On the Starlit Sea by Idrils Scribe

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Chapter 14: Desperate measures/“This wasn’t supposed to happen”

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“Oi! Fuckers!” From up aloft, an Elvish voice calls out in Adûnaic with a deep, dark desert accent. 

Glorfindel hacks the foremost Umbarian clean in two before he dares to raise his eyes to the rigging. Horror leaps snarling at his throat, but it is too late. 

Elrohir has jumped across. He is standing on one of the Shakalzôr’s yardarms, his Elvish mail a bright glimmer of silver outlined against the dark ceiling of storm clouds. The boy is helmetless, utterly vulnerable with his tell-tale dark hair and the face of Eärendil’s house exposed, but he is shouting at the top of his lungs.

“I am Thanak of Harad!” Elrohir bellows, and at that name a low mutter swirls among the Umbarian soldiers. 

They murmur Elrohir’s Haradi name to each other, and something else: “Gold!” With their gazes they shape alliances and weigh competitors in who shall capture the regicide and earn the bounty on his head. 

The first gold diggers are already clambering up into the rigging, greed burning in their eyes, but Elrohir ignores them. Instead he turns his face to the quarterdeck, where the prince stands wide-eyed amidst the gold and crimson cluster of his silk-clad bodyguards. 

“Hail, oh prince!” Elrohir salutes him with a mock bow and a grin, all false bluster, but Glorfindel can feel the terror underneath, pressing sharp and sour against his own mind. 

Please, not this! Glorfindel begs, because he can do nothing else to stop the disaster unfolding before his eyes.  

Elrohir’s eyes find Glorfindel amidst the crowd. It is the only way. Forgive me.

“Your father, the old emperor, was a swine!” Elrohir shouts at the prince with a voice that is somehow steady, “and when I slit his throat he squealed like a piglet!”

For a single heartbeat Elves and Umbarians both stand stunned. The next, a roar of rage bursts from the throng of Umbarians. 

“Get him!” barks the prince, spitting with fury. “Take him alive! In the name of Mûlkher!”

At once his marines stream up the ratlines like a red spring tide. Men scramble over each other, bellowing with rage, pushing and shoving their comrades to be first to reach the wanted man - and the prize. 

Glorfindel remains at bay with his back against the gunwale, but his assailants falter, ill-pleased at missing out on their chance at fame and fortune. A few even turn away from Glorfindel to climb aloft after Elrohir. 

A few, but it is enough. Glorfindel whirls. Hadhafang cleaves the air in a swirl of silver too quick for Mortal eyes to follow, and the men fall bloodied at his feet. Glorfindel’s blade drips wet, his gauntlets are soaked, his sleeves red to the elbow, but he is free. For a moment he thinks, frantically - how to buy Elrohir the most time? 

He wants nothing more than to leap up into the rigging after him, but once they are both cornered high up on the yard, capture is certain. 

Then he remembers. 

The prince’s marines may outnumber the Elves, but they make up less than half the Shakalzôr’s complement. 

In the centre of the deck gapes a rectangle of almost tangible blackness: the dark maw of the great grate stands open. 

Glorfindel leaps down the ladder into the ship’s bowels. 

The topmost rowing deck is stifling hot and dark. A wan, grey light filters through the iron grates overhead. 

The slavemaster’s whip cracks at him the instant his feet hit the planks, but Glorfindel lets the braided leather lash wrap around his vambrace and yanks, making the man stumble towards him. He dies quickly, skewered on Hadhafang. 

As he wrenches his blade from the slavemaster’s chest with a wet crack, he draws a deep breath. A solid wall of stench makes his eyes water. He knows this smell, from being at Elrond’s side when the dungeons of Barad-Dûr were opened. Festering wounds, unwashed sweat and excrement: the stink of human misery. 

Glorfindel looks down the double lines of tightly packed rowers, noting the stained runnels in the floor leading filth down into the bilges as the chained slaves foul themselves where they sit; the dark manhole that leads down into the deeper rowing decks and the nethermost hell of the slave hold below; the great chain running along the aisle from shackle to shackle through rings bolted down into the ship’s timbers. 

The men sit bowed over their oars, five to a bench but a spear-length long. A few lucky ones possess the small dignity of a bunched rag around their hips, but most are entirely naked. The Umbarians must have run their thralls into the ground to catch the Nemir : every bare back is bloodied by the lash. 

Gondorian faces share their benches with dark-skinned Southrons, Dunlendings from Enedwaith, straw-haired Middle Men from the coasts of Anfalas, and not a few who might be Haradrim. Their foreheads all bear a branded G, for galley. 

Glorfindel has no time for pity, but he can do better than that. He takes hold of the great chain, a coil of black iron thick as a man’s wrist.

Aulë himself taught him this Song in the great smithing halls of Valmar, before he returned to Middle-earth. He Sings it now with a steady voice, calling the crystalline essence of the iron, once folded into the earth by the Great Smith himself when the world was young. Into the Music he weaves freedom, escape, the breaking of fetters. Soon the very metal groans, railing against the dark enchantments laid upon it for this foul use. 

White light forms around him, bright and sharp, and when at last he brings Hadhafang down upon the chain, the iron shatters like glass. 

The slaves sit stunned, then scramble off their benches to get away from him, terrified. 

“Fight!” Glorfindel roars, first in Westron, then Adûnaic, and in Haradi for good measure. “If you want to live, fight! Free as many as you can, and kill the Umbarians!”

A heartbeat of silence for his words to sink in, and then his cry is taken up in all these tongues and more. “Fight!” 

These men will never get another chance to escape this hellish half-life, and they know it. 

A mad rattle of chains fills the hold as the slaves pull themselves loose. The lower deck’s slave masters come running, wielding their lashes until blood spatters the planks, but soon they are strangled with their own whips. 

Some of the slaves leap down the open hatch to the lower decks, where more chains begin to rattle. 

Most fly up the ladder, towards the light. A stream of desperate men pours onto the deck, three or four to every Umbarian marine. Enough to leap and grab; hands around throats, fingers into eye sockets; tearing the mail-clad soldiers apart with bare hands before looting their blades and moving on to their comrades.

Glorfindel climbs up, shouldering through the chaos as he lightly holds his footing on the deck’s blood-slicked planks, ignoring the dreadful squelch of corpses underfoot. 

A single thought burns in his mind as he frantically scans the rigging.

Elrohir! Where is Elrohir!? 

The sky has gone dark as night, a terrifying mountain of clouds crowned with lightning. The wind whips. Blue fire crackles off the masts. The fire grenades stopped falling when the slaves tore the grenadiers limb from limb, but the Nemir is still aflame. Biting smoke billows over all.

There! 

A cry of sheer dismay wrests from Glorfindel’s throat. Driven at bay, Elrohir stands on the bitter end of the Shakalzôr’s yardarm as the Umbarians close in. One hand clenches white-knuckled around a rope, the other wields his bloodied scimitar. His eyes are wide with terror.

Galdor is battling to reach him. Alphalas is already up aloft, leaping from rope to rope light and quick as a squirrel, while skewering one Umbarian after another in a mad dash to Elrohir’s side. 

Too late! 

The foremost Umbarian reaches out and grabs Elrohir’s arm. Elrohir hacks at the man’s hand, severs it at the wrist, sending him plummeting into the angry waves below. For a moment hope returns, and Elrohir stands tall once more, bright and brave in his terrible peril, for at once another Corsair leaps to, and another behind him. 

For a moment, Elrohir’s gaze meets Glorfindel’s. Their minds touch, and Glorfindel can feel Elrohir’s fear as his own. He can bear much, but the thought of being captured has him near-mad with panic.

An Umbarian officer looms on the yardarm, a burly brute twice Elrohir’s weight. The Elvish archers desperately try to sink their flights in the gaps in his armour, but the angle is bad and their arrows plink off the black steel and scatter uselessly. 

The man laughs at Elrohir’s white-faced despair, showing teeth filed to points. He has seen his comrade’s demise, and instead of lunging within reach of Elrohir’s blade, he draws a throwing knife and launches it at Elrohir’s face. 

Glorfindel’s warning shout goes unheeded. 

"One hand for yourself, one for the ship." The lesson is drummed into any young sailor on their first climb aloft, and a thousand times after that. Not Elrohir. There has not been time.

Glorfindel can only watch, horror-stricken, as the hand without a blade jerks up from the rope, desperate to deflect the flying knife. With Elrohir distracted the Umbarian leaps forward with a shout of triumph, but his grabbing hands catch only air. 

In the single heartbeat when Elrohir released his handhold, the Shakalzôr hit a deep trough between the waves. The ship rolls sideways with a jerk. 

A stagger. A hoarse, cut-off scream, and then, before Glorfindel's very eyes, Elrohir plunges down into the sea. 

Glorfindel needs not look at the churning waves. Armoured men sink like stones, and Elrohir was wearing full mail. 

He stands reeling on the Shakalzôr’s deck amidst the din of battle, the world gone dull and dark around him, only partly aware of the wordless howl of grief that tears from his throat. 

His back shudders but no tears come. Not yet. Not here. 

He knows not how long, but then Galdor is at his side, his face equally slack with sorrow. A quick jerk of Galdor’s cutlass deflects a blow aimed at Glorfindel, and runs the offending Umbarian through. Glorfindel looks up wildly, and finds in his friend’s gaze that same shocked agony of the bereaved.

They have stood like this before, Galdor and he, side by side in loss and horror and defeat. Ost-in Edhil. The Dagorlad. Mordor. The time will come for tears and laments and regrets, but not today. Together they straighten, and in their hearts the grief sharpens to a fell, white anger. 

Glorfindel raises Hadhafang once more. The blade gleams silver and blue, its edge bright in the deadly dark. Elrond’s sword, forged in Gondolin. Glorfindel might be the last Elf in Middle-earth who remembers seeing it wielded by Idril’s own hand. Now he raises it and leaps lightly up the gilded stairs to the quarterdeck, Galdor behind him. Side by side they stand before the wall of steel that is the massed throng of the prince’s bodyguards. 

For a moment Glorfindel eyes them - their glaives and scimitars, their high Númenórean helms, the Eye of Sauron embossed on their cuirasses. Then he laughs, the sound bright and clear but terrible, and plants his feet, hefting the blade in both hands and spinning it into an arc of shimmering steel. At his shoulder, Galdor draws his long knife so he wields a blade in each hand, the Sindar way. 

"You owe us a reckoning, Umbarian," Glorfindel says, and though his voice comes out level, he knows by the way these battle-hardened men shrink back that his eyes are alight with fury, "for you have slain our friend, who was brave, and kind, and a better man than you will ever be. We will have justice for him."