CHAPTER 23

Mountains of Shadow, Hotont pass

May 12, 3019

“There’s your Ithilien.” The mountain Troll put down the sack and pointed forward, where the thick chaparral of low scrub oak piled up in the gorge below like dense clouds of light-green smoke. “I can go no further, but you won’t get lost, the path is well-trod. You’ll hit a stream in about an hour; the ford is a bit downstream. Looks scary, but it’s fine to cross.

The thing there is not to be scared and step right into the eddies, that’s where the water is calmest. Just re-pack and go.”

“Thank you, Matun!” Haladdin firmly shook the guide’s shovel-wide hand. The Troll resembled a bear in both looks and demeanor: a good-natured placid honey-eater capable of turning, in a blink of an eye, into a deadly fighting machine fearsome even more in its swiftness and cunning than in its monstrous strength. The bulbous nose, the unkempt red beard, the expression of a yokel who just saw a carnival magician pull a gold coin out of his ear – all these concealed an excellent warrior, both skilled and ruthless. Looking at him, Haladdin always recalled what he had heard once: peaceful family men make the best fighters – when a man like this one, coming home from work one day, finds nothing but charred bones in the ruins of his home.

He glanced once again at the snowy masses of the Mountains of Shadow looming over them – not even Tzerlag would have been able to get their company through all these ice pools, vertical moss-covered walls and vast rhododendron-covered slopes.

“When you get back to the base, please take care to remind Ivar to meet us in this same place in July.”

“No worries, buddy: the chief never forgets anything. We have an agreement, so we’ll be here through last week of July come hell or high water.”

“Right. And if we’re not here by August first, drink one to the rest of our souls.”

In parting, Matun slapped Tzerlag’s shoulder so that he barely kept his feet: “Be well, scout!” He and the Orocuen had become fast friends during the last few days. Of course, he did not even nod at Tangorn; had he only leave to do what he wanted to this Gondorian dude… Whatever, the officers know better. He had fought in Ivar the Drummer’s guerilla band since the beginning of the occupation and knew full well that one is supposed to wait for a scouting team’s return at the rendezvous point for no more than three days, and here the orders were for a full week! A mission of special importance, see? So the Gondorian dude must not be here just for show, either.

Yes, Haladdin thought, looking at the rhythmically bobbing pack on the baron’s back, it all depends on Tangorn now: whether he can protect us in Ithilien the way we protected him up to now. He’s Prince Faramir’s personal friend – that’s great, but we have to get to this wonderful prince first. Plus it may very well turn out that this Faramir is nothing but Aragorn’s puppet, while the baron has rather peculiar relations with Minas Tirith authorities– he may have already been declared an outlaw… In other words, we may easily hang together, either in the forest if we run into a Gondorian patrol, or on the wall of Emyn Arnen; the funniest thing is that in the forest the baron will hang with us, while in the fort we’ll hang with him. Yeah, the right company is key…

Such gloomy thoughts must have bothered the baron about ten days ago, when they confirmed that the route to Ithilien through Morgul Vale and the Cirith Ungol pass had been sealed shut by Elvish outposts, which meant that they had to seek help from the guerillas in the Mountains of Shadow. The worst fate would have been to run into one of the smaller bands that acknowledged no authority and were seeking nothing but revenge; no talk about any mission would have helped, as the guerillas now killed their prisoners with no less cruelty than their enemies did. Fortunately, using Sharya-Rana’s information, Tzerlag managed to locate in the Shara-Teg Gorge a well-regulated company reporting to the main command of the Resistance. It was led by a commissioned officer, one Lieutenant Ivar, a one-armed veteran of the North Army. A native of this area, he had turned the gorge into an unassailable fastness; among other things, he instituted a remarkable audible warning system on all the observation posts, earning himself the nickname “the Drummer.”

The lieutenant had weighed Haladdin’s nazgúl ring fearlessly in his hand, nodded and asked only one question: what can he do to assist sir Field Medic in his mission? Escort their recon team to Ithilien? No problem. His opinion is that they should use the Hotont pass; since it’s considered to be impassable during this time of year, it’s most likely unguarded from the Ithilien side. Unfortunately, his best guide, one Matun, is away on a mission. Can you wait three or four days? No problem, then; this will let you rest and fatten up a little, too – it’ll be one arduous trek… Only when all three of them got back the weapons of which they had been relieved by the forward guard did Tangorn return the poison he had borrowed from the doctor.

Haladdin had never been to this part of the country before, so now he observed the daily life of the Shara-Teg Gorge with genuine interest. The mountain Trolls lived spartanly but conducted themselves with truly princely dignity; to an outsider, only their hospitality often went beyond any reasonable measure, acutely embarrassing Haladdin. At least now he understood where the amazing ambience of the Barad-Dur house of his classmate Kumai came from.

The Trolls have always lived together in large tight-knit families, and since the only way to put up a house big enough for thirty people on a steep slope is to build up, their abodes were thick-walled stone towers twenty to thirty feet high. The stonemasonry experience accumulated in the building of these miniature fortresses later made Troll expatriates into the leading city builders of Mordor. Their other line was metallurgy. First they perfected blacksmithing, making weapons cheap and therefore widely available; then they mastered working with iron-nickel alloys (most of the ores in the region were self-legated), and since then the swords worn by every local male over the age of twelve were the best in Middle Earth. Not surprisingly, the Trolls never knew any authority other than their own elders: only a total idiot will attack a Trollish tower and sacrifice half of the attacking force only to gain a dozen scrawny sheep as booty (or church tithe).

The Mordorian powers understood this well and therefore did nothing but recruit warriors here, which much flattered the Trolls. Later, though, when mining and metal refining became their main occupation, the sale of those commodities was hit with a stupendous tax, but the Trolls did not seem to care – their indifference to wealth and luxury was already legendary, along with their stubbornness. This also gave rise to a popular legend that the known Trolls were only a half of that people. The other half (mistakenly called ‘gnomes’ or ‘dwarves’ in the Western countries, in confusion with another mythical race – that of underground smiths) supposedly were wealth-crazy and spent all their lives in secret underground tunnels, searching for gold and gems; they were allegedly miserly, aggressive, treacherous – in other words, a mirror image of the real, above-ground Trolls. Be that as it may, the fact remains: the Trollish community gave Mordor many outstanding personalities, from generals and bladesmiths to scientists and preachers, but not a single merchant of note.

When the Western allies implementing ‘the final solution of the Mordorian problem’ have finished ‘mopping up’ the foothills and went to work on the Trolls in their Ash and Shadow Mountains gorges, they quickly discovered that fighting mountain men was rather different from collecting ears in Gorgoroth. The Trollish villages have been decimated or worse –thousands of men have perished in the march on Esgaroth and on the Field of Pelennor – but waging war in the confines of the mountains pretty much nullifies numerical advantages.

The mountain dwellers always had the option to give battle in the narrowest points, where ten good warriors can hold back an entire army for hours, while catapults on the slopes above methodically pound the paralyzed enemy column. Having thrice buried large companies of the enemy under man-made avalanches in the gorges, the Trolls then expanded their operations to the foothills, so that the Easterlings and the Elves alike did not dare stir out of a few well-fortified outposts at night. In the meantime, people from the plains kept arriving at the mountain villages which were now guerilla bases – if the end is near, better to meet it armed and not alone.