“Don’t touch that,” Linden panted. “It’s still hot.” Her mouth was full of crushed horror.
Still—? Covenant kicked aside his dismay. “Take his legs. We’ll carry him into the house.”
She did not move. She looked small and abject in the night.
To make her move, he lashed at her, “I told you it was dangerous. Did you think I was kidding? Take his legs!”
Her voice was a still cold articulation of darkness. “He’s dead. There’s nothing we can do.”
The sound of her desolation choked his protests. For one keening moment, he feared that he had lost her—that her mind had gone over the edge. But then she shifted. Her hair fell forward, hid her face, as she bent to slip her arms under Nassic’s legs.
Covenant lifted him by the shoulders. Together they bore him into his house.
He was already stiff.
They set him down gently in the center of the floor. Covenant inspected him. His skin was cold. There was no blood in his robe around the knife; it must have been washed away by the rain. He must have lain dead in the rain for a long time.
Linden did not watch. Her eyes clinched the black iron knife. “It didn’t kill him right away,” she said hoarsely. “It didn’t hit him right. He bled to death.” The bones of her face seemed to throb with vehemence. “This is evil.”
The way she uttered that word evil sent cold fear scrabbling down Covenant’s spine. He knew what she meant; he had formerly been able to perceive such things himself. She was looking at the cruelty of the hand which had held that knife, seeing the eager malice which had inspired the blow. And if the iron were still hot—He swallowed harshly. Nassic’s killer must have been someone of great and brutal power.
He scrambled for explanations. “Whoever did it knew we were here. Or else why leave him out there? He wanted us to find the body—after he got away.” He closed his eyes, forced some clarity onto his spinning thoughts. “Nassic was killed because of us. To keep him from talking to the Stonedown. Or from talking to us. By hell, this stinks of Foul.”
Linden was not listening; her own reaction dominated her. “Nobody does this.” She sounded lorn, fear-ravaged.
He heard the strangeness of her protest; but he could not stop himself. His old anger for the victims of Despite drove him. “It takes a special kind of killer,” he growled, “to leave a hot knife behind. Foul has plenty of that kind of help. He’s perfectly capable of having Nassic killed just to keep us from getting too much information. Or to manipulate us somehow.”
“Nobody kills like this. For pleasure.” Dull anguish blunted her tone, blinded her face. “People don’t do that.”
“Of course they don’t.” Her dismay reached him; but the frailty of Nassic’s dead limbs affronted him to the marrow of his bones, made his reply savage. “He probably decided to take a nap in the rain, and this knife just fell on him out of nowhere.”
She was deaf to his sarcasm—too intimately shocked to recognize him at all. “People kill because they’re hungry. Afraid.” She struggled for certitude against the indefeasible iron. “Driven. Because someone, something, forces them.” Her tone sharpened as if she were gathering screams. “Nobody likes it.”
“No.” The sight of her distress pulled Covenant to her. He tried to confront her mounting repudiation. “Everybody likes it. Everybody likes power. But most people control it. Because they hate it, too. This is no different than any other murder. It’s just more obvious.”
A flinch of revulsion twisted her face; his assertion seemed to hurt her. For an instant, he feared that her mind was going to fail. But then her eyes climbed to his face. The effort of self-mastery darkened them like blood. “I want—” Her voice quavered; she crushed it flat. “I want to meet the sonofabitch who did this. So I can see for myself.”
Covenant nodded, gritted his own black ire. “I think you’re going to get the chance.” He, too, wanted to meet Nassic’s slayer. “We can’t try to second-guess Foul. He knows more than we do. And we can’t stay here. But we’ve lost our guide—our only chance to learn what’s happening. We have to go to Mithil Stonedown.” Grimly he concluded, “Since the killer didn’t attack us here, he’s probably waiting for us in the village.”
For a long moment, she remained motionless, mustering her resources. Then she said tightly, “Let’s go.”
He did not hesitate. Nassic had not even been given the dignity of a clean death. With Linden at his side, he marched out into the night.
But in spite of the violence in him, he did not allow himself to rush. The stars did not shed an abundance of light; and the rain had left the floor of the dell slick with mud. The path to Mithil Stonedown was hazardous. He did not intend to come to harm through recklessness.
He made his way strictly down the valley; and at its end, he followed the stream into a crooked file between sheer walls, then turned away along a crevice that ascended at right angles to the file. The crevice was narrow and crude, difficult going in the star-blocked dark; but it leveled after a while, began to tend downward. Before long, he gained a steep open slope—the eastern face of the Mithil valley.
Dimly in the distance below him, the valley widened like a wedge northward toward an expanse of plains. A deeper blackness along the valley bottom looked like a river.
Beside the river, somewhat to his right, lay a cluster of tiny lights.
“Mithil Stonedown,” he murmured. But then vertigo forced him to turn away leftward along a faint path. He could not repress his memory of the time he had walked this path with Lena. Until he told Linden what he remembered, what he had done, she would not know who he was, would not be able to choose how she wished to respond to him. Or to the Land.
He needed her to understand his relationship to the Land. He needed her support, her skills, her strength. Why else had she been chosen?
A cold, penetrating dampness thickened the air; but the exertion of walking kept him warm. And the path became steadily less difficult as it descended toward the valley bottom. As the moon began to crest the peaks, he gave up all pretense of caution. He was hunting for the courage to say what had to be said.
Shortly the path curved off the slopes, doubled back to follow the river outward. He glanced at Linden from time to time, wondering where she had learned the toughness, unwisdom, or desperation which enabled or drove her to accompany him. He ached for the capacity to descry the truth of her, determine whether her severity came from conviction or dread.
She did not believe in evil.
He had no choice; he had to tell her.
Compelling himself with excoriations, he touched her arm, stopped her. She looked at him. “Linden.” She was alabaster in the moonlight—pale and not to be touched. His mouth winced. “There’s something I’ve got to say.” His visage felt like old granite. “Before we go any farther.” Pain made him whisper.
“The first time I was here, I met a girl. Lena. She was just a kid—but she was my friend. She kept me alive on Kevin’s Watch, when I was so afraid it could have killed me.” His long loneliness cried out against this self-betrayal.
“I raped her.”
She stared at him. Her lips formed soundless words: Raped—? In her gaze, he could see himself becoming heinous.
He did not see the shadow pass over their heads, had no warning of their danger until the net landed on them, tangling them instantly together. Figures surged out of the darkness around them. One of the attackers hit them in the faces with something which broke open and stank like a rotten melon.
Then he could no longer breathe. He fell with Linden in his arms as if they were lovers.
SIX: The Graveler
He awoke urgently, with a suffocating muck on his face that made him strain to move his arms to clear the stuff away. But his hands were tied behind his back. He gagged helplessly for a moment, until he found that he could breathe.
The dry, chill air was harsh in his lungs. But he relished it. Slowly it drove back the nausea.
&nb
sp; From somewhere near him, he heard Linden say flatly, “You’ll be all right. They must have hit us with some kind of anesthetic. It’s like ether—makes you feel sick. But the nausea goes away. I don’t think we’ve been hurt.”
He rested briefly on the cold stone, then rolled off his chest and struggled into a sitting position. The bonds made the movement difficult; a wave of dizziness went through him, “Friends,” he muttered. But the air steadied him. “Nassic was right.”
“Nassic was right,” she echoed as if the words did not interest her.
They were in a single room, as constricted as a cell. A heavy curtain covered the doorway; but opposite the entrance a barred window let the pale gray of dawn into the room—the late dawn of a sunrise delayed by mountains. The bars were iron.
Linden sat across from him. Her arms angled behind her; her wrists, too, were bound. Yet she had managed to clean the pulp from her cheeks. Shreds of it clung to the shoulders of her shirt.
His own face wore the dried muck like a leper’s numbness.
He shifted so that he could lean against the wall. The bonds cut into his wrists. He closed his eyes. A trap, he murmured. Nassic’s death was a trap. He had been killed so that Covenant and Linden would blunder into Mithil Stonedown’s defenses and be captured. What’s Foul trying to do? he asked the darkness behind his eyelids. Make us fight these people?
“Why did you do it?” Linden said. Her tone was level, as if she had already hammered all the emotion out of it. “Why did you tell me about that girl?”
His eyes jumped open to look at her. But in the dim light he was unable to discern her expression. He wanted to say, Leave it alone, we’ve got other things to worry about. But she had an absolute right to know the truth about him.
“I wanted to be honest with you.” His guts ached at the memory. “The things I did when I was here before are going to affect what happens to us now. Foul doesn’t forget. And I was afraid”—he faltered at the cost of his desire for rectitude—“you might trust me without knowing what you were trusting. I don’t want to betray you—by not being what you think I am.”
She did not reply. Her eyes were shadows which told him nothing. Abruptly the pressure of his unassuaged bitterness began to force words out of him like barbs.
“After my leprosy was diagnosed, and Joan divorced me, I was impotent for a year. Then I came here. Something I couldn’t understand was happening. The Land was healing parts of me that had been dead so long I’d forgotten I had them. And Lena—” The pang of her stung him like an acid. “She was so beautiful I still have nightmares about it. The first night— It was too much for me. Lepers aren’t supposed to be potent.”
He did not give Linden a chance to respond; he went on, reliving his old self-judgment. “Everybody paid for it. I couldn’t get away from the consequences. Her mother ended up committing a kind of suicide. Her father’s life was warped. The man who wanted to marry her lost everything. Her own mind came apart.
“But I didn’t stop there. I caused her death, and the death of her daughter, Elena—my daughter. Because I kept trying to escape the consequences. Everybody refused to punish me. I was Berek reborn. They wanted me to save the Land. Lena”—oh, Lena!—“got butchered trying to save my life.”
Linden listened without moving. She looked like a figure of stone against the wall, blank and unforgiving, as if no mere recitation of guilt could touch her. But her knees were pressed tightly, defensively, to her chest. When he ceased, she said thickly, “You shouldn’t have told me.”
“I had to.” What else could he say? “It’s who I am.”
“No.” She protested as if an accusation of evil had been raised between them. “It isn’t who you are. You didn’t do it intentionally, did you? You saved the Land, didn’t you?”
He faced her squarely. “Yes. Eventually.”
“Then it’s over. Done with.” Her head dropped to her knees. She squeezed her forehead against them as if to restrain the pounding of her thoughts. “Leave me alone.”
Covenant studied the top of her head, the way her hair fell about her thighs, and sought to comprehend. He had expected her to denounce him for what he had done, not for having confessed it. Why was she so vulnerable to it? He knew too little about her. But how could he ask her to tell him things which she believed people should not know about each other?
“I don’t understand.” His voice was gruff with uncertainty. “If that’s the way you feel—why did you keep coming back? You went to a lot of trouble to find out what I was hiding.”
She kept her face concealed. “I said, leave me alone.”
“I can’t.” A vibration of anger ran through him. “You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t followed me. I need to know why you did it. So I can decide whether to trust you.”
Her head snapped up. “I’m a doctor.”
“That’s not enough,” he said rigidly.
The light from the window was growing slowly. Now he could read parts of her countenance—her mouth clenched and severe, her eyes like dark gouges below her forehead. She regarded him as if he were trespassing on her essential privacy.
After a long moment, she said softly, “I followed you because I thought you were strong. Every time I saw you, you were practically prostrate on your feet. You were desperate for help. But you stood there acting as if even exhaustion couldn’t touch you.” Her words were fraught with gall. “I thought you were strong. But now it turns out you were just running away from your guilt, like anybody else. Trying to make yourself innocent again, by selling yourself for Joan. What was I supposed to do?” Quiet fury whetted her tone. “Let you commit suicide?”
Before he could respond, she went on, “You use guilt the same way you use leprosy. You want people to reject you, stay away from you—make a victim out of you. So you can recapture your innocence.” Gradually her intensity subsided into a dull rasp. “I’ve already seen more of it than I can stand. If you think I’m such a threat to you, at least leave me alone.”
Again she hid her face in her knees.
Covenant stared at her in silence. Her judgment hurt him like a demonstration of mendacity. Was that what he was doing—giving her a moral reason to repudiate him because she was unmoved by the physical reason of his leprosy? Was he so much afraid of being helped or trusted? Cared about? Gaping at this vision of himself, he heaved to his feet, lurched to the window as if he needed to defend his eyes by looking at something else.
But the view only gave credence to his memories. It verified that he and Linden were in Mithil Stonedown. The wall and roof of another stone dwelling stood directly in front of nun; and on either side of it he could see the corners of other buildings. Their walls were ancient, weathered and battered by centuries of use. They were made without mortar, formed of large slabs and chunks of rock held together by their own weight, topped by flat roofs. And beyond the roofs were the mountains.
Above them, the sky had a brown tinge, as if it were full of dust.
He had been here before, and could not deny the truth; he was indeed afraid. Too many people who cared about him had already paid horrendously to give him help.
Linden’s silence throbbed at his back like a bruise; but he remained still, and watched the sunrise flow down into the valley. When the tension in him became insistent, he said without turning, “I wonder what they’re going to do with us.”
As if in answer, the room brightened suddenly as the curtain was thrust aside. He swung around and found a man in the doorway.
The Stonedownor was about Linden’s height, but broader and more muscular than Covenant. His black hair and dark skin were emphasized by the color of his stiff leather jerkin and leggings. He wore nothing on his feet. In his right hand he held a long, wooden staff as if it articulated his authority.
He appeared to be about thirty. His features had a youthful cast; but they were contradicted by two deep frown lines above the bridge of his nose, and by the dullness of his eyes, which seemed to have been wo
rn dim by too much accumulated and useless regret. The muscles at the corners of his jaw bulged as if he had been grinding his teeth for years.
His left arm hung at his side. From elbow to knuckle, it was intaglioed with fine white scars.
He did not speak; he stood facing Covenant and Linden as if he expected them to know why he had come.
Linden lurched to her feet. Covenant took two steps forward, so that they stood shoulder-to-shoulder before the Stonedownor.
The man hesitated, searched Covenant’s face. Then he moved into the room. With his left hand, he reached out to Covenant’s battered cheek.
Covenant winced slightly, then held himself still while the Stonedownor carefully brushed the dried pulp from his face.
He felt a pang of gratitude at the touch; it seemed to accord him more dignity than he deserved. He studied the man’s brown, strong mien closely, trying to decipher what lay behind it.
When he was done, the Stonedownor turned and left the room, holding the curtain open for Covenant and Linden.
Covenant looked toward her to see if she needed encouragement. But she did not meet his gaze. She was already moving. He took a deep breath, and followed her out of the hut.
He found himself on the edge of the broad, round, open center of Mithil Stonedown. It matched his memory of it closely. All the houses faced inward; and the ones beyond the inner ring were positioned to give as many as possible direct access to the center. But now he could see that several of them had fallen into serious disrepair, as if their occupants did not know how to mend them. If that were true— He snarled to himself. How could these people have forgotten their stone-lore?
The sun shone over the eastern ridge into his face. Squinting at it indirectly, he saw that the orb had lost its blue aurora. Now it wore pale brown like a translucent cymar.
The Stonedown appeared deserted. All the door-curtains were closed. Nothing moved—not in the village, not on the mountainsides or in the air. He could not even hear the river. The valley lay under the dry dawn as if it had been stricken dumb.