The Last Ring-bearer - Kirill Yeskov [48]
Part II – The King and the Steward
"And besides, when folk talk of a country covered with troops, it's but a kind of a byword at the best. A soldier covers nae mair of it than his bootsoles."
Robert L. Stevenson
Chapter 20
Ithilien, Emyn Arnen
May 3, 3019
"What time is it?" Éowyn asked sleepily.
"Sleep on, sweetheart." Faramir rose on his elbow a little and gently kissed the top of her head. Apparently it was a sharp movement in his sleep that woke up the girl; his wounded arm kept going numb, but he never let on, knowing that she preferred to sleep stretched along his body, her head pillowed on his shoulder. As usual, they have only fallen asleep close to sunrise, so by now the sun's rays were already bathing the wooden buildings of Fort Emyn Arnen, getting in the narrow window of their 'princely bedchamber.' In the olden times the prince was always up with the dawn; being a morning person, his best working hours were before noon. Now, however, he slept late with a clear conscience: first, a honeymoon is a honeymoon; second, a prisoner has nowhere to hurry.
However, she had slipped out from under his arm already, and her laughing eyes looked at the prince with fake severity: "Listen, we'll totally undermine the public morals of the Ithilien colony."
"Like there's something there to undermine," he grumbled. Éowyn flitted to the foot of the bed, sat down there, naked and cross-legged, and began putting her ripe-wheat hairdo in order, glancing at him from time to time from under lowered eyelashes. He told her on one of their first nights, only half-joking, that looking at his beloved brushing her hair in the morning is one of the most intense and exquisite pleasures available to man, so now she kept polishing and perfecting this little ritual of theirs, jealously observing his reaction: do you still like it, darling? He smiled to himself, remembering how Prince Imrahil used to insist that northern women, for all their beauty, are a cross between a dead fish and a birch log in bed. I wonder if it's my good luck or his bad one for all those years?
"I'll make coffee for you."
"Now that is certainly a blow to public morals!" Faramir laughed. "The Princess of Ithilien in the kitchen – an aristocrat's nightmare!"
"I'm afraid they'll have to put up with my lack of refinement and manners. For example, I intend to go hunting today and prepare some real baked venison for supper, and let them all blow their gaskets! I can't abide our cook's fare any more; the guy apparently knows no spices other than arsenic and strychnine!"
She should go, he thought, and perhaps we'll start the Game tonight? Lately he and Éowyn
were allowed to leave the fort one at a time – enough to be grateful for; the hostage system has its advantages.
"Will you read to me tonight?"
"Certainly. About Princess Allandale again?"
"Well… yes!"
Those evening readings were another of their rituals; Éowyn had a few favorite stories which she was ready to hear again and again, like a child. Like most of Rohan's elite, the girl was illiterate, so the magical world that Faramir laid open before her astonished her imagination. That was the beginning of their relationship… or perhaps it started earlier?
…On the day of the battle for Pelennor fortifications the prince was commanding the right defensive flank; he fought in the front line, so it was bewildering that a heavy armorpiercing arrow struck him from behind – in the trapezius muscle, to the left of the base of his neck. Its three-sided tip had channels for poison, so by the time the good knight Mithrandir got him to Minas Tirith the prince was in a bad way. For some reason he was carried to a far room in the hospital, and, most astonishingly, forgotten there. Completely helpless, he lay right on the stone floor – the poison had caused blindness and paralysis, so that he could not even cry for help – feeling the cold of the grave spreading through his body from the already numb left arm and neck. His