Shortly thereafter, Covenant had been drawn to the Land for the first time. His devotion to Lord Foul’s defeat had finally cost him his life. Nevertheless he, too, had not failed.
So where, Linden had to ask herself, was the old man now?
If Roger’s intentions threatened the Land in some way, surely that ragged figure must be somewhere nearby? And if he did not appear to forewarn her, surely Roger could not be as dangerous as she feared?
Deliberately she chose to believe that. Roger might well attempt to take his mother. But as long as the old man did not accost Linden, the Land was safe-and neither she nor Jeremiah were truly at risk.
Pulling a couple of paper towels from their dispenser by the sink, she dried her face and hands. Then she returned to her office to call Megan again, as she had promised.
When she had done that, she warned her staff to call Security as well as her if Roger put in another appearance. But she could think of no other precautions to take.
If the old man appeared, she would have to choose between the Land and Jeremiah. She could not challenge Lord Foul in the Land’s defence without abandoning her son; and
Driving home after work, she involuntarily scrutinised every face she saw, every figure she passed. Anxiety daubed her peripheral vision with ochre, added years and desuetude to every man whom she failed to recognise. Yet she saw no sign of peril.
And soon she reached her home: a small two-story wooden-frame house she had bought when she had decided to adopt Jeremiah. Parked in her short driveway, she remained in her car for a few minutes, granting herself that brief opportunity to set aside her concerns in order to concentrate on her son.
The gratitude that she so often felt when she came home helped settle her attention. She did not have to care for her house herself. A neighbour whose son she had treated after a crumpling car wreck tended the lawn for her. The family of a woman who had been one of her early successes at Berenford Memorial supplied her with maintenance, patching her roof when it leaked, conditioning her heat pump for the changing seasons, repainting her walls every few years. And twice a week an appreciative wife came in to clean, cook, and do laundry: simple thanks for Linden’s attention to her disturbed husband.
Linden valued the help. It simplified her life enormously. And she was grateful that she lived in a community that honoured what she did.
In addition, her gratitude for Jeremiah was too great to be contained in words. He was the centre of her life. He gave her a use for the capacity for love which she had learned from Covenant; from Sunder and Hollian, the First and Pitchwife; and from the Land. His mere presence seemed to validate her. He was like a flower which had bloomed within her, fragile and inestimable. She could not have removed it, or turned away, without tearing herself open. The fact that its petals had been crushed in the Despiser’s fist, and had never regained their natural shape and scent, only caused her to cherish him more. As long as he remained to her, she would never entirely lose heart.
Thomas Covenant had told her that some decisions could not serve evil, no matter how severely they appeared to harm the Land. When he had been summoned to Revelstone’s last defence, he had refused to comply: not because he had no love for the Land, but rather because a little girl in his present world had been bitten by a rattlesnake and needed his help. That refusal had delayed his arrival in the Land by many days. And during those terrible days many of the Land’s most valiant champions had fallen. Yet the conditions of the delay had enabled him to challenge Lord Foul in ways which might never have been possible otherwise. In the end, Covenant’s rejection of the Land for the sake of a little girl had provided for the Despiser’s defeat.
Fervently Linden prayed that Covenant’s promise would hold true for her as well.
With that, she left her car, climbed the steps to the front porch, and let herself into her home.
The door admitted her to Jeremiah’s domain; and at once she had to duck her head. During her absence, the short hallway which joined the living room on one side, the dining room on the other, and the stairway to the second floor had been transformed into the site of a high, ramified castle of Tinker Toys.
Turrets of wooden rods and circular connectors rose above her on both sides. If she had not ducked, she would have struck her head on the flying rampart stretched between them. Other ramparts linked the turrets to a central keep: more turrets proliferated beyond it. The whole edifice was at once enormously elaborate, thick with details like balconies and bartisans, and perfectly symmetrical, balanced in all its parts. Its strangeness in her entryway, a pedestrian place intended for the most ordinary use, gave it an eldritch quality, almost an evanescence, as though some faery castle had been half translated from its own magical realm, and could be discerned by its outlines in slim rods and wheels like a glimpse into another dimension of being. Seen by moonlight, blurred and indistinct, it would have seemed the stuff of dreams.
As perhaps it was. Jeremiah’s dreams-like his mind itself-lay beyond her reach. Only such castles and his other constructs gave her any hint of the visions which filled his head, defined his secret life.
“Sandy?” she called. “Jeremiah? I’m home.”
“Hi,” Sandy answered. “We’re in the living room.
“Jeremiah,” she added, “your mother’s home.”
One of the things that Linden appreciated most about Sandy was that she consistently treated Jeremiah as if he were paying attention.
Smiling, Linden worked her way between the turrets to the living room.
Sandy put down her knitting as Linden entered. “Hi,” she said again. “We were going to put the Lego away, but I wanted you to see what he made.” She gestured around the room, pleased by what her charge had accomplished.
Linden was accustomed to Jeremiah’s projects. Nevertheless this time she stopped and stared, stricken with shock. At first she could not grasp the import of what she saw.
Sandy sat in an armchair in one corner of the room. Opposite her, Jeremiah knelt on the floor as he usually did when he was not busy, feet splayed out on either side of him, arms across his stomach with both hands folded under them, gently rocking.
And between them-
From the floor up onto an ottoman in the middle of the rug, he had built a mountain of interlocking Lego. Despite the stubbornly rectangular shape of the Lego, and their uncompromising primary colours, his construct was unmistakably a mountain, ragged ravines cut into its sides and foothills, bluffs bulging. Yet it also resembled a titan kneeling at the edge of the ottoman with its elbows braced on the ottoman’s surface and its crown raised defiantly to the sky. A canyon widened between its legs as its calves receded into the floor. The whole structure stood almost to the level of Linden’s shoulders.
The mountain or titan faced the sofa; and there Jeremiah had been at work as well. He had adjusted one of the seat cushions so that its corner jutted outward; and out onto the floor from that corner as from a promontory he had devised another castle. However, this one was entirely unlike his towering, airy construct in the entryway. Instead it resembled a wedge like an extension of the cushion’s corner-a wedge which had been hollowed out rather than built up for habitation. Its high walls were marked with tiny windows, clever ramparts, and delicate battlements, so lifelike in spite of the materials from which they had been formed that they might have been limned from memory. And at the tip of the wedge stood a sturdy watchtower, nearly half the height of the wedge itself, connected to the main castle by a walled, open courtyard. In the base of the tower, and again in the base of the high keep, he had built entrances like tunnels, guarded by gates that closed like teeth.
“Jeremiah,” Linden gasped involuntarily, “oh, Jeremiah,” while all her fears rebounded through her, and her heart laboured in her throat as if she might choke.
She had seen such shapes before. She recognised them, even though they had been constructed of bright plastic, all flat sides and right angles. The resemblance was too exact for confusion. The mountain was Mount Thunder, ancient Gravin Threndor, its bowels full of Wightwarrens and buried evil. And the castle was Revelstone beyond question, Lord’s Keep, delved from the gutrock of its mountain promontory by Giants millennia before she had known it during her time with Thomas Covenant.
She had seen them, but Jeremiah had not: never in his life. He had not accompanied her to the Land after Covenant’s murder.
