Of Lúthien and Huan by Moreth

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Chapter 1

Lúthien Tinúviel has a bad morning

Lúthien awoke alone. A glance around confirmed Beren was missing from the glade, so were his boots. So was the horse.

"Oh crap!" Lúthien could not believe that the bloody idiot had gone off by himself a second time. She would have to track him down again. When she caught up with him this time, she was going to let him know exactly what she thought about his behaviour, about his total lack of foresight and about his complete disregard for her opinion. Hadn't he listened to her at all? Who exactly did he think he was?

Fuming, she pushed herself to her feet and began to collect her possessions. She dropped them into the travel pack and tightened the string with a jerk.

"Shit, stupid thing!" She glared at the broken end in her hand. "This is turning into a really bad day." Taking a spare tie she used for her hair, she swiftly rethreaded the drawstring.

She tugged her tangled mane into a thick braid and wrapped it off with the broken thread. "Right!" She swung her cloak around her shoulders. "Let's go." She whistled sharply to call Huan back from the edge of the glade, where he was nosing at Beren's tracks. He turned his head towards her and gave a deep whine, cocking his ears and turning back to point at the trail. "Oh, don't worry - I know exactly where to find him this time. Just keep going north."

Lúthien walked forward in that direction, through the dappled light and the bird-song. It was time to rescue her man. Again.

 

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Lúthien stood upon the bridge: Reprise

They had been heading North for days, out of the green forests of Doriath and into the darker woods around the Sirion. The sound of river reminded Lúthien that she really wanted a bath. Her hair badly needed washing, and a bath wouldn't do Huan any harm either. She wrinkled her noise at the strong smell of... well... dog. Although it seemed a little unkind to think of that when he was so pleased to help by carrying her again.

With a clatter of wings, a pair of crows rose from the alders by the bank, shaking Lúthien from her thoughts. The birds circled the stained stone of the castle that over-shadowed the forest. Lúthien eyed the tower on the island uneasily. Even in the daylight, the shadows beneath the trees were heavy. Bathing suddenly seemed less of a good idea.

She didn't like being here; it brought back bad memories of what she had found inside. Sometimes, when she dreamt, she felt that terrible, gut-wrenching twist in her soul again, as she had before, when she had seen Beren lying there in a crumpled heap. She recalled his grief-stricken denials as he clung to his friend's remains, lying among the corpses and the filth of the slave pits. In the worst dreams she had been too late, and then it was Beren's emaciated body she carried from the ruins.

"Uh... why come back here, Huan? You know Beren wouldn't come to... this place. He wouldn't come back on a bet. I certainly don't want to be anywhere near it!" Huan kept trotting forward, clearly determined to head back into Tol-in-Gaurhoth. Lúthien still found it impossible to think of the island by any other name. The unease was definitely growing.

"Not good," she thought. "Really not good!"

"Wait! Just stop a minute, will you?" she commanded Huan. He did, turning his head back over his shoulder to look up at her quizzically. Lúthien promptly slid down from her seat on his back and looked him in the eyes. The hound nudged her gently with his head, encouraging her forwards. "Okay," she said finally, "Okay. Just give me a minute." She walked onto the bridge.

The memory hit her as badly as she had expected. For one horrible moment she tried not to throw up. Taking a deep breath, she flicked the stray wisps of hair from her face.

"I won, dammit. I did. It might not have been the most orthodox way of fighting, but I won, and he ran, and I'm not going to let the fear of Sauron, or his bloody wolves, scare me off." She turned back to face her companion. "Alright, Huan, if you need to go in there again, then let's go."

 

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How to skin a bat

Huan whined as he pawed at the mound where they had buried the fallen foe. Looking at him askance, Lúthien said, “I don't know what the problem is but if you want to dig there, you're going alone. Have you any idea what the bodies in there will look like by now?”

Nevertheless, he continued to dig, excavating a deeper and deeper hole into the ground. Lúthien was impressed how quickly he worked, front paws scraping out the soft, boggy earth. She sat on the closest fallen trunk and waited. After some time, he backed out of the pit, turned his head and whined.

“What have you found?” she asked, sliding the dagger she had been whetting - rather needlessly - back into its sheath. Huan turned his head back to the hole and wormed his way in, hunching down on his rear legs to pull something out. As Lúthien had rather suspected, something turned out to be a corpse; the corpse of a wolf in fact.

“Draugluin,” she shuddered and shut her eyes. This just kept getting worse.

Huan hauled it back to her and dumped it unceremoniously at her feet, and then looked up, thumping his tail on the ground. She took as shallow a breath as she could.

“No. There is no 'Good dog' about this. It's just revolting and..." she paused and glared at him, “... frankly, pretty worrying!”

She suddenly realised that the stench she expected was not, in fact, a reality. Huan shoved his nose under the body and pushed it towards her. She looked at it warily, there seemed to be none of the signs of decay she expected. Frowning, she looked more closely, then knelt down to examine it.

Battered, wet, stained – and now covered in mud – as it was, the corpse had not decomposed.1 Bemused, she reached out to part the thick fur until she could see the skin beneath. Undamaged. “Weird!“ she muttered. Peripherally, she was aware of Huan digging again.

She stared down at the carcass. Well... there was only one useful thing you did with a dead wolf: pulling the skinning knife from its sheath, she made the first incision to gut the body. Glancing up, she saw Huan dragging another carcass towards her. She shook her head. A bat was going to take some improvisation!

 

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Lúthien takes a bath

As Lúthien ran the edge of her thumb between the skin and muscle, it made a soft tearing noise; the hide separating cleanly from the flesh beneath. She turned to look at Huan. He was sitting next to her and looking terribly pleased with himself, still wagging his tail occasionally. He was filthy.

“Um... Huan,” she said, “I don't mean this to sound rude, because you really have had a good idea – it's grotesque, but still a good idea. Only you're covered in mud and... Well, okay, mostly mud - thank the Valar! Go and have a wash in the river! I'll be busy here for a while.”

She picked up the knife to deal with a particularly annoying area of tissue that refused to part under her hands. Deftly slicing through the tough integument, she continued to separate the heavy, wet pelt from the underlying membrane. Thankfully, skinning a wolf was not proving very different from skinning a deer, and she had already peeled the hide from most of the underside. The longest part of the work was complete.

Lúthien stood, stretched and used the back of her wrist to push strands of hair from her forehead. The faintly acrid smell of peat and bog water permeated the air, only slightly tinged with the darker smell of blood and flesh from the carcass. It was, all things considered, a lot better then it could have been. Her mind turned to Beren, her concern for his insane risk a constant nagging: “Is he well? Is he far ahead? Is he safe?"

She shook her head, refusing to dwell on such thoughts; they didn't help. She and Huan simply had to reach him as quickly as possible.

Leaning down to roll the carcass over, she pushed her fingers through the coarse outer hair to take a firm grip on the soft fur and skin beneath. The wet side of the hide was going to get dirty, but she could always wash it before scraping away the subcutaneous fat; fortunately it shouldn't need to last very long.

By the time Lúthien heard Huan padding back from the river bank, she had already made progress on the bat-fell. With spare clothes from her pack, she had carefully wrapped the wicked spurs that protruded from the wrist joints. If she took even a minor wound from such a talon while skinning, it could mean a serious delay.

The simplest thing to do, she had decided, was to leave the wings intact and sever the shoulder joint, as if it were a tail. The thin membrane would undoubtedly dry quickly and cause no additional problems, and the weight of the claws would pull the folds down, preventing them catching every small gust of wind.

She was considering how the pelt could be worn as a cloak when Huan suddenly shook himself dry, spraying her with cold water. “Huan!” she wailed. Lúthien looked down at herself. “Ah well! I suppose I need a wash too,” she allowed, grimacing at the mess the work had made of her clothes. Rolling the hides neatly, she tucked them under one arm.

“Right, my turn for a bath,” she said, heading down to the river.

 

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Nothing like embroidery

Lúthien knotted the thin strip of tendon and picked up her knife to trim it off. "There," she said, "that should hold for a while. Hopefully, at least as long as we need." She looked at Huan, now covered by Draugluin's skin, and concluded he was sufficiently horrible to scare anything away. Thankfully there was no mirror to consult after she donned the bat pelt.

It had taken several hours to prepare the hide and, even with the excess fat removed, she knew it would not be long before they began to stiffen and stink.

Stitching the wolf skin around Huan had been a tedious job for both, but it was finally accomplished. She was rather proud of the way she had allowed flexibility at the knee and elbow joints, giving Huan freedom of movement. Rudimentary as it was, this was their best chance of passing through land inhabited by the wandering remnants of Sauron's army; wearing the skins would change their scent and, at least at a distance, deter any predator they encountered.

She picked up the crude cape made of Thuringwethil's fell. It was unbelievably heavy and stank of earth, bog-water and faintly of decaying corpse. Shuddering, she swung it over her shoulders and felt the weight of the wet hide drop down her back. She almost wished she hadn't taken a bath, since the touch of the membrane on her skin felt greasy and somehow unclean. Nevertheless, she steeled herself to shrug it over her shoulders, pulling the disguise around her and the mask of skin across her face. Lúthien's breath briefly clamped shut with the stench, but she reminded herself it would be unnoticeable within moments.

Glancing around for Huan, she noticed he had cocked his leg to water a nearby bush. Suddenly aware the reason for wearing these skins was to avoid detection, she called him away.

"Huan," she admonished him, "I know we both need to... umm, attend to necessary functions, but we really can't just do so wherever we want. Any trace that we leave, orcs or wolves can track. We need to be careful."

Huan dropped his head to one side and nudged her shoulder in acquiescence, although the shocked expression on his face immediately afterwards indicated it was not a very pleasant experience.

"Okay, so if you need to urinate, or anything else - Valar, if you need to throw up, which isn't unlikely in these skins - just let me know, and I'll dig a hole. That way we can disguise our passage and avoid any enemies." She grinned under the skin covering her face, "Although I think no enemy will hang around very long, given the way we look!"

 

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Under the northern sky

A thin drizzle of rain had been falling since the early hours of the morning. Long before dawn, Lúthien gave up trying to sleep. She was damp and cold and not in a good mood. Discovering that the water had soaked through the lembas, leaving the wafers soggy and unpalatable, did nothing whatsoever to improve her humour.

By the time they were ready to leave, the rain had become a dismal downpour and the westerly wind drove endless grey clouds across the sky. The rain had set in for the day. Lúthien resigned herself to getting wetter and pulled the dripping skin close around her shoulders; it released the first unmistakeable whiff of corruption and she shuddered in distaste.

Over the past days neither she nor Huan had detected any sign of enemies, and she had begun to feel the whole disguise was a little over-dramatic. On the other hand, a swift consideration of what might happen if they met a roving orc-band persuaded her that every precaution was worth taking. Even if she felt like a complete idiot while doing so...

Huan dropped his head to rest on her shoulder and rumbled deep in his throat. She realised she was staring into the pine trees and forced a smile as she reached up to scratch his ear. "Okay, let's go!" she said, and turned to clamber onto his back.

He trotted steadily north, the pad of his footfall silenced by the damp pine needles beneath the wet trees. On his back Lúthien, exhausted by days of travel, half-dozed as the miles passed.

 

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For a while he was silent

Huan's sudden change of direction nearly unseated Lúthien from her perch. She grabbed the thick hair over his hackles and hung on tightly. The hound's ears were pricked and he had moved from a steady trot into a fast lope. Lúthien's heart beat faster. She tried not to hope. She failed.

Only when Huan whimpered in protest did she manage to unclench her fists slightly from the death-grip she had taken on his skin.

Faintly she heard the noise which had attracted Huan's attention: a distant voice. It was a distinctive sound, even muffled by the clinging bat-skin. It was the sound of an untrained tenor failing to hit top C.

Even as she felt relief wash over her, she inwardly winced. The thin warble continued, and she began to make out the words of the song. She rather wished she hadn't. Just one brief line made it plain that this particular poem was going to remain private.2 If it ever reached Daeron's ears he would never stop laughing at her! She found herself blushing at the thought.

"... unmade into the old abyss..." the voice carolled. Lúthien flinched.

As Huan cleared the final cluster of shrubs that separated her from Beren, her heart lurched at the sight of his shocked expression. Seeing him safe and well, all the irritation she had supressed came flooding back. She had chased across half of Beleriand after this man, and here he was singing bad songs and making calf-eyes at the woodland! This whole crazy journey could have been avoided if he had simply stopped his over-protective foolishness.

Jumping down from Huan, she ran forward to meet her lover.

"Now let's get a few things straight!" she said.

Chapter End Notes

 

1. I remembered a fascinating book I read a *very* long time ago called something like 'Bog-People'. Finds of extraordinarily well-preserved ancient bodies in peat bogs across Europe are well-documented. The acidic nature of the water, coupled with the anaerobic atmosphere, prevents the normal decay process taking place - even preserving the internal organs. Which is why the body is wet and beginning to show the characteristic staining of such a corpse. If you want to know more (for some bizarre reason...) check here.

2. Except it didn't!

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