Then the truly uncomfortable moment arrives, when Atiaran knows Covenant raped her daughter. I had this eerie, somewhat nauseous fascination with reading on to see what would happen to Covenant as a result of his violent act.
In [i]Lord Foul's Bane[/i] Chapter 8 was wrote:Slowly, Atiaran raised her head and spread her arms, as if opening her breast to an impaling thrust from the sky. Her face was covered in pain, and her eyes were dark craters of grief, looking inward on her compromised humanity. "Trell, help me," she breathed weakly. Then her voice gathered strength, and her anguish seemed to make the air about her ache. "Alas! Alas for the young in the world! Why is the burden of hating ill so hard to bear? Ah, Lena my daughter! I see what you have done. I understand. It is a brave deed, worthy of praise and pride! Forgive me that I cannot be with you in this trial."
But after a while, her gaze swung outward again. She climbed unsteadily to her feet, and stood swaying for a moment before she rasped hoarsely, "Loyalty is due. I forbid your vengenance."
"Does he go unpunished?" protested Triock.
"There is peril in the Land," she answered. "Let the Lords punish him." A taste of blood sharpened her voice. "They will know what to think of a stranger who attacks the innocent." Then her weakness returned. "The matter is beyond me. Triock, remember your Oath." She gripped her shoulders, knotted her fingers in the leaf pattern of her robe as if to hold her sorrow down.
Triock turned toward Covenant. There was something broken in the young man's face--a shattered or wasted capacity for contentment, joy. He snarled with the force of an anathema, "I know you, Unbeliever. We will meet again." Then abruptly he began moving away. He accelerated until he was sprinting, beating out his reproaches on the hard floor of the file. In a moment, he reached a place where the west wall sloped away, and then he was out of sight, gone frome the cut into the hills.
"Impossible," Covenant murmured. "Can't happen. Nerves don't regenerate." But his fingers hurt as if they were being crushed with pain. Apparently, nerves did regenerate in the Land. He wanted to scream against the darkness and the terror, but he seemed to have lost all control of his throat, voice, self.
As if from a distance make great by abhorrence or pity, Atiaran said, "You have made of my heart a wilderland."
"Nerves don't regenerate." Covenant's throat clenched as if he were gagging, but he could not scream. "They don't."
"Does that make you free?" she demanded softly, bitterly. "Does that justify your crime?"
"Crime?" He heard the word like a knife thrust through the beating wings. "Crime?" His blood ran from the cuts as if he were a normal man, but the flow was decreasing steadily. With a sudden convulsion, he caught hold of himself, cried out miserably, "I'm in pain!"
The sound of his wail jolted him, knocked the swirling darkness back a step. Pain! The impossibility bridged a gap for him. Pain was for healthy people, people whose nerves were alive.
Can't happen. Of course it can't. That proves it--proves this is all a dream.
All at once, he felt an acute desire to weep. But he was a leper, and had spent too much time learning to dam such emotional channels. Lepers could not afford grief. Trembling feverishly, he plunged his cut hand into the stream.
"Pain is pain," Atiaran grated. "What is your pain to me? You have done a black deed, Unbeliever--violent and cruel, without commitment or sharing. You have given me a pain that no blood or time will wash clean. And Lena my daughter--! Ah, I pray that the Lords will punish--punish!"
The running water was chill and clear. After a moment, his fingers began to sting in the cold, and an ache spread up through his knuckles to his wrist. Red plumed away from his cuts down the stream, but the cold water soon stopped his bleeding. As he watched the current rinse clean his injury, his grief and fear turned to anger. Because Atiaran was his only companion, he growled at her, "Why should I go? None of this matters--I don't give a damn about your precious Land."
"By the Seven!" Atiaran's hard tone seemed to chisel words out of the air. "You will go to Revelstone if I must drag you each step of the way."
He lifted his hand to examine it. Triock's knife had sliced him as neatly as a razor; there were no jagged edges to conceal dirt or roughen the healing. But the cut had reached bone in his middle two fingers, and blood still seeped from them. He stood up. For the first time since he had been attacked, he looked at Atiaran.
She stood a few paces from him, with her hands clenched together at her heart as if its pulsing hurt her. She glared at him abominably, and her face was taut with intimations of fierce, rough strength. He could see that she was prepared to fight him to Revelstone if necessary. She shamed him, aggravated his ire. Belligerently, he waved his injury at her. "I need a bandage."
For an instant, her gaze intensified as if she were about to hurl herself at him. But then she mastered herself, swallowed her pride. She went over to her pack, opened it, and took out a strip of white cloth, which she tore at an appropriate length as she returned to Covanant. Holding his hand carefully, she inspected the cut, nodded her approval of its condition, then bound the soft fabric firmly around his fingers. "I have no hurtloam," she said, "and cannot be take the time to search for it. But the cut looks well, and will heal cleanly."
When she was done, she went back to her pack. Swinging it onto her shoulders, she said, "Come. We have lost time." Without a glance at Covenant, she set off down the file.
Only in the context of Covenant being seen as a prophesied figure of salvation can I understand Atiaran's incredible show of forbearance, especially given Covenant's belligerent and self-concerned attitude toward Atiaran after she has just learned what he has done to Lena. For Covenant, the pain in his fingers makes the Land unreal. For me, Atiaran refusing Triock's request for violence against Covenant makes the Land unreal. And yet, Atiaran is the most realistically-described character in the Land that we have encountered, so far. I can visualize her more vividly than I can Drool, Foul, Lena, Trell, or Triock.