The Last Ringbearer (14 page)

He spent some time considering using the glider that Sharya-Rana had mentioned leaving at Dol Guldur, the launch pad for Mordor’s infrequent flyovers of Lórien. Suppose he flies to the Elvish capital (or, rather, is flown there by someone who knows piloting) and manages to land in some inconspicuous clearing; suppose further that he actually steals or captures the Mirror; then what? How would he get it out? There is no glider catapult there, nor anyone to operate it, nor can any glider lift a thousand pounds. Another dead end. How about capturing an Elvish officer and having him guide their company through the Enchanted Forest traps? No doubt he’d guide them straight into a trap; if what he’s learned about the inhabitants of Lórien is true, an Elf would choose death over treason.

The notes found among Eloar’s belongings haven’t escaped his attention, either. Those were mostly travel notes; the only item with useful content was an unsent letter, beginning with ‘Dearest Mother!’ and addressed to ‘Milady Eornis,
clofoel
of the Lady.’ About half of it was a description, remarkable in its artistic expressiveness, of the valley of river Nimrodel – it seemed that both the Elf and his mother had especially fond memories associated with that location. In general it looked like the memory of those glades with their
mallorns
reaching to the very sky, where bursts of golden
elanors
hide in the emerald-green grass, was what had sustained the Elf’s spirit among the hated sands of Mordor. Eloar expressed concerns over the rumored break-up between his cousin Linóel and her fiancé, criticized his older brother Elandar for ‘encouraging futile hopes in the hearts of his Umbarian protégés,’ congratulated his mother on the high honor of having been chosen to organize this year’s Festival of the Dancing Fireflies … plus much more of the same kind of fluff. They had already guessed that Eloar’s family was part of the highest elite of Lórien (Sharya-Rana explained that it was difficult to translate the Elvish title
clofoel
exactly – something between a lady-in-waiting and a royal adviser). That the Elves were secretly infiltrating all parts of Middle Earth and that one of those tasked with this covert activity was a certain Elandar undoubtedly would be of much interest to the local authorities and counter-intelligence services, but had no bearing on their mission. To sum it up: one more dead end.

Haladdin suffered thusly through the day, spent half a night nursing a cup of hideously strong tea by the fire, and finally woke up Tzerlag and went to sleep without a single idea, placing his hopes in the coming morning. It should be mentioned that the day before, having observed his comrades’ calm businesslike preparations for the march, he resolved firmly to break his head if that was what it took to come up with at least an intermediate solution. Even he knew that an army without a mission quickly goes to pot.

He slept badly that night, waking intermittently and only truly sleeping close to sunrise. He dreamed of a wonderful circus and himself – a large-eared second-grader skipping school, fingers sticky with cotton candy. Heart almost still, he is watching an unimaginably beautiful girl in a golden cape, impassively walking across the dark abyss on a thinnest of golden rays; he had never seen a tightrope walker to also juggle three large balls as she walks – how is this possible? Wait – this is Sonya! NO! Stop her – this is not her job, she doesn’t know how! … Yes, I understand – she can’t turn back, going back is even scarier … Yes, if she doesn’t become afraid, nothing will happen to her, it’s ancient magic. Of course it’s magic: those balls she’s juggling are
palantíri
! All the three Seeing Stones that are in reach in this part of Middle Earth; we’ve collected them ourselves and turned them over to her … I wonder: if I and Sonya each had a
palantír
, would we be able to transmit a touch?

He woke up with that thought; it turned out to be late morning. The pot was bubbling soothingly over a fire (Tzerlag had trapped a few partridges), while Tangorn was busy polishing his beloved
Slumber-maker
. It was sunlight reflecting off the sword that woke up Haladdin: his comrades obviously did not intend to disturb the doctor, but to let him get enough sleep. He followed the reflection arcing swiftly over the boulders on the shadowed side of the dale with his gaze and thought sadly: that’s what would have no problems reaching the palace of Lady Galadriel – a light ray! …

A dazzling flash lit up all the nooks of his exhausted brain when by a wonderful coincidence the last dream thought and the first waking thought brushed wingtips before flying apart forever. There’s your solution – send a light ray through a
palantír
… He had had such flashes of insight before (for example, when he guessed and then proved that the signals traveling over nerve fibers were electrical, rather than chemical, in nature), and yet each and every time there was some magic novelty in the experience, like in a lovers’ meeting. All creative work has two components: the moment of insight and then painstaking work, sometimes for years, whose goal is to make your revelation available to other people. The nature of insight is always the same, whether in poetry or criminal detection, nobody knows where it comes from (one thing is certain, though – it is not from logic); and the moment itself, when for however brief an instant you’re equal to the One Himself, is the only thing truly worth living for.

“Gentlemen!” he announced, coming up to the fire. “It looks like I’ve managed to put together this puzzle after all, or at least a substantial part of it. The idea is simple: rather than take the Mirror to Orodruin, we will take Orodruin to the Mirror.”

Tzerlag froze with a full spoon halfway to his mouth and shot a wary look to the baron: has our commander gone nuts from all that thinking? Tangorn politely raised a brow and suggested that the doctor have some partridges first, while they’re hot, and only then broach his extravagant hypothesis.

“To hell with the partridges! Just listen! There are other magical crystals beside the Mirror – the
palantíri
. We have one of them, or at least we can get it whenever we want …”

He related everything he now knew about the Seeing Stones, marveling at his comrades’ ability, given their lack of any education in magic or science, to precisely pluck the bits they considered important from that torrent of information. Everyone was absolutely serious now – the real work had begun.

“… So, suppose we have two
palantíri
– one set to receive, the other set to send. If we drop the ‘sender’ into Orodruin, it will be destroyed, but not before managing to transmit a bit of the Eternal Fire to the immediate environs of the ‘receiver.’ Therefore, our task is to place one such receiver next to the Mirror.”

“Well, fair sir,” the baron said thoughtfully, “your idea certainly doesn’t lack the proverbial ‘noble madness’ …”

Tzerlag scratched his head. “Better tell me how we’re gonna get a
palantír
into Lórien and find the Mirror there?”

“I don’t know yet. All I can say is what I said yesterday: I hope to come up with something.”

“You’re right, Haladdin,” Tangorn agreed. “At least we have a concrete task for now: to find another
palantír
. I think that we should start in Ithilien, since Faramir is bound to know what happened to the crystal that used to belong to his father. Besides, I’m certain that you will quite incomparably enjoy conversing with the prince …”

PART II

The King and the Steward

“And besides, when folk talk of a country covered with troops, it’s but a kind of a byword at the best. A soldier covers nae mair of it than his bootsoles.”
Robert L. Stevenson

CHAPTER 20

Ithilien, Emyn Arnen

May 3, 3019

W 
hat time is it?” Éowyn asked sleepily.

“Sleep on, sweetheart.” Faramir rose on his elbow a little and gently kissed the top of her head. Apparently it was a sharp movement in his sleep that woke up the girl; his wounded arm kept going numb, but he never let on, knowing that she preferred to sleep stretched along his body, her head pillowed on his shoulder. As usual, they have only fallen asleep close to sunrise, so by now the sun’s rays were already bathing the wooden buildings of Fort Emyn Arnen, getting in the narrow window of their ‘princely bedchamber.’ In the olden times the prince was invariably up with the dawn; being a morning person, his best working hours were before noon. Now, however, he slept late with a clear conscience: first, a honeymoon is a honeymoon; second, a prisoner has absolutely nowhere to hurry.

But she had slipped out from under his arm already, and her laughing eyes looked at the prince with fake severity: “Listen, we’ll totally undermine the public morals of the Ithilien colony.”

“Like there’s something there to undermine,” he grumbled. Éowyn flitted to the foot of the bed, sat there naked and cross-legged, and began putting her ripe-wheat hairdo in order, glancing at him from time to time from under lowered eyelashes. He had told her on one of their first nights, only half-joking, that watching his beloved brush her hair in the morning is one of the most intense and exquisite pleasures available to man, so now she kept polishing and perfecting this little ritual of theirs, jealously observing his reaction: do you still like it, darling? He smiled to himself, remembering how Prince Imrahil used to insist that northern women, for all their beauty, are a cross between a dead fish and a birch log in bed. I wonder if it’s my good luck or his bad one for all those years?

“I’ll make coffee for you.”

“Now that certainly is a blow to public morals!” Faramir laughed. “The Princess of Ithilien in the kitchen – a nightmare for any guardian of aristocratic primness!”

“I’m afraid they’ll have to put up with my wildness and lack of manners. For example, I intend to go hunting today and prepare some real baked fowl for supper, and let them all blow their tops! I can’t abide our cook’s fare any more; the guy apparently knows no spices other than arsenic and strychnine!”

She should go, he thought, and perhaps we’ll start the Game today? Lately he and Éowyn were allowed to leave the fort one at a time – enough to be grateful for; the hostage system has its advantages.

“Will you read to me tonight?”

“Certainly. About Princess Allandale again?”

“Well … yes!”

Those evening readings were another of their daily rituals; Éowyn had a few favorite stories which she was ready to hear again and again, like a child. Like most of Rohan’s nobility, the girl was illiterate, so the magical world that Faramir laid open before her totally astonished her imagination. That was the beginning of their relationship … or perhaps it started earlier?

On the day of the battle for Pelennor fortifications the prince was commanding the right defensive flank; he fought in the front line, so it was bewildering that a heavy armor-piercing arrow struck him from behind – in the trapezius muscle, to the left of the base of his neck. Its three-sided tip had channels for poison, so by the time the good knight Mithrandir got him to Minas Tirith the prince was in a bad way. For some reason he was carried to a far room in the hospital and most astonishingly abandoned there. Completely helpless, he lay right on the stone floor – the poison had caused blindness and paralysis, so that he could not even cry for help – feeling the cold of the grave spreading uncontrollably through his body from the already numb left arm and neck. His brain still functioned with total lucidity, and he understood clearly that he was believed to be dead.

An eternity passed, full of loneliness and despair, and then he felt the spicy taste of some oily liquid on his lips; the sensation seemed familiar, dredging up a half-forgotten name:
athelas
. The cold retreated a little, as if unwillingly, and a commanding voice materialized out of the darkness: “Prince, if you’re conscious, move the fingers of your right hand.”

How was he supposed to move fingers he couldn’t feel? Perhaps he should remember a movement in all its details … here, he’s taking his sword out of the scabbard, feeling the supple leather of its grip …

“Very good!”

Did it work? Apparently, yes.

“Now, a bigger challenge. One movement will mean ‘yes,’ two mean ‘no’. Try saying ‘no’.”

He tried to imagine making a fist twice … whatever for? Oh yes: here, he’s taking a pen from the table, writes down a word, puts it down; now he has to pick it up again to make a correction …

“Excellent. Allow me to introduce myself: Aragorn, son of Arathorn. As the direct descendant of Isildur, I wish to express my royal gratitude to you: the dynasty of Stewards of Gondor, of which you are the last scion, had maintained my throne well. Now this arduous service is over: I have come to relieve your dynasty of this burden. From now and forever your name will be the first of the glorious families of the Reunited Kingdom. Do you understand what I’m saying, Faramir?”

He understood it all perfectly, but moved his fingers twice – ‘no’ – otherwise it would mean that he implicitly agreed with this nonsense. A descendant of Isildur, right – why not Ilúvatar himself?

“You have always been an alien to them, Prince.” Aragorn’s voice was now quiet and compassionate, as if he was a bosom friend. “It’s quite understandable that they greatly resented your studies; that’s not a royal pursuit. However, they even blamed you for creating the Ithilien regiment and setting up an intelligence network beyond Anduin, didn’t they?”

Pride would not let him answer ‘yes,’ honesty precluded answering ‘no:’ all this was true, this Aragorn really did know his Gondorian politics. When the war broke out, Faramir, himself an excellent hunter, formed a special unit for forest combat out of free shafts (and not a few outlaws) – the Ithilien regiment; the famous Cirith Ungol Rangers soon discovered that their monopoly on lightning raids through enemy’s rear was over. The prince personally commanded the Ithilienians in a number of skirmishes (for example, the one that trapped and destroyed a whole caravan of
mûmakil
) and even had time to write a sort of a manual for what would much later be called ‘commando warfare.’ As a result, the aristocrats in the capital joked that he was about to add a flail and a black mask to his familial coat of arms. And long before the war Faramir, who had an honest and profound love of the East and its culture, had set up a regular collection of military and political information in its countries through volunteer efforts of like-minded people – the first real intelligence agency in Western lands. Making his case on its reports, the prince argued in the Royal Council for cooperation with states beyond the Anduin, earning himself the ‘defeatist’ label and almost getting branded as an enemy collaborationist.