PART III The Blood of the Earth
Twenty One: Lena's Daughter
TROY had called Thomas Covenant's Unbelief a bluff. But Covenant was not playing a mental game. He was a leper. He was fighting for his life.
Unbelief was his only defence against the Land, his only way to control the intensity, the potential suicide, of his response to the Land. He felt that he had lost every other form of self-protection. And without self protection he would end up like the old man he had met in the leprosarium-crippled and fetid beyond all endurance. Even madness would be preferable. If he went mad, he would at least be insulated from knowing what was happening to him, blind and deaf and numb to the vulturine disease that gnawed his flesh.
Yet as he rode westward away from Revelwood with High Lord Elena, Amok, and the two Bloodguard, in quest of Kevin Landwaster's Seventh Ward, he knew that he was changing. By fits and starts, his ground shifted under him; some potent, subtle Earthpower altered his personal terrain. Unstable footing shrugged him toward a precipice. And he felt helpless to do anything about it.
The most threatening aspect of his immediate situation was Elena. Her nameless inner force, her ancestry, and her strange irrefusability both disturbed and attracted him. As they left the Valley of Two Rivers, he was already cursing himself for accepting her invitation. And yet she had the power to sway him. She tangled his emotions, and pulled unexpected strands of assent out of the knot.
This was not like his other acquiescences. When Lord Mhoram had asked him to go with the Warward, he had agreed because he completely lacked alternatives. He urgently needed to keep moving, keep searching for an escape. No similar reasoning vindicated him when the High Lord had asked him to accompany her. He felt that he was riding away from the crux of his dilemma, the battle against Lord Foul — evading it like a coward. But in the moment of decision he had not even considered refusing. And he sensed that she could draw him farther. Hopelessly, without one jot or tittle of belief to his name, he could be made to follow her, even if she went to attack the Despiser himself. Her beauty, her physical presence, her treatment of him, ate away portions of his armour, exposing his vulnerable flesh.
Travelling through the crisp autumn of Trothgard, he watched her alertly, timorously.
High and proud on the back of Myrha, her Ranyhyn, she looked like a crowned vestal, somehow both powerful and fragile-as if she could have shattered his bones with a glance, and yet would have fallen from her seat at the touch of a single hurled handful of mud. She daunted him.
When Amok appeared beside her as if concretized abruptly out of blank air, she turned to speak with him. They exchanged greetings, and bantered pleasantly like old friends while Revelwood fell into the distance behind them. Amok's reticence on the subject of his Ward did not prevent him from gay prolixity in other matters. Soon he was singing and talking happily as if his sole function were to entertain the High Lord.
As Amok whiled away the morning, Covenant gazed over the countryside around him.
The party of the quest rode easily up out of the lowlands of Trothgard. They travelled a few points south of westward, roughly paralleling the course of the Rill River toward the Westron Mountains. The western edge of Trothgard, still sixty or sixty-five leagues away, was at least three thousand feet higher than the Valley of Two Rivers, and the whole region slowly climbed toward the mountains. Already the High Lord's party moved into the gradual uprise. Covenant could feel their relaxed ascent as they rode through woodlands anademed in autumn, ablaze with orange, yellow, gold, red leaf-flames, and over lush grassy hillsides, where the scars of Stricken Stone's ancient wars had been effaced by thick heather and timothy like healthy new flesh over the wounds, green with healing.
He was barely able to sense the last hints of Trothgard's convalescence. Under the mantling growth of grass and trees, all the injuries of Kevin's last war had not been undone. From time to time, the riders passed near festering barren patches which still refused all repair, and some of the hills seemed to lie awkwardly, like broken bones imperfectly set. But the Lords had laboured to good effect. The air of Trothgard was tangy, animate, vital. Very few of the trees showed that their roots ran down into once-desecrated soil. The new Council of Lords had found a worthy way to spend their lives.
Because of what it had suffered, Trothgard touched Covenant's heart. He found that he liked it, trusted it. At times as the day passed into afternoon, he wished that he was not going anywhere. He wanted to roam Trothgard destinationless, preferably alone-without any thought of Wards or rings or wars. He would have welcomed the rest.
Amok seemed a fit guide for such sojourns. The bearer of the Seventh Ward moved with a sprightly, boyish stride which disguised the fact that the pace he set was not a lazy one. And his good spirits bubbled irrepressibly. He sang long songs which he claimed to have learned from the faery
Yet in the twilight of Trothgard, he disappeared suddenly, gestured himself out of visibility, leaving the High Lords' party alone.
Covenant was startled out of his reverie. “Where-?”
“Amok will return,” answered Elena. In the gloaming, he could not tell if she were looking at him or through him or into him or in spite of him. “He has only left us for the night. Come, ur-Lord,” she said as she dropped lightly down from Myrha's back. “Let us rest.”
Covenant followed her example, released his mount to Bannor's care. Myrha and the other two Ranyhyn galloped away, stretching their legs after a day's walking. Then Morin went to the Rill for water while Elena began to make camp. She produced a small urn of graveling, and' used the fire-stones to cook a frugal meal for herself and Covenant. Her face followed the motion of her hands, but her vision's strange otherness was far distant, as if in the earthy light she read of events on the opposite edge of the Land.
Covenant watched her; in the performance of even the simplest chores she fascinated him. But as he studied her lithe form, her sure movements, her bifurcated gaze, he was trying to regain a grip on himself, trying to recover some sense of where he stood with her. She was a mystery to him. Out of all the strong and knowledgeable people of the Land, she had chosen him to accompany her. He had raped her mother-and still she had chosen him. In Glimmermere she had kissed-The memory made his heart hurt. She had chosen him. But not out of anger or desire for retribution-not for any reason that Trell would have approved. He could see in her smiles, hear in her voice, feel in her ambience that she intended him no harm. Then why? From what secret forgetfulness or passion did her desire for his company spring? He needed to know. And yet he was half afraid of the answer.
After supper, when he sat drinking his ration of springwine across the pot of graveling from Elena, he mustered his courage to question her. Both Bloodguard had withdrawn from the campsite, and he was relieved that he did not have to contend with them. Rubbing his fingers through his beard, remembering the peril of physical sensations, he began by asking her if she had learned anything from Amok.
She shook her head unconcernedly, and her hair haloed her head in the graveling light. “We are surely several days from the location of the Seventh Ward. There will be time enough for the questioning of Amok.”
He accepted this, but it did not meet his need. Tightening his hold on himself, he asked her why she had chosen him.
She gazed at him or through him for several moments before she replied. “Thomas Covenant, you know that I did not choose you. No Lord of Revelstone chose you. Drool Rockworm performed your first summoning, and he was guided by the Despiser. In that way, we are your victims, just as you are his. It may be as Lord Mhoram believes-perhaps the Land's Creator also chose. Or perhaps the dead Lords-perhaps High Lord Kevin himself wields
