clandestine structures here in under three weeks, knowing nothing but a single name we got from Eloar’s letter – Elandar…
Tangorn finished his wine, tossed his last Umbarian silver coin with Castamir’s haughty profile on the table (Sharya-Rana gave them the locations of several secret money caches, but he avoided paying with golden dungans of Mordor) and headed for the exit, limping slightly. The sea urchin connoisseur at the nearby table has also finished his meal and unhurriedly wiped first his fingers and then his lips (thin and slightly puckered with a multitude of tiny scars around them) with a handkerchief –
All he had to do was hint to Tangorn in the name of the Foreign Ministry that his official accreditation would be untimely (the lieutenant had absolutely no desire to abduct a diplomat of a foreign and nominally allied state); the assistant state secretary managed that quite well. Unfortunately, he was cowardly (even his recruitment was accomplished with blackmail over really trivial matters), so Mongoose’s demand that he keep this assignment secret from his case officer at the station plunged the Umbarian into utter dread. He knew very well that at 12 Shore Street they would judge such ‘forgetfulness’ as double-dealing, with all proper consequences. Gagano shuddered with fear at the mere thought of either of his Gondorian masters, and so fell apart after Tangorn’s shot in the dark.
No, Mongoose said to himself, don’t jump at it. Nothing terrible has happened yet. Yes, the baron had surely figured out that his interlocutor is connected to Gondorian spies, but most likely he will interpret that as Minas Tirith’s desire to curtail Emyn Arnen’s diplomatic activity… All right, we’ll let him go and stick to the original plan. The lieutenant put the handkerchief back in his pocket – rather than dropping it on the table – and Tangorn went by the sailors at the door without a hindrance. He mixed with the street crowds and unhurriedly headed to the waterfront; he checked for surveillance twice but saw none.
Indeed, there was none: Mongoose took the sane view that right then it was most important not to spook their quarry. In just a few hours they will be fully ready for the operation, when they receive two genuine Umbar police uniforms. This very evening a police detail will visit the Lucky Anchor hotel, present a properly executed warrant and ask him to come to the local station to testify… and they will not let the baron die before he tells them everything he knows about the Ithilienian intelligence service’s accomplishments in the hunt for Mordorian technology.
Chapter 37
Probably no one will ever know when people started settling on this long mountainous peninsula and the flat swampy islands of the bay it encloses. In any event, while the inhabitants of the Reunited Kingdom do not utter the word ‘Numenor’ without a reverential sigh, a gaze at the sky, and an upraised index finger, the Umbarians sincerely scratch their heads: “Numenorians? Man, who can remember all those barbarians! Have you any idea how many of them we’ve seen here?” Two circumstances have determined Umbar’s fate as a great sea power: an excellent enclosed harbor and the fact that the highest point on the peninsula is 5,356 feet above sea level; these are the only real mountains on the entire coast south of Anduin. In these arid latitudes ‘mountains’ spell ‘forests,’ ‘forests’ spell ‘ships,’ and ‘ships’ spell ‘sea trade,’ which organically blends with privateering and – let’s be honest – plain piracy. Add to that a fantastically advantageous location in the middle of everything: it is a true World’s crossroads, an ideal transit point for trade, and the terminus of the caravan routes from the Eastern countries.
A solid line of defensive works on the Chevelgar isthmus joining the peninsula to the mainland plus a superior navy to guard against enemy landings made Umbar unassailable, which makes its being constantly conquered by all and sundry very puzzling. To be more precise, every time an attack loomed the Umbarians averted action by acknowledging the sovereignty of whatever continental power it was and paying tribute, quite sanely figuring that a war, even a victorious one, would cost their trade republic a lot more in all respects. Their attitude can be likened to that of a businessman who pays ‘protection money’ to a racketeer, with neither pleasure nor undue upset, building this expense into his prices; he cares nota whit which criminal cartel his ‘partners’ belong to, but only that they do not stage gunfights next to his store.
On the mainland long sieges followed awesome battles; storied kings (ever concerned with winning new lands rather than wisely governing those they already had) were tempted time and again to order their finance ministers beheaded for daring to interrupt the grandiose flights of royal fancy with their pedestrian: “The treasury is empty, sire, and the army hasn’t been paid since last September!” – in other words, life went on. In the meantime, behind the Chevelgar fortifications the Umbarians kept beautifying their swampy islands, joining them with dams and bridges and splitting them with canals. The mega polis that rose from the azure waters of the lagoon was rightly considered the most beautiful city in all Middle Earth: its merchants and bankers swam in money, so for four centuries and counting the best architects and sculptors have labored here dawn to dusk.
In the last three hundred years or so Umbar got powerful enough to eschew paying tribute to anyone. An absolute sea power, it turned instead to a tactic of temporary defensive alliances – now with Mordor against Gondor, then with Gondor against Mordor, then again with Khand against both of the above. Last year, though, the situation changed drastically: Mordor sank into oblivion (not without Umbar helping by supplying Aragorn with a landing fleet at the crucial moment, so as to get rid of a caravan trade competitor for good), Khand was being torn apart by a religious civil war and had no influence in the seashore regions, while a new threat arose in the South, one with which there was no negotiation – the Haradrim. As a result, the Republic faced a Hobson’s choice between southern savages and northern barbarians. The Senate chose the latter, hoping to hide from the Haradi invasion behind Aragorn’s swords, although it was crystal clear that this time the protection price would be direct occupation of the tiny country by its ‘great northern neighbor.’ No few citizens were of the opinion that Umbarian independence and civil liberties were quite worthy of defending with their lives.
Most denizens of the city, though, never dwelled on these sad matters, or at least tried hard not to. Happy cosmopolitan Umbar with its gauche and intimately corrupt authorities led its usual life of the World’s Crossroads. It had active temples of all three major and scores of minor religions, while a merchant from anywhere could celebrate a deal in a restaurant of his national cuisine. Here, information was gathered, traded, and stolen by diplomats and spies from countries no one in the Reunited Kingdom had ever heard of, and who in their turn cared nothing for the snowy outback beyond the Anduin. Here one could find any merchandise ever produced by the Arda’s soil, water, or mines, or created by the minds and hands of its inhabitants: from exotic fruits to rarest medicines and drugs, from a magnificent
