Disclaimer: Nothing belonging to the Tolkien Estate belongs to me.
The heroes are long gone now, the battle almost over. We are losing, I can tell, and I have only the faintest echo of hope to cling to. My mother, curled in my arms, long past sobbing. We must wait here in the caves, wait on the morrow and the carnage we will find in the light of the red and rising sun.
There shall be many to bury, if we live to see their bodies into the ground and do not litter the gaping earth with our own corpses. I can imagine it, taste the copper tang of blood and indeed I can even smell it on the air now. Perhaps some of it is blood of the men we knew. But I shall not think of that. I shall not.
All there is in the world is my mother and I, her head pillowed in my arms like a child. Situations reversed and fate in the hands of a young boy, as it always seems to come out.
Now I hear a roaring all through the battlefield. They are driving forward, forward toward the caves where we lie, the women and children and other boys like me, all breathless. I can feel the pounding, pounding of many feet, shod in cruel iron, rushing forward. There is no stopping them, only tense waiting.
My mother sings. She hopes to sing away the pain of tense eardrums and stretched stomachs and flesh crawling from the imagined fatal blow.
Oh, over the sunset and over the dawn
Oh over the land all so green,
Oh over the forest, the doe and the fawn
Over the pond where the swans preen,
Over the land, all of the land
we fly, we fly forever
hand in hand, hand in hand
and we come to a place where we shall stay for ever.
She sings it again and again, softly, in a voice broken by sobs and muffled in the dim heat of the makeshift tent.
I do not know what to do, so I hug her closer to me, her soft hair like a child's across my shoulder. That this is my mother hardly leaves my mind, but it seems different. Everything seems different, since They came.
And now They are coming closer, closer. My mother stops singing her song and whimpers, drawing in on herself as They approach. Footsteps boom out and then I feel her stiffen under my hand, for I can hear the sound of screams, too. The voice is familiar, young and reedy, and it rings out in helpless pain. My flesh is crawling now, for it is the voice of my brother Galder.
And then before I can say a soothing word, my mother has risen and started for the flap on the door of the shelter we have made here in the far back recesses of the caves, and she has ripped it down and rushed out and I see it, the wild animal look of her, and I know naught to do but follow. Perhaps I can save her. I hope you believe me when I say is the only thought on my mind, to save her. No thoughts of heroism, certainly. I was as frightened as anything but my family was falling around me like an avalanche of broken rocks, and I had to save her. My mother.
I am running through the fray, along the edges. There are bodies scattered all around and I cannot look but I follow her. And we come to my brother, my only brother left now. And he is fallen in a puddle of blood upon the field, fallen and still wearing a helm that looks ridiculously large and holding a huge sword and I cannot believe it until I see the Uruk-hai, one of Them, standing over him with a cruel grin. I am terrified, frozen where I stand, and he is coming toward me and I am so frightened and then my mother is there, and she has lifted a sword and come between us.
There is an instant when I could have dashed forward and taken the blow myself, but I hear a horn blowing. The tide of battle has turned and we are victorious!
But my mother has fallen, her efforts to save her son in vain. I cry out.
Mother, no! A strangled croak, all I can manage. I squeeze my eyes shut as the Uruk-hai raises his sword and wait for the blow to fall.
Nothing comes, and I see him now stretched dead at my feet. My father pulls his blade out of the Uruk's back. His face is gray with shock and horror as he takes in the bodies of my mother and Galder, and then he sees me and it is lit up again with life.
I am swept into his strong arms, there in the battlefield littered with dead.
