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A Family Way	By : kspence Category: Lord of the Rings Movies > Het - Male/Female Views: 5843 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
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.

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5. Orc bites dog

It was an existing leg-injury that had led to Shagrat’s original capture. Setting bear-traps in the autumn, the Barker had been surprised when he snared in one of them a much rarer - and wholly unexpected – quarry: a living, breathing Uruk-hai. While catching a creature like Shagrat was one thing, the Barker soon found find that keeping hold of him was quite another matter; both tasks were deceptively difficult (the former being especially troublesome to repeat) and a viable prospect in the first place only on account of the Orc’s already-weakened condition.

Too ill and incapacitated to be able immediately to flee, Shagrat had borne the tribulations of his captivity if not stoically, then at least with a forward-looking eye on the main chance - for the time, which was not long after the end of the war, had been a period of trouble and great difficulty for the few surviving remnants of the Black Army in general, and this applied to Shagrat no less than to any of his compatriots from Mordor. While depriving him of his freedom, the Barker had provided him with board and safe lodgings of a sort and the Uruk, confident of his ability to eventually give his new proprietor the slip, bided his time with him through the winter, waiting only for spring and the beginning of the warm weather to make good his escape. Once he reckoned the roads in the mountains would be sufficiently clear of snow, Shagrat set off – only to be smartly recovered by the new hired man Chard, a fellow who made far more a zealous and hands-on overseer than the Barker ever had, and at half his age had twice the stamina of the older man to boot.

It was however Shagrat’s subsequent getaway, an attempt that took place almost immediately after Chard had fetched him back from the first one, that was – due to the unforeseen and long-lasting consequences it had for him - the clincher.

Shagrat’s second escape bid had been a much more concerted, and desperate effort, for the Barker was preparing to move his travelling show from the hillside villages where they had passed the winter down to the larger – and from his point of view more profitable - towns of the plains. The Orc knew that his best chance of making a clean break from his captors lay in taking refuge on the high ground in the mountains where he would be able to cover his tracks with little difficulty. As a matter of urgency then, to avoid being carried down to the lowlands with the rest of the Barker’s retinue, Shagrat set off the night before the Barker’s planned departure, trusting that the confusion of the morning’s preparations for the journey would allow him a good head start. And to begin with it seemed that he’d been right: three days he’d been running, or three nights, since this time was careful to steer clear of even the remotest contact with country-people out in the wilds, and travelled only under cover of darkness. Three days, and though the after-effects of his injuries made his progress slow, at last he was properly gaining altitude: the undulating foothill country through which he’d been travelling was giving way to brittle, upland pasture, white-rimed in the frost, and the high blue mountains, that for so long had showed themselves only as a jagged outline against the horizon, finally seemed within reach.

Lying up at daybreak in the lee of a wind-weathered outcrop, the Orc heard the clamour of his pursuers – or rather the baying from the pair of mastiffs that were tracking him - when they were still some distance off. Knowing he had no real avenue of escape he had broken cover and run from them anyway; but the dogs, off the leash and easily able to outpace even horses over this type of rocky terrain, soon drew level with, then outflanked him and began circling back to bring him to ground. Next instant one of them - a massive, muscular beast, carrying the heavily-scarred flanks and muzzle of a seasoned fighting animal – had leapt up and was scrambling across his back. The extra weight was comparable with that of a grown man’s and it made the Uruk falter: he pitched heavily onto one knee causing the dog, which had not properly latched its jaws on him to overshoot, half-somersaulting as its momentum carried it up and over his shoulder and head. Shagrat followed its nose-dive in a clumsy forward roll, grabbing for the loose skin at the scruff of its neck as they fell together, the Orc’s arms encircling the beast’s ribcage as he pulled it close, to keep it from gaining better purchase on him. The dog still kicked and twisted vigorously, its blunt claws raking through his shirt, scoring him over his chest and sides, and though it snapped for his face as he closed in on it, such a beast, bred for fighting or not, would never have been any kind of match for an adult Uruk-hai. It was over in seconds for even as they hit the ground, Shagrat was slashing with his teeth, severing the main blood-vessels in the dog’s neck. He was not quick enough to avoid the great pulse of arterial blood that fountained up from the dying animal’s body and it sprayed across his face, but he took little notice. Lunging forwards again he delivered a ferocious killing-bite and pulled free again with a massive, sideways wrench of the head; a vicious, brutal manoeuvre that brought with it the greater part of the mastiff’s throat. Shaking himself, Shagrat spat the ugly mouthful away, spattering blood-gouts and sprays of gore far and wide. He was fairly coated in it too; could barely see for the sticky drops that were dripping into his eye and he tried in vain to clear it, a twisted, yet dreadfully familiar kind of elation kindling in him. Absently he licked at the runnels of warm liquid wetting his skin and he stood for a moment squinting at the chilly sunrise; a grotesque figure hunched against the pale winter sky, swamped in blood-lust yet filled with an elemental kind of rightness of purpose. But the thrill of the fight soon faded, and the Orc began to shiver as the dog’s blood that was saturating his hair, his face and the shreds of his clothing started losing its heat to the freezing morning air.

An angry shout rose up from someone in Chard’s party – still lagging a way behind – then, telling Shagrat that one of them had realized that something was awry: it was also a timely reminder to the Orc that he had yet to make good his escape.

In the meanwhile the second mastiff had begun circling him but was warily keeping its distance; skipping a few steps back and forth, every now and then it would stop to bark furiously at him, a frantic, yelping note in its voice. During one of these interludes the Uruk put his head down abruptly and charged at it, staggering even as he snarled back wildly and the dog, not recognising his bluff turned and ran for its master at once, the stub of its part-docked tail tucked firmly between its legs.

On Shagrat went. Though he not registered it in the heat of the scuffle, he had landed awkwardly when the first dog jumped at him and the fall had further weakened his injured ankle, so that now it couldn’t bear his full weight. Even without such a setback, the outcome of the morning’s pursuit would have been in little doubt. Chasing the Uruk from horseback, Chard and one of the local helpers he’d recruited – the bereaved dog-owner as it turned out – were soon able to close the distance between them, and riding him down while he was running, used a rope slung between the saddle-horns of their two mounts to fell him. At this point the Orc was on a downhill sloping stretch, having just crossed the first crest of higher ground that marked the beginning of the mountains proper and once off his feet he tumbled onwards, rolling head-over-heels for some distance down the rocky slope. Still, he’d forced himself up and faltered on, but Chard and his comrades caught up with him directly and having knocked him down a second time, proceeded to beat him senseless. The dog owner, bereft of a valuable animal, had borne a particular grudge - for from the feel of things afterwards, they had carried on long after he’d lost consciousness - the usual sticking point for Shagrat’s handlers under any normal circumstances. Even then, that was far from being the worst of it. After Chard had returned him to town, the Barker, speaking not unkindly, had explained to Shagrat that he represented a problem that needed to be resolved for reasons of sheer economic necessity. The Orc was then taken outside and Chard and possibly some of the others had come and re-broken the healing injuries to his right ankle and that was that.

Setting the bones broken in the bear-trap had been bad enough the first time, when the injuries had been fresh and clean. Nevertheless, Shagrat had managed to force everything into line and had splinted it all more-or-less straight. And – wonder of wonders - it had been mending nicely; knitting together firm and true. The second time, they pulled and twisted the half-healed bones and joints viciously, and as a cruel afterthought kept the Orc bound until long after the tortured ankle swelled itself stiff, ensuring he would have no chance whatever of repairing the additional damage.

He hadn’t even tried. The pain at the time had been severe, but Shagrat, up until this time had been nothing if not resilient, and as an Orc was used to dealing with injuries of a type that would have been debilitating – or even on occasion fatal - to almost anyone else. The physical damage inflicted on him was not trivial, but its effects on the Orc ran far deeper than that.

Over the course of a long and somewhat chequered career the Uruk had been down on luck more than a few times; had found himself in protractedly dire situations by comparison with which his current difficulties seemed the merest trifle, fit only to be sneezed at. It wasn’t faith, or even close to being a sense of optimism that had sustained him through these troubled times, but Shagrat at the core of his being had always possessed a certain something - a tenacious, bloody-minded kind of quality that if not upstanding enough to count as moral fibre proper, at least stood in as a fairly approximate substitute for it. It was much the same as the single-minded focus-of-purpose that had sent armies of Orcs out into battle for centuries, in the absence of courage or valour, advantage in victory or even any real prospect of it.

So, Rashanka had been wrong to berate the Uruk for his failure to break from his captors. Granted, it was the most painful of sore points for him – bitterly reminding the Orc of his impotence, of the futility of his continuing existence – but this could only ever count as old news indeed, for someone like him. The most that she could perhaps criticise him for was merely a breakdown in Orcish stubbornness, a characteristic of Shagrat’s that had, due the difficulties he had recently been facing simply worn itself out. This seemingly little thing was turning out to be disproportionately significant to the Uruk, for without that well-spring of native obstinacy to drive and oversee his actions, he found himself all at sea and as he explained to Rashanka, had all but given up.

TBC
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A Family Way