White Gold Wielder (6 page)

Covenant continued groping. But now he saw that Linden had begun to rally. She shook her head, struggled internally for some way to refute or withstand Findail’s accusation. Her mouth tightened: she looked like she was chewing curses. The sight lit a spark of encouragement in him, made him lean forward to aim his next challenge at the
Elohim
.

“That doesn’t justify you,” he grated. “You talk about silencing me as if that was the only decent alternative you had. But you know goddamn well it wasn’t. For one thing, you could’ve done something about the venom that makes me so bloody dangerous.”

Then Findail did look at Covenant. His yellow gaze snapped upward with a fierceness which jolted Covenant. “
We dared not
.” His quiet passion left trails of fire across Covenant’s brain. “The doom of this age lies also upon me, but I dare not. Are we not the
Elohim
, the Würd of the Earth? Do we not read the truth in the very roots of the Rawedge Rim, in the shape of the mountainsides and in the snows which gild the winter peaks? You mock me at your peril. By means of his venom this Despiser attempts the destruction of the Arch of Time, and that is no little thing. But it pales beside the fate which would befall the Earth and all life upon the Earth. were there no venom within you. You conceive yourself to be a figure of power, but in the scale of worlds you are not. Had this Despiser’s lust for the Illearth Stone not betrayed him, enhancing you beyond your mortal stature, you would not have stood against him so much as once. And he is wiser now, with the wisdom of old frustration, which some name madness.

“Lacking the venom, you would be too small to threaten him. If he did not seek you out for his own pleasure, you would wander the world without purpose, powerless against him. And the Sunbane would grow. It would grow, devouring every land and sea in turn until even
Elemesnedene
itself had fallen, and still it would grow, and there would be no halt to it. Seeing no blame for yourself, you would not surrender your ring. Therefore he would remain trapped within the Arch. But no other stricture would limit his victory. Even we, the
Elohim
, would in time be reduced to mere playthings for his mirth. While Time endured, the Desecration of the world would not end at all.

“Therefore,” the Appointed articulated with careful intensity, “we bless the frustration or madness which inspired the gambit of this venom. Discontented in the prison of the Earth, the Despiser has risked his hope of freedom in the venom which gives you such might. It is our hope also. For now the blame is plain. Since you are blind in other ways, we must pray that guilt will drive you to the surrender which may save us.”

The words went through Covenant like a shot. His arguments were punctured, made irrelevant. Findail admitted no alternative to submission except the Ritual of Desecration—the outright destruction of the Earth to spare it from Lord Foul’s power. This was Kevin Landwaster’s plight on a scale which staggered Covenant, appalled him to the marrow of his bones. If he did not give up his ring, how could he bear to do anything but ruin the world himself in order to foil the eternal Sunbane of the Despiser?

Yet he could not surrender his ring. The simple thought was immediately and intimately terrible to him. That metal circle meant too much: it contained every hard affirmation of life and love that he had ever wrested from the special cruelty of his loneliness, his leper’s fate. The alternative was better.
Yes
. To destroy. Or to risk destroying in any kind of search for a different outcome.

His dilemma silenced him. In his previous confrontation with Lord Foul, he had found and used the quiet center of his vertigo, the still point of strength between the contradictions of his plight; but now there seemed to be no center, no place on which he could stand to affirm both the Earth and himself. And the necessity of choice was dreadful.

But Linden had taken hold of herself again. The conceptions which hurt her most were not the ones which pierced Covenant; and he had given her a chance to recover. The look she cast at him was brittle with stress; but it was alert once more, capable of reading his dismay. For an instant, empathy focused her gaze. Then she swung back toward the Appointed, and her voice bristled dangerously.

“That’s just speculation. You’re afraid you might lose your precious freedom, so you’re trying to make him responsible for it. You still haven’t told us the truth.”

Findail faced her; and Covenant saw her flinch as if the
Elohim
’s eyes had burned her. But she did not stop.

“If you want us to believe you, tell us about Vain.”

At that, Pindail recoiled.

Immediately she went after him. “First you imprisoned him, as if he was some kind of crime against you. And you tried to trick us about it, so we wouldn’t know what you were doing. When he escaped, you tried to kill him. Then, when he and Seadreamer found you aboard the ship, you spoke to him.” Her expression was a glower of memory. “You said, ‘Whatever else you may do,
that
I will not suffer.’ ”

The Appointed started to reply; but she overrode him. “Later you said, ‘Only he whom you name Vain has it within him to expell me. I would give my soul that he should do so.’ And since then you’ve hardly been out of his sight—except when you decide to run away instead of helping us.” She was unmistakably a woman who had learned something about courage. “You’ve been more interested in him than us from the beginning. Why don’t you try explaining
that
for a change?”

She brandished her anger at the
Elohim
; and for a moment Covenant thought Findail would answer. But then his grief-ensnared visage tightened. In spite of its misery, his expression resembled the hauteur of Chant and Infelice as he said grimly, “Of the Demondim-spawn I will not speak.”

“That’s
right
,” she shot back at him at once. “Of course you won’t. If you did, you might give us a reason to do some hoping of our own. Then we might not roll over and play dead the way you want.” She matched his glare; and in spite of all his power and knowledge she made him appear diminished and judged. Sourly she muttered, “Oh, go on. Get out of here. You make my stomach hurt.”

With a stiff shrug, Findail turned away. But before he could depart. Covenant interposed, “Just a minute.” He felt half mad with fear and impossible decisions; but a fragment of lucidity had come to him, and he thought he saw another way in which he had been betrayed. Lena had told him that he was Berek Halfhand reborn. And the Lords he had known had believed that. What had gone wrong? “We couldn’t get a branch of the One Tree. There was no way. But it’s been done before. How did Berek do it?”

Findail paused at the wall, answered over his shoulder. “The Worm was not made restive by his approach, for he did not win his way with combat. In that age, the One Tree had no Guardian. It was he himself who gave the Tree its ward, setting the Guardian in place so that the vital wood of the world’s life would not again be touched or broken.”

Berek? Covenant was too astonished to watch the
Elohim
melt out of the cabin. Berek had set the Guardian? Why? The Lord-Fatherer had been described as both seer and prophet. Had he been shortsighted enough to believe that no one else would ever need to touch the One Tree? Or had he had some reason to ensure that there would never be a second Staff of Law?

Dizzy with implications, Covenant was momentarily unaware of the way Linden regarded him. But gradually he felt her eyes on him. Her face was sharp with the demand she had brought with her into his cabin—the demand of her need. When he met her gaze, she said distinctly, “Your friends in Andelain didn’t think you were doomed. They gave you Vain for a reason. What else did they do?”

“They talked to me,” he replied as if she had invoked the words out of him. “Mhoram said, ‘When you have understood the Land’s need, you must depart the Land, for the thing you seek is not within it. The one word of truth cannot be found otherwise. But I give you this caution: do not be deceived by the Land’s need. The thing you seek is not what it appears to be. In the end, you must return to the Land.’ ”

He had also said,
When you have come to the crux, and have no other recourse, remember the paradox of white gold. There is hope in contradiction
. But that Covenant did not comprehend.

Linden nodded severely. “So what’s it going to be? Are you just going to lie here until your heart breaks? Or are you going to fight?”

Distraught by fear and despair, he could not find his way. Perhaps an answer was possible, but he did not have it. Yet what she wanted of him was certain; and because he loved her he gave it to her as well as he was able.

“I don’t know. But anything is better than this. Tell the First well give it a try.”

She nodded again. For a moment, her mouth moved as if she wished to thank him in some way. But then the pressure of her own bare grasp on resolution impelled her toward the door.

“What about you?” he asked after her. He had sent her away and did not know how to recall her. He had no right. “What’re you going to do?”

At the door, she looked back at him, and her eyes were openly full of tears, “I’m going to wait.” Her voice sounded as forlorn as the cry of a kestrel—and as determined as an act of valor. “My turn’s coming.”

As she left, her words seemed to remain in the sunlit cabin like a verdict. Or a prophecy.

After she was gone, Covenant got out of the hammock and dressed himself completely in his old clothes.

When he went up on deck, the sun was setting beyond the western sea, and its light turned the water crimson—the color of disaster. Honninscrave had raised every span of canvas the spars could hold; and every sail was belly-full of wind as Starfare’s Gem pounded forward a few points west of north. It should have been a brave sight. But the specific red of that sunset covered the canvas with fatality, gilded the lines until they looked like they were slick with blood. And the wind carried a precursive chill, hinting at the bitter cold of winter.

Yet Honninscrave strode the wheeldeck as if he could no longer be daunted by anything the sea brought to him. The air rimed his beard, and his eyes reflected occasional glints of fire from the west; but his commands were as precise as his mastery of the Giantship, and the rawness of his voice might have been caused by the strain of shouting over the wind rather than by the stress of the past two days. He was not Foamfollower after all. He had not been granted the
caamora
his spirit craved. But he was a Giant still, the Master of Starfare’s Gem; and he had risen to his responsibilities.

With Cail beside him. Covenant went up to the wheeldeck. He wanted to find some way to apologize for having proven himself inadequate to the Master’s need. But when he approached Honninscrave and the other two Giants with him, Sevinhand Anchormaster and a steersman holding Shipsheartthew, the caution in their eyes stopped Covenant. At first, he thought that they had become wary of him—that the danger he represented made them fearful in his presence. But then Sevinhand said simply, “Giantfriend,” and it was plain even to Covenant’s superficial hearing that the Anchormaster’s tone was one of shared sorrow rather than misgiving. Instead of apologizing, Covenant bowed his head in tacit recognition of his own unworth.

He wanted to stand there in silence until he had shored up enough self-respect to take another step back into the life of the Giantship. But after a moment Cail spoke. In spite of his characteristic
Haruchai
dispassion, his manner suggested that what he meant to say made him uncomfortable. Involuntarily Covenant reflected that none of the
Haruchai
who had left the Land with him had come this far unscathed. Covenant did not know how the uncompromising extravagance of the
Haruchai
endured the role Brinn had assigned to Cail. What promise lay hidden in Brinn’s statement that Cail would eventually be permitted to follow his heart?

But Cail did not speak of that. He did not address Covenant. Without preamble, he said, “Grimmand Honninscrave, in the name of my people I desire your pardon. When Brinn assayed himself against
ak-Haru Kenaustin Ardenol
—he who is the sovereign legend and dream of all the
Haruchai
among the mountains—it was not his intent to bring about the death of Cable Seadreamer your brother.”

The Master winced: his cavernous eyes shot splinters of red at Cail. But almost at once he regained his deliberate poise. He glanced around the Giantship as if to assure himself that all was still well with it. Then he turned over his command to Sevinhand, drew Cail and Covenant with him to the port rail.

The setting sun gave his visage a tinge of sacrificial glory. Watching him, Covenant thought obscurely that the sun always set in the west—that a man who faced west would never see anything except decline, things going down, the last beauty before light and life went out.

After a moment, Honninscrave lifted his voice over the wet splashing of the shipside. “The Earth-Sight is not a thing which any Giant selects for himself. No choice is given. But we do not therefore seek to gainsay or eschew it. We believe—or have believed,” he said with a touch of bitterness, “—that there is life as well as death in such mysteries. How then should there be any blame in what has happened?” Honninscrave spoke more to himself than to Covenant or Cail. “The Earth-Sight came upon Cable Seadreamer my brother, and the hurt of his vision was plain to all. But the content of that hurt he could not tell. Mayhap his muteness was made necessary by the vision itself. Mayhap for him no denial of death was possible which would not also have been a denial of life. I know nothing of that. I know only that he could not speak his plight—and so he could not be saved. There is no blame for us in this.” He spoke as though he believed what he was saying; but the loss knotted around his eyes contradicted him.

“His death places no burden upon us but the burden of hope.” The sunset was fading from the west and from his face, translating his mien from crimson to the pallor of ashes. “We must hope that in the end we will find means to vindicate his passing. To vindicate,” he repeated faintly, “and to comprehend.” He did not look at his auditors. The dying of the light echoed out of his eyes. “I am grieved that I can conceive no hope.”