Chapter 11: Fickle Games

"It likes riddles, praps it does, does it?". . . . Riddles were all he could think of. Asking them, and sometimes guessing them, had been the only game he had ever played with other funny creatures sitting in their holes in the long, long ago, before he lost all his friends and was driven away, before he crept down, down, into the dark under the mountains.

Ere the call of the Ring had come, ere malice and hollow hunger replaced light and love, there was the beginning of Gollum, the key to who he had been.


Along the banks of the Anduin on a long forgotten day, Sméagol trudged lazily through the tall marsh grasses, the smell of the warm sun upon stagnant water making him wrinkle his nose, weaving and leaping to miss the green pools and sucking mud as he tramped along behind his cousin. His companion was a distance ahead of him and Sméagol was following the swaying grasses. Déagol's warbling voice was launched suddenly up into the air.

"Oh, el-breath gilth-on-kneel,
We do not forget, we who live
Over here, under the trees,
The stars on the sea."

"What in the world are you singing?" shouted Sméagol, and he closed the gap between them at a clumsy, mucky run.

Déagol whirled, his face delighted. "What the Fair Folk were singing!" he declared, and he leapt upon a mossy rock and sang the verses again with more gusto. He grinned and bowed floridly, then frantically pinwheeled his arms to keep from tipping off into the marshy water.

"It is not. It doesn't sound a bit like it."

Déagol rolled his eyes. "It's what their song meant, coz. Well, sort of. Grandmother said so!"

Déagol had been irritatingly buoyant ever since yesterday, when a group of half a dozen Fair Folk had passed West over the Great River, pausing along their way to speak with the elders of their small hill-village. It had been some time since any visitors had happened that way and life had just begun to feel dull. Déagol was ecstatic and spent the entire morning shyly circling the horse that had accompanied the Fair Folk, daring even to dart forward and pet its shining ivory coat when no one was looking.

Sméagol picked his way through the mire, scowling and chewing upon a long blade of grass. "It makes no sense, Déagol."

His observation did not dissuade his younger cousin from voicing another chorus of the nonsensical rhyme, this time more loudly and further out of tune. "Perhaps it's a riddle?" suggested Déagol, as his last, painfully dying note drifted away on the breeze.

"It isn't neither a riddle."

"I bet!"

"It isn't! Anyhow, the Fair Folk don't tell riddles," Sméagol told him. "Did you ask grandmother if it was a riddle?" Sméagol's voice rose a little with interest despite the indifference he tried for. He liked riddles.

"No. I... didn't... think... to... ask!" Déagol punctuated his words by jumping through the mud and water, generously splattering both of them.

"Stop that!"

Déagol stopped and made a face. He bent down and gingerly picked up a long, slimy, green stick that lay at his feet. He grasped it, then drove it, *splunch*!, into the ground. He gestured to it meaningfully. "Stick. In. The. Mud."

Then he screeched and dove pushing through the grasses with Sméagol in pursuit. He did not make it far before his older cousin caught him and tossed him down, rolling him over and over in the muck and slime until Déagol was covered in black ooze and laughing so hard he couldn't stand up.

"Enough! Enough enough..." gasped Déagol, and then broke into another fit of giggles. He pushed himself off the ground and stood there blinking water from his eyes. "I don't know what it means, Sméagol, but I liked it right enough." He looked mournfully down at his mud-covered clothing and made a regretful chirking sound. "Father said if I came home like this again, I'd be walking about the village bare."

"Perhaps you could sing your song as you went," Sméagol grinned.


Sméagol had been right. Fair folk do not tell riddles. Elves were not a people who practiced word-play such as riddle making and conundrums; they took little pleasure in shutting their words away in concealing rhymes. Riddling-talk was loved by Dwarves and hobbits and dragons who were raised and reared and fashioned their speech within hidden caves and meandering burrows. The Elves much preferred to set their words free with clear music and soaring voices beneath an open sky.

But never let it be said that any Elf was to be found lacking in eloquence of a kind when occasion called.

Legolas regarded the little creature rocking and twitching in misery before him and he hastily swept together words that would suffice. The Elf carefully shifted his legs from beneath him and pushed himself to his knees. With an eager glint in his eyes, he chanted:

"I run as smooth as any rhyme
I love to fall but cannot climb
I tremble at every breath of air,
And yet shall heaviest burden bear."

Whirling, swirling, the wind danced over the water; it tugged at the Elf's cloak and tousled his dark hair; it picked up his words and swept them tickling into the creature's ears.

Sméagol ceased the incessant writhing of his hands. He stared blankly at the Elf for a moment, and then his luminous eyes blinked and focused and his expression twisted into something akin to surprise. He hiccupped hoarsely and made that hard swallowing sound again deep in the back of his throat.

Whatever Sméagol had been expecting, had he expected anything at all, it seemed this was not it. He crept sideways uneasily, and then crept back, pacing this way and that as he considered the Elf.

Legolas forced himself to keep still, though he exulted. He had unquestionably caught the creature's full attention! Emotion was upon Sméagol's face, yet the Elf struggled to read it. For good or ill, it was no longer that hopeless, morbidly curious expression of the mouse waiting upon the cat, nor was it the hazy greyness of remembered torment. It was something more.

There was a part of Sméagol that was still intrigued by games. It was in Bilbo's story and it was evident in the creature's eyes. Sméagol had enjoyed Legolas's surprise at his sudden, strange appearance; something in him was drawn by the Elf's attempts to tempt him from his hidden thoughts. Legolas believed this was so. A smile touched his lips and sat quietly, wondering, waiting.

"Come, Master Sméagol," said the Elf. "I am no loremaster, and it is a simple riddle to unlock. Do you not know the answer?" Gimli would have recognized the playfully taunting quirk of the Elf's eyebrow and his persuasive tone; it was just such the manner Legolas employed to draw the Dwarf into countless idle arguments. Gimli hated that look, he knew. It had been perfected over the course of several hundred years and it rarely failed.

The creature's eyes narrowed at him. Sméagol squirmed and sniffed the air as if trying to scent deceit in the Elf. Legolas could determine not whether he had drawn Sméagol's thoughts back to his cave and his encounter with Bilbo, or if he had touched upon some other memory from his past. The Elf hoped for the latter. Someone had taught Sméagol the rhymes he had dredged from his mind in his battle of wits with Frodo's uncle! Gollum had certainly not played riddling games with the Orcs he throttled in the dark underground of the Misty Mountains.

Sméagol regarded Legolas with interest and it seemed, just for an instant, almost as if he would take up the Elf's challenge.

Sméagol did respond, but not in a manner the Elf expected. The creature crouched down slowly low to the ground and his breathing deepened. His thin flanks heaved in and out and he looked at Legolas, the glittering slits of his eyes lurking behind heavy lids.

He hissed, a soft, prolonged hiss, a rush of air pushed between tight teeth, and he flexed his long fingers slowly, menacingly.

Legolas banished all hints of jest from his demeanor. Alarmed, he drew himself up, preparing to fend off an attack.

Sméagol wet his lips. When he spoke, it was with a rasping whisper that prickled the Elf's skin. "It comessss," said the creature. "It comes on black wings."


There were tracks here, many tracks, all of the same sort, stirring the smooth sand to mud. Gimli paced forward cautiously with a frown and crouched to examine them. Oddly, they seemed to be the marks of bare feet trampled near the River's edge; the depressions were filled with gleaming water and the outline of them sparkled clearly beneath the starlight.

Well, why not? Gimli snorted to himself. Legolas had sauntered over the snows of Caradhras in naught but light shoes and would certainly not hesitate to stroll unshod along the banks of the Anduin if the mood took him.

But these were not the footprints of the soft-stepping Elf. The prints were pressed deeply into the earth and were strangely elongated, faintly webbed; whatever had clambered from the water had dug into the moist earth with grasping toes, pushing and clawing like an animal, but like no animal Gimli had ever seen.

Gimli studied the footprints, his face impassive, his eyes hard and thoughtful. He stroked a hand over his thick beard. The rocks near the patch of mud had been disturbed, the dirt scraped away as if something had tipped them over to search for the slimy things beneath.

He was drawn to a glitter of silver flashing in the moonlight and he rose stiffly to investigate. He retrieved the object from the sifted sand and cleaned the grime away with his thumb. It was a plain steel buckle from a pack or strap, unadorned and unremarkable other than it was there, upon their eyot, where it should not have been. Gimli's frown deepened.

He fingered the cold metal pensively and puzzled over it. He was feeling just a little pleased over his astuteness at finding it when he turned about and stepped on a fish.

Or rather, what was left of a fish. Muttering a disgusted oath, Gimli flicked it over with his foot and stared down at the vile thing. The bulging, dead white eye of it stared back at him accusingly, as if it blamed the Dwarf for dragged it from its calm, wet existence to leave it half-eaten and rotting between the stones. Gimli scowled and kicked sand over it, then scraped his boot clean upon a nearby rock.

He furrowed his brow and bent down. Trodden into the muck at his feet there winked a tiny bit of cloth. Gimli tugged upon it and pulled forth a knotted and torn pocket handkerchief. He smoothed it out upon a rock and discovered the dirty thing to be very much like the blue one Merry used to carry with him in the breast pocket of his jerkin before it had been lost along the road.

A light began to dawn in the Dwarf's tired mind. Disquieted, he combed through the mud, gathering more of the discarded 'treasure', for that was indeed what this scattered debris had been. A length of stretched leather. A sharpened stone. A wooden button. A bit of old, white jawbone with broken teeth still clinging to it, too small to belong to any but a child. (Gimli grimaced and cast this out into the water.) He found as well a shard of crockery and a bent hobnail. A silver penny. A bootlace.

His nostrils then flared with indignation as he pried something dark from a cleft between the rocks... The rounded, familiar shape of the object startled him immensely. He traced the curved side, the scrolling etchwork along the bowl, and the chips and cracks that now marred the edges where it had been knocked about and beaten upon the stones. The long sturdy stem had been snapped off at the shank, and the remains of it were ragged and uneven as if it had been gnawed at.

Gimli's flesh crawled. "Little scavenger!" he spat. He rose and surveyed the small pile of objects at his feet and he strove to make sense of it. Gimli thought he could put a name to the animal that was not an animal. A nasty name. But where was it?

His blood ran suddenly cold in his veins. These were the treasured possessions of a vicious and crafty little creature, cast haphazardly about as if the owner had lost interest. Abandoned carelessly. Abandoned with haste. Abandoned for something more tempting.

Perhaps an Elf, alone in the dark.

Gimli clutched the battered remnant of his pipe tightly in a white-knuckled hand. His eyes followed the pattern of the splayed footprints from where they led off the riverbank. He pushed himself hastily from the ground and followed. He had at last a clear and unmistakable trail laid out before him that would lead him to his companion; he wished he had not found it, and he dreaded what he would come upon when he reached its end.


Legolas knelt, half-ready to spring from the ground, and his eyes were sharp and wild. "What is coming, Sméagol?" he demanded. "What do you speak of?"

The creature looked fitfully up at the sky and Legolas did the same. The Elf strained his senses, but there was naught to be seen, naught to be heard but the wind. The stars shone as they had and the night remained clear. Sméagol tilted his head and gazed towards the south, out over the hills and blasted earth. Legolas also turned his sight, and then he prompted Sméagol with a questioning glance.

The creature pawed at his face and feverishly stroked his neck. He raked his hair over his face and peered at Legolas through the ragged strands. "It comes," he said. "On black wingses it comes! He mussst not get it, precious, no, He musssst not find it." Sméagol's rasping voice was low and his eyes were hopeless; he regarded Legolas with a mixture of weariness and desperation.

Legolas swallowed and shook his head. "Nay," he whispered. "He must not."

Both heard the footsteps approaching ere more could be said. It was the sound of steel-shod boots moving towards them. It was not the threat that had filled the creature with fear but a threat nonetheless, and Sméagol had yet the presence of mind to pay heed to it. He swivelled his head towards the sound in alarm, then flattened himself upon the ground. He crept a few paces back and stopped, twitching in agitation, clinging to the stones, then crawled further away. He cast a last inscrutable look at the Elf, and then he turned from him and ran.

Legolas did not give chase; he watched the pale light of the eyes wink out ere the creature vanished into the darkness. A faint splash came to the Elf's ears and he knew the creature had taken once more to the River and slipped away. The Elf released a shuddering breath and listened to the rush of the breeze and the water and the beat of his heart.

He could not hear it, could not see it, but he could feel it now. It was remote and difficult to discern, but the sense of it was there. He sensed the presence of a new shadow rising and caught the distant echo in his mind of a fell voice screaming its consecration high upon the wind. It hunted. The Enemy's servant was far, far from them yet, but it would come swiftly enough. Upon black wings.

The footsteps drew nearer. A firm tread and short stride.

"Gimli..." he murmured. But he did not rise to meet him. He waited. He bowed his head and closed his eyes, willing his hands to cease their trembling ere the Dwarf arrived.