The Giant hefted his sack. “I am ready,” he said. “Our supplies are scant-but we have no recourse. We must hope for
Without looking away from the Fall, Covenant addressed Bannor. He could not ask the Bloodguard to change his decision, so he said, “You’ll bury Triock? He’s earned a decent grave.”
Banner nodded, then said, “I will do another thing also.” He reached one hand into his short robe and drew out the charred metal heels of the Staff of Law. “I will bear these to Revelstone. When the time of my end comes upon me, I will return to the mountain home of the
Thank you, Covenant whispered silently.
Banner put the bands away and bowed once briefly to Covenant and Foamfollower. “Look for help wherever you go,” he said. “Even in the Spoiled Plains, Corruption is not entirely master.” Before they could reply, he turned and trotted away toward the Colossus. As he passed over the hilltop, his back told them as clearly as speech that they would never see him again.
Bannor! Covenant groaned. Was it that bad? He felt bereft, deserted, as if half his support had been taken away.
“Gently, my friend,” Foamfollower breathed. “He has turned his back on vengeance. Two thousand years and more of pure service were violated for him-yet he chooses not to avenge them. Such choices are not easily made. They are not easily borne. Retribution-ah, my friend, retribution is the sweetest of all dark sweet dreams.”
Covenant found himself still staring at the waterfall. The complex plunge of the river had a sweetness all its own. He shook himself. “Hellfire.” The emptiness of his curses seemed appropriate to his condition. “Are we going to do it or aren’t we?”
“We will go.” Covenant felt the Giant’s gaze on him without meeting it. “Covenant-ur-Lord-there is no need for you to endure this descent. Close your eyes, and I will bear you as I did from Kevin’s Watch.”
Covenant hardly heard himself answer, ”That was a long time ago.” Vertigo was beginning to reel in his head. “I’ve got to do this for myself. For a moment, he let slip his resistance and almost fell to his knees. As the suction tugged at his mind, he comprehended that he would have to go into it rather than away from it, that the only way to master vertigo was to find its centre. Somewhere in the centre of the spinning would be an eye, a core of stability. “Just go ahead-so you can catch me.” Only in the eye of the whirl could he find solid ground.
Foamfollower regarded him dubiously, then started down to the edge of the cliff near the Fall. With Covenant limping in his wake, he went to the rim, glanced down to pick the best place for a descent, then lowered himself out of sight over the edge.
Covenant stood for a moment teetering on the lip of Landsdrop. The Fall yawed abysmally from side to side; it beckoned to him like relief from delirium. It was such an easy answer. As his vertigo mounted, he did not see how he could refuse it.
But its upsurge made his pulse hammer in his wounded forehead. He spun around that pain as if it were a pivot, and found that the seductive panic of the plunge was fading. The simple hope that vertigo had a firm centre seemed to make his hope come true. The whirl did not stop, but its hold on him receded, withdrew into the background. Slowly, the pounding in his forehead eased.
He did not fall.
He felt as weak as a starving penitent-hardly able to carry his own weight. But he knelt on the edge, lowered his legs over the rim. Clinging to the top of the cliff with his arms and stomach, he began to hunt blindly for footholds. Soon he was crawling backward down Landsdrop as if it were the precipice of his personal future.
The descent took a long time, but it was not particularly difficult. Foamfollower protected him all the way down each stage of the broken cliff. And the steeper drops were moderated by enough ledges and cracks and hardy scrub brush to make that whole stretch of the cliff passable. The Giant had no trouble finding a route Covenant could manage, and Covenant eventually gained a measure of confidence, so that he was able to move with less help down the last stages to the foothills.
When at last he reached the lower ground, he took his drained nerves straight to the pool at the foot of the Fall and dropped into the chill waters to wash away the accumulated sweat of his fear.
While Covenant bathed, Foamfollower filled his water jug and drank deeply at the pool. This might be the last safe water they would find. Then the Giant set out the graveling for Covenant. As the Unbeliever dried himself, he asked Foamfollower how long their food supplies would last.
The Giant grimaced. “Two days. Three or four, if we find
Covenant shivered. He had had some experience with hunger. And now the possibility of starvation lay ahead of him; his forehead had been reinjured; he would have to walk a long distance on bare feet. One by one the conditions of his return to his own life were being met. As he tightened the sash of his robe, he muttered sourly, “I heard Mhoram say once that wisdom is only skin-deep. Or something like that. Which means that lepers must be the wisest people in the world.”
“Are they?” the Giant asked. “Are you wise, Unbeliever?”
“Who knows? If I am-wisdom is overrated.”
At this, Foamfollower’s grin broadened. “Perhaps it is-perhaps it is. My friend, we are the two wisest hearts in the Land-we who march thus weaponless and unredeemed into the very bosom of the Despiser. Verily, wisdom is like hunger. Perhaps it is a very fine thing-but who would willingly partake of it?”
Despite the absence of the wind, the air was still wintry. Knuckles of ice clenched the rocky borders of the pool where the spray of the Fall had frozen, and Foamfollower’s breath plumed wetly in the humid air. Covenant needed to move to warm himself, keep up his courage. “It’s not fine,” he grated, half to himself. “But it’s useful. Come on.”
Foamfollower repacked his graveling, then swung the sack onto his broad shoulder, and led Covenant away from Landsdrop along the river.
Night stopped them when they had covered only three or four leagues. But by that time they had left behind the foothills and the last vestiges of the un-Spoiled flatland which had at one time, ages ago in the history of the Earth, stretched from the Southron Wastes north to the Sarangrave and Lifeswallower, the Great Swamp. They were down in the bosque of the Ruinwash.
Grey, brittle, dead brush and trees — cottonwoods, junipers, once-beautiful tamarisks — stood up out of the dried mud on both sides of the stream, occupying ground which had once been part of the riverbed. But the Ruinwash had shrunk decades or centuries ago, leaving partially fertile mud on either side-mud in which a scattering of tough trees and brush had eked out a bare existence until Lord Foul’s preternatural winter had blasted them. As darkness soaked into the air as if it were oozing out of the ground, the trees became spectral shapes of forbidding which made the bosque almost impassable. Covenant resigned himself to camping there for the night, though the dried mud had an old, occluded reek, and the river made a slithering noise like an ambush in its course. He knew that he and Foamfollower would be safer if they travelled at night, but he was weary and did not believe the Giant could find his way in the cloud-locked dark.
Later, however, he found that the river gave off a light like lambent verdigris; the whole surface of the water glowed dimly. This light came, not from the water, but from the hot eels which flicked back and forth across the current. They had a hungry aspect, and their jaws were rife with teeth. Yet they made it possible for him and Foamfollower to resume their journey.
Even in the cynosural eel light, they did not go much farther. The destruction of the Staff had changed the balance of Lord Foul’s winter; without the wind to hold them, the massed energies of the clouds recoiled. In the deeper chill of darkness, they triggered rain out of the blind sky. Soon torrents fell through the damaged grasp of the clouds, crashed straight down onto the Lower Land as if the vaulting which held up the heavens had broken. Under those conditions, Foamfollower could not find his way. He and Covenant had no choice but to huddle together for warmth in the mud and try to sleep while they waited.
With the coming of dawn, the rain stopped, and Covenant and Foamfollower went on along the Ruinwash in the blurred light of morning. During that day, they saw the last of the
