Though Linden knows that Covenant survived the ordeal—she witnessed it all in her percipience—she feels sure that their relationship has died because of her attempt to possess him to dissuade him from the Banefire. The Covenant who emerges from the fire is not in any sense the same person, and she dares not expect that he will now be anything to her at all.
Linden’s morality about possession has been a thread weaving in and out of the entire second series. As I read her reflections here, outside the Banefire enclosure and while guiding the irrigation, I thought of two earlier points in her trajectory: early in the voyage in TOT, when, for fear of possession, she refuses to attempt to reach a Covenant delirious and comatose with venom; and in Bhrathairealm, when she reaches into Covenant and breaks him free of the Elohim silence. The consequences of the latter act had provoked Brinn to attempt to pronounce a capital sentence; when Linden reflects on the consequences of her recent possession of Covenant, she comes near sentencing herself to death.…As he had moved sightlessly past her toward some place or fate which she could no longer guess, her heart had turned to bitterness and dust, leaving her as desolate as the demesne of the Sunbane. She had thought that her passion was directed at him, at his rejection of her, his folly, his desperate doom: but when she saw him emerge from the Banefire and pass by her, she knew better. She had been appalled at herself—at the immedicable wrong of what she had tried to do to him. Despite her horror of possession, her revulsion for the dark ill which Lord Foul had practiced on Joan and the Land, her clear conviction that no one had the right to master others, suppress them, rule them in that way, she had reacted to Covenant’s need and determination as if she were a Raver. She had tried to save him by taking away his identity.
There was no excuse.
But Findail shows again his newfound beginnings of moral courage and of respect for mortal humans:Then for a moment she had believed that she had no choice but to take his place in the Banefire—to let that savage blaze rip away her offenses so that Covenant and her friends and the Land would no longer be in danger from her. …If her life had been shaped by a miscomprehended lust for power, then let it end now, as it deserved. There was no one nearby to stop her.
So she goes not to the death she feels she deserves, but to the task she knows is needed. Just as she always has done since she was a pre-med.Sun-Sage,…I know not how to dissuade you. I do not desire your death—though mayhap I would be spared much thereby. Yet consider the ring-wielder. What hope will remain for him if you are gone? How will he then refuse the recourse of the Earth’s ruin?
Durris guides Linden up through Revelstone to the upland plateau, and remains at her side thereafter throughout the chapter.
This sentence, very like SRD’s descriptions of Bannor and other Bloodguard in the first series, both invokes Haruchai history and shows that Haruchai redemption has begun. They are no longer prisoners and victims in this city, but its condign inhabitants.She sensed all the Haruchai as if they were simply a part of Revelstone, a manifestation of the Keep’s old granite.
Spoiler
This image made me wince, for it connects to a similar image in the TOT chapter “Mother’s Child,” as Linden advanced to confront her Haruchai accusers.An old habit which might once have been a form of self-respect caused her to thrust her hands into her hair to straighten it. But its uncleanness made her wince.
At the steaming outskirts of the sacred enclosure, Linden encounters Pitchwife and the First. Just as the First had confronted Linden during the voyage with the necessity of attempting to heal Covenant, she now breaks into Linden’s confessions with a call to medical readiness.The wind fluttered her unwashed hair against her cheeks. Under other circumstances, she would have loathed that dirt. She had a doctor’s instinct for cleanliness; and a part of her had always taken pride in the sheen of her hair. But now she accepted her grimy appearance in the same spirit that she displayed the dark stain [Ceer’s blood!] on her thighs. It, too, was just.
As I read the description of Linden’s repairs to Mistweave’s broken elbow and many other wrecked limbs, I remembered that SRD’s father was an orthopedist—and speculated that Linden herself might have chosen an orthopedic residency if expiation had not driven her into family practice. Here in the forehall, an opportunity for more constructive reparations presents itself.There is need of you. The wounded are gathered in the forehall. They must be tended….Mistweave labors among them, though he is no less hurt. He will not rest….It is your work he does.
This scene, subdued and sickroom-quiet as it is after the climactic battle of the last chapter, nevertheless is a turning point in Linden’s life. Her motivations for practicing medicine transform before our very eyes.Fole’s hurt reminded her of Ceer’s—the leg crushed by a Sandgorgon and never decently treated—and so she immersed herself in the damage as if restitution could be made in that way, by taking the cost of broken bones and torn flesh upon herself.
Linden has come a long way from “Father’s Child” in TOT, when she said,Yes. It was specific and clean. It had meaning, value; the pain of it was worth bearing. Yes. And it held her in one piece.
As if for the first time: Yes.
I don’t think I’ve ever done anything in my life except deny. I didn’t become a doctor because I wanted people to live. I did it because I hate death.
Spoiler
We all know what "as if he were not" means in SRD's lexicon!…The Haruchai were not unaffected by their part in the Land’s plight. The merewives and the Clave had taught them their limitations. And Brinn’s victory over the Guardian of the One Tree had done much to open the way for Cable Seadreamer’s death and the Despiser’s manipulations. In a strange way, the Haruchai had been humbled. When Linden looked up at Cail, he said as if he were still unmoved, “It will be done. You are Linden Avery the Chosen. It will be done.
Cail guides Linden to a part of the Keep unfamiliar to her, but achingly familiar to us. The circular court leading to the Lords’ private quarters is where the soothtell took place, beginning Covenant’s war against the Clave that has now been won. Mhoram’s room, where Covenant now waits for Linden, is where Mhoram learned from Elena’s sculpture that Covenant and Bannor both required absolute answers for their lives—and where Mhoram taught Covenant that the results of his choices, even if costly, were less important than the motives of those choices.
The word “anele” took me back to the TOT chapter “Also love in the world,” where Linden awakes the next morning “aneled of numbness as if her blood had become chrism.” In that chapter, Covenant had put himself between Linden and the judgment of the Haruchai. Here and now, he puts his reborn self between Linden and her own self-judgment. He can do this because he has transcended his own self-judgments.Mute with shame and longing, [Linden] fought the inadequacy of her vision and strove to anele [anoint, as for the Sacrament of Healing] her sore heart with the simple sight of him.
Luminous in silver and tears, he stood before her….She saw only that he carried himself as if he had not come to berate her.
As Foamfollower emerged as the Pure One after his total-immersion caamora in Hotash Slay?His contradictions remained, defining him beneath the surface. Yet he had become new and pure and clean.
Linden has been trying to figure out what she’s seeing that is different. At first she thought Covenant’s leprosy had been eradicated, then that the venom had been burned out. Covenant explains that what has happened is neither of those things.It was as if his doubt were gone—as if the self-judgments and –repudiation which had tormented him had been reborn as certainty, clarity, acceptance in the Banefire.
Recall that Kasreyn coveted the white gold because it was an alloy rather than a pure metal, because perfect works and pure materials could not endure in an imperfect world.”I guess you could say it’s been fused. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s been burned into me so deeply that there’s no distinction. I’m like an alloy—venom and wild magic and ordinary skin and bones melted together until they’re all one. All the same. I’ll never be free of it.”
As he spoke, she saw that he was right. He gave her the words to see that he was right. Fused. An alloy. Like white gold itself, a blend of metals.
Covenant concludes,
Berenford’s quote from Covenant’s recent novel, “Only the damned can be saved,” reminded me of the biblical passage, “Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.” Hanging on to putative innocence rather than taking a moral risk in the service of life can be a way of trying to save oneself rather than lose oneself?I used to say I was sick of guilt. But not anymore….It’s not a sickness anymore. I am guilt. I’ll never use power again.
Linden doesn’t remotely understand how Covenant can face Foul if he has renounced the use of power. But she can see his certainty down to the core; and she loves him. She asks what her choices are, what he wants her to do. He replies,
*blink, flinch* One of the most moving moments in the mythos. Covenant and Linden enact a mutual Tan-Haruchail far deeper than that of their initial intimacy on Starfare's Gem, because neither is now the same person he or she was when they first gave themselves to each other.”I want what you want. I want you to find something that gives you hope. I want you to come into your power. I want you to stop believing that you’re evil—that your mother and father are the whole truth about you. I want you to understand why you were chosen to be here….I want you to have reasons”.
She still did not comprehend his apprehension. But he had given her an opportunity she coveted fervidly, and she was determined to take it at any cost. Her voice was thick with a kind of weeping she had suppressed for most of her life; but she no longer cared how much frailty or need she exposed. [The very antithesis of her “flat professional voice”.] All the severity and detachment to which she had trained herself had fled, and she did not try to hail them back. Trembling fiercely to herself, she uttered her avowal.
“I don’t want hope. I don’t want power. I don’t care if I never go back. Let Foul do his worst—and to hell with him. I don’t even care if you’re going to die.” That was true. Death was later: he was now. “I’m a doctor, not a magician. I can’t save you unless you go back with me—and if you offered me that, I wouldn’t take it. And that also was true; she had learned it among the wounded in the forehall of the Keep. “All I want is a living love. For as long as I can get it.” Defying her weakness, she stood erect before him in the lamplight as if she were ablaze. “I want you.”
At that, he bowed his head at last; and the relief which flooded from him was so palpable that she could practically embrace it. When he looked up again, he was smiling with love—a smile which belonged to her and to no one else. Tears streaked his face as he went to the door and closed it, shutting out the consequences of wild magic and venom. Then from the doorway he said thickly, “I wish I could’ve believed you were going to say that. I would’ve told Cail to bring us some blankets.”
But the safe gutrock of Revelstone enclosed them with solace, and they did not need blankets.
*Durris dries eyes and reaches for spouse*