The Wounded Land (73 page)

Covenant grimaced; he had no room in his heart for that question. “Where I come from,” he muttered, “time moves differently. I’ve never been here before. But I knew Saltheart Foamfollower. Maybe better than I knew myself. Three and a half thousand years ago.” Then abruptly the wrench of pain in his chest made him gasp. Three and a half—! It was too much—a gulf so deep it might have no bottom. How could he hope to make restitution across so many years?

Clenching himself to keep from panting, he started down the slope toward the central tunnel, the main entrance to
Coercri
.

The clouds had withdrawn westward, uncovering the sun. It shone almost directly into the stone passage, showed him his way to the cliff-face. He strode the tunnel as if he meant to hurl himself from the edge when he reached it. But Brinn and Hergrom flanked him, knowing what he knew. His companions followed him in silence, hushed as if he were leading them into a graveyard hallowed by old blood. Formally they entered The Grieve.

At its end, the tunnel gave onto a rampart cut into the eastmost part of the cliff. To the north and south,
Coercri
curved away, as if from the blunt prow of the city. From that vantage, Covenant was able to see all The Grieve outstretched on either hand. It was built vertically, level after level of ramparts down the precipice; and the tiers projected or receded to match the contours of the rock. As a result, the city front for nearly a thousand feet from cliff edge to base had a knuckled aspect, like hands knotted against the weather and the eroding Sea.

This appearance was emphasized by the salt deposits of the centuries. The guard walls of the lower ramparts wore gray-white knurs as massive as travertine; and even the highest levels were marked like the mottling of caducity, the accumulated habit of grief.

Behind the ramparts, level after level, were doorways into private quarters and public halls, workshops and kitchens, places for songs and stories and Giantclaves. And at the foot of the cliff, several heavy stone piers stood out from the flat base which girdled the city. Most of these had been chewed to ruins; but, near the center of
Coercri
, two piers and the levee between them had endured. Combers rolling in the aftermath of the storm beat up the levee like frustration and obstinance, determined to break the piers, breach the rock, assail
Coercri
, even if the siege took the whole life of the Earth to succeed.

Considering the city, the First spoke as if she did not wish to show that she was moved. “Here is a habitation, in good sooth—a dwelling fit for Giants. Such work our people do not lightly undertake or inconsiderately perform. Perhaps the Giants of this place knew that they were lost to Home. But they were not lost to themselves. They have given pride to all their people.” Her voice held a faint shimmer like the glow of hot iron.

And Pitchwife lifted up his head as if he could not contain his wildness, and sang like a cry of recognition across the ages:

Covenant could not bear to listen. Not lost to themselves. No. Not until the end, until it killed them. He, too, could remember songs.
Now we are Unhomed, bereft of root and kith and kin
. Gripping his passions with both hands to control them, restrain them for a little while yet, he moved away along the rampart.

On the way, he forced himself to look into some of the rooms and halls, like a gesture of duty to the dead.

All the stone of the chambers—chairs, utensils, tables—was intact, though every form of wood or fiber had long since fallen away. But the surfaces were scarred with salt: whorls and swirls across the floors; streaks down the walls; encrustations over the bed frames; spontaneous slow patterns as lovely as frost-work and as corrosive as guilt. Dust
or cobwebs could not have articulated more eloquently the emptiness of The Grieve.

Impelled by his private urgency, Covenant returned to the center of the city. With his companions trailing behind him, he took a crooked stairway which descended back into the cliff, then toward the Sea again. The stairs were made for Giants; he had to half-leap down them awkwardly, and every landing jolted his heart. But the daylight had begun to fade, and he was in a hurry. He went down three levels before he looked into more rooms.

The first doorway led to a wide hall large enough for scores of Giants. But the second, some distance farther along the face of the city, was shut. It had been closed for ages; all the cracks and joints around the architrave were sealed by salt. His instincts ran ahead of his mind. For reasons he could not have named, he barked to Brinn, “Get this open. I want to see what’s inside.”

Brian moved to obey; but the salt prevented him from obtaining a grip.

At once, Seadreamer joined him and began scraping the crust away like a man who could not stand closed doors, secrets. Soon he and Brinn were able to gain a purchase for their fingers along the edge of the stone. With an abrupt wrench, they swung the door outward.

Air which had been tombed for so long that it no longer held any taint of must or corruption spilled through the opening.

Within was a private living chamber. For a moment, dimness obscured it. But as Covenant’s eyes adjusted, he made out a dark form sitting upright and rigid in a chair beside the hearth.

Mummified by dead air and time and subtle salt, a Giant.

His hands crushed the arms of the chair, perpetuating forever his final agony. Splinters of old stone still jutted between his fingers.

His forehead above his vacant eye-sockets was gone. The top of his head was gone. His skull was empty, as if his brain had exploded, tearing away half his cranium.

Hellfire!

“It was as the old tellers have said.” Brinn sounded like the dead air. “Thus they were slain by the Giant-Raver. Unresisting in their homes.”

Hell and blood!

Trembling Seadreamer moved forward. “Seadreamer,” the First said softly from the doorway, warning him. He did not stop. He touched the dead Giant’s hand, tried to unclose those rigid fingers. But the ancient flesh became dust in his grasp and sifted like silence to the floor.

A spasm convulsed his face. For an instant, his eyes glared madly. His fists bunched at the sides of his head, as if he were trying to fight back against the Earth-Sight. Then he whirled and surged toward Covenant as if he meant to wrest the tale of the Unhomed from Covenant by force.

“Giant!”

The First’s command struck Seadreamer. He veered aside, lurched to press himself against the wall, struggling for self-mastery.

Shouts that Covenant could not still went on in his head: curses that had no meaning. He forced his way from the room, hastened to continue his descent toward the base of
Coercri
.

He reached the flat headrock of the piers as the terns were settling to roost for the night and the last pink of sunset was fading from the Sea. The waves gathered darkly as they climbed the levee, then broke into froth and phosphorescence against the stone.
Coercri
loomed
above him; with the sun behind it, it seemed to impend toward the Sea as if it were about to fall.

He could barely discern the features of his companions. Linden, the Giants, Sunder and Hollian, the
Haruchai
, even Vain—they were night and judgment to him, a faceless jury assembled to witness the crisis of his struggle with the past, with memory and power, and to pronounce doom. He knew what would happen as if he had foreseen it with his guts, though his mind was too lost in passion to recognize anything except his own need. He had made promises—He seemed to hear the First saying before she spoke, “Now, Thomas Covenant. The time has come. At your behest, we have beheld The Grieve. Now we must have the story of our lost kinfolk. There can be neither joy nor decision for us until we have heard the tale.”

The water tumbled its rhythm against the levee, echoing her salt pain. He answered without listening to himself, “Start a fire. A big one.” He knew what the Giants would do when they heard what they wanted. He knew what he would do.

The
Haruchai
obeyed. With brands they had garnered from Seareach, and Seadreamer’s firepot, they started a blaze near the base of the piers, then brought driftwood to stoke the flames. Soon the fire was as tall as Giants, and shadows danced like memories across the ramparts.

Now Covenant could see. Sunder and Hollian held back their apprehension sternly. Linden watched him as if she feared he had fallen over the edge of sanity. The faces of the Giants were suffused with firelight and waiting, with hunger for any anodyne. Reflecting flames, the flat countenances of the
Haruchai
looked inviolate and ready, as pure as the high mountains where they made their homes. And Vain—Vain stood black against the surrounding night, and revealed nothing.

But none of that mattered to Covenant. The uselessness of his own cursing did not matter. Only the fire held any meaning; only
Coercri
, and the lorn reiteration of the waves. He could see Foamfollower in the flames. Words which he had suppressed for long days of dread and uncertainty came over him like a creed, and he began to speak.

He told what he had learned about the Unhomed, striving to heal their slaughter by relating their story.

Joy is in the ears that hear
.

Foamfollower! Did you let your people die because you knew I was going to need you?

The night completed itself about him as he spoke, spared only by stars from being as black as The Grieve. Firelight could not ease the dark of the city or the dark of his heart. Nothing but the surge of the Sea—rise and fall, dirge and mourning—touched him as he offered their story to the Dead.

Fully, formally, omitting nothing, he described how the Giants had come to Seareach through their broken wandering. He told how Damelon had welcomed the Unhomed to the Land and had foretold that their bereavement would end when three sons were born to them, brothers of one birth. And he spoke about the fealty and friendship which had bloomed between the Giants and the Council, giving comfort and succor to both; about the high Giantish gratitude and skill which had formed great Revelstone for the Lords; about the concern which had led Kevin to provide for the safety of the Giants before he kept his mad tryst with Lord Foul and invoked the Ritual of Desecration; about the loyalty which brought the Giants back to the Land after the Desecration, bearing with them the First Ward of Kevin’s Lore so that the new Lords could learn the Earthpower anew. These things Covenant detailed as they had been told to him.

But then Saltheart Foamfollower entered his story, riding against the current of the Soulsease toward Revelstone to tell the Lords about the birth of three sons. That had been a time of hope for the Unhomed, a time for the building of new ships and the sharing of gladness. After giving his aid to the Quest for the Staff of Law, Foamfollower had returned to Seareach; and the Giants had begun to prepare for the journey Home.

At first, all had gone well. But forty years later a silence fell over Seareach. The Lords were confronted with the army of the Despiser and the power of the Illearth Stone. Their need was sore, and they did not know what had happened to the Giants. Therefore Korik’s mission was sent to
Coercri
with the Lords Hyrim and Shetra, to give and ask whatever aid was possible.

The few Bloodguard who survived brought back the same tale which Foamfollower later told Covenant.

And he related it now as if it were the inassuageable threnody of the Sea. His eyes were full of firelight, blind to his companions. He heard nothing except the breakers in the levee and his own voice. Deep within himself, he waited for the crisis, knowing it would come, not knowing what form it would take.

For doom had befallen the three brothers: a fate more terrible to the Giants than any mere death or loss of Home. The three had been captured by Lord Foul, imprisoned by the might of the Illearth Stone, mastered by Ravers. They became the mightiest servants of the Despiser. And one of them came to The Grieve.

Foamfollower’s words echoed in Covenant. He used them without knowing what they would call forth. “Fidelity,” the Giant had said. “Fidelity was our only reply to our extinction. We could not have borne our decline if we had not taken pride.

“So my people were filled with horror when they saw their pride riven—torn from them like rotten sails in the wind. They saw the portent of their hope of Home—the three brothers—changed from fidelity to the most potent ill by one small stroke of the Despiser’s evil. Who in the Land could hope to stand against a Giant-Raver? Thus the Unhomed became the means to destroy that to which they had held themselves true. And in horror at the naught of their fidelity, their folly practiced through long centuries of pride, they were transfixed. Their revulsion left no room in them for thought or resistance or choice. Rather than behold the cost of their failure—rather than risk the chance that more of them would be made Soulcrusher’s servants—they elected to be slain.”

Foamfollower’s voice went on in Covenant’s mind, giving him words. “They put away their tools.”

But a change had come over the night. The air grew taut. The sound of the waves was muffled by the concentration of the atmosphere. Strange forces roused themselves within the city.

“And banked their fires.”

The ramparts teemed with shadows, and the shadows began to take form. Light as eldritch and elusive as sea phosphorescence cast rumors of movement up and down the ways of
Coercri
.

“And made ready their homes.”

Glimpses which resembled something Covenant had seen before flickered in the rooms and solidified, shedding a pale glow like warm pearls. Tall ghosts of nacre and dismay began to flow along the passages.

“As if in preparation for departure.”

The Dead of The Grieve had come to haunt the night.

For one mute moment, he did not comprehend. His companions stood across the fire from him, watching the specters; and their shadows denounced him from the face of
Coercri
. Was it true after all that Foamfollower had deserted his people for Covenant’s sake? That Lord Foul’s sole reason for destroying the Unhomed was to drive him, Thomas Covenant, into despair?