The Runes of the Earth t3cotc-1

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Dear God! she thought in dismay and outrage. He’s threatening my son. Lord Foul meant harm to Jeremiah.

  Ignoring Sandy for the moment, she moved to kneel in front of Jeremiah. There she put her arms around him as if her mere embrace might ward him from the Despiser’s malice.

  Passively he accepted her hug without touching her, or turning his head, or focusing his eyes. She only knew that he noticed her on some level-that his nerves felt her presence if his mind did not-because he stopped rocking until she let him go.

  Although she had known him for ten years, and had been his adopted mother for eight, he still gave her only the subtlest of indications that he was aware of her existence.

  However, she had long ago accepted him as he was. Subtle indications were enough for her. She loved him intensely enough for both of them.

  “Linden?” Sandy repeated. “Have I done something wrong?”

  Linden closed her eyes, took a deep breath to steady herself. “I’m sorry,” she told Sandy. “I didn’t mean to scare you. There’s nothing wrong. You haven’t done anything. It’s just another of those feelings. When I saw all this”- she swallowed convulsively”- I panicked. I can’t explain it.”

  “I understand.” Sandy’s relief was evident. She loved Jeremiah: Linden did not doubt that. “Don’t worry about it.” Then she asked, “Is there anything I can do-?”

  Linden tried to put aside the shock of seeing Jeremiah’s construct, but it clung to her. Seeking reassurance, she opened her eyes and looked into his face.

  He gazed past or through her exactly as Joan did, blankly, without any shadow or flicker of cognisance. Yet the effect on Linden was entirely different. He was so much more active than Joan, demonstrated so much more capability, and was at times so much less compliant, that Linden often forgot this one resemblance between them.

  She had witnessed his growth since he was five, and had cared for him in every possible way since he was nearly seven, studying each increment of change over the years. She had brushed his teeth and washed his body, wiped his nose, bought him clothes, dressed and undressed him. She had seen him take on size and bulk until he was nearly as tall as she was, and weighed slightly more. She had watched his features shift from the starved and haunted shapelessness of the unregarded five-year-old who had placed his right hand in the bonfire at Lord Foul’s command to the lean definition of a teenager. His eyes had the muddy colour of erosion run-off. His first few whiskers marked his passive cheeks. Saliva moistened his open mouth. In spite of his blankness, he had the face of a boy on the verge of manhood, waiting for sentience to give it meaning.

  When Linden had satisfied herself that the eerie impulse that had inspired him to construct images of Mount Thunder and Revelstone had not caused him any discernible distress, she rose to her feet and turned to Sandy.

  Sandy Eastwall was a young woman, perhaps twenty-eight, still living with her parents and apparently content to do so. After high school she had trained as a practical nurse; but she had taken care of Jeremiah for seven years now, and exhibited no ambition to do anything else. Responsibility for one charge instead of many, and always the same charge, seemed to suit her emotional instincts and warm heart, as well as her natural complacence. Although she dated Sam Diadem’s son, she showed no particular impulse to get married. As far as Linden could tell, Sandy was comfortably prepared to tend Jeremiah for the rest of her life.

  That unlikely attitude was high on Linden’s list of reasons for gratitude.

  “If you don’t mind,” she asked, answering Sandy’s offer to help, “can you stay long enough to get his Lego put away? I have something I need to do.” Then she added, “You can leave the Tinker Toys. I like that castle. And it’s not in the way.”

  “Sure” Sandy responded with an uncomplicated smile. “I’ll be glad to.

  “Come, Jeremiah,” she said to the kneeling boy. “It’s time to put your Lego away. Let’s get started.”

  Crouching to the floor, she took one of the many cartons clustered at the side of the room and set it near Mount Thunder’s ankles. Then she detached a piece from the construct and placed it in the carton.

  That was all she had to do to trigger Jeremiah’s hidden awareness. At once, he left his knees and moved to squat beside the carton. With the same unhesitating meticulousness with which he built his constructs, he began to disassemble Mount Thunder, arranging the Lego in compact rows in their carton as he removed them.

  Linden had spent many hours watching him do such things. He never moved quickly, never appeared to feel any hurry or tension-and never paused for thought or doubt. She herself might have needed two or three hours to put away so much Lego-or to put them away with such precision-but he moved so efficiently, using his maimed hand as deftly as the whole one, that his Mount Thunder appeared to melt away before her eyes. He would probably be done in forty-five minutes.

  Because she needed to speak to him, hear his name in her mouth, she said, “Thank you, Jeremiah. You’re very good with Lego. I like everything you make with them. And I like the way you put them away when it’s time.”

  Then abruptly she turned and left the room so that Sandy would not see the sudden tears in her eyes, or notice the lump of love and fear in her throat.

  While Jeremiah took Mount Thunder apart, and Sandy resumed her knitting, Linden went upstairs to master her alarm.

  He’s threatening my son.

  She had tried to believe that there would be no danger unless the old man in the ochre robe appeared to warn her. But she no longer trusted his absence to mean that anyone was safe.

  Alone in her bedroom, she asked herself for the first time whether she should flee.

  She could do that, in spite of her responsibilities. The necessary arrangements would require nothing more than a few phone calls. She could pack and drive away in an hour or two; take Jeremiah out of harm’s reach. In fact, she could make her calls when she had driven far enough to avoid any conceivable peril.

  Lord Foul was threatening her son.

  Roger Covenant had no idea that Jeremiah existed. Nevertheless it could not be an accident that Jeremiah had created images of Mount Thunder and Revelstone on the same day that Roger had demanded his mother’s release.

  And if Linden was wrong? If Roger proved to be as harmless as Barton Lytton claimed? Why, then she could simply bring Jeremiah home again, with no damage done.

  Aching to protect her son, she gave serious consideration to the possibilities of flight.

  But the prospect shamed her. And she had learned the necessity of courage from the most stringent teachers. Love and beauty could not be preserved by panic or flight.

  The ruin of Jeremiah’s hand was in some sense her fault; and she did not believe that she could bear to see him hurt again. But he was not the only one who had been maimed that night. And Thomas Covenant himself had died for the same reason: because she had failed to intervene. When she had seen what was happening, she had been appalled by horror, stunned motionless. In dread she had simply watched while Covenant had smiled for Joan; while men and women and children had sacrificed their hands to the Despiser’s malice; while the barriers between realities had been torn asunder by blood and pain.

  Now she knew that that night’s evil could have been prevented. When she had finally broken free of her dismay and charged forward, toward the bonfire, Lord Foul’s hold on his victims had been disrupted. If she had acted sooner, that whole night’s carnage might have been averted. Even the Land might have been spared-

  If she fled now, no one would remain to stand between the Despiser and more victims.

  She did not mean to be ruled by her fears again. Not ever. No matter how severely Roger Covenant provoked her.

  Here, however, she faced a conundrum which she did not know how to untangle. To flee for Jeremiah’s sake? Or to remain for her own, and for Joan’s, and for the Land’s? Trapped by indecision, she found herself sitting on her bed with her hands over her face and Thomas Covenant
’s name on her lips, listening as if she were helpless for sounds of danger from downstairs.

  There were none. Occasionally the distant murmur of Sandy’s voice reached her. At intervals a car drove down the street. Erratic gusts of wind tugging past the eaves of the house suggested a storm brewing. She heard nothing to justify her gathering apprehension.

  Sighing, she told herself that in the morning she would make another attempt to enlist Lytton’s aid. Or perhaps Megan could sway him. For tonight she would watch over Jeremiah with all her vigilance, and let no harm near him.

  By now, he had probably finished with Mount Thunder and begun to separate the pieces of Revelstone. Nothing in his manner had suggested that Gravin Threndor and Lord’s Keep held any significance for him. As far as she could tell, his life remained exactly as it had always been, despite the Land’s strange intrusion into his lost mind.

  This was how he had spent his time for years: he put things together and took them apart. Indeed, he seemed incapable of any relationship except with physical objects which could be connected to each other. No human being impinged on his attention. He did not react to his name. If he was not involved in making one of his constructs, he simply knelt with his feet angled outward beneath him and rocked himself soothingly with his arms across his stomach. He walked only if he were raised to his feet and led by the hand. Even animals found no focus in his muddy gaze.

  Presented with Tinker Toys, however, with Lego, Lincoln Logs, or an Erector set, or any other form of non-mechanical object designed to be attached to or inserted into other non-mechanical objects, he became a wizard. The castle in the entryway, and the models of Revelstone and Mount Thunder in the living room, were only today’s examples of his talent. By the hundreds, by the thousands, obsessively, he devised structures of such elegance and imagination that they often made Linden hold her breath in wonder-and of such size that they sometimes filled the available space. Perhaps they would have expanded indefinitely if he had not run out of materials. And yet they always appeared complete when he did run out, as if somehow he had calculated exactly what could be done with the Lego or Tinker Toys at hand.

  Often Linden sat with him while he built his edifices. She had conceived a method of playing with him; of producing a personal reaction from his inattention toward her. She would take a piece-a block or connector-and place it somewhere in his construct. He would not look at her when she did so-but he would pause. If by his inarticulate standards she had placed the piece incorrectly, he would frown. Then he would rectify her mistake. But if by chance she had set the piece where it belonged, he would nod slightly before he continued.

  Such indications assured her that he was aware of her.

  Two years ago, guided by a flash of intuition, Linden had spoken to Sam Diadem about Jeremiah. Sam ran a small assembly-line business that produced wooden playthings for children, primarily rocking horses, marionettes, and various wooden puzzles in strange shapes which interlocked to form balls, pyramids, and the like. At her urging, Sam had discovered that if he left Jeremiah alone with a supply of ready parts, Jeremiah would quietly and steadily produce finished toys. He would not paint or package them, and never played with them. But they were always perfectly assembled.

  Now Jeremiah “worked” in Sam’s shop two mornings a week. His “pay” Linden spent faithfully on K’nex, or 3-D jigsaw puzzles of palaces, or more Lego and Tinker Toys.

  Some of the psychologists whom Linden had consulted called Jeremiah’s condition a “dissociative disorder.” Others spoke of “hysterical conversion reactions” and “somatoform disorders.” His symptoms resembled autism-specifically, he appeared to be an autistic savant-yet he could not be autistic. Autism was congenital, and beyond question Jeremiah’s condition had been induced by trauma. His natural mother had described him as “a normal boy” before the bonfire-whatever those words might mean in her deranged lexicon. Certainly none of the known therapies for autism had produced any change in him.

  Memories of that trauma still woke Linden at night, sweating, with cries which she had failed to utter locked in her throat.

  His natural mother was a woman named Marsha Jason. She had had three children, all adopted now by other parents-Hosea, Rebecca, and her youngest, Jeremiah, prophet of woe. She had chosen that name, apparently, because her husband had abandoned her during her last pregnancy.

  For the first few years of Jeremiah’s life, Marsha Jason had subsisted at the mercy of various welfare agencies. In one form or another, she had kept herself and her children alive through the charity of strangers. And then, when her self-pity and ineffectiveness had reached unendurable proportions, she had discovered the Community of Retribution.

  From that point onward, as she proclaimed afterward, she had had no control over anything that happened. She must have been brainwashed or drugged. She was a good mother: without brainwashing or drugs, she would never have sacrificed her dear children to the Community’s mad crusade against Thomas Covenant. Had she not been victimised of her own right hand at the same time? Surely she did not deserve to have her sons and daughter taken from her; placed in foster care?

  Yet she had not been able to deny that in the last weeks before Covenant’s murder-soon after Joan Covenant’s departure-she and her children, along with perhaps thirty other members of the Community of Retribution, had left the commune and made their way toward Haven Farm, supporting themselves by beggary when they could not gain donations by preaching. Entranced, perhaps, by some form of mass hysteria, they had snatched Joan from her ex-husband; had slaughtered a cow so that they could splash his home with blood. Then they had taken her into the woods behind Haven Farm and built a bonfire. When Covenant had at last appeared to redeem Joan, Mrs. Jason and her children had been the first to hold their right hands in the blaze, Hosea after his mother, then Rebecca, and then five-year-old Jeremiah.

  With years to study the question, Linden still could not explain how ordinary adults, much less their uncomprehending children, had been impelled to endure the pain long enough to burn the flesh from their bones. But the fact remained that Marsha Jason, Hosea, and Rebecca had done so. Jeremiah had been damaged almost as badly. And after them, more worshippers had followed.

  And in the bonfire, Lord Foul had emerged to claim Covenant’s life.

  Linden still too easily remembered the Despiser’s eyes as they had appeared in the bonfire, carious as fangs. She would never forget his figure forming in the deep heat of the blaze. Alive with fire and offered pain, he had stopped her life in her veins. And she had remained paralysed while the leader of his worshippers had set a knife to Joan’s throat, intending to sacrifice her if Covenant did not surrender himself.

  Then Covenant had retrieved Joan from her doom; and Linden had at last broken free of her immobility. She had rushed toward the bonfire, striving frantically to block the knife from his chest. But the worshipper with the knife had struck her senseless; and as she lost consciousness she had seen the blade pound into Covenant’s heart.

  A few hours or a lifetime later, in the dawn of a new day, Dr. Berenford found her where she lay beside Covenant’s corpse. Mrs. Jason had rousted him from his home, seeking treatment for herself and her children. He and Sheriff Lytton had discovered Joan asleep in her bed in Covenant’s house, all memory of the night’s events apparently gone. While Lytton had taken Joan to County Hospital, Julius had searched the woods behind Haven Farm until he located Linden and Covenant.

  Thus he had spared her any accusation that she had played some role in Covenant’s death. Legally, of course, she had not. Morally, she knew better.

  She had suffered acutely during the long months of that one night. Nevertheless she had gone into surgery as soon as Julius had driven her back into town. Together, they had spent interminable hours fighting to save as many flame-savaged hands as they could.

  For Hosea and Rebecca, Linden had been able to do little except amputate. With Jeremiah, however, she had met somewhat more success. Through
simple stubbornness as much as by skill, she had found a way to save half of his thumb and two of his fingers: the last two.

  They remained shorter than they should have been. Yet they were strong now: he could use them. To that extent, at least, she could forgive herself for what had happened to him.

  At the time, she had given no thought to other forms of restitution. The particular sense of responsibility which she had learned from Covenant and the Land had asserted itself slowly. After the initial crisis, she had occupied herself for months adjusting to her new life: to the county itself; and to her work at County Hospital. And then Julius had involved her in the complex efforts that had eventually led to the construction of Berenford Memorial Psychiatric Hospital, and to her appointment as its chief medical officer.

  Nearly two years passed before she recognised the residual ache in her heart for what it was: not grief over Covenant’s death, although that pang never lost its poignancy, but rather a hollow place left by the Land. Her parents had dedicated her to death, but she had transcended their legacy. Now she realised that her new convictions and passions required more of her. Her work with her patients suited her abilities; but it did not satisfy the woman who had sojourned with Giants, contended with Ravers, and opposed the Sunbane at Thomas Covenant’s side.

  She wanted to heal as well some of the harm which Lord Foul had done in her present world. And she needed someone to love.

  She had heard Pitchwife sing:

  My heart has rooms that sigh with dust

  And ashes in the hearth.

  They must be cleaned and blown away

  By daylight’s breath.

  She could not allow the hollow place within her to remain unfilled.

  Her own damaged childhood had taught her an intense empathy for children forced to pay the price of their parents’ folly; and before long she remembered Jeremiah Jason. She had already done him a little good. Perhaps she could do more.