The One Tree
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The One Tree (The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Book 2) is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
A Del Rey eBook Edition
Copyright © 1983 by Stephen R. Donaldson
All Rights Reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Originally published in Hardcover in 1983 by Del Rey, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Del Rey and the Del Rey colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-307-81921-5
www.delreybooks.com
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
What Has Gone Before
PART I: Risk
1: Starfare’s Gem
2: Black Mood
3: Relapse
4: The Nicor of the Deep
5: Father’s Child
6: The Questsimoon
7: Elemesnedene
8: The Elohimfest
9: The Gift of the Forestal
PART II: Betrayal
10: Escape from Elohim
11: A Warning of Serpents
12: Sea-Harm
13: Bhrathairain Harbor
14: The Sandhold
15: “Don’t touch me”
16: The Gaddhi’s Punishment
17: Charade’s End
18: Surrender
PART III: Loss
19: The Thaumaturge
20: Fire in Bhrathairealm
21: Mother’s Child
22: “Also love in the world”
23: Withdrawal from Service
24: The Isle
25: The Arrival of the Quest
26: Fruition
27: The Long Grief
Glossary
Dedication
Other Books by This Author
What Has Gone Before
The Wounded Land, Book One of The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, describes the return of Thomas Covenant to the Land—a realm of magic and peril where, in the past, he fought a bitter battle against sin and madness, and prevailed. Using the power of wild magic, he overcame Lord Foul the Despiser, the Land’s ancient enemy, thus winning peace for the Land and integrity for himself.
Ten years have passed for Covenant, years that represent many centuries in the life of the Land; Lord Foul has regained his strength. Confident that he will succeed in his efforts to gain possession of Covenant’s white gold ring—the wild magic—Lord Foul summons Covenant to the Land. Covenant finds himself on Kevin’s Watch, where once before Foul prophesied that Covenant would destroy the world. Now that prophecy is reaffirmed, but in a new and terrible way.
Accompanied by Linden Avery, a doctor who was unwittingly drawn to the Land with him, Covenant descends to the old village of Mithil Stonedown, where he first encounters the heinous force that the Despiser has unleashed: the Sunbane. The Sunbane is a corruption of the Law of Nature; it afflicts the Land with rain, drought, fertility, and pestilence in mad succession. It has already slain the old forests; as it intensifies it threatens to destroy every form of life. The people of the Land are driven to bloody sacrificial rites to appease the Sunbane for their own survival.
Seeing the extremity of their plight, Covenant begins a quest for an understanding of the Sunbane, and for a way to heal the Land. Guided by Sunder, a man from Mithil Stonedown, he and Linden fare northward toward Revelstone, where lives the Clave, the lore-masters who most clearly comprehend and use the Sunbane. But the travelers are pursued by Ravers, Lord Foul’s ancient servants, whose purpose is to afflict Covenant with a strange venom that will eventually drive him mad with power.
Surviving the perils of the Sunbane and the attacks of venom, Covenant, Linden, and Sunder continue northward. As they near Andelain, a once-beautiful region in the center of the Land, they encounter another village, Crystal Stonedown, in which a woman named Hollian is being threatened by the Clave because of her power to foresee the Sunbane. The travelers rescue her, and she joins them on their quest.
She informs Covenant that Andelain, while still beautiful, has become a place of horror. Dismayed by this desecration, Covenant enters Andelain alone to confront the evil therein. He learns that Andelain is not a place of evil: rather, it has become a place of power where the Dead gather around a Forestal who defends the trees. Covenant soon meets this Forestal, who was once a man named Hile Troy, and several of his former friends—the Lords Mhoram and Elena, the Bloodguard Bannor, and the Giant Saltheart Foamfollower. The Forestal and the Dead give Covenant gifts of obscure knowledge and advice; and Foamfollower offers Covenant the companionship of a strange ebony creature named Vain, who was created by the ur-viles of the Demondim, and whose purpose is hidden.
With Vain behind him, Covenant seeks to rejoin his companions, who, in his absence, have been captured by the Clave. His search for them nearly costs him his life, first in the desperate village of Stonemight Woodhelven, then among the Sunbane victims of During Stonedown. However, with the aid of the Waynhim, he at last wins his way to Revelstone. There he meets Gibbon, the leader of the Clave, and learns that his friends have been imprisoned so that their blood can be used to manipulate the Sunbane.
Desperate to free his friends and to gain knowledge of Lord Foul’s atrocity, Covenant submits to a soothtell, a ritual of blood in which much of the truth is revealed. His visions show him two crucial facts: that the source of the Sunbane lies in the destruction of the Staff of Law, a powerful tool that formerly supported the natural order; and that the Clave actually serves Lord Foul through the actions of the Raver that controls Gibbon.
Unleashing the wild magic, Covenant frees his friends from Revelstone; he then resolves to find the One Tree, from which the original Staff of Law was made, so that he can fashion a new one to use against the Sunbane.
In this purpose he is joined by Brinn, Cail, Ceer, and Hergrom: Haruchai, members of the race that spawned the Bloodguard. With Linden, Sunder, Hollian, and Vain, Covenant turns eastward toward the sea, hoping there to find the Giants who name themselves the Search. One of them, Cable Seadreamer, has had an Earth-Sight vision of the Sunbane, and they have come to the Land to combat the peril. Guiding the Search to Seareach and Coercri, the former home of the Giants in the Land, Covenant uses his knowledge of their ancestors to persuade them to commit their Giantship to the service of his quest for the One Tree.
Before his departure from the Land, Covenant performs a great act of absolution for the Dead of Coercri, the former Giants who were damned by the manner of their death at the hands of a Raver. He then sends Sunder and Hollian back to the Land, hoping they will be able to inspire the villages to resist the Clave, and prepares himself to begin the next stage of his quest.
Here begins THE ONE TREE, Book Two of The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.
“You are mine”
PART I: Risk
ONE: Starfare’s Gem
Linden Avery walked beside Covenant down through the ways of Coercri. Below them, the stone Giantship, Starfare’s Gem, came gliding toward the sole intact levee at the foot of the ancient city; but she paid no heed to it Earlier she had witnessed the way the dromond rode the wind like a boon—at once massive and delicate, full-sailed and precise—a vessel of hope for Covenant’s quest, and for her own. As she and the Unbeliever, with Brinn, Cail, and then Vain behind them, descended toward the headrock and piers of The Grieve, she c
ould have studied that craft with pleasure. Its vitality offered gladness to her senses.
But Covenant had just sent the two Stonedownors, Sunder and Hollian, back toward the Upper Land in the hope that they would be able to muster resistance among the villages against the depredations of the Clave. And that hope was founded on the fact that he had given them Loric’s krill to use against the Sunbane. Covenant needed that blade, both as a weapon to take the place of the wild magic which destroyed peace and as a defense against the mystery of Vain, the Demondim-spawn. Yet this morning he had given the krill away. When Linden had asked him for an explanation, he had replied, I’m already too dangerous.
Dangerous. The word resonated for her. In ways which none but she could perceive, he was sick with power. His native illness, his leprosy, was quiescent, even though he had lost or surrendered most of the self-protective disciplines which kept it slumberous. But in its place grew the venom that a Raver and the Sunbane had afflicted upon him. That moral poison was latent at present, but it crouched in him like a predator, awaiting its time to spring. To her sight, it underlay the hue of his skin as if it had blackened the marrow of his bones. With his venom and his white ring, he was the most dangerous man she had ever known.
She desired that danger in him. It denned for her the quality of strength which had originally attracted her to him on Haven Farm. He had smiled for Joan when he had sold his life for hers; and that smile had revealed more of his strange potency, his capacity to outwrestle fate itself, than any threat or violence could have. The caamora of release he had given to the Dead of The Grieve had shown the lengths to which he was able to go in the name of his complex guilts and passions. He was a paradox, and Linden ached to emulate him.
For all his leprosy and venom, his self-judgment and rage, he was an affirmation—an assertion of life and a commitment to the Land, a statement of himself in opposition to anything the Despiser could do. And what was she? What had she done with her whole life except flee from her past? All her severity, all her drive toward medical effectiveness against death, had been negative from the start—a rejection of her own mortal heritage rather than an approval of the beliefs she nominally served. She was like the Land under the tyranny of the Clave and the Sunbane—a place ruled by fear and bloodshed rather than love.
Covenant’s example had taught her this about herself. Even when she had not understood why he was so attractive to her, she had followed him instinctively. And now she knew that she wanted to be like him. She wanted to be a danger to the forces which impelled people to their deaths.
She studied him as they walked, trying to imprint the gaunt, prophetic lines of his visage, the strictness of his mouth and the wild tangle of his beard, upon her own resolve. He emanated a strait anticipation that she shared.
Like him, she looked forward to the prospect of a voyage of hope in the company of Giants. Although she had spent only a few days with Grimmand Honninscrave, Cable Seadreamer, Pitchwife, and the First of the Search, she already comprehended the pang of love which entered Covenant’s voice whenever he spoke of the Giants he had known. But she also possessed a private eagerness, an anticipation of her own.
Almost from the moment when her health-sense had awakened, it had been a source of pain and dismay for her. Her first acute perception had been of the ill of Nassic’s murder. And that sight had launched a seemingly endless sequence of Ravers and Sunbane which had driven her to the very edges of survival. The continuous onslaught of palpable evil—moral and physical disease which she would never be able to cure—Had filled her with ineffectuality, demonstrating her unworth at every touch and glance. And then she had fallen into the hands of the Clave, into the power of Gibbon-Raver. The prophecy which he had uttered against her, the sabulous atrocity which he had radiated into her, had crammed every corner of her soul with a loathing and rejection indistinguishable from self-abhorrence. She had sworn that she would never again open the doors of her senses to any outward appeal.
But she had not kept that vow. The obverse of her sharp vulnerability was a peculiar and necessary usefulness. The same percipience which so exposed her to dismay had also enabled her to provide for her own recovery from Courser-poison and broken bones. That capacity had touched her medical instincts deeply, giving a validation to her identity which she had thought lost when she had been translated out of the world she understood. In addition, she had been able to serve her companions by helping them against the murderous ill of the lurker of the Sarangrave.
And then the company had escaped Sarangrave Flat into Seareach, where the Sunbane did not reign. Surrounded by natural health, by fall weather and color as pristine as the beginning of life, and accompanied by Giants—especially by Pitchwife, whose irrepressible humor seemed a balm for every darkness—she had felt her ankle heal under the eldritch influence of diamondraught. She had tasted the tangible loveliness of the world, had experienced keenly the gift Covenant had given to the Dead of The Grieve. She had begun to know in the most visceral way that her health-sense was accessible to good as well as to evil—and that perhaps she could exercise some choice over the doom which Gibbon had foretold for her.
That was her hope. Perhaps in that way if in no other she would be able to transform her life.
The old man whose life she had saved on Haven Farm had said, Be true. There is also love in the world. For the first time, those words did not fill her with dread.
She hardly looked away from Covenant as they descended the Giant-wrought stairs. He appeared equal to anything. But she was also aware of other things. The clear morning. The salt-rimed emptiness of Coercri. The intransigent black peril of Vain. And at her back, the Haruchai. The way they paced the stone belied their characteristic dispassion. They seemed almost avid to explore the unknown Earth with Covenant and the Giants. Linden concentrated on these details as if they formed the texture of the new life she desired.
However, as the companions moved out into the direct sunlight on the base of the city, where the First, Seadreamer, and Pitchwife waited with Ceer and Hergrom, Linden’s gaze leaped outward as if it were drawn by a lodestone; and she saw Starfare’s Gem easing its way into the levee.
The Giantship was a craft to amaze her heart. It rose above her, dominating the sky as her sight rushed to take it in. While its Master, Grimmand Honninscrave, shouted orders from the wheeldeck which stood high over the vessel’s heel, and Giants swarmed its rigging to furl the canvas and secure the lines, it coasted into its berth with deft accuracy. The skill of its crew and the cunning of its construction defied the massive tan-and-moire granite of which it was made. Seen from nearby, the sheer weight of the dromond’s seamless sides and masts disguised the swiftness of its shape, the long sweep of the decks, the jaunty angle of the prow, the just balance of the spars. But when her perceptions adjusted to the scale of the ship, she could see that it was apt for Giants. Their size attained a proper dimension among the shrouds. And the moire of the stone sides rose from the water like flames of granite eagerness.
That stone surprised Linden. Instinctively she had questioned the nature of the Giantship, believing that granite would be too brittle to withstand the stress of the seas. But as her vision sprang into the ship, she saw her error. This granite had the slight but necessary flexibility of bone. Its vitality went beyond the limitations of stone.
And that vitality shone through the dromond’s crew. They were Giants; but on their ship they were more than that. They were the articulation and service of a brave and breathing organism, the hands and laughter of a life which exalted them. Together the stone and the Giants gave Starfare’s Gem the look of a vessel which contended against the powerful seas simply because no other test could match its native exultation.
Its three masts, each rising high enough to carry three sails, aspired like cedars over the wheeldeck, where Honninscrave stood. He lolled slightly with the faint unevenness of the Sea as if he had been born with combers underfoot, salt in his beard, mastery in every glance of
his cavernous eyes. His shout in answer to Pitchwife’s hail echoed off the face of Coercri, making The Grieve resound with welcome for the first time in many centuries. Then the sunlight and the ship blurred before Linden as sudden tears filled her eyes as if she had never seen joy before.
After a moment, she blinked her sight clear and looked again at Covenant. Tautness had twisted his face into a grin like a contortion; but the spirit behind that grimace was clear to her. He was looking at his means to achieve his quest for the One Tree, for the survival of the Land. And more than that: he was looking at Giants, the kindred of Saltheart Foamfollower, whom he had loved. She did not need him to explain the desire and fear which caused his grin to look so much like a snarl. His former victory over Lord Foul had been cleansed of Despite by the personal anodyne of Foamfollower’s laughter. And the cost of that victory had been the Giant’s life. Covenant now regarded the Giants of Starfare’s Gem with yearning and memory: he feared he would bring them to Foamfollower’s fate.
That also Linden understood. Like his obduracy, her own stubbornness had been born in loss and guilt. She knew what it meant to distrust the consequences of her desires.
But the arrival of the Giantship demanded her attention. Noise bubbled out of the vessel like a froth of gaiety. Hawsers were thrown to Pitchwife and Seadreamer, who snubbed them taut to the long-unused belaying-posts of the pier. Starfare’s Gem rubbed its shoulders against the sides of the levee, settled itself at rest. And as soon as the dromond had been secured, the Master and his crew of two score Giants swung down ropes and ladders, bounding to the piers.
There they saluted the First with affection, hugged Seadreamer, shouted their pleasure at Pitchwife. The First returned their respects gravely: with her iron hair and her broadsword, she held their familiarity at a distance. But Pitchwife expressed enough mirth to compensate for Seadreamer’s mute resignation; and shortly the Giants began to roil forward to look at the city of the Unhomed, their ancient lost kindred. Linden found herself surrounded by weathered, brawny men and women twice her height—sailors built like oaks, and yet as full of movement and wonder as saplings. All of them were plainly dressed in the habiliments of their work—in sarks of mail formed of interlocking stone discs and heavy leather leggings—but nothing else about them was drab. They were colorful in language and exuberance and salt humor. With a swirl of activity, they restored life to The Grieve.