Orc in Ithilien

Shagrat woke late the next morning. The Hobbit greeted him cheerily, apparently not at all offended by having been barked at the previous night and in a tentative gesture of reconciliation, the Uruk offered up his stash of deer-meat for the communal pot. As a result of this Ludlow had been cooking all morning. To Shagrat’s dry venison strips he had enthusiastically added a variety of strange vegetables (“wild onions! Delicious!”) and oddly-coloured, late season mushrooms (Look, Shagrat! Wood blewits!”) that he had rooted around for in the hanger-wood on the mountainside. Though he’d watched these dubious preparations with a leery eye, even Shagrat had to admit the end result was worth waiting for - the Hobbit certainly knew how to cook.

After their meal the Uruk and Hobbit sat lazily, watching the glowing embers of Ludlow’s camp fire.

“You know, if you need money, we could do what those other Orcs were planning,” Ludlow chirped up after a while, resuming one of the subjects from their previous night as if there hadn’t been a break in the conversation. “We could beat them to it.” Taking Shagrat’s lack of reply as a sign to continue, he began to explain what Dokuz’s band had been preparing to do.

“Slaying giants, you say?” said Shagrat after a moment, thinking he had the jist of it. “Do me a favour. What kind of giant-killer do I look like to you? You must be off your rocker.”

“No,” Ludlow insisted , Shagrat was missing the point. There was only one giant left to deal with, since giants had in general been dying out across Middle Earth for many years –

“Just like all dark creatures are just now, or have been doing since the fall of Mordor,” Ludlow said earnestly, before remembering who he was talking to. “Oh! -”

Shagrat raised his eyebrows at him.

“Yes, well,” Ludlow blustered, continuing quickly to cover his faux pas.

In any case, the giant in question was almost certainly already dead, given the length of time for which the reward for his removal had been standing. Dokuz and his band had met some crazy old coot in a pub who had told them all about it –

“In a pub?” Shagrat interrupted. “That lot could drink in pubs, and nobody’d say anything?”

“Well - yes, everyone always seemed quite happy about it,” the Hobbit said. “I met them in a pub myself, to begin with. Why do you ask?”

“Every time I’ve been in a pub some have-a-go pillock hero tries to lynch me,” Shagrat replied darkly, before prompting Ludlow to continue, which he did.

All that remained, the elderly gentleman had said, was for some fellow or fellows of stout heart with doughty natures, such as Dokuz and his Orcs obviously were to tackle the ascent to the giant’s mountain retreat, and collect tangible proof of the monstrous creature’s demise. They would bring this back and then collect and share between them the reward that was still standing for his removal.

“And you know where to find this old geezer do you?” asked Shagrat, still puzzling over Ludlow’s use of the word ‘doughty’.

At this the Hobbit’s eyes welled up with unshed tears. “That poor man,” he said. “It was such an awful tragedy – him waiting all that while for someone to go into partnership with, then meeting with a fatal accident on the very night he found someone, someone he could trust.”

Searching Ludlow’s plump and honest face, Shagrat looked for some indication that he understood the irony of what he’d just said, but finding none, simply commented: “I suppose you saw all this for yourself, did you?”

“No. I think it happened just before I met them.”

Shagrat said that it was a fine enough idea on Ludlow’s part, but went on to explain that their not knowing where to collect the bits of dead giant, or where to take the things once they had them would most likely count as insurmountably significant barriers to their success.

“Oh, but there’s no need to worry about that,” Ludlow countered cheerfully. “Dokuz’s lads have already been. And the trophy -”

He undid the drawstrings of Azof’s backpack with something of a flourish.

The Uruk, accustomed as he was to the more gruesome sides of life, still recoiled slightly when he first caught sight of the horrible thing that was resting inside the haversack. It was a huge, disproportionately gigantic severed head, more than twice as large as Shagrat’s own, which meant that the creature from which it had been taken must have stood well in excess of fifteen feet high. It had black empty eye-sockets and the leather-like lips were pulled back from a double line of massive, slab-shaped yellow teeth. Dried and desiccated, obviously much shrunken from its original size, the wizened relic also bore an iron crown about its brow.

“Azof and Rukush went to get it. They got back just before you found us the other night. That was the meeting place, at their camp. We’d been waiting ages for them, everybody was very excited. There was going to be a celebratory feast and everything. It’s such a pity we had to miss it!”

Shagrat made no comment. For obvious reasons, Ludlow had been very fortunate not to have been included in the night’s festivities.

“Afterwards, Dokuz was going to take that thing -” Ludlow indicated the head – “to the town down the valley. It’s the same one where I met them that first time.”

Suddenly the Hobbit’s plan did not seem quite as unfeasible as it had done a moment before. But Shagrat still had his doubts: if the object in Azof’s pack really was as valuable as the Hobbit claimed it was, he couldn’t see Dokuz letting go of it so easily. The Uruk wondered why the others hadn’t come to reclaim it as yet.

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

Part of the reason for their delay was that after being chased a long way off-course by the pursuing Warg, it had taken Dokuz and his cronies some time to find their way back to the main body of their band. Given the filthy mood their leader had been in since they regrouped, Azof, very wisely, decided not to volunteer any information about the fate of the spoils he had been carrying until somebody asked him directly. Even later on, once Dokuz had found out about the loss of the trophy, he reacted to news of the cock-up with less than his usual vehemence, and seemed strangely willing to let the matter lie.

“Why the blazes did you want to take the dratted thing along when we were chasing after them anyway?” was Dokuz’s main comment. “You already said yourself it weighed a frigging tonne.”

“And leave it with this light-fingered lot, what’d nobble anything that weren’t nailed to the floor?” Azof retorted incredulously. “As if!”

Relieved to know that he was not being held personally accountable for anything that had happened, Azof decided that Dokuz could do with being needled a bit. He was bored, for one thing, eager for more violent action, and also it has to be said a little disgusted with his leader, having witnessed Dokuz’s recent headlong flight from the Warg.

“What we going to do about it Dokuz, then, eh?” he said.

“’Bout what?” Dokuz grumbled surlily.

“About the fact that your ‘old mate’ Shaggers is sitting up there, Boss, with our booty what we have first dibs on,” Azof replied. “He’s on his own! With that Halfling half-wit. What are we waiting for?”

“I got my reasons,” Dokuz said.

Azof challenged him to name them.

“Well, he’s come back from the dead at least once already, hasn’t he?” said Dokuz. He lowered his voice, superstitiously fingering one of the amulets he wore around his neck as he spoke. “You know years ago, back in Mordor, they gave him to a Nazgul to play with - a proper Ringwraith mind, and you know what they’re liable to do to a body. Never wondered how a useless old tosser like Shagrat came to walk away from it? Well, not walked, exactly - not for the first few months after it was finished with ‘im, the way I heard it, but you know what I mean. Point is, he came through it alive though, did’n’ee? Now who else you ever heard of has done that? Can you think of anybody?”

None of the Orcs replied, so in due course Dokuz answered his own question.

“You can’t, cos there’s nobody. No-one. That ain’t right, and there were a lot said there was something well fishy about it back at the time. Gave ‘im a wide berth, on account of it. Then at the end of the war, back he goes to the Black Pits for the second time. But darn if he don’t turn up not long after right as rain, more or less. Like a proper bad penny. And, I was pretty sure I’d done for him last time we fought.”

“What, you’re never saying he’s invincible, anythink like that?”

“Nah,” said Dokuz, not sounding not at all convinced, but he soon rallied. “Just supposing though - suppose that’s not really Shagrat, what’s come after us.”

“You wot?”

“Maybe it’s some kind of – of vengeful spirit that looks just like ‘im, instead,” Dokuz blurted out. “Everyone knows you get spirits, don’t ‘cher, the higher up you go in mountains? And that dog-thing what’s following it, that don’t look right either. That’s never natural, out of this earth or anywhere like it. I think we should just leave it.”

“What I reckon it might be,” growled Azof, into the disbelieving silence that had fallen over the Orc band following Dokuz’s announcement of his surprising theory, “is that you ’av somehow gone and found yourself a guilty conscience late in life. You must ‘ave, ‘cos if it ain’t that, the only other explanation is you’ve come over all lilly-livered and you’re bottling it.”

Dokuz screamed at him and dared him to say that again. The loyal Rukush leapt to his feet, intent on supporting his leader’s interests while a number of the smaller Orcs immediately sided with Azof. The round of in-fighting and factionalisation into sub-groups that this confrontation sparked off was more than enough to distract them all from Shagrat for the time being.

*******

Over the next few days the Uruk and Hobbit made their way down from the mountainside, travelling slowly and without any major incidents. They arrived at the edge of the little township Ludlow had spoken about on an overcast afternoon, and spent some time lingering on the outskirts there. Nobody had accosted them, but Shagrat was still in two minds about carrying his companion’s hare-brained scheme through and he hesitated, thinking about the experiences he’d had in out-of-the-way places like this in the past. After a certain amount of hanging about indecisively however, Ludlow commented mildly enough that -

“Dokuz and that lot were never bothered about it,” which for some reason seemed to decide things from Shagrat’s point of view. After that the Orc strode purposefully along, straight to the town hall chambers, and let himself in with scarcely a backward glance. Ludlow and the Warg scurried after in his wake, the Hobbit noting that for some reason, the lanky, stoop-shouldered Uruk was attracting a lot of curious stares and interest in general. The citizens of the border town they were visiting were accustomed to exotic-looking types though, and Shagrat’s party were able to pass without any real trouble. On entering the municipal building they were faced with a bank of chest-high, wooden desks, topped with a long iron-work grille, each with a pale-faced clerk sitting behind.

Here about the giant, Shagrat said shortly, to the nearest of these fellows.

Their clerk was a rumple-haired youth, still not old enough to be sporting a proper beard. The dozy adolescent had broken off from scratching his pimply chin just for long enough to look up disinterestedly as they approached his booth. He did a definite double-take on catching sight of Shagrat however and craned his head over the desk he was sitting at, the better to stare at the unlikely band of giant-killers who were standing in front of him. His gaze drifted from the fearsome Orc down to the limping, pot-bellied wolf-beast that accompanied it, and rested for a moment on the shortest member of the company. It was an odd-looking creature, of a species not immediately familiar to the Clerk, although he knew he had heard of something like it before. The short one beamed back at him.

“A one-eyed Orc and a three-legged Warg?” the Clerk said, incredulously. “Is that it? Halfling doesn’t look like he’s all there either. Haven’t any of you people got the full set of parts you was born with?”

“These two aren’t with me, not really,” said Shagrat. “They keep following me about, that’s all. Can’t seem to shake the bleeders.” Quickly changing the subject, he said they believed there was a reward on offer for the relief of a giant-related problem in these parts?

“Well, yeah,” the Clerk said hesitantly, confirming that there was a reward still standing, technically at any rate. He went on to say that nobody had ever been able to claim it, “’cos you know where them giants live, do yer? It’s just the other side of the Mountains of Shadow. Near as in Mordor as makes no difference.”

“Oh no! That would put anybody off!” squeaked Ludlow agitatedly.

“You’re right there. You’re dead right. Black Army’s gone but there’s still packs of wild Wargs and Uruk soldiers roamin’ and who knows what else besides.” At that the Clerk broke off, beginning to think properly for the first time about the species composition of the group that was standing there, large as life, in front of him.

“Anyway,” he continued uncertainly, “we’ve been told to tell anyone that asks that -” the youth continued, pausing to consult a note that had been written in block-captials and pinned to the wall of his stall, “’under no circumstances will any claim be considered unless it is substantiated by e-v-i-d-e-n-t-i-a-r-y c-o-r-r-o-b-o-r-a-t-i-o-n.’”

“Fair enough,” Shagrat said, opening Azof’s bag and hefting it up onto the counter between them.

Perusing the browned and leathery relict the Clerk commented: “you’ve never killed him though. Looks like he’s been dead a long time.”

“That,” replied Shagrat, “is neither here nor there,” and added that he thought they’d take the reward sharpish and be on their way.

The Clerk, faced with a novel situation that he neither the necessary experience, interest in or indeed inclination to handle himself did what young people employed in junior administrative positions generally do at times like this.

“I’ll get my supervisor,” he said, and went to ask for him.

After a short wait a self-important-looking older man arrived. Like his employee, the Supervisor spent some time appraising the Orc and the Hobbit. The Warg-hybrid he ignored, but the unique combination of species and personal attributes that other two of them represented were posing him with some unexpected conceptual problems, none of which would have applied if he had been facing either one of them alone.

Shagrat, as an Orcish undesirable, would immediately have been shown the door while the Hobbit, similarly, would have been laughed right through it. Together though, together they had – not an air of respectability or gravitas, that wasn’t it. Not even close; but they did at least make for a baffling combination. The Supervisor was trying and failing miserably to work out which one (if either) of them could possibly be the brains of the partnership.

“I’m acting as his legal representative in this matter,” Ludlow said suddenly, showing a flash of perspicacity that if Shagrat had had the faintest idea what he was talking about, would have confirmed that the Hobbit perhaps at times understood slightly more of what was going on around him than he was in the habit of letting on. “We’re here on official business. I’ve been keeping a detailed record of our activities - kept all the receipts and everything.”

On hearing this the Supervisor looked definitely disgruntled, probably because he had been hoping to fob the pair of them off.

“That’s what I do back home,” the Hobbit added, in response to a curious look from Shagrat. “It’s the family business.”

“Is it? Really?”

“In a way. Well – no,” Ludlow admitted sotto voce. “I am grand-nephew to a Justice of the Peace though.”

What Ludlow said didn’t mean much to Shagrat since he didn’t know what a Justice of the Peace was, and as to the rest of it, Orcs did not generally have much truck with familial relationships. Shagrat for example, didn’t even know who his parents were, and had never knowingly met either of them.

After that the Clerk and his Supervisor were gone for almost an hour. As they waited, Ludlow tried to catch the Uruk’s eye but Shagrat seemed intent on studying the intricate iron-wrought scroll-work that topped the counter as a security grille. At last the two men returned, the older of them handed Ludlow a bundle of paperwork. There was quite a number of people following them.

“What’s this?” Ludlow exclaimed in dismay, riffling through the sheaf of parchment. “Land deeds? This can’t be it.”

“Standard giant-killing contract, I think you’ll find,” the clerk’s superior replied. “Payment may be made in lieu at the payer’s discretion, and will stand at half the kingdom or equivalent land area - which in the case of this district roughly comes to the five valleys on the other side of the Bald Mountain. It’s the same area from which you originally obtained the – ah – evidentiary relict.”

After this there was a long and disappointed sort of silence.

“If your legal representative would be so kind as to make his mark here –“ the Supervisor said smoothly, indicating the place on a particularly thick piece of parchment, one that was already heavy with official-looking wax seals – “and here, we’ll begin effecting the transfer of deeds to you directly. Congratulations!”

Some of the Supervisor’s colleagues and seniors had apparently come to witness the hand-over, and were complaining loudly about the folly of handing over vast areas of mountainside and water rights - not to mention valuable timber resources - to random vagrants willy-nilly. Against this background of mutinous grumblings Ludlow, having little other option duly signed on the dotted lines. He was all but oblivious to the mens’ grumblings. The little creature was much more worried about Shagrat, who he could tell without even looking was glaring and glowering at him, probably with murderous intent.

TBC
*************