Middle-earth, and all who dwell within it, belongs to Tolkien. I am grateful to him for growing this beautiful garden in which our imaginations can play. Please review!
They stopped for a meal at midday and built no fire though the wind was colder now. Soon they would leave the shelter of the hills. The sky was gray and, although the spirits of the dwarves had been lightened by tales of battle, Betta's mood was dark. It hurt her arm to dismount and then to climb back onto her pony after their rest. Her wounds gave her a great deal of pain, and she was so tired that she found herself drifting to sleep in her saddle until twice Kili had to call out to her, waking her (although he did not know it) and reminding her to stay on the path as her pony strayed or fell behind.
Long before their noon meal, the sharp ridges of Emyn Uial had begun to march down toward the plain, and there were grass and clinging plants still growing up the steep sides of the hills. Then the land grew grim and grey until the cheerful ravine of birch trees was a distant memory. As the afternoon wore on, Betta's pain grew worse. The cold sank into her bones, but she was reluctant to strain her arm in reaching behind her to take the spare cloak out of her bag. If the growing cold bothered the dwarves, they gave no sign of it.
As they approached the northern plains, Fili grew quiet. He kept his eyes ahead. Both dwarves were apprehensive, feeling the change in the ill wind that blew steadily from the east, cold but not yet cruelly so though it came down from the ghost-lands of Carn Dum. Betta did not remember when she saw the first flakes of snow, but before they left the hills, it had begun to fall quite steadily. At first it was invisible against the graying of the sky, but it was white when it landed cold and wet against the dark hair of her pony's neck.
Soon after that that they came to the end of the Emyn Uial. Fili called a halt and they looked out across the long, brown flats and a few low hills that spread into the north and east. Far, far to the west, while the winter air was still very clear, they could see the shadowy rise of the northernmost Blue Mountains that curved east along the coast toward the southern spur of the Icebay of Forochel that was beyond the edge of sight.
With a nod to his brother, Fili led them out of the hills and onto the plain. Almost immediately, the wind picked up and the dusting of snow became large and heavy flakes. The wind swept the flakes up in gusts and blew them into the faces of the travelers, sharp as glass and cold as bitter ice. The change in weather was a shock to Betta who had done nearly all of her wandering in the warm south where winter was little more than cold weather and snow was a grief to gardeners but a joy to the children who slid down hills of it on the lids of cooking pots.
Betta wrapped the reins around her wrists and tucked her cold fingers into her sleeves. Several lengths ahead of her, Fili and Kili pulled their hoods over their heads and bent low against their ponies' warm bodies. They put their shoulders to the wind and rode on into the storm.
.
The cold grew as they rode along, and the ache in Betta's arm deepened. She could no longer hold the reins at all and did not have the strength to steer her pony. The cold that throbbed in her arm had numbed her fingers and her feet. Her breath was a white cloud before her lips and left frost upon her scarf. When she raised her eyes to look ahead, the wind blew cold into her face and the snow flew in her eyes. She pulled up her hood and put down her head, trusting the pony to follow its fellows.
Fili did not like the sudden turn in the weather, but they were now an hour out from the shelter of Evendim and there was no other windbreak in sight unless they should turn back and hide behind the Hills again. That, he refused to do. He glanced aside at Kili and saw the snow gathering in his brother's beard. Kili forced a smile to hearten his brother, but his cheerful spirits had been dampened by the damp snow melting in his boots. Fili turned his face forward again and spurred his pony on.
Here and there, now and again, Fili thought that he would see the shadows of huddled trees through a break in the snow, but always as they drew nearer, he found that it was only one or two boles with baleful branches made to look like more by the wind and distance. If the storm did not let up, they would need to find shelter somewhere. Beside him, Kili muttered under his breath and cursed the icy winds.
Neither dwarf noticed that Betta's pony was falling farther and farther behind them.
.
An hour passed, and the wind blew harder. The cold deepened, and the snow, though it did not gather higher than the top of their ponies' ankles, obscured their sight until they could not see more than a few dozen yards ahead of them. Indeed, the air and ground were such a uniform white that they might have ridden off a cliff and not know it until they hit the ground.
It was only mid-afternoon, but Fili knew that they could not ride on much longer. The ponies were growing stubborn, and they wanted constant urging to keep them moving forward. Some distance ahead, through a brief break in the flurry, he thought he spied a shape darker than any that he had seen before and it stood out against the blowing snow. It seemed to be a square hill or stone. He had been fooled before, but he was determined to make for it this time and even if it be only a single tree-stump, they would camp there and wait out the storm using the ponies for a windbreak.
Fili urged his pony faster. The flat, white land made it difficult to judge the distance, and it was more than half a mile before they reached the shape that he had seen. His first glimpse of had made it seem less than what it was for the snow had half buried it under the gathering drifts. There was indeed shelter in a half-broken stone building so worn by the elements that there was no way to judge its age.
Three walls were all that was left of the old stall that might once have held grain or winter hay. Those walls had their back to the blowing snow and the wind had built up a drift nearly to the top of them, but over the years the earth had risen also to swallow up the outer foundations and inside the walls was a shielded cellar some feet below ground-level, and it was carpeted in only a few inches of snow.
Though the stone had been eroded by the many long years, Fili's eyes could still pick out cuttings on the highest bricks, and he knew that once there had been a wooden roof over the building. The wood had long ago rotted and fallen in to become food for the stunted trees that grew in the protection of the cellar.
Neither pony nor dwarf needed urging to enter the shielded space, and Fili dismounted to lead his pony down between the walls. The animal trotted to the far corner and stood shivering and shaking the snow from its back. Kili entered after him and let his pony stand beside its fellow, and they shivered together.
Kili laughed and threw back his hood, shaking the snow from his back. "Well, if this doesn't make you wish for a mountain over your head, I don't know what will, eh, lass?" he called, turning back and expecting to see Betta trailing in after them.
She did not.
"Betta?" Kili jogged out of the shelter of the stone building and looked around, even climbing up onto its broken walls to peer out into the blinding wind. He saw only white hills and gusting snow.
.
The wind blew hard and the cold deepened. Betta lay low against her pony's back, and she had pulled her hood down nearly to her nose. The wind was so loud in her ears that she did not notice that she no longer heard the clip-clop of the dwarves' ponies walking ahead of hers. The snow had dampened the sound the deeper it gathered.
It seemed like a day had passed, but it was less than an hour before she knew that she could not ride on much farther. It was cold and she was tired, and she had heard stories of men who lived in the mountains and had grown so tired that they lay down and had fallen asleep in the snow. The bitter cold did that to you, sometimes; it made you sleep, so said the men of Gondor, and especially the beacon lighters who dwelt on lonely cliffs for long spans of time and knew the cold like an old friend.
And sometimes – so went the tale – those sleeping men were rescued from the snowdrifts by the folk who dwelt upon Ered Nimrais, a strange people who grew long, white hair upon their backs and blended into the snow. They wore large, furry boots so that they seemed to be more animal than man and would walk into distant villages carrying those poor souls they had found, appearing and disappearing with equal mystery.
More often, though, the men who fell asleep in cold weather were lost. In the spring when the snows melted and drew back to the top of the mountains, they would be found frozen on the ground, still curled up as if in peaceful sleep.
Betta raised her head to call to the dwarves and ask for them to stop. Only then did she see that the brothers were far ahead of her and trotting away swiftly. She saw the silhouette of a single dwarf and pony dark against the swirling snow and guessed that it was Kili. He was thinner and his shoulders less wide than his brother.
"Hurry up," Betta told her pony. She shook the reins to urge it into a trot, and gasped at the pain in her stiff arm. The pony reluctantly trotted ahead for a few yards, and it seemed that they might catch up, but the animal was stiff and cold as well and did not like to be walking through the wet carpet of snow over its feet. It slowed back to a walk and, for all that she tried, she could not convince it to trot again.
She tried to call out for the brothers to wait for her, but the wind took her words and blew them away. Kili's shadow disappeared in a swirl of snow, and she was alone and shivering in the middle of a hard, white land.
The cold was deadly. Fili and Kili could ride on to Angmar if they chose, but Betta could not. She had lost her sense of direction and did not know which way they had turned after Evendim. Her pony was walking slower and slower, and it wasn't long before it gave up altogether and refused to take another step. Betta looked around, left and right; she spied a copse of trees not far away. She managed to dismount, though it was difficult to do with no dwarf to lend her his arm, and with many words of encouragement, she managed to coax her pony forward again toward the chance of shelter.
Luck was with her. The copse she found was not like the others that they had passed. It was, though small, very full of trees that had been sheltered in their growth by a short cliff of stone. She guessed that it was some last finger of Evendim thrust out, but she was too cold to be curious.
Betta led her pony into the trees and in the center of the small grove, she found a wide but shallow hollow of bare ground near a broken alcove in the rock like the washed-out cove in a sea-cliff. Over their heads, the thick-grown trees wove their branches together and met the stone in a low roof that kept off most of the snow. The pony was glad for the change and took its place at the back of the hollow near the stone cliff; it knelt down on the ground and put down its head, exhausted. Betta took a bright blue handkerchief from her pack – the only cloth of real color that she carried – and risked the storm once more to go out and tie it to a branch on the outer ring of trees.
That was all that she could do, knowing that to mark her shelter might bring enemies, but that it was also the only way to let the dwarves know where she lay. Though it was a small flag to fly, both brothers had keen eyes, and Fili was a clever tracker. If they survived the night in whatever shelter that they had found, they would come looking for her by morning.
Back in the hollow, Betta set to work; her injured arm was nearly senseless, and she clutched it to her side whiel her left arm she put to work. With her numb fingers she tore down branches and took the flint-stone out from her pack. She could no longer tell the pain of her wounds from the pain of the cold that burned and numbed at the same time as she sat striking the flint against her blunting-stone. She was so tired and had not known that the cold air alone could hurt a body so badly. As the sparks from her stone fell upon the kindling and failed to light it, she thought of the white-furred folk of Ered Nimrais and of men lying dead in the snow.