“You must think of a name the Northerners can pronounce, a name that does not raise suspicion nor betray your foreign ancestry, like the one I have adopted: Arrowood.”
“Arrowood,” she repeated, her fleshy mouth shaping the unfamiliar syllables, looking very much like a fish gulping water to breathe. “I am Arrowood.”
“You cannot call yourself Arrowood! That is my name. Call yourself by another.”
Rhoshira’s eyes blazed fiercely, and the scrawny man thought he might have been too outspoken in his choice of words. “Very well, we can be relatives, I suppose,” he muttered, “although we look nothing alike. I know! We can pose as husband and wife.”
The woman stared down at him, lip curled in disgust. “Alright, never mind. I expect that I will be doing all the talking for us, anyway.” She is just the hired muscle, he reminded himself.
After he was contacted by Azrazôr’s man, and told that his skills were needed in the Northern Wastes, he wasted no time in packing up his calipers and funnels, his texts and manuscripts, his bottles and flasks, and headed straight to the Sail-haven of Umbar Baharbêl. There, leaning against a piling, gazing at the placid turquoise waters, was the mercenary. At first glance, Arrowood thought she was one of the Variag, but during the sea voyage north, he deduced that she was from a different clan of Easterling tribes, those of mixed blood that were descended from the people of Hador Lórindol, first Lord of Dor-Lómin and leader of the Third House of the Edain. After the Battle of the Unnumbered Tears in the First Age, Hador’s people were enslaved by Brodda, Chieftain of the Easterlings, servant of Morgoth: that would account for Rhoshira’s lighter skin and hair, and unusually large stature.
It surprised him when she hefted his steel strongbox on her shoulders as easily as if she were toting a basket of spices to market. He could not have asked for a better bodyguard, he thought, following close behind her as she climbed the gangplank, watching the sway of her broad hips like a cobra mesmerized by the snake charmer’s rhythmic flute. Slave-Lord Azrazôr always did have an eye for excellence.
In the fields of Southern Mordor slaves outnumbered the slavers by a hundred to one as they worked the rich black soil to feed Sauron's armies. The region that contained the inland sea Núrnen, formed from a crater of an extinct volcano, was fed by rivers flowing from the Ephel Dúath and Ash Mountains, and despite its closeness to Barad-dûr on the plateau of Gorgoroth, was some of the most fertile farmland in Middle-Earth. It was one of the slaves from Rhûn, now known as Arrowood, who suggested they build a system of channels and ditches to better distribute water for irrigation, thinking to lessen his own toil, and then he devised a chain pump, or ‘dragon spine’ as he called it, that was useful for lifting water to moderate heights, and, as he told the Overseer, the pump would also be helpful for pumping out bilge water from the ships and slave galleys of the Corsairs. But it was the wondrous machine that moved water uphill, when rotated, that caught the attention of the Slave-Lord.
One day in late summer, Arrowood was hoeing and weeding, before the fields were flooded for the last time that season, and then the cutting and threshing would begin. A shadow fell across the row he was working. He cringed, expecting the whip's lash, fearing he was not working fast enough. Instead he was told he was given his freedom, and he was taken to the City of the Corsairs, held under lock and key inside one of Azrazôr’s luxurious compounds.
Arrowood was furnished with all the tools and equipment he needed; the only labor required of him was to continue his study of cranks and springs, turbines and axles, and provide ingenious new methods and inventions for his master. His freedom was not quite free, but it mattered not: his new life was far preferable than the grueling slave fields of Nurn, the "death fields", some called them; and he lived in relative ease and luxury, with everything he could wish for, except wine and women, as these vices would take time away from his work. Being too craven to escape, he readily acquiesced, and accepted his fate without question.
