Isengard, 3004

She passed most of a year hidden in the deepest parts of her mind. Now and again, it occurred to her that there was something unnatural about this, but the feeling went away if she ignored it long enough. She could see the outside world going about its business, but it did not seem to matter. The pictures that came to her from the outside were clear but infinitely remote, and interpreting them took more effort than she could summon. She was safe inside, behind walls that were as clear as glass and stronger than stone. She rarely turned her attention outward. There was nothing out there to reward curiosity.

Her walled garden was tranquil and filled with color and fragrance. There was always a story unfolding there to occupy her whenever the beauty was no longer enough. Some were the old tales she had been raised on and others invented themselves as they went along, but in none of them did she ever see a person or a place she knew from before. That part of her life was lost forever and she was afraid of what might happen if she looked too closely at those memories.

She thought her captors might have been angry that she paid them no mind, but that did not really matter, either. She realized they had beaten her a few times, before they gave her up as a lost cause. But that was the glory of her wall - it was so very thick that even pain took a long time to get through. From a distance, she could watch them strike her, and her body would respond in the way the guards expected, if a bit sluggishly. But by the time the pain reached her mind, the sensations had dulled and the fear had been stripped away. It worked well. Left to fend for itself, her body reacted enough to keep from rousing the guards’ curiosity, but not so much as to make her a rewarding victim.

When the baby was born, she watched from a safe distance as the midwife and the guard argued over whether she would rouse enough to care for it herself. The midwife seemed to think not, but the guard disagreed. Finally, the guard tired of the argument, shoved the baby against her breast and placed her arms around it. There was something not quite right about the baby, but it would take too much effort to move her arms away and examine it more closely.

She now lived in a long, low-roofed stone chamber with many other slave women. How long she had been there was hard to tell. There was a pattern to her days that probably contained the answer, but the question could not hold her attention long enough. The baby huddled close to her and its little body was warm against her skin. Nobody had touched her except in malice for over a year, and his cuddling felt wonderful, like something from those days she would not allow herself to recall, before she was captured. His warmth reminded her of summer sunshine and thick fluffy blankets in the winter; all the beloved lost things. The wall was suddenly a hindrance instead of a blessing.

Looking at the baby sleeping miles away in her arms, she thought she could get through the wall if she really wanted. She was not quite sure how she built the wall to begin with, or if she would be able to build another if she breached this one. But in the end, it became so frustrating to wait for bits of muted pleasure to filter through that without ever deciding to, she began to work her way out.

She had built a good wall and it did not fall easily, but in the end, she broke through. The baby squeezed her finger and she felt it as it happened, the little warm palm touching and the fingers closing. She held the hand up to look at it, followed the baby’s arm back to the shoulder, and nearly vomited when she took her first real look at her son’s face.

Once when she was a child, a troupe of traveling performers had come through with a trained ape from some land beyond Harad. Her son bore a sickening resemblance to that ape. She knew what his father was - even through the wall there was no ignoring that - but somehow she had not expected her baby to look so far from human. She owed nothing to such a monster. She should thrust him away and have nothing to do with him, but he stayed pressed as close to her as he could get, and that was a thing too precious to give up just because he looked like an Orc.

She played with the baby, touching the bottoms of his feet to make his toes curl and caressing his cheek. The Dunlending whose pallet was next to hers noticed. “Hey, look, the lunatic’s back with us,” she said. The sound roused the Dunlending’s baby and it began to shriek in rage and strike out with its clawed hands. The Dunlending held it at arm’s length with a motion that looked more like a reflex than a conscious decision. “You got a name?”

She could only shrug. Her old name was gone along with her old life, and it did not matter much what came along to replace it. That other girl who used to live in her body had died almost a year ago, and as far as she knew, no one had bothered to name the one who lived there now.

The Dunlending snorted in exasperation. “Well, we can’t just keep calling you ‘the lunatic’. Too many lunatics to keep straight around here already!”

She shrugged again. All the names she knew were markers of nation and social position, and since she had neither now, how could she name herself?

The Dunlending cocked her head. “On second thought, we could call you Lu and the next one Nat and the one after that Tic so we don’t run out of names so fast.“ She chuckled a bit at her cleverness, provoking a fresh outburst from her baby.

Lu short for Lunatic. That might do very well, she thought.

After her son’s appearance, the smell was the first thing that caught her attention once she left her sanctuary. The chambers where they were kept were cut out of the base of the mountains that made part of the rocky wall surrounding Orthanc. The room had only one door and a handful of vents leading out to the valley floor. The vents allowed some fresh air in but no breeze could blow through to clear away the odor of slop buckets and wet swaddling bands. Somewhere nearby were forges and foundries, and though the breezes couldn’t find a way into the chamber, the smoke and fumes did. The vapors were pale and smelled as sharp as vinegar but prickled more in the throat, and when the wind was out of the north, no one could stop coughing. Tirga, the Dunlending who had named her, noticed her looking around for the source of the fumes and said, “Sharkey’s hid all sorts of things underground. There’s a workshop not far from here where they’re working with some sort of...of...oh, stupid Westron! Stuff that burns like lye.”

Lu nodded her understanding and the girl continued, “He still gets visitors now and again that wouldn’t like what he’s up to, so the slaves and the half-orcs and the armories are all tucked away down here where nobody’s going to see.”

It had worked, Lu thought. There had been no rumors of anything untoward going on at Isengard. She looked down at her baby and idly stroked his cheek. Even if she could walk out the gate carrying the proof in her arms, who would believe her? Saruman the White was a wizard of great power and respect. The implications of such a person secretly breeding monsters were more than she could bear, so she thrust the thought away.

The baby gave her one more sleepy smile before he dozed off in her arms and her eyes went wide She’d never been able to see the resemblance people claimed to find between infants and their elders, but those were definitely her brother’s dimples in her baby’s face. The likeness was startling. Maybe she could name the baby after him...no, under the circumstances, Hathaldir would hardly see that as an honor. Dairuin. That was better; one companion of Barahir for another. She would name him Dairuin.

As soon as the overseers noticed that the wall was gone, they expected her to join in the work. She did as she was told. With no shell around her mind, pain was immediate and frightening, and the work could hardly be beneath her anymore. The wheat was ripe and all the slaves that could be spared were busy with the harvest. The women who were not near term were led out into Nan Curunír, to the fields outside the walls of Isengard.

The baby, riding in a sling on her back, squalled at his first venture into daylight but soon settled. Lu looked around, squinting in the light of a cloudy morning. She had wondered why the handful of guards felt safe giving dozens of slaves sickles but once her eyes adjusted to the brightness, she understood. The cliffs ringing the Wizard’s Vale were nearly sheer. She looked up and down the valley, thinking that the smaller streams that fed into the Isen might have cut side valleys into the walls, through which more than water might go. But though she saw several small streams, all ended in high waterfalls. Apart from the Isen, none of the valleys feeding into Nan Curunír came within a hundred feet of the plain where she stood. The only way out was south, down the Isen and past the guards at the narrow mouth of the valley.

And if by some miracle she did escape, what then? There was no place for Dairuin outside Isengard, and she would not go without him. Even if she had been willing to leave him, there was no place in her old home for a ruined noblewoman. It would break her family’s hearts and their pride to see her this way. They would be kind; it wasn’t in their nature to be otherwise, but what could they do with her except keep her hidden away for the rest of her life? The despoiled maidens in the old songs always conveniently died, but even when she had not meant for it to do so, her body seemed bent on surviving. This was her life now, her name had always been Lu, and her baby was all the family she had. She settled him more comfortably against her and turned back towards the fields.

By midmorning, her hands were raw and sticky with fluid from her burst blisters. She could not seem to get the angle of the sickle right no matter how she tried, though it looked like such a natural motion when the other women did it. Several of the women glared and cursed at her for knocking down so much grain. When the water bucket went around at midmorning, Tirga elbowed her aside as she reached for the dipper, saying, “You were more use when you just sat there like a lump. You drink last, if there’s any left. No use wasting good water on somebody who thinks she’s too fine to work.”

Lu winced. She had no idea what to do with a sickle, but she had been raised from infancy to know the uses of social power, and that at least had not died with the girl she used to be. Tirga was very young, but most of the others liked and respected her. Only once or twice had Lu heard anyone mention Tirga’s ancestry, though the better-born among the Dunlendings often claimed heavy features like hers were only found in the lower classes and proved they had Orc blood. Lu couldn’t see a difference in appearance between the two groups, but the Dunlendings took it very seriously. If Tirga decided to gain ground with the better-born women by setting them all against the outsider, then Lu would be in trouble.

‘In trouble‘, she thought, marvelling at the absurdity of it. Being a breeding slave in Isengard is not 'in trouble'?

She noticed Tirga watching her closely through the rest of the day. The next morning as Lu struggled to wrap her blistered hands with a rag torn from the baby’s swaddling, the other woman came over.

“Here, you’ll never get that tied by yourself.” She quickly wound the scraps of cloth around Lu’s hands and tied them off. Lu must have been giving her a strange look, because she glared and said, “You may not be able to do much of anything, but at least you kept trying yesterday. I suppose it’s not your fault you’re so useless, and who knows, you might learn.”

Thinking of all the things she learned and wished she hadn’t since her capture, Lu was hard put to suppress a bitter laugh.

***

The longer she was in Isengard, the harder it became to keep herself from putting the pieces of Saruman’s plan together. The number of women in the dens continued to grow, and when they went out to the fields, they passed small groups of half-orcs training for battle. One rainy day while the baby napped, her curiosity got the better of her. She picked a bit of charcoal out of the fire pit and started figuring on the stone floor of the den. The babies grew much faster than humans, the rate depending upon the amount of Orc blood. At two months, Dairuin was beginning to sit up and had discovered that he could travel by rolling. Others with more Orc in them grew even faster. The female half-orcs would surely be bred as soon as it was physically possible. Tirga was proof that Saruman had no reservations about very young mothers; this was her third baby, and Tirga thought she hadn’t yet turned twenty.

So if she started with the number of women she knew were already in the dens....The number that she reached in the end was so startling that she thought she must have misread it in the dim light. She checked it twice before she could believe. Some of the women had laughed about Saruman’s half-orc army as they passed the training field, but in ten or fifteen years, it would be no joke. She hastily scuffed out the numbers with her bare foot.

That night as she lay on her pallet, she tried to distract herself from following her calculations to their logical conclusion by whispering stories of her past to her son. But in Isengard, things like listening to the music at a Midsummer fair or sailing toy boats down a stream seemed as unbelievable as the wildest traveler’s tale. Her words sounded like lies in her own ears, and she had to stop. Finally, she remembered the Narn i Hîn Húrin. She had hated the tale passionately when she had been made to read it as part of her Sindarin studies, but now it was the only thing that did not seem like a joke in the worst possible taste. Dairuin seemed to like the rhythm of the words, and listened with his eyes fixed greedily on her face.

Gradually, she learned more about the people who shared her prison. Most of the women in the slave dens were Dunlendings - surplus daughters of the poor, or the women of defeated rivals who had been sold to Isengard. Saruman was offering a good price for healthy young women. Tirga was appallingly proud of the amount the slave trader had given her parents for her and would boast of it, given any encouragement.

No one knew for certain what Saruman was offering the Orcs to induce them to bring undamaged women to Isengard, and no one really wanted to find out. Whatever it was, it persuaded at least some of them to keep their female captives alive and comparatively well until they could reach Isengard. Most of the women the Orcs brought in were from Rohan. Lu suspected that even the most enticing rewards could not restrain Orcs for a journey much longer than that. If there hadn’t been so many Men in the party that stumbled across her and her friends picnicking by a mountain stream, she doubted she would have survived. Even so, it had not been enough to save Celosiel or any of the others. Just for a moment, she could see plumes of blood in the clear water and hear... no, she wouldn’t think about that. The others were dead and she was alive and that was as much as she could bear to remember.

The overseers, like the women, were mostly Dunlendings. There were a few Men she thought might have been from Rohan or Gondor, but to her surprise, there were no Orcs among them. While the overseers were playing dice one evening, she asked Tirga about it. Tirga looked a little startled to hear a question from her, but answered readily enough. “No, no Orcs in here. I hear they tried letting them come in here to breed at first, but there were always fights and a couple of girls got hurt so bad they miscarried. Even Sharkey can’t scare them enough to keep them in line when they get all excited. We have mostly fellows from home as guards and they aren’t too bad.”

Since one of them had opened his trousers in front of her and ordered her to suck him, Lu couldn’t entirely agree. Still, he was less revolting than an Orc, and she knew by now how much worse it could have been. Her shock, disgust and ignorance made her awkward, but he had only cursed her stupidity rather than punishing her lack of skill. The men were under orders to do nothing that might get the women pregnant with a human child or that might endanger a half-orc already conceived, but some of them could be viciously inventive within those boundaries.

“Our fellows like a bit of fun sometimes, but mostly they just want to stay on Sharkey’s good side. Those others, though....” Tirga shuddered. “Watch out for them. They’re as bad as the Orcs, maybe worse. Orcs are cruel, but that lot’s smart and cruel.”

The warning came a little late, thought Lu, fingering her nose where it now veered to the right. There were a half-dozen or so men from Rohan or Gondor who had signed on with Saruman looking for a place that tolerated a level of brutality unthinkable in their homelands, and they made the most of it.

She herself had become a favorite object of speculation among the women. Her appearance did not match the images the Dunlendings had of people of Rohan or of Gondor. The Dunlendings were certain all Rohirrim were blond and everyone in Gondor was black-haired and very pale. The un-Númenórean brown hair that had embarrassed her all through her childhood was a blessing now. It inspired the others to spend hours concocting unlikely tales of illicit affairs and scandalous offspring, which she always made a great show of ignoring while she listened avidly. Those stories were as close to amusement as anyone ever got in Isengard.

Until she mastered the dialect of the slave dens, she rarely spoke. Her speech would have told the Dunlendings nothing, but one or two of the guards might have been able to recognize her accent. Everyone was sure she had been raised a lady, because her hands had been soft, pale and unmarked, and everyone had noticed her struggles with the reaping hook. Beyond that, no two theories agreed. She enjoyed the absurd ones, but serious speculation about her past made her uncomfortable. She was born here in Isengard. Whatever happened before, happened to someone else and ought to remain decently buried.

Whenever she had a few moments to herself, Lu surreptitiously watched Tirga and the others with their babies. She was not just imagining that her baby was different. Tirga’s baby was a bit older than hers, and had a full set of sharp teeth, which he was not at all averse to using. He bit or clawed almost every time he could reach some part of the Dunlending’s body; he would nurse only as long as he was desperately hungry, and as soon as the edge was off, he attacked. Most of the other babies barely tolerated being held, and would stiffen, scream and struggle if their mothers picked them up.

Any doubts she had disappeared. Dairuin was different from the others. He howled when he was put down, and when she picked him up, he’d nuzzle against her and tuck his little hands into her armpits. Like the others, he grew and matured faster than a normal baby, but there in his face were her brother’s eyes with their mismatched brows. The shape of his head and his jagged teeth made it clear what his father was, but the other half, the stronger half, was hers. She smiled and walked her fingers up his stomach to brush his nose and he giggled. When she moved her hand away, he called out “mama” and caught at her wrist. She sat back in astonishment. None of the others his age had spoken yet, and when the older ones spoke, their first words were usually demands for food. Delighted, she repeated their new game.

“Don’t waste your time on that little monster,“ said one of the other women, when she noticed what Lu was doing. “They get meaner as they get older, and if somehow he doesn’t, he’ll end up in the stew pot with the rest of the culls.“

Lu looked questioningly at Tirga, who jerked her head towards her own baby. “This one wasn’t too bad for the first month or two. They probably want to hurt you at that age, but there’s not much they can do about it.“

“Is it true what she said about the culls?“ whispered Lu as they went back to work. She wasn’t sure which frightened her more: that he would turn as vicious as Tirga’s baby, or that he wouldn’t and he would die for it. She hugged Dairuin close and he fussed a little, wanting to go back to their game instead of into his sling.

Tirga nodded curtly. “I worked in the kitchens here for a while. The orcs think the culls are delicious.“

“But those could be their children!“

“I don’t think Orcs like half-orcs any better than Men do. We wouldn’t think twice about doing away with a half-orc brat, and Orcs are nowhere near as squeamish.“

“Well, they won’t get Dairuin. There has to be some way to....” Her voice trailed off as she noticed Tirga’s peculiar expression. “What’s wrong, Tirga?”

Tirga had turned red from holding her breath and she gasped a couple of times before she could speak. “You named the little bastard! You actually named it!” She looked away, her shoulders shaking with smothered laughter, but recovered enough to catch Lu’s hand as she turned to stalk away. “Ah, I shouldn’t have laughed so soon after bad news, should I? No place like Isengard for tossing your manners into the cesspool. It was just the thought of naming them. It’s not like they’re real babies, after all. They‘re Saruman’s, not ours. He decides if they live or die, and what they‘re going to be called. When they go to the training barracks, they get a name in the Black Tongue and they forget you ever existed. Don’t waste a name on any of them.”

Lu kept her mouth tight shut. Tirga was wrong. Dairuin’s name wasn’t wasted, and he wouldn’t forget her. As long as he lived.

***

When the harvest was over, the slave women were given the task of sewing and knitting for the soldiers and slaves of Isengard, and that went no better. She couldn’t knit. It was a skill for cottar’s daughters and her mother had certainly not included it among the needlecraft she had been taught.

Lu had thought that sewing, at least, would present no problem. That belief lasted until the overseers brought around the work allotment. It was afternoon and most of the babies were napping. They slept more than Lu thought human babies did, thank the Valar, or there would have been no hope of keeping up with the work. At the rate the babies grew, perhaps it wasn’t surprising that most of them did very little besides eat and sleep.

The burly Dunlending who had accosted her earlier tossed a length of linen onto her pallet and said, “There, make yourself useful for once. That’s for two soldiers’ shirts.“ As he moved on down the row doling out bundles of cloth, Lu picked up the piece and looked at it in consternation. It could not be possible to cut one shirt for a grown man from so little cloth, let alone two. And she’d seen the soldiers training while they went out to the fields; half-orcs, most of them, and the proportions she had learned for a man‘s shirt would never work.

Tirga noticed her shock and said, “What’s the matter? You can sew, can’t you?“

“Of course I can!“ said Lu, stung. She had been accounted a skillful needlewoman, and had been very proud of her tiny, even stitches. Being forced to use any of that skill for Saruman’s benefit suddenly struck her as a terrible affront. She snapped back at the Dunlending. “Nobody ever thought I might need to know how to cut an orc’s shirt out of some paltry bit of sackcloth.“

As soon as the words were out, Lu cringed inside. She’d given anyone who still needed it proof that she came from a good family, and probably insulted Tirga into the bargain.

But Tirga only looked at her oddly for a moment. “Paltry, is it? It’s as good a piece of cloth as I ever saw when I was a girl. And there’s enough there to give you a start on a new shift for yourself if you cut it right.”

Tirga gave Lu’s shift an appraising look. It was the same one she’d been captured in and worn ever since, cut of a broad piece of finely-woven linen, and now ripped in several places and stained with blood and other things that it was better not to think about. She had considered trying to scrub the stains out, but she had no other clothing. The thought of stripping off the filthy shift in full view of the guards so that she could wash it was more than she could bear. If she had a spare shift, she could finally clean the old one. She was suddenly desperate for a bit of that coarse cloth.

Tirga glanced back at her own pallet, where her own baby was mercifully asleep. A similar piece of cloth lay at the foot of the pallet, and the concern on the other woman‘s face made Lu realize that Tirga would have little chance to make up the time she lost teaching her plain sewing. The Dunlending shot a nervous glance after the guard and said in a quiet, hurried voice, “They aren’t going to give you anything to make a new shift, so you’d better pay attention. Here, look....”

The Dunlending laid out the two lengths of fabric side by side before she went to the overseer to borrow the scissors. Kneeling down, she quickly folded and cut the cloth, then passed the scissors to Lu and ordered her to do the same. The layout was fairly simple, though Lu could see that the clothing would fit closer than she was used to, and seemed to have an inordinate number of gores and gussets. Lu cut her own cloth, earning an approving nod from Tirga. “You’re not as stupid as you look, are you?”

Lu shook her head. “Not anymore.”

By the time the winter was over, Dairuin had learned to walk. Once that happened, most of the children completely ignored their mothers and spent most of their time prowling the chamber looking for something or someone to attack. It was lucky for Saruman that the babies were as tough as they were or he would have lost half of them before they were weaned.

Lu thought at first that the babies left their mothers because they wanted to be with their own kind, but after watching a while, she decided that they were simply not comfortable around other living creatures. It was rather like watching a cage full of wildcats; they had no notion of how to deal peacefully with each other. Every encounter led to a fight, even between mother and child.

Soon she no longer had time to watch the others. She had enough to worry about. Dairuin had decided he liked the feel of the coarse cloth and if he could get his hands on it, he would latch his claws into it and wrestle it like a cat with a ball of wool. She’d saved almost all the cloth she needed for a new shift when he tore a hole too large to mend right in the middle of one of the shirts. She’d had to sacrifice the largest piece she’d saved to replace it. With the spring planting about to begin, there would be no more sewing for months, but she thought she could cut a replacement from the last length she’d been given and still meet the quota. If Dairuin tore another piece, she wouldn’t be able to make her new shift until after the harvest.

The next time Dairuin reached for a piece of cloth, she snatched him away and set him down on the other side of her. He shrieked and began scrambling back to his prize. When she moved him away again, he slashed at her with his claws. She threw herself backwards, eyes filling with tears. No, she thought, he can’t be like that. I can’t survive if he really is nothing but an orc. He sprang at her again, and she dodged out of the way. Remembering how Tirga had held off her baby, she reached in behind him and got a handful of the back of his shirt. He kept swinging and screaming “Bad, bad, bad mama!” but his blows couldn’t connect. The bleeding began to slow, and the drops welled up as round and red as currants before they slid down her arm. She watched numbly as they formed and fell. It was better to think of the pain in her arm than the one in her heart.

Eventually his rage passed, and he subsided into tired whimpers. She pulled a scrap of ruined linen from under her pallet and wrapped it around her bleeding arm, keeping a wary eye on her son as she did. Then as he had always done, he reached up for her. Cautiously, Lu picked him up. He sighed contentedly and laid his head on her breast. He dozed on her lap as she rushed to get the shirt done, and when he woke, it was as if the attack had never happened. As soon as he opened his eyes, he smiled at her and within a minute or two, he was begging for a story. She hid the shirt away before he could fly into another rage and started to recite what nursery rhymes she could remember.

“No, do right!“ he ordered. While she was still puzzling out what he meant, he climbed onto her lap and wrapped her arm around his waist. “Story,” he said with satisfied nod. She bent to hug him and drop a kiss on the top of his head before continuing with the rhymes. He was not turning into an orc, no matter what the others said.

The incident set the pattern for their days together. When she had to keep him from something he wanted, he attacked with all the violence that a creature so small could muster. She learned soon enough to watch for the first hints that he was getting tired. All the babies she’d known before had turned cranky when they were tired or hungry, so it was not hard to see why the Orc in him emerged most strongly at those times. If she caught him in time, she could head off the rage. The rest of the time, she learned how to keep him from injuring her. Still, he was hers, not some anonymous half-orc’s and certainly not Saruman’s.

Dairuin was fascinated by every finger game and nursery rhyme she could dredge up from her memory. He struggled hard with the words since his mouth was not shaped for clear speech, but he was speaking in complete sentences long before the others his age could do anything but scream. What he still loved best, though, was to listen as she told stories. By then, she had told him the Narn i Hîn Húrin so many times that she was certain he had learned bits of it by heart. He was hers.

As she smoothed his hair, she caught Tirga looking at the two of them sadly. The other woman must have noticed that he was still affectionate long past the age when most of the babies turned entirely vicious.

“Don’t get so attached, Lu” said the Dunlending with uncharacteristic gentleness. “You know nothing good‘s going to come of this, don’t you?”

Lu nodded and bent forward so her hair made a dark curtain around her and the baby. In its privacy, she struggled to will away the tears. It was past denying now that though he was a joy to her, he was not what Saruman required. He was going to die and there was nothing she could do to save him. “I know,” she murmured, “but as long as he’s still alive, I’m going to do everything I can to make him happy.”

She heard Tirga sigh. “Oh, Lu, that wasn’t what I meant! Well, never mind. I suppose you’ll just have to see for yourself.”

Lu shrugged the comment away. Someone or another was always trying to tell her that he was only an Orc, but she knew better. It baffled her that they couldn’t see it for themselves.

Once Dairuin could get around on his own, he began to explore the chamber like the other babies. Lu never let him go far. Three or four of the oldest children had become a menace, and they would have made short work of him if they caught him where she couldn’t reach them in time. It finally caught the guards’ attention the night one of the older ones attacked the slave who was carrying in the soup kettle.

The child had hidden among the women who were lined up for the food. As the slave passed with his eyes on the ground to avoid tripping over any of the half-orcs, the child hurled himself at the slave’s arm, biting and gouging. The slave shrieked and dropped the soup and the child turned to pounce on the spill. The mother tried to right the pot before all the soup was lost, but her child snarled and drove her away from his prize. Tirga shouted something in her own tongue that Lu was sure had to be an obscenity, kicked the child away, and set the kettle back on its legs. By then, most of the soup had already run into the gutters beside the central aisle, and none of the women were hungry enough yet to consider eating anything that had fallen in there. The children, though, snatched up as much as they could and stuffed it into their mouths.

Tirga gave the slave’s injury a quick look, and as soon as she saw that the child’s teeth and claws had missed severing an artery, she snarled, “What were you thinking of, dropping your guard around them? They’d kill you for that food if they knew how! Now we’re all going to have to go without dinner, thanks to you.”

The slave, shaken and still bleeding, backed away apologizing. The guard only grinned as he watched, and Tirga snapped at him, “You won’t be smirking long if that little monster manages to kill one of Sharkey’s pet half-orcs.”

The next morning a group of soldiers came to take the oldest children away. The girls went to a different breeding den, and the boys to the training barracks. Lu couldn’t decide whether she was more relieved or upset. Dairuin was safer for the moment with the older children gone, but it hurt to be reminded that she would not be allowed to keep him much longer.

As the strangers walked up and down the aisles, the children who were old enough to run fled. They had already seen enough of what went on in the dens to know that when those in power paid attention to the slaves, it normally ended in pain. They scattered, trying to hide under pallets or behind the workbox. Dairuin whimpered and threw himself at Lu, trying to burrow his face into her shoulder. She cuddled him close and rocked him a little. He gradually stopped whimpering, but would not raise his head.

One of the other children bumped against her just as one of the soldiers grabbed him. Lu looked up. The soldier holding the struggling child was Wulfstan, one of the most brutal of the guards, and he was staring fixedly at Dairuin. Without turning away, he handed the child he’d caught to one of the other guards. Lu looked around, trying to see what it was that caught his attention so. It didn’t strike her for a moment because it was so ordinary, but finally she realized that out of all the children who were old enough to walk, Dairuin was the only one that had run to his mother when he was afraid.

Wulfstan stared at Lu and the baby till she was nearly ready to scream, then shook his head angrily as if to clear it and stalked off.

Lu looked to Tirga for an explanation, but the other woman only shrugged. “I don’t know what goes on in his head, and I don’t want to. But he’s interested in you and the baby, and that can’t be good. Be careful!”

Lu took the advice to heart, but days passed and nothing else happened. She pushed the concern a little farther back in her mind and went on. Not long after midsummer, Tirga’s baby was taken to the training barracks and they began trying to breed her again. When the guards took Tirga away, Lu squeezed her eyes shut and tried to cover her ears. But at the worst of it, Dairuin woke and began to cry. She held him tight, wishing she could block the sounds, but not able to give up the comfort of his touch.

On her return, Tirga gave Lu a swat on the shoulder that was half-chastening and half-consoling. “Don’t take on so,” she insisted. “We don’t have it bad here, considering.”

Lu raised an eyebrow at the red marks that were deepening into purple on Tirga’s face and arms.

“Really,” said the Dunlending. She looked hard at Lu‘s baby and something seemed to dawn on her. “Oh, that’s right! It won’t be long till it’s your turn again. Well, don’t work yourself into a crying fit over it. Nobody wants to be with an orc, but Sharkey doesn’t let them get too rough with us. And there’s things you can do to get them off faster. I’ll teach you if you like.“

Lu nodded, but couldn’t repress a shudder. Tirga made an exasperated noise and said, “They rape the other slaves too, and those poor bastards usually end up dead or maimed. It’s kind of a good joke on the orcs, if you want to look at it that way. I don’t think they can mate at all without a little torture to get them going, and Sharkey only lets them hurt us just barely enough to get the job done. All they get is a really bad lay, and as long as we keep turning out these little monsters for Sharkey, we get enough food and don’t have to work ourselves to death. We could do a lot worse than this around here.”

“And much better at home.”

Tirga was momentarily stricken silent. “No,” she finally said with studied casualness. “It would be worse at home. We all worked till we dropped and got barely enough to survive. Then the house burned down and we lost even that. If it hadn’t been for this place, my parents would have had to sell all of us. Even after the slave dealer took his cut, they ended up with enough to give my sisters a little dowry and still buy some seed corn and an iron cooking pot. Maybe it doesn’t seem that way to you, but this is much better than watching my little sisters die, and not much worse than the sort of brothel that would have bought me in Dunland. These...things aren’t my real children, my sisters are. If I have to screw orcs to save them, then that’s what I‘ll do.”

Even after nearly two years in Isengard, Lu had a hard time imagining anything that could be worse than life in the breeding pens, but Tirga clearly believed what she said. Well, she’d never believed anything as dreadful as the last two years, either, so perhaps she simply lacked imagination.

***

“I have been keeping an eye on them, just as you said. If it had not been for your orders, I would have culled this one already.”

Saruman frowned. If the situation was as bad as Wulfstan claimed, that would make the second time in a month that one of the half-orc and human crosses had had to be culled. There were so many benefits attached to that cross that he had meant to have his entire army of such soldiers, but it began to look as if he would have to settle for uniformity instead. Breeding the women to full orcs gave a predictable result, but without the cunning and discipline that more human blood allowed. “Show me. Perhaps we may still be able to salvage it.”

Wulfstan stopped in the doorway and said softly, “There it is. As you can see....”

Indeed I do see, thought Saruman. The miserable little beast sat on its mother’s lap, and she seemed to be telling it a story, and the creature was listening enthralled. Saruman shook his head. He had hoped that this one in particular would have proven dependable, and given him a creature with the soul of an Orc in a body that could pass for a Man of Gondor. Still, with enough attention, there might be hope of remaking it into an adequate soldier at least.

The woman finished her story and tried to put the child down for a nap. It went wild, doing its best to injure her, but she got it in a hold where it could do her no harm and kept it there till its rage trailed away into sniffles. Then to his surprise, she gathered the creature close. “Better now?” she asked, and it nodded and lay its head on her shoulder.

“I nice to Mama,” it murmured drowsily. The woman smiled and rocked it until it fell asleep. She laid it tenderly on the pallet and covered it before reaching for her sewing.

He moved silently into the room and looked more closely at the mother. With this woman and a few others, he had planned to breed servants of undoubted loyalty who could move unnoticed through Gondor and Rohan. There were still a few of the quarter-orcs that might prove reliable, but the rest had shown an undesirable softness.

Still, he might find some gain in this apparent failure. To be able to produce the daughter of a noble house and offer her back to them so debased that she would choose her half-orc child over them...that was an unexpected bounty. Much could be made of such a revelation at a well-chosen time. If Gondor someday chose to pit its armies against him, he had a weapon available that would utterly crush one of its captains. He smiled.

In the meantime, there was much to be done. He called to Wulfstan, and the woman looked up.

Saruman! What is he...no! It can’t be time already.

He saw recognition in her eyes, and a flash of despair before her face went blank. Yes, this was the one who had retreated into madness. No matter. If she did so again, she would lose some of her power to wound her father, but by no means all of it.

“Wulfstan, from now on, you will take the infants from their mothers as soon as they can be weaned. They must be raised from the earliest possible moment to the service of the White Hand. This rate of failure is completely unacceptable, and cannot be allowed to continue.” He caught the woman’s gaze before he continued. “Take this one away and see to his training. Call him...hmm, Urgakh will do. Make a proper Orc out of him.”

He’s going to live, he’s going to live! But why? Saruman doesn’t do anything out of kindness. There has to be some other reason.

Ah, there was the surge of emotion, quickly suppressed, that he had hoped for in the mother’s eyes. “Yes, I have plans for this one. Perhaps you will see him again someday. Would that please you?”

What can he be planning? If I get what I want, it’s only because it suits his purposes. He would never offer that much unless there was some benefit to him. Oh, Valar, don’t let it be something unspeakable, because I don’t think I have the strength to refuse. Not if the price is Dairuin’s life.

He saw suspicion grow in her eyes and continued in a more persuasive tone. “Do not be so alarmed! I only want what is best for your child. Nowhere in Middle Earth will he find himself more valued. Surely if you love him, you must want to find a place where he will be useful and respected. So he will be within these walls, and your love for him need not be hidden.”

He’s right, Dairuin is wanted here. There’s nowhere else he can go, and Saruman does deal fairly with half-orcs. Maybe I was too suspicious, seeing dreadful plots where there was only the need of a good army. He said we could be together, that I wouldn‘t have to pretend not to care about my own baby. What could be the harm in that?

The woman said nothing and her blank expression slipped only a little, but Saruman was entirely satisfied with what got past her guard. He motioned to Wulfstan to take the child. It began to shriek for its mother as he carried it away, and the mother went rigid in the arms of one of the other slaves. Yes, her father would regret it if he ever tried to oppose Saruman the White. He must see if the same could be managed among the Rohirrim, where it would be of more immediate use. Had Erkenbrand a daughter?

Dairuin! Oh, don’t take him away! Why is he taking Dairuin away if he wants us to be together? He’s lying; it doesn’t make any sense unless he’s lying. ‘What could be the harm?’ If there were no harm in it, he wouldn’t have needed to fill my head with rubbish.

As Saruman walked away, Lu began to shudder against Tirga’s shoulder. She had seen a look like that on her brother’s face when he was fishing, after the bait was taken and the hook set. Saruman had the only bait that could draw her now, and he meant to use it. She had no idea what his purpose was, but it was sure to be something terrible, and how could she fight against something entirely unknown?

She doubted she could defy him for long; she was no Húrin. How was she to bear the view from Thangorodrim?

********

“Then Morgoth cursed Hurin and Morwen and their offspring, and set a doom upon them of darkness and sorrow; and taking Hurin from prison he set him in a chair of stone upon a high place of Thangorodrim. There he was bound by the power of Morgoth, and Morgoth standing beside him cursed him again; and he said: ’Sit now there; and look out upon the lands where evil and despair shall come upon those whom thou lovest...with my eyes thou shalt see, and with my ears thou shalt hear; and never shalt thou move from this place until all is fulfilled unto its bitter end.’

And even so it came to pass; but it is not said that Hurin asked ever of Morgoth either mercy or death, for himself or for any of his kin.”

The Silmarillion

  , Chap. 20 “Of the Fifth Battle”

Children of Húrin

by Salsify

Disclaimer: However much I admire his work, I’m not Tolkien and I never will be. This is a work of fan fiction, done entirely for the fun of exploring the blank places in history of Middle-earth.

Author’s note: This chapter has been revised substantially. Thanks so much to The Lauderdale and LOTRlover for the input!

Isengard, 3014

Lu was stitching a fur lining into a cloak when an Uruk she hadn’t seen before swaggered into the sewing room. He jerked his thumb at her and said to the overseer, “The Boss wants that one moved right now.”

“He wanted that cloak done ‘right now’ too,” said the overseer. “Why don’t he make up his mind?”

“Ask him yourself if you’re feeling lucky,” said the Uruk, grinning.

The overseer glared and swore, but told Lu to put away the work. “And mind you don’t wrinkle it. That’s for Sharkey himself.”

She folded her work carefully, wondering what was going on now. She’d nearly died giving birth to her fourth child, but instead of being given to the Orcs when she was no further use for breeding, she’d fallen into the most pleasant work to be had. Tirga told her years ago that the breeding slaves were well off, but this was undoubtedly much better. As long as she hadn’t run afoul of one of the guards, she had few chores beyond fine sewing for Saruman and his lieutenants. The Orcs left her alone, the work was hardly grueling, and she was kept as clean as the sewing room. Saruman took great care of the fine fabrics.

Isengard being what it was, though, there was always the fear that the job could be withdrawn as easily as it had been given. Now and then, she had been sent back to the breeding dens to teach sewing to any of the new girls who needed instruction. From those visits, she knew that Tirga was training as a midwife, but Lu knew of no others who had lived very long once they were no longer able to produce more half-orcs. They’d all been sent to the fields or the foundries, and most died within six months. The orcs didn’t waste any time making up for the restraint Saruman forced them to practice with the breeding stock.

The Uruk led her out the gates and off towards the far edge of the valley. She panicked for a moment, fearing that Saruman had thought the better of sparing her. Still, he’d let her live in relative comfort this long, and she couldn’t think of any rules she’d broken or guards she’d annoyed lately. It was more likely that they were going to allow her to see her son again. She hid a tiny smile at the thought. The work was exhausting and the overseers in the fields were renowned for their brutality since farm workers were so easy to replace, but it would be worth everything to see Dairuin.

He had been working as a field slave for the last couple of years, after it became clear that nothing they’d thrown at him in the training barracks would make him just like the rest. The bosses talked about it sometimes. They said Sharkey had had plans to make the boy into a soldier once he got a look him and saw he’d never pass for human, but that hadn’t worked. Her son never fit in anywhere in Isengard. The other half-orcs had nearly killed him before Sharkey got wind of it and sent him to the fields.

That made three times that Saruman had spared them when it would have made more sense to kill them. At first, she had been too afraid of looking at her past to wonder what the plan could be. She wouldn’t have survived those first few years if she had allowed herself to remember, but Isengard eventually proved to her that she could live through much worse than memories of her past.

Even when she allowed herself to remember, she had never been able to recall anything that explained his actions. Saruman might have guessed from her appearance and clothing when she first arrived that she was from Gondor and came of a good family. A party of well-born young people could not be slaughtered at a favorite summer retreat without causing a storm of talk all over the Outlands. Though the tales might have included the names of the girls whose bodies were never found, she thought it was unlikely that Saruman could have connected her to the right family.

Even if he had known her ancestry, what did he stand to gain by keeping her? Her plight would certainly not distress Lord Denethor to the point of altering his plans or changing any alliances. Her father would be more susceptible, but he was little use as a tool against Rohan. Still, if she and Dairuin were not being held as hostages, then what use were they? Dairuin could not be used as a spy, nor could he be placed into one of the half-orc troops. She was no use for breeding anymore, and fine sewing could be purchased elsewhere for less than the cost of her keep.

It wasn‘t like Saruman to leave any potential tool unused, nor to spare anyone who was no use to him, but he had spared them. It was more than she could fathom, and she no longer really tried to make sense of it.

The Uruk slowed as they reached a field of carrots where some slaves were at work Lu scanned the group hopefully, but didn‘t see Dairuin among them. When she spotted old Bran, she allowed herself a tiny smile. Nobody could remember a time before Bran arrived in Isengard, nor did anyone know for sure where he came from. He was as close as the field slaves had to a healer, and during Dairuin’s long recovery from the tortures he’d endured in the barracks, the older man had befriended her son. The two of them had been on the same crew ever since her son was sent to the fields, and Bran had undertaken to help him learn to behave like a Man instead of an Orc. If Bran was about, then so must Dairuin be.

“Here she is,” said the Uruk to a half-orc lounging in the shade of a hut. The overseer looked up at her and spat in disgust. He rolled to his feet and seized her by the arm to give the muscle an appraising squeeze. “Sha! Not enough meat on her to bother with. She won’t last, and she won’t be good for anything but soup bones when she croaks.”

The first orc gave a bark of laughter. “You’d better make her last. Sharkey wants her back same as you got her, and he’ll make you sorry if she’s not. Ask Garzh’s mates what became of him...when you’ve got a couple of hours to spare. And the Boss wants her working with Urgakh, too.”

“Why? That sorry excuse for a snaga wouldn’t have a go at her if you paid him in mithril.”

“He’s her whelp. Sharkey likes to see a happy family.”

The half-orc in charge of the harvest crew hooted and slapped his thigh. “Happy family...that’s a good one! Why didn’t Sharkey check before he sent the bastard’s mother over? Stupid dungworm got into a fight with the new slave again and they’re over in the factories. Ha! If you ask me, we should just kill the both of them and be done.”

He turned his annoyance back on Lu. “She doesn’t look like she’ll be any more use than her brat, and I‘m already shorthanded with those two gone. You’ll owe me if I have to coddle her along.”

The first orc made a dismissive gesture as he turned to leave. “Sharkey’ll owe you, and if you ever decide to collect, I want to be there to see the fun.”

The other growled and aimed a half-hearted blow at the first, who laughed and dodged out of reach. The overseer shoved Lu back at the Uruk. “I’m not taking this one off your hands unless you get me some that can work. I don’t care what Sharkey says, I‘m not letting those maggots at the factories do me out of two bonuses in a row.”

“I’ll be sure and tell the Boss you said so.”

“Not if I stuff your mangy carcass into the limekiln first,” said the overseer, fingering his spear suggestively.

The Uruk had only his knife with him. He made a scornful noise, but the hint of uneasiness in his expression suggested he was less than certain of his victory. After a moment, the Uruk said, “If they were mine, they’d be too scared to run even if I was gone all day. You run along and get the other two and I’ll have this lot properly trained before you get back.”

The overseer considered, then reluctantly snapped his fingers and told Lu to come along.

She clenched her teeth and hurried along after him. The fields and the mines were deadlier in the long run, but everyone feared the factories and the possibility of maiming injuries more. Compared to what the orcs did with crippled slaves, death by overwork or in an accident seemed relatively easy.

Though the factories were hidden underground, the earth above them could not entirely mute the noise. The path beneath her feet trembled slightly from the thump and roar of the machines underneath. The overseer yanked open a door in one of the low domes and dragged her down the stairs into a large chamber filled with metal presses.

After a short bellowed argument with the orc in charge of the presses, Groblug stalked off to the other side of the chamber. She couldn’t help giving a sigh of relief when she was left behind. The presses frightened the wits out of her, even when she wasn’t required to reach inside and snatch out a jammed part. Shortly, Groblug returned leading a young blond boy and her son. Dairuin stared at her in confusion for a moment, exhausted and still half-caught in the trance that came from working the machines too long. Finally, he broke into a brief smile. The expression looked odd on him, as if his face was already set in lines of despair and had to be wrenched to fit a lighter mood. The moment passed and he nodded solemnly at her as Groblug led them back out to the fields.

The two boys gave each other wide berth as they walked. Could this child have been the one Dairuin had been fighting with? The boy’s face was certainly bruised enough, but she had so hoped that Dairuin was beginning to gain some control over his violent urges. She sighed. It was probably too soon to expect that level of mastery.

As they neared the gate, the boy began making obscene gestures at Dairuin behind the overseer’s back. Dairuin looked down at the roadway and ignored him. At the edge of the field, the boy whispered something that Lu, with Dairuin and the overseer between them, couldn’t hear. Dairuin went rigid and snarled, “Rot you, Folcred!”

Groblug whirled and slammed the boy up against the wall of the hut. “Listen, you little pustule, ‘cause I’m not telling you this again. Sharkey wants this one alive. I don’t know why, so don’t bother asking. You, though...if anything happened to you, we could get five more just like you by tomorrow. Get the idea? Pick another fight and he can kill you for all I care.”

He flung the boy toward the field. Bran had come up to get Dairuin, his usual partner in the fields, and Folcred reeled into him. Lu wasn’t certain who looked angrier, Bran or the boy. Folcred’s fury was easy enough to understand - no one enjoyed hearing just how little his life mattered in Isengard - but Bran’s patience with Dairuin was normally endless. He’d obviously reached the end of it today, and his expression lightened only a little when he saw her standing behind Dairuin.

“What are you standing around for? Get to work!” said Groblug, leaning back into the little patch of shadow cast by the hut.

Lu pulled Dairuin into the field. “It looks like I’ll be working with him for a few days,” she murmured to Bran as they passed.

“Talk some sense into him before he and Folcred get us all packed off to the mines. I’m not getting anywhere with either of them.” Bran gave Dairuin one last glare as he towed Folcred, still fuming and inclined to balk, off to the other end of the field.

Dairuin grinned briefly and unkindly. “Good. Now he can gnaw on Folcred for a while instead of always me.”

Lu sighed. “Maybe he has good reason. Do you want to dig or trim?”

“Dig,” he said. His eyes lost focus and he shuddered. After a moment, he picked up the shovel and said, “Groblug said he’d break my fingers if he caught me with a knife.”

That was something new since the last time they had met, and it didn’t make a great deal of sense to Lu. If Groblug had suddenly become concerned about slave revolts, Dairuin was the last person he should suspect. The other slaves wouldn’t trust a half-orc with their plans, and they wouldn’t accept one as their leader. Nor did it make sense for the guards to worry about his rages. They had swords and spears and wargs against the short knives that the slaves used, and the guards were hardly going to be taken by surprise by a quick temper in a half-orc.

“Why no knives?” she asked as they started to work.

Dairuin grimaced. “Groblug’s onto me. You heard him; he has to keep me alive, so he won’t let me touch anything sharp.”

Lu squeezed her eyes shut. She had wondered during her last visit whether he was considering killing himself, but she’d thought she managed to talk him into being properly repulsed by the idea. It seemed she hadn’t.

“I thought this time I’d got him, though,” Dairuin said, more to himself than to her. “I thought he was finally so mad that he’d forget, but he didn’t. He put the sword back half-drawn ... he didn’t even touch me. If he’d started to beat me, I know I could have made him kill me, I know I could!” Suddenly, he recalled that she was listening, and fell silent.

She wanted to grab him and shake him and tell him what she’d been taught as a child: that suicide was not even a last resort. She couldn’t, though. They were slaves, not heroes of legend, and some things were more than even heroes could bear. She looked away, making herself very busy with the harvest until she had a better grip on herself.

It was a long time before the tension eased enough that she could ask, “What was the fight about?”

“It was that new slave, Folcred. He was taken in a raid on some little village in the Westfold, and the rest of his family was killed. He hates orcs,” said Dairuin curtly, seeming to find that all the explanation that was necessary.

“You’ll have to do better than that. Everyone in Isengard hates orcs, not excepting the other orcs. What else?” She suspected she knew the answer, but asked anyway.

Dairuin set his jaw and dug a few more feet of row before he began to fidget under her stare. “Oh, all right! If you must know, it was the things he said about you. I tried to ignore it, just like Bran said, but some of the others were starting to repeat it and I lost my stupid temper again and went for him. I’m doing better,” he added plaintively. “I wasn’t trying to kill him or anything, just make him shut up.”

Lu looked away, caught between chiding him for his lack of restraint and praising him for not losing control entirely. He had never been one to seek out a fight, but once in one, he seemed to forget all boundaries. If he hadn’t gone beyond his original intention to bloody Folcred’s nose, then he was making progress.

“Ma, I thought they were my friends...well, at least not my enemies,” he went on without noticing her dilemma. “They knew what he was saying was a lie and they still repeated it! Why would they say those things when they knew they weren’t true?”

She sighed. Dairuin might look like a grown man, but he was only ten. When it came to understanding human nature, he often seemed even younger than that. He’d been raised most of his life in the training barracks, and they studied humans only as warriors they would someday have to fight. How Men behaved among themselves was a mystery that Dairuin had only lately begun to explore. She gave the carrots a good deal more attention that they deserved as she tried to put what she needed to say into terms that would make the situation clear to a very young child without patronizing a young man.

“They know it isn’t true,” she said finally, “but sometimes people will do what their friends are doing even if it’s wrong. It’s the way we’re made. Sometimes it seems more important to be part of the group than to be kind or honest.”

“But that’s not right!” said Dairuin, jabbing the spade into the ground angrily.

Lu hoped he hadn’t just sliced the carrots in two. If Groblug wanted to do the factory bosses out of a bonus, he was not going to look kindly on any waste. As she pulled the vegetables free of the dirt, she said, “I know it’s right, but that’s the way it is. In a few days, when they’ve stopped going out of their way to be kind to Folcred, things will probably go back to the way they were before he came.”

“I won’t.”

“No, you won’t, but Dairuin....”

“Don’t call me that! I’m just an orc. I shouldn’t have a fancy Elven name,” he snarled.

“If you want to quibble, you’re more entitled to ‘Dairuin’ than you are to ‘Urgakh’. You have more human than orc blood.”

“As if that matters!”

In the eyes of the rest of the world, he was probably right, so Lu didn’t press the matter and he let it drop to return to the carrots.

***

He and Folcred were not allowed to stop at noon and have their share of the bread and soup. Lu watched them toiling away at opposite ends of the field and slipped a chunk of bread up her sleeve while the overseer was looking the other way. The guards were always watching for any excuse to beat one of the slaves, but Lu had had plenty of practice at smuggling food to her son. Dairuin was usually being punished for something again as soon as the prior punishment was over. Though she knew he had his full growth now, he was still learning as quickly as a human ten-year-old and his life would be hard enough without being starved into feeble-mindedness as well.

By the time everyone returned to the hut that evening, Dairuin and Folcred were both trembling with hunger. The slaves had always suspected, and Bran had recently confirmed, that the porridge of boiled grains that they were offered morning and evening was the same stuff that went into the troughs for the livestock. It was clearly chosen to be palatable to the animals rather than the humans. The latest batch was almost too bitter to eat, and even half-starved as they were, most of them could not choke it down. There was plenty left from that morning.

Lu noticed Folcred’s friend Kuy slipping a handful of food out of his shirt and winced. She opened her mouth to warn him to wait, but before she could get the words out, Gorblug came in with the bucket of water.

“Skai!” he snarled, dropping the bucket. “No food for him! Don’t you lot ever listen?”

He ground the bread into the dirt under his foot, then grabbed the man by the arm and flung him out the door. “Well, you’ll learn now,” he said, pulling the whip from his belt. “Out here, the lot of you. Now!”

Kuy took off his shirt, though his fingers shook so that he barely managed it, and handed the garment to Folcred. The boy sprang back in alarm when the half-orc snapped the whip in his direction.

“Yeah, you should jump! If I had the time, you’d be next. Pay you back proper for putting him up to it. This’ll have to do, though.” Groblug turned back to the other man, who stood bone-pale and braced for the beating.

Lu clenched her teeth and stared at a point high on the wall of stone that surrounded Isengard. It was all too easy to put herself in his place - she’d been beaten for the same thing several times before she learned caution - and each blow woke an echo on the skin of her back. Dairuin reached out and squeezed her hand.

She pulled him closer. Groblug was far gone in the enjoyment of his task, and she thought it was as safe now as it would ever be. Sheltering the movement behind her son, she pulled out the piece of bread and tucked it into his shirt. He jumped and whispered with his lips barely moving, “Not now, Ma. Are you crazy?”

“Always,” she murmured as she began to edge away from him, “Always.”

The overseer truly must have had no time to spare, because the beating lasted only a fraction of the usual time. He normally liked to drag the torment out as long as possible and display all his skill, but this time, he struck hard and quick and without any particular cunning. When he was done, he ordered them back inside curtly. Folcred got himself under the other man’s arm and helped him inside. As Lu started towards the doorway, Groblug blocked her way with his whip.

“Not so fast. I’ll bet you have something for that brat of yours, don’t you?” he said. He ran his hands over her body, and she set her teeth, expecting him to make the most of the opportunity, but he did only a hasty search. He squinted at her suspiciously, then glanced at the hut where Dairuin stood in the doorway. “If I wasn’t already late.... I’ll catch you at it next time, though. Count on it.”

He shoved her hard between the shoulder blades, knocking her through the door. Dairuin caught her and pulled her inside. The overseer gave them one last glare and stalked off.

In the hut, the injured man was already lying beside the fire.

“Build this up, will you? I need more light,” said Bran, and Folcred tossed on a few more of the twists of straw that served them as fuel. “Is there any water left?”

“No, it’s all spilled,” said one of the others. He looked doubtfully out the door. “I don’t think I could get to the river, but since Groblug is gone, I could probably get some from one of the cisterns.”

“That’ll have to do,” said Bran, and the other man picked up the bucket and hurried out.

Folcred squatted next to his injured friend, now and then glowering across the fire at Dairuin. Dairuin hunched down and pretended not to have noticed until the man returned with the water.

Bran dampened a bit of rag, then paused and squinted for a moment. “I need more light. Urgakh, put some more of the hay twists on the fire,” he said, then seemed to think the better of it after the words were already out.

Dairuin tossed a few more knots of dry grass onto the fire. As he turned away, his gaze fell on the injured man as Bran began to wipe the blood away. Lu had been so busy chasing her own thoughts about bread and beatings and the ability of Isengard to crush all noble impulses that she didn’t notice what was going on until Folcred cried out in disgust.

Oblivious to everything else around him, Dairuin was reaching slowly towards the blood that still oozed from one of the deeper cuts. If he touched it, she knew from experience that he would dip his fingers in the blood, carry it to his mouth, and suck his fingers clean with a look of utter bliss.

“I can’t help it,” he’d told her once. “It’s almost like it has a life of its own. Everything here is so grey and dull, but it’s so bright it glows. It’s so much more... real than anything else is here.”

She’d distracted him that time by remarking that when it came to things that were real and alive in Isengard, in her opinion the fleas were the clear winners. This time, though, his eyes were glassy and he didn’t seem to realize at all that his hand was moving towards the wound. No joke would break the fascination this time.

“Dairuin!” she shouted, calling him by the name that only she ever used. Interfering would only call attention to how he was different from the others, but the last thing they needed now was for him to do something entirely orc-like just when Folcred was accusing him of being an orc.

Dairuin jumped, but his hand kept reaching forward. He stared at it aghast for an instant, then whirled and thrust his finger against the hot stones of the fire pit. Lu sprang forward and snatched his hand away.

“Stop it!” she said, steering him to the water bucket to try to cool the burns.

“What else was I supposed to do?” he asked. His voice was angry, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes and he was flushed with embarrassment. “I couldn’t think of any other way to stop myself.”

She sighed. “You just need more practice. It will come with time.”

“Ha!” said Folcred triumphantly. “What did I tell you? It only takes one drop of orc blood to make an orc. Everybody knows that.”

The others shifted uncomfortably. Aside from the general unpleasantness of being forced to work with people who couldn’t get along, most of them had been present when Dairuin got his last chance to be accepted into one of the half-orc regiments. He hadn’t been able to torture the balky slave they‘d offered him, not even when the alternative was to take the other slave’s place in the hands of the torturers. The others might not like him or entirely accept him, but Lu knew they understood that there was a point beyond which the one they knew as Urgakh was not an orc at all. The others were too respectful of Folcred’s grief to argue with him about it now, but if he still said the same in the spring, he might find them less receptive.

She leaned closer to Dairuin and murmured, “Ignore him. He’s still too hurt by what happened to his family to care about the truth. You are not an orc. You just have to work harder than other people do at being a Man. Don’t worry. It will come naturally one of these days. Bran and I will help you all we can.”

He kept his eyes turned away, but he didn’t try to pull his hand out of hers as she tied the bandage. Well, perhaps later when he was calmer, he would remember her words and take comfort. They really did need to drill more, though, on ways to channel those violent impulses. Still, if his burned fingers pained him enough in the fields tomorrow, it might remind him of the price of giving in to his baser urges the next time Folcred goaded him. She sighed. There was sure to be a next time.

Bran was done cleaning the injured man’s back by then, and frowned and shook his head at Folcred as he wrung out the rag.

“Orc lover,” said Folcred, glaring back.

Before Bran or Dairuin could say anything, Kuy lifted his head off the floor and said, “Be quiet, boy. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Folcred flinched away, then froze as he noticed a small piece of bread lying on the floor beside him. Lu squeezed Dairuin’s unburned hand, as certain as she could be that when her son went to eat the bread she’d saved him, it would be half its former size. Folcred seem to suspect as much too, because he glared at Dairuin again and said, “Half-orcs have no business trying to pretend to be Men because they’re not Men and they never will be.” But for all that, he kept the piece of bread as he retreated to his blanket.

Bran frowned at the boy. “What would you do, then? Encourage him to act more like an orc? Seems to me that we have plenty of those already.”

Folcred frowned and grumbled, but said nothing further. With one last glare at Dairuin, he rolled himself into his blanket and turned away with great finality.

Lu raised her eyebrows and murmured, “That’s settled, then.”

“Until they put another new man on the crew,” said Dairuin bleakly.

“You can worry about that when it happens,” said Lu. “Now get some sleep and remember that I’m very proud of you.”

“Silly Ma,” said Dairuin. As he lay down and wriggled around in search of a smooth bit of ground, he asked hesitantly, “Ma, would you tell me the story again?”

“Which story?” asked Lu, though she was pretty sure she knew.

“The one about the children of Húrin.”

Children of Húrin

by Salsify

Disclaimer: However much I admire his work, I’m not Tolkien and I never will be. This is a work of fan fiction, done entirely for the fun of exploring the blank places in history of Middle-earth.

Isengard, morning of March 2nd, 3019

Lu had never become accustomed to being in Saruman’s presence. He had summoned her dozens of times over the years but it had never become an everyday occurrence and it always unnerved her. At first, she had been brought before him alone, but after a few years, Dairuin was usually summoned along with her.

This time, she was once again alone in one of Orthanc’s upper chambers with only her fears to keep her company. The thought was almost enough to make her laugh; dread was a very loyal companion these days.

The chamber held little besides bookshelves and a chair and a table strewn with maps and notes. She’d been left alone in that room more than once, but she had never looked at the papers again after she pulled out an ordinary-looking ledger and found that it listed scalp bounties paid in the previous month - five silver coins apiece for an adult of the Rohirrim and three for a child. Had Saruman paid for the slaughter of her friends too? The reawakened memories had driven her to the edge of collapse: screams filling the glade, the warm smell of entrails, and the orcs moving among the dead and dying, laughing and collecting trophies.

Apart from the papers, the only thing to occupy her while she waited was the window, and it did have an excellent view. The fields where she’d worked after Dairuin was born were long gone now. The last time she’d had a chance to look down from here, there had still been a swath of fruit trees and tilled ground along the road from the gates to the doorway of the tower. Even that was gone now. Until Mithrandir arrived, that corridor had been carefully maintained to preserve the illusion that nothing untoward was happening in Isengard. Now it seemed Saruman had decided there was no longer any need of secrecy. No one came to Isengard anymore except as an ally or a prisoner.

The half-orc army whose existence she’d guessed at so many years before was now a reality. From the window, she could see them down below looking small and harmless from this height, but as busy and numerous as ants while they loaded the packs and readied their weapons. Her two younger sons were undoubtedly down there somewhere. They, at least, were exactly what Saruman had hoped to produce. Whether her daughter fell in gladly with Saruman’s will or fought it, she had no idea. All Lu knew was that she was somewhere in the breeding dens, turning out still more half-orcs whether she liked it or not.

Isengard was full to overflowing with orcs, half-orcs and troops from Dunland, and the place hummed with a tension that was impossible to overlook. The slaves had never been told directly of Saruman’s plans, but by now everyone knew that the next few days would see the war move out into the open. What that meant for her and Dairuin was still a mystery, and in Isengard, surprises were never a good thing.

They were still no use for any of their original purposes. Neither of them had ever heard the so much as a rumor of any other use that might be planned for them, but whatever Saruman intended seemed to require that mother and son should remain close. That thought made Lu excruciatingly nervous. The wizard wouldn’t encourage their love unless it was to his advantage somehow. If she had any honour or even any sense, she should push Dairuin away and thwart whatever it was that Saruman was planning. Well, she’d never had much sense, and honour and nobility were not virtues that held up well in the dens, especially not when set against something as precious as her child’s love.

She didn’t want to be party to whatever evil Saruman had planned for them, but how could she resist when it probably meant rejecting Dairuin? It was possible that she might be a hostage, but in fifteen years, no one had given any hint of knowing who she had been before. Even if Saruman had heard the tale of the slaughter by the stream, she doubted anyone could be certain about which of the young women she had been. She and her friends had all been dressed in plain, sturdy clothing suitable for a walk in the woods, and she was not the only girl in the party whose body would never have been found. She had thought as she watched Eilinel and Celosiel die during the journey that there could be nothing more terrible than their deaths. Isengard had taught her how much she had been mistaken; they could have lived instead.

She shook her head hard, still not willing to look too closely at those memories, even after years immersed in the horrors of Isengard. That glade was the bridge between the two halves of her life, and it was hard enough to survive on this side of it without remembering too much of what had gone before. Her earlier life was gone, and so were the years of careful preparation in Isengard.

War was almost upon them and the training and provisioning of the troops had taken on a frantic urgency. The valley was covered in haze regardless of the weather, and a layer of soot quickly settled on anything left outdoors. The forges ran constantly to turn out more weapons. They were dreadful shoddy things by Dairuin’s account, apt to break under even a middling blow, but Isengard had them by the cartload.

“Sharkey goes for quantity, not quality,” Dairuin told her one day at mealtime. He waved one hand back toward the training field, now packed with warriors. “With them, too. All he needs from half-orcs is a little skill with weapons and a will to tear apart every living thing in sight. If five or ten of us die to kill one man, well, he’ll still have the numbers on his side, won’t he?”

Judging by the horde getting ready to depart below her, he had not been exaggerating.

“It will not be long now,” said Saruman quietly from behind her.

She jumped and spun around to curtsy deeply. Sometimes Saruman treated her almost as if she was a colleague rather than a slave, but she had learned that it wasn’t safe to rely on that leniency. “You wished to speak to me, sir?”

“Yes.” Saruman went to the window himself, turning her back to look out again. “The time for preparation is at an end. Already armies are on the move, driving events to the conclusion I have long foreseen.” He looked over at Lu, compassion clear on his face. “Soon you will be free of the prejudice that has trapped you here. You will no longer have to hide the love that binds you and your son together.”

She smiled and nodded. Her smile widened as an image rose in her mind of a tidy little village she’d never seen before. She was walking across the market square with Dairuin beside her. The brilliant sunlight of a midsummer noon shone on the stone cottages, with their well-scrubbed steps and window boxes full of marigolds so that the flowers seemed to glow from within. The villagers noticed them but went calmly about their business, inspecting the goods and dickering over prices. No hands went to swords and no cruel words were spoken as they passed. The people nodded in greeting and one stallholder called out a cheery comment that made Dairuin laugh. She was so enthralled by the picture that it took a moment to drag her attention back to Saruman.

“Such a world is close, Lu, very close,” Saruman continued, still watching her. “You can help me bring it about, if you will.”

“Yes, of course I will!” The village was still clear in her mind and more real than Orthanc itself and she longed for it more than she had desired anything in years.

Saruman smiled indulgently. “Your enthusiasm does you credit. Then listen closely and I will explain your part.

“I am certain you have noticed that the war we have expected for so long is finally upon us. For the moment, our part is against the Riders of Rohan, but Théoden has little will to fight and Théodred ...no matter. Rohan will soon fall, and we will move south.”

“South?” she asked, confused. Till now, Saruman had spoken only of Rohan and the lands to the north. He had never shown an interest in conquering Gondor, only in preventing it from interfering with his plans for Dunland and Rohan. She knew by now what forces he could muster very nearly as well as he did, and he did not have an army sufficient to conquer Rohan and Gondor both. If Saruman’s troops were going south, he had to be expecting aid from....

Saruman, watching her closely, said, “I can well imagine what you have been told about Mordor, Lu, but it is not true. Sauron has great power, and so his enemies will call him cruel and despotic rather than admit that he is mightier than they are. For those who are wise, there will be many benefits to his rule. I know you are not one to rush into error; your prudence will serve you well in this. Do not allow silly nursery tales to cloud your judgment! We have a chance now to bring peace to these lands for the first time in your life. It would be unthinkable to let the chance slip away only because Gondor uses Mordor as a bugbear to frighten little children into obedience.”

He drew her back to the table with its litter of maps and spread out one of Gondor. Giving her an assessing look, he said, “If we were to move down the coast rather than through Anórien, which fief would we enter first?”

Lu felt her throat tighten. She knew right down to her bones that what Saruman said was wise and true, but still...Mordor! She had to swallow hard before she could answer. “Anfalas, if we go around Andrast. Pinnath Gelin, if we go through the Pass.” Even after fifteen years, she shuddered, remembering her last trip through it.

Saruman nodded. “And there you may help me both to achieve a victory and to prevent unnecessary loss of life. Your father, Lu...”

Without any intention on her part, a tiny whimper escaped. The wizard patted her hand reassuringly. “I have known since you first arrived who your father is. I have no wish to slay him or his people, none at all, and in that you may aid me. Hirluin the Fair has fallen under the influence of diehards and fools. He is ready to throw away his life and his people’s lives to oppose powers he can never hope to defeat. I have seen the forces of Mordor and they cannot be defeated by any army in Middle-earth.” The wizard’s gaze lost focus and he smiled very faintly. “No, not by any army.”

Then he seemed to recollect himself and continued, “How much better for everyone if Hirluin understood his error before those lives were lost! There you can help me, you and Urgakh.”

“What must we do?” asked Lu, a little hoarsely.

“You need do very little, I think. Your father and your brother only fear what they do not understand. Once they have seen the affection between you and your son, they will realize that they fear to no purpose. From that point, I have every chance of persuading them to set aside a mistaken cause that is already lost.”

Lu nodded slowly. It made sense. Father and Hathaldir were reasonable, caring men. They would not let Pinnath Gelin be laid waste if there was any alternative. Once they met Urgakh, they would see that he was a son to be proud of, and that Saruman could be a generous master. Pinnath Gelin would be saved, and her family would be whole.

The wizard smiled. “I knew I could rely upon you to do what is best for your family and for Pinnath Gelin. I must see to the ordering of the troops now, but I will send Groblug up to take you to your new work crew.” He looked back over his shoulder as he left the room. “It will not be long now. Give Urgakh the good news when you see him.”

Then he was gone. Lu closed her eyes and smiled. The two of them would be able to save Pinnath Gelin from terrible and unnecessary carnage. Then she would see her family again and introduce Urgakh to them. They would be startled at first by his appearance, but in no time, they would see her son for what he really was and learn to love him as she had. She would have what she had never thought to have in this world - her whole family together and happy. The thought of that made her feel satisfied and...

Deluded.

He’d done it again, hadn’t he? Her mind was awash with the misty warmth that she had come to regard as Saruman’s signature. What had she agreed to this time?

She’d learned years ago that she could not keep Saruman from toying with her thoughts, and she had eventually stopped trying. The harder she fought the interference, the more skilfully he had used the enchantment of his voice. Even though half of his mind had always been on some other matter when he spoke to her, she could not shake off the compulsion while he was there. Once his attention was elsewhere, though, she had found that she could go back and winnow his thoughts out of hers. What Saruman put into her head always seemed a little...sweeter, perhaps? than what grew there naturally, and he’d certainly given her enough opportunities to study the difference.

That charming village scene, what of that? She never let herself think of such things. Surely it had come from him, but it somehow didn’t have exactly the right flavour. He’d never sent her such an intense and detailed vision before. Other times, he’d convinced her she saw bright sunshine, but it had never been this real before. The skin of her cheeks had even felt a little tight, as if she was beginning to sunburn, and Dairuin had had a definite door of sweaty orc. Saruman had never put in any of the unsavoury details before. Had he learned more about the way her mind worked? She went over the scene again. It still didn’t feel like Saruman’s work, but he’d clearly been aware of what she was seeing. She gave up on that part and considered the plan instead.

On that, Saruman’s mark was clear. That blandly perfect family reunion was impossible to square with her father‘s quick temper or Dairuin’s melancholy or her own habit of pulling back into herself. If the three of them ever did meet, the result would be anything but sweet and mild.

Father would never accept a half-orc grandson. He’d always been so proud, so careful of all the details of protocol. Though he was more usually known as Hirluin the Fair, she’d heard “Hirluin the Hairsplitter” more than once from the local gentry when he‘d pushed them to the limit with his finicking attention to every detail of conduct. He hated to be taken for a yokel, and he’d always gone to great lengths to ensure that no one from Minas Tirith could fault his or his family’s refinement. Meeting Dairuin - dear uncouth half-orc Urgakh - would destroy him.

In his anguish, it would be all too easy to provoke her father into a rash attack. The mountains were Gondor’s guardians to the north, and if Saruman could bring his army through the pass and establish an outpost in Pinnath Gelin, Gondor’s least costly defence was lost. She had half-listened through enough of Hathaldir’s lessons on strategy and tactics to know that there were very few places between Isengard and Minas Tirith where a much weaker force could hold off an invading army for long. The best place to make a stand was at the pass. Once the enemy crossed the mountains, the people of the Outlands could do little more than harry them as they passed.

She fell back against the wall. All Saruman had to do was produce her and her son at the appropriate time and turn the full strength of his voice on her father and brother. He wouldn’t even have to be there himself. Gossip among the guards said that he could use one of his minions as a conduit for the power of his voice, and that he had done just that in Rohan. Where there was any opening at all for him to exploit, Saruman could seduce even the strongest. Her sudden reappearance with a beloved half-orc son would give him that opening against her family. By the time they realized their thoughts were not their own, there would be tens of thousands of orcs camped in Pinnath Gelin.

She might resist when Saruman turned his attention elsewhere, but what could she do? Once they knew she still lived as Saruman’s hostage and would not repudiate her son, the damage would be done. The damage probably had been done fifteen years ago when she fell in love with her baby. If she didn’t fight somehow, she might as well declare herself Saruman’s loyal slave in truth, but she could see no way to change what was already done.

Out in the corridor, she heard the heavy tread of the orc who was supposed to take her to her son. She pushed herself away from the wall and settled her face into the chilly impassivity that was her habit around the orcs. The only blessing she could see was that Saruman must be certain that she was entirely under his spell. He would never have moved her to Dairuin’s crew otherwise. It was little enough hope, but perhaps there was still something they could do to avert the disaster.

******

TBC

Author’s notes:

As you probably noticed, what Saruman tells Lu of the planned attack on Gondor doesn’t sound much like what actually happened. Since this takes place before Saruman’s defeat and before Aragorn revealed himself to Sauron through the palantir, I assumed the plan at that time might have looked very different. If Saruman had had the easy victory he expected in Rohan, it might have seemed reasonable to attack Gondor from the north as well, particularly if he thought he could get a foothold there at a fairly low cost.

Thanks so very much for the reviews! I’m always happy (and amazed!) to discover that I have readers for this one, what with the OCs and half-orcs and near-total lack of canon characters.

LOTRlover: I’m not giving up on this, and I may even manage to update a little faster since Chap. 6 is pretty much written already. Thanks for catching the name problem. I’ve been over that chapter way too many times and my brain is beginning to lock up.

The Lauderdale: Thanks! You’re right about Dairuin/Urgakh’s character in Chap. 4 - definitely another area where I was putting too much faith in the power of telepathy. I’ve made some revisions to Chap. 4 that may help get what was in my brain out where everyone can see it. If you haven’t already, please do check out The Silmarillion. You can read this story without it, I think, but I did add a pertinent quote from the Silm to the end of Chap. 3. That’s the bit that I think sticks in Lu’s mind when she thinks of that tale.

Jen Littlebottom: Wow! I’ll have a job ahead of me to make sure the rest of the story lives up to those adjectives! I’m glad you’re enjoying it.

Children of Húrin

by Salsify

Disclaimer: However much I admire his work, I’m not Tolkien and I never will be. This is a work of fan fiction, done entirely for the fun of exploring the blank places in history of Middle-earth.

Isengard, night of March the 2nd, 3019

Their shift started at dusk, replacing another crew that had spent the daylight hours emptying out what remained in the outlying storehouses and packing it up for the departing troops. Groblug had kept them working double-time to get the last of the supplies ready, right up until the soldiers marched away. He hadn’t even given her time to put her bedroll in the hut; it still hung on the side of one of the carts they were loading.

It never got very dark in Isengard at night anymore; even at midnight, the low clouds cast back a muddy orange reflection of the glare from the forges and foundries. In the murky light, Lu could see more than she ever wished to of Saruman’s army. The Orcs and the warg riders were followed by troop after troop of Dunlendings and half-orcs. The Men looked grimly determined but the Orcs laughed and shouted obscenities about the Rohirrim and jostled each other as they marched. Perhaps by their standards, she thought, they were being offered a rare treat.

The slaves on the crew watched the departure of the troops with growing horror. Somehow, there hadn’t seemed to be so many when they were milling around collecting their gear. Dairuin’s expression was bleak, and beyond him, she could see the tears on Folcred’s face glint in the torchlight. Bran put a steadying hand on Folcred’s shoulder as the younger man wept for the coming destruction of Rohan.

As the troops filed past, Groblug roared encouragement and shook his sword in the air. “Stick it to those pushdug horseboys! Give it to ‘em good!” he shouted, then noticing them standing idle behind him, turned and snarled, “What are you maggots waiting for? Everything left in the outbuildings goes into the storerooms in the Tower. Sharkey’s orders, and he wants it done yesterday. Move!”

Dairuin gave his mother a questioning look and she shrugged. They’d been able to talk a bit earlier in the evening when they were allowed to stop for a drink of water. Dairuin had been quick to come to the only conclusion that was left. As soon as the guards’ attention slipped, he said, they should throw themselves down the nearest airshaft. They couldn’t allow themselves to be used as Saruman intended, and there was no other way out of it.

She was only a little distressed at how easily she accepted his plan. She had been trying to dissuade him from it for years now, but any fool could see he had the right of it this time. There had never really been any chance that waiting would improve their situation, but she’d clung to the teachings of her childhood and fought her son’s self-destructive tendencies for too many years to stop easily. Now, though, even she could see that there was no reason to put him off any longer and great need of haste. What she had become over the years shamed her ancestors so thoroughly that suicide could hardly make things any worse. She was a creature of Isengard. She had nothing in common with the High Men of Númenor any longer. If there was still a way for her to oppose the darkness, it would have nothing noble about it.

But ever since they had reached their decision, the guards had kept them too busy to get anywhere near one of the airshafts. Even while the troops marched out, Groblug had been keeping half an eye on the two of them. She was almost certain that Saruman still believed she was under the spell of his voice, but he would not risk losing them just short of his goal. If the rush to prepare the troops for battle had been only a little less, the two of them would probably have been locked safely away in the tower.

As the crew emptied the nearest storehouse, Lu wondered how long it was going to take for Groblug to get distracted. The storehouse they were clearing out held food, and the crates of dried fruit and barrels of brined meat were driving Lu mad with hunger. She could see the other slaves on the crew struggling just as hard to convince themselves that they were not affected by the smell of so much rich food they were not allowed to eat. There was little left of the winter stores at this time of year anyway, and most of that had gone with the soldiers. The slaves had had nothing for days but chaffy brown bread and what was optimistically called cabbage soup.

Folcred leaned in close as he passed them with a crate and whispered to Dairuin, “Drop the box. Go on, Orcboy, convince me there‘s some good reason for you to exist.”

Dairuin’s expression grew even more closed than usual, but Folcred had been needling him for years now, and Dairuin had heard it all so many times that he only got a little grimmer around the mouth. Bran sometimes claimed that Folcred didn’t even mean the insults anymore, but the habit was too strong to break. Lu had never been able to decide if she believed that, but it hardly mattered now.

If Groblug hadn’t been among the guards, she thought Dairuin might even have done what Folcred suggested. The Orcs weren’t very fond of fruit, and most would leave the other slaves to snatch the spilled food out of the dirt and hide it away while they amused themselves with punishing the one who’d dropped the box. It had become something of a tradition. The Orcs knew what was going on, but they lost nothing they really coveted, and got an excuse to beat one of the slaves. The slaves got the food, and they all carefully set aside a share of their pickings for the one who took the beating.

Groblug would have none of it, though. Drop anything on his watch and it was picked up, dusted off and repacked before he attended to torturing the slave who had dropped it. A broken box would not distract Groblug long enough for either of them to reach the nearest airshaft, and it wouldn’t gain the others any food. Once or twice, Lu caught the other Orc guard stroking the handle of his whip and looking wistfully at them. An occasional slash to hurry them along was a scant pleasure compared to the punishment for breaking open a box.

They had only loaded a few boxes when a commotion began down near the gate. Lu looked down the road, but they were too far away to see or hear anything clearly. The orcs on the wall seemed very alarmed about something, but she couldn’t make out what they were shouting. Groblug, who had been staring in that direction also, caught a glimpse of them watching and gave out a few cuts with his whip. Lu dodged out of his way, but he managed to connect with Dairuin once. Lu brushed her hand over her son’s arm comfortingly as they picked up more boxes. Groblug turned back towards the gates, where a little stir of activity had begun.

She was still inside the storehouse when she heard Groblug let out one of the coarsest oaths she’d ever heard. Hurrying out, she saw him gaping in the direction of the gate, the slaves standing disregarded and staring alongside him.

At that distance, she didn’t see anything happening at first. Then suddenly chunks of rock began falling away from the gates and the surrounding walls. The gates were disintegrating. There was no other way to describe it; the solid stone was crumbling like dirt. In only a few minutes, the gate and much of the wall around it had fallen into ruins, and cracks were appearing in the part of the wall nearest the storehouse.

Next to her, Lu heard Bran repeating some phrase over and over in a language she didn’t understand. She followed the direction of his gaze and wondered if he was swearing or praying. If he saw the same thing she did, either one would have been completely reasonable. It looked almost as if trees were climbing through the ruins of the gate. A figure in white dashed towards Orthanc just ahead of them - could that really be Saruman? It was hard to imagine him hitching up his robes and racing across Isengard, but who else here ever wore white?

The boss of the crew just down the road from them yelped and fled. His crew dropped their loads and ran also. Seeing that, Groblug snarled at Lu and the others, “You stay right where you are till I say you can move! You’re not going anywhere while I‘m in charge.”

But while he was turned towards the slaves, the other overseer bolted. Groblug started after him, yelling, “Get back here, you pile of warg spew!“

The other orc only made it a few yards before the wall collapsed in front of him and one of the tree-creatures strode through the gap. It spotted the fleeing orc and pounced on him, crushing him underfoot. The slaves all stood frozen in shock as Groblug drew his sword. He took a swing at the creature, but it was like chopping at a mature tree. The sword only bit a tiny way into the tree-creature. It seemed more annoyed than pained by the attack, and wrenched the sword from Groblug’s hand. He started to run, but stumbled and fell on the loose stones and the creature was on him in one long step. It caught his feet as he tried to scramble over the pile of rubble and swung him so his head lay on the ground. Then it stepped on the orc’s head with one of its long feet and yanked up on his legs. Groblug’s head came off with a sharp crack. Just like killing a chicken, thought Lu numbly.

The creature then turned to the slaves. He murmured to himself at great length as he walked around the group with a peculiar, almost jointless gait. In spite of herself, Lu couldn‘t help wondering how he managed to move so swiftly without bending at the knee. There were others of his kind inside the wall now, dealing with the fleeing Orcs as this one had. He was one of the taller ones, with smooth, silver-grey bark...no, skin. The sky was clearing now and between the light of the moon and the torches, she could see that his eyes were a light, clear color like spring leaves, shrewd and ancient. The look in them was a little like Saruman‘s, and if she hadn’t been so afraid of what he might do to Dairuin, she would have spent a long time just trying to fix the image of those eyes in her mind. There was a power in them that she’d never seen except when it was fallen to evil.

He stopped in front of them again and said, “The Men may go. The Ents have no quarrel with those whom Saruman has held captive. But this,” he said, fixing his gaze on Dairuin, “we will not release. Saruman has compounded an ancient evil by mixing Orcs with other races, and that we cannot allow.”

His long arm shot out and all Lu could think of was Dairuin’s head being torn off just like the others. She threw herself in front of Dairuin, screaming, “No! He isn’t an Orc. He’s my son. Leave him alone.” She glared at the creature and pressed back against Dairuin, who was standing rigid and perfectly still behind her. She couldn’t read the Ent’s expression. The skin or bark of his face didn’t seem to be flexible enough to allow much expression, but something about his movements or posture made Lu feel that there was a good deal of pity in his gaze.

The Ent looked Dairuin over suspiciously. “He has Man blood, perhaps, but he looks and stinks of Orc. Their axes have done grievous harm in my homeland, and I will not allow any of them to go free.”

“Ma, don’t,” whispered Dairuin. “You have a chance to get away. Take it!” He tried to push Lu to one side. She’d thought his usual expression was bleak, but now she realized her mistake. He said to her as he looked up at the Ent, “He’s right. I’m not an Orc, but I’m not a Man either. It’s better this way.”

“That’s not true,” said Bran suddenly. “He is a Man. I’ve been here for nearly twenty years and I’ve seen enough of both to know the difference. Maybe he’s the ugliest one I’ve ever met, but he’s a Man.”

Murmurs ran through the group, and Lu thought they sounded almost like agreement. Bran stared pointedly at Folcred, and she held her breath. If anyone would encourage the Ent to mayhem, it would be Folcred.

Folcred glared back at Bran but said angrily, “He’s right. I hope every orc in Middle Earth dies in agony for what they did to my parents, but he’s no Orc.”

The Ent hmmed and hoomed at that but said nothing. He slowly stretched out one hand toward Dairuin. Dairuin closed his eyes and shuddered, but made no move to escape. Something in the tree creature’s expression sent a burst of hope through Lu and she didn’t try to stop him as he put one long finger under Dairuin’s chin and turned her son’s face toward the torchlight. When a moment passed and his head still hadn’t been ripped off, Dairuin opened his eyes and looked up at his captor. The two of them studied each other for what seemed to Lu like eternity before the Ent said, “Perhaps I am being hasty, but war often requires haste. All of you are free to go.”

Lu let out a long, shaky breath and threw her arms around her son, who was still too stunned to react. “Did you hear that, Dairuin? We’re free! Let’s go.”

He shook his head and pointed to the others, who were already relieving the dead orcs of their gear. “We’ll need food and knives and anything else we can get.”

Lu gasped. “My needles!” She grabbed the bag that held all her possessions off the side of the wagon and checked the side seam carefully. They were still there: a neat row of needles of the finest quality, stolen from the sewing room over the last dozen years. She’d known there was no hope of escape, but she had carefully collected and hidden them away anyhow. It had been something to hold onto that in case she ever did get away, she would have the needles she needed to set up as a seamstress. She had sometimes worried about her own sanity for doing so, but now she was glad she had. She quickly filled the bag with food and swung it over her shoulder.

The Ent was looking around anxiously. There were many other Ents inside what was left of the outer walls now, pulling apart buildings and any Orcs they happened to find. He reached into a pouch that hung over his shoulder and pulled out a handful of clay tiles embossed with what looked like a beech leaf and gave one to each of them. “You must go now, and quickly. Do not leave the road until you are well away from the Wizard’s Vale, and keep these tokens where they can be seen at all times. Go in a group and keep this one,” he gestured towards Dairuin, “in the center. If any question you, say that Beechbone gave you leave to go.”

“Thank you, “ said Dairuin, in a voice that shook only a little. “Please, sir, there are other slaves here. They’re all locked in at this time of night, and I doubt the guards will let them out. Would you please send someone over to the dens to help them? They’re mostly women, you know, the mothers....“

“I will go myself. Farewell!“ The Ent bent forward slightly in what might be their version of a nod or a bow and strode away. Bran watched him go for a moment, then shook himself and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

With Dairuin in the center of the group, they set off. They passed several Ents on their way out, but as soon as they showed their tiles, the Ents went back to demolishing Isengard and let them pass. All the Orcs they saw had been torn to pieces, but Lu could see another little group of Men hurrying ahead of them through the gate. She thought one of them was Wulfstan, but the only thing that mattered now was for her own group to escape.

As they passed through the wrecked gates themselves, they stopped in astonishment. On either side of the road was a thick forest. None of them had been outside the walls since last autumn, but there had been no forest then. Folcred stared at the trees in shock. “These weren’t here four months ago. Not even a sapling.”

Bran gave him a little push to get him moving. “Worry about that later.”

Dairuin nodded urgently and whispered, “Those trees, they’re watching us. Let’s go.”

Lu moved a little closer to Dairuin and slipped her hand into his as they hurried down what was now a dark forest path. They hadn’t gone very far when there was a loud whump behind them and the ground shook. The unnatural forest swayed and groaned. Whirling back to look, she could see an orange light flickering through the ruins of the gate tunnel. Enraged cries echoed until they were submerged in a roar that reminded Lu of a storm coming in off the ocean. Without a word, the whole party turned and fled.

As they ran down the road, Lu realized that Dairuin hadn’t just been imagining that the forest was aware and had an interest in them. There was no wind that night, but the woods creaked and clattered as if a gale passed through it. The road ahead was nearly blocked with the shadowy forms of trees. As the group approached, the trees leaned out over the bit of path that remained, their branches groping down toward the refugees.

Bran, who was in the lead, held up his token and the tree shapes straightened with a groan of twisting wood and drew back from the road. She glanced back over her shoulder once, and saw some of the trees slowly turning to follow their progress. She didn’t look back again.

By the time they reached the crossroad, they were out of the forest and walking under the fading stars. One of the roads led to the Fords of the Isen and then into the heart of Rohan, and the other led to Dunland. Knowing they had to make a choice there, they stopped and built a small fire. While they feasted on bacon, bread and dried fruit, they traded what they’d looted from Isengard so that everyone would have the necessities for a few days at least.

“Which way are you headed?” Lu asked Bran. She suspected he was in much the same situation that she was, and had no one who would rejoice to have him back after twenty years as a slave.

He shrugged and glanced at Folcred. “I thought Rohan would be as good a place as any. They’ll need all the hands they can get.”

Folcred nodded and said, “We would appreciate your help. If you come with me, I’ll put in a good word for you.”

Bran nodded in return and said, “What about you two?”

Nothing Folcred could say to his countrymen would make Dairuin welcome in Rohan. Before the young man could steel himself to make the offer, she shrugged and said, “Dunland for now, I suppose. These supplies won’t last long, and Tirga can probably get a good deal for us there. After that, who knows? No matter which side wins this war, they won’t want Dairuin and me around.”

“There’s wilderness north and west of Dunland, isn’t there?” asked Dairuin cheerfully. “After we get some supplies, we could settle there and build a little house where there’s nobody to bother us.”

Bran looked hard at Dairuin, apparently trying to decide whether the half-orc really didn’t understand how dismal his prospects would be in the wilderness, or if he knew and spoke so lightly only to put a good face on it. After a moment, Bran sighed and squeezed Dairuin’s shoulder. “That’s the way, youngster. Go and enjoy your freedom.”

At mid-morning, those who were going to Rohan gathered up their things and bid the rest farewell. For the first time since Lu had met him, she could truly believe that Folcred was only sixteen. He was almost running as he started down the road to Rohan, but then remembered he wasn’t alone and waited for Bran. Bran turned back and waved, then hurried to catch up to Folcred.

The rest of the group looked at each other uncertainly after they had gone. None of them had any welcome awaiting them in Dunland, but neither would any other land be happy to see them. Without ever talking about it, they took the road to Dunland, moving slowly to give the slaves freed from the dens a chance to catch up. Lu hadn’t seen Tirga in more than a year, and Kuy had a sister among the breeders.

That evening, the party camped beside the Dunland road. They lingered there through the next day and night, but no others came up the road behind them. Finally, everyone got too nervous to stay there any longer. That section of the road was too close to the mountains and their orc colonies and no one wanted to risk being captured now that they were finally free of Isengard. The next morning, the group set out again.

On the western slope of the Misty Mountains, the land did not drop away as sharply as it did to the east, where the Anduin had carved its valley. The plateau of Dunland was considerably higher than Isengard, and the road climbed steadily all morning to reach it.

At noon, they stopped to eat at the western edge of the plateau. Dairuin went to gather firewood, and as he returned to camp, he froze, looking back in the direction of Isengard. His mouth moved, but no sound came out. The others sprang to their feet, reaching for what weapons they had, and Lu ran to his side. “What’s wrong?”

He pointed back in the direction of Isengard and croaked, “Look.”

Lu turned. Through the gap between two peaks, she could see down into the Wizard’s Vale. A few wisps of fog still clung to the base of the mountains, but it had cleared enough for her to see that Isengard had become a lake. Only Orthanc and a couple of guard towers rose above the water.

Behind her, Kuy howled in anguish. There would be no others following them out of Isengard. Tirga, Lu’s daughter, Kuy’s sister, all of them had drowned. Why hadn’t Beechbone freed them? He had said he would, but then left them all to drown. The image filled her head of the long, dark chambers with floodwater roaring in through the narrow airshafts, and the doors, as always, locked from the outside for the night. She wanted to scream or cry or smash something, but if she did, she didn’t think she could ever stop.

She looked down at the lake of Isengard one last time, then turned away and tried to force the picture of Tirga’s last moments out of her mind. Had she learned nothing at all from Isengard? Justice always passed Saruman’s slaves by; they suffered whether they had done anything to deserve it or not.

They hadn’t deserved punishment, but by the standards of her childhood, she had. Good and honorable people did not let themselves be used for evil, no matter the cost to themselves or their families. Only luck had saved her from bringing ruin to Pinnath Gelin, but would it have been any better to deny her son? In the old stories, she thought the answer would have been yes, but that had never been an answer she could live with. Her choice might be no easier to endure, but it was made past unmaking.

Not that they were likely to have long to repent the answer she had chosen. Without Tirga’s aid in Dunland....She shook herself and noticed Dairuin watching her anxiously. She forced her face into a calm expression that she knew didn’t fool him in the slightest and said softly, “There’s nothing we can do for them now. We had better get going. We have a long walk ahead of us.”

The End

*******

Author’s note: At some point in the future, I plan to continue on with another story about Lu and Dairuin and their lives in the north. In fact, this was only intended as a short prologue to what I thought would be the main part of the story, but it kinda got away from me.

Unfortunately, that story begins with a section that is going to be very tricky to write. Thanks to corporate restructuring, I need to spend most of my free time on résumés and cover letters right now. Once the job situation is resolved, I will be getting back to these two.