"They say war is young men dying and old men talking," said Faramir, and the wind peeled his words thin across the field. "Well—I hope you are not talking but watching this, Father. Watch our courage shine across these fields like beacons of silver driving into the dark that comes for us all." He raised his sword so the men could see it, not the enemy. "And if this is to be our end, then let it be an end worth the telling. For Gondor!"
He stood in the stirrups and roared: "Charge!"
He put his heels to his horse and two hundred riders followed, then more: bright helms shining in the light of the dawn. His riders leaned low and pushed their mounts to his sides, forming a line, breath smoking in the cold morning air—and the line arrowed for the broken arc of Rammas Echor and the ruined spans of Osgiliath beyond. The far wall crawled with black figures. The nearer breaches seethed.
The world held its breath.
From the gaps and the parapets, a dark cloud rose—first a ripple, then a sheet—and the sky learned a new weather. The first arrows whispered past. The second wave hissed. The third came down like a short rain squall under a bright sun.
It was over in a heartbeat.
Horses stumbled mid‑stride and folded with a sound like tents collapsing. Men flipped from saddles as if snatched by invisible hands. A helm rang; a neck cracked. Feathers showed through mail where iron should have. A rider and his mount skidded together and did not part. Faramir himself took an arrow in the shoulder, another low in the side, and a third struck and drove him from the saddle. He still kept the sword in his fist without noticing it; then his fist forgot why and let go. The charge unraveled into wreckage—silver and bay tangled, spear hafts spinning uselessly, banners snapping once before they went dark.
Then Mordor's horn blew, low as a flat ugly note.
From the shattered gate of the Rammas poured the small ones, the goblin's, pale and grinning at honest work. They poured over the fallen the way water finds a hole. Knives tested throats. A hook behind a knee rolled a man to see if he had anything worth keeping. A goblin perched on Faramir's ribs and peered at the fletchings trembling in him, tapping them like a tinker examining rivets. Another leaned to his ear as if to hear orders; when none came, it laughed and opened him where the arrow had already shown the seam.
The banner beside him drooped into the mud and lay still.
High above the ruin, Gandalf watched from the wall‑walk of the first circle, chalk dust under his nails. The townsfolk who had peered over the merlons at the glittering beginning now drifted back from the edge, muttering prayers or merely breathing with relief at not seeing. The wizard shook his head once, then opened a thin notebook and wrote with a steady hand:
March 15, 3019 (Third Age).
The day Faramir died. The day a legless Steward lost the son he never wanted. Deduct: one fine commander; several villages' worth of oaths, rents, and sons; potential incomes, assorted. He paused for a second, then capped the charcoal, shut the book, and looked up toward the seventh circle where the Hall of the Kings sits like a thought the City tries not to think.
At the same time on the seventh Circle within the Tower Hall, (beneath the throne-steps).
The legless Steward of Gondor, Denethor had driven the servants out and dragged himself to a trestle set below the steps of the King's throne, where the high windows made cold squares on the flagstones.
His arms were knotted like ship rope from a lifetime of refusing help; now they flicked deftly from trencher to goblet to roast, the old man eating in a silence that sounded like satisfaction.
But he was not alone, and his eyes quickly slid to the shadow by the door that looks toward the Court of the Fountain, and found a small, unwilling shape.
"Did I not order this hall empty?" he said.
Peregrin Took—a halfling in black-laced mail with a White Tree stitched upon a chest too narrow for the device—stepped forward a pace and no more. "I was told to wait upon your lordship," he said, hands unsure of themselves.
Denethor lifted a tomato in fingers wet with grease and threw it lazily. It burst upon the halfling's cheek. "Then do not wait. Sing fool, sing me a song. If you must stand in my sight, pay for it."
Pippin swallowed. He stood where he was—too far—and began a walking-song, small as a kitchen lantern in that cavern of kings: "Upon the hearth the fire is red…" — "Home behind, world ahead…" — "through shadow to the edge of night…" The words were hedges and lanes and bed at journey's end, and they shook a little on the way out.
"Closer," Denethor said, not loud at all. Another tomato leapt and struck the halfling's shoulder. "I am old, and my house is wide. I will not hunt your whisper."
Pippin edged along the board until he could smell the roast and the wine. He sang again, voice trembling into steadiness because fear had taught it a skill. The tune made a small place in the air where grief hesitated to sit.
Denethor ate through it—strip, crack, grind—staring past the singer into distances that only he could see.
Then as the song neared its last turn. Denethor barked a laugh.
"You sing like a girl," he said, each word a neat little cut. "A kitchen tune for kitchen hearts. Will you lull wolves with that north of Bree?" He bit deep again—careless, greedy.
The sliver took the wrong road.
His breath hitched. Color bloomed and then blackened in his face. He snatched up the wine and drank as if the cup were rescue. The wine betrayed him; the shard set itself more cruelly. He struck the table; cups hopped; fat trembled. Then strength fled the seat: his legless body slid from the chair, spilled the basin, and the red went down in a slow bright sheet, pooling under him.
He began to crawl, clawing at the flags toward the little singer, his mouth working around a word that would not come. His hand opened and closed, beckoning—not to music, but to help.
Pippin did not understand.
He saw a great lord glaring and gesturing; he heard, underneath the choking, the last contempt: you sing like a girl. Fear obliged him in the only language he knew.
He sang on.
"Home behind… world ahead…" he whispered, desperate to be right by obeying. "Through shadow… to the edge of night…" His lips tried a smile and failed. Denethor's fingers found the hobbit's ankle and gripped once—and then loosened. The Steward's eyes glazed like cooling glass.
Pippin, shaking, finished the thread: "All shall… fade."
Silence answered, and the red wine crept wider.
Pippin felt panicked and cornered. He did not understand, was his singing really that boring that the steward fell asleep, so he began to think. He remembered home and happier times, and thus he seized a merrier air from the Shire to prove that he had obeyed; his voice leapt too bright in the black hall:
"Hey, ho—to the bottle I go,
to heal my heart and drown my woe…"
He did a frightened half‑jig, the soles of his small boots skidding in spilled wine. The Steward lay crooked, the wine‑lake lipping at his sleeve. Pippin flinched, then hurried his cheer:
"You can drink your fancy ales,
you can drink them by the flagon—
but the only brew for the brave and true…
comes from the Green Dragon!"
The doors burst. Black‑and‑silver men filled the threshold, and the sight that met them was madness: their lord fallen in a red flood, a tomato‑spattered half‑thing capering and caroling over him.
"By the City," one breathed. "The witch's whelp dances on the Steward."
"Seize him," said the Captain, Beregond son of Baranor, voice like a blade. They hit Pippin like iron. The halfling squealed, hands fluttering to his belt‑pouch—"Leaf, good leaf, please—" —the pouch spilled, pipe‑weed sticking in wine like hay in blood.
"Keep your rat‑herb," snarled Beregond. "Gondor judges on the height." He jerked his chin at the door that opened toward the White Tree. "Drag him."
Mail‑gloves closed on Pippin's arms. His small heels scraped the stone. And the hall—black pillars, stone kings, cold steps—watched without speaking as they hauled the singer away.
They dragged the halfling out through the inner door and along the short, echoing passage. Cold air cut the heat of the hall; banners snapped and hissed; the White Tree stood leafless and unmoved in its bed of pale stone. They hauled him past it—Pippin's small heels squealing on marble—toward the parapet where the world fell away in seven circles to the plain.
At the lip, Beregond son of Baranor raised a fist and the guards halted. The wind worried the hem of his black surcoat; his eyes never left the drop.
"Any last words, halfling?" he asked, almost conversational. "Speak—or let the gods hear them for you, not us."
Pippin's breath hitched. He jerked once against their grips, then suddenly flared with a tiny, hopeless anger that sounded like home. "Aye, I've got words," he snapped, voice climbing. "All you big folk with your big mouths and even bigger arse‑brains! All boots and bellies and drooping bosoms, and not an ear among you fit to hear a tune! Hairless legs also, like plucked chickens—in the Shire even our calves are handsomer!"
A few soldiers barked laughter; others just looked grim and tired, grateful for something punchable. "Hear that?" muttered one. "The ratling curses our women. Says they sag." "He'd know sag," another said. "He hangs off his own feet."
"Enough," Beregond said—without heat, without pity. "Let the height judge what we haven't time to weigh. Grip him."
They lifted. For a breath the whole City opened beneath the halfling like a map of all his mistakes. The plain smoked; ladders crawled; far below the gate looked like a coin left on the table of the world.
"Cast," said the Captain.
They flung him.
He spun once—small boots kicking at air that would not take his weight—and the wind tore the scream out of him and dashed it against the stone.
The fall took long enough for the City to notice. On the fifth circle a washerwoman cried out and blessed herself. On the third, two boys ran along a balustrade to follow the arc. On the first, a crowd already restless in siege‑weather looked up as the body arrived.
There was no heroism in it. Bone met flagstone with a noise the street had not heard before. The body folded in three places; metal snarled and bent; one small shoe spun off into a gutter as if eager to be first. Blood made up its mind at once, choosing every direction. The bladder, well‑timed and faithless, did what bladders do. A stink went up as if the day had found one more way to be honest.
Someone screamed, "A child!" and three more took it up. Mothers clutched at mouths. Boys craned their necks; hands pushed their heads down; no one wanted to look and everyone had to. A guard leaned on his spear and turned his face away because uniforms do not blush in Minas Tirith.
Gandalf came quick and long‑stride into the ring of silence.
"Calm down everyone, It is not a child," he said, voice level and tired as a millstone. "Merely my hobbit."
The sentence did its work. Shoulders loosened. A woman made a sound equal parts sob and laugh, ashamed of herself for feeling relief. Two men stepped back with the air of laborers realizing they'd rushed to the wrong wagon.
And Gandalf merely shook his head and said, "Not another one," his voice so soft that only the stone heard it. He crouched and laid two fingers to a neck that had already forgotten its tasks. The fingers came away spotted. He stood. "Back," he told the ring of people around. "Give him air he cannot use."
A warder—older than his mail—rounded on Gandalf, anger the only tool left that fit his hand. "Yours, is he?" he snarled. "Your hobbit, storm‑crow? Then the mess is yours as well. We've fines for fouling the King's road. Gold, wizard. Or clean it."
The tall old figure bent at once—two full heads above the guards and suddenly smaller than any of them. "Of course. I will see to it."
The sergeant smirked victory and turned away, pressing a sleeve to his nose.
Gandalf knelt, the height of him folding like a hinge, and let the clamor fade behind the thunder in his chest. Damn I lost another one. The words rose of their own accord, the same bitter words he had said a long time ago over the ash of Dale when Bilbo—General Baggins to his legion—had vanished in dragonfire and two thousand hobbit squares had melted like wax. Galadriel had laughed at them in Imladris before that march—adorable she had said, but what she meant was useless. He had sworn to prove her wrong that day. He had built his nation in the west from mills and ledgers, caravans and contracts, drilled legions and lockstep discipline; he had minted coin and made tools of iron and so much more, but he had paid for all of that greatly with grain and blood, for the Shire had plenty of that but no Iron, never any iron or any other mineral resources of note. And still, even after so many centuries of progress the small ones still died in handfuls and armfuls and he could never count them all, for their enemies were many, the dangers were great and so the losses were always high.
Then a rustle on the wind turned his head. By a sewer grate, a fat rat stood on her haunches, whiskers tasting the air, small rat children nosing at her flanks.
Gandalf spoke softly in an older tongue, the one that named small lives without contempt. Go, lady of gutters. Call your folk. Do your work. Leave the stones bare. Little eyes blinked. The rat ghosted away along the wall's seam. In a minute, then five, the court swarmed as if shadow had found needles—whiskers, paws, disciplined hunger. The city's tiny cleaners advanced in ranks more honest than armies. Pippin Took became meat and then nothing at all.
A runner stumbled up, breath burning, helm in his hands. "My lord—word from the Citadel. The Steward is dead."
Hearing the words, Gandalf nodded in understanding, took out his book and wrote once more.
After that with the throne room sealed and the palantír's whisper gone, the chain of command sagged like a severed cable. In that gap, Beregond stepped forward and made of his voice a scaffold.
"Drums and bells! Muster every bowman with two fingers and an eye. Slingstones to the parapets. Pitch to the cauldrons. Send the weak and the little ones to the higher circles with bread and water. Smiths—your forges. Fletchers—your benches. Carpenters—barricades on the third and the fifth and kill‑alleys on the stairs. Quartermasters, open the grain like a wound and bleed it slow. Chirurgeons to the cloisters. Runners—move."
Men moved. When fear finds an order to hold, fear holds.
On the plain beyond the Rammas Echor, the Enemy moved also. Their army did not arrive; it continued—a river of bodies stretched from the black gate to the Pelennor, as if the East itself had decided to walk.
Starved goblins in ragged leather jostled at the front, stringy and wild‑eyed, whipped forward by overseers who wore better steel and better smiles. Behind them tramped the true weight: compact Uruk cohorts with tower shields and short spears; warg packs kept to the flanks like tide along rock; siege trolls in chain, hauling towers bristling with hooks and bridges.
And in the mid‑host rode the black captains—Black Númenóreans in lamellar that drank the light, faces hidden, banners stitched with old blasphemies. Among them, taller than his peers, the Black Hand sat a coal‑colored destrier and never looked left or right. Drums spoke for him. Whips did. So did the geography of his order of battle: trash to bleed the stones, iron to break the bones, monsters to eat the heart.
Wheels screamed: towers, catapults, and a battering ram that was no tool but a myth—Grond, the Hammer of the Underworld—its wolf‑head iron and obscene, pulled by teams of beasts that hated their own flesh.
Within the city, trebuchets creaked as crews tested the throw with empty slings, then with cobbles, then with jars of pitch. Arrow‑makers peeled strings with their teeth and lined shafts by touch. Girls in soot‑smudged aprons toted baskets of fletchings, and old men who could not draw a bow sharpened the knives of those who could. Over all of it, the White Tree held its black fingers to the sky like a prayer that knew better, and the wind carried the first clear pulse of Mordor's drums up the tiers like thunder climbing stairs.
Night did not fall so much as crouch.
Both sides drew breath, and then the other began to move.
The enemy came on not as a line but as a happening. Engines rolled, towers lurched, and the front of the host arrived with a noise like furniture being pushed across the world. Gondor's stone answered: the trebuchets spoke first, and well. One tower took a rock in the gut and folded like bad carpentry; another toppled backward into its own ranks and made a square of orcs vanish as if a giant had clapped his hands there. The catapults along the second circle found their ranging—two flights long, one left—and began to chew trenches into the crawling mass.
But the host kept arriving.
Ladders were brave and stupid. They came in herds; they fell in herds. Men with billhooks and pole‑pikes sent whole rushes of them skidding back, and every time a ladder went, fifty small, arguing shapes fell with it, and the wall learned new ways to say splat. The towers were another matter. Smoke‑soaked, roofed against fire, they blundered up to the parapets, yawed, kissed stone—bridges slammed—goblins and rabble poured like slurry.
There the City showed its teeth. The regulars of Minas Tirith fought in hobbit steel—not pretty, but plentiful and mean: short plates riveted over good mail, big board shields, workman's helms. Smiths from the Shire had sold it dear over many years of peace, and Gondor had paid, because a kingdom with old walls still appreciates new iron. Archers—some with Lórien wood bows traded through the hobbits' fat‑fingered merchants—shot until their fingers bled, and the arrowheads did what Shire forges promised: bit and kept biting. For every man who went down at the merlons, twenty of the Enemy fell or were kicked back screaming into the crush below. It was a slaughter with good accounting.
But catapults don't mind numbers when the piles begin. Stones found crews on the ramparts with hateful luck; one engine crew died standing, all five were thrown off the wall by the same hurled rock, looking very surprised to be sharing in death. Down on the fields, corpses rose hill‑high—goblin stacks and orc ladders of meat that ate arrows and hid living feet. Archers began to lose their angles; swordsmen began to lose their arms, not from wounds but from fatigue.
At the Great Gate, a shabby ram of logs and nails took its turn, thudding with the determination of drunks at a locked tavern. The gate, iron‑bound on ancient hinges, shrugged and held. The orcs using the ram died completing their lesson.
Night covered shame and industry both. Against the gate the dead piled until the taller orcs could climb the flesh hill and grope for crenels with dirty fingers. Torches guttered; oil burned; men smashed hands with mallets. Somewhere, a watchman sang under his breath to keep his courage where he could find it. The 12 fellbeasts with 12 black riders upon them kept altitude, swooping down like hawks hunting pray, grabbing claw fulls of men at a time and hurling them off of the walls. Arrows shot back, and the fellbeasts took to the skies again. So the night went onwards and Gandalf was nowhere to be seen.
Soon dawn came and found the Enemy rearranged. Gothmog—the Marshal of these Western marches, a ruin with ideas had ordered the great ram dragged forward, wolf‑headed and awful, to make a lesson of the Gate. He gestured to clear the corpse‑heaps out of the approach, but a taller shadow in black plate come. From a top his black armoured steed the Black Hand—lifted a finger to stop him, and smiled wide under his helm where men or orc couldn't see it.
"Leave them," the Hand said. "Bodies are bridges. All legions—on. Don't stop until the Tree burns."
So they didn't. Elite cohorts came up, the uruk with their tower‑shields, heavily armoured trolls, heavy warg riders in packs and eager to kill, although the trash went first as ever—starved goblins and ornery orcs who would either get meat under their nails today or be meat tomorrow. They climbed the dead wherever ladders had failed, poured through breaker‑gaps the night had chewed, and in a hundred places the First Circle learned what it means to be only a circle.
On the battered streets below, Beregond stood on a wagon and made his throat into a trumpet. "First Circle—evacuate! Clear the lanes, carry those who can't walk, burn what you can't carry!" The barricades at the cross‑streets lit; carts were pulled back, then burned where they stood to deny cover; cistern teams dashed water down alleys to keep fire from learning to run uphill. The Gate Ward became a maw: in with the living, out with the dead. The math went ugly and stayed.
Higher up, unseen by all was Gandalf. He did what came naturally: first he looked for a way out. He sent butterflies with please and urgent tucked under their wings to the high airs where eagles might be fat and idle. None came. Next he had looked to the mountain, but the mountain was too steep for a man as tired and as honest about fear as he was. He tried not to try, and succeeded. He stayed, because reputation is a tether and shame is a second one.
Then he found children and mothers in stair‑wells and door‑nooks and made a job of them. "Do not be afraid. Not for yourselves only, but for the friends at your shoulders. Be strong and take up arms for all that is good. If you fall, it is another path—white shores, a far green country, a better one than this awaits. So go. Others need the space behind you. If you do not fight, they will die."
A little girl, soot on her face, stared up. "Will you come with us?"
Gandalf laid a big hand softly on her hair. "No, little one. I have…other work. A nation to steer. I must stand where I can see." The truth sounded worse out loud than in his head. Courage did not kindle. Eyes did not brighten. Even so, after a few more alleys and a few more speeches, he had some hundreds—old men, boys, mothers with teeth set—who took up pikes and cleavers and scythes and went out the Second Circle Gate in a sally that bought ten minutes of tolerable dying.
Beregond heard what Gandalf had done and found him, face like iron. "No more speeches," he said. "Up‑tier. Keep your counsel. I need silence and orders that kill the enemy, not us."
Gandalf bowed his big, tired head. "As you command."
Then suddenly the second level gates shook. A bar split. One hinge screamed. The second‑circle gate buckled and blew inward, shards of oak scything down the street. The first wave in were not soldiers at all but things that ate.
"Stand!" Beregond howled, voice raw. "Stand, you bastards!"
The city's breath hitched, and somewhere beyond the smoke and the death and the ruin, a deep sound rolled over the battlefield like thunder.
A horn.
Not theirs. Not of Mordor. It was of Rohan, and every head turned.
They came unseen by road that was no road, a green thread pulled through the black weave of the Drúadan-wood. Stunted stone‑faces watched them pass; owls blinked and did their counting. When the trees fell away at last, the Rohirrim stood upon a long slope of grass and gravel, and the world below told them the truth.
You cannot flank a sea.
From the Anduin to the Mountain Gate the Mordor‑host lay like night poured out of a broken jar—ranks upon ranks, black to the horizon, banners like torn mouths in the wind, engines crawling, trolls hunched like hills grown legs. A man could ride until his horse forgot its name and still be counting enemies. Six thousand Riders could not make a dent in that. Four hundred thousand and more could forget they had been dented by breakfast.
Behind the Riders, at a crooked angle on the northern flank, came Dunlendings—4,800 of them by some captain's last brave lie. They wore plundered mail and wood‑shields stitched with crude beasts; they had ash‑axes and boar spears and grins that had nothing to do with hope. They sang about dying properly, which is a subject that takes the sting out of rhyme. Intermixed were a string of Drúedain with shaved crowns and iron collars—"guides" taken a day too long on a friendly path—now pressed forward as meat shields and pack‑bearers, because Dunland had accepted Aragorn's advice to "bring all courage to the field" and had heard "bring all bodies." It was the kind of compromise the West had learned to call strategy.
On the ridge the Riders fell quiet. Men who had laughed at sleep went pale; a few spat to give their mouths a job; one or two horses shied at nothing and had to be gentled with lies. A murmuring like wind went up: turn, no shame, not our city, not our doom. Helm-crests trembled as heads half‑turned toward home.
Théoden put his heels to Snowmane and went alone in front of them. The old king's shoulders were narrow where youth had been; his hair had become the color of the thing he rode. He looked down at the Pelennor—at the sea that would not even notice his stone—and instead of breaking, he stiffened like a banner in a sudden gust.
"Mark me," he said, and the captains drew near whether they wished to or not. "No flanking will turn that tide. But oaths are not mills to grind only on fair weather. We promised—we ride."
He turned in the saddle, drew his sword, and called the Eorlingas to remember what they were for. The war‑horn of his house came up—Guthláf holding it with two hands as if it were a child he was offering—and the king blew until the ridge itself seemed to wake and lean forward to listen. The note hit the field and split it; even the fellbeasts overhead tilted their heads like carrion mathematicians considering an unexpected sum.
Théoden stood in the stirrups and gave them the kind of speech that doesn't make men live longer—only makes them die facing forward:
"Rise, Riders of the Mark!
Grim deeds awake; let spears quiver and shields crack.
A sword‑day, a red day, though dawn is hardly come.
Ride now—ride for ruin, and for the world's last hour!
Death! Death! Death!
Forth Eorlingas!"
The word Death went down the line like fire taking pitch. Men who had wanted to flee felt the shame burn all the way to their heels and turned the shame into spur. Éomer lowered his helm and laughed the way a man does when nothing inside him will agree to be reasonable. Standards dipped. The ridge moved.
On the left, the Dunlendings roared their own blasphemous joy. "DRAUGA!" they cried—to die, to die, to die—and beat their shields with the sides of their axes as if to tenderize them for the after‑feast. One of them shoved a Drúadan forward with a boot and told him kindly to catch arrows like a hero so the gods would learn his name. The Drúadan said nothing. He had already learned that men's gods have good hearing and bad taste.
The Riders dressed the line: six thousand points of moving light under a grimed sun. The Dunlendings formed a ragged wedge below them, thirsty for the kind of proof one brings to a mead‑hall. Above, fellbeasts drew lazy circles, content to observe the beginning of a story they planned to finish.
"Ride!" cried Théoden, and Snowmane leapt like the king had just told him the truth.
Hooves began the long drum down the slope—first the tap of a scout's fingers, then the roll of a rain on hard thatch, then the thunder of choice made irrevocable. The line put its head down and ran at the ocean.
On the Pelennor below, a troll captain paused, lifted a hand to shade his lidless eyes, and grinned. Black Númenórean staffers lifted their iron wands and made the front dress tighter for the impact. Uruks slammed door‑shields to shoulder. Goblins in the trash ranks hopped in place, unable to decide whether to be terrified first or hungry first. The fellbeasts folded their wings a little, the better to watch.
There was a last, small silence that men have always kept for cowardice or prayer.
Then the Mark came down like a hammer someone had finally decided to swing.
The first contact was not a clash so much as collapse. Half a ton of horse at a gallop is a verdict; the front files of underfed goblins never heard the sentence finished. Lances speared through two bodies, sometimes three, until wood bowed and split and the iron heads came free in a spray of black. Hooves did the rest—ribs folding, skulls turning to wet gravel. The air smelled of wool‑smoke and copper; reins squeaked; men shouted. For fifty heartbeats the Riders butchered with momentum alone.
A goblin captain—bare chest striped with white clay, a knife in either fist—had planted himself at the very lip of the killing ground to show his cohort how not to fear. He got his wish. A bay mare took him square in the chest; his knives pinwheeled up; he vanished under an avalanche of horses and never finished the word he was screaming.
Arrows? A few. The host of Mordor had packed itself so tight that archers could hardly draw without scraping elbows, and the front ranks blocked line of sight. Most bowstrings stayed slack while the living wall in front simply absorbed the charge.
But momentum cannot argue with physics for long. The Riders ran out of air and into order: blocks of Uruks in tower‑shields, knees braced, spears leveled like a hard green hedge turned black. Horses do not willingly drive their chests onto a hedge; they shy, they sidestep; riders fight them and lose half a stride. Some men leaned and cast short javelins first; some stood in the stirrups to strike over the shields; some tried to hook edges and pull gaps.
It worked where the shield‑wall was thin or scared. Where it wasn't, the hedge bit: spearheads punched up under breastplates or found the soft seam where cuisses met belly; a horse's eye took a splintered stake and the animal went end‑over‑end, hurling its rider into a forest of points. Lances snapped or jammed between shields; swords got trapped under rims. At close range the press became push‑of‑shield—knee to knee, snorting breath, men stabbing around wood and iron more by feel than form.
Some captains called "Break and wheel!"—hit, peel off, hit again. The discipline held for a few cycles. Then the field changed the plan. The living sea offered no room.
A scattering of trolls—some bare, some in bolted plate—came on like walking gates. Against a naked brute, a couched spear rammed at the last instant into throat or armpit could turn the charge into a kill; the best of the Mark made those shots, and one beast went down rolling, black blood fountaining from its neck.
Against armored trolls the arithmetic reversed. A horse will not meet a wall; it will try to slip past. The rider who forced it found what that meant: a shattered lance, a saddle torn free, a spine broken when half a ton of muscle hit iron at speed. The survivors learned fast—aim at joints, strike the back of the knee, cut the hamstring and clear away. Even then, a single flailing swing from a tree‑club turned three horses to red wreckage and left a score of men deaf from the sound.
A handful of trolls were drilled as counter‑shock: heavy shields, low stances, stepping into the impact with a shove and a hook. Where they stood, the charge stopped.
Elsewhere, the warg packs slid like oil along the flanks to bite at stirrups and hocks. Light riders on wiry beasts darted inside lance reach; the answer was hooves—the old, ugly trick of turning the horse into the weapon—front shoes cracking skulls as sure as maces. A warg that took a full kick in the jaw simply folded and was trampled to paste by its own kin.
But some warg riders wore mail and iron caparisons on their mounts, heavy as any knight. Those did not dodge; they collided. Lance points skated off scaled leather; claws found horseflesh; jaws closed on a stirrup and dragged a man down to be finished by three knives before he could rise. Where armored packs gathered nose‑to‑tail, they made a counter‑charge of their own, lower and meaner than the Mark's, ripping long tears in the Rider line and leaving gaps that filled at once with orcs.
For a bright, vicious minute the Mark ruled the ground it touched. Then the sea learned to flow. The dead underfoot grew so thick that both sides were riding and running on meat; horses lost balance and skidded; men slipped and never stood again. The front became a moshpit in the old soldier's sense: bodies packed chest to back so tight that sword work shifted from craft to habit—chop, shove, punch—while strangers behind them pushed them forward whether they wished it or not. Some climbed the backs of the fallen just to get their blades into someone else. Others were lifted off their own feet by the crush and smothered without a wound.
The Dunlendings hit beside the Riders—ragged shields, long knives, eyes alight with the promise of songs in a hall beyond the world. They took the goblin front like wolves, laughing wetly when the first line toppled. Then they met Uruk order and learned the cost; their bravado broke against iron drill. Still they hurled themselves on, one clan after the next, trying to die loudly enough to be heard by their gods. Some Rohirrim, hard with old grief, bared their teeth at that sight—a grim, unpretty satisfaction as feuding ghosts found their graves.
Mixed among those footmen, a skein of Druedain were flung forward as shields by their new captors—short, fierce folk who had led men through the woods and now paid for it in the open. They disappeared under the first press; a few left behind a ring of orc bodies to mark where they had stood. The rest left nothing.
And as for Théoden, he had began the descent at the tip of the spear, but halfway down he had eased Snowmane a length or two, then five, letting the youngest éoreds overrun him. Some of it was command—keep the royal banner visible and unbroken so men have a place to wheel to. Some of it was the old man's good sense—if a king dies at the first bite, he dies useless. Some of it, if he had confessed it at a hearth on some other winter, was fear. When the wave broke ahead of him; he paced its back, sword high, voice raw, sending reserves left where Uruk shields held and right where trolls had made dents in the line. But here tactics and strategy sadly held little ground.
On a trampled knoll, a Rider named Harl hit an Uruk shield with his knee and felt his horse's shoulder go at the same instant. He rolled, cut, and found his sword arm pinned between two bodies he did not know. He killed by listening—for breath to his left and the scrape of a blade to his right—because there was no seeing in the crush. He learned that you can die standing when you cannot fall.
Fifteen lengths away, an orc drummer lost his stick in the mud and started beating the skin with his fist. The rhythm held a company together for three more breaths—and that was enough for the heavy wargs to bite through a plume of green cloaks.
The goblin captain with the knives reappeared in pieces—one hand still gripping a hilt, twitching. Someone stepped on it. The blade slid free and was used by a Dunlending to finish a warg that would not stop kicking.
During the second minute of the battle, the Riders adapted because survival is a teacher. Lines folded into wedges where they could, trading reach for punch; light horses peeled off to harry the flanks; javelins went to the men who had the balance left to throw. But for every three yards they won, five more orcs shouldered in from behind. The black host did not break; it thickened.
Rohirrim archers—those with the nerve to shoot from saddle in that churn—found little space; sometimes they killed their own on the far side of the scrum. So they slung bows and drew blades and joined the shove.
Overhead, fellbeasts tilted and watched, banking for the moment when watching would turn to choosing, and then they saw the king.
Théoden, now a banner at the rear of his own storm, drew breath to signal a wheel when a shadow crossed Snowmane's neck. He looked up, and the light seemed to bend around a shape falling out of the cloud.
Somewhere in the crush below, a horn blew the note that means close up and live. Somewhere else, a Dunlending laughed and died on an Uruk spear, happy because he had seen the sun flash on Théoden's blade before the end.
Then it came from the clouds, death fell. The Witch‑king of Angmar came down like a cut in the sky, his fellbeast stooping with a scream so thin and cruel it made men's teeth ache and horses forget their names.
The wings hit first—great, tar‑black sails that slapped riders from the saddle and sent banners corkscrewing into the mud. The beast's talons caught Snowmane in a bind of iron and hide; the white horse reared, shrieked, and the two creatures tangled with a sound like a gate torn off its hinges. Théoden pitched, struck earth, and Snowmane crashed across him. Bone gave. Air fled his chest and did not return.
The fellbeast landed, all claw and shadow, and its hunting cry emptied brave men's knees. Gondor's and Rohan's lines wavered, then broke around the point of that terror as if a rock had been dropped into a stream.
"Back!" a Rider shouted, high with panic. "Back, back—"
"Hold!" another lied, and died under a whipping wing.
And then—Éowyn came.
Mail blacked with other people's hours, cloak in ribbons, goblin‑blood drying in thumbprints along her cheek, she stood where men had been and failed. Her shield arm trembled; her sword did not. The visor shadowed her eyes, but what looked out from there was anger clean as steel.
"Away from him, shadow," she said—not loud, just correctly. "I am here."
Beside her, very small and making himself smaller, Meriadoc crept from under a fallen rider's skirts—hobbit breath quick and careful, Barrow‑blade held low so the sun would not gossip. He slid sidewise, counting ribs on the Witch‑king's greaves, thinking there, and there again, and when he leans.
The fellbeast lunged. Éowyn did not.
She stepped into the reach—too close for the jaw to close fully—and drove her blade up under the jaw‑hinge. The sword found meat where even monsters must nod. Black blood hissed; the head bucked and hung by gristle for a heartbeat; the cry went very high and then stopped. The carrion‑thing collapsed upon itself, a heap of wing‑bones and hate, and its stink slapped the men nearest as if to mark them for later.
From the heap, the Witch‑king rose.
He did not get to his feet; the air did it for him, as if eager to be useful. He towered—armor black as instructions, runes along the edges glowing like coals crushed underfoot. The helm was a skull grown crowns; where a face would be, there was a hunger that made the breath labor. In one hand he held a flail—chain thick as a man's wrist, head a gnarled planet of iron; each spike smoked as if it had learned fire's grammar.
He looked at Éowyn, and the world tilted around his gaze.
"You will not touch him," she said. "Not while I breathe."
The Witch‑king inclined his head, courteous as a hangman. "Breathe, then," said a voice that did not trouble the air but went straight to bones.
The flail fell.
Éowyn lifted the shield and met it square. The wood became chaff, the rim became storm, her bones decided to be outside. The arm went to shards—radius and ulna coming up like white worms through meat. She screamed and moved back along the ground on knees and heels, the useless arm knocking at the mud like a stranger at a locked door.
"Mistress!" Merry hissed—too loud—and darted his two small steps from behind, knifepoint greedy for the gap behind the greave. He had measured it correctly. He had timed it correctly. He had believed correctly.
The Witch‑king half‑turned without turning. The flail went sideways in a soft arc, almost idle.
It found the hobbit with the ease of a hand remembering a pocket. Chest first—crunch, collapse—air went out with a squeak and did not return. Merry left the scene the way people leave arguments; he struck the earth and didn't learn from it. He did not rise.
"Small one," that bone‑voice observed, almost fond. "Not for you."
Éowyn spat blood, set her knee, and came up again with one arm. She had no business standing; she stood anyway. "Here. Here." Her sword shook; her eyes did not. "I am no man," she began to say—then coughed and changed it, stubborn even now. "I am Éowyn."
The Witch‑king rewarded accuracy. The flail came down like someone finishing a sum. It met the helm at the temple and asked the skull a question the skull could answer only once. Metal accordioned; neck made a shape no neck survives; her sword fell and lay beside her leg.
The King beneath Snowmane did not move. The Shieldmaiden lay still. The hobbit made no more noise. Around them, the fight shuffled to make room for certainty; even orcs, who adore a show, stepped back to watch the air dim around their master.
The Witch‑king turned toward the White City as if concluding a conversation that had gone as expected. The fellbeasts overhead tightened their circles; eleven shadows marked his step like punctuation.
Behind a broken cart, a Dunlending with an axe watched the woman who had stood when no one else would and shook his head like a man trying to dislodge a fly. "Good death," he said, unwillingly impressed, and then someone put a spear in him and he did not finish becoming wise.
The charge of Rohan had become a funeral, yet the battle continued.
Within the walls the day shrank. The Second Circle was lost, and now the Third Gate learned the names of its hinges as troll‑hammers introduced them, blow on blow. Gandalf stood high above the Gate Ward, face full of worry, watching the street below bend to the work of fear: barrels dragged to make chokes, pitch slopped and sparked along the parapets, boys given weapons and turned into warriors. He did not say anything, he merely watched and waited for a miracle to occur that would save him from whatever fate awaited him if the city fell.
Out on the field, the Witch‑king walked, a hole in the light, and the Nazgûl's shadow went long to the walls and there found and took The Black Hands Horse. Éomer kept swinging because grief needs a job; the Dunlendings—so brave in brag—were now brave in pieces; the Drúedain had vanished into the arithmetic underfoot. Orcs, newly confident, ate where they stood and called it mercy, because the dying were spared the second hour.
The piles rose. Green went red—a stew of blood and bowels and last meals. Hope told its last lie and stopped. If there was to be a final stand of men, then this was the hill and now was the hour.
From the south‑west, across the Erui and its bridge, the ground began to tremble—twelve thousand marching feet, six thousand horses—a seam of steel and silver cutting toward the plain. Men on both sides felt it in the teeth. Heads turned as if a weather front had arrived in armor.
At their head, the riders saw a man the City had been promised dead and had kept mourning anyway: Boromir, Steward's war‑son, riding where no tale had left him. Black and silver; the White Tower on his breast; helm slung loose at the hip so the wind could take his hair and lend it motion. He had left Osgiliath to his brother with too much faith and too little choice, then ridden west and south, beating on shut doors, prying oaths from old halls; he had come back with whatever followed. He spared grief no breath. He spent it and raised his sword so a river could see.
Men formed from mountain to river, a line long enough to make the day count them twice. Boromir set his helm, pointed the blade at the black sea and roared:
"FOR GONDOR—FORWARD!"
The cry took as if poured into a mold.
Imrahil's swan‑knights came behind arrow‑true in blue and silver; the men‑at‑arms of Belfalas with sea‑fish on their shields paced the lances; Lebennin's pike‑blocks in river‑green shouldered the left; Forlong of Lossarnach thundered in to buttress them with axemen; Duinhir of Morthond sent the Blackroot bowmen to the clefts that command a field; Hirluin of Pinnath Gelin, green‑cloaked, drew the right in along the Anduin; Angbor of Lamedon, lean as rawhide, angled for Osgiliath; Golasgil of Anfalas spread his beach‑spears to harry wargs and larger horrors; a ragged wing of Pelargir mariners, riding like men who hate horses slightly less than drowning, came as Boromir's shadow. And in front of all of it, Boromir rode the hinge—the place where collapse might become corridor if a man could force it.
They struck the Mordor front the way a hammer strikes a puddle: not thunder, but impact everywhere at once. Goblins collapsed into paste; rabble took the shape of the shoes that taught them manners. Where the lances bit, the line puckered and gave; where uruk shield‑walls closed—door‑shields braced, spearheads planted—the charge didn't halt so much as grind. Boromir's horse took an arrow high in the neck and folded in a way horses shouldn't; momentum threw him over the uruk shields. He turned in the air, swatted two spears aside with the edge of his sword like flies, landed in a knee‑deep stew of bodies and iron, and shoved his blade clean through an armor‑gap taught to be there and hated for it. His shield broke; so he used an orc for another. Where the sea would have closed over him, the knights arrived like oaths kept on time. And the killing went on.
Swan‑lances punctured throats; Lossarnach axes unzipped ribs with carpenters' neatness; Lebennin hedged the left with pikes that made wargs think about backs. Belfalas shields locked; Anfalas spears found knees; Blackroot arrows ticked neat little periods into uruk sentences; Angbor carved a rude initial toward the river road. Imrahil kept time.
They were fresh, and freshness kills. Blood puddled and found paths; corpses learned to be terrain. And after each yard taken there was another yard to take, and after each pile cut down there was another pile being made. Victory did not move. It only watched.
Men on the walls learned again how to hold their breath without choking. Éomer found enough room to make a wedge that refused to lie down. The remnant of the Mark tried to drive a tunnel through to the new silver line and failed, but having a point to die for is half of living. High above, Nazgûl counted the West's arithmetic and did not think the column dangerous.
Nothing would turn this tide. Gandalf knew it; everyone knew it. Too few, too late. Still the men went, and for a breath the storm paused—not in fear, but to acknowledge the particular madness of those who deny silence a final word.
Then the day told the next truth.
From the haze over the Anduin, black sails shouldered into sight—dozens, then hundreds—tall, cruel, with no friends painted on them. The Eye everywhere. The walls gave back a single sound—the kind people make when the map has been lying.
Umbar had once meant men—corsairs, sinners with shirts and reasons. That was dust. Mordor had stopped being a shadow and become an empire; Twelve Nazgûl riding at the head of black legions had scoured South and East and far beyond the West's paper edges. Khand, Harad, Rhûn—down; cities broken, thrones kicked clean, peoples enslaved or eaten; Umbar's harbor burned seven nights and then went quiet under a Black Númenórean duke who taught orcs to say "mine" with a sailor's tongue. Now no men lived there. Only orcs—salt‑scarred, bone‑armored, sails like flayed hide, hulls like accidents—coming not to seize but to feed.
The men on the field turned to the river. Some knelt. Even the hard ones felt the cold come up through their boots. They were already drowning in the tide; now the sea itself had turned against them.
High on the stone, Gandalf watched the sails withhold honesty. Saruman had warned him this arithmetic would come due; he had pretended a kinder merchant kept the books. The map had changed. The East and South had new owners. Reinforcements were not coming—only death, in ever more inventive forms.
No man on the wall, no orc on the field, no-one knew yet what those sails carried. But far downriver at Pelargir, the answer had already been written in silence.
The Oathbreakers came aboard like mildew that could think: a plague of whispers and old shame. The orc‑crews—sea‑mad, salt‑scarred—broke at the sight. Some leapt screaming into the Anduin; some drowned themselves in buckets meant for deck‑swabbing; a few tore their own throats rather than be handled by the Dead. When the noise had finished, the ships lay with slack sails over slick decks. Aragorn climbed the nearest ladder, looked past the corpses to the next hull, and said simply: "Crew them."
So they did: Rangers at the tillers and boarding hooks; the Dead seething in holds like a memory you can't unlearn; and—filling a dozen decks from prow to stern—ten thousand hobbit mercenaries of the Shire. They were not children in bright livery now. They wore iron the way other folk wear stubbornness: plate where coin had permitted it, mail where work had, scale where a careful hand with a punch had made time into armor. Bowl helms with nose‑guards and cheek‑plates; greaves to keep a pony's kick from breaking both legs; semi‑cylindrical shields that made a moving wall out of three rows of small men. Their captains—Frodo among them—could be read at a glance by the crests braided from wheat or weed, set different ways for rank, the Shire's old jokes turned into an officer's code. Samwise moved among the demolition carts with a sack of egg‑shaped surprises and the grim efficiency of a man who knows what a stove does when you overfill it.
From the southern fiefs came the last of Gondor's coast‑born: oarsmen with swords, net‑men with pikes, pilots who could thread a reef at night by the sound of their own teeth. Argue as they might with their pride, they fell into companies and took orders from the man with Andúril.
The black sails turned north.
They rose out of the haze like a rumor learning to be a fact and ran straight for the Harlond. At the wharf the first gangplanks banged down and a phalanx of hobbits came ashore in step—shields locked, Lórien‑wood bows stacked at the rear ranks for the moment their shoulders would need fire instead of iron. A volley went up and into orc backs—short bows, short draws, and a forest of short shafts that did tall work. Hobbits with war‑ponies (few, but cursedly fast) struck the warg flanks that Boromir's men had nicked and left; the wargs learned to hesitate, which is death in a pack.
At the center, Aragorn himself came down the plank with Andúril unsheathed. There were no elves and no dwarves beside him—only hobbits and the rangers who had learned long ago that quiet is a weapon when you keep it sharp. He walked into the press and began editing the host where its sentences ran too long.
The Dead poured after—blades like whispers, kills that didn't bother with air. They split the Enemy the way cold splits wet stone: the part grinding against Minas Tirith and the part coiled along the river were now two problems listening to one solution.
Panic ran the ranks like trench‑water—Witch‑king panic, the kind that makes Nazgûl sing. Above the rear lines, the Eleven circled. The Witch‑king, astride a black Númenórean steed, chanted in a voice that knew which ribs to touch. A pulse of Morgul power washed the field; the Dead—who should have been untouchable—suddenly caught on orc steel. Spectral limbs staggered. A few fell, which ought not to have been possible and so, of course, happened.
But the living were not done. Gondor, Rohan, what was left of Dunland, and the hobbit cohorts made the old infantry push—press, stab, step, repeat—while mounted squads ran the cycle charge: hit, peel, circle, hit again. For the first time all day the orcs were the ones being told to reconsider.
They did it well. Not a rout; a recoil. Under the Nazgûl's eyes the black tide walked backward toward Osgiliath, standards upright, trolls turned with their handlers' prods, captains counting their remnant and how to lie about it later. At the bridge‑approaches, seated on a caragor that liked the taste of men, the Mouth of Sauron watched like a man balancing ledgers while a building burns. Graug riders loomed behind him like moving pieces of hill. He did not run. He waited, gathered the broken, and began to compose the next assault.
By sunset the Pelennor spoke a new dialect of heaps. Fly‑lines of smoke went crooked in the wind. The West had bought a pause. Mordor had sold one, at a price it could afford.
Rohan was ruin—a king under his horse; a shieldmaiden made silent; of six thousand, less than a hundred able to answer if their names were called. The Dunlendings were gone, as debtors are—paid out into the mound and remembered mostly as a smell. The Drúedain had slipped back into the arithmetic that had used them. Within the walls, the defenders were nearly spent, but new banners flew—the White Tree stitched under Aragorn's hand; southern fiefs answering; swan‑feathers still white from murder. Minas Tirith would not fall today. The victory felt like a man who doesn't drown yet.
On the high stone, Gandalf stood beneath the reunited emblem and stared east, as if a stare could be a finger pressing down on a scale. Where was the Ring? Three thousand years since Isildur lost it and still the world pretended to be a stage where you could find props on cue. The Dark Lord groped; the wizard hoped. In between, armies met and ate one another.
Gandalf had hoped, and had planned. He had forged the Shire into a kingdom because coin bends knees that songs cannot; he had turned hobbits from farmers to factors, then to soldiers, all to prove a lady of leaves wrong: that the small are not merely adorable, which is a soft curse, but decisive. He still believed it. He would believe it tomorrow, because belief keeps its own calendar even when the world won't. He watched the small shields move and thought, Work, little stones. Break the river's teeth.
Far within, in a hall that remembered kings, Aragorn did not climb the steps to stand above the men gathered there. He stayed on the stone at eye‑height with the captains—mail smoked black, hair matted, hands raw where the day had gnawed them.
"Men of Gondor," he said, and his voice did not try to be large. "And of every hill and river that still remembers its name. If you came to be comforted, I have brought you nothing. If you came for a star to hang your fear upon, I have run out of stars.
"Look outside. The maps we trusted have burned at the edges. The sea marched; we tried to flank a sea, and learned what that means. A king of horses is down. A shieldmaiden's name has already begun to turn into silence. The green folk of the Drúadan who led us once through mercy have vanished into our arithmetic. The Dunlendings bought their gods with their blood and have nothing left with which to pay.
"You know all this. You saw it. So hear me tell the part you will not say aloud: the day we feared has come. The courage of men did fail. It failed at dawn. It failed at noon. It failed at the hour when the Witch‑king walked and light went around him like a dog avoiding a master. It failed in the alleys where boys became soldiers and in the fields where riders became wreckage. And I—who am supposed to be a king when the story can afford one—I tell you there is no miracle waiting at the next bell.
"Do not lift your heads. Keep them where they are. Listen.
"I curse this crown that waits for a cleaner brow. I curse the high ones who sailed away with their songs and left us the echo. I curse the deep folk who count stones behind shut doors while the world burns beyond their thresholds. I curse the small folk who bargain and invoice and bleed in tidy columns—bless them also, for they bled beside us all day—but I curse the ledgers that taught us to measure courage in coin. I curse fate, which writes in a hand no man can read until the page is ash.
"And I curse myself—for expecting the age to soften because I wished it so.
"Now I will tell you what remains.
"We are few. We will be fewer when the drums across the river finish their counting. The Enemy is not broken; he is merely rearranged, and he has lieutenants who can do sums. If we seek victory, we will go mad. We cannot have it.
"What we can have is refusal.
"Tomorrow, when their lines come on again in neat black rows, we will open our gates by our choosing and spit in their order. We will stand in the doors of Osgiliath if we must and make the river remember us. We will wreck their rams and burn their towers and salt their math with our bodies until their captains throw away their wands and start pointing with their hands like ordinary men. We will not give them our backs. We will not give them our quiet. We will give them our faces until they have learned them.
"This is not hope. This is habit.
"If you have a prayer, say it now and keep the last word for yourself. If you have a curse, spend it—I have spent mine. If you have a name that is dear, speak it while you have a mouth; the dead deserve to be called properly. If you have nothing left but breath, save one ribbon of it to spit when the Eye looks at you.
"I will not promise you dawn. I will not lie to you about songs.
"But hear this, and take what use you can: we go anyway. Not because there is a path, but because there is a door and it will not bar itself. Not because we live if we go—because we are men and this is the last honest work we are allowed.
"Sleep where you can. Bind what you can. Sharpen what will take an edge. When the drums change, we will move. Boromir—hold the hinge with your infantry. Imrahil—keep your swans where the cavalry can still find sky. Angbor—pull a line toward the bridges and make the Mouth choke on his own sums. Rangers—make the river a rumor they fear. And any man who can stand—stand.
"If the world intends to end, let it end looking at us.
"This day we endure. Tomorrow we will offend the dark.
"That is all."
He turned away first, so no one would have to. The banners behind him—bleached, blood‑heavy—stirred in a wind that had learned to whisper. Outside, across the water, the drums began a new number.