The Wounded Land

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 eyesockets 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 succour 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 unassuageable 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 rumours 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 spectres; 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