1 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!

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4 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.

So perhaps when we reached Minas Tirith, Svip and I would be hailed as glamorous explorers. But if we could have avoided that trek through the marsh, I would cheerfully have resigned any claim to the glamour.

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 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 his throat out – 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 my life out 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.

It did me no good to rage about it now. I could not change what had happened, and stewing over it would only distract me from the threat that was now at hand. I should let it go; it would do no good even to complain of it, if I encountered my former comrades again. They’d have no idea what I was talking about. Legolas would just look at me like I was a fool or a madman, Gimli would go into some tirade about how my complaints were an insult to the Lady of the Golden Wood, and Aragorn would tell me that I’d have no problem with it if it weren’t for the evil I carried within myself. Frankly, I could do without all of that.

It was over, and we had wasted a month among the Mallorn trees, no matter how much I hated it. It was over, and what mattered was what I did now.

So what was I going to do?

I frowned at the sleeping Svip and wondered how he could look so comfortable sleeping in the rain. Of course he was used to sleeping in water, but I would have thought that the raindrops on his face might tickle enough to keep him awake.

I reckoned he’d probably had an hour’s nap by now, while I had been standing here cursing Fate. His use of that hour, I told myself, had been far more productive than mine had. At least he’d been resting up for whatever might lie ahead, instead of brooding over how unjust everything was.

I shook his shoulder gently. He woke at once and blinked calmly at me.

I told him in a whisper, “I’m going to check on the Orcs again.”

He nodded. “I’ll go with you.”

Leaving our sunken boat and gear, we swam and scrambled through the water, mud and reeds. Several times we had to swim underwater to get through particularly bad patches of reeds without resorting to our unacceptably noticeable technique of hacking through the plants at water level.

I had to grimly fight down surges of panic, when the murky yellow-green water grew so dark and thick with mud that I could barely see my arms as I swam, and when I found myself temporarily trapped where the reeds grew around each other. The water was too foul for me to see Svip through it, but twice the little creature swam back to me as I struggled to find my way around the reeds. He tugged on my sleeve to indicate the right direction, then swam on again, keeping close so he could reach back and guide me if I lost the way again.

I was loath to admit it. But as we watched from the shelter of yet more clumps of vile weeds, I knew our earlier conclusion had been correct. There was no way we would get through this stretch of the River until the Orcs moved on. There were just too many of them, spread out over treeless twin islands that rose from the marsh on either side of what passed for the River’s main current. Not that the current was significant enough that it mattered whether we stayed in it or not. But the Orcs had not made it simple for us. They were camped all over those islands. I saw no way around them that offered even half a chance of slipping past without falling under a hail of arrows. We’d have no chance at all if we tried to take the boat, and precious little chance without it.

We could desert the River entirely, and strike west in the search for actual dry land. It would mean, again, abandoning the boat, but it wasn’t as if the boat had done much to aid our progress over the past day. Walking might well prove faster.

Yet in the long run, following that course would probably leave us worse off than we were now.

We would have satisfied my immediate need to do something, instead of just sitting here waiting. But that was all we would have accomplished. The time spent in reaching the edge of the marsh and then circumnavigating it would likely put us at least a day’s march behind the Orcs. It would do nothing to help us reach my country’s outposts before they did.

And we would have lost track of this war party. I would have little to report beyond the bare fact that I had seen forty Orcs in the marshland, and I presumed that they were heading south. I’d have no idea of where they were mustering, how many their assembled troops might number, or where they intended to strike. I could guess on that last question, but any shopkeeper in Minas Tirith would be able to make as informed a guess as I could.

The conclusion could not be escaped. Our only reasonable choice was to wait, and continue our journey when the Orcs broke camp. If we kept just far enough behind for them not to see us, we could track their passage and perhaps learn something of their destination and strategy.

There was even, I told myself with sour humour, a chance that they would break down enough of the reeds for us to follow in their path, without having to carve through every inch of the way.

We swam through the reed-infested sludge, back to the elven boat. And we waited.

The rain stopped in mid-afternoon. A pallid, fitful sun tried to break through the haze.

Svip offered to take a turn on watch and let me nap. My decades at war stood me in good stead, for they had taught me to catch sleep wherever I could, no matter how uncomfortable the position or how troubled my mind. But the couple of hours’ sleep I got that day were far from pleasant. Mocking, fevered dreams flitted through them, filled with monstrous bugs and floating corpses, huge red eyes and a golden ring that whispered to me, promising victory and glory if I would but take it into my hand.

I woke, washed my face, and vainly sought a more comfortable position among the reeds. I was glad to be awake and free from those dreams, but my waking thoughts were not much easier. My mind throbbed with thoughts that I did not want to think, but that had too strong a hold for me to shove them aside.

I kept thinking of Faramir.

I had no idea where my brother might be now. He might be in the City, or with his troops in North Ithilien, or at one of our other strongholds. But I could not shake the feeling that wherever he was, it was right in the path of an advancing army. Or armies.

I tried to tell myself that my dream of two nights ago meant nothing. Or rather, it meant only that I was worried for my family and my country. I did not need a prophetic dream to tell me that.

I watched one of the giant centipedes swim past me, and doggedly tried to banish from my mind the image of my brother standing alone as unknown foes rushed him from the darkness. And the sound of his voice whispering “Boromir, where are you?”

Sunset grew in the West like a bleeding wound on the sky. We began to hear more activity from the Orcs’ camp. Brusque shouted conversations as their troops crawled out of their bedrolls and started to break down their tents. The clank of weapons and equipment. As evening closed in, a breeze caught the smell of the cook fires, their spears of smoke striking upward beyond the reeds. It brought also the smell of our enemies, the reek that spoke of old decay, fresh blood and ever-present death.

The thought came to me that I had grown up with that smell.

With as much stealth as possible we retrieved our sunken boat. We replaced our gear in it, but left it hidden while we crept forward once more to watch as the Orcs packed up their camp.

They went forth as the dark stain of sunset vanished into night. They had no boats or horses with them, relying on their own hardy limbs and tough hides to hew a passage through the plants of the marsh.

I kept as close count of them as I could, as they set out from the two islands. I was sure I had missed some. But the final total with them all together, not scattered about the islands, still came to nearly sixty. The question gnawed at me of how many such groups might be on the march even now, converging on the outposts of Gondor.

We delayed our departure longer than I would have chosen, but Svip assured me he could track them by their scent and the trail of broken reeds.

Both Svip’s eyesight and the Orcs’ were better suited to darkness than mine. Yet night creatures though they were, the Orcs must have decided their troops needed some standard to follow to keep them in close formation. Two of their soldiers carried torches, great brands nearly as tall as the Orcs themselves. Long after the Orcs had vanished from my sight I saw the yellow torchlight flicker ahead of us, like ghost lanterns luring us to doom.

On Svip’s decision that we had waited long enough, we towed, pushed and squeezed our elven craft through the reeds where we had fought that morning. Then as a relatively clear stretch of water spread out ahead of us, I took my place again in the boat’s stern, paddling as silently as I could manage. Svip perched in the prow, now and then leaning out to touch or smell the plants that we glided past.

When I thought of it before, it had been a speculation born in sarcasm. But the Orcs had indeed carved a path for us to follow. The passage of fifty-odd Orcs through the reeds was a far more efficient means of road- building than had been my endless sword-hacking. I thought, if we tail the Orcs the rest of the way we may get home in decent time.

This was not, of course, a comforting thought. If our foes kept up their current pace, two days’ march would bring them well within our borders. They could be at Cair Andros in four days at the most.

But they would not attack the island fortress with a force of only sixty. Somewhere along the way, I reasoned, this band must be planning to meet up with others of their kind. My hope was that while they gathered their troops, I could get to one of our border outposts and send a messenger to Cair Andros, Osgiliath, and my father.

It was probable that they had some knowledge of the force moving against us. But there was yet a chance that my information might fill some crucial gaps. If Minas Tirith was still the same city I rode out from all those months ago, then the Council was even now in session, day and night, debating whether the suspicious enemy movements were isolated raids or the prelude to full-scale assault.

Ha, I thought, that’s probably where Faramir is right now. Never mind my accursed dream. He wasn’t in the River facing foes who splashed out of the darkness, he was sitting in the conference chamber arguing with councillors who wouldn’t know an Orc from an Elf.

And, I thought, better him than me.

Being Faramir, he would doubtless get through the council session with more grace than I would. At least he usually kept his temper, instead of threatening to bind the councillors hand and foot, abduct them from the City, and deposit them on the front lines to see for themselves if we were under attack. It must be going on fifteen years since the meeting where I uttered that particular threat. But there were councillors who apparently still had not recovered from it, and had maintained a wary distance from me from that day to this. That was fine by me, but unfortunately their scare had not increased their ability to see beyond the ends of their noses.

Our journey that night seemed as strange and haunting as any of my dreams. The ghost lights of the Orcs’ torches flickered in and out of sight in the distance. They were almost the only light I could see. The young moon, that we had glimpsed the evening before, sank this night before ever it could break through the cloud. Here and there patches of the marsh glowed a faint whitish-green. It was only some kind of glowing moss, I was sure, but the cold glimmer reminded me uncomfortably of the light that had surrounded the elven boat in my dream. I did not ask Svip about it. I fully believed he would agree that it was moss, but a superstitious corner of my mind feared he would matter-of-factly tell me it was the spirits of the drowned.

It was fortunate that we had Svip’s eyes and nose to guide us, for I was virtually paddling blind. All I would have had to guide me were the noises of the troops ahead: steady splashing, an occasional grunt or growl followed by the crack of breaking reeds, now and then weapons clanking on armour. From this distance, there was little in the sounds to distinguish them from a troop of Men passing through this same country. Only the speed of their progress set them apart. Powerful Orc legs and the brute strength that tore through the water plants assured them passage at a speed twice what Men could have accomplished.

The night must have been half gone when Svip whispered to me that we were passing another stream on our right-hand side. It might be some smaller creek, but the timing seemed about right for it to be Geirthjof, Entwash’s Fifth Mouth.

If it was Geirthjof, then we had one Mouth left to go. And forty miles beyond that would lie the main current of Entwash, at the southernmost boundary of the marsh.

We would leave the marshland behind. And then we, and the Orcs, would pass into Gondor proper, into the Sun-land itself.

Hour after hour we glided through the dark. Only occasional touches of reality – the weight of the paddle in my hands, and sharp-edged reeds that had survived the Orcs’ onslaught, slicing at my skin as we floated past -- served to assure me that this journey was not another dream.

Svip’s whispered voice woke me out of the trance-like state I had slipped into. He hissed, “I think they’re stopping.”

“Want me to stop paddling?” I whispered back.

“In a minute. Hang on.” I heard the familiar faint scratching noise as the fingers of the reeds brushed against our boat.

Svip spoke again. “I don’t think they’ll see us in here. Wait here, I’ll go check on them.”

I rested my paddle on my knees, and waited. I listened, but the faint sounds that I caught did not seem to tell me anything. Orc voices, possibly, but too indistinct for me to guess anything from their tone. Though when I thought about it, I supposed the lack of sounds told me something after all. Either they had got much farther away from us than they had been through most of this night, or they were indeed stopped, as Svip had said. Through the night there’d been a tapestry of sound as they marched through the reeds and the water. Now there was no splashing, no crackling of trampled reeds. Only the distant, muted hint of their voices.

Another, well-known voice rose out of the water, as Svip reappeared at the boat’s side.

“They’re stopped, all right,” he reported. “Doesn’t look like they’re setting up camp. They’re just sitting there.”

“Where?” I asked. “More islands?”

“No. Looks like there’s some fairly dry land on the Western bank. They’re just sat along the shore. A few are lying down, but I didn’t see any bedrolls or tents out. I guess they sent out a patrol something; anyway a really big one gave some orders and ten or so of them headed inland.” He paused, then went on again, a frown in his voice. “Why would they stop so early? They’ve got a couple good hours left till dawn.”

I hazarded the guess, “they’re waiting for someone. This must be their rendezvous point."

There was nothing to do but wait ourselves. Svip dove underwater to fetch us an early breakfast of fish, which I ate without really thinking about it. Only as I was flicking the last few fish bones over the side did it occur to me that I was probably going to start enjoying this stuff, if I wasn’t careful. I had to grin at the thought of how scandalised my cook would be, if I started sending her culinary creations back to the kitchen and ordering raw fish instead. Though like most servants, I supposed, no doubt she was already firm in her conviction that we of the ruling classes are irretrievably mad.

With the fish gone, Svip suggested I let him take the first watch. I could get some sleep, then take my turn on watch once it was light enough for me to see.

That made sense, so I settled down in the boat once more with the elven cloak wrapped about me. This time, I told myself, I was not going to have any dreams. I did not care if the dreams tried to come to me, I just was not going to notice them.

Perhaps it worked, for I do not remember any dreams that came in those hours. When I woke it was not a nightmare that had torn me from sleep, it was the pre-dawn cold. I sat up and rubbed my hands to get some life into them. Coldness seemed to have seeped into my bones.

The air had grown chill with the passing of the night. As light crept in on us, the water’s warmth congealed in the colder air. The night’s blackness melted into grey clouds of mist.

Svip whispered that he would check again on our foes. When he returned, it was to report that they had scarcely moved since his last reconnaissance. They were still sitting by the water’s edge, though he thought that more of them were asleep than had been before. A few small fires had been lit. He’d seen two of the Orcs standing inland from the rest of the group, facing West.

Svip took his pack from the boat and curled up with it to sleep. I leaned back in the boat, propped on one elbow, and watched as tendrils of mist rose among the reeds.

I could not see the sun itself, but it must have risen, for the mist was turning a sort of gleaming white as light sifted through it.

Blast, it was cold. I eyed the mist, thinking sourly that the morning was going a little far out of its way to put me in a setting appropriate for a slain warrior. With the cold and mist, I might just as well be in the barrow world, standing eternal guard against the mortals who might covet my funeral goods.

I told myself, that is quite enough of that. I decided I would do some reconnaissance of my own. As quietly as I could, I lowered myself over the side.

I moved forward cautiously, keeping as much under the cover of the reeds as possible.

The Orcs were still there, just as Svip had described them. The spreading daylight had lured more of them into sleep, but the two sentries still stood statue-like, inland. One huge Orc with a gilt breastplate and plumed helmet paced back and forth through the ranks of his seated or sleeping comrades. He kept glancing out to the water and back to the shore again, and I thought that he must be their leader, grown impatient with waiting. I wondered if his gilded armour had been taken from a slain chieftain of Men, but he would have searched long to find a Man high-ranking enough to own that armour, and massive enough for his armour to fit the Orc.

I frowned, thinking that the land around here looked familiar. I was not sure how I could tell that, shrouded as it was in the mist. But something about it stirred a memory.

I turned and crept my way back to the boat and Svip. As I neared our concealing clump of reeds, I saw something through the mist beyond. And I knew where we were.

I had been here before. Twenty, no, twenty-three years ago I supposed, by now. It was in the Noman-Lands Campaign of 2996, the last time I saw the tree that now loomed out of the mists.

Our troops in the Entwash borderlands knew the thick-trunked, twisting cypress as the Gallows Tree. I did not know of a particular instance when anyone had been hanged from it. It was a border marker, and a place of warning. When there had been fighting nearby, the victors traditionally festooned the tree with corpses of the defeated. Twice I had seen its boughs laden with Orcs and their allies of Harad, and once, the branches had borne Men of my own company. I had helped to build the barrows under which they now lay, half a league inland along the Sixth Mouth of Entwash.

The reeds where we had hidden our boat were mere yards from the tree, and from the wide, sluggish stream that emptied into Anduin. We had reached the Sixth Mouth at last.

It was hard for me to believe that I had not known where we were. Somehow I felt that, even in the dark, I should have sensed the Gallows Tree reaching out its limbs above us.

I swam closer to the tree, struggling to see its branches through the mist. I drew a breath of relief when I saw that today the tree was empty.

At least it made sense now, that the Orcs would have stopped here. If they were waiting for others of their forces to join them, the Gallows Tree and the Sixth Mouth were landmarks that all would recognise.

Almost against my will I gazed up into the tree.

The memories had not faded in twenty-three years. It seemed that if I let the memories take me, I would live all of it again. I would feel it again when we first realised what was hanging from the tree. And again I would scale that tree, to cut down the corpses of my men.

I had felt that I owed it to them, but another motivation had set me to climbing the Gallows Tree. When I was up there, it gave a few moments when none of my living comrades could see my face. So they could not see that Denethor’s heir was crying, with tears that had broken forth the instant I knew I was out of their sight.

Movement, inland beyond the Gallows Tree, jolted me to the present.

Orcs. I counted ten of them, tramping toward the shore. They must be the scouting party that Svip had reported. I assumed they had not found what they were sent after, for their dogged trudge was that of soldiers whose report will not be good.

I lowered myself deeper in the water, hoping that the elven cloak’s hood and the reeds along the riverbank would hide me from their eyes.

Then I realised it was not myself I should be worried for.

It was one of those moments when one seems gifted with preternatural understanding, yet it will not be enough to stop things from going horribly wrong. I could see how to avert disaster if I could go back mere seconds in time, but that didn’t exactly help.

The reeds where we had hidden our boat – and where Svip was sleeping – looked thick enough from the water. And, probably, from the shore downstream, as well. Unfortunately, neither of us had bothered to check what the sight lines were like from the shore just up river.

The Orcs were stomping along by the bank of the Sixth Mouth. The one in front suddenly stopped and called out something to his fellows, pointing toward our clump of reeds.

My heart lurched with dread. Then I slipped underwater and swam toward our hiding place.

I might be making things worse, of course. Perhaps movement caused by my arrival in the reeds would lead to discovery we might otherwise have avoided. But if the Orcs had already seen the boat, they were bound to investigate it anyway. How could it get much worse?

My hands touched the base of the reeds, in the sludgy bottom. I felt my way along until I thought I should be far enough into them to perhaps avoid discovery. Then with agonising caution I raised myself toward the surface.

As my head broke through the water I found myself staring into the wide, startled eyes of Svip. In the same instant each of us put a finger to his lips, in what I suppose must be a world-wide gesture for silence.

Orc shouts sounded very near us. I heard splashing as several of them waded into the water.

I pulled out an edge of my sodden elven cloak, and draped it over Svip. Underwater, I eased my sword from its scabbard.

The voice and splashings of the nearest Orc were all but on top of us.

Ten of them, I thought. We could perhaps take them – I had put paid to eight myself, in the fight outside Svip’s house, and Svip and I had accounted for another seven, yesterday. Yet this time, the odds were not good. Even if we did conquer this ten, there was little chance that the noise of the fight would not reach their comrades. Or that we would be able to defeat all fifty, or however many Orcs might be left.

Then suddenly Svip closed his hand around my arm. I glanced at him and saw him looking even more wide-eyed than before. In a minimal gesture he nodded his head toward the boat.

I followed his gaze. And stared in utter confusion.

The boat was moving. We could see it sliding its way out of the reeds as if someone were pulling it. And yet it did not seem as if anyone was.

For one moment before the reeds began blocking it from my sight, I was sure I could see the entire boat. I could see that no one was touching it. No Orc hands had closed around the gunwale, no stick or weapon was being used to snare it. I could even see the rope, hanging from the ring on the prow. It drooped loosely into the water, with no sign of anyone using it to pull the boat free.

In near silence the boat glided from the reeds. And out of our sight.

The Orcs’ voices sounded again, but this time in tones of amazement and disbelief. I wondered if they saw what we had seen: the elven craft moving on its own, upstream.

The splashes of our enemies’ footfalls started up once more, but this time moving farther away from us.

For several moments more Svip and I stayed motionless, as the splashes sounded ever further in the distance. Then the water creature whispered to me, “wait here.” Before I could stop him he dove under and had swum out of my reach.

I swallowed back several curses. I wanted to follow and stop him, but if there was a chance the Orcs might not notice him, there was very little chance they would not notice me.

But I heard no shouts of discovery. Only the Orcs’ voices, increasingly distant, murmuring in what sounded like confusion and wonder.

Svip popped back out of the water at my side. He whispered, “I think you should come see this.”

I wondered if he had taken leave of his senses. But I sheathed my sword, and as silently as I could manage, I obeyed.

Svip dove under again and I followed, just managing to keep him in sight ahead of me in the green soupy water. He tugged on my sleeve and stopped, cautiously rising to the surface once more.

I had scarcely believed that we could avoid being seen. Yet as I poked my head above the water, I saw why he had been so confident that we could.

Svip had brought us to the point where Glammad the Sixth Mouth meets the Anduin. As we gazed along the Sixth Mouth’s course, we saw our elven boat, still gliding steadily upstream. The morning sun started to break through the mist, casting a golden light over the grey wood of the boat, and the tendrils of mist that played around it.

Our ten Orcs were following the boat, as if it had bewitched them. Some of them kept pace with it along the shore, some waded behind it. Ever it seemed to keep just out of their reach, gracefully slipping through the water as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a boat to pass upstream on its own.

We watched the elven craft and the Orcs, until they rounded a bend in the stream. The reeds along Glammad’s banks hid them from our sight.

The boat had taken with it a good deal of our gear: the shield, the bow and quiver, and the majority of Svip’s collection of bottles. But I had no intention of following to get them back.

A moment’s horror shot through me as I thought that the Horn of Gondor had been in the boat as well. But no, I remembered, it was all right. We had stowed the Horn in Svip’s pack after we started using the cloak of Lórien. And Svip’s pack, that he’d been using as his pillow, was back amid the reeds.

There was nothing left to do now but go back to waiting. We swam to our last hiding place, where Svip retrieved his pack. Then we made our way across to the East shore, where the ground was still more marshy and treacherous. Here we found ourselves another nest of reeds, from which we could observe our foe across the River. I watched for them, but saw no sign of the ten Orcs returning. I half expected to see the boat return as well, making its stately way down Anduin. But I did not see it, then or ever again.

Perhaps two hours later, the Orcs’ waiting was rewarded. My attention had wandered, as I stared unseeing at the Gallows Tree and tried to remember the names of the men we had lost here. I had thought I would never forget, but now two men’s names were missing from my memory. I vowed I would look up their names as soon as I reached home. Then a shout from one of the sentries dragged my attention back.

A party of perhaps thirty Orcs came striding across the land. They seemed untroubled by the sunlight that had now burned off the last of the mist. Even from across the River, we could see the signs that they had recently been victorious in combat. Many of them carried bags that I assumed held their loot. I saw two Orcs carrying what were clearly saddlebags, and another with a huge sack formed of some red and gold cloth, that must have been a cape or some wall-hanging, refashioned for the Orc’s purpose. Four of the Orcs were leading horses. As I watched, one big sorrel jerked at the reins and fought to tear them loose from its captor’s grasp. The Orc walking alongside slammed his shield into the sorrel’s neck.

I had to bite my lip to keep from yelling in frustrated rage. And had to remind myself that if I’d not thought we could successfully fight fifty Orcs, I had damned well better not go attacking eighty of them.

The leader of these new Orcs, in a black suit of armour and a rakish red cape, stood conferring with the gilt-armoured chieftain of the group we had followed. Whatever they had decided, it did not seem welcome news to Gilt Armour’s troops. Their groans and snarls of protest reached us across the water. Then a bark of command from Gilt Armour silenced them and dragged them to their feet.

Gear was collected, marching order was established in a few brisk commands. The two bands set off, along the Western shore.

We followed. But it was soon clear that we had no chance of keeping up. With the boat no longer there to aid us, the Orcs outpaced us without the slightest effort.

When they were finally, irretrievably lost to sight, we altered our method of travel. We had both been swimming while the Orcs were still within eyesight. Now I got out of the water and trudged along the riverbank, while Svip alternated between swimming along beside me in his own form, and getting out and plodding on the shore for a few miles as a horse.

The Orcs were still ahead of us. That much was clear from their footprints that had churned through the mud.

In this manner we passed the next two days.

All through the day on which we had lost the boat, from dawn to dusk of the next day, and far into the afternoon of the third, we slogged along the shore. Three times we thought we saw figures moving in the distance, twice on the East bank and once on the West. But they never got close enough for us to tell what they were, or apparently, for them to see us.

The signs of the Orcs’ passage went ever onward, marring the muddy bank that stretched unending ahead of us.

On the afternoon of that third day, the River Entwash broke through land that had become less of a marsh than a green, rolling plain. As I watched the Entwash pour its waters into Anduin, I felt like falling to my knees and kissing the ground. We had come to the end of the marshland.

We had also come to point where the Orcs’ path diverged from ours.

Their prints and those of the captured horses veered off down the riverbank, and headed into Anduin. Svip swam across the River to check, and reported that the prints continued on the East shore, heading almost due east into North Ithilien.

I hated to lose track of them. It made little sense, I supposed, to keep following them. I needed to get to my own people, in the shortest possible amount of time. But it infuriated me to have trailed the Orcs this far, and now be left again to guess where they might be heading. They might have their eye on our North Ithilien outposts – outposts that were far- flung and isolated enough that if the Orcs found them, they could pick them off one by one with little chance of the garrisons receiving any help. Or they might still rendezvous with other war parties, massing for an attack that I thought would almost certainly be aimed at Cair Andros. If they took the island fortress, they would have its boats to aid them. Boats that would help them make a crossing further downriver. And that might turn the tide in their favour when they struck at our country’s heart. A dark image played before my eyes: our troops holding the shore at Osgiliath, hewing down the Orcs that rushed at them, ever on the brink of being swept away as countless more of the enemy spewed forth from the boats they had taken from us.

I shook my head. This was not the time for visions.

We must nearly have reached my first goal. Within two miles of Entwash and Anduin’s meeting point was the refuge of Lilla Howe, the hidden outpost that nestled beneath the barrow of an ancient warrior of Gondor. I did not know if any of our men would be there, but if not, I could at least leave a message there before heading on again. Our rangers stop there frequently, and even if I could not send a messenger from Lilla Howe at once, there was every chance that one would pass through soon, find my message and send it on.

And, I thought suddenly, at Lilla Howe there would be supplies. Supplies including food – food that did not consist of weeds and raw fish.

I was almost cheerful again, despite losing the Orcs.

I was on solid ground. And it was my own ground, at last.

Svip was in good spirits too. As the afternoon sun began moving lower in the sky, he switched into horse form – after first handing me his pack to carry, so he would not have to worry about keeping it on his back. Then he tried out his legs, galloping along and sending sprays of earth flying from his hooves. I grinned as I watched him. The air was growing warmer as we left the marshland behind. Ahead of me, Svip was galloping in great circles. I paused in the shade of a grove of trees, to take a drink of river water from one of the two canteens that had been in Svip’s pack.

With the canteen to my lips, I froze.

A voice behind me said flatly, “don’t move if you want to live.” And the point of a dagger pressed into my back.