Post by Admin on Mar 2, 2022 20:58:05 GMT
Author: WindSurfBabe
Summary: March 15, TA 3019. As the siege of Minas Tirith comes to an end, the men of Gondor face their fears…and their regrets.
A grandson.
Menerdil shook his head, still not daring to believe his luck. He had a grandson! A little boy, the embodiment of a man’s hopes for the future; a future he had strived to build with his own two hands. He lowered his gaze and, switching his sword from his right hand to the left, stared at the open palm. Blood had dried in the grooves and crevices of his skin; deep, dark lines meandered between calluses and old scars, resembling the circles of a felled tree. Menerdil rubbed his hand against his thigh in an attempt to wipe away the grime, chagrined as the splintering cracks caught and tugged at the fabric.
Would his grandson cry when he held him for the first time with hands as rough as these?
Gilwen had grown to hate them, and what they represented. Shortly after their daughter’s birth, she had refused to let him touch her again, claiming that his work had made them hard and cruel. When she’d left their little house in the Second circle to live with her sister in the Sixth, taking Rhoswyn with her, Menerdil hadn’t truly fought her decision, nor had he tried to change her mind, convincing himself it was she who had changed, not him. He had hearkened, relieved, to the sentence passed by other men concerning Gilwen’s true reasons for leaving – namely, the meagre pay of a simple city footman, and her own excessive ambitions.
At the time Menerdil had not understood what Gilwen had tried to tell him; now he looked at his hands with new eyes.
How many times had he raised them at her in anger? How many times had he returned from duty, reeling from what he’d seen that day, eager to silence the reproaches she rained upon him so that the cries of his fallen comrades would not echo in the shrillness of her voice? When the times had grown dark, and the shadows in the East had risen to peer over the mountains once more, he had chafed against his helplessness, growing deaf to Gilwen’s ordinary troubles.
The distance had settled between them like a third body in their marital bed, growing fat on his resentment, until the day it had pushed Gilwen out.
Menerdil tugged on his mustache and raised his eyes towards the sky. A black smoke rose from the remains of the Fourth gate, billowing in the wind and screening the low-hanging sun. Crows circled above the wall to his left, cawing loudly but not daring to land just yet, startled by the arrhythmic clanging of the battle that was being lost in the circles below.
The distant thundering of hooves carried in from the Pelennor, along with the trumpeting of horns. Far from cheering him up, the noise grated on his ears, aggravating the painful pounding of blood in his temples. Menerdil wiped the sweat from his forehead; the movement ruffled the letter he had stashed beneath his armor, between the tunic and the jerkin, safe against his heart. The parchment crackled, a corner poking him in the his chest, yet Menerdil endured the sensation with stoic endearment.
He had a grandson.
The message did not mention a name, or so Carastor had claimed. The tavern owner had read the letter out to him twice, and Menerdil had strived to remember every word. He’d never learned to read or write himself, but he had a good memory, for it was one of the few qualities his work had taught him. That, and patience – for a soldier’s life was as much made of waiting to fight as it was of the actual fighting.
A grandson.
He liked to imagine that Rhoswyn could’ve named the boy in the Gondorian fashion, and that he’d live to know his heritage. To hope she had given him her own father’s name would’ve been too much to ask; Menerdil dreaded to imagine how much Rhoswyn could have remembered of their life together, and what Gilwen had told her, once she was old enough to understand.
He had no right to expect anything of her, and still, she had written….
The Fifth gate groaned and shuddered, tilting towards them as the battering ram smashed against the wood from the other side to the cheers and grunts of the orcs. Menerdil had glimpsed the monstrous machine being rolled up the street, spiked wheels scraping against the cobblestones, coals glowing inside the frame of steel like soulless eyes. In its wake came the armies of Mordor, their numbers too large to fit into the city. It was that same engine that had breached the Rammas Echor; the impact still rang in Menerdil’s ears, like the knell marking the downfall of Gondor.
Another impact and the drawbar splintered, bending towards them.
“Stand your ground!” Arthion’s voice rang through the courtyard. Menerdil craned his neck to see the naked blade of his commander’s raised sword glimmer dully under the veiled sunlight. “Stand, men of Gondor! Defend the city, fight for those you love!”
Menerdil switched his sword into his right hand again, dispirited despite the pleasant coolness of the leather against his sweaty palm.
Those he loved….
While Rhoswyn had still lived with her aunt, he had thought it his duty to visit her. Every seventh day he’d washed and shaved, grumbling under his breath at every cut that appeared on his cheeks and resenting his wife for making him undergo such a farce for appearances’ sake. As he ascended into the richer circles of the city, Menerdil had tugged on his patched-up coat, feeling distinctly out of place amongst those who earned their lives without ever soiling their hands. Nevermind the miles he could trek during his duty as a soldier, day after day, carrying his armor on his back instead of a clean tunic; those four circles could have been part of Morgoth’s realm, for the discomfort every step had caused him.
Engrossed as he’d been in his misery, Menerdil hadn’t learned not to resent the comforts Rhoswyn had grown accustomed to, preferring the abundance of her toys to the scarce and sullen presence of her father. His visits had grown wider apart, until he’d stopped speaking of her altogether, for fear of admitting he’d lost count of her age.
Only now did he realize how much he’d missed.
It seemed like yesterday when he’d seen Rhoswyn take her first steps, waddling from the table and straight into his arms, unsure yet beaming toothlessly in reflection of his own pride. To his worried father’s heart, those few tiles between them had appeared as wide as the Bay of Belfalas, and now….
Now Rhoswyn was a woman grown and married, living in Esgaroth with her husband and their son.
Esgaroth.
A city far in the North – such was the extent of his knowledge about it. Brynjar had written to Menerdil after their marriage and, at the time, he’d wondered what it was the man was hoping to accomplish, except reminding him of everything he’d lost. They lived in a house that stood on a lake – Brynjar’s own idea, no doubt. Menerdil couldn’t help but worry at the prospect, thinking back of his own childhood in Lebennin, and the ravenous waters of the Anduin that had once carried away a friend of his, never to be seen again. He’d considered speaking to Gilwen about it, and forwent the idea at once.
Rhoswyn was hale and happy, or so Brynjar wrote, and there was little Menerdil could do but pray to Ulmo to watch over his only daughter.
Esgaroth.
A world away, or as good as, for Menerdil could not afford to visit. Not in times such as these, when the shadows of Mordor stretched their fingers ever further towards Minas Tirith; when the Lord Denethor, already harried by the heaviness of his duty and the grieving of first his wife, and now his firstborn. That, and his own salary, which had never sufficed to keep either Gilwen or Rhoswyn as comfortable as he would’ve wished. No matter what his friends liked to say; pride didn’t keep a child warm, and deeds of bravery only fed the imagination.
Nowadays, Menerdil found himself wondering: if not for the chasm between them, would Gilwen have stayed? Something in his mind whispered that loving hands could have mended the rift that darkness had started to dig, but he’d denied Gilwen even that.
The ram thundered against the gate once more; Menerdil startled. The pounding under his helm worsened as he squinted against the slanting rays of the sun, trying to ignore the cloying scent of the lilac bushes that grew in a small garden by the courtyard. The house that peeked from behind the lush clusters of pink and white resembled the one he had lived in with his wife, before she’d left and the home became an empty shell, and Menerdil had all but moved into the casern, preferring a constant noise to the reproachful silence. Today, as he and the men had retreated from the Fourth circle into the small courtyard they now huddled in, Menerdil had glimpsed a patch of white upon the neat, stony path that led towards the door, thrown open in the inhabitants’ hurry to seek refuge in the upper circles of the city.
A child’s bonnet.
He tried to picture what his grandson looked like, dressed in lace and the soft silks his father traded in. Did the boy look like his mother, if only a little? Menerdil remembered all too well Rhoswyn as a babe, and the until then unknown and as of yet unequaled sentiment of pride that had swelled inside his chest at the sight of her crimson, scrunched-up little face, and the pudgy little hands balled into fists against her cheeks. The keening that never failed to wake him at night, before even Gilwen arose from her exhausted slumber, and the amused looks she had given him when she’d found him cradling their daughter in the thick of the night, cooing all-but-forgotten lullabies into her willing ear.
With a resounding crack, the wood was rendered and the giant claws of the war engine appeared in the gap between the smoldering beams.
“Stand firm!”
The ram swung backwards for the final strike.
Beside Menerdil, Égon started to pray as the loose cobblestones under their feet clattered in the wake of the impact like the young soldier’s teeth. He edged closer to his father while casting regretful glances above, towards the Sixth circle of Minas Tirith, where the wives and children of Gondor waited at the mercy of their men’s courage. There stood the Houses of Healing, where the wounded lay, helpless and unable to defend those remaining; there worked Gilwen, her patient hands now at the service of others, now that Rhoswyn was gone. Should the gate fall, no man would live to see what fate befell their wives and daughters.
Perhaps was it best that neither party saw what became of the other.
There would be deeds of courage, in this courtyard, before the Steward’s Guard fell in their attempt to safeguard their city. What now pervaded the air, however, was every man’s uttermost regret, and the overpowering scent of fear.
The scent of fear.
When he was young, Menerdil had thought it to be the tang of enemy blood that he shed, or the stench that rose from the battlefield after a few days of summer. Now he knew. It was the odor of his own sweat that stuck his tunic to his lower back and stung his eyes, together with the acrid smoke of the fires. It was the ointment Heldir used for the gout that crippled his sword arm, and the dust ingrained in Celebon’s old armor – the very one he had hastily donned to come defend the city alongside the men he had once trained.
Younglings and cripples. They were all that remained of the Guard.
Menerdil tightened his grasp on the handle of his sword. The leather was slippery in his sweaty hands, but he doubted it would make any difference. His thoughts flew North, beyond Emyn Muil and the vast forests and open plains of Rhovanion; beyond the woods where elves still dwelt, towards a city built upon the cold waters of a lake.
Esgaroth.
It lay, unreachable, taunting Menerdil with the distance between them. A blessing in times such as these, and no other man in the courtyard could count himself as lucky.
He hoped that Gilwen had made it safely, having left before the siege.
In a better world, Menerdil would’ve lived a little longer, so that he could meet his grandson and bounce him on one knee while he tickled him, until the child’s bubbling laughter elicited his own rumbling chuckle. He’d meet his wife’s softened gaze over the wispy hairs that stood, swaying, on the boy’s fragile skull, and the heavy burden of guilt would be lifted from his chest. Then Menerdil would tell his grandson of the tales he’d listened to as a child: of badaliscs and strigas, and seven-headed dragons.
He swallowed, mouth growing dry with fear, mesmerized by the irrevocable movement of the ram towards the gate. In the shimmering air that rose from the coals, the iron claws seemed to contract, ready to tear them all apart, as the engine took on the appearance of one of those legendary beasts.
What stories did people tell their children, up in the North?
Menerdil would never know.
Esgaroth lay half a world away; thank the Valar, the evil of Mordor had not yet reached so far.
Summary: March 15, TA 3019. As the siege of Minas Tirith comes to an end, the men of Gondor face their fears…and their regrets.
A grandson.
Menerdil shook his head, still not daring to believe his luck. He had a grandson! A little boy, the embodiment of a man’s hopes for the future; a future he had strived to build with his own two hands. He lowered his gaze and, switching his sword from his right hand to the left, stared at the open palm. Blood had dried in the grooves and crevices of his skin; deep, dark lines meandered between calluses and old scars, resembling the circles of a felled tree. Menerdil rubbed his hand against his thigh in an attempt to wipe away the grime, chagrined as the splintering cracks caught and tugged at the fabric.
Would his grandson cry when he held him for the first time with hands as rough as these?
Gilwen had grown to hate them, and what they represented. Shortly after their daughter’s birth, she had refused to let him touch her again, claiming that his work had made them hard and cruel. When she’d left their little house in the Second circle to live with her sister in the Sixth, taking Rhoswyn with her, Menerdil hadn’t truly fought her decision, nor had he tried to change her mind, convincing himself it was she who had changed, not him. He had hearkened, relieved, to the sentence passed by other men concerning Gilwen’s true reasons for leaving – namely, the meagre pay of a simple city footman, and her own excessive ambitions.
At the time Menerdil had not understood what Gilwen had tried to tell him; now he looked at his hands with new eyes.
How many times had he raised them at her in anger? How many times had he returned from duty, reeling from what he’d seen that day, eager to silence the reproaches she rained upon him so that the cries of his fallen comrades would not echo in the shrillness of her voice? When the times had grown dark, and the shadows in the East had risen to peer over the mountains once more, he had chafed against his helplessness, growing deaf to Gilwen’s ordinary troubles.
The distance had settled between them like a third body in their marital bed, growing fat on his resentment, until the day it had pushed Gilwen out.
Menerdil tugged on his mustache and raised his eyes towards the sky. A black smoke rose from the remains of the Fourth gate, billowing in the wind and screening the low-hanging sun. Crows circled above the wall to his left, cawing loudly but not daring to land just yet, startled by the arrhythmic clanging of the battle that was being lost in the circles below.
The distant thundering of hooves carried in from the Pelennor, along with the trumpeting of horns. Far from cheering him up, the noise grated on his ears, aggravating the painful pounding of blood in his temples. Menerdil wiped the sweat from his forehead; the movement ruffled the letter he had stashed beneath his armor, between the tunic and the jerkin, safe against his heart. The parchment crackled, a corner poking him in the his chest, yet Menerdil endured the sensation with stoic endearment.
He had a grandson.
The message did not mention a name, or so Carastor had claimed. The tavern owner had read the letter out to him twice, and Menerdil had strived to remember every word. He’d never learned to read or write himself, but he had a good memory, for it was one of the few qualities his work had taught him. That, and patience – for a soldier’s life was as much made of waiting to fight as it was of the actual fighting.
A grandson.
He liked to imagine that Rhoswyn could’ve named the boy in the Gondorian fashion, and that he’d live to know his heritage. To hope she had given him her own father’s name would’ve been too much to ask; Menerdil dreaded to imagine how much Rhoswyn could have remembered of their life together, and what Gilwen had told her, once she was old enough to understand.
He had no right to expect anything of her, and still, she had written….
The Fifth gate groaned and shuddered, tilting towards them as the battering ram smashed against the wood from the other side to the cheers and grunts of the orcs. Menerdil had glimpsed the monstrous machine being rolled up the street, spiked wheels scraping against the cobblestones, coals glowing inside the frame of steel like soulless eyes. In its wake came the armies of Mordor, their numbers too large to fit into the city. It was that same engine that had breached the Rammas Echor; the impact still rang in Menerdil’s ears, like the knell marking the downfall of Gondor.
Another impact and the drawbar splintered, bending towards them.
“Stand your ground!” Arthion’s voice rang through the courtyard. Menerdil craned his neck to see the naked blade of his commander’s raised sword glimmer dully under the veiled sunlight. “Stand, men of Gondor! Defend the city, fight for those you love!”
Menerdil switched his sword into his right hand again, dispirited despite the pleasant coolness of the leather against his sweaty palm.
Those he loved….
While Rhoswyn had still lived with her aunt, he had thought it his duty to visit her. Every seventh day he’d washed and shaved, grumbling under his breath at every cut that appeared on his cheeks and resenting his wife for making him undergo such a farce for appearances’ sake. As he ascended into the richer circles of the city, Menerdil had tugged on his patched-up coat, feeling distinctly out of place amongst those who earned their lives without ever soiling their hands. Nevermind the miles he could trek during his duty as a soldier, day after day, carrying his armor on his back instead of a clean tunic; those four circles could have been part of Morgoth’s realm, for the discomfort every step had caused him.
Engrossed as he’d been in his misery, Menerdil hadn’t learned not to resent the comforts Rhoswyn had grown accustomed to, preferring the abundance of her toys to the scarce and sullen presence of her father. His visits had grown wider apart, until he’d stopped speaking of her altogether, for fear of admitting he’d lost count of her age.
Only now did he realize how much he’d missed.
It seemed like yesterday when he’d seen Rhoswyn take her first steps, waddling from the table and straight into his arms, unsure yet beaming toothlessly in reflection of his own pride. To his worried father’s heart, those few tiles between them had appeared as wide as the Bay of Belfalas, and now….
Now Rhoswyn was a woman grown and married, living in Esgaroth with her husband and their son.
Esgaroth.
A city far in the North – such was the extent of his knowledge about it. Brynjar had written to Menerdil after their marriage and, at the time, he’d wondered what it was the man was hoping to accomplish, except reminding him of everything he’d lost. They lived in a house that stood on a lake – Brynjar’s own idea, no doubt. Menerdil couldn’t help but worry at the prospect, thinking back of his own childhood in Lebennin, and the ravenous waters of the Anduin that had once carried away a friend of his, never to be seen again. He’d considered speaking to Gilwen about it, and forwent the idea at once.
Rhoswyn was hale and happy, or so Brynjar wrote, and there was little Menerdil could do but pray to Ulmo to watch over his only daughter.
Esgaroth.
A world away, or as good as, for Menerdil could not afford to visit. Not in times such as these, when the shadows of Mordor stretched their fingers ever further towards Minas Tirith; when the Lord Denethor, already harried by the heaviness of his duty and the grieving of first his wife, and now his firstborn. That, and his own salary, which had never sufficed to keep either Gilwen or Rhoswyn as comfortable as he would’ve wished. No matter what his friends liked to say; pride didn’t keep a child warm, and deeds of bravery only fed the imagination.
Nowadays, Menerdil found himself wondering: if not for the chasm between them, would Gilwen have stayed? Something in his mind whispered that loving hands could have mended the rift that darkness had started to dig, but he’d denied Gilwen even that.
The ram thundered against the gate once more; Menerdil startled. The pounding under his helm worsened as he squinted against the slanting rays of the sun, trying to ignore the cloying scent of the lilac bushes that grew in a small garden by the courtyard. The house that peeked from behind the lush clusters of pink and white resembled the one he had lived in with his wife, before she’d left and the home became an empty shell, and Menerdil had all but moved into the casern, preferring a constant noise to the reproachful silence. Today, as he and the men had retreated from the Fourth circle into the small courtyard they now huddled in, Menerdil had glimpsed a patch of white upon the neat, stony path that led towards the door, thrown open in the inhabitants’ hurry to seek refuge in the upper circles of the city.
A child’s bonnet.
He tried to picture what his grandson looked like, dressed in lace and the soft silks his father traded in. Did the boy look like his mother, if only a little? Menerdil remembered all too well Rhoswyn as a babe, and the until then unknown and as of yet unequaled sentiment of pride that had swelled inside his chest at the sight of her crimson, scrunched-up little face, and the pudgy little hands balled into fists against her cheeks. The keening that never failed to wake him at night, before even Gilwen arose from her exhausted slumber, and the amused looks she had given him when she’d found him cradling their daughter in the thick of the night, cooing all-but-forgotten lullabies into her willing ear.
With a resounding crack, the wood was rendered and the giant claws of the war engine appeared in the gap between the smoldering beams.
“Stand firm!”
The ram swung backwards for the final strike.
Beside Menerdil, Égon started to pray as the loose cobblestones under their feet clattered in the wake of the impact like the young soldier’s teeth. He edged closer to his father while casting regretful glances above, towards the Sixth circle of Minas Tirith, where the wives and children of Gondor waited at the mercy of their men’s courage. There stood the Houses of Healing, where the wounded lay, helpless and unable to defend those remaining; there worked Gilwen, her patient hands now at the service of others, now that Rhoswyn was gone. Should the gate fall, no man would live to see what fate befell their wives and daughters.
Perhaps was it best that neither party saw what became of the other.
There would be deeds of courage, in this courtyard, before the Steward’s Guard fell in their attempt to safeguard their city. What now pervaded the air, however, was every man’s uttermost regret, and the overpowering scent of fear.
The scent of fear.
When he was young, Menerdil had thought it to be the tang of enemy blood that he shed, or the stench that rose from the battlefield after a few days of summer. Now he knew. It was the odor of his own sweat that stuck his tunic to his lower back and stung his eyes, together with the acrid smoke of the fires. It was the ointment Heldir used for the gout that crippled his sword arm, and the dust ingrained in Celebon’s old armor – the very one he had hastily donned to come defend the city alongside the men he had once trained.
Younglings and cripples. They were all that remained of the Guard.
Menerdil tightened his grasp on the handle of his sword. The leather was slippery in his sweaty hands, but he doubted it would make any difference. His thoughts flew North, beyond Emyn Muil and the vast forests and open plains of Rhovanion; beyond the woods where elves still dwelt, towards a city built upon the cold waters of a lake.
Esgaroth.
It lay, unreachable, taunting Menerdil with the distance between them. A blessing in times such as these, and no other man in the courtyard could count himself as lucky.
He hoped that Gilwen had made it safely, having left before the siege.
In a better world, Menerdil would’ve lived a little longer, so that he could meet his grandson and bounce him on one knee while he tickled him, until the child’s bubbling laughter elicited his own rumbling chuckle. He’d meet his wife’s softened gaze over the wispy hairs that stood, swaying, on the boy’s fragile skull, and the heavy burden of guilt would be lifted from his chest. Then Menerdil would tell his grandson of the tales he’d listened to as a child: of badaliscs and strigas, and seven-headed dragons.
He swallowed, mouth growing dry with fear, mesmerized by the irrevocable movement of the ram towards the gate. In the shimmering air that rose from the coals, the iron claws seemed to contract, ready to tear them all apart, as the engine took on the appearance of one of those legendary beasts.
What stories did people tell their children, up in the North?
Menerdil would never know.
Esgaroth lay half a world away; thank the Valar, the evil of Mordor had not yet reached so far.