With a roar, Foamfollower charged to his friend’s aid.
Before he had taken two strides, an avalanche of creatures rushed through the shattered doorway and fell on him. They pounded him to the floor, pinned him under their weight, secured his limbs. He fought wildly extravagantly, but his opponents were many and strong. They mastered him in a moment. They dragged him to the side wall and fettered him there with chains so massive that he could not break them. When the creatures left him, hurried out of the thronehall, he was helpless.
The dead Giant was not with them. Already it had served or failed its purpose; it had been banished again.
He had been placed in a position where he could watch Lord Foul and Covenant-where their conflict would be enacted with him as its audience.
As soon as the creatures had departed, the Despiser turned toward him for the first time. When the gleaming green penumbra had shifted itself to face him, he saw the Despiser’s eyes. They were the only part of Lord Foul that was visible within his aura.
He had eyes like fangs, carious and yellow-fangs so vehement in malice that they froze Foamfollower’s voice, gagging him on the encouragement he had tried to shout for Covenant’s sake.
“Be silent,” Lord Foul said venomously, “or I will roast you before your time.”
Foamfollower obeyed without volition. He gaped as if he were choking on ice and watched with helpless passion in his throat.
The Despiser’s eyes blinked in satisfaction. He turned his attention back to Covenant.
Covenant had been knocked from his feet by Lord Foul’s blow, and he knelt now with his shackled hands covering his face in a gesture of the most complete abjection. His fingers seemed entirely numb; they pressed blindly against his face, as incapable as dead sticks of exploring his injury, of even identifying the dampness of his blood. But he could feel the disease gnawing at his nerves as if Lord Foul’s presence amplified it, made the senseless erosion tangible; and he knew that his leprosy was in full career now, that the fragile arrest on which his life depended had been broken. Illness reached down into his soul like tendrils of affectlessness, searching like tree roots in a rock for cracks, flaws, at which the rock could be split asunder. He was as weak and weary as any nightmare could make him without causing the labor of his heart to stop.
But when he lowered his bloodied hands-when the swift poison of Foul’s touch made his lip blacken and swell so acutely that he could no longer bear to touch it-when he looked up again toward the Despiser, he was not abject. He was unbeaten.
Damn you, he muttered dimly. Damn you. It’s not that easy. Deliberately, he closed his fingers of his halfhand around his ring.
The Despiser’s eyes raged at him, but Lord Foul controlled himself to say in a sneering, fatherly tone, “Come, Unbeliever. Do not prolong this unpleasantness. You know that you cannot stand against me. In my own name I am wholly your superior. And I possess the Illearth Stone. I can blast the moon in its course, compel the oldest dead from their deep graves, spread ruin at my whim. Without effort I can tear every fiber of your being from its moor and scatter the wreck of your soul across the heavens.”
Then do it, Covenant muttered.
“Yet I choose to forbear. I do not purpose harm against you. Only place your ring in my hand, and all your torment will be at an end. It is a small price to pay, Unbeliever.”
It’s not that easy.
“And I am not powerless to reward you. If you wish to share my rule over the Land, I will permit you. You will find I am not an uncongenial master. If you wish to preserve the life of your friend Foamfollower, I will not demur-though he has offended me.” Foamfollower thrashed in his chains, struggled to protest, but he could not speak. “If you wish health, that also I can and will provide. Behold!”
He waved one penumbral arm, and a ripple of distortion passed over Covenant’s senses. At once, feeling flooded back into his hands and feet; his nerves returned to life in an instant. While they flourished, all his distress-all pain and hunger and weakness-sloughed off him. His body seemed to crow with triumphant life.
He was unmoved. He found his voice, breathed wearily through his teeth. “Health isn’t my problem. You’re the one who teaches lepers to hate themselves.”
“Groveller!” Lord Foul snapped. Without transition, Covenant became leprous and starved again. “You are on your knees to me! I will make you plead for the veriest fragments of life! Do lepers hate themselves? Then they are wise. I will teach you the true stature of hatred!”
For a moment, the Despiser’s own immitigable hate gouged down at Covenant from his carious eyes, and Covenant braced himself for an onslaught. But then Lord Foul began to laugh. His scorn shone from him, shook the air of the thronehall like the sound of great boulders crushing each other, made even the hard stone of the floor seem as insidious as a quagmire. And when he subsided, he said, “You are a dead man before me, groveller-as crippled of life as any corpse. Yet you refuse me. You refuse health, mastery, even friendship. I am interested-I am forbearant. I will allow you time to think better of your madness. Tell me why you are so rife with folly.”
Covenant did not hesitate. “Because I loathe you.”
“That is no reason. Many men believe that they loathe me because they are too craven to despise stupidity, foolhardiness, pretension, subservience. I am not misled. Tell me why, groveller.”
“Because I love the Land.”
“Oh, forsooth!” Lord Foul jeered. “I cannot believe that you are so anile. The Land is not your world-it has no claim upon your small fidelity. From the first, it has tormented you with demands you could not meet, honour you could not earn. You portray yourself as a man who is faithful unto death in the name of a fashion of apparel or an accident of diet-loyal to filthy robes and sand. No, groveller. I an unconvinced. Again, I say, tell me why.” He pronounced his why as if with that one syllable he could make Covenant’s entire edifice founder.
The Land is beautiful, Covenant breathed to himself. You’re ugly. For a time, he felt too weary to respond. But at last he brought out his answer.
“Because I don’t believe.”
“No?” the Despiser shouted with glee. “Still?” His laughter expressed perfect contempt. “Groveller, you are pathetic beyond price. Almost I am persuaded to keep you at my side. You would be a jester to lighten my burdens.” Still he catechized Covenant. “How is it possible that you can loathe or love where you do not believe?”
“Nevertheless.”
“How is it possible to disbelieve where you loathe or love?”
“Still.”
Lord Foul laughed again. “Do my ears betray me? Do you-after my Enemy has done all within his power to sway you-do you yet believe that this is a dream?”
“It isn’t real. But that doesn’t matter. That’s not important.”
“Then what is, groveller?”
“The Land. You.”
Once more, the Despiser laughed. But his mirth was short and vicious now; he sounded disturbed, as if there were something in Covenant which he could not understand. “The Land and Unbelief,” he jeered. “You poor, deranged soul! You cannot have both. They preclude each other.”
But Covenant knew better; after all that he had been through, he knew better. Only by affirming them both, accepting both poles of the contradiction, keeping them both whole, balanced, only by steering himself not between them but with them, could he preserve them both, preserve both the Land and himself, find the place where the parallel lines of his impossible dilemma met. The eye of the paradox. In that place lay the reason why the Land had happened to him. So he said nothing as he stared up at the blank shadow and the emerald aura and the incalculable might of the Despiser. But in himself, he gritted, No they don’t, Foul. You’re wrong. It’s not that easy. If it were easy, I would have found it long ago.
“But I grow weary of your stupid assertions,” Lord Foul went on after a moment. “My patience is not infinite. And there are other questions I wish to ask.
I will set aside the matter of your entry into my demesne. It is a small matter, easily explained. In some manner unknown to me, you suborned a number of my chattel, so that twice I received false reports of your death. But set it aside. I will flay the very souls from their bones, and learn the truth. Answer this question, groveller.” He moved closer to Covenant, and the intensity of his voice told Covenant that the Despiser had reached the heart of his probing. “This wild magic is not a part of your world. It violates your Unbelief. How can you use this power in which you do not believe?”
There Covenant found the explanation of Lord Foul’s forbearance. The Despiser had spent his time interrogating Covenant rather than simply ripping the fingers off his hand to take the ring because he, Lord Foul, feared that Covenant had secretly mastered the wild magic-that he had concealed his power, risked death in the Spoiled Plains and Hotash Slay and Kurash Qwellinir, permitted himself to be taken captive, so that he could surprise the Despiser, catch Lord Foul from a weak or blind side.
Foul had reason for this fear. The Staff of Law had been destroyed.
For an instant, Covenant thought he might use this apprehension to help himself in some way. But then he saw that he could not. For his own sake, so that his defense would not be flawed by his old duplicity, he told the truth.
“I don’t know how to use it.” His voice stumbled thickly past his swollen lip. “I don’t know how to call it up. But I know it is real in the Land. I know how to trigger it. I know how to bring this bloody icebox down around your ears.”
The Despiser did not hesitate, doubt. He seemed to expand in Covenant’s sight as he roared savagely, “You will trigger nothing! I have endured enough of your insolence. Do you say that you are a leper? I will show you leprosy!”
Power swarmed around Covenant like a thousand thousand mad wasps. Before him, the Despiser’s blank shadow grew horribly, swept upward larger and larger until it dwarfed Covenant, dwarfed Foamfollower, dwarfed the thronehall itself; it filled the air, the hall, the entire Creche. He felt himself plunging into the abyss of it. He cried out for help, but no help came. Like a stricken bird, he plummeted downward. The speed of his fall roared in his ears as if it were trying to suck him out of himself. He could sense the rock on which he would be shattered, unutterably far below him.
In the void, an attar-laden voice breathed, “Worship me and I will save you.”
Giddy terror-lust rushed up in him. A black whirlwind hurled him at the rock as if all the puissance of the heavens had come to smash him against the unbreakable granite of his fate. Despite screamed in his mind, demanding admittance, demanding like the suicidal paradox of vertigo to overwhelm him. But he clung to himself, refused. He was a leper; the Land was not real; this was not the way he was going to die.
He clenched his fist on the ring with all the frail strength of his arm.
At the crash of impact, pain detonated in his skull. Incandescent agony yowled and yammered through his head, shredded him like claws ferociously tearing the tissue of his brain. Foul rode the pain as if it were a tidal wave, striving to break down or climb over the seawall of his will. But he was too numb to break. His hands and feet were blind, frozen; his forehead was already inured to harm; and the black swelling in his lip was familiar to him. The green, ghastly cold could not bend the rigor of his bones. Like a dead man, he was stiff with resistance.
Lord Foul tried to enter him, tried to merge with him. The offer was seductively sweet-a surcease from pain, a release from the long unrest which he had miscalled his life. But he was harnessed to himself in a way that allowed no turning aside, no surrender. He was Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever and leper. He refused.
Abruptly, his pain fell into darkness. Harm, injury, crushing, assault-all turned to ashes and blew away on windless air. In their place came his own numbness, his irreparable lack of sensation. In the great, unlimited abyss, he found that he could see himself.
He was standing nowhere, surrounded by nothing; he was staring as if in dumb incomprehension at his hands.
At first they seemed normal. They were as gaunt as sticks, and the two missing digits of his right hand gave him a sense of loss, unwholeness, that made him groan. But his ring was intact; it hung inertly on his index finger, an argent circle as perfect and inescapable as if it had some meaning.
But as he watched, dim purple spots began to appear on his hands-on his fingers, the backs of his knuckles, the heels of his palms. Slowly, they spread and started to suppurate; they bulged slightly like blisters, then opened to show abscesses under his skin. Fluid oozed from the sores as they grew and spread. Soon both his hands were covered with infection.
They became gangrenous, putrescent; the cloying stench of live, rotten flesh poured from them like the effluvium of some gnawing fungus, noisome and cruel. And under the infection, the bones of his fingers began to gnarl. Unmarrowed, flawed by rot, stressed by tendons whose nerves had died, leaving them perpetually taut, perpetually clenched against each other, the bones twisted, broke, and froze at crooked angles. In the rot and the disease, his hands maimed themselves. And the black, sick swelling of gangrene began to eat its way up his wrists.
The same pressures, the same fetid and uncontrollable tension of muscles and thews-bereft of volition by the rot in his nerves-bowed his forearms so that they hung grotesquely from his elbows. Then pus began to blossom like sweat from the abscessed pores of his upper arms. When he twitched his robe aside, he found that his legs were already contorted to the knees.
The assault horrified him, buried him in misery and self-loathing. He was wearing his own future, the outcome of his illness-the destination of the road down which every leper fared who did not either kill himself or fight hard enough to stay alive. He was seeing the very thing which had first determined him to survive, all those long months ago in the leprosarium, but now it was upon him, virulent and immedicable. His leprosy was in full rank flower, and he had nothing left for which to fight.
Nevertheless he was on his home ground. He knew leprosy with the intimacy of a lover; he knew that it could not happen so swiftly, so completely. It was not real. And it was not all of him. This heinous and putrescent gnawing was not the sum total of his being. Despite what the doctors said-despite what he saw in himself-he was more than that, more than just a leper.
No, Foul! he panted bitterly. It’s not that easy.
“Tom. Tom!” a stricken voice cried. It was familiar to him-a voice as known and beloved as health. “Give it up. Don’t you see what you’re doing to us?”
He looked up, and saw Joan standing before him. She held their infant son, Roger, in her hands, so that the child was half extended like an offering toward him. Both of them appeared just as they had been when he had last seen them, so long ago; Joan had the same look of torn grief in her face, the expression that begged him to understand why she had already decided to divorce him. But she was inexplicably naked. His heart wept in him when he saw the lost love of her loins, the unwillingness of her breasts, the denied treasure of her face.
As he gazed at her, purple stains began to show through the warmth of her skin. Abscesses suppurated on her breasts; sickness oozed from her nipples like milk.
Roger was puling pathetically in her hands. When he turned his helpless infant head toward his father, Covenant saw that his eyes were already glazed and cataractal, half blinded by leprosy. Two dim magenta spots tainted his cheeks.
Foul! Covenant shrieked. Damn you!
Then he saw other figures pressing forward behind Joan. Mhoram was there; Lena and Atiaran were there; Bannor and Hile Troy were there. Mhoram’s whole face had fallen into yellow rot and running chancrous sores; his eyes cried out through the infection as if they were drowning in a quagmire of atrocious wrong. All Lena’s hair had fallen out, and her bald scalp bristled with tubercular nodules. Atiaran’s eyes were drowning in milky blindness. The grotesque gnarling of Banner’s limbs entirely crippled him. Troy’s eyeless face was one puckered mass of gangrene, as i
f the very brain within his skull were festering.
And behind these figures stood more of the people Covenant had known in the Land. All were mortally ill, rife and hideous with leprosy. And behind them crowded multitudes more, numberless victims-all the people of the Land stricken and destitute, abominable to themselves, as ruined as if Covenant had brought a plague of absolute virulence among them.
At the sight of them, he erupted. Fury at their travail spouted up in him like lava. Volcanic anger, so long buried under the weight of his complex ordeal, sent livid, fiery passion geysering into the void.
Foul! he screamed. Foul! You can’t do this!
“I will do it,” came the mocking reply. “I am doing it.”
Stop it!
“Give me the ring.”
Never!
“Then enjoy what you have brought to pass. Behold! I have given you companions. The solitary leper has remade the world in his own image, so that he will not be alone.”
I won’t let you!
The Despiser laughed sardonically. “You will aid me before you die.”
“Never! Damn you! Never!”
Fury exalted Covenant-fury as hot as magma. A rage for lepers carried him beyond all his limits. He took one last look at the victims thronging innumerably before him. Then he began to struggle for freedom like a newborn man fighting his way out of an old skin.
He seemed to be standing in the nowhere nothingness of the abyss, but he knew that his physical body still knelt on the floor of the thronehall-With a savage effort of will, he disregarded all sensory impressions, all appearances that prevented him from perceiving where he was. Trembling, jerking awkwardly, he levered his gaunt frame to its feet. The eyes of his body were blind, still caught in Lord Foul’s control, but he grated fiercely, “I see you, Foul.” He did not need eyes. He could sense with the nerves of his stiff cheeks the emanations of power around him.
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