The One Tree

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Linden wanted to cry out. Gibbon had touched her. She carried his evil engraved in every part of her body, would never be clean of it again. How could she bear a repetition of that touch?

  But Honninscrave’s question was just; and an answering anger enabled her to meet him. The ship was threatened: Covenant was threatened. And here at least she had a chance to show that she could be a danger to Lord Foul and his machinations, not only to her friends. Her failures with Joan, with Marid, with Gibbon had taught her to doubt herself. But she had not come this far, only to repeat the surrender of her parents. Tightly she replied, “I won’t go down there. But I’ll try to locate where it is.”

  Covenant released his pent breath as if her decision were a victory.

  The First and Honninscrave did not hesitate. Leaving the wheeldeck to the Storesmaster, they went down the stairs; and he sent a Giant hastening ahead of him to rouse the rest of the crew. Linden and Covenant followed more slowly. Brinn and Cail, Ceer and Hergrom formed a protective cordon around them as they moved forward to meet the Giants who came springing out of hatchways from their hammocks in Saltroamrest below the foredeck. Shortly every crewmember who could be spared from the care of the dromond was present and ready.

  Pitchwife and Seadreamer were there as well. But the First’s demeanor checked Pitchwife’s natural loquacity; and Seadreamer bore himself with an air of resignation.

  In a tone of constricted brevity, forcibly restraining his Giantish outrage at the slayer of the Unhomed, Honninscrave detailed the situation to his crew, described what had to be done. When he finished, the First added sternly, “It appears that this peril is directed toward Covenant Giantfriend and the Chosen. They must be preserved at any hazard. Forget not that he is the redeemer of our lost kindred and holds a power which must not fall to this Raver. And she is a physician of great skill and insight, whose purpose in this quest is yet to be revealed. Preserve them and rid the Search of this ill.”

  She might have said more. She was a Swordmain; her desire to strike blows in the name of the Unhomed was plain in her voice. But Pitchwife interposed lightly, “It is enough. Are we not Giants? We require no urging to defend our comrades.”

  “Then make haste,” she responded. “The scouring of Starfare’s Gem is no small matter.”

  Honninscrave promptly organized the Giants into groups of two and sent them below. Then he turned to Linden. “Now, Chosen.” The command came from him firmly, as if he were bred for emergencies. “Guide us.”

  She had been groping for a way to find the Raver, but had conceived no other method than to pace the ship, trying to track down the intruder’s presence. As severely as she could, she said, “Forget everything under the wheeldeck. My cabin’s down there. If it were that close, I would’ve known sooner.”

  Through one of the open hatches, the Anchormaster relayed this information to the search parties below.

  As the moon set behind Starfare’s Gem, Linden Avery began to walk the afterdeck.

  Working her way between the railings, she moved deliberately forward. At every step, she fought to overcome her distinctive resistance, struggled to open herself to the Raver’s ambience. Even through her shoes, her senses were alive to the stone of the dromond. The granite mapped itself under her: she could feel the Giants hunting below her until they descended beyond her range. But the evil remained hidden, vague and fatal.

  Soon the muscles along the backs of her legs began to cramp. Her nerves winced at each step. Gibbon had taught every inch of her body to dread Ravers. But she did not stop.

  Dawn came not long after moonset, though the time felt long to her; and the sun caught her halfway up the afterdeck, nearly level with the midmast. She was shivering with strain and could not be certain that she had not already passed over the Raver’s covert. When Ceer offered her a drink of water, she paused to accept it. But then she went on, knurling her concentration in both fists so that she would not falter.

  Covenant had seated himself in a coil of hawser as large as a bed on one side of Foodfendhall. Brinn and Hergrom stood poised near him. He was watching her with a heavy scowl, radiating his frustration and helplessness, his anger at the blindness of his senses.

  In fear that she would weaken, fail again, again, Linden increased her pace.

  Before she reached the housing, a sudden spasm in her legs knocked her to the deck.

  At once, Cail and Ceer caught her arms, lifted her erect.

  “Here,” she panted. A fire of revulsion burned through her knees into her hips. She could not straighten her legs. “Under here. Somewhere.”

  The Anchormaster shouted word down to the search parties.

  Honninscrave studied her with perplexity. “That seems a strange hiding,” he muttered. “From deck to keel below you lie only grainholds, foodlockers, waterchests. And all are full. Sevinhand”—he referred to the Anchormaster—“found pure water, wild maize, and much good fruit on the verges of the Great Swamp.”

  Linden could not look at him. She was thinking absurdly, The verges of the Great Swamp. Where all the pollution of Sarangrave Flat drained into the Sea.

  Gritting her teeth, she felt the darkness gather under her like a thunderhead. For a time, it lay fragmented in the depths of the ship—pieces of malice. Then it stirred. Thrumming like an assault through the granite, it began to swarm. The sunlight filled her eyes with recollections of bees, forcing her to duck her head, huddle into herself. Somewhere above her head, untended sails flapped limply. Starfare’s Gem had become still, braced for the onslaught of the Raver.

  It began to rise.

  Abruptly shouts of anger and surprise echoed from the underdecks. Fighting for breath, she gasped, “It’s coming!”

  The next instant, a dark gray tumult came flooding over the storm-sill out of Foodfendhall.

  Rats.

  Huge rats: rodents with sick yellow fangs and vicious eyes, hundreds of them. The Raver was in them. Their savagery filled the air with teeth.

  They poured straight toward Covenant.

  He staggered upright. At the same time, Brinn and Hergrom threw themselves between him and the attack. Ceer sped to their assistance.

  Leaping like cats, the rodents sprang for the Haruchai. Covenant’s defenders seemed to vanish under the gray wave.

  At once, Honninscrave and Seadreamer charged into the assault. Their feet drummed the deck as they kicked and stamped about them. Blood spattered in all directions.

  More Giants surged out of the housing in pursuit, pounded into the fray. Brinn and Ceer appeared amid the slashing moil, followed by Hergrom. With hands and feet, they chopped and kicked, crushing rats faster than Linden’s eyes could follow.

  Without warning, she felt a concatenation of intensity as Covenant’s power took fire within him. But his defenders were too close to him. He could not unleash the wild magic.

  Yet for a moment she thought he would be preserved. The Haruchai were dervish-wild, flinging rats away on all sides; the Giants trampled slaughter through the pack. The air became a scream which only she could hear—the fury of the Raver. In her fear for Covenant, she thought that she was rushing to his defense. But she had not moved, could not move. The simple proximity of the Raver overwhelmed her. It violated her volition, affirmed everything she had ever striven to deny about herself; and the contradiction held her. Only her vision swept forward as Covenant stumbled and fell, grappling frantically at his right leg.

  Then he rolled back to his feet, snapped erect with a rat writhing clenched in both hands. White fire gutted the beast before he pitched it overboard. Revulsion twisted his face.

  He seemed unaware of the blood which stained the shin of his pants.

  In the confusion of the struggle, no one noticed that all the winds had died.

  THREE: Relapse

  The Giantship went dark around Linden. The blood on Covenant’s pants became the blood of his knife-wound, the blood of her nightmare: it blotted out the world. She could taste the venom she ha
d sucked from his forearm after Marid had bitten him. A moral poison. Not just sick: evil. It tasted like the nauseous breath of the strange figure on Haven Farm who had told her to Be true.

  In spite of that man’s putrid halitus, she had saved his life when his heart had stopped. But she could not save Covenant. The darkness was complete, and she could not move.

  But then the Raver disappeared. Its presence burst like an invisible bubble; sunlight and vision rushed back over the ship. Covenant stood motionless near the rail, as distinct in her sight as if he wore a penumbra of fire. All the rats that could still move were scrabbling in his direction. But now they were driven by their fears, not by the Raver. Instead of trying to harm him, they ran headlong into the Sea.

  Linden had taken two steps toward him before her knees failed. The relief of the Raver’s flight turned her muscles to water. If Cail had not caught her, she would have fallen.

  As she started forward again, Covenant looked down at his leg, saw the blood.

  Everyone else was silent. The Giantship lay still as if it had been nailed to the water. The atmosphere seemed to sweat as realization whitened his features. His eyes widened; his lips fumbled denials; his hands pleaded at the empty air.

  Then she reached him. He stumbled backward, sat down on the coiled hawser. At once, she stooped to his leg, pulled his pants up to the knee.

  The rat-bite had torn a hunk out of his shin between the bones. It was not a large wound, though it bled copiously. For anyone else, the chief danger would have arisen from infection. Even without her bag, she could have treated that.

  But before she could act, Covenant’s whole frame sprang rigid. The force of the convulsion tore a curse from his corded throat. His legs scissored; the involuntary violence of his muscles knocked her away. Only Brinn’s celerity kept him from cracking his head open as he tumbled off the coil.

  Impossible that any venom could work so swiftly!

  Blood suffused his face as he struggled to breathe. Spasms threatened to rend the ligatures of his chest and abdomen. His heels hammered the deck. His beard seemed to bristle like an excrudescence of pain.

  Already his right forearm had begun to darken as if an artery were hemorrhaging.

  This was the way the venom affected him. Whether it was triggered by bee stings or spider bites, it focused on his forearm, where Marid’s fangs had first pierced his flesh. And every relapse multiplied the danger horrendously.

  “Hellfire!” His desperation sounded like fury. “Get back!”

  She felt the pressure rising in him, poison mounting toward power, but she did not obey. Around her, the Giants retreated instinctively, mystified by what they were seeing. But Brinn and Hergrom held Covenant’s shoulders and ankles, trying to restrain him. Cail touched Linden’s arm in warning. She ignored him.

  Frantically she threw her senses into Covenant, scrambled to catch up with the venom so that she might attempt to block it. Once before, she had striven to help him and had learned that the new dimension of her sensitivity worked both ways: it made her so vulnerable that she experienced his illness as if it were her own, as if she were personally diseased by the Sunbane; but it also enabled her to succor him, shore up his life with her own. Now she raced to enter him, fighting to dam the virulence of the poison. His sickness flooded coruscations of malice through her; but she permitted the violation. The pounding along his veins was on its way to his brain.

  She had to stop it. Without him, there would be no Staff of Law—no meaning for the quest; no hope for the Land; no escape for her from this mad world. His ill hurt her like a repetition of Gibbon-Raver’s defilement; but she did not halt, did not—

  She was already too late. Even with years of training in the use of her health-sense, she would have been no match for this poison. She lacked that power. Covenant tried to shout again. Then the wild magic went beyond all restraint.

  A blast of white fire sprang from his right fist. It shot crookedly into the sky like a howl of pain and rage and protest, rove the air as if he were hurling his extremity at the sun.

  The concussion flung Linden away like a bundle of rags. It knocked Brinn back against the railing. Several of the Giants staggered. Before the blast ended, it tore chunks from the roof of Foodfendhall and burned through two of the sails from bottom to top.

  It also caught Cail. But he contrived to land in a way which absorbed Linden’s fall. She was unhurt. Yet for a moment the sheer force of the detonation—the violence severing her from Covenant—stunned her. White fire and disease recoiled through her, blinding her senses. The entire Giantship seemed to whirl around her. She could not recover her balance, could not stifle the nausea flaming in her.

  But then her sight veered back into focus, and she found herself staring at Vain. Sometime during the confusion, the Demondim-spawn had left his position on the foredeck, come aft to watch. Now he stood gazing at Covenant with a ghoulish grin on his teeth, as if he were near the heart of his secret purpose. The iron bands on his right wrist and left ankle—the heels of the Staff of Law—gleamed dully against his black skin.

  Cail lifted Linden to her feet. He was saying, “You are acquainted with this ill. What must be done?”

  Her nerves were raw with power-burn, shrill with anguish. Flame flushed across her skin. She wrenched free of Cail’s grasp. Another spasm shook Covenant. His muscles tautened almost to the ripping point. His forearm was already black and swollen, fever-hot. Fire flickered on and off his ring. And every flicker struck at her exacerbated heart.

  She did not know what to do.

  No, that was not true. She knew. In the past, he had been brought back from this death by aliantha, by Hollian’s succor, by the roborant of the Waynhim. Perhaps diamondraught would also serve. But he was already in the grip of delirium. How could he be induced to drink the liquor?

  Brinn tried to approach Covenant. A white blast tore half the rigging from the midmast, compelling Brinn to retreat. Its force heated Linden’s cheeks like shame.

  All the Haruchai were looking at her. The Giants were looking at her. The First held her silence like a sword. They were waiting for her to tell them what to do.

  She knew the answer. But she could not bear it. To possess him? Try to take over his mind, force him to hold back his power, accept diamondraught? After what she had seen in Joan?

  His blast still wailed in her, Gritting her teeth against that cry, she rasped, “I can’t do it.”

  Without conscious decision, she started to leave, to flee.

  The First stopped her. “Chosen.” The Swordmain’s tone was hard. “We have no knowledge of this illness. That such harm should come from the bite of one rat is beyond our ken. Yet he must be aided. Were he merely a man, he would require aid. But I have named him Giantfriend. I have placed the Search into his hands. He must be given succor.”

  “No.” Linden was full of fear and revulsion. The horror was too intimate: Gibbon had taught her to understand it too well. That she was powerless—that all her life had been a lie! Her eyes bled tears involuntarily. In desperation, she retorted, “He can take care of himself.”

  The First’s stare glinted dangerously; and Honninscrave started to expostulate. Linden denied them.

  “He can do it. When we first showed up here, he had a knife stuck in his chest, and he healed that. The Clave slit his wrists, and he healed that. He can do it.” As she articulated them, the words turned to falsehood in her mouth. But the alternative was heinous to her beyond bearing.

  In shame, she thrust her way past the First toward Foodfendhall. The combined incomprehension and anger of so many brave, valuable people pressed against her back. To possess him? His power had come close to burning through her as virulently as Gibbon’s touch. Was this how Lord Foul meant to forge her for desecration? Pressure and protest sent her half running through the hall to the empty foredeck.

  Afterimages of Covenant’s blast continued to dismay her senses for a long time. She had been hugging one of the cross-sup
ports of the rail near the prow for half the morning before she realized that the ship was not moving.

  Its motionlessness was not due to the damage Covenant had done. The gear of the midmast hung in shambles still. Erratic bursts of wild magic had thwarted every attempt at repair. But even with whole canvas on all three masts, Starfare’s Gem would have lain dead in the water. There was no wind. No movement in the Sea at all. The ocean had become a blank echo of the sky—deep azure and flat, as empty of life as a mirror. The dromond might have been fused to the surface of the water. Its sails hung like cerements from the inanimate yards: lines and shrouds which had seemed alive in the wind now dangled like stricken things, shorn of meaning. And the heat— The sun was all that moved across the Sea. Shimmerings rose from the decks as though Starfare’s Gem were losing substance, evaporating off the face of the deep.

  Heat made the dull trudge of Linden’s thoughts giddy. She half believed that the Raver had taken away the wind, that this calm was part of Lord Foul’s design. Trap the ship where it lay, impale the quest until Covenant’s venom gnawed through the cords of his life. And then what? Perhaps in his delirium he would sink the dromond before he died. Or perhaps he would be able to withhold that blow. Then the ring and the quest would be left to someone else.

  To her?

  Dear God! she protested vainly. I can’t!

  But she could not refute that logic. Why else had Marid feinted toward her before attacking Covenant—why else had Gibbon spared her, spoken to her, touched her—if not to confirm her in her paralyzing fear, the lesson of her own ill? And why else had the old man on Haven Farm told her to Be true? Why indeed, if both he and the Despiser had not known that she would eventually inherit Covenant’s ring?

  What kind of person had she become?

  At painful intervals, blasts of wild magic sent tremors of apprehension through the stone. Repeatedly Covenant cried out, “Never! Never give it to him!” hurling his refusal at the blind sky. He had become a man she could not touch. After all her years of evasion, she had finally received the legacy of her parents. She had no choice but to possess him or to let him die.