White Gold Wielder

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  But as that power withdrew toward the arghuleh, Covenant straightened his legs, pushed himself out of Cail’s grasp, and sent his gaze like a cry after the Stonedownor.

  Half naked in the low sunlight and the tremendous cold, Hamako shone like a cynosure as he flashed through the ice-beasts. The sheer intensity of his form melted the nearest attackers as if a furnace had come among them. From place to place within the fray he sped, clearing a space around the Giants, opening the way for the Waynhim to reform their wedge; and behind him billowed dense clouds of vapor which obscured him and the battle, made everything uncertain.

  Then Linden shouted, “There!”

  All the steam burned away, denaturing so fiercely that the ice seemed to become air without transition and the scene of the combat was as vivid as the waste. Scores of arghuleh still threw themselves madly against the wedge. But they had stopped using their ice to support each other. And some of them were attacking their fellows, tearing into each other as if the purpose which had united them a moment ago had been forgotten.

  Beyond the chaos, Hamako stood atop the leader of the arghuleh. He had vaulted up onto the high back of the strangely doubled beast and planted himself there, pitting his power squarely against the creature and its croyel.

  The beast did not attempt to topple him, bring him within reach of its limbs and maws. And he struck no blows. Their struggle was simple: fire against ice, white heat against white cold. He shone like a piece of the clean sun; the arghule glared bitter chill. Motionless they aimed what they had become at each other; and the entire plain rang and blazed to the pitch of their contest.

  The strain of so much quintessential force was too much for Hamako’s mortal flesh to sustain. In desperate pain, he began to melt like a tree under the desert avatar of the Sunbane. His legs slumped; the skin of his limbs spilled away; his features blurred. A cry that had no shape stretched his mouth.

  But while his heart beat he was still alive—tempered to his purpose and indomitable. The focus of his given heat did not waver for an instant AU the losses he had suffered, all the loves which had been taken from him came together here; and he refused defeat. In spite of the ruin which sloughed away his flesh, he raised his arms, brandished them like sodden sticks at the wide sky.

  And the double creature under him melted as well. Both arghule and croyel collapsed into water and slush until their deaths were inseparable from his—one stained pool slowly freezing on the faceless plain.

  With an almost audible snap, the unnatural cold broke. Most of the arghuleh went on trying to kill each other until the rhysh drove them away; but the power they had brought with them was gone.

  Linden was sobbing openly, though all her life she had taught herself to keep her grief silent. “Why?” she protested through her tears. “Why did they let him do it?”

  Covenant knew why. Because Hamako had been twice bereft, when no man or woman or Waynhim should have had to endure such loss so much as once.

  As the sun went down in red and rue beyond the western line of the escarpment. Covenant closed his eyes, hugged his bloody arm to his chest, and listened to the lamentation of the Waynhim rising into the dusk.

  SEVEN: Physician’s Plight

  Though the night was moonless, the company resumed its journey shortly after the Waynhim had finished caring for their dead. The Giants were unwilling to submit to their weariness; and the pain Covenant shared with Linden made him loath to remain anywhere near the place of Hamako’s end. While Mistweave prepared a meal, Linden treated Covenant’s arm, washing it with vitrim, wrapping it in firm bandages. Then she required him to drink more diamondraught than he wanted. As a result, he could hardly keep himself awake as the company left the region of the last rhyshyshim. While several Waynhim guided the Giants up the escarpment, he strove against sleep. He knew what his dreams were going to be.

  For a time, the hurt in his forearm helped him. But once the Giants had said their long, heart-felt farewells to the Waynhim, and had settled into a steady gait, striding southwestward as swiftly as the dim starlight permitted, he found that even pain was not enough to preserve him from nightmares.

  In the middle of the night, he wrenched himself out of a vision of Hamako which had made him sweat anguish. With renewed fervor, he fought the effect of the diamondraught.

  “I was wrong,” he said to the empty dark. Perhaps no one heard him over the muffled sound of the runners in the snow. He did not want anyone to hear him. He was not speaking to be heard. He only wanted to fight off sleep, stay away from dreams. “I should’ve listened to Mhoram.”

  The memory was like a dream: it had the strange immanence of dreaming. But he clung to it because it was more tolerable than Hamako’s death.

  When High Lord Mhoram had tried to summon him to the Land for the last battle against Lord Foul, he, Covenant, had resisted the call. In his own world, a small girl had just been bitten by a timber-rattler—a lost child who needed his help. He had refused Mhoram and the Land in order to aid that girl.

  And Mhoram had replied, Unbeliever, I release you. You turn from us to save life in your own world. We will not be undone by such motives. And if darkness should fall upon us, still the beauty of the Land endures—for you will not forget. Go in Peace.

  “I should’ve understood,” Covenant went on, addressing no one but the cold stars. “I should’ve given Seadreamer some kind of caamora. Should’ve found some way to save Hamako. Forget the risk. Mhoram took a terrible risk when he let me go. But anything worth saving won’t be destroyed by choices like that.”

  He did not blame himself. He was simply trying to hold back nightmares of fire. But he was human and weary, and only the blankets wrapped around him held any warmth at all. Eventually his dreams returned.

  He could not shake the image of Hamako’s weird immolation.

  Without hope, he slept until sunrise. When he opened his eyes, he found that he was stretched out, not in the sled, but in blankets on the snow-packed ground. His companions were with him, though only Cail, Pitchwife, Vain, and Findail were awake. Pitchwife stirred the fagots of a small fire, watching the flames as if his heart were somewhere else.

  Above him loomed a ragged cliff, perhaps two hundred feet high. The sun had not yet reached him; but it shone squarely on the bouldered wall, giving the stones a faint red hue like a reminder that beyond them lay the Sunbane.

  While Covenant slept, the company had camped at the foot of Landsdrop.

  Still groggy with diamondraught, he climbed out of his blankets, cradling his pain-stiff arm inside his robe next to the scar in the center of his chest. Pitchwife glanced at him absently, then returned his gaze to the fire. For the first time in many long days of exposure, no ice crusted the twisting lines of his visage. Though Covenant’s breath steamed as if his life were escaping from him, he was conscious that the winter had become oddly bearable—preferable to what lay ahead. The small fire was enough to steady him.

  Left dumb by dreams and memories, Covenant stood beside the deformed Giant. He found an oblique comfort in Pitchwife’s morose silence. Surely Cail’s flat mien contained no comfort. The Haruchai were capable of grief and admiration and remorse; but Cail kept whatever he felt hidden. And in their opposite ways Vain and Findail represented the antithesis of comfort. Vain’s makers had nearly exterminated the Waynhim. And Findail’s yellow eyes were miserable with the knowledge he refused to share.

  He could have told Hamako’s rhysh about the croyel. Perhaps that would not have altered Covenant’s plight—or Hamako’s. But it would have saved lives.

  Yet when Covenant looked at the Elohim, he felt no desire to demand explanations. He understood Findail’s refusal to do anything which might relieve the pressure of his, Covenant’s, culpability. The pressure to surrender his ring.

  He did not need explanations. Not yet. He needed vision, percipience. He wanted to ask the Appointed, Do you think she’s up to it? Is she that strong?

  However, he already knew the answ
er. She was not that strong. But she was growing toward strength as if it were her birthright. Only her preterite self-contradictions held her back—that paralysis which gripped her when she was caught between the horror of what her father had done to her and the horror of what she had done to her mother, between her fundamental passions for and against death. And she had a better right to the wild magic than he did. Because she could see.

  Around him, his companions began to stir. The First sat up suddenly, her sword in her hands: she had been dreaming of battle. As he rose stiffly to his feet, Honninscrave’s eyes looked strangely like Hamako’s, as if he had learned something Grim and sustaining from the example of the Stonedownor. Mistweave shambled upright like an image of confusion, a man baffled by his own emotions. The release and clarity of fighting the arghuleh had met some of his needs, but had not restored his sense of himself.

  When Linden awoke, her gaze was raw and aggrieved, as if she had spent half the night unable to stanch her tears.

  Covenant’s heart went out to her, but he did not know how to say so. The previous evening, she had tended his mangled arm with a ferocity which he recognized as love. But the intensity of his self-repudiation had isolated them from each other. And now he could not forget that her right was better than his. That his accumulating falseness corrupted everything he did or wanted to do.

  He had never learned how to give up.

  His nightmares insisted that he needed the fire he feared.

  Mistweave moved woodenly about the task of preparing breakfast; but abruptly Pitchwife stopped him. Without a word, the crippled Giant rose to his feet. His manner commanded the attention of the company. For a moment, he remained motionless and rigid, his eyes damp in the sunrise. Then, hoarsely, he began to sing. His melody was a Giantish plainsong, and his stretched and fraying voice drew a faint echo from the cliff of Landsdrop, an added resonance, so that he seemed to be singing for all his companions as well as for himself.

  “My heart has rooms that sigh with dust

  And ashes in the hearth.

  They must be cleaned and blown away

  By daylight’s breath.

  But I cannot essay the task,

  For even dust to me is dear;

  For dust and ashes still recall,

  My love was here.

  “I know not how to say Farewell,

  When Farewell is the word

  That stays alone for me to say

  Or will be heard.

  But I cannot speak out that word

  Or ever let my loved one go:

  How can I bear it that these rooms

  Are empty so?

  “I sit among the dust and hope

  That dust will cover me.

  I stir the ashes in the hearth,

  Though cold they be.

  I cannot bear to close the door,

  To seal my loneliness away

  While dust and ashes yet remain

  Of my love’s day.”

  When he was done, the First hugged him hard; and Mistweave looked like he had been eased. Linden glanced at Covenant, bit her lips to keep them from trembling. But Honninscrave’s eyes remained shrouded, and his jaws chewed gall as though Farewell were not the only word he could not bring himself to utter.

  Covenant understood. Seadreamer had given his life as bravely as Hamako, but no victory had been gained to make his death endurable. And no caamora had been granted to accord him peace.

  The Unbeliever was bitterly afraid that his own death would have more in common with Seadreamer’s than with Hamako’s.

  While the companions ate a meal and repacked the sleds, Covenant tried to imagine how they would be able to find their way up the harsh cliff. Here Landsdrop was not as imposing as it was nearer the center of the Land, where a thousand feet and more of steep rock separated the Lower Land from the Upper, Sarangrave Flat from Andelain—and where Mount Thunder crouched like a titan, presiding darkly over the rift. But still the cliff appeared impassable.

  But the eyesight of the Giants had already discovered an answer. They towed the sleds southward; and in less than a league they reached a place where the rim of the precipice had collapsed, sending a wide scallop of earth down fanlike across its base. This slope was manageable, though Covenant and Linden had to ascend on foot while the Giants carried the sleds. Before the morning was half gone, the company stood among the snows of the Upper Land.

  Covenant scanned the terrain apprehensively, expecting at any moment to hear Linden announce that she could see the Sunbane rising before them. But beyond Landsdrop lay only more winter and a high ridge of mountains which blocked the west and south.

  These appeared to be as tall and arduous as the Westron Mountains. However, the Giants were undaunted, wise in the ways of peaks and valleys. Though the rest of the day was spent winding up into the thin air of the heights. Covenant and Linden were able to remain in their sleds, and the company made good progress.

  But the next day the way was harder, steeper, cramped with boulders and old ice; and wind came slashing off the crags to blind the eyes, confuse the path. Covenant clung to the back of the sled and trudged after Honninscrave. His right arm throbbed as if the cold were gnawing at it; his numb hands had no strength. Yet vitrim and diamondraught were healing him faster than he would have believed possible; and the desire not to burden his companions kept him on his feet.

  He lost all sense of progress; the ridge seemed to tower above him. Whenever he tried to breathe deeply, the air sawed at his lungs. He felt frail and useless and immeasurably far from Revelstone. Still he endured. The specific disciplines of his leprosy had been lost long ago; but their spirit remained to him—the dogged and meticulous insistence on survival which took no account of the distance ahead or the pain already suffered. When the onset of evening finally forced the company to halt, he was still on his feet.

  The following day was worse. The air became as cold as the malice of the arghuleh. Wind flayed like outrage down the narrow coombs which gave the company passage. Time and again, Cail had to help either Covenant or Linden, or was needed to assist the sleds. But he seemed to flourish in this thin air. The Giants fought and hauled their way upward as if they were prepared to measure themselves against any terrain. And Linden stayed with them somehow—as stubborn as Covenant, and in an odd way tougher. Her face was as pale as the snow among the protruding rocks; cold glazed her eyes like frost. Yet she persevered.

  And that night the company camped in the lower end of a pass between peaks ranging dramatically toward the heavens. Beyond the far mouth of the pass were no more mountains high enough to catch the sunset.

  The companions had to struggle to keep their fire alight long enough to prepare a meal: the wind keening through the pass tore at the brands. Without a makeshift windbreak of blankets, no fire would have been possible at all. But the Giants did their best, contrived both to warm some food and to heat the water Linden needed for Covenant’s arm. When she unwrapped his bandages, he was surprised to see that his self-inflicted wounds were nearly well. After she had washed the slight infection which remained, she applied another light bandage to protect his arm from being chafed.

  Grateful for her touch, her concern, her endurance—for more things than he could name in that wind—he tried to thank her with his eyes. But she kept her gaze averted, and her movements were abrupt and troubled. When she spoke, she sounded as forlorn as the peaks.

  “We’re getting close to it. This—” She made a gesture that seemed to indicate the wind. “It’s unnatural. A reaction to something on the other side.” The lines of her face stiffened into a scowl. “If you want my guess, I’d say there’s been a desert sun for two days now.”

  She stopped. Tensely Covenant waited for her to go on. From the first, the Sunbane had been a torment to her. The added dimension of her senses exposed her unmercifully to the outrage of that evil, to the alternating drought and suppuration of the world, the burning of the deserts and the screaming of the trees. G
ibbon had prophesied that the true destruction of the Earth would be on her head rather than Covenant’s—that she would be driven by her very health-sense to commit every desecration the Despiser required. And then the Raver had touched her, poured his malice like distilled corruption into her vulnerable flesh; and the horror of that violation had reduced her to a paralysis as deep as catatonia for two days.

  When she had come out of it, after Covenant had rescued her from the hold of Revelstone, she had turned her back entirely on the resource of her percipience. She had begged him to spare her, as he had tried to spare Joan. And she had not begun to recover until she had been taught that her health-sense was also open to beauty, that when it exposed her to ill it also empowered her to heal.

  She was a different woman now; he was humbled by the thought of how far she had come. But the test of the Sunbane remained before her. He did not know what was in her heart; but he knew as well as she did that she would soon be compelled to carry a burden which had already proved too heavy for her once.

  A burden which would never have befallen her a second time if he had not allowed her to believe the lie that they had a future together.

  Firelight and the day’s exertions made her face ruddy against the background of the night. Her long-untended hair fluttered on either side of her head. In her eyes, the reflection of the wind-whipped flames capered. She looked like a woman whose features would not obey her, refused to resume the particular severity which had marked her life. She was returning to the place and the peril that had taught her to think of herself as evil.

  Evil and doomed.

  “I never told you,” she murmured at last, “I just wanted to forget about it. We got so far away from the Land—even Gibbon’s threats started to seem unreal. But now—” For a moment, her gaze followed the wind. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  After the extremity of the things she had already related to him, Covenant was dismayed that more remained to be told. But he held himself as steady as he could, did not let his regard for her waver.