The Book of Short Tales by Lyra

*B2MeM '13 - March 4-12 - The Lucky Ones

At last, a story that's wholly B2MeM '13! Inspired by the Númenor quote for March 4 (Breaking the Ban of the Valar), and incidentally also covering March 5 (Going aboard the Alcarondas), March 8 (Persecution of the Faithful), March 9 (the Gift of Ilúvatar), March 12 (Ilúvatar changing the fashion of the world). Oof! Quick, post it before yet another prompt comes along!

"... and there was little wind, but they had many oars and many strong slaves to row beneath the lash." One of these slaves looks back on when it all started to go terribly wrong.

*This chapter rated "Adult" for allusions to extremely disturbing subject matter, such as human sacrifice and cannibalism.

The Lucky Ones

We considered ourselves the lucky ones. Like most others of our faith, we had been arrested under some bogus charges, like Sedition or Espionage or Rebellion; but unlike most others, we were not brought to the Temple, where we knew people were tormented and then burned in sacrifice. Instead, we were chained and marched to the west coast, where they assigned us to the shipwrights that were building the King's new fleet.
So we would live; and we gave thanks for our good fortune, our strong arms and broad backs that had bought us this respite.

I know, I know: Being of the faith, we should have been ready to accept the gift of death willingly, when our time came. It was just that we were very certain that our time was not yet at hand.
And indeed, it was not. So, although the work was hard, and the food was bad, and the beatings were frequent, we counted ourselves lucky; and though we guessed the purpose of the fleet that we were building – for indeed, one would not have needed such a fleet to conquer any realm to the East – we ignored our misgivings and did as we were bidden.

Well, not all of us: There were some who tried to tamper with the materials, who shortened the nails so they would not hold under pressure or did not seal the oakum that was meant to make the seams between the planks watertight. When they were found out, we heard them scream and plead for three days and three nights, until they fell silent forever; their mangled bodies were hung from the quay walls to feed the gulls at low tide and the fish at high tide.
After that, nobody tried to hamper the progress again. We did the work we were assigned, and we did it as well as we could -- or else. Indeed, I admit I took some pride in my work. There is a certain elation when a newly-built ship is launched, when newly-shaven oars glide into the water, when newly-woven sails are hoisted for the first time.

It was harder to ignore the purpose of the fleet when the work was complete, and the armada – so many ships that they spread out in all directions further than the eye could see, so many that you could walk from the westernmost cape of Andustar to the westernmost tip of Hyarnustar in a straight line without getting your feet wet – were laden with provisions and horses and tools and, above all, weaponry. But I did not worry about the Lords of the West just then, for I was more worried about my own fate. We had been left alive because we were useful, but now the fleet was built; would we now be taken to the Temple, to bleed and burn as the King prayed for a safe journey and a succesful campaign?

But we were lucky again, for we were brought aboard the King's ship, the Alcarondas, a marvel and a beauty without peer; and there we were chained to the thwarts. It seemed that the King's ship was to be rowed by Adûnaic slaves only. I do not know why. Maybe the King thought us more trustworthy than the foreign slaves. Or maybe he sought to demonstrate how utterly we were conquered, forced to speed his unrightful expedition to make war upon the West? Be that as it may, it was the strength of Faithful arms that brought Ar-Pharazôn to the Blessed Realm – although not all of us on the oars were of the faith; some also were proper criminals, brought in for theft or worse crimes.

Still, the thought that we were instrumental to the King's campaign now troubled me. It troubled me so much that I could not keep it to myself, even though we were forbidden to speak and severely punished when we were caught. But I was twice lucky: There were four men to an oar, and I was the last in line, sitting right next to the ship's wall where the creaking of the oar and the sloshing of the water would drown my whispers, if only the guards did not see my lips move.
"What will happen to us," I asked my neighbour, "when this campaign fails-" for it would fail, it had to fail, with all my heart I had to believe that it would fail – "and we are taken prisoner? Will we be judged alongside the Unbelievers?"
"We will appeal to Their clemency," my neighbour whispered back. "We are slaves; we are not here of our own choice. We had no choice. We are not Their enemies. They will show us mercy."

So we reached the Blessed Realm, where all was quiet and there was no army to block our way. The deadly silence was unnerving, but it was soon filled with yelled commands and the noises of unloading, the uneasy neighing of the horses, the clinking of armour and the crack of the inevitable whips. The King claimed all the land, and we all knelt to him in his splendour: Because we would have to, anyway, and because he truly looked like the King of all the World in that moment, and because it would not do to draw attention to ourselves in case this campaign would not fail after all.

We were made to carry the provisions inland and dig ditches and put up the tents and gather wood for the fires; and the King and his warriors laid siege on Tirion upon Túna, a city I had never thought I would see with my own eyes and could not believe I was seeing even now, in that unreal silence in the gloom of dusk. We saw no watchers upon those high, white walls; but surely they were watching us somewhere?
I stared too long at the white city and caught a couple of lashes for it. On that evening, I was glad of it. I was glad when we were chained outside to sleep under the the leaden sky. Anyone could see that we were slaves, that we were forced to take part in this heresy, could they not?

Still, I did not sleep well that night. I was homesick, thinking of my home in Nindamos, of my dear sister and my old parents – but no, they had been taken to the Temple, they were no longer there.
I wept a little, and I was sweating. It was oppressively hot, and no wind was moving the air, which was stuffy and metallic, not at all sweet and fragrant as you would expect the air of the Blessed Realm to smell. Maybe the next day would bring a thunderstorm.

And oh, there was a storm indeed; but we did not see its end. For the walls of the Calacirya came down and buried us beneath them. I thought we would be killed as the rocks fell, and for a while everything was confusion and darkness; but then one of the soldiers lit a lantern, and as far as I could see we were still alive, King and warriors and slaves and horses all, but buried underneath the rocks, which enclosed us in a sort of cavern.
They made us dig, then, to try and force us a way out of this cave. But it was as if the rocks had melted and melded together, covered by a thick, smooth layer of volcanic glass; and though we dug and hacked and chopped at the walls until our arms were tired, and they whipped us on till their arms were tired, we did not make so much as a dent, let alone a tunnel.

We watched as they rationed the provisions that had been buried with us, and doled out this day's portion: A bowl of gruel for the King, and half a bowl of gruel to each of the soldiers, and half a cup of water for each of us. We tried to guess how long our provisions would last: not long. We tried to guess how much time had passed since we had been enclosed in this cave, but it was impossible to tell; no light came into the cave from outside, and the temperature of the air did not change in any way that could have told us whether it was day or night outside. It seemed that our cavern was altogether closed in onto itself, with no connection to the world outside whatsoever. In the dark, time stretched out immeasurably.

"We will suffocate," some said then; but we never did. The air grew ever hotter, and ever more smoky from the fire the warriors had lit, first burning the wood we had gathered for the cooking fires and the palisade; and when that was used up, they burned the poles and the canvas of the tents. But still we could draw breath, though it smelled foul and stung in our dry throats.
"We will die of thirst," some said, but that did not happen either: Even when the barrels had been empty for what certainly must have been a week at the very least, we lived, though we were parched and miserable.
"We will starve," it was said. The provisions had run out, and the King's men were arguing whether one should butcher a horse. The men of Númenor, it was said in the old days, would starve before they would eat their beloved horses; but that, too, was a lie, for by and by, they did slaughter the horses and ate their meat and drank their blood. I would have, too, given the chance, but they offered nothing to us. It did not matter: We could certainly feel the hunger, clawing at our bellies like an angry beast, but it did not kill us.

I was indeed praying for death in those days, calling upon Eru Himself and every Vala whose name I remembered. Many of us were praying openly now, and many of the King's men were also praying – not all of them to Melkor. But either our prayers could not reach outside the walls of our cave, or there were none to listen.
"Or they will not listen," one of us said. "We wanted life neverending, and now we have it. We forsook the Gift of Ilúvatar, and now we are forsaken and forgotten."
"We did not want life neverending," I protested. "They made us come! We never would have come here, if not for them."
He shrugged. "We should have refused," he said.
"Then they would have put us to death."
Another shrug. "Yes. We should have died while we had the time."

We were praying, for mercy or release or death, and there was no answer. We were indeed forsaken. The good thing, I thought, was that at least it could not get worse - until one of the younger slaves said, "How long, I wonder, until they decide that we are not much more than beasts of burden?"
Most of us did not understand what he meant, so he explained, "What happens when there are no more horses to eat?"
"Then they, too, will starve as we do," I said.
"Not, I think, while we are here," said he.
It took a while until we fully understood his meaning. "They wouldn't!" many protested then.
He shook his head, and said, "Just wait."
"They wouldn't," we said again. And I was certain that they wouldn't. There was only so low a man would stoop, wasn't there?
"What," another man asked, "if that won't kill us, either?"
One thought more terrifying than the last! I am certain I was not the only one whose blood seemed to turn to ice at that question, despite the suffocating heat in the cave.
"We will be lucky," said the man who had sat next to me while we had been rowing. "We will die."
"And stay dead?" someone else muttered.
My thwart-neighbour frowned, but insisted, "We will die."

And we did. We were, after all, the lucky ones.