The One Tree

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Outside the Sandwall, his apparent callousness toward Hergrom’s death had covered a passion as extravagant as his commitment. But Covenant’s silence struck her as a final refusal. He was not looking at her now. From the beginning, he had doubted her. She wanted to go to him, pound at him with her fists until he gave some kind of response. Is that what you think of me? But she could barely lift her arm from the shoulder, still could not flex her elbow.

  A stutter of canvas underscored the silence. Gusts beat Linden’s shirt against her. The First’s expression was hooded, inward. She appeared to credit the picture Brinn had painted. Linden felt herself foundering. All of these people were pushing her toward the darkness that lurked like a Raver in the bottom of her heart.

  After a moment, the First said, “The command of the Search is mine. Though you are not Giants—not bound to me—you have accepted our comradeship, and you will accept my word in this matter.” Her assertion was not a threat. It was a statement as plain as the iron of her broadsword. “What retribution do you desire?”

  Without hesitation, Brinn replied, “Let her speak the name of a Sandgorgon.”

  Then for an instant the air seemed to fall completely still, as if the very winds of the world were horrified by the extremity of Brinn’s judgment. The deck appeared to cant under Linden’s feet; her head reeled. Speak—?

  Is that what you think of me?

  Slowly words penetrated her dismay. The First was speaking in a voice thick with suppressed anguish.

  “Chosen, will you not make answer?”

  Linden fought to take hold of herself. Covenant said not one word in her defense. He stood there and waited for her, as the Giants and Haruchai waited. Her numb hand slapped softly against the side of her leg, but the effort was futile. She still had no feeling there.

  Thickly she said, “No.”

  The First started to expostulate. Pitchwife’s face worked as if he wanted to cry out. Linden made them both fall silent.

  “They don’t have the right.”

  Brinn’s mouth moved. She cracked at him in denial, “You don’t have the right.”

  Then every voice around the afterdeck was stilled. The Giants in the rigging watched her, listening through the ragged run of the seas, the wind-twisted plaint of the shrouds. Brinn’s visage was closed against her. Deliberately she forced herself to face the raw distress in Covenant’s eyes.

  “Did you ever ask yourself why Kevin Landwaster chose the Ritual of Desecration?” She was shivering in the marrow of her bones. “He must’ve been an admirable man—or at least powerful”—she uttered that word as if it nauseated her—“if the Bloodguard were willing to give up death and even sleep to serve him. So what happened to him?”

  She saw that Covenant might try to answer. She did not let him. “I’ll tell you. The goddamn Bloodguard happened to him. It wasn’t bad enough that he was failing—that he couldn’t save the Land himself. He had to put up with them as well. Standing there like God Almighty and serving him while he lost everything he loved.” Her voice snarled like sarcasm; but it was not sarcasm. It was her last supplication against the dark place toward which she was being impelled. You never loved me anyway. “Jesus Christ! No wonder he went crazy with despair. How could he keep any shred of his self-respect, with people like them around? He must’ve thought he didn’t have any choice except to destroy everything that wasn’t worthy of them.”

  She saw shock in Covenant’s expression, refusal in Brinn’s. Quivering she went on, “Now you’re doing the same thing.” She aimed her fierce pleading straight at Covenant’s heart. “You’ve got all the power in the world, and you’re so pure about it. Everything you do is so dedicated.” Dedicated in a way that made all her own commitments look like just so much cowardice and denial. “You drive everyone around you to such extremes.” And I don’t have the power to match you. It’s not my—

  But there she stopped herself. In spite of her misery, she was not willing to blame him for what she had done. He would take that charge seriously—and he did not deserve it. Bitter with pain at the contrast between his deserts and hers, she concluded stiffly, “You don’t have the right.”

  Covenant did not respond. He was no longer looking at her. His gaze searched the stone at her feet like shame or pleading.

  But Brinn did not remain silent. “Linden Avery.” The detachment of his tone was as flat as the face of doom. “Is it truly your claim that the Bloodguard gave cause to Kevin Landwaster’s despair?”

  She made no reply. She was fixed on Covenant and had no room for anyone else.

  Abruptly something in him snapped. He jerked his fists through the air like a cry; and wild magic left an arc of argent across the silence. Almost at once, the flame vanished. But his fists did not unclose. “Linden.” His voice was choked in his throat—at once harsh and gentle. “What happened to your arm?”

  He took her by surprise. The Giants stared at him. Cail’s brows tensed into a suggestion of a scowl. But that brief flare of power took hold of the gathering. In an instant, the conflict changed. It was no longer a contest of Haruchai against Linden. Now it lay between Covenant and her, between him and anyone who sought to gainsay him. And she found that she had to answer him. She had lost any defense she might have had against his passion.

  Yet her sheer loathing for what she had done made the words acid. “Cail kicked me. To stop me from killing Ceer.”

  At that stark statement, his breath hissed through his teeth like a flinch of pain.

  Brinn nodded. If he had taken any hurt from Linden’s accusation, he did not show it.

  For a moment, Covenant grasped after comprehension. Then he muttered, “All right. That’s enough.”

  The Haruchai did not retreat. “Ur-Lord, there must be retribution.”

  “No,” Covenant responded as if he had heard a different reply. “She’s a doctor. She saves lives. Do you think she isn’t already suffering?”

  “I know nothing of that,” retorted Brinn. “I know only that she attempted Ceer’s life.”

  Without warning, Covenant broke into a shout. “I don’t care!” He spat vehemence at Brinn as if it were being physically torn out of him. “She saved me! She saved all of us! Do you think that was easy? I’m not going to turn my back on her, just because she did something I don’t understand!”

  “Ur-Lord—” Brinn began.

  “No!” Covenant’s passion carried so many implications of power that it shocked the deck under Linden’s feet. “You’ve gone too far already!” His chest heaved with the effort he made to control himself. “In Andelain—with the Dead—Elena talked about her. She said, ‘Care for her, beloved, so that in the end she may heal us all.’ Elena,” he insisted. “The High Lord. She loved me, and it killed her. But never mind that. I won’t have her treated this way.” His voice shredded under the strain of self-containment. “Maybe you don’t trust her.” His half-fist jabbed possibilities of fire around him. “Maybe you don’t trust me.” He could not keep himself from yelling, “But you are by God going to leave her alone!”

  Brinn did not reply. His flat eyes blinked as if he were questioning Covenant’s sanity.

  Instantly light on the verge of flame licked from every line of the Unbeliever’s frame. The marks on his forearm gleamed like fangs. His shout was a concussion of force which staggered the atmosphere.

  “Do you hear me?”

  Brinn and Cail retreated a step as if Covenant’s might awed them. Then, together, they bowed to him as scores of the Haruchai had bowed when he had returned from Glimmermere with Loric’s krill and their freedom in his hands. “Ur-Lord,” Brinn said in recognition. “We hear you.”

  Panting through his teeth, Covenant wrestled down his fire.

  The next moment, Findail appeared at his side. The Appointed’s mien was lined with anxiety and exasperation; and he spoke as if he had been trying to get Covenant’s attention for some time.

  “Ring-wielder, they hear you. All who inhabit the Eart
h hear you. You alone have no ears. Have I not said and said that you must not raise this wild magic? You are a peril to all you deem dear.”

  Covenant swung on the Elohim. With the index finger of his half-hand, he stabbed at Findail as if to mark the spot where he meant to strike.

  “If you’re not going to answer questions,” he snarled, “don’t talk to me at all. If you people had any goddamn scruples, none of this would’ve happened.”

  For a moment, Findail met Covenant’s ire with his yellow gaze. Then, softly, he asked, “Did we not preserve your soul?”

  He did not wait for a reply. Turning with the dignity of old pain, he went back to his chosen station in the prow.

  At once, Covenant faced Linden again. The pressure in him burned as hotly as ever; and it forced her to see him more clearly. It had nothing to do with Findail—or with the Haruchai. In surprise, she perceived now that he had never intended to permit any retribution against her. He was raw with grief over Ceer and Hergrom—nearly mad with venom and power—appalled by what she had done. But he had never considered the idea of punishment.

  He gave her no time to think. “Come with me.” His command was as absolute as the Haruchai. Pivoting sharply, he stalked to the new junction of the fore- and afterdecks. He seemed to choose that place so that he would not be overheard. Or so that he would not be a hazard to the masts and sails.

  Pitchwife’s misshapen features expressed relief and apprehension on different parts of his face. The First raised a hand to the sweat of distress on her forehead, and her gaze avoided Linden as if to eschew comment on anything the Giantfriend did or wanted. Linden feared to follow him. She knew instinctively that this was her last chance to refuse—her last chance to preserve the denials on which she had founded her life. Yet his stress reached out to her across the gray unsunlit expanse of the afterdeck. Stiffly abrading her thighs at every step, she went toward him.

  For a moment, he did not look at her. He kept his back to her as if he could not bear the sight of what she had become. But then his shoulders bunched, bringing his hands together in a knot like the grasp of a strangler, and he turned to confront her. His voice spattered acid as he said, “Now you’re going to tell me why you did it.”

  She did not want to answer. The answer was in her. It lay at the root of her black mood, felt like the excruciation which clawed the nerves of her elbow. But it dismayed her completely. She had never admitted that crime to anyone, never given anyone else the right to judge her. What he already knew about her was bad enough. If she could have used her right hand, she would have covered her face to block the harsh penetration and augury of his gaze. In an effort to fend him off, she gritted severely, “I’m a doctor. I don’t like watching people die. If I can’t save them—”

  “No.” Threats of wild magic thickened his tone. “Don’t give me any cheap rationalizations. This is too important.”

  She did not want to answer. But she did. All the issues and needs of the past night came together in his question and demanded to be met. Ceer’s blood violated her pants like the external articulation of other stains, other deaths. Her hands had been scarred with blood for so long now that the taint had sunk into her soul. Her father had marked her for death. And she had proved him right.

  At first, the words came slowly. But they gathered force like a possession. Soon their hold over her was complete. They rose up in her one after another until they became gasping. She needed to utter them. And all the time Covenant watched her with nausea on his visage as if everything he had ever felt for her were slowly sickening within him.

  “It was the silence,” she began—words like the faint, almost pointless hammer-strokes which could eventually break granite. “The distance.” The Elohim had driven it into him like a wedge, breaking the necessary linkage of sensation and consciousness, action and import. “It was in me. I knew what I was doing. I knew what was happening around me. But I didn’t seem to have any choice. I didn’t know how or even why I was still breathing.”

  She avoided his gaze. The previous night came back to her, darkening the day so that she stood lightless and alone in the wasteland she had made of her life.

  “We were trying to escape from the Sandhold, and I was trying to climb out of the silence. I had to start right at the bottom. I had to remember what it was like—living in that old house with the attic, the fields and sunshine, and my parents already looking for a way to die. Then my father cut his wrists. After that, there didn’t seem to be any distinction between what we were doing and what I remembered. Being on the Sandwall was exactly the same thing as being with my father.”

  And her mother’s gall had soured the very blood in her veins. In losing her husband, being so selfishly abandoned by him, the older woman had apparently lost her capacity for endurance. She had been forced by her husband’s financial wreckage—and by Linden’s hospital bills—to sell her house; and that had affected her like a fundamental defeat. She had not abrogated her fervor for her church. Rather, she had transferred much of her dependency there. Though her welfare checks might have been sufficient, she had wheedled an apartment from one member of the church, imposed on others for housework jobs which she performed with tremendous self-pity. The services and prayer-meetings and socials she used as opportunities to demand every conceivable solace and support. But her bitterness had already become unassuageable.

  By a process almost as miraculous as resurrection, she had transformed her husband into a gentle saint driven to his death by the cruel and inexplicable burden of a daughter who demanded love but did not give it. This allowed her to portray herself as a saint as well, and to perceive as virtue the emotional umbrage she levied against her child. And still it was not enough. Nothing was enough. Virtually every penny she received, she spent on food. She ate as if sheer physical hunger were the symbol and demonstration of her spiritual aggrievement, her soul’s innurturance. At times, Linden would not have been adequately clothed without the charity of the church she had learned to abhor—thus vindicating further her mother’s grievance against her. Both chidden and affirmed by the fact that her daughter wore nothing but cast-offs, and yet could not be cajoled or threatened into any form of gratitude, the mother raised her own sour ineffectuality to the stature of sanctification.

  The story was hot in Linden’s mouth—an acrid blackness which seemed to well up from the very pit of her heart. Her eyes had already begun to burn with the foretaste of tears. But she was determined now to pay the whole price. It was justified.

  “I suppose I deserved it. I wasn’t exactly easy to get along with. When I got out of the hospital, I was different inside. It was like I wanted to show the world that my father was right—that I never did love him. Or anybody else. For one thing, I started hating that church. The reason I told myself was that if my mother hadn’t been such a religion addict she would’ve been home the day my father killed himself. She could’ve helped him. Could’ve helped me. But the real reason was, that church took her away from me and I was just a kid and I needed her.

  “So I acted like I didn’t need anybody. Certainly not her or God. She probably needed me as badly as I needed her, but my father had killed himself as if he wanted to punish me personally, and I couldn’t see anything about her needs. I think I was afraid that if I let myself love her—or at least act like I loved her—she would kill herself too.

  “I must’ve driven her crazy. Nobody should’ve been surprised when she got cancer.”

  Linden wanted to hug herself, comfort somehow the visceral anguish of recollection; but her right hand and forearm failed her. Memories of disease crept through her flesh. She strove for the detached severity with which she had told Covenant about her father; but the sickness was too vivid for repression. Suffocation seemed to gather in the bottoms of her lungs. Covenant emitted a prescient dismay.

  “It could have been treated. Extirpated surgically. If she had been treated in time. But the doctor didn’t take her seriously. She was just a fat w
hiner. Widow’s syndrome. By the time he changed his mind—by the time he got her into the hospital and operated—the melanoma had metastasized. There wasn’t anything left for her to do except lie there until she died.”

  She panted involuntarily as she remembered that last month, reenacting the way her mother gasped on the thick fluids which had filled her with slow strangulation. She had sprawled on the hospital bed as if the only parts of her which remained alive were her respiration and her voice. Heavy folds and bulges of flesh sagged against the mattress as if they had been severed from her bones. Her limbs lay passive and futile. But every breath was a tortuous sibilant invocation of death. And her voice went on and on berating her daughter’s sins. She was not trying to win her daughter to the church. She had come to need that denial, to depend upon it. Her protest against it was her only answer to terror. How else could she be sure she had a claim on God’s love?

  “It was summer then.” Memory possessed Linden. She was hardly aware of the Giantship, of the cloud-locked sky lowering like a bereavement. “I didn’t have school. There wasn’t anywhere else for me to go. And she was my mother.” The words could not convey a fifteen-year-old girl’s grief. “She was all I had left. The people of the church took care of me at night. But during the day I didn’t have anything else to do. I spent a month with her. Listening to her sob and moan as if it were my fault.

  “The doctors and nurses didn’t care. They gave her medication and oxygen, and twice a day they cleaned her up. But after that they didn’t know what to do about her. They didn’t let themselves care. I was just alone with her. Listening to her blame me. That was her way of begging. The nurses must’ve thought I wanted to help. Or else they couldn’t stand it themselves. They gave me a job. They gave me boxes and boxes of tissue and told me to wipe her when she needed it. The sweat. And the mucus that dribbled out of her mouth even when she didn’t have enough strength to cough. I had to sit right beside her. Under all that weight, she was just a skeleton. And her breath—The fluid was rotting in her lungs. It got so bad it made me sick.” A stench like the gangrenous reek of the old man whose life she had saved on Haven Farm. “The nurses gave me food, but I flushed it down the toilet.”