Prologue

‘Now I see the beauty of distance. Now I understand astrologers.’ thought Castamir, the Steward of Gondor, the First Royal Doctor and the Prince of Ithilien, as he looked over moonlit forests and plains of his homeland from Minas Elen. ‘Not a sign of plague seen from here. Not one corpse seen amidst trees and grass. Not one purple stain in the silvery green. One could almost think that Kingdom is in its peak bloom.’ He wiped tears away from his eyes, not sure if they were tears of joy or sorrow, for the children would be here soon, and he could not show that anything was wrong, not till morning. Although two other tasks awaited him that night, more important than almost anything he had ever done, right now, to regain composure in front of his pupils and seem like nothing had happened seemed to him to be the hardest quest of his life.
And just as he managed to put his usual tranquil expression of a patient teacher, the children entered in their typical style. The crown prince Valacar bursted in with bravado as he were to be crowned here and now in this place, while the princess Berúthiel stopped at the threshold and gazed in wonder at the arched blue-and-silver ceiling painted with stars that were slowly moving and changing while lines between them revealed patterns of constellations. Castamir smiled at Berúthiel. “Fascinating, isn’t it?” The princess nodded. “I knew you would like it, while your mate would fail to even notice it.”
“That’s… the last design of Master Elrond, isn’t it?” Berúthiel asked. “His gift to Steward Faramir when he founded the University of Elrond---”
“Wait, the University of Elrond was not founded by Elrond?” Valacar asked, puzzled.
Castamir sighed. “It would be in bad taste to name a university after yourself, something that would reveal much hubris, not something Master Elrond is especially known for, don’t you think?” Valacar squinted his eyes, as if he was thinking about it, while Berúthiel said “You know Valacar would do exactly that, don’t you.” Castamir resignedly smiled and continued.
“No, Valacar, it was not. It was founded by Faramir, the First Steward of Reunited Kingdom and the brother of your favorite hero Boromir. It was named Elrond to both honor the greatest Elven loremaster and to characterize it as a place, since Elrond means Star Vault in Sindarin and as you will soon see, there is hardly a better place in Middle-Earth to observe stars. That is why we are here for our astrological lessons.
But in a way, it was truly founded by Elrond, for it is here where most of the books and scrolls from Rivendell ended up and indeed the founding act was Faramir’s organization of Rivendell’s Library after he built this place for it here in Emyn Arnen. But now come on, sit down, it is time to start our lesson.”
As children sat down, Castamir walked to the side and pulled a lever on the wall. The arched ceiling began receding into walls and revealed a glass dome pierced by telescopes, through which the night sky was clearly seen. Berúthiel let out a surprised sigh of amazement, and now even Valacar seemed impressed. Castamir waited till the whole Star Vault, the original which the moving image on the ceiling depicted, was uncovered, and began his lecture.
“Now, let us talk about star movements, so we know what we are going to observe in next lessons. Have you heard about Isengar?” Valacar resolutely shaked his head, and even Berúthiel, usually knowledgeable beyond the content of his lectures, seemed unsure.
“One of the greatest scholars of his generation. I had the opportunity to be his student, and although I have always been more interested in more... immediate matters, in matters of bones, flesh and blood, and stars were a bit out of my area of academic concern, still he was my most beloved teacher. A brilliant mind indeed, the sharpest I have ever known.
Before he came, we still depended on movements of stars as were observed by loremasters of Elves of old. But as was the case with everything after the Departure of Elves, the night sky changed as well. This was predicted by Master Elrond in his Kindled Composition, which I expect you to read in a simplified edition by the end of the month. He claimed that as long as Elves, beings created out of the same fabric as stars, walked under them in Middle Earth and looked and sang up, it was as if stars reciprocated their gaze and voice and so history and night skies mirrored each other, as if intertwining together as two voices in a musical harmony, and he substantiated it with an interpreted list of correlations between celestial patterns and historical events. This mutual mirroring is most clearly seen in one event, when it ceased to be a mere mirroring and became one identical event, both celestial and historical. May I ask what that could be?”
He looked to the West, to the brightest star crowning a mountain ridge on the horizon. The princess opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, Valacar blurted. “The Ascent of Eärendil.”
“Oh, so you can recall something other than wars and battles then!” Castamir teased.
“Well, I do not think I do. I do not think I would know it if it did not mark the beginning of the most epic war in the First Age.” the prince replied with a grin, followed by Castamir’s heartfelt laugh.
“Well, fair enough. The Ascent of Eärendil indeed. I might start making up wars that never happened just to teach you the rest of the history thoroughly.” Castamir grinned in reply.
Anyway, with the Dawn of Age of Men, which is, as interpreted by Master Elrond in Doom of Children, far more characterized by chance and arbitrariness, skies would also become, as if to say, more cacophonic, and would disentangle their movements from histories of Men. For hundreds of years our astrologers thought that this meant that we had to see what patterns of elven skies remained and were helpless to analyze the new movements, for they were random, but, as Isengar showed, there are patterns in cacophony as well, and was able to accurately lay out movements of the night skies in the Age of Men.”
“But Isengar was not only a scholar, he was, well, how shall I put it... a dreamer, a phantast. Some thought him a lunatic for this, but I have always had a soft spot for people who thought that yes, after all, there could be something new under the Sun and among the stars. And Isengar phantasized that there could be other people living on fringes of heavens, other civilizations, other kingdoms and realms.”
This apparently caught children’s attention and they began to listen intently. The Steward was pleased and gently smiled at them.
“This became an obsession of his, and he began to study it most passionately to the point that he even claimed that he opened a window where he could see another Earth and talked to a hobbit from the other world. Can you imagine that? A hobbit from the stars.”
“How did he look like? Was he any different? Did he have... a blue skin? Three eyes? Wings? Was that a hobbit who could fly between the stars...?” The princess’s imagination was sparkled.
“Did he have another Ring of Power, one I could use to...” the prince’s imagination joined but was abruptly stopped by Castamir.
“Do not even joke about that. Ever. But no,” he smiled again. “He did not have a blue skin nor wings. Nor blue wings, but he might have had blue eyes. And apparently and most otherwordly, such as no hobbit in Middle-Earth ever grew... he had a beard. And most intriguingly, he supposedly called himself a gnome, which is, in some of the earliest texts, a word that was used for Noldor.” Castamir smiled with a hint of nostalgia at the memory of his strange late conversations with his mentor. Kids seemed a bit disappointed.
“Most thought that he definitely went mad right then, since his window to the other world was never to be seen by anyone else, although his lectures on movements of stars were as excellent as they had ever been, and shortly thereafter he retired to his homeland, to the Shire. Even now, most students here at the Star Vault only know his astrological work, and not the bizarre cosmological theories of his. It is not a well-kept secret that we, scholars of Elrond, are unhealthily conscious of our reputation.”
“Did you think he went mad?” asked the young prince with a voice that mingled passionate interest and fear of another disappointment.
“Of course, I did. But I also hoped I was wrong... I... wanted to believe him. And he talked about it with the same force and conviction he talked about his other studies. So, who knows?” Castamir said, but his face betrayed a sudden pain, as he bitterly thought ‘I do know. I do know too well.’
‘And in times like these I finally appreciated value of matters so distant as stars, and the value of fantasies of other civilization.’ he continued in his inner monologue ‘For here I find consolation, under the unstained vault, here I can see with my own eyes that there are other worlds, civilized or uncivilized, that are untouched by Purple Plague, worlds strange and beautiful, so unlike immediate matters of bones, blood and flesh, so unlike streets of quarantined cities filled with rot and agonic cries that seemed to compose my world entirely of late.’
Now another pain joined in his body, a sudden heartache that finally broke his composure of a teacher who lectured his students as if nothing was going on. As if not only was the Kingdom ravaged by the greatest plague in the Fourth Age, but also the young prince’s father had not succumbed to it in the morning, without the kid even knowing that he was sick, as if he had not died in the way that is most tragic, on the threshold of hope when the cure might be nigh. Tomorrow, when terrible stains of sickness would be washed away from the king’s body and he would reclaim his royal visage in death, so the prince and his future queen would not have to see him in his plagued state, then he would tell them, not now.
“I am sorry, I am not feeling well. That would be all for today, my dears.” He said, fatigue and sorrow suddenly overflowing in his voice. “I need to rest. Go to your chambers and get a good sleep, we might tomorrow leave Elrond and go back to Minas Tirith for a while.” For a funeral and unwanted coronation, he left unspoken.
He gazed at stars for another hour, while reminiscing. “Hands of the King are the hands of the healer.” the late King Narmacil forcefully repeated the ancient saying. “My kingdom is dying by thousands while I sit comfortably on the throne. What kind of king that makes me? This is not something Elessar would do.” “But Elessar healed wounded, not sick. And wounds do not tend to wound other people.” Castamir replied then. But little good it did. Little good it did that he said that exactly by touch, by hands, is the Purple Plague transmitted, that if he went down to people, he was sure to become ill, and the Kingdom would not only lose thousands of its people, but the beloved King as well. But Narmacil was unyielding, and said, not without justification, that if he were not to come down among people to fight the plague, there would be no reason for him to stay beloved. And, to be fair to him and to his memory, the situation was desperate and there seemed to be no other way, and hope seemed just a futile word.
And the King succeeded as far as he could, for the ancient saying was still true. He indeed healed hundreds before he himself succumbed, though seeing him in his last moments, his face and body ravaged by purple stains and sores, crying in agony, he regretted that he did not listen to Castamir’s advice. But the roles were reversed now, and Castamir could not help but thinking that the King’s life was worth those hundreds he saved. Of course, he had no other choice now, for the moral decision he himself took followed the same lines.
For Castamir was working on a cure even before the king had decided to descend among his people, but he worked on the queerest crossroads of his lifelong research, connecting fields of knowledge as distant as South Harad from Withered Heath, in corners of thought he would have deemed impossible. If there was ever a sign of desperation, it was this very work, for it was the time when he, a Royal Doctor and one of the greatest physicians the Fourth Age had seen, was forced to see all his medical knowledge as futile and devised a plan more bizarre and far fetched than any of Isengar’s ideas. He never believed in the slightest that it would work. He was quite rationally convinced that he himself went completely mad as well and to crown his desperation, in his attempt to fight the plague in the field, he himself got infected. And then, in the last scream to the void, in the last attempt to clutch at straws… against oll knowledge of Nature, the straw bore fruits. The plan worked. And when it did work, Castamir had no choice but to accept it as a miracle. The most devious, twisted miracle, so unlike miracles of saints, and yet with the potential to help and save far more people than all of the saints ever did. He rolled up sleeve of his robe and looked at a purple sore on his forearm. It was smaller now. He still could not believe it. It really worked. Ecstatic joy of victory mingled in his soul with sorrow and heartache, taking him into the state of mind he had no word to describe. He looked at the stars for one last time, expressed a silent gratitude to them as he closed the ceiling, and went down to his laboratory in dungeons.
He reluctantly unlocked three locks of a big metal door, for in the middle of the room was the sight he dreaded, the sight he knew he would never get comfortable with. Three tables stood in the middle of the room. On the closest one laid a body of Narmacil, ravaged by the sickness. That was his second task of this night, to return to him the semblance of the kind and serene King he was, not the patient terrified of pain and imminent decease he became. ‘Oh, Death, you divine Gift, how truly sweet you are.’ Castamir thought bitterly. But it was the second body, more beautiful than anything he had seen before, laying on the middle table, that never failed to bring tears in Castamir’s eyes. He gazed into faded, extinct eyes, into the face that was pale and translucent like thin ice on a pool of spring rain water, and wept out loud. But it was no time to fully express grief, not yet, and slowly he moved to the third table, where the first task of the night awaited him. As he moved closer, an orc lying there let out a terrifying shriek and rattled chains with such a fierce strength that forced Castamir to instinctively take a step back.
“Shh, there, I am here to help.” Castamir said in a soothing voice and opened a flask prepared nearby, letting out a strong stench of alcohol. “Here, drink. You will feel better.” The orc turned his face to him and took a sip. Though the Steward managed to hide it, as much he would like not to, he could not help but feel a strong sense of disgust, looking at the face that was almost unrecognizable as one, at the saggy green and yellow skin overgrown by layers of purple like fungal disease growing on an already rotten tree, with one eye almost completely lost under a tumorous growth sprouting from the orc’s brow. “Do you trust me?” he asked. It was difficult to recognize the orc’s words, mumbled and lisped as they were, but he deciphered the confession of his unlikely patient claiming he had no other choice. “Good. Now listen and drink the whole flask. It is a liquor I brewed especially for you from quite ancient recipes I found at the Black Library, the recipes that were used in days of War of the Ring. Do not ask how many rules I broke and how many forbidden corners of the Library I visited to find them. Now, I do not know if you still brew it in the Far North or not, but I expect that it was brewed especially for your taste and, most importantly, to get you drunk, and you are sure going to need it. Well, I am going to need it as well. For this is going to hurt, going to hurt badly, and I need you drunk, for I cannot overpower you and for reasons obvious to both of us, you must remain my secret.” The orc nodded his head in understanding and continued drinking until he gulped the last drop of the flask. “Good. Now wait.”
Castamir moved to the table and took up a a glass tube with a thick hollow needle attached to it and filled it from the flask containing deep-sea blue liquid. “Now, time for the strangest experiment performed on the strangest patient of my life.” he mumbled, took a deep breath, silently moved behind the orc to meet with as little instinctual defense as possible, and with full force of his arms he pierced the orc’s thick vein with the needle and pumped the liquid in. The following shriek might have bursted one of Castamir’s eardrums, but as he covered his ears, the joy of a dreaded task successfully done overrode the pain, and once more, he felt a strange satisfaction. Now all he had to do was wait to see the result, and when the orc’s shriek faded into silence and the orc himself into unconsciousness, Castamir stood up, stopped bleeding from his ear and slowly moved to the table where the corpse of the king awaited. He would have never thought that embalming the corpse of his lifelong friend would one day quailify as a wanted rest.