The Last Ringbearer

Epilogue

Our narrative is based entirely on Tzerlag’s tales, however incomplete, that are preserved by his clan as an oral tradition. It should be stressed that we have no documents that might attest to its veracity. The one who might have been expected to leave the most detailed account – Haladdin – had not recorded even a word on the subject; the other participants in the hunt for Galadriel’s Mirror – Tangorn and Kumai – remained silent for obvious reasons. Therefore, whoever would like to declare the whole thing to be the old-age ravings of an Orc who wanted to replay the finale of the War of the Ring is free to do so with clear conscience. After all, that’s what memoirs are for: to let veterans recast their losses as victories after the fact.

On the other hand, those who consider this story to be, if not a true, then at least a plausible version of history, might be interested in certain events outside its immediate time frame. Tzerlag related that he had accompanied Haladdin from Orodruin to Ithilien; the doctor seemed very ill and didn’t say ten words in a row throughout the journey. On one of their stops the sergeant fell in a sleep so deep that he woke up only by next evening, nauseous and with a monster headache. Instead of his comrade he found the mithril coat by his side, with a farewell letter wrapped in it. Haladdin wrote that Middle Earth was now free from the Elvish menace and that in his capacity as the commanding officer of the operation he thanked the sergeant for excellent service and awarded him the precious armor. As for the doctor himself, regretfully he ‘had paid such a price for victory as to see no place for himself among people.’ Those words led the scout to fear the worst, but the hunch did not pan out: judging by his tracks, Haladdin had simply reached the Ithilien highway and took it to points south.

Interestingly, a few years ago a certain light-minded doctoral student at the Umbar University’s Medieval History Department took this legend at face value and invested the effort to comb the account books of several Eastern monasteries, which have been keeping records for the last fifteen hundred years with an unnatural thoroughness. What do you think – the whelp did unearth a very curious coincidence: in January 3020 (by the then current calendar) an Umbarian-looking monk did join the Gurwan Aren cave monastery in the mountains of North Vendotenia. This monk took an oath of silence and donated an inoceramium ring to the monastery. This led the student to make (quoting the minutes of the departmental meeting) “a hasty, unfounded, and totally non-scientific claim of identity of the said monk with the legendary Haladdin.” Naturally, the doctoral committee administered a proper tongue-lashing to the wannabe ghost-hunter, so that the young man forswore departures from his approved dissertation topic and has been dutifully dusting clay fragments from the garbage piles of Khand’s Seventh Dynasty ever since.

As for the real Haladdin, his name can be found in any university course on history of science – as an example of the dangers of sudden leaps forward – rather than physiology, his life’s work. His brilliant studies of nerve tissue function have been so far ahead of his time as to fall out of scientific context and be forgotten. Only three centuries later did the medics of the Ithilien School come across his works while searching for ancient antidotes. It became clear then that Haladdin had beaten the famous Vespuno by more than a hundred years; not only did he prove experimentally the electric nature of axon stimulation, but he also predicted the existence of neurotransmitters, and even modeled how they should work. Unfortunately, only historians are interested in the ‘who was there first’ kind of things; the scientific community has no use for this information. In any event Haladdin’s last known work is dated year 3016 of the Third Age and the official version is that he perished during the War of the Ring.

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 population of the cities 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 grow from the right place (rather than out of 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 the first gold nugget in Ithilien in the creek’s gravel bed, 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 about 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 those matters is truly without limit). The sergeant’s great-great-grandson ended up turning it over (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 real 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’ll 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 story of 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 just extremely rare in Arda’s crust (its clark is 4 x 108; compare gold at 5 x 1077 or iridium at 1 x 107) – 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 had been 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 characteristics aside from 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 had 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 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 string of broken hearts – none of which brought him any family 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 had been replaced 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 reduce everything to primitive erotica. Alas, the recent Amengian screen version – The Spy and The Whore – was 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 – Harado-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 Jacuzzi were hanged in the courtyard of the Ar-Horan prison on one of the exhaustingly hot August nights of 3019; Flag Captain Makarioni and seven other officers that had participated in ‘Admiral Carnero’s mutiny’ were executed along with them. This 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’ 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, and its participants deserters and traitors who had abandoned their oath and military 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 a foreign invasion, 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 concluding statement: “Let the world perish but justice be done!” Be that as it may, the executed officials of the Umbarian secret service should have known 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 at the Field of Pelennor. 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 textbook, let me remind you that Aragorn’s reign was one of the most magnificent in Middle Earth history and is one of the watershed events separating the Middle Ages (the Third Age) from modernity. The usurper did not try to win the love 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 free farmers. These factors were the basis for the famous ‘Gondorian economic miracle’ and the colonial expansion that followed, while the representative legislative bodies Aragorn had created to counterweight 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 advanced and supported science, craftsmanship, 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, with 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; 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 Annuminas. In any case none of those portraits have anything in common with the chiseled 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 river Harnen to conduct a series of intelligence and sabotage operations: “…by all signs the fate of Middle Earth will be decided there, 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 nomad Aranians against their Haradi masters, which had led, domino-fashion, to the fall of the entire ominous Harad Empire and its fracturing into a non-threatening 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 buying a son of an Aranian chieftain at the Khand slave market appears entirely unreliable; the idea that his way to power went 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.

But the fate of Éomer is so incredible that some authors 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 great surprise and 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 monarch remembered a certain marvelous eastern faith that had led him to victory on the Field of Pelennor. At first Éomer wanted to make Hakimianism 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 were and are a fertile field for armies of theologians. Be that as it may, he converted his entire Royal Guard, idle and ready to fight anyone at all, to that sect (legend has it that one of Éomer’s warriors, when asked how he felt on the path of True Faith, responded: “Not bad, Tulkas be praised – my boots aren’t leaking”) and went South. The king left his cousin- twice-removed as regent in Edoras; sure thing, 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 did renounce his previous life, 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 ‘good’ Hakimians dubbed him The Prophet’s Sword, while the ‘schismatics’ called him God’s Wrath. At the end of the third battle, when the heretics’ defeat was all but assured, Éomer was killed by a missile from an enemy catapult – truly the best death a genuine commander 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 these events is mostly derived from the adapted Western epos, The Lord of the Rings, at best, and often from the Sword of Isildur TV series and the Galleries of Moria first-person shooter game.

I have to sonorously remind those critics that The Lord of the Rings is the historiography of the victors, who have a clear interest in presenting the vanquished in a certain way. Had genocide taken place back then (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 rulers that would relinquish their 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 wonderful 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 doubtful. 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