ERNIL

Chapter 23 ~ Dust to Dust III

The Orcs were worsted and those that escaped fled once more behind the obdurate Black Gate.  The immediate danger passed, yet the assault had not achieved its object, and all the Alliance had to show for its effort was a morbid field of death.  A drizzling rain had begun, making ashen mud of the ground already saturated in blood.

The might of Greenwood lay in carnage.  Galadhmir wandered amid the devastation in a daze, tattered and disheveled, one hand pressed firmly against a bleeding shoulder.  The cries of the wounded were all around him, mingled with the moans of those in their last agony, all strangely swallowed by the enormous silence of the dead.

How had this happened?  An hour ago, their army stood defiantly against the hordes of Sauron.  Now that same force was utterly prostrated.  The healers were overwhelmed, and many of the wounded went untended.  For the moment Galadhmir felt nothing but numb, but he shook himself from his stupor and searched the fallen for the once brilliant green and white garb that had indicated the other members of Oropher’s house.

The mire underfoot only deepened as the rain continued, and growing streams of blood and water flowed aimlessly from the piled corpses.  Galadhmir trudged through it doggedly, his stomach turning cold as he spied a touch of green and white beneath a crush of Orcs.

Rushing to it, he hauled aside the loathsome carcasses, forgetting his own injury as he discovered the face of his fellow.  It was Baranor, horribly disemboweled and already long dead.  Dozens of broken shafts were embedded in his chest, but his sword lay still in his hand.

Unable to do more at the moment, Galadhmir located Baranor’s fallen standard nearby and staked it in the ground beside his body as an indication for those others who would be looking for him.  He would be much mourned, but a thousand other griefs weighed upon Galadhmir’s heart.

He continued his morbid search with a greater sense of urgency.  Of the third of their army that had remained in reserve, many were combing the ruin with him, the others presumably managing the wounded as best they could.

There.  Something else distinctive caught his eye.  Dropping to his knees, Galadhmir felt the breath go out of him as he gently brushed aside the begrimed silver hair and revealed the lifeless face of his son.

He had known this would happen, but that made it no easier to bear.  He felt his heart breaking as never before as he gathered what remained of Celebrin up from the mud.  Suddenly all his strength was sapped, leaving him exhausted and sick, overwhelmed in the flood of his own grief.

It was a mere moment and yet an eternity before he felt a hand on his shoulder.  Linhir said nothing for a time, sharing in some measure his crushing sense of loss.  In many ways, Celebrin had belonged to all of them.

“I am truly sorry,” Linhir said at last, a tremor in his voice.

Galadhmir nodded, unable to reconcile his own raging emotions.  “I know very well that there was nothing I could have done,” he said, feeling his own bitter tears mingling with the rain on his face.  “Why, then, do I feel at fault?”

Linhir could give him no answer, could only kneel beside him and offer what poor solace misery could find in company.

A Guardsman approached them there, yet hesitated at a respectful distance.  “Lord Linhir,” he called.  The weary voice was that of Dorthaer.  Even he seemed overwhelmed by their disaster.  Bidden to report, he stood before Linhir and lay something in his hand.

It was Oropher’s mithril ring.

Linhir closed it in his fist, saying nothing.  That blow, too, had not come unexpectedly.  Each of them had come to love Oropher as a father, and they would mourn him as such.  He had been so vibrantly alive that morning.

“What of the others?” Linhir brought himself to ask.

“The Lords Luinlas and Anárion have been recovered alive,” Dorthaer told him.  “I regret the prince remains unaccounted for.”

Galadhmir moaned, still clutching the body of his son.  How much more could he endure?

“Thank you, Dorthaer,” Linhir dismissed him.  “Resume your search.”  He stood in silent thought for a long moment after the bloodied silvan commander left them.  Then he turned to share a pained look.  “I go to join him,” he said.

“Wait,” Galadhmir asked, finding somewhere in him the strength to tear himself away and leave Celebrin to the care of others.  His son was beyond all pain now.  “I shall go with you.”

The task before them was morbid and daunting, but they could not leave Thranduil undiscovered, be he alive or dead.

“He would have come from that rise.” Linhir observed, singling out the most likely portion of the battle plain.  They waded through mud and blood up to their ankles, working their way back along the corpse-strewn path of that ill-fated charge.  Some faces would never be recognized, completely crushed by trolls’ maces.  Many of the dead no longer had heads at all, stolen for grisly trophies.  All around them were Elves and Orcs tangled in the hideous embrace of death, but nowhere could they find any indication of their royal brother.

At last Linhir stooped down to drag up a barely recognizable shred of a royal Elvish standard.  They both looked about them anxiously, but it was Galadhmir who finally saw the bedraggled wolf clawing and whining plaintively at a black heap of Orcs.  They came to his aid at once, recognizing a filthy streak of golden hair among the maimed dead.

Beneath three fallen Orcs and one smothering black standard they found him. 

Galadhmir felt sick all over again.  Thranduil’s body was bent backward at an almost unnatural angle, stained black with Orcs’ blood and red with his own, motionless and deathly pale.  There was a gaping wound in his side, and at least five broken arrows.

Already several others had begun to congregate around them.  “Belain above,” a soldier gasped.  “Is he dead?”

Galadhmir was at his side.  Unbelievably, a pallid flutter of life remained in that tortured body, enough to bring tears of both relief and worry again to his eyes.  “He is alive,” he sighed, “but fading.  He cannot die now.  I will not let him!”

“Is his back broken?”

“Perhaps.  Handle him carefully.”

Linhir was standing over them, his arms crossed, pensively fingering the ring in his hand.  “Bear our lord the king back to the camp at once,” he said, pronouncing the words deliberately as though he were unused to them.

Indeed, the reality of it struck them unexpectedly.  Oropher was lost.  Thranduil, if he survived, would now be required to assume the throne of Eryn Galen.