Thomas Covenant 01: Lord Foul's Bane Read online

  Covenant shook his head again. He felt strangely unable to understand. But when Atiaran said gently, “Shall we go?” he heard a note of unwilling respect in her voice. She seemed to believe that he had in fact done something to the storm.

  Numbly he mumbled, “Sure,” and followed her onward again.

  They walked in clean rain for the rest of the day. Covenant’s sense of mental dullness persisted, and the only outside influences that penetrated him were wetness and cold. Most of the day passed without his notice in one long, drenched push against the cold. Toward evening, he had regained enough of himself to be glad when Atiaran found a Waymeet, and he checked over his body carefully for any hidden injuries while his clothes dried by the graveling. But he still felt dazed by what had happened. He could not shake the odd impression that whatever force had changed the fury of the storm had altered him also.

  The next day broke clear, crisp, and glorious, and he and Atiaran left the Waymeet early in the new spring dawn. After the strain of the previous day, Covenant felt keenly alert to the joyous freshness of the air and the sparkle of dampness on the grass, the sheen on the heather and the bursting flavor of the treasure-berries. The Land around him struck him as if he had never noticed its beauty before. Its vitality seemed curiously tangible to his senses. He felt that he could see spring fructifying within the trees, the grass, the flowers, hear the excitement of the calling birds, smell the newness of the buds and the cleanliness of the air.

  Then abruptly Atiaran stopped and looked about her. A grimace of distaste and concern tightened her features as she sampled the breeze. She moved her head around intently, as if she were trying to locate the source of a threat.

  Covenant followed her example, and as he did so, a thrill of recognition ran through him. He could tell that there was indeed something wrong in the air, something false. It did not arise in his immediate vicinity—the scents of the trees and turf and flowers, the lush afterward of rain, were all as they should be—but it lurked behind those smells like something uneasy, out of place, unnatural in the distance. He understood instinctively that it was the odor of ill—the odor of premeditated disease.

  A moment later, the breeze shifted; the odor vanished. But that ill smell had heightened his perceptions; the contrast vivified his sense of the vitality of his surroundings. With an intuitive leap, he grasped the change which had taken place within him or for him. In some way that completely amazed him, his senses had gained a new dimension. He looked at the grass, smelled its freshness—and saw its verdancy, its springing life, its fitness. Jerking his eyes to a nearby aliantha, he received an impression of potency, health, that dumbfounded him.

  His thoughts reeled, groped, then suddenly clarified around the image of health. He was seeing health, smelling natural fitness and vitality, hearing the true exuberance of spring. Health was as vivid around him as if the spirit of the Land’s life had become palpable, incarnate. It was as if he had stepped without warning into an altogether different universe. Even Atiaran—she was gazing at his entrancement with puzzled surprise—was manifestly healthy, though her life was complicated by uneasiness, fatigue, pain, resolution.

  By hell, he mumbled. Is my leprosy this obvious to her? Then why doesn’t she understand—? He turned away from her stare, hunted for some way to test both his eyes and hers. After a moment, he spotted near the top of a hill a Gilden tree that seemed to have something wrong with it. In every respect that he could identify, specify, the tree appeared normal, healthy, yet it conveyed a sense of inner rot, an unexpected pang of sorrow, to his gaze. Pointing at it, he asked Atiaran what she saw.

  Soberly she replied, “I am not one of the lillianrill, but I can see that the Gilden dies. Some blight has stricken its heart. Did you not see such things before?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then how does the world from which you come live?” She sounded dismayed by the prospect of a place in which health itself was invisible.

  He shrugged off her question. He wanted to challenge her, find out what she saw in him. But then he remembered her saying, You are closed to me. Now he understood her comment, and the comprehension gave him a feeling of relief. The privacy of his own illness was intact, safe. He motioned her northward again, and when after a moment she started on her way, he followed her with pleasure. For a long time he forgot himself in the sight of so much healthiness.

  Gradually as the day moved through afternoon into gloaming and the onset of night, he adjusted to seeing health behind the colors and forms which met his eyes. Twice more his nostrils had caught the elusive odor of wrongness, but he could not find it anywhere near the creek by which Atiaran chose to make camp. In its absence he thought that he would sleep peacefully.

  But somehow a rosy dream of soul health and beauty became a nightmare in which spirits threw off their bodies and revealed themselves to be ugly, rotten, contemptuous. He was glad to wake up, glad even to take the risk of shaving without the aid of a mirror.

  On the sixth day, the smell of wrong became persistent, and it grew stronger as Atiaran and Covenant worked their way north along the hills. A brief spring shower dampened their clothes in the middle of the morning, but it did not wash the odor from the air. That smell made Covenant uneasy, whetted his anxiety until he seemed to have a cold blade of dread poised over his heart.

  Still he could not locate, specify, the odor. It keened in him behind the bouquet of the grass and the tangy bracken and the aliantha, behind the loveliness of the vital hills, like the reek of a rotting corpse just beyond the range of his nostrils.

  Finally he could not endure it any longer in silence. He drew abreast of Atiaran, and asked, “Do you smell it?”

  Without a glance at him, she returned heavily, “Yes, Unbeliever. I smell it. It becomes clear to me.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means that we are walking into peril. Did you not expect it?”

  Thinking, Hellfire! Covenant rephrased his question. “But what does it come from? What’s causing it?”

  “How can I say?” she countered. “I am no oracle.”

  Covenant caught himself on the edge of an angry retort. With an effort, he kept his temper. “Then what is it?”

  “It is murder,” Atiaran replied flatly, and quickened her pace to pull away from him. Do not ask me to forget, her back seemed to say, and he stumped fuming after it. Cold anxiety inched closer to his heart.

  By midafternoon, he felt that his perception of wrongness was sharpening at almost every step. His eyes winced up and down the hills, as though he expected at any moment to see the source of the smell. His sinuses ached from constantly tasting the odor. But there was nothing for him to perceive—nothing but Atiaran’s roaming path through the dips and hollows and valleys and outcroppings of the hills—nothing but healthy trees and thickets and flowers and verdant grass, the blazonry of the Earth’s spring and nothing but the intensifying threat of something ill in the air. It was a poignant threat, and he felt obscurely that the cause would be worth bewailing.

  The sensation of it increased without resolution for some time. But then a sudden change in the tension of Atiaran’s back warned Covenant to brace himself scant instants before she hissed at him to stop. She had just rounded the side of a hill far enough to see into the hollow beyond it. For a moment she froze, crouching slightly and peering into the hollow. Then she began running down the hill.

  At once, Covenant followed. In three strides, he reached the spot where she had halted. Beyond him, in the bottom of the hollow, stood a single copse like an eyot in a broad glade. He could see nothing amiss. But his sense of smell jabbered at him urgently, and Atiaran was dashing straight toward the copse. He sprinted after her.

  She stopped short just on the east side of the trees. Quivering feverishly, she glared about her with an expression of terror and hatred, as if she wanted to enter the copse and did not have the courage. Then she cried out, aghast, “Waynhim? Melenkurion! Ah, by the Seven, what ev
il!”

  When Covenant reached her side, she was staring a silent scream at the trees. She held her hands clasped together at her mouth, and her shoulders shook.

  As soon as he looked at the copse, he saw a thin path leading into it. Impulsively he moved forward, plunged between the trees. In five steps, he was in an open space much like the other Waymeets he had seen. This chamber was round, but it had the same tree walls, branch-woven roof, beds, and shelves.

  But the walls were spattered with blood, and a figure lay in the center of the floor.

  Covenant gasped as he saw that the figure was not human.

  Its outlines were generally manlike, though the torso was inordinately long, and the limbs were short, matched in length, indicating that the creature could both stand erect and run on its hands and feet. But the face was entirely alien to Covenant. A long, flexible neck joined the hairless head to the body; two pointed ears perched near the top of the skull on either side; the mouth was as thin as a mere slit in the flesh. And there were no eyes. Two gaping nostrils surrounded by a thick, fleshy membrane filled the center of the face. The head had no other features.

  Driven through the center of the creature’s chest—pinning it to the ground—was a long iron spike.

  The chamber stank of violence so badly that in a few breaths Covenant felt about to suffocate. He wanted to flee. He was a leper; even dead things were dangerous to him. But he forced himself to remain still while he sorted out one impression. On seeing the creature, his first thought had been that the Land was rid of something loathsome. But as he gritted himself, his eyes and nose corrected him. The wrongness which assailed his senses came from the killing—from the spike—not from the creature. Its flesh had a hue of ravaged health; it had been natural, right—a proper part of the life of the Land.

  Gagging on the stench of the crime, Covenant turned and fled.

  As he broke out into the sunlight, he saw Atiaran already moving away to the north, almost out of the hollow. He needed no urging to hurry after her; his bones ached to put as much distance as possible between himself and the desecrated Waymeet. He hastened in her direction as if there were fangs snapping at his heels.

  For the rest of the day, he found relief in putting leagues behind him. The edge of the unnatural smell was slowly blunted as they hurried onward. But it did not fade below a certain level. When he and Atiaran were forced by fatigue and darkness to stop for the night, he felt sure that there was uneasiness still ahead—that the killer of the Waynhim was moving invidiously to the north of them. Atiaran seemed to share his conviction; she asked him if he knew how to use the knife he carried.

  After sleep had eluded him for some time, he made himself ask her, “Shouldn’t we have buried it?”

  She answered softly from her shadowed bed across the low light of the graveling, “They would not thank our interference. They will take care of their own. But the fear is on me that they may break their bond with the Lords—because of this.”

  That thought gave Covenant a chill he could not explain, and he lay sleepless for half the night under the cold mockery of the stars.

  The next day dawned on short rations for the travelers. Atiaran had been planning to replenish her supplies at a Waymeet the previous day, so now she had no springwine left and little bread or staples. However, they were in no danger of going hungry—treasure-berries were plentiful along their path. But they had to start without warm food to steady them after the cold, uncomforting night. And they had to travel in the same direction that the killer of the Waynhim had taken. Covenant found himself stamping angrily into the dawn as if he sensed that the murder had been intended for him. For the first time in several days, he allowed himself to think of Drool and Lord Foul. He knew that either of them was capable of killing a Waynhim, even of killing it gratuitously. And the Despiser, at least, might easily know where he was.

  But the day passed without mishap. The dim, constant uneasiness in the air grew no worse and aliantha abounded. As the leagues passed, Covenant’s anger lost its edge. He relaxed into contemplation of the health around him, looked with undiminished wonder at the trees, the magisterial oaks and dignified elms, the comforting spread of the Gilden, the fine filigree of the mimosas, the spry saplings of wattle—and at the calm old contours of the hills, lying like slumberous heads to the reclining earth of the western plains. Such things gave him a new sense of the pulse and pause, the climbing sap and the still rock of the Land. In contrast, the trailing ordure of death seemed both petty—insignificant beside the vast abundant vitality of the hills—and vile, like an act of cruelty done to a child.

  The next morning, Atiaran changed her course, veering somewhat eastward, so that she and Covenant climbed more and more into the heart of the hills. They took a crooked trail, keeping primarily to valleys that wandered generally northward between the hills. And when the sun was low enough to cast the eastern hillsides into shadow, the travelers came in sight of Soaring Woodhelven.

  Their approach gave Covenant a good view of the tree village from some distance away across a wide glade. He judged the tree to be nearly four hundred feet high, and a good thirty broad at the base. There were no branches on the trunk until forty or fifty feet above the ground, then abruptly huge limbs spread out horizontally from the stem, forming in outline a half-oval with a flattened tip. The whole tree was so thickly branched and leaved that most of the village was hidden; but Covenant could see a few ladders between the branches and along the trunk; and in some tight knots on the limbs he thought he could make out the shapes of dwellings. If any people were moving through the foliage, they were so well camouflaged that he could not discern them.

  “That is Soaring Woodhelven,” said Atiaran, “a home for the people of the lillianrill, as Mithil Stonedown is a home for those of the rhadhamaerl. I have been here once, on my returning from the Loresraat. The Woodhelvennin are a comely folk, though I do not understand their wood-lore. They will give us rest and food, and perhaps help as well. It is said, ‘Go to the rhadhamaerl for truth, and the lillianrill for counsel.’ My need for counsel is sore upon me. Come.”

  She led Covenant across the glade to the base of the great tree. They had to pass around the rough-barked trunk to the northwest curve, and there they found a large natural opening in the hollow stem. The inner cavity was not deep; it was only large enough to hold a spiral stairway. Above the first thick limb was another opening, from which ladders began their way upward.

  The sight gave Covenant a quiver of his old fear of heights, almost forgotten since his ordeal on the stairs of Kevin’s Watch. He did not want to have to climb those ladders.

  But it appeared that he would not have to climb. The opening to the trunk was barred with a heavy wooden gate, and there was no one to open it. In fact, the whole place seemed too quiet and dark for a human habitation. Dusk was gathering, but no home glimmers broke through the overhanging shadow, and no gloaming calls between families interrupted the silence.

  Covenant glanced at Atiaran, and saw that she was puzzled. Resting her hands on the bars of the gate, she said, “This is not well, Thomas Covenant. When last I came here, there were children in the glade, people on the stair, and no gate at the door. Something is amiss. And yet I sense no great evil. There is no more ill here than elsewhere along our path.”

  Stepping back from the gate, she raised her head and called, “Hail! Soaring Woodhelven! We are travelers, people of the Land! Our way is long—our future dark! What has become of you?” When no answering shout came, she went on in exasperation, “I have been here before! In those days, it was said that Woodhelvennin hospitality had no equal! Is this your friendship to the Land?”

  Suddenly they heard a light scattering fall behind them. Spinning around, they found themselves encircled by seven or eight men gripping smooth wooden daggers. Instinctively Atiaran and Covenant backed away. As the men advanced, one of them said, “The meaning of friendship changes with the times. We have seen darkness, and heard dark tidi
ngs. We will be sure of strangers”

  A torch flared in the hands of the man who had spoken. Through the glare, Covenant got his first look at the Woodhelvennin. They were all tall, slim, and lithe, with fair hair and light eyes. They dressed in cloaks of woodland colors, and the fabric seemed to cling to their limbs, as if to avoid snagging on branches. Each man held a pointed dagger of polished wood which gleamed dully in the torchlight.

  Covenant was at a loss, but Atiaran gathered her robe about her and answered with stern pride, “Then be sure. I am Atiaran Trell-mate of Mithil Stonedown. This is Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever and message-bearer to the Lords. We come in friendship and need, seeking safety and help. I did not know that it is your custom to make strangers prisoner.”

  The man who held the torch stepped forward and bowed seriously. “When we are sure, we will ask your pardon. Until that time, you must come with me to a place where you may be examined. We have seen strange tokens, and see more now.” He nodded at Covenant. “We would make no mistake, either in trust or in doubt. Will you accompany me?”

  “Very well,” Atiaran sighed. “But you would not be treated so in Mithil Stonedown.”

  The man replied, “Let the Stonedownors taste our troubles before they despise our caution. Now, come behind me.” He moved forward to open the gate.

  At the command, Covenant balked. He was not prepared to go climbing around a tall tree in the dark. It would have been bad enough in the light, when he could have seen what he was doing, but the very thought of taking the risk at night made his pulse hammer in his forehead. Stepping away from Atiaran, he said with a quaver he could not repress, “Forget it.”

  Before he could react, two of the men grabbed his arms. He tried to twist away, but they held him, pulled his hands up into the torchlight. For one stark moment, the Woodhelvennin stared at his hand, at the ring on his left and the scar on his right—as if he were some kind of ghoul. Then the man with the torch snapped, “Bring him.”