Rain continued to fall like the collapse of the sky. Covenant placed himself at one end of the raft and used the weight of his boots to steady its course. Half paralyzed with cold, he and his companions rode through a day that seemed to have no measure and no end. When the rain began to dwindle, that fact could not penetrate his dogged stupor. As the clouds rolled back from the east, uncovering the clear heavens of evening, he gaped at the open air as if it spoke a language which had become alien to him.
Together the companions flopped like dying fish to the riverbank, crawled out of the water. Somehow Sunder mustered the strength to secure the raft against the rising of the River. Then he joined Covenant and Linden in the wind-shelter of a copse of preternatural gorse, and slumped to the ground. The teeming black clouds slid away to the west; and the sun set, glorious with orange and red. The gloaming thickened toward night.
“Fire.” Linden’s voice quivered; she was trembling from head to foot. “We’ve got to have a fire.”
Covenant groaned his mind out of the mud on which he lay, raised his head. Long vibrations of cold ran through him; shivers knotted his muscles. The sun had not shone on the Plains all day and the night was as clear as perfect ice.
“Yes,” Sunder said through locked teeth. “We must have fire.”
Fire. Covenant winced to himself. He was too cold to feel anything except dread. But the need was absolute. And he could not bear to think of blood. To forestall the Graveler, he struggled to his hands and knees, though his bones seemed to clatter together. “I’ll do it”
They faced each other. The silence between them was marked only by the chill breeze rubbing its way through the copse, and by the clenched shudder of breathing. Sunder’s expression showed that he did not trust Covenant’s strength, did not want to set aside his responsibility for his companions. But Covenant kept repeating inwardly, You’re not going to cut yourself for me, and did not relent. After a moment, Sunder handed him the orcrest.
Covenant accepted it with his trembling half-hand, placed it in contact with his ring, glared at it weakly. But then he faltered. Even in ten years, he had not been able to unlearn his instinctive fear of power.
“Hurry,” Linden whispered.
Hurry? He covered his face with his left hand, striving to hide his ague. Bloody hell. He lacked the strength. The orcrest lay inert in his fist; he could not even concentrate on it. You don’t know what you’re asking.
But the need was indefeasible. His anger slowly tightened. He became rigid, clenched against the chills. Ire indistinguishable from pain or exhaustion shaped itself to the circle of his ring. The Sunstone had no life; the white gold had no life. He gave them his life. There was no other answer.
Cursing silently, he hammered his fist at the mud.
White light burst in the orcrest: flame sprang from his ring as if the metal were a band of silver magma. In an instant, his whole hand was ablaze.
He raised his fist, brandished fire like a promise of retribution against the Sunbane. Then he dropped the Sunstone. It went out; but his ring continued to spout flame. In a choking voice, he gasped, “Sunder!”
At once, the Graveler gave him a dead gorse-branch. He grasped the wet bark in his half-hand: his arm shook as he squeezed white flame into the wood. When he set it down, it was afire.
Sunder supplied more wood, then knelt to tend the weak fire. Covenant set flame to the second branch, to a third and fourth. Sunder fed the burning with leaves and twigs, blew carefully on the flames. After a moment, he announced, “It is enough.”
With a groan, Covenant let his mind fall blank, and the blaze of his ring plunged into darkness. Night closed over the copse, huddled around the faint yellow light and smoke of the fire.
Soon he began to feel heat on his face.
Sagging within himself, he tried to estimate the consequences of what he had done, measure the emotional umbrage of power.
Shortly the Graveler recovered his sack of melons from the raft, and dealt out rations of ussusimiel. Covenant felt too empty to eat; but his body responded without his volition. He sat like an effigy, with wraiths of moisture curling upward from his clothes, and looked dumbly at the inanition of his soul.
When she finished her meal, Linden threw the rinds away. Staring into the flames, she said remotely, “I don’t think I can take another day of this.”
“Is there choice?” Fatigue dulled Sunder’s eyes. He sat close to the heat, as if his bones were thirsty for warmth. “The ur-Lord aims toward Revelstone. Very well. But the distance is great. Refusing the aid of the River, we must journey afoot. To gain the Keep of the na-Mhoram would require many turnings of the moon. But I fear we would not gain it. The Sunbane is too perilous. And there is the matter of pursuit.”
The set of Linden’s shoulders showed her apprehension. After a moment, she asked tightly, “How much longer?”
The Graveler sighed. “None can foretell the Sunbane,” he said in a dim voice. “It is said that in generations past each new sun shone for five and six, even as many as seven days. But a sun of four days is now uncommon. And with my own eyes I have beheld only one sun of less than three.”
“Two more days,” Linden muttered. “Dear God.”
For a while, they were silent. Then, by tacit agreement, they both arose to gather wood for the fire. Scouring the copse, they collected a substantial pile of brush and branches. After that, Sunder stretched out on the ground. But Linden remained sitting beside the fire. Slowly Covenant noticed through his numbness that she was studying him.
In a tone that seemed deliberately inflectionless, she asked, “Why does it bother you to use your ring?”
His ague had abated, leaving only a vestigial chill along his bones. But his thoughts were echoes of anger. “It’s hard.”
“In what way?” In spite of its severity, her expression said that she wanted to understand. Perhaps she needed to understand. He read in her a long history of self-punishment. She was a physician who tormented herself in order to heal others, as if the connection between the two were essential and compulsory.
To the complexity of her question, he gave the simplest answer he knew. “Morally.”
For a moment, they regarded each other, tried to define each other. Then, unexpectedly, the Graveler spoke. “There at last, ur-Lord,” he murmured, “you have uttered a word which lies within my comprehension.” His voice seemed to arise from the wet wood and the flames. “You fear both strength and weakness, both power and lack of power. You fear to be in need—and to have your need answered. As do I.
“I am a Graveler—well acquainted with such fear. A Stonedown trusts the Graveler for its life. But in the name of that life, that trust, he must shed the blood of his people. Those who trust must be sacrificed to meet the trust. Thus trust becomes a matter of blood and death. Therefore I have fled my home”—the simple timbre of lament in his tone relieved what he said of any accusation—“to serve a man and a woman whom I cannot trust. I know not how to trust you, and so I am freed of the burden of trust. There is naught between us which would require me to shed your lives. Or to sacrifice my own.”
Listening to Sunder’s voice and the fire, Covenant lost some of his fear. A sense of kinship came over him. This dour self-doubting Stonedownor had suffered so much, and yet had preserved so much of himself. After a long moment, Covenant chose to accept what Sunder was saying. He could not pay every price alone. “All right,” he breathed like the night breeze in the copse. “Tomorrow night you can start the fire.”
Quietly Sunder replied, “That is well.”
Covenant nodded. Soon he closed his eyes. His weariness lowered him to the ground beside the fire. He wanted to sleep.
But Linden held his attention. “It isn’t enough,” she said stiffly. “You keep saying you want to fight the Sunbane, but you can hardly light a fire. You might as well be afraid of rubbing sticks together. I need a better answer than that.”
He understood her point. Surely the Sunbane—capa
ble of torturing nature itself at its whim—could not be abrogated by anything as paltry as a white gold ring. He distrusted power because no power was ever enough to accomplish his heart’s desires. To heal the world. Cure leprosy. Bridge the loneliness which thwarted his capacity for love. He made an effort not to sound harsh. “Then find one. Nobody else can do it for you.”
She did not respond. His words seemed to drive her back into her isolation. But he was too tired to contend with her. Already he had begun to fade. As she settled herself for the night, he rode the susurration of the River into sleep.
He awoke cramped and chilled beside a pile of dead embers. The stars had been effaced; and in the dawn, the rapid Mithil looked dark and cold, as fatal as sleet He did not believe he could survive another day in the water.
But, as Sunder had said, they had no choice. Shivering in dire anticipation, he awakened his companions. Linden looked pale and haggard, and her eyes avoided the River as if she could not bear to think about it. Together they ate a scant breakfast, then stood on a boulder to face the dawn. As they had expected, the sun rose in a glow of blue, and menacing clouds began to pile out of the east. Sunder shrugged in resignation and went to retie his shrinking sack of melons to the raft.
The companions launched the bundle of wood. The sting of the water burned Covenant’s breath out of his lungs; but he fought the cold and the current and the weight of his boots with his old leper’s intransigence, and survived the first shock.
Then the rain commenced. During the night, the River had become less violent; it had washed itself free of floating brush and trees and had risen above the worst of its turbulence. But the rain was more severe, had more wind behind it. Gusts drove the raindrops until they hit like flurries of hail. Torrents lashed into the water with a hot, scorching sound.
The downpour rapidly became torment for the companions. They could not escape from the sodden and insidious cold. From time to time, Covenant glimpsed a burst of lightning in the distance, rupturing the dark; but the unremitting slash of rain into the Mithil drowned out any thunder. Soon his muscles grew so leaden, his nerves so numb, that he could no longer grip the raft. He jammed his hand in among the branches, hooked his elbow over one of the bindings, and survived.
Somehow the day passed. At last, a line of clear sky broke open along the east. Gradually the rain and wind eased. More by chance than intent, the companions gained a small cove of gravel and sand in the west bank. As they drew their raft out of the water, Covenant’s legs failed, and he collapsed facedown on the pebbles as if he would never be able to move again.
Linden panted, “Firewood.” He could hear the stumbling scrunch of her shoes. Sunder also seemed to be moving.
Her groan jerked up his head, heaved him to his hands and knees. Following her wounded stare, he saw what had dismayed her.
There was no firewood. The rain had washed the gravel clean. And the small patch of shore was impenetrably surrounded by a tangle of briar with long barbed thorns. Exhaustion and tears thickened her voice as she moaned, “What are we going to do?”
Covenant tried to speak, but was too weak to make any sound.
The Graveler locked his weary knees, mustered a scant smile. “The ur-Lord has granted permission. Be of good heart. Some little warmth will ease us greatly.”
Lurching to his feet, Covenant watched blankly as Sunder approached the thickest part of the briar.
The muscles of his jaw knotted and released irrhythmically, like a faltering heartbeat. But he did not hesitate. Reaching his left hand in among the thorns, he pressed his forearm against one of the barbs and tore a cut across his skin.
Covenant was too stunned by fatigue and cold and responsibility to react. Linden flinched, but did not move.
With a shudder, Sunder smeared the welling blood onto his hands and face, then took out his orcrest. Holding the Sunstone so that his cut dripped over it, he began to chant.
For a long moment, nothing happened. Covenant trembled in his bones, thinking that without sunlight Sunder would not be able to succeed. But suddenly a red glow awakened in the translucent stone. Power the color of Sunder’s blood shafted in the direction of the sun.
The sun had already set behind a line of hills, but the Sunstone was unaffected by the intervening terrain; Sunder’s vermeil shaft struck toward the sun’s hidden position. Some distance from the cove, the shaft disappeared into the dark base of the hills; but its straight, bright power was not hindered.
Still chanting, Sunder moved his hands so that the shaft encountered a thick briar stem. Almost at once, flame burst from the wood.
When the stem was well afire, he shifted his power to the nearest branches.
The briar was wet and alive; but his shaft lit new stems and twigs easily, and the tangle was so dense that the flames fed each other. Soon he had created a self-sustaining bonfire.
He fell silent; and the blood-beam vanished. Tottering weakly, he went to the River to wash himself and the Sunstone.
Covenant and Linden hunched close to the blaze. Twilight was deepening around them. At their backs, the Mithil sounded like the respiration of the sea. In the firelight, Covenant could see that her lips were blue with cold, her face drained of blood. Her eyes reflected the flames as if they were devoid of any other vision. Grimly he hoped that she would find somewhere the desire or the resolution to endure.
Shortly Sunder returned, carrying his sack of ussusimiel. Linden bestirred herself to tend his arm; but he declined quietly. “I am a Graveler,” he murmured. “Such work would not have fallen to me, were I slow of healing.” He raised his forearm, showed her that the bleeding had already stopped. Then he sat down near the flames, and began to prepare a ration of melons for supper.
The three of them ate in silence, settled themselves for the night in silence. Covenant was seeking within himself for the courage to face another day under the sun of rain. He guessed that his companions were doing the same. They wore their private needs like cerements, and slept in isolation.
The next day surpassed Covenant’s worst expectations. As clouds sealed the Plains, the wind mounted to rabid proportions, whipping the River into froth and flailing rain like the barbs of a scourge. Lightning and thunder bludgeoned each other across the heavens. In flashes, the sky became as lurid as the crumbling of a firmament, as loud as an avalanche. The raft rode the current like dead wood, entirely at the mercy of the Mithil.
Covenant thrashed and clung in constant fear of the lightning, expecting it to strike the raft, to fry him and his companions. But that killing blow never fell. Late in the day, the lightning itself granted them an unexpected reprieve. Downriver from them, a blue-white bolt sizzled into a stand of prodigious eucalyptus. One of the trees burned like a torch.
Sunder yelled at his companions. Together they heaved the raft toward the bank, then left the River and hastened to the trees. They could not approach the burning eucalyptus; but when a blazing branch fell nearby, they used other dead wood to drag the branch out from under the danger of the tree. Then they fed brush, broken tree limbs, eucalyptus leaves as big as scythes, to the flames until the blaze was hot enough to resist the rain.
The burning tree and the campfire shed heat like a benediction. The ground was thick with leaves which formed the softest bed Covenant and his companions had had for days. Sometime after sunset, the tree collapsed, but it fell away from them; after that they were able to rest without concern.
Early in the dawn, Sunder roused Covenant and Linden so that they would have time to break their fast before the sun rose. The Graveler was tense and distracted, anticipating a change in the Sunbane. When they had eaten, they went down to the riverbank and found a stretch of flat rock where they could stand to await the morning. Through the gaunt and blackened trees, they saw the sun cast its first glance over the horizon.
It appeared baleful, fiery and red; it wore coquelicot like a crown of thorns, and cast a humid heat entirely unlike the fierce intensity of the desert sun. I
ts corona seemed insidious and detrimental. Linden’s eyes flinched at the sight. And Sunder’s face was strangely blanched. He made an instinctive warding gesture with both hands. “Sun of pestilence,” he breathed; and his tone winced. “Ah, we have been fortunate. Had this sun come upon us after the desert sun, or the fertile—” The thought died in his throat. “But now, after a sun of rain—” He sighed. “Fortunate, indeed.”
“How so?” asked Covenant. He did not understand the attitude of his companions. His bones yearned for the relief of one clear clean day. “What does this sun do?”
“Do?” Sunder gritted. “What harm does it not? It is the dread and torment of the Land. Still water becomes stagnant. Growing things rot and crumble. All who eat or drink of that which has not been shaded are afflicted with a disease which few survive and none cure. And the insects—!”
“He’s right,” Linden whispered with her mouth full of dismay, “Oh, my God.”
“It is the Mithil River which makes us fortunate, for it will not stagnate. Until another desert sun, it will continue to flow from its springs, and from the rain. And it will ward us in other ways also.” The reflected red in Sunder’s eyes made him look like a cornered animal. “Yet I cannot behold such a sun without faintheartedness. My people hide in their homes at such a time and pray for a sun of two days. I ache to be hidden also. I am homeless and small against the wideness of the world, and in all the Land I fear a sun of pestilence more than any other thing.”
Sunder’s frank apprehension affected Covenant like guilt. To answer it, he said, “You’re also the only reason we’re still alive.”
“Yes,” the Graveler responded as if he were listening to his own thoughts rather than to Covenant.
“Yes!” Covenant snapped. “And someday every Stonedown is going to know that this Sunbane is not the only way to live. When that day comes, you’re going to be just about the only person in the Land who can teach them anything.”