He had already reached the shores of the Anduin and had a good chance of getting to the boat that would save him when the Elves dogging his heels managed to chase him onto a kurum – 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 spot was mortally dangerous.
Wolverine had barely made it through 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 stone 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 boulder, but could not 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 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 move his backpack over his head and in front of him. The sheaf of Dol Guldur papers had a bottle of fire jelly attached to it (praise Grizzly for thinking of everything!), so all he had to do now was strike a flint on the ignition charge – an air-tight porcelain bottle filled with the light fraction of naphtha. Only after untying the strap of the backpack and locating the flint 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 mere meters separating him from the pursing 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 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 worked, praise Aulë! Belatedly he saw an Elf squatting to the left of him, on the side of the eye almost covered with dried lymph. The Elf was disgustedly wiping 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, frozen, 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 back, 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 astonished 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 together with 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 ‘unfroze’ 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 does ‘if it can be called victory’ mean?”
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 should not even suspect what he had just witnessed and indirectly caused, for his own good. Let all this remain our Dagor-Dagorlad to him – a victorious Dagor-Dagorlad…
“What I mean is… The thing is, not a soul in Middle Earth will believe in our victory. No victory parades, you know? Mark my words: the Elves and the Men from beyond the Anduin will find a way to paint themselves as the victors, 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 Show
Have the courage to dream and lie.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Our narrative is based entirely on Tzerlag’s 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 its veracity. The one who might have been expected to leave the most detailed account – Haladdin – had not recorded even 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 ravings of an Orc who wanted to replay 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 recast their losses as 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 coat 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 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 thoroughness. What do you think – the whelp did unearth a very curious coincidence: in January 3020 (by the then current calendar) an Umbarian-looking monk did join the Gurwan Aren cave monastery in the mountains of North Vendotenia. This monk took an oath of silence and donated an inoceramium ring to the monastery. This led the student to make (quoting the minutes of the departmental meeting) “a hasty, unfounded, and totally non-scientific claim of identity of the said monk with 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 have 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 while searching for ancient antidotes. 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.
Let’s go back to Tzerlag, whose historicity is beyond doubt. As is known, the occupation of Mordor ended (suddenly and inexplicably) by the winter of 3020, and life there started slowly getting back to normal. The population of the cities had suffered tremendous losses (strictly speaking, the Mordorian civilization had not fully recovered since then), but the nomads have mostly avoided those tribulations. The sergeant used to say that a real man whose hands grow from the right place (rather than out of his butt) will come out on top whatever the situation, and proved this maxim with his entire life. After returning to his home grounds, he ended up the founder of a large and powerful clan, which had preserved the tale of his journeys in its oral tradition, as is customary with nomadic peoples.
Incidentally, the fate of the other sergeant, Runcorn, was almost the same as Tzerlag’s, aside from the fact that the ex-ranger lived on the other side of the Mountains of Shadow in the valley of the Otter Creek, rather than on the Morgai plateau. The hamlet he built under a strange name Lianica had grown into a regular village in only five years. When his little son found the first gold nugget in Ithilien in the creek’s gravel bed, the neighbors only shrugged: money always attracts money. Had he and the Orocuen met in their old age, undoubtedly they would have put their Mirkwood debates about the comparative advantages of dark beer and kumiss to a practical test, but it was not to be.
Tzerlag had decided to return the mithril coat to Haladdin’s girl together with the tale of his vanished friend’s heroic achievement. But Kumai had perished, and the scout himself knew nothing of the girl beside the name Sonya (very common among Trolls) and vague knowledge of her participation in the Resistance, so all his efforts to locate her failed. The despairing Orocuen then decided that he and his clan were the keepers rather than the owners of the artifact (the nomads’ punctiliousness in those matters is truly without limit).
The sergeant’s great-great-grandson ended up turning it over (together with the associated headaches) to the Núrnen History Museum, where anyone can see it today together with the other relics of the mysterious Mordorian civilization. At this point the apologist for the legend might say: “Aha! Isn’t the coat of mail proof enough for you?” The grave and absolutely correct answer would be that the coat proves nothing even within Tzerlag’s narrative, since Haladdin had obtained it before receiving the nazgúl’s ring.
By the way, concerning mithril… There is a total of four such coats of mail in the museums of Arda, but the technology of their manufacture remains a mystery. If you want your metallurgist friend to throw something heavy at your head, ask him about this alloy. It’s been analyzed to death: 86% silver, 12% nickel, plus trace amounts of nine rare metals from vanadium to niobium; they can measure these proportions to the ninth digit after the decimal, X-ray its structure, and do a myriad other things, except reproduce it. Some say (not without a trace of mockery) that the old masters would supposedly forever invest a fraction of their souls in each batch of mithril, and since today there are no souls, but only the ‘objective reality perceived by our senses,’ by definition we have no chance to obtain real mithril.
The most recent attempt at a solution had been undertaken by the smart guys at the Arnor Center for High Technologies with a special grant from Angmar Aerospace. It all came to naught: the grantor was presented with a plate of some alloy two millimeters thick (86.12% silver, 11.96% nickel, and so forth) and told that this was real mithril and everything else was just legends. As usual, the smart guys then asked for another grant to study this creation of theirs. Without blinking an eye the boss of the rocket men produced a loaded museum crossbow from under his executive desk, aimed it at the project leader and suggested that he protect himself with his plate – if it holds, you’ll get your money, if it doesn’t, you won’t need it. Unsurprisingly, that was the end of the project. I have no idea whether this actually happened, but those who know the CEO of Angmar Aerospace well insist that the joke would be quite in his taste – not for naught does he trace his lineage from the Witch-king.
The story of inoceramium that supposedly served to make th
e rings of the Nazgúl is much simpler, and the reason people don’t often see it is obvious. This metal of the platinum group is not just extremely rare in Arda’s crust (its clark is 4 x 108; compare gold at 5 x 1077 or iridium at 1 x 107) – unlike the other platinoids it is never found scattered, but only in large nuggets. You can figure out the probability of finding one such yourself. Actually, not too long ago a nugget weighing a fantastic 87 ounces had been found in Kigvali mines in South Harad; the headline in the local paper was Find of the Century – Six Pounds of Inoceramium Would Make Enough Rings for a Platoon of Nazgúl. This metal has absolutely no unusual characteristics aside from its density (higher than osmium).
But enough about metals.
Alviss never married. She dwelt in self-imposed isolation in her Jasper Street mansion, dedicating her life to raising the son she had at the appropriate time after those events. This boy grew up to be none other than Commodore Amengo – the one whose voyages are universally considered to have ushered in the era of great discoveries. The Commodore had left behind the maps of the shore of a new continent that was to bear his name, wonderful (in a literary sense) travel notes, and a long string of broken hearts – none of which brought him any family happiness. Aside from the great western continent (which was long believed to be the legendary Far West, with resultant attempts to discern Elvish features in its aborigines), Amengo’s list of discoveries includes a small tropical archipelago which he had deservedly named Paradise. The name had been replaced later by the Holy Church (the local girls looked like the living, breathing houranies as portrayed by the godawful Hakimian heresy), but the two biggest islands of the archipelago, whose shapes closely resemble the yin-yang symbol, have managed to keep the names given them by the discoverer: Alviss and Tangorn.
The Last Ringbearer (2011) Page 43