The One Tree

'We are a people united by our vision. I have spoken of this. The truths which Morninglight finds within himself, I also contain. In this way we are made strong and sure. But in such strength and surety there is also hazard. A truth which one sees may perchance pass unseen by others. We do not blithely acknowledge such failure, for how may one among us say to another, 'My truth is greater than yours'? And there are none in all the world to gainsay us. But it is our wisdom to be cautious.

“Therefore whensoever there is a need upon the Earth which requires us, one is Appointed to be our wisdom. According to the need, his purpose varies. In one age, the Appointed may deny our unity, challenging us to seek more deeply for the truth. In another, he may be named to fulfil that unity.” For an instant, her tone took on a more ominous colour. “In all ages, he pays the price of doubt. Findail will hazard his life against the Earth's doom.”

Doom? The idea gave Linden a pang. How? Was Findail like Covenant, then-accepting the cost for an entire people? What cost? What had the Elohim seen for which they felt responsible-and yet were unwilling to explain?

What did they know of the Despiser? Was he Chant's shadow?

Her gaze continued to follow Findail. But while she grappled with her confusion, a change came over the eftmound. All the Elohim stopped moving, and Daphin gave a smile of anticipation. “Ah, Sun-Sage,” she breathed. “Infelice comes. Now begins the Elohimfest.”

Infelice? Linden asked mutely. But the bells gave no answer.

The Elohim had turned toward her left. When she looked in that direction, she saw a figure of light approaching from beyond the elms. It cast the tree limbs into black relief. With the grave and stately stride of a thurifer, the figure entered the ring, passed among the people to the crest of the hill. There she halted and faced the company of the quest.

She was a tall woman, and her loveliness was as lucent as gemfire. Her hair shone. Her supple form shed gleams like a sea in moonlight. Her raiment was woven of diamonds, adorned with rubies. A penumbra of glory outlined her against the trees and the sky. She was Infelice, and she stood atop the eftmound like the crown of every wonder in Elemesnedene.

Her sovereign eyes passed over the company, came to Linden, met and held her stare. Under that gaze, Linden's knees grew weak. She felt a yearning to abase herself before this regal figure. Surely humility was the only just response to such a woman. Honninscrave was already on his knees, and the other Giants were following his example.

But Covenant remained upright, an icon graven of hard bone and intransigence. And none of the Elohim had given Infelice any obeisance except their rapt silence. Only the music of the bells sounded like worship. Linden locked her joints and strove to hold her own against the grandeur of that woman's gaze.

Then Infelice looked away; and Linden almost sagged in relief. Raising her arms, Infelice addressed her people in a voice like the ringing of light crystal. “I am come. Let us begin.”

Without warning or preparation, the Elohimfest commenced.

The sky darkened as if an inexplicable nightfall had come to Elemesnedene, exposing a firmament empty of stars. But the Elohim took light from Infelice. In the new dusk, they were wrapped around the eftmound like a mantle, multi-coloured and alive. And their gleaming aspired to the outreach of Infelice's arms. Viridian and crimson lights, emerald and essential white intensified like a spray of coruscation, mounting toward conflagration. A rainbow of fires rose up the hill. And as they grew stronger, the wind began to blow.

It tugged at Linden's shirt, ran through her hair like the chill fingers of a ghost. She clutched at Covenant for support; but somehow she lost him. She was alone in the emblazoned gloaming and the wind. It piled against her until she staggered. The darkness increased as the lights grew brighter. She could not locate the Giants, could not touch any of the Elohim. All the material substance of Elemesnedene had become wind, and the wind cycled around the eftmound as if Infelice had invoked it, giving it birth by the simple words of her summoning.

Linden staggered again, fell; but the ground was blown out from under her. Above her, globes of Elohim-fire had taken to the air. They were gyring upward like the sparks of a blaze in the heart of the Earth, wind-borne into the heavens. The starless sky became a bourne of bedizenings. And Linden went with them, tumbling helplessly along the wind.

But as she rose, her awkward unfiery flesh began to soar. Below her, the hill lay like a pit of midnight at the bottom of the incandescent gyre. She left it behind, sailed up the bright spin of the sparks. Fires rang on all sides of her like transmuted bells. And still she was larked skyward by the whirlwind.

Then suddenly the night seemed to become true night, and the wind lifted her toward a heaven bedecked with stars. In the light of the fires, she saw herself and the Elohim spring like a waterspout from the travertine fountain and cycle upward. The maidan spread out below her in the dark, then faded as she went higher. Woodenwold closed around the lea: the mountains encircled Woodenwold. Still she rose in the gyre, rushing impossibly toward the stars.

She was not breathing, could not remember breath. She had been torn out of herself by awe-a piece of darkness flying in the company of dazzles. The horizons of the unlit Earth shrank as she arced forever toward the stars. An umbilicus of conflagration ascended from the absolute centre of the globe like the ongoing gyre of eternity.

And then there was nothing left of herself to which she could cling. She was an unenlightened mote among perfect jewels, and the jewels were stars, and the abysses around her and within her were fathomless and incomprehensible-a void cold as dying, empty as death. She did not exist amid the magnificence of the heavens. Their lonely and stunning beauty exalted and numbed her soul. She felt ecstasy and destruction as if they were the last thoughts she would ever have; and when she lost her balance, stumbled to fall face down on the earth of the eftmound, she was weeping with a grief that had no name.

But slowly the hard fact of the ground penetrated her, and her outcry turned to quiet tears of loss and relief and awe.

Covenant groaned nearby. She saw him through a smear of weakness. He was on his hands and knees, clenched rigid against the heavens. His eyes were haunted by a doom of stars.

“Bastards,” he panted. “Are you trying to break my heart?”

Linden tried to reach out to him. But she could not move. The bells were speaking in her mind. As the Elohim slowly returned to human form around the eftmound, restoring light to the sky, their silent language attained a moment of clarity.

One string of bells said:

— Does he truly conceive that such is our intent? Another answered:

— Is it not?

Then they relapsed into the metal and crystal and wood of their distinctive tones-implying everything, denoting nothing.

She shook her head, fought to recapture that tongue. But when she had blinked the confusion out of her eyes, she found Findail the Appointed standing in front of her.

Stiffly, he bent to her, helped her to her feet. His visage was a hatchment of rue and strain. “Sun-Sage.” His voice sounded dull with disuse. “It is our intent to serve the life of the Earth as best we may. That life is also ours.”

But she was still fumbling inwardly. His words seemed to have no content; and her thoughts frayed away from them, went in another direction. His bruised yellow eyes were the first orbs she had seen in Elemesnedene that appeared honest.

Her throat was sore with the grief of stars. She could not speak above a raw whisper. “Why do you want to hurt him?”

His gaze did not waver. But his hands were trembling. He said faintly, so that no one else could hear him, “We desire no hurt to him. We desire only to prevent the hurt which he will otherwise commit.” Then he turned away as if he could not endure the other things he wanted to say.

The four Giants were climbing to their feet near Linden. They wore stunned expressions, buffeted by vision. Seadreamer helped Covenant erect. The Elohim were gathering again about the slopes.