JMJ
TWO
(Excerpt from Ori's writing while living and working in Bree)
We could not get out. We barred the door to Mazarbul with everything we had. We were forced to lock ourselves in, prolonging the inevitable end. Once everything had been pressed against the door, we could only wait. I wrote.
Furiously I wrote, though at I knew no one would ever read of our account. No one, only goblins and orcs would ever have Moria again. Gone was Khazad-dûm. Only Moria would forever remain. Never would a Dwarf delve for its lost gleaming treasures of our long-past fathers, a treasure still taunting us even then at the back of our minds. Anyone else who dared enter this chasm of darkness would die before reaching this chamber.
Silence.
The drums stopped.
No one dared to speak. We had no leader any longer, no one to give out commands. We would simply fight as we would when the time came.
Then the bang of the door.
I clamped the book shut as everyone else readied themselves.
Another pause.
I put the book down with care; my eyes remained fixed on the door alone.
I must admit that I had never been as good a fighter as most Dwarves. Dori told me once or twice that I spent just a little too much time in the books with the pen and the inkwell and the paints. He did not say it often, for he had been the one that had introduced these things to me. Though, I had long overreached his interest in the arts. For me it had turned into a passion. And yes, I thought of that as I stared at that door.
A memory of that fine day when paint had been brought my way by Dori long before I had been battle-ready came also to my mind. He had showed me with a frank whisk of his hand, the tidy, solid strokes of the brush over parchment, wood, and stone …
"Now give it a try," he said handing me the brush.
Dori is not the most patient teacher in the world. He tries to be at the beginning of a given lesson but patience wears thin fast. Before one knows it he has taken over the whole project and seems to have forgotten there was a lesson, but this time he smiled.
"There! See? You have a natural knack for it."
I did not think so.
The stroke did not look at all as straight and orderly as Dori's. Painting was not the same as writing with a pen or carving with a knife or pick. Maneuvering the brush seemed to me guiding an uneven pulley. Dori did not even need a sharp edge to keep the edges of a paint job clean and straight. But when I told him this, he simply stated that it would make it all the better for me thinking that way in the long run.
"It'll make you practice for perfection," he said in his practical way …
That memory was, I think, a foretaste of the moment when my life would flash before my eyes, but I awoke before anything further could pass over my mind at that moment.
"At least you and Nori aren't here," I murmured under my beard.
The pen may be mightier than the sword in many cases, but I could not say this was one of them. Perhaps, just perhaps, it was my lack of skill that saved me. As ironic as that is I think it may be the only reason save that fate or luck had been with me that day. Curse some would say, that I would live, the only survivor.
It all happened so fast after the door flung wide. In they came like an army of giant locusts: senseless, uncontrollable things, which always had the lower hand in a fair-sided battle, but we were the beetle in the anthill this time.
Weapons clanked, and roars were shouted. Instinct had taken over by then. I fought as hard as I could without any thought but to survive in the most carnal of basic being. Men have made us symbols of death and war* among the many other philosophical ideas they place upon us. In some ways befitting, for we more often die untimely in battle than live to ripe old age especially of late. Now I was to be numbered among them even more untimely than was usual, for I was still young as far as Dwarves are concerned.
I started out rather behind the others and I did not get a chance to get at any enemy before one shot me with an arrow. I did not even feel it at first save for the vibration as I caught my balance. Adrenaline and heat of the fight boiled too strong for that. It was fuel for the furnace rather, and it had struck nothing vital but my leg, the side of my shin, one of the few places that was not protected by a guard pad or by our beloved mail of mithril for which we had sold our lives.
Leaping at our adversaries I brandished that axe like the sword of noble legend, or more properly the mighty Axe of Durin, which had not been anyone's now to wield as it had been buried with Balin, the Lord of Moria. I knocked two ugly wretches back as I aimed for the head of the one who had shot me — then a great sweep and a knock!
It seemed to come from nowhere, as it descended upon me. The hammer of their pet troll launched me like a boulder in a catapult. I did not know hardly what had happened when I was hit, for as landed I lost all consciousness amidst stone and shadow outside the chamber door.
It was as if someone had suddenly snuffed out a candle when I opened my eyes again. A profound stillness hung in the darkness surrounding me as though I was a ghost awoken in an age beyond my life's end. At first I did not know what had happened, nor did I care. The shock of being able to come to my senses left me frozen for some time. I stared out above me at the blackness, listening to the stillness through the ringing in my ears left over from the blow.
It crossed my mind that I may be dead but had not had the strength and good merit in life to have deserved a proper merging into a peaceful afterlife, but of course such thought was the folly of a besieged mind. The afterlife could not be anything like this with my heart still pounding and my breath gasping; I could feel the pain of the hammer to my chest, the pounding of my head having collided with the pillar of stone outside the chamber of Mazarbul (for I had been unable to get myself a helmet by the time we had been trapped in the chamber), and the arrow still lodged in my leg just above my boot-line along with the other cuts, scrapes, and smaller wounds that I could not account for.
Why had they not killed me?
Reaching down I placed my hands around the arrow and pulled as fast and as hard as I could. The impact caused me to fall over with nausea. Once the feeling lessened, I threw the arrow aside and bound the wound as well as I could with a strap from my coat around my waist.
I thought for sure they would have smelt that life still flowed within my unconscious body had they seen me lying there and would have mutilated me, but here I was, and though it was with much effort, I could still stand. A wave of dizziness passed through, and I felt consciousness begin to slip again, but I forced myself steady with a hand upon the pillar, I forced my eyes open.
I must have been too hidden in this corner to be noticed.
That explained my predicament.
But what about …?
"The others," I whispered in a tone lost in the darkness.
I shook my head.
Could I dare hope that anyone else had survived? To look inside the chamber of Mazarbul filled me with such a dread, but I had to. I had to see for myself. Had anyone else survived?
A rage and a hatred filled me starting in the back of my mind and building. I hated goblins. I hated orcs. I hated trolls. Everyone does, but such a hatred I had never felt before surged through me then as I knocked some dead goblin away from the doorway to see what had happened inside.
Hatred had been held back as I staggered back in my dismay. The smell of death and blood was strong and mixed with the remnants of torch fire having burned wood, clothe, and flesh. Besides that, that complete stillness, the ill-omened stillness, not a sound even the most distant seemed to tell what I sought to know. Yet a single candle still managed to burn in a far corner of the room, a small remnant that remained while all other candles had been snuffed. It had almost reached the end of its course now and was half hidden in its stem and holder. I suppose, a Man would not have been able to see much of anything by that light, but Dwarves are used to darkness and the flickering of candlelight and can make out shapes in the gloomiest of spaces with minimal light source.
Not one survived that last stand of Dwarves in Moria but me.
With an angry shake and the clenching of my fists, I kicked a dead goblin, and with a roar began to pull it in rage out of the chamber. It had no right to be there among my people — desecrating their place of rest. First one goblin, then another, I wrenched them out of the chamber with all the strength I could muster and ignored the throbbing pain in my head and in my leg. I was in the process of dragging out a third of those revolting creatures, but the stillness had suddenly been broken, my solitary motion in the death-gripped mountains had been joined by the movement of another.
Something else alive was not far away …
I held my breath and listened.
A vile, heavy, harrowing sound as if Moria itself breathed out the winds of its cursed bowels from deep within the mines shook me in my smallness against its looming greatness. I could see nothing outside the chamber, but it seemed to be as though the empty hall became a little warmer and not at all in a comforting sort of way.
In the long, dim silence I waited with the goblin's scruff still in my hands just outside the doorway, and I recalled something Balin had said about Dain's fears of returning to Khazad-dûm. "A curse, he said. We've all heard of it before, a darkness said of old entices evil things to dwell and thrive here, and that is what Dain always believed and always feared." Those had been his words when our misfortunes began to curdle our previous luck from bad to worse.
I had heard rumors of it before that. Everyone had, though it was usually so vague. Elves may be the reason it had never been entirely forgotten; some, we would say, would keep anything to say against us or to prove that we were a rash and senseless race, but no Dwarf in his right mind wants to hear or say anything bad about the line of Durin, especially those connected with the line itself as I and most I knew were. Certainly no Dwarf even insane wants to hear about the consequences of greed or about how too much of even a good thing can become an obsession, treasures included. Thus it remained always a distant shadow and nothing specifically spoken of until no one knew what to make of it but a blurred nightmare that children may have on a night too quiet: Durin's Bane.
I knew more about it than many other Dwarves but Dain knew more, and what he knew he never said. What I know could only be accounted for because of my time spent with nose in books and of those no more than a few mentions and comparisons in a tale or ballad, but like Balin I too considered it no more than a tale, something of the ancient past that had nothing to do with the present. I would not have gone had I believed it.
The hottest furnace heat, a something of terrible power, an embodiment of volcanic might from the very center of the earth. Perhaps Moria itself was indeed a living thing and had no desire for Dwarves or otherwise to clank upon its body year after year and would see that none inhabited its tunnels but that which would do nothing other than guard it from anything of order and balance, and good for that matter. An evil essence. That might explain our ill luck of having everything against us at our moment of need. The water's rising for the Watcher's pleasure at the Westgate, the back door a refuge for all things foul, our inability to prevent being caught unaware when they shot Balin down unarmed.
Though all my hair stood on end now and a chill took my heart and slithered down my spine, I went forward rather than back as under some curse or spell of enchantment. I tripped over a fallen, blunt goblin blade in the dark, and its clanking brought me to my senses as I looked around in terror. I feared the sound would draw that vile essence closer to me, as if my yelling and dragging goblins about would not have done that already.
Pressing my back up against the wall I squinted toward the deep, wicked breath, which again wafting through the hall enough to feel the hot air through my hair.
Then I saw the faintest color. The fiery light looked like the remaining glow of a red-hot poker at the bottom of a murky pool of water, save that the more I stared the more it seemed to grow into a distant red mist getting larger and larger.
The air became hotter still, fouler, and a terror struck me powerfully enough to force me into a run. I bolted west with no thought but to not have to face what had been the death of so much of my race, the destroyer of the magnificent Khazad-dûm that chased my ancestors from our mighty city founded by Durin himself and ending under Durin VI and Nain his son.
After a time I dared a glance behind me. I did not see the glow anymore nor the nightmarish sounds of his approach. Yet I dared not stop, for I heard a far more tangible sound of clanking in the distance. Goblins may have heard my careless noise not long before, and some may have been sent to investigate. I ran faster, but the sounds came closer. I ducked into a side corridor as quiet as I could and leapt behind the smashed remains of a stone table in a small, now forgotten chamber.
I closed my eyes and waited. My wounds began to throb now. All I could do was listen and wait. Yes, there were goblins about. I could hear their racket and their rummaging. They croaked and cackled in their idiotic way. There was only three or four of them I guessed from my position. A strong urge to kill them crept over me, and though I had no weapon on me, I felt ready to fight them with my bear hands. I even got to my feet again, but here is when I stopped.
The fatigue stopped me. I needed the strength I had left to try and get out, if there was even the smallest hope of that. If I survived the days ahead to the Westgate was it too much to hope that the water had gone down and the Watcher receded with it?
I sat back down and waited. For now I would have to ignore all urgings for vain vengeance that my agonized heart roared for. I was getting so tired of waiting, waiting, waiting for the fate of life or death.
The noises of the goblins rose and fell, drew closer and withdrew. They seemed to grow tired of their search, and I could hear enough to make out one complain that it had all been so-and-so's imagination and that no Dwarf could be living still after that final onslaught. For a moment I felt the satisfaction of being the living proof that they were wrong even if they could never know it if this truth was to remain a reality. Their clamor died away a final time, and I remained motionless a long while.
Though it proved more difficult than ever, I pulled myself to my feet. Creeping out of the chamber and down the corridor, I peered again toward the west and my only meager chance of escape. Determination that I could wait no more drove me onward, and onward I went not knowing how much time passed and much of the time in near sightlessness.
There was a storeroom we had been using in the middle somewhere, and I knew if I could find it I would get enough nourishment to last me until I could reach the Westgate. I found it after what I think may have been two days, though just barely for I missed it for a time and had to backtrack. I reached for the light after closing the door behind me, and found to my relief that flint stone still remained by that lamp. After lighting it and blinking back the brightness of the flame from my being so long in darkness, I scanned the area.
It looked like goblins had already been snooping around in here, Orcs too most likely. Though their taste for normal food would be minimal, the dried meat had been entirely pilfered and many containers of anything else had been thrown about. Broken glass and dented metal lay everywhere, and I made my way about careful not to make a sound. I found some bread, though a little old and left uncovered, and a half rind of cheese that had been untouched since Dwarves last sliced at it. I took these greedily and ate with a sudden ravenousness that I had not known existed until now. I found also not long afterwards an unbroken bottle of brandy.
I drank, choking in my eagerness, though remembered to unbind my wound and pour some on where the arrow had struck so as to clean it a little. With a bread cloth, I rewrapped it, and found something with which to carry some bread, cheese and jam as well as ale to pack which I also managed to find in undamaged casing.
Though strengthened immensely after my meal I rested for a time, snuffed out the light and slept hidden behind a few shelves. I would not to be caught unaware by anything that may enter the mess of a room. Then as fully reinforced as I could be, I set forth again in a little better state of mind. So on into the darkness I crept, for I would not dare a light that would draw attention to me. I felt along the walls and tried my best to remember which way to the Westgate. As far as I knew I could reach it well enough, but as days seemed to creep by and my meager food supply ran out with the gate nowhere in sight, I began to feel that I had lost myself somewhere.
Sitting down in an empty, ancient hall I tried to think what to do next.
It was far too late to go back, aside from the danger of running into Durin's Bane once again. My wounds were not healing well either, and though I could force myself onward for some time longer, without food to keep up my strength I knew I would not make it for long. It occurred to me to backtrack just a little, and see if perhaps I missed a hall or corridor, but I did not know in the least where I was anymore. I had for the longest time had a map of Khazad-dûm in the back of my mind and where I was on it at a certain given time, but that had been lost now.
With a heavy sigh I decided to go on just a little longer in the direction I headed, and if I could still not figure out where I was I would go back and see if another route would prove better. Getting up slowly with only the remains of the jam at the bottom of the jar to keep me going I gathered enough courage to go on.
A sound.
I stopped.
Something moved in the darkness. A rock moved, a scuffle sounded. I held my breath and listened, and as I turned I could see the glow of torchlight above me.
Did the goblins know of my presence on the corridor below them? I could not know for certain at first, for the torchlight stopped as though its bearer may be looking over the edge. Withdrawing to the wall, I hoped the shadow would hide me. The torchlight moved on. I exhaled in relief.
Again I started forward after I felt the goblin had moved too far ahead to notice me, but as I turned my attention back to the ground ahead of me I jolted to halt to see just ahead a most gruesome, deformed face, and of course the blackened blade at his side.
"Well," croaked the goblin with a noxious sneer, "look who I found skulking about. Looks like one got away after all. But not for long."
I growled, but it was half a distraction as I grabbed hold of the empty ale bottle in the bundle at my side.
As he made to strike with his weapon I threw the bottle as hard as I could right at the goblin's face. He dropped the torch and staggered with a cry, but he held his blade tighter. I meanwhile jumped away and ran. He did not have arrows with him at least, but he would outrun me in my present condition, and could see better in the darkness as we left the torchlight, which had no doubt been a diversion. Not far behind, my pursuer snarled and screamed at me with rage calling me a cheater and wining quite pathetically. It seemed quite in my favor too when he suddenly squealed too for having gotten a piece of glass in his eye. It would have been laughable had it not been for that fact that these cries would draw others, especially the one with the torchlight, and soon the light was returning and joined by others.
There was a crevice up ahead I just managed to see as a pit of darker blackness and to steer clear from as I ducked behind a wall.
Once stopped, I could hear some rustling and distant clamor of goblin voices echoing far away, and the beast in question came running up to the crevice as well.
"I saw where you went, you filthy, furry badger, you!" he snarled as he hurried toward the crevice. "You can't hide from me! I'll skin you alive, you! Spill out your brains! Gut you! Wear your nasty beard as a—!"
Though with a bit of a stagger he stopped himself from falling down the crevice just as I had, but I would not allow him to take his full balance back. Leaping out from behind the wall I pushed with all my might. The creature fell with an animal-like screech and disappeared.
I did not linger long after that for the sounds of the others seemed to be getting closer. I hid myself to the side as best I could in a chamber filled with coal, sulfur, and wood. They would not smell me in here, I felt certain.
One or two did come close to my hiding place. One even glanced inside, but no one ever saw me. I waited for some time again, much longer than their first hunt. I was left in peace once more after what seemed like the better half of a day. Then slowly, slowly, the noises died away. I peered out with care, covered from head to foot in soot. They were on the lookout for me now and were quietly, patiently waiting. I knew this to be only too true.
I went for a deeper passage, as quietly as I possibly could.
For some time again I walked undisturbed in darkness. I slept at some point, though again I am uncertain for how long. When I awoke, my stomach complained earnestly for food, and my throat was parched. I licked out what remained of the jam, and afterwards I tucked the jar back into my bundle so as not to leave any sign of my trail.
Then not long afterwards I did behold it. The Westgate!
I could hardly believe my luck, but I wasted no time for celebration.
Once outside I found that the water had indeed receded if only a very little, but there was enough ledge not to have to cross the water with a raft or board. The water proved very still, but I knew lurking beneath its deceiving surface the Watcher was ever watchful. I had not seen it for myself in action save once when we had been strong enough to escape it and the water had been far lower. The end of poor Oin had been told me through the voice of others; but that little I had seen of it made me more than assured that I would stand no chance of escaping it now if it should happen to notice me. Had it not been for the smallest taste of Durin's Bane that I knew I had seen, I would have probably rather braved the walk through to the other side of Moria than face the Watcher in the Water, but I felt now that I had no other choice but to go toward the West.
For Oin's sake I will not be killed by the Watcher, I told myself, and with that last emboldening thought, I took to the ledge and made my way slowly to the other side of the water.
My eyes never left the surface save to check my footing in dire need. I dared not look ahead or give myself false courage in seeing the far bank. I would not consider myself safe until my feet touched the soil of the bank and even then not entirely until I was well out of reach of any slippery, coiling, serpent-like arm. I should have perhaps kept an eye better on my footing however, for I could not believe my luck when, as I tripped, I was able to catch myself from falling in.
Regaining my bearing I looked down and trembled at the thought of the rubble I had just caused to dribble into the water. I watched a moment or two, holding my breath.
Nothing.
I stepped forward with the utmost caution, eyes all the while on the water. My feet continued on slower and with far more care this time.
Almost.
I was almost there.
I had promised myself not to look ahead, but near the end of the ledge I could not bear it anymore. The dry grasses and weeds so near my feet gleamed silver in the pale moonlight. I leapt the last part of the way, tumbling upon my sore leg as I landed, for I had nearly forgotten it in my excitement. Rolling into the weeds, I lay in a heap on my back a moment or two, and perhaps would have fallen asleep right then and there, for after that last feat all the fatigue of my journey out of Moria seemed to catch up with my wearied body.
The moment I closed my eyes however, I knew I could not stay there. The Watcher in the Water would see me sleeping there even in the weeds, and I felt for certain I had heard a ripple. Scrambling to my feet, I forced myself away from the water.
I tripped once more several yards away from my spot in the weeds, and I fell into a ditch of some sort. Tumbling down into that pit dried leaves fell all about me and cushioned my fall. Scrambling a little further I hid under the shelter of a great bush arching over the pit, for I remained where I had fallen more or less.
Enemies could be anywhere and everywhere in the lands surrounding Moria, and the sun was not risen to keep them at bay. I had no strength to fight any longer. Not enemies, not fatigue, not pain. I plunged like a stone into water into a deep sleep.