In the back of his mind, he could hear Mhoram saying,
He clenched his teeth until his jaws ached, and the wound on his forehead pounded. The pain steadied him. It held him like a spike driven through his brain, affixing him to the task of the fang marks.
With an abrupt movement, he slashed twice, cut an X across the swelling between the two red marks.
The child let out a low cry, and went rigid, clinging to him fervidly.
For an instant he stared in horror at the violent red blood which welled out of the cuts and ran across the pale leg. Then he dropped the knife as if it had burned him. Gripping her leg in both hands, he bent his mouth to the fang marks and sucked.
The strain of stretching his lips tight over her shin made his mouth wound sting, and his blood mingled with hers as it trickled across the darkening stain of the swelling. But he ignored that as well. With all his strength, he sucked at the cuts. When he stopped to breathe, he rubbed the child’s leg, trying to squeeze all of her blood toward the cuts. Then he sucked again.
A nauseating dizziness caught hold of his head and made it spin. He stopped, afraid that he would faint. “All right, “he panted. “I’m finished. You’re going to be all right.” After a moment, he realized that the child was whimpering softly into the back of his shoulder. Quickly, he turned, put his arms around her, hugged her to him.” You’re going to be all right,” he repeated thickly. “I’ll take you to your mommy now.” He did not believe that he had the strength to stand, much less to carry her any distance at all.
But he knew that she still needed treatment; he could hardly have removed all the venom. And the cuts he had inflicted would have to be tended. She could not afford his weakness. With an effort that almost undid him, he lurched painfully to his feet, and stood listing on the hillside as if he were about to capsize.
The child sniffled miserably in his arms. He could not bear to look at her, for fear that she would meet his gaze with reproach. He stared down the hill while he struggled to scourge or beg himself into a condition of fortitude.
Through her tears, the child said, “Your mouth’s bleeding.”
“Yes, I know,” he mumbled. But that pain was no worse than the ache in his forehead, or the hurt of his bruises. And all of it was only pain. It was temporary; it would soon fall under the pall of his leprosy. The ice in his bones made him feel that the numbness of his hands and feet was already spreading. Pain was no excuse for weakness.
Slowly, he unlocked one knee, let his weight start forward. Like a poorly articulated puppet, he lumbered woodenly down the hillside.
By the time he reached the tree-it stood black and straight like a signpost indicating the place where the child had been bitten-he had almost fallen three times. His boots were trying to trip him; without laces to hold them to his feet, they cluttered every step he took. For a moment, he leaned against the tree, trying to steady himself. Then he kicked off his boots. He did not need them. His feet were too numb to feel the damage of hiking barefoot.
“You ready?” he breathed. “Here we go.” But he was not sure he made any sound. In the fever which clouded his thoughts, he found himself thinking that life was poorly designed; burdens were placed on the wrong people. For some obscure reason, he believed that in Banner’s place he could have found some other answer to Korik’s corruption. And Bannor would have been equal many times over to the physical task of saving this child.
Then he remembered that Mhoram had not told him any news of the Giants in connection with Korik’s mission. Sparked by the association, a vision of Gallows Howe cut through his haze. He saw again a Giant dangling from the gibbet of the Forestal,
What had happened to the Giants?
Gaping mutely as if the woods and the stream and the little girl in his arms astonished him, he pushed away from the black tree and began shambling along Righters Creek in the general direction of the town.
As he moved, he forced open his caked lips to cry aloud, “Help!”
The child had said that her parents were a long way away, but he did not know what distances meant to her. He did not know whether or not her parents were anywhere near the Creek. He did not even know how far he was from Haven Farm; the whole previous night was a blank hurt in his mind. But the banks of the stream offered him the most accessible route toward town, and he could think of nothing to do but move in that direction. The girl’s pain was increasing. Her leg was blacker every time he looked at it, and she winced and whimpered at every jolt of his stiff stride. At intervals she moaned for her parents, and every moan made him gasp out like the jab of a goad, “Help!”
But his voice seemed to have no authority, no carrying power; it dropped into silence after him like a stillborn. And the effort of shouting aggravated the injury to his mouth. Soon he could feel his lip swelling like the girl’s leg, growing dark and taut and heavy with pain. He hugged her closer to him and croaked in grim, forlorn insistence, “Help! Help me!”
Gradually, the heat of the sun made him sweat. It stung his forehead until his eyes blurred. But it did not touch the cold in his bones. His shivering mounted. Dizziness dismembered his balance, made him reel through the woods as if he were being driven by a tattered gale. Whenever he stepped on a pointed rock or branch, it gouged far enough up into his arches to hurt him. Several times, his joints folded sharply, and he plunged to his knees. But each time, the dark wound he carried pulled him upright again, and sent him forward, mumbling past his thick lip, “Help me.”
His own swelling seemed to take over his face like a tumour. Hot lances of pain thrust from it through his head every time the ground jarred him. As time passed, he could feel his heart itself trembling, quivering between each beat as it laboured to carry the strain. The haze of his fever thickened until at odd moments he feared that he had lost his sight. In the blur, he quailed away from the dazzles of sunlight which sprang at him off the stream; but when the creek passed through shadows, it looked so cool and healing that he could hardly restrain himself from stumbling into it, burying his face in its anodyne.
Yet all the while he knew he could not deviate from the strait path of his trek. If he failed to find help for the child, then everything he had already done for her would be useless, bereft of meaning. He could not stop. Her wound would not tolerate his futility. He saw too much of his lost son Roger in her bare shin. Despite the nails of pain which crucified him, he lurched onward.
Then in the distance he heard shouts, like people wailing for someone lost. He jerked to a swaying halt on stiff legs, and tried to look around. But he seemed to have lost control of his head. It wobbled vainly on his neck, as if the weight of his swelling threw it out of joint, and he was unable to face it in the direction of the shouts.
In his arms, the girl whimpered pitifully, “Mommy. Daddy.”
He fought his black tight pain to frame the word,
“Help me.”
It was no louder than a whisper.
A sound like hoarse sobs shook him, but he could not tell whether they came from him or from the girl. Weakly, almost blindly, he straightened his arms, lifted the child outward as if he were offering her to the shouts.
They became a woman’s voice and took on words. “Karen! Here she is! Over here! Oh, Karen! my baby!” Running came toward him through the leaves and branches; it sounded like the blade of a winter wind cutting at him from the depths of his fever. At last he was able to see the people. A woman hurried down the side of a hill, and a man ran anxiously after her. “Karen!” the woman cried.
The child reached out toward the woman and sobbed, “Mommy! Mommy!”
An instant later, the burden was snatched from Covenant’s arms. “Karen. Oh, my baby,” the woman moaned as she hugged the child. “We were so frightened. Why did you run away? Are you all right?” Without a glance at Covenant, she said, “Where did you find her? She ran away this morning, and we’ve been frightened half to death.” As if this needed some explanation, she went on, “We’re camping over there a ways. Dave has Good Friday off, and we decided to camp out. We never thought she would run away.”
The man caught up with her, and she started speaking to the child again. “Oh, you naughty, naughty girl. Are you all right? Let me look at you.”
The girl kept sobbing in pain and relief as the woman held her at arm’s length to inspect her. At once, the woman saw the tourniquet and the swelling and the cuts. She gave a low scream, and looked at Covenant for the first time.
