Strange Company by StarSpray

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Chapter 1

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The most wonderful thing about the Misty Mountains was that, even after more than two Ages of the world spent exploring them, there was always something new to find—a new pass, a new cave, a new giant to contend with if you were unfortunate enough to be caught in the high places during a storm. Very few folk went looking for such things, of course. If you were going through the mountains there was usually a reason, and you took the Redhorn Pass or the High Pass, depending on where you were or where you were going—and whether our preferred to take your chances with the stone giants or with old Redhorn himself.

On this occasion Eluréd and Elurín had chosen neither, and were exploring the mountains far to the north, looking for the source of the River Langwell. Even now, after Sauron's final defeat and the beginning of the Fourth Age, it was not the safest of pastimes. There were still trolls in the Ettenmoors, and Mount Gundabad was still occupied by orcs, though the latest word was that their numbers were dwindling, and the dwarves of Erebor were making plans with their kin from the Iron Hills and Blue Mountains to retake the mountain once and for all.

There were no paths in this part of the Misty Mountains, but that had never deterred them before. You found the most delightful places when you strayed from the paths. On this day Eluréd was particularly enjoying the meadow they had stumbled upon, through which the Langwell, this high up only a burbling brook, flowed. Elurín had immediately spotted eyebright growing along the bank, a blanket of small bright flowers, and while he collected it to take back down the mountains with them, Eluréd lay in the grass and watched the clouds.

The peaceful afternoon was disrupted suddenly by a shaking and rumbling from higher up in the mountains. Eluréd thought that he heard a shrill scream, cut off suddenly. He sat up as Elurín straightened from his crouch across the meadow. "Landslide," Eluréd announced.

Elurín grinned as he tucked away the satchel of eyebright. "You would know," he said. Two Ages of the Sun had passed since Eluréd had been caught in a landslide on the eastern side of the Blue Mountains, and still he could not escape the teasing. He ignored it but for a brief put-upon sigh, and grabbed his own pack. Landslides were in the Misty Mountains were always worth investigating. You never knew what might be unearthed.

They had to scale some steep slopes to reach the place where the landslide had occurred. To their surprise, a path appeared after they made it up the second steep incline. "That's odd," said Eluréd as he and Elurín stood and gazed down it.

"It's new," added Elurín, pointing to signs of recently cleared brush, hacked away carelessly and with rather more enthusiasm than was warranted. The path itself was littered with footprints, larger and smaller, some barefoot and others booted, though there was nothing to indicate who had made them. The path wound up towards them and then away into the mountains, coming from a valley down and to the north of them that Eluréd could just glimpse through the trees.

"Orcs," he murmured. Elurín nodded, already reaching for his bow. It was still very early in the day for orcs to be creeping out of their holes, but something like a landslide could disrupt quite a lot of things.

More carefully, they continued forward, passing silently along the path. It was quiet in this part of the mountains now; the disturbance had caused the birds and beasts to flee, and the only sound was the breeze whispering through the leaves and grass. And after a while another sound reached them—a keening, pained sound, a white interspersed with words. The words were in a language that set Eluréd's teeth on edge. He and Elurín exchanged a glance.

At last, as the sun was starting to sink behind the mountains to the west, they found the place where the mountainside had crumbled. It was not terribly big, as far as those things went, but it had covered a good portion of what looked like a semi-permanent encampment. From the trees Eluréd could see at least two cave entrances not overtaken by loose earth, and evidence of fire pits and other odds and ends, including what looked like a small smokehouse.

There was also a single orc in sight. In fact, Eluréd thought she—for it was a woman—looked more like one of Saruman's Uruk-hai than one of the smaller orcs most often seen in the mountains. She was desperately trying to dig into the rocks and dirt and branches of the landslide, all one-handed while her other arm hung limp and useless at her side. As they watched, she faltered, leaning heavily on a large boulder. It was her keening that they had heard along the path.

It looked as though all of her companions had been buried. It was either very good luck or very bad luck that had saved her.

"I think there is someone still alive under there," Elurín whispered after a few moments, as they watched the orc woman stagger to her feet and begin digging again. "Her child, perhaps."

"Should we try to help her?" Eluréd asked. Because she clearly needed help. Whether she would accept it from a pair of Elves was a different matter. It was likely they'd have to dodge from rocks themselves, or perhaps a knife.

"It doesn't feel right to leave a child underneath all of that," said Elurín. They began to make their way carefully down the path. As the shadows lengthened Eluréd keeps his eyes on the trees around them, just in case the orc woman was not as alone as she appeared. He let Elurín be the one to call out to her when they were closer. She whirled around, nearly pitching over onto her face, eyes going wide with fear before she snarled at them, baring her teeth. Elurín held out his empty hands, palm up. "We mean no harm," he said. She growled something back in her own speech, which sounded like a curse, or perhaps a suggestion that they go jump off of a cliff, or something equally pleasant.

But she was hurt worse than a mere broken arm; up close Eluréd could see blood seeping from a gash on her head, matting sticky in her tangled hair. He deliberately turned away from her, continuing to keep watch—and to keep his bow pointed away. Elurín took a step closer, encouraged by the fact that she had only attacked with words. He kept his hands up and his voice low, like when he calmed frightened animals.

It was when Eluréd glanced back at Eluréd and the orc woman that he spotted movement on the disturbed earth far above their heads. It was a mountain cat, near invisible in the gloaming against the pale earth nearly the same shade as its pelt. Its eyes flashed the way cat-eyes did, seeming to glow briefly in the darkness, and they were fixed upon the orc woman arguing with Elurín.

He spun and loosed an arrow in one smooth movement, putting another to the string before the first hit its target. He shot again as the cat screamed, and Elurín managed to pull the orc woman out of the way as it tumbled, dead, down the incline to land with a dull thud where she had been standing. Eluréd slung his bow over his shoulder as he went to make sure it was dead.

"Ah, pity," he said as he turned it over. His arrows were broken.

In the silence that fell over them with the settling of the earth that had been dislodged by the cat, a small and muffled crying—the crying of a very small child—came from the rubble. The orc woman turned back to it with a frustrated noise. "Let us help," said Elurín, and without waiting for her to agree or not, he began shifting rocks and broken branches. Eluréd left the dead cat for later and helped him, as the orc woman at last gave into exhaustion and sank to the ground. Eluréd glanced at her, and after helping to heave a particularly heavy rock out of the way, he left Elurín to continue digging.

The orc woman eyed him suspiciously as he knelt in front of her. "May I see your arm?" he asked. "It will hurt, but I can set and splint it."

"What're you so keen on helpin' for?" she asked as she allowed him to run his fingers gingerly over her arm, feeling for the break.

"It is a new Age, you know," he said. "There are no more dark lords to pit us against one another. That won't change much in general, I know, but sometimes one must become the change one wishes to see in the world." He smiled at her, but she just looked baffled. So he returned his attention to putting together a splint, humming a song of healing and of strength beneath his breath as he did so. "This will hurt," he warned her before he set the bone, but she had turned her attention back to Elurín. The crying was getting louder. Eluréd took advantage and set the bone, earning himself a flurry of ugly curses, though she did not pull her arm away as he tied the splint in place.

"Hello!" Elurín said, as the crying at last became clear and very loud. "You're a lucky little thing, aren't you?" He pulled a squalling boy-child out of the hole. Though dirty, the child—no more than a few months old, if Eluréd were to guess—was entirely unhurt.

"Gazlûk!" The woman held out her good arm, relief in her voice. The child quieted a little once he was in her arms, although he was still very upset. He was naked, also, and with night coming on it was getting cold very swiftly. Eluréd turned his attention to the dead cat, which needed skinning and butchering, if it was to be of any use to anyone, and Elurín vanished, returning after a short time with firewood.

There was a cave that had escaped the landslide. It was quite small, and looked as though it had been used for storing food and odds and ends. Elurín built a fire near the entrance, while Eluréd hauled up the various cat parts on a tattered blanket he had rescued from the rubble. He had no idea how orcs went about preparing their food, so he did not attempt to do anything more.

By this time it was full night. The moon had not yet risen, but the stars were out. "What is your name?" Eluréd asked the orc woman.

She looked at him from beneath her hair; little Gazlûk was quiet now, nursing contentedly. "Dushlob," she said finally. "What's yours, bright-eyes?"

"I am Eluréd," he said. "My brother is Elurín."

Dushlob snorted. "That's elvish nonsense, that is, naming everyone the same."

Elurín laughed. "We were named to honor our grandfather, whose name was Elu."

"Do you come from Isengard?" Eluréd asked her. He was almost certain that she was, and was very curious as to how anyone had escaped the flooding.

Dushlob leaned over and spat in the dirt. "Filthy place," she said. "Hope old Sharkey never gets let out of that nasty tower."

"He was released, as a matter of fact," said Elurín as he fed another stick to the fire. Dushlob's scowl spoke volumes. "But you needn't be upset about it, because he was killed not long afterwords."

Her expression cleared. "Good," she said. "He deserved it."

"I daresay he did," said Eluréd. Unlike Dushlob, however, he and Elurín remembered when Saruman had first come to Middle-earth. He had been prideful even then, and great fun to tease because of it, but still at his core he had been good. His fate, though it was of his own making, was a tragic one. He had fallen so very far.

It was very strange to share a camp with an orc, although the news of Saruman's death, on top of saving her son and killing the mountain cat, had broken through something in Dushlob and she ceased to be so hostile after hearing it. She was more than happy to eat the cat meat, only slightly cooked and still dripping. She would dry the rest, she told them, and take it with her when she left in a few days. Her clan had separated to search for a good place to settle down, so she would not be wholly alone. She did not tell them where the rest of her clan was—her good humor and gratitude did not extend to trust—only that they were not too far. This was, of course, an assurance that she would be all right, and a warning that Eluréd and Elurín should leave sooner rather than later.

"They won't believe me when I told them a couple of elves helped us out," she said as she settled down at last to sleep. Then she asked, "What would you've done if it weren't just me alone?"

"We would have watched a while, probably," said Elurín after he and Eluréd exchanged a glance. "But we would not have interfered."

"You woulddn't've tried nothin'?" She sounded incredulous.

"Why should we? You aren't up here marauding or anything," said Eluréd. "And anyway, we have our own things to do."

"Like what?"

"We thought we'd try to find the source of the River Langwell," said Elurín. "The one that flows east down to join the Great River in the vales."

Dushlob stared at them. "What for?"

"Just to see it," said Eluréd.

Dushlob settled down with Gazlûk for good after that, muttering about the strange ways of elves. Eluréd and Elurín also bedded down, taking turns on watch in case the rest of the orc clan was closer than they had been led to believe. But the night was a quiet one, and dawn came with birdsong and a scattering of clouds that promised a change in the weather later in the day.

They bid Dushlob and her son farewell, as she rubbed her eyes sleepily. Gazlûk was in better humor, and gurgled happily as his mother hefted him onto a hip so she could get to work organizing the contents of the cave in preparation for moving on.

As they strode away into the sunshine Elurín remarked, "Do you think she'll tell the rest of her clan about us?"

"Do you think they'll believe her if she does?" Eluréd replied.

"Unlikely." But it was something. They had not made a friend, but they had spent a night with an orc—with one of the Uruk-hai, in fact—in peace, and Eluréd was happy to call that a step in the right direction.

They retraced their steps back to the meadow, and continued on following the brook to find its source.