Synopsis—Episode 1.06
(Part II )
As Adar hurries from the tavern and hails Waldreg, “I have a task for you” the first riders reach the village, white armor gleaming in the early morning light, white plumes streaming on the wind of their passage. Orcs come running out the tavern door into the street. And inside the tavern, the people of Tirharad—their fighting spirit restored—take on those of Adar’s orcs who remain.
Arondir and Theo enter the fray. An orc aims an arrow at Galadriel, but using some elvish trick riding she dodges the arrow and beheads the orc. Valandil and Ontamo are de-horsed, but fight on. On a nearby hillside, the Queen watches, attended by guards, and also by Isildur, who is dressed for battle rather than as a stable boy, but until now he has been held back. Miriel, seeing his impatience to enter the action, says, “Go!” and without pausing to ask questions, he races down the hill and enters the scene of battle, killing orcs as he goes. (Apparently while he was getting himself kicked out of the Horse Guards—which was before the Sea Guard, and probably another case of willful incompetence rather than lack of ability—he nevertheless picked up some skill and confidence with a blade in the process). Berek is wounded, a shallow cut, but when Isildur spots his father in danger he leaps the horse over about a dozen orcs to get to him. (This production does have excellent horses.) Meanwhile, Elendil is knocked from his mount and is about to be spitted by an orc, but it is Hal who saves him before Isildur can reach him. Father and son have a brief bonding moment in the midst of the battle.
And frankly, the whole thing is so chaotic it is hard for me to keep track of all the action. Lots of orcs die, probably a lot of humans do, too. Cavalry, of course, has a certain advantage, but I have to say that for cavalry who we never saw training as such—and who wouldn’t have had much time doing so in any case—the Númenóreans are doing surprisingly well. To be fair to the orcs, they weren’t expecting—and were not provided weapons or tactics to most efficiently take on—Men on horses. They came with the intention of crushing a small number of inexperienced villagers, and now there are five hundred mounted warriors to contend with.
Adar steals a horse to carry him away from the scene of battle, but is followed by a determined Galadriel (Arondir had warned her that the enemy commander is carrying an item he must not be allowed to escape with.) Her trick riding impresses Theo. Hal spots her chasing Adar, arms himself with a lance, and takes off, too. Adar’s chestnut is fast, and though Galadriel’s white horse is faster, Adar has a significant head-start and has some familiarity with the land thereabouts.
It is now that Galadriel speaks the words that so so many of us who loved the movies have been waiting for, “Noro lim!” (This was a mount provided her by the Númenóreans, and there is no reason why it should respond to commands in Sindarin elvish—but I admit I had already been shouting it myself—getting into the spirit of the thing—and the white horse does indeed “run swiftly,” and begin to gain ground. And, as an aside, the music during this chase reminded me very much of the LOTR soundtrack It's not quite Howard Shore, but it's close..)
She’s nearly got him, when Halbrand rides in from a different angle, and—displaying some trick riding of his own—slides down to one side, almost completely out of the saddle, and uses his lance to trip Adar’s mount. (The horse throws its rider, but almost immediately climbs to its feet, unharmed—so don’t worry on that account, horse-lovers.) Adar crawls toward the cloth-wrapped bundle which had slipped away when he fell, but just as he touches it, Hal skewers his hand with the blade of his spear.
“Do you remember me?” asks Hal, ominously.
There is a moment where Adar appears to consider him, before declaring, “No.”
It’s the wrong answer. Or maybe there is no right answer. Hal pulls out the spear from Adar’s hand, and prepares to skewer him in the throat, when Galadriel calls out, “Stop! We need him alive. I need him alive.”
“You don’t know what he did,” says Hal gruffly.
“Did I cause someone you love pain?” asks Adar. “A woman? Perhaps a child?”
“Eat your tongue,” hisses Galadriel. (Wonderful phrase. She seems to think he is taunting Hal, but maybe he really wants to know. You can never really tell with him.) “Halbrand, put it down! One cannot satisfy thirst by drinking sea water.”
Hal says nothing, and can only stand struggling whether to listen to the wisdom in her words (which I guess means you can’t cure the pangs of grief with hateful actions) and his impulse toward revenge.
Back in Tirharad, the battle is over, the Southlanders and Númenóreans were victorious. Many of the surviving orcs have been taken as prisoners and chained together, out of the sunlight. Buildings that suffered damage during the fighting are being repaired. Isildur and his friends discuss future plans to go orc-hunting in the mountains.
And in Waldreg’s barn, Adar is chained to a post, while Galadriel stands over him, about to start her interrogation. She begins, however, by telling him that when she was a child she heard stories of elves taken by Morgoth, and tortured and twisted and ruined. “You are one of them, are you not? The Morionder. The Sons of the Dark. The first orcs.”
So I guessed right about him. But the clues were there. Many others probably put them together, too.
“Uruk,” says Adar. “We prefer Uruk.”
“Even Moriondor take orders from a master,” she says, getting down to business. “And I seek yours. Where is Sauron?”
Adar only chuckles.
Galadriel’s face hardens. “Perhaps we should bring our prisoners into the sunlight?”
This is enough to get Adar talking again. “After Morgoth’s defeat, the one you call Sauron, devoted himself to healing Middle-earth, bringing its ruined lands together in perfect order.” (As Tolkien explains in his letters, this was indeed Sauron’s purpose, though it’s fulfillment was based on enslaving everyone to do Sauron’s will, as the quickest way to get everything done correctly. And one shudders to think what his idea of "perfect order" might be. This desire for control quickly transformed into a lust for power, and ultimately his turning back toward evil.) “He sought to craft a power, not of the flesh, but over the flesh. A power of the Unseen World.” (This, of course, is the world that the ringwraiths will come to inhabit.)
Adar explains how Sauron bid the orcs to follow him up to the far north. (This would be where Galadriel and her original band of warriors in Episode One found gruesome evidence of Sauron’s experiments in the dark arts.) But despite his efforts there, something was missing. “A shadow of dark knowledge, that kept itself hidden. No matter how much blood he spilt in its pursuit. For my part …” Adar smiles ruefully. “… I sacrificed enough of my children for his aspirations. I split him open. I killed Sauron.”
“I do not believe you,” snaps Galadriel. (Naturally she doesn’t. She was born and raised in Valinor, schooled by Valar and Maiar, and she knows that it isn’t that easy to kill a being such as Sauron. Plus, she probably doesn’t trust anything Adar says, just on principle. Though possibly Adar believes it himself.)
“You cannot believe an Uruk could do that which your entire army could not?”
“I cannot believe that you are this army’s only master!”
“My children have no master.”
“They are not children,” she retorts. “They are slaves.”
“But each one has a name. A heart. We are creations of The One, Master of the Secret Fire, the same as you. As worthy of the breath of life, and just as worthy of a home.” (I’d be a lot more sympathetic right now, if I hadn’t seen how willing he was to expend their lives himself.. And if he had tried to find them a home in one of the wide empty lands, instead of stealing one from the inoffensive Southlanders.) “Soon, this land will be ours. Then you will understand.”
Needless to state, Galadriel isn’t buying any of this. “No. Your kind was a mistake. Made in mockery.” And now she turns vicious. “And even if it takes me all of this age, I vow to eradicate every last one of you. But you shall be kept alive, so that one day, before I drive my dagger into your poisoned heart, I will whisper in your piked ear that all your offspring are dead, and the scourge of your kind ends with you.” (I admit that at this point, Galadriel is sounding absolutely hateful, but I’ll have more to say about this and a few other things after the synopsis.)
“It would seem I am not the only elf alive who has been transformed by darkness,” Adar replies. "Perhaps your search for Morgoth’s successor should have ended in your own mirror.”
(Ouch!)
She narrows her eyes. “Perhaps I shall begin by killing you, you slavering orc.” She draws her knife and is about to stab him, when she is stopped by Hal. She cuts Adar’s throat, but a shallow cut, just enough to hurt and to bleed a little, not enough to do actual harm. (He may look like a scarred elf, but he bleeds black like an orc.) Then she walks out of the barn.
“Who are you?” Adar asks Halbrand, just before Hal reaches the door. Hal pauses, but then follows Galadriel silently out of the barn.
And why, why, why, did they just leave this dangerous enemy chained to a post, without so much as a single man to watch him? The wise thing to do would have been to station several guards. To do otherwise strikes me as abominably careless.
Outside, Galadriel sits by the burbling stream below the bridge. (I’ve seen the bridge many times before, of course, but never heard the stream. Who knew it was so noisy?) Hal sits down beside her.
“Thank you,” she says, “for pulling me back.”
“It was you pulled me back first,” replies Hal.
Galadriel looks pensive. “Whatever it was he did to you, and whatever it was you did, be free of it.”
“I never believed I could be.” Hal pauses a moment. “Until today. Fighting at your side I felt … if I could just hold on to that feeling, keep it with me always, bind it to my very being, then I ….”
“I felt it, too,” she says. They look at each other, but before they can say more, footsteps approach and a voice says, “Lord Halbrand. The Queen Regent wishes to see you.”
(Some people I know think this was a romantic moment that was interrupted. But I agree with those who think they are simply acknowledging, a profound sense of companionship, and no more than that.)
Hal leaves, and Galadriel picks up the bundle that Adar dropped, and uses it to clean his blood from her knife. All this time, she seems not to be curious what the object actually is.
In Tirharad, long tables line the street, and Southlanders and Númenóreans sit down together to a feast. (I’m not sure where all this food comes from. The former were short on food, and the latter are far from their ships.) Bagpipes and other instruments play merrily in the background. Arondir and Bronwyn approach the Queen.
A smiling Miriel rises from her seat to greet them. Arondir bows and leaves the two women alone.
“My people are alive because of you,” says Bronwyn.
"As I understand it,” the Queen replies graciously, “they’re alive because of you.”
“A burden I never sought to take up.”
“Few of the finest leaders do,” says Miriel. “But if you would like some relief in carrying it, I may be able to help you.”
Hal, with impeccable timing arrives just then. “You called for me, Your Majesty.?
“Bronwyn, this is Lord Halbrand,” says the Queen.
The healer turns and immediately spots the pouch and medallion hanging from his belt. (And very quickly, too, seeing that it’s not anywhere near face level. Well, perhaps not so far down for her, considering she’s short, but still . . . this seems contrived.) She also immediately recognizes its meaning.
He bows his head courteously; she studies his face. “Is it true? Are you the king we were promised?”
Hal looks away for a moment, then back, before he admits, “Yes.” All around them, those who have heard this exchange begin to chatter with excitement.
Bronwyn looks ready to cry for joy. “All hail!”
“All hail,” the Queen Regent joins in, “to the true King of the Southlands!”
I must admit, I have wondered sometimes if Hal might be Theo’s missing father. There was no reason to suspect this, except that he is a Southlander and we've been trying to figure him out. A husband or lover who deserted her when she was carrying his child might well be the reason why Bronwyn left Hordern, where she had so many friends, and went to live in Tirharad, to escape the gossip. The boy looks nothing like Hal, of course, but Theo is such a copy of his mother, except for his height, I never thought we’d identify his father through any resemblance between them. But there was no sign of recognition between Hal and Bronwyn just now, so it seems like this can’t be it.
Tankards are lifted high as all the others join in. “All hail to the true King of the Southlands!”
Hal smiles broadly, his first genuine smile that we have seen, I think. The people all cheer.
“The Men of these lands have awaited this moment a long time,” says Arondir to Galadriel.
"Not nearly so long as the elves,” she replies, before walking away, leaving the bundle of cloth in his hands.
Seeing Theo sitting apart from the others, looking glum, Arondir sits down beside him. “Do not torment yourself. Many might have done the same in your place.”
“You don’t understand. It’s not just guilt I feel,” says the boy. “It’s loss. When it was in my hands I felt . . . powerful.”
“Then rid yourself of it, once and for all.” Arondir passes the bundle over. (Quite a show of trust!) “Give it to Númenor. To toss into the sea, on their voyage home.”
After a moment of weighing it in his hands, Theo seems to notice something amiss. He unwraps the bundle … and instead of the hilt, finds a small hand-axe, which someone has substituted in its place.
And speaking of which, we return to the rubble that was once the fortress and tower of Ostirith. There stands Waldreg, with the burning black sword in his hands, one of his arms dripping with blood. He plunges the sword (remember when Arondir said it was a key? remember when Adar told the old man, “I’ve a task for you?") into some sort of lock mechanism, an innocent-looking plaque just below the sculpture of the sword.
Waldreg turns the key, there is a click!, and things begin to happen.
Stones rumble and scrape. A dam near the fortress begins to break (I don’t remember seeing that this was a dam before; it just looked like a large stone wall. But the view we have of it now, it is certainly a dam.) and to pour water down into the river below—where the waters are already agitated. More and more water gushes out, and as the dam bursts apart, it becomes a raging torrent.
In a meadow outside the village, Isildur is trying to treat the cut on Berek’s side, but Berek won’t settle down and let him do it. The horse prances, he shakes his head, he whinnies.
“Easy, easy. It’s just a scratch. You’re okay.” (Errgh. Did Isildur really say, “okay”? Yes he did.) He continues to try to soothe the horse, but Berek isn’t having it.
Elendil—who has been silently looking on— comes to help him. “Careful.” Then he speaks softly to Berek. “Athae, no ídhui hí.” (So it appears that Númenórean horses do understand Sindarin, even if most of the people don’t.) Berek immediately calms down.
“How did you do that?” asks Isildur.
“It’s not his pain that is bothering him. But that of his rider.”
“I’m not in pain,” says Isildur with a frown. Berek snorts and tosses his head.
“When a horse of Westernness rides into battle,” explains Elendil (Westernesse is another name for Númenor), “he forms an unbreakable bond with the soldier he bears. In time they become as one, even knowing the innermost feelings in each other’s heart.”
“You know his feelings?” asks Isildur, with a disbelieving smile.
“No,” says his father. “He knows yours.”
“Where did you learn all this?”
“From your mother,” answers Elendil quitely. (So again with Isildur’s mother. There is definitely something we’re to learn about her, one of these episodes.)
Isildur swallows. “Think you could teach me?”
For answer Elendil only smiles, and gives his son a rough, manly hug.
This lovely scene of father/son harmony is interrupted as they catch the unexpected sound of a loud rumbling. Both look up, startled. A great spray of water bursts up through the ground, shattering a nearby farm building.
And in Tirharad, there are more explosions of water up and down the street. In their makeshift shelter, the orc prisoners start chanting, “Udûn. Eden.” In the barn, Adar hears the commotion. Breathing heavily, he puts his ear to the floorboards, and closes his eyes. He can hear the water racing through the tunnels now. And we can see it flowing through the trenches, which we now understand were built to serve as channels leading … somewhere.
So Arondir’s guess that the elves and other slaves were digging to find a weapon was completely wrong. The weapon was in Waldreg’s barn—as perhaps Adar knew all along—and the trenches serve another purpose entirely. When a character in this series —no matter how trustworthy that character—makes what looks like a good guess, we can't accept it for truth, because he could simply be wrong. The writers, on the other hand, love to mislead us.
Multiple channels feed into wider channels, swelling the flood. Smoky vapors begin to rise from the ground alongside. Then the channel goes underground, feeding the water into the hidden magma chamber of a volcano. (Guess which one?) The great stream of water hits the lava below with a crashing and hissing sound. Mount Doom explodes and erupts! Lava flows down the slopes. A great cloud of ash rises into the air and spreads out. All this can be seen from Tirharad, that’s how close the mountain is.
The Southlanders give way before this new terror. People are running and screaming. Fire explodes from the ground again and again. Flaming ash and burning stones fall everywhere. Elendil shouts, “The Queen” and rushes downhill to aid her. A bewildered Isildur calls for his horse, until something hits him in the head and drops him to the ground. The Queen, Hal, and others still among the strong and whole, assist the weak and the wounded, and guide the panicked away from the worst of the danger, but Galadriel stands with a blank look on her face. After all she has suffered in the past, after all her efforts in the present, she appears at last to be broken by this new horror. Flame breaks open the doors of the barn. Adar is no longer there; somehow, he has disappeared.
Something rumbles, as a great ball of fire bursts through the ground in front of Galadriel. Then all goes black.
(Part II )
As Adar hurries from the tavern and hails Waldreg, “I have a task for you” the first riders reach the village, white armor gleaming in the early morning light, white plumes streaming on the wind of their passage. Orcs come running out the tavern door into the street. And inside the tavern, the people of Tirharad—their fighting spirit restored—take on those of Adar’s orcs who remain.
Arondir and Theo enter the fray. An orc aims an arrow at Galadriel, but using some elvish trick riding she dodges the arrow and beheads the orc. Valandil and Ontamo are de-horsed, but fight on. On a nearby hillside, the Queen watches, attended by guards, and also by Isildur, who is dressed for battle rather than as a stable boy, but until now he has been held back. Miriel, seeing his impatience to enter the action, says, “Go!” and without pausing to ask questions, he races down the hill and enters the scene of battle, killing orcs as he goes. (Apparently while he was getting himself kicked out of the Horse Guards—which was before the Sea Guard, and probably another case of willful incompetence rather than lack of ability—he nevertheless picked up some skill and confidence with a blade in the process). Berek is wounded, a shallow cut, but when Isildur spots his father in danger he leaps the horse over about a dozen orcs to get to him. (This production does have excellent horses.) Meanwhile, Elendil is knocked from his mount and is about to be spitted by an orc, but it is Hal who saves him before Isildur can reach him. Father and son have a brief bonding moment in the midst of the battle.
And frankly, the whole thing is so chaotic it is hard for me to keep track of all the action. Lots of orcs die, probably a lot of humans do, too. Cavalry, of course, has a certain advantage, but I have to say that for cavalry who we never saw training as such—and who wouldn’t have had much time doing so in any case—the Númenóreans are doing surprisingly well. To be fair to the orcs, they weren’t expecting—and were not provided weapons or tactics to most efficiently take on—Men on horses. They came with the intention of crushing a small number of inexperienced villagers, and now there are five hundred mounted warriors to contend with.
Adar steals a horse to carry him away from the scene of battle, but is followed by a determined Galadriel (Arondir had warned her that the enemy commander is carrying an item he must not be allowed to escape with.) Her trick riding impresses Theo. Hal spots her chasing Adar, arms himself with a lance, and takes off, too. Adar’s chestnut is fast, and though Galadriel’s white horse is faster, Adar has a significant head-start and has some familiarity with the land thereabouts.
It is now that Galadriel speaks the words that so so many of us who loved the movies have been waiting for, “Noro lim!” (This was a mount provided her by the Númenóreans, and there is no reason why it should respond to commands in Sindarin elvish—but I admit I had already been shouting it myself—getting into the spirit of the thing—and the white horse does indeed “run swiftly,” and begin to gain ground. And, as an aside, the music during this chase reminded me very much of the LOTR soundtrack It's not quite Howard Shore, but it's close..)
She’s nearly got him, when Halbrand rides in from a different angle, and—displaying some trick riding of his own—slides down to one side, almost completely out of the saddle, and uses his lance to trip Adar’s mount. (The horse throws its rider, but almost immediately climbs to its feet, unharmed—so don’t worry on that account, horse-lovers.) Adar crawls toward the cloth-wrapped bundle which had slipped away when he fell, but just as he touches it, Hal skewers his hand with the blade of his spear.
“Do you remember me?” asks Hal, ominously.
There is a moment where Adar appears to consider him, before declaring, “No.”
It’s the wrong answer. Or maybe there is no right answer. Hal pulls out the spear from Adar’s hand, and prepares to skewer him in the throat, when Galadriel calls out, “Stop! We need him alive. I need him alive.”
“You don’t know what he did,” says Hal gruffly.
“Did I cause someone you love pain?” asks Adar. “A woman? Perhaps a child?”
“Eat your tongue,” hisses Galadriel. (Wonderful phrase. She seems to think he is taunting Hal, but maybe he really wants to know. You can never really tell with him.) “Halbrand, put it down! One cannot satisfy thirst by drinking sea water.”
Hal says nothing, and can only stand struggling whether to listen to the wisdom in her words (which I guess means you can’t cure the pangs of grief with hateful actions) and his impulse toward revenge.
Back in Tirharad, the battle is over, the Southlanders and Númenóreans were victorious. Many of the surviving orcs have been taken as prisoners and chained together, out of the sunlight. Buildings that suffered damage during the fighting are being repaired. Isildur and his friends discuss future plans to go orc-hunting in the mountains.
And in Waldreg’s barn, Adar is chained to a post, while Galadriel stands over him, about to start her interrogation. She begins, however, by telling him that when she was a child she heard stories of elves taken by Morgoth, and tortured and twisted and ruined. “You are one of them, are you not? The Morionder. The Sons of the Dark. The first orcs.”
So I guessed right about him. But the clues were there. Many others probably put them together, too.
“Uruk,” says Adar. “We prefer Uruk.”
“Even Moriondor take orders from a master,” she says, getting down to business. “And I seek yours. Where is Sauron?”
Adar only chuckles.
Galadriel’s face hardens. “Perhaps we should bring our prisoners into the sunlight?”
This is enough to get Adar talking again. “After Morgoth’s defeat, the one you call Sauron, devoted himself to healing Middle-earth, bringing its ruined lands together in perfect order.” (As Tolkien explains in his letters, this was indeed Sauron’s purpose, though it’s fulfillment was based on enslaving everyone to do Sauron’s will, as the quickest way to get everything done correctly. And one shudders to think what his idea of "perfect order" might be. This desire for control quickly transformed into a lust for power, and ultimately his turning back toward evil.) “He sought to craft a power, not of the flesh, but over the flesh. A power of the Unseen World.” (This, of course, is the world that the ringwraiths will come to inhabit.)
Adar explains how Sauron bid the orcs to follow him up to the far north. (This would be where Galadriel and her original band of warriors in Episode One found gruesome evidence of Sauron’s experiments in the dark arts.) But despite his efforts there, something was missing. “A shadow of dark knowledge, that kept itself hidden. No matter how much blood he spilt in its pursuit. For my part …” Adar smiles ruefully. “… I sacrificed enough of my children for his aspirations. I split him open. I killed Sauron.”
“I do not believe you,” snaps Galadriel. (Naturally she doesn’t. She was born and raised in Valinor, schooled by Valar and Maiar, and she knows that it isn’t that easy to kill a being such as Sauron. Plus, she probably doesn’t trust anything Adar says, just on principle. Though possibly Adar believes it himself.)
“You cannot believe an Uruk could do that which your entire army could not?”
“I cannot believe that you are this army’s only master!”
“My children have no master.”
“They are not children,” she retorts. “They are slaves.”
“But each one has a name. A heart. We are creations of The One, Master of the Secret Fire, the same as you. As worthy of the breath of life, and just as worthy of a home.” (I’d be a lot more sympathetic right now, if I hadn’t seen how willing he was to expend their lives himself.. And if he had tried to find them a home in one of the wide empty lands, instead of stealing one from the inoffensive Southlanders.) “Soon, this land will be ours. Then you will understand.”
Needless to state, Galadriel isn’t buying any of this. “No. Your kind was a mistake. Made in mockery.” And now she turns vicious. “And even if it takes me all of this age, I vow to eradicate every last one of you. But you shall be kept alive, so that one day, before I drive my dagger into your poisoned heart, I will whisper in your piked ear that all your offspring are dead, and the scourge of your kind ends with you.” (I admit that at this point, Galadriel is sounding absolutely hateful, but I’ll have more to say about this and a few other things after the synopsis.)
“It would seem I am not the only elf alive who has been transformed by darkness,” Adar replies. "Perhaps your search for Morgoth’s successor should have ended in your own mirror.”
(Ouch!)
She narrows her eyes. “Perhaps I shall begin by killing you, you slavering orc.” She draws her knife and is about to stab him, when she is stopped by Hal. She cuts Adar’s throat, but a shallow cut, just enough to hurt and to bleed a little, not enough to do actual harm. (He may look like a scarred elf, but he bleeds black like an orc.) Then she walks out of the barn.
“Who are you?” Adar asks Halbrand, just before Hal reaches the door. Hal pauses, but then follows Galadriel silently out of the barn.
And why, why, why, did they just leave this dangerous enemy chained to a post, without so much as a single man to watch him? The wise thing to do would have been to station several guards. To do otherwise strikes me as abominably careless.
Outside, Galadriel sits by the burbling stream below the bridge. (I’ve seen the bridge many times before, of course, but never heard the stream. Who knew it was so noisy?) Hal sits down beside her.
“Thank you,” she says, “for pulling me back.”
“It was you pulled me back first,” replies Hal.
Galadriel looks pensive. “Whatever it was he did to you, and whatever it was you did, be free of it.”
“I never believed I could be.” Hal pauses a moment. “Until today. Fighting at your side I felt … if I could just hold on to that feeling, keep it with me always, bind it to my very being, then I ….”
“I felt it, too,” she says. They look at each other, but before they can say more, footsteps approach and a voice says, “Lord Halbrand. The Queen Regent wishes to see you.”
(Some people I know think this was a romantic moment that was interrupted. But I agree with those who think they are simply acknowledging, a profound sense of companionship, and no more than that.)
Hal leaves, and Galadriel picks up the bundle that Adar dropped, and uses it to clean his blood from her knife. All this time, she seems not to be curious what the object actually is.
In Tirharad, long tables line the street, and Southlanders and Númenóreans sit down together to a feast. (I’m not sure where all this food comes from. The former were short on food, and the latter are far from their ships.) Bagpipes and other instruments play merrily in the background. Arondir and Bronwyn approach the Queen.
A smiling Miriel rises from her seat to greet them. Arondir bows and leaves the two women alone.
“My people are alive because of you,” says Bronwyn.
"As I understand it,” the Queen replies graciously, “they’re alive because of you.”
“A burden I never sought to take up.”
“Few of the finest leaders do,” says Miriel. “But if you would like some relief in carrying it, I may be able to help you.”
Hal, with impeccable timing arrives just then. “You called for me, Your Majesty.?
“Bronwyn, this is Lord Halbrand,” says the Queen.
The healer turns and immediately spots the pouch and medallion hanging from his belt. (And very quickly, too, seeing that it’s not anywhere near face level. Well, perhaps not so far down for her, considering she’s short, but still . . . this seems contrived.) She also immediately recognizes its meaning.
He bows his head courteously; she studies his face. “Is it true? Are you the king we were promised?”
Hal looks away for a moment, then back, before he admits, “Yes.” All around them, those who have heard this exchange begin to chatter with excitement.
Bronwyn looks ready to cry for joy. “All hail!”
“All hail,” the Queen Regent joins in, “to the true King of the Southlands!”
I must admit, I have wondered sometimes if Hal might be Theo’s missing father. There was no reason to suspect this, except that he is a Southlander and we've been trying to figure him out. A husband or lover who deserted her when she was carrying his child might well be the reason why Bronwyn left Hordern, where she had so many friends, and went to live in Tirharad, to escape the gossip. The boy looks nothing like Hal, of course, but Theo is such a copy of his mother, except for his height, I never thought we’d identify his father through any resemblance between them. But there was no sign of recognition between Hal and Bronwyn just now, so it seems like this can’t be it.
Tankards are lifted high as all the others join in. “All hail to the true King of the Southlands!”
Hal smiles broadly, his first genuine smile that we have seen, I think. The people all cheer.
“The Men of these lands have awaited this moment a long time,” says Arondir to Galadriel.
"Not nearly so long as the elves,” she replies, before walking away, leaving the bundle of cloth in his hands.
Seeing Theo sitting apart from the others, looking glum, Arondir sits down beside him. “Do not torment yourself. Many might have done the same in your place.”
“You don’t understand. It’s not just guilt I feel,” says the boy. “It’s loss. When it was in my hands I felt . . . powerful.”
“Then rid yourself of it, once and for all.” Arondir passes the bundle over. (Quite a show of trust!) “Give it to Númenor. To toss into the sea, on their voyage home.”
After a moment of weighing it in his hands, Theo seems to notice something amiss. He unwraps the bundle … and instead of the hilt, finds a small hand-axe, which someone has substituted in its place.
And speaking of which, we return to the rubble that was once the fortress and tower of Ostirith. There stands Waldreg, with the burning black sword in his hands, one of his arms dripping with blood. He plunges the sword (remember when Arondir said it was a key? remember when Adar told the old man, “I’ve a task for you?") into some sort of lock mechanism, an innocent-looking plaque just below the sculpture of the sword.
Waldreg turns the key, there is a click!, and things begin to happen.
Stones rumble and scrape. A dam near the fortress begins to break (I don’t remember seeing that this was a dam before; it just looked like a large stone wall. But the view we have of it now, it is certainly a dam.) and to pour water down into the river below—where the waters are already agitated. More and more water gushes out, and as the dam bursts apart, it becomes a raging torrent.
In a meadow outside the village, Isildur is trying to treat the cut on Berek’s side, but Berek won’t settle down and let him do it. The horse prances, he shakes his head, he whinnies.
“Easy, easy. It’s just a scratch. You’re okay.” (Errgh. Did Isildur really say, “okay”? Yes he did.) He continues to try to soothe the horse, but Berek isn’t having it.
Elendil—who has been silently looking on— comes to help him. “Careful.” Then he speaks softly to Berek. “Athae, no ídhui hí.” (So it appears that Númenórean horses do understand Sindarin, even if most of the people don’t.) Berek immediately calms down.
“How did you do that?” asks Isildur.
“It’s not his pain that is bothering him. But that of his rider.”
“I’m not in pain,” says Isildur with a frown. Berek snorts and tosses his head.
“When a horse of Westernness rides into battle,” explains Elendil (Westernesse is another name for Númenor), “he forms an unbreakable bond with the soldier he bears. In time they become as one, even knowing the innermost feelings in each other’s heart.”
“You know his feelings?” asks Isildur, with a disbelieving smile.
“No,” says his father. “He knows yours.”
“Where did you learn all this?”
“From your mother,” answers Elendil quitely. (So again with Isildur’s mother. There is definitely something we’re to learn about her, one of these episodes.)
Isildur swallows. “Think you could teach me?”
For answer Elendil only smiles, and gives his son a rough, manly hug.
This lovely scene of father/son harmony is interrupted as they catch the unexpected sound of a loud rumbling. Both look up, startled. A great spray of water bursts up through the ground, shattering a nearby farm building.
And in Tirharad, there are more explosions of water up and down the street. In their makeshift shelter, the orc prisoners start chanting, “Udûn. Eden.” In the barn, Adar hears the commotion. Breathing heavily, he puts his ear to the floorboards, and closes his eyes. He can hear the water racing through the tunnels now. And we can see it flowing through the trenches, which we now understand were built to serve as channels leading … somewhere.
So Arondir’s guess that the elves and other slaves were digging to find a weapon was completely wrong. The weapon was in Waldreg’s barn—as perhaps Adar knew all along—and the trenches serve another purpose entirely. When a character in this series —no matter how trustworthy that character—makes what looks like a good guess, we can't accept it for truth, because he could simply be wrong. The writers, on the other hand, love to mislead us.
Multiple channels feed into wider channels, swelling the flood. Smoky vapors begin to rise from the ground alongside. Then the channel goes underground, feeding the water into the hidden magma chamber of a volcano. (Guess which one?) The great stream of water hits the lava below with a crashing and hissing sound. Mount Doom explodes and erupts! Lava flows down the slopes. A great cloud of ash rises into the air and spreads out. All this can be seen from Tirharad, that’s how close the mountain is.
The Southlanders give way before this new terror. People are running and screaming. Fire explodes from the ground again and again. Flaming ash and burning stones fall everywhere. Elendil shouts, “The Queen” and rushes downhill to aid her. A bewildered Isildur calls for his horse, until something hits him in the head and drops him to the ground. The Queen, Hal, and others still among the strong and whole, assist the weak and the wounded, and guide the panicked away from the worst of the danger, but Galadriel stands with a blank look on her face. After all she has suffered in the past, after all her efforts in the present, she appears at last to be broken by this new horror. Flame breaks open the doors of the barn. Adar is no longer there; somehow, he has disappeared.
Something rumbles, as a great ball of fire bursts through the ground in front of Galadriel. Then all goes black.
