The Last Ringbearer (56 page)

Let’s go back to Tzerlag, whose historicity is beyond doubt. As is known, the occupation of Mordor ended suddenly and inexplicably by the winter of 3020, and life there started slowly getting back to normal. The city population had suffered tremendous losses (strictly speaking, the Mordorian civilization had not fully recovered since then), but the nomads have mostly avoided those tribulations. The sergeant used to say that a real man whose hands are attached properly (rather than to his butt) will come out on top whatever the situation, and proved this maxim with his entire life. After returning to his home grounds, he ended up the founder of a large and powerful clan, which had preserved the tale of his journeys in its oral tradition, as is customary with nomadic peoples.

Incidentally, the fate of the other sergeant, Runcorn, was almost the same as Tzerlag’s, aside from the fact that the ex-ranger lived on the other side of the Mountains of Shadow in the valley of the Otter Creek, rather than on the Morgai plateau. The hamlet he built under a strange name
Lianica
had grown into a regular village in only five years. When his little son found Ithilien’s first gold nugget in the creek’s gravel bed while fishing, the neighbors only shrugged: money always attracts money. Had he and the Orocuen met in their old age, undoubtedly they would have put their Mirkwood debates on the comparative advantages of dark beer and
kumiss
to a practical test, but it was not to be.

Tzerlag had decided to return the
mithril
coat to Haladdin’s girl together with the tale of his vanished friend’s heroic achievement. But Kumai had perished, and the scout himself knew nothing of the girl beside the name Sonya (very common among Trolls) and vague knowledge of her participation in the Resistance, so all his efforts to locate her failed. The despairing Orocuen then decided that he and his clan were the keepers rather than the owners of the artifact; the nomads’ punctiliousness in such matters is truly without limit. The sergeant’s great-great-grandson ended up donating it (together with the associated headaches) to the Núrnen History Museum, where anyone can see it today together with the other relics of the mysterious Mordorian civilization. At this point the apologist for the legend might say: “Aha! Isn’t the coat of mail proof enough for you?” The grave and absolutely correct answer would be that the coat proves nothing even within Tzerlag’s narrative, since Haladdin had obtained it before receiving the nazgúl’s ring.

By the way, concerning
mithril
… There is a total of four such coats of mail in the museums of Arda, but the technology of their manufacture remains a mystery. If you want your metallurgist friend to throw something heavy at your head, ask him about this alloy. It’s been analyzed to death: 86% silver, 12% nickel, plus trace amounts of nine rare metals from vanadium to niobium; they can measure these proportions to the ninth digit after the decimal, X-ray its structure, and do a myriad other things, except reproduce it. Some say (not without a trace of mockery) that the old masters would supposedly forever invest a fraction of their souls in each batch of
mithril
, and since today there are no souls, but only the ‘objective reality perceived by our senses,’ by definition we have no chance to obtain true
mithril
.

The most recent attempt at a solution had been undertaken by the smart guys at the Arnor Center for High Technologies with a special grant from Angmar Aerospace. It all came to naught: the grantor was presented with a plate of some alloy two millimeters thick (86.12% silver, 11.96% nickel, and so forth) and told that this was real
mithril
and everything else was just legends. As usual, the smart guys then asked for another grant to study this creation of theirs. Without blinking an eye the boss of the rocket men produced a loaded museum crossbow from under his executive desk, aimed it at the project leader and suggested that he protect himself with his plate – if it holds, you get your money, if it doesn’t, you won’t need it. Unsurprisingly, that was the end of the project. I have no idea whether this actually happened, but those who know the CEO of Angmar Aerospace well insist that the joke would be quite in his taste – not for naught does he trace his lineage from the Witch-king.

The deal with inoceramium that supposedly served to make the rings of the Nazgúl is much simpler, and the reason people don’t often see it is obvious. This metal of the platinum group is not only extremely rare in Arda’s crust (4 x 10
⁸
atoms; compare gold at 5 x 10
⁷
or iridium at 1 x 10
⁷
atoms) – unlike the other platinoids it is never found scattered, but only in large nuggets. You can figure out the probability of finding one such yourself. Actually, not too long ago a nugget weighing a fantastic 87 ounces was found in Kigvali mines in South Harad; the headline in the local paper was
Find of the Century – Six Pounds of Inoceramium Would Make Enough Rings for a Platoon of Nazgúl
. This metal has absolutely no unusual properties other than its density (higher than osmium).

But enough about metals.

Alviss never married. She dwelt in self-imposed isolation in her Jasper Street mansion, dedicating her life to raising the son she bore at the appropriate time after those events. This boy grew up to be none other than Commodore Amengo – the one whose voyages are universally considered to have ushered in the era of great geographical discoveries. The Commodore had left behind the maps of the shore of a new continent that was to bear his name, wonderful (in a literary sense) travel notes, and a long train of broken hearts – none of which brought him any marital happiness. Aside from the great western continent (which was long believed to be the legendary Far West, with resultant attempts to discern Elvish features in its aborigines), Amengo’s list of discoveries includes a small tropical archipelago which he had deservedly named Paradise. The name was changed later by the Holy Church (the local girls looked like the living, breathing
houranies
as portrayed by the godawful Hakimian heresy), but the two biggest islands of the archipelago, whose shapes closely resemble the yin-yang symbol, have managed to keep the names given them by the discoverer: Alviss and Tangorn.

By my lights the famous seafarer had immortalized his parents’ names in the best possible way. Nevertheless, the love story of the Umbarian courtesan and the Gondorian aristocrat had been a favorite topic of writers ever since. For some reason these people either turn the protagonists into disembodied romantic ghosts or else reduce everything to primitive erotica. Alas, the recent Amengian screen version –
The Spy and The Whore
– is no exception: it was rightfully rated XXX in Gondorian theaters and banned outright in puritanical Angmar. The movie’s artistic merits are scant, but it’s totally politically correct: Alviss is black (excuse me – Haradi-Amengian), and the relationship between Tangorn and Grager has distinct gay overtones. The critics predicted as one man that the judges of the Silver Harbors Film Festival would protect themselves from the charges of racism, sexism, and other horrible ‘isms’ by throwing every conceivable award at it, which is exactly what happened. In any event, the inimitable Gunun-Tua’s
Golden Elanor
for Best Actress was well-deserved.

Almandin and Yakudze were hanged in the courtyard of the Ar-Horan prison on one of the exhaustingly muggy August nights of 3019; along with them were executed Flag Captain Makarioni and seven other naval officers that had led the ‘Admiral Carnero’s mutiny.’ That was the
post factum
description of Operation Sirocco, during which the admiral first destroyed the entire Gondorian invasion fleet right at the piers in a pre-emptive strike, and then landed a raiding party which burned Pelargir shipyards to the ground. To save face, Aragorn had to sign the Dol Amroth Compact. By its terms Umbar did acknowledge itself “an inseparable part of the Reunited Kingdom,” but got itself permanent free city status in return. Its Senate was renamed to ‘magistrate council’ and its army to ‘garrison;’ Special Envoy Alkabir, who represented the Republic, even managed to wangle a special provision banning His Majesty’s Secret Guard from operating in its territory. To the mutual satisfaction of the king of Gondor and Umbarian senators, Admiral Carnero’s raid was declared to have been a banal pirate foray, its participants deserters and traitors who had forsaken their military oath and officer’s honor.

Of course, the people viewed Carnero’s co-conspirators (the admiral avoided court-martial by getting himself killed at Pelargir) as heroes who had saved their Motherland from foreign enslavement, but the fact remained that they had gone against orders. The Republic’s Prosecutor General Almaran had a simple solution to this ethical dilemma: “Winners are always right, you say? Like hell! Either law exists and is the same for everybody, or there’s no law at all.” The pathos of his prosecutor’s speech (quoted in whole or in part in every modern law textbook) can be summed up exhaustively by its historic concluding statement: “Let justice be done though the heavens fall!” Be that as it may, the executed officials of the Umbarian secret service should have known better than anyone else that motherland’s gratitude usually takes strange forms …

Sonya never found out about Haladdin’s mission (as we already know, this had been his special concern) and remained certain that he and Kumai had perished on the Pelennor Fields. But time is merciful, so once those wounds had healed she fulfilled her life’s destiny by becoming a loving wife and wonderful mother, having married a worthy man whose name is absolutely irrelevant to our story.

In my opinion, royal personages are of much lesser interest, since their fates are well-known. For those too lazy to pick up a book or at least review their sixth-grade history lessons, let me remind you that Aragorn’s reign was one of the most magnificent in Middle Earth history and one of the watershed events separating the Middle Ages (the Third Age) from modernity. The usurper did not try to win the affections of the Gondorian aristocracy (such a project would have been dead on arrival), instead betting correctly on the third estate, which cared for things like tax rates and safety of trade routes, rather than dynastic rights and other such phantoms. Since His Majesty had effectively burned all bridges with the aristocracy, paradoxically this gave him freedom to implement radical agrarian reform, drastically curtailing the rights of landlords in favor of freeholders. These factors were the basis for the famous ‘Gondorian economic miracle’ and the colonial expansion that soon followed, while the representative legislative bodies Aragorn had created to counterbalance the aristocracy have survived to our day almost unchanged, earning the Reunited Kingdom its well-deserved title of Middle Earth’s oldest democracy.

It is common knowledge that the king promoted and supported science, crafts, and sea-faring ventures, appointed talented men to important state positions without regard to their lineage, and was sincerely loved by his subjects. The only dark stain on Elessar Elfstone’s reputation is the early period of his reign, when his Secret Guard (admittedly a really scary outfit) had to protect the throne from the feudal lords with an iron hand; actually, most of today’s experts believe that the scale of terror had been greatly magnified by the nobility’s historians. Aragorn’s famously beautiful wife Arwen (Elven-born, according to legend) played no role in matters of state and only imparted a certain mysterious luster to his court. They had no children, so the Elfstone dynasty ended with its founder, the throne reverting to the Prince of Ithilien – in other words, things went back to the way they were.

It is rather hard to analyze the reign of the first Princes of Ithilien, Faramir and Éowyn, in political or economical terms – it appears that they had neither politics nor economics over there, but only a never-ending romantic ballad. Nearly all the contemporary poets and painters must have contributed to the creation of the captivating image of the Fairy of the Ithilien Woods (weird, isn’t it – Ithilien, the industrial heart of Middle Earth, had forests once!), since Faramir’s modest court had become a sort of a holy shrine to them, and not making a pilgrimage there was the height of bad taste. But even correcting for the unavoidable idealization, one has to admit that Éowyn must have been an exceptionally pure soul.

Thanks to that army of artists we have several portraits of Prince Faramir, too; the best one I know of is reproduced in a monograph entitled
Philosophical Agnosticism and its Early Adepts
recently printed by the Amon Súl Tower Publishers in Annúminas. In any event, none of those images have anything in common with the brass profile gracing the cockades on the mustard-colored berets worn by the commandos of the Ithilien Paratrooper Regiment. By the way, the famous ‘mongooses’ – a special anti-terrorist unit whose soldiers were on every TV screen in Arda recently when they brilliantly freed the passengers of a Vendotenian airliner captured in Minas Tirith airport by the Hannani fanatics from the Northern Mingad Liberation Front – are part of that regiment, as well.

Faramir had committed exactly one act of foreign policy during his entire reign – he approved Baron Grager’s request to send him south of the Harnen River to conduct a series of intelligence and sabotage operations he had devised: “… by all indications the fate of Middle Earth will be decided, and soon, in Near Harad.” Strangely, the subsequent fate of Grager of Aran (often called, not without justification, the savior of Western civilization) remains the stuff of unverified legends and anecdotes. The only thing that is known is the end result of his efforts – the massive rebellion of nomadic Aranians against their Haradi masters, which had led, domino-fashion, to the fall of the entire ominous Harad Empire and its fracturing into an ineffective bunch of warring tribes. Nobody knows how this adventurous intellectual had earned his iron-clad authority among the fierce savages of the Harnen savannah. The fairy tale of him accidentally ransoming a son of an Aranian chieftain at a slave market in Khand appears entirely unreliable; the suggestion that his path to power lay through chief priestess Svantatra’s bed is cute and romantic, but people familiar with the realities of the South can only laugh at it. Even the manner of the baron’s death is uncertain: either he perished in a lion hunt, or was killed accidentally while mediating a conflict over summer watering-hole rights between two small Aranian clans.