Chapter Text
Thorongil felt a sneeze coming on and wrinkled his nose, then stuffed his face into the shoulder of his cloak. The sweaty, scratchy, wet-dog smell killed the sneeze but left him with an irritating itch that wouldn’t go away. Somewhere in the washed out dome of grey light the sun was moving. He’d rested enough already and gathered his things. No fire to put out, no water to collect. He hoisted his weapons, cloak, and small bundle of gear over his aching shoulders and walked northwest.
Mordor, as usual, seemed to be made up exclusively of unpleasant landforms in configurations designed to make him hurt. He stopped at regular intervals to dump stones and ash-ridden sand out of his boots. Only an hour or so into his march he discovered the sole was disjoining itself from the body of his left boot and went on in a dour mood. He’d snapped the iron awl in a fall into a defile in the mountains and had been making do with some makeshift bone tools ever since. The foothills of the Fence crawled in and out of sight on the horizon, gradually growing larger and darker. Having crossed it once with difficulty, he had developed a deep-seated respect-cum-fear for those ridiculously rough and craggy volcanic mountains. The elongated gray clouds might as well be scabs from the sky dragging their low belly continuously over those knife-like peaks, unable to escape the strange convoluted currents that stirred over the Morgul plain.
The “road” he was loosely following hadn’t been used in at least a few years, although it was hard to tell in this seasonless place. He crossed back and forth across it, keeping to low ground and rough places where his silhouette wouldn’t break the gruesome uniformity of the landscape. He kept pace with his shadow for hours, until the sun was likely at its zenith and Day was in full, punishing effect. It was unwise to continue until later in the day.
Like a dog, he scratched out a trough amidst the rocks. He took his sheathed sword and swung it through any dark crevices to clear them of small but potentially venomous occupants before he himself slithered into it, piling his gear and cloak next to him where it wouldn’t stop any airflow. After yanking off his filthy shirt and depositing it with the rest, he was almost not sweltering. His head ground into the gravel, but it was a little cooler in the shade; rock was slow to warm, especially in the perpetually smoky, overcast conditions.
His hair stuck to his neck and sweat trickled down his cheeks. Sweeping up a droplet with his finger, he let it dangle, only to have it evaporate before it could drop onto his chest. The sun hung like a sweltering blot on the sky, a pustule under the smoggy skin of smoke and airborne ash. He watched a displaced scorpion crawl across the nearby sand and when it didn’t move quickly enough, gently whisked it further away with his good boot before he curled up and tried to sleep.
Sleep came with sounds in the night and a bag of nightmares that addled his mind when he awoke. The sun was a little lower, the rocks perpetually still and black, although now there always seemed to be something that ducked out of sight right before he could see it clearly, a smudge that wouldn’t leave his eyes no matter how hard he blinked. He used a cautious splash of the water to soak his bandana and wrapped it around his head, pushing the matted hair out of the way. The horizon seemed all-encompassing.
“No time like the present.” The silence ate up his words. He ached and popped and groaned his way upright, leaning on the rock while he warmed up. He stretched, eliciting another round of pops and clicks, then shook out all his gear. The scorpion, or one very similar, had wound up in his boot.
“I would have thought it would be safe from the smell. Who wants to live in a boot?”
The creature didn’t dignify him with a response. He considered eating it, but it had just been inside his boot. He knew where he'd been.
He held his one swallow of water in his mouth until it began to get warm, then let it trickle down his throat, savoring every last drop. He had another month at least until he could make it back to Minas Tirith and water was scarce. He scanned the eastern horizon on the off chance he’d see the other scouts somewhere in the distance and thought he saw movement, but it could have just been the heat waves.
The passage they were looking for was only mentioned once, and vaguely, by a goblin. The result was that they only had the foggiest idea where exactly it was, somewhere between the two westernmost tributaries of the Nurnen and two day’s march from Minas Morgul. They didn’t know anything other than it was a big hole in the ground. Torture rarely worked on Men, it never worked on goblins. He kept walking, scanning the land around the road for a large and secret looking crater or sink hole that might host the passage they were searching for.
He could feel Minas Morgul growing on the northern horizon like a storm front. Once, the scrap of a breeze brought a terror-filled shriek to his ears, although what kind of animal could have made it, he had no idea. It was starting to grow dark out, or at least darker. It was always dim but never absolutely dark. The cloud-covered sky was lit as if from within with the reddish volcanic radiance of Mt. Doom gave him a ghostly second shadow.
He smelled the orcs long before he saw them. With luck that would be the outpost; if he had his bearings, he was getting close. That said, his faith in his own navigational skill waned with each hour. He felt like he was going in circles, even though he’d definitely been walking northwest the whole time. The uniformly chaotic, shiftless landscape was difficult to waymark and the clouds covered the stars, the weak sun had either set or was similarly concealed. Dim, red light, friendly with various tricks of the eye, covered all. He slunk closer, following his nose. There was no wind at the moment, but he reeked of Man. He’d just have to hope they wouldn’t sniff him out before he had time to scope out the outpost and make his rendezvous with Coru and the other scouts. As low as he could get, he crept closer.
.
Later, he would remember the stark blackness of the Fence to the west, the smell of volcanism on the air, mellow and phlegmatic under the tinge of sulfur, sweat dripping into his eyes, how he was starting to feel the cutting of the ground thorough one of his mush abused boot soles. The nagging bruise he’d somehow gotten from the scabbard smacking against his thigh. He’d try to figure out what he’d missed, or if he’d been worse off than he thought, too exhausted to notice the deep but narrow fissure in the old lava flow, or to react quickly as his feet shot out from under him and he skidded down the jagged edge and fell several feet to the uneven bottom, landing on his hands and knees and still somehow hitting his head on the side of the fissure. Stars spiraled around him in a cloud of blurry white flecks and he heard a cacophony of startled sounds all garbled together as his vision sloshed from side to side. He sagged to his side, arms and hands speckled with embedded bits of volcanic rock.
After a moment he rolled back against the wall of the fissure and levered himself up, shaking his stinging digits, vision still somewhat doubled. Blood was beginning to trickle down his forehead and it throbbed like a mother. He looked up, and locked eyes with an orc staring open-mouthed at him. Behind him, his buddies wore similarly startled expressions: one had just put a tiny, living lizard into his mouth and had been about to bite it in half when Thorongil catapulted headlong into their little resting place. The tail was still thrashing madly.
He broke the peace by drawing his knife.The first orc just barely beat him to it and lunged with a bestial shriek.
He was a cornered animal and he fought like one, lashing out as hard as he could as often as he could, without reservation or thought. They, however, had the virtue of not fighting blind, it was dark down there below the limited and shadowy light of dusk, his vision was impaired by blood and involuntary tears, and none of them seemed to be concussed. The rain of blows from their knives and cudgels overwlhemed him and he crashed to the ground, immediately flattened by a muscular knee into his stomach and a knife at his throat. He nearly slit his throat himself as he involuntarily doubled up from the blow, an undignified gurgle choked off by cold iron. Without leaving him a moment to recover they hauled his arms over his head and dragged him out of the fissure into the light, such as it was, where the first one grabbed his chin and moved his face back and forth, examining him with glee as the rest tore at his coat, eventually pulling it all the way off and letting in the cold wind while they emptied his pockets and upended his bag. He kicked the one holding him in the balls and tried to run, only to have something hard hit the back of his head. He was unconscious before he even hit the ground.
The Men of Westernesse and the Orcs of Mordor had long come to an arrangement the terms of which went like this: No mercy would be asked for, and none would be given. They’d been busy trying to exterminate each other for too many years for that, the hatred of orcs was bred into Aragorn in much the same way the hatred of Men was bred into them. It was the only similarity either side would concede.
Thorongil tried to stand before he was fully aware, ready to run, to fight, to do something. He tugged at his arms and legs, thinking they were too heavy to move, and then felt the bite of coarse ropes and the poles under his back and realized grimly that he was tied to a rack. He’d been stripped to his breeches and his boots were gone. His hair was stuck unpleasantly over his face, one eye was swollen shut regardless, and a crust of blood over his eyebrows and nose cracked as he squinted and looked around. Full night, and the only light was firelight from somewhere behind him. He was propped up on something at about a forty five degree angle and all he could see was night. Straining his eyes to see just worsened his beast of a headache. He shut his eyes and gritted back a moan, then, without letting himself rest and maybe black out again, began to slowly shift and rock back and forth, feeling out if there were any sharp snags or knots in the rope that might weaken the rope enough for him to slip free. There were none, the poles were polished smooth, the taut ropes didn’t catch on so much as a sliver.
Remotely, he was aware of the possibility that he would die in perfect agony in this exact spot, tortured to death or eaten alive. He’d seen it happen. But the thought never came to the forefront of his mind, maybe from the concussion, maybe the long exposure to the potential for death by torture or worse. Dunedain tended to be fatalistic. However, he was not remotely out of options. Just because you know you’re going to die doesn’t mean you stop going. Thorongil had had a lot of “as difficult as possible” in his life, and he liked to think he thrived there. The crew of the Morroc would agree with him.
He’d been unconscious or nearly so when they captured him and tied him down so he hadn’t had the chance to tense to make the ropes appear to fit tighter. He started maneuvering his feet to try and slip out there first, maybe he could twist and break the frame, or flip it over. The ropes were made of rough Nurn-grown callitropsis, a kind of milkweed plant modified to grow in the fertile, but only-recently-not-lava fields of Nurnen. The rope rubbed through the skin of his ankles and abraded the flesh. He gritted his teeth and kept going. He’d be picking the fibers out of the abrasions for days, if he escaped. If he didn’t… severing the hands and feet, or even whole limbs, was not an uncommon punishment. Maybe it was the lack of fields in which to play stickball or other games, but the orcs had taken to torture like a national sport. He got one foot out through a loop so tight he thought the bones would be dislocated.
A couple of orcs came into view and he stilled, breathing hard. It was two smaller ones, wiry torsos covered in intricate bone and tooth embossed vests, with twists of cloth tying their hair back into round mounds on the crown of their skulls. They looked so similar they could be siblings. He’d never seen two orcs look so similar. They were usually born in litters of three or four, but mortality was high, even higher than the Dunedain, and he’d heard that among various rights of passage, killing your sibling(s) was a good way to advance.
He bared his teeth, but they just grabbed the two corners of the rack and yanked it off its supports so that he fell to the ground still bound. Concussion number three, he thought distantly as they dragged him into what seemed like a solid bubble of sound and light. In a minute he realized it was a cave, a lava tube with a dry, sandy bottom, filled to bursting with orcs, in armor, naked, singing and playing what looked like jaw harps, a variety of gourd drums and rattles, and a harp with just one string that emitted a throbbing bass note at irregular intervals. It looked like a festival and felt like someone had cut open his skull and was somehow screaming straight into his brain. Depictions of the red eye of Sauron decorated every available surface, including bodies. He shut his eyes and tried to block everything out but the mechanism for that was absent or broken. They propped him up against a wall far too close to the din and action. They didn’t appear to notice one foot was looser than the other, and left him there to rejoin the festivities as the others all clustered around to yell and throw things at him.
The evening progressed through every stage of celebration he’d ever witnessed and several more he fervently wished he’d never see again. Food was served, meat of unknown provenance, but he felt no hunger. Likewise the liquids of unsettling turbidity didn’t pique his thirst. There seemed to be a handful of honored leaders present, powerful orcs wearing decorations that corresponded to other paintings or banners, and they went swaggering around more loudly than the rest. They’d be offered gifts, or if they saw something they liked they took it. This spawned a few bloody fights and then an orgy after which everything seemed to be forgiven. But what made his stomach churn were the slaves. They were probably human, eyes glassy, movements sluggish as if they were drugged, or maybe they were simply exhausted. He tried to catch their gaze, to smile at them, to try and gift them hope, but they either looked right through him, or their eyes slid over him. Just another phantom in their world.
He was starting to ache from being unnaturally suspended, waiting for everyone to drink themself to sleep so he could continue escaping. The party had been going on for hours, with no end in sight. Occasionally orcs would come up to him, poke or cut or hit him trying to force a reaction. They would pour drink into the cuts so that they burned. Luckily, he was too tall for most of them to reach his face. The drink sometimes contained human blood, and some of the slaves had suggestive scars on their arms and necks.
He made himself a nest of Rivendell blankets in the back of his mind, under the boulder of the pain, and laid himself inside, using the pain as a shield between himself and the events washing around him.
He was roused when one of the people came up to him. He blinked stupidly at her, then realized she wasn’t an orc, just so bruised and filthy that she resembled one. She was tiny and emaciated, her belly hunger-swollen under the stained rectangle of cloth hanging off of her, deeply scarred, burned hands clenched at her sides. Her gaze bored into him, a blunt, fist-shaped light from within that felt heavy as clay as he held it.
She looked him up and down in unabashed assessment, then turned and melted into the crowd without a backward glance. He pushed back against the rack, feeling unaccountably ashamed.
Dawn had come and gone by the time the ordeal died down and he was left in relative silence amid piles of bodies, either dead of excess or in a stupor distinguished only by the volume of their snores.