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I woke to the shriek of stone grinding against stone. In my little cell, I was accustomed only to the movement of the metal grate covering a rough opening in the door, not of the door itself. Twice a day, food and water were passed through that grate. The water came in a wooden bowl that would have been better-suited to porridge. If I did not lift it carefully in my shackled hands, it splashed precious drops on the damp, sooty ground. The food was left on the bare rock: hardtack, daily, and every other day, a scrap of dried meat. This diet, for a count of weeks, had loosened my teeth painfully. My limbs were somehow wasted and swollen at the same time, but I was an old man, and a condemned one. The state of my body did not matter.
When the door was heaved aside, letting in light, I covered my eyes in a spasm, making my chains rattle. Any light was too much for me. The men who came might have been the same who brought me here in the first place. I did not know. They dragged me out of my cell, complaining of the stench... both of the narrow, stony hole and of my dirty rags. I could not hold myself upright at first, and they held me under my arms as we moved forward down a corridor, black-walled on both sides.
I expected that they had come to kill me. In the silence of my mind, which had never, even in moments of great pain, been wrested from me, I prayed.
May Thy virtues take the place of my sins; may Thy merits be my only adornment in the sight of God and make up for all that is wanting in me…
“Step lively,” grunted one of my guards, and we began to mount a series of rough-hewn steps.
We climbed for a long time. I knew that we were still in near-darkness, but it did not seem so to my weakened eyes. Torches, hooked in the walls, gave forth a scorching yellow glow that swelled and seemed to hum. My legs, stiff and crooked from disuse, were unsteady beneath me. In the distance, I thought I heard a voice crying out. It was the first sign of another’s torment I had known since I was taken from my fellow slaves. I had tried to be their father for a while. Buried beneath the earth, I could only offer them distant prayers. I offered the same to that anguished voice.
Miserére nostri, Dómine, miserére nostri. I knew better than to ask who my companion in suffering was. I knew better than to ask anything. My old pupil would put an end to all my questions when I was delivered to him… as I was sure, somehow, that I would be.
Little Sarron, as I still named him: bloody-handed and demon-eyed. He had promised me more than a brand, next time we met.
“In here,” ordered the guard who had last spoken, and a door—a more proper door than the one leading to my cell—was flung open. I was expecting a smithy, but I found myself in a clean, white-washed room. Again, the brightness dazzled me, though my sight was growing stronger. Oil lamps swung from the ceiling, and a large wash-tub stood beside a woodstove, the belly of which was cherry-red. Its pipe jutted into the wall, a suggestion that the outside world was near. Another guard—or perhaps merely a slave, favored with a better lot than the rest—was busy pouring a great pot of steaming water into the tub. It had been so chilly, underground. Here, I shrank from the heat, as though I had not long been dreaming of it.
The guards dropped me unceremoniously to the floor. One said to the other, disbelieving,
“You’re sure? He doesn’t look like a doctor.”
“Didn’t hear he was one, only that he knows the trade. He’s a priest,” said the second man, already disinterested in my plight. Some men shrink from horror; others accept its presence unflinchingly. They may join in exacting it, but they neither seek nor avoid it. “Look there—there’s the proof.”
My hair had grown enough for a few lank strands to cover the angry scar on my forehead. The first guard, peering at it, could still make it out. I waited for my orders, or my death. I waited for them to finish grimacing at me. Their disdain fell short of pity; they had no wish to look beyond a ruined body to glimpse a man's soul.
“Bathe,” said the first guard, his eyes still fixed on my brow. “And dress.” Mockingly, he added, “The Master of the Mountain wishes to speak with you.”
The water was scalding hot. The sight of the glowing stove, and the throbbing dry heat in the air around me, burned in my scarred flesh as remembered pain. I was so weak that I stumbled and shook as I tried to obey. I knew that such men, forced to help me, would not be gentle. Still, time passed slowly. Then it did not seem to pass at all. My wasted body settled in the water, and I breathed more deeply than I had in months while I sloughed away the itching grime. It was almost like shedding a skin.
How strange it was to be a man of God brought back to humanity once more, only to stand at the brink of death! A final temptation, I realized, and steeled myself. I must not accept earthly comforts. The Master of the Mountain was one with the Prince of Darkness, and I must resist him to the end. Rinsing the soap from my hair and face, I touched the cross on my forehead.
Sarron had given me a gift when he had marked me so, even if he did not know it.
I rose, and stumbled again, and then I dressed in the new clothes that were laid out for me. They were plain and coarse, much too large for my shrunken frame. I was surprised that my captors did not bind me, but then I realized that I was no threat to any man walking freely in these stony halls.
“I am ready,” I said, and was answered only by a sneer.
They led me to another white-walled chamber, this one farther up the stone steps. This room was colder, and ink-blotted by the shadows of shelving, cupboards, and a long narrow table that I recognized as suitable for a physician’s examination—or operation. Scarcely did I take in the array of jars, basins, coffers, herb-bundles… scarcely did I step shakily forward… than I felt the shadows grow and move.
I turned round to face the door through which I had entered, and I faced him.
I had no time to mull over my memories of Melkor Bauglir. Not in the instant in which he stood before me. He seemed to swallow the present moment as much as he swallowed the light; a tall, barrel-chested man with powerful arms and over-long legs. His height did not give him grace so much as it gave him immensity.
He smiled when he saw me, and folded his large, pale hands together as if in prayer. He wore no frock-coat, but the rest of his clothes were those of a gentleman—just as always. He did not wear the rough drugget or buckskin of a frontiersman. Against his exposed waistcoat, a silver watch-chain glittered. I shrank from it, as if each shining link was a needle.
The guards had not needed to remain with me, much less bind me. I would not fight; I could not defy him.
“Père Clément,” Bauglir said, with mocking inflection. “I cannot say that a hole in the ground agrees with you, but it has not done you much harm.”
He stepped forward, and I, knowing that weakness was my portion and cup, steadied myself against the hard edge of the table, on which I could so well imagine a body lying.
No healing here, I mourned, more sorrowful than fearful.
“Are you afraid of me?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, for I knew no reason to lie.
“I am the monster men make me,” he said. “By their own choice—always their own choice. You could not keep your prying hands from the hunter’s snare, now could you?”
I expected his hunter to enter behind him, but he did not.
“He marked you with your own mark,” Bauglir said, and I almost did not believe that he was speaking to me. All men see visions; not all visions come from God. In the far north, where the days of darkness stretch long and cold, I knew that.
Even before little blood-soaked Sarron, I knew.
“We have caged you,” Bauglir continued, “with bars of your own making. Bear up beneath the cross, mon frère!”
I was silent. I awaited his command; his judgment. In my mind, I prayed again.
Death be not proud. It would not be swift, or merciful, when Sarron came. Did I hear footsteps, even now? Would the hunter make a sound as he approached?
“Mairon has gone mad,” Bauglir said. “And I—I have been robbed of a future. I am at pains, you will understand, to contend for another.”
I did not understand. My breath was too short to speak.
“I intended to let you rot,” Bauglir said. “I intended to deliver your withered body to Mairon as a bone to gnaw, nothing more. The hunter must not be fattened on fresh meat—I have known this! Damnation, I have—” His voice broke. It was an almost human sound, such as I had never heard from him. He covered his face with his hands and his shoulders heaved. Then through the cleft of two long fingers I saw his black eye watching me. He lowered his hands and there was no grief on his face, but a smile.
“How soon we forget,” he said. “How soon the future greets us, after all.”
By the future, he meant another body.
“Ecce homo,” Bauglir said, as two guards trundled in a stretcher. A sheet, already filmed by the black dust of crumbling cavern stone, covered my future. I felt Death lay a hand on my shoulder: offering a choice.
If a corpse lay before me, and I was asked to mutilate it for Bauglir’s amusement, would I obey? Would I tell myself that survival mattered more than dignity?
The black-dusted sheet twitched. A low, aching sound, a groan trapped in lungs that were too weak, even, to properly breathe—
Death receded; here was life, and my path was plain. Here was a patient for me to doctor. Bauglir must have remembered, as no one else had ever cared to in all the years of my imprisonment, that I served as an apothecary when I worked among my people in the icy north. The settlements I traveled between were too small even to share a proper hôtel-Dieu, but still the work of the Divine physician was translated into the duties of His lesser assignees on earth.
I stepped forward, towards the body. Towards the man. Bauglir drew aside the covering eagerly, and we stood side by side. Did this make us alike? I could not wonder at that, for I saw—
Red and white, black and blue. Shining burns, shocked and angry—torn flesh, stained flesh, flesh marred and cursed—
I felt the cross burning on my brow. The brow above that blood-crusted mouth, those strain-swollen eyes, was clear of scars, clear of age’s lines.
No man, I thought, and the grief that seized me was so deep, so due entirely to the grace I had sacrificed my freedom for, that I threw aside my fear.
Only a boy.
This litany I prayed in fragments:
He did not bleed to death because most of the wounds were cauterized. Those that were not were shallow or already scabbing over. Those driven deep into the core of his body had, by some chance not worthy of the name miracle, left his heart and lungs and bowels unpierced.
He did not starve to death because we fed him, Bauglir and I, with bone-broth spooned between his swollen lips.
He did not die of fever because I ground feverfew and belladonna, soaked willow-bark and brewed tea, while Bauglir bathed his wounds and cooled his head.
He did die. He did not die. He did not die.
Bauglir was, to this nameless boy, both physician and tormentor. He was jealous about the changing of every wound dressing, crowding me away from the bedside and applying the salves and bandages himself. It was a lengthy ordeal, but he never tired of it, using his greater strength to shift and turn the wound-mapped body from one side to another. In addition to the many brands and flaying wounds, the boy had recently been flogged. The stripes still bled sluggishly, and opened whenever the bindings were drawn away. In all this, I was only an assistant. Bauglir forgot me, save as a pair of hands offering up tinctures and herb-pots, or the long, cobwebby linen bands. He treated me with something approaching disinterested favor: I was allowed to eat and sleep, and I was required to keep very clean.
But then another mood would take him, and he would hover for hours over the boy’s fevered head, whispering slyly or muttering oaths. Sometimes he scraped his fingertips through the ragged hair the way an attentive father might. (I had, after my first shocks, observed how splendid a color the boy’s hair was, as auburn as a maple in autumn, where the roots were not darkened with the drenching perspiration of illness.) Sometimes he pressed the ring he wore like a wedding band against the boy’s lips, as if testing for breath on its shining surface. Sometimes he covered the boy’s mouth with his hand, or squeezed the hunger-hollowed throat, to see if suffocation would elicit some response. In the early days, it did not—the drugged slumber was too deep.
During the very first hours of our work, Bauglir ascertained a mark as yet unknown to him—something at the nape of the neck—and ordered me to lift the boy by his shoulders, so that Bauglir might see what his probing fingers had only touched. When I protested, he struck me in the face. It was a heavy blow, but not crippling. Conscious that if I pressed him I might suffer worse, and thus be unable to serve the boy further, I rose to my feet and shuffled obediently back to the bedside.
“Lift him beneath his arms,” Bauglir said, sure that I would oppose him no further. “He is not heavy.”
I did so. I felt the fluttering heartbeat through the layers of fresh bandaging, beneath the broken shelter of sternum and rib. His head, dragged low in oblivion, lolled against my shoulder. His jaw was hot and swollen where, as I would later learn, the raw socket of a tooth had become infected. I leaned awkwardly against the table, stretching to support him, for in life—and this, which he presently endured, was not quite life—he was a very tall young man.
Bauglir stood above us both, and again I labored under the strain of utter darkness. Bauglir peered down at the boy’s neck, sweeping aside the strands of damp hair that clung there. What he saw angered him. I knew this from the plum flush that bloomed over his smooth cheeks, his long, aquiline nose.
“He had no right,” Bauglir hissed. I did not think he was speaking to me. “No right to claim you so.” Then without warning, he wrenched the boy’s shoulders from my hold, dragging him down with such violence that his head struck the table, and a shudder passed through the limp, wound-wracked body.
“Sir—” I begged, but it was as if Bauglir did not hear me.
“Yes,” he said savagely, leaning over the helpless, unconscious form. “You hear me. You hear me, deep in that wool-wrapped skull. Wherever you walk, wherever you believe you move freely—you are mine.”
Then Bauglir reached with his thumbs, thick and hard-driving as hammer-shafts, and forced the boy’s closed eyelids upwards.
“Look at me,” he cried, and his voice shook me. I was afraid. I was more afraid of him than death, and I wondered at the life of misery that had led this tall, once-beautiful stranger into such a hell. “Look at me, Maedhros.”
Only silence answered. The shadow passed; it was Bauglir who shuddered now. He stretched to his full height, and gazed disdainfully now at the prone body, so pitifully exposed. He rubbed his long hands together, as if to rid them of an unclean touch, and left the room for an hour on some errand of his own.
I was left alone, with—
Maedhros, I thought dimly. His name is Maedhros.
When Maedhros began to drift back to us, his limbs moving in small, jerking shifts, and his face revealing expressions of deep confusion and deeper pain, Bauglir’s humor improved.
“He must be restrained,” he said briskly one day—I did not know whether it was day or night, only that many hours had passed since I last woke. “Else he will hurt himself with thrashing about. Bind him with cloth, for now. When he is well again we will exchange linen for sterner stuff.” As he stood there, deciding the course of that future he had first ordained, I thought he looked like a vulture hulking over fresh carrion.
Only—Maedhros was alive. The night (or the solitary sleeping watch I kept, at least) before, I had heard his voice for the first time, small and murmuring in his throat. He wanted to speak, I was sure of it. But I would have been dragged apart by wild horses before I said as much to Bauglir.
Bauglir did not think—or choose—to question me. His attention was fixed on a single point. He lifted the thin right hand—it was missing the forefinger nail—and examined it, forcing the knuckles to flex and the wrist to bend.
“His father dwells here,” Bauglir said. As usual, I suspected that it was not me he spoke to; if he did not address Maedhros outright, he was speaking to himself. “More than in any other part of his body. His tongue he must force to do his father’s work, and it is a torturous business. He has been forced to sharpen silver as if it were iron. But this—” He rolled the fingers in, and laid the thumb across them, forming a fist that could strike no blow to him—“this is a natural instrument.”
I woke to a whisper. It came from the bed, and though I had gently bound his limbs with twisted skeins of cloth, Maedhros still managed to twist and turn.
“Be still now,” I said, hastening to kneel beside him. My bones ached. I was old, and still feeble. This life, whatever it accomplished, would not last long. “You can rest, Maedhros. You are not alone.”
“Fingon,” he murmured. The first word entire that I had heard him utter, and I did not understand. “Fingon… please.”
“Oh,” I breathed, realizing. It was a name.
“Fingon is not here,” I said, as gently as I could, and then spurred by some inspiration that I believed was Providential—“Do not speak of him. Keep him safe.”
Maedhros turned his head slightly towards me. He could not have seen me even if he opened his eyes, for I had blindfolded him as soon as his waking seemed imminent—a protection against the stabbing pain of the yellow-glowing lamps that I remembered so well. I wished it was a better protection against Bauglir’s cruel touch.
Maedhros’ cracked lips worked soundlessly. Then he whispered,
“Safe?”
“Sleep now,” I urged. At any moment the monster might hear us; I knew he slept in a chamber up above, and who knew what secret holes he might have bored in the stone, the better to listen to the watches he chose not to share with me?
Maedhros was quiet. A tear slipped from beneath the bandage that covered his eyes, gleaming like a dim star upon his cheek.
Moved with pity, I reached for his right hand where it lay, pinned against his side. I slipped my fingers through his.
To my surprise, his hand tightened around mine. He was weak, yet, and it was only for an instant—
But in his grip, I felt steel.