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I
“Soldier!”
It was almost the last voice Gwindor wanted to hear as he limped back to his quarters, the bruises on his back like dull crawling fire, which flared and heated to a fierce glow in his twisted shoulder. But it was also an expected voice, for scarcely a day passed without Twitch asking an impertinent question—a dangerous question.
One day that impertinence would be the death of him, Gwindor thought bitterly. Aloud, he hissed,
“Shut your trap, Twitch. It’s past curfew.”
Past curfew, unless you were called to the master’s quarters. Past curfew, but not for old Soldier. Gwindor clenched his teeth until they ached.
“What did he want with you?” Twitch—Haldar—demanded, in a passably less audible whisper, crouching beside Gwindor’s cot. Gwindor shook off his shoes and stretched out, careful to lie on his good arm.
“Nothing,” he said. He was still hungry from watching Gothmog eat fried steak and eggs, still sick from wondering if the answers he’d given to question after question had done harm or good. Always trying to dig for signs of rebellion, was Gothmog. Always ready with bait, hung on a deadly hook. “Go to sleep.”
Haldar lay down obediently, but as his cot was next to Gwindor’s, there was little hope that he would stay silent for long. No one had prevented the boy from choosing his place, when they moved into the barracks. Rough, low beds under a half-finished roof, fitted out with horse blankets—slaves never knew contentment or comfort, but these had almost seemed riches after the dripping black caves higher up the mountain. Gwindor and most of the other men had been shivering there, toiling like ants under the crushing weight of stone.
It was a queer place, the mountain—the air of it was choking and foul, the prisoners who were kept there more like ghosts than men. What was Gothmog’s errand there tonight? He’d taken off like a shot after that guard—a sniveling sort, always with a nose for new women—had appeared with a message from on high.
You’re wanted by the Master.
Even Gothmog had his betters; even Gothmog labored in service of a greater power.
What was Gothmog’s errand with Melkor Bauglir?
Gwindor stared upwards, minding the spaces between rafter and overhung canvas. The women and the brats were worse off, of course. They always were. No cots for them, and precious little bedding, though less was needed in summer. Always, too, there was the threat of being singled out by one of the ‘seers, who didn’t care if their bedwarmer was willing or not. Gwindor would spend the rest of his life laboring, would never be a whole man again, would never bring back the dead or make his own death worth a bent nail—but he could hate and blame himself, as the women couldn’t. He had as much freedom as there was to claim.
“Silas said Gothmog went up the mountain,” Haldar whispered. “Why? It’s so late. Do you think—do you think we’ll find out? He didn’t say anything to you?”
“He said plenty,” Gwindor growled. “Quiet now, or I’ll come over there and smother you myself.”
Twitch sighed and rolled over. The sharp lines of his too-thin body, half-shrouded by his blanket, brought a sight-memory to Gwindor too painful to bear. He rolled deliberately onto his bad shoulder, letting the pain blind him.
The day had gone wrong in the early afternoon. Gwindor, seeing that Goodley’s system for stacking ties on the sleds and wagons that would drag them downhill were leading the men to move slowly and mistakenly, had taken matters into his own hands and reorganized the loading line. He hadn’t considered efficiency to be defiance; he had only known that it was not Goodley who would pay for unfinished work at the day’s end.
But Gothmog had appeared at the slaves’ supper, Goodley at his side. He’d had called Gwindor to the head of the hall, and ordered him on his belly before all the company. Gwindor hadn’t seen Gothmog take up Goodley’s cane, but he felt it crack over his bad shoulder enough times to make the world blast white and starry.
It had been a message to more than Gothmog’s Soldier—Gwindor was, after all, the slaves’ Soldier, too. They were meant to follow him about their work, but not to treat him as a master. Not to see him as a friend strong enough to intercede for them.
Yet the lesson, harsh as it was written on Gwindor’s back, wasn’t sticking. Haldar trusted to Gwindor’s knowledge of everything. So, in his bullish way, did Lem. So did more than a handful of the others—men and women.
Then, too, Gothmog himself played unfair, muddying the same waters he’d bidden to stop or flow. He had helped Gwindor up from his prone sprawl with the handsome offer of a hard-gripping hand. When Gwindor was stood on weak legs, blinking away the stars in his eyes, Gothmog had said,
“Come find me after supper, Soldier,” with half a smile on his stone-hard face.
Do you think we’ll find out? Haldar had asked, little knowing that it was his own death the Mountain’s orders would command.
For Gothmog brought a slave back from the Mountain, and Gwindor felt the ill-wind that seemed to blow both dog and master into their midst without knowing in the least what to make of it. In his efforts to lead in the shadow, to guard his bond-kin with what strength he could, he treated the new slave as harshly as he dared. Who could trust such a strange, heart-bleeding, ingratiating fellow—with his mouth locked up to keep it from begging?
So Gwindor said to himself, though Gelmir cried to him in dreams.
So Gwindor said to himself, while time and life wasted.
Gwindor and Lem buried Haldar a corner of the field too rocky for even stubborn crops to grow. It was backbreaking work to dig a shallow grave, but when the scrawny, stiff-limbed body was laid in it, they had only to cover him with a thin layer of red-brown earth. Haldar would twitch no longer, not even to dust the clay from his black-lashed eyes.
He’d died with two eyes in his head, a tongue in his mouth, and two hands.
He was still dead.
One by one, they set the stones over and around him. Lem had never worked so painstakingly, to Gwindor’s eye, as he did now: unburdening himself of the stones with care, as if Haldar’s body could still be bruised by their weight.
If Gwindor had not had another body in mind—a breathing, fever-warmed body with the blood still flowing hot and sore from its many wounds—he would not have contented himself with stones. (Slaves never knew contentment.) He would have stretched himself out on the sun-warmed earth beside Haldar without waiting for a command to go down on his belly.
He would have begged Lem to drive the shovel edge into his skull.
Instead, he said,
“We’d better be getting back.”
II
“Take me with you.”
Russandol had the cheek to blink like an owl, though it was clear from the quirk at the corner of his mouth that he’d expected that offer. Meant to draw it out, perhaps.
Gwindor didn’t care. He just stared straight on, not planning to move an inch until they were in final agreement.
“It would be dangerous,” Russandol said, worrying his lip between his teeth. “Setting ourselves between Mithrim and Bauglir will be a battle that must be fought at every moment, and on every field.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“I do not promise to protect myself above all else.”
Gwindor was well-used to nonsense of that sort. “That’s what you’d have me for.”
“My foolish friend,” Russandol said, forgetting himself and smiling in earnest. “You must not try to convince me by offering to die for me.”
“I’m suggesting,” Gwindor said, “that we both live.” His hand was still in Russandol’s, atop the bedclothes, and Russandol’s grip was as sure as ever. At such a moment, it seemed doubly cruel that the camp slave had had two hands, and the free man only had one.
“I shall be so glad of your company,” Russandol said, as Gwindor had longed for him to say a thousand times since the departure for Doriath. “Since I must leave—so many behind.”
Sleep was coming over him. Gwindor could see it in the drooping, violet-tinged eyelids. Sleep rarely came as a friend to Russandol—it was at times an enemy threatening ill dreams, and at other times a physician, forcing a useful but unwelcome drug upon him. But Gwindor knew that rest would do the weary body and mind good, so he patted Russandol’s hand with his free one and then released it.
“I think I’d better be gone, lad, and let you catch at least a few of your forty winks.”
“But we haven’t finished the flask,” said Russandol, his voice becoming just a shade more like Maglor’s than usual.
“Aye,” Gwindor sighed. A few more swallows of stolen whiskey wouldn’t hurt either of them. “So we haven’t.”
III
The slave on the cot was awake.
It seemed rude to call him by any of the many names his masters had given him—or written on him—and so Gwindor racked his brain for that strange title that impudent Sticks had concocted.
“Russandol,” he said, hoping it wouldn’t frighten the lad.
It did. Russandol started, raving and choking. He vomited blood and bile on the packed earthen floor, crying out sharply between short, piteous gasps. Gwindor knew how the stripes of an hours-old flogging hurt almost worse than when they were first laid on—knew it well and bitterly.
He tried to be gentle-like with the arm he flung around Russandol’s shoulders. It was his good arm, but Gwindor could not mind it when Russandol braced himself on the other, gripping Gwindor’s forearm with all his might. Gwindor gritted his teeth. The pain in his shoulder was a gift once more—it would keep him here, instead of flinging him towards the past.
“Easy now, dammit. Easy,” he said, when Russandol’s heaving breaths had slowed a little. Nothing like Haldar, this red-and-white creature. Nothing like Gelmir.
Nothing at all.
Gwindor said, half to himself,
“You’re a fool.”