The Last Ringbearer (57 page)

But the fate of Éomer is so incredible that some researchers are still trying to prove that he was a legend rather than a real person. Having ascended to the throne of the Mark of Rohan after the Mordorian campaign, he had discovered – to his surprise and acute displeasure – that there was no one left to fight any more, at least in the near Middle Earth. For some time the famed warrior had tried to amuse himself with tournaments, hunts, and amorous adventures, but quickly tired of it all and fell into depression. (Historical veracity impels me to admit that on the battlefields of love this
chevalier sans per et sans rеproche
was characterized by a total lack of taste combined with a fantastic appetite, so much so that Edoras wags suggested that their monarch’s motto should be ‘one for all.’) That was when the involuntarily idle king remembered a certain marvelous eastern faith that had led him to victory on the Field of Pelennor. At first Éomer wanted to make Hakima the state religion of Rohan, but then he came up with a more interesting plan.

At that time the Khand Caliphate was in the middle of an anemic religious war between two sects of Hakimians. It is still uncertain how Éomer decided which one of those was the one true faith. Personally, I suspect that he flipped a coin – the actual dogmatic differences thereof were and are a fertile field for scores of Doctors of Divinity. Be that as it may, he converted his entire Royal Guard, bored silly and ready to fight anyone at all, to that true faith (legend has it that one of Éomer’s knights, when asked how he felt on the path of True Faith, responded guilelessly: “Not bad, praise Tulkas – my boots aren’t leaking”) and went South. The king left his cousin-twice-removed as regent in Edoras; sure enough, this plunged the country into dynastic struggles that lasted almost a century and culminated in the War of Nine Castles, which wiped out the entire knighthood of Rohan.

To the total astonishment of his companions, once in Khand Éomer actually did renounce his previous life as sinful, gave all his possessions but the sword to the poor, and joined the order of Hannanites (warrior dervishes). Utilizing his commander’s talent in the service of his chosen sect, he crushed the opposition in three decisive battles, ending the twenty-six-year ‘holy war’ in only six months; the faithful Hakimians deservedly dubbed him The Prophet’s Sword, while the schismatics called him God’s Wrath. At the end of the third battle, when the heretics’ imminent defeat was beyond doubt, Éomer was killed by a stone from an enemy catapult – truly the best death a genuine warrior may wish for. The Hakimians promptly canonized him as a holy martyr, so he should have no problems obtaining the companionship of
houranies
.

This looks like a good place to stop … In conclusion, I would like to stress that I have filled the gaps in Tzerlag’s story at my own discretion. The old soldier bears no responsibility for my inventions, especially since many will now passionately charge the storyteller – who else? – with deviating from the mainstream version of the events of the end of the Third Age. One has to note that the public’s knowledge of those events is usually derived from the literary adaptation of the Western epos –
The Lord of the Rings
– at best, but often only from the
Sword of Isildur
TV series and the
Galleries of Moria
first-person shooter game.

I might sonorously remind such critics that
The Lord of the Rings
is the historiography of the victors, who had a clear interest in presenting the vanquished in a certain way. Had genocide taken place back then, after the Western victory (where did those peoples vanish if it hadn’t?), then it’s doubly important to convince everybody, including oneself, that those had been orcs and trolls rather than people. Or I could ask them: how often do we find in human history a ruler that would relinquish his power, for free, to some nobody from nowhere (pardon me – a Dúnadan from the North)? Yet another subject of immodest curiosity might be the actual payment Elessar Elfstone had to make to the marvelous companions he had acquired on the Paths of the Dead. I mean, summoning the powers of Absolute Evil (for a noble cause, of course) is totally commonplace, he’s neither the first nor the last; but for those powers to meekly revert back to nothingness after doing their job without asking anything in return sounds highly dubious. At least I’ve never heard of such a thing. Or I can … I can, but I won’t. Whatever for? I have no desire to engage in this sort of polemics.

In other words, guys, live and let live. In our case it translates to this: you don’t have to listen to me spin tall tales if you don’t like them.

THE END

APPENDICES

APPENDIX I

Quote Attributions, Historical and Cultural References, and Translator’s Notes

TITLE

The term ‘Ringbearer’
in the title of this work is a re-translation of the word used to translate the term ‘Ring-wraith’ in the most popular rendering of
The Lord of the Rings
into Russian. This loads the Russian version of the title with double meaning, referring at once to the nazgúl ring Haladdin carries and to the way his mission parallels Frodo’s in
The Lord of the Rings
. Obviously, this nuance is lost in English translation.

PART I

Vae Victis
– “Woe to the vanquished” (Latin), see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vae_victis
.

“No indeed! We are not strong …”
– Rudyard Kipling,
Song of Picts
.

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few”
– Winston Churchill, referring to the deeds of British fighter pilots in a speech on 20 August 1940.

“Gold is for the mistress …”
– Rudyard Kipling,
Cold Iron
.

CHAPTER 1

Hamada (Arabic)
– a type of desert landscape consisting of largely barren, hard, rocky plateaus, with very little sand. A hamada may sometimes also be called a
reg
(pronounced “rug”), though this more properly refers to a stony plain rather than a highland. Hamadas exist in contrast to ergs, which are large areas of shifting sand dunes. (Wikipedia)

Orocuen
– author’s reconstruction of the name that got shortened to “Orc”; meant to evoke Araucanian Indians.

Bactrian (Arabic)
– camel; usage mimics Tolkien’s avoidance of the term ‘elephant.’

Haladdin
– the name is meant to evoke Aladdin and Saladdin (Salah-ad-din), the foe of the Crusaders.

CHAPTER 2

Garden of Thirteen Stones
– a type of Japanese garden containing thirteen stones, placed so that only twelve are visible from any vantage point.

Manna
– actual common name of edible lichen
Lecanora esculenta
.

Abo
– author’s play on ‘obo,’ a small stone pyramid the Mongols erect as shrines to spirits.

Tzandoi
– invented word.

Mantzag
– invented word.

CHAPTER 3

The agricultural debacle
described in this chapter is modeled on the one caused in the kingdom of Babylon by irrigation engineers imported by Egyptian Princess Nitocris.

“Not to wait for nature’s mercies”
– a part of the official slogan of Stalin’s “Re-engineering Nature” plan.

“World’s Smithy”
– England’s designation at the height of Industrial Revolution.

“A state that is unable to feed itself and is dependent on food imports cannot be considered a formidable foe”
– a statement variously attributed to Winston Churchill and Henry Kissinger regarding the Soviet Union.

CHAPTER 4

“There are things more important than peace and more terrible than war”
– the first part of this statement was made by Alexander Haig, Secretary of State in the Reagan administration, during his confirmation hearings.

“What you are about to do is worse than a crime. It is a mistake.”
– Joseph Fouché, Napoleon Bonaparte’s Minister of Police, reportedly said something similar regarding the planned assassination of Enghien, Duc d’Otrant. The quote is also sometimes attributed to Charles Maurice de Talleyrand or Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe.

CHAPTER 6

“Strange war”
– a reference to the stand-off between British and German armies in 1939.

“Land for peace”
– the modality of negotiations between Israel and its enemies following the 1967 Six-day War.

CHAPTER 7

Commander-South
– this construction for “Commander of the South Army” mimics Soviet terminology of the 1917 Civil War (which was typically portrayed romantically in Soviet propaganda), with its penchant for abbreviations.

“We’re all mortal, guys”
– a hint at Friedrich II of Prussia’s famous “Dogs, do you want to live forever?”

Houranie
– a derivation from “houri.”

CHAPTER 10

Teshgol boundary
– a boundary (sometimes called a tract) is a geographical term that denotes a parcel of land that is markedly different from the surrounding landscape, a wooded depression in this case.

“Mop-up”
– the author’s intent was to use the American Vietnam-era term “sweep and clear,” which the Russian Army had adopted during the Chechen War to mean wholesale destruction of civilian population. Since such connotation is missing from contemporary American English, I have decided to substitute it.

The set-up with a prisoner
buried in the sand up to his neck and left to die may be meant to invoke a similar situation in a cult Soviet “eastern” movie “The White Sun of the Desert.”

CHAPTER 11

“I swear by near and by far”
– Alexander Pushkin,
Imitation of the Quran
.

“The World is Text”
– a reference to Umberto Eco’s “open text” philology.

“If you’re weak, show strength to the foe”
– Sun-Tzu,
The Art of War
.

“Edge against edge”
– a cliché popular in Maoist propaganda, denotes a forceful response.

CHAPTER 15

Vendotenia
– the author’s creation, a country south-east of Mordor.

“
The Natural Basis of Celestial Mechanics
… theology”
– a reference to Sir Isaac Newton, supposedly a member of Prince Ashoki’s secret order whose goal was channeling science into peaceful applications.

CHAPTER 16

Law of causality
– a fundamental principle of physics that rules out the possibility of a given event affecting any preceding ones.

Twin-key principle
– an approach to security in which it takes two keys, held by distinct persons, to open a lock.

CHAPTER 17

“… find a hidden object with a frame”
– one of the methods used by “biolocators,” people supposedly capable of locating aquifers, ore deposits, and the like when walking over them holding a wooden or metal frame, which rotates toward the sought object.

“Searching a dark room for a black cat that’s not even there”
– a reference to a series of quotes, variously attributed, regarding mathematicians, philosophers, and theologians. One of the best known is by H. L. Mencken: “A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it.”

PART II

“A soldier covers nae mair of it”
– Robert Stevenson,
Kidnapped
.

CHAPTER 20

“… watching his beloved brush her hair in the morning”
– a reference to Graham Greene’s
The Quiet American
.

CHAPTER 23

Matun
– a reference to Kipling’s
Truce with The Bear
.

“Thick-walled stone towers twenty to thirty feet high”
– this describes the dwellings of mountain men of the Caucauses and Scottish Highlanders.

CHAPTER 24

“A chain of fishes’ voice and the sound of cats’ steps”
– a reference to the Norse myth of Fenrir.

Firn
– a type of snow that has been left over from past winters and has been recrystallized into a substance that is an intermediate stage between snow and glacial ice.

CHAPTER 25

Mashtang
– the author’s term.

Greengo
– a riff on ‘greenhorn’ and ‘gringo’; original text uses American Indian term ‘chechako’ popularized by Jack London. It was replaced due to perceived low awareness of Jack London’s works.

Gibberish
– the actual name for the direct substitution coding method; the current meaning of ‘nonsense’ developed later.

CHAPTER 27

Nin’yokve
– the author’s term, a phonetic meld of Japanese ‘ninja’ and Latin ‘que’ (that, which).

Hadaka-jime
– an actual term for one of ju-jitsu strangleholds, the rear naked choke.

CHAPTER 32

Fasimba
– a character in Harry Harrison’s
Deathworld 2
(ironically, a slaver). That character trades pleasantries with another: “Hate you, Ch’aka!” “Hate you, Fasimba!” This is meant to hint that the first Emperor of Harad is modeled on Chaka-Zulu.