“I’m ready when you are.”
Linden stared at him. “You can’t be serious.”
In response, Covenant wheeled away from her. Brandishing his fists, he shouted into the air over the valley. “Do you hear that? She thinks you aren’t serious!” He must have believed-or known-that the Theomach was still nearby.
“We don’t really have much choice, Mom,” Jeremiah said tentatively. “We weren’t expecting to end up here. What we wanted to do was pretty easy. This is much more complicated. Right now, we’re as lost as you are.”
Reflexively Linden wanted to reassure him. “That’s all right, honey. I’ll think of something.” In fact, she did not need to think. Her choices were already plain to her. The shaped snow had whispered them to her; or she had seen them in the winter’s irrefusable beauty. “There’s just one more thing that I want to understand.”
She had many other questions, a long list of them. But first she needed to leave this hilltop; needed an answer to the cold. And the potential for redemption in Covenant’s intentions urged movement. For the first time since Roger had taken her son, she seemed to see a road which might lead to Jeremiah’s rescue, and the Land’s.
Covenant spun back toward her as if he meant to yell in her face. But his tone was unexpectedly mild as he said. “Just one? Linden, you astonish me.”
“Just one for now,” she acknowledged. “But it’s important. In spite of the Theomach, you make it sound like there’s hope. If I choose the right path. If we can get to Melenkurion Skyweir. So why did the ur-viles try to stop you?”
The implications of their attack undermined Covenant’s explanations. What did they see that she did not?
“Is that all?” Covenant scowled sourly. “Hell and blood! They’re Demondim-spawn, Linden. Their makers are besieging Revelstone. Don’t tell me you still imagine they want to help you?
“Think, for God’s sake. They made Vain so you could create that Staff, which has effectively prevented me from stopping Foul. Then they guided you to it so you would have the power to erase me anytime you don’t happen to like what I’m doing. Sure, they gave you what you needed to weaken the Demondim. Hell, why not? If I don’t succeed, Revelstone is going to fall eventually, and in the meantime they want to stay on your good side. Every bit of trust they can squeeze out of you serves the Despiser. They’re trying to turn you against me.”
Linden did not believe him: she could not. The ur-viles had done too much-And whenever he reproached her for forming and using the Staff of Law, her instinctive resistance to him stiffened. The man whom she had accompanied to his death would not have said such things.
His scorn and ire made her ache for the Thomas Covenant who had once loved and accepted her.
But she had nothing to gain by arguing. If the ur-viles had intended their manacles for Covenant, they had failed. She would have to live with the consequences of their failure.
All right,” she said as if Covenant’s vehemence had persuaded her. He had enabled her to withstand the cold-temporarily, at least. To that extent, he resembled his former self. “I’m just trying to understand. If I have to decide what we’re going to do, I need to understand as much as I can.”
She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “Here’s an idea. Why don’t we call the Ranyhyn?”
Hyn would not be born for thousands of years. Even the herd that had reared to Covenant lived millennia in the future of this present. But Linden did not know how to gauge the mysterious relationship between the Ranyhyn and Time. Her constrained linear conceptions had been proven inadequate repeatedly. Hyn’s far distant ancestors might already be aware of her need for them.
But Jeremiah covered his face as if she had embarrassed him. And Covenant exploded. “Hellfire and bloody damnation! That’s another terrible idea. In fact, it’s even worse than wanting to go to Andelain.”
Holding his glare, Linden made no effort to interrupt him.
“Maybe they can hear you,” he told her hotly. “Maybe they can’t. If they can, they’ll probably answer. They’re loyal enough for anything. That’s not the point. You’ll be asking them to violate the Land’s history. To risk the Arch.”
“How?” she countered.
Covenant made a visible effort to recover his composure. “Because right now there aren’t any Ranyhyn in the Land. After Foul killed Kelenbhrabanal, he drove them away. If they hadn’t left, he would have exterminated them. They won’t come back for another three or four hundred years. Until they find the Ramen-or the Ramen find them. Without Kelenbhrabanal, they need the Ramen to lead them.
“If you summon them now-and they answer-the consequences will ripple for millennia. And they’ll only get worse. One thing will lead to another. They’ll cause more and more changes.”
Linden waited coldly until Covenant was done. Then she said without inflection. “I didn’t know any of that. There are too many things that you haven’t told me. I don’t have any way to tell the difference between good ideas and bad ones.”
“She’s right,” Jeremiah put in hesitantly. “We’re asking an awful lot of her. It isn’t her fault if she gets some of it wrong.”
His apparent reluctance to defend her-or to disagree with Covenant in any way-made her bite her lip. She needed that small hurt to conceal her deeper pain. She had spent much of his life caring for him with her whole heart; and during that time, Covenant had become more essential to him than she had ever been.
She remembered a Covenant who would not have blamed her-
She did not fault her son for his loyalties. She loved him enough to be grateful that he had grown capable of the kind of attachment which he felt for Covenant. But her helpless rage at what the Despiser had done mounted with every fresh sign that Jeremiah did not love her.
Covenant avoided her gaze. “I get mad too easily,” he admitted as if he were speaking to the empty air. “I know that. It’s the frustration-What I’m trying to do is hard as hell. And it hurts. But it’s nothing compared to what Jeremiah is going through. I want to help him so bad-” After a moment, he added, “And you. And the Land. You didn’t cause any of these delays and obstacles. But they’re making me crazy.”
He seemed to be attempting an apology.
Linden did not care. He could have asked for her sufferance on his knees without swaying her. For Jeremiah’s sake, however, she replied quietly, “Don’t worry about it. Eventually we’ll learn how to talk to each other.
“We’re all tired of frustration. We should go before it gets any worse.”
The relief on Jeremiah’s face was so plain that she could not bear to look at it.
Covenant jerked his eyes to hers. A sudden intensity exaggerated the strictures of his face. “Go where? You still haven’t-”
Linden cut him off. “Where else? Berek’s camp. You said that he’s in the middle of a battle. But he has food. He has warm clothes.” Even true believers could not fight on faith alone. And I’m willing to bet that he has horses. If we can reach him”- if she could endure the cold long enough- “he might be persuaded to help us.”
She was serious: she did not know how else she could hope to reach Covenant’s goal. But she also wanted to hear what he would say about ripples now. If her choices and actions were somehow consonant with the Arch-The Theomach had asserted that her deeds will do no harm. That I will ensure.
Surely entering Berek’s camp would be less dangerous than redirecting the entire past of the Ranyhyn?
“I told you,” Jeremiah crowed. “Sometimes she does exactly the right thing. This is going to work. She’ll make it work.”
For a long moment, Covenant studied her sceptically, as if he suspected a trick of some kind. Then he seemed to throw up his hands. “It’s worth a try. Berek is still in the dark about almost everything. He hardly knows what he can do, or how he can do it. He isn’t likely to recognise the truth about any of us. And he definitely has horses.
“I should warn you, though,” he added grimly. “You
’ll have to make this work because I sure as hell can’t. He doesn’t realise it yet, but he’s full of Earthpower. He can erase us. If he so much as touches us, this whole ordeal will be wasted.”
Linden nodded to herself. She was not surprised: she was only sure. If she stepped aside from the Theomach’s “path,” he would correct her.
At first, she led the way, not because she knew the location of Berek’s battle, but because she was in a hurry to leave the hilltop. She did not want to exhaust herself by following the difficult crests: she needed the less arduous passage of the valley bottom, in spite of its death-laden atmosphere. So she headed downward across the slopes at the best pace that she could manage, keeping her back to the west.
Her haste caused her to slip often as her boots skidded over buried stones or bones. Sometimes she fell. But her cloak gave her a measure of protection from the snow. She did not slow her steps until she reached the floor of the valley.
There the implications of the fallen were stronger. The mere thought that she trod over abandoned corpses daunted her. But the sun was westering; and with its light behind her, she did not suffer from its flagrant glare. Now she moved more slowly for the same reason that she had hurried to reach the valley: she feared exhaustion. The laborious hesitation-and-plunge of every step drained her strength. And the cold grew sharper as the sun lost its force. If she tried to walk too quickly, she would soon defeat herself.
Before long, Covenant and Jeremiah caught up with her. For a time, they matched her burdened plod, keeping a safe distance from her. But they both seemed proof against exertion as well as cold; and gradually they began to draw ahead as if they were reluctant for her company.
“Covenant, wait,” Linden panted. “I have another question.” She did not want to be left behind.
Covenant and Jeremiah exchanged comments too low for her to hear. Then they slowed their strides.
Hardly able to control her breathing, she asked. “How far do we have to go’?”
“Three leagues,” Covenant answered brusquely. “Maybe more. At this rate, we won’t get there until after dark.”
Until even the insufficient warmth of the sun had vanished from the Last Hills.
If she did not think about something other than her own weakness, she would lose heart altogether. “I have no idea what were getting into,” she admitted. “I know that there are things the Theomach doesn’t want you to say. But what can you tell me?”
Covenant scowled at her. “You want me to describe the battle? What does it matter? People are hacking at each other, but they’re too tired to be much good at it. From one minute to the next, most of them don’t know if they’re winning or losing. There’s yelling and screaming, but mostly it’s just hacking.”
Linden shook her head. She had already been in too many battles. “I meant Berek. You said that he doesn’t realise what he can do. Or how he can do it. But he summoned the FireLions. He must have some kind of lore.”
“Oh, well.” Covenant seemed to lose interest. “It wasn’t like that. He didn’t exactly summon the FireLions. He didn’t even know they existed. But he got their attention, and for that he only had to be desperate and bleeding. And he had to have a little power. The real question is, where did he get power?
“According to the legends, when Berek was desperate and bleeding and beaten on Mount Thunder, the rocks spoke to him. They offered him help against the King if he pledged to serve the Land. So he swore he would, and the rocks sent the FireLions to decimate the King’s forces.
“But that doesn’t actually make sense. Sure, the stone of the Land is aware. That’s especially true in Mount Thunder, where so many forces have been at work for so long. But it doesn’t talk. I mean, it doesn’t talk fast enough for most people to hear it.
“So how did Berek do it?” Covenant asked rhetorically. “How did he tap into the little bit of Earthpower he needed to call down the FireLions?”
Concentrating so that she would not think about her weariness, Linden waited for him to go on.
“This is the Land, remember,” Covenant said after a moment. She could not read him with her health-sense; but his manner betrayed that he was losing patience again. His tone gave off glints of scorn. “Earthpower runs near the surface. And Berek has what you might call a natural affinity. He just didn’t know it. The damn stones were more aware than he was.”
“Then how-?” Linden began.
Without transition, Covenant seemed to digress. “It’s easy to criticise Elena,” he drawled. “Silly woman. Didn’t she know despair is a weakness, not a strength?” He was talking about his own daughter. “Didn’t she know Kevin dead was bound to be weaker than he was alive?
“But she had precedent. She understood that better than anybody. Which is probably why they made her High Lord. No matter what you’ve heard, the Old Lords were all about despair. It gave them some of their greatest victories. And it’s what saved Berek.
“It opened him up. Tapped into his natural affinity. Being half insane with pain and blood loss and despair made him raw enough to feel what’s really going on here. What the life of the Land is really like. That’s all it took. When he finally felt the Earthpower in Mount Thunder, he felt it in himself as well. And the FireLions felt that. They responded to it because that’s what they do.”
As Covenant’s restiveness mounted, he began to pull ahead, taking Jeremiah with him. Without turning his
head, he finished, “The rest of it, all the legends people told about him-That stuff was just a way to make what happened sound heroic.”
Because of Berek, everything in the Land had changed. It had been made new. He had given its inhabitants their heritage of Earthpower. Yet Covenant disdained Berek’s achievement.
She did not ask him to wait for her: she hardly wanted his company now. But in one sense, he had not answered her question. Breathing painfully, she increased her pace for a moment.
“Just tell me one more thing,” she panted at his back. “What’s Berek like? What kind of man is he?”
If she wanted the first Halfhand’s help while he fought a fierce battle that would leave many of his supporters dead, she needed to know enough about him to gain his sympathy.
Covenant quickened his strides. Keeping his face to the east, he replied harshly, “He’s charismatic as all hell. Basically a good man, or his despair wouldn’t have left him so raw. And half the time he has no earthly idea what he’s doing.”
Then, for no apparent reason, he added. “When Elena summoned Kevin, he didn’t fail her. She failed him.”
After that, he and Jeremiah left Linden to struggle along as well as she could.
Gradually the uneven shadows of the hills spread into the valley. As much as possible, trying to conserve her strength, Linden followed the trail that Covenant and Jeremiah broke in the crust ahead of her. But more and more often, their way took her into the shade; and then she understood that the coming night would be far more cruel than the day. The temperature of the air seemed to plummet whenever she crossed out of the light.
She did not know how much longer she could go on.
When Covenant and Jeremiah were forty or fifty paces ahead of her-far enough to fade in the shadows, so that she could only be sure of them when they returned to sunlight-she began to draw cautiously on the sustenance of the Staff, evoking a slow current of heat and fortitude from the untroubled wood. Doubtless her son and her former lover would warn her if she endangered them. They had too much to lose. And she needed the nourishment of Law and Earthpower. Without it, she would have to ask for more of Covenant’s inexplicable fire; and that prospect increased her sense of helplessness.
The more time she spent with him, the less she trusted him.
She was prepared to support his purpose. But she would do so for Jeremiah’s sake, and to oppose the Despiser, and so that she would not find herself stranded ten thousand years before her proper time. Covenant had been too profoundly altered: Linden no longer knew how to
believe in him.
In that fashion, she continued her burdened trudge through the snow and the cold while the shadows deepened and the valley grew dim. Long after she should have fallen on her face, she kept walking because the Staff of Law nurtured her.
But then, in one of the last swaths of sunshine, she saw Jeremiah dropping back. He let Covenant forge ahead alone so that she would be able to catch up with him.
Of its own accord, Linden’s heart lifted. Involuntarily she pushed herself to move faster; and as she did so, she quenched the Staff’s subtle warmth. She did not intend to threaten her son.
He started talking as soon as she drew near enough to hear him. He sounded tense; uncomfortable with her. Or perhaps he had been afflicted with Covenant’s frustration, Covenant’s impatience. He almost babbled as he said. “This isn’t normal. We’re too far south. The winters aren’t usually this bad.”
Nevertheless he had elected to accompany her, at least for a while. He must have felt some concern for her, despite his devotion to Covenant. That was enough to encourage her.
“It’s an after-effect of the war,” Jeremiah went on as if he could not stop. “when Berek was losing. Nobody in this time knows Foul. They won’t meet him until after Kevin becomes High Lord. But he’s in the Land. He has a home where nobody can stumble on him by accident. He’s waiting. Until the Lords become powerful enough, they won’t have a realistic chance of breaking the Arch.”
As Linden drew level with him, Jeremiah matched his pace to hers. He kept a distance of four or five steps between them, and he stayed on her left: she could not see his tic. But he did not pull ahead again, or fall behind. And he did not stop talking.
“But earlier Foul wasn’t just waiting. Once samadhi started this war, Foul did what he could to help Berek’s King win it.
“Of course, if that happened, there wouldn’t be any Lords. But Foul didn’t want Lords then. He wanted the King to win. That whole kingdom had the right attitude. I mean the right attitude for Foul. He could manipulate them easily. If they won, he could teach them how to set him free. They could use the Earthpower in the Land to provoke the Creator until the Creator had to intervene. That would break the Arch. Or Foul could get them to rouse the Worm.
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