Stephen Donaldson - Fatal Revenant

By buying the tracks and pylons for Jeremiah’s raceway, she had in some sense freed him; or had given him the means to free himself. She had made possible an escape from blankness into the wealth and wonder of the Land. And in so doing, she had lost him to Covenant. But that, she insisted to herself, was not the crucial point. The crux of what she had inadvertently achieved was this: she had supplied her son with an alternative to ordinary consciousness, ordinary responses and emotions; ordinary life. She had made it easier for him to escape than to strive for a more difficult and precious form of recovery.

It was conceivable that Linden had failed her son as entirely-and as unintentionally-as she had failed Joan.

Arguing with herself as she plodded ahead, Linden countered, Yes, that was conceivable. But it was also conceivable that Jeremiah would not have been capable of his present sentience, or his disturbing loyalties, if he had not been granted an escape from his mental prison. His mind might have died, utterly alone inside his skull, if he had not found his way to the Land.

The simple fact was that Linden was too human to know the truth. She could not assign responsibility, blame, or vindication because she was inadequate to gauge the condition of Jeremiah’s soul. He was closed to her. He had always been closed.

In the years since she had travelled and suffered and loved with Thomas Covenant, she had endeavoured to become content with her inadequacy. She would have admitted with unruffled confidence that she healed none of her patients. Instead, at her best, she merely encouraged them to heal themselves. But now, in the Land, she was less able to accept her limitations.

There was too much at stake

She understood almost nothing that had happened since Covenant and Jeremiah had ridden into Lord’s Keep. And she had no reason at all to believe that she was strong enough for what lay ahead of her. But she told herself that such things were trivial. The only inadequacy that truly mattered was her inability to gauge the health or illness of Jeremiah’s restored mind.

How could she make choices, or defend what she loved, when she did not know whether or not he still needed her?

The ascent to Covenant’s destination was as difficult as she had feared it would be. Although the snow on the northward slope had seen less sunlight and formed less ice, it was also deeper. The hillside itself was hazardously steep. And the eldritch heat which Covenant had given her faded ineluctably, leaving her with nothing except her clothes and her exertions to ward off the cold.

Nevertheless she struggled upward. And when she finally gained the hilltop, stood panting in the comfortless sunshine of early afternoon, her doubts and confusion had settled into a grim determination. The Theomach had told Covenant that he must allow her to make her own decisions. She meant to do so. She had never used her inadequacy as an excuse, and did not intend to start now.

While Jeremiah shuffled his feet, Covenant scowled into the distance, and the Theomach hummed tunelessly to himself, Linden scanned her surroundings. Here the glare from the snow was less severe. In this cold, any wind would have cut at her eyes; but the air was almost entirely still. She was able to look around without the blur of tears or the danger of snow blindness.

Covenant had chosen an effective vantage point. On all sides, the unimpeded sunshine etched the shapes and edges of the terrain in sharp detail. From this crest, she saw that the hills which bordered both sides of the valley stood in rough rows that gradually lost height from west to east. And they were only two rows among many: a range of rugged slopes and crooked valleys extended farther than she could see into the northwest as well as toward the southeast. The entire landscape was tossed and crumpled, like a discarded blanket. As it tended eastward, it smoothed out in small increments.

If these were the foothills of mountains in the west, those peaks were too distant to be seen. But as she scanned the vistas, she found that their contours allowed her to see farther into the southwest as well as the southeast. In that direction also, the hilltops sank slowly lower. And beyond their ridges-

She blinked hard in an effort to clear the ache of brightness from her sight. There was something-For a moment, she closed her eyes; rested them. Then she looked again.

Now she was sure that she could see trees. At the limits of vision, deciduous trees clung to each other with their stark and naked limbs. And among them a few tall evergreens-cedars, perhaps, or redwoods-stood like sentinels, keeping watch over their winter-stricken kindred. At this distance, she could see only a sliver of woodland past the obstruction of the hills. But percipience or intuition told her that she was squinting at a forest.

We’re too far from her time. Under the Sunbane, the last vestiges of the ancient woods west of Landsdrop had been utterly destroyed. Yet she remained in the Land: she was sure of that. And there were forests-?

She wanted to demand, Covenant, damn you, what have you done ? But determination had settled into her like the cold, and it brought with it a kind of calm. She was frightened enough for rage; could have slipped easily into fury. Nevertheless she refused to be swayed by her emotions. Until she learned the truth about her son, she intended to hold herself in check. She would do anything and everything that fear or imagination suggested; but she would do it coldly. And she would think about it first.

Like paralysis, panic served the Despiser.

“All right, Covenant,” she said when she was ready; when she could bear Jeremiah’s reluctance to look at her. “You promised me an explanation. It’s time.”

“Well, time,” he replied. His voice was a harsh rasp. “That’s the problem, isn’t it. It’s all about time. Even distance is just a matter of time.”

Then he sighed. Gesturing around him, he began. “We’re a little less than two hundred leagues from Revelstone. These are the Last Hills, the last barrier. Where we are now, they separate the Centre Plains from Garroting Deep.”

Two hundred leagues ? Linden thought; but she was not truly surprised. The suddenness of her transition to this place had prepared her for imponderable dislocations.

“That piece of forest,” Covenant continued, “is Garroting Deep. Eventually it’ll be considered the most dangerous of the old forests. Of course,” he added, “they’re all places you don’t want to go. In this time, anyway. Morinmoss, Grimmerdhore, hell, even Giant Woods-they’re all protected by Forestals.”

Now she was taken aback, although she tried not to show it. If Forestals still defended the trees, she was deep in the Land’s past; deeper than she had dared to imagine. During the time of the Sunbane, Caer-Caveral had preserved Andelain; but he had been the last of his kind. According to the tales which Covenant had told her long ago, most of the Forestals had disappeared before his first experiences in the Land. If that were true-

Oh, God.

— she was now more than seven thousand years before her proper time.

However, Covenant had not stopped speaking. She fought down her chagrin in order to concentrate on him.

But Garroting Deep is the worst,” he was saying sourly. “Giant Woods is practically benign, probably because Foul and the Ravers spend most of their time south of the Sarangrave. Sometimes you can get through Morinmoss. On a good day, you can survive in Grimmerdhore for a few hours. But Caerroil Wildwood is an out-and-out butcher. He pretty much slaughters anything that doesn’t have fur or feathers.”

While Linden stared at the distant trees in wonder and dismay, the Theomach put in casually, “Perhaps it would profit her to know why the Forestal of Garroting Deep has grown so savage.”