Today’s book is Lord Foul’s Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson. This is book one of the first Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever trilogy. There aren’t many authors willing to make a leper the anti-hero of a trilogy. Donaldson is the one. Covenant is an author and a successful one. But he becomes bitter at the world after his disease. His wife and son leave him. He stops writing. He withdraws from the world except for when he absolutely has to deal with it. The excerpt from page 170 and it is after Covenant and Atiaran, his guide, have been saved from an attack through the sacrifice of an Unfettered One. Covenant is still not convinced that the Land is real and is trying to understand.
To distract himself from his hollow discomfort, he resumed his half-forgotten efforts to learn about the Land. Stiffly, he said, “Tell me about that – whoever saved us. Back there.”
A long silence passed before she said, “Tomorrow.” Her voice was lightless, unillumined by anything except torpor or defeat. “Let me be. Until tomorrow.”
Covenant nodded in the darkness. It felt thick with cold and beating wing, but he could answer it better than he could respond to Atiaran’s tone. For a long time he shivered as if he were prepared to resent every dream that affilicted a miserable mankind, and at last he fell into fitful slumber.
The next day, the ninth from Soaring Woodhelven, Atiaran told Covenant about the Unfettered One in a voice as flat as crushed rock, as if she had reached the point where what she said, how she exposed herself, no longer mattered to her. “There are those from the Loresraat,” she said, “who find that they cannot work for the Land or the Lore of the Old Lords in the company of their fellows – Lords or Lorewardens, the followers of the Sword or Staff. Those have some private vision which compels them to seek it in isolation. But their need for aloneness does not divide them from the people. They are given the Rites of Unfettering, and freed from all common demands, to quest after their own lore with the blessing of the Lords the respect of all who love the Land. For the Lords learned long ago that the desire for aloneness need not be a selfish desire, if it is not made so by those who do not feel it.
“Many of the Unfettered have never returned into knowledge. But stories have grown up around those Ones who have not vanished utterly. Some are said to know the secrets of dreams, others to practice deep mysteries in the arts of healing, still others to be the friends of animals, speaking their language and calling on their help in times of great need.
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