Faramir Fiction Archive

Speaks to the Trees (R)

Written by Draylon

27 July 2011 | 18210 words | Work in Progress

Title: Speaks to the Trees
Author: Draylon
Rating: R
Pairing(s): Faramir
Warnings: Orc-heavy content

This is a tricky one, this being a stand-alone-ish sequel to the (the still unfinished, and not yet posted here) sequel to ‘Captain of Mordor’. Please note that Faramir, though generally sniped about by Orcs in earlier chapters, doesn’t actually play a main part in this story in until Chapter 6 onwards. Contains generally Orc-heavy content and some explicit (mostly consensual) Faramir / Shagrat sex scenes in later chapters.

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Chapter 1. A walk in the dark

Just after sunset, and it was already dark under the trees at the edge of the wood. Winter still lingered in the highest passes of the mountains, but here the first celandines, their petals closed against the cool of the evening, were already blooming all along the bank. Deeper into the little ravine, where the air was still and rang with the chattering sounds of water falling over rock, it was noticeably warmer than out under the empty, windswept sky, and in amongst the trees the gentle exhalations from fresh, unfurling fronds of leaf-growth perfumed the air with a delicate, green scent.

The hazel bushes, in the shelter of their mountain gorge grew as high as the wind-shortened trees that were to be found at this altitude. Their glossy, grey-brown limbs were bare of leaves as yet but there were lambs’-tail catkins, laden with dusty pollen, hanging down in glorious abundance from every branch. In a mossy nook, down among the hazel roots that clung to the bare rock of the hillside, were drifts of wind-flowers and sweet-scented moschatel, and in the open space at the sides of the tumbling stream, early primroses just coming into bud. A late-singing blackbird, safe in his little haven of wood and watercourse, warbled a few last notes of liquid melody against the darkening sky.

It was the first flush of springtime and the stars were shining faintly through a cool, greeny-yellow dusk as a stately figure, tall, slim and silent, made his way down the ravine between the trees, treading lightly through the stands of spring flowers and stepping with great care. He was bare-headed and his long hair swung straight, glimmering faintly like silver as it caught the starlight; the hem of his fine woollen cloak, which showed a subtly-woven pattern running through its threads, brushed through the leaf-tops of tender new growth, gathering glistening beads of freshly-fallen dew.

So quietly did this person approach that a little Orc, crouching in a moss-lined depression and with his thoughts on other, sundry matters, did not notice the tall figure until he was nearly upon him. Up went the Orc, shooting out from almost under the tall one’s feet, like a partridge breaking from a covey.

“Save us an’ ‘elp us all!” he cried, as bolting from his hidey-hole between the hazel bushes, the startled Orc began running pell-mell down the slope, screeching something about ‘the light of the cold and terrible stars that was shinin’ in ‘is cruel eyes’ as he went.

The lofty, cruel-eyed figure clumped over to the hollow where the little Orc had been sitting and bent down stiffly to retrieve a discarded item from among the tree-roots.

“Oi, Maz!” he called after the fleeing figure. “Here! Maz! You’ve forgotten your kecks.”

“Shagrat!” the little Orc cried, blowing out a great puff of breath in relief. Pausing in his panicky flight, he came to a stop some way further down the ravine.

“What d’you have to go walking so quiet for, like?” Maz demanded, as his companion approached. “For a minute there, Shaggers, when first I seen you coming through them trees I could’a sworn you was one of ‘em – I fort for sure I was seein’ an – “

Shagrat, who was in fact also an Orc – and a large one – himself, sighed wearily through his teeth. He’d been walking carefully mainly because he had to, on account of having a gammy leg. He handed Maz the grubby pair of breeches he’d picked up for him. “One of them what.”

It was slowly dawning on Maz that the issue of who – or rather what sort of a person – he thought he’d glimpsed coming through the trees might well be construed as a mortal insult to an Orc like Shagrat.

“Oh – nothing, nothing,” he muttered shiftily. Then perking up a bit he asked hopefully: “Ludlow not wiv’ you then?”

Shagrat grunted. Through a recent series of misadventures, the Hobbit to whom Maz was referring had come to be something of a constant – if unlikely – companion of his.

“Says he’s not one for late nights,” he said. “What about you?”

“I ‘eard a pair of ringnecks ‘ad flown the gamekeeper’s coop,” the little Orc replied quickly. “An’ I found a likely-looking nest halfway down the ‘ill, the other day. Hen should be sitting on ‘er clutch by now. Wanna come see?”

“As it happens I – might be heading down that way myself,” Shagrat said. “I suppose I could come some of the way with you.”

The two Orcs made their way along in silence for a while; Maz, his companion noted, picking his way through the new swathes of plant growth quite as carefully as he himself had been earlier.
For the greater portion of life – until a year or two ago, actually – Shagrat had been a serving Officer in the Black Army of Mordor; a commander of other Orcs as well as larger Uruk-hai of his own type. This had been a difficult role; a wholly un-relished task that had left him with the prickliest of natures, combined with almost zero tolerance for the company of his fellow Orcs. And yet on that cool spring evening in the glowing dusk, Maz and Shagrat ambled down through the perfumed wood peacefully enough, in what very nearly counted as being a genuine, companionable silence.

Maz gave the big Uruk a sideways glance. As they were stepping along Shagrat, with an oddly absent-minded expression on his face, was humming through his teeth, droning out a melody-free tune – almost certainly without being aware that he was doing it.

“It’s funny you know, these days. Wiv’ us being outdoors so much all the time and that,” Maz began.

Shagrat stared at him, apparently nonplussed. “What d’you mean ‘these days’?” he asked. “We used to get sent out in all weathers the whole ruddy time, before.”

“Yeah, but it was always running off on some jaunt on ‘orders’ an’ wiv’ a whip at yer’ back. Do-or-die stuff. Everything was always so dead serious, then, weren’t it?”

Marching out on manoeuvres, or raiding parties and looting. Thinking about his life as it had been under the control of his dark superiors in Mordor, Shagrat could only answer – “I suppose it was, at that.”

“And then,” Maz went on, warming to his subject, “even when you was out you’d be on fer constantly getting it in the neck from some bloody-minded jobsworth Kapitan-type.”

Shagrat, who as an Orcish commander had more or less been a walking definition of the phrase ‘bloody-minded Kapitan-type’, scowled at him.

“No offence intended, I’m sure,” Maz added quickly.
“Thing is,” he went on after a minute, “before, I used to tromp all over the green, growing things – squash ‘em flat – just for the ‘eck of it. Even if it didn’t have stingers, and weren’t prickly, an’ – an’ even if it weren’t really in me way.”

“There wasn’t a lot green, or growing that I ever saw down on Mordor Plain,” Shagrat replied, “but I suppose I know what you mean. Used to go out of my way to do it, too.”

The two Orcs had reached the halfway point of the hillside by now. They were finding that the further down the valley they went, the further the new season had progressed and at this level, spring was already well underway. Here the soft, fern-like fronds of cow parsley were already covering the sides of the path with thick green growth, and taller stands of Jack-by-the-hedge –

- also known as ‘hedge garlic’ and called ‘poor man’s mustard’ by the country-folk round these parts due to the rather acrid flavour of its technically, edible leaves (noted Shagrat, all without properly registering the thought that it was pretty unlikely that he could possibly know any of this)

– growing fine and lush by side of the watercourse, with their starry heads of bright, white flowers, were knee-high already.

Surreptitiously Shagrat slipped off one of his heavy gauntlets and reached out with his nearest hand so that his fingertips would just brush lightly through the stiff, slightly sticky flower-spikes as he walked. He drew in a deep lungful of the sweet, scented evening air, and sighed out happily.

After a while he considered Maz for a moment. Then, clearing his throat he said, much in the manner of somebody making an unwarranted admission – “although – between you and me, a lot of that tramping down the vegetation I did was –“

“Just showin’ off?”

“Well – all right, yes. That, too. But partly it was because I – well, I sort of liked the smell.”

The little Orc was nodding enthusiastically. “Me an’ all!” he said. “D’you know what I woz doin’, in the ‘azel bushes afore you came?”

Actually, Shagrat hadn’t quite liked to think. “Searching for your britches?” he suggested faintly.

At that timely moment there came a loud rustling and cracking of branches from somewhere close by. Shortly after that a third Orc stepped out from a thorny thicket into Maz and Shagrat’s path, and waited a little way ahead of them.

“Wot,” the new Orc’s sarcastic voice called back to them, “did you say you was looking for in Maz’s kecks, Shagrat, mate? You wanna watch yourself, Maz. He’ll be up to ‘is old tricks in a minute, given ‘arf a chance. They didn’t use to call ‘im ‘Cap’n Shag-anything-wot-moves’ for nuffink.”

Chapter 2. Wood chat

This third party would be Azof, a black Uruk of Mordor, whom Shagrat had known slightly of old. Though shorter than average, he was extremely stocky; nearly as broad across the shoulders as he was tall. His yellow eyes slanted above high cheekbones in a cruel, angular face and most unusually for an Orc he seemed to boast some development of proper facial hair: he sported a thin black stripe of beard all along his jaw-bone – in a delicately-drawn line so narrow, carefully-trimmed and also (it has to be said), at such variance to the colour of the rest of the hair on his head that Shagrat often suspected he had to have been secretly augmenting it, by use of pen and ink.

In Azof the general Orcish fondness for making trouble for its own sake was developed to an especially high degree, and for some reason he had always had a particular axe to grind against Shagrat.

“Wasn’t expecting to see you out on your lonsesome tonight, Shaggers,” he opened, nastily. “Where’s your missus gotten to then, eh?”

“Ludlow’s back at camp,” Maz put in helpfully.

“I wasn’t talkin’ about our dear little sawn-off, half-pint Hobbit runt,” Azof said. And then addressing Shagrat – “I fort The Fairy Princess was honouring us wiv’ a visit. And everybody knows whenever that plonker turns up, you two goes about practically joined at the ‘ip for the duration.”

Though it would stretch anyone’s credulity quite a bit, the fact was that Prince Faramir of Ithilien and – of all people – the Uruk Shagrat, had been enjoying and on-again but mostly off-again love affair for quite a number of years at this point – and it was none other than Faramir himself who was this ‘missus’ of Shagrat’s that Azof was currently taunting him about. The previous day Faramir had arrived on one of his rather frequent visits to see his awful Urukish paramour – only to walk into yet another heated dispute between the recently-established mountain colony of Orcs and the locals already resident in the surrounding region, who (quite understandably) didn’t want creatures of Shagrat’s ilk anywhere near them. At that moment Faramir was no doubt utilising his (formidable) skills in polite-speaking and diplomacy to help calm the volatile situation; a fact that Azof, whose lax attitudes to notions of the personal ownership of property had engendered much of the trouble in the first place, couldn’t possibly have failed to be aware of.

“Not getting bored wiv’ you already, is ‘ee, Shaggers?” Azof went on, doing his level best to needle the other Uruk. “If you’d only asked me, I could’ve told you I’d seen this coming.” And then, when that failed to get a response – “I reckon you surrendered your virtue to that boy far too quickly, Shagrat, an’ that’s the long and short of it.”

Thinking about the pleasant evening he might have been spending with his sweetheart, instead of standing about arguing with berks like Azof, had the other Orc’s antics not thrown such a monumental spanner in the works, Shagrat hunched his shoulders and clenched and unclenched his right hand repeatedly. In dealing with Azof the key point to remember was to never let the bugger know he was succeeding in getting to you.

“Should’ve been a bit more careful about the guarding of your ‘chaste treasure’, shouldn’t you, Shaggers? Loverboy will think you’re easy, now.”

“Leave the Captain alone, Azof,” an even larger Uruk, who had been on the far side of the narrow strip of woodland put in mildly, as he stepped closer to the little group. This was Rukush, surviving remnant of a one-time wizard’s army from the north. Rukush was an even-tempered fellow, who possessed what in Orcish terms was such an unusually pleasant nature that it would certainly have turned out to be a grave handicap for him, if he hadn’t been saved by the end of the war.

“I think it’s sweet!” Rukush said.

Shagrat glanced sidelong at him, convinced as usual that he was trying to take a rise out him – but also as usual, saw that Rukush was just being Rukush.

“You wot?” Azof was scoffing, his eyebrows arched in mock incredulity. “You fink it’s sweet, do you, the way our glorious leader’s come down’ter being nuffink better’n a little lapdog, always running after Queen Fairy-mir?”

“I think it’s sweet the way the two of them are so devoted,” Rukush elaborated. “You can see ‘em always holding hands and that when they think no-one’s looking.”

Shagrat, his calm mood by now no more than a distant memory, was almost beside himself with irritation. He could take Azof’s mockery in his stride easily enough, but this clap-trap the other Uruk was spouting! He heartily wished that Rukush would please, just stop talking about this.

“He’s gone down to the village to pay the farmer for those cows you ate, all right, Azof?” Shagrat barked out, knowing even before he’d uttered his words that Azof wouldn’t let that be the end of it.

Azof guffawed. “What a plonker! S’pose that’s lurve for you though, innit?”

“I still think it’s nice to have someone special,” Rukush insisted.

“Ooooo! Sounds like we might be speakin’ from personal h’experience!” crowed Azof. “You’re never telling me you’ve got ‘someone special’ too, then, are you Rukush?”

“Well –“ the other Uruk broke off, before continuing bashfully – “I was going to meet this girl, tonight.”

“Now, where are you going to find a ‘uman to get with you?” Maz demanded. “They all ‘ate Orcs! An’ that goes double for the ol’ misery-guts ones round ‘ere!”

“She’s not from round here though is she!” Rukush countered, “she’s from the travelling folk. They’ve come an’ camped in the bottom of the next valley down the ridge. And they don’t seem to mind us near so much as the other people here do.”

“You don’t know nothink about it,” Azof announced slyly, “because I’ve been seeing one of them farmers’ wives from down in the valley meself.”

“You’re going steady with one of the women from the village?” Rukush exclaimed, astonished.

Azof looked blank. “Eh?”

“Stepping out with her, I mean. You’re not really, though, are you Azof?”

“No, I’ve been seeing her – watching her, I said,” Azof repeated. “It’s not every night, but she has a sponge-bath most every other evening before she turns in. Never shuts ‘er curtains neither. An’ you can see the bleedin’ lot!”

Maz gasped. “What’s she like?” he asked eagerly, hopping from foot to foot.

Azof shrugged. “I s’pose she’s nice enough. Bit older, mind you though.”

Maz shook his head impatiently. “No! I mean – what’s she like? ‘Ave you seen her ‘jubblies’?”

“Yes, Maz,” Azof replied, “and like I said, she’s no spring chicken – but her bazooms is still bloomin’ enormous – and she always soaps up a right good lather over ‘em too.”

“What about ‘er bum?”

“Yup, an’ it’s a good big ‘un as well,” the block-shaped Uruk replied, salaciously pouting his lips. “Got a great stonking pair of luverley white buttocks, she ‘as!”

“But can you see –“ said Maz, dropping his voice nervously – “have you ever seen her minge?”

“Course I have,” Azof said, suavely. “’Er lady garden, fanny hair, flaps, an’ everythink. I told you Maz – I’ve clocked the blinkin’ lot!”

“Can I come an’ see her with you some night then too, Azof?” Maz asked eagerly. The little Orc was practically salivating.

“No, Maz,” Azof told Maz, with a gruff sort of proprietorial /stern tone, oddly out of character for him (Shagrat noted) as in general the fellow was such an awful blinkin’ show-off – “you bleedin’ well cannot.”

By this time Shagrat, who was after all nominally in charge of this Orcish rabble, had heard more than enough. “Now then Azof,” he growled, “you’re not going to be seeing this farming person again either. I’m not having you stirring up even more trouble with those folk down in the valley – and especially not now when we’ve barely gotten over the last lot! You know they’re not happy we’re here to begin with.”

“You said the Queen of the Fairies ‘ad come to sort all that out for us!”

“That’s as maybe!” Shagrat yelled, “but the way you’re carrying on’s only going to make things worse, isn’t it!”

This was quite the understatement. Having secured part-ownership rights to a tract of otherwise desolate mountainside on a technicality, Shagrat was finding that in practice his occupation of this conveniently isolated piece of land (as a sitting tenant with a few of his fellow-Orcs, plus one itinerant Hobbit thrown in) was turning out to have all sorts of unlooked-for ramifications. Their nearest neighbours – together with most of the local district, in fact – were all up in arms about the situation, and that these people had not (yet) come together as one to unite against their common Orcish enemy, was only due to the general lawlessness of the upland region – together with the deep-seated clannish character of its inhabitants, most of whom were already embroiled in various complicated inter-familial disputes and squabbles over all sorts of sundry matters – many of these epic quarrels of centuries’ duration in themselves – of their own.

It was important in the light of all this for the Orcs, if they were ever to successfully establish themselves, to avoid sticking their heads up above the metaphorical parapet – a point which Azof, with his livestock-poaching antics, and now, peeping-Tom-foolery, needed to be reminded of now and again. Shagrat delivered him of a short, sharp, dressing-down accordingly.

“But what about him and his Pikey bint!” Azof exploded, pointing a shaking finger at Rukush.

“What’re you even bringing me into this for?” the other Uruk was outraged.

“That’s different,” Shagrat said firmly. “Because Rukush’s Gyppoe friend – “

“’Not ‘Pikeys’. ‘Gypsy travellers’,” Rukush put in.
The others turned to stare at him.

“Gyppoes prefers to be called ‘Gypsy travellers’,” Rukush explained. “When you say ’Pikeys’ it has –it’s got all sorts of – “ he broke off, apparently searching for the right means of expressing himself.

“Negative connotations?” suggested Shagrat after a minute.
“Oh, lah-di-dah! ‘anging about wiv royalty, an’ h’ain’t we gettin’ verbose!” crowed Azof. “Anyway it don’t make no difference whatc’her call ‘em. Gyppoes is still a load of light-fingered, clothes-peg-selling, wagon-dwelling horse-thieves.”

Shagrat rolled his eye. “But at least Ruskush’s Gypsy traveller friend knows she’s stepping out with him!”

“How is that different?” demanded Azof.

“’Cause of he’s not spying on her through her window, when she’s alone at night, is he!”

“Come on, Azof,” Maz said, shivering. “All that ‘anging about! Even you’d ‘ave to admit that is a bit on the creepy side, is’nit?”

“I’m not spying on her,” Azof retorted. “She knows all about it. Doesn’t begin taking her bath till I get there, most times. She very bloomin’ well makes sure I’m there before she even gets started!”

The other Orcs looked at one another, perplexed.

“An h’exhibitionist!” Maz hissed.

“And you’re sure you’re not getting hold of the wrong end of the stick ‘bout all this, are you Azof?” Rukush ventured at last.

“I ain’t! Threw a proper strop one night the other week after I got ‘eld up and never made it over to her gaff, didn’t she! And next time I went, wouldn’t take her kit off for ages. I told you – she leaves the curtains, big, ‘eavy shutters like they’ve all got an’ everythink open, specially.”

Apparently Azof was warming to his subject because he carried on excitedly: “First night I went down to ‘er’s, right, I started off ‘iding in the bushes in ‘er back yard, right, ‘cause you can get a good view an’ you’re kinda under cover too. But after a while she clocks me ‘anging about in there, doesn’t she, an’ -”
“What sort of bushes were they?” Maz asked.

“Wot? – Oh – they was, er – some sort of cultivated variety of the wild ‘azel nut, I think. Anyway, this woman, Julienne ‘er name is, right – ”

“Hazel bushes!” interrupted Maz. “Oh, but they’re brilliant! The way the bark’s all shiny-smooth in winter – then it’s so pretty when the first leaves do come. An’ in autumn you get ‘azel nuts! Or cobnuts!”

“Or filberts!” Rukush put in.

“Eh?”

“Some people says ‘filberts’ instead of ‘hazelnuts’,” Rukush explained. “I quite like nut trees too. Walnuts, ‘specially.”

“Walnuts!” Maz nodded appreciatively. “Yeah. Walnuts ‘ave got lovely leaves ain’t they. All soft and bronzy in spring, before they toughen up an’ go proper green. Nice! And how the whole plant smells good! Strongly h’aromatic throughout.”

He looked round the group for a moment with a decidedly shifty air, and then lowering his voice, asked Rukush hesitantly: “Is… is that what yours’ has turned out to be, then?”

“Rukush’s what has turned out to be?” Azof scoffed, not quite convincingly. “What’c’her on about now, eh, Maz?”

There was an awkward moment of silence.

“Do you know what these two are yammerin’ on about, Shagrat?” Azof demanded, turning to the older Uruk.

Shagrat sighed as he looked around the little group. Perhaps it was about time for them to be getting these things out and in the open, at that. Because Maz might talk about his pheasant’s nest, and Azof and Rukush their respective ‘girlfriends’ as justification for why they were out and about that night; but it wasn’t even as if it was just the four of them who were affected. The sweet draw of that soft, spring evening had been strongly felt by everyone – to the extent that the Orcs’ camp had been nearly deserted by the time Shagrat himself had left it.

Looking Azof in the eye, Shagrat said quietly – “I think you know what he’s talking about as well as I do. Otherwise I’m betting we wouldn’t be finding you, Azof, standing around making silly excuses for why you’re hanging about here, at night, in a wood.”

“Now, I’ve got as much right as anyone else –“ Azof began, blustering.

“Is it walnut though, Rukush?” Maz whispered, ignoring him. “I mean the tree wot ‘as… turned out to be the right one for you?” “Nah, I mean I like walnuts all right and everything,” replied Rukush, “but for me it’s def’nitely the small-leaved lime!”

“Yes, to my eyes it ‘as got a somewhat more attractive growth habit than many of the larger-leaved varieties,” Maz commented, knowledgably. “Foliage not quite so luxuriant of course – as you’d h’expect given the name – but I do like the look of them downward-arching branches, wot becomes apparent in the more mature specimens, in general.”

Azof fairly goggled at him. “Wait a minute! Anyone thought to wonder how does a pig-ignorant little twerp like Maz come to know all that?” he demanded. “’I bet ‘ee couldn’ tell a bloomin’ lime tree from a cobnut from an ‘ole in the ground the other week! Now he says ‘ee ‘likes the look of the downward-arching branches in general!’ Like ‘eck ‘ee does! Where is all this h’information coming from, is what I want to know!”

“Oh. Mine’s a bit like I’m hearing this voice,” Rukush answered helpfully.

“This voice – comes from outside of yous, does it?” Azof muttered fearfully.

“Oh, no! It’s a voice I hear just in my head.”

Maz nodded. “She’s a lady.”

“Yeah. Dead ethereal –an’ awful well-spoken, too. Mouth full of plums, that lady’s got.”

“An’ knows everythink you wanna know about plants, don’t she, Rukush?” Maz said seriously.

“Yeah, because it’s like she made them,” the Uruk replied, shaking his head in wonder, “or something. Actually I’m not too sure I understand that part.”

“Satisfied with that, Azof?” barked Shagrat. “Apparently some posh bird’s been telling them all about it.”

“’Earing a voice in yer ‘ead!” spluttered Azof, quivering now with indignation, “takin’ account of a voice in yer ‘ead! Listen to yerselves! Think, for a minute. Where, exactly, ‘as that sort of thing gotten Orcs like us before?”

“Wind your neck in Azof!” cried Rukush. “This is nowhere near the same!”

“Ee’s right,” Maz put in, “this isn’t like when we were in” – and he whispered it low – “Mordor. It’s ‘elpful, this voice is! It isn’t like it takes you over – an’ – an’ crushes you an’ drives you till there’s nothink left, like it’s some sort of – of -“ he stopped, and stood waving his claw vaguely, not sure how to finish.

“- compulsion?” Shagrat concluded for him, eventually.
“That’s right!” Maz cried, defiantly. “So you tell me, Azof, where’s the ‘arm in that?”

Azof merely made a short lunging step towards him, and the little Orc, all his earlier bravado vanishing, scampered back to cower beside Rukush. Azof shook his head at the pair of them.
“It’s perverse, this carryin’ on with nut bushes and such is,” he muttered.

“Azof doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Rukush said, turning to console his smaller friend. “He’s just narked ‘cause of we didn’t want to listen to his silly, grubby stories, isn’t he? Look Maz, there’s some nice lime trees just on the edge there where this wood gets big and opens out an’ I’m going across there, in a minute. You know Maz, d’you – d’you want to come and see them with me?”

“Nah, I’ll stop ‘ere with me ‘azel shrubbery, if it’s all the same to you, Rukush mate.”

The two Orcs were now grinning at one another ecstatically, as if engrossed in sharing some wonderful new secret.

“We shouldn’t even be speaking about this!” insisted Azof. “Don’t’cher all remember how it was, before? I’ve not forgotten, even if you lot ‘ave! Trees an’ that ‘ave got long memories, is what we was told time an’ again in barracks. And we was always learnt about the way they hate Orc-folk like us!”

“But that doesn’t seem right, not here and now, anyways,” Maz replied, sounding none too sure of himself. “Happen – ‘appen these ones don’t?” He turned to Rukush in for support. “There’s no harm in it, surely?”

“And why would we ‘ave any call to think things ‘ud be any different ‘ere?” sneered Azof.

Rukush’s brow furrowed with effort as he made a valiant attempt to think things through. This was always a slow and painful process for him, and a measure of the great importance he attached to Maz’s question was that he even bothered trying to answer it in the first place. “All these old roads and bridges and what-not you see all over in Gondor,” he began eventually, following several false starts. “That stuff they say the Men from the West built.”*

“Tarkish h’infrastructure?” sneered Azof. “Yeah, I’ve seen it an’ it’s rubbish. What about it?”

“I mean I heard the Tarks here were builders back in the old days. Workers of stone.”

“They were well known for it,” put in Shagrat, who of all of them had arguably had most first-hand experience of Tarkish skills in stone-masonry – as he had in fact inhabited a building made through their efforts, the Tower of Cirith Ungol, for many years.

“Tarks was also well good at smithy-work. Ship-building too,” Maz added.

Azof shrugged. “I s’pose that’s all fair enough. Don’t see what difference it makes though.”

“What I’m saying is, you can’t build, in stone, or make roads – or do all them other things like Maz said – without, well – felling a good few trees can you? I saw it with that wizard when I lived up north,” Rukush explained defensively. “Had us lot slash and burn down acres of the old forest he did, and the woods – well, I can tell you they wasn’t pleased by it.”

“The woods wasn’t pleased by it?” Azof exclaimed. “You see ! This is ‘xactly wot I’ve been saying all along!”

“But what I’m trying to get at – if only you’d let me finish, is something’s different here! I remember how it was before, and the feel of all this is different! I dunno – maybe it’s because of these trees having been chopped before, back in ‘istory, but not by the likes of us –“

“Or maybe something’s different, now, about – us?” Maz suggested, very quietly.

“It could be that,” Rukush acknowledged, “I don’t reckon it’s for me to know – but maybe, it could. But whatever is – behind it, it’s like the trees, an’ – an’ even the little greenstuff here, I don’t think it’s bothered if you’re a Man, or beast or – or even an Orc, so long as you – you know, you see it for what it is. Really an’ properly see it, I mean.” He broke off, apparently exhausted by his efforts to explain himself.

“But. We. Is. Orcs!” roared Azof. “Seein’ trees and liking plants? Everybody knows we shouldn’t have no truck with that, because we don’t go in for – all that namby-pamby sort of thing!”

“Maybe we ‘ave just been – mis-h’informed,” Maz said doggedly, “about what we does and doesn’t like. Or – or even purposely misled. I mean it wouldn’t be the first time, would it?“

“The Captain’ll know what’s for the best,” announced Ruskush after a moment. Turning to Shagrat he said stoutly: “If he thinks it’s all right for us to keep on as we have been doing – I say it will be.”

“Have you got a tree wot ‘is – the proper one for you too then, Shagrat?” Maz breathed. “Have you?”

“Well, ’ave you or ‘aven’t you, Shaggers?” jeered Azof when the big Uruk didn’t reply. “An’ if he ‘as,” he told Maz and Rukush, airily, “chances are it’ll be something with a pretty flower-pattern on it, or growing in a pot – like a little pansy-bush, I should think.”

There was a stiff moment’s silence. The other Orcs waited expectantly.

“Grey poplar,” said Shagrat in a tight voice, at last.

At this Azof positively roared and hooted with laughter. “A tree wot only grows in the fertile loams of riverine floodplains! And you livin’ halfway up to a bloomin’ mountain-top! Oh, Shaggers! You’ve been shafted again there all right, you poor bastard! Them farmers down the valley‘ll shoot you full of holes soon as look at you, long before you even get near any grey poplars!”

“What about you, then, Azof?” Maz asked, bristling. “Got one of your own too, ‘ave you?”

“It’s blackthorn,” Azof replied, sticking his chin out and changing his stance slightly, as if he was daring anyone to make something of it.

Maz looked appalled. “Blackthorn!”

“Not even a proper tree, is it?” scowled Shagrat.

“More of a thicket,” agreed Rukush. “Blackthorn hasn’t really got what anyone’d call ‘a trunk’.”

“It’s as proper a tree as ‘azel is, in’t it?” yelled Azof defensively. “All that bloomin’ ‘self-coppicing’ malarkey!”

“Still difficult to cuddle up to, mind, Azof,” Maz said, recovering from his shock somewhat. “It’s so – spiny. An’ I ‘eard if you prick yourself, on the branches it’s got this ‘orrible, ‘orrible fungus -”

“Oh, go an’ prick yourself!” Azof howled. “It’s no bleedin’ surprise that Maz’d know all about ‘orrible funguses’! He would, wouldn’t he, the dirty little bleeder! We’ve much more chance of picking somethink catching off of you, Maz, as off a blackthorn bush! Or – or off your ‘orrid, manky old tregs! What’d you go picking ‘em up for ‘im for, Shagrat? You should’ve left ‘em lying where they was! They’d ‘ave been better off buried in an unmarked grave at midnight! ”

Maz abroad in the countryside with his trousers on, rather than off, had generally seemed the lesser of two evils to Shagrat, and he said as much to Azof, who swore at him and looked as if he was about to start squaring up for a fight.

“No use taking it out on him,” said Rukush in a mild voice, stepping in almost nonchalantly, to put his great muscular bulk squarely between Azof the old Uruk Captain. “It’s not Maz’s, and it’s not Shaggers’ fault you got landed with one of the duff ones, Azof. I think it serves you right.”

Azof shot him a filthy look. “Blackthorn’s better than stinkin’ poplars at any rate!” he shouted back at them, as he proceeded to stomp off into the woods. They heard his voice echoing back through the trees: “an’ at least I can always make sloe gin!”

Shagrat watched him go with a baleful eye. Then he shook himself and sighed. “Right then,” he said, addressing the two remaining Orcs. “Any other business? No? Then I’ll be bidding you both a good night.”

TBC

*Author’s note: not surprisingly, Tolkien did address this specific point, but as I understand it, reckoned something along the lines of – and I’m putting this into my own words – ‘the vegetation of Ithilien / Gondor wouldn’t have “minded” being cut down and used in building by the Men of the West, because what they were doing was well-intentioned.’
Yeah. Well (bearing in mind I write stories about Faramir getting it on with an Orc in my spare time and thus might not be considered the most reliable of sources) I can’t say I find that totally convincing myself….

Chapter 3. Gone fishing

The quarter moon was long set, which made it well after midnight by Shagrat’s reckoning, as he continued on his way. His progress down from the mountain had been slower than he’d anticipated; he had aimed to arrive at the grove of poplar trees he was heading for a few hours before sunrise, which would give him enough time for a fairly leisurely sojourn – although he’d planned to leave before the sun was up, preferring to travel in these regions under cover of darkness. The lowland his favoured trees were growing in was a decidedly pastoral setting; well populated by livestock farmers, and the floodplain itself was stocked with many domestic animals of various types. The hedges, willow copses and water-meadows they grazed down on the plain offered very little cover, and the Orc had no wish to be caught out in the open by some angry farm-hand or stockman. He’d have to pick up his pace if he was going to avoid this, but thinking he could still make it – there and back for a good run – Uruk jogged heavily on down the path. There was no sound but the rhythmic scuff and thud of his boots on the rocky downhill slope for some time.

One of the trickier parts of his journey in fact, lay not far in front of him near the foot of the hillside. Here, in a place where the woods narrowed and the trees grew more sparsely, was a village spanning both sides of the mountain path. Despite an obvious lack of good building space, the stone houses there were surprisingly numerous, teetering on the edge of fabulous drop-offs on either side of a steep-sided, forest ravine and for some distance down from this point on the hillside, the path Shagrat had been following became the only traversable route. Just uphill of here, the stream running beside the path was joined by a number of tributaries and increased in size to become a white-watered torrent. This abundant source of fresh water was used to wash fleeces sheared from the flocks grazing downstream, and a settlement of wool-workers, spinners and weavers had grown up around it.

At this time of night however, the weavers’ village was quiet. There were still lamps lit in a few of the houses, so perhaps some of their occupants were still awake, and here and there were warm squares of lamp-light shining through the trees. But the cobbled main-street was deserted and even the village tavern dark and with its shutters closed. Shagrat was struck once again by a human peculiarity he’d noted in the past; granted, they might stay up late for the odd night or special occasion, but really, the creatures were very strictly diurnal in their habits. But it worked as an advantage for him this night, and he passed through the middle of village and then down onto the wooded hillside beyond without incident.

He had been stepping along quietly enough, he thought, when there came a flurry of movement and commotion a little way ahead of him, after which Shagrat was passed by one, then two or more people running silently past him through in the trees; hurtling at break-neck speed. Shortly he came to an open space on the riverbank. The place was now deserted, but in their great rush to leave, whoever had just been here had left their fishing net staked out at the water’s edge – together with a few other odds and ends of kit still lying about. It looked as if he had stumbled upon a poachers’ night-time camp – perhaps even set up by the same band of ‘Gypsy travellers’ Rukush said he’d been going to visit.

The Orc approached cautiously. Their abandoned net was a long, narrow affair, lightly weighted at the bottom end and with a line of floats along the top – clearly designed to be pulled through the water by hand rather than cast out from the riverbank. And there seemed to be something with some weight still caught in it. Shagrat hesitated for a moment – but after all, he’d made it past the weavers’ village without any trouble and this shouldn’t take much time. His thoughts on a free meal of fish, the Orc began pulling in the slack of the net.

The weight was surprising: far greater than he’d been expecting, but Shagrat hauled away hand over hand at the line, determinedly gathering the waterlogged mesh in a heap on the river bank – until, as he gave a final mighty pull, the contents of the far end of the net flopped in a streaming mass onto his feet. The Orc exclaimed in surprise and then swore as he saw that there was someone tangled up in there; a young boy, and from the looks of his still, cold and white face, he must have been under the water for quite a time. He wasn’t breathing, and pressing his fingers for a moment against the lad’s neck, Shagrat couldn’t detect a pulse. The Orc cut the body free with a few swift knife-strokes and heaved it further away from the riverbank, stepping over it carelessly as it lay on its back. He was setting off on his way again when a thought occurred to him, and he turned around in his tracks.

One night long ago in Mordor, one of the squaddies from Shagrat’s company – a new recruit fresh down from the mountains, had drunk more wormwood-laced grog than was good for him, and taken it into his head to go arseing about in the gantries high on the walls of the Tower. Halfway to the top the full effects of the brew he’d been quaffing kicked in and the fellow passed out. He keeled down arse over tip till a big water butt broke his fall – but by the time someone had climbed up there to get a rope round and haul him out, they might as well have saved themselves the bother as it seemed they’d gotten to him too late after all. They’d all been standing round the lifeless body – someone had their filleting-knife in hand already and Shagrat was thinking about divvying up the rest of the squaddie’s kit, in point of fact – when one of the young Orc’s mates, serving in one of the neighbouring companies, had come rushing up and flung himself over him, then started sort of blowing air into his mouth – Shagrat could still remember watching as the drowned squaddie’s chest gently rose up and down – and up and down, as each breath from his mate made it rise then fall. Eventually the group of on-looking Uruks’ lewd jeers and jibing had been replaced by a kind of quietly impressed silence as the half-drowned squaddie began to revive – and soon enough he coughed up a load of water and started breathing properly, and that was that. At the time Shagrat had made a mental note to remember the episode in case of someday the novel technique coming in handy, but of course it happened many years ago and he’d never had occasion to use it since that.

More out of curiosity than anything else, he tilted the lad’s head back, pinched his nose shut, and huffed a series of deep breaths into his mouth. Nothing happened for a time and the Orc was thinking of trying a second round – when suddenly the youth began retching and choking, shivering violently as he started to draw in shallow, painful breaths. He rolled onto his side as Shagrat jumped back.

In their haste to get away, the poachers had left a few odds and ends lying on the riverbank. These consisted of a few dry hessian sacks and two or three shuttered oil-lamps, only one of them lit. Being careful not to touch him, Shagrat chucked a couple of the sacks over the lad’s trembling shoulders. Then he opened the cover on the lighted lamp just the tiniest bit, allowing it to it illuminate a few inches all around, and put it on the ground nearby.

He realized then that the youth’s companions had come back. There were three of them, all of about the same age and none of them much more than half-grown, standing in a small, silent group, a short distance away under the trees.

“That’s our friend there,” the boldest one ventured, coming forwards a few steps. “My best mate. What were you doing – when you was leaning down over him like that before? Is he – is he going to be all right?”

It was occurring to Shagrat that while he himself could make their faces out quite clearly, of course – in the dark they couldn’t see him properly as yet. “If you’re such ‘mates’,” he said disgustedly, “how come you all upped and ran for it then?”

“We didn’t know he’d gone under, Mister,” another of the boys gulped, “honest!”

They were village youths, who had apparently been engaged in some strictly illicit night-fishing; poaching, really, for the migratory sea-trout that were often found in the river at this time of year. The half-drowned one – who, ironically, was credited with being the best swimmer of the group – had been holding the far end of their wade-net near the opposite bank of the river, while his friends took care of their side, on land on the nearer side. The lads’ lookout, having mistaken Shagrat for the water-bailiff who patrolled much of this part of the river, had panicked and lost his head completely at the Orc’s approach for this particular official had a reputation for dealing with poachers with quite unnecessary severity: “he shoots them with his crossbow, Mister, no questions asked! And he’s got a big fierce dog, too!” The boys had scattered into the woods, assuming that their friend had managed to get out of the water too, but had returned for him when they realized he’d failed to rejoin the group.

By now the lad who had been caught in the fishing net was trying to sit up, and encouraged by this the others moved in closer and began to cluster round him.

“I can’t see a thing here,” one of them said. “How about a bit more light?”

“Wait a minute – what about that water bailiff?” Shagrat began, knowing full well the effect that the sight of an Orc standing there – large as life – would be likely to have on them. “You’ll totally knacker your – your night vision.”

But the boy was already holding the dark lantern high in his hand and had started sliding open the shutter on the side. Light from the oil-lamp inside flamed full onto Shagrat, casting awful, leaping shadows to go dancing about his rough and weather-beaten face. A moment of terrible silence ensued as the youngsters took in the Orc’s pointed ears – and claws and fangs; his missing eye. Perhaps acting on the vain hope that removing this new horror from view might improve their situation, the lad who had hold of the lantern flung it away from him, casting it violently onto the ground – where it went out. Then they all began shouting incoherently as the mood of the gang of youngsters switched once again from hopeful gratitude to – blind panic.

“One of them Orcs from up the mountain’s got him!”

“Must’ve been chewing on his head!”

“It’ll be after us, too!”

And finally – “Run!” – as in a confusion of flapping garments and flailing limbs, the lads, scattering in all directions, ran off again into the cover of the trees.

The youth who’d been nearly half-drowned remained sitting in the same place on the ground, however, and it became clear that he had not properly been keeping up with recent events. Water in his ears – or on the brain most probably, thought Shagrat, as carefully keeping his distance, he edged his way round him.

“Did Garvey say something about an Orc?” the boy piped up, in a quavering voice.

“I didn’t see one,” Shagrat replied truthfully. “Maybe your friend’s got a vivid imagination, or some such.”

“Then why did they all just run away and leave me!” the boy sobbed. “What sort of friends have they turned out to be?”

“You might find they – will have had their reasons,” Shagrat told him abruptly. “Look. After what’s just – after what your friends think has just happened, I’m sure they’re going to be sending someone back to find – well, what’s left of you, at any rate. Your –“ he broke off, not at all sure how these things were worked in practice.

“My Dad’s going to kill me!” The boy wailed.

“You know, I bet your – father – will be along now any minute,” Shagrat said, looking around doubtfully. An Orc in the night woods standing over some abandoned kid – a cowering, weeping, kid – well, that sounded bad even to Shagrat, and the situation was definitely open to all sorts of unfortunate interpretations, wasn’t it? Already he imagined he could hear the sounds of angry townspeople coming for him, off in the forest. He knew the best thing would be to get far away from this place at once.

“Now where’re you going!”

The Uruk didn’t reply. Then the lad began crying in earnest.

TBC

Chapter 4. Nightmares and shadows

It was none of his business, Shagrat told himself as he set off briskly on his way; but after going only a short distance, something – and it might well have been something other than pity, or perhaps even the tiniest flicker of conscience; in any case, some barely-recognised form of emotion made him stop.

He could still hear the lad whimpering to himself, all alone in the dark and as he listened to it the sound began to stir up certain old memories of Shagrat’s, of traumatic events from a past he had never quite been able to put entirely out of mind. The Orc shivered, and in spite of himself looked over his shoulder warily, being unable to quell a mounting sensation of fear and dread.

For Shagrat had not survived the fall of Mordor in full possession of all of his wits: his first encounter with Faramir, many years before, had had a dark and brutal ending in which the Orc, having deliberately allowed his former prisoner to walk free, was sent to make payment for his actions in the terrible fortress of Barad-Dur. The Uruk’s experiences there had slightly unhinged him; isolated in the darkness and under the duress of near-constant, excruciating torment, hallucinations and other visions had started coming to him thick and fast.

His head spinning with vertigo as he stood in the wood, Shagrat experienced a terribly familiar sense of disassociation: all those years ago, at first in the dungeons and afterwards, much more frequently, he had begun losing track of himself for increasingly prolonged periods – the duration of which even now, he could never be quite sure. Having been delivered into the eager hands of one of his fellow Orcs following his initial imprisonment, Shagrat would reluctantly return to awareness and find himself engaging in all sorts of violent, degrading acts – or actually more often given the character of his personal warder, to find some form of viciously inventive humiliation being enacted upon him. Under these circumstances by far the best option for Shagrat was simply to stay away – ‘out’ of his head – for as long as he possibly could and consequently he’d gotten quite good at it – even though this fact had greatly hampered his painful and slow recovery.

Listening to himself whimpering that night in the dark of the woods, once again Shagrat’s occasionally-tenuous grip on reality faltered, and for a moment he genuinely wondered if after all he really was back in his dungeon, only conjuring up far-fetched dreams of a life after escape. Of course he was aware that the faraway voice he was hearing was far too soft, as well as too high-pitched to be his own, but that sort of doubt was certainly no guarantee of veracity: on one occasion he remembered, thinking he’d been kept up half the night by the agonized shrieks and yells of the fellow chained next to him, he’d come round the next morning with his throat screamed raw, finding himself alone in his cell with the dawning realization that it was he, himself who must have been making all that embarrassing racket.

Some things were still second nature to an Orc like Shagrat, and he moved over to one of the larger trees by the side of the path and put his back against it. Hunching his shoulders he dropped his head and bared his teeth, snarling out long and loud and at nobody in particular, into the night at large. But there was no answer from the dark or the surrounding trees and panting slightly with the effort, he forced himself to think back over his current situation, as he struggled to get a grip on himself.

The Orc thought he was currently standing alone at night in a forest, but throughout his incarceration he’d often believed himself to be hale and hearty, out of doors and free – when in fact the reality was that he was lying naked in some pit or prison cell, beaten and broken in captivity. To combat these rising doubts Shagrat tried thinking for a moment about his lover Faramir, and his sweet acceptance of him.

Unfortunately this only made things worse; no doubt about it, because the greater portion of Shagrat’s fevered imaginings in his dungeon – the earlier ones, at least – had involved Faramir sweetly accepting him. This was in stark contrast to the tone of their last meeting, during which the young Gondorian had railed at him, bitterly accusing the heart-broken Orc of having taken despicable advantage of Faramir’s youth and inexperience, exploiting their hostage /captor relationship in the most base and disgraceful manner, acting only towards the gratification of his own vile ends. Actually Shagrat, in the privacy of his own thoughts, could quite understand why his erstwhile prisoner might have felt like this: that he might have dreamt up a (for some reason, somewhat older-looking version) of the Faramir he’d known and that the proud young man was now willingly associating with an Orc – and coming to see Shagrat on rather frequent visits, if you please! Well obviously that was all so fantastic as to be beyond ridiculous. The Uruk passed a trembling hand across his face, dashing away the beads of cold sweat that were gathering on his brow. While there was not yet all that much to go on, on balance the odds that he was tangled in some sort of bizarrely intricate lucid dream seemed definitely on the increase.

After slamming his fist – followed by the back of his skull, both with painful force – back against the tree behind him in the attempt to wrench his thoughts away from a distractingly compelling, if patently false ‘memory’ of older-version Faramir slap bang in the middle of making love to him –

Faramir half-naked, with his fair hair falling in his eyes was sweating, the pale, smooth skin of his shoulders and flanks seeming to glow in the soft light from the candles that lit the bower or couch they were lying upon. Leaning over Shagrat, who was resting close beside him, he grinned down in anticipation and began softly kissing his mouth; whispered his name and kept kissing him as he closed his hand around the Orc’s upstanding cock –

Shagrat shook his head violently to rid himself of this painfully vivid delusion of mutual pleasure shared, for it threatened to overwhelm him with (amongst other things) its breathtaking level of attention to detail: he imagined he could recollect everything – from each nuance of sensation as Faramir’s hands moved over his body, caressing him, to the sweet scent of his lover’s arousal, and his ragged gasps of ecstasy – the groans of pleasure in his throat. He thought he could even remember the feel of the rich fabric covering the velvet bolster on which he was resting his head –

‘Velvet cushions!’ the Orc thought, a little hysterically, half convinced by now that he really had begun to lose his mind. Gritting his teeth, he did his best to force himself to concentrate upon the problem in hand, automatically performing a swift weapons stock-take: he felt for both his swords and his various daggers and then for the smaller hunting-knife he kept hidden in his boot. He was searching in the pocket of his tunic for a set of knuckle-dusters that often came in handy when his fingers brushed across a stubby, soft and furry item. Blinking in confusion he took it out and looked at it and then thought, as clearly as if he really seeing it in front of him, of the round and ruddy-coloured face of the fellow who’d given it him. This was a real person, a Hobbit, whose name was – and for some reason Shagrat had no doubts whatever about this – Ludlow Pennycress.

*

“It’s my lucky rabbit’s foot,” Ludlow had explained to him, earlier on that day. “You carry it with you, for luck. It’s served me very well in the past, you know!”

They had been sitting together by the fire in the mouth of the large and roomy cave (dry all the way to the back, and with not bad clearance-height in the middle; Shagrat could even stand properly upright in parts) that he and the Uruk were sharing up in the Orcs’ hideaway in the mountains –

“Watch your back in there, won’t’c’her ‘arf pint,” Azof had hooted, on first hearing about this strictly casual living arrangement, “ovver’wise you might wake up some night an’ find our fearless leader is ‘ploughin’ ‘is lonely furrow’ in you from behind! Hur-hur-hur –“

“Ignore him, Shagrat,” Ludlow had tutted, and then yelling over to the other Orc: “Oi! Azof! We all think – what is it again, Shagrat?”

“- steaming great berk,” the Uruk muttered under his breath, deliberately selecting the mildest selection of epithets he might have thought of applying to Azof, for he was beginning to have some serious concerns about the bad influence that he and his compatriots were having on their resident Hobbit’s behaviour.

“You’re a great big ber-erk!” Ludlow called over to Azof, practically singing out the last words, in what sounded to Shagrat to be a reassuringly inoffensive manner. “Well really!” he went on in his normal tone, “I don’t know why some people have to go out of their way to carry on like that!”

Ludlow had been using the last of the afternoon sunshine to finish sewing a hem onto one of Shagrat’s blankets, while the Orc (who was trying hard not to look at the fancy crewel-work designs that his little companion was embroidering along the freshly-turned edge) methodically sharpened the blades of his own personal arsenal.

“There! Finished!” Ludlow had said eventually, standing up to shake out the piece he’d been working on. A quantity of dust and dander, as well as a number of long, coarse, crinkly strands that looked as if they must have come from the pelt of some strange and savage animal rose up in a small cloud from it. The Orc watched out of the corner of his eye as these Warg-hairs, turning gently in updrafts of sunny evening breeze drifted slowly down and settled to the ground.

Ludlow was shaking his head. “Really, Shagrat, you should try and air these out sometimes.” He indicated the new stitching on the blanket. “Well then, what do you think?”

Shagrat put down his whetstone. “It’s –“ he cast about for something encouraging to say, but appropriate words failed him. “I thought you were only going to fix some of the big holes! Just a quick patch-up job, you said.”

Ludlow beamed at him. “I knew you’d go for a nice skull-and-bones motif!“ He sat down again next to Shagrat and his manner suddenly became much more serious.

“Look,” the Hobbit said, “I can see you’ve already begun preparing all your – big swords and things, so I assume you still haven’t changed your mind about your plans for tonight. In that case, I want you take this.” And then he’d given the thoroughly perplexed Orc his rabbit foot.

“I’d come with you myself,” the Hobbit explained apologetically, “you know, to back you up, but I don’t think I should leave. Not when they’re all so – little. Just not now, you know!”

With shining eyes, he looked over towards a large, battered, wicker-work basket, that was wedged tight beneath a rocky overhang in one of the low-ceilinged areas towards the back of the cave. Out of the basket had squirmed a peculiar-looking young animal, nearly hairless and shaped, with its over-large barrel chest, something like a steroid-enhanced puppy. Obviously only a few days old, there were already teeth sprouting in its protruding lower jaw and as the Hobbit picked it up, interrupting its onward wriggle towards the lighted cave-mouth, it opened its milky new-born’s eyes, fixed him in a cross-eyed glare and snarled at him. Ludlow clasped the horrible infant to his breast – thereby demonstrating against the odds that it had a face somebody other than its own mother could love – and carefully returned it to the dog-bed. The larger version, its dam, which was nursing a number of similar-looking siblings, raised her head at Ludlow’s approach and gave her stub of a tail a couple of quick thumps against the bottom of the basket.

The Uruk grunted. Tiny soft and hairless helpless-looking newborn pink things, as he’d recently discovered, gave him the absolute willies, and he’d been more than happy to have Ludlow take charge of caring for the Warg mother and her new litter.

“So anyway, if you must go down there later on, Shagrat, I think you ought to take it.”

“It’ll be fine,” Shagrat assured him gruffly, hoping the Hobbit would just leave the matter at that. “I won’t get in any trouble. Really.”

“It’s not just the distance. Or all the trouble with those townspeople and farmers and what-not,” Ludlow went on, pressing his little talisman into the Orc’s hand, “although that’s more than bad enough! But down past that village where the wool-weavers live. That old wood there – the people say it’s haunted!”

Shagrat just looked at him.

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

And the Orc, shrugging his shoulders as he reluctantly pocketed Ludlow’s lucky charm, had told him not really.

Standing there remembering all of this in the haunted wood, clinging to Ludlow’s rabbit foot as if his life depended on it, Shagrat – who as far as he knew, didn’t have an ounce of whimsy in him – couldn’t think of a single reason why he might having deluded himself into thinking he was friends with an imaginary – and slightly fussy – Hobbit. Which meant – and he felt a physical release of tension at the prospect – that he was safe for the moment after all. Well – safe in a relative sense, given that he was alone in unfamiliar territory with an in-all-probability-dangerously-hostile group of locals soon to be hunting after him; but considering the difficulties the Orc thought he might have been facing, mobs of angry locals could only ever count as extremely small potatoes indeed.

Squaring his shoulders, he picked himself up and started back to the youths’ fishing camp.

TBC

Chapter 5. Swept away

The boy from the river, showing a complete lack of initiative, was still waiting in the dark near the riverbank, exactly where the Orc had left him. “I thought you’d gone!” he cried, at Shagrat’s approach. “What were you doing back there, Mister?”

“Nothing,” Shagrat replied brusquely.

“Sounded like you were talking to yourself. Or blubbering, maybe -“

“I wasn’t,” the Orc snarled. “And as for blubbering, you can bloody well talk.”

“But I’m just a kid!“

“How many years have you?”

“I’ll be fourteen next June.”

Shagrat made a non-committal noise in his throat. If he’d had to, he would have guessed substantially less than that. “All right then. Let’s start getting you back to – wherever it is you live. Think you can walk, yet?”

The lad shook his head. Shagrat rolled his eye and ground his teeth. Of course he ruddy well couldn’t. Without further preamble, he bundled the youth, covering of dry sacks and everything, up and carrying him in his arms, set off back towards the village.
The Orc stalked on in silence for a time, but the boy it seemed, wanted to talk.

“You’re wearing chainmail – and actual armour and everything. Are you – a warrior?”

“No,” Shagrat said shortly. “But I suppose you could say I was – in the War.”

The boy gasped. “A soldier of Gondor!”

The Uruk quickly told him it hadn’t been exactly like that.

“Are you a travelling mercenary?”

“Not one of those, either.”

“Then when did you join up?”

“I didn’t,” Shagrat replied, in a brisk voice. “I was conscripted. Probably when I wasn’t that much older than you.”

“Before you were of age!” the boy exclaimed excitedly. “What was that like?”

Shagrat frowned for a moment. He never thought about those days if he could help it. “It was a long time ago and I don’t really remember,” he said at last, and this was quite true. “It didn’t make much difference, because back then there weren’t many other options for – for persons of my sort.” He sighed out heavily. “There still aren’t.”

“But did you get to slay many Orcs?”

Shagrat bared his teeth, grinning mirthlessly into the dark. “I suppose you could say I did for more than my fair share. I got to finish off a fair good few, yes.”

The boy made an awestruck sort of ‘ooh’-ing noise. “They say there’s some come to live out over in the mountains. Everyone in town’s up in arms about it. But I’ve never even seen one.”

“You should count yourself lucky then, shouldn’t you?”

They walked on in silence for a while. Then the boy said –

“Mister, have you got proper weapons on you? Like – maybe a sword?”

“Might have. What d’you want to know for?”

“Can I – could I maybe have a go with it?”

It was on the tip of Shagrat’s tongue to tell him: not a chance, but then reconsidering, he handed him the smaller of the side-weapons that hung from his sword-belt, thinking: at least it might help shut him up.

“It’s really heavy!” The boy said, sweeping the sword through the air with a great wobbling swipe in his enthusiasm.

The Orc winced. “Careful not to cut yourself,” he advised, “and try and not drop it.”

On they went: the lad feinting and jabbing inexpertly with Shagrat’s side-arm, and the Orc, very much against his better judgement, unable to stop himself from issuing the occasional note on technique and form.

Soon enough they reached a slightly better-maintained section of path, that indicated they were nearing the outer reaches of the weavers’ settlement. The track before them, following the contours of the hillside, swept in a broad curve down the valley, and from here their route back up towards the village was visible for a quite a way.

“Give us that,” Shagrat told the boy, deftly reclaiming his weapon. “And keep quiet a minute.”

Across the still night air, above the constant chattering sounds of the river tumbling down the nearby gorge, he thought he could hear the noise from a large party up on the road ahead. A bank of ground-mist, mixed with various watery vapours, was rising up the valley, but after a moment he was able to make out a number of tiny, bright points of light from the lanterns carried by the villagers – together with their larger, flaming fire-brands, away in the distance. The Orc drew back into the shelter of the trees by the edge of the path. He hadn’t expected them to be quite this quick off the mark.

“Your legs working yet?” he whispered.

“I think they are – well, sort of,” the boy replied. And then, on noticing the approaching lights in the distance – “hey, is that someone coming from our village over there?”

“I expect so,” Shagrat replied. “I shouldn’t think there’d be anyone else from round these parts out and about this time of night.” Their lamps were noticeably brighter already, which meant the villagers had to be approaching at quite a rate.

“Then what’re we waiting for?”

“You go on,” the Orc told him. “I’ll be stopping here.”

“Aren’t you coming any further?” the lad sounded disappointed. “My Mum and Dad, you know, they’re, kind of like – high-up in our village. If you wanted work, you know – if you’re not going anywhere else – or a place to stay, they could maybe sort something –“

Shagrat cut him short. “They couldn’t.” He waited a moment, but the lad did not leave. “Of you go then!” he encouraged. “And give ‘em a good yell before you get too near, so they’ll know it’s you.”

The boy seemed nonplussed. Then he said – “My Dad’s going to want to thank you for bringing me back. You should maybe come and talk to him.”

“No, I shouldn’t.”

“My Mum’s a really good cook –“

“I don’t think your Mum and Dad,” Shagrat exclaimed in exasperation, “are going to want to have the likes of me round for dinner at their house!”

“But why’s that?”

Shagrat ignored the question. The cluster of lights were already uncomfortably close. “Go on, then – quickly! he shoved the boy out into the centre of the path. “Off you – trot. Don’t fall in any more rivers. And son – ?”

“Yes?” the boy, dragging his feet and dawdling, half-turned in his tracks.

“If it all starts – kicking off in a minute, and it probably will, I wouldn’t look back, if I were you.” Shagrat was already setting off as fast as he was able, resolutely heading back down the hill.

After a disturbingly small amount of time he heard a happy cry coming from the road behind, no doubt signalling that the youth had been successfully reunited with friends and family. Then an interval of relative silence, followed by angry shouting and indignant howls of rage: Shagrat thought he knew what that meant, but even as he was trying to quicken his steps still further he registered, with a sinking feeling, the sound of hoof-beats on the road behind him.

The Orc hadn’t reckoned on pursuit from horseback, and knowing from bitter experience that he had no chance whatever of out-distancing a rider on his mount, he immediately veered off the path, running between the trees. When he was still in the vicinity of the weavers’ village, the slight track or animal trail he was following petered out into nothing, and the ground began to slope steeply downhill.

It was hard going, through those woods. The trees on the walls of the gorge grew tall and slender and spaced far apart, but their open canopy allowed more light than usual to fall to the forest floor and an abundant under-storey of tangled bramble vine, stouts rope of hanging clematis, and other thorny bushes and spine-covered creepers had developed. Time and again Shagrat had to use his sword to slash his way through the nigh-impenetrable thicket, the only consolation being that his pursuers from the village – whom he could still hear some way behind him – were meeting similar obstacles to their progress, too. A greater difficulty was actually that the sides of the ravine were surfaced in many places with patches of loose scree; expanses of flattish stones that were held only lightly in place by the network of roots and woody stems growing over them. Stumbling onto one of these areas, in a part of the forest that unfortunately, was not well-clothed in undergrowth, the whole plane of rocks under Shagrat’s feet suddenly began to slip downwards: for only a moment was he able to keep his balance and then he fell head over heels, bouncing off the accelerating rock-slide as it rushed him down the hill to the river running at the bottom of the gorge.

As he tumbled towards the rushing waters, a snippet of information from years ago, back in basic training in Mordor returned to him. On a black and frozen day in dead of winter, Shagrat, together with a motley selection of other new-recruits, lined up together on the edge of an ice-rimed cistern by an particularly sadistic drill-sergeant, had been kicked or pushed or shoved into its freezing depths one by one, in what turned out afterwards to be nothing more than a graphic demonstration of the point that when falling into cold water, the shock of immersion often made a person draw his breath in by reflex.

So much for Orcish training methods in outdoor survival: the Uruk was concentrating most of his efforts on trying to avoid breathing in a lungful of river when he belly-flopped into the water.

Shagrat floundered for a moment and then sat up, finding to his relief that the river was actually rather shallow, here. It seemed as good an escape route as any – and was considerably less trouble than forcing a path through the woods. The Orc splashed through knee-high water for a while, slipping and stumbling over the algae-covered rocks, but the racket of his progress was at least covered somewhat by the noise of the river, and the sounds of pursuit from the townspeople seemed gradually to die away behind.

Concentrating more on keeping his footing than on looking where he was going, Shagrat didn’t register for a moment that the depth of the water was steadily increasing, as was the strength of the current – until suddenly his feet were swept out from under him and he was picked up and carried by the weight of water behind him, bashing over and crashing painfully through a barrier of rocks that formed a low, step-like waterfall across the path of the river. On the other side a dragging sensation caught him as the undertow at the foot of the weir started to pull him down – but only for an instant; for then the main push of water took hold of him, and twisting in the current he was swept downstream.

The Orc was out of his depth in this part of the river, and even if he had not been severely weighed down by water-logged clothes and armour plus all the other accoutrements he was carrying, had never learned to swim. But still in a sense he was fortunate, for the strength of the current here was so great that even as the waters would close over his head and he went under, he was kept moving by it, and at times was able to push himself up off the weed-covered boulders of the riverbed, lunging towards the surface to grab a precious lungful or two of air. Flailing inexpertly through the dark water, flung repeatedly onto river rocks and against other submerged objects, the Orc was carried far beyond the boundaries of the village. After what seemed to Shagrat like an age of struggling against the turbulent, freezing river, the current smashed him into a kind of natural dam running part-way across it that had been thrown down the previous winter when the floodwaters were in full spate. For a moment his position there held: he scrabbled frantically through woody debris trying for a hand-hold – but the next instant felt the tangle of branches he was lodged against began to break apart under his weight. Before he was properly adrift however, he snagged his claws into a hefty piece of waterlogged timber from near the base of the barrier which floated back into the main stream alongside him, and after several attempts was able to haul himself head and shoulders clear onto this slippery, make-shift raft. Riding low in the water, the bruised and battered Uruk clung to his tree-trunk like a drowned rat as the swirling river bore him away once more.

After a time the current slackened and Shagrat found he did not have to fight quite as strenuously to stay afloat. Eventually, prying free fingers that were stiff from cold and painfully cramped with the effort of hanging on, he risked trying for a better position on the log. With his face properly out of the water at last, the exhausted Orc slumped against his tree-trunk and closed his good eye for a moment. The river, in fact, was carrying him – albeit at a slowish walking pace – in the direction he wanted to go, and the bobbing, rocking motion as he floated downstream was so very nearly pleasant that at times he almost fell into a doze.

By now the river had widened and was beginning to meander through low-lying water meadows bordered by fine stands of old willows, the watercourse switching its direction from side to side time and again in a succession of great, sinuous loops. The water was shallower here and the strength of the current greatly reduced. Resting his feet for a moment on a submerged sandbar and with his upper body lifted clear of the water, Shagrat thought he could recognise a group of familiar-looking poplar trees away on the floodplain. With the river now following its changing, twisting course, the distance to be carried near them by water was likely to be greater than it would have been on foot, and the Orc waded out of the main stream and into the shallows, ploughing his way through swathes of flowering water-crowfoot, booted feet stirring up great clouds of fine sediment around him. Pulling himself up by a platform of willow-roots onto the riverbank, he rested briefly on his back.

The sun was not yet risen, but the sky was brightening and the meadows were already lit with a faint, cool and clear light. As yet the air retained a certain breathless quality, that (as Shagrat had occasionally noted) it quite often did during the changeover between darkness and break of day, that would only last until the first morning breezes began to blow. The Orc had always considered this time of waiting stillness in the pre-dawn, early hours as a signal for the various creatures that walked the night, to tell them that they should begin returning to their caves and dens and bolt-holes. For those who lived in daylight however, that this was the part of the night when their dreams were at their deepest, and they would be most difficult to rouse from sleep. Under cover of the last of the old night, Shagrat thought he should be safe from any further trouble with humans, for a while as yet at least.

Picking himself up, the Orc set off towards the distant stand of trees.

TBC

Chapter 6. A merry morning meeting

The low rising sun throwing his long shadow ahead of him, Prince Faramir of Ithilien walked a leisurely path along the river margin, leading his horse along behind. His goal in sight ahead of him and not too far away, he tethered the docile beast to graze at a gate-post in the shade of a tall hedgerow, by the edge of a pasture full of plump white goats.

As for the trees he was searching for, Faramir was only familiar with the general type. Grey poplars, he knew, were most often found growing singly or in small groups on field boundaries, rather than in the company of other trees in woods, and while they could not grow with their feet wet or in waterlogged soil, they did prefer the fertile meadows adjacent to watercourses. Apart from this he had never thought to pay them much attention before.

Looking more closely now, he saw that the bases of the tree-trunks were dark and had a deeply fissured, almost corky appearance, which lent them an extremely – almost alarmingly – craggy character; but almost as soon as the upper limbs began to diverge from the main stem their appearance was quite different. The large branches were in the main smooth and were coloured an unusual – and pleasant – pale greenish grey, being marked here and there with darker bands, each comprised of clusters of lightly raised, arrow-shaped points. Even a slight breeze was enough to stir the shaggy clusters of leaves, which hung at the ends of the branches, into constant pattering motion; and these leaves, coloured pale grey on the lower surface and dark, dusty green above, made the two-toned foliage stand out pale and surprisingly distinct; this type of tree could be seen from miles away across the open countryside.

And a full-grown grey poplar was as statuesque as it was massive: Faramir reckoned that the trees he was looking at now were among the largest he had ever seen. Though clothed with great tousled bunches of leaves from the top of the crown – on somewhat drooping branches – right down to the ground, the trees retained an almost see-through aspect for the main branches, each of enormous girth, were widely spaced apart and this – together with the trees’ tendency to bear foliage at their extremities, left them with markedly open canopies. From a distance they were a singularly impressive sight.

Faramir could understand the attraction. And they were obviously an excellent match for Shagrat.

Riding in the valley at daybreak, he had been told a strange tale as he passed through the outskirts of a community of still-agitated weavers. People were talking about an enormous mountain Orc running wild and savage that had been sighted near their village in the night, and even in spite of some of the fabulously inaccurate descriptions of the monster he’d been given (‘they say he was twice as tall as I am, Sir, and with fire in his eyes!’), Faramir had a fairly good idea of who this creature have might been.

And there a short way ahead of him, softly-lit against a backdrop of green-and-grey poplar leaves fluttering in the sunlight, was Shagrat, making his way through a glade of fresh spring grass. He stopped in the middle of the clearing, shed his cloak and turning to the left and right, carefully sniffed the morning air. But the morning sun was in his eyes and Faramir still some way upwind of him; he appeared to notice nothing and his alert, wary pose visibly relaxed.

As Faramir drew nearer Shagrat unfastened his greaves and wrist-plates and stepped out of his boots. Then he began unbuckling his sword belt, which was supported by a pair of straps that ran diagonally from each shoulder to the opposite hip, crossing the middle of his chest. Battle harness removed, he doffed his short-sleeved chainmail tunic, having difficulty with his left shoulder as the close-fitting, heavy material caught; and bending forwards he struggled for a moment, half in and half out of the battered old garment, as he tried to take it off over his head. As Shagrat stood up again, Faramir quietly stepped back into the cover provided by a line of young poplar saplings, quashing his quick impulse to help.

The Orc had worn armour of some sort continually, in Mordor, and Faramir knew very well how exposed and vulnerable he felt without it. The fact was that Shagrat avoided taking off his outer garments wherever possible, and almost never willingly undressed. Seeing him in an unguarded moment like this was a rare experience for the Prince, and for once Shagrat did seem relatively relaxed: working his shoulder for a moment, the Orc straightened up slowly and stretched his back. Now that he was not weighed down by battle-trappings his habitual stooping hunch was gone and he stood up much straighter, posture improved immensely. It occurred to Faramir then, as it had sometimes done before, that if one did not look too closely at the details, the Uruk’s general shape could be said to be a fine one, indeed. He had long legs, straight limbs and was strongly built, with a broad-shouldered, though not overtly muscular frame. This underlying structure of Shagrat, unfortunately, was packaged in an outer envelope that most people would find decidedly off-putting: the Orc had mottled grey skin and a fearsome face with fang-like teeth, and he was covered, each and every inch of him, with ugly marks and burns and scars. All in all it was a sad and ragged covering, and though it bore witness to its owner having endured countless years of abuse, of greater import was that this gruesome exterior was the badge of his Orcishness, and more than enough to condemn him for that.

There came to Faramir then, as he watched the lone Orc by the trees, another strange notion and he fancied he saw – as if overlying the broken face of Shagrat – a fleeting impression of the person he might have been if the circumstances of his life had followed a radically different course – and it was a savagely handsome, merry-looking fellow: dark haired, clear of eye, and with a wide, expressive mouth. Then, as quickly as it had come this vision or idea of Faramir’s was gone, and he was only looking at the scarred, wrecked features of his Orc, with his familiar twisted nose and bitten lips and fear, always, hiding in his eyes.

The sight of the Uruk standing quietly in the sunlit clearing moved Faramir first to pity, then arousal, and he felt the familiar light-headedness coupled with a tightness in his groin that he often did when he was near to Shagrat, as the thought of him sent a swift rush of blood away from Faramir’s head.

Meanwhile, the Orc had been picking up all the pieces of clothing, armour and weaponry he’d been carrying or wearing, and had methodically hung them one by one on a low branch that was catching the sun on the far side of the glade. Then returning to the middle of the clearing, he sat down carefully on a large fallen trunk. Crossing his legs, he rested his elbows on his knee, assuming something absurdly close to classic pose of a shore-bound mermaid and began to dry his hair. The bright morning sunlight shone down through the widely-spaced poplar branches, back-lighting this pastoral scene – to unfortunate and gruesome effect. Having twisted a long, ragged grey skein over one shoulder into a somewhat stringy hank, Shagrat was inexpertly trying to wring the moisture out from it.

At this point it finally occurred to the usually-observant Faramir (who in all fairness to him, had clearly been distracted by other pressing matters whilst watching the Orc) to wonder why Shagrat was absolutely sopping wet. He stepped forwards into the clearing through the screen of poplar leaves, deliberately making noise to make his presence known.

On seeing him Shagrat started violently where he was sitting, almost jumping to his feet. “Goldilocks!” he exclaimed in a warm voice, and there was a definite note of welcome in it.

Faramir smiled down at him. “Don’t get up on my account,” he said.

**

Faramir closed his eyes and thrust hard down into the Orc’s throat. At first Shagrat choked and struggled with it a bit but soon accommodated him properly, as he always did. Because you could say what you liked about higher-minded motivations, but for Faramir part of the joy of sex with Shagrat often involved something – pretty much exactly like this. Trembling with the effort of – containing himself – the Prince shook his head. This wasn’t quite the tender reunion with the Uruk he’d been anticipating.

“Don’t get up,” was all Faramir had said, and at that – quick as a cloud shadow flitting over a field of summer grass – some subtle element of expression seemed to go out of the Orc’s face, and he was left regarding Faramir impassively, but with a wary look in his eye. Then with an abrupt movement he’d reached for him – for the front fastening of his breeches in fact, and while it wasn’t wholly out of the ordinary for the Orc to suddenly proposition Faramir in this unexpected fashion, this time it had taken him by surprise and he had – so to speak – found himself going with the flow.

Looking down, he saw that Shagrat was in what had become to be a fairly familiar pose for him: hunkered down on his knees in front of Faramir, face jammed up between his legs and clutching hold of them for balance; being vigorously fucked, in short. The Prince twisted his head to one side only to be met by the much same image – only this time played out in shadow-format, as the slanting sunbeams merrily lit their activities and projected them onto the riverbank. It was an arresting tableau, no doubt – but again, not what he’d intended. He seized a handful of the Orc’s wet hair – none too gently – and dragging his head back, held him away from his body for a while, to make sure he would make no effort to resume.

As usual when they’d been engaged in this sort of activity it took a moment for Shagrat to catch his breath and he hung his head, panting, at the Prince’s feet. But Faramir hadn’t failed to note the flicker of apprehension that had passed over the Orc’s face as they disengaged from one another and now he saw Shagrat dart a swift, assessing look towards the branch where he’d left his sword-belt. The tree it was hanging from was clear across the wooded glade however, well beyond the kneeling Uruk’s capacity to reach – a fact Faramir could almost see Shagrat registering as he dropped his gaze, hunching his shoulders and quickly clenching his fist. Shagrat’s left hand snaked out quietly, as he reached for a hefty fallen limb from a nearby tree.

Nettled by this reaction Faramir bowled him over onto his back directly, driving his knee into the Orc’s shoulder to knock the branch out of his grip – but even given the element of surprise, it still took a couple of tries to make him let go.

In spite of himself Shagrat made a soft noise of dismay in his throat as he squinted up at Faramir, which turned into a cut-short yell as the Prince launched himself on top of him.

“No, Faramir!” he cried. “No -”

The Orc’s long arms grabbed for him, closing round his chest in what was more of a wrestling-grip than a proper embrace, and Faramir used his knees again to pin him down.

While his mouth was otherwise occupied earlier, Shagrat hadn’t had much chance to swallow, and a certain amount of moisture had run down his neck and was still wet on his chin. Gathering what he could of it, Faramir quickly swiped some of it off him into his hand then added as much of his own saliva as he was able to muster. The problem with Shagrat, he was thinking a little feverishly – possibly with all Orcs, he wouldn’t know – was that his privvy parts had been mauled so much about during his sexual encounters in the past, that sometimes it was tricky to know how to handle those same parts here and now in the present. A little lubrication – well, that often helped, and he moved some of his weight off the Uruk’s hips, eagerly pulling down the waistband of his leggings and slipping his spit-slicked fingers in.

Shagrat was only half-hard as yet but as Faramir squeezed and shifted his grip around him, his manipulations called up a rush of blood to the Orc’s member and he felt it swell and begin to stiffen properly in his hand. Aching with arousal himself, the Prince was anticipating a quick completion for both of them, when he felt the Orc shove a hard, closed fist against his chest, pushing him firmly back.

“Goldilocks, get off me,” Shagrat said in a breathless voice – not much more than a rattling rasp.

Faramir almost laughed out loud on noticing the tiny blade that Shagrat was now holding up between them in his shaking hand.
As Faramir was recognising his own clasp-knife – a little novelty piece that he habitually carried in his the pocket of his breeches, the Orc jammed the sharp tip into the pulse-point at the angle of his jaw, not quite hard enough to break the skin, but using a disconcerting amount of pressure, nevertheless.

“Get off me, Goldilocks,” the Uruk said.

And Faramir realized then that he looked absolutely terrible – worse, that is, than usual: cold sweat was running off him and his naturally-haggard face was even more drawn and livid than it was in its ordinary state. Snarling lips drawn back over jagged teeth he was panting hard in – fear, Faramir realized to his consternation, for it was exactly the same look the Orc had worn towards him once before in Mordor, many years ago. He drew himself smartly off Shagrat, who immediately rolled away from him, lifting himself up onto all fours and from there into a hunch-backed fighting stance, which he held lop-sided, on obviously unsteady legs.

“Shagrat! It’s all right, Shagrat!” Faramir assured him.

Approaching warily, showing open hands that he held carefully away from his sides, he was able to get close enough to reach over and clasp the Orc companionably on the shoulder. Flinching slightly under it, the Uruk searched his face briefly, not meeting Faramir’s eyes.

Feeling utterly at a loss as to know what to do next, a vague, hare-brained idea occurred to Faramir. Letting go of him, he abruptly turned his back on the Uruk – paced a few slow steps forwards without turning round to look. Then he sat on the ground with his back against the fallen tree trunk and waited. This trick was also a signal to ‘follow me’ that was sometimes calming to skittish horses; the means of it working, as Faramir understood things, being related to the way it immediately removed from the animal’s field of view any perceived threat associated with a direct human gaze – and it also might have had something to do with the way that the eyes of a horse were placed on the sides, rather than at the front of the animal’s head. While Faramir had no idea how such – basically, equestrian – principles might apply to an over-wrought Orc, after a long, precarious moment, he was gratified to note Shagrat hesitantly approaching and wavering for a while on the brink, before finally sitting down beside him.

The Uruk cleared his throat. “Was that you trying – horse-whispering – on me?”

In spite of himself Faramir snorted with amusement. “And wherever did you become acquainted with horse-whispering as a general concept, Shagrat?”

“Heard one of the stable hands talking about it once, back at your place. Fellow didn’t much rate it. Said if you wanted to break a nag, all you had to do was jam the reins on its head and give it a good taste of your spurs, then stay on its back till it knackered itself out. Better to let it know its place and who was boss right from the off – no point bothering with all that fannying about trying to be friends with it, he said.”

“Well,” Faramir replied, making a mental note to get a full description of this unsympathetic character from Shagrat at some later date, “when it comes to the training of horses, and – actually, many other matters also, I think your stable hand and I would certainly have to agree to differ on that point.”

“The other way works though, and not just on horses. I can tell you that.”

“Really. Is that so,” Faramir murmured. He put his arm round the Orc’s shoulders and pulled him nearer, until they were sitting side by side. He spoke soothing, gentle words to him for a long time until at last, the Uruk seemed to calm down.

“That softly-softly approach,” Shagrat said a little indistinctly, as he had his face pressed so close against Faramir’s neck. “I should’ve known you’d be all for it.”

The Prince smiled as he kept on stroking the Orc’s still-damp head of scraggy hair. “I’ve seen for myself that sometimes it can produce remarkable results.”

TBC.

Chapter 7. On an interlude in Minas Tirith

Anticipating another adverse reaction, Faramir tightened his hold of his companion before he spoke again. “Now we’re sitting here so happily Shagrat,” he began, “wouldn’t you agree that it’s a little early for such excesses of drama as we’ve already enjoyed together on this fine morning? Now, what on earth –“

- here the Orc wrenched himself away from Faramir’s side and proceeded to pace agitatedly back and forth in front of him –

“Shagrat! What on earth was going through your head when we were together…before?”

“You tell me!” the Uruk cried. “There I was, just having a nice sit-down, minding my own business. Then all of a sudden you turn up, prancing about and waggling your morning stiffy in my face – catching me all unawares. What was I supposed to think?”

“I have never – pranced about – in my life!” protested Faramir. The colour rose to his cheeks. “ And I most certainly did not have a – ‘morning stiffy’ or anything like it, either!”

“Not half, you didn’t!”

“Honestly, Shagrat, sometimes you have a one-track mind.”

“I’m just speaking as I find,” the Orc replied stubbornly. He continued in a reluctant voice – “and – you’re not long back from a spell in the White City either. A lot of times you start out being a bit off with me after that.”

This seemed outrageously unfair to Faramir. “But of all the people
at Court,” he protested, “I’m the one who’s always on your side – the only one, if it comes to it!”

“I know that,” the Uruk sighed, “and I’m – grateful to you Goldilocks, of course I am, really. But it’s just last time you went, didn’t you got a right rollicking about – well, the state of things between you and me?”

Actually, the reaction to Faramir’s airily-delivered confirmation to the Court of Minas Tirith at large that all those scandalous rumours were quite true and that yes, he had indeed taken a frightful ex-of-Mordor Uruk into his bed, hadn’t been so much a ‘right rollicking’ as a group of his nearest and dearest standing around staring at him in a ghastly, stunned and embarrassed silence. Though he’d done his best to brazen out the situation while it was happening, Faramir still felt hot and cold with mixed indignation and shame whenever he thought back over it. Shame, if not exactly for the fact of his Orcish lover’s identity then at the time for having caught himself out: as for a split second following his revelation, he’d found himself wondering why he couldn’t have chosen a partner from at the very least – some slightly less socially-unacceptable species.

This truth was obviously something from which Faramir felt it would be better to shield Shagrat, and so he merely replied – “what does it matter if the idea of – the two of us – might take some people a bit of getting used to? I’m sure most of them will come round to it sooner or later.”

“Because that only took about twenty-odd years in your case, didn’t it?” the Orc muttered astutely.

“Be fair, Shagrat! They’ve only just found out!”
The Uruk persevered. “And then there was that ‘special chat’ you went to have with your new King.”

Faramir stared at him for a moment. “Oh, you mean when I received instructions for my covert undercover assignment. Yes, but I told you all about that.”

“Well I’ll tell you something Faramir, when it looked like you were really going to go for me back there for a minute, I couldn’t help thinking maybe you’d had a change of orders, and come back on another one of those secret mission-type things –“

*

It was evening in the Citadel of Minas Tirith, perhaps three months or so before. At the close of that chilly winters day, the Mountains of Shadow were painted with a queer red light as they reflected the sky above them, still blazing in the afterglow of a frosty winter sunset. The time was that quiet span of hours after the main dealings of the day were done, when the upper echelons of King Elessar’s court retired to their quarters in the city, and could attend to personal or private business.

His new Steward Faramir’s public declaration of deepest personal depravity earlier that day notwithstanding, King Elessar would certainly have preferred to try and keep the matter that was currently occupying him as something closed and private. Word had come to him a while before of trouble of some sort, involving the good name of his chief and trusted counsellor in the city coupled – most incredibly – with that of an Orc. The King always made a point of discouraging this kind of scurrilous gossip – no matter who its subject; but he knew that rumour-mongering in one form or another would almost always be a feature of life among the idle at court, and had paid little attention to the tales that the bolder of his courtiers had dared repeat to him.

A flying visit from an outraged Lady Éowyn and her contingent of Rohirrim, who confirmed that Faramir had indeed taken up with the notorious Uruk Shagrat – together, in fact, with a small company of other Orcs – had made him change his mind about the scale of the potential problem. And so earlier that day he had requested an urgent audience with his Steward, fresh on his return from a visit to the provinces. Circumstances however had caused first the King, and then the Steward, to be delayed and before he knew it he was watching the new Prince of Ithilien standing before the assembled court and expressing – with all apparent sincerity – the depth of his feelings for this so-called Mordain ‘lover’.

Faramir was already waiting for him in a chamber off the throne-room. He had been standing by the floor-length windows, gazing at the sunset, and turned at once on hearing King Elessar’s approach. The Steward stood up very straight as he turned to face his King.

“I’ve lived a long life, Faramir,” he began wearily, sitting down in one of the low chairs provided. “And I understand that we cannot always choose to whom we give – or claim to give – our hearts. But, my friend, when you talked openly today in court of your recent intrigue, with your – companion, the -“

“The Orc,” Faramir said, in a serious voice. With a quick shake of the head, he declined the seat the King had offered and remained standing awkwardly before him, his pose painfully self-conscious.

“Forgive me, but I do no more than my duty to ask, and would have you to tell me the degree of import you attach to this current – entanglement.”

“This is no mere entanglement, intrigue – or dalliance!” Faramir cried, colouring up at once. “For in its way it is an affair of many years’ standing. I’ve known this Orc for longer than I’ve known anyone, almost – far longer, indeed, than I have known you!”

The King sighed as he noted his Steward’s desperate manner: his agitation; the over-bright eyes. Knowing Faramir’s character as he did, he had feared it would turn out to be something along these lines. “There’s no use in suggesting you forsake him then, I suppose.”

The young Steward’s expression grew grave. “Do you mean to issue me an order?” he asked softly.

And for the first time King Elessar saw, in Faramir’s narrowed eyes and the stubborn set of his jaw, a definite family resemblance: he thought for a moment of the old Steward Denethor, and found himself forcibly reminded that for all his mild demeanour and pleasant manner, there was a core, or reserve, of something unshakeable in this new Steward and that Faramir, after all, was still his father’s son.

“No, my friend,” he said. “At most I meant perhaps to offer you advice. It will be a difficult course, this path you’re thinking of setting your feet upon. ”

“I should tell you now,” stated Faramir grimly, “that I am resolved to it.”

“You’re quite certain? There would still be time enough, if you wish to reconsider.”

He gave Faramir a period to reply, but the Steward didn’t waver. His face pale now, his jaw set, he shook his head.

The King was regarding him with a long, contemplative look. “The area, then, that you’ve thought to – settle these creatures in,” he said at last, in a businesslike tone, “at least seems suitably remote. Something of a disputed territory – of long standing, in fact, and all the better-chosen for it. That was well done of you, Faramir. Something of a bold decision –“

The Steward shook his head again, thrown off-balance. “But did you not charge me, as warden of the Eastern Marches, with ridding Gondor of all traces of the Dark Lord’s domain?” he exclaimed. “Instead of which, I’ve thrown my lot in with exactly the kind of creature I was sent to extirpate -”

“Your instructions, as I remember them, were to clear the outlying regions of this realm of evil remnants. So you’d count him as an evil individual, this Orc of yours, would you?”

“I think perhaps – not entirely,” Faramir said. The King nodded. “That you, Faramir, are willing to stand here and vouch for him tells me more than you might think.”

“But I’d assumed that after this – episode,” the Steward confessed, all perplexed, “I would be sundered of my duties – publicly disgraced – “

“Not necessarily,” the King told him, “Though I won’t deny that opinion among my advisors is certainly divided, as of course it always will be wherever dealings with – this type of creature – are concerned. But still, they do pose a special kind of problem, and it’s one that has ever weighed heavy upon my mind, although – until now – I will admit it’s something I have rarely sought to address. On the other hand, there is a kind of precedent.”
He went on, explaining: “our relations with the Haradrim are always improving, and as you know, there have been several visits already from the emissaries of Dunland at court. We’ve even brokered a peace – of sorts – with Umbar -”

“Largely by assimilating it,” Faramir put in.

“Unavoidably, as I’d be the first to acknowledge,” the King replied, “but again, a kind of truce with those who formerly, counted themselves among our enemies is officially underway. And the fact remains that in Umbar, the people there – well you’ve seen them, Faramir, and it’s obvious that many of them – the Corsair men and women – are more than half-Goblin to begin with. Do you begin to see the point I’m attempting to make to you?”
Unsure, but filled with a strange, leaping feeling of hope, Faramir asked him to go on.

“It would certainly be – convenient for us, if their kind didn’t, or somehow suddenly ceased to exist. But the alternative – to set out on the deliberate extermination of an entire race, already wide-spread – already being assimilated, as you might put it – into human bloodlines up and down the land? Whether we, personally might wish to tolerate these creatures or not, that’s a strategy I would never, willingly, embark upon. ”

The King leaned back in his seat. “So, for the time being, we’ll allow your Orcish settlement to stay the mountains, where it belongs. But in addition to your other activities, I expect to have you regularly monitoring the situation up there. Attend to it personally, and report anything out of the ordinary directly to me. I take it that will fit in with your plans?”

The Steward nodded mutely, scarcely able to believe his ears.

“And I’ll speak plainly, Faramir,” the King continued, fixing his Steward with a beady look. “Though you won’t like to hear it, this arrangement we’ve agreed upon may not turn out to be a lasting one. If there should be trouble of a serious type, or other issues we find we can’t resolve – we may have to come up with something else.”

“Which would involve –“

“I said I wouldn’t set out to exterminate your Orcs willingly. It’s in your hands to ensure we won’t have recourse for – anything else.”
Kneeling before his King, Faramir clasped his hands in gratitude, thanking him profusely; until at last the increasingly discomfited sovereign petitioned him to cease.

“Now, Faramir,” the King added as the Steward took his leave, “try and have a word with Master Gimli, before you set off on your travels again. He thinks he’s heard talk about some fabulous source of mithril on that mountain, and has all sorts of elaborate plans for rebuilding the city gates – “

TBC

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