THE POWER THAT PRESERVES

by default

  He followed it to the left, downward, into a hollow between hills. He kept his eyes on the trail immediately before him, fearing to look up and find that the maker of the trail was out of sight, out of reach. He saw where the maker had fallen, shed blood, rested, limped onward. Soon he met the next hill and began crawling up it along the crawling trail. He was desperate-alone and impoverished as he had never before been in the Land.

  But at last he recognized the truth. When the trail turned, crawled away to the left, fell back down the hillside, he could no longer deny that he had been following himself, that the trail was his own, a circle between hills he could not master.

  With a thick moan, he passed the boundary. His last strength fell out of him. Keen gleams winked across the dark gulf behind his closed eyes, but he could not answer them. He fell backward, slid down the hill into a low snowdrift.

  Yet even then his ordeal continued. His fall uncovered something in the snow. While he lay gasping helplessly, felt his heart tremble toward failure in his chest, a smell intruded on him. Despite the cold, it demanded his notice; it rose piquant and seductive in his face, ran into him on every breath, compelled him to respond. He propped himself up on quivering arms, and wiped the snow away with dead fingers.

  He found grass growing under the snowdrift. Somehow its potent life refused to be quenched; even a few yellow flowers blossomed under the weight of the snow. And their sharp aroma caught hold of him. His hands were useless for plucking, so he knocked some of the ice from around his mouth. Then he lowered his face to the grass, tore up blades with his teeth and ate them.

  As he swallowed the grass, its juice seemed to flow straight to his muscles like the energy of madness. The suddenness of the infusion caught him unaware. As he bent for a fourth bite, a convulsion came over him, and he collapsed into a rigid fetal position while raw power raged through his veins.

  For an instant, he screamed in agony. But at once he passed beyond himself into a bleak wilderland where nothing but winter and wind and malice existed. He felt Lord Foul's preternatural assault on a level that was not sight or hearing or touch, but rather a compaction of all his senses. The nerves of his soul ached as if they had been laid bare to the livid ill. And in the core of this perception, a thought struck him, stabbed into him as if it were the spear point of the winter. He identified the thing he did not understand.

  It was magic.

  A suggestion of keen gleams penumbraed the thought, then receded. Magic: eldritch power, theurgy. Such a thing did not exist, could not exist.

  Yet it was part of the Land. And it was denied to him. The thought turned painfully in him as cruel hands twisted the spear.

  He had heard Mhoram say, You are the white gold. What did that mean? He had no power. The dream was his, but he could not share its life-force. Its life-force was what proved it to be a dream. Magic: power. It sprang from him, and he could not touch it. It was impossible. With the Land's doom locked in the irremediable white gold circle of his ring, he was helpless to save himself.

  Gripped by an inchoate conviction, where prophecy and madness became indistinguishable, he flung himself around the contradiction and tried to contain it, make it all one within him.

  But then it faded in a scatter of keen alien gleaming. He found himself on his feet without any knowledge of how he had climbed erect. The gleams danced about his head like silent melody. The wild light of the grass played through his veins and muscles, elevating inanition and cold to the stature of gaunt priests presiding over an unholy sacrifice. He laughed at the immense prospect of his futility. The folly of his attempts to survive alone amused him.

  He was going to die a leper's death.

  His laughter scaled up into high gibbering mirth. Stumbling, limping, falling, lurching up and limping again, he followed the music toward the dark trees.

  He laughed every time he fell, unable to contain the secret humor of his distress; the frozen agony grinding in his ankle drew shrill peals from him like screams. But though he was impatient now for the end, eager for any blank damnable repose, still the keen gleams carried him along. Advancing and receding, urging, sprinkling his way like glaucous petals of ambergris, they made him rise after each fall and continue toward the outskirts of the forest.

  After a while, he began to think that the trees were singing to him. The gleams which fraught the air fell about him in alien intervals, like moist, blue-green shines of woodsong. But he could neither see nor hear them; they were apparent only to the restless energy in his veins. When in his wildness he tried to pluck them as if they were aliantha, they strewed themselves beyond his reach, enticing him on and on again after each fall until he found himself among the first winter-black trunks.

  As he wended through the marge of the forest, he felt an unexpected diminution of the cold. Daylight was dying out of the ashen sky behind him, and ahead lay nothing but the brooding bloom of the forest depths. Yet the winter seemed to ease rather than sharpen with the coming of night. Shambling onward, he soon discovered that the snow thinned as he moved deeper among the trees. In a few places, he even saw living leaves. They clung grimly to the branches, and the trees in turn clung to each other, interwove their branches and leaned on each other's shoulders like staunch, broad, black-wounded comrades holding themselves erect together. Through the thinning snow, animal tracks made light whorls that dizzied him when he tried to follow them. And the air grew warmer.

  Gradually, a dim light spread around him. For a time, he did not notice it to wonder what it was; he walked like a ruin along the alien spangles, and did not see the pale ghost-light expanding. But then a wet strand of moss struck his face, and he jerked into awareness of his surroundings.

  The tree trunks were glowing faintly, like moonlight mystically translated out of the blind sky into the forest. They huddled around him in stands and stretches and avenues of gossamer illumination; they were poised on all sides like white eyes, watching him. And through their branches hung draped, dangled curtains and hawsers of moist black moss.

  Then in his madness, fear came upon him like a shout of ancient forestial rage, springing from the unavenged slaughter of the trees; and he turned to flee. Wailing lornly, he slapped the moss away from him and tried to run. But his ankle buckled under him at every stride. And the music held him. Its former allure became a command, swinging him against his will so that his panic itself, his very flight, drove him deeper among the trees and the moss and the light. He had lost all possession of himself. The strength of the grass capered in him like poison; the gleams danced through their blue-green intervals, guiding him. He fled like the hunted, battering and recoiling against trunks, tangling himself in moss, tearing his hair in fear. Animals scampered out of his wailing path, and his ears echoed to the desolate cries of owls.

  He was soon exhausted. His flesh could not bear any more. As his wailing turned to frenzy in his throat, a large hairy moth the size of a cormorant suddenly fluttered out of the branches, veered erratically, and crashed into him. The impact knocked him to the ground in a pile of useless limbs. For a moment, he thrashed weakly. But he could not regain his breath, steady himself, rise. After a brief struggle, he collapsed on the warm turf and abandoned himself to the forest.

  For a time, the gleaming hovered over him as if it were curious about his immobility. Then it spangled away into the depths of the trees, leaving him clapped in dolorous dreams. While he slept, the light mounted until the trunks seemed to be reaching toward him with their illumination, seeking a way to absorb him, rid the ground of him, efface him from the sight of their hoary rage. But though they glowered, they did not harm him. And before long a feathery scampering came through the branches and the moss. The sound seemed to reduce the trees to baleful insentience; they withdrew their threatening as a host of spiders began to drop lightly onto Covenant's still form.

  Guided by gleams, the spiders swarmed over him as if they were searching for a vital spot to place their stings. But instead of stinging him, they
gathered around his wounds; working together, they started to weave their webs over him wherever he was hurt.

  In a short time, both his feet were thickly wrapped in pearl-gray webs. The bleeding of his ankle was stanched, and its protruding bone-splinters were covered with gentle protection. A score of the spiders draped his frostbitten cheeks and nose with their threads, while others bandaged his hands, and still others webbed his forehead, though no injury was apparent there. Then they all scurried away as quickly as they had come.

  He slept on. His dreams wracked him at odd moments, but for the most part he lay still, and so his ragged pulse grew steadier, and the helpless whimper faded from his breathing. In his gray webs, he looked like a cocooned wreck in which something new was aborning.

  Much later that night, he stirred and found the keen gleams peering at him again through his closed eyelids. He was still far from consciousness, but the notes of the melody roused him enough to hear feet shuffling toward him across the grass. "Ah, mercy," an old woman's voice sighed over him, "mercy. So peace and silence come to this. I left all thought of such work-and yet my rest comes to this. Have mercy."

  Hands cleared the gentle bindings from his head and face.

  "Yes I see-for this reason the Forest called me from my old repose. Injured-cold-ill. And he has eaten amanibhavam. Ah, mercy. How the world intrudes, when even Morinmoss bestirs itself for such things as this. Well, the grass has kept life in him, whatever its penalty. But I mislike the look of his thoughts. He will be a sore trial to me."

  Covenant heard the words, though they did not penetrate the cold center of his sleep. He tried to open his eyes, but they kept themselves closed as if out of fear of what he might see. The old woman's hands as they searched him for other injuries filled him with loathing; yet he lay still, slumberous, shackled in mad dreams. He had no volition with which to oppose her. So he lurked within himself, hid from her until he could spring and strike her down and free himself.

  "Mercy," she mumbled on to herself, "mercy, indeed. Cold-ill and broken-minded. I left such work. Where will I find the strength for it?" Then her deft fingers bared his left hand, and she gasped, "Melenkurion! White gold? Ah, by the Seven! How has such a burden come to me?"

  The need to protect his ring from her drew him closer to consciousness. He could not move his hand, could not even clench his fist around the ring, so he sought to distract her.

  "Lena," he croaked through cracked lips, without knowing what he said. "Lena? Are you still alive?"

  With an effort he pried open his eyes.

  [THIRTEEN] The Healer

  Still sleep shrouded his sight; at first he saw nothing except the compact, baleful light of the trees. But his ring was in danger from her. He was jealous of his white gold. Sleep or no sleep, he did not mean to give it up. He strove to focus his eyes, strove to come far enough out of hiding to engage her attention.

  Then a soft stroke of her hand swept the cobwebs from his eyebrows, and he found that he could see her.

  "Lena?" he croaked again.

  She was a dusky, loamy woman, with hair like tangled brown grass, and an old face uneven and crude of outline, as if it had been inexpertly molded in clay. The hood of a tattered fallow-green cloak covered the crown of her head. And her eyes were the brown of soft mud, an unexpected and suggestive brown, as if the silt of some private devotion filled her orbs, effaced her pupils-as if the black, round nexus between her mind and the outside world were something that she had surrendered in exchange for the rare, rich loam of power. Yet there was no. confidence, no surety, in her gaze as she regarded him; the life which had formed her eyes was far behind her. Now she was old, timorous. Her voice rustled like the creaking of antique parchment as she asked, "Lena?"

  "Are you still alive?"

  "Am I-? No, I am not your Lena. She is dead-if the look of you tells any truth. Mercy."

  Mercy, he echoed soundlessly.

  "This is the doing of the amanibhavam. Perhaps you have preserved your life in eating it-but surely you know that it is poison to you, a food too potent for human flesh."

  "Are you still alive?" he repeated with cunning in his throat. Thus he disguised himself, protected that part of him which had come out of hiding and sleep to ward his ring. Only the damaged state of his features kept him from grinning at his own slyness.

  "Perhaps not," she sighed. "But let that pass. You have no knowledge of what you say. You are cold-ill and poison-mad-and-and there is a sickness in you that I do not comprehend."

  "Why aren't you dead?"

  She brought her face close to his, and went on: "Listen to me. I know that the hand of confusion is upon you-but listen to me. Hear and hold my words. You have come in some way into Morinmoss Forest. I am-a Healer, an Unfettered One who turned to the work of healing. I will help you-because you are in need, and because the white gold reveals that great matters are afoot in the Land-and because the Forest found its voice to summon me for you, though that also I do not comprehend."

  "I saw him kill you." The raw croak of Covenant's voice sounded like horror and grief, but in his depths he hugged himself for glee at his cunning.

  She drew back her head but showed no other reaction to what he had said. "I came to this place from-from my life-because the Forest's unquiet slumber met my own long ache for repose. I am a Healer, and Morinmoss permits me. Yet now it speaks- Great matters, indeed. Ah, mercy. It is in my heart that the Colossus itself- Well, I wander. I have made my home here for many years. I am accustomed to speak only for my own pleasure."

  "I saw."

  "Do you not hear me?"

  "He stabbed you with a wooden spike. I saw the blood."

  "Mercy! Is your life so violent then? Well, let that pass also. You do not hear me-you have fallen too far into the amanibhavam. But violent or not I must aid you. It is well that my eyes have not forgotten their work. I see that you are too weak to harm me, whatever your purpose."

  Weak, he echoed to himself. What she said was true; he was too frail even to clench his fist for the protection of his wedding band. "Have you come back to haunt me?" he gasped. "To blame me?"

  '' Speak if you must,'' she said in a rustling tone, "but I cannot listen. I must be about my work." With a low groan, she climbed to her feet and moved stiffly away from him.

  "That's it," he continued, impelled by his grotesque inner glee. "That's it, isn't it? You've come back to torture me. You're not satisfied that I killed him. I put that knife all the way into his heart but you're not satisfied. You want to hurt me some more. You want me to go crazy thinking about all the things I'm guilty of. I did Foul's work for him, and you came to torture me for it. You and your blood! Where were you when it would have made a difference what happens to me? Why didn't you try to get even with me after I raped you? Why wait until now? If you'd made me pay for what I did then, maybe I would have figured out what's going on before this. All that generosity-! It was cruel. Oh, Lena! I didn't even understand what I'd done to you until it was too late, too late, I couldn't help myself. What are you waiting for? Torture me! I need pain!"

  "You need food," the Healer muttered as if he had disgusted her. With one hand she fixed his jaw in an odd compelling grip while the other placed two or three treasure-berries in his mouth. "Swallow the seeds. They, too, will sustain you."

  He wanted to spit out the aliantha, but her grip made him chew in spite of himself. Her other hand stroked his throat until he swallowed, then fed him more of the berries. Soon she had coerced him to eat several mouthfuls. He could feel sustenance flowing into him, yet for some reason it seemed to feed his deep slumber rather than his cunning. Before long he could not remember what he had been saying. An involuntary drowsiness shone into him from the trees. He was unable to resist or comply when the Healer lifted him from the grass.

  Grunting at the strain, she raised his limp form until he was half erect in her arms. Then she leaned him against her back with his arms over her shoulders, and gripped his upper arms like t
he handles of a burden. His feet dragged behind him; he dangled on her squat shoulders. But she bore his weight, carried him like a dead sack into the pale white night of Morinmoss.

  While he drowsed, she took him laboriously farther and farther into the secret depths of the Forest. And as they left its borders behind, they passed into warmer air and greater health-a region where spring had not been quenched by Lord Foul's winter. Leaves multiplied and spread out around bird nests to cloak the branches; moss and grass and small woodland animals increased among the trees. A defying spirit was abroad in this place-resisting cold, nourishing growth, affirming Morinmoss's natural impulse toward buds and new sap and arousal. It was as if the ancient Forestals had returned, bringing with them the wood's old knowledge of itself.

  Yet even in its secret heart Morinmoss was not impervious to the Despiser's fell influence. Temperatures rose above the freezing point, but failed to climb any higher. The leaves had no spring profusion; they grew thinly, in dark bitter greens rather than in hale verdancy. The animals wore their winter coats over bones that were too gaunt for true spring. If a Forestal had indeed returned to Morinmoss, he lacked the potency of his olden predecessors.

  No, it was more likely that the monolithic Colossus of the Fall had shrugged off its brooding slumber to take a hand in the defenses of the Forest. And it was more likely still that Caerroil Wildwood was reaching out from his fastness in Garroting Deep, doing what he could across the distance to preserve old Morinmoss.

  Nevertheless, this lessening of winter was a great boon to the trees, and to the denizens of the Forest. It kept alive many things which might have been among the first to die when Lord Foul interdicted spring. For that reason among others, the Unfettered Healer trudged onward with Covenant on her back. The defying spirit had not only tolerated both her and him; it had summoned her to him. She could not refuse. Though she was old, and found Covenant painfully heavy, she sustained herself by sucking moisture from the moss, and plodded under him toward her home among the secrets of the Forest.