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ancestor, which Faramir viewed with deep suspicion. The ancestors couldn’t all
have cloven a path up the slopes of Mount Doom and died at the very feet of the
Unnamed just as Elendil and Gil-galad came up to finish him. Very occasionally,
however, there was a variation that allowed you to glean something extra. He
had a notebook full of these gleanings; they didn’t amount to much, but he hoped
that one day Mithrandir would read them and find some key that he, Faramir,
didn’t know enough to recognise.
The chronicle before him now told just the same story as all the others, but
he rather liked it because some artist had decorated the margins with tiny
pictures. Whenever Elendil was mentioned he drew a little gold star, for Anárion
a golden sun, and for Isildur a silver moon. Where the text told about the deaths
of Elendil and Anárion the artist, or someone else, had gone over the star and the
sun with black paint, leaving the moon gleaming triumphant, but lonely. Round
the middle of the silver moon the artist, or somebody, had drawn a thin gold line.
Perhaps it was meant to mean that Isildur had taken on some of the splendour of
his dead father and brother; it was a nice idea. Underneath this moon there was a
band of the same thick black paint. Perhaps it represented Mount Doom, or
perhaps it was meant to represent Isildur’s sorrow.
Faramir sneezed and rubbed his nose; the page was dusty. There seemed
no more to be gleaned from it, and it was time he was going, or somebody would
certainly notice his absence. There was a guest coming to supper, someone
important from Rohan. That wasn’t unusual, but it would certainly mean more
trouble if Faramir was late. As he started to close the book the dust rained from
the page he’d been reading: not fine, grey dust but black flakes. The turning of
the stiff parchment leaf had cracked the band of black paint and it was coming
off.
There was no way he could restore the black paint, and since what
remained was obviously so loose that it was bound to come off in its turn, there
could be no harm in helping it a little… He scraped at it gently with a fingernail.
Underneath, he saw with sudden interest, was writing, in a different hand from
the copyist’s, and in Quenya. A crabbed hand, using a lot of contractions –
difficult to decipher, but not impossible, even in this light, if Mithrandir had
taught you.
And so Srn lay dead – he shivered; normally that name was never written, in
however contracted a form – and frm his hnd Ildr…Isildur, obviously. Isildur
what? Maddeningly, it was a word he didn’t know. He would have to find what
it meant before next time – find it in such a way that the person he asked had no
idea why he wanted to know. He was good at asking that sort of question;
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