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QuotesThe Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever Lord Foul's Bane  (Lord Foul's Bane, Chapter 1, Golden Boy) She came out of the store just in time to see her young son playing on the sidewalk directly in the path of the gray, gaunt man who strode down the center of the walk like a mechanical derelict. For an instant, her heart quailed. Then she jumped forward, gripped her son by the arm, snatched him out of harm's way. The man went by without turning his head. As his back moved away from her, she hissed at it, "Go away! Get out of here! You ought to be ashamed!" Thomas Covenant's stride went on, as unfaltering as clockwork that had been wound to the hilt for just this purpose. But to himself he responded, Ashamed? Ashamed? His face contorted in a wild grimace. Beware! Outcase unclean! (Lord Foul's Bane, Chapter 3, "Invitation to a Betrayal") "Say to the Council of the Lords, and to the High Lord Prothall son of Dwillian, that the uttermost limit of their span of days upon the Land is seven times seven years from this present time. Before the end of those days are numbered, I will have the command of life and death in my hand. And as a token that what I say is the one word of truth, tell them this: Drool Rockworm, Cavewight of Mount Thunder, has found the Staff of Law, which was lost ten times a hundred years ago by Kevin at the Ritual of Desecration. Say to them that the task appointed to their generation is to regain the Staff. Without it, they will not be able to resist me for seven years, and my complete victory will be achieved six times seven years earlier than it would be else." (Lord Foul's Bane, Chapter 4, Kevin's Watch) After a last instant of hesitation, he said, "I'm Thomas Covenant." "Thomas Covenant?" His name sounded ungainly in her mouth. "It is a strange name--a strange name to match your strange apparel. Thomas Covenant." She inclined her head in a slow bow to him. Strange, he thought softly. The strangeness was mutual. He still had no conception of what he would have to deal with in this dream. He would have to find out where he stood. Following the girl's lead, he asked, "Who are you?" "I am Lena," she replied formally, "daughter of Atiaran. My father is Trell, Gravelingas of the rhadhamaerl. Our home is in Mithil Stonedown. Have you been to our Stonedown?" "No." He was tempted to ask her what a Stonedown was, but he had a more important question in mind. "Where--" The word caught in his throat as if it were a dangerous concession to darkness. "Where are we?" "We are upon Kevin's Watch." (Lord Foul's Bane, Chapter 5, Mithil Stonedown) "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. (Lord Foul's Bane, Chapter 6, Legend of Berek Halfhand) The song made Covenant quiver, as if it concealed a specter which he should have been able to recognize. But Atiaran's voice entralled him. No instruments aided her singing, but before she had finished her first line, he knew that she did not need them. The clean thread of her melody was tapestried with unexpected resonances, implied harmonies, echoes of silent voices, so that on every rising motif she seemed about to expand into three or four singers, throats separate and unanimous in the song. (Lord Foul's Bane, Chapter 8, The Dawn of the Message) A leaping figure flashed over the edge of the cutand dropped toward him. He dodged away from the plummet, flung up his arms to ward off the figure's swinging arm. As the attacker passed, he scored the backs of Covenant's fingers with a knife. Then he hit the ground and rolled, came to his feet with his back to the east wall of the cut, his knife weaving threats in front of him. The sunlight seemed to etch everything starkly in Covenant's vision. He saw the unevennesses of the wall, the shadows stretched under them like rictus. The attacker was a young man with a powerful frame and dark hair--unmistakably a Stonedowner, though taller than most. His knife was made of stone, and woven into the shoulders of his tunic was his family insignia, a pattern like crossed lightning. Rage and hate strained his features as if his skull were splitting. "Raver!" he yelled. "Ravisher!" He approached swinging his blade. Covenant was forced to retreat until he stood in the stream, ankle-deep in cool water. (Lord Foul's Bane, Chapter 9, Jehannum) He jerked aside and clutched at the lomillialor with his right hand. But he did not have enough fingers to get a quick grip on it; it slipped away from him, dropped to the floor with a wooden click that seemed unnaturally loud in the hush of the chamber. For an instant, everyone remained still, frozen while they absorbed the meaning of what they had seen. Then, in unison, the Heers uttered their verdict with all the finality of a death sentence. "The High Wood rejects him. He is a wrong in the Land." (Lord Foul's Bane, Chapter 10, The Celebration of Spring) Before Covenant could take in all that was happening, the hulking figure who had saved them turned and hissed, "Go! North to the river. I have released the Wraiths. Now we will make time for your escape. Go!" "No!" Atiaran panted. "You are the only man. The animals are not enough. We must help you fight." "Together we are not enough!" he cried. "Do you forget your task? You must reach the Lords - must! Drool must pay for this Desecration! Go! I cannot give you much time!" Shouting, "Melenkurion abatha!" he whirled and jumped into the thick of the fray, felling ur-viles with his mighty fists. (Lord Foul's Bane, Chapter 11, The Unhomed) Foamfollower's question caught him wandering. "Are you a storyteller, Thomas Covenant?" Absently, he replied, "I was, once." "And you gave it up? Ah, that is as sad a tale in three words as any you might have told me. But a life without a tale is like a sea without salt. How do you live?" Covenant folded his arms across the gunwales and rested his chin on them. As the boat moved, Andelain opened constantly in front of him like a bud; but he ignored it, concentrated instead on the plaint of water past the prow. Unconsciously, he clenched his fist over his ring. "I live." (Lord Foul's Bane, Chapter 13, Vespers) "Bannor!" With a wrench, his mounting fear turned to anger. "Bloody damnation! Bannor. Open this door!" Almost immediately, the stone swung inward. Bannor stood impassively in the doorway. His flat eyes were expressionless. "I can't open the door." Covenant snapped. "What is this? Some kind of prison?" Bannor's shoulders lifted fractionally. "Call it what you choose. You must remain hereuntil the Lords are prepared to send for you." "'Until the Lords are prepared.' What am I supposed to do in the meantime? Just sit here and think?" "Eat. Rest. Do whatever you want." "I'll tell you what I will. I will not stay here and go crazy waiting for the good pleasure of those Lords of yours. I came here all the way from Kevin's Watch to talk to them. I risked my--" With an effort, he caught himself. He could see that his fuming made no impression on the Bloodguard. He gripped his anger with both hands, and said stiffly, "Why am I a prisoner." "Message-bearers may be friends or foes," Bannor replied. "Perhaps you are a servent of Corruption. The safety of the Lords is in our care. The Bloodguard will not permit you to endanger them. We will be sure of you before we allow you to move freely." (Lord Foul's Bane, Chapter 16, Blood-Bourne) "Where I come from we don't see-- If you don't know the annual cycles of the plants, you can't tell teh difference between spring and summer. If you don't have a--have a standard of comparison, you can't recognize-- But the world is beautiful--what's left of it, what we haven't damaged." Images of Haven Farm sprang irrefusably accross his mond. He could not restrain the mordancy of his tone as he concluded, "We have beauty, too. We call it 'scenery'" "'Scenery.'" Mhoram echoed. "The word is strange to me--but I do not like the sound." Covenant felt oddly shaken, as if he has just looked over his shoulder and found himself standing too close to a precipice. "It means that beauty is something extra, " he rasped. "It's nice, but we can live without it." "Without?" Mhoram's gaze glittered dangerously. And from behind him Foamfollower breathed in ashtonishment, "Life without beauty? Ah, my friend! How do you resist despair?" (Lord Foul's Bane, Chapter 18, The Plains of Ra) The Giant was sitting with his back to the last standing, extinguished fragment of Soaring Woodhelven. Grime and blood darkened his face; his skin had the color of a flaw in the heart of a tree. But the wound on his forehead dominated his appearence. Ripped flesh hung over his brows like a foilage of pain, and through the wound, drops of new blood seeped as if red thoughts were making their way from a crack in his skull. He had his right arm wrapped around his great jug of diamondraught and his eyes followed Llaura as she tended little Pietten. (Lord Foul's Bane, Chapter 24, The Calling of Lions) Slowly, Mhoram's grip eased. His lips softened; the fire of his eyes faded. His gaze seemed to turn inward, and he winced at what he beheld. When he spoke, his voice sounded like dust. "Ah, Covenant--forgive me. I forget myself. Foamfollower--Foamfollower understoof this. I should have heard him more clearly. It is wrong to ask for more than you give freely. In this way, we come to resemble what we hate." He released Covenant's wrist and stepped back. "My friend, this is not on your head. The burden is ours, and we bear it to the end. Forgive me." The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever The Illearth War (The Illearth War, Chapter 1, "The Dreams of Men") By the time Thomas Covenant reached his house the burden of what had happened to him has alraedy become intolerable. When he opened the door, he found himself once more in the charted neatness of his living room. Everything was just where he had left it--just as if nothing had happened, as if he had not spent the past four hours in a coma or in another world where his disease had been abrogated despite the fact that such a thing was impossible, impossible. His fingers and toes were numb and cold; there nerves were dead. That could never be changed. His living room--all his rooms--were organized and carpeted and padded so that he could at least try to feel safe from the hazard of bumps, cuts, burns, bruises which could damage him mortally because he was unable to feel them, know that they had happened. There, lying on the coffee table in front of the sofa, was the book he had been reading the previous day. He had been reading it while he was trying to make up his mind to risk a walk to town. It was still open to a page which had had ah entirely different meaning to him just four hous ago. It said, "...modeling the incoherent and vertiginous matter of which dreams are composed was the most difficult task a man could undertake...." And on another page it said, "...the dreams of men belong to God...." He could not bear it. (The Illearth War, Chapter 21, Lena's Daughter) Troy had called Thomas Covenant's Unbelief a bluff. But Covenant was not playing a mental game. He was a leper. He was fighting for his life. Unbelief was his only defense in the Land, his only way to control the intensity, the potential suicide, of his responce to the Land. He felt that he had lost every other form of self-protection. And without self-protection he would end up like the old man he had met in the leprosarium--crippled and fetid beyond all endurance. Even madness would be preferable. If her went mad, he would at least be insulated from knowing what was happening to him, blind and deaf and numb to the vulturine disease that gnawed his flesh. Yet as he rode westward away from Revelwood with High Lord Elena, Amok, and the two Bloodguard, in quest of Kevin Landwaster's Seventh Ward, he knew that he was changing. By fits and starts, his ground shifted under him; some potent, subtle Earthpower altered his personal terrain. Unstable footing shrugged him toward a precipice. And he felt helpless to do anything about it. (The Illearth War, Chapter 26, "Gallows Howe") The Warmark winced eyelessly under repeated blows of realization, and within him a gale brewed. He seemed to see Elena in his mind--remember her, taste her beauty, savor all the power of sight which she had taught him. He seemed to see her useless, solitary end. "Lost?" he panted as his fury grew. "Lost? Alone?" All at once, he erupted. With a livid howl, he raged at Covenant, "Do you call that love?! Leper! Unbeliever!"--he spat the words as if they were the most damning curses he knew--"This is all just a game for you! Mental tricks. Excuses. You're a leper! A moral leper! You're too selfish to love anyone but yourself. You have the power for everything, and you won't use it. You just turned your back on her when she needed you. You--despicable leper! Leper!" He shouted with such force that the muscles of his neck corded. The veins in his temples bulged and throbbed as if he were about to burst with excration. Covenant felt the truth of the accusation. His bargain exposed him to such charges, and Troy hit the heart of of his vulnerability as if some prophetic insight guided his blindness. Covenant's right hand twitched in a futile fending motion. But his left clung to his chest as if to localize his shame in that one place. When Troy paused to gather himself for another assult, Coveant said weakly "Unbelief has got nothing to do with it. She was my daughter." |