Кирилл Еськов - The Last Ringbearer

“Oh yeah? Then I’m dropping my ball into the crater! Run like hell if you can! You can figure yourself how many seconds you’ve got – I’ve never been good at figuring in my head…”

Wolverine, lieutenant of the Secret Guard, was also facing a difficult choice at about the same time.

He had already reached the shores of the Anduin and had a good chance of getting to the boat that would save him when the Elves dogging his heels managed to chase him onto a kurum – a boulder-strewn slope that the real wolverines favor for their lairs. Trying to take a shortcut, the lieutenant ran straight across the kurum , leaping from boulder to boulder. It is most important to maintain one’s momentum and never stop when moving like that – jump and bounce, jump and bounce. This is not too difficult in dry weather, but now, after several days of rain, the lichens covering every boulder with black and orange spots were water- logged, and every spot was mortally dangerous.

Wolverine had barely made it through a half of the slope when he realized that the pursuers were closer than he thought: arrows began falling around him. Those arrows arrived on high trajectories at the very end of their range, but the lieutenant knew too much of the Elves’ skill – the best archers in Middle Earth – not to steal a glance backwards. After another leap he pushed off a large stone with his left foot while turning to the left – and that was when the soggy lichen, slippery as the proverbial banana peel, gave way under his Mordorian boot (I knew this hard-soled footwear would fail me!) and Wolverine was thrown to the right into a narrowing crevice. His breaking fingernails left rips across the lichen spots on the boulder, but could not hold him. A stupid thought flitted across the lieutenant’s mind – “wish I were a real wolverine” – right before his right ankle, stuck in the crevice like in a steel trap, cracked and shot a bolt of pain through his spine, knocking him out. …Strangely, his unconsciousness had lasted a very short time. Wolverine managed to prop himself up in the crevice so as to rest his weight on the uninjured leg. Now he could move his backpack over his head and in front of him. The sheaf of Dol Guldur papers had a bottle of fire jelly attached to it (praise Grizzly for thinking of everything!), so all he had to do now was strike a flint on the ignition charge – an air-tight porcelain bottle filled with the light fraction of naphtha. Only after untying the strap of the backpack and locating the flint in his pocket did he think to look around, leaning back (it was impossible to turn around) just in time to see column-like figures in gray-green cloaks kind of slowly falling on him from the pale noon sky. With mere meters separating him from the pursing Elves, the lieutenant knew with certainty that of the two duties left to him in this life – setting off the ignition charge and chewing the green pill of salvation – he only had time to perform one, and an officer of Task Force Féanor should know which one took priority… So it was that the last sight Wolverine saw before a blow to the head knocked him out was that of the bluish naphtha flame licking the slightly frayed saltpeter-soaked fire cord.

He came to in a large clearing with a good view of the valley of the Great River. His hands were tied behind his back, his Mordorian uniform was all singed tatters, and the entire left side of his body was one large burn – the device worked, praise Aulë! Belatedly he saw an Elf squatting to the left of him, on the side of the eye almost covered with dried lymph. The Elf was disgustedly wiping his flask with a rag – apparently, he had just been pouring Elvish wine down the prisoner’s throat.

“You awake?” the Elf inquired in a melodious voice.

“Mordor and the Eye!” Wolverine responded automatically (imagine dying as an Orc! Well, them’s the breaks…)

“Quit pretending, dear ally!” The Firstborn was smiling, but his eyes burned with such hatred that his vertical cat’s pupils narrowed into tiny slits. “You are going to tell us everything about those strange games of His Majesty Elessar Elfstone, aren’t you, beastie? There shouldn’t be any secrets between allies.”

“Mordor… and… the Eye…” The lieutenant’s voice was still even, although Manwe only knew the effort it took: the Elf had casually dropped his hand to the prisoner’s broken ankle and…

“Sir Engold, look! What’s that?!”

At the cry of his comrades the Elf turned around and stared, frozen, at something resembling a colossal dandelion swiftly grow to the sky beyond the Anduin, right where Caras Galadhon ought to be – a thin blinding-white stalk crowned with a bright-red bulbous ‘flower.’ Almighty Eru, if this thing is indeed in Galadhon, how huge must it be? What Galadhon? There’s probably not even ashes left there… A strangled cry made him turn back: “Sir Engold, the prisoner! What’s happening to him?..”

Fast as he turned back, it was all over before he could see it happen. The prisoner was dead and no physician was necessary to confirm that. In a few moments, right under the gaze of the astonished Elves, the man had turned into a skeleton covered here and there in remnants of mummified skin. The brown-yellow skull, its eye sockets filled with sand, grinned at Engold from between shrunken blackened lips, as if mockingly inviting him to ask his questions – immerse me in the truth potion, perhaps that will help?

And in the palace in Minas Tirith Aragorn watched in astonishment the subtle changes taking place in the face of Arwen, seated across from him. Nothing seemed to change, really, but he felt with absolute certainty that something important, perhaps the most important, was going, slipping away like a blissful morning dream slips from memory… some magical incompleteness of her features, which became completely human. When this metamorphosis was over in a few moments, he reached a verdict summing up that period of his life: a beautiful woman, no question about it. Very beautiful, even. But that’s all.

None of his subjects saw that, nor would they have ascribed any importance to it had they seen it. What they did dutifully reflect in the chronicles of that day was another event of that noon: when the Mirror was destroyed in Lórien, the other six palantíri remaining in Middle Earth detonated, too, and a monstrous geyser almost half a mile high shot up from the Anduin-receiving Bay of Belfalas. The geyser spawned a forty-foot tsunami that wiped out several fishing villages together with their inhabitants; it is doubtful that anyone recognized that those unfortunates, too, were victims of the War of the Ring.

The most surprising thing is that despite his powers of observation and insight His Majesty Elessar Elfstone had not connected those two events that happened at noon of August the first of the Year 3019 of the Third Age and in a sense became its final moment, either. For sure, no one after him had ever connected them, having had no opportunity to do so.

“Bend the arm, quick!” Haladdin ordered, tightening the tourniquet above Tzerlag’s left elbow. “Keep the rag pressed there, lest you bleed out.”

The sergeant’s hand ‘unfroze’ the moment the volcano swallowed the palantír , so now his blood gushed like it always does when a man loses a couple of fingers. They had no means to stop the bleeding other than the tourniquet: it turned out that the blood-clotting medicines from the Elvish medkit, including the legendary mandrake root (which reputedly could even patch a severed artery), have stopped working entirely. Who would have thought that this was magic, too?

“Listen… so we won, right?”

“Yes, dammit! If it can be called victory…”