The walls were expanding, or was it the light shifting inward? Parnard blinked hard to focus. The Men of Umbar were staring at him with a strange expectation on their faces as they faded into a seamy purple mist and the walls behind them flattened out. Was he rising into the air as silently as an owl? If he reached out, he could almost touch the ceiling with his fingers and climb out of his cell. His hand fumbled around in the empty air, then fell to the bedcover with a soft thump.
“It is done,” said the Sorceress Zairaphel to her waiting coterie of servants, and in triumph deposited the phial into the old-fashioned double-hinged basket she carried around everywhere. “Just a few drops brings the deepest of slumbers to Orc and Elf alike.”
Duzir squinted one eye at Parnard, then pinched him hard on the fleshy part of his forearm.
“Du-zir!” Zairaphel screeched at the dwarf, as if she herself had been pinched, and not on the forearm.
“I was only testing, Mistress! Your voice is more powerful than the rooster’s crow, and would wake not only the slumbering but the dead, too! - it is the most potent of bewitchments.”
“Mind your manners, fool, else I shall draw the very marrow out of your bones!”
“Begging your pardon, Lady Zairaphel,” interjected Balkumagan, "but what will we do with the other elf?”
“I have what I need. Captain Naraal may have whatever is left of her.”
Behind her back, Khahaynd saw Balkumagan frown, and she scowled too, her heart dry as dust. The thought of her brother Naraal lying with the red-haired elf woman galled her like hot iron, but it was Zairaphel’s bidding, and she would not gainsay the promise of King Azrazôr’s aunt to his Fleetmaster. Then a wicked idea came into her head, and she smiled. “You two, carry the High Lord to the running wagon,” she said to the two waiting Corsairs, and left the room, making an excuse that she needed to pack the few items she had brought.
Duzir rubbed his hands together. He would be driving the curved top wagon with black oil-cloth curtains tacked to its rails of mahogany wood studded with bronze nails. The wagon's interior was lined with green silk woven in a herringbone twill, and along its sides ran two long sleek black leather seats stuffed with coiled horsehair. The steel wheels attached to an ingeniously-wrought axle designed in the far-away land of Rhûn, crafted to withstand the roughest terrain. “I shall ready the horses,” he said, and went to find his whip of holly and mûmak hide. No ordinary horses were these two beasts born and bred in Angmar, fed potent herbs mixed with drake meat in a great bronze manger. One was named Shining, named not for his glossy black coat but the fey light in his wild eyes, and the other was named Terrible, because of his savage temper and propensity to kick and bite anyone who came near. Both wore leather collars studded with precious iridescent stones, fire opals, that shifted from blackish orange to a pale minty green, mined from a cavern in Far Harad.
Through a secret narrow mountain pass the wagon fled, ‘the Small Door,’ the Sorceress called it; then the foothills of the North Downs opened up before them, dotted all over with stunted trees; then the shrubs gave way to a few farms that were bounded with wooden fences. The road, although once a marvel of engineering, was in a sorry state of disrepair. They bounced and jostled around in the wagon, Duzir laughing each time the wheels hit a bump or dove through a pothole. Over the prone form of Parnard, who had been laid out on the bottom of the wagon with a cloak draped over him, Pharazagar remarked to his friend, “Our King will repair these roads, and see all made right again.” Balkumagan nodded; the things they had seen Zairaphel do were only a glimpse of greater things to come from Castamir’s heir. Khahaynd clung to the seat with both hands to keep from being pitched off, the black panther Zîr curled up on her feet. Every so often the Umbari sorceress cast a hopeful glance towards Balkumagan, but he seemed to eschew conversation.
Down the Greenway they flew, past wide green fields, and in the distance veered up high ivy-covered walls of a backwater village located at a crossroads that, once upon a time, had guided ancient traffic around a burgeoning settlement of the Northern Kingdom. When they neared the place Zairaphel muttered a few words under her breath; the two high-tailed black horses’ nostrils flared, and they picked up their hooves so that the wheels whirled even faster.
Barely a single soul marked their southward flight. An itinerant ragged minstrel who was making his drunken way to Bree-Town was nearly run over; and, as he jumped into the ditch, heard the dwarf’s mocking laughter as the wagon rattled past. Later that evening the minstrel’s story at the local tavern would afford a small amount of amusement and the near-death experience inspired the composition of a long ballad that the minstrel titled, ‘The Black Wain, Highway Horror’. It was not a very popular song.
By the time they neared the town of Herne the wagon's progress slowed to a crawl. The foam-flecked Angmarrim coursers panted, having lost most of their frenzy, their pale tongues lolling out of their mouths and steam rising from their sweating coats. No amount of whip–cracking would induce them to trot. “The horses will drop dead in their traces unless we stop to rest,” warned Duzir.
“Tsk!” In the blink of an eye, the Black Wain was now a merchant’s green grocer wagon pulled by two tired grey mares, and the dwarf a particularly ugly brindle bulldog seated on its box holding a small stick of holly in its mouth. The gate guards yelled out, wanting to know just what the mousy old woman wanted, for the wagon had appeared out of the night and startled them. The witch showed no trace of her former beauty, and as there was no time for cleanliness on the road, she was covered head-to-toe in road dust. Her hair was white and stood almost on end, and her big pale eyes glittered under the moonlight.
When she spoke next it was a high-pitched grating wheedle. A feeble old woman’s words never came with great authority, but in this case, the guards found themselves stepping back quickly, believing everything she said without question, even though it made no sense, they later admitted to each other. Mother Somebody, she was called (for later they could not remember the name she gave) and the guards were even so helpful as to point out a house where she could find lodging. Nothing would induce them to follow the wagon into the stables.
Zairaphel watched the two guards return to their posts, reflecting that since they grudged her nothing and were courteous had fully believed her enchantment, and sensing no trouble, went to the house and knocked on the door. She would pay a goodly sum; her small, wrinkled face even softened to a kindly charm when she said she wished to take possession of its quarters. The homeowner, with a troubled expression, cleared out immediately.
A soft pattering sound awoke Parnard deep in the night. Two brown moths flitted around an oil lamp that hung on a long rusty nail, their wings beating furiously against the glass to reach the light within. He rubbed his temples, for his head ached, and there was a sluggish sensation in his limbs. Then the horror of where he was came back to him with a start, but he saw no sign of his former cell in the mouldering house in the swamp. He lay there listless and bewildered in mind from the lingering effects of the sleeping draught. Eventually a deep voice spoke out from a dark corner, a voice that he recognized as the Corsair Balkumagan:
“Keep quiet, High Lord, or the gag goes back on, and you need unfettered jaws to break your fast.”
“Lofty speeches serve no purpose,” said Khahaynd. “Soon he will see bright new stars, nothing like he has ever known in this misty cold land. Resign yourself to your fate; the days ahead will be far more pleasant.”
“Far from friends and home you are, High Lord. There is no returning,” Pharazagar the Swordsman said from the place behind the headboard where he lurked.
Before Parnard could open his mouth and ask where he was, the Sorceress Zairaphel swept into the room, her long skirts rustling, followed by her dwarf servant. Once again she wore the false form of a beautiful young woman, but her eyes were just as hard and cruel as ever as she peered down at him.
“We are encouraging the High Lord to embrace his new life among us, Lady Zairaphel,” said Pharazagar, hoping this news would please her.
Duzir fixed a malicious glare on Parnard. He would spend the rest of his days in a glittering marble palace, nothing more than a gilt prison. “The elf will see things our way, in time,” he said.
“He would be a fool to do otherwise,” said Balkumagan with a bow. “Service to Lady Zairaphel is a reward in itself.”
“If I might ask,” ventured the Pharazagar the Daring, “why is the High Lord of the Noldor so important to our King?”
Zairaphel flashed a crooked smile at the swordsman. He was strong and good-looking, if not a fast thinker (which is how she liked her manservants) and she replied that the future of the King’s heir required the elf be brought under his Dominion to be inculcated into the Royal Household. Pharazagar glanced towards Parnard. He looked just as confused as he felt, but he decided that the less he knew of the matter the better.
“Ha ha!” Duzir twirled his mustache and said with another scornful laugh, “the stupid elf still does not know what we need from him!”
“He truly does not understand the honour you would bestow!” said Khahaynd.
“He does not need to understand,” snapped Zairaphel. “He must do as I say. Magan, stay here and guard him. Khahaynd, take your cat and go with Pharazagar to find what comforts can be had in town - but be wary.”
“Release me at once, repulsive hag!” Parnard burst out, his rage rekindled. “Soon my friends will come and you will all die! Die!”
“Silence!” shrieked the witch, and then she spoke a few words, guttural and so full of malice that the Wood-elf blanched and drew back. She began to croon softly. Parnard stoppered his ears and showed signs of the greatest discomfort, unable to utter a sound as he writhed, then lay still. His face was handsome in repose, when the hard lines of anger softened; and as the old crone contemplated his features and long, wavy hair, her machinations turned to Ivoriel, the quiet and obedient woman who would become his wife, and the many children she would bear, if the High Lord would but cooperate. If he remained unwilling, as she suspected he would, then she would ply him with such a potent love-drug that he would pine away and die if the maiden’s embraces were denied to him. Arnoldir, Ivoriel's black-hearted brother, had kept his part of the bargain, bringing his sister from Eastern Gondor, and now sheltered within a ruin located along the river awaiting their arrival. There a small boat hidden in the reeds would transport them to the abandoned port of Lond Daer where a waiting dromond would speed them across the Bay of Belfalas to the Haven of Umbar.
“You would renew our King’s bloodline? You would restore Númenórian blood to its former potency?” Balkumagan whispered.
“Long have I worked to this end. It is all for nothing if he will not love us, but hearken to my words: we will conquer him. Now bring that bandbox with the suit of clothes, Duzir. They will add little to his beauty, and he is more useful out of them than in them, but we will not be negligent and allow any to see the High Lord in this rude and disordered state that is far below his fortune.”
