The Boundaries of Time

The Ephel Dúath, a towering wall of serrated peaks and sheer cliffs of shadow, blotted out sun and stars. Beyond the woods bordering Anduin, the land became desolate: dusty and bleak, blemished by jagged rocks. The earth was barren, of gray dust and cruel black rock. Poisonous fumes spewed up from vents discharging gases searing the lungs and eyes. No cool breezes bringing hope and life blew here. The air was stale, oppressive, and sweltering, for volcanic fumes from Mordor eddied in the Vale. There was no water and the plant life was sparse; spiny cacti, poisonous flowers, and brush with barbs that rent like knives.

Brooding gloom caked the desolate tors, the cragged spurs of Ephel Dúath thrusting down to the broken vale. The summit of the Mountains of Shadow was swathed in cloud and ash and smoke, black as a moonless night. The fumes sickened him; Aragorn trudged through the sharp rocks and twisted brush. Though the very air he breathed scalded his lungs and tears stung his eyes, he persisted slogging across the wasteland. To the past his mind wandered, and he thought this could be no worse than the flight of the Noldor across Helcaraxë or the captivity of Húrin, Beren, and Finrod in the dungeons of Morgoth.

The morose cloud of ash hugging Mordor and Ephel Dúath veiled the Ered Nimrais in an impregnable black and gray haze. How it tempted him to turn away from this desolate place of misery and despair at the ends of the earth and flee to the North or even Gondor! But he held to his way and never turned aside. Knowledge of Middle-earth’s fate should Sauron find the Ring strengthened his resolve. In his veins flowed the blood of great heroes of Beleriand like Dior, Eärendil, Beren, and Túrin, who had pursued the Enemy unceasingly to their deaths. Hardship and pain would not stop him.

Had he traveled straightway, the distance between Minas Morgul and Anduin was not more than a two days’ walk. But in a meandering course he wandered for four days hither and thither through the foothills of the Ephel Dúath, searching for Gollum’s tracks. Then on the fifth day, the ominous shadow of Minas Morgul itself, the city of the Ringwraiths, lanced him like a spear wielded by a stone-giant. Still, Aragorn could not see the city. It lay one day more to the Southeast, concealed by high ridges and cragged defiles.

The sulphuric stench of fumaroles rose to his nostrils and he saw noxious green and gray steam belching from the ground not fifty feet to his right. Covering his nose and mouth with his sleeve, he turned away from the vent, but it was too late and before long dizziness swept over him. He sank down upon the ground, head between his knees, resting his eyes from the twirling mirages. As he rested underneath the shadow of a boulder, he heard rough voices, clanking metal, and hard boots stomping against rock and earth. A large company of orcs. For several breathless minutes, Aragorn waited, listening. They spoke a disfigured version of Westron rather than their own coarse tongues. It must be more than one tribe, then, for languages amongst orcs varied enough that orcs from one region or tribe did not comprehend the tongues of orcs from another.

“You smell somethin’?”

Aragorn hearkened the sound of sniffing and growling.

“Manflesh!”

“’ere? What’s a Man doing ‘ere?”

“Spyin’ of course. Hunt ‘im down, boys!”

In wide, concentric circles they searched, drawing ever closer to Aragorn’s hiding place underneath the basalt boulders. He rued the poison fumes fogging his mind – he had not been as careful as he would otherwise have been and left them a trail to follow. The Orcs would find him. Hope fled his heart. But not in vain would he die! Weak as he was, they had not found him yet; the element of surprise would work in his favor. He unsheathed his sword. The moment the orcs came close enough for their stench to furl his nostrils, he gathered what strength remained and rushed at them, sword brandished high. His swift attack stunned them, and he slew two before they besieged him like a pack of rabid curs. Blades clashed. Aragorn maimed a third orc and turned upon a fourth, breathing labored as the air burned and choked his lungs, battling exhaustion and strain as furiously as he battled his enemies. Alas, he failed on both counts. He felt a sharp blow across the back of his head. There was agony and then there was nothing. Death perhaps bearing him away at last.



* * *



Though none of Ilúvatar’s Younger Children knew of their fate after death, Aragorn imagined it was peaceful, liberated from the sorrows and toils of the word. There should be neither pain nor sweltering heat. There should be neither foul odors nor grating voices. There should be no rough hands clawing at his shoulder, jerking him about, flinging him upon his back and forcing vile-tasting, acidic liquid down his throat, which caused him to sputter and cough and thrash in protestation, and brought consciousness back like a blow to the head. He was not dead after all. The hands pinned him against the ground and depraved Orc voices laughed at his suffering and more liquid was forced into him. In spite of its astringent taste, it brought warmth to his stomach and strength to his mind and body. He knew enough of orcs to recognize the liquid from stories and scrolls; a powerful tonic that could ease many hurts if the taste of it alone did not kill, sometimes used to enliven a prisoner so that information could be tortured out of him. They will cure me to torment me, Aragorn thought, recalling with a shudder tales of those captured and enslaved by Orcs, so I shall not respond to it.

The Orcs shook him violently. “It’s not working,” one said.

“Who’s fault is that, Snegrath? You’re the fool who hit ‘im in the ‘ead.” The owner of the second voice kicked Aragorn in the ribs, and it took all Aragorn’s will to not do more than curl up in pain. Lie still he must, for heavy boots in his ribs would be the least of his agonies should his captors think him closer to life than death.

Spitting vile curses upon Aragorn and upon one another, the Orcs flung him aside and lurched to their main encampment. Greatly relieved to be let alone, he considered his predicament. Sharp rocks bore into his side and hip, but he feared movement of any sort would draw their attention again; better to withstand discomfort and prolong his life. The Orcs had bound his wrists together with rough rope, which chafed painfully at his flesh, but they had not bound his feet. They had also removed all weaponry, but left him his mail corslet and the ring of Barahir. If hording treasure be their mission, why leave him the ring and the mail? He wondered that he was still breathing, for Orcs were not known for mercy or for taking prisoners. A stroke of fortune indeed; the same luck that had brought Barahir to the aid of Finrod Felagund, who was cut off from his people and surrounded by his enemies and would have been slain had Barahir not risked great peril to rescue him. Aragorn shut his eyes and his fingers went to the two emerald-eyed serpents.

“The Eye wants ‘im alive,” the Orc called Snegrath grunted, bringing Aragorn back to the present. “That’s the orders, lads, to bring anything caught wanderin’ these lands to ‘im alive. For questionin’.”

“This one’s already ‘alf dead,” said a new voice. “He won’t be much good for questionin.’”

“And we ain’t had much to eat ‘cept moldy bread since we left Lugbúrz with you rats,” complained a third. “You think the Eye’ll notice if you don’t bring back one prisoner?”

“We ‘ave our orders,” snarled Snegrath, “and intend on keepin’ to ‘em.”

“And we’re ‘ungry! ‘e’s not walkin’ anyway, so we ‘ave to drag him all the way to Lugbúrz? Might as well drag a bloody corpse.”

“Why are you complaining? You ain’t doing the dragging.”

The harsh voices went back and forth for some time. Aragorn guessed that one group of orcs was from Minas Morgul, the other from Barad-dûr, and the Barad-dûr orcs ostensibly had orders from their dark master to not indiscriminately kill Men and Elves found wandering within their borders, while the Minas Morgul orcs had less compunction and saw more value in satiating their appetites with flesh than in appeasing Sauron. Either way, death was inevitable if he did not escape. But orcs were not attentive creatures and a distraction, food or a skirmish amongst their ranks, which was brewing in any event, might provide him with an opportunity for flight.

And so did he shut his eyes and abide his time. For a long while, he was left lying on the borders of the orc encampment, but after some hours Snegrath stomped over to him, spitting, “You’re still ‘alf dead. Well, not much can be done about it now and you’re still comin’ along with us.” The Orc bent down, touching Aragorn’s face with hands ice cold like a dead fish, prodding him with a scythe-like knife, and he grunted, “Well, you ain’t all the way dead yet. You’ll be of some use.” Grunting some words in the cruel language of Mordor Orcs, he grabbed Aragorn’s shoulders and heaved him over onto his back.

Aragorn kicked out, catching the Orc in the groin so he uttered a yelp and fell on top of him. He was heavy and hot, reeking of rotting carrion and alcohol. They struggled in the dust. Grimy Orc nails reaching for his windpipe clawed bleeding furrows in his neck. The Orc stuck the scythe into Aragorn’s breast, but the chain mail foiled it. Its curved tip caught upon the rings. In the Orc’s moment of confusion as he struggled to free the weapon from the mail, Aragorn rolled over on top of him and got his hands around the Orc’s throat. With the strength bequeathed to him by desperation, he held onto the thrashing and moaning Orc until he thrashed no more. Badly short of breath himself, he rolled off his vanquished foe and lay in the dust, panting and coughing up blood. He pulled the scythe free of his mail and cut loose his bound hands with it.

Over three dozen orcs had set up a camp fifty or so yards away, a number Aragorn would be hard pressed to battle single-handedly in the best of health and strength, and in this moment he had neither. Already their scuffle had alerted those in the camp to something going amiss and in seconds, they would set upon him and kill him. He had to flee into the craggy hills at the foot of the Ephel Dúath, a precarious place to hide indeed, but he had grasped at tenuous threads of life, and he had won thus far. Light and hope pierced him, a smiting and transplendent thought that the shadow was no more than a passing thing and the light of Ilúvatar would prevail in the end.

His assortment of weapons had been thrown callously into an immense pile of daggers, swords, knives, and bows the orcs had assembled in their rampaging and pillaging. Though he regretted losing the sword, it was hardly worth losing his life to retrieve. His foe had been heavily armed. From the body Aragorn collected the scythe, a small dagger, a broadsword, and a skin of water.

“Where are they?”

“ ‘ow long does it take to drag a bloody prisoner over ‘ere?”

The grating voices intensified as the orcs advanced. Hastily Aragorn knelt behind a rock and thrust his arsenal into his belt and cloak, and then he vaulted over another boulder and ran to the lee side of another. Enraged curses floated to his ears: the orcs had found their comrade dead and their prisoner gone astray. Before they could commence a search, Aragorn crawled over the rocks, clinging to the basalt so as to leave no track, clambering into the nethermost coombs, the vast crevasses and faults slicing through the Ephel Dúath.

A vista of serrated peaks rearing for the dark sky stretched before him, and not more than two miles to the North, high on its rocky seat at the knees of the Ephel Dúath, the gloomy walls and tower of Minas Morgul guarded the mountains and Cirith Ungol. Aragorn gazed northwards, shading his eyes as he oriented his position, well to the south of anywhere he desired to be. He had feared as much. The orcs had carried him some leagues south, for he had been approaching Minas Morgul from the North, aiming to investigate Cirith Ungol while remaining several miles distant from Minas Morgul itself. Now he had to travel just beneath its villainous battlements.

All was dark about it, the earth and sky, yet it glowed with a light paler than moon and stars. The mere sight of Minas Morgul plunged Aragorn’s spirit into gloom. His ancestors had safeguarded it for a thousand years when it stood proud as Minas Ithil, Tower of the Moon, a gem in the paradise of Ithilien, and the blood of Westernesse infused strength into Men. In these dark days the blood of Númenor was all but exhausted, the Ring found at last, the Enemy’s strength swelling. But Sauron did not have the Ring yet – it was in the possession of a hobbit, a race Gandalf, one of the Wise, had a great deal of faith in -- nor had he yet slain Elendil’s heir.

Below him, Aragorn saw the Orcs crawling about, searching for a track, but he had vanished like a wraith, melting into the shadowy foothills. He hid in a crevasse just wide enough for him to brace his knees against one side and his back against the other, the broadsword drawn in the event he was found, his heart beating a heavy rhythm. Find him they did not, though they searched exhaustively. Perhaps a more patient and exacting search would have led the Orcs to Aragorn’s hiding-place, but Orcs, especially when angered, were impatient creatures and under the best of circumstances they were not exceedingly clever.

As night fell and the Orcs abandoned their search, Aragorn cautiously climbed out of his crevasse, chimnying up the sheer walls and resting upon the crest, concealed from view of any creature below by toothy ridges jutting from the hogback. Minas Morgul glowed a dim and pallid green in the dark. Aragorn gazed at the sky seeking Eärendil, a flare of hope, but no stars pierced the ashen sky. The only visible light being the evil green glow cast by Minas Morgul on the side of a long, tilted valley, a deep gulf of shadow reaching far back into the mountains. Tomorrow Aragorn would waylay festering doubts that Gollum had gone that way. Tonight, he must rest and examine his wounds as best he could, given that he loathed the idea of removing his cloak or mail in this noxious place.

Dried blood encrusted the back of his head and neck. Fresh blood oozed from raw and painful flesh on his wrists and oozed from the four claw-marks in his neck. He tore off two strips from his cloak and wrapped his wrists, and he cleansed the furrows on his neck with spit and a drop of water. Until he reached Ithilien where the flowers were not deadly to the touch and the water not poisonous, and there clean the wounds with fresh water, these makeshift bandages would have to do. Better to wrap the wounds in the soiled cloth than let them be infected by falling ash and dust. Tired from his ordeal, he tried to sleep upon the rock face, a restless sleep tossing and turning, listening fearfully to the night-noises with one ear open.

Thus Aragorn was still exhausted when feeble tendrils of morning sunlight pushed their way through cloud and ash – what would, by some, be called dawn. It was always dark here. Menacing black clouds clung to the tower of Minas Morgul, casting the valley where the city huddled against the Ephel Dúath in shadow, and a faint bloodied light glowed sullenly within the dark clouds and mist covering Mordor beyond the mountain range.

Wounds and fatigue harried him as he trudged over the rocks. Should orcs or other chattel of Sauron attack him now, he felt sure he could not withstand it. Yet his luck did not forsake him. He encountered few living creatures in the crags of Ephel Dúath, not even snakes and lizards. Only crows circled high overhead; spies of Sauron they well might be, but they would not harm him themselves.

By his will alone, he pressed onward. A route he held high above the long valley, climbing wearily over the black volcanic rock, sharp and unforgiving, gashing and scraping himself anew every time he slipped or stumbled. In this way he found himself creeping beneath its battlements, oppressed until he could not will his limbs to move.

As he crouched beneath the southernmost wall, terror keener than any he had ever known in all his long life clutched him. He had come so far; he could not give in now. He crawled along the wall, shoulder pressed against chilled stone, until he reached the gap in the bulwark where the road proceeded through the gate, two hideous stone sentinels, gaping, disfigured demons baring vicious fangs, atop intricately filigreed columns guarding the causeway. The gate itself was a cavernous maw in the northward walls. Cirith Ungol lay two miles down a road crawling deviously up the side of the valley towards the gate, crossing a stream from which steam rose in insalubrious wisps wrapping around the ghostly white bridge. Behind the walls of the city stood the tower gleaming with a ghastly fallow light illuminating nothing. The top tier of the tower rotated, a steady back and forth motion like an unblinking pale eye surveying its realm.

A steep drop-off from the road to a culvert alongside it afforded Aragorn some scanty protection. On his hands and knees, he crept through the culvert lest he be espied by the evil fortifying Minas Morgul, the Nazgûl and other fell things dwelling behind the battlements. His eyes he averted from the hideous tower until he reached the white bridge and the wide flats flanking the stream trickling silently from the city. Luminous flowers speckled the flats, beautiful yet disfigured and corrupted images from a nightmare. They stank of rotting flesh, of death and of decay. Who knew if they were deadly to the touch? If Aragorn did not cross the bridge, he must pass through the flowers and jump the rill. From where he huddled on the bank, a chill colder than death brushed his face -- the deadly touch of foul steam wafting from the rivulet. He must cross the road, and it seemed wiser to cross in the dark instead of upon the pale bridge in full view of the city. Holding his breath, he negotiated the flat, stepping over and around the flowers, hopped across the water and dropped upon his stomach on the other side of the flat. Here he crawled to the road and gazed down its steep and winding descent to Cirith Ungol.

All warmth fled from his body. The steam of Morgulduin’s tributary had brushed him and cast a chill upon him as he had jumped the stream. For several minutes he lay on the stony bank. His keen vision blurred; the rocks and fulsome green tower shimmering in a netherworld of haze.

The only sound in his ears was his anxious breathing in the ghoulish silence. Silently Aragorn crossed the road and began his descent. But he collapsed amongst the rocks and lay still for a time until he perceived shadows slinking about the walls, reason to withdraw further from Minas Morgul and climb behind a pile of jagged boulders fallen from the cliff. There, his eyes failed him and the shadows rending the tors deepened, darkness accursed and forlorn and more fearsome than the deepest chasm in Moria. Aragorn shivered. It was cold, so very cold. Minas Morgul itself glowed, a translucent light growing ever more luminous, a lance brighter than the sun stabbing his eyes, and yet he could not forestall his gaze, though hot tears coursed down his cheeks and the pain was unendurable. A bloodcurdling screech arose from the city. Six figures swathed in black robes riding black horses sprang forth from the gate. Terror overcame him and wrenched him from his torpor, and he flung his forearm before his eyes, blocking the stabbing light. Abruptly the shrieks fell silent and some great force cast Aragorn upon his back so that he came to lie gazing at the pitch black, starless sky. The haziness clouding his eyes dwindled, and while things remained blurry around their edges, his sight came back to him. All was silent as a tomb but for the breath sobbing in his throat. Trembling, he crawled to a cumbrous gap between two rocks. The pale city held its venomous breath and did not stir. No horsemen rode hence from its gates. “Tiro nin, Elbereth,”[i] he whispered.

What were the six horsemen Aragorn had seen galloping from the leering gate? A vision, then, the foresight of his Númenorean lineage troubling him with premonitions of the doom Sauron would unleash. Maybe it was no more than delirium, the poisons from the Morgulduin and the deadly flowers contaminating his mind, dissembling his sight. Whichever it had been, it had passed like a lethal yet swift-moving squall. If it was delirium, then he should let it be and if not, it presaged an uncertain future and he was more concerned with surviving the present.

Furtively he crept down the rock wall just abreast of the road towards the stairs of Cirith Ungol, keeping his body pressed to the ground and rocks. Alone in this dreadful place, he had not the palest hope of survival should one of the watchers in the towers pierce him with a well-aimed arrow. He considered the chances that one had shot Gollum, putting a quick and just end to the wretched creature’s miserable life. A fainter hope than Aragorn’s hope of tracking Gollum, for the little footpad who had eluded even the Mirkwood Elves was too wily to be easily slain from the watchtowers of Minas Morgul.

At long last Aragorn arrived at the pass two miles below the city, a series of treacherous, steep stairs carved into the sheer, black cliffs. The pass reached to the looming clouds at the top of the mountains, beyond Aragorn’s sight. Few creatures, good or evil, hazarded the precarious stairs, for a single misstep caused a deadly fall for a thousand feet or more. And should one survive the climb, the evil in the tunnels at the summit never slept and was not beholden even to Sauron.

Aragorn knelt upon the bottom stairs, looking for a track or any other sign in the iron-gray dust suggesting that some creature had recently passed this way. He climbed up the stairs about one hundred feet, often bending on one knee, brushing the rock with his fingers, studying every mark and depression in the sand. For all he saw, the pass was long abandoned. Neither orcs nor anything else had trod the fatal stairs. Gollum, if he had been in or out of Mordor at all, had either traveled by a different road or crept so stealthily that not even a Ranger could hunt him. Breathing a curse at Minas Morgul, the Pass of Cirith Ungol, and his own foolishness and pride, he rested upon a flat ledge overlooking the Minas Morgul, disconsolate, coughing up more blood and catching his laboring breath and wiping sweat off his brow with his sleeve. His limbs were tremulous and a fierce headache brewed, the affliction of the Morgulduin’s fulsome poisons.

He could continue to search the pass for Gollum, but exhausted and ailing as he was, the redoubtable ascent would be ill-advised and deadly. If Aragorn had found neither track nor trace of Gollum down here, he doubted his odds of finding it closer to the summit. Wearily he pulled himself to his feet with a spire-like rock and limped down the pass. More coughing fits assailed him.

Once he stood upon firm earth again, he searched for signs in the dust near the head of the stairs, but he expected to find naught and indeed, his search yielded naught. Resting his back against a boulder concealing him from the tower’s watchful eyes, Aragorn entertained the idea that Gollum had exited Mordor via the Black Gate after all. He did not understand how the craven creature would be so courageous, for the Morannon was heavily guarded and afforded few hiding places. The Pass had seemed to him a more likely route to Gollum, a secret way through the Ephel Dúath into Mordor. Though he desired to dismiss the idea as ludicrous and leave this blackened land, he could not cast it aside without regret. Stranger things had happened. While the chance remained that Gollum had passed through the Black Gate, Aragorn would uphold his duty and seek him there.

Continuing his journey through the foothills of Ephel Dúath until they intersected with Mordor’s northern mountain range -- Ered Lithui, the Ash Mountains -- at the Morannon would be fatal. Not too much longer could he walk through the desolate, poisonous land alone and injured without food and substantially more water than the inadequate skins he had pilfered from the dead Orc. He pined for glittering snowcapped peaks, for cold and clear rushing rivers pounding glorious music against the rocks, for ancient and beautiful forests of fragrant trees, for windswept plains rolling to the horizon, rising and falling like the sea.

A spiral of dust, disturbed by a whisper of air expelling its last breath in the stale valley, settled near his right hand. Absently he scooped up a handful, black and sooty, and let it sift through his fingers. The only way to survive then was to prolong his quest by swinging around through Ithilien and then approaching the Morannon through Dagorlad, the Battle Plain, and the Slag Hills. In Ithilien, he could replenish his food and water, treat his wounds, and recover his strength before he imperiled himself at the Morannon. Armies passed daily through its ramparts and raised a substantial risk of getting captured or killed. And traveling through Ithilien’s glades without leave from the Steward of Gondor or in the very least the captain of the Rangers of Ithilien violated the law of Gondor, but was a safer road than journeying in the confines of Mordor. Aragorn had faith in his ability to talk his way out of a confrontation with soldiers of Gondor. Although these dark days and the heightened activity in Mordor gave them grounds to be suspicious of strangers, they would not shoot a man first and ask questions afterwards. At least Aragorn hoped not, though Gandalf had spoken darkly of an evil thing eating away at the mind of the Steward. Nevertheless the Steward’s son, Faramir, commanded Ithilien, and the stories Aragorn had heard described him as fair of heart and clear of mind. Perhaps not so swift to shoot.

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[i] Sindarin: “May Varda watch over me.”
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