The One Tree

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  She cried out to him. But the outrage of his ring blew her away.

  For a time, she lay buffeted by gusts of midnight. They echoed in her—men and women shed like cattle, guilt and delirium, wild magic made black by venom. Her whole body burned with the force of his blast. She wanted to scream, but could not master the spasms which convulsed her lungs.

  But gradually the violence receded until it was contained within her head; and the dark began to take shape around her. She was sitting half upright, supported by Call’s arms. Vaguely she saw the First, Honninscrave, and Pitchwife crouched before her. A lantern revealed the tight concern in their faces.

  When she fought her gaze into focus on the Giants, Honninscrave breathed in relief, “Stone and Sea!” Pitchwife chortled, “By the Power that remains, Chosen! You are hardy. A lesser blast broke Sevinhand Anchormaster’s arm in two places.”

  He knew it was me, Linden answered, unaware of her silence. He didn’t let it kill me.

  “The fault is mine,” said the First grimly. “I compelled you to this risk. Take no blame upon yourself. Now nothing lies within our power to aid him.”

  Linden’s mouth groped to form words. “Blame—?”

  “He has put himself beyond our reach. For life or death, we are helpless now.”

  Put—? Linden grappled with the surrounding night to look toward Covenant. The First nodded at Honninscrave. He moved aside, unblocking Linden’s view.

  When she saw Covenant, she almost wailed aloud.

  He lay clenched and rigid, as though he would never move again, with his arms locked at his sides and need like a rictus on his lips. But he was barely visible through the sheath of wild magic which encased him. Shimmering argent covered him as completely as a caul.

  Within his cocoon, his chest still struggled for breath, heart still beat weakly. The venom went on swelling his right arm, went on gnawing at his life. But she did not need any other eyes to tell her that nothing known on Starfare’s Gem could breach this new defense. His caul was as indefeasible as leprosy.

  This was his delirious response to her attempted possession. Because she had tried to take hold of his mind, he had put himself beyond all succor. He would not have been less accessible if he had withdrawn to another world altogether.

  FOUR: The Nicor of the Deep

  Helplessly Linden watched herself go numb with shock. The residue of Covenant’s leprosy seemed to well up in her, deadening her. She had done that to him? Brinn went stubbornly about the task of proving to himself that no strength or tool he could wield was capable of penetrating Covenant’s sheath; but she hardly noticed the Haruchai. It was her doing.

  Because she had tried to possess him. And because he had spared her the full consequences of his power.

  Then Brinn blurred and faded as tears disfocused her vision. She could no longer see Covenant, except as a pool of hot argent in the streaked lambency of the lanterns. Was this why Lord Foul had chosen her? So that she would cause Covenant’s death?

  Yes. She had done such things before.

  She retreated into the numbness as if she needed it, deserved it. But the hands which grasped her shoulders were gentle and demanding. Softly they insisted on her attention, urged her out of her inner morass. They were kind and refused to be denied. When she blinked her gaze clear, she found herself looking into Pitchwife’s pellucid eyes.

  He sat in front of her, holding her by the shoulders. The deformation of his spine brought his misshapen face down almost to her level. His lips smiled crookedly.

  “It is enough, Chosen,” he breathed in a tone of compassion. “This grief skills nothing. It is as the First has said. The fault is not yours.”

  For a moment, he turned his head away. “And also not yours, my wife,” he said to the shadow of the First. “You could not have foreknown this pass.”

  Then his attention returned to Linden. “He lives yet, Chosen. He lives. And while he lives, there must be hope. Fix your mind upon that. While we live, it is the meaning of our lives to hope.”

  I— She wanted to speak, wanted to bare her dismay to Pitchwife’s empathy. But the words were too terrible to be uttered.

  His hands tightened slightly, pulling her posture more upright. “We do not comprehend this caul which he has woven about him. We lack your sight. You must guide us now.” His gentleness tugged at the edges of her heart. “Is this power something to be feared? Has he not perchance brought it into being to preserve his life?”

  His words seemed to cast her gaze toward Covenant. She could barely see him through his shield. But she could see Vain. The Demondim-spawn stood near Covenant, and all suggestion of grinning was gone from his black mien. He bore himself as he always did, his hidden purpose untouched by any other morality. He was not even alive in any normal sense. But he concentrated on Covenant’s wracked form as if together they were being put to the question of a cruel doom.

  “No.” Linden’s voice husked roughly out of her emptiness. “He still has that venom. He’s dying in there.”

  “Then”—Pitchwife’s tone brought her back to his probing—“we must find the means to unweave this power, so that he may be succored.”

  At that, her stomach turned over in protest. She wanted to cry out, Weren’t you watching? I tried to possess him. This is my doing. But her ire was useless; and the Giant’s empathy sloughed it away. Her remaining bitterness compressed itself into one word: “How?”

  “Ah, Chosen.” Pitchwife smiled like a shrug. “That you must tell me.”

  She flinched, closed her eyes. Unconsciously her hands covered her face. Had she not done enough harm? Did he want her to actually hold the knife that killed Covenant?

  But Pitchwife did not relent. “We lack your sight,” he repeated in quiet suasion. “You must guide us. Think on hope. Clearly we cannot pierce this caul. Very well. Then we must answer it with understanding. What manner of power is it? What has transpired in his mind, that he is driven to such defense? What need is occulted within him? Chosen.” Again his hands tightened, half lifting her to her feet. “How may we appeal to him, so that he will permit our aid?”

  “Appeal—?” The suggestion drew a gasp of bile from her. Her arms dropped, uncovering her indignation. “He’s dying! He’s deaf and blind with venom and delirium! Do you think I can just go over there and ask him to please stop defending himself?”

  Pitchwife cocked an eyebrow at her anger; but he did not flinch. A smile softened his features. “It is good,” he said through his twisted grin. “If you are capable of wrath, then you are also capable of hope.”

  She started to spit at him, Hope? But he overrode her firmly. “Very well. You see no means of appeal. But there are other questions to which you might reply, if you chose.”

  “What do you want from me?” she burned into his face. “Do you want me to convince you that it’s my fault? Well, it is. He must’ve thought I was a Raver or something. He was delirious—in terrible pain. The last thing he knew before he relapsed, he was being attacked by those rats. How was he supposed to know I was trying to help him? He didn’t even know it was me. Until too late.

  “It’s like—” She fumbled momentarily for a description. “Like hysterical paralysis. He’s so afraid of his ring—and so afraid Foul’s going to get it. And he’s a leper. His numbness makes him think he can’t control the power. He hasn’t got the nerves to control it. Even without the venom, he’s afraid all the time. He never knows when he’s going to kill somebody else.”

  Words poured from her. In the back of her mind, she relived what she had learned before Covenant hurled her away. As she spoke, those inchoate images took shape for her.

  “And he knew what was happening to him. He’s had relapses before. When the venom came over him, probably the only conscious thing he had left was fear. He knew he was defenseless. Not against us—against himself. Against Foul. He was already full of power when I tried to take over. What else could he do? He struck back. And then—”

 
For an instant, she faltered in pain. But she could not halt the momentum of the words.

  “Then he saw it was me. For all he knew, he might’ve killed me. Exactly the kind of thing that terrified him most.” She gritted herself to keep from shivering in dismay. “So he closed all the doors. Shut himself off. Not to keep us out. To keep himself in.”

  Deliberately she fixed Pitchwife with her glare. “There is no way to appeal to him. You can stand there and shout at him until it breaks your heart, and he won’t hear you. He’s trying to protect you.” But then she ran out of ire, and her voice trailed away as she conceded lornly, “Us.” Me.

  Around her, silence spread out into the stagnant night. Starfare’s Gem lay still as if the loss of wind had slain it. The Giants remained motionless, becalmed, as if their vitality were leaking out of them into the dead Sea. Her speech seemed to hang like futility in the air, denying hope. She could not find any end to the harm she had inflicted on her companions.

  But when Pitchwife spoke again, his resilience astonished her. “Linden Avery, I hear you.” No hue or timbre of despair marred his voice. He talked as though his lifetime as a cripple had taught him to overcome anything. “But this despond ill becomes us. By my heart, I flounder to think that so many Giants may be rendered mirthless! If words have such power, then we are behooved to consider them again. Come, Chosen. You have said that Covenant Giantfriend seeks to preserve us, and that he will not hear us if we speak. Very well. What will he hear? What language will touch him?”

  Linden winced. His insistence simply reaffirmed her failure.

  “What does he desire?” the Giant went on steadily, “What need or yearning lies uppermost in him? Mayhap if we provide an answer to his heart, he will perceive that we are not harmed—that his protection is needless—and he will let his power go.”

  She gaped at him. His question took her by surprise; and her response came automatically, without forethought. “The One Tree. The quest.” Covenant’s images were still in her. Pitchwife’s calm drew them out of her. “He doesn’t know what else to do. He needs a new Staff of Law. And we’re not moving—”

  At that, Pitchwife grinned.

  An inchoate prescience shocked her. She surged at him, grabbed for the front of his sark. “The One Tree? He’s dying! You don’t even know where it is!”

  Pitchwife’s eyes gleamed in response. From somewhere nearby, the Storesmaster’s blunt voice said, “It may be done. I have taken soundings. This Sea is apt for Nicor.”

  At once, the First said harshly, “Then we will make the attempt.”

  A chuckle widened Pitchwife’s grin. His hale aura stroked Linden’s senses with a steady confidence she could not comprehend. “There, Chosen,” he said. “Hope. We cannot bespeak Covenant Giantfriend, to say that we are well. But we can move Starfare’s Gem. Mayhap he will feel that movement and be consoled.”

  Move—? Linden’s lips formed words she could not utter. You’re kidding.

  Heft Galewrath addressed her stolidly. “I can make no beginning until dawn. We must have light. And then the answer—if I am answered—may be slow in coming. Will the Giantfriend endure so long?”

  “He—” Linden fought the extremity which closed her throat. Her brain kept repeating, Move Starfare’s Gem? Without wind? “I don’t know. He has the power. Maybe—maybe what he’s doing will slow down the venom. He’s shut his mind to everything else. Maybe he’s stopped the venom too. If he has—” She struggled to achieve a coherent assessment. “He’ll live until the venom eats through his heart. Or until he starves to death.”

  Move Starfare’s Gem?

  Abruptly Honninscrave started shouting orders. Around him, Giants sprang into motion as if they had been brought back to life by a sense of purpose. Their feet spread new energy through the stone as they hastened to their tasks. Several of them went below toward the storage-lockers; but many more swung up into the rigging, began to furl the sails. They worked on all three masts at once, repairing the damage which behung the midmast while they clewed up and lashed the canvas fore and aft.

  Linden watched them as if the confusion in her head had become an external madness. They meant to move the ship. Therefore they furled the sails? Pitchwife had already followed the First and Galewrath forward; Honninscrave had positioned himself on the wheeldeck. And Seadreamer, who stood nearby with a private smolder in his eyes, could not speak. She felt like a lost child as she turned to Cail.

  Instead of replying, he offered her a bowl of food and another flask of macerated diamondraught.

  She accepted them because she did not know what else to do.

  Deliberately she moved back into the lantern light around Covenant, sat down with her back to Foodfendhall as close to him as her nerves could bear. Her viscera still trembled at the taste of his illness, but she forced herself to remain near enough to monitor his shield—near enough to act promptly if the shield failed. And near enough to keep watch on Vain. The Demondim-spawn’s strange attentiveness had not wavered; but his obsidian flesh gave no hint of his intent. With a sigh, she leaned against the stone and compelled herself to eat.

  What else could she do? She did not believe that his shield would fail. It looked as absolute as his torment. And Vain went on gazing at that caul as though he expected the Unbeliever to drop through the bottom of the world at any moment.

  Later, she slept.

  She awoke in the first muggy gloaming of the becalmed dawn. Without their sails, the masts above her looked skeletal against the paling sky, like boughs shorn of leaves, of life. Starfare’s Gem was little more than a floating rock under her—a slab of stone crucified between water and sky by the death of all winds. And Covenant, too, was dying: his respiration had become perceptibly shallower, more ragged. He wore his power intimately, like a winding-sheet.

  The afterdeck was empty of Giants; and only two remained on the wheeldeck, Sevinhand Anchormaster and a steerswoman. No one was in the rigging, though Linden thought she glimpsed a figure sitting high overhead in Horizonscan, the lookout. Except for herself. Covenant, and Vain, Brinn, Cail, Hergrom, and Ceer, everyone had gone forward. She felt their activity through the stone.

  For a while, she could not decide what to do. Her desire to learn what the Giants were about tugged at her. At the same time, she knew she belonged beside Covenant. Yet she obviously could not help him, and her uselessness wore at her. His Power, like his mind, was beyond her reach. Soon she became too tense to remain where she was. As a compromise, she went and ascended to the wheeldeck to examine Sevinhand’s broken arm.

  The Anchormaster was lean for a Giant, and his old face was engraved with an un-Giant-like melancholy. In him, the characteristic cheer of his people had been eroded by a habitual grief. The lines on his cheeks looked like galls. But his mien lightened as Linden approached, and the smile with which he answered her desire to inspect his arm was plainly genuine.

  He carried his limb in a sling. When she slipped back the cloth, she saw that the forearm had been properly splinted. Probing his skin with her fingers, she discerned that Cail had reported the injury accurately: the breaks were clean—and cleanly set. Already the bones had begun to knit.

  She nodded her satisfaction, turned to go back to Covenant. But Sevinhand stopped her.

  She looked at him inquiringly. His melancholy had returned. He remained silent for a moment while he considered her. Then he said, “Heft Galewrath will attempt a calling of Nicor. That is perilous.” The flinch of his eyes showed that he was personally acquainted with the danger. “Mayhap there will be sore and instant need for a healer. It is Galewrath who tends the healing of Starfare’s Gem—yet the gravest peril will befall her. Will you not offer your aid?” He nodded forward. “Surely the Haruchai will summon you with all speed, should you be required by Covenant Giantfriend.”

  His earnest gaze moved her. The Giants had already shown their concern and support for her in many ways. Seadreamer had carried her out of Sarangrave Flat after the breaking of
her ankle. And Pitchwife had tried several times to demonstrate that there were other smiles in the world than the fatal one Covenant had given Joan. She welcomed a chance to offer some kind of service in return. And she was clearly valueless to Covenant as matters stood. Vain did not appear to pose any threat.

  Turning to Cail, she said, “I’m counting on you.” His slight bow of acceptance reassured her. The flatness of his visage seemed to promise that his people could be trusted beyond any possibility of dereliction or inadequacy.

  As she left the wheeldeck, she felt Sevinhand’s relief smiling wanly at her back.

  Hastening across the long afterdeck, she passed through Foodfendhall toward the prow of the ship. There she joined a milling press of Giants. Most were busy at tasks she did not understand; but Pitchwife noticed her arrival and moved to her side. “You are well come, Chosen,” he said lightly. “Perchance we will have need of you.”

  “That’s what Sevinhand said.”

  His gaze flicked aft like a wince, then returned to Linden. “He speaks from knowledge.” His misformed eyes cast a clear echo of the Anchormaster’s sorrow. “At one time—perhaps several brief human lives past—Sevinhand Mastered another Giantship, and Seatheme his wife served as Storesmaster. Ah, that is a tale worth the telling. But I will curtail it. The time is not apt for that story. And you will have other inquiries.

  “To speak shortly—” Abruptly he grimaced in vexation. “Stone and Sea, Chosen! It irks my heart to utter such a tale without its full measure. I am surpassed to credit that any people who speak briefly are in good sooth alive at all.” But then his eyes widened as if he were startled by his own intensity, and his expression cleared. “Nevertheless. I bow to the time.” He saluted Linden as if he were laughing at himself. “Shortly then. Sevinhand and his Giantship sailed a Sea which we name the Soulbiter, for it is ever fell and predictless, and no craft passes it without cost. There a calm such as we now suffer came upon them. Many and many a day the vessel lay stricken, and no life stirred the sails. Water and food became dire. Therefore the choice was taken to attempt a calling of Nicor.