Chapter Text
PROLOGUE
Orcskin: An Oral History as Performed in the Highest Courtly Theatre of Zarahed, Near Harad, in the Fourth Age of Arda
The eagles had savaged him.
The eagles had savaged him, said the story of old Beleriand, because no man could tear a body so viciously in the exact shape of beak and claw. It had to be the eagles, for his corpse was found in the eagles nest. Perhaps it was the fledglings, or perhaps the father itself, a family of birds racing across the heights of old Beleriand, squawking and screeching and humming and screaming, leading their way into the man with an impudent beak and claw. It could only be the eagles and the eagles could only belong to Manwë himself because the fledgling of no other eagle could tear so deeply into a man. By the time they had realised his grave lay empty and found his corpse, the eagles had been long gone, and they had to shoo away the lesser birds, vultures with carrion crows on their tails.
He was torn from limb to limb by my men, sneered Tyelkormo the first time the story was uttered, Tyelkormo whose men had indeed done such a deed. He was torn because he was a traitor. There are no eagles upon these plains.
Do you wish for our men to be cast as animals, brother? thundered Nelyafinwë, slamming upon the council table a palm and a wrist. As grave robbers? Do you wish them to say like does as to like?
My men, Russandol. You mean my men, sang Tyelkormo in a sing-song song, and spoke no more henceforth, though only after he raised a brow at the uneven slant of Nelyo’s shoulders as he attempted to pick his palm up at the same time as his wrist and said in truth, brother, eagles do not scavenge carrion. I am merely watching out for your reputation.
It was Turukáno of Gondolin who reaffirmed the corpse to be savaged by eagles in the story. Something needs to be said and done of this. Traitor he may be and traitor he shall be known as, but cruelty I shall not have done in my name. It must be a nameless and blameless act from above.
Tyelkormo continued saying naught, though his eyes uttered aloud: it was not done in your name, for my men would never lift a finger in your name and lest we all forget, these were my men, though he was your traitor.
They had found him at dawn, and that was potent and even in the circumstances, rather pleasing, because with all the differences within the Union of Maedhros, they were all military men and military men held that important matters should happen at dawn. So they had their servants bear his eagle-ravaged carcass shoulder high to the city, where chattering crowds swiftly filled the misty air with their confusion and curiosity. Was it a good omen or a bad, the savaging of man by eagle?
Or was it a simple fact?
The swarthy man had wandered into the nest of eagles with ill intent. The eagles had savaged him because he was not of a kindred so pure of heart he could rush so swiftly upon eagleback from clifftops of accursed mountains. That must have been the reason. Not all the crowd were convinced, and some of them wanted to turn away and leave the ability to turn moments into history to another people altogether and turn into foam and dissipate into the air, pressing like birds against the ceiling of clouds. They stood, hands poised upon each corner of the pelvis bone, hissing do eagles truly scavenge carrion? and if eagles may do such a deed, had it been the command of Manwe to so desecrate a corpse?
This grave they spoke of was the grave of Ulfang the Black, who turned upon the Union of Maedhros, and the existence of this grave was doubtful to most of Arda, which was to say it was nary invisible. The man within it had been stolen and moved and rummaged around in and then moved back, but the cost of disturbing a grave was that the man within it was exposed once again to the elements and wrapped in the comfort of a lie and the lie burst out at artistically regular intervals across seven thousand years. What happens when you drag a body from the grave is what happens when you put the right hand in the wrong glove. His deeds run like accidentally-freed goats into the wrong forests, newborn beetles scurry into the freshly opened shroud, and the shroud itself becomes utterly pointless. The body is shrouded in an eternal mist. Ulfang had never made a secret of his treachery, Ulfang had made it perfectly clear. He was not like Bór, Bór who scrubbed the hunting dogs, who polished reluctant floors, Bór the Faithful whose renaming coincided with the unnaming of Ulfang, Bór whom in the eyes of Ulfang and Tyelkormo spent a lifetime snuffling for crumbs beneath the tables, he whose three sons died just as painfully as the three sons of Ulfang.
Ulfang came from the uttermost East. That Ulfang, who was not born a traitor, had been known as Ulynroi then, Oroi to his wishers-well alone, oh, he was a mountain man from a race of mountain men, and these mountainfolk had Awoken in Rhûn and decamped upon the steppes of Kalormë before they wandered West, and that is why they were so very tall, though Ulfang was not so tall at all. Ulynroi, the word, means mountaintop, or summit, for he was small and squeaky as an infant and his mother was a good humoured sort, and she did not name him Ulfang for Ulfang was Zindarï of the Westerly Elves, Zindarï for Unsightly Beard, for he was named first as an infant, when he had no beard at all. [1][2]
They say also the steppes of Kalormë in the uttermost east were as hot, dusty and empty as an Imir’s windpipe but the truth was that they taxed the laziest eye, giving it a hard time by making it cut from sandstone to granite to seagrass, for Kalormë was on a rocky island. Ulfang had been slight and handsome, red of cheek and black of eye, and his beard was most certainly not unsightly. Ulfang’s beard was well-oiled and trailed a path from dimple to dimple, slipping surreptitiously from one region to the next with a knife-wound through its middle. The more superstitious of his riders claimed this beard, wrapped like creepers around the strongest of chins, foretold his life and his loyalties. The more daring of them saw it to represent the noble cleft of a princely buttock, to which the fellow was notoriously rather partial to.
That little fiend of an Ulfang, he perfumed the dancing horizons of his beard with attor, for in his travels he had encountered Izbina, the great physician of Deep Harad, and Izbina had passed him secondary scribings of his books to carry West, and some trinkets he had carved out of thin air, the most glorious perfumes sunk deep into oils, which tenderly kissed farewell even the most noxious of bodily odours. Ulfang, alas, was a militaristic fellow and did not see much use in reading such dense and gory texts, though he much liked the bottles of attor in the bags, and those perfumes he kept, and refused to pass them on to the Westerly Peoples.
Which explains much.
Our people of Zarahed of Near Harad were not the people of the mountain-riders of Ulynroi, we were the people who travelled with Izbina, who met with the caravan of Zaida-khanum and her son and so founded Zarahed between the havens of Umbar and the borders of what became Gondor, and we had only even gone there because that Alkhwar had gotten it into his head that it was entirely down to him to measure the circumference of Arda, and simply did not give anyone a moment’s peace until Zaida-khanum agreed to the people caravan.[3]
It was that Zarahed which we irrigated with the leavings of the River Kovir, she which had been made to disappear in order to defeat the Foe. Oh, what a river she had been at the founding of Zarahed, gasping and tumbling against the banks like new lovers upon a feathered bed, so tired by dawnlight she had to rest with the tide, lapping luxuriously at our feet. The remnants of Ulfang-who-was-Ulynroi’s caravan, they cast themselves out of the cold western valleys and dived back into Kheirovir, that dusty little hole of a city on the borders of Rhun and Khand with no mountain in sight (we are, currently, not on the very best of terms with Khand).
Still, the story of Ulfang and the eagles cast itself into Zarahed, and we turned the tale into our own, turned it into the thought that when a corpse’s skin collapsed and his wasted bones were knocked out of rhythm, it was only then that a man was truly known as dead. It was the story of Zarahed, and at the same time it was the story of Kheirovir and the story of Kor in the deeper south, and equally it was the story of Beleriand and thus of Aman.
For stories do not shed their wings when crossing lines drawn in sand, yes stories spread smoothly in the East also as do they spin in the South, rolling in flight and clashing in midair and dropping feathers like stardust upon the sea. The wind sings them as you know, sings adventure into adventure and the Haradrim and the men of Rhûn and the men of Khand, we exchange amidst our battles our dreams and our songs. The story of Ulfang and the eagles, the most beautiful slant of rain on the sandstone havens of Umbar, the men in chains given to the ships of the Foe, we pass these from mouth to mouth, they play wild and free amidst the star-spattered dome cupping our desert. The most salacious tale of that Nelyafinwë, who took such a shine to the buttocks of Ulfang, oh that story in particular whistles through the dunes like a plump lover’s toss of the hip.
Elsewhere was not a single face monolingual in its grief. Harad and Rhûn and Khand share a designation on the map, a single, dismissive flick of the wrist, and perhaps the experience of being named by another, and this was a commonality, though it was a commonality of the healing-house ward rather than of the family, the commonality of scattered seeds flung far from the forest blaze, the commonality of a tidal wave pushing too many bodies aside. Rhûn had its own unravelling and sometimes it wound itself together as we of Harad unravelled, its own relationship to what the fire-sorcerer had been and what peacetime replaced him with, and that feeling, sitting inside the mouth of it, would have felt nothing like it felt from within Harad. And Khand, that Khand, she was a third thing entirely, named in a language that was forgotten but was hers alone.
Or; the jerboa may eat any plant it comes across and sometimes other jerboa if they are hungry enough, but that speaks little of the quality of the plant matter or the potential benefits of cannibalism, and much of the appetite of the jerboa.
Of course, we too eat the stories of Beleriand whole.
Beleriand of yore was a land of warring tribes beneath a frosty roof of strange old stars, featuring the mightiest of men and the most crackpot of despots and more often than not both in one. They warred over gemstones and land as feral cats in the bazaar, and their winners always came off worse than their losers, which one can ascertain from the fate of Earendil the Clouded Star, whose gleaming goodness jutted from his tragedy like a sore thumb, or the fate of Gil-galad the Windfucker, that drinker of rivers and pisser of bones, whose spontaneous combustion is depicted in the tapestries at the War Hall of Halkovir, for it was funny enough to soften the blow of what losing that war had meant for our forefathers.
We guzzled such tales as it was human to thirst, and as we drank, we wondered about the shape of a world in which all peoples were permitted stories. The saddest of men were those who refused the stories of others, for they did not even know the shape of the missing thing yet walked around the world letting their innards tumble from the hole, always walking in circles and never stopping because they knew not what they were seeking, only that something had been lost.
One such story told of Kanafinwë, who was the younger brother of Nelyafinwë, whose temperament was so gentle that blood ran down his hands as tenderly as dew off a dove’s back. At the third slaying of kin in the war for the jewels, Kanafinwë had taken sudden pity upon the twin sons of the princess-in-exile and raised them, and in time they had grown to love each other, because even war finds it difficult to beat out a child’s capacity to love. That story spun through the desert too, even all the way to Kor in the Deeper South, where it took the form of a children’s fable about an absent-minded hyena, a spinster who found a sheep carcass and, thinking herself a swan, sang about her supper for so long that the carcass had turned into bone by the time she finished, before giving an almighty shrug and deciding to breastfeed the lambs instead.
As it was a child’s story, it came with a set of morals. What the claw failed to grab in darkness, the mouth claims it had never wanted. What the foot tramples in haste, the heart insists it never saw. Suckling from the teat of a hyena requires proximity to its jaw. The mouth which opens to curse may yet learn to sing, though it will always sing slightly off-key, and that this is not a flaw but a record, and that a record is not nothing unless recounted as fact.
We of Harad knew this story best of all, and in this way we were kin to the Westerly Peoples, for they too knew this story best of all and this is not a very surprising fact because stories are the relationship between a people and their environment, which means that stories do not live inside a singular people, are not stored within individual men like grain in a jar. They live between people, live in the space of their relation to each other and to the land, and do not require the specific conditions of their own making in order to go on being true. A story, once told, can no longer go untouched, no longer stay obedient and preserved like a treaty or a deed. What was lost when the story of Kanafinwë and the elven twins sung itself into being was not the fact of the matter itself, but the set of conditions under which such a story could happen. No matter the circumstances of the princess-in-exile’s leap into the sea, the merciful raising of the orphaned twins required an initial intent to slay their mother. Like the golden ages of Zarahed before the draining of the Kovir, a golden people who were gilded by circumstance, lost when the four great rivers were sucked dry.
Is that true?
Are we lost?
Has the Harad been lost all along?
There are sixty seven species of birds in Near Harad, and forty nine in Middle-Harad where prayers decorate the foreheads of men, though in deepest Harad where the mumakil live, there are fourteen hundred and sixty seven. Behind them they trail the lush, fat midges, fatter, fleshier stems of water-hoarding succulents, thirty eight accents and seventeen and a half languages. Across the centuries, different broods of larks nibbled at the same unsteady palms, the grasses grew and died and dried and grew again, and though perhaps the gold of bunchgrass seemed to stunt the beauty of the lilies, that did not mean that the bunchgrass was cruel. The dunes wavered across long white lines of sky, and it was neither a dying land or a dead land in need of reviving, for time and time, again, this desert was chosen. Over and over, with gentle hands and vicious claws, the heat and the dust were chosen. Gilded not by circumstance but by bunchgrass, and those who tended to wells, though the wellkeepers counted less than the bunchgrass as the wellkeepers, if you beheld them from far enough, seemed to be clad in orcskin.
So the boy-twins of Beleriand lived, and grew to be lofty lords, kind and brooding by turns, one everlasting in the flesh and the other everlasting in the sword, and across six thousand years, their family trees thrusted against each other like—nay, Zarush, you will make no comment on neither Ulfang nor the redhead, sit down—like twigs in a wreath of mourning, and so the King and Queen of Gondor-at-Peace were the descendent and the daughter of the boy twins above.
This is where Mehrzād of Zarahed comes into play, for the King and Queen had taken a shine to this youngest of the Southron footsoldiers of Sauron, and had taken him gladly into the court of Minas Tirith. His grandmother had named him Mehrzād, for he was born smiling in the solstice and of course, Mehrzād meant born of the sun. Three decades later, his people had named him Nazilar, for he had become the Vizieroy then, the unsmiling ambassador of Harad in Gondor, who presently leads the militaristic campaign for peaceful surrender, which by the count of two months ago numbered casualties almost approaching a thousand. And of course, Nazilar means pallbearer. [4]
It was true, it was concurred, that Mehrzād was born in Halkovir, the vast region surrounding Zarahed of Near Harad, named for the Kovir for the Kovir had rushed up to the feet of Izbina and Zaida-khanum as they first landed within its banks. He was born in our dust and spoke Zarhi when he wished to and spoke it truly, he knew which foods were eaten on what feast days and could sit with the Imir himself, using the correct posture and the appropriate terms of address. [5]
Of course, he has not used them in quite some time, and the Imir he knows how to address knows as clear as a sunrise that the ascension of Mehrzād meant an Imir loyal to Gondor, which the current Imir is most certainly not, praise to his name, though he knows his head may be the price. Everyone knows what is happening, though nobody tells the story aloud: we are all river-people, we of Zarahed and they of Minas Tirith, and we knew of circular currents, that the circuit between what is required by Gondor and what is provided by Mehrzād has been running so smoothly that it is no longer clear which direction the current actually flows. Oh Nazilar, you grass-snake who took a sword to the neck of the cobra and wept clean your blade, you who must poke your prayers by night into sodden pillows like toothpicks into the sand, you to whom every glimmer of light on stone is a scimitar slavering over the throat of your queen, where lie the boundaries of your life?
He was only but a boy in the years of the war: the foolishly cheerful second son of a water-thief, and for him it had been but a great adventure, the crossing of the land, his eyes had shone like a child’s when he first saw a Corsair, that silly boy. Boy he was then, fourteen years of age, and so had not the eye in the middle of the brain that lets one see how another sees them. He had been so tall and so handsome, so unlike the son of a water-thief, and to Gondor he seemed to be cut by the sandstorm itself, in all its golds and silvers, the shape of his jaw clearly showing this, hollowed gently, crouching under the highest of cheekbones, words leaving his mouth like stars streaking trails down a cliffside. With those thick beetle-wing brows and trimmed, frightened beard, the risqué curiosity in his green eyes, he wore a face that freed and imprisoned him both.
He liked to say things like the people who overran Hithlum and subjugated the House of Hador, they of the resilient spine, those sons of dogs were a tribe of war-mongering horse-riders, the men of Uldor, who were born nine thousand yards into Rhun six thousand years ago, and have never had anything to do with Zarahed. He liked to say such things, as though they mattered, and some would say in the early days, that the hope in his eyes had been simply agonising to behold.
That Mehrzād, who had never truly marched with orcs, the poor boy could not see that whichever face he wore, he too would always be clad in orcskin. Step by step we had crawled our battalions behind malodorous masses of meat and so to the watcher within the walls it was as though we were one. How must we have looked to the men of Gondor, watching from the walls? How our corpses broke their line of sight, reminded them that amongst orcs were smaller, darker orcs, men who were not made for the sorcerer’s army but men who thought and felt and were once children, spreading the memory of the treachery of that Ulfang.
Or perhaps we were worse than the orc. For we were not once of the Eldar, and we did not represent the fall of a once-glorious race. Here we stay in Zarahed and beyond, flinging proverbs loosely in the wind and turning blind eyes to the development of weapon caches. Whom the death of the sorcerer did not break, who are still a golden people, tarnished though they may be.
Fourteen years Mehrzād had lived in his home, two at war and twenty five in Gondor, for Gondor raised him hence, as the new lord and lady of the realm were as merciful as they were fair in face. And who better to raise this Mehrzad, second son of a water-thief, than Imir Elessar and Khanum Arwen, whose combined father had been commanded to drain the Kovir in the years of the Greatest Drought, that elf who moved both gracefully and jerkily at once, as if he was unsure whether he was man or elf, but narratively resembled a series of hiccups, or an eternal bookmark, fraying between the pages of a well-thumbed tome, an interval of disruption within the cosmic oneness of this world.
They were good to him, and kind, and raised him far above his station, for he had been sixteen and so swift to surrender, knowing as well as we that the sorcerer was one ruler among many potential candidates, because he had free will and because he was young and sweet enough for Gondor to accept his surrender and not execute him upon the walls. He was free to come, and freer to go. If you asked him, you would receive the same response you would get if you asked them, which was that there was love despite the odds. And so there had been, for in the courtly houses of Minas Tirith, the great war had ended and the bloodshed was past, they could speak of other things, do other things, like teach Sindarin to the son of a water-thief, and love him truly as if he was their own, allowing the solid yet precarious distances between them to close.
That was the worst part. The donkey kick to the teeth, my friends, the pit in the heart of the dune. There are days, and those days are dark, the people of Zarahed, have a swallow-swoop of a secret desire. There are days we wish they had burned him at the stake, or taken his head, torn him apart, that son of our soil. Took him to the eagle-pit and let them tear that child from limb to limb, shove him alive into a hole of writhing soil. Anything but this, anything but this kindness, regurgitated as it is from the cow’s second stomach.
Why does it matter? Why does it matter to the people of Zarahed? Why do we smell danger in the re-upbringing of a teenage captive, why do we begrudge a boy the comforts he enjoys in the royal houses of Minas Tirith?
Do not ask this storyteller. Ask Minas Tirith. For this royal household in particular, both King and Queen, had cause to know the reason for our hatred of his past, and they, like no other occupants of that marble throne before them, knew exactly what we feared. There was no true border between Harad and Gondor as we have established, and the stories of Beleriand sung in all of our hearts, and as young Mehrzad was taught within the courts, the people of Zarahed and the royal household of Minas Tirith were waiting and waiting for the same end to come. We all waited and waited and waited till we were exhausted by waiting, and henceforth waited further, glee and dread rising and falling across the land. There was a plan in the body of the land, and the glowing dark face of it was turned towards Harad with its teeth laid bare, whilst the princely clefted buttock was turned towards the white city of Minas Tirith, clenched tighter than the eyes of a child on the morning of his naming-day, hoping beyond hope that the present is all that he dreamed of.
Wait-without-hope in our hearts, hope-despite-wait in theirs, and there was an old saying in Umbar that tragedy echoed the militaristic strategy of the evening mosquito, where every sad story is but practice for the next, sadder story. What the claw failed to grab in darkness, the mouth claims it had never wanted. What the foot tramples in haste, the heart insists it never saw. Mehrzād of Zarahed was taken in by the royal court of Gondor after the War of the Ring. And love grew between them, as little might be thought.
NOTES
- Kalormë was a mountain in the farthest East of Arda, as mentioned in Lost Tales Part I, assumed to be ‘cast away’ by Ilúvatar during the Downfall of Numenor. The connection to the land of Calormen, the cruel sultanate in the works of CS Lewis, is interesting, though not particularly likely to be directly connected to each other’s work in any meaningful sense: the common link seems to be the Latin word calor, which means heat. My perspective is that though the shared root might not evidence permeability between the works of the two as individual writers, it certainly does evidence their position within the mid 20th century’s most renowned Anglophone writers; ie the tendency to label entire swathes of the globe according to one’s own tolerance of temperature fluctuations.
- Ulfang is Sindarin (Zindari as pronounced in Zarahed) for ‘horrible/ugly/unsightly beard’ from ulug -> horrible/ugly, and fang -> beard, and was ostensibly a posthumous epithet given to him by the elves after the betrayal, similar with the names of his sons, Ulwarth (Ugly Traitor), Ulfast (Ugly Tangled Hair) and Uldor (Ugly Lord), which are the only names the legendarium refers to them by, and as they are unlikely to be their ‘real’ names, I have named Ulynroi, which is derived from the Mongolian phrase for ‘mountaintop’, uulyn oroi.
- Izbina is a reference to renowned Persian physician Ibn-Sena [980—1037], known as Avicenna in the West, who did actually come up with the formula for attar (attor in the fic) i.e. oud perfume, among many other things. Similarly, the name Alkhwar gestures to Al-Khwarizmi (AD 780 - AD 850), a mathematician during the Golden Age of Islam, who had calculated the circumference of the globe at a time when the majority of Europe would probably kill you with hammers if you told them the world was anything but flat [note: this hammers part is just a joke quoting Lowkey I am not maligning the greatness of European thought in the Middle Ages and what not by calling them flat-earthers]. Zaida, a reference to Sayyida Shirin, who was regent and de-facto ruler of the realm when Ibn-Sena was court physician at Ray. Khanum is simply a word used in Afghanistan/South Asia, denoting a term of respectful address to an older woman.
- Both of Mehrzād’s names have a Persian root, wherein Mehrzād is an actual Iranian male name, relatively common, and can be translated into ‘born of the sun’. Nazilar is a derivation I made from the Avestan nasa a salar, meaning caretaker of pollutants, and is the root of the word nusessalar, which refers to a specific priestly class in Zoroastrianism as practiced in Iran, by communities-in-exile, and by the Parsi community of India: they are the only people allowed to enter the Towers of Silence and prepare corpses for excarnation by the elements and wildlife, hence, a class of pallbearers.
- Halkovir is the region referred to as ‘Near Harad’ in the legendarium. Halkovir has two major city-states and the port settlement of Umbar, of which one is Zarahed and the other is Vashta, closer to ‘Middle Harad’. Religious practices in the region have roots in Zoroastrianism and Shiite Islam.
The region of ‘Middle Harad’ is known as Vashemkor, and ‘Deep Harad’ is Nailar. All three of the Harad regions are named after three of the four great rivers that used to flow through the desert, which were all rerouted and subsequently destroyed in the Second Age, by Numenorian forces assisted by Gil-galad’s envoy and the rings of power. Some of the Vashemkor confederacy states are wealthy and have access to mineral reserves, the Kor deposits on their border with Nailar. I will have a map alongside the next chapter.