Thomas Covenant 02: The Illearth War

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  But the High Lord seemed to understand this. Though her elsewhere gaze did not touch him, she replied to his thought. “Thomas Covenant, you do not altogether comprehend Lena my mother. I am a woman—human like any other. And I have chosen you to be my companion on this quest. Surely my choice reveals my mother’s heart as well as my own. I am her daughter. From birth I lived in her care, and she taught me. Unbeliever, she did not teach me any anger or bitterness toward you.”

  “No!” Covenant breathed. “No.” No! Not her, too! A vision of blood darkened his sight—the blood on Lena’s loins. He could not bear to think that she had forgiven him, she!

  He turned away. He felt Elena watching him, felt her presence reaching toward him in an effort to draw him back. But he could not face her. He was afraid of the emotions that motivated her; he did not even name them to himself. He lay down in his blankets with his back to her until she banked the graveling for the night and settled herself to sleep.

  The next morning, shortly after dawn, Morin and Bannor reappeared. They brought Myrha and Covenant’s mount with them. He roused himself, and joined Elena in a meal while the Bloodguard packed their blankets. And soon after they had started westward again, Amok became visible at the High Lord’s side.

  Covenant was in no mood for any more of Amok’s spellbinding. And he had made a decision during the night. There was a risk he had to take—a dangerous gesture that he hoped might help him recover some kind of integrity. Before the youth could begin, Covenant clenched himself to contain the sudden hammering of his heart, and asked Amok what he knew about white gold.

  “Much and little, Bearer,” Amok answered with a laugh and a bow. “It is said that white gold articulates the wild magic which destroys peace. But who is able to describe peace?”

  Covenant frowned. “You’re playing word games. I asked you a straight question. What do you know about it?”

  “Know, Bearer? That is a small word—it conceals the magnitude of its meaning. I have heard what I have been told, and have seen what my eyes have beheld, but only you bear the white gold. Do you call this knowledge?”

  “Amok,” Elena came to Covenant’s aid, “is white gold in some way interwoven with the Seventh Ward? Is white gold the subject or key of that Ward?”

  “Ah, High Lord, all things are interwoven.” The youth seemed to relish his ability to dodge questions. “The Seventh Ward may ignore white gold, and the master of white gold may have no use for the Seventh Ward—yet both are power, forms and faces of the one Power of life. But the Bearer is not my master. He shadows but does not darken me. I respect that which he bears, but my purpose remains.”

  Elena’s response was firm. “Then there is no need to evade his questions. Speak of what you have heard and learned concerning white gold.”

  “I speak after my fashion, High Lord. Bearer, I have heard much and learned little concerning white gold. It is the girding paradox of the arch of Time, the undisciplined restraint of the Earth’s creation, the absent bone of the Earthpower, the rigidness of water and the flux of rock. It articulates the wild magic which destroys peace. It is spoken of softly by the Bhrathair, and named in awe by the Elohim, though they have never seen it. Great Kelenbhrabanal dreams of it in his grave, and grim Sandgorgons writhe in voiceless nightmare at the touch of its name. In his last days, High Lord Kevin yearned for it in vain. It is the abyss and the peak of destiny.”

  Covenant sighed to himself. He had feared that he would receive this kind of answer. Now he would have to go further, push his question right to the edge of his dread. In vexation and anxiety he rasped, “That’s enough—spare me. Just tell me how white gold—” For an instant he faltered. But the memory of Lena compelled him. “—how to use this bloody ring.”

  “Ah, Bearer,” Amok laughed, “ask the Sunbirth Sea or Melenkurion Skyweir. Question the fires of Gorak Krembal, or the tinder heart of Garroting Deep. All the Earth knows. White gold is brought into use like any other power—through passion and mystery, the honest subterfuge of the heart.”

  “Hellfire,” Covenant growled in an effort to disguise his relief. He did not like to admit to himself how glad he was to remain ignorant on this subject. But that ignorance was vital to his self-defense. As long as he did not know how to use the wild magic, he could not be blamed for the fate of the Land. In a secret and perfidious part of his heart, he had risked his question only because he trusted Amok to give him an unrevealing answer. Now he felt like a liar. Even his attempts at integrity were flawed. But his relief was greater than his self-distaste.

  That relief enabled him to change the subject, attempt a normal conversation with the High Lord. He felt as awkward as a cripple; he had not conversed casually with another person since before the onset of his leprosy. But Elena responded willingly, even gladly; she welcomed his attention. Soon he no longer had to search for leading questions.

  For some time, their talk floated on the ambience of Trothgard. As they climbed westward through the hills and woodlands and moors, the autumn air grew crisper. Birds roved the countryside in deft flits and soars. The cheerful sunlight stretched as if it might burst at any moment into sparkles and gleams. In it, the fall colors became dazzling. And the riders began to see more animals—rabbits and squirrels, plump badgers, occasional foxes. The whole atmosphere seemed to suit High Lord Elena. Gradually, Covenant came to understand this aspect of Lordship. Elena was at home in Trothgard. The healing of Kurash Plenethor became her.

  In the course of his questions, she avoided only one subject—her childhood experiences with the Ranyhyn. Something about her young rides and initiations was too private to be treated under the open sky. But on other topics she replied without constraint. She allowed herself to be led into talk of her years in the Loresraat, of Revelwood and Trothgard, of Revelstone and Lordship and power. He sensed that she was helping him, allowing him, cooperating, and he was grateful. In time, he no longer felt maimed during the pauses in their conversation.

  The next day passed similarly. But the day after that, this unthreatened mood eluded him. He lost his facility. His tongue grew stiff with remembered loneliness, and his beard itched irritably, like a reminder of peril. It’s impossible, he thought. None of this is happening to me. Deliberately driven by his illness, and by all the survival disciplines he had lost, he raised the question of High Lord Kevin.

  “I am fascinated by him,” she said, and the core of stillness in her voice sounded oddly like the calm in the eye of a storm. “He was the highest of all Berek Heartthew’s great line—the Lord most full of dominion in all the Land’s known or legended history. His fidelity to the Land and the Earthpower knew neither taint nor flaw. His friendship with the Giants was a matter for a fine song. The Ranyhyn adored him, and the Bloodguard wove their Vow because of him. If he had a fault, it was in excessive trust—yet how can E trust be counted for blame? At the first, it was to his honor that the Despiser could gain Lordship from him—Lordship, and access to his heart. Was not Fangthane witnessed and approved by the orcrest and lomillialor tests of truth? Innocence is glorified by its vulnerability.

  “And he was not blind. In the awful secret of his doubt, he refused the summons which would have taken him to his death in Treacher’s Gorge. In his heart-wrung foresight or prophecy, he made decisions which preserved the Land’s future. He prepared his Wards. He provided for the survival of the Giants and the Ranyhyn and the Bloodguard. He warned the people. And then with his own hand he destroyed—

  “Thomas Covenant, there are some who believe that the Ritual of Desecration expressed High Lord Kevin’s highest wisdom. They are few, but eloquent. The common understanding holds that Kevin strove to achieve that paradox of purity through destruction—and failed, for he and all the works of the Lords were undone, yet the Despiser endured. But these few argue that the final despair or madness with which Kevin invoked the Ritual was a necessary sacrifice, a price to make possible ultimate victory. They argue that his preparations and then the Ritual—fo
rcing both health and ill to begin their work anew—were enacted to provide us with Fangthane’s defeat. In this argument, Kevin foresaw the need which would compel the Despiser to summon white gold to the Land.”

  “He must have been sicker than I thought,” Covenant muttered. “Or maybe he just liked desecrations.”

  “Neither, I think,” she replied tartly, sternly. “He was a brave and worthy man driven to extremity. Any mortal or unguarded heart may be brought to despair—for this reason we cling to the Oath of Peace. And for this same reason High Lord Kevin fascinates me. He avowed the Land, and defiled it—in the same breath affirmed and denounced.” Her voice rose on the inner wind of her emotion. “How great must have been his grief? And how great his power had he only survived that last consuming moment—if, after beholding the Desecration, and hearing the Despiser’s glee, he had lived to strike one more blow!

  “Thomas Covenant, I believe that there is immeasurable strength in the consummation of despair—strength beyond all conceiving by an unholocausted soul. I believe that if High Lord Kevin could speak from beyond the grave, he would utter a word which would unmarrow the very bones of Lord Foul’s Despite.”

  “That’s madness!” Covenant gasped thickly. Elena’s gaze wavered on the edge of focus, and he could not bear to look at her. “Do you think that some existence after death is going to vindicate you after you’ve simply extirpated life from the Earth? That was exactly Kevin’s mistake. I tell you, he is roasting in hell!”

  “Perhaps,” she said softly. To his surprise, the storm implied in her voice was gone. “We will never possess such knowledge—and should not need it to live our lives. But I find a danger in Lord Mhoram’s belief that the Earth’s Creator has chosen you to defend the Land. It is in my heart that this does not account for you.

  “However, I have thought at times that perhaps our dead live in your world. Perhaps High Lord Kevin now restlessly walks your Earth, searching a voice which may utter his word here.”

  Covenant groaned; Elena’s suggestion dismayed him. He heard the connection she drew between Kevin Landwaster and himself. And the implications of that kinship made his heart totter as if it were assailed by potent gusts of foreboding. As they rode onward, the new silence between them glistened like white eyes of fear.

  This mood grew stronger through that day and the next. The magnitude of the issues at stake numbed Covenant; he did not have the hands to juggle them. He withdrew into silence as if it were a chrysalis, an armor for some special vulnerability or metamorphosis. An obscure impulse like a memory of his former days with Atiaran prompted him to drop away from Elena’s side and ride behind her. At her back, he followed Amok into the upper reaches of Trothgard.

  Then on the sixth day, the thirteenth since he had left Revelstone, he came to himself again after a fashion. Scowling thunderously, he raised his head, and saw the Westron Mountains ranging above him. High Lord Elena’s party was nearing the southwest corner of Trothgard, where the Rill River climbed up into the mountains; and already the crags and snows of the range filled the whole western sky. Trothgard lay unrolled behind him like the Lords’ work exposed for review; it beamed in the sunlight as if it were confident of approbation. Covenant frowned at it still more darkly, and turned his attention elsewhere.

  The riders moved near the rim of the canyon of the Rill. The low, incessant rush of its waters, unseen below the edge of the canyon, gave Trothgard a dimension of sound like a subliminal humming made by the mountains and hills. All the views had a new suggestiveness, a timbre of implication. It reminded Covenant that he was climbing into one of the high places of the Land—and he did not like high places. But he clenched his frown to anchor the involuntary reactions of his face, and returned to Elena’s side. She gave him a smile which he could not return, and they rode on together toward the mountains.

  Late that afternoon, they stopped, made camp beside a small pool near the edge of the canyon. Water came splashing out of the mountainside directly before them, and collected in a rocky basin before pouring over the rim toward the Rill. That pool could have served as a corner marker for Trothgard. Immediately south of it was the Rill’s canyon; on the west, the mountains seemed to spring abruptly out of the ground, like a frozen instant of ambuscade; and Kurash Plenethor lay draped northeastward across the descending terrain. The aggressive imminence of the mountains contrasted vividly with the quiet panoply of Trothgard—and that contrast, multiplied by the lambent sound of the unseen Rill, gave the whole setting a look of surprise, an aspect or impression of suddenness. The atmosphere around the pool carried an almost tangible sense of boundary.

  Covenant did not like it. The air contained too much crepuscular lurking. It made him feel exposed. And the riders were not forced to stop there; enough daylight remained for more traveling. But the High Lord had decided to camp beside the pool. She dismissed Amok, sent the two Bloodguard away with the Ranyhyn and Covenant’s horse, then set her pot of graveling on a flat rock near the pool, and asked Covenant to leave her alone so that she could bathe.

  Snorting as if the very air vexed him, he stalked off into the lee of a boulder where he was out of sight of the pool. He sat with his back to the stone, hugged his knees, and gazed down over Trothgard. He found the woodland hills particularly attractive as the mountain shadow began to fall across them. The peaks seemed to exude an austere dimness which by slow degrees submerged Trothgard’s luster. Through simple size and grandeur, they exercised precedence. But he preferred Trothgard. It was lower and more human.

  Then the High Lord interrupted his reverie. She had left her robe and the Staff of Law on the grass by her graveling. Wrapped only in a blanket, and drying her hair with one corner of it, she came to join him. Though the blanket hung about her thickly, revealing even less of her supple figure than did her robe, her presence felt more urgent than ever. The simple movement of her limbs as she seated herself at his side exerted an unsettling influence over him. She demanded responses. He found that his chest hurt again, as it had at Glimmermere.

  Striving to defend himself against an impossible tenderness, he flung away from the boulder, walked rapidly toward the pool. The itching of his beard reminded him that he also seeded a bath. The High Lord remained out of sight; Bannor and Morin were nowhere around. He dropped his clothes by the graveling pot, and went to the pool.

  The water was as cold as snow, but he thrust himself into it like a man exacting penance, and began to scrub at his flesh as if it were stained. He attacked his scalp and cheeks until his fingertips tingled, then submerged himself until his lungs burned. But when he pulled himself out of the water and went to the graveling for warmth, he found that he had only aggravated his difficulties. He felt whetted, more voracious, but no cleaner.

  He could not understand Elena’s power over him, could not control his response. She was an illusion, a figment; he should not be so attracted to her. And she should not be so willing to attract him. He was already responsible for her; his one potent act in the Land had doomed him to that. How could she not blame him?

  Moving with an intemperate jerkiness, he dried himself on one of the blankets, then draped it by the pot to dry, and began to dress. He put on his clothes fiercely, as if he were girding for battle—laced and hauled and zipped and buckled himself into his sturdy boots, his T-shirt, his tough, protective jeans. He checked to be sure that he still carried his penknife and Hearthrall Tohrm’s orcrest in his pockets.

  When he was properly caparisoned, he went back through the twilight toward the High Lord. He stamped his feet to warn her of his approach, but the grass absorbed his obscure vehemence, and he made no more noise than an indignant specter.

  He found her standing a short distance downhill from the boulder. She was gazing out over Trothgard. with her arms folded across her chest, and did not turn toward him as he drew near. For a time, he stood two steps behind her. The sky was still too sun-pale for stars, but Trothgard lay under the premature gloaming of the mountains. In t
he twilight, the face of the Lords’ promise to the Land was veiled and dark.

  Covenant twisted his ring, wound it on his finger as if he were tightening it to the pitch of some outbreak. Water from his wet hair dripped into his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was harsh with a frustration that he could neither relieve nor repress.

  “Hellfire, Elena! I’m your father!”

  She gave no sign that she had heard him, but after a moment she said in a low, musing tone, “Triock son of Thuler would believe that you have been honored. He would not utter it kindly—but his heart would speak those words, or hold that thought. Had you not been summoned to the Land, he might have wed Lena my mother. And he would not have taken himself to the Loresraat, for he had no yearning for knowledge—the stewardship of Stonedownor life would have sufficed for him. But had he and Lena my mother borne a child who grew to become High Lord of the Council of Revelstone, he would have felt honored—both elevated and humbled by his part in his daughter.

  “Hear me, Thomas Covenant. Triock Thuler-son of Mithil Stonedown is my true father—the parent of my heart, though he is not the sire of my blood. Lena my mother did not wed him, though he begged her to share her life with him. She desired no other sharing—the life of your child satisfied her. But though she would not share her life, he shared his. He provided for her and for me. He took the place of a son with Trell Lena’s father and Atiaran her mother.

  “Ah, he was a dour parent. His heart’s love ran in broken channels—yearning and grief and, yes, rage against you were diminishless for him, finding new paths when the old were turned or dammed. But he gave to Lena my mother and to me all a father’s tenderness and devotion. Judge of him by me, Thomas Covenant. When dreaming of you took Lena’s thoughts from me—when Atiaran lost in torment her capacity to care for me, and called to herself all Trell her husband’s attention—then Triock son of Thuler stood beside me. He is my father.”

  Covenant tried to efface his emotions with acid. “He should have killed me when he had the chance.”