Orc in Ithilien

“I didn’t think it looked that bad, not really,” Ludlow said tentatively, peering into the evening gloom. The fog that had drifted up from the valley bottom at sunset had obscured most of the vista that lay before them from view. This was probably just as well. Where there was woodland, the stunted, twist-limbed trees crowded together far too thickly, and elsewhere the landscape seemed to be made up of nothing more than rocky outcrops, interspersed by rolling, brownish stretches of featureless upland plain. A thin night wind had risen now and was snickering restlessly through the bare branches of the thorn bushes that bordered the narrow mountain path. The whole place was beyond desolate, Ludlow thought. He shifted his hairy, un-shod feet doubtfully, dislodging a cascade of rocks and pebbles that went rattling their way down into the gulley on the other side of the path. After a moment a series of clattering echoes sounded from the depths of the ravine. They sounded a bit like someone shouting and laughing in an evil, unknown language.

Thoroughly spooked, the Hobbit turned on his heels and scuttled back to the yellowish circle of lamplight cast by the lantern on their donkey-cart. It didn’t look much proof against the darkness and he shivered, clutching tightly on the lucky rabbit foot he carried in his jacket pocket.

Shagrat’s was still standing by the side of the wagon, staring into space. His remaining eye was glowing with a feral light and he seemed to be shivering with barely-suppressed excitement.

“Not that bad?” the Uruk answered, and there was a strange note of exultation in his voice as he spoke. “North facing, did you notice? I think it’s bloody perfect!”

“You like it then?” the Hobbit replied incredulously.

“Don’t you?” his companion sounded surprised.

“I don’t think it’s exactly – my kind of place,” Ludlow explained carefully. Quite frankly the wild and barren topography of Shagrat’s own private expanse of blasted heath gave him the willies. He much preferred greener, more pleasant varieties of countryside.

“Oh, well,” Shagrat commented, “if was any use to anyone, they’d never have let you and me get our hands on it, would they?”

“They might have,” the Hobbit said bitterly. “Because of that and the land tax.” Following Ludlow’s signing of the deeds of transfer back at the town, there had been a sort of a hastily cobbled-together social soiree, during which about a half dozen different local dignitaries had all taken great delight in informing him that as co-opted owner of a huge (and hugely useless) tract of mostly inaccessible mountainside, he now owed the Crown of Gondor a not inconsiderable sum of money, all payable as back-taxes.

“Because they’ve had to raise revenues these last few years, to pay for the War,” one of the men had hiccoughed at him, quite late, as the evening wore on. “And – this’ll make you laugh. They’ve decided it’s all to be payable by land area! Rates’re sky high. Really, you couldn’t have taken possession at a worse time!”

Ludlow knew for a fact that the Uruk, though he’d heard all of it had been deliberately pretending neither to notice, or understand why everyone was laughing at them. He hadn’t attended much of the social gathering. Having taken his Warg and a bottle of some kind of over-proof local spirit he had decamped outside, to carry on a ‘personal celebration’ as he called it in the municipal gardens -

“Drinking yourself silly, more like,” Ludlow sniffed, on finding him out there afterwards. “You’re three sheets to the wind, Shagrat. Again. Have you had anything solid to eat as yet?”

The next morning they hired a farm cart and a donkey to pull it – both rather rickety but all they could afford, and armed with a map of the county provided by the councilmen, set off to have a look at their new landholding. There was a track-way of sorts that they had been following, not much more than a game-trail really, and unsuitable for wheeled traffic but justabout passable by their tiny vehicle. The swathe of hillside that had passed into Shagrat’s ownership began at the peak of the mountain ridge that separated it from the more fertile, Gondorian uplands on the southern side. They arrived there in the evening of the second day, a short while before sunset.

“Have you thought about how we’re going to pay what we owe, incidentally?” asked Ludlow as they began their preparations for the night ahead. The thought of being in debt to anyone was worrying him sick.

“Oh, I expect something’ll turn up,” Shagrat said. His new-found optimism was beginning to be quite unsettling

In the morning Ludlow had to revise his first impression of the Uruk’s mountain realm. It wasn’t entirely comprised of open, rocky wasteland after all, because the hillsides were also intersected by a large number of near vertical, wooded ravines. There had been a succession of thunderstorms for most of the night and to get out of the howling gale that was now blowing on the mountaintop, the Uruk and Hobbit decided to explore the nearest of these. They picked their way carefully down over the massive rock-slabs and tumbled boulders that filled the upper reaches of the gorge, eventually coming to a wider, flatter area, a plateau or rock-shelf high in the mountainside. The valley opened out noticeably here, so that a few rays of wintry rising sunlight were able to penetrate through the trees and down to the valley floor.

Though the rain had stopped during the night it was still overcast and the sunshine was very weak, but somehow the whole of the little mountain grotto seemed to be shimmering with a bright-white dancing light. The sunlight was definitely reflecting off something. More accurately, it was reflecting off a great deal of something.

“Shagrat, what’s all this silvery stuff?” asked Ludlow after a moment.

The Uruk searched for a moment, then spotting what he was looking for bent down and picked up one of the ingots from a pool of water at his feet. It was about the size of the first joint of his thumb and was as light as pumice-stone. The pretty little piece of metal had a familiar sort of shiny, sparkling quality to it that Shagrat was sure he’d seen somewhere before.

“It’s unusually light-weight, isn’t it?” Ludlow said. “Remarkably so. D’you think it could possibly be –“

“Nah,” said Shagrat quickly, “no chance. If that was what this is, these valleys would be wall-to-wall Dwarves, wouldn’t they? Never mind what else was living here. Mad for that stuff, those half-pint hairy little buggers.”

“I don’t know though Shagrat. There were Giants here till quite recently, weren’t there? And afterwards I don’t think anyone came here much. Everyone said this place had an ill reputation.”

“Can’t think why,” Shagrat said bemusedly, and he really didn’t seem to be joking. Ludlow fought briefly against a superstitious urge to look back over his shoulder, to check that there was nothing unnatural spying on him in this fell and lonely place, before giving in to it. His gaze took in the craggy, moss-covered walls of the ravine on either side and then far, far above them, through the branches of the gnarly trees that crowded the sides of the gulley –

(“The haunted, frightened, trees,” Ludlow thought to himself, suppressing a shudder)

-he could see a patch of grey-black, definitely lowering sky. And there was indeed something unnatural watching them. It was Shagrat’s Warg, which was perched on a boulder higher up the valley and was staring intently at the back of his head. It barked at him, then stood up and sat down again a few times agitatedly, until at last Ludlow chucked a large piece of mithril at it to make it stop. With a reproachful look, the Warg turned and skulked off, zig-zagging its way up the steep slope out of the valley.

“And,” the Orc continued, as if he was still trying to convince himself that they had definitely not just stumbled upon a vast resource of mineral wealth, “you can’t just go picking that stuff off the ground. You have to go mining, deep in the earth, don’t you? That’s why Dwarves are always stirring up ancient evils, by digging too far down for it. Stands to reason, doesn’t it?”

“’Ancient evils?’” Ludlow echoed faintly.

“You know - things that’ve buried themselves deep at the roots of the mountains, hiding there from the....light of the stars,” Shagrat replied hesitantly. An odd faraway look passed over his face and then he pulled himself together abruptly. “Ancient evils and all sorts.”

“I don’t know about that,” the Hobbit admitted, “but this is such a deep gorge. That means there must be a lot of water in it, sometimes. Maybe all that - stuff’s – getting washed down here from further up?”

Mordor, in the time Shagrat had lived there was effectively a desert realm, but even he had not failed to notice that the little stream that flowed down the bottom of the gulley was already bigger than it had been when they arrived. “When would there be a lot of water coming down here do you reckon?” he asked, as the first few fat raindrops of the morning’s deluge began to fall.

“I suppose, about – this time of year, actually,” Ludlow said slowly, “especially after it’s been raining for - a - long - time – higher – up –“

The Hobbit and Uruk looked at each other for a moment, listening to an odd hissing, roaring and splashing noise that was rushing down the valley towards them, getting louder and louder all the while. Left to his own devices Ludlow would tried and failed to outrun the flash-flood that was descending on them, but fortunately Shagrat kept his wits about him. He grabbed the fleeing Hobbit by the back of his coat and swung him up, boosting him high onto one of the side-walls of the gorge, out of reach of the approaching wall of water. The Hobbit hung on among the tree-roots for dear life as Shagrat clambered up after.

He swore eloquently, shaking himself off and spitting out fragments of leaf-mould that Ludlow had kicked down on him.

“Can you swim?” Ludlow squeaked hysterically, through chattering teeth.

“Don’t think so. Can you climb?”

The Hobbit shook his head, giving him a look of mute appeal.

Shagrat rolled his eye exasperatedly. “Think you can you keep out of my way and hang on while I climb us out of here then?”

The Orc was not particularly limber or agile but largely through brute force he was able to pull them up to scale the walls of the ravine. The point they climbed out at was some distance downhill from the pass where they’d left their wagon and as they struggled to regain the height they’d lost, the rain turned to icy sleet. When eventually they got back to the point they’d started at the sun was already well past its highest point and Ludlow in particular had become severely chilled.

Shagrat regarded the bedraggled Hobbit for a moment. The rain and wet didn’t especially bother him, but the little creature was soaked through and looked like he was in a bad way. “Come on,” he said after a moment, raising up his cape. “You can get under here if you want.”

Ludlow hesitated, and the corners of the Orc’s mouth turned down. “I’m not going to do anything to you, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he said shortly.

Actually, being manhandled by Shagrat was the last thing that Ludlow had on his mind. It had not escaped the observant Hobbit’s attention that his travelling companion avoided physical contact wherever possible - was almost pathologically averse to it, in fact. He hadn’t for example coped particularly well when Ludlow was clinging to his back during their ascent from the ravine, and had shivered him off with obvious relief the moment they were safe on relatively level ground. Ludlow was so cold and miserable by now though that he almost didn’t care, and since an invitation had been issued, he surged the short distance across the wagon bench and snuggled gratefully against Shagrat’s side.

Brusquely, the Uruk pulled his cloak around to cover him, stiffening and gritting his teeth as he felt the Hobbit press in close beside him. Ludlow’s trembling slowly abated as he warmed himself on the hot-blooded Uruk and by tiny increments, Shagrat eventually succeeded in forcing himself at least to partly relax. He still didn’t much care for the enforced proximity, but supposed it wasn’t as bad as all that.

The going was much easier as they were travelling downhill. As they came down from the mountain, the sleet gave way to rain, the rain to drizzle, and then the drizzle to heavy mountain mist. At some point they must have missed their way or chosen the wrong fork in the road however, because they arrived at a mountain settlement just before dark. Even with their faster travelling pace, they got there far too quickly for it to be the town they originally started at. It had just started raining again and as all their possessions were soaking wet, the Hobbit thought that they should try to find lodgings there anyway. There was, as luck, or otherwise would have it, a tavern in view just on the road they were travelling on.

“I’m not sure,” Shagrat said warily, stopping the donkey-cart outside the premises. “We don’t know the lie of the land hereabouts. Must be a fair bit away from the border, up here, mustn’t we?”

“Go on,” Ludlow insisted. “We could at least go for a drink, to get out of the cold for a while. It’s got to be better than getting rained on, doesn’t it?.”

So they went in. It was warm and stuffy in the tavern although they were among the first customers of the evening. To Shagrat’s relief the woman serving behind the bar greeted them hospitably enough.

“Master Hobbit, Mister Orc,” she said. “What’ll it be?”

Ludlow mugged an ‘I told you so’ expression at Shagrat. Still unconvinced, he ordered a beer for the Hobbit, then named his poison, in Orcish.

The Barmaid, quite unperturbed, turned and poured a measure of what Shagrat had asked for out from a dusty earthenware pot, making it a double.

The Uruk stared at her. “You stock that?”

“Well, we don’t find we have Orcish gentlemen in so very often these days,” the Patroness explained, “but when we do, they always seem to drink an awful lot of it. So it’s worth our while keeping a few gallons in store.”

That sounded about right. Taking their drinks, Shagrat and Ludlow retired to a table in an inglenook near the fireplace. The stonework round the chimney-breast was warm from the fire and the coals in the grate cast a ruddy, comforting glow. It did, the Orc had to admit, beat being rained on.

The trouble started when Ludlow went to purchase the next round of drinks. The Patroness had left the bar for a moment, and as the Hobbit perched on a bar-stool waiting for her to return, a crowd of men from the village arrived. They stood blocking the doorway as they removed and hung up their wet rain-coats, talking and shouting excitedly among themselves. There was a definite undercurrent of aggression and menace about the group.

An older, moustachioed man stepped over to join the Hobbit and greeted him quite amicably, introducing himself as the local Constable.

“Please could you tell me what all this shouting’s about, Sir?” Ludlow piped up at him.

“Royal Edict, little Master,” the Constable explained. “Nothing that should worry you! Notice’s gone out to every parish in the country. There’s a bounty, a king’s ransom offered, for – well see for yourself.” He handed Ludlow one of the pamphlets.

“They’re hunting down the last of the Orcs, aren’t they!” a second man said excitedly, picking up the same topic as the Constable. “Looks like someone’s finally had the back-bone to take a stand. Long live Prince Faramir, I say! He’s the one behind it.”

Ludlow turned the paper over and over in his hands. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Shagrat shuffling his chair further back into the shadow of the chimney-breast. He had his hand up to his face and was looking extremely shifty.

“It’s only a shame we didn’t get word of this before!” the man continued.

“And why’s that?” the Hobbit asked.

“Haven’t had time to round up a proper bunch of Orcs for them have we? We easily could’ve! That vermin’s taken to coming in here sometimes, bold as brass – and he – “ he glared at the Constable, “says there ain’t a thing he’s been able to do about it!”

“Not so long as they pay for their drinks and aren’t seen to break any laws,” the Constable insisted, red in the face. “I’ve told you time and again.”

“But now at least we won’t have far to take them when we catch some!” the man cried, thumping the bar for emphasis. “Royal Party’s travelling down through the province at the moment, and word is that presently they’re over at – “ he named a locality which was apparently was not too far away.

“What’s that you’re drinking there, eh?” the Constable said, peering suspiciously at Shagrat’s cup, which was waiting on the counter to be refilled.

“What was someone saying about Orcs?” the Patroness asked loudly, as she bustled up to the bar again. She waved her hand in Shagrat’s general direction. “Because the little gentleman was just speaking to an Orc there –“

There was a moment of dead silence during which every head in the house turned to look at Shagrat.

More people had squeezed into the bar-room and there was now no chance that he would be able to make it to the door. Since his time with the travelling showmen, Shagrat had always feared that he’d meet his end being ripped apart by a mob of angry villagers; he still regularly had nightmares about it, in fact. Now that the worst had happened there was in an odd sort of sense, an undeniable feeling of relief.

Shoving his chair back, Shagrat drew himself up from his usual stooping hunch, standing tall at his impressive height, and felt for his sword-stick, which wasn’t there.

“Come on then,” he snarled at the bar-room at large. “Come and have a go, if you think you’re hard enough –“

And then he was down on the floor, pinned in place by half a dozen eager men.

“Alive? Or dead?” asked the fellow who’d been speaking to Ludlow at the bar, eagerly.

One of the men holding Shagrat down seized a handful of the Orc’s greyish hair and pulled his head back, exposing his throat. Asking if anyone had a decent pig-sticking blade on them, he said: “usual form for these things isn’t it? Better safe than sorry, eh?”

Snarling maniacally, the Uruk tried to bite him.

But the Hobbit was doggedly pushing his way through the crowd. “I really think,” Ludlow chirped insistently, waving the Royal Edict and tugging at the Constable’s sleeve, “that you should read this through properly, before you do anything else. I mean. Look what it says here – and on the back. There’s a codicil. It’s very strongly-worded.”

The Constable hesitated for a moment and then withdrew a pair of reading glasses from his pocket. “Well I must say we’re all very indebted to you Master Hobbit,” he said at length. “You’ve saved us from a lot of trouble. That could have had very expensive consequences.”

“They’re wanting them alive, brought in alive, at any rate,” he told his companions loudly. “There’s a codicil. It’s very strongly-worded.” The man holding Shagrat’s head back let go of it abruptly and it hit the floor with a resounding bump.

“Oh, we’ll leave him alive,” said the man from the bar. “He’ll definitely be alive at the end of it – more or less.”

What happened to the Uruk next shocked Ludlow more than a little, although it was nothing particularly new to Shagrat. Human curiosity about Orcs tended to express itself in very limited, predictable ways and by the time that his current would-be lynch-mob had ticked off all the usual points on its metaphorical checklist the Uruk was reacting to the townspeople who surrounded him like little more than a beast. This was in some way understandable because he certainly was being treated like one. His responses to adversity became more and more animal-like the further that Shagrat was provoked, and by the end of it Ludlow would have been hard-pressed even to recognise the jaded and world-weary Uruk he thought he’d come to know over the past few weeks. The Hobbit was more than a little daunted by the prospect of facing the raging, spitting creature into which his travelling companion had been transformed, but Ludlow was at his most basic a stout-hearted and loyal little fellow and to his credit, his resolution to rescue Shagrat did not waver for an instant.

It was late at night when they were finished with him. Peeking into the outbuilding in which Shagrat had been imprisoned, the Hobbit was glad to see that he seemed to have calmed down – or had slumped into a slew of morose feelings and dejection, it was difficult to tell which. The door to the building he was being kept in had been bolted and barred from the outside, but was otherwise unsecured, the townsmen relying on the guard they had placed on it rather than locks to contain their Uruk captive. The guard had volunteered for the duty – it was the same fellow from the bar who’d been ringleader during the evening’s earlier entertainments – but he was now well and truly passed out, because Ludlow had been plying him with strong drink for the past several hours. Moving as quietly as only a Hobbit could, Ludlow let himself in.

Shagrat had obviously not been expecting him to come and although he tried to hide his surprise he was bad at it. It was clear to Ludlow that even then, the Uruk was far from being sure of him.

“Still not seen enough as yet?” he snarled. “Come to gawk some more?” He lunged at Ludlow as if to attack but it was an empty gesture and they both knew it, because Shagrat had been tied fast by his captors, hand and foot. To forestall any further negative comments the Hobbit bent down and began trying to untie him. He swallowed when he saw how the deeply the cords binding him had bitten into the Uruk’s wrists and ankles. He had obviously been struggling violently against his bonds for quite some time.

“Just cut it through,” Shagrat told him harshly, dismissing Ludlow’s careful attempts to avoid injuring him any more than necessary. “Cut it through quickly and let me up.” By this time the Hobbit was nearly in tears of sympathy himself.

“I, er, brought your clothes and things,” Ludlow said as he worked at the knots.
“I think it was disgraceful, the way they wanted to look at your -“

“That’s the first thing they always do, especially when they’ve got a few drinks in them,” Shagrat said quickly, cutting him off. “Whole world and his wife want to see for themselves if it’s true what everyone says about Orcs. You get used to it.”

“What, how everyone says that you can’t experience the smallest shred of pleasure or enjoyment save for in witnessing the torments you inflict on your victims?” Ludlow asked bemusedly. “But I don’t see what that has to do with them taking down your britches and –“

As he dressed, Shagrat tersely explained that he had been referring to the other thing that everybody knew about Orcs. This seemed to embarrass Ludlow unduly, perhaps because he hadn’t been able to avoid seeing that the physical characteristic everybody attributed to Orcs was certainly possessed by Shagrat - and then some. Most uncharacteristically he stopped speaking at once. This suited Shagrat, who was in no mood for talking, and in silence they made their way out of the building, then hurried through the deserted streets to the edge of the town.

The Hobbit and Uruk stood together in the dark for an uncomfortable moment. Folding himself stiffly onto one knee Shagrat brought himself down to the Hobbit’s level, so that they were more or less eye-to-eye. The Orc looked as if he might be considering clapping him on the shoulder in a comradely manner, but if he was he quickly thought better of it. He seemed to be searching for the right words for something he hadn’t much experience in knowing how to say.

“You know I – I won’t be forgetting this,” was what he eventually came up with.

“Where did they say his High and Royal Wonderfulness Prince Faramir was making his camp?” Shagrat asked the Hobbit after another awkward silence. Ludlow named the place.

“And where was that?” Shagrat wanted to know. Ludlow pointed him in what he thought was the right general direction. “But Shagrat, wait,” he continued. “You’ve –“

“No,” Shagrat interrupted, this unfinished business couldn’t wait. He turned and loped away into the dark.

“You don’t understand!” Ludlow protested, running a little way along after. But the Uruk had already been swallowed up by the vastness of the night, and the lone Hobbit had no way of following him.

TBC

A/N - once again, for everyone who's so kindly reviewed, thanks so much for bearing the story so far and especially for your supportive comments....ness-Sachiel, re. happy endings, well let's see shall we, I should be wrapping it up in about...three more chapters if all goes according to plan. Mary...the pantomime season is on us so I suppose there's no harm in admitting I'm pinching a fair bit of the plot for this from 'Jack & the Beanstalk' - sophisticated, no? AntiDolorifico - I'm very glad you're enjoying the orc-talk. I feel a bit guilty about this as much of it is cobbled together from a variety of British cultural stereotypes (as is much of the orc-dialogue in the books!) - but it is a lot of fun to write.