Bloodguard gave him no chance. Bannor took him on down the slope, and Morin followed with the High Lord riding emptily at his back.
They found Amok awaiting them on the grass at the bottom of the valley. His eyes held something that resembled concern as he approached the High Lord and helped her to dismount. “Pardon me,” he said quietly. “I have brought you pain. What could I do? I was not made to be of use in such needs.”
“Then begone,” Elena replied harshly. “I have no more use for you this day.”
Amok's gaze constricted as if the High Lord had hurt him. But he obeyed tier promptly. With a bow and a wave, he wiped himself out of sight.
Dismissing him with a grimace, Elena turned toward the landslide. The piled rubble creaked and retorted more fiercely now, promising other slides at any moment, but she ignored the hazard to kneel at the foot of the scree. She bent forward as if she were presenting her back to a whip, and tears streaked her voice as she moaned, “Alas, Ranyhyn! Alas, Myrha! My failure has slain you.”
Covenant hurried to her. He ached to throw his arms around her, but her grief restrained him. With an effort, he said, “It's my fault. Don't blame yourself. I should know how to ride better.” Hesitantly, he reached out and stroked her neck.
His touch seemed to turn her pain to anger. She did not move, but she screamed at him, “Let me be! This is indeed your doing. You should not have sent the Ranyhyn to Lena my mother.”
He recoiled as if she had struck him. At once, his own instinctive ire flamed. The panic of his fall had filled his veins with a tinder that burned suddenly. Her quick recrimination changed him in an instant. It was as if the peace of his past days had been transformed abruptly into umbrage and leper's vehemence. He was mute with outrage. Trembling, he turned and stalked away.
Neither Bannor nor Morin followed him. Already they were busy tending the cuts and abrasions of their Ranyhyn and his mustang. He strode past them, went on down the valley like a scrap of frail ire fluttering helplessly along the breeze.
After a while, the dull detonations of the landslide began to fade behind him. He kept on walking. The smell of the grass tried to beguile him, and within the pine stands a consoling susurrous and gloom, a soft, quiet, sweet rest, beckoned him. He ignored them, paced by with a jerky, mechanical stride. Thick anger roiled his brain, drove him forward. Again! he cried to himself. Every woman he loved-! How could such a thing happen twice in the same life?
He went on until he had covered almost a league. Then he found himself beside a trilling stream. Here the bottom of the valley was uneven on both sides of the brook. He searched along it until he found a grass-matted gully from which he could see nothing of the valley's northward reach. There he threw himself down on his stomach to gnaw the old bone of his outrage.
Time passed. Soon shadows crossed the valley as the sun moved toward evening. Twilight began as if it were seeping out of the ground between the cliffs. Covenant rolled over on his back. At first, he watched with a kind of dour satisfaction as darkness climbed the east wall. He felt ready for the isolation of night and loss.
But then the memory of Joan returned with redoubled force. It stung him into a sitting position. Once again, he found himself gaping at the cruelty of his delusion, the malice which tore him away from Joan-for what? Hellfire! he gasped. The gloaming made him feel that he was going blind with anger. When he saw Elena walking into the gully toward him, she seemed to move through a haze of leprosy.
He looked away from her, tried to steady his sight against the failing light on the eastern cliff; and while his face was averted, she approached, seated herself on the grass by his feet. He could feel her presence vividly. At first she did not speak. But when he still refused to meet her gaze, she said softly, “Beloved. I have made a sculpture for you.”
With an effort, he turned his head. He saw her bent forward, with a hopeful smile on her lips. Both her hands extended toward him a white object that appeared to be made of bone. He paid no attention to it; his eyes slapped at her face as if that were his enemy.
In a tone of entreaty, she continued, “I formed it for you from Myrha's bones. I cremated her-to do her what honour I could. Then from her bones I formed this. For you, beloved. Please accept it.”
He glanced at the sculpture. It caught his unwilling interest. It was a bust. Initially, it appeared too thick to have been made from any horse's bone. But then he saw that four bones had been in some way fused together and moulded. He took the work from her hands to view it more closely. The face interested him. Its outlines were less blunt than in other marrowmeld work he had seen. It was lean and gaunt and impenetrable-a prophetic face, taut with purpose. It expressed someone he knew, but a moment passed before he recognized the countenance. Then, gingerly, as if he feared to be wrong, he said, “It's Bannor. Or one of the other Bloodguard.”
“You tease me,” she replied. “I am not so poor a crafter.” There was a peculiar hunger in her smile. “Beloved, I have sculpted you.”
Slowly, his ire faded. After all, she was his daughter, not his wife. She was entitled to any reproach that seemed fit to her. He could not remain angry with her. Carefully, he placed the bust on the grass, then reached out toward her and took her into his arms as the sun set.
She entered his embrace eagerly, and for a time she clung to him as if she were simply glad to put their anger behind them. But gradually he felt the tension of her body change. Her affection seemed to become grim, almost urgent. Something taut made her limbs hard, made her fingers grip him like claws. In a voice that shook with passion, she said, “This also Fangthane would destroy.”
He lifted his cheek from her hair, moved her so that he could see her face.
That sight chilled him. Despite the dimness of the light, her gaze shocked him like an immersion in polar seas.
The otherness of her sight, the elsewhere dimension of its power, had focused, concentrated until it became the crux of something savage and illimitable. A terrible might raved out of her orbs. Though her gaze was not directed at him, it bored through him like an auger. When it was gone, it left a bloody weal across him.
It was a look of apocalypse.
He could not think of any other name for it but
Twenty Three: Knowledge
THE sight sent him stumbling up the gully away from her. He had trouble keeping himself erect; he listed as if a gale had left him aground somewhere. He heard her low cry, “Beloved!” but he could not turn back. The vision made his heart smoke like dry ice, and he needed to find a place where he could huddle over the pain and gasp alone.
For a time, smoke obscured his self-awareness. He ran into Bannor, and fell back as if he had smashed against a boulder. The impact surprised him. Bannor's flat mien had the force of a denunciation. Instinctively, he recoiled. “Don't touch me!” He lurched off in another direction, stumbled through the night until he had placed a steep hill between himself and the Bloodguard. There he sat down on the grass, wrapped his arms around his chest, and made a deliberate effort to weep.
He could not do it. His weakness, his perpetual leprosy, dammed that emotional channel; he had spent too long unlearning the release of grief. And the frustration of failure made him savage. He brimmed with old, unresolved rage. Even in delusion, he could not escape the trap of his illness. Leaping to his feet, he shook his fists at the sky like a reefed and lonely galleon firing its guns in bootless defiance of the invulnerable ocean. Damnation)
But then his self-consciousness returned. His anger became bitterly cold as he bit off his shout, clamped shut that outlet for his fury. He felt that he was waking up after a blind sleep. Snarling extremely between his teeth, he stalked away toward the stream.
He did not bother to take off his clothes. Fiercely, he dropped flat on his face in the water as if he were diving for some kind of cauterization or release in the glacial frigidity of the brook.
He could not endure the cold for more than a moment; it burned over all his flesh, seized his heart like a
