Thomas Covenant 03: Power That Preserves (38 page)

No tentative or half-unready answer would satisfy his need.

He levered himself up, then slipped and fell, crying out unconsciously at the unfelt pain. For a moment, the winter roared in his ears like a triumphant predator. His breathing rasped him as if claws of cold had already torn his air passages and lungs. But he braced the spear on the hard earth again, and climbed up it hand over hand until he was erect. Then he lurched forward once more.

He forced himself up the hill and beyond it to a low ridge lying across his way like a minor wall. His arms trembled at the strain of bearing his weight, and his hands slipped repeatedly on the smooth shaft of the spear. The ascent almost defeated him. When he reached the top, air whooped brokenly in and out of his frostbitten lungs, and icy vertigo made the whole winterscape cant raggedly from side to side. He rested, leaning on the spear. His respiration was so difficult that he thought the frozen sweat and vapor on his face might be suffocating him. But when he tried to break it, it tore away like a protective scab, hurting his skin, exposing new nerves to the cold. He let the rest of his frozen mask remain, and stood panting until at last his vision began to clear.

The hard barren region ahead of him was so dreary, so wilderlanded by Foul’s cruelty, that he could hardly bear to look at it. It was gray cold and dead from horizon to horizon under the gray dead clouds—not the soft comfortable gray of twilit illusions, of unstark colors blurring like consolation or complacency into each other, but rather the gray of disconsolation and dismay, paradoxically dull and raw, numb and poignant, a gray like the ashen remains of color and sap and blood and bone. Gray wind drove gray cold over the gray frozen hills; gray snow gathered in thin drifts under the lees of the gray terrain; gray ice underscored the black, brittle, leafless branches of the trees barely visible in the distance on his left, and stifled the gray, miserable current of the river almost out of sight on his right; gray numbness clutched at his flesh and soul. Lord Foul the Despiser was everywhere.

Then for a time he remembered his purpose. He set his ice-muzzled teeth into the teeth of the cold and hobbled down from the ridge straight toward the source of the winter. Half blinded by the opposition of the wind, he stumped unheeding past slight shelters and straggling
aliantha
, thrust his tattered way among the hills, dragging his frozen foot like an accusation he meant to bring against the Despiser.

But gradually the memory faded, lapsed from his consciousness like everything else except his reiterating interrogation of hate. Some inchoate instinct kept him from wending downward toward the river, but all other sense of direction deserted him. With the wind angling against his right cheek, he struggled slowly upward, upward, as if it were only in climbing that he could keep himself erect at all.

As the morning passed, he began to fall more often. He could no longer retain his grip on the spear; his hands were too stiff, too weak, and a slick sheen of ice sweat made the spear too slippery. Amid the crunch of ice and his own panting cries, he slipped repeatedly to the ground. And after several convulsive efforts to go on, he lay face down on the ruined earth with his breath rattling in his throat, and tried to sleep.

But before long he moved again. Sleep was not what he wanted; it had no place in the one focused fragment of his consciousness. Gasping thickly, he levered himself to his knees. Then, with an awkward abruptness, as if he were trying to take himself by surprise, he put weight on his broken ankle.

It was numb enough. Pain jabbed the rest of his leg, and his foot twisted under him. But his ankle was numb enough.

Ignoring the fallen spear, he heaved erect, tottered—and limped extremely into motion again.

For a long time, he went on that way, jerking on his broken ankle like a badly articulated puppet commanded by clumsy fingers. He continued to fall; he was using two hunks of ice for feet, and could not keep his balance when the hillsides became too steep. And these slopes grew gradually worse. For some reason, he tended unevenly to his left, where the ground rose up to meet black trees; so more and more often he came to ascents and descents that affected him like precipices, though they might have seemed slight enough to a healthy traveler. He went up them on hands and knees, clawing against the hard ground for handholds, and plunged rolling helplessly down them like one of the damned.

But after each fall he rested prone in the snow like a penitent, and after each rest he staggered or crawled forward once more, pursuing his private and inevitable apotheosis, though he was entirely unable to meet it.

As the day waned into afternoon, his falls came more and more often. And after falling he lay still and listened to the air sob in and out of his lungs as if the breaking of his ankle had fractured some essential bone in him, some obdurate capacity for endurance—as if at last even numbness failed him, proved in some way inadequate, leaving him at the mercy of his injury. By degrees he began to believe that after all his dream was going to kill him.

Sometime in the middle of the afternoon, he slipped, rolled, came to rest on his back. He could not muster the strength to turn over. Like a pinned insect, he struggled for a moment, then collapsed into prostrate sleep—trapped there between the iron heavens and the brass earth.

Dreams roiled his unconsciousness, giving him no consolation. Again and again, he relived the double-fisted blow with which he had stabbed Pietten. But now he dealt that fierce blow at other hearts—Llaura, Manethrall Rue, Elena, Joan, the woman who had been killed protecting him at the battle of Soaring Woodhelven—why had he never asked anyone her name? In dreams he slew them all. They lay around him with gleams of light shining keenly out of their wounds like notes in an alien melody. The song tugged at him, urged-but before he could hear it, another figure hove across his vision, listing like a crippled frigate. The man was dressed in misery and violence. He had blood on his hands and the love of murder in his eyes, but Covenant could not make out his face. Again he raised the knife, again he drove it with all his might into that vulnerable breast. Only then did he see that the man was himself.

He lurched as if the blank sky had struck him, and flopped over onto his chest to hide his face, conceal his wound.

When he remembered the snow in which he lay, he got quavering to his feet and limped on into the late afternoon.

Before long, he came to a hillside he could not master. He flung himself at it, limped and crawled at it as hard as he could. But he was exhausted and crippled. He turned left and stumbled along the slope, seeking a place where he could ascend, but then inexplicably he found himself rolling downward. When he tumbled to a stop at the bottom, he rested for a while in confusion. He must have crossed the top without knowing it. He hauled himself up again, gasping, and went on.

The next hill was no better. But he had to master it. When he could not drive himself upward any farther, he turned to the left again, always left and up, though for some strange reason this seemed to take him down toward the river.

After a short distance he found a trail in the snow.

Part of him knew that he should be dismayed, but he felt only relief, hope. A trail meant that someone had passed this way—passed recently, or the wind would have effaced the marks. And that someone might help him.

He needed help. He was freezing, starving, failing. Under its crust of scab and ice, his ankle was still bleeding. He had reached the infinitude of his impotence, his inefficacy, the point beyond which he could not keep going, could not believe, envision, hope that continuation, life, was possible. He needed whoever or whatever had made that trail to decide his fate for him.

He followed it to the left, downward, into a hollow between hills. He kept his eyes on the trail immediately before him, fearing to look up and find that the maker of the trail was out of sight, out of reach. He saw where the maker had fallen, shed blood, rested, limped onward. Soon he met the next hill and began crawling up it along the crawling trail. He was desperate—alone and impoverished as he had never before been in the Land.

But at last he recognized the truth. When the trail turned, crawled away to the left, fell back down the hillside, he could no longer deny that he had been following himself, that the trail was his own, a circle between hills he could not master.

With a thick moan, he passed the boundary. His last strength fell out of him. Keen gleams winked across the dark gulf behind his closed eyes, but he could not answer them. He fell backward, slid down the hill into a low snowdrift.

Yet even then his ordeal continued. His fall uncovered something in the snow. While he lay gasping helplessly, felt his heart tremble toward failure in his chest, a smell intruded on him. Despite the cold, it demanded his notice; it rose piquant and seductive in his face, ran into him on every breath, compelled him to respond. He propped himself up on quivering arms, and wiped the snow away with dead fingers.

He found grass growing under the snowdrift. Somehow its potent life refused to be quenched; even a few yellow flowers blossomed under the weight of the snow. And their sharp aroma caught hold of him. His hands were useless for plucking, so he knocked some of the ice from around his mouth. Then he lowered his face to the grass, tore up blades with his teeth and ate them.

As he swallowed the grass, its juice seemed to flow straight to his muscles like the energy of madness. The suddenness of the infusion caught him unaware. As he bent for a fourth bite, a convulsion came over him, and he collapsed into a rigid fetal position while raw power raged through his veins.

For an instant, he screamed in agony. But at once he passed beyond himself into a bleak wilderland where nothing but winter and wind and malice existed. He felt Lord Foul’s preternatural assault on a level that was not sight or hearing or touch, but rather a compaction of all his senses. The nerves of his soul ached as if they had been laid bare to the livid ill. And in the core of this perception, a thought struck him, stabbed into him as if it were the spear point of the winter. He identified the thing he did not understand.

It was
magic
.

A suggestion of keen gleams penumbraed the thought, then receded. Magic: eldritch power, theurgy. Such a thing did not exist, could not exist.

Yet it was part of the Land. And it was denied to him. The thought turned painfully in him as cruel hands twisted the spear.

He had heard Mhoram say,
You are the white gold
. What did that mean? He had no power. The dream was his, but he could not share its life-force. Its life-force was what proved it to be a dream. Magic: power. It sprang from him, and he could not touch it. It was impossible. With the Land’s doom locked in the irremediable white gold circle of his ring, he was helpless to save himself.

Gripped by an inchoate conviction, where prophecy and madness became indistinguishable, he flung himself around the contradiction and tried to contain it, make it all one within him.

But then it faded in a scatter of keen alien gleaming. He found himself on his feet without any knowledge of how he had climbed erect. The gleams danced about his head like silent melody. The wild light of the grass played through his veins and muscles, elevating inanition and cold to the stature of gaunt priests presiding over an unholy sacrifice. He laughed at the immense prospect of his futility. The folly of his attempts to survive alone amused him.

He was going to die a leper’s death.

His laughter scaled up into high gibbering mirth. Stumbling, limping, falling, lurching up and limping again, he followed the music toward the dark trees.

He laughed every time he fell, unable to contain the secret humor of his distress; the frozen agony grinding in his ankle drew shrill peals from him like screams. But though he was impatient now for the end, eager for any blank damnable repose, still the keen gleams carried him along. Advancing and receding, urging, sprinkling his way like glaucous petals of ambergris, they made him rise after each fall and continue toward the outskirts of the forest.

After a while, he began to think that the trees were singing to him. The gleams which fraught the air fell about him in alien intervals, like moist, blue-green shines of woodsong. But he could neither see nor hear them; they were apparent only to the restless energy in his veins. When in his wildness he tried to pluck them as if they were
aliantha
, they strewed themselves beyond his reach, enticing him on and on again after each fall until he found himself among the first winter-black trunks.

As he wended through the marge of the forest, he felt an unexpected diminution of the cold. Daylight was dying out of the ashen sky behind him, and ahead lay nothing but the brooding bloom of the forest depths. Yet the winter seemed to ease rather than sharpen with the coming of night. Shambling onward, he soon discovered that the snow thinned as he moved deeper among the trees. In a few places, he even saw living leaves. They clung grimly to the branches, and the trees in turn clung to each other, interwove their branches and leaned on each other’s shoulders like staunch, broad, black-wounded comrades holding themselves erect together. Through the thinning snow, animal tracks made light whorls that dizzied him when he tried to follow them. And the air grew warmer.

Gradually a dim light spread around him. For a time, he did not notice it to wonder what it was; he walked like a ruin along the alien spangles, and did not see the pale ghost-light expanding. But then a wet strand of moss struck his face, and he jerked into awareness of his surroundings.

The tree trunks were glowing faintly, like moonlight mystically translated out of the blind sky into the forest. They huddled around him in stands and stretches and avenues of gossamer illumination; they were poised on all sides like white eyes, watching him. And through their branches hung draped, dangled curtains and hawsers of moist black moss.

Then in his madness, fear came upon him like a shout of ancient forestial rage, springing from the unavenged slaughter of the trees; and he turned to flee. Wailing lornly, he slapped the moss away from him and tried to run. But his ankle buckled under him at every stride. And the music held him. Its former allure became a command, swinging him against his will so that his panic itself, his very flight, drove him deeper among the trees and the moss and the light. He had lost all possession of himself. The strength of the grass capered in him like poison; the gleams danced through their blue-green intervals, guiding him. He fled like the hunted, battering and recoiling against trunks, tangling himself in moss, tearing his hair in fear. Animals scampered out of his wailing path, and his ears echoed to the desolate cries of owls.