Orc in Ithilien

Chapter 17. Another near-death experience.

Probably there was something right and proper about it, Shagrat thought to himself, as he toiled futher uphill. When Eowyn attacked for the second time the night before, she’d sort of fallen into his arms while she was running, and the dagger she’d been carrying in her right hand, well, it’d gone right through his left side, a lot like he hadn’t even been standing there in the way. He cursed himself for not having worn more armour, but while he was creeping through Goldilocks’ campground the night before, trying to sniff out which one was his High and Mightyness’ tent, there’d been a definite need for stealth to contend with. Shagrat wasn’t sure another coat of mail would’ve made much of a difference in any case, against that Dwarf-forged, blade-enchanted filth. Talk about sharp! The knife that’d done for him was obviously the second of a pair that Faramir and Eowyn had been given on the occasion of their wedding. Its twin had been traded, by Faramir, with his previous owner, for Shagrat - back in the early days of this round of their turbulent relationship. And so there was a kind of a….a dreadful symmetry, or something, about that, he supposed. Stumbling, he fell clumsily onto his knees, and unable to get up to his feet, stayed down on all fours.

Shagrat had heard it said once that being cut by an extremely sharp edge wasn’t particularly painful. Well that was total bloody bollocking bollocks for a start. Eowyn’s knife had slipped up and under his ribs, and while it was there it had obviously sliced through something important, either on its way in or on its way out. It had left an incongruously neat little, superficial-looking wound that initially, Shagrat had easily been able to plug with his fingertips, but as the night wore on, the bleeding had grown steadily worse. At first he hoped he’d make it back to the rocky overhang where he’d left the rest of his kit; his water-flask was there, and better yet, a bottle of Azof’s grog, which, if useless as a curative would at least have helped take his mind off his latest set-back for a while. From the top of the valley where he’d ditched Goldilocks, the place was a scant three miles along the south-western arm of the mountain spur that overlooked Faramir’s camp – and an even shorter distance, if you were going straight down hill. Close enough as the crow flies that the day before, the Orc had been able to spy on the comings and goings down below from his cliff-side eyrie quite clearly. But three miles or three hundred, it made no difference as things currently stood. Shagrat was now unable to crawl more than a little way and soon could go no further. He realised then that he probably wasn’t going to make it.

There was precious little shade up where he was, and so the place he’d fallen in looked about as good any. The winter sun, though almost as high in the sky as it was going to get at this time of year was still an hour or so off its zenith, and the strength of it rays were amplified by the thin mountain air. The wounded Uruk, weakened by blood-loss lay where he was and baked in it, drifting in and out of consciousness as the afternoon shadows gathered and slowly lengthened into dusk.

*********

It was well after moonrise when Ludlow, or rather the Warg that Ludlow was following finally tracked him down, and by that time there wasn’t very much left of Shagrat. The Hobbit went straight past him the first time but with a loud yelp the Warg, which had been leading the way suddenly doubled back in its tracks and bounded off the path to the Orc’s side.

“Shagrat!” Ludlow cried, at once – and quite reasonably, based on previous experiences - assuming the worst.

As he approached, the Uruk, making a noise like an air-filled bladder slowly deflating, rolled out of the hollow he’d been lying in till he was resting on his back. The Hobbit saw the dark, sticky mess that was left underneath him and was utterly horrified.

“All the blood - your blood!” he wailed. He kept muttering it over and again in dismay as he stared at him, wide-eyed.

“What about it!” Shagrat snapped, immediately irritated by this almost to breaking point.

“Well it - it looks black in the moonlight,” Ludlow replied, in a sing-song, horror-stricken tone.

Shagrat groaned painfully and rolled his eye. “My blood,” he said, “looks black in the moonlight, in full sunlight and at all other times too, on account of it is black, you blithering idiot. Go on! Tell me something I didn’t already know about.”

“But Shagrat! There’s such an awful lot of it. There can’t be that much left in you!”
“The silly cow that stabbed me botched it, didn’t she?” Shagrat wheezed. “Hadn’t a clue what she was about. Couldn’t have done a decent job and finished me off properly, could she? Oh no. Just my luck to get knifed by some dratted novice who leaves me dying by inches all over the place instead.”

“Dying?” Ludlow yelped.

“Prob’ly,” Shagrat said weakly, closing his eye. “It’ll be something like that, I expect.” He didn’t say anything more.

The Hobbit panicked. It had been bad enough, he thought, when Shagrat had gone running off into the night, back at the settlement they’d stopped in two days before. Ludlow had always been a respectable gentle-Hobbit, and the idea of having to leave town at once, that or be chased out of it come the morning for helping Shagrat had been dreadful to him. Left all alone he had had little idea of what he should do, but at least then he’d had the goal of tracking the Uruk down, to focus his attention. Loading up his donkey-cart, he had quickly struck off on the same bearing that he thought the Orc had taken, and then late in the afternoon of the following day he had been joined by Shagrat’s Warg, which had only improved his situation - despite a few false starts at first, owing to a complete breakdown in inter-species communication:

“Find Shagrat!” the Hobbit had cried, over and again until his throat was getting sore and his voice was hoarse. But apparently the Warg didn’t understand the common tongue, and Ludlow, of course, knew not a single word of the Black Speech. Eventually, he’d been able to come up with more of a non-verbal form of instruction, and had given the beast a sniff of one of the blankets the Orc had been using. After this the Warg had caught on to the idea quickly enough and had proved much better able to follow the Uruk’s trail.

The donkey itself had been troublesome as it was scared witless of the Warg, but being an elderly animal it hadn’t the energy to properly sustain a fear-filled reaction. For all the problems it had caused, Ludlow was immensely thankful that he’d brought it along. After a minute or so of running back and forwards aimlessly he’d decided on a plan, of sorts. He had seen the lights and fires of a large encampment down in the valley and guessed that it was probably the place that Shagrat had set out to visit - either before or after he’d had his accident. Ludlow had no idea what sort of reception he and his Orcish companion would receive there but it was the nearest – and in fact the only – likely source of help. He set about trying to shift the Uruk into the back of the wagon. Sturdy and stocky as he was, the Hobbit still wouldn’t have managed it if it hadn’t been for the Warg, which was clearly used to dragging things about the place – even sizeable burdens that were well in excess of its own body-weight.

*********

For most of the day after Shagrat’s visit, both Faramir and Eowyn had been badly indisposed, albeit for quite different reasons. Having agreed by proxy that they had very much to discuss, they had scheduled a meeting, to be held on neutral territory, for later in the evening. The Prince was making his way across from his quarters to meet with his wife and, most likely her counsellor, when he noticed that there was a very short person with a donkey-cart trying to gain access to the camp. His way was being blocked by a pair of Eowyn’s guards, who were, for want of something better to do, not letting him get past.

“I said, I’d like to see – that is, I’m here to see whoever’s in charge,” the little creature was insisting. Even to Ludlow’s own ears his voice sounded thin and reedy and pathetic in the dark.

At almost any other time the sudden and unexpected appearance of a Hobbit would have been a matter of note to Faramir, but at that moment he was almost too tired, and heart-sick, to care. The Rohirrim were baiting the Halfing quite needlessly however and as Faramir’s sense of fair-play over-rode his weariness he went over to see if he could resolve the problem.

“Your Highness,” one of the guards warned, as he pushed past, “take care! For all we know this might be a trap.”

“Nonsense,” Faramir said, and then brusquely to the Hobbit, “state your business. What are you hiding back there?”

Ludlow waved his hands pathetically, explaining that his travelling companion had been gravely wounded and needed assistance. On seeing Shagrat lying under the blanket in the back of the little cart the Prince drew his breath sharply, in a quick, panicked gasp.

“What did you have to bring him back here for?” he demanded, not daring to raise his voice above a whisper.

“He’s injured!” Luldow exclaimed. “I didn’t know what else to do! Don’t you want to help?”

The Prince stared at him, his expression closed and unreadable. “What’s happened to him?”

“He said he was stabbed! By a woman!”

Faramir’s hands came away from Shagrat’s side stained with black wetness. Just for a moment, Ludlow was horrified to see the man’s control begin to slip, and he looked easily as much at a loss to know what to do as the Hobbit himself had been, up on the mountain. But then, with an effort he forced himself to think clearly.

“You two! Step lively!” Faramir ordered the guards. “Help me bring this fellow in at once – and have a care while you’re about it.”

They were moving a still-unconscious Shagrat into the campground, Faramir and the Hobbit trying to support his head and shoulders, while the guardsmen carried a leg each when they had the bad luck to run aross the Lady Eowyn, who was on her way to keep her appointment with the Prince. The speed with which the guards and Faramir dropped hold of their burden might have been comedic under other circumstances.

Eowyn glanced briefly at the prostrate Orc. “Another stray for you to take under your wing, Faramir?” she said. “Haven’t you been able to recover your ‘true love’ as yet? Though I notice it showed little enough inclination to stay with you last night, surely the beast can’t have gone very far?”

“He’s – this is a different one,” Faramir answered quickly. Straightening up, he stood in front of the Uruk, trying to block Eowyn’s view of him. “As I was saying, you’re to just – just put it with the others,” he told the guardsmen.

Looking Shagrat briefly up and down over Faramir’s shoulder, Eowyn said: “it seems as if this one shouldn’t last much longer, at least. Something the rest of us can be thankful for, I suppose.” She pulled away from him with hasty distaste.

The Hobbit watched this exchange with mouning indignation, staring back and forward at the two protagonistis. That they were husband and wife, and their relationship was badly soured, was obvious. He had heard of the great beauty of the fair Lady of Rohan, and of the gallant good-looks of her husband the Prince, but either he had been seriously misinformed or someone had been greatly over-stating the case, for at that point there wasn’t much to choose between them: they were both drawn and haggard, and looked angry, ill-humoured, and thoroughly out of sorts. Ludlow wondered what on earth could have been happening to them.

At the same time Shagrat’s appearance – and injuries - were nothing if not distinctive but incredible as it seemed, it was obvious that Eowyn simply didn’t recognise him as the Uruk she’d seen at close quarters, and had even had some dialogue with on two previous occasions. This gave Faramir a sudden, disturbing insight into his wife’s state of mind: looking at Shagrat it was obvious that she saw no distance at all past his typically Orcish bad skin, hair, and teeth, and to Eowyn’s eye it was clear that he was even less than the sum total of those – admittedly rather dubious - parts. The characteristics that usefully marked him out as being a servant of the enemy had also defined him so effectively in Eowyn’s mind that she just hadn’t bothered to – or perhaps, even genuinely couldn’t remember what Shagrat, as an individual, looked like.

Barely bothering to take her leave, Eowyn reminded her husband that she and her counsellor were expecting to speak with him shortly. Before he followed them, Faramir seized the front of the Hobbit’s jacket and pulled him to one side. “Go with the guards, quickly,” he told him, pressing a weapon into Ludlow’s hands, “you’ll have to try – you must do everything you can to keep the other ones off him.”

“He’s coming with you,” Faramir informed the two guardsmen. “This little, um, mercenary insists on keeping an eye on his investment. You’re to see that no harm comes to him while he’s about it.”

“’Other ones?’ What ‘other ones’?” Ludlow squeaked. He could barely lift the sword Faramir had handed him.

“The other Orcs,” Faramir replied, under his breath. “They’ve – quite frankly of late, they’ve been complaining that they’re hungry for – for fresh meat. Given their general tendencies, I don’t know what’s liable to happen. In fact I’m afraid of it.”

“You can’t leave me alone with them then!”

“I’ll be with you as soon as I possibly can,” Faramir told him, pushing Ludlow after the guards, “you may count on it.”

Despite his misgivings, the Hobbit followed the two Rohirrim men, and trotted diligently after them. They were now pulling the still-recumbent Shagrat along by the arms, leaving his feet to drag behind in the dirt, and after a short walk they came to a smallish fenced-off area, where they stopped. Ludlow realised then that the perimeter of Faramir’s encampment was effectively open, and that he had been rather unlucky to be challenged on trying to gain access to it. Really, it was likely that his presence had only been noted because of the commotion he’d made as he approached on his rickety little vehicle, because at that moment he saw that most of the guarding activity that was going on that night was directed at the sort of a camp-within-a-campground, at which they’d arrived. The cordoned-off area was made up of quite sizeable tree-trunks, that had been sunk, or hammered close-together into the earth, to form an impassable-looking circular wall. Around this was gathered quite a concentration of Rohirrim, and other troops. They had exactly the same threatening, menacing look about them that the Hobbit remembered seeing on the faces of the men two nights ago, when Shagrat had been accosted in the village tavern. It was as if they were all waiting and eager for trouble, and for someone to get started on some violent kind of activity.

“What’s this?” Ludlow squeaked in consternation, standing on tip-toe to peek through a gap in the bars.

“That,” one of the Rohirrim told him resentfully, “is what you might call his Highness’ ‘special collection.’”

“Are they all – they’re never all –“

“Orcs,” the first Rohirrim spat, in a clear statement of the bleedin’ obvious, “all of them filthy, murderin’ Orcs. And all of us under special orders from his Highness that we’re not to harm a hair on their stinking heads. Unless they start something first, that is.”

“Which is why they’re saying milord the Prince,” the other Rohirrim muttered under his breath, “is mad as the mist and snow.”

There were at least a dozen Orcs and Uruks on the other side of the tree-trunk wall. They stayed carefully well away from the entrance to their compound, as the Rohirrim unfastened and opened it, then lobbed Shagrat unceremoniously through.

As Ludlow began to protest about this unsympathetic treatment, the first Rohirrim made a show of holding the gate open a little way for him. “So are you in or are you out, little Master?” he grinned, exchanging a knowing look with his partner. “Not so keen on watching our ‘investment’ now, are we – oh!”

He exclaimed because just then Ludlow, moving at slightly above knee-level had shoved past him and entered the compound.

A snort or two of approval went up from the semi-circle of Shagrat’s compatriots who were waiting for him on the other side. They watched the gate swing shut behind the Hobbit, their eyes glittering in the darkness.

“Oh, hullo, Azof,” Ludlow said after a time, waving half-heartedly at the nearest of them. “Nice to see you again too, Rukush. Well then. How, er, how have you all been keeping?”

TBC


Author’s Note – sorry it’s taken a while for me to update...originally I’d intended to wrap this up as concisely as possible but the story’s become a kind of law unto itself lately and seems to be dragging on and on.

Mary – please, no apologies for not reviewing sooner - I regard reviews, particularly nice ones like yours as being a happily-welcome privilege, instead of anything else. Nah, Shagrat’s not mortally wounded, or anything like that. And yes, well, it was sort of a reunion for F&S but I hope I can do better for you later on. Hmmm. The Eowyn element in this is something I have been a bit bothered about, so and I’m glad that the (very slight) ambiguity relating to that seems to be coming across. As you say it does sort of suck, the whole husband-doing-the-dirty-with-an-Orc thing, but then again I’ve never really been convinced by the ‘Oh! I’m so in love with Aragorn!” and “Oh! And now I’ve found someone else to be my true love! All in the space of about 15 minutes!” aspect that Eowyn might be said to have about her. And the last chapter’s ending....well, you call it mean, I call it a cliff-hanger. Though undeniably mean however. Sorry about that

KAurion – thank you so much for your extremely kind comments. I’m so pleased you’re liking the story, and especially that you haven’t got bored with the plot details so far. I must say I wasn’t sure how well all that was working (it is an ‘adult’ fiction archive, and as you say many of the stories are basically...people getting down to it, so I did wonder, is this just getting in the way of all the shagging?) so it was particularly nice to know you thought that that was a good thing. Regarding the discrimination element you mentioned, I suppose that was largely sort of deliberate. There’s a bit in the books, but much more in the films, that does bother the heck out of me - about the interspecies stereotyping / relationships in ‘Lord of the Rings’ (and this isn’t exclusively relating to Orcs, although they’re the obvious example of it). This sort of thing is pretty disturbing and I suppose with these stories I was trying to think of a plausible scenario where someone somehow ends up getting a bit fond of a member of the much-maligned Orcish race, and then goes on to defy public opinion on account of it. I’m not sure how much this would achieve, either in Middle Earth, or here - but it is diverting to write about.

NessSachiel - yes, those weeks of continually being forced to ‘verify your age’ on AFF.net were a pain. That annoyance does seem to have gone away now anyway, thank goodness. Yes, the good news is that Faramir and Shagrat seem likely to be getting it on – despite my advice – in the next chapter, and one of them does, finally, make up his mind - so do keep reading!