Lord of the Rings Barking mad

Barking mad

I think I told you that Father was interested in practically everything. One thing he was particularly interested in was languages, and that reminds me of something that happened long ago, when I was about eight. Like a lot of the things that happened to us, it was funny in some ways, but also important; in this case, important to the whole of Gondor, as I'll try to explain. I didn't witness all the events myself, of course, but I had the rest of the story from Captain Beregond, who is a very careful observer where Father is concerned, because protecting Father is his life's work.

It was after the first bout of skirmishing with the Haradrim, before Father was sent to Harad as ambassador to sort things out. (They took some sorting. Father still says that whenever he remembers that embassy, he feels his head to make sure it's still on his shoulders.) The King's armies sent a number of prisoners back to the City, all of them strange to Gondorian eyes, and none of them popular, especially with people who remembered the Great Siege. Among them was one who looked to be out of a nightmare: hairy, shambling and foul, dragged along by a piece of cord bound round his wrists, slavering and snarling and baring his teeth. People who did remember the siege identified him as a Variag, and of all the horrors that surrounded the City at that time, by all accounts the Variags were one of the worst. Tearing out the throats of wounded men and drinking their blood was one of the milder of the Variags' unpleasant habits, or so folk said.

Father, who had come down from the Tower to supervise the disposal of the prisoners, asked sharply why this one was being so mistreated. The guards told him that unless it (they said 'it') was bound, the prisoner would attack anyone who came near and try to bite their throats out. It wasn't a man but a beast: it couldn't be a man, because it couldn't speak but only make vile animal noises. Even the other prisoners loathed it.

Father spoke to the prisoner and sure enough, 'it' snarled back and struggled against its bonds as if it wanted to fly at him. Father stood stock still and just looked at it, and after a minute or two its snarls grew less, and it stopped struggling and sank to the ground and ground its knuckles into its eyes and made strange whimpering sounds.

Father turned to the guards and said 'Cut his bonds.' They protested, and I can't say I blame them. Nobody wants to be close to a freed wolf. Father repeated, 'Cut them – or stand aside and let me do it.' This shamed them, and one approached and disgustedly cut the cords before leaping back out of range. The Thing just squatted there and whimpered. Father stepped up to it – Beregond gasped and started drawing his sword, but Father snapped at him to stand still – and took it by the hand, and led it away, as if it had been an honoured guest. It was a grotesque sight, the Steward of Gondor alongside this strange, stinking, shambling, hopping thing, but nobody laughed.

That was bad enough. If ever Father strained the people's good opinion of him to the limit, it must have been then. People grumbled a good deal in the streets of the City, but Father took no notice; if he thought he was doing right, no amount of grumbling or direct protest, or even the threat of the King's displeasure (which terrified most men), would move him in the least. It was when he brought the Thing home that things became truly terrifying, because it was then that he came up against Mother.

I said before that nobody could stand against Mother when she was in one of her rages. I ought to have said 'nobody except Father'. Father could stand against them, and would if he thought it necessary, but even he was known to turn a little paler at times. When Mother found that Father intended to give house room to a worse-than-beast, even if it had been forcibly cleaned up after its first arrival in the City, her wrath – though not, of course, expressed in public - was tigerish. She asked him – in private – what he hoped to gain by sheltering a hell-hound of Sauron that only wanted to tear everyone in pieces, including his own children. Father answered that he'd make sure that we children remained un-torn, since the Thing (Father said 'he') was kept under guard day and night, and that he was sheltering 'him' because he wanted to talk to 'him'. Mother said that you couldn't talk to a ravening beast and that Father must have gone mad and needed dosing. (Father turned a shade paler at this point.) Father replied that anything which had the form of a man must have speech. Mother said that the noises the Thing made were plainly not speech. Father said that they weren't speech as we understood it, and perhaps to the Thing, the noises _we _made were not speech as _he _understood it. This startled Mother so much that she became speechless herself, which gave Father a chance to beat a retreat. Father, like all great warriors, always knew when a strategic withdrawal was necessary.

After that began an episode which we thought was the most glorious entertainment we'd ever had. (I should explain that 'we' at that time meant my cousin Elfwine, prince of Rohan, and myself; Fíriel was too small to understand what was going on, and was the only one whose confidence in Father remained quite unaffected. Elfwine had been sent to Ithilien to be taught by Father, and once we'd finished beating each other black and blue – he was not the easiest person to get on with, though sweetness itself compared with Túrin later - we had become tolerably good friends.) Every day Father would walk in our garden with the Thing shambling and hopping beside him, while whatever hapless members of the White Company who'd been told off for the duty tried to reconcile Father's orders to leave the Thing alone and not appear to threaten it in any way, with Beregond's orders to shoot it instantly if it showed the slightest inclination to attack Father. The Thing would utter strange clicks and growls and gurgles and Father would imitate them, whereupon the Thing would glower at him and jump up and down. Elfwine and I, discreetly hidden up a tree, would almost choke in our attempts not to laugh, and wonder why Father didn't talk instead to a dog or cat, when he'd have more chance of being understood. After some five or six days of this, Mother was on the brink of despair. She said that Father was making a fool of himself and debasing his dignity and hers and the honour of Gondor. Father replied that folly was not always what it seemed, and it was the honour of Gondor he was trying to promote, and as for dignity, if the honour and safety of Gondor depended on his barking like a dog, he would bark like a dog and let his dignity go hang. Elfwine and I overheard this (please don't ask me how), and the idea of Father barking like a dog struck us as so wonderfully funny that we rolled about laughing, and Mother came out like a thunderbolt and dealt us each a slap that was all the sharper because she would have liked to land both slaps on Father.

Father continued his walks in the garden, and after a time Elfwine and I became bored and found other pursuits. That was a pity, because we missed the Great Moment; we only heard an excited account of it from Beriad, one of the guards. The Great Moment was when instead of just glowering when Father clicked at it, the Thing waved its arms and was clearly seen to _smile_. Then it made a different kind of click, Father repeated his original click, and the Thing smote its own chest vehemently. Father had learned its name.

After that there was no stopping them. It didn't take Father so very long to work out how the clicks and growls and gurgles fitted together to make meanings, and it wasn't so very long after _that _that nobody dared suggest that the Thing wasn't a man, or that it couldn't speak. Only Mother remained aloof and distrustful; Mother hated to be proved wrong.

After about two months, Father and the Variag – I'd tell you his name, but I have no notion how to write it – had become good friends and knew quite a bit about each other. The Variag even learned our names, though I must confess that to hear him attempting to say mine gave me rather a shudder; he never became as fluent in our tongue as Father became in his. A few weeks after that, Father, with the King's approval, sent the Variag away with messages of goodwill and offers of friendship to his people. And a few months after _that_, the Variag reappeared, still rough-looking to our eyes but plainly got up for the occasion, with four others of his kind, bearing gifts – gifts of finely wrought gold that made us all gasp – and held a series of negotiations with Father. They utterly refused to talk to anyone else, even with Father as interpreter. By the time the negotiations were complete, Gondor and the Variags were bound in alliances as strong as a chain of mithril, and Father was suffering from a virulent sore throat. Mother dosed him in thunderous silence; the fact remained that in her eyes, he'd made a fool of himself and her. Father swallowed the dose obediently and looked at her with an amused tenderness that annoyed her more than ever.

It was Elfwine and I, and above all Fíriel, who made the peace between them in the end. We'd never quite forgotten what Father had said about barking like a dog, and the embassy brought it back to our minds. On the evening the Variags departed, the general excitement so went to our heads (Elfwine's and mine) that we passed the play-hour between supper and bed-time chasing each other around the room on all fours, going 'woof! woof!' at the tops of our voices, while Fíriel sat in the middle and urged us on with shrieks of laughter. We made such a noise that Father came in to see what was going on, and we were so completely out of hand that he started to frown in a way we knew meant trouble. We collapsed on to the floor and cowered. Fíriel caught Father's mood instantly, as she always did, and she held out her arms appealingly and said, 'Woof?'

Father's frown vanished, his eyes crinkled with laughter, and he stooped and caught her up and kissed her as she giggled and woofed and wriggled with ecstasy. Then in came Mother, frowning ten times worse than Father, but when she saw Father's face, and heard Fíriel's laughter – nobody was ever proof against Fíriel's laughter – after one tense moment she stopped frowning and said, 'Oh, you ….' and put her arms around them both and kissed them both indiscriminately, and Elfwine and I danced about the room in celebration, but were careful not to bark.

Oh, and many years later, when the Haradrim went to war against us, in alliance with all the other old enemies of Gondor, after all Father's good work among them had been undone by that fool Turgon, not one Variag marched with them. Not one.


End file.

Lord of the Rings, Humor