The sunlight seemed to etch everything starkly in Covenant's vision. He saw the unevennesses of the wall, the shadows stretched under them like rictus.
The attacker was a young man with a powerful frame and dark hair-unmistakably a Stonedownor, though taller than most. His knife was made of stone, and woven into the shoulders of his tunic was his family insignia, a pattern like crossed lightning. Rage and hate strained his features as if his skull were splitting. "Raver!" he yelled. "Ravisher!"
He approached swinging his blade. Covenant was forced to retreat until he stood in the stream, ankledeep in cool water.
Atiaran was running toward them, though she was too far away to intervene between Covenant and the knife.
Blood welled from the backs of his fingers. His pulse throbbed in the cuts, throbbed in his fingertips.
He heard Atiaran's commanding shout: "Triock!"
The knife slashed closer. He saw it as clearly as if it were engraved on his eyeballs.
His pulse pounded in his fingertips.
The young man gathered himself for a killing thrust.
Atiaran shouted again, "Triock! Are you mad? You swore the Oath of Peace!"
In his fingertips?
He snatched up his hand, stared at it. But his sight was suddenly dim with awe. He could not grasp what was happening. .
That's impossible, he breathed in the utterest astonishment. Impossible.
His numb, leprosy-ridden fingers were aflame with pain.
Atiaran neared the two men and stopped, dropped
for a moment before she rasped hoarsely, "Loyalty is due. I forbid your vengeance."
"Does he go unpunished?" protested Triock.
"There is peril in the Land," she answered. "Let the Lords punish him." A taste of blood sharpened her voice. "They will know what to think of a stranger who attacks the innocent." Then her weakness returned. "The matter is beyond me. Triock, remember your Oath." She gripped her shoulders, knotted her fingers in the leaf pattern of her robe as if to hold her sorrow down.
Triock turned toward Covenant. There was something broken in the 'young man's face-a shattered or wasted capacity for contentment, joy. He snarled with the force of an anathema, "I know you, Unbeliever. We will meet again." Then abruptly he began moving away. He accelerated until he was sprinting, beating out his reproaches on the hard floor of the file. In a moment, he reached a place where the west wall sloped away, and then he was out of sight, gone from the cut into the hills.
"Impossible," Covenant murmured. "Can't happen. Nerves don't regenerate." But his fingers hurt as if they were being crushed with pain. Apparently nerves did regenerate in the Land. He wanted to scream against the darkness and the terror, but he seemed to have lost all control of his throat, voice, self.
As if from a distance made great by abhorrence or pity, Atiaran said, "You have made of my heart a wilderland."
"Nerves don't regenerate." Covenant's throat clenched as if he were gagging, but he could not scream. "They don't."
"Does that make you free?" she demanded softly, bitterly. "Does it justify your crime?"
"Crime?" He heard the word like a knife thrust through the beating wings. "Crime?" His blood ran from the cuts as if he were a normal man, but the flow was decreasing steadily. With a sudden convulsion, he caught hold of himself, cried miserably, "I'm in pain!"
The sound of his wail jolted him, knocked the swirling darkness back a step. Pain! The impossibility bridged a gap for him. Pain was for healthy people, people whose nerves were alive.
Can't happen. Of course it can't. That proves it -proves this is all a dream.
All at once, he felt an acute desire to weep. But he was a leper, and had spent too much time learning to dam such emotional channels. Lepers could not afford grief. Trembling feverishly, he plunged his cut hand into the stream.
"Pain is pain," Atiaran grated. "What is your pain to me? You have done a black deed, Unbeliever violent and cruel, without commitment or sharing. You have given me a pain that no blood or time will wash clean. And Lena my daughter-1 Ah, I pray that the Lords will punish-punish!"
The running water was chill and clear. After a moment, his fingers began to sting in the cold, and an ache spread up through his knuckles to his wrist. Red plumed away from his cuts down the stream, but the cold water soon stopped his bleeding. As he watched the current rinse clean his injury, his grief and fear turned to anger. Because Atiaran was his only companion, he growled at her, "Why should I go? None of this matters-1 don't give a damn about your precious Land."
"By the Seven!" Atiaran's hard tone seemed to chisel words out of the air. "You will go to Revelstone if I must drag you each step of the way."
He lifted his hand to examine it. Triock's knife had sliced him as neatly as a razor; there were no jagged edges to conceal dirt or roughen the healing. But the cut had reached bone in his middle two fingers, and blood still seeped from them. He stood up. For the first time since he had been attacked, he looked at Atiaran.
She stood a few paces from him, with her hands clenched together at her heart as if its pulsing hurt her. She glared at him abominably, and her face was taut with intimations of fierce, rough strength. He could see that she was prepared to fight him to Revelstone if necessary. She shamed him, aggravated his ire. Belligerently, he waved his injury at her. "I need a bandage."
For an instant, her gaze intensified as if she were about to hurl herself at him. But then she mastered herself, swallowed her pride. She went over to her pack, opened it, and took out a strip of white cloth, which she tore at an appropriate length as she returned to Covenant. Holding his hand carefully, she inspected the cut, nodded her approval of its condition, then bound the soft fabric firmly around his fingers. "I have no hurtloam," she said, "and cannot take the time to search for it. But the cut looks well, and will heal cleanly."
When she was done, she went back to her pack. Swinging it onto her shoulders, she said, "Come. We have lost time." Without a glance at Covenant, she set off down the file.
He remained where he was for a moment, tasting the ache of his fingers. There was a hot edge to his hurt, as if the knife were still in the wound. But he had the answer to it now. The darkness had receded somewhat, and he could look about him without panic. Yet he was still afraid. He was dreaming healthy nerves; he had not realized that he was so close to collapse. Helpless, lying unconscious somewhere, he was in the grip of a crisis-a crisis of his ability to survive. To weather it he would need every bit of discipline or intransigence he could find.
On an impulse, he bent and tried to pull Triock's knife from the ground with his right hand. His halfgrip slipped when he tugged straight up on the handle, but by working it back and forth he was able to loosen it, draw it free. The whole knife was shaped and polished out of one flat sliver of stone, with a haft leather-bound for a secure hold, and an edge that seemed sharp enough for shaving. He tested it on his left forearm, and found that it lifted off his hair as smoothly as if the blade were lubricated.
He slipped it under his belt. Then he hitched his pack higher on his shoulders and started after Atiaran.
NINE: Jehannum
BEFORE the afternoon was over, he had lapsed into a dull, hypnotized throb of pain. His pack straps constricted the circulation in his arms, multiplied the aching of his hand; his damp socks gave him blisters to which his toes were acutely and impossibly sensitive; weariness made his muscles as awkward as lead. But Atiaran moved constantly, severely, ahead of him down the file, and he followed her as if he were being dragged by the coercion of her will. His eyes became sightless with fatigue; he lost all sense of time, of movement, of everything except pain. He hardly knew that he had fallen asleep, and he felt a detached, impersonal sense of surprise when he was finally shaken awake.
He found himself lying in twilight on the floor of the file. After rousing him, Atiaran handed him a bowl of hot broth. Dazedly, he gulped at it. When the bowl was empty, she took it and handed him a large flask of springw
ine. He gulped it also.
From his stomach, the springwine seemed to send long, soothing fingers out to caress and relax each of his raw muscles, loosening them until he felt that he could no longer sit up. He adjusted his pack as a pillow, then lay down to sleep again. His last sight before his eyes fell shut was of Atiaran, sitting enshadowed on the far side of the graveling pot, her face set relentlessly toward the north.
The next day dawned clear, cool, and fresh. Atiaran finally succeeded in awakening Covenant as darkness was fading from the sky. He sat up painfully, rubbed his face as if it had gone numb during the night. A moment passed before he recollected the new sensitivity of his nerves; then he flexed his hands, stared at them as if he had never seen them before. They were alive, alive.
He pushed the blanket aside to uncover his feet. When he squeezed his toes through his boots, the pain of his blisters answered sharply. His toes were as alive as his fingers.
His guts twisted sickly. With a groan, he asked himself, How long-how long is this going to go on? He did not feel that he could endure much more.
Then he remembered that he had not had on a blanket when he went to sleep the night before. Atiaran must have spread it over him.
He winced, avoided her eyes by shambling woodenly to the stream to wash his face. Where did she find the courage to do such things for him? As he splashed cold water on his neck and cheeks, he found that he was afraid of her again.
But she did not act like a threat. She fed him, checked the bandage on his injured hand, packed up the camp as if he were a burden to which she had already become habituated. Only the lines of sleeplessness around her eyes and the grim set of her mouth showed that she was clenching herself.
When she was ready to go, he gave himself a deliberate VSE, then forced his shoulders into the straps of his pack and followed her down the file as if her stiff back were a demand he could not refuse.
Before the day was done, he was an expert on that back. It never compromised; it never admitted a doubt about its authority, never offered the merest commiseration. Though his muscles tightened until they became as inarticulate as bone-though the aching rictus of his shoulders made him hunch in his pack like a cripple-though the leagues aggravated his sore feet until he hobbled along like a man harried by vultures-her back compelled him like an ultimatum: keep moving or go mad; I permit no other alternatives. And he could not deny her. She stalked ahead of him like a nightmare figure, and he followed as if she held the key to his existence.
Late in the morning, they left the end of the file, and found themselves on a heathered hillside almost directly north of the high, grim finger of Kevin's Watch. They could see the South Plains off to the west; and as soon as the file ended, the stream turned that way, flowing to some distant union with the Mithil. But Atiaran led Covenant still northward, weaving her way along fragmentary tracks and across unpathed leas which bordered the hills on her right.
To the west, the grasslands of the plains were stiff with bracken, purplish in the sunlight. And to the east, the hills rose calmly, cresting a few hundred feet higher than the path which Atiaran chose along their sides. In this middle ground, the heather alternated with broad swaths of bluegrass. The hillsides wore flowers and butterflies around thick copses of wattle and clusters of taller trees-oaks and sycamores, a few elms, and some gold-leaved trees-Atiaran called them "Gilden"-which looked like maples. All the colors-the trees, the heather, and bracken, the aliantha, the flowers, and the infinite azure sky-were vibrant with the eagerness of spring, lush and exuberant rebirth of the world.
But Covenant had no strength to take in such things. He was blind and deaf with exhaustion, pain, incomprehension. Like a penitent, he plodded on through the afternoon at Atiaran's behest.
At last the day came to an end. Covenant covered the final league staggering numbly, though he did not pass out on his feet as he had the previous day; and when Atiaran halted and dropped her pack, he toppled to the grass like a, felled tree. But his overstrained muscles twitched as if they were appalled; he could not hold them still without clenching. In involuntary restlessness, he helped Atiaran by unpacking the blankets while she cooked supper. During their meal, the sun set across the plains, streaking the grasslands with shadows and lavender; and when the stars came out he lay and watched them, trying with the help of springwine to make himself relax.
At last he faded into sleep. But his slumbers were troubled. He dreamed that he was trudging through a desert hour after hour, while a sardonic voice urged him to enjoy the freshness of the grass. The pattern ran obsessively in his mind until he felt that he was sweating anger. When the dawn came to wake him, he met it as if it were an affront to his sanity.
He found that his feet were already growing tougher, and his cut hand had healed almost completely. His overt pain was fading. But his nerves were no less alive. He could feel the ends of his socks with his toes, could feel the breeze on his fingers. Now the immediacy of these inexplicable sensations began to infuriate him. They were evidence of health, vitality-a wholeness he had spent long, miserable months of his life learning to live without-and they seemed to inundate him with terrifying implications. They seemed to deny the reality of his disease.
But that was impossible. It's one or the other, he panted fiercely. Not both. Either I'm a leper or I'm not. Either Joan divorced me or she never existed. There's no middle ground.
With an effort that made him grind his teeth, he averred, I'm a leper. I'm dreaming. That's a fact.
He could not bear the alternative. If he were dreaming, he might still be able to save his sanity, survive, endure. But if the Land were real, actual-- ah, then the long anguish of his leprosy was a dream, and he was mad already, beyond hope.
Any belief was better than that. Better to struggle for a sanity he could at least recognize than to submit to a "health" which surpassed all explanation.
He chewed the gristle of such thoughts for leagues as he trudged along behind Atiaran, but each argument brought him back to the same position. The mystery of his leprosy was all the mystery he could tolerate, accept as fact. It determined his response to every other question of credibility.
It made him stalk along at Atiaran's back as if he were ready to attack her at any provocation.
Nevertheless, he did receive one benefit from his dilemma. Its immediate presence and tangibility built a kind of wall between him and the particular fears and actions which had threatened him earlier. Certain memories of violence and blood did not recur. And without shame to goad it, his anger remained manageable, discrete. It did not impel him to rebel against Atiaran's uncompromising lead.
Throughout that third day, her erect, relentless form did not relax its compulsion. Up slopes and down hillsides, across glens, around thickets-along the western margin of the hills-she drew him onward against his fuming mind and recalcitrant flesh. But early in the afternoon she stopped suddenly, looked about her as if she had heard a distant cry of fear. Her unexpected anxiety startled Covenant, but before he could ask her what was the matter, she started grimly forward again.
Some time later she repeated her performance. This time, Covenant saw that she was smelling the air as if the breeze carried an erratic scent of evil. He sniffed, but smelled nothing. "What is it?" he asked. "Are we being followed again?"
She did not look at him. "Would that Trell were here," she breathed distractedly. "Perhaps he would know why the Land is so unquiet." Without explanation she swung hastening away northward once more.
That evening she halted earlier than usual. Late in the afternoon, he noticed that she was looking for something, a sign of some kind in the grass and trees; but she said nothing to explain herself, and so he could do nothing but watch and follow. Then without warning she turned sharply to the right, moved into a shallow valley between two hills. They had to skirt the edge of the valley to avoid a large patch of brambles which covered most of its bottom; and in a few hundred yards they came to a wide, thick copse in the northern hil
l. Atiaran walked around the copse, then unexpectedly vanished into it.
Dimly wondering, Covenant went to the spot where she had disappeared. There he was able to pick out a thin sliver of a path leading into the copse. He had to turn sideways to follow this path around some of
the trees, but in twenty feet he came to an open space like a chamber grown into the center of the woods.
The space was lit by light filtering through the walls, which were formed of saplings standing closely side by side in a rude rectangle; and a faint rustling breeze blew through them. But interwoven branches and leaves made a tight roof for the chamber. It was comfortably large enough for three or four people, and along each of its walls were grassy mounds like beds. In one corner stood a larger tree with a hollow center, into which shelves had been built, and these were laden with pots and flasks made of both wood and stone. The whole place seemed deliberately welcoming and cozy.
As Covenant looked around, Atiaran set her pack on one of the beds, and said abruptly, "This is a Waymeet." When he turned a face full of questions toward her, she sighed and went on, "A resting place for travelers. Here is food and drink and sleep for any who pass this way."
She moved away to inspect the contents of the shelves, and her busyness forced Covenant to hold onto his questions until a time when she might be more accessible. But while she replenished the supplies in her pack and prepared a meal, he sat and reflected that she was not ever likely to be accessible to him; and he was in no mood to be kept in ignorance. So after they had eaten, and Atiaran had settled herself for the night, he said with as much gentleness as he could manage, "Tell me more about this place. Maybe I'll need to know sometime."
She kept her face away from him, and lay silent in the gathering darkness for a while. She seemed to be waiting for courage, and when at last she spoke, she sighed only, "Ask."
Her delay made him abrupt. "Are there many places like this?"
"There are many throughout the Land."
Lord Foul's Bane Page 12
