Out of the East by AdmirableMonster  

First Impressions

This chapter contains threats of violence, not terribly explicit depictions of rather graphic violence, in-universe oppression/prejudice/etc, and brief attempted but unsuccessful sexual assault.

For the prompt, "I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."

Khorshid,

I hope you have not handed this to Nasir and told him to read it to you.  If you have, pray get it back from him at once.  I know you can read.  Stop acting like you can’t.  This letter is for your eyes only—you may tell Nasir, if he is curious, as I know he always is, that I have not left anything out of the full, formal report with which I enclosed this letter.  And tell him to keep his overlarge nose of my business.

There, if that has not gotten you to read this alone, I don’t know what will.  My journey to the land of Mordor was very long and very boring.  We barely had to fight anything at all, although as we passed through the northernmost reaches of Khand we were set upon by a terrifying sand demon in the middle of the night.  I will admit to no one but you that I was afraid for my soul, as well as for my life.  I never heard anything like the sound of its cries, like a bird and the wind and a tiger’s roar all at the same time.  But as this was the only excitement during the whole journey, I am not at all certain why Lord Noor-Ali felt it necessary to bring a full squadron and a half of soldiers with him.  Besides, we mostly just got in one another’s way when the sand demon attacked and, embarrassingly, we did not kill it.  I am not even sure if we caused it any difficulty at all, or if it simply got bored with us and went off to scream at some other unlikely travelers.  So that was the sum totality of the excitement on our excruciatingly long journey.

I hope you have not found another sweetheart.  I would not want to have to gut her, or worse, if you really loved her, pine after you.  I wouldn’t cry, you know, if you left me.  But I hope you won’t.

Our arrival in Mordor was likewise quite boring.  I know you have never been outside the walled city, so I will write to you of what it was like anyway, but I want you to know that I had to hide my yawns the whole time.  We had to go north before we reached Harad, for nearly the whole of Mordor is ringed by tall, black mountains, very thin, especially at the tops, which are not snow-covered, as I have always thought mountains must be.  Instead, they are like the fangs of a shark, at least so Ramin said.  I am unsure if any animal has teeth like these, which glitter so brightly in the harsh sun that you cannot look directly at them near noontide.

Once we had made our way around the mountains, we were met with a troop of Mordor’s finest legions, mostly Orcs but with one or two Elves and some humans.  They talked much more than we did.  At first, our men were scornful of their discipline, though no one said anything out loud.  We thought it must be because their leader did not seem like much of a soldier.  He is quite slim and not very muscular, and he wears a black helm polished to the same shine as the mountains which hides his face.  You know the kinds of things our soldiers say when someone does not show their face.  After we had traveled alongside him and his troops for the day, there were murmurs of woman and witch. (Yes, I did write something of this to the Lady Maliheh as well.  If you hear a shriek of indignation from her chambers, that is probably why.)

The funny thing is, there were women among the warriors of Mordor.  I don’t think anyone but me realized it, but you know that I am quite well-attuned to that sort of thing.  Most of them were Orcs and very big and muscular compared to our women, but they had smoother faces and you could tell from the roundness of their hips.  The armor was well-fitted to them; maybe that’s why no one but me noticed.

But they didn’t pretend to be men.  The Orcs don’t dress and act the way we do at home.  I think that’s part of why they speak so much: they don’t have the time for silence and the time for speech as we do.  All times seem to be times for speech, unless they don’t want to talk.  I saw one Orc—I learned later her name was Hayani—punch one of the Elves because he kept trying to talk to her when she didn’t want to speak.  Actually, it may have been she.  The Orcs I could tell men from women, the Elves—I don’t know.  There aren’t many Elves, but all of them are tall and horribly beautiful—yes, even more beautiful than the Lady Maliheh—and they all look alike in an eerie way.  Their hips are all too round to be men and too slim to be women.  Maybe they aren’t anything.  They do say that the gods of Mordor are not men or women.  Maybe the Elves aren’t either.  Anyways, Hayani was a very short round little Orc, like a sack of potatoes, and this Elf would not stop talking to her, and she just turned around and punched him (or her) low in the gut, and she (or he) folded over and lay on the ground, while everyone else in their troop laughed and all of us stood around in shock.

Lord Noor-Ali was the most shocked of all.  He came over and demanded what had happened, but before anyone could answer or anyone could be punished, the leader of Mordor’s troops came over and sighed and said something in a language I don’t speak, but very sarcastically.  Hayani shouted something, and the Elf who had been speaking to her sat up and began to laugh.  The leader—we were told, eventually, to call him Faši, but we didn’t start doing it right away so I keep forgetting—spoke to both of them after that, very quietly with his voice shaking as if he were afraid.  But I don’t think he was afraid, or not of them, anyway.  Hayani folded her arms and stuck her nose in the air—the way Nasir does when he is particularly cross—and the Elf said something very quickly in yet another language.  Everyone here seems to speak three of them, at least.  You would love it.  You’d also get your hands broken right away—none of them would have the least bit of patience for you trying to filch their purse or their weapons or whatever you would take it into your silly head to steal this time.

Faši—there, that time I remembered!—apologized to Lord Noor-Ali and said that all of them were very newly-arrived in Mordor themselves, as the Most Admirable King had only just returned and brought all of them with him from the Sunset Island.  Lord Noor-Ali was very polite about it, but you could tell he was judging them all.  Many of our soldiers decided to follow his lead.  I think that is why there were quite so many murmurs of woman and witch.

We covered a fantastic amount of ground the first day, which may also have had something to do with it.  I still don’t know how.  We went west from the mountains along a wide, flat road.  On both sides, the land sloped down slightly and then stretched away to the north and south covered in a soft yellow grass as far as the eye could see.  By late afternoon, we caught sight of sunlight on water.  By the time the sun was setting, we had reached the Gul-An, as the shadow-landers call it.  It is a wide, flat, shallow river that flows southwest towards the Sea of Nurnen, and I overheard Jalil telling Lord Noor-Ali that we had come at least fifty miles and perhaps more since we’d met the other troops.  I swear we weren’t walking that fast.

Now I suppose we come to it.  Faši is very definitely not a woman.  I think he might be like me, Khorshid.  I know you’ve said before that you don’t think I am alone in my peculiarities, and it’s very sweet that you don’t care and would rather nobody stabbed you but me—flatterer! someone ought to cut out your tongue before you say all those beautiful lies to someone who will believe you—but I’ve never met anyone like me before.

After we reached the Gul-An, it was finally getting dark, so we set up camp there.  Habib was bothering me again.  Apparently he decided the sum we have been paying him isn’t enough, or maybe he was drunk and wanted to show off to the other soldiers.  But he was hanging over my shoulder and putting his arm around me and saying all kinds of things into my ear—the coward.  He knew I couldn’t respond as I wished to, or he would tell everyone, and then I’d just be beheaded.  He was getting very bold, and I will confess I was not at all sure what I was going to do.  I thought about fucking him to get him to shut up long enough that I could stab him in the throat, but I didn’t want to be unfaithful to you.

You will not believe what happened.  One minute I was trying to eel out from under his arm with his stinking drunk breath in my face, and the next he was on his back with an Elf’s knee in his chest and an Elvish blade at his throat, and the lord Faši demanding to know what was going on.  It was his personal guard who was threatening Habib.

He must have been eating his dinner, I think, because he had traces of sauce on the corner of his mouth.  He had taken off his helmet to do it, and that is one reason I think he must be like me.  His hair is cut very short, almost shorn across the head, and the bones of his face are delicate.  The same open eye that is picked out in gold on his helm is also seared into his forehead and both cheeks, but very neatly.  There is a ring on the third finger of his right hand that draws the eye, which is as black and polished as the mountains but with a bright red gem set into it, like the wing of one of the yelling birds that bother everyone in the bazaar for food.

Habib tried to yell that I was a woman and ought to be beheaded for playing at soldier.  I have never seen anything half as frightening as Faši’s face then.  I don’t know how to explain it.  He didn’t look angry.  He didn’t look like anything.  His countenance went from faintly worried to absolutely blank.  His guard tried to say something in their language, and he put up a hand and not another word came out.  I swear to you, Khorshid, that man is not a warrior.  He does not have the muscles, and he does not move like a warrior.  He is not trained in combat.  He went over to his guard and said something, and the guard gave him a knife from his belt, and he just

He apologized, after.  To me.  For being clumsy about it.  He was right.  It wasn’t very clean.  I don’t care.  I was relieved.  But it wasn’t very clean.  It would have been cleaner if it had been me, if Lord Noor-Ali’s guards had done it because of what Habib said.  

After he apologized, he said he would have to go and apologize to Lord Noor-Ali for disciplining his soldier.  But he said to me, in front of everyone, that women were permitted among his guard, and that asking someone if they were a woman was absolutely not permitted, whether they were or not, and if they had a problem with this, Lord Noor-Ali could go back to the Calif and say that there would be no peace and no treaty and the Most Admirable King would crush the soul from the earth.

Everyone was quiet, after that.  

I don’t know what I think, but I had to write to you, and it was so hard to explain all this that I have had to write it all back to front, as if it’s a story, or a lie, but it’s not.  It happened.  I have no idea what is going to happen when we actually reach Mordor.  I suppose I’ll write you again then.

Yours with affection,

Firouz