Chapter Five: In the Marshlands 1/2

Author's Note (May 2002): Hello again – I hope someone is still reading this! Thanks for the reviews! I've had the devil of a time with this chapter, so I'll be interested to know what you think. There's a fairly non-canon bit coming up in here – though, I guess it's not any more non-canon than Boromir not being dead. Well, I think it actually doesn't badly contradict what Tolkien tells us, but see what you think. Enjoy, I hope!

Chapter Five: In the Marshlands

By noon the next day, I came to cordially loathe the marshes of Anduin.

We had made reasonable progress on our first day's voyaging. I reckoned we must have made around forty miles, which was as good as some of the better days with the Fellowship, upriver. But as the hazy sun moved up the sky on that second day, I knew we would be lucky to make half of that.

I had, indeed, wondered a bit at the ease of our progress. I should have remembered my maps, and the endless discussions with my father and the Council, debating strategies for the defence of our borders.

There should have been nothing surprising to me in the channel being clear just south of Rauros. I had seen it often enough on my maps; there was even one map painted by Arnulf the Far-Ranging during his voyage to the sea, that showed in detail the River beneath Rauros and the gradual descent into marshland. But the Nindalf Marsh got thicker, the farther the River flowed. By the time the River won clear again around the point where the Entwash itself met with Anduin, the marsh was thick and treacherous enough that generations of our statesmen believed it a border requiring only the most desultory guard.

The few men of Gondor that I knew of who had travelled south through the marshes had the glamour of explorers about them. They could dine out on the stories of their adventures for the rest of their lives.

After a quick breakfast – if it could be called that – of some rather slimy water plant that Svip referred to as eelsbane, we set out shortly past dawn. An hour later our journey was changing from a simple paddle downriver, to a challenge worthy of the heroes of legend. As far as I was concerned, the heroes of legend could keep it.

Half an hour or so after we started, the terrain had altered abruptly. The reeds no longer lingered at the edges of the River, but started to grow across our path in an ever-thickening wall. We began to lose the current, and I began to wonder if the current even still existed. Svip got out of the boat and swam ahead of it. I paddled along behind him, but even with him following the current we lost it twice and found ourselves in dead ends where the water disappeared into grasses and mud.

When we did find the main channel, the River was still deep enough that my paddle could not touch the bottom. But the reeds were so thick, even here, that I wondered if I should draw my sword and just start hacking our way through them. I was spending less time paddling than I was shoving aside the reeds.

It must have been around eleven that morning when Svip volunteered to change into horse form. He had stashed a good length of rope in his pack, and we spent an irritating several minutes trying to sort out how to rig the rope to pass through the ring on the prow and go around the horse's forequarters, without riding up on his neck and choking him. In horse form, we discovered, Svip's hooves could touch the bottom of the River while his head was still well above water.

His chattiness was greatly reduced as he trudged along lugging the Elven boat. I was starting to feel guilty about him doing all this work while I got a free ride, but I need not have worried. My chance to work came soon enough, when the water got so shallow that it barely went over Svip's hooves, and the boat started bumping along as though we were trying to draw a sled over a field of boulders.

I had got out of the boat a mile or so back and was walking beside it. We stopped for a noon break, and lunched on some orangeish plant stems that Svip recommended, which tasted a little like rhubarb. Then we re-divided our duties. Svip had turned back into his usual shape over lunch, but when we set out again he was once more a horse, with his pack, the shield and our paddles strapped awkwardly to his back. I, for my part, carried the boat on my shoulders, with the cloak of Lórien folded up and providing some minimal padding between my shoulders and the boat's gunwales.

We were moving into the realm of the insects. I began to be very grateful that we were making this voyage at the end of winter, rather than summer. If the bugs were out in such force now, I hated to think of what they might be like in July. Great dragonflies as long as my forearm perched on the leaves of the reeds, watching us impassively from out their purple iridescent eyes. Mosquitoes, it seemed, were mercifully absent, but there were swarms of biting midges so thick that walking through them was like stepping into a cloud of smoke. It seemed that the midges were attracted by sweat, of which I was unfortunately producing rather a lot. I had to keep stopping to put down the boat so I could splash water over myself and wash off the worst of the sweat and the midges. On several occasions I noticed what seemed to be some kind of giant swimming centipedes gliding over my boots, but luckily these creatures did not seem inclined to bite.

Stopped for the third or fourth time to drown a new batch of midges and scrape several layers of mud off my boots, I was trying to remember if any of the explorers of the River had described this stretch of the voyage. Presumably the water was not always this low, or there'd have been some established route going around the marshland rather than through it. There'd been an old portage-way above the Falls of Rauros; I knew that both from history and from hauling boats and luggage along it with my comrades a couple of days before I was killed. But I had never heard of a portage-way that bypassed the Nindalf Marshes. I wondered if, with my usual luck, I'd managed to voyage through the marshlands on the one year out of hundreds when it was this accursedly shallow.

Whatever the case might be, I was becoming increasingly convinced that this marsh should be wiped from existence.

As I trudged on, I vowed sourly that when – or if – I succeeded my father as Steward, my first great undertaking would be an engineering project to remove this marsh from the face of Middle Earth. Perhaps I could convince the Rohirrim to combine forces with us in building a canal that would bypass Nindalf. And then, I thought, if Anduin's waters were re-routed through the canal, we could reclaim the marshlands and use them for farming.

By three o' clock that afternoon, I had created for us a new golden age based on the unprecedented ease of North-South travel and the wealth we would get from our vastly increased farmlands. Now all we had to do was slaughter Sauron's minions and send the Dark Lord packing, so we could take on my engineering project without stopping to kill Orcs every five minutes.

That, I realised, was the one thing we had not had to deal with this day. Not since last night had we encountered any Orcs.

It figured, I thought. It was just like me to be part of an expedition through territory so foul that not even Orcs would go near it.

The sun was disappearing in ruddy cloud on the Western horizon, when I noticed water slopping over the tops of my boots. Only then did I realise that the River was gradually getting deeper. My comrade the horse seemed not to have noticed it either; at least he kept plodding doggedly onward until I called out for him to wait. I put down the boat and saw that it floated, but the real test was when I clambered back in and it remained afloat. Then I had to get out again to take our luggage off Svip, after which he switched forms and lay down in the water, groaning about his aching back.

I grimaced in agreement, splashing more water on myself and trying to rub out some of the burning pains that had developed in my shoulders. I should count myself lucky, I supposed, that it was an elven boat I'd been carrying. If I'd spent the afternoon carrying a Gondorian boat of the same size as this one, I'd really have something to complain about, since our boats were probably twice as heavy as the crafts of the Elves. While waiting for Svip I poured the water out of my boots and scraped off their most recent deposit of mud. Then my companion hopped into the boat and we set out once more. Paddling was still more like poling along the bottom, but at least the boat moved forward without me having to carry it.

I had never thought I would be so happy just to be paddling a boat.

The reeds were still thick, but not so bad that we could not make our way through them. As darkness set in around us we paddled past a gap in the reeds that I guessed just might be Gilling, the Entwash's fourth Mouth.

Brilliant, I thought. If that's Gilling, we've probably made twelve miles today.

We decided not to risk a fire that night, despite the day's lack of Orcs, but it was remarkable how good the raw fish tasted after an afternoon of slogging through the mud with a boat over my head. I just wished we'd brought along some of the contents of Svip's wine cellar. But in my post-death reality, the River water I scooped up and swigged from one of Svip's canteens tasted nearly as good.

I was leaning back against the side of the boat and Svip had made himself a nest out of the reeds. We sat in companionable silence for a while, revelling in the luxury of not having to walk, portage, paddle, or do anything else. I had started to nod off, when Svip startled me awake with a question.

"What's 'Son of Denethor' mean? Is it a title?"

I sat up straighter and blinked at him in the gathering darkness. I wondered if I had missed some crucial portion of his question. "Um," I began. "Ah, Denethor is my father's name. He's the Steward of Gondor."

I could see Svip looking confused. "I thought you were the Steward of Gondor," he said.

"No," I said slowly, still trying to figure out what I had missed. "He's the Steward. I'm his son. It's 'Son of Denethor-who-is-the-Steward-of-Gondor', not 'Steward of Gondor who is the Son of Denethor.'"

"Oh," said Svip. I saw him staring at me in what seemed to be growing amazement. He suddenly asked, "You know your father?"

His face and voice held such incredulity that I nearly laughed, but I retained my composure. "Yes," I said. "I've known him all my life."

"And you live together?" he went on, his voice going higher in disbelief.

I took a swig of river water and resigned myself to this odd conversation. "Well," I explained, "ever since reaching adulthood my brother and I have had our own households. And we're often stationed at other outposts. But, yes. We do still live together sometimes. And we did so all the time, when we were growing up."

He shook his head in wonder. "And you don't kill each other?"

That brought a grin to my face. "We haven't yet."

Svip was frowning again. "Who's your brother?" he asked.

I said, "His name is Faramir," then it occurred to me that Svip might not even know what the word 'brother' meant. I added, "He's my father's other son. He's five years younger than I am."

Svip gazed down at the water, looking lost in thought. I dipped the canteen into the River, took a drink, then tore loose a piece of the nearest reed and started shredding it. I was pondering what Svip's questions might reveal about his own life.

Finally I asked him, "Have you never lived with your family?"

He looked at me in shock. "No! Not since I was weaned. That would be horrible!"

I shrugged. "Some families among Men are like that, too."

He shook his head impatiently. "No, I mean none of us do. We can't be near each other. If we smell another of our kind, we want to kill them."

"Ah." I frowned, then forged on, "I can't imagine you wanting to kill anyone."

He said vigorously, "That's because you're not one of us. I only ever met two others after I left my mother's house. I never want to do it again."

I heard something in the reeds behind Svip. A rustling, then a small plopping sound.

"It's a frog," said Svip, noticing that I had reached for my sword.

I relaxed a little, moving my hand from the sword hilt. I just hoped that the frog had not jumped out here to get away from any Orcs. But nothing came lurching out of the marsh to attack us, and gradually I turned my mind back to what Svip had been saying.

"Forgive me for asking," I said, "but it seems very strange to me. Why would you get along with others, but not with your own kind?"

Svip started swinging his feet back and forth in the water, looking down at them and the ripples they made. "It's territory," he said. "Whenever another's there you can't help it, you think he's after your territory. Even if you know he isn't. And then if you don't get away from each other fast, you start trying to rip each other's throats out."

"Ah." The unbidden and fairly unwelcome thought came to me that it sounded like the way I had reacted to Aragorn. Although, I argued, he was after my territory, so it was hardly the same situation. And I hadn't tried to rip out his throat – not precisely – though there were times when that sounded like a very good idea.

There was another small splashing sound, probably the frog trying to get away from Svip's feet.

An unseemly curiosity was taking hold in my mind, and did not seem inclined to let go. I asked, "But this must only hold true with the males of your kind?"

"Oh, no," Svip said, with a vehement shake of his head, "with all of them."

"Then, how is it possible to – " I stopped myself with an effort. "Forgive me, it isn't my business."

"No, I don't mind," he said. He gave a mournful sort of grin. "I started this conversation."

I told myself that I really should not ask him this. But somehow the words slipped out while I was still convincing myself not to say them. "It must be very difficult to … produce offspring. That is, if you do. I'm sorry, I've no reason to assume that you do."

"Oh, we do." He shuddered. "It's awful. Most of us only go through it once; we get it over with as fast as possible. You can usually avoid fighting while it's happening, but whoever doesn't own the house has to leave right afterward, or you'd start killing each other."

"Ah," I said again. I couldn't think of any appropriate comment, although several observations leapt into my head along the lines of there being some men and women who conduct their interactions with each other on the same basis.

We were both silent for a time. Then Svip asked tentatively, "What about you? Do you have a – what do you call the one you produce your young with?"

I thought, I should end this now. It was not fitting for me to discuss this with him. But another voice in me argued that it would be unfair for me to just shut up now. Svip had answered my questions; it would be cowardly of me not to answer his.

"A wife," I said, not looking at him. "I did have one. She died five years ago." I did not want to say the next words, but they followed relentlessly. "So did my son."

"Your son?" Svip whispered.

I stared down at the water as it disappeared into the gathering night. "Yes. He was two years old."

Svip fell silent again, and at first I thought he was not going to ask any more. Then he asked quietly, "Was it in the fighting? With the East?"

"No. The fever was very bad that summer. I think around half the City fell ill with it, though not all of those died. My brother's wife died from it, on the same day as my son. Our father was taken ill then, as well, but he pulled through."

The River seemed to change from grey to black as I stared into it.

Thinking of them brought the same dull ache as always, but it was long now since their loss held the pain of an open wound. It had become something that just was, that I could do nothing to change.

My companion queried in a hesitant voice, "Can you take another wife? Does it work like that?"

"Yes. It works like that. I haven't yet." The wry speculation came to me from somewhere that perhaps Svip was in the pay of my father, who had hired him to prod me on the wife question. I could hear my father's constant lecture that the Line of the Stewards must be preserved, and my own repeated assurances that of course I was going to seek another wife, soon.

I had meant it. It was only that I had not wanted to face it yet, at first. And then when that was becoming no longer a worthy excuse, the danger from the East was growing and I had more pressing concerns confronting me than the need to go out bride-hunting.

I thought, If I'd known I was going to die so soon, maybe I'd have got round to it faster. If I had foreseen gasping out my life with those Orc arrows in my chest, perhaps I'd have wed the first likely princess my father flung at me and would have been siring heirs to the Line of the Stewards as rapidly as I could manage.

Well, now I had another chance. Presuming that I didn't just immediately get myself slain again – and presuming that by the time I got back we still had a city to fight for, and a line of Stewards to be preserved.

And of course, presuming that my interlude of being dead hadn't created any problems with my ability to produce heirs.

That, at least, was a concern I did not have to worry about just now. My first concern was getting back to Minas Tirith without being killed. Again.

Svip's quiet voice asked out of the gathering dark, "Do you like them? Your family, I mean?"

I smiled at that, trying to think of an answer that would not just entirely confuse him.

"Yes, I do," I said. "Most of the time. I love them, anyway." I wondered if he would ask me to explain that, but he did not.

He said, "I hope I get to meet them."

I thought about it and decided that I hoped so, as well, even though it was going to be a damned peculiar conversation when I explained him to them. I said, "I hope you do, too."

If any dreams came to me that night, I do not remember them.

The next morning our journey got off to a promising start. The sky was heavy and looked like rain, which seemed a good sign as it might wash away some of the bugs. The reeds were still absurdly thick, but at least the boat remained afloat and we did not have to resort to portaging.

After a few minutes of struggling through the reeds we divided our duties once again. Svip took my place at the stern, alternately paddling and jumping out to swim ahead, pulling the boat along behind him. I sat in the prow, finally trying out the idea that I'd had the day before. I had my sword drawn, and with it I hacked, sliced, chopped and sawed at the plants blocking our path. For a while I tried using Svip's little silver axe, but the thing was so tiny that I thought I might make as much progress if I were trying to cut through the reeds with my teeth. In my battle against the water plants I used also the shield from Svip's collection, holding reeds out of the way with it and protecting my head when we glided through or under stretches that I'd not managed to cut or shove aside. Even with the shield, I acquired a myriad of tiny cuts from the razor-sharp edges of the leaves.

I was hacking at a particularly resilient wall of plants that blocked our way, thinking that perhaps I should name the sword "Reedsbane" or "Weedslayer." Svip was swimming, towing the boat by its rope, but the reeds were too thick for me to see him.

He called out, "This patch doesn't go on much farther. I'm through to the other side." I was about to call back a reply, when there came a yelp from Svip in the water ahead, and a sudden splash.

It was fortunate that I had the shield already to hand, for in the next instant the whirr of arrows sounded through the reeds. I jerked the shield upward just in time to catch in it two black feathered arrows, thudding into its thick, battle-scarred wood.

The arrows had come from out of the wall of plants that I'd been hacking at. Three more followed in close succession, one slamming into the shield, one sailing over my head, one glancing off the side of the Elven boat and falling into the water.

I vaulted over the gunwale, landing with my feet planted in the muddy bottom of the River and the water reaching halfway up my chest. I could do nothing against whoever was firing at me unless I could see them, nor could I find out what had happened to Svip if I just huddled there under my shield. So I plunged forward, once more hewing the plants asunder and now using the shield to protect myself both from sharp-edged leaves and from arrows.

I burst out into the next clear stretch of water, nearly on top of a startled Orc archer. He was just nocking another arrow to his bow. I had a brief impression of his staring eyes and the fangs in his gaping mouth, then I smashed the shield, edge on, into his jaw. As he staggered back, one strike of my sword carved open his chest.

The archer hit the water with a massive splash, as I was charging a second Orc bowman who'd stood a few feet behind and to his right. This Orc managed to fire off two arrows at once, but I caught both of them in my shield. Before he could fire again I slammed bodily into him, knocking him backward with the shield and then stabbing him through the gut.

That was two down, but I hadn't managed to get any count of how many might be left. I ducked under my shield again as arrows rained down on me. I'd caught a glimpse of an island ahead, a small outcrop of land on which there seemed to be several tents and at least four more Orcs, running down to the water toward me.

I couldn't see any sign of Svip. No tiny corpse floating in the water, to my intense relief. But no hint of his whereabouts, either. Hopefully that meant that he had made himself scarce.

I fell back to the reeds, diving into their cover and keeping just within their borders so that I could see the advancing Orcs but they, I hoped, could not see me. It was my guess that when I'd been on the other side of the reeds from them, the Orcs had been able to see me from the greater heights of the island. I hoped the reeds would now hide me enough to stop them from taking decent aim at me. But that did not stop them from just firing in a random swathe into the wall of reeds.

The four Orcs splashed through the water. Two of them were still firing and two were beating their blades against the reed wall in the attempt to roust me out. I thought I might have seen a fifth of the brutes behind them, but I could not be sure. As I moved away, to my right, I kept low in the water and prayed that I could do this without agitating the reeds too badly and giving my location away.

With agonising caution I shouldered the shield, sheathed my sword and drew forth my confiscated Orc dagger.

The Orcs ploughed into the water plants, the tall stalks breaking with loud, hollow snaps. I lowered myself deeper, only protruding out of the water from the nose upward. Then I glided back toward the nearest Orc.

As he slashed his sword through the reeds like a farmer wielding his scythe, I sprang at him. I drove the dagger up through his thick, burly neck, at the same time seizing hold of him and dragging him down beneath the water.

That had worked like a charm, and there were no yells from his fellows to suggest that the killing had even been noticed. I slipped past the corpse that now bobbed gently in the water, moving to claim another victim.

Arrows whizzing past my face at least told me where to find my target. I leapt up again, shoving the dagger through his throat. But as I grabbed him and pulled him down, I heard shouts from out in the open water behind my prey.

Enraged roars, huge splashes, breaking water plants and the whine of arrows converged on me. I leaped over the latest corpse, swinging my shield from shoulder to hand and smashing it into the foremost Orc. He floundered, enough for me to stab him. Leaving the dagger in this Orc's chest, I drew my sword once more.

Arrow after arrow plunged into my shield. Fiery pain blossomed in my left side, as one of the arrows caught me in the chest and stuck there. I swung the sword at the next Orc but he jumped back out of the way.

Then several astounding things seemed to happen at once.

One of the two remaining Orcs, at the edge of the reeds, yelled out something as his footing was yanked from under him. He tumbled forward and vanished behind the reeds. His last standing comrade took a couple of steps toward him, and suddenly a great grey horse surged up out of nowhere, leaping at the last Orc.

I heard the Orc shout in terror, striking out wildly with his sword. The horse's hooves smashed into his forehead, and he toppled like a felled oak. For good measure, the horse brought its hooves down on the prostrate Orc, time and again.

Of course I recognised this particular big, grey horse. It was just that I had a hard time making myself believe in what I was seeing.

As I stared, the horse turned away from his victim and trotted calmly out of the reeds. Then he vanished.

I stumbled out of the reeds after him.

The sight that met my eyes looked like some fever-born nightmare. My little comrade Svip was perched on the back of a huge Orc in red armour. The Orc floated face downward, with Svip's short sword jammed up into his backbone, penetrating beneath the crimson-painted cuirass. Svip was tugging on the sword, bracing himself against the Orc's big tree trunk-like legs. As he pulled at the sword, the Orc bobbed up and down in the water like a gruesome raft.

"Good heavens, Svip," I gasped out. "I don't believe it!"

Svip looked up at me, with a relieved smile. "Hello," he said. "Could you pull this out for me? It's stuck."

I splashed a little unsteadily over to him, and Svip hopped off the corpse and remained treading water beside it. Being taller, I had the advantage of being able to brace my feet on the river bottom rather than on the floating Orc. I shoved on the Orc's back with one hand and yanked out the sword with the other, the weapon pulling free with an unpleasant slurp.

As I handed him his sword, I noticed Svip staring at me in concern. "Are you badly hurt?" he asked.

I looked down at the arrow in my side and cautiously prodded the area around it. "No," I said, "I don't think it's bad. I think it's more stuck in my clothes than in me." There was definitely blood, and my clothing and chain mail had acquired another tear. But it seemed that the arrow had glanced off a rib and ended up getting stuck in my tunics.

Looking back at Svip, I saw that he too was bleeding, from a long cut along his left shoulder and collarbone. One of the last Orc's panicked sword swings must have connected. "What about you?" I asked. "You all right?"

He nodded. "It's not deep. That Orc was too scared to concentrate."

I thought that I could not blame the Orc for that. I was also thinking that perhaps my strange green friend wouldn't make a half bad warrior, after all.

Something moving in the distance beyond Svip drove all other thoughts from my mind. I crouched down into the water, hissing, "There's more of them coming. Get back into the reeds."

We slipped back to their cover and peeked out through the stalks. There were definitely more of the large, dark shapes approaching. A lot more of them. The little island was between us and them, but as we watched I saw one Orc, and then a second, climb up over the island's crest.

Their voices started to carry through the heavy air, many voices overlapping each other. My estimation from what I saw and heard was that at least twenty of them were headed toward us. Possibly a good deal more than that.

"Damnation," I whispered. "We can't fight all of them."

"Let's get back to the boat," breathed Svip. "We'll hide it. And us."

We crept and swam through the reeds once more. I hissed in pain as the arrow still hanging from my side got caught on some underwater plant. I paused briefly to break off the arrow's shaft, and made another stop a few seconds later when I retrieved the dagger I had left in one Orc's chest. Then I followed Svip through the watery forest.

An angry shout from behind us told that some of our victims were discovered.

Svip had reached the boat and was towing it toward another grove of reeds. I caught up with him as he got to the reeds' edge. Svip whispered, "Let's sink it." We flipped the boat over and forced it under the water, no easy task with an Elven boat that had a mind of its own, determined on staying afloat. But we got it jammed between several plant stalks, underwater. I had grabbed the cloak of Lórien out of the boat before we sank it, and now I put it on. Svip and I ducked into the reeds and made our way as deeply into them as we could go, before the plants grew so closely together that we could not get any farther without cutting them down.

We heard the Orc voices growing closer. We heard their shouts, and splashes, and the rustling, crashing sounds of bodies moving through the reeds.

I raised the hood of the elven cloak over my head. Then I gestured for Svip to move closer to me, and when he reached me I stretched the cloak out to cover him. I'd still no real idea if its fabled invisibility actually worked, but it made more sense to try it than not.

Thus we passed the rest of the day.

Twice searching Orcs shoved through the reeds only inches away from us. I was convinced that even if they did not see us, they would have to step on us. Or they would trip on the submerged boat. But they did neither, and gradually the sounds of the search moved farther away. There was much splashing and what sounded like groans, grunts, and curses, and I supposed they might be dragging our victims ashore. Then the noises faded, but Orcish voices still growled in the distance, like the far away threat of thunder.

When we finally decided they were unlikely to continue the search, Svip and I tended to our wounds. He dove under the water and returned with handfuls of some dark, oozing moss, which he recommended we bind into the wounds. Svip hung the moss in great gobbets from the reeds until such time as we should need it. I was going to sacrifice part of my tunic for bandages, but Svip vanished and reappeared again with his sopping wet pack, from which he pulled a random selection of clothing bits from his collection. I gave him a questioning look. He merely shrugged and said, "I figured we'd need some bandages."

The first bit of cloth I grabbed up turned out to be that same white baby dress that I'd seen on one of the piles in Svip's house. I grimaced but said nothing, just shoving the dress back into the handful of cloth and seizing instead a piece of blue fabric that was not recognisable as any clothing in particular.

Svip rubbed the dark moss into the long wound along his shoulder, then I helped him bind it with strips of the blue cloth. Moving awkwardly to avoid shifting the reeds and alerting any watching Orcs, I managed to hike up my tunics and chain mail and get a look at my wound. The arrow had scraped along my ribs. I was cut, bruised and sore, but not in any real danger. There seemed no sign of poison, though I supposed it was too early yet to know for sure.

"I'll go check on the Orcs," whispered Svip, when I had bound my wound. He swam off, to return perhaps fifteen minutes later with discouraging news. The Orcs, it appeared, had set up camp for the day. Svip had seen our victims' corpses piled up on the little island; their fellows had helped themselves to their armour and equipment, and some had moved into the tents that had presumably belonged to their slain comrades. Swimming farther down river, Svip saw more of the Orcs camped on two larger islands. Tents and campfires dotted the islands, and Svip reckoned the Orcs must number forty at the least.

We were clearly not going anywhere, unless the Orcs left first. So we settled in for a long siege.

It started to rain.

Less than three hours had passed since we woke that morning. But we could not risk much conversation, so Svip, deprived of his usual hobby, decided to take a nap. He tied his pack around the stalks of several reeds, and curled up with it as a bobbing, half-submerged pillow.

I sighed, adjusted the hood of the Elven cloak in a futile attempt to keep the rain out of my face, and settled back as comfortably as I could, against the reeds.

I wished we could chance sneaking past the Orcs. Most of them would likely be asleep; I could almost convince myself that we would make it through. But I knew our enemy would post guards, especially now that seven of their company had been mysteriously slain.

My thoughts circled gloomily around these forty Orcs, and what their journey must mean. Orcs travelling in force, through an area unlikely to be well-patrolled by the border guards of Gondor … it was all too easy to conclude that they were heading for some rendezvous point, in preparation for an assault on our country.

If we could just get past them, without being caught … perhaps, if we travelled day and night and they kept stopping in the daytime, we'd outdistance them enough to reach Gondor before them, and bring word of the coming attack …

But I did not know how we could get past. Svip had reported that the reeds were just as thick ahead as those we had already fought. With the boat or without it, we would still have to be struggling our way through the accursed plants. How we could do that without the Orcs noticing, I could not possibly imagine.

For a moment I toyed with the idea that we might fight those forty Orcs and win, before dismissing that thought as too stupid even for me.

I stared up desperately into the rain-choked sky, fighting to think of some way I could get us out of this. But I just kept coming up with ways that, in hindsight, I would change my actions in the past. If only we had left Svip's house earlier, even by a few hours – or if we'd travelled day and night, if we'd even slept a few hours less …

But that wouldn't solve the current problem, would it? Because if we had left earlier or travelled faster, we might not have run into this troop of Orcs at all, so I might not know about this apparent mustering for attack and I could not report it, even if I did reach Gondor before they did.

Damn it, anyway, if I was going to get myself worked up about how we should have timed things differently, there were far more egregious examples I could seize on. If we'd only paddled, curse it, for those first couple of days on Anduin, instead of just letting ourselves drift, we'd have reached Rauros before that Orc war party, and I would probably not have got killed. Then of course there were those bloody two months in Rivendell. There was a brilliant tactical decision, twiddling our thumbs and discussing elvish poetry while we lost the last of the good weather, and setting out to cross the mountains in the damned dead of winter.

And then another month in Lothlórien – it was disgusting, unforgivable, insane.

I closed my eyes and let the raindrops slide over my face, remembering the fury that had surged in me when I finally learned how long we had spent there. It had taken every last scrap of self control that I had, not to start yelling out my rage and challenge Aragorn to a duel right then and there.

It had been that night we spent in the boats, after arrows first reached us from the Eastern shore and Legolas had shot at the flying shadow. I could hear Sam's voice again as he mused whether the phases of the moon were the same in Lothlórien as elsewhere, and felt again my infuriated shock as I heard Aragorn tell him that we had spent a whole month in the woods of Lórien. Poor Merry and Pippin had probably thought I was going to capsize the boat, from the way I had started and grabbed at my sword hilt when he said that.

A month. A whole month. It still made me want to weep in my rage as I thought of it. To think of what we could have done with that month!

If nothing else, if I had known how much time we were wasting there, I would have confronted Aragorn about it.

It is the part of a leader to make decisions for his followers. But had it really been Aragorn's part to keep us so entirely in the dark, to not even let us discuss the choice of whether to spend a month there or not? Should not the Ringbearer, at least, have been given the choice? If it was so cursedly urgent that we destroy the Ring, if darkness was closing in and evil was nipping at our heels, shouldn't we have been given the chance to push ahead with our mission rather than spending a month sitting around on our backsides?

Damnation, I wished I'd been able to say that to Aragorn, there in Lothlórien. And if he had not accepted my point of view, perhaps my break with the Fellowship would have come then, without that last encounter with Frodo – and without the Orcs at Amon Hen. If Aragorn had ignored my protests in Lórien, perhaps I'd have seen then that the Fellowship's goals and mine were no longer the same. I might have left the Golden Wood and set out for home on my own; plague take it, I might be at Minas Tirith now.

I supposed, to give Aragorn the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he'd been as much in the dark about the time that was passing as the rest of us. Perhaps he'd not learned of it until after we left; he might have noticed the difference in the moon just as Sam had, and perhaps he had then asked Legolas about it. Though that would make me furious, too, if I allowed it to. You'd think that after everything we had been through together, Legolas might have had the decency to tell the rest of us how long we were idling there. But I supposed I could not blame Legolas for being an Elf. He'd probably never even thought of it; he'd been too busy wandering around counting trees, or whatever it is that Wood Elves do for fun. It probably never occurred to him that for mortals like the rest of us, a month was rather a large amount of time.

I sighed and stared into the rain.