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.
