The One Tree t2cotc-2

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  “I can't tell you why you.” He appeared too weary or defeated to raise his head. "I know something about the needs that drive people into situations like this. But I don't know your needs. I don't know you. You were chosen for this because of who you are, but from the beginning you haven't told me a thing. My life depends on you, and I don't really have any idea what it is I'm depending on.

  “Linden.” He appealed to her without looking at her, as if he feared that his gaze would send her away. “Please. Stop defending yourself. You don't have to fight me. You could make me understand.” Deliberately, he closed his eyes against the risk he was taking. “If you chose to.”

  Again she wanted to refuse him. The habit of flight ran deep in her. But this was why she had come to him. Her need was too clear to be denied.

  Yet the question was so intimate that she could not approach it directly. Perhaps if she had not heard Pitchwife's tale she would not have been able to approach it at all. But his example had galvanized her to this hazard. He had the courage to relive his own past. And his story itself, the story of the First's father-

  “Sometimes,” she said, though she was hardly ready to begin, “I have these black moods.” There was a chair near her; but she remained standing rigidly. “I've had them ever since I was a girl. Since my father died. When I was eight. They feel like-I don't know how to describe them. Like I'm drowning and there's nothing I can do to save myself. Like I could scream forever and nobody would hear me.” Powerless. "Like the only thing I can do to help myself is just die and get it over with., ,

  "That's what I started feeling after we left Coercri. It piled up the way it always does, and I never know why it comes when it does or why it goes away again. But this time was different. It felt the same to me-but it was different. Or maybe what you said is true-when we were on Kevin's Watch. That here the things inside us are externalized, so we meet them as if they were somebody else. What I was feeling was that Raver.

  “So maybe there is a reason why I'm here.” She could not stop now, though an invidious trembling cramped her chest. “Maybe there's a connection between who I am and what Foul wants.” She almost gagged on the memory of Gibbon's touch; but she knotted her throat to keep the nausea down. "Maybe that's why I freeze. Why I get so scared. I've spent my whole life trying to prove it isn't true. But it goes too deep.

  “My father-” There she nearly faltered. She had never exposed this much of herself to anyone. But now for the first time her craving to be healed outweighed her old revulsion. “He was about your age when he died. He even looked a bit like you.” And like the old man whose life she had saved on Haven Farm. “Without the beard. But he wasn't like you. He was pathetic.”

  The sudden vitriol of her ejaculation stopped her momentarily. This was what she had always wanted to believe-so that she could reject it. But it was not even true. Despite his abject life, her father had been potent enough to warp her being. In his hammock, Covenant seemed to be resisting a temptation to watch her; but he spared her the self-consciousness of his gaze.

  Impacted emotion hardened her tone as she went on, "We lived a mile outside a dead little town like the one where you live. In one of those tottering square frame houses. It hadn't been painted since my parents moved in, and it was starting to slump.

  "My father raised goats. God knows where he even got the money to buy goats so he could raise them. Every job he had was worse than the last one. His idea of being proud and independent was selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. When that failed, he tried encyclopaedias, Then water-purifiers. Water-purifiers! Everybody in thirty miles had their own well, and the water was already good. And every time a new career failed he just seemed to get shorter. Collapsing in on himself.

  He thought he was being a rugged individualist. Make his own way. Bow to no man. Good Christ! He probably went down on his knees to get the money to start raising those goats.

  "He had ideas about milk and cheese. Breeding stock. Meat. So of course he had no more conception of how to raise goats than I did. He just put them on leashes and let them graze around the house. Soon we were living in dust for a hundred yards in all directions.

  "My mother's reaction was to eat everything she could get her hands on, to go to church three times a week, and punish me whenever I got my clothes dirty.

  "By the time I was eight, the goats had finished off our property and started on land that belonged to somebody else. Naturally my father didn't see anything wrong with that. But the owner did. The day my father was supposed to appear in court to defend himself-I found this out later-he still hadn't told my mother we were in trouble. So she took the car to go to church, and he didn't have any way to get to the county seat-unless he walked, which didn't really make sense because it was twenty miles away.

  “It was summer, so I wasn't in school. I was out playing, and as usual I got my clothes dirty, and then I got nervous. My mother wasn't due home for hours yet, but at that age I didn't have much sense of time. I wanted to be someplace where I could feel safe, so I went up to the attic. On the way, I played a game I'd been playing for a long time, which was to get up the stairs without making them squeak. That was part of what made the attic feel safe. No one could hear me go up there.”

  The scene was as vivid to her as if it had been etched in acid. But she watched it like a spectator, with the severity she had spent so many years nurturing. She did not want to be that little girl, to feel those emotions. Her orbs were hot marbles in their sockets. Her voice had grown clipped and precise, like a dissecting instrument. Even the strain rising through her knotted back did not make her move. She stood as still as she could, instinctively denying herself.

  “When I opened the door, my father was there. He was sitting in a half-broken rocker, and there was red stuff on the floor around him, I didn't even understand that it was blood until I saw it coming from the gashes in his wrists. The smell made me want to puke.”

  Covenant's gaze was fixed on her now, his eyes wide with dismay; but she disregarded him. Her attention was focused on her efforts to survive what she was saying.

  "He looked at me. For a minute, he didn't seem to know who I was. Or maybe he hadn't figured out that I mattered. But then he hauled himself out of the chair and started to swear at me. I couldn't understand him. But I worked it out later. He was afraid I was going to stop him. Go to the phone. Get help somehow. Even though I was only eight. So he slammed the door, locked me in with him. Then he threw the key out the window.

  "Until then, I hadn't even realised there was a key. It must've been in the lock all the time, but I'd never noticed it. If I had, I would've locked myself in any number of times, just so I could feel safer.

  “Anyway, I was there watching him die. What was happening took a while to filter through to me. But when I finally understood, I got frantic.” Frantic, indeed. That was a mild word for her distress. Behind Linden's rigid self-command huddled a little girl whose heart had been torn in shreds. "I did a lot of screaming and crying, but that didn't help. My mother was still at church, and we didn't have any neighbours close enough to hear me. And it just made my father madder. He was doing it out of spite to begin with. My crying made him worse. If there was ever a chance he might change his mind, I lost it. Maybe that was really what got him so mad. At one point, he mustered enough strength to stand up again so he could hit me. Got blood all over me.

  “So then I tried pleading with him. Be his little girl. Beg him not to leave me. I told him he should let me die instead of him. I even meant it. Eight-year-olds have a lot of imagination. But that didn't work either. After all, I was just another burden dragging him down. If he hadn't had a wife and daughter to worry about, he wouldn't have failed all those times.” Her sarcasm was as harsh as a rasp. For years, she had striven to deny that her emotions had such force. “But his eyes were glazing. I was just desperate. I tried being angry at him. Worked myself into a fit telling him I wouldn't love him anymore if he died. Somehow that reached him. The las
t thing I heard him say was, 'You never loved me anyway.' ”

  And then the blow had fallen, the stroke which had nailed her forever to her horror. There was no language in the world to describe it. From out of the cracked floorboards and the untended walls had come pouring a flood of darkness. It was not there: she was still able to see everything. But it rose into her mind as if it had been invoked by her father's self-pity-as if while he sprawled there dying he had transcended himself, had raised himself by sheer abjection to the stature of power, and had summoned the black malice of nightmares to attend upon his passing. She was foundering in the viscid midnight of his condemnation, and no rescue could reach her.

  And while she sank, his face had changed before her eyes. His mouth had stretched into what should have been a cry; but it was not-it was laughter. The triumphant glee of spite, soundless and entire. His mouth had held her gaze, transfixed her. It was the dire cavern and plunge from which the darkness issued, hosting forth to appal her. You never loved me anyway. Never loved me. Never loved. A darkness indistinguishable now from the vicious malevolence of Gibbon-Raver's touch. Perhaps it had all taken place in her mind-a product of her young, vulnerable despair. That made no difference. It had taught her her powerlessness, and she would never be free of it.

  Unwillingly, she saw Covenant's face, grown aghast for her. She did not want that from him. It weakened her defences. Her mouth was full of the iron taste of rage. She could no longer keep her voice from shivering. But she was unable to stop.

  "A long time after that, he died. And a long time after that, my mother came home. By then, I was too far gone to know anything. Hours passed before she missed us enough to find out the attic was locked. Then she had to call the neighbours to help her get the door open. I was conscious the whole time-I remember every minute of it-but there was nothing I could do. I just lay there on the floor until they broke down the door and took me to the hospital.

  “I was there for two weeks. It was the only time I can remember ever feeling safe.”

  Then abruptly the quivering of her joints became so strong that she could no longer stand. Covenant's open stare was a mute cry of empathy. She fumbled to the chair, sat down. Her hands would not stop flinching. She gripped them between her knees as she concluded her story.

  "My mother blamed me for the whole thing. She had to sell the goats and the house to the man who was suing my father so she could pay the funeral costs and hospital bills. When she was having one of her pathos orgies, she even accused me of killing her dear husband. But most of the time she just blamed me for causing the whole situation. She had to go on welfare — God knows she couldn't get a job, that might interfere with church — and we had to live in a grubby little apartment in town. Somehow it was my fault. Compared to her, an eight-year-old in shock was an effective adult,"

  The long gall of her life might have continued to pour from her, releasing some of her pent outrage; but Covenant stopped her. In a voice congested with pain and care, he said, “And you've never forgiven her. You've never forgiven either of them.”

  His words stung her. Was that all he had garnered from her difficult story-from the fact that she had chosen to tell it? At once, she was on her feet beside the hammock, raging up at him, “You're goddamn right I never forgave them! They raised me to be another bloody suicide!” To be a servant of the Despiser. “I've spent my whole life trying to prove they were wrong!”

  The muscles around his eyes pinched; his gaze bled at her. But he did not waver. The chiselled lines of his mouth, the gauntness of his cheeks, reminded her that he was familiar with the attractions of suicide. And he was a father who had been bereft of his son and wife for no other fault than an illness he could not have prevented. Yet he lived. He fought for life. Time and again, she had seen him turn his back on actions and attitudes that were dictated by hate. And he did not compromise with her, in spite of all that she had told him.

  “Is that why you think people shouldn't tell each other their secrets? Why you didn't want me to tell you about Lena? Because you're afraid I'll say something you don't want to hear?”

  Then she wanted to howl at him like a maddened child; but she could not. Once again, she was foiled by her health-sense. She could not blind herself to the quality of his regard. No man had ever looked at her in that way before.

  Shaken, she retreated to the chair, sagged against its stone support.

  “Linden,” he began as gently as his worn hoarseness allowed. But she cut him off,

  “No.” She felt suddenly defeated. He was never going to understand. Or he understood too well. "That's not why. I haven't forgiven them, and I don't care who knows it. It's kept me alive when I didn't have anything else. I just don't trust these confessions.“ Her mouth twisted. ”Knowing about Lena doesn't mean anything to me. You were different then. You paid for what you did. She doesn't change anything for me. But she does for you. Every time you accuse yourself of rape, you make it true. You bring it into the present. You make yourself guilty all over again.

  “The same thing happens to me. When I talk about my parents. Even though I was only eight then and I've spent twenty-two years trying to make myself into somebody else.”

  In response, Covenant gripped the edge of the hammock, pulled his weakness that much closer to her. Aiming himself at her like a quarrel, he replied, “You've got it backward. You're doing it to yourself. Punishing yourself for something you didn't have the power to change. You can't forgive yourself, so you refuse to forgive anybody else.”

  Her eyes leaped to his; protest and recognition tangled each other so that she could not retort.

  “Aren't you doing the same thing Kevin did? Blaming yourself because you aren't equal to every burden in the world? Killing your father in your mind because you can't bear the pain of being helpless? Destroying what you love because you can't save it?”

  “No.” Yes. I don't know. His words pierced her too deeply. Even though he had no health-sense, he was still able to reach into her, wrench her heart. The roots of the screaming she had done for her father seemed to grow all through her; and Covenant made them writhe. “I don't love him. I can't. If I did, I wouldn't be able to keep on living.”

  She wanted to flee then, go in search of some way to protect her loneliness. But she did not. She had already done too much fleeing. Glaring up at him because she had no answer to his complex empathy, she took a flask of diamondraught from the table, handed it to him, and required him to drink until he had consumed enough to make him sleep.

  After that, she covered her face with her hands and huddled into herself. Slumber softened the rigor of his face, increasing his resemblance to her father. He was right; she could not forgive herself. But she had failed to tell him why. The darkness was still in her, and she had not confessed what she had done with it.

  Six: The Questsimoon

  SHE did not want to sleep. Afterimages of her father glared across the back of her thoughts from time to time, as if she had looked at that story too closely and had burned the nerves of her sight. She had not exorcised the memory. Rather, she had stripped away the defensive repression which had swaddled it. Now her own eight-year-old cries were more vivid to her than they had been for years. She tried to fend off sleep because she feared the hunger of her nightmares.

  But what she had done in speaking to Covenant also gave her a curious half-relief, a partial release of tension. It was not enough, but it was something-an act for which she had never before been able to find the courage. That steadied her. Perhaps restitution was more possible than she had believed. At last, she returned to her cabin, rolled over the edge into her hammock. Then the motion of Starfare's Gem lifted her out of herself along the waves until she was immersed in the width and depth of the Sea.

  The next day, she felt stronger. She went to check on Covenant with some trepidation, wondering what he would make of the things which had passed between them. But he greeted her, spoke to her, accepted her ministrations in a way clearly int
ended to show that his challenges and demands had not been meant as recrimination. In a strange way, his demeanour suggested that he felt a kind of kinship toward her, a leper's attraction toward the wounded and belorn. This surprised her, but she was glad of it. When she left him, her forehead was lightened by the lifting of an unconscious frown.

  The following morning, he came out on deck. Blinking against the unaccustomed sunlight, he stepped through the port seadoor under the wheeldeck, moved toward her. His gait was tentative, weakened by incomplete recuperation; his skin was pallid with frailty. But she could see that he was mending well.

  The unexpected fact that his beard was gone startled her. His bare cheeks and neck seemed to gleam vulnerably in the light.

  His gaze was uncertain, abashed. She had become so used to his beard that he seemed almost young without it. But she did not understand his evident embarrassment until he said m a conflicted tone, “I burned it off. With my ring.”

  “Good.” Her own intensity took her aback. But she approved of his dangerous power. “I never liked it.”

  Awkwardly, he touched his cheek, trying with numb fingers to estimate the exposure of his skin. Then he grimaced ruefully. “Neither did I.” He glanced downward as if to begin a VSE, then returned his attention to her face. “But I'm worried about it. What scares me is being able to do something like this so easily.” The muscles of his face bunched in reference to the strictures which had formerly limited the wild magic, permitting it to arise only in desperation and contact with other, triggering powers. “I did it because I'm trying to teach myself control. The venom-I'm so tangled up. I've got to learn to handle it.”

  While he spoke, his eyes slid away to the open Sea. It lay choppy and cerulean to the horizons, as complex as himself. “But it isn't good enough. I can make that fire do anything I want-if I hold it down to a trickle. But I can feel the rest of it inside me, ready to boil. It's like being crazy and sane at the same time. I can't seem to have one without the other.”