Consequently, I not only welcome constructive criticism, I beg for it. Please.
Chapter 2
Another Man's Armor
"Name?"
His name was Freawinë, and he was the son of Freamer.
"Have you a horse?"
He had – a most admirable beast, which I had seen him riding earlier towards Edoras. The sight of it had brought back memories of the horse I might have brought with me if the orcs had not slaughtered it, along with the rest of my family's animals. My stomach turned as I remembered the smell of burning horseflesh and the screams of my dying neighbors that had sent me running across the fields to the city of the King. Even then, I dared not think that some of the screams had belonged to my family. I swallowed the memory and thought of nothing but the youth in front of me. It would not do to cry when I was in line to join the army.
"To the right," the soldier said, and the youth trotted off to stand in the line that wound into the tent that served as an impromptu armory. I stepped forward with my arms crossed in what I thought was a confident position, the wind rolling in from the plains and blowing my newly shorn hair about my shoulders. The absence of my long braids bothered me, for now that my hair was cut I could not tie it back easily. It tickled my face almost constantly, especially here, outside the city, where boys milled about waiting to be catalogued and enlisted, and soldiers rode about them on tall horses.
"Name?"
"Lôgan," I said, lowly and quietly, glad that my name was not as feminine as I might have previously wished.
The soldier glanced at me as I paused before stating my lineage. "Son of?" he prompted.
"Lômund," I said, assuring myself that technically I had not lied yet. If the soldier did not notice that a girl who happened to be small-breasted and happened to have her hair cut in the fashion of a boy was not really anyone's son, that was certainly no fault of mine. He continued to stare quizzically at me for a moment, and I looked back as blankly as I could, though I was beginning to feel sick with nerves. I continued to cross my arms over my chest. I was young, and the years had been hard ones, so I had very little to hide. Yet I was paranoid that the slight curve of my breasts would give me away, if my voice or my face did not, and the way the soldier was staring at me made me feel alarmed
But he finally looked back at his paper, and I reminded myself not to breathe a sigh of relief, for that would incriminate me as well.
"Have you a horse?"
I swallowed my humiliation and said "No."
"Sign," the soldier said, holding out his paper, and I scrawled a rough set of runes on the paper with an untrained hand. I could read fairly, but I wrote very little. There had been no reason to master the art in my previous life.
"To the right," the soldier said, gesturing to a line of boys waiting to be equipped. I ran off, barely able to believe that my rough ruses had worked thus far.
It was about this point that it occurred to me that I was not going to be able to keep fooling soldiers for much longer. Desperation prevented me from acknowledging it sooner, but the fact that I had not thought this out very well was beginning to present itself in such a way that I could not go on ignoring it. The man who was listing recruits had been writing for some time, and after a long while of entering boys' names into a roster, faces begin to blur. Even if I could pass for a little bit, a sharp-eyed soldier would eventually notice that I was of the fairer sex, however unfair I appeared as of late.
I assumed, once found out, I would be expelled from the army. Shieldmaidens were a thing of the past, and lying was disgraceful. I dared not think of what might happen to me if my plans to become a soldier fell through. I had been living on charity for too long to go back to it, not without a fight. I told myself I would gladly march as a herald at the head of a hopeless battle against an army of orcs before I went back to die on the streets, and I believed it. In reality, I probably would have been able to survive passably as someone's stablehand if I was as dedicated to becoming one as I was to becoming a soldier, but my mind would foolishly not hear of it.
The boys in the line watched me momentarily as I joined them, but most were there with brothers or friends to keep their attention, and one small street rat with a face so filthy as to be indiscernible as female was the least of their concern. I followed Freawinë Freamer's son into the tent, where soldiers were dispensing armor, most of it secondhand.
I picked up a helmet and slipped it on experimentally. It was too big and wobbled uncomfortably, but it hid my face. A man approached me with a hauberk. He judged it against my height, and draped it over my shoulder. The sudden weight of the chainmaille nearly made me lose my balance, and the man caught me and pushed me up gruffly.
"Stand up, lad," he said. "You'll bear heavier loads than this in time."
He laid a woolen jerkin across my arms, as well as a belt and leggings of leather. He checked that the shoes I wore were suitable. They were good sturdy boots, and he approved them, and handed me gloves, gauntlets and a corslet of leather. Atop all these he laid a cloak of thick and heavy wool. I sighed with audible relief at the sight of the cloak. It was old and stained and would itch fiercely, but it would keep me warm, something I had not been for months.
The man turned away to look through weapons, and I cleared my throat urgently.
"This is too big," I said, shaking my head so that he could see how my helm rattled. He glanced at it dismissively.
"Chances are all of it is," he said, as he placed upon my laden arms a dagger and – oh Béma – a sword. "You'll grow into it."
I barely heard him as I stared at the sword. I had never felt the weight of a real one. I was strong for my size even then – farming breeds hearty children – but the weight of the armor was uncomfortable. I could hardly believe that I would be expected to wear this nearly all of the time.
He ushered me out the tent, saying "Come back tomorrow after noon. You'll be assigned quarters and given rations. Camps are to the east of Edoras."
"I want to stay here," I objected, shaken out of my reverie. "I can take my quarters now."
The man looked at me, and I think now that his expression was somewhere between pity and amusement.
"Go home," he advised me. "Go to sleep early and wake up late, because chances are you won't ever get to do it again."
I left the armory and crept into an unlocked shed, where I folded my secondhand armor on a wooden bench as reverently as if it had been made by elves. Moonlight poured in through a small, high window, and I watched it land on the regalia – my regalia – blotting out the stains and tears with the strange, silvery blue light of nighttime. I was unspeakably proud. I thought of how Lômund Halmund's son would have smiled if he were alive to know that he was the father of a soldier, though all his sons were dead, and the memory of him made my eyes smart with tears. I thought of wearing that armor as a soldier of Rohan, of doing great things in it, of being hailed by Éomer King as a hero of my country. In my fantasies, Lady Éowyn had returned to Rohan to meet me, the second great shieldmaiden, and she was a stern and proud and beautiful as ever.
The faceless image of a man that was my mental stand in for my lady's new husband Faramir stood to the side, and I thought that if he was enough to convince the Lady Éowyn to willingly leave her country and her title as a hero to marry him, then he must have been an exceptional man indeed. I resented him terribly.
I wonder now what man wore that armor before I did. I wonder what man died in Helm's Deep or on the Pelannor Fields, that I might have had a soldier's uniform to fuel my dreams of glory that evening in the shed. But I was young then, and did not realize that the reason armory was bursting to the seams was because our city was emptied of soldiers.
I took the sword then, and in my mind I named it. I forget the name now – the name of the sword of someone who is not a great leader is not important. With moonlight turning the deep brown of the leather sheath silvery-blue, I drew the sword expectantly. What I thought I would see, I do not know. Perhaps I expected the moonlight to flash heroically across the blade, or for some ancient magic to indicate that I was correct in taking the path of a shieldmaiden. All that happened was that I was disappointed by the dullness of the blade, and the absence of sheen upon the metal. It would need to be sharpened and polished.
But I stood there with that sword in my arms until the moon had disappeared from the window, leaving me in darkness with my arms tired from the weight of the sword. My sword, I thought, though I know now that it was no more my sword than it would have been if I had found it on the field. That sword belonged to a man who was dead, but though death had claimed all the traces of my life up to that day, I had still somehow managed not to understand it.
I slept, finally, and dreamed of a glorious woman whose sword shone brightly in the sun as she stood upon a high mount. Armies of darkness scattered before her, and her cloak of white spread like snow across the unspoiled plains of Rohan.