A/N: Another cloudy fragment of a story that seems to be a crossover between my Ethics class and CSI. Please tell me what you think!
Title: The Judge
Rating: T
Characters: Lothíriel, Imrahil, OCs
Summary: Lothíriel oversees a murder investigation in Dol Amroth and must decide between the truth and a lie.
The Judge
"Tell me then, what is the pious and the impious, do you say?"
- Socrates, Euthyphro
Mud squelched under her boots and Lothíriel nearly slipped for the third time; last night had been a hard rain and the dirt road that led through the town had turned to mire, threatening to pull anyone who dared lay foot upon its surface into a muddy brown grave.
"All right there, m'lady?"
"Yes," she said curtly. The clouds on the horizon were dour, hinting that last night's storm might not have been the last. The bright blinding sunlight had turned to rain and fog and sometimes she was hard put to remember that all was well in the world once more.
"Right over here," said the guard. He was a young man, cheerfully irreverent in all that he did, but now he sobered, his face set in grim lines. "It's not pretty. M'lady."
"No, I don't suppose so."
It was a simple house like any other she might have seen in the village, made of crudely hewn oak and plastered with mud to weatherproof it. Unlike its neighbors, it seemed strangely forlorn without the customary curl of smoke from its chimney, and she thought it would be very cold inside.
"Your Highness?"
"A moment."
She could have waited for her father, she supposed, as everyone had expected, or better one of her brothers, but when she had heard the news two villagers dead in their home she had called for her boots and informed the startled page that she would go. For a moment she wavered.
Then she went inside.
No survivor of the War could emerge unscathed, and she recognized the stench immediately. It was the sort of memory she would never forget as long as she lived, and no matter how old she grew, she knew she would always remember her first sight of death, the first fresh bodies, the first decaying corpses, the first blood-stained fields. For a moment she stood on the Pelennor once more, peering across the remains of her broken country, wondering if any whom she loved lay strewn like dolls across the ruined fields.
She recognized the grey-faced man who sat hunched in the corner as the mayor of the village, and the other taller man as the captain; he came to bow to her, regarding her with some confusion, and she gestured for him to speak.
"Woman stabbed a dozen or so times, husband stabbed in the heart. Bled out pretty quickly."
"I see. Did any of the neighbors see anything?"
"Nothing. Best I can see, the husband went mad and killed his wife and then himself. Poor bi- ,"
She cut him off. "Why did he kill her?"
He looked only a trifle embarrassed at confessing that he had no idea. He was a smart man, she thought, and had had the charge of overseeing the meager band of soldiers left to guard Dol Amroth during the war. He had never seen battle except for a few distant glimpses of the Corsairs.
The house was small and crude; she saw remnants of a homely life, a hard one, a life so unlike her own as to make her ashamed. They had one narrow bed and a hearth and a chest of some sort. She went to it and saw neatly folded calico dresses and worn trousers, a patched apron. In the corner was a three-legged stool.
"What time were they found?" she asked.
"Yesterday afternoon."
"There are no dishes anywhere," she said. "They were killed during the night."
"And their nightclothes," said the solder, and she was briefly discomfited.
"Of course."
She went outside and pressed a hand to her whirling, aching head. The smell was cloying, clinging, and she was certain that when she returned, even if she scrubbed every inch of skin raw, that she would still smell the stench of death. It clung to every particle of her being, to her memory, to her soul.
"Milady?"
Another of the village women offered her a dipper and gratefully she drank the water inside. It tasted of mud but it cleared the bile from her mouth.
"Thank you. The bodies ," she said, and found she could not finish.
"Faronhim," said the woman. "Faronhim and Gaelchol,"
"Yes," she said. She had forgotten that they had names. "Thank you. Would you tell me about them?"
The woman twisted her apron in her hands. She was older than Lothíriel, but barely, and if she was distressed she kept her face remarkably composed.
"Married just three months ago," she said. "Gaelchol thought she was with child."
She studied the mud that encrusted her soles. "I see."
"Faronhim came home not two weeks ago," said the woman, and at this her composure slipped. "Came back, only to be slaughtered?"
"I am sorry," Lothíriel said, but the words were inadequate, and in any event, she could not offer anything else. She had not known these people and their names were ill-suited to her tongue. They had a false ring of fiction, for they would only be bodies in her mind.
A thought hovered on the edge of her mind.
"What was he like, when he came home?"
"Oh," said the woman. "Well ,"
She thought of the men she had known and the terrors that wracked her own nights.
"He was different," she said finally, flatly.
.
The Prince of Dol Amroth returned a week later to much fanfare; the sun had broken through the clouds, having decided to submit to the customary weather pattern of June, but all the same his retinue was liberally splattered in mud. She watched, fingers worrying at her skirts, as he dismounted and granted her a tired smile.
"All is well?" he said.
"I think so," she answered.
Later that night, once he had washed the grime of the journey from Minas Tirith away and poured himself a generous portion of wine, and she lit the lamps and settled down with him over the accounts. As ever, her writing was meticulous and he had nothing but praise that made her glow.
"There is one matter more," she said, and she explained of the murder of Faronhim and Gaelchol.
"What have you done, then?"
She looked away. "I said…"
"Yes?"
"I told the truth, that I thought Faronhim had killed his wife and then killed himself when he saw what he had done."
Her father exhaled. "Recently returned home, you said?"
"Yes. His brother said that he slept with a knife under his pillow because he feared the enemies would return, that nightmares haunted his sleep. One of the neighbors told the captain that often she had bruises on her throat, and her mother said that he had hurt her often in the throes of a dream."
Imrahil drank deeply from his wine and when he set it aside, she saw the furrows slashed across his face, new lines cut by the turmoil of the war. "And so he is to remembered as a murderer?"
It was mild: a question, not a condemnation, and so she sought to explain.
"I thought that at first, I should lie, that someone else had killed them."
"He served Gondor bravely."
"Yes," she said, hesitating, "and I do not wish to set aside his sacrifice."
He was silent, the firelight flickering in eerie shadows across his face.
"But," she said, "who are we to decide justice? If I were to decide what happened, if I could change the truth, then what sort of world do we inhabit?"
He gestured for her to continue.
"What sort of a world would it be," she said, "if we could, arbitrarily, lie? Where is the line? It seems to me it would be one etched in sand, because if I change this man's life, then how am I to stop? Justice may be ugly, but it is just all the same."
When her father finally spoke, it was gently. "And still, this man is to be labeled a murderer."
"Yes," she said, shoulders slumping. "I wish it were not so."
.
The graves were dug in the soft, sinking mud, and she watched with tearless indecision, knowing she had done the right, if there was such a thing as justice.
"There is one thing more I have learned," she said to her father. "This war will never be over, not if we live a thousand years."
A/N: Again, reviews make my day. Please let me know what you thought!
Note: The opening quote is taken from Plato's writings, but the character who spoke them was Socrates, and so I have attributed the thought to Socrates rather than Plato.