The Hospices of the red edge
Good evening everyone! Tonight master Finran had a strange idea! He told us the story of a fellow innkeeper, then he stopped right in the middle of it! Satisfied with himself, he asked his friend Rhâst to continue, and so on with his neighbour...
As all this was likely to cut short, he imposed a theme: the red edge!
At the end of the evening, the common hall had made a colorful tale, multifaceted, where the most romantic hope of wenches, along with the laborer's cynicism could be recognized.
Here is what it resulted in...
.oOo.
The oak sign swayed creaking under its mast. It bore the effigy of a grim cleaver, whith a sharp edge glistening with fresh blood.
The hospice of the red edge took its name from its founder, Caranlain1, former executioner of Baron of En Eredoriath2. Legend had it that he had left his charge, noting with dispair that his office's customers increasingly tended to come back from their graves to disturb his sleep.
These were troubled times indeed. Doubt crept into the minds, Dunedain kingdoms seemed to erode by the threatening shadow of the Witch-king, and the tombs of the Kings won by dark spells.
So our executioner sold his charge and converted into the worthy profession of ghost hunter, with the blessing of his lord who had some urgent use for it.
Caranlain established his quarters in an abandoned post house that served the greenway. Perched atop a hill on the South Downs, mid-way between Bree and Thalion, an old dilapidated tower - which bore the name of Barad Luindalf - neighbored a main building and stables, all surrounded by a rubble wall.
He strengthened the modest fortifications and dug a well. His large family provided to stewardship with discreet efficiency and parsimonious affability of an ancient line of executioners. Fodder collecting, cultivating a vegetable garden, farming land to sheep herders, all these arrangements were made with cold blood (!) of an industrious family.
By necessity, the establishment rather quickly became a haven in the middle of a hazardous crossing. Travelers rightly feared the stage rallying Bree and Thalion. When fog or night invaded the Barrow Downs, fear spread by the hills bristling with stone teeth. People disappeared in uncertain circumstances and rumors of atrocities were told. Then father Caranlain lit a fire at the top of his tower, beacon of hope for the unwary travelers lost in the void.
The shelter became famous for its vigilant hospitality, even if it was somehow less comfortable than a hostel. Merchants saved from disaster often offered, by generosity and gratitude, large sums that allowed the family to flourish. Popular saying gave them a new name: the "bloody hospices." But this success attracted dark venomous wrath against the sign of the red edge.
Under such a standard, the coming war began with bloody auspices.
.oOo.
For this was a war for good. The shadow was leading a sneak attack, yielding apparently to mustered forces, to regain ground on weakened hearts, insinuating a creeping fear.
The remains of kings waved under their mounds, nightly escaping to the wilderness in search of lost souls and fresh blood. The lies of Morgoth haunt the memory of humans since the dawn of time, with death as an odious dispossession or usurpation of a sacred heritage. The Witch-king, by his evil spells, gave to see the frightening spectacle of great souls suffering the throes of unworthy death and impossible rest.
Men, their dead kings should have inspired, were troubled and disbanded, abandoned by faith. The most desperate were found bloodless and pale, motionless and icy as stone, near the big barrows, if not eviscerated at the bottom of a ravine.
The bloody hospices supported a permanent seat. During day, under the protection of the glorious star, Caranlain and his son roamed the greenway, condemning the barrows doors, affixing the powerful sigils3 forged by their lord. Women closed in the desecrated graves, pronounced calming words and banished the evil spirits that infested the sanctuaries with their lies.
At nightfall, they lit on the greenway a standby fire indicating the path that rose to their stronghold, and stirred up the straggling travelers there. When the kingdom of shadows resumed his rights, cold blowed from the graves to the foot of their walls. When wolves and ospreys cried at night, the guards of the bloody hospices slept with one eye open.
But when silent darkness won every corner of the country by a moonless night, then all watched tirelessly, repelling fear and persistent rumor of rattling bones in the cold air. Women sang a song of forgiveness, which casts out fear and disperses the illusions of the Dark Lord.
It happened that abject creatures attacked the walls, during a night of deep darkness. Then the master of the hospital defended his kin with the edge of his former office, while his cronies waved sulfur torches. The cleaver worked wonderfully, cutting undead flesh and breaking the evil animating the spoils.
.oOo.
The fortress held out, the last bastion of light facing the furious ocean of human fears. The Caranlain family, stood fighting around the inflexible father.
Of course all preferred praise for their unwavering watch than suffering the fleeting looks and shy ways towards the executioner! The family shared the feeling of a promotion.
Only the youngest, bright Firniel, showed an independent and whimsical spirit. Certainly, she helped her mother and her sisters-in-law and showed gentle patience with her nephews, but she spent most of her time dreaming elven tales and foreshore lays.
Her universe, populated by sprites, august kings, tiny fairies, elves as beautiful as the stars, was a counterpoint to the obscure fight of their lives. The girl often escaped, running hills, courting the Zephyr and murmuring the loves of Earendil to valleys sources. The family ended up not worrying about her escapades, especially as Firniel seemed insensitive to the fears and doubts of adults.
But one evening, when the low cloud ceiling masked night light, she did not return to the shelter.
.oOo.
Her brothers and father frantically scoured the black moor, torches in hand, calling for her all night long.
Only in the early morning, did they, exhausted, find her quietly leaning against the upper stone of a large barrow. She gently chanted ballads of old, smiling casually as inhabited by a sweet secret.
The girl was returned to the fold, surrounded, nourished, rubbed with invigorating leaves and inspected at every angle. She suffered these inconveniences with all the good grace one is able of at seventeen springs. Her mother noticed that she had nothing, not even a sniffle.
Then came the ritual question:
- "But, Firniel, what did you do out all night? What is wrong with you?"
With gentle authority and disarming grace - You people cannot understand, this is a girl's story! - she had all the men ousted out of the room. When her stepsisters had closed the door with ill-concealed excitement, she announced with a candid aplomb, she had found the boy of her dreams.
The men, ambushed behind the door, heard a chorus of hysterical screams.
They could take few more details out of her, except that he was a son of old family, never married, with an elven beauty and exquisite sensitivity...
The mother, stunned, inquired about the intentions of the young man. Her daughter appeared to think for a moment and, with a little childish pout belying her grave tone, she said:
- "He is much older than me, but he is not yet ready for marriage. I do not mean to hurry him! We should take our time!"
Speechless before such maturity, the mother agreed to spare the father and prepare him calmly to these news.
.oOo.
The father found this idyll very hasty, and the circumstances particularly unseemly - a young man of good family should not lead the girl of his thoughts into shadows and dangers. Draconian security measures fell upon the household. After locking his daughter in her room, he decided to surprise the young dandy.
Caranlain climbed atop his small but valiant dungeon and sat for a long watch. He scanned the night without failing, determined to spot the cheeky lad if ever he came. Hours weighed heavily on his lids, but he stood up immediately when a distant murmur rippled the smooth darkness.
Far below, a clear wisp was dancing on the road, eclipsing the semaphore his people had lit at dusk. The father's eyes widened like saucers when he recognized his youngest child frolicking at night. He roared like a bear, harmed in his pride and threatened in the flesh of his flesh. How had she managed to escape? And what madness, magic or attraction made her sparkle like a flare of hope adrift on a sea of ink? Grabbing his red cleaver, he plunged into the ocean of liquid darkness, to rescue his precious little girl.
.oOo.
In great fury, Caranlain rushed down to the greenway. He called, horned, raged. A heavy reluctant silence spread around him. Fog seemed to fill the air with its icy indifference. Then a light tune, blown from a hill pipe, scattered several mocking notes, as through the veils of a remote time. Sweat chilled the executioner's powerful spine.
Controling his fury and now fully aware of the danger, Caranlain took a firebrand and followed the trail of the sour tune, in the winding alleys of the old necropolis. Relentless, the father called his child with his heart and his voice, feeling around him the growing malevolent attention of restless souls. He erred lengthily, waking the minions and calling upon himself the anger of vengeful spirits.
The pipe hushed. A curl of fog revealed a large stone portal, that opened on a lighted tomb under its turf tumulus. The former executioner shivered with horror. His little girl must be there for sure, laying at the mercy of a spirit of hatred and thirst for her life. He brandished his loyal red edge and advanced valiantly.
.oOo.
Unreal shimmers lit the stone vault. Caranlain set his firebrand on a door-flare, but men's light is no avail in the dead's kingdom. A skeleton, wrapped in gold chains, seemed to be waiting for him from the depth of time, sat on his stone throne. A red flame burned at the bottom of his hollow orbits. The man stopped, fascinated by the hypnotic sparkling of the malevolent will.
Grey foggy arms brushed and wrapped him like wet algae in an icy stream, striking him with stupor. Fleeting and macabre images assailed his mind – a childish hair, disheveled by the wind, revealed a fleshless face, eaten away by the gangrene. He firmly pushed this corruption back, but another scene sprang to his mind – his daughter paralyzed under the impure embrace of an obscene corpse.
This time fury overwhelmed him. His cleaver beat down on the skeleton with great strength. As he frenzied and the golden-helmed skull threw its last anger look, before being smashed by the red edge, Caranlain felt his limbs abandon him. The torch light flickered and hope died in his heart as he stumbled on the cold paving stones.
.oOo.
Caranlain awoke to the sound of a little treacherous tune, sour as a coward's threat and insidious as a contagious disease. He found that he was hampered on a high stone bench. He tried to struggle, but his limbs were paralyzed. The odious tune gradually gained strength and confidence, forcefully chanting the hateful vanity of its abject repetitions, fed by the fear and helplessness of the sacrificed.
Then he saw it. A long twisted creature was standing at his benchside, bitterly withered and mad with desire to annihilate this life intended to run freely in the sun. A short and pale blade in hand, the hideous corpse, covered with scales and eaten by decay, chanted its litany of killing, attentive to the fear of its victim. Caranlain's terror was boundless – then the former executioner fully understood the ultimate desperate fury of the doomed. When the infamous casting reached its acute and powerful pitch, the hysterical ghoul, with flaming orbits, was brandishing its pale dagger above the the unfortunate's heart.
A word snapped like a death sentence. But the voice seemed like a beautiful starry night:
- "Down!"
The awful creature retreated, cowering on itself and hissing like an old cat. Two figures, inhabited by a soft diaphanous light, entered the barrow. The largest, bearing a majestic authority, came casting irresistible injunctions to the ghoul, who writhed belching up in the dust and returned to its sarcophagus. The slenderer, graceful and considerate, unfastened the unfortunate Caranlain and calmed him with a kiss on the forehead:
- "Come on Dad, you should not linger here at night! It's dangerous, you know! "
.oOo.
The former executioner had been obediently led back by his youngest, to his bloody and still family hospices. After a bowl of hot soup, and in the light of day, he had recovered his spirits:
- "But who is this young man, Firniel? What is his father's job? »
As you can see, parents are all the same everywhere!
- "His father died long ago. He was the head of a powerful family!
- But then he does nothing of a living, he is a nobleman?
- Yes, he is a noble man, in every sense of the word. And he is not idle: he cares about containing evil spirits, like you, Dad! But it's true he… sleeps all day long.
- Why did he not come home along with us?
- He cannot, he's... allergic to sun. And all these sigils everywhere, these give him a headache!
- But what do you do all night long, walking by the Downs?
- I've told you, Dad, this is where he lives! »
Caranlain did not know there was a noble mansion in the Downs.
- "You've already gone to his home?
- ... Yes, Dad... "
The daddy considered the short answer and the anxious look of his daughter. While understanding, he felt older, all of a sudden. He sighed deeply:
- "It will be very hard for your mother..."
The girl smiled. Indeed her father still had some menial details to overcome…
.oOo.
Since that time, the hospices of the red edge have been living to the rhythm of rather peculiar domestic arrangements.
Firniel divided her time between her father's refuge and her husband's barrow. During the moonless weeks, she left the living world to abide underground in the company of Lord Eldanar. This last descendant of a noble family of former Arnor, swore by Mandos, a long time ago, not to leave Middle Earth before experiencing true love...
This tiny twist to the conservative convenances of En Eredoriath had some advantages. The fight against evil spirits that plague the graves, was very effective. The merchants were able to resume shuttle between Bree and Thalion, the road was much safer since Firniel found this exquisite ally.
Obviously, there were also a few minor drawbacks...
Every month, the master of the hospices of the red edge had to bring his son-in-law, what kept him in good shape. We all know that love is blind, but you would certainly not want your beloved daughter to live with a husband in advanced state of decay?
As a matter of fact, lord Eldanar, the step-son, needed two good pints of fresh blood every new moon in his barrow.
The guests of the bloody hospices did not all get back on the greenway in the morning... But rest assured, the former executioner always chose, for the needs of his step-son, a hardened criminal or questionable character, whose disappearance would bother no-one...4
.oOo.
NOTES
1 Sindarin caran, red and lain, edge.
2 The Hirdor (hereditary domain) of En eredoriath encompassed Tyrn Hyarmen (the South Downs), and Tyrn Gorthad (the Barrow-Downs).
3 These are signs, seals, that bear thaumaturgic powers, affixed to repel spirits and ghosts.
4 This short novel was inspired by the film « l'auberge rouge » and the goddess Persephone.