The One Tree

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  “Yes.”

  “Then perhaps you will comprehend that which befell me.” With one hand, she gripped the hilt of her falchion. The other she held straight at her side as if to restrain it from impatience or protest.

  “In my testing,” she said, “one of the Elohim came before me in the semblance of a Giant. By some art, he contrived to wear the lineaments and countenance of Pitchwife. But not my husband as I have known him. Rather he was Pitchwife as he might have grown from a perfect birth—flawless of limb, tall and proud of stance, hale in every way which becomes a Giant.” Memory suffused her gaze; but her tone held its cutting edge. “He stood thus before me as Pitchwife should have been born and grown, so that the outward seeming well became the spirit I have learned to love.”

  Pitchwife stood near her, listening with a crooked smile. But he did not try to express the things which shone in his orbs.

  The First did not waver. “At first I wept. But then I laughed. For all his cunning, that Elohim could not equal the joy which enlightens Pitchwife my husband.”

  A glint of hard humor touched her tone. “The Elohim misliked my laughter. But he could not answer it, and so my examination was brought to a displeasurable ending for him.”

  Pitchwife’s whole face chortled, though he made no sound.

  A long shiver of recollection ran through Linden. Speaking half to the First, half to the discomfited sea and the acute sky, she said, “The only thing Daphin did to me was answer questions.” Then she stepped past the Giants, left their incomprehension behind as she made her way toward Foodfendhall and the underdecks. Toward Covenant’s cabin.

  The uncertainty of the dromond’s footing affected her balance. Starfare’s Gem moved with a tight slewing pace, veering and shaking its head at the unexpected force of the swells. But Linden caught herself against walls when she had to, or against Cail, and kept going. Maybe she had no power to extort the truth from Findail. But Covenant did. If she could somehow pierce the veil which covered his consciousness like a winding-sheet. She was suddenly eager to make the attempt.

  She told herself that she was eager for his restitution. She wanted his companionship, his conviction. But she was thin-lipped and stiff with anger, and within her there was darkness stirring.

  At the door of Covenant’s cabin, she met Brinn. He had come out to meet her. Stolidly he barred her way. His distrust was tangible in the air of the companionway. Before Elemesnedene, he had never questioned her right of access to Covenant; but now he said bluntly, “Chosen, what is your purpose here?”

  She bit back a curse. Breathing deeply in an effort to steady herself, she said, “We’ve got an Elohim aboard, in case you haven’t heard. It’s Findail. They sent him here for something, and there doesn’t seem to be anything we can do about it. The only one of us who has that kind of power is Covenant. I’m going to try to reach him.”

  Brinn glanced toward Cail as if he were asking Cail to vouch for her. Then he gave her a slight bow of acquiescence and opened the door.

  Glaring, she moved into the cabin, then watched him until he closed the door after her, leaving her alone with Covenant.

  There for a moment she hesitated, trying to muster her courage. But Covenant’s featureless presence gripped her like a hand on the back of her neck; it compelled her to face him.

  He sat in a stone chair beside the small round table as if he had been deliberately positioned there. His legs were straight, formally placed; he did not slouch; his forearms lay on his thighs, with his hands open and the palms laid bare. A tray on the table contained the remains of a meal. Apparently Brinn had been feeding the Unbeliever. But Covenant was unaware of such things. His slack face confronted the empty air as if it were just another avatar of the emptiness within him.

  Linden groaned. The first time she had ever seen him, he had thrown open the door of his house like a hurling of vituperation, the fire and fever of his eyes barely restrained; his mouth had been as strict as a commandment. In spite of his exhaustion, he had been living the life he had chosen, and he had appeared to her strangely indomitable and pure.

  But now the definition of his features was obscured by the scruffy helplessness of his beard; and the gray which raddled the hair over his forehead gave him an appearance of caducity. The flesh of his face sagged as if he had lost all hope. His eyes were dry—lustreless as death.

  He looked like her father had looked when his last blood had fallen to the warped old floorboards of the attic.

  But Covenant still had pulse and respiration. Food and fluids sustained his life. When he uttered his refrain, as distinct as an augur, he seemed beneath all his loss to be aware of her—and terrified of what she meant to do to him.

  She would have to possess him. Like a Raver. The thought filled her mouth with acid revulsion. But she did not hesitate. She could feel paralysis crouching around her. The fear which had so often bereft her of will was imminent in every wrench of her heart. The fear of what she would become. Trembling she pulled the other chair close to Covenant’s knees, sat down, placed her hands in his flaccid grasp as if even now he might preserve them from failure. Then she tried to open herself to his dead gaze.

  Again his darkness flooded into her, pouring through the conduit of her senses.

  There she saw the danger. Inspired by his passive slackness, his resemblance to futility, her old hunger rose up in her gorge.

  Instinctively she fought it, held herself in the outer twilight of his night, poised between consciousness and abandonment. But she could not look away from the fathomless well of his emptiness. Already she was able to perceive facets of his condition which were hidden from the outside. She saw to her surprise that the power which had silenced his mind bad also stilled the venom in him. It was quiescent; he had sunk beyond its reach.

  Also she saw the qualities which had made him pervious to the Elohim. They would not have been able to bereave him so deeply if he had not already been exposed to them by his native impulse to take all harm upon himself. From that source arose both his power and his defenselessness. It gave him a dignity which she did not know how to emulate.

  But her will had fallen into its familiar trap. There could be no right or valid way to enter him like this, to desecrate his integrity with her uninvited exigencies—and no right or bearable way to leave him in his plight, to let his need pass without succor. And because she could not resolve the contradiction, she had no answer to the dark, angry thing in the pit of her heart which came leaping up at the chance for power. Covenant’s power: the chance to be a true arbiter of life and death.

  Fierce with hunger, she sprang down into him.

  Then the night bore her away.

  For a time, it covered all the world. It seemed to stagger every firmament like a gale; yet it was nothing like a gale. Winds had direction and timbre; they were soft or strong, warm or chill. But his darkness was empty of anything which would have named it, given it definition. It was as lorn as the abysm between stars, yet it held no stars to chart its purpose. It filled her like Gibbon’s touch, and she was helpless against it, helpless—her father had thrown the key out the window and she possessed no strength or passion that could call him back from death.

  The dark swept her around and down like a maelstrom without movement or any other sensation except loss; and from its pit images began to emerge. A figure like an incarnation of the void came toward her across the desert. It was obscured by heat-waves and hallucination. She could not see who it was. Then she could.

  Covenant.

  He struggled to scream, but had no mouth. Scales covered half his face. His eyes were febrile with self-loathing. His forehead was pale with the excruciation of his lust and abhorrence. Eagerness and dread complicated his gait; he moved like a cripple as he approached her, aimed himself at her heart.

  His arms had become snakes. They writhed and hissed from his shoulders, gaping to breathe and bite. The serpent-heads which had been his hands brandished fangs as white as bone.
<
br />   She was caught. She knew that she should raise her hands, try to defend herself; but they hung at her sides like mortality, too heavy to lift against the doom of those fangs.

  Surging forward, Covenant rose in front of her like all the failures and crimes and loves of her life. When his serpents struck, they knocked her away into another darkness altogether.

  Later she felt that she was being strangled in massive coils. She squirmed and whimpered for release, unable to break free. Her failed hands were knotted in the blanket Cail had spread over her. The hammock constricted her movements. She wanted to scream and could not. Fatal waters filled her throat. The dimness of her cabin seemed as ruinous as Covenant’s mind.

  But then with a wrench the fact of her surroundings penetrated her. This was her hammock, her cabin. The air was obscured with the dusk of dawn or evening, not the dark void into which she had fallen. The faintly remembered taste of diamondraught in her mouth was not the taste of death.

  The cabin appeared to lie canted around her, like a house which had been broken from its foundations by some upheaval. When she felt the dromond’s pitching, she realized that Starfare’s Gem was listing heavily, causing her hammock to hang at an angle to the walls. She sensed the vibration of winds and seas through the hull of the Giantship. The dimness did not come from dawn or evening. It was the cloud-locked twilight of a storm.

  The storm was bad—and becoming monstrous.

  Her mind was full of snakes. She could not wrestle free of them. But then a movement near the table took her attention. Peering through the gloom, she made out Cail. He sat in one of the chairs, watching her as if no inadequacy or even betrayal on her part could alter his duty toward her. Yet in the obscurity of the cabin he looked as absolute as a figure of judgment, come to hold every count of her futility against her.

  “How long—?” she croaked. The desert was still in her throat, defying the memory of diamondraught. She felt that time had passed. Too much time—enough for everything to have recoiled against her. “Have I been out?”

  Cail rose to his feet. “A day and a night.”

  In spite of his inflexibility, she clung to his dim visage so that she would not slip back among the serpents. “Covenant?”

  The Haruchai shrugged fractionally. “The ur-Lord’s plight is unaltered.” He might as well have said, You have failed. If it was ever your purpose to succeed.

  Clumsily she left the hammock. She did not want to lie before him like a sacrifice. He offered to assist her; but she rejected his aid, lowered herself alone to the stepladder, then to the floor, so that she could try to face him as an equal.

  “Of course I wanted to succeed.” Fleeing from images of Covenant’s mind, she went farther than she intended. “Do you blame me for everything?”

  His mien remained blank. “Those are your words.” His tone was as strict as a reproof. “No Haruchai has spoken them.”

  “You don’t have to,” she retorted as if Covenant’s plight had broken something in her chest. “You wear them on your face.”

  Again Cail shrugged. “We are who we are. This protest skills nothing.”

  She knew that he was right. She had no cause to inflict her self-anger on him as if it were his fault. But she had swallowed too much loathing. And she had failed in paralysis. She had to spit out some of the bile before it sickened her. We are who we are. Pitchwife had said the same thing about the Elohim.

  “Naturally not,” she muttered. “God forbid that you might do or even think much less be anything wrong. Well, let me tell you something. Maybe I’ve done a lot of things wrong. Maybe I’ve done everything wrong.” She would never be able to answer the accusation of her failures. “But when I had you sent out of Elemesnedene—when I let the Elohim do what they did to Covenant—I was at least trying to do something right.”

  Cail gazed flatly at her as if he did not mean to reply. But then he spoke, and his voice held a concealed edge. “That we do not question. Does not Corruption believe altogether in its own rightness?”

  At that, Linden went cold with shock. Until now, she had not perceived how deeply the Haruchai resented her decisions in Elemesnedene, Behind Call’s stolid visage, she sensed the presence of something fatal—something which must have been true of the Bloodguard as well. None of them knew how to forgive.

  Gripping herself tightly, she said, “You don’t trust me at all.”

  Call’s answer was like a shrug. “We are sworn to the ur-Lord. He has trusted you.” He did not need to point out that Covenant might feel differently if he ever recovered his mind. That thought had already occurred to her.

  In her bitterness, she muttered, “He tried to. I don’t think he succeeded.” Then she could not stand any more. What reason did any of them have to trust her? The floor was still canted under her, and through the stone she felt the way Starfare’s Gem was battered by the waves. She needed to escape the confinement of her cabin, the pressure of Cail’s masked hostility. Thrusting past him, she flung open the door and left the chamber.

  Impeded by the lurch of the Giantship’s stride, she stumbled to the stairs, climbed them unsteadily to the afterdeck.

  When she stepped over the storm-sill, she was nearly blown from her feet. A predatory wind struck at the decks, clawed at the sails. Angry clouds frothed like breakers at the tips of the yards. As she struggled to a handhold on one of the ascents to the wheeldeck, spray lashed her face, springing like sharp rain from the passion of a dark and viscid sea.

  TWELVE: Sea-Harm

  There was no rain, just wind as heavy as torrents, and clouds which sealed the Sea in a glower of twilight from horizon to horizon, and keen spray boiling off the crests of the waves like steam to sting like hail. The blast struck the Giantship at an angle, canting it to one side.

  Linden gasped for breath. As she fought her vision clear of spume, she was astonished to see Giants in the rigging.

  She did not know how they could hold. Impossible that they should be working up there, in the full blow of the storm!

  Yet they were working. Starfare’s Gem needed enough sail to give it headway. But if the spars carried too much canvas, any sudden shift or increase in the wind might topple the dromond or simply drive it under. The crewmembers were furling the upper sails. They looked small and inconceivable against the hard dark might of the storm. But slowly, tortuously, they fought the writhing canvas under control.

  High up on the foremast, a Giant lost his hold, had to release the clew-lines in order to save himself. Dawngreeter was instantly torn away. Flapping wildly, like a stricken albatross, it fluttered along the wind and out of sight.

  The other Giants had better success. By degrees, Starfare’s Gem improved its stance.

  But towering seas still heaved at the vessel. Plunging across the trough of a wave, it crashed sideward up the next ragged and vicious slope, then dove again as if it meant to bury its prow in the bottom. Linden clutched the stairs to keep herself from being kicked overboard.

  She could not remain there, She feared that Starfare’s Gem was in danger for its life—that any increase in the storm might break the ship apart. And the storm was going to increase. She felt its fury concatenating in the distance. The dromond rode the fringes of the blast: its heart was drawing closer. This course would carry the Giantship into the worst of the violence.

  She had to warn Honninscrave.

  She tried to creep up onto the stairs; but the wind flung her hair against her face like a flail, sucked the air from her lungs, threatened to rend her away. An instant of panic flamed through her.

  Call’s arm caught her waist like a band of stone. His mouth came to her ear. “Seek shelter!” The wind ripped the words to pieces, making his shout barely audible.

  She shook her head urgently, tried to drive her voice through the blow. “Take me to the wheeldeck!”

  He hesitated for a moment while he cast a look about him, estimating the dangers. Then he swung her up the stairs.

  She felt like
a ragdoll in his grasp. If he had been any ordinary man, they would both have been slashed overboard. But he was an Haruchai. Surging across the weight of the wind, he bore her to the wheeldeck.

  Only three Giants were there: Honninscrave, Galewrath, and the First. The Storesmaster stood at the great wheel, embracing it with both arms. Her muscles were knotted under the strain; her feet were widely planted to brace herself. She looked like a granite monolith, capable of standing there and mastering Shipsheartthew until the sea and time broke Starfare’s Gem into rubble.

  Anchored by her weight and strength, the First remained still. The Search was out of her hands. Under these conditions, it belonged to the storm—and to Starfare’s Gem. And the dromond belonged to Honninscrave.

  He stood near Galewrath; but all his attention was focused forward like a beacon, burning for the safety of his ship. The bony mass of his brows seemed to protect his sight. He bore himself as if he could see everything. His trenchant bellow pierced the wind. And the Giants responded like a manifestation of his will. Step by arduous step, they fought sheets and shrouds and canvas, tuned Starfare’s Gem to endure the peril.

  Linden tried to shout; but the wind struck her in the teeth, stuffed her voice back down her throat. With a fervid gesture, she directed Cail toward the Master.

  “Honninscrave!” She had to scream to make herself heard. “Change course! We’re running right into the storm!”

  The import of her words snatched at his attention. Bending over her, he shouted, “That cannot be! This storm rises from the south! Riding as we do, we shall remain on its verge and be driven only scantly from our path!”

  The south? She gaped at him, disbelieving that he could be wrong about such a thing. When she forced her vision in that direction, she saw he was not wrong. Her senses plainly discerned a cusp of violence there, though it was several leagues distant. Honninscrave’s present course would carry Starfare’s Gem around the fierce core of that storm.

  But a look toward the northwest verified what she had seen earlier. A hurricane crouched there, titanic and monstrous. The two storms were crowding together, with Starfare’s Gem between them. Every heave and crash of the dromond’s keel angled it closer to the savagery of the stronger blast.