Adult-FanFiction.org : Lord of the Rings

Azof and the Farmer's Wife	By : kspence Category: Lord of the Rings Movies > AU - Alternate Universe Views: 9835 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: Disclaimer: I do not own the Lord of the Rings book series and movie series, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1
- 2
A/N: This chapter is mainly about....ham. Which isn’t code for some esoteric form of sexual perversion that despite many years on aff.net, you’re surprised to find you’ve yet to heard of (unless it is and this author, thank god, isn’t aware of it), I mean actual...ham.   Sorry about that. They’ll probably be getting their respective kits off in the next instalment.

1. The bride from outside

It was the smell of all the blood that called him down from the mountain that first time, of course.
True enough, it was late in the winter to be sticking a pig. But one wily one, gone a bit feral, had slipped through last autumn’s round-up and though they’d searched high and low, it stayed missing all through the end of the season. Pig lasted quite well till the turn of the year - guzzling beech-mast and what-not up in the high forest, but then when the weather closed in it turned tail and headed for home again. Neighbour Drew, whose farm was on the opposite side, over the head of the valley, caught it and brought it back to Julienne’s; crafty old sod looked like he might have wanted to keep it for himself, but then he and everyone else knew it was only the farmer’s wife who ever raised fancy black porkers like that.
But she didn’t as a rule keep them through the winter: there wasn’t nearly enough forage on her holding to sustain them. The rest of this year’s herd – a dozen strong, for there had been a heavy acorn-crop and an especially good autumn - were all slaughtered and off to market; that, or salted and hanging for ham in the outbuilding beside Julienne’s house.   For a while it looked like she’d be keeping Number Thirteen after all, but late one evening there came a dreadful racket and Julienne hurried out with her lantern to find that the silly creature, having jumped the wall of its sty, had managed to impale itself on one of the hurdle posts she was sharpening to use to pen the lambing ewes next spring.
It looked to be a fatal wound; pig had nicked a vein or even an artery, and there was nothing the farmer’s wife could do. She ran back to the house to fetch her long knife because the poor animal was squealing and suffering terribly, then it was the work of a moment for her to finish the thing off. By the time it was over, both pig and woman were soaked with the animal’s blood, for Julienne had not had time to fetch the kitchen basin or even her scalding-trough to catch it with.
She sat back on her haunches for a moment, heart hammering with the unwonted excitement and shivering a bit, wishing she’d thought to take her winter wrapper off. Now the woollen garment – dark in colour, at least - was wringing with blood and would have to be soaked or the stain would fix. Breaking the ice on the rain-bucket, she dunked it under before shutting up again and turning in for an early night. The death of the pig meant a there would be a quantity of extra work to do tomorrow.
Next morning Julienne was up early, long before it was light. She had spent the night dozing in front of her kitchen fire on the straight-backed wooden settle, having not bothered with a proper wash (for once) or even to change out of her pig-sullied clothes beforehand. There hadn’t seemed much point, as there promised to be a deal more grubbing about in the mud and blood to come! Day dawned on one of the biting cold mornings, overcast but still with a hard, black frost, that often came in this region at the end of winter. As she stood on her doorstep, shivering in the stiff breeze that was blowing up the valley, Julienne wondered if her pig would have frozen solid in the night. It hadn’t, but there were ice-crystals forming a gruesome variety of rime round the edges of the slick of blood in the mud by the pig-sty. The unfortunate creature had bled out during its death-throes, at least.
Sighing, Julienne looked down at the sad, stiff-legged corpse.   This was quite the wrong time of year to be carrying out any kind of messy butchering work, and that went double for doing something like this out in the open. The farmer’s wife was no stranger to manual labouring, and she knew at first hand - knew from long experience - exactly how much work went into preparing such a carcass. But when she thought of the freezing mud and numb fingers and chilblains her heart sank, and for a moment she was almost tempted – but, really, there was far too much meat on the carcass for her even begin to consider wasting.   Those special acorn-fed hams slowly curing in the lean-to beside her house formed Julienne’s main source of income, meagre enough as that invariably turned out to be in practice and - pending some sort of winter-starvation disaster, which (touch wood), had never come near to happening for as long as she’d been living up here – were marked as strictly for market . Longer-distance trading routes were opening up again all across Gondor now that the war had ended, and apparently, some of the rich folk over in the White City were wild about Julienne’s type of product and would pay handsomely – prices you wouldn’t believe! - for the thinnest-cut sliver of it. This was according to one of the locals following his visit to the capital to see the new king crowned a year or so back; fellow hadn’t been able to wait to come home and crow to her about it, seemingly. But then grass-roots producers on Julienne’s scale were never likely to see much of the mark-up garnered by middle-man traders, meat-merchants and such. The farmer’s wife was happy to be able to sell enough of her produce to maintain what level of independence remained to her and usually, that was enough to get by.
Julienne’s spirits rose a little, as it occurred to her that this was one of the days that Coppey Drew, a youth who sometimes helped with chores about the place, would surely visit. And of course, having a second person on hand would make dealing with the pig a far easier task. Coppey was one of the many younger grand nieces and nephews of her nearest neighbour, and was currently lodging at his uncle’s farm across the valley. As a Drew he was also technically a distant relative, though circumstances meant that Julienne, who (thank goodness!) was not a direct relation, would never have wanted to presume upon any family connection.
Generations of limited immigration into the area, together with the extended Drew clan’s tradition of cousins and cousins intermarrying, had left its inhabitants with a particular ‘local look.’ This rendered many of those who bore it so like one another in appearance that at first it was often difficult for outsiders (among whom the farmer’s wife was still counted, despite her many years of residence) to tell them all apart. Actually this ‘look’ was, indirectly, one of the main influences that had plotted much of the course of Julienne’s life. Many years before a particularly astute Drew grandmother, noticing that her family’s ongoing matrimonial traditions were taking a toll (on the intellect, as well as the appearance) on the younger generations, had taken steps to ensure a flow of fresh blood into the family: Julienne was only one a number of women (often referred to by irreverent locals as ‘the brides from outside’) who had been drafted in to supply it. Her marriage, at the age of seventeen, to a member of the Drew clan had been arranged by her mother’s mother, a contemporary of the Drew matriarch’s in her youth, and at the time it had been considered a most admirable match. It was to a much older man, of course, but he was a prosperous farmer with a handsome holding down in the fertile lowland.   This farmer was childless, having out-lived his first wife, and the naive young woman was assured of his eagerness to begin raising a family.
Unfortunately for Julienne, her farmer was also in love with his cousin.
But, as Julienne reminded herself (though even after all this time, her cheeks flamed with shame and humiliation whenever she thought about it) they were all friends these days, and that was no more than water under the bridge, now! Speaking of which: processing a pig required quantities of the stuff; far more than Julienne kept at hand for day to day use. The little mountain stream from which she drew her supply was only a short walk from the house and she set off with buckets and yoke. To and fro, down the hill with buckets empty, and back up again with them brimming over a dozen times and more she went, and by that time the water butt and scalding kettle were full, but there was no sign yet of Coppey Drew.
Trusting that Coppey was only running late this morning and would arrive in due course, Julienne cast about for something useful to do. The winter log-pile looked in good shape. There was more than enough fire wood, but Julienne was running short of smaller kindling, so she took her carrying-pack and marched over the fields and up into the hanger-wood. This was a beautiful place in springtime, where wild hyacinths grew in such profusion between the young ash saplings and smooth-barked beeches that for a scant few weeks early every year it looked as if the steeply rising hillside was being hugged by a lovely, blue-and-purple mist.
(It was all a bit bleak come mid-winter, mind you.)
Clambering over tangles of springy fallen branches cloaked in light green moss, Julienne made for a fallen beech-tree that she knew of. This type of tree had an unusually shallow root-system, just right for growing on sloping ground where there was not much earth, but the bigger specimens rarely fared well in very stormy weather. The one Julienne was aiming for had come down in the autumn gales, and the farthest twigs should have dried out enough by now.
Further into the wood the farmer’s wife had to stop repeatedly, to shake off the prickling sensation that there was someone watching her (as later events transpired, actually, he was) - determined not to let local superstition get the better of her.
One of the reasons Julienne lived where she did was that long-standing tradition in the region held that the valley-head where her farmhouse was sited was – well, not cursed, exactly, but its proximity to a piece of land that was considered to be out-and-out blighted had made it difficult for the owners to find reliable tenants.   Above the valley behind her house the ground rose higher and higher until the hillside merged into upland plateau, beyond which stood of a range of mountains. It was the lower foothills of this range that encompassed the steep-sided valley lived in by the farmer’s wife.
Gigantic, fell creatures (or so it was said) had haunted these mountains within living memory; while the level-headed Julienne wasn’t entirely convinced that such monsters had ever existed as she had never seen the slightest sign of one, she did know for a fact that another band, or group, or tribe of undesirables had recently taken up residence in the vicinity. So perhaps it was true about the land being cursed after all, because the incomers were a gang of renegade Orcs, which obviously, as Julienne knew, did exist (and she had even seen one with her own eyes the previous winter: a great, grey, wreck of a creature someone had caught and thought it a good idea to chain to a post in the middle of the market for everyone to gawk at). The fall of Mordor clearly had not – everyone’s hopes to the contrary - been the end for that kind of being, and although nobody wanted to have such a villainous collection establishing themselves even as the remotest of neighbours, the onset of winter had discouraged any concerted action against them, and for the time being local consensus seemed to be to simply wait and see what would happen next.
Arriving at the fallen tree, Julienne spent some time clambering through the snarl of its upper branches, snapping off and collecting likely-looking bits of small timber with her hands. As she worked, the sense of someone watching, from away in the trees, intensified until the feeling became too strong for her to shake. She soon grew certain there was someone there, just at the edge of sight, but whoever it was didn’t answer her call, nor could she catch the slightest glimpse of them.   In spite of this she made herself continue until her pack was full, and then - tripping and slipping repeatedly, barking her shins badly on a jagged branch as she scrambled downhill, the farmer’s wife turned and hurried for home.
As she neared the little farmstead she could see that all was quiet. The low winter sun told her it was not long past midday, and Coppey Drew had still not come.   It was just under an hour’s walk to the farm where he was staying - and yet more time to get back. Even if she set out to ask for him straight away, there would not be time enough to finish processing the pig in daylight.
Julienne sat down on one of the rounded boulders that marked the corners of her vegetable plot, wearily rubbing the places where her legs, following her fall in the wood, were sore. Then she screamed aloud in vexation! She had not been brought up to be so ill-mannered as to openly display (or even admit to experiencing) such noisy emotions, but twenty years of biting her tongue and nothing but hard work and more work, all while doing her best to curry favour with a husband who was, at best, completely indifferent, had taken a toll on her good nature. And after he’d had the temerity to actually try and move that love of his life, his cousin, together with her entire grown-up brood, into the marital house - !   Suddenly the years of pointed remarks from family, of whispered conversations falling silent whenever she entered a room – not to mention the volumes of wicked, village gossip that year-in and year-out, for the sake of dignity and a quiet life, she’d tried her dutiful, wifely best to ignore! At one stroke it all suddenly made sense. And at that moment, Julienne – cast aside for another woman, but still nominally the farmer’s wife, right there in the middle of wondering how on earth she could have allowed herself to be – no, not just insipid, but so terribly, terribly dense, had decided that was going to be the end of it. Whatever else an uncertain future might hold, Julienne resolved that there would be no further doing of duty, or maintenance of dignified silences for her, for the rest of her life.
Living alone up here, where there was nobody’s business for Julienne to mind about, and (more importantly), no-one to mind her own made that much easier, of course. But then again, there were drawbacks: her nearest neighbours and the potential for their help at short notice being so far away, to start with.
After thoroughly cursing young Coppey loud and long, for a feckless slacker and a pop-eyed half-wit (the young man in question being afflicted to a greater than usual degree by the Drew clan’s ‘look’), Julienne pulled herself together as well as she was able, and wearily set to work. She knew it was unfair of her to blame poor Coppey, who was a good boy at heart, and so by way of mitigating her earlier outburst, she racked her brains to try to think of something in his favour, such as....his beard! Which, when the wispy collection of threads he was cultivating finally meshed together into a decent size, would certainly cover much of the weakness of his characteristically receding family chin.
In the meantime Julienne lit a fire and boiled water, but the rather dense hair on the pig, which seemed to have grown itself a winter coat, had ‘set’ on the animal’s carcass as it cooled and could not be scalded loose in the usual fashion. The farmer’s wife had expected (feared, actually) that this would be the case.   The dead animal weighed substantially more than she did, and it took a great deal of effort for her to haul the body into a better location and onto the thin bed of hay she’d laid out for it. When it was in position, she placed more hay, mixed with some of the kindling twigs she’d collected earlier over and around the body and set fire to it. The smell as the hair singed off was appalling and there were quantities of evil-looking smoke but it was a fast burn as she’d intended, and the flames died down quickly enough. Covering her mouth and nose, she bent over and began scraping away the burned hair-residue together with the charred outer layer of skin. It was an unpleasant, messy task.
At last both sides of the pig were done (she’d rolled it over halfway through) and the farmer’s wife, now coated in greasy soot, was fitting it to a gambrel / pulley arrangement when a great clamour arose from one of the pair of large, rough-coated guardian-dogs she had on the premises. These weren’t sheep dogs in the usually sense - rather they were watch dogs, for sheep. In winter Julienne’s small flock was penned in a field not far from the farm, but for the rest of the year they grazed the stretch of moor up on the hill behind her house, the evil reputation of which had made it impossible for her to employ a human shepherd. Her dogs, accustomed to running free, tended to come and go as they pleased and returned home at this time of year mainly in bad weather, or to be fed. This one had just come running up and was now barking continuously, his furious attention directed at a dense row of nut bushes that stood a stone’s throw away from where she was working, a short distance up the hill from the farmhouse.
Immediately the sense of foreboding that had afflicted Julienne when she was collecting fire-wood returned, and she realized that although the small drama of her reaction to Coppey’s continued absence and the chore of hog-butchering had distracted her mind to other things, since her experience in the wood that unnerving sensation had never left her, really.
The big dog kept bounding towards, then back from the tree line of little trees, barking and yelping excitedly, and also – Julienne noted with mounting unease – with an unmistakeable note of apprehension in its voice. And this from an animal quite capable of single-handedly defending its woolly charges from bears, or even a smaller pack of wolves! She briefly considered, then discarded the idea of running for the house. Anger and indignation at being frightened by some unknown person here on her own property were part of it; and something made her quite certain it was a person she was dealing with - rather than some cold and famished animal, drawn down to her farm from out of the winter wilds. But also there was the real worry that even if she were to turn and run, the distance was such that she might be overtaken before reaching safety.
With one hand Julienne unloosened the gambrel-beam –a heavy length of seasoned timber – from the pig and held it out in front of her like a cudgel. In the other she clasped her scraping tool. This was actually a fish-slice from out the kitchen skillet – metal, but only with a short handle and it was dull at the edges too; not much of a weapon. As she clutched it, the farmer’s wife wished she’d kept hold of her pig-sticking knife.
“If you’re that same silly bugger as was spying on me up in the wood,” she yelled across the farmyard, in a voice that wavered only a little bit, “you might’ve noticed I’ve better things to do than be stood here, arseing about the place with you!”
(Living alone – as demonstrated by what she just said - had had its effect on Julienne’s sense of propriety, and by now she was accustomed to speaking out loud in the kind of language that hitherto fore, she would have hesitated to use even in the privacy of her own head.)
“ So,” (she continued), “ why don’t you come out where I can see you, if you’re coming, but if you’re feared to, or not fit to be looked at, then – well then, I think you’d better just – just bloody buggering well piss off then, shouldn’t you!”
“Call yer dog ter ‘eel and I’ll fink abaht it,” the person hidden in the tree-line shouted straight back.
“I’m – I’m not without means of defence!” Julienne retorted, brandishing her gambrel.   But she signalled her dog to lie flat.
“So I can see.” The stranger had a most peculiar pattern to his speech; he was not from around these parts and spoke in a flat-toned accent so unlike anything Julienne had ever heard that she couldn’t have begun to place it. “I ain’t got nuffink like that on me,” the man added, as stooping out from under the low hazel branches, he held his empty hands palm outwards for Julienne to see.
As the figure moved into the open Julienne saw that although he was man-shaped, actually this was far from being a man. A terrible chill that had nothing to do with the cold of winter ran down her back and she shook with fear when she realized what manner of creature was approaching: for a moment the farmer’s wife was frozen with unthinking terror, because it was a black Orc from the mountains she was standing stock still and staring at, even as he came closer and closer.
The Orc however, seemed wary too and he stopped somewhat short before coming in striking-range of Julienne’s gambrel-post. “I never fort nice ladies knew of any of them filthy swear words,” he said.
TBC.
- 1
- 2
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Azof and the Farmer's Wife