Chapter Text
I
The door stood ajar, hung halfway across with a velvet curtain. Smoke hazed around it and drifted out into the hall. There had been complaints, at first, but now the smoke and the curtain and the inhabitant behind it were permanent fixtures of the Oriental Hotel. When there was no smoke, he had guests that brought in enough revenue to make him worth keeping. The complaints had therefore ceased.
Outside the door, footsteps creaked on the landing.
“Entrez!” he called, and a neatly dressed man, not above thirty and dressed in a shimmering coat a little too worn to be splendid, came rustling in.
“I have been called away on business,” said Glaurung, and Melkor Bauglir heaved an indulgent sigh, putting aside his pipe.
“My dear young man,” he said, the words seeming to puff up and circle the rafters with the smoke rings sent heavenward a moment before, “You sound as if all the world is against you.”
“Business has been against me, of late.” Glaurung did not sit down. Ordinarily, he did, but he had not come more than once or twice when the room (or its inhabitant) was in such a state of artful disarray. Standing, then, he curled the brim of his hat in his fingers.
Melkor had often had cause to examine those fingers, which were thin and surprisingly smooth—but rather unshapely, all told. Not the sort of fingers one wanted to shape, or use…or punish.
Glaurung added, “I am grateful for your attentions.”
The opium still pleasantly ripe in his lungs and veins, Melkor guided himself with especial care towards the great carafe of port wine that glittered amidst a heap of discarded finery. “Do you fancy a drink?”
“Always,” said Glaurung. His lips—too thin, too inexpressive—formed a fine line as he surveyed what no doubt looked, to him, like wreckage.
Melkor himself hid a smile.
“My table is a humble one,” he said, an obvious falsehood, offered like a gift. “If it has allowed you meet and mix with some of this promising city’s most estimable gentlemen—if not its most pleasing ladies—I trust you will remember me as more than a doddering old fool.”
He poured a glass of port for this guest, who had haunted his doorway long after a message from Anne McCalagon had been a reasonable excuse for his coming. Then Melkor said,
“Sit down,” and Glaurung did not refuse, because Glaurung was a snake who had grown to fancy the mice this master fed him. He would refuse Melkor nothing.
I disgust you, little worm, but you like my flattery. My flattery and my friends.
There was no love between them. It was not like that.
“What is this business you speak of?” Melkor asked, tapping an overlong nail against the fine weave of his soiled trousers. In six hours, he would be as sober as a lamb, ready to entertain two bankers, three councilmen, and their wives. Until then, his more intimate acquaintances would have to bear his preparatory guises.
“Madame McCalagon,” Glaurung said, smiling at the toes of his boots in an unpleasant way that revealed, when his eyes slowly lifted to meet Melkor’s, just how warmly he felt towards that blackhearted dame, “Has new plans for the vineyard.”
Melkor raised his eyebrows. The mind, bisected by the drug, could see both the plain-faced dandy before him and juxtapose, over and under his fine clothes, the pretty features of another.
God, it had been so long since he had—felt. He needed flesh to work, and soon.
“New plans?” he said, just as attentively as if he was all there. “For the vineyard?”
“There is newly arrived troop of soldiers from the East,” Glaurung said. “They’ve come to settle…well I think they’ve come to settle the same unrest you’ve been concerned with, though we both know there’s been precious little rattling from Mithrim since you…since the little brat…since.”
Melkor had twitted him already about the loss of Maeglin, then soothed the lad’s conscience with a few tales of Thuringwethil. But now he had no thought for either of those petty prizes.
“Troops?” he said, stupid with the blight of the poppy. “From the East?”
The last word he had had was two months old. It had spoken of…delay.
Now it was April. By the first reckoning, they should have arrived in April. By the second—
“Eight hundred,” Glaurung said. “Give or take. That was the report she sent me. Lord knows the vineyard house is a drop in the proverbial bucket. But I suppose the old dragon no longer hopes to plant grapes. She owns all that property, and its nicely flat—for drills and such—yet out of the way. How did she get her hands on the troops, though? Oughtn’t they to be the government’s?”
Melkor was on his feet—his feet were getting away from him—he needed flesh to tear and kill. He had none, for Glaurung was pick-boned little reptile.
“They ought,” Melkor bellowed, “To be mine.”
He had settled his temper (and drenched his mind with a cool draught of good sense) by the time the supper hour came round. He had cancelled all his engagements with bankers and councilmen, and was instead in a hackney coach headed for the hotel where, based on intelligence he paid rather too handsomely for, the leader of the regiment, one Captain Bane, was dining.
It was to be a party of special magnificence. Melkor had dressed for it. Smiling as grimly as he had the night an upstart craftsman was presented to him in New York—hotblooded as the moment that a bullet rang outside his carriage and split a skull he did not want preserved—he entered the dining room of the Niantic Hotel.
Under the blazing candelabra, he saw a familiar face. Not the unknown, most likely boorish features of a captain who had not seen fit to send a timely letter. Not Anne McCalagon, gloating over her usurpation.
No. There, at the head of the long table, standing out in his plain coat among a dozen gaudy military men, was Cosomoco Gothmog.
II
Melkor Bauglir looked smaller outside the artful shadows of his mountain. Or maybe, Gothmog reflected, the man was getting old.
He had to be nearing sixty. Gothmog himself was past forty, but he had not noticed much decline in strength since first reaching brutal manhood.
His body and his mind worked in concert, like a well-oiled machine.
He had had an uneventful trek to meet Captain Bane, and had found the man blunt and coarse and likable. Most importantly, Bane knew nothing of Melkor personally, though he’d been dispatched (in effect) by Melkor’s brother.
Manwe Sulimo was the governor of New York State. Apparently, his influence extended to Washington; even to the ears of the President. None of this was of particular interest to Gothmog, except that it reminded him to tread carefully. Even the dullest snake could still prove to have poison in its fangs. Whenever he struck at Melkor, he must aim precisely for the head—before it struck him first.
He’d been successful on that front tonight, judging from the slack-jawed amazement on his former employer’s face. Ordinarily, Melkor oozed smug satisfaction out of every pore. Gothmog had only seen him distraught on a few occasions, and all of those had concerned a certain redheaded slave of dubious charm.
Gothmog did not cease eating the finest steak he’d had in two months (Doriath-sourced, of course) when Melkor burst into the room. He pretended not to see the questions crowning every brow.
“I beg your pardon for my late arrival,” Bauglir said to Anne McCalagon, his sonorous voice shaking a little. She was the only woman present; she did not look at all surprised to see him.
“The cats are back early from the fishmongers,” she said. “If they’ve managed to drag you in.”
“Thank you, madame, I drag myself,” Bauglir returned, with more dignity than Gothmog would have thought possible for such words—or such circumstances. Then, without taking one of the few remaining seats, he addressed himself to Captain Bane.
“David Bane, I presume? Captain in the United States’ most estimable army?”
Captain Bane rose and bowed.
“I am your host,” Bauglir said, and in his tone was an echo of the same confidence that had lured Gothmog to his service, long ago in the sultry south. There had been chattel to chase, quivering bodies to subdue, and money to be made under Melkor Bauglir—in those days. It was only here, in a harsher land, that the cracks in his façade had begun to show.
Bane was still befuddled. “My—”
“Brother to Manwe Sulimo,” Melkor said. “And overseer—” This with just a touch of acid, a touch of venom, aimed, no doubt, at Gothmog—”Of the construction of the railroad. I trust you were able to traverse it some distance?”
“Indeed,” said Bane. “It is a very fine establishment.”
“It is unfinished,” Melkor said. “Because there has been a good deal of civil unrest at this, its intended terminus. Unrest, you understand, not only caused by Indians. Might I take this seat beside you, Captain? I would be honored to speak to the man who last saw my dear brother.”
Gothmog glanced down the long expanse of the table and met Anne McCalagon’s eyes. She shrugged.
Melkor took the seat he wanted, ousting a lesser officer, and conversation resumed. Gothmog ate his meat silently and pondered. He knew that whatever plans Melkor might have, they were already undermined: Bane had been warned, by Gothmog himself, of the weakness of the man’s magpie mind.
He will call himself your master, Gothmog had said. But you didn’t come to serve a master, did you?
Bane, over a generous helping of rich drink, had shaken his head. I came to restore order.
Good, Gothmog had answered. Then you and I will get on.
Still: he needed to remember that the snake lived.
“It is so good to see you again, my friend,” Melkor said after the supper, as they mingled in a haze of cigar smoke. Gothmog did not pride himself on having an overly sensitive nose, but the man, under layers of expensive wool and brocade, smelled positively foul. It was a stark reminder that Bauglir was shockingly addicted to black-tar opium.
“Heard from the Missus that you were in the city,” said Gothmog, breathing through his mouth. “She said you’d been here a couple of months.”
“Mm. Little less, I think, than the time it took you to ride east and meet my troops.”
“I’m a traveling man,” said Gothmog, turning his cigar in his fingers. “A traveling man in search of pay.”
“Captain Bane sang your praises,” Melkor said, with the hard little smile playing round the corners of his mouth that had always, always meant bloodshed.
(Gothmog had known him for years, though they both liked to forget it.)
“Captain Bane is a man much alike to me,” said Gothmog. “It’s no wonder that you’d endeavor to do business with us both.”
If one could keep the snake well-fed—
“And here I thought,” murmured Bauglir, “That you despised me.”
He was aging. The cracks were appearing, as sure as the fault-lines in the foolish hollow of his mountain heart. But there was a good deal of use in Manwe Sulimo’s brother yet left, and a good deal of cruelty still burning in his coal-dark eyes.
It was better to have two employers, perhaps, each jealous of the other, each eager to improve upon the other.
Gothmog puffed out a beautiful ring of hot smoke.
“We had a falling-out over a plaything,” he said, just as soft. “It needn’t be more than that.”
“Needn’t it?”
“I’m a fighting man,” Gothmog said. “And so is Bane. But you’re a building man, Bauglir. Now tell me, what have you built, these months I’ve been away?”
If the snake was well-fed, and you understood its poison well, you could be its master without it knowing.
III
With careful hands that did not shake, he placed every fallen curio in its proper position. The room felt strangely empty: set in order for its own sake, not to receive visitors.
Even Glaurung would not come again. He had gone to prepare a place for new messiahs.
Anne McCalagon’s vineyard grounds would house the regiments that Melkor had fancied would be established on Gothmog’s old grounds.
The irony was bitter.
It was easy to be angry, because anger was itself as easy as opium. When he was inclined to be cautiously brilliant, as now, Melkor put anger far from himself. He wandered, instead, in memory. It had rushes of its own as potent as any drug.
Now he was thinking of his Southern empire…now he was thinking of the early days at the Mountain. Now, most naturally, he was thinking of the failed experiment that had yielded only bones for his accoutrement and a ring for his finger.
Yes, in the course of a dark year, Gothmog had wronged him more than once. Gothmog had gone ahead and made choices before, without consulting his master.
There were lessons to be learned, from that.
Melkor called for a tub of hot water and bathed at last. Amidst the pungent steam, he decided first that Gothmog was an impatient man—an intractable dog—and then that he was a predictable dog.
Yes, Gothmog always wanted to solve every disagreement with quick, convenient violence.
Why, then, did he trouble himself with searching out Bane? Nay—he must not be muddled. The answer to that was likewise a simple extension: Bane represented an orderly sort of power. To Gothmog, orderly power had infinite use.
Melkor blinked long and slow, peering through the damp haze around him, and understood, as if for the first time, why the room felt so bare. Order created new territory: spacious, open territory.
It was beloved by those who had little to hide.
He slipped under the water and held his breath. The only mysteries of Gothmog, then, were the moments when he had hidden. Most of those moments concerned Maitimo, the rotten Eden-apple at the core of all recent troubles.
Gothmog had accepted the disgraced slave with shrugging condemnation, and then… he had been changed by a winsome, wily boy.
Changed in ways he tried to hide from Melkor, which suggested weakness.
Yes, it was weakness that was of interest now. Gothmog’s weaknesses. Melkor had none, himself. He only had disappointments…of his own mind, at times, but mostly of other people’s.
He had been torn between anger and amusement, for instance, when news came of the flogging.
With one breath he might have gloated. So, Cosomoco—it has not been as easy as all that, subduing the madcap spirit that flares to life just when it seems well-muzzled!
This was satisfying—
The thought that his prize might be dead outside his own sight, less so.
Still, he had been wise to conceal his wrath. He had gone first to the squalid quarters where they kept Maitimo, and what he saw there had pleased him. He had looked past the dingy slave kneeling at the cot-side, the better to gaze upon that the long, lonely body. It looked as if Mairon had his way with it again.
It looked dead.
But it was not so. Melkor himself had felt the thrill of fever-fouled breath—what proof of life!—and had probed the warm muscle of the tongue. Then they had spoken, one to the other, just as in the days of old.
He had not expected Maitimo to return to him (the boy was, as ever, a fool), but he had been pleasantly surprised to find that Gothmog left him salvageable.
He was even more pleasantly surprised to find Gothmog nervous.
There in a cramped cabin, with lizards climbing the walls and an aura of smoke and dust around them, Melkor had of course had to look carefully for the nerves. As a rule, Gothmog showed little shift in his moods. One needed to ruminate on the angle of his pipe or cigar, or discern whether his gun was nearby.
“I told you that he would be more than you could manage.” (Gloating.)
“And I told you we ought to put a bullet in his head.” (Yet he hadn’t.)
He is afraid of you. It was the only explanation for that particular interview, and it was a comforting one. Fear was the most powerful master of all, and only one man—one boy, really—whom Melkor Bauglir had ever known had bucked peculiarly beneath its yoke. That boy had been taken to pieces, since he always fought to the other side of his fear.
But Gothmog was predictable. He could be frightened; it was only that very little could do the trick.
He fears an absence of purpose. An absence of strength.
Based on all of this, he had been an estimable overseer. It was well to credit him for that.
Would it really be a handicap to his own plans, if Gothmog overtook the training and dispatchment of these new troops? Melkor could, with the proper coaxing, aim them primarily at any interruptions of the railroad’s finishing…another task that he was eager to delegate, now that the doing had dragged on.
With Anne sitting in the web of this city, and Gothmog smugly directing a military force…it freed Melkor, really, to do what he did best.
Befriend. Envision. Expand.
Those who loved order for the power it brought them had a fatal flaw designed in that selfsame love; they accepted circumstances as they were. Gothmog, when told that he was not to shoot a wounded animal in the head had accepted this directive, though it countered his every instinct. Anne McCalagon, who hated the Spanish and those who would not do business with her, refused to unseat Thingol of Doriath because he had always been there.
Such bars would have been lifted by more creative, spirited minds.
For it must be said—Bauglir, had he known the trouble Maitimo would cause, would have killed him sooner. He had come very close, in fact, on one occasion in particular. His favored plan had always been death by starvation. He tried it for three days, with the boy bound hand and foot in the very room that had healed him.
That was doctorly. That was… beautiful.
But after those three days Melkor had had enough of his own dark poetry. He had become a little maudlin, a little regretful. He killed the priest instead, and built the boy back up.
A mistake. He could see that now.
But all his mistakes came right in the end, for he never repeated them.
In Thingol, he was faced with another dog. His choice—everybody’s choice—was to prod or shoot it, or to let lie.
Cowards chose the latter. Lovers of order chose the latter.
(They were the same.)
Melkor Bauglir, maker of mountains, was not a coward. He did not accept the supremacy of the cattle-rancher. Let Anne McCalagon have San Francisco. Let Gothmog have Manwe’s troops.
Let Mairon, for a long while, tend the Mountain.
Melkor had long since decided on his heart-right: the sweeping plains of Doriath, as much as the gem at its heart, belonged to him.
No coward would think to prevent him from taking it.