He has succeeded, Haladdin realized with horror. I have doubts, and therefore I have lost the right to act: to interpret doubt for the defendant’s benefit is too deeply ingrained in me. To do what I intended while knowing of the possible consequences (which I now do, thanks to Saruman) one has to be either God or a madman, and I’m neither. Nor can I do it and say later that I was following orders – that’s not my style… Plus you really don’t want to fry that Elvish beauty with your own hands, right? Right, I don’t, to put it mildly – is that a plus or a minus?
Forgive me, guys… forgive me, Sharya-Rana, and you, Baron! (In his mind he went down on his knees.) Everything you’ve done has been for naught. I know that I’m betraying you and your memory, but the choice I have to make is beyond me… or any Man – only the One can make such a choice. All I can do is block my palantír from transmitting and drop it into Orodruin; let what may come do so without my participation. I’m not cut out to decide the fate of the World – I’m made from a different kind of clay… and should you want to say: from crap, not clay – I accept that.
As if to confirm this decision of his, the palantír suddenly lit up from the inside and showed him the interior of some tower with narrow windows, something resembling a low table on curved legs, and a deathly pale – and somehow even more beautiful for that – face of Eornis.
Chapter 69
It is truly amazing what trifles change the course of history sometimes. In this case the matter was decided by the interruption of blood flow to Haladdin’s left calf muscle due to the uncomfortable position he had assumed over the past few minutes. The doctor got a cramp in his leg; when he got up awkwardly and leaned over to relieve the pain in his calf, the smooth globe of the palantír fell out of his hand and rolled slowly down the crater’s almost-level outer slope. Tzerlag, who stood a little below, interpreted his commander’s muffled oath as an order and lunged at the crystal ball…
“No-o-o-o-o!!” The frantic yell shattered the silence.
Too late.
The Orocuen grabbed the palantír and froze in an awkward pose; his body shimmered with bluish-purple sparks, as if frosted. Desperately Haladdin rushed to his comrade and knocked the devil’s toy out of his hands without thinking, in one motion; it took him a couple of seconds to realize with astonishment that it had not harmed him.
The purple sparks went out, leaving a strange frosty smell behind, and the Orocuen fell slowly sideways onto the gravel; Haladdin heard a strange clunking sound. He tried to lift the sergeant and was amazed by his body’s weight.
“Doctor, what’s happening to me?” The Orocuen’s face, usually expressionless or smiling, showed fear and bewilderment. “Can’t feel my hands or feet… at all… what’s happening?”
Haladdin took his wrist but jerked his hand back in surprise: the Orocuen’s hand was cold and hard as stone… Merciful God, it is stone! A couple of fingers on Tzerlag’s other hand broke off in the fall, and the doctor was now looking at the fresh break shimmering with tiny crystals – snow-white porous calcite of the bones and the darkly pink marble of the muscles shot with bright-red garnet of blood vessels – and marveling at the astonishing exactness of this stony imitation. The Orocuen’s neck and shoulders were still warm and living; feeling the arm, Haladdin realized that the boundary between stone and flesh was a bit higher than the elbow, slowly moving up the biceps. He was about to utter some comforting lie like ‘a temporary loss of sensation due to an electrical discharge,’ concealing the nature of the problem with fancy medical terminology, but the sergeant had already noticed his mangled hand and understood everything.
“Don’t leave me like this, hear? The strike of mercy – now’s the time…”
“What happened, Haladdin?” the palantír came to life with Saruman’s alarmed voice.
“What happened?! My friend is turning to stone, that’s what! Your work, bastards?”
“He touched the palantír?! Why did you let him…”
“Devil take you! Lift the spell right now, you hear?”
“I can’t do that. It’s not my spell – why would I need to do that? – and it’s impossible to lift someone else’s spell, even for me. It must have been how my stupid predecessors have tried to stop you.”
“I don’t care who did it! Do what you can or else drag the one who did it over to your palantír!”
“They’re all gone already… I regret this deeply, but I can do nothing for your friend even at the cost of my own life.”
“Listen, Saruman.” Haladdin managed to get hold of himself, realizing that yelling would accomplish nothing. “It looks like my friend will turn to stone in five or six minutes. If you manage to lift the spell during that time, I’ll do what you’re asking me to do: block this palantír‘s transmission and throw it into Orodruin. How to do it is your problem, but if you can’t, I’ll do what I intended to do, although, to be honest, you’ve almost convinced me otherwise. Well?”
“Be reasonable, Haladdin! Would you destroy a whole World – two Worlds, actually – to save one man? It won’t even save him when he dies later together with the World…”
“I don’t give a shit about your worlds, understand?! For the last time – will you try or not?”
“I can only repeat what I’ve said before to those idiots of the White Counciclass="underline" ‘What you are about to do is worse than a crime. It is a mistake.’”
“Oh yeah? Then I’m dropping my ball into the crater! Run like hell if you can! You can figure yourself how many seconds you’ve got – I’ve never been good at figuring in my head…”
Wolverine, lieutenant of the Secret Guard, was also facing a difficult choice at about the same time.
He had already reached the shores of the Anduin and had a good chance of getting to the boat that would save him when the Elves dogging his heels managed to chase him onto a kurum – a boulder-strewn slope that the real wolverines favor for their lairs. Trying to take a shortcut, the lieutenant ran straight across the kurum, leaping from boulder to boulder. It is most important to maintain one’s momentum and never stop when moving like that – jump and bounce, jump and bounce. This is not too difficult in dry weather, but now, after several days of rain, the lichens covering every boulder with black and orange spots were water- logged, and every spot was mortally dangerous.
Wolverine had barely made it through a half of the slope when he realized that the pursuers were closer than he thought: arrows began falling around him. Those arrows arrived on high trajectories at the very end of their range, but the lieutenant knew too much of the Elves’ skill – the best archers in Middle Earth – not to steal a glance backwards. After another leap he pushed off a large stone with his left foot while turning to the left – and that was when the soggy lichen, slippery as the proverbial banana peel, gave way under his Mordorian boot (I knew this hard-soled footwear would fail me!) and Wolverine was thrown to the right into a narrowing crevice. His breaking fingernails left rips across the lichen spots on the boulder, but could not hold him. A stupid thought flitted across the lieutenant’s mind – “wish I were a real wolverine” – right before his right ankle, stuck in the crevice like in a steel trap, cracked and shot a bolt of pain through his spine, knocking him out. …Strangely, his unconsciousness had lasted a very short time. Wolverine managed to prop himself up in the crevice so as to rest his weight on the uninjured leg. Now he could move his backpack over his head and in front of him. The sheaf of Dol Guldur papers had a bottle of fire jelly attached to it (praise Grizzly for thinking of everything!), so all he had to do now was strike a flint on the ignition charge – an air-tight porcelain bottle filled with the light fraction of naphtha. Only after untying the strap of the backpack and locating the flint in his pocket did he think to look around, leaning back (it was impossible to turn around) just in time to see column-like figures in gray-green cloaks kind of slowly falling on him from the pale noon sky. With mere meters separating him from the pursing Elves, the lieutenant knew with certainty that of the two duties left to him in this life – setting off the ignition charge and chewing the green pill of salvation – he only had time to perform one, and an officer of Task Force Féanor should know which one took priority… So it was that the last sight Wolverine saw before a blow to the head knocked him out was that of the bluish naphtha flame licking the slightly frayed saltpeter-soaked fire cord.