Sunder grabbed at the suggestion as if it were a benison. “Yes. It must be so. Flesh is flesh, susceptible to the Sunbane. But your footwear-it is unlike any I have seen. Surely you were shielded at the sun's first touch, else you would have been altered beyond any power to know me.” Then his face darkened, “But could you not have told me? I feared-” The clenching of his jaws described eloquently the extremity of his fear.
“We didn't know.” Covenant wanted to lie down, close his eyes, forget. “We were lucky.” A moment passed before he found the will to ask, “Marid-?”
At once, Sunder put everything else aside. He went to look at the stakes, the holes. A frown knotted his forehead. “Fools,” he grated. “I warned them to ware such things. None can foretell the Sunbane. Now there is evil upon the Plains.”
“You mean,” asked Linden, “he didn't escape? He isn't safe?”
In response, the Graveller rasped, “Did I not say there was not time? You have achieved nothing but your own prostration. It is enough,” he went on stiffly. “I have followed you to this useless end. Now you will accompany me.”
Linden stared at Sunder. “Where are we going?”
“To find shelter,” he said in a calmer tone. “We cannot endure this sun.”
Covenant gestured eastward, toward a region with which he was familiar. “The hills-”
Sunder shook his head. “There is shelter in the hills. But to gain it we must pass within scope of Windshorn Stonedown. That is certain sacrifice-for any stranger, as for the Graveller of Mithil Stonedown. We go west, to the Mithil River.”
Covenant could not argue. Ignorance crippled his ability to make decisions. When Sunder took his arm and turned him away from the sun, he began to scuffle stiffly out of the bowl of dust.
Linden moved at his side. Her stride was unsteady; she seemed dangerously weak. Sunder was stronger; but his eyes were bleak, as if he could see disaster ahead. And Covenant could barely lift his feet. The sun, still climbing toward mid-morning, clung to his shoulders, hagriding him. Heat flushed back and forth across his skin-a vitiating fever which echoed the haze of the scorched earth. His eyes felt raw from the scraping of his eyelids. After a time, he began to stumble as if the ligatures of his knees were parting.
Then he was in the dirt, with no idea of how he had fallen. Sunder supported him so that he could sit up. The Graveller's face was grey with dust; he, too, had begun to suffer. “Thomas Covenant,” he panted, “this is fatal to you. You must have water. Will you not make use of your white ring?”
Covenant's respiration was shallow and ragged. He stared into the haze as if he had gone blind.
“The white ring,” Sunder pleaded. “You must raise water, lest, you die.”
Water. He pulled the shards of himself together around that thought. Impossible. He could not concentrate. Had never used wild magic for anything except contention. It was not a panacea.
Both Sunder and Linden were studying him as if he were responsible for their hopes. They were failing along with him. For their sakes, he would have been willing to make the attempt. But it was impossible for other reasons as well. Tortuously, as if he had been disjointed, he shifted forward, got his knees under him, then his feet.
“Ur-Lord!” protested the Graveller.
“I don't,” Covenant muttered, hall coughing, “don't know how.” He wanted to shout. “I'm a leper. I can't see-can't feel- ” The Earth was closed to him; it lay blank and meaningless under his feet-a concatenation of haze, nothing more. “I don't know how to reach it.” We need Earthpower. And a Lord to wield it.
There's no Earthpower. The Lords are gone. He had no words potent enough to convey his helplessness. “I just can't.”
Sunder groaned. But he hesitated only momentarily. Then he sighed in resignation, “Very well. Yet we must have water.” He took out his knife. “My strength is greater than yours. Perhaps I am able to spare a little blood.” Grimly, he directed the blade toward the mapwork of scars on his left forearm.
Covenant lurched to try to stop him.
Linden was quicker. She seized Sunder's wrist. “No!”;
The Graveller twisted free of her, gritted acutely, “
“Not like that.” The cuts on Nassic's hand burned in Covenant's memory; he rejected such power instinctively.
“Do you wish to die?”
“No.” Covenant upheld himself by force of will. “But I'm not that desperate. Not yet, anyway.”
“Your knife isn't even clean,” added Linden. “If septicemia set in, I'd have to burn it out.”
Sunder closed his eyes as if to shut out what they were saying.: “I will outlive you both under this sun.” His jaws chewed his voice into a barren whisper. “Ah, my father, what have you done1; to me? Is this the outcome of all your mad devoir?”
“Suit yourself,” Covenant said brutally, trying to keep Sunder from despair or rebellion. “But at least have the decency to wait until we're too weak to stop you.”
The Graveller's eyes burst open. He spat a curse. “Decency, is it?” he grated. “You are swift to cast shame upon people whose lives you do not comprehend. Well, let us hasten the moment when I may decently save you.” With a thrust of his arm, he pushed Covenant into motion, then caught him around the waist to keep him from falling, and began half dragging him westward.
In a moment, Linden came to Covenant's other side, shrugged his arm over her shoulders so that she could help support him. Braced in that fashion, he was able to travel.
But the sun was remorseless. Slowly, ineluctably, it beat him toward abjection. By mid-morning, he was hardly carrying a fraction of his own weight. To his burned eyes, the haze sang threnodies of prostration; motes of darkness began to flit across his vision. From time to time, he saw small clumps of night crouching on the pale ground just beyond clarity, as if they were waiting for him.
Then the earth seemed to rise up in front of him. Sunder came to a halt. Linden almost fell; but Covenant clung to her somehow. He fought to focus his eyes. After a moment, he saw that the rise was a shelf of rock jutting westward.
Sunder tugged him and Linden forward. They limped past another clump like a low bush, into the shadow of the rock.
The jut of the shelf formed an eroded lee large enough to shelter several people. In the shadow, the rock and dirt felt cool. Linden helped Sunder place Covenant sitting against the balm of the stone. Covenant tried to lie down; but the Graveller stopped him, and Linden panted, “Don't. You might go to sleep. You've lost too much fluid,”
He nodded vaguely. The coolness was only relative, and he was febrile with thirst. No amount of shade could answer the unpity of the sun. But the shadow itself was bliss to him, and he was content. Linden sat down on one side of him; Sunder, on the other. He closed his eyes, let himself drift.
Some time later, he became conscious of voices. Linden and Sunder were talking. The hebetude of her tone betrayed the difficulty of staying alert. Sunder's responses were distant, as if he found her inquiries painful but could not think of any way to refuse them.
“Sunder,” she asked dimly, “what is Mithil Stonedown going to do without you?”
“Linden Avery?” He seemed not to understand her question.
“Call me Linden. After today-” Her voice trailed away.
He hesitated, then said, “Linden.”
“You're the Graveller. What will they do without a Graveller?”
“Ah.” Now he caught her meaning. “I signify little. The loss of the Sunstone is of more import, yet even that loss can be overcome. The Stonedown is chary of its lore. My prentice is adept in all the rites which must be performed in the absence of the Sunstone. Without doubt, he shed Kalina my mother at the sun's rising. The Stonedown will endure. How otherwise could I have done what I have done?”
After a pause, she asked, “You're not married?”
“No.” His reply was like a wince.
Linden seemed to hear a wide range of implications in that one word. Quietly, she said, “But you were.”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
Sunder was silent at first. But then he replied, 'Among my people, only the Graveller is given the choice of his own mate. The survival of the Stonedown depends upon its children. Mating for children is not left to the hazard
