The Last Ringbearer (2011)

by Kirill Yeskov

  It’s strange, really, he thought while climbing up the stairs back into the street (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 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 listened to Tangorn’s introduction and said coldly: “I don’t care 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 everything 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’s 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 tracked 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 the cream of the Republic’s elite gathered. Alviss’ outfits regularly caused major indigestion in wives and official mistresses of high officials, and her body was the model for three large canvasses 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 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 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 mentioned in passing (analyzing the real trade volume between Mordor and the other countries beyond Anduin) had seemed so fruitful to Grager that the latter decided to pursue it himself right there, in Khand. To Tangorn’s total amazement Grager appointed him chief of station in Umbar: “Sorry, but there’s no one better; besides, you know the Southern saying: to learn to swim, you gotta swim.”

  The very next day 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 surface from those damn sapphire depths.

  “Valya-Vekte?”

  “If I’m not mistaken, she’s the goddess of virginity in the Aritanian pantheon. 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 an blazing 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 meeting 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

  Of 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 got nowhere; the secon
d time the mix-up almost cost him a well-designed operation.

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

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

  “You must have had trouble…”

  “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’ boundless 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-Dur. 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 news, and other openly available sources.

  While Tangorn, on Alviss’ advice, perused the activities of Umbarian financiers (the magic of the White Council was a child’s game in comparison), Grager became Algoran, merchant of the second guild, and founded a company in Khand to export olive oil to Mordor in exchange for products of high technology. The trading house Algoran & Co. prospered; with its hand always on the pulse of the local agricultural markets, the firm kept increasing its export share and even managed to corner the import of dates for a time. The head of the company avoided visiting his Barad-Dur branch (having no reasons to believe that Mordor’s counterintelligence service was staffed with incompetent fools), but his position did not require that: the commander’s place is not in the front ranks but on a nearby hill.

  The result of all this activity was a twelve-page document that historians now call ‘Grager’s memorandum.’ Putting together the rising profit margins of the caravan trade (as it was followed by the stock and commodity exchanges in Umbar and Barad-Dur), the introduction of a number of protectionist bills in the Mordorian parliament by the agrarian lobby (a reaction to the sharp increase of local growing costs), and a good dozen of other factors, Grager and Tangorn proved conclusively that import-reliant Mordor was incapable of waging prolonged war. Being totally dependent on caravan trade with its neighbors (a position totally incompatible with war), it was interested in peace and stability in the region above all else, and therefore posed no danger to Gondor. On the other hand, the safety of trade routes was a matter of life and death to Mordor, making it likely to react harshly and perhaps not too judiciously to any threat to these. The spies concluded: “Should anyone wish to force Mordor into a war, it would be very easy to accomplish by terrorizing caravans on the Ithilien Highway.”

  Faramir took these conclusions to a special session of the Royal Council in another of his attempts to prove, facts in hand, that the much-belabored ‘Mordorian threat’ was nothing but a myth. The Council, as usual, listened respectfully, understood nothing, and ruled on the matter by addressing the prince with its by now familiar litany of reprimands and instructions. These boiled down to two points: “gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail” and “your spies have gotten lazy and do no real work.” Thereafter Grager’s memorandum was sent to the archives, where it gathered dust with the Faramir’s intelligence service’s other reports until catching the eye of Gandalf during a visit to Minas Tirith…

  When the war began exactly following their script, Tangorn realized with horror that it was all his doing.

  “…’The World is Text,’ eh, man – just the way you like it. What’s your problem?” Grager smirked woodenly, pouring yet another shot of either tequila or some other moonshine with an unsteady hand.

  “But we wrote a different Text, you and I, totally different!”

  “Whaddya mean – different? My dear aesthete, a text exists only in its interaction with a reader. Everyone writes their own story of Princess Allandale, and whatever Alrufin himself wanted to say is absolutely irrelevant. Looks like we managed to create a real work of art, since the readers,” the resident waved a finger near his ear, so it was impossible to say whether he meant the Royal Council or some really Higher Powers, “managed to read it in this rather unexpected way.”

  “We betrayed them… We got played like little kids, but that’s no excuse – we betrayed them…” Tangorn repeated, staring fixedly into the murky opalescent depths of his glass.

  “Yep – it’s no excuse… Another one?”

  He could not figure out which day of their binge it was – not considering themselves in any service, they did not keep track. They started the day the head of the trading house Algoran & Co. heard of the war and raced to Umbar, running down several horses, and learned the details from him. Strangely, they more or less held up when apart, but now, looking each other in the eye, they recognized clearly and at once – this was the end of all they held dear, and they have destroyed it with their own hands. Two well-meaning idiots… Then there was the nightmarish nauseating hung-over dawn when he awoke because Grager poured a pitcher of ice-cold water over him. Grager looked his usual self, quick and sure-footed, so his bloodshot eyes and several days’ growth of beard seemed a part of some not too successful disguise.

  “Up!” he informed drily. “We’re in business again. We’ve been summoned to Minas Tirith to brief the Royal Council on the possibilities of a separate peace with Mordor. Immediately and with utmost secrecy, of course… Hot damn, maybe we can still fix something! His Majesty Denethor is a practical ruler; looks like he, too, needs this war like a fish needs an umbrella.”

  They have worked on their document for three days with almost no sleep or food, running on coffee alone, putting all their souls and all their expertise into it – they had no right to a second mistake. It was a true masterpiece: a meld of unassailable logic and inerrant intuition based on an intimate knowledge of the East, expressed in a brilliant literary language capable of touching every heart; it was the road to peace with an exhaustive description of the dangers and traps lining that road. On his way to the port Tangorn found a minute to drop in on Alviss: “I’m going to Gondor – only for a short while, so don’t feel lonely!”

  She paled and said almost inaudibly: “You’re going to war, Tan. We’re separating for a long time, most likely forever… could you not say a proper good-bye, at least?”

  “What’re you talking about, Aly?” he was sincerely puzzled. He hesitated for a couple of seconds then decided to breach security: “To be honest, I’m going there to stop this stupid war. In any case I hate it and I’m not about to play those games, by the halls of Valinor!”

  “You’re going to war,” she repeated despondently, “I know that for sure. I’ll be praying for you… Please go now, don’t look at me when I’m like this.”

  When their ship had passed the gloomy stormy shores of South Gondor and entered the Anduin, Grager muttered through clenched teeth: “Picture this: we show up in Minas Tirith and they stare at us: ‘Who are you guys? What Royal Council – are you crazy? It must be some joke, nobody called for you.”

  Bu
t it was no joke. Indeed, they were impatiently expected right at the Pelargir pier: “Baron Grager? Baron Tangorn? You’re under arrest.”

  Only their own could have taken the two best spies of the West so easily.

  CHAPTER 39

  “Now tell us, Baron, exactly how you sold the Motherland over there, in Umbar.”

  “Maybe I’d sell it, on sober reflection, but who the hell would buy such a motherland?”

  “Let the record reflect: suspect Tangorn admits planning to switch to the enemy’s side and didn’t do it only because of circumstances beyond his control.”

  “Yeah, that’s it: maybe he was planning something, but didn’t manage to do anything. Put it down like that.”

  “Just the documents you brought are enough to have you drawn and quartered – all those ‘overtures of peace’!”

  “They were written at the direct order of the Royal Council.”

  “We’ve heard this fairy tale already. Can you show us this order?”

  “Dammit, I must have calluses on my tongue already from telling you: it came under the G-mandate, and such documents are to be destroyed after reading!”

  “Gentlemen, I do believe it’s beneath us to plumb the customs of thieves and spies…”

  This ‘investigation’ has been dragging on for two weeks already. Not that the spies’ guilt or their impending sentence were in any doubt on either side; it was just that Gondor had the rule of law. This meant that an out-of-favor nobleman could not be simply sent to the gallows with only a flick of the royal wrist; proper formalities had to be observed. Most importantly, Tangorn never had a feeling that what was happening was unfair. That traitorous feeling had sometimes undone many brave and straight-thinking individuals, causing them to write useless and demeaning pleas to the authorities. The spies were about to be executed not in error or on a false report, but precisely for what they did do – for trying to stop a useless war their country did not need; everything was honest and above board and no one was to blame. So when Tangorn was roused from his cot one night (“Out, with your possessions!”), he did not know what to think.