Chapter eight – Buffy's winter
Buffy did not allow the Woodmen to call her "Lost" for long. That moment of discomfort came and went, and soon she found herself feeling that she had been absurdly melodramatic. She still felt no real hope, but she just preferred not to think about it, and to do the best she could together with her new friends.
They had, at any rate, understood, and preferred to call her by the name her appetite had earned her on their first evening together: "BigHobbit". Hobbits, it seemed, were small creatures in old stories, mainly known for being able to eat their own weight at every meal. That was just about all that was known about them, but there were stories when the sudden appearance of a Hobbit, and its inevitable requirement for masses of food, caused hilarious catastrophes. The disaster usually happened because the victim, or patsy if you will, had failed to notice the danger sign: bare feet and lower legs covered with fur. Hobbits, it seemed, meant well, but in every story, the appearance of a short, barefoot man-like creature ended up meaning trouble.
That was the first thing she learned about her new hosts, and it was unexpected: that they loved laughter and jokes, and had a store of funny stories. Her stay with them, over most of an increasingly grim winter, was constantly dotted by silly stories, comic ideas, and laughter. They were, of course, quick enough to fall silent in the hunt, if prey or a possible enemy were in the wind. But they did not otherwise seem able to be together without waves of chatter, old shared stories, and witticisms.
But behind this kind of funny story lay a real and serious issue of Druadán life. The Druedain lived what Buffy had learned in school to call "hunter-gatherer" lives. They did not grow crops or raise herds: they sought for wild vegetables, mushrooms, and game. So every moment of the day was dedicated to finding food. They had ways of storing and preserving it, but they did not do it often. A wandering lifestyle, without houses or larders, did not lend itself to piling up stores. And they could not stay in one place for too long, for they would strip it of its potential food. So their relationship with the land was very delicate. They dealt with it by constantly moving. That was he second thing she learned: they were always moving. They slept on large trees they felt to be safe.
It was in one such tree that Buffy went to sleep, that night, after some of the Woodmen had shown her how to be most sheltered and least visible and perceptible to Orcs and predators. And, unusually for her, she slept all night – eight hours, she estimated. She also had her first Slayer dream since she had left Isengard. She dreamed that she was running around with hundreds of Woodmen and their women and children, playing as if they were children in a playground, joking and laughing. And all this happy play went on even as Buffy began growing, and growing, and growing. And she was a giant now, beginning to tower above the trees, and still the Woodmen showed confidence and no fear. But as she rose above the treeline, she saw a long, deep shadow over the furthest East she could see; and she knew, somehow, that she did not want to be seen by that shadow. And she grew scared, because her head and shoulders towered above the tallest tree, and she did not know how the eye in the shadow could fail to see her. And then the sun was in her eyes, and she was waking up.
As the Woodmen had been hunting and gathering almost up to the time when they went to sleep, so almost the first thing they did in the morning was to go gather food to eat. If moving around and looking for food counted as work, the Woodmen were as hard-working a people as any she had ever met. Buffy would have thought it a dreary way to be, but in fact all this moving included and framed a whole lifestyle's worth of things and events and feelings. As they went, they chatted, argued, flirted, told jokes and old stories, agreed to do things together, taught and reproached their children – everything happened at a walking pace, while their eyes scanned the ground and the trees.
She did not have time to be bored. And she was learning too much. She had learned enough about hunting and living in the wild, first in her months in Huntaworde, and then in her summer alone in the mountains; but she soon found out that everything she knew was kindergarten stuff compared to what the Woodmen knew. There were dozens of plants and grasses she had never considered, that were edible if tasteless, and could be improved by the use of appropriate herbs. There was such a thing as edible bark on certain trees. Some poisonous weeds could be made harmless by being placed in water for a few hours, and the water could then be boiled to be made into poison for arrow-tips (Buffy remembered with horror the poisoned arrow that had once pierced Angel). There were edible roots and tubers. And then there were bugs. Finding nests of ants or masses of bugs behind a patch of tree barks was particularly appreciated.
And then, of course, there was hunting. All the Woodmen bore small bows made with particular woods – rather smaller than those Buffy had been used to, both in Sunnydale and in Huntaworde – and were very skilled in their use. Many also used slings and stones, and could sometimes be seen picking up and carfully weighing rocks from the ground, according to whether size, shape and weight suited their slings. The range of their bows was shorter than she was used to. This was to cause trouble a few days later, when Buffy and her friends ambushed a troop of rather small Orcs. One of them managed to escape, as Buffy, overestimating the reach of her allies, had let it run to them instead of killing it on the spot. But that never happened again, and within their range, the Woodmen were amazing, even better than the Rohirrim of Huntaworde. And there was almost no animal they would not kill and eat.
Buffy's greatest deed for them, in their view, was not the destruction of Orc war bands, which they could have carried out well enough without her. During her time with them, three war bands were destroyed to the last Orc (except for the one): the one that she had helped with when they first met, and a couple of others during the winter. There were also cases of random single Orcs or small bunches, and those, of course, stood no chance. But the Woodmen valued her far more for what happened a couple of weeks after they met, when the weather was beginning to turn decidedly autumnal, windy and drizzly. Buffy and a group of her hunter friends were foraging near the border of their forest. A few dozen paces beyond began the land where the Woodmen would not go, bare of trees and all too open to the sight of passing Rohirrim and travellers. And suddenly, one after the other, they all could smell an alien smell. They turned to each other, some in surmise, some with the shadow of fear in their eyes, as they all fell instantly silent. Buffy had never smelled it before from close by; all she could be sure of, is that it was some sort of animal. And then – suddenly – almost without noise – there it was: a gigantic black shadow – a gigantic black bear. Except for magical creatures, it was the largest animal she had ever seen.
The bear raised its head, looked at them, and roared; and Buffy was suddenly remembering something she had heard in an Earth Science class in junior high long ago, when she was small: that bears in late autumn have to eat a lot, to put on fat for the winter hibernation. In that second, she had no doubt whatsoever that she and her Woodmen friends were slated to help the creature build up its reserves. The Woodmen were even ahead of her, and were already scrambling up the nearest trees, as far up as they could possibly get.
Buffy sought no tree. She drew the sword that Isenhand the smith had made for her in Huntaworde, kept sharp by the whetstone the sisters had given her, and waited, as the bear's eyes measured her. Then it charged. Buffy stepped aside, and her sword bit the animal's right paw. The bear roared with pain, but her sword was nearly torn from her hands as the injured paw jerked it forwards. Holding on to it, she let herself roll and came up standing a couple of foot to the side of the bear. She gave it no time to regroup, charging its side and inflicting another sword-wound. By this time, the bear was aware that this was not a meal, but a fight for its life, and it stepped back, still staring beadily at the deadly little thing before him. And then it made its last charge – and Buffy, with a motion almost too swift to see, ducked under its charging head and paws, and then thrust her sword upwards at a precise point, with all her strength. Nobody else could have done it; but the hard, shining steel forged by Isenhand, driven by the Slayer's demonic strength, smashed through both the jugular vein of the muscular neck and the join of spine and skull. The bear was already dead as its charge turned into a crashing tumble, dragging Buffy with it, spraying her with dark blood from its severed artery.
By the time a bruised and dirty Buffy managed to disentangle herself from the clumsy embrace of massive, dead, furry limbs, the Woodmen were clambering down from their trees and approaching, some still showing residual fear, others wonder and the beginnings of celebration. But it was when they realized that she was alive and almost unhurt that the celebration started. Buffy had never thought of bears as animals one could eat, but to the Woodmen, they were the height of luxury food: mountains of meat, offal, and fat, enough to be shared out between many families for an evening's festivity.
Buffy and the Woodmen still mostly spoke in the Common Tongue; but Saruman's spell had not yet quite run out, it was still was weakly at work, and Buffy was beginning to understand the Druadan speech. And that night she discovered that the Woodmen not only told jokes and funny stories, but also sang, and sang heroic songs. Apparently the tribe's own poet had witnessed her killing of the bear, and, whether or not she liked it, he would stand up in the middle of the feast and belt out several minutes' worth of chanting about the heroine from far away and her struggle with the giant of the woods, describing moment after moment in his best heroic style. And as if that was not enough, that was when Buffy found out that the Woodmen had given her a name of their own in their own language. And that name translated as Goldhair.
Buffy was pierced to the heart. It was too soon to be reminded of her lost friend; she had an irrational feeling that she was somehow stealing Goldhair's name, that she was demeaning the love and credit and memory that her friend deserved. But she had been living in the open for months, often sleeping in the branches of a tree or behind some natural hideout. As a result, the sun had streaked her naturally brown hair with blazes of gold, even more notable among the brown, and practically unknown among the swarthy Woodmen. All these things passed through her mind as she sat in silence and listened to the poet-singer chanting her great deed, as the tribe clapped in rhythm and joined in when asked.
As the evening progressed, more and more Woodmen came to join in the feast. At one point, the poet was asked to repeat his performance for the many guests who had come late and missed it, and he good-humouredly agreed, with the offer of a gourd of strong fermented drink to encourage his Muse. But there was a curious undercurrent of carefulness, even nervousness. Some of the men got up and formed little groups around the edge of the clearing, and incomerst talked with them – sometimes briefly, sometmes at length. One of her friends told her that some of the people who had begun to come in were "farfamily", and his tone implied that there was a need for attention when such people came in.
These were Woodman words that she had heard once or twice before, without thinking too much about it. She now began to understand. People from the group to which her friends belonged were "closefamily". She knew that she had never met strangers, only siblings, cousins, parents and other relatives. Now, when this great party was taking place, actual Woodman strangers were coming to taste the bear meat and listen to the song. They were "farfamily" and had to introduced into the group and into the territory. "Greatfamily" was the whole people of the Woodmen of Druadan, the Druedain. It was their name for a whole people, a nation. They called the men of Rohan "the Greatfamily of Horsemen", and King Theodén "the Father of Horsemen", because of course every family had to be headed by a father, or maybe a mother.
It was a happy evening, till the fire died down. The strangers left in ones and twos, and each Woodmen of Buffy's closefamily disappeared between the trees to find their own place to sleep the night. Buffy climbed a large tree and rested on a large horizontal branch that she had marked out earlier.
In the days that followed, Buffy learned to know what she had only perceived in outline over the evening of the party. It became clearer and clearer to her, as day followed day, that the wandering Woodmen all kept, in fact, within specific boundaries, moving from place to place, yes, but always to places they knew. She understood from stories and Woodman conversations that these were their Walking, or their Home. The territories were each as large as a county back in California, yet each was barely enough to feed a few hundred Woodmen.
There she felt she was getting close to the heart of the riddle. The Woodmen all required large spaces to exploit, to hunt-and-gather; and they had to move regularly, to search for places where their sources of food, exploited earlier, had regrown. But these were always places they had been there before, places they knew well - home, And it was not just the Closefamily's constant need for recovered food grounds; it was something else, maybe deeper. The Woodmen knew and and loved their Walkings even as they knew and loved their Closefamilies. They felt at home in their Home, safe, sheltered, protected. They had no desire to get into someone else's Walking, any more than to steal their food or rape their women. And that was why even seeing a Woodman outside his own Walking and Closefamily was strange and unsettling, and needed to be explained.
But Buffy found that they covered always the same regions, which they knew minutely. And now that she understood about closefamily and farfamily, she thought she understood. Each closefamily, each tribe, had their own home, their territory, which they never left except for extraordinary occasions such as the bear festival. There they felt at home. It was not just a matter of cold calculation; it was an emotional link. The Woodmen's stories were often tales of friendship; the tales they claimed were most ancient, in particular, all told of relations of friendship and trust between individual men of the forest and men of the civilized tribes downstream. Friendship seemed to be an instinct with them, and they still lamented the fear and hate that had fallen long ago between them and the Gratfamily of Rohan. There were parts of the forest edge where the Druadán did not go, because they feared being seen by the Rohirrim and hunted like beasts, and there was a whole genre of song-poetry to do with the tragedy of this separation. And Buffy felt that they felt about their Walkings just as they felt about friendship.
All the time the weather was closing in. One day in late October she was with the Father of their Closefamily, an elderly but hale and vigorous Woodman with stringy white hair, called Ghan siva Jon, when a man ame with news. "The Closefamilies of Silkaya Renn and of the Highpass have decided to have it out about the possession and use of the new swamps of Ghul ussedd; the confrontation will take place at the Grand Sleeping Trees on their border."
Buffy said, in shock: "Is there going to be fighting?"
"Fighting? No, that's unlikely…"
"Yes, but could it? I mean, I once stopped a big fight between Dunlendings and Rohirrim…"
"There will be no fighting, Lady. Believe me. We don't kill Greatfamily members. There are too few of us as it is, and if we fought each other, what would be left? But if you are still worried, come with us. We were going to go see it anyway."
Buffy still had doubts, but she said nothing and followed Ghan siva Jon and several relatives. It was quite a long journey, and after three hours they had to cross a border and make themselves known to the local Closefamily according to the rules. The locals were less tense and careful than was usual in these circumstances; in fact, one of them smiled and remarked that they were getting a lot of traffic, thanks to the Highpass. Some of the travellers smiled back.
Finally they were on the spot, a small hill with several very large trees, which Buffy recognized as the kinds that Woodmen liked to sleep and rest on. The place was surrounded by a small mob of Woodmen, visibly from different tribes, looking on and talking low. And at the centre, on the hill, on and around the trees, there stood dozens of Woodmen, in two rows, glaring at each other and standing still. They stood more upright than Buffy had ever seen them, as firm and silent as poles dug into the ground, the only visible evidence of life the anger in their eyes. Buffy did not understand. She looked in bewilderment at the unmoving rows of Woodmen and their silence and stillness and mutual glowering. At last Ghan siva Jon understood her puzzlement and explained.
"It's… Lady Goldhair… it's a trial of strength." He was stuttering, trying to find expressions for something that had, till then, been so normal to him that he had never had to put it into words. "They will stand there, facing each other, doing nothing else, till one of them collapses. That is – there are two kinds of trials – to the first man, and to the last man. According to the importance ofhow to e the contest. A trial to the first man ends when the first man on either side collapses. A trial to the last man ends when all the men on one side have collapsed. However many on the other side are left standing, that side is the winner. This is only a trial to the first man.
"Long ago," went on the elder, "Woodmen used to fight and kill each other in war just like all other men, and other beings. And then there was a war that was so terrible that it killed almost every Woodman who was alive then. Those who survived came together and swore a great oath that there would never be again a war of Woodmen with Woodmen. And as there had to be a way to resolve disputes that could not be agreed on, someone invented this."
Buffy waited a few more minutes, just contemplating the rows of stiff, silent, glowering Dunedain, There would be no need for her to enforce peace, after all. She slowly walked away.
Next day, she heard that the Closefamily of Highpass had lost, when one of them had tumbled off the tree branch he had been standing on, and fallen on to rocks, breaking an arm. The news-bearer had seen it happen, and had his own opinions on the matter.
"He asked for it. He was showing off, standing on a tree branch over stony ground. What did he expect?"
Everyone seemed to agree. There was little sympathy for the young man. "What was he, seventeen?" "They shouldn't take kids to a serious challenge. They always show off." "Well, he'll have learned his lesson, I hope." "Even apart from his injuries, he's going to be hearing from his closefamily – all of them. He's lost them the confrontation." "Well, he deserves it." "He sure does." All the conversations Buffy heard were pretty much along the same lines. It seemed that there was a consensus among the Woodmen about rash young men who tried to show off.
Winter closed in. There was frost and snow. Buffy and the Druedain had to work harder to find food, and went further off in search of it, closer to the lands where other Men and Orcs could be found. And she and they both began to feel that there were too many Orcs around. "Last winter,"said Ghan siva Jon to Buffy, "we saw maybe one or two a month. They don't like coming here, because they know that we will kill them if they show their faces in our forests. But this year, it seems they are losing their fear."
"Or," said Buffy thoughtfully, "that there is something they fear more than your arrows."
The last and worst of her hunts with the Woodmen happened in late December, with the land covered in snow and all animals hiding. One grim, cold morning, as Buffy was alone looking for the tracks of animals, she found something she had never expected, after Ghan siva Jon's tale of the terrible war and the resolution never to let Woodman kill Woodman again. It turned out that there was at least one Druadán who was able and willing to kill other Druedain.
Buffy had been taught to use a portable drum to broadcast simple messages, though the elaborate conversations that expert drummers could hold across miles of ground were beyond her. But this was the simplest and most horrible message imaginable. She drummed with all her might, calling all Druedain within hearing to witness the remains of a foul deed.
There could have been no mistake as to how she had died. This was not the work of animals. And it was both heartbreaking, and suggestive of motive, that she had been very young, and, as the Druedain women went, graceful, with unusually thick and glossy black hair, a very curvy figure, and remarkably small hands and feet. But nothing could be told of her face, that had been repeatedly, methodically smashed, by a large stone that still lay near the body.
Buffy had been with the Woodmen enough not to have any "noble savage" idea about them. She had seen them be angry, tired, unhappy with each other, stupid, obstinate, petty – every normal bad aspect of ordinary people. But somehow, she still did not associate this simple, primitive life in the open air with the cold violence that she had so often faced at home or in Isengard. Even if she had not heard Ghan siva Jon's calm and certain assertion that Woodmen do not kill each other, this would have seemed out of place, out of keeping with her experience of her small friends. Slowly rage rose in her for the pathetic, broken body before her, smaller even than she was, and systematically destroyed.
When she at last looked up from her, she saw that dozens of Woodmen had come; and, in all their eyes, the same fire of anger that had been growing in her. Justice had to be done for the girl. Nobody bothered saying anything. Buffy only nodded, and started to methodically analyze the ground and sniff the air. All the Woodmen were doing the same, like the hunters they were. Her senses were still keener than any of theirs, but the difference was far less than that between Buffy and the Rohirrim of Huntaworde, let alone her friends back in California. They communicated easily, their words barely a hint of the things they felt with noses and ears and eyes. "One." "Soap." "Hare… ate one." "Hares are in Barfeter Wood." And as they spoke, they were already moving together, in a ragged group, walking in a crouching walk with nose and eyes as close to the ground as possible. Soon they were jogging, almost running, the trail clear in their nostrils.
About half an hour there, they reached the border of their Walking. They did not stop, but slowed down noticeably; and soon Woodmen from the local Closefamily came through the trees, to know them and what they had come for. Buffy could practically see the moment the locals were being told of the dead girl, the swift rise of their rage, and the way each of them, with no further need of words, joined the hunt.
A couple of hours later, the killer was in sight. Like his pursuers, he was running at a fast, huddled lope, and in spite of the long run he must have had, he was still moving swiftly and without visible strain. But at this point Buffy noticed that the crowd of pursuers was stretching ahead on both sides of the prey. The youngest and fastest runners were deliberately taking the lead on both sides – they were on his sides – they were ahead of him – they had joined. And the pursued was now surrounded. He stopped.
Ghan siva Jon stepped forward and called three times in a loud voice, but not in a shout: "Ghusl gan Guna! Ghusl gan Guna! Ghusl gan Guna!" And now Buffy could see the hunted man's face. Was it the strain of hours of pursuit that made it look twisted and malevolent, like an ugly caricature of the rather funny faces and big noses of her friends? His reply was: "Yes? You have something to say to me, Ghan siva Jon?"
"Why did you kill her?"
"Because it was fun." Now Buffy was feeling at home, in an ugly way. How many such monsters had she fought, how many killed? Hate was a symptom of vampirism, but how many humans she had met also carried in them like a snake ready to bite? She looked at the creature with bleak hate, as it launched into a rant.
"I wish I could have done it ten times over, to you and you and you! I wixh I had your throat in my hands now! And it cheers me that you are dead already and don't know it yet. The Dark Lord is coming. The world is dead, and rotting, and the new Lord will feed you all to the Orcs! Take this for a piece of good news!"
"Enough," answered Ghan siva Jon. "You shall now die, and none of us shall touch your foul body." And as if he had been waiting for nothing but this, another Woodman's arm whipped out, and a rock flew through the air, hitting the murderer's frame and making it shake.
It was a long and ugly business. The stones were thrown with a kind of rhythm, one by one, from every side, each smashing in the man's body. Soon he was mangled, bleeding, shaking with every blow. He fell to his hands and knees, and still the inexorable flight of rocks continued. For a while he kept silent except for grunts of pain, but in the end his control failed, and inarticulate, horrible noises came from his injured lungs and mangled throat. Eventually he was on the floor, motionless and making no more sound. But the Woodmen were not done with him. Each of them approached him with a stone in his hand, and dropped if over the broken body. In the end, nothing was visible, not even the shed blood – nothing but a pile of rocks.
Buffy had not taken part in any of this. She had watched in horror, forcing herself to remember what the man had done and what he was being punished for. Even so, the long and terrible execution brought her close to feeling pity for him. She wanted to say, "Did you have to do that?", but that would have been stupid. Obviously they felt they had to. Everyone had taken part in the stoning. So she asked, "Do you always do that?"
"This is our law," said Ghan siva Jon grimly, as he saw her expression. "He had killed a woman. That is the worst of crimes. Women give us life. Women risk their lives every time they give birth to a baby. Men must defend women, fight for women, if necessary die for them… NEVER kill them." He stopped, as if trying to rein in his emotions.
"If he had killed a man, or even a boy, we would have stopped when he was dead. But by burying his body under the stones, we undo his birth. We pay back the debt he owed to the woman who gave him life, the woman he outraged in the body of the girl he killed." Buffy saw that he was literally shaking with indignation.
That night, as they sat around a carefully concealed fire and talked about the thing they had hunted and punished, Buffy heard stories that were different from the usual amusing and made repertoire. She was made aware that the Woodmen knew all about rogues and crooks, and that they had had their own share of human monsters. She should not have been surprised, she thought. Small and odd as they were, they were indubitably human, and their passions and emotions were human. Some hated each other. Some took what they had no right to. Some hurt others for no other reason than mutual dislike. And murder was not unknown. Buffy heard the many stories of Gunzla the bad, an outlaw of long ago who had become famous for how long he remained at large, even when the whole Woodmen Greatfamily turned against him. They spoke of Gunzla with a sort of awe: he was never caught, and they had to wait till he starved himself to death. Buffy thought of rogues and vampires she had known.
By the time Ghusl gan Guna had been executed, winter was at its height. It was an ordinary bad winter, however, until mid-January. Then suddenly, without warning – not event the subtle hints by which the more experienced Woodmen could predict the weather hours or days in advance – there was terrible cold in the Forest of Druadan. As the winds blew, and the rain turned to snow and ice, and they seemed to be digging through Buffy's body and soul, the Slayer had a strange feeling. Looking up at the sky, she felt as if it she were looking at some sort of barrier or hiding shield, and that behind it there hid a power, or many powers, that hated – hated the forest, hated the Woodmen, hated other men and animals and living things. To her, the hissing and howling wind was the language of their hatred, not just a particular purpose, but a lasting statement of destructive purpose. And she was not wrong.The Powers that had unleashed the Hell of cold on the terrible mountain only intended to destroy a small group of travellers, but the weather could not be changed at one point on Caradhras alone. And the mountain, and any other Power that might have helped in that extreme feat of weather magic, did not care about the results other parts suffered. Indeed, if man-like feelings could be ascribed to such things, the mountain and its allies were smug and pleased by the pain they had caused, all the way from Mirkwood Forest to Buffy and the Woodmen in Druadan.
Buffy could not know that. It was only much later, collating dates and records, that the Wise came to understand the effect and reach of Caradhras' snowstorms. But she knew enough to trust her instinct that something more than just bad weather was driving the horrible winds and the freezing, blinding snows. The Woodmen were soon of the same mind, especially as there soon was a pullulation of Wargs and wolfriders under Druadan's eaves. The cold seemed to have given birth to them: or, at least, they had come, no longer frightened, driven by the ice and snow to seek new prey among the small men of the woods. Only, having come hunting, they had not expected to beds hunted in turn, with Buffy leading them on.
For three days there was bloodshed under the eaves, and by the time the struggle was over, not one Orc had escaped. But Buffy had a feeling that this was only a foretaste; and in fact, three days later, something like a regiment of Orcs was at the gates of Druadan Forest.
Only, they did not enter. They gathered in ordered ranks and waited. All day and the next, more Orcs came and joined them: mostly stragglers, but, in a couple of cases, ordered companies of a few dozen each. And from hidden places in the trees and in the hills, Woodmen observed them patiently.
Buffy disappeared briefly, and when she reappeared, she was carrying the gross armoured dress of a rater small Orc. Putting the thing on, it would have taken some effort and close attention to see hat she was not one of the dark host. Now, however, it was off. She left it at the bottom of the tallest tree in that part of the wood, and spoke to Ghan siva Jon. "Come up with me, please," she said, pointing upward to the great trunk. "We have to talk."
None of them had any problem climbing to the top of that giant of the forest. And there, at the top of the tree, with the landscape spread out before them and the black stain of Orc hosts clearly visible, Buffy, Ghan siva Jon, and his closest friends, looked and debated. Before them, looking north in the distance, there was a land of water – the delta of the Entwash, where it joined the mighty Anduin. It was hard to distinguish land from water, and water from mist.
"I have been scouting among the enemy. Don't worry, they never knew I was there. And I think I know what they intend to do.
"They are not turned towards you. Only a few sentries are posted in the direction of the Forest, obviously to make sure that they get no surprises from that direction. But what everyone is preparing for, talking about, looking forward to, is an advance northward, toward a place called the Anduin."
"That is not a place, my lady. That is the name of the Great River – that blue ribbon of water you can see there on the horizon. That is Great Anduin, the Father of Waters."
"Is it now? That makes sense. Because the most extraordinary thing I saw was Orcs teaching each other to swim. I know that the creatures hate the water, and don't cross rivers except in boats or such, but I saw them forcing themselves to float and swim. And some of them were doing it rather well. The creatures are going to be crossing Anduin or some other body of water, probably a large one. And that is not here, nowhere near here.
"The battle they are being gathered for will be fought here. And it is there I must go. Whatever they are preparing, it is important, and it is very likely that their targets have no idea what awaits them. I must be there."
Saruman's spell was just about dying out then, but it had still managed to make her learn the Druedain language. She had been using it from time to time, to make jokes impossible in the Common Speech, or just to be polite. Now, for the first and last time ever, she used it to address the whole Closefamily and convince them.
"My friends, there is a greater thing happening now than just the raids of horrible Orcs. You have felt the unnatural cold. You have felt the horrible weather, and the poison and hatred in the air. You have heard the words of horror coming from the open sky. My friends, it is not just us, and it is not just here. The whole world is under attack." And as if she had called it, a shriek came from the open sky, distant but terrible, charged with knowledge and hate and horror. Even Buffy, who knew a thing or tw about the demonic. It took a minute or two before they were able to speak again.
"That was… whatever that was… that was evil," said Buffy slowly, and the Woodmen nodded.
"There you see it, my friends. War has even taken to the air. We cannot shelter each other from it. I have to go where it takes me, to strike at the enemy where I can most hurt them. And you – you have your wild woods to defend, and your Walkings, and wives, and children."
Buffy felt, unspoken, the Druedain belief that men protect women and die for them. She knew that they were resisting it, because they knew all too well what she was. But it was an instinct, and it was still there.
"You are good people, my friends. You know you can't protect me, but you still want to. But you must stay here and guard your own homes and Walkings. The war is coming from every direction, and it will spare nobody. Be here for your women and your little ones."
There was a bleakness and a sadness in the eyes of all the Woodmen. They all knew that they were unlikely to meet again, and that the strange beauty with gold in her hair, who has come among them out of nowhere so many months ago, and who had made that autumn and winter unforgettable in their eyes, was going down into a darkness too terrible even for her great powers. And their gift for love and friendship had bound them to her, and they would miss them. She looked at them with sad eyes, and bowed her head; and then she was gone, running away at that terrible speed she had rarely used while she was with them.
In the outer world, it was February 23 and the Fellowship of the Ring was coming dangerously close to the rocks of Sarn Gebir. Though Buffy was not to know it, the peril in the sky she and the Woodmen had felt was to be unsaddled that very night by the arrow of Legolas the Elf. But that did not make the sky any less perilous and grim.
For a day and a night, the ragged figure of Buffy kept up with the troop of Orcs, that was slowly growing, as groups and individuals came from various directions and joined. By the time the second day dawned, the troop had grown to a mob, hundreds of goblins of all shapes and sizes. And just as she was wondering if they would ever reach a target, they saw the vanguard race towards a shore, and beyond it a large, hilly, forested island, surrounded by the greatest river Buffy had seen in her life.
She saw the lines of Orcs throwing themselves into the water. Some, clearly scared of swimming, were shoved in by their companions; and here and there floated the corpses of those who had proved unable to swim. And still the Orcs rushed in by dozens, and she managed not to be noticed, by the simple device of moving as they did and diving in where they did.
When she reached the shore, though, she saw the Orcs suddenly slow down and grow wary. It became clear to her that she was near the target of the cursed army. And suddenly, over all of them, over the hill and the trees, rang the sound of a great horn call.
Buffy could have no doubt that this was the call of the host's enemies, its intended victims. The call rang again, even louder, and she was sure that there was something like despair and rage in it. She could feel in it the voice of a warrior alone and without help against numberless yet contemptible enemy – a lion surrounded by hyenas.
The orc cloak flew off, and the blade of Isenhand the smith flashed in the sun. A terrible cry rang across the host of Orcs on the island slope: "For Goldhair Swertisdaughter!" The Isengard orcs, the Uruk-Hai, screamed in terror, almost with one voice: "The Slayer!"Many of them knew her from Isengard, and some had survived the long pursuit the previous summer, through the mountains. The rest had learned about her from scary stories heard around evening campfires and mountain barracks. The smaller Morgul orcs knew little of her, but the very name held terror. And then she was among them, striking right and left, cutting, killing, crushing. And suddenly she was in a clearing, and on the other side there was a human figure surrounded by monsters. The man raised his horn to his lips and blew again; she answered with her battle-cry, For Goldhair!
The Orcs were caught between the hammer of the tiny wild blonde girl, moving among them like an unstoppable machine, and the anvil of the gigantic man, standing with a ragged shield still covering most of his body, and a bloody and unbroken sword. Boromir could hardly see the ally who had suddenly come on to the army, but he knew that he now stood a chance, beyond all hope, and his last remains of strength grew strong within him. And Buffy kept striking, striking, striking, as she had not done even that awful dawn at Huntaworde.
And suddenly the clearing was empty, and they could hear the screeches of fear of the last Orcs as they fled. Boromir and Buffy were alone.
The injured man looked at her with wonder, slightly tinged by doubt. Standing with his back against a tree to hold himsef up, he held his sword before him with both hands, and his grip seemed strong and steady still. But Buffy stopped, and, making sure that he could see her hands at all times, she tore a rag from an Orc's corpse and briefly cleaned the blade of her sword. Then she sheathed it, and then she raised her empty right hand in token of peace. He sheathed his own sword in turn, and only then she began to move towards him.
She nearly did not make it. Suddenly, with a speed that surprised even her, one of the apparently dead Orcs leapt from the pile of bloodied carcasses and tried to stab her. But the black blade only touched her cheek as she dodged it with her own instinctive and incredible speed. And a second had not passed before her iron fingers had fastened on the monster's throat on both sides and started pressing. The monster died horribly, as Buffy's hands crushed his neck muscles and black blood spurted on every side, and its last attempt at a shriek was choked in its throat, and its head lolled on its smashed spine. And Boromir, the experienced warrior, gasped at what he had seen. And Buffy turned to him again, dropping her enemy's corpse among the others.
Boromir did not look his best. The filth and blood of a long battle, the trailing rags of clothing and of torn chain mail, and the temporary disfigurement of uncleaned, untreated wounds, added up to a tottering scarecrow. One of his eyes was closed by caked blood, making the other look like it squinted. But Buffy had dealt with injuries and filth long enough not to be deceived. She could tell that, after he had been patched up and properly washed, this guy, scars and all, would turn out to be one absolute hunk. She moved towards him, when suddenly two small people – they looked almost like children – appeared behind the big man. Incredulous, Buffy looked at their legs – their furred, shoeless legs and feet, just like the Woodmen had told. "Hobbits!" she said in surprise. "Are you really hobbits?" It seemed the height of incongruity, to have ran and fought all the way to thi island clearing, only to meet those comic figures from silly Druedain tales. Buffy was about to laugh.
What happened next was a pure coincidence. Nobody had planned for things to happen as they did, not even the One who sent the Messenger. But Buffy, Boromir, Merry and Pippin, each felt a shriek like the knives of death, a shriek that tore through to their bones, and a darkness that all but covered the sky. Faster than even she could react, Buffy knew she was being seized from behind by immense talons, and violently lifted in the air. In one second, she had vanished, and the darkness had dissipated: and Boromir and the hobbits stood there blinking, in a clearing full of Orc corpses, looking at each other, and wondering what had just taken place.