Chapter Text
The mountains—this mountain—are wholly different from the lush, maple-clad hills of the east. There, a flagged evergreen would rear its head above its brothers, tall and hardy even near the uppermost heights, and an ocean of foliage would roll about it. Gwindor knew those hills, years ago, when he was a free man with an unmarked back. He has never said as much to anyone living, for to do so would be to awaken the dead.
Here, pines hunched like broken men are the only trees that brave Diablo's cragged crown. Bauglir himself did not try to reach so high. His stronghold nestles among the slipping rock-faces and rough undergrowth, which he has blithely carved and hewn in defiance of nature's hand.
Gothmog's camp, rather, was sensibly built in the flat dell between two clefted foothills. The land around it is grassland of a sort, but not at all akin to the even prairies at the country's heart. Rather, it was dense with shrubs until the slaves rooted them out; arid until fertilized; hard on its unsought masters no matter how they ground it beneath their feet.
If the slave-made road—Gwindor knew two men who died in its making—was followed farther down-slope, the pine trees stretched their arms up and together, making the forest into which he hopes Russandol has fled.
The forest meets another road: Bauglir's secret road down to the forge. And though the forge was a place of yet more bondage, the forest follows the chill splash of a carefree river, out and out. At the edge of the forest the shrubby fields open wider, grassier, the sort of place where horses can run.
There aren’t enough horses to spare. Gwindor is sick to the pit of his stomach, to the marrow of his bones.
“Carry what you can,” Haleth ordered. After a moment, the stunned slaves realized that she meant: carry what weapons you can find, carry what food you can find, and otherwise, carry each other.
Gwindor cannot be the one to carry Estrela. His shoulder will not bear her. Instead, he does what he can to strip weapons from the dead. There are many dead, but most of them were Gothmog’s. Most of them do not have the faces of friends; those that do are equally ugly.
He must keep himself from turning round and round in circles, looking for Russandol.
“Where is Russandol?”
He shouldn’t have let the lad go.
“There are two—two children,” Gwindor says, in answer to Haleth’s inquiry. “Missing. He went to find them.” Desperately, he adds, “We could not delay.”
Haleth tilts her head as if considering him and his loyalty, him and that part of his warped old soul that wants to lie down and die—or that simply wants to wait.
“Hmm,” she says. For the first time, Gwindor remembers what Haldar told them. Not only his sister, was Haleth; his twin. Almost as young as the boy was, when he—
Not so far from Gelmir’s age.
“He should not have gone alone,” Haleth says, hard.
Gwindor knows what she cannot. “He would not have let anyone go with him,” he answers. “It is dangerous.”
Dangerous, for one or many. Dangerous, for Mairon’s prey and Bauglir’s favorites.
“Your Russandol is a fool.” She purses her lips. “Come now, or are you a fool as well? We are to keep you safe. No delay.”
Before the roofs were up, before the women came, Gwindor and Lem and the rest of the slaves who were builders slept on the hard ground they cleared, all but gasping dust by night as well as by day. Gwindor was chosen with a handful of others to climb the tortuous path to thinner, cleaner air. He knew some from his crew had the mountain for tombs; rock-work was like that. It left few unmarred.
It left many dead.
There had been too many nights, since they were driven up from the south. Too many nights, and he could not—in the sunshine, bright as it was that long-ago hell-day—
Hours passed, like this.
(He could not remember Gelmir’s face.)
The wind roared, dry. The sun burned. It was summer—he was spending another summer under the savagery of the whip. His hands bled already, from his own clumsiness. The day’s labor was still ahead.
Gwindor climbed like a wretched ant to the hole in the mountain, and there he found no light.
It is dark inside the mountain, even when lamps are hung overhead; even when windows are chiseled out.
They move more quickly than Gwindor expected. Which is to say: it is still a crawl, choking in the smoke that follows them like a gathering storm. They travel over the makeshift fields, down a road cut through the hills that is wide enough to allow a wagon.
This is Gothmog’s road.
If—if the plan had been as of old, but if the victory was still theirs, Gwindor would have led his fellows in the opposite direction that they now track. Here are a thousand questions that all bear the same, remembered face. Here are two:
Would the forest have saved them? Will it save Russandol?
He is worn, hurt. His hands are burned. There is no red-headed scarecrow to look at him with sad, sea-brined eyes, and ask him if he is well, if he is angry, if he is going to be brave. Belle is carried by one of Haleth’s men. Her eye stays shut.
Lem is gone. Haldar is gone. Even the children are gone, perhaps, and Russandol—
Gwindor clenches his fists so tightly that his shoulder howls. He quickens his pace, as if each step away does not break him, and draws level with Haleth, who leads her horse by the reins.
“I warn you, Gothmog shoots fast,” Gwindor says.
She does not look at him. “Except when he runs.”
“A man can do both.”
“I know.” Haleth sighs. Her leather coat has a burn-mark along the shoulder, and her right hand, gripping the reins, is wrapped in a bandage stained red. “How many men are at the railroad?”
“I do not know. Some of us were sent there, in my time here. They would not fight us, I think. I—” and he gestures at his shoulder, ashamed. “I was no good.”
“You planned this. You and your Russandol.”
“Yes.”
“It was foolish, but well-done.” She says, looking at him, “Who killed my brother?”
“Gothmog.” Gwindor stares her down as he answers, because only a coward would look away. “It was Gothmog.”
Russandol has an Eastern accent, an orphan’s loneliness, a thief’s skill. When sleep truly takes him, he looks like a child in the way he tilts his head against his hand.
This is what they find at the railroad: Haleth’s friends, victorious. They have not burned the shanties to the ground, nor they killed anyone, that Gwindor sees. Gothmog and his men are simply…not there.
“They fled,” says one square-jawed young man with stiff, wild hair and a long rifle over his shoulder. “Cowards.” He pauses, looking with furrowed brow over Haleth’s straggling band, who have dragged on nigh half a day to reach uncertain freedom. Gwindor thinks the man looks like he is counting. “What…”
“Freemen,” Haleth says. “If you’ve taken what you can from this place, we must be on. Snow’s coming.”
Gwindor sees a grey ribbon of cloud in the east. Almost nothing, yet. Almost nothing. The day is not even half-cold.
“Fingon has gathered what food and medicines they kept here,” the man says. “It wasn’t much. I’ll fetch the rest. They’re scouting.”
Gwindor takes his leave, heavy-hearted. He has drawn the best map he can, in words and with a scrap of charcoal that one of Haleth’s followers had tucked in her vest. He does not speak to anyone he does not know unless he must. Every face is Russandol’s face.
Russandol told him he would meet him at the edge of the forest in a day’s time. A day.
Gwindor has with him what Haleth was willing to give, and what he was willing to accept from her. A coat for himself, one for his friend; a gun, a waterskin, a little food. It has been a day of easy victories for other people.
His hands are still stained with Lem’s blood. Lem’s body has not even the dignity of a grave.
Neither did Gelmir’s.
The mountain seems neither near nor far. It simply is. Gwindor is a man gone mad, but he has been that—and has known that—for a long time. Would a man with all his wits have refused Haleth’s help, not once but twice? Would a man with all his wits chase another man’s death-wish and call it survival for both of them?
What warmth there is sets with the sun.
Somewhere, Russandol lives. Beneath the coming clouds, above the unforgiving earth: he lives.
Gwindor has to believe that.