Mirkwood: A Novel About J.R.R. Tolkien

by Стив Хиллард

  He paused. “What I had earnestly hoped was that this council would be summoned amongst us without distraction and, forgive me, the shrill whisperings of those lawless insurgents known as Quicklegs and his outlaws. Let me speak clearly here. That man is a cruel usurper! He pretends to a crown only to rule you all for his own selfish purposes. And also blessed are we to meet this very eve without the, again forgive me, fear-mongering of this lesser wizard known as Stormhue …”

  He leaned forward and lowered his voice, as if confiding, “Who, by the way, brings bad news to cover the bad luck he spreads everywhere like a disease. This council, then, I hoped would avoid the dialogue of ‘great causes’ and also the, forgive me one last time, the pettiness of settling things for a few generations of your race.”

  He marked this moment with a deep breath. “Let there then be no cavil as to the terms that can divide us bitterly or embrace us both to greater purpose and most blessed peace. I am prepared humbly to accept your terms, if you will but render me one small token. To fill up a parchment such as that unkindly gift of empty space and unfeeling heart which you earlier bestowed upon me. The token I ask is but a small ornament, suitable as a trifling pendant or ring. Plain, of little value to others yet sentimental to me and my lineage. Just as your lands and heraldry are … shall we say ‘precious’ … to you. Help me find this bauble, give me this which is mine, and I, along with my supporters—” he gestured to the lines on either side of him, “for as you can see they are neither slaves nor minions, but worthy men of principle and allies of orcs who have been unfairly harassed and ungentled by your houses from time immemorial — these all shall withdraw. The Long River shall make us good neighbours and its waters reflect unguarded borders, rather than warring camps sending forth boats of fire and war, from this day forward.”

  The visiting ambassador waited a moment to respond. He was cold and unyielding in his manner. “We know not of this token, save by vague legend bandied about by those who pretend to have memories longer than my many grandfathers’ lives. But if you value it so, it may be of greater value than you admit, or perchance of use only to those of your kind. In either case we care little. If we possessed it, we would in all likelihood deliver it unto you as ransom alongside your fear of defeat, and seal this offer. But we possess it not, nor shall we divert to aid your search for this trinket. You have made war upon our lands and now amass your armies at our borders, and indeed stand here at this moment upon some mission of secrecy deep within our own territory. You summon to our vicinity those hated dogs of terror known as the Wraiths. We shall not take the bait of your soft words. Quit our lands or we shall evict you by defeat and death!”

  The Dark Lord did not regard the man. He simply sighed and said, “May you feel such fear that your balls turn as brittle as stones.”

  In response, the company under their proud emblems pulled forth their swords, their sudden ringing like a cry of metallic harmonies. Shiiinnnggg! The swords reflected the reddening light of day’s end.

  Just as suddenly those in the forward ranks shrieked. The troll had let slip the brudarks. The ambassador was torn into pieces in a moment. His sword and helm spit into the air like mere twigs and crumbs. The stunned company turned in panic, gave spur to their mounts in retreat, and then suddenly reined them in.

  Ringing the path of their escape were five mounted Wraiths.

  “Finish them, and bring me their banners that we may use them as rolls in our latrines and sop-rags in our banquet halls!”

  With that, the dark knights and the orcs fell on the hapless few who quailed now between the Wraiths and the brudarks.

  Here the scribe’s hand failed, as if interrupted. There were scribbles, scratch-throughs, question marks, and redos of various symbols. There was half of a note, something about a trap awaiting the Bearer, then an arrow leading to the words “The trap is set for the next full moon!” After further space, the writing again gathered momentum toward Ara’s fate:

  There followed hoarse shouts and the screams of men and beasts, clashing and banging, the dull thuds of weapons on bodies, and a hideous brudark roar. As these subsided, the howls of Dire Wolves, now loosed to search out survivors, filled the glen.

  One approached Ara’s spot, picking up a scent and eager to tear into a quailing prey. It pounced at a darker spot in the grass. Its jaws set upon the limp and empty chords of her bonds.

  Ara was gone.

  Maddening! Cadence looked at the clock and then leafed through the pages until she found once again the sign of a sliver moon. She read with a flash of energy as she saw whose paths had crossed:

  Ara had been here. The Bearer felt it.

  He stopped, smelled the freshening air that rushed down this glen, and knelt facing the pathway before him. The breeze sang gently of distant snows and the awakening of the Winter Giants far to the north as it rippled in wavelets across the expanse of green grass. Sunlight and shadow danced an ensemble as the nearby trees swayed back and forth.

  The patterns of light caught a glint.

  There! Gone. There again!

  He stretched and pulled from the grass a necklace of gold. It was broken, and dark stains painted its delicate links. It was Ara’s. Its lineage traced back to the treasure hordes of the Last Dragon. He had given it to her as their first exchange of gifts. (He had received from her a green Shandy, the distinctive hat of travelers of the Great Road.)

  She had been here. Perhaps only hours before!

  He leapt forward holding his Shandy tightly in his hand, his feet compressing the shallower grass of the path, and left that place forever.

  There was a note in the margin of the passage. The note-maker scribed these lines perhaps centuries after the original document, yet still of a time lost to antiquity:

  Where this most famous Halfling thus passed— proudly wearing his Shandy as portrayed in the famous Tapestries of Ulmarest — he was intent on his search for the footprints of Ara. The grass grows there even today in similar long-bladed fashion. The wind still ripples across this expanse, just as it did then. The earnest aromas of spring still arrive there yearly. The rich, sad smells that herald the onset of fall are identical there today. The hares and marmots of the nearby rocky hillside reside there yet. And to those who say Middle-earth has passed on, let them stand here! For they are shown the lie by this moment.

  That world exists still, for any that would kneel down and smell the simple earth, stoop and partake of the plain and honest work offered by a fine summer’s vegetable garden, or gaze to the snow-crested, blue mountains that beckon one to adventure.

  If, of a moment, you next linger in such a place, perchance travelling a rude and simple country road, ask thyself who trod this path before? What errands did they seek? What stories did they live? Where did this path take them in their long journey?

  Indeed, where does it take thee?

  She read on, obsessed now, and came across a context for the evil toward which Ara’s feet carried her:

  An Account and Prophecy.

  By Gifol, Historian of the Third Age in the Court of Hrothulf. My Lord,

  The tale of Ara and the single moon cycle which ordered so much of the end of that world and the beginning of our own, cannot be fully understood without the history of the Source and its Embodiment. Unfortunately this comes to us in tatters, rife with dispute and contradiction. Was this embodiment merely a ring? Or, as various sages maintain, a shield, or sword, or symbol? Was it a secret incantation, with the story of a ring attached merely as a myth? Ruse and distraction infect all history from these times.

  A review of its popular names from antiquity tells us little. “Un-still” it was sometimes called in the south, but by far it was known, universally and simply, by one name: “Bind”.

  I repent now that my long research in the few scattered archives that survived the wreckage of those times is complete. This is what we know: there was an Embodiment of a kind. It was called Bind. It was most likely a pendant or a ring. It was
indeed destroyed. With it went much of the magic of the world, along with a pernicious concentration of evil.

  Alas, the nature of evil is that it lurks and gathers. It is a seed in the hearts of men.

  Magic is more fragile. Have hope, my lord, for I believe it too has survived. The makers at the Source made another Embodiment. Its fate is at present unknown. It may conceal itself as a ring, a book, or perhaps a secret gate.

  But to your charge to me as historian of the Court, this I foresee: Evil will once again stir, as leaves gather in the eddy of a stream. Long hence, a holder of that other surviving token from the Source shall emerge. The ancient and esteemed tradition of ring-giving shall be revived. Magic shall be renewed and—”

  It ended there. She leaned back and took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. Maybe another round of espresso, she thought, just to rev things up. Yeah. She hid the valise under her table and went up to the counter, glancing warily back. She returned and sat down and took a few contended sips. Her hands leafed through page after page of runic lettering. Then, like a wizened goldpanner, her eye narrowed as the black sands of unintelligible inscription revealed another gleaming nugget. She teased with the meaning and it unraveled easily. It shared key threads with what she had read already.

  From the Histories of the Ara Society:

  Not surprisingly, as the Fourth Age spread across the world, much was made of the power of rings. They became baubles of fashion that marked idleness and sloth as much as fealty to policy, tribe and guild. The market displayed false relics in all forms. They became counterfeit, tawdry, and trifling.

  Ara, it was said, did acquire in her travels a ring of some power. That ring was imagined during the next century by untold numbers of cheap imitations sold in stalls in every market. Even as this common vulgarity of fake “Rings of the Third Age” spread, a few true copies bearing her unique rune bore witness to a secretive “Society of Rings.” These groups were in time banned as the last histories of her life were hunted down and destroyed.

  And what was the power of her ring? That truth is lost, but one suspects it was but a symbol, a repository perhaps, for her own inner strength.

  The text ended abruptly. Cadence could feel the cumulative effects of the shots of espresso. It was like a bubbling hot spring, welling up inside her. She sat upright in her chair, fidgeting, toes tapping, a jittery tempo surrounding her. Looking at the stack of documents, she knew that at best there could be only a few more readable pages. Then the story would dissipate, like a ship faitly seen and passing away in the fog. Her nervous energy told her to take a break, relax and just draw something. She got out a sketch pen and a piece of stationary from the Algonquin, and let her hand run free. Soon a rough-out of a mysterious gate, perhaps a secret gate, encrusted with vines and roots, began to form. She put her pen down and looked at it. Nice, but the most telling thing was that it was closed tight.

  It is telling me something, she thought. She got out another blank sheet and doodled for more answers, her pen performing like a farmer’s dowsing road. It whished a few lines and circles and, faintly, she began to see an image of ponderous mechanisms. Her mind’s eye quickly outstripped the pen and paper. The picture was too big, too dynamic, too cinematic. Beyond feelings and intuition, her guts told her that she was about to lay her hands on the starter crank of some vast, dead mechanism. Something that had sat ice-entombed for centuries. If Leonardo da Vinci and Tim Burton had collaborated on the concept of an Early Industrial Transformer, this would be it. She saw her hands grasp and then turn the crank, felt it whipsaw back viciously, heard the dead clank inside. She tried again, and again, creating a pattern worthy of her name. Finally it coughed. Another crank and it sputtered and vomited coal-black smoke. With the next crank, it stuttered and found a jagged rhythm of pistoning heartbeats. Steam, or whatever life force drove it, was rising in its pipes. It was coming alive and its feet were breaking free of those bitter winter-welds.

  Cadence looked at the documents and knew that the engine and its elusive crank lay hidden within those indecipherable pages.

  The vision began to slide away. She scavenged the pile for a moment, then found two pages in an elegant and coherent hand:

  By wager of battle goes victory, and with it the power to name. This alone, over the long expanse of time, may be worth the test. Kingdoms come and go, lines of noble blood are thinned to whelped vassals, castle keeps wear and tumble. But more enduring, surely, are the word and the name. What lost tales and feats of valor are tethered to simple names? Think only of Cragmoor and Selharm and Vitus! Middle-earth itself. Those coming long after will ponder such names and search for the tale of the victor.

  So the protagonists of the Great War ultimately fought, in the long march of history, to brightly name their lands and mark their foes with enduring labels of dishonour.

  The Valley of the Dark Lord, now long resigned to the stain of foul names, once had a more pleasant designation. ‘The Source,’ it was called, and a bit of its lost history tells much.

  The one place in the world where the most basic elements of the world come together, save where ice and fire live as one on islands in the far, far north, was the Valley of the Source. Here forests and meadows and stags the size of three war horses once flourished, along with steaming vents and great geysers of boiling water. Beneath the valley floor, the very essence of Mother Earth dwelled. From a single great cone at the center of the valley, a place known as Fume, she periodically burst forth and poured molten rock down its slopes.

  In this valley long there lived a cult of making, and the rich array of exotic minerals, plants, and waters led them to continuous learning. Rock pictures on the valley walls tell of the first nameless physics who here sought deeper truth. Along the way, the art of tanning, the making of inks not much different than that by which these words are scribed, paints and dyes, even the explosive powders secreted by the wizards in their fireworks— all were here invented.

  So, deep in thought and process they delved, and the Source provided the materials and energy for their work. Their goals were noble, seeking to transcend by some metaphysical solvent the base diseases of imperfection, corruption, and dissolution. To create the gold that is alive, that imbues the water of life and provides panacea to all ills — that is the quest toward which all their powers were bent.

  They tinkered and toiled, kept great scrolls, wrote books without words, and invented humors and elixirs to cure much malady in this world.

  In time one among them, a secretive hermit of great wisdom, claimed to have created the Philosopher’s Stone, the noblest of substances, the gold that is not dead and that contains the force of life and destiny itself. His study was a cave in the bowels of Fume, and the substance he discovered was al-bimiva, the Quintessence. This he fashioned into many things, but chief among them were pendants and rings.

  Fume awoke one day and belched a vomit of lava across the valley. By some miracle unrecorded, the old man that resided in that mountain of fire survived. His study, holding years of careful records and incantations, was destroyed. He managed to save a collection of tokens, each made of al-bimiva. They were precious to him. One in particular, the lost and legendary artifact known as Bind, was the very symbol of his power.

  His lifetime secrets lost, he sought out and stole the libraries of others. But he coveted most those tokens. From these he would rebuild. He vowed to control as much of the vulgar world as he could with these tokens.

  Of course, as for the Quintessence, it was not yet totally pure. In its flaws melded the imperfection of the world with the corruption of the hermit.

  That bent figure, be he human or wizard (for in those days they competed in the quest of alchemy), became the Dark Lord. He returned to Fume to guard the Source and rebuild his library and plot his machinations.

  His real name was erased in his vanquishing. In its place are evil names, some with damning mor- designations, and others of simple descriptions: Glutter of Crows, Lord of the Slain, a
nd the like.

  The glowering red ellipse at the summit of Fume’s soaring cone became known as the Glowing Eye.

  Another surprise page seemed to jump forward or backward in time:

  The ending of our age has begun in earnest.

  It has, in the span of a generation of men, become a time of deepening cold. Springs arrive late and summers fail their promise with chill rains and early frost. The Great River as far south as Allnoon stays frozen half the year. At the winter solstice we dance the jig on the river like a gala of berobed skeletons. All weep at the frail forms of the children. Final stores of turnips and grazus [a form of lumpy, twisted, pale carrot — ed.] expire and the stock will go and then the people. All will be gone if the river’s thaw again slackens till the end of a long, drear spring.

  I fear a turning is upon us, the scars of which will mark all lands and all peoples.

  She stopped and checked the time on her cell phone— almost two o’clock. As she packed up the valise, she felt as if Ara and her tale were actually unwinding in real time. What was happening to her right now? She didn’t have time to search further. The second bell was about to sound at the library.

  As Cadence rushed to catch the subway, Barren entered the West End Bar. He went up to the bar and waited for the ogre-man to come over. He watched him in the mirror, a man built like a warhorse. Certainly a potential nuisance if not taken care of now. The man approached as Barren sat, head down.

  “What’ll it be, pal?”

  Barren looked up. “Be?”

  “What would you like?”

  Barren just stared at him with his glistening dark eyes.

  The big man stared back. He stood no-nonsense still, his huge nine-fingered pair of hands splayed across the expanse of copper bar-top.

  Barren slowly said, “Medu.”

  The man smiled wanly, doing his best convivial barkeep imitation. “If you mean ‘mead’, you’re in the wrong century. However, if you like weird old earthy stuff, I’ve got something for you.” He turned and retrieved a dark, dust-covered bottle from the back shelf. He put it gravely on the copper bar, label out, as if for inspection, then picked it up and poured a shot glass full. It was a deep brown. It smelled like overturned earth.” Fernet Branca. Italian. I don’t know what’s in it, but I think it’s a liqueur made of loam. You know, dark garden soil. Try it. On me.”