Only one concern remained: First Woodhelven.
Gripping the Staff of Law until her knuckles ached, Linden leaned along Hyn’s neck, silently urging the mare and all of the Ranyhyn to run faster.
A long rising slope blocked the view ahead. It fell away to lower ground on the south: to the north, it mounted toward a rocky tor, rugged with old stone. But along the company’s path the ascent was too gradual to slow the pounding horses. They sped upward over earth that lost its scruff of grass to become an ungiving admixture of flint, crumbled shale, and bare dirt. The hooves of the Ranyhyn pelted debris behind them with every stride. The horses following Linden were forced to space themselves so that they did not run in the spray of jagged pebbles and grit kicked up by Hyn and Hynyn, Whrany and Narunal.
Along the lower terrain, she saw evidence of the caesure’s passage. The ground there was as barren as the slope, but it had a churned look, as though it had been raked by thousands of claws. A stretch of disturbed soil nearly a stone’s throw across led like a crooked road into the south.
God, the Fall was big-
Now Linden spotted what appeared to be a storm around the caesure’s seething column. The sky was free of clouds, uncluttered from horizon to horizon. Nevertheless lightning flared in the distance, crackling around the caesure like a nimbus. The air thickened as if it were crowded with thunderheads; full of theurgy rather than moisture and wind.
She stifled a gasp of chagrin. The Fall was not the only peril. Some power as lorewise and puissant as the Demondim was striving urgently to interrupt or influence the caesure.
Biting her lip, she turned her head away. Stave had said that First Woodhelven occupied a fertile lowland surrounded by bare hills. If it lay beyond this rise, it may have been directly in the path of the Fall.
The crest was near. Already she could see past it to more hills perhaps half a league distant; slopes as barren as the dirt over which the Ranyhyn galloped.
Oh, God, she groaned as Hyn bore her to the top of the rise. Please. No.
Then the Ranyhyn swept over the crest, poured like a torrent down the far side; and Linden saw that First Woodhelven had not been spared.
It occupied a wide, low valley which stretched beyond the tor in the northwest and curved away to the east; a slow crescent of soil made arable by a bright brook and seasonal flooding. As Stave had suggested, the lowland was contained by hills like mounds of shale, dirt, and marl. But centuries of water and overflow had made the bottom of the valley as hospitable as pasturage.
At one time-perhaps as long as half an hour ago-the tree-village must have been extraordinary: a magnificent banyan straddling the stream, sending down tendrils in thick clusters to become new roots and secondary trunks until the single tree formed an extensive grove. Massive boughs by the thousands must have offered their leaves to the heavens, growing between and among each other until they provided abundant opportunities for homes as well as for paths from trunk to trunk. And the homes themselves must have been extraordinary as well, for they would have been fashioned, not of planks and timbers, but of interwoven limbs and branches, and sheltered by a dense thatch-work of twigs and leaves. All along the brook, the crops of the Woodhelvennin would have flourished.
If Linden had seen First Woodhelven before the caesure hit, the sight might have gladdened her sore heart. She would have been so proud of Sunder and Hollian-But she and her companions had not reached the tree-village in time to save it.
Now it looked like a cyclone had torn through it. Ancient trunks as thick as five or six Giants standing together had been shattered; split apart and scattered like kindling. Their oozing stumps were jagged as fractured bones. Broken boughs made a trail of wreckage in the wake of the Falclass="underline" rent wood in jumbled clusters resembled the piles of pyres: leaves littered the ground like bloodshed.
After millennia of growth and health, generation following generation, a thriving community had become a catastrophe.
Yet for Linden that was not the worst of it, although the damage cried out to her senses. The tree was only wood. Precious beyond measure, its ruin nonetheless did not communicate the full cost of the caesure. More poignant to her was the condition of the fields-and of the Woodhelvennin themselves.
On either side of the Fall’s path, the fields remained untouched. They had been recently ploughed and tended, and wore the fresh vulnerable green of new crops. But where the caesure had passed, it had dragged carnage through the soil, maiming First Woodhelven’s hopes for food; for a future. Raw dirt ached in the sunlight like a weeping gall in the body of the Land.
And all around the calamity of their homes stood the banyan-dwellers, hundreds of men, women, and children milling in shock and dismay, utterly lost.
Among them moved two Masters. No doubt that explained why the Woodhelvennin were still alive: the unblinded senses of the Masters had warned the villagers to gather their families and flee before the Fall struck. And a few horses had been saved as well. But the Haruchai could do nothing to ease the effects, the force and impact, of the disaster. The Woodhelvennin gazed dumbly upon the devastation of their lives, too appalled to think or take action. They did not know how to bear the sheer casualness, the complete lack of purpose or desire, with which their homes and possessions and tasks had been reduced to debris.
Lacking any knowledge of the Land’s history, they had no context for atrocity.
In Berek Halfhand’s camp, Linden had gone without hesitation to do what she could for the victims of his war. This was different. The Woodhelvennin were not wounded: their hearts rather than their bodies had been pierced. With all of her power, she could not make their spirits whole again.
And she had shared no responsibility for the sufferings of Berek’s warriors. First Woodhelven’s razing she could have prevented, if she had insisted on haste hours earlier, when her company had broken camp-
If she had not restored Joan’s wedding band-
She hardly noticed that the Ranyhyn, the whole company, had slowed to a halt on the rise above the shattered grove. A deep rage held her attention.
Roger had said of Falls, Wherever they are at a particular moment, every bit of time in that precise spot happens at once. He had tried to explain why the fabric of reality had not already been irreparably shredded. Since they’re moving, they give those bits of time back as fast as they pick up new ones. In addition, the Law of Time strove to preserve itself. Presumably Thomas Covenant himself fought to defend it. And Joan’s inability to concentrate prevented the caesures from expanding to consume everything. Thus the larger integrity of causality and sequence endured despite the severity of the Falls.
Nevertheless the restoration of Law as the caesure passed contributed to its destructiveness. Every instant of First Woodhelven’s life had been superimposed-and then those instants had been flung back into their natural order. The result was a doubled violation. In effect, the Fall’s departure did as much harm as its arrival.
Linden concentrated on such things in an effort to control the wild scramble of guilt and sorrow that made her want to rage at the heavens rather than seek some means to ease the villagers. In another moment, she might turn her back on them. She hungered to ride like vengeance after the Fall and rip it out of existence. The eldritch storm surrounding it she would sweep aside. She had stood on Gallows Howe: she yearned to repay savagery with destruction.