Chapter 4: Meeting
Author's Note: Sorry about the long wait for an update! I've been really busy, both in real life and as a fanfic writer. Several stories have been clamoring for my time and inspiration, and this one has been drawing the short straw for a while. *turns to glare at her other notebooks* "BAD Silmarillion fics! Bad! Wait your turn! Aww, that's okay, I love you all too."
*calms down* Okay, on to more serious matters. I wonder if the same pattern will hold true that I've been seeing so far, and I'll get one racist anti-Orc review per chapter for the entire duration of this fanfic?
Come on, people. This is the year 2009. No race, culture, or society in OUR world is inherently evil. Why not give the same benefit of the doubt to the Orcs? They were corrupted by Morgoth and then enslaved by Sauron. They didn't ask to be evil, and it happens to be my interpretation that after Sauron's power was broken, they would be free to choose.
That said, enjoy! And again, sorry for the long wait!
"No!" A wild shout rang out through the trees. "Filthy Elf! That's my deer!"
Glorfindel stood transfixed. He had never stood this close to an Orc since before the Dark Lord was defeated. This one, crouching on the back of the deer he had just shot, with her own dagger hilt-deep in the slain animal's neck, seemed somehow different from the hundreds of savage enemies he had faced in the past. Her face snarling in defiant rage, sharp yellow teeth showing between her twisting lips, she stared at him out of huge, round, gray eyes that seemed to snap and burn with hatred.
Hatred, but no evil. Glorfindel lowered his bow slightly. He could not ask himself to kill even an Orc for voicing such a basic thought of protest: don't steal my food! Instead he took a placating step back. The Orc had spoken in the common Westron tongue; Glorfindel responded in the same way.
"It would seem that this is both your kill and mine," he said, feeling more than a little surprised at himself. Never had he expected to be having a civil conversation with an Orc-woman in the middle of his hunting trip!
She snarled warningly, letting go of the dagger in the deer's neck and standing up on the ground behind the animal. Glorfindel smoothly shouldered his bow and put a hand on the hilt of his own sword, to show that he was not defenseless.
Quickly matching his motion, the Orc grasped the hilt of a long, straight but jagged-edged sword that hung unsheathed by her side.
This is not useful, Glorfindel thought in frustration. Taking a mad chance, he let go of his sword and spread both hands out to the sides.
"We can try to kill each other now," he said with just a hint of steel in his voice, "as our peoples have been doing for Ages. But I am unwilling to kill over a game animal. I can hunt another, if you want this one." He smiled, nobility and the excellent upbringing that his parents had given him bringing his good manners to the surface even through his astonishment. "Besides, I believe you went to more effort for this kill than I did. I have never seen anyone leap onto the back of a deer before!"
The Orc-maiden - for something suddenly told Glorfindel that she was very young - looked at him in deep suspicion. Then, clearly overwhelmed with hunger, she crouched down and started simply tearing mouthfuls of raw meat from the deer's body with her sharp teeth, still watching him the whole time.
Dismayed by the violence of her meal, Glorfindel almost looked away.
No, he thought. I must not show her ill-manners. Either I choose to treat her as an enemy and slay her quickly and with honor, or I must behave towards her with the same civility that I would show to anyone else I might have met.
After a moment, the young Orc stopped eating and looked up. Glorfindel ignored the traces of blood around her mouth.
"Why aren't you trying to kill me?" she demanded. "You elves and your bows and swords and things are always out hunting Orcs. So why not me?"
"I could say the same about Orcs!" Glorfindel replied in surprise, thinking with a flash of grief and old, deep anger of the many friends he had lost to that savage race. But of course, we are the race that they know as their ancient enemies.
As the Orc-woman bristled, Glorfindel realized that his words had done no good. "I see no reason to attack you," he said, answering the question she had asked a moment earlier. "You have not tried to harm me."
She looked surprised, as though she had not realized that the question of why a battle had not broken out applied to them both. "Maybe I was just too hungry to kill you!" she said. It sounded almost as if she felt the need to make an excuse for not attacking someone who should be her enemy.
Looking at her rough-skinned gray face, Glorfindel was suddenly and forcefully struck with the realization that she was descended from the same race as he. The history of the Orcs was something he had always known, of course; but the story of how the Great Enemy had captured and tortured the kinsfolk of his earliest ancestors, changing their bodies and souls into those of the Orcs in nameless pits of agony far below the earth, was something that Glorfindel had usually thought of only as a tragic tale of ancient history. Now he found himself staring the living truth of that story in the face.
Suddenly amazed, Glorfindel looked into the Orc's enormous gray eyes and saw them as the eyes of an Elf. Aside from the shape and color of the face they were set in, they were no different. Now that he was looking at them this way, he felt an acute sense of wonder at the spirit he saw shining in them.
"The light of Valinor is in your eyes," he told her, not knowing he was going to say it until he already had. Despite his surprise at his own words, he knew that it was perfectly, amazingly true.
The young Orc-maiden stared at him in total blank puzzlement. "What is Valinor?"
Glorfindel's heart almost broke as she said it. She knows nothing of our people! Then he was distracted from that sudden grief by realizing that he had indeed been guilty of a most basic and terrible oversight in manners.
"Forgive me," he said, bowing slightly but with sincere respect. "I am Glorfindel, an Elf of Imladris. What is your name?"
Author's Note: This fanfic is rated only K+ or PG if you go by movie ratings. There is no place in it for details of the Orcs' tragic and terrifying history. If you want to read my version of how some of the early Elves were transformed against their wills into the beginnings of the Orc race, I will be telling it (along with many other things) in my Silmarillion fanfic "The Last Note." That fanfic is rated T, or PG-13, and parts of it are quite a bit more violent than this story, though I am writing it with complete respect and a lack of anything I would consider gratuitous.
To date I have only written and posted "The Last Note" through Chapter 4, but several more chapters should be forthcoming in the very immediate future. Chapters 7 and 8 of "The Last Note" will be the ones that tell the central part of the story of the Orcs' origins, although there will also be a lot about it in other chapters.