White Gold Wielder

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Yet his distress remained. Even lepers and murderers were not immune to hurt. He fought down the thickness in his throat and said, “I want my old clothes. They’re in her cabin.”

  Cail nodded as if he saw nothing strange in the request. As he left, he closed the door quietly after him.

  Covenant lay back again and clenched his teeth. He did not want those clothes, did not want to return to the hungry and unassuaged life he had lived before he had found Linden’s love. But how else could he leave his cabin? Those loathed and necessary garments represented the only honesty left to him. Any other apparel would be a lie.

  However, when Cail returned he was not alone. Pitchwife entered the chamber ahead of him; and at once Covenant forgot the bundle Cail bore. The deformity which bent Pitchwife’s spine, hunching his back and crippling his chest, made him unnaturally short for a Giant: his head did not reach the level of the hammock. But the irrepressibility of his twisted face gave him stature. He was alight with excitement as he limped forward to greet Covenant.

  “Have I not said that she is well Chosen?” he began without preamble. “Never doubt it, Giantfriend! Mayhap this is but one wonder among many, for surely our voyage has been rife with marvels. Yet I do not dream to see it surpassed. Stone and Sea, Giantfriend! She has taught me to hope again.”

  Covenant stared in response, stung by an inchoate apprehension. What new role had Linden taken upon herself, when he still had not told her the truth?

  Pitchwife’s eyes softened. “But you do not comprehend—as how should you, who have not seen the sea loom with Nicor under the stars, not heard the Chosen sing them to peace.”

  Still Covenant did not speak. He had no words for the complex admixture of his pride and relief and bitter loss. The woman he loved had saved the Giantship, And he, who had once defeated the Despiser in direct combat—he no longer signified.

  Watching Covenant’s face, Pitchwife sighed to himself. In a more subdued manner, he went on, “It was an act worthy of long telling, but I will briefen it. You have heard that the Giants are able to summon Nicor upon occasion. Such a summons we wrought on your behalf, when last the venom-sickness of the Raver possessed you.” Covenant had no memory of the situation. He had been near death in delirium at the time. But he had been told about it. “Yet to the Nicor we do not speak. They lie beyond our gift of tongues. The sounds which may summon them we have learned from our generations upon the sea. But those sounds we make blindly, uncertain of their meaning. And a Giantship which enters a sea of Nicor in their wrath has scant need of summons.”

  A small smile quirked his mouth; but he did not stop. “It was Linden Avery the Chosen who found means to address them for our survival. Lacking the plain might of arm for her purpose, she called Galewrath Storesmaster with her and went below, down to the bottommost hull of the dromond. There through the stone she read the ire of the Nicor—and gave it answer. With her hands she clapped a rhythm which Galewrath echoed for her, pounding it with hammers upon the hull.”

  Then for a moment the Giant’s enthusiasm resurged. “And she was heeded!” he crowed. “The Nicor parted about us, bearing their anger into the south. We have been left without scathe!” His hands gripped the edge of the hammock, rocked it as if to make Covenant hear him. “There is yet hope in the world. While we endure, and the Chosen and the Giantfriend remain among us, there is hope!”

  But Pitchwife’s claim was too direct. Covenant flinched from it. He had wronged too many people and had no hope left for himself. A part of him wanted to cry out in protest. Was that what he would have to do in the end? Give Linden his ring, the meaning of his life, when she had never seen the Land without the Sunbane and did not know how to love it? Weakly he muttered, “Tell that to Honninscrave. He could use some hope.”

  At that, Pitchwife’s eyes darkened. But he did not look away. “The Master has spoken of your refusal. I know not the good or ill of these matters, but the word of my heart is that you have done what you must—and that is well. Do not think me ungrieved by Seadreamer*s fall—or the Master’s hurt. Yet the hazard of your might is great. And who can say how the Nicor would answer such fire, though they have passed us by? None may judge the doom which lies upon you now. You have done well in your way.”

  Pitchwife’s frank empathy made Covenant’s eyes burn. He knew acutely that he had not done well. Pain like Honninscrave’s should not be refused, never be refused. But the fear and the despair were still there, blocking everything. He could not even meet Pitchwife’s gaze.

  “Ah, Giantfriend,” Pitchwife breathed at last. “You also are grieved beyond bearing. I know not how to solace you.” Abruptly he stooped, and one hand lifted a leather flask into the hammock. “If you find no ease in my tale of the Chosen, will you not at the least drink diamondraught and grant your flesh rest? Your own story remains to be told. Be not so harsh with yourself.”

  His words raised memories of dead Atiaran in Andelain. The mother of the woman he had raped and driven mad had said with severe compassion. In punishing yourself, you come to merit punishment. This is Despite. But Covenant did not want to think about Atiaran. Find no ease—Belatedly he pictured Linden in the depths of the dromond, holding the survival of the Search in her hands. He could not bear the rhythm of her courage, but he saw her face. Framed by her wheaten hair, it was acute with concentration, knotted between the brows, marked on either side of the mouth by the consequences of severity—and beautiful to him in every bone and line.

  Humbled by what she had done to save the ship, he raised the flask to his lips and drank.

  When he awoke, the cabin was full of afternoon sunshine, and the pungent taste of diamondraught lingered on his tongue. The Giantship was moving again. He remembered no dreams. The impression he bore with him out of slumber was one of blankness, a leper’s numbness carried to its logical extreme. He wanted to roll over and never wake up again.

  But as he glanced blearily around the sun-sharp cabin, he saw Linden sitting in one of the chairs beside the table.

  She sat with her head bowed and her hands open in her lap, as if she had been waiting there for a long time. Her hair gleamed cleanly in the light, giving her the appearance of a woman who had emerged whole from an ordeal—refined, perhaps, but not reduced. With an inward moan, he recollected what the old man on Haven Farm had said to her. There is also love in the world. And in Andelain dead Elena, Covenant’s daughter, had urged him, Care for her, beloved, so that in the end she may heal us all. The sight of her made his chest contract. He had lost her as well. He had nothing left.

  Then she seemed to feel his gaze on her. She looked up at him, automatically brushing the tresses back from her face; and he saw that she was not unhurt. Her eyes were hollow and flagrant with fatigue; her cheeks were pallid; and the twinned lines running past her mouth from either side of her delicate nose looked like they had been left there by tears as well as time. A voiceless protest gathered in him. Had she been sitting here with him ever since the passing of the Nicor? When she needed so much rest?

  But a moment after he met her gaze she rose to her feet. A knot of anxiety or anger marked her brows. Probing him with her health-sense, she stepped closer to the hammock. What she saw made her mouth severe.

  “Is that it?” she demanded. “You’ve decided to give up?”

  Mutely Covenant flinched. Was his defeat so obvious?

  At once, a look of regret changed her expression. She dropped her eyes, and her hands made an aimless half-gesture as if they were full of remembered failure. “I didn’t mean that,” she said. “That isn’t what I came to say. I wasn’t sure I should come at all. You’ve been so hurt—I wanted to give you more time.”

  Then she lifted her face to him again, and he saw her sense of purpose sharpen. She was here because she had her own ideas—about hope as well as about him. “But the First was going to come, and I thought I should do it for her.” She gazed into him as if she sought a way to draw him down from his lonely bed. “She wants t
o know where we’re going.”

  Where—? Covenant blinked pain at her. She had not withdrawn her question: she had simply rephrased it. Where? A spasm of grief gripped his heart. His doom was summed up in that one Grim word. Where could he go? He was beaten. All his power had been turned against him. There was nowhere left for him to go—nothing left for him to do. For an instant, he feared he would break down in front of her, bereft even of the bare dignity of solitude.

  She was saying, “We’ve got to go somewhere. The Sunbane is still there. Lord Foul is still there. We’ve lost the One Tree, but nothing else has changed. We can’t just sail in circles for the rest of our lives.” She might have been pleading with him, trying to make him see something that was already plain to her.

  But he did not heed her. Almost without transition, his hurt became resentment. She was being cruel, whether she realized it or not. He had already betrayed everything he loved with his mistakes and failures and lies. How much more responsibility did she wish him to assume? Bitterly he replied, “I hear you saved us from the Nicor. You don’t need me.”

  His tone made her wince. “Don’t say that!” she responded intensely. Her eyes were wide with awareness of what was happening to him. She could read every outcry of his wracked spirit. I need you.”

  In response, he felt his despair plunging toward hysteria. It sounded like the glee of the Despiser, laughing in triumph. Perhaps he had gone so far down this road now that he was the Despiser, the perfect tool or avatar of Lord Foul’s will. But Linden’s expostulation jerked him back from the brink. It made her suddenly vivid to him—too vivid to be treated this way. She was his love, and be had already hurt her too much.

  For a moment, the fall he had nearly taken left him reeling. Everything in the cabin seemed imprecise, overburdened with sunlight. He needed shadows and darkness in which to hide from all the things that surpassed him. But Linden still stood there as if she were the center around which his head whirled. Whether she spoke or remained silent, she was the one demand he could not refuse. Yet he was altogether unready to tell her the truth he had withheld. Her reaction would be the culmination of all his dismay. Instinctively he groped for some way to anchor himself, some point of simple guilt or passion to which he might cling. Squinting into the sunshine, he asked thickly, “What did they do about Seadreamer?”

  At that. Linden sagged in relief as though a crisis had been averted. Wanly she answered, “Honninscrave wanted to cremate him. As if that were possible.” Memories of suffering seemed to fray the words as she uttered them. “But the First ordered the Giants to bury him at sea. For a minute there, I thought Honninscrave was going to attack her. But then something inside him broke. It wasn’t physical—but I felt it snap.” Her tone said that she had sensed that parting like a rupture in her own heart. “He bowed to her as if he didn’t know what else to do with all that hurt. Then he went back to the wheeldeck. Back to doing his job.” Her shoulders lifted in a pained shrug. “If you didn’t look at his eyes, you wouldn’t know he isn’t as good as new. But he refused to help them give Seadreamer to the sea.”

  As she spoke, his eyes blurred. He was unable to see her clearly in all that light. Seadreamer should have been burned, should have been freed from his horror in a caamora of white fire. Yet the mere thought made Covenant’s flesh itch darkly. He had become the thing he hated. Because of a lie. He had known—or should have known—what was going to happen to him. But his selfish love had kept the truth from her. He could not look at her. Through his teeth, he protested, “Why did you have to do that?”

  “Do—?” Her health-sense did not make her prescient. How could she possibly know what he was talking about?

  “You threw yourself in the fire.” The explanation came arduously, squeezed out by grief and self-recrimination. It was not her fault. No one had the right to blame her. “I sent you away to try to save my life. I didn’t know what else to do. For all I knew, it was already too late for anything else—the Worm was already awake, I’d already destroyed—” A clench of anguish closed this throat. For a moment, he could not say, I didn’t know how else to save you. Then he swallowed convulsively and went on. “So I sent you away. And you threw yourself in the fire. I was linked to you. The magic tied us together. For the first time, my senses were open. And all I saw was you throwing yourself in the fire.

  “Why did you force me to bring you back?”

  In response, she flared as if he had struck a ragged nerve. “Because I couldn’t help you the way you were!” Suddenly she was shouting at him. “Your body was there, but you weren’t! Without you, it was just so much dying meat! Even if I’d had you in a hospital—even if I could’ve given you transfusions and surgery right then—I could not have saved you!

  “I needed you to come back with me. How else was I supposed to get your attention?”

  Her pain made him look at her again; and the sight went through him like a crack through stone, following its flaws to the heart. She stood below him with her face hot and vivid in the light and her fists clenched, as intense and uncompromising as any woman he had ever dreamed. The fault was not hers, though surely she blamed herself. Therefore he could not shirk telling her the truth.

  At one time, he had believed that he was sparing her by not speaking, that he was withholding information so that she would not be overwhelmed. Now he knew better. He had kept the truth to himself for the simple reason that he did not want it to be true. And by so doing he had falsified their relationship profoundly.

  “I should’ve told you,” he murmured in shame. “I tried to tell you everything else. But it hurt too much.”

  She glared at him as if she felt the presence of something horrible between them; but he did not look away.

  “It’s always been this way. Nothing here interrupts the physical continuity of the world we came from. What happens here is self-contained. It’s always the same. I go into the Land hurt—possibly dying. A leper. And I’m healed. Twice my leprosy disappeared. I could feel again, as if my nerves—” His heart twisted at the memory—and at the poignant distress of Linden’s stare. “But before I left the Land, something always happened to duplicate the shape I was in earlier. Sometimes my body was moved. I stopped bleeding—or got worse. But my physical condition was always exactly what it would’ve been if I’d never been to the Land. And I’m still a leper. Leprosy doesn’t heal.

  “So this time that knife hit me—and when we got to the Land I healed it with wild magic. The same way I healed those cuts the Clave gave me.” They had slashed his wrists to gain blood for their soothtell; yet already the scars had faded, were nearly invisible. “But it doesn’t make any difference. What happens here doesn’t change what’s going on there. All it does is change the way we feel about it.”

  After that, his shame was too great to hold her gaze. “That’s why I didn’t tell you about it. At first—right at the beginning—I thought you had enough to worry about. You would learn the truth soon enough. But after a while I changed. Then I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t think I had the right to ask you to love a dead man.”

  As he spoke, her shock boiled into anger. The moment he stopped, she demanded, “Do you mean to say that you’ve been planning to die all along?” Her voice was abruptly livid against the quiet background of the ship and the sea. “That you haven’t even been trying to find a way to survive?”

  “No!” In despair, he sought to defend himself. “Why do you think I wanted a new Staff of Law—needed it so badly? It was my only hope. To fight for the Land without risking wild magic. And to send you back. You’re a doctor, aren’t you? I wanted you to save me.” But the anguish of her stare did not waver; and he could not meet it, could not pretend that what he had done was justified. “I’ve been trying,” he pleaded. But no appeal was enough. “I didn’t tell you because I wanted to love you for a while. That’s all.”

  He heard her moving; and the fear that she would walk out of the cabin, turn her back on him forever, wrench
ed at him. But she was not leaving. She retreated to the chair, seated herself there as if something in her had broken. Her hands covered her face as she hunched forward, and her shoulders jerked. Yet she made no sound. At her mother’s deathbed, she had learned to keep her weeping to herself. When she spoke, her voice shook.

  “Why do I end up killing everybody I care about?”

  Her grief hurt him like the raw acid of his guilt. This, too, was on his head. He wanted to descend from the hammock, go to her, take her in his arms; but he had forfeited that privilege. There was nothing he could do except fight back his own rue and protest, “it’s not your fault. You tried. I should’ve told you. You would’ve saved me if you could.”

  The vehemence of her reaction took him by surprise. “Stop that!” she spat. “I’ve got eyes! A mind of my own! I’m not some innocent kid you can protect.” The sun flashed on her face. “You’ve been lying down here ever since we came back aboard as if you were to blame for everything. But you’re not. Foul set this up. He manipulated you into it. What’re you trying to do now? Prove him right?”

  “I can’t help it!” he retorted, stung by the salt she rubbed into his futility. “Of course he’s right. Who do you think he is? He’s me. He’s just an externalization of the part of me that despises. The part that—”

  “No.” Her contradiction cut him off, though she did not shout. She had become too clenched and furious for shouting, too extreme to be denied. “He’s not you. He’s not the one who’s going to die.” She might have said, I’m the one who kills. The words were plain in every line of her visage. But her passion carried her past that recognition as if she could not bear it in any other way. “Everybody makes mistakes. But all you’ve done is try to fight for what you love. You have an answer. I don’t.” The heat of her assertion contained no self-pity. “I haven’t had one since this thing started. I don’t’ know the Land the way you do. I haven’t got any power. All I’ve been able to do is follow you around.” Her hands rose into fists. “If you’re going to die, do something to make it count!”