Age Shall Not Weary Them
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now.
Wilfred Owen, Strange Meeting
By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead.
JRR Tolkien
There had been four of them. Lords' sons, thrown together by their similar age and their fathers' instructions. Beren, Turgon, Hador, and Faramir. They were tutored together, and trained together, and, as luck would have it, they also liked and admired each other. When the time came for them to serve Gondor, they went in different directions, but whenever their leave and their duties allowed, they would meet in a tavern on the fifth, and share their tales and jokes and sometimes even their dreams. Fewer of those, as the years went by, and the jokes became ever darker.
Beren was first. Two-and-twenty, felled by an orc arrow not far from Poros. By then they had all seen death aplenty, but none perhaps so close to the bone. The loss of one bound the other three more tightly together. Each year, as near to the anniversary as their duties allowed, they would meet and drink to his memory. "One arrow," said Hador. "Valar, that's all it took."
Turgon had served under his brother. One of Boromir's favourites, and not just for Faramir's sake. Turgon was exuberant and handsome. He broke hearts, and was rarely beaten at cards. He went down with the bridge. A week later, Hador and Faramir met at the tavern as usual. "Why does it feel wrong," said Hador, "to be mourning one man in particular?" They drank until they were staggering, then pulled each other back up the circles of the City to their beds. "Two down," said Hador, wavering on his doorstep. "Two to go."
Hador had taken the risk that the others were not willing to take. There was a wife and two little girls. After the siege and the pyre, he came to see Faramir in the Houses of Healing. "You look terrible," he said. Then he clasped Faramir's hand and embraced him. "Praise the Valar," he whispered. "I couldn't have borne being the last." He'd marched the next day for the Morannon, where he fell. So Faramir was the last instead.
After everything calmed down, Minas Tirith was very different. Fewer of the younger men around, Faramir thought, and the older men looked shocked. His heart went out to the grandsons, much too young to be lords of their houses, unclear how they had inherited these duties and even less sure what they were supposed to do about them. He made a particular effort to look out for these; he sympathised with their plight. But they were not, and could never be, his friends.
Each year, at dawn on the fifteenth, the lords and men of Minas Tirith will gather in the Court of the Fountain and, as the first light of dawn breaks in the East, where once there had only been the ever-growing darkness, the horns will sound, and they will remember their dead and their deliverance. But at sunset, he will go out by himself, and on the walls of the fifth he will light three candles. And he will sit there while the sun goes down, and think of the passing of the years, and all that has been lost with them – the loves, the laughs, the sweet joys of life, the honours that are now his and his alone. There had been four of them. And now there is one, charged with the care of the memories and the privilege of living.
Altariel, 17th August 2018