THE LINDEN TREE

Chapter 51

Helmwyn stirred, and sleepily asked herself where she was. She was dimly aware of a strange chamber, of feather pillows, and furs. Then she remembered. Thorin. Smiling to herself, she rolled over, seeking his warmth under the heavy coverlet, and curled closely against him, nuzzled his shoulder, and sighed contentedly.

But something was wrong.

Thorin was bathed in a cold sweat, and she felt his heart racing beneath her hand. His body was tense, and his jaw was clenched, and his eyes moved beneath his closed lids; and she saw that he was in the throes of a terrible nightmare. He ground his teeth, and his breathing was ragged, and his limbs shook with tremors, as though he were fighting off foes in his sleeping mind. He muttered words in Khuzdul that Helmwyn did not understand; and she thought about waking him, so distressed did he seem. But then Thorin cried out, and woke with a start, and opened his eyes, panting.

He saw with relief that he was in his own chamber, and that his bride was beside him, and that it had only been a ghastly dream; but the impression of it had been so vivid that the fear was still upon him, and it took several minutes to abate. Helmwyn gently smoothed the hair away from his clammy brow; and he sought refuge in her arms, and waited for his racing heart to slow.

"I dreamt of the dragon," he said at last. "This… sometimes happens."

"Will you tell me?" she said. She had heard that the telling of bad dreams took away some of their power; though she doubted whether the fear of this particular dream could ever be truly dispelled.

And so Thorin told her.

He told her of silken pennants of the house of Durin, streaming wildly in the hot, dry wind as the dragon beat the air with his vast leathery wings. He told her of the beast's approach, spewing gouts of flame onto the stricken sentinels on the battlements. He told her of the heavy bronze doors melting under the worm's fiery breath. He told her of the creature crashing through the great stone gate as though it were no more solid than a mud-hut. He told her of the beast's scaly tail flailing like a whip, dashing scores of soldiers against the rocky walls. He told her of the acrid smoke, and the smell of burning flesh, and the oily, chemical stench of the dragon himself. He told her that no walls of stone were safe. Helmwyn was chilled to hear what horrors he had seen, and survived.

He did not tell her that in his dream, the dragon had come to Ered Luin, and that she had been among those consumed by the flames.

Instead he pulled her close, and kissed her; and they made love, clutching at each other to keep the past at bay, to keep fear at bay. This is here and now, Thorin told himself, with his lips on Helmwyn's throat, as he felt her fingers digging into his back. This is here and now.

Perhaps Thorin's senses were still alert from the danger in his dream; but he felt more acutely alive than he had in a long time. And indeed so absorbing was the here and now that his fears were pushed back into the dark corner of his mind whence they had come; and they stayed there, and did not trouble him again that night.


How they had ached for each other.

Now that they had overcome that initial awkwardness, now that they had reacquainted themselves with each other's body, a desperate hunger was upon them, and they could not bear to be further apart than fully wrapped up in each other.

One thing that surprised Thorin a little, though in truth he found it very alluring, was that his lady no longer restrained her moans – as perforce they had had to do, when they had snatched a few moments of intimacy in the Mark. Perhaps she thought none could hear, on account of the thick stone walls; or perhaps she cared not if anyone heard, since after all what they were doing was now perfectly legitimate.

Thorin wondered whether anyone could hear them through the various chimneys and ventilation shafts. At the very least, the servants were bound to listen at the door. Let them hear, he thought darkly. The sooner word got around that the marriage was consummated, and very happily so, the sooner his people would have to acknowledge the bond as indissoluble, and accept his lady – if only because, according to the law, he could now wed none other.


The sounds did carry through the chimneys and ventilation shafts. Dís heard what passed in her brother's chamber, distorted though it was by the echo; and she spent a bitter and wakeful night, weeping tears of disgust and powerless rage.


They touched brows, then fell back onto the furs, panting and spent; and they gazed at each other as their heartbeat slowed, and the sharp pleasure faded, and gave way to a deep, blissful peace. They lay closely entwined, and held each other long, stroking each other's hair.

They were together at last, though it had long been no more than a distant hope; they were together at last, alone and undisturbed, in a chamber of their own. Whatever else they were, whatever else the world demanded of them, here and now they were lovers, they were husband and wife; and they felt safe in each other's arms, and whole.


A bell rang somewhere under the mountain. At first Helmwyn thought it was part of her dream; but the insistent sound dragged her to wakefulness at last. "Mmmh?" she moaned drowsily into Thorin's hair. "'re we under attack?"

Thorin grinned. "Nay, my love. This is a chime to announce the dawn!"

Helmwyn gave an inarticulate groan, and wrapped herself more closely around Thorin. Dawn. Trust the Dwarves to invent some infernal noisy device to signal the dawn, instead of just having cockerels. Or windows. Like normal people.

"Come, my love, let us rise!" said Thorin brightly, and disentangled himself form her.

"Why?" she grumbled; "are we going to be overrun by servants?"

"Not quite yet. But there is something I want to show you!"

Helmwyn, who had been looking forward to a leisurely moment of tenderness with her new husband - once she were fully awake - wondered whether he were always so boisterous in the mornings. She tried to hide among the pillows, but he leaned over her and head-butted her gently. "Rise, my love, and come with me," he said. "I would show you the chamber I have had readied for you."

She blinked at him, surprised. "But my lord… am I not to share your chamber?"

Thorin laughed. "Aye, I should be glad of that!" he said; "but I think this chamber will please you." She tried to protest. "Wait till you have seen it!"

Helmwyn rose reluctantly, and threw on a robe; and Thorin led her to a door. He clasped her hand, and opened the door; and Helmwyn all but gasped in amazement.

The room was airy and elegantly furnished; but that was not what had caused her astonishment. Great bay windows had been cut into the side of the mountain; and they were glazed with glass of many colours, and the morning sun now flooded the chamber with light. "I thought you might miss the daylight," Thorin said. And he led her through another door, out onto a stepped terrace that looked south. There they stood together in the cool morning air, under the rising sun; and from that high place Helmwyn beheld the wide spaces that surrounded her new home.

Thorin pointed westward, and told her that the Sea lay there beyond the rolling heights of the Blue Mountains, that appeared blue indeed as their fir-clad tops receded into the distance. He pointed eastward, towards wooded foothills and green valleys, still wreathed in mist, and told her that that way lay the fertile plains of Eriador, where there were the homesteads of Men and Halflings. He pointed in a southerly direction where, beyond the mountains, lost to sight beyond the wide featureless plains of Dunland, in the distant south-east, lay the Mark.

Helmwyn was speechless; and Thorin looked upon her face, and saw that she was deeply moved. "My lord, my dear lord -," she said at last, and her voice was choked, torn as she was between laughter and tears. "Not only have you made fair chambers beneath the mountain; you have given me the sun and the sky and the rolling green lands -"

She broke off, and threw her arms about his neck. "Mín deóre, módleófne freáwine," she whispered into his hair. Thorin had nearly said something about this being but a poor substitute for the view from Meduseld; but seeing her so overcome with love and gratitude, he bit his tongue, and held her. "I take it you like it, then?" he said.

They tarried on the terrace for a while longer, gazing out on that fair morn; then they went back inside, hand in hand, and made themselves ready to face the world.


Whatever ceremony had been laid on for the wedding was over now, and the halls under the Blue Mountains were once again filled with scaffoldings and workmen and the sound of chiselling; for the Dwarves were practical folk. The royal party from the Mark did not seem to mind overmuch, not being especially formal.

Incredibly enough, Thráin and Brytta appeared to find each other's company extremely congenial; and they spent long hours swapping tales of war and Orc-slaughter. To be sure, Thráin sometimes seemed a little vague about who King Brytta was – "Oh, you have a daughter too?" he once told him; "My son was smitten with a human girl once, you know; not unlike your daughter, she was" – which confused King Brytta at first, until he learned to take that sort of thing in his stride.

When the newlyweds appeared, they were greeted by various degrees of leering; and Thorin wore his stoniest countenance to put an end to that. Their manner was demure, and they avoided any demonstrative show of affection; but those who knew them marked the looks that passed between them, and the way their fingertips brushed and linked. King Brytta especially marked that.

"You look happy, child," he told his daughter.

"I am, father. Very much so," she answered.

"I am glad of it," said the King. "Yesterday, you were as tense as a bow-string. I almost believed you were having second thoughts!"

Helmwyn was tempted for a moment to tell her father of the plot against her, but thought better of it. Instead she said: "Father, do you remember what you once told me, that you feared I would sicken and fade under these stone vaults?"

"Aye, I do, child; and to tell the truth, I fear it still, handsome though these halls may be."

But Helmwyn beamed at him, and told him of the light-filled chamber and the terrace on the mountainside. King Brytta had to admit that it was a handsome gesture, and a loving one; and the Dwarf Prince went up several notches in his esteem. (1)

Weddings were all very well and good, but there was day-to-day business to be taken care of; and so Thorin decided to go about it, which would serve as a tour of the settlement for his guests from the Mark. There was little more to show them as far as grand dwarven architecture went; but he took them around the forges and the foundries, the workshops and the warehouses, the glassworks and the mines (well, the entrance of one mineshaft, at least – there was work to do, and they could not have visitors loose in the mineshafts, bent double; that sort of thing led to accidents).

Helmwyn and King Brytta and his close guard observed Thorin in his role as a prince, a merchant, and a craftsman. He smiled little; but then again, Dwarves were unsmiling people, by and large. But those who knew him also knew that his manner was not stern, but business-like; and they saw satisfaction and approval in his face, and even, at times, a spark in his eye: the love of work well done.

The settlement in the Blue Mountains was a poor thing indeed, to those who remembered Erebor. But something dawned on Thorin that he may not have realised before: he took pride in it. He took pride in his people. He remembered how much more miserable the place had been only a few years before; he saw how hard his people had worked, and how far they had come, and he thought that he had no cause to blush. Not before the folk of the Mark, certainly: he knew how they lived and laboured and fought; and though he had come to love that people, he also knew that they were only a few generations away from being a nomadic tribe, and that crucible steel was so incomprehensible to them as to seem magical.

But Thorin was not only showing the settlement to his bride, and the King her father, and their guards; he was also showing them to his people. Or rather, he was showing them off. He hoped that they displayed enough wealth, and strength, and nobility, and benevolence, to impress those who were sceptical, and cow those who were hostile.

But whatever his doubts concerning his people's opinion of his bride, Thorin knew that if she became as involved in the running of things as she had been in the Mark, she would make him proud.


Dwalin sidled up to Thorin whilst the royal guests were given a demonstration of the art of glassblowing.

"What news?" asked Thorin under his breath.

"We searched the assassins' dwelling," Dwalin whispered back; "and guess what we found." He discreetly showed Thorin a small suede pouch, of the kind that was used to hold jewels. It contained gems and coins – not much, to be sure, but more than an honest miner could have hoped to save. The purse was tied by a cord adorned with beads; and these bore a sigil.

Thorin examined the markings. "What a careless, vain fool," he said distantly. "I shall see to that anon. Thank you, my friend." He clasped Dwalin's arm, and stuffed the pouch into his pocket.


They left King Brytta with Snorri the engineer, who was currently working on a network of pipes to tap into the hot springs and bring the steaming water into the halls. The system was fascinatingly complex, and they guessed Snorri could talk about it for quite some time. As they left, the King's polite smile already looked rather forced.

Dwalin led Thorin and Helmwyn down to the cellars once again; but now they had their culprit. As they went, Dwalin told them that the assassins had been identified. "Two brothers; name of Árni and Bjárni. Both miners. The supervisor of shaft 8 recognized them. Both unmarried. Lived together down the valley. We found a cache of gems and coins at their place, and that purse I showed you." And the sigils on the purse had pointed straight to the Dwarf who had hired the killers. "Luckily, he's one of those we rounded up yesterday," Dwalin said.

"Dór," said Thorin as the guards brought the prisoner before him. Helmwyn stared. His beard had been shorn; and seeing a shaved Dwarf was a sight more disturbing than she would have imagined. He was one of those patricians with velvet clothes and intricately braided hair; and he put on a show of outrage and offended dignity, but Thorin was having none of it. He merely looked coolly upon the prisoner for a long moment; and when Dór became sufficiently unnerved, he showed him the purse.

When Dór saw that, the bluster went out of him. "They all knew about it," he said.

"What of my sister?" Thorin asked. "Did she know?"

Dór thought a while before answering. "It would have been unseemly to burden the lady Dís with any…details. I assumed she guessed." He paused for a moment. "Perhaps she chose not to know."

Thorin thought upon those words, bitterly grateful for anything that could lessen his sister's betrayal. But now he turned his attention back on the prisoner. "You say the others all knew." Dór nodded. "But yesterday you said the miners had acted out of their own will. Now I learn that you are the one who incited them. You are the one who paid them. And that in my eyes makes you as guilty as those who swung the axe."

Dór tried to protest. "But the others-"

"YOU WILL BE SILENT!" Thorin roared. "Whether the others conspired with you or no does not lessen your guilt!" Thorin gathered himself again, and took Helmwyn's hand, and drew her to him. "My lady, here is one who wished you dead. Tell me, what would you have me do with him? For I believe it is meet that you should decide this."

Helmwyn stood beside Thorin and looked into Dór's eyes. He shot her a look of pure malevolence; and she understood that he loathed her for what she was, and that was unlikely to change. She also knew that this time, she could not meekly defer to Thorin's judgment. Word of this would spread. She was a shieldmaiden, a daughter of the house of Éorl; she had slain Orcs in battle, and rendered justice in the name of the King. If she was to be left untroubled, and if Thorin's rule was to be unchallenged, then she must be seen to be both stern and just. Now. And according to how Dwarves saw the world.

"What is his trade?" she asked.

"He is a jeweller," answered Thorin, "though he, like the rest of us, has practiced other trades during our years of exile."

Helmwyn still gazed at Dór, and all of a sudden the punishment was clear in her mind. A cold shiver ran down her spine, for in her very conscience she did not know whether this were justice, or cruelty. "You shall be cast out of King Thráin's halls," she spoke. "You shall wander the wild again, and make what living you may in the wilderness. But you shall not go alone. That axeman whom you hired, the one that lived…"

"…Árni," Dwalin supplied.

"…he shall go with you. He lost his tongue out loyalty to the lady Dís; and so you shall be his tongue. But as for him, he shall be your hands." Dór had listened to the sentence stoically; but now his head shot up. "He shall be your hands," she went on, as Dór began to protest, "for your thumbs shall be struck off. Furthermore" – she raised her voice to be heard above Dór's shouts – "you shall be joined together by shackles; so that Árni shall have ever by his side the author of his brother's death, and of his own ruin." She wondered whether they would cooperate, or whether the one would not strangle the other with their chain before the winter.

"The lady of the Mark has spoken wisely," said Thorin. "And I command moreover that you shall be shunned by Durin's folk, and that none shall grant you hospitality. Therefore you shall be branded with the mark of infamy, so that all shall know you to be outcasts. You shall try your luck among Men if you will, and see whether they treat you with more kindness that you showed my lady."

Dór had been restrained by the guards; but now he struggled against them, and cried: "Just kill me outright! Kill me if you must; strip me of wealth and dignity. But do not take my livelihood from me!"

"We have spoken," said Thorin in a very final way, and gestured for the prisoner to be taken away, still shouting. When he was gone, Thorin's mask of grim majesty cracked, and he squeezed Helmwyn's hand. "Forgive me, my lord, if I have spoken ill," she said simply. "That sentence is ugly."

Thorin nodded. "It is inventive," he said pensively. "But it is also singularly appropriate. I believe my own sentence would have been more violent and less…exemplary."

"But you supported me, my lord."

He touched her chin. "Of course I did. My queen in all but name," he said. "I would hear your counsel. Always." He sighed. "I pray that this shall be the last time you or I shall ever have to pass such a sentence again, my lady."

They laid their brows together; but there was something on Helmwyn's mind. "My lord," she asked Thorin, "what was that phrase Dór shouted at me? The one that had something to do with 'horse'?"

Thorin hesitated. "You really wish to know?" She nodded. "It was… 'siginul ishuluk kharubaz.' Which translates roughly as…" – he lowered his voice – " 'you long thin streak of horse-piss.' I am sorry, my lady."

Helmwyn repeated the phrase a few times. It seemed somehow familiar. Perhaps the assassin – Árni – had used it. "I shall try to remember that, my lord," she said. "In case I hear it again."


(1) Almost as high as he had been before he announced his intention to wed his daughter. No son-in-law is ever good enough, as far as a doting father is concerned.