I don’t know who was more unhappy about Gandalf’s departure the next morning—Bilbo or the dwarves. I would miss Gandalf simply because he was a wizard, but otherwise I didn’t know him well enough to form too solid an opinion. But Gandalf reiterated Beorn’s advice—well and thoroughly—bade us farewell more than once, then spun and galloped away on his appropriated borrowed horse.
I hefted my assortment of supplies, the straps of which cut into the very bones of my shoulders with its weight, as late as I possibly could, as the others were already stepping tentatively into the wet gloom of the forest. Oin waited until I went ahead of him to leave the sunlight behind. His wrinkle-rounded eyes flickered over my pack, my shoulders and spine, deciding whether or not he ought to object in regards to the weight I’d claimed I was able to bear. I had been so careful though not to let anyone else lift my pile of supplies once it was arranged, for fear they would claim I overestimated myself. I swear they all looked at me with a little more concern each day, since I had told them that I would progressively worsen as time scraped on.
I was only two steps past the trunks of the first wretched trees when the dark closed in around me like a heavy theater curtain that stretched up farther than I could ever reach. If I wasn’t still convinced of my other life, the real one, I would be sure that this forest would kill me. It would kill all of us.
We had to walk in single file. The path—paved with irregular broken stones nearly overgrown with roots and ropy vines like brown centipedes—wended and switched through trees that, in my eyes, had once been mighty and grand. There wasn’t a new growth tree among them, and I didn’t know if that made it more despairing or less. That there should be nothing new growing here, or that there was nothing young to be taken by the evil that seemed to seep up out of the very soil like a noxious fume. Some of the trunks were rent from stem to stern, even more than once, and had split so wide that Dwalin could fit comfortably inside them. Some had twisted so far as to crumple in at their turning point and topple. Some grew as if they no longer knew where the sun used to come from. All of them looked wretched, and corrupted.
The chitterings of strange creatures watching us from hidden shadows were terrible. Occasionally a dark squirrel with white eyes would streak across the path, skinny and pointed, or we would hear muffled grunts and rummaging off where we couldn’t see. The screech of some predatory bird and the pall of smaller creatures that immediately followed. What seemed to unnerve the others most were the spider webs, thick and tangled, spread like a thin froth throughout the forest. They grew thicker the further in we went, and sagged beneath their own damp weight. I suppose I wasn’t immediately frightened by those because I’d always rather liked spiders and didn’t stop to think about the proportions that the creators of these webs must be. But none dared stretch across the path, for whatever reasons, and for that even I was grateful. I did know how strong the webs of my own spiders were, and knew that should any of us tumble into one of these there was a small chance of any of us being able to get them out again.
The first night we had to spend in that forest—which somehow grew even darker even if no daylight seemed to ever reach down to us—was one of the most suffocating I had ever spent. I was not surprised when I woke, standing, to find Ori throwing small stones at my back. We had to sleep in a line to remain on the path, and he’d been at the other side, unable to extend his arm far enough to touch me. If I’d wandered off the path I would have been lost forever.
Shaken I sank back down into my spot and did my best to stay there. But of course I couldn’t control my feet when I was sleeping. They controlled me.
I woke that next morning to every one of my companions staring at me, their expressions ranging from uncertainty to regret, from anger to sorrow. “What?” I asked softly, afraid to rise in case I had somehow done something to offend them.
Of all of them—and they had loomed quite close, the better to see me I suppose—Fili edged around his brother Kili and knelt before me. My heart felt crooked and imbalanced in my chest, panicking without trying to show it, brought to this simply by the way they were all behaving. “Mabyn,” he said slowly. “Your face.”
My hands slid up to see what my eyes were too close to find. The right side of my lower and upper lip was swelled, the lower having split. My left eye was blacked, but not swelled. The bruise extended up over my brow.
Despite these being smaller, less permanent injuries, these ones hurt far more than the burns had. My father had not held me to the hot metal, I had tripped. But I remembered how his fist had caught my mouth and my eye had caught the edge of the table. That had been so much more personal, to me, and had in no way been my own fault.
“I remember when he did this,” I whispered, when ordinarily I would have only sighed, and apologized that they had to see me in such a state. We had been trapped in this forest for barely a day and already I felt the fishhooks of its misery dragging on my skin. “I’m sorry.”
Oin began, “Do you want—”
“No.” I flickered a smile, making sure to catch both his eyes. “Thank you, but it will be gone in a couple days.”
He regarded me softly. “But it doesn’t have to hurt.”
I tried harder to smile this time. “Whoever said anything about hurting?” I turned away from the rest of them, finding the straps of my overlarge satchel and heaving it onto my back. “I’m fine. Let’s go.”
I couldn’t express how ashamed I was that they had to see me like this. Of the few who knew, or had ever known, what some parents did to their children, none of them ever seemed to understand just why we were so upset when people saw the marks they left on us. Children don’t choose their parents, but for some, inexplicable, intangible reason, we are still invisibly devastated by how even though we know we can do no better, the people who are most supposed to love us will never love us enough. Our efforts to be worthy of their respect repel and disgust them. And that knowledge is one of the most effective ways of killing us. It isn’t the bleeding lips, the eyes swelled shut or the half-moon cuts on our arms. It’s that we are not enough, and never will be. We aren’t dying of malnutrition or internal bleeding we’re dying of lack of faith and poisoned love.
I kept my head down as we walked that day. I am always humiliated when my body wants to cry.
I was right. Within a couple of days—I don’t know how many; we struggled in keeping time—the cut in my lip fused back together and healed. A yellow thumbprint lay underneath my eye for another few days after the darkest violet went away, but with the lack of light I knew it was hard to see. I didn’t feel the need to mention the footprint that bloomed on my back one night; it too faded on its own.
To save myself from my own despair I spent long hours thinking about Beorn’s garden. The oversized flowers that had leaned over my shoulder like they were telling me a secret; the tiny blossoms of the moss, the tadpoles I had seen in eddies in the stream; the taste of his red clover honey; the springy curls of the sheep that had come to sleep with me; the texture and the gloss of the grass, green in the shade but reflecting yellow and pink in the sun.
It was on account of these daydreams that I walked into Gloin’s back when the Company unexpectedly stopped. I was glad for the momentary rest, and slid my weighted pack to the ground, but I was sad that with the halt my daydreams had dissolved.
“There’s a river!” Bifur exclaimed from the front, to inform those of us in the back.
The dwarves around me clamored, taken in by the first optimistic change to our scenery we had found. The river ran as black as tar but as thin as ink. The river itself was menacing, but the boat on the other side, we collectively decided, was a good sign.
“How far away do you think it is?” Thorin asked Bilbo, who we had by now realized had the keenest eyesight of all of us. Fili and Kili were next, and not to be forgotten, but even Bilbo was the better judge of the distance.
“Not at all far,” said Bilbo. “I shouldn’t think above twelve yards.”
“Twelve yards! I should have thought it was thirty at least, but my eyes don’t see as well as they used a hundred years ago. Still twelve yards is as good as a mile. We can’t jump it, and we daren’t try to wade or swim.”
I sank to sit on my pack. We weren’t going anywhere in a hurry.
“Can any of you throw a rope?”
“What’s the good of that? The boat is sure to be tied up, even if we could hook it, which I doubt.”
“I don’t believe it is tied,” countered Bilbo, “though of course I can’t be sure in this light; but it looks to me as if it was just drawn up on the bank, which is low just there where the path goes down into the water.”
“Dori is the strongest,” Thorin said, looking over us all as he assessed strengths and weaknesses. “But Fili is the youngest and still has the best sight.”
I hadn’t known Fili was the youngest. He didn’t act it.
“Come here, Fili, and see if you can see the boat Mr. Baggins is talking about.”
Fili was one dwarf ahead of me, and had to step carefully around those ahead of him to reach the bank without losing the path. “I think I can see it,” he said at last, and continued to stare in its direction, the better to gauge just how to best throw the rope that was being passed forth. Gloin firmly knotted an iron hook about the end of it, then handed it over. Fili took it in hand, turned it over, balancing the weight, then flung it across the stream.
“Not far enough!” Bilbo said as the hook splashed into the water. “A couple of feet and you would have dropped it into the boat. Try again.” At Fili’s uncertain look at the sopping rope he was reeling out of the water, Bilbo put in, “I don’t suppose the magic is strong enough to hurt you, if you just touch a bit of wet rope.”
Fili threw it with all his strength this time.
“Steady!” called Bilbo, “you have thrown it right into the wood on the other side now. Draw it back gently.” Fili grasped the rope firmly and wound it back. “Carefully! It is lying on the boat; let’s hope the hook will catch.”
When it did we all grinned, even I. The rope straightened, and Fili dug his heels and toes into the loam in an attempt to haul it across. Kili joined him, then Oin and Gloin as well. They heaved, throwing all their weight into the effort of it, Bilbo all the while standing anxiously on his toes to watch the boat groaning at the other side.
With a squeal the boat leaped free of its entanglement, surging across the atramentaceous gulf of water, and Fili, Kili, Oin and Gloin tottered backward on top of one another.
I yelped with surprise when Gloin landed on my toes but he rolled back up too quickly to cause even the conception of a bruise, and reassured himself with my smile that I hadn’t been hurt.
“It was tied after all,” Balin was saying, fingering the frayed rope at the boat’s bow. “That was a good pull, my lads; and a good job that our rope was the stronger.”
“Who’ll cross first?” asked Bilbo.
“I shall,” Thorin answered, “and you will come with me, and Fili and Balin. That’s as many as the boat will hold at a time. After that Kili and Oin and Gloin and Dori; next Ori and Nori, Bifur and Bofur; and last Dwalin and Bombur and Mabyn.”
“I’m always last and I don’t like it,” grumbled Bombur, scowling. “It’s somebody else’s turn today.”
“You should not be so fat,” Thorin returned. “As you are, you must be with the last and lightest boatload. Don’t start grumbling against orders, or something bad will happen to you.”
Bilbo was patting the inside of the boat. Sticking his head back up he said, “There aren’t any oars. How are you going to push the boat back to the far bank?”
“Give me another length of rope and another hook,” suggested Fili, and once they had he cast it into the darkness ahead, where it lodged itself in unseen branches and held. “Get in now,” he said to the others he would be going across with, “and one of you haul on the rope that is stuck in a tree on the other side. One of the others must keep hold of the hook we used at first, and when we are safe on the other side he can hook it on, and you can draw the boat back.”
Soon everyone but Dwalin, Bombur and I was across the river. Dwalin had just scrambled out, with myself right behind him, and a grumbling Bombur was stretching for a root to steady himself when, true to Thorin’s prediction, something bad did happen. The rattling of heavy hooves came from ahead of us, then suddenly materialized before us on the path. It saw us, coiling its muscles beneath its skin to leap over the river. It cleared it by less space than it takes to flick a rabbit’s tail, and disappeared into the gloom.
Bilbo cried out, “Bombur has fallen in! Bombur is drowning!”
I whirled. Bombur had had only one foot on land when the hart leaped, and not a steady foot either. He had stumbled, the boat surging away, his hands slipping from the slick roots he’d been trying to grip.
Fili threw out a rope with a hook, and one of Bombur’s hands flailed to grasp it. He caught a firm hold, and knowing my assistance was neither needed or wanted, I stayed out of the dwarves’ way as they dragged him up onto the bank. I thought he had suddenly drowned when they flopped him over onto his back, but Thorin bent over his mouth and recoiled.
Bombur was indeed alive. But he was sleeping. There was a peaceful smile on his face, and his hand clutched about the hook so steadfastly no one could remove it.
I dropped down against an exposed swell of rough stone, drawing my knees up to my chest and trying not to sink back into my own anxiety. The dwarves tried all they could think of in rousing dreadfully, happily slumbering Bombur, but he wouldn’t be woken. They tried for over an hour before sinking down themselves, at a loss for ideas and nearly for hope.
At last Thorin said we ought to get what rest we could; we wouldn’t be traveling any further that day, if it was even still day on the outside of this accursed forest. We sat quietly, each feeling alone among the others, for a long while. Eventually Gloin began putting some food together for us. I made a point to lose myself in my thoughts, and for a while I felt much better. With my eyes closed it was sometimes easier to pretend.
“What was it you were saying?” Bilbo asked suddenly, voice hushed, as though we had been the victims of a tragic event. “About places in the world that aren’t real.”
My eyes slid open to let this particular world back in. “Every place in the world is what you make of it,” I whispered. “My garden may be useless to you because I grow no vegetables, but for me it will be a relentless haven into which I will pour everything I have before I allow it to wither.”
“What of this place?” he asked, leaning on his elbow toward me. “What would you make of it?”
I inhaled deeply, taking in the scents even as I for once tried to listen to and see our surroundings objectively. I saw the expressions on the faces of the dwarves and hobbits that lay slumped against rocks and trees, bones wilting in defeat, faces sagging with no hope to hold them up anymore. “It reminds me of a song.”
“Will you sing it?”
“In a moment. This forest reminds me of an old woman, one who has lost everything dear to her and feels forgotten. You can see by the breadth of the trees that this forest is incredibly old—I bet it was once magnificent too. These huge trees, homes to entire communities of animals just in themselves, so large none would dare to offend them. I’ll bet she was beautiful.
“But something happened to her, perhaps she lost someone that she dearly loved, and she began to wilt. The trees are like her bones falling apart. The animals are her frightened thoughts scattering this way and that in confusion. The gloom is her sadness. The river is how she wishes to forget how grand she used to be because now she has to see herself like this.
“We will reach the other side if we follow the open route she’s left for us—she knows how important she is still, but she’s struggling. She can’t help what dark things lurk here now. But she will attempt to keep us safe if she can.”
My metaphors were met with a long silence. I had no idea if they could see what I was seeing, but they did seem very introspective. Since they had asked, I began to hum, introducing them to the tune and myself to the rhythm. This wasn’t a song to lift our spirits, but once I found the song that could match what we felt now I would be better able to lift us out of our melancholy, if I could.
Gloin pressed a wooden bowl of cold vegetables, bread and jam into my hands. I thanked him, and began to sing.
“What if the storm ends and I don’t see you
As you are now, ever again?
A perfect halo of cold hair and lightning
Sets you off against the planets’ last dance.
Just for a minute the silver-forked sky
Lit you up like a star that I will follow.”
I found the songs to slowly shift us after that. The others picked at their food. They had adopted my strategy of slowly eating, since we were all making our supplies stretch to their thinnest and longest. I ate a bite here and there between tunes, until I was too tired to continue and they to listen.
*
I didn’t know how long I had been in the hospital. No more than a couple of days. But there came the day when the hourly nurse came in to check on me and found my fingertips and my toes were gently turning blue. The skin on my hands was mottled and mixed. My hands and feet were cold but the rest of my body felt flushed even if my skin was abnormally pale. When the nurse hollered down the hall then bent over me to fuss with my tubes and shake my shoulders, I barely roused. My eyelids sleepily gummed back and rolled up to look in her direction, but I was having a hard time making our eyes meet.
The doctors unhooked all my tubes and plugged me into new ones. They took me to Intensive Care and stationed a nurse and several more monitors nearby; one of those was meant to restore my blood pressure to a life-sustaining capacity. They stacked pillows beneath my legs and carefully settled me onto my seared back. The doctors ran a dozen more tests and then declared that my liver was failing.
Can you hear us? My friends asked. Hazily one of them reached for my hand but I never felt hers touch mine. I opened my eyes as best I could and she seemed to slide back and forth across my vision. My ability to think in straight or coherent lines seemed to have already been lost. I couldn’t even tell her I was sorry. I hated to cause anyone pain they didn’t deserve. They had never been anything but kind to me.
And now I was lost, wasn’t I?
*
The next morning felt just as gray as the last one, but I hummed a hopeful tune loud enough for them all to hear, and with the greatest resignation we began dividing up Bombur’s things. I took what supplies I could, and soon our packs were heavier than they had been the week—or weeks—before when we entered the forest. The belongings of four others had to be divided up as well, so they could carry Bombur. Despite the added weight of our packs we all agreed that Bombur was the most difficult load. Bombur did not have straps, nor was he an easy shape to tote along. No one asked me to take a turn helping to carry him, and it was just as well because I didn’t think I could be of any use there.
The third day away from the stream, I rose to don my pack and Oin stopped me with a quick grip on my arm. He’d stuck near me since we’d entered the forest. Before I could ask he pointed and said, “Your arm.” I craned back to look.
There was blood lightly trailing from a jagged, crescent-shaped break in the skin near my shoulder. “Oh,” I said quietly, and wished the blood hadn’t gotten into my tunic. I had lied about these returning injuries not hurting, but I was glad to pretend if it might lessen the upset they caused my companions. “I remember that one.” That had been my disrupting his sleep, at two in the morning, when I got home from work and tripped over his shoes. I rolled my shoulders and started forward again.
Oin renewed his grasp on my arm. “Mabyn, I need to cover it with something.”
“No you don’t,” I disagreed. “It’s shallow, and barely bleeding.” Oin opened his mouth and I whirled to look ahead for Thorin. “Thorin,” I called beseechingly. “I have a cut on my shoulder that I don’t think needs tending.”
“It’s bleeding into her tunic—” said Oin as Thorin made his way toward us.
“Not much,” I interrupted.
Oin tugged the wide collar of my tunic down on that side to see the location under discussion. “If it isn’t covered the threads from her tunic could get caught in the wound and fester.”
“They didn’t last time.”
“This isn’t last time.” Thorin passed through the remaining dwarves to stand at Oin’s side and see what I was fussing about.
“I’ll be fine.”
“Not if you get an infection.”
“But—”
“I’ve decided, Mabyn,” he said firmly. “You may be dying but the least we can do is see to it that you don’t die any faster.”
My lips were pursed but I sighed. “That’s fair.”
Thorin left, but he kept an eye on me as Oin used a special sap to layer a strip of linen over the cuts, just thick enough to keep any more blood from seeping out.
I sang most of that day, since I knew the dwarves approved of distractions in this place. I told a few stories too. When my voice began to wane I begged for and received stories told by the others, which I found enthralling. With this new practice of distracting ourselves from our surroundings we managed to lift ourselves and Bombur’s obnoxious weight and continue on even when we didn’t want to.
On the fourth day away from the river the aged trees began to turn into beeches. Since any change was a welcome one we weren’t at all displeased by this, for if the forest changed it could only improve. The faintest breeze was touching us now, even if the air felt colorless and flavorless. It was different, when all the past weeks had been nothing but the same and the one change had been terrible.
The other change disconcerted us though. On occasion we would spin about, hearing disjointed laughter. The voices themselves were melodious, but they were also otherworldly, and we hurried away from the places we heard them. I tried to sing over them when the laughter seemed to be following us, and sometimes my noise seemed to make theirs stop entirely, whoever they were.
We had left the river about a week behind us when we descended into a long valley and the beeches changed to sturdy oaks. I liked the look of the oak trees, even if they too still carried a semblance to darkness, but I tried to ignore that likeness, and continued singing.
“Is there no end to this accursed forest?” Thorin growled that afternoon. “Somebody must climb a tree and see if he can get his head above the roof and have a look round. The only way is to choose the tallest tree that overhangs the path.” Then he, and every other dwarf present, looked to Bilbo.
Bilbo quailed. “Me?”
“What about me?” I asked. I wasn’t entirely sure what Bilbo’s purpose was to the Company, though they clearly found him useful. I liked him as well, no doubt, but as he was the only hobbit here I had to suppress my curiosity. I was entirely too afraid of the dwarves’ final location to ask them of it.
Fili was the first to look my way, but then he had been the only one to see my tree-climbing thus far. “She could,” he attested, giving his earnest gaze to Thorin. “She climbed one of those huge firs at Beorn’s house without a pip of trouble.”
Thorin turned his dark eyes on me, unwilling to ask favors of someone who was only here by chance. “Can you do it?” he asked at last.
I nodded. “Without question. These trees will be even easier than the fir was, and I’m lighter than Bilbo.”
Thorin nodded. “Then go ahead.”
Kili helped me lower my bulky pack to the ground—I’d learned the worst way that doing it without help, as I had been, was a contributing factor to the pulled muscles in my back. As soon as the pack was on the ground Dwalin suggested a tree and I nodded, indicating that I could climb it, and took off my shoes. Fili took them so they wouldn’t be mislaid in the gloom, tucking them under his arm, as I stretched and warmed my hands for the ascent.
I got into the bottom branches easily. The oak bark didn’t allow me to grip it in the way I had the fir, and the tree was too wide to get my arms around, but Gloin cupped his hands and this time I accepted the assistance. I could have gotten into the lowest branches myself but why bother showing off when help was readily available? I swung myself over that lowest branch then vaulted into the next one. I was no longer directly over the path but I could still see it, which comforted me. Up and up I went, until the leaves obscured the ground much as they had previously obscured the sky. The branches grew more wobbly as I rose, and I had to pay more attention to them. Still, I had done this before, and at last, after circling the trunk at multiple levels to find it, I located the means to stick my head above the canopy: a broken off branch, one of the few that began to arc directly up, which allowed me to see through the other trees.
“How goes it?” shouted Thorin from below.
I ducked to shout back. “I’ll start back down in a minute!”
“What do you see?”
“Butterflies!” And I truly did. Never before had I seen butterflies that were completely black, with specks of clear skin hidden within their darkness, the better to go unnoticed in the watery shadows below. Up here I had to squint to see without being blinded, and the light wind was clean and sweet, and I wished in that moment that I could stay up there forever.
But the dwarves below expected me. So I rearranged my feet and began picking my way back down. Since it was more efficient, I arranged myself to hang from one branch and drop to the other. When they heard me descending in this way the dwarves began to worriedly mutter, but I was back on the ground and pulled onto the path in no time, so they didn’t have to worry long.
“What did you see?” Thorin hurriedly demanded, pushing through the others to stand before me.
“Not much,” I said ruefully. “We’re at the bottom of a valley, so I can only see as far as the edges. The forest could well end behind any of these hills but I can’t tell.”
The dwarves delved into their curses, miserable.
“But if I climb another one outside the valley I may see differently!” I reminded them. “It’s just a bad perspective from here.”
But we finished the last scraps of our food that night, and none of us felt quite well enough to be hopeful.
(pg108)
Last Edit: 22 December 2014