Five: Fathers Child
DURING the night, squalls came up like a reaction against the earlier calm. They gusted and drove the dromond until it seemed to breast its way ponderously eastward like a worn-out grampus. But that impression was misleading. The masts were alive with lines and canvas and Giants, and Starfare's Gem raced through the cross-hacked waves like a riptide.
For four days, a succession of small storms battered the region, permitted the ship's crew little rest. But Linden hardly noticed the altercation of wind and rain and quiet. She grew unconsciously accustomed to the background song of the rigging, the rhythm of the prow in the Sea, to the pitching of the stone and the variable swaying of the lanterns and hammocks. At unexpected intervals, the Giants greeted her with spontaneous celebrations, honouring her for what she had done; and their warmth brought tears to her eyes. But her attention was elsewhere. The little strength she gained from troubled snatches of sleep and nibbled meals, she spent watching over Thomas Covenant.
She knew now that he would live. Though he had shown no hint of consciousness, the diamondraught was vivid in him—antivenin, febrifuge, and roborant in one. Within the first day, the swelling had receded from his right side and arm, leaving behind a deep mottled black-and-yellow bruise but no sign of any permanent damage. Yet he did not awaken. And she did not try to reach into him, either to gain information or to nudge him toward consciousness. She feared that perhaps the sickness still gnawed at his mind, exacting its toll from his bare sanity; but she was loath to ascertain the truth. If his mind were healing as well as his body, then she had no reason or excuse to violate his privacy. And if he were being corroded toward madness, she would need more strength than she now possessed to survive the ordeal.
The venom was still in him. Because of her, he had been driven right to the edge of self-extirpation. And even then she had risked him further for another's sake. But she had also called him back from that edge. Somehow through his delirium and looming death he had recognized her—and trusted her. That was enough. Whenever the continuing vulnerability of his sopor became more than she could bear, she went to tend the injured Giant.
His name was Mistweave, and his hardiness was vaguely astounding to her. Her own restless exhaustion, the inner clench of her tension, the burning of her red-rimmed eyes on the salt air, made him seem healthier than she was. By the second day of the squalls, his condition had stabilized to such an extent that she was able to attempt the setting of his fractured ribs. Guiding Galewrath and Seadreamer as they applied traction to Mistweave's torso, she bent those bones away from his lungs back into their proper alignment so that they could heal without crippling him. He bore the pain with a fierce grin and a flask of diamondraught; and when at last he lapsed into unconsciousness Linden could hear the new ease of his breathing.
The Storesmaster complimented the success of the manipulation with a blunt nod, as if she had expected nothing else from the Chosen. But Cable Seadreamer lifted her from her feet and gave her a tight hug that felt like envy. The flexing of his oaken muscles told her how severely the Master's brother ached for healing—for the Earth, and for his own misery. The scar under his eyes gleamed, pale and aggrieved.
In recognition and empathy, she returned his clasp. Then she left Saltroamrest, where Mistweave lay, and went back to Covenant.
Late at night after the third day of squalls, he began to rouse himself.
He was too weak to raise his head or speak. He seemed too weak to comprehend where he was, who she was, what had happened to him. But behind the dullness of his gaze he was free of fever. The venom had returned to latency.
Propping up his head, she fed him as much as he could eat of the food and drink which Cail had brought for her earlier. Immediately afterward, he slipped away into a more natural sleep.
For the first time in long days, Linden went to her own chamber. She had stayed away from it as if it were still full of nightmares; but now she knew that that darkness had receded, at least temporarily. Stretching out her exhaustion in the hammock, she let herself rest.
Throughout the next day, Covenant awakened at intervals without fully regaining consciousness. Each time he opened his eyes, tried to lift his head, she fed him; and each time he drifted almost at once back into his dreams. But she did not need her health-sense to see that he was growing stronger as his flesh drank in sleep and aliment. And that gave her a strange easement. She felt that she was linked to him symbiotically, that the doors of perception and vulnerability which she had opened to him could not be closed again. His recuperation comforted her in more ways than she could name.
This baffled her lifelong desire for independence, frustrated her severe determination to live at no behest but her own. If she had ever permitted herself to be thus accessible to someone else's needs and passions, how could she have survived the legacy of her parents? Yet she could not wish herself free of this paradoxically conflicted and certain man. The knots within her softened to see him healing.
Early the next morning, she fed him again. When he went back to sleep, she ascended to the afterdeck and found that the squalls had blown away. A steady wind carried Starfare's Gem lightly through the seas. Overhead, the sails curved like wings against the untrammelled azure of the sky.
Honninscrave hailed her like a shout of praise from the wheeldeck, then asked about Covenant. She replied briefly, almost dourly, not because the question troubled her, but because she did not know how to handle the unwonted susceptibility of her answer. Something within her wanted to laugh in pleasure at the breeze, and the clean sunshine, and the dancing of the waves. The dromond sang under her. And yet, unexpectedly, she felt that she was on the verge of tears. Her innominate contradictions confused her. She was no longer certain of who she was.
Scanning the afterdeck, she saw Pitchwife near the place where Covenant had lain in his cocoon. Vain still stood in the vicinity—he had not moved at all since Covenant's rescue—and Pitchwife ignored him. The deformed Giant bore a rude slab of rock over one shoulder. In the opposite hand, he carried a stone cauldron. Impelled partly by curiosity, partly by a rising pressure of words, Linden went to see what he was doing. He seemed to have a special empathy for confusion.
“Ah, Chosen,” he said in greeting as she approached; but his gaze was distracted, and concentration furrowed his brows. “You behold me about my craft.” In spite of his preoccupation, he gave her a smile. “Doubtless you have observed the workings of Starfare's Gem and seen that each Giant serves the needs of the ship. And doubtless also you have noted that the exception is myself. Pitchwife rides no rigging, bears no duty at Shipsheartthew. He defenses not in the galley, neither does he tend either sail or line. What purpose then does he serve among this brave company?”
His tone hinted at humour; but most of his attention was elsewhere. Setting down his rock and cauldron, he examined first the wild magic scars in the deck, then the damage done to the roof of the housing. To reach the roof, he ascended a ladder which he must have positioned earlier for that purpose.
“Well,” he went on as he studied the harmed granite, “it is plain for all to see that I am inaptly formed for such defense. My frame ill fits the exertion of Shipsheartthew. I move without celerity, whether on deck or aloft. In the galley”—he laughed outright—“my stature poorly suits the height of stoves and tables. A Giant such as I am was not foreseen by the makers of Starfare's Gem. And as to the tending of sail and line—” With a nod of satisfaction at the condition of the roof, or at his thoughts, he returned to the cauldron. “That is not my craft.”
Reaching into the stone pot, he stirred the contents with one hand, then brought out a rank brown mass which looked like partially-hardened tar. “Chosen,” he said as he worked the mass with both hands, "I am condignly named Pitchwife. This is my 'pitch,' which few Giants and no others may grasp with impunity, for without Giant-flesh and Giant-craft any hand may be turned to stone. And the task for which I mould such pitch is 'wiving.'
“Witness!” he exclaimed as if his work made him gay. Climbing the ladder, he began to form his pitch like clay into the broken wall at the edge of the roof. Deftly, he shaped the pitch until it filled the breach, matching the lines of the wall exactly. Then he descended, returned to his slab of rock. His mighty fingers snapped a chip the size of his palm off the slab. His eyes gleamed. Chortling cheerfully, he went back to the roof.
With a flourish, as if to entertain a large audience, he embedded his chip in the pitch. At once, he snatched back his hand.
To Linden's amazement, the chip seemed to crystallize the pitch. Almost instantly, the mass was transformed to stone. In the space between two heartbeats, the pitch fused itself into the breach. The wall was restored to wholeness as if it had never been harmed. She could find no mark or flaw to distinguish the new stone from the old.
The expression on her face drew a spout of glee from Pitchwife. “Witness, and be instructed,” he laughed happily. “This bent and misbegotten form is an ill guide to the spirit within.” With precarious bravado, he thrust out his arms. “I am Pitchwife the Valorous!” he shouted. “Gaze upon me and suffer awe!”
His mirth was answered by the Giants nearby. They shared his delight, relished his comic posturing. But then the First's voice carried through the jests and ripostes. “Surely you are valorous,” she said; and for an instant Linden misread her tone. She appeared to be reprimanding Pitchwife's levity. But a quick glance corrected this impression. The First's eyes sparkled with an admixture of fond pleasure and dark memory. “And if you descend not from that perch,” she went on, “you will become Pitchwife the Fallen.”
Another shout of laughter rose from the crew. Feigning imbalance, Pitchwife tottered down the ladder; but his mien shone as if he could hardly refrain from dancing.
Shortly, the Giants returned to their tasks; the First moved away; and Pitchwife contented himself with continuing his work more soberly. He repaired the roof in small sections so that his pitch would not sag before he could set it; and when he finished, the roof was as whole as the wall. Then he turned his attention to the fire-scars along the deck. These he mended by filling them with pitch, smoothing them to match the deck, then setting each with a chip of stone. Though he worked swiftly, he seemed as precise as a surgeon. , Sitting against the wall of the housing, Linden watched him. At first, his accomplishments fascinated her; but gradually her mood turned. The Giant was like Covenant-gifted with power; strangely capable of healing. And Covenant was the question to which she had found no answer.
In an almost perverse way, that question appeared to be the same one which so bedevilled her in another form. Why was she here? Why had Gibbon said to her, You are being forged as iron is forged to achieve the ruin of the Earth, and then afflicted her with such torment to convince her that he spoke the truth?
She felt that she had spent her life with that question and still could not reply to it.
“Ah, Chosen.” Pitchwife had finished his work. He stood facing her with arms akimbo and echoes of her uncertainty in his eyes. “Since first I beheld you in the dire mirk of the Sarangrave, I have witnessed no lightening of your spirit. From dark to dark it runs, and no dawn comes. Are you not content with the redemption of Covenant Giantfriend and Mistweave—a saving which none other could have performed?” He shook his head, frowning to himself. Then, abruptly, he moved forward, seated himself against the wall near her. “My people have an apothegm—as who does not in this wise and contemplative world?” He regarded her seriously, though the corners of his mouth quirked. “It is said among us, 'A sealed door admits no light.' Will you not speak to me? No hand may open that door but your own.”
She sighed. His offer touched her; but she was so full of things she did not know how to say that she could hardly choose among them. After a moment, she said, “Tell me there's a reason.”
“A reason?” he asked quietly.
“Sometimes—” She groped for a way to articulate her need. “He's why I'm here. Either I got dragged along behind him by accident. Or I'm supposed to do something to him. For him,” she added, remembering the old man on Haven Farm. “I don't know. It doesn't make sense to me. But sometimes when I'm sitting down there watching him, the chance he might die terrifies me. He's got so many things I need. Without him, I don't have any reasons here. I never knew I would feel”—she passed a hand over her face, then dropped it, deliberately letting Pitchwife see as much of her as he could—"feel so maimed without him.
“But it's more than that.” Her throat closed at what she was thinking. I just don't want him to die! "I don't know how to help him. Not really. He's right about Lord Foul—and the danger to the Land. Somebody has got to do what he's doing. So the whole world won't turn into a playground for Ravers. I understand that. But what can I do about it? I don't know this world the way he does. I've never even seen the things that made him fall in love with the Land in the first place. I've never seen the Land healthy.
“I have tried,” she articulated against the old ache of futility, “to help. God preserve me, I've even tried to accept the things I can see when nobody else sees them and for all I know I'm just going crazy. But I don't know how to share his commitment. I don't have the power to do anything.” Power, yes. All her life, she had wanted power. But her desire for it had been born in darkness—and wedded there more intimately than any marriage of heart and will. “Except try to keep him alive and hope he doesn't get tired of dragging me around after him. I don't think I've ever done anything with my life except deny. I didn't become a doctor because I wanted people to live. I did it because I hate death.”
She might have gone on, then. There in the sunlight, with the stone warm under her, the breeze in her hair, Pitchwife's gentleness at her side, she might have risked her secrets. But when she paused, the Giant spoke into the silence.
“Chosen, I hear you. There is doubt in you, and fear, and also concern. But these things pass as well by another name, which you do not speak,”
He shifted his posture, straightened himself as much as the contortion of his back allowed. “I am a Giant. I desire to tell you a story.”
She did not answer. She was thinking that no one had ever spoken to her with the kind of empathy she heard from Pitchwife.
After a moment, he commenced by saying, “Perchance it has come to your ears that I am husband to the First of the Search, whom I name Gossamer Glowlimn.” Mutely, she nodded. "That is a tale worthy of telling.
“Chosen,” he began, "you must first understand that the Giants are a scant-seeded people. It is rare among us for any family to have as many as three children. Therefore our children are precious to us—aye, a very treasure to all the Giants, even such a one as myself, born sickly and malformed like an augury of Earth-Sight to come. But we are also a long-lived people. Our children are children yet when they have attained such age as yours. Therefore our families may hope for lives together in spans more easily measured by decades than years. Thus the bond between parent and child, generation after generation, is both close and enduring—as vital among us as any marriage.
“This you must grasp in order to comprehend that my Glowlimn has been twice bereaved.”
He placed his words carefully into the sunshine as if they were delicate and valuable. "The first loss was a sore one. The life of Spray Frothsurge her mother failed in childbed—which in itself is a thing of sad wonder, for though our people are scant-seeded we are hardy, and such a loss is rare. Therefore from the first my Glowlimn had not the love of her mother, which all cherish. Thus she clung with the greater strength—a strength which some have named urgency— to Brow Gnarlfist her father.
"Now Brow Gnarlfist was the Master of a roaming Giant-ship proudly named Wavedancer, and his salt yearning took him often from his child, who grew to be so lissome and sweet that any heart which beheld her ached. And also she was the memory of Frothsurge his wife. Therefore he bore young Glowlimn with him on all his sailings, and she grew into her girlhood with the deck lifting beneath her feet and the salt in her hair like gems.
“At that time”—Pitchwife cast Linden a brief glance, then returned his gaze to the depths of the sky and his story—"I served my craft upon Wavedancer. Thus Glowlimn became known to me until her face was the light in my eyes and her smile was the laughter in my throat. Yet of me she kenned little. Was she not a child? What meaning should a cripple of no great age have to her? She lived in the joy of her father, and the love of the ship, and knew me only as one Giant among many others more clearly akin to Gnarlfist her father. With that I was content. It was my lot. A woman—and more so a girl—looks upon a cripple with pity and kindness, perhaps, and with friendship, but not desire.
"Yet the time came— as mayhap it must come to all ships in the end—when Wavedancer ran by happenstance into the Soulbiter.
"I say happenstance, Linden Avery, for so I believe it was. The Soulbiter is a perilous and imprecise Sea, and no chart has ever told its tale surely. But Brow Gnarlfist took a harsher view. He faulted his navigation, and as the hazard into which we had blundered grew, so grew his self-wrath.
"For it was the season of gales in the Soulbiter, and the water was woven with crosswinds, buffeting Wavedancer in all ways at once. No sail could serve, and so the dromond was driven prow after keel southward, toward the place of reefs and peril known as Soulbiter's Teeth.
"Toward the Teeth we were compelled without help or hope. As we neared that region, Gnarlfist in desperation forced up canvas. But only three sails could be set—and only Dawngreeter held. The others fled in scraps from the spars. Yet Dawngreeter saved us, though Gnarlfist would not have credited it, for he was enmeshed in his doom and saw no outcome to all his choices but disaster.
“Torn from wind to wind among the gales, we stumbled into Soulbiter's Teeth.”
Pitchwife's narration carried Linden with him: she seemed to feel a storm rising behind the sunlight, gathering just out of sight like an unforeseen dismay.
"We were fortunate in our way. Fortunate that Dawngreeter held. And fortunate that we were not driven into the heart of the Teeth. In that place, with reefs ragged and fatal on all sides, Wavedancer would surely have been battered to rubble. But we struck upon the outermost reef-struck, and stuck, and heeled over to our doom with all the Soulbiter's wrath piling against us.
"At that moment, Dawngreeter caught a counterposing gale. Its force lifted us from the reef, hurling us away along a backlash of the current before the sail tore. In that way were we borne from the imminent peril of the Teeth.
"Yet the harm was done. We knew from the listing of the dromond that the reef had breached our hull. A craft of stone is not apt for buoyancy with such a wound. Pumps we had, but they made no headway.
“Gnarlfist cried his commands to me, but I scarce heard them, and so caught no hint of his intent. What need had I of commands at such a time? Wavedancer's stone had been breached, and the restoration of stone was my craft. Pausing only to gather pitch and setrock, I went below.”
His tone was focused and vivid now, implying rather than detailing the urgency of his story. "To the breach I went, but could not approach it. Though the wound was no larger than my chest, the force of the water surpassed me, thrust as it was by the dromond's weight and the Soulbiter's fury. I could not stand before the hole. Still less could I set my pitch. Already the sea within Wavedancer had risen to my waist. I did not relish such a death belowdecks, on the verge of Soulbiter's Teeth, with nothing gained for my life at all.
"But as I strove beyond reason or hope to confront the breach, I learned the import of Gnarlfist's commands. To my uttermost astonishment, the gush of water was halted. And in its place, I beheld the chest of Brow Gnarlfist covering the hole. Driven by the extremity of his self-wrath or his courage, he had leaped into the water, fought his way to the breach. With his own flesh, he granted me opportunity for my work.
“That opportunity I took. With terrible haste, I wrought pitch and setrock into place, thinking in desperation and folly to heal the wound ere Gnarlfist's breath gave way. Were I only swift enough, he might regain air in time.”
The knotting of his voice drew Linden's gaze toward him. Deep within himself, he relived his story. His fists were clenched. “Fool!” he spat at himself.
But a moment later he took a long breath, leaned back against the wall of the housing. “Yet though I was a fool, I did what required to be done, for the sake of the dromond and all my companions. With pitch and setrock, I sealed the breach. And in so doing I sealed Gnarlfist to the side of Wavedancer. My pitch took his chest in a grip of stone and held him.”
Pitchwife sighed. “Giants dove for him. But they could not wrest him from the granite. He died in their hands. And when at last Wavedancer won free to clear weather, allowing our divers to work at less hazard, the fish of the deep had taken all of him but the bound bones.”
With an effort, he turned to Linden, let her see the distress lingering in his gaze. “I will not conceal from you that I felt great blame at the death of Brow Gnarlfist. You surpass me, for you saved Mistweave and yet did not lose the Giantfriend. For a time which endured beyond the end of that voyage, I could not bear to meet the loss in Glowlimn's countenance.” But gradually his expression lightened. "And yet a strange fruit grew from the seed of her father's end, and of my hand in that loss. After her bereavement, I gained a place in her eyes—for had not her father and I saved a great many Giants whom she loved? She saw me, not as I beheld myself—not as a cripple to be blamed—but rather as the man who had given her father's death meaning. And in her eyes I learned to put aside my blame.
“In losing her father, she had also lost his salt yearning. Therefore she turned from the Sea. But there was yearning in her still, born of the heart-deep reaving she had suffered. When the spirit is not altogether slain, great loss teaches men and women to desire greatly, both for themselves and for others. And her spirit was not slain, though surely it was darkened and tempered, so that she stands among our people as iron stands among stone.” He was watching Linden intently now, as if he were unsure of her ability to hear what he was saying. “Her yearning she turned to the work of the Swordmainnir.” His tone was serious, but did not disguise the smile in his eyes. “And to me.”
Linden found that she could not meet his complex attention. Perhaps in truth she did not hear him, did not grasp the reasons why he had told her this story. But what she did hear struck her deeply. Gnarlfist's suicide contrasted painfully with her own experience. And it shed a hard light on the differences between her and the First—two daughters who had inherited death in such divergent ways.
In addition, Pitchwife's willingness to look honestly and openly at his past put the subterfuge of Linden's own history to shame. Like him, she had memories of desperation and folly. But he relived his and came out of them whole, with more grace than she could conceive. Hers still had so much power—
He was waiting for her to speak. But she could not. It was too much. All the things she needed drew her to her feet, sent her moving almost involuntarily toward Covenant's cabin.
She had no clear idea of what she meant to do. But Covenant had saved Joan from Lord Foul. He had saved Linden herself from Marid. From Sivit na-Mhoram-wist. From Gibbon-Raver. From Sunbane-fever and the lurker of the Sarangrave. And yet he seemed helpless to save himself. She needed some explanation from him. An account which might make sense of her distress.
And perhaps a chance to account for herself. Her failures had nearly killed him. She needed him to understand her.
Woodenly, she descended to the first underdeck, moved toward Covenant's cabin. But before she reached it, the door opened, and Brinn came out. He nodded to her flatly. The side of his neck showed the healing vestiges of the burn he had received from Covenant. When he said, “The ur-Lord desires speech with you,” he spoke as if his native rectitude and her twisted uncertainty were entirely alien to each other.
So that he would not see her father, she went straight into the cabin. But there she stopped, abashed by the bared nerves of her need. Covenant lay high in his hammock; his weakness was written in the pallor of his forehead, in his limp recumbency. But she could see at a glance that the tone of his skin had improved. His pulse and respiration were stable. Sunlight from the open port reflected lucidly out of his orbs. He was recuperating well. In a day or two, he would be ready to get out of bed.
The gray in his tousled hair seemed more pronounced, made him appear older. But the wild growth of his beard could not conceal the chiselled lines of his mouth or the tension in his gaunt cheeks.
For a moment, they stared at each other. Then the flush of her dismay impelled her to look away. She wanted to move to the hammock—take his pulse, examine his arm and shin, estimate his temperature—touch him as a physician if she could not reach out to him in any other way. Yet her abashment held her still.
Abruptly, he said, “I've been talking to Brinn.” His voice was husky with frailty; but it conveyed a complex range of anger, desire, and doubt. “The Haruchai aren't very good at telling stories. But I got everything I could out of him.”
At once, she felt herself grow rigid as if to withstand an attack. “Did he tell you that I almost let you die?”
She read his reply in the pinched lines around his eyes. She wanted to stop there, but the pressure rising in her was too strong. What had Brinn taught him to think of her? She did not know how to save herself from what was coming. Severely, she went on, “Did he tell you that I might have been able to help you when you were first bitten? Before the venom really took over? But I didn't?”
He tried to interrupt; she overrode him. “Did he tell you that the only reason I changed my mind was because the First was going to cut off your arm? Did he tell you”—her voice gathered harshness—“that I tried to possess you? And that was what forced you to defend yourself so we couldn't reach you? And that was why they had to call the Nicor!” Unexpected rage rasped in her throat. “If I hadn't done that, Mistweave wouldn't have been hurt at all. Did he tell you that?”
Covenant's face was twisted into a grimace of ire or empathy. When she jerked to a stop, he had to swallow roughly before he could say, “Of course he told me. He didn't approve. The Haruchai don't have much sympathy for ordinary human emotions like fear and doubt. He thinks everything else should be sacrificed for me.” For a moment, his eyes shifted away as if he were in pain. “Banner used to make me want to scream. He was so absolute about everything.” But then he looked back at her. “I'm glad you helped Mistweave. I don't want more people dying for me.”
At that, her anger turned against him. His reply was so close to what she wanted; but his constant assumption of responsibility and blame for everything around him infuriated her. He seemed to deny her the simple right to judge her own acts. The Haruchai at least she could understand.
But she had not come here to shout at him. In a sense, it was his sheer importance to her that made her angry. She wanted to assail him because he meant so much to her. And that frightened her.
But Covenant seemed scarcely aware that she had not left the cabin. His gaze was fixed on the stone above him, and he was wrestling with his own conception of what had happened to him. When he spoke, his voice ached with trouble.
“It's getting worse.”
His arms were hugged over his chest as if to protect the scar of his old knife-wound.
“Foul is doing everything he can to teach me power. That's what this venom is all about. The physical consequences are secondary. The main thing is spiritual. Every time I become delirious, that venom eats away my restraint. The part of me that resists being so dangerous. That's why—why everything. Why that Raver got us into trouble in Mithil Stonedown. Why we've been attacked over and over again. Why Gibbon risked showing me the truth in that soothtell. Part of the truth.”
Abruptly, he shifted in the hammock, raised his right hand. “Look.” When he clenched his fist, white fire burst from his knuckles. He brought it to a brightness that almost dazzled Linden, then let it drop. Panting, he relaxed in the hammock.
“I don't need a reason anymore.” He was trembling. "I can do that more easily than getting out of bed. I'm a timebomb.
He's making me more dangerous than he is. When I explode—“ His visage contorted in dismay. ”I'll probably kill everybody who has any chance of fighting him. I almost did it this time. Next time—or the time after that—"
His exigency was vivid in him; but still he did not look at her. He seemed to fear that if he looked at her the peril would reach out to doom her as well. "It's happening to me. The same thing that ruined Kevin. Broke the Bloodguard Vow. Butchered the Unhomed. I'm becoming what I hate. If I keep going like this, I'll kill you all. But I can't stop it. Don't you understand? I don't have your eyes. I can't see what I need to fight the venom. Something physical—my wrists—or my chest—that's different. My nerves are still alive enough for that. But I don't have the health-sense.
“That's probably the real point of the Sunbane. To cripple the Earthpower so I won't be healed, won't become able to see what you see. Everyone here has already lost it. You have it because you come from outside. You weren't shaped by the Sunbane. And I would have it. If I weren't—”
He snatched back what he had been about to say. But his tension poured from him like anguish, and he could not refrain from turning his distress toward her. His gaze was stark, blood-ridden, haunted; his eyes were wounds of understanding. And the depth of his self-dread caught at her throat, so that she could not have spoken, even if she had known how to comfort him.
“That's why I've got to get to the One Tree. Got to. Before I become too deadly to go on living. A Staff of Law is my only hope.” Fatality stalked through his tone. He had his own nightmares—dreams as heinous and immedicable as hers. “If we don't do it in time, this venom will take over everything, and there won't be any of us left to even care what happens to the Land, much less fight.”
She gaped at him, at the implications of what he was saying. In the past, he had always spoken of needing a Staff for the Land—or for her, to return her to her own life. She had not grasped the true extent of his personal exigency. Behind all his other commitments, he was wrestling for a way to save himself. That was why the movement of the ship when the Giants snared the Nicor had been able to reach him. It had restored his most fundamental hope: the One Tree. Restitution for the harm he had wrought when he had destroyed the old Staff. And escape from the logic of his venom. No wonder he looked so ravaged. She did not know how he endured it.
But he must have misunderstood her silence. He returned his gaze to the ceiling. When he spoke again, his voice was flat with bitterness.
“That's why you're here.”
She winced as if he had struck her. But he did not see her.
“That old man—the one you met on Haven Farm. You said you saved his life.” That was true. And he had spoken to her. But she had never told Covenant all the old man had said. "He chose you for your eyes. And because you're a doctor. You're the only one in this whole mess who can even grasp what's happening to me, never mind do anything about it.
“And Foul—” he continued dismally. “If Gibbon was telling the truth. Not just trying to scare you. Foul chose you because he thinks he can make you fail. He thinks you can be intimidated. That's why Gibbon touched you. Why Marid jumped at you first. To set you up for failure. So that you won't help me. Or won't do the right thing when you try. He knows how vulnerable I am. How long I've needed—”
Without warning, his voice sharpened in pure protest. "Because you're not afraid of me! If you were afraid, you wouldn't be here. None of this would've happened to you. It would all be different.
“Hell and blood, Linden!” Suddenly, he was shouting with all the scant strength of his convalescence. “You're the only woman in the world who doesn't look at me like I'm some kind of reified crime! Damn it, I've paid blood to try to spare you everything I can. I killed twenty-one people to rescue you from Revelstone! But I can't reach you. What in hell do you—”
His passion broke her out of her silence. She interrupted him as if she were furious at him; but her ire was running in a different direction.
“I don't want to be spared. I want reasons. You tell me why I'm here, and it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't have anything to do with me. So I'm a doctor from outside the Land. So what? So is Berenford, but this didn't happen to him. I need a better reason than that. Why me?”
For an instant, he glared reflections of sunlight at her. But her words seemed to penetrate him by degrees, forcing him backward muscle by muscle until he was lying limp in the hammock again. He appeared exhausted. She feared that he would not be able to find the strength to tell her to get out of his cabin. But then he surprised her as he had so often surprised her in the past. After all this time, she still could not estimate the workings of his mind,
“Of course you're right,” he murmured, half musing to himself. "Nobody can ever spare anybody else. I've got so much power—I keep forgetting it isn't good for what I want. It's never enough. Just a more complicated form of helplessness. I should know better. I've been on this kind of journey before.
“I can't tell you why you.” He appeared too weary or defeated to raise his head. "I know something about the needs that drive people into situations like this. But I don't know your needs. I don't know you. You were chosen for this because of who you are, but from the beginning you haven't told me a thing. My life depends on you, and I don't really have any idea what it is I'm depending on.
“Linden.” He appealed to her without looking at her, as if he feared that his gaze would send her away. “Please. Stop defending yourself. You don't have to fight me. You could make me understand.” Deliberately, he closed his eyes against the risk he was taking. “If you chose to.”
Again she wanted to refuse him. The habit of flight ran deep in her. But this was why she had come to him. Her need was too clear to be denied.
Yet the question was so intimate that she could not approach it directly. Perhaps if she had not heard Pitchwife's tale she would not have been able to approach it at all. But his example had galvanized her to this hazard. He had the courage to relive his own past. And his story itself, the story of the First's father—
“Sometimes,” she said, though she was hardly ready to begin, “I have these black moods.” There was a chair near her; but she remained standing rigidly. “I've had them ever since I was a girl. Since my father died. When I was eight. They feel like—I don't know how to describe them. Like I'm drowning and there's nothing I can do to save myself. Like I could scream forever and nobody would hear me.” Powerless. "Like the only thing I can do to help myself is just die and get it over with. , . ,
"That's what I started feeling after we left Coercri. It piled up the way it always does, and I never know why it comes when it does or why it goes away again. But this time was different. It felt the same to me—but it was different. Or maybe what you said is true—when we were on Kevin's Watch. That here the things inside us are externalized, so we meet them as if they were somebody else. What I was feeling was that Raver.
“So maybe there is a reason why I'm here.” She could not stop now, though an invidious trembling cramped her chest. “Maybe there's a connection between who I am and what Foul wants.” She almost gagged on the memory of Gibbon's touch; but she knotted her throat to keep the nausea down. "Maybe that's why I freeze. Why I get so scared. I've spent my whole life trying to prove it isn't true. But it goes too deep.
“My father—” There she nearly faltered. She had never exposed this much of herself to anyone. But now for the first time her craving to be healed outweighed her old revulsion. “He was about your age when he died. He even looked a bit like you.” And like the old man whose life she had saved on Haven Farm. “Without the beard. But he wasn't like you. He was pathetic.”
The sudden vitriol of her ejaculation stopped her momentarily. This was what she had always wanted to believe—so that she could reject it. But it was not even true. Despite his abject life, her father had been potent enough to warp her being. In his hammock, Covenant seemed to be resisting a temptation to watch her; but he spared her the self-consciousness of his gaze.
Impacted emotion hardened her tone as she went on, "We lived a mile outside a dead little town like the one where you live. In one of those tottering square frame houses. It hadn't been painted since my parents moved in, and it was starting to slump.
"My father raised goats. God knows where he even got the money to buy goats so he could raise them. Every job he had was worse than the last one. His idea of being proud and independent was selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. When that failed, he tried encyclopaedias, Then water-purifiers. Water-purifiers! Everybody in thirty miles had their own well, and the water was already good. And every time a new career failed he just seemed to get shorter. Collapsing in on himself.
He thought he was being a rugged individualist. Make his own way. Bow to no man. Good Christ! He probably went down on his knees to get the money to start raising those goats.
"He had ideas about milk and cheese. Breeding stock. Meat. So of course he had no more conception of how to raise goats than I did. He just put them on leashes and let them graze around the house. Soon we were living in dust for a hundred yards in all directions.
"My mother's reaction was to eat everything she could get her hands on, to go to church three times a week, and punish me whenever I got my clothes dirty.
"By the time I was eight, the goats had finished off our property and started on land that belonged to somebody else. Naturally my father didn't see anything wrong with that. But the owner did. The day my father was supposed to appear in court to defend himself—I found this out later—he still hadn't told my mother we were in trouble. So she took the car to go to church, and he didn't have any way to get to the county seat—unless he walked, which didn't really make sense because it was twenty miles away.
“It was summer, so I wasn't in school. I was out playing, and as usual I got my clothes dirty, and then I got nervous. My mother wasn't due home for hours yet, but at that age I didn't have much sense of time. I wanted to be someplace where I could feel safe, so I went up to the attic. On the way, I played a game I'd been playing for a long time, which was to get up the stairs without making them squeak. That was part of what made the attic feel safe. No one could hear me go up there.”
The scene was as vivid to her as if it had been etched in acid. But she watched it like a spectator, with the severity she had spent so many years nurturing. She did not want to be that little girl, to feel those emotions. Her orbs were hot marbles in their sockets. Her voice had grown clipped and precise, like a dissecting instrument. Even the strain rising through her knotted back did not make her move. She stood as still as she could, instinctively denying herself.
“When I opened the door, my father was there. He was sitting in a half-broken rocker, and there was red stuff on the floor around him, I didn't even understand that it was blood until I saw it coming from the gashes in his wrists. The smell made me want to puke.”
Covenant's gaze was fixed on her now, his eyes wide with dismay; but she disregarded him. Her attention was focused on her efforts to survive what she was saying.
"He looked at me. For a minute, he didn't seem to know who I was. Or maybe he hadn't figured out that I mattered. But then he hauled himself out of the chair and started to swear at me. I couldn't understand him. But I worked it out later. He was afraid I was going to stop him. Go to the phone. Get help somehow. Even though I was only eight. So he slammed the door, locked me in with him. Then he threw the key out the window.
"Until then, I hadn't even realised there was a key. It must've been in the lock all the time, but I'd never noticed it. If I had, I would've locked myself in any number of times, just so I could feel safer.
“Anyway, I was there watching him die. What was happening took a while to filter through to me. But when I finally understood, I got frantic.” Frantic, indeed. That was a mild word for her distress. Behind Linden's rigid self-command huddled a little girl whose heart had been torn in shreds. "I did a lot of screaming and crying, but that didn't help. My mother was still at church, and we didn't have any neighbours close enough to hear me. And it just made my father madder. He was doing it out of spite to begin with. My crying made him worse. If there was ever a chance he might change his mind, I lost it. Maybe that was really what got him so mad. At one point, he mustered enough strength to stand up again so he could hit me. Got blood all over me.
“So then I tried pleading with him. Be his little girl. Beg him not to leave me. I told him he should let me die instead of him. I even meant it. Eight-year-olds have a lot of imagination. But that didn't work either. After all, I was just another burden dragging him down. If he hadn't had a wife and daughter to worry about, he wouldn't have failed all those times.” Her sarcasm was as harsh as a rasp. For years, she had striven to deny that her emotions had such force. “But his eyes were glazing. I was just desperate. I tried being angry at him. Worked myself into a fit telling him I wouldn't love him anymore if he died. Somehow that reached him. The last thing I heard him say was, 'You never loved me anyway.' ”
And then the blow had fallen, the stroke which had nailed her forever to her horror. There was no language in the world to describe it. From out of the cracked floorboards and the untended walls had come pouring a flood of darkness. It was not there: she was still able to see everything. But it rose into her mind as if it had been invoked by her father's self-pity—as if while he sprawled there dying he had transcended himself, had raised himself by sheer abjection to the stature of power, and had summoned the black malice of nightmares to attend upon his passing. She was foundering in the viscid midnight of his condemnation, and no rescue could reach her.
And while she sank, his face had changed before her eyes. His mouth had stretched into what should have been a cry; but it was not—it was laughter. The triumphant glee of spite, soundless and entire. His mouth had held her gaze, transfixed her. It was the dire cavern and plunge from which the darkness issued, hosting forth to appal her. You never loved me anyway. Never loved me. Never loved. A darkness indistinguishable now from the vicious malevolence of Gibbon-Raver's touch. Perhaps it had all taken place in her mind—a product of her young, vulnerable despair. That made no difference. It had taught her her powerlessness, and she would never be free of it.
Unwillingly, she saw Covenant's face, grown aghast for her. She did not want that from him. It weakened her defenses. Her mouth was full of the iron taste of rage. She could no longer keep her voice from shivering. But she was unable to stop.
"A long time after that, he died. And a long time after that, my mother came home. By then, I was too far gone to know anything. Hours passed before she missed us enough to find out the attic was locked. Then she had to call the neighbours to help her get the door open. I was conscious the whole time—I remember every minute of it—but there was nothing I could do. I just lay there on the floor until they broke down the door and took me to the hospital.
“I was there for two weeks. It was the only time I can remember ever feeling safe.”
Then abruptly the quivering of her joints became so strong that she could no longer stand. Covenant's open stare was a mute cry of empathy. She fumbled to the chair, sat down. Her hands would not stop flinching. She gripped them between her knees as she concluded her story.
"My mother blamed me for the whole thing. She had to sell the goats and the house to the man who was suing my father so she could pay the funeral costs and hospital bills. When she was having one of her pathos orgies, she even accused me of killing her dear husband. But most of the time she just blamed me for causing the whole situation. She had to go on welfare— God knows she couldn't get a job, that might interfere with church— and we had to live in a grubby little apartment in town. Somehow it was my fault. Compared to her, an eight-year-old in shock was an effective adult,"
The long gall of her life might have continued to pour from her, releasing some of her pent outrage; but Covenant stopped her. In a voice congested with pain and care, he said, “And you've never forgiven her. You've never forgiven either of them.”
His words stung her. Was that all he had garnered from her difficult story—from the fact that she had chosen to tell it? At once, she was on her feet beside the hammock, raging up at him, “You're goddamn right I never forgave them! They raised me to be another bloody suicide!” To be a servant of the Despiser. “I've spent my whole life trying to prove they were wrong!”
The muscles around his eyes pinched; his gaze bled at her. But he did not waver. The chiselled lines of his mouth, the gauntness of his cheeks, reminded her that he was familiar with the attractions of suicide. And he was a father who had been bereft of his son and wife for no other fault than an illness he could not have prevented. Yet he lived. He fought for life. Time and again, she had seen him turn his back on actions and attitudes that were dictated by hate. And he did not compromise with her, in spite of all that she had told him.
“Is that why you think people shouldn't tell each other their secrets? Why you didn't want me to tell you about Lena? Because you're afraid I'll say something you don't want to hear?”
Then she wanted to howl at him like a maddened child; but she could not. Once again, she was foiled by her health-sense. She could not blind herself to the quality of his regard. No man had ever looked at her in that way before.
Shaken, she retreated to the chair, sagged against its stone support.
“Linden,” he began as gently as his worn hoarseness allowed. But she cut him off,
“No.” She felt suddenly defeated. He was never going to understand. Or he understood too well. "That's not why. I haven't forgiven them, and I don't care who knows it. It's kept me alive when I didn't have anything else. I just don't trust these confessions.“ Her mouth twisted. ”Knowing about Lena doesn't mean anything to me. You were different then. You paid for what you did. She doesn't change anything for me. But she does for you. Every time you accuse yourself of rape, you make it true. You bring it into the present. You make yourself guilty all over again.
“The same thing happens to me. When I talk about my parents. Even though I was only eight then and I've spent twenty-two years trying to make myself into somebody else.”
In response, Covenant gripped the edge of the hammock, pulled his weakness that much closer to her. Aiming himself at her like a quarrel, he replied, “You've got it backward. You're doing it to yourself. Punishing yourself for something you didn't have the power to change. You can't forgive yourself, so you refuse to forgive anybody else.”
Her eyes leaped to his; protest and recognition tangled each other so that she could not retort.
“Aren't you doing the same thing Kevin did? Blaming yourself because you aren't equal to every burden in the world? Killing your father in your mind because you can't bear the pain of being helpless? Destroying what you love because you can't save it?”
“No.” Yes. I don't know. His words pierced her too deeply. Even though he had no health-sense, he was still able to reach into her, wrench her heart. The roots of the screaming she had done for her father seemed to grow all through her; and Covenant made them writhe. “I don't love him. I can't. If I did, I wouldn't be able to keep on living.”
She wanted to flee then, go in search of some way to protect her loneliness. But she did not. She had already done too much fleeing. Glaring up at him because she had no answer to his complex empathy, she took a flask of diamondraught from the table, handed it to him, and required him to drink until he had consumed enough to make him sleep.
After that, she covered her face with her hands and huddled into herself. Slumber softened the rigor of his face, increasing his resemblance to her father. He was right; she could not forgive herself. But she had failed to tell him why. The darkness was still in her, and she had not confessed what she had done with it.