Orc in Ithilien

The moon was low in the western sky and would soon be setting behind a thick bank of clouds. Dawn was still several hours off as Shagrat limped his way doggedly along the valley bottom that led from Faramir’s state residence, keen to put a few more miles between himself and any Rohirrim pursuers before day-break. On leaving the Palace grounds he had left an obvious trail leading deep into the middle of the largest of the Ithilien marshes before he’d doubled back and made straight for the highway. Even though the road he was on was one of the main thoroughfares serving the province, Shagrat had chosen to take the quickest route out of Ithilien. He had no doubt that he could be tracked easily enough in any case.

Shagrat stopped short. The stealthy footsteps off to his right that he had been listening out for continued for a moment then stopped, and he breathed a long sigh of relief.

“You again,” the Orc said gruffly, into the darkness. “You can come out now. Let’s be having you.”

There was a prolonged rustling in the dry grass that lined the side of the track, and after a while, a dark-furred creature crept out from the underbrush. It was hunkered so far down on its paws that its mangy belly dragged along on the ground as it inched forwards, and as it approached, it whined at Shagrat, wagging its stub of a tail appeasingly. The beast was vaguely dog-like, but its head was over large and its rear-quarters sloped downwards abruptly, like a hyaena’s, which gave it a front-heavy, disproportioned appearance. Despite the part that this beast had played in his recent and hasty departure from Ithilien, Shagrat was glad enough to see it.

He knew it had Warg in its make-up, for it understood the Black Speech when Shagrat had first spoken to it, but there was not a great deal of that ferocious breed, and what there was had been mixed and diluted with sundry other doggy strains. Though rather undersized for a Warg, it was much too big to be to be a wolf, and it had a scrofulous cast to its staring coat that suggested more than a dollop of domestic dog or jackal in its recent ancestry. On the whole it represented a pretty poor specimen of any canine species, for it was mangy, decrepit-looking, and had lost more than half its teeth. If this hadn’t been the case however, there was every chance that Shagrat wouldn’t have been standing talking to it at that moment; if not for the poor condition of this Warg, the Orc would have been long-since dead.

During Shagrat’s time with the travelling circus, he had occasionally been called on to participate in certain crowd-pleasing, special entertainment events: Orc takes on and is defeated by the village strong-man, is grappled to the ground by a local wrestler - and so on. The last of these challenges he’d been involved in had also featured the Warg hybrid, which Shagrat had been scheduled to fight and eventually defeat. When it came to it, the competition hadn’t exactly been a clash of Titans. On the night of the contest Shagrat, at the end of his tether, had knelt down in front of the beast, and beseeched it to put an end to his miserable life.

The Warg, in all fairness, had tried its best but had failed to finish Shagrat off entirely. Although Shagrat’s Barker had quickly stepped into the fray and forcibly prised the two combatants apart, this was largely due to the Warg’s dentally-challenged condition. Sometime during the night following their contest, Shagrat, who had been left for dead outside the Barker’s lock-up, had managed to release the Warg from its cage. Strictly speaking this hadn’t been a good deed on the old Orc’s part: what he’d really intended as a parting shot was to try and scotch another one of the Barker’s fairground enterprises. The morning after though, Goldilocks had very unexpectedly stepped in at the last possible moment, and had rescued Shagrat in turn, after which the Orc found himself being borne off to safety in Ithillien. And the wolf-Warg had trailed after them, following at enough of a distance that it had escaped even the notice of the keen-eyed Rangers of Ithillien who formed Faramir’s personal escort. Since then it had been lying up in one of the swamplands that bordered the Royal Palace, where Shagrat had been feeding it, partly out of gratitude but mostly for fear that otherwise, it would have attempted to messily disembowel one of Faramir’s household staff. He had done his utmost to impress upon it the idea that humans were no longer legitimate prey, he’d thought till now with some success.

It had attacked the guard back at the palace though, and Shagrat eyed it speculatively, considering that it might possibly be running rabid. It looked calm enough at the moment and he wondered why of all people, it had chosen to savage the Rohirrim guard. Most likely the reek of horse-sweat that came off the man had enraged it, stirring long-suppressed emotions in the beast, Shagrat decided at last, and he could certainly sympathise with that easily enough. He never did figure out what had provoked it to attack, the notion that anyone or anything might willingly want to watch his back being a concept that was at that point completely unfamiliar to him.

As he walked, Shagrat mulled over his future prospects, and in very little time had decided where he was heading. There was only one kind of place that suited Orcs, really. Up in the mountains, where the high passes would be permanently cloud-covered, and the gorges and ravines were so deep that they’d provide shelter from even the hottest noon-day sun. Accompanied by the Warg, he struck out for the distant line of peaks that formed the border region of Gondor at the first opportunity, and within a week they reached the first foothills of the mountains.

It had been many years since Shagrat had had the chance to hunt at his leisure, and he had almost forgotten the satisfaction of tracking and catching his own dinner. Roe deer, wild sheep and smaller game animals were in fine, fat condition and were plentiful in the woods and pastures. With the Warg’s help, he made easy prey of them, and they could easily catch as much as they could eat. The Orc’s plan, such as he had one was to find a secure place in which he could over-winter. But the hunting was good and the cold season still some way off, and so the Uruk and Warg spent the last days of summer wandering at their ease through the high forests. Clean air, fresh food and regular exercise turned out to have the same beneficial effects on ex-servants of Mordor as they would on anyone else, and in very little time both Shagrat and his canine travelling companion had noticeably filled out, the Uruk regaining some of the strength and muscle-mass he’d lost since the fall of Mordor.

He had been roaming in the mountains for a perhaps a little under a month he first came across a trail that had obviously been made by other Orcs. The scent was still fresh and their spoor looked to be no more than a day old. The Warg wasn’t with him; it had taken to spending longer and longer periods away on its own in the woods, and Shagrat surmised that it was off looking for others of its own kind, perhaps for a mate. Though he was not by nature a sociable creature, through Faramir’s influence, Shagrat had become much more tolerant of company and to his surprise, he found that he had even come to wish for it. That, combined with his curiosity about his fellow-Orcs, was enough to make him decide to follow them.

By night-fall, Shagrat was within sight of their encampment. He hadn’t bothered to conceal his approach, and soon enough his presence had been detected by whatever Orcish watchmen had been set about the camp’s perimeter. Before long, a voice was shouting at him out of the little hollow in the hills where the group was positioned.