The One Tree

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  For a few moments, Linden was too full of amazement to think about anything else. But then a pang of recollection reminded her of Covenant.

  Immediately, urgently, she sent her senses scrambling toward the afterdeck. At first, she could not feel her way past the immense straining of the Giants. They were a cynosure of effort, blocking her percipience. But then her grasp on the ambience of the dromond clarified, and she felt Covenant living as she had left him—locked rigid within his argent caul, rendered by his own act untouchable and doomed. An ache of dismay sucked at her when she thought that perhaps the ploy of the Giants had already failed. She protested, but could not seal herself against the fear. They did not deserve to fail.

  The next moment, the Nicor thrashed through a violent change of direction. Starfare’s Gem canted as if it had been stricken below the waterline. Swiftly the steerswoman spun Shipsheartthew. The dromond began to straighten.

  The Nicor wrenched itself the other way. Hooked by its prow, the Giantship pitched to that side. Water leaped toward the railing and Linden like a hammerblow.

  The Sea curled away scant feet from her face. Then Honninscrave shouted, “Ease the line!”

  The Giants obeyed; and the hawser leaped to a squeal through the holding-blocks, shot with a loud yammer past the prow. As the steerswoman fought the wheel, Starfare’s Gem righted itself.

  “Once more!” the Master ordered. “Hold!”

  At his signal, blocks bit back into the cable, brought it squalling to a halt.

  Linden found that she had forgotten to breathe. Her chest burned with the strain.

  Before she could recover her balance, the dromond sagged back on its stern. Then the deck was nearly ripped from under her. The Nicor had surged to a stop, coiled its strength, and leaped forward again with redoubled ferocity.

  In the instant that the pressure was released, all the Giants staggered backward. Some of them fell. Then the hawser tore at their arms as the Nicor began to run.

  They were off-balance, could not hold, Honninscrave barked urgently, “Release!” They struggled to obey.

  But they could not all unclose their holding-blocks at the same instant. One of them was late by a fraction of a heartbeat.

  With the whole force of the Nicor, he was snatched forward. His grip appeared to be tangled on the hawser. Before he could let go, he crashed head and body against the rail of the prow.

  The impact tore him free of the line. He tumbled backward, lay there crushed and still.

  Shouts echoed unheard around Linden as Honninscrave mustered his crew to grip the hawser again. Her whole attention was fixed on the broken Giant. His pain cried out to her. Thrusting away from Cail, she jumped the hissing cable as if she were inured to peril, dashed to the sprawled form. All her instincts became lucid and precise.

  She saw his shattered bones as if they were limned in light, felt his shredded tissues and internal bleeding as though the damage were incused on her own flesh. He was severely mangled. But he was still alive. His heart still limped; air still gurgled wetly from his pierced lungs. Perhaps he could be saved.

  No. The harm was too great. He needed everything a modern hospital could have provided—transfusions, surgery, traction. She had nothing to offer except her health-sense.

  Behind her, the ululation of the hawser fell silent as the Giants regained their hold. At once, they strove to win back the line they had lost. Starfare’s Gem swept forward.

  And yet his heart still beat. He still breathed. There was a chance. It was worth the attempt.

  Without hesitation, she knelt at his side, cleared her mind of everything else. Reaching into him with her senses, she committed herself to the support of his faltering life.

  With her own pulse, she steadied his, then bent her attention to the worst of his internal injuries. His pain flooded through her, but she refused to be mastered by it. His need outweighed pain. And it enabled her to trace his wounds as if they were laid bare before her. First she confronted his lungs. Broken ribs had punctured them in several places. Firmly she nudged his tissues closed around the bones so that his lungs would not fill with blood. Then she followed the damage elsewhere. His bowels had been lacerated, but that was not the most immediate danger. Other organs were bleeding profusely. She poured herself toward them, fought to—

  “Chosen.” Cail’s voice cut through her concentration. “Brinn calls. The ur-Lord rouses himself.”

  The words pierced her like cold death. Involuntarily her awareness sprang in the direction of the afterdeck.

  Cail was right. Covenant’s sheath had begun to flash back and forth, flickering toward disaster. Within it, he twisted as though he were on the verge of the last rigor.

  But the Giant—! His life was seeping out of him. She could feel it flow as if it formed a palpable pool around her knees. Like the wound in her nightmare.

  No!

  As it flashed, Covenant’s power gathered for one more blast. The import of that accumulation was written in the distress of his aura. He was preparing to release his white fire, let go of it entirely. Then the last barrier between him and the venom would be gone. She knew without seeing him that his whole right side from hand to shoulder, waist to neck, was grotesquely swollen with poison.

  One or the other, Covenant or the Giant.

  While she sat there, stunned with indecision, they might both die.

  No!

  She could not endure it. Intolerable that either of them should be lost!

  Her voice broke as she cried out, “Galewrath!” But she did not listen to the way her call cracked across the foredeck, did not wait for an answer. Cail tugged at her shoulder; she ignored him. Panting urgently, frenetically, Covenant! she plunged back into the stricken Giant.

  The injuries which would kill him most quickly were there and there—two hurts bleeding too heavily to be survived. His lungs might go on working, but his heart could not continue. It had already begun to falter under the weight of so much blood-loss. With cold accuracy she saw what she would have to do. To keep him alive. Occupying his abdomen with her percipience, she twisted his nerves and muscles until the deeper of the two bleedings slowed to a trickle.

  Then Heft Galewrath arrived, knelt opposite her. Covenant was going to die. His power gathered. Still Linden did not permit herself to flinch. Without shifting her attention, she grabbed Galewrath’s hand, directed the thumb to press deeply into the Giant’s stomach at a certain point. There. That pressure constricted the flow of the second fatal hurt.

  “Chosen,” Call’s tone was as keen as a whip.

  “Keep pressing there.” Linden sounded wild with hysteria, but she did not care. “Breathe into him. So he doesn’t drown on blood.” She prayed that the experience of the seas had taught Galewrath something akin to artificial respiration.

  In a frenzy of haste, she scrambled toward Covenant.

  The foredeck appeared interminable. The Giants straining at the hawser dropped behind her one by one as if their knotted muscles and arched backs, the prices they were willing to pay in Covenant’s name, measured out the tale of her belatedness. The sun shone into their faces. Beyond Foodfendhall, the flickering of Covenant’s power grew slower as it approached its crisis.

  Hergrom seemed to materialize in front of her, holding open the door to the housing. She hurdled the storm-sill, pounded through the hall. Ceer flung open the far door.

  With a wrench of nausea, she felt white fire collecting in Covenant’s right side. Gathering against the venom. In his delirium, blind instinct guided him to direct the power inward, at himself, as if he could eradicate the poison by fire. As if such a blast would not also tear his life to shreds.

  She had no time to try for any control over him. Springing out onto the afterdeck, she dove headlong toward him, skidded across the stone past Vain’s feet to collide with Covenant so that any fire he unleashed would strike her as well. And as she hurled herself into danger, she drove her senses as far into him as she could reach.

/>   Covenant! Don’t!

  She had never made such an attempt before, never tried to thrust a message through the link of her percipience. But now, impelled by desperation and hazard, she touched him. Far below his surface extremity, the struggling vestiges of his consciousness heard her. Barriers fell as he abandoned himself to her. A spring of fire broke open from his right hand, releasing the pressure. Flame gushed out of him and flowed away, harming nothing.

  A wave of giddiness lifted her out of herself. She tottered to her feet, staggered against Cail. Her lips formed words she could hardly hear.

  “Give him diamondraught. As much as you can.”

  Dimly she watched Brinn obey. She wanted to return to the foredeck. But her limbs were so full of palsy and relief that she could not move. Around her, the deck started to spin. She had to summon more strength than she knew she owned before she was able to tell Cail to take her back to Galewrath and the injured Giant.

  At sunset, Starfare’s Gem passed out of the zone of calm. Waves began to rock the vessel and wind kicked at the shrouds, drawing a cheer from the weary crew. By that time, they had recaptured half the line connecting them to the Nicor. Honninscrave spoke to the First. With a flourish, she drew her broadsword, severed the hawser at one stroke.

  Other Giants climbed into the rigging and began to unfurl the sails. Soon Starfare’s Gem was striding briskly before a stiff wind into the eastern night.

  By that time, Linden had done everything she could for the wounded Giant. She felt certain he would live. When he regained consciousness enough to gaze up into her exhausted visage, he smiled.

  That was enough. She left him in Galewrath’s charge. Pulling together what remained of her spent courage, she stumbled back down the long foredeck to care for Covenant.

  FIVE: Father’s Child

  During the night, squalls came up like a reaction against the earlier calm. They gusted and drove the dromond until it seemed to breast its way ponderously eastward like a worn-out grampus. But that impression was misleading. The masts were alive with lines and canvas and Giants, and Starfare’s Gem raced through the cross-hacked waves like a riptide.

  For four days, a succession of small storms battered the region, permitted the ship’s crew little rest. But Linden hardly noticed the altercation of wind and rain and quiet. She grew unconsciously accustomed to the background song of the rigging, the rhythm of the prow in the Sea, to the pitching of the stone and the variable swaying of the lanterns and hammocks. At unexpected intervals, the Giants greeted her with spontaneous celebrations, honoring her for what she had done; and their warmth brought tears to her eyes. But her attention was elsewhere. The little strength she gained from troubled snatches of sleep and nibbled meals, she spent watching over Thomas Covenant.

  She knew now that he would live. Though he had shown no hint of consciousness, the diamondraught was vivid in him—antivenin, febrifuge, and roborant in one. Within the first day, the swelling had receded from his right side and arm, leaving behind a deep mottled black-and-yellow bruise but no sign of any permanent damage. Yet he did not awaken. And she did not try to reach into him, either to gain information or to nudge him toward consciousness. She feared that perhaps the sickness still gnawed at his mind, exacting its toll from his bare sanity; but she was loath to ascertain the truth. If his mind were healing as well as his body, then she had no reason or excuse to violate his privacy. And if he were being corroded toward madness, she would need more strength than she now possessed to survive the ordeal.

  The venom was still in him. Because of her, he had been driven right to the edge of self-extirpation. And even then she had risked him further for another’s sake. But she had also called him back from that edge. Somehow through his delirium and looming death he had recognized her—and trusted her. That was enough. Whenever the continuing vulnerability of his sopor became more than she could bear, she went to tend the injured Giant.

  His name was Mistweave, and his hardiness was vaguely astounding to her. Her own restless exhaustion, the inner clench of her tension, the burning of her red-rimmed eyes on the salt air, made him seem healthier than she was. By the second day of the squalls, his condition had stabilized to such an extent that she was able to attempt the setting of his fractured ribs. Guiding Galewrath and Seadreamer as they applied traction to Mistweave’s torso, she bent those bones away from his lungs back into their proper alignment so that they could heal without crippling him. He bore the pain with a fierce grin and a flask of diamondraught; and when at last he lapsed into unconsciousness Linden could hear the new ease of his breathing.

  The Storesmaster complimented the success of the manipulation with a blunt nod, as if she had expected nothing else from the Chosen. But Cable Seadreamer lifted her from her feet and gave her a tight hug that felt like envy. The flexing of his oaken muscles told her how severely the Master’s brother ached for healing—for the Earth, and for his own misery. The scar under his eyes gleamed, pale and aggrieved.

  In recognition and empathy, she returned his clasp. Then she left Saltroamrest, where Mistweave lay, and went back to Covenant.

  Late at night after the third day of squalls, he began to rouse himself.

  He was too weak to raise his head or speak. He seemed too weak to comprehend where he was, who she was, what had happened to him. But behind the dullness of his gaze he was free of fever. The venom had returned to latency.

  Propping up his head, she fed him as much as he could eat of the food and drink which Cail had brought for her earlier. Immediately afterward, he slipped away into a more natural sleep.

  For the first time in long days, Linden went to her own chamber. She had stayed away from it as if it were still full of nightmares; but now she knew that that darkness had receded, at least temporarily. Stretching out her exhaustion in the hammock, she let herself rest.

  Throughout the next day, Covenant awakened at intervals without fully regaining consciousness. Each time he opened his eyes, tried to lift his head, she fed him; and each time he drifted almost at once back into his dreams. But she did not need her health-sense to see that he was growing stronger as his flesh drank in sleep and aliment. And that gave her a strange easement. She felt that she was linked to him symbiotically, that the doors of perception and vulnerability which she had opened to him could not be closed again. His recuperation comforted her in more ways than she could name.

  This baffled her lifelong desire for independence, frustrated her severe determination to live at no behest but her own. If she had ever permitted herself to be thus accessible to someone else’s needs and passions, how could she have survived the legacy of her parents? Yet she could not wish herself free of this paradoxically conflicted and certain man. The knots within her softened to see him healing.

  Early the next morning, she fed him again. When he went back to sleep, she ascended to the afterdeck and found that the squalls had blown away. A steady wind carried Starfare’s Gem lightly through the seas. Overhead the sails curved like wings against the untrammeled azure of the sky.

  Honninscrave hailed her like a shout of praise from the wheeldeck, then asked about Covenant. She replied briefly, almost dourly, not because the question troubled her, but because she did not know how to handle the unwonted susceptibility of her answer. Something within her wanted to laugh in pleasure at the breeze, and the clean sunshine, and the dancing of the waves. The dromond sang under her. And yet, unexpectedly, she felt that she was on the verge of tears. Her innominate contradictions confused her. She was no longer certain of who she was.

  Scanning the afterdeck, she saw Pitchwife near the place where Covenant had lain in his cocoon. Vain still stood in the vicinity—he had not moved at all since Covenant’s rescue—and Pitchwife ignored him. The deformed Giant bore a rude slab of rock over one shoulder. In the opposite hand, he carried a stone cauldron. Impelled partly by curiosity, partly by a rising pressure of words, Linden went to see what he was doing. He seemed to have a special empathy for confus
ion.

  “Ah, Chosen,” he said in greeting as she approached; but his gaze was distracted, and concentration furrowed his brows. “You behold me about my craft.” In spite of his preoccupation, he gave her a smile. “Doubtless you have observed the workings of Starfare’s Gem and seen that each Giant serves the needs of the ship. And doubtless also you have noted that the exception is myself. Pitchwife rides no rigging, bears no duty at Shipsheartthew. He labors not in the galley, neither does he tend either sail or line. What purpose then does he serve among this brave company?”

  His tone hinted at humor; but most of his attention was elsewhere. Setting down his rock and cauldron, he examined first the wild magic scars in the deck, then the damage done to the roof of the housing. To reach the roof, he ascended a ladder which he must have positioned earlier for that purpose.

  “Well,” he went on as he studied the harmed granite, “it is plain for all to see that I am inaptly formed for such labor. My frame ill fits the exertion of Shipsheartthew. I move without celerity, whether on deck or aloft. In the galley”—he laughed outright—“my stature poorly suits the height of stoves and tables. A Giant such as I am was not foreseen by the makers of Starfare’s Gem. And as to the tending of sail and line—” With a nod of satisfaction at the condition of the roof, or at his thoughts, he returned to the cauldron. “That is not my craft.”

  Reaching into the stone pot, he stirred the contents with one hand, then brought out a rank brown mass which looked like partially-hardened tar. “Chosen,” he said as he worked the mass with both hands, “I am condignly named Pitchwife. This is my ‘pitch,’ which few Giants and no others may grasp with impunity, for without Giant-flesh and Giant-craft any hand may be turned to stone. And the task for which I mold such pitch is ‘wiving.’