Mirkwood: A Novel About J.R.R. Tolkien

uncertain path. Now was her chance to flee toward home.

Dawn came swift and bright, dispensing the few clouds and unfurling a fresh breeze that swept away Ara’s doubts as if they were dandelion tufts. She left to another time the toting of grievances. She had skills to use and clues to find.

Perhaps all’s a journey, but most are as the errands of shopkeepers. Very few, and never by volition or knowledge foretold, slip the slope that funnels them into a quest. Even so, with the road offered, the heart in all its mystery will weed out those unsuited. Ara’s heart was true.

The next evening she hovered at the threshold to an unnamed byway. She was at once fortunate and ill fortuned. A current of air wended down from ragged purple mountains to the south, sending leaves skeltering along the path.

She stood for a long time at this crossroads — primitive tracks spun forth from great well-trudged roads. Roads were now her enemy. Roads like this had taken her away from home, ripped her from her comrades. Before her several loomed now, brooding and silent, save for the saw of the wind. Each path provided only a dumb way, withholding guidance to the itinerant who must choose She studied the four directions. Narcross had not yet risen this night. Soon, flickering points of light saturated the sky, overwhelming the fine lacework of black. One by one, a few died and fell in long arcs. For each one so lost, a thousand more flashed into view. The heavens were alive and breathing.

And moonless. Ara knew that soon it would emerge as a sliver, a battered fingernail eroding nightly until it was gone. From there, it would reemerge and wax swiftly to fullness that would seal her Amon’s fate. She knew that every day meant miles to go to a destination she had never seen, save in dark legend.

This week in Frighten, the great lamps of the Giant Pumpkins would be lit. She knew she would never see them again. She could hear her Mum, wise beyond even the village elders foretelling her destiny, “For some children, the front step, once truly left, can never again be found.”

With that thought, Ara stepped onto the broken and forked track that led away from her home. She walked south, watching a row of thunderheads illume and quiver against the distant mountains before being sucked away into the endless starry night.

Cadence put the manuscripts down. Exhausted, she took the blanket from the closet and flopped on the couch. Tomorrow would be tomorrow.

She met sleep halfway, and in the surreal, liquid seams of that union, her mind concocted a Technicolor dream. Intrepid Professor Tolkien, old and white-haired but all dressed up like some elderly Indiana Jones, and the Fearless Young Heroine, Ara. Armed and steadfast, they were surrounded by a lurching, drooling, moaning multitude of the Dark Lord’s zombie monsters.

The crazy scene froze mid-frame. Heartbeats passed. Any moment Tolkien’s face would mutate to something evil and he would be one of Them. Catchy synth bass notes would punch in, a great multitude of hands would clap in unison, and the Professor would break into the funky song and dance routine of Thriller. It was ordained; he had succumbed to the Dark Side! Ara and all the Heroines would be lost.

The dream fizzled out like a spent sparkler, closing with Ara defiantly sweeping forth her cutlass to confront them all.

Chapter 14 INKLINGS V

The recording of this meeting of the Inklings captured episodes of a competition to see who could read the famously bad prose of Amanda Ros for the longest without laughing. Toward the end of the evening the discussion turned to other matters.

“Charles, as a historian, you have lectured us about the tatters and fragments and competing versions of ‘truth’ that underlie what we today call the King James Bible. Despite that, is there not an essential truth to the varied tellings of the tales of Jesus?”

“I wish I could be of more comfort, but the truth is that many of the gospels, wildly variant in their accounts, were systematically tracked down and destroyed, especially, as we all know, after the Council of Nicea. The accounts fell prey, along with their followers and those who possessed the documents themselves. So what you are left with today, is not justified by its history. Only belief will carry one through …”

Part of the tape is lost here. It resumes with clanks and knockings on the table, perhaps a call for ale as the group huddled about in discussion. C.S. Lewis is talking.

“… I have a hero, modeled after Tollers here, who is in one of my books. Sort of a philologist-adventurer. A swashbuckling professor of ancient languages. He discovers things because he is not afraid to believe. What, Ian?”

“And where does this discovery occur? So often we speak of breakthroughs and journeys. Tollers speaks of hidden gates, you Jack, speak of passages through the doors of old wardrobes. Why such devices?”

“These are the stuff of tales not by literary convention, but because they mirror the way we form and test the very art of believing. Mark this: true belief arises only from a passage, after a long and perilous journey. The terrain may be of Fear, call it dragons or demons, or Despair, a desolate waste, but it must be traversed.”

“Speaking of journeys, and having duly ravaged poor Madame Ros, let us do justice to the true doers of heroic deeds, heroines.”

“Some might say we, all of us male prattlers of tales, do not do enough to acquit that justice.”

“But there is a void of the feminine heroic, is there not? In your ‘discovery’ of your myths, Tollers, you read to us little of heroines. Why so?”

“Speaking within those myths, I suspect many heroines existed, but were rooted out by censors with different agendas— none more persistent that the wizards, of all stripes and colors. And yet, there are intimations of one, a tale lost in the root and branch of many languages. A legend of which I am slowly seeing more. A saga that barely survived. A heroine that may have changed the entire course of history in a real place, a place I have seen only imperfectly from ruined foundations.”

“Well, so be it. I, for one, suspect that, if history be told straight and true, our heroes, and thus we, owe much to heroine counterparts. In fact, I would wager our fare tonight that …”

The tape grinds down to unintelligible drunken growl sounds, presumably as the battery ran down.

Chapter 15 OCTOBER 22. MORNING

Cadence awoke on the couch, stiff and groggy. The dream remnants of the Tolkien and Ara MTV video dissipated like strands of mist. She could hear traffic, the distant warble of a fire truck, the deep hum of the city imploring her that worrying over these documents was a delusion. She was on a fool’s errand, they said, maybe stumbling toward a precipice. Her body agreed. Fuzzy as she felt, her neck hairs, her heart, and her palms all forewarned of disaster.

She got up, rubbing her eyes, and went to the bathroom. She splashed water on her face. She came back to the bed fully awake and took a deep “start-over” breath. She surveyed the documents on the couch still in the rough groupings she had assembled. She picked through them, seeking a trail that had gone cold. Page after page of Elvish gibberish passed beneath her fingers. Finally, she went back to the small “readable” pile. The first page she picked out had long ago been ripped apart and reassembled with resinous glue. A rust-colored stain hung at one corner. It read:

The hawk, gray topside and mottled white on the bottom, stood one-legged in the middle of the road. One wing jutted out from its body, torn feathers splayed like fingers, a pitiful wave for help or possibly a giving of directions. It gave the lie to the latter as it jerked about, hopping left then right.