Eventually we began to circle down, and alit upon yet another outcropping. I slid down from the eagle’s glossy feathers. “Farewell!” they called, as they one by one divested of their passengers and lifted off again. “Wherever you fare, till your eyries receive you at journey’s end.”
Gandalf appropriately replied, “May the wind under your wings bear you where the sun sails and the moon walks.”
We then began our way down from the hillock of stone. I felt as surefooted as I ever did, but the others were less familiar with such things than I. Oin walked behind me, with everyone else ahead of us, but gave no indication that Dori had spoken to him already, as I imagined he had. Why wouldn’t he? I only worried if he would feel the need to tell Thorin of my predicament. But how would I ever explain that I wasn’t really here? That, in my world, I was truly dying? Of course there was the slight chance that they would be able to save me, the doctors. But there was certainly nothing that could be done for me here. In one moment when Nori had made a little headway ahead of me—surefooted as I was, I was mincing my steps so my shoes wouldn’t slip—Oin lightly laid his hand on my shoulder, and I looked warily over my shoulder at him.
“Is there anything else you can tell me that I can help you with?” he asked, bushy brows pushed together.
My shoulders dropped. “I truly am sorry, Oin, but there is nothing you can do.”
“Can you tell me more of what ails you?” he persisted.
I shook my head. “My fate is already out of the fire; it can’t be changed. If it will help to settle your concerns, I can tell you that I am suffering from a curse, and it cannot be broken. I accepted it myself as payment for a favor.”
“How will this curse affect you?”
I sighed, eyes flickering to where the others were still ambling down and away. “I am not entirely well now, and will be entirely unwell by the end of it. I will explain further when I have to, but I would prefer to allow it to bear on your conscience for as little time as possible.”
Oin sighed, but I knew he would permit my silence, and my opinion of him soared as high as the eagles had. “We’d best get back, then,” he said, and gladly I returned to trekking after the others of the Company.
They had paused at the bottom of the hill, at the beginning of the returning vegetation, presumably to allow us to catch up. Dori glanced quickly at me and away.
“—I may look in on it again before it is all over, but in the meanwhile I have some other pressing business to attend to.”
The dwarves all looked stricken, and I know I was taken aback as well by Gandalf’s planned departure.
“I am not going to disappear this very instant,” Gandalf informed them. “I can give you a day or two more. Probably I can help you out of your present plight, and I need a little help myself. We have no food, and no baggage, and no ponies to ride; and you don’t know where you are. Now I can tell you that. You are still some miles north of the path which we should have been following, if we had not left the mountain pass in a hurry. Very few people live in these parts—” He looked my way when he said this, to warn me I suppose. “—unless they have come here since I was last down this way, which is some years ago. But there is somebody that I know of, who lives not far away. That Somebody made the steps on the great rock—the Carrock I believe he calls it. He does not come here often, certainly not in the daytime, and it is no good waiting for him. In fact it would be very dangerous. We must go and find him; and if all goes well at our meeting, I think I shall be off and wish you like the eagles ‘farewell wherever you fare!’”
The dwarves begged him left and right, blue and green, and remembering the fires the wizard had made in the pinecones and atop the eyrie I quite wished he would commit to staying as well, though Gandalf only shook his head and smiled, promising nothing to the clamoring dwarves. I would have clamored as well, but I didn’t feel I had the right to put in an opinion as to the fate of whatever pilgrimage the dwarves were on, since I was neither one of them nor part of their Company, and wasn’t intended to stay.
But the pleading accomplished nothing more than Gandalf’s silence to further elaborate on the topic, and at last he suggested we cross the river and refresh ourselves and our clothes before setting out, considering the abominable several days we had just survived. Everyone agreed, and stomped forth through the thin trees toward the edge of the ford. I took off my shoes and stepped in cautiously—I had never learned to swim, and the current was a strong presence at our legs, and then our chests.
We were only a quarter of the way across when the water began lifting my feet, and I sliding sideways, downriver, unable to cross any further. The water was up to my mid-chest already. When they heard me splashing the dwarves Bifur and Bofur, who were closest, waded back to me. Bofur stood downstream with his back to me, Bifur upstream with his hands clenched in the back of my tunic. When I tried to keep from sliding into Bofur he shook off my breathless apologies.
“No, you hop right up and sit on my shoulders,” he said.
“But, I’ll be fine if I have something to hold onto,” I said, unsure.
“And look, there, Bilbo’s got up on Dori’s shoulders already,” he pointed out, and I caved.
“All right.” The current pushed me into Bofur’s back and Bifur helped me climb up to sit on his shoulders. I swayed, the combination of our height and the water surrounding us ruining my balance.
“Hold tight,” Bofur said cheerily, patting my knee.
“To what?” I demanded, casting about as though I expected a handle to appear.
Bofur gave it a moment’s thought. “That’s a good question,” he said at last, not offering a solution.
We made our way across eventually, and when I patted Bofur’s shoulder he crouched and let me down in the shallows. I splashed onto the rocks, pulled my shoes out of my dress—tunic—and threw them onto the bank. I glanced over my shoulder, saw the dwarves disrobing without any further hesitation, and immediately spun back to face the trees. I sat myself down on a mound of moss and kept my back decidedly turned on the jovial dwarves and their entertainments.
“So Mabyn,” Bofur called out at one point. “How is your realm different from ours?”
I thought about it. I knew that this world wasn’t real but I was having a hard time remembering the real one. “There are too many people,” I said at last. “Our land is smaller than yours, and I suspect it is older as well. We have no large castles or halls anymore because there is no room.”
“No room?” Nori asked, astonished. “Where do you all live?”
“In individual dwellings, for small families usually. The king may live in a large home, but there are very few castles—I suppose I shouldn’t say they’re all gone. That’s one of the reasons I so love this place, your world.” I felt myself growing distant as I considered it further. “There is ever so much green, stretching on and on, and it is so easy to tell who is likely to harm you and who isn’t because your enemies can confront you directly about why they don’t like you.”
“Well there’s no other way to go about having an enemy,” Dwalin retorted.
“I’m afraid in my world there is,” I said, and reached beneath my hair to find the buttons holding Bofur’s hood to his cloak. I undid them, pulled the hood low over my eyes, and twisted up the ends until I was effectively blindfolded. Turning to face them once again, I picked my way down toward a boulder near the water’s edge by memory. “There are so many people you see, we can’t afford to offend each other because there is no space to run or fight. If two families engage in a feud either both families are entirely obliterated ending it, and anyone who tries to come in between them, or they sit and hate each other while pretending not to.”
“That sounds awful!” exclaimed Bilbo, and I heard the other dwarves muttering that they wouldn’t let that stop them.
“I completely agree,” I said, “it’s a terrible way to go about it.”
“Is that one of the reasons you left?” Kili wanted to know. At my nod, he asked, “But didn’t you have any family, any companions?”
I took a breath. “No. I am the last of my kind.”
“To have no family,” Balin said with a sigh. “That must be terrible.”
Here was what I had worried about saying. “I do not mind it overmuch. Of my family I only ever had my father—my mother vanished soon after giving life to me. But my father was….not a tolerant man. He was rarely overtly cruel, but neither did he allow me to have many of the….trappings of a happy life.” I could feel my ribcage closing in, heating like pokers left too long in the fire. I sucked in another breath, trying to cool the black-edged heat of it.
“And what happened to him?” Balin gently asked. I could hear that he had walked closer through the water now, by the way his voice floated over the ripples, which were easier on this side than they had on the outside of the bend.
“I killed him.” I leaned down on my side, half-curled as though to keep the world at bay. It didn’t matter how far away my father was. He wasn’t dead in my real life. But I’d dreamt about killing him so many times, when he was looming over me as I cowered against the wall, a broken beer bottle in his fist and a threat on his voice. I had grown so very careful about knowing how best not to anger him, but as I’d grown, I had also lost much of my own tolerance. My hatred of him grew from a spark in my belly to a slow smolder, like those hiding under the leaves after forest fires, waiting on tenterhooks for the next foul breath to whip them into an inferno. It had made me careless, this last year. I had earned his wrath far more frequently than before.
Accepting that one’s new companion was a murderess was not a revelation they had expected they would need to adjust to. I felt their silence like a blanket that had been left in the snow. It cooled the tearful rage in my chest but left me feeling hollow when it had gone.
“Did he die well?” one of them, I wasn’t sure who, asked at last.
“What do you mean?”
“Did he die with his head up?”
“I pushed him off a cliff after he opened the back of my head with a mug of beer. I climbed down immediately after to make sure he was properly dead. It wouldn’t be right for him to suffer.”
I had no idea what they’d made of that, and I refused to peek to see what their faces would have told me.
“I’m sorry he wasn’t a proper father,” Balin said at last.
“Thank you,” I mumbled.
I stayed that way for a good hour, until the men were all splashing out of the water and throwing their wet clothes onto rocks. At that point I needed to dry out other sides of my clothes so I sprawled on my back to let the sun dry what it hadn’t already reached. After a while I tugged the warmed strip of jerky from my tunic and began working on it.
“How long have you had that tucked away?” I think it was Ori who asked.
“Since this morning. It’s a habit to hide things. My father.” I sighed. Might as well be honest about this much now. “Did not provide much food. If I didn’t save things I wouldn’t eat.”
“Well if you’re hungry you can have some of mine. I saved a bit.” I heard him rummaging in among something leather and chuckled.
“No no, I’m just fine, thank you.” I heard him keep rummaging and laughed again. “No I mean it, Ori. If I am hungry I am rude enough to mention it.”
“Thank goodness,” Kili proclaimed, “we won’t have to be too polite back then.”
I shook my head, struggling to keep a straight face. “My world is less polite as well. Please don’t let me keep you down.”
“Do any of your women grow beards?” Fili asked.
I shook my head. “Very, very rarely. They consider it a terrible phenomenon and shave it immediately.”
“How wretched!” Gloin declared. “A true pity.”
“They think the same about women with beards.”
“Blasphemy.”
“Well what about me? Am I blasphemous then, for being smooth-cheeked?”
“We may consider forgiving you.”
“You could always cut off some of yours and share it with me. I’ll dip it in sap and stick it on. I’ll fit right in.”
“Now that is blasphemous,” Bofur said. “If you ever ask again we may have to get rid of you.”
“Don’t do that,” I complained. “I can climb trees like a squirrel. And cook. And I can sing. And I know a lot of great stories.”
“Oh yes?” Bofur lifted his head with interest. “Sing something.”
I nodded, then brought my toe into the beat as soon as I found one appropriate. I inhaled.
“Underneath the echoes, buried in the shadows,
There you were.
Drawn into your mystery, I was just beginning,
To see your ghost, but you must know
I’ll be here waiting,
Hoping, praying, there.
The sky will guide you home.
When you’re feeling lost I’ll leave my love
Hidden in the sun, for when the darkness comes.”
I sang gladly, having never been shy about it. I sing songs whether or not I know the words. I’d have been humming to myself already, glad to be among such optimistic people, but I was afraid to vex them, particularly when I came to the notes I couldn’t actually find.
“Is that a common song where you’re from?” Balin asked.
“It was new when I left. I haven’t heard any of the songs from home since then. No one here knows them.”
“Well,” said Bofur, “as long as you aren’t singing them when we’re trying to sleep they certainly are interesting.”
“One of the strangest songs I’ve ever heard,” Kili put in.
My lips spread again. “I have many that are much stranger. I will lead you into them, so as not to frighten you.”
He chortled.
“Do you know any instruments, Mabyn?” asked Bifur.
“I’m afraid I do not. I wanted very much to learn, but instruments are very expensive, and I didn’t have the money for either it or the lessons. Singing was free.”
I sighed, smiling faintly up at the sun shining down over us, and turned so my head was resting comfortably across my arms, drying out the back of me as well. This was a happy place. Happy people laughing and flicking stones at each other, discussing old politics and even things in another language that I didn’t understand, allowing the sun to save us from our cold in its own time, glad to have survived and now just to be clean.
*
It was the middle of summer when I was hospitalized. I should have been wearing shorts and tank tops. I should have been swimming in a friend’s pool or sunbathing with my T-shirt pulled up on someone’s parched front lawn.
But because it was summer, and there was no school, I was working nearly full time at both of my jobs, and thankfully was in uniform all that time. I received a second degree burn across my back eleven days before I could no longer hold myself up. I had been hiding it, wearing the softest, oldest shirts I could find underneath my uniform, in part because it didn’t hurt so much and in part because the burn tended to bleed through only one layer of fabric. Between the sweltering heat already provided by the sun and the layers I wore to hide it, I shouldn’t have been so taken aback when an infection set in. That part was entirely my fault.
First I developed a fever. Before she left without taking me with her, my momma had taught me a trick for telling fevers on yourself without having a thermometer. It all had to do with watching how long it took a glass of ice to condense, then doing some measurement of that to how far the steam stain spread from your palm pressed against the window. When testing temperatures, if the neighbor was home, she and I used to ask to use her thermometer just to see how close she was. She was within a degree every time.
My fever had been a hundred and two within four days. Within six my heart rate couldn’t keep up with the rest of me and I began to gasp, but I didn’t sweat. On the eighth day I developed a bellyache, and found that I was easily confused, and short-tempered with people who usually made me the happiest. On the eleventh day the sky was blue, the painted-on clouds were white, and someone had spilled a strawberry ice cream on the sidewalk I plunged down into while my friends and I were walking to the grocery store.
They called an ambulance because the hospital was too far away for us to walk. I was small enough for one of them to easily pick me up though, and they hauled me inside the gas station and laid me out on the floor in front of the soda cooler and opened the doors over me. My friends weren’t allowed to come with me in the ambulance, but I didn’t find that out until later. Later I woke up with the needles in my arms and surrounded by screens telling me things I couldn’t comprehend. My friends sat up from where they’d been sitting and one of them started to cry.
Why didn’t you tell us, she moaned. Why didn’t you tell us you were hurt so bad?
Because you’ll want to know how it happened, I would have said, but I only closed my eyes. I was so tired, more exhausted than I’d ever been, even after working a shift at my first job, picking up a shift in the middle, going to school the next day, and being called into work immediately after. I’d gone days without sleeping when I’d had to. Days without eating. Now I felt as though I had tried to do both at the same time.
When they grasped my hands I started to cry too, and I apologized, over and over, because I was afraid I wouldn’t have been able to pay for it, and I’d known I would have lost money being out of work, and I didn’t want to lose my jobs too. I had been a fool.
They would never forgive me if I died, they said. And there was a fifty percent chance that I would. Severe sepsis is like that.
When I woke I wasn’t aware that I had fallen asleep. A nurse’s hand was on my shoulder and she told me she was going to take a couple more samples to see how I was doing. I had been arranged on my side with my arms and one leg bent, so my open back wasn’t pressed into anything, and I could feel her swabbing back there with something damp. I wondered if the burn had dried and cracked yet. I wondered if it was supposed to, and if it would hurt any more. I’d never had a worse injury, and hadn’t been prepared for this one. I was surprised my hair hadn’t burned. At least not much of it.
The nurse asked me if I was in pain, and I said yes, and she adjusted my morphine drip. I tasted the saline in my mouth—I hated the fumes that seemed to emanate from inside me when they adjusted my IV—and felt my sensations drop away.
*
“Mabyn. Mistress Mabyn.” Someone was jostling my shoulder. I flinched, eyes opening though I hadn’t realized I’d fallen asleep, and saw that my shaker was Oin, who was peering over me worriedly. Someone had pushed my hood-blindfold back and now I was blinking up into the yellow midday sun.
“What?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”
He stared at me a moment, and as my eyes flicked from side to side and I rose onto my elbow I realized that all of the others were staring at us as well. Gandalf was leaning on his long staff, frowning. Thorin was scowling. “We couldn’t wake you, child. For nearly a minute.” He shifted, and glanced over his shoulder. “I had to tell them what you had told me.”
My eyes warmed with shame. “Oin,” I whispered, “you promised.”
“They had the right to know why they might have to carry you away,” Oin said firmly. “I apologize.”
“What curse is it you suffer from?” Thorin asked from behind crossed arms.
Slowly, a faint ache in my bones, I sat up and hung my feet over the edge of the stone. “There are people with certain powers where I come from, too,” I said with a look in Gandalf’s direction. He nodded. I wondered what would be convincing. “I made a deal with one, at a time when I was very ill. I was looking for my mother, and begged him to let me live long enough to find her. He healed me, took my body back to the healthier state it had been in a couple years before. He said when my time caught up to me again the sickness would return, and I would suffer from it just as I had before. I say I am cursed because he only told me afterward that I would be just as helpless to fight the sickness the second time as I had been the first, and I was already dying when I found him then.”
Thorin exchanged a look with Gandalf, who regarded me contemplatively.
“There is nothing you can do!” I insisted as he approached, switching his staff to his left hand. “My fate has already been decided, and I’ve accepted that. I found my mother. I got what I wanted. Please don’t waste your energies worrying about this.”
“Let me see if there is something for me to find, regardless,” Gandalf patiently said, and sank to one knee, laying his wrinkled hand against my hair. I bit both lips together to keep the tears out of my eyes. I hated to be seen as weak.
Gandalf sought out his magical traces with his eyes closed, utterly quiet, and the dwarves and hobbit surrounding us as well. I sat frozen with my shoulders hunched. At last Gandalf sighed, and opened his eyes, though he didn’t lift his hand. “Well,” he said, in answer to all of our curious gazes, “what will result of this remains to be seen.”
I closed my eyes. “I know what is coming, Gandalf,” I said quietly. “Please.” My voice rose until all of them could hear me. “Please, do me the decency of treating me as though you have never heard of this. My only despair comes from causing others concern.”
“We may be able to ease your way,” Thorin countered, though clearly disapproving. I couldn’t blame him for being frustrated that I would likely slow them down.
“I won’t accept your help if it is at your own expenses. Honestly. I came to your lands to see what beauty I could before dying. This is all I need to be happy. I am happier here than I ever was at home.”
He watched me for long moments, perhaps tasting the validity of my earnestness, before curtly nodding and turning. It was time to leave again.
“Don’t let Thorin get you down,” Balin advised as I slid meekly from the rock and retrieved my shoes. “He’s distracted, is all.”
“I understand,” I quietly replied. “I will do anything I can not to be a distraction as well.”
I gathered Bombur’s’s cloak and reattached the hood, shaking the wrinkles out of it, and returned it to its owner, who smiled sympathetically at me. I doubt my returning smile looked much as I’d intended it to.
“Sing us another song, Mabyn,” Fili suggested as we set out.
I thought a moment before taking my breath.
“I planned my journey for the long way round,
Bottles of whiskey for the way,
But I sure would like your sweet company,
And I’m leaving tomorrow, what do you say?”
(pg 46)
Last Edit: 22 December 2014