As the chapter opens, Covenant and Linden are waking up in captivity. They have been attacked and anesthetized by a melon called mirkfruit. Mirkfruit is an example of how twisted the Land has become. It is still providing its people with things they can make clever, practical use of, but now it is providing weapons instead of the warmth of graveling or the healing of hurtloam.
Once they have discovered they aren’t injured, Covenant and Linden have nothing to say about their circumstances. What they want to talk about is Covenant’s confession of rape. Covenant doesn’t want to be on false terms with Linden. He says that not telling her would have been a betrayal. Linden takes the practical standpoint that he didn’t do it intentionally. It’s over, he has made up for it by saving the Land. What she needs to know is why he told her, so she can know who she is dealing with. She is disillusioned.
Linden has pinpointed what may be Covenant’s main motivation of the trilogy: recovering his sense of innocence.“You use guilt the same way you use leprosy. You want people to reject you, stay away from you – make a victim out of you. So you can recapture your innocence.”
At a meeting of the people of Mithil Stonedown, they undergo the “test of silence”. The idea is that if the villagers say nothing, the accused will babble out their guilt. Covenant and Linden speak in their own defense, only to discover that most of what they say, based on ideals of friendship, is considered to be abomination. They are about to be condemned, when Linden, without knowing what she is seeing, shows Covenant that a stonedowner named Marid has a Raver in him. The Raver reveals himself with a sneer to be the murderer of the Unfettered One Nassic, and is condemned by the villagers. Covenant and Linden are returned to their prison.
Covenant explains to Linden what a Raver is, why her earthsense allows her to see it – and that she is the only one who can. Covenant and all the villagers no longer have the earthsight. The graveler comes to tell them they have been condemned to death in spite of the Raver’s exposure. He also tells them that Marid, though innocently possessed by the Raver, has been punished, abandoned to the unmercy of the Sunbane. After he leaves, Covenant tries to give Linden a sense of the battle they are entering by telling her the story of how the Land was created.
The returning graveler, Sunder, overhears him. Sunder is a tragedy of a name, the epitome of separation and loss. Sunder means part. As graveler of the village, he was forced to kill or “shed” his own wife and son for the blood that keeps the village alive. Sunder’s estranged father Nassic, who told Sunder the same forbidden Creation story he has just overheard from Covenant, has been murdered, and Sunder is now required to kill his fatally injured mother. When Covenant proves his power, by touching his white gold ring to Sunder’s fragment of orcrest and freeing himself, he and Linden persuade Sunder to take the final loss: abandoning his village, to act as guide to condemned strangers who may be able to save the Land.
There is a lot of explanation elegantly incorporated into Chapter 6. A deeply-felt piece of Donaldson’s philosophy is also included:
One may feel compelled to think of this in relation to the religions Donaldson was surrounded by as he grew up....[He] raged at the brutality which had taught people like Sunder to think of their own lives as punishment for a crime they could not have committed.
Chapter 7 is titled “Marid,” and describes the first stage of their escape from Mithil Stonedown. In this chapter the Sunbane makes its raw impact on Covenant and Linden.
This, of course, is exactly what has happened, but Covenant hasn’t begun to grasp it yet. Donaldson begins our intimate acquaintance with the new version of the Land as it begins to tighten its grip on Covenant. He does this by choosing words that best express his own visceral reaction to the Sunbane.The riverbed was as desiccated as a desert. Had the Law itself become meaningless?
Here Covenant is suffering the kind of shock that leaves one floundering inwardly, unable to process input.A moment passed before he regained himself enough to look outward, away from his dismay.
The following are examples of the incredible writing that it takes to express SRD's visceral reaction to the Sunbane.
Then as Covenant becomes more aware:Moonlight gave the night a crisp patina of old silver, as if the darkness itself were a work of fine-spun craft.
As sunrise with its dangers approached:The low moonlight gave them an appearance of ghostly sterility, as if they had been weathered barren by ages of implacable thirst.
Linden describes her perceptions of the desert:Sunder ... made digressions from his path like spurts of fright...
Covenant sets off into the desert, hoping to find and save Marid:“It’s wrong. ... It’s like a running sore. I keep expecting to see it bleed.”
(vitiate - make ineffective)The sun beat down as if onto an anvil, like a smith shaping futility. At times, he felt himself wandering over the colorless earth, through the haze, as if he were a fragment of the desolation.
Heat flushed back and forth across his skin – a vitiating fever which echoed the haze of the scorched earth. His eyes felt raw from the scraping of his eyelids.
When they discover Marid has escaped, Covenant says:
and we see that Covenant protects innocence with the need of a shepherd protecting his sheep.“I had to try. He was innocent.”
Covenant, Linden, and Sunder reach the limit of their endurance,. They happen to rest near an aliantha bush, and reach the turning point of Sunder’s life. Sunder has been taught that aliantha is deadly poison. Covenant proves, by eating an aliantha berry, that it is still the treasure of healing earthpower that it used to be, forcing Sunder to see that the teachings of his society are a lie.
There is one more trial in this chapter, which will shape the rest of Covenant’s life. Marid, distorted by the Sunbane, finds Covenant, and in a suicidal attack, gives him a venomous bite.
About Marid’s transformation:
Thick scale-clad bodies writhed from his shoulders; serpent-heads gaped where his hands had been, brandishing fangs as white a bone. His chest heaved for air, and the snakes hissed.
Marid has been turned to Foul’s service by the mere fact that he was touching the earth at the time the baned sun rose.In the back of [Covenant’s] mind, a pulse of outrage beat like lifeblood.
This refers back to the quote from Covenant that made such an impression on all of us in Chapter 2:The Land had become like Joan. Something broken.
This is the kind of insight that makes me wonder what Donaldson had to suffer to know so much. Then I remember he was raised surrounded by people who had suffered so much, and by their doctor who probably suffered along with them. Did he know someone wise enough to tell him this, when he was a child? None of my business to ask, I know, but the question demands out. Where did he learn such knowledge of humanity? Was it taught, or realized?There’s only one way to hurt a man who’s lost everything. Give him back something broken.
The Sunbane is one of the most intelligent, thoroughly-realized magical systems I have ever read. In these two chapters we have not yet begun to understand the Sunbane’s logic, but we have begun to feel its horror.