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

by Стив Хиллард

  The army of refugees bore no banners. Its cause was survival, its heraldry the leavings of the victorious and the defeated alike, its prey the lost and wayward. It failed any test of allegiance. It had not the memory of any land and it lacked the protection of any king, wizard or liege. It tramped on, ill-equipped to resist any side in this great war.

  Ara hugged the ground, quiet as the hare that trembled and shivered with her in the thorny nest, and she smelled the soft and pungent earth that remembered still the nameless age that built the road.

  The next morning, the horizon showed a land fully at war. Distant plumes of smoke coiled to the skies, each leaning in perfect choreography with the chill wind freshening from the north.

  She was a prisoner. She listened to her captor. “Each of those columns of smoke comes from one of our villages,” said Thygol, leader of the Cerian Band of the Free. Ara leaned over again to look into the distance from their observation post in a high cluster of rocks. There was an unbroken line of armies and their support in movement on the roads far below. At a crossroads a great encampment sprawled like a black, tentacled fungus reaching across a ravaged landscape.

  “They round up our innocents and take them away. Some say into the Black Gate for sport, slavery and … food for the man-orcs. Anything to humiliate and destroy us. The Goblin Camp will pay this night!”

  She stared at him, eyeing the swirls of stained scars that festooned his arms, legs, face and hands. “May I make my own way to the south?”

  “No. I have some things to tell you, and questions to ask. But first, be still.” He watched closely, then whispered, “Since only our sentinel hounds detected you, I know your ability to move with stealth, as unseen as a passing breeze. Do you wish to see my enemy close up?”

  Even as she took a deep breath and nodded, he was moving ahead of her down a ravine that cut the road beneath a small bridge. They huddled at the bridge and watched a trudging column approach. It was thick with effort, moving beasts and engines of war. As they waited beneath the timbers, they felt the beams strain and creak as the black army began its passage. All was clank of metal and thud of hard-ridden, lathering horses. Crack of whip at man and beast and orc alike. Complaint and anger moved with the cloud of dust that escorted the column.

  With its passing, they crept to the very edge of the enemy camp. The general pall quickly gave way to night. A ceremony began. Dry lightning approached from the distance, the freshening breezes bringing the far-off smells of raindrops on dry soil. Camp bonfires were piled higher. Rising torrents of sparks shifted with the fickle winds. Around the fire, a thousand orcs bearing the sign of a flaming circle, ranks of men, and a hundred great drums pounding in unison. And then came the Goblins. A procession of them, each impossibly tall, heads like huge living jack-o-lanterns that grimaced as they moved. They danced, a horrible shuffling remnant of the Days-Before, as six prisoners, bound and greased, were brought forth.

  “They are ours,” said Thygol. “We must get back and prepare to interrupt their party.”

  They made their way back along the ravine, through the rocks, and finally to a deep, dry vale. There waited a thousand armed men of mien and marking similar to Thygol. A lonely, blasted tree served as his headquarters. After a moment of dispensing instructions, he sat on a stump and gestured for her to sit likewise.” We will be ready in a few moments. Let’s talk while we can. Why do you journey here, alone save for the raptor that circles far above our bowshot? Are you lost in search of Lyfthelm, the gate that cannot be passed?”

  “I search for one with whom I began this journey. We were separated. He has since traveled by paths I know not. Sparse clues, some the castaways of a wizard, told me to come this way. I continue on the chance that I may cross his path.”

  “Wizards once came and went hereabouts, but they have forsaken this land. Or perhaps it was their parting curses that left us to this.”

  “Tell me, Thygol why don’t you submit? Join the forces of the Dark One? That has to be better than resisting and being slaughtered.”

  “That counsel we have debated many times. Even their company may not be too great a price to pay for life. Or so some say. But I cannot. I know not the right of it. The plain fact is … they are, simply and completely, the enemy of my blood. We have fought them since the times of our grandfathers, when we came into these lands as nomads herding the auroch. And even since the times of our ancestors, a race with armor and bright helms that came to live with us in the smoky world of the Before Time. Now much runs as great storms across the steppes. One approaches even now, and will herald our attack. An omen to our liking.”

  A plate of simple food was brought to Ara. As she ate, he continued. “At first we doubted you, just for your orc-like size. And even appearances must be twice studied. There are no doubt spells about….”

  Thygol’s sentence was cut short by a bolt of lightning that cracked open the sky, momentarily revealing huge breakers of clouds rolling forth in purple waves. The thunder that followed, hard and swift, pressed them down with its pounding force. The moment is now!” he ordered, “Gather with us the beasts of vengeance so they may feed on our spoils.”

  At the stern direction of his hand signals, Ara followed Thygol. They were headed toward the Goblin Camp. The rain swept down on them as thunder rolled overhead in hellish beats. Flashes of light revealed jagged images of men jostling, intent on havoc and destruction.

  Ara remembered the final approach only as imagery torn by relentless, windswept rain. She recalled the angled rents of flame and sparks that had been the fires of the camp. The roar of the storm and the peals of thunder masked the clank of metal, creak of leather, and boot-treads of a thousand armed men. They lined the wide stone road that ran alongside the camp, waiting for Thygol’s signal.

  “Young halfling?”

  She came close to his side. He bent and said “Hogal, my aide, shall take you now by this western road. Three leagues from here opens the last free lands of this corner of the world. With the token of my word, you may take respite there. But beware. Prince Thorn and his advisors in that realm survive by audacity and irreverence. They parlay for neutrality with the minions of the Source even as they make jest of him. Dangerous business, this toying. Like dancing in the set jaws of a cave bear trap. Go now, and may luck accompany you on your journey. You may need it more than most.”

  She thanked him and turned as Hogal beckoned for her to make haste in moving down the line and unto the road. They had just cleared the flank of the Cerian warriors when, from a nearby jumble of boulders, there sprang a great torch. Its light revealed the unforgettable, leering pumpkin face of a fully grown Goblin. Two feet wide at the head, twice a man’s height at the shoulders, he roared past them. Another six followed as the wishwash of torch sounds mixed with the storm. A great war cry rose up from the Cerians as they moved on the camp. Ara and Hogal ran into the night.

  She never learned which force, each to the other embittered enemies of the blood, prevailed that night.

  Dawn two days hence found the storm clearing as they approached the great gates of the castle that rested on the shoulder of the Black Lands and protected young Prince Thorn. The man-size door within one of the gates opened, and Hogal spoke to a guard. The guard gazed past his shoulder, his eyes settling on Ara.

  Her escort returned to her, “You may enter and take refuge as the guest of the Prince. I leave you now, lest my entry violate the neutrality of this place. I return to what may survive of my band. Goodspeed!”

  “Goodspeed to you and your people.” replied Ara, as she thought of the unprotected, silly borders of her own people. No contrivance of politic or force of arms was likely to hold back the enemy that surely approached her village by now.

  But my fate and my errand are, for now, here, she thought as she entered the door to Thornland, where intrigue and plots within plots swirled in a cauldron of double meanings.

  Cadence reread the last passage. Plots within plots. Sounds familiar, sh
e thought. I’m with you, girl. With you to the end.

  After a moment she looked around the room, the piles of scribbled pages, the strange Elvish documents, the exdrug king biting his lip as he turned a page with the circular key held upside down. She shook her head ever so slightly and blew out a breath. She spoke out loud to the air, “Professor Tolkien, did you have any idea how this would turn out?”

  Chapter 28

  INKLINGS VII

  “So Tollers, you’re off to America?”

  “Sshh, few know of this, save those who plot around me!”

  Laughter.

  “In fact, no one but my Edith and my travel agent, one of whom apparently is your general informant — and now anyone within earshot.”

  “Well, it’s always a small world, and this business with the inscription on the rock has to be the puzzler — or has the Mail got it wrong again?”

  “On the condition of privacy, I’ll be in New York City for a few days to examine an interesting document that has turned up. An Old English text stuffed, quite out of place, in the Thornberry Collection at King’s College or, as they persist in calling it in rude defiance of dear George II, Columbia University. They’ve offered to help pay my way and insist on the importance of my personal review. So what the …”

  “Yes, but what about the rock?”

  “Well, I suppose ‘Elvish runes’ on a two-ton rock native only to the island of Britain, found buried in an undisturbed barrow, or ‘mound’ as they say there in Connecticut, and carbon-dated to one thousand A.D. is a bit of a strange affair. If they wish to catch up with me in the city, I shall oblige them.”

  “Aye, and we’ll give you ale as wages for your report.”

  “I’m afraid, on that topic, I don’t wish to over-commit. I carry another errand to America, one founded on a deep urge to tidy things up. Unbear some burdens. This journey is part of that, I suppose, especially the unbearing part.”

  “Now what burden could you have?”

  Long pause.

  “I would rather not speak of that quite yet, or perhaps ever. I am thinking of leaving some papers in America where they may be better off than here.”

  “Rubbish! Papers? They should be here, at Merton!”

  “These papers are, I’ve decided, best left at a distance. They will not be still.”

  “What is that? They move around?”

  “Worse, Charles, you missed one of our prior discussions about these. As I said then, they are a trove of Elvish texts. Unfortunately they have a kind of voice — almost as if some … demonic energy was reaching through them.”

  “I would make light of it Tollers, but you seem genuinely troubled.”

  “This little I will say. Like my dwarves, I delved too deep. Something stirred. Documents unbidden, and more mysterious than I first imagined, came to me some years ago.”

  Here there is a longer pause.

  “But enough! Wish me well. I hope to return to sit at this very oak table that we have so profoundly educated these many years.”

  “Tollers, I won’t let this go just yet. You are on edge about this.”

  “More than I can say. But then, we are all haunted as old men. Swirlings of unease hover about our elder years, when there is more in the past than in the future.”

  “Well, I wish you safe passage, good fortune, and a quick return. We all value your presence.”

  “Thank you, Richard. And I feel the same about each of you. Even you, Jack!”

  “Hah, you rump!”

  A pause. Background sounds. The tape ends.

  Chapter 29

  OCTOBER 29. 7:15 A.M

  Standing in the lobby in the Algonquin there was a grandfather clock, a staid Edwardian sentinel with a gleaming brass pendulum. It had faithfully kept its watch, ticking and tocking and chiming, since the grand opening of the hotel over a century earlier. If one listened closely, the arc of its pendulum to the right sounded a distinctive clunk. Like Os, there was a hitch in the old man’s gait.

  Cadence sat in the lobby across from the embered fireplace and listened. She couldn’t help it. The swinging pendulum signaled to her the remaining days of her own watch. Two more days and her stay would end with a long, black train ride back across the fading autumn of America. She had done all she could for a thin skein of hard information and no results on her search for Jess.

  She checked on Osley at seven. He was already fully at it, scribbling, hunched over on his desk, uncommunicative and haggard. As she started to slip out the door, she paused and looked back.

  There was no doubt about it. The man’s circuits were frying. Soon, perhaps before she left this town, he would crash. He wouldn’t blow. He would just frizzle out in a fitful spray of sparks and sputters and stinky blue smoke, like that old Emporia mixer her mom once had.

  As she poised there, still looking, she saw more. Her inner sketch-artist framed him in charcoal, his hand holding up his head, the desk lamp spilling soft chiaroscuro light on his face and the curious papers spread before him. The imagined sketch was titled. Too Full of Secrets.

  She would give him another hour and then go up and insist that he take a break. Until then, she would sit down here and commiserate with the clunking grandfather clock.

  Across from her, on what she guessed was his own reserved chair, Heraclitus nestled. The hotel mascot regarded her with passing interest, then blinked and turned away, a rude dismissal that seemed to say, “Dog-Person.”

  She watched him and thought of graymalkin, the cat named by the strange creeker man in Topanga. That seemed ages ago.

  Heraclitus was right, though. Growing up, her household did favor dogs. Nonetheless, the neighborhood felines secretly parlayed with the canines to achieve first an uneasy truce, and then entry into the house.

  The terms were direct: dog sovereignty and primacy in all things that matter: food, attention from the humans, first passage down hallways, and guaranteed periodic and unexplained absence of all cats.

  Of course, right from the start, the cats breached these terms as often as they honored them. Once they were in, they were in. Like many a sovereign that bought such peace, the dogs rued their bargain and saw their position steadily erode over time. At a notable low point, one really dumb family dog got relegated to sleeping outside on the porch as the cats gloated at him from inside the windows.

  One day her father brought home an ocelot kitten acquired through some carnie black-market connivings. It had never seen a South American jungle. It grew to fifteen pounds of amiable human companion and pure dynamite-wild tomcat to others. It took no part of dog-cat treaties. Then one day it disappeared. They never saw it again, but for years there thrived in the canyon obvious crossbreeds whose ferocity, size, feral instincts, and hybrid vigor began a reign of terror over local dogs. These cats were a rare, stand-up match for squads of coyotes that had grown fat on tabby dining.

  The topic of “Cats in History” came to Cadence as a paper in her high school World Civ class. She discovered the Great Cat Disappearance of the Dark Ages. As Christianity evolved, cats were viewed as demonic agents. They were rounded up and dispatched as surely and cruelly as Romans undid Christians. Tortured, eviscerated, burned alive, thrown from towers, cats became all but extinct in the growing towns and feudal kingdoms of Europe. And at just that time, rats and mice found the two requisites of vermin paradise: easy food and, ssshh N-O C-A-T-S.

  A plague of rats came, carrying a cargo of fleas, ushering in the Black Death.

  So, after experiencing a forty-per-cent mortality, people lost interest in persecuting cats. They become tolerated, albeit with lingering suspicion, and things got better.

  Cadence read these echoes in Shakespeare, who, keen to our basest human superstitions, had cat-loving witches and suspect cats to have fun with. He knew the deep disquiet occasioned when cats go forth lean and high-shouldered, posing as black-paper cut-outs arched on picket fences before a full moon. He knew our suspicion that cats slither through cracks in br
ambled gates to congregate in unholy rituals, there to flow as outlandish shapes malevolent beyond fantasy. Thus do cats conspire with evil where none can bear witness.

  As if reading her thoughts and impatient with them, Hera-clitus looked at the fire and blinked. The fire erupted in green and purple flames. Cadence looked at him and said with raised eyebrows, “Did you do that?” Heraclitus yawned and licked his paws. But in that blink Cadence thought she saw a multi-hued fire of warning.

  Whatever it was, she would heed it. She got up and took the elevator. When she got to Osley’s room she knocked. He let her in. He was holding two pages in front of him, gazing first at one then the other. He looked like a man who had rolled the bones and seen his death sign.

  “Os, are you OK?”

  He didn’t seem to hear her.

  “Tell me what you’re seeing or I’m going to bonk you with this lamp!”

  He put the papers down solemnly and looked over at her. “We’re in trouble, Cadence. More than I thought.” Then he again stared at the pages. “I’m going to read you the first one. It’s short. It’s in beautiful Elvish, by someone that seems to have the power to see at least some of the future. I may stumble a little, but here goes:

  The fate of the tale of the hobbittess lies at a time and place distant even to my eyes. The world changes now with breathless speed, and much will be sundered from our influence and concern. But this I have seen: Holder will be the Hunted. Alansis!

  “I think,” he interrupted, “that last word is a colloquialism, an imprecation like a ‘God Be With Them’ sort of phrase. So then it finishes with:”

  May they sense the monsters that follow.

  “What is that about?”

  “It’s a warning beacon. Buried right in these texts. Putting the documents back together with the translation key just upped their power to attract these, what did it say, monsters. I think this is real. This isn’t shadows in the subway or a fairy tale or a video game. There may be no second chance, no restart.” “So what’s the other page say?”