Orc in Ithilien

Far away on a mountainside in the south of Gondor, not long after Eowyn and Hrodgar's conversation had taken place, the smell of the Hobbit’s cooking was making Shagrat’s mouth water. He still had a number of half-dry strips of venison, unappetising remnants of his last kill, secreted in the lining of his cloak, and anaesthetised by the effects of Azof’s grog, he unthinkingly began to get to his feet to collect them. The shooting pain from the injuries in his side doubled him over immediately and he stayed where he was, waiting for it to subside. Ludlow, busy with whatever culinary enterprise was currently engrossing him had noticed nothing and after a moment he bustled over to Shagrat, proffering a large bacon sandwich.

The Warg stood up quickly too, its attention fully focussed on the Hobbit, and deftly caught the sandwich that Ludlow tossed its way in its jaws. Shagrat noted that it too had sustained an injury and was limping heavily. He called it over and examined the damage: there was a deep slash down one of its fore limbs and the pad of its foot had been skewered through, no doubt by Azof’s - or possibly even Dokuz’s blade. The wounds had bled clean and the Uruk, knowing of no better antiseptic, sloshed them liberally with a measure of the Orc-draught from his cup. While the Warg bared its teeth and laid its ears flat at him, he bandaged its injury with a strip of leather torn from the hem of his jerkin.

Shagrat realised to his dismay that neither he nor the Warg would be able to hunt like this. “You should go back home,” he advised the Hobbit. “Winter’s coming. You don’t want to end up stuck out here with no board and lodgings.”

What about you, the Hobbit asked.

“I’ll find somewhere to lie up till Spring,” said Shagrat, with an easy confidence he by no means felt. “Rustle a couple of cows or sheep or something to tide me over. I’ve done it before.” Circumstances had indeed forced him to try something similar at one point in the past. This had not ended at all well.

“How did you hurt your leg?” Ludlow asked suddenly.

Barking out a harsh, humourless laugh, Shagrat said - “it was when I was trying to rustle a couple of cows or something to tide me over last winter, wasn’t it? Never said I was any good at it.” He went on to explain what had happened:

******

Shagrat cast about in desperation. It had taken him two long days to make his way down from the high mountain pass where Dokuz and the others had taken his weapons and left him. The pickings had been very slim indeed for Orcs, following the end of the war, and he couldn’t remember when his last proper meal had been before that. Night was falling and he could smell snow on the wind – in fact, a few flakes of it were swirling about already, in the cold evening breeze. If a blizzard started, he would be stranded until the following morning, and farmland was not a safe place for Orcs, nowadays. He’d expected there would be livestock - a risky prospect at best, for even farmers had grown bold enough to hunt down and slaughter Orcs in these difficult, unsettled times, but on the other hand, domestic animals were easy to catch, and even unarmed and in his weakened state, Shagrat knew he would be able to dispatch a farm animal without too much trouble. Although his knowledge of agricultural practices was hazy at best, it wasn’t winter yet, and he had been certain that there would be livestock grazing up in the high pastures. They had been, not long ago, there was evidence enough of that, but now the hillsides were empty and quite deserted.

The Uruk made his way into the shelter of a stand of trees. The wind had risen and without his outer clothing, boots and gauntlets – items of which he had been relieved by Dokuz’s gang - the cold cut through Shagrat like a knife. Out of the wind, he picked up a strong, compelling scent immediately and followed his nose to a clearing in the middle of the clump of trees. The side of goat flesh that had attracted him was greenish with age, air-dried almost all the way through, but even so the sight of it caused Shagrat’s stomach to contract painfully, and he began salivating at once. The meat had been hung high up off the ground and was well out of reach. It was obviously intended as bait, for directly beneath it there was a large steel-jawed spring-trap, loosely covered with twigs and leaf-litter.

*******

“I knew it was a trap, of course,” Shagrat said after a moment. “I’d hurt my hand, but I still thought I could get up at it. I wouldn’t have gone after it if I hadn’t been sure I could.”

“Then what happened?” Ludlow breathed.

“Fell out the bleedin’ tree, didn’t I,” the Orc said simply.

*******

Shagrat felt the branch he was clinging to give, sickeningly, under him the instant before it snapped. He twisted frantically in the air, trying to break his fall, and hit the ground heavily, first with his shoulders and then his buttocks. He remembered the bear trap the split second before his legs came down and for a moment thought he’d been lucky enough to clear it, but then there was an awful stomach-churning, metallic and bone-crunching impact. The pain did not come at once. First, there was only a terrifying sensation of intense pressure, as if all of his right leg below the shin was being gripped in an enormous vice. He’d drawn breath to scream before it properly started but when it did hit him, the severity of it drove every bit of air from his lungs. He retched and gasped helplessly, blacking out for a merciful moment in shock, but came to roaring in anguish.

***********

“You get the general idea,” said Shagrat. “After that a bear came, and my eye –“ he broke off quickly and shook himself, trying to rid himself of yet another unpleasant memory.

“Well that’s no good then,” Ludlow tutted, “that sounds much too dangerous.” He thought for a moment, and then suggested brightly: “why don’t we rent some accommodation instead? At an inn or something. Somewhere that does meals all-in, too. That way you wouldn’t have to rustle anything, not if you didn’t want to. It’ll be off-season, so it shouldn’t cost that much.”

The Orc muttered that he hadn’t any money, a relevant point that wasn’t the real reason for his reluctance. After falling into the hands of the travelling showmen, he had been exhibited up and down the country, more often than not at wayside taverns, where his suffering would routinely be exploited as a source of public entertainment. The associations that Shagrat had formed with those types of venues were all unpleasant, and he would have been happy never to set foot in another one of them again. Not wanting to admit any of this to the Hobbit, he said shortly:

“They don’t let people like me in inns,” which was also true enough.

That can’t be right, insisted the Hobbit. “When was the last time you were in one?”

After a moment, the Uruk told him.

************

It was evening on the day that Faramir had acquired him. Soaked to the skin, and begrimed from the dirt of the road, the royal party had arrived at a coaching tavern where they intended to spend the night. The Prince and his personal advisors had already gone inside to arrange their accommodation, with Shagrat and the rest of the royal retinue following behind.

There was a rough-looking fellow, the tavern’s cellar-man, lingering just inside the entrance to the building. As Shagrat and the others approached, he extended one heavy arm across the door, blocking the Uruk’s way.

“No Orcs inside the premises,” he said, and spat at Shagrat’s feet. “We ain’t having none of that filth in here. Stable it round the back if you must, but be sure and keep it away from the other livestock.” Meeting the man’s eye, one of the royal aides gave him a brief nod of approval, commenting that that would be a capital arrangement.

From inside the tavern, Faramir turned back to see what was causing the delay. As the two aides who were with him hurried the Prince further into the inn, the travelling companions remaining outside closed ranks smartly around Shagrat, calling out that they would be glad to attend to the Orc themselves. It was a neatly-accomplished manoeuvre.

Seeing the familiar expressions of loathing and disgust that were clearly written upon their faces, Shagrat had come close to entreating Goldilocks not to leave him at the mercy of those men. The plea had been on the tip of his tongue, but Shagrat had bitten it back, stifling the words in his throat. There was, in the Orc’s opinion, every likelihood that Faramir would have left him to his own devices no matter what Shagrat himself wanted, or said. On asking for Goldilocks’ help in the past, he had been met with derision, contempt, and worse, and the Orc knew from bitter experience that complete indifference was likely to be best response he could hope for.

By Shagrat’s reckoning, his best chances of survival lay in keeping the lowest of possible profiles, and in causing minimum annoyance to Faramir and his men. So he had gone with the royal aides, meekly following them down into the stable yard. Not daring to openly misuse their master’s new favourite, they had nevertheless treated him with all the casual brutality that the Uruk had come to expect from his human handlers: they leaned him against a hitching post and had him strip, after which they’d doused him with a bucket or two of water, and then, being unwilling to actually lay hands on him, ordered him to clean his filthy body, watching in amusement while he inexpertly tried to wash himself down. After that they’d gone indoors, taking his clothes – which they said were fit for nothing but burning – and leaving him outside. Shagrat, knowing better than to try and accompany them, had made his way across to the stable block. It had been raining for much of the day, but the night sky had cleared of clouds and though it was early summer, to Shagrat it felt bitterly cold in the dark.

The horses shied and stamped in their stalls, as horses usually did when they sensed there was an Orc abroad, but eventually quietened. The cape that Faramir had lent him earlier in the day, now muddy and damp and reeking of wet wool, was still clutched in Shagrat’s hands. He had held on to it like a lifeline despite the best attempts of the royal aides to prise it off him, and now he spread it out in one of the empty loose-boxes. Thankfully he noted that the straw that lined it was both dry and relatively fresh, considerations that taken together, qualified this accommodation as being some of the best that the Orc had been provided with in months.

Shagrat was wrapped in his cloak, resting down in the straw, when Faramir came to find him later that evening. The Uruk, if asleep was only dozing fitfully, for he started up immediately at the Prince’s light step. His face radiated such simple honest pleasure when he saw Faramir that for a moment, his fearsome countenance softened oddly and he looked quite startlingly different.

Then apparently, he remembered himself. His head went down and his shoulders hunched up warily.

“Shagrat! What are you up to?” called Faramir softly, feeling strangely touched by the Uruk’s obvious happiness to see him. “What on earth are you still doing out here?”

The Orc had made the mistake of believing that he and Faramir shared some kind of personal feeling between them once before. Only once; then Faramir had turned on him with such scorn and fury that the shock, coming as it had at a time when the Orc’s natural resilience was running at a particularly low ebb, had nearly broken him, and the first tentative tendrils of trust that Shagrat had so hopefully extended towards his Prince had withered instantly in the ferocity of the young man’s contempt. The Uruk had been taught a lasting lesson by that painful experience, and had no intention of being caught in the same trap twice.

“Nothing. I’m not up to anything,” Shagrat replied warily. Then quickly reconsidering, because he thought knew the rules of the game they were engaged in of old, he added: “should I – what do you want me to be doing?”

*************

“As if I didn’t already know full well,” Shagrat scoffed. “Although he said he only wanted to make sure I was all right. I wasn’t going to fall for that though, thought he must just want me to –“ he broke off and looked sharply at Ludlow, who, he was relieved to note did not appear to be following all the specifics of the tale he was relating. “But he never tried anything on,” Shagrat continued, and there was a definite note of wonder in his voice. “Not that I could’ve stopped him the state I was in, but - he stayed all night and he didn’t make me do a thing. He just – just sat and watched with me. I couldn’t believe it. Someone like him sleeping rough, out in a stable.”

“Who’s ‘him’?” Ludlow asked innocently.

“It’s none of your sodding business,” snarled Shagrat, which more or less ended that conversation.

*************

TBC