The One Tree

  Yet surely this was not Revelstone, and the Elohim had nothing in common with Ravers, for Daphin’s smile conveyed no hint of underlying mendacity, and her eyes were the color of new leaves in springtime. And as she passed, the wonderments put aside their self-absorption to join her and the Sun-Sage. Melting, swirling, condensing into human form, they greeted Linden as if she were the heir to some strange majesty, then arrayed themselves behind her and moved in silence and chiming toward the conclave of the Elohimfest. Appareled in cymars and mantles, in sendaline and jaconet and organdy like the cortege of a celebration, they followed Linden as if to do her honor. Once again, she felt the enchantment of the clachan exercising itself upon her, wooing her from her distrust.

  But as the Elohim advanced with her, the land behind them lost all its features, became a vaguely undulating emptiness under a moonstone sky. In its own way, Elemesnedene without the activity of the Elohim was as barren and sterile as a desert.

  Ahead lay the only landmark Linden had seen in the whole of the clachan—a broad ring of dead elms. They stood fingering the opalescent air with their boughs like stricken sentinels, encompassing a place which had slain them eons ago. Her senses were able to discern the natural texture of their wood, the sapless desiccation in their hearts, the black and immemorial death of their upraised limbs. But she did not understand why natural trees could not endure in a habitation of Elohim.

  As she neared them, escorted by Daphin and Morninglight and a bright procession of Elohim, she saw that they ringed a broad low bare hill which shone with accentuated light like an eftmound. Somehow the hill appeared to be the source of all the illumination in Elemesnedene. Or perhaps this effect was caused by the way the sky lowered over the eftmound so that the hill and the sky formed a hub around which the dead elms stood in frozen revolution. Passing between the trees, Linden felt that she was entering the core of an epiphany.

  More Elohim were arriving from all sides. They flowed forward in their lambency like images of everything that made the Earth lovely; and for a moment Linden’s throat tightened at the sight. She could not reconcile the conflicts these folk aroused in her, did not know where the truth lay. But for that moment she felt sure she would never again meet any people so capable of beauty.

  Then her attention shifted as her companions began to ascend the eftmound from various directions around the ring. Honninscrave strode there with his head high and his face aglow as if he had revisited one of his most precious memories. And from the other side came Pitchwife. When he saw the First approaching near him, he greeted her with a shout of love that brought tears to Linden’s eyes, making everything pure for an instant.

  Blinking away the blur, she espied Seadreamer’s tall form rising beyond the crest of the hill. Like the First, he did not appear to share Honninscrave’s joy. Her countenance was dour and self-contained, as if in her examination she had won a stern victory. But his visage wore a look of active pain like a recognition of peril which his muteness would not permit him to explain.

  Alarmed by the implications in his eyes, Linden quickly scanned the eftmound, hunting for a glimpse of Covenant.

  For a moment, he was nowhere to be seen. But then he came around the hill toward her.

  He moved as if all his muscles were taut and fraying; his emanations were shrill with tension. In some way, his examination had proved costly to him. Yet the sight of him, white-knuckled and rigid though he was, gave Linden an infusion of relief. Now she was no longer alone.

  He approached her stiffly. His eyes were as sharp and affronted as shards of mica. Chant was a few paces behind him, smirking like a goad. As Covenant brought his raw emotions close to her, her relief changed to dismay and ire. She wanted to shout at Chant, What have you done to him?

  Covenant stopped in front of her. His shoulders hunched. In a tight voice, he asked, “You all right?”

  She shrugged away the surface of his question. What did Chant do to you? She ached to put her arms around him, but did not know how. She never knew how to help him. Grimly she gripped herself, searched for a way to warn him of what she had learned. She could not put together any words that sounded innocent enough, so she assumed a tone of deliberate nonchalance and took the risk of saying, “I wish I could talk to you about it. Cail had a good point.”

  “I got that impression.” His voice was harsh. Since their first meeting with the Elohim, he had been on the verge of violence. Now he sounded rife with potential eruptions. “Chant here tried to talk me into giving him my ring.”

  Linden gaped. Her encounter with Daphin had not prepared her for the possibility that her companions might be examined more roughly.

  “He had a lot to say on the subject,” Covenant went on. Behind his asperity, he was savage with distress. “These Elohim consider themselves the center of the Earth. According to him, everything important happens here. The rest of the world is like a shadow cast by Elemesnedene. Foul and the Sunbane are just symptoms. The real disease is something else—he didn’t bother to say exactly what. Something about a darkness threatening the heart of the Earth. He wants my ring. He wants the wild magic. So he can attack the disease.”

  Linden started to protest, He doesn’t need it. He’s Earthpower. But she was unsure of what she could afford to reveal.

  “When I said no, he told me it doesn’t matter.” Chant’s mien wore an imperious confirmation. “According to him, I don’t count. I’m already defeated.” Covenant bit out the words, chewing their fundamental gall. “Anything that happens to me is all right.”

  Linden winced for him. Trying to tell him that she understood, she said, “Now you know how I feel every day.”

  But her attempt misfired. His brows knotted. His eyes were as poignant as splinters. “I don’t need to be reminded.” The Giants had gathered at his back. They stood listening with incomprehension in their faces. But he was caught up in bitterness and seemed unaware of the hurt he flung at Linden. “Why do you think you’re here? Everybody expects me to fail.”

  “I don’t!” she snapped back at him, suddenly uncaring that she might hurt him in return. “That isn’t what I meant.”

  Her vehemence stopped him. He faced her, gaunt with memory and fear. When he spoke again, he had regained some measure of self-command. “I’m sorry. I’m not doing very well here. I don’t like being this dangerous.”

  She accepted his apology with a wooden nod. What else could she do? Behind it, his purpose had hardened to the texture of adamantine. But she did not know what that purpose was. How far did he intend to go?

  Holding himself like stone, he turned from her to the Giants. Brusquely he acknowledged them. The First could not conceal the worry in her eyes. Pitchwife emitted a bright empathy that told nothing of his own examination; but Honninscrave appeared perplexed, unable to reconcile Covenant’s report and Linden’s attitude with his own experiences. Once again, Linden wondered what kind of bargain it was he so clearly hoped to make.

  More Elohim continued to arrive, so many now that they filled the inner curve of the elm-ring and spread halfway up the slopes of the eftmound. Their movements made a murmurous rustling, but they passed among each other without speaking. They were as composed and contained here as they had been in their rites of self-contemplation. Only the bells conveyed any sense of communication. Frowning, she strove once more to catch the gist of the chiming. But it remained alien and unreachable, like a foreign tongue that was familiar in sound but not in meaning.

  Then her attention was arrested by the approach of another Elohim. When he first entered the ring, she did not notice him. Neither his clean white flesh nor his creamy robe distinguished him from the gracile throng. But as he drew nearer—walking with an aimless aspect around the hill—he attracted her eyes like a lodestone. The sight of him sent a shiver down her spine. He was the first Elohim she had seen who chose to wear an appearance of misery.

  He had taken a form which looked like it had been worn and whetted by hardship. His limbs were lean,
exposing the interplay of the muscles; his skin had the pale tautness of scar-tissue; his hair hung to his shoulders in a sweep of unkempt silver. His brows, his cheeks, the corners of his eyes, all were cut with the tool-work of difficulty and trepidation. Around the vague yellow of his eyes, his sockets were as dark as old rue. And he moved with the stiffness of a man who had just been cudgeled.

  He did not accost the company, but rather went on his way among the Elohim, as heedless of them as they were of him. Staring after him, Linden abruptly risked another question.

  “Who was that?” she asked Daphin.

  Without a glance at either the man or Linden, Daphin replied, “He is Findail the Appointed.”

  “ ‘Appointed?’ ” Linden pursued. “What does that mean?”

  Her companions listened intently. Though they lacked her sight, they had not failed to notice Findail. Among so many elegant Elohim, he wore his pains like the marks of torment.

  “Sun-Sage,” said Daphin lightly, “he bears a grievous burden. He has been Appointed to meet the cost of our wisdom.

  “We are a people united by our vision. I have spoken of this. The truths which Morninglight finds within himself, I also contain. In this way we are made strong and sure. But in such strength and surety there is also hazard. A truth which one sees may perchance pass unseen by others. We do not blithely acknowledge such failure, for how may one among us say to another, ‘My truth is greater than yours’? And there are none in all the world to gainsay us. But it is our wisdom to be cautious.

  “Therefore whensoever there is a need upon the Earth which requires us, one is Appointed to be our wisdom. According to the need, his purpose varies. In one age, the Appointed may deny our unity, challenging us to seek more deeply for the truth. In another, he may be named to fulfill that unity.” For an instant, her tone took on a more ominous color. “In all ages, he pays the price of doubt. Findail will hazard his life against the Earth’s doom.”

  Doom? The idea gave Linden a pang. How? Was Findail like Covenant, then—accepting the cost for an entire people? What cost? What had the Elohim seen for which they felt responsible—and yet were unwilling to explain?

  What did they know of the Despiser? Was he Chant’s shadow?

  Her gaze continued to follow Findail. But while she grappled with her confusion, a change came over the eftmound. All the Elohim stopped moving, and Daphin gave a smile of anticipation. “Ah, Sun-Sage,” she breathed. “Infelice comes. Now begins the Elohimfest.”

  Infelice? Linden asked mutely. But the bells gave no answer.

  The Elohim had turned toward her left. When she looked in that direction, she saw a figure of light approaching from beyond the elms. It cast the tree limbs into black relief. With the grave and stately stride of a thurifer, the figure entered the ring, passed among the people to the crest of the hill. There she halted and faced the company of the quest.

  She was a tall woman, and her loveliness was as lucent as gemfire. Her hair shone. Her supple form shed gleams like a sea in moonlight. Her raiment was woven of diamonds, adorned with rubies. A penumbra of glory outlined her against the trees and the sky. She was Infelice, and she stood atop the eftmound like the crown of every wonder in Elemesnedene.

  Her sovereign eyes passed over the company, came to Linden, met and held her stare. Under that gaze, Linden’s knees grew weak. She felt a yearning to abase herself before this regal figure. Surely humility was the only just response to such a woman. Honninscrave was already on his knees, and the other Giants were following his example.

  But Covenant remained upright, an icon graven of hard bone and intransigence. And none of the Elohim had given Infelice any obeisance except their rapt silence. Only the music of the bells sounded like worship. Linden locked her joints and strove to hold her own against the grandeur of that woman’s gaze.

  Then Infelice looked away; and Linden almost sagged in relief. Raising her arms, Infelice addressed her people in a voice like the ringing of light crystal. “I am come. Let us begin.”

  Without warning or preparation, the Elohimfest commenced.

  The sky darkened as if an inexplicable nightfall had come to Elemesnedene, exposing a firmament empty of stars. But the Elohim took light from Infelice. In the new dusk, they were wrapped around the eftmound like a mantle, multicolored and alive. And their gleaming aspired to the outreach of Infelice’s arms. Viridian and crimson lights, emerald and essential white intensified like a spray of coruscation, mounting toward conflagration. A rainbow of fires rose up the hill. And as they grew stronger, the wind began to blow.

  It tugged at Linden’s shirt, ran through her hair like the chill fingers of a ghost. She clutched at Covenant for support; but somehow she lost him. She was alone in the emblazoned gloaming and the wind. It piled against her until she staggered. The darkness increased as the lights grew brighter. She could not locate the Giants, could not touch any of the Elohim. All the material substance of Elemesnedene had become wind, and the wind cycled around the eftmound as if Infelice had invoked it, giving it birth by the simple words of her summoning.

  Linden staggered again, fell; but the ground was blown out from under her. Above her, glodes of Elohim-fire had taken to the air. They were gyring upward like the sparks of a blaze in the heart of the Earth, wind-borne into the heavens. The starless sky became a bourne of bedizenings. And Linden went with them, tumbling helplessly along the wind.

  But as she rose, her awkward unfiery flesh began to soar. Below her, the hill lay like a pit of midnight at the bottom of the incandescent gyre. She left it behind, sailed up the bright spin of the sparks. Fires rang on all sides of her like transmuted bells. And still she was larked skyward by the whirlwind.

  Then suddenly the night seemed to become true night, and the wind lifted her toward a heaven bedecked with stars. In the light of the fires, she saw herself and the Elohim spring like a waterspout from the travertine fountain and cycle upward. The maidan spread out below her in the dark, then faded as she went higher. Woodenwold closed around the lea: the mountains encircled Woodenwold. Still she rose in the gyre, rushing impossibly toward the stars.

  She was not breathing, could not remember breath. She had been torn out of herself by awe—a piece of darkness flying in the company of dazzles. The horizons of the unlit Earth shrank as she arced forever toward the stars. An umbilicus of conflagration ascended from the absolute center of the globe like the ongoing gyre of eternity.

  And then there was nothing left of herself to which she could cling. She was an unenlightened mote among perfect jewels, and the jewels were stars, and the abysses around her and within her were fathomless and incomprehensible—voids cold as dying, empty as death. She did not exist amid the magnificence of the heavens. Their lonely and stunning beauty exalted and numbed her soul. She felt ecstasy and destruction as if they were the last thoughts she would ever have; and when she lost her balance, stumbled to fall face-down on the earth of the eftmound, she was weeping with a grief that had no name.

  But slowly the hard fact of the ground penetrated her, and her outcry turned to quiet tears of loss and relief and awe.

  Covenant groaned nearby. She saw him through a smear of weakness. He was on his hands and knees, clenched rigid against the heavens. His eyes were haunted by a doom of stars.

  “Bastards,” he panted. “Are you trying to break my heart?”

  Linden tried to reach out to him. But she could not move. The bells were speaking in her mind. As the Elohim slowly returned to human form around the eftmound, restoring light to the sky, their silent language attained a moment of clarity.

  One string of bells said:

  —Does he truly conceive that such is our intent?

  Another answered:

  —Is it not?

  Then they relapsed into the metal and crystal and wood of their distinctive tones—implying everything, denoting nothing.

  She shook her head, fought to recapture that tongue. But when she had blinked the confusion out of her e
yes, she found Findail the Appointed standing in front of her.

  Stiffly he bent to her, helped her to her feet. His visage was a hatchment of rue and strain. “Sun-Sage.” His voice sounded dull with disuse. “It is our intent to serve the life of the Earth as best we may. That life is also ours.”

  But she was still fumbling inwardly. His words seemed to have no content; and her thoughts frayed away from them, went in another direction. His bruised yellow eyes were the first orbs she had seen in Elemesnedene that appeared honest.

  Her throat was sore with the grief of stars. She could not speak above a raw whisper. “Why do you want to hurt him?”

  His gaze did not waver. But his hands were trembling. He said faintly, so that no one else could hear him, “We desire no hurt to him. We desire only to prevent the hurt which he will otherwise commit.” Then he turned away as if he could not endure the other things he wanted to say.

  The four Giants were climbing to their feet near Linden. They wore stunned expressions, buffeted by vision. Seadreamer helped Covenant erect. The Elohim were gathering again about the slopes. She had understood the bells once more.

  That such is our intent? She needed to talk to Covenant and the Giants, needed their reaction to what she had heard. What harm did the Elohim think they could prevent by demeaning or wounding Covenant? And why were they divided about it? What made the difference between Daphin and Chant?

  But Infelice stood waiting atop the eftmound. She wore her gleamings like a cocoon of chiaroscuro from which she might emerge at any moment to astonish the guests of the Elohimfest—a figure not to be denied. Firmly she caught Linden’s gaze and did not release it.

  “Sun-Sage.” Infelice spoke like the light of her raiment. “The Elohimfest has begun. What has transpired is an utterance of our being. You will be wise to hold it in your heart and seek to comprehend it. But it is past, and before us stand the purposes which have brought you among us. Come.” She beckoned gracefully. “Let us speak of these matters.”