Comparing his impressions with those of the company leader, the landlord knew that the absence of a black arrow meant only that Runcorn was not one for theatrical gestures and cared little for the gawkers’ opinions. A serious man who needed to be dealt with seriously… That same night the forester’s house was set afire from all four sides. The arsonists propped the door shut with a large beam; when a man’s shadow appeared in the fire-lit attic window, arrows flew from the darkness below; after that, no one tried to escape the burning hut.
A King’s forester burned alive was no stinking serf that managed to get run over by a landlord’s horse; no cover-up was possible. Although…
“Everybody here thinks it was the poachers, sir. The late forester, gods rest his soul, was real hard on them, so they struck back. A really sad story… More wine?” The young landlord addressed those words to the court’s magister from Harlond, who had stopped at his hospitable manor.
“Yes, please! A wonderful claret, haven’t had its like for a while,” the magister, a dumpy sleepy old man with a nimbus of silver hair around a pink bald spot, nodded courtly. For a long time he admired the flames in the fireplace through the wine in a thin Umbarian glass, and then raised his faded blue eyes – piercing icicles, not sleepy at all – at his host.
“By the way, that drowned girl – one of your serfs?”
“What drowned girl?”
“Why, do they drown themselves every other day here?”
“Oh, that one… No, she was from the north somewhere. Is it important?”
“Maybe, maybe not.” The magister again raised the glass to eye level and said thoughtfully:
“Your estate, young sir, is very well-kept – an example for all landlords in this area. I figure at least two and a half hundred marks in annual rents, right?”
“A hundred fifty,” the landlord lied smoothly and caught his breath: praise Eru, the conversation is turning to real business. “About a half goes to taxes, plus there’re the mortgages…”
Poachers, you say? All right, poachers it is. A suitable candidate was soon found; after some time on a rack above a censer the man made the appropriate confession and was duly impaled on a stake, as a lesson to the other serfs. The court magister departed to town, tenderly hugging to his side a money bag with a hundred eighty silver marks… All set?
Right!..
From the very beginning the landlord was troubled by the absence of any bones in the rubble of Runcorn’s house. The company leader, who had personally commanded that operation, tried to calm his boss down: the house was large, with a wooden rather than earthen floor, the fire had burned for more than an hour, so the corpse must have burned to cinders, this does happen often. However, the young lord, being (as already mentioned) prudent beyond his years in nearly all matters, ordered his men to examine the location once again. His worst suspicions came true: the forester, who had had his share of surprises, was prudent, too, with a thirty-yard tunnel leading from the basement outside. There were a few fresh blood spots on the tunnel floor – one of the arrows had found its mark that night.
“Find him!” the young lord ordered – quietly, but in a tone of voice that made his hastily assembled henchmen break out in goose bumps. “It’s us or him, no going back. So far, Oromë be praised, he’s licking his wounds somewhere in the forest. If he escapes, I’m a dead man, but you will all die before me, I promise.”
The landlord took personal charge of the hunt, declaring that he would not rest until he sees Runcorn’s corpse with his own eyes. The fugitive’s tracks led inside the forest and were clearly readable throughout the day; the man had not bothered to conceal them, apparently assuming that he was believed dead. Closer to evening the company leader found a cocked crossbow hidden in the bushes by the path; more precisely, the crossbow was found later, after its bolt had already buried itself in the leader’s gut. While the henchmen bickered around the wounded man, another arrow whistled in from somewhere, taking a man in the neck. Runcorn gave himself away thereby – his silhouette showed briefly between the trees some thirty yards away down the dale, and they all chased him down a narrow clearing between the bushes. That was the idea: to get them all to run without looking down. As a result, three men wound up in the pit, more than he expected. Eggy the Chicken Hawk’s bandits have crafted it with skill and care: eight feet deep with sharp stakes at the bottom, smeared with rotten meat to guarantee a blood poisoning at the very least.
Twilight fell, and the gloom deepened. The landlord’s men were very cautious now, moving along in pairs; when they finally spotted Runcorn in the bushes, they showered him with arrows from twenty yards away. Alas, when they approached (right in the path of a five-hundred-pound log that dropped from a nearby tree), they found only a roll of bark dressed in some rags. Only then did the landlord realize that even just getting away from Eggy’s forest stronghold where this damned wos had so expertly lured them would be very difficult: the night forest around them was chock-full of deadly traps, and their four wounded (not to mention two dead) have robbed their company of mobility. Another thing he understood now was that their overwhelming numerical superiority was of no consequence in this situation and the role of prey was theirs at least until dawn.
CHAPTER 56
They set up a defense perimeter in a worst possible location – an overgrown dale with zero visibility – because moving elsewhere was even more dangerous. There was not even a suggestion to light a fire, they were afraid to even talk, much less expose themselves to light.
Even the wounded had to be tended to in pitch-black darkness. Gripping their bows and swords, the lord’s men stared and listened to the moonless night, firing at every rustle and every suggestion of movement in the fog rising from rotting leaves. It ended with someone losing his cool at about two in the morning: the idiot yelled “Woses!” and sank an arrow into his neighbor, who had just gotten up to stretch his numb legs; then he ran inside the perimeter, crashing through the bushes. The worst thing that can happen in a nightly battle happened then: the perimeter fell apart and everyone ran around in the dark shooting at everybody else, every man for himself.
This was no accident, though: the ‘someone’ who caused the free-for-all with a shot at his comrade was none other than Runcorn. The forester had appropriated the cloak of one of the dead (who were left unguarded), blended in with the lord’s men as they were setting up their defense, and waited. He certainly had a hundred opportunities to put an arrow into the landlord and vanish into darkness in the ensuing chaos – but in his judgment the man did not deserve such an easy death, so he had other plans.
Only at dawn did the outcome of the fight become clear to the hapless hunters – they lost two more men and the landlord himself vanished without a trace. Supposing that he got lost in the night scuffle and secreted himself in the dark (which is the correct solution: only a total idiot would run headlong through the night forest; a thinking person would hide quietly under a bush until someone trips over him), the fighters started combing the forest, calling on their lord. They found him a couple of miles away, guided by the cackling of crows.
The young lord was tied to a tree, his genitals sticking out of his mouth – “choked on his balls,” as the serfs later said in relish.
The entire local population joined in the hunt for the evildoer with gusto, but they might as well have been trying to capture an echo. The former royal forester’s career had only one possible direction now – a life of robbery and death at the hands of the law. Wounded in a fight with the sheriff of Harlond’s men, broken on the rack, Runcorn was about to grace the local gallows when Baron Grager rode into town looking to recruit reinforcements for the decimated Ithilien regiment. “I’ll take this one,” said the baron in approximately the tone of a housewife picking out a cut of ham at the butcher’s (“…and slice it thin!”); the sheriff could only grit his teeth.
The war beyond Osgiliath was going so-so; the Ithilien regiment fought noticeably better than any other unit
and, as is customary, was the last one to be replenished. In general reinforcements were hard to come by (the folks at Minas Tirith who screamed the loudest about the ‘need to free Middle Earth from the eastern darkness once and for all’ have all suddenly developed pressing business on this side of the Anduin, whereas the plain folk never cared for the War of the Ring to begin with), so the special dispensation that Faramir had bargained for – ‘even right off the gallows’ – had to be used quite frequently. Grager himself was walking in the gallows’ shadow, but the reach of the courts of Gondor was too short to grab a front-line officer in wartime.
The regiment’s physician had to expend a mountain of effort to turn the bag of bones Grager had extracted from the Harlond jail into a semblance of a man, but the famous robber was worth it. Runcorn could not shoot a bow like he used to (his mangled shoulder joint had forever lost flexibility), but he remained an excellent scout, and his experience with traps and other forest warfare tricks was truly priceless. He finished the war with the rank of sergeant, then participated under his lieutenant’s command in freeing and elevating Faramir to the throne of Ithilien, and was just about to start building himself a home – somewhere far from people, in the Otter Creek dell, say – when His Highness the Prince of Ithilien invited him over. Would he kindly agree to accompany two of his guests north, to Mirkwood?
“I’m no longer in service, my Captain, and charity is not my business.” “That’s exactly what I need – a man not in my service. Nor is this charity, they’re prepared to pay well.
Name your price, Sergeant.” “Forty silver marks,” Runcorn said out of the blue, just to get them off his back. But the wiry hook-nosed Orc (who seemed to be the leader) only nodded:
“Done,” and undid the money bag with Elvish embroidery. When a handful of assorted gold coins appeared on the table (Haladdin had long wondered where Eloar might have gotten the Vendotenian nyanmas or the square chengas from the Noon Islands), the ranger could no longer back out gracefully.
Runcorn took responsibility for all preparations for the trip to Dol Guldur, so Haladdin and Tzerlag enjoyed a total lack thereof. The scout tried the leather ichigas bought for them with obvious anxiety (the Orocuen did not trust any footwear without a hard sole), but he really liked the ponyagas the locals used instead of rucksacks. These rigid frames of two bird-cherry arcs conjoined at a straight angle (the wood is bent right after cutting and becomes bone-hard when it dries) allow one to carry a lumpy hundred-pound load without worrying about fitting it to one’s back.
To the doctor’s mild surprise the Orocuen decided to move from Emyn Arnen’s guest quarters where the prince had put them to the barrack of Faramir’s personal guard for the duration. “I’m a simple man, sir, I’m like a fly in honey amidst all this luxury. It’s bad for the fly and bad for the honey.” He showed up at breakfast the next day sporting a large shiner but quite pleased with himself. It turned out that the Ithilienians, who had heard tell of the sergeant’s exploits on the night of the prince’s escape, prodded him into challenging the two best hand-to-hand fighters they had. Tzerlag won one fight and lost (or, perhaps, had the smarts to lose) the other to complete satisfaction of all involved. Now even the Orocuen’s dislike for beer, uncovered during long evening jaw sessions, met with the rangers’ understanding: a competent man within his rights. What’s the drink you got over there – kumiss? Sorry, man, no deliveries this year… One day Haladdin visited the barrack to talk to his companion and noted how a lively conversation in Common died down the moment he showed up and an awkward silence reigned – the learned doctor was nothing but a hindrance to farmers’ sons finally free of the necessity to shoot each other, a boss.
Since they did not know who was in charge in the Brown Lands on the left bank of the Anduin, they chose a water route. They sailed all the way to the Falls of Rauros (about two-thirds of the trip), helped by the strong even south wind that blows throughout the valley of the Great River at that time of year. From there they had to use light dugouts. Haladdin and Tzerlag spent that part of the journey as cargo: “You don’t know the River, so the best you can do for the company is keep your asses glued to the bottom of the boat and make no sudden movements.” On June 2nd the expedition reached the North Undeep, a twist in the river right before the mouth of Limlight river originating from Fangorn. The Enchanted Forests began here – Lórien on the right bank, Mirkwood on the left; that left less than sixty miles to Dol Guldur as the crow flies. Faramir’s men remained behind to guard the boats (on the Rohan bank, just in case), while the three of them reached the jagged black-green wall of Mirkwood firs the next day.
This forest was completely unlike the sun- and life-filled groves of Ithilien: complete absence of undergrowth and bush made it resemble a colonnade of some mammoth temple.
Silence reigned under its ceiling, as a thick carpet of acrid-green moss, dotted here and there by little whitish flowers that resembled potato sprouts, swallowed all sound. This stillness and the greenish twilight made for a perfect illusion of being under water, further enhanced by ‘seaweed’ – unappetizing hoary beards of lichen hanging off fir branches. Not a ray of sunlight, not a breath of a breeze – Haladdin physically felt the pressure of a thick sheet of water. The trees were enormous, their true size given away only by the fallen trunks; these were impossible to climb over, so they had to go around them anywhere from a hundred to hundred fifty feet in either direction. Larger patches of storm-felled trees were completely impassable and had to be circumvented. The insides of those trunks were carved out by huge palm-sized ants that fiercely attacked anyone who dared touch their abode. Twice they came across relatively fresh human skeletons; graceful coal-black butterflies swarmed noiselessly over the bones, and this was scary enough for even the jaded Orocuen to make the sign of an Eye.
Packs of werewolves and wheel-sized spiders turned out to be fairy tales: the forest did not deign to actively oppose Man, being absolutely alien to him, like the ocean expanse or the cold fire of Ephel Dúath glaciers; the forest’s power expressed itself in alienation and rejection, rather than confrontation, which is why forester Runcorn felt it most acutely. It was this power that Dol Guldur had been gathering inside its charmed stones over the ages, century after century, drop by drop. The three magic fastnesses – Dol Guldur in Mirkwood, Minas Morgul by the Cirith Ungol pass, and Ag-Jakend amidst the lifeless high mountain plateau called Shurab in northern Khand – enclosed Mordor in a protective triangle fed by the ancient power of the forest, the light of mountain snow, and the silence of the desert.
The Nazgúl that had erected these magical ‘resonators’ made them look like fortresses in order to conceal their true purpose; one supposes that they must have had a good laugh watching yet another Western general wander the cracked stones of Dol Guldur’s courtyards, trying to locate any sign of a garrison that had just engaged his soldiers. (This trick was last used two months ago: the ‘shadow garrison’ had distracted the Elves and the Esgaroth militia for almost two weeks, allowing the real North Army to retreat to Morannon almost without casualties.) Only the castle’s dungeons were off limits to everyone, protected by clear warnings in Common chiseled into the walls.
…The discussion on the path was becoming more protracted. Haladdin took down his ponyaga (as usual, the first sensation was an illusion of blissfully floating on air, quickly replaced by the accumulated weariness of the march) and approached the rangers. Both sergeants looked worried: they have been walking paths through deep forest, avoiding the road joining Dol Guldur to Morannon, and yet the scouts constantly felt human presence even in these enchanted thickets. And now this: fresh bootprints of a Mordorian infantryman… yet Sharya-Rana had mentioned no Mordorian forces near the fortress.
“Perhaps deserters from the North Army back then?”
“Unlikely…” Tzerlag scratched his head. “Any deserter would’ve fled these parts immediately, anywhere’s better than here. This one is stationed somewhere nearby: judging by the depth of the
print, he’s carrying no load.”
“Strange tracks,” Runcorn confirmed, “the soldiers of your North Army have to have worn-out boots, but these look like they’re fresh from the warehouse. Look how sharp the edge is.”
“How do you know that these are Mordorians?”
The scouts traded slightly offended looks. “Well, the height of the heel, the shape of the toe…”
“That’s not what I mean. Tzerlag and I here are wearing ichigas – so what?”
There was a brief silence. “Damn. Yeah, that’s true, but why?”
There was, indeed, no sense to it, and the decision Haladdin made suddenly was totally irrational – a stab in the dark. Strictly speaking, it was not even his decision; rather, some unseen power ordered him to go ahead. When this happens, you either obey or quit the game.
“All right, here’s what we’ll do. As I understand it, it’s less than a dozen miles to Dol Guldur. We will go to the road now, where you will camp and I’ll continue to the fortress alone. If I’m not back in three days, I’m dead and you’re to go back. Do not approach the fortress under any circumstances. Any circumstances, understand?”
“Are you crazy, sir?” the Orocuen piped up.
“Sergeant Tzerlag,” he had never even suspected himself to be capable of such a tone, “do you understand your orders?”
“Yeah…” the man hesitated, but only for a second. “Yes, Field Medic Second Class, sir!”
“Wonderful. I need to have some sleep and a good think about what I’m going to tell these guys in brand-new boots, should they be in charge at the fortress. Who I am, where have I been all these months, how did I get here, and all that… why I’m shod in ichigas – no detail is too small.”
The Last Ringbearer (2011) Page 35