The Illearth War

What Has Gone Before

THOMAS COVENANT is a happy and successful author until an unfelt infection leads to the amputation of two fingers. Then his doctor tells him he has leprosy. The disease is arrested at a leprosarium, but he returns home to find himself an outcast. His wife has divorced him and ignorant fear makes all his neighbours shun him. He becomes a lonely, bitter pariah.

In rebellion, he goes to town. There, just after he meets a strange beggar, he stumbles in front of a police car. Disorientation overcomes him. He revives in a strange world where the evil voice of Lord Foul gives him a mocking message of doom to the Lords of the Land. When Foul leaves, a young girl named Lena takes him to her home. There he is treated as a legendary hero, Berek Halfhand. He finds that his white gold wedding ring is a talisman of great power in the Land.

Lena treats him with a mud called hurtloam, which seems to cure his leprosy. The sensations of healing are more than he can handle, and losing control of himself, he rapes Lena. Despite this, her mother Atiaran agrees to guide him to Revelstone; his message is more important than her hatred of him. She tells him of the ancient war between the Old Lords and Foul, which resulted in millennia of desecration for the Land.

Covenant cannot accept the Land, where there is too much beauty and where stone and wood are subject to the power of magic. He becomes the Unbeliever, because he dares not relax the watchful discipline which a leper needs to survive. To him, the Land is an escape from reality by his injured and perhaps delirious mind.

At the Soulsease River, a friendly Giant takes Covenant by boat to Revelstone, where the Lords meet. There the Lords accept him as one of themselves, calling him the ur-Lord. But his message from Lord Foul dismays them. If Drool Rockworm-evil Cavewight-holds the supremely powerful Staff of Law, their position is perilous indeed. They no longer have even the powers of the Old Lords, whom Foul overcame. Of Old Lord Kevin's Seven Wards of lore they have only the first, which they partly understand.

They determine to seek the Staff, held by Drool in caverns under Mount Thunder. Covenant goes with them as they flee through the attacks of Lord Foul's minions. They go south, to the Plains of Ra, where the Ramen serve the Ranyhyn, the great free horses. There the Ranyhyn bow to the power of Covenant's ring. As some recompense to Lena for what he did, he orders that one horse shall go to do her will each year.

Then the Lords ride to Mount Thunder. There, after many encounters with evil creatures and dark magic, they face Drool. High Lord Prothall wrests the Staff from Drool. They escape from the catacombs when Covenant manages to use the power of his ring-but without understanding how.

As the Lords escape, Covenant is beginning to fade away. He finds himself in a hospital bed a few hours after his accident. His leprosy has returned, suggesting it was all delusion. Yet he cannot quite accept any reality now. He is not seriously injured, however, and he is discharged from the hospital. He returns home.

This is a brief summary of Lord Foul's Bane, the first Chronicle of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever.