Chapter five – The Slayer
Most of Buffy's oath was fulfilled within twenty minutes.
First, she gently lay he friend's body down on the ground. She shut her staring eyes with two soft fingertips; she bent over and kissed Goldhair's untouched forehead. Then she straightened herself up and strode off to find her gear and the sword that Isenhand had made especially for her after their mountain journey, complete with its scabbard of strong leather. She tied kit and scabbard to her belt and drew the sword. The moonlight caught the blade, and it seemed to shine in the night.
The Huntaworders had been gathering inside their own walls, trying to drive the Orcs back and retake the battlements. In response, more Orcs had come in great gangs from various points where they had been gathering, completely neglecting Swerti's farmhouse and granary. The five whom Buffy had slain seemed to have been strays. Fighting inside the village, with the walls already breached, had meant that they had not been able to gather in their preferred formation, forming a shieldwall that would allow them to push back against their enemies. But their village buildings, and a few outlying farms, still made good defensive positions, from which they could strike at and kill the enemy. And even if their instinctive loathing of Orcs did not make any idea of surrender impossible, they still would rather die than stop fighting, once they had seen their enemy seize on a fallen Man and devour him alive as he screamed.
But suddenly the pressure lessened. And they began to perceive the chaos in the rear of the Orc host. Buffy had come on them like death and the night. They knew nothing of her till one Orc's head flew over the rest, dripping black blood as it went, and a terrible howling scream tore through the dark: "FOR GOLDHAIR SWERTI'S DAUGHTER!" And then it was chaos. Soldiers fell like pins. Heads and arms flew off, iron armour was crushed like tinfoil, orcs saw their own comrades impaled on their own scimitars and pikes, and one large Orc was raised and used as a flail to smash into four more, getting beaten into a pulp in the process. And time and time again there was that female screech, "FOR GOLDHAIR!" Buffy's senses were leading her straight to anyone who had been touched by her friend's blood, and she was making sure that they knew why they died.
On the Huntaworder side there was a shout: "It's the Lady Baffy!" From one moment to the next, the word was flying among them: their wonder-warrior was attacking the enemy from behind. Suddenly they were at the walls, as dozens of Orcs left the village battlefield to rush on to th enew enemy. Suddenly heartened, the Rohirrim tightened their ranks and started encouraging each other with their ancient battle cries: "Come forth, monsters! Come forth and die!" "Westfold arms, and Westfold steel!" "Forth Eorlingas!" And the battle-line began to press forward grimly, unhalting, stepping over dying Orcs as it went.
(But Swerti Goodmouthsson had understood Buffy's words, and he had stopped alone in his tracks, and big silent tears were crawling down his ravaged face.)
Buffy, on the other side, was something with which Orcs could not cope. They had been made, in the depths of time, for war and murder; but not for war with her, and not at night. Her small, lean frame darted among them, almost invisible between the dark and the random, confusing light from torches and burning buildings, turning whatever was at hand – even the bodies of other Orcs – into instruments of death.
But the commanders were not in the van of battle. They had detailed orders from Saruman, who had made it clear to them that the assault on Huntaworde was not important. They could destroy the village, or leave it untouched, and it would not have mattered. What mattered was one tiny blonde girl.
"Flush out the Weapon, and kill or capture her, if you can," the voice had said, with its power. "If you cannot…" and he had set out a plan. And now the commanders heard again his voice in their ears: "Separate the Weapon of Victory from the Rohirrim forces. Manoeuvre to drive her into the forest and away from areas inhabited by Men." And from their minds, the order cascaded down to the minds of their followers.
Saruman was following the battle in the Palantìr. He could not talk into the minds of his slaves at such a distance; but he could, and did, enter their minds when they were with him, and leave his words, the very sound of his voice, there, to work their magic over time and distance. And they could, in turn, pass them on to their subjects. Orcs and Dunlendings, and all other followers, often had the impression, when their commanders spoke, of hearing the very voice of Saruman and feeling his presence. And so, in obedience to a voice they did not even know they heard, ragged groups of Orcs started drifting from the walls of Huntaworde to the place where their fellows were already fighting the Weapon.
The men of Huntaworde felt the pressure lessening. The shieldwall kept pushing forward, and Orc after Orc fell under its blows. And then suddenly there weren't enough enemies to maintain a battle line, and the survivors were scattering across the fields. They realized that the number of their enemies had so thinned that they could no longer form a line. Far away across the Dene, where the fields gave way to woodland, there was still fighting; all the Orcs left alive must be pressing hard the Lady Baffy, but the Men of Huntaworde could not see her from where they stood. Once they had cleared the closest fields, they stood there, uncertain
From the point of the Huntaworders, the raid had failed. Most of Huntaworde still stood, its fields had not been burned, and its storehouses had not been emptied; and the village and its fields were full of orcish corpses. But in spite of their evident success, they did not dare spread out across the fields. They were exhausted, and many of them needed wounds to be dressed and washed. The sun was already low in the sky, and soon it would be evening; too late to start a counter-attack, as darkness would soon fall, and too many places could be hiding ambushes and enemy forces. They would have to wait until morning to sweep the fields. These were simply the rules of war, which all Rohirrim had learned with their mother's milk. The Lady Baffy would have to fight alone. The men of Huntaworde could not even see her from where they stood. Hours of fighting had seen Buffy slowly driven into the forest above the village, further and futher away.
It was like fighting a disciplined army of sociopaths. They obeyed orders, and moved in ranks; but they had no feeling for each other, in fact they seemed to hate each other nearly as much as they hated their enemies, and so even the death of their comrades did not intimidate them. Buffy slew and slaughtered dozens of them, and still the survivors kept coming forwards to engage her.
Buffy had fought against the odds before, but she had never had to fight a whole, disciplined, unyelding army.
Buffy was not only berserk she was berserk for a longer time she had ever imagined possible. The loss of her friend, in such a horrible way, had a terrible effect on her. It was during this battle that she was given, for the second time, the name of The Slayer, and it was by her enemies, the orcs whom she killed by the dozens. But when she came to analyze and understand her experiences afterwards, she realized that Orcs did not fear death; or rather, the little aboriginal voice in their minds that told them that dying was something to be dreaded was constantly overwhelmed by the sounds of spite, hate and self-contempt that their terrible life history wrought from the depths of their souls. And so the pressure on Buffy redoubled. Slowly, at the price of many more dead, they managed to manoeuvre her away from the walls of Huntaworde. Step by bitter step, she was being driven back, away from the fields of Huntaworde and towards the forest eaves.
When the fight reached the wood, it changed character. From the clash of a mass of armoured soldiers against one solitary but terrible superheroine, it turned into a scary hide and seek behind trunks and bushes. It went on for hours, till darkness had fallen; and then, without realizing how or why, Buffy found herself alone.
She could not be mistaken about it. Her senses reached out, and could find neither the smell nor the sound of her enemies anywhere near her, let alone within striking distance. She was alone… and as the realization washed over her... she was... suddenly exhausted… and horribly hungry.
She had no food with her. Since she had charged out of Swerti's granary the previous night, she had eaten nothing, and now she needed food urgently; or her hunger would not even allow her to sleep.
But she still was the Slayer, the huntress. The forest might seem mysterious and empty to a normal person, but to her it was full of the noise and smell of living things. Soon, she knew where to search for prey; and of course she stalked as if born for it. Within a quarter hour, she was within reach of a beautiful, fat deer, with a stone in her hand that seemed to have been designed for her to throw.
Killing the animal, breaking its skull, was the work of a second for the daughter of Sineya, and mercifully quick. But what followed was a nightmare for her, and she could never have gone through with it except for the devouring hunger she suffered. Cutting, skinning, quartering the beautiful creature she would so much rather be petting – it all made her feel terrible. And yet she had to eat. And then suddenly she was attacked by Orcs again. In a few minutes of bitter struggle, she drove them off, two of them being left dying on the battlefield. And at that point the most terrible thing yet happened to her. She looked at the dying monsters – and her hunger interfered with her thoughts.
It was a matter of a moment, before self-fright and revulsion took hold of her. At the thought of what she had nearly thought there for a few seconds, she felt like throwing up. She turned to the roasting fire and looked at the parts of the deer with pain and horror – and yet, it was not the same kind of horror she had felt when hunger and the dying orcs had met for a second in her mind. The roasting spit, luckily, had not been wrecked in the fight, and there was enough meat for her to eat. And when she was done, she put together all that was left of the deer and placed it on the fire to burn. She could not have explained it, but she felt it was a sort of apology. She did not want to leave the remains of the creature there to rot.
She fell asleep at the feet of a great tree.
Her senses did not warn her of anything, but if she had not been so tired that, even lying on the hard ground, she was asleep within seconds, she might not have gone to sleep at all. Because, as she lay there, white against the darkness and as tiny as a child, the tree slowly opened two large eyes that stared at her.
Morning came, and Buffy opened her eyes. For a few seconds she was drifting – then there was a sudden realization of where she was and what had just happened, and she almost literally jumped to her feet. She realized that, after a day spent fighting the most terrible battle of her life, she had been helpless for hours, asleep – and as she thought, she realized that she had slept at least seven or eight hours, which she never did. As a Slayer, she only needed about three hours of sleep a night. She must have been exhausted. But… there were two Orcs lying by her. She knew they were still alive as she ate, the previous night. They must have died during the night. She did not hear them, and none of their fellows had come for them. Buffy placed them in the remains of the previous night's fire, gathered as much fuel as she could find, and set fire to them. She could think of nothing else, and did not want to leave them to rot in the clean green wood – even less than the deer. In fact, she stopped to think, the deer would have been better left on the ground, to be eaten and become ground and be part of the cycle of life and death. But these things… they were not natural, and they needed some sort of cleansing.
This the Slayer thought as the flames rose high under the canopy of trees. And when they began to die down, she asked herself what she should do.
It was obvious… or it seemed obvious to her, then, She decided to try and retrace her steps, going back to Huntaworde. That was the only place where she could stay. Besides, they might need her there. Not all the Orcs were dead, and there probably were more where they had come from.
And indeed there were. Almost the moment she had begun to set out for the village, a wave of arrows struck in her direction. About four struck her directly, but they had so little impulse that they barely scratched her skin; they had been shot from too far away. However, immediately after, half a dozen fires sprang up around her, cutting off all the paths to the village. The message was clear; Buffy could almost hear the wizard's voice through his acts. (She had, after all, spent enough time in his company.) What Saruman thought was: "We do not know what it would take to kill her. We do know that our ordinary means of war, welded by our soldiers, are not enough. Even if I sent a whole army against her, I cannot be sure of killing her, and I would risk losing more forces than I can afford. So, what I have to do is to remove her from the chessboard another way." Buffyheard it all, in the following months, as she used her senses to listen in on the debates Orcs had in the evenings, after the chase was over for the day. Saruman did not believe his Orcs could kill her (though he promised a reward to anyone who managed it), but he wanted her out of Rohan. And while his Orcs were not numberless, he still could afford to lose a few - even a few dozen – to avoid the potentially disastrous junction between Buffy and the lords of Rohan.
This was not necessarily all clear to her on the first day; but that she would not be allowed to rejoin the Rohirrim was. And when she first realized that, she was furiously eager to break their strategy. She tried to go around the forest fire, but it was guarded. Three hours of battle achieved nothing except pushing her a few hundred yards further back than where she had begun.
That night she had to sleep further away than she had the previous night. It was incredibly frustrating. And she had to kill and cook her own meal again, which did not improve her mood. (It was a hare this time.) But she slept again without trouble. And as she was naturally – and rightly – suspicious, that bothered her a lot.
The next night, she did not sleep much. She was troubled by the implications of what was happening. But she did suddenly fall asleep, without realizing it, late in the night, and she awoke with a start when it was at least nine in the morning. She was, at this point, scared: how could she go on being defenceless, alone and asleep, every night, within reach of enemies who were hunting her, and who tended to eat people? She had had no trouble yet, but she could not trust to luck much longer. She decided to try and scatter periods of sleep, no more than half an hour at a time, during the day. As the Slayer, she did not need more than three or four hours of sleep a night, and if she dispersed them across the twenty-four hours of the day, she might reduce the risk of being assaulted while helpless.
That morning, she decided that, rather than try to probe again the Orcish stand between her and Huntaworde, she would go exploring the forest she was in. She did not have much hope, but it was still possible that she might find a way to circumvent the monsters, and reach Men, or even Dwarves.
It was, on the whole, a useless effort. But it did prove one thing. When she went in a direction that did not lead to Huntaworde or other inhabited areas of Rohan, nothing happened. But when she made a purely token effort to move towards Huntaworde, she was nearly buried by the fall of a number of rocks that fell right in her path; and when she seemed to take a clear path downhill and towards the fields of Men, fire blew up across her path. The flanks of Thrihyrne, where she had repeatedly tried to break the Orcish barrier strategy, were marked by bursts of flame and devastation where she and the Orcs clashed, till she was, not completely consciously, driven south-east towards Starkhorn.
The Orcs could have told her, though of course they would not. They knew that the two eyes that opened above Buffy as she slept her exhausted sleep that first night, were the eyes of one of the tree giants of the forest, one of the beings whom the Orcs dreaded most. Saruman was known to deal with them, which was one of the things by which the great Orcs of Isengard dreaded their master above all things. But they would not approach one of the demons of the wood, even for him; and they would certainly never tell him that they had slackened their attack on the Weapon of Victory because an Ent was near her. They had a superstitious fear of even discussing such things; and besides, they feared that Saruman would ignore their terrors and order them to attack the girl and the wood-demon as well. They were probably right, too.
As they moved south and east across the mountains, the Orcs engaged her less and less frequently. They had a serious disadvantage against her: her superhuman senses, that could hear and smell them at a distance, and even feel their coming through vibrations in the ground. And Buffy's senses also gave her other advantages, which neither Buffy nor her enemies had thought of. A few days into her adventure, she climbed a tall tree to be able to see the country, and she suddenly saw the Orc force from a distance. They were on the other side of the valley she was looking down on, and she saw them march in her direction, in single file. She was able to count them as they went by, which nobody else could have done without binoculars, and was shocked to realize that they were more than two hundred.
This changed everything in her mind. She did not, at first, understand why they were doing what they were doing, but it was clear, at least, that they were not looking for an opportunity to assault her. With those numbers, they could easily have started a battle; but they did not. In fact, she realized, they had deliberately kept their numbers from her. What were they doing, then? Well, clearly, they were doing what they were doing: using their numbers to form a cordon around her, surround her, drive her, keep her alone and drifting through these empty mountain lands.
Through all this, her senses, especially her hearing, placed at her disposal her a sad, ugly, yet addictive ersatz for company. After the wild struggles of the first few days, the flailing effort to break through the Orcish cordon, Buffy had got used to the thought of being alone. But being used did not mean accepting: she hated it, she found it unnatural and venomous, and sometimes she could not even look up to the moon and the stars without feeling that the very sky was a lifeless desert, and the world a prison chamber in which she was caught. Without any company, without anyone to react to her thoughts, her loneliness actually drove her to listen to Orc talk. She had begun for purely practical reasons, using her senses to listen to what they might have to say; but she found that there was something about listening to other intelligent beings that relieved her, that took away from her that nightmare sense of being in a jail as big as a universe.
Mind you, it was like drinking dirty water to relieve thirst. The conversation of Orcs was in every way so odious, so crawling with viciousness, resentment and schadenfreude, that a few of it would go a long way. After a few minutes of listening, Buffy felt the need to shut herself back into herself, to clean her mind.
After a few days, she began to gain a decent idea of how to orient herself, starting from the fact that the sun rose in the east and set in the west. So, early in the morning, and late in the evening, she could be certain of the direction she was walking in, and the rest of the day she began to approximate it. Over time, she realized that she was – well, moving, or being driven – south and east, and that that was the overall direction of the mountain ridge in which she found herself. She was moving parallel with the line of the high peaks, crossing a series of streams that flowed down from the glaciers to her right. Sometimes she would reach some high place or ridge that reached above the trees, from where she could look down on the valleys and lands below; and she saw, over and over again, that valleys and rivers all bent north and east. She wondered where they all went, whether there was some sea or great lake where they all ended, or maybe a big river like the Missisippi at home. Sometimes she could even perceive, in the dim blue-green distance, little farmhouses or plumes of smoke; and then she ached.
She was still hounded by squads of Orcs. She could never count on their being away or on being alone, even when they would not show themselves for a week at a time. And at any rate her senses could not be deceived, and by now she was as well-acquainted with their smell as with her family's. She could even recognize many individuals in the group. And she was becoming aware that the battle and the following pursuit had been causing an ugly kind of selection among the monsters; those who were after her now tended to be those who had understood how to survive her, how to respond to her, how to strike effectively. She was still worth a hundred of them, but there were at least two hundred. They had control of her situation, she had not.
For in all the time she had been here, she had not seen any men, or dwarves, or any other friendly creature. The Orcs wandered through it as if it were their own. Time and again, she found abandoned refuges, marks on trees, even the surviving marks of places where fire had been made – all signs that hunters had once wandered across these woods. Men had lived here, in the past, like the owners of that ruined booth she had found. But it was all old, overgrown, rusted. She saw that the mountains were deserted of men and dwarves, but that had not always been the case. She sometimes found traces, broken tools, rags of clothing, even, once, the remains of a shattered cart. But the most recent were clearly years old, maybe five years. For some reason, long before the start of the war, Men and Dwarves and friendly creature had ceased to use the forests.
Late in the third week of her flight, near the spring of the Morthond River (though she did not know that), she found a cave that went deep into the side of the mountain. It was not a mine, and was not a Dwarvish delving. It was someone's dwelling, and it had been stormed and destroyed. Buffy found wardrobes and chests smashed to pieces, even broken weapons, and here and there a few pieces of silver and other valuable things. She had the impression that this was the remains of a much more valuable possessions. And she found other things – terrible things. There were human bones , and a few human skeletons, all, it seemed to her, belonging to large, burly men. Some of the skeletons had been dismembered, and it was to them that the bones that lay about had once belonged. And she thought that some of those bones bore the mark of biting fangs.
She immediately thought of what she had seen done to the body of her poor friend Goldhair. These men, large and burly as they were, had been bitten to death, probably eaten, and surely the thing that had done it was the same. Their weapons lay broken on the floor, their chests were shattered and empty, and maybe the few bits of precious stone and metal that her sharp eyes had located on the floor were left over from treasure taken out from the cave with careless brutality. A few men had lived in this cave, large and strong men, men with weapons, men with a treasure that could be looted. This had been the lair of a gang of human brigands, until something even worse than them had come and put an end to them, leaving their remains well in sight to rot and to warn anyone who ever thought of coming back to use it.
These woods had not been hostile to humans until something had made them so; and that had happened quite recently. Men and Dwarves had worked, hunted, even lived in these forests; until, at a guess, maybe five years. And given her experiences, it was easy for her to suspect that they had been Saruman, of whom she was beginning to believe that there was nothing he would not do, or of that Dark Lord of whom she had heard so much in Isengard and in Huntaworde.
To Treebeard, who followed Buffy and her enemies quietly and without revealing himself, the fact was even more clear. The land, the vegetation, the fauna, spoke to him. Until about three or four years ago, he could see, Men, and Dwarves, and even – he thought – an Elf, had regularly used these forests. They were not the habitation of anyone in particular. He found traces of old dwarfish delvings in the upper end of Ringló valley, but he could see that they had been a simple failure and had been abandoned many years before, when the ore yeld had proved disappointing. The brigands in the cave hardly counted. But traces of booths, temporary campfires, tents, and stores, were everywhere. Until recently, Men and Dwarves had found these forests a welcoming place; or at least, not more dangerous than any other high mountain forest, with the possibility of meeting bears or wolf packs.
But over months and years, the outlands had been emptied. Treebeard, in his slow way, had realized over weeks and months that Orcs were walking his paths more boldly and in greater numbers. That was why he had set out from his realm in Fangorn Wood to explore the mountains and the woods outside. And everywhere he found evidence that confirmed his fears. The number of Orcs in the woods had been growing slowly, and the humans still did not realize it; he himself had only recently realized how often the creatures came within his sight. It was now clear to him that the game was to separate mortal groups from each other, making the borderlands impassable. It agreed with what he had heard about the increasing hostility between Dunlendings and Rohirrim, and explained why Orcs haunted his woods.
This also meant that the Orcs had a great advantage in the woods. They had spent years in them, haunting them and making them a place of dread for humans and dwarves. So wherever they went, one of them knew the land; but Buffy was wandering blind. Treebeard understood that this was the game of the Orcs. A warrior and huntress such as he time and again saw her to be would have been a terrible enemy, and they were preventing her from joining with Rohan or even Gondor.
When Treebeard had set out from Fangorn Forest, which was still shielded from the worst of enemy activities, he already had a good idea what he expected to find, based on weeks of observation and thought. But seeing them in person, and over weeks, had told him even things that he had not suspected. The Orcs he met were larger than those he had been familiar with for so long, and subtly different in many ways. He became certain that they were a breed apart, and then heard them saying it for themselves; and this new breed did not even fear the sun. He began to have a suspicion that he refused to accept until later, that Saruman had been mixing Orc and Human blood. This shocked him. For he was certain now who he was dealing with Unnoticed and unseen, he heard them talk in the evening, discussing their pursuit around the fire, and speaking of someone they called Sharku, the old man. From several things they said and implied, and from his own past experience, he concluded that this was Saruman. That enraged him, as Saruman had long been a neighbour and, he thought, a friend. He thought of Saruman's habit of exploring the forests in the old days, centuries before, and wondered how long he had been laying his plans.
For many days, Treebeard followed the path of the Slayer and her pursuers. Buffy did not notice him, because he did not want her to; how could she have told one tree among so many? And much less did the Orcs, who had no care for trees except to cut and burn them. But Treebeard had left his own realm of Fangorn Wood, many leagues north and west, to see by himself what Saruman and his Orcs were doing. But even not knowing who she was and what she was doing in the forests, he knew that the little blonde creature had to be on the right side. He thought more than once of revealing himself and coming to her aid. No doubt, between the formidable abilities she showed practically every day and his own immense power, they could have destroyed the Uruk-Hai. But what then? It was clear to him that Saruman was committed to this course of action, hounding this girl and keeping her from any contacts, for whatever reason. If Treebeard destroyed the Orcs sent by Saruman, he would be at war with him, a war for which he was unprepared. Increasingly, in his mind, the need for an Entmoot was becoming clear.
There came a morning when Buffy felt strangely tense. It was as though something was reaching her, at some level below the conscious; yet it was nothing to do with her Slayer senses. The tension went away for a while, then it was there again, twice as strong – and this time, Buffy could not mistake it. Far away, across valleys and trees, someone had let out a human scream.
Butty had not realized how lonely she felt, how much she missed the sight and voice of a human being, until that strange sound. There was nothing cheerful about it; from what she could perceive of it, it was a toneless, yet painful sound, like the cry of a seagull. And for hours after, it came and went, apparently wandering at will. And yet, having once realized that this was a human, one of her kind, who cried like that, Buffy could not go away. She ached for the sight and sound of she who screamed (she? Yes, that was a female voice) like she ached for water, for air, for light. She moved, walked to try and intercept the sound; not an easy task, when it seemed to be coming and going at will, in no particular direction; and not made any easier when she knew that every tree might hide an Orc.
Then there it was, something light in colour, and, even from a distance, somehow ragged and unkempt. Buffy saw her drift in and out of sight between the trees, and moved in her direction.
As she moved closer, she realized that the girl's cries came at almost regular intervals, a few minutes between each. It was a loud, painful sound, and the feeling it gave Buffy was that it came from some kind of inner pressure, something that grew within her and that had to be relieved somehow. And now the girl had seen her; but she did not change her strange wandering gait, or her cries.
She was short, shorter even than Buffy, with a rather stumpy body and misproportioned arms and legs, short in proportion to her trunk. She had a mop of yellow hair, too untidy to be called golden; her complexion was pink almost to excess, and her small slanting eyes were bright blue. It took little for Buffy to understand that she carried some severe genetic disability. In her previous life in California, she had known little of such people; in Huntaworde, she had seen a couple of what locals called "simple people", whom the people treated with a weird sort of respect, letting them go and come as they wished. She thought this must be the case here. By her complexion, hair, and eye colour, this girl was of the Rohirrim, come from some village like Huntaworde, where they allowed her to move in her own uncontrolled way.
The girl moved neither closer to nor away from Buffy, although she left the impression of finding her a vaguely concerning presence. It was not easy to understand how she felt, or even if she felt anything at all. Her constant cries did in fact feel mournful and painful, but without any other kind of communication, how could she assess that? But Buffy found that the girl followed her without any sign of resistance or fear, and sat down with her when Buffy did. The time to eat came, and Buffy started a fire with her tinderbox, and put a large cut of meat – a remainder of the previous night's hunting – to cook. She noticed with the corner of her eye that the girl was going around collecting leaves and what looked like fruits. When the meat was cooked, she cut a piece and gave it to the girl. The girl took it with what looked like bewilderment, took it to her mouth…. And spat it out with every evidence of disgust. She filled her mouth with water from a bowl that Buffy had placed there, and then proceeded to feed from the vegetables she had collected. (In the few days they spent together, Buffy learned a lot about edible vegetables from watching her go about collecting and treating them. Someone, at some point, and in spite of her disabilities, had taught her a lot.)
When night came, the girl surprised Buffy again. She lay down next to her, with her back to Buffy's front, curving before her. For the first time in months, for the first time since she had felt Goldhair die, Buffy felt the warmth of another human body next to hers. The seagull cries – which Buffy had actually learned to ignore, as she realized with some surprise – died out, and the little creature was asleep. Buffy was not feeling like sleeping, and was awake for most of the night. But looking at the stars over the malformed little body did not feel so dry and prison-like any more, and the time that passed did not feel wasted.
They were together for more than a week. Buffy often spoke to her, even though she did not know whether the girl understood anything. One thing encouraged her to continue: the Orc conversations that she still heard nearly every evening showed that the creatures, whose reasoning was hardly of the best anyway, had a superstitious dislike for the likes of the seagull girl, for disabled, deformed, strange humans. They would not touch them. And their fear of Buffy had grown since she had adopted, as it seemed, the wandering little simpleton. When Buffy first understood this, she almost burst out laughing, and only held back because she neither wanted the Orcs to suspect that she could hear them, nor to bewilder the girl.
One day she was gone, just as inexplicably. Buffy bent all her senses to find her path, and how she had left the place where they had been sleeping; but before she had managed to have more than an idea of the direction in which the poor little creature had wandered, the damned Orcs fell on her again. She was not allowed to go anywhere near humans, she knew that by now, but she let the ones who came close pay for her frustration At least Buffy was sure that the Orcs had not got or eaten the seagull girl. The monsters made a mess, and did not conceal the signs of their killing and eating. She was sure she would have found – or at least smelled – her remains, had they found her. Maybe that superstitious fear they had shown had kept her alive. That simple being had just wandered off, and Buffy prayed that whatever powers there be should keep a hand on her.
She managed, more or less, to keep pace with time. She had been driven from Huntaworde during July 24, and she reckoned that she was now in late September. And she was surprised how much she missed the seagull girl. Something in her was weary. It was not that she was tired of fighting the monsters, but she felt that they had taken hope from her. She had had no company since the seagull girl had gone, and constant contact with Orcs, even hearing them argue and talk, did not make for comfort. They were simply too corrupt, their minds were too ugly, like the worst of the vampires in her old country long ago. She was inevitably attracted to communication, to something that almost felt like comradeship – only to be repelled by everything that was said and implied. Plus, she could not let it be known that she could hear them from a great distance. The choice seemed to be between being mentally polluted and sinking into loneliness and desolation.
Three times in two months, she had grown so frustrated that she decided to start an all-out attack against the Uruk-Hai, hoping either to be killed or to slaughter them all. But that was the one thing they would not allow. Their manoeuvres always managed to keep most of them away from her reach, while enough of their toughest fighters collaborated to beat her back, injure her, and wear her out – till night fell, and they managed somehow to disengage.
But the last time when she tried an all-out attack, things turned out different. She had noticed from their night's conversation, that the Orcs did not like this part of the land. It was a place where the forest extended from the mountains down into the low hills, and Buffy understood that she was near the end of Rohan, and that the woods stood between Rohan, the Great River – which she had not yet seen – and the Stoningland, Gondor, of which she had heard so often in Huntaworde. It was one of those conversations that were rather frustrating to interpret, because all the Orcs referred to events that they all knew about and experiences they had had, but it was clear that they hated the thought of the Forest. They would still go into it, because Sharku said so, to pursue the Weapon; but they felt ill at ease.
On the next morning, Buffy found that the monsters had unexpectedly gathered into a large mob. Most of the 170 or so Uruk-Hai who were left were in one place. She took the opportunity without even thinking about it, and attacked them as they were standing around in an irresolute manner.
This was the biggest and grimmest battle Buffy had fought since the attack on Huntaworde. The Orcs felt threatened and were furious, and also enraged at having been caught by surprise. Numbers pressed on the Slayer till she was, at times, almost buried under enemies; and she reacted by striking to kill, over and over again. Soon the ground was littered with Orc bodies.
Buffy saw the Orcs forming a shieldwall before her, and so of course she charged it. She did not expect the enemy to suddenly part before her. This was the first mistake she made in two months of weary and terrible struggle, and indeed, she was later to reproach herself at her asinine behaviour. There was nothing behind the shieldwall, and Buffy, charging through it, suddenly found herself in a void, with the ground falling off yards beneath her. She screamed and fell without control, and felt herself smashing against a wet, muddy ground.
She did not quite faint. But she was on the edge of unconsciousness for a few seconds, and as she rose out of it, she also became aware of widespread and intense pain. She did not dare to move.
Then she realized that that might be a blessing in disguise. The Orcs were lining the edge of the cliff from which she had fallen, looking down. And from their talk – her senses were still working – it seemed that they were wondering whether she was really dead. The cliff was steep and almost impossible to climb, and clearly the idea of coming down somehow to inspect her body did not appeal to them. One of them threw a clutch of a vile, evil-smelling substance down in her direction, and she forced herself not to move or show disgust. Another monster did the same, and this time the filth struck her directly. There was a laugh, and all the Orcs started throwing their filth and waste at her, insulting her as they did. This was their idea of a party, a celebration for the end of a long and grievous mission. They were debating among themselves what they would say to Sharku when they reported her death. By this time, Buffy too was sure that Sharku was Saruman.
Eventually the Orcs moved off from the cliff, and Buffy heard their voices move further and further away in the trees, while losing nothing in brutality and vulgarity. And as she listened to them move away, she became aware that they were definitely relieved to be leaving, not only because of her, but also because they hated this part of the woods. There was something about this forest that made them eager to be gone. Just before the voices grew too distant to distinguish, she heard the name of the tract: the Forest of Druadan.
And still Buffy lay there in the Orcs' filth, as the night came down and the air grew cold. It was not only worry that the Orcs might have left some sneaky watcher to make sure she did not move, but also because she needed her healing factor to kick in. She knew that if she gave herself time, her body would knit itself together at a speed inconceivable to ordinary humans, and even to Orcs. And she knew that once she began to mend, she would become ravenously hungry and thirsty. She was already uncomfortable as she was, lying among evil-smelling orc waste; but, injured as she was, she could not chance the risk of the Orcs becoming aware that she was not dead.
Morning came, and Buffy felt the warmth of the sun on her skin. She decided she had waited enough. Her arms and legs felt like they could function again. She rose – not without pain – and saw the glimmer of water to her left. She was at the bottom of a steep valley that led towards a river. She picked up and checked, one by one, the possessions that had come with her and kept her alive for all those weeks. The tinder box, thank the powers, was intact. Her few remaining sewing items were not worse than they had been on the previous say. The sword was in one piece, and so was the whetstone. But her hunting bow was broken in two, and her arrows were scattered in the filth. She gathered together everything she could, and made for the water. She would have a lot of things to wash, apart from herself. But it would be a blessed relief.
Buffy had long since run out of Brauna's liquid soap, and the only way she could wash her clothes and herself was by vigorous use of her strength. And that worried her, because even strong cotton and linen would not resist for ever to the way she beat them to wash the grime out. She was beginning to wonder how long her clothes would last. But for now it was just a pleasure, almost a liberation, to be rid of all the filth she had had to put with for most of a day and night.
It was when she had done all the washing and was washing her own body – in other words, she was stark naked in the water – that she noticed a strange little man sitting on the opposite shore. The little man looked something like the rocks of the forest himself, lined and gnarled. And he did not look like he was getting an eyeful. He did not look excited or amused, only curious and concerned.
Then things seemed to happen all at once. She saw a large mountain goat some way behind the small man, and her hunger reacted almost without realization. Her bow was broken, but she did not need it. She was probably the only person in the world who could throw a steel sword, as she did, as if it was a knife or a rock, and strike the target exactly. The sword cut through the goat's neck, and it died at once. By the time Buffy's eyes had moved from her prey to the little man, he had vanished.
For a couple of days afterwards, she was conscious of the presence of the little man or of other members of his tribe, though she hardly ever saw anything. She suspected that her killing of the goat must have spooked them; and they were probably of timid disposition anyway, living hidden in this forest.
On the third day, she suddenly was aware of much motion and tension behind the trees. Suddenly one of the little men came to her and tried to signal her to leave. She did not move as urgently as he seemed to wish, so he actually took her by the hand and pulled. "Orc, miss!" he whispered urgently. "Orcs is here comin!"
Buffy understood and smiled a smile she had not smiled since she was in another world, hunting vampires – the smile of a predator called, at last, to do what she understood, what she even enjoyed. "Orcs, is it?" she answered the man. "No fear. Watch." And she drew her sword.
The little man vanished, and a troop of monsters was suddenly there. Buffy noticed that they were smaller and somehow different from those who had hounded her for so long. She was seeing properly, for the first time, Uruks from the main race, who served Mordor if they served anything. But at that point, what mattered was something else. She showed them her bright drawn sword, and, without even waiting for any kind of palaver and communication, the monsters recognized the gesture and threw themselves against her. Buffy could have laughed out loud: there were only about a couple of dozens – she'd had tougher fights against vampires and demons. Only, as she began to move like death among her enemies, another death came flying in from the trees. One, two, five, eight Orcs were shot down by arrows aimed with terrifying accuracy. Even more remarkably, none of them came near her as she did her own killing. Within a few minutes all the Orcs were dead.
The little men came down from the trees with no more fear or caution. Great smiles were everywhere. They were talking over each other, until the chieftains presented themselves, speaking a clumsy but understandable version of Westron. And that night Buffy did not have to search for a place to sleep. She was taken to a great cave – so well disguised that even she had not noticed its entrance – and invited to be their guests for as long as she pleased. Her wanderings were over, at least for a while. And it came to her that it had happened just in time. She had kept, more or less, track of the time, and she was aware that it was getting on for the end of September. Living in the open in forests and high mountains had been hard enough in summer; she did not want to try and see whether she could survive in winter. Perhaps that had been the plan of Saruman and his Orcs, to keep her alone and wandering until she died of cold and hunger.
That night there was a celebration, in a great hall in the depths of the cave, and hundreds of the little stone men – Buffy found out that they called themselves Woodmen or Wild Men – came to meet their new guest and ally. There was food and drink in rivers, and Buffy, for the first time in weeks, ate as much as she wished. Her feats at the banquet impressed the Woodmen so much that they called her "the big Holbytla", after some beings of legend who were said to be able to eat their own weight at every meal. As they were themselves hearty eaters, the fact troubled them not at all, and in fact added to the glamour that their orc-killing new friend already carried.
But among all the happy, celebrating faces, Buffy alone felt her mood sinking. Yes, she was saved, it seemed. Her wanderings were over. But where did she go from here? She had escaped the traps laid for her by Saruman and the Orcs, but, in a much deeper sense, she was trapped. She had no place in this world, no purpose, and clearly no hope whatever to go home; even assuming that her home still existed and had not been destroyed by Glory and her demons.
And so, when she was asked who she was and where she came from, her answer came not from reason, but from the feelings that were overwhelming her. "My name," she said slowly… "my name is Lost."