Under strange stars by Idrils Scribe

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Chapter 6

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Elrohir woke as the sun touched the western horizon. He looked refreshed, free from the shadows of fear he had carried since the encounter with the Ringwraith. 

When it dawned on him that he had slept an entire day away he leapt to his feet, swearing under his breath. Glorfindel could not help but grin as he watched the realisation sink in that Ot was already saddled, their small camp packed away and loaded onto the camel’s back. Glorfindel had even managed to pull the saddle-blanket from under Elrohir without waking him, and now sat waiting beside a small ration of food with an amused expression he hoped would not veer into smugness. His newfound skills with Ot came with an edge of danger: Haradrim war camels were trained to bite strangers. 

Elrohir did not begrudge him his victory. “Well, good evening! Hold up your hands so I may see which fingers my camel had for breakfast!”

Glorfindel smiled. “There is nothing to it once one has seen it done a few times.”

“You’re lucky he hasn’t gone in for your hair!” Elrohir quipped, having already noticed Glorfindel’s one vanity.

As he sat down and started on his handful of dates, he became serious once more. “Why didn’t you wake me?”

“You needed sleep. I gave it to you.“

Elrohir shook his head in disapproval. “No more please! We can’t afford such long days or we’ll run out of water before we reach the mountains.”

With that he stood up, still chewing his last mouthful, to inspect Ot. He found saddle and packing like he would have done himself.  

So began their crossing of the vast salt flats, white and empty beneath the stars. Neither spoke much, with the desert wind’s ever-present whistling and Ot’s hasty steps the only sounds breaking the uncanny silence.

Later, Glorfindel found that he could not remember those three days and nights they spent on the plains of the Kes Ubil separately. They merged into a conglomerate of excruciating thirst, heat and sun-glare. Glorfindel and Elrohir both gave up speech, simply because their throats were too parched. Rationing water became an obsession and a torment. When they allowed themselves a sip they could hardly feel it in their dry, cracked mouths. To conserve water and spare Ot they rested briefly under tarps at high noon. They rode all night, willing themselves to think of anything other than the deflating water-skins in their packs and finding no diversion in the flat monotony of the starlit landscape. Elrohir slept fitfully. Glorfindel was baffled to find his dreams filled with the sea, the surf cool and refreshing against an impossibly blue expanse. He sat beside his sleeping charge and watched Arien’s white-hot glare span its high arc over the great emptiness of the desert.

Towards the end Glorfindel almost lost hope that the vast, featureless wasteland of salt and forlorn tumbleweeds stretching as far as the eye could see would ever end. Large carrion-birds circled overhead, waiting for the travelers to accept the inevitable and lay themselves down for it. The one thing keeping up Glorfindel’s spirits was Elrohir’s firm conviction, read in his eyes clear as day, that he knew exactly where they were and where they were going. Sure enough, before sunrise on the fourth day a dark line could be seen on the horizon. When Glorfindel strained his eyes it broke apart into jagged peaks and valleys between. They had found the mountains.

As they entered the foothills in the early morning Elrohir spurred Ot on. He steered the camel into a deep canyon where a few green leaves on otherwise skeletal acacia trees made a promise of water. When they caught sight of a small, brownish water hole, all that was left of mighty floods that had passed here after a long-past downpour, Ot made a strangled noise Glorfindel had never heard before, and broke into a gallop. 

Elrohir let go of the rein. The camel lowered its head and slurped noisily. Elrohir jumped off Ot’s back into the water without even bothering to make him kneel, clothes and all. Glorfindel followed suit. The puddle was brackish, laden with sand and surrounded with the dung of animals that had drunk there, but none of them cared. No crystal mountain spring of Imladris could have been more precious. 

Elrohir stopped drinking just long enough to whip up Ot, who was trying to roll in the mud with the saddle and packs still on him. He unsaddled the camel, then let him do as he pleased. Ot covered himself in mud with noisy abandon.

The rosy light of dawn began to filter into the canyon, painting its towering russet walls with fire. The water-sculpted rock of layered colours seemed otherworldly, unlike anything Glorfindel had seen in either Middle-earth or Valinor. Elrohir sat on a boulder beside the water. He had taken off his soaked overclothes and turban and spread them out to dry beside him. He closed his eyes to simply enjoy not being thirsty, relishing the victory of having survived another crossing.

Glorfindel sat down beside him. “Where to from here?” he asked, his voice surprisingly melodious after the long thirst.

When Elrohir answered he did sound hoarse from the days of silence. “The mountains are a maze of canyons like this one. We will be riding in the shade from here to the Pass of Horns. And we’ll have company long before that. Our people heavily patrol these mountains, water sources especially.”

Glorfindel’s curiosity had been piqued. “What lies beyond them, then, to require such guarding?”

He received a piercing look while Elrohir considered keeping him in the dark, before deciding that they had come far enough together to warrant some trust.

“Khibil, the capital of the Haradrim. A large oasis, a stone fort and a city. It’s fertile land, providing most of our food. Remoteness is its only protection. One cannot travel to Khibil the way the Umbarians do, without knowledge of the desert.”

Glorfindel could guess what was coming. “But now they are going to try it regardless?”

“Emperor Zimrathôn has mounted a campaign against the Haradrim unlike any we have seen before. Our spies in Umbar send word that most of the Imperial army is moving into the deep desert. Their measures to supply the troops with food and water are beyond anything we’ve ever seen. Umbar means to raze Khibil to the ground and occupy the the oasis. That would end our ability to feed ourselves, and thereby the war.”

“What does Harad mean to do about it?” Glorfindel inquired, dreading the answer.

“Scorched earth,” Elrohir answered matter-of-factly. “We mean to cut their supply lines, starve them by poisoning every last well and waterhole, then finish them off in an ambush at the Pass of Horns. An army that size cannot pass these mountains any other way.”

A wild hope shone in Elrohir’s eyes. “If we destroy them, Umbar loses an entire army. They cannot send another without leaving their northern borders undefended against Gondor. This campaign could end Umbar’s grip on the desert once and for all.”

Glorfindel breathed deeply. This was talk he knew well indeed. Desert navigation might have him puzzled, but he had been Elrond’s chief strategist for nearly an age of the world. 

“How many troops?”

“About ten-thousand, twenty among them mounted. On elephants, that is. They also bring some three thousand camels.”

Glorfindel whistled softly between his teeth. Like no other he understood the logistical challenge of bringing an army that size to such a remote location, and the breathtaking arrogance required to even try.

“Where is Zimrathôn getting all that water?”

“Much of it is being carried by the animals, but he also leaves behind fortifications at regular intervals to keep supply lines up.”

“An ambitious plan,” Glorfindel remarked, anxious to hear more about Elrohir’s role in all this.

“It has already begun to come apart,” Elrohir answered. “They did not expect us to poison our own wells. You have seen the burned fields. The Umbarians will find neither food nor water for weeks. We keep their supply convoys under heavy attack. And when they come here, to the heart of the desert, we will be ready for them.”

A fire had appeared in Elrohir’s eyes as he spoke.

Glorfindel felt the bleak press of concern. He had expected fighting at the Pass of Horns, something like Amuk's raid on the Umbarian caravan or slightly larger, and had planned to somehow keep Elrohir out of the thick of it. Now that the full scale of the operation was revealed he felt only shock at the sheer hopelessness of it. He looked the young Half-Elf up and down as he sat there in his drying undertunic, unpleasantly reminded of mulish King Oropher’s Silvan warriors at Dagorlad, mowed down by the hundreds by mail-clad orcs while dressed in boiled leather, with wooden arrows for their longbows.

He needed to at least try to inject some reason into the conversation. “Allow me to summarize this: a couple of thousand Haradrim with stolen weapons and no armour, against three legions of Imperial soldiers armed to the teeth and not only a large camel cavalry, but also elephants? You are all insane.”

Elrohir smiled wryly. “Probably. But you forget our greatest ally. Not the Haradrim will defeat Umbar. The desert itself will. By the time they reach the Pass of Horns we hope to have them half-mad with thirst, their mounts already slaughtered or abandoned. Once we have them caught in the Pass we’ll be spearing fish in a barrel.”

Glorfindel, with ages of tactical experience, was thinking fast. He considered distances, supply lines, provisions, calculated the needs of water and food for man and beast each day in this climate. But most of all he thought of the maddening torture that was thirst and the despair that had threatened even him on their long crossing. He was greatly vexed by the lack of information on the current position and state of the Umbarian army. Elrohir could not tell him: he had not received any news in the days the two of them had travelled the empty desert. In the end, Glorfindel had to concede this: the Haradrim were ruthless bastards and their plan, while risky, had potential to succeed.

“You will suffer heavy losses, against such an enemy,” Glorfindel brought up.

Elrohir answered with surprising equanimity. “We all prefer death to slavery.”

The words shed a new and disconcerting light on Elrohir’s state of mind. By his own admission he had been an ardent supporter of this risky strategy. When the Haradrim council agreed to it, Elrohir had willingly embarked on what amounted to a suicide mission to eliminate the Ringwraith before it could turn the tides of war in Umbar’s favor.

Glorfindel was once more at a loss to understand how a descendant of Finwë could wish to die over a cause of so little consequence in the grand scheme of things. The stiff-necked Peredhel had clearly inherited his family’s penchant for the dramatic. At least his grandmother’s rash decision to throw herself off a cliff had been over a Silmaril instead of a random patch of desert and some vague illusions of liberty. Glorfindel surmised that Harad’s victory would attract far less rejoicing, or even understanding in Valinor than Elwings’s offerings had, should Elrohir find himself dispatched West by the swiftest road.

The thought that followed was most unwelcome. Unlike Glorfindel’s own experience, for Elrohir Mandos’ Halls would hold not just an accounting but a Choice. He had not, could not be told of that yet. In his current state of mind there was no doubt that he’d rashly choose death if his adopted cause required it, and the Fate of Men thereafter. Glorfindel tried not to imagine the conversations he would be having with Elrohir’s parents and grandparents if that came to pass.

Glorfindel spoke carefully. “Do not throw your life away rashly or in bitterness. You are needed back home, for things other than war. Your family loves you, Elrohir, and you will remember it ere the end.”

Elrohir nodded, his manner detached. “Let us not worry about tomorrow. Today has its own merits.”

With that he rose to don his half-dried clothes and began to light a small fire from dead shrubs he gathered around the waterhole. Once it burned brightly he commenced a curious ritual of boiling water, grinding strange black beans from his pack, which he treated like the most precious of gems, then combining the two. He poured the resulting black liquid in two small cups into which he then dropped a lump of sugar. 

“Come Glorfindel. Even if life as we know it shall end soon, I do believe we have earned ourselves a cup of coffee. It’s nice and sweet, though I can’t offer you cardamom with it.” 

Glorfindel accepted the strange, steaming concoction and sniffed it before taking a tentative sip. Its bitterness accosted him despite the sugar, and he could barely keep himself from grimacing. Elrohir seemed to be enjoying his like a treat. An acquired taste of the Haradrim, then. After a few sips he could feel the stimulating effect of the drink.

“What is this?”

“Roasted beans of a bush that grows in these mountains. I’ve used them sparingly until now, but I have hopes of refilling my pack soon.”

“Is it a medicine?”

Elrohir gave him a strange look. “No, just something people have with breakfast, or in the afternoon. Don’t you drink coffee in the North?”

“We have small beer with breakfast, or watered wine.”

Elrohir shot him an incredulous look. “Wine for breakfast? It’s a wonder Northerlings get anything done at all.”

Glorfindel emptied his cup more out of politeness than enjoyment, but he laughed merrily as he did so.