Chapter Four: Day Eight: The World Below
"Oh, Frodo-lad. Come over here." Bilbo beaconed Frodo over to the helm. "I've been learning about tacking into the wind. Fascinating!" The helmsman smiled and gave Bilbo the long handled wooden double helm. "See! We can sail West even when the breeze isn't behind us. Fascinating stuff, this tacking! Keeps the crew on their toes though. Quite a lot of work."
Frodo smiled. "You're taking to the Sea like a Brandybuck takes to ale, Uncle Bilbo. If I didn't know any better I would claim you were part-Elvish."
"Nonsense," the older hobbit grumbled. "But if I had known how much I enjoyed living on a boat, I would have taken the journey a long time ago."
"Ship," the helmsman corrected. "This vessel is a ship, not a boat."
"You weren't invited a long time ago," Frodo gently reminded his uncle.
"Oh, mere formality," Bilbo huffed and dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. The Elf smiled and winked at Frodo, who smiled back. Bilbo had taken an active interest in everything to do with running the vessel. He quite enjoyed life aboard ship, and it agreed with him as well.
The two hobbits shared a special-built cabin below decks at the front of the ship, tucked into an odd angle. Frodo had the upper bunk, deferring to his elderly Uncle's stiffness, aches, and pains of advanced age. Bilbo was grateful at first for the easy-to-reach lower bunk. But Bilbo was awaking each morning with fewer and fewer complaints.
"You look well rested, Uncle," Frodo said over breakfast on day eight.
"I feel well rested," Bilbo smiled. "I haven't slept this well in decades. I had no idea traveling in a ship would be so pleasant. Why, I'm sleeping all the way through the night, which is something I haven't done in years either!" Bilbo launched into a plate of scrambled eggs and fish. "Can't say the same for you though."
"Sorry about that," Frodo sighed and sipped his tea. "I would move, but there isn't another bunk available. Guess I could sleep with Shadowfax."
"Oh, silly boy," Bilbo said, "that's not what I meant, and you know it. I just worry about your nightmares. Would you like to tell me about them? Maybe talking will dispel them." Bilbo reached for another piece of toast. His appetite had returned like in his mid-nineties, much to his delight. Food smelled and tasted SO good now.
"Nightmares discussed over breakfast?" Frodo countered. "I think not. Perhaps later after we've made landfall." Frodo was feeling somewhat better, though he tried to not dwell upon such things for fear that the feelings might be temporary. The coldness in his left shoulder seemed somewhat lessened. In the innermost recesses of his battered and burned soul, a spark of hope had returned.
'Perhaps Arwen was right after all,' he thought and unconsciously fingered the Evenstar pendant which took the place of the Ring about his heck. A quickening chill breeze brought the scent of fresh rain.
"Please excuse me." Frodo stood up. "I'm going above." Frodo made a detour back to his cabin and grabbed his travel-worn Lothlorien cloak before climbing the stairs leading to the main deck.
Contrary to what he believed prior to boarding, life aboard a sea-going vessel was anything but boring. Each day brought fresh, new surprises to delight the senses. Or scare him out of his wits! The first time he had seen the Elvish crew scampering up the main mast to secure the sails against a sudden squall, Frodo had almost left finger marks gripping the solid wooden railing in concern. But the nimble crew was quite comfortable at heights, in cold slippery weather, and aboard a violently rocking ship.
Frodo and Bilbo watched the workings of the crew throughout the rather chilly storm on day eight, fascinated at the lack of panic. The two hobbits lashed themselves securely to the railing with stout ropes, fearful that they would be swept overboard by an errant wave and not be noticed by the busy crew until it was too late. The work was actually well coordinated and rather calming to the worried hobbits. There was a certain beauty in the ballet of rigging and securing occurring far above the rolling deck.
On day nine Frodo awoke to find that the ship was running at a steep slope. He found himself lying in an angle where the ship's exterior wall met his bunk. Actually, he was lying more on the wall than in the bunk. Frodo could tell it was morning, but something was strange about the light coming into the cabin. It flickered and sparkled like diamonds or opals caught in bright sunlight.
When he looked up at the porthole near the ceiling, Frodo was astonished to see blue rather than the normal pale yellowish grey morning sunlight.
"Water!" Frodo cried, bumping his head against the wall in blind panic to untangle himself from the bed sheets. His heart was racing as if he had been running for miles. Frodo struggled to get out of his bunk due to the extreme slant. "Bilbo! Get out! We're sinking!"
"Sinking?" A confused sleepy voice came from the bunk below. "What? Sinking? I don't see any water, Frodo. We're not sinking." Bilbo struggled out of his bunk just as Frodo leapt from upper one, both attempting to stand upright on a steeply slanting floor. Frodo grabbed onto Bilbo's sleeve to keep from falling flat.
"What are you going on about, Frodo?" Bilbo helped steady Frodo as a frown crossed his disheveled face.
"But…" Frodo pointed a shaking finger at the porthole. Bright morning sunlight rippled through the filtering teal water, sending blue and green tram beams dancing along the polished wood.
Bilbo laughed in delight. "Well! Will you look at that!" A thin speckled fish darted past the porthole, causing the hobbits to gasp slightly.
"Good thing that porthole is watertight," Bilbo swallowed.
"Are we going to tip over?" Frodo asked, putting his hands against the wall to pull himself upwards towards the door. With the extra help of gravity it opened inward a bit faster than he was anticipating, bumping him on the forehead.
"Ow!" Frodo pulled himself past the doorjamb and looked down the empty hallway. He could hear the ship creaking, naked feet padding softly on the polished wooden deck above his head, and the occasional thump of Shadowfax shifting about. The smell of bacon and toast wafting by. Everything was normal, save for the fact that the ship was sailing at a decidedly low angle to the waterline. Frodo went back inside and heaved the door shut.
Bilbo was putting on a shirt. "Maybe this is normal," the elder hobbit said.
Frodo saw something rather flat and brown swim past the porthole. It looked like some sort of gigantic troll's dinner platter with a long, thin tail at one end and bulbous eyes poking up through the mottled skin at the other. Frodo's own eyes widened and he scrambled back up into his bunk, standing up to press his face against the cool glass. The porthole was situated directly underneath the waterline. The motion of the ship under sail occasionally caused the porthole to rise above the waterline, and then sink back below. Frodo stood, transfixed at the novel sight of seeing the underworld of the ocean open up just past his nose.
There were fish… and… well… things… swimming beside the hull and out into the dark distant water. He had never seen such things, or even imagined them in his dreams.
Long, sinuous fish with heads shaped like elongated Dwarvish axes. Whirling clouds of small silvery fish in numbers too large to count. Dark grey fish with saws sticking out of their mouths and others with row upon row of ghastly knife-like teeth. Something that resembled a turtle, but couldn't possibly be, since it was swimming rather than sinking. It appeared to be wearing thick green leather armor. 'Perhaps it is a foot soldier for some underwater realm,' Frodo mused. 'Ah, don't be ridiculous. Can't be a foot soldier. He hasn't any feet. Maybe it's a female. How can one tell with things like that?'
Frodo observed many bizarre creatures bobbing near the surface that looked so strange he spent a long time coming up with a concept for what it was made of and how it could possibly swim. He finally named them 'sea clouds' because they mostly resembled transparent clouds with long, thin tangles of rain trailing beneath and behind the larger, loosely rounded 'head.' If it was a head. Maybe it was the body. Maybe it had no head. Maybe it was an underwater thunderstorm, though that also sounded absurd. Frodo wasn't sure what it was, but sketched it anyway. As to how the 'sea cloud' moved about, Frodo could only guess. Perhaps it used some sort of pump, though how a sea creature could ever construct a pump without the benefit of hands was beyond his imagination.
Frodo tried to remember any mention of creatures such as these in any of the books he read, but came up blank. He spent the rest of the morning gazing out the porthole into the blue abyss, and madly sketching the strangeness swimming in the deep blue waters.
When the relentless wind finally shifted to the East and then died out, the ship righted itself to a more normal slant and Frodo lost his view into the ocean's secrets. He had sketched several creatures in his ever-present journal. Frodo went above deck in the afternoon and redrew his crude sketches into more fully detailed charcoal drawings before the memory of what he had seen was lost to the nightmares of the night.