Chapter 10. What the Healer Found Out

Tulerion laid the old man down as comfortably as might be on the edge of the scaffold and began his examination.

Pippin climbed the steps and crouched down by Jack, then sat himself down, easing the hoary head onto his lap. The healer looked up briefly and muttered something that might have been thanks, on Jack's behalf.

At last the healer spoke. 'A fall, you say?' he said, his hands gentle but thorough in their probing. 'A bad fall?'

Pippin looked from Jack's face, to Will's, and waited.

Will swallowed again and said, rather huskily, 'A bad fall.'

'How long ago? There are long-healed bones...'

'Ten years,' Pippin said, and the healer looked up from his hands to scrutinise the hobbit, and then down again.

'Yes,' Will said after clearing his throat. 'Ten years.'

'His rope failed him,' Sam said, and had to clear his own throat. How grieved he had been at the time, to hear that his son's saviour had been himself lost, and how he'd rejoiced last night, to hear that reports of Jack's death had been premature. And now... perhaps to see the man dying, yet unthanked, before his eyes...

Jack gave a chuckle, dry as husks rattling in the autumn breeze, and said, '...rope didn't fail. That rope never failed to do my bidding, faithful friend...'

'Delirious,' the healer muttered.

Jack's eyes opened and he stared into Pippin's eyes above him, and smiled. 'It's an Elven-rope, you know,' he said.

'So I've heard,' Pippin said, 'and I'd like to hear the story in full, some day, and preferably over a tankard of ale.'

Jack moistened his lips. 'Such would taste good, right about now.'

'It would,' Pippin said lightly. 'Shall I send a guardsman to fetch us some?'

Tulerion snorted. It seemed this hobbit could have whatever he desired, save perhaps the lives of these prisoners.

Samwise, however, stepped forward, lifting his chin above the edge of the platform. 'Why?' he said now. 'Why did the rope let you fall?'

Jack turned his head slowly to regard the Mayor. 'Because I told it to let me go,' he said.

'Why?' Sam repeated. 'To fall into the base of the waterfall, to be pounded against the rocks by the weight of the falling water... it looked to be a certain death!'

'Will...' Jack said, looking beyond the Mayor to his son. 'I could not let them haul me up, learn who I was. It did not matter, what happened to me, but that knowing me would lead them to Will... Though it was my fault he was in violation of the King's edict, he would bear the penalty nonetheless.'

Tulerion stiffened, knowing now why the man before him, and the young man standing bound but a few feet away, were doomed. Edicts were serious business, never lightly issued, and not lightly to be violated.

'We would have worked things out,' Pippin said softly. 'You had my pardon, even then, even before you saved my son, and the Mayor's, from those murderous ruffians. You had my guarantee of safe passage out of the Shire...'

'You wouldn’t know it to look at us now,' Jack observed wryly, his glance taking in the hanged man, almost near enough for the healer to reach out and touch. 'Just another fall away from death, and I fear that this rope will not be as accommodating as my Elven-rope. May the King find much joy in it.'

'The King...?' Pippin said.

'I heard Haleth say that the shop and all its contents were forfeit to the Crown,' Jack said. 'I'm sure the King would not leave an Elven-rope to the chances at the coming auction.'

'And your family left with naught, I suppose,' Tulerion murmured, drawn against his inclination into the conversation. Really, a healer was supposed to pay no attention to the talk around him, but bitter memory rose in him with his gorge, and just as difficult to swallow down again. 'As bad as the last days under the Lord Denethor, it sounds...'

'The King has returned to the North-land,' Pippin said stoutly, 'and his justice with him, and not a moment too soon, it seems!' The guardsmen stiffened at this, and Merry, noticing, shook his head. It seemed Elessar would have his work cut out for him, in more ways than one, if his chosen steward's rule had caused his people to obey out of fear rather than love.

'But you survived,' Merry said, returning to the thread of the story. He, too, had wondered to find Jack alive all these years later. He had seen the waterfall, on more than one occasion, a grand and breathtaking sight. To think a man could fall into that violent maelstrom and live...! 'How?'

Jack chuckled again, that dry chuckle that was painful to hear. 'I don't remember,' he said. 'It would make a grand tale, wouldn’t it? ...if one were not afraid to tell it. I awakened in my own bed, much later.'

'And how did you come from the riverbed to your own?' Pippin said. Jack's eyes turned again to Will.

'He didn't come home that night,' Will said quietly, without even a glance at his guard. 'He left early, to gather mushrooms, for it was the first day of the week, when you hobbits were likely to visit the market, and Turambor would split the profit with us.'

'I wondered how it was that the greengrocer had fresh mushrooms, and not a bad one among them!' Pippin said impulsively. 'It was a surprising thing to find in a city of Men!'

'I learned much of mushrooms in my days in the Shire,' Jack said.

'In the days when you were "Robin", before you became "Jack",' Pippin said. 'Is "Robin" your true name, then?'

The sergeant started at this news. How many names did the old man bear?

'Nay,' Jack whispered. 'Truly I am Gwill o'Dale, just as you know me, Haleth. "Robin" was a name that warmed the Shire-folk to me, in my early days, before the King's edict, when I wandered the Shire. A beautiful place, the Shire...'

'And then you were Jack,' Pippin said, a question in his voice.

'I ran afoul of a rather rough sort of men,' Jack said. 'They were bullying an old farmer and his son, Shire-folk that is, and I gave them someone their own size to measure themselves against... but as bullies do, they ran. Still, they spread word amongst themselves of a man named "Robin" to lay in wait for, to be taught a lesson, and when I heard of it I changed my name to "Jack" and "Jack" I remained long after.'

'Ruffians,' Merry muttered.

'They were that,' Jack admitted, and closed his eyes again, obviously wearied by the conversation.

'And so Jack didn't come home that night,' Merry said, returning to the thread of the tale. 'How did he come to be in his bed?'

'Rob and I went out in the early light of the dawn, with an excuse to Seledrith that we were going fishing with our father,' Will said. 'We'd heard the whole story that night--it was all the talk of the marketplace, how ruffians had shot the Halflings' escort with arrows, one brought down by Denny's sword even as Denny fell, pierced through, and the other escaped, stealing two children away, sons of Thain and Mayor; how the ruffian lost his footing, crossing the river, and dropped the little ones into the water; how he slipped and fell himself and was carried over the falls...'

Merry, watching Pippin intently, saw his cousin shudder and close his eyes briefly before turning them once again to Will. The wound was old, but Pippin's conscience remained tender. Pippin, pursuing, had cast the stone that brought the ruffian down, to fall into the river, and he still rued the death he'd wrought. Which was as it should be, Merry thought with a nod to himself. A hobbit should never take death lightly, no matter how much of his time he dwells in the halls of Men.

Will, his eyes on his father, continued, '...how a man came out of nowhere with a slim, silver-hued rope and saved the little ones from the river, only to be lost himself in the falls. How the Kingsmen found the body of the ruffian, but not the rescuer... Rob and I took our fishing gear and food and blankets and searched through the morning, below the falls, hoping against hope.'

Jack's eyes remained closed, but he was smiling.

'And you found him,' Merry prompted when Will fell silent.

Will swallowed hard. 'We found him,' he said. 'Somehow he'd dragged himself from the river and wedged himself into hiding under a patch of brambles. Bloodied and broken he was, and we might never have found him but for the sun glancing off the silver rope that was still around his waist. I wonder that the guardsmen did not see it...'

'My faithful rope,' Jack murmured.

'I sent Rob back to the city at a run, and I removed the rope and hid it in the bag with the fishing gear. We told everyone that our father had fallen while we were fishing near the base of the falls, and no one seemed to connect "Gwill" of the linen shop with "Jack" that the hobbits knew.'

'And so he awakened in his own bed,' Pippin said as Tulerion, whose attention had been drawn away by the drama of the narrative, bent to continue his interrupted work.

'Not for a long time,' Will said. 'He was like a babe, not knowing us, having to be fed and lifted, helpless as a babe... Airin helped us care for him, and Merileth, once Denny was out of danger, while Seledrith ran the shop.' Tears came to his eyes, and he blinked them away, for his hands were bound behind him. 'So wonderful they were, all of Turambor's family were wonderful; they took us in and made us a part of their family...'

'And so you stayed, despite the periodic danger of discovery.'

'We stayed,' Will admitted. 'When Jack found out that Shire-folk would be visiting on occasion, and among them hobbits who knew our faces and could identify us to the King as law-breakers...'

'Though we wouldn't have,' Pippin muttered under his breath.

'...he determined he'd sell the shop, and we'd go to Dale, the town where he was born. He had no family to draw him there, but at least it was far from the Shire and the hobbits who might betray us to our deaths.'

All three of the hobbits winced at this. Jack's fear had been all too real, as it turned out.

But Will continued as if he hadn't noticed. 'But of course we could not go, after he was so badly injured, and confined to his bed for so long, and then... and then... the roots went too deep for us to leave, after he could get up, and learned to walk again...' 

'And you married Seledrith,' Sam said, to change the subject.

'She married me, rather,' Will said. 'I could hardly believe she'd have someone like me, so small of stature, half a head shorter than herself...'

'But great of heart,' Jack whispered.

'You'd make a tall hobbit,' Pippin said. 'And you were just the right size, when Hilly was drowning in the freezing bog. Small and light enough to crawl over the branches Diamond had shoved in, to try to reach Hilly, and yet strong enough to pull him to safety.'

Tulerion shook his head at this. It was a pity the young man had run afoul of one of the King's edicts. He didn't sound like the sort to end his life choking at the end of a rope. The old man was likely to find mercy from the King, if Elessar were truly on his way. But the young man... A resolve formed itself in the healer's heart, that he'd help in whatever way he could.