The One Tree

loss; and from its pit images began to emerge. A figure like an incarnation of the void came toward her across the desert. It was obscured by heatwaves and hallucination. She could not see who it was. Then she could.

Covenant.

He struggled to scream, but had no mouth. Scales covered half his face. His eyes were febrile with self- loathing. His forehead was pale with the excruciation of his lust and abhorrence. Eagerness and dread complicated his gait; he moved like a cripple as he approached her, aimed himself at her heart.

His arms had become snakes. They writhed and hissed from his shoulders, gaping to breathe and bite. The serpent-heads which had been his hands brandished fangs as white as bone.

She was caught. She knew that she should raise her hands, try to defend herself; but they hung at her sides like mortality, too heavy to lift against the doom of those fangs.

Surging forward, Covenant rose in front of her like all the failures and crimes and loves of her life. When his serpents struck, they knocked her away into another darkness altogether.

Later, she felt that she was being strangled in massive coils. She squirmed and whimpered for release, unable to break free. Her failed hands were knotted in the blanket Cail had spread over her. The hammock constricted her movements. She wanted to scream and could not. Fatal waters filled her throat. The dimness of her cabin seemed as ruinous as Covenant's mind.

But then with a wrench the fact of her surroundings penetrated her. This was her hammock, her cabin. The air was obscured with the dusk of dawn or evening, not the dark void into which she had fallen. The faintly remembered taste of diamondraught in her mouth was not the taste of death.

The cabin appeared to lie canted around her, like a house which had been broken from its foundations by some upheaval. When she felt the dromond's pitching, she realised that Starfare's Gem was listing heavily, causing her hammock to hang at an angle to the walls. She sensed the vibration of winds and seas through the hull of the Giantship. The dimness did not come from dawn or evening. It was the cloud-locked twilight of a storm.

The storm was bad-and becoming monstrous.

Her mind was full of snakes. She could not wrestle free of them. But then a movement near the table took her attention. Peering through the gloom, she made out Cail. He sat in one of the chairs, watching her as if no inadequacy or even betrayal on her part could alter his duty toward her. Yet in the obscurity of the cabin he looked as absolute as a figure of judgment, come to hold every count of her futility against her.

“How long-?” she croaked. The desert was still in her throat, defying the memory of diamondraught. She felt that time had passed. Too much time-enough for everything to have recoiled against her. “Have I been out?”

Cail rose to his feet. “A day and a night.”

In spite of his inflexibility, she clung to his dim visage so that she would not slip back among the serpents. “Covenant?”

The Haruchai shrugged fractionally. “The ur-Lord's plight is unaltered.” He might as well have said, You have failed. If it was ever your purpose to succeed.

Clumsily, she left the hammock. She did not want to lie before him like a sacrifice. He offered to assist her; but she rejected his aid, lowered herself alone to the stepladder, then to the floor, so that she could try to face him as an equal.

“Of course I wanted to succeed.” Fleeing from images of Covenant's mind, she went farther than she intended. “Do you blame me for everything?”

His mien remained blank. “Those are your words.” His tone was as strict as a reproof. “No Haruchai has spoken them.”

“You don't have to,” she retorted as if Covenant's plight had broken something in her chest. “You wear them on your face.”

Again, Cail shrugged. “We are who we are. This protest skills nothing.”

She knew that he was right. She had no cause to inflict her self-anger on him as if it were his fault. But she had swallowed too much loathing. And she had failed in paralysis. She had to spit out some of the bile before it sickened her. We are who we are. Pitchwife had said the same thing about the Elohim.

“Naturally not,” she muttered. “God forbid that you might do or even think much less be anything wrong. Well, let me tell you something. Maybe I've done a lot of things wrong. Maybe I've done everything wrong.” She would never be able to answer the accusation of her failures. “But when I had you sent out of Elemesnedene — when I let the Elohim do what they did to Covenant — I was at least trying to do something right.”

Cail gazed flatly at her as if he did not mean to reply. But then he spoke, and his voice held a concealed edge. “That we do not question. Does not Corruption believe altogether in its own lightness?”

At that, Linden went cold with shock. Until now, she had not perceived how deeply the Haruchai resented her decisions in Elemesnedene, Behind Cail's stolid visage, she sensed the presence of something fatal-something which must have been true of the Bloodguard as well. None of them knew how to forgive.

Gripping herself tightly, she said, “You don't trust me at all.”

Cail's answer was like a shrug. 'We are sworn to the ur-Lord. He has trusted you.' He did not need to point out that Covenant might feel differently if he ever recovered his mind. That thought had already occurred to her.

In her bitterness, she muttered, “He tried to. I don't think he succeeded.” Then she could not stand any more. What reason did any of them have to trust her? The floor was still canted under her, and through the stone she felt the way Starfare's Gem was battered by the waves. She needed to escape the confinement of her cabin, the pressure of Cail's masked hostility. Thrusting past him, she flung open the door and left the chamber.

Impeded by the lurch of the Giantship's stride, she stumbled to the stairs, climbed them unsteadily to the afterdeck.

When she stepped over the storm-sill, she was nearly blown from her feet. A predatory wind struck at the decks, clawed at the sails. Angry clouds frothed like breakers at the tips of the yards. As she struggled to a handhold on one of the ascents to the wheeldeck, spray lashed her face, springing like sharp rain from the passion of a dark and viscid sea.

Twelve: Sea-Harm

THERE was no rain, just wind as heavy as torrents, and clouds which sealed the Sea in a glower of twilight from horizon to horizon, and keen spray boiling off the crests of the waves like steam to sting like hail. The blast struck the Giantship at an angle, canting it to one side.

Linden gasped for breath. As she fought her vision clear of spume, she was astonished to see Giants in the rigging.

She did not know how they could hold. Impossible that they should be working up there, in the full blow of the storm!

Yet they were working. Starfare's Gem needed enough sail to give it headway. But if the spars carried too much canvas, any sudden shift or increase in the wind might topple the dromond or simply drive it under. The crewmembers were furling the upper sails. They looked small and inconceivable against the hard dark might of the storm. But slowly, tortuously, they fought the writhing canvas under control.

High up on the foremast, a Giant lost his hold, had to release the clew-lines in order to save himself. Dawngreeter was instantly torn away. Flapping wildly, like a stricken albatross, it fluttered along the wind and out of sight.

The other Giants had better success. By degrees, Starfare's Gem improved its stance.