Seventeen: The Spoiled Plains

BANNOR recovered more quickly than Foamfollower. In spite of his advancing age, the toughness of the Haruchai was still in him; after Covenant had chafed his wrists and neck for a moment, he shrugged off his unconsciousness and became almost instantly alert. He met Covenant’s teary gaze with characteristic dispassion, and together they went to do what they could for the Giant.

Foamfollower lay moaning on the ground in a fever of revulsion. Spasms bared his teeth, and his massive hands thrashed erratically against his chest as if he were trying to smite some fatal spot of wrong in himself. He seemed in danger of harming himself. So Bannor sat on the ground at the Giant’s head, braced his feet on Foamfollower’s shoulders, and caught his flailing arms by the wrists. Banner held the Giant’s arms still while Covenant sat on Foamfollower’s chest and slapped his snarling face.

After a moment of resistance, Foamfollower let out a roar. Wrenching savagely, he heaved Bannor over Covenant’s head, knocked the Unbeliever off his chest, and lurched panting to his feet.

Covenant retreated from the threat of Foamfollower’s fists. But as the Giant blinked and panted, he recovered himself, recognized his friends. “Covenant?” he gritted, “Bannor?” as if he feared they were Ravers.

“Foamfollower,” Covenant responded thickly. Tears of relief streamed down his gaunt cheeks. “You’re all right.”

Slowly, Foamfollower relaxed as he saw that his friends were unmastered and whole. “Stone and Sea!” he gasped weakly, shuddering as he breathed. “Ah! My friends—have I harmed you?”

Covenant could not answer; he was choked with fresh weeping. He stood where he was and let Foamfollower watch his tears; he had no other way to tell the Giant how he felt. After a moment, Bannor replied for him, “We are well—as well as may be. You have done us no injury.”

“And the—the spectre of High Lord Elena? The Staff of Law? How is it that we yet live?”

“Gone.” Covenant fought to control himself. “Destroyed.”

Foamfollower’s face was full of sympathy. “Ah, no, my friend,” he sighed. “She is not destroyed. The dead cannot be destroyed.”

“I know. I know that.” Covenant gritted his teeth, hugged his chest, until he passed the crest of his emotion. Then it began to subside, and he regained some measure of steadiness. “She’s just dead—dead again. But the Staff—it was destroyed. By wild magic.” Half fearing the reaction of his friends to this information, he added, “I didn’t do it. It wasn’t my doing. She—” He faltered. He had heard Mhoram say, You are the white gold. How could he be sure now what was or was not his doing?

But his revelation only drew a strange glint from Banner’s flat eyes. The Haruchai had always considered weapons unnecessary, even corruptive. Bannor found satisfaction rather than regret in the passing of the Staff. And Foamfollower shrugged the explanation aside, as if it were unimportant compared to his friend’s distress. “Ah, Covenant, Covenant,” he groaned. “How can you endure? Who can withstand such things?”

” I'm a leper,” Covenant responded. He was surprised to hear himself say the word without bitterness. “I can stand anything. Because I can’t feel it.” He gestured with his diseased hands because his tears so obviously contradicted him. “This is a dream. It can’t touch me. I’m”—he grimaced, remembering the belief which had first led Elena to break the Law of Death—“numb.”

Answering tears blurred Foamfollower’s cavernous eyes. “And you are very brave,” he said in a thick voice. “You are beyond me.”

The Giant’s grief almost reopened Covenant’s weeping. But he steadied himself by thinking of the questions he would have to ask, the things he would have to say. He wanted to smile for Foamfollower, but his cheeks were too stiff. Then he felt he had been caught in the act of a perennial failure, a habitual inadequacy of response. He was relieved to turn away when Banner called their attention to the weather.

Bannor made him aware of the absence of wind. In his struggle with Elena, he had hardly noticed the change. But now he could feel the stillness of the atmosphere like a palpable healing. For a time, at least, Lord Foul’s gelid frenzy was gone. And without the wind to drive it, the grey cloud-cover hung sullen and empty overhead, like a casket without a corpse.

As a result, the air felt warmer. Covenant half expected to see dampness on the ground as the hard earth thawed, half expected spring to begin on the spot. In the gentle stillness, the sound of the waterfall reached him clearly.

Banner’s perceptions went further; he sensed something Covenant had missed. After a moment, he took Covenant and Foamfollower to the Colossus to show them what he had found.

From the obsidian monolith came a soft emanation of heat.

This warmth held the true promise of spring; it smelled of buds and green grass, of aliantha and moss and forest-loam. Under its influence, Covenant found that he could relax. He put aside misery, fear, unresolved need, and sank down gratefully to sit with his back against the soothing stone.

Foamfollower hunted around the area until he located the sack of provisions he had carried with him from the Ramen covert. He took out food and his pot of graveling. Together, he, Bannor, and Covenant ate a silent meal under the fist of the Colossus as if they were sharing a communion—as if they accepted the stone’s warmth and shelter to do it honour. They had no other way to express their thanks.

Covenant was hungry; he had had nothing but Demondim-drink to sustain him for days. Yet he ate the food, absorbed the warmth, with a strange humility, as if he had not earned them, did not deserve them. He knew in his heart that the destruction of the Staff purchased nothing more than a brief respite for the Land, a short delay in the Despiser’s eventual triumph. And that respite was not his doing. The reflex which had triggered the white gold was surely as unconscious, as involuntary, as if it had happened in his sleep. And yet another life had been spent on his account. That knowledge humbled him. He fed and warmed himself because all his work had yet to be done, and no other being in the Land could do it for him.

When the frugal meal was finished, he began his task by asking his companions how they had come to the Colossus.

Foamfollower winced at the memory. He left the telling of it to Banner’s terseness. While Banner spoke, the Giant cleaned and tended Covenant’s forehead.

In short sentences, Banner indicated that the Ramen had been able to defeat the attack on their covert, thanks to the Giant’s prodigious aid. But the battle had been a long and costly one, and the night was gone before Bannor and Foamfollower could begin to search for Covenant and Lena. (”Ur-viles!” Foamfollower muttered at Covenant’s injury. ‘ “This will not heal. To make you captive, they put their mark upon you.”) The Manethralls permitted only two Cords, Whane and Lal, to aid in the search. For during the night, a change had come over the Ranyhyn. To the surprise and joy of the Ramen, the great horses had unexpectedly started south toward the sanctuary of the mountains. The Ramen followed at once. Only their mixed awe and concern for the Ringthane induced them to give Bannor and Foamfollower any aid at all.

So the four of them began the hunt. But they had lost too much time; wind and snow had obscured the trail. They lost it south of the Roamsedge and could find no trace of Covenant. At last they concluded that he must have gained other aid to take him eastward. Together the four made what haste they could toward the Fall of the River Landrider.

The journey was made slow and arduous by kresh packs and marauders, and the four feared that Covenant would have left the Upper Land days ago. But when they neared the Colossus, they came upon a band of ur-viles accompanied by the Raver, Herem-Triock. Then the four were dismayed to see that the band bore with it the Unbeliever, prostrate as if he were dead.

The four attacked, slew the ur-viles. But they could not prevent the call which Herem sent. And before they could defeat Herem, rescue Covenant, and retrieve the ring, that call was answered by the dead Elena, wielding the Staff of Law. She mastered the four effortlessly. Then she gave Whane to Herem, so that Triock’s anguish would be more poignant. When Jehannum came to her, that Raver entered Lal. Covenant knew the rest.

Bannor and Foamfollower had seen no sign of Lena. They did not know what had delayed Covenant’s arrival at Landsdrop.

As Bannor finished, Foamfollower growled in angry disgust, “Stone and Sea! She has made me unclean. I must bathe—I will need a sea to wash away this coercion.”

Bannor nodded. “I, also.”

But neither of them moved, though the River Landrider was nearby beyond a low line of hills. Covenant knew they were holding themselves at his disposal; they seemed to sense that he needed them. And they had questions of their own. But he felt unready for the things he would have to say. After a silence, he asked painfully,’ Triock summoned me—and he’s dead. Why am I still here?”

Foamfollower mused briefly, then said, “Perhaps because the Law of Death has been broken—perhaps it was that Law which formerly sent you from the Land when your summoner died. Or perhaps it is because I also had a hand in this call.”

Yes, Covenant sighed to himself. His debt to Triock was hardly less than what he owed Foamfollower.

He could not shirk the responsibility any longer; he forced himself to describe what had happened to Lena.

His voice was dull as he spoke of her—an old woman brought to a bloody and graveless end because in her confusion she clung to the man who had harmed her. And her death was only the most recent tragedy in her family. First and last, her people had borne the brunt of him: Trell Gravelingas, Atiaran Trell-mate, High Lord Elena, Lena herself—he had ruined them all. Such things altered him, made a different man of him. That made it possible for him to ask another question after he had told all he knew of his own tale.

“Foamfollower”—he framed his inquiry as carefully as he could—“it’s none of my business. But Pietten said some terrible things about you. Or he meant them to be terrible. He said—” But he could not say the words. No matter how he uttered them, they would sound like an accusation.

The Giant sighed, and his whole frame sagged. He studied his intertwined hands as if somewhere in their clasped gentleness and butchery were a secret he could not unclose, but he no longer evaded the question. “He said that I betrayed my kinfolk—that the Giants of Seareach died to the last child at the hands of turiya Raver because I abandoned them. It is true.”

Foamfollower! Covenant moaned. My friend! Sorrow welled up in him, almost made him weep again.

Abstractedly, Bannor said, “Many things were lost in The Grieve that day.”

” Yes.” Foamfollower blinked as if he were trying to hold back tears, but his eyes were dry, as parched as a wilderland. “Yes—many things. Among them I was the least.

“Ah, Covenant, how can I tell you of it? This tongue has no words long enough for the tale. No word can encompass the love for a lost homeland, or the anguish of diminishing seed, or the pride—the pride in fidelity—That fidelity was our only reply to our extinction. We could not have borne our decline if we had not taken pride.

“So my people—the Giants—I also, in my own way—the Giants were filled with horror—with abhorrence so deep that it numbed the very marrow of their bones—when they saw their pride riven—torn from them like rotten sails in the wind. They foundered at the sight. They saw the portent of their hope of Home—the three brothers—changed from fidelity to the most potent ill by one small stroke of the Despiser’s evil. Who in the Land could hope to stand against a Giant-Raver? Thus the Unhomed became the means to destroy that to which they had held themselves true. And in horror at the naught of their fidelity, their folly practiced through long centuries of pride, they were transfixed. Their revulsion left no room in them for thought or resistance or choice. Rather than behold the cost of their failure—rather than risk the chance that more of them would be made Soulcrusher’s servants—they—they elected to be slain.

“I also—in my way, I was horrified as well. But I had already seen what they had not, until that moment. I had seen myself become what I hated. Alone of all my kindred, I was not surprised. It was not the vision of a Giant-Raver which horrified me. It was my—my own people.

“Ah! Stone and Sea! They appalled me. I stormed at them—I ran through The Grieve like a dark sea of madness, howling at their abandonment, raging to strike one spark of resistance in the drenched tinder of their hearts. But they—they put away their tools, and banked their fires, and made ready their homes as if in preparation for departure—” Abruptly, his suppressed passion broke into a cry. “My people! I could not bear it! I fled them with abjection crowding at my heart—fled them lest I, too, should fall into their dismay. Therefore they were slain. I who might have fought the Raver deserted them in the deepest blackness of their need.” Unable to contain himself any longer, he heaved to his feet. His raw, scourged voice rasped thickly in his throat. “I am unclean. I must—wash.”

Holding himself stiffly upright, he turned and lumbered away toward the river.

The helplessness of Covenant’s pain came out as anger. His own voice shook as he muttered to Banner, “If you say one word to blame him, I swear—“

Then he stopped himself. He had accused Bannor unjustly too often in the past; the Bloodguard had long ago earned better treatment than this from him. But Bannor only shrugged. “I am a Haruchai, ” he said. “We also are not immune. Corruption wears many faces. Blame is a more enticing face than others, but it is none the less a mask for the Despiser.”

His speech made Covenant look at him closely. Something came up between them that had never been laid to rest, neither on Gallows Howe nor in the Ramen covert. It wore the aspect of habitual Bloodguard distrust, but as he met Banner’s eyes, Covenant sensed that the issue was a larger one.

Without inflection, Bannor went on: “Hate and vengeance are also masks.”

Covenant was struck by how much the Bloodguard had aged. His mortality had accelerated. His hair was the same silver as his eyebrows; his skin had a sere appearance, as if it had started to wither; and his wrinkles looked oddly fatal, like gullies of death in his countenance. Yet his steady dispassion seemed as complete as ever. He did not look like a man who had deserted his sworn loyalty to the Lords.

“Ur-Lord,” he said evenly, “what will you do?”

“Do?” Covenant did his best to match the Bloodguard, though he could not look at Banner’s aging without remorse. “I still have work to do. I’ve got to go to Foul’s Creche.”

“For what purpose?”

“I’ve got to stop him.”

“High Lord Elena also strove to stop him. You have seen the outcome.”

“Yes.” Covenant did full justice to Banner’s statement. But he did not falter. “I’ve got to find a better answer than she did.”

“Do you make this choice out of hate?”

He met the question squarely. “I don’t know.”

“Then why do you go?”

“Because I must.” That must carried the weight of an irrefusable necessity. The escape he had envisioned when he had left Morinmoss did not suffice. The Land’s need held him like a harness. “I’ve done so many things wrong. I’ve got to try to make them right.”

Bannor considered this for a moment, then asked bluntly, “Do you know then how to make use of the wild magic?”

“No,” Covenant answered. “Yes.” He hesitated, not because he doubted his reply, but because he was reluctant to say it aloud. But his sense of what was unresolved between him and Bannor had become clearer; something more than distrust was at stake. “I don’t know how to call it up, do anything with it. But I know how to trigger it.” He remembered vividly how Bannor had compelled him to help High Lord Prothall summon the Fire-Lions of Mount Thunder. “If I can get to the Illearth Stone—I can do something.”

The Bloodguard’s voice was hard. “The Stone corrupts.”

“I know.” He understood Banner’s point vividly. “I know. That’s why I have to get to it. That’s what this is all about—everything. That’s why Foul has been manipulating me. That’s why Elena—why Elena did what she did. That’s why Mhoram trusted me.”

Bannor did not relent. “Will it be another Desecration?”

Covenant had to steady himself before he could reply. “I hope not. I don’t want it to be.”

In answer, the Bloodguard got to his feet. Looking soberly down at the Unbeliever, he said, “Ur-Lord Covenant, I will not accompany you for this purpose.”

“Not?” Covenant protested. In the back of his mind, he had been counting on Banner’s companionship.

“No. I no longer serve Lords.”

More harshly than he intended, Covenant rasped, “So you’ve decided to turn your back?”

“No.” Bannor denied the charge flatly. “What help I can, I will give. All the Bloodguard knowledge of the Spoiled Plains, of Kurash Qwellinir and Hotash Slay, I will share with you. But Ridjeck Thome, Corruption’s seat—there I will not go. The deepest wish of the Bloodguard was to fight the Despiser in his home, pure service against Corruption. This desire misled. I have put aside such things. My proper place now is with the Ranyhyn and their Ramen, in the exile of the mountains.”

Covenant seemed to hear an anguish behind the inflectionless tone of the speech—an anguish that hurt him in the same way that this man always hurt him. “Ah, Bannor,” he sighed. “Are you so ashamed of what you were?”

Bannor cocked a white eyebrow at the question, as if it came close to the truth. “I am not shamed,” he said distinctly. “But I am saddened that so many centuries were required to teach us the limits of our worth. We went too far, in pride and folly. Mortal men should not give up wives and sleep and death for any service —lest the face of failure become too abhorrent to be endured.” He paused almost as if he were hesitating, then concluded, “Have you forgotten that High Lord Elena carved our faces as one in her last marrowmeld work?”

“No.” Bannor had moved him. His response was both an assertion and a promise. “I will never forget.”

Bannor nodded slowly. Then he said, “I, too, must wash,” and strode away toward the river without a backward glance.

Covenant watched him go for a moment, then leaned his head back against the warmth of the Colossus and closed his sore eyes. He knew that he should not delay his departure any longer, that he increased his risks every moment he remained where he was. Lord Foul was certain to know what had happened; he would feel the sudden destruction of the Staff, and would search until he found the explanation, perhaps by compelling Elena once more out of her death to answer his questions. Then preparations would be made against the Unbeliever; Foul’s Creche would be defended; hunting parties would be sent out. Any delay might mean defeat.

But Covenant was not ready. He still had one more confession to make—the last and hardest thing he would have to tell his friends. So he sat absorbing the heat of the Colossus like sustenance while he waited for Bannor and Foamfollower to return. He did not want to carry the weight of any more dishonesty with him when he left the place where Triock had died.

Bannor was not gone long. He and Foamfollower returned dripping to dry themselves in the heat of the stone. Foamfollower had regained his composure. His teeth flashed through his stiff wet beard as if he were eager to be on his way—as if he were ready to fight his way through a sea of foes for one chance to strike a blow at the Despiser. And Bannor stood dourly at the Giant’s side. They were equals, despite the difference in size. They both met Covenant’s gaze when he looked up at them. For an odd moment he felt torn between them, as if they represented the opposing poles of his dilemma.

But odder than this torn feeling was the confidence which came with it. In that fleeting moment, he seemed to recognize where he stood for the first time. While the impression lasted, his fear or reluctance or uncertainty dropped from him.’ “There’s one more thing,” he said to both his friends at once, “one more thing I’ve got to tell you.”

Then, because he did not want to see their reactions until he had given them the whole tale, he sat gazing into the lifeless circle of his ring while he described how High Lord Mhoram had summoned him to Revelstone, and how he had refused.

He spoke as concisely as he could without minimizing the plight of Revelstone as he had seen it then, or the danger of the little girl for whom he had denied Mhoram’s appeal, or the hysteria which had been on him when he had made his choice. He found as he spoke that he did not regret the decision. It seemed to have nothing to do with either his regret or his volition; he simply could not have chosen otherwise. But the Land had many reasons for regret—a myriad reasons, one for every life which had been lost, one for every day which had been added to the winter, because he had not given himself and his ring into Mhoram’s hands. He explained what he had done so that Bannor and Foamfollower at least would not be able to reproach him for dishonesty.

When he was done, he looked up again. Neither Bannor nor Foamfollower met his eyes at first; in their separate ways, they appeared upset by what they had heard. But finally Bannor returned Covenant’s gaze and said levelly, “A costly choice, Unbeliever. Costly. Much harm might have been averted—“

Foamfollower interrupted him. “Costly! Might!” A fierce grin stretched his lips, echoed out of his deep eyes. “A child was saved! Covenant—my friend—even reduced as I am, I can hear joy in such a choice. Your bravery—Stone and Sea! It astounds me.”

Bannor was not swayed. “Call it bravery, then. It is costly nonetheless. The Land will bleed under the expense for many years, whatever the outcome of your purpose in Foul’s Creche.”

Once again, Covenant was forced to say, ”I know.” He knew with a vividness that felt terrible to him. “I couldn’t do anything else. And—and I wasn’t ready then. I’m ready now—readier.” I’ll never be ready, he thought. It’s impossible to be ready for this. “Maybe I can do something now that I couldn’t do then.”

Bannor held his eyes for another moment, then nodded brusquely. “Will you go now?” he asked without expression. “Corruption will be a hunt for you.”

Covenant sighed, and pushed himself to his feet. “Yes.” He did not want to leave the comfort of the Colossus. “Ready or not. Let’s get on with it.”

He walked between Bannor and Foamfollower, and they took him up the last of the hills to a place where he could look down the cliff of Landsdrop to the Spoiled Plains.

The precipice seemed to leap out from behind the hill as if it had been hiding in ambush for Covenant—abruptly, he found himself looking over the edge and down two thousand feet—but he gripped the arms of his friends on either side and breathed deeply to hold back his vertigo. After a moment, the suddenness of the view faded, and he began to notice details.

At the base of the hill on his right, the River Landrider swooped downward in a final rush to pour heavily over the lip of Landsdrop. The tumult of its roar was complex. In this region, the cliff broke into four or five ragged stairs, so that the waterfall went down by steps, all pounding simultaneously, anharmonically. From the bottom of the Fall, it angled away south-eastward into the perpetual wasteland of the Spoiled Plains.

“There,” said Bannor, “there begins its ordeal. There the Landrider becomes the Ruinwash, and flows polluted toward the Sea. It is a murky and repelling water, unfit for use by any but its own unfit denizens. But it is your way for a time. It will provide a path for you through much of these hazardous Plains. And it will place you south of Kurash Qwellinir.

“You know”—he nodded to Foamfollower—“that the Spoiled Plains form a wide deadland around the promontory of Ridjeck Thome, where Foul’s Creche juts into the Sea. Within that deadland lies Kurash Qwellinir, the Shattered Hills. Some say that these Hills were formed by the breaking of a mountain—others, that they were shaped from the slag and refuse of Corruption’s war caverns, furnaces, breeding dens. However they were made, they are a maze to bewilder the approach of any foe. And within them lies Gorak Krembal —Hotash Slay. From Sea-cliff to Sea-cliff about the promontory, it defends Corruption’s seat with lava, so that none may pass that way to gain the one gateless maw of the

Creche.

“Corruption’s creatures make their way to and from Ridjeck Thome through tunnels which open in secret places among Kurash Qwellinir. But it is in my heart that such an approach will not avail you. I do not doubt that a Giant may find a tunnel within the maze. But on that road all Corruption’s defending armies stand before you. You cannot pass.

“I will tell you of a passage through the Shattered Hills on their southward side. The narrowest point of Hotash Slay is there, where the lava pours through a gash in the cliff into the Sea. A Giant may find crossing in that place.” He spoke as if he were discussing a convenient path among mountains, not an approach to the Corrupter of the Bloodguard. “In that way, it may be that you will take Ridjeck Thome by surprise.”

Foamfollower absorbed this information, and nodded. Then he listened closely while Bannor detailed his route through the maze of Kurash Qwellinir. Covenant tried to listen also, but his attention wandered. He seemed to hear Landsdrop calling to him. Imminent vertigo foiled his concentration. Elena, he breathed to himself. He called her up in his mind, hoping that her image would steady him. But the emerald radiance of her fate made him wince and groan.

No! he averred into the approach of dizziness. It doesn’t have to be that way. It’s my dream. I can do something about it.

Foamfollower and Bannor were looking at him strangely. His fingers gripped them feebly, urgently. He could not take his eyes off the waterfall’s rush. It called him downward like the allure of death.

He took a deep breath. Finger by finger, he forced himself to release his friends. “Let’s get going,” he murmured. “I can’t stand any more waiting.”

The Giant hefted his sack. “I am ready,” he said. “Our supplies are scant—but we have no recourse. We must hope for aliantha on the Lower Land.”

Without looking away from the Fall, Covenant addressed Bannor. He could not ask the Bloodguard to change his decision, so he said, “You’ll bury Triock? He’s earned a decent grave.”

Banner nodded, then said, “I will do another thing also.” He reached one hand into his short robe and drew out the charred metal heels of the Staff of Law. “I will bear these to Revelstone. When the time of my end comes upon me, I will return to the mountain home of the Haruchai. On the way, I will visit Revelstone—if the Lords and Lord’s Keep still stand. I know not what value may remain in this metal, but perhaps the survivors of this war will find some use for it.”

Thank you, Covenant whispered silently.

Banner put the bands away and bowed once briefly to Covenant and Foamfollower. “Look for help wherever you go,” he said. “Even in the Spoiled Plains, Corruption is not entirely master.” Before they could reply, he turned and trotted away toward the Colossus. As he passed over the hilltop, his back told them as clearly as speech that they would never see him again.

Bannor! Covenant groaned. Was it that bad? He felt bereft, deserted, as if half his support had been taken away.

“Gently, my friend,” Foamfollower breathed. “He has turned his back on vengeance. Two thousand years and more of pure service were violated for him—yet he chooses not to avenge them. Such choices are not easily made. They are not easily borne. Retribution—ah, my friend, retribution is the sweetest of all dark sweet dreams.”

Covenant found himself still staring at the waterfall. The complex plunge of the river had a sweetness all its own. He shook himself. “Hellfire.” The emptiness of his curses seemed appropriate to his condition. “Are we going to do it or aren’t we?”

“We will go.” Covenant felt the Giant’s gaze on him without meeting it. “Covenant—ur-Lord—there is no need for you to endure this descent. Close your eyes, and I will bear you as I did from Kevin’s Watch.”

Covenant hardly heard himself answer, ”That was a long time ago.” Vertigo was beginning to reel in his head. “I’ve got to do this for myself. For a moment, he let slip his resistance and almost fell to his knees. As the suction tugged at his mind, he comprehended that he would have to go into it rather than away from it, that the only way to master vertigo was to find its centre. Somewhere in the centre of the spinning would be an eye, a core of stability. “Just go ahead—so you can catch me.” Only in the eye of the whirl could he find solid ground.

Foamfollower regarded him dubiously, then started down to the edge of the cliff near the Fall. With Covenant limping in his wake, he went to the rim, glanced down to pick the best place for a descent, then lowered himself out of sight over the edge.

Covenant stood for a moment teetering on the lip of Landsdrop. The Fall yawed abysmally from side to side; it beckoned to him like relief from delirium. It was such an easy answer. As his vertigo mounted, he did not see how he could refuse it.

But its upsurge made his pulse hammer in his wounded forehead. He spun around that pain as if it were a pivot, and found that the seductive panic of the plunge was fading. The simple hope that vertigo had a firm centre seemed to make his hope come true. The whirl did not stop, but its hold on him receded, withdrew into the background. Slowly, the pounding in his forehead eased.

He did not fall.

He felt as weak as a starving penitent—hardly able to carry his own weight. But he knelt on the edge, lowered his legs over the rim. Clinging to the top of the cliff with his arms and stomach, he began to hunt blindly for footholds. Soon he was crawling backward down Landsdrop as if it were the precipice of his personal future.

The descent took a long time, but it was not particularly difficult. Foamfollower protected him all the way down each stage of the broken cliff. And the steeper drops were moderated by enough ledges and cracks and hardy scrub brush to make that whole stretch of the cliff passable. The Giant had no trouble finding a route Covenant could manage, and Covenant eventually gained a measure of confidence, so that he was able to move with less help down the last stages to the foothills.

When at last he reached the lower ground, he took his drained nerves straight to the pool at the foot of the Fall and dropped into the chill waters to wash away the accumulated sweat of his fear.

While Covenant bathed, Foamfollower filled his water jug and drank deeply at the pool. This might be the last safe water they would find. Then the Giant set out the graveling for Covenant. As the Unbeliever dried himself, he asked Foamfollower how long their food supplies would last.

The Giant grimaced. “Two days. Three or four, if we find aliantha a day or two into the Spoiled Plains. But we are far from Foul’ s Creche. Even if we were to run straight into Soulcrusher’s arms, we would have three or four foodless days within us before he made sustenance unnecessary.” Then he grinned. “But it is said that hunger teaches many things. My friend, a wealth of wisdom awaits us on this journey.”

Covenant shivered. He had had some experience with hunger. And now the possibility of starvation lay ahead of him; his forehead had been reinjured; he would have to walk a long distance on bare feet. One by one the conditions of his return to his own life were being met. As he tightened the sash of his robe, he muttered sourly, “I heard Mhoram say once that wisdom is only skin-deep. Or something like that. Which means that lepers must be the wisest people in the world.”

“Are they?” the Giant asked. “Are you wise, Unbeliever?”

“Who knows? If I am—wisdom is overrated.”

At this, Foamfollower’s grin broadened. “Perhaps it is—perhaps it is. My friend, we are the two wisest hearts in the Land—we who march thus weaponless and unredeemed into the very bosom of the Despiser. Verily, wisdom is like hunger. Perhaps it is a very fine thing—but who would willingly partake of it?”

Despite the absence of the wind, the air was still wintry. Knuckles of ice clenched the rocky borders of the pool where the spray of the Fall had frozen, and Foamfollower’s breath plumed wetly in the humid air. Covenant needed to move to warm himself, keep up his courage. “It’s not fine,” he grated, half to himself. “But it’s useful. Come on.”

Foamfollower repacked his graveling, then swung the sack onto his broad shoulder, and led Covenant away from Landsdrop along the river.

Night stopped them when they had covered only three or four leagues. But by that time they had left behind the foothills and the last vestiges of the un-Spoiled flatland which had at one time, ages ago in the history of the Earth, stretched from the Southron Wastes north to the Sarangrave and Lifeswallower, the Great Swamp. They were down in the bosque of the Ruinwash.

Grey, brittle, dead brush and trees —cottonwoods, junipers, once-beautiful tamarisks —stood up out of the dried mud on both sides of the stream, occupying ground which had once been part of the riverbed. But the Ruinwash had shrunk decades or centuries ago, leaving partially fertile mud on either side—mud in which a scattering of tough trees and brush had eked out a bare existence until Lord Foul’s preternatural winter had blasted them. As darkness soaked into the air as if it were oozing out of the ground, the trees became spectral shapes of forbidding which made the bosque almost impassable. Covenant resigned himself to camping there for the night, though the dried mud had an old, occluded reek, and the river made a slithering noise like an ambush in its course. He knew that he and Foamfollower would be safer if they travelled at night, but he was weary and did not believe the Giant could find his way in the cloud-locked dark.

Later, however, he found that the river gave off a light like lambent verdigris; the whole surface of the water glowed dimly. This light came, not from the water, but from the hot eels which flicked back and forth across the current. They had a hungry aspect, and their jaws were rife with teeth. Yet they made it possible for him and Foamfollower to resume their journey.

Even in the cynosural eel light, they did not go much farther. The destruction of the Staff had changed the balance of Lord Foul’s winter; without the wind to hold them, the massed energies of the clouds recoiled. In the deeper chill of darkness, they triggered rain out of the blind sky. Soon torrents fell through the damaged grasp of the clouds, crashed straight down onto the Lower Land as if the vaulting which held up the heavens had broken. Under those conditions, Foamfollower could not find his way. He and Covenant had no choice but to huddle together for warmth in the mud and try to sleep while they waited.

With the coming of dawn, the rain stopped, and Covenant and Foamfollower went on along the Ruinwash in the blurred light of morning. During that day, they saw the last of the aliantha; as they penetrated into the Spoiled Plains, the mud became too dead for treasure-berries. The travellers kept themselves going on scant shares of their dwindling supplies. At night, the rains came again, soaking them until they seemed to have its dankness in the marrow of their bones.

The next day, an eagle spotted them through a gap in the grey trees. It cycled twice close over their heads, then soared away, screaming in mockery like a voice from the dead, “Foamfollower! Kinabandoner!”

“They’re after us,” said Covenant.

The Giant spat violently. ” Yes. They will hunt us down.” He found a smooth stone the size of Covenant’s two fists and carried it with him to throw at the eagle if it returned.

It did not come back that day, but the next—after another torrential downpour avalanched the Plains as if the cloud lid over the Land were a shattered sea—Lord Foul’s bird circled them twice, morning and afternoon. The first time, it taunted them until Foamfollower had hurled all the stones he could find nearby, then it slashed close to bark scornfully, “Kinabandoner! Groveller!”

The second time, Foamfollower kept one stone hidden. He waited until the eagle had swooped lower to jeer, then threw at it with deadly force. It survived by breaking the blow with its wings, but it flew limping away, barely able to stay aloft.

“Make haste,” Foamfollower growled. “That ill bird has been guiding the pursuit toward us. It is not far off.”

At the best pace Covenant could manage on his numb, battered feet, he pushed ahead through the bosque.

They stayed under tree cover as much as possible to ward against spying birds. This caution slowed them somewhat, but the largest drag on their progress was Covenant’s weariness. His injury and the ordeal of the Colossus appeared to have drained some essential resilience out of him. He got little sleep in the cold wet nights, and he felt that he was slowly starving on his share of the food. In dogged silence he shambled along league after league as if his fear of the hunt were the only thing that kept him moving. And that evening, in the gloaming verdigris of the eel fire, he consumed the last of Foamfollower’s supplies.

“Now what?” he muttered vaguely when he was done.

“We must resign ourselves. There is no more.”

Ah, hell! Covenant groaned to himself. He remembered vividly what had happened to him in the woods behind Haven Farm, when his self-imposed inanition had made him hysterical. The memory filled him with cold dread.

In turn, that dread called up other memories—recollections of his ex-wife, Joan, and his son, Roger. He felt an urge to tell Foamfollower about them, as if they were spirits he could exorcise by simply saying the right thing about them to the right person. But before he could find the words, his thoughts were scattered by the first attack of the hunt.

Without warning, a band of apelike creatures came crashing through the bosque from the south side of the Ruinwash. Voiceless, like the rush of a nightmare, they broke through the brittle wood and the eel light. They threw themselves from the low bank and heaved across the current toward their prey.

Either they did not know their danger, or they had forgotten it. Without one shout or cry, they all vanished under a sudden, hot, seething of blue-green iridescence. None of them reappeared.

At once, Covenant and Foamfollower started on their way again. While the crepuscular light lasted, they put as much distance as possible between themselves and the place of the attack.

A short time later the rain began. It fell on them like the collapse of a mountain, made the whole night impenetrable. They were forced to stop. They hunched together like waifs under the scant, leafless shelter of a tree, trying to sleep and hoping that the hunt could not follow them in this weather.

After a while, Covenant dozed. He was hovering near the true depths of sleep when Foamfollower shook him awake.

“Listen!”

Covenant could hear nothing but the uninterrupted smash of the rain.

The Giant’s ears were keener. “The Ruinwash rises! There will be a flood.”

Straggling like blind men, thrashing their way against unseen trees and brush, slipping through water that already reached above their ankles, they tried to climb out of the bosque toward higher ground. After a long struggle, they worked clear of the old riverbed. But the water continued to mount, and the terrain did not. Now beyond the rain, Covenant could hear the deeper roar of the flood; it seemed to tower above them in the night. He was stumbling knee-deep in muddy water, and could see no way to save himself.

But Foamfollower dragged him onward. Some time later, they waded into an erosion gully. Its walls were slick, and the water poured down through it like flowing silt, but the Giant did not hesitate. He attached Covenant to him with a short clingor line and began to forge up the gully.

Covenant clung to Foamfollower for a distance that seemed as long as leagues. But at last he could feel that they were climbing. The walls of the gully narrowed. Foamfollower used his hands to help him ascend.

When they reached an open hillside where the flow of water hardly covered their feet, they stopped. Covenant sank exhausted into the mud. The rain faltered to an end, and he went numbly to sleep until another cold grey dawn smeared its way across the clouds from the east.

At last he rubbed the caked fatigue out of his eyes and sat up. Foamfollower was gazing at him with amusement. “Ah, Covenant,” the Giant said, “we are a pair. You are so bedraggled and sober—And I fear my own appearance is not improved.” He struck a begrimed pose. “What is your opinion?”

For a moment, Foamfollower looked as gay and carefree as a playing child. The sight gave Covenant a pang. How long had it been since he had heard the Giant laugh? “Wash your face,” he croaked with as much humour as he could manage. “You look ridiculous.”

“You honour me,” Foamfollower returned. But he did not laugh. As his amusement faded, he turned away and splashed a little water on his face to clean it.

Covenant followed his example, though he was too tired to feel dirty. He drank three swallows from the jug for breakfast, then pried himself unsteadily to his feet.

In the distance, he could see a few treetops sticking out of the broad brown swath of the flood. No other signs remained visible to mark the bosque of the Ruinwash.

Opposite the flood, in the direction he and Foamfollower would now have to take, lay a long ridge of hills. They piled in layers above him until they seemed almost as high as mountains, and their scarred sides looked as desolate as if their very roots had been dead for aeons.

He groaned at the prospect. His worn flesh balked. But he had no choice; the lowlands of the Ruinwash were no longer passable.

With nothing to sustain them but frugal rations of water, he and the Giant began to climb.

The ascent was shallower than it had appeared. If Covenant had been well fed and healthy, he would not have suffered. But in his drained condition, he could hardly drag himself up the slopes. The festering wound on his forehead ached like a heavy burden attached to his skull, pulling him backward. The thick humid air seemed to clog his lungs. From time to time, he found himself lying among the stones and could not remember how he had lost his feet.

Yet with Foamfollower’s help he kept going. Late that day, they crested the ridge of hills, started their descent.

Since leaving the Ruinwash, they had seen no sign of pursuit.

The next morning, after a night’s rain as ponderous and rancid as if the clouds themselves were stagnant, they moved down out of the hills. As Covenant’s gaunt flesh adjusted to hunger, he grew steadier—not stronger, but less febrile. He made the descent without mishap, and from the ridge he and Foamfollower travelled generally eastward out into the barren landscape.

After a foodless and dreary noon, they came to an eerie wilderness of thorns. It occupied the bottom of a wide lowland; for nearly a league, dead thorn-trees with limbs like arms and grey barbs as hard as iron stood in their way. The whole bottom looked like a ruined orchard where sharp spikes and hooks had been grown for weapons; the thorns stood in crooked rows as if they had been planted there so that they could be tended and harvested. Here and there, gaps appeared in the rows, but from a distance Covenant could not see what caused them.

Foamfollower did not want to cross the valley. Higher ground bordered the thorn wastes on both sides, and the barren trees offered no concealment; while they were down in the bottom, they could be easily seen. But again they had no choice. The wastes extended far to the north and south. They would need time to circumvent the thorns—time in which hunger could overcome them, pursuit overtake them.

Muttering to himself, Foamfollower scanned all the terrain as far as he could see, searching for any sign of the hunt. Then he led Covenant down the last slope into the thorns.

They found that the lowest branches of the trees were six or seven feet above the ground. Covenant could move erect along the crooked rows of trunks, but Foamfollower had to crouch or bend almost double to keep the barbs from ripping open his torso and head. He risked injury if he moved too quickly. As a result, their progress through the wastes was dangerously slow.

Thick dust covered the ground under their feet. All the rain of the past nights seemed to have left this valley untouched. The lifeless dirt faced the clouds as if years of torrents could never assuage the thirst of its ancient ruin. Choking billows rose up from the strides of the travellers, filled their lungs and stung their eyes—and plumed into the sky to mark their presence as clearly as smoke.

Soon they came to one of the gaps in the thorns. To their surprise, they found that it was a mud pit. Damp clay bubbled in a small pool. In contrast to the dead dust all around it, it seemed to be seething with some kind of muddy life, but it was as cold as the winter air. Covenant shied away from it as if it were dangerous, and hurried on through the thorns as fast as Foamfollower could go.

They were halfway to the eastern edge of the valley when they heard a hoarse shout of discovery in the distance behind them. Whirling, they saw two large bands of marauders spring out of different parts of the hills. The bands came together as they charged in among the thorn-trees, howling for the blood of their prey.

Covenant and Foamfollower turned and fled.

Covenant sprinted with the energy of fear. In the first surge of flight, he had room in his mind for nothing but the effort of running, the pumping of his legs and lungs. But shortly he realized that he was pulling away from Foamfollower. The Giant’s crouched stance cramped his speed; he could not use his long legs effectively without tearing his head off among the thorns. “Flee!” he shouted at Covenant. “I will hold them back!”

“Forget it!” Covenant slowed to match the Giant’s pace. “We’re in this together.”

“Flee!” Foamfollower repeated, flailing one arm urgently as if to hurl the Unbeliever ahead.

Instead of answering, Covenant rejoined his friend. He heard the savage outcry of the pursuit as if it were clawing at his back, but he stayed with Foamfollower. He had already lost too many people who were important to him.

Abruptly, Foamfollower lurched to a halt. “Go, I say! Stone and Sea!” He sounded furious. “Do you believe I can bear to see your purpose fail for my sake?”

Covenant wheeled and stopped. “Forget it,” he panted again. “I’m good for nothing without you.”

Foamfollower spun to look at the charging hunters. “Then you must find the way of your white gold now. They are too many.”

“Not if you keep moving! By hell! We can still beat them.”

The Giant swung back to face Covenant. For an instant, his muscles bunched to carry him forward again. But then he went rigid; his head jerked up. He stared hotly through the branches into the distance past Covenant’s head.

A new dread seized Covenant. He turned, followed the Giant’s gaze.

There were ur-viles on the eastern slope of the valley. They rushed in large numbers toward the wastes as if they were swarming, and as they moved, they coalesced into three wedges. Covenant could see them clearly through the thorns. When they reached the bottom, they halted, wielded their staves. All along the eastern edge of the forest, they set fire to the dead trees.

The thorns flared instantly. Flames leaped up with a roar, spread rapidly through the branches from tree to tree. Each trunk became a torch to light its neighbours. In moments, Covenant and Foamfollower were cut off from the east by a wall of conflagration.

Foamfollower snatched his gaze back and forth between the fire and the charging hunters, and his eyes shot gleams of fury like battle-lust from under his massive brows. “Trapped!” he shouted as if the impossibility of the situation outraged him. But his anger had a different meaning. “They have erred! I am not so vulnerable to fire. I can break through and attack!”

“I’m vulnerable,” Covenant replied numbly. He watched the Giant’s rising rage with a nausea of apprehension in his guts. He knew what his response should have been. Foamfollower was far better equipped than he to fight the Despiser. He should have said, Take my ring and go. You can find a way to use it. You can get past those ur-viles. But his throat would not form the words. And the fear that Foamfollower would ask for his wedding band churned in him, inspired him to find an alternative. He croaked, “Can you swim in quicksand?”

The Giant stared at him as if he had said something incomprehensible.

“The mud pits! We can hide in one of them—until the fire passes. If you can keep us from drowning.”

Still Foamfollower stared. Covenant feared that the Giant was too far gone in rage to understand what he said. But a moment later Foamfollower took hold of himself. With a sharp convulsion of will, he mastered his desire to fight. “Yes!” he snapped. “Come!” At once, he scuttled away toward the fire.

They raced to find a pool of the bubbling clay near the fire before the hunters caught up with them. Covenant feared that they would be too late; even through the wild roar of the fire, he could hear his pursuers howling.

But the blaze moved with frightful rapidity. While the creatures were still several hundred yards distant, he slapped into the heat of the flames and veered aside, searching for one of the pits.

He could not find one. The rush of heat stung his eyes, half blinded him. He was too close to the fire. It chewed its way through the tree tops toward him like a world-devouring beast. He called to Foamfollower, but his voice made no sound amid the tumult of the blaze.

The Giant caught his arm, snatched him up. Running crouched like a cripple, he headed toward a pool directly under the wall of flame. The twigs and thorns nearest the pit were already bursting into hot orange flower as if they had been brought back to life by fire.

Foamfollower leaped into the mud.

His impetus carried them in over their heads, but with the prodigious strength of his legs he thrust them to the surface again. The mounting heat seemed to scorch their faces instantly. But Covenant was more afraid of the mud. He thrashed frantically for a moment, then remembered that the swiftest way to die in quicksand was to struggle. Straining against his instinctive panic, he forced himself limp. At his back, he felt Foamfollower do the same. Only their heads protruded from the mud.

They did not sink. The fire swept over them while they floated, and long moments of pain seared Covenant’s face as he hung in the wet clay, hardly daring to breathe. His intense helplessness seemed to increase as the fire passed.

When the flames were gone, he and Foamfollower would be left floating in mire to defend themselves as best they could against three wedges of ur-viles without so much as moving their arms.

He tried to draw a large enough breath to shout to Foamfollower. But while he was still inhaling, hands deep in the mud pit caught his ankles and pulled him down.