The Last Ring-bearer - Kirill Yeskov [191]
"What I mean is… The thing is, not a soul in Middle Earth will believe in our victory. No victory parades, you know? Mark my words: the Elves and the Men from beyond the Anduin will find a way to paint themselves as the victors, anyway."
The Orocuen nodded and held still for a moment, as if listening to the slowly subsiding growl of the Fire Mountain. "Yeah. That's how it's gonna be, no doubt. But what do we care?"
Epilogue
"What will History say?" "History, sir, will lie – as always." Bernard Show
Have the courage to dream and lie. Friedrich Nietzsche
Our narrative is based entirely on Tzerlag's tales, however incomplete, that are preserved by his clan as an oral tradition. It should be stressed that we have no documents that might attest to its veracity. The one who might have been expected to leave the most detailed account – Haladdin – had not recorded even a word on the subject; the other participants in the hunt for Galadriel's Mirror – Tangorn and Kumai – remained silent for obvious reasons. Therefore, whoever would like to declare the whole thing to be the old-age ravings of an Orc who wanted to replay the finale of the War of the Ring is free to do so with clear conscience. After all, that's what memoirs are for: to let veterans recast their losses as victories after the fact.
On the other hand, those who consider this story to be, if not a true, then at least a plausible version of history, might be interested in certain events outside its immediate time frame. Tzerlag related that he had accompanied Haladdin from Orodruin to Ithilien; the doctor seemed very ill and didn't say ten words in a row throughout the journey. On one of their stops the sergeant fell in a sleep so deep that he woke up only by next evening, nauseous and with a monster headache. Instead of his comrade he found the mithril coat by his side, with a farewell letter wrapped in it. Haladdin wrote that Middle Earth was now free from the Elvish menace and that in his capacity as the commanding officer of the operation he thanked the sergeant for excellent service and awarded him the precious armor. As for the doctor himself, regretfully he 'had paid such a price for victory as to see no place for himself among people.' Those words led the scout to fear the worst, but the hunch did not pan out: judging by his tracks, Haladdin had simply reached the Ithilien highway and took it to points south.
Interestingly, a few years ago a certain light-minded doctoral student at the Umbar University's Medieval History Department took this legend at face value and invested the effort to comb the account books of several Eastern monasteries, which have been keeping records for the last fifteen hundred years with an unnatural thoroughness. What do you think – the whelp did unearth a very curious coincidence: in January 3020 (by the then current calendar) an Umbarian-looking monk did join the Gurwan Aren cave monastery in the mountains of North Vendotenia. This monk took an oath of silence and donated an inoceramium ring to the monastery. This led the student to make (quoting the minutes of the departmental meeting) "a hasty, unfounded, and totally non-scientific claim of identity of the said monk with the legendary Haladdin." Naturally, the doctoral committee administered a proper tongue-lashing to the wannabe ghost-hunter, so that the young man forswore departures from his approved dissertation topic and has been dutifully dusting clay fragments from the garbage piles of Khand's Seventh Dynasty ever since.
As for the real Haladdin, his name can be found in any university course on history of science – as an example of the dangers of sudden leaps forward – rather than physiology, his life's work. His brilliant studies of nerve tissue