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Disclaimer: I do not own these characters. They are owned by Tolkien Enterprises, and I am not making a penny by writing this. However, the situations and story are copyright me.
He had been harsh enough with me when the four riders had freed the king's mind from its snare.
Now, with Orthanc in ruins at his feet, Saruman turned to me snarling.
My master had already beaten and bloodied me. Such treatment I was used to. But the look in his eye stirred fear in me all the same… a fear of death, or something worse.
"Master," I wheedled. "It was not my fault. Did you expect your poor servant to triumph over one such as Gandalf the Grey?"
"No." he intoned, advancing upon me as I cringed before him. "But with better support from you, I could most certainly have dealt with him myself."
"What more could I have done?" I whimpered, backing into an obsidian wall.
"You were not focused on the task at hand." He referred to my passion for, nay my obsession with, the White Lady of Rohan.
I fell on my knees before him.
"Forgive me, my lord." I wept. "I sought only and in all things, to serve you." They were ill-chosen words. Familiar at least to Saruman who had heard me speak them to Theoden at the end.
"You are a liar," Saruman denounced, "and a cringing coward. It is no wonder your own mother shoved you aside." I trembled, but looked up at him as he loomed over me.
"My mother?" I protested, "My mother died when I was but a child."
He laughed then and the sound caused my shriveled soul to shrink smaller.
You see, I remembered nothing of my mother. Try as I might, I could not look inward to the place where those memories lay.
Now I found that I did not desire to do so.
"Die?" he continued. "No she did not die. But she would rather have died than bring such a sorry thing as you to life." His words filled every margin of my mind, nearly blotting out my own thoughts. "You were more like a creature of the marshes than a child, a white writhing maggot she was forced each day to hold to her breast. Her milk dried within her before she could long continue that loathsome task."
I shook my head. Lies. These were a wizard's lies. But my whole being reeled with a new yet gnawingly familiar pain. It was like remembering in a dream that one has had this dream before, an unconscious familiarity with an event to which the conscious mind has long since broken ties.
And with a wrathful wizard's power Saruman reached past the stone walls built long ago by my own willful mind. Slowly I felt him begin to turn the key.
"My lord," I said desperately, my eyes shifting from his intensifying gaze. "Gandalf the Wizard is at your door. Will you not answer your enemy's call?"
"There is time." Saruman said darkly. "First, your reward for such faithful service."
"I need no reward, my master." My words ignored the heavy sarcasm in his voice, yet I wriggled like a worm on a hook. "To have served you in my own small way is enough."
Saruman raised his hands and drew my gaze forcibly back to his own. My eyes flew wide as his long fingered hand fell to my shoulder, gripping me hard as I stared through him transfixed…
And felt another white hand on my flesh.
I looked out at a time nearly forty years earlier, and watched the face of the beautiful woman who was my mother as she pushed me slowly under the water of my bath…
and held me there.
There was a look of such loathing on her fair face. What had I done, an innocent, to earn such hate?
I struggled against her tightening grip with all the strength a scrawny underweight four-year old child could muster.
Another part of me fought to free my mind from memory's equally insurmountable hold.
"It was my father she hated." I heard my weak voice protesting as I fought for my small life beneath the water, beneath the ultimate betrayal. "He was the cause."
"You were the product of a rape, it is true." The voice was a calm undercurrent in the thrashing violence of a past that did not falter before my eyes. "But she was not a cruel woman. She vowed to forgive you your father's sins. She loved her other children… your brothers, your sisters."
I heard the voice of my older sister even as I choked and darkness blurred my vision.
"Mama… mama!! Stop!"
I resurfaced with a gasp and faced Saruman, shaking with a cold unmatched by all of the cold days marking the many cold years of my chilled life.
"Son of Galmod." The wizard gloated. "You are the son of no man. None would lay claim to you, and your mother would have killed you… the pale thing clinging always to her skirts, an ugly reminder of an ugly sin. A sin," he added triumphantly. "You strove to the last to repeat."
"I never…" I protested in weak rebellion, clutching at my own arms as my body sought to cave in on itself.
Eowyn, my own Eowyn, I would not have forced that fate on she whom I most loved.
"Only because you lacked the courage," Saruman spat. I rocked myself as tears flowed from my eyes like the rivulets of water pouring off of the corpse-like figure of the small child who should have drowned.
The wizard wheeled from me to deal with more pressing problems.
Leaving me alone in the long dark of a memory revived from a place where it should have slept forever.
I survived my childhood only because my sister shoved me out the door. She would not have a murderess for a mother.
"Go away worm!" She had shouted, crying as only a child (or I) can cry. She had dropped me from the cart and into a roadside ditch. "Go and take your poison with you. You have ruined my family." She had been only seven when she'd selfishly saved my life to save her own.
In spite of their attempts to kill or crush me, I'd used my own wit, my own wiles to ascend to a position of which they in their thatched hut could never have dreamt.
I'd often thought of the comforts I could bring to my mother. If only she had she lived to see my great rise to power. I filled a portion of my daydreams with her imagined pride. But Saruman had loosed the blackness of the truth upon those fancies, drowning them as my mother had not succeeded in drowning me.
The triumphant sounds of the enemy drowning our city and our plans had no effect on me.
My mind was a thing now thoroughly broken.