Part VIII
Ngiranimo
Pippin sat cross-legged at the edge of the firelight, watching Asouk speak with the survivors of the attack. Na Bani kaswarra o gatlamo ni Horkanbanbo. Horkanbanbe, a! Ukehori. That was a name, or an epithet. Horkanbanbo, sky shaman. Ukehori. Demon blue.
Pippin saw one of the old men staring at him with suspicious eyes. Pippin looked away, and resumed sharpening his sword.
He heard a slight crumpling in the dirt behind him, and he said in Bani, "I see you."
The girl giggled a little. That was good. When he had found her, she had been mute with fear.
They had found the village by following what looked to Pippin like wain tracks. Their rims left furrows not wider than his wrist in the damp earth and green growth. They led them to the village.
It was a settlement of fourteen huts made of mud and straw, grey-white from the ash and pumice of the Mothers. As Asouk and Pippin walked in, they saw beams and maize drying in the sun, scattered from their well-ordered baskets and blankets; oxhide doors flung ajar at the houses; broken clods of earth, and cold cookery fires beneath burnt porridge and stew. Pippin looked at Asouk, and his companion's expression was cold and stern.
"Look in the homes," he said, and Pippin obeyed.
He found the girl at the back of one of the huts, hiding behind tall baskets. She was huddled in the shadows, but her eyes were huge, and she quivered like a plucked string when he discerned her.
Pippin sheathed his sword and smiled. "Hello," he said, then smacked himself mentally and switched to her own language. "Pemen," he said. "Kibopemi." Little man friend. He held out his hand to her. "Come on," he said in Westron, speaking to her as if he were speaking to Farrie. "It's all right, I'm not going to hurt you. Kibopemi."
The girl did not move. Pippin smelled a sharp odor. She had urinated. She was terrified of him.
Heart sinking, he went to the doorway, and called for Asouk. It was Asouk who convinced her to put her arms around his neck and be carried out into the light of the waning day.
The girl said her name was Tiso. She was seven years old. Asouk held her as she cried, saying the strangers had taken her mother and her sisters, and she did not know where her father was. Pippin wanted to hug her and tell her it would be all right, but he did not know that, and in any case she was scared of him. Instead he waited as Asouk asked her if there were any other survivors of the attack.
In the end she led them to the woody groves by the swollen river and called out for the elders who had there taken refuge. One by one they emerged. Tall, but none so tall as Asouk, and thinner than he, they wore robes of roughspun fabric the same red and yellow as the marker stones, dyed from ochre and seeds of flowers that grew plentifully among the slopes of the Mothers. They had come quickly to Asouk once he declared himself to them, but Pippin was another story. One of them, an old man with a long necklace composed of warthog tusks, pointed at him and demanded of Asouk what sort of witch he was.
Now as he sat by the fire and tended his sword Pippin kept one ear on the conversation and one ear to the girl who had come to sit next to him, staring at him with her large black eyes. She no longer seemed afraid, but she remained silent, chewing on some toasted millet from the bowl in her hand.
She offered him some. Pippin smiled and nodded. "Why, thank you," he said. "Beme."
The girl smiled. Well, this was an improvement.
Pippin chewed the millet. It was gritty, and saltless, but filling, and the toasting gave a nuttiness that was passably flavorful to a hobbit with a much-shrunken stomach.
Tiso watched him eat. Pippin noticed she was inching closer and closer to him, staring at his hair, his face, his ears.
He smiled again at her. "Want to sit with me? You can stare at my ears all you want, and I can have some more of your millet."
Between his expression, his tone, and the Bani words for "sit", "ears", and "millet," she must have grasped his offer. She grinned at him and went to sit by his side.
She reached out, shy again, and looked at him. "Pengi?" she said, pointing at his ear.
Pippin nodded. "You can touch it. I don't mind."
The girl's fingertips were rougher than he expected as they ran along the upswept scapha and helix of his left ear. When they found the point, they lifted for a moment, as if startled by its existence even though her eyes told her it was there. Then she touched her fingertip to it. Pippin squirmed. He was ticklish there.
Tiso giggled, and Pippin smiled at her. "You think that's funny," he said, "look at my feet!" And he wiggled his toes, making her laugh harder.
"Nubna!" she called him. "Enokasi ni kibo nubnane."
"Young lady," said Pippin haughtily, "did you just call me a jackal? Why, I may have to spank you!"
"Nubne a." Asouk stood above them, addressing the girl. "I kibo akaso kisihoru."
Tiso looked at Asouk, and then at Pippin, and nodded, her smile growing more serious. "E," she said, nodding. "Kisihoru."
"Tiso!" came the sharp voice of one of the elders, a woman, beckoning her. Tiso looked apologetically at Pippin, and then went to the woman, who bent close as if to scold her, and glared at Pippin.
Pippin sighed.
"They have not seen anyone like you before," said Asouk. "You must forgive them. We are not very fond of strangers."
"It's all right," Pippin said. "I don't care." He jutted his chin at the departing elders. "What did they say about a battle?"
"Chariots came from the northeast," said Asouk, "early this morning, before the sunrise. They attacked the herders who were out with the grazing, and then came here. They took all the able-bodied men and women, killing those who resisted. Afterward the elders fled into the woods with the children, except for one, apparently."
"What do you know of these Nekhetans?"
"Nekheti," Asouk corrected. "I have told you that they live in the valley of the Longest River, the only green land in the Great Desert. Their boats ply the River, sometimes all the way to the lake beyond the Elder Mother. We used to trade with them for their fine cotton cloth."
"They don't usually go around taking slaves."
"No. That is what is different. I never knew them to do so. This has been happening only in the last thirteen years."
"Do they trade the slaves with Umbar?"
"We would have known about it," Asouk said, and Pippin thought of Neimor and the other pirates. "I do not think Umbar has ever traded much with Nekhet. Their only contact must be through the wanderers of the desert, who are unwelcome."
"Oh? Why?"
"They are zealots," Asouk answered. "They worship fire, and it is said offer sacrifice to it upon a desert mountain. They are fierce warriors." Asouk glanced behind him. "These people are still frightened, but they do not know what to do. I have convinced them to seek the aid of our king in the village at the foot of the Elder Mother."
Pippin recognized the location. "Your village," he said. "Your father, then?"
"If he is alive," said Asouk. "I have not asked them. I do not wish them to know me, yet."
"I understand," Pippin said. "We're going there next then, I take it."
Asouk nodded. "In the morning. Tonight, I have promised we shall keep a watch on this village." He threw Pippin's sleeping roll on him. "It is time for you to sleep, before your dreams wake you."
"How kind of you," Pippin said. "I don't suppose I can sleep inside one of those nice huts tonight?"
"I do not think they would be willing, yet."
"Thought not. Ah, well, the life I've always wanted."
Pippin and Asouk left for Ngiranimo, the main village of the Bani, at dawn. The elders and the children watched them go with silent eyes and a few upraised palms. Asouk turned back and promised them to return with aid from the king.
The little girl, Tiso, was holding the hand of the old woman who had taken her in. She watched as silent as the others the two travelers walking east toward the dawn. Then the sun rose, and a random lance of light chanced to strike Pippin's face, making him wince and look away. It lit his hair copper and gold.
"Kisihorunebi!" Tiso shouted at him. She broke free from the old woman's grip and ran a short ways and pointed at the hobbit. "O Sihorunebi m'Hobengo!"
Pippin looked her way in surprise. Seeing him, the girl smiled, and waved, before her guardian caught hold of her again and forced her back to the line. But still she beamed at Pippin.
Pippin returned her smile.
2.
The trail to Ngiranimo ran around the Younger Mother's south side, where an ancient flow of molten rock had hardened into harsh boulders of great size rising like walls and fortifications above the rolling plain, and on through a brief vale to the greener slopes of the Elder Mother. It was a good three-day walk.
On the third day they came upon a tributary that sprang out of another of the old flows between the two mountains. Pippin and Asouk stopped there for a bit to drink. The water was bitter with minerals, but potable, as they shared the spring with a herd of impala, some washing widowbirds, and a sullen shoebill stork.
Pippin chewed on a strip of dried meat as they rested, sitting on a table-topped boulder he had found particularly pleasant to climb. He was in a thoughtful mood, and though the possibility of imminent violence was ever present in his mind, he paid it little attention for now, intent instead on the landscape about him and the taste of the food in his mouth.
"Asouk," he asked.
"Yes?" said his companion, sharpening his knives.
"Did the Bani ever fight for Sauron in the War? Or any war with the West for that matter."
Asouk glanced at him before answering. "Some," he said. "Those who are friendly with the jungle peoples. Those who worship the Eye. They trap young mumakil and raise them as battle-fortresses. I have heard a great train of them passed through Umbar for the great battle before the White City."
Pippin nodded. He remembered seeing the dead beasts after the battle. "But these charioteers," he pursued, "they never did?"
"No," said Asouk. "Not that I have ever heard spoken of. The Valley is well-protected, and there are few roads for such an undertaking. The Longest River is their only highway, and it empties into the eastern sea, not the Bay." He gestured. "No, the mumakil-riders take their young mounts through the jungle to the havens by the Grey Mountains, old havens founded by the men of the sea who followed the Eye in the dark ages. The coastal route is long, but passable. The Valley is closed. North and east of it is hard rock and ash from the earth. And west is the Great Desert where none can pass."
"Except the sand people."
"Except the Erites, yes."
Pippin thought of the veiled girl in his dream, the one he mistook for Diamond though for no apparent reason why. Zeah. Somehow he knew she was one of these Erites.
Suddenly, as if struck by a gust of wind, Pippin saw her. She was in an alley among golden houses of brick and mud. Her breath was swift and her hair disheveled where it fell from the lip of her veil.
Soldiers surrounded the entrance to the alley, soldiers in blue armor with the blue swirl on their brows. They held their arced swords and advanced on her.
The woman raised her sword, curved and keen as a river-reed.
"I will not be taken."
Pippin cried out as the soldiers attacked her, but he was swept away again, to a round space surrounded by the whitewashed huts of the Bani, before a raised altar of stone, beneath the hideously graven image of a figure with outstretched arms. Instead of a face, it had a single burning Eye. A youth was bound upon a pyre, struggling, wide-eyed in terror, the ropes cutting into his flesh as he struggled. Other bound figures, all young and terrified, waited bound to the idol's arms. A figure in a lionskin robe, with the lion's skull and mane on his head, raised a dagger.
"A life for the Great Eye, that he may deliver us!"
A halfhearted murmur from a crowd of people, and an anguished cry from a woman screaming in grief.
Pippin looked back as the lion-robed man raised the dagger high into the setting sun. The dagger flashed and fell.
Pippin cried out again. He was being shaken. Suddenly he saw Asouk. They were still by the spring. The dried meat had just fallen from his fingers.
"Razar! What is happening?"
Pippin couldn't say. He wasn't dreaming, he wasn't asleep. But he had seen it, and somehow he knew it, he knew it was real. The sun was high above them, the same sun that glinted at sunset on the dagger in his sight.
"We have to go," he said. He hopped off the boulder and started to run. "Come on! Ngiranimo is just a few hours away, isn't it, if we run?"
"Yes, but why—"
"Come on! We can still save the prisoners!"
"Razar! What are you talking about? What happened to you?"
"I don't know! I'll explain! Hurry!"
Ngiranimo was built into a sheltered hollow among the brushy foothills of the Elder Mother. Thirty-eight families occupied thirty large, dome-shaped huts and adjacent smaller structures and lean-tos arranged in broad paddocks where dairy cattle were kept and chorework was done, clustered around an open courtyard where feasts and councils had been held in previous days. Those days were gone. Now the courtyard was the site of the altar of the Eye, built on a mound beneath the image of the Eye, and the people of Ngiranimo no longer held happy feasts.
To the side of the courtyard nearer the rock of the mountainside was built the paddock of the kings. There surrounded by smaller huts was the king's house, a large mud building with a high domed roof and many windows. The smaller huts housed wives and children of the king, or kings as it were, for two brothers now ruled Ngiranimo and in a way all the People of the Plains.
The sun was westering over the plains and setting afire the curve of the river when the two kings appeared before the gathered crowd. They both wore lionskin mantles, the tokens of their office, and their faces were painted with white ash and red ochre. The elder's robe was black-maned, the younger's gold. Behind them, the sacrifices were led out and bound to the outstretched arms of the idol of Sauron. Before them, upon the altar, bundles of thorn wood were being laid and drenched in rendered oxfat. A guard of young men armed with spears stood between them and the crowd.
At length the elder of the two brothers stood before the people. He raised his arms and spoke.
"The Eye has turned from us," he said, loud and hoarse. "The Eye is displeased with our worship! For twenty rains now He has cursed us with the scourge of Nekhet. Cursed be the blue soldiers and cursed be their Star."
"Cursed be their Star," responded the people wearily. They had heard this all before. It had never helped.
"Cursed be their Star," said the king, "for the only light is that which comes from the splendor of the deathless Eye!"
"May the Eye find us worthy," was the bitter response, overlying the anguish of those in the crowd whose sons and daughters were bound to the idol's arms. Even the armed guards looked sick of it.
The king looked to his brother in the golden-maned mantle. "Sanao." The brother nodded and motioned for one of the captives to be brought forward. The prisoner chosen, a youth, stared in disbelief as he was led forward to the fire. He began to struggle and kick, but the older man summoned guards, who held him fast and propelled him to the altar.
"Adban!"
The cry came from a woman weeping in the thin part of the crowd behind the mound, near the king's house. She wore a necklace of polished stones and beads, and her robe was fine red cloth. She plead with the king with the black mane. "Narok, I beg you, spare him."
"The Eye makes no distinction between highborn and low, Nibo," said the man named Narok imperiously. "Our son will plead for his people before the naked Eye!" The boy Adban was bound to the altar and held there by three men. He begged them to let him go, but they feared the power of the kings.
Narok approached. From beneath his robe he pulled out a dagger made of knapped flint, jagged and sharper than any knife, with a handle made out of mumakil ivory, stained with old blood.
"Turn your gaze upon us, O Abezoni, Red Eye of Death," he intoned, raising the dagger. "See the offerings we place before you. Send your mighty gaze upon the invaders who steal our people and slay our kine!"
He gripped the knife handle with both hands, arms upraised, and shouted, "A life for the Great Eye, that he may deliver us!" The boy's mother keened.
"Stop!"
Like a cloud the long shadow of a man fell over the altar and the sacrifice. The people gasped and cried out at the apparition standing upon the roof of a hut, his form a shape in the sunset in the west.
"Who is it who speaks when the kings of the People speak?" cried the one named Sanao.
"A man of the People, who has come home!" And Asouk showed his face.
The people murmured his name. "Asouk." They recalled his father. They remembered his mother, the beautiful one, beloved of the people, and they began to call out his name. "Asouk!"
The king named Narok's face also showed recognition, and hate. He jabbed the knife in his half-brother's direction.
"Kill him!"
The armed men gazed at each other, and then rushed to the house. Three threw their spears.
Asouk leapt aside from the flight of one and with his staff slapped the other two away. Then he leapt down into the courtyard and spun the staff so quickly and powerfully that it raised a breeze. The men stopped, daunted.
"Do not obey them," Asouk told them. "They are your enemy, not I."
"Kill him! The Eye commands!" Sanao cried.
Fearful of retribution, they raised their weapons, and attacked Asouk, and Asouk met them with his staff. He spun it, gripped it, thrust and parried with it, left, right, spiraling through their number, catching their jaws, their sides, laying them low like a wind in the reeds, until none were left standing.
Now the prisoners still bound to the idol found that their ropes were being cut from behind. Narok and Sanao spun around and stared in disbelief as, one after the other, the youths and maidens ran from the mound into the crowd and the arms of their loved ones, who were now gazing upon the kings in hate and vengeance.
Narok saw the gaze of the woman Nibo, and remembered the boy on the altar.
"Sanao!" he shouted. "Burn him!"
Sanao nodded and picked up a burning brand. The boy Adban now struggled to free himself from the ropes, his eyes showing terror as his uncle advanced on him, set to burn him alive.
"Hey, you! Lion-head!"
The voice came from the idol. Sanao looked up in shock.
A small hand passed over the carven orb of the Eye, followed by another clutching a sword that gleamed like fire in the sunset, as Peregrin revealed his perch atop the statue of Sauron.
"You shouldn't do that," Pippin said, and leapt.
With a kick that sent the idol teetering, he flew into the air, and crashed into the man, knocking the brand from his hands. The man was taller, but soft and unprepared, and Pippin kicked and jabbed him with his fists and knees, flinging him onto his back with a great heave. Sanao tried to stand. On his knees, he lunged for Pippin, and received a hard blow to the back of his head from the solid steel counterweight at the pommel of Pippin's sword. He fell motionless onto the ground.
Pippin leapt onto the altar and sliced through Adban's ropes.
The boy stared in disbelief at the creature standing above him, who looked like a man, but was half as large, and seemingly twice as fierce.
Pippin held out a small, hard hand. "Get up," he said in Bani.
Adban nodded.
But into their path stepped Narok, gripping a spear tipped with a blade of hard flint. Pippin pushed the boy back and held Trollsbane at the ready. Narok roared and lunged at him with the spear. Pippin leapt back.
He pulled his cloak off his shoulders. Narok swung again, but Pippin had only to dip his head for the spear shaft to pass over harmlessly over him. Crouching he flung his cloak towards Narok and at the same time jumped toward the spear.
The elven-cloak flew upon the head of Narok, allowing Pippin to seize the spear and wrench it away with the hurtling strength of his whole weight. Disarmed and blinded, Narok stumbled and fell upon his back.
Struggling to get up, he found the cloak lifted from his head, and saw Pippin holding Trollsbane to his throat.
Asouk ascended the mound and stood next to Pippin. "Good work," he said in Westron.
"It wasn't even difficult."
"Asouk," hissed his brother. "You were supposed to be dead!"
"I am not," Asouk replied. "And I had hoped for a better welcome than the chariots of Nekhet at our borders, and murder in our homestead!"
Narok spit and tried to rise.
"Ah-ah," admonished Pippin in his rudimentary Bani. "Head, blade, dead."
Asouk called to the people. "Bind their hands and place them under guard!" At his command many did his bidding without objection.
Pippin noticed, stepping away and sheathing his sword. He remarked, "I think they've found a king they prefer. What do you think?"
But Asouk was staring at the idol, left unbalanced by Pippin's maneuver. "This should not be here," he said, and took up the spear Pippin had taken from Narok. As Pippin and the people watched, he thrust the spearhead into the soil beneath the base of the idol, grasped the end of the shaft with both hands, and pulled.
The idol creaked, as if in protest, and then began to topple. Built of wood and stone, graven in the image of a god who was no god and who indeed no longer had any power in the world or any other, it fell to the ground with a dull crash and broke into many meaningless pieces.
Pippin remembered his own meeting with Sauron. He had burned in the gaze of that Eye. Gandalf stitched him whole again: whole, but not the same. The dreams would never go away, and now long sight was his as well. He watched the toppling of the idol with satisfaction.
"For Frodo," he murmured, recollecting.
3.
They slew a fatted calf for a feast that night, to celebrate the overthrow of Narok and Sanao and the Eye. But Asouk ordered men to bring food and weapons to the outlying village by the Younger Mother. It turned out that several families in Ngiranimo had kin there, including one who recognized Tiso as a cousin. Pippin, when he grasped what was being said, was pleased by that.
After the feast Asouk and the men gathered closer around the fire to drink sorghum beer and talk. Their talk was dominated by the raids of the charioteers from Nekhet. Nekhet's soldiers spread wide throughout the southland and the desert and even into the hill-tribes of the inhospitable rift valley to the east. Slaves who escaped told of being made to build a mountain out of stone, a stepped building high as a hill, around the ancient silver pillar that held the mysterious Noonstar.
"Noonstar?" Pippin piped up. All eyes turned to him. Pippin felt like a fool for interrupting, but then asked, "What is this star?"
Some said it was a true star, come down from heaven. Others said it was a flame of some sort, a beam of sunlight mixed with moonlight. Others said it was a living thing. There was no common answer, except that its light was regarded as magical and unrivaled in all the world, and that it entranced all who gazed upon it.
Asouk was more interested in who was doing all this. "Who is building this stepped mountain?" he wanted to know. "Is it this blue demon?" Ne te ba ukehora?
"Seht," said the most vocal of the men, Dyomu, a man of rank who had been a hunt-leader under Asouk's father. Pippin remembered he was the father of the woman Nibo, wife of Narok and mother of the boy he'd saved. "Their god of the desert storm that brings death."
"Nekhet has no gods," Asouk said. "Only idols."
"It is not the god Seht," Dyomu responded, "but the sorcerer who speaks in his name."
"And who is this magician?" Asouk asked.
"None know his name," Dyomu reported, "but they say he is of great power, and he holds the mind of the king Osyr; and that the armies wear blue in his honor, for his clothes are always blue."
The evil of Seht spreads south. Pippin remembered the words of Zeah from his dream, which he now had to believe was no dream, but a vision of long sight. Blue, he thought. That sounded familiar.
"How many of the People have been taken to Nekhet?" Asouk asked.
"Who knows. Many homesteads have been emptied all across the plains over these dark years," said Dyomu.
"How have we fought them?"
"We have not. Your brothers would not allow it. They said the Eye would deliver us."
"The Eye is gone," Pippin interrupted. "He had no power to bestow life, only power to kill."
Many pairs of suspicious eyes fell upon Pippin.
"Who are you?" Dyomu asked with a frown. "What are you? Where do you come from, and what sort of man are you? We are all grateful for what you have done, but I do not know what you are."
"Razar is my ally," Asouk said. "I guided him here, for he is on a great journey to seek all the knowledge in the world. He is a brave warrior and a seer who finds many things in his dreams."
"Then he should speak with a shaman," said Dyomu. "One will tell him many mysteries." He turned to Pippin. "No one but men may sit in this circle and speak. You are no man."
Pippin was about to protest, when Asouk raised a hand.
"He is," Asouk said. From a pouch he produced a long daggerlike tooth, relatively new, its roots still blooded, bound to a leather cord. "This is proof. Here is the tooth of a lion, as all can see. Two moons ago, as we lay upon the shore of bones far to the west, a lion came upon us. If not for Razar, the lion would have devoured me. He killed it with his blade and his courage." He rose, and walked to Pippin, holding the fang aloft. "I have kept it for this moment so that the People may know that Razanur Tuk, little falcon from the north, is a man in our ways."
He knelt, took Pippin's left hand, and placed the tooth upon it, closing the fingers tight upon the totem. To Pippin he added in Westron, "I should have given this to you sooner. They would not have asked."
Pippin accepted it, speechless, and gazed at it in the firelight.
Asouk stood and addressed the men. "I see you have accepted me as king. I take the burden to honor the People and my father. I say to you as king that we must now make a defense against the chariots of Nekhet. We must unite all the villages and homesteads, all the herd-lands and hunting grounds, and defend our homes, our kine, our children and ourselves. If we must walk the Long Valley to Nekhet itself and bring war upon them, then we shall. I say to you what I learned from wise men in the north: Heaven grants blessings upon those who act, not those who wait."
Dyomu stood. "I agree with this. Lead us and I will follow you."
All the men stood. "We will follow you."
Dyomu let out a high, ululating cry, and began to leap up and down in the firelight. The men joined him in the dance, bouncing upon the hard balls of their bare feet, singing in their deep voices, like the sparks that leapt from the flames to the stars above.
Pippin watched, entranced, as Asouk joined them.
Tonight's dream was simple: the Black Gate again, and the stone troll falling upon him. The darkness. The crushing weight. The inability to breathe. Nothing out of the ordinary, as he sat up, gasping, heart pounding.
He was glad he did not wake the young woman who lay next to him, one of the maidens he had rescued from the altar of the Eye. She had approached him after the meeting with the men and asked him if she could thank him for saving her life. Pippin, feeling like a knight, answered gallantly, "My lady, I am ever at your service," except he said so in Westron, which made her laugh. She asked to see the lion's tooth, proof he was a man in the People's eyes. He showed it, hanging from its cord around his neck. Satisfied, she unbound the cloth of her garment and took him to bed. Pippin put up only token resistance. She wasn't all that much taller, and besides, he knew exactly where to place himself.
Now he slipped quietly from the girl's bed and tiptoed past her sleeping siblings and parents out of the hut. He dressed quickly. What rags he wore. If his mother saw him she would weep, and Vinca would scold. Pippin smiled and pulled on his breeches and the remnants of his shirt. He fastened his sword-belt around his waist, tying it off with a knot. He shook out his cloak and looked at it. It was dirty, but otherwise whole. It had been the most useful piece of clothing he wore throughout the long trek across the plains of the Sun. He folded it up and carried it under his arm.
He took a walk around the sleeping village, pausing to gaze at the remnants of the idol. The wood had been burned for the bonfire at the feast; the stone remnants would be used for other purposes. He kicked some dust on a fragment of the Eye. Who's in pieces now, Bloodshot?
Feeling thirsty, he went to the village well, and drew a skinful of water into which he dunked his head to drink. Refreshed, he removed his shirt and threw the rest of the contents of the skin over himself. The sting of the water was cool and bracing as it vanished from his skin into the warm night.
He heard a noise and turned. Something was moving beyond the last hut of the king's corral.
Pippin, not bothering to dry, donned his cloak and fixed it with the brooch. He pulled the hood of his cloak over his head. Slipping into the shadows cast by the bright yet waning moon, he found a trace of the sound he'd heard: two sets of footsteps in the dust. He followed the trail.
At some distance he saw them: the brothers, Narok and Sanao, hands still bound, but legs free, running into the east over the slopes of the Elder Mother.
Now part of Pippin, a still-young but full-fledged hobbit of forty-one, told him to go to Asouk and rouse him, so that they could form a pursuit party to go after the escapees. But Pippin was Pippin. All his age and experience could not quench his rashness; only reinforce it with boldness.
"I can always double back," he told himself, and it was all the convincing he needed, before he set out alone in pursuit of the brothers.
It was too late to go back by the time Pippin admitted to himself this was a bad idea. Dawn was nearing, and the brothers had run, stumbled and walked many miles around north and east over the low slopes of the mountain. Pippin had followed, pausing only to wish he had brought some food for a midnight snack.
Now he saw the brothers run into a small blind valley whose grassy floor was sheltered from wind and sight by bald ridges of old flows. Pippin stopped by a rock when he heard unfamiliar voices raised in anger.
He hid and peered out. He could not see much, but he heard the voices of the brothers, crying out in alarm, and then Narok's voice, hoarse and ugly, rising up in a shout and then stilled. Pippin knew there were Men down there. Many Men. And then he heard horses as well, and he knew what the brothers had stumbled into.
Sanao appeared, running for his life, his cruel face distorted in mortal fear. Pippin shrunk back against the rock as the man ran past. A whistling in the air made Pippin duck out of habit, and Sanao fell, stuck with several blue-feathered arrows.
Pippin hugged the rock against which he hid, flinging his elven-cloak over himself so that he was almost unnoticeable in the shadows and moonlight. He watched through the weft of the cloak as men dressed in the armor of Nekhet picked up Sanao's body and carried it away.
Pippin waited immobile until he was certain the Nekheti had gone. Then he rose and stole his way through the rock and grass to a better vantage over the box valley.
He saw fifty chariots, each drawn by a light-limbed horse, and nearly a hundred soldiers. They were armed with spears, swords, and bows. There were also several wains drawn by teams of four. Pippin realized the wains were cages filled with people.
These were the slavers. He had to return to Ngiranimo now. Maybe there was a chance for the Bani to come upon the Nekheti and surprise them …
In his haste he failed to notice the soldiers approach him from behind until it was too late. With a whisper a net fell upon and entangled him.
"Let me go!" he shouted, and tried to get to his sword.
An officer in slightly different garb, with a headdress bearing the device not of a storm but of a bird in flight, appeared. He held an arrow in his hand. Pippin glared at him in defiance.
He grabbed Pippin's hair and pulled his head back and nicked his neck with the wet tip of the arrow. Pippin felt heat and then a strange numbness. His vision blurred and his head began to swim. The last thing he saw was the men lifting him up and taking him to the waiting chariots. Then the world went away and he saw no more.