The Last Ringbearer (4 page)

CHAPTER 6

M 
eanwhile in the south a ‘strange war’ went on. Although the Osgiliath Crossing had changed hands three times in two years, neither of the foes had made any attempts to follow up on their successes and take the fighting to the other side of Anduin. The fighting consisted of a series of ‘noble contests’ – something between a gladiator show and a knightly tournament. The best warriors were known by name on both sides, and bets were made regardless of the personal allegiances of the bettors; the officers competed in civility and never failed to congratulate an opponent on his monarch’s birthday or some other state occasion before running him through. The only dissonant note in this exalted symphony of courteous killing was sounded by the bands of Dúnadan ‘rangers,’ gathered here like flies to carrion. Those mostly “harassed enemy communications” – or, to put it plainly, robbed caravans. The Mordorians considered them bandits rather than enemy combatants, to be dealt with harshly in wartime, and hung not a few of those ‘rangers’ off the sprawling oaks along the Ithilien highway. The Northerners paid back in the same coin when they could. No wonder that working men like Tzerlag saw this ‘war’ as total baloney.

The Battle of Fangorn changed the situation drastically. Even prior to it the armies of Mordor and Isengard numbered no more than a third of the combined forces of Gondor and Rohan. After the task force perished, Mordor had no defensive strategies left; it had no chance of holding Ithilien with the forces it had. Sure, those were more than sufficient to hold the fastnesses in the passes of the Ash and Shadow Mountains, but what good was that? Gondor and Rohan had no need to storm those citadels; it was quite enough to simply establish a blockade and wait for Mordor to surrender or starve to death. The powers-that-be in Barad-dúr considered the situation soberly and realized that they had only one chance to break this stranglehold.

While Isengard remained unconquered in Rohan’s rear, the Rohirrim would not risk moving their army to the southeast, beyond Anórien. Although Isengard’s army was small, taking the city was no easy task, since primitive Rohan had no decent siege engines. Therefore, Mordor had some time, at least six months. Under cover of the low-grade war in Ithilien, this time had to be used to gather all of the country’s resources into a fist – muster all men, hire mercenaries, request assistance from allies (the Easterlings and especially the Haradrim). Then this entire force had to suddenly crush Gondor’s army in a blitzkrieg while it was temporarily deprived of Rohan’s aid. Afterwards, Mordor would conclude the war quickly under the well-known ‘land for peace’ scenario, keeping control of the Ithilien Crossroads. The risk was huge, but there was no other choice!

The Mirror gave this plan a decent chance of success. Gandalf was extremely concerned because the war in the northwest was not going as well as he expected. Éomer made a quick march west and did manage to capture the strategically important Helm’s Deep after a bloody battle at Hornburg, breaking into Isen’s valley. But it was a pyrrhic victory; the attackers’ losses were such that there was no question of storming Isengard. The only option was a siege, which was what Mordor was counting on.

The Elves found a solution. When the Rohirrim approached Isengard, they were stunned to behold a large lake in its place, the Orthanc tower sticking out of its middle absurdly like a log out of a swamp. The Elves had solved the problem radically by breaching the dams of the Isen the previous night, drowning the sleeping city with its defenders. Horrified Gandalf and hotly angry Éomer (the riches of Isengard, which were the reason for this campaign, were now at the bottom of an artificial lake) went to visit the Elves to settle a few things.

They came back after dark much subdued, silent, avoiding looking at each other. Surprised officers asked Éomer whether they should celebrate victory; the general snapped: “Whatever,” went to his tent and uncharacteristically drank himself into a stupor all alone. Gandalf, for some reason of his own, hurried to Orthanc and tried to talk to Saruman; after an icy rebuff he slumped listlessly at the water’s edge, watching the moon’s reflection. When all is said and done, the Elves are probably correct – the most important goal right now is to free up forces in the north and lead the Rohirrim south … But the Mirror … Was Saruman The Fastidious right back then? … Better not to think about it, there’s no way back now anyway … And that Dúnadan ranger – what’s his name, Aragorn? Arathorn? What do the Elves need him for, all of a sudden?

All the while the war in the south was picking up steam. Of course, it is impossible to hide troop movements on the scale of those started by Mordor from enemy intelligence, even if those did not possess the Mirror. Gondor also began moving its allied forces towards Minas Tirith from Anfalas, Ethir, and Dol Amroth, but Mordor deployed first. After a successful feint to the north (towards Lórien and further to Esgaroth) had tied up most of the Elvish army there, the main force of Mordor’s army slammed Gondor. Osgiliath was taken on the march; six days later, having overrun and scattered the more numerous but badly positioned units of the army of Gondor, the victorious South Army camped with all of its siege engines at the walls of Minas Tirith, which was still unprepared for a siege. The formidable Pelennor fortifications have been stormed immediately prior to that in only a couple of hours. So when the
palantír
in Denethor’s quarters suddenly came to life and Sauron offered an immediate peace in exchange for Mordor’s right to maintain a limited military presence in Ithilien, the king agreed right away, reasoning quite correctly that he was getting a heifer for a chick. Then, something strange happened.

The next day a man in a white cloak appeared in Sauron’s
palantír
. Introducing himself as the military commandant of Minas Tirith, he said that the signing of the peace treaty would have to wait for a few days, due to a sudden illness of the king of Gondor. Why isn’t Prince Faramir conducting these negotiations? Oh, the prince is literally hovering between life and death, having been struck by a poisoned arrow. What do you mean – “whose?!” The Mordorian army has no poisoned arrows? Really? Hmm … Honestly, he doesn’t know. As for Prince Boromir, unfortunately, he is believed to have been killed somewhere in the North a few months ago. In other words, let’s just wait a week or so, while the king gets better; yes, a mere formality.

So the Mordorians waited. The war is over, soon we’ll go home. Sure, discipline is important, but how about a little celebration of the victory, eh? After all, even if Isengard falls and the Rohirrim go south, Saruman will let us know, so even if worse comes to worse, there will be plenty of time to prepare a welcome party … Little did they know that Saruman’s
palantír
was only silent because defecting Grima took it along as a ‘dowry,’ and Rohan’s army was only a three days’ march off.

CHAPTER 7

Gondor, the Pelennor Fields

March 15, 3019

T 
he Mordorians only realized that they had been had when the brown splotch of Rohan’s army began spreading through the northern edge of the white fog blanketing the Pelennor Fields, while Gondor’s troops poured through the opened gates of Minas Tirith, quickly congealing into battle formations. Fury tripled the strength of the duped ‘victors;’ they hit the Gondorians hard enough to send them flying before the Rohirrim made it to the battlefield, almost gaining the city gates in hot pursuit. The armored cavalry of Rohan, tired by the long march, did not live up to expectations; it turned out to be less than easily maneuverable, so light Orocuen cavalry calmly showered it with arrows, easily avoiding a head-on clash. Although the South Army of Mordor was outnumbered two to one and surprised to boot, the scales began tipping in its favor.

It was then that fresh forces landed in the Mordorians’ rear at the southeast edge of the Pelennor Fields from ships that had just gone up the Anduin. The landed force was small, and the Mordorian commander did not pay much attention to the first panicked reports: “those can’t be killed!” In the meantime the battle intensified. On the northern edge of the field the Umbarian bowmen and deftly maneuvering Orocuen cavalry completely tied up the armor of Rohan; in the west the
mûmakil
of the Haradrim trampled and scattered Gondorian infantry once again, while the engineers smashed the famed (supposedly
mithril
) gates of the city to bits in less than ten minutes and began catapult bombardment of the inner ramparts. Only in the southeast was something alarming happening: the troops that had landed from the ships were moving forward like a hot knife through butter. When the Commander-South got to the site of the breach, this was what he saw.

A phalanx six men deep and about a hundred across was moving unhurriedly across the field in total silence. The warriors were dressed in gray cloaks with hoods covering their faces, and were armed only with long narrow Elvish swords; they had no armor, no helmets, not even shields. There was something weird about the look of the soldiers in the forward rank, and it took the commander a few seconds to understand what that was: they were literally studded with three-foot Umbarian arrows, but kept advancing just the same. They were commanded by a horseman in their rear, wearing a tattered camouflage cloak of a Dúnadan ranger, his faceplate closed. The sun was almost directly overhead, yet the horseman cast a long coal-black shadow, while the phalanx cast no shadow at all.

An aide reported to Commander-South that neither cavalry nor the
mûmakil
were able to breach the ranks of those warriors – the animals became wildly uncontrollable on approach. In the meantime, the invulnerable phalanx kept pushing northwest – fortunately, rather slowly and too directly. The Trollish armored infantry managed to slow it down some while the engineers moved two batteries of field catapults from the walls of the city. The Commander’s reckoning was precise: at the moment he anticipated the entire phalanx went into a large shallow depression, and the catapults placed on its edge opened up withering fire at pre-calculated distances and angles. The three-bucket naphtha jars turned the hollow into an erupting volcano, and a victory cheer went up to the cold March sky.

It ceased just as quickly, for the ranks of the gray warriors emerged again out of the bursting bubbles of orange naphtha flames. Their cloaks were smoldering and smoking, some were ablaze; the shafts of the arrows studding them were burning, too. Here one of those living torches – the fourth from the right in the forward rank – halted and started breaking into pieces, raising a fountain of sparks; his mates immediately closed ranks. One could see that the bombardment had taken a toll on the grays: at least fifty such firebrands were scattered in the middle of the depression, where the brunt hit. Some of those kept trying to get up and walk.

The general slammed the pommel with his fist – let the pain bring him back to the real world and banish all traces of this nightmare from his brain … No such luck. He is still standing at the edge of a burned-out hollow on the Pelennor Fields, and his warriors, ever ready to follow him into fire and water, will break into flight at any moment, for this is simply beyond their ken! Without thinking any more, he thundered: “Mordor and the Eye!” and, scimitar raised high, spurred his horse towards the right flank of the gray ranks – for it was there that the closed-helmeted Dúnadan has moved now, for some reason of his own.

When the Commander-South neared the phalanx, his mount reared and almost tossed him from the saddle. Now he could see the enemy warriors clearly and knew that the numerous ‘panic-mongers’ were right. These were, indeed, the living dead: respectable-looking parchment-skinned mummies with eyes and mouths carefully sewn shut, horribly bloated drowned men dripping greenish goo, skeletons covered with tatters of blackened skin, cause of death now indeterminable to the best pathologist. The corpses stared at him, and a chillingly terrifying low growl went up; such is the growl of a sheepdog about to go for the enemy’s throat. The general had no time to be terrified, though – a dozen gray figures have already detached themselves from the rear right corner of the formation, clearly intending to block his way to the indecisively halted Dúnadan, so he spurred the stallion again.

He broke through the line of the dead with surprising ease: they turned out to be rather slow and no match for a fighter of his caliber one-on-one. A hanged man with a lolling tongue and bulging eyes had barely raised his sword when Commander-South sliced through his sword-arm with a lightning-fast horizontal flick of his wrist and then cut the enemy almost in half from the right shoulder down. The others backed away for some reason and made no more attempts to stop him. Meanwhile the Dúnadan was clearly deciding whether he should fight or run, and seeing that he had no chance of escaping, dismounted decisively and drew his Elvish sword. So that’s how you want it, eh? Fight on foot – fine. Shouting the traditional: “Defend yourself, fair sir!” the commander of the South Army jumped nimbly off his horse, thinking in passing that this northern bandit hardly deserved to be called ‘sir.’ The phalanx had already moved away a hundred yards or so and kept going; seven of the undead stood in the distance, not taking their unseeing eyes off the duelists; a ringing silence fell.

He suddenly realized with a clarity that amazed him that this one duel would determine the outcome not only of this battle, but the fate of the entire Middle Earth for many years to come. His inner voice then said in an eerily pleading tone: “Think this through, while there’s still time! Please!” – as if trying to warn him without knowing how. But he had thought this through already! They are both lightly armored, so his curved scimitar will have a clear advantage over any straight western sword; the guy doesn’t seem to be a leftie, so no surprises there; it would’ve been better to fight on horseback, but let’s not be greedy … It’s all set – a meal ready to eat, as the saying goes!