The Sun is Falling

Children of the House of Hurin lived on tales as much as on food; for a family whose purpose lay in sworn trust to a line of kings which only madmen and idealists did not think exist, words were as important as sustenance.  Faramir took to them with a verve that defied comparison.  Long before he could speak, he would tell stories with the rhythm and inflection of words.  Boromir remembered hearing, through his mother’s closed door, the burble of wordless stories and Finduilas’s husky musical laugh.

Delighted.  She sounded delighted.  Sometimes he would try to make her laugh like that, but even before Faramir’s birth had left her ill and dragged the bitter homesickness up from the depths of her to choke her breath, she had never been so free with him.  She looked at him and saw his father.  He tried, at six, hollow and ringing with Ecthelion’s death, to remember when he figured this out, and wondered if he should have felt anything save numb to realize he couldn’t recall a time when he hadn’t known.

Perhaps that was why the tales had never taken hold of him as he had his brother.  Hearing them, he wondered what had made the kings so great; wondered what taxes they had levied, and how they had spent them; wondered how they had administered justice, by what gently inexorable march of precedence they had kept the ponderous progress of society spiraling forward, rather than simply circling.  He wondered why the women waited at home, singing mournful songs, rather than using their wits and hands to help themselves or their lost loved ones.

Gifts, Part II

Faramir sings the wrong laments.  He is thirteen; he is angry and alone, and standing upwind of the battlefield's bountiful crop of pyres, he sings some ancient lay in the tongue of long-dead Kings, whose language ebbs and swells like the sea over which they came on ships with sails like the wings of gulls.  Faramir is thirteen, angry and alone, and he sings the wrong laments in a voice whose piercing beauty hasn't yet begun to crack.

It's late May - early summer, the vast plains of eastern Gondor blushing green-gold blending into the silver-violet haze of sage, the high desert of no-man's land where Vanka's people's skins of brown and grey and green lend them an advantage unattainable to even the stealthiest of Rangers.  The air, musical with fat swift-winged bees, had smelled of grasses, warm earth, and far-off rain.  Now that flies had replaced the bees, the field reeked of blood, shit and fear, and roasting meat.  Soon it would smell of burning meat.  War lent no time to bury the dead in un-tilled soil, sun-baked in Gondor's dry summers.

When the monsoons of August and September came, when their mother was alive and their father sane, the water ran off the russet soil in rivulets, curling into hollows, etching out gullies and shooting, sudden and lethal, down the arroyos of years and centuries gone by.  The monsoons seldom come now; and when they do, often, their violence robs the earth of the good they once brought, hail battering to death even the hardy roots of sage and gorse and long golden grasses, winds twisting the limbs of olive trees past what even their gnarled strength could bear.

The Sun is Falling