The Runes of the Earth

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Dehydration, she told herself weakly. Stupid, stupid. She was a doctor, for God’s sake; familiar with the effects of exertion. She ought to know better.

  “My fault,” she murmured when Liand had helped her drink again. “I forgot about water.” Until she dropped it, the blanket must have heated her; increased her fluid loss. “I’ll be all right.”

  The Stonedownor looked skeptical. “I am unsure. Our sojourn has only begun. If we are not taken by the Masters, we will face many days more harsh than this one. I fear that you will be unable to endure.”

  She wanted to say, You and me both, but refrained for his sake. Instead she indicated the waterskin and asked, “Can we refill this?”

  He frowned. “Linden Av—Linden. I have never ascended so far above Mithil Stonedown. I know nothing of what lies before us.” Then, as if he were taking pity on her, he said, “Yet I believe that we will discover streams and springs among the mountains. And snow remains upon the heights. Drink all that you require. Doubtless we will need to ration aliment, but it will be false caution to stint on water.”

  “In that case,” she replied, “don’t worry about me. I’ll get tougher.” She would have to. “And I’ll take better care of myself.”

  Liand nodded, clearly unconvinced, and turned away to unpack the food he had promised her.

  While he did so, Linden looked around for Anele.

  To her right, in the direction of the Mithil valley and the South Plains, she found her view blocked by a hill of rocks like a fold in the detritus spilling down the rift. Somehow Liand had urged her high enough up the scree to reach the shelter of a hollow in the scree. Past the rise, she could see only mountains and sky: she and her companions were hidden from the valley. If they had not been spotted before they reached the rift, the Masters would catch no sight of them now.

  Of course, she also could not see if they were pursued—

  To her left, the broken slope climbed southward into the narrowing cleft; and there she located the old man. He sat on shards of granite and obsidian several paces above her, his head cocked to one side, blindly studying the cliff opposite her and mumbling to himself.

  Linden drank more water and tried to focus her fading health-sense on him.

  Physically he looked no worse than when she had first met him: tired, certainly, and ill-fed; but sustained by old stubbornness and Earthpower. He conveyed the conflicting impressions that he had already suffered more privation than ordinary flesh could bear, and that he had reached none of his limits. As for his mental state, she could discern little through the shaded dusk. However, the phases of his madness had apparently stabilized, leaving him in a condition which resembled his partial sanity when she had talked to him among the rubble of Kevin’s Watch.

  There he had spoken of reading the wreckage of the Watch. In his fractured way, he had tried to tell her what he saw.

  He has no friend but stone.

  She had no one else who could so much as hint at what had happened to the Land.

  Unsteadily she rose to her feet. When she had reached a fragile poise, unsure of her center as she was of her muscles, she picked up the waterskin and carried it to Anele’s side, wallowing like a derelict in the troughs of the rocks as she moved.

  He did not turn his head at her approach: he might have been unaware of her. As soon as she placed the waterskin in his lap, however, he raised it to his mouth and drank, automatically, without shifting his sightless scrutiny of the cliff.

  Stifling a groan, she eased herself to the rocks beside him. A low wind tumbled down the slope, cooling the sweat from her skin. Its faint susurrus covered his voice: she only knew that he spoke because his lips moved. For a moment, she rested, gathering herself. Then she asked softly, “Anele, what do you see?”

  At first, he did not respond. She thought that perhaps he could not. His concentration resembled a trance: he might have been bespelled, caught by granite incantations audible only to him. His head hung to one side as if that might improve his hearing. But then he seemed to shudder, and a sad anger reached out to her senses.

  “These stones are old.” A flick of his hand indicated the detritus in the rift as well as the cliffs themselves. “Old even by the ancient measure of mountains. They know nothing of caesures. Or Masters.” Gradually his voice took on a cadence she had not heard from him before, a rhythm hinting at music and gall. “Rather they speak of great forests filling all the Land. In their hearts they lament the rapine of trees.”

  He is the hope of the Land.

  Linden leaned close to him; breathed, “Tell me.”

  “Their sorrow is no fault of mine,” he replied as if he were answering an accusation so old that its meaning had perished long ago. “That at least I am spared. It is aged beyond antiquity, and they neither forget nor cease to keen.

  “Here is written the glory and slaughter of the One Forest.”

  The One—? She had heard the name before; but she could not imagine why the stones of the world would remember the transient lives of wood. Nevertheless she yearned for anything he could reveal which might place the Land’s plight into some kind of context.

  “Tell me,” she repeated softly.

  Liand approached over the rocks to offer his companions a little bread, but Anele ignored him. When Linden had accepted it, however, the old man answered her, impelled to words by a threnody in granite.

  “It is a tale of humankind and destruction, of defenseless beauty unheeded, ripped from life. A tale of Ravers and Elohim and Forestals and sleep, the fatal sleep of long time and unmitigated loss.”

  Facing the cliff, Anele let his anger flow. His head leaned, first to one side, then to the other, as though he followed a tune that passed from stone to stone around him.

  “Then was not the age of men and women in the Land, and neither wood nor stone had any knowledge of them. Rather it was an era of trees, sentient and grand, beloved by mountains, and the One Forest filled all the Land.

  “Its vast life spread from the ancient thighs of Melenkurion Skyweir in the west to the restless song of the Sunbirth Sea in the east, from the ice-gnawed wilderness of the Northron Climbs to the high defiance of the Southron Range. Only at the marges of Lifeswallower did the One Forest stand aside, for even in that lovely age evils and darkness seeped from the depths of Gravin Threndor, leaking harm and malevolence into the Great Swamp.

  “And in that age, the spanning woodland was cherished in every peak and fundament of the Land, held precious and treasured by slow granite beneath and around it, for the One Forest knew itself. It had no knowledge of malevolence, or of humankind, but of itself its awareness was immense beyond all estimation. It knew itself in every trunk and limb, every root and leaf, and it sang its ramified song to all the Earth. The music of its knowledge arose from a myriad myriad throats, and was heard by a myriad myriad myriad ears.”

  Linden listened as if she were ensnared. She moved only to eat the viands Liand handed to her. In the rhythm of Anele’s voice as much as in his words, she recognized the Land she loved.

  She knew little of the Land’s deepest past: even this much of its history was new to her. But she had sojourned in Andelain, her every nerve alight with percipience and Earthpower, and she felt the fitness of Anele’s story. It was condign: it belonged. She could believe that the Earth’s gutrock would remember such things.

  At her side, Liand crouched down to listen, caught by wonder; but she hardly noticed him. For a time she forgot pursuit and black storms. The tale of the One Forest had no bearing on her immediate plight, but she drank it in as if it were hurtloam and aliantha; another form of nourishment.

  “Yet in those distant years,” Anele related, “neither men nor women had true ears.” His anger sharpened as he continued, as if he had absorbed the passion of the stones. Linden heard his heart in every word. “When they came to the Land, they came heedless, providing only for themselves. And the malevolence within Lifeswallower had burgeoned, as all darkness must, or be
quenched. It had grown great and avid, and its hunger surpassed satiation.

  “No tongue can tell of the shock and rue among the trees when human fires and human blades cleared ground for habitation. The mountains know it, and in their hearts they yet protest and grieve, but mortal voice and utterance cannot contain it. A myriad myriad trunks, and a myriad myriad myriad leaves, which had known only themselves in natural growth and decay, and which had therefore never considered wanton pain, then cried out in illimitable dismay—a cry so poignant and prolonged that the deepest core of the peaks might have answered it, were stone itself not also defenseless and unwarded.”

  Anele clasped his arms around his knees to contain his distress. “Yet men and women had no ears to hear such woe. And even if they had heard it, their single minds, enclosed and alone, could not have encompassed the Forest’s betrayal, the wood’s lamentation. Only the malice within Lifeswallower heeded it—and gave answer.

  “For a time, those who had come to the Land felled trees and charred trunks only because they knew not how else they might achieve space for homes and fields. Thus was their cruelty at first restrained. But their restraint was brutal and brief by the measure of the One Forest’s slow sentience. And after those generations, humankind discovered malevolence, or was discovered by it. Then the murder of the trees was transformed from disregard to savagery.

  “Hence came Ravers to the Land,” the old man rasped bitterly, “for they were the admixture of men and malevolence, an enduring hunger for evil coalesced and concentrated in transient flesh generation after swift generation until they became beings unto themselves—spirits capable of flesh, yet spared the necessities of death and birth. Thus they gained names and definition, three dark souls who knew themselves as they knew the One Forest, and who aspired above all things to trample underfoot its vast and vulnerable sentience.

  “And humankind had no ears to hear what had occurred. Men and women were only ignorant, not malefic, for their lives were too brief to sustain such darkness, and when they perished their descendants were again only ignorant.

  “Yet even that renewed and ever renewed ignorance could not spare the One Forest. Humankind was as deaf to malevolence as to lamentation, and so it was easily led, easily mastered, easily given purpose, by the three who had learned to name themselves moksha, turiya, and samadhi. Therefore the butchery of the trees swelled and quickened from generation to generation.”

  There Anele paused; released his knees in order to scrub unbidden tears from the grime on his cheeks. His blind eyes stared at the broken rocks as if he could see the ancient moment of their shattering. Around him, the breeze flowed slowly, and the chill of high ice seeped into the rift, as the westward peaks began to bar the sun.

  Linden waited for him in a kind of suspense, as though she needed the old man’s tale.

  When he had gripped his knees again, he said, “Still the One Forest could only wail and weep, unable to act in self-defense.” Voiceless tears spread anger and sorrow into his torn beard. “Despite its vastness, it, too, lived in ignorance. It knew only itself and pain, and so could not comprehend its own possible strength. Born of Earthpower, sustained by Earthpower, knowing Earthpower, the One Forest could not grasp that Earthpower might have other uses.

  “Thus the destruction of the trees grew as the ambitions of humankind and Ravers mounted. And with that bereavement came another loss, inseparable from the first, but more bitter and deadly. In the slaughter of each tree, one small gleam of the Forest’s Land-spanning sentience failed, never to be renewed or replaced. Thus the wishes of the Ravers were fulfilled. As the butchery of the trees increased, so the One Forest’s knowledge of itself diminished, lapsing toward slumber and extinction.

  “That grief was too great to be borne.” Anele himself seemed hardly able to contain it. His voice rose to a low cry. “Even mountains could not endure it. Peaks shattered themselves in sorrow and protest. This very cliff split as a heart is torn asunder by rage and loss, and by helplessness.”

  For a moment, he gaped at the riven walls. Their yearning had come upon him like a geas. They needed his mortal tongue to articulate their interminable rue. Cold exhaled down the rift like a sigh of protest and loss.

  But then his head jerked to the other side, and he seemed to find a new vein of song. His voice dropped to a murmur which Linden would not have been able to hear if he had not chipped each word off his stone lament like a flake of obsidian, jagged and distinct.

  “The Earth itself heard that cry. Every knowing ear throughout the Earth heard it. And at last, when much of the Lower Land had been slain of trees, and the devastation of the Upper had truly begun, the cry was answered.”

  Abruptly Anele leaned forward, shifted the angle of his head. “There.” With one trembling, gnarled finger, he pointed into the center of the sloping rubble. “It is written there—the coming of the Elohim.”

  Gloaming filled his moonstone eyes. “Many centuries after the rising of the Ravers, at a time when much of the One Forest’s sentience had dwindled to embers, a being such as the trees had never known came among them, singing of life and knowledge, of eldritch power beyond the puissance of any Raver. And singing as well of retribution.

  “Why the Elohim came then and not earlier, before so much had been lost, these stones cannot grasp. Yet come she did—or he, for the Elohim are strange, and such distinctions describe them poorly. And with her song, the remaining leagues of the One Forest awoke to power.”

  This part of the story Linden had heard before. Findail the Appointed had told it to the assembled Search for the One Tree aboard Starfare’s Gem. Still she listened with all her attention. Anele conveyed an impression of urgency, of necessity, which she could neither name nor ignore.

  “The trees,” he told the gathering shadows, “could neither strike nor flee. Their limbs were not formed to wield fire and iron.” Findail had said, A tree may know love and feel pain and cry out, but has few means of defense. “Yet even that remnant of wakefulness which remained was vast by mortal measure, and its power was likewise vast. Capable then as well as aware, the One Forest turned its loathing and ire, not against the deaf ignorance of humankind, but rather against the Ravers.

  “Nor did the trees count the cost of their new might. The Elohim had sung to them of retribution, and she was more puissant than any Raver. Her nature granted them the power to deny. Therefore they took her and bound her, and with Earthpower set her in bonds of stone at the edge of Landsdrop as a barricade, a forbidding, against the Ravers. And such was the strength of their ramified will that while she lived, while she retained any vestige of herself, moksha, turiya, and samadhi were entirely barred from the Upper Land. No Raver in any form could pass that interdiction to threaten the remnants of the One Forest.”

  There Anele stopped, although his tale was not done. He had lost the thread of memory in the granite, or his ability to discern it had faltered. Nevertheless its compulsion held Linden. When he did not continue, she finished his tale for him as if she, too, had been bound in place by the exigency of the trees.

  “But that’s not all,” she added. “People didn’t stop cutting down forests just because the Ravers couldn’t goad them to it.” Covenant had told her this. “The trees had spared them, but they were still too ignorant to know it. Ordinary people kept on hacking and burning whenever they thought they needed more open ground. They didn’t know,” could not know, “that they were murdering the mind of the One Forest.

  “So the trees went further. After they formed that forbidding,” the Colossus of the Fall, “they used what they had learned from the Elohim to create the Forestals. Guardians to protect the last forests.” Morinmoss between Mount Thunder and the Plains of Ra. Dark Grimmerdhore east of Revelstone. Fatal Garroting Deep around the flanks of Melenkurion Skyweir. Giant Woods at the borders of Seareach. “Because most of the time we humans don’t seem to care what we’re doing to the world.”

  Then she had to stop as well. She needed ti
me to pray that the ending of the Sunbane and the creation of a new Staff of Law had undone some of humankind’s harm; that the Land had regained enough vitality to enable the growth of new forests.

  “It may be so,” Anele sighed into the gathering chill. “That knowledge is not written here.”

  After a long moment, Liand stirred. He rose to his feet; gathered up the food and waterskins. “No one remembers it.” His bitterness echoed Anele’s tale. “The Masters do not speak of it. This treasure of the Land’s past, these memories of glory, they keep to themselves.”

  Linden groaned inwardly. He was right. The Haruchai had left the people of the Land as ignorant and blind—and as potentially destructive—as their first ancestors had been.

  In their own way, the Masters might prove as fatal as Ravers.

  “Thank God,” she murmured obliquely, hardly aware that she spoke aloud, “there are only two of them left.”

  No ordinary death could claim a Raver. But samadhi Sheol had been rent, torn to shreds, by the sacrifice of Grimmand Honninscrave and the power of the Sandgorgon Nom.

  “Two?” Liand asked in confusion.

  And, “Masters?” croaked Anele, rousing himself. “Masters?”

  Linden brushed them aside with a flick of her hand. Anele’s tale filled her head. “I’m just thinking—”

  She felt now that she had never before grasped the full atrocity of the Sunbane. Oh, she had experienced its horror in every nerve. Her knowledge was both personal and intimate. But she had not guessed what such devastation meant to the fading sentience of the trees. Or to Caer-Caveral, the last Forestal, who had lost more than he could bear.

  It was no wonder, she thought, that he had given up his defense of Andelain for the sake of Hollian and her unborn child. He had known too much death, and needed to affirm life.

  Suddenly Anele flung himself to his feet. Wailing, “Masters!” he began to scramble frantically up the raw sharp rocks.

  Masters—?

  Remembering forests and slaughter, Linden struggled upright in time to see Stave top the rise which blocked her view of the South Plains.