With what was left over from our stores Siv made us sit down—Bofur tried to rise to make the toast and she planted her hands on his shoulders and pushed him back down—while she whirled together a rather spectacular meal of snacks and other bits and bobs. When I saw a spark set the crust of a bread slice on fire I stood too but Siv spun, pushed me back down, then twirled the grate out of the hearth and blew out the spark before it had the chance to do more than whimper its name.
I decided I wanted to be as competent as her when I grew up.
Of course as soon as we were done with that meal she took off for more food and company from her house so she could feed us all supper as we began putting together what Bofur wanted from his house. Bofur sent a dwarf-girl into town with an order for a wagon to be delivered by the end of the day, then he showed me around the house as Siv came back with two heavy baskets—one over each arm—and began pointing out and describing things he wanted to bring.
Only about a minute behind Siv was one of her two sons, Dolin, carrying a pot of a massive size Bofur apparently didn’t have, and two minutes after him came another, Dofin, with a variety of cooking utensils serving the same purpose. Dolin was older than I but not quite an adult I’d guess, since I still couldn’t follow dwarf ages, and Dofin was perhaps a little younger than I. They readily introduced themselves to me, and asked me, just like their mother, what was wrong with me to make me so emaciated. I cheerfully explained as I had to Siv, they nodded just as she had, and they too returned to the task at hand. I decided I liked them.
We then commenced first bringing to the center of each room that which Bofur decided he wanted to keep from it, including furniture, paintings both in the frame and out (there weren’t many of these), mementos, a few wooden figurines he said his father had carved, and a few stone ones from his grandfather.
“Let me take that for you, lass,” said Dolin, lifting the only large framed picture—of Erebor in the fall—from where I’d propped it between my hands and leaned it against my chest. He took it and lowered it against a small desk with far too many drawers than a sane soul would know what to do with. Just a few minutes later Dofin took a wide nightstand—also with drawers, which were the hardest part of the carrying endeavor—and set it in the middle for me. After this happened twice from both of them when I carried anything more cumbersome than a candlestick I caught Bofur before he went back inside after haggling with the wagon-seller and demanded to know why I wasn’t permitted to carry things.
Bofur heaved a mountainous sigh. “Lass, it’s got nothing to do with you, really. Well I suppose it’s a little to do with you. You do look—how was it Siv said it—well how she said it wasn’t necessarily the most kindly way either.”
I closed my eyes. “Bofur.”
He sighed again. “Lass, you don’t look healthy by our standards, not entirely. I mean look at the lot of us! Have you ever met a dwarf of your, well, horizontally diminished proportions.”
My fists flew to land on my hips. “Bofur I am perfectly healthy! I’ve even rounded out a bit after getting sick at the end of last fall.”
“Yes but to us you just don’t look right!” he cajolingly insisted. “It’s two different cultures, I get that, but you’ve just got to understand that you look rather, well, delicate. And you’re a girl, and most lads will be in the habit of doing things for you anyway.”
I threw my head back and groaned. “I understand. Is there any way to cure them of this? I’ll go mad.”
Less than three minutes later I was in the rafters loosening the screws for the blue lamp Bofur wanted. He had gone to find a ladder and I, to save time and so he wouldn’t have to find two, was getting the work started for him. I’d found a pair of chisels in a drawer somewhere and used them to pinch the heads of the knuts securing the chandelier.
When Dolin and Dofin came through the living room from the bedroom carrying a wardrobe between them Dofin was so startled to see me in the rafters he dropped his end of the wardrobe and his brother cursed in Dwarvish from behind him. “What’re you on about?” Dolin complained. “You can’t go about dropping furniture at random.”
“Look at her!” Dofin said over him, pointing. The pair of them stared up at me, open-mouthed, and I cheerily, impertinently waved.
“You two weren’t letting me do anything useful, so I found something to do that you can’t take away from me.”
They continued staring.
“Look,” I said, at my most reasonable, “I appreciate your courtesy in not wanting me to overwork myself, but I assure you I am very healthy now, and accustomed to doing things for myself. If I can’t be helpful I’ll be unhelpful. Please don’t make me be unhelpful.”
Dolin and Dofin nodded in a rather stunned sort of manner.
I seemed to affect members of this family in a fairly predictable way.
Bofur returned with the ladder hooked over his shoulder and only paused and shook his head when he saw me. Siv’s sons had whipped their heads around to see Bofur’s reaction to my escapade, but Bofur only shook his head with a grin. “You’ll get used to it,” he quipped to the boys. “Now help me position this.” They helped him get the ladder up and underneath the loosened lamp I was spotting and Bofur clambered up. “Can you unscrew them the rest of the way? Don’t lean too far.”
“I’ve got this,” I assured him. “Take the weight of it for a minute.” Swiftly I unscrewed the two bolts on my side, then, to the paired gasps of the boys below, jumped the gap between this rafter and the next so I could remove the other two bolts without leaning out any further. I kept a tight grasp on the chain. “You’ve got it?”
“Aye.”
“I’ve got the bolts and can hold the chain a little ways.”
Bofur, balancing the lamp in his fingers, began his way down with one hand while I kept the chain from dropping down onto either him or the glass of the lantern. Dolin rushed forth and took the chain from me as soon as he could, catching it so it wouldn’t clatter down on anything. I dropped him the knuts and bolts as well then clambered right down the wall and thumped to the rug with a smile. Patting Dolin twice on the arm I said, “Thanks chap,” and took the knuts and bolts back from his still-open palm.
“I think you may have frightened them,” Bofur slyly told me in a spare moment before Siv called us for supper. Her husband was on his way over too, bringing a few bottles—or armfuls, probably—of seasoned ale from their house.
“I have not,” I retorted, retying the end of my braid because it had begun to fray.
“Have too,” he shot back, utterly nonplussed. “completely shaken their worldviews.”
“Then their worldviews were obviously too narrow.”
“They’re just not accustomed to strange people like you.”
“Well they’ll have to be until we leave, I’ll not put up with all the nonsense they were pulling.”
“You’d best get used to it, lass,” he lightly chastised me. “All sorts of dwarf-lads and dwarf-men are going to be doing it. It may not be how you were raised but it’s how we were, and it’ll be far easier to change the one of you than the hundreds of us you’ll be seeing on a daily basis.”
“Well yes but, but—it’s so wasteful! Why should they do something for me I can very easily do for myself? How would you feel if you were carrying a jug of ale from one table to the next and I bounced right up and took it from you. It’s distrustful, is how it is. Or feels.”
“Just feels,” he assured me with a brisk nod, suppressing far more of his amusement than he allowed me to see. “I suppose I can see your point a bit. Think of it as a courtesy and try to get over it.”
I grumbled to myself and kicked a doorjamb.
“Supper!” Siv hollered, and I heard her sons coming out of the bedroom behind the living room. I followed Bofur into the kitchen where Siv had stacked six large wooden bowls on the counter beside the pot she’d had brewing in the hearth. She told the four of us to sit at the table, which she did, and began sliding over the bowls once she’d filled them.
“Spoon?” I asked.
“Coming, lass,” said Siv, tossing those out too. “Dotar should be here soon. Ah here he is.”
Dotar arrived with the armful of ale and set it out on the counter, passing out mugs to each of us. Despite having been drunk or mildly drunk on four occasions—two of which having been entirely conducted in the dwarves’ presence—Bofur mixed my ale with water, which I didn’t mind for multiple reasons. I didn’t care for the taste of ale on its own, nor did I truly intend to drink it for any other reason than it was in front of me and I was thirsty. I’d have been happy with plain water too. But I suspected dwarves considered plain water a crying shame, so I kept my smile tucked firmly in cheek and settled into my bowl of stew.
Siv was eyeing me with satisfaction as she squeezed in between a son and her husband. “Been a long time since I’ve seen someone paying such gracious attention to something I’ve made.”
I chuckled and flashed her a grin. “If it isn’t still moving I’ll still eat it.”
She snorted. “Where were you when these two were in their picky stage?” She gestured toward her boys. “Could have taught them a thing about minding their manners and not asking for something else.”
“My friend’s mother was very generous when it came to suppers at her house,” I supplied. “She said there were always two choices: take it or leave it.”
The entire table guffawed, and I sighed happily into the steam of the hot stew bathing my face. There were no better comforts in this world or any other than hot food. This was why on the hottest days my appetite tended to flee to the shadows, not that I was accustomed to hot food anyway. The stove at my father’s house hadn’t always sparked, and it being a gas stove it had made me very nervous.
That and the stove was about level with my eyes.
A few minutes ago Siv had caught Dotar for a few seconds and muttered something in his ear before he sat while she thought I was talking to Bofur, so I suspected that was why he was able to regard me so casually when the three other members of his family had all gaped at the sight of me. “So Mabyn,” he said then, “how do you find the Mountain?”
“Under the dust it’s gorgeous and even with the dust it’s more impressive than anything else I’ve seen.”
All the dwarves smiled at my praise of Erebor.
“Why walk all this way to the Blue Mountains if you have a place to stay there?”
I appreciated the habitual bluntness of dwarves. “Because I wanted to see Bilbo off—he’s a friend of ours—and I like to travel.”
“That’s a lot of traveling.”
“Yes and maybe I’m finicky and didn’t want to spend the last six months—however long it’s been—cleaning.”
They chuckled.
Bofur and I only spent two days in his house, and most of that time honestly was spent catching up with his neighbors, some of whom would be leaving a week or two behind us for their own migration, as we packed up most of the belongings he meant to save within the first day. The rest, he told Siv, she was welcome to have or to sell, as she saw fit. A small measure of his thanks for her having looked after his house for a year. We then hitched our two sturdy ponies up to the wagon—it didn’t carry much of anything too heavy, and at least one of us was usually walking. Since the ponies followed us so well we often didn’t have to lead them much, just keep a light hand on their reins from ahead of them and they amiably followed. I rather liked our ponies. We’d have little use for them in Erebor though, so I didn’t know what we’d do with them then when we got home. But they’d go to happy owners, I was sure.
We were the first ones back to our predetermined meeting place for the return journey. Dwalin and his wagon were next, followed by Gloin and his family. I was sad to see Dwalin traveling alone, when Bofur now had someone to call his family, in a way, and Gloin had a full family. I wondered how many dwarf-men lived their entire lives alone, with so few of the dwarf-children born being females. Reminded of my friendly, melancholy conversation with Fili I felt as though a stone had dropped into my chest, but I was getting marginally better at holding it in different ways so I wouldn’t get too tired. Either way, Dwalin didn’t appear to be pining. Perhaps I’d ask Bofur how the dwarf-men felt about there being so few dwarf-women someday. He may think it was a conversation for a maturer me. Or at least older.
I was more nervous meeting Gloin’s family than I had been Bofur’s neighbors, since it appeared unlikely I would ever again meet Bofur’s neighbors, and being close to Gloin it was very likely I’d continue to see his family. That and I held in my mind a strange vision I wanted to fill, for kicks and giggles, with ideas of what my life would have held if I’d been Gloin’s daughter instead of Bofur’s.
Gloin’s family consisted of Freda, his wife; Gimli, his eldest son; Fraeg, his daughter; and Gloni, his younger son. The moment she saw me Freda dug a sweetroll stuffed with bits of fruit out of the covered basket she had beside her and tossed it to me. “Here, lass. You look like the sort who’s always hungry. Mabyn, am I right?” She tugged their ponies to a stop and tied off the reins somewhere on the wagon bench.
I caught the roll—barely (Gloin’s sons hid smiles)—and nodded. “Yes, Ma’am. Shall I call you Gloin’s Wife or is there something else?”
Freda cackled with laughter, slapping the tops of her thighs and climbed down from the wagon. “You may call me Freda, pert mistress Mabyn. These are our sons Gimli and Gloni, and our daughter Fraeg.”
I picked at the roll I’d been given and waved cheerily at them. They may have been looking a bit oddly at me, on account of the fact that I was balancing on one of the tall rungs that held the canvas over the wagon, but Gloin must have gossiped a bit while packing up house, because they didn’t necessarily seem surprised. All three children—though Fraeg and Gimli looked more like adults to me—removed their bright hoods and waved them about their knees in a proper dwarven bow. I patted my head once and flourished my hand as though taking off my own hood and bowed, feet merrily kicking. “Where’s Gloin?”
“Oh, we dropped something out of the back about a league past,” said Freda, planting her fists on her knees and grinning at Dwalin as he strode over to greet her—clearly they were old friends too. “He’ll be along in a moment. Master Dwalin, you old pickler, come here!”
“That fool cousin of mine still treating you right, Freda?” Dwalin wanted to know, stooping a bit to embrace her. “I’ll steal you if he is.”
“Oh no you will not!” puffed Gloin, catching up at a trot, a tied box under his arm. He threw the box back into the wagon and slapped Dwalin heartily on the shoulder. “Introductions already been made?” he asked, looking between me and his children. In a lull Freda had introduced them to Bofur, and the three were already deep in conversation with him.
“Didn’t waste a minute,” I assured him.
I only noticed that Greenly had edged cautiously out from underneath the shadow of the wagon because Gloni had strung an arrow on his short bow and drawn the string back, pointing down below me. Without a pause I pushed off the top of the wagon and thumped to the ground in front of him, making him loosen his grip in an instant and Greenly to scatter behind the farthest wheel.
“What are you on about?” he demanded, fairly startled by me jumping in front of his loaded bow.
“That’s my pet rabbit,” I said. “Please don’t shoot her. I’m sorry, I should have warned you.”
Gloni, Gimli, Freda and Fraeg stared at me a moment, then looked over their shoulders to stare at Gloin.
Gloin spread his hands and lifted his shoulders. “What? She raised it, she has the right to call it hers.”
“I’m more concerned about the fact that she jumped in front of a loaded bow, Gloin,” Freda pointedly said. “Bofur, what have you been teaching her?”
Bofur and Dwalin had lit their pipes and were talking over by the ponies. At the sound of his name Bofur raised his head. “What? Nothing, I haven’t had her long enough to discover all the bad habits.”
Suppressing a smile that was entirely inappropriate here I twisted and slid through the grass underneath the wagon, whistling faintly with my arms outstretched. Greenly tentatively poked out from behind the very protective wagon wheel and came to me, and I hauled her out and sat her in my lap so the others would see her. If they recognized her they were less likely to try to eat her. “I’m sorry,” I apologized. “I won’t do it again.”
Freda put her fists on her hips again. “And how can we guarantee that?”
I grinned brightly this time. “Because now that Gloni and Gimli have seen her they won’t try to shoot her anymore. And unless you and Fraeg have mad hunting skills I needn’t worry about you either.”
“Insanity strolls in her family,” called Bofur from where he was chatting with Dwalin. “Take everything she says with a drop of ale.”
Freda gave him a look, then gave her husband a different look. “I’m beginning to think we got off lucky, my love.” Something mischievous twinkled in her brown eyes and I beamed.
Fraeg, I later learned, was about my age. When she saw all the grass and tangle in my hair later that day after we’d gotten over the initial shocks presented when we met each other she whistled in sympathy. “I’ve got a wide-toothed comb that will help you tame some of that,” she offered. “Don’t you usually braid it?”
“I try to, but I haven’t had the opportunity to learn how most dwarves style their hair yet so admittedly I’m still a bit of a bumble at it.” The elves’ interlocking and weaving braids came more easily to me, but then I had seen plenty more of them. I’d spent very little time with other dwarf-women. We had begun the next stretch of our journey—to Bilbo’s house for a visit—so Fraeg was sitting next to her mother on the wagon and I was walking beside them.
Fraeg rummaged in her belt purse. “Well come here, I’ll help get the knots out and show you one of the easier styles. You’ve got awfully long hair so I’m not sure how it’ll work though.”
I hopped up by stepping on one of the spokes on the back half of the wheel, which lifted me up to the seat in a trice, though I startled Fraeg. We saw at once that there was a certain shortage of room on the bench, so I sat on the footboard with my legs dangling off and Fraeg maintained her seat on the bench behind me.
“Don’t you be falling off now,” Freda warned me. “With the wrong luck one of the wheels will catch you and snap a foot right off.”
“I’ll be careful,” I said; she nodded.
“Gloin says you can be mature for your age,” she said as a way to both assure herself that I wasn’t ignoring her advice and to ask me where that maturity had been when we’d been introduced.
“It comes from my family’s situation from Aetna,” I said, speaking on the assumption that Gloin had filled them in on my past as I’d filled the Company in months ago. “Did Gloin tell you about it?”
She made a small gesture. “The general toast of it. A true pity.”
“Well, looking after myself from a young age is the most of it,” I said. “To be quite honest, I’m the only dwarf-child I’ve ever known until today. Most of the people I’ve ever interacted with have been adults, of various races.”
I knew without looking that her eyes had widened. “Well. That’ll do it.”
“I hope you don’t mind my seeming rather flighty for the moment—I’m enjoying a belated childhood.”
“Well in that case more power to Bofur.” She grunted. “I’m beyond the age when I want any more young children in my house.”
I laughed. “Well I’ll try to keep the worst of my childishness at Bofur’s house then.”
“Good lass. Though if you bring Bofur with you to ours it may be enjoyable to watch him trying to figure out how to get you back in line. I’d imagine this is quite a novel experience for him.”
“It’s had its moments,” I said with a passing grimace. “But for the most part we see eye-to-eye, so that helps. And as childish as I may act I still make most decisions with my adult brain in the forefront.”
“Are your parents part of the reason you haven’t got a proper beard?” Gimli asked from where he’d dropped back to walk with us. Freda snapped his name in admonishment and Gimli only shrugged. “I was curious.”
“Far be it from me to rebuke you for curiosity,” I replied. “And yes, they are. A combination of less food than was healthy early in my life, and a mother who may or may not have imbibed of too many drinks when she was carrying.”
Freda shook her head. “Oh, that just sets my bones to scorching, that does. A woman’s first duty is to her children. Not even her husband or her parents come before her children.”
Fraeg’s hands and comb in my hair was very soothing and I hummed. “I agree, however I survived, so that’s that.”
“Do you know where your mother is now?”
“Dead.” Something niggled at the back of my memory, poked at it like a seedling trying to wrest free of its shell but trapped by a fallen tree. There were two answers to this question….but the one that came immediately to my tongue wasn’t the one that settled properly in my mind. Unable to come to rest with this discordance I shook it off and decided to ignore it.
“And your father is still alive?”
“I don’t know.” And don’t care. More or less. To Gimli and to change the subject, I said, “Gloin called you stubborn.”
Gimli smiled behind his bushy, auburn beard. “That may well be an understatement.” I think I heard Freda snort, but she was on my bad side. I could only mostly hear her because she was sitting so close and there weren’t many other sounds to distract me.
“He also called you small.”
“Well there he went wrong, didn’t he?”
I chuckled. Freda said something I didn’t quite catch this time and I turned. “I’m sorry, say again? I’m hard of hearing on this side.”
“I said Gimli was born broad and hasn’t been small a day in his life.”
I laughed. “Oh you poor thing!”
“I’m glad he mostly looks after himself these days.”
“Do you have your own house, Gimli?”
“Aye I do.”
I nodded. Good to know. It would take me ages to be able to convert dwarf-ages to something I was used to without thinking about it.
“Did you truly climb a solid rock face in the goblins’ lair?” he wanted to know then.
I nodded again. “Yup.”
“And the stone curtain at the front of the Mountain?”
“On multiple occasions.”
He chortled. “That I’d have to see to believe.”
“Carry my things to Bofur’s house when we get there and you will,” I offered. “I’m not carrying them while climbing.”
He shook his head, still not sure if he could believe what his father had apparently told him about me. At least not all of it.
“What else did he say?” I asked. “Since we’re on the topic of what Gloin gossips about.” Freda and Fraeg laughed. Fraeg began taking up different locks of my hair to braid them.
“He said not to be surprised if we notice any strange habits.”
“Well I do have a few of those. What else? Don’t spare my feelings, I think this is fun.”
“He says you sing a variety of peculiar songs.”
“I do have a lot of those tucked under my collar.”
“Will we get to hear any?”
I smiled. “So curious. Got any requests?”
At Gimli’s baffled expression Dwalin called over, “She wants you to give her a topic, lad. She’s tired of coming up with the songs on her own.”
Gimli fumbled. “Travel,” he said at last. “Got any good travelling songs?”
I pursed my lips. “Dwalin how odd should it be? Or should I go easy on him and bring out one more likely to sound familiar?”
“Best ease him into it, lass,” he advised. “Don’t want to traumatize him too early. Not if Gloin and Bofur want to continue socializing in the future. Family playdates and everything.”
“Oh tosh. Playdates.” I took a breath.
“Sometimes I feel the uncertainty stinging clear
And I can’t help but ask myself how much I’ll let the fear take the reins and steer
It’s driven me before, it seems to have a vague
Haunting mass appeal
Lately I’m beginning to find that I should be the one behind the reins
Whatever tomorrow brings, I’ll be there
With open arms and open eyes, yeah
Whatever tomorrow brings, I’ll be there, I’ll be there.”
“I’m not sure how familiar that was supposed to be but familiar to me it certainly was not,” Gimli declared.
“I’m sorry!” I exclaimed through my laughter. “Hold on, hold on, I’ll find another one.”
I didn’t sing much that day because I wanted to talk and listen to the others talk, to get to know them, not make them feel like they ought to be attentively listening to me when certain members of our group ought to know better by now. But it was the uncertain ones I wanted to know better myself, so I withheld singing too much.
(pg136)
>> I reached a thousand views overnight so I shall take a moment to say thank you very much, this story and your responses to it have made my season thus far. As ever, if you have any questions/corrections or other things you feel the burrowing desire to say, message me or comment somewhere, and I'll do my best to satisfy as needed. Thank you!
Last Edit: 22 December 2014