The Last Ringbearer Read online

  The fire, quickly burning down salsola roots (their gray trunks covered most of the nearby slope), cast a bright light on his comrades: the chiseled profile of the Gondorian turned towards the moon-like face of the Orocuen, who resembled some placid Eastern deity. With a sudden heartache Haladdin realized that their strange fellowship was almost over -- in only a few days their paths will diverge, probably forever. The baron, once his wound heals completely, will head to the Cirith Ungol pass -- he decided to make his way to Prince Faramir in Ithilien -- while the sergeant and he will have to decide what to do next. It was strange, but having gone through several potentially fatal adventures alongside Tangorn, they have not really found out anything about his former life. ("Are you married, Baron?" -- "Well, that's a complicated question, can't just answer yes or no." "So where is your estate located?" -- "I don't think that's important any more, no doubt it has been confiscated.") Nevertheless, with every passing day Haladdin had more and more respect, if not quite love, for this slightly ironical man of few words. Looking at the baron, for the first time he could relate to the idea of `inborn nobility.' Another quality he could sense in Tangorn was unusual for an aristocrat -- dependability, of a kind different from, say, Tzerlag's, but quite certain all the same.

  Being of the third estate, Haladdin had always had a lukewarm view of aristocracy. He could never understand how one could be proud not of the achievements of one's ancestors, whether in work or war, but rather of how far one could trace their genealogy, especially since most of those "noble knights" had been nothing but lucky and ruthless highway robbers, murder their trade and betrayal their calling. Besides, the doctor had despised idlers since childhood. Still, he felt subconsciously that were the useless and immoral aristocracy to disappear, the world would irretrievably lose some of its color; most likely it would become more just, perhaps cleaner, but for sure duller, and that alone is worth something! After all, he himself was a part of a brotherhood much more exclusive than any based on heredity; Haladdin knew with absolute certainty that he had been knighted by Someone much more powerful than the King of the Reunited Kingdom or the Caliph of Khand. Isn't it strange that almost nobody realizes how undemocratic science and art are by their very nature...

  The sergeant interrupted his musings by suggesting they draw for the first watch. A small desert owl drifted like a giant feather some fifteen feet over their heads, its hoot reminding all the good children to go to bed already. "You crash, guys," Haladdin offered, "I'm going to clean up, too." Strictly speaking, this whole evening -- with a fire, however well concealed, and no sentry for a while -- was a major security lapse. However, Tzerlag had judged the risk very small, since the search for Eloar has been called off and Elvish patrols do not stray far from the highway otherwise. After all, people have to relax sometime; constant vigilance can backfire, too.

  The fire had died down in the meantime -- salsolas produce almost no embers, turning directly into ash -- and Haladdin put Tzerlag's `Khandian' bowl into the brewing pot and took it down to the stream to wash up. He had already put the clean pot down on the shore gravel and was warming fingers numb from icy water with his breath when quick flickers on the surrounding boulders told him that the fire was building up again. Who's still up? -- he wondered, -- can't see anything against the firelight... The black silhouette by the fire was motionless, its hands stretched towards the quickly rising orange flames. The circle of light widened smoothly, illuminating their packs, Tangorn's crutches leaning against a boulder, and both sleeping forms... Both?! So who's sitting by the fire? Suddenly the doctor realized something else: he had gone on his twenty-yard dishwashing mission without any weapons. No weapons at all, which probably had just doomed his friends. The person sitting by the fire turned unhurriedly towards the hapless sentry and made a commanding beckoning gesture. It was clear as day that had he so desired, all three of them would have been dead by now. Haladdin made his way back to the fire in a kind of a daze, sat down opposite the black-cloaked intruder -- and caught his breath as if hit with a body blow: the closely drawn cowl concealed nothing but emptiness, with two dim scarlet embers gazing intently at him from the inside. He was facing a nazg l.

  Chapter 15

  The Nazg l! An ancient magical order, ever surrounded by most ominous rumor. Black wraiths, supposedly in touch with the highest powers of Mordor; the miracles ascribed to them were such that no serious person would ever believe them. Nor had Haladdin believed them, but now a nazg l was here for his soul... Having said that common phrase in his mind, he almost bit his tongue. Despite being a skeptic and a rationalist, Haladdin had nevertheless always known that some things are better left untouched, lest one lose his fingers... Suddenly he heard a voice, quiet and a little husky, with a hard-to-place accent, issuing, it seemed, not from the darkness under the hood, but from somewhere off to the side, or from above:

  "Are you afraid of me, Haladdin?"

  "Well, to be honest..."

  "So say it straight: yes, I'm afraid. You see, I could have assumed... er... a more neutral form, but I've too little strength left. So please bear with me, it'll not be for long. Although it must be creepy to one unused to such things."

  "Thank you," Haladdin answered gruffly, feeling his fear suddenly dissipate without a trace.

  "Could you at least introduce yourself, since you know me but I don't know you?"

  "Actually, you do know me, if only by hearsay: Sharya-Rana, at your service." The edge of the cowl dipped in a small bow. "To be more precise, I was Sharya-Rana in my previous life."

  "Amazing!" Now Haladdin was sure that he was dreaming, and tried to behave accordingly.

  "A personal conversation with Sharya-Rana himself -- I would've gladly given five years of my life for that. By the way, you have a rather interesting lexicon for a Vendotenian who lived more than a century ago."

  "It's your lexicon, not mine." Haladdin could have sworn that for a split second the darkness under the cowl coalesced into a smirk. "I'm simply using your words, it's no effort for me. Although, if you prefer..."

  "No, this is fine." Total delusion! "But tell me, honored Sharya-Rana, they say that all the Nazg l are former kings?"

  "There are kings among us, too, as well as doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, and such. As you can see, some of us are mathematicians."

  "So is it true that after publishing The Natural Basis of Celestial Mechanics you turned completely to theology?"

  "Yes, but that, too, is all behind me, in my former life."

  "And when you leave those former lives, you simply shed your tired flesh and acquire unlimited powers and immortality?"

  "No. We are long-lived, but mortal. Indeed, we are always nine -- that is the tradition -- but members of the Nine change. As for unlimited powers... it's really an unimaginably heavy burden. We are the magic shield that had for ages protected the little oasis of Reason in which your light-minded civilization had so comfortably nestled. It is absolutely alien to the World in which we had to be born, and Middle Earth is struggling against this alien presence with all the might of its magic. When we manage to absorb a blow, we dematerialize, and then it is simply very painful; whereas when we make a mistake and a blow reaches your little world... What we feel then has no name in any human language: all the World's pain, all the World's fear, all the World's despair is the payment for our work. If you only knew how emptiness can hurt..." The burning coals under the hood seemed filmed with ash momentarily. "In other words, you shouldn't envy us our powers."

  "Forgive me," Haladdin mumbled. "None of us even suspect... they tell all kind of tales about you... I myself thought that you're phantoms that don't care about the real world."

  "On the contrary, we do care a lot. For example, I'm well acquainted with your work."

  "Really?!"

  "Oh yes. Congratulations: what you did the year before last with your study of nerve tissue will inaugurate a new era in physiology. Not sure that you'll make it into a school textbook, but a university c
ourse certainly. Provided, of course, that after the recent events this world will ever have textbooks and universities."

  "Yeah?" Haladdin was doubtful. Sure, to hear this kind of praise from Sharya-Rana himself (provided that this was, indeed, Sharya-Rana) was pleasant beyond belief, but the great mathematician seemed not so competent in a foreign subject. "I'm afraid that you're confusing a couple of things. I did indeed achieve a few good results studying how poisons and antidotes work, but that work with nerve fibers was just a fleeting whim. A couple of cute experiments, a hypothesis that still needs a lot of checking..."

  "I never confuse anything," the nazg l snapped coldly. "That little paper is the best work you have done and will ever do; at the very least, you've immortalized your name. I say this not because I believe it, but because I know it. We have some ways to see the future, and use them sometimes."

  "Well, sure, you must be interested in the future of science."

  "In that particular case our main interest was you rather than science."

  "Me?!"

  "Yes, you. Still, not everything is clear, which is why I'm here to ask a few questions. Most of them will be... rather personal, and I only ask for one thing: please answer as honestly as you think necessary, but don't invent anything; that'd be useless anyway. And please stop looking around all the time! There are no other people for..." -- the nazg l paused for a moment -- "at least twenty-three miles in any direction, and your friends will sleep soundly until we're done here. So -- are you ready to answer under those conditions?"

  "As I understand it," Haladdin smiled crookedly, "you can obtain my answers without my consent."

  "Yes, I can," the nazg l nodded, "but I will not. Not with you, anyway. The thing is, I have a certain proposition for you, so we must at least trust each other... Hey, do you think I'm here to buy your immortal soul?" Haladdin mumbled something unintelligible. "Oh, please -- that's complete nonsense!"

  "What's nonsense?"

  "Buying a soul, that's what. Be it known to you that a soul can be obtained as a gift, as a sacrifice, it can be lost -- but it can be neither bought nor sold. It's like love: there's no give- and-take, otherwise it's just not love. Besides, I'm really not that interested in your soul."

  "Really? " Strangely, that stung. "So what interests you, then?"

  "First of all, I'm interested in finding out why a brilliant scientist would quit his job, which was the meaning of his life rather than just a livelihood, and volunteer as an army field medic."

  "Well, for example, he was interested in verifying some of his ideas about how poisons work in practice. Such a wealth of data was being lost, you know..."

  "So the Elf-wounded soldiers of the South Army were nothing but guinea pigs to you? That's a lie! I know you like my own two hands, from your idiotic experiments on yourself to... Why the hell are you trying to seem more cynical than you are?"

  "But the practice of medicine predisposes one to certain cynicism, especially military medicine. You know, they give this test to all novice field medics. Say that you get three wounded men: one with a belly wound, one with a serious thigh wound -- open break, blood loss, shock, the works -- and one with a glancing shoulder wound. You can only operate one at a time, so where do you start? Surely, all novices say, it's the belly wound. No, says the examiner. While you're busy with him, and it's nine out of ten that he's going to die anyway, the guy with the thigh wound will get complications and will at least lose his leg, and most likely die, too. So you have to start with the most serious wound among those who have a decent chance of survival -- in our case, the thigh wound. As for the belly wound, well... give the man an analgesic and leave him to the One's will. To a normal person this must seem cynical and cruel, but at war you can only choose between bad and worse, so this is the only way. It was only in Barad-Dur that we could talk nicely, over tea and jam, about how every human life is invaluable..."

  "Something doesn't add up here. If all your considerations are eminently practical, why did you carry the baron and risked the whole team, rather than administering the `strike of mercy'?"

  "Where's the contradiction? It's plainly obvious that you have to help your comrade to the hilt, even at the greatest risk: you save him today, he'll save you tomorrow. As for the `strike of mercy', don't worry -- were it necessary, we would've done it in the best form... It used to be better in the old times, when wars were declared in advance, didn't involve peasants, and a wounded man could simply surrender. Too bad that we weren't born then, but no inhabitant of those glass-house times can cast a stone at us."

  "A beautiful exposition, Field Medic, sir, but I suspect that you'd ask the sergeant to do the `strike of mercy'. No? All right then, another question, again about practical logic. Have you considered that a leading physiologist sitting in Barad-Dur and studying antidotes professionally could save a lot more lives than a field medic?"

  "Of course I've considered it. It's just that -- sometimes there are situations when a man has to do an obviously stupid thing just to retain his self-respect."

  "Even if this self-respect is ultimately bought with others' lives?"

  "Well... I'm not sure. After all, the One may have His own ideas about that."

  "So you make the decision, but the One bears responsibility for it? Wonderful! Haven't you told the same thing to Kumai in almost the exact same words I've just used? Remember? You had no chance, of course -- once a Troll decides something, that's the end of it. "We may not sit out the battle which will decide the fate of the Motherland" -- and so an excellent mechanic becomes an army engineer, Second Class. A truly priceless acquisition for the South Army! In the meantime it seems to you that Sonya is looking at you strangely: sure, her brother is fighting at the front while her bridegroom is cutting up rabbits at the University like there's not a war on. So then you can think of nothing better than to follow Kumai (truly it is said that stupidity is contagious), so that the girl is bereft of both brother and bridegroom. Am I right?"

  For some time Haladdin stared at the flames dancing over the coals (strange thing: the fire keeps burning, although the nazg l doesn't seem to be adding any wood). He had the distinct feeling of having been exposed in something untoward. What the hell!

  "In other words, doctor, your head is a total mess, if you pardon the expression. You can make decisions, no question about that, but can't complete a single logical construct; rather, you slide into emotionalism. However, in our case this is actually not bad."

  "What's not bad?"

  "You see, should you decide to accept my proposition, you will thereby take on an opponent that is immeasurably more powerful than you are. However, your actions are frequently totally irrational, so he'll have a hell of a time guessing what you'll do. It is quite possible that this is our only hope."

  Chapter 16

  "That's interesting," Haladdin said after thinking a little. "Go ahead, tell me your proposition, I'm intrigued."

  "Wait a bit, all in good time. First of all, be aware that your Sonya is alive and well, and even relatively safe. So you can actually take her and go to Umbar or Khand to continue your studies; after all, it is precisely the accumulation and preservation of knowledge that..."

  "Enough already!" Haladdin grimaced. "I'm not leaving here for anywhere... that's what you want to hear, right?"

  "Right," Sharya-Rana nodded. "However, a man should have a choice, and for men like you it's especially important."

  "Ri--i-i-ight, just so that later you can shrug and say: `You got into this crap all by yourself, buddy -- no one was prodding you with a sharp stick!' What if I do, indeed, tell you to get lost and beat it to Umbar -- what then?"

  "Well, you won't. Haladdin, please don't think that I'm daring you. There will be a lot of work to be done here, very hard and mortally dangerous work, so we will need everybody: soldiers, mechanics, poets..."

  "Poets? Why those?"

  "Seemingly, those will be needed no more than all the rest. We will have to save everything that ca
n be saved on this Earth, but first and foremost -- the memory of who we are and who we were. We must preserve it like embers under the ashes -- in the catacombs or in the diaspora -- and poets are indispensable for that."

  "So I will take part in those rescues?"

  "No, not you. I have to tell you a sad secret: all our current activity in Mordor can't really change anything. We have lost the most important battle in the history of Arda -- the magic of the White Council and the Elves overcame the magic of the Nazg l -- and now the green shoots of reason and progress, bereft of our protection, will be weeded out throughout Middle Earth. The forces of magic will reconfigure this world to their liking, and henceforth it will have no room for technological civilizations like that of Mordor. The three- dimensional spiral of history will lose its vertical dimension and collapse into a closed circle; centuries and ages will pass, but the only things to change will be the names of the kings and the battles they win. As for Men... Men will remain pitiful deficient creatures who will not dare raise their eyes to look at the masters of the world -- the Elves; it's only in a changing world that a mortal can turn his curse into a blessing and rise above the Immortals through generational change. In two or three decades the Elves will turn Middle Earth into a well-tended tidy lawn, and Men into cute pets; they will deprive Man of a very small thing -- his right to Create, and grant him a myriad of plain and simple pleasures instead... Actually, Haladdin, I can assure you that most people will make this trade without remorse."