Chapter 14
Beth had taken to writing down the number of days since she had, well, fallen into the company that she was now in. She had started to hide this scrap of parchment in the secret compartment in her grandfather's box. Not because it was really secret, but the idea that she had something hidden away that was only hers and for no one else's eyes.
The recording of her days and thoughts helped not only to cement her grasp on the reality of her situation but also it was a place to pour out everything that she could not speak of to anyone else. Beth had one morning gotten the horrible idea in her head that she might change or mess up some little thing that would in turn change the course of how things should have been and the time she had been from. What if by some random act she caused one of her ancestor's death? What would happen then, would she cease to exist? And as she had thought about it more it had started to make sense to her, for with how far back she was Beth did not really know but the further back in time one goes the more ancestors one seems to acquire. Sure everyone has four grandparents, but that doubles to eight great-grandparents, then sixteen great-great-grandparents, and just continues to double each generation you go back. Before you know it you suddenly have an impractical quantity of people, who you have no idea who they are, that you very much hope will live so that you in turn will exist. All in all she wished she had not ever thought of such a situation.
It was a little bit maddening, and she needed every ounce of her sanity now that they were set to leave this pocket of relative safety with the elves. She could at least sort of pretend that everything was mostly normal here, if she ignored the fact that she had hardly seen any other humans. Well with the exception to the one human woman and her young son, but she had only seen them from a distance a time or two and would not have been able to converse even if she had tried to talk with her. However, Beth could only guess why they would be here, in this time-frozen place. Later, much later this city of peace and plenty will become abandoned, forgotten, and rediscovered again in the modern era. For now, this strange time forgotten place had no true room for just mere mortal human beings.
….
The night was getting late and the candle sputtered as threatened to gutter out with how low it had become, but Beth had to make one last check over the contents of her bag. The elves had been most kind and generous with their giving but Gandalf had limited what she would have to carry. It made sense, but she had been rather off put to have to leave the silken dress behind not that it would have been any use to her in the wilderness. She did however insist on a few essentials. Namely, soap of course, and hidden at the bottom were her jeans, the rest of modern clothing having been rather destroyed and not worth mending.
Another recent addition to her load was her now returned gun. It had just appeared on the desk in her room one afternoon when she had been out training; Beth had a sneaking suspicion that it had been Gandalf all along who had taken it that day. She had not seen him take it in the confusion; the only thing missing was one lonely bullet. Strange but she was not about to go asking around for it. Instead, she had made better use of her time by making a holster from fabric and leather scraps.
In the morning, or five hours from now, they are to leave for her grandfather's house on the way to the dwarves' mountain home. Even when she did finally blow out the dying candle and went to bed, Beth did not sleep a wink. She was too worried about the unknown and all too unfamiliar world that she was now living in to truly rest.
….
The light had barely come up above the steep hills surrounding Rivendell; the light would not reach the city for some hours yet. They set out on the winding paths above the city that led north and east; Beth only figured this out by the blinding sun in their eyes. It was also apparently still a little too early for talking of any length longer than two words, with grunting being included in that count. Not really that Beth minded that at all, she was more than willing to stay silent if it meant she could better keep a look out for stones and roots that were made to trip and low hanging branches that seemed to have great pleasure in swatting her unprotected face. She was however eternally grateful that they were just normal branches instead of briars.
It was not until, what she surmised had been two or three hours though she could have been very wrong since she had not really mastered the art of telling time by the sun's position in the sky, that someone a few dwarves behind her and Bilbo had started whistling a deep and mellow tune. It seemed to be a tune they all knew, with the exception of Bilbo and herself, a few of the other dwarves whistled or even softly sang deeply words the human and the hobbit did not understand. Even the wizard took to humming along, his eyes twinkling in that now familiar way that they did when he was either planning something that would likely rile more than a few dwarven tempers, or that he was exceedingly happy.
Not knowing the words to the song, Beth contented herself with humming along with Gandalf. After the first few rounds it had not been that hard to pick up, and she had that nagging feeling that she had been occasionally getting that it was just a pinch away from being familiar. Perhaps the tune itself would be remembered and evolve into whatever old folk song that it had become in her time. Merely the shadow of an age that had been forgotten or disbelieved as just myth and tale, Beth wondered what else from the supposed "fairy tales" of her childhood might have been at least based in fact if not entirely true.
….
One thing that Beth could be sure of however was her skills as a nurse, or healer as Gandalf had put it. Other than her main pack of clothes and other essentials, which she managed to stuff into her own bag, Beth had been gifted a small cloth sack filled with the tools of her trade. The cloth had been waterproofed with wax to keep everything inside as dry as possible. Healing herbs that could be used from treating the general gambit of illness that could pop up while traveling, the inner bark of slippery elm for scrapes and burns, skullcap and ginger for headache or queasy stomach, athelas and witch hazel to keep deep cuts from festering, agrimony to stop bleeding, and milk of the poppy for pains that where worse than the mere ache of discomfort. There were a few other such dried up plants but Beth had been more familiar with their modern-day synthetic counterparts and had only committed to memory the others, with time she would learn their properties better as well. There was also an assortment of needles, curved and straight, for whatever wound she might encounter, inside a pocket of the bag was a goodly amount of thin silken thread to be used for stitches, a sharp pair of shears, and an assortment of knives ranging in size, and sturdy leather tourniquets Beth hoped that she would not have to do anything major in the way of surgery. For when she had first been given the satchel, she had been confused why they had included a slim wooden cylinder with everything else. When she had inquired about it to Gandalf, he had looked slightly surprised before explaining it was for whomever, she was working on, to bite on so as not to break their teeth or accidentally bite through their tongue in pain. It had only been then that Beth had realized that there would been no anesthetic or sedative in this time for her to use, if it was a long procedure it would be better for them to faint from the pain since there was little else to be done.
Fortunately, the first few days for their trek went without mishap, and after that there was only a few bad scrapes, which the dwarves refused to let her look at for fear that it would appear that they could not handle such trivial wounds. Beth's insistence on infection in such unclean conditions had fallen on supposedly deaf ears, and Bilbo had urged her to leave such small matters alone and to save her arguments for when they were better needed.
It was only a day or so after that conversation that Beth was glad she had listened to the hobbit. After another rather horrid night sleeping on the ground, conditions under which she would not have slept usually but seeing as Beth, and everyone else for that matter, was exhausted after the day's journey they all promptly fell asleep the instant they lay their heads down on their stony pillows. The first few nights they had let Beth sleep the whole night through, but after the forth night it was determined that she would also sit on night watch for a time with Bifur and Bofur during their watch, which was just fine with her. All they really had to do was keep quiet enough to let the others sleep in peace, which really was not that had since the rest of the sleeping dwarves made a bit of noise themselves with all the snoring that occurred.
This day however had been misty and damp from the start, one could hardly see through the trees just twenty feet off on account of the mist being so thick and white. However, that was not too horrible in itself. No, it had really started to turn hazardous when the rain had started. First, there was the distant rumble of thunder that had everyone digging in their packs for their best-waterproofed cloak if it was not yet already out. Then the first drops had fallen, and humongous drops they were. It was if the sky had combined four or five normal sized raindrops into one monstrously sized drop.
And as expected the heaven opened up and poured down upon the travelers, within minutes everyone was well and thoroughly soaked through. Beth had to keep making faces from when the water reached her underwear, making for a very cold and uncomfortable walk. But no one else complained and she was not about to start.
The rain alone of course would not have been the worst thing, just a huge inconvenient that could be dried in front of the fire later. It was the fact that their path had changed from earthen forest path, into a steep and narrow pathway of rock. Rock that was extremely slippery when wet. It did not help either that while on one side of the path there was a rather sudden drop that Beth could not rightly tell how far down it went because of the severity of the rain, affecting the visibility of everything.
Beth was more than content to clutch tightly onto Bofur's shirtsleeve when he had offered it. Her other hand grasping to handholds in the mountainside of the steep and winding pathway, instead of shielding her eyes to the torrent, he had shouted that they would be stopping as soon as those in front found a suitable place for the whole lot of them.
They continued on like this, for how long Beth never knew. As those now further in front of Beth and Bofur turned a corner and could no longer be seen, all of a sudden there was a dull rumble and the pathway shook and trembled for several long moments before returning to just the now normal deluge. From Bofur's concerned face, Beth could only surmise that it had been a landslide or mudslide or the like that had happened in front of them. She did not realize they had stopped until Bofur had her let go of his arm and carefully started edging towards where the sound had come from. After several long moments of no sight of anyone coming back, and Bofur having also gone around the corner and disappeared, Beth let go of the breath she had been holding when he popped back around the corner. He hurried back to her as quickly as the elements allowed for safe travel.
"No need to be worried there, Beth." Bofur said in his normal cheerful voice, "Just a wee little landslide up ahead, everyone in front is all safe, if not a little pelted by some pebbles now as well as rain. Just have a little jump across to their side now. No need to worry at all."
However, when they got around the corner, Beth was struck at how not little the jump was. Where there once had been part of the mountainside path was now a gap of at least 15 if not 20 feet or more. There was no way she was going to be able to jump that yawning gap that wished to swallow her whole.
She turned to Bofur with eyes wide with fear, "I cannot make that!" Beth said in desperation.
"That's fine you don't have to jump." Bofur said, and for an instant, Beth relaxed. "I'll just throw you." With only that as her warning, Bofur scooped her up and tossed the human girl over the abyss.
For an instant, Beth was frozen unable to process anything, but then the fear kicked in. As she practically flew through the air, pelted by rain that felt more like hail, Beth suddenly focused on the other side of the breach and immediately zoned in on the pair of hands and arms outstretched to catch her. She did not even have time to think everything was going to be ok when she saw that she was going to go too far
Stretching her arms out as far as she could Beth felt her legs treading the air instinctively, as if to keep her body from slamming to hard into her catcher. Right before impact, a pair of rough and solid hands caught a hold of her around the waist before he too fell down. Thankfully, directly onto the pathway and not out into nothingness as she had feared would happen.
For a long moment Beth could not find herself able to catch her breath, she had collided directly into hard armor and a sword pommel was digging into her stomach. Gasping and coughing for air Beth felt her catcher sit up and force her into a sitting position as well. When she had caught a breath she finally noticed who's hands where pounding her back to help improve her breathing. It was Thorin. Dripping wet as he was he seemed hardly effected by her being literally thrown into him. She only noticed the heavily bleeding cut above his eye when he turned a dower glare at Bofur when he jumped across.
"Did you think to knock me off the side of the mountain with her?" He grumbled at his friend.
Bofur just shrugged with a sheepish smile, "She was lighter than I expected, flew just a little further than intended."
….
Sorry, about the lack of updates but until after with finishing my senior year in university, I had little time to write much less sleep. So bear with the big break in-between chapters these summer months will hopefully bring more time for me to work on this and other projects I had to put to the side. Also I don't have internet at home at the moment so that will be effecting posts too, but hopefully I can write more and then post it afterward. J
Thanks for the patience and support! – H.D. Lynn