A weapon of victory 2 - Buffy in Isengard – part 4

Another morning came, and Buffy went out to meet Goldhair and her fiends in the refectory. In spite of her terrible concerns, this world could not but make Buffy feel happy. There was such beauty in the mountain and wood, and the air smelled clean, fresher and less humid than the seaside California air she was used to.

Some things were the same. Mealtimes were so much like home – the din of hundreds of voices in the refectory at mealtimes, sounding just like the school's cafeteria; and Goldhair, who made a very good stand-in for her Sunnydale friends; and, unfortunately, the cliques and ethnic groups. Her feeling about the mutual hatred between Rohirrim and Dunlendings had at first being reinforced by the fact that they looked so much like each other to her eyes. Buffy was used to thinking of ethnic hatred as falling along colour lines, blacks and latinos and wasps and Asians; these people were all what she would have called white, and when had not seen the difference at all, at first. Now she was beginning to see variations. There were more people with brown and black hair among the Dunlendings. Goldhair and her Rohirrim friends tended to have lighter skin and grey or blue eyes, and, as her name said, blonde hair. Both groups tended to be on the strapping side, the Dunlendings more broad, the Rohirrim more tall. But Buffy thought it was a matter of shading.

Saruman's raised seat was empty. She cast a glance around herself, as she had got into the habit of doing, to check for possible trouble, and saw nothing. She sat down at her usual place, as conversations went on all around them. The Rohirrim had become used to her, she noticed. Nobody even turned to look, except for a few greetings. But she still felt the eyes of the Dunlendings on her from the other side of the hall.

The bell rang for the end of breakfast time. Buffy noticed that Saruman had come in, late, and was eating, indifferent to the time and to the sight of people going off to work. She had the feeling that he was just avoiding to be caught looking at her. She left the thought behind; there was something else she needed to do.

"Goldhair," she said, "can we talk?"

"Of course, Lady Baffy."

"What would you be doing if I wasn't here today?"

"My job, I guess. I'm a seamstress, like a lot of us Rohan girls."

"Well, then. I'm not telling you to go away… you can stay with me if you like… but I'm going to be spending the morning exercising, so if you want to catch up with other work, that's all right."

"Oh," said Goldhair. And again, "oh.." Her eyes went wide.

"Is that a problem?"

"I'd never thought of it, Lady Baffy… the Lord Saruman told me to stay with you. Maybe we should ask him first?"

"Yes, I guess… we'll probably meet today, we always do. But I'm not going to bother him till then. I just hope you don't get bored."

Bored was the last thing that Goldhair expected to be. Awed as she had been by her friend's evident superhuman powers, she was amazed to hear that Buffy would exercise like any normal warrior- And all of a sudden she was burning to see how one of the Maiar, or perhaps even the Valar, would exercise.

Buffy had found the bit of open ground in the shadow of the tower where the men practised fighting. Dunlendings and Rohirrim both had tasks they were paid for, but it was understood that they would not allow their edges to be blunted, and so they all practised fighting at regular intervals. Goldhair followed her. silent and curious.

In the event, she was bewildered and a bit disappointed. The Lady Baffy did not lift immense rocks or wrestle squads of men. She began with a very, very slow series of motions, and followed with a number of abstract moves, often repeating them till she reached some standard of perfection she saw in her head.

A group of Dunlendings were going through their workout. Goldhair looked at them with distrust. If she hadn't been with the Lady Baffy, she would not have trusted them within a stade of her. But at this moment, somehow, her strange, solitary, repetitious moves still managed to keep her eye.

She was not the only one. Under the shadow of his hood and of his deep brows, Saruman's eyes were on Buffy. Once or twice, as she turned around in one of her katas, she caught him, standing motionless at a window some distance away. But she was too distant to read the intensity of that stare.

There were many things in that stare; including some that Saruman himself was only just discovering. He was thinking about the discovery that, in her world, incarnate spirits had become able to reproduce, in the way of mortals, and multiply, and that the power of spirits and what she called demons was handed down from generation to generation. This opened strange… terrifying prospects. But they were prospects that had never opened themselves to him before, in all his centuries of physical life.

Saruman's mind turned to his body. He was perfectly conscious of it, of course, as he had been from the beginning. It was a machine to bear the power of a Maia, generation after generation, efficient and almost unaging. But all the things that he had taken for granted until then now seemed to acquire a different meaning, a meaning of their own, rather than the service of the spirit. He thought of the flow of physical power along the muscles, on the sturdy frame of the skeleton; of the steadfast, terrible beat of heart and veins and arteries; of how and in how many ways the internal and the external met – sight and hearing, air through the lungs, food. For the first time in his life he was thinking of himself as a body, not as a power.

And yet there was power in the flesh. Saruman watched Buffy perform her routines. More acute, more experienced than Goldhair (or the Dunlendings, who, one by one, were sneaking looks at the strange and terrible little blonde), he could read the perfection with which a given posture would transmit or absorb force, pivot, shift posture out of range. He felt as though he were learning a new language, a language of motion and mass. He committed each move to his immense memory.

To be honest, he was fascinated. This little, helpless looking creature, looking like a lost Elf; and power ran along her slim limbs and supple core like fire. He was beginning to understand, what he had known without thinking of it for so long, what physicality was, and what attraction; what drew mortals to each other in Eru Iluvatar's design, to create – to procreate.

And there was something else in him. He felt an anger at her being so inaccessible, of another world, and of an order of power equal to his own. If he were honest with himself, he would have said that he felt almost a need to force her… though the force he was feeling, the force in his imagination, might not have been sexual at all. Besides, he knew that force as such would not do it. Saruman kept watching… and watching… and watching, watching the courtyard and the tiny blonde figure.

Meanwhile, the Dunlendings' exercise had almost stopped. Even the practice leaders had been distracted by the Lady Baffy and her strange exercises. They did however make an effort to look busy… when she turned and walked towards them. Saruman was amused. He did not thnk she would be taken in by the sudden, poorly coordinated resumption of their exercises.

What he saw next, however, did not amuse him. The Weapon of Victory started talking with the exercise leaders. At first they showed fear and tension in every line of their bodies. But then, one by one, they seemed to grow interested, as she talked on, showing what she meant by motions of her hands. They started their exercise again, but now there were some subtle differences. The Weapon went through the rows, making comments, occasionally correcting someone's posture or motion.

Saruman was troubled by this generosity. The Weapon possessed, not only phenomenal powers, but an amazing level of skill. She was, in her own field, nearly as knowledgeable as he in his. And she just gave away that knowledge, that skill, as though there were no danger in informing others of how she fought and defended herself, Of course, whatever she taught them, they were still mere humans, and she had nothing to fear from them. But Saruman had never been so careless with his knowledge, and it disturbed him.

Goldhair was also unhappy with Buffy, but for a different reason. For the obvious one. As they walked to the refectory (it was getting on for lunchtime), her anger took on an oddly whiny tone.

"...It's all very well for you, Lady Baffy, they can't do anything to you, but I tell you, those Dunlendings are dangerous to us! It wasn't right, to help them train."

"Oh, good grief. Look, I only corrected their postures a bit. I'll do the same for your boys if you want me to."

That did not satisfy Goldhair. They were still arguing as they joined the crowd going into the refectory. Buffy decided not to say anything more, but it was too late. Suddenly there was a burst of talk. She heard awful stories about border raiding, cattle rustling, the abduction of girls and children, farms burned down and forests deliberately set on fire. She listened with a solemn expression, nodding or making assenting sounds from time to time. She did notice that almost none of the stories showed personal experience. They always were about what had happened to an ancestor, or in a nearby village, or somewhere unspecified. But she did not challenge them. She had begun to understand how these people talked and thought, and she knew there would be no purpose in trying to argue the matter in a group. They were all just trying to confirming each other's knowledge. Buffy shook her head and kept silent. Years of trying to convince people that vampires and demons were real had taught her that there was no getting past people's prejudices.

Buffy decided to try and change the subject. She brought in Orcs, with a vague suggestion that if the Dunlendings were so bad, perhaps the Orcs were their friends. Or was it that they were there to keep them in line?

That caused a strange reaction. There was more attention, but less talk. The general opinion seemed to be that the Dunlendings would not do that, because there was no way the Orcs would not turn on them too. When Buffy asked why they could not make a deal with the monsters, nobody would quite say why, but everyone seemed to imply that it was about something too deep and too essential to be stopped by agreements or deals. Yes, even if they were meant. Someone said that if it wasn't for the power of the Lord Saruman, nobody would feel safe with so many Orcs around. Yes, said someone else, I would never have thought of an alliance between Orcs and Men. That's why I trust him. If he can do that, he can do anything.

….

That afternoon Saruman came to her for what she was beginning to think as an interview, if not indeed a debriefing. Saruman always wanted information, while giving away as little as he could. Today, however, he was more communicative than usual. He spoke of the Dark Lord, of the need to oppose him, and of how, in his view, the prospects for an alliance of the kind that had stopped him centuries ago looked grim. Only a few elves were left in Middle-Earth, and they no longer interacted with Men or Dwarves. Long before the Dark Lord had unveiled himself in Mordor – and yes, Saruman had no doubt that this was the same Dark Lord who had been defeated a thousand years before by the Last Alliance – orcs had been spreading in the interstices between human, elvish and dwarvish societies, hated by everyone and hating everyone. By the time the Lord of Mordor had declared himself, the free peoples of Middle-Earth had been too isolated and distracted to react, even if they had wanted to.

Then the king of Mordor had made use of the same infestation of Orcs. It took a while for the free peoples of the West to realize that all the Orcs that crawled around and behind them were one way or another under Mordor's control. But, said Saruman, that was now part of his strategy.

"The Dark Lord's power, as a king, is based on Orcs. As long as they obey him alone, all other races are in danger. That is why I have been working at building up different orcish societies, whose loyalty will not be to him. Of course, traditionally Orcs and Men have not got along, but I am working to change that, right here."

"You seem to be working long term," said Buffy in a neutral tone.

"That is what is required when dealing with the Dark Lord. He himself thinks in centuries, and does not worry about raising or destroying whole nations for his purposes. And unfortunately neither Men, nor Orcs, nor Dwarves are apt to think like that. They are mortals. They cannot cast their plans long beyond their own life-limit." And Buffy nodded.

When Buffy went to sleep that night, she felt a weird unease that she could not quite express or name. It was not to do with the Orcs themselves, or with the strange and stupid hatreds between Men, or with the mysterious other races Saruman was mentioning – Dwarves and Elves; races for whom, Buffy felt, Saruman felt rather more dislike than he would show or admit. It was something else.

Her unconscious, or maybe the Slayer mind, understood it better than she did. She forgot the dream she had when she awoke, and did not remember it till days had passed; but she dreamed of Saruman tearing a black being with black clothes down from a seat, cutting its throat, and then taking off its black rags and sitting in his seat.

…...….

Two days later, something happened. It began far out of Buffy's sight, as she was practicing archery while chatting with Goldhair. Suddenly there was a violent sound on the edge of her hearing. Goldhair heard nothing. But when Buffy turned her head, she saw people running in one direction – dozens of people. Many of them held sticks or working tools. And there was something about the way they held it that told the Slayer that they meant to use them as weapons.

Then Goldhair's head turned. By this point, the turmoil had spread to where she could see it, without need for a Slayer's sight. And Goldhair knew at once what it was.

"A riot!" she yelled. "The boys are fighting the Dunlendings again!"

For some reason, Buffy was horrified. There was something totally wrong about this outburst of violence. And to judge from what she had already seen, too many people were involved to be able to stop this one by her own strength. But she turned and started to run towards the noise.

Suddenly there was a total silence, and then a single thunderous word. "ENOUGH!" Somehow, Saruman had imposed a spell of silence on the whole area, rioters and all, and then superimposed his own voice on the silence.

"THIS HAS GONE ON TOO LONG. IT IS CLEAR THAT I CANNOT HAVE DUNLENDINGS AND ROHIRRIM IN ONE PLACE." Then a few seconds' silence, and then – "ALL ROHIRRIM WILL LEAVE. I WILL PAY EACH OF YOU A BONUS IN GOLD AND ALL THE WAGES YOU ARE DUE. I WILL CONSIDER HIRING ROHIRRIM AGAIN IF I EVER SEE THINGS CHANGE."

The spell of silence lasted a few more minutes, but Buffy could see the Rohirrim in despair, and most of the Dunlendings showing exultation.

….

"Many people needed the Lord's gold," said Goldhair to her later, as they were making their way to Goldhair's quarters, soon to be deserted. "And I won't say that I will be happy to lose my wage. But I think in some ways this is almost a relief. I've been thinking about it."

Buffy kept silent and put on the curious expression that she knew always stimulated her friend to further talk. But Goldhair said nothing. The Rorhirrim drifted towards their quarters in small, ragged groups, silent or talking quietly, the very image of defeat. And still Goldhair did not expand on why she thought it was almost a relief. Only, when they were about to break, and Goldhair had pulled together all her belongings and tied them into one solid-looking backpack, she turned and made as if to say something.

"Lady Baffy… please look after yourself. Even with your power…. And might I please hug you?" Then Buffy held her in her arms without saying a word, but they both had tears in their eyes. And they kissed each other on the cheek. And Buffy stood and watched Goldhair join a dozen of her friends and a few packhorses, and walk away on a ragged path that climbed the hills eastwards towards Rohan.

…...

The next day, Buffy had another interview with Saruman. But this was different. He seemed to have been impacted by the loss of the Rohirrim. He looked tired and discouraged, more human than she had ever thought him. And he was more open with her, she thought, than he had ever been. He spoke of opened him. It is almost as though there was no hope anywhere, he said. Gondor is declining, and at any rate was always more concerned about building up its own rule and empire than with fighting the DL Rohan is weak and its subjects are undisciplined. He did not know what path to follow to unite the free peoples of earth. Buffy felt unhappy and conflicted, and she did not know what about. Her mind instinctively retreated from blaming Saruman. The old man radiated a comfortable, paternal atmosphere, and she felt herself drifting into it. Buffy had always been a daddy's girl. She had forgiven Giles more than once, even when she had thought there would be no way back, because he had taken that role. She'd even have forgiven Hank Summers, if he had made the effort. And now it was as though she had found another father. Saruman was finding her way into her confidence, into her spirit.

…

Radagast the Brown was a simple person. He knew it, he knew that other members of the council knew it, and he had no problem with it, or desire to appear different from what he was. He had spent many centuries of life becoming more and more like himself. He loved green and growing things and the animals and birds that moved through them, and he spent much of his life away from men. This, admittedly, made him a less effective wizard than other members of his order; but those who knew him, men and elves and dwarves, loved him, and so did more or less every creature he met.

But Radagast, was no fool. And he could not enter Isengard as it was now without smelling Saruman's changed priorities in the mere shape of things. And Saruman had to direct him properly, because he was in pursuit of a much bigger target. So he had to meet him far from his own home, in Radagast's simple little hut in Rhosgobel.

Saruman had used all his powers and skills to reach Buffy, to open her soul to his ideas and control. And he was coming pretty close to his goals. But he had underestimated the effect of distance, separtion, and lack of continuity.

That night, Buffy woke up suddenly and unwillingly, far before the dawn. As a rule, the Slayer slept preternaturally little, two to four hours every night, but at least she could count on sleeping like a stone and waking up refreshed. Even the occasional Slayer dream did not normally spoil her rest. But that night she knew that she was awake too soon – fretful, irritable, unrested. She walked up and down in her chamber, and looked out, and saw a beautiful, bright full night moon. She stepped out on the balcony, half way up the great tower of Isengard, and looked at the land spread out below and all around. And suddenly she saw what only a Slayer, with a Slayer's senses, could have seen: Saruman, in the middle of the night, leaving Isengard.

That was wrong. That had to be wrong. Sure, a king might have all sorts of reasons to go out at night in secret. But, somehow, it clashed with all sorts of thing Saruman had said or implied. He had left her with the impression that he was getting to confide in her. He had told her of his plans against the Dark Lord. He had spoken of his servants and his messages. This sudden, secretive journey – he had already disappeared in the trees – was somehow unlike anything he had told her.

But, a voice asked her, was it unlike him?

No.

No it wasn't.

Suddenly Buffy was not trusting anything her host had told her or suggested to her. And she was awake to something her subconscious had long known. Her dream of two days earlier came to her. She remembered her vision – Saruman cutting the Dark Lord's throat, only to sit in his place. What her dream had been telling her was that he wants to make himself king of Middle-Earth in place of Sauron, rather than just bring him down. She realized that all the plans she had heard discussed, and all the prospects for action, somehow implied Saruman being the leader of all the Dark Lord's enemies. And as this light of realization, of attention, stretched over event after event and point after point, she realized that she had too often been manoeuvred into assenting, or positively saying "yes", to many of these plans and prospects.

She now suspected that she had been manoeuvred into saying something that would risk committing her.

The strangest thing was that these realizations did not come as shock. It was as if she had always known them. Her conscious attention had been drawn elsewhere, that was all. And it was not all magic – though Saruman's magic must have been frighteningly subtle and powerful, to act as it did without her senses not perceiving even the slightest feel of it. But much of it was just an ability to talk and be interesting, to keep her thinking of what he told her – lie by truthful statement. Or was it truthful?

Buffy watched Saruman leave, focussing all her senses to be sure that he was not coming back. There were things she wanted to do. She was now aware that, over the two weeks she had been here, her spatial awareness had been singling out areas in the tower from which she was being carefully kept. Now she was aware, instinctively estimating the size of the tower and the number of floors. Even on the main floor she was in, there was a considerable amount of space she had never entered.

She left her chamber, in hunter mode, making no sound and bending all her senses to perceive any living thing, man, orc, or even animal that Saruman might have bespelled. In this world without the hum of machinery and with no sound from outside except the quiet pulse of natural things, her hearing could work almost like a radar. Anything that was still awake, whether it was guards or just benighted workers, she dodged – easily, but carefully.

There was a little door three corners from her chamber that she had never entered. And now, as her mind and senses calculated the volumes about her, it became clear to her – though it would not have been to many people – that the little door led straight to the unexplored area. She pressed it, found it open, and walked in.

She found a number of high, but not hospitable corridors, with roomsome of which contained objects that she did not understand, and a few weapons such as swords and chain mail armour. As she explored, her senses always bent to hearing the slightest trace of a human or near-human being, her mind was still on Saruman and the things he had not told her. The Orcs now. He had spoken quite glibly, quite at length, about how he was working with them and what he was hoping to achieve with them, politically and militarily. But she had become aware – among the first things she had noticed – that they were being kept away from her. What did Saruman not want her to know? How did those beings live? And – one question that quickly sprang to the Vampire Slayer's mind – what did they eat?

AS she proceeded deeper into the corridors, her senses began to identify something human. There were voices – breath – the sound of heartbeats and bodies working. As she moved in their direction, the sounds became clearer. Two women. Alive, not undead; quite young; and - the tone of the voices was unmistakable – in great distress, yet with some anger and spite mixed in.

As she turned a corner, there they were. The chamber was squalid, dirty and foul-smelling, but it had no door. The two women were held by long chains, that allowed them to move, but not to escape; and they were both clearly in the last stages of pregnancy. The younger was little more than a child, about thirteen, with rather ugly, fleshy features and squinting eyes. The older must have been in her middle to late twenties, and before the dirt and the obvious abuse, she might have been quite attractive. From what Buffy had been hearing, they did not like each other at all, and the younger one was addressing the older with something like cruelty.

Buffy stepped from the dim corridor into the chamber, which was more or less lit by a fire in a large chimney, and both women looked at her with absolute astonishment. "Another one?" said the teen-ager; but the adult said with a bleak look: "Tell them it's too early. We're still alive."

Buffy was bewildered. They both spoke with a Dunlending accent, but did not look like anyone she had seen in the tower – and she was sure she'd have noticed their baby bump, if nothing else. And while she did not understand what the adult had said, it was clear that they were both in distress, and seemed to feel that they were in danger. In danger of their lives.

"Listen," she said as quietly and unthreateningly as she could, "I'm a foreigner here. My name is Buffy. I don't know anything about Isengard. But if you two are in danger…" She could not continue, as both prisoners burst out in a bitter laugh, the older one sounding like she was close to hysteria.

"Danger? Danger?" said the girl in her typical spiteful tone. "We're in no danger at all. We are way past danger. Can't you see we're carrying?"

The adult just shook her head. "We are dead. Stick around and you'll see us die – but you'd better not, because if they find you here, they'll rape you too."

A horrible suspicion was crawling through Buffy's mind. "You mean the babies you are carrying…."

"Thety are orc babies. Half-orc babies. In her case," and she pointed to the teen-ager, "three-quarter-orc babies." And her voice held so much venom that Buffy was startled.

"So when your babies come out…"

"By the Dark Lord's shit, don't they teach you anything where you come from?"

"Shut up, you little bitch! And yes, that's it. When the little monsters come out, they shall rip us to pieces. That's what they do with female orcs, "Buffy". That's why you never see any. They spend their lives hiding, because they know that when they meet a male in heat, they will be raped, and then they will have a pregnancy and they will die. The males organize hunts, because they can't be without sex for long. Orcs are monsters."

"But…"

"You want the whole story? The whole miserable story? Well, with her, you can tell what she is. She was destined to breed from birth, from the moment her father picked her up from her mother's bloody corpse. And me….

"Buffy, there are wild lands to the west of Dunland, where we Free People live. We are nomads… we don't obey any kings, and we flee the Dunlendings, because if they find us, they will enslave us. At least, that's what the elders used to say.

"But in the last few years, things have changed. Troops of Orcs have come into the Wild Lands, hunting for women. Young women of child bearing age. We didn't know what for… I didn't until they caught me. And then they dragged me here, and they didn't keep their mouths shut, and I heard it all.

"The old man in the tower…" "Saruman?" asked Buffy, who did not think her horror could increase.

"Saruman, that's what they call him. The old man wanted a breed of beings who were half orc, half man, and whom he would rule without any contrast. He could not take the women from among the Dunlendings, they are his allies, or at least they think they are. But we free people… we have no protector, nobody to defend us, nobody to go to if there is trouble.

"And here I am. In this hideous hole, in my own filth, waiting to be killed by my own children."

Buffy had reached the nadir of horror. Her mind was rebelling against the whole concept. She looked at the women – yes, even the half-orc – and did not want them to die, and there was nothing she could do… If they were right, it was almost time…

Suddenly the teen-ager went rigid, and her whole face clenched itself in a spasm of pain. And Buffy realized, with further horror, that there were several shrill voices shrieking out from within her womb. And then other voices started coming from the older woman's womb, as if there was some kind of obscene dialogue taking place between creatures not yet born.

The woman clenched her teeth, and still managed to speak in her clench, a sound barely audible to Buffy's powerful hearing:

"Her name is Vosu. I am Thilivernlóth. Try to remember our names, if you get out of here alive." And then Vosu started shrieking uncontrollably, and the older woman joined her.

Buffy realized that she had stayed too long. The sound of heavy boots could be heard from the corridors. Practically trapped, there was only one direction she could go. She heaved herself up and wedged herself in the arched ceiling.

It wasn't tiring as such. Buffy could have stayed for hours, silent and unnoticed in the ceiling, her mighty hands and feet pressing on the rock like hydraulic jacks. But the scene that she could not avoid seeing below her was hideous even to someone who had fought every devil in Hell in her own world. A small rabble of Orcs came in chattering and laughing, making jokes at the women's agony. Vosu tried to point to her on ceiling, but the Orcs took her pointing finger for just another convulsion and laughed some more, one or two of them witlessly imitating her motions. And the cacophony reached a peak… screams, shrieks and laughts… and there was a tearing of blood and gore, and each orc bent, and picked up one ugly, white, bloodstained, squirming thing. And they all walked away without looking back, leaving Buffy alone with what was left of Vosu and Thilivernlóth.

And it was so that, late in May, the Weapon of Victory fled Isengard. Nobody knew where she had passed, by what path she had crossed the guarded fortress, or crossed the fields around it. Indeed, when Saruman returned early in the morning, and failed to find it, he had to waste several days in a thorough search of the tower, the village, and the surrounding fields, just to make sure that she wasn't hiding somewhere; and then in a difficult and demanding search spell, to make doubly sure. But Buffy Summers, small and delicate like a golden statuette, was gone. And one part of Saruman's mighty mind remained focused on her, on every direction she might have gone, on every country abutting on Isengard.

END OF THE CHAPTER