Lord Foul's Bane: Chapter 4: Kevin's Watch

[teres]

Chapter Three | Chapter Five

A good day, everyone, and welcome back to Lord Foul’s Bane! Last time, Covenant had two evil beings, one of whom is a Dark Lord, evilly monologue at him, and nothing much of consequence happened besides that.

For the reader post… I don’t have much, so let me go on!

Chapter Four: Kevin’s Watch

That’s a decent title, I think. Incidentally, I’ve tried to find a good map for this one, and these are the best I could find:

So, let me begin with the chapter proper. Covenant lies down for a time, welcoming the sun’s warmth and “grateful for […] the end of nightmare”. There is wind, but it doesn’t bother him, and soon he hears birds calling. Eventually, he remembers that there were people nearby at the time of his accident, and they are “strangely silent”; the town itself “seem[s] hushed”. From this, he concludes that he’s been hurt worse than he thought, and he gets up on his hands and knees. I do like that he apparently doesn’t notice that he’s lying on stone, not on asphalt; it does not feel quite the same, after all!

So we get a description of his surroundings: it’s a “smooth stone slab”, which is “roughly circular”, ten feet in diameter, and has a wall “three feet high” around it. Above him there is “an unbroken expanse of blue sky”. Covenant is completely shocked at this, but before he can do anything, a “panting voice” calls out “Hail!” and asks if he needs help. Covenant can’t locate the voice and wonders what this is. Then there comes a “scrambling sound”, at which Covenant dives to the wall and puts his back to it. I do like how this sequence conveys Covenant’s alarm at this, and I wish we’d had more of this in the previous chapter…

We get some more description: past the wall stands a snow-capped mountain with a peak far above him, which takes up “nearly half the slab’s horizons”. It is about a “stone’s throw” away. At that side of the slab there is a “gap in the wall”, which the scrambling sound comes out of. Covenant wants to look, but he’s just too afraid of what he might see to do so. The sound comes closer, and before Covenant can react, a girl climbs into the gap and braces herself on the stone. That was about what we could expect, though I can’t blame Covenant for being afraid.

So we get a description of this girl: she has “long full hair” that is “brown with flashes of pale honey scattered through it”, “skin [] deeply shaded with tan”, and she is wearing a “dark blue” dress with a “pattern of white leaves” woven in the shoulders. It further seems like she has just climbed for a while (which she probably has, since this is in the mountains), and she looks at Covenant with “frank wonder and interest”. Finally, Covenant says she doesn’t look “older than sixteen”.

Covenant feels uncomfortable at her interest and resorts to glaring at her, because of course he does. The girl asks if he is well, and then quickly explains why she is here. She saw a “gray cloud” over Kevin’s Watch from the hills, and there seemed to be a battle in it, after which she saw Covenant stand and fall. She didn’t know whether to come herself or get help, but then she thought that “a small help soon” is better than a “large help late”, so she came. She stops herself and asks again if Covenant is well. I do like her already from her initial appearance!

Covenant… doesn’t answer yet, as this reminds him that he was supposedly hit by the police car. He looks over his injuries, which only consist of some scraping and bruising on his hands and a “low ache of impact” in his head, but there is no damage on his clothing, no sign that he was struck. He feels his body over, but there is no pain, and he seems “essentially uninjured”. He’s convinced that the police car must have hit him somewhere, though. I’m not very sure why he thinks that, when he fell before he was hit, and the car did brake, so it didn’t have to hit him.

He then just stares at the girl, who climbs onto the platform. We get some more description of her: she’s wearing a “dark blue shift” with a white cord at the waist and sandals; she is “slim, delicately figured”; and she looks at him with “apprehension, uncertainty, eagerness”. She walks toward him, and then kneels to look more closely at him. She asks how she can help him, saying that she sees he’s a stranger to the Land, and he has fought an “ill cloud”. She asks him to command her. When he doesn’t answer, she drops her eyes and asks if he won’t speak.

Covenant, for his part, wonders what is happening to him. Well, maybe you could ask the person who is clearly willing to explain as much as she can? Just then, the girl “gasp[s] with excitement” as she notices his right hand, and wonders aloud if he is Berek Halfhand and legends live again. Covenant needs some time to recognise that name, but when he does, he realises “in cold panic” that “the nightmare [is] not over”, and the girl and Lord Foul are part of the same experience. At that, he talks about darkness “crouching behind the brilliant blue sky”. After all, this is just as nightmarish as Rockworm and Foul, isn’t it? I get why he’d be disturbed, but this seems like a bit of an overreaction to me.

He wonders where he is, and gets up. At once, he sees an “immense panorama” below him. The platform he is on is “four thousand feet or more above the earth”. Birds fly underneath it, and the air is “as clean and clear as crystal”. The landscape he sees seems “immeasurably huge” (a quick look tells me that he’d be able to see for 135 kilometres, so that checks out), and we get a description: hills stretch ahead of him, plains lie on either side, and a river comes out of the hills on his left. Everything is “luminous with spring”. Hmm, it’s not a bad description, though it’s a bit clunky, and it tells us little that we couldn’t deduce from the map. Most of all, I’m missing any feeling from Covenant, which would be nice to have here.

After Covenant has calmly described all this to us, he panics again, this time because of the “giddy height” and he gets gripped by vertigo. So, as we’ll be seeing much of later, Covenant is afraid of heights, which I do quite like; it’s a good way to inconvenience him, it’s handled quite well, and it gives him something outside of his leprosy to complain about, at least. He now switches to thinking about how he doesn’t know where he was, and how can Foul have brought him here, uninjured? Maybe that is because the police car didn’t hit you at all, as we’ll learn eventually?

So he goes over to the girl, and with three steps, he reaches the gap in the wall. He sees there that the platform stands “on the tip of a slim splinter of stone” (which is some five hundred feet long) which extends from the base of the cliff. A stair as “steep as a ladder” is cut into the upper surface. For a moment, he thinks about how he needs to “get out of here”, and this is not happening to him, and then he realises just where he’s standing. His fear of heights strikes at once, and he stumbles toward the gap, internally screaming “No!!”. Well, he’s got the melodrama right, at least.

As he falls, the girl catches his arm and pulls him away, so Covenant instead drops to the floor of the “parapet”, where he curls up. Then… he goes into a full-on panic attack once again. He goes on about how he’s going “mad”, and insists to himself that he was crossing the street when the police hit him. He gets completely stuck on being uninjured (even though he doesn’t have any proof that he must be injured), and thinks that none of this is happening. The girl grips his hand.

At this point, Covenant comes on the thought that he’s dreaming, which bursts through his panic “like a revelation”. He quickly assembles a narrative: he was hit by the police car and knocked unconscious, which he might stay for hours and days, and during that time, he’s having this dream. He finds that that is the answer, but it’s not enough, as he can’t help but wonder where you get “dreams like this”. He can’t bear to think about that, since he’ll “go mad” if he does, so he tells himself not to think about it; “madness is the only danger”, so he just needs to get going and don’t look back. He opens his eyes, and as he looks at the sunlight, his panic recedes into the background.

This segment isn’t badly written, but it just doesn’t work for me. That’s foremost because I don’t know why Covenant is panicking like this. Sure, part of it is because of his fear of heights, but for the rest… it would be so easy to connect this to him thinking that he “can’t” have an imagination because of his leprosy (and that connection will appear soon), but there’s no given reason for it, and I find it just a bit implausible that he’d react this strongly to something so “impossible”.

Further, I have to ask again why he didn’t have this breakdown when confronted with Rockworm or Foul. Yes, I could understand it if he held himself together then and break down now, but this seems like he thought last chapter was just a dream? I don’t quite get what Donaldson meant to do here. Then we have him talking about “going insane”, which I can’t really take seriously, since that isn’t how that works. Finally, it’s just a bit too dramatic for me.

So Covenant sees the girl kneeling next to him, holding his right hand between both of hers, and looking at him with concern. She asks him “what ill assail[s] him”, and she doesn’t know what to do. Covenant thinks that she’s done enough in helping him through his panic attack (not that he’ll say that), but he’s reminded of his leprosy, so he goes to sit with some difficulty and tells her that he’s a leper, and she shouldn’t touch him. I guess thanking her would just be too hard for Covenant… but at least he’s talking to her.

She lets him go, looking unsure of what he means, so Covenant pulls back his hand. The girl gets chagrined and goes to sit against the opposite wall, as if she afraid “she [has] offended him”. I’d think so, given that she thinks he’s a legendary figure. Well, the girl is still interested in him, so after a bit, she asks if it’s wrong to touch him. She didn’t mean harm; after all, he’s Berek Halfhand, and he was hurt, so how could she bear to see him “tormented so”? Covenant repeats that he’s a leper, “trying to conserve his strength”. The girl clearly doesn’t understand, so he explains that he’s sick and she doesn’t “know the danger”. She asks if she will become sick if she touches him. “Sick” is notably in quotes, as if she doesn’t understand that word. I get that she’s supposed to be naïve, but she’d certainly know what “sick” means.

Covenant’s answer is “who knows” (because he can’t just give a straight answer). Then, because he can’t believe his senses, he asks if the girl doesn’t know what leprosy is. She says she doesn’t, but she’s not afraid. Covenant tells her to be afraid, and says that the girl’s “ignorance or innocence [makes] him vehement”. …You are aware that people might be afraid of you if you tell them to be afraid, Covenant? If you want people not to shun you, maybe you shouldn’t be pushing them away? Either way, he gives a description of how leprosy gnaws at you and rots you away and such. The girl asks if it can be healed, and maybe the Lords can do something about it. Covenant says there is no cure. He wants to “spit out some of the bitterness Foul [has] left in him”, but he just feels too drained to keep his anger up, and he needs to think his situation through.

The girl once again asks how she can help him, since she doesn’t know what to do, and he is Berek Halfhand. Covenant finally bothers to tell her that he isn’t. The girl asks who he is then, since he has “the omen of the hand”, and the legends say that Berek may come again. She asks if he is a Lord. Covenant deflects her question, and tries to think, but when he closes his eyes, and leans back, he feels fear coming up in him, so he again says that he needs to move forward and “flee along the path of the dream”.

He looks again, and now notices that the girl is “pretty”, and he even finds her awe pretty (which I do not quite like). And she isn’t afraid of lepers (as I’m sure the greatest part of the world’s population isn’t). So, after a bit more hesitation, he gives his name. The girl finds it sounds strange, then inclines her head to him. Covenant thinks further on how he finds his situation strange, and he doesn’t know what to expect, so he needs to find out. He asks the girl who she is. She replies that she’s “Lena, […] daughter of Atiaran”, her father is “Trell, Gravelingas of the rhadhamaerl”, and their home is “Mithil Stonedown”. That gives us something to look forward to seeing, at least.

She asks if he’s been to the Stonedown (despite her seeing he’s a “stranger to the Land”), and he says he isn’t. He wants to ask what a Stonedown is, but he has a more important question to ask: where are they? Lena says they’re on Kevin’s Watch, and gets up, telling him to “behold”. Covenant gets to his knees and looks out over the parapet. Lena says that this is “the Land”, which stretches beyond sight to the “north, west, and east”, though the “old songs” say that Kevin stood here and could see the entirety of the Land and everything in it, and so this is called Kevin’s Watch. I do like that, though I wonder why Lena doesn’t assume “the old songs” are actually true. Then she asks if it’s possible that Covenant doesn’t know that. Once again, Donaldson’s shot past “naïve” and into “who would even say this?”.

Covenant has more trouble with vertigo and such, and he says he doesn’t know anything. Lena decides to explain further. The river to their left is the “Mithil River”, and the Stonedown is next to it, but behind the mountain. The Mithil flows from “the Southron Range” behind them to the “Black River”, which forms “the northern bound of the South Plains”. I don’t mind this exposition, but I do feel compelled to note that we could get this from reading the map, too; the only advantage is for people reading the audio book. Well, in these plains, “the soil is not generous”, and there are only five Stonedowns (which is quite little, considering how large these plains are). But in the hills to the north live some “Woodhelvennin”.

To the east of the hills are the “Plains of Ra”, which she enthusiastically says is the home of “the wild free horses, the Ranyhyn, and their tenders the Ramen”. These horses gallop over the Plains for “fifty leagues”, and only serve those that they choose themselves. She says that it’s her dream to see these horses. She finds most of her people “too content”; they don’t travel and haven’t even seen a “Woodhelven”, but she wishes to go to the Plains of Ra and see the Ranyhyn. I’m fully with her on that; the Ranyhyn are some of the best parts of the series, I find.

She pauses for a while, and then keeps expositing. The mountains they’re in are the “Southron Range”. Behind it lies “the Wastes, and the Gray Desert”… which seem to be the same thing, so I’m not sure why she’s calling them separate things. Also note “Southron Mountains”, especially since we’ll be getting the “Westron” and “Northron” Mountains later; that’s a blatant Tolkien ripoff if I ever noticed one (which doesn’t bode well for this book). Well, there is “no life or passage” through the desert, according to her, and all the Land lies in the other directions. Unless it’s a magical wasteland, there certainly is “life and passage”, so I quite doubt that.

This is Kevin’s Watch, where “the highest of the Old Lords” stood at the last battle, “before the coming of the Desolation”. Her people remember that, and so shun it as a “place of ill omen”, but her mother brought her here to teach her about the Land. In two years, she’ll be old enough to go to “the Loresraat” and learn for herself, like Atiaran did, and she says “proudly” that Atiaran has “studied with the Lorewardens” (and she might well be proud, given that few people do so).

She looks at Covenant, expecting him to be impressed, but then looks away, saying that he’s a Lord and only listens to this so he can “laugh at her ignorance”. Given Covenant’s behaviour, it’s not even that far-fetched. Covenant… doesn’t even seem to notice at first. Instead, he has a vision of the Land after the Desecration: “hills ripped barren”, “soil blasted”, “rank water trickling through vile fens in the riverbed”, and silence, since there are no living things any more. I do like this vision (though I wish it were less random)! Then he pulls back from the rim and says to Lena did he did all his laughing long ago (yes, thank you for that). He thinks that he has found the way forward, and tells Lena that he needs to go to the Council of Lords. At least we’re getting the quest started early?

Lena wants to ask him why, but she seems to think it’s not her place to ask. She goes to the stair and tells him they need to go to the Stonedown, where a “way will be found” to take him to Revelstone. Covenant notes she looks like she wants to come along with him. Well, he doesn’t think he can take the stair, so he decides to stall, by asking how long ago the Desolation was. Lena doesn’t know, but the people of the South Plains came back “twelve generations past”, and it’s said that Kevin forewarned them, so they escaped and lived in the wilderness “by nail and tooth and rhadhamaerl lore for five hundred years”. It’s a legacy their people don’t forget; at fifteen, they each take “the Oath of Peace”, and they live for “the life and beauty of the Land”.

I do like all this worldbuilding, though I’d love it if we could go in-depth. We will do so with all of this eventually, sure, but at the moment, none of it really sticks for me, because we don’t know what it is. I get the impression that Donaldson wanted to put most of the worldbuilding in the front, so he could focus more on the story later… but this is not the best way to go about things. (Maybe he could have put what he wanted in an appendix at the end, and then share the worldbuilding more naturally in-story?)

Covenant hardly understands her, since he isn’t so much interested in what she’s saying as hearing her voice, which helps him steady himself. So he asks her what she was doing in the mountains when she saw him. With some feedback from Covenant, we learn that it is “stone-questing”, or “suru-pa-maerl”. Lena is learning it from her aunt “Acence”, who, in turn, learned it from “Tomal, the best Craftsmaster in the memory of the Stonedown” (who has also studied in the Loresraat). The craft involves finding naturally-occurring images in stones, and bringing it out without “binding or shaping”. Whenever she finds a form she understands, she takes it home and finds a place for it among other forms. Sometimes, “when [she is] very brave”, she smooths the stones a bit to make them join together better. In that way, she “remake[s] the broken secrets of the Earth, and give[s] beauty to the people”.

I do like this, then, since we get a full explanation of what suru-pa-maerl entails (and I love the idea of it), and we get some background detail, too! This is what I’d rather have. So Covenant says that he’d like to see her work, but he doesn’t pay attention to what he’s saying, since his mind is still with the stairs. He talks about how the way to endure a dream is “to flow with it until it end[s]”, and it’s very important that he puts the stair behind him. So he gets up, ignoring everything around him, and gives himself a VSE, thinking further about climbing down, and how it can’t kill him because it’s a dream.

So he “snap[s]” at Lena to listen, saying that he needs to go first, and she shouldn’t “give [him] that confused look”. Thanks for the reminder of why I don’t like Covenant, I suppose. Since he’s got leprosy and he can’t feel well with his hands and feet, and his fear of heights, he might fall, and he doesn’t want her beneath him, since she’s been “decent” to him, and he hasn’t “had to put up with that for a long time” (only because you couldn’t be bothered to seek it out). I like the sentiment, but the execution could be much better. Lena winces at his tone, and asks why he’s angry. Covenant says to himself that it is because she’s nice (oh, come on), but doesn’t say anything out loud and immediately starts down the stairs.

So we get coverage on that: Covenant tries to go with closed eyes at first, but soon opens them and looks ahead. He has trouble gripping well with his hands, and his shoulders soon shake, but he can see where he’s putting them; he can’t see his feet unless he looks down, which would naturally not help him, so he’s never quite sure if he’s touched the next step. He tries kicking his feet forward to feel the edges, but that often has him hit his knees or shins, and the pain “nearly [makes] his legs fold”.

We then get him cursing about his two missing fingers, and how that makes him this his hold on the left is weaker, and that he’s pulling to the left. He keeps going to the right to compensate and missing the stairs, too. He also gets sweats in his eyes from the exertion, but he doesn’t dare to do anything about it, lest he upset his balance. Further, his “back and shoulders” are now severely cramped. Lena calls out that he’s halfway now.

Covenant keeps going and feels himself go faster, as his muscles are failing, and he begins to lose control over his descent. He makes himself stop now, against his will (and he considers jumping off and hoping he’ll make it for a moment). Lena approaches and tells him that just “fifty steps remain”, which Covenant barely understands. He goes further down again. The last steps are “a loud chaos of cramps and sweat blindness”, and then he lies at the base of the Watch, gasping at the cramps. He lies there for a while, recovering, then opens his eyes, where he sees the sky, Kevin’s Watch, the mountain, and Lena, bending low over him. There the chapter ends, rather abruptly. I did like this final scene, especially since it’s got some tension and doesn’t drag on very much!

For the chapter as a whole… we get to meet Lena and Covenant descends the Watch, but the bulk of it is given over to Covenant having a panic attack at his new situation and Lena providing with lots of new terms. I don’t care much about the former, since it means that Covenant doesn’t engage with Lena and what she tells us, and because it doesn’t tell us much about why Covenant has such trouble with it. The latter… if there was more worldbuilding, like with suru-pa-maerl, I’d quite like it, but lots of terms don’t convey much on their own. All this probably explains why I haven’t been all that articulate; there simply isn’t much interaction or information to go into. Either way, that’s it for now. Until next time!