The Last Ring-bearer - Kirill Yeskov [194]
Almandin and Jacuzzi were hanged in the courtyard of the Ar-Horan prison on one of the exhaustingly hot August nights of 3019; Flag Captain Makarioni and seven other officers that had participated in 'Admiral Carnero's mutiny' were executed along with them. This was the post factum description of Operation Sirocco, during which the admiral first destroyed the entire Gondorian invasion fleet right at the piers in a pre-emptive strike, and then landed a raiding party which burned Pelargir shipyards to the ground. To save face, Aragorn had to sign the Dol Amroth Compact. By its terms Umbar did acknowledge itself "an inseparable part of the Reunited Kingdom," but got itself permanent free city status in return. Its Senate was renamed to 'magistrate' and its army to 'garrison;' Special Envoy Alkabir, who represented the Republic, even managed to wangle a special provision banning His Majesty's Secret Guard from operating in its territory. To the mutual satisfaction of the king of Gondor and Umbarian senators, Admiral Carnero's raid was declared to have been a banal pirate foray, and its participants deserters and traitors who had abandoned their oath and military honor.
Of course, the people viewed Carnero's co-conspirators (the admiral avoided court-martial by getting himself killed at Pelargir) as heroes who had saved their Motherland from a foreign invasion, but the fact remained that they had gone against orders. The Republic's Prosecutor General Almaran had a simple solution to this ethical dilemma: "Winners are always right, you say? Like hell! Either law exists and is the same for everybody, or there's no law at all." The pathos of his prosecutor's speech (quoted in whole or in part in every modern law textbook) can be summed up exhaustively by its concluding statement: "Let the world perish but justice be done!" Be that as it may, the executed officials of the Umbarian secret service should have known that motherland's gratitude usually takes strange forms… Sonya never found out about Haladdin's mission (as we already know, this had been his special concern) and remained certain that he and Kumai had perished at the Field of Pelennor. But time is merciful, so once those wounds had healed she fulfilled her life's destiny by becoming a loving wife and wonderful mother, having married a worthy man whose name is absolutely irrelevant to our story.
In my opinion, royal personages are of much lesser interest, since their fates are well-known. For those too lazy to pick up a book or at least review their sixth-grade history textbook, let me remind you that Aragorn's reign was one of the most magnificent in Middle Earth history and is one of the watershed events separating the Middle Ages (the Third Age) from modernity. The usurper did not try to win the love of the Gondorian aristocracy (such a project would have been dead on arrival), instead betting correctly on the third estate, which cared for things like tax rates and safety of trade routes, rather than dynastic rights and other such phantoms. Since His Majesty had effectively burned all bridges with the aristocracy, paradoxically this gave him freedom to implement radical agrarian reform, drastically curtailing the rights of landlords in favor of free farmers. These factors were the basis for the famous 'Gondorian economic miracle' and the colonial expansion that followed, while the representative legislative bodies Aragorn had created to counterweight the aristocracy have survived to our day almost unchanged, earning the Reunited Kingdom its welldeserved title of Middle Earth's oldest democracy.
It is common knowledge that the king advanced and supported science, craftsmanship, and sea-faring ventures, appointed talented men to important state positions without regard to their lineage, and was sincerely loved by his subjects. The only dark stain on Elessar Elfstone's reputation is the early period of his reign, when his Secret Guard (admittedly a really scary outfit) had to protect the throne from