The Stars Above the Sea by Idrils Scribe

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Chapter 1

Desert of Far Harad, year 178 of the Third Age.

The Great Desert was a circle of blinding whiteness and glare. A leaden sun beat down from directly overhead, burning nothing but silence and salt. Elrohir stood in his saddle and looked out over salt flats without end. Crossing Harad’s central plains in the shimmering daytime heat was reckless. To anyone less experienced with the desert it would have been deadly.

Elrohir drove his camel faster than was wise to make good time to the remote waterhole he knew lay beyond the horizon. He had grown rash during his flight, with no more patience for circumspection.

His voice had gone hoarse from disuse. He had been alone for weeks and could ill afford noise while stealth was his only safety. The word he whispered was a name. It rolled off his tongue with difficulty, his lips unused to shaping the lilting Sindarin vowels.

“Elladan.”

His twin brother. Elrohir knew it was true the very instant the strange northerner who called himself Glorfindel spoke the words. This one certain kernel of fact was a comfort, a pole star around which revolved the complicated tangle of improbabilities that came after.  

Glorfindel had uncannily spotted that Elrohir was fundamentally different from the Haradrim, and gone on to give what was, on the face of it, a perfectly reasonable explanation -- if only it hadn’t involved various creatures of myth and legend. Elrohir would have taken insult at being thought so gullible, had he been any less desperate and terrified at the time. But when battle was upon them, Glorfindel had held Elrohir’s very life in his hands. And saved it. With what intention, exactly, was clear as mud.

Elrohir looked down at his hands, tanned and sword-calloused, dirt thick under his fingernails. There wasn’t a wrinkle on them, and by his own reckoning he had to be at least forty-five years old. Forty-five hard years, from being a nameless Northern child-slave to the Black Numenoreans of Umbar, to a perilous escape and joining the Haradrim rebellion against his former masters, a merciless war fought deep in the unforgiving desert. He knew his face would still look well-favoured enough on a man half that age.

His youthful look had never seemed particularly alarming until the tooth. It had fallen victim to the iron gauntlet of a particularly agile Black Númenórean during a caravan raid. Elrohir had been a fraction too slow, and when he came to, hacking and gurgling on his own blood, he had spat out one of his front teeth along with the congealed clots filling his mouth. There had been some good-natured taunts of the sort that occur between warriors who have fought beside one another for a long time, and Elrohir resigned himself to his new battered appearance. Until he woke one morning to sore gums and the tender beginnings of a brand new tooth filling the gap, even and milk-white as ever.

The general consensus among his comrades was that Eru Allfather had to be a bloody idiot to be wasting His miracles on such ridiculous matters as Elrohir’s mouth while they had a war going on. Some looks were far more disturbing, and then and there Elrohir knew he needed to avoid getting punched in the mouth again if he wanted to live. The Haradrim had seen too much black sorcery wielded against them to tolerate anything that even smelled of it in their own ranks.

They needn’t have concerned themselves. Elrohir was no dark sorcerer, but he might be an Elf.  

Even so, Elrohir could never have brought himself to risk his life in the Black Númenórean lands by the coast on the evidence of Glorfindel’s word alone. There were safer ways to the Far North. Abandoning Glorfindel to travel north alone had been his only possible choice. Elrohir had told himself that each time his ever-turning mind arrived at this point during the past weeks. He had made sure the man was well cared for. The fine camel Glorfindel had been given for his journey from the deep desert back to the coast had been paid for out of Elrohir’s own share of the spoils of war.

And even if Elrohir had sworn a solemn oath to Glorfindel that he would come north, Glorfindel had failed to specify by what route and in whose company.  

Elrohir chose his path away from where he knew people would dwell. He did not bother to hunt, using sparingly his waybread and dried dates, the last of his field-rations from the war. He felt himself grow lean. His loose, desert-coloured robes billowed around his thinning body like a shroud. With the long silence taking away his voice it was as if he had become so much part of the desolate landscape around him that he’d eventually dissolve into it.

Reaching the vast gravel-plains of East Bellakar was but a short reprieve. In such an open landscape Elrohir could travel only at night, taking great care to hide himself and his camel from hostile eyes in the light of day. The Southern legions of Umbar’s military had been exterminated by the Haradrim rebels, but brigands and other desperate folk were a scourge upon these lands. None had ever been bold enough to confront an entire company of Haradrim, but one camel-rider alone, even as heavily armed as Elrohir, would be an easy victim.

During the long days of uneasy rest while he waited for dusk Elrohir’s dreams became distressingly vivid. He fell in battle again and again, each repeat more terrifying than the previous. He feared having gone mad until he learned to hold off sleep for so long that he dreamed no more when he did lay down.

Even exhaustion could not banish the restless spirits of the dead. It seemed they were all around him, their chatter thick on the incessant desert wind. Whether the warbling sounds were indeed his fallen comrades who had not yet left the Circles of the World, or merely figments of his own imagination conjured by grief, he could not tell. He tried his best not to be drawn into their strangely disjointed conversations, keeping his eyes on the stars and the way forward, not daring to look aside for fear he might see more than just the whirling of windblown dust. For the first time Elrohir found himself wishing for a companion to ground his mind. He would have welcomed even Glorfindel’s strangeness as a shelter from his own raging thoughts.

When the watch-fires of Kadar, a fortified market town, appeared in the distance on what had to be the twenty-fifth night, Elrohir was astonished at having reached his journey’s end, in spite of having known exactly where the city would be.

Kadar was the gateway to Harondor, a country permanently torn between Umbar and Gondor like a scrap of meat among fighting dogs. Of late it fell under the hard hand of Gondor’s King Cemendur. At some point during his trek Elrohir had crossed the unmarked, ever-shifting borderline and left Umbar behind. He was glad to see sable banners bearing the silver tree flutter atop Kadar’s sturdy walls of red rammed earth.

He spent a few hours half-asleep hidden between a jumble of boulders. Ot lay beside him, fettered and grumbling plaintively. At sunrise Elrohir dressed in something finer than his travel-stained desert clothes. He hid his weapons in his pack to present himself at the city gates as they were opened for the day. The guards waved him through with barely a glance, one of a growing throng of desert dwellers pouring into the town to conduct their business. Despite the coolness of early morning the soldiers of Gondor looked uncomfortably warm in their dark livery and high helmets, a uniform so eminently unsuitable for the desert it boggled Elrohir’s mind. He was glad to see the strange warriors nonetheless. He did not look forward to the business that brought him to the city, but the sight of another human being was an unspeakable relief.

On Kadar’s narrow, shaded alleyways convened a bustling mix of veiled nomads, dark-skinned Haradrim and pale Númenóreans. The town was a crossroads of trade routes into the deep desert and beyond. Gondorian merchant adventurers were always in attendance. They would be Elrohir’s final destination. First he had a sad necessity to see to.

On the outskirts of town lay the sprawling cluster of noise that was the animal market. Red dust, frantic bleating and the smells of goats and stale urine assaulted his senses as he led Ot past the corrals. Among many goat sellers he found an amicable Haradi trader in horses and camels. The man was a canny haggler, but Elrohir gave as good as he got. Their transaction bled into a lengthy discussion, lubricated by several cups of sweet coffee. The full power of the midday sun pummelled the market square by the time Elrohir had finally bartered Ot for a hardy, dun-coloured mare and a leather purse--smaller than he would have liked--of silver coins bearing King Cemendur’s likeness. He kept goodbyes brief, feeding his faithful mount of many years a last dried date before leaving with a wistful look into the dark, unknowing eyes.

Upon setting foot in the city’s maze of shadowed alleyways he had to sit down behind a crumbling mud-brick garden wall. The very tears he found himself incapable of after the deaths of so many friends now came to him unbidden, over a cantankerous bastard of a camel. Frantically rubbing his eyes, Elrohir sank to the ground and cried his fill, muffling his sobs in the wide sleeve of his new Gondorian tunic while the strange mare patiently waited beside him.

The Men of Gondor were easier to manage. Inside the jewel-market Elrohir found a company of well-to-do merchants in spices and precious stones. They were planning their return journey through Harondor by the fords of the River Poros and from there to their home city of Pelargir. Those were lawless lands, and their leader was keen enough to add one more armed mercenary to the caravan. Elrohir did not relish the thought of more fighting, but plying his soldiers’ trade was the only way he could afford to pay his way north. On this particular journey their caravan was fortunate. The only fighting for Elrohir and his fellow sell-swords was chasing off a ragtag band of local would-be highwaymen who had clearly bitten off much more than they could chew.

Among the Gondorians was a tall, fine-boned gemstone trader called Elemir. The man struck up a pleasant conversation with Elrohir on their first day in the saddle, intrigued by the unusual combination of a deep desert accent and a face that spoke of the purest Northern blood. Elrohir was glad for Elemir’s company and the distraction it provided from his own preoccupations. He introduced himself by his Haradi name, and upon Elemir’s enquiry told him the simple truth about his journey to Pelargir, or at least the believable parts of it. Former slaves escaped from their Black Numenorean masters and roaming in search of their home and family were not unheard of in South Gondor, even if few of them were headed as far away as Arnor.

Elemir had an inquisitive mind and an entrepreneurial spirit, and Elrohir knew he was being cannily questioned. He divulged some of his knowledge of gemstone trade in Harad's deep South, in opals and diamonds from secret mines deep in the desert. In exchange Elemir taught him the dialect of Pelargir, chuckling as Elrohir struggled to draw out his Haradi staccato to the longer, more Sindarin-like vowels of Gondor.   

As a true Gondorian patriot Elemir harbored a deep-seated resentment of all things Umbarian, including their slave-trade. Despite his talent for business he was not a hard-hearted man, and Elrohir’s tale garnered his sympathy. He was the younger son of one of Gondor’s foremost noble families, and proved a highly useful acquaintance: his eldest brother was dockmaster of the King’s Harbour in Pelargir. When Elrohir spoke of his intention to crew on a ship for passage north, Elemir enthusiastically offered to find him a position.

“We’ll get you on your way home, lad!” Elemir drawled with the broadest of smiles, and despite his misgivings Elrohir summoned one to match it.   

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