I Sit and Think of Times There Were Before by Erdariel  

As the years of my life grow few, I find myself looking back more and more often. I seek patterns, try to find some reason in why things befell as they did, and why I was given the part I played in them. Perhaps there is no reason, but I feel there must be and I cannot help but look for it, though others may see my search as nothing but folly or a touch of the madness of old age. Somehow I hope that writing this down might help me see the pattern at last.

I fought at the late king’s side in the war, for even when my father grew bitter and turned against him, my loyalty always belonged to the king, and he allowed me to remain with him even after the betrayal. I saw much during the war and did many things in defence of my king and my people. I cannot say I remember all of them with pride. I ohtar i arano, the esquire of the king, I know men call me now when they speak of the war, for my name matters less than my place in King Isildur’s service. I was named Zôrzagar by my mother who loved the tongue of Númenor, but the kings prefer the elven tongues to be spoken in their courts, and so Ruinamacil is the name I have worn for much of my life. But I doubt these names will outlive me by very long, though the tale of King Isildur’s esquire carrying the broken sword of Elendil out of the defeat at Gladden Fields to the hands of Valandil Isildur’s son may still be remembered for a time.

Isildur only called me Ohtar, too, that last time he spoke to me. That night is seared into my memory. More than any other event, it divides my life in two; there is a before and an after, irreconcilably different from each other.

I remember the look on his face when he told me to flee. I remember his words, and I do not know if I am resentful or grateful that he did not call me by my name. All the pain of that parting was disguised under an order by a lord to a soldier. If he had spoken longer or more gently, I do not know whether I would have had the strength to leave him. If he had spoken so, I do not know if he would have had the resolve to order me to flee. Yet at times I cannot help but feel bitter that those were his final words to me, as if all the years I spent at his side meant nothing. I wish he would have called me by name, that he would have thanked me for my faithfulness or reassured me of my courage.

In that moment I could do nothing but obey. I took Narsil and Gileinas took a bag of supplies from one of the packhorses, and we fled.

I remember wishing that I could look back. That I could see him once more, mighty and kingly and crowned with a star. I think in my heart I knew it was our last parting, though through all the long days that followed I hoped otherwise. I loved him both as his servant and his kinsman. I had devoted most of my adult life to him. I wanted to look back as I fled, to see him that one last time and let the sight reassure me. But I could not; I had to keep my mind on my task.

Part of my heart lies trodden to the grass of that battlefield.

We were not pursued as we fled. I do not know why. Perhaps the orcs trusted the watchers they had left on the west bank of the river to take care of anyone who might flee. Or perhaps some power of evil drew them to the king and those with him so that they cared for little else. Estelmo and I have since spent many hours together guessing at the meaning of what we heard and saw that night, but I am still not certain of much. I think Lord Elrond knows more than he says, but something has always held me back from asking him. There is a dread that raises its head alongside curiosity when the thought crosses my mind, warning me that the truth is something more terrible than I could bear.

Be that as it may, Gileinas and I fled fearing pursuit or arrows shot after us, but none came. The steep ground was treacherous and we stumbled often, but picked ourselves up and kept running. The sun was gone behind the clouds and gloomy twilight thickened around us. Far below us the Anduin cut the landscape in two with a purple-grey line. We made for it as directly as we could, but the direct way was often too steep and we were obliged to head somewhat northward.

Darkness fell before we made it to the bottom of the valley. We stopped there for a while, breathless, and leaned on each other to stay on our feet. I do not know how many miles we had covered, but neither of us felt that we were out of danger.

“We should keep going”, I said. “Let us continue northward until the night is through. Once it is light again, we can climb back out of the vale and make for the forest. If we are lucky, we might meet King Thranduil’s marchwardens and could wait with them for news of the others.”

“And if we are less lucky, orcs will find us long before then. How do you think that would go?” asked Gileinas. “Besides, the orcs came from the forest. If there are any servants of Thranduil in this region, they must have hidden themselves well from the orcs. I doubt we would find them in time.”

“What other option do we have? We cannot stay here all night either.”

“Cross the river. Then we can head north again and make for the road to Cirith Forn en Andrath. Even if the orcs cross the river after us, at least they cannot corner us against it with nowhere to escape as easily as now, and they will have to spend more time chasing us.”

“It will be a much harder trek north; there may not be any road we could use for most of it. We would also put ourselves out of the reach of any help until we reached Imladris. And how would we cross the river?” said I, though in truth the fear of the orcs was in me, and I already wanted to agree to Gileinas’ plan.

“By swimming, if we must. It will not be easy, but we have done harder things, you and I.”

I ran my fingers across the scratched leather of Narsil’s scabbard and stared into the night for a while. I could see very little, only the faintest gleam of water in the river and vague ghost-shapes of the rest of our surroundings. I did not want to linger in one place much longer. I liked the thought of having the river between the orcs and myself. And Gileinas was right; we had done harder things.

“Alright.”

“Stay here”, Gileinas said. “I will find a good place to get into the water.”

I did not want to be left alone there in the dark, but there was no sense in spending more time arguing. “Do not go too far. Come back soon”, I whispered.

His hand squeezed my shoulder. Then he was gone, a shadow among shadows, the grass rustling under his retreating footsteps.

It was impossible to tell how much time passed. I sat huddled half-under some bush. Dying leaves wavering in the wind that blew across the river from the southwest brushed my skin. The air was chill. I shivered. At any moment I expected to hear screams and the sound of a fight, but all was quiet.

At length I heard footsteps approaching. Only one set, treading carefully, not the stomping of orcs. I held my breath nonetheless, unable to relax until I heard the voice of Gileinas softly calling my name.

“Here”, I replied and stood up, reaching my hand out to seek him in the darkness. His groping hand met mine. I pulled him closer until we stood so near that I could feel the warmth of his body.

“I found something”, he whispered, sounding tense but satisfied. “Better than a place to swim across.”

I followed him as he searched for the place again. Some impulse made me lay my hand on his shoulder, to assure myself of his presence. Although I was no longer alone, the weight of the night pressing on me from all sides was almost too heavy to stand. When we had run, there had been no time or room to notice it, but now I had been still for too long and had had time to think, and I was all too aware of how small we were in the midst of the vast darkness. Gileinas went half-crouched, feeling his way with his hand. The reeds and rushes grew taller than us at our side, hissing in the wind. The old grass rustled underfoot.

I sensed more than saw a gap in the rushes when we came to it. Gileinas halted, caught my hand, and brought it down near to the ground. I felt rough wood under my fingers, and slowly my eyes began to make out the shape of a raft drawn up to the riverbank.

“Orc-make”, I whispered.

“Some of them must have crossed the river with this”, Gileinas agreed. “But it can get us across just as well.”

In any other circumstances I would not have trusted a thing made by orcs, but crossing the river by raft was preferable to swimming. And if the raft had carried a dozen orcs across without sinking, it ought to carry two men.

We pushed the raft into the water and got on, crouching low to its surface and trying to keep it from tipping. It was not made to be steered easily. We both were sweating by the time we were halfway across the river. The current was swift and strong and swept us a good way downstream despite our best efforts.

The raft was nearing the western bank when the clouds broke. From between their ragged edges the thin sliver of the waning moon shone down on us. I welcomed even that faint light, but my heart was chilled by what it showed me. On the riverbank, near to where our raft would land, I saw metal glint in the moonlight. Four orcs sat there, swords and bows near to hand.

They must not have been very alert or expecting any trouble. Evidently they had not seen us, or else they had taken our crouched forms upon the raft to be those of their fellow orcs. The wind, thankfully, blew in such a direction that they had not smelled us.

I tapped Gileinas on the hand and pointed the orcs out to him as subtly as I could. He nodded a little. We could not speak to make any plan and did not dare to gesture, either. All we could do was trust that we both thought the same thing.

I could see no way out but through. Even if we tried to turn now, we could not get out of the range of their bows before the orcs noticed that something was wrong. We held our course, paddling steadily toward the bank. I kept my crouched position, but I my body grow tense until it strained like a full-drawn bow waiting for the archer to take his shot.

The raft floated nearer and nearer to the bank. Finally one of the orcs raised his head and called out a lazy greeting. We were as good as caught then; if either Gileinas or I replied, our voices would reveal us for what we were, but our lack of reply was equally suspicious. Besides, the orc’s attention was on us then, and it did not take long for him to see that our armour was no kind of orc-gear.

Gileinas moved first, leaping like deer. He had no time to draw his long sword or even his eket, only his small knife, but he was a vicious fighter and at knife-range few were ever a match for him. He must have come upon one of the orcs before any of them could even cry out.

I drew my eket and moved, only a moment behind him. My leap was a little short and my back leg slid down the bank into the water, but Gileinas’ attack had cleared enough room that I could scramble back up. I swung the eket wildly, hoping more to ward off the orcs than to do much true harm. Once I felt the sword bite into flesh, but I do not know whether it killed or merely wounded.

I dashed forward the instant there was nothing blocking my way, then swerved to one side as soon as I thought I was out of the reach of any grasping hands. I ran into the night, weaving my steps like a drunkard to make myself a harder target for the archers. The cries of the orcs faded into the night behind me.

How long we ran I do not know. At first I was not even certain that Gileinas had survived. Words cannot describe my relief when I heard his running footsteps again. But there was no time to halt, no breath to spare for speech.

I only stopped when I heard Gileinas stumble and fall. I helped him to his feet. He was shaking and his breathing was ragged.

“Are you all right?” asked I.

“Yes”, he said between gasping breaths. “But I do not think I can go much further tonight. Ruinamacil, if you must leave me, do it.”

We both knew I had the endurance to keep going. Gileinas was hardy and clever and could survive much, but in a long race he would always fail before I did. He was not born as one of the Dúnedain, and in some things could never quite match us.

Gileinas was a name he adopted only after we first met, though it was the first name I knew him by. He told me once the name he had first been given, but said he had left it behind and that I should go on calling him Gileinas. In a way I suppose I understand; after my father's betrayal only Queen Varyandë ever called me Zôrzagar again, and since her death I have never wished to be called so. There is too large a confusion of emotions tied up with that name. I buried Gileinas’ old name with him and will not dig it back up, not even to write it down here.

Chapter End Notes

Gileinas is possibly janky (as in I'm not very good with the elvish languages and have a hard time telling if i've fucked something up or not) Eldamo-sourced Neo-Sindarin for "Star of Freedom", from the Sindarin "gil" for star, and "leinas" which Eldamo's Neo-Sindarin list gives for "freedom"

Ruinamacil is Quenya for "fiery sword". Zôrzagar is as near as I can get to the same meaning in Adûnaic, constructed with the help of Kimikocha's Adûnaic name spreadhseet

I hope you liked the fic so far, and hope you'll like the rest of it, whenever I get the rest wrangled into something I can post!

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Gileinas was half-starved when I first saw him, covered in more mud than clothes. It was evening under the murky clouds of Mordor. I was standing watch at the edge of our camp, for Isildur had sent me away. The kings were holding council together and seemed to not want even their closest servants present. It was quiet that night, but the kind of quiet that makes a man feel ill at ease, as though the world was holding its breath in anticipation of something. And I saw the movement of something crawling in a ditch only some thirty yards from my post.

I thought it some spying orc at first, and fitted an arrow to the string of my bow and was about to cry out, but some doubt gnawed at the back of my mind and kept me from shooting. The creature did not move with the purpose and determination I would have expected of an orc. Nor did I see any sign of weapons or armour on the figure. It just crawled and dragged itself forward a few inches at a time, seemingly oblivious to how near I stood.

I put the arrow back in the quiver and roused the other watchman, a fellow named Mornaras who was dozing nearby in a little hollow on the ground sheltered by a large rock. We stood guard in pairs, and often when the hours of the shift grew long, one of the pair would rest while the other kept watch. (In truth people were not supposed to do it, but there never seemed to be quite enough time for rest otherwise, so I never told Isildur or any of the captains about it and did very little to discourage it myself.) I pointed the figure out to Mornaras and told him to sound the alarm if something happened to me. Then I walked nearer until I stood at the edge of the ditch almost directly above the figure.

“Where are you going and what do you think you are doing?” I asked, loudly enough that Mornaras must have heard it back where he stood, and so must anyone else who might be hiding nearby.

The figure looked up at me and scrambled back a little, cringing back from an anticipated attack. This close I could see that it was a man — stick-thin and dirty, dressed in clothes that were in some places quite literally hanging on by a thread, but in any case a man, not an orc. His hair was thick and tightly curled, and as caked with dirt as the rest of him. His eyes were dark, and wide with terror.

I crouched down and went a little closer. He said something in a tight, breathless voice, but I could make no sense of it; many of the words were slurred or mumbled. Some of the words had the cadence of Adûnaic, but the accent, reminiscent of the speech of Black Númenoreans but not quite the same, was very thick and hard to understand. And some other words sounded entirely strange to me.

It was clear to me that he was no threat, but also clear that many of my superiors would not agree without further proof. In any case, if I told him to go away and left him alone, he would not survive very long. Either he would be shot on sight by another watchman like I had nearly done, or he would be found by orcs and killed or worse, or he would simply starve.

“I have to take you to the camp”, I said, “but if you mean us no harm, you should be safer there than you are out here.”

The man seemed to understand me, though he said nothing in response. His shoulders drooped resignedly and he bowed his head. I reached out to take him by the arm and rose to my feet. He did not resist, but it quickly became plain to me that he was very weak and could not walk far without help.

Mornaras looked dubiously at me when I brought the man over to where he stood. He clearly felt less kindly about the stranger than I did, and somewhat resentful for having been woken up because of him.

“What are you going to do with him?” he asked.

I considered my options for a while. If the man had been stronger, I would have brought him to camp right away and returned to finish my watch, trusting that all would be well in the mean time. But with as weak as he was, the walk to the camp would take much longer, and even if all went well at camp and I could hand the man over to someone else quickly, it would take longer than I could in good conscience leave Mornaras alone for.

“Take him back when our watch ends and find someone with the authority to make decisions about him”, I said.

The man had curled up in the same hollow Mornaras had slept in and was watching us warily. Mornaras looked at him for a while. He shrugged.

“It sounds like more trouble than he is worth, but if that really is what you want.”

The rest of our watch went by quietly. I offered the stranger a drink from my canteen twice, but he did not seem to trust it and refused. Mornaras was pointedly silent. I stared at the desolate plains of Mordor and the heavy clouds above. Nothing moved to break the monotony. There was no sign of danger, though I could not quite shake the feeling that something was going to happen soon.

The next pair of watchmen came to relieve us. They looked curiously at the stranger as I turned to help him up.

“Looks like something interesting happened”, one of them remarked.

“Ruinamacil decided to act like a fool is what happened”, said Mornaras. “He had to go and take that man prisoner.”

“He looks harmless enough”, the soldier replied placidly. He had no interrupted sleep to feel resentful about. “I do not think there is anything wrong with leaving him alive. In any case, he will be someone else’s problem soon enough.”

Despite his annoyance, Mornaras helped me bring the man back to our camp. He even agreed to keep an eye on him while I went to fetch one of our captains. I made sure to do him some favours later, as opportunities presented themselves. It tends to be useful to be known as a man who will return the favours others make for him. Being the king’s esquire often left me awkwardly in between groups, still low in the ranks and not equal with the knights and the captains, but also separate and not entirely regarded as one of the common soldiers. Even among the esquires of knights and lords of Gondor, Elendur's esquire Estelmo and Anárion’s esquire Limbifion and I were always held as something a little different. Acting fair with the soldiers and not making much of a fuss about my position alleviated the friction somewhat, though it never removed the difference.

I was lucky enough that when I went to report to Malicontar, the captain in charge of watchmen on the edge of the camp that I had been on, I found him in conversation with Lord Elrond. I paused at the door to the captain’s tent, clearing my throat and hoping I had not disturbed anything important.

“Come in, Ruinamacil. You look as though you have more than the usual to report”, Malicontar said.

I came to stand in front of his desk and nodded. “We have taken a prisoner.”

“A prisoner?”

“Yes. A man, not an orc.” I shifted my weight a little, feeling much less confident about my choices under the captain’s gaze than when I had made them. “In truth, I do not think he is in league with the enemy. He was alone, so far as I can tell, and with no weapons or tools of harm on him. And his condition seemed quite poor. I doubt he could have been very much use as a spy in such state. But he is not one of our own, or of our allies. I could not let him go free.”

“You could have killed him”, said Malicontar.

“I could have”, I admitted. It would have been no use to try to justify my actions. I had spared the man’s life because he had looked harmless, and he had been scared, and I had pitied him and felt that it would be wrong to kill him, not because I had had a practical reason to take him prisoner, but I knew that Malicontar did not care to discuss questions of morality. I think he would have preferred that I had killed the man and spared him the trouble of deciding what to do with a prisoner.

“Well, I had better see your prisoner then. Where is he?” Malicontar asked.

“Mornaras is keeping an eye on him. I will take you there.”

Lord Elrond had moved aside when I entered and had been quiet since then. Now he bent to pick up his bag from where he had set it down near one wall of the tent and stepped closer to us again.

“I shall come with you if you have nothing against it, captain”, he said.

“As you wish.” The captain sounded like he indeed had nothing against it, but also did not understand why Lord Elrond was interested in the matter.

“If he is indeed in poor health, whatever else is true of him, he may be better able to answer questions once he has been tended to by a healer”, Lord Elrond pointed out.

Mornaras was dismissed as soon as he had handed the man over to us. He looked relieved to wash his hands of the matter and go back to his usual routine.

I helped take the man to a small tent in the part of the camp where prisoners were kept. Not that there were many prisoners; the enemy soldiers rarely allowed themselves to be taken alive, and we rarely had a reason to try to capture them.

Captain Malicontar did not dismiss me, so I stood outside the tent while he and Elrond went inside with the prisoner. I heard them speak in low voices, at times in Adûnaic, then changing to some mixture of Sindarin or Quenya which the prisoner was unlikely to understand. I could not catch everything was that said, only a word here and another there. Nor did I try. Whether I knew what was being said or not, the prisoner’s fate was out of my hands. If there was anything I needed to know afterwards, I would be told.

After some time Elrond called for me. I poked my head into the tent and he asked me to fetch him a bucket of water. I did. He thanked me, and I was once again left to wait outside. A long while passed before Lord Elrond and Captain Malicontar stepped out of the tent.

“…needs the care of a healer, not the rough hand of a jailer”, Lord Elrond was saying.

“Even a beaten dog might run back to its master. What proof have we that he will not return as soon as his lords call?” asked Malicontar sharply.

“If you treat him kindly, I doubt he shall”, Lord Elrond replied. “I saw no love for his former masters in him, only fear. So long as he fears us as much as them there is a danger that he will do something foolish, but if he is treated well, it should not take very long before nothing would make him willing to go back.” He looked at Malicontar rather coldly. “You are a fine warrior, captain, and in the matters of strategy and the leading of battle you have my trust. But I have long knowledge of people, men and elves alike, good and evil and every kind in between, and I tell you that you misjudge this man.”

Captain Malicontar snorted doubtfully. “If you care so much, then you may take him and do as you will with him for all I care.” He glanced at me, seeming to only now remember my presence. “Ruinamacil, you are free to go. Get what rest you can before the king needs you again.”

With that he turned and walked away. I stood and watched him for a moment. Then I obeyed his dismissal and began to head for the tent I shared with Isildur. Lord Elrond fell in step beside me.

“It is a good thing you did not kill that poor man”, he said quietly to me. “He is only a frightened mistreated slave who fled his masters, nothing worse, unless the enemy has devised some new way to entirely blind my judgement. I think I shall speak with Isildur and see what can be done; I do not entirely trust that he would be safe or well-treated here.”

I nodded and gave Lord Elrond a small smile, though I said nothing. I was glad for the assurance that I had chosen right. I hoped the man would use his chance at a new life well.

After that I became busy for some time. The following day the news spread that the enemy was readying a major assault in an attempt to break our siege, and we were all in a rush to prepare for it. I was with Isildur day and night, ready for anything he might need of me. Three days later the attack came. Our lines held, but only just. For nearly four months afterwards the fighting never ceased entirely. Men fought, slept, and carried the wounded who might yet be saved out from the field in shifts with no time for leisure in between. I was excused from transporting the wounded, but only because my duty was to stay with the king at all times unless he ordered me otherwise. He could hardly ever be convinced to leave the battlefield or rest until the sword no longer stayed in his hand, and so I also saw very little rest in those days.

I did not entirely forget the escaped slave I had brought to our camp. I wondered often what had become of him. But I had no time or chance to ask after him. I left the thought of the man to the back of my mind and focused on the endless series of tasks to be taken care of in front of me.

At last the battle died down. The enemy forces drew back behind the impenetrable gates of Barad-dûr. The forces of our Alliance settled back into the routine of the siege. Many of our soldiers had died and many more had been wounded, and countless corpses of our enemies lay across the plains where the scavenging beasts of Mordor crept out of their dens to take their share. The front lines had not shifted by much more than fifty yards anywhere.

There was more time for leisure again, then, but I still never looked for the man. Four months had gone by since my paths had briefly crossed with him, and it seemed to me long enough that asking Lord Elrond about him would be a strange thing to do. In hindsight I doubt whether he would have taken it to be so, for he sees the passing time rather more like the elves do than like men, and for an elf four months is not so very long, but at the time I could not bring myself to it. I filled my time with the expected things instead; repairing my (and Isildur’s) armour and gear and doing other little tasks that had been left to pile up during the battle, gossiping with my fellow soldiers, playing games with Estelmo and Limbifion and some others.

It was almost a year later when I found out anything more. Isildur had ordered me to oversee a training session for a group of soldiers recently stationed with us. He did so often towards the end of the war, preparing me for when I would be a knight and maybe a captain in charge of my own troop, but this was one of the first times I was doing it.

The captain who was the soldiers’ actual trainer, a quiet but good-natured man by the name of Gwaedir, pointed groups of them out to me and told where they came from and what kind of background they had. These were not a unified group, nor were they likely to all be placed in the same units with each other. There were farmers and fishermen from Lebennin and Anfalas, shepherds from Calenardhon, craftsmen’s sons from Osgiliath and Minas Anor and Pelargir, even a few young men all the way from the distant Arnor who were looking to follow in the footsteps of their fathers or brothers or cousins who had gone to war before, or who wished to do something that seemed important and return home as heroes with great stories to tell. Sometimes I wonder how many of them never returned to their homes in the North.

“Those four there”, said the captain, pointing to a group who stood near each other, seemingly talking amongst themselves, “have seen something of this war already. They have not been soldiers as such, but they have been travelling with the supply caravans back and forth between here and Minas Ithil, minding the animals and carrying some burdens themselves. And while those caravans have soldiers to protect them, I gather that they have had to join in the fight themselves from time to time as well.”

One of the four was shorter than the rest, with darker complexion than most Dúnedain have and tightly curling black hair that had been cut quite short. He was lean, but I guessed he had some muscles nonetheless; work with the supply caravans took strength. He glanced towards me and the captain, and our eyes met briefly. His were sharp and alert. I do not know what he saw in mine.

He looked familiar, but I did not recognise him at first. I thought he might be a son of one of those families who had settled somewhere on the coasts of Middle-Earth long before the Downfall. Maybe some men of Middle-Earth had married into the family and those features happened to come through in him. I guessed I had perhaps seen him briefly at some time or another when the supply wagons had arrived at the camp and that was why he looked familiar.

The training session went by without incident. The captain told me which of the men he intended for archers, which as spearmen and axe-men, and which few he meant to train as swordsmen. The short dark man, whom the captain told me was called Gileinas, was one of them. He was agile enough to be good with a sword, and also had the strength to carry the heavy shield the front-line fighters used. Captain Gwaedir chuckled when he told me that, and said that if our kings had any sense in their heads, they would all rush to try and snatch Gileinas up for their Guards when he was fully trained. I smiled and resolved to tell Isildur that when I returned to him.

I tried to organise the men into two somewhat evenly matched groups with most of them wielding the weapons the captain had recommended for them. I put the men through some basic exercises in thangail against thangail and then dírnaith against thangail and made notes of their strengths and weaknesses to discuss with Gwaedir. I knew I was only clumsily copying practice drills I had been put through myself and seen others lead, but I hoped the captain would trust that in time I would learn to do it well.

I was walking back to Isildur’s tent after the training session when I heard the footfalls of someone running to catch up with me. I halted and turned around. It was Gileinas, and as he approached I finally recognized him. He looked very different now, washed as clean as any of the soldiers and no longer starving or terrified, but there was enough of the same in the shape of his face that I knew him now for the escaped slave I had brought into the camp over a year before.

“My lord”, said he, pausing a respectful distance in front of me.

“I am not a lord, merely an esquire”, I said.

“But I am told you are of a high family and are well-trusted by King Isildur”, he replied uncertainly.

I supposed that was true enough, if one did not take into account my family’s fall into disgrace — or counted me as a relation of Queen Varyandë rather than the son of my father. Not being in the mood to draw attention to the more shameful details of my family history, I nodded.

“Nonetheless, I am not a lord. I would have you call me by my name rather than by a title that is not mine. But can I do something for you?”

He hesitated for a moment. “You saved my life. I wanted to thank you.”

It was my turn to hesitate. I did not know how to answer that. Telling him he was welcome seemed overly arrogant.

“I only did what seemed right to me. And I am glad to see you are well. I wondered what happened to you, sometimes”, I admitted.

“Lord Elrond and some of his healers took care of me. I was told I was free, that I could go where I wished. I wished to help the people who had saved me”, he told me.

“If you would indulge my curiosity— I take it that Gileinas is not a name you always carried?”

“It is not, no. But the elves taught me some of their speech, and I liked the thought of giving myself a new name in that language.”

I nodded. I had heard a new layer in his accent that was alike to that of the elves. It was in strange contrast with the notes of the Black Númenorean accent that were still there, too, but somehow they came together in his speech to create their own new harmony.

Some years later he told me the tale behind his name. He said that one night, when he had been a slave of men stationed near Lake Núrnen, by fate or carelessness he had been left unchained, and had seen a star shine through a break in the clouds. It had awakened some seed of defiance that had slumbered deep in the mould of his heart. He had resolved then to follow the star as far as it would lead him, and had slipped out past the guards and their watch-fires and travelled through the long night, and many more long nights like it. Why a kind star would have led him northward into the most terrible and desolate parts of Mordor and the thick of the war, I cannot fathom, but in the end it did lead him to me, and I am glad of that. He told me that when the star was shrouded by clouds, he hid himself, and often that was when enemies passed him by. When the star appeared again he continued his journey. The star guided him right, and he was never caught until I found him. And when he was told he was a free man, it had seemed right to him to take on a new name to use in his new life, and so he had named himself after that guiding star.

At the time we did not speak of his name or history at such length, however, but exchanged some more polite words and parted ways, he going to his duties and I returning to mine. When Isildur asked me how things had gone, in addition to an overall account of the practice, I told him what Captain Gwaedir had said of Gileinas having the makings of a member of his or King Elendil’s or King Anárion’s Guard and added some observations of my own from the day. I did not tell him about having met Gileinas before, however. I hope he would have taken it well if I had told him, but I was not quite certain enough to do so.

For a while I kept a polite distance to Gileinas. Although I felt some affection for him, it seemed to me that while I was, even if only rarely and for the sake of my own learning, involved in training the group of new soldiers that included him, it would not be fair for me to be close with one over all the rest.

But eventually all of those men were assigned to their permanent troops. Somewhat to my surprise, Isildur had kept Captain Gwaedir’s comment in mind. After making some inquiries by himself and seeing the men fight with his own eyes, he chose Gileinas and one of the others for his own Guard.

I saw Gileinas more after that, and began making some cautious efforts toward friendship. He seized on them more eagerly than I had expected, and returned my offers with his own.

Not everyone approved of him quite so easily. He made no secret of being a former slave, and even had he wished to do so, it could not have stayed secret very long. No-one would challenge or question Isildur’s choice to his face, but outside of the battle, simply between soldiers, it was nonetheless easy to make it clear to Gileinas that he was not entirely welcome.

“I do not understand why you like him so much”, Estelmo said to me one evening while we were sitting together.

“Because he is good company.” I picked up a pawn from the game board and moved it absentmindedly. “I do not understand why the rest of you are so determined not to.”

“You know he is not the same as the rest of us. You know he belonged to the enemy once”, Estelmo sighed.

“He was a slave who escaped as soon as he found a way to. I should think he has as much reason to hate the enemy as any of us. And certainly less reason to go to the enemy again or believe any tempting lies than some of us have. There were men in Númenor who only cast their lot in with the Faithful late, because the sacrifices in the Temple frightened them, or because they did not dare to go to war against the Lords of the West, not because they loved the elves or the old ways or thought the way the Faithful did. Elendil welcomed them into the fold nonetheless, and Isildur says the choice proved right more often than it proved wrong. Why should we deny Gileinas the same chance?”

“He is not a man of Númenor. Not even partly. No doubt he has reason to side with us, no doubt he has courage to back it up, but his kind are not made as strong or enduring as we are. When the push comes to shove, he will be the first to break.”

“Someone must always be the first to break, even if there were only Dúnedain in the company. But I also do not think he will be the first”, I said.

“Very well”, replied Estelmo. “Be his friend, if you see fit. But when his strength falters at the worst moment, remember that I always told you so.”

“And when you see that he endures where others fail, remember that I always said he would.”

We continued playing our game in silence. It ended in a tie, but only because we ran out of time and had to return to our duties.

If Isildur minded my friendship with Gileinas, he never showed it to me. He seemed to trust him as much as any other soldier. Gileinas paid back for that trust, fighting as fiercely as anyone, doing his duty just as diligently as the rest. (Sometimes more diligently; he never slept on watch the way many others did.) His knowledge of the ways of the enemy helped us more than once. And as battle after battle went by and his resolve and courage remained as strong as anyone else’s, the others began to accept him.

The years of the war dragged on. I grew used to Gileinas’ presence, his friendship and his grounding and practical approach to the dangers and troubles we faced every day. More and more often I found myself going to him for counsel and comfort. I laid out my fears and sorrows in front of him, and he laid out his in front of me, and somehow we both found our burdens lightened. There were others I loved and others I trusted with my life, but none I ever felt I could confide in so easily. Isildur carried the weight of thousands of lives on his shoulders; I did not wish to burden him with my individual troubles as I might have in days of peace. To the others I was too often Isildur’s esquire before I was Ruinamacil; I dared not speak with them for fear that they would think Isildur had confided in me something that made our situation seem more hopeless than anyone had known, and my words would shake their faith and resolve. But to Gileinas I was always his friend and the man who had shown him kindness and trust unprompted before I was anything else, and he welcomed me as I was and did not take my words for more than they meant.

Gileinas became also the one whose eyes I sought to see what he was thinking when we sat around a campfire with other men and someone was singing or telling a tale. His laughter became the one I was most trying to coax out when I told jokes. He was the one I turned to grin to when I won at some game.

Now, when I write these words, Gileinas is long since dead. He was young when we met, even by the reckoning of his own people. I was much older than him, though still young by the lifespan of the Dúnedain. He told me before he died that his life had been longer than many could hope for. Yet it seems too short to me, for I have been obliged to go on through the decades without him, carrying only memory and grief in my heart.

I am loath to speak ill of the Lords of the West or the One that is above them, but at times I cannot help but think that it was ill-done to give us such long lives and build a land for us so separate from all other kindreds of men. It is easy to look down on that which one knows to be briefer than himself, and hard to love it as an equal, knowing that one will have to suffer a long life without it. A hunter or a shepherd may love his dogs, but he will love them as creatures different from himself, whose master he is and who exist to serve him, and he knows they shall die before him and hardens his heart against that loss. But men are not dogs and it is a terrible thing to treat them as such, no matter how short their lifespans may be. 

Yet how could the men of Númenor, coming from their secluded island where folk were so long-lived and illness and early death were rare, look upon the men of this Middle-Earth and meet them as equals, to be loved and trusted and understood the same way as their own folk? They were asked to knowingly welcome grief and pain that they might have to carry half their lives or more. It is only natural for their hearts to have tried to avoid such hurt.

Chapter End Notes

On the names; Mornaras, Malicontar, Limbifion, and Gwaedir are all sourced from Chestnut_pod's Elvish Name List. Mornaras and Gwaedir are Sindarin and mean "Black stag" and "Wind watcher" respectively. Malicontar and Limbifion are Quenya and mean "Amber lord" and "Swift hawk".

The name of Varyandë (who I mentioned in the first chapter as well, but oh well, you get notes on the name now) is Quenya for "protector", from varya, "to protect" (which come to think of it I'm now suspecting may be borrowed from the Finnish word varjella, but that's beside the point and I have no proof that it is), and the -ndë suffix which turns it from a verb into the feminine form of person-who-is-doing-the-verb. I made the name up for my take on Isildur's wife for a fic I've written previously and will keep using it for her in the future too, and I know at least one of my friends has borrowed the name for a fic of theirs once.

As an additional lore note because it probably won't come up in the next chapter either, if anyone's curious about Ohtar's relation to Varyandë: in my head he's the son of her nephew. I have some half-formed ideas regarding Ohtar's father and whatnot, but no details or full stories for now.

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We stood on the hillside, darkness wrapping tightly around us. The moon had vanished behind the clouds again. Gileinas’ words hung in the air.

He had given me leave to abandon him. The broken Narsil felt very heavy in my hand. Isildur had ordered me to save it at all costs; I knew that included abandoning Gileinas just as surely as it had included abandoning Isildur himself. No man would hold it against me if I left Gileinas behind to continue my desperate flight further than he had the strength to run. No man but myself.

I listened for a while. I could hear no sign of orcs. We had already fled far that night, and I chose to believe we were out of immediate danger. If we were, that meant I did not have to abandon Gileinas to keep Narsil safe.

“I will stay with you”, I whispered. “We should find somewhere to rest.”

We slept in a hollow probably left by the roots of a fallen tree in the nearest thicket we could find. I took first watch and sat in the dark huddled in my cloak and jumping at every crack and rustle.

The sun cannot have been very far above the horizon when I woke. The morning was bleak and overcast and I felt cold, tired, and stiff. The edge of my helmet had dug uncomfortably into my cheek while I slept.

Gileinas sat next to me. He was staring out into the thicket. His sword was bared and his hand on the hilt, but the blade rested on his lap and he did not look as if he had seen or heard anything worrying.

“All quiet?” I asked in a low voice.

“All quiet”, he replied.

We ate breakfast in silence. I already missed the noise and laughter of our fellows. I tried not to think about who might have survived and who died.

After breakfast we went through the bag of supplies Gileinas had taken when we fled and split the contents evenly between our packs. Most of it was food rations, but there was also a bundle of firewood. Near the edges of the forest we had not needed it, for there had been plenty of dead wood that could be gathered from the ground where the trees began, but earlier our way had gone along the edges of the barren Brown Lands where the only available firewood was what we had brought with us.

Between the additional supplies, the provisions we already had in our packs, and the waybread in the sealed wallets we carried for last need, we had enough food to last us maybe twenty-seven days. At the time I thought that was enough; it was more than twice how long the rest of our march to Rivendell was supposed to take. We were now alone, on the wrong side of the river from the road we had followed, in lands neither of us knew well, but surely, I thought then, it could not take us longer than twenty-five days to reach Rivendell. After all, the terrain made it hard to lose our direction entirely; if we kept the mountains to our left and the river and the forest beyond it to our right, we would be heading north. And if we just headed north long enough, we would hit the road again and could follow it the rest of the way.

How I wish things really had been so simple!

We made our way out of the little thicket. Gileinas moved stiffly and I could see pain in the set of his mouth, but he assured me that he was not badly hurt, only bruised. The clouds hung low above our heads. The air was damp, but it was not raining.

The thicket stood near the top of a hill. On one side, the ground sloped down into a shallow bowl before climbing back up to a larger hill. On the other, it dove further down at a steeper angle. That valley was half-filled with fog, but I knew somewhere at the bottom of it lay the River Anduin. I adjusted the belt I carried across my shoulder that the sheath of Narsil hung from, glanced at Gileinas, and got to walking.

We followed the crest of the hill northward. The weather turned into something halfway between fog and drizzling rain and we could not see very far in any direction, but so far as I could tell, we were keeping up a good, even speed. We aimed for much the same pace as on a regular march; after all, it was a speed we could sustain for days upon days without exhausting ourselves.

Our intention was also to stop for breaks the same way as on any march. As such we paused when we thought we had covered about a league, and sought a sheltered place further downhill to sit down for a little. Gileinas slumped to the ground with a grimace.

We had not sat there very long when I saw Gileinas tense up. He lifted a hand to silence me before I could ask anything. I listened with him, and after a moment I heard it: the sound of many heavy feet and the harsh voices of orcs, still muffled by the fog but moving inexorably in our direction.

In hindsight, I suppose they must have been some of the orcs chased out from the battlefield the night before who were now on their way to their secret dwellings in the mountains, and it was simply by coincidence that our paths crossed. But at the time it felt like a cruel joke. I felt certain they were pursuing Gileinas and I in particular, though I could not fathom how they had found us or where they had appeared from. I shot to my feet and gave Gileinas my hand to pull himself up, but by the time we were ready to move, the figures of the first orcs had already become visible in the grey mist ahead.

It was hard to tell how many orcs there were, or how battle-ready they were, but plainly they outnumbered us by far. During the war it was often said that one Dúnadan was worth ten orcs, and that might well be true when one stands in a sturdy thangail with fellow soldiers at either shoulder and the wave of enemies breaks upon the linked line of shields. It might even be true after a thangail breaks, in the chaos of a battlefield when the enemy has plenty of targets to choose from and distractions are everywhere. But for two weary men alone and exposed, things look much less bright. And even if each of us truly were a match for ten orcs, what is to be done when the eleventh one comes?

“Run”, I whispered to Gileinas, though he hardly needed me to tell him to do so; he must have known the odds as well as I did.

We turned and ran, scrambling up the hill as fast as we could. The orcs’ voices took on a sharper tone as they gave chase.

I halted at the top of the hill just long enough to glance around. The orcs were clambering up behind us, and more had circled to keep our way northward blocked. To the south there was only the steep descent towards the river and the long, open crest of the hill. Westward the shallow bowl of the vale opened before us. Its further edges disappeared into the fog again, but I recalled seeing a stand of trees somewhere in that direction earlier in the day. If we made it that far, perhaps we could lose the orcs. It was our best chance. On the open ground we could maybe outrun them for a little while, but not for long, and we certainly could not shake them off our track.

Gileinas and I ran side by side, hearts pounding, feet sinking into the soft earth, ears ringing with the cries of orcish voices. Arrows fell around us, but the fog must have made aiming hard and most of them went wide. Some were stopped on our armour. We reached the level ground on the bottom of the valley. It was wider than it had seemed from the hilltop, and I could only hope that the ground was firm enough to hold us and the recent rains had not turned it swampy.

Suddenly I felt a piercing pain in my right shoulder. I had no breath for crying out, but I nearly stumbled. Gileinas grabbed me by the arm and steadied me and we kept running, never fully coming to a halt. At every step I felt the jolt of something in my shoulder, but I forced it out of my mind. There was nothing that could be done unless we escaped from the orcs first.

I knew what must have happened, of course. Some of the metal scales on the back of the shoulder on my coat of armour had come off. It had happened all the way back in Minas Tirith, but I had never gotten around to having it repaired. The missing scales were easily covered by a cloak so I still looked tidy in my armour, and no one had expected any attack on the march north. A few missing armour scales had not seemed urgent. But now an arrow had found its way through that gap.

Lord Elrond told me later that the arrow must have missed a blood vessel that I would have inevitably bled out from by a mere hair’s breadth. It is strange to me how in the midst of all the ill fortune of the day I could still be so lucky. I am glad I did not know it then; even now the thought that the arrow came so close to killing me chills me.

We made it to the stand of trees before the orcs caught us. The fog was nearly as thick there as it had been on open ground. Roots and undergrowth got on our way. We scrambled further and further into the trees, though we had no idea how large an area they covered.

Finally I pulled Gileinas down by the arm and crawled under some bushes. They had lost most of their leaves, but grew thick enough that their centre could not seen from the outside. Gileinas crawled in after me. I felt his hands on my wounded shoulder.

“How bad is it?” I asked quietly, biting back a hiss of pain.

“Hard to say”, he answered. “All your clothes are getting in the way.”

He went still and quiet and I followed his example, nearly holding my breath. I could hear the shouts of orcs from at least two directions, not very close, but still too close for comfort. At length they faded and I allowed myself to breathe again.

“Can you get the arrow out?” I whispered.

“You might scream. We cannot afford alerting the orcs.”

I nodded. Gileinas was silent for a while, one hand still on my shoulder. I found it too awkward to turn my head far enough to see him, so I rested my head on a tree root and stared at the ground an inch away from my eyes. I heard Gileinas shift, felt his hand pulled away from me. The dry leaves rustled and twigs snapped as he crawled away. I listened to him move about somewhere outside of the bushes. But he was not gone for very long.

“What were you doing?” I asked.

“I needed something to staunch the bleeding. I have no healer’s tools with me, and I doubt you do, either. Moss is the best thing I could think of.”

I let him work, sliding pieces of thick moss under my clothes and trying to pack them close to the arrow shaft. He secured them with string tied around my shoulder as best he could, though I was not certain how well it would hold.

Afterwards we lay a while longer under the bushes. The sound of the orcs had disappeared. The fog had not fully lifted, but it was thinning. The sun was hidden behind clouds and the light filtering down to the forest floor was dim, but I thought it must be near midday. I did not know whether the orcs were still hunting us, but if they were, the full light of the day was our best chance, even on such a cloudy and foggy day.

We crawled out of our hiding place. Gileinas helped me to my feet. I felt a little unsteady, but I knew I could walk.

I let Gileinas walk ahead, picking our path through the trees. He led me westward until we could see the trees growing sparse. I waited there while he crept to look ahead.

“There are orcs to the north of us”, he told me when he returned. “I do not think they saw me. If we come out of the trees a little further west, we should be out of their sight.”

It seemed to work. We walked on, careful but trying to keep up a good pace, still trying to head westward. The arrow in my shoulder had gone through my cloak, and as I walked the weight of the cloak kept pulling on the shaft. It was terribly painful, but I said nothing. I did not want to waste more time tending to the wound when I thought the orcs were still close on our trail.

We had only walked for half an hour or so when we heard the voices of orcs somewhere ahead of us. We did not see them; there was another stand of trees ahead, seemingly growing around a little stream running down from the mountains. The orcs must have been in the trees. They sounded as though they were arguing, but had they spotted us, they would likely have abandoned their argument in favour of pursuing us. We turned westward, trying to climb another hill while staying out of sight. The soil was thinner here, but the hillside nonetheless was covered in thickets of bushes and shrubs. Only waist-high, they offered little protection from the searching eyes of enemies, but they were hard to walk through. We circled around them when we could, but sometimes the only place where the hillside was not impossibly steep to climb was where the bushes grew.

I was trembling by the time we made it to the top of the ridge; the pain was taking more out of me than I had expected. Gileinas looked worriedly at me, but I only paused to drink some water and then told him to keep going.

We had not yet reached the mountains themselves, but the terrain was getting rougher and the hills steeper and more frequent. Gileinas tried to lead us northward, but we spent much time circling around hills or clambering over their lower slopes. We no longer paused for rest as we had planned before, but for all that I think we covered scarcely more distance than we would have on a march, and not much of the distance we did cover was in our planned direction. The fog thinned until it was entirely gone, though the clouds remained low and grey.

In the late afternoon we heard the voices of orcs again, this time coming from behind. We tightened our pace, but there was nowhere to hide. On our left the trees grew too sparsely to offer cover. On our right the hill rose steeply in cracked slopes of bare rock. It had begun to rain not long before, and I knew the rocks would be slippery. I might have been able to scale the hill for sport, unwounded and well-rested and carrying no weight; I had climbed such rock walls on the lower slopes of Ephel Dúath as a boy, as had many others who grew up in Minas Ithil. (Once I had competed with Ciryon about which of us could climb one faster, because Aratan had dared us to. We both had come rather close to losing our grip and falling in places where it might have killed us, and Isildur had been furious with all three of us when he had found out.) But now, wounded and weary and carrying a heavy pack, I could not hope to climb the rocky hill fast enough to escape the orcs.

In front of us the ground rose a little and we could not see what there was on the other side of the hill, but certainly on our side of it there was nothing that could help us. The orcs had spotted us now. We raced up the hill, the orcs nearer and nearer at our heels. I felt faint and it was all I could do to keep running.

We passed the crest of the hill and kept on running down the slope, hardly looking at where we were going until the ground dropped abruptly into a narrow, rocky gully at the bottom of it. It was sheer luck that I did not break my ankle when I stumbled down into it. Gileinas leapt down after me.

“We might as well keep going down this”, he said, eyeing the gully. “They cannot cut off our way downstream, the drop becomes too high to make without getting hurt.”

I nodded and began to follow the gully. The stream running down it did not quite come up to my knees, but it was very swift and I had to be careful to not fall. Gileinas walked a few steps behind me.

We had not been walking for long when we heard the sound of the orcs clambering down into the gully behind us. Gileinas’ steps halted.

“Ruinamacil”, he said in a quiet, even voice, “King Isildur gave you an order. Carry it out.”

“Do not let them kill you. Please. I need you”, I whispered. I did not turn to look at him.

Ignoring the protests of my aching heart, I ran. I slipped and stumbled and forced myself back up and ran down the gully. The clash of steel on steel echoed from behind and rang in my ears.

The light was beginning to fail between the steep walls of the gully. So was my strength. I lost my footing and fell into the stream again, scraping my palms bloody on the rocks in a vain attempt to catch myself. I stood back up on shaking legs. My head was spinning. I leaned on the rocky wall and looked back up the gully.

As I stood there trying to catch my breath, Gileinas came walking down to me. The front of his armour was splattered with orc-blood and he looked exhausted, but I could see no sign of injury in his movements.

So great was my relief that I rushed to embrace him. He closed his arms around me and held my trembling body.

“What happened?”

“The orcs are dead. It was only five of them, and in the narrow space they could only come at me one at a time.”

“If we are lucky, no other orcs came this far in pursuit of us. We might have escaped them”, I said.

“If we are lucky. But luck has not been on our side lately.”

“I think we must trust luck now. I can run no further”, I admitted.

Gileinas nodded. “We both need rest, and I should like a better look at your wound and to see if I can do more for it.”

We walked on for a while, searching for a place where we might be able to climb out of the gully. Finally we came across one, a place where a larger part of the left side had collapsed. We struggled over the rubble and dirt to find a man-high piece of nearly straight rocky wall still standing over us. Gileinas climbed it first. I looked at the wall doubtfully. I could hardly move my right arm for the pain that it caused to my shoulder. I knew I could not put enough of my weight on it to climb out.

“I will help you”, Gileinas said, seeing my doubt. “Give me your pack first, so I do not have to pull more weight than I have to at once.”

I wrestled the pack off my back. The right shoulder-strap caught on the arrow. I could not help the cry of pain that escaped my mouth as the weight wrenched the shaft downward until it snapped in two.

I passed my pack hurriedly to Gileinas. I feared my cry might have alerted more orcs, and the only thing we could do about that was to get somewhere else swiftly.

Gileinas hauled me up by my left arm. I helped as best I could, and soon enough we were both on level ground above the gully. I shouldered my pack again and stood up. Darkness was thickening and the rain had gotten heavier.

All the shelter we found for that night was a cliff face that leaned outward at the top, so that at the bottom there was a narrow space of somewhat drier ground. We made a campfire, not caring that it might draw orcs to us. We were drenched through from the rain, and without a fire the cold would have been as lethal as any orc’s sword.

After a dinner eaten in silence, Gileinas made me take off my coat of armour and the clothes underneath. He tugged the pieces of moss away from the wound. I pulled my cloak over my uninjured shoulder and wrapped it around myself as best I could, and tried to keep from shivering in the cold. Then I felt Gileinas’ hand on my shoulder go very still and heard a catch in his breath.

I listened for a moment. There was no sign of orcs or any other danger approaching.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I think the arrow was poisoned”, he said reluctantly, as though by not saying it he might have made it not true.

The breath turned to ice in my chest. Orcs used many kinds of poisons, but none of them offered a pleasant death. Some there were antidotes for, but I knew that even if the poison on the arrow was one of them, we did not have an antidote with us. Some of the poisons a strong man might survive by luck, but that did not much comfort me. I had seen men with poisoned wounds during the war, lying in terrible agony that the healers had no means to ease in the infirmary tents until either death took them or the poison’s strength waned. I had heard some of them beg for death because the pain was more than they could bear.

“There is nothing we can do about that now”, I said, trying to not let my voice shake. “Just get the arrow out and do what you can for the wound.”

I felt Gileinas pull tentatively at the arrow. It hurt, but not as much as I was expecting. I felt him pull again. He cursed.

“I only got the shaft, the head has broken off. I do not think I can reach it”, he told me.

He got to work with washing the wound as best he could, and then binding it with strips of fabric torn from his spare shirt. It did not take very long. When he was done, I struggled back into my shirt and tunic. The pain in my shoulder and the entire arm was terrible and I could scarcely move it, and getting the arm through the sleeve proved a very frustrating task.

I opened out my bedroll, wrapped myself in my blanket and my cloak, and curled up to sleep. Gileinas sat with his back to the fire, looking out into the darkness. There was no need to discuss it. I was wounded. I would be the one to rest, and he would keep watch.

But the pain made it hard to sleep. I dozed off for short whiles, only to wake up again to the burning in my arm or the sting in my shoulder. Each time falling asleep again took longer than I had spent asleep. Finally after half a night spent so I sat up.

“Go to sleep, Gileinas. I can watch”, I said.

“But…”

“I cannot sleep in any case. Better that you at least are rested tomorrow.”

The fire had burned down to little more than embers, but even in the dim light I saw the doubtful look Gileinas gave me. At length he rose, however. We changed places, he lay down to sleep and I sat keeping watch.

The night passed quietly, save for the constant drumming of rain. The downpour would have made it hard to see far even by day, and in the night I could not see an arm’s length in front of me. I think even the night-eyed orcs could have passed us by fifty yards without ever catching sight or scent or sound of our presence.

The pain of my wound was relentless. As soon as I thought I might grow used to it, I shifted a little and a new wave of agony crashed over me. All I could do was sit still and hope the pain would ease. I tried not to think of the morning or the journey ahead.

I roused Gileinas as soon as there was enough light to see by. It was still raining. He looked at me blearily for a while before crawling out of his blankets. We ate breakfast, staring out into the dim grey world under morning twilight.

“What do we do now?” asked Gileinas.

“We keep going”, I said.

He sighed. “Ruinamacil, you should not…”

“I have an order to carry out. I will attempt to do so. And if I must die, I doubt I shall be more comfortable here than at any other campsite we might find.”

Gileinas looked as though he wanted to argue, but there was nothing he could say. Our campsite was not a very sheltered or comfortable one, and staying there did not give me much better odds than moving on. And we were soldiers, and orders were orders.

We returned to the gully, thinking we might travel further down it toward the Anduin, only to discover that the night’s downpour had turned the swift little stream into a great gushing flood that would have killed any man that went into it in an instant. We followed the route of the gully downstream for a while, but the ground fell in steep, jagged cliffs that were slick from the rain. Even walking was quickly exhausting me and my arm was useless. There was no way that I could have gotten down alive. I am not certain Gileinas could have, either.

We had hoped to make it back east somewhat nearer to the Anduin, where the hills were by and large less steep and the terrain easier to traverse, but plainly we had to find another route there. To the west the mountains rose in ever-higher peaks, and neither of us knew of a safe way to cross them before Cirith Forn en Andrath. Southward tracing our footsteps from the previous way we would not turn for fear of running into orcs again. So we turned northward, hoping to come upon a place somewhere ahead where the way eastward would be easier.

It was a wet and miserable day, and I hardly remember more of it than that. Gileinas chose our route; I followed him blindly, forcing my legs to keep walking. I could hardly think through the pain and knew very little of what was happening around us. The sounds around us turned into one constant noise from which it was impossible to distinguish anything meaningful. I could hardly see more than Gileinas a few steps ahead and the ground lying between us.

At times I felt so faint we were forced to stop and rest until the world stopped spinning and I could stand steadily again. Once a dizzy spell came upon me so suddenly that I was on my knees on the ground before I could say anything. After that Gileinas took my hand and led me like a child for the rest of the day.

I remember faintly that perhaps halfway through the day’s trek, when we had once again stopped to rest, Gileinas told me that the terrain seemed to keep leading us northwest. I do not know if I replied.

When stopped for the night, I could do nothing to help Gileinas set up camp. I slumped down and sat and watched dumbly as he built a shelter of cut branches and made a small, smoky fire to warm us. When he put a bowl of food on my lap and a spoon into my hand, I forced myself to eat, but it was an effort. I did not feel hungry, only exhausted and miserable and sick from the pain.

Gileinas wrapped me in both our blankets and made me lie down, and I wandered the borders of sleep and waking and true unconsciousness. I kept repeating to myself that Isildur had trusted me and I should not fail his trust. I should find a way to endure and complete the task that I had been given. It could not end here, not like this, not so soon. I had to bring Narsil to safety, at all costs. I had promised it to Isildur. I owed it to him. He was my lord and he had given me an order and I had to carry it out.

There is some time after that that I cannot account for. Days must have passed, but in my memory there are only some disjointed moments and hazy dreams. There is rainfall, and there is Gileinas tending to a fire, or his arms holding me, or his voice speaking words I cannot make sense of, and there is a sense that I am wasting time, that I should get up and act.

I dreamt often of Isildur. I only know they must have been dreams because he could not have been there, and because he was never so cruel with me as in some of the dreams, but they felt as real as any of what I think are waking moments. Sometimes he looked as I recalled him during the war, dressed in painted armour, his hair tied back from his face. He would look at me sternly and ask me when I would return Narsil to him, or accuse me of weakness and failing my mission. I could never find the words to explain myself to him. Other times he looked as in the days before the war, dressed in embroidered silks with a jeweled chain draped on his shoulders. He would never speak, but turn away from me, and that was accusation enough. And yet other times I saw him bloodied, bleeding from bone-deep marks of orcish weapons. The star shone red and blinding bright on his brow, and blood ran from his wounds and rose around us higher and higher until it was near to my chin and I thought I would soon drown in it. He would stare at me. I stood there, incapable of moving, my legs rooted into the ground, and could do nothing but watch him bleed.

I woke up to a sweet taste in my mouth and Gileinas shaking me. My body hurt all over and at first I could not make sense of where I was or what was happening. I blinked and stared at Gileinas in confusion. I could not find the words to ask any questions.

“I am sorry”, Gileinas whispered. “You must get up. I heard orcs nearby, it is not safe here anymore. We must go.”

The word orcs penetrated through the haze. I struggled to sit up, looking wildly about. The fire had been trampled out and the remains of it scattered. The shelter had been dismantled. My coat of armour and my pack were nowhere to be seen, but Gileinas’ pack and the sheath of Narsil were laid out on the ground nearby.

Gileinas shouldered his pack and Narsil and pulled me to my feet. My head spun and I clung to him. He wrapped an arm around me and began to lead me through the thicket of spruce trees. Night was quickly falling. The weather was clear, but it was very cold.

Fear gave me enough strength to keep stumbling on, though my legs ached and I knew if Gileinas had let go of me, I would have collapsed at once. The cold night air felt as though I was breathing shards of glass. Every step I took felt like a stab in my wounded shoulder, my arm was aflame with pain. I held onto the thought that there were orcs, that we could not afford to be caught by them, and grit my teeth and forced myself to endure one step more, over and over again. I must have groaned and whined in pain, but I had little breath for it. I suppose it did not make any difference to our safety; if any creature had been close enough to hear it, it would also have been close enough to hear our footsteps.

We climbed up a hill. I do not know where I found the strength for it, for even my fear and desperation were waning in the face of overwhelming pain and exhaustion. Gileinas had taken on as much of my weight as he possibly could, but the remaining burden was still nearly too much for me.

When at last Gileinas lowered me to the ground, I could do nothing but gasp and weep in pain. He held me so that my back was against his chest and my head rested on his shoulder while my mind drowned in the dark deeps of agony.

I do not think I slept that night, but I must not have lost consciousness at times. I stared dully at the stars filling the sky above. Then, with no recollection of moving, I was curled up on my side, my cloak wrapped carefully around me and my head in Gileinas’ lap. Next I saw the sky above me turned into a dull blue-green ahead of the slowly approaching dawn.

Slowly I realized that Gileinas was not with me. I shivered in the absence of his warmth. I was too weak to sit up, but I turned my head and saw his pack leaning against a stone barely more than an arm’s reach away. The shards of Narsil in their sheath were laid by my side.

I fought to remain conscious, though I do not know why. I could not have defended myself from an enemy, and if any had found me, death that caught me unawares might have been the easier option. Nonetheless I held on to the ragged edges of my awareness. The sun climbed into the sky. She still had some warmth left to give, enough that at length I stopped shivering.

The hours crawled by. Pain weighed my body down so that even my breathing was laboured, but my mind was clearer than it had been in days. I understood now consciously that I was very near death. The poison was still burning in my veins, sapping the last scant strength I had. Perhaps if I could endure a few days more, it might run its course, but I knew there was no guarantee that I would last that long.

That Gileinas had left his pack and Narsil with me was a sign that he meant to come back. I could not help but feel guilty of the predicament I had brought him into. Every moment either of us lingered in one place in these wild lands was a moment that yet another danger could find us, and so long as he tried to protect me, I was placing him in danger he might have evaded alone. But I knew also that it would be both cruel and useless to ask him to abandon me.

I had nearly lost the struggle against the darkness creeping in from the edges of my vision when he returned to me. His face softened with relief when he saw me awake. He dropped my pack, which he had been carrying, to the ground by his own, and knelt next to me. He brushed the side of my face with his hand.

“You went back for my things?” I asked.

He nodded. “I had to leave your armour behind. It was too heavy and I cannot risk going back to retrieve it. But we cannot afford to leave the other supplies.”

I said nothing. Simply breathing was hard enough; speech was an effort I did not want to make if I did not have to. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Gileinas busy himself with building a small fire and preparing food for us. I also saw him pausing from time to time to cast worried glances at me. I wished I could have reassured him.

I did not feel hungry, but he made me eat nonetheless. Afterwards I must have slept for some hours, for when I opened my eyes again, the sky was dark. The fire was still burning. Gileinas was holding me in his arms and had wrapped his cloak around both of us. He was singing softly in some tongue of the Haradrim that I could not understand. I lay still for a while, listening to his voice, feeling the beating of his heart in his chest.

“Gileinas”, I said when he ended his song.

I felt the sharper inhale when he heard me. I think he had not noticed I was awake. I tilted my head back until I could see his face, the skin tinted clay-red by the glow of the fire.

“Gileinas, if I die…”

“You are not going to die. You are not”, he insisted. It is strange, the way men instinctively deny such things as though they were in our control.

“But if I do”, said I, “then my orders must be yours to carry out. Will you promise that to me?”

Sleep had dulled my pain for a while, but now I was too awake and felt the full force of it again. I could speak no more. It took all I had to endure the pain. Gileinas must have seen it in my face. His hand strayed into my hair, stroking it quietly for some time.

“If you die, then I will do what is in my power to bring Narsil to its rightful owner. I give my word I will”, he replied at length. “But while you live I will not leave your side.”

I nodded. I let my eyes close and fell into a half-doze. Though I no longer saw it, I was aware of Gileinas’ eyes on me, but I thought nothing of it. I was warm, and would have been comfortable if not for the pain, and while Gileinas held me I could even pretend I was safe.

Gileinas shifted and woke me up. I could hear the rustle as he sought for some item. He propped my head against his shoulder and pressed something cold and metallic to my lips. He told me to drink. I obeyed. My mouth filled with the sweet taste of the cordial we had alongside waybread in the sealed wallets. I realised that I had had the same taste in my mouth when I had woken up the night before.

Warmth filled my body. My pain eased and I could breathe easier. I watched as he slipped the silver phial back into the wallet at his belt.

“I had hoped I could stretch it out longer. But last night was too hard on you”, he said.

“It was not your fault”, I replied, hearing the apology in his voice. “How much do you have left?”

“A third, maybe.”

I nodded. “I hope what you have used will be enough. Who knows if we might need it again before our journey is over.”

I fell to sleep again soon afterwards, and it was the most restful sleep I had had in days. I was alert enough the next day that I could keep watch for some time while Gileinas slept. Toward the evening I fell again into restless dreams, but the respite the cordial had given my body was enough. Some days later I started to recover.

It took a while longer before I could travel again. I was unhappy about it, but at least it gave us time to consider our course. Our last flight from the orcs had taken us up to the lower slopes of the Misty Mountains themselves, and we realised that after the way we had run in directions chosen at random, neither of us knew an easy route back to the Vales of Anduin. We also did not know where in the foothills we would have to cross the orcs might have permanent dwellings, and we thought the orcs in those regions might still be more alert than usual after our passage through. The mountains were never entirely safe and the autumn weather would not make them more so, but we nonetheless decided on trying to cross them instead of turning back eastward.

Chapter End Notes

Hope you guys are still enjoying whatever this fic has decided to be, and hope I'll see you guys again soon-ish with a fourth chapter! (It should be the last chapter. I can't see how it could develop so much more story as I write that I'd have to up the chapter count again, but I mean... I've already thought that twice, so I no longer trust my judgement)

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