Disclaimer: Everything except for the original characters (again, I have tried to keep the cast to a minimum) belongs to J.R.R. Tolkien, and rightfully so after spending most of a lifetime inventing it. Also rightfully so, since this particular story is drawn from material he never meant to publish: namely, The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales.
I would really love constructive criticism, but then again I'm not too good at giving it myself, so I shouldn't talk much.
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10. Akallabêth
From then on, the King's Men seemed to think that the Faithful in the harbor of Rómenna posed no further threat. No boat ventured out to hail them, and they had no news from land. Somehow, though, everyone knew it when the fleet set out westward a few days later. All Númenor lay quiet.
Oddly enough – ominously, Isildur thought – the weather stayed perfectly calm as well. Ordinarily the Faithful, most of whom had never traveled farther than a league from shore, would have taken far longer to adapt to life aboard ship. Elendil made no move to set sail for Middle-Earth. Granted, in this weather it would have done little good; their ships were not the slave galleys that had stubbornly rowed west. By now, though, the crews would normally have made some effort to get underway.
"What do we wait for?" Isildur asked on the thirty-ninth day after the departure of the fleet. "Our provisions are not infinite, and it is past time we abandoned Númenor."
"There still may be a sign," his father countered wistfully. "Even now, Ar-Pharazôn could turn back…"
"Not likely!"
"I know." Elendil paced the length of the small cabin slowly, unconsciously ducking under the low beams of the upper deck, then stopped and sighed. "I always thought that at my age, I could leave the King's ships and remain in Andúnië, with the breezes blowing from Eressëa. It is hard to leave that behind forever.
"Of course, at one time I was certain that Tar-Miriel the Queen would allow me to do so," he admitted with a smile. "We cannot wait much longer. Return to your ships, senya, and I will tell Anárion that we are setting off."
Still becalmed, the only way to move a sailing ship forward was to tether the ship's boats to the bow and take turns rowing. They towed the nine larger vessels gradually across the water; Isildur staved off complaints about the difficulty of the task by taking the first turn himself. He and Elendur boarded the smallest of the boats and rowed out ahead and a little to starboard, where they would not entangle themselves with the others.
Thus were they completely unprepared for the sudden earthquake, this time far worse than the one that had struck the land as warning. Father and son had time for a moment of consternation before the swell overtook them and capsized the boat. This early in the year, the cold of the seawater made Isildur gasp; Elendur surfaced a moment later, coughing. Isildur could swim, but he knew that in cold water it hardly mattered.
"Th-the ship! Hurry!" The boy nodded convulsively, but the freezing death Isildur had feared never happened. Lines were thrown from the ship until everyone was back aboard. The boats too full of water to be retrieved were simply cut loose.
A few minutes passed in a flurry of blankets and hauling of ropes before someone glanced back at the heart of Númenor, between the two long peninsulas that still protected their ships from the open sea. "Valar help us, look at the mountain!"
Everyone knew what was meant: Meneltarma, the sacred mountain that rose from the center of Númenor, just visible now as a sharp spire against the sky. A sky that suddenly glowed orange at the summit. The mountain spewed fire. After a moment's horrified silence, someone ventured, "Another portent?"
"Overlate, don't you think?" another retorted. The few who had stayed below deck came out to see what had happened. Another earthquake rocked the ship, and simply continued; rocks on the cliffs of the two peninsulas tumbled into the bay.
"I think the Valar have gone beyond warning," Elendur said miserably, and tucked his blanket more tightly about himself. Soon, the westerly wind of which they had despaired sprang up, and the ships moved slowly toward the mouth of the bay. The air reeked of sulfur, more than a single volcano should have produced at this distance. As they neared the open ocean, they saw the surge of water moving west around the island. A wall of salty steam stretched along the horizon behind them.
"A rift must have opened in the ocean floor," Eregwen said, her voice soft with terror. "Númenor will fall – not the people only, but the land itself!"
For a moment, Isildur looked out and saw two versions of the western horizon: the rift and the downfall of Númenor, and a stretch of calm ocean as far as even his eyes could see. He understood. Assailed once too often, the Undying Lands had been withdrawn from the world of those who could never come to it. The world itself had changed – bent around itself. Then the seas of the West disappeared, leaving Númenor to reel on the edge of the new abyss.
"We stand too close," he thought aloud. "The sea will draw us in afterward—"
The gale struck the ship so suddenly that all of its passengers were thrown off their feet, and with the wind came blinding rain. They heard rather than saw one of the masts snap overhead and blow away, but there was no sign of the other ships.
"Or perhaps not!" he continued, too stunned to think sensibly.
The storm raged on steadily all that day, and it was a steady struggle to prevent the ship from breaking under the strain. The heavy canvas sails refused to furl against the wind, and more than one man fell before the crew gave up and returned to the deck. At any rate, most of the rigging tore free and disappeared into the wind before it had the chance to do much more damage to the rest of the ship. They plunged forward nevertheless as if they had every sail filled.
Meanwhile, there was no sign of any other ship in the little fleet. Isildur feared at first that only the one on which he stood had survived the first onslaught. Then his eye chanced upon a small black banner that still flew, somehow, from the mizzenmast. It bore a single, six-pointed star in white. An odd emblem; he tried to remember why the crew had put it up. He knew that only seven of the nine ships carried one like it.
Of course. As the ship's captain rushed past him, he called, "Where is the palantir?"
"Below!" the captain shouted at him, all formality forgotten in his anxiety. "With the rest of the ballast people thought too precious to leave behind!"
"Thank you!" He made his way toward the hatch – delayed briefly by a wave that swept across the deck amidships and forced everyone either to hold onto something or to be swept overboard. He ducked through as someone on the other side helped him to force it open. Seawater poured in after him.
"Atarinya?" his helper cried. It was Aratan, who was small for his age like his mother's kin. He was pale and soaking wet, but grinning proudly.
Isildur had a sudden, horrible vision of the little boy being swept overboard when the wind pulled too strongly on the broad side of the hatch. "Why aren't you in the cabin with Ciryon and your mother?" he demanded.
"Mother is helping with the pumps," Aratan informed him. "She said there weren't enough men to take shifts, and they will need rest if the storm goes on."
He looked around in the gloom. Sure enough, some of the sailors' hammocks were occupied, and the few supposed passengers still on that particular deck were busy with one thing or another. He hoped they had the sense to stay away from tasks that required more experience, but for the moment, he could understand the wisdom of the idea.
"Be careful!" he told his son at last, and ran the rest of the way down to the hold.
As the captain had indicated, the palantir's case lay at the top of a rather disorganized heap of things that the various families had brought along as treasures. Some care had been taken at least to see that the sapling White Tree had remained upright, but the rest seemed to be arranged more by weight, as ballast indeed. Isildur was briefly startled to see a round black boulder nearly his own height in diameter. How had the crew gotten it down here? Why had they bothered?* He had other problems to worry about, though, and he soon forgot about it.
This palantir was a Master-stone, much larger than the one his family had generally used in Rómenna, and would have been beyond his strength alone to move if it had slipped out of alignment. Fortunately, the case seemed to have done its work; when he opened the metal latch, the Stone erupted in a flurry of images. With an effort of will, he focused on the tossing water around the ship.
There! Another ship loomed suddenly out of the waves, not far away, and a third had stayed within hailing distance of that one. His own portion of the fleet was accounted for. Looking further, he saw Anárion's two ships holding the same course. The palantíri were dark; he doubted anyone else had thought of this method yet.
That left four ships, his father's, but several minutes passed before he found them. They had been swept northward as a group, despite their best efforts to the contrary. He caught a tiny image of Elendil checking his compass before it and the pile of charts slid onto the cabin floor. The older man looked exhausted, as if he had not rested since the storm began; Isildur remembered, rather abruptly, that he had done no better himself.
Nearly everyone lost track of time in that terrible storm. Day and night were barely distinguishable under the clouds, and even the children could seldom sleep regular hours. They therefore had no accurate idea of how long they fought against it, but at last the wind died down to a breeze that could again support sails. The crews emptied their stores of extra canvas as they tried to replace what had blown away; Isildur struggled to calculate their position before the lookout announced that land had appeared on the horizon. Everyone came on deck to peer out at it.
"Pelargir?" Elendur asked, sounding vaguely disappointed. He was right. They had come through the Bay of Belfalas to the place where the river Anduin emptied into the sea. Before long, a glimmer of white far upriver betrayed the Númenórean haven.
"Good," Isildur said. "I have seen enough adventure for one lifetime…"
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*The Stone of Erech. ROTK says that Isildur brought it there from Númenor, but I can't work out why he or his people would have troubled themselves with a big rock when their lives were at stake. Perhaps it has some tremendous importance that he has overlooked for the moment.
I'm being cruel – they, of course, had no idea that Sauron had survived the Downfall and would attack them out of Mordor in 3429, the first event in what would become the War of the Last Alliance. This story, however, has come to an end. Hope you liked it.