Fatal Revenant

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Linden was an unskilled horsewoman, but she knew enough to turn her mount’s head so that the beast directed its lengthening strides toward the pavilions. At the same time, she urged more power from the Staff to protect the horse from slipping on the treacherous slope. In that way, she gathered her own strength as well as her mount’s, so that she would be able to bear what lay ahead of her.

  Her haste attracted attention at several points along the edge of the camp. And as she approached the light, her open cloak, red shirt, and stained jeans marked her as a stranger; a likely threat. Shouts rose against her. At least half a dozen warriors ran for their horses, plainly intending to intercept her.

  In response, she summoned fire like a shout from the end of the Staff and kicked awkwardly at her mount’s sides, trying to compel more speed.

  Her display made the men and women racing for their mounts hesitate. More shouts scattered through the camp, dragging warriors urgently away from their chores and cookfires. Doubtless Berek’s forces were acquainted with theurgy. The King whom they had opposed had been counseled by a Raver. They had felt black malevolence from the east, and knew their Lord’s unforeseen might. A few of them had witnessed the salvific rampage of the Fire-Lions. Nonetheless it was likely that none of them had ever seen Earthpower in thetic fire. And apparently most of them had not yet felt the first stirrings of health-sense. They could not look at Linden’s emblazoned rush and recognize that she wielded the same Law which had brought the Fire-Lions to Berek’s aid.

  Commanders yelled orders. A few warriors flung themselves onto their mounts, followed by others—and by still others. As Linden reached level ground and sped toward the tents of the wounded, holding aloft her pennon of power, a thickening barricade of riders surged into formation across her path.

  She could not fight them. Nor could she bear to be stopped. In her ears, the need of Berek’s wounded and dying was as loud as a wail, and as compulsory as blood. Even the men and women who rode out to refuse her were rife with injuries.

  Mustering fire, she called in a voice of flame, “By Yellinin’s command! I’m a healer! Let me pass!”

  Again Berek’s warriors hesitated. Some began to rein in their mounts: others veered aside. But an older veteran, hardened and glaring, yelled back, “Yellinin’s command does not suffice! Halt and answer!”

  Linden swore to herself. If she could elude the riders, she suspected that her mount would be able to outdistance them. Its energy was the Staff’s. But they were mere heartbeats away. And the prospect of delays and argument was intolerable.

  Shouting, “In Lord Berek’s name!” she mentally stamped one heel of her Staff against the frozen ground. With Earthpower and Law, she sent a concussion like the tremor of an earthquake rolling under the hooves of the advancing horses.

  Covenant and Jeremiah had withstood worse when she had closed the caesure of the Demondim. The Theomach might not protect them; but they had risked too much: they would not allow themselves to be banished now.

  Instinctive animal terror cleared her passage. Some of the beasts stumbled, pitching their riders. Others shied; reared; wheeled away. Their panic forced the riders behind them to struggle for control.

  Through the momentary turmoil, Linden’s mount raced like Hyn, pounding the ice and dirt toward the tents of the wounded. Followed by shouts of rage and alarm, she ran for her destination.

  She was now little more than a hundred paces from the edge of the encampment. When she dismounted, she would be within twenty or thirty steps of the nearest pavilion. But during her dash at the camp, Berek’s commanders had readied a wall of swords and spears to resist her. Warriors stood clenched against their fear. Damn it: this was the cost of her haste. She had left behind anyone who might have spoken for her. Now she seemed to have no choice except to fight or fail.

  But she had seen too much death and could not do otherwise than she had done.

  She began to pull on her mount’s reins, slowing the beast so that the warriors ahead of her would see that she did not mean to hurl herself onto their weapons. While riders swept toward her, she eased the horse to a canter; to a walk. Then she slipped down from the beast’s back and left it.

  A heartbeat later, horses clattered to a halt behind her. But she did not turn toward them. Striding directly at the wall of warriors, she let the Staff’s fire die away. She wanted Berek’s people to recognize that she had no wish to harm them. Then she said as calmly as she could, knowing that she was close enough to be heard, “By Yellinin’s command, and in Lord Berek’s name, let me pass. Please. I would beg you, but I don’t have time. Your friends are dying in those tents.”

  Still the points of the spears and the edges of the swords confronted her. Berek’s forces had grown accustomed to fear and death: they may not have been capable of heeding her.

  “I’m a healer.” She walked straight at the barricade of warriors. “I intend to help. Either cut me down”—she did not raise her voice—“or let me pass.”

  No one answered her. She heard no order given; felt no conscious decision reached. Yet something in her tone or her manner, her strangeness or her steady stride, must have inspired conviction. When she drew near enough to spit herself on the first of the spears, it lifted out of her path. Abruptly several men and women lowered their swords. More spears followed the example of the first. The warriors stared at her with fierce concentration: their eyes held every shade of apprehension and doubt. Nevertheless they parted so that she could walk between them.

  For a moment, tears blurred her sight. “Thank you,” she murmured unsteadily, “thank you,” as she moved unhurt into the encampment.

  Men and women formed an aisle for her, a gauntlet, all with their weapons held ready—and all motionless in spite of their uneasy tension. Here and there, firelight reflected in their eyes, or on the battered metal of their breastplates. Many of them wore hardened leather caps in lieu of helmets; leather vambraces and other protection. All were variously clad in blood and bandages. As individuals, they ached with weariness and old wounds, entrenched loss and desperation. Together they hurt Linden’s senses like a festering abscess. Yet she caught only hints of hopelessness or despair. Berek’s people were sustained by their deep belief in him. It kept them on their feet.

  She loathed war and killing. At times, she did not know how to accept humankind’s readiness for evil. But she was already starting to admire Berek, and she had not yet met him. His spirit preserved his people when every other resource failed. And he was the reason—she was sure of this—that they had refrained from slaying her. She had invoked his name. They strove to prove themselves worthy of him.

  Roughly she rubbed away her tears. Without hesitation, she followed the aisle and her raw nerves toward the nearest pavilion.

  As she approached the heavy canvas, torn and filthy from too much use, her perceptions of distress accumulated. The naked human suffering ahead of her was worse than any she had faced before.

  She had spent years preparing for such crises. Nothing in that tent was more severe than the mangled cost of car wrecks or bad falls; the outcome of drunken brawls and domestic abuse; the vicious ruin of gunshots. Berek’s people were not more severely damaged than Sahah had been, or others of the Ramen, or the Masters who had opposed the Demondim.

  But there were so many of them—And they were being given such primitive care—During the last strides of her approach to the pavilion, she felt three of them die. More than a score of them lingered on the absolute edge of death, kept alive only by simple unbending steadfastness; by the strength of their desire not to fail their Lord. Before long, they would slip away, some stupefied by their wounds, others in pure agony. And this was only one tent: there were two more.

  Never before had Linden faced bleeding need on this scale: not by several orders of magnitude. The grim frantic hours that she and Julius Berenford had spent in surgery after Covenant’s murder were paltry by comparison.

  And her nerves were raw; too raw. She f
elt every severed limb and broken skull, every pierced abdomen and slashed joint, as if they had been incused on her own flesh. Nevertheless she did not falter. She would not. Confronted with such pain, she would allow nothing to prevent her from doing what she could.

  Trust yourself.

  As if she had forgotten her own mortality, she thrust the stiff fabric of the opening aside and strode into the tent.

  She hardly noticed that no one entered behind her.

  The tent was supported by four heavy poles, each more than twice her height. And the interior was illuminated by oil lamps, at least a score of them. Nevertheless she could scarcely descry the far wall. The whole place was full of smoke, a heavy brume so thick and pungent that her eyes watered instantly and she began to cough before she had taken two steps across the dirt floor.

  God damn it, she might have shouted, are you trying to suffocate them? Almost at once, however, her senses came into focus, and she saw and smelled and felt that the rank fug arose from burning herbs. It was a febrifuge of some kind, intended to combat fever. In addition, it had a degree of virtue against infection. Beyond question, it hurt the lungs of the wounded. But most of them had grown accustomed to it, or were too weak to cough. And it kept some of them alive.

  They lay on the iron ground in long rows, protected from the cold only by thin straw pallets padded with blankets. But the blankets had been fouled by months or seasons of blood and pus and sputum, urine and faeces: they were caked and crusted with disease. Still coughing, Linden discerned pneumonia and dysentery rampant around her, exacerbating the bitter throng of wounds and a host of other illnesses.

  Then she understood that the true horror of this war was not that so many people were dying, but rather that so many still clung to life. Death would have been kinder—The men and women who served as Berek’s physicians had wrought miracles against impossible odds.

  There were three of them in the tent, two men and a woman: three to care for twenty or thirty times that many wounded and dying. As one of them came toward her, she saw that he wore a thick grey robe nearly as vile as the blankets. A length of rope cinched his waist, and from it hung several pouches of herbs—his only medicines—as well as a short heavy sword and a crude saw which he obviously, too obviously, used for amputations. He trembled with fatigue as he approached, a heavy burden of sleep deprivation. Rheum dulled his gaze, and the weak flat sound of his cough told Linden as clearly as bloodwork that he had contracted pneumonia.

  Nevertheless he did his best to accost her. “Begone,” he wheezed irritably. “This is no place for you, stranger, madwoman. I will summon—”

  Linden silenced him with a sharp gesture. Before he could protest, she drew flame blooming from her Staff.

  She had spent ten years without percipience and Earthpower, restricted to the surface of life. During that time, she had lost much of her familiarity with the Land’s gifts. But in recent days, she had made repeated use of the Staff. Unaware of what would be required of her, she had nonetheless trained her nerves and sharpened her perceptions for this crisis, this multitude of pain. To that extent, at least, she was ready.

  Carefully she sent out sheets of yellow fire, immaculate as sunshine, and wrapped them like a cocoon around the physician.

  She knew exactly what he needed: she felt it in her own blood and bone. Swift as instinct, she found his tiredness, his illness, his unremitting exposure to infection, and she swept them away.

  She barely heard the other two physicians yell in alarm. From their perspective, their comrade must have appeared to blaze like an auto-da-fé. And she paid no heed to the answering shouts from outside the tent. When warriors burst past the tent flaps behind her, she ignored them. Her concentration admitted no intrusion.

  The physician’s heart had time to beat twice or thrice while she worked. Then she released him from fire. The emotional and spiritual toll of his labors she could not heal, but she left him physically whole: staggering with surprise, and exalted by relief and wellness.

  At once, Linden turned away and dropped to her knees beside the nearest of the wounded.

  This warrior was a woman, and Linden knew that she was not yet dying. She might linger for several days, excruciated by fever and infection. The sword-cut which had split her breastplate and opened her ribs was not necessarily fatal. With cleanliness and rest, it might heal on its own. But her left foot had been amputated above the ankle, and there her real danger lay. Her shin suppurated with infection and anguish. Slivers of bone protruded from the mass of pus and maggots where one of the physicians had attempted to save her life.

  She was far from being the most needy warrior here. She was simply the nearest. For that reason, Linden had chosen her.

  The other physicians still called for help. Linden heard quick steps at her back; swords drawn. No one here could comprehend what she was doing. They saw only fire and were afraid. She needed to show them what her actions meant before a blade bit into her back.

  Hurrying, she closed her eyes; refined her attention; swathed the wounded woman in Earthpower. With flame, she burned away infection and maggots, cleansed poisons, excised and sealed necrotic tissues, knit together shards of bone. And she caused no pain: the bright efficacy of the Staff was as soothing as Glimmermere’s lacustrine roborant.

  Near her, the physician yelled frantically, “Halt!” She felt him leap to intercept the stroke of a sword. “Do not!” His voice became a roar as he found his strength. “Heaven and Earth, are you blind? She has mended me!”

  There must have been whetted iron mere inches from her neck; but Linden allowed nothing to interrupt her as she assoiled the fallen woman’s injuries.

  When she was done, she quenched the Staff and raised her head.

  The rumpled hood of her cloak touched the edge of a sword. “What madness is this?” demanded one of the warriors behind her, a man. “She has set flame to a woman who might have lived, and you wish her spared?”

  “Unclose your eyes,” retorted the physician. “Behold what she has done. It is not harm.

  “By my life,” he added more softly, in wonder, “I had forgotten that there was once a time when I was not ill.”

  The healed woman tried to lift her head from the pallet. “What—?” she asked weakly. “What has become of my pain? Why am I not in pain?”

  Daring Berek’s people to cut at her now, Linden braced herself on the Staff and rose to her feet. She felt their astonishment; their reluctance to credit what they saw and heard. They had so little experience of the Land’s true life—They could not imagine its implications.

  However, the physician did not leave the warriors to reach their own conclusions. Suddenly resolute, he commanded, “Begone!” as he had tried to command Linden. “This lady”—he could hardly find words for his amazement—“will do no hurt. Mayhap she will work great good, if she is not hindered. Depart, that I may beseech her aid.”

  Flapping both arms, he gestured in dismissal until the men and women behind Linden complied. Then he turned to her while his fellow healers hastened among the rows toward him.

  “My lady,” he began, flustered by healing and hope, “I comprehend naught here. Such fire—It is beyond—

  “But”—he seemed to grasp himself roughly with both hands—“I do not require comprehension, and must not delay. Will you grant us further flame? We are badly surpassed. The need is too great to be numbered. Our simples and implements redeem few. Most perish.” The rheum in his eyes had become tears. “I will prostrate myself, if that will sway you—”

  He began to sink to his knees.

  Still Linden did not falter. The tent had become an emergency room, and she was a surgeon. Grabbing quickly at the man’s arm, she said, “Of course I’ll help. That’s why I’m here. But I need you to do triage for me.” When he frowned at the unfamiliar word, she explained. “I should treat the worst cases first, but I don’t know who they are. You’ll have to tell me.” Guide me. The sheer scale of the suffering around her
confused her perceptions. “And get me some drinking water.”

  She would need more than the Staff could provide to sustain her during the ordeal ahead.

  The man’s mouth formed the word “cases” in silent confusion. Nevertheless he grasped her meaning. “Then commence with the fifth in this row,” he replied, nodding to Linden’s left. He seemed ready to obey her smallest word. “Palla and Jevin will direct you further.” Plainly he meant his fellow physicians. “I am Vertorn. I will command wine from the guards to refresh you.”

  Good enough, Linden thought. She had to get to work. Pausing only to say, “I’m Linden. Don’t be afraid of anything you see,” she strode toward the pallet Vertorn had suggested.

  When she saw how badly the man there had been slashed and pierced, she might have quailed, overwhelmed by the scale of her dilemma. He looked like he had been hung up like a dummy and used for weapons practice. His life was little more than a wisp of breath in the back of his throat. With her Staff, she had the capacity to fill the entire tent with vivifying flame. The iron-shod wood was constrained only by her own limitations. But she was too human to function in that way. She had to see what she strove to heal; needed to focus her attention on each individual wound and illness. In her hands, an undefined broadside of Earthpower might do more harm than good. She could only struggle to save one patient at a time, treat one need at a time, as she had always done.

  And they were so many—

  But during the single heartbeat when her courage might have broken, she felt a woman immediately behind her slip into death. After that, she did not hesitate. Unfurling the Staff’s severe and kindly puissance like an oriflamme, she began her chosen task.