CHAPTER 15

The Nazgúl! An ancient magical order, ever surrounded by most ominous rumor. Black wraiths, supposedly in touch with the highest powers of Mordor; the miracles ascribed to them were such that no serious person would ever believe them. Nor had Haladdin believed them, but now a nazgúl was here for his soul… Having said that common phrase in his mind, he almost bit his tongue. Despite being a skeptic and a rationalist, Haladdin had nevertheless always known that some things are better left untouched, lest one lose his fingers… Suddenly he heard a voice, quiet and a little husky, with a hard-to-place accent, issuing, it seemed, not from the darkness under the hood, but from somewhere off to the side, or from above:

“Are you afraid of me, Haladdin?”

“Well, to be honest…”

“So say it straight: yes, I’m afraid. You see, I could have assumed… er… a more neutral form, but I’ve too little strength left. So please bear with me, it’ll not be for long. Although it must be creepy to one unused to such things.”

“Thank you,” Haladdin answered gruffly, feeling his fear suddenly dissipate without a trace.

“Could you at least introduce yourself, since you know me but I don’t know you?”

“Actually, you do know me, if only by hearsay: Sharya-Rana, at your service.” The edge of the cowl dipped in a small bow. “To be more precise, I was Sharya-Rana in my previous life.”

“Amazing!” Now Haladdin was sure that he was dreaming, and tried to behave accordingly.

“A personal conversation with Sharya-Rana himself – I would’ve gladly given five years of my life for that. By the way, you have a rather interesting lexicon for a Vendotenian who lived more than a century ago.”

“It’s your lexicon, not mine.” Haladdin could have sworn that for a split second the darkness under the cowl coalesced into a smirk. “I’m simply using your words, it’s no effort for me. Although, if you prefer…”

“No, this is fine.” Total delusion! “But tell me, honored Sharya-Rana, they say that all the Nazgúl are former kings?”

“There are kings among us, too, as well as doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, and such. As you can see, some of us are mathematicians.”

“So is it true that after publishing The Natural Basis of Celestial Mechanics you turned completely to theology?”

“Yes, but that, too, is all behind me, in my former life.”

“And when you leave those former lives, you simply shed your tired flesh and acquire unlimited powers and immortality?”

“No. We are long-lived, but mortal. Indeed, we are always nine – that is the tradition – but members of the Nine change. As for unlimited powers… it’s really an unimaginably heavy burden. We are the magic shield that had for ages protected the little oasis of Reason in which your light-minded civilization had so comfortably nestled. It is absolutely alien to the World in which we had to be born, and Middle Earth is struggling against this alien presence with all the might of its magic. When we manage to absorb a blow, we dematerialize, and then it is simply very painful; whereas when we make a mistake and a blow reaches your little world… What we feel then has no name in any human language: all the World’s pain, all the World’s fear, all the World’s despair is the payment for our work. If you only knew how emptiness can hurt…” The burning coals under the hood seemed filmed with ash momentarily. “In other words, you shouldn’t envy us our powers.”

“Forgive me,” Haladdin mumbled. “None of us even suspect… they tell all kind of tales about you… I myself thought that you’re phantoms that don’t care about the real world.”

“On the contrary, we do care a lot. For example, I’m well acquainted with your work.”

“Really?!”

“Oh yes. Congratulations: what you did the year before last with your study of nerve tissue will inaugurate a new era in physiology. Not sure that you’ll make it into a school textbook, but a university course certainly. Provided, of course, that after the recent events this world will ever have textbooks and universities.”

“Yeah?” Haladdin was doubtful. Sure, to hear this kind of praise from Sharya-Rana himself (provided that this was, indeed, Sharya-Rana) was pleasant beyond belief, but the great mathematician seemed not so competent in a foreign subject. “I’m afraid that you’re confusing a couple of things. I did indeed achieve a few good results studying how poisons and antidotes work, but that work with nerve fibers was just a fleeting whim. A couple of cute experiments, a hypothesis that still needs a lot of checking…”

“I never confuse anything,” the nazgúl snapped coldly. “That little paper is the best work you have done and will ever do; at the very least, you’ve immortalized your name. I say this not because I believe it, but because I know it. We have some ways to see the future, and use them sometimes.”

“Well, sure, you must be interested in the future of science.”

“In that particular case our main interest was you rather than science.”

“Me?!”

“Yes, you. Still, not everything is clear, which is why I’m here to ask a few questions.

Most of them will be… rather personal, and I only ask for one thing: please answer as honestly as you think necessary, but don’t invent anything; that’d be useless anyway. And please stop looking around all the time! There are no other people for…” – the nazgúl paused for a moment – “at least twenty-three miles in any direction, and your friends will sleep soundly until we’re done here. So – are you ready to answer under those conditions?”

“As I understand it,” Haladdin smiled crookedly, “you can obtain my answers without my consent.”

“Yes, I can,” the nazgúl nodded, “but I will not. Not with you, anyway. The thing is, I have a certain proposition for you, so we must at least trust each other… Hey, do you think I’m here to buy your immortal soul?” Haladdin mumbled something unintelligible. “Oh, please– that’s complete nonsense!”

“What’s nonsense?”

“Buying a soul, that’s what. Be it known to you that a soul can be obtained as a gift, as a sacrifice, it can be lost – but it can be neither bought nor sold. It’s like love: there’s no give-and-take, otherwise it’s just not love. Besides, I’m really not that interested in your soul.”

“Really? “ Strangely, that stung. “So what interests you, then?”

“First of all, I’m interested in finding out why a brilliant scientist would quit his job, which was the meaning of his life rather than just a livelihood, and volunteer as an army field medic.”

“Well, for example, he was interested in verifying some of his ideas about how poisons work in practice. Such a wealth of data was being lost, you know…”

“So the Elf-wounded soldiers of the South Army were nothing but guinea pigs to you?

That’s a lie! I know you like my own two hands, from your idiotic experiments on yourself to… Why the hell are you trying to seem more cynical than you are?”

“But the practice of medicine predisposes one to certain cynicism, especially military medicine. You know, they give this test to all novice field medics. Say that you get three wounded men: one with a belly wound, one with a serious thigh wound – open break, blood loss, shock, the works – and one with a glancing shoulder wound. You can only operate one at a time, so where do you start? Surely, all novices say, it’s the belly wound. No, says the examiner. While you’re busy with him, and it’s nine out of ten that he’s going to die anyway, the guy with the thigh wound will get complications and will at least lose his leg, and most likely die, too. So you have to start with the most serious wound among those who have a decent chance of survival – in our case, the thigh wound. As for the belly wound, well… give the man an analgesic and leave him to the One’s will. To a normal person this must seem cynical and cruel, but at war you can only choose between bad and worse, so this is the only way. It was only in Barad-Dur that we could talk nicely, over tea and jam, about how every human life is invaluable…”

“Something doesn’t add up here. If all your considerations are eminently practical, why did you carry the baron and risked the whole team, rather than administering the ‘strike of mercy’?”

“Where’s the contradiction? It’s plainly obvious that you have to help your comrade to the hilt, even at the greatest risk: you save him today, he’ll save you tomorrow. As for the ‘strike of mercy’, don’t worry – were it necessary, we would’ve done it in the best form…

It used to be better in the old times, when wars were declared in advance, didn’t involve peasants, and a wounded man could simply surrender. Too bad that we weren’t born then, but no inhabitant of those glass-house times can cast a stone at us.”

“A beautiful exposition, Field Medic, sir, but I suspect that you’d ask the sergeant to do the ‘strike of mercy’. No? All right then, another question, again about practical logic. Have you considered that a leading physiologist sitting in Barad-Dur and studying antidotes professionally could save a lot more lives than a field medic?”

“Of course I’ve considered it. It’s just that – sometimes there are situations when a man has to do an obviously stupid thing just to retain his self-respect.”

“Even if this self-respect is ultimately bought with others’ lives?”

“Well… I’m not sure. After all, the One may have His own ideas about that.”

“So you make the decision, but the One bears responsibility for it? Wonderful! Haven’t you told the same thing to Kumai in almost the exact same words I’ve just used?

Remember? You had no chance, of course – once a Troll decides something, that’s the end of it. “We may not sit out the battle which will decide the fate of the Motherland” – and so an excellent mechanic becomes an army engineer, Second Class. A truly priceless acquisition for the South Army! In the meantime it seems to you that Sonya is looking at you strangely: sure, her brother is fighting at the front while her bridegroom is cutting up rabbits at the University like there’s not a war on. So then you can think of nothing better than to follow Kumai (truly it is said that stupidity is contagious), so that the girl is bereft of both brother and bridegroom. Am I right?”

For some time Haladdin stared at the flames dancing over the coals (strange thing: the fire keeps burning, although the nazgúl doesn’t seem to be adding any wood). He had the distinct feeling of having been exposed in something untoward. What the hell!

“In other words, doctor, your head is a total mess, if you pardon the expression. You can make decisions, no question about that, but can’t complete a single logical construct; rather, you slide into emotionalism. However, in our case this is actually not bad.”

“What’s not bad?”

“You see, should you decide to accept my proposition, you will thereby take on an opponent that is immeasurably more powerful than you are. However, your actions are frequently totally irrational, so he’ll have a hell of a time guessing what you’ll do. It is quite possible that this is our only hope.”