Haladdin had never been to this part of the country before, so now he observed the daily life of the Shara-Teg Gorge with genuine interest. The mountain Trolls lived spartanly but conducted themselves with truly princely dignity; to an outsider, only their hospitality often went beyond any reasonable measure, acutely embarrassing Haladdin. At least now he understood where the amazing ambience of the Barad-Dur house of his classmate Kumai came from.
The Trolls have always lived together in large tight-knit families, and since the only way to put up a house big enough for thirty people on a steep slope is to build up, their abodes were thick-walled stone towers twenty to thirty feet high. The stonemasonry experience accumulated in the building of these miniature fortresses later made Troll expatriates into the leading city builders of Mordor. Their other line was metallurgy. First they perfected blacksmithing, making weapons cheap and therefore widely available; then they mastered working with iron-nickel alloys (most of the ores in the region were self-legated), and since then the swords worn by every local male over the age of twelve were the best in Middle Earth. Not surprisingly, the Trolls never knew any authority other than their own elders: only a total idiot will attack a Trollish tower and sacrifice half of the attacking force only to gain a dozen scrawny sheep as booty (or church tithe).
The Mordorian powers understood this well and therefore did nothing but recruit warriors here, which much flattered the Trolls. Later, though, when mining and metal refining became their main occupation, the sale of those commodities was hit with a stupendous tax, but the Trolls did not seem to care – their indifference to wealth and luxury was already legendary, along with their stubbornness. This also gave rise to a popular legend that the known Trolls were only a half of that people. The other half (mistakenly called ‘gnomes’ or ‘dwarves’ in the Western countries, in confusion with another mythical race – that of underground smiths) supposedly were wealth-crazy and spent all their lives in secret underground tunnels, searching for gold and gems; they were allegedly miserly, aggressive, treacherous – in other words, a mirror image of the real, above-ground Trolls. Be that as it may, the fact remains: the Trollish community gave Mordor many outstanding personalities, from generals and bladesmiths to scientists and preachers, but not a single merchant of note.
When the Western allies implementing ‘the final solution of the Mordorian problem’ have finished ‘mopping up’ the foothills and went to work on the Trolls in their Ash and Shadow Mountains gorges, they quickly discovered that fighting mountain men was rather different from collecting ears in Gorgoroth. The Trollish villages have been decimated or worse – thousands of men have perished in the march on Esgaroth and on the Field of Pelennor – but waging war in the confines of the mountains pretty much nullifies numerical advantages. The mountain dwellers always had the option to give battle in the narrowest points, where ten good warriors can hold back an entire army for hours, while catapults on the slopes above methodically pound the paralyzed enemy column. Having thrice buried large companies of the enemy under man-made avalanches in the gorges, the Trolls then expanded their operations to the foothills, so that the Easterlings and the Elves alike did not dare stir out of a few well-fortified outposts at night. In the meantime, people from the plains kept arriving at the mountain villages which were now guerilla bases – if the end is near, better to meet it armed and not alone.
Chapter 24
There were many intriguing personalities among those arriving in the Shara-Teg Gorge in those days. The doctor met one of them, a certain maestro Haddami, at Ivar’s headquarters, where the small parchment-faced Umbarian with inexpressibly sad eyes worked as a clerk, from time to time offering Ivar highly interesting ideas for reconnaissance operations. The maestro had been one of the country’s leading crooks; during the fall of Barad-Dur he was serving a five-year sentence there for a grandiose scam involving countersigned bank drafts. Being a financial ignoramus, Haladdin could not appreciate the technical details, but judging by the fact that the defrauded merchants (the heads of the three oldest trading firms of the capital) have expended a titanic effort to keep the prosecution out of court and thus out of the public eye, the scheme must have been very good indeed. With no opportunities to ply his trade in the ruined city, Haddami dug up his secreted gold and headed south towards his historical motherland, but the exigencies of war brought him to the guerillas instead of to Umbar.
The maestro was a fountainhead of assorted talents; having sorely missed learned conversation, he willingly demonstrated those to Haladdin. For example, he could perfectly imitate anyone’s handwriting, which was certainly very useful in his craft. Nor was this simple forgery of signatures; far from it. After studying a few pages of the doctor’s notes, Haddami wrote a meaningful text which Haladdin first thought to be his own – I must have written and forgotten it; now he had found it and is playing games with my mind…
It turned out to be simultaneously simpler and more complex. Haddami was a genius graphologist able to put together a complete psychological profile of an author and then morph into him, so that the texts he wrote in other people’s names were authentic, in a way. After the maestro told Haladdin everything he had learned about him from a few handwritten lines, the doctor experienced bewilderment liberally spiced with fear – this was real magic, and not benign, either. For a moment Haladdin was even sorely tempted to show the maestro some notes of Tangorn’s, although he clearly realized that this would have been even worse than simply snooping in someone’s private diary. No one has the right to know more about a person than he is willing to tell, and both friendship and love die together with the person’s right to privacy.
That was when he had a weird idea to submit Eloar’s letter (from the dead Elf’s possessions) to Haddami’s analysis. He and the baron went through its contents with a fine-tooth comb during their sojourn at Morgai, looking for any clues for entry into Lórien, but have found nothing useful. Now Haladdin wanted, for reasons unclear to himself, to have the Elf’s psychological portrait.
The results surprised him beyond belief. From the fine curlicues of runes, Haddami weaved a portrait of an exceptionally noble and likeable person, perhaps too dreamy, and open to the point of vulnerability. To Haladdin’s objections the graphologist insisted that his analysis of Eloar’s other notes on topography and logistics only confirmed his conclusions; there was no mistake.
Finally, Haladdin lost his patience. “If so, your entire method isn’t worth a damn!” he stated, and then described to the startled expert what he had seen in Teshgol, sparing him no grisly detail.
“Listen, doctor,” somewhat haggard Haddami said after a pause, “I still insist – it wasn’t him there, in that Teshgol of yours…” “What do you mean, it wasn’t him?! Perhaps he personally hadn’t raped an eight-year-old girl before slitting her throat, but he commanded the people who did!”
“No, no, Haladdin, that’s not at all what I mean! See, this is a deep, unimaginably deep (for us humans) split of personality. Imagine for a moment that you had to participate in something like Teshgol – just had to. You have a mother whom you love dearly; with the Elves, it can’t be otherwise, since children are very few and every member of society is truly invaluable. I suspect that you’d do everything possible to keep any knowledge of this nightmare from her, and knowing the Elves’ perceptiveness, simple lying or even withholding information would not be enough. This would require you to really turn into another person. Two totally different personalities in one creature – for internal and external consumption, so to speak. Do you understand me?”