Delioron had a bathtub filled with hot water delivered in his room and soaked there for a long time. He shaved his stubble with a sharp razor, but still he couldn’t shake the restlessness out of his body. Finally he went down to the common room. He ordered wine and the comically named barman – Barliman – must have softened up to him by then, because this time he got what he wanted without grumbling. It was late in the evening, but the tavern was still crowded and everyone was full of that hearty good-fellowship the Prancing Pony was famous for. Delioron sipped his wine at a secluded table by a wall and closed his eyes, letting his mind wander back in time and distance, into that miraculous, distant land far to the southeast. Rhûn…
”Delioron? Loremaster Delioron? Can it really be you?”
For a moment he thought he had imagined the voice, a melodic female voice speaking Sindarin in that familiar Minas Tirith accent, a distant memory from the time when he really had been Loremaster Delioron of the Houses of Lore of Minas Tirith, a promising historian and scholar with a bright future still ahead of him. He blinked and turned his gaze upon the raven-haired pretty young woman dressed in Gondorian-made traveling garbs standing next to his table. It took him a couple of seconds to realize that the apparition indeed was real and not something his troubled mind had just conjured up.
”Excuse me?” he asked, trying to figure out who the woman was and what her presence in Bree meant.
”It is you!” she marveled, gave a delightful little laugh and pulled herself a chair next to Delioron. As she sat down he noticed that she wasn’t quite as young as he had first thought. Slight lines of age in the corners of her eyes and mouth betrayed her age to be over thirty, perhaps in her mid-thirties, but still quite beautiful. ”You don’t probably remember me, but I was your student – well, one of them, a long time ago. Alas, it must have been fifteen years ago at least!”
Delioron stared at the woman and attempted a smile that felt false and frozen on his face. He didn’t remember the girl, not this one specifically, but he remembered the students now. He had been unusually young to hold the title of Loremaster, still in his late twenties, and he must have cut a handsome figure in the eyes of many a female scholar who had flocked around him, listening to his dry and arrogant lectures with adoring eyes. All of them had been young, almost all attractive and many had developed a crush on the young, reclusive and mysterious Loremaster Delioron. Many of them had cherished hopes of attracting his romantic interest, perhaps marry and start a family with the revered historian. But in those days Delioron had been so cocky and conceited, so singularly interested in himself that he had not even noticed.
How foolish had that younger version of himself been, he now thought. Nowadays he often wondered how different his life would have turned out had he not entertained such high ideas about himself and his own importance, if he had reciprocated the romantic advances of any of those girls – maybe the one sitting next to him right now? Perhaps he would live a simple but prosperous senior scholar’s life in Minas Tirith. Perhaps he would be the Warden of the Houses of Lore by now. Perhaps he would be married and have children. Instead of what he had – this empty life of shadows and secrets, lies and petty murders.
Delioron’s smile softened a little, but it still seemed somewhat clumsy, a smile of someone who wasn’t used to smiling. ”Of course, I remember now”, he lied. ”It was, wait a minute…”
”Elwil”, she reminded, with a hint of reproof glimmering in her blue eyes. Then the expression softened and she laughed again. ”But I really can’t blame you for not remembering. There were so many of us, all flocking around you like hens! You know, I had a little crush on you back then. You were so enthusiastic, so passionate in the way you spoke about history and Rhûn! It was very inspiring to listen. In fact I think it was you who inspired me to choose the life of a scholar in the first place.”
Delioron blinked, taken aback by the remorseless barrage of flattery by this ghost from his past life, a book long since closed and abandoned. It touched something in his frozen heart, stirred up emotions he had buried long ago.
”Elwil”, he repeated clumsily. ”Elwil… what are you doing here in Bree, Elwil?”
”I want to write a book about hobbits and their history”, she explained. ”You have met them, haven’t you? I want to visit the Brandy Hall in Buckland, the Great Smials, the Undertowers and the Mathom-house in Michel Delving, to read their books and to write an extensive study about the hobbits, their history and their culture. Such a treatise would be of immense importance to the Houses of Lore about this fascinating race of which so little is know in Gondor, don’t you think?”
”Oh”, he said. ”Sounds… grand.” I sound like a complete idiot. There was something almost frightening about Elwil, in her passion and intensity, which he found attractive. It reminded him of the way he himself must have been fifteen years ago, when he had allegedly inspired this woman to become a historian. He felt proud, but suddenly he wished she would stop talking and just sit there quietly with him in the darkness, surrounded by those old memories about Minas Tirith, Rhûn and being young. Suddenly he wished he could go back there now and choose a different path for himself.
”And what are you doing here, Loremaster Delioron?” Elwil wanted to know.
”Just Delioron, please”, he said. ”I forfeited the title of Loremaster when I stopped lecturing in Minas Tirith years ago. I have spent a few months buried in the Scholar’s Stair Archives here in Bree. There is a lot of lore there that is still unknown in Gondor.”
”It is so good to see you again, Delioron, after all these years”, Elwil said. There was so much warmth in her words that it made him feel uneasy.
”You too, Elwil. I am happy to see a friend.”
Elwil grabbed his hand impulsively and held on to it, and Delioron was glad that she didn’t let go.
”You sound different now, Delioron, somehow less… self-confident?” Elwil chuckled. ”I think I prefer you this way, you were always so poised and cocky back then, I mean it was attractive but maddening at the same time. You were so passionate but also so guarded. I would have loved to know how to get past those walls. You’re still guarded, but easier to talk to now. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be saying these things to you. But, Delioron… what happened to you? I remember how you told us you had been selected to conduct a special mission for the Steward, that you would get the rare opportunity to see Rhûn in your own eyes, rather than just read about it from books. You were so excited… and then one day you left, and we never heard from you again. I honestly thought you had died. I’m glad you are not, but… what happened?”
That was a very good question, but he couldn’t tell much about it to Elwil. He remembered the day he had been summoned to the office of the Warden of the Green to discuss ’matters of great importance to the Kingdom’. It wasn’t Parthadan back then, it was his predecessor, but Delioron had forgotten his name. ’We know of your great knowledge in the languages, history and geography of the area known as Rhûn’, had been the little man’s first words to him. ’How would you like an opportunity to see it with your own eyes?’
How would he like it? It had been his secret dream for as long as he could remember, but actually visiting there would have been impossible for most Gondorians, for Rhûn was under Sauron’s sphere of influence for the most part. But there was trouble brewing in a former Gondorian province of Dor-Rhûnen, now known as the Kingdom of Narimanush and ruled by King Seddîd of the Jhangovar tribe. The Jhangovars were by no means friends of Gondor, but King Seddîd, who ruled from his palace in the great capital of Kravod, also had an enmity with the Great Khanate and refused to swear allegiance to the Lôke-Khan Zôr Bozorganush. Proud and stubborn, King Seddîd would never swear allegiance to Gondor either, but Denethor had seen an opportunity for Gondor to bring Narimanush back to the side of the Free Peoples – or at the very least, prevent the Kingdom from falling permanently under Sauron’s sway. Delioron had been selected – if he accepted the duty – to be sent to Seddîd’s court as a special envoy from Gondor with the authority to negotiate in behalf of Denethor about Gondor’s aid and support to Seddîd.
Delioron had been all too eager to accept the mission. He had travelled to Kravod and spent a year in Seddîd’s court, spending all his free time getting acquainted with the city of Kravod and the Jhangovar people, their culture and history. It had been the best year in Delioron’s life. All that had ended abruptly when kazars Tiglin, Ulurth and Ogadei had organized a bloody coup to replace Seddîd with Hûz III, a supporter of the Lôke-Khan. Seddîd and a lot of his supporters died in the hands of Tiglin’s soldiers, and those who survived were forced to flee the city, Delioron among them. They settled into the mountains near Kravod and for the next three years Delioron lived with them, as part of the rebellious movement to overthrow Hûz III and restore the independence of the realm of Narimanush to the Jhangovars.
But the rebellion was doomed to failure, and finally the last rebels were hunted down and killed by the armies of Kravod. Delioron managed to escape capture and death only barely and was forced to return back to Gondor, the marvelous realms of Rhûn now forever closed to him.
They didn’t know what to do with him at first. Parthadan had replaced the old Warden of the Green, and everyone had presumed Delioron had died three years earlier with King Seddîd. Years of war and rebellion had chipped away Delioron’s soul until all that remained from his heart was a blackened, sharp-edged piece of cold marble. Returning to his old profession as a Loremaster in the Houses of Lore was out of the question, but Gondor and Parthadan still had use for someone with his past, knowledge and skills. They made him swear an oath of secrecy, for nothing of the deeds he had committed in Kravod and Narimanush on Denethor’s behalf could be revealed to the general public in Gondor, and awarded him with a prestigious house in the Cape of Belfalas and enough money to set him up for life – for ’commendable services for the Kingdom of Gondor’. And then they had used him, again and again as years went by. They would continue using him until he was dead or too old to perform any more ’commendable services’ for Parthadan and Gondor. Until ha was used up.
”Nothing special”, he responded to Elwil. ”The work didn’t turn up to be quite so exciting I had thought. In fact I never got any closer to Rhûn than Walstow in Eastern Rohan. I spent there a couple of years waiting for the permit that never came, and after that I just didn’t feel like going back home anymore. Mostly I’ve been just walking the Middle-Earth all these years, going from place to place, settling down somewhere for sometimes a month, sometimes a year, studying history. Perhaps one day I will return to Minas Tirith and write a chronicle about all the things that I’ve learned.”
”And you still have your passion for history!” Elwil exclaimed enthusiastically. ”I wish I had your passion and courage, courage to love history so much I could just abandon everything else.”
It made him feel miserable. All of his passion had died years ago, replaced by lies and deceit.
”Don’t you?” he was forced to say. ”If you don’t think so, then what are you doing here, so far from home? Just like me.”
She looked at him and something warm flickered in the bottom of her bright blue eyes.
”Did you ever marry, Delioron?”
”No”, he said with a wry smile. ”I’m married to my work.” Some truth there for a change, he thought bitterly. ”How about you, Elwil?”
”No”, she said, glancing away for the briefest of moments. Not anymore, Delioron interpreted the gesture. ”I’m not married.” She squeezed his hand a little harder. ”I am glad that you are not married either.”
Delioron couldn’t say anything. His throat was suddenly dry. He felt like he was drowning in those big blue eyes.
”Do you need a written invitation or something?” Elwil teased. ”I’m not some naive and innocent teenager anymore, if you’re afraid of taking advantage of me. I’m a grown woman and know what I’m doing.”
”I’m sorry”, Delioron said. ”I have lived alone for so long that I seem to have lost my gift for small talk. Or seduction.”
”Then say nothing more.”
And he didn’t. He stood up and pulled Elwil from her chair. Holding hands they walked across the common room and retreated into his room. And for a short while he was able to forget his fear, his longing and his loneliness. Perhaps it was the same for her.
