Chase the Wind by StarSpray

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One

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Summer
TA 2720

“What is it about this place that makes the sun so much hotter?” Elurín wondered aloud. He and Eluréd perched on large rocks near the road, watching a herd of grazing horses in the distance as the herders watched them in return. Hawks circled overhead; Eluréd was not sure whether they belonged to the horse folk or only to themselves. Overhead the sky was clear and blue, and the sun blazed its way toward noontide.

“No trees,” said Eluréd. Over the course of their wanderings through the lands east of the Sea of Rhûn, where the lands were more often than not wide open, all rolling hills of green-gold grass that stretched beyond even elven sight, like a great sea, he had decided that while it was nice to visit wide open spaces, he much preferred the cool green-tinted shadows beneath the trees. And what was more, without any real landmarks it was shockingly easy to get lost, even with the stars and sun to guide them.

“Have we come upon this road before?” Elurín asked, kicking his heels against his boulder.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Eluréd. He did not look up from the map a trader had kindly drawn for them a week before. It did have a road marked, but whether it was this road or another road—or merely a much-used track—was difficult to say. It also had a river drawn snaking down quite near the road, and they had seen no sign of that. “Do you see anyone near the horses yet?”

“No. I think they’re wild.” Elurín sighed and slid to the ground. “Come on. We may as well follow the road. We’ll come to familiar lands eventually if we keep heading west.”

“I don’t know about you,” said Eluréd as he rolled up the map and joined Elurín on the road, “but I am quite looking forward to winter.”

“Caradhras could drop a blizzard on us when we cross, and I would thank him!” Elurín said. Eluréd snorted. “But, of course, we must reach Caradhras first.”

“My fear is that we will veer too far south and find ourselves close to Mordor,” said Eluréd. “I have no objection to passing through Gondor, but I should like to give the Ered Lithui a wide berth.”

“We would have to go very far south to end up there,” said Elurín.

“And how do we know we haven’t already? I can’t even say whether we were going in circles or not, for a time. And that trader did seem nervous about something.”

“Maybe the weather?”

They both peered up at the cloudless sky, and then all around at the horizon; there wasn’t a single dark cloud to be seen, and there was very little wind—only enough to stir the hot air around them. While the weather on the plains could be unpredictable, it seemed unlikely that foul weather was the cause of the trader’s nerves. “Maybe there are bandits in the area,” Elurín suggested next, almost hopefully. Anything was better than what might venture out of Mordor.

For some days they met no bandits, nor any other travelers, and the weather held: hot and dry. There was the occasional stream that wound its way lazily through the grasslands that allowed them to refill their water skins, but not often enough for comfort. “The next time you decide you want to see what’s east of Rhûn, I am going to drag you to Mithlond and dunk you in the Sea instead,” Eluréd said after a long time of no change to the scenery. “Or perhaps I will follow in family tradition and imprison you up a tree until you see sense. I am sure Elrond would help me.”

“I think Elrond would object on principle,” said Elurín. “But I’ll keep it in mind should such a madness come over me.”

That night they spread their blankets out on the grass. A few clouds appeared to drift lazily across the stars. Eluréd folded his arms behind his head and gazed up at them as Elurín drifted off to sleep beside him. His thoughts drifted; he wondered what was happening in Imladris, and what Radagast was up to, and old Gandalf in his wanderings. Perhaps they should stop by Rhosgobel for a visit. Perhaps they should go spend a decade or two with old Iarwain…

The smell of smoke roused him. It was not mere woodsmoke; there was a bitter, acrid tang to it that sent a shiver down Eluréd’s spine. He nudged Elurín as he sat up, but Elurín only rolled over with a wordless grumble. The breeze picked up and carried more of the smell with it, and also the distant echo of a cry—a scream, perhaps, or a wail? It was hard to say. That did wake Elurín, and he sat up with a start, reaching for his weapons. “What is it?”

“I don’t know.” Eluréd got to his feet, and in the distance he could see the faint glow of a fire. “Whatever it is, we’re too far to be of any help.”

“We should still try,” said Elurín. “There may still be something we can do even if we arrive after whatever is happening is over.” So they gathered up their things and set off, racing swiftly and silently down the road and through the grass, when the road began to curve away from where they wanted to go. The stars slowly wheeled past overhead, and the sky began to grow pale with the coming dawn. In the pre-dawn light, before all the stars had gone, the world seemed strange and grey, as though all the color had been leached out of it. Then the sun sprang into the sky and all the colors returned; the sky was a bright blue, and there were more clouds on that morning, puffy things blushing pink, and the grass was green and gold. They were passing into country dotted with clusters of heather, lending a soft purple haze to the distant hills. There was also water in the distance, a slender grey ribbon winding through the countryside. There were occasional stands of trees on either side of it; good places to shelter for anyone traveling that way. The road had bent back around to run alongside the water.

And there, beneath one such stand of trees, was the source of the smoke; Eluréd and Elurín could see it when they crested the last hill before the land sloped down to the water. There was no movement to be seen, except for the slow, lazy drifting of smoke from still-smoldering fires. “Bandits?” Elurín suggested. He pointed down the road where horses could be seen moving away at a swift pace. “Horse thieves, perhaps.”

They made their way more slowly down to the camp. It had been thoroughly ransacked, but it was also smaller than Eluréd would have expected, and everything had a ragged, worn look—hardly the target for thieves, unless the horses had been exceptional. He and Elurín had seen little groups like this before: outcasts, for one reason or another, from larger clans or the rare settled town. He crouched down by one of the six bodies; a woman, shot through the back with her arms outstretched as though she had been trying to crawl to the shelter of some bushes. Eluréd brushed her dark hair out of her face, and sighed at the frozen look of fear on her face. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Would that we had been closer.”

Then he heard movement in the bushes. He tensed, hand going to the hilt of his knife, but the next sound to emerge was a small whimper. “Eluréd?” called Elurín from across the camp.

“One moment,” said Eluréd. He crept closer to the sound, and parted a few branches to find a bundle of blankets, tightly wrapped, and something squirming and crying inside them.

“What is it?” Elurín asked from behind him.

“A child.” Eluréd picked up the bundle, and pulled down a blanket to reveal a round-faced baby with a shock of dark hair, whimpering in fear or discomfort, or perhaps pain. Eluréd quickly drew the child out of the bushes and away from the camp. By the riverbank he unwrapped the blankets, discovering that the child was a girl and also—to his great relief—unharmed. She was thinner than he would have expected, though she seemed otherwise healthy—certainly her lungs were strong. She also had a large ruddy birthmark, like a wine spill over her neck and the lower part of the right side of her face. Eluréd wrapped her back up in one of the blankets, and cut the other into strips to fashion a makeshift sling so that he could carry her and also have the use of his hands.

“All right?” Elurín asked when he returned.

“She’s unhurt,” said Eluréd. “But I’m not sure what to do with her.”

“We take her to another clan, or to a town,” said Elurín.

“Yes, but where? And how far? And what will we feed her?”

“We’ll follow the river,” said Elurín, gesturing to the water. “There will be forage and better hunting near the water, at the very least. She looks big enough to have started eating food, don’t you think?”

“I suppose,” said Eluréd doubtfully. “She has a few teeth, anyway.” Neither of them knew the first thing about properly taking care of children. They had been far too young to notice what happened to Elwing, and their relationship with Elrond’s children when they were tiny had been to spoil them and play silly games, and leave the feeding of everything besides pilfered sweets to others.

“Then she must be on to at least soft foods,” said Elurín, sounding far more confident than Eluréd felt. “I can’t imagine anyone continuing to nurse when there are teeth involved.”

They took turns digging graves and tending to the child, and going through what was left of the camp for anything they could use to care for her. She fell asleep on Eluréd’s back after a little while, and he was able to help with the digging. It took all day and into the evening before all of the dead were laid out and buried. Neither Eluréd nor Elurín knew the proper rites or customs, but at least they were able to give them back some dignity in death, and to protect the bodies from the ravages of animals and elements with small cairns of river stones. By the time night fell Eluréd was exhausted.

The child was not. Once freed from her sling and given some of their way bread to munch on, she crawled around their small camp in the trees, babbling and apparently looking for something. Or someone. When she began to cry Elurín scooped her up and began to sing. It took Eluréd a few minutes to recognize the song—it was a lullaby their own mother had sung to them when they were very small. It calmed the child and also sent him to sleep; he dreamed of Elwing splashing in the shallow pool beneath Lanthir Lamath.

In the morning Eluréd went foraging, and Elurín tried his hand at fishing while keeping an eye on the child. Eluréd was the more successful of the two; he came back to find no fish, and both Elurín and the child soaking wet, one of them giggling and the other exasperated. “It’s as though she knows just where she isn't supposed to go!” Elurín exclaimed. “Shall we set out today?”

“I suppose,” said Eluréd. They could set out at any time; the child could sleep in her sling, and to travel by sunshine or starlight was all the same to them. It was only their food stores that worried him—that and making sure the child was properly fed and kept clean. “Do we have any proper clothes for her?”

“Not that I could find,” said Elurín. “But there are enough scraps to fashion a few tunics for her, I think, though they won’t be pretty.”

“Just so long as she’s covered,” said Eluréd. “Let’s stay here one more night. You go dry off; I’ll watch her for a while.”

“We also need to think of a name,” said Elurín as Eluréd took the child. He stripped off his sodden shirt and spread it out over the grass. “We can’t keep calling her the child.”

“I don’t see why not, if we won’t be caring for her for long,” said Eluréd. He pulled out his sewing kit and gathered up the various scraps of cloth they had recovered from the encampment. His kit was meant for mending clothes, not crafting new garments, but he managed to roughly stitch together two small tunics for the child before he ran out of thread. The child had exhausted herself in trying to escape Elurín, and napped while he worked. Elurín vanished, and returned after a few hours with fish from upstream.

They set out the next morning, both of them wishing for horses. They took turns carrying the child, who kicked her feet and babbled cheerfully in her sling. The road continued to follow the river, which bent northward, and Eluréd feared that they really had come farther south than they’d intended. It turned out that he was right: one afternoon they crested one of the many rolling hills to see on the horizon the silver line of the Sea of Rhûn. “Well,” said Elurín cheerfully, “at least now we know where we are! And look, you can see smoke, too—there is a town ahead.”

“We should see if we can get horses,” said Eluréd.

“After we see the little one safe,” Elurín agreed.

But as they drew closer the smoke revealed itself to not be the hearth fires of a town, or even the cook fires of an encampment. The air grew heavy with it, and the smell was of woodsmoke and also other, acrid things that were all too familiar. The child began to cry. Eluréd drew his cloak around to cover her face, to protect her a little from the smoke but mostly to she could not see whatever they were about to walk into.

“Stay back here,” Elurín said, evidently thinking along the same lines. “I’ll go see what’s happened.”

“Be careful,” said Eluréd. Elurín flashed him a grin, and darted ahead, vanishing into the smoke that drifted across the road like fog. Eluréd retreated back down the road where it wasn’t so thick, and crouched in the grass off to the side, out of sight. The child whimpered in his arms, and he stroked her downy hair and murmured soothing words.

Before Elurín returned, Eluréd heard hoof beats approaching. He peered up out of the grass and saw a party of a dozen or so horsemen riding hard toward the town. He ducked back down and they thundered past. The child began to cry again, and once they were out of sight Eluréd retreated further, back toward the river where some trees offered shelter. From there he watched the riders move through the village, and hoped that Elurín had also heard them coming. Shouts reached him a few minutes later, and then he saw a figure on foot fleeing out of the village toward the river. Horses thundered after him—and their riders had bows.

Eluréd raced out of the trees and shouted to the horses, putting forth his will to get them to turn aside. They did, wheeling away with shrill whinnies, but one of the horsemen got off a shot just before, and Elurín fell, vanishing into the tall grass. Fear nearly choked him as Eluréd ran to his side. The child began to fuss even harder at the jostling. When Eluréd reached Elurín he found him struggling to roll over, and reaching down to clutch at his leg where an arrow stuck out of his thigh. “Don’t touch it,” Eluréd said. He struggled out of the sling and put the child into Elurín’s arms. “Here, hold her while I look at it.”

“There is no one alive in the village,” Elurín aside as Eluréd cut away the fabric around the wound. “There are wheel tracks and hoof prints—I think it was wainriders.”

“I would wager those horsemen think it was you,” said Eluréd.

“Well they think something, after your display,” said Elurín. “We need to be gone by the time they return.”

“Easier said than done, since you’ve gone and gotten yourself shot.” Eluréd broke off the longer portion of the shaft, and gripped the arrow beneath the head. “Ready?”

“Just do it,” said Elurín, gritting his teeth. He turned his head away, and Eluréd yanked. Elurín growled a few choice words, and Eluréd began to wrap up the wound, murmuring words of healing as he did so. As he worked he tried to think. They could not outrun horsemen—not on foot, and not with Elurín injured. He looked up and around, through the haze of the smoke, and glimpsed the Sea of Rhûn. “Elurín, were there boats?”

“I don’t know,” Elurín said, struggling to sit up. “I didn’t get down to the shore.”

“There must be,” Eluréd said. He scooped the child into his arms and settled her sling over his chest, and then hauled Elurín up. “If we can get to the water we can make a straight course for the western shore.” They had made friends there, and could be sure of safety and welcome, and maybe even horses if they were lucky. “Come on.”

They had almost made it to the small harbor when Eluréd heard faint shouting in the distance, and the sound of horses. The horsemen had brought friends. “There!” Elurín exclaimed, pointing to a small fishing boat someone had pulled up onto the shore. Both he and Eluréd grabbed a side to shove it back into the water, Elurín going white with the strain on his leg. Eluréd lifted the child into the boat and gave it one last great shove, and it slid off of the sand into the water. Elurín tumbled into it with a curse, and Eluréd waded after it until it was well into the water before heaving himself up and in. As soon as he got his legs into the boat he heard a few dull thuds, and saw an arrow go whistling overhead. The current caught the boat then, and pulled them farther out into the water. After a few minutes Eluréd risked peeking his head over the side of the boat. He ducked again immediately, but the arrows fell just short of the boat. Encouraged, he rose again, murmuring a prayer to Ulmo as he fumbled with the sails. At last he managed to get one up, and it caught the breeze immediately, taking them even farther out into the Sea of Rhûn and away from the horsemen on the shore.

Eluréd sank against the mast, able at last to breathe. “Elurín?” he said.

“I’m all right.” Elurín had gotten himself into a more comfortable position, and had the child on his lap. She had calmed down, and was currently trying to climb up his shoulders to see out of the boat. “Ow,” Elurín said as she grasped a handful of his hair. “That’s enough of that, my lady.”

“She does seem to like the water,” Eluréd remarked, recalling her delight in splashing about in the river. He set about organizing the boat, coiling ropes that had been tangled in their haste, and pulling up another smaller sail to compliment the first. It was a different style of boat to what they were used to, and the Sea of Rhûn was different also from Belegaer, but he was confident that he could make it work. Their supplies were another matter; they had hoped to restock at that town, but clearly that wasn’t going to happen.

“Are we going to have to try our hand at fishing?” Elurín asked as he watched Eluréd sort through what was left in their packs.

“I hope not,” said Eluréd. “You can’t stand, and I don’t think a single line will be very effective out on the open water.”

“It might be. Folk go out on little boats on ponds and lakes and things.”

“If you can find a single line, then, you can try,” said Eluréd. At least the water was fresh and they did not have to worry about salt. He fussed with the sails until he figured out how to adjust their course. Elurín moved so he was seated by the rudder, keeping one hand on it while he gripped the child with the other arm. She was swiftly tiring; her fright seemed to have been forgotten, but it had been a very eventful day, and her nap had been rather rudely interrupted. Eluréd dug out a little of their dried fruit and some way bread, which he softened with water for Elurín to feed to her.

“Don’t take us too far away from shore,” said Elurín, shifting to try to ease his wounded leg. He and Eluréd removed their cloaks and used them and a coil of rope to fashion a bed for the child; she fell asleep almost immediately.

Eluréd sat down to unwrap it and take a better look. “I won’t,” he said, “but I don’t intend to find a harbor until we absolutely must.”

“That will be sooner than you think,” Elurín said. “Ow.”

“Sorry.” The wound was a clean one, and the arrow did not seem to have been poisoned. Eluréd poured clean water over it, and got to work sewing each wound shut. Elurín gritted his teeth and concentrated on chewing a particularly tough piece of dried meat. Eluréd sang a quiet song of healing as he worked, and then carefully wrapped the leg up in clean bandages. “There.”

“Thank you.”

Eluréd looked up at the sky; it was evening now, and the stars were starting to appear, one by one, as the sky darkened. Twilight settled over the water around them like a faint purple mist. “You should rest,” Eluréd said. “I’ll keep us on course tonight.”

It grew very quiet once Elurín joined the child in sleep. There was little wind, and Eluréd had little to do except sit and watch the stars and think. He sang for a while, quiet songs that Nellas had taught him and Elurín when they were children as they journeyed from the forests of Doriath to the river valley of the Withywindle. But for most of the night he merely sat in the boat and listened to the water lapping against the hull, and to the whispered music of the water itself—an echo of the Music that had first shaped the world.

Near dawn, as the eastern skies grew pale, Elurín stirred. He stretched carefully, and sat up, peering around. “Have we moved at all?” he asked, voice quiet.

“Oh yes,” said Eluréd. “How’s the leg?”

“No worse. I had a dream.” Elurín glanced down at the child, slumbering in her nest of cloth and rope. “Her road will lead her far from this place, to other waters and also to great joy.”

“Well, her own feet won’t carry her there just yet,” said Eluréd. He sat up and pulled on one of the ropes. The boat creaked around them. “We’d best take her back west with us.” And he began to sing, calling up a stiff wind to speed them on their way.