The Last Ringbearer (55 page)

“Don’t leave me like this, hear? The strike of mercy – now’s the time …”

“What happened, Haladdin?” the
palantír
came to life with Saruman’s alarmed voice.

“What happened?! My friend is turning to stone, that’s what! Your work, bastards?!”

“He touched the
palantír
?! Why did you let him …”

“Devil take you! Lift the spell right now, you hear?”

“I can’t do that. It’s not my spell – why would I need to do that? – and it’s impossible to lift someone else’s spell, even for me. It must be how my stupid predecessors have tried to stop you.”

“I don’t care whose spell it is! Do what you can or else drag the one who did it over to your
palantír
!”

“They’re all gone already … I regret this deeply, but I can do nothing for your friend even at the cost of my own life.”

“Listen, Saruman.” Haladdin managed to get hold of himself, realizing that yelling would accomplish nothing. “It looks like my friend will turn to stone in five or six minutes. If you manage to lift the spell during that time, I’ll do what you’re asking me to do: block this
palantír
‘s transmission and throw it into Orodruin. How to do it is your problem, but if you can’t, I’ll do what I intended to do, although, to be honest, you’ve almost convinced me otherwise. Well?”

“Be reasonable, Haladdin! Would you destroy a whole World – two Worlds, actually – to save one man? It won’t even save him when he dies later together with the World …”

“I don’t give a shit about your worlds, understand?! For the last time – will you try or not?”

“I can only repeat what I’ve said before to those idiots of the White Council: ‘What you are about to do is worse than a crime. It is a mistake.’”

“Oh yeah? Then I’m dropping my ball into the crater! Run like hell if you can! You can figure yourself how many seconds you’ve got – I’ve never been good at figuring in my head …”

Wolverine, lieutenant of the Secret Guard, was also facing a difficult choice at about the same time.

He had already reached the shores of the Anduin and had a good chance of reaching the boat that would save him when the Elves dogging his heels managed to chase him onto a
kurum
– the kind of a boulder-strewn slope that the real wolverines favor for their lairs. Trying to take a shortcut, the lieutenant ran straight across the
kurum
, leaping from boulder to boulder. It is most important to maintain one’s momentum and never stop when moving like that – jump and bounce, jump and bounce. This is not too difficult in dry weather, but now, after several days of rain, the lichens covering every boulder with black and orange spots were water-logged, and every such spot was mortally dangerous.

Wolverine had barely made it across a half of the slope when he realized that the pursuers were closer than he thought: arrows began falling around him. Those arrows arrived on high trajectories at the very end of their range, but the lieutenant knew too much of the Elves’ skill – the best archers in Middle Earth – not to steal a glance backwards. After another leap he pushed off a large boulder with his left foot while turning to the left – and that was when the soggy lichen, slippery as the proverbial banana peel, gave way under his Mordorian boot (I knew this hard-soled footwear would fail me!) and Wolverine was thrown to the right into a narrowing crevice. His breaking fingernails left rips across the lichen spots on the top of the boulder, but failed to hold him. A stupid thought flitted across the lieutenant’s mind – “wish I were a real wolverine” – right before his right ankle, stuck in the crevice like in a steel trap, cracked and shot a bolt of unbearable pain through his spine, knocking him out.

Strangely, his unconsciousness had lasted a very short time. Wolverine managed to prop himself up in the crevice so as to rest his weight on the uninjured leg. Now he could unstrap his backpack and force it over his head and in front of him. The sheaf of Dol Guldur papers had an ignition charge of ‘fire jelly’ attached to it (praise Grizzly for thinking of everything!), so all he had to do now was strike a flint of the Mordorian igniter – an air-tight porcelain bottle filled with the light fraction of naphtha. Only after untying the cord of the backpack and locating the igniter in his pocket did he think to look around, leaning back (it was impossible to turn around) just in time to see column-like figures in gray-green cloaks kind of slowly falling on him from the pale noon sky. With but a few yards separating him from the pursuing Elves, the lieutenant knew with certainty that of the two duties left to him in this life – setting off the ignition charge and chewing the green pill of salvation – he only had time to perform one, and an officer of Task Force Féanor should know which one took priority … So it was that the last sight Wolverine saw before a blow to the head knocked him out was that of the bluish naphtha flame licking the slightly frayed saltpeter-soaked fire cord.

He came to in a large forest clearing with a good view of the valley of the Great River. His hands were tied behind his back, his Mordorian uniform was all singed tatters, and the entire left side of his body was one large burn – the device had worked, praise Aulë! Belatedly he saw an Elf squatting to the left of him, on the side of the eye almost covered with dried ichor. The Elf was disgustedly wiping the mouth of his flask with a rag – apparently, he had just been pouring Elvish wine down the prisoner’s throat.

“You awake?” the Elf inquired in a melodious voice.

“Mordor and the Eye!” Wolverine responded automatically. (Imagine dying as an Orc! Well, them’s the breaks …)

“Quit pretending, dear ally!” The Firstborn was smiling, but his eyes burned with such hatred that his vertical cat’s pupils narrowed into tiny slits. “You are going to tell us everything about those strange games of His Majesty Elessar Elfstone, aren’t you, beastie? There shouldn’t be any secrets between allies.”

“Mordor … and … the Eye …” The lieutenant’s voice was still even, although Manwe only knew the effort it took: the Elf had casually dropped his hand to the prisoner’s broken ankle and …

“Sir Engold, look! What’s that?!”

At the cry of his comrades the Elf turned around and stared, transfixed, at something resembling a colossal dandelion swiftly grow to the sky beyond the Anduin, right where Caras Galadhon ought to be – a thin blinding-white stalk crowned with a bright-red bulbous ‘flower.’ Almighty Eru, if this thing is indeed in Galadhon, how huge must it be? What Galadhon? There’s probably not even ashes left there … A strangled cry made him turn back: “Sir Engold, the prisoner! What’s happening to him? …”

Fast as he turned, it was all over before he could see it happen. The prisoner was dead and no physician was necessary to confirm that. In a few moments, right under the gaze of the stunned Elves, the man had turned into a skeleton covered here and there in remnants of mummified skin. The brown-yellow skull, its eye sockets filled with sand, grinned at Engold from between shrunken blackened lips, as if mockingly inviting him to ask his questions – immerse me in the truth potion, perhaps that will help?

And in the palace in Minas Tirith Aragorn watched in astonishment the subtle changes taking place in the face of Arwen, seated across from him. Nothing seemed to change, really, but he felt with absolute certainty that something important, perhaps the most important, was going, slipping away like a blissful morning dream slips from memory … some magical incompleteness of her features, which became completely human. When this metamorphosis was over in a few moments, he reached a verdict summing up that period of his life: a beautiful woman, no question about it. Very beautiful, even. But that’s all.

None of his subjects saw that, nor would they have ascribed any importance to it had they seen it. What they did dutifully reflect in the chronicles of that day was another event of that noon: when the Mirror was destroyed in Lórien, the other six
palantíri
remaining in Middle Earth detonated, too, and a monstrous geyser almost half a mile high shot up from the Anduin-receiving Bay of Belfalas. The geyser spawned a forty-foot tsunami that wiped out several fishing villages and their inhabitants; it is doubtful that anyone recognized that those unfortunates, too, were victims of the War of the Ring.

The most surprising thing is that despite his powers of observation and insight His Majesty Elessar Elfstone had not connected those two events that happened at noon of August the first of the Year 3019 of the Third Age and in a sense became its final moment, either. For sure, no one after him had ever connected them, having had no opportunity to do so.

“Bend the arm, quick!” Haladdin ordered, tightening the tourniquet above Tzerlag’s left elbow. “Keep the rag pressed there, lest you bleed out.”

The sergeant’s hand de-petrified the moment the volcano swallowed the
palantír
, so now his blood gushed like it always does when a man loses a couple of fingers. They had no means to stop the bleeding other than the tourniquet: it turned out that the blood-clotting medicines from the Elvish medkit, including the legendary mandrake root (which reputedly could even patch a severed artery), have stopped working entirely. Who would have thought that this was magic, too?

“Listen … so we won, right?”

“Yes, dammit! If it can be called victory …”

“I don’t understand, Field Medic, sir …” It seemed that the sergeant’s lips, gray with blood loss, had trouble obeying him. “What do you mean – ‘if it can be called victory’?”

Don’t you dare, Haladdin told himself. That had been my decision; I have no right to burden anyone else with it, not even Tzerlag, not even a tiny bit. He must not even suspect what he had just witnessed and indirectly caused, for his own good. Let all this remain our personal Dagor Dagorath to him – a victorious Dagor Dagorath …

“What I mean is … You see, not a soul in Middle Earth will believe in our victory. No victory parades for us, you know? Mark my words: the Elves and the Men from beyond the Anduin will find a way to portray themselves as the winners anyway.”

The Orocuen nodded and held still for a moment, as if listening to the slowly subsiding growl of the Fire Mountain. “Yeah. That’s how it’s gonna be, no doubt. But what do we care?”

EPILOGUE

“What will History say?”
“History, sir, will lie – as always.”
Bernard Shaw

Dare to err and to dream.
Friedrich Schiller

O 
ur narrative is based entirely on Tzerlag’s detailed tales, however incomplete, that are preserved by his clan as an oral tradition. It should be stressed that we have no documents that might attest to their veracity. The person who might have been expected to leave the most thorough account – Haladdin – had recorded not a word on the subject; the other participants in the hunt for Galadriel’s Mirror – Tangorn and Kumai – remained silent for obvious reasons. Therefore, whoever would like to declare the whole thing to be the old-age demented ravings of an Orc who wanted to recast the finale of the War of the Ring is free to do so with clear conscience. After all, that’s what memoirs are for: to let veterans turn their losses into victories after the fact.

On the other hand, those who consider this story to be, if not a true, then at least a plausible version of history, might be interested in certain events outside its immediate time frame. Tzerlag related that he had accompanied Haladdin from Orodruin to Ithilien; the doctor seemed very ill and didn’t say ten words in a row throughout the journey. On one of their stops the sergeant fell in a sleep so deep that he woke up only by next evening, nauseous and with a monster headache. Instead of his comrade he found the
mithril
mail by his side, with a farewell letter wrapped in it. Haladdin wrote that Middle Earth was now free from the Elvish menace and that in his capacity as the commanding officer of the operation he thanked the sergeant for excellent service and awarded him the precious armor. As for the doctor himself, regretfully he had “paid such a price for victory as to see no place for himself among people.” Those words led the scout to fear the worst, but fortunately, the hunch did not pan out: judging by his tracks, Haladdin had simply reached the Ithilien highway and took it to points south.

Interestingly, a few years ago a certain light-minded doctoral student at the Umbar University’s Medieval History Department took this legend at face value and invested the effort to comb the account books of several Eastern monasteries, which have been keeping records for the last fifteen hundred years with an unnatural meticulousness. Guess what – the smart aleck did unearth a very curious coincidence: in January 3020 (by the then current calendar) an Umbarian-looking man did join the Gurwan Aren cave monastery in the mountains of North Vendotenia. The new monk took an oath of silence and donated an inoceramium ring to the monastery. This led the student to make (to quote the minutes of the departmental meeting) “a hasty, unfounded, and completely unscientific claim of identity of the said monk and the legendary Haladdin.” Naturally, the doctoral committee administered a proper tongue-lashing to the wannabe ghost-hunter, so that the young man forswore departures from his approved dissertation topic and has been dutifully dusting clay fragments from the garbage piles of Khand’s Seventh Dynasty ever since.

As for the real Haladdin, his name can be found in any university course on history of science – as an example of the dangers of sudden leaps forward – rather than physiology, his life’s work. His brilliant studies of nerve tissue function had been so far ahead of his time as to fall out of scientific context and be forgotten. Only three centuries later did the medics of the Ithilien School come across his works accidentally while searching for ancient antidote recipes. It became clear then that Haladdin had beaten the famous Vespuno by more than a hundred years; not only did he prove experimentally the electric nature of axon stimulation, but he also predicted the existence of neurotransmitters, and even modeled how they should work. Unfortunately, only historians are interested in the ‘who was there first’ kind of things; the scientific community has no use for this information. In any event Haladdin’s last known work is dated year 3016 of the Third Age and the official version is that he perished during the War of the Ring.