Note: Since Our Hero is trying to learn Roherric, it is not written in Old English. Instead, what words he understands are noted in italics. The others are replaced by dashes, much as the mind tends to glaze over unfamiliar combinations of sounds before one breaks through the immersion barrier. (This is also necessary because none of the Old English lexicons I have at my disposal contain the word for the main plot-driving element in the story. Gee, I wonder why.)

The Devilry of Edoras

Part One: A Coarse New Life

Thorongil – for it was best to start thinking of himself by that name as soon as possible – hugged his hoodless wool cloak about his shoulders and picked up his sodden boots. They were short and hard-soled, and they fitted him poorly; so unlike the supple leather sheaths of Elven make that guarded him up to the knee and sat like a second skin over feet and calves. These he had stowed away in the bottom of the narrow chest he had been assigned, with the rest of his scant personal possessions. They were too unlike anything commonly worn in this land, and he was conspicuous enough as it was. 

He reached over the edge of the wooden walkway that ran under the long eave that covered the porch of the barracks-lodge, and shook the stubby boots one last time. A fresh shower of water rained down from them, and the smell of cheap wet leather was strong. They would never dry by morning, but he supposed that did not matter: he would be going right back into the water anyhow. He glanced at the graduated clothes-rails over which the soldiers’ garments had been slung to dry in the cold late-winter wind. They were all identical: tunics of coarse worsted in an inexpensive mossy green, trousers in sheep’s-colour twill. Like the boots, they fit few men well but most at least serviceably. From the tallest rail were hung the strips of cloth that they wore wrapped around their lower legs for warmth and protection. Winingas, these were called: it was one of the pitiful handful of words that were all Thorongil had managed to learn of the language of Rohan. 

He was shivering ferociously, and his bare toes curled against the cold boards. He glanced about the barracks-yard once more. The éored’s skinny pageboy was bailing out the big wooden trough that served as a tub, sloshing the dark and dirty water of four and a half dozen bathers into the gutter that ran beneath the wall. He had his eyes on his work, and Thorongil was thankful. It was a wearisome thing to be stared at wherever one went. Wearisome and unsettling for one who had grown used to passing largely unnoticed in his own lands. He hitched his cloak closer and went around to the door that led into the lodge.

The long room was smoky and aglow with the torches set in brackets on each of the tall supporting shafts that held up the ridgepole. Their light did not reach that high: it faded away halfway up the underside of the thatching. But it did keep most of the floor illuminated, and down the centre where the trestle tables were set end-to-end it was cheeringly bright. There were two sunken hearths, one near each end of the room, and both were blazing hotly. Some of the men were gathered around these. Most were at the tables, sturdy legs slung over the crude benches as they talked and laughed and ate. One, who had been the new recruit until Thorongil’s arrival four and twenty days before, was already abed although he had had less than five minutes’ lead over the stranger at the bathtub.

These were the least men of the Lord Mayor’s éored, the most junior Riders in a company maintained as much for the service of the city as for the field of war. They were the unwed men, those who through inexperience or indolence or ineptitude had not obtained any rank or renown. Most were little more than stripling boys, still wearing their first beards and a look of bald-faced hope that with time would crystalize into the ruddy, hearty joy in life and in glory that graced the Men of the Mark. Some were older, a mixed lot of the jaded, the indifferent, and those who for all their bravery and good intentions did not possess the cleverness to lead. Among them Thorongil, for all his youth and admitted unfamiliarity with mounted warfare, stood out like a gangly goose in a henhouse.

They were a sorry sight tonight, sitting around barelegged and straggle-haired in their long, coarse shirts. These at least were not so unlike what Thorongil was used to, though the linen was far poorer than any he had worn before, and his very nearly reached his knees – no small thing, given that it had been made with the much shorter Men of the Mark in mind. It was his second shirt and it was damp from his wet skin, but it was clean. The garments he had peeled off before his swift and unpleasant bath had been anything but.

The entire barracks had come trudging home wet to the waist and caked with mud. They had been labouring since sunup to dig a drainage culvert through the great dike that ringed the city. The winter was nearing its end, and the runoff from the mountain snows was heavier than it had been in many a year. The water had overrun the usual channels and backed up the slope towards the great wall that formed the city’s second ring of defence. Close by the wall there were the huts and sheds of the poor who could not obtain a place within the city proper and yet sought the protection of her fortifications from the emptiness of the wide plains beyond. There were rumours of dark things in the East; rumours that Gondor was arming; rumours that there would be war. Any who could sought shelter and the safety of an inhabited place.

Those who had come to this loose shantytown had fared well enough in the clement months. They had weathered the cold with the good will of the King and the provisions of fuel donated at his behest by the wealthy citizenry who dwelt beyond the third barrier, the thorny fence that seemed to crown the foot of the mountain. But now, as the frosty months waned and spring drew near, they had come upon a threat unlooked-for: rising waters that might sweep away their simple homes and their meagre belongings and perhaps even imperil their lives.

So the Lord Mayor had sent forth his own men to rectify the problem. One of His Majesty’s trusted architects had consulted on the problem, and had chosen the spot best calculated to drain the ring inside the dike. Someone had to dig the culvert, and it had fallen to these men, these least of the Lord Mayor’s household strength, to do it.

It had been unpleasant work. They had been issued picks and short-handled shovels with which to bite into the hard-packed earth, and great wooden buckets with which to bail away soil and mud and the omnipresent runoff. They had shored up the sides of their tunnel as they went, and the royal architect had deemed the work well-done indeed. Yet that had made the digging no less miserable, the labour no less exhausting, and the men no less chilled and sodden at the end of it. Those in the culvert itself had had the worst of it, standing in the deepest water and stooping to work on into the low tunnel. In that last party, not a man had been dry below the breast, however tall. And in fine martial tradition this worst of tasks had been thrust upon the lowliest in the company.

Thorongil upended his boots over their set of simple lasts, hoping they would at least retain some ghost of their shape as they dried. He wiped his hand on a corner of the short cloak, keeping it snugly about him, and rubbed his thumb against the back of his neck to quell an itch of discomfiture. The other men seemed unaffected by their casual state of undress, but he was unused to it; in the Wild it was rare to shuck off anything but the outermost layers. Nor did he like the exposed and vulnerable feeling of being draped in one coarse piece of linen and nothing else. At home, at least, he wore nether clothes as well. 

The man on mess duty was already packing up the trappings of his office, and Thorongil hurried over to claim his night’s meal. He was met with surprised eyebrows and a playful grin, and the man said something he could not understand. He tried a thin, hopeful smile, and received a rueful chuckle for his pains.

‘Eat,’ said the man. ‘You –  – – – much –.’ That was all he could catch: about one word in six. They all spoke so swiftly, and the language bore little resemblance even to its closest cousin Westron. But the golden-haired soldier scraped the bottom of his big stew-pot and slopped a ladleful of thin juices and sliced turnip and shreds of boiled meat into a wooden bowl. He put a hunk of good brown bread atop it, and plucked an apple from the crate which stood on a nearby stool. These he thrust into Thorongil’s hands, and when the newcomer tried to retreat he tugged at the shoulder of his cloak to bring him back, so that he could drive a wooden spoon down into the contents of the bowl. 

‘Thank,’ said Thorongil. Even to his ears it did not sound right, and the man grinned in amusement. He did not correct him, though, and Thorongil felt a hot flare of frustration. How was he ever to learn if they merely accepted his clumsy efforts with cheerful politeness? Nonetheless he smiled and ducked his head respectfully before moving off to let the man finish with his duties. In the corner stood the ale-barrel, attended by another soldier. Here Thorongil was given a coarse earthenware jar with his half-pint measure of the warm, sweetish drink that was, so far as he could tell, an important part of the men’s pay. 

He carried his meal past the first two tables, which were crowded with laughing men. Thorongil knew they were not laughing at him, but somehow it always seemed that way when you had no inkling what others were saying. It did not help that he had been the butt of more than a few jokes in these last days. His looks were peculiar enough, with his dark hair and his pale face. His ineptitude with the language did not help matters, nor did the fact that when he could not understand an order he was by necessity slow to follow it. He could tell from the looks in the other men’s eyes, and from their flamboyant mimicking gestures when they thought his back was turned, that he was getting a reputation for being a tall, lumbering lummox. And if he could but translate that phrase into Roherric, he might actually win himself a friend or two. 

The third table, in the central and therefore coldest part of the room, was almost empty. Thorongil set down his dish and his apple, wrapped his cloak snugly about his body again, and sat. The rough wool tickled his ears and rasped at his wrists, but he was glad of its warmth. It was dry, too, for they had all done off with their outermost wrappings before setting to work. A crisp, cold day it had been, but not a wet one: all the wet was running down the mountain to pool at the dike. 

The juices of the meat – too thin to properly be called gravy, much less stew – were soaking into his bread with enthusiasm, and Thorongil bit off the soggy piece first. It was pleasant bread with a faint taste of nuts to it, and it stayed longer in the stomach than the delicate white loaves of home. It had to, for with their lodging and their annually allotted suit of clothes the men of the Lord Mayor’s éored were given but two meals a day: one at mid-morning and one when the day’s duties were over. It had not seemed particularly draconian at first, when they had all been keeping busy with routine chores and mounted field maneuvers, but it was not enough to sustain hard manual labour. Thorongil cast one last wary look around him, gauging his surroundings, and then bowed his head over his dish in a posture that would have horrified his mother and tucked in ravenously. 

Last one signed, last one washed. Last one washed, last one in. Last one in, last one fed. His scraped-up portion had a scorched taste to it. He did not especially mind, for the truth was that without it the boiled beef would have had little flavour at all. It had been liberally salted and there was a faint memory of thyme in the broth, but it had neither the gamey vigour of wild meat nor the imaginatively spiced richness of Elven cooking. Still he ate every scrap of it, and drank what was left of the briny liquid it had cooked in. He chewed his bread slowly, hooking one foot up onto the other’s heel when they began to grow chilled on the bare floor. He drank his ale, which was a weak young brew so unlike the hearty beers of the North. It quenched his thirst, but did little to warm his chest or satisfy his half-filled stomach. Thorongil looked hungrily at the apple for a minute before tucking it away into the crook of his arm. They were going back to the culvert in the morning, and he would be glad of something to gnaw on come early afternoon.

He was about to rise and go to rinse his dishes when a strong hand clapped down on his shoulder. Thorongil looked up to find one of the older men standing over him, grinning.

‘Dark One!’ he said cheerfully. It had not taken very long for the stranger to work out what that meant. Next he said something that meant either come or go: some instructive word about moving in one direction or another. This was followed by a rapid barrage of words that were beyond his understanding but certainly seemed to be meant pleasantly. They were all trying so hard to be kind and to include him in their camaraderie, but he spoke so little of their tongue and they spoke none of his. A couple of the sergeants and several of the married men knew the Common Tongue, and one of the lieutenants (whose wife was a maid of the body to the Queen) actually spoke Sindarin in the dialect of Gondor, so in the field Thorongil could usually manage to beg a translation. When evening came and the men went to their simple recreation, however, he was utterly lost. 

He spared a sour thought for Gandalf, who had lured him down here with promises of much to learn and much to give and then left him, friendless, hapless and functionally mute, after only three days. It was nothing, certainly, to the turns the wizard had tried on others, but it was nonetheless a source of some irritation and much inconvenience.

The man – Thorongil thought his name was Deorwine – slung a leg over the bench and straddled it, hand still firm on the lean shoulder. Awkwardly Thorongil smiled, not understanding what was wanted of him. From somewhere above there came the skitter of small claws, and flakes of dust and thatching reed rained down. He could not help cringing. There were rats living in the lodge, and on his first night he had awakened to one running across his shoulder. It was not an experience he cared to repeat. Animals in the wild were one thing, but the vile rodents with their wormlike tails and their noisome teeth were carriers of filth and disease. They had no place in the dwellings of Men.

Deorwine withdrew his hand and frowned. His next words were clearly a question, and Thorongil had the gnawing feeling that he was trying to find out how he had caused offence. Hurriedly he shook his head and pointed upward before brushing the debris exaggeratedly from his shoulder.

The other man followed his finger and then threw back his head in a mighty laugh. Someone shouted a question from the far end of the string of tables, and Deorwine roared back an answer, wobbling his free hand dramatically. A chorus of chuckles and unintelligible phrases that were somehow both encouraging and jeering filled the room. Flushing crimson, Thorongil slouched again over his empty bowl, curling his forearms around it and staring down at the roughly turned rim. He was the butt of the joke again: the Dark One was afraid of rats.

He wished that he could slink away in secrecy and find a little quiet, but there was no hope of that. Clapping him on the back, Deorwine lifted his other leg over the bench and leaned forward to look Thorongil in the eyes. He grinned affably, and said something in the negative. Thorongil tried to smile to show there were no hard feelings on his part, but he feared it was nothing more than a tight-lipped grimace.

On the other side of the room, someone started up a song. It was a lively, rollicking ballad with a repetitive chorus that seemed known to all the listeners: after the first line of it they all joined in. The first singer belted out the verses with an impassioned vigour that stirred the imagination with images of bold glory beneath a bright sun, though for all Thorongil knew it was a song about defeat in a rainstorm. Beside him Deorwine joined in the second chorus, thumping the table in time. Others were doing the same, and soon the whole room was filled with the thunder of slapping hands and resonant voices. 

Thorongil’s own pulse beat to the rhythm, and almost was he borne away into the song himself. But he was weary from the day’s labours and his constant struggle to scrape by in this alien place. He wanted little more than sleep and a few hours of forgetfulness. He reached to scratch the back of his neck and tried to keep his smile from wavering. Never before coming to Rohan had he realized what an effort it took to maintain a smile that did not come from the heart.

The song ended and another voice took up, this one high and clear and young. It warbled plaintively in a tender melody that was either a lament or a lullaby. Thorongil heard the word for rest, likely because it was all he yearned for himself, but that did not narrow it down. No one joined in this song, but neither did they return to their talk. All eyes focused on the singer, who was standing near one of the columns with his round mug of ale in his hand. His beard, though short with youth, was twined into two braids at the sides of his mouth, and his golden hair flowed free. He was beautiful in his rugged and barefooted simplicity, and in his earnest feeling for the words he sang. He was the wholesome honesty of the Mark personified, and watching him Thorongil could not regret his decision to dwell among these people. 

Yet that he did not regret did not mean he was content. A mighty cheer went up when the last clarion note of the young Rider’s song died away, and then almost by unspoken assent the men launched into a raucous call and response. From the gestures some were employing and the laughter in every pair of eyes, it was plainly quite ribald. It seemed they would run through the full range of manly feeling tonight. Likely there would be little sleep for anyone: even Thorongil’s nearest equal was sitting up in his bed now, joining in the refrain.

The dirtied bowl and cup offered him the excuse he needed to get up from the table. When Deorwine caught his arm and tried to pull him back down, Thorongil gestured apologetically at them and went to the coopered tub where the men washed their simple dishes. It was near the frontmost fire, and the warmth of the floor was welcome beneath his chilled toes. The lodge would grow warmer through the evening, heated like a stable by the many vital bodies within, but at present the middle of the long room was still uncomfortably cold.

The dishwater was cloudy, with a scum of grease on the top. Most of the others had washed their bowls already, even if they were still savouring the ale. Yet it was cleaner than the water Thorongil had bathed in, and he made quick work of laving and wiping the vessels. He added his bowl to a stack on the shelf above, and laid his mug among the others. There was a shallow box for the spoons.

The door to the lodge opened as he turned back to the room, and the lodge sergeant came in. He was still fully dressed, having been spared the actual labour of the day, and he thumped with a cudgel on the doorframe. The song aborted suddenly and all eyes turned to him.

‘Fall quiet!’ he bellowed. It was one of the standard commands that Thorongil had learned very early on, and the one that had caused him the least embarrassment in the learning: he was always quiet here. The sergeant went on, but he was off the staple script now. Work, morning and bed were all clear enough, however, and the stranger was not at all surprised when his fellows began to hurry through the night’s last chores. 

He stepped away from the wash-table just in time, for it was quickly mobbed by men bolting down their last swallows of ale. Others crowded out the door, off to relieve themselves before bed. No conveniences were provided for this need in the lodge itself, and whatever the weather the men had to go out to the foul-smelling privy in the yard. Thorongil had nothing more to keep him from his bed, and he padded up the room to the centre, where his place stood.

He removed his cloak at last, hanging it on the peg on his side. The scratchy woolen blanket was tucked squarely over the mattress, turned back neatly in imitation of all the others. He lifted the upper corner and slipped beneath the sheet sewn of the same coarse linen as his shirt. The ropes creaked as he settled, and the delicious relief of stretching his back after a long day overtook him briefly. Only briefly, because the next instinct was to extend that relief into his legs, and the bed was too short by ten inches to allow him to do so. With his crown touching the headboard and his toes against the foot, he still had to curl his lower back and bend his knees to fit. He would have been more comfortable lying in the straw in the stables.

The short bed also meant he had to lie on his side, but in these circumstances that was less of an annoyance than it might otherwise have been. No sooner had he settled into his cramped pose than his back was exposed to a blast of cold air. The ropes bucked and the tick crackled as his bedmate sat down. Thorongil was not as spoilt as his privileged upbringing had led some of his Rangers to suspect, and he was not averse to the idea of sharing his bed: the warmth of having another body at one’s back was welcome on these cold winter nights when it took hours for the air to reach a clement temperature. But of all the awkward positions in which his want of the language had put him this was the worst. It was no comfortable thing to be tucked into a narrow bunk with a man with whom you had exchanged less than twenty words. 

Thorongil tried to lie still as Herward shifted around and finally settled on his side, but his body had other ideas. An unwanted and uncontrollable crawling sensation crept up behind his ear, and he had to scratch at it. His hand protested the move into the cold, and the narrow channel opened at the top of his blanket chilled him down his front. His finger found the trouble spot and relieved it with a couple of swift passes. Before he could withdraw his hand it was moving around to the back of his neck instead, scratching. He supposed the hasty, tepid dip had made his scalp long for a proper scrubbing.

Herward said something as he lay down, shifting to settle his spine against Thorongil’s. The bed was not broad enough to allow any space between them, not when one had to crook his legs to fit. The son of the Mark was a comfortable height for the bed, and Thorongil felt guilty turning the soles of his cold feet in towards the other man’s calves. A brief brush was all it took for his bedmate to draw his legs away. He spoke again, deliberately cheerful. Then he remembered that he could not be understood and sighed. He reached back and gripped Thorongi’s forearm where it rested on the crest of his hip. The hand was reassuring.

‘Regret have I,’ Thorongil said, trying to shape an apology. 

Herward made a distasteful noise in the back of his throat, and he knew he had erred again. ‘I am sorry,’ the Rider said, very slowly. 

‘I am sorry,’ repeated Thorongil carefully. Herward’s back bobbed as he nodded, and he patted the taller man’s arm before withdrawing his hand. I am sorry, Thorongil thought, trying to fix the sounds in his memory. He mouthed it noiselessly. ‘I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry.’ 

The occupant of the near side of the next bed had just sat down, and he looked quizzically at the man who was apparently talking to himself. Thorongil closed his mouth hastily, and then shut his eyes against the puzzled and unimpressed expression on the other man’s face. How long, he wondered, before his aptitude for languages would catch up to the need of the moment? How long before he could leave this lonely place filled with good people and return home to the empty wilds of the North where camaraderie was never more than a three-day walk away?

He was homesick; bitterly homesick. As the nightly noises of the barracks swelled and then faded one by one, he felt it more keenly than he had at any time since coming to this place. He missed the craggy hills and thick forests of Eriador, beautiful though these open plains might be. He missed the tempestuous Northern skies, though here the dome of the heavens was more vast than he could have imagined and the sunsets seemed to linger for hours in scarlet splendour. He missed his familiar peoples: the rough woodsmen of what had once been Cardolan, the stolid and often parochial Bree-folk, the merry hobbits of the Shire, and most of all his faithful Dúnedain. And he missed the serene beauty and contemplative peace of the Last Homely House.

Thorongil tried to close his mind to such thoughts, focusing instead on the new phrase that he sorely needed and would no doubt wear to death as he blundered onward in this coarse new life. I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry. It was no use. Now instead of pining for peoples, he was pining for people: his stoic and patient grandfather Dírhael, charged with the command of the Rangers in his absence; his grandmother with her sharp eyes and her deep wisdom; the friends he had made among his men in the six short years he had led them. Worse still was the loneliness for his childhood companions: Glorfindel, who had been as much a playmate as a teacher; Erestor with his critical but never spiteful tongue; quiet and sorrowful Ancalimon; all the others he had left behind in Rivendell when he rejoined the Dúnedain. He longed for a soft word of encouragement from Master Elrond, who in his heart would always hold the place of father. And at this moment he would have traded all his lofty lineage and his heavy destiny and his secret hopes for his mother’s tender touch. 

His throat was stinging now, and he swallowed against it. His lower hand crept up, worrying at the back of his neck from the other side. He was trying to wear his hair as much in the style of the Rohirrim as he could, considering its insurmountably strange colour. Clearly he was not yet used to it.

Herward dug an annoyed elbow into his ribs, and Thorongil forced himself to be still. The torches had been doused and the lodge was dark now, the fire on the side he faced glowing orange in a limited orb near the beds of the more senior men. Though the room was very quiet when compared to its earlier din, it was far from silent. Men snuffled and snored in their sleep. Straw crackled and bed-ropes squeaked. Someone belched. And along the walls, in the corners and up under the thatch the rats were busy. It was a wonder that every unwed man in the éored did not suffer from the spirillary fever. 

Elves shunned cats, even as cats mistrusted Elves, but rats were not a problem in Imladris. Among the Dúnedain it was the custom for each house or farmholding to keep at least one cat to control these pestilential rodents. Not for the first time, Thorongil wondered why a similar measures were not used here.

But he did not dwell long on the subject. He was exhausted from the long day’s toil, and his heavy eyelids soon drifted closed. As he slipped blessedly into the amorphous forgetfulness of sleep, he realized dimly that his hand had crept up again, scratching with a drowsy reflex at the back of his head. The thought of wet hair in this chill weather was not heartening, but he supposed he would have to wash it after all.