White Gold Wielder (59 page)

“Naught,” he replied. “I am capable of naught.” His empathy for her made him acidulous. “I have no sight to equal yours. Before the truth becomes plain to me, the time for all necessary doing will have come and gone. That which requires to be done, you must do.” He paused; and she thought that he was finished, that their comradeship had come to an end. But then he gritted softly through his teeth, “Yet I say this. Chosen. You it was who obtained Vain Demondim-spawn’s escape from the snares of
Elemesnedene
. You it was who made possible our deliverance from the Sandhold. You it was who procured safety for all but Cable Seadreamer from the Worm of the World’s End, when the Earthfriend himself had fallen nigh to ruin. And you it was who found means to extinguish the Banefire. Your worth is manifold and certain.

“The First will choose as she wishes. I will give you my life, if you ask it of me.”

Linden heard him. After a while, she said simply, “Thanks.” No words were adequate. In spite of his own baffled distress, he had given her what she needed.

They walked on together in silence.

The next morning, the sun’s red aura was distinct enough for all the company to see.

Linden’s open nerves searched the Hills, probing Andelain’s reaction to the Sunbane. At first, she found none. The air had its same piquant savor, commingled of flowers and dew and treesap.
Aliantha
abounded on the hillsides. No discernible ill gnawed at the wood of the nearby Gildens and willows. And the birds and animals that flitted or scurried into view and away again were not suffering from any wrong. The Earthpower treasured in the heart of the region still withstood the pressure of corruption.

But by noon that was no longer true. Pangs of pain began to run up the tree trunks, aching in the veins of the leaves. The birds seemed to become frantic as the numbers of insects increased; but the woodland creatures had grown frightened and gone into hiding. The tips of the grass-blades turned brown: some of the shrubs showed signs of blight. A distant fetor came slowly along the breeze. And the ground began to give off faint, emotional tremors—an intangible quivering which no one but Linden felt. It made the soles of her feet hurt in her shoes.

Muttering curses. Covenant stalked on angrily eastward. In spite of her distrust. Linden saw that his rage for Andelain was genuine. He pushed himself past the limits of his strength to hasten his traversal of the Hills, his progress toward the crisis of the Despiser. The Sunbane welded him to his purpose.

Linden kept up with him doggedly, determined not to let him get ahead of her. She understood his fury, shared it: in this place, the red sun was atrocious, intolerable. But his ire made him appear capable of any madness which might put an end to Andelain’s hurt, for good or ill.

Dourly, the Giants accompanied their friends. Covenant’s best pace was not arduous for Pitchwife: the First could have traveled much faster. And her features were sharp with desire for more speed, for a termination to the Search, so that the question which had come between her and her husband would be answered and finished. The difficulty of restraining herself to Covenant’s short strides was obvious in her. While the company paced through the day, she held herself grimly silent Her mother had died in childbirth; her father, in the Soulbiter. She bore herself as if she did not want to admit how important Pitchwife’s warmth had become to her.

For that reason. Linden felt a strange, unspoken kinship toward the First. She found it impossible to resent the Swordmain’s attitude. And she swore to herself that she would never ask Pitchwife to keep his promise.

Vain strode blankly behind the companions. But of Findail there was no sign. She watched for him at intervals, but he did not reappear.

That evening. Covenant slept for barely half the night: then he went on his way again as if he were trying to steal ahead of his friends. But somehow through her weary slumber Linden felt him leave. She roused herself, called the Giants up from the faintly throbbing turf, and went after him.

Sunrise brought an aura of fertility to the dawn and a soughing rustle like a whisper of dread to the trees and brush. Linden felt the leaves whimpering on their boughs, the greensward aching plaintively. Soon the Hills would be reduced to the victimized helplessness of the rest of the Land. They would be scourged to wild growth, desiccated to ruin, afflicted with rot, pommeled by torrents. And that thought made her as fierce as Covenant, enabled her to keep up with him while he exhausted himself. Yet the mute pain of green and tree was not the worst effect of the Sunbane. Her senses had been scoured to raw sensitivity: she knew that beneath the sod, under the roots of the woods, the fever of Andelain’s bones had become so argute that it was almost physical. A nausea of revulsion was rising into the Earthpower of the Hills. It made her guts tremble as if she were walking across an open wound.

By degrees. Covenant’s pace became labored. Andelain no longer sustained him. More and more of its waning strength went to ward off the corruption of the Sunbane. As a result, the fertile sun had little superficial effect. A few trees groaned taller, grew twisted with hurt: some of the shrubs raised their branches like limbs of desecration. All the birds and animals seemed to have fled. But most of the woods and grass were preserved by the power of the soil in which they grew.
Aliantha
clung stubbornly to themselves, as they had for centuries. Only the analystic refulgence of the Hills was gone—only the emanation of superb and concentrated health—only the exquisite vitality.

However, the sickness in the underlying rock and dirt mounted without cessation. That night, Covenant slept the sleep of exhaustion and
diamondraught
. But for a long time Linden could not rest, despite her own fatigue. Whenever she laid her head to the grass, she heard the ground grinding its teeth against a backdrop of slow moans and futile outrage.

Well before dawn, she and her companions arose and went on. She felt now that they were racing the dissolution of the Hills.

That morning, they caught their first glimpse of Mount Thunder.

It was still at least a day away. But it stood stark and fearsome above Andelain, with the sun leering past its shoulder and a furze of unnatural vegetation darkening its slopes. From this distance, it looked like a titan that had been beaten to its knees.

Somewhere inside that mountain, Covenant intended to find Lord Foul.

He turned to Linden and the Giants, his eyes red-rimmed and flagrant. Words yearned in him, but he seemed unable to utter them. She had thought him uncognizant of the Giants’ disconsolation, offended by her own intransigent refusal; but she saw now that he was not. He understood her only too well. A fierce and recalcitrant part of him felt as she did, fought like loathing against his annealed purpose. He did not want to die, did not want to lose her or the Land. And he had withheld any explanation of himself from the Giants so that they would not side with him against her. So that she would not be altogether alone.

He wished to say all those things. They were plain to her aggrieved senses. But his throat closed on them like a fist, would not let them out.

She might have reached out to him then. Without altering any of her promises, she could have put her love around him. But horror swelled in the ground on which they stood, and it snatched her attention away from him.

Abhorrence. Execration. Sunbane and Earthpower locked in mortal combat beneath her feet. And the Earthpower could not win. No Law defended it. Corruption was going to tear the heart out of the Hills. The ground had become so unstable that the Giants and Covenant felt its tremors.

“Dear Christ!” Linden gasped. She grabbed at Covenant’s arm. “Come on!” With all her strength, she pulled him away from the focus of Andelain’s horror.

The Giants were aghast with incomprehension; but they followed her. Together the companions began to run.

A moment later, the grass where they had been standing erupted.

Buried boulders shattered. A large section of the greensward was shredded; stone-shards and dirt slashed into the sky. The violence which broke the Earthpower in that place sent a shock throughout the region, gouged a pit in the body of the ground. Remnants of ruined beauty rained everywhere.

And from the naked walls of the pit came squirming and clawing the sick, wild verdure of the fertile sun. Monstrous as murder, a throng of ivy teemed upward to spread its pall over the ravaged turf.

In the distance, another eruption boomed. Linden felt it like a wail through the ground. Piece by piece, the life of Andelain was being torn up by the roots.

“Bastard!” Covenant raged. “Oh, you bastard! You’ve crippled everything else. Aren’t you content?”

Turning, he plunged eastward as if he meant to launch himself at the Despiser’s throat.

Linden kept up with him. Pain belabored her senses. She could not speak because she was weeping.

Early the next morning, the company climbed into the foothills of Mount Thunder near the constricted rush of the Soulsease River. Covenant was gaunt with fatigue, his gaze as gray as ash. Linden’s eyes burned like fever in their sockets: strain throbbed through the bones of her skull. Even the Giants were tired. They had only stopped to rest in snatches during the night. The First’s lips were the color of her fingers clinching the hilt of her sword. Pitchwife’s visage looked like it was being torn apart. Yet the four of them were united by their urgency. They attacked the lower slopes as if they were racing the sun which rose behind the fatal bulk of the mountain.

A desert sun.

Parts of Andelain had already become as blasted and ruinous as a battlefield.

The Hills still clung to the life which had made them lovely. While it lasted, Caer-Caveral’s nurture had been complete and fundamental. The Sunbane could not simply flush all health from the ground in so few days. But the dusty sunlight reaching past the shoulders of Mount Thunder revealed that around the fringes of Andelain—and in places across its heart—the damage was already severe.

The vegetation of those regions had been ripped up, riven, effaced by hideous eruptions. Their ground was cratered and pitted like the ravages of an immedicable disease. The previous day, the remnants of those woods had been overgrown and strangled by the Sunbane’s feral fecundity. But now, as the sun advanced on that verdure, every green and living thing slumped into viscid sludge which the desert drank away.

Linden gazed toward the Hills as if she, too, were dying. Nothing would ever remove the sting of that devastation from her heart. The sickness of the world soaked into her from the landscape outstretched and tormented before her. Andelain still fought for its life and survived. Much of it had not yet been hurt. Leagues of soft slopes and natural growth separated the craters, stood against the sun’s arid rapine. But where the Sunbane had done its work the harm was as keen as anguish. If she had been granted the chance to save Andelain’s health with her own life, she would have taken it as promptly as Covenant. Perhaps she, too, would have smiled.

She sat on a rock in a field of boulders that cluttered the slope too thickly to admit vegetation. Panting as if his lungs were raw with ineffective outrage. Covenant had stopped there to catch his breath. The Giants stood nearby. The First studied the west as if that scene of destruction would give her strength when the time came to wield her blade. But Pitchwife could not bear it He perched himself on a boulder with his back to the Andelainian Hills. His hands toyed with his flute, but he made no attempt to play it.

After a while. Covenant rasped, “Broken—” There was a slain sound in his voice, as if within him also something vital were perishing. “All that beauty—” Perhaps during the night he had lost his mind. “Your very presence here empowers me to master you. The ill that you deem most terrible is upon you.’ ” He was quoting Lord Foul; but he spoke as if the words were his. “ ‘There is despair laid up for you here—’ ”

At once, the First turned to him. “Do not speak thus. It is false.”

He gave no sign that he had heard her. “It’s not my fault,” he went on harshly. “I didn’t do any of this. None of it. But I’m the cause. Even when I don’t do anything. It’s all being done because of me. So I won’t have any choice. Just by being alive, I break everything I love.” He scraped his fingers through the stubble of his beard; but his eyes continued staring at the waste of Andelain, haunted by it “You’d think I wanted this to happen.”

“No!” the First protested. “We hold no such conception. You must not doubt. It is doubt which weakens—doubt which corrupts. Therefore is this Despiser powerful.
He
does not doubt. While you are certain, there is hope.” Her iron voice betrayed a note of fear. “This price will be exacted from him if you do not doubt!”

Covenant looked at her for a moment. Then he rose stiffly to his feet His muscles and his heart were knotted so tightly that Linden could not read him.

“That’s wrong.” He spoke softly, in threat or appeal. “You need to doubt. Certainty is terrible. Let Foul have it. Doubt makes you human.” His gaze shifted toward Linden. It reached out to her like flame or beggary, the culmination and defeat of all his power in the Banefire. “You need every doubt you can find. I want you to doubt. I’m hardly human anymore.”

Each flare and wince of his eyes contradicted itself. Stop me. Don’t touch me. Doubt me. Doubt Kevin. Yes. No. Please.

Please
.

His inchoate supplication drew her to him. He did not appear strong or dangerous now, but only needy, appalled by himself. Yet he was as irrefusable as ever. She touched her hand to his scruffy cheek; her arms hurt with the tenderness of her wish to hold him.

But she would not retreat from the commitments she had made, whatever their cost. Perhaps her years of medical training and self-abnegation had been nothing more than a way of running away from death; but the simple logic of that flight had taken her in the direction of life, for others if not for herself. And in the marrow of her bones she had experienced both the Sunbane and Andelain. The choice between them was as clear as Covenant’s pain.