Lord Foul's Bane

Five: Mithil Stonedown

COVENANT felt strangely purged, as if he had passed through an ordeal, survived a ritual trial by vertigo. He had put the stair behind him. In his relief, he was sure that he had found the right answer to the particular threat of madness, the need for a real and comprehensible explanation to his situation, which had surrounded him on Kevin's Watch. He looked up at the radiant sky, and it appeared pure, untainted by carrion eaters.

Go forward, he said to himself. Don't think about it. Survive.

As he thought this, he looked up into Lena's soft brown eyes and found that she was smiling.

“Are you well?” she asked.

“Well?” he echoed. “That's not an easy question.” It drew him up into a sitting position. Scanning his hands, he discovered blood on the heels and fingertips. His palms were scraped raw, and when he probed his knees and shins and elbows they burned painfully.

Ignoring the ache of his muscles, he pushed to his feet. “Lena, this is important,” he said. “I've got to clean my hands.”

She stood also, but he could see that she did not understand. “Look!” He brandished his hands in front of her. “I'm a leper. I can't feel this. No pain.” When she still seemed confused, he went on, “That's how I lost my fingers. I got hurt and infected, and they had to cut my hand apart. I've got to get some soap and water.”

Touching the scar on his right hand, she said, “The sickness does this?”

“Yes!”

“There is a stream on the way toward the Stonedown,” said Lena, “and hurtloam near it.”

“Let's go.” Brusquely, Covenant motioned for her to lead the way. She accepted his urgency with a nod, and started at once down the path.

It went west from the base of Kevin's Watch along a ledge in the steep mountain slope until it reached a cluttered ravine. Moving awkwardly because of the clenched stiffness of his muscles, Covenant followed Lena up the ravine, then stepped gingerly behind her down a rough-hewn stair in the side of a sharp cut which branched away into the mountain. When they reached the bottom of the cut, they continued along it, negotiating its scree-littered floor while the slash of sky overhead narrowed and the sides of the cut leaned together. A rich, damp smell surrounded them, and the cool shadows deepened until Lena's dark tunic became dim in the gloom ahead of Covenant. Then the cut turned sharply to the left and opened without warning into a small, sun-bright valley with a stream sparkling through the centre and tall pines standing over the grass around the edges.

“Here,” said Lena with a happy smile. “What could heal you more than this?”

Covenant stopped to gaze, entranced, down the length of the valley. It was no more than fifty yards long, and at its far end the stream turned left again and filed away between two sheer walls. In this tiny pocket in the vastness of the mountain, removed from the overwhelming landscapes below Kevin's Watch, the earth was comfortably green and sunny, and the air was both fresh and warm-pine-aromatic, redolent with springtime. As he breathed the atmosphere of the place, Covenant felt his chest ache with a familiar grief at his own sickness.

To ease the pressure in his chest, he moved forward. The grass under his feet was so thick and springy that he could feel it through the strained ligaments of his knees and calves. It seemed to encourage him toward the stream, toward the cleansing of his hurts.

The water was sure to be cold, but that did not concern him. His hands were too numb to notice cold very quickly. Squatting on a flat stone beside the stream, he plunged them into the current and began rubbing them together. His wrists felt the chill at once, but his fingers were vague about the water; and it gave him no pain to scrub roughly at his cuts and scrapes.

He was marginally aware that Lena had moved away from him up the stream, apparently looking for something, but he was too preoccupied to wonder what she was doing. After an intense scrubbing he let his hands rest, and rolled up his sleeves to inspect his elbows. They were red and sore, but the skin was not broken.

When he pulled up his pant legs, he found that his shins and knees were more battered. The discoloration of his bruises was already darkening, and would be practically black before long; but the tough fabric of his trousers had held, and again the skin was unbroken. In their way, bruises were as dangerous to him as cuts, but he could not treat them without medication. He made an effort to stifle his anxiety, and turned his attention back to his hands.

Blood still oozed from the heels and fingertips, and when he washed it off he could see bits of black grit lodged deep in some of the cuts. But before he started washing again, Lena returned. Her cupped hands were full of thick brown mud. “This is hurtloam,” she said reverently, as if she were speaking of something rare and powerful. “You must put it on all your wounds.”

“Mud?” His leper's caution quivered. “I need soap, not more dirt.”

“This is hurtloam,” repeated Lena. “It is for healing.” She stepped closer and thrust the mud toward him. He thought he could see tiny gleams of gold in it.

He stared at it blankly, shocked by the idea of putting mud in his cuts.

“You must use it,” she insisted. "I know what it is. Do you not understand? This is hurtloam. Listen. My father is Trell, Gravelingas of the rhadhamaerl. His work is with the fire-stones, and he leaves healing to the Healers. But he is a rhadhamaerl. He comprehends the rocks and soils. And he taught me to care for myself when there is need. He taught me the signs and places of hurtloam. This is healing earth. You must use it."

Mud? He glared. In my cuts? Do you want to cripple me?

Before he could stop her, Lena knelt in front of him and dropped a handful of the mud onto his bare knee. With that hand free, she spread the brown loam down his shin. Then she scooped up the remainder and put it on his other knee and shin. As it lay on his legs, its golden gleaming seemed to grow stronger, brighter.

The wet earth was cool and soothing, and it seemed to stroke his legs tenderly, absorbing the pain from his bruises. He watched it closely. The relief that it sent flowing through his bones gave him a pleasure that he had never felt before. Bemused, he opened his hands to Lena, let her spread hurtloam over all his cuts and scrapes.

At once, the relief began to run up into him through his elbows and wrists. And an odd tingling started in his palms, as if the hurtloam were venturing past his cuts into his nerves, trying to reawaken them. A similar tingling danced across the arches of his feet. He stared at the glittering mud with a kind of awe in his eyes.

It dried quickly; its light vanished into the brown. In a few moments Lena rubbed it off his legs. Then he saw that his bruises were almost gone-they were in the last, faded yellow stages of healing. He slapped his hands into the stream, washed away the mud, looked at his fingers. They had become whole again. The heels of his hands were healed as well, and the abrasions on his forearms had disappeared completely. He was so stunned that for a moment he could only gape at his hands and think, Hellfire. Hellfire and bloody damnation. What's happening to me?

After a long silence, he whispered, “That's not possible.”

In response, Lena grinned broadly.

“What's so funny?”

Trying to imitate his tone, she said, “I need soap, not more dirt.” Then she laughed, a teasing sparkle in her eyes.

But Covenant was too full of surprise to be distracted. “I'm serious. How can this happen?”

Lena dropped her eyes and answered quietly, “There is power in the Earth-power and life. You must know this. Atiaran my mother says that such things as hurtloam, such powers and mysteries, are in all the Earth-but we are blind to them because we do not share enough, with the Land and with each other.”

“There are-other things like this?”

“Many. But I know only a few. If you travel to the Council, it may be that the Lords will teach you everything. But come”- she swung lightly to her feet “here is another. Are you hungry?”

As if cued by her question, an impression of emptiness opened in his stomach. How long had it been since he had eaten? He adjusted his pant legs, rolled down his sleeves, and shrugged himself to his feet. His wonder was reinforced to find that almost every ache was gone from his muscles. Shaking his head in disbelief, he followed Lena toward one side of the valley.

Under the shade of the trees, she stopped beside a gnarled, waist-high shrub. Its leaves were spread and pointed like a holly's, but it was scattered with small viridian blooms, and nestled under some of the leaves were tight clusters of a blue-green fruit the size of blueberries.

“This is aliantha,” said Lena. “We call them treasure-berries.” Breaking off a cluster, she ate four or five berries, then dropped the seeds into her hand and threw them behind her. “It is said that a person can walk the whole length and breadth of the Land eating only. treasure-berries, and return home stronger and better fed than before. They are a great gift of the Earth. They bloom and bear fruit in all seasons. There is no part of the Land in which they do not grow except, perhaps, in the east, on the Spoiled Plains. And they are the hardiest of growing things the last to die and the first to grow again. All this my mother told me, as part of the lore of our people. Eat,” she said, handing Covenant a cluster of the berries, “eat, and spread the seeds over the Earth, so that the aliantha may flourish.”

But Covenant made no move to take the fruit. He was lost in wonder, in unanswerable questions about the strange potency of this Land. For the moment, he neglected his danger.

Lena regarded his unfocused gaze, then took one of the berries and put it in his mouth. By reflex, he broke the skin with his teeth; at once, his mouth was filled with a light, sweet taste like that of a ripe peach faintly blended with salt and lime. In another moment he was eating greedily, only occasionally remembering to spit out the seeds.

He ate until he could find no more fruit on that bush, then looked about him for another. But Lena put her hand on his arm to stop him. “Treasure-berries are strong food,” she said. “You do not need many. And the taste is better if you eat slowly.”

But Covenant was still hungry. He could not remember ever wanting food as much as he now wanted that fruit-the sensations of eating had never been so vivid, so compulsory. He snatched his arm away as if he meant to strike her, then abruptly caught himself.

What is this? What's happening?

Before he could pursue the question, he became aware of another feeling-overpowering drowsiness. In the space of one instant, he passed almost without transition from hunger to a huge yawn that made him seem top-heavy with weariness. He tried to turn, and stumbled.

Lena was saying, “The hurtloam does this, but I did not expect it. When the wounds are very deadly, hurtloam brings sleep to speed the healing. But cuts on the hands are not deadly. Do you have hurts that you did not show me?”

Yes, he thought through another yawn. I'm sick to death.

He was asleep before he hit the grass.

When he began to drift slowly awake, the first thing that he became conscious of was Lena's firm thighs pillowing his head. Gradually, he grew aware of other things-the tree shade bedizened with glints of declining sunlight, the aroma of pine, the wind murmuring, the grass thickly cradling his body, the sound of a tune, the irregular tingling that came and went from his palms like an atavism-but the warmth of his cheek on Lena's lap seemed more important. For the time, his sole desire was to clasp Lena in his arms and bury his face in her thighs. He resisted it by listening to her song.

In a soft and somehow naive tone, she sang:

Something there is in beauty

which grows in the soul of the beholder

like a flower:

fragile—

for many are the blights

which may waste

the beauty

or the beholder—

and imperishable—

for the beauty may die,

or the beholder may die,

or the world may die,

but the soul in which the flower grows

survives.

Her voice folded him in a comfortable spell which he did not want to end. After a pause full of the scent of pine and the whispering breeze, he said softly, “I like that.”

“Do you? I am glad. It was made by Tomal the Craftmaster, for the dance when he wed Imoiran Moiran-daughter. But oft-times the beauty of a song is in the singing, and I am no singer. It may be that tonight Atiaran my mother will sing for the Stonedown. Then you will hear a real song.”

Covenant gave no answer. He lay still, only wishing to nestle in his pillow for as long as he could. The tingling in his palms seemed to urge him to embrace Lena, and he lay still, enjoying the desire and wondering where he would find the courage.

Then she began to sing again. The tune sounded familiar, and behind it he heard the rumour of dark wings. Suddenly he realized that it was very much like the tune that went with “Golden Boy.”

He had been walking down the sidewalk toward the offices of the phone company-the Bell Telephone Company; that name was written in gilt letters on the door-to pay his bill in person.

He jerked off Lena's lap, jumped to his-feet. A mist of violence dimmed his vision. “What song is that?” he demanded thickly.

Startled, Lena answered, “No song. I was only trying to make a melody. Is it wrong?”

The tone of her voice steadied him-she sounded so abandoned, so made forlorn by his quick anger. Words failed him, and the mist passed. No business, he thought. I've got no business taking it out on her. Extending his hands, he helped her to her feet. He tried to smile, but his stiff face could only grimace. “Where do we go now?”

Slowly the hurt faded from her eyes. “You are strange, Thomas Covenant,” she said.

Wryly, he replied, “I didn't know it was this bad.”

For a moment, they stood gazing into each other's eyes. Then she surprised him by blushing and dropping his hands. There was a new excitement in her voice as she said, “We will go to the Stonedown. You will amaze my mother and father.” Gaily, she turned and ran away down the valley.

She was lithe and light and graceful as she ran, and Covenant watched her, musing on the strange new feelings that moved in him. He had an unexpected sense that this Land might offer him some spell with which he could conjure away his impotence, some rebirth to which he could cling even after he regained consciousness, after the Land and all its insane implications faded into the miasma of half-remembered dreams. Such hope did not require that the Land be real, physically actual and independent of his own unconscious, uncontrolled dream-weaving. No, leprosy was an incurable disease, and if he did not die from his accident, he would have to live with that fact. But a dream might heal other afflictions. It might. He set off after Lena with a swing in his stride and eagerness in his veins.

The sun was down far enough in the sky to leave the lower half of the valley in shadow. Ahead of him, he could see Lena beckoning, and he followed the stream toward her, enjoying the spring of the turf under his feet as he walked. He felt somehow taller than before, as if the hurtloam had done more to him than simply heal his cuts and scrapes. Nearing Lena, he seemed to see parts of her for the first time-the delicacy of her ears when her hair swung behind them-the way the soft fabric of her shift hung on her breasts and hips-her slim waist. The sight of her made the tingling in his palms grow stronger.

She smiled at him, then led the way along the stream and out of the valley. They moved down a crooked file between sheer walls of rock which climbed above them until the narrow slit of the sky was hundreds of feet away. The trail was rocky, and Covenant had to watch his feet constantly to keep his balance. The effort made the file seem long, but within a couple hundred yards he and Lena came to a crevice that ascended to the right away from the stream. They climbed into and along the crevice. Soon it levelled, then sloped gradually downward for a long way, but it bent enough so that Covenant could not see where he was headed.

At last, the crevice took one more turn and ended, leaving Lena and Covenant on the mountainside high above the river valley. They were facing due west into the declining sun. The river came out of the mountains to their left, and flowed away into the plains on their right. There was a branch of the mountain range across the valley, but it soon shrank into the plains to the north.

“Here is the Mithil,” said Lena. “And there is Mithil Stonedown.” Covenant saw a tiny knot of huts north of him on the east side of the river. “It is not a great distance,” Lena went on, "but the path travels up the valley and then back along the river. The sun will be gone when we reach our Stonedown. Come."

Covenant had an uneasy moment looking down the slope of the mountain-still more than two thousand feet above the valley-but he mastered it, and followed Lena to the south. The mountainside relaxed steadily, and soon the path lay along grassy slopes and behind stern rock buttresses, through dells and ravines, among mazes of fallen boulders. And as the trail descended, the air became deeper, softer, and less crystalline. The smells slowly changed, grew greener; pine and aspen gave way to the loam of the grasslands. Covenant felt that he was alive to every gradation of the change, every nuance of the lowering altitude. Through the excitement of his new alertness, the descent passed quickly. Before he was ready to leave the mountains, the trail rolled down a long hill, found the river, and then swung north along it.

The Mithil was narrow and brisk where the path first joined it, and it spoke with wet rapidity to itself in a voice full of resonances and rumours. But as the river drew toward the plains, it broadened and slowed, became more philosophical in its low, self-communing mutter. Soon its voice no longer filled the air. Quietly it told itself its long tale as it rolled away on its quest for the sea.

Under the spell of the river, Covenant became slowly more conscious of the reassuring solidity of the Land. It was not an intangible dreamscape; it was concrete, susceptible to ascertainment. This was an illusion, of course-a trick of his wracked and smitten mind. But it was curiously comforting. It seemed to promise that he was not walking into horror, chaos that this Land was coherent, manageable, that when he had mastered its laws, its peculiar facts, he would be able to travel unscathed the path of his dream, retain his grip on his sanity. Such thoughts made him feel almost bold as he followed Lena's lithe back, the swaying appeal of her hips:

While Covenant wandered in unfamiliar emotions, the Mithil valley dropped into shadow. The sun crossed behind the western mountains, and though light still glowed on the distant plains, a thin veil of darkness thickened in the valley. As he watched, the rim of the shadow stretched itself high up the mountain on his right, climbing like a hungry tide the shores of day. In the twilight, he sensed his peril sneaking furtively closer to him, though he did not know what it was.

Then the last ridge of the mountains fell into dusk, and the glow on the plains began to fade.

Lena stopped, touched Covenant's arm, pointed. “See,” she said, “here is Mithil Stonedown.”

They stood atop a long, slow hill, and at its bottom were gathered the buildings of the village. Covenant could see the houses quite clearly, although lights already shone faintly behind some of the windows. Except for a large, open circle in the centre of the village, the Stonedown looked as erratically laid out as if it had fallen off the mountain not long ago. But this impression was belied by the smooth sheen of the stone walls and the fiat roofs. And when he looked more closely, Covenant saw that the Stonedown was not in fact unorganized. All the buildings faced in toward the centre.

None of them had more than one story, and all were stone, with fiat slabs of rock for roofs; but they varied considerably in size and shape-some were round, others square or rectangular, and still others so irregular from top to bottom that they seemed more like squat hollow boulders than buildings.

As she and Covenant started down toward the Stonedown, Lena said, “Five times a hundred people of the South Plains live here- rhadhamaerl, Shepherds, Cattleherds, Farmers, and those who Craft. But Atiaran my mother alone has been to the Loresraat.” Pointing, she added, “The home of my family is there-nearest the river.”

Walking together, she and Covenant skirted the Stonedown toward her home.