Usual disclaimers and thanks: nothing is mine, etc., etc. Many thanks to my betas, eekfrenzy, Amedia and Rose; all errors are mine.
Fair warning—this section includes SONG LYRICS!! But not, I bet, any song that you might imagine.
And to answer my latest review, yep, rockets! If you think back you'll recall one important change that occurred in Saruman's tactical situation…
Section 14 Charge of the Light Brigade
Climbing up those steep slick steps in the dark would have been no picnic, even if I hadn't been so scared that I was shaking in my slippers. And when I finally reached the top of the stairs, my heart seemed to sink right down into those very slippers. I'd gotten it right—the gritty haze swirling over the Wall stank of gunpowder.
I couldn't see far through the rain and gunsmoke, but about a stone's throw away I could make out shadowy figures in the front line. Even Éomer's seasoned warriors were holding their shields over their heads to protect them from the sky! It figures—the Rohirrim laughed at death but they were frightened by the supernatural.
Where was Aragorn? Surely a great commander like Lord Aragorn would be able to knock some sense into these men and rally the waverers. Hey—at that point I would have cheerfully settled for Pippin and Merry. At least they knew what fireworks looked like!
From out of the darkness, an auburn-haired figure pushed toward me through the mass of armored bodies. It was Haleth. At first I was proud that he at least was more solemn than terrified. But then he grabbed me by the shoulder and said earnestly, "You must not remain here, Barbarella. The men say that we will all die, that mortals like us cannot defeat magic."
No. I didn't want to hear that any more. Not from Haleth.
"But we did defeat magic—remember?" I snapped back furiously. And that had been real magic, too, not just high school science! "Anyway, what the enemy is using isn't sorcery. It's just…just chemistry."
"Chemistry?" Haleth echoed incredulously. Well, no, what he actually said was "alchemy" because there's no such word as 'chemistry' in Rohirric.
I did a quick reboot and came up with a better explanation on my second try. It was a world-class translation, if I do say so myself. "It's not sorcery—it's just vesper fire!"
"Vesper fire?" It was too dark to make out Haleth's expression, but he began to sound a bit more convinced. This time I was making sense, after all. Everyone knew how handy the little vesper boxes were, and nobody was afraid when they sparked—but nobody knew exactly why they worked, either. "How can you be sure?"
"Because I recognize that smell, and it sure isn't magic."
Haleth must have recognized that odor too—he had to realize that the enemy weapon had sulfur in it, just like the vesper boxes.
"Look, Haleth, you can see for yourself that the warriors are going crazy out there." Taking a deep breath, I ordered him, "You have to run to the Great Gates and explain to your father and to Théoden King that what they're facing is just vesper fire, not sorcery."
I was taking a lot onto myself, I know, but nobody else understood what was going on, and somebody had to do something.
Haleth, bless him, was willing to believe what I'd told him and to follow my orders. He had already put one foot on the top step of the stairs and was starting to head down when he turned to ask, "But how can I possibly convince them?"
Good point. Haleth was as brave and as smart a grown man, but he was a thirteen-year-old kid, not Lord Aragorn. How was a beardless boy going to convince a terrified mob that he was right?
Well, what is it that the Rohirrim will always listen to?
Just on the spur of the moment, I came up with an idea that surprised even me. "You can sing to them! The Riders of Rohan will believe a battle song if they believe nothing else, and one of the battle songs of my people describes this weapon perfectly."
Translating lyrics on the fly in the middle of a battle sure isn't what I studied linguistics for! But I managed to do it. Not only that, I even managed to carry the tune that no ballpark vocalist ever gets right. Now that wasn't magic—that was a miracle!
And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
Over the land of the free and the home of the brave?
Just as I completed my halting solo, another rocket exploded in a burst of crimson sparks only feet above the Wall. As the defenders scattered on either side Haleth turned his face toward the sky and said quietly, "I will make them listen to me."
Watching him skid down the stairs, I was sure that Haleth would make those warriors believe him. And I….
I would have to do the same thing on the Deeping Wall.
At any rate, I had to try. Crazy as it might sound, convincing the Rohirrim that Saruman's rockets were fashioned from nothing but gunpowder and malice might actually change the course of the battle.
And then I looked out onto the Wall and got scared all over again. The orcs were still shooting an endless hail of arrows toward us. Even over the yells and screams I could hear an agonized cry when a warrior in the front line fell with an arrow in his chest.
No. No. No way. I couldn't do it. I was no shieldmaiden. I didn't even have a shield!
While I was dithering and sniveling, two old men shoved past me to roll the injured warrior onto a stretcher, then started to haul him back toward the stairs. I couldn't see their faces in the dark, but I knew that they had to be two of Aldmore's recruits.
Those men were running out onto the Wall under my orders. I had talked them—and my kids, too!—into marching into a war zone. I was going to have to talk myself into it too.
In the end, I wound up over-intellectualizing the whole thing. I told myself that what I saw out there on the Wall was horrible, but realistically, it wasn't anywhere near certain death. If it was, Aldmore and his ancient warrior-buddies would have been dead and buried long ago. Anyway, it's not like my own world had been risk-free. Every day you read about someone getting slaughtered on the highway, but reading about it never made anyone stop driving. Back home I'd driven on icy, dangerous mountain roads lots of times and I'd never really been scared—or ever had a reason to be scared, either.
Well—except for that last time, of course.
If I didn't figure out a tactical plan quickly, my brain would turn into terrified mush. The simple facts were these: the Deeping Wall is maybe three hundred feet long. There's a big tower at each end of the Wall. One was at my back, its twin stood at the opposite side. I figured that if I ran all the way to the other tower, screaming, "Vesper fire" every minute or so, I'd eventually pass within earshot of every man on the Wall.
While I was trying to nerve myself up, I noticed that some of Gamling's pinch-hitter pikemen were huddled close to me at the top of the stairs, their pikes clutched uselessly to their chests. Before I could freeze up or talk myself out of doing anything, I sidled over and slapped the arm of the closest pikeman. "Why are you guys just standing here? That's not sorcery—it's just vesper fire! Will you let a bunch of orcs deceive you?"
The scared young farmboy—no Luke Skywalker, he—looked as startled as if a daffodil had reared up and bitten him. I yelled once again, louder, "It's just vesper fire! Get to your posts!" and this time some of his buddies noticed me back. Some of the bona fide warriors were also turning to look at us, and they would soon see that the newbie pikemen weren't doing anything. If these farmboys didn't mend their ways real quick they'd be sunk in shame forever.
Well, boo hoo.
Elbowing roughly through the confused pikemen, I stepped out onto the narrow Wall that had seemed so broad by daylight. It felt like walking into a pitch-black alley crammed with angry gang-bangers. To get to the opposite tower I would have to thread my way through a crowd of distracted warriors who were brandishing razor-sharp swords. The defenders weren't exactly shoulder-to-shoulder but they kept lunging back and forth without warning. If I wasn't extremely careful and lucky I could get sliced up by my own people.
Probably the enemy couldn't see much through the smoky haze either but they kept firing arrows anyway. Our guys couldn't see them either, but everybody knew what to do—shoot and keep on shooting.
The warriors had set up a line of thick boards behind the parapet as an extra defense, but believe me, propped-up barrel staves aren't very reassuring when you know that people are shooting at you. Arrows were constantly thudding into the parapet and the boards—and sometimes they arced all the way over them and hit one of the warriors. There was an awful coppery smell all around me that I thought at first was from the chemicals from the rockets, but the real explanation was much worse—it was the odor of human blood.
Go. Go. Go.
I inched forward through the warriors, and every time one of them shifted his attention from the orcs to me, I'd stand on tiptoe and scream into his face any arguments that came into my head—"It's not sorcery, it's an orc trick!" "C'mon, you've seen vesper fire before!" and even "Lord Aragorn says that it isn't magic!"
As the fighting grew more fierce, the warriors didn't dare allow themselves to be distracted either by sorcery or by me, although somebody did yell once, "Gríma's Bane says it's a trick." A couple of times I even heard, "Who let that girl onto the Wall?"
Over the yelling and the thunk-thunk-thunk of the arrows I could hardly hear my own voice, and I could feel myself getting hoarse from all the screaming. I think it actually helped that a lot of the Rohirrim knew me from the trial. They'd decided then that I was a truth-teller, so it must have made it easier for them to believe me in the heat of battle.
Sometimes life's funny that way.
By the time I got about halfway to the other side, the opposing army must have figured that we'd been softened up enough for a direct assault. I heard a lot of yelling and roaring, so I looked down into the Deeping Coomb and saw that orcs were charging toward us carrying ladders to scale the Wall.
I'm sure you're thinking, "Just push 'em over!" and of course our warriors did—but between the volleys of arrows, the gunpowder haze, and the exploding rockets, some of the Uruk-Hai managed to scramble up to the top of the Deeping Wall. Our men wound up fighting hand-to-hand against monsters with the hides of snakes and the teeth of sharks.
That was no place for me!
Pulling my sodden skirts up to my knees, I ran in sheer panic toward the far tower. Thankfully I was pretty close to the line of Haldir's Elves—I could already see their fishscale armor glittering in the dark.
Still yelling with what was left of my voice, I'd almost reached the Elves when a man got killed right in front of me.
He must have been one of the Northern Cousins, because I heard him cursing in that Down East accent of theirs at the orcs, at the Dunlendings and probably at Saruman himself. A bolt of lightning split the sky and for just an instant I could see him clearly. Greasy dark hair and a scraggly beard half-covered his surly features as he brandished his pike toward the enemy. Then a gigantic arrow struck him right above the shoulder blade and catapulted him over the side of the Wall. The terrible sound of his long gurgling "Yeeeahhh!" froze me with horror where I stood.
Then adrenaline kicked in and every nerve in my body screamed 'RUN RUN RUN'!
I pushed, shoved, and clawed my way through rows of shiny elven archers toward my only possible refuge—the stone tower looming so tantalizingly in front of me. In my panic, I would probably have tripped and catapulted myself right into the Deep if I hadn't been guided by a series of those nearly identical Elves.
As I lunged frantically toward the big oak doors of the tower, I was grabbed at the last second and held back by a pair of strong arms.
"BARBARELLA!"
Whipping my head around, I saw that it was Legolas, so I didn't try to bite him and escape. Even blood-smeared and with raindrops dripping from his long hair, he was still perfectly poised and unflappable. I looked for Aragorn too, but no dice. Not much hope of spotting him, either, in the midst of all those tall Rohirrim.
Over the screams and the clanging, Legolas was yelling at the top of his voice. "WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT SARUMAN'S WEAPON? DO YOU KNOW HOW TO DEFEAT IT?"
I plastered my body against the tower door, desperately hoping that it would make me a smaller target. How to defeat Saruman's weapon? Oh…yeah. That was the obvious question, all right. I'd been so busy screaming about what Saruman's rockets weren't that I hadn't even considered how to defeat what they were. Surely I knew enough basic science to give Legolas some kind of an answer.
Yeah, surely I did. In the absolute worst of all possible times and places I would have to wrack my poor feeble brain to come up with some kind of clue.
Think, Barbarella, think! Crank up those little gray cells!
"Ummm…Saruman's weapon is a rocket, a tube propelled by a combustible explosive," I finally wheezed in what was left of my voice. "It was first invented by the Chinese, who used it to make fireworks for their celebrations. Later on Europeans used it for military purposes in guns and cannon, and called it gunpowder…."
Legolas was staring at me as if I was a lunatic...and he may have been right. Okay, enough of the History Channel. What did I know about rockets that was practical?
"It stands to reason that all of those rockets were made in Isengard. That means that the orcs had to haul them through the same kind of terrain that we went through—up and down hills and valleys, over plains, and fording rivers. Somehow they managed to get here without blowing themselves up, which is not the easiest thing to do when you're transporting unfamiliar hazmat."
Legolas managed a very creditable nod of understanding. "If you say so, Barbarella."
Sometimes it helps me to listen to myself think, and fortunately, this was one of those times. "The question is, how did they manage to keep their powder dry? They're even shooting off rockets in the rain!"
'Keep your powder dry?' Suddenly an image from a Wild West movie popped into my head. "Covered wagons! Those rockets were brought here in covered wagons! Somewhere in the middle of the enemy army there are orcs pulling big tubes—longer than a torch, and thicker—out of wagons covered with cloth or wood or something else that's impervious to water."
I jumped up and down excitedly and yelled, "And gunpowder is highly flammable! If you shoot a couple of fire arrows into those wagons they'll set off the explosives!"
Then I took a look out at the vast expanse of the enemy army swarming through the blackness of the Deeping Coomb and came down to Earth. "Is there any chance that you'll be able to hit those wagons in the dark?"
"I am an Elf of the Forest Kingdom. Most certainly I can." Legolas' lips quirked a little in the elvish equivalent of 'D'oh!' "But the Wall is no place for you, Barbarella. Go back now to the Hornburg." He pulled a burning torch from the wall of the tower (a relatively fresh one, I noticed), opened the tower door, and ran lightly up the stairs.
Of course I knew that the middle of a combat zone was no place for me—but how could I possibly reach the Hornburg without returning the same way I'd come?
"You must descend into the Deep," said a gruff voice from a little higher than waist-level. It was Legolas' dwarven counterpart, Gimli. In the absence of the wall torch that the Elf had just removed, my mortal eyes couldn't make him out very well, but there was no way that I missed seeing that great big axe of his, or the fact that it was running with blood clear down to the hilt.
"And how do I do that?"
"Use the flight of stairs right in front of you."
Of course—how stupid could I get? As soon as he mentioned them, I was able to make out white limestone steps only a few feet ahead of me. I'd seen those stairs by daylight, too. Then I realized that Gimli was asking me something. "Tell me, girl, do you know how Saruman's toys are made? What did you tell the Elf?"
"He didn't ask me about how they were made." That, I guess, is the difference between an Elf and a Dwarf. "But since you're interested, Gimli, I think what they're made of is 'black-niter firedamp-spark'."
Gimli's eyes seemed to glow as he said with a strange accent, "Aye, I suppose you could be right."
Hiking up my skirt so I wouldn't trip on that slippery limestone staircase, I gingerly made my way down into the Deep. About halfway down the steps it occurred to me that I must have answered Gimli in Dwarvish. I guess he wasn't used to human women speaking to him in his own language.
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