Faramir Fiction Archive

The Moon Has Waned (PG-13)

Written by Erfan Starled

22 August 2010 | 17300 words

Chapter Seven

The strangeness did not wear away. Faramir, used to stone walls and overarching cliffs or green-tree’d hills stretching for miles around, had spent little time in South Gondor’s broken wastes. Near Harad, a land where endless plains of waving grasses two and three feet high unrolled before them, was truly foreign soil.

The year was yet young enough for the nights to fall cold and swift, and in the chill clarity of cloudless skies the stars arced unbroken from horizon to flat horizon in a way Faramir had never seen before. They seemed ten times in number, and brighter, close enough to touch. Like a spell cast over him, the great silence filled him with nightly wonder. He felt small, and Gondor far away.

Only Hajiri had ever strung as much as a sentence together intelligible to Faramir, yet the Southrons nonetheless treated him as one of them, save only for their watch on him and his weaponless state. Again and again, he reached to settle his quiver or bow in the habitual check of a dozen years and more of soldiering, only to find yet again the empty place, or wonder what was amiss and realize it was the lightness of his burdens — only his clothes and a water-skin, no more than that.

During the quiet days of travel, he went over the conversations Hajiri had held with him, aware of the distance they were covering and his failure to escape. Hajiri was ever-present in his mind, by day — and by night…

In the cool of the dark, Hajiri always stripped off his leather, and unwound the layers of cloth. With even the least part of a cup of water, he would ceremonially wash his face and neck and hands, and then brush out his hair, stroke after stroke until it fell gleaming from his bent head, a curly dark mass half way to his waist.

Faramir would glimpse this ritual if he turned unawares, glancing in the wrong direction. Then, as he sat quietly accepting food from the guards, Hajiri’s quiet rumble would rise and fall with the evening’s needs and in social pleasantries with his men, until sleep brought a different escape than Faramir looked for, and in its train another day.

They travelled on. Hajiri led them through wide plains dotted with sparse-scattered shrubs, while above hung birds on the wing unseen in Ithilien, hawks eyeing the ground for snakes, small birds and rabbit-kits, or for mice and their cousin voles. Fatter fowl tip-tipped along the ground: half-hidden quail and partridge, and others new to Faramir. He walked amid the tall grasses breathing the new smells of the hot plains, knowing they would in time give way to desert sands, broad and uncharted in Gondor’s records. That desert was a land Faramir would never find his way back across alone.

“You do know,” said Hajiri, quietly one night when no-one was near, “that where I come from, it is considered shameful for a lord or master to fail to command his subjects? You do realize my men will think I am weak if I do not subdue you?”

Faramir could feel him as if they touched but it was not so, only an illusion of his reactions. His pulse was raised, his skin alert, his senses all on edge as if poised in readiness.

“I have their loyalty to think of on this journey and my reputation to safeguard against the day we arrive home.” Hajiri was still talking, and he was close, too close. Faramir would have turned away but some strange mesmerized quietness was in him, conjured by the soft voice.

Hajiri placed leather-clad fingers under his chin. “No,” said Hajiri and those fingers tightened a little. “My men are watching.” His voice, for the first time, hardened briefly in a warning which Faramir took note of. Warily, he prepared to reject with force what came next, but Hajiri released him.

In low, intense tones, Hajiri continued, “Listen to me. My people fear Mordor’s Lord, and they know that he would abhor even the smallest band such as ours defying him. Some are worried he will not believe us taken up by Gondor’s forces. So I must be sure of leading my men strongly. What we are attempting, this desertion, is not a safe thing for our people though we live far to the south, far even for his overseers’ reach. In truth, they know little of our ways and we are more nomadic than settled. Still, there are those who will disapprove — at home, and even a few among my men, though I doubt any of them are truly sorry to get away from that place.”

He paused, and when he spoke again it was more slowly. “Your capture does much to help me. You make an excellent trophy of successful leadership. You are so very proud… a man of honour. We know how to value honour.” Gravely, Hajiri contemplated him, as if he were in very truth a valued symbol to admire.

Faramir set his lips in distaste, honest enough to know he was disturbed by more than a recounting of barbaric custom. Hajiri’s proximity, his voice, conjured a second rebellion of quite another kind.

“You, my friend, are a prince among your people. I would be a fool to let you go. By all our custom you are mine, mine to keep, to make my own, to sell, to gift in exchange for some power or favour. My men will not respect me if I do not make you mine. Yet you were not born to our ways. I can subdue you but the cost to you would come very high. I have a different proposition, one I suspect you will not dislike. One you should consider.”

Faramir let himself look into the dark eyes and held his ground like any soldier under unwelcome review. It was not hard, when pride and the civilisation of centuries revolted. He was no trophy, no chattel to be prized or traded, not for advantage and not for coin.

Unwillingly apprehensive, he listened for what came next. Hajiri’s pauses to consider him reassured Faramir not at all.

“We have another tradition, of fond foolishness to those we take to ourselves. Gifting them, even with their freedom, is an ancient custom among us…

“Lie with me — and my men will accept my reasons for releasing you. It will not be many days more, before we reach the great desert. From this side, you could make your way home alone, but from the south of the shifting sands — no. You would never survive a lone crossing.”

Faramir shook his head, not trusting his voice to remain calm. Outrage and desire made bedfellows which filled him with roiling conflict. Lying with a man did not dismay him of itself — when he remembered his younger years, he almost smiled to think what sort of state this suggestion would have reduced him to — but lying with the enemy, lying under coercion such as Hajiri’s was an enormity that even to contemplate it left Faramir wondering where Gondor’s famed pride had fled. Perhaps he was a changeling and no get of his father’s at all. It was dignity that kept him still while Hajiri talked, but what he felt was not dignified, what he felt, and what he wanted, were not dignified at all.

Hajiri extended his hand. Faramir already knew his touch. He already knew its effect on him. He shook his head again and stepped away.

“You can still change your mind,” rumbled Hajiri in his accented version of Gondor’s speech, and then murmured something else in his southern tongue. “I think you would not hate it. I believe I can promise you that…”

He refrained from running his gloved hand down Faramir’s arm, but even his shadow mime of the gesture as he let his hand fall to his side evoked the reaction Faramir had hoped to avoid. “You can submit to me but once, as man to man, and I will free you. Honour will be satisfied. You can take your chances to travel home when we reach the desert’s edge. It will be dangerous, but I will give you food and water.”

Faramir refused to look away but feared his eyes betrayed him.

“You look dismayed. I wonder if it is because you dislike the prospect — or because you are tempted?” Hajiri touched Faramir’s lip with his forefinger, butterfly light. The glove smelled of leather, and more faintly of spice and sweat. “You have until the sands lie before us to make your decision.”

Faramir stared into the darkness where Hajiri disappeared. Hajiri had seen his nature and had stripped away pretense. Faramir could choose, he could refuse, defy — but he doubted he could deny and be believed.

How strange that an offer of freedom should strike more dismay in him than any threat of captivity. What treason would he commit in agreeing to this? What would be the worst of his betrayals if he lay with this soft-voiced stranger with his keen eyes and his touch, soft as kidskin? Betrayal of Gondor? Of her laws? His office as a soldier? Or of himself?

Honesty was a hard habit to abandon. Hajiri knew what Faramir was, knew it and — most assuredly no stranger to the arts men used one on another — was enjoying that knowledge, and still he did not represent Faramir’s darkest fears.

Out here, his father would never learn what he did. Out here, Gondor felt far away. In night’s large dark, the idea came that perhaps the true betrayal he committed was to his own nature, in his long denial of it. While outer walls lay leagues behind, inner walls, never of his own making, were crumbling in the dust-dry heat.

No. What he feared the most was not Hajiri, but his own response.

End of Chapter Seven

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