Sunset by AdmirableMonster  

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Sunset

And the empire fell

On its own splintered axis

And the emperor wanes

As the silver moon waxes.

...Oh, where is the sun?

-- Dar Williams, Empire

The wind rattled through the nearly-stripped branches of the trees.  Sakalkhôr shivered and drew his cloak tighter about him.  He was feeling a bit weak about the knees, a problem he would need to address shortly.  Possibly he needed food.  Possibly the day had just been too much of a blur.  

His hand cramped.  He had been writing almost nonstop.  This physical impediment concerned him less than the fact that he was beginning to run out of notebook.  During the past blurry, dark months, he had written sparingly: there was not much to say.  The Númenorean mines of Andrast were just so interminably boring.  Yes, they were just as unpleasant as people said—there wasn’t enough food, there wasn’t enough water, the labor was backbreaking and the company was worse.  Well, that last wasn’t really fair, Sakalkhôr had to concede.  He could accept that people were not really at their best when they were being imprisoned for crimes against the king.  The trouble was, people who were imprisoned for similar crimes were separated, which was very logical and also very annoying.  For months, Sakalkhôr had had no one to talk to who cared the least bit about history.

His head was spinning again.  Maybe he needed some water along with the food.  He had better go see what he could find.  Today had been eventful enough to pay for all the months.  (Had it really been only one day?  He ought to be doing a better job of keeping time.) First the word had come: Númenor was gone.  When the messages had stopped coming—after the storm—it hadn’t been because the seas were too rough to traverse.  It was because the island itself was—gone.  Fallen to fire, some said; to the ocean, others claimed.  It made Sakalkhôr frantic.  Who had survived?  Surely some of the historians of the Historians’ College, at least.  There had to be witnesses (of course there must be witnesses of some sort—how else would it be known that it had fallen at all?)

He wasn’t thinking about his parents or his home or any of that.  Sakalkhôr was very good at compartmentalizing.  Right now, he needed to think about history, and he needed to focus on history, and he needed to make sure he was correctly recording history.  He corralled his wayward mind as he made his way gingerly away from the entrance to the quarry where he’d ended up.

The message arriving hadn’t even been the most momentous thing that had happened today.  Although that had thrown the encampment into quite a bit of confusion—enough for Sakalkhôr to begin rapidly using up his remaining scraps of notebook paper and pencils to try to get down as much as possible of the words spoken and the actions taken.  He absolutely hadn’t succeeded at capturing most of it, but it was better than no one trying at all.  Then he had half cursed himself for trying, because he was running out of pages when Zigûr’s men appeared.  Or—Tar-Mairon’s, Sakalkhôr corrected himself.  That seemed to be his preferred name.

Everything had been very confused, which was dreadfully frustrating.  Sakalkhôr was a trained historian—he was supposed to be better at witnessing historic events.  He knew he had done much better the last few times he had been assigned to cover a battle than he had this time.  Of course, before he had been exiled, he had known that at least the Númenoreans would try to avoid hurting him, so he had not had to spare quite as much energy in making sure he wasn’t going to die.  Also, this had been different, because with so many of the prisoners rising up against their captors, everything had rapidly devolved into a series of tiny, deadly little clusters of fighting.  Sakalkhôr still wasn’t certain how he’d ended up back in the quarry.

He needed to get back, he told himself.  He was a little light-headed, and that wasn’t helping him concentrate.  He turned himself in the direction he thought—he was fairly sure—the encampment was in, and started shakily putting one foot in front of the other.

Almost to his surprise, he turned out to have been going the correct way.  After a few minutes, he found himself walking out of the tightly-clustered trees in front of the small constructed wooden settlement.

It didn’t look the same.  Sakalkhôr’s hand cramped again, and he wished he had thought to do a sketch of it sometime earlier, though he wasn’t much of an artist.  But it was changed.  It had been neat and orderly, in a tired, run-down kind of way.  The Númenorean style dictated a stark divide between the forest and the encampment—all the trees had been cleared out.  It had been very sterile.  

Now half the buildings were smoking ruins, and a few of them seemed to have been bulldozed, though he couldn’t figure out how they could have done that without some of the bigger machines that must have, well, fallen with the island (if it had really fallen into the ocean, the way some people were saying—what had happened to it? This was going to drive him mad, it really was.) Besides the fallen buildings, a great bonfire had been built in the central courtyard, but the thing that changed everything the most was the way small trees had been planted, scattered and haphazard, all across the clearing.

“Sakalkhôr!” someone said.  He turned to see a young woman whose name he couldn’t remember.  “That’s you, right?  Everyone thought you must be dead.”

“I’m not dead,” Sakalkhôr said automatically.

“But it is you, right?”  She had the flat broad face and dark sleek hair of one of the Dunlendings, though she spoke Adunaic without much of an accent.  He remembered she was—had been—one of the newer prisoners.  She hadn’t spoken much, but there was—somewhere in his notes—something about who she was—a Dunlendish warrior, maybe?  Who had been leading raids against the Númenorean colonists?  That sounded right, but his head was buzzing so much it was hard to be sure.

“Yes.  I’m Sakalkhôr.  Also, I really need something to eat and drink.”

She paused and peered intently into his face.  “You look done in,” she agreed.  “Sit down for a minute.”

To his surprise, he found himself sitting down on a creaking, rotted log, with a waterskin in one hand and a warm dumpling in the other, which smelled delightful of spiced meat.  He’d tucked his notes into his sweaty breast bindings, where he’d been keeping them the whole time.  None of the guards had been willing to try that hard to get his notes away from him, thankfully.  He’d been a little worried, because not all of the King’s Men would bother to avoid assault or even rape, but as far as Sakalkhôr knew, none of the guards at Andrast had tried anything like that.

When he’d consumed most of the dumpling and was starting to feel a little more as if his head was actually settling back onto his shoulders, the young woman spoke to him again.  “If you are Sakalkhôr, the Mouth of Slànaighear has been asking for you.”

Sakalkhôr groped immediately for his notebook.  “Who?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, it’s what my people call Tar-Mairon.  It means savior.”

Tar-Mairon, savior of the Dunlendings.  (Don’t think too much about the Black Temple.  Don’t think about Nimruzimir.)  “Tell me more!” Sakalkhôr brightly fumbled out his notebook.

She laughed.  “I’m glad you’re doing well, but let me take you to the Mouth.  He has been asking after any word of you for hours.”

“The Mouth…?”

“Tar-Mairon’s servant—they say he is a very great man—he directed the attack.”

Certainly someone to interview, though Sakalkhôr couldn’t begin to think why he had been asking about him.  The best way to find out was going to be to ask, though, and if he was of interest, he might even get answers.  Lilóteo—the Royal Physician and the only person who’d managed to speak to Nimruzimir after he was ejected from the natural philosophers—had told Sakalkhôr that Nimruzimir had told him that Tar-Mairon had tried to help him.  Maybe Tar-Mairon had found out about that.  Maybe Sakalkhôr could find out what had happened to his friend, after—

(after he was taken to the king’s bedchamber)

(after you could not save him)

(after you were sent to Andrast for trying to find him, too much of a liability for the Historians’ College to protect)

Well, maybe he could talk to him and find out what he wanted.  Firmly, Sakalkhôr commanded himself, automatically smoothing out his robes.  “All right,” he said.  “Let’s go talk to the Mouth of, erm,” he concentrated—as a historian he needed to be good with languages, “Slànaighear.  Did I get that right?”

“Better than most of the native Adunaic speakers manage.”  She led him through the center of the encampment, past all the new trees, the greenery, past groups of people who were setting up temporary shelters in the Dunlendish style, past other groups who were cooking, laughing, or even dancing together—there are many celebrations, Sakalkhôr managed to note down in very shaky, very poor handwriting.  Tar-Mairon is celebrated as a liberator.

Past all of this, all the good cheer, all the celebrations, following the woman unerring as an arrow.  He felt lightheaded, but he’d eaten now—maybe he was still tired.

At the far end of the encampment had been the high gates—not really that useful, since what kept people in was more that there wasn’t anywhere to go.  Great mountains rose to the north, peaks piercing the sky.  One or two escaped captives wouldn’t be in any shape to traverse them, and there was little potable water in the narrow strips of land to either side.  Tar-Mairon’s army had followed the Númenorean method of access of the peninsula, and sailed in on slim, dark boats.

But the gates had been a symbol—high, dark, and mighty.  Machined with precision, strung with lightning-lines that could kill a person if touched, in some way they had represented Númenor herself, and her approbation for those kept contained within them.  Now, they were toppled.

Someone must have known enough about lightning lines to overload them, because the wood had scorched beneath them—maybe this was where the fire had come from to set the rest of the encampment alight—and the gates had apparently been torn down after the lines were cut, maybe at their source.  Sakalkhôr knew that many Númenoreans would not expect a Dunlander to be able to understand the operation of a lightning line.  He wasn’t that naive, but he was still surprised.  Overloading them rather than just cutting them suggested more familiarity with their operation than he would have expected.

Seated in the middle of the ruin of the gates, behind a board hastily nailed across two logs in imitation of a desk, was a man in dark armor, including a peculiar metal helmet—oblong shaped, with almond-shaped holes for the eyes, and with a copper pattern inlaid across the front in a wide, mouth-shaped crescent.  He was running a gloved finger down a ledger, perhaps checking supplies.  When Sakalkhôr and the woman approached, the helmet tilted up, then paused.

“This is—” the young woman began.

The man in the helmet stood up.  “S—Sakalkhôr.”

The hitch in that too-familiar lilting voice told Sakalkhôr instantly whose countenance was hidden behind the visor, even before Nimruzimir fumbled it off and flung it down onto his makeshift desk.  His dark eyes were tired, his hair longer than when Sakalkhôr had last seen it, gathered into a hasty tail at the nape of his neck, and his once smooth-skinned face was scarred—a lidless eye had been engraved into the center of his forehead, and once on each cheek.  

Sakalkhôr noticed all of this because he was used to observing things very quickly so that he could properly record them.  It didn’t stop him from jumping over the desk and throwing his arms around his friend, burying his face in Nimruzimir’s neck.

“Oof,” said Nimruzimir.  It was probably a good thing he was sitting down, because Sakalkhôr’s more energetic hugs had been known to knock down friends much stronger than Nimruzimir.

Usually, Nimruzimir wasn’t much of a hugger.  His expressions of physical affection tended to be not pushing people away.  But this time he hugged Sakalkhôr back, fiercely hard, and said, “I th-th-thought you were d-dead.”

“I thought you were dead!  They took you away to the Black Temple!”

“I wasn’t—sacrificed,” Nimruzimir said, sounding wretched.

“Well, obviously.”  Sakalkhôr peered at him.  Nimruzimir looked upset, maybe guilty.  He wasn’t meeting Sakalkhôr’s eyes, but he didn’t usually like doing that anyway, so it didn’t mean anything.  “I don’t care what happened,” he said, in case Nimruzimir needed to hear that.  “I’m just glad you’re alive.”  Then, because Nimruzimir looked like he didn’t believe him, “Can I kiss you?”

Had that been the wrong thing to ask, he wondered suddenly.  He knew what had happened to Nimruzimir when the natural philosophers had wrongly decided that he was a woman.

But a small smile appeared faintly across Nimruzimir’s thin mouth.  “No one has ever asked me that before,” he said softly.  “All r-right.  Just please recall you are more experienced than I.”

Sakalkhôr had to put both hands on his shoulders and sit back, looking into his face.  “Do you honestly think I give a shit how good you are at kissing, Nimruzimir?”

Nimruzimir cleared his throat irritably—gods, it was good to hear that stupid little noise!—and rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly.  “Well, n-not now that you’ve r—reacted to the question like that.  I may have poor social instincts but I am capable of basic inference.”

Sakalkhôr squawked with laughter.  Maybe it wasn’t that funny, but it was very Nimruzimir, despite the vast gulf that seemed to separate them from the afternoons they used to spend together in the parks and courtyards of Armenelos, talking about the novels of the Vérië or the royal academy, or nothing in particular. “I’m going to kiss you now,” he said, and Nimruzimir nodded, and then they were.

It was, admittedly, clumsy.  Nimruzimir did know to move his mouth, but Sakalkhôr was balanced precariously half on his lap, and that was distracting, in both good ways and bad ways.  He had just managed to worm his tongue into Nimruzimir’s mouth when he slipped, and Nimruzimir nearly bit him.

“Sorry, sorry,” both of them said, and Sakalkhôr was just finding a better position—straddling Nimruzimir’s lap, which was interesting, and his friend seemed to agree—when the young woman who had brought Sakalkhôr to Nimruzimir cleared her throat.  Nimruzimir nearly flung him onto the ground.  Sakalkhôr glared at her.  This was a really bad time to interrupt, especially with how annoyingly shy Nimruzimir could be.

“I’m sorry,” she said, sounding both contrite and amused.  “I was just wondering if you would like—um, they’ve been setting up tents, and—would a tent be of interest?”

“Yes,” said Sakalkhôr.  “I mean, if it’s all right with you, Nimruzimir?”

“I—y-yes.  If you d-do not expect—I mean, I—”

“Just for kissing privacy.”  Sakalkhôr squeezed his hand.  “Nothing else.  Unless you want anything else.  But there’s no expectation.”

“For k-kissing privacy.” Another shy smile.  “Yes.  Thank you.”  Before Sakalkhôr could get up, however, Nimruzimir’s arms tightened around him in a tight and slightly desperate hug.  “I have missed you,” Nimruzimir said, very quietly.  “And I will tell you all about the t-t-t—war and anything else you want to know, Sakalkhôr.  Anything you want to know.  Any t-testimony.  It is—some of it is—ugly.”

“I’m not going to say no to that,” Sakalkhôr told him.  “But you don’t have to—”

“It is what I have,” Nimruzimir interrupted.  “A gift.  A thank you.”

“For what?”

“For coming back.”

Chapter End Notes

I've used Celtic as a proxy for the language of the Dunlanders, as I think it's implied that Tolkien did(?). "Slànaighear" is indeed a Celtic word for savior, if my Celtic-English dictionary is to be believed, but I am absolutely not a scholar of Celtic, so please let me know if I've made an oopsy.

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