Isildur rides in the carriage with Giminzil and finds that he is wounded more severely than he originally thought.
ISILDUR let out a sigh of relief once he stepped into the carriage. Nothing had gone the way he had planned, but he was still alive, and the guards did not seem to guess at his identity which was a relief.
But he was leaving without the fruit. And he had risked a lot for it.
He could already imagine what his grandfather or father would say. They did not believe in taking action, any action that was remotely against the king. He could imagine the lectures. But worse, what would Abrazan say?
Isildur was supposed to wait for him and not do anything 'rash.' But he had not been rash. Had he waited for Abrazan to arrive at Armenelos, a week and half later, it was possible that either the king or Sauron would have returned to the palace. Their presence would have made it that much harder to accomplish what he intended.
He knew changing their plan at the last minute could backfire, but circumstances changed when the king and Sauron left a week early.
But to leave the palace without getting what he came for… if only he wasn't wounded. He had already asked Daira to risk too much, and he could not ask the young lady.
Isildur glanced at the woman through the veil. He had solemnly promised Abrazan that he would not involve his sister.
Damn it all.
Still, if Sauron kept the fruits of the tree, there was a chance. He had to believe that there would be another chance when he was well enough to try again.
Amdir. Isildur reminded himself. Look up. Think positively. He breathed in.
Estel. Trust. He will trust that things will work out. He let out a long breath.
The young woman sitting across from him looked up. She tried not to show it, but he could see the corners of her lips quiver ever so slightly upward.
Her obvious amusement made him remember what the three women had done. He had tried to protest, but he had been too weak to fight them.
Dammit. Anarion will never let me forget this if he ever finds out about this. Dear Eru!
"You can take off your veil now." The girl tossed her head which was tightly wrapped in silk fabric.
He missed the sight of her beautiful hair, but it was apparent that she did not share his sentiment.
"Who knew her great size would come in so handy?" With obvious laughter in her voice, the young woman looked at him as if he should agree.
Isildur tried to think how old she was. The last time he found her surrounded by the angry mob, she was twenty-five, hardly more than a girl.
But now, the past six years had filled her up in all the right places. Isildur marveled at what six years can do for a woman. Besides her obvious physical changes, the young woman had turned out very different from the scared young girl he found among the angry group of ignorant people.
The past few hours had been trying even for him, and he had faced battlefields and stormy seas.
This young woman would have known nothing but peace and affluent life. Yet, she had handled what happened last night with calm and poise he had not expected to see in a young lady of a noble family. Most of them he had met were too soft, too proud, or too needy. Anarion's wife was an exception. Probably why his brother married so early.
Isildur threw another glance at the young woman. He had not expected to see her again and had been completely surprised to find her on the secret balcony.
He had planned it carefully. He was supposed to use the slight opening during the change of the guards, then climb back down the cliff. If something went wrong and he could not escape that way, he was to hide out in the secret chamber until the commotion died out.
Just then, he remembered he left Daira's rope at the sealed chamber. It shouldn't matter. He couldn't imagine the queen making an issue of it even if she found it if she ever went there.
Isildur had been at the sealed chamber only once as a child with the former Queen Inzilbeth. It was a long time ago now. He and his younger brother Anarion had accompanied his grandfather to the King's House. While playing hide and seek with Anarion, he had run into the Queen Inzilbeth emerging from behind a large portrait. She had shown him the sealed chamber, saying it was the best place to watch the White Tree. He had promised her to keep it a secret. Isildur had not known that there was another person who knew about the room other than their current queen.
Sudden pain stabbed through his wound, and Isildur clenched his back teeth to prevent a hiss. There was something wrong with his injury. He had been stabbed many times on the battlegrounds of the Great Lands. But this one felt different.
"I don't think anyone suspected. Don't you think that is a good thing?" the young woman smiled.
"We are not even out of the palace yet, lady. It is too early to celebrate."
But, more than successfully leaving the palace, Isildur worried whether the girl's nurse could do what he had asked of her. That woman was very old and very big.
"Will your nurse be able to slip out without the notice of the guards?" Isildur asked.
He needed someone to pick up the palantir that he had hidden just outside the palace walls. He had taken two of the smallest palantiri, the seeing stones, without his grandfather's knowledge.
Isildur had known that he was taking a lot of risks. He had not told his family where he was going or what he planned. He had left one of the two seeing stones with Abrazan. In the event things went wrong, he needed to communicate with his friend and mentor.
If anyone could get him out of trouble, Abrazan would. He always did. And the stone could not fall into someone else's hands, especially not Sauron. Even the thought of that possibility chilled him.
"Zoreth is an old dragon," the young lady said. "She knows more about the palace and the people in it better than anyone I know. She will find that thing for you and do what you asked of her. At least, she has never failed me."
"You have a lot of confidence in that old woman."
"She is old, and she is slow, but she is nimble of mind. She will not fail you."
The girl seemed convinced, although he wasn't so sure. He winced when a sharp pain radiated through his injured side.
"How is your injury?" The girl leaned forward. Young as she was, the lady didn't miss much.
"It's bearable."
It was then that the carriage slowed, then stopped.
Both of them looked out the window. They were at the palace gate. A guard was talking to an elderly nobleman who Isildur knew to be Abrazan's father.
"Do you know who I am?" the nobleman grumbled.
"I apologize to your lordship," the guard said. "But I was told to check every carriage that passes through the gate. There was an intruder last night."
"Yes, I have heard of it, lieutenant," the elderly man stared down at the young guard. "But you know who I am, don't you? And this is my carriage with my daughter."
"If you do not allow us to search the carriage, my lord, then I have to report it to Lord Zigur when he returns" Someone walked over. He was dressed in the red and black captain's uniform Isildur knew to belong to Sauron's guards.
Isildur cursed under his breath as he moved away from the window. He had hoped that they could leave the palace easily because he was in a carriage that belonged to the Lord of Mittalmar who ruled over the city of Armenelos. But these days, even the Lords of the Sceptre bowed down to Sauron.
"Fine! You may do what you must, but it is only my daughter and her nurse."
Sauron's captain gestured to the lieutenant of the palace gate.
"Take off your veil," the girl whispered to Isildur when the guard approached the carriage. "We don't usually wear a veil inside the carriage."
Isildur took off the veil and arranged the deep blue velvet dress with white laces on the sleeves and the neckline. The girl and her nurse had chosen the most frivolous of the nurse's dresses to put on him. And that wasn't the only thing.
The young guard apologized before glancing at his dress and face. Isildur tensed. Despite his fervent refusal, the three women wrestled him to shave his face of the beard and the mustache, then applied thick paste all over his face, painting his lips, eyes, and brows. He was too weak and in too much pain to fight them. When the women gave him a mirror to check himself, he could not recognize himself. Still, the paste made it obvious that his face was painted. Would not the guard see through all this muck?
Just act normal, stupid. Berating himself, Isildur forced a smile at the guard, feeling the heaviness of his painted lips. The young guard blushed as he apologized again.
The carriage passed through the gate, and Isildur sat back against the cushion with a sigh.
"Are you not glad, lord, that Zoreth insisted on shaving you and putting make-up on your face now? It is the most fashionable thing among women these days."
Isildur could not help the growl that escaped his lips. He took off the gloves and wiped off the red lip stain with the back of his hand.
"Wait. You shouldn't erase anything until we are completely out of view of the city. We never know, you know." The girl's eyes sparkled as her lips trembled upward.
"You are having fun at my expense, aren't you?"
The girl shrugged her shoulders. "I do not know what you mean." She looked up at him with an innocent expression, as if she could fool him. He turned away.
They rode in silence until they were passing the temple. Up close, the black marble building was colossal. As the carriage rode past the building, leaving Armenelos, Isildur craned his neck far back to look up at the silver dome.
"It is so beautiful," the girl murmured when the sunlight ignited the silver dome into a blaze of white light.
"Do not let the outside beauty blind you to the darkness it holds. You see the shadows it casts over the King's House and the entire city?"
The girl scoffed. "The King's House sits on the west side, so it is normal for the building to cast a shadow. That is to be expected. I am talking of the architecture, the amount of ebony, marbles, gems and skill that were used to build it. It is the epitome of our people's skill."
"Wealth and power combined can mesmerize, but it cannot hide the corruption that lies underneath. But then, when the king discards his own morals and works with the lieutenant of the Darkness to embrace the lies, it is hard to expect the people to see beyond that."
"Do not speak ill of the king." The young woman frowned. "And you are maligning his chief adviser. Lord Zigur has done nothing but assists the king to bring wealth and prosperity to our great nation."
Isildur tamped down the sudden heat in his stomach. He was aware of how the King and Sauron worked to influence the minds of the people, especially the youth of the nobles. The children of the nobles were taught from an early age to spread the lies formed by the King's Men to further the king's agenda.
"If I speak ill of the king, it is because instead of leading our great nation, he is destroying it."
"The king has brought us wealth and peace. You do not hear of the many conflicts I heard so much of during the reign of our previous monarch, do you? And we are greater than we have ever been. We are bringing knowledge and wisdom to those savages in the outer world while we increase wealth. Everyone is wealthy now. We have so much more now than we ever had. But then you rebels do not care about that."
Isildur smiled wryly. "'Rebels'? Is that what they call us these days?"
"I thought that is what they called your kind always."
"'My kind'? What kind is that?"
The girl shrugged. "The kind who hates and opposes the King and Lord Zigur."
"Is that really your words or are you just repeating what they have been feeding you?"
"My words are my own. Can you deny that is what the rebels do?" the young woman raised her chin and stared back at Isildur as if to challenge him. "Rebels have been criticizing the king for years now. They hate everything he does."
"Let me make this clear, lady. We do not hate the king. And it is not us who oppose the king; it is the king who opposes us. We are not the ones who changed, the king and his men did. We do not criticize because we hate. We criticize because we love this land, and it grieves us to see it fall lower every day."
"How are we falling lower? Daira told me how it is like in the Great Lands. They live in huts and caves with hardly enough food. But everything is plentiful here. She is amazed by the things we can do and build here. I mean, look at that temple. No one in the world can build something like that except us."
"Have you been there?" Isildur asked.
"In the ancient land?" the young woman shook her head.
"I have. And I have met the Elves who still live there. I have been at the king's campaign and seen what we do to those less fortunate in the name of 'saving them' from savagery and ignorance. Long ago, we did share our knowledge with them as the Elves did with us. But we are no longer the teachers and liberators the King claims. Now, instead of sharing, we take. We suppress and lord over our ancient kin. Ask your brother. I had been a lieutenant under him. And if you dare to know the truth, ask your maid. Do you really believe these people gave up their freedom and rights willingly to come all the way across the ocean to be slaves to our people?"
The girl frowned.
Isildur looked out the window. The lies Sauron spread, aided by the king and his men, were sown deep into the people. And when the lies helped justify what they want, it was hard to persuade the people away from them.
They had left Armenelos and were traveling at an easy pace through a wide stone-covered road. On each side of the road, rolling green pastures spread out wide dotted here and there with groups of sheep. And amongst them stood tall statutes and gilded buildings.
"You are right. We have magnificent buildings and wealth and riches so that people feast every day. But have you seen at what cost?" Isildur asked. "The magnificent buildings that you speak of comprise tombs and monuments to those who are no longer with us. We no longer build libraries and schools to educate, to pursue knowledge. All the beautiful buildings and bridges we had built are crumbling, overtaken by the glitz of memorials of the rich and the powerful. Our history is buried because the Elven tongue with which most of our history is written is no longer taught to our people. Instead, what little history that is known, all the wisdom the Elves had given us, are either twisted or hidden."
"But Elves do not care about us. If they did, wouldn't they share their knowledge of immortality with us?"
"And what makes you think that?"
"Why would our king lie to us?"
A fire ignited in Isildur's heart. He sat forward, then grimaced as his head swarmed. The inside of the carriage swerved, making his stomach turn. Isildur took in a quick breath to calm his head which pounded like the war drums.
"Let me ask you this, lady." He steadied his breath. "I know that the king and his adviser claim that the White Tree is a symbol of Elven dominance and treachery. Is that what you believe, too?"
That was what everyone was told to believe; what everybody around him other than the Faithful believed. If this young woman believed that, too, then it was useless to try to convince her otherwise. The fervent followers of the king refused to listen to reason.
"I… I don't know." She blushed.
Briefly, he thought she looked like the pale white flowers he found many years ago at the summit of Meneltarma. In that moment, his heart fluttered, a feeling most strange to him.
Isildur leaned back in his seat. "At least, you admit to the possibility that all that you heard may not be the truth. It is more than I get from others. Too many of our people are blind and deaf to the truth these days. Some even prefer willingly to ignore the truth because the lies are what they wish to believe."
"But if what you say is true, then there would have been some members of the Council of Sceptre who would have noticed. They are there as the king's advisers, as the check and balance to the king. But you do not hear any of them oppose the King. At the least, if not against the king, shouldn't there be one or two who would speak against Lord Zigur?"
"How? The king dismisses anyone who disagrees with him. He and Zigur discredit anyone who speaks against them. Either you are with the king or you are labeled traitors and rebels, as we have been."
The girl looked unconvinced. It was unfortunate, but Isildur did not expect much. Well, maybe he did. She is, after all, Abrazan's sister.
Just then, the carriage shook and the sudden movement threw the girl onto him. The pain that had radiated from his injury seared, and Isildur hissed too late to bite down the groan that escaped him.
"I'm sorry. Let me see," the girl pulled open Isildur's top before he could stop her.
They had wrapped pillows around his trim waist to fill the dress which was meant for a much wider woman. The side of the pillow that was laid against his bandage was soaked, the redness of the blood vivid against the whiteness of the linen binding.
"Aren't the bleeding supposed to stop?" the girl's face turned pale.
"I think the dagger had something on it." Even as he said so, Isildur wished he was wrong. But the pain was intense. His head swam again, and he swallowed down nausea. Something was definitely wrong.
The carriage slowed just then.
"Why are we slowing?" Isildur tensed. He tried to sit up, but his spine did not feel like his own. It was as if strength was leaving him like water in a cracked urn. Cold sweat pricked his backside.
"We usually stop here before getting to Center Tavern to change horses. My father owns a hunting lodge beyond that hill. But I don't think we should stop. You need to see a healer." She rapped at the top of the carriage. "Pretend to sleep," she said, and the young woman got off the carriage once it stopped before Isildur could stop her.
Isildur fell back onto the cushion. Even if he wanted, he didn't think he could move much. His body felt heavy, and he was so sleepy.
He closed his eyes and felt the wheels under him move. Isildur looked up and saw the lady's concerned face hover above his. She was saying something, but he couldn't hear clearly.
He looked into her eyes, a gentle gray speckled with silver. Such beautiful eyes, he thought. If only his plan had been a success and he had the fruit of Nimloth with him, he wouldn't have minded the ride or even the pain.
Isildur closed his eyes as the darkness swallowed him.
Palantir (plural, palantiri)-seeing stones. Elves gave Amandil, Isildur's grandfather and the 18th Lord of Andunie, seven seeing stones to comfort the Faithful when they were no longer welcome in Numenor. These marvelous orbs allowed the owners to communicate with each other over long distances or to see things that are happening in images (if you are powerful enough). Elendil took them to Middle Earth when Numenor was lost.
Meneltarma-tallest mountain in the center of the Island of Numenor. It was a holy place dedicated to Eru(God). Even Sauron did not dare to go there even at the height of his power. During Ar-Pharazon's reign, he forbid anyone from going up the mountain. (So, Isildur would have been mere youth when he had gone up there for the last time)