Note: Thank you to everyone who's weighed in on the poll so far, both here and at fanfiction.net! There have been some very compelling arguments on both sides, and clearly I’ve got some thinking to do. Happily we still have a little further to go on this "long and lonely road"…

Chapter LXIII: Fishing

Aragorn met Galion around the first turn, coming from the Ranger’s little room in puzzlement. He had looked in when his knock went unheeded, and of course found it empty. At his guest’s bidding the steward left the platter of simple foods and took the rest on to the guardroom, where his assistant was already bearing the watchers’ meal.

Aragorn ate as quickly as he dared, still distrustful of his uneasy stomach. There was a portion of cold game hen, but that he left untouched in favour of the gentler fare. He found he craved bread most of all, and the bakers of the Greenwood were skilled in its making. When he had finished he rose, but not before fishing the piece of vellum out and glancing at it to refresh his memory as to the identity of Gollum’s mysterious friend. He left the sheet it on the table. The last thing they needed was for it to fall from his garments by some mischance. Even if their captive could not read Elvish it would raise questions in his mind.

Easing his weight onto the crutches again, Aragorn cast a brief longing glance at the neatly made bed. The temptation to stretch out upon it was great, for his back was stiff and his limbs ached with the long morning of sitting in an unyielding chair. He resisted, however, and instead took a long moment to screw up his resolve.

He took stock of himself, too, before abandoning his refuge. The comical effect of the robe’s too-narrow shoulders, too-generous body and too-short sleeves was dispelled somewhat by the wholesome cleanness of the cloth and its sumptuous colour. Perhaps Thranduil’s tailor was not entirely in error about that. Aragorn adjusted the sheath upon his decrepit belt so that his knife was plainly visible on his hip. As an afterthought he plucked up one of the fine woven bands which had been left upon the washstand, and bound back his hair.

The brief walk back to the cells was at once eternal and far too swift. Aragorn scarcely had to think about using the crutches now, so there was nothing to distract him from his dread. Sitting at once remove and listening to Gollum’s gabbling had been quite trying enough. The thought of actually having to stay composed and ask the questions set his jaw to clenching and his belly roiling. Perhaps it had been a mistake to eat.

Gandalf’s voice could be heard right up the carven corridor, talking animatedly of horse husbandry in Lothlórien. They had left the door open wide, doubtless in the hope of dispelling the sour air that leaked from Gollum’s cell. Aragorn swung his good foot past the posts and took a quick, deep breath that brought him neither pleasure nor confidence.

‘How goes the questioning?’ he asked. There was a note of command in his voice, but he took care not to overplay the subterfuge: he spoke no louder than necessary to be heard through Losfaron’s pleasant boast of his own mare.

Gandalf turned in his chair, piercing eyes still puzzling. This was not at all what had been agreed, but his trust in the Ranger was great. ‘Poorly,’ he said with chill displeasure. ‘Our guest refuses to treat with me, whatever I try. Today it has been persistent cold questioning. I fared no better with that than with enticements. I am beginning to think him incapable of intelligible speech.’

While he spoke, Aragorn was listening. From behind the locked door a strangled squawk had arisen at the sound of his voice. Now there were noises of a frantic, scrabbling muster: banks and rattles from the wooden cot, muted breathless snuffling, and the screech of ragged nails clawing the stone. Their artifice had been successful: only now was Gollum aware of his captor’s arrival.

‘Mayhap I can help you to persuade him,’ Aragorn said. ‘Certainly we have travelled far enough together that I must know something of his mind by now.’

Gandalf was searching his eyes, trying to divine the course this conversation was meant to take. He had little success, for Aragorn had given the matter scanty thought. He was trusting to their long acquaintance to guide them both through it as naturally as possible.

‘You had little fortune questioning him ere this,’ said the wizard, caution in his eyes but none in his voice.

"I did not,’ said Aragorn coolly, though despite their intent the words stung. ‘But we were driven at a great pace through uncertain lands. I had no opportunity to mount a proper interrogation.’

It appeared that Gollum had not yet heard that word from Gandalf, for a dread silence fell upon the locked room.

‘I would be glad of your aid,’ Gandalf said aloud, though his eyes were blazing. As the two Elves began to gather the dishes from their meal, he swooped in towards Aragorn so they stood nearly nose to nose. ‘What is this madness?’ he hissed through his teeth, only just audible even so near and surely overpowered by the clacking of crockery. ‘You need not endure him: you are not yet well!’

‘I am well enough for this,’ Aragorn breathed, eyes firm with a conviction he did not feel. Returning to a speaking voice he said; ‘Has the prisoner been fed?’

Losfaron had caught on to the game, and he stepped in to make a play. ‘Watered only, my lord. Mithrandir bade us forgo his feeding.’

‘That is well,’ Aragorn said. He lowered his voice to a murmur loud enough that Gollum should catch the occasional word. ‘Send to the kitchen for some river fish. Trout or dace will serve. They should be filleted but uncooked. Knock when you return, and one of us shall come out to meet you.’

‘Aye, my lord,’ Losfaron assented. He went back to gather up a laden tray and he and his guard departed with haste. Aragorn moved out of the way so that Gandalf might close and lock the door.

‘Do you mean to question him alone?’ This was spoken for the prisoner to hear, but the question was grimly earnest.

‘Indeed, no!’ Aragorn said, a little too emphatic in his distaste. Modulating his tone, he said; ‘Perhaps we two together will prove more successful.’

Gandalf grunted skeptically at this, and then took hold of Aragorn’s forearm. ‘Much though I mislike this, it is surely for the best,’ he said. Then he dropped his voice almost to nothingness and whispered; ‘I am weary with this work, and it has made me imprudent. Again it seems I must implore your forgiveness: in my carelessness I uttered your name!’

Aragorn nodded. ‘I heard. It is of no moment. He has heard it at every waystation from Lórien onward. My name, at least, is no secret to him. It cannot be helped now, and surely the name itself means nothing to him.’

There was uncertainty in Gandalf’s eyes, and little relief. Aragorn had become so resigned to the inevitability of Gollum learning something of his secrets after such prolonged and imprudent association that he had not paused to think how dismaying the prospect must seem.

‘Let us make a start,’ he said, again in an audible voice. ‘We shall see what he may tell us. I have not hunted so long that he might sit sullen and silent in the Elven-King’s dungeon forever.’

That would make Gollum wonder about his future, and with a little luck make him anxious to secure it. Aragorn went to the door and braced his right shoulder on the wall by the post that he might lay by his crutches. Gandalf pursed his lips in disapproval, but said nothing. It was plain that any show of weakness would harm their position. He found the key and put it into the lock, hauled the door wide and motioned for Aragorn to pass through.

Not since his encounter with the great cats had Aragorn taken a step upon his mangled ankle, nor even tested his weight on it. It was still inflamed and tender, bruised brilliantly beneath its bindings. The foot itself was raw and peeling, even as the left one was. This gambit was a risk: falling would be far worse than crutches. But Aragorn put his left hand on the far doorpost and took his perilous step.

The sickening looseness of the sinews struck him first as the joint trembled beneath its load, followed swiftly by a stab of protesting agony. By then he had his left foot on the floor again, and he relieved his right momentarily of his weight. Setting it down again was like planting his heel upon a bare framing spike and stomping down to drive it upward into the bones of his leg.

Aragorn bent his will to moving as naturally as possible, and bore the pain with silent fortitude. In another moment he was in the corner of the cell. He leaned back with a shoulder against each wall and planted his left shoe firmly. He bent his knee to draw his right foot back and off of the ground, letting his toes brush the floor but loosely. He crossed his arms to complete the posture of indolent confidence, and looked appraisingly down at Gollum.

He was crouching on the bed with his bony back pressed into the corner. His pale eyes were enormous with apprehension, and the hideous contortions of his face added to it the blackest hate.

Gandalf was inside now, locking the door. When he turned his face remained impassive, but his eyes flicked worriedly down the length of the Ranger’s legs. Aragorn gave him a tight-lipped nod. Then the wizard set his staff against the wall in the opposite corner and frowned at Gollum.

‘Well? What have you to say for yourself?’ he asked, his voice resounding with authority in the shallow space.

Gollum’s lips worked soundlessly, his eyes still roving over Aragorn as if trying to take his measure. Then he glared piercingly at the wizard instead.

‘Nothing!’ he spat. ‘We has nothing to say! No, nothing at all. Cruel manses, both of them: we won’t say it! We won’t!’

‘What is it you will not say?’ asked Aragorn; an old trick he had learned from a wily soldier in Gondor. ‘Is it to do with your Precious? With your Birthday Present?’

Gollum hissed as his head whipped to its right. His eyes narrowed almost to slits as he stared at the Ranger’s pallid face, just before he cast his gaze abruptly away. ‘We won’t talk to him, we won’t, we won’t,’ he muttered. ‘Tall wicked Bright Eyes. Ties us, Gollum, and beats us! Steals us away to the Elveses, Precious, and sends cruel old Greybeard to question us. Yess he does!’

‘You have had your chance to speak to me alone,’ said Gandalf sternly. ‘And you have had your chance to confess to him. Now you must answer to us both.’

‘No!’ Gollum snarled, lunging forward on the cot in angry defiance. ‘We won’t , we won’t! You can’t force us, Gollum.’

‘To be sure we could, if that was what we wished,’ Gandalf said, his voice low and dangerous. ‘But it will go easier for you if you tell us of your own accord. There are many things we may provide you: comforts, even luxuries. Are you hungry, Gollum?’

A sly look flitted across the creature’s face before the wasted features drooped into an approximation of long-suffering misery.

‘Hungry, hungry, yes!’ he moaned piteously. ‘Always hungry, poor belly pinching. Starves us, he does, hateful manses. Scorches our squirrel, stringy already and then dry and nassty. Days and days and nothing at all, Precious: not a nibble or a bite. And then? Then it feeds us wood!’

Gandalf turned his head curiously to Aragorn, who had to resist the urge to squirm uncomfortably against the wall. ‘Pine bark,’ he said simply. ‘Nourishing enough.’

‘See? You see what he does?’ Gollum cried, jabbing an accusatory finger at the Ranger. ‘Admits it! He forbids us nice sweet eggses, too. Feeds us roots and dirt, gollum, expects us to eat it. Bitter roots and Elvish poisons!’

There was nothing to be gained from answering these charges, though it was interesting to watch Gollum try to turn Gandalf against his cohort. Aragorn waited silently for the wretch to wind down his diatribe. Then he spoke, calmly factual.

‘I now have the means to feed you and you shall be fed well, if once you cooperate,’ he said.

‘Lies! Liesss!’ hissed Gollum. ‘Lies like Baggins, he does. Liars, all liarsssss. You lie, you do!’

Aragorn shrugged one shoulder regretfully, as if to say he had expected no better. ‘I do not doubt that someone is lying,’ he said dryly. Gollum was working up to an enraged protest when Aragorn went smoothly on, still hoping to surprise him into some admission. ‘What did you do to your friend Déagol?’

Gollum made a strangled swallowing sound and Gandalf looked sharply at the Man. He knew not whence this question had come, but he also knew better than to give voice to his confusion.

Seeing that he had successfully tapped a vein, Aragorn pressed on. ‘What did you do to Déagol? Tell me.’

‘No, precious, no!’ Gollum shrieked. ‘Went fishing and never came back, he did. Gone far from home, far from nice holes and ponds, what did he think would happen?’

‘He went fishing and he never came back,’ Aragorn echoed. ‘Fishing for your birthday meal?’

Gollum cast him another startled look, this one more fearful than the last. ‘We didn’t tell him, no we didn’t,’ he muttered to himself. Then he seemed to be puzzling through something. ‘Just today it was. Just today.’ He glared suspiciously at Gandalf.

‘Did Déagol go fishing on your birthday?’ Aragorn asked more explicitly still. He had forgotten his weariness and the pulsing pain in his foot. The quickening of the hunt was on him, almost as it had been in the Marshes of Dagorlad. ‘You wanted him to catch you something nice for your birthday.’

‘Yes!’ Gollum gabbled. ‘No! Fish! We wanted fish, we did: only fish! Nice juicy fish, fat fish. Oooh, it pinches, Precious! Poor stomach, always empty and hungry. Starves us, precious!’

Just as Aragorn was thinking that this would be a most opportune time for Losfaron to return, he heard a muffled knock without. Gandalf moved to the door as silently as possible, trying not to draw their prisoner’s attention. Gollum was sniveling incoherently, hiding his eyes with his hands and scrabbling with his feet against the tick so that the straw within bunched into unsightly humps.’

‘Did he catch anything?’ Aragorn asked as the lock clicked to again. Déagol’s luck with a line was immaterial, but it might bring Gollum around to the thing he wanted so hard to convince himself he ‘didn’t do’. It was like drawing an ugly memory from a very small child, or a bewildered and traumatized old man: skirting the edges of the truth and working slowly inward was best.

‘Caught him, it did!’ Gollum barked, something horribly like amusement in his voice. ‘Tugged on the line, and splash! Out of the boat and into the big river. Wide waters, big beautiful fish, gollum!’

So a large fish had dragged this Déagol into the water, had it? Aragorn thought absently that it would take a wide water indeed to harbour such a fish. Giant carp and sturgeon were not unknown in the fathomless Northern lakes, but in a river? Perhaps this was only another lie after all. Yet there surely must be some grain of truth hidden within.

‘Did he drown?’ Aragorn asked. Now he made his voice very soft, as filled with sympathy as he could counterfeit to make it. Two months and nine hundred miles back, he might not have had to pretend. ‘He was your good friend, and it was your birthday. Did he drown?’

‘Drown, drown, drown,’ Gollum mumbled in a haunted singsong that hardened to a snarl as he added; ‘We should have drowned him, Precious! Drowned him and sank him and left him to rot. Let the fishes eaat his eyes, Gollum, and his toes and his nose and his…’

There was more, and Aragorn was briefly certain he had learned something significant at last. Then Gollum straightened, fixed hateful eyes upon him, and snarled spitefully; ‘And left him there forever, under the ice!’

Aragorn let out a hot column of air through his nostrils, jaw tightening in frustration. Gollum had doubled back to their journey again: this time to the ill-starred crossing that had nearly claimed them both.

‘Perhaps you will fare better when next you try to drown me,’ he said with sour restraint. ‘I asked if your friend was drowned.’

Gollum’s nostrils flared, but before he could speak the door opened and Gandalf came back. He fastened the lock and held out a handsome carven platter to the Ranger. On it were the filleted sides of several trout, silvery-orange and glistening, obviously fresh.

Aragorn looked from the uncooked to the uncouth and drew his roughened lips into a thin line. If this method was to work, he had to make a show of faith. Unfortunately, he recalled only too well how such gestures had been met in the past. It was irksome to be forced to extend courtesy where it had been so often rejected before.

He gave the dish back to Gandalf and picked up one of the cool, slippery pieces. He tore off a small chunk and placed it in the palm of his hand. Gollum was watching him warily, but with avarice.

‘Déagol went fishing on your birthday to catch you something nice,’ Aragorn recited slowly. ‘A large fish pulled him from the boat, so you said.’ It might be unwise to include this last, for he risked rewarding a lie, but Gandalf had not yet heard it. Besides, trust must first be given before it could be expected. ‘Since you have told me these things, you may have this.’

The slightest sidelong glance at Gandalf was all that was needed. He reached out and stayed Aragorn’s hand.

‘You reward such a paltry tale as that?’ Gandalf asked coldly. ‘I would not feed him for twice as much.’

‘He has earned it,’ said Aragorn. ‘When he has done my bidding before this he was rewarded as circumstances would permit. It is only just that I do the same now.’

He slipped his arm from the commanding grip that was truly little more than a light touch, and held out the fish to Gollum again.

‘Come and fetch it,’ he invited, almost pleasantly. ‘You have earned it.’

Gandalf was very still, his staff in the crook of the arm that held the platter. His eyes moved slowly between Gollum squatting on his cot and Aragorn standing casually one-legged in the corner. Aragorn did not take his gaze from the prisoner, but he kept his eyes soft and very patient. It was like the night when he had invited his foul travelling companion to shelter beneath his blanket: acceptance or rejection would decide the course of the interrogation. This time, at least, there would be no wargs to disrupt the crucial moment.

Gollum reached out with one grasping hand, clutching at empty air. He could not reach the fish: to take it he would have to cross the room and enter the Man’s armspan. He took a crouching hop away from the wall, and then another. Spittle was dribbling from one corner of his mouth, and his eyes were so intent upon the scrap of fish that it might have been yet living and he preparing to snatch it from the water.

Now he was perched on the wooden lip of the bed. One skeletal foot crept over the edge and slowly down, excruciatingly slowly like a swimmer slipping down off a pier into icy water. Aragorn watched, not daring to move and scarcely hazarding a breath, as the long toes hovered just above the floor. Then they touched it, flexing down.

All at once Gollum let out a shriek and leapt back up onto the cot. ‘A trick, a trick, a trick! Tricksy manses, wicked cheating thing. Snatch it away, he will, and grab us! He’s a friend of Baggins: tricksy cheating Baggins. He cheated first, he did, and tricked us. Tricked us out of our Precious, gollum. Stole it away: hateful thief. Find him and squeeze him and dig out his eyes…’

For a moment Aragorn and Gandalf both stood speechless, startled by the swiftness of the change far more than by the ugly words. Gollum was gabbling senselessly again, licking at his hands and rocking to and fro. Exasperated and trying not to give in to it, Aragorn flung the piece of fish back onto the plate in Gandalf’s hand. It landed with a soft plop, and the wizard stared down at it for a moment before flinging the dish onto the floor in the right-hand corner.

‘Enough of this!’ he snapped. ‘You will tell us what we wish to know, or we shall compel you.’ He motioned briskly at Aragorn.

‘What happened to Déagol? Did he drown in the river?’ the Ranger asked, his voice hard now with the effort to restrain himself. ‘How do you know of the great fish?’

‘He cannot know: it is another lie,’ said Gandalf unexpectedly. He snorted disdainfully in Gollum’s direction. ‘His friend left home to go fishing, and never came back: that is all. He knows nothing of his fate.’

‘It’s not a lie!’ Gollum snarled, uncoiling himself to glare murderously at the wizard. ‘It’s the truth, it is: we saw it! We watched him, yes we did, gollum. Watched him, saw him: in he went! Splash, into the water like a stone.’

This hung upon the air. After a moment’s swift consideration, Aragorn spoke. ‘When is your birthday, then?’ he asked. ‘The daisies were blossoming, and the bearded iris?’

Gandalf shot him another incredulous look, doubtless wondering what bearing flowers could possibly have on the matter. Gollum was shaking his head spastically.

‘No, no, no,’ he moaned. ‘Go away! Turn away! Leave us be! Leave us be, gollum. We don’t know it, don’t know it, don’t know any of it, we don’t. We didn’t do it, none of it: all lies and nassty suspicious little minds. Take us and whip us and hurt us, Precious! Not fair at all: not fair.’

‘Answer me,’ Aragorn pressed. ‘The daisies and the iris were blooming on your birthday?’

Gollum tried to give him another hateful glance, but as soon as Aragorn caught his eyes he held them, staring deeply and willfully into Gollum’s heart. All he saw was blackness, twisting and writhing in misery and hatred, but that was no less than he had expected to see. More importantly, Gollum was transfixed: unable to move, unable to speak, unable even to look away. His jaw dropped and his sparse gums worked, and his hands writhed together. Then he let loose another of his ear-splitting wails and cast himself bodily onto the floor, scuttling under the cot as swiftly as a bedbug in sudden light.

‘Yes! Yes!’ he yowled. ‘Daisies and purple beards, nassty stinking flowers. Spoiling our birthday, Precious: ruining it. Hates them, Precious. Hates them all: nassty kicking feet and cruel handses, fire and knife and cruel ropes! And their stinking flowers, all around the river.’

Now Gandalf was fairly seething with questions he could not ask. Gollum was sobbing and whimpering, almost hidden from sight as he tried to cram himself into the corner under the cot. He cowered behind the brass pot that was tucked beneath it, slavering and whinging.

Aragorn looked sharply at his friend. ‘The irises still in bloom, and the daisies open,’ he said calculatingly. ‘Late spring or very early summer.’

Gandalf’s look was clear, and very irritated: what can that possibly matter?

This Aragorn could not say aloud, but his mind was moving at a frenetic pace. If Gollum’s birthday was not the first of March but near the time when spring gave way to summer, then it had not been the day that had reminded him of it. And if it was not the day, what else could it have been? Not his companion, surely: he counted Aragorn no friend. Assuredly not the weather, or the scent of the wind. No: if anything had prompted Gollum’s memories of his birthday and his all-important Birthday Present, it must have been the place.

‘Gollum,’ he said sternly. The whimpering hiccoughed and quieted somewhat, but did not cease. ‘Gollum, where did Déagol go to fish? In what river?’

He already knew: in the only river known to him that might run broad and deep enough to harbour a fish sufficiently large and strong to drag a hobbit-like fisherman out of a boat. It was not necessarily a lie after all.

‘Was it Anduin?’ Aragorn pressed. ‘Did you dwell near Anduin? Near the Great River? Was your grandmother’s hole…’ He lost his words for a moment as he put this together: Déagol had gone far from home, and had never returned. And if there had been a big river, did it not make sense that there might be a small river? ‘Was your grandmother’s hole near the banks of the Gladden?’

Gandalf’s eyes widened and he turned to Aragorn, lips parting as he realized what the Ranger’s questions were suggesting. Aragorn looked to the wizard in his own turn.

‘But have a hobbit-like people ever dwelt in the Vale of Anduin at all?’ he asked breathlessly, not quite whispering but certainly hopeful that Gollum might be too distracted to heed his words.

‘Yes,’ Gandalf said. His voice was hoarse. ‘Yes, long ago there were little folk burrowing in the hills and banks of the lowlands. There are tales yet among the Beornings… but they dwindled and were lost as the mountain passes became infested with orcs and the lands darkened beneath the Shadow of Dol Guldur.’

Aragorn’s brows furrowed. In this his family’s history served as a touchstone; not his family of birth, this time, but the family that had fostered him. For the first clear sign that the mountain passes were becoming infested with orcs had been the capture of Celebrían, wife of Elrond. And that had been more than five centuries ago. ‘If that is so…’ he began.

Gandalf put a hand upon his arm. ‘Not now,’ he whispered. More loudly he said; ‘Gollum? Where did you get it? How did you come to possess that ring?’

‘Birthday Present, BIRTHDAY PRESENT!’ Gollum yowled. From beneath the cot came more frantic scrambling noises.

Gandalf squatted down onto his hams, tilting his head to peer beneath the bed. With only one good foot, Aragorn was incapable of such contortions. He had to make do with the dim shape lurking in the deep shadow cast by the lantern which hung high upon the wall.

‘Gollum,’ said the wizard, his voice taking on a stentorian quality that seemed to make the very air rumble in this close and stinking place. ‘How did you come by this Birthday Present?’

‘Gave it to us, she gave it to us!’ Gollum droned shrilly. ‘Grandmother. Very rich, she was, yesss, very rich! No raggedy wild manses to trouble us then, oh, no! Wouldn’t dare it, would they, gollum?’

Gandalf shot Aragorn a brief amused look that clearly said Gollum should not be so sure of that. Aragorn felt his own spirits lift, just for a moment. If Strider had business with someone, it was true enough that wealth and influence would not prevent him. But the matter at hand was too grave for levity to linger long.

‘You cannot expect us to believe that,’ Gandalf said severely. ‘It is as improbable an excuse as any I have ever heard. Your Grandmother did not have the Ring.’

‘She did, she did! Her hole was filled up with treasures: beautiful things. We would dig our tunnels and we would find them: gold and silver trinkets, cups and dishes, gollum. Knives and clasps and buttons, rings, yess, and bracelets, and plates as big as coracles, gollum. Many, many precious things….’

He went on in this vein for some time, bemoaning the loss of his grandmother’s treasures and her favour and muttering curses upon those who had driven him out of his home and away from his people. Gandalf gave up his awkward crouch and sat down upon the floor, now and then trying to bring Gollum away from the subject to something more fruitful. But Aragorn was occupied in keeping himself upright against the wall.

His head was swimming in a way that had little to do with his weariness, and there was a sickness in his belly that neither the stench nor his uneasy meal could explain. The notion of Gollum’s grandmother possessing many Elven Rings, even lesser ones, was absurd. However, the tale of tunnelling and finding treasures had the feel of terrible truth. If indeed Gollum’s people had dwelt in the crook of Gladden and Anduin, they would have unearthed the long-hidden remains of the hosts of Arnor slaughtered there at the dawn of the Age. Gold and silver trinkets, knives, dishes: the ornaments of lords great and small and the utensils of soldiers, wrought handsomely even when in base metals. And plates as big as coracles? Steel bucklers with the leather rotted away. As he had on that same day when Gollum had spoken of his Birthday Present, Aragorn felt a lonesome desolation that only the slaughter of his ancient kindred could bring. Failed by their Captain, failed by their King.

‘Get out of there,’ Gandalf said at last, climbing to his feet and dusting the skirts of his robes. ‘We have had quite enough of your histrionics. It is a sad thing that your grandmother disowned you, and no doubt it was unpleasant to be driven off by your kindred, but all that was long ago. If you can remember it, you can remember how you came by your beloved Precious.’

Gollum jabbered something senseless, but he made no move to abandon his shelter. Aragorn shook off his haunted thoughts and cleared his throat. ‘Gollum!’ he said in the imperious tone that had from time to time compelled the wretch to obey. ‘Come forth and face us. There is nowhere to hide.’

From beneath the bunk came a warbling noise of dissent followed by many an imprecation of cruel manses and hateful liars and gollum. They listened for a while, each struggling in his own way for control. Aragorn wanted to cross the room and fling the bed aside, that he might seize the wretch by the shoulders and shake him as he deserved to be shaken, as he had so often by word and deed begged to be shaken, until his neck bobbed loosely on sinews too jarred to hold it and his six fetid teeth rattled in his accursed head. He knew he could not do it, but that was not enough. He had to keep himself from wishing to do it. It was a base impulse, an unworthy desire. Gollum was his prisoner, helpless before his will: helpless to do anything but thwart how ever he could their desire to learn what he knew. It was to be expected that he would resist. It was maddening, but it was natural. It fell upon them, the jailors, to maintain in this place both order and justice. However weary, irate and provoked, they could not stoop to the devices of the Enemy.

He had fought such urges before, and suppressed them. He had meted out his punishments with calculation and control. He had struck Gollum heatedly only in those moments when he had been fighting not only for mastery but for his very life. If the lonely road with its countless travails had not broken him in this, he would not be broken in this warm and sheltered room. He closed his mind to thoughts of petty vengeance and strove to cool the choler of his blood.

Gandalf was undergoing a similar struggle, eyes stormy with wrath and wizened hands working. They clenched and unclenched. They plucked at his beard and raked through his hair. They tugged at one another’s sleeves. Many were the proverbs that warned of the wrath of wizards, and Aragorn knew that none of these were unfounded. His own temper might burn hot as a forge, but beside it Gandalf’s was dragon-fire.

‘Turn it on end,’ Aragorn said at last, his voice more hoarse than he would have expected.

Gandalf turned on him as if to launch into a fearsome dressing-down. His eyes blazed and his restless fingers tightened. But all he said, grinding out the word over set teeth, was; ‘Turn what?’

‘The bunk,’ said Aragorn. ‘Turn it on its end, and he will have nowhere to hide.’

The room was not five feet deep and only seven broad, but the bed did not occupy the whole of the back wall. In length it was short of six feet: during his two-day sojourn here as he had done his utmost to test the limits of Thranduil’s security, Aragorn had taken his brief spans of sleep stretched out on the floor instead of folded onto that abbreviated thing. It was not fixed to the wall, nor to the floor, and he had made every conceivable use of it in his own escape attempts. Though heavy and unwieldy it could be moved.

‘I had thought to take him by the ankle,’ said Gandalf tartly; ‘but someone once warned me against his teeth.’ Then he took the two swift steps across the room and flung the thin straw pallet and blanket from the cot. He took hold of the edge that was driven into the corner – where Gollum had been sitting until he threw himself to the floor – and with a swift, sparing sweep of his arms that spoke of strength far greater than appearances would indicate, he flipped the simple furnishing onto its foot, narrowly avoiding the lantern on the wall.

Cast suddenly into the light, Gollum’s legs scuttled up beneath his wasted body. He was curled in a ball, but his hands did not guard his head as might have been expected in such a position of defence. Instead, his head sheltered his hands. They were huddled between his bony shoulders, writhing like overturned insects. He was licking them as he whimpered.

"Poor handses!’ he sobbed. ‘No, no! No more! No more!’

A sour metallic taste filled Aragorn’s mouth, nothing like the thick, vile flavor of the stagnant air. He remembered the early days, fleeing into the Emyn Muil and tending his own festering arm while all the time mindful of the need to be vigilant of Gollum’s ruined hands. Burns and shallow cuts and the hard, bruised wheals left by strange and terrible instruments. He and Gandalf might have kept the arts of Mordor from this cell, but they flourished in the prisoner’s mind. The terror of that place lay black upon Gollum’s heart.

lar

So it went on. Hours passed, and they tried every stratagem they knew. Wordlessly they passed the roles back and forth: one now advocating for the prisoner while the other spoke against him; then the other would press him fiercely while the other reasoned or coaxed. They tried silence. They tried barrages of questions so rapid that an accomplished Elven scholar could not have kept track of them all. They tempted him with the fish. They tempted him with water. This last privation they could not sustain, for Gollum frothed at the mouth and sweated out such quantities that Aragorn’s healer’s eye began to fear for his wellbeing. He had endured longer stretches of thirst than this, but never with such unearthly exertions. He writhed and he scrabbled and he tried to climb the walls. He scurried between them when Gandalf strode wobbling ellipses around the small room and the two of them pelted him with their queries. Ever his wiry hands were in motion.

The questions were almost as repetitive as the garbled evasions. They pressed him for his history, for the rest of the story of his friend which seemed so wound up in the fated birthday, for an account of his movements after leaving his dark lake beneath the Misty Mountains, and again and again for whatever he might know of Bilbo beyond his name and his purported dishonesty at riddle-games. Now and then they would throw in some other inquiry, trying to distract him briefly so that the other might surprise some truth from him. But Gollum was skilled in the arts of evasion, and his sanity was tenuous. He wept and whined and spouted all manner of lies, and when none of that availed him he repeated his accusations of cruelty again and again. They were both cruel, it seemed, but Aragorn most of all.

That was almost the worst of it: his distorted accounts of mistreatment on the road behind which the Ranger knew his friend could read the struggles and deprivations. Once or twice when Gollum was in the throes of one of his gymnastic contortions, Aragorn caught the wizard watching him with sad and knowing eyes.

The physical discomforts of the work were secondary to the mental agonies and the ringing in their ears, but they were not insignificant. Aragorn did not dare to move from his corner, not even when his left thigh began to burn and threaten to cramp. He did not wish to risk stumbling upon his bad foot without cause, and the only cause he could imagine that would be worth the risk was departing from this place. His back ached fiercely, putting to shame any twinges he had suffered this morning. His neck was stiff and sore from resisting the flinch his body wanted to make every time Gollum let out one of his sundering howls. And the headache that had been brewing almost from the beginning of the day’s labours deepened and intensified until it seemed his very skull pulsed and throbbed each beat of his heart.

Gandalf’s troubles seemed chiefly to be in the hollow of his spine and up his arms into his shoulders. During his most terse and testy questions, he would kneed at these places with hard-fisted knuckles. The drawn look that came over his face whenever Gollum’s ululations rose beyond a certain octave told Aragorn that the wizard, too, was sore in the head.

But Gandalf was not tethered to the wall by the limitations of his body. Twice he left the cell to bring back water (on the second occasion for Gollum as well as the Ranger). He took away the fish when it began to smell strongly enough to be detected even under Gollum’s reek, and once he brought in a thick slice of the guards’ bread with a careful scraping of butter, that Aragorn might eat a little. He did so, but only through a mighty exertion of his will: the smell in the room made no notion quite so unpleasant as feeding.

In the end, when Gollum was once more muttering snatches of riddles between self-pitying sobs, Gandalf turned from him with a face curled into a rictus of disgust.

‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Let him stew in his juices another night if he must. This has gone beyond toil to torment.’

Before Aragorn could speak out to agree, much less offer comment of his own, the door was thrust open. Gandalf took hold of his shoulder with a strong hand and moved as if propelling a reluctant Ranger through the exit. In fact what he was doing was offering something sturdy for Aragorn to thrust his weight against when he had to step with his right foot. This time there was no pain: his leg was numb below the middle of his shin, having fallen asleep in its limp, pendulous position. Aragorn covered the short distance to the anteroom with ease, and could not help cringing with the pounding of his head when Gandalf slammed the door with all his might. He thrust the key in the lock and turned it wrathfully.

‘Tomorrow,’ he vowed bleakly, as much for the captive’s benefit as for their own.

Aragorn got his crutches under his arms and hobbled to the table. He feared to take one of the chairs, lest he should prove unequal to rising again, but he sat himself on a corner of the table. It was an enormous relief to take even a portion of the burden off his left foot, which was burning with itch and weariness even as prickling needles of awakening nerves began to ripple through its mate. Again he motioned that Gandalf should go and fetch the guards while he stayed. This time, however, Gollum said nothing. There was only the crackle of straw and the whisper of canvas as he punched at the simple mattress, doubtless making himself a nest on the floor.

Gandalf returned swiftly with two fresh soldiers in his wake. Brief instructions were given: water, but no food; the light to be left burning; the one door ever locked when the other was not. Neither of the two interrogators asked how long they had been cloistered with their subject in the sunless, timeless room. Neither of them wished to know.