Read Online Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson - Free Book Online Page B

and Lena bending over him so low that her hair almost brushed his face.

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