The Last Ringbearer (6 page)

“How can you think that, my fair Amazon!” and there she was in his saddle, looking at him with shining eyes, prattling nonsense, and then kissing him in front of everybody – the girls of Rohan are not big on southern ceremony, and a heroine of Pelennor certainly could not care less … All Éomer could do was look at this idyllic picture and get more upset by the minute, thinking: “Fool! Open your eyes and look at his face, it’s all written plainly there – what he is to you and what you are to him! Why, why do the idiot girls always fall for scoundrels – this one isn’t even handsome …” – not that he was the first or the last such in that World, or any other …

He said none of that aloud, of course, only asked: “Show me your arm.” Only when Éowyn protested that she was adult enough to handle it and that it wasn’t even a scratch did he let out some of his frustration by yelling loudly and profanely enough to curl ears, describing to the heroine of Pelennor, in graphic detail, what he was going to do to her if she didn’t report to the medics by the count of three. Éowyn laughed and saluted: “Yes, my general!” and only the unusual care with which she mounted his horse told him that much more than a scratch was involved here. But the girl had already leaned on her brother’s shoulder: “Éom, dear, please don’t sulk, spank me if you want, just don’t tell Auntie, please?” and rubbed her nose on his cheek, just like in their childhood … Aragorn was watching them with a smile, and Éomer shuddered when he caught his look: it was the look in the eye of an archer right before he lets fly.

He only fully grasped the meaning of that look the next day, when it was too late. There was a council of war in Aragorn’s tent that day, attended by Imrahil, Gandalf-Mithrandir, and a few Elvish lords (whose army had arrived the night before, when it was all over). There, the Dúnadan explained to the heir of Rohan (the king now, really) without any pleasantries that he was a subordinate rather than an ally now, and that the life of Éowyn, under special guard in the Minas Tirith hospital, depended entirely on his reasonableness.

“Oh, dear Éomer can run me through right here and now, no doubt – and then watch what will happen to his sister in this
palantír
; it won’t be a sight for the fainthearted. No, she suspects nothing of the sort, of course; observe how touchingly sincere she is in caring for the wounded Prince Faramir … What guarantees? The only guarantee is common sense: when I am the King of Gondor and Arnor, I will have no one to fear … How? Very simply. As you know, the king of Gondor is dead. A dreadful tragedy, really – imagine, he went mad and immolated himself on a funeral pyre. Prince Faramir had been struck by a poisoned arrow and will not get well for quite a while, if he ever does; this depends on … ah … on a number of factors. Prince Boromir? Alas, no hope there, either – he fell in battle with the Orcs at Anduin, just beyond the Falls of Rauros, and I put his body in the funeral boat with my own hands. And since there is a war on, the heir of Isildur may not leave the country without a leader. Therefore, I accept command over the Army of Gondor and all the forces of the Western Coalition … Did you want to say something, Éomer? No?

“We are immediately moving on Mordor, for I can only accept the crown of Gondor when we return victorious. As for Faramir, I am inclined to grant him one of Gondor’s duchies … oh, Ithilien, say. To tell the truth, he had always been more interested in poetry and philosophy than in matters of state. But we should not plan that far ahead, since his condition is critical and he may not survive until our return. So pray for his health, dearest Imrahil, incessantly during our campaign; they say that the Valar especially appreciate the prayers of a best friend … When do we set out? Immediately after we mop up the remnants of the South Army at Osgiliath. Any questions? Good!”

The moment the tent was empty, the man in a gray cloak standing behind Aragorn said in a respectful reproach: “You have taken an unjustified risk, Your Majesty. This Éomer was clearly beside himself; he could have cast everything aside and lashed out …”

The ranger turned to him and bit out: “You strike me as both too talkative and too unobservant for a member of Secret Guard.”

“My apologies, Your Majesty – a
mithril
coat of mail under your clothes?”

Aragorn’s mocking gaze went over the speaker’s swarthy dry face, lingering on rows of tiny holes around the lips. A silence fell for almost a minute.

“Heh, I’ve almost decided that your brains must’ve dried up in the crypt and you would now question its provenance … By the way, I keep forgetting to ask: why do they sew your mouths shut?”

“Not just the mouths, Your Majesty. The belief is that all openings in a mummy’s body must be closed up, lest the departed spirit re-enter it on the fortieth day and take vengeance on the living.”

“That’s a rather naïve method of … um … contraception.”

“Indeed, Your Majesty,” the man in gray allowed himself a smile, “and I am living proof of that.”

“Living, eh? By the way, how about the ‘vengeance on the living’ bit?”

“We only follow orders. Our shadow is your shadow.”

“So whether I tell you to kill a child or become like a father to him, it’s all the same to you?”

“Absolutely. I will perform either duty to the best of my ability.”

“All right, this suits me. Here’s a job for you in the meantime. The other day one of my Northern comrades-in-arms, one Anakit, got drunk and boasted to his friends that soon he’ll be as rich as Tingol. Supposedly he has information about some legendary sword for which a certain someone will pay any price. This talk has to end immediately.”

“Yes, Your Majesty. Those who listened to these boasts …”

“Whatever for?”

“You think? …”

“Remember this well, my dear friend: I kill without hesitation, but I never – never, you hear me? – kill unless absolutely necessary. Understand?”

“This is truly wise, Your Majesty.”

“You take too many liberties, Lieutenant,” said the ranger in a tone that would chill many a man.

“Our shadow is your shadow,” repeated the other calmly. “So, in a way, you and us are now one. May I carry out your orders?”

There is not much to add. The Western Coalition army (joined by the turncoat Easterlings who were ‘forgiven’ by the victors) set out for its last campaign, the highlight of which was the March 23
^rd
mutiny of the Westfold Rohirrim and Lossarnach militiamen, who could not for the life of them understand why they had to die far from home for Aragorn’s crown. Having ruthlessly put down the revolt, the Dúnadan brought his army to the Cormallen field at the entrance to Morannon, where he met the last defenders Mordor could scrape up; the latter had already exhausted its reserves, having invested them all in the South Army. The coalition won; more precisely, Gondorians, Rohirrim, and Easterlings simply piled the fortifications of Morannon with their corpses. The Elves, as usual, joined the battle when it was already decided. The losses of the victors were so massive that a legend about a huge Army of the East had to be quickly invented. The Mordorians there died to a man, including King Sauron; the monarch fought in the ranks of his Royal Mounted Guard in a captain’s cloak, so his body was never identified. The chronicles of the Western countries mostly gloss over the Coalition’s deeds after the victory, for the slaughter it carried out in Mordor had been horrific even by the not-too-humanitarian standards of the time.

Be that as it may, Gandalf’s plan had succeeded (if you don’t count the small matter of the Mirror, which the Elves had no intention of returning): the Mordorian civilization had ceased to exist. However, the wizards of the White Council had somehow forgotten one factor: namely, that there is a certain Someone in the world Who rather abhors complete victories and assorted ‘final solutions,’ and is capable of showing His displeasure with same in the most improbable ways. Even now, that Someone was dispassionately surveying the vanquished – all that flotsam cast ashore by the passed storm – when suddenly He rested His gaze upon a couple of soldiers of the extinct South Army lost among the dunes of the desert of Mordor.

CHAPTER 10

Mordor, the Teshgol boundary

April 9, 3019

S 
o why not wait until nightfall?” Haladdin whispered.

“Because if this really is a trap and the guys who set it are not total idiots, the evening is when they’ll be expecting visitors. What does the Field Manual teach us, doctor?” Tzerlag raised a finger. “Right – do the opposite of what the foe expects. So, don’t move until my signal, and if I’m lost, may the One preserve me, even more so. Clear?”

He cast another look at the camp and muttered: “Damn, I don’t like this picture.”

The Teshgol boundary consisted of fixed sands dotted with fairly thick copses of white saxaul in shallow depressions between small hillocks covered with desert serge and sacaton. The camp was three yurts pitched in a triangle, with entrances facing in, in a small wind-protected hollow about hundred and fifty yards from their hideout, so everything in it was clearly visible. Tzerlag had watched it for an hour, detecting no suspicious movements; however, there were no non-suspicious movements, either, the camp looked deserted. This was very strange, but it was time to make some move.

A minute later Haladdin, holding his breath, watched the scout in his brown cloak fairly ooze along the barely discernible creases in the ground. He was right, of course: the only thing a field medic could do to help was to avoid getting in a professional’s way. True, but it is not very pleasant to sit in the relative safety of a hideout when your comrade is risking his life a few steps away. He scanned the horizon once again and then discovered, to his amazement, that meanwhile the sergeant has vanished. Nuts! One could almost believe that the scout had turned into an agama lizard and sank into the sand the way they can; or, more appropriately, was now slithering along as a deadly saw-scaled viper. The doctor has been staring into the hillocks around the camp till his eyes hurt for almost half an hour, when suddenly he saw Tzerlag standing up right between the yurts.

Everything is fine, then! The departure of the feeling of danger was an almost physical pleasure; every muscle of his, previously tense, was now blessedly relaxing, and the world, once discolored by adrenalin, was regaining its natural colors. Climbing out of the pit under a saxaul tree that leaned almost to the ground, Haladdin easily shouldered the bag of gear and marched forward, looking closely at the ground – the slope was seriously dented by desert rats. Almost at the bottom he finally looked up and realized that something was wrong. Very wrong, to judge by the Orocuen’s behavior: after standing for some time at the entrance to the leftmost yurt, he then trudged to the next one without entering. Yes, trudged – for some reason the sergeant’s step had lost its usual spring. Only a barely audible hum disturbed the unnatural quiet of the hollow, like tiny ripples on the oily surface of a swamp … Then he suddenly understood everything, recognizing it as the sound of a myriad of flies.

Even in the sandy desert soil it takes more than a few minutes to dig a grave for ten people (four adults, six children); they had to hurry, but they had found only one spade and so had to spell each other. Haladdin was about waist deep when Tzerlag walked up to him.

“Listen, you keep digging, I’ll go walk around one more time and check on something.”

“You think someone may have survived and is hiding out there?”

“Unlikely, seems they’re all here. But over there there’s blood on the sand.”

“But they were all murdered right in the yurts …”

“That’s the point. Keep working, but look around once in a while. I’ll whistle if I need you – one long, two short.”

He heard the signal in no more than five minutes. The sergeant waved to him from a small dune near the path to the highway, then disappeared behind its crest. Following, Haladdin found the scout crouching before a dark round object; only when he was almost there did he realize that it was the head of a man buried in the sand up to his neck, and that the man appeared to still be alive. There was a clay bowl of water a few inches from his lips, just beyond reach.

“That’s who put up a fight back there. Are we too late, doctor?”

“No, it’s all right. See, he’s still sweating, so it’s only the beginning of the second stage of dehydration, and he has no sunburns, thank the One.”

“Yeah, they put him in the shade of the dune, precisely so that he’d take longer to die. By all signs he’d pissed them off mightily … Can I give him water?”

“At the second stage – yes, but only in small portions. But how did you know? …”

“To be honest, I was looking for a corpse.”

With those words Tzerlag put his leather flask to the blackened and cracked lips of the buried man. The man shuddered and gulped down water, but his barely opening eyes remained clouded and lifeless.

“Wait up, fella, not so fast! Hear what the doctor says: not all at once. All right, let’s pull him out; the sand is loose here, so we don’t need a spade … Got him?”

Shoving the sand back some, they grabbed the man by his underarms and – “one-two!” – pulled him out like a carrot from the garden patch. “Damn!” the Orocuen said with feeling, gripping his scimitar; the rush of sand off the clothes of the rescued man revealed a green jacket of a Gondorian officer to their stunned gazes.

This, however, did not affect the rescue operations in the slightest, and in a dozen minutes the prisoner was, in Tzerlag’s words, “ready to use.” The cloudiness in his gray eyes gone, his gaze was now steady and slightly mocking. After a quick glance at his rescuers’ uniforms, he fully appraised his situation and, much to their surprise, introduced himself in good, if accented, Orocuenish: “Baron Tangorn, lieutenant of the Ithilien regiment. To whom do I have the honor of speaking?”

For a man who had just miraculously escaped a tortuous death only to face it once again the Gondorian was acquitting himself very well. The scout gave him a respectful look and stepped aside, nodding to Haladdin to continue.