The Last Dark (44 page)

Breezes and tuned ire made the woods appear to waver like a mirage. Scraps of song more audible to percipience than to ordinary hearing spread like ripples. Boughs and roots added notes which should have been discordant, but which instead wove a dire counterpoint through the lamentation of leaves, the grief and objurgation of sap. Words that almost formed verses skirled through the grass at Linden’s feet:
days before the Earth
, and
its walk to doom
, and
forbidding dusty waste
.

Wearing an aura of embattled music, Caerroil Wildwood appeared far back among the trees.

His steps were instances of a dirge, ancient and unreconciled; irreconcilable. Lucent melody rather than light cloaked him in lordship. A penumbra of sorrow etched with gall and despair surrounded him as he advanced; and he seemed to waft rather than walk, as if he were carried along by the chords of his puissance. He was as tall as a king; his flowing hair and beard and his long robe were white with antiquity; the silver authority of his eyes judged all things harshly. He commanded homage from the trees as he passed, but it was an obeisance of appreciation and reverence, not of servility. The service here was his: the forest did not serve him. In the crook of one elbow, he cradled a gnarled wooden scepter as if it were the symbol and manifestation of every trunk and shrub and seed-born wonder that he had ever loved. Loved and lost.

At her first glimpse of him, Linden bowed her head. Carefully she displayed the Staff of Law in front of her, lying like an offering across her hands.

Please, she breathed in silence. Just look. Don’t decide anything until you look. I abandoned my son for this. If you don’t help me, I’ve abandoned the whole world.

Beside her, Manethrall Mahrtiir stood straighter. He held up his head as if he wanted to emphasize his bandage, the ruined sockets of his eyes; wanted the Forestal to see that he was unafraid in spite of his blindness.

At the edge of the clearing, Caerroil Wildwood stopped. He did not deign to come closer. He did not speak. His tune in its myriad voices spoke for him.

My leaves grow green and seedlings bloom.

I inhale all expiring breath,

    And breathe out life to bind and heal.

My hate knows neither rest nor weal.

Linden ached to sing with him. If she could have replied with melody, he would have known that she had no wish for harm: not here; not in any forest. But she did not know the rites and cadences of his lore. Even her own magicks were mysteries to her. She could not address the Forestal in his natural tongue.

Still she had to try. Singing, he seemed to become higher and mightier, exalted by the inadequacy of her silence.

“Great One—” she began. But then her littleness caught in her throat, and she faltered.

“Ringthane,” Mahrtiir urged privately, “you must. It is as you have said. He is aware of his doom. There lies the true heart of his torment. With every leaf and sprout of his realm, he cries out in bitterness and supplication. I hear now that he cannot decline to heed you. Some hope he must have. Is it not for this that he has clung to his devoir? Is it not for this that we have come, to proffer hope? Or, if not hope itself, then our striving in the name of hope?”

Linden feared the guardian of the Deep. Oh, she feared him!
From border to border, my demesne thirsts for the recompense of blood
. Now more than ever, that was true. He had known for millennia that he could not prevail over heedlessness and malice. His trees were too vulnerable—

Vulnerable and precious.

Yet his insights when she had met him before had surpassed her comprehension. They might do so again.

She made another attempt. “Great One. You know me.”

She wanted to raise her voice even though she had no music to match Caerroil Wildwood’s. But she could not be peremptory in his presence. She had to speak softly.

“You gave me a gift.” She insisted on her Staff as if it were a pledge. “And you asked me a question that I couldn’t answer. I need your help.”

Vexation spread through the trees. “What is that to me?” the Forestal countered: raw tatters of sound that seemed to arise from the woods at his back. “In a bygone age, my heart was wrath. I was avid for bloodshed, and my ire suffused every leaf and twig and branch and trunk and root of my demesne. Yet now I recall that time as a halcyon era. Though I knew myself and all forests doomed, I remained capable of much, potent for both killing and nurturance in the name of trees and green. As you foretold, I feasted on the flesh of a Raver. But the years have become an age of the Earth, and the time of my power has passed. My strength withers in my veins. I cannot restore it.

“Do you ask my aid? I have none to give. My every effort is required to slow the ruin of all that I have held dear.”

He fell silent, although his music went on weeping.

“You’re right,” Linden replied, forcing herself. Such honesty was difficult for her, but she had no other response. “You’ve always been doomed. But soon it’s going to get worse. Much worse.” She meant the Sunbane. “The Clave is going to create an evil like nothing that the Land has ever seen before, and it won’t stop even when it has destroyed every last fragment of the One Forest. Eventually even Caer-Caveral will be gone. He’ll reach the end of himself and let go.

“But long ago I told you that you would have a chance to make a Raver suffer. Now I tell you that the coming evil
will
be stopped. White gold and Law and love will cast it out. A new forest will grow,” Salva Gildenbourne, “and it will be vast. The world will keep on turning, Great One.

“But that’s not the end of what I know. Eventually there will be new evils. Worse evils. That’s why I’m here. I can’t offer you hope. I have to ask for it. I need
forbidding
. I need to know how to
forbid
. Otherwise my time will be as doomed as yours. Where I come from, the world won’t keep on turning. The evil has gone too far. Nothing except forbidding can save it.”

“What is that to me?” the august figure asked again. “The end of my days crowds close around me. I cannot forbid the waning of my own strength. My trees must perish. What will you forbid that I have not already failed to prevent? Soon or late, all things come to dust. I have no other purpose than sorrow.”

“Now, Ringthane,” Mahrtiir breathed like the breeze. “You are acquainted with despair. Harken to his, and he will heed you. His song speaks to my heart. In this, he and I are one.”

Linden winced. She understood the Manethrall. She feared that she understood him too well. She had been given hints enough. But she could not afford to falter in her purpose.

“Great one, look at me,” she implored. “Look at my Staff.”
This blackness is lamentable
—“Look at your runes. You know what they mean. You gave them to me long ago, but even then you saw what was coming. You could already feel the hopelessness that eats at you now. You were so angry then because you were fighting your own futility. That’s why you asked me a question.”
How may life endure—?
“Now I’ve come back. You’ve been waiting for millennia, and I’m finally here. Let me try to answer you.”

Let me tell you why I need you.

The Forestal did not reply at once. For a time that strained Linden’s nerves, he sang to himself as if he were considering her plea, or her death; debating the many cruelties of his plight. Small winds carried plaints through the struggling grass.

When he spoke at last, his melody sounded sharp enough to draw blood.

“Then come, human woman.” He gestured imperiously with his scepter. “Bring your companion if you must. If you would dare my scrutiny, you must stand upon Gallows Howe. In the presence of my doom and denunciation, you will speak. There you will live or be slain.”

Before Linden could give her assent, Mahrtiir’s voice rang out, pealing against the chime of the Wildwood’s music. “What of proud Narunal, Great One? What of Hyn, loyal and loving? They are Ranyhyn, as revered as trees. Without them, we are lost.”

For the third time, Caerroil Wildwood demanded, “What is that to me?”

Then Linden no longer stood on open ground. Ripples altered the surface of her senses, and she drifted among the trees where the Forestal had waited. The Forestal himself was gone: his song remained. It summoned her like a
geas
from the depths of the dark Deep.

While she staggered within herself, the fringes of the forest wavered like disturbed water. She stepped without transition onto a thin track like a path for deer wending crookedly among monarchs thick with age. She had no sensation of movement, but she had already come far. Aching branches swathed her in shadows defined by sunlight falling cleanly between the leaves. Caerroil Wildwood was drawing her toward the heart of his demesne. Doing so, he seemed to call her in the direction of her own past, and the Land’s. With every stride, she crossed decades and leagues as if they were seamless, woven together by the fecund mutter of music from a thousand thousand voices.

Vaguely she was aware that Manethrall Mahrtiir walked at her side, passing farther and farther into Garroting Deep and time. He did not speak, and she did not. Like her, he appeared ensorcelled by the counterpoint of the Forestal’s ubiquitous song.

Together she and her companion traveled among changes in the terrain: hills and streams; low stone buttresses grey with age and clad in moss; complex trails like a web of welcome for the animals that enriched the woodland. Variations among the trees themselves measured the progression of leagues: stands of new growth interrupted by the magisterial contemplation of ripe oaks; thickets crowded with orchids and
aliantha
; vibrant tracts of aspen and cottonwood on higher ground in the west, draped cypress and willow in lowlands and swales to the east. If the sun moved at all in the distant heavens, Linden did not notice it.

How far had they come? How far were Gallows Howe and the Black River from Cravenhaw? She did not know—and could not care. While Caerroil Wildwood’s trance carried her, compelled her, she only took one step after another, and filled her lungs with the woodland’s wealth of scents, and marveled that so much largesse had withstood the depredations of centuries and humankind and malevolence.

The woods seemed as timeless as the chaos of a
caesure
; but Garroting Deep was not Desecration. In spite of its enduring bitterness, its galls of woe and ire, it had been formed for peace. The lost nature of the One Forest was irenic, as rapt as
Elohim
, and as self-absorbed. Perhaps that similarity, that kinship, explained the willingness of the
Elohim
to take action for the preservation of woodlands. The result was an anodyne for travail even when the trees were stiff with outrage. If Linden had ever been afraid, or desperate, or appalled, she had forgotten it; or the Forestal’s music warded her from herself.

For her, the way was not long. Denser shade cut out more and more sunlight. Darker trees gathered gloom beneath their branches: their roots fed on shadows. Vines like hawsers tangled the underbrush on both sides of the trail where she and Mahrtiir walked. Swaths of leaves looked as black as dying blood except when brief glimpses of the sun revealed their true green. After unremarked moments or hours, she found herself approaching the barren slope of Gallows Howe.

The hill seemed higher than she remembered it: higher and more cruel, as if it had absorbed a terrible increase of savagery from the killing of a Raver’s physical form, the destruction of a fragment of the Illearth Stone. The very dirt radiated hunger, thirst, desire, as though every clod and pebble craved the taste of blood; of slaughter enough to drench the soul of the forest. Here the Deep had no language for its bereavement except rage. Utterly dead, the Howe piled darkness upward as if it were impervious to sunshine; as if no light from the heavens could touch it. And near the crest arose the two dead trunks which supported the Forestal’s gibbet.

From the branches of the crossbar hung two nooses, ready and willing.

Beside his gibbet, Caerroil Wildwood stood with his arms folded over his scepter as if he had been waiting for an age of the Earth. Around his neck he wore a garland braided from the stems and blooms of accusations. The song he spread around him had once been a dirge, but it had become as harsh and heavy as drumbeats announcing judgment.

His presence stopped Linden and Mahrtiir at the foot of the slope.

“Ringthane,” the Manethrall breathed, suddenly aghast. “This place—Mane and Tail! Tales name it, but no Raman has beheld it. It is the Forestal’s heart. It cannot be answered.”

“I know,” Linden said hoarsely. The labor of her pulse seemed to clog her throat. “But he has a right to it. I felt like that, and all I lost was my son. What he’s suffered is worse.

“The
Elohim
made this possible.” One of them had planted the seeds of power and lore which had germinated to become Forestals. “But they don’t die, so they don’t grieve. They had no idea what his life would be like.”

A handful of Forestals had not sufficed to save the woods. As benign as Gilden and oaks, Caerroil Wildwood and his kind had been slow to recognize hate and heedlessness. They had taken too long to learn anger, too long to summon their strength. As a result, they had been forced to watch millions of living things in their care perish.

“But you said it yourself,” Linden went on. “He’ll hear us anyway. He needs something to hope for.”

She had to believe that.

Touching Mahrtiir’s shoulder, she urged him to join her as she began her ascent of Gallows Howe.

He may have faltered for a moment—but only for a moment. Then he found his resolve, and his features seemed to become sharper.
You’ll have to go a long way to find your heart’s desire
. With his chin jutting, he moved upward at Linden’s side.

Death accumulated under her boots at every step. The dirt heeded no appeal and would never be appeased: it had lost too much. On this hill in another era, she had found the granite rage which had carried or driven her from her battle with Roger and the
croyel
to Thomas Covenant’s resurrection. She understood the Howe’s ire in the deepest channels of her heart.