The 1st Chronicles of Thomas Covenant #2: The Illearth War (2 page)

When he had shaved off two weeks of beard, he studied himself for a moment in the mirror. He saw a gray, gaunt man with leprosy riding the background of his eyes like a plague ship in a cold sea. And the sight gave him an explanation for his delusion. It was the doing of his subconscious mind-the blind despair work or cowardice of a brain that had been bereft of everything which had formerly given it meaning. The revulsion of his fellow human beings taught him to be revolted at himself, and this self-despite had taken him over while he had been helpless after his accident with the police car. He knew its name: it was a death wish. It worked in him subconsciously because his conscious mind was so grimly devoted to survival, to avoiding the outcome of his illness.

But he was not helpless now. He was awake and afraid.

When morning finally came, he called his lawyer, Megan Roman-a woman who handled his contracts and financial business-and told her what had happened to Joan’s stables.

He could hear her discomfort clearly through the connection. “What do you want me to do, Mr. Covenant?”

“Get the police to investigate. Find out who did it. Make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

She was silent for a long, uncomfortable moment. Then she said, “The police won’t do it. You’re in Sheriff Lytton’s territory, and he won’t do a thing for you. He’s one of the people who thinks you should be run out of the county. He’s been sheriff here a long ,; time, and he gets pretty protective about ‘his’ county. He thinks you’re a threat. Just between you and me, I don’t think he has any more humanity than he absolutely needs to get reelected every two years.”

She was talking rapidly as if to keep him from saying anything, offering to do anything. “But I think I ; can make him do something for you. If I threaten him -tell him you’re going to come into town to press charges-I can make him make sure nothing like this happens again. He knows this county. You can bet he already knows who burned your stables.”

Joan’s stables, Covenant answered silently. I don’t .’ like horses.

“He can keep those people from doing anything else. And he’ll do it-if I scare him right.”

Covenant accepted this. He seemed to have no choice.

“Incidentally, some of the people around here have been trying to find some legal way to make you move. They’re upset about that visit of yours. I’ve been telling them it’s impossible-or at least more trouble than it’s worth. So far, I think most of them believe me.”

He hung up with a shudder. He gave himself a thorough VSE, checking his body from head to foot for-: danger signs. Then he went about the task of trying to recover all his self-protective habits.

For a week or so, he made progress. He paced through the charted neatness of his house like a robot curiously aware of the machinery inside him, searching despite the limited functions of his programming-for one good answer to death. And when he left the house, walked out the driveway to pick up his groceries, or hiked for hours through the woods along Righters Creek in back of Haven Farm, he moved with an extreme caution, testing every rock and branch and breeze as if he suspected it of concealing malice.

But gradually he began to look about him, and as he did so some of his determination faltered. April was on the woods-the first signs of a spring which should have appeared beautiful to him. But at unexpected moments his sight seemed to go suddenly dim with sorrow as he remembered the spring of the Land. Compared to that, where the very health of the sap and buds was visible, palpable, discernible by touch and scent and sound, the woods he now walked looked sadly superficial. The trees and grass and hills had no savor, no depth of beauty. They could only remind him of Andelain and the taste of aliantha.

Then other memories began to disturb him. For several days, he could not get the woman who had died for him at the battle of Soaring Woodhelven out of his thoughts. He had never even known her name, never even asked her why she had devoted herself to him. She was like Atiaran and Foamfollower and Lena; she assumed that he had a right to such sacrifices.

Like Lena, about whom he could rarely bear to think, she made him ashamed; and with shame came anger-the old familiar leper’s rage on which so much of his endurance depended. By hell! he fumed. They had no right. They had no right! But then the uselessness of his passion rebounded against him, and he was forced to recite to himself as if he were reading the catechism of his illness, Futility is the defining characteristic of life. Pain is the proof of existence. In the extremity of his moral solitude, he had no other answers.

At times like that, he found bitter consolation in psychological studies where a subject was sealed off from all sensory input, made blind, deaf, silent, and immobile, and as a result began to experience the most horrendous hallucinations. If conscious normal men and women could be placed so much at the mercy of their own inner chaos, surely one abject leper in a coma could have a dream that was worse than chaos -a dream specifically self-designed to drive him mad. At least what had happened to him did not altogether surpass comprehension.

Thus in one way or another he survived the days for nearly three weeks after the fire. At times he was almost aware that the unresolved stress within him was building toward a crisis; but repeatedly he repressed the knowledge, drove the idea down with anger. He did not believe he could endure another ordeal; he had handled the first one so badly.

But even the concentrated vitriol of his anger was not potent enough to protect him indefinitely. One Thursday morning, when he faced himself in the mirror to shave, the crisis abruptly surged up in him, and his hand began to shake so severely that he had to drop the razor in the sink in order to avoid cutting his jugular.

Events in the Land were not complete. By regaining the Staff of Law, the Lords had done exactly what Lord Foul wanted them to do. That was just the first step in Foul’s plotting-machinations which had begun when he had summoned Covenant’s white gold ring to the Land. He would not be done until he had gained the power of life and death over that entire Earth. And to do that, Foul needed the wild magic of the white gold.

Covenant stared desperately at himself in the mirror, trying to retain a grip on his own actuality. But he saw nothing in his own eyes capable of defending him.

He had been deluded once.

It could happen again.

Again? he cried, in a voice so forlorn that it sounded like the wail of an abandoned child. Again? He could not master what had happened to him in his first delusion; how could he so much as live through a second?

He was on the verge of calling the doctors at the leprosarium-calling them to beg!

— when he recovered some of his leper’s intransigence. He would not have survived this long if he had not possessed some kind of fundamental capacity to refuse defeat if not despair, and that capacity stopped him now. What could I tell them that they would believe? he rasped. I don’t believe it myself.

The people of the Land had called him the Unbeliever. Now he found that he would have to earn that title whether the Land actually existed or not.

And for the next two days he strove to earn it with a grimness which was as close as he could come to courage. He only made one compromise: since his hands shook so badly, he shaved with an electric razor, pushing it roughly at his face as if he were trying to remold his features. Beyond that, he acknowledged nothing. At night, his heart quivered so tangibly in his chest that he could not sleep; but he clenched his teeth and did without sleep. Between himself and delusion he placed a wall of DDS and VSEs; and whenever delusion threatened to breach his defense, he drove it back with curses.

But Saturday morning came, and still he could not silence the dread which made his hands shake.

Then at last he decided to risk going among his fellow human beings once more.

He needed their actuality, their affirmation of the reality he understood, even their revulsion toward his illness. He knew of no other antidote to delusion; he could no longer face his dilemma alone.

TWO: Halfhand

BUT that decision itself was full of fear, and he did not act on it until evening. He spent most of the day cleaning his house as if he did not expect to return to it. Then, late in the afternoon, he shaved with the electric razor and showered meticulously. For the sake of prudence, he put on a tough pair of jeans, and laced his feet into heavy boots; but over his T-shirt he wore a dress shirt, tie, and sports coat, so that the informality of his jeans and boots would not be held against him. His wallet-generally so useless to him that he did not carry it-he placed in his coat pocket. And into a pocket of his trousers he stuffed a small, sharp penknife-a knife which he habitually took with him in case he lost control of his defensive concentration, and needed something dangerous to help him refocus himself. Finally, as the sun was setting, he walked down his long driveway to the road, where he extended his thumb to hitch a ride away from town.

The next place down the road was ten miles from Haven Farm, and it was bigger than the town where he had had his accident. He headed for it because he was less likely to be recognized there. But his first problem was to find a safe ride. If any of the local motorists spotted him, he was in trouble from the beginning.

In the first few minutes, three cars went by without stopping. The occupants stared at him in passing as if he were some kind of minor freak, but none of the drivers slowed down. Then, as the last sunlight faded into dusk, a large truck came toward him.

He waved his thumb, and the truck rode to a halt just past him on the loud hissing of air brakes. He climbed up to the door, and was gestured into the cab by the driver.

The man was chewing over a black stubby cigar, and the air in the cab was thick with smoke. But through the dull haze, Covenant could see that he was big and burly, with a distended paunch, and one heavy arm that moved over the steering wheel like a piston, turning the truck easily. He had only that one arm; his right sleeve was empty, and pinned to his shoulder. Covenant understood dismemberment, and he felt a pang of sympathy for the driver.

“Where to, buddy?” the big man asked comfortably.

Covenant told him.

“No problem,” he responded to a tentative inflection in Covenant’s tone. “I’m going right through there.” As the automatic transmission whined upward through. its gears, he spat his cigar out the window, then let go of the wheel to unwrap and light a new smoke. While his hand was busy, he braced the wheel with his belly. The green light of the instrument panel did not reach his face, but the glow of the cigar coal illuminated massive features whenever he inhaled. In the surging red, his face looked like a pile of boulders.

With his new smoke going, he rested his arm on the wheel like a sphinx, and abruptly began talking. He had something on his mind.

“You live around here?”

Covenant said noncommittally, “Yes”

“How long? You know the people?”

“After a fashion.”

“You know this leper-this Thomas something-or-other Thomas Covenant?”

Covenant flinched in the gloom of the cab. To disguise his distress, he shifted his position on the seat. Awkwardly, he asked, “What’s your interest?”

“Me? I got no interest. Just passing through-hauling my ass where they give me a load to go. I never even been around here before. But where I et at back in town I heard talk about this guy. So I ask the broad at the counter, and she damn near yaks my ear off.

One question-and I get instant mouth with everything I eat. You know what a leper is?”

Covenant squirmed. “After a fashion.”

“Well, it’s a mess, let me tell you. My old lady reads about this stuff all the time in the Bible. Dirty beggars. Unclean. I didn’t know there was creeps like that in America.

But that’s what we’re coming to. You know what I think?”

“What do you think?” Covenant asked dimly.

“I think them lepers ought to leave decent folks alone. Like that broad at the counter. She’s okay, even with that motor mouth, but there she is, juiced to the gills on account of some sick bastard. That Covenant guy ought to stop thinking of his self. Other folks don’t need that aggravation. He ought to go away with every other leper and stick to his self, leave decent folks alone. It’s just selfishness, expecting ordinary guys like you and me to put up with that. You know what I mean?”

The cigar smoke in the cab was as thick as incense, and it made Covenant feel light-headed. He kept shifting his weight, as if the falseness of his position gave him an uncomfortable seat. But the talk and his vague vertigo made him feel vengeful. For a moment, he forgot his sympathy. He turned his wedding ring forcefully around his finger.

As they neared the city limits, he said, “I’m going to a nightclub just up the road here.

How about joining me for a drink?”

Without hesitation, the trucker said, “Buddy, you’re on. I never pass up a free drink.”

But they were still several stoplights from the club. To fill the silence, and satisfy his curiosity, Covenant asked the driver what had happened to his arm.

“Lost it in the war.” He brought the truck to a stop at a light while adjusting his cigar in his lips and steering with his paunch. “We was on patrol, and walked right into one of them antipersonnel mines. Blew the squad to hell. I had to crawl back to camp.

Took me two days-I sort of got unhinged, you know what I mean? Didn’t always know what I was doing. Time I got to the doc, it was too late to save the arm.

“What the hell, I don’t need it. Least my old lady says I don’t-and she ought to know by now.” He chuckled. “Don’t need no two arms for that.”

Ingenuously, Covenant asked, “Did you have any trouble getting a license to drive this rig?”

“You kidding? I can handle this baby better with my gut than you can with four arms and sober.” He grinned around his cigar, relishing his own humor.

The man’s geniality touched Covenant. Already he regretted his duplicity. But shame always made him angry, stubborn-a leper’s conditioned reflex. When the truck was parked behind the nightclub, he pushed open the door of the cab and jumped to the ground as if he were in a hurry to get away from his companion.