The Last Ringbearer (25 page)

“Then you think … Faramir is doing the same thing?”

“Usually, astute thoughts occur to clever minds simultaneously; by the way, the Elves are engaged in the same kind of search, to other ends, of course. The thing is that Faramir will have a much easier time searching thanks to his old connections in the East. That list we have is based on pre-war reports of his resident spies – praise Manwe that we, rather than the Elves, got the Royal archives … In any case, Captain – find this Tangorn immediately and get everything he knows out of him; then consider how to get our hands on whatever Ithilien has. There’s no task of greater importance now.”

“An abduction right out of Emyn Arnen?” Cheetah shook his head dejectedly. “But that damned Grager has practically destroyed our network there, it can hardly handle such a task.”

“Tangorn won’t stay in Emyn Arnen. No doubt Faramir will send him to Umbar, where he’s had so much success before the war: it’s full of Mordorian emigrants now, plus it’s the best possible location for secret diplomatic missions. Certainly they’ve already hid Haladdin somewhere … actually, that’s easy to check. I’ll send a courier to Emyn Arnen right away – I owe the Prince of Ithilien my best regards anyway. Should the messenger find neither Haladdin nor Tangorn there – which is what I expect – send your people to Umbar at once. Get moving, Captain, and get well soon: there’s plenty of work to do.”

“So where is Wolverine now?”

“He’s in Isengard, commanding a band of Dunlending marauders. His task is obtaining ‘blasting fire.’”

“What about Mongoose?”

“He’s in Mindolluin, a prisoner in the quarry,” answered the Task Force Féanor member tasked with briefing Cheetah, clarifying: “He’s with Operation Mockingbird, Captain. His extraction is planned for next Tuesday.”

“Can you speed up the completion of that operation?”

“No, Captain, sir. Mongoose is working without cover, and that quarry is the Queen’s men bailiwick. Should we expose him, he’ll be dead in five minutes or less: ‘escape attempt’ and finished.”

“Very well,” he estimated a courier’s round-trip to Emyn Arnen, “this will keep till Tuesday. Send him to me the moment he shows up.”

CHAPTER 32

Gondor, Mount Mindolluin

May 19, 3019

F 
rom bird’s eye view the Mindolluin quarry which supplied limestone to Minas Tirith builders looked like a chipped porcelain bowl, its inside covered by hundreds of tiny persistent house ants looking for traces of sugar. On a nice day like today the white cavity functioned as a sunlight-gathering reflector, and its inner area, isolated from the winds, was hot as hell. And this in the middle of May; Kumai tried not to think of what it was going to be like in the summer. Sure, the prisoners who ended up in Anfalas, on the galleys, fared much worse, but that was not much of a consolation. He was actually very lucky today, having drawn a work detail at the very top edge, where a refreshing breeze blew and there was almost no chocking calcium dust. Of course, those working on the outer perimeter of the quarry had to wear leg irons, but he found that an agreeable trade-off.

For the second week now Kumai’s partner was Mbanga, a
múmak
driver from the Harad battalion, who did not speak Common. Over the last six weeks the overseers had kicked into him the knowledge of all the words they considered necessary and sufficient (up, go, carry this, roll that, hands on the back of your head); however, translating the expression ‘lazy black ass’ stumped both sides, so they made do with ‘nigger.’ Mbanga was in kind of a permanent semi-dreaming state and did not seek to expand his vocabulary by communicating with the other prisoners. Perhaps he still mourned his perished Tongo – the
múmakil
and their drivers develop a human-like friendship, far beyond any bond between a rider and his beloved horse. Or maybe in his mind the Southron was in his unimaginably distant South, where the stars over the savannah are so large that you can reach them with the tip of your
assegai
if you stretch, where any man can use simple magic to turn into a lion, and where every woman is beautiful and tireless in love.

Once upon a time that area had been home to a mighty civilization, which left behind nothing but stepped pyramids overgrown with lush tropical greenery and roads paved with basalt plates leading nowhere. The modern history of Harad began less than a hundred years prior, when a young and energetic chief of a tribe of cattlemen from the interior named Fasimba swore to destroy the slave trade, and succeeded. It must be noted parenthetically that the countries of the South and the East had slave trade since time immemorial, but not on any serious scale; it was mostly limited to selling beauties into harems, plus other such exotica that had no economic underpinnings. The situation changed drastically when the Khand Caliphate ‘industrialized’ the business, establishing a regular trade in black slaves throughout Middle Earth.

A well-fortified Khandian colony candidly named Slaveport arose on the shore of a deep bay at the mouth of the Kuvango, the main river artery of Eastern Harad. Its inhabitants first tried slave-raiding themselves, but quickly realized that this was a grueling and dangerous task; as one of them put it, “much like shaving a pig: lots of squealing, little hair.” This did not faze them; they established mutually beneficial alliances with chiefs of the coastal tribes. One Mdikva became their main trading partner. From that point on, live merchandise was in steady supply in Khand’s markets, in exchange for beads, mirrors, and poorly distilled rum.

Many people had pointed out both to the inhabitants of Slaveport and their respectable wholesalers in Khand that their way of making a living was dirtier than dirt. To that they responded philosophically that business was business and as long as there was demand it was going to be satisfied by one supplier or another (this line of reasoning is by now universally known, so there is no need to cite it in full). Be that as it may, Slaveport boomed and its businessmen got rich quickly, with the side benefit of being able to satisfy their most exotic sexual fantasies thanks to the plentiful supply of young black girls (and boys) in their temporary possession.

Such was the situation when Fasimba successfully poisoned six neighboring chiefs at a friendly party (actually he was the one supposed to have been poisoned, but quite adroitly he struck first, as was his style), joined their domains to his own and declared himself Emperor. After assembling the warriors of all seven chiefdoms into a single army and instituting both a unified command and capital punishment for any expression of tribalism, the young chief invited military advisors from Mordor, which jumped at the chance to establish a counterweight to neighboring Khand. The Mordorians fairly quickly taught the black warriors, who knew neither fear nor discipline, how to function together in closed ranks, and the result exceeded all expectations. In addition, Fasimba was the first to fully appreciate the true battle potential of the
múmakil
; of course, they had been used in war since time immemorial, but he was the one to standardize and streamline the taming of calves in large numbers, thus essentially creating a new army service. The effect was similar to that of tanks in our day and age: one war machine attached to an infantry battalion is a useful thing to have, but no more than that, whereas fifty tanks gathered into a single armored fist is a force that drastically changes the nature of war.

Three years after Fasimba’s military reform he declared a war of total destruction on the coastal chiefs that were involved in slave-raiding and crushed them all in less than six months; finally, Mdikva’s turn came. Spirits were low in Slaveport until a messenger of the coastal kinglet brought good news: Mdikva’s warriors have met Fasimba’s vaunted army in a decisive battle and triumphed completely, and soon the town will receive a large shipment of good strong slaves. The Khandians breathed a sigh of relief and complained to the messenger that slave prices at the metropolis markets were down sharply (which was a total lie). The man was not overly displeased: there were so many prisoners that there would be enough rum to last half a year.

The slave caravan, personally led by Mdikva, arrived at the appointed time – a hundred eighty men and twenty women. Despite the messenger’s boasts, the chained men had a poor appearance: worn-out, covered in bruises and wounds haphazardly bandaged with banana leaves. However, the women, paraded totally naked at the head of the column, were of such qualities that the entire garrison crowded around them, salivating and unwilling to look at anything else. This proved their undoing, for the chains were fake, the blood was paint, and the slaves themselves were the Emperor’s personal guard. The banana leaf bandages concealed star-shaped throwing knives lethal up to fifteen yards, but the guardsmen could have done without any weapons: every one of them could outrun a horse in a short sprint, dodge a flying arrow, and break eight stacked tiles with a bare fist. The city gates were captured in mere seconds, and Slaveport fell. Fasimba commanded the operation himself: it was he who led the ‘slave caravan’ dressed in Mdikva’s leopard-skin cape, familiar to the entire coast; the Emperor knew well that the members of the master race have never bothered to learn to tell ‘all those blackies’ apart. Mdikva himself had no further need of the cape; by that time, the ferocious fire ants in whose path he had been staked (this was now the punishment for aiding the slave trade) had already turned the coastal ruler into a well-cleaned skeleton.

Two weeks later a slave transport ship from Khand tied up at Slaveport. The captain, somewhat surprised by the deserted piers, went into town. He came back escorted by three armed Haradrim and in a voice shaky with fear told the crew to come ashore and help load the cargo. To be fair, the nature of the cargo they were to take on would have shaken anyone.

It was 1,427 tanned human skins: the entire population of Slaveport, save seven infants whom Fasimba had spared for some unknown reason. Each skin bore an inscription made by the town’s clerk (who was paid honestly by being killed last with a relatively easy death) – its owner’s name and a detailed description of the tortures he had to endure before being skinned alive. The women’s skins bore a notation of exactly how many black warriors have thoroughly appreciated their qualities; the town women were few and the warriors were many, so the numbers varied but were invariably impressive. Only a few inhabitants of Slaveport were lucky enough to merit a brief note ‘died in battle.’ The top of the bill was the stuffed mayor, a relative of the Caliph himself. Professional taxidermists probably would not have approved of the material used as stuffing – the very beads Khandians had used to pay for slaves – but the Emperor had his reasons.

Some will say that such monstrous cruelty has no justification; the chief of the Haradrim must have simply passed off his personal sadistic tendencies as revenge on the oppressors. Others will talk of ‘historical retribution’ and blame the ‘excesses’ on what the Haradrim, who were no angels, had suffered over the previous years. Such a discussion seems pointless on its merits, and is in any event irrelevant in this case. What Fasimba did to the inhabitants of the ill-fated town was neither a spontaneous expression of the chief’s cruelty nor revenge for ancestral suffering; rather, it was an important element of a fine strategic plan, conceived and carried out with a totally cool head.

CHAPTER 33

T 
he Caliph of Khand, having received a gift of his subjects’ hides and a stuffed relative, reacted in precisely the way the Emperor was counting on. He had the captain and crew beheaded (choose your cargo better next time!), publicly swore to have Fasimba stuffed in the same manner, and ordered his army to Harad. His advisors, forewarned by the sailors’ sad fate, did not speak against this dumb idea; they did not dare to even insist on some reconnaissance first. Rather than supervise preparations for the expedition, the Caliph indulged in devising the tortures he was going to inflict on Fasimba once he had him.

A month later twenty thousand Khand soldiers landed at the mouth of Kuvango next to the ruins of Slaveport and marched into the country. It should be mentioned that in terms of the amount of iron they had to carry (and especially the gold-plated doodads studding said iron) the Khand warriors were unequaled in all Middle Earth. The problem was that their battle experience was limited to putting down peasant revolts and similar policing actions. It looked like this was quite enough to deal with the black savages – the Haradrim fled in panic the moment they saw the menacing gleam of the iron phalanx. The Khandians chased the haphazardly retreating enemy through the coastal jungle and entered the savannah, where they met Fasimba’s patiently waiting main force the very next morning.

Too late did the Caliph’s nephew commanding the army realize that the Harad forces were twice the size of his and about ten times as effective. Strictly speaking, there was no battle as such: there was one devastating
múmakil
attack, followed by a disorderly rout and chase of the fleeing enemy. The casualty tallies speak for themselves: a thousand and a half killed and eighteen thousand captured Khandians versus about a hundred dead Haradrim.

A short time later the Caliph received from Fasimba a detailed account of the battle together with an offer to trade all the prisoners for all the Haradrim enslaved in Khand. Alternatively, the Caliph was advised to send to Slaveport a ship capable of taking on eighteen thousand human skins; by then Khand knew well that the Emperor was not joking. Fasimba made another foresighted move when he freed about two hundred prisoners and sent them home to inform the entire population of Khand as to the nature of the Haradi offer. As was to be expected, the people became restless and the smell of rebellion was in the air. A week later the Caliph, whose armed forces had been reduced to his palace guard, gave in. The exchange Fasimba had offered took place in Slaveport, and the Emperor acquired the status of a living deity among his people – for to the Haradrim a return from Khandian slavery was only a little short of resurrection.