Seeds of the White Tree

Chapter 50 - Meant to Be

It was a slow, laborious process, attempting to clean up the aftermath of the attack on Minas Ithil. Eldarion could not help but find it ironic that it could take so much time and effort to build up a city...only to have it all fair near destroyed overnight. The battering rams, ballistas, and catapults of the Easterlings had smashed parapets, crushed walls, and toppled buildings. Broken stones, splintered wood, and all assortment of rubble filled the streets, and every which way a person turned it seemed there was some new debris to trip over. A fine film of white dust floated stubbornly in the air for nearly four days after the siege, only settling out completely after a brief evening rainstorm. 

So much of the progress which Elboron and Eruthiawen and their folk had made on remaking Minas Ithil had been lost. The people of the Vale were undaunted though. Fewer lives than one might guess had been lost in the siege, largely thanks to Elboron's quick action in bringing all civilians inside the citadel. Eruthiawen was already hard at work on designs to reconstruct the damaged portions of the city, taking into account structural losses which could not be fully salvaged. The Lady of the Vale worked over blueprints and sketches from dawn till dusk, Barahir nestled securely in the crook of her arm and Mistress Eidith begging her to please go and lie down every once in a while. 

Meanwhile, there was more than enough for everyone to do down in the city. Women and children worked at gathering up the smaller pieces of rubble and depositing them into a growing quarry pile in the main square. As much as could be reused by the stonemasons would be, and the rest would be ground down for repairing the road through the vale. The men and strong youths meanwhile were tasked with reinforcing those structures which could be preserved, and safely collapsing those which could not. Eldarion and his men were tasked with bringing down one such building; an apothecary which had lost two out of four walls and now stood lilting at a dangerous angle into the street. Under the guidance of a pair of master carpenters and stonemasons, they were in the process of removing as much of the remaining structure as possible before taking sledgehammers to the far side of the foundation. 

Crowbar in hand, Eldarion levered the final corner of a window sill out from its cracked stone setting. Glass was expensive, and so salvaging intact windows was a must. Malbeth and two others were ready, and together the four of them managed to get the thing out without breaking any of the twelve panes. Moving carefully in unison, they carried the window across the street and handed it off to women with canvas tarps who would see their delicate package safely wrapped. 

"Ahhhh...for being so thin and pretty, glass has no right to weigh as much as it does," groaned Hallas as he straightened up. 

"Could be worse," Malbeth, ever the optimist, pointed out. "We could be with Ohtar and King Aragorn trying to drag the rubble from the bridge out of the stream." 

Imagining that damp, frustrating work - even with the help of teams of horses and tow-ropes - made Eldarion somewhat less inclined to groan when he looked back to the apothecary and counted at least six windows still remaining in the wreck. Repairing the main bridge into Minas Tirith was a task which took fairly high priority; until some manner of replacement could be fashioned, getting in and out of the city involved either picking one's way across half-submerged pieces of the old bridge...or floating across on a makeshift ferry.

 With so much to do and so little time for anything but eating and sleeping at the end of each work-packed day, Eldarion had yet to speak more than ten words to Galieth. It was not entirely by design; there just always seemed to be other people about whenever the two of them came face-to-face. Eldarion had tried to ask her for a moment in private yesterday evening, but even after she had agreed that moment had simply failed to present itself. What Eldarion intended to say to Galieth, he still was not entirely sure. He had been so off-kilter following the events of The Black House, the memory of the days immediately after was beginning to blur into something of a hazy dream. Eldarion remembered the relief he had felt at weeping in Galieth's arms; only after that had the world begun to feel 'real' to him again. He also remembered the soft, almost desperate whisper of her voice when she told him that she loved him. If nothing else, as his father had said, he owed Galieth his honesty after such an encounter. What his honest feelings about her were though...