Our Love is Great by Huinare

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Our Love is Great

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“Our love is great,” Gorlim says, frequently enough to convince the others in Barahir’s camp. The others are consumed with their mission and their ever-present danger, and they accept the great love of Gorlim and Eilinel as true. Some of them have love lying in wait for them back home, a counterpoint to the death lying in wait for them abroad, and are content to see their lives and their cares reflected in others. Some of them have no such thing, and are either too unfamiliar with it or too indifferent to it to detect the possible lie.

It is not a lie, not exactly, nor does Gorlim know if it is true anymore. There was a great row, the day before he last departed, the culmination of months of slammed doors and sniping remarks. The risk he faced with each departure had interceded during the night, resulting in an almost violently impassioned encounter and a couple surreal hours of near-sleep before several of the men stopped by to collect him while it was still dark. But he does not really believe that the risk, that the physical consequences of the risk, has set things right between him and Eilinel.

_________

“I must leave; it is my duty, Eilinel, it–”

“I know that, Gorlim. Leave all you want, it matters not, you already left a long time ago.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Are you daft, or cruel and you only pretend to be daft? When was the last time you–”

“You demand so much of me. We are at war, there are important–”

“Demand? I demand? At war? At war indeed, and you bring it into this house, Gorlim. All I ‘demand’ would be simple for you, if you–”

“So you think I’m an idiot?”

“No, I hope and pray you aren’t. I might think so, soon.”

“Is that a threat?–What, I don’t comply with your demands and you think you can stand there insulting–”

“Demands? Demands! I am not the enemy here. If anything, I am pleading with you, but you–”

“So it’s all my fault?”

“I never said that, but I’m starting to think so. Yes. Yes, Gorlim, it’s all your fault and I rue the day I met you.”

_________

The small orchard greets him with no burgeoning fruit, only the charred standing corpses of the trees. There are two urges, one to sprint at full tilt toward the house, the other to pick his way along. He opts for the latter, setting each foot slowly and lurchingly before the other as though in a nightmare where he cannot run, until his door and his windows face him impassively. He knocks, knowing better, still hoping, obscenely. No one answers, and he pushes the door softly, and it yields inward with a loud creak. There is nobody in the one-room cabin, only bedclothes fallen partially onto the floor and open doors disclosing the emptied cabinets and pantry.

He begins to sit on the edge of the bed, his heart racing and the roots of his teeth aching, then leaps up as though something terrible may have happened there. He staggers outside and sits down, prostrates himself really, in the barren orchard. For a long time he huddles there breathing, until a desperate optimism takes over. He ambles up and down their property, calling for Eilinel, and then he searches farther abroad, up and down, east to west, until he is floundering through the brush and his shouts have turned to screams. This is risky. He does not care.

One of his compatriots finds him, pats him on the shoulder many times and speaks in a surprisingly gentle voice, eventually leading him back to an encampment where several of Barahir’s folk have hunkered down until their next foray.

“I loved her,” Gorlim says to everyone, repeatedly, “Our love was great.” Sometimes, or most times, he speaks in the present tense. I love her. Our love is great.

_________

In time, he returns to the house. He sees that maybe he did not properly explain to Eilinel that he loved her, maybe he did not properly demonstrate this great love. Surely it was great, though, even if it had lately been like the trees in the orchard. Maybe if he could see her again, tell her, then the orchard would bear fruit again.

The orchard never bears fruit and the empty innards of the house fail to change.

_________

Sometimes he approaches the house in the evening, and then the impassive door and windows stand darker than ever. But then, one evening, he draws near and he sees a change. As he passes out of the thick foliage and into the orchard, the thin, stark branches are silhouetted from behind by a light. This light spills forth from the windows of the little cabin.

Gorlim, trained as he is and this being wartime, is cognizant that a stranger, friend or foe, may occupy the house. He knows that the light from the windows will make him easy prey for anyone hiding in the brush. Yet, his hope or his despair overwhelms all other knowledge. Quivering, he creeps up to one of the windows, and he braces himself and peers in, and there in the old wooden rocker he sees Eilinel. She is crocheting something, deep red yarn almost black like the blood of something bleeding out, and crying. No matter that Eilinel disliked crocheting and knitting, she is there in the house, beyond all hope, rocking and weeping, and he discerns now his own name–

“Gorlim, where have you gone, I have waited”–

–”Eilinel! I’m right here, I’m sorry, I–”

A loud rusting announces their presence, springing suddenly at him, several orcs and wolves. In that same instant, all lights have gone out. He finds himself pinioned on the night-cold earth, cold against his back and arms, while the warm and foul breath of a wolf slavers in his face. “Welcome home, Gorlim,” sneers one of the orcs.

_________

They ask him, with their voices and with objects both sharp and blunt, about Barahir’s hideout and plans. Gorlim resists bitterly, anger and despair rendering him partially numb to pain. But he is only one, and the orcs and wolves are numerous and can work in shifts. Dawn arrives and throws severe west-trending shadows down into the ravine where his captors are encamped, and as the shadows change their shape and the hours proceed, the torture continues with no sign of their tiring. But Gorlim is becoming tired. Eventually he croaks, “Where is my wife? Spare my wife,” although his reason knows that such speech will only make them more likely to harm Eilinel if they do have her. Surely they must have her. She was right there, asking for him, and then they came with pain and the light was gone and then–But surely he can help, he might have hurt Eilinel in the privacy of their own home and in ways that defied physical explanations, but surely he can keep them from hurting her now because he has information, he has–

“We have not harmed your wife here,” some voice assures him, mocking and placating. “In fact, you have only to speak to the Lord of Tol-in-Gaurhoth concerning this Barahir with whom you are acquainted, and you’ll be released, and you’ll see your Eilinel again.”

His mind is charred with grief and pain, like the trees in the orchard, fruitless and brittle.

_________

Gorlim is on the floor, the cold floor somewhere dark and with flickering light none too comforting, and he remembers the warm woody smell of his and Eilinel’s cabin. He huddles on the cold floor with little care for his dignity, and someone’s feet in dark leather boots with a complicated series of bronze buckles pace idly back and forth before his eyes.

“They tell me you are prepared to barter with me, Gorlim,” a voice says fairly pleasantly, but with a dreadful power, “for information you possess on the movements of Barahir and his folk.”

Is has come to this, then. Gorlim must have agreed to this, to tell Sauron what he knows. He does not remember if or what he agreed to. He had vowed to devote his life to resisting Morgoth and Sauron. He had vowed to devote his life to Eilinel, whom he loved greatly. He had vowed, had he not? His vows are evidently as weak as his will and his character. He blinks and groans in confusion. Sauron’s voice continues, unruffled, “What is your price?”

“Eilinel,” Gorlim rasps. He notices that he is very thirsty and the back of his throat protests the articulation of each syllable, his voice is ugly and barely louder than a whisper. “Let me be with her again. Let us go. I will–anything.”

The boots stop, and a faint rustling indicates the crouching of their owner, not an abject couching but an ominous one like a man or boy crouching to look at an easily-crushed insect on a rock. Gorlim looks up in spite of himself, and the face of Sauron smiles mildly down on him and murmurs, “That is a small price for so great a treachery. Surely, this I can and will grant you. Say on.”

_________

He is in a high-backed chair, having somehow been impelled or placed there, aching and thirsty. He addresses Sauron, who is in a similar chair facing him at a forty-five degree angle and quite close to him, “You have it now. Eilinel. You told me.”

“I’m sorry?” Sauron says, extremely courteously.

“You told me–” Gorlim raises his head weakly, and his vision swims. The chair is polished and shiny on its mahogany arms and legs, and its padded portion is deep red velveteen almost black like the blood of something bleeding out.

“I told you that you can be with Eilinel again, yes.”  There appears to be both sympathy and irony in the countenance of his captor.

“Yes! Please. Show her to me,” he pleads or demands, croaks. He can barely keep upright in the chair.

“I fear I can’t, Gorlim. You see, my people found that homestead months ago, and they destroyed all that lived.”

Gorlim stares into the dark eyes of the tall figure seated sedately near him. Yes, the orchard had been burned, the three goats and the white-booted tabby gone, and even the house spiders seemed to have retreated in dread. But–

“I saw her!” he screams suddenly, starting forward in vengeance or grief, only succeeding in sprawling on the floor and laying hold of Sauron’s booted ankle. “She was right there, she was crying, I heard her…”

A hand, untroubled, strokes the back of his head placatingly, or grasps his hair at the nape in a threat, or both, it hardly matters. “It was known to us that you returned often to that place, calling for Eilinel. Moreover, I may assume many forms.”

“You–!” Gorlim screams, and then crumples, useless, quaking.

“I deceived you. Your wife was slain by my will, months ago.”

“Fuck you,” he rails, perhaps many times, and at some point he understands that he is addressing himself. “What if I didn’t love her?” he appends at the last, ludicrously and transparently. “If I could only see her, if I could only tell her…”

“I don’t believe I am qualified to address such concerns,” Sauron says softly. “However, you stipulated that you be restored unto Eilinel and that both of you be released. I am told that she and the cat were burned in the orchard. She is already gone, and, as she is mortal, neither the lords of darkness nor of light can say whence she has departed.”

“You do not know–even you?”

“No, I know not.” Sauron stares at him intently, with neither sympathy nor malice. “Certainly she is beyond my power now. I will see to it that you join her. Do you wish to be with her again?”

“Please.”

_________

They were dead already, when they burned. Gorlim is not dead. His hands are bound to the charred trunk of the cherry tree, and despite his resignation, he screams as he is consumed.