The One Tree

on food. She ate as if sheer physical hunger were the symbol and demonstration of her spiritual aggrievement, her soul's innurturance. At times, Linden would not have been adequately clothed without the charity of the church she had learned to abhor-thus vindicating further her mother's grievance against her. Both chidden and affirmed by the fact that her daughter wore nothing but cast-offs, and yet could not be cajoled or threatened into any form of gratitude, the mother raised her own sour ineffectuality to the stature of sanctification.

The story was hot in Linden's mouth-an acrid blackness which seemed to well up from the very pit of her heart. Her eyes had already begun to burn with the foretaste of tears. But she was determined now to pay the whole price. It was justified.

'I suppose I deserved it. I wasn't exactly easy to get along with. When I got out of the hospital, I was different inside. It was like I wanted to show the world that my father was right-that I never did love him. Or anybody else. For one thing, I started hating that church. The reason I told myself was that if my mother hadn't been such a religion addict she would've been home the day my father killed himself. She could've helped him. Could've helped me. But the real reason was, that church took her away from me and I was just a kid and I needed her.

'So I acted like I didn't need anybody. Certainly not her or God. She probably needed me as badly as I needed her, but my father had killed himself as if he wanted to punish me personally, and I couldn't see anything about her needs. I think I was afraid that if I let myself love her-or at least act like I loved her-she would kill herself too.

“I must've driven her crazy. Nobody should've been surprised when she got cancer.”

Linden wanted to hug herself, comfort somehow the visceral anguish of recollection; but her right hand and forearm failed her. Memories of disease crept through her flesh. She

strove for the detached severity with which she had told Covenant about her father; but the sickness was too vivid for repression. Suffocation seemed to gather in the bottoms of her lungs. Covenant emitted a prescient dismay.

“It could have been treated. Extirpated surgically. If she had been treated in time. But the doctor didn't take her seriously. She was just a fat whiner. Widow's syndrome. By the time he changed his mind-by the time he got her into the hospital and operated-the melanoma had metastisized. There wasn't anything left for her to do except lie there until she died.”

She panted involuntarily as she remembered that last month, re-enacting the way her mother gasped on the thick fluids which had filled her with slow strangulation. She had sprawled on the hospital bed as if the only parts of her which remained alive were her respiration and her voice. Heavy folds and bulges of flesh sagged against the mattress as if they had been severed from her bones. Her limbs lay passive and futile. But every breath was a tortuous sibilant invocation of death. And her voice went on and on berating her daughter's sins. She was not trying to win her daughter to the church. She had come to need that denial, to depend upon it. Her protest against it was her only answer to terror. How else could she be sure she had a claim on God's love?

“It was summer then.” Memory possessed Linden. She was hardly aware of the Giantship, of the cloud- locked sky lowering like a bereavement. “I didn't have school. There wasn't anywhere else for me to go. And she was my mother.” The words could not convey a fifteen-year-old girl's grief. 'She was all I had left. The people of the church took care of me at night. But during the day I didn't have anything else to do. I spent a month with her. Listening to her sob and moan as if it were my fault.

'The doctors and nurses didn't care. They gave her medication and oxygen, and twice a day they cleaned her up. But after that they didn't know what to do about her. They didn't let themselves care. I was just alone with her. Listening to her blame me. That was her way of begging. The nurses must've thought I wanted to help. Or else they couldn't stand it themselves. They gave me a job. They gave me boxes and boxes of tissue and told me to wipe her when she needed it. The sweat. And the mucus that dribbled out of her mouth even when she didn't have enough strength to cough. I had to sit right beside her. Under all that weight, she was just a skeleton. And her breath-The fluid was rotting in her lungs. It got so bad it made me sick.“ A stench like the gangrenous reek of the old man whose life she had saved on Haven Farm. ”The nurses gave me food, but I flushed it down the toilet.'

Be true.

“She wouldn't look at me. I couldn't make her look at me. When I tried, she squeezed her eyes shut and went on begging.”

Please, God, let me die.

And after a month, the girl had taken that frail life into her own hands. Grief and affront and culpability had covered her more entirely than all Ceer's blood, stained her more intimately, outraged her more fundamentally. She had needed the power to take some kind of action, create some kind of defence; and because her conscious mind lacked the strength, the dark hunger she had inherited from her father's death had raised its head in her. You never loved me anyway. Swarming up from the floorboards of the attic, spewing like a hatred of all life from his stretched and gleeful mouth. His mouth, which should have been open in pain or love. Facing her mother, the blackness had leaped up like a visage of nightmare, had appeared full-formed, precise, and unquestionable not in her mind but rather in her hands, so that her body knew what she meant to do while her brain could only watch and wail, not prevent, control, or even choose. She had been weeping violently, but without sound, had not dared to let one sob through her teeth to be heard by the nurses, betray her. She had hardly seen what she was doing as she unhooked the tubes of oxygen from her mother's nostrils. The darkness in her had begun to gibber. It laughed like lust at the prospect of nourishment. Death was power. Power. The strength to stuff accusations back down the throats of those who accused her. Are you not evil? Shedding the tears which had dogged her all her life and would never stop, never be forgiven, she began thrusting sheets of tissue one by one into her mother's mouth.

“At least that made her look at me.” Covenant was a blur across her sight; but she felt him aching at her as if he were being broken by her words. 'She tried to stop me. But she didn't have the strength. She couldn't lift her own weight enough to stop me.

“Then it was over. I didn't have to breathe that stench anymore.” She was no longer trembling. Something inside her had parted. “When I was sure, I went on as if I'd already planned exactly what I was going to do. I took the tissues out of her mouth-flushed them down the toilet. I put the oxygen tubes back in her nose. Then I went and told the nurses I thought my mother had stopped breathing.”

The deck canted under her feet; she almost fell. But then Starfare's Gem righted itself, righted her. Her eyes felt as livid as the fire which spilled from her right shoulder, etching the nerves until it vanished into the numbness beyond her elbow. Now Covenant's emanations were so poignant that she could not be blind to them. He regarded her in stricken recognition, as if he and the Giantship were cripples together. Through her tears, she saw that even his leprosy and venom were precious to her. They were the flaws, the needs, that made him honest and desirable. He wanted to cry out to her-or against her, she did not know which. But she was not finished.

'I gave her what she wanted. God Himself couldn't do anything except let her suffer, but I gave her what she wanted.

“It was evil.”

He started to protest as if he felt more grief than she had ever allowed herself. She cut him off.

'That's why I didn't want to believe in evil. I didn't want to have to look at myself that way. And I didn't want to know your secrets because I didn't want to tell you mine.

“But it's true. I took away her life. I took away the chance that she might find her own answer. The chance that a miracle might happen. I took away her humanity.” She would never be finished with it. There was no expiation in all the world for what she had done. “Because of me, the last thing she felt in her life was terror.”

“No.” Covenant had been trying to stop her. “Linden. Don't. Don't blame yourself like this,” He was gaunt with dismay. Every line of his form was an appeal to her across the stone of the deck. “You were just a kid. You didn't know what else to do. You're not the only one. We all have Lord Foul inside us.” He radiated a leper's yearning for the wounded and the bereft. “And you saved me. You saved us all.”

She shook her head. 'I possessed you. You saved yourself. He had let the Elohim bereave him of mind and will until all that remained was the abject and unsupportable litany of his illness. He had accepted even that burden in the name of his commitment to the Land, his determination to battle the

Despiser. And she had surrendered herself entirely, braved the worst horrors of her past, to bring him