by Adam Roberts
‘Well,’ said Nobbi, rubbing his beard. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Look over there!’ called the second Eye. ‘The boat has gone!’ And he spurred his horse and rode over the beach, to the place where the elvish boat had been constructed. Its keelprint was still in the sand, and spare timber and tools were piled by the grasses at the head of the beach.
The second Eye galloped back along the beach to the place where Eärwiggi stood. ‘Do you know anything of this? Answer me truly.’
‘No,’ said Eärwiggi, grinning.
‘There is strange work here,’ said the second Eye. ‘There were Elves here, and they had been forbidden either to complete their boat, or to travel anywhere in the land. So where are they?’
‘Perhaps,’ said the first Eye, ‘they pulled their incomplete boat into the water in despair and drowned themselves?’ He said this with an almost hopeful inflection of voice.
‘Possibly,’ said the first Eye. ‘Although I have never heard of Elves committing suicide before.’
Nobbi cleared his throat loudly. It was a tremendous, rumbling, thrumming throat-clearing, such as only Dwarfs can properly manage. It sounded like scree falling down a great slope. ‘Right, boyos,’ he said, pulling himself to his full height, which by coincidence was exactly the same height as Eärwiggi. ‘Now, you two – I’ve a question, and I want to address it to Sharon himself.’
‘Speak to me,’ said the first Eye. ‘Verily I am Sharon, wearing this mannish body as a tool.’
‘No,’ said the second Eye, crossly. ‘Speak to me. I am the true Sharon.’
‘I was here first,’ said the first Eye.
‘And I was created Eye of Sharon before you,’ said the second Eye. ‘Talk to me, Sir Dwarf, and Sharon will answer your question.’
‘No, Sir Dwarf,’ said the first Eye. ‘Ignore this man – he is a merely secondary, subsidiary Eye. I’m the one you should address.’
‘Me!’ yelled the second Eye.
‘He said,’ said Eärwiggi, pointing to the first Eye. And at that moment, as in the dead eye of a storm, everything fell silent, so that his words could be heard by all: the Orks ceased their mutterings; the sea surf seemed to hush to silence; the wind dropped away; and the two bickering Eyes were speechless with their respective rages. And so Eärwiggi spoke, and rarely have any words spoken by a child been so significant. The words of Túrin returned to him: always tell the truth and something about the face, because actually Eärwiggi couldn’t remember the second part. And he thought of the Sellmi tucked into his clothes. And he spoke.
‘He said,’ said Eärwiggi, pointing to the first Eye, ‘that he was going to kill you. I overheard him.’
There was a moment of silence. The fate of the world turned on its pivot.
‘Oh you did, did you?’ roared the second Eye.
‘No!’ called the first Eye in outrage. ‘What? Hey – no.’
‘Do you know that doesn’t surprise me at all,’ said the second Eye.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I always thought you were a murderous swine,’ said the second Eye. ‘And I don’t mean that in a good way.’
‘You take that back!’ said the first Eye, livid. ‘You just apologise and take that back right now!’
‘You’re plotting to kill me,’ said the second Eye.
‘No I’m not,’ snarled the first Eye. ‘Though heaven knows you deserve it.’
‘The boy has a command upon him to tell the truth!’ cried the second Eye with furious emphasis. ‘Can you deny it? – It is the Dragons’ magic.’ He turned to Eärwiggi. ‘Boy, speak again, and speak only the truth. Did this creature say he was going to slay me?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Eärwiggi. ‘When you rode over the beach a moment ago. He said “When I come back. I’m going to stick him with my long black sword.” And he called you a rude name.’
‘Oo, I never!’ yelled the first Eye. ‘He’s lying!’
‘He has the Dragons’ spell upon him,’ shrieked the second Eye. ‘He cannot lie! You, however, are composed of nothing but lies and treachery. Since being appointed one of the Eyes of Sharon you have spent the entire time plotting to rise up against your own Master.’
‘How could I plot like that?’ howled the first Eye, in an ecstasy of rage and fury. ‘I am not Sharon’s servant, but part of Sharon himself. You talk gibberish. Your brain must have rotted away – are your wits truly so maggot-eaten that you would think . . .’
In a trice, the second Eye whipped out his black-bladed sword and sheathed it again in the first Eye’s chest. The victim’s eyes opened even wider and looked even more furious, which Eärwiggi would hardly have believed possible, although there it was, for all to see. His speech broke off in mid word with a gurgle, and he fell straight out of his saddle to the damp sand.
The Orks sucked in a collective ‘Ha!’ of horror, and all took a step back.
The second Eye looked with surprise at the sword in his hand. Vapours curled off the blade, and a dribble of blood ran from the point. ‘Er,’ he said.
At exactly that moment the ground shook violently.
Eärwiggi was thrown off his feet by the tremor; and even the stocky, sturdy Dwarf had a job not falling over. The Orks squealed in terror, and fled away, some south, some east. The body of the slain Eye of Sharon twitched on the sand as if going through a second death spasm.
The second Eye’s horse reared up, and sloughed him off backwards, before cantering whinnyingly away over the dune grass and onto the snow. And the second Eye lay screaming.
The ground shook a second time.
The sea seemed to boil, and throw up exaggerated waves, twice or three times as tall as they had been only a moment before. For a third time the ground shook.
Eärwiggi got on all fours and looked north. The cave where they had found the Sellmi had collapsed. The rocks above were shaking, trembling, rearing in great spasms, as if the mountains themselves were feverish.
Getting to his feet, the second Eye looked around him with fear and horror on his face. His eyes were black and sightless, and he stumbled. ‘Something is very wrong here . . .’ he said.
And with the mightiest tremor yet the mountains burst to life, and upreared into the air. The second Eye screamed and fell on his face.
‘It is the ending of all things!’ said Eärwiggi.
‘Now let’s not leap to conclusions,’ said Nobbi, before his voice was drowned out by a tempestuous rushing of wind. The sea’s edge sucked back and ran away from them, withdrawing half a league to reveal wet mud and seaweeds and gasping fish dancing in plain air.
A shadow passed over them; and the Dragon of the North, awake again, was circling very slowly through the air over their heads.
The Dragon of the North spoke: ‘What is your name?’ And his voice boomed and rumbled, as the earth shivered its last trembles and settled itself.
To begin with, Eärwiggi thought he must be speaking to somebody else. He prodded Nobbi’s shoulder, and nodded at him, raising his eyebrows, as if to say ‘Go on then.’ But the Dwarf said, ‘He’s speaking to you, bach.’
So Eärwiggi said, ‘Eärwiggi.’
‘You have the Sellmi?’
Eärwiggi thought about telling another lie; but then he thought to himself ‘If I lie all the time, then people will know the truth simply by inverting what I say. So I shall tell the truth on this occasion.’ He looked up at the huge beast. It hung in the sky above the beach, filling the view; although at the edges of his great rock-like frame Eärwiggi could see the sky behind. It looked darker, and clouds were hurrying over it at a great rate as if keen to get away.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Do you want it?’
‘No,’ said the Dragon. ‘It was in my claw, but it froze me to the margin of Upper Middle Earth – as you saw. I cannot carry it, as I hoped.’
‘Carry it?’
‘Away.’ And he swum through the air in a circle, nodding his great head at the west. ‘It should
not be here. It disturbs the balance of this world. We are ready to pay the price to be rid of it.’
‘We?’ asked Eärwiggi.
‘My brother dragons,’ said the Dragon of the North. ‘The time has come.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Sharon hoped to form an unbreakable spell. He took much of our power from us to fashion the spell, and its words are our words, and they are words of making. He commanded that he be lord over all Elves and Men; and that he be invulnerable to harm; and that he be immortal; and that he be victorious in any battle. And with these words he has enslaved Upper Middle Earth, for they are powerful words.’
‘But,’ said Nobbi, with a great smile on his face, ‘You, laddo, have resisted his magic!’
‘Your mother was an elf, and your father a man,’ boomed the Dragon. ‘And you are both elvish and mannish, and yet neither. As neither man nor elf, Sharon could not command you.’
‘Even the winter thawed around you,’ said Nobbi.
‘The problem with a being such as Sharon,’ said the Dragon, ‘is that he can only see the one thing or the other. He must inhabit the centre, and margins make him uncomfortable. If looked at in terms of one thing or the other thing his charm was firm. But here, at the margins of the world, it frays.’
‘Frays?’
‘The Eye of Sharon is both Sharon and not-Sharon, for he is a Man possessed by Sharon. Sharon cannot be harmed, or killed, or defeated in battle; and so the second Eye was victorious, and alive, and unharmed. But Men can be harmed, or killed, or defeated in battle; and so the first Eye lies dead. And the first Eye was Sharon, also, and so the spell is broken.’
‘Is it so simple?’ asked Eärwiggi.
‘No,’ boomed the Dragon, mournfully.
‘Sharon fought Sharon!’ chortled the dwarf. ‘Both must be victorious by the terms of the spell, and yet both cannot be victorious – for to be victorious means to defeat the other. The spell circled back on itself, a serpent devouring its own tail! It fused itself.’
‘Is the spell broken?’ Eärwiggi asked again. ‘Just like that?’
‘No,’ boomed the Dragon, ‘and yes, for this is the way of all answers to the really complicated questions.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘The spell is made of our magic, and of our words; and the world itself is made of our magic and of our words. The spell is broken, and not broken. It is broken, in that Sharon no longer commands the hearts of Men or Elves, and he can be harmed and slain and defeated in battle. But it is not broken, so long as the world is unbroken; and some part of Sharon remains immortal, imperishable, invincible. So mighty a spell cannot simply disappear in a puff of smoke. Its unmaking will unmake the land that we made; and it will unmake us also, for we are the speech that spoke the land, just as we are the speech that spoke the spell.’
‘Well, this is most alarming news,’ said Eärwiggi. ‘It sounds, after all, like the end of the world.’
‘End,’ said the Dragon, ‘and beginning. The tremors are starting now, in the heart of Blearyland; and they will soon reach us here at the edge of things. Already Sharon’s tower has fallen in rubble, and his Thing™ has fallen from him and been washed away in the flood, to fall from sight and mind. Already his Orks flee in terror or fall into chasms in the earth. Soon the land will be broken, hills will tumble into valleys, fields will rear up as new mountains, and everything will become new. Yet Men and Elves will survive, and the new world will continue.’
‘Dear me,’ said Eärwiggi. ‘What a to-do.’
‘It is indeed,’ boomed the Dragon, lifting his head to the hurtling clouds and the wine-dark sky, ‘a To-Do! We shall soon perish, broken to fragments by the upheavals of this land we made.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘Don’t worry. We have laid our eggs in the rocks of this world, and a new generation of Dragons will arise eventually, smaller than we but more removed from the evil of Moregothic who created us, and wiser in their way. We accept our fate. Will you now accept yours?’
‘My fate?’
‘You must carry the Sellmi over the western ocean, and return it to Emu who made it.’
‘But there isn’t time to build a boat!’ said Eärwiggi. And truly it seemed so, for the hills on the horizon were shuddering like jellies, and trees and rocks were bouncing into the air; and the air was bruised with the distant sound of apocalypse.
‘Climb onto my tail,’ said the Dragon, whisking his huge rocky tail through the air and laying it along the beach. ‘Quick now.’
As Eärwiggi clambered up he asked, ‘Will you carry me through the air?’
‘Not I,’ boomed the Dragon. ‘I cannot leave this land I created, and the Sellmi is too heavy a thing for my power. But you can take it in your hand. By cutting off the end of it, Sharon opened its magic potency; for it is full of light and power. Hold it tight, with the severed end towards the ground.’
‘Alright,’ said Eärwiggi, doing so. ‘Then what?’
‘You’ll see,’ said the Dragon. And he lifted his tail into the air again.
‘Goodbye!’ Eärwiggi called down to Nobbi on the ground. ‘It was nice knowing you.’
‘Glad to know you too,’ said the Dwarf. But Eärwiggi was already high in the air, and the world beneath had shrunk away.
From here he could see the great spread of lands to the east, and the stippled deserts of ocean water to the west. And it was a vantage point from which the spreading wave of earthquake destruction was clearly visible, shaking the whole landscape; as if the fields and hills and mountains were made not of solid substance, but of a sluggish fluid, and a great wave was passing through them, undoing and remaking.
The Dragon whipped his tail round; and with a tumbling sense of falling in his belly, Eärwiggi dropped hundreds of yards; yet still he clutched onto the Sellmi.
And with sudden and devastating force, the Dragon of the North whipped his tail round again and hurled Eärwiggi westward into the air. He screamed. He couldn’t help it. He was flying free like a chucked pebble, with the seas wrinkling far below him.
And with a great shudder, the Sellmi came to life in his hands. Light gushed from its severed end: light of all colours, streaking behind him as he flew: a comet’s tail of red and gold, of spring green and sky blue.
He flew so fast that the wind tugged at his face, pulling his mouth open and squeezing his eyes shut; and he could no longer hear himself call. But ducking his head down and forcing his eyes open, he saw the path of many colours he was marking across the sky. And even in his fear he was amazed.
And from the ground those Elves and Men who survived the upheavals of their world looked up in amazement also. Never before had such a thing been seen in Upper Middle Earth. And at first it was called ‘Eärwiggi-in-the-sky’; but afterwards, when people thought back and decided this was a pretty silly name for it they called it instead ‘rainbow’.
Eärwiggi flew, and the force and noise of the air pressed him close about, but still he cut his way through the sky.
Behind him the Dragon of the North broke into ten thousand fragments of stone, some great boulders, some small shards, and scattered across the landscape; and Nobbi did call out ‘Crikey o’ bikey’ and hide his head; and by great good fortune, or perhaps by good fate, none of the ten thousand fragments fell upon him.
And in like fashion did each of the four great dragons perish with the breaking up of this, their greatest spell.
Eärwiggi passed through the highest point of the sky, where the blue aether was close enough almost for him to touch; and below him the sea was ever more distant, and the curve of the world was clearly visible. The sun’s light and heat was strong upon this place, and one thought crossed his mind; that he was the most alone and free of any Upper Middle Earthly individual.
And then he began to fall in a great arc. But although the fall curved down and down, yet as he clutched the Sellmi it seemed to Eärwiggi that his speed was slowing, and th
at he was less falling and more floating, until he caught a glimpse of a fresh green landscape, and the crisp frill of white breakers on a golden beach, and then he plopped onto the turf of Asdar.
‘Wow. That,’ he said to nobody in particular, ‘was quite a ride.’
So it was that the Sellmi was returned to Asdar. Of Eärwiggi little more is known; some tales say he lived in happiness in Asdar forever; other tales say he returned to Upper Middle Earth, to find a changed landscape and new adventures. But of Sharon all the tales agree: he was cast down in the ruin of his orgulous castle, and his spirit fled whimpering to the high sky where it was lost to memory. And his ThingTM, the last remnant of the Sellmi in Upper Middle Earth, fell into floodwater and was washed away, whither none knew.
And Men and Elves rebuilt their cities from the ruins of the land. And the name of Blearyland was wiped from official records, for all agreed it had brought nothing but bad luck; and instead the land was called Elfriardor. Or Manland, according to some. Or Dwarfswereherefirstshire according to others.
So ends the tale of Eärwiggi.26
26 Whose name, clearly, is not derived from the Elvish for ‘ear covering’ after all, but from the Old Mannish meaning ‘air-way’ or ‘air-path’, on account of his fantastic journey through the sky.
The Voyage of the Darned Traitor
During that time when the whole of Upper Middle Earth was overrun by darkness and Sharon was Master of All Things, certain Elves, called for obvious reasons the Coward Elves, fled to the far north and west of Blearyland. And there they built themselves a boat, called by them The Spirit of Exploration, but called by everybody who remained behind and lived under the terrible yoke of Sharon The Spirit of the Darned Traitor.
As Sharon laid waste to Blearyland, Túrin Again-dikwittingdn took his people, and escorted the vacant-headed Queen Lüthwoman to the uttermost western shore of Upper Middle Earth. There they began building a boat, but the construction fell under the malign influence of one of the Eyes of Sharon, who came upon them. And they fell at his feet as he ordered them to cease building the boat, and ordered them also not to roam the land but to waste the rest of their days sitting on the cold beach. And they were powerless to resist his command, and languished on the beach for many months.