One Tree

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Covenant’s face was twisted into a grimace of ire or empathy. When she jerked to a stop, he had to swallow roughly before he could say, “Of course he told me. He didn’t approve. The Haruchai don’t have much sympathy for ordinary human emotions like fear and doubt. He thinks everything else should be sacrificed for me.” For a moment, his eyes shifted away as if he were in pain. “Bannor used to make me want to scream. He was so absolute about everything.” But then he looked back at her. “I’m glad you helped Mistweave. I don’t want more people dying for me.”

  At that, her anger turned against him. His reply was so close to what she wanted; but his constant assumption of responsibility and blame for everything around him infuriated her. He seemed to deny her the simple right to judge her own acts. The Haruchai at least she could understand.

  But she had not come here to shout at him. In a sense, it was his sheer importance to her that made her angry. She wanted to assail him because he meant so much to her. And that frightened her.

  But Covenant seemed scarcely aware that she had not left the cabin. His gaze was fixed on the stone above him, and he was wrestling with his own conception of what had happened to him. When he spoke, his voice ached with trouble.

  “It’s getting worse.”

  His arms were hugged over his chest as if to protect the scar of his old knife-wound.

  “Foul is doing everything he can to teach me power. That’s what this venom is all about. The physical consequences are secondary. The main thing is spiritual. Every time I become delirious, that venom eats away my restraint. The part of me that resists being so dangerous. That’s why—why everything. Why that Raver got us into trouble in Mithil Stonedown. Why we’ve been attacked over and over again. Why Gibbon risked showing me the truth in that soothtell. Part of the truth.”

  Abruptly he shifted in the hammock, raised his right hand. “Look.” When he clenched his fist, white fire burst from his knuckles. He brought it to a brightness that almost dazzled Linden, then let it drop. Panting he relaxed in the hammock.

  “I don’t need a reason anymore.” He was trembling. “I can do that more easily than getting out of bed. I’m a time bomb. He’s making me more dangerous than he is. When I explode—” His visage contorted in dismay. “I’ll probably kill everybody who has any chance of fighting him. I almost did it this time. Next time—or the time after that—”

  His exigency was vivid in him; but still he did not look at her. He seemed to fear that if he looked at her the peril would reach out to doom her as well. “It’s happening to me. The same thing that ruined Kevin. Broke the Bloodguard Vow. Butchered the Unhomed. I’m becoming what I hate. If I keep going like this, I’ll kill you all. But I can’t stop it. Don’t you understand? I don’t have your eyes. I can’t see what I need to fight the venom. Something physical—my wrists—or my chest—that’s different. My nerves are still alive enough for that. But I don’t have the health-sense.

  “That’s probably the real point of the Sunbane. To cripple the Earthpower so I won’t be healed, won’t become able to see what you see. Everyone here has already lost it. You have it because you come from outside. You weren’t shaped by the Sunbane. And I would have it. If I weren’t—”

  He snatched back what he had been about to say. But his tension poured from him like anguish, and he could not refrain from turning his distress toward her. His gaze was stark, blood-ridden, haunted; his eyes were wounds of understanding. And the depth of his self-dread caught at her throat, so that she could not have spoken, even if she had known how to comfort him.

  “That’s why I’ve got to get to the One Tree. Got to. Before I become too deadly to go on living. A Staff of Law is my only hope.” Fatality stalked through his tone. He had his own nightmares—dreams as heinous and immedicable as hers. “If we don’t do it in time, this venom will take over everything, and there won’t be any of us left to even care what happens to the Land, much less fight.”

  She gaped at him, at the implications of what he was saying. In the past, he had always spoken of needing a Staff for the Land—or for her, to return her to her own life. She had not grasped the true extent of his personal exigency. Behind all his other commitments, he was wrestling for a way to save himself. That was why the movement of the ship when the Giants snared the Nicor had been able to reach him. It had restored his most fundamental hope: the One Tree. Restitution for the harm he had wrought when he had destroyed the old Staff. And escape from the logic of his venom. No wonder he looked so ravaged. She did not know how he endured it.

  But he must have misunderstood her silence. He returned his gaze to the ceiling. When he spoke again, his voice was flat with bitterness.

  “That’s why you’re here.”

  She winced as if he had struck her. But he did not see her.

  “That old man—the one you met on Haven Farm. You said you saved his life.” That was true. And he had spoken to her. But she had never told Covenant all the old man had said. “He chose you for your eyes. And because you’re a doctor. You’re the only one in this whole mess who can even grasp what’s happening to me, never mind do anything about it.

  “And Foul—” he continued dismally. “If Gibbon was telling the truth. Not just trying to scare you. Foul chose you because he thinks he can make you fail. He thinks you can be intimidated. That’s why Gibbon touched you. Why Marid jumped at you first. To set you up for failure. So that you won’t help me. Or won’t do the right thing when you try. He knows how vulnerable I am. How long I’ve needed—”

  Without warning, his voice sharpened in pure protest. “Because you’re not afraid of me! If you were afraid, you wouldn’t be here. None of this would’ve happened to you. It would all be different.

  “Hell and blood, Linden!” Suddenly he was shouting with all the scant strength of his convalescence. “You’re the only woman in the world who doesn’t look at me like I’m some kind of reified crime! Damn it, I’ve paid blood to try to spare you everything I can. I killed twenty-one people to rescue you from Revelstone! But I can’t reach you. What in hell do you—?”

  His passion broke her out of her silence. She interrupted him as if she were furious at him; but her ire was running in a different direction.

  “I don’t want to be spared. I want reasons. You tell me why I’m here, and it doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t have anything to do with me. So I’m a doctor from outside the Land. So what? So is Berenford, but this didn’t happen to him. I need a better reason than that. Why me?”

  For an instant, he glared reflections of sunlight at her. But her words seemed to penetrate him by degrees, forcing him backward muscle by muscle until he was lying limp in the hammock again. He appeared exhausted. She feared that he would not be able to find the strength to tell her to get out of his cabin. But then he surprised her as he had so often surprised her in the past. After all this time, she still could not estimate the workings of his mind,

  “Of course you’re right,” he murmured, half musing to himself. “Nobody can ever spare anybody else. I’ve got so much power—I keep forgetting it isn’t good for what I want. It’s never enough. Just a more complicated form of helplessness. I should know better. I’ve been on this kind of journey before.

  “I can’t tell you why you.” He appeared too weary or defeated to raise his head. “I know something about the needs that drive people into situations like this. But I don’t know your needs. I don’t know you. You were chosen for this because of who you are, but from the beginning you haven’t told me a thing. My life depends on you, and I don’t really have any idea what it is I’m depending on.

  “Linden.” He appealed to her without looking at her, as if he feared that his gaze would send her away. “Please. Stop defending yourself. You don’t have to fight me. You could make me understand.” Deliberately he closed his eyes against the risk he was taking. “If you chose to.”

  Again she wanted to refuse him. The habit of flight ran deep in her. But this was why she had come
to him. Her need was too clear to be denied.

  Yet the question was so intimate that she could not approach it directly. Perhaps if she had not heard Pitchwife’s tale she would not have been able to approach it at all. But his example had galvanized her to this hazard. He had the courage to relive his own past. And his story itself, the story of the First’s father—

  “Sometimes,” she said, though she was hardly ready to begin, “I have these black moods.” There was a chair near her; but she remained standing rigidly. “I’ve had them ever since I was a girl. Since my father died. When I was eight. They feel like— I don’t know how to describe them. Like I’m drowning and there’s nothing I can do to save myself. Like I could scream forever and nobody would hear me.” Powerless. “Like the only thing I can do to help myself is just die and get it over with.

  “That’s what I started feeling after we left Coercri. It piled up the way it always does, and I never know why it comes when it does or why it goes away again. But this time was different. It felt the same to me—but it was different. Or maybe what you said is true—when we were on Kevin’s Watch. That here the things inside us are externalized, so we meet them as if they were somebody else. What I was feeling was that Raver.

  “So maybe there is a reason why I’m here.” She could not stop now, though an invidious trembling cramped her chest. “Maybe there’s a connection between who I am and what Foul wants.” She almost gagged on the memory of Gibbon’s touch; but she knotted her throat to keep the nausea down. “Maybe that’s why I freeze. Why I get so scared. I’ve spent my whole life trying to prove it isn’t true. But it goes too deep.

  “My father—” There she nearly faltered. She had never exposed this much of herself to anyone. But now for the first time her craving to be healed outweighed her old revulsion. “He was about your age when he died. He even looked a bit like you.” And like the old man whose life she had saved on Haven Farm. “Without the beard. But he wasn’t like you. He was pathetic.”

  The sudden vitriol of her ejaculation stopped her momentarily. This was what she had always wanted to believe—so that she could reject it. But it was not even true. Despite his abject life, her father had been potent enough to warp her being. In his hammock, Covenant seemed to be resisting a temptation to watch her; but he spared her the self-consciousness of his gaze.

  Impacted emotion hardened her tone as she went on, “We lived a mile outside a dead little town like the one where you live. In one of those tottering square frame houses. It hadn’t been painted since my parents moved in, and it was starting to slump.

  “My father raised goats. God knows where he even got the money to buy goats so he could raise them. Every job he had was worse than the last one. His idea of being proud and independent was selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. When that failed, he tried encyclopedias. Then water-purifiers. Water-purifiers! Everybody in thirty miles had their own well, and the water was already good. And every time a new career failed he just seemed to get shorter. Collapsing in on himself.

  He thought he was being a rugged individualist. Make his own way. Bow to no man. Good Christ! He probably went down on his knees to get the money to start raising those goats.

  “He had ideas about milk and cheese. Breeding stock. Meat. So of course he had no more conception of how to raise goats than I did. He just put them on leashes and let them graze around the house. Soon we were living in dust for a hundred yards in all directions.

  “My mother’s reaction was to eat everything she could get her hands on, to go to church three times a week, and punish me whenever I got my clothes dirty.

  “By the time I was eight, the goats had finished off our property and started on land that belonged to somebody else. Naturally my father didn’t see anything wrong with that. But the owner did. The day my father was supposed to appear in court to defend himself—I found this out later—he still hadn’t told my mother we were in trouble. So she took the car to go to church, and he didn’t have any way to get to the county seat—unless he walked, which didn’t really make sense because it was twenty miles away.

  “It was summer, so I wasn’t in school. I was out playing, and as usual I got my clothes dirty, and then I got nervous. My mother wasn’t due home for hours yet, but at that age I didn’t have much sense of time. I wanted to be someplace where I could feel safe, so I went up to the attic. On the way, I played a game I’d been playing for a long time, which was to get up the stairs without making them squeak. That was part of what made the attic feel safe. No one could hear me go up there.”

  The scene was as vivid to her as if it had been etched in acid. But she watched it like a spectator, with the severity she had spent so many years nurturing. She did not want to be that little girl, to feel those emotions. Her orbs were hot marbles in their sockets. Her voice had grown clipped and precise, like a dissecting instrument. Even the strain rising through her knotted back did not make her move. She stood as still as she could, instinctively denying herself.

  “When I opened the door, my father was there. He was sitting in a half-broken rocker, and there was red stuff on the floor around him, I didn’t even understand that it was blood until I saw it coming from the gashes in his wrists. The smell made me want to puke.”

  Covenant’s gaze was fixed on her now, his eyes wide with dismay; but she disregarded him. Her attention was focused on her efforts to survive what she was saying.

  “He looked at me. For a minute, he didn’t seem to know who I was. Or maybe he hadn’t figured out that I mattered. But then he hauled himself out of the chair and started to swear at me. I couldn’t understand him. But I worked it out later. He was afraid I was going to stop him. Go to the phone. Get help somehow. Even though I was only eight. So he slammed the door, locked me in with him. Then he threw the key out the window.

  “Until then, I hadn’t even realized there was a key. It must’ve been in the lock all the time, but I’d never noticed it. If I had, I would’ve locked myself in any number of times, just so I could feel safer.

  “Anyway, I was there watching him die. What was happening took a while to filter through to me. But when I finally understood, I got frantic.” Frantic, indeed. That was a mild word for her distress. Behind Linden’s rigid self-command huddled a little girl whose heart had been torn in shreds. “I did a lot of screaming and crying, but that didn’t help. My mother was still at church, and we didn’t have any neighbors close enough to hear me. And it just made my father madder. He was doing it out of spite to begin with. My crying made him worse. If there was ever a chance he might change his mind, I lost it. Maybe that was really what got him so mad. At one point, he mustered enough strength to stand up again so he could hit me. Got blood all over me.

  “So then I tried pleading with him. Be his little girl. Beg him not to leave me. I told him he should let me die instead of him. I even meant it. Eight-year-olds have a lot of imagination. But that didn’t work either. After all, I was just another burden dragging him down. If he hadn’t had a wife and daughter to worry about, he wouldn’t have failed all those times.” Her sarcasm was as harsh as a rasp. For years, she had striven to deny that her emotions had such force. “But his eyes were glazing. I was just desperate. I tried being angry at him. Worked myself into a fit telling him I wouldn’t love him anymore if he died. Somehow that reached him. The last thing I heard him say was, ‘You never loved me anyway.’ ”

  And then the blow had fallen, the stroke which had nailed her forever to her horror. There was no language in the world to describe it. From out of the cracked floorboards and the untended walls had come pouring a flood of darkness. It was not there: she was still able to see everything. But it rose into her mind as if it had been invoked by her father’s self-pity—as if while he sprawled there dying he had transcended himself, had raised himself by sheer abjection to the stature of power, and had summoned the black malice of nightmares to attend upon his passing. She was foundering in the viscid midnight of his condemnation, and no
rescue could reach her.

  And while she sank, his face had changed before her eyes. His mouth had stretched into what should have been a cry; but it was not—it was laughter. The triumphant glee of spite, soundless and entire. His mouth had held her gaze, transfixed her. It was the dire cavern and plunge from which the darkness issued, hosting forth to appall her. You never loved me anyway. Never loved me. Never loved. A darkness indistinguishable now from the vicious malevolence of Gibbon-Raver’s touch. Perhaps it had all taken place in her mind—a product of her young, vulnerable despair. That made no difference. It had taught her her powerlessness, and she would never be free of it.

  Unwillingly she saw Covenant’s face, grown aghast for her. She did not want that from him. It weakened her defenses. Her mouth was full of the iron taste of rage. She could no longer keep her voice from shivering. But she was unable to stop.

  “A long time after that, he died. And a long time after that, my mother came home. By then, I was too far gone to know anything. Hours passed before she missed us enough to find out the attic was locked. Then she had to call the neighbors to help her get the door open. I was conscious the whole time—I remember every minute of it—but there was nothing I could do. I just lay there on the floor until they broke down the door and took me to the hospital.

  “I was there for two weeks. It was the only time I can remember ever feeling safe.”

  Then abruptly the quivering of her joints became so strong that she could no longer stand. Covenant’s open stare was a mute cry of empathy. She fumbled to the chair, sat down. Her hands would not stop flinching. She gripped them between her knees as she concluded her story.

  “My mother blamed me for the whole thing. She had to sell the goats and the house to the man who was suing my father so she could pay the funeral costs and hospital bills. When she was having one of her pathos orgies, she even accused me of killing her dear husband. But most of the time she just blamed me for causing the whole situation. She had to go on welfare—God knows she couldn’t get a job, that might interfere with church—and we had to live in a grubby little apartment in town. Somehow it was my fault. Compared to her, an eight-year-old in shock was an effective adult.”