Full of Wisdom and Perfect in Beauty by Gadira

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The White Tree

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“I am counting five now. Where could the other be?”

The night was still, almost eerily so in the vast, empty space of the Outer Courtyard. For the last half hour, Isildur had been hiding with Malik behind one of the flower bushes close to the northern end, where the White Tree stood majestically under the intermittent glow of a veiled crescent moon. Under his aching knees, the earth was wet, and the discomfort he felt was magnified by the uncertainty of the wait.

“He must have left for a moment, perhaps to relieve himself”, Malik shrugged. “He will be back soon.”

“How long do we have left before midnight?”

“According to my calculations, it must still be about an hour away. But perhaps we should attack sooner, now that we have an opening. I know! We could waylay the Guard on his way back, and steal his sword!”

“No.” Isildur also found it hard not to surrender to impatience, but he still remembered the mainland, where people’s lives had hinged on his decisions. And this was no different. “We do not know where he has gone, or what path he will use to come back. And for the last time, will you remember that you are unarmed?”

That had been the main obstacle to the development of their plan so far, one which had rarely been an issue on the mainland. It was not that difficult to enter the Palace if one knew the right people, but entering it while carrying weapons was a different thing altogether. Isildur had been allowed to carry what they believed to be a ceremonial dagger, and since he had been with Lord Amandil at the time, no one had searched him. But Malik had not been so lucky, and swords and spears did not lie around in those marble and obsidian floors as easily as they had in the battlegrounds of the Vale. Whenever he thought that his friend would have to be pursued by the Palace Guards without even the means to defend himself, Isildur was tempted to call the whole thing off, but they were too deep in enemy territory as to be able to afford aborting the mission. It was now, or never.

“There he is, anyway”, Malik whispered, an edge of frustration in his tone. The Guard was indeed back, and they could see him exchange words with one of his companions, which ended in a brief but explosive fit of laughter. After that, he walked back towards his post, and silence reigned again for a while.

“They are guarding it so dutifully, even though they know it will be nothing but firewood in a few days”, Malik broke it at some point. “To fight and kill and risk their lives for something so meaningless… do you think they will have second thoughts?”

Isildur frowned.

“Do you?”

His friend glared at him.

“I am not someone who was just recruited for a post. I am here to prevent you from getting killed. That is my mission.”

“The unarmed decoy is here to prevent me from getting killed.” Isildur snorted, though the more he thought about it, the less amusing he found it. “You should have stayed away from this, Malik.”

“Stop it. Can you imagine yourself questioning things in the middle of a mission in Arne or in Harad? This is not Númenor anymore, Isildur. This is Harad. Keep thinking and you will die.”

“Well, one of us has to think, or we would be mindlessly heading towards our destruction.”

“We have been mindlessly heading towards our destruction since you first had this idea.” Malik shrugged, and interrupted Isildur before he could whisper an angry retort. “It is time.”

The half-Númenórean’s innate sense of the passing of time had always been much better than his own, perhaps from some mysterious heritage passed on from his ancestors. Abandoning the pointless debate, Isildur looked up, and his whole body tensed in anticipation of the risk they were about to take. In a process that was already familiar to him from every other ambush he had led in his life, he could feel his heartbeat increase, and his lifeblood flow in droves towards every limb and extremity of his body, while his brain remained strangely aloof and unaffected by those processes, as if it belonged to someone else.

He nodded curtly.

“I am ready.”

“So am I. Good luck.”

That was all, and Malik was already crouching under cover of the next set of bushes, his movements as silent and precise as ever. Isildur watched him leave, realizing that he should have said something meaningful, anything, before they parted for what could well be the last time in the world of the living. But it was too late for that now, and besides, his friend was right: he could not afford to waste a single second thinking of what could, or should, have been.

Careful not to make any sound, he grabbed the helmet that lay on the ground at his feet, and pushed his head into it. It was not quite his size, and the pressure of the cold metal hurt his temples, but it fit, and no one would be able to recognize him while wearing it, unless they happened to be looking closely at his eyes. Once this was done, he grabbed the pommel of his long dagger in his right hand, muttering a prayer to Eru up in Heaven to aid them in their endeavour. Then, calculating that Malik must have reached his position by now, he stood on his feet, and left his hiding place.

From then on, many things happened at once, though Isildur’s sense of reality had narrowed down to the most immediate processes. As Malik was spotted approaching the Tree, he could hear the first shouts ring in the empty courtyard. He rushed in their direction, running as if a thousand Orcs were chasing after him. While he ran, he yelled at the Guards to chase after the intruder, trying to pour all his powers of conviction into his voice, and refusing to think of his defenceless friend being chased by armed men. The ruse worked so well that they ran ahead towards the passage to the old Fountain Gardens, which lay buried in shadow and could not be seen from his location. Only one of them stayed behind to guard the Tree, and he was approaching Isildur without even unsheathing his sword, certain that he was having affair to one of his comrades.

“Where on Earth did he come from?” he asked, in a puzzled voice. “And how could he get inside the Palace? What is happening?”

If Isildur had not been in battle mode, he certainly would have regretted slitting his throat, for the man was no enemy of his, only a Palace Guard of the King of Númenor doing his duty. As it was, he rushed to lay the body on the ground, and extract the fine sword he carried from the sheath where it had been kept. The shouts had receded in the distance, and he suddenly came to the realization that he had been left as he was in his dream: alone with the White Tree.

In his visions, he had always been unable to climb it before the waters came to sweep him away, but reality was different. Though he had never been a great climber, the trunk was so old and gnarled that even an eight-year old would have been able to manage it. He looked up, trying to locate his prize, until he found it hanging above his head like a paradox of nature among the bare branches. Even under the half-light of the clouded moon, it seemed to him that it shone with a beautiful silver glow. As he stood there staring at it, the feeling that he had already been there and done this increased, until it threatened to overwhelm his waking senses.

This was not a dream. And if he were to fail, he would not awake in his bed to the sight of Malik making fun of him.

Coming out of his daze, Isildur grabbed the trunk with both hands, and started the climb. The white wood felt solid and oddly comforting under his weight, as if, somehow, the Tree had been awaiting him, and was lending him its own strength. Even when he reached the upper branches, he was not afraid of any of them giving way under his weight. The White Tree would never let him fall.

At last, his hand closed around the large, bulbous fruit, and he marvelled at how hard it was to his touch, though it had looked soft and fragile from below. To cut it from its branch would have felt like sacrilege, if Isildur had not been so certain that this is what he was meant to do.

“Halt! What are you doing?”

Jolted out of his feelings of predestination, the lord of Andúnië’s grandson looked down, to see two of the guards who had left in pursuit of Malik running back towards his location. There was not even the time to guess what this meant for his friend, if he had been caught or had managed to escape; he could only afford to think of himself.

As fast as he could, Isildur hid the fruit of Nimloth inside his clothes, pressed against his chest, and grabbing the branch with both hands he slid down until he was hanging from it. From that position, he released his right hand, which went towards the sword he had just taken from the corpse of the Guard he had killed. He calculated the trajectory, and waited until the men were close enough to jump, land on top of one of them, and use the momentum to deal him a blow across the chest. Wounded, the Guard staggered back, but the other was already on him, and Isildur was still caught in his previous movement so there was no time to adopt a defensive stance. Even worse; as he landed on the floor, pain shot through his leg, and he realized that he must have sprained, perhaps even broken his ankle in the jump.

But this pain was nothing compared to that which he felt as the Guard’s sword slashed his shoulder. Overcome by agony, it was all he could do to retreat from a second blow aimed at his heart, which beat swiftly against the rugged surface of the White Tree’s last fruit. His fierce battle stance lost in a grimace, he moved aside and managed to block the next attack with his sword.

“Get him!”, the wounded man yelled. “He is an accomplice!”

Isildur thought about escape, but he knew that he would never make it past the gates with a limp and another Guard in pursuit. All he could do now was face his opponent, defeat him, and hope that no one else would join them in the meantime. Somehow, the awareness of walking so close to the edge of disaster gave him a renewed strength and purpose. Though he could feel the great gash in his shoulder dripping blood under his clothes, his thrusts and parries were as relentless as they had ever been, and it was not long until he had driven the Guard back. Taking advantage of an opening, he grabbed the dagger with his left hand and sunk it on the man’s flank. With a cry of pain, he fell to his knees first, then face flat to the ground. Isildur moved past him, towards where his wounded companion was trying to struggle into an upright position, swiftly knocking him out with the pommel of his sword.

It was unbearable agony to simply move, let alone walk with a rapidly swollen ankle and a bleeding wound on his shoulder. Isildur knew that it was only a matter of time before the heat of the battle, and the manic energy animating his movements in the face of danger slipped away from his grasp. And once it did, he would fall to the floor like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

Even if it was the last thing he ever did, he had to get out of there before this happened.

Perhaps it was the feel of the stolen fruit against his chest, exerting some kind of beneficial influence over his mind and body, but he managed to endure the pain and limp all the way across the Outer Courtyard to the main gate. Once there, he realized that the gate guards were already aware of what had happened. Luckily, as they saw him arrive, they seemed to assume that he was there to join the chase that the three Guards he had lost, together with some reinforcements from their own number, were leading outside against the slippery intruder who had climbed over the Palace walls.

“You should stay here! You are in no shape for… is that blood?”

Isildur pretended not to hear the voices calling after him and walked on, doing his best to walk as normally as he could. The pain was growing steadily, and for a moment he thought he was going to faint, as the voices inside him blended into an undistinguishable buzz. He bit his tongue so hard that his mouth tasted of blood.

Outside, he heard shouts in the darkness, coming from several directions. Malik was somewhere out there, he thought, chased by those men, perhaps wounded like he was, and probably still unarmed. He had no Guard outfit, no thin veneer of anonymity to hide him from his pursuers. He was tracked and hounded, like a dog, and yet there was nothing Isildur could do to help him in his current state. He should be trying to find a dark alley where he could take off those clothes. He should be pouring all his strength into an effort to reach the Andúnië residence with his prize. He should…

The round stones of the pavement crawled under his feet, as if they were the scales of one of the dragons from the old tales. Suddenly the entire floor began to spin, the only warning he got before he collapsed, and everything went pitch black around him.

 

*      *     *     *     *

 

“Isildur!”

The sky was black above his head, and his ears shook with a menacing rumble. Below his feet, the ground was shifting, and he desperately tried to hold on to something. But there was nothing but a dead stump where the White Tree used to stand, and he could not climb it anymore.

“Isildur. Isildur!”

The voice seemed to be reaching him from a great distance, though he could feel the presence hovering right over him.

“Malik”, he whispered. His voice was hoarse; it did not sound like him at all. “Malik, where are you?”

“I am here. Here, Isildur”, the ghost called. “Come on, look at me!”

A pair of rough hands that did not belong to a disembodied presence grabbed his face, and began shaking it. He tried to escape them, but he could barely move. Slowly, an awareness of his own body, his real body, dawned on him. He was sitting on a hard surface, and his back was propped against another hard surface. His clothes were wet with something warm and viscous, and he was in pain.

“Finally!” Malik was right in front of him, not the ghost Malik, but the real, flesh-and-blood one. As Isildur’s eyes focused on his face, he turned away to stare nervously over his shoulder. “Listen to me, for we do not have much time. You look terrible, and you probably cannot walk, but you have to. Lean on me and pretend to be drunk; that will not be considered anything unusual around here.” He took out his cloak, and wrapped Isildur on it. “There, now they cannot see the blood.”

Standing up, even with Malik doing most of the work, proved an excruciating task. If he had not been saving all his strength for this purpose, Isildur would have cursed in all the tongues of the Island and mainland.

“Wh-where… are they?” he asked. The pavement seemed to be lying at a great distance from his eyes, and this frightened him.

Malik grabbed his arm with one of his, and supported his back with the other, careful not to touch the wounded shoulder. Slowly, yet relentlessly, he began pushing him forwards, and it was all Isildur could do not to pass out again.

“Too close. I have given them the slip, but they are still searching, and if they see you lying here, they will take you back to the Palace and discover your identity.” He paused for a moment, in which all that could be heard was Isildur’s ragged breaths as they trudged on, and the distant sounds of carousing by revellers who were oblivious to the drama unfolding a mere street away from them. “Do you have it?”

Isildur experienced a split second of alarm, before he could feel the fruit of Nimloth still securely pressed against his chest.

“Yes.”

“Good. Because if this has all been for nothing, I swear…”

All of a sudden, Malik’s body tensed against his, and his voice trailed away. After a moment, however, he relaxed and continued walking as if nothing had happened.

“Praised be Eru the Almighty, I thought I heard something.”

“Perhaps they gave up. Perhaps they are… far from here”, Isildur muttered, feeling some of his old spirit come back to him. “S-so far the plan is working, isn’t it? Maybe it wasn’t so badly conceived.”

“Shut up”, Malik hissed. Though he kept his voice low, Isildur was able to detect a great anger simmering underneath, mixed with something else -was it fear? “If you survive this, stay awake all night if you must, but never, ever have another dream!”

Isildur did not answer. The pain made it difficult to come up with an appropriate retort.

As they moved across the empty alley, he could hear the voices of the revellers draw closer. He recognized this as the vicinity of a well-known street with many taverns. If they could reach it, and as long as the blood did not stain the cloak too visibly, they would be hidden in plain sight, two more drunkards among the rabble. They could even make it to the safety of the Andúnië mansion on foot, as it stood in this very hill, quite close from their current location.

“Come on. One last effort”, his friend’s voice encouraged him when he faltered. His ankle had gone numb by now, so he could barely feel it anymore, but the damned shoulder would not do him the same favour. Suddenly, he realized that the blood was beginning to be visible on the cloak as well. How much of it had he lost?

A scream rent the air somewhere nearby, and Malik’s body froze again. Isildur stopped with him. As he began to listen, he could hear more shouts, the noises of a drunken argument, nothing more… but then, the unmistakeable clinking sound of armed men on the march reached his ears, and he froze as well.

“Malik”, he whispered, but his friend was in full possession of his senses, and of course he had heard them before he had. His face was drained of all colour, and even in his state, Isildur could realize what this meant.

They were heading their way.

“We…” We have to hide, was what he was trying to say, but he never managed to reach the second word. His voice died in his throat when Malik grabbed his sword, pulled it out of the scabbard, and removed his supporting weight from under Isildur’s wavering body. Bereaved from his sole anchor, it was all he could do not to fall face flat against the pavement again, but even as he stumbled and wavered, the son of Ashad pushed him against the wall. He groaned in pain.

“W-what...?” he began. Malik shook his head, pointing the sword at his throat. The blade gleamed under the moonlight, and right then, his friend’s lips curved into the most terrible smile Isildur had ever seen.

“Like I said back then, Isildur. We were born at the same time, but we were never meant to die at the same time.” The sword slashed at the air, and as the flat side of the blade impacted against his wounded shoulder, he crumbled to the ground with a scream of agony. “Farewell.”

No. No, no, no, no, his mind reeled, unable to accept it, and yet unable to prevent it, to do anything except lie on the floor as Malik ran past him, and the Palace Guards chased after his retreating form without sparing him a second glance.

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

Blackness. Numbness. Oblivion. He wanted nothing more than to achieve them all, to leave his self behind and lose all consciousness of who he was. It was so easy now, too: he only had to close his eyes and everything would disappear, like the light of a candle when it was pressed between two fingers.

But he could not. He had to go on. He had to feel the pain, the terror, the crushing weight of all those thoughts he could not even think because his mind would be torn apart if he did.

You must not die, Isildur. You have a great destiny, and you must fulfil it.

“I cannot” he whispered, grabbing an iron bar of the window above him, and trying to pull himself up. “I cannot.”

Are you a coward?

The voice was angry, and he realized belatedly that it belonged to the ghost in his dream. The ghost who would not help him climb, night after night, since he had been a child, not because he did not want to, but because he could not. And now, at last, he understood the true logic of prophecy, the one that a stupid, foolish young man had believed himself wise enough to understand.

Isildur. Isildur, you must not die. You must rise.

“Leave me” he mumbled raggedly. “Leave me alone. I have failed.”

You cannot do that. You cannot die, you coward. If you do, everything will have been in vain.

His grip on the iron bar became stronger, and with a strangled yell, he somehow managed to pull himself up to an erect position. He could not look down; the entire world was spinning.

That is it. You are doing well. Now, keep walking.

But how could he do that? If he let go of his only support, he would fall again.  It was not a matter of resolve anymore: he could not even feel his legs, and his arms were growing weaker by the second. The Andúnië residence was close, but he would never reach it. As soon as he had lost enough blood, he would die, and if the Guards came back they would identify his corpse, and then his family would be in danger because he had failed in his mission. Because he had not been strong enough.

“Not strong enough”, he mumbled. “Sorry.”

But you have been strong. Let go, you are safe now. Lean in here.

Confused, Isildur tried to blink. Why would the ghost say those things to him? Was it the voice of his own desire, telling him to surrender to the darkness that he found so sweet? However it might be, he could not listen to it. He had to listen to Malik.

“Cannot”, he managed to articulate. “Cannot do… that.”

“Yes, you can.” Strong arms grabbed him, and suddenly he realized that he was not alone. His first thought was that Malik was back, that he had somehow managed to survive and escape his pursuers, but it was not his voice. His second thought was more ominous: it was one of the Guards, who had doubled back and found him. He tried to struggle, but fell limp in the man’s arms.

“Help me carry him”, were the last words that he heard before he lost consciousness.