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Speaks to the Trees	By : kspence Category: Lord of the Rings Movies > Slash - Male/Male Views: 4967 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- 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.

Chapter List
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5. Swept away
The boy from the river, showing a complete lack of initiative, was still waiting in the dark near the riverbank, exactly where the Orc had left him. “I thought you’d gone!” he cried, at Shagrat’s approach. “What were you doing back there, Mister?”
“Nothing,” Shagrat replied brusquely.
“Sounded like you were talking to yourself.   Or blubbering, maybe - “
“I wasn’t,” the Orc snarled. “And as for blubbering, you can bloody well talk.”
“But I’m just a kid!“
“How many years have you?”
“I’ll be fourteen next June.”
Shagrat made a non-committal noise in his throat. If he’d had to, he would have guessed substantially less than that. “All right then.   Let’s start getting you back to - wherever it is you live. Think you can walk, yet?”
The lad shook his head. Shagrat rolled his eye and ground his teeth. Of course he ruddy well couldn’t. Without further preamble, he bundled the youth, covering of dry sacks and everything, up and carrying him in his arms, set off back towards the village.
The Orc stalked on in silence for a time, but the boy it seemed, wanted to talk.
“You’re wearing chainmail - and actual armour and everything. Are you - a warrior?”
“No,” Shagrat said shortly. “But I suppose you could say I was - in the War.”
The boy gasped. “A soldier of Gondor!”
The Uruk quickly told him it hadn’t been exactly like that.
“Are you a travelling mercenary?”
“Not one of those, either.”
“Then when did you join up?”
“I didn’t,” Shagrat replied, in a brisk voice. “I was conscripted.   Probably when I wasn’t that much older than you.”
“Before you were of age!” the boy exclaimed excitedly. “What was that like?”
Shagrat frowned for a moment. He never thought about those days if he could help it. “It was a long time ago and I don’t really remember,” he said at last, and this was quite true. “It didn’t make much difference, because back then there weren’t many other options for – for persons of my sort.” He sighed out heavily. “There still aren’t.”
“But did you get to slay many Orcs?”
Shagrat bared his teeth, grinning mirthlessly into the dark. “I suppose you could say I did for more than my fair share. I got to finish off a fair good few, yes.”
The boy made an awestruck sort of ‘ooh’-ing noise. “They say there’s some come to live out over in the mountains. Everyone in town’s up in arms about it. But I’ve never even seen one.”
“You should count yourself lucky then, shouldn’t you?”
They walked on in silence for a while. Then the boy said –
“Mister, have you got proper weapons on you? Like – maybe a sword?”
“Might have. What d’you want to know for?”
“Can I – could I maybe have a go with it?”
It was on the tip of Shagrat’s tongue to tell him: not a chance, but then reconsidering, he handed him the smaller of the side-weapons that hung from his sword-belt, thinking: at least it might help shut him up.
“It’s really heavy!” The boy said, sweeping the sword through the air with a great wobbling swipe in his enthusiasm.
The Orc winced. “Careful not to cut yourself,” he advised, “and try and not drop it.”
On they went: the lad feinting and jabbing inexpertly with Shagrat’s side-arm, and the Orc, very much against his better judgement, unable to stop himself from issuing the occasional note on technique and form.
Soon enough they reached a slightly better-maintained section of path, that indicated they were nearing the outer reaches of the weavers’ settlement. The track before them, following the contours of the hillside, swept in a broad curve down the valley, and from here their route back up towards the village was visible for a quite a way.
“Give us that,” Shagrat told the boy, deftly reclaiming his weapon. “And keep quiet a minute.”
Across the still night air, above the constant chattering sounds of the river tumbling down the nearby gorge, he thought he could hear the noise from a large party up on the road ahead. A bank of ground-mist, mixed with various watery vapours, was rising up the valley, but after a moment he was able to make out a number of tiny, bright points of light from the lanterns carried by the villagers – together with their larger, flaming fire-brands, away in the distance. The Orc drew back into the shelter of the trees by the edge of the path. He hadn’t expected them to be quite this quick off the mark.
“Your legs working yet?” he whispered.
“I think they are – well, sort of,” the boy replied. And then, on noticing the approaching lights in the distance - “hey, is that someone coming from our village over there?”
“I expect so,” Shagrat replied. “I shouldn’t think there’d be anyone else from round these parts out and about this time of night.” Their lamps were noticeably brighter already, which meant the villagers had to be approaching at quite a rate.
“Then what’re we waiting for?”
“You go on,” the Orc told him. “I’ll be stopping here.”
“Aren’t you coming any further?” the lad sounded disappointed. “My Mum and Dad, you know, they’re, kind of like - high-up in our village. If you wanted work, you know - if you’re not going anywhere else - or a place to stay, they could maybe sort something –“
Shagrat cut him short. “They couldn’t.”   He waited a moment, but the lad did not leave. “Of you go then!” he encouraged. “And give ‘em a good yell before you get too near, so they’ll know it’s you.”
The boy seemed nonplussed. Then he said - “My Dad’s going to want to thank you for bringing me back. You should maybe come and talk to him.”
“No, I shouldn’t.”
“My Mum’s a really good cook –“
“I don’t think your Mum and Dad,” Shagrat exclaimed in exasperation, “are going to want to have the likes of me round for dinner at their house!”
“But why’s that?”
Shagrat ignored the question. The cluster of lights were already uncomfortably close. “Go on, then – quickly! he shoved the boy out into the centre of the path. “Off you - trot. Don’t fall in any more rivers. And son – ?”
“Yes?” the boy, dragging his feet and dawdling, half-turned in his tracks.
“If it all starts – kicking off in a minute, and it probably will, I wouldn’t look back, if I were you.” Shagrat was already setting off as fast as he was able, resolutely heading back down the hill.
After a disturbingly small amount of time he heard a happy cry coming from the road behind, no doubt signalling that the youth had been successfully reunited with friends and family. Then an interval of relative silence, followed by angry shouting and indignant howls of rage: Shagrat thought he knew what that meant, but even as he was trying to quicken his steps still further he registered, with a sinking feeling, the sound of hoof-beats on the road behind him.
The Orc hadn’t reckoned on pursuit from horseback, and knowing from bitter experience that he had no chance whatever of out-distancing a rider on his mount, he immediately veered off the path, running between the trees. When he was still in the vicinity of the weavers’ village, the slight track or animal trail he was following petered out into nothing, and the ground began to slope steeply downhill.
It was hard going, through those woods. The trees on the walls of the gorge grew tall and slender and spaced far apart, but their open canopy allowed more light than usual to fall to the forest floor and an abundant under-storey of tangled bramble vine, stouts rope of hanging clematis, and other thorny bushes and spine-covered creepers had developed.   Time and again Shagrat had to use his sword to slash his way through the nigh-impenetrable thicket, the only consolation being that his pursuers from the village – whom he could still hear some way behind him - were meeting similar obstacles to their progress, too. A greater difficulty was actually that the sides of the ravine were surfaced in many places with patches of loose scree; expanses of flattish stones that were held only lightly in place by the network of roots and woody stems growing over them. Stumbling onto one of these areas, in a part of the forest that unfortunately, was not well-clothed in undergrowth, the whole plane of rocks under Shagrat’s feet suddenly began to slip downwards: for only a moment was he able to keep his balance and then he fell head over heels, bouncing off the accelerating rock-slide as it rushed him down the hill to the river running at the bottom of the gorge.
As he tumbled towards the rushing waters, a snippet of information from years ago, back in basic training in Mordor returned to him. On a black and frozen day in dead of winter, Shagrat, together with a motley selection of other new-recruits, lined up together on the edge of an ice-rimed cistern by an particularly sadistic drill-sergeant, had been kicked or pushed or shoved into its freezing depths one by one, in what turned out afterwards to be nothing more than a graphic demonstration of the point that when falling into cold water, the shock of immersion often made a person draw his breath in by reflex.
So much for Orcish training methods in outdoor survival: the Uruk was concentrating most of his efforts on trying to avoid breathing in a lungful of river when he belly-flopped into the water.
Shagrat floundered for a moment and then sat up, finding to his relief that the river was actually rather shallow, here. It seemed as good an escape route as any - and was considerably less trouble than forcing a path through the woods. The Orc splashed through knee-high water for a while, slipping and stumbling over the algae-covered rocks, but the racket of his progress was at least covered somewhat by the noise of the river, and the sounds of pursuit from the townspeople seemed gradually to die away behind. Concentrating more on keeping his footing than on looking where he was going, Shagrat didn’t register for a moment that the depth of the water was steadily increasing, as was the strength of the current – until suddenly his feet were swept out from under him and he was picked up and carried by the weight of water behind him, bashing over and crashing painfully through a barrier of rocks that formed a low, step-like waterfall across the path of the river. On the other side a dragging sensation caught him as the undertow at the foot of the weir started to pull him down - but only for an instant; for then the main push of water took hold of him, and twisting in the current he was swept downstream.
The Orc was out of his depth in this part of the river, and even if he had not been severely weighed down by water-logged clothes and armour plus all the other accoutrements he was carrying, had never learned to swim. But still in a sense he was fortunate, for the strength of the current here was so great that even as the waters would close over his head and he went under, he was kept moving by it, and at times was able to push himself up off the weed-covered boulders of the riverbed, lunging towards the surface to grab a precious lungful or two of air. Flailing inexpertly through the dark water, flung repeatedly onto river rocks and against other submerged objects, the Orc was carried far beyond the boundaries of the village. After what seemed to Shagrat like an age of struggling against the turbulent, freezing river, the current smashed him into a kind of natural dam running part-way across it that had been thrown down the previous winter when the floodwaters were in full spate. For a moment his position there held: he scrabbled frantically through woody debris trying for a hand-hold - but the next instant felt the tangle of branches he was lodged against began to break apart under his weight. Before he was properly adrift however, he snagged his claws into a hefty piece of waterlogged timber from near the base of the barrier which floated back into the main stream alongside him, and after several attempts was able to haul himself head and shoulders clear onto this slippery, make-shift raft. Riding low in the water, the bruised and battered Uruk clung to his tree-trunk like a drowned rat as the swirling river bore him away once more.
After a time the current slackened and Shagrat found he did not have to fight quite as strenuously to stay afloat. Eventually, prying free fingers that were stiff from cold and painfully cramped with the effort of hanging on, he risked trying for a better position on the log. With his face properly out of the water at last, the exhausted Orc slumped against his tree-trunk and closed his good eye for a moment.   The river, in fact, was carrying him - albeit at a slowish walking pace - in the direction he wanted to go, and the bobbing, rocking motion as he floated downstream was so very nearly pleasant that at times he almost fell into a doze.
By now the river had widened and was beginning to meander through low-lying water meadows bordered by fine stands of old willows, the watercourse switching its direction from side to side time and again in a succession of great, sinuous loops. The water was shallower here and the strength of the current greatly reduced. Resting his feet for a moment on a submerged sandbar and with his upper body lifted clear of the water, Shagrat thought he could recognise a group of familiar-looking poplar trees away on the floodplain. With the river now following its changing, twisting course, the distance to be carried near them by water was likely to be greater than it would have been on foot, and the Orc waded out of the main stream and into the shallows, ploughing his way through swathes of flowering water-crowfoot, booted feet stirring up great clouds of fine sediment around him.   Pulling himself up by a platform of willow-roots onto the riverbank, he rested briefly on his back.
The sun was not yet risen, but the sky was brightening and the meadows were already lit with a faint, cool and clear light. As yet the air retained a certain breathless quality, that (as Shagrat had occasionally noted) it quite often did during the changeover between darkness and break of day, that would only last until the first morning breezes began to blow. The Orc had always considered this time of waiting stillness in the pre-dawn, early hours as a signal for the various creatures that walked the night, to tell them that they should begin returning to their caves and dens and bolt-holes.   For those who lived in daylight however, that this was the part of the night when their dreams were at their deepest, and they would be most difficult to rouse from sleep. Under cover of the last of the old night, Shagrat thought he should be safe from any further trouble with humans, for a while as yet at least.
Picking himself up, the Orc set off towards the distant stand of trees.

TBC
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Speaks to the Trees