“Now what?” he muttered vaguely when he was done.
“We must resign ourselves. There is no more.”
Ah, hell! Covenant groaned to himself. He remembered vividly what had happened to him in the woods behind Haven Farm, when his self-imposed inanition had made him hysterical. The memory filled him with cold dread.
In turn, that dread called up other memories-recollections of his ex-wife, Joan, and his son, Roger. He felt an urge to tell Foamfollower about them, as if they were spirits he could exorcise by simply saying the right thing about them to the right person. But before he could find the words, his thoughts were scattered by the first attack of the hunt.
Without warning, a band of apelike creatures came crashing through the bosque from the south side of the Ruinwash. Voiceless, like the rush of a nightmare, they broke through the brittle wood and the eel light. They threw themselves from the low bank and heaved across the current toward their prey.
Either they did not know their danger, or they had forgotten it. Without one shout or cry, they all vanished under a sudden, hot, seething of blue-green iridescence. None of them reappeared.
At once, Covenant and Foamfollower started on their way again. While the crepuscular light lasted, they put as much distance as possible between themselves and the place of the attack.
A short time later the rain began. It fell on them like the collapse of a mountain, made the whole night impenetrable. They were forced to stop. They hunched together like waifs under the scant, leafless shelter of a tree, trying to sleep and hoping that the hunt could not follow them in this weather.
After a while, Covenant dozed. He was hovering near the true depths of sleep when Foamfollower shook him awake.
“Listen!”
Covenant could hear nothing but the uninterrupted smash of the rain.
The Giant’s ears were keener. “The Ruinwash rises! There will be a flood.”
Straggling like blind men, thrashing their way against unseen trees and brush, slipping through water that already reached above their ankles, they tried to climb out of the bosque toward higher ground. After a long struggle, they worked clear of the old riverbed. But the water continued to mount, and the terrain did not. Now beyond the rain, Covenant could hear the deeper roar of the flood; it seemed to tower above them in the night. He was stumbling knee-deep in muddy water, and could see no way to save himself.
But Foamfollower dragged him onward. Some time later, they waded into an erosion gully. Its walls were slick, and the water poured down through it like flowing silt, but the Giant did not hesitate. He attached Covenant to him with a short clingor line and began to forge up the gully.
Covenant clung to Foamfollower for a distance that seemed as long as leagues. But at last he could feel that they were climbing. The walls of the gully narrowed. Foamfollower used his hands to help him ascend.
When they reached an open hillside where the flow of water hardly covered their feet, they stopped. Covenant sank exhausted into the mud. The rain faltered to an end, and he went numbly to sleep until another cold grey dawn smeared its way across the clouds from the east.
At last he rubbed the caked fatigue out of his eyes and sat up. Foamfollower was gazing at him with amusement. “Ah, Covenant,” the Giant said, “we are a pair. You are so bedraggled and sober-And I fear my own appearance is not improved.” He struck a begrimed pose. “What is your opinion?”
For a moment, Foamfollower looked as gay and carefree as a playing child. The sight gave Covenant a pang. How long had it been since he had heard the Giant laugh? “Wash your face,” he croaked with as much humour as he could manage. “You look ridiculous.”
“You honour me,” Foamfollower returned. But he did not laugh. As his amusement faded, he turned away and splashed a little water on his face to clean it.
Covenant followed his example, though he was too tired to feel dirty. He drank three swallows from the jug for breakfast, then pried himself unsteadily to his feet.
In the distance, he could see a few treetops sticking out of the broad brown swath of the flood. No other signs remained visible to mark the bosque of the Ruinwash.
Opposite the flood, in the direction he and Foamfollower would now have to take, lay a long ridge of hills. They piled in layers above him until they seemed almost as high as mountains, and their scarred sides looked as desolate as if their very roots had been dead for aeons.
He groaned at the prospect. His worn flesh balked. But he had no choice; the lowlands of the Ruinwash were no longer passable.
With nothing to sustain them but frugal rations of water, he and the Giant began to climb.
The ascent was shallower than it had appeared. If Covenant had been well fed and healthy, he would not have suffered. But in his drained condition, he could hardly drag himself up the slopes. The festering wound on his forehead ached like a heavy burden attached to his skull, pulling him backward. The thick humid air seemed to clog his lungs. From time to time, he found himself lying among the stones and could not remember how he had lost his feet.
Yet with Foamfollower’s help he kept going. Late that day, they crested the ridge of hills, started their descent.
Since leaving the Ruinwash, they had seen no sign of pursuit.
The next morning, after a night’s rain as ponderous and rancid as if the clouds themselves were stagnant, they moved down out of the hills. As Covenant’s gaunt flesh adjusted to hunger, he grew steadier-not stronger, but less febrile. He made the descent without mishap, and from the ridge he and Foamfollower travelled generally eastward out into the barren landscape.
After a foodless and dreary noon, they came to an eerie wilderness of thorns. It occupied the bottom of a wide lowland; for nearly a league, dead thorn-trees with limbs like arms and grey barbs as hard as iron stood in their way. The whole bottom looked like a ruined orchard where sharp spikes and hooks had been grown for weapons; the thorns stood in crooked rows as if they had been planted there so that they could be tended and harvested. Here and there, gaps appeared in the rows, but from a distance Covenant could not see what caused them.
Foamfollower did not want to cross the valley. Higher ground bordered the thorn wastes on both sides, and the barren trees offered no concealment; while they were down in the bottom, they could be easily seen. But again they had no choice. The wastes extended far to the north and south. They would need time to circumvent the thorns-time in which hunger could overcome them, pursuit overtake them.
Muttering to himself, Foamfollower scanned all the terrain as far as he could see, searching for any sign of the hunt. Then he led Covenant down the last slope into the thorns.
They found that the lowest branches of the trees were six or seven feet above the ground. Covenant could move erect along the crooked rows of trunks, but Foamfollower had to crouch or bend almost double to keep the barbs from ripping open his torso and head. He risked injury if he moved too quickly. As a result, their progress through the wastes was dangerously slow.
Thick dust covered the ground under their feet. All the rain of the past nights seemed to have left this valley untouched. The lifeless dirt faced the clouds as if years of torrents could never assuage the thirst of its ancient ruin. Choking billows rose up from the strides of the travellers, filled their lungs and stung their eyes-and plumed into the sky to mark their presence as clearly as smoke.
Soon they came to one of the gaps in the thorns. To their surprise, they found that it was a mud pit. Damp clay bubbled in a small pool. In contrast to the dead dust all around it, it seemed to be seething with some kind of muddy life, but it was as cold as the winter air. Covenant shied away from it as if it were dangerous, and hurried on through the thorns as fast as Foamfollower could go.