Кирилл Еськов: The Last Ringbearer

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 will 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. In other words, let’s just wait a week or so, while the king gets better; yes, just a 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.

Gondor, the Field of Pelennor

March 15, 3019

The Mordorians only realized that they have been had when the brown splotch of Rohan’s army began spreading through the northern edge of the white fog blanketing the Field of Pelennor, 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 field 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 breakthrough, this was what he saw.

A phalanx six deep and about a hundred men across moved 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 weirdly out of place about 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 invincible 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 bombs 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 depression on the Pelennor field, 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 lighting-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.