Uruk-hai, or the journey there...

[Olmer]

Here I decided to put on your judgment a beginning of my translation of a story about orcs, hobbits and other familiar characters.
I am doing it just for my friends, so bear with my English.

All rights on this story and its translation are RESERVED.

Uruk-Hai, or the journey to there…
by Alexander Bayborodin


Foreseen, but not imprinted way,
And the footpath is twisting...

Instead of the Foreword
This won't be the tale about Hobbits, to be exact, it will be about them too, but, basically, not about them...

I
The sunny hills of Hobbiton. They are covered with soft silky grass. They smell of honey and caress eyes with gentle shades of meadow flowers. Heads of cream and white clovers are scattered over a dark green carpet. Little suns of daisies are shining here and there. Cornflowers are nodding their clear-blue heads. A lungwort joyfully opens deep violet flowers towards diligent, unhurried, heavy bumblebees and to hasty bees. An imperceptible shepherd's purse, all covered with little white flowers, luxuriates under an easy breeze. Soft whisks of broom-grass are bending and caressing a face. You can lay in this grass for hours! The wind rumples hair and brings smells and sounds: sweetness of flowers and bitterness of wormwood, rustling of grass and hum of insects, smoke from a distant fire of a charcoal maker's kiln, squabbles of children playing under the hill and a distant creak of wheels.
The sunny hills of Hobbiton… It's been a long time since I saw them.
Probably, since that fateful day...

I quarreled with my father at that time. Quarreled, because he decided it’s time for me to get married. I just have turned thirty-three, and ,as they say, have already “came of age”, so the father resolved that it is time for me to have a wife. To tell the truth, hardly having left “tweens“, I did not want to marry at all, but he did not ask me.
In any way it is not in hobbit’s custom. It’s been a traditional practice that spouses for children are being chosen by parents. In our small population almost everybody knows each other and almost everyone is connected by complex relations. For that reason, the parents, while choosing, for a long time are tracing who the groom and the bride are to each other. But for even longer time they are determining of what would be the bride’s dowry, and what kind of a homestead will have the groom. If the parents will decide that the bride and the groom do not fit each other, then the young people will never get married.

I think that Grandfather Sam would have never married to Grandmother Rose, even if they loved each other. Who was he? The son of a gardener who even did not have his own garden, when the Cottons family was prosperous. But Grandfather got lucky. They say, that the old Cotton, giving the consent to a betrothal, thought that Sam has returned from a journey not as a poor man, just like it have been with the master Bilbo Baggins, who, undoubtedly, was not poor even before the voyage. Contrary to his believe, my grandfather, upon returning from the distant lands, couldn’t lead an idle, lazy life, not working at all, as Bilbo has lived.
So, Cotton has decided that Grandfather Sam, too, has brought a chest with coins on the back of his pony. Daddy Cotton was mistaken about that then, and was regretting his decision, but to terminate a betrothal is almost like to take away a wife from the house of her husband - it would be against any customs.
Anyway it happens that Cotton did not have to have regrets for long. Grandfather Sam was not dumb. The Grey powder, that the Elven queen has presented him, made him both rich and respected. Everyone wanted Sam the Gardener to work over theirs grounds. And when King Elessar, all of a sudden has arrived in our remote areas and politely asked the Elders to select a Mayor from someone of his friends, the old men have thought not for long.
After an overseas departure of the master Frodo Baggins, Grandfather Sam has remained the most senior and the most sensible of all three friends.
Certainly, I do not remember it, for then I was not born yet, but in his advanced years Grandfather Sam used to chat with grandsons. The events, described in the Red Book, he recollected infrequently, and did not like to do it, as well as the Grandfather Peregrin, by the way. On questions about those times both of them were saying that the master Bilbo Baggins already has written it all better than they can tell.
But often Grandfather Sam was telling how he married Grandmother Rose and how they have started to live together. He liked very much to recollect it.
It was understandable. No matter if you tell or write about whatever heroic feats have been done by the grandfather in another lands, only gullible little kids will believe in it, and only until they reach “tweens”, and then they will begin to laugh too, just as adults. Or even worse, they might cease to respect , because wandering in the distant lands is not a respectful hobbit’s engagement. Of course, they will not say it straight to the face, but will gossip a great deal behind the back .
A history of marriage is another matter. My grandfather has managed to marry a girl whom he loved and who loved him. Up till now many of young hobbits, and not only the young, speak about it with envy. Obviously, with the secret envy. Who would speak openly about such thing? You can talk about it only with close friends, and in whispers. But all in all, many were envying them secretly.

Anyway, my father has decided to get me married, and I had no reason to count on being lucky enough, just like my grandfather, to pick up the bride by myself.
It’s not that I was grieving too much about it. I have been around young girls, but none of them has touched my heart, and I even thought, that it is not that too important of who of them will become my wife.
But my father has chosen Nastursia Furfoot for my wife! I cannot deny, that Nastursia has had not simply good, but an excellent dowry - a part of Furfoot’s grazing land in the Brandywine’s river meadow. Far not every hobbit’s family, even a very respectful one, has the meadows in Brandywine’s grassland. The Brandybucks, for example, have it, but us, the Tooks, don‘t. Everyone knows that from a sunken meadow one could get three times more grass, than from the usual one. Which means that you can have more livestock.
The Тooks are far from poor, but even to us it would be unacceptable to miss such riches.
So the dowry after Nastursia was outstanding, and a relationship between us was very distant, almost none. In prosperity the Furfoots almost conceded the Тooks. And that fact that the Furfoots are less prominent than the Тooks is even better for a marriage.
All it so.
But for a whole life to tie myself up with this stupid old broad, whose face is even more repelling than her attitude, and whom so far nobody wanted to marry despite of all her dowry?!

When the father declared to me, that in a week we will have an introductory dinner party with Nasturtia and her family, in a half-year - an engagement, and in a year - the wedding, I unloaded on him everything what I thought of Nasturtia and his decision, slammed the door and, since a pony has been saddled and stood in a court yard, has jumped in a saddle and was gone.
If I would know then in what it will result, I would remain at home.

From time to time fidgets are getting born among us, the Tooks, who at the first suitable occasion are ready to go off into the blue, just like Grandfather Peregrin. Because of this, all the others consider us not as quite levelheaded hobbits, though don't speak aloud about that.
But I’m not like that. I am the most ordinary Hobbit, it would never come into my head to leave the beloved Hobbiton and our comfortable hole-house. I have been mad at the father, but, honestly, deep inside I understood, that Nastursia is not the worst choice at all .
Yes, she is not that clever and utterly unattractive, but unwise the one who searches for brain in the woman, and beauty is a thing, that spoils quickly. As for a bad attitude, they say, that such thing often happens to girls, whom for a long time nobody wants to marry, but it changes, when they will get a husband. Besides there is the dowry…

But I jumped in the saddle and raced my pony on a dusty well-trodden road. The pony was fast and fresh. It flew over the road, and his for a long time uncut mane fluttered like a banner. The hoofs are spiritedly thudding, raising up clouds of dust behind.
And in this thudding, seems, was heard as the road itself cheerfully calls out: "Away, away, away!"
The wind forced to squint the eyes, bushes and trees on the roadside were flashing by, and the dirty ribbon of the road was twisting way away to a horizon. A far! Seems like it called up to go where the sun is arising, where the wind is swooping over, and where, still, many more roads unbeknownst to you.

Truly the old folks had a saying: "Be cautious, choosing a way when you step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where it might lead to.“
I was heading towards another river bank of Brandywine, to my friend Teddy Brandybuck.

In Brandybuck’s family they love stately names like Fortinbras, Meriadoc, - and, since returning of Meriadoc the Magnificent, they have grown fond of Rohan’s names. So, Тeddy is short for Тheoden, but his regal name is hardly correlates with him. He is an impulsive and high-spirited guy. For certain he would have liked to be in my present place.
They all, the Brandybucks, are like this. Even thought that us, the Tooks, have been considered not quite levelheaded, the Brandybucks far surpassed us in this irrationality . Some even call them " Braldabecks" behind the back, hinting that they are perpetually drunk from theirs dark “brald” and therefore, accordingly, have such characters. But to call like this somebody from the Brandybucks in the face, means to get severely beaten for sure.The Brandybucks do not forgive insults. You have to be a swashbuckler to dare on such bravado, but we don’t have the swashbucklers in the Shire. Of course, if you won‘t count the Brandybucks themselves as the swashbucklers, but then again, who would dare to say it aloud about them.
Then, just to think about, would more respectable and conscientious Hobbits be able for fifteen generations protect the borders of Hobbiton? Everyone can sow wheat or to shepherd goats. But how many can live at the very Hedge, every year moving it further and further into the Old Forest?
How many, when troubles come, without wasting time on unnecessary doubts, can take axes and bows, and fight without any regrets about their life? The Brandybucks can. It has happened many times in all existence of the Hobbiton.
Much is already forgotten, but everyone remembers that the white wolves of the Long Winter have been stopped by the Brandybucks. Also a fight with Orcs, in time of youth of both my grandfathers and Teddy’s grandfather, is still alive in folk memory.

There is a book about those times in Buckland, and Тookborough both. It's called the Red Book because of its red soft leather cover. Teddy and I often would take ours or theirs book and run off onto the hills, and up to darkness read it aloud to each other. Mesmerizing has been this reading. Heroes and magicians were rising up from pages, and it was strange to come to realization that our own grandfathers have been among these heroes. When all around you just a peaceful land and pastures, you don’t want to contemplate that somewhere there's a fire and blood. And it is absolutely impossible to imagine that hands, which gently stroked you head in the childhood, once had held a sword, and that the one, who rocked you on the knee, is the warrior and the hero.
While Teddy and I had been in “tweens”, it amused us very much, but the time goes by, and one day you are realizing that you are already an adult, there are no any battles around, and, simply, you have to live as everybody lives.

Тeddy was my friend. With whom would I share my grief, if not with him?
But that evening Тeddy was more cheerful than usual. His father, the same as mine, has declared to him about an impending marriage. But for a wife for him has been chosen Lukretsia Sackville-Baggins, from those Sackville-Bagginses that now live in the Bag End, the former Bagginses manor. And Lucretsia is the one-and-only heir of all manor, what is rarely happens in Hobbits families, as we, usually, having lots of children.
Besides, the matter was not only in the dowry. Lucretsia and Теddy for a long time have been “making eyes” to each other, and at every casual and not casual meeting were attempting to squeeze in together somewhere away from somebody else's eyes.
I already told about how we choose brides and grooms, and the fact, that the choice of Teddy’s father has matched with the choice of Теddy himself, could be a smile of fortune. Could be, or could be not. The Brandybucks often behave in a way different from the others. So, Теddy was very cheerful or, to tell more correctly, " fairly tipsy ", and did not share my grief .
Anyway, we took a pair of kegs with beer, a considerable quantity of snacks from a pantry, loaded all this on my pony so its legs began to buckle, whistled for a company to about a dozen of lounged around young Brandybucks and Boffins and went to the grove on the river-bank on the bachelor party.
At the Brandybucks they are always winking at the frolics of young hobbits, and therefore, on the occasion of forthcoming of mine and Teddy’s engagements, nobody interfered with our party, and such thing as a small loss of beer, in any way, won’t affect the extensive Brandybucks stocks.

Perhaps, you know, that Hobbits are extremely thorough people, and everything what we are doing we are doing thoroughly.
We drank thoroughly too, and one of the young Brandybucks had to ride to the pantry on my pony twice .
We have begun with a light beer from Bree, because it was the mildest. Then we have given due to our Light, from Tookborough: it’s darker than from Bree and has more tart taste, but does not differ at all in its potency.
But, obviously, most of all we drunk the dark Brandybuck’s brald. And I shall tell you, it is rather a virile beer. It’s dark in color, same as Brandywine‘s water, for what it jokingly sometimes called as Bralda-wine. On taste it is bitter-tart, but pleasant. As for a strenght... We have got used to it. Usually Hobbit’s stomach quickly digests everything what has got in it . But it will quickly make a head spinning for the one unaccustomed to such beer. I, once, still being in “tweens“, was with Teddy and his father in Bree, and in there I happened to see, how one of the Big Folk got knocked down off the bench and under the table from just three mugs of “brald“. We, at that time, have brought the beer to the Butterburs for their "Prancing pony ". Recently Bree is growing out, as a dough in the kiln. More and more of the Big Folk are moving in, and all of them are not fools to drink. So, the “Brald” brings to the Brandybucks a considerable share of their income, and to us, the Tooks, our “Light “ brings too.

By a sundown the beer was already sloshing in me somewhere up in between ears, and I was afraid to bend, being worried that it will pour out. Teddy was even “better“. He started to celebrate the future marriage even before my arrival. The young Brandybucks and Boffins also barely stayed up. Somehow, it imperceptibly darkened around: it was a time to go home.
And right at that time I felt an urge to go to the bushes. You know, how it happens when you are drinking too much beer? And we, also, have eaten a lot .
I walked away, but the light from the fire, which has been kindled by one of the young Brandybucks, extended far enough from the glade, and I walked away a bit more. Probably, if I would be more sober, I would notice that I walked too far from the light, but I was hardly seeing through the beer in my eyes, and, besides, when you are sitting with lowered pants, you won’t look around too much . I have already started to button up, when something have crackled behind, and I got knocked out cold with something heavy...

[Olmer]

II

The first, what penetrated into my consciousness, was a murmur of brook, and then an irritating, hardly audible dripping of water .
- Came around, the little one?
The voice was quiet, cunning. The sound was coming just from the right of me and a little above. More to the left someone was noisy snuffing and snorting .
- It is good that you came around, because of you I already wanted to tear someone’s ass to pieces. Open your peepers, don’t dawdle feigning a fainted girl, I see your eyelashes quiver; means, you came out.
I was sitting, leaning on a wet earthen wall. Seems like all my clothes: both the jacket and the waistcoat, has become drenched with cold sticky moisture. I was violently shaking and shivering, all my back was wet, and from the wall an irksome little stream of water was trickling down into my collar and straight on the neck. The darkness around was so thick, that you can cut it with a knife. What eyelashes has he managed to see? I couldn’t see at all even him himself; just hardly felt it as a dark bulk beside.
- Good! Not queasy?
I shook my head and right away threw up.
- Here goes, - said the same voice, already irritably, - all boots have got fouled. If you, snaga, shook his brains, I will beat out through your ears that dung you have instead of brains, and force to chow it down. Understood?
- It is from the fright, - the second hoarse voice answered and snuffed again .

They were speaking on Westron, but the first was speaking as anyone of Big Folk usually speaks, while the second - as if sounds were being pushed out of a throat, and the words were so deformed, that I had a difficulty to understand it.
- From the fright and from overeating. Did you see, how much they have gobbled up? Fifty our guys could eat up for three days. In the size of a rat and where all this goes? And beer also... - the hoarse voice has enviously sighed.
- Forget about beer and about food forget also.
- Yeah, right, forget... What a life they have…Never in my life I saw such eats. And the amount of beer! We should brain all of them. Still a lot of it left out, would be a feast for our throats.
- I will please your throat with teeth if you won’t slam your mouth. To you, snaga, thinking is harmful for health, you can bite the dust still being a snaga. What has been told? To take one, warm and unharmed, and to deliver as such. And we will do as it has been told. If one of them will be gone - they won’t search for him right away. And if they will find on the shore a dozen of stiffs - we won‘t get away..
- I did not mean it…Just hungry as a wolf...
I heard the sound of whack, and the first voice has continued:
- To whom I have told to slam the mouth? Gag him, so he won’t scream, and let‘s go.
A firm cold paw has blocked-up my nose. I have tried to inhale through a mouth, but instantly in there have been deftly thrust a slippery leather pear. The narrow ends of the pear were sticking out of the mouth and had long strips, which have been pulled together at my nape. The leather glob filled up my mouth so tightly, that I could not even moan, not mention of speaking. It was impossible to spit it out: the strings are not letting to do it.
- Can you breathe? - asked the first voice, - Don’t have a snot?
I shook my head.
- Breathe. Good. You won’t choke. If you will start to choke, don’t suffer - waggle your head or kick him with your heel. All right? Come on, snaga, take him.

Only at this instant I understood, that I’m swaddled, as if in a baby's wrap, without any chance to move, save to bend over and to nod a head. It was not painfull for me; I have not been tied up, but namely swaddled. My hands and legs and all my body has been bound up with wide strips of a rough, prickly sackcloth fabric in the way as we are swaddling babies, only less restrictive. As for me I could not move at all, of that I became aware immediately after having tried to move my hands.
- Do not twitch, - has warned me the first voice from the darkness, - The knots will get tightened. You will press on your cords - blood will cease to flow. We will have a long run and it is no time there to untie you. What to do with you if a hand or a leg will become lifeless? Only to finish you off. Do not twitch, if you want to live. It will be a halt in a couple of hours and there we will make it looser.

Above the head silently, without grating, a cover was cast out, and a small circle of starry sky has become visible . The stars were as large as wood nuts, and bright. They have never happened to be like this when you look at them from a house window.
It did not add too much light, but it became clear, that it is only three of us in this crude, damp and tight earthen den.
I, still, was not distinguishing faces of my kidnappers; even the rest of all was difficult to make out. Also, it was not clear what their height was, but I have understood at once: they were not hobbits.
Besides, I discovered that they are armed. When the one who talked to me, stood up and pushed out the cover, in the star's glimmer right in front of my nose I have glimpsed a blade. The blade was strange, dark as darkness itself, and I did not see it as much, as felt the cold of metal and its smell. The stars were silvering a thin strip of the honed edge and the blade, almost shimmery in the gloom, has been crookedly bent forward. There was something menacing, predatory in this ridiculous bend. For an instant it even seemed to me, that now this black creature will launch on the neck, seize it with a sharp edge and will start to drink upgurgling from a ripped up throat blood.
Two black hands stretched upwards past me, I heard the sound of push-up, and the snuffing and snorting have moved outside from the den. Then I have been pulled by the collar, pushed from below, and, too, came out on an open air.
Besides the stars, there was also a moon in the sky, which was allowing to look around. And this is what I did. We were in the woods. Black bulks of trees were crowded around us, concealing almost everything from sight . It smelled of dampness and moss. A brook murmured nearby. It seems, that it‘s sound I have heard in the hole. The hole was visible as a black spot on the dark mossy ground. Out of it have appeared a head, then shoulders, hands - and in instant besides me was standing one more kidnapper.
Together they cautiously transferred me far away from the hole to a tree, laid me down on firm knotty roots and began to put back the cover. Directly on the cover grew a small bush. My kidnappers lifted it and carefully lowered on a black spot of the manhole, so the black spot of the hole became completely invisible. Besides that, they have straightened branches, with palms have smoothed moss around, and collected fine lumps of dirt, which, probably, were got scattered when the cover had been open from within. Then they strew leaves around this bush, getting them from a bag, watered the moss with water from the stream, and, at the end, sprayed the bush with some liquid from a small canteen.
All of this they did without a single word, even without a sound, if not count for a sound of hardly audible rustlingat five steps away, which, anyhow, sometimes was reaching me through the silvery murmur of the stream. But this rustling did not disturb even a night birdie, twittering above my head .

Having finished, the kidnappers came over to me, and one of them has tried to lift me up. And could not do it.
- Ghash, - a confused hoarse whisper has sounded in the darkness, - it does not let him go.
The one, who was called with this strange whether a name, whether a nickname, has given to the whispered a thwack on the head and has shown a fist. The hoarse one waved his hands and pointed downwards, on me. Ghash sat down and begun to grope around me, sliding hands from top to down. I could only look, but it was a bad visibility in the darkness under the branchy tree’s canopy, and, in addition I, also, have been wrapped up in something dark. I could only feel as the firm palms were running over my body. The palms have reached a waist, attempted to pull something wrapped around it, move lower, but seems have found nothing more. Ghash looked further around me, and then he stuck his lips to a rigid bark of the tree.
- Listen to me, a walking stump, - he said in quiet, but distinct whisper, - or you will release him now, or, I swear on my name, I will cut you on fine splinters.
The tree has squeaked, as if answered, rustling with foliage, though there was not even a feeble breeze in this damp low land .
- I don‘t give a damn what you want to do with him, - Ghash have whispered again, angrily pressing on some words, - you can crush him, tear apart, squash or suck out dry. But if you will kill him, I have to look for a new one, and it’s long and dangerous work. Did you get it? You are getting in our way. And I do not like those, who are getting in our way.
The tree has again become agitated, rustling. It seemed to me, what even its branches began to move.
-You,the stump, don’t threaten me! I am Ghash and it means - Fire. I am quick-tempered myself. Either way, or we will agree, or I’ll waste you on fire-wood. And all your offspring too.
The tree was rustling its crown, as if in a thunderstorm, swaying, creaking, jerking branches, and the root, twisted around me, compressed more strong, so it became difficult to breathe.
- I have already told you, I don‘t give a hoot about his life, but if you will kill him, it’s means, that you are getting in our way. And I don’t joke. While your friends will reach us, you already will be giving the light to the whole this area, and the dampness won't help you: I can kindle you in the water and the water itself too. You know us, if needed, we can convert all woods into coal, just in case that some of your shoots unintentionally won’t be forgotten. Release him, or it will be a different talk.
The root has painfully squeezed my ribs and breathing became absolutely impossible. The tree frantically creaked, swayed and swung branches.
- All right, the log , it is useless to talk with you, - unexpectedly in full voice suddenly declared Ghash. - Snaga, we are leaving.
He straightened up; a black curved blade has silently fluttered out of the sheath and has squawked two times on both sides from my waist. Snaga pulled me off the root, tossed on the back, as if a sack, and we began to run.

That is, of course, they have been running, and I have been rattling on snaga’s back, with my nose being stuck into covering it fur which was stinking like a dog . But at least it was possible to breathe.
Snaga and Ghash were breaking through bushes like wild boars, not choosing a road, snapping branches and crackling everything that happen to get under the feet.
Behind us something hooted, creaked, grumbled and heavily stomped. Branches were swaying and whipping the runners so hard, that even I have got some of beating. And I even cannot tell how much more fell on Ghash’s and snaga’s share .
Then the crunching under their feet has disappeared, but there was a sloshing and squishing, and in a little while cattails canes began to rustle around .
- Stop! - sounded tired, out of breath Ghash’s voice - Broke free, they won't get into a swamp - too heavy. We shall overstay here till sun is up, they are calmer in the afternoon. And then we will leave. You can speak, snaga, if you are yearning to. Here the cattails muffle all noise. But only in a half-voice, do not shout.
- I **** my pants, - croaked Snaga and lowered me in a dirt between two clumps of grass, so I could see only fading stars on a graying sky .
- It happens, - humorously responded Ghash, - especially at the first time. Take off pants and rinse in that water-hole, while it has not dried up. You, shorty, probably too has got in your pants from beer, jolting, and from scare. Even the weathered one would make in the pants from this scare. … Can you imagine! The darn wooden dummy said it’s got tired of drinking only water and wanted some live juice.
How are you managing to live next to them? They are staying in rows along your fences. People say, once it used to be ordinary trees, did not prowl at night and did not jump on anybody.
All of this because of the pointy-eared…It's good that they did not get an idea to wake up stones, then we would have bigger troubles. On another hand, maybe they thought it up, but it has not turned out their way.
- And you, Ghash, got scared too , - Snaga’s voice got carried through sounds of rinsing, - became so talkative. All the time kept mum and for each whisper - on the neck and in the teeth. And now you sing as a starling .
- If I wouldn’t teach you, you already would be done. You, rustlers, are audible for a league in woods, for two - in the fields... Our business loves silence. Will be more silent - will live longer. But it is true that I got scared. Do you think that I’m meeting these roving stumps every day? We have got lucky. His rootlet was thin, seems only now it has been grown out and was cut off with just two strikes. And I was talking the tree away. It could wring out the small one, and me with you at the same time. I saw once, not here, in other places, what they were doing with our brothers. Gruesome. I’d rather not even talk about it, a recollection makes me sick.

- Maybe, we shall rinse a little rat too? - Snaga came over and, probably, stretched out down beside. - He is stinking, possibly all in his own juice.
- Would need to, only we can’t. For this we will have to untie him. And what if he, suddenly, will scurry aside to somewhere ? We won't find him. They, as rumored, can hide even in your own trousers so good, that you won’t be able to find. It is better not to risk, let him bear with it for a while. We will wash him when we will meet the others. And will shave his legs ...
- All right. You are the boss, you know better. Is it allowed to sleep?
- Allowed, if you want to. I won‘t. Well, you are some guy! Took this one cleverly! And did not hesitate at the willow, has pulled him at once from the roots. How mothers were naming you?
- One - Ghurghy, and the others - Ghurgha.
- Is it for a temper or what?
- Just so that anything won’t cling on.
- Sounds well. Ghurgh…Such name for you is rather premature. I shall call you Ghu-urghan (1). Is it good?
- You asking, Ghash. Certainly will be good! And will you call me so at the presence of guys?
- I told you. I will call at the guys presence. And I will order to the guys. And I will tell to the Ghoy-Iteremi (2) .
- Wow! Means, I’ll have the name?
- You will have, if we will survive.
- We will survive. Now I’ll certainly survive! And I myself will haul this one on my back to the home .
- I have somebody to haul him without you. This task does not ask for too much brain. You’d better to keep close to me. You are a sharp guy. I would make a good shaghrat of you. Only you are snuffing with your nose, an unneeded sound.
- But it was wet it the hide-out. I have got this from there. But you are not snuffing and the little rat too.
- The feeding is better - the health is stronger. It’s all right, we will feed up and you too. For now take a shaghy (3) to feel better, - I heard a gurgle and sounds of swallowing. At once the crave for drink became intolerable. I found out that already for a long time the tongue has dried up and swelled, and I don’t have saliva in my mouth. Besides, there is the gag also…
- Easier, buddy, easier. You will drink up all of it, and I still need you. You’d better give a drink to the little one. He is suffering from a hangover now .

The pale sky got obscured by a shadow and I saw a face. Or, to tell it better, a muzzle. Or not. It’s better to say - a snout. The wide, cross-eyed and thin-lipped snout, with peeling skin covered by smears of brown-green dirt. The snout has blinked with yellow, widely-spaced eyes, revealing his small crooked teeth in seems to be a smile, snuffed, snorted back a green snot which just appeared on a tip of his flat, with wide nostrils nose and has said in a hoarse, cheerful voice of snaga Ghu-urghan: "Did not get bored, yet, the little rat?"
A wide, like a shovel, palm, squeezed in under my head and slightly raised it, and under the snout, there, where the chest should begin, I discovered a dense grey fur, with a familiar dog‘s stink. The second paw, which has appeared in sight, covered with thick hair, but for some reason tawny instead of grey, with wide claws-nails, whether broken off or whether chewed off, held a flat flask, fitted in a brown leather, which slightly resembled a reduced round of cheese. I did not have time to think how they gonna make me drink without taking the gag out, as it turned out that the gag is perfectly customized for such tricky matter. Cool refreshing liquid went down right into my throat. The water. I didn’t have even to gulp, and, anyway, the gag was not allowing to make any swallowing movements.
Then the brown flask was replaced by a small green, and the throat got burnt, as of a liquid fire. The heat went in streams under my skin, and the head has begun to spin and run somewhere.
The sensation was even pleasant. Though that the head was spinning, the thoughts has ceased to hurry around and, at last, have started to adhere one to another.
I did not know, has this horrible fiery drink affected me, or the beer has stopped clogging my mind, leaving my body by some different ways, but in my head, finally, all these strange names-nicknames have got connected together into a one picture. The bent forward curved blade in color of black night, clothes with a wolf’s fur outside, and a cross-eyed painted snout. Orcs!

They were the orcs! The Orcs about whom I have read in the Red Book and of whom thought that they all up to the last one have been wiped out. How to describe to you those feelings which then have begun to boil in me?
Try to imagine, how would feel a small, defenceless hobbit swaddled, as a baby. The hobbit, who only once in his life for couple of days has left the Hobbiton’s borders. The hobbit that alone has never left the house longer than a half of day. The hobbit, a homebody and a bookworm, which has been stolen, who was snatched directly from a friendly party, almost out of the table.
I knew, nobody will search for me. Everyone will simply decide that Took’s blood has got the best of me because I have got offended and I run away. They will wait for my return for a few days, and maybe, even weeks. Then the father will disinherit me and will betroth with Nasturtia one of my younger brothers. She already has been waiting long for a marriage, and will wait for couple of years more. You cannot let go of the sunken meadows because of the silly offences. What offence!
With pleasure I would marry Nasturtia even without any dowry and, I swear, would live with her in content and peace up to the end of the days, for only not to feel nearby these two comers from a becoming alive nightmare.
The abovementioned nightmare did not hesitate to appear, and I have fallen in viscous sticky nothingness, as in a well, in which the huge shaggy spiders with the snouts of Ghu-urghan for a long time have been trying to ensnare me and, eventually, I was caught. And eaten up. I was eaten up!

[Olmer]

1. At that time, of course, I did not understand a meaning of the talk. The thing is that in the Dark speech nicknames are ending up on vowels, while names are ending on consonants.
Recognition of the name means that its possessor is quite independent in his behavior and can answer for his actions. But far not everybody has got recognition of the name. Even a quite adult uruuk-hai might not to have the name, by being a snaga - a forever subordinate.

In here I have mentioned two names - Ghurgh, which could translate as a “demon”, and Ghu-urghan - “the spirit of wolf’s pack”.
Besides, to understand the game of words, you should know that there is two different sounds of a vowel “U” in the Dark speech. The first “U” is strong and short, and the meaning is - ” a death”, “ an evil”. The second “U” is weak and long and means “many”, “multiple”. The runes of Westron doesn’t present this sounds, therefore the weak “U” was written in the book as “UU”.

2.Translates as a “Judging mother”. It is not a title, it’s an acceptance of the wisdom.

3.An alcoholic drink, literally means a “burning evil”.

[nokom]

Did you write this or is this a trans. of one of those Rusian books?

[Olmer]

III.
I woke up for the second time from a cheerful subdued roar of Ghash.
- Wake up, Ghu-urghan, enough of snoring. And wake up our little friend. I see he has absolutely languished from shaghy. It is time to leave.
- You are a scumbug , Ghash, - rasped a plaintive, almost childish voice of Ghu-urghan, - For the first time in three days I have got my eyes closed, and right away you are waking me up.
- Right away? The sun only began to ascend when you have fallen asleep, and now is a midday. I managed to run all over half of the woods and all around the swamp while you were squashing your cheeks. It is good that I looked up for the swamp beforehand, otherwise where would we be now. Uragh and guys are on the other side. I saw a marker. And there are no elms or willows in the woods: only maples and ashes. Take the shorty, and let‘s go.
- What about eating? What is the rush? Let’s have a bit of rusks. And we shall feed this one too, he, probably, wants to eat.
- His yesterday's meal still has not digested. Get up, before you'll get a whack on the neck! Take him, and go.
The face of Ghu-urghan has appeared over me. Really, it was the face. In a bright sunlight it did not look like a snout any more.
On the brown-green cheek was a clear print of grass-blades and a head of some marsh flower. Seems, he slept having put the cheek on a grass knoll. Slanting eyelids were silly blinking, a snub nose is snorting just the same, and his entire look was giving the impression of an offended child.
- It’s always like this, - he complained to me, as if I was his friend. - For a week eating almost nothing, for three days not sleeping, crawling through bushes and ditches, as mice, had such a fright, got into dirt and water up to the neck, and you can neither eat, or to have a sleep...
- Eating and sleeping is a pig’s job, - in the same cheerful voice interrupted him Ghash. - We will eat and sleep, and do whatever we need to do together with the rest of our group. Are you ready or not?
- Yes, I am ready, ready, - grumbled Ghu-urghan. - And you, ratty, have been bitten so badly by mosquitoes! All swelled up. Or is it from a hangover?

He heaved me up on his back. In the daylight it become visible that I am entirely, except for a head, stuffed in a long bag with straps. And now I was laying with my back to the back of Ghu-urghan, so I could only look on what was behind and a little bit on the sides.
Though, behind was not of anything remarkable: sickly marsh trees, cattails and reeds. Nothing left to me but to look at the bright sky and clouds in it. But it was not many clouds. Only diffused feathered spreads in a far height had occasionally coming across.
From time to time scarce birds were dashing by, and for a long time I was following them with my eyes. How much I wished to shout to them, asking to pass on the news about me to my dear Hobbiton!
But the mouth has been stuffed up with that awful leather gag. And, anyway, I cannot speak in a bird's tongue.
Under me Ghu-urghan's feet was squishing on mud and he was heavily sighing. Sometimes he was muttering something under his nose, and from time to time was heaving higher up the slipping down bag, and then it was becoming even more painful and more inconvenient to me than before.
But he has hardly considered my inconvenience. Most likely he thought of not to slip off a barely visible footpath.
Nevertheless, once he has stumbled, and we fell heavily into a warm, smelling of algae water of a small water hole. He has got out quickly and without Ghash’s help, who was not audible, or visible.
I only had a time to get scared, but the fright has quickly passed, and I even got annoyed that we stayed in the water for such a short time.

The sun already passed a midday, and now was shining from the western side, and directly on me. But the sweat, which was flooding my eyes, was not the biggest annoyance.
Ghash was right about the scare, the jolting, the beer and the great deal of what has been eaten and drank… And I was not able even to ask for...you know, this!
I was not concerned about stinking worse than a pigsty, this could be endured. But a caustic mix of a heated up filth began to abrade my skin, and all lower half of the body was terribly itching. I tried to turn and twitch on the back of Ghu-urghan, but he, having removed me a few times and having made sure that nothing disturbs my breathing, was again throwing the bag on the shoulders. It did not even come into his head to take out the gag and to ask what the problem is.
So two or three hours have passed like that. There is no worst thought, than the thoughts about your own suffering. It strengthens the agony and makes it intolerable. If, at sometime, you will get into a trouble, then better think about what is dear to you, and this will give you a power to go through everything.
I did not know of it then, and pretty soon I began to hate not only the orcs, -thought even before that I did not have any love for them, - but also myself, the sun, and the entire world around.

However, eventually everything comes to an end, and the walk through the marsh has ended too. The squelching and squishing under Ghu-urghan’s feet have ceased. The usual, full-grown trees replaced the thin, bended marsh trees, and ferns have begun to appear instead of cattails and reeds.
The orcs switched to a run when they have got on the dry ground. The movement became faster, and now I was rattling, as if riding a pony without a saddle. But it was to the best. The fabric, saturated with the dirt, which was stuck to the body, has moved from jolting, and the itch became not so grueling. Besides in the woods, unlike in the swamp, was breezy and a slight waft was cooling the skin, carrying away the smell. The sun, which has disappeared behind the wide treetops, was less disturbing too.
Nonetheless a hunger started to gnaw on. My stomach was growling already for a long time, but, while suffering from the itch, I did not pay a big attention to it. When the itch became not so bothersome, the stomach reminded me of its existence.
Hobbits can sit down at the table for seven times in a day, if on that table would be something to eat. And I did not eat since yesterday's evening. All my meal for almost a day was of some gulps of water and a drink of a fiery brew.
Can it be called a good food? Or even simply the food?
Orcs can stay long without meal. But I am not the orc!
My grandfather Peregrin and Меriadoc the Magnificent were being fed when they were in orc’s captivity.
But, seems, nobody have been thinking of feeding me, and, probably, they have no intention to give me much of water, too.
I imagined myself dying on the back of Ghu-urghan of starvation and thirst and this idea somewhat has grieved me. I, still, would like to live for much more.
I did not count on any feats, like both of mine grandfathers had been having, - it’s quite difficult to think of the feats in my position, since the thoughts itself were jumping on a piece of pie with a good mug of ale and a hot bath…
But still, it was too insulting to die here so plainly, in a filth and stink.

Being busy with such uncheerful thoughts, I did not notice that we have stopped. Ghu-urghan removed the bag with me from his shoulders and lowered me to the ground. Not so carefully, I shall note, but in my position you should be glad to any change. He put me with my back to a small earthen escarpment, and I could look around.
The sun, dropping to the horizon, did not burn any more, but was shining bright, and a twilight was still far away. Directly at my legs, in about ten steps, a slanting slope was ending into a blue transparent water of a little, in my fifty steps, lake.
Immediately I became queasy from dryness. Right now I would greedily drink even smelling of warm dirt and algae marsh water, but this one in the lake was giving a sensation of coolness and freshness.
To wash off! To wash off myself from all this nastiness, to relax, to stretch out a becoming numb body and to sway on this silent blue smooth surface.
I have learned to swim from Teddy. Actually, he forced me to learn, and right now I would dearly pay to take an advantage of his lessons.
A gray even through the brown-green smears face bent over to me and in Ghash’s voice has told : "To drink and to wash? Right?"
I nodded.
- Now we will untie you, you will swim, rinse off the dirt, then we shall eat. The gag we will take out too, here you can scream as much as you like - only trees and ours guys will hear. But I will tie a long cord to you with a dead knot, which is possible only to cut, so you cannot escape. But better not to try. There are not many of kind souls among us. It can be bad. Understood?
I nodded again.
Ghash untied the strings of the gag and took it out of my mouth, but the mouth has remained open. Then from the fastened to the left hip scabbard he took out a jagged dagger in a length of one and a half elbow, with its tooth hooked on to a fabric at my throat and with one yank sliced down to the knees both - a bag and my wrap.
Turned out that under the wrap I am a stark naked. It was no shirt, or a waistcoat, no jacket, or even trousers. Nothing! Only a defenseless naked body. I have tried to cover myself, but my hands have not obeyed me. The numb muscles are languidly twitched, but the limbs were not moving…
- It‘s okay, - told Ghash, - you will ease off in the water.
He was not suffering from fastidiousness. He has quickly wrapped a thin twisted cord around my waist, has tightened the knot, and pulled out my powerless body from the remainders of the unstitched bag. With the same bag and wrap he has wiped off the most of filth from me, and has carried me into the water.

The water only looked cool, actually, it was warm. Warm, soft, gentle and tasty. Try in the heat to not drink for the whole day and you will discover the real taste of water.
I was immersing in it at the very shore and feeling how my blood again starts to flow and a power comes back into a weakened body.
Nearby, in four steps away, Ghu-urghan was splashing, same naked as I am. His back was wide and wiry, all covered with small freckles, as of the smith from the Waymeet. When he has turned around, I found out that his face, washed from the dirt, is sprinkled over with the freckles too..
- Here, - he gave to me a piece of something dark-brown, - this root is like a soap, rub it - the dirt will get washed off better.
And he went to the shore, to put clothes on.
While I was rubbing myself with the root and washing off a sticky gray film from my skin, he and Ghash have switched over. Now Ghu-urghan is holding the cord and guarding me, and Ghash was going into the water.
He swam like an otter, without any splash. In one dive he crossed the entire lake, emerged at an opposite coast, and in four strokes has come back.
I thought that even Teddy won’t measure up to such a swimmer, and as for me, I decided not to swim and humiliate myself. I just simply finished washing and gave the soap root to Ghash.
Ghu-urghan, getting dressed, was sitting on the shore and reeling up on his hand the end of my cord. But as soon as I got out from the water, he jumped up and wrapped me in a piece of a gray soft fabric, and sat me up in the same area, under the ledge, only not exactly in the same place. Then from his waist bag he has got a small cup, made out of birch-tree bark, which smelled rather sharp and not so pleasant.
- It’s a medicine to protect the skin from getting any lichens, - he explained and has begun to daub me with this smelly grease, carefully searching for the red inflamed places.
So my skin was quickly become covered with a black greasy disgusting film, especially on the legs, the bottom of my stomach and on the back. However, though this medicine had a terrible appearance and an awful smell, it has calmed an itch at once. I felt a pleasant heat in those places on which it was smeared..
Having finished with the treatment, he, again, has wrapped me up and I was given a small hard piece.
- It’s bread. Chew this for a while, we have nothing else. Here is the water, - and he put nearby the already familiar to me flask in a brown leather. The inside of the flask was, probably, of a birch-tree bark too, because the neck, definitely, has been made from the birch-tree bark. The water was cool and fresh.
I was sitting, gnawing on the hard bread, washing it down with the water and contemplating, whether the Adventure can begin the way like this?

It was led to believe, that once in two generations it happens to one of the Тooks. Probably, now it’s going to be in my destiny. After all, I am a grandson of Peregrin Took. But I was very disturbed by one aspect: if it is the real Adventure, and not a simply stretched out terrible dream, than it has begun in an absolutely wrong way.
Those Adventures, about which I have read, were beginning with an arrival of a wizard, instead with a blow on the head.
On the other hand, just to think about it, is it all Adventures are supposed to begin in the same way? And the blow on the head is similar to the appearance of the wizard. Anyway, it also occurs unexpectedly….
If it is the Adventure, then I don’t like it.
Probably, they won’t be hitting me on the head anymore; it was no signs on such notion. Seems, that nobody is going to kill me, otherwise what for to drag me on themselves for such distance and then to feed.
But all this thoughts were not calming me at all. I may very soon die of starvation on my own, if further on I will be fed once a day with a piece of stony-firm black and sour bread, which in Hobbiton was never seen, not even to mention that was ever eaten.
Right now, instead of cold water, I would prefer a mug of warm goat milk with bread. Or better not. A half-pound of fried bacon, only from the Cotton‘s farm, salted, with duck eggs. I like Cotton's bacon more than ours: they are having some special secret of feeding. Then I would have several of freshly smoked Waymeet’s sausages, fried on goose fat with onions, garlic and vegetables. In the Waymeet they are making them very thin and smoking in a smoke of a marsh alder. What else they are adding in the meat - nobody knows, but the sausages are melting on the tongue, you don’t even have to chew them.
Bread, certainly, needed too: ten toasts of our white wheat loaf will be sufficient. Only it needed to be not fresh baked, but of three-days old, when it’s not so fluffy and soft, so it’s easier to cut into thin slices, as it should be done for the toasts. On the prepared toasts you need to put just a little of butter: the bacon and sausages are fat enough.
After the sausages you can move to the beer. It’s better to start with ours Tookborough‘s. ''Brald” is also good in its own way, but I’m not the Brandybuck, and extreme measures are alien to me, so I prefer the light beer.
And with the beer it would be not bad to have fresh crawfish, but not from the Brandywine, those are small. It’s better to get them from the Thistle brook; over there the crawfish are very large and tasty. You don’t have to do anything special with them, simply cook with dill and parsley and eat, while they have not cooled yet, washing them down with the beer from a cooler. The difference of tastes is remarkable.
Also good with beer is smoked trout from Stockbrook, and I even love it more when it not smoked, but slightly salted and sun-cured ...
It would be quite enough for a light supper…

Eventually I finished the given to me piece despite all my tries to gnaw on it more slowly, stretching the time. It was an agonizingly small. The last crumb has fallen down into my stomach, but it has not filled its emptiness at all.
I gulped down more water, but it did not added a satiety too. To get distracted, I began to scrutinize the orcs, since both of them now were sitting in front of me. Up until now I did not have an opportunity to have a good look on them.
To tell the truth, now both of them have reminded me more of the usual Big Folk, than the orcs. I even have doubted, whether orcs are they? Neither of them you could call a handsome, anyway by hobbit’s measures, but similarly looking persons I saw in Bree, and over there none of them have caused a suspicion in anybody.
Ghu-urghan, at least, had slightly slanting eyes, but Ghash’s eyes were even the most usual. They, perhaps, were short for the Big Folk, though in height they both were much more taller than me: Ghu-urghan - on two inches with something, and Ghash - almost on two and a half. But both were wide in shoulders, and Ghu-urghan was even wider than Ghash, what was giving him a burly look.
They have been wearing gray, up to the throats sleeveless jackets with fur outside and without cuts and seams. The kind that must be put on by pulling it over the head. Pants were with fur too, but they were brown.
Much later I have learned, that they are making it from tarred goat’s skins, and in such pants you could easily walk up to your waist in the water and won‘t get wet. At that time I have only thought, that it must be too hot in this fur.
Also the boots, which both of them were wearing, caught up my attention. Hobbits do not use footwear, save for the Brandybucks. They are using dwarf’s boots on an especially wet and cold weather. I saw such at Teddy‘s.
But the fashion of the orc’s boots was little of the similar. They have been made of thick rough leather and even at glance looked strong and heavy. Two metal plates, - on a toe and a heel -were visible on a sole of each boot, and the wide thongs with blued iron fasteners were tightly clasping the ankles and short, barely higher the shins, boot-tops.
However the weapons of both my kidnappers were different. Ghu-urghah had a straight, two-foot length sword in a new wide leather scabbard.
But Ghash has carried a little shorter, curved forward sword, that same what I saw in the earthen den. Its worn out hilt was sticking out behind Ghash’s left shoulder. And both of them had daggers on left hips.
Also, on them were many of all kind belts with clasps, to which, in turn, were fastened different bags, feedbags, pouches and sacks. I should remark, that they had a frightening look in this leather-iron harness.

From time to time glancing at me, they were with enthusiasm smearing themselves alternately with brown and with green greasy dirt from two birch-tree bark cups, like the one I already saw.
- It’s for being not so noticeable in the wood, - has explained Ghu-urghan, intercepting my glance, - and mosquitoes bother less. We will smear on you too.
I got shuddered.
But they did not pay any attention. Gradually the bare skin of hands and faces has disappeared under multi-colored streaks, and when Ghu-urghan looked at me and showed the teeth, probably smiling, I saw again that dreadful orc’s snout, that so frightened me in the morning.
The smile, if it there was a smile, did not promise anything good.
- Smearing yourselves? - sounded above my head so unexpectedly, that I jolted.
- If you see it, why are you asking then? - calmly answered Ghash. - Couldn't hold yourself back ?
- Aha. The watchers gave a sign that there are three of you. And then I heard that your were splashing like ducks, and decided to see by myself.
- I saw their sly eyes under the fallen tree roots. You will explain to them, that the place should be chosen unremarkable. And if your guts took the best of you, the crackers needed to be wet with saliva and chewed carefully, instead of crunching on all woods around.
- Understood, Chief, I will punish.
- It’s aside from it. But, firstly, you will explain to them.
- Understood, - a newcomer has jumped off the ledge and appeared beside me. I saw only a black big-headed and long-armed shadow against the setting down the horizon sun.
The shadow bent the head to me, and I saw what I was afraid to see most of all. The short, split-up upper lip did not hide curved canines, the nose has been flattened, as from impact, and yellow-green eyes, shone in coming twilight, has appeared looking in different ways. Even the painted snout of Ghu-urghan was looking like an infant’s face in comparison with this wolf’s muzzle.
The muzzle has come closely to my face, exhaling stink, and in a terrible whistling whisper, stretching words on vowels, has told :
- What, ratty, shall we have a fun? "

[Olmer]

4.
It has been told in such a voice, that it has crumpled me into a shivering ball, and I felt as a cold trickle of sweat runs along the spine. Pictures, one is more terrible than another of how he will be “having fun” with me begun to roll on before my eyes . At once the body started to ache, responding on not yet felt pain, teeth began to chatter, a nausea came up to a throat, and I got an agonizing urge to release myself of just drank water.
- Uragh, hold your tongue, - Ghash’s voice has cut through my fears. Strange clanking sounds were in it. Ghash stood up, hands rested on his hips, and stooped his head. There was something horrid, wolfish in his demeanor, even his eyes, as it has appeared, got lighted up with a greenish cast. Or it could be, simply, a last flicker of the sun.
- Not a big deal, - lazy filtered through his teeth the one who was named Uragh, straightening up and moving away from me. - Just joked a little, he needs to be somehow entertained.
- One more joke out of place and out of time, - has warned Ghash with the same metal pressing in the voice, - and you can lose something!
For some reason I have thought, that he spoke about the head.
- You will be hauling and protecting him up to the very end. And, if it’s will be needed, will carry him on your back, - continued Ghash. - So sift your barks, but better tie up your tongue in a knot and, until asked, keep mum. You answer for him with your head. Clear?
Uragh has not answered. He was staying, having stooped, ruffled up as if a fighting rooster and, as it was ordered, kept mum.
- I have asked, clear?! - I thought that now Ghash will jump and will seize Uragh’s throat. With teeth. Or will snatch out his curved sword and chop him on three quarters, as if to cut pork for a salty roulade. Even the hilt above Ghash’s left shoulder began to quiver, asking to get out.
Uragh has straightened up, and at once became not simply the big, but the huge, on a head above Ghash. The hands stretched along the body up to knees. I do not lie, the word of honor! And he has rapped out:
- So it is! Clear! To haul, to protect, if necessary to carry, be silent, answer questions! You order - I submit!
And he has boomingly knocked a fist on the jut out chest.
- That‘s it, - already with almost usual cheerful voice has answered Ghash, and, too, has put a fist to the chest, there, where the heart is, - Relax. Ghu-urghan, give him the rope. What’s on in a camp?
- Everything is alright in the camp, - has grumbled Uragh, accepting the cord from jumping up Ghu-urghan and reeling it up on the fist in the size of my head, - not any unneeded rustle for all week. This morning Turogh killed a young deer, two-pointer; today we will eat a roasted meat.
My mouth instantly filled up with a viscous saliva, and a delightful, charming vision has appeared in my mind. A roasted deer’s leg was laid in front of me on an oblong brown clay dish. The leg was stuffed with strips of pork fat and slivers of garlic, garnished with parsley, strewed over with caraway seeds and seeds of dill, and a burning spicy steam was coming up from it . My nostrils has got tickled by a sharp smell of a sauce with onions, rosemary and basil, and to it has been adding an aroma of a hot wheat loaf, cut in large slices that laid directly on a table near the dish.

I was returned to the reality by a rough chuckle of Uragh: "Ghu-urghan! You, guy, are growing! Will you celebrate with friends? "
- In a way, - has responded Ghu-urghan, suddenly for some reason in a dignified bass, but it seemed to me, a bit shyly, and he even blushed. However, I cannot be sure about "blushing": for certain it was impossible to make it out under a layer of a frightening paint in the beginning of a twilight. For me it just looked like it.
- I will let everyone to have by one swig, the rest - at home. Pick up the little guy, Uragh, and let‘s go to the guys, and you, - Ghash turned to Ghu-urghan, - tidy up here after all of us, then come to the camp.
Ghu-urghan has pressed a fist to the heart and rushed to bury my bag with smelly rags. I still have had a time to notice, that, instead of a shovel, he has got from some of his bags something like a leather mitten without sheaths for fingers, but framed with a flat iron rim.
- Why to carry him? - Uragh has asked Ghash, easy, as if I did not weigh anything, grabbing me as it was, entangled in a coverlet, and jumped up on the ledge. - Can‘t he walk by himself?
- He is naked, I have scattered his clothes back there in the woods. In a viciously torn condition. When they will find it - will think, that animals had eaten him.
At these words I pitied my clothes: a brand new jacket made of a good material from Bree, a Fornost’s thin linen shirt of, also, Fornost’s dressmaking. The shirt had an excellent lacy collar. Nobody has had like this. Тeddy has envied me terribly, saying that I am an incorrigible flaunter. But I know that he, simply, would like very much to have such shirt too, to show off before Lucretsia, but his father, as well as all Brandybucks, an uncomplicated man, considers lacy collars as an excessive luxury and a waste. He says, that to them, the Brandybucks, it is too expensive. In my opinion, he is feigning. The Brandybucks are not poorer than us, Тooks. At desire they could not only put the Fornost’s laces on themselves, but also dress up in it all theirs ponies.
But especially I pitied the vest. My father gave it to me on his last birthday. An absolutely new orange vest embroidered with silver thread and with eighteen silver buttons. On every button around the rim was hammered out a "Тookborough" and my name - that it would be easier to find, if it will be lost. If you understand what I ‘m talking about.
- But one can tell if it torn by canines, or cut by a knife.
- You are offending me. I was personally tearing it with teeth. And has squeezed out five squirrels up to the last drop, nearly twisting them. So all his rags are in blood, dirt and s...t. Everything is as it must be.
- And bones? The bones are missing.
- Animals took away the bones. It won’t deceive a good scout, but they are not that kind of hunters. There they have barred themselves from woods with a fence, rarely going past it. I did it just in case if they will search. We have taken him drunk yesterday, already after a sundown. There were a dozen of them on the shore celebrating something. By that time they were going to go home, but this one strayed off. Nobody even had noticed that he is missing. They were so boozed up that even can’t count each other.
If they will miss him, it will be only this morning. For a day they will be looking for him inside the fence: maybe he is lying somewhere, looking green about the gills from a hangover. They won’t go in the wood at night. Over there they have such forest, that even to wolves it is better to not run there at night. Tomorrow they will search for him in the woods. It is, if they decide that he went in the woods, and not that he went for a swim, being drunk, and has got drowned. His clothes, maybe, won’t be found in one day. I carried it far away from our hiding place. We swept up all traces, and have carried him all the time, so, from him it's no any traces at all. We have a couple of days for sure. We shall leave in the morning, and by the day after tomorrow we will be already past the Barrow Downs. Even if they will guess what happened, it will be useless to search for us.

All this time I was dangling between them, as a sack, in Uragh’s left hand. They talked between themselves about something else, while walking, but I did not listen any more. I was thinking that the sly, cautious and practical Ghash has been mistaken in some things. Actually, Hobbits are good hunters. It doesn’t matter that they seldom go into the Old Forest. Only Brandybucks are prowling over there on their own will. In the Hobbiton there are another forests for hunting. But this is not the matter. The matter is that Teddy and his father are quite very good hunters and scouts. Тeddy once bragged that he has managed to track down a lynx, and stealthed up to it on fifteen steps for a sure shot from a bow. However, he doesn’t show the skin.
It’s still a question whether the Brandybucks will be afraid to search for me in the forest at night. The problem is: whether they would want to search? Teddy is not Aragorn, the drifter-pathfinder from the Red Book, whom he loved and has been playing him while being in “tweens“..
Besides, Aragorn knew for certain that his friends were stolen by orcs. Teddy does not know it. For him I have simply disappeared, and, probably, he even doesn’t remember how it has happened. We have drunk much, and the “Brald” is a deceitful thing even for the accustomed to it Brandybucks. He would simply think that I have left. He will recollect how I had been crying to him for a half-day that I don’t want to marry Nastursia, and will resolve, that in me is more of Took’s defiance, than of a hobbit’s prudence. Even, though, he was always insisting on the otherwise...
No, it would be better if Теddy would be getting this Adventure. He would show himself a worthy Brandybuck. I do not think, that he would be just dangling in this converted into a bag coverlet ...
And what would he do? Also what can I do? Not much. I even do not know at all where we are now. How far to the Hobbiton from this place? And in which way? And, if the orcs would, suddenly, decide to release me, how to get to there naked. Only, not likely they will do it. By their words, they are going to drag me "up to the end ", and who knows where is that "end"? In Mordor? This is the last place I would like to get to. Those horrors, which I have read about this place in the Red Book, made more than enough of bad impressions on me. And I don’t have a desire to get new sensations of such kind by my own experience, it would be worse than getting to the dear Hobbiton through the Old Forest naked!

At the thought of Mordor I became downhearted from sadness and disgust, and again my thoughts returned to the small firm rusk, that Ghu-urghan have given to me. Whatever you take, but the ordeal by starvation is above a hobbit‘s strength. I would give anything for that small rusk!
Only nobody was offering it to me. Uragh said something about the roasted deer… Whether I will get at least a tiny slice? As I remembered, the orcs have offered a meat to a grandfather Peregrin. He, then, has thought that is not known whose meat it was, and has refused. Besides it was hard. I would not pay any attention on firmness now, even if orc’s bread was such, that only good for breaking teeth, but it was eaten any way. And here - the meat...
If only they would give some! Especially if there is no a tormenting question to whom it belongs. The deer is a deer, no matter who has killed it. At the hobbit’s the deer’s meat is a rare food, for the rich, or for those who hunts, like Brandybucks. Only they are seldom hunting in the Old Forest. But I have happened to eat venison, last year at Теddy’s birthday party.
The aroma of roasted meat hit the nostrils, and a stomach has got knotted, tightened up to a throat. I have thought, that again I was visited with a previous dream vision, but the aroma was different, the real one. It was a smoked smell of some unfamiliar to me grass, baked ground and the MEAT. By the smell, the meat was slightly burned, but because of it seemed even more tasty. I do not know how I did not lose my consciousness from this intoxicating aroma. Even my nose began to move itself, turning in the direction of the smell.

- Do not twitch, - Uragh jerked me up, - in a couple of minutes we will come to the camp, and will eat. Why he is so hungry? Snuffling with his nose like a dog.
- He did not eat anything since morning, and yesterday's snack we have shaken out from him. We ourselves don’t have anything. The guys, who made that hideout in autumn, have erred, and everything, what was left, was gobbled up by mold. Two of us have pulled through the week only on rusks. At the lake Ghu-urghan has given him the last one. I myself have a nausea from the smell of food.
- Soon we will come and will give a chunk to each. You will fill yourself up to the rim.
- Feed the little guy. You answer with your head for him. I can fall asleep with food in my hand. For the last three days we were scoured without sleep, now goes the fourth. If I’ll sit down - I ‘ll fall asleep. Ghu-urghan dozed off from the dawn up till noon, but I was running, looking around.
- If you will fall asleep - then you will finish eating later.. Should we awake you in the morning or should we just take off?
- If I won’t wake up by myself, then don’t, pick up and leave. Turogh knows that to do.
- Is he will be ordering?
- Yes. It was settled a long time before.
Straight before us, between trees, I have noticed a wattle fence in Ghash’s breast height. The gate has opened in the fence.
When they brought me inside the fence, I have noticed, that the wattle fence is doubled, all in a half-foot width between two barriers has been filled up by soil and turf. Thus the fence at once has got a look of a small earthen citadel. It represented by itself as a circle in the size of no more that lake in which we have bathed, but from the beginning I did not see anything inside. Then, by a reflection of flame, I guessed, that in the middle there is a fire fenced by gray coverlets, just like in which I have been carried, stretched out on stakes. And only when around us the orcs began to appear from nowhere, I have noticed, that the same coverlets are stretched out under an angle to the fence. And the orcs were resting under these canopies-corners .

Since we have got a chance, as we start talking about it, and in order not to name this thing “a gray coverlet” all the time, I shall go a little ahead and I will tell about it.
This thing called a buurgha (4) . It’s look like a rectangular piece of fabric, in length and width is more than an extent of hands of the owner on two palms. Actually, a buurgha sewn in two layers.The external layer is from a rough hemp’s sackcloth of a mousy color, usually imbued with a special compound from which it becomes a little rigid and does not get soggy. From inside it is a bluish-gray thick cloth of goat or sheep wool and it is much softer that the outside layer. It is difficult to explain, what the buurgha means for Uruuk-hai, as it is difficult to describe all ways of its utilization.
They are carrying the buurgha instead of a raincoat, fitting it around the head and shoulders with special strings sewn right in the buurgha.
By wrapping up in the buurgha you can sleep on a bare ground, and sometimes on a snow.
With the buurgha you could screen yourself from a view or block the wind, or make a canopy from the rain.
Having connected a few buurgha together, you can make a tent.
If you will roll a buurgha into a tube, fill up with cattails or straw, or branches, bend and tightly fasten the open ends, you can make a raft on which you can transfer a small cargo, or cross the river and lakes by yourself, even with a weapon and in a chain armor.
Out of it you can make sails for bigger rafts.
Also from the buurgha they can make traps for birds or entraps for fish.
When there is no a shield, the buurgha is tightly reeled up on a hand and with it you can block off impacts of enemy’s weapons. Arrows are getting stuck in it, and blades also, even spears… And it is possible to ward off an axe, only you need to place the hand at an angle, under a haft of the ax.

Since it weighs a good deal, it is possible to make a fighting club by having reeled up a buurgha on a thick stick. Especially, if it’s wet.
My present buurgha, even when it’s dry, pulls for five pounds, and Ghash’s - on all eight. With such soft bludgeon I has been knocked off by Ghu-urghan. Believe me, an iron helmet or a chain armor won't protect you from such an impact. With them on it won't be anything of external damage, but pretty much could get disjoined inside of you... A tightly packed in a special way buurgha, even without a stick, is a quite good weapon.
From the buurgha you can compile a knapsack or a bale for dragging something heavy on two poles.
In the buurgha, rolled in a pipe and pulled on a pole, two persons can carry of some frail cargoes, and, also, sleeping or wounded men and tied up captives. And the capturing can be made with use of buurgha, too, by throwing it on a head or by a sharp whip on legs.
To carry wounded men from a battlefield the four corners of buurgha are having pulled on two spears, and, if it is not enough force, one can put the wounded man on a buurgha and drag along the ground.
You can sleep in the makeshift hammock, not being afraid to be noticed, by suspending the buurgha by corners between branches high in a tree’s crown.
A buurgha serves also as a cover to hide. It is difficult to see someone in woods in the buurgha. The eye habitually searching for a familiar form of a body, but the buurgha hides and deforms it. In ten steps you cannot see a motionlessly sitting man, and in fifty - even a walking one. At night you can trip on the laying in a buurgha. And if things occur in mountains, even in daytime you can mistake a gray buurgha for a stone, until you sit down on its owner.
For walking in the wood the outside of buurgha’s panel sometimes is getting smeared in spots with a multi-colored dirt, like one that they use for a face and hands. More often the buurgha is simply getting sprinkled with a dust of suitable color, or branches and bunches of grass are getting tied to it; there is special strings on it for this purpose.
On a march the buurgha is usually carried atop, as a long rectangular, having lain so that the bag is completely covered. Then the part of the buurgha protects the bag and things from rain, and the part lies between the bag and the back, softening the weight.
When you don’t have a knapsack, then more often a buurgha is getting rolled in the tight tube and fasten up below the back, then it’s possible to sit down anywhere without being afraid to catch a cold: on a wet ground, on cold stones, even on a snow, or on a heated ground of Mordor without being burnt.
Before the battle a buurgha usually fastens up on shoulders, behind a neck to protect it from cutting impacts.
The buurgha is the first thing which Uruuk-hai receives exclusively for his use. Even rattles he is getting later. He spends all his life with the buurgha, learning to use it even before learning to walk, just when he is hardly having learned to sit.
Newborns with just tied up an umbilical cord are getting wrapped in a buurgha, and, also wrapped in a buurgha, they send the dead on their last journey.
For certain I did not say everything what was needed to be told. But I don’t know in what words it is still possible to tell about it. For Uruuk-hai the buurgha is all his life.

So, in here, the orcs have got out from under these buurgha, and stood around us like a wall. Later I have learned, that in аt-a-ghan (5) (this how a group of Uruuk-hai calls ) contains few dozens, but then it looked to me as few hundreds. They stood, looking at me, slapping each other on shoulders and backs and have obviously been pleased with my arrival.
I have thought, that such joy is strange enough. It is not too much enjoyment, when you are getting examined with everyone's eyes. Especially when the examiners were looking so disgusting. I already understood that the horrifying appearance is mostly a deceit, but I was getting shivers just from one sight of many of them. The night’s twilight, unsteady flickers of fire and a skilful painting transformed whom into a wolf, whom into a bear, and whom into a dreadful distorted creature for which you won’t even pick up the name.
When they smiled, and some of them smiled, they looked even more terrible. In the darkness the two white strips, drawn from corners of a mouth and bent at a chin, while smiling, were making an impression of two-inch canines stuck out of the mouth. I was lucky, because I have had a time to get a better look on Ghash and Ghu-urghan at the sun, and saw how they were painting faces, otherwise I would receive a shock from such an amount of terrifying masks.
Uragh was, probably, the only person in this crowd without a painted face, but he looked frightful even without it. I have tried to imagine as he would look painted, and understood, that I shouldn’t do that. There is a limit to hobbit’s self-confidence.

In the meantime Uragh gave the rope to someone from the camp and, waving a stony fist in front of his nose, told him to guard me more than an apple of the eye. I have been quickly carried to a fence, where from two buurgha they have built a small house over me. Then they showed in my hands three hard bread-crackers, put next to me a big, more than a pint, birch-tree bark mug with smoking dark liquid, brought on a huge burdock’s leaf a piece of juicy, smelling of smoke and grasses, deer meat, have put it on my knees and... left me alone.
Certainly, in a relative peace, but nobody was pulling the cord, and now they were looking at me only occasionally, stealthily. And as soon as everyone has got the meat, nobody was looking at me at all, being busy with chomping and crunching. And I did not look at anybody.
O, what a pleasure to sunk hungry teeth in a hot, exuding blood, half-raw chunk of meat. And the rusks have appeared not too firm. And a sweetish grass brew on a taste appeared to be absolutely delightful.
It is a pity that it was very little of the meat. I only have had a time to have a bite and start to enjoy the taste, as it was finished. And I would eat more rusks too. Only was a lot of the grass brew, and, when I have drunk the first glass, they quickly have brought the second to me. From the hot drink, the meal, not plentiful, but nourishing, and from everything what I lived through, I fell asleep.
I was seeing soft homely dreams, and through the dream someone with a voice of Ghu-urghan was excitedly telling, what a fright he had in a wood of walking trees, and other voice regretted, that here Ghu-urghan has volunteered for the hunting, when Ghash has called, and now he will have the name, and he has got afraid and, now, seems forever will be a snaga. The voice of Ghu-Urghan was reassuring, speaking that is still far to the end of their trail, and it will be the chance to get a noteworthy, just do not stand behind other's backs and be more courageous. Because, everyone is having more trust in those, who are stepping forward.

[Olmer]

4. This word has a remarkable meaning. The base comes, undoubtedly, from a word "buurz", that in the Dark speech has many meanings, but in the essence it signify “a ground“, “a house“, “a society“. In "BUURGHA" the magic suffix "Z" is replaced by "GH", which means thing, not person, and ends up with an impersonal vowel "A" means, that this thing has no independent existence. Buurgha was called a BUURGHA when it has the owner, otherwise it just simply a piece of fabric. A part of the HOUSE, a part of the SOCIETY, a part of the WORLD -this is what a buurgha for Ur-uuk-hai. It is a rather rough interpretation, and the true meaning of the word is deeper and more important.
5. Literally - " we are together " or " as one", but it is better to translate like a "brotherhood", a "team".

[Olmer]

5

Orc’s morning begins at one and half hour before dawn. At that same time, when stars already went away, the moon has turned pale, the sky became dark, awaiting the sun, dreams drifted away till the dawn, and everyone is in a deep sleep. Orcs named this hour a "wolf time". Really, when else for the wolves to run? And for the orcs.

My morning has begun with a kick of boot in my side. Not strong, but sensible. I almost have got offended, but, opening my eyes, have understood that I can be angry with nobody. Simply because it is useless. Really, it is possible to take an offence on the one who will apprehend your insult, will understand that you hurt. Looking at Uragh, it was difficult to hope for it.
As a matter of fact a stone's throw away from me other orc in the same way was lifting up someone overslept .
All camp was stirred up as an anthill. All were running somewhere, and all were doing something.
Uragh has thrown on my knees some cloths and bellowed: "Put on!"
The cloths appeared to be a trousers of rough sackcloth and the same rough sleeveless jacket made from a whole rectangular piece of fabric, sewn on each side, and with a hole for a head. The trousers were narrow for me in a stomach and hips, but on half-foot longer than it was needed, and I had to roll them up. And the vest was long and wide in shoulders, but if one side was hanging down to knees, then another has remained hanging with hem on a rope by which I have been tied.
Uragh has pulled a rope, forcing me to get up, and has dragged me to an exit and behind the fence.
We walked away from the camp on twenty-twenty five steps, when he stopped and ordered: " Come on, do your business! " It was visible that this irritates him very much. At first I even did not understand what is it all about.
Uragh has interpreted my delay in his own way: " Come on, what are you waiting for? For me to turn away? You are not a woman for me to turn away. Do it, I have told! "

And want it or not, but I had to DO it.
You, maybe, ask, what for I’m telling about all of this? Does it necessary to mention these particularities? And it is not for the first time.
Probably, it doesn‘t.
They don’t write about such things in heroes‘ books. But I am not the hero. And I’m writing about myself. The biggest humiliation, what I happened to experience in my life, is the impossibility to conduct myself even in such very private affair.
I do not know how grandfather Peregrin has managed, he, too, was in captivity not for one day. It is not a word about it in the Red Book. But I felt bad. I won’t begin to search for words to explain how bad. Try to portray yourself in such position, and you will understand what it means - bad. Probably, you will manage to do it. But I doubt it…
Anyone can picture himself as a hero. It’s easy, pleasant and entertaining for your self-esteem. Me, too, not once saw myself in dreams on the white pony and with a sword in hands. But very few people can envisage theirs own humiliation and fear. I have been going through exactly those same feelings. There is a special word for this condition - a degradation.
Picture yourself doing IT while tied on a rope, held by a giant twice your height, who is shouting at you, pulling the rope and loudly laughing at his own obscene jokes. Try, you only need to tell yourself honestly that such things happen in life too. Have happen even worse things, much worse.

When we returned, the small buurgha’s tent has been already taken out, and on its place stood a familiar birch-bark mug. Pair of crackers has been put on the top. In the mug was lapping the flour-stirred soup. I drank it, hot and burning. In dark dreggy liquid were swimming grains of millet, and the stone-firm crackers were easily softened in the hot liquid.
It was rather a poor breakfast. Fruitcakes and tea with honey would go better. But the fruitcakes were not to be expected, and the second breakfast too.
About half an hour have been spent on getting up, walking in burdocks bushes and eating. And then Uragh in one movement has rolled me up in the buurgha, has thrown across of the already packed marching bag, has shouldered it, and everyone began to run.

My bobbing up and down with each step has been so fast, that everything, what was eaten before, became a bother.
Sometimes has sounded a sharp order, and the orcs would change the running to fast wide steps. They were walking as if creeping to the ground. "As wolves ", - I have thought. They were resting this way. In such time Uragh would shake me off down on the ground, and I had to ran beside, hardly getting after his strides.
Running is not in hobbit’s habit. Especially so fast and so much. A decent hobbit from a good family should leisurely walk on soft sandy paths, and use a pony and a carriage, if wishes to leave a house further than on five hundred foots. But it would be much better to sit at home with a mug of good beer, rather than to run like mad through ditches, all foamy, as if a pony on a fox hunting, smashing own toes on sticking out wood’s roots .
This is when I regretted that I don’t have Теddy’s dwarf boots.
Seems to me, Uragh did not know what a tiredness is. Switching to the run, he was throwing me back across the bag, managing to wrap me in a buurgha without slowing down even for a second. Only by a noisy breath and a heavy caustic smell of sweat you would understand, that this run to him is a difficult task, as well as to all of the rest, probably, because it was not a lightweight’s jog.
Uragh was carrying the bag and me, but others, also, have been loaded as mules. Next to us on a suspended to a pole buurgha they have been lugging Ghash. From atop of the bag I could see his large bare feet. Seems he did not suffer any inconveniences from jolting, because he was not waking up even when carrying him orcs, with a guttural shout, on the move were swapping the pole with next replacement pair.

The first stop has been made at midday, when we already for a long time have left the woods and were baking under the ruthless summer sun. The order sounded unexpectedly. The orcs have abruptly stopped and right away, taking off their shoulder loads, have collapsed on grass. Everybody, as one, have mounted the legs up on the bags.
Only Uragh did not sprawl, but sat down, and once again, having shaken me out of the buurgha, has put in my hands a cracker and a canteen with water.
To tell the truth, I only wanted to drink. For the first time in my life I was ready to refuse the offered food.
I was wrenched out by the pressure of the run, but just in time I remembered that orcs were offering meals infrequently, and diligently gnawed away the cracker and washed it down with the water.
Everybody around me were chewing and greedily swallowing the water, too. Uragh ate his cracker dry, and drank already on the move, since we did not sit for long, and, just as a majority barely has finished with meal and drink, someone ahead has barked an order, and everybody have started the trek again.
All day long we proceeded like this under the scorching sun. One more stop has been made before the sunset; we drank water and chewed on crackers. I thought that we, at last, have stopped for a long time, but I was mistaken. Then the sun went down. Then stars have appeared on the sky. The run was going on.
I do not know about orcs, but even I, who have been riding on Uragh for more than half of the way, was exhausted. When, once again, he has thrown me off from the bag, I could not run any more. That's what I thought, that I wouldn’t be able to run. I have been hitched up by the collar, pulled up on my feet and dragged along with such force, that my legs were mostly threading the air, hardly touching the ground. Nothing interested me. Hobbits have strong legs, but mine have been battered to blood. When being thrown on the bag, I was falling into unconsciousness, but, seems, did not have time to close my eyes, as again were being put on legs, and again I had to tread with the beaten-up feet. I even no more can force myself to lift up my eyelids, and was putting my trust in the hands that were still strongly holding me by the collar. I was simply moving my legs, as I could master, and was listening. Тоp, тоp, тоp, тоp...


It was an infinite stomping. And I did not believe my ears when it has stopped. I thought, that it is the next brief stop. But I have been dumped from the bag, and a buurgha has been unrolled...
- Alive, the little one? - has sounded Ghash’s voice, - Are you still breathing?
I have opened the eyes and somehow sat up. Ghash was squatting before me. There was a reddening sky behind his back. Uragh was laying beside on a buurgha, having mounted his bare feet on the bag. Looked like he was sleeping.
- You are okay, a strong guy. I was watching you all the time since I have woken up. Some others, without getting used to it, would collapse a long time ago. Of a very few people could keep up with these "wolves". They can run faster than horses. Well, maybe not faster, but longer, definitely. Do you want to eat?
I shook my head and then hastily have thought: what if he won’t ask any more? But Ghash has simply put beside me a small packet and has unfastened a flask from his belt.
- Here. I know, that now from a weariness you would want only to drink. Munch, when you will want to eat. And you can sleep as long as you want. Here is safe for us. We will stay for long, getting the rest.
And he walked away, leaving his buurgha, also. I saw, how he talked to someone, and then, together, they went somewhere into a graying twilight. For the first time in two days of my captivity I was staying alone, if not taking Uragh into account , who was snoring beside.
The main thing was, that nobody stared at me, did not swear, did not pull a rope and did not ask any question. It was a right time for thinking.

The orcs slept where they dropped on the ground. Some were wrapped in a buurgha, some were sleeping on it just spread on the grass, others slept by two, having laid one buurgha and getting covered with another. Someone snored, someone whistled with a nose, someone smacking in a dream.
Nearby Uragh was making a deep hollow rattle, as if choking.
Such noise was staying here, that it should be audible for a league. Surprisingly, nobody was afraid to be heard. In the woods Ghash was very much worried about the silence. Now it does not bother him. Anyway, nobody was running between the sleeping, was not turning anybody on another side , and was not awaking the loudest snorers.
The impression was that the orcs afraid absolutely of nothing.
Before I thought, that they are very cautious. And now they behaved as if Mordor around, instead of Arnor’s plain. It seemed to me that they even did not have guards on.
And I have thought that it, maybe, my last opportunity for escape. I did not want to run. I did not want to run at all. I did not even want to move a muscle.
But on the other hand it could be the last opportunity. Where I will run when we will go utterly far away from the Hobbiton? Where I will find food and water? Even now I have just a little of it.
Will , then, be possible for me to distract attention of my watch guard, who now sleeps carefree beside?
Now I know, that if I will go South or North, in a day or two, for sure, I will come to the big road. There are merchants on the road . It is possible to meet there a horse guard patrol of King Elessar. Everyone knows that the King Elessar is kind to the hobbits.
And what will be in few days later? Where I will be then? And how I will search for the road to my home? And will be enough strength in me for such intent? For how long I will last on orc’s feeding?
It was vital to run right now.
What’s more, Ghash has not left with me other security guard because he thinks that I already cannot move at all. Little he knows of the strength of hobbits!

The rope has not stopped me. Maybe the knot was "dead", impossible to untie, but I did not even touch it. Ghash has tightened a loop around my waist two days ago, when I was much chubbier hobbit than now. So I have, simply, slipped out of the loop. It was not especially too difficult thing to get out of a circle of sleeping orcs. When hobbits want, they can move almost silently. But this skill was almost unneeded for me. It was such snoring , that if I would be leaving and bawling " The Road goes ever on and on.. ", even then nobody would hear me.
I simply crept from one sleeper to another, so I would not be so visible among them. The edge of the sun has already showed up on the east, and it was not too difficult to identify where is the north .
More difficult was to get around the guards. As it turned out, they were there! But the first guard, which has got on my way, was looking in other direction, and maybe even sleeping.
The guard has heard not a slightest rustle and has seen not even a light shadow.
Hobbits like to hide, disappear and creep up. Any respectable hobbit won’t miss a chance to entertain himself with it. For hobbits in “tweens” a hide-and-seek is a pastime hardly less favorite, than a Springle-ring, but much more preferable, than a golf - an entertainment for respectable elders. (6)
I have an ample experience at hiding-and-seeking. Теddy and I are the first disguisers in all Hobbiton, if you understand what I am talking about. Well, maybe, Teddy is the first, but then I am the second for sure .

Escape! What a remarkable word. It is difficult to describe what you feel, breaking away from a captivity. There is no any comparison between the hide-and-seek. No doubt, the hide-and -seek is good for an entertainment of young silly kids, but if you wish to learn the real meaning of hiding, get captured and run away! Whether it’s possible to describe what you truly feel when you creep between sleeping orcs?
How you freeze, when somebody suddenly turns on the side. Facing you! And your heart freezes and stops together with you. How it trembles and fast-fast beats in a chest when you are waiting to exhale, having found out that did not breathe more than a minute.
How to describe that sensation on the skin when, suddenly, you understand that someone looks at you from the twilight. Every little hair on your body rises up then, and you are pressing close to a hot snoring body, to a gray wolf’s fur, trying to merge with it, to get lost in its shadow, to become for a while a simple heap of cloths in gray grass.…
Where to find words for the description of feelings that overwhelm you when the guard steps over your pressed in the ground body and calmly goes further on his way. And you, wet and shivering as a frightened mouse, creep out from a shelter given to you by an armful of grass.
How to describe the moments when you are tiptoeing behind a wide back of the guard, putting a foot on the ground at the same time with him and just in unison lifting it up. How you drop to the ground, when he looks back and sharp-sightedly inspects distant surroundings, and you are shivering under him, almost embracing his boots.
It would be impossible to me to do anything of such things if my kidnappers would be hobbits. He, who is able to hide from others, is able to search and to observe also.
If it would be a little bit darker, I would simply quietly walked away. But the sun was already coming up, and it was difficult to hide not as much of myself, but as my own shadow.

I have left, but I have spent a lot of time on it.
When I managed to go away on two hundred steps, a half of solar circle has already stuck out the horizon. I should run as fast as I can, or hide somewhere for all day. Otherwise I would be found very quickly.
I can’t run, but to hobble, leaning on the stick. So, I should get a hide-out while I have not been missed. But there was no place to hide.
We were in a concave surrounded by hills. The enormous black column has towered in the middle of where orcs were sleeping, and from where I have crept away. On the top of the hills were also sticking out stones, but smaller and of a different kind, similar to faceted ant hills ...
And I decided, that if I will manage to get over the nearest hill, maybe there are some bushes at the back of it in which will be possible to hide for a day.
And this is what I did.
I had to reach the top of nearby hill by crawling, because the sun was already shining on the slope, though below, in the concave, was still shadowy, but I knew that if I will rise up, I would be seen by anyone who has got a strength to open the eyes, especially by the guards.
The sun already has come out completely when I have reached the stone at the top . And here I have got disappointed. It were the bushes on another side of the hill , the clumsy bushes were stretching out North almost till the horizon, but to reach them I needed to bypass two orcs that sat on the other side of the stone monolith.
It was the second ring of the watchmen. Only some time aftewards I have learned, that the group has been awaited here, and this is why Ghash did not care about anything.
But I found out about it much later, so at that moment the presence of the watchmen took me by surprise. I have had no time at all to think what to do about them.

A sharp modulated whistle came out from a bottom of the concave.
- Do you hear? - has reached to me, - Something happens there.
- Are you hard on hearing? - the second has answered derisively, - A prisoner’s runaway, this is what happens. Seems, that little rat, they have brought, has run away.
- Would it be nice to catch, - the first one has sighed.
- Aha, sure, he lies behind a stone and waits for you. Where will he run here? Probably he has crawled away and hides somewhere. How he could get here? The guys below are not without eyes, they are looking around.
- So and I will go and look. There would be already a dismissal whistle, if he has been somewhere near them. They are not whistling, which means he is hiding. Maybe has crawled up here.
- Aha, sure. And got by us too. Use your brains. It was already the beginning of dawn when they came. Do you think he has slipped by us in the broad daylight? Sit, do not bother.
- It‘s up to you; do not go, if you do not want to. But, I think, I will walk around the stone.
I heard him rising up. Any hobbit’s skill won’t help when around only the low rigid grass. It was no place to hide here, unless to hammer yourself under the stone…

Under the stone! Near me, between the stone base and the grass, was a narrow, only for me to squeeze in, crack. There was no time to deliberate. The orc was already near.
With my legs forward I hammered myself under the stone, and in instant later the boots have appeared before my face. The new, well stitched together boots: on the left has stuck the small yellow blade. The boots trampled the grass, was heard a disappointed sigh, and, suddenly, the legs in boots began to squat. Seems, the orc was going to kneel down and look into my rescue hole. Cautiously I began to squeeze deeper into it, and as further from the opening as possible, hoping, that this tight hole will be a little bit bigger. But it ended...
My legs have ceased to feel a support and in couple of seconds the ground under my stomach has disappeared, and I have slipped in a small low cave to which the hole has leaded.
The flat face blocked the shining through the crack sun. The face has swayed and blinked a couple of times, but it is difficult to see something when you are looking from light into darkness. I even closed my eyes, so the orc won't sense that someone is looking at him. And when I has opened them, the face in the crack was not there any more. The boots were gone. There was only a bright sunlight.
The held on breath has regained awareness and in short gasps has started to pump up air in the chest. The cold sticky sweat has started to warm up, and hands have calmed down and have ceased to shake. While the sun still stood low and could look in the crack, it was crucial to inspect this so successfully turned up shelter.
I looked back and barely have had a time to bite my tongue, having choked with my own scream. In the sun’s spot under fancifully horned helmet, in a frame of a red wreath of braided in long braids hair the skull was looking at me with its bony eye-sockets holes.

[Olmer]

6.Golf, as it known, is a hobbit’s invention. The honor of the authorship of this game belongs to my ancient ancestor Brandobras Took - The Bullroarer. He was standing out of other hobbits for his unusual tallness, four foot five. Besides he was riding on a real horse, not on a pony, and was known for an extremely mean temper . Once an orc’s gang came in Hobbiton for plundering or some other dark affair. A fight took place. And the Bullroarer with such force has struck with a club the leader of orcs on a head, that it has flown away on two hundred foots and has got into a rabbit’s hole.
And this is how the game of golf has been invented. This entertainment has pleased all other hobbits, and all have begun to play it with such enthusiasm, that by the evening of that day in the Hobbiton did not remain any orcs with a head on shoulders.
Later the hobbits played golf also. The orcs were not always there for this purpose, and then my ancestors would pay visits to neighbors - Big Folk, i.e. people. The neighbors for some reason did not like the golf, and often enough they paid the reciprocal visits to explain to especially violent and keen players that there are happen to be more decent and quieter games. Sometimes it was ending up in a terrific golf with participation of newcomers. However, all this is an ancient history. Now the golf is a composed pastime of dignified elders, who are using cheerful orange balls for the play.
It‘s said, that the last time the golf has been played according olden rules by my grandfather Peregrin Took and Meriadokc Brandybuck the Magnificent, when they, having returned from a distant journey, have found that orcs took over the Hobbiton.
I think, that is a spiteful misstatement. They, certainly, have beaten the orcs, it is written about that in the Red Book , but there is not a word about the golf.

[Olmer]

6.
Barrow-downs - the hills of the last resting place.
Who only has named them so? This is a wrong name. A resting place is the place where the dead should lay. But if to trust the Red Book, they are not resting too much here, going around at night and bringing about all kind of unseemly things.
They say that during a lifetime they were great and noble warriors. Perhaps, but somehow I do not recall a nobleness in their acts after the death. Certainly, I am not an expert about the Barrow-downs, knowing only what is written in the Red Book. But it was sufficient to me.
No. The decent dead person won’t walk around at night and disturb peaceful passers-by. If the dead is not lies down, as it supposed ... Or as he was put down. If he doesn’t lie, as a dead should , then he is not dead at all. He is an undead.
And the place should be named not the resting place, but the Unresting place. So, by hearing this name, everyone should steer clear of it for ten leagues.
It is a pity, that I have not paid attention when Ghash was talking about it.

It’s always happens with me. I will do something without giving a good thought, and then SUCH things come out!
I have left the house without even saying a "good-bye". And where is the house now? Will I ever see it again? And in just the same way I have decided to run: without looking back at all.
Was it difficult to look at the area? Perhaps, barrows and stones would led to some idea. So much have been read and re-read about this terrible place ! It is written in details in the Red Book ! You must be blind not to recognize that place. But no! Have rushed to where laid eyes on!
I have spent so much efforts , went through so much fear, but did not even once had considered to give a good thinking.
Truly old men say: "You won’t do a thing if you won’t set your mind on it".
Here I am sitting in a crypt together with a corpse that might become alive any minute .
All right, he might or not, but it‘s obvious that it’s desirable to get out of here.

I have thought all of this while I was trying to unclench my teeth contracted by a spasm. When I finally made it, I spent some time to make sure that my tongue is still there.
Fortunately I did not manage to bite it off, but I was close to it, because for a quite long time I had to swallow the blood and rinse a mouth, using the precious water. Who would think that so much blood could gush out of the tongue? I even became afraid that I will exude all my blood and forever will remain lying side by side with a red-haired horned skeleton.
But it has stopped. The tongue has remained swollen, but there was no need of talking and there is nobody to talk to, unless with a skeleton. But for now he was not inviting me to a friendly conversation. Frankly, I was not regretting about that.
Slightly adjusted and calmed down, I have tried to get out.
Тeddy is always saying that you don’t need to try to do something, you just simply DO it. I would like to look at him here!

I have slipped in the crypt, but even though it was low, when I needed to get out, it has appeared that the hole under the ceiling is out of my reach, and the only possibility is to jump to it.
It was easy. A regular hobbit can jump up on a height of his growth, and such thin one, whom I became, even higher. It was the easiest to jump to the hole , only on a foot high. But it was absolutely impossible to grasp an earthen edge that was crumbling under fingers, and not to mention to lift myself up on the edge, which was disappearing under palms. Besides, I was afraid to make a noise.
Having realized all it, I have decided, that it is not necessary to hurry up. The sun has risen up more and it became almost light in the crypt. Maybe not so light, but the eyes have got adjusted and distinguished a surrounding quite well . The skeleton does not show, yet, any signs of life, - phy! what life he can have! - while he does nothing , simply lays, as the deadman should. Probably, it will start to do something at night, but any way I, yet, have to wait till the night . While the orcs are above, I cannot run anywhere in the daytime, and therefore I still have a lot of time. It will be wise to look round and think up something.

It is said in the Red Book , that if you will sit long enough at the gate, eventually, you will think up how to enter. I think this approach suits and for getting out too.
First of all I have had a snack.
In Ghash’s pack were five rusks and a small piece of same dry and firm meat jerky. I did not even think of whose meat it was.
It was difficult to chew on such hard food with the swelled, covered with wounds tongue, but was a hobbit ever complain of difficulties with meal? I have managed.
It is a pity, the meat was not only dry, but also a very salty. It burned the tongue unmercifully, and I had to drink of more water, than I should.
Maybe, it was not necessary to eat all at once, ahead was a long day, but after two days of captivity and daily jogs the emptiness in a stomach and dryness in a mouth were intolerable. It would be a top of stupidity to die from a hunger and thirst when there was food and water. Especially if it’s not known, what awaits me further, and whether it will be a chance to eat without rush again.
For the time being I have engaged myself in a robbery.
Did you ever rob tombs? No? It‘s all right. It is an unworthy job.
It would be better to pick up another, more harmonious word, than a "robbery". For example, a "grave digging". But the dead man was not in a coffin, you can’t call the coffin a shroud in which he has been wrapped up. And I did not dig anything. So the "robbery" is the most suitable name for that business in which I have got involved myself.
First I began to search for the weapon.
The search was not long. Here, in this musty crypt, were so many weapons as if they equipped the dead man not for a tomb, but for the great war. In corners of the crypt stood a sheaf of spears and darts, at the legs of a skeleton laid a huge, in one and a half of mine stature, poleax, near laid two withered and splintered bows and half-dozen of quivers, up to the rims filled with arrows. Laid on a chest hands in long, up to elbows, mail mittens has been clamping a hilt of the long sword, which extended down to knees of the deadman.

The sword to the touch was rusty and corroded, whether it doesn’t have a sheath from the very beginning, or it have decayed while was laying in the tomb.
All around the crypt have been scattered fragments of some other metal. Here were hilts of swords, and bent shafts of spears, jagged blades of axes without handles, twisted strips of knives and daggers, pieces of chain armors and chopped shields. The wooden base of the shields was perforated by wood-boring bugs, and it was turning to dust at contact, and only a rusty iron crossbar with a capper in the middle still has remined.
Also there were a lot of pieces of iron, sometimes of a very freakish forms. If all of it once had some appliance, by its look now I did not know about it and could not guess. Probably, it was the weapon and an armor of the enemies, conquered by the dead man. I mean, when he still was not the dead.
After digging in this remnants and having inspected stuff at the walls, I have not found anything suitable for myself.

Actually, it’s not that I have not found anything at all. The arrows, for example, and especially, their tips, have drawn my attention very much .
Do you know, what is a real battle arrow? Did you ever happen to see it? Or, maybe, you only read about warriors entirely pierced with many arrows? If so, then it won’t be irrelevant for you to know something about it.
The real battle arrow is a staff in three and a half foot in length, and in thickness of the big finger, which ends with a six-inch iron beak.
In the quivers I have found a wide assortment of arrows with a large array of the tips.
There were extended, four-faceted thorns; flat-ended and heavy, as a forge chisel; long and thin as skewer; flat, with one tooth on the side and trihedral, with three tooth; spread wide tridents, like a pitchfork, and with three separate thorns on the general crossbeam, as at fish spears.
There were also such as in our region has called "cutters". They looked like a half moon or like a flat spatula for turning over meat on a frying pan. These arrows are good for hunting. The wide tips leave a greater wound, and an animal is quickly looses blood, so the wounded animals does not remain escaped in the woods . But ours, hobbit’s cutters, are in the width of only in inch, and in these the width of a half moon was about five inches. If such arrow will get into an unprotected by mail neck, it, perhaps, will cut a head off. I have got goose bumps when envisaged such thing. The staffs of the arrows, as it seems, have been saturated with something, and wood-boring bugs have not touched them, only feathers fell off.
For me each of such arrows could become a quite good dart. But at whom to throw it in this den of five by eight steps? You need to get outside first.
The arrows would be good for making a ladder by hammering them into the wall, but still I needed the weapon with which I could cut.
I well remembered, that master Frodo Baggins has managed to chop off Barrow-wight’s hand. I wouldn’t want to repeat his feat, but I won’t simply surrender if the dead man suddenly will begin to move.

The sword of the red-haired skeleton obviously did not suit me, I have hardly shifted it from its place. I am even not talking of the poleax, and I did not touch it at all .
I had to cast my fears far away and to get under the shroud. Under the shroud I found a long, down to the skeleton‘s heels, chain mail, for some reason completely untouched by rust, a great variety of gold knickknacks and a foot-and-half blade in a scabbard. The scabbard has crumbled to pieces from one touch, and there was a heavy sharp dagger in my hands. For me - a sword.
It was pleasantly heaving the hand and a bronze handle was cooling a palm. At a swing the sword was thinly whistling, and in a stiff air it was looking like a tiny orange sparkles scattered from it.
It‘s just amazing, how differently you’ll start to feel yourself, when your hands are holding a heavy fighting blade. Whether there will be a man which, having touched the weapon, would not feel how unusually his heart began to beat, and how differently the blood began to run in veins ?
Hobbits are peaceful people. If we are having any weapons, than it will be the hunting bows. Others, more tall people, can laugh at their "children's" sizes, short arrows, and ability to shoot only on fifty steps. But so what? A hobbit can creep up to a deer for a length of its jump and thrust the arrow precisely in the chosen speck on the deer’s skin. To us our bows are just right.
You won’t see other war weapons in our parts. When the trouble comes, the hobbits are taking the same bows; woodcutting axes with long handles almost in size of a woodcutter himself; pitchforks; flail and others, what is at hands.

The sword is an absolutely another matter. You do not cut a fire wood or do not go on hunting with a sword. It’s even ridiculous to picture of picking in manure or mowing wheat and barley with a sword.
A sword is not an instrument, it is the weapon. A pure quintessence of war. Its exclusive applicability is to kill. And everyone, who has taken the sword in his hands, involuntarily feels it. When a palm contacts a cold hilt, you suddenly feel how your blood has begun to play and boil with fine bubbles under the skin . How fast and booming your heart began to thud. How the tired, swelled, hardly moving legs in a flash would switch to flexible, stealthy fighting steps.

The sword has been kept and at our place. Such thing won’t happen frequently in hobbits’ families.
Our sword belonged to a grandfather Peregrin. He has brought it from his wanderings together with black chain armor and a high helmet with small silver wings. All this has been attractively hanged out on the wall of our drawing room for an entertainment and gossips of visitors.
Only rarely, on especially festive days, the grandfather would put the armor on.
How I envied him then! But I was a silly little kid and another hobbit’s kids and me were sternly forbidden to touch the armor and especially the sword. Once I have tried to do it, and I was so flogged, that up till now I feel a pain when I am recollecting it.
And then the grandfather has forever left for Gondor and took the weapon with him. I remember that I regretted it very much. What for the grandfather needs a sword in Gondor? Of whom he would be afraid at the court of the King Elessar? Wouldn’t they find for him another sword in there?

Now I have a blade of my own. And at once somehow it became believable that all what is going on with me, the Adventure is almost usual for Тooks business.
Only the sword was very sharply honed, and just as I offhandedly touched the edge, I felt that blood began to drip. I put the finger in the mouth. In such position it’s not very easy to do something else. It is good that the blood from the finger has ceased to flow quickly enough. Seems, after going through the whole day, it has not left too much in me.

After some consideration I have decided, that it will be no any difference for a skeleton, and has taken the shroud away from him. He did not object. The cloth was shabby, but it was better than nothing, and I made from it quite good wrappers for my broken feet. From a bowstring of one bow has turned out an excellent belt, and from the second bowstring I have made a harness for the sword. However, I had to tinker with it.
On pictures in the Red Book the swords were drawn at the belt, or behind the back.
At first I have decided that it will be more convenient to carry it at the back, but, as it has appeared, it was very difficult to take out the blade from behind of your shoulder: the length of the hands was not long enough, and it was an absolutely impossible to put it quickly back. I had to hang it up on the harness going across the shoulder and around the waist.
I did not find a shield and a helmet, but among rubbles laid something like a flat iron bowl with little handles - a detail of an old armor. It was too big for my head, but it would be good as a breastplate, I just had to tie strings to the handles. But seems that something I did not do right. The bowl was constantly slipping down from the breast, and, eventually, being tired to struggle with it, I decided that I will have an iron stomach-plate, instead of the breastplate.
For a helmet I took a metal cap of one of the quivers. The quiver was once a leather tube, and now has collapsed, got tattered, and I have separated it from the cap without any difficulty. Whether copper, whether bronze, it resembled a short bell with a cover or a low hat without brims, and constantly strove to slip on my ears and to close the eyes, and I had to truncate the hem of my sleeveless jacket. I put the fabric inside of the helmet, and at once it became more soft and comfortable to the head.
Probably, I looked ridiculous in this "armor", but I was not thinking of an attractiveness.

Having got the weapon and a some kind of dress shied, I, at once, have felt as a weathered warrior. Even the hunger, which has already reminding of itself, did not frustrate me. The warrior should be hungry, thin and angry. Otherwise, what kind of warrior is he?
The food will be. There will be a new day, there will be also a meal.
To occupy myself somehow and to muffle a little of the hunger, I have practiced with the sword: have brandished it, poked on all four sides, have stood in different positions, which I have seen on pictures in the Red Book, and has come to a conclusion that to fight with the sword should be not so difficult. Not more difficult than a springle-ring with a club. Even easier. The club in the springle-ring has made of an oak and is very heavy. The sword seemed to me was not such weighty.
It is difficult to find a hobbit that is not able to dance a springle-ring. I think, that it’s impossible. In every hobbit’s family even the smallest hobbit-kid knows a pair of steps. And the steps in everyone’s families are sort of individual. Who loves high jumps and long leaps, who prefers
different "sweeps" and teeter-totters, and others are able to do such spins, having dropped to the ground, so that at first you don’t know how to approach them. There are such artful moves, that right away you will not understand how it ‘s done, even if you saw it many times. I am not talking about an immediate repeating of them.
You could have a lot of sweat out while learning of some special movements .
But who is afraid of sweating, while doing such thing? They love to dance in Hobbiton.
But who dances the springle-ring best? Ask anyone from Bree to South Farthing, and you will hear: Gamgees, Тooks and Brandybucks. Maybe they will have a difficulty of whom to put on the first place.
I am a grandson of Sam Gamgee and The Peregrin Took! And nobody matches me in the dancing! Even Теddy has recognized it, eventually. For that not once we had competed in a circle, giving to each other many bruises and bumps. But I have always remained at the top, and he finally has agreed in spite that it was insulting to him, the Brandybuck, acknowledge it.
But this is for him like water off a duck's back, he is the first in many other things.
Besides a pair of especially intricate Brandybuck’s dodges have not been known to me at that time.
And I can teach a springle-ring of anyone. Even THIS ONE, red-haired, if he will decide to get up. Then we will have fun together! And we will dance in pair as Teddy and me used to do!

And now a daring idea has come to the head. No. Not to get outside and disperse the orcs. The hobbits from Тook’s clan are happen to be a reckless, but not that much. We are not the Brandybucks.
I have thought, what if not to wait till night, guessing in fear, will he become alive ... - that is he cannot become alive! - guessing, will the dead man get up or not. What if to chop him in bone crumbs right now? While he lays and touches nobody. Probably, he won’t rise when all bones will be chopped. It is difficult to raise up even when you have only the bones, but when the bones are broken...
But my charge has gone quickly. I wouldn’t be able to do it without a big noise and rumble.
And how I will get him out of a huge and heavy mail? I don’t have enough power to chop it. Up there were orcs, and I would not like at all that, suddenly, they would have got a desire to find out what rattles and clangs under the stone. It would be easier to wait before twilight, get out of the hole and to reach bushes, crawling past the guards.
At daytime there is no hope to disappear on a flat place, but none of orcs can find me at night. Even in the morning twilight they were walking and almost stumbling on me. It is understandable, the orcs are not people from woods, but from mountains, have got used to look afar, instead of under the feet.

Seems the skeleton was not going to move, anyway, for whole day he has never turned the head, even when he has been brazenly ransacked, and I have decided not awake the dog while it sleeps. There were more important things. A ladder should be built up to the hole.
And I made myself busy with this project.
From the inside the walls of the crypt have been laid out by roughly squared stones, only at the hole several pieces have been missing, therefore I have begun to insert the tips of arrows into crevices.
I wouldn‘t say, that it was an easy job. It seemed, that a mortar between stones was stronger than the stones and firmer than the iron’s tips. I had to scrape it out by small pieces. I have managed to thrust some arrows deeply enough, so they wouldn’t brake off under my weight. But any way the ladder has turned out up to my chest, and I have considered it's sufficient to get out.

Being busy with working and thinking, I did not notice as it was imperceptibly darkened. Even without that it was not too much light in the crypt, but my eyes have got used to the twilight, and I did not pay to it any attention. Only, upon having risen on the last step, I have found out, that stars already are blinking in the sky. I can get out now, just needed to get a flask.. It was not any water in it, but the water can be found, if it would be in what to store. And again I have gone down on the floor.
Something has changed in a crypt.
There was whether a steam, or whether a light, hardly visible fog. A strange rustling and an unclear scratching was coming from the skeleton. I should get out as soon as possible, but I couldn’t find the darn flask in a suddenly becoming impenetrable gloom. Darkness became so dense that you can slice it on chunks.
But I have noticed the movement. Perhaps, by the penetrating into the hole flickers of stars on gold trinkets of the skeleton.
A dark with faint glitters mountain has started to move slowly, and a cold has blown on me. The deathly cold.
It was no need for the ladder, for such dodges I had not thrown even in the springle-ring. I have simply jumped into the hole from the place I stood, a head and hands forward, as if dived into the river. It was four steps to the hole, but I precisely have flown into it.
I think, that from the scare I would fly through out, but the sword has betrayed me. It got hooked by the hilt on the wall of the hole, has turned on the harness and was jammed across a narrow vent. I jerked once, twice, have stretched out a hand to loosen up the harness, and suddenly have realized, that not only the sword does not let me go. Just above ankles, I was strongly held with bony long fingers, cold even through a cloth of shroud.

[Olmer]

7.

How did I scream! It seemed to me, what even the stone above the crypt has jumped up. Probably, my scream was heard in a dear Тookborough. And orcs, I mean the watchers at the stone, have heard it for sure. I was screaming so loud, that my ears have got plugged.
But an air in my chest has quickly ended, and I was not able to shout for a second time, besides, the bites on the tongue did not get healed yet, and blood has began to trickle again from reopened cuts. The blood was filling my mouth quickly enough, and I had to spit it constantly.
So, I couldn’t scream, even if I wanted to do it very much, because two more hands have got added to the first pair, which has seized me!
"How many of them the skeleton has? Or is it not one? Then from where the other two came out?" - I have thought, but at this instant I have been
grabbed more firmly and pulled, and I flew out from the hole back into the crypt.
Those, who pulled me back, did not calculate a force of jerk, having thought, that I am sitting in the hole more tightly than I actually was, and I have flown from one wall of the crypt to another, and got collided with a crude stone with all my…well, let it will be a back, and fell on all four.
Something was moving under me! Shaggy and dirty.
What would you do in my place? I threw myself in the nearest corner. That is where it has to be by my own understanding, because I was seeing absolutely nothing. I only have heard a noisy hoarse snorting from different sides .
I have not reached a corner, but ran headfirst into someone very firm. It is good that I had a previously acquired helmet on me. Even if it was a kind of flimsy, it has sustained the impact, otherwise I would crack my head. But the head stayed intact, and he, whom I ran into, loudly, and raspingly exhaled and fell off aside. It has calmed me a little:the skeletons do not breathe!
But someone has grabbed my shoulders from behind, or more correctly, has tried to seize them. From the unexpected stop and an impact my legs buckled under, I have fallen on knees, and he, who tried to grab me, flew over me. And by a sound of impact with the wall and a metal’s racket he has reached the corner for sure. Still seeing nothing, I started to crawl aside, to the wall, but come to a halt at someone's legs in huge boots, battered and dirty to the touch.
"Gotcha, I’ve got him!" - has cried over me a rasping bass, and I was hitched up on my legs. The top of the helmet on the way got hooked on something, the helmet flew off the head, holding me paws immediately has got loose, and the same voice, which for some reason suddenly has become high and thin, squealed: "Oy-ee-oy! "
Being afraid of every second to run into somebody, somehow, on all four, I have reached one of the corners, and hunkered down behind a thick dusty sheaf of spears.
From the hole under the ceiling have been coming a modulated whistling and muffled shouts, but in the crypt were heard steps, crackling on fragments of iron, raspy faltering breath and rough clanks of the weapon.
I did not see and did not know how many of adversaries I have. It has been a mystery to me of where they came from, but the thought that they are alive calmed me down. Anyway, dead men, even risen up, are drinking nothing, and especially anything strong, or so it has been written in books. But these, not visible in darkness, have smelled of old, chronic alcohol’s fumes, as if they did not dry out for weeks.

Even Waymeet’s smith in days of hard drinking have smelled better. However, he doesn’t drink any muck, and prefers a malt liquor made by the Oakers from South Farthing. I am not a fan of such heavy drinks, for me even Brandybuck’s “brald” is already too strong, only for drinking a little on special occasions.
The smith would have been expelled from the Waymeet for a long time ago, as he is from Big Folk, and the Big Folk are not favored in Hobbiton. But he is an excellent master. When he was looking for a job in Waymeet, he forged an iron lily right in front of the eyes of Mistresses Lilia, and has presented it to her.
Up to nowadays this forged flower stays in a hall of Waymeet’s smials on a specially made for it little table covered with a cloth from blue Khand’s linen that changes shades from gentle-azure up to dark-lilac, depending on how light falls on it. The carved little table, and especially the cloth, came to Mrs. Lilia at a great cost, but it was worth of that expenses. When you are entering into a dark hall from a sunny street, it looks like the real black lily has opened its gentle petals in a tiny lake.
Since then Mrs. Lilia always sticks up for the smith and defends him from old Nibs, especially, when the smith is getting drunk. Such thing has happens three times in a year, each time on the same days.
Once, being drunk, the smith has told, that on these days he recollects his killed sons, his wife and a burned down house. He did not tell who has burnt the house and has killed his family, and for a long time only cried with fine scanty tears, smearing them on the pitted by sporadic pockmarks face.
But he drinks like this only three weeks in a year, and all the rest of the time he spends at a forge and anvil, pounding with a heavy for any hobbit to lift up hummer on the red heated up iron to its waxy softness. The old miser Nibs unfairly grumbles that the smith eats his bread for free. Where will he find such worker for such price and without any shortcomings? My father not once has tried to lure the smith to us, in Tookborough, and was offering the favorable conditions. But the smith would only shake his early turned gray head, rumpling long singed hair, which have been tied up by a leather band, saying that he does not wish to upset Mrs. Lilia, because she was so good to him by giving him a shelter when he was bitter and alone.

Above, judging by sounds, they whether has been trying to pull out the stone, whether to dig an entrance into the crypt, whether were doing both of that. However, it's not that what was worried me, but the terrible whistling whispers inside the crypt, as if it is coming right from the walls:
"Search, search!"
A crunch of steps was becoming closer. I have groped the hilt of the sword, but it has again got tangled in the harness, and did not wish to get out in spite of all my hard trying. When I have pulled it harder, I have shifted the spears which were covering me. The pulled ropes, which were holding them together, seems have decayed a long time and barely stayed intact. The sheaf has collapsed with a horrifying clatter, lifting up a cloud of dust, from which I immediately have begun to sneeze. Only after all of it the sword, at last, has decided to obey me.
- I’ve found, he is here! - wildly screamed someone beside, and rushed to me, but I thrusted out the sword in front me, and the one who screamed have jumped aside, as being stung.
However, he was not alone, the others were somewhere here. I brandished the sword with all my mastery, sticking with it to the right and to the left, but did not manage to strike anybody any more.
My adversaries, seems, too were doing something. Few times I have heard the grate of metal against the wall above my head, and stone crumbs were sprinkling on me. Suddenly I have got a sensitive enough hit on my stomach, and then I got thwacked on a head with something soft.
-"Not again!", - I have thought, the head has slightly floated, and the hands only for one second have stopped to swing a sword.
Immediately from the darkness someone's paw has seized me by a shoulder and with force has pulled from the corner. With all my might I cleaved on the paw and even has got connected with it, - the one, who pulled me, howled and jumped aside, - but the traitor-sword has got torn out of my palms and, ringing and scattering red sparks, flew somewhere to an opposite wall.
I was hit on the head two more times, my stomach-plate has been ripped off, my hands have been twisted back so, that elbows almost nestled on a nape, making radiant spots to jump in my eyes from the pain, and have been dragged with knees on firm stone steps, with added kicks and punches on each step .

A stone plate has banged above the head, sprinkling me from a head to toes with fine splinters of granite, and around at once has begun a howling, screaming, and a hoarse shouting on different voices.
- " Go! " - someone has bellowed to me right in the ear, and I was impelled through the stony, sharply smelling of mold, passes.
Boots were thundering on the stones, striking dark blue spiky sparks, the rigid cold paws were strongly squeezing my wrists, almost wrenching out of the sockets both hands and bending my back so, that from time to time my forehead was bumping on my own knees. Each attempt to unbend was responding with a wild pain in the joints unscrewed to the limit.
They were dragging me, howling and squealing, turning to here and to there, then squeezed, peeling the skin, through a narrow stone crack, two times have creaked with some heavy doors and then have stopped.

An iron flint has been struck, crimson sparks flew out, and on tinder has got kindled a blinking red-eyed flicker. The red eye has swayed in the air, grew up and turned into a small, of a buttercup‘s color yellow flame. Then something began to smolder with a dense smelly smoke, and then a crimson light of a torch lit up the moldy stone walls of a damp pass.
It was dripping from ceiling, the mold was hanging off the walls in strange colored tatters, and the crimson flame was transforming the porous, eaten by the water and time, stone into an improbable pattern of bearded, spitefully teeth-baring grimaces. The flame was unsteadily jumping, discarding clubs of soot and fumes, dropping on the floor a fine, quickly dying away sparks, and the bearded stone-men were constantly changing the expressions of gloomy faces, frowning, blinking and scowling thin lips, covered by the mold.
The holding me paws have weakened the grip and have allowed me to unbend slightly. Someone huge and strong grabbed my hair with a harsh palm, with a sharp jerk has unbent me and has forced to lift up the face.
And I saw...
Uragh would be called a real handsome in comparison with the appeared in front of me mug of a thoroughly drunken sot. Even with a fighting paint on.
The brute has been barring at me his sparse splinters of front teeth and droolingly grinning.
- "Aha, we have got you, an overgrown rat, - he lisply hissed into my face. - Fat! Today we will guzzle on meat".
For some reason I, at once, have guessed, that the owner of the mug does not joke. Most likely, he simply does not know what a joke is. His words have not added to my good mood.
At once it became somehow cold and empty in my stomach, the skin was quivering with relentless shivers, and got covered by a sticky disgusting perspiration. It was wet enough around, but I knew for certain, that it’s not an earthly moisture, but my own cold sweat.
- Are you shivering for your skin? - the mug mockingly continued, - Rightly do shiver. While you have it. When you will get in Ghashur’s playful hands, you will get rid of your skin fast. More quickly, than you will die. Much more quickly. Ghashur knows his business well ".
I thought that Ghashur is his name. A little later it turned out, that I was mistaken.
-"I would have fun with you, but too hungry, for the third day a stomach has plastered to the back, - the brute has spat through teeth. - All right! You, a rat, are juicy - we will feast ".
They again had stuck my face into the knees and had dragged me further, singing a vile song in four drunken, hoarse and shrill voices :
Come on, grab faster them and drag,
Kick harder them and whip their back,
Heat up the torture ticks to brand,
And pour salt on open wound,
Cut ears off, and pull theirs nails,
Keep them in pain and hear their wails.

The song was long enough. Here I am not reciting it completely because I don’t remember, I have remembered it up to the last word. I just don’t want you to deprive for long days of your spirit’s calmness and good mood.
To my luck, they did not have with themselves any torture instruments, which had been mentioned in the disgusting rhymes, except for a whip, but first two lines they put into practice rather zealously. I shall notice to you, that a strong kick of a shoehorned boot will be much worse than an impact by a scourge.
So they have dragged me long enough, crisscrossing different passes, going down, ascending an abrupt spiral staircases. Some times it seemed to me, that I have been dragged on circles: the spots of mold on the floor looked very similar to one’s I saw before. But how you can be sure on something in these monotonous passes?
Even if I would manage to escape, I would not find a way to the surface. With a torch, or without the torch. Only, it was silly to hope for any escape: they did not let me out of the paws for a second. When the awful song, at last, has ended, my torturers have begun to discuss aloud how they will eat me. One, probably, not a most respected, spoke, that a meal could be postponed for a while, and they could have fun with me till I die.
Three others, having explained to the first in words and expressions, which I shall not repeat here, that he is stupid, began to bicker: to fry me or to cook. The owner of an ominous mug stood up for to fry, but not thoroughly, to leave with blood, as a medium rare. Two others, who were holding me, insisted on cooking, pointing that it wouldn’t be bad to slurp up something hot after three-days of starvation.
The owner of the mug insisted on his way of cooking, and they almost have got into a fight, very nearly forgetting about me. But the first has interfered again, saying that just a little bit of wood has been left, and it won‘t be enough neither to cook, nor to fry. And it would be better, after skinning me, simply to salt the meat, keeping for a couple of days. As I have understood, he suggested doing that all with me alive.
The owner of the mug, however, has got very irate with such offer, and has declared, that if he wants a fried meat, then he will eat the fried meat, and those, who interested in a corned beef, could be used on the corned beef themselves.
They have fought a little, but the owner of the mug was obviously larger and stronger, so the victory was on his side.
But the beaten one has remained at his opinion. He was not interfering with a dispute on cooking, but was loudly muttering, that all will be how Ghashur will decide, and it is useless to argue now.
-"Ghashur is not a commander to me! - the owner of a mug has angrily bellowed. - Some “chief” he is! We walked away from the chiefs, and he won’t order to us. Not him has caught this ratty, and not him to order what to do".
The beaten one has told, that he still will have to see, whether the mug could utter such things to Ghashur himself. Right away he has got in the teeth, has spitted one of them and after that did not open the mouth at all, saving the remained.

And the dispute about the ways of my preparation has flamed up with a new force. Between squabbles of orcs... - I have forgotten to tell, that all four were orcs - between orc’s squabbles and fights, all four were not forgetting to give me a kick, a punch or to strike with a rope whip. By the end of the way I, already, did not have an alive place on my back and down below.
My mood was horrible. Not every day you can hear as at your presense is being discussed the ways of how to eat you.
It seems amusing, when you are reading in the book as trolls are going to eat dwarves and Bilbo Baggins. But all amusement disappears, like a torch smoke, when it happens to you.
I would vomit from only a visualization that with me they could do the same that I would do with a beef cutting for a dinner’s cooking. Would vomit, but the crackers were digested a long time ago.
Hardly I could hope for a sunrise and a transformation of the orcs into a stone. First, orcs are not trolls and do not turn into a stone. Secondly, where you can find the sun in these stone sacks? Unless if all ground above us will go up in the air. But even then: it is a night above.
Besides only a wizard can do such tricks. But I don’t know any wizards, even the cheesiest one. The last real wizard has been seen in our region about hundred years ago.
Seems, all was going to that my Adventure, which started in the wrong way , would end up in the wrong way too.
In sense, would end in the stomach of these disgusting four and an unknown to me Ghashur.
I have convulsed from such terrible idea, and from that sharp movement the pain in the twisted out shoulders right away has got joyfully awaken and has started to gnaw on joints even more diligently.

The narrow pass has ended. I was dragged into a low vaulted hall, filled with thick, in a few of my grasps, stone columns supporting a ceiling. The hall, basically, was dark, and you could only guess its size. The darkness, which condensed in the corners, was pushed away of the middle by a smoky crimson light of torches.
In the middle, on a stone podium in the height of my growth and thirty foots in a length and width, was a huge wooden carved armchair. The torches have been placed in iron racks around edges of the podium, four on each side, and were fully lightening up of all what has been going around.
A small crowd of orcs has congregated around the armchair. In the armchair, intended for a giant, sat a small orc, probably, on half-foot higher than I am. I even have thought that he is an orc-kid. Was sitting and funny and childishly swinging with short, not getting up to a floor, legs. The orcs around him were finding this picture neither amusing, nor worth of an attention. They were simply being busy with their own things. My appearance has got them stirred up.

Once again I was dragged on the stone to the podium and have been thrown to the legs of the armchair, and my hands, at last, were being released. It was so pleasant, that for some seconds all around appeared joyful.
- What is that? - the midget-orc has asked in a melodious voice .
- The meat! - proudly stepped forward the owner of mug.- Have taken him up there, in the crypt with a vent. He fought like animal! It took all five of us together to restrain him!
- All five? - puzzly asked the midget, - And where is the fifth?
- The fifth? - the owner of a mug looked around and scratched a nape with a huge paw. - The fifth. The fifth, seems, left in the crypt. This one so solidly has plastered his head on the wall! He, also, has nearly chopped off my hand!.. Have forgotten the fifth. ..
And he looked back on the others, searching for support, but it was looking like they were not in rush to add something .
- This means that you disobeyed my order, - boringly said the midget, - and went upward. And also have left out there the one of your group. You have to go back to get him. If you will return with him, I, maybe, will forgive you. Nail this one to that column. I will entertain myself.
- What do you mean, to entertain? What, Ghashur? - yelled the owner of the mug. - What about eating? For the third day we are eating an empty soup! We have got the meat! And you - to entertain yourself!
- To a developed mind boredom causes much greater suffering, than a hunger to a silly stomach, - mildly has answered the midget. - Mine dead before time brother, used to say that eating and sleeping is pig’s business… I won’t be for long, six hours, no more.
- But if you will let all blood out, - continued to worry the ruffian, - then he, dried, won’t get fried through!
- It seems to me, that you are already should be on the way upward. And they are too. Is not so?
- Seems you began to order around too much, Ghashur! Here all guys are free, and can decide of whom what to do! For sure we can have a meal without you! - and the ruffian has loudly laughed, baring splinters of his teeth.
Somehow it became empty around him. Even those three, which stood beside him earlier, have slipped away somewhere, probably, have rushed back into the crypt.
The midget in the carved armchair has sharply waved with his left hand, and the huge, in seven foot, owner of a frightening mug got chocked with the laughter and grasped for his neck. For some time he was still staying, trying to do something with the gurgling throat, but then his knees has bended down, and he boomingly crashed backwards, lifting a cloud of dust. The midget easily jumped off the armchair, approached a corpse, pulled out a small, in six inches, blade from the body and, stretching words, has ordered:
- This one to the kitchen. And this one to a pillar .

Immediately I have been pulled down from the platform, pressed with my back to the nearest column, and some orc already was going to hammer his dagger in a crack of stone right through my wrist, but he was stopped with a new order.
- No.Tie him up. This way he won’t die quickly. Since we already have the meat, I wish to have fun for much longer.
And I have been stretched out by ropes between four daggers, hammered in the pillar.
The midget has approached me, looked into my eyes, a little bit from below upwards, and has asked:
- What’s your name?
I would tell him. I would tell him everything, that I knew, and everything, that I have forgotten. But my horror was so great, paralyzing all my muscles, that I could not even open a mouth.
- "Proud, - the midget shook his head. - Proud and brave, if this idiot was not lying . My brother, too, was proud and courageous. And noble. I have finished him. If he would be here, he would rescue you. But he died ".

[Olmer]

8
Did you ever happen to ask yourself a question of what you can think about under a torture? What comes into your mind when you are stretched out in front of the executioner? Do you get enough of the will power or curiosity to picture yourself in such position: powerless, defenseless, given for a torment and violation?
I think, that you have never thought about it. It is natural. Such thoughts cannot, should not occur in a coziness of your house, near the heat of your fireplace. You have either, a perverted perception, or a character of an exceptional hardness, if you can manage to picture the helplessness of your will and the very brink of your life. Only a few, being in sane mind, would voluntary decide on it. All of us would run away from the thoughts of death and suffering.

Ur-uuk-hai have a terrible custom. The one, who choose for himself a path of the soldier, is being locked for some months in a solitude. He stays in semi-darkness, not letting out on the sun. He is not allowed to communicate with anybody, even with those who brings water and food to him. He has only one thing to do: every day, each hour, every minute he should envisage his own death. He is obliged to think of it constantly. To picture its infinite faces in all of their horror and details. Only sometimes some ancient elder comes, and such at Ur-uuk-hai are a few, and talks to him. About the death. About tortures. This is a tough test. Many were not able to carry it on . Some loses their mind. Others, after a few days, would start to shout and demand to let them out. And they would be let out of the confinement. Only a few can pass trough this test up to the end, and then they are coming out being able to look in the face of death. Coming out, having killed in themselves the horror of the death apprehension agony. Coming out, having found an ability to withstand any torture, because in their hearts they already have gone through the death and the agonal terror for many times, and have lived through many torments, which only an imagination is capable to invent. Coming out, having refused their own life. And so this is how they live then, the frontier guards on a thin divider of life and death.

You would ask, how such thing is possible? It is possible. I already mentioned it. When you will be led for a torturing, and the agonal horror will seize a throat with cold fingers, recollect those who are dear to you, the one who you love more than yourself. In love you will find a strength, and then you will get enough of it to endure and forget any suffering. Or, to meet the death. It is very difficult, but it is possible. It is difficult, because for this purpose you constantly need to remember about the existence of the death . You need a habit to cultivate a mortal memory in yourself. But whether many , being busy with daily dilemmas, are getting a courage to remember of the meaning of the life and its so fast flowing away instances ?
This is why among Ur-uuk-hai are not that many warriors, whom people call - Uruk, but the correct is Ur-uugh. (7) Each of Ur-uuk-hai is able to handle a weapon. Each of Ur-uuk-hai, if necessary, can transform any object into the weapon . But from a hundred only one can say about himself: " I am Uragh ".(8) This word means not simply a "warrior", its exact meaning - " an alive embodiment of war ". Only the one who has converted all his life into a boundary stone on a border line between life and death can be named by this word. It is easy to recognize Ur-uugh among the others Ur-uuk-hai: each of them carries a sword with a curved blade, and all the others - with a straight. Because of this easy detectable difference, sometimes they are called the Centries, the special soldiers. But it is a mistake. They are not the special warriors. They are The Warriors. All others have only taken the weapon in hands.
Almost since a birth the Ur-uuk-hai know, that in every instant of life the death and malice are staying behind the left shoulder of any of us.Not many have succeeded in passing the uragh’s trial, but many have tried to pass it, and keep a remembrance about it. This why the majority of ur-uuk-hai are ready for the meeting with own death, and are able to refuse regrets about own life.

But whence such skill could be found in the small, weak, defenseless hobbit? I hung on daggers, firmly hammered into a column, and with all my skin felt how the gaze of the undersized executioner is sliding over me. As he calculates and chooses. As estimates and determines. The midget still did not started to do anything , but my body already was feeling a precursor of pain, where he has stopped his gaze. I wanted to scream from only this one sensation. And I would scream from overflowing me visceral horror , would scream, choking and tearing of vocal cords. If I could scream.
The midget did not rush. From folds of the clothes he slowly took a small, stained with blood blade, the minimized copy of Ghash’s jagged dagger, and began to twirl contemplatively in his fingers, thinking his own thoughts. The dagger was not black, as Ghash‘s, and polished. A crimson flare of torches played on sides of this silvery small fish, and my gaze, against my will, was drawn to a sparkling steel, and the consciousness was representing terrible pictures, one after another.
With a greater effort I managed to look away from this dancing death. The hand with the dagger stretched to my neck, the sharp sting slightly scratched the skin, but the midget wasn’t going to cut me. Right now his pleasure was in this. A tooth of the dagger has hooked a collar of a sackcloth jacket and gently and slowly has pulled downwards. The fabric with a tearing sound gave in under the metal, the tooth sometimes was gently touching the skin, and from these hardly noticeable contacts I was beginning to shake with an immense shiver.

- At first I will cut off clothes from you, - smiling, have informed the midget. - Then the skin. Not all at once. I won’t let you to die fast. By the way, and why you are not screaming? Do not hesitate, everyone screams. Sooner or later. If you will scream, it will be not so painful , and you will live longer . Scream. What for you have to suffer the pain? To whom and what you need to prove? Nobody, you hear, nobody will come to your aid. Nobody at all will learn, were you stoical or not. And even if somebody will learn, they won’t care for someone’s business. The world is indifferent. One death more, one less. Who will be grieved by yours?
He would force me to scream. It would not be difficult to master such thing. At once it was evident, that he loves the craft of torture, and he is familiar with all persecution intricacy. It is true, what have said the later owner of a drunken mug, that he "knows his business well”.

But he was interrupted. From the darkness other orc has approached and has silently stopped beside, respectfully inclining a head.
- What? - discontentedly said the midget, stopping to cut my clothes.
- It’s a mishap in the kitchen , - the orc has answered, - the fire wood has almost finished. It's just a little bit has left, only to singe a skin .
- What else we have to burn?
- A bundle of old spears, some rags and just a little bit of fat. But all this is for torches.
- The spears - in fire. Rags for the torches can be wrapped around of long bones, it’s a lot of them over here. Fat, - the midget pocked my stomach with a finger , - it will be soon. Order to reduce the number of torches .
- The spears won‘t be enough.
- Then, - the midget has looked back on the armchair, and the regret has sounded in his voice , - take a throne. Also, send a half-dozen of guys to rummage around distant crypts, let them drag everything what can burn.
- Maybe, we shouldn’t take the throne, - the orc replied respectfully , - The guys can eat it raw too. But without the throne…
- The guys, -the midget has answered resolutely , - should know, that for the sake of them I will give all. You will make a new throne, from the stones, will cover with buurgha, and it will be possible to sit on it. It’s even is better, than this old rummage of the dead.
And we will eat raw this one, if these, above, won’t leave in two days. But they did not put up buurgha’s tents, means, they should leave soon. Then we will be storing meat and fire wood. Do, as I have told.
The orc inclined again , but did not leave.
- What?
- There are some guys, - the orc hesitated a little, - They want to watch…
- Tell them - later. I want to be alone for a while. Let them eat first. They still will have time to watch, and, maybe, I will let them to have fun too. And cook a liver for me. With blood.
The orc bowed for a second time, and run away, loudly stomping.

While they talked, I have had a time to shake myself off from my delusion of horror, and to think. I am a hobbit. I am of a small stature. My power is an insignificant. Probably, I will never see the gold hair of my mother. But this is not the matter. I am a descendant of Gamgees and Тooks. One my grandfather, without shuddering, had faced a spider Shelob, and had reached the fiery bowels of the Lonely Mountain. The other had almost died on Pelennor’s fields, and much later had fought with enemies in Shire. For the sake of what did they do it? I have not got to meet the enemy in a fight, I have to die not with a weapon in the hands, but on the wet, smelling of mold, stone column . My fight is here. If this creature with the face of child and habits of the master of torturing wants my screams, then he will have to work hard for it. If sometime after my death he would want to visit the Hobbiton, let him learn in advance with what kind of people he will have to deal.
The midget again returned to my clothes, cutting it slowly and diligently, saying something, smiling and stretching words. Probably, this slow ritual should intimidate me, and finally to break my will. Only I was not near him.
I was in my Hobbiton. I was saying a goodbye to everyone, whom I remembered, knew and loved. I was asking them for a forgiveness for everything, in what I have had time to offend them, and was forgiving them for what I, myself, had been earlier considering as the insults. I was pleased with a knowledge that I will be dying of a slow death , because it were many of those, whom I should tell a few words, or even just one. I needed to forgive many, and even many more to ask for forgiveness.
The midget was making an incisions in thin strips on the skin of my chest, and I felt a pain, but I did not think of it. I was recollecting the gold hair of my mother and sly eyes of the father. I was talking to the fun-loving and mischievous grandfather Peregrin. I even apologized before Nastursia Furfoot that I never won’t be able to marry her, and wished her to find other husband.

My torturer has been stopped by a short yell at a distant entrance in the hall.
- " Who is there? " - the midget has discontentedly turned back . He just pulled off a first of narrow strips of my sliced skin, tearing it off from the meat. The skin was getting peeled off with an easy crackle, and has come off already on about eight inches. I saw an uneven strip of my own meat exuding drops of dark blood. It was... However, you don’t need to know how it was. Take my word for it; it’s an unpleasant feeling, when you are getting skinned alive. I almost screamed from a nightmare of this view, and from a mental grasp that all of this is happening to me, to my body. But just in time I have got remembered, that, in effect, I have already died, and managed to stop the scream. I needed to return to Hobbiton in order not to remain one-to -one with this terrible reality.
- Who is there? - has repeated the midget. - Who is sneaking there? I ordered to leave me alone!
- Guests, - a strangely familiar voice has derisively answered from the darkness.
- Guests , - has repeated the midget , seemed to me, puzzled and even confused. - Say something more.
- What for? - derided the voice . - Do you like to listen scary fairy tales at a bedtime?
- Ghashi? - now the confusion in midget’s voice sounded quite distinctly. - it cannot be!
- Why? - the voice was surprised. - You have simply forgotten, who I am. It is forbidden to us to die, and ur-uuk-hai know, what is a duty. I have survived. Give me the little guy, Ghashur! Give, while it is still possible to bring him to life, and I will spare yours.
- Ghashi, my little Ghashi, - the midget suddenly started to croon , - I even glad, that you are alive. You cannot imagine how I am glad.
- I can, - Ghash cut him off from the darkness. By the voice, he was moving over the hall. - After I have died, I can imagine everything. Even your pleasure. Give me the little one, while I’m asking nicely!
- No! - the midget huddled against on my “stripped” bare chest and put a dagger to my throat. - He is mine, and not a step further, if you want to get him alive.
- If I won’t get him alive, you won’t leave this place.
- So what, - the midget has sung , - any way, you will not let me out . Neither me, nor guys. You have seventy blades above, I know. But, any way, you won’t kill all of us.
- No, - has answered Ghash, - Today I won’t kill. I will kill, if I will meet you another time. Give me the little one, Ghashur, give!
- Well, - the midget agreed suddenly, - I will give. Only not now. You will let us out, and then I will leave him in the wood, if you need him so .
- Without eyes, tongue, ears and something else? - angrily bellowed Ghash. - Do not joke with me, the bastard, I know what your promises means.
- Yes, - the midget answered with а sneer , - I am the bastard, the degenerate, the son of your mother and your father. Only did not grow tall enough, daddy should drink less of shaghu. But not an idiot like you are. " Ur-uuk-hai know what is a duty!" To whom is your duty? To your precious Uu-ghoy? " We are Ur-uuk-hai, we are not afraid of the sun ! " They intended to become people!! Have themselves harnessed, urging themselves on and proud! " We know what is a duty! " I am free! And my guys are free! We are orcs! We do, that we want! If I want this rat to die under my knife and so it will be! You will not stop me! Even if I will have to kill you one more time!

The midget has jumped aside from me and gave an audacious marauding whistle. At once the end of the hall opposite to the entrance has got filled with orcs, and he yelled to them something unintelligible. The orcs crowd has rushed to the entrance. They already passed me, when simultaneously from the different places of the hall has rumbled a feral roar of many throats: " U-ur-r-r-a-a-a-gh! " The midget threw himself back to me, but from behind of the column towards him has jumped a gray "wolf" shadow and knocked him down. The hall was filled with an incoherent, continuously unrestrained roar and howl, intermixed with clash and grating of iron, but at my feet, between the column and the podium , in a soft light of torches two “werewolves” fought in a furious hand-to-hand " combat.
The midget has won. He has jumped aside to the podium, holding in front himself the short dagger. His challenger has dropped a sword, pressed hands to a stomach and was moving back. He was moving back until he has rested his back against my chest. The wide shoulders have almost completely closed me , so I could only peek out , and saw a little. But I saw, how the midget has jumped to him and began furiously and fast-fast to stick the dagger into a wounded man stomach. Through the fur of wolf’s jacket of another ’s person I felt, how each given impact is echoing by the pushes in my body.
Then, from the darkness, rotating, has arrived,a curved blade, turned around the midget’s neck, squooshed, and departed to a distant wall. And there it has fallen, having rung mournfully . The midget swayed, dropped the head, and it has rolled, deafly knocking on the stone blocks, the body stood for some more instants, has spurted over us a dense black blood, and fell, still not letting the dagger out of the palm. My savior has slipped down directly on me, wakening a sharp, tearing pain in the free from the skin places, and has remained to sit at my legs, with his back to the column.

With a sliding gait of the good dancer barefooted Ghash has come from the darkness . In the left hand he had a dagger, from the blade was dripping . Ghash sat down at my legs, tending the wounded :
- Ghurgh, come around, Ghurgh . - the wounded raised a head, inhaled and, having tried to lift a hand, whispered: -" He... "
- He is alive, - has told Ghash, fleetingly glancing on me, - Holding on.
- Am I… dying?..
- Yes. This viper has got your vein in a stomach. You have an internal bleeding. I can’t stop it.
- Means... - Ghu-urghan has falteringly sighed. - I won’t have the name.
- I will name you, Ghurgh, - whispered Ghash, and it seemed to me, that he was crying. - I will let my blade to drink your blood.
- Let ... - the wounded doesn’t have enough of a strength even for words. - me...
Ghash looked back, searching for something, then rushed to a dropped by Ghu-urghan short, wide sword, and put the hilt of it in the hand of the dying. Then he clasped a powerless palm with his fingers, lifted the blade and sliced on his hand above a wrist.
On the sleeveless vest, stained with blood of Ghu-urghan’s stomach , has dripped a new blood . For the last time Ghu-urghan suck in the breath, and his body stretched out. He died. Ghash unbent, looked around, stopped his gaze on a headless corpse and has uttered through the teeth a long phrase with many "gh", "zsh", "vzh" and similar sounds. I have not understood a single word. Only after that he looked at me. I think, that he hated me. Such eyes he has had .
He took a small bottle from his bag’s pouch and began to pour its contents on my chest. And now I have felt an excruciating pain.. As if every cut on the skin were caught by the fire, not talking about the strip of the open meat. I gave out an ear-piercing scream. Ghash, however, did not pay any attention on it. Though, he also did not pay attention on the blood that was still dripping from the slashed forearm. Putting the bottle away, he took out from somewhere a curved needle and, turning away to the torchlight, for long time was putting a thread in the needle. The orcs were running around him. Someone dragged away by legs a decapitated corpse. Four others have cautiously lifted and have carried away on their shoulders the body of Ghu-urghan . But nobody touched me, only Ghash sometimes was casting the glance, turning around . At last, he put the thread in, turned to me, fitted the dangling strip of my skin back on its place, and has begun to sew up the opening on my chest...As if putting a patch put on an old torn clothe. This seam with uneven stitches till now is decorating my body. Having sewn up, Ghash has admired the work a little, seems, has got satisfied with a result, then has got a jar with a sharply smelling tar black ointment, and has applied it all over my chest. I should tell you, that the treatment of orcs differs from the torture only by an outcome. On sensations they are almost identical. But I was glad for this pain. It meant, that I will live!

[Olmer]

7 Plural from of word "warriors".
8 Singular - a "warrior".

[Olmer]

9.
The next few days fell out of my memory. I slept. Not because I was very tired, or was so hurt that could not do anything else. All this was much simpler. In the catacombs of the Barrow-Downs Ghash gave me to drink of some water, preliminary adding in it a few droplets of an unknown liquid from a tiny bottle. And from these droplets I fell into a sleep, like into a whirlpool. My consciousness has left the world and has gone to travel in mysterious and strange places.
Some of these places, for example, like the vaults of destroyed Barad-Dur, I happened to visit later in reality. Others up to now remain mysterious and strange to me.
To tell the truth, now I do not have a desire to visit these places, even if I would know where to look for them. In my visions the vaults of Barad-Dur were simply mysterious, even a mysteriously attractive, in reality they are dangerous, if in this words it is possible at least somehow to relate to what I had happened to live through in there. I think, that other places in reality would be sort of the same - dangerous.
And I, as well as any other hobbit, love rest and coziness, and I prefer to not look for troubles when it can be avoided. If you understand what I am talking about. Among my visions, also, were really, attractive, even seductive, and I was dreaming of some of them for a quite long time, but even they do not initiate in me a desire to see them in reality. I have lived already long enough to know, that a temptation is only a temptation, and a vision - just a vision, however attractive it seems to be. It is a pity, what even in reality is not always possible to distinguish at once, where is an actual existence, and where is an alien and spiteful phantom, a "ghull" (9) on the Dark language.

It was bright in the room, when I have woken up. This is what amazed me most of all - the room. For a minute I have thought, that I am in my own Hobbiton, and all what have happened to me is only an aftereffect dream, same strange and mysterious, as all other vision, and caused by too much of boozing.
But then I found out that the ceiling is not less than eight foot above my head, and, so, it cannot be the Hobbiton in any way. It cannot be even the Bree, because a hobbit’s lodge in the “Prancing pony " is in very pleasant smials with usual for hobbits ceilings. The Butterburs has conducting business with our people for so many years, and already learnt hobbit’s preferences and prejudices better than theirs own.
I wouldn‘t say that the room was very spacious, but it was not small also. Just right for a bedroom. A fireplace of a quite fair size has situated at an opposite from me wall, but it was not kindled, though the accurate pile of firewood indicated, that it is possible to start it up at any minute. The light was coming from a high lancet window, which have been barred with a graceful forged lattice. All room was clean and tidy, but not in the hobbit’s taste at all.
A coverlet on the bed became my second impression. It was white! Maybe, is not an absolutely white: a homespun cloth, not a linen of Fornost. Maybe even slightly yellowish, but not gray, not brown, and especially, not black. The usual linen cloth that in the Hobbiton everyone uses for bed sheets, tablecloths and coverlets. I mean for an unfestive, everyday use.
The bed, on which I laid covered by that coverlet, was huge. It was so great, that for some reason I have thought, if it would be ours with Nastursia Furfoot matrimonial bed, it would be enough place and for Теddy. And at once has recoiled. What for I have to imagine myself in one bed with Nastursia? It is not enough of horror in reality? And why Теddy has to be there? We are friends, but not to such extent that I could drag him into my own family bed. And into a non-family bed too.

It’s looked like my awakening was not an absolutely final, and the sleeping potion has continued to play jokes on me. I sat down on the bed and found out, that, also, I am dressed in a nightshirt! The shirt was twice longer than me and so wide, that I had to search for myself. I mean to find where sleeves come to an end and my hands begin, and then to think, on how much I will have to roll up a hem to make it possible to walk.
The thinking was as ineffective, as it was after the blow to the head on the Brandywine‘s shore. Some ideas were scampering in the head, but they did not wish to get constructed into something coherent and clear, scurrying each by itself. But I have managed to roll up the sleeves, having decided not to dawdle with the hem, but simply to hold it with hands, when will come the need to go somewhere. Besides, right now I did not wish to go anywhere.
The chest was burning, and, glancing under the shirt, I have found a thick scar on it from which the threads were sticking out in all directions. The scar was itching a lot, but I did not dare to touch it. It was looking so unusual and strange: my own chest, which has been sewn up by a rough seam. If you will scratch, it might, all of a sudden, to get open up again. I did not want again to try on myself the orc’s art of doctoring.
And I did not doubt that, if anything happens, they would treat me again. Even Teddy, though he is not inclined for a long contemplation, would understand that for some reason I am needed to orcs. I was not killed at once. Moreover, they were treating me almost kindly, as much as it is possible to act nicely toward the captive. Even the rough joke of Uragh was stopped at once by Ghash, and now, by knowing orcs a little bit more, I understood, that it was really a joke. Quite in an оrc’s spirit. I have been fed not generously, but also no more poor than any of those orcs that I saw. Twice I have been remediated; I cannot tell that those treatments were pleasant, but they did the job: I feel well.
And the most important: they were not simply searched for me after my escape, but for my sake they took up the fight with other orcs, risking their lives, and some of them have lost it. Besides, they are already carrying me, even unconscious, for long enough, and have brought me to this clean house. They won’t do so with the useless and unneeded captive. Probably, these orcs differ from those, others, about whom I have read. Probably, my present ordeals are still ahead, and for them I will be needed healthy. But it was useless to contemplate about all this.
Nothing left for me, but to rely on a natural course of events. At present I have been assured in one thing: they won’t kill or torture me for now, and the orcs will treat me kindly, as much as, in general, can they kindly treat someone.. . Now my confidence at that time seems to me ridiculous. But then I have cheered up after having considered everything that I knew.

Probably, this sleeping potion did not let me to think clear and rationally. Only one strangeness has got hooked in my memory: judging by a conversation, Ghash and Ghashur were brothers. What has made them enemies?
Anyway, I have calmed down and even started to think, that my Adventure develops not so badly, yet. I have happened to go through some suffering, but then it will be something to tell about when I will return to the Hobbiton. Also I’ll have something to show. Girls are so vulnerable and sensitive to man's wounds. Even Теddy doesn‘t have such courageous scar. Only it will be necessary to pull out the thread. Our people are sharp on tongue - could start to call "patched". But what do they understand in the Adventures!
Behind the door something was rustled, the door squeaked, has got ajar, and a little girl of about three years old was appeared on a threshold. I do not know about babies of Big Folk, up till now I have never saw human children of such age, and therefore I won’t insist that she was exactly three years old, but hobbit’s three years old toddlers are looking just the same, only smaller. The girl was staying on a threshold, sucking the big finger, and looking at me with big sad eyes.
Her hair was the color of a ripe straw.

- L’eefy (10), - have called her from the next room, - go away from the door, darling. There is a man sleeps, don’t disturb him.
The girl, again, sadly looked at me, turned around and wandered away.
- Why is she silent all the time? - there was Ghash’s voice.
- Silent, - have sighed in the answer. - The horsemen have been here, at us, on early spring. Royal eored (11). Whether they were catching of your kind here, whether something else… For two weeks they have stayed.
Well, if they decided to stay; than I, as a head of community, have to take a trouble to give places to them and their horses, and to provide with food and fodder. Their leader was staying in my house. We, at Folds, don’t favor the horsemen too much. But it’s no way out - the royal obligation…
All right, we have placed them somehow… They are all of a noble blood; you won’t put them just anywhere. It’s my house with stone walls and a wood floor. A sin to complain, I live richly: the grandfather’s inheritance. But at many the floor is earthen, mud-walls, they sleep side by side. Where, in addition, you can put a lodger?
Than their horses... It’s not simple too…not like ours, won’t walk along the furrow. They needed a special treat. You won’t feed them with only hay, they need a grain. But our wheat was finished already, did not want to touch what was left only on seeds, whatsoever remains in barns. Have been managing on rye with barley. And here they are... Mind all seed grain has been used for a horse’s fodder.
Besides, they were eating it themselves. See, they did not get used to eat rye and barley bread. The time to sow has come - and there is nothing. At some others nothing left at all. I have save some for a bad time, raked out all up to a last kernel, but this was not enough for all community.
This winter, believe, we will live without wheat, again on the rye with barley. On the next year all grain will go on seeds, if, again, somebody won’t come to us. Than I don’t not know what to do.
- And L’eefy?
- So I’m telling…. Their chief was staying at my house. Once he has had a dinner, but did not finish bread: salted it and put aside. Said he will take it to his horse later. They love horses. And she was staying near the table. Hungry she was, we ourselves did not sit down at the table, yet, waited for him to finish eating. Well, she saw he left out the bread, and snatched it from the table. Knew that she can do it at home... When would we deny a piece of bread for the baby? Let her eat it, if she wants.
But he saw it, called for me and said: "How come that you, the head of community, have the younger daughter, who since such early years is a thief? She has to be taught, or she will grow the thief."
And everything has been done, as it should be: called the community meeting. It was so much shame ... He said that the thieves must to get a lesson, and at your leader’s even little kids are thieves. We will punish the thief, so you will know, that the royal ruling is fair.
And so they punished: had spread her on a log and lashed five or six times with a whip. Have taken a pity because of her small years, cause for such thing the hand should be cut off.
So, she is silent since then. And under the whip also was silent. Maybe from the fright ... But she does not sit down at the table with all of us. And we were calling her, and were putting at the table by force. No way.
Tucks herself away in the corner and sits there, just little eyes are glinting. And as soon as you turn away, she will run up, grabs a piece of bread from the table and, again, runs to the corner, and gnaws it quietly in there, covering with a palm. Means, that we shouldn’t see.
We began to put in the corner a separate little bowl with meal, and the bread.. At first she shunned, did not touch. Now, seems, has got used to. Eats. Maybe, will begin again to talk too, before that she was such a babbler.. All the time was chattering in her own way… Others wouldn’t understand, but we have got used to.

- Is it when they hung up the smith?
- No. This was the other time. About five days before you came. Remember, it was a dolt here?
- The huge one.
- Aha. Even he, though, was the dolt, and his strength was a walloping, he was a quiet one. Last year the smith took him as a helping hand for himself. He became too old to wield a helve-hammer. His helper run away after his wife with kids has died from some malady. So, he has adopted the dolt for a helve-hammer wielder. The smith will knock with his hammer, and the dolt will hit with his big hammer. To him it is like a game, but it was turning out to be very helpful. And it was simpler to the community. The dolt doesn’t eat his bread for free, investing some help too. What could you do with such unfortune if he was born as a slow-witted?
But you have never known, from working the dolt began to come to senses. Sometimes would connect five words without a mistake, not like saying just "g-e-e" and "m-m-e".
So, all things started up from the dolt. See, he has decided to feed the horsy. Too fond of animals he was…In the morning has dug peas at the smith’s kitchen garden and has piled up a full manger.
You can’t feed the cattle with peas, and especially the dewy one. It will swell up the stomach with gasses. A sure death to a horse. That horseman, who stood at the smith’s house, has begun to cry after he saw it, was too sorrowful about the horse.
So they have made a questioning, who spoiled the horse. And the dolt, he even did not hide it. They are asking “Is it you?” and he is glad to admit, knocking his chest with a fist: “Me! The horsy, - speaks, - was eating.”
The horsemen began hollering, trying to catch him. But he, even being a dolt, still, seems, have guessed, that they will hang him up. Began to fight off. Bawls on all village. The smith run out. Sees what is going on, and shouts to them to leave the fool alone, because he did it not from malice, but from a stupidity.
The horsemen have left the dolt alone and tried to tie up the smith, saying that he told the fool to do so. All his face they smashed to a blood. The smith, old but sinewy, was not giving in, shootings to the dolt to run, to save himself.
But the dolt did not run anywhere. While the horsemen were tying up the smith and were forgetting about the fool, he run up to a smithy, grabbed a helve-hammer and went on swinging with it. Seems, he has grown fond of the smith. Began to fend him off. Two of them he has slugged to a death. And then they shoot him down with bows. Totally have covered him with arrows. He was not falling down for a long time, the strength was enormous….
Hence, they hung them up on a well’s crane. Both the smith and he dead dolt. Ordered not to remove for a week. Shouted that it’s a riot. I thought, they will burn the village, but it blew over. Only the smith’s house has been burnt down. Have imposed restitution on us for a horse and for those dead. I had to untie a purse and to add to the money, which the village has gathered together. Have paid out for a while.
And we have removed the dead from the well’s crane in the evening, as soon as the horsemen went away. What for they should be hanging on the crane: the people can’t get the water, can’t do anything. We buried them side by side three days ago.
Here, you are more knowledgeable than me, read the books. How come it turns out that way? In my house they eat my bread, and for mine own bread are flogging with whips mine own child? Or to hang up a person for a horse?
They are the authority. They should protect us against enemies, or from any kind of misfortune. And they behave toward us in such way.
I know, there, at them, is a steppe and freedom that the wind whistles in ears. If the war comes, they are going first. And what are we?..The Folds.
We are picking in the earth since morning till the night, bowing to every blade, picking up every kernel. In the war, we can stand up in resistance, but to ride on or something else - this we can’t do. Besides, we don’t have the horses such as theirs. To compare our horses with theirs, is as a regular wolf against yours wargs (12).
But we used to live with them on very good terms…And it is strange nowadays. The King has awarded my grandfather with silver for he was fought well against your people. However I am sitting here at the same table with you, paying a respect to you. But theirs leader, of those who were here…Do you think he has invited me at my own table? No. For him I am not the owner here. A royal vassal… I don’t understand it.

- I can’t explain. An authority is everywhere an authority. And it is strict everywhere. At us too. At us for the stolen bread not a hand, a head would chop off. But your girl was not stealing.
- And I say so. It’s understandable. What is the authority without force? But should not they respect us too? Or you can do whatever you want, if you have a sword in hands?
- They did not do it willfully .The Royal troops.
- That ‘s it! Wrong it is done. I do not understand.
- What about to go to us, on the north?
- Cold is there, at you.
- We live. People live. We do not quarrel.
- And what to do with a household? The House? You will not take it away with yourself. Its no horses will be enough to carry all belongings. Besides, you have everything communal over there. We did not get used to it.
- Not all is communal. Every family has own house. And we do not impose our rules on anybody. You have one wife, and me - six, so it doesn’t mean that I shall ask you to marry off a five more. Especially that your custom is to ask woman to marry, and at us, on the contrary, they ask us. And the house... The house will be built and will be given everything what is necessary. It is simple in the buurth: you work for buurth, and it - for you.
- And what I, for example, should do?
- To manage. We are growing the wheat poorly, and you can do it well. Others will learn.
- And how much of land you will measure out?
- Our land is communal. For all. Whatever much wheat we will gather, we are dividing it to all , nobody is being left hungry. If you will teach how to grow the wheat better - it will be more for all, and for you too.
- And we do the same in a lean year , but you are doing so all the time. Not common to us. Means: I am breaking my back , and everyone eat?
- Everyone is breaking the back. Who - on the field, who - in the war, who - in the mines, to whom as it has got. If a greater war or a trouble come, then everyone rise. Or it’s not so at you ?
- The same. But still not common. Here we are living on the border, the royal authority are seldom coming in to us, yet it’s comforting. And you have orcs there...
- And who am I? - I heard as Ghash has quietly burst out laughing - I am the Orc too.
- That you are saying, frea (13) Ghash. The orc. You, as have got an acquaintance with me before last year, told me, that not the orc at all, but an uruk-hai. Not afraid of the sun. Orcs, they are raiding at nights, plundering of whatever happened to be around. Two weeks ago the next to us village has raided by some orc’s gang. Twenty people killed, and houses have been burned down. Their leader was the short one, just like yours over there. They are orcs for sure.. But yours guys are different. While is staying in the village, they eat their own, and did not touch ours. If would ask for something, than will pay for it. Even girls are not afraid of your guys. Know, that you will take a head down, if who will decide to offend. Saw it already. But if who will get under girl’s skirt with her consent, then it is flattering to her. As of the year before two boys was born from your guys, will grow into good men. And you are saying - the Orc.
- You think well of us,frea Halm (14). But the kind among us are few, all sorts of characters are coming about.
- All sort of people and among us too. Sometimes ours, also, are leaving to orcs. Who from a misery and a poverty, who from a violent temper. Do you know how many of those are plundering on southern tract? I shall tell you...
The speaker was interrupted by a sound of the opening door. Someone heavy walked in, squeaking with floorboards. Then something has dropped on the floor and rolled away.. It was a silence in the next room, and then the shaken and strained voice of the owner has whispered:
- " Well, dear guests... Well have done to an ill turn, how well have done to an ill turn... "

[Olmer]

9.By the way, from here also comes a word "Nazgh-ghull“, or as they say “Nazgul“.
"Ghull" is a dead and spiteful phantom, but not the phantom-vision - that refers to a "ghulla" - but a real, which is having his dead existence. It's possible to translate on a general word as the "vampire", but it's a weak translation. On the Dark Speech "ghull" has much more terrible meaning..
Everyone knows the meaning of "nazgh" and everyone is mistaken. “Nazgh" is not the "ring"; as the world is usually translate. It's more correct to translate like "have been made to put the ring on", but even more correct is the words combination as "the imprisoned in the magic ring“. It is not exact too, but much more close to a sense. "
The simple ring on the Dark speech is "ghana", the word which is really designated not to the ring only, but in general to any isolation: the fenced court yard of the house, for example, or the house, if it a constant home.
Similarly sounds an assembly of people - a "ghan"
10. “L‘eefy“- "dear, “precious” on Rohan.
11. Rohan’s cavalry.
12. The big intelligent wolf, which people are naming as a werewolf. Now cold be met very seldom. The Rohans call it “Warg, with solid “g” at the end, the Beorings- “Wark”, the Gondoreans - “Waak”.
On the Dark Speech - "U-argh", literally - the “destroyer".
13.”Frea” - the "master" on Rohan.
14.“Halm“ - the "protector" on Rohan.

[Olmer]

10.- Mistress, - said Ghash in the same quiet whisper, - take away the baby, she shouldn’t look at such things.
Fast steps have rustled by, the door has slammed again, and Ghash’s voice has flared up with an enraged fury.
- Are you completely lost your mind, a tattered moron?! Did you get your brains steamed while resting?! What for you have brought it here?! Could not call for me if it was necessary to show?! Wanted to brag ?!
- It’s not me, - answered a stifled Uragh’s voice, - it’s Udugh.
- I did not ask, who has chopped off heads, I have asked, what for YOU brought them here?
- Have not thought, - after some silence has answered Uragh in a whisper for some reason.
- Have not thought, - has noticed venomously Ghash, - And do you remember what it means? If not, then I am REMINDING you! Clear?
- Yes, it is. Clear, - Uragh has answered with an absolutely hopeless voice.
- Now tell.
- It was two of them. Both are here. They were riding from the West, from a southern tract. Udugh has removed them both.
- Now they will burn us down for sure, - the owner of the house has interfered with a conversation, - and that if they won’t drive us to the Wandering wood, to cut and to guard woodpiles from running them away. This is, if won’t kill us all at once.

- Wait, frea Halm, let's clear it out. Maybe, we still can manage somehow. Where are the horses?
- The horses run away. Udugh wanted to catch them, because the horsemen have been removed first. They were trotting along. Only he did not catch them. They broke his knee with a hoof.
- So-o-o. Was there the order to shoot horses first? Did he know?
- Knew. How to not know, has been told to everyone for five times.
He also has argued with guys that have been on patrol together with him.They wanted to shoot the horses first, but he has ordered to shoot the horsemen first and then to catch the horses. Did not catch.
- Obviously, this idiot has already lost his head. You will appoint somebody smarter to commandeer his five guys.
Frea Halm, should the horses come back to the place where the horseman has lost?
- If they are correctly trained, than should. Anything could happen, the owner got wounded or something else. But these will not return.
- Why?
- Because they have been chased. They trained to run away from outsiders. If they have been chased and have not been caught, they at once will run to the eored. Means, to their own kind.
- So it means, very soon all of them will be here?
- It’s how to look at it. Did they have spare horses?
-No, just by one, - has answered Uragh.
- With packsacks?
- No.
- It means a close by patrol, if without the packsacks and with two horses. But the close by patrol does not go in two. One more pair was riding behind of these one. At the distance as far away, as they can see the leading pair. They must be seeing as these have got shot and as horses were chased. In three-four hours a whole eored will be here, and, in no doubt, will burn us, this is the least.
I have recognized that one, which rolled into the corner. They have been here five days ago, and wanted to burn us down for a rebellion even then. And now, when they will learn that we were welcoming you, will just kill everybody. What did you do, frea Ghash? You let us down. What shall we do now? They will put the whole village to ashes. And it still will be better than if we have to rattle in shackles.

- I did let you down… Will it help if we will leave the head of this idiot, who has stirred up all of this? You will tell that passers-by orcs were plundering, you have caught and have killed. And the head is here. Will they believe?
- Doubtfully. Maybe they would believe if the guys would not rush to catch the horses. To catch them or not to catch, but they won’t go to another's hands. Did not train this way. It’s ours, rural‘s, can be harnessed by anyone and led on the field to plough. But these are the fighting horses. They are listening only to the owner and to an eored‘s horn. Should remove the back patrol first, and just then - the leading. If the patrol saw yours guys, then they have tracked them up to the village. And if have tracked, then saw and the others. They will burn us down, for sure they will.
- Understood. You need to go away, frea Halm. The whole village must leave. And we will remain here and take the fight. I do not know for how long we will hold on, but night and day - it is for sure. In this time you can go far north. I’ll give a guide to you and a secret sign for ours to welcome you.
- Where shall we go? How shall I persuade people just to get up and abandon everything? Everyone has a household, and everyone holds to it. Men are slow on the rise. Everyone will think, that, maybe, it will blow over somehow. We live in this places for hundred years, built up, have ploughed out the ground, sweated so much blood in it ...
How could we get up and leave? We can’t. Do not even talk about it.
- Stay. Only by the morning here will be just brands. And if you will go, I ‘ll give you a sign for our people. Will help you there.

- I would go; it’s in any way to be gone. I did not tell all. We have managed to pay the restitution for the horse only. But for the people no silver will be enough. The whole village is in a royal arrears until autumn. But now who will be waiting for the autumn. They will assign all households to the treasury, and us too.
But the people won't move from the place: men will be arguing for a week, and you have to explain in both ears to each and everyone until they will finally get it. And even then a half will not understand, and will be blaming you, forgetting both and your silver, and an ill-treatment from the royal horsemen, but remembering only that the village went up in smoke because of your guys. And if you will stay, then when the men will see how bones have fell down, could grab pitchforks and will strike at your back to show that they have nothing to do with it. You all are the passers-by, but the horsemen are the royal authority, we definitely must stay with them on good terms.
You'd better leave, frea Ghash. Fast and far away. Leave and that eored lead away after you, since any way you will gona fight. If you will leave quickly, they will catch up with you just before sundown, maybe you will get them lost at night.. And we... When they will burn us, then we will move on, but maybe, if they will be chasing you, they won't have time for it.
For a while it was a silence in the room, then Ghash has told:
- All right. We shall do so. I will give a sign to you. We will leave. It is a pity, that you don’t have the smith.
- And what for the smith?
-That the short one, who sleeps in the bedroom, has to be chained to this guy. He is an important captive, can't let him to escape. He had ran away before and got in such s..t, that I have lost eight guys while getting him out. But this is okay now; anyway we have neither time, nor the smith, nor a chain.
- I can do for smith. I won’t forge anything good, but I shall manage to open a chain’s link and weld it back together. The chain is on the well’s crane. Thin, but you won’t break by hands. It will take only a quarter of hour. Shall do while you all are gathering up. The smithy is still here. In there are both a forge and an anvil, and all other things. They have burnt down only the house.

Further time has rushed off as a broken free from his tie-up bull in an early spring. Ghash with Uragh have rushed into the bedroom, and in less than one minute I have been taken out of the bed, shaken out of a nightgown and clothed in gray sackcloth. It took one more minute to reach the smithy on the outskirt of the village.
Uragh was burning up the road, having me clamped under an armpit, as if a light sackcloth bag. For a few instants he has stopped by the well at the village court to tear off the chain. I have not made a mistake, he has, really, torn it off. He has tore out a hammered in the trunk of crane prod together with a piece of wood, and continued his running, in one hand holding me under an armpit, and reeling up on the second hand a long chain with a heavy wooden bucket dragging at the end of it.
When we run into the dark smithy, a sturdy fair-haired man has been already hastening around. While he was flaring up a forge, heating up and opening up the links of chain, Uragh sat me on a piece of log in a corner, and stood beside, strongly holding me by hair.
Not too much time passed by as my neck have got wrapped up with a damp cloth, the head have got pressed to an anvil, and after a pair minutes of a clanging in my ears there was a chain-link collar on me. The man wrapped up the other end of the chain around Uragh’s left shoulder. In rush they did not think of shortening the chain, and it has appeared long enough, not less than twelve foot. But Uragh just shrugs off, and getting me under the armpit again, run back, to the village court..

A whole аt-a-ghan was already gathered on the village plaza. The orcs, loaded like horses, and, just like the horses, were staying impatiently tramping, just give a sign with a hand, and they will break into a fast run.
In the village dust, near the well for livestock’s watering, laid a decapitated orc’s body. The head was there too,carefully placed by someone on the back of the corpse. The head’s eyes were widely, bewilderingly opened, and looked as if now he will open a mouth and will plaintively ask: "What for?“ The split neck still exuded blood, and green, thick, happy flies were buzzing over a dark wet spot in the dust.
As soon as Uragh with me has come nearer, the order has sounded, and the orcs moved on with an unhurried pace from the beginning, but gradually picking up the speed and changing to a run. I had to run too, but for a short time. Exactly as long as it was needed to Uragh to move the sheath of the curved blade on the right side and tie it up. And then he has shouldered me on himself.
This time he didn’t have his bag, someone else was carrying it for him.. A rolled-up buurgha has been fastened across the back and a little bit below the neck, and I made myself comfortable sitting on it and hanging my legs on both sides of Uragh's neck. Uragh has discontentedly muttered something, but seized my ankles, moved me up with shoulders, better arranging the weight, threw the loose loop of the chain on my knees, and took off with an even, wide gait.

I swear! No hobbits have ever had such unusual pony! And such fast too. My Fat Friend greatly conceded to Uragh in the speed. I think that Teddy's Scaldfield too.
And anyway, why a hobbit's pony needs to run fast? Hobbits, as it is known to everyone, are unhurried people. In our areas to hurry is considered indecent. If a grown up hobbit suddenly will be running somewhere, they won't point a finger on him, but for sure with this finger will knock on a forehead. Of course, only after he will already run past. If you will see the hobbit running at a full speed, it means that something really awful was happened to him. Probably a war has begun, or they are going to marry him to Nasturtia Furfoot.
But the wars in our regions are very rare, and Nasturtia Furfoot, in my opinion, is still not married.
Hence a rare hobbit managed to experience a sensation of a swift flight above the ground, when a warm wind is blowing into a face, and eyes are getting tearful from getting motes in them.

I think I won’t experience such sensations any more. I won’t pick up a speed on mine two, and even if I will pick up the speed, I will hardly manage to run for long.
Nowadays I am too big and heavy for hobbit’s ponies, and I would mount a rohan’s horse only at a very big need, or a deathly danger.
Because Rohan’s horses are malicious and freedom-loving, as wargs, and dangerous to strangers only a little less. Even with the horsemen, who brought them up from a womb of mother, they have a complex relationship. For the stranger to subordinate such horse, and even not to subordinate at all, but to come close -it is an almost impossible business. Unless the horse itself will want to accept a friendship of the horseman.
But I think, that for this purpose it's necessary to possess a gift of Fiery Persuasion and to have a "nazg thrakatuluk (15) ". Or, if you prefer a sindarin speech, - to carry Narya on a finger, the ring with a fiery-bright stone.
Though, as I understand, that stone has nothing to do with it: the main thing was not in the stone, but in an inscribed on the ring spell that was possible to read only by throwing it into the fire.
It's just the Elves love all that is shining, to what they have some kind of a special passion, which is not understandable to other people.
However, I am not an expert on Elves’ customs. Probably, I shouldn’t recollect the rings; they have lost the power, and what it was has already gone. Not that soon will appear in the world the sorcerers, capable to create such really terrible dainties. More terrible, than everything, that I knew and I know till now. But who will try to make a prediction of how many generations will be fascinated by a legend about the Ring of the Absolute Power?
On my travel I happened to hear this story one more time, and it was so much differed from what has been written in the Red Book, that till now the heard disturbs my feverish memory.
Though, does Elve's ancient games matter now? Two small hobbits have done what nobody could expect from anyone. The chain of the rings was broken, and the world change. Nowadays there is no magic in it, as there are almost none of the Elves.
Probably, sometime there will be those who will manage to return the magic to the world. But I do wish neither to live till that time, nor to live in that world. I do not believe in a kind lie. And what is magic, if not an art of false images?

It seems that I was talking about horses?
Or about the wind into a face?
I do not know, if I will ever again experience a delight of such race. There are no horses at Ur-uuk-hai. I mean the ones you can ride on. The horses of Ur-uuk-hai are slow dobbins, short and wideboned, like Dwarves. And so strong! You can't hold an involuntary laughter when you will see such wideboned horsy for the first time: on thick short legs with huge hoofs and with a stomach all covered by a dense long hair, which is almost touching the ground.
So amusing and toylike they look even in comparison with the Hobbit's ponies. But the power of these horses is not toyish. I do not know how of much it is possible to carry on Rohan's horses, but Ur-uuk-hai's horse can drag on a cart of ten thousand pounds of a cargo. And it is not a limit! For such horse the main thing is to move the cart from a place, then it still possible to throw on it more. And the horse will calmly pull and pull until drops dead.
The horses of Ur-uuk-hai are quiet and slow, and even any child can plough on them, if only he is tall enough to reach up handles of the plough and keep it in the row.
The slowness of the short horses is expiated by their endurance and unfussiness. Ur-uuk-hai joke, that their horses are as persistent, as they are, as hardy and just as stupid, because who will drag such weights on his own, and do such heavy work, sometimes overstraining itself to a death.
It is an insulting for the horses lie. I met more fools among Ur-uuk-hai, than among the horses.
But the rest is the truth. Nobody could be compared with Ur-uuk-hai in persistence and durability, unless it were the Hobbits, or the greatest soldiers, like Аragorn. And especially no comparison with those, who in Rohan with horror and reverence call "a light infantry".

However... No. Nobody can compete with the light Ur-uuk-hai’s infantry in resilience. The "Light" infantry named not for an easy life, or lessened equipments. Often the light infantryperson is loaded more than a hard -armored. They call them "light" because they are light-footed.
The Ur-uuk-hai themselves call the light infantrymen the "ghu-ur-uukhan" - the wolf’s packs. Only don’t confuse them with wargs, which were commonly regarded as werewolves, the huge wolves that have intelligence and theirs own wolf's language. But we will talk about them later. “Gha-urkhan” is a usual wolf. The Ur-uuk-hai dislike, but respect them.
Perhaps, the light infantry has received its name because of the wolf's vests, maybe they began to carry the wolf’s sleeveless jackets because of the name. But more likely that the light infantry started to be referred so for the "wolf's" habits.
As gray packs the "wolf's" at-a-ghans are sliding at nights all over Middle-Earth, and they are as hard to detect, as the real wolves.
When walking in twilight’s calmness of your own garden, look back, perhaps a studying slanting eyes are looking at you from a near bush.
Just as the real wolves, the easy infantry attacks unexpectedly. Those, who have been attacked, not always even have time to see a movement of dark steel or to hear a brief click of bowstring and a lingering singing of black-feathered arrow.
But sometimes it happens in a different way. In twilight of the night you suddenly start to feel a condensing horror. No one who experienced it and survived it can tell you from where comes this imperceptible sensation. It scattered in rustle of foliage and grass, it is hidden in a black shadow of bushes and trees. With an illusive light of stars and devious whispers of wind it suppresses your thoughts. And when out of this gloom have appear the gray phantoms of death with curved blades in hands, a few can keep in themselves a shout of fear.

But the light infantry never attacks just for nothing, for the sake of entertainment or a robbery. Their main designation is not in it.
The light infantry helps to the spies, protects secret caravans and even more secret camping, makes hiding places and safekeepings for arms and food, accompanies the important captives, and does a huge amount of tasks besides that. But the main purpose of the light infantry is the same as of the real wolves - the hunting.
Ghu-ur-uu-khan hunt not animals. Not people as you, maybe, have thought. Not Elves or Dwarves. The fights with them have happen. And these clashes are severe and bloody. But they still remain as sporadic encounters.
The light infantry is not in search for blood of people, dwarves, or even elves. No. The main quarry for a light infantry -are those, who Ur-uuk-hai named the " dead brotherhoods ", "u-at-а-gha". Derelicts. Those who has disregarded the cruel orderliness of life in a buurth, who has wished to dump heavy as shackles, laws and prohibitions of the people of Ur-uuk-hai, who has wished to be the orc, knowing no limit of lust of his own will.
It is a dangerous hunting. In it are known neither pity, nor forgiveness, or clemency. Often people are ready to pursuit Ur-uuk-hai as wild animals. The “Wolves" of the light infantry are pursuing the derelicts of their people just as the wolves-animals could hound the people, if for this purpose they would have enough of power, reasonable forces, a slyness and an intelligence.
In this hunting the hunters and the hunted are often exchanging places. And then in buurthes an inconsolable crying of wives, "uu-ghoi", comes to an end, because Ur-uuk-hai cry not for dead, but for who went away from the home. They are crying for alive till their very return, but not for those, who already will never return. Because you have to to cry for those, who is living now or will live after us, for only alive need a compassion.
About the dead you can only remember. With a gratitude.

[Olmer]

15. It's a part of a spell on the one of the Rings of Power - the Ring of Persuasion. The Elves call this ring - Narya, the Ring of Fire.

[Olmer]

11.
How beautiful is an attacking eored!
Spread in a semicircle, lava of horses with a daring, broad gait is streaming upwards of a gentle slope. In the run horses bodies are stretched as strings above the ground, and it seems that the horses are flying without touching grass with hoofs.
Horsemen are clinging to the horses necks so low, that made from horsehair white plumes on the pointed tops of helmets have merged with multi-colored manes, sprawled in the air, and the wind playfully interweaves their locks.
The horsemen are almost invisible: the horse’s neck covers everyone’s front, spears are pressed to the right side, and at the left - the shields extending up to the very sole of the foot. Only eyes are sparkling behind half-masked iron helmets. Two-tailed scarlet banners are fluttering in the wind at the ends of the lowered down spears, and the downing sun shines on sharply honed sides of metal tips of the spears.
Coming nearer, the lava is getting condensed, being pulled together to the middle until the horsemen will contact each other with mail-glad knees, until the horses will lock in with dropping foam sides. And instead of an assemblage of many bodies there will be the one, huge alive multi-legged, multi-headed and muli-eyed.
The monster sparkles with scales of armor, bristles with fifteen-foot needles, and is so boomingly, and resonantly hitting the grass with multiple sets of heavy horseshoes that the ground caves in under it.
It is a beauty in the attacking eored. It’s an admirable and horrid in this magnificence, filled with splaying fury.
Seems like everything, which might have appear on its way, will be swept away under the force of a huge centipede, that any expression of resistance will be trampled into a dust and mixed with the ground with such force that would be left nothing to bury. Because after the multitudinous sharp hoofs there will be hardly something in size bigger than a wood nut, and even that will be pounded into becoming as hard as a stone ground. And the eored will ride further, not looking back and not even realizing who was taken down by their impressive power.
To a small hobbit, tucked in behind the backs of a mere handful of orcs, and chained to a biggest of them, was no any chances to survive. None. I was firmly convinced in it.
In long terrible months of uragh‘s trial, the death more often was appearing to me in a smiling mask of Ghashur and in a shining form of the eored.

The eored was flying upwards on a gentle slope of a whether a hill, or whether a barrow, gradually turning into a many-headed monster, and a few horses leaps has remained to the top on which the orcs have settled down. I couldn’t see too much, for the sake of it again swaddled, stuffed in a bag and adhered to Uragh’s back. But I too have already started to make out the foams on horses’ muzzles and mad eyes of the horsemen.
Suddenly staying close by Ghash loudly and monotonously has started a mournful: " U-u-u... "
And all orcs, as one, have picked up this lingering, gloomy howl. And so it was lasting, not interrupting even for a breath, muffling a thunder of conjoint impact of the multitude of hoofs. Until the horsemen remained hundred fifty foot. Hundred twenty. Hundred ten. Hundred!
Ghash has growled: " R-r-a-a-gh!!! " And fifty-two throats changed the howl on a ferocious, tearing up eardrums, growl: “U-r-r-a-a-gh”!
And hands have thrown up the stringed out bows, and fifty-two bowstrings clicked in a unified crack as if a huge whip.
They used the armor-piercing arrows, that same, similar to a blunt forge chisel, which on a distance of three hundred foot punches all the way through a panel armor (16) of dwarves’ work together with carrying it body. At hundred feet it pierces through a horse’s neck, and though an oak shield, and chain armor, and a body of the horseman, and sometimes it still has enough power to fly further.
A good archer is able to do twelve shots in a minute.
The "wolf‘s" at-a-ghans are taking only the good archers...

Dying horses mournfully neighed, trashing on wet grass. The “rods” of sticking in the ground spears were cracking and breaking. Screaming in horror and pain riders were flying over the horses’ heads, getting covered on the way with black-feathered bristles of arrows.
The riders in the back ran into the fallen before them, and the horses flew head over heels, breaking theirs necks and smothering those who had no time to free legs from stirrups. Those, who managed to do it, being carried by a swiftness of horse’s run suddenly cut off in the middle of a full gallop, were running on unsteady legs right over human’s and horses’ bodies, having opened in screams warped by confusion and fear mouths, until the merciful death kiss them with sharp lips of the feathered ash’s arrows. The blood was spattering in all sides and hanging in the air as a pink evening fog.
The echo of the оrc’s growl has not calmed down yet, but the all was already over.
In sixty foot from orcs the heap of horses and humans was convulsing in an agonal spasm. The slope became crimson, and an overuse book’s words about the blood streaming in currents have turned into an impossible reality. The bloody streamlets playfully tinkling downhill, overtaking each other and carrying in air a tart smell of death.
The unharmed horsemen of eored with a previous precipitancy drove horses down off the hill.
Those, who lost horses, crept away. Those, of course, who got lucky to get wounded. Nobody was shooting on them. It‘s only forty arrows in a quiver. And half of them have already flown away.

Probably, you won’t believe me, probably, you condemn me, but during those brief instants I have felt in myself a respect for orcs. For their quiet readiness to meet the death. For their fighting skill. For their endurance and courage.
Beautiful and horrifying was the fury of the attacking eored, but in constrained black fury of orc’s defensive line was something superb too, both arresting and nobly majestic. And terrible.
I have been simply shaken by theirs fighting skill. It deviated so much from my book’s perception.
I am not talking about that in the Red Book was written that the orcs were being killed by thousands, at the same time constantly recollecting that they are strong and persistent in fights. Not about that. Just the war in the book was different, bright and shining, with feats of great soldiers.
I saw a heavy work. I saw how by the set of simple events and actions creates that what later will be named a victory. Or a defeat.

Having run out of the village, orcs did not go far away. The at-a-ghan ran for only one and a half hour, never having changed to a stride. On the other hand, for those who can run all day and night, this is not such difficult exercise.
In one and a half hour we were at the bottom of a low hill or, more likely, a barrow, for it was very much round.
I did not doubt at all then, and now I simply know, that Ghash has found and has chosen this place in advance. He is able and likes to anticipate of everything and choose the best thing, taking care of any possible accident. I have no idea how he can do it. I like to be provident too, as all hobbits are provident, but his meticulous causticity in arrangements of any affairs sometimes irritates even me. However, this his quality prove to come effectively handy in some other unpleasant minutes of life.
The hill, of which I already spoke, was low, but wide in the base, this why the slopes have a very gentle decline, except for the northern flank. There, at the bottom, a stream was bending around it, as a result the slope has been undermined by the water, and at the very bottom had a quite abrupt drop of about eight foots in height. A maple grove grew on the western part of the hill. Southern and eastern slopes were bare and smooth.
This hill Ghash has chosen for defense.
" Stop!" - has sounded in the head of the group, and Uragh has stopped so sharply, that I almost flown over his head. But the fingers strongly held my ankles.
- We are putting the burgh at the top. First ten - midnight, the second - sundown, the third - an afternoon, the fourth - sunrise, the fifth - the slope, others - water and other stuff ".
From this Ghash’s order I understood nothing. But the orcs have perfectly understood it all. They took off theirs bags, and in a few instants an iron was already knocking on trees in the grove.
However, only a half has run to the grove, the others have dragged the bags on the top of the hill. Uragh too. He took me off his neck, has brought the impressive fist up to my nose and plainly explained that I have to move on my own, and if I won’t be fast enough and will hinder him, he will find the way to force me to be quicker. I had nothing to do, but only to nod, as I did not doubt at all in execution of his promises. After that he has picked up two nearest bags and hauled them uphill with such speed, that I hardly had time to move the legs.

The work at the top of the hill was already in a full swing. But I did not understand what for it ‘s all are being done. For example, it amazed me that the orcs are digging holes. One, narrow and deep, is on the top of the hill, and another, shallow but wide, just nearby. And a lot of small ones on all four sides.
Their digging was especially interesting. One orc was loosening the ground with a sword. He would stuck a narrow edge of it in the ground and start to rotate and shake the blade, pressing on it so that soon the blade would go in the ground up to the hilt. Then the sword is taken out, and the second orc would start to pull out the loosened ground by the same leather mitten with an iron edge that I saw at Ghu-urghan.
By the way, if you are surprised why earlier I spoke about wide swords, and now have started talking about the narrow, I shall explain. These are the same swords. Orcs have many unusual things, the purpose of which you will not always guess at a first sight. The snaga’s sword calls “chinghri”, and in a scabbard it‘s really looking wide. But, actually, only the base of the sword, just near the hilt has a width in a palm. At the end the blade is getting narrowed to about two fingers, and the edge is sharpened in a blunt angle, as a forge chisel or an armor-piercing arrow. With such sword is very convenient to punch through a strong armor, and it does not demand a special skill in fight, only a boldness to approach the opponent, since it is short, only two foot.
But the Ur-uuk-hai don’t have to borrow courage.

While the holes were being dug, the stakes and sheafs of branches and twigs have already been dragged from a grove below. The stakes are being hammered into those deep narrow holes that was dug by the swords. It was done quickly and simply.
That what till now seemed to me a backboard for carrying heavy bags, has appeared an elongated six-sided shield. One orc was inserting the stake into the hole and covering its top with the shield, and another with all his might was banging on the shield with soft hammer, made of a buurgha and one of those stakes.The hummer refers as “оghrap“, I already mentioned it.
The third orc followed them, trampled down the ground around the hammered down stakes, and sharpened their tops with a sword. Soon the top appeared to be fenced from all four sides with three rows of sharp stakes.
The stakes have been bound with branches, weaving together not only the stakes in one row, but also with the next to it. The intervals between the turned out wattle fences have been filled in with soil and turf, and the layers of turf were plotted so that they would form two adjacent confronting walls, external and internal, and the space between them was filled with the soil. The ready wall with sticking out sharp stakes on the top has turned out in thickness of one and a half foot and in a height up to orc’s chest, even a little bit higher.
It was no any gate.

They were doing the wall fast, but without an unnecessary rush.
Obviously, everyone knew precisely what he should do. While some are hammering stakes down and weaving a wattle fence, others were cutting turf and digging the ground outside the wall, so as a result there turned out a superficial trench.
The wide concave, which was dug out on the top, was lined down with the buurghas in two layers and filled in with water. They dragged it from the stream in the removed pants with the trousers legs tied up below. Very capacious wineskins have it turned out.The hole was too large, so those, who dragged the water, had to run several times for it.
In the second hole, the deep one, they have driven in a twenty-foot tree trunk with a branching top, and at the top, between branches, have pulled out like a hammock one more buurgha. Someone immediately has got into it and has begun to survey the vicinities.
The slope too has not been forgotten. It was watered for long-long time, and all space in fifty foot before walls has got covered with small sharply pointed pegs.
As a very last thing the all remained buurghas have been soaked in the stream and hung out on an outer side of the walls. In two hours of the continuous joining work at the top has arisen a small, about forty on forty foot, earthen fort.

And then it was ordered to all to eat and to get ready. As usual, ate crackers and meat jerky, but I also has got a few dried, wrinkled, as the old person face, pears. They looked pitiful, but on taste they have appeared to be very sweet.
I do not know, whether I have got used to orcs food, whether I still have not recovered from Ghashur’s "hospitality" and a subsequent cure treatment, but it has sufficed me to stave off the hunger. Only I was afraid to drink. You will agree, it is quite difficult to make yourself to take a sip of the water which is just on your eyes has been dragged in prosweated pants. My thirst was not so strong.
But nobody subjected me to such test. Uragh has allowed me to drunk from his canteen and the rest has dried out him.
Later a few orcs was sent to the stream to fill the canteens anew for all. After having dinner or, more likely, having had a supper, the orcs have begun to prepare for the fight.
Uragh sat down on the ground, laid on his knees a curved sword, taken out of scabbard, and has got a dagger. Having turned a ring on the end of its handle he has got a tiny hair brush from an opened cavity. The brush was covered with something gooey and black like tar, smelling unpleasant and sharp.
Cautiously, with fine exact strokes Uragh started to put this viscous liquid on the edge of the sword. Someone nearby was doing the same with arrow’s tips.
- Poison, - explained Uragh, having intercepted my sight, - I will scratch and in a couple hours you will rot alive, and in couple of days will go belly up...
He hid a small brush back into a hilt of the dagger, carefully examined for a presence of leakage, and has begun to pull a bowstring on a bow.
Ur-uuk-hai’s bows are of an unusual construction. Up until now I do not know of what kind of tree they are having been maid.
On the north it does not grow, it is for sure. Once Ghash, having taken too much of shaghu, has spilt the beans that the raw material is getting delivered from Umbar, but in Umbar they do not do the bows from this wood, because, although it’s flexible, it easily cracks up when it’s dry. He has not told me what Ur-uuk-hai do to prevent this problem, but the bows of Ur-uuk-hai are so durable, that sustain an impact of the sword. However, the wood usually is not being put to ward off the blow, for this purpose there is a special iron piece with thorns before the bow’s handle, and the hits are getting deflected by it, when there is the need. With it you can strike an adversary in the face or in other unprotected place.
I won’t describe now the other bow’s unexpected adjustments, but they are there. Maybe later, if I’ll happen to talk about.

Ghash has approached with one orc, Тurogh, it seems. They sat down nearby, have got the daggers and have started to drive them on the edges of swords. By a grating sound you could guess, that they use a dagger as a grinding stone, but I did not understand how it is possible.
-I see smoke, - the watcher has cried out from the tree. - It is look like the village is burning.
- Halm has not got lucky, - has sighed Ghash. - Two years went under a cat’s tail. And in fact we already almost became friends. The good resting spot it could be. And he is a good man. If he won’t be killed, but only enslaved, I should find him.
- You are, Ghash, always worrying about wrong things. - Тurogh have grumbled. - Better think how we will pull out of it. For naught we stopped here, we should be running and running. Probably, we would get away.
- Would not get away. There is no place to go. It would be worth to try if it would be a forest. But here... The Field. If they are looking for you, you won’t hide in little groves. It is possible to stop on a day’s rest when it’s all quiet, but with the horsemen on our shoulders - doesn’t make any sense. To the mountains is a one and a half day’s run. We won’t get away from the horsemen, since they already us have caught up with us. It would be better in the village, but this place is quite good also.
- They will slay us here like marten hens. The place is naked as a navel - nowhere to hide. In vain you have chosen it. You made a mistake.
- I made a mistake in the Barrow-down, when did not interrogate those who have been taken. Before finishing, we should question them where they with Ghashur have left marks. Then would know that to get in this village is out of the question. That in these areas the horsemen are searching for Ghashur ... Good brother I have got! Even after death he has arranged malice. Right now we have not have too much of opportunities. We cannot run away, can’t hide too. Only to fight.
-This is not a possibility too. It’s two hundred of them. They will encircle the hill, send for a back up, and then, together with reinforcement, they will crush us.
- And what for they need the reinforcement? It is fourfold more of them than us, and they are mounted. You know yourself their horses in fight worth of any fighter. They know it too. So, consider them against us the least as six to one. And maybe even all eight. What for the reinforcement to them? To divide the glory? They already interrogated the villagers, and they have told where to look for us. Halm is the first, I have advised him to do so. Hence they are riding here now. To look for our heads while it has not darkened yet.
-You are crazy! You want them to caught up with us before dark, like it is not enough troubles for us!
- Right. If they will come here before sundown, then, maybe, will hurry and will strike at once. But if they will come at night then, as matter as fact, for us is better to bury ourselves. Less trouble… Don’t worry before the time. It’s not for the first time as you and I are gambling with our lives. The Death’s dice are all marked, but and we are playing not by her rules too. Ratghaur is hanging around with his own kin somewhere in these areas. We will kindle a fire at night, if we will be lucky, they will see it. Or will hear the fight.
- All yours are "can be "and "if". It’s not right somehow.
- And if you do the right way, by the rules, it won’t be any "can be" and "if", and tomorrow before noon our heads would be stuck on the spears.
- They are not total fools to drive on the horses uphill and on the wall. For whom you are taking them?
- I am not taking them for anybody. I have a hope that they will show up here before the very sunset, and before the darkness they will have no time to make long calculations. The hill is with the low slopes, for their horses to jump over this fence is the same as for you to step over a threshold. It is not clearly visible from below. Besides it is four times more of them than us. If Halm did lie, when told, their leader is fast on decisions, does not think far ahead of what will be then. But Halm says lies only when he sees a benefit of it. Аnd what his benefit in here? That’s how I think. If I have guessed their leader right, than maybe we will win through. And if not, then it doesn’t matter for us where to die, over here or in the field. Over here they will pay to us more dearly.
- “At Death on dice has fallen eighteen“, - Тurogh has spoken, as if in verses .
- ”Means, that is nineteen to throw to us”, - has continued Ghash. - Soon they will be here. Take ten guys, and leave scatteringly as far as it is possible. If after sunset you will see our fire, means, we are still alive. Come back by the "wolf‘s time ". You know yourself what to do”.
Тurogh has risen up, pressed the fist to the chest and said: -" My heart is in your hands ".
Ghash too has risen up and, having pressed the fist to the chest, has repeated as an incantation: -" My heart is in your hands ".
Then Тurogh and some orcs climbed over the wall and walked away.

And in a few minutes later the watcher has cried: " The Horsemen! "
All orcs around have jumped up from their places, and begun to take off all-nonessential from themselves: bags, belts, - leaving only quivers and blade‘s sheaths. They hang theirs absurd shields on the neck by thongs, fastened it with another strap around the waist, so it completely blocks a chest and a stomach.
But Uragh has tied his shield to me, and I, bound again and rolled up in buurgha, have been put in the bag. I thought, that I will be doomed to be left lying on the ground, but he has put the bag on the shoulders. We have been pressed with him back to back, but, when getting ready to shoot, he stood in a half-turn, and I, have turning the head, could see almost what he could see.

The eored was majestically approaching the bottom of the hill.
Having drawn nearer, the horsemen have got scattered, some has begun to go around the hill, others began to remount on others, fresh horses, which before has been leaded on a leash.
The beams of coming close to the horizon sun shone on armor and polished copper parts of horses’ harnesses. A small banner with a white horse was flapping in the wind. Under the banner have conferred two horsemen. They fiercely argued about something. Then one has given up and rode off.
The second has lifted high a hand in a metal mitten, the horn has sounded, the spears were lowered down, and I saw the beauty of the attacking eored.

[Olmer]

16. Means, an armory suit wielded with a metal plates.

[Olmer]

12.
The arrows of the orcs were ruthless, and the horsemen have incurred awful losses, but it was much more of the eored’s soldiers than the orcs. Those, who survived the attack, were got scattered at the base of the hill, and it was visible as the horseman in a green topcoat gives orders, that one who rode off from the banner before the attack. He lost the helmet, and in last beams of the sun his hair were looking as white as wheat.
The second horseman, that has sent the eored up on the hill, was not been seen anywhere. Probably, he was lost in the attack.
Under the banner with a white horse the fair-haired soldier was shouting something, waving on, and the horsemen in small parties, by four-five, have started to surround the hill from different directions. Some others were drove aside a huge herd of spare horses.
Two, having taken a pair of horses by reins, galloped in the direction of the village.
- "That’s right, - told Ghash, and spitted over the wall into condensing darkness. - Now they will surround the hill, and will guard us till the reinforcement will come. Only this should be done earlier, when they came. Now they won’t have enough force. So we are still in the game."
He shouted to the watcher on the tree, and a minute later on the top, between branches, the torch was lit up and started on being weaved.
I did not know to whom Ghash tried to give a signal and who is Ratghaur. I thought that he is the leader of another at-a-ghan, just like this one.
In the meantime Ghash continued to give short quiet orders, and probably about a dozen of orcs in pairs have started to climb over the wall and disappear downhill into a condensed darkness.
After some time few of them have returned, and have passed through the wall’s stakes two groaning bodies.
These were the wounded Rohirrim men. One is a very young, with barely making the way short mustaches and frightened children's eyes, and the second - is more senior, and his eyes were hateful, furious. He tried to resist, but dirty from sweaty smears of fighting paint hands of orcs held him strong. Besides, the wound gaped in his chest, and from there pink foamy bubbles were coming with each exhalation. The young has been wounded by three arrows in legs: in a hip and both shins.

The Rohirrim were heaped down in the corner of the wall. Ghash and Uragh have approached them, squatted down beside, and I heard the familiar to goose bumps on the back Uragh’s whisper:
- "Well, horse-eaters, shall we have fun? "
I did not see the answered, but have guessed that it was the elderly soldier, because he answered with rattling, gurgling, faltering whisper.
- "Just wait, the orc’s degenerate, - rattled a captured, -The morning will come, at the sun we will cut you on pieces“.
I heard a sound of a weak spittle, and then Ghash’s voice quietly and calmly said:
- "Guessed wrong, mustached, we are the Ur-uuk-hai, we are not afraid of sun. And your comrades won’t live till the morning. We will feed them to wargs together with those beasts of yours. Wargs love horsemeat. Even hoofs won’t be left after them. So let’s get to a business. How many of you are here? "
Again I have heard the sound of the weak spittle, seems the captured was refusing to answer.
- "All right, - as if agreeing with him said Ghash. - It’s your business, you could live more".
For a few instants the champing sound and gurgle became very loud, and then has stopped. Uragh moved a little aside, and now, having turning a head and cocking the eyes, I could see the young rohirrim.

The young horseman sat leaning on the wattle wall, and pressing himself into a seeping through cracks soil. He was scared.
- "Will you talk?” - asked him Ghash with the same quietly-calm tone. -”Or to give you to Uragh right away? By the morning he will make from you a breakfast for us ".
The young rohirrim made himself pressed into the wall even more, and bleated in a thin broken voice:
- "No! Don’t do it. I will tell everything! Everything what I know! "
- “And what do you know?”
-” It was two hundred thirty of us when we have left Edoras. But here is already less, because in two weeks we have lost several people “.
- “What you are doing here?”
- “But“… - the captured has become confused, -” We are searching for you. You have burnt a village here nearby. It is has been ordered to us to find you.”
- “And so you have found“. - Ghash smirked. - “Who orders? Who is the leader?”
- “Eolund, the third earl of the Mark, he orders. It is a year already as he put to command our eored.”
- “Who is the second? In a green raincoat?”
-“It’s Hasutain, the sergeant of the eored. He is not from the noble, just made his way up.”
- “So, he is the old fighter. Yes? Answer quickly!”
-“He is not old yet, about thirty, he just serves for fifteen ears already. When our former chief has been killed, he was commanding the eored for a half year. And then the earl took over. But it was before me “...
- “That‘s it“, - Ghash cut him off. - “Uragh…”
The dark blade has flashed at the rohirrim’s neck. The horseman chocked, seizing the ripped up throat, trying to stop blood, and has started to fall sideways, twitching with all body.
- "It is good, that the old timer is ordering them now. This one will do everything as it should be done, but it is already too late to do as it should.“ - Ghash has again spitted through a teeth, and the spittle has got on the body of the young rohirrim. - “As much as a good sense dictates, by now they should scatter, let us out off the hill and follow us, shooting from to time from afar to make us ran not so fast. They have sent for reinforcement, but where is it? Right now they can’t count on help of men in the village, who just have extinguished the fire.To remind to them now about the royal obligation is just like to tease the bull. It means, they are expecting for someone else. If they surrounded the hill, it means they are waiting for a back up to come by the morning. Or earlier. It will be bad, if earlier ".

I do not know, for how long he would argue aloud with himself, but suddenly somewhere in a distance has sounded a long, hardly audible howl.
- "Ratghaur, - Ghash whispered for some reason, and in its whisper was heard a lightening up. - With any luck it is Ratghaur ".
He has thrown back the head, put palms to a mouth, as a loudspeaker, and the same chilling, indistinguishable from wolf’s, only much louder howl, has got carried over the hill.
Ghash howled for long time, sometimes pausing for a few instants to get air or to listen.
I saw who is howling, but nevertheless I have got the goose bumps. And I cannot even imagine how the horsemen should be feeling, but frightened whinnies of horses were audible even at the top of the hill. Of course I could hear them only when Ghash was pausing.
I do not know how many minutes of his howling passed by, but not for so long. Ghash has paused once again, and from afar, but is already much closer, has come an answer. Or, maybe, a question: the sound was changing in interesting way, as if the howled was really asking.
- " The luck is on our side now", - Ghash has whispered again and howled something, playing with voice, as if on a pipe of a wolf’s throat.
In the distance he, probably, has been understood, because one more much lower voice has joined the previous howl.This one howled with short, chopped sounds, asking about something as if ordering. Ghash was howling to him from time to time.
So, they howled-spoke in this way for two or three minutes. Then Ghash has ordered to all orcs to come close.
- “So, guys, - he said cheerfully, - We have got lucky as nobody has been. The Wargs have come. Sixteen wargs in a half-league from us, and soon they will be here. Before the horse-eaters were hunting us, now we will hunt them. All of you get divided into pairs. The horse-eaters are patrolling around the hill. It is more than hundred of them there. But the hill is big, so the distance between the patrols is rather big too. Our intention is to keep them awake, that they won’t sleep till the morning, won’t even doze at all. When the wargs will come, they will drive away the herd of spare horses, then we shall shoot down the remained horse-eaters’ horses and will leave. Understand?”
-“Is it permissible to shoot the horse-eaters? - someone has asked. - Or it is usual as at removal of patrol - first the horses? Because they would hide in grass. In the darkness“.
-”Permissible. Same as hunting, do what you want, only do not go under the arrows. And do not come close to them, otherwise they will catch you up on the horses. Is better to shoot from afar, it is not a big deal if you will miss. Any way will stir them up. Come on!”

Soon only four of us remained in the burgh: Ghash with Uragh, me, and the watcher on the tree, who was still lazily waving the torch.
From time to time at the wall the orcs have been materializing from darkness, wrapped in the buurghas up to the eyes.
Someone was throwing over the wall a quiver or a bunch of arrows, someone, in-turn, was saying that he doesn’t have any more arrows, and was getting what just has been brought. Several times heavy saddlebags have been hauled in.
And once they have brought on a buurgha the wounded. The wounded orc groaned, coming to a consciousness, then again was falling in oblivion. His chest was crushed, and white shards of ribs were sticking out through the torn wolf‘s vest.
Ghash has hustled a little over him and said:
-"Won’t live, will die by the morning. Good. Don’t have to carry him".

The second wounded man has come by himself, somehow climbed over the wall, with a gait of drunk has reached a concave with water, dropped beside and was greedy drinking it for a long time.
- How is there? - Uragh has asked, when he, having replenished his thirst, has started to do something with the shoulder.
- Cats- and-mice, - the wounded orc has answered, picking on the wound. - Help to pull out a tip. The viper has thrown a trident spike. Laid low together with a horse, I thought, they are dead. And they jumped up! He threw the spike and wanted to trample me down by the horse. Good that the arrow was already on a bowstring. I have set it right into a mouth of this gelding. From four steps!
- Into the horse? - Uragh has specified, pouring something on the wound. Shaghu, by a smell.
- What horse? - the wounded man has taken an offence and, shifting, has hissed: - Easy, pull easier, it’s scratching the bone…Into the very horse-eater. Guys have felled down the horse. Тоghi has hooked it with a bow-buckler and has ripped up all side together with a harness. But the beast was so strong! She still had run for ten steps with all guts are being dragged on the ground!
Uragh has thrown something on the ground and has encouraged the wounded:
-" Will live. And if it won’t get festered, you will live long".
The wounded man did not get offended by a silly joke, only laughed and said that it does not matter now: his life was not wasted, and, if anything, the hand can be cut off.
I even got queasy from such attitude to the death and wounds. If an iron tip would be pulled out of me, I would be screaming non -stop .

The most dreadful in Rohan’s spikes and arrows is easily removed tips. Unskilled fighters, having received a wound with such weapon, often, in a fighting fever pull an arrow or a spike, and the tip is slipping off and remains in the wound.
Worse than that, sometimes they happen to be attached to the staff by a thong passed through an eyelet in one of the facets. When you pull a staff, the tip in the wound turns and gets jammed. You can’t to pull it out any more, only to cut out. Often you have to cut it out together with a piece of meat. The malicious weapon.
However, the Rohirrim have the same opinion on a "black tar" that is stored in a hollow of Ur-uuk-hai’s dagger handles.
I think, that they would agree not to use the removed tips, if the Ur-uuk-hai won’t use the "black tar", but I have no idea how to make this possible.
The King of Rohan can order to the soldiers to secure the tips better, but between many buurthes it will be difficult to agree
on such "trifle".
What’s more the оrс’s custom to smear blades with the "black pitch" is carrying on for hundreds years. Or thousands, what is truer.
At the beginning the Orcs were undersized people, not higher than Dwarves, and did not possess that much power.
In a hand-to-hand combat any Orc was yielding to a Man, an Elf and especially to a Dwarf. So, they invented a poison, that even a scratch was a fatal.
The Ur-uuk-hai in fight do not concede in a power and skill to anybody . But the custom is a custom, the "black tar" still fills the handles of daggers.

I did not know what was happening at the foot of the hill. You could only guess by an occasional agonal neighing of horses, or a short human shriek. Once were heard loud furious screams, and then suddenly from different directions the orcs began to climb over the wall.
Ghash, swearing and giving kicks and slaps to the right and left, was giving orders and placing those, who came, around four sides of the burgh.
From the darkness has whistled a few arrows, someone from the climbing over the wall orcs has caught the one between shoulder blades and hung on sharp, sticking out spikes. The others have immediately started to shoot to there, from where the arrows have arrived.
But, seems, have missed, because from the darkness someone derisively shouted something in an unfamiliar melodious language. The melodious voice yelled a bit more, but has stoped short on a half-word, a frightened horse’s neighing came out, and from that side someone gave a short whistle.
Ghash had sworn again, ordered, and the orcs, again, started to get out of the stronghold.

This night game with the death has continued for several hours, and then came forth a howl. The howl of many wolf’s throats.
Before I thought, that an expression " the hair have risen up on ends" is simply a figure of speech. Now I know that such things are really happens. Anyway, every hair on my body stood upraise in a horror.
The howls were wavering, getting higher or lower, seems, the wolves were conversing among themselves.
This howl was known and for the orcs. At once under the hill sounded the already familiar to me growl: "U-r-r-a-a-gh! "
In the stronghold Ghash was running back and forth, as if he himself was the wolf, who has got into a cage. It was visible that he was gnawed with an impatience. And I have thought that, probably, a place for the leader is there, where his fighters are, and it was not clear why Ghash does not let himself to go downwards, under the hill. But he knew better then me what he should do.

From below, through the howls, growls, neighing and the ringing of iron has come a trilling whistle, and Ghash immediately whistled in an answer, then he shouted to the watcher to get down, and all of us: Ghash, the watcher and Uragh with me on his back, have left the burgh.
Stars have already left a firmament, and the sky, pending the sun, became a pre-dawn gray. The darkness has turned to a muddy, dark blue twilight. During such time outlines of objects are deformed, concealed, seem more close than actually is, and the eyes are getting constantly deceived, accepting one for another and confusing the distance.
Therefore it seemed to me that we were going down from the hill for an infinitely long time. Besides I was hanging on Uragh’s back facing the burgh, and I was not able to see for how long is still needed to go to the bottom of the hill.
Turogh was the first whom we have met under the hill.
- Speak, -Ghash has ordered impatiently.
- All is clear, - Turogh has answered quietly, without hurrying up. - We did not count them, yet, maybe someone managed to get away, but it is a few. About fifty lays around the hill, and about one and a half hundreds more -on the hill. Someone is hiding in the grass and in the grove, those who has lost their horses. If you will order, we will fish them out . The Wargs drove away the herd of spare horses.
- Whistle to the guys to remove the burgh, we must leave. Would be nice to count how many of them we have put here, but there is no time.
Turogh put fingers in a mouth and whistled something sharp and short. At once around the hill has begun a subtle movement. Even not too far from us some "stones" has risen from the ground and has run to top.
- Here an old friend is waiting to see you, - Turogh has again turning to Ghash, - asked you to wait for him.
- I would myself gladly hug him, but it’s no time to wait there, - Ghash spoke in becoming warmer voice, - I will apologize next time, when we’ll meet.

However he did not have to wait for the next time, nor to apologize, because out of darkness has suddenly jumped something, of which my hair have risen upright again. This Something has struck Ghash in a chest, knocked down and, having pressed down with heavy paws, began to lick his face with wide as a shovel tongue.
Did you ever see the wolf in the size of a bit more than a pony? No?
His nape was up to the level of Uragh’s chest. He was strong and sturdy with big, thicker than my hip, paws and with a neck wider than me myself. And this monster has been showing a loving affection to laying on the ground Ghash, with all his behavior expressing a delight and pleasure of the meeting.
- " Enough, Ratghaur (17)! - Ghash has begged. - Enough, you will crush the chest. You are not a puppy any more. Grew up, even won‘t recognize!"
The wolf has removed the paws from his chest and sat up, so when Ghash has got up, he and the wolf have appeared to be at the same level.
The wolf has put an huge, broad-browed head on Ghash’s shoulder, and was enjoyably squinting the yellow eyes, while Ghash was squeezing the short neck in thickness of a grasp of my hands, scratching behind an enormous upright ear and clapping on a wide, brawny chest.
Ghash was caressing the huge wolf as if a tiny kitten, and the wolf was pressing ears, swaying the head, barring the canines in length in my palm, and only did not purr from a pleasure.
But he growled, quietly and gently, and Ghash, as the same, quietly and tenderly growled something into his ear.

- " I have been told that you have got yourself a girlfriend? - asked Ghash, having come off, at last, from hugging and petting.-Will you intriduce me?”
The wolf has turned the head and loudly and leigthy roared .
A movement has appeared in twilight, and the second wolf has approached us, just a little, absolutely slightly, smaller than the first.
- "Hello, - Ghash has addressed to her, bowing, but the first wolf has cut off his greeting with a lingering, as a yawn, sound.
- “Does not understand? " - Clarified Ghash and changed to a low guttural growl.
The bitch answered him, throaty grumbling, and if the wolves were able to wag a tail, I swear, she would wag. She had such look.
Since then I saw many times how Ghash talks to women of different races, and almost all of them behaved the same way as this bitch.

Turogh has interrupted this strange conversation.
- " Everybody is ready, - he has told. - Wounded - six, two are not walking. Killed - four, one has died of wounds, have buried him in the grove. We can move on".
- "I am sorry, Ratghaur, - Ghash has addressed to the wolf. - We have to leave. We must reach mountains while the new horse-eaters won’t come. Will you see me off? "
The wolf has growled something in an agreement.
- " Then, - Ghash looked back at Uragh and me, - “Can you take that small one on your back? He cannot run as quickly as we are, and for Uragh it’s too heavy to carry him all the time“.
The wolf has noisily sniffed the air and gave a short skeptically-interrogative roar.
- " No, he is not a hare, - patiently answered Ghash. - And you can‘t eat him. We need him.”
The wolf shook his broad-browed head, growled like something bewildered, but, probably, has agreed.
I was taken out of the bag, untied, and sat on a lumpy and firm from muscles nape and have ordered to hold tight.
And then the at-a-ghan started on a journey, quickly picking up the speed.
And, the word of honor, it is a pity that now I am too heavy for warg’s rides!