Friends

Canohando's gentleness had drawn Malawen to him in spite of her hatred of his kind. She felt as if her dark thoughts rested in his cupped hands, and he was not dismayed by them. Ever since her capture by Orcs she had known herself shamed, defiled. She had been rescued, it was true, and her wounds ministered to, but the other Elves had been loath to meet her eyes. They had pitied her and looked away, and at last she had felt almost unbodied, a ghost walking under the sun. But when Canohando's black eyes rested on her, she was visible and real again.

She hardly recognized him for an Orc anymore; he was her friend, who had wept with her at Undomiel's death and now had rescued her. She shivered. They would have slain me in torment. And I am no more fit for the Halls of Mandos than I am for Tol Eressea.

Canohando looked back and she met his glance, familiar and comforting. She smiled involuntarily and his eyes sparked with answering warmth. She felt suddenly as if this stealthy creeping through the forest were some game of her childhood, and the Orc was her playfellow. Almost she laughed, and pressed her lips tight together to hold in her merriment as she slipped from shadow to shadow behind him.

They reached the band of trees along the River and turned north. It was a narrow swath of woodland; they could see the glint of water off to the right and yet look out at the rolling plain on the other side. It seemed an empty landscape, but still they made their way cautiously under cover, and the third day showed the wisdom of this. A cloud of dust appeared on the horizon, drawing closer to become a hundred wild horses, kept in one herd by stalwart riders with long blonde braids.

"Men of Rohan?" Canohando questioned under his breath. "What are they doing here? Their land is far south of your country, Elfling."

Malawen gnawed on her lip. "They are far from home," she murmured. "They seek new blood for their horse breeding, perhaps, now the Shadow has departed. Stay down, Canohando; they have no love for Elves."

He snorted softly. "Nor for Orcs either, little one. We will not ask them to dinner."

She giggled, stifling the sound against her forearm as she lay flat on the ground. The horsemen passed out of sight.

"Better take shelter now, till we know they are far away," Canohando said. He climbed a tree and slung both their hammocks from the branches; he had woven one for Malawen from a spare coil of rope in his pack. "Come, Elfling, we will eat even though it is not dark yet, and you shall tell me one of your stories. Someday I will play my drum for you, when it does not matter how the sound carries."

The sun went down and they swung lazily in the treetop; it was beginning to leaf out, and they were well hidden. "I will sing you the Lay of the Ring-bearer," she said. "Have you ever heard it?"

"No, but I have heard enough of what it says to know it is far from the truth. Are all your stories of like kind, Elfling, half true and half lies?"

"How would I know?" she countered. "I tell them to you as I heard them, but I was not present at the Sack of Nargothrond!"

He chuckled. "No? But you describe it so well, and you told me you are not a child, for all your littleness."

She feigned sternness. "Be quiet, Orc, and listen, or go to sleep if you do not care to hear it." She reveled in the teasing; thus she had bantered with her father long ago, before the War. Canohando broke off a spray of leaves and tossed it into her hammock.

"Go on, then," he said, and lay quiet listening to her soft voice, trying to sift out the overlay of legend from the tale and find the nuggets of plain fact. I would have despised him as soft, if I had known him from the first, he thought. But long before Malawen's voice faded away, Canohando was pierced to the marrow as he understood at last what Frodo had taken on himself. He had known the end of the story; he had not known the beginning.

"Well? Is any of it true?" Malawen asked. Night had fallen and faint moonlight filtered through the leafy canopy around them. She peered over at the Orc.

Canohando stirred himself, sitting up and waiting until the hammock stopped swaying before he spoke. "Yes, it is true, all of it, or nearly all. True that he had a noble heart, and I will never know why he befriended a greyskin, bloodthirsty and depraved..."

"You are not depraved," Malawen said, fierce in her defense of him, but Canohando had pulled himself up onto the branch next to her, and he stared down, his face black in the shadows.

"I taught him to shoot," he said. "I feared he would starve if ever the old man left him, so I taught him to hunt. He was a good shot in the end, but he hated killing, even for food. While I -- I kill as easily as breathing -- worse than that. I take joy in it; I was born for it." His voice was bitter.

"You kill to protect yourself, or someone else," Malawen said stoutly. "You shot that Orc to save me –"

"Yes. And I hunt to survive, when I do not have waybread. But the quiver of living flesh under my knife, the little push to slide the blade home –" He groaned. "I try to be careful now, not to take life wantonly: only for food or for protection. But slaughter feeds something inside of me; I hunger for it more than food, sometimes. I am no companion for you, Elfling."

He loomed over her, blocking the moonlight. "I am an Orc. I cannot escape it; I will never escape. And when you said you are Orc-marked – you do not understand; you do not know what that means. You have a scar, you are angry at what you suffered; no blame to you for that! But you are clean -- shining and fair and called to Valinor, while I –"

He turned and began climbing down out of the tree, clumsy in his haste and bumping his head on a branch. He swore, or so she supposed; anything in the harsh Orkish tongue sounded like imprecation. She stared after him, whispering, "But you're wrong, Canohando. I do know what it means." Then she flung herself out of her hammock and slid down the tree in his wake, reaching the ground and darting after him.

"Don't leave me! Don't leave me, Canohando!"

He kept on as if he had not heard, another ten or twelve steps, and then a low howl broke the silence and he froze. There was another howl just ahead, and Canohando whirled around and ran back, catching Malawen in his arms and boosting her into the nearest tree. "Climb!" he said sharply, and was gone.

She climbed, shivering with fear. When the Orcs invaded Lothlorien she had heard wolves; that was the only time, but she had not forgotten the sound. She kept going higher until the branches in her hands felt too thin and pliant for safety; then she backed down a few feet and sat straddling a sturdy bough, hugging the trunk so hard that the bark scraped painfully against her bare arms. Canohando did not follow and she wondered where he was. The eerie howling seemed to fill the dark void below. She did not dare look down.

There was a caterwaul from the ground, pain and rage, and then a cacophony of yowling and yipping, and Malawen clung to her tree, sobbing in terror. Finally the noises began to move away, until at last everything was silent, and she choked back her tears to listen. Nothing. Not the hoot of an owl, not the faintest moan of any creature. And then Canohando's voice came softly, "Elfling? Climb down now; they are gone."

A moment later he was just below her, holding out his hand, and she unwound herself from the tree trunk and let him help her from branch to branch all the way down. But her knees nearly folded beneath her when she looked around; there were a half a dozen dead wolves scattered about on the ground under the tree, transfixed by arrows.

"Come, Elfling, we will go back to our hammocks. I don't think they will return, but we are safer in the treetop, and there we can rest."

She still gripped his hand and would not let him draw it away. "Don't leave me."

"No." His voice was gentle. "I will not leave. Come, now."

But when they had found their own tree again, she would not sleep alone. Nothing would satisfy her but to crowd into his hammock with him, cuddling under his arm and pillowing her head on his chest.

"I can hear your heart," she said after a while. He grunted and she reached up to rest her hand on his shoulder. "It is a good heart, Canohando. Not depraved."

He did not answer and soon she fell asleep, her breathing soft and regular. Her arm slipped down to her side, but her cheek was still warm against his chest and he stroked her head, his clawed hand feather light on her hair. At length he wrapped his arms around her and closed his eyes.

"Elfling," he whispered. "My little Elfling."

The night of the wolves brought Canohando self-knowledge, and drove away his peace. Malawen had become his delight and his tenderness for her was sweet agony. He wanted to fight a troll for her, to catch her up and carry her where no one could ever hurt her again, to keep her for his own, make himself one with her, until Arda fell to pieces and melted into the Sea...

He dragged his attention back to the present. They were coming into a region of marshes now, meandering slow streams and little islets of solid ground; it behooved him to watch where he was going or he would have them both waist-deep in the mud.

She is not for you, Bloody Knife, Death-dealer. She has suffered enough from Orcs! He lashed himself with every contemptuous name he could invent, holding out his arm sometimes and contrasting his rough grey skin with her pearly whiteness. But his yearning did not abate for all his self-flagellation.

When his fingernails grew too long he took out his knife to trim them, and on impulse he filed them down to the ends of his fingers, instead of cutting them into the sharp Orc claws he had worn all his life. Often Malawen reached out for his support to steady her as she stepped from one grassy tussock to another, trying not to slip into the quagmire, and the next time she caught at his hand she felt his smooth fingertips and smiled at him without speaking.

He grew warm with embarrassment, yet he was pleased that she had noticed, and angry at himself for being pleased. If she could see into your mind, Black-heart –

But he did not finish the thought, distracted by wondering what the Elf-girl really thought of him. She journeys with me of her own will, he reminded himself. By her own wish she climbed into my hammock. But he had not allowed that to happen a second time. It had been too sweet, her softness pressed against him through the night. He had lain awake holding her until the morning, torn between rapture and anguish.

He was ashamed of his body's response to her. All his experience of sexuality was bound up with violence and degradation; he had raped and he had been raped, in the old days that he tried to forget, and now the memories stalked his dreams. As deeply as he longed for a son, yet he recoiled from the act which must beget new life; he did not know how to separate union from brutality. And his Elfling –

"Watch out!" he exclaimed, pulling her back. She half fell against him and he flung an arm around her, holding her to his side. A watersnake just beyond their feet opened its mouth wide in silent threat, before it disappeared beneath the surface.

"Thank you." She leaned on him, and he could not muster the strength of will to push her away. "Oh, I hate them! I never saw snakes in Lothlorien while Galadriel ruled, but later they crept in sometimes." She shuddered. "Hold onto me, Canohando, please. I don't want to fall in that water; it's so murky, you can't see what's down there."

He could not tell her no. They went on hand in hand, her fingers curled trustingly around his, and his heart sang even as self-contempt churned in his mind.

He thought she was unaware of his agitation, until the morning he woke to find her staring down at him through the netting of her hammock. She was a little above him in the tree, and her eyes held him as if he had been bound with the light, thin rope the Brown One had carried so many years ago, strong for all its softness.

Her eyes are like the leaves, he thought. Green… no, golden… hazel? I cannot tell. He shook his head, trying to clear it.

"You would not hurt me, Canohando," she said, and the absolute conviction in her tone was contagious. He stretched out his hand to her and she grabbed it, nearly tipping herself out of the hammock.

"Careful!" He let go hurriedly and she righted herself, laughing. "No, Elfling, I would never hurt you. I would cut off both my arms first." He looked up at the pale little face with the amazing eyes, and gladness shivered through him. He felt a great shout building up in his throat, one that would startle the birds out of their nests and set the new leaves dancing on all the branches, and he clenched his teeth to hold it in. They were hiding, after all. There was no telling what might hear him.

But the next time memory scrolled scenes of long-ago carnage before his eyes, he would not look. Both my arms first, he muttered, and was comforted.

Malawen had never been out of Lothlorien and knew no more than he where they were. Canohando brought out the map Arwen had given him, and they bent over it together. The marshy country was marked as Loeg Ningloron, and the river which flowed into it from the west as Sir Ninglor.

"Goldenwater, that means," Malawen said. "I wonder why; there's nothing golden about it. I would have called it Mud-water, if I'd been naming it."

Canohando chuckled. "Elves have music in their blood, I think, and would rather speak in poetry than plain words. Perhaps the one who named it thought the yellow water looked like gold."

"He must have been blind, then." She turned the map over to read what was written on the other side. "What is this? Arwen Undomiel grants leave for Canohando the Orc to enter the Shire--" Where is the Shire? I thought you were going to Rivendell."

He took the map hastily and rolled it up again, reluctant to have her handle it, though he could not have said why. "Rivendell first, but then to my brother's land." It came to him suddenly that he had never told her more than the bare fact that he had known Ninefingers. He tucked the map away, and as they walked he told of his friendship with Frodo and his desire to see the Halflings' country.

"But I am too late to find him again," he finished. "I miss him, Elfling."

"What a strange tale," she marveled. "An Orc and a Halfling - and now we are friends, Canohando. An Orc and an Elf. How is it that you draw such varied folk to you? The Queen and her brother -- the Men of your company --"

He shrugged. "It was the Brown One, perhaps. He was a man of power; I felt it in his hands when he healed my wound. Are we friends, Elfling?"

"Mellon-lithui, that is what you are. My friend as-grey-as-ashes."

He grimaced. She was teasing, but he had grown to hate his grey skin, outward sign of inner depravity, the Orc nature he could not escape. "And you are Mellon-bain," he said, matching her carefree tone with an effort. "Have I got it right? My beautiful friend."

"You know Sindarin?" The admiration in her voice took away the sting of her name for him, and he smiled.

"The Lady was teaching me, but I don't know how much I remember."

"Really? Let's find out. What is this?" She held out her arm.

"Ranc," he answered, and she nodded.

"Good. And this?" She lifted a strand of her hair.

"Finnel."

She laughed. "No, that's your hair, in braids. Mine is laws, loose and curly."

It pleased them both, Malawen tutoring him in the Elven tongue, and it passed the time as they walked. It was well for them that the country they were traveling through was nearly empty, for they completely forgot to be cautious.

They came out of the marshes of Loeg Ningloron and into upland forest, still following the River, and they strolled hand in hand as casually as if they had not been scouting through trackless wilderness, where neither had ever been before. The woodland glowed with spring sunshine, where later in the season all would be deep green shade. Violets and hepatica bloomed underfoot and birds flitted from branch to branch, busy with nest-building. There was no sound but the wind in the treetops and the laughter of an Elf and an Orc, who were friends.

note: Sir Ninglor is the Elvish name for the River Gladden, named for the yellow waterlilies that bloomed along its marshy banks and reflected in the water. The lilies would not have been in flower this early in the season, if indeed they still grew there at this period.