The Boundaries of Time

Aragorn’s road after he departed Ithilien took him through tangled heathland, shrubs, fronds, and mosses overgrown with ling, broom, and cornel. No longer did he walk beneath a tumbled canopy, a grotto of deciduous trees; oaks, birches, cedars and cypresses. Here and there, clumps of tall pine trees dotted otherwise open space. The road, little more than a poorly maintained county cart-road overgrown with capricious vegetation, ran straight as ever, built with the handiwork of Númenor. With reluctance he followed the road, for it was the swiftest path through Ithilien to the Morannon and perhaps the main corridor for the legions of Mordor. It seemed little used, unsullied by armies and other travelers, but Aragorn trod it warily, lest his sight and the hosts of Mordor deceive him.

There were parallel ruts in the soil -- wagon tracks -- worn smooth by wind and rain and obscured by irascible vines and roots. Wagons had once traversed this road, but no longer. Nevertheless, Aragorn traveled cautiously, attentive to every sound, every birdcall, every shudder of the brush. Sometimes ravens crowed, harsh voices shattering oppressive silence, but otherwise he heard only his light, swift footsteps and the occasional breeze rustling the fronds. If walkers or riders trailed him, he would hear their approach.

Always to his right, the Ephel Dúath cast an ominous shadow veiling the sun as his course took him closer to the towering mountains. Trees like dark clouds spotted the hillsides as the land rose towards the mountains. It did not matter how many journeys Aragorn risked to the foothills of these mountains, the withered feeling in his heart never abated when the sun waned behind the blood-flecked ash rising from Mordor. He only traveled by day, for the nights were blacker than the chasms in the depths of Khazad-dûm, and he mistrusted what might travel this road under cover of darkness. When the sun fell behind the lofty moors to the west, he found cover for the night, hedges, rocks, or close-knit clusters of pine trees. Often he built a small fire and cooked over it, vigilant for the fire might serve as a beacon to his enemies. After having eaten he would curl up beneath the forest green Ithilien Ranger cloak and sleep fitfully until the gray light of morning roused him.

Aragorn held a steady pace along the road for four days until the infringing foliage overrunning the road receded and the ancient stonework had been reinforced. Fresh tracks crossed the old wagon ruts, tracks belonging to Orcs, men, horses, and unidentifiable creatures with tracks more than ten times as large as the foot of an eighteen-hand draught horse. Mûmakil, he wondered, legendary war animals of the Haradrim. In his time in Harad he had never once seen any, but they proliferated in tales, songs, and artwork. For a while, he knelt over a massive ball of rotted dung, festooned with southern plant shoots. Whatever it was, it had passed this way several weeks ago and many Orcs and men, on foot and on horseback, had followed. He found no sign that Gollum had traipsed through here, but he had no illusions about discovering any traces of Gollum. The creature, stealthy and swift, would not dare use the road.

Aragorn too must be stealthy and swift now that he had departed the quiet lands at Ithilien’s borders. The Black Shadow of Minas Morgul had been cleansed and he had the strength to stand and fight, but he did not deem it wise to draw attention to himself. Like a specter he faded into the broken country abreast of the road, leaving no trace, nothing arousing the curiosity and hunger for blood of Orcs and wild men. Under the black, starless nights he dozed, one ear tuned to sounds in the brush, and he only reluctantly lit small, inconsequential fires if cover was thick enough to obstruct the flames from the road. Wolves often howled, sometimes distant, at other times nearby; and he was aware of fell things lurking about in the murky gloom.

His decision to leave the road proved shrewd indeed. A few days after he cut through the desert, hordes of heavy boots marching across stone reached his ears. He scrambled behind a bramble and lay flat on his stomach, holding his breath, as immobile as a stone. Only his eyes moved, watching the road, a dike slashing through the earth itself, steep banks rising upon either side of it. A legion of men arrayed in the war garments Aragorn recognized from his journey to Harad traipsed beneath him. The leaders rode fine-boned horses and the others marched on foot in two lines straight as the mast of a ship. Horned helms covered their heads and faces, armor with ornamentation like the wings of a dragon protected their bodies, and they carried painted spears and curved scimitars.

Not until the Haradrim had gone round a bend of the foothills did Aragorn exhale. Warily he drew himself up to his hands and knees and crawled away from the road. How many legions passed through this barren country every day? The army amassing on Gorgoroth must be astounding, large enough to still the hearts of men if they knew what doom awaited them. A shiver of fear knifed between his shoulder blades. What terrifying onslaught was Sauron preparing behind the ridges of the Ephel Dúath? The thought of it burned Aragorn’s heart like a brand; carnage would be inevitable, battles bloodier and more prolonged than any he had seen in all his long life. Whether they lost or beat the formidable odds and won, many would die before the end. The fate of Beleriand shall be our fate, he thought. Kingdoms destroyed, embattled refugees driven to the shores. And none now lived to brave the seas and appeal to the Valar for aid. Even if another Eärendil arose, the folly of Ar-Pharazôn had made sailing to Valinor impossible.

But even the darkest nights see sunrise. As long as Gandalf let embers of hope kindle and placed a great deal of faith in the sturdiness of halflings, Aragorn too would hold out and refuse to break before the oncoming storm. Every day the Ring remained out of Sauron’s grasp, hope blazed all the brighter. It was not inevitable that history would be repeated. Finrod had said Aragorn was bound to the fate of Beren and his ancestors of old and would, as Finrod had, pit his will against Sauron’s, but the Elven-king had not presaged death or defeat. Aragorn recollected his wits and fingered the ring of Barahir, vexed that emotional torrents unnerved him so. Sterner than steel he must be. Knowledge of the emergent might of Mordor must not unsettle his resolve.

Since the road had transformed from an abandoned cart-road into a highway for the servants of Mordor, Aragorn parted from its swift and straight path for the Morannon and trod a roundabout course through the wasteland of broken rocks, dust, dried grass, dark thickets, and jumbled trees like clusters of smoky clouds. The looming Ephel Dúath, sweeping northwards until it butted heads with the Ered Lithui, led him to the Morannon. The black mists grew thicker and darker. With each passing day, the lands of the living retreated behind him, and his good spirits remained there as well, gone astray in this black place.

On a pitch-black night, Aragorn lay curled against a rock outcropping, the cloak pulled about his shoulders. The small fire flickering upon his face offered him some warmth and inspired malformed shadows to flit hither and thither on the sandstone wall. He did not sleep. His fingers were wrapped around the hilt of the sword. Something skulked in the darkness. Every muscle in his body was taught as a drawn bowstring.

He heard the snorting breaths of a large animal snuffling through the brush and sand, prowling about his campsite, afraid of the fire or otherwise it should have attacked him already. A musky scent, fetid and repulsive, filled his nostrils. A warg, he thought. Wargs and other foul creatures roamed this bleak land, hunting for stragglers, Orcs and men from the armies marching to the Morannon. They cared not what flesh they feasted on, good or evil. The yellow eyes gleamed in the firelight and it watched Aragorn. Meeting its gaze, he slowly sat up, squatting on his haunches and notching an arrow to the Gondorian bow.

The warg bared rows of yellow fangs and uttered a growl from deep within its throat. Unwavering, Aragorn planted his feet and waited, the cool bow pressing into his palm, the string cutting his flesh. The moment the warg gathered itself and launched, he let loose the arrow and flung himself sideways, landing on his right shoulder and rolling away from the animal’s shriek of pain and its heavy crash as it plowed into the earth. His arrow must have hit it. Alas, his aim had been true but not fatal. As he regained his feet, unsheathing his sword and shaking sand out of his eyes and hair, he saw the warg rising, unsteady and maddened by pain. The feathered shaft of the arrow jutted out from the base of its throat. It lunged at him, blood and foam flying from its jaws, and then darted sideways to avoid his slashing blade. He leapt towards the fire, grabbing one of the sticks he had used earlier in the night to stoke it, and raised it before the warg. The warg attacked again, but shied away from the fiery stick that Aragorn brought down upon it, snarling and clawing the sand in rage.

Aragorn took a threatening step towards the animal. It retreated, flinching from the scorching wood and the blazing white sword of Númenor. Malice shone in the glittering eyes. Its fermenting breath, hot and fetid, made Aragorn lightheaded and nauseous, but nevertheless he held his ground. The warg trembled with rage and madness. Then, before Aragorn could finish it with his sword, it shuddered and collapsed upon its side, its muscles seizing in a final protest against death. Taken aback, Aragorn took a swift step away from it. The arrow in its neck must have damaged it mortally after all. Wargs were notoriously resilient – they did not die easily or quickly, but die they did.

Cautiously Aragorn approached the beast, the edge of his sword against its throat should it stir. He bent down, removing the arrow from its neck – a fountain of blood spurted from the wound -- wiping the tip clean and thrusting it into his quiver. Fearing that the tumult had awakened every Orc, Haradrim, and Ilúvatar only knew what else within ten leagues, he swiftly extinguished the fire and faded away into the night, furtive and silent. Traveling at night disquieted him, but remaining in proximity to the dead warg was perilous. They would find it, and they would wonder what killed it, and they would hunt for him. He had intended for his presence here to go unnoticed, but alas, that aspiration had eluded him unless the orcs never found the dead warg or did not think anything of it. That chance he refused to bet upon and made haste through the night, fearful of what his eyes and ears did not detect in the moonless and lifeless terrain.

Once he stumbled into a hidden, steaming bog and had to vigorously claw his way out, hacking at a long, reptilian arm with his sword, some dark thing pulling him in. Breathless, he hurried away, a backward glance over his shoulder revealing two gleaming eyes glaring balefully at him. His course through the night in a northwesterly direction, his only guide the shadowy mountains and dour red glow beyond their jagged peaks, swung him around towards the road.

To his dismay he saw hundreds of small fires flickering like stars in the dejected land and the hunched backs of the Haradrim company he had seen several days earlier bent over them. Most were silent, either asleep or deep in thought, but several stood upon the edge of the encampment, gazing curiously across the escarpment in the direction Aragorn had come. He crawled between several rocky fins and hunkered down there, long legs folded under him.

It seemed wisest to wait out the night here, for the Haradrim sentries might notice unusual shadows lurking in the dark. Though the sun would arise and disperse the murky blackness in a few hours, the remainder of the night felt endless, as if dawn would never again shed her light upon this blighted land. Aragorn remained wide awake, alert to every movement in the encampment and every noise emerging from the heath and rock enfolding him. When dawn’s gray light at last broke through the sullen clouds, the Haradrim packed their camp and formed ranks. A formidable noise they made, crying out for battle and rattling weapons, ere they set upon the road to Mordor in great haste.

The road swept around a bend, the spur of a great mountain jutting forth from the flanks of the Ephel Dúath. After the men bringing up the rear of the twin columns vanished round the turn, Aragorn crept out of his hiding place, his gait stiff and limbs cramped from huddling in the small crawl-space for those countless hours. He blinked the dust from his eyes and sipped the cool Ithilien water, which he had rationed carefully for no streams for leagues carried drinkable water.

The stiffness he soon walked off, and he trudged through the dells alongside the road for many hours that blended together, an endless stretch of time through the ageless, wrecked country. On the horizon he saw the high and desolate ridges of the Ered Lithui, the northfacing wall of Mordor. The two mountain ranges enclosed the somber Plains of Gorgoroth and Lithlad and the inland Sea of Núrnen. Behind the gate, a deep cleft cut between them at the point where the Ered Lithui bent southwards and became the Ephel Dúath. On either side of the gate sat the two watchtowers, built by Men of Gondor when they overthrew Sauron and he fled from Mordor. On Aragorn’s last journey here many years ago, the watchtowers, the Teeth of Mordor, had fallen into disuse and decay, but he imagined that the Enemy in his ever-increasing strength had restored them. Thousands of eyes surely kept vigilance upon the gate and Cirith Gorgor. Aragorn could not fathom how Gollum had crept unnoticed past the hordes of Orcs, trolls, and other fell beasts guarding the pass, unless Sauron had deliberately released him. Gollum forever felt the Ring drawing on him. Hence he could lead the Nazgûl and other servants of the Enemy to it. Was Sauron savvy enough to use an unwitting Gollum as a hound on the hunt?

The sight of four Haradrim and one of their horses halted on the road disrupted Aragorn’s musings. He sprang behind a rock outcropping, pressing his shoulder against an upright stone and unsheathing the sword, fearing that he had reacted too late for stealth. Alas, he should be more alert. Mordor set the minds of men adrift, lost in a waking nightmare should they lack the strength to resist. One of the Haradrim held up the left front foot of the horse, palpating the tendons in its leg, his brows – indeed the only visible part of his face – drawn in vexation. The other three restrained the horse, two by the bridle and another by the stirrup. Nervous, the horse tossed its head and attempted to dance around on three legs.

“What ill turn of fortune is this, that one of their horses should go lame here?” Aragorn said to himself as the man who had been at the stirrup clambered up the bank, spear thrust forward, gaze probing the tors and crags for the movement that had drawn attention. If he must fight for his life, at least Aragorn only faced four of them so long as the remainder of the legion did not turn back. Four he could defeat, but as adept a swordsman as he was, he had no expectations of withstanding an onslaught of several hundred. Better to not draw the attention of any. He watched the Southron pursue a zig-zag course across the rough terrain, closing in upon him. Staying ever ahead of his foe, he withdrew against the mountains. The shadowy defiles enclosed him.

He drew a dagger and hid behind a tumble of rocks that had fallen from a grim cliff, abiding his time while the Haradrim came nearer and nearer. In front of Aragorn’s shelter he passed, and as he beheld the heir of Isildur, Aragorn sprang upon him and thrust the dagger into his breast. The Haradrim’s dark eyes widened with surprise. Back he staggered, but in his dying moments he valiantly swung his spear and caught Aragorn in the left shoulder. The blow sent Aragorn reeling, pain lancing through his arm. As the Haradrim collapsed, so did Aragorn, clutching his shoulder. A fleeting moment of nausea passed over him. Pressing his arm to his chest, he lurched to his feet. He must not linger, or the dead man’s company would find him.

Without a backward glance, Aragorn sheathed his dagger and ran, slinking across the road beyond sight of the Haradrim with the lame horse so he did not venture deeper into the Ephel Dúath while avoiding detection and disappearing into the heath and rocky fissures. He feared his arm might be broken, but he had not the time to examine it. Enduring the shooting pains, he furtively scrambled through rocks and thickets as far as he could muster the energy to travel.

When at last the road vanished from sight and the sullen bloodied glow hanging between the mountains flanking Cirith Gorgor was no more than six leagues away, he desisted his desperate flight at an old broken statue, a great king or lord, resting between two battered columns. The tops of the columns had been shorn off and the king’s face and hands were eaten away, whether by battle or by the unforgiving wind and storms, Aragorn could not say.

Up the statue he clambered one-handed and made an emphatic obscene gesture towards Mordor. His gaze set upon the mountain ranges. The Teeth of Mordor rose from the dark cliffs, two ominous sentinels, silhouettes against the sallow light of the sun and rising plumes of fire from Orodruin. To the south the ruined battlements of Durthang leered at him, a fortress like the Teeth-Towers of Cirith Gorgor built by the Men of Gondor at Sauron’s last defeat to guard the passes of Mordor. It sat high in the mountains, upon the great spur of the Ephel Dúath keeping vigilance over the valley of Udûn. Like Minas Morgul and the Cirith Gorgor towers, Durthang was a chilling memory of the failing strength of the west, something once fair and noble overthrown by evil. Aragorn shuddered. Should they fail, Minas Tirith and all the lands beyond her fair walls would fall into shadow, many replicas of the evil that had befallen the kingdoms of Beleriand, Minas Ithil, and the towers guarding Cirith Gorgor.

Resting his back against the statue, Aragorn examined his wounded shoulder, probing the sore flesh with his fingers. There was a cruel laceration on his upper arm a few inches below the shoulder, but he did not believe the bone had been fractured, for though it hurt, the arm was mobile. He spit upon a few remaining athelas leaves from Ithilien and massaged them into the cut. Within seconds, the weed alleviated throbbing pain and he felt cool relief washing through his arm, from the bruised shoulder to his fingertips. Then he had a few bites to eat and a few more droplets of water and lay down against the foot of the weather-beaten statue, wearied beyond all cares of what might befall him come twilight.



* * *



Whether or not the Haradrim found their slain companion and what they did upon their discovery Aragorn never cared to find out. His flight from the road had brought him nearly to his destination. The gray hued light of morning had woken him from a restless sleep plagued with disturbing dreams, which flitted away from his waking mind. Fiery pain and stiffness had revisited his wounded shoulder in the night, and he applied more athelas, frowning at the purple, blue, and black splotches surrounding the gash. After a hasty breakfast of Ithilien bread, he resignedly trod the path towards the barren ridges and towers, eyes cast down in defense against the occasional whirling dust eddy stirred up by the fetid breezes rousing the stagnant air. Though he saw tracks of Orcs and other things, for a few hours he encountered no living creatures traversing the lonely plain.

When the pallid sun touched high noon over the torturous ridges of the Ephel Dúath and Ered Lithui, he heard the great thundering roar of a company of Orcs running across the plain. They were behind him! He diverted from his route, surmounting the jagged flank of a rock buttress rising from Dagorlad. Here, he squatted amongst brambles and slabs of granite and watched about fifty Orcs charge through a cloud of dust below him, making haste towards Durthang. He remained immobile until the dust had settled and the Orcs had vanished beyond the buttes and low ridges of the red and black landscape. Then he climbed down from the buttress. Enemies, Orcs and wild men and other spies and servants, overran the southern reaches of Dagorlad. The last few miles around the spur of the Ephel Dúath between here and the Morannon would be beneath the very Eye of the Enemy. His luck was stretched thin and he feared it would not hold out much longer.

Aragorn henceforth swung wide around the spur and Durthang, a meandering course adding several hours upon his expedition but avoiding heavily used Orc trails winging towards Durthang and the Morannon. Sometimes the sound of trumpets and horns bellowing from the ridges froze his blood and at other times, he narrowly slipped past roving patrols, darting from shadow to shadow in the fissures and dells across the final stretches of Dagorlad as it ran up against the mountains.

Time wore away as he slogged through the rough country until at last he looked upon the Morannon, an iron gate below a great rampart. Sheer cliffs rose on either side of it and the Teeth of Mordor, Narchost and Carchost, stood upon the steep hills thrusting from the cliffs. Hordes of Orcs manned the towers and unsleeping sentinels paced back and forth on the rampart above the gate. Aragorn beheld their steel glinting in the sunlight. Nothing could navigate through the gate without suffering the bite of arrows from the towers and ramparts.

His ears caught the thud of hundreds of steel-shod feet marching across rock and hundreds of weapons rattling against armor, a throbbing roar like great waves pounding upon a rocky shoreline. A prodigious army approached. Apparently nothing could navigate through the gate without encountering armies of Mordor pouring through its parapets like debris in a flood, either. Pilous boulders and slag mounds concealed the army from Aragorn’s eyes, but he guessed from the clamor that they were not more than half a mile away. He sought cover in a rocky hollow amongst the reeking slag mounds west of the road. From there he surveyed the gate, the cliffs, and the mountains, searching for a secret path to the pass. The deep gash in the gnarled rock and bubbling, steaming slag heaps in which he took cover would be a clever hiding place for Gollum, but no trace of the miserable creature did he see. Nor did he see a defensible passage to the Cirith Gorgor. Any attempt to reach the gate from here brought one out into the open, an easy target for the archers in the nearest tower.

Battling disconsolation, he threaded his way through the fissures to the eastern side of the gate and the buttresses of the Ered Lithui. A discordant trumpet call ringing from the rampart shattered the air, and many horns responded. Startled, Aragorn took a short intake of breath. The gates swung open and the army of men and Orcs emerged from behind a sharp ridge lying across the slag as if an angry Vala had thrown a giant knife that had embedded itself in the black and dusty red earth. They marched into the defile, swallowed by Cirith Gorgor. Aragorn lay motionless beneath an overhang, holding his breath, feeling the rock beneath him quaking with the vibrations of hundreds of steel-shod feet, imagining a stealthy creature slinking through the gate just as it thudded shut. Could it be done? There was an open bowl devoid of cover a hundred or so feet in front of the gate, and once through, Cirith Gorgor’s sheer, narrow walls enclosed, and the Teeth Towers and Durthang watched all. The Men of Gondor had designed them to keep evil at bay and let nothing slink undetected in or out of Mordor. Indeed, nothing did.

It was folly to venture to that accursed vale seeking Gollum and folly to then risk his life at the Black Gate when he had found no trace of Gollum near Cirith Ungol. All hope he had of finding the wretch evaporated. Then as swiftly as it consumed him, his ire diminished, for this mission had not been as completely futile as others he had embarked upon in his life. What he had found at the fences of Mordor enthused very little optimism, but it was better to know it than not. The Enemy was amassing an army that would be the doom of Middle-earth. It would be like the hordes Morgoth had poured forth from Angband that had destroyed the great cities of Gondolin and Doriath. Even the Wise, Elrond, Gandalf, and Galadriel, were not yet aware of this intelligence, though they had foreseen it. The armies of Gondor and Rohan as they stood were weaker than Gondolin and Doriath had ever been and would be rent apart like the hulls of ships in a gale.

Perhaps Isildur’s heir could unite men and make them strong again, as in the days of Elendil and Gil-galad when the Shadow had fallen, defeated. But Gondor and Rohan were weak, Théoden of Rohan was an impotent ruler and Denethor of Gondor was looking to consolidate his power rather than relinquish it. Aragorn could not foresee how to gain the throne and reunite men, waging a successful war against Sauron, without tearing asunder Gondor in civil war. In the face of the massive armies gathering strength on the Gorgoroth plain, his wild hopes seemed further from fulfillment than ever.

Nothing could be done for the present; the time was not yet ripe to fret over Minas Tirith politics or future wars. Events would play themselves out as Ilúvatar willed. While he lived, while Gandalf lived, while Arwen loved him and clung to hope, and while the Ring remained hidden and Minas Tirith stood strong and splendorous, there remained a chance that the free peoples would prevail. His will might very well be stronger than that of Sauron.

There was no reason to linger until his enemies slew him. To Lórien – one hundred fifty leagues to the north – he would go to offer his counsel and forewarnings to Galadriel and Celeborn. The borders of Lothlórien were well protected, and there he could forget about his burdens and worries for a little while. Traveling through the borderlands of Mordor had exhausted him and wounded him in body and in spirit, ailments for which he would find relief in the tranquil, nourishing groves and streams of Lórien. Then if he did not have tryst with Gandalf for a long while – the wizard’s movements were mysterious and Aragorn never knew with certainty where and when they would meet – the Galadhrim would pass the warnings on to him.

Not without regret could he turn his back to the gloomy walls of Mordor. He had but two choices, to seek Gollum on the Gorgoroth Plain itself, a suicide mission, or turn back. The wretched maggot was not worth dying for. Nine years scouring Middle-earth for Gollum, and he had failed. It stung his pride that fate should force him to at last give up, though his duty lay elsewhere now. It was just as important, if not more so, to get word to the Wise forewarning the amassing strength of Mordor.

His decision made, he crept out of the dell in which he had hidden. He took a secretive route across the arid moors of the Noman-lands, loathsome mudflats pockmarked with dying, poisonous pools of gray ash and gas and fire-blasted rock. Green shoots would never sprout here, even as spring, grim and sickly, arrived in the southern reaches of Dagorlad.

Eventually his path would bring him into the Dead Marshes, the site of great battles between Men, Orcs, and Elves. There, the slain of the Battle of the Last Alliance were laid to rest where the growing marshes had swallowed up the graves. Traversing the Marshes, one beheld the faces of the dead in the water, some fair and noble, others foul, all corrupted and all holding candles, flames flickering atop the putrid water. Lore held that the Dead Marshes were impassible, that anyone who stumbled into the water would die and join the dead faces beneath the murky meres, lighting their own corpsecandles. Fearful of their perfidious reputation, Orcs and wild men bypassed the Marshes by many leagues across the flat, stony Dagorlad. At any rate, Aragorn believed he knew of a passage through the Marshes, a secret path unknown to the hosts of Mordor, dangerous in its own way but far safer than the heavily-used trails crossing Dagorlad and then swerving to the east and west of the Marshes. The dead did not frighten him as much as the living.

At the northwest corner of the Marshes, the Emyn Muil rose up from the formless lowlands, a series of sharp and steep cliffs and deep ravines as the land plunged from the plateau of the Anduin to moors and plains at Mordor’s fences. Aragorn banished thoughts of the Emyn Muil as he plodded across the stagnant mudflats. Climbing up the unforgiving and razor-sharp cliffs with an injured shoulder would be an arduous endeavor he did not relish. Green and gray haze veiling the Marshes concealed the remote Emyn Muil from his eyes. It was a rotting wall of steam wafting from the meres and smoke born by the foul winds from Mordor that perennially lay across the low vale.