. “Your slumber has been long and long, and you awaken to confusion and diminishment. Here is water fresh from the eldritch wealth of Glimmermere.” She offered the goblet to Linden. “Has its virtue declined somewhat? Assuredly. Yet much of its healing lingers.
“Drink, lady,” the Mahdoubt urged. “Then you may speak, and be restored.”
But Linden needed no encouragement. As soon as she caught sight of the goblet, she became conscious of an acute thirst. Propping herself up on one elbow, she accepted the goblet and drained it eagerly.
In the absence of any health-sense, she could not gauge how much of the water’s potency had been lost. Nevertheless it was bliss to her mouth and throat, balm to her thirst. And it awakened her more fully. A numinous tingling sharpened her senses, reminding her of a more fundamental discernment.
At once, she dropped the goblet on the bed, sat up, and reached for the Staff.
As soon as she closed her hands on the necessary warmth of the wood, and read with her fingers the deft precision of the Forestal’s runes, she felt the return of a more complete life. In the space between her heartbeats, the stone of the chamber ceased to be blind granite, inert and unresponsive: it became a vital and breathing aspect of Lord’s Keep. She recognised warmth and fire in the hearth of the larger room beyond her bedroom; smelled water poised to flow in the bathroom. Every inch of her skin and scalp became aware of its cleanliness. And the comfortable ease of the Mahdoubt’s aura washed over her like a baptism.
Hugging the Staff to her bare breasts, Linden retrieved the goblet and handed it back to the older woman, mutely asking for more of Glimmermere’s benison.
With a nod of approval, the Mahdoubt complied. When she returned from the sitting room this time, however, she brought a large wooden pitcher as well as the replenished goblet. The goblet she gave to Linden: the pitcher she placed on the floor beside the bed, where Linden could reach it easily. Then she retreated to her chair.
Until Linden had emptied the goblet again, she did not remember that she was naked.
Instinctively self-conscious, although she knew that she had no reason to be, she pulled up the sheet to cover herself. With a grimace of embarrassment, she found her voice at last.
“Who bathed me?”
Now the Mahdoubt grinned broadly. “The lady’s questions are endless. And some may be answered. Aye, assuredly, for there can be no peril in them.
“Lady, you and the Mahdoubt were chanced upon by Ramen beside the falls of Glimmermere. Their Manethrall himself bore you hither, and here-with pleasure the Mahdoubt proclaims it-you have slumbered for two days and a night. Was such rest needful? Beyond all doubt it was. But when she discerned the depth of your slumbers, she saw that other care was needful as well.
“It was the wish of all who have claimed your friendship, the flattering
Stonedownor youth among them, and also he who was once a Master, to stand in vigil at your side. Assuredly. Are you not worthy of their attendance? Yet the Mahdoubt dismissed them, permitting only the Ramen girl to remain. Together she and the girl bathed you. Your raiment as well they cleansed and in part mended, though the marks of fecundity and long grass remain-as they must. Oh, assuredly.
“When these small services had been accomplished, the Mahdoubt dismissed the girl also. The Mahdoubt is aged,” she explained lugubriously, in apparent playfulness, “and finds only brief ease in the accompaniment of the young. They remind her of much that she has left behind.” She sighed, but her tone held no regret. “Therefore the Mahdoubt has watched over you alone, taking satisfaction in your rest.”
The older woman’s gentle voice filled the room with a more ordinary and humane solace than the relief of urgent thirst, the Earthpower in Glimmermere’s waters, the recovery of percipience, the stubborn protectiveness of Revelstone, or the confirmed strictures of the Staff. Listening, Linden found that she could accept the sound and relax somewhat, despite the hard clench of her heart.
She wanted to see her friends. But the Mahdoubt’s reply implied that Liand, Stave, Anele, and the three Ramen were well. Indeed, it seemed to indicate that they had not been harmed by the violence surrounding Linden’s disappearance, or threatened by the siege of the Demondim. And if Linden’s resolve remained as unmistakable as a fist, her utter extremity had passed, sloughed off by sleep and the Mahdoubt’s astonishing succour. She could afford to take her steps one at a time-and to take them slowly.
“When you washed my clothes,” she asked, holding images of Jeremiah’s plight at bay, “did you find a piece of red metal?” She could not recall what she had done with her son’s ruined racecar; his only reminder of her love. “It would have looked unfamiliar, but you could tell that it was twisted out of shape.”
The older woman nodded. “Aye, lady.” Her expression became unexpectedly grave, as though she grasped the significance of the racecar. “It lies beneath your pillow.”
Reaching under her pillow, Linden drew out the crumpled toy. Her fingers recognised it before she looked at it. It had been warmed while she slept, yet the croyel’s touch lingered in it, palpable and malign; and for an instant, she could not understand why she did not weep. But of course she knew why: all of her tears had been fused into the igneous rock of her purpose.
Closing the car in her fingers, she met the Mahdoubt’s sympathetic gaze. “My friend,” s
he said, trying to soften her voice so that she would not sound angry. “I don’t know how to thank you. I can’t even imagine how to begin. I don’t understand how you helped me, or how you even knew that I needed help. And I certainly don’t understand why you went to all of that trouble. But you saved me when everything that I could have hoped for was gone.” Ever since we got you away from your present, there haven’t been any possible outcomes that don’t give us exactly what we want. “Now I hope that someday I’ll be worthy of you.”
She was not one of the Land’s great heroes. Her many inadequacies had almost given Lord Foul his ultimate victory. But the Mahdoubt had done more than restore her to her proper time: the Insequent had given her a new opportunity to fight for her son.
Linden did not mean to waste it.
“Pssht, lady,” replied the Mahdoubt. “Are your thanks pleasing to the Mahdoubt? Assuredly. Yet they are sufficient-nay, more than sufficient. Already you have surpassed her own hopes. And you have enabled her to gaze more deeply into the peril of these times. That which she has seen teaches her that she is not yet done with service.
“Lady,” she went on briskly. “one of those who is named the Humbled has discerned your awakening. Summons have been sent to your companions. Assuredly they will gather in haste, clamouring to attend upon you.” The woman smiled with evident affection. “Ere their coming, the Mahdoubt must depart, for she will not submit to their queries. Yet she is cognisant of your need for knowledge which none here possess. Perchance some few of your questions may now be sated. If there is aught that the Mahdoubt may reveal to you, she urges you to speak of it without qualm.”
Linden sat up straighter. She had not expected the Mahdoubt’s offer. And her mind was still clogged by long sleep as well as by the croyel’s cruel spoor on Jeremiah’s toy. Half reflexively, she called up a small tongue of flame from the Staff to lick away the disturbing residue in the metal. Then she scrambled to catch up with her circumstances.
Fatal Revenant t3cotc-2 Page 47