The rain came that evening. This, too, seems a constant coda to slaughter. What had been ash was now gray mud, and the stripped bodies which had not been reclaimed by sons and mothers now glistened a ghastly white, cleansed by the gods in their remorseless way.
After three days, me and Halvadyr decided to go to Edoras, find our pregnant mother. On our way, we came upon a man digging a grave for an infant. The baby, wrapped in the man's cloak, lay like a grocer's bundle at the edge of the pit. He asked me to hand it down to him. He was afraid the wolves would get it, he said, that's why he had dug the hole so deep. He didn't know the child's name. A woman had handed it to him during the attack. He had carried the baby for two days; on the third morning it died.
"We needed the army," he declared, speaking softly behind his sad watery eyes. "Just fifty riders would have saved us. "See how numb we are?" the man continued."
We started walking away. "Fifty of them!" the man still shouted, "Five! One would have saved us!"
After a while, we saw them again. A squad of Haradrim infantry had set up camp around the gutted ruins of a farmhouse. A Haradrim taking a piss spotted us. We took to flight but he called after us. Something in his voice convinced us that he and the others intended no harm. They had had enough of blood for now.
I don't remember much, I was only 7 years old, but I remember they captured us, they wanted to take us with them to Harad. I still can't imagine why. But, one day, one of them let us go. He pressed a hard bread into my hands. "Two more groups will be coming from the north tomorrow. Get into the mountains and go back to Rohan". He spoke kindly, as if to his own son. I turned and spat on his dark stinking tunic, a gesture of powerlessness and despair.
They say that ghosts sometimes, those that cannot let go their bond to the living, linger and haunt the scenes of their days under the sun, hovering like substanceless birds of carrion. That is how we lived, Halvadyr and I, in the weeks following. It was winter, it was cold.
"Why won't you talk to me anymore?" l asked Halvadyr one night as we tramped across some stony hillside. "Can't l put my head in your lap like we used to?" She began to cry and would not answer me.
l had made myself an infantryman's spear, stout ash and fire–hardened, no longer a boy's toy but a weapon meant to kill. Visions of revenge fed my heart. l would join the army. I would become one of the riders. l would slay Haradrim one day. l practiced the way l had seen warriors do, advancing as if on line, an imaginary shield before me at high port, my spear gripped strong above the right shoulder, poised for the overhand strike.
In the winter hills we were starving. Halvadyr and I would raid a shepherd's fold at night, fighting off the dogs with sticks and snatching a kid if we could. Most of the shepherds carried bows; arrows would whiz past us in the dark. We stopped to grab them and soon had quite a cache. We got a bow one time, snagging it right out from under a sleeping goatherd's nose. It was so stout that neither Halvadyr nor I could draw it.
One day, I got caught stealing a goose. She was a fat prize, her wings pegged for market, and I got careless going over a wall. The dogs got me. The men of the farm dragged me into the mud of the livestock pen, tying me on a hide board the size of a door. I was on my back, screaming in agony, while the farm men lashed my kicking, flailing legs to the board, vowing that after lunch they would castrate me like a sheep, as a warning to other thieves. Halvadyr crouched, hidden, up the hillside; she could hear everything…
I was screaming upon the hide board. I could hear my cries bounce off the walls of the livestock enclosure and shriek off, multiplied, up the hillsides. I knew it was disgraceful but I could not stop. I begged the farm men to release me, to end my agony. I would do anything, and I described it all at the top of my lungs. A fist shattered my cheek. "Shut your pipe hole, you sniveling little shitworm!"
When at last their own growling bellies drove my tormentors indoors for supper, Halvadyr slipped down from the hill and cut me free.
