The Chief in a Village by Himring

Chapter 5

This Part Has Too Many Dead People In It

Fingon follows the trail of a horde of orcs in Eastern Beleriand and meets someone he had not expected to meet.

(Warning:  note chapter title!)

The village lay in a strip of no man’s land between the zones of influence of the Laiquendi and the sons of Feanaro. It was not exactly large, but not small either, except by comparison with the miles and miles of unsettled forest around it: an irregular patchwork of fields surrounding a few dozen cottages close to a minor tributary of the Ascar.

I will not pretend that we had been entirely consistent about it, but governance among the Noldor in Middle-earth was a matter of consent by the ruled as well as dynastic considerations. We were essentially rebels after all and, besides, the kind of war we were engaged in would have been too difficult to conduct while attempting to control the unwilling at the same time. Some of us were more autocratic in temperament than others, obviously, but we had not usually stopped anyone from simply leaving or striking out on their own—not as long as there were no loud complaints from the Sindar or Naugrim whose vicinity they settled in.

This particular village was, you might argue, an object lesson why not too many of the Noldor had chosen to go their own ways—although of course that was only hindsight and perhaps a cynical way of viewing things. They had simply had spectacularly bad luck, after all. They were nowhere near the territory currently controlled by Angband—what must have been the odds against that particular horde of orcs stumbling across them? Unless, that is, the Dark Foe had somehow found out and the orcs had been sent… But I really do not see how he could have known.

We are Noldor, though; at least half of that village was Noldorin.  Where the Noldor are concerned, it is never safe to rule out spectacularly bad luck as a very real possibility. There is that.

I do not mean to say, of course, that they had just been sitting there in the wilderness, dreaming of peace until their fate overtook them, quite the contrary. For a village their size, they had clearly put unusual forethought into their defence, conscious of their exposure; the surrounding palisade and ditch were well maintained. They had had warning, too, for it seemed they had managed to get almost everyone inside the palisade in time and bar the gate.  I had come across evidence for a couple of small skirmishes as I approached, but no sign of anyone being surprised out in the fields. Probably, they had had some kind of watchers posted—or scouts.

And they had fought. They had fought fiercely, making the most of any advantage they could get. Orcs lay in piles around the gate and filled the ditch. Breaking through had cost the enemy dearly.

But the orcs had not been stopped by the discovery that their prey had teeth. The Dark Foe has tampered with the orcs’ minds and instincts but they do tend to calculate the cost and try to preserve their own lives when they are free to do so. Probably, in this case, they just could not believe that such a small village could be putting up such a stubborn resistance—perhaps they had imagined that if only they could get through the gate, things would be easy after that. Or perhaps they had been sent, after all. But I do not see how Morgoth could have known!

I climbed through the hole in the gate and faced the first barricade. The houses near the palisade had been torched, probably by the inhabitants themselves, trying to render the area impassable for the next few hours. They were smouldering still. 

The villagers had fought every step of the way.

I had seen a lot of violent death since first setting foot in Beleriand. You get used to it. You don’t get used to it.

It could have been worse, I suppose. When it was over, the orcs had run, too shocked by the extent of their losses to linger over their victory. There had been no orcish fun and games. But even so, violent death leaves little dignity to the dead, most of the time.  I would have liked to avert my eyes as I picked my way through the wreckage. Instead, I looked the bodies over carefully where they sprawled, right and left. There might be signs of life, someone who was not entirely dead. Also, these were my people, and it seemed that I was the only witness to the end they had met in Middle-earth.

Before they had run, the orcs had killed them all, every single living being in the village. The depth of the silence surrounding the place had instilled fear in my heart as soon as I approached the gate. I kept listening hard for any sound but there was nothing. The voice of a single blackbird fluting in a small plum tree between the cottages sounded impossibly loud and brash.

I came to the village square. The corpses lay thicker there, both elves and orcs. It had ended here.

She lay half propped against a pile of splintered wood, the remains of a wagon that had formed part of the last barrier. She was wearing men’s breeches and a plain tunic of tough leather, her hair securely braided out of the way. The shaft of the halberd she had wielded had slipped from her grasp. Dead orcs were strewn about in a rough half circle before her feet.

She must have terrified the orcs. Having brought her down and succeeded in fatally wounding her, in her case, unlike the others, the orcs had not dared to make sure or finish her off. They had just left her there to bleed her life out, slowly.

I had not thought about her very often, during the last years. When I had thought of her, I had envisaged her in her workshop in Tirion, making mysteriously significant pots as she always had.  I knew that was an illusion, of course, just like thoughts of my mother presiding over the dinner table or Aunt Earwen singing. As memories they were genuine enough but to imagine that things were going on just the same still in Tirion unchanged was utter self-deception. It was to ignore the consequences of our departure and deny the inevitable feelings of mutual betrayal. But it was tempting, very comforting, to imagine in the turmoils of Beleriand that those we had left behind were leading idyllic lives, unaffected by time, change or politics.

Only, she was not in Tirion at all. She was here, in Beleriand. And I had not known it, not until this moment.

I dropped to my knees before her.

‘Irime’, I said, in a strangled voice.

She opened her eyes at the sound of her name.

‘Findekano’, she said, recognizing me, and, as I stretched out my hands to try and check her wounds and see whether I might be able to save her, she said sharply: ‘No! Don’t bother. Go find my son! Find Gil-galad.’