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A Long and Weary Way  by Canafinwe

Chapter XLV: Over the Road and Up to the Town

When light came at last to the forest, it was nothing but a diffuse charcoal gloom through the tumultuous clouds and the wildly dancing snow. Still it was spreading distinctly from one side of the sky to the other, and Aragorn knew that he should muster his wits before it grew too late to orient himself. Somehow he could not quite manage it, as though his mind had warped and cramped along with his frozen body. He could no longer feel his feet where they pressed against the nearby branch, and his back was curled into a huddled stoop against the worst of the wind. His arms seemed melded to his ribs, and his tucked hands were curled into numb and yet burning fists. The edge of the Lórien-blanket was stiff where it curled up to his throat and around his head, and his eyebrows and his forelocks and his beard were all choked with rime. He blinked, and crystals of frost tumbled down onto his cheekbones.

He could not raise his head to look for Gollum. Though he tried, the muscles in his neck seemed carved of stone and they would not yield. He tried again to seek out the dim glow of dawn and found that by turning his shoulders he could scan a wider area. It seemed that he was perched on the southeastern side of the tree. Southeastern, and he wanted a northeasterly course. That was simple enough.

He moved his stiff and stinging lips, trying to form words that might be heard against the wailing of the wind. If dawn had brought any surcease in the storm he could not hear it. Still the snow whipped frenetically and still the trees rocked and groaned and cracked about him. He could not think why he had been fool enough to shelter in a pine: surely he would have been just as guarded by its boughs if he had bedded down among the roots, and then he would not have this frightening deadness across the backs of his thighs where his weight was pressed against the bough.

Then he remembered, as one remembers a fragment of ancient lore learned once and then long forgotten. The wargs. Howling, prowling, hunting even in the throes of the blizzard. Hunting him, perhaps – perhaps some other unfortunate. It scarcely mattered. It was enough that if they had found him and his captive there would have been bloodshed, and he doubted his ability to lie low an entire pack as poorly armed as he was.

Finally his left leg obeyed him, and slid free of the branch to dangle below. The motion rocked his chilled body and for a moment he was certain that he would fall. Yet somehow his balance held and he tried to make the right leg do as its partner had done.

There was a shower of thick clumps of snow, falling from the ends of the branches and thankfully not onto Aragorn's head. Gollum came slithering down to perch beside the Ranger's lodged boot. His lips were blue and his eyes rimmed in red, and he was shivering; but he seemed as limber as ever and not much the worse for his wretched night. He stared at the Man with his bright, malicious eyes, and Aragorn knew that he could not sit here any longer proclaiming his weakness to his captive. A final determined push into strained muscles caused his right foot to slip from its bracing place. He had intended to lower it gently beside the left, but it seemed that he lacked the strength or the control to do so. It fell, leaden and lifeless, and swung with the force of its own inertia.

It was enough to send him toppling from the tree.

He landed in the snow with stunning force that drove the breath from his lungs in a great hot cloud and left him for a moment utterly unmanned, unable even to draw in new air. Then he gasped, and the terrible cold that flooded through his chest brought him perilously near to unconsciousness and raised a flood of water in his eyes. He did not even hear the shriek as Gollum, tugged by the rope that bound them, came tumbling after him. Thankfully he had been facing Aragorn at the crucial moment, and the halter's knot had been dangling between his clavicles, for he was neither strangled nor hung by the force of the Ranger's fall. Still it was with murderous malevolence that he glowered at his fallen jailor as Aragorn lay in a crumpled heap in snow that had managed to drift even into the refuge at the foot of the pine, and struggled to fight off the swoon that wanted to swallow him.

In the end he managed it, by subsisting on slow, shallow breaths and reminding himself mercilessly that he had no intention of driving himself to death on this journey and that to faint away in such a storm with its dreadful cold would certainly be his undoing. When at last he somehow got his elbows planted beneath him so that he might lift his head out of the snow, Gollum's hatred had faded a little into a sort of skittish unease. No doubt he feared that if the wargs should return while he was tethered to this mass of bones and frozen flesh, he would be slain before he could manage to escape.

Aragorn tried again to speak, but though this time his lips moved no sound issued from them. His throat seemed locked with the cold, and it would not suffer speech to pass. He focused instead on attempting to gain his feet. The effort was inelegant and tortured, but he managed it at last despite the bright agony that flared up in knees and hips when he attempted to straighten them out of the narrow angles they had kept through the night. His back he could not wholly extend. It was as if the bones of his spine had frozen together like small floes of ice when winter deepens sufficiently to cover a lake in solid white glass. Bowed and in far more pain than he would have expected, Aragorn drew his arms back in to the poor protection of his makeshift and increasingly ragged cloak and forced his wooden hands into the shelter of his arm-pits.

He looked up at the tree, straining his neck agonizingly to do so. The branch from which he had fallen had lost all of its snow, clearly marking it from his fellows. It was a wonder that neither he nor Gollum had struck any of the others as they crashed to earth. If that branch was on the southeastern side of the tree, then he wanted to turn a little to his left before he began to walk.

If standing had been a trial, walking was a torment. Every step, scarcely felt in his feet and ankles, sent jarring anguish through his knees and into his hips, and so up in to the fiddle-curve of his stiffened back. He moved with terrible slowness at first, fighting the storm with every step, and somehow Gollum shuffled after him. He seemed reluctant to bury his hands in the snow, and in this air Aragorn could not blame him for that. It was frightfully cold; colder even than it had been on the night after their calamity at the River Gladden. The lashing wind only served to make him feel colder, but his exhausted muscles had little strength for shivering. Instead of constant steady shaking he was overtaken time and again by crippling tremors that seemed to thrum into the very fibre of his bones and left him breathless and tottering.

Yet somehow, miraculously, he did not fall, and slowly the strain of moving began to warm him a little. Not that he felt warm; no, not at all. But at least he knew that he was not quite so dangerously cold. He pushed himself as much as he dared, for he feared to raise a sweat almost as much as he feared to swoon from pain or enervation. If he managed to get himself wet on such a fearsome day as this, he would surely die of exposure.

With the blizzard still driving there was no trouble over Yellow Face, and Aragorn walked on with his charge hopping from one dragging footprint to the next. Though the Ranger tried to avoid the deep drifts, so much snow had fallen – driven not downward but at an angle nearly parallel to the ground – that this was almost impossible. Once he reached a clearing full of new growth, where there had plainly been a forest blaze two summers past, where the snow spilled over the tops of his boots and nearly reached his knees. In this Gollum was almost buried. If he had not had the Man before him, toiling to break a trail, he would have been unable to go on.

But go on they did, and finally Aragorn found that he could work his fingers a little, and open them out of their loose frigid fists. When this happened he began to look for a likely pine, and using the corner of his blanket to guard his hand from the deadly chill of the steel he drew his knife. He cut his marks clumsily and not at all straight, and chipped away with fumbling nails at the inner bark. He gave some to Gollum and took what he could hold in the crook of an elbow for himself. As he walked he ate, though at first he had to struggle just to force his jaw to work in the cold. A fine trickle of heat touched his lip as he did so: his right nostril, bleeding again.

Ere dusk began to gather the land began to rise, and Aragorn quickened his pace as much as he dared. If he did not reach the Old Forest Road before nightfall he would have to wait for dawn to be sure the way was safe, and he did not like his chances of remaining unfrozen huddled in a ditch. Gollum seemed resentful of the haste, but he did not balk and he did not protest. Like as not he, too, knew their peril in this unrelenting storm.

Aragorn came at last to a break in the trees, about fifty feet in breadth but running off both west and east in a gently curving corridor. It could only be the Road, but the snow had buried it in shifting unbroken drifts so that it was indistinguishable from the land about. Sheltering from sight amid a tangle of brambles Aragorn crouched, scanning the branches of the trees about him and then squinting against the swirling snow and ice to try to do the same on the other side. He could not see well even at so short a distance in this miserable storm, but that was in fact not entirely to his advantage. If his sight was hampered, so would be the gaze of any watcher that might have been set to guard the road. It was indeed possible that even such sentries would have laid by their duties to take shelter until the blizzard passed, trusting that their prey would have enough sense to do the same.

Before he could succumb to the cold or to his fears, he sprung up and scurried as hastily as he could across the swath of open country. His boots struck snow hard-packed beneath this day's loose cover, and he was on the road itself now. Gollum scurried after him, looking warily left and right himself. But next they were stumbling and slipping down a shallow slope into the far ditch, and then they were back in the shelter of the trees. The road kept a true west-east line, or near enough, and Aragorn took his bearings from it and struck out with greater confidence, still moving northeastward towards the Carrock.

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He dared not halt that night, for although the winds laid by their whirling madness with the coming of the dark and settled in to a steady westward gale the cold did not abate, nor did the snow. Aragorn tried in vain to be grateful, but though he knew that both would serve to bury any signs of his crossing of the road he yearned only to be warm again. Or if not warm, for he had not truly known warmth since departing Lothlórien, at least not so wretchedly, relentlessly, blindingly cold. He could not feel his arms to well above the wrists, though at last light he had checked his fingers and yet seen no signs of deep white frostbite upon them. He supposed this too might be counted a small mercy, but in truth it only filled him with a quiet, sickening fear born in his healer's mind. He could not even bear to think of Gollum's unshod feet in the snow; how the creature managed to keep on through these conditions he could not guess.

His latest attempt to harvest a little food for them both had failed. Though the knife was hatefully cold even through a woollen buffer he could use it, but his fingers scrabbled uselessly over the inner bark and he could not peel it away. He had tried to dig it out with the point of the blade, but had succeeded only in gouging deep into the tree and very nearly lopping off his own thumb when his hand slipped unexpectedly on a second pass. He had abandoned the effort. He would walk on hungry if he had to, but he could not risk an unwitting amputation.

For all that he had slept some hours before the storm and Gollum's agitation had wakened him the previous night, the urge to give way to slumber kept coming over him in deep somniferous waves that seemed almost too delicious to resist. This, he knew, was the alluring song of the cold, and he fought it with every shred of his will and every artifice available to him.

He scolded himself silently, his mind running through all those voices that had ever had occasion to upbraid him. Master Elrond chided tenderly, in the patient voice of a loving father who was trying all the while to impart some essential lesson. Gandalf blustered, hiding his care and concern in his lectures. His mother, startled and perhaps saddened, spoke very quickly and intently. Elrohir laughed, hoping to make his words stick with the paste of embarrassment, while Elladan kept a stern and sombre but very gentle face. Halbarad was quiet but unyielding in his disapproval, at times scathingly sarcastic. Barliman Butterbur of Bree gusted and huffed and let his criticism come out in long, rambling speeches which he clearly thought disguised his firm opinions. And Denethor, the other half of Ecthelion's matched pair of champions, dressed him down with the wrath of a prince belittling the lowliest soldier for some act of unthinkable stupidity. But all of them in their different ways were urging the same thing: to walk, to wake, to keep from giving in to the pleas of his weary body and the sweet song of the storm.

When this began to fail, he sought for a song. He wanted very much to sing of warm things: of hearths and warm drinks, summer nights and beds heaped high with blankets, of fur mantles and cosy hobbit-holes, of the bright brilliance of the Sun or the blaze of dragon-fire that had devoured Gondolin or of the fires of Mount Doom itself. Yet all that he could think of were the songs of ice and chill and cheerlessness: the Man in the Moon and his cheerless supper, the journey of the Noldor across the Helcaraxë, hoarfrost upon the beeches in Imladris, the cold stubborn heart of Queen Erendis, and dank and bitter mountain caves where strange creeping creatures dwelt.

So he tried running through mathematical problems in his head, but he could not muster enough intelligence to contrive or remember any truly difficult ones. The plodding pace of the numbers in his mind fell in with the rhythm of his feet and the bolts of pain that he could now only feel in his hips, and it threatened to lull him to sleep of its own accord without any help at all from the storm. After that he simply walked on, unthinking and increasingly unfeeling as the storm blew on around him and the snow continued to fall.

And somehow, remarkably, Gollum still walked with him.

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It was in the forenoon of the third day when at last the wind died away, having driven off the clouds and their steadily falling snow. The silence that fell then was both strange and terrible; as haunting in its own way as the dead hush of the Ephel Dúath. Above the trees the sun shone brightly, and where their branches allowed the light to fall upon the frozen crust of the drifts, the snow glittered like fields of scattered adamant beneath the frosty air.

Aragorn was too weary to appreciate this glacial beauty, and Gollum too weary to protest against the light. They toiled on together, the Ranger fighting to break his narrow path and the prisoner loping almost on his heels. They must have made a miserable sight, Aragorn thought. His back was still bowed like that of an old man, the chilled muscles unable to straighten his crooked spine. His stride had shrunk to a shuffling hobble. He had the blanket pulled snug about his chest, trapped near his sides by his elbows because his hands could not grasp any longer. One side was still drawn up over his head like a milkmaid's shawl, and the simple brass brooch clasped the whole arrangement in place near his throat. Behind him Gollum was a twisted wreck, whimpering as he went and taking it in turns to lift one of his four limbs out of the snow as he hopped along. The bright cruel gleam of his eyes was dimmed to grim resignation and dulled with the stupor of cold, and Aragorn was certain that his own eyes had lost their light. They were both worn ragged with exhaustion, unfed and ill-watered (for drinking from his cold bottle was a torment in such weather, and Gollum shunned his usual helping of snow), and frozen almost to the limit of what living flesh could bear.

Thus they came, wretched and driven beyond their endurance, to the edge of the first farmstead that bordered the Town at Carrock.

In the years of prosperity that had come to these lands after the fall of the Dragon and the restoration of the dwarves to their ancestral halls in Erebor, the scattered folk of northern Wilderland had gathered together. Beorn the skin-changer had been their leader in those days, and a little upstream of his ford had sprung a town. Placed so advantageously for travel and trade, it had flourished. More than once in his long travels had Aragorn passed this way, and the growth of the community and the increasing security and comfort of its residents had always been a source of hope to him. His own people were now as the Beornings had been: a dwindling and hidden race, dwelling in small villages scattered through the wilds. If such a place as the Town at Carrock could thrive even in a world besmirched by the Shadow, there was sure hope of rebuilding the cities of the North if ever the fall of Sauron might be achieved.

Aragorn had last come this way almost sixteen years ago, on the journey to Mirkwood to pick up the cold trail of the creature now staggering in his wake. Then, travelling with Gandalf, he had passed the night at a pleasant inn before making an easy crossing on the ferry to the Carrock itself, from which a clear eastward fording was possible over the far leg of Anduin where it spread about the isle. The Beornings he had found to be a stalwart and friendly people – a little suspicious of strange travellers, perhaps, but Gandalf was well known to them and his good words had carried much weight. Yet Gandalf was not with him now, and he did not have the comfortable purse of coin that he had carried on that journey. He knew he could not reasonably hope for such a courteous welcome this time.

Still he had to cross Anduin, and therefore he must somehow enlist their aid or else go back southward apace and attempt to swim the river again. This he did not dare do, for the cold was many times what he had braved in his more southerly crossing, and he was weakened by hunger and weariness. He did not think that he would have the strength to keep from floundering.

Thus he trudged onward, past distant farmhouses battened tightly against the cold, their stout chimneys blowing streams of pale wood-smoke. At last, when he was beginning to think that he had lost his way entirely, a dark mass appeared off to his right; far enough that he had to turn southeast to put it squarely in his path. As he drew nearer he could see the shape of the town wall. It was made of the trunks of great firs, bared of their branches but left with their bark and driven deep into piling-holes in the earth. The tops of the trunks had been cut to a uniform height and sharpened to tapered points. Scaling such a wall was all but impossible, and it stood sturdy against all weapons but fire. As the Beornings' chief enemies were the wild wolves and the mountain wargs, it was effective protection for their town.

The road that led to the gate wound off to the south, where it joined with the Old Forest Road somewhere east of where Aragorn had crossed it. He cut his way through the snow-drifts and climbed to the surer ground of the road. Its snow was not much broken, but at least one cart had passed this way since the storm's end that morning, and he settled his unfeeling feet into one of its wheel-ruts. It seemed a tremendous relief to walk without fighting for every step, and he managed a somewhat quicker pace here. It was drawing on to sunset.

The town gates were open, drawn in and tied off to the posts that supported the inner edge of the simple wooden allure on which no sentries walked today in the terrible cold. Sensible for their bodies, if not for the defence of the town, the guardsmen were gathered in the lower room of one of the wooden towers that flanked the gate. The door at least was open wide, and one man had his tall spear to hand. The others were lounging on the wooden benches or leaning on the walls. A deep charcoal brazier stood in their midst, its iron struts glowing orange about the edges with the heat of the blaze.

Aragorn halted some yards from the gate and bent to take up the greater length of Gollum's tether. It took him three attempts to make his frozen left hand obey him, but finally he had a grip on the rope that he knew was true only because it forced Gollum to fall into step close by his boot. Then he straightened his aching back as much as he possibly could and drew near. He waited for one of the guards to come out to waylay him; to demand his business in the town, to ask what arms he carried, to assure themselves that he was not a danger to their folk. But though the one bearing the spear peered out at him with scrutinizing eyes he said nothing. Aragorn drew nearer still.

He was straight beside the door now, and he could see that in the outward corner two men were sitting at a small table playing at draughts while the others offered their advice on the game and passed around an earthenware flagon that gave off faint steam from its mouth. Certain that he was about to be stopped, the Ranger hoped miserably that he could force his chilled vocal chords to work. If he could not speak to offer what reassurances he could, he might be forced to dig down in the snow for his night's meagre shelter, for he could not walk on without the means to cross the Great River. He took another step, and then another. The joints of his hips seemed to grind with the pain of the motion, and at his side Gollum shambled sullenly. But the chatting men did not bestir themselves, and the one with the spear merely looked him over from head to foot with a sort of pitying disdain and then turned back to remark upon the game in the corner.

Taken for a beggar, then, Aragorn thought as he limped past the threshold of the gate and into the town itself. He managed a few steps in appreciation of his remarkable luck before remembering in numb dawning surprise that he had not just been taken for a beggar, but was one. His garments were in rags and his boots were cracked and leaking. He had no pack, no food, no supplies of any kind, and he had not had money in his hand since his southward journey more than a year ago. He walked with a companion who was the very picture of miserable penury, and if they were to have any hope at all of continuing this journey it would be on the strength of the charity of these folk. It was not at all a heartening thought.

There were few people abroad in this cold, but those that were went forth warmly bundled in thick woollen clothing and hurried about their errands with little attention to spare for the tattered Ranger and his captive. Aragorn followed the road from the gate, trying and failing to recall whether it would take him all the way down to the east water-gate that opened on the ferry-landing. He did not know how he might possibly pay the ferryman, but he would have to manage something. He was certainly desperate enough to avoid another swim. He would manage something.

The street he was on opened up on the town square, neat cobblestoned space with a covered well and troughs for horses. There was more activity here: bearded men and ruddy-cheeked women moving from shop to shop, and sturdy healthy children running about in the snow with their scarves flying. Bright-mittened hands scooped up fistfuls of snow which they tried to toss at one another, but the cold was too great and the balls would not hold their shape. Instead the children sent off showers of glistening powder from their hands, uttering delighted golden laughs that seemed to ring in the air.

It was that sound that made Aragorn halt, Gollum shrinking in beside him and staring warily in every direction at once. That sound; the laughter of happy children. He could not remember when he had last heard it. Even sweet little Osbehrt and his bold sister Annis had not laughed in his hearing. It was the very noise of innocence, of elemental joy. It brought a hot film to his stinging eyes and put a cavernous ache in his weary chest. Loneliness so great that it seemed it would consume him entirely drained the last of the heat from his near-frozen body and left him an icy statue at the edge of the square.

Someone was speaking and he tried to muster himself. 'Your pardon?' he croaked, his lips managing to form the words after all though their noise was unlovely.

A broad-shouldered young man still wearing his first beard was standing with bolt of flannel on one hip and a firm hand on the other. 'I said you look lost, stranger. Can I help you along?'

'Help me…' Aragorn mumbled stupidly. A child laughed again and he tried to close his ears to the sound. The pain of it was too great. 'I am cold,' he whispered. He glanced at Gollum, cowering by his boot and looking up at the youth with wide, uncertain eyes. 'We are cold.'

The boy chuckled, a rich and hearty chuckle that was nonetheless not quite the torment of the children's happy cries. 'I should think you would be, dressed like that in this weather. Are you mad, or simply careless?'

Aragorn found himself looking down in spite of himself, at the frosty blanket tucked clumsily about his arms and the tattered hem of his cote which had never, even when new, been warm enough for such a winter; at his patched hose and his failing boots. 'I have not been fortunate,' he said. 'I have travelled far and I am hungry. Please, where might I find a little to eat?'

The young man took the hand from his hip and used it to clap Aragorn's shoulder. He was a tall lad, and this did so without too much stretching. 'It's Kvigir you want. Bakehouse just there on the left – see the shingle? Or if you've a spare copper or two you could always get a hot meal from Afvald down at the inn. I'm headed there myself if you'd like to follow.'

'Thank you, no,' said Aragorn, no less hoarsely than before. 'I have no coin to spare. I will go to see Kvigir.'

With a nod and a shrug the boy sauntered away, and Aragorn's eyes travelled to the tall, slate-shingled shop that he had pointed out. As he dragged his weary feet across the square towards it he was suddenly struck by the warm and almost overwhelming scent of fresh-baked bread, laced thickly with another sweet aroma that he could not immediately place. Together they set his mouth flooding and his shrivelled stomach roiling. Even Gollum did not seem wholly immune to its influence, for he stopped short until the rope tugged at his neck, and walked on when he had to with his nostrils flared and his eyes glinting greedily. Somehow Aragorn reached the door to the bakehouse and managed to get it open.

The warmth within struck him in a wave and the toothsome fragrances were suddenly overpowering. His right foot caught on the threshold and he stumbled across it with very little dignity at all. As the door swung shut behind the travellers, they found themselves in a large stone-walled room that seemed to occupy most of the first floor of the shop. There were shelves to one side, laden with baked goods that Aragorn did not even dare to look at. He focused instead on the far side of the room, where a huge brick oven glowed bright with the heat of the fire within and a muscular man with a bushy black beard stood with his feet planted wide before a high work-table. He was kneading a massive ball of dough, and beside him sat rows of new-shaped loaves waiting their turn to bake.

The man looked up with a broad, friendly smile on his face. 'What can we be getting for you today, sir? Some honey-cakes, perhaps, or some wee manchet loaves for the supper table? Or I have…'

His voice trailed away as he took in the dishevelled stranger and his curious companion, and the smile faded to a suspicious scowl.

'Here now,' he said, all the welcome gone from his voice. 'What do you want?'





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