It was mid February when Éowyn went with Faramir to Minas Tirith. As had become customary, she stayed in his Uncle and Aunt's town house. Annoyingly, his father decided that Faramir should stay in the Steward's palace.
The visit was a short one. Faramir had expected to be sent back to Henneth Annûn post haste, but instead his father instructed him to go to the garrison on the western side of Anduin, in the ruins of Osgiliath. Denethor had received intelligence that troops were massing once more on the eastern shore, a mixture of orcs, Haradrim and Easterlings. Once again, Faramir found himself wondering with some disquiet what the source of his father's intelligence was. He himself knew the eastern shore, the secret paths and hideouts of Ithilien, like the lines on his own hand. Yet neither he nor his scouts had picked up any obvious signs of troop movements. He could not help but question, therefore, what it was that made his father so certain of an impending attack.
He tried to enquire, but his questions were dismissed peremptorily. On the surface, his father seemed to hold his customary annoyance towards his younger son, seasoned with more than a dash of disdain. But Faramir sensed that on this occasion, the annoyance was in part a theatrical performance designed to deflect his attention from an underlying uneasiness on his father's part. There was definitely something his father was not telling him about the source of his intelligence. Whether this was because there was something suspect about its origins, and he did not care to open it to critical scrutiny, or whether he was worried that Faramir might at some later date be captured and did not want him to reveal the extent to which Denethor had infiltrated the enemy and gather information, he was not sure. But the Steward's evasiveness left Faramir feeling deeply unsettled.
In the dark hours of the night, the inky blackness of the new moon, Faramir woke with a start. Instinctively he reached out for Éowyn, lying beside him, only for his hand to meet an empty space. With a sinking heart and a feeling of empty need, he realised she was at his Uncle's townhouse and he alone in his father's palace. Seized with disquiet he sat up and ran his hand through his hair. The night was deathly silent, and Faramir found himself straining as if to hear some sound just out of earshot.
Then the sound came to him once more, drifting through the window from the north. He was not sure whether he did indeed hear it, or whether his overwrought imagination was playing tricks on him. But it sounded like a faint echo of his brother's horn, the great ox horn bound with silver which Boromir always carried. He had last heard it blowing in challenge as his brother rode out of the gates of the Citadel the previous summer. But his memory was carried back further, to the moment when Boromir sounded the retreat at Osgiliath and the bridge came crashing down behind them as they dived into the water. Then, the horn note had sounded the retreat from evil beyond imagining, and somehow this memory infused the faint echoes in his mind with an immeasurable feeling of foreboding.
Knowing sleep would not come to him again, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up. Reaching for the table, he found a steel and flint, and quickly struck a spark to light the oil lamp which sat beside the bed, then pulled on his clothes. He wrapped his cloak around his body to keep out the damp night air, and made his way swiftly down the passage and up the spiral stair at the far end to the battlements where the Steward's palace abutted one of the inner walls of the Citadel.
By the dull glow of the torch hanging from the wall, he could dimly make out the figure of his father, attended by two of the Tower Guards. He made his way to his father's side.
"I should have known you would hear it too." His father's words were not a question. The tone was less dismissive than usual, though no less bitter. Or was it perhaps fear that Faramir heard? He could not quite tell.
"Yes, the note of Boromir's horn, carried on the night wind from the north."
"An ill omen." Again, the words were not a question.
"I fear so, father." Faramir found he could not continue. Words threatened to burst forth: his instinct was to cry to the heavens. Why, oh why did you not let me ride in his place? The dream came first to me – to me should have fallen the burden of seeing the allotted task to completion. Instead, you chose to oppose the fates, to set another on the path chosen for me, and all has gone awry. But he bit his tongue and remained silent.
"Time will tell," Denethor continued. "It seems I ventured the most precious thing I possessed on an ill-considered stratagem, and now I am to pay a heavy price, the heaviest imaginable." His voice dropped to a quiet murmur, Faramir's presence seemingly forgotten. "Boromir, my son, my first born, my best beloved, would that you were still by my side."
Faramir stood awkwardly for a few moments as his father lapsed into silence and stared into the dark, facing north. Eventually, unable to bear the tension any longer, he gave the slightest of bows and said, "We must pray to the Valar that the horn call summoned allies to his aid and was not the harbinger of desperate tidings. I bid you good night, father." He turned and paced back along the battlement, returning to his cold chamber where he lay in the darkness, staring at a vaulted ceiling he could not see, until at last the dim grey light of dawn began to creep through the windows.
The next day, Faramir and Éowyn rode back across the Pelennor to Osgiliath. As they rode, Faramir told Éowyn of the previous night's strange events. She listened, a serious, intent look on her face, and said little. She too was seized by a feeling that something terrible had happened, a feeling not helped by her memory of her last conversation with Boromir, in which he had asked her to name their first-born son for him. Eventually, running out of words, they rode the rest of the way to the river in silence.
Having checked the situation at the garrison, on the advice of Lieutenant Hatholdir, they headed north up the river bank to an encampment opposite an outcrop on the far shore where the enemy had been sighted in numbers. The camp was set some way back from the riverbank, out of sight among the trees, and being on the west side, Lieutenant Hatholdir's second-in-command had risked tents rather than bivouacs. There they bedded down for the night. Faramir had picked a quiet corner of the camp for their tent, and it was with a sense of enormous relief that he was finally able to wrap his arm round Éowyn's waist and hold her close. But it was a long time before he finally drifted into sleep, and even then his rest was shallow and fitful.
That night was the only night they had to sleep together; thereafter for the next couple of days they found themselves standing alternate watches, Faramir the first watch after sunset, and Éowyn the later watch after moonset. The sense of foreboding grew steadily, but all remained quiet until the third night.
~o~O~o~
Éowyn once again had the second watch, and was rolled up in her cloak, trying to get some sleep as best she could before she went down to the bank of the river to keep a look-out for enemy movements. But sleep would not come. The night was cold, a sharp frost already in the air, and the chill seemed to penetrate even the thick wool around her. She dozed fitfully. Every time she started to drift off, something would disturb her watch – an owl's hoot, the rustle of a badger in the undergrowth, a wildcat or pine marten amid the trees. Eventually, she decided she might as well get up and relieve Faramir earlier than planned. She pulled her arms free of the cocoon she had made with her cloak, and started to parcel it up. She crawled through the flap in the tent.
Out to the west, the sliver of crescent moon hung low in the sky. It must be close to midnight, close to moonset. There was hardly any light to find her way by, and for the most part she made her way along the narrow track by feel, carefully placing her feet so as not to trip over roots or hidden stones. As so often at night, a journey in the daytime would have taken five minutes seemed instead to to stretch out endlessly; she was not sure how much this was due to her hesitant pace, and how much due to the way darkness seemed to stretch out time itself, spinning it into a long, tenuous filament of silver to match the moon. Finally she stepped through last of the thinning trees and onto the path along the river bank. The water flowed, dark and oily looking, sluggish at this point where the stream was wide and deep and slow. All the rage and fury of the rapids and the falls of Rauros had been spent upstream; now the river seemed to have no ire left and was content to flow silently and smoothly to the distant sea.
She rounded a bend and saw him standing upright, still as a statue. To her surprise, he made no movement as she approached, almost as if he had not heard her. It was most unlike him not to be perfectly attuned to his surroundings. When she got within a few paces, she lifted her hands to her mouth and cupped them, and made the low hooting sound that the Rangers used to alert one another to their presence. She had no wish to take him unawares.
Slowly, he turned, and Éowyn froze mid-step. His face was stricken by grief. By the dim light she could just make out silver trails on his cheeks. In that moment, Éowyn too was hit by a wave of sadness. The look on his face pierced her to the heart, brought back every loss she had ever suffered: her father, her mother, her beloved cousin Théodred. Faramir's face seemed lined beyond his years, his eyes sunk with anguish, his expression filled with bleak desolation. Silently, he turned back to face the river.
As if the spell lifted, Éowyn moved again. Slowly, she made her way to his side and reached out to place her hand on his arm.
"He has gone. Gone to the sea, cast adrift in a boat, arrayed in splendour, like the sea kings of Numenor."
"You saw him?"
"Yes, laid out in splendour and majesty, his weapons by his sides, the weapons of his foes piled at his feet."
"But... Rauros... How?"
"I know not. Whether it was his body, brought safely by the Valar, or a vision sent to bear tidings of his passing... Either way he is gone."
Suddenly, Faramir's voice broke, and he turned to Éowyn and buried his face in her shoulder. She held him as he sobbed, body shaking uncontrollably. Éowyn pulled his head tight against her, her own body filled with a tension, an ache at the pain she could feel welling up from him. Time seemed suspended, but gradually Éowyn felt Faramir's body relax in her arms, his breathing slow as the storm passed. Eventually, he loosened his grip and raised his face. He looked down at her, his expression still stricken with grief.
"Oh Éowyn, my love, what shall I do without him? I want to turn back time, make the sun run backwards across the sky. I wish that I had gone in his place. I wish that I had known to ride to his aid before I heard his horn blow. Anything... anything but this." He stepped back from her arms and turned to look out across the inky water. With a sigh, he let his legs fold beneath him and sank onto the grassy edge of the bank.
Éowyn sat down next to him, resting her hand in the small of his back. She felt almost nauseous with the feeling of powerlessness that clenched at her guts. Faramir's pain was agonising to behold, and yet she could do nothing to make it better. She felt that she would willingly have taken it upon herself, if only that were possible. But it was not.
They sat in silence, Éowyn's hand pressed against him, as the sliver of moon passed beneath the horizon, and the stars slowly turned in the night sky. After what she guessed was maybe an hour, maybe two, he began to speak. Over and over he described the boat, Boromir's body, his face at peace in a sleep from which he would never wake, his own proud weapons about him, his enemies' weapons at his feet. Perhaps he needed the constant retelling to make the vision real. Perhaps he hoped that if he retold it enough times, eventually it would end in a different way. Éowyn was not sure.
Interspersed with this tale was the repeated memory of the meeting with his father in which Denethor had peremptorily dismissed Faramir's claim that the quest was his to go on, since the vision had been sent to him, and had instead made the fateful decision to send Boromir. Éowyn could hear the tortured guilt in his voice, as if Faramir thought that somehow there should have been something he could have done to have made his father act rationally. Éowyn remembered the scene all too well, remembered his father's harsh words. Those words had been aimed both to herself, which she could understand if not forgive, and to his younger son, which she would never forgive. She knew that there was nothing Faramir could have done to have altered Denethor's decision. But at the same time she also knew there was nothing she could do now to make Faramir realise that. There was nothing she could do except listen.
A thin line of cold grey had started to light the sky just above the mountains in the distance beyond the far bank of the river when Hatholdir's sergeant arrived to relieve Éowyn of her watch. He seemed surprised to find Faramir still there, and it was clear from the tone of his voice that he suspected them of having been dallying with one another rather than paying attention to the far shore. Éowyn deflected his questions. She could not deny that she had not really paid much attention to her watch duty, though she would have given anything for the reason for her inattention to have been as trivial as the sergeant thought it was.
She led Faramir back to the encampment and guided him into the tent. As the first rays of the fitful winter sun began to creep between the tree tops, the two finally lay down to rest. Éowyn pulled the blankets tight around them, wrapped her arms around Faramir and held him close as he finally sank into an exhausted sleep.
Thank you for all the reviews!
Hello, guest reviewers 1, 2 and 3 (I think there are now 3 separate guest reviewers. Re. contraception, I know what you mean. I think hormonal contraception is (at a rough guess based on the experience of myself and friends) great for about 2/3 of women and seriously awful for the other 1/3 and the medical profession downplays this. Funnily enough I almost wrote a really geeky footnote to the last chapter. Éowyn's use of mare's piss is based on the fact that early forms of oestrogen used in contraceptives were extracted from horse urine (in fact, there is a packet of pills on my bedside table which lists "conjugate equine oestrogen" as one of the key ingredients. But (geeky scientist alert) of course the big challenge is the delivery system. If you drank it neat, the hormones would just get de-natured by your stomach acid. So I'm afraid Éowyn's contraceptive of choice is pure make-believe on my part. (Rue was mentioned by one of Hypocrates' contemporaries as an abortifacient, and raspberry leaf tea is contra-indicated in early pregnancy because it can induce miscarriage, as can salicylic acid, a.k.a. aspirin, extracted from willow-bark – hence my folk remedy).
Oh, and sorry for the long gap between chapters. Summer hols, demanding small children, changing to a new computer at work... all gets in the way.