Azzam stayed with Dakheel until the foreigner lapsed into a fitful sleep.  It did not take long; Azzam scarcely had time to finish sponging the man’s raw skin before his eyelids began to flutter.  Beatings were exhausting, a fact Azzam had learned years ago as a young conscript in the Grand Army.  Still, he roused the Gondorian for just long enough to remove the manacles from his wrists and carefully wash the torn skin beneath.  Dakheel did not react to the treatment, though Azzam suspected it stung.  The warrior seemed to have run out of words, or perhaps he was no longer even aware of his surroundings.  When he released the man’s wrists, Dakheel immediately pulled them back to wrap around his head—an instinctively defensive posture.  Azzam stepped back and kept his peace while Dakheel’s breathing evened and his face relaxed.  What little he could do to ease the other’s pain had already been done.

He had retrieved his sputtering lantern and was making for the door when the slight billowing of his robe made Azzam realize he’d forgotten something.  He turned and spotted his belt still lying where he’d dropped it under the slowly swinging chains.  He eyed it with distaste, but after a moment, he crossed the floor to pick it up.  A few drops of blood streaked the leather, but he took no notice.  Wrapping it around his hand, he left the Gondorian, at last, to his rest.

The rain had stopped not long ago.  The air was thick and still.  For long moments, he stood still, staring at the leather around his hand while his feeble lamplight flickered and danced. 

Twenty-two years.

Twenty-two years since he’d mustered out of the Grand Army and married Asima.  He’d started his life afresh and tried to forget all that came before.  In twenty-two years, he’d never struck another person.

Until Dakheel.  Proud, stubborn Dakheel with his quiet dignity and fire-bright hatred of Mordor.

A scowl darkened his face as he wrapped his belt once more around his waist and buckled it.  His gambit had failed.  He’d sacrificed whatever pitiful shred of honor he had left, and it had done far more harm than good.

Not—he conceded as he walked toward the house on leaden feet—that this charade of his had stood much chance of success to begin with.  It relied, after all, on frightening Dakheel—a feat that might be within the Dark Lord’s power, but was certainly beyond Azzam.  Still, he’d held out hope that with enough pressure, he might find some give in the man.

He’d not intended to hurt Dakheel so badly—truly he hadn’t.  He’d thought that a bit of rough treatment and perhaps a few strokes of the lash would be enough to awaken the other man to the reality of what he faced.  He had not counted on the Gondorian bearing up so well under the blows, nor on how Dakheel’s stoicism would bleed over into a defiance that almost dared him to continue.  He’d sought only to rattle the man—had thought to return in a day or so with comforting words after Dakheel had had time to think.  Then, he had thought wildly and foolishly, the man might at last share his origins and a new course could be laid.  He hadn’t expected the truth to spill out so suddenly, nor for that truth to be so hopeless.

Azzam wondered, idly, what Dakheel could have done that’d he’d incurred the Dark Lord’s wrath—or at least thought he had.  It didn’t matter; Azzam knew he would never ask him.  There was always the risk, after all, that Dakheel might tell him.

The northerner did not understand.  He still viewed resistance to Mordor as a point of honor.  He did not see how Sauron had risen over Harad like a mighty wind—one that would soon cover all the world.  There was no shame in bowing before that power, like a tree bows before a gale.  Those that did not bend would shatter or be uprooted entirely.

But, Dakheel would not bow—would not bend.  In time, Azzam knew, he would break.  And if his spirit was typical of the Men of Gondor, he would be only the first of many.

Defiance, after all, was hardly an unusual phenomenon among Men.  There had once been many among the Haradrim who shared Dakheel’s fire, especially in the early days after Sauron’s return, when his people were still discovering what their storied alliance with the Dark Lord would cost.  Plenty of proud warriors had rejected their rulers’ commands and placed themselves in opposition to the falling Shadow.  They girded themselves with pride in noble houses or commitment to tribal codes of conduct or piety for forbidden gods.

And, one by one, they were shattered.  As Dakheel would be.

For reasons he couldn’t begin to explain, Azzam’s mind was drawn to the image of Jabari, the last high king of Harad on his pyre, with the crown of the Sixteen Tribes on his head and the bitter glint of triumph in his eyes.

He shook off these dark thoughts as he reached his front door.  The house beyond was pitch black and silent.  His sandaled feet made no sound on the fired-clay tiles.  The dying flame of his lantern flickered redly off crumbling adobe walls.  As he always did last thing at night, he paused before his children’s doors.  Hakim and Kalima were sound asleep; plowing time always exhausted them.  Of course, it was hardly less wearying for Asima, but she was sitting up in bed with her arms drawn around her knees when he finally reached their bedchamber.  “It grows late, husband.”

Azzam turned away from the unspoken question in her eyes.  As he hung the lantern on the lampstand, she stood, her body unfolding with the grace of a much younger woman.  Azzam sighed.  How often had he told her that he needed no help changing his own clothes?  She persisted, nonetheless.  It was tradition, after all, for a wife to help her husband with his garments, even if those garments were only the simple robes of a peasant.  After twenty-two years of marriage, Azzam found it easier to simply lift his feet so that she could remove first one sandal, then the other.  Slowly and with great reluctance, he removed his belt and dropped it into her waiting hands.

As he’d known she would, Asima suddenly froze, breaking the familiar rhythm of the ritual as she stared at the belt.  Turning away from him, she examined it more closely under the lamplight.  Azzam knew what she would find:  dark smears of blood clinging to the edges of the leather, beginning to go sticky as they dried.

When she turned back to him once more, her face was closed but her eyes burned.  With a single look, she took him in—saw his lack of a wound, saw the guilt in his face, saw so many things he wished he could hide from her.

“What did you do, Azzam?”  Her voice was barely a whisper.

He took a slow step back and sank down to sit on the edge of the bed, feeling the creak of the woven hemp that supported their thin mattress.  He stared at his hands, noting that they, too, bore signs of his crime in the form of drying red smudges.  “I thought I could make him tell us,” he said at last, matching her low tone, “Who he is, where his family dwells . . . I thought if he could only be made to speak, that it would be enough.  That the ends would justify.”

For a moment, she just stared at him.  Her face did not change.  Then she turned and reached for her overrobe where it hung from its peg.  Wordlessly, she pulled the loose garment on over her simple sleeping shift, not bothering to dress fully or even to cover her hair.  She disappeared into her bower for a moment only to emerge with sandals on her feet, her healer’s kit under her arm, and a jar of lamp oil in her hands.  While Azzam contemplated the blood under his fingernails, Asima refilled the lantern with quick, efficient movements and made to bear it out of the room.  Remembering himself at last, Azzam stood to follow, but Asima stopped him with a hand on his chest.  “You’ve done enough, husband,” she said in a voice that warned he would be a fool to argue.

So Azzam stayed behind in darkness while Asima left the house.  After a moment, flickers of light slipped past the window coverings as she walked past outside, following the well-worn path that led down to the barn.  Azzam drew a slow breath.  With clumsy fingers, he pulled off his overrobe and hung it on the wall.  Blindly, he fumbled at the clasps that closed his ankle-length body shirt.  It took longer than it should have, but at last, the garment fell open and he was able to remove that as well.

Sitting on the edge of the bed in nothing but his loincloth, Azzam reached up to rub an old scar—the deep one that ran from just beside his spine almost to the point of his shoulder.  Even after more than twenty-two years, it still ached at times.  Few had laid eyes on that scar in twenty-two years—not even his own children.  Only Asima knew its full meaning.

As he waited in the dark, he tried, with limited success, to think of nothing at all.  After what felt like several eternities, he again glimpsed Asima’s bobbing lantern through the slit in the window coverings.

She entered the room silently and hung the lantern again from its stand.  As she removed her overrobe, her arm bumped against the iron lampstand, causing the frame to rock and the woman to wince.  In the process of hanging her robe, she paused and rubbed her wrist.

Azzam stood.  “Asima?”  She turned away from him, but he stepped around her and caught her hand.  Lifting it gently, he could easily see where the skin of her wrist was reddened—where bruises like fingerprints were beginning to form.  “What happened?”

She looked away.  “What does ‘baudaro’ mean?”

Azzam shook his head in bewilderment.  “I do not know.  The Gondorian speaks other languages besides Westron.  What did he do?”

“He seemed deep in dreams when I entered his quarters.  Troubled dreams.  He whispered that word over and over:  ‘baudaro.’  And other words in strange tongues.  I recognized only one word, a name.  ‘Mordor.’”  She swallowed.  “I worried for a moment that the illness that plagued him when he first came to us had returned.  I touched his forehead, but there was no fever and he did not stir.”

Azzam waited silently, still not releasing her hand.  After a moment, she shrugged.  “I thought I could check his pulse without waking him.  I was wrong.”

Azzam winced.  He could imagine the rest easily enough:  waking disoriented from dreams of the Black Land only to find himself wounded and chained, confused and not alone . . . Dakheel could hardly be blamed for reacting like any soldier who suddenly found himself in enemy hands.  In such a state, men could behave like trapped animals.  Asima’s hand twisted to grip his wrist, her eyes suddenly sharp.  “Don’t you even think of holding this against him, Azzam.  All he did was grab my arm.  I don’t believe he was even fully awake until I cried out.  And then he apologized at once, as if he were the one who’d dealt some grievous hurt.”

Azzam closed his eyes.  Tenderly, he placed his other hand over her wrist.  This, then, was one more wound on his conscience—this time not on a near-stranger like Dakheel, but on the person most precious to him in the world.

“Were you able to do anything for him?”

She pulled her arm back and turned away.  “Little enough.  I gave him one herb to ease his pain and another to ease his sleep.”  She extinguished the lamp; they’d used too much oil already.  Azzam sensed more than saw her pad around to her side of the bed and sit.  Wearily, he, too, pushed back the light covers and got into bed.  Once his eyes adjusted to the dark, he could just make out Asima, silhouetted against the faint light from the window.  She was staring off into the darkness, but he thought her face had softened a little.  “There was little enough to be done,” she said quietly, “His spine is intact as are his ribs.  The cuts are shallow, and he said you’d cleaned them already.  He will have a few scars, but no worse.”

Azzam looked away.  Neither of them would speak of how he’d learned to deal out so much pain without leaving an injury.  It was a skill he apparently hadn’t lost, despite wishing to.  Even after twenty-two years.

“Did he say anything?”

Azzam closed his eyes and wished he could close his ears to the cautious hope in her voice.  He said ‘I forgive you’ . . . He swallowed.  “Nothing that could help him.”

Without looking at him, Asima reached over to place her hand on his bare shoulder.  Her fingers quickly found the old scar and massaged deep circles into the flesh around it.  Somehow, she always knew when the wound was troubling him.  Her touch was gentle and soothing.  But it was not enough.

It never was.

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Breakfast the next morning was a quiet affair.  The children drooped over their porridge, not truly rested enough given the previous days’ long labor.  Kalima was allowed, but every time Hakim began to slump, Azzam caught his gaze and glared until the boy straightened.  He would not be accused of raising a weak son.

As they scraped up the last of the morning meal, Azzam looked at his son and cleared his throat.  “I will see to Dakheel.  Hakim, you check on the fold with your sister and then haul the plow out of the shed.  We’ll start on the south field today.”

Hakim’s face fell.  He opened his mouth to ask for an explanation, but then closed it again.  Azzam and Asima hadn’t raised him to question orders.  The youth’s face was glum as he cleared his bowl and trudged out the door.  Azzam felt a twinge of regret; relegated to manual labor and deprived of his morning visit with Dakheel, Hakim probably thought he was being punished for something.  The man shook off that thought.  Hakim was fond of Dakheel, and for that reason he should not see the man in his current state.  At least not until Azzam had found a chance to explain.  A way to explain.

Asima pressed a bowl into his hands with a look that was sad and far too knowing.  As he left the house, Azzam studied the bowl’s contents to give himself something to do as his reluctant feet carried him towards the barn.  Dakheel’s breakfast was somewhat richer than what the rest of them had eaten; the porridge was fortified with chopped nuts, milk, and green specks that were probably Asima’s herbs against pain.  Azzam sighed.  Clearly, his wife was trying to build up Dakheel’s strength while she still had the opportunity.  That was classic Asima:  nurturing from afar and hoping no one would notice.

When he reached the slave quarters and pushed the door open, Azzam’s first thought was that perhaps he could have sent Hakim after all.  Dakheel sat with his back perfectly straight.  He’d pulled his tunic back on and rolled the loose sleeves down until they covered the abrasions on his wrists.  But for the absence of shackles on his arms, the previous night could have been a foul dream.  When Dakheel saw Azzam, though, his posture relaxed and he slumped a little with what seemed strangely like relief.  Absent the need to pretend nothing had happened, the northerner’s face tightened slightly with pain.

Azzam handed him the bowl.  “You were expecting Hakim,” he said conversationally.

Dakheel nodded.  “I take it you’ve not told him.”

Azzam frowned.  “I do not keep secrets from my son, but . . .”  He shook his head.  “No matter.  I’ll tell him today.”

But, Dakheel shook his head.  “There is no need for that, Azzam.  I will be well enough by nightfall.  He need never know.”

Azzam arched an eyebrow.  Dakheel took a bite of porridge.  “Hakim is sensitive,” he said by way of explanation, “He cannot change what happened and it would only trouble him.  He would not understand.”

“But you do?” Azzam said skeptically.  Dakheel merely shrugged and turned his attention to his meal.  Azzam sighed and turned away.  Stepping past Dakheel, he lifted the lid from a barrel holding fresh water and stooped to retrieve a washbasin.  Once the bowl was full, he hesitated but then scolded himself for his hesitation.  Perhaps there were legitimate reasons to allow another to suffer, but appeasing his own squeamishness was not one of them.  Dipping a few rags in the basin, he knelt beside Dakheel and reached for the hem of his tunic.  “If I may . . .”

Dakheel started and pulled away from his touch.  He twisted to regard Azzam with wary eyes.  After a moment, though, he pulled his tunic off, set it aside, and returned to his meal, his expression carefully blank.  Azzam’s lips pressed into a thin line.  He remembered that reaction well:  how concealed fear faded to resignation.  Then he looked at Dakheel’s back and realized that the man was still offering far more trust than Azzam deserved.  With sunlight streaming through the upper windows, Azzam could see that the other man’s injuries were far more extensive than a cursory examination by lamplight had suggested.  Bruises were rising, red and purple, along what seemed like every inch of Dakheel’s upper back.  The skin was crisscrossed with small scratches and several deeper wounds had scabbed over.  Asima was right:  even if everything healed perfectly, Dakheel would have at least three or four scars.  Three or four new scars, Azzam amended mentally.  His eyes had alighted on a thin white line that suggested a sword cut just above the man’s kidneys.

Though it was still early, the air was growing warm, and Dakheel had begun to sweat already.  Azzam sponged over the other man’s back as gently as he could.  The fresh water would keep the sweat from stinging the abraded skin, at least for a while.

“How long?” Dakheel’s voice startled him out of his contemplations.  “If your mind is made up, I would just as soon not linger.”  But his voice wavered just a little, and Azzam suspected his words were mostly bravado.

“At least three days,” Azzam responded evenly, “Perhaps four.  I cannot leave even for a day until the fields are ready for sowing.”  Dakheel did not respond, but at the next touch of the cloth, a slight tremor ran through his shoulders.  It was probably a sign of pain.  Probably.  Azzam swallowed.  “You will have a chance in Umbar,” he offered, though Dakheel did not need to know how slim that chance was.  “The nobles always seek out a few of the more educated Tarks to be servants in their houses.  They are slaves, yet, but they receive better treatment than most.  Better even than some free men of Harad.”

Dakheel snorted.  “I will not grovel,” he said scornfully, “Nor seek to curry favor simply for a more comfortable cage.”

Azzam sighed.  Defying the Shadow was one thing, but would Dakheel not bend at all?  Did he not realize that his life was worth more than his pride?  “More to the point,” he continued as if the other had not spoken, “They have access.  There are resources at their disposal that a simple galley slave could not hope to touch.  Opportunities, you might say.”

Dakheel was silent.  He seemed to consider that.  Still, Azzam knew it was unlikely the man would take his advice.  But he also knew that when Kalima inevitably asked what had become of Dakheel, he would tell her about the manservants who lived in mansions with their noble masters rather than the galley slaves kept chained in dark holds.

Dakheel’s back was as clean as it was likely to get, and he was beginning to flinch from the pressure on his bruises.  Azzam set the basin aside, accepted Dakheel’s empty bowl, and waited while the Gondorian pulled his tunic back on.  Setting the bowl down next to the basin, Azzam picked up the abandoned wrist manacles and turned them over and over in his hands.

He hesitated.  Dakheel’s arms, he could see, were nearly as scraped and bloodied as his back—bruised and torn from catching his weight as he fell.

Bruised like Asima’s wrist.

He cut his deliberation short when he felt Dakheel’s gaze on him.  The man’s eyes were hooded, his expression carefully neutral.  Making up his mind, Azzam squatted and dipped two cloths in the wash basin.  Lifting Dakheel’s unresisting hand, he wrapped the thin cloth around the battered skin of his wrist.  Then, he took the shackle and closed it over the crude bandage.  Dakheel’s expression didn’t change, but he looked away as Azzam gave his other wrist the same treatment.  The rags, at least, would cushion the skin slightly.

This wasn’t vengeance, Azzam told himself sternly.  Merely prudence.  Dakheel, after all, had proven himself quite resourceful, and he would be understandably desperate to escape.  That was a risk Azzam simply couldn’t take.

He locked the second shackle but did not release Dakheel’s arm at once.  He waited until the man met his gaze.  “Don’t throw your life away, Dakheel,” he all but pleaded, “Not for something as superfluous as pride.”

Something flickered in the foreigner’s eyes.  Not for the first time, Azzam had the strange impression that, though Dakheel’s eyes were fixed on his, the other man was looking through him and somehow past him.  Like he was making a mental record of some larger story, with implications far beyond the humble question of two men and their lives.  Strangely, a slight smile played across his face.

It occurred to Azzam that even among condemned men, he’d never seen a smile so sad.

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An afternoon rainstorm drummed steadily against the roof.  Aragorn leaned forward, his elbows propped on his knees.  Sweat trickled down his back, stinging where it touched his cuts, but he gave it no thought.  That irritation had been his constant companion all day; it could no longer trouble him.  Worse than the lingering pain of cut skin was the general feeling of being pounded—as if he’d fallen off a horse or perhaps been trampled by one.

Overall, though, he felt well enough.  In fact, his chief trouble was a sort of embarrassment.  By light of day, it was clear that his injuries from Azzam’s whipping were quite mild compared to some of the wounds he’d suffered over the years.  There was, he felt, little reason for him to react as he had last night.  Such minor wounds should not have been enough to render him helpless and all but insensate. 

He tried to push all that out of his mind and focus on nothing but the pick in his hand.  Still, dark thoughts kept creeping back in.  If this was what a whipping was like when the assailant had only good intentions, what must his captured countrymen be enduring?  Without even bothering to think, Aragorn could call to mind the names and faces of a half dozen men who had fought by his side and had disappeared or been captured after battles with the Haradrim.  Was this their life now?  Chains and whips and the loss of all dignity and control?  Was this this their reward for defending Gondor?

So suddenly it surprised him, the shackle on his left wrist fell open and clattered to the ground, taking the lock pick with it.  Aragorn’s eyes widened.  He recovered the pick with fumbling fingers.  He had done it.  He’d finally worked out the trick . . . and because he’d allowed his mind to wander, he didn’t even remember how he’d done it.

Or, did he?  Lifting the pick with his left hand, he slid it into the shackle on his right wrist, trying to replicate half-remembered sensations.  Slip and catch the mechanism . . . a bit more pressure . . . adjust the angle slightly . . . and then his right wrist, too, was free and the manacles were falling to the floor.  Fighting to keep an excited tremor out of his fingers, he repeated the process with the chains at his ankles and found that they fell away just as easily.  Hardly daring to believe his sudden success, he stretched slowly, working the kinks out of his shoulders for the first time in days.  He was free at last.

Which meant a decision long put off was now upon him.

He lifted the shackles and turned them over in his hands, feeling the roughness of the iron.  A trickle of sweat stung his deepest cut and he heard again Azzam’s words.

“Do you want to know what real slavery is?”

That was what far too many of his allies faced every day:  real slavery.  The loss of choice, the loss of hope.  Was there truly nothing more he could do for them?

And as he stared at the empty shackles, an idea began to form.  Perhaps there was something he could do—something the Haradric lords would never expect.

Because they’d never imagine anyone would be crazy enough to try.

But, he’d known since he was barely a man that it was his duty to oppose the Enemy.  This was just one more thing—one more seemingly impossible mission that he would somehow have to make possible.

And if, along the way, he could do something for this nation of starving children and dying sons—anything that might lift fallen Harad and weaken her bonds to Sauron—then surely that was his duty as well.  What Azzam and his family endured, after all, was just another kind of slavery.  Their chains were invisible, but no less real.

He let the shackles drop to the ground and for a moment, he almost wanted to laugh at his own arrogance.  All he’d accomplished, after all, was to pick a dilapidated set of manacles.  There was no guarantee that he would even be able to escape the next time he was chained, much less defeat his captors, free his fellows, and liberate all of Harad from Sauron’s influence.

He rolled his shoulders and winced as the motion agitated his torn skin.  He closed his eyes and breathed deep.  He could almost see the sparkling waterfalls of Rivendell and the verdant forests of the Angle.  Though home lay countless leagues away, for a moment, it felt so close he could almost touch it.

He opened his eyes, picked up the shackles, and locked them around his wrists and ankles before he could change his mind.

Easier roads were for other Men, after all.

And when it was done—when he was sure that he had done everything in his power—maybe then he could finally get some sleep.

Fin

A/N:  “Baudaro” is actually two words, which Asima mistook for one—“Baw, daro”—Sindarin for “No, stop.”