Father and Uncle Eomer did not get on.

It wasn’t through ill-will; each of them admired and esteemed, and even in a funny way liked, the other, and you could never have doubted that they would stand loyally shoulder to shoulder with each other in battle, as on one memorable occasion they did. But they were too different from one another to get on, and the more courtesy and forbearance they showed toward one another – or rather, that Father showed toward Uncle Eomer – the more palpable the tension became.

The first reason was that Father was all Gondor. For all that he loved and admired the Rohirrim – after all he had married one of them – and for all that he understood and spoke their language and deferred to their customs, he could never help being different. He was like a polished steel sword in an armoury full of iron clubs: out of place. Oddly enough, it didn’t happen with King Elessar: though he loved Númenorean splendour and magnificence, he could set them aside like an unwanted garment and mingle so thoroughly with the men of Rohan that you almost expected him to sprout a yellow beard. He had spent so many years blending with different kinds of people that blending had become second nature to him. Father had spent all his life being Gondor; what’s more, he had grown up with the expectation that Gondor would soon cease to exist and he wanted to cherish while it was still there. He didn’t have a second nature.

The second reason was that Uncle Eomer was jealous. He loved my Mother, his sister, and he didn’t like the way that she had – as he obviously put it to himself, though not out loud – gone over to Gondor. He didn’t like her Gondorian dress and her Gondorian manners and the way she occasionally forgot herself, even in Meduseld, and spoke to Father or Firiel or me in the Gondorian speech. He didn’t like knowing – and he did know, because I once heard Mother pointing it out to him in a moment of exasperation – that Father, when they first met, had come to understand her better after talking to her for five minutes than he, Uncle Eomer, had after living with her for twenty-four years. He didn’t like her way of seeming only distantly conscious that other men, including himself, existed for as long as Father was around.

Then there was the King –  our King, I mean. Uncle Eomer took the greatest possible pride in being King Elessar’s dearest friend and brother monarch and closest ally, and he didn’t like the fact that Father was the King’s chief councillor and support and, in the early years at least, the link that bound the new King to the people of Gondor: the man the King had to listen to if he wanted to reconcile everybody to the rule of an unknown Northerner; the man of all men that he could not do without. The fact that Father took no pride in his own importance and never sought to come between Uncle Eomer and King Elessar didn’t do much to help matters; boasting was a way of life among the Rohirrim and they found it difficult to understand a man with so little interest in his own glory.

As if all that wasn’t enough, there was Fíriel. Uncle Eomer and Aunt Lothiriel had only one son, Elfwine, and no daughters at all, and it seemed that Aunt Lothiriel couldn’t have any more children. Uncle Eomer adored Fíriel and was constantly inviting her to sit on his knee and be chucked under the chin and fed choice bits of food from his own plate. Fíriel, even when she was very small, hated sitting on anybody’s knee except Father’s and hated being chucked under the chin and didn’t like chunks of roast meat being thrust between her teeth, but she had been bred to courtesy and she would sit bolt upright on Uncle Eomer’s knee, smiling the bright crystal smile she kept for people whom she didn’t much like, and making brief shy answers to his questions in the speech of Rohan (though at home with Mother she would chatter away in it for hours); but when he let her go she would fly over to Father and give him one of her famous strangling hugs, and bury her face in the hollow of his shoulder, and not even Uncle Eomer could fail to notice the contrast. He’d pull his beard and turn away and sulk, and it would take hours of riding or sword-practice to restore his good humour.

There was Aunt Lothíriel too, of course, but that is a long tale and a sad one, and I won’t tell it here.

Naturally these tensions filtered through to the respective households and naturally some bickering went on, though our people were too in awe of Father to let things get out of hand. (‘The Prince wants you to like these Rohirrim, and so you’ll like them or you’ll clean out the guardroom latrines every day for a year when we get back,’ I once heard Captain Beregond bellow at a resentful member of the White Company who was over-proud of his ‘Númenorean’ blood.) Equally naturally they filtered down to Elfwine and me, and at every new meeting – they took place about twice a year, and six months is plenty of time to work up some fresh enmity when you’re very young – we would have long, pointless arguments, of the is-isn’t, is-isn’t kind, about the relative merits of Rohan and Gondor that invariably ended in fisticuffs followed by an uneasy truce, with occasional gleams of amity.

It was because of Elfwine’s goading that I once, at the age of ten, climbed up to the roof of Meduseld one rainy, slippery day and tied the moon-banner of Ithilien to the top of the highest roof-post, only to find, at my moment of triumph, that I couldn’t get down. I was stuck up there for an hour in the pouring rain, with the eyes of all Rohan on me, with Mother hiding her eyes and Aunt Lothíriel fainting and Uncle Eomer bellowing with fury and Elfwine jeering, until finally Father climbed up – never, never will I forget the moment when two of the gilded tiles slid from under him and he was left hanging on to the roof-ridge with one hand – and somehow carried me on his shoulder to a place where I could get a foothold, and we came down together and Father handed me over to Uncle Eomer and said that he’d leave my punishment in Uncle Eomer’s hands. Uncle Eomer fetched me a buffet on the head that threw me five yards, and as he did so his eye caught a movement overhead and he said to Father, ‘In your zeal to rescue this scapegrace boy of yours, you forgot to rescue your own banner.’ Father looked up and snapped his fingers and said so he had, but he didn’t think that his courage would sustain him to make the climb again in cold blood. He and Uncle Eomer each other in the eye for a long, challenging minute, until everyone started to wonder if Uncle Eomer – who was a lot heavier and less sinewy than Father – was going to attempt the climb himself, but suddenly Uncle Eomer roared with laughter and said that I had spirit, like a real son of Rohan (Elfwine scowled worse than ever at this), and we all went in out of the rain and the banner was left, damp but triumphant, to proclaim the superiority of Ithilien (at least, that’s how I saw it; I never got round to asking Father how he saw it because I spent the next three days keeping out of his way and the next six weeks not reminding him), until the wind blew it to tatters and away.

But the real strain came over the horses.

The Rohirrim were marvellous with horses. Everyone in Rohan said so. Everyone in Gondor said so too; we were not a horse people and we were very grateful to the Rohirrim for doing the job for us. Nobody in Gondor could breed horses as magnificent as those they bred in Rohan, and when King Eomer announced that his sister’s dowry would be two stallions and twenty brood mares from among the descendants of the mearas, everyone gasped and said that it was a truly magnificent gift, and it was.

The trouble was that Father was marvellous with horses. Not only could he ride any horse ever foaled and make it do whatever he wanted, but he knew a lot about horse-breeding too – and what he didn’t know he learned, and learned fast. The horses from Rohan thrived on the pastures running down from Emyn Arnen towards Anduin, and because our climate is drier they developed lean, muscular bodies and hard hoofs. Then when Father was sent into Harad to discuss the settling of borders, he brought back horses from the far south where the climate is drier and dustier still, and although these horses were smaller than King Eomer’s great battle-chargers, they were swift and wonderfully beautiful. And when these horses were bred with the horses out of Rohan, some of their foals combined the best traits of sire and dam, and were much sought after, so that some people came to Ithilien to buy rather than going to Rohan. Naturally the Rohirrim didn’t like this, and when Father went riding with King Eomer among the Rohirrim, some murmured.

Some even mocked, because Father’s style of riding was not what you could call flamboyant. He scarcely moved in the saddle, directing the horse almost, as it seemed, with a thought; he never used whip or spur, generally kept a light rein, and the horses he rode always seemed to be as gentle as lambs. Quite a few of the men of Rohan concluded that Father couldn’t ride a difficult horse, and one day a group of them decided to put it to the proof. It was in the late spring, when the herdsmen of Rohirrim bring the young horses in from the grasslands where they’ve been roaming half-wild, and the young warriors and would-be warriors choose the ones they want and begin to tame them. It’s part serious, part fun and games, and generally involves a lot of yelling and bucking and falling off, and if you happened to be looking at some of the older herdsmen while this was going on you’d see them shake their heads, for when they brought in the horse-herds they always did it gently, encouraging them with soft voices and not hurrying or frightening them. I’d noticed that none of these herdsmen ever said anything disparaging about Father’s ways with horses. Uncle Eomer never did either, to do him justice; he was a kind man under the boasting, and loved his horses.

Anyway, these four young warriors had corralled a particularly wild two-year-old and had worked it  into a frenzy, urging it to run and buck and then competing to see which of them could stay on longest. Father came by and stopped to watch them. Father didn’t say anything and his face was quite expressionless, but the youngsters took his silence for disapproval and after a while one came over to him and said, would my lord be so kind as to help them with this horse because it was giving them trouble and they’d heard that Father was Gondor’s best man with horses. Behind him the others smirked, as if to say that if Father was the best that Gondor could do in that line, Gondor wasn’t up to much. Father smiled mildly and walked into the corral. The young horse retreated to the furthest corner and stood there trembling and covered with foam. Father called to it very softly in horse language – or that’s what it sounded like – and after a few tense moments it came, step by step, rolling its eyes and shivering, but as if it couldn’t help itself. Father went on talking to it for about five minutes, and by the end of that time he was stroking its nose and you could no longer see the whites of its eyes. After another five minutes he had one arm across its withers; another five again and he vaulted on its back, so lightly that you’d think he’d flown there. He rode it three times round the corral at a walk, once at a trot and once at a canter, and the horse obeyed him, meek as milk. Then he brought it back, dismounted and told the stupefied youngsters that it seemed like a promising mount, but would need a lot of schooling because its paces were very rough. He dismounted, handed the halter rope to the nearest youngster and walked away, and the youngster vaulted on to the horse’s back and within twenty seconds it threw him with such a crash that he was unconscious for an hour and spent the next week in bed.

After that the Rohirrim started to say that Father must have some Elvish power. I don’t think they meant it as a compliment, but they stopped mocking at his peaceable way of riding.  

What really won a good many of them over, though, including Uncle Eomer (on this point at least) was the Demon.

You must have seen the Demon, out there at grass: a great ugly beast with a head like a lump of rock  and teeth like tombstones. He was Father’s war horse for many years. He had – still has – a dangerous temper, and the hardest thrashing I ever got from Father was when he caught me climbing into the Demon’s paddock with the obvious intention of trying to ride him. If Father hadn’t caught me I probably wouldn’t be talking to you now; only Father and Bergil could do anything with the Demon, and even Bergil always felt himself all over when he came out of the Demon’s stall, to make sure that he still had all his limbs. A lot of people, including Mother, thought the Demon was too ugly to suit Father’s dignity, but Father didn’t care, and after we learned from Haradrim prisoners that they  believed that the Demon could wither men with his eyes and was fed on human flesh, and that no warrior of Harad would stand his ground with the Demon bearing down on him, we realised how useful the horrid beast could be.

The Demon came from Rohan, but don’t be too quick to remind any of the Rohirrim of that fact, if you go there. They pride themselves on the beauty of their horses, and the Demon did not fit the pattern. Nobody knew where he came from; there was a rumour, which may well have been true, that he was the result of some foul experiment of the wizard Saruman, to create a troll-horse. The first the Rohirrim knew of him was when mares started to disappear from the horse-herds in the foothills around Helm’s Deep. At first the disappearances were a mystery, but the herdsmen became more watchful, and soon it was certain that the troll-horse was stealing mares for a troll-herd of his own. But knowing what he was up to was a different matter from stopping him. The first man who got in his way was knocked over and trampled to rags. Another had his skull split by one of the Demon’s fore-hoofs; a third was caught in the Demon’s teeth and flung against a rock so that his back was broken. Another was killed by the mere sound of his savage neighing, or so the herdsmen said: they were beginning to think he was no flesh-and-blood horse but an evil spirit in horse’s shape. He wasn’t, of course; but men certainly died, and I wouldn’t put anything past the Demon.

In the end the herdsmen appealed to the King, and though he hated the thought of using horses as weapons against horses, he arranged an expedition to track and kill the terrible beast. We were in Meduseld at the time, so naturally Father was invited along. Equally naturally I wanted to go too, and sulked when Father refused. The only mitigating factor was that Elfwine wasn’t allowed to go either, so we sought consolation in beating each other up.

The  expedition rode away one spring morning, with all the young warriors singing and waving their spears and boasting of the great deeds they would do, according to custom, and Father rode in their midst looking thoughtful. My account of what happened next is based mostly on what old Anborn, Father’s steward, told me, and is probably boggled by Anborn’s usual attitude. Anborn looked on the Rohirrim as amiable but inexperienced children, sadly lacking in the dignity which befitted a man (by which he meant a man of Gondor), and so tended to under-estimate them. He also went through life in the firm but incompatible convictions that (1) Father could do no wrong, and (2) Father was in need of continual reproof and criticism to keep him on the right path. Father found the first conviction heart-warming and the second salutary, and so allowed Anborn to get away with a good many things that he wouldn’t have stood from anyone else. Anyway, according to Anborn the expedition frolicked along towards Helm’s Deep, and owing entirely to the rangerly skills of himself and Father, they picked up a solitary horse’s trail that, from the enormous hoof-prints, seemed to belong to the troll-horse, and followed it until nightfall, when they made camp.

Although they didn’t exactly fear an attack, they set a watch; after all, who knew what a troll-horse could do? In the middle of the night they were all roused by a yell from the one of the watchman, and there on a few hundred yards away, outlined in starlight against the black hills, was a blacker form, huge  and menacing: it was the Demon, looking down on them. Anborn thought he must have come because some fool among the Rohirrim had decided to ride a mare; the Rohirrim thought that his evil spirit had brought him to the place where he could challenge his enemies to battle.  There was a lot of stifled excitement and running around, and within minutes about ten arrows were on string and aimed at the Demon, but nobody fired and everybody looked to  King Eomer for orders. The King hesitated. He hated the idea of killing a horse, even a troll-horse; and the Demon was barely within bowshot and might not be killed outright, or even hit. And the way he just stood there was uncanny.

Then Father stepped forward, dead in line with the horse and between him and the arrows. Eomer grabbed at his elbow and hissed at him not to be a fool, and indeed it was most unlike Father to act so rashly. But he shook off Eomer’s hand and, being stricken with madness, ignored Anborn’s urgent and sensible protests (this is Anborn talking, remember) and went on walking forward. And the Demon stood still as a stone, waiting for him. The Rohirrim muttered that the troll-horse had bewitched Father and was drawing him to his death.  They were even more sure of it when Father went right up to the horse and stood face to face with him. The next moment he was on the Demon’s back, and the Demon swung round and disappeared among the rocks. That broke the spell, and the whole band rushed to mount their horses and follow, but never a track did they find, though they spent the rest of the day looking. At sundown they concluded that the troll-horse had spirited Father away from this world and that he would never be seen again. ‘And what in Middle-Earth,’ moaned King Eomer, ‘am I to say to my sister?’ Then, with the utmost reluctance and leaving a trembling party of Rohirrim to watch the fatal spot, they turned towards Meduseld.

Anborn, of course, never doubted for a moment that Father, wherever he was, was master of the situation. (I told you Anborn was sublimely inconsistent.) Hence Anborn was the only one in the party who was not surprised when they heard the thudding of hooves behind them and up came Father, riding on the Demon. Father looked as if he’d been dragged through several hedges backwards and through a considerable amount of mud, and he had the most villainous black eye anybody had ever seen, far surpassing Elfwine’s and my best efforts, which had cost King Eomer’s chief cook a fortune in raw beefsteaks. But he was riding the Demon as easily as if he were the Evenstar’s palfrey, and without any saddle or bridle, like an Elf. A murmur of terrified astonishment went up, gradually swelling into a cheer, but even this raucous human noise didn’t seem to alarm the Demon.

Father rode up to King Eomer – not too close – and asked him in his mildest voice, somewhat muffled by a cut lip,  if he, Father, could keep the horse, if Rohan really wanted to be rid of it. King Eomer gave a sort of strangled grunt that seemed to mean something like ‘Yes’, and they rode home side to side in awed silence, except when they passed by a pool of water and Father caught sight of  his own reflection and groaned and said, ‘What in Middle Earth am I to say to your sister?’

I won't tell you what Mother said, but you can probably imagine it. 

Anyway, that’s how Father earned his reputation as a Master of Horses even among the Rohirrim, and that’s how the Demon came to Ithilien to dismay our enemies and terrify us.

I wouldn’t go any closer to him than that, if I were you.