Thomas Covenant 03: Power That Preserves

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  But instead of moving him to obey, their vehemence washed away his fury, his power for battle. Violence drained out of him, giving place to sorrow for them—a sorrow so great that he could hardly contain it, hardly hold back his tears. They had earned obedience from him; they had a right to his rage. But their demand made his intuitions clear to him. He remembered Foamfollower’s former lust for killing. He still had something to do, something which could not be done with rage. Anger was only good for fighting, for resistance. Now it could suborn the very thing he had striven to achieve.

  In a voice thick with grief, he answered the Lords, “I can’t kill him. He always survives when you try to kill him. He comes back stronger than ever the next time. Despite is like that. I can’t kill him.”

  His reply stunned them. For a moment, they trembled with astonishment and dismay. Then Kevin asked in horror, “Will you let him live?”

  Covenant could not respond directly, could not give a direct answer. But he clung to the strait path of his intuition. For the first time since his battle with the Despiser had begun, he turned to Saltheart Foamfollower.

  The Giant stood chained to the wall, watching avidly everything that happened. The bloody flesh of his wrists and ankles showed how hard he had tried to break free, and his face looked as if it had been wrung dry by all the things he had been forced to behold. But he was essentially unharmed, essentially whole. Deep in his cavernous eyes, he seemed to understand Covenant’s dilemma. “You have done well, my dear friend,” he breathed when Covenant met his gaze. “I trust whatever choice your heart makes.”

  “There’s no choice about it,” Covenant panted, fighting to hold back his tears. “I’m not going to kill him. He’ll just come back. I don’t want that on my head. No, Foamfollower—my friend. It’s up to you now. You—and them.” He nodded toward the livid, spectral Lords. “Joy is in the ears that hear—remember? You told me that. I’ve got joy for you to hear. Listen to me. I’ve beaten the Despiser—this time. The Land is safe—for now. I swear it. Now I want—Foamfollower!” Involuntary tears blurred his sight. “I want you to laugh. Take joy in it. Bring some joy into this bloody hole. Laugh!” He swung back to shout at the Lords, “Do you hear me? Let Foul alone! Heal yourselves!”

  For a long moment that almost broke his will, there was no sound in the thronehall. Lord Foul blazed contempt at his captor; the Lords stood aghast, uncomprehending; Foamfollower hung in his chains as if the burden were too great for him to bear.

  “Help me!” Covenant cried.

  Then slowly his plea made itself felt. Some prophecy in his words touched the hearts that heard him. With a terrible effort, Saltheart Foamfollower, the last of the Giants, began to laugh.

  It was a gruesome sound at first; writhing in his fetters, Foamfollower spat out the laugh as if it were a curse. On that level, the Lords were able to share it. In low voices, they aimed bursts of contemptuous scorn, jeering hate, at the beaten Despiser. But as Foamfollower fought to laugh, his muscles loosened. The constriction of his throat and chest relaxed, allowing a pure wind of humor to blow the ashes of rage and pain from his lungs. Soon something like joy, something like real mirth, appeared in his voice.

  The Lords responded. As it grew haler, Foamfollower’s laugh became infectious; it drew the grim specters with it. They began to unclench their hate. Clean humor ran through them, gathering momentum as it passed. Foamfollower gained joy from them, and they began to taste his joy. In moments, all their contempt or scorn had fallen away. They were no longer laughing to express their outrage at Lord Foul; they were not laughing at him at all. To their own surprise, they were laughing for the pure joy of laughter, for the sheer satisfaction and emotional ebullience of mirth.

  Lord Foul cringed at the sound. He strove to sustain his defiance, but could not. With a cry of mingled pain and fury, he covered his face and began to change. The years melted off his frame. His hair darkened, beard grew stiffer; with astonishing speed, he was becoming younger. And at the same time he lost solidity, stature. His body shrank and faded with every undone age. Soon he was a youth again, barely visible.

  Still the change did not stop. From a youth he became a child, growing steadily younger as he vanished. For an instant, he was a loud infant, squalling in his ancient frustration. Then he disappeared altogether.

  As they laughed, the Lords also faded. With the Despiser vanquished, they went back to their natural graves—ghosts who had at last gained something other than torment from the breaking of the Law of Death. Covenant and Foamfollower were left alone.

  Covenant was weeping out of control now. The exhaustion of his ordeal had caught up with him. He felt too frail to lift his head, too weary to live any longer. Yet he had one more thing to do. He had promised that the Land would be safe. Now he had to ensure its safety.

  “Foamfollower?” he wept. “My friend?” With his voice, he begged the Giant to understand him; he lacked the strength to articulate what he had to do.

  “Do not fear for me,” Foamfollower replied. He sounded strangely proud, as if Covenant had honored him in some rare way. “Thomas Covenant, ur-Lord and Unbeliever, brave white gold wielder—I desire no other end. Do whatever you must, my friend. I am at Peace. I have beheld a marvelous story.”

  Covenant nodded in the blindness of his tears. Foamfollower could make his own decisions. With the flick of an idea, he broke the Giant’s chains, so that Foamfollower could at least attempt to escape if he chose. Then all Covenant’s awareness of his friend became ashes.

  As he shambled numbly across the floor, he tried to tell himself that he had found his answer. The answer to death was to make use of it rather than fall victim to it—master it by making it serve his goals, beliefs. This was not a good answer. But it was the only answer he had.

  Following the nerves of his face, he reached toward the Illearth Stone as if it were the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of life and death.

  As soon as he touched it, his ring’s waning might reawoke. Immense red-green fire pillared upward, towered out of the Stone and his ring like a pinnacle tall enough to pierce the heavens. As he felt its power tearing through the battered hull or conduit of his being, he knew that he had found his fire, the fire for which he was apt like autumn leaves or a bad manuscript. In the heart of the whirling gale, the pillar of force, he knelt beside the Stone and put his arms around it like a man embracing immolation. New blood from his poisoned lip ran down his chin, dripped into the green and was vaporized.

  With each moment, the conjunction of the two powers produced more and more might. Like a lifeless and indomitable heart of fury, the Illearth Stone pulsed in Covenant’s arms, laboring in mindless, automatic reflex to destroy him rather than be destroyed. And he hugged it to his breast like a chosen fate. He could not slay the Corruption, but he could at least try to break this corruptive tool; without it, any surviving remnant of the Despiser would have to work ages longer to regain his lost power. Covenant embraced the Stone, gave himself to its fire, and strove with the last tatters of his will to tear it asunder.

  The green-white, white-green holocaust grew until it filled the thronehall, grew until it hurricaned up through the stone out of the bowels of Ridjeck Thome. Like fighters locked mortally at each other’s throats, emerald and argent galled and blasted, gyring upward at velocities which no undefended granite could withstand. In long pain, the roots of the promontory trembled. Walls bent; great chunks of ceiling fell; weaker stones melted and ran like water.

  Then a convulsion shook the Creche. Gaping cracks shot through the floors, sped up the walls, as if they were headlong in mad flight. The promontory itself began to quiver and groan. Muffled detonations sent great clouds of debris up through the cracks and crevices. Hotash Slay danced in rapid spouts. The towers leaned like willows in a bereaving wind.

  With a blast that jolted the Sea, the whole center of the promontory exploded into the air. In a rain of boulders, Creche fragments as large as homes, villages, the wedge split op
en from tip to base. Accompanied by cataclysmic thunder, the rent halves toppled in ponderous, monumental agony away from each other into the Sea.

  At once, ocean crashed into the gap from the east, and lava poured into it from the west. Their impact obscured in steam and fiery sibilation the seething caldron of Ridjeck Thome’s collapse, the sky-shaking fury of sea and stone and fire-obscured everything except the power which blazed from the core of the destruction.

  It was green-white—savage, wild—mounting hugely toward its apocalypse.

  But the white dominated and prevailed.

  TWENTY-ONE: Leper’s End

  In that way, Thomas Covenant kept his promise.

  For a long time afterward, he lay in a comfortable grave of oblivion; buried in utter exhaustion, he floated through darkness—the disengaged no-man’s-land between life and death. He felt that he was effectively dead, insensate as death. But his heart went on beating as if it lacked the wit or wisdom to stop when it had no more reason to go on. Raggedly, frailly, it kept up his life.

  And deep within him—in a place hidden somewhere, defended, inside the hard bone casque of his skull—he retained an awareness of himself. That essential thing had not yet failed him, though it seemed to be soaking slowly away into the warm soft earth of his grave.

  He wanted rest; he had earned rest. But the release which had brought him to his present dim peace had been too expensive. He could not approve.

  Foamfollower is dead, he murmured silently.

  There was no escape from guilt. No answer covered everything. For as long as he managed to live, he would never be clean.

  He did not think that he could manage to live very long.

  Yet something obdurate argued with him. That wasn’t your fault, it said. You couldn’t make his decisions for him. Beyond a certain point, this responsibility of yours is only a more complex form of suicide.

  He acknowledged the argument. He knew from experience that lepers were doomed as soon as they began to feel that they were to blame for contracting leprosy, were responsible for being ill. Perhaps guilt and mortality, physical limitation, were the same thing in the end—facts of life, irremediable, useless to protest. Nevertheless Foamfollower was gone, and could never be restored. Covenant would never hear him laugh again.

  “Then take peace in your other innocence,” said a voice out of the darkness. “You did not choose this task. You did not undertake it of your own free will. It was thrust upon you. Blame belongs to the chooser, and this choice was made by one who elected you without your knowledge or consent.”

  Covenant did not need to ask who was speaking; he recognized the voice. It belonged to the old beggar who had confronted him before his first experience in the Land—the old man who had urged him to keep his wedding band, and had made him read a paper on the fundamental question of ethics.

  Dimly he replied, “You must have been sure of yourself.”

  “Sure? Ah, no. There was great hazard—risk for the world which I made—risk even for me. Had my enemy gained the white wild magic gold, he would have unloosed himself from the Earth—destroyed it so that he might hurl himself against me. No, Thomas Covenant. I risked my trust in you. My own hands were bound. I could not touch the Earth to defend it without thereby undoing what I meant to preserve. Only a free man could hope to stand against my enemy, hope to preserve the Earth.”

  Covenant heard sympathy, respect, even gratitude in the voice. But he was unconvinced. “I wasn’t free. It wasn’t my choice.”

  “Ah, but you were—free of my suasion, my power, my wish to make you my tool. Have I not said that the risk was great? Choiceless, you were given the power of choice. I elected you for the Land but did not compel you to serve my purpose in the Land. You were free to damn Land and Earth and Time and all, if you chose. Only through such a risk could I hope to preserve the rectitude of my creation.”

  In his darkness, Covenant shrugged. “I still wasn’t free. That singer—who called me Berek. That revival. The kid who got herself snakebit. Maybe you left me free in the Land, but you didn’t leave me alone in my own life.”

  “No,” the voice responded softly. “I had no hand in those chances. Had I done anything at all to shape you, you would have been my tool—effectless. Without freedom, you could not have mastered my enemy—without independence—without the sovereignty of your own allegiance. No, I risked too much when I spoke to you once. I interfered in no other way.”

  Covenant did not like to think that he had been so completely free to ruin the Land. He had come so close! For a while, he mused numbly to himself, measuring the Creator’s risk. Then he asked, “What made you think I wouldn’t just collapse—wouldn’t give up in despair?”

  The voice replied promptly. “Despair is an emotion like any other. It is the habit of despair which damns, not the despair itself. You were a man already acquainted with habit and despair—with the Law which both saves and damns. Your knowledge of your illness made you wise.”

  Wise, Covenant murmured to himself. Wisdom. He could not understand why his witless heart went on beating.

  “Further, you were in your own way a creator. You had already tasted the way in which a creator may be impotent to heal his creation. It is ofttimes this impotence which teaches a creation to despair,”

  “What about the creator? Why doesn’t he despair?”

  “Why should he despair? If he cannot bear the world he has made, he can make another. No, Thomas Covenant.” The voice laughed softly, sadly. “Gods and creators are too powerful and powerless for despair.”

  Yes, Covenant said with his own sadness. But then he added almost out of habit, It’s not that easy. He wanted the voice to go away, leave him alone with his oblivion. But though it was silent, he knew it had not left him. He drifted along beside it for a time, then gathered himself to ask, “What do you want?”

  “Thomas Covenant”—the voice was gentle—“my unwilling son, I wish to give you a gift—a guerdon to speak my wordless gratitude. Your world runs by Law, as does mine. And by any Law I am in your debt. You have retrieved my Earth from the brink of dissolution. I could give you precious gifts a dozen times over, and still not call the matter paid.”

  A gift? Covenant sighed to himself. No. He could not demean himself or the Creator by asking for a cure to leprosy. He was about to refuse the offer when a sudden excitement flashed across him. “Save the Giant,” he said. “Save Foamfollower.”

  In a tone of ineffable rue, the voice answered, “No, Thomas Covenant—I cannot. Have I not told you that I would break the arch of Time if I were to put my hand through it to touch the Earth? No matter how great my gratitude, I can do nothing for you in the Land or upon that Earth. If I could, I would never have permitted my enemy to do so much harm.”

  Covenant nodded; he recognized the validity of the answer. After a moment of emptiness, he said, “Then there’s nothing you can do for me. I told Foul I don’t believe in him. I don’t believe in you either. I’ve had the chance to make an important choice. That’s enough. I don’t need any gifts. Gifts are too easy—I can’t afford them.”

  “Ah! but you have earned—”

  “I didn’t earn anything.” Faint anger stirred in him. “You didn’t give me a chance to earn anything. You put me in the Land without my approval or consent—even without my knowledge. All I did was see the difference between health and—disease. Well, it’s enough for me. But there’s no particular virtue in it.”

  Slowly the voice breathed. “Do not be too quick to judge the makers of worlds. Will you ever write a story for which no character will have cause to reproach you?”

  “I’ll try,” said Covenant. “I’ll try.”

  “Yes,” the voice whispered. “Perhaps for you it is enough. Yet for my own sake I wish to give you a gift. Please permit me.”

  “No.” Covenant’s refusal was weary rather than belligerent. He could not think of anything he would be able to accept.

  “I can return you to the L
and. You could live out the rest of your life in health and honor, as befits a great hero.”

  “No.” Have mercy on me. I couldn’t bear it. “That’s not my world. I don’t belong there.”

  “I can teach you to believe that your experiences in the Land have been real.”

  “No.” It’s not that easy. “You’ll drive me insane.”

  Again the voice was silent for a while before it said in a tone made sharp by grief, “Very well. Then hear me, Thomas Covenant, before you refuse me once more. This I must tell you.

  “When the parents of the child whom you saved comprehended what you had done, they sought to aid you. You were injured and weak from hunger. Your exertions to save the child had hastened the poison in your lip. Your condition was grave. They bore you to the hospital for treatment. This treatment employs a thing which the Healers of your world name ‘antivenin.’ Thomas Covenant, this antivenin is made from the blood of horses. Your body loathes—you are allergic to the horse serum. It is a violent reaction. In your weak state, you cannot survive it. At this moment, you stand on the threshold of your own death.

  “Thomas Covenant—hear me.” The voice breathed compassion at him. “I can give you life. In this time of need, I can provide to your stricken flesh the strength it requires to endure.”

  Covenant did not answer for some time. Somewhere in his half-forgotten past, he had heard that some people were allergic to rattlesnake antivenin. Perhaps the doctors at the hospital should have tested for the allergy before administering the full dosage; probably he had been so far gone in shock that they had not had time for medical niceties. For a moment, he considered the thought of dying under their care as a form of retribution.

  But he rejected the idea, rejected the self-pity behind it. “I’d rather survive,” he murmured dimly. “I don’t want to die like that.”