Orc in Ithilien

Chapter 20: Murderer on the Dance Floor

The clock was striking twelve when Faramir, from his position at the far end of the ballroom, became aware of a certain fracas ongoing just outside the entrance to the chamber.

Faramir had spent his evening engaged in social chit-chat with the various provincial big-wigs and their consorts who customarily attended this type of gathering, all of whom had of course been so eager, delighted and completely overawed to be in the presence of a bona fide Prince that barely a one among them had had recourse to say a single sensible thing to him all night. He had, accordingly, found the engagement to be a long and rather wearying one overall - but he had also attracted the attention of a certain glossy-haired fellow, a man who Farmair knew very well from prior reputation, if not immediately by sight.

His charm and grace had made him quite the fixture in the higher levels of Gondorian society, and while in some circles he was reknowned more for his sexual adventuring and appetites - for the fellow was practically the male equivalent of a professional courtesan, he was fast becoming something of a minor celebrity at the new King’s court. And that night, this well-favoured fellow had his cap set at the Prince of Ithilien. Moving towards Faramir with all the easy self-assurance and confidence in his own position that the Prince knew he himself would always sorely lack, he had taken charge of their interaction immediately, presuming on a number of shared acquaintances as an excuse for introducing himself. Wherever in the great hall that Faramir went that night, he invariably found the man lingering somewhere in the region of his right elbow, at a sometimes greater - or more frequently something of a lesser distance. Seldom speaking but often catching the Prince’s eye with an easy smile and arch look, he had been quick to assume a definitely proprietorial air over him. Under different circumstances Faramir might have rebelled in the face of such presumptiousness, but the man was well-presented and assuredly good-looking: his robe of white samite shot with silver, if neither mystic nor particularly wonderful, was at least eminently suited to his height and rather slim figure, and though the man’s lengthy auburn tresses were of a shade that brought most forcefully to mind nothing more than the usefulness of certain herbal hair-dyes, they flowed quite attractively and bore a lightly appealing fragrance. Moreover he was turning out to be both a personable and charismatic companion, an amusing enough character with whom the Prince could while away a little of his time.

When the clock struck the hour the gay, social evening was beginning to wind itself down. Faramir and his new companion were standing together near the back of the function room, midway up a wide row of steps that led to a raised area abutting the farthest wall. On this low platform were a number of cloth-covered tables on which earlier during the evening’s festivities had been set out a cold dinner buffet. From this slightly elevated vantage point, Faramir was one of the first in the room to notice Shagrat’s arrival. The Uruk, having used the top of his sword to jemmy the (apparently locked) double-doors open, shouldered his way inside.

The Prince blanched to see him. There was always - almost by definition - something of the night about Shagrat, but even allowing for that the contrast between the Orc and his (in this case opulent) surroundings had never been more marked. Given the decidedly dodgy state of Shagrat’s health, together with the fact that he was making such heavy use of a walking stick, it shouldn’t have been possible for him to stride forwards quite so impressively, but despite this the long-legged Uruk managed to do it all the same. He moved with such speed and certainty that his cloak, which was fastened at the shoulders, billowed elegantly behind him as he swept down the central aisle across the room towards Faramir. Underneath the cloak he was wearing a clean shirt of mail, leather breeches, gauntlets and a short-skirted tunic, and he had acquired a fresh sword-belt and set of iron shin-guards and wrist-plates. The items were scuffed and dented, obviously second-hand; no more than typical Orcish attire of course, but everything had recently been cleaned, and to Faramir’s eyes he looked quite well in it - almost dashing, in fact. A frosty swirl of cold winter air draughting in from the great outdoors accompanied him as he drew nearer, and made Shagrat’s long (admittedly rather scraggy) hair swirl out dramatically as he made his approach. At first sight of him Faramir thought of nothing except for how much he’d missed him, while at the same time he noted that on occasions like this Shagrat was not so very far off from being completely and utterly, quite magnificent. But close on the heels of that came the poisonous realisation that there could be no reason for Orc to have come here other than for revenge; to publicly humiliate him, most likely.

As the Uruk drew nearer his pace became slower and slower until at last he came to a halt just in front of the small crowd of guests who still lingered around the Prince. The people nearest Shagrat turned their backs and moved pointedly away from him, till his line of sight to Faramir was clear.

“Well, Shagrat?” Faramir asked tiredly.

The Orc’s gaze darted back and forth as he scanned the other guests, looking at them cautiously. “Can I – I couldn’t have another word with you, could I?” he said gruffly. “Maybe over there, for a bit?”

“Anything further you have to say to me,” Faramir told him, “would be better discussed in public, wouldn’t you think? Out in the open and in a public forum, since I certainly wouldn’t want you to think of me dealing with you dishonestly, or have cause to claim that I was treating you in any kind of underhand manner.”

“Oh!” the Uruk exclaimed, in some dismay. “Well, I - I see your wife’s chucked you again,” he began again, clearing his throat. “She was a bit much to deal with, wasn’t she? All in all if you don’t mind me saying – it’s for the best, most likely. I should think you’re probably well rid.”

Determined to brazen this new scandal out as shamelessly as Shagrat, Faramir matched his attitude. “If you’ve come to gloat,” he replied, “there’s no need. It was a mutual separation – our second, actually, but this time all quite amicable.” He was acutely embarrassed by this reminder of his failed relationship with the Uruk, and now wished only to be rid of him. “Is that it? Have we covered everything? Will that be all?”

Shagrat looked nonplussed. “Well – no. It’s – also about Azof and those other lads. About you gathering ‘em all up the way you did. You know, I think I might’ve gotten the wrong end of the stick about that.”

“Finally realized that, have you?” Faramir asked stiffly. “I’m very glad to hear it.”

“I only thought you’d gone off on one again, didn’t I? I thought you’d got another bee in your bonnet about your ‘honour’ and – you know – being the big hero, getting rid of Orcs. Trying to prove something. I mean – it wouldn’t be the first time, would it? And all along, you were – well, they said you were only really looking for me. Scouring the kingdom, and that. I’m just saying, it was an easy mistake to make,” Shagrat insisted doggedly.

“I can barely remember what I was about at that time, of course,” Faramir said. “Head filled with romantic twaddle for the most part. Eyes blinded by – well. I wasn’t thinking clearly, that much is certain. As any normal person, or even anybody with even the barest ounce of common sense would no doubt by now have surmised.”

The Orc, who wasn’t stupid, only blinked at him.

“It was under duress,” Faramir went on. “Look at my actions - my behaviour – my expectations, throughout that entire unhappy episode. My perceptions were all off – to the extent that I scarcely knew what I was doing! Wits addled by long-term drug use, you see.”

Shagrat’s face fell. “Didn’t you mean any of it - those nice things you said about me, then?”

At that moment Faramir wanted nothing else than for the Uruk to go away, and he was about to make a withering retort, something to end their dialogue that would with any luck send him packing for good, when through a break in the crowd he caught a sudden glimpse of Shagrat’s Hobbit companion, who was glaring fiercely across the room, quite literally staring daggers at him. The gap in the crowd closed quickly, but Faramir was still left with nothing more than the afterimage of Shagrat’s unlikely champion - with eyes narrowed, jutting out his pudgy double chin; utterly failing to make his jolly little face look menacing. But even so, he had succeeded in making his point quite effectively. Someone has to make the first move as the Hobbit said, and Shagrat had certainly done more than that already.

But Faramir’s new companion had taken the Prince’s lack of a reply as an indication that he should jump into their conversation. Shagrat’s presence was a grave annoyance to the man for various reasons, foremost of which did not necessarily concern the fact that this competitor for Faramir’s attentions was only a miserable Orc. “How could his Highness have?” he hissed at Shagrat. “Are you stupid? Have you gone blind? Just look at you!” and he made a hateful hawking noise at the back of his throat. “Yrch!“

There was indeed something slightly different about him, Faramir realised, as he regarded the Uruk more closely. “My goodness Shagrat!” he exclaimed. “Has someone been trying to braid your hair?”

At that the Orc snatched convulsively at himself until his fingers caught hold of the stringy little plait, and he tore most of it out by the roots. “That bloody Hobbit,” he muttered, his jaw clenched, “kept messing about with it. Said he was only going to try to make it a bit more presentable - tidy it up, maybe. But then the teeth on his comb broke -”

“And the mirror, jug and washstand too, I should think, dealing with a face like that,” Faramir’s companion scoffed, and laying a proprietorial hand on the Prince’s elbow he began to steer him gently but insistently away.

There was a time when the last thing an issuer of a statement like that would have felt was the steel of Shagrat’s sword against his neck, and at once the Uruk, squaring up aggressively took a single, heated step towards him, fingers flexing as if he intended to snap the slender man in two like a twig – but then he paused and seemed to be staring at his feet for a long moment - after which unbelievably, Shagrat backed down.

He was looking at the deep, thick-pile carpet he was standing on, and noting the rich velvet and brocade drapes and hangings that decorated the place. Orcs in general were much-maligned creatures; Shagrat through his past experiences even more so than most, and he had encountered hostile attitudes so often that the disparagement was usually like water off a duck’s back to him. But possibly for the first time the Uruk was beginning to register the full burden of public disapproval being directed at him, and his shoulders sagged under the weight of it. The surge of adrenalin that had borne him from carriage to ballroom was fading and in its wake came a debilitating loss of self-confidence, for in this oppressive, alien setting he was out of his depth; had never felt so glaringly out-of-place. Trying to avoid catching sight of his own reflection in the glittering, candle-lit mirrored walls of the ballroom, Shagrat turned abruptly aside. All those bright lights were making him look even more haggard and ghastly than usual.

“That’s right,” Faramir’s companion said, “it’s time for you to return yourself to whichever gutter you first crawled from. Your foul presence is a grievous affront to every one of us - you are not wanted here.”

“Actually, that’s not quite the case,” Faramir cut in, addressing the man more sharply than he meant to, because he had never thought he’d see the Uruk turning away from a fight. This ran so contrary to everything Faramir thought he knew about Shagrat’s nature that the idea was thoroughly alarming to him, as was the notion that by now the Orc had been knocked down so often that there was a good chance that sometime soon he simply might not bother getting up again. “That is not the case because wherever he’s planning to take his foul presence off to,” he informed the assemblage at large - because curiosity having gotten the better of their manners, many of the people within earshot were turning round to stare at him - “this time I think that I for one will certainly be accompanying him. I think we’ll be going now, in fact.”

“Here,” the Prince continued, his voice sounding overly loud in the dead silence that had fallen all around them. Stepping forward he took the Uruk’s hand. “Come on, Shagrat. Outside. You were right. We can’t talk like this.”

“You’re leaving? In public? With me?”

“So it would seem,” Faramir replied, and closing his ears to the wave of astonished exclamation that followed them, he pulled the stumbling Orc through the crowded ballroom along after him. He dragged Shagrat to one side of the chamber, but the effect of their surprise departure was somewhat marred by the fact that the floor-to-ceiling windowed doors, through which the Prince had planned to exit, were bolted shut. Faramir, wrestling with quite an acerage of heavy curtain that was in the way rattled the locks exasperatedly for a moment, before recalling that he had something of an expert in antisocial doings and all round thuggish behaviour standing right there at his side.

“Go ahead,” he told Shagrat, “I’ll have to bow to your superior experience in this sort of thing.”

The Uruk grinned back at him. Using one iron-reinforced fist he punched the window-locks through, then with a single wrenching movement of his arm twisted the doors wide open. Shagrat’s single eye was shining as with an odd, almost courtly little movement, he stood back, gesturing to Faramir that he should lead the way outside. They went out together, going carefully because of all the newly-broken glass.

Remembering himself, Faramir hurried back to close the windowed doors behind them – though it was a largely futile exercise, because due to Shagrat’s efforts much of the glass and woodwork were shattered and one of the doors was hanging loose from its hinges. “I must extend my sincerest thanks!” the Prince called, through the gently swinging gap. “Really, it’s been a most wonderfully enjoyable evening! And, er, – of course I do intend to make good any and all of the superficial – or structural – damage that unfortunately seems to have taken place. You may have my personal guarantee of that.” And then he hurried back out to the waiting Orc.

TBC



A/N: Many thanks to Jolly and Rhody for your very supportive comments! It's taken so long for me to update the story that I wondered whether people would've given up on it by now, so it's really reassuring to know you remembered this. And Rhody, I'm terribly flattered by the comparisons to Peter Jackson's films. Not sure I deserve that, but if 'Lord of the Rings' had been made into a movie by somebody whose main interest in Middle Earth was Orcs, possibly there might've been a few similarities. Before those films I have to admit I was most interested in the exploits of Aragorn et al., but heigh ho. Things change.