The Last Ringbearer (29 page)

A solid line of defensive works on the Chevelgar isthmus joining the peninsula to the mainland plus a superb navy to guard against enemy landings made Umbar totally unassailable, which makes its being constantly conquered by all and sundry very puzzling. To be more precise, every time an attack loomed the Umbarians averted action by acknowledging the sovereignty of whatever continental power it was and paying tribute, quite sanely figuring that a war, even a victorious one, would cost their trade republic a lot more in all respects. Their attitude can be likened to that of a businessman who pays ‘protection money’ to a racketeer with neither pleasure nor undue upset, building this expense into his prices; he cares not a whit which criminal cartel his ‘partners’ belong to, but only that they do not stage gunfights next to his store.

On the mainland long sieges followed awesome battles; storied kings (ever concerned with winning new lands rather than wisely governing those they already had) were tempted time and again to order their finance ministers beheaded for daring to interrupt the grandiose flights of royal fancy with their pedestrian: “The treasury is empty, sire, and the army hasn’t been paid since last September!” – in other words, life went on. In the meantime, behind the Chevelgar fortifications the Umbarians kept beautifying their swampy islands, joining them with dams and bridges and splitting them with canals. The mega polis that rose from the azure waters of the lagoon was rightly considered the most beautiful city in all Middle Earth: its merchants and bankers swam in money, so for four centuries and counting the best architects and sculptors have labored here dawn to dusk.

In the last three hundred years or so Umbar got powerful enough to eschew paying tribute to anyone. An absolute sea power, it turned instead to a tactic of temporary defensive alliances – now with Mordor against Gondor, then with Gondor against Mordor, then again with Khand against both of the above. Last year, though, the situation changed drastically: Mordor sank into oblivion (not without Umbar helping by supplying Aragorn with a landing fleet at the crucial moment, so as to get rid of a caravan trade competitor for good), Khand was being torn apart by a religious civil war and had lost all influence in the seashore regions, while a new threat arose in the South, one with which there was no dicker – the Haradrim. As a result, the Republic faced a Hobson’s choice between southern savages and northern barbarians. The Senate chose the latter, hoping to hide from the Haradi invasion behind Aragorn’s swords, although it was crystal clear that this time the protection price would be direct occupation of the tiny country by its ‘great northern neighbor.’ No few citizens were of the opinion that Umbarian independence and civil liberties were quite worth defending with their lives.

Most denizens of the city, though, never dwelled on these sad matters, or at least tried hard not to. Happy cosmopolitan Umbar with its gauche and intimately corrupt authorities led its usual life of the World’s Crossroads. It had active temples of all three major and scores of minor religions, while a merchant from anywhere could celebrate a deal in a restaurant of his national cuisine. Here information was gathered, traded, and stolen by diplomats and spies from countries no one in the Reunited Kingdom had ever heard of, and who in their turn cared nothing for the snowy outback beyond the Anduin. Here one could find any merchandise ever produced by the Arda’s soil, water, or mines, or created by the minds and hands of its inhabitants: from exotic fruits to rarest medicines and drugs, from a magnificent platinum tiara encrusted with famous Vendotenian emeralds to a Mordorian scimitar that can split stone and then be wrapped around your waist like a belt, from oversized fossilized teeth (supposedly dragon’s and magical) to manuscripts in dead languages. (Consider the popular joke: “Does the Ring of Power really exist? No, else it could have been bought in an Umbar market.”) And how did blood mix here, what fantastic beauties surfaced regularly from this universal melting pot! In any case, on his way from the Fish Market to the Three Stars Embankment Tangorn had counted at least half a dozen such knock-me-down-with-a-feather lovelies.

Once there he stopped by a familiar dugout bar to drink some of his favorite Golden Muscat. Its sweetness and tartness balance each other so perfectly that the taste seems to disappear altogether and the wine turns into materialized aroma, seemingly simple and even somewhat crude, but in reality weaved from a multitude of shades – multiple meanings and hints. Let some of it linger on your tongue, and you will see the topaz berries warm with the afternoon sun, slightly sprinkled with limestone dust, and the blindingly white path through the vineyard, and then the enthralling Umbarian six-line verses –
takatos
– will begin creating themselves right out of the noon haze …

It’s strange, really, he thought while climbing up the chipped stairs out of the cool gloom of the dugout (another check – still no tail), it’s strange but he used to believe that fully appreciating the taste of this magic drink would lead him to a full understanding of the soul of the city where it was born. Umbar – the wonderful, damned, tender, fickle, mocking, depraved, ever avoiding real intimacy Umbar … A bitch of unbelievable beauty and charm who gave you a love potion to drink, precisely so she could then openly flirt with all and sundry in your full view, leaving you the choice of either killing her or accepting her as she was. He chose the latter, and now, back after a four-year absence, knew with complete certainty: baron Tangorn’s Gondorian phase was nothing but a prolonged misunderstanding, for his real home is here …

He stopped by the parapet, leaned on the warm pinkish limestone, swept his gaze over the majestic view of both of Umbar’s bays – Kharmian and Barangar – and suddenly realized: this was the very place where he met baron Grager on his first day in Umbar! The resident spy listened to Tangorn’s introduction and declared coldly: “I don’t give a damn for Faramir’s recommendations! Young man, I won’t give you any real work for at least six months. By then you must know the city better than the police, speak both local languages without an accent, and have acquaintances in all strata of society – from criminals to senators. That’s just for starters. If you fail, you can go home and do literary translations, you’re pretty good at it.” Truly, what goes around, comes around …

Did he manage to become a local? That doesn’t seem possible … Be that as it may, he learned to write
takatos
well appreciated by connoisseurs, to understand ship rigging, and to easily converse with Kharmian smugglers in their gaudy
patois
. Even now he can guide a gondola through the maze of Old City canals with his eyes closed; he still remembers a dozen open-ended courtyards and other such places where one can lose a tail even when openly stalked by a large team … He had weaved a pretty decent agent network here, and then he had Alviss – this city held no secrets from her … Or, perhaps, she had him?

Alviss was the most glamorous of the Umbar courtesans. From her Belfalas mother who kept a humble port brothel called
The Siren’s Kiss
she had inherited sapphire eyes and hair the color of light copper that instantly drove any Southerner crazy; from her father – a corsair skipper who wound up on a yardarm when the girl was barely a year old – a man’s mind, an independent character, and a penchant for well-considered gambles. This combination of qualities enabled her to rise from the port hovels of her birth to her own mansion on Jasper Street, where her receptions attracted the cream of the Republic’s elite. Alviss’ outfits regularly caused major indigestion in wives and official mistresses of high officials, while her body was the model for three large canvases and the cause of a dozen duels. A night with her cost either a fortune or nothing but a trifle like a well-dedicated poem.

That was precisely how it happened with Tangorn, who dropped by her salon once (he had to establish contact with the secretary of the Khand embassy, who was a regular). When the guests started to leave, the beauty confronted the funny northern barbarian and said with indignation belied by sparkles of laughter in her eyes:

“Rumor has it, Baron, that you claimed my hair is dyed!” Tangorn opened his mouth to deny this monstrous lie, but realized immediately that this was not what was expected of him. “I assure you that I’m a natural blond. Would you like to confirm that?”

“What, right now?”

“Sure, when else?” Taking his arm, she marched from the living room to the inner chambers, purring: “Let’s find out if you’re as good in bed as you are on the dance floor …”

It turned out that he was even better. By morning Alviss had signed an unconditional surrender pact to which she stuck quite well over the years that followed. As for Tangorn, at first it seemed nothing more than an exciting adventure to him; the baron realized that this woman had stealthily taken up more of his heart than he could afford only when she bestowed her characteristically generous attentions on Senator Loano’s young son – an empty-headed pretty boy fond of writing sickeningly sweet verses. The duel that followed made the whole city laugh (the baron inflicted blows with the flat of his sword, using it as a club, so the youngster got away with only a set of mighty bruises and a concussion), made Grager furious, and totally confused the Umbarian secret service: a spy has no right to behave thusly! Tangorn took the drubbing from the chief indifferently and asked only to be immediately reassigned away from Umbar – to Khand, say.

Somehow he had no consistent memories of the year he spent in Khand: only the sun-bleached adobe walls, windowless like the forever veiled faces of the local women; the smell of overheated cotton oil, the taste of bland flatbreads (the moment they cool they resemble mortar in both taste and texture), and the incessant whine of the
zurna
over it all, like the maddening buzz of a giant mosquito. The baron tried forgetting Alviss by losing himself in work – he found out that the syrupy caresses of the local beauties could not do that. Strangely, he did not connect Grager’s sudden order to return to Umbar to his reports. However, it turned out that one of the ideas he had mentioned in passing (to analyze actual trade volume between Mordor and the other countries beyond Anduin) seemed so promising to Grager that the latter decided to pursue it himself right there, in Khand. To Tangorn’s complete amazement Grager appointed him station chief in Umbar: “Sorry, but there’s no one else available; besides, you know how they say here in the South: to learn to swim, you gotta swim.”

The day after his return a woman wearing an opaque Khand burka found him, gracefully turned up the veil and said with a shy smile that astounded him: “Hello, Tan … You’ll laugh, but I’ve waited for you all this time. I’ll wait more if I have to.”

“Really? You must’ve devoted yourself to serving Valya-Vekte,” he scoffed, trying desperately to emerge from those damn sapphire depths.

“Valya-Vekte?”

“If I’m not mistaken, she’s the goddess of virginity in the Aritanian pantheon, right? The Aritanian temple is only three blocks from your house, so this service won’t be too burdensome …”

“That’s not what I mean,” Alviss shrugged. “Sure, I’ve slept with a bunch of people this past year, but that was just work, nothing else.” Then she looked straight at him and fired a broadside: “But you know, Tan, you shouldn’t have any illusions that the so-called decent folks would think your work any less shameful than mine – I mean your real work here.”

He digested this silently for some time, and then found strength to laugh: “Yeah, you got me to rights, Aly!” With those words he put his hands on her waist, as if about to spin her in a dance: “And let them all go to hell!”

She smiled sadly: “I’ve got nothing to do with it; nor have you … It’s just that we’re sentenced to each other, and there’s nothing to be done about it.”

It was God’s honest truth. They parted numerous times, sometimes for a long time, but then always started from the same place. She greeted him differently on his return: sometimes one look of hers chilled the room with an inch of hoarfrost; sometimes it seemed that Arda split to its very hidden core and a searing protuberance of the Eternal Fire sprang forth; sometimes she simply stroked his cheek with a sigh: “Come in. You look thin; want to eat something?” – a model housewife welcoming her husband after a routine business trip. Both of them understood with absolute clarity that each of them carried a lethal dose of poison in their veins and only the other had an antidote, a temporary one at that.

CHAPTER 38

O 
f course, Tangorn’s life in Umbar was not limited to travails of love. It should be noted that the baron’s professional responsibilities left a certain imprint on his relationship with Alviss. Since she let him know that she was aware of the true nature of his business, at first the baron thought that his girlfriend was somehow connected to the Umbarian secret service. He learned otherwise in a fairly aggravating manner, when twice he planted on her some information meant for his ‘colleagues’ and twice it went nowhere; the second time the mix-up almost cost him a well-designed operation.

“Aly, do you think your secret service has so little interest in me that they haven’t even asked you to keep tabs on me?”

“Of course they’ve asked me, right after you came back. And left empty-handed.”

“You must have had problems …”

“Nothing serious, Tan, forget about it, please!”

“Maybe you should’ve agreed, at least for show.”

“No. I don’t want to do it, not even for show. You see, to inform on a loved one, one has to be a highly moral individual with an ingrained sense of civic duty. But I’m just a whore who knows nothing of those things … Let’s not talk about this anymore, all right?”

This discovery gave the baron the idea to use Alviss’ vast connections for his own data gathering – not of the secret kind (God forbid!), but public information. He and Grager were most interested not in the new generation of warships being built at the Republic’s shipyards or the recipe of the ‘Umbarian fire’ (a mysterious flammable liquid used to great effect during sieges and sea battles), but rather in such mundane matters as caravan trade volumes and price fluctuations on the food markets of Umbar and Barad-dúr. Another keen interest of the baron’s were the technological advances that more and more defined the civilization of Mordor, which he had always sincerely admired. Amazingly, it was Faramir’s semi-amateurish team (whose members, it should be mentioned, were not in state service and received not a dime from the Gondorian treasury during all these years) that had intuitively arrived at the style that intelligence services have only widely adopted in our days. It is well known that these days it is not the swashbuckling secret agents toting micro-cameras and noise-suppressed pistols who obtain the most valuable intelligence information, but rather analysts diligently combing newspapers, stock market reports, and other openly available sources.