We All Follow Drums - by Viv

"Mistress Addie? I’ve grim news from the fighting at Umbar, and I’m sorry to bring it,” said Thorongil, slipping just inside the flap to her tent. He paused a beat before lowering the hammer: “Your husband Beledin is among the dead.”

It took his eyes a while to adjust to the dimness inside, but when they did, he saw Addie bent over her washing, calmly, like she hadn’t even heard him. Sleeves rolled up past her elbows, her worn hands worked steady in the dirty water. One shoulder slumped a bit at his words, but it could have been her hard stroke on the soap cake.

“Did you hear me, ma’am?” Thorongil nudged, keeping his voice gentle but casting it just a little louder. This was not his favorite part of warring: telling the fresh widows that their men were gone. His leather brigandine had soaked in so many tears he reckoned he could scrape it for salt. But such duties were part of command, and Thorongil accepted them solemnly. If ever he was going to reclaim his true name and see the sword of his fathers reforged, he had to learn the good with the bad: not just the elegance of swordplay but the gut-gnawing tedious horrible things, too. Like telling young Addie that she was today a widow thrice over.

He knew this woman; she’d been in the camp as long as he had. Born a soldier’s daughter, she’d followed the drum out of Dol Amroth as a Swan Knight’s bride when she was just a lass of fifteen. That knight had given her one babe, which they lost crossing the River Harnen. And when her husband had followed that child into the ground at the Battle of Dushan, Addie’d married his commander, a man of Gondor easily thrice her age but singularly devoted, ere Winter took him three skirmishes into their bliss. Beledin had been her third husband, this one for all of four summers, a lifetime for a soldier. She’d born him three babes on the march; one lived still, a little boy. Thorongil spied him sleeping on a pallet in the corner, one fist jammed into his mouth, already inured to a life of war.

Thorongil wondered why Addie didn’t just go back to Dol Amroth. What made a girl of good family work herself to calluses and live in mud, burying babies and husbands as regular as new seasons? But then he reckoned that he wasn’t the only soul with secret reasons.

“I heard you,” said Addie, drawing the linen shirt from the water and twisting it hard in her fists. When she’d squeezed every drop from the cloth, she laid it out flat on a boulder, careful that the cuffs didn’t turn in on themselves as they dried. Thorongil noted the skilled embroidery along the collar, picked out in purple thread. He wondered whom she’d made it for.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Thorongil repeated, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He longed to escape back out to the camp, to leave her makeshift tent and save himself the weight of her tears. But he sensed she still had something to say, and hearing it was his responsibility. He expected her to ask what most women did: how had he died? Had he suffered much, ere the end? Could she remain on the march, or did this news mean that she was no longer welcome among the soldiers of Gondor? But Addie asked none of these things. Instead her silence stretched until Thorongil felt distinctly discomfited.

“Have you a wife, Captain?” Addie asked eventually in her cool Dol Amroth accent, one finger still against a damp cuff. She hadn’t turned to him yet, and he couldn’t see her face.

Thorongil thought about his nightingale, the vision that sang him to sleep each night of this exile, the memory that kept him living when all other hope failed. He’d wrapped himself so deep in the fantasy of her, in the want of her, that he could not hang so plain a word on her as “wife.” Queen, yes. Goddess even, perhaps. But not wife.

“No,” he replied. It crossed his mind that Addie might be propositioning him. War widows had done it before, trying to tie themselves to the first available soldier after their husbands died, to avoid having their rations cut off, even for a day.

Addie left off fingering the shirt and turned to him then. Her saw her eyes dry of tears, her weathered face solemn.

“Maybe that is best,” she told him.

Thorongil found himself, oddly, without words. In the corner of his mind, his vision of Arwen glowed brighter than all the stars in the firmament, but he knew it for a vision, never a reality. If he went to her, let her love him as he already loved her, would a foot soldier one day bring her such news as he had brought today and would again when he left this tent? He could not see that fate for her. Would not see it.

“You tell me that my Beledin is dead,” Addie went on. “Yet I heard the bugle call this morn: we had victory in Umbar. Victory. Word is that our forces will repair to Pelargir and thence to Minas Tirith, for a celebration.” She snorted delicately. “But how many others died in fighting this fortnight, Captain? Even in victory, our spoils are but death.”

“You speak as if all were lost, but I know ‘tis your grief I hear. Please, do not despair,” Thorongil managed.

Her eyebrows swooped down like twin gulls over her nose.

“I should persist, then? Continue to follow the drums? Tend the wounded, mend their clothes and their hearts and their hope? For how long?” She gestured to her son, sleeping now fitfully. “Until he too dies on a sword?” Her voice broke, and she swiped the back of her wrist against the sudden surge of tears. Anger, Thorongil knew, was just another side of grief. He had seen both far more than he wished, and he knew that Mistress Addie needed a moment of weakness. They all did, from time to time, even the strongest of them. Thorongil reached out an arm, and as many before her had done, she accepted what comfort he could offer. She set her forehead against his breast and wept quietly. He let her, and he would keep those tears secret.

“You must persist until we win, Mistress Addie. And we will,” he answered gently, but he felt the lie of his words. She was right: fighting was gaining them nothing. Even Thorongil, blessed with a touch of his mother’s foresight, could not envision a victory that would mean the end of fighting. But surely such a fate was possible. It had to be! Just as he had implored this woman, he could not allow himself to abandon hope.

Again he thought of Arwen. He thought of her brothers and the Dunedain, skirmishing endlessly with the shadow but always losing ground. Counter-offensive would not win them this war, he realized. He needed more information, more wisdom. A slow notion suffused his mind even as Addie’s tears soaked his brigandine anew, and there in a stark tent a new path emerged for Thorongil, for Aragorn, for Estel.

oOoOo

Next morning, Thorongil officiated at the wedding of Addie to a foot soldier from Andrast. The groom wore a clean linen shirt with purple embroidery at the collar; the bride carried wilting flowers bought off the sutler but most likely stolen from the sacked gardens in Umbar. After the lines were read and the union sealed, Thorongil kissed Addie on either cheek but stilled when she touched his shoulder lightly.

“We will follow the drums on to Pelargir, but we won’t go on to Minas Tirith for the victory parades,” she said in a voice seers would envy. “For we have no victory.”

“No,” Thorongil said. “But veterans like us needn’t seek our victory just in war. We must find other paths out of the shadow. Be at peace, Addie.”

oOoOo

“But when they came back to Pelargir, to men’s grief and wonder, [Thorongil] would not return to Minas Tirith, where great honour awaited him. He sent a message of farewell to Ecthelion, saying: ‘Other tasks now call me, lord, and much time and many perils must pass, ere I come again to Gondor, if that be my fate...’

“… and then in the hour of victory he passed out of the knowledge of Men of the West, and went alone far into the East and deep into the South, exploring the hearts of Men, both evil and good, and uncovering the plots and devices of the servants of Sauron.”

--Appendix A, LoTR.

Return to October, 2008 Submissions list