The Runes of the Earth

At last he said, “You have a son.” His voice was a forlorn sigh, filled with decades of bereavement and suffering. “His birthright has been torn from him. Mine I have lost. I am not worthy of protection. I live only because I am the Land’s last hope.

“Ask your questions. I will attempt to answer.”

Oh, Anele. His reply caught at Linden’s heart. The last hope? Was that possible?

What had happened to him? How had he been so badly damaged?

Still striving for caution, she asked in a musing tone, “‘Kevin’s Dirt.’ Why is it called that?”

He leaned his head to the other side and looked around, apparently searching for an explanation. “These stones do not know,” he replied gruffly. “Kevin Landwaster they know, the last of the Old Lords. The Ritual of Desecration is written within them. But Kevin’s Dirt is a human name. It is too recent to be discerned here.”

Linden did not understand. She was too tired; and the mounting ache of her many bruises confused her. She, too, had known the High Lord. Kevin’s shade had accosted her in Andelain, trying to persuade her to turn against Thomas Covenant. The dead Lord had believed that Covenant’s intentions would damn the Land.

His tormented spirit had been difficult to refuse. He was familiar with despair; as familiar as Linden herself. Yet in the end she had set her doubts aside to join Covenant against the Despiser.

Kevin’s Dirt. It was not a good omen that Lord Foul’s blinding shroud had been named for the man who had helped perform the Ritual of Desecration.

While Linden tried to comprehend Anele’s response, the old man continued to study the shattered rocks blindly. After a while, he asked, “Are you content? I must not remain here. They will discover me.”

She made an attempt to go on. “How long-” But her throat closed, choked by auguries and dust. She had to swallow several times before she could ask, “How long has the Dirt been up there?”

Her companion shrugged. “Twenty-five score years? Fifty score? The bones of the Earth do not regard such details.”

“And these caesures? ” she pursued. “Have they been around that long?”

He shook his head. “I read nothing certainly. It appears that they have hunted the Land for perhaps five score years. No more than that, I judge.”

“And you?” Linden asked. “How old are you?”

Anele sagged as though her question diminished him. “The stones do not know.” An undercurrent of bitterness ran beneath the surface of his tone. “I also am too recent. And I cannot answer you. My recall is disturbed. Have my parents perished? Did I receive my birthright from their failing hands?” He sighed again. “I am uncertain.”

The more he spoke, the more confused he seemed.

“But you said the caesures hunt for you,” she objected. “If they’ve been around for a hundred years, they must have appeared before you were born. You aren’t that old.”

“Did I? It may be that I did” By degrees, his bitterness lapsed into mourning. “My mind wanders betimes.

“Certainly they did not threaten the Land when I was born.” His head fell further to the side as if he lacked the strength to hold it up. “Yet I cannot be so aged. I have been harried beyond endurance, lost and alone, footsore and battered and hungry to the marrow of my bones. It is not possible that I have lived so long. My flesh could not have borne it.”

Softly he finished, “The caesures do not desire me. I am scant threat to the Grey Slayer. Yet I fear them utterly. If they take me, I am doomed and damned.”

As Anele spoke, Linden’s frustration grew. He had been born before the caesures began, yet they were older? Impossible. Clearly she could not trust his apparent sanity. His mind existed in fragments dissociated from each other, and he had lost the ability to combine them into a coherent whole.

Pausing to gather her resolve, she gazed around at the rocks and hillsides. If or when someone came to investigate the collapse of Kevin’s Watch, she did not want to be taken by surprise. Then she returned her attention to Anele.

“What do they do,” she asked, “these caesures? “

“They sever,” he answered. “Dislocate. I cannot name it. Five score years is too short a time. These stones do not speak of it plainly.”

Sever? Dislocate? Vexation tugged at her restraint. With an effort, she fought it down. “The stones speak to you? You can read them?”

In spite of Kevin’s Dirt? Did his inherent Earthpower give him that discernment?

He turned to face her squarely. His white eyes regarded her like closed shutters, concealing the strange rooms of his mind. “Look about you,” he said with a touch of his former impatience. “The truth is visible here.”

Ah, visible, she groaned to herself. To him, perhaps: not to her. In crucial ways, she was as blind as her companion. And she felt so weak-She had eaten nothing for several hours; drunk nothing. And since then she had been stretched to her limits.

She only continued questioning Anele because she could not imagine where she might find food or water.

“All right,” she murmured. “You already know I can’t see whatever is in the rocks. She had never been a woman who could read stone. “Never mind that. Earlier you said the Law of Death was broken. And the Law of Life. What did you mean?”

“Only what all folk know.” His air of impatience grew as he answered: he may have felt as frustrated as she did. As if he were reciting part of a liturgy, he intoned, “High Lord Elena wrested Kevin Landwaster from beyond death. She drank the Blood of the Earth and coerced him with the Power of Command. Thus was the boundary which distinguishes the end of life made fragile. In her folly, she violated the Law of Death.”

Linden had heard such things from Thomas Covenant.

But then Anele faltered. “The Law of Life-” For a moment, he fell silent, angrily slapping the top of his head with both hands. Next he rubbed his face roughly. “Do I read or remember? Nothing is certain, nothing sure. Have I heard a tale? Do the stones remember?” His impatience vanished, engulfed in sorrow. “The fault is mine. All this”-he gestured wildly around him-”Kevin’s Dirt and caesures, the Masters and the dread fire of the skurj. All the Land’s pain. The fault is mine.”

Shaken by his distress, Linden reached out to comfort him; but he struck her hand aside.

God help me, she thought. Protect me from people who punish themselves. She had spent far too much of her own life doing the same.

Sadly she said again, “All right. Never mind. I can live without knowing that. Just tell me what the Law of Life is.”

She already knew the answer. She only wanted to keep him talking while she groped for courage.

“It is hope and cruelty,” he replied like a tocsin, “redemption and ruin. It is the boundary which distinguishes the end of death.”

She had been in Andelain when Sunder and the last Forestal had brought Hollian back to life-and with Hollian her unborn child.

Surely thousands of years had passed since that fraught night? It had nothing to do with Anele. It could not. Nor could Linden imagine that it pertained to her dilemma now.

By its very nature, the new Staff of Law that she had fashioned should have stabilised the disturbed boundaries between life and death. And its wielders-Sunder, Hollian, and their descendants-would have wished to restore the Land’s essential health. Surely their use of the Staff would have healed the strictures which separated the living from the dead long ago?

Such evils as Kevin’s Dirt and caesures should not have been able to exist in the presence of the Staff of Law. Had her efforts for the Land accomplished nothing?

Everything Anele said carried her farther and farther from sanity.

Roughly she demanded, “And you had something to do with it? It’s your `fault’?”

In response, he clutched for the sides of her face. His hands shook feverishly. “Gaze about you!” he cried. “Consider the stones!” His eyes burned as if he had gone blind with terror and abhorrence. “Do not torment me so.”

Trying to ease him, Linden softened her tone. “Does the Law of Life have anything to do with your