Ashes to Ashes

Armies do this.

He's sixteen and a half, rooting purposefully through the settlement's destruction. Even through the black silk drawn over the lower half of his face, the acrid air chokes him. There's nothing left here, not even screaming.

Armies do this; all armies do this.

He's sixteen and a half; he ought to have known, by now. It had been sitting in front of him for years, obvious, ghastly, grinning, like the dead owl under his little brother's bed five years ago – the owl Faramir had found still warm and limp and lovely and had expected him, the elder brother, the all-powerful, all-competent, to fix it. To make it right again, and when he couldn't had slipped away, betrayed, to try himself to nurse the dead thing back to life. And when it had started to stink too badly, again he'd come to his big brother to fix it, this time with funeral rites. Time had made the beautiful corpse ugly, by then.  Make it right.

His troops had done this. He had made nothing right.

Had the settlement been made of walls, of adobe or stone, wood or wicker, it would have looked just like a scene from some bard's lament of towns razed and butchered in the War of the Ring. Human towns, elven towns...The only difference here is that what stands against the sun-bleached sky is the skeletons of tents, some with blackened hides flapping in the breeze, echoing carrion birds' wings. The vultures are bold as hell, and he almost stumbles over one; it looks up at him and croaks a curse and he blinks at it, numbly, from smoke-reddened eyes, unable to hate it for the purpose it fills.

The tents' skins caught their smaller occupants like insects in a net, when the fire took hold. The vulture is perched on the shoulder of a little boy, blistered but intact.  The smoke must have smothered him. The young commander kneels anyway, feeling for a pulse, but the boy is cold. So cold, for someone who died by fire.

Mantling, the vulture yells at him again. It's huge and dusty black and its powerful beak leaves a welt along the back of his hand as it lashes out at him. Rising hastily, he stumbles back, turning his ankle on another corpse and, catching his balance, he stares down at it from the terrible silence inside his skull. It's a young woman, her black hair matted with blood, her skirts hiked up...down there, her hair is blood-matted too.  For a moment his eyes rest blankly on the marks on her thighs and belly. When the men finished, they slit her throat. Her skin is green, subtly dappled with a darker shade and freckled here and there with gold, but her blood is as red as any man's.

He does not know how orcs bury their dead.

All armies do this. Even mine. And I did not stop them.

Of course, he hadn't been there.  He'd been leading the eastward flank of his army to hammer the latest wave of invaders back through the pass over which they'd come. Even in his head, the excuse runs hollow. This had happened; this had been perpetrated, at the hands of men of Gondor, his men, and he had done nothing to stop it. Eighty civilians, he'd counted dead so far.

The wind picks up again, out from across the plains that stretched, parched golden-green, westward to the White City, vibrant with the living scents of long grasses and blooming heather.

The young commander takes a deep swig of water from the skin at his hip. Cutting through the smoke and the numbness of grief, it burns like hard liquor. He lets it sting the salt from his eyes, and then he takes up the Horn and sends its call echoing out over the plains and through the smoke, calling his men to him here, in the burnt-out street of a slaughtered civilian camp, over the young woman's body. Had she been the little boy's mother, sister, aunt? Some stranger?

From this day forth, he tells his men, to wreak violence upon anyone's civilians will mean death for the ringleaders, demotion and lashes for anyone else proven to have participated. By sundown, four pyres stand to the west of the ruined camp, offering the redness of their flames to sunset.

He has settled his men upwind of them, but himself, he stands beside the pyres, silent, until dawn. The smoke settles in his clothing, stings his eyes, dulls the russet-black hair Ecthelion's kind old hands had loved to stroke, but it does not bring back the dead.