This will be more a response than a summary, and it may not track altogether linearly: the chapter left me too molten inside for coherent logic.
As the curtain rises, the First, Pitchwife, Covenant, and Linden (and, far on the periphery, Brinn and Cail) have been at the rail of Starfare's Gem watching a gavotte of preternatural waterspouts move in to surround the becalmed ship. Then a Song is heard.
The call of the merewives went through Covenant like an awl, so bright and piercing that he would not have known it for music if his heart had not leaped up in response,...The song consumed him. Its pointed loveliness and desire entered him to the marrow. Vistas of grandeur and surcease opened beyond the railing as if the music had words,
Come to us for heart-heal and soul-assuage,
for consummation of every flesh.
Would I be rude to suggest that the song of the merewives might have been better left untranslated? At a Renaissance music concert I once attended, one performer recited a portion of Beowulf. His introduction stuck with me: he said that the poem never gives an explicit description of Grendel, because the Grendel each of us 'sees' unbidden is much scarier than any Grendel spelled out. The song of the merewives personifies longing, and one's own heart's desire just barely glimpsed is more painfully acute than another's heart's desire described explicitly.
The merewives lose interest in Covenant when they sense his power. (What cowardesses! They only want to seduce their ontological inferiors.) But their interest in the Haruchai is reciprocated.
Very cinematographic moment. Sun coruscating off a turquoise sea and burnishing teak-colored quadriceps and glutei for the instants of their arcing flight. Cut to a close-range shot of abandoned robes scattered randomly on the deck.Together, Brinn and Cail bounded onto the railing. For a fractional [that classic Haruchai adjective!] instant, they were poised in the sunlight, crouched to leap forward like headlong joy. Then they dove for the sea as if it had become the essence of all their hearts' desires.
I had two responses to this passage. Why does Covenant see this as his failure? And Spoiler:Covenant's mouth stretched into a lost shout... He had placed so much faith in the Haruchai, needed them so much. Were their hearts mortal and frangible after all? Bannor had commanded him, Redeem my people. He had failed again.
Spoiler
Covenant's fear for Brinn and Cail raises involuntary wild magic, which he fights down laboriously lest it provoke the merewives further or endanger the ship. The First and Galewrath dive to the rescue. On deck, Covenant demands help of Findail; as usual, Findail refuses. The Elohim's only contribution to the emergency is an explanation of where the merewives came from.
....the tale that they are the descendants and inheritors of the woman whom Kastenessen loved;that she took with her the power and knowledge which she gained from him, and also the daughters of all men-betrayed women, and set herself and them to seek restitution from all men who abandon their homes in the name of the sea
This description reminded me of the ballet Giselle, which features the Wilis, a tribe of female spirits: ghosts of maidens who died unlucky in love-who attract and vanquish men who disappoint their living loves.
Mrs. Kastenessen probably was far over Sea from the Westron Mountains, so I won't suggest that she literally recruited there. But I couldn't help thinking of 6000 years' worth of abandoned Haruchai brides and betrotheds when Findail said this.
Meanwhile, the rescue has succeeded, sort of. The Giantesses return to the ship with two very unconscious Haruchai draped all over them. Linden flinches under the First's and Covenant's request that she use her percipience to break them free of the merewives' hold, and finally says a fearsome, teeth-grinding TFH to the task:
So many layers in that sentence. Even if she fouls up completely now (First, do no harm) she can't possibly do more damage than she willed to do to Ceer scant days ago, because this time her intent is to heal, whatever the results are. Also, whatever her percipience encounters in this attempt can't possibly be worse than what she's already seen inside Covenant at various times...the Marid/Sunbane Covenant is pretty hard to top.It can't be any worse than what I've already done.
But she doesn't have to touch their minds; threatening Brinn's bones gets his and Cail's immediate attention. When Brinn recovers the power of speech, things start getting interesting.
Oh dear God, here it comes.
The First misunderstands, thinking they intend to go back to the merewives right now. Brinn corrects her.We withdraw our accusation against the Chosen. She has adjudged us rightly. [Huh? When did she judge them at all? Or does Brinn mean when she said You don't have the right; when they were judging her?] Mayhap she is in sooth the hand of Corruption among us. But there are other Corruptions which we hold in greater abhorrence.
We speak neither for our people among the mountains nor for those Haruchai who may seek to wage themselves against the depredations of the Clave. But we will no longer serve you.
"That is not our intent. We do not seek death. We will not again answer the song of the Dancers. But we will no longer serve either the ur-Lord or the Chosen." His tone did not relent. He spoke as if he were determined to show himself no mercy. "We cannot."
We've already seen that Brinn had no mercy for Linden. At least he doesn't have a double standard...but this seems like entirely too much consistency.
Covenant can't take refuge in incomprehension any longer.
In this one sentence SRD makes present Bannor's entire trajectory in The Power that Preserves: it was the Ranyhyn's surpassing fidelity that drew Bannor back to the Land from his self-imposed exile after the Vow. Brinn and Cail had no actual Vow, but their private fealty is ending in a very similar spirit to the Vow's disruption. Bannor's post-Vow experience was, in the most constructive sense of the term, purgatorial: he's a completely different person at the end of TPTP. Brinn and Cail too will each have their own purgatory, very different from Bannor's and from one another's.Was he going to lose the Haruchai? The Haruchai, who had been as faithful as Ranyhyn from the beginning?
Yikes. We all knew the capacity for passion was there under the surface all along; nevertheless, seeing it come to the surface like this !But then Brinn met his gaze for the first time; and the passion in those dispassionate orbs made him tremble.
But Covenant has no room for other passions than his own single-minded purpose; and he preempts Brinn for pure fear and refusal of the pain Brinn's words will bring.
This paragraph makes present the entire Soothtell/The Quest trajectory from TWL, in which Covenant and Brinn mutually accepted each other's commitments. What's happening right now on Starfare's Gem is exactly what Covenant wanted to prevent when he kept on hesitating to accept Brinn's service. (Of course neither knew about the merewives back in Revelstone. I mean that Covenant could scarcely bear the thought of reciprocating Brinn's Tan-Haruchail only to find history repeating itself and fidelity becoming discontinuity. He did accept, for pure need left him no other choice; right now he must be thinking that he did the wrong thing, because it's ending as neither of them can bear for it to, after what happened with the ancestors.)"You made a promise...I didn't want to accept it. I didn't want to be responsible for any more service like the kind Bannor insisted on giving me. But I had no choice." He had been more than half crippled by loss of blood, might have died of sheer remorse and futility on the upland plateau above Revelstone if Brinn had not aided him.
But mere obligation is no match for Brinn's passion.
"Mayhap you know too little of us. The lives of our people in the mountains are strict and costly, for peaks and snows are no gentle bourne. Therefore are we prolific in our seed, that we may endure from generation to generation. The bond joining man to woman is a fire in us, and deep. Did not Bannor speak to you of this? For those who became Bloodguard, the loss of sleep and death was a little thing, lightly borne. But the loss of wives... It was that which caused them to end their Vow when Corruption placed his hand upon them. Any man may fail or die. But how may one of the Haruchai who has left his wife in the name of a chosen fidelity endure to know that even his fidelity may be riven from him? Better the Vow had never been uttered, no service given."
And suddenly it comes into focus why it had to be Korik who broke the Vow long ago. In Gilden-Fire Korik's awareness of this precise cost of the Vow is made wrenchingly clear:
.He could not forget any detail of the last night he had spent with his wife, whose bones were already ancient in the frozen fastness of her grave. The Vow sustained him, but it was not warm
I'm remembering something Thomas Merton, ascetic of Covenant's world and ours, wrote late in his monastic life:
.The tragic chastity, which suddenly realizes itself to be mere loss and fears that death has won: that one is sterile, useless, hateful. I do not say this is my lot, but in my vow I can see this as an ever-present possibility
Covenant and Linden have just healed each other of parched years of tragic chastity. In the song of the merewives Brinn and Cail suddenly see their own renunciations as wasted and tragic.
"Ur-Lord." Brinn did not look away. He hardly blinked. Yet the unwonted implication of softness in his tone was unmistakable. "In the song of the merewives we heard the fire of our yearning for that which we have left behind. Assuredly we were deluded, but the delusion was sweet. Mountains sprang about us. The air became the keen breath which the peaks exhale from their snows. And upon the slopes moved the women who call to us in their longing for fire and seed and offspring." For a moment, he broke into the tonal tongue of the Haruchai; and that language seemed to transform his visage, giving him an aspect of poetry. "Therefore did we leap to answer, disregarding all service and safety. The limbs of our women are brown from sun and birth. But there is also a whiteness as acute as the ice that bleeds from the rock of mountains; and it burns as the purest snow burns in the most high tor, the most wind-flogged col. For that whiteness, we gave ourselves to the Dancers of the Sea."
ai. Just as prose that's one of the two or three most splendid paragraphs SRD ever wrote.
Almost as though it's too dangerous to be owned, they again transmute this newfound passion into the more familiar ferocity of judgment.Their rigid and judgmental stance against the world came from this, that every breath they took was an inhalation of desire and loss.
They blame themselves for succumbing to the merewives as intransigently as Bannor once blamed himself for Korik's succumbing to the Illearth Stone; and no one on Starfare's Gem can convince them otherwise.
Even now, Brinn's manner of speaking to Covenant recalls his deep solicitude during their trek to Glimmermere in The Quest.,
At last, Brinn spoke. He sounded almost gentle. "Ur-Lord, have we not served you well?"..."Then let it end."
He ends his service because that is what "compromised" Haruchai have always done; but he doesn't know how to end linamia (those strong friendships that are limited to two or three in a man's life). Come to think of it, Bannor didn't know how either.
........
*Durris swallows hard and reaches for spouse*