Father and Uncle Eomer did not get on.

It wasn’t through ill-will; each of them admired and esteemed, and even in a funny way liked, the other, and you could never have doubted that they would stand loyally shoulder to shoulder with each other in battle, as on one memorable occasion they did. But they were too different from one another to get on, and the more courtesy and forbearance they showed toward one another – or rather, that Father showed toward Uncle Eomer – the more palpable the tension became.

The first reason was that Father was all Gondor. For all that he loved and admired the Rohirrim – after all he had married one of them – and for all that he understood and spoke their language and deferred to their customs, he could never help being different. He was like a polished steel sword in an armoury full of iron clubs: out of place. Oddly enough, it didn’t happen with King Elessar: though he loved Númenorean splendour and magnificence, he could set them aside like an unwanted garment and mingle so thoroughly with the men of Rohan that you almost expected him to sprout a yellow beard. He had spent so many years blending with different kinds of people that blending had become second nature to him. Father had spent all his life being Gondor; what’s more, he had grown up with the expectation that Gondor would soon cease to exist and he wanted to cherish while it was still there. He didn’t have a second nature.

The second reason was that Uncle Eomer was jealous. He loved my Mother, his sister, and he didn’t like the way that she had – as he obviously put it to himself, though not out loud – gone over to Gondor. He didn’t like her Gondorian dress and her Gondorian manners and the way she occasionally forgot herself, even in Meduseld, and spoke to Father or Firiel or me in the Gondorian speech. He didn’t like knowing – and he did know, because I once heard Mother pointing it out to him in a moment of exasperation – that Father, when they first met, had come to understand her better after talking to her for five minutes than he, Uncle Eomer, had after living with her for twenty-four years. He didn’t like her way of seeming only distantly conscious that other men, including himself, existed for as long as Father was around.

Then there was the King –  our King, I mean. Uncle Eomer took the greatest possible pride in being King Elessar’s dearest friend and brother monarch and closest ally, and he didn’t like the fact that Father was the King’s chief councillor and support and, in the early years at least, the link that bound the new King to the people of Gondor: the man the King had to listen to if he wanted to reconcile everybody to the rule of an unknown Northerner; the man of all men that he could not do without. The fact that Father took no pride in his own importance and never sought to come between Uncle Eomer and King Elessar didn’t do much to help matters; boasting was a way of life among the Rohirrim and they found it difficult to understand a man with so little interest in his own glory.

As if all that wasn’t enough, there was Fíriel. Uncle Eomer and Aunt Lothiriel had only one son, Elfwine, and no daughters at all, and it seemed that Aunt Lothiriel couldn’t have any more children. Uncle Eomer adored Fíriel and was constantly inviting her to sit on his knee and be chucked under the chin and fed choice bits of food from his own plate. Fíriel, even when she was very small, hated sitting on anybody’s knee except Father’s and hated being chucked under the chin and didn’t like chunks of roast meat being thrust between her teeth, but she had been bred to courtesy and she would sit bolt upright on Uncle Eomer’s knee, smiling the bright crystal smile she kept for people whom she didn’t much like, and making brief shy answers to his questions in the speech of Rohan (though at home with Mother she would chatter away in it for hours); but when he let her go she would fly over to Father and give him one of her famous strangling hugs, and bury her face in the hollow of his shoulder, and not even Uncle Eomer could fail to notice the contrast. He’d pull his beard and turn away and sulk, and it would take hours of riding or sword-practice to restore his good humour.

There was Aunt Lothíriel too, of course, but that is a long tale and a sad one, and I won’t tell it here.

Naturally these tensions filtered through to the respective households and naturally some bickering went on, though our people were too in awe of Father to let things get out of hand. (‘The Prince wants you to like these Rohirrim, and so you’ll like them or you’ll clean out the guardroom latrines every day for a year when we get back,’ I once heard Captain Beregond bellow at a resentful member of the White Company who was over-proud of his ‘Númenorean’ blood.) Equally naturally they filtered down to Elfwine and me, and at every new meeting – they took place about twice a year, and six months is plenty of time to work up some fresh enmity when you’re very young – we would have long, pointless arguments, of the is-isn’t, is-isn’t kind, about the relative merits of Rohan and Gondor that invariably ended in fisticuffs followed by an uneasy truce, with occasional gleams of amity.

It was because of Elfwine’s goading that I once, at the age of ten, climbed up to the roof of Meduseld one rainy, slippery day and tied the moon-banner of Ithilien to the top of the highest roof-post, only to find, at my moment of triumph, that I couldn’t get down. I was stuck up there for an hour in the pouring rain, with the eyes of all Rohan on me, with Mother hiding her eyes and Aunt Lothíriel fainting and Uncle Eomer bellowing with fury and Elfwine jeering, until finally Father climbed up – never, never will I forget the moment when two of the gilded tiles slid from under him and he was left hanging on to the roof-ridge with one hand – and somehow carried me on his shoulder to a place where I could get a foothold, and we came down together and Father handed me over to Uncle Eomer and said that he’d leave my punishment in Uncle Eomer’s hands. Uncle Eomer fetched me a buffet on the head that threw me five yards, and as he did so his eye caught a movement overhead and he said to Father, ‘In your zeal to rescue this scapegrace boy of yours, you forgot to rescue your own banner.’ Father looked up and snapped his fingers and said so he had, but he didn’t think that his courage would sustain him to make the climb again in cold blood. He and Uncle Eomer each other in the eye for a long, challenging minute, until everyone started to wonder if Uncle Eomer – who was a lot heavier and less sinewy than Father – was going to attempt the climb himself, but suddenly Uncle Eomer roared with laughter and said that I had spirit, like a real son of Rohan (Elfwine scowled worse than ever at this), and we all went in out of the rain and the banner was left, damp but triumphant, to proclaim the superiority of Ithilien (at least, that’s how I saw it; I never got round to asking Father how he saw it because I spent the next three days keeping out of his way and the next six weeks not reminding him), until the wind blew it to tatters and away.

But the real strain came over the horses.