Thomas Covenant 02: The Illearth War

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  “I know,” Troy replied carefully. His trepidation returned in a rush. “But we haven’t got any choice. Even at this pace, too many warriors and Bloodguard are going to get killed buying us the time we need.”

  “I hear you,” Amorine grated. “We will keep the pace.”

  When the army stopped for the night, Mhoram, Elena, and Amatin moved among the bright campfires, singing songs and telling gleeful Giantish stories to buttress the hearts of the warriors. As he watched them, Troy felt a keen regret that long days would pass before the Lords could again help Amorine maintain the Warward’s spirit.

  But the separation was necessary. High Lord Elena had several reasons for visiting the Loresraat. But Revelwood was out of the way; the added distance was prohibitive for the marching warriors. So the Lords and the Warward parted company the next afternoon. The three Lords, accompanied by Covenant and Troy, the twenty Bloodguard, and the Lorewardens, turned with the road southwest toward Trothgard and Revelwood. And First Haft Amorine led the Warward, with its mounted Hirebrands and Gravelingases, almost due south in a direct line toward Doom’s Retreat.

  Troy had business of his own at the Loresraat, and he was forced to leave Amorine alone in command of his army. That afternoon, the autumn sky turned dim as rain clouds moved heavily eastward. When he gave the First Haft his final instructions, his vision was blurred; he had to peer through an ominous haze. “Keep the pace,” he said curtly. “Push it even faster when you reach easier ground past the Gray River. If you can gain a little time, we won’t have to drive so hard around the Last Hills. If those Bloodguard the High Lord sent out were able to do their jobs, there should be plenty of supplies along the way. We’ll catch up to you in the Center Plains.” His voice was stiff with awareness of the difficulties she faced.

  Amorine responded with a nod that expressed her seasoned resolve. A light rain started to fall. Troy’s vision became so clouded that he could no longer make out individual figures in the massed Warward. He gave the First Haft a tight salute, and she turned to lead the warriors angling away from the road.

  The Lords and Lorewardens gave a shout of encouragement, but Troy did not join it. He took Mehryl to the top of a bare knoll, and stood there with his ebony sword raised against the drizzle while the whole length of his army passed by like a shadow in the fog below him. He told himself that the Warward was not going into battle without him—that his warriors would only march until he rejoined them. But the thought did not ease him. The Warward was his tool, his means of serving the Land; and when he returned to the other riders he felt awkward, disjointed, almost dismembered, as if only the skill of the Ranyhyn kept him on balance. He rode on through the rest of the day wrapped in the familiar loneliness of the blind.

  The drizzle continued throughout the remainder of the afternoon, all that night, and most of the next day. Despite the piled thickness of the clouds, the rain did not come down hard; but it kept out the sunlight, tormented Troy by obscuring his vision. In the middle of the night, sleeping in wet blankets that seemed to cling to him like winding sheets, he was snatched awake by a wild, inchoate conviction that the weather would be overcast when he went into battle at Doom’s Retreat. He needed sunlight, clarity. If he could not see—!

  He arose depressed, and did not recover his usual confidence until the rainclouds finally blew away to the east, letting the sun return to him.

  Before midmorning the next day, the company of the Lords came in sight of the Maerl River. They had been traveling faster since they had left the Warward, and when they reached the river, the northern boundary of Trothgard, they were halfway to Revelwood. The Maerl flowed out of high places in the Westron Mountains, and ran first northeast, then southeast, until it joined the Gray, became part of the Gray, and went eastward to the Soulsease. Beyond the Maerl was the region where the Lords concentrated their efforts to heal the ravages of Desecration and war.

  Trothgard had borne the name Kurash Plenethor, Stricken Stone, from the last years of Kevin Landwaster until it was rechristened when the new Lords first swore their oath of service after the Desecration. At that time, the region had been completely blasted and barren. The last great battle between the Lords and the Despiser had taken place there, and had left it burned, ruined, soaked in scorched blood, almost soilless. Some of the old tales said that Kurash Plenethor had smoked and groaned for a hundred years after that last battle. And forty years ago the Maerl River had still run thick with eroded and unfertile mud.

  But now there was only a trace of silt left in the current. For all the limitations of their comprehension, the Lords had learned much about the nurturing of damaged earth from the Second Ward, and on this day the Maerl carried only a slight haze of impurity. Because of centuries of past erosion, it lay in a ravine like a crack across the land. But the sides of the ravine were gentle with deep-rooted grasses and shrubs, and healthy trees lifted their boughs high out of the gully.

  The Maerl was a vital river again.

  Looking down into it from the edge of the ravine, the company paused for a moment of gladness. Together Elena, Mhoram, and Amatin sang softly part of the Lords’ oath. Then they galloped down the slope and across the road ford, so that the hooves of the Ranyhyn and the horses made a gay, loud splashing as they passed into Trothgard.

  This region lay between the Westron Mountains and the Maerl, Gray, and Rill rivers. Within these borders, the effects of the Lords’ care were everywhere, in everything. Generations of Lords had made Stricken Stone into a hale woodland, a wide hilly country of forests and glades and dales. Whole grassy hillsides were vivid with small blue and yellow flowers. For scores of leagues south and west of the riders, profuse aliantha and deep grass were full of gold-leaved Gilden and other trees, cherry and apple and white linden, prodigious oaks and elms and maples anademed in autumn glory. And air that for decades after the battle had still echoed with the blasts and shrieks of war was now so clear and clean that it seemed to glisten with birdcalls.

  This was what Troy had first seen when his vision began; this was what Elena had used to teach him the meaning of sight.

  Riding now on Mehryl’s back under brilliant sun in Trothgard’s luminous ambience, he felt more free of care than he had for a long time.

  As the company of the Lords moved through the early part of the afternoon, the country around them changed. Piles of tumbled rock began to appear among the trees and through the greensward; rugged boulders several times taller than the riders thrust their heads out of the ground, and smaller stones overgrown with moss and lichen lay everywhere. Soon the company seemed to be riding within the ancient rubble of a shattered mountain, a tall, incongruous peak which had risen out of the hills of Kurash Plenethor until some immense force had blasted it to bits.

  They were approaching the rock gardens of the Maerl.

  Troy had never taken the time to study the gardens, but he knew that they were said to be the place where the best suru-pa-maerl Craftmasters of the rhadhamaerl did their boldest work. Though in the past few years he had ridden along this road through the bristling rocks many times, he could not say where the gardens themselves began. Except for a steady increase in the amount of rubble lying on or sticking through the grass, he could locate no specific changes or boundaries until the company crested a hill above a wide valley. Then at least he was sure that he was in one of the gardens.

  Most of the long, high hillside facing the valley was thickly covered with stones, as if it had once been the heart of the ancient shattered peak. The rocks clustered and bulged on all sides, raising themselves up in huge piles or massive single boulders, so that virtually the only clear ground on the steep slope was the roadway.

  None of these rocks and boulders was polished or chipped or shaped in any way, though scattered individual stones and clusters of stones appeared to have had their moss and lichen cleaned away. And they all seemed to have been chosen for their natural grotesquerie. Instead of sitting or resting on the ground, they jutted and splint
ered and scowled and squatted and gaped, reared and cowered and blustered like a mad, packed throng of troglodytes terrified or ecstatic to be breathing open air. On its way to the valley, the road wandered among the weird shapes as if it were lost in a garish forest, so that as they moved downward the riders were constantly in the shadow of one tormented form or another.

  Troy knew that the jumbled amazement of that hillside was not natural; it had been made by men for some reason which he did not grasp.

  On past journeys, he had never been interested enough in it to ask about its significance. But now he did not object when High Lord Elena suggested that the company go to look at the work from a distance. Across the grassy bottom of the valley was another hill, even steeper and higher than the one it faced. The road turned left, and went away along the bottom of the valley, ignoring the plainer hill. Elena suggested that the riders climb this hill to look back at the gardens.

  She spoke to her companions generally, but her gaze was on Covenant. When he acquiesced with a vague shrug, she responded as if he had expressed the willingness of all the riders.

  The front of the hill was too steep for the horses, so they turned right and cantered up the valley until they found a place where they could swing around and mount the hill from behind. As they rode, Troy began to feel mildly expectant. The High Lord’s eagerness to show the view to Covenant invested it with interest. He remembered other surprises—like the Hall of Gifts, which had not interested him until Mhoram had practically dragged him to it.

  At the top, the hill bulged into a bare knoll. The riders left their mounts behind, and climbed the last distance on foot. They moved quickly, sharing Elena’s mood, and soon reached the crest.

  Across the valley, the rock garden lay open below them, displayed like a bas-relief. From this distance, they could easily see that all its jumbled rock formed a single pattern.

  Out of tortured stone, the makers of the garden had designed a wide face—a broad countenance with lumped gnarled and twisted features. The unevenness of the rock made the face appear bruised and contorted; its eyes were as ragged as deep wounds, and the roadway cut through it like an aimless scar. But despite all this, the face was stretched with a grin of immense cheerfulness. The unexpectedness of it startled Troy into a low, glad burst of laughter.

  Though the Lords and Lorewardens were obviously familiar with the garden, all their faces shared a look of joy, as if the displayed hilarious grin were contagious. High Lord Elena clasped her hands together to contain a surge of happiness, and Lord Mhoram’s eyes glittered with keen pleasure. Only Covenant did not smile or nod, or show any other sign of gladness. His face was as gaunt as a shipwreck. His eyes held a restless, haggard look of their own, and his right hand fumbled at his ring in a way that emphasized his two missing fingers. After a moment, he muttered through the company’s murmuring, “Well, the Giants certainly must be proud of you.”

  His tone was ambiguous, as if he were trying to say two contradictory things at once. But his reference to the Giants overshadowed anything else he might have meant. Lord Amatin’s smile faltered, and a sudden scrutinizing gleam sprang from under Mhoram’s brows. Elena moved toward him, intending to speak, but before she could begin, he went on, “I knew a woman like that once.” He was striving to sound casual, but his voice was awkward. “At the leprosarium.”

  Troy groaned inwardly, but held himself still.

  “She was beau— Of course, I didn’t know her then. And she didn’t have any pictures of herself, or if she did she didn’t show them. I don’t think she could even stand to look in the mirror anymore. But the doctors told me that she used to be beautiful. She had a smile— Even when I knew her, she could still smile. It looked just like that.” He nodded in the direction of the rock garden, but he did not look at it. He was concentrating on his memory.

  “She was a classic case.” As he continued, his tone became harsher and more bitter. He articulated each word distinctly, as if it had jagged edges. “She was exposed to leprosy as a kid in the Philippines or somewhere—her parents were stationed there in the military, I suppose—and it caught up with her right after she got married. Her toes went numb. She should have gone to a doctor right then, but she didn’t. She was one of those people whom you can’t interrupt. She couldn’t take time away from her husband and friends to worry about cold toes.

  “So she lost her toes. She finally went to a doctor when her feet began to cramp so badly that she could hardly walk, and eventually he figured out what was wrong with her, and sent her to the leprosarium, and the doctors there had to amputate. That gave her some trouble—it’s hard to walk when you don’t have any toes—but she was irrepressible. Before long she was back with her husband.

  “But she couldn’t have any kids. It’s just criminal folly for lepers who know better to have any kids. Her husband understood that—but he still wanted children, and so in due course he divorced her. That hurt her, but she survived it. Before long, she had a job and new friends and a new life. And she was back in the leprosarium. She was just too full of vitality and optimism to take care of herself. This time, two of her fingers were numb.

  “That cost her her job. She was a secretary, and needed her fingers. And of course her boss didn’t want any lepers working for him. But once her disease was arrested again, she learned how to type without using those dead fingers. Then she moved to a new area, got another job, more new friends, and went right on living as if absolutely nothing had happened.

  “At about this time—or so they told me—she conceived a passion for folk dancing. She’d learned something about it in her travels as a kid, and now it became her hobby, her way of making new friends and telling them that she loved them. With her bright clothes and her smile, she was—”

  He faltered, then went on almost at once: “But she was back in the leprosarium two years later. She didn’t have very good footing, and she took too many falls. And not enough medication. This time she lost her right leg below the knee. Her sight was starting to blur, and her right hand was pretty much crippled. Lumps were growing in her face, and her hair was falling out.

  “As soon as she learned how to hobble around on her artificial limb, she started folk-dancing lessons for the lepers.

  “The doctors kept her a long time, but finally she convinced them to let her out. She swore she was going to take better care of herself this time. She’d learned her lesson, she said, and she wasn’t ever coming back.

  “For a long time, she didn’t come back. But it wasn’t because she didn’t need to. Bit by bit, she was whittling herself away. When I met her, she was back at the leprosarium because a nursing home had thrown her out. She didn’t have anything left except her smile.

  “I spent a lot of time in her room, watching her lie there in bed—listening to her talk. I was trying to get used to the stench. Her face looked as if the doctors hit her with clubs every morning, but she still had that smile. Of course, most of her teeth were gone—but her smile hadn’t changed.

  “She tried to teach me to dance. She’d make me stand where she could see me, and then she’d tell me where to put my feet, when to jump, how to move my legs.” Again he faltered. “And in between she used to take hours telling me what a full life she’d had.

  “She must’ve been all of forty years old.”

  Abruptly he stooped to the ground, snatched up a stone, and hurled it with all his strength at the grinning face of the rock garden. His throw fell far short, but he did not stop to watch the stone roll into the valley. Turning away from it, he rasped thickly, “If I ever get my hands on her husband, I’ll wring his bloody neck.” Then he strode down off the knoll toward the horses. In a moment, he was astride his mount and galloping away to rejoin the road. Bannor was close behind him.

  Troy took a deep breath, trying to shake off the effect of Covenant’s tale, but he could think of nothing to say. When he looked over at Elena, he saw that she was melding with Mhoram and Amatin as if she needed their suppor
t to bear what she had heard. After a moment, Mhoram said aloud, “Ur-Lord Covenant is a prophet.”

  “Does he foretell the fate of the Land?” Amatin asked painfully.

  “No!” Elena’s denial was fierce, and Mhoram breathed also, “No.” But Troy could hear that Mhoram meant something different.

  Then the melding ended, and the Lords returned to their mounts. Soon the company was back on the road, riding after Covenant in the direction of Revelwood.

  For the rest of the afternoon, Troy was too disturbed by the Lords’ reaction to Covenant to relax and enjoy the journey. But the next day, he found a way to soothe his vague distress. He envisioned in detail the separate progresses of the Warward—the Bloodguard riding with Lord Callindrill, the mounted Eoward rafting and galloping, the warriors marching behind Amorine. On his mental map of the Land, these various thrusts had a deliberate symmetry that pleased him in some fundamental way. Before long, he began to feel better.

  And Trothgard helped him, also. South of the rock gardens, the land’s mantle of soil became thicker and more fertile, so that the hills through which the company rode had no bare stone jutting up among the grass and flowers. Instead, copses and broad swaths of woodland grew everywhere, punctuating the slopes and unfurling oratorically across the vales and valleys. Under the bright sky and the autumn balm of Trothgard, Troy put his uncertainty about Covenant behind him like a bad dream.

  At that point, even the problem of communications did not bother him. Ordinarily, he was even more concerned by his inability to convey messages to Quaan than by his ignorance of what was happening to Korik’s mission. But he was on his way to Revelwood. High Lord Elena had promised him that the Loresraat was working on his problem. He looked forward hopefully to the chance that the students of the Staff had found a solution for him.