Crocuses

Death's doorstep bloomed white with crocuses. He had expected to die, of course. It is not man's lot to live forever. Neither did it surprise him to die in failure. In forty years (no, forty-one, somewhere in the violent dark of Moria) he'd paid little thought to himself, but at least now he knew his mettle – tarnished, base and brittle.

But he had not expected crocuses.

"Spring's candles," murmured Ecthelion's deep old voice, warm and dry as the dusty sunbeams in his library. "Here, take some to your mother. 'tis a fine little brother she's born you, and the flowers will do her good."

Spring's candles, for his brother's birthday. Enchanted by what he took for a colloquialism, he'd repeated it, years later, and Faramir the lyrical had, even at nine, laughed in baffled astonishment at such fancy from his pragmatic brother.

The Uruk-hai commander dared a step closer, crushing twigs and crocuses. A slow tortured creak punctuated the breathless silence with its equally extenuated sounds of leather, steel and breath. He couldn't tear his eyes from the crocuses.

The luminous secrets of their buds burned gently up through February's brown leaf-duff, their improbably elegant green stems bowing softly in a chill wind wistful with the scent of spring. Later, it would rain, swift water washing away the frost that golden late-afternoon sunlight left, for now, in peace. Three of the many arrows had torn holes in his breath, but for the first time in weeks his mind worked clearly.

Slowly, he dragged heavy eyes up from the crocuses, up from the leaf-duff, past the heavy black boots and the cold bright eye of the iron arrowhead catching the sun. Up to the slotted gold eyes pinning him in place.

Keeping the halflings behind him, he'd been moving the fight back, along the curve of the hill to a low foot-bridge remembered the days of kings. At its narrow base, he could hold them until Death pulled him through her door. Come in; you look done in. Come home.

No, Lady. I'm sorry to keep you waiting, but not yet. I still have work to do...

If he could stand. The archer smiled with yellow teeth behind breath misting silver in the cold air as his first attempt failed at its start. Vision blurred from pain, he stared steadily into the dark smear of the archer's face, where the eyes must be, and counted to five.

One, one thousand...

The hobbits' rapid, frightened breathing echoed in his skull. The lull before, long though it had seemed, had lasted maybe six whimpering exhalations.

Two, one thousand...

He tried to breathe, ignoring the things that grated and gurgled in what had been his ribcage.

Three, one thousand...

His mouth tasted of blood. The world at last came back to focus, crisper than before; the archer's eyes were flecked with colours of garnet and obsidian and the tree behind him stood heavy with buds. His heartbeat kept faltering rhythm, and the edge of his left hand, his dominant hand, which had with the last arrow lost its grip on his sword, brushed something.

Leather and steel. A hilt. The hilt of a knife, a throwing knife.

Four, one thousand...

The uruks had begun to steal closer, in a sort of rotating advance as each strove to keep several colleagues between themselves and him. The whites of their eyes showed. Their fear would have flattered him, had he any illusion left of being less a brute than they.

Five, one thousand...

He breathed deeply, drawing in cold clean air past interrupting arrows and splintered bones, sneering at the renewed welling of blood into his mouth.

The commanding archer's snarling laugh unfurled across the crocuses. The bowstring twanged in protest, near to breaking, the gloved fingers released -

- and the arrow thudded to rest halfway up a tree. The archer's eyes crossed, for half a second, on the hilt of the throwing knife protruding, like a horn, from his forehead. Then, like a tree himself, without bending, he fell forward, before the kneeling man, crushing the crocuses under him.

And the man stood, steady, dripping blood, and shielding the two halflings behind him, moved the battle one more step backwards, toward the relative safety of the bridge.