Stephen Donaldson - The Power That Preserves

He approached the High Lord with his head lowered in an attitude of shyness, but Mhoram knew that it was not embarrassment which caused Trell to avoid meeting the eyes of other people. Another explanation glowered behind the thick intensity of Trell’s red and grey beard and the graveling ruddiness of his features. Involuntarily, Mhoram shivered as if the wind of winter had found its way through Revelstone to his heart.

Like the other rhadhamaerl , Trell had given his whole life to the service of stone. But he had lost his wife and daughter and granddaughter because of Thomas Covenant. The simple sight of Covenant seven years ago had driven him to damage the rock of the Keep; he had gouged his fingers into the granite as if it were nothing more than stiff clay.

He avoided other people’s eyes in an effort to conceal the conflicting hate and hurt which knotted themselves within him.

He usually kept to himself, immersing himself in the stone labours of the Keep. But now he accosted the High Lord with an air of grim purpose.

He said, “You go to the Close, High Lord.” Despite the severity of his mien, his voice held an odd note of supplication.

“Yes,” Mhoram answered.

“Why?”

‘ ‘Trell Atiaran-mate, you know why. You are not deaf to the Land’s need.”

Flatly, Trell said, “Do not.”

Mhoram shook his head gently. “You know that I must make this attempt.”

Trell pushed this statement aside with a jerk of his shoulders, and repeated, “Do not.”

‘ Trell, I am High Lord of the Council of Revelstone. I must do what I can.”

“You will denounce-you will denounce the fall of Elena my daughter’s daughter.”

“Denounce?” Trell’s assertion surprised the High Lord. He cocked an eyebrow and waited for the Gravelingas to explain.

“Yes!” Trell averred. His voice sounded awkward, as if in the long, low, subterranean songs of his rhadhamaerl service he had lost his familiarity with human speech; and he looked as if he were resisting an impulse to shout. ”Atiaran my wife said-she said that it is the responsibility of the living to justify the sacrifices of the dead. Otherwise their deaths have no meaning. You will undo the meaning Elena earned. You must not-approve her death.”

Mhoram heard the truth in Trell’s words. His decision might well imply an affirmation, or at least an acceptance, of Elena’s fall under Melenkurion Skyweir; and that would be bitter bread for Trell’s distress to swallow. Perhaps this explained the inchoate fear which he sensed behind Trell’s speech. But Mhoram’s duty to the Land bound him straitly. So that Trell could not mistake him, he said, “I must make this attempt.” Then he added gently, “High Lord Elena broke the Law of Death. In what way can I approve?”

Trell’s gaze moved around the walls, avoiding the face of the High Lord, and his heavy hands clutched his hips as if to prevent themselves from striking out-as if he did not trust what his hands might do if he failed to hold them down. “Do you love the Land?” he said in a thick voice. “You will destroy it.”

Then he met Mhoram’s gaze, and his sore eyes gleamed with moist fire. “It would have been better if I had”-abruptly, his hands tore loose from his sides, slapped together in front of him, and his shoulders hunched like a strangler’s-“crushed Lena my own daughter at birth.”

“No!” Mhoram affirmed softly. “No.” He yearned to put his arms around Trell, to console the Gravelingas in some way. But he did not know how to untie Trell’s distress; he was unable to loosen his own secret dilemma. “Hold Peace, Trell,” he murmured. “Remember the Oath.” He could think of nothing else to say.

“Peace?” Trell echoed in ridicule or grief. He no longer seemed to see the High Lord. “Atiaran believed in Peace. There is no Peace.” Turning vaguely from Mhoram, he walked away down the side passage from which he had come.

Mhoram stared after him down the passage for a long moment. Duty and caution told him that he should have warriors assigned to watch the Gravelingas. But he could not bear to torment Trell with such an expression of distrust; that judgment might weaken the last clutch of Trell’s self-control. And he, Mhoram, had seen men and women rise to victory from anguish as bad as Trell’s.

Yet the Gravelingas had not looked like a man who could wrest new wholeness out of the ruins of his old life. Mhoram was taking a grave risk by not acting in some way. As he started again toward the Close, the weight of his responsibilities bore heavily on him. He did not feel equal to the multitude of dooms he carried.

The Lords possessed nothing of their own with which to fight the long cruel winter that fettered the Land.

He strode down a long, torchlit corridor, climbed a spiral stairway, and approached one of the Lords’ private entrances to the Close. Outside the door, he paused to gauge the number of people who had already gathered for the Council, and after a moment he heard Lord Amatin coming up the stair behind him. He waited for her. When she reached the landing where he stood, he saw that her eyes were red-rimmed, her forlorn mouth aggravated by tension. He was tempted to speak to her now, but he decided instead to deal with her feelings before the Council. If he were ever to reveal his secret knowledge, he would first have to prepare the ground for it. With a quiet, sympathetic smile, he opened the door for her and followed her into the Close.

From the door, he and Amatin went down the steps to the Lords’ table, which stood below the level of the tiered galleries in the high, round council hall. The hall was lit by four huge, lore-burning lillianrill torches set into the walls above the galleries, and by an open pit of graveling in the base of the Close, below and within the wide C of the table. Stone chairs for the Lords and their special guests waited around the outer edge of the table, facing in toward the open floor and the graveling pit; and at the head of the table was the high-backed seat of the High Lord.

On the floor of the Close beside the graveling pit was a round stone table with a short silver sword stabbed halfway to the hilt in its centre. This was the krill of Loric, left where Covenant had driven it seven years ago. In that time, the Lords had found no way to remove it from the stone. They left it in the Close so that anyone who wished to study the krill could do so freely. But nothing had changed except the clear white gem around which the guards and haft of the two-edged blade were forged.

When Mhoram and Callindrill had returned from their plunge into Garroting Deep, they had found the gem lightless, dead. The hot fire which Covenant had set within it had gone out.

It stood near the graveling like an icon of the Lords’ futility, but Mhoram kept his thoughts away from it. He did not need to look around to learn who was already present in the Close; the perfect acoustics of the hall carried every low noise and utterance to his ears. In the first row of the gallery, above and behind the seats of the Lords, sat warriors, Hafts of the Warward, occupying the former places of the Bloodguard. The two Hearthralls, Tohrm the Gravelingas and Borillar the Hirebrand, sat with Warmark Quaan in their formal positions high in the gallery behind the High Lord’s chair. Several Lorewardens had taken seats in tiers above the table; the weary dust of their flight from Revelwood was still on them, but they were too taut with the news of the tree’s fall to miss this Council. And with them were virtually all the lillianrill of Lord’s Keep. The burning of a tree struck at the very hearts of the Hirebrands, and they watched the High Lord’s approach with pain in their eyes.