But first, a Warning to Readers, especially the Weak-Willed - HERE BE (SOME) SPOILERS!

The following events are set in the background - the extreme background - of the events forming Chapters V to X of Book Five in the final book of a certain massively popular fantasy trilogy. While every effort has been made to obscure the plot details, a certain amount of spoilage has been unavoidable in two or three areas. Anyone who has not read the book in question, and intends to, is gently advised not to read this. Or you could wait for some kind of screen interpretation, possibly coming out in the near future.

So, as the saying goes, if you don't want to know the score, look away now.

PS - This time I really, really mean it!

'Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster...'

- Friedrich Nietzsche

'Whereupon the men of Captain Aledoor did Surge forward,
even unto the Plain, and did Break like a Wave upon the great Moomak that stood there. Noble Souls all, they marched into -'


- Extract from unpublished notes of the Royal Historian.

The historian's horse whinnied and reared, upsetting his precariously balanced ink-bottle and blotting out a page of scrawled notes. After regaining his balance, he swore mildly, and turned again to the captain.

'I'm awfully sorry, um, but I'm going to have to get your
name again!'
'What!?'
'Your name! Your name, sir!'
'Like I said, it's Aleodor! Eh? Aleodor! A-L-E...'

It was a curious sight. Two horsemen, side by side, roaring at each other over the sound of a pitched battle, one of them eagerly scribbling. Still, as the historian would point out, sources didn't come any more primary than this. This was his trade in the raw, as it were. He had even had blood splatter on him. It was all dreadfully interesting from a historical perspective, as well as being more than a little diverting.

A symptom of his single-mindedness was that he tended to view life even as he was living it under neat headings, with footnotes and a bibliography. But this... ! When the Eagles had arrived, booming overhead like thunder, he had very nearly snapped his quill in two with excitement. Now another rank of soldiers rushed by, carrying long spears between them, and he smiled giddily. Noble souls marching into the maw of death... he made a note of that. The 'maw of death'.

Hmm. A touch morbid... Perhaps 'the maw of sacrifice' would work better...? The quill scritched and scratched across the paper.

'And what is, um, happening here, captain?' he shouted. 'The men seem to be at bay! Why is that?'
'I think we're having a little trouble with a rogue Mûmak... oh, and there are some orcs... yes, that's right, orcs. No, I don't know what their names are. Is it important?'

'Hoy there, orc! Stop this foolishness!'

'...ohnoohnoohno...'

Ghurz scuttled to the edge of the swaying howdah and looked down, to see Lurkh sprawled on the ground far below.

Emboldened by much back-slapping and cheering, the line of men was beginning to edge forward, now barely a stone's throw from the prone figure. Several were shoving their way through from the back, hauling long sticking-spears with them.

The orc moaned, and bit his knuckles till it drew blood. He couldn't swing down and grab Lurkh, they would be on him in a moment... couldn't abandon him, as Lurkh had not abandoned him in the forest... what to do? The Mûmak trumpeted again, and shifted from foot to foot, and Ghurz staggered.

'Come down from there, orc! We will grant you a quick end!'

It was a booming voice, used to command.

'How bloody big of you!' shouted Ghurz. His human parents had filled him with stories of the great warriors, blithely unaware of the terror they were inflicting on the young orc. These men were killers, and they could chop him into a black mist before he hit the ground... There was an angry muttering from below, as well as a querulous inquiry after his name, which he ignored. He ran his fingers over the assembly of reins and pulleys that adorned the mahouts' place. What was this one? A large
lever marked in red caught his eye – there was a lot of curling writing about it but, being illiterate, it didn't concern Ghurz, so he took a firm grip of the mysterious scarlet lever and pulled.

He was not to know this, but the lever lead to a series of ropes and wheels tied down the side of the great beast and strapped onto its underbelly, ending in a small but effective clamp in a highly personal location. The upshot of this was that the Mûmak immediately let out a
shrill blast, and stood to rigid attention.

'Now pick him up! Pick up the orc!' Ghurz yelled over the
wreck and crash of battle, jabbing a finger at the recumbent figure below. Animals can display almost paranormal intuition when it comes
to the continued propagation of the species, and this was the case with the uncomfortable pachyderm now. With sinuous grace, the Mûmak extended its trunk, snaked it around Lurkh's leg and tugged him into the air. Ghurz grabbed a flailing arm and dragged him into the howdah. The educated orc fell limply to the floor.

The bristling army of men let out a great roar and charged forward. Before Ghurz' horrified gaze, one of the sticking-spears caught the Mûmak in a fold of its thick hide. The enraged creature charged into the mass of soldiers, trampling and gouging at the armour-clad figures milling about it. Ghurz was bumped and knocked into the walls, and
arrows whined about his ears.

'No! No!'

He yanked hard on a random set of reins, the creature let out a blast of protest and then turned ponderously. The floor jerked, and he tumbled against one of the supports. A silver arrow thumped into the woodwork by his head, and he whimpered. But now there was a great roar, one last flight of arrows whipped past and they were on open ground; the Mûmak was clear of the fray, lumbering at a surprising speed across the battlefield and crunching through drifts of bodies. Ghurz set his eyes on the horizon, on the south.

As the cries of men faded, there was a great spasm of the earth and the world shook violently. Red light seared every eyeball, like an ancient sun rising from beyond the mountains, followed a moment later by a boom which made every sound which had ever gone before it since the birth of the continents seem very quiet indeed.

Lurkh raised his head weakly at this, and croaked: 'Did we do it? Did we lose?'

Ghurz glanced hastily backwards, and swallowed hard. 'Yeah, I think so. Pretty sure, in fact.'
'Oh good...'

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Soft, lilting voices were raised in song, when he came to. He shifted sluggishly under the sheet, feeling fierce pain throughout his body. One of the voices stopped singing abruptly.
'A! Intya Meneaer er ná cuina!'
'Still alive? I do not think so, brother – not looking as he did when they brought him in. Our task is simply to sing for the peace of his soul...'
'I tell you, I saw him move just now!'
'Listen Aleision, 'twould be a curse to still live in his condition... to be brutally honest, the lord looks as though he has been chewed upon by a Balrog, savaged by a warg and used as a midden by an incontinent herd of...'

Meneaer opened his eyes at this inopportune moment, and weakly nudged aside the white shroud that covered him. Two elves stood staring down at him, dumbstruck by his apparent return from the dead. One of them put a hand to his mouth, and turned pale pink with embarrassment.

'Ah! Lord Meneaer! Ummm... what I meant to say was -'
'Fetch... me a mirror,' croaked the prone elf.
'... you fell from a great height, and have more broken bones than sound, you should not be moving like this – if you would sit back? No? - we thought you dead, aha...'
'A mirror! At once!'
'... and the crux of the matter is that when you landed, you landed, umm, on your... your, ahh, face...'
'MIRROR!'

The second elf had retrieved a small hand-mirror from a chest, and now gingerly held it up for Meneaer's inspection.
'Umm. The Eagle concerned is really very sorry... we could barely console him when he thought -'

The elf-lord screamed.

This horribly alien noise seared out of the thin tent walls and throughout the camp. Around the carousing bonfires, the music ceased for a moment - men paused in their merriment and bowed their heads. At the great feast, the King nearly fell off his throne. There was a general attack of goosebumps in the camp of the Captains of the West.
At last, the keening died down into a low bubbling sound of utter despair.

What Meneaer saw in the depths of the mirror was a monstrosity. A sick joke.

He was ugly.

As such, a creature to be shunned and reviled and cleansed from the earth. This he knew with every particle of his patrician being. Unworthy. Impure... More – more orc than elf.
How could this happen to me? I was ever guided by the purest motives...

A soft voice intruded in his thoughts. 'Do you hear me, brother? Don't you want to hear how the battle went? We won! It's a new Age out there!'

The ruined elf burrowed his head into the shroud. His voice was low and hate-filled. 'What happened to the orc?'
'Brother, your present appearance... I tell you, it is of no importance...'
'The orc.'
'Well, most of them are dead, or they ran away -'
'You know the one I mean. The one they called 'Lurkh'. The educated vermin. What happened to him?'

The elves glanced at one another. One of them suddenly took great interest in the ground, and the other cleared his throat slowly.
'We... reports are confused. But we... I mean, it was not us, oh no, but some of the humans. That is to say we – we think he has escaped. He stole a Mûmak, and seems to have trampled his way out. We have sent men and elves in pursuit, good trackers and hunters...' The elf cracked his knuckles nervously. 'If there is aught we can do...'
'Get out.'
'But... you need a healer...'

There was a pause. When the words came they were clipped and toneless.
'Get. Out.'

The elves exchanged sad looks, and quietly filed out. Meneaer was left alone with his thoughts.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

'Come out, orcs! Come out!'

The cry of the hunter echoed through the midnight forest. Torches flickered in the clearing. Horses snickering carried on the still night air, raising clouds of frosted breath.
'Your master is defeated! Come out! You will be safe! You will receive fair and equitable treatment!'

Ghurz let the branch swing back gently, and turned to Lurkh. The injured orc was propped up against a tree trunk, dim in the starlight. The pair had abandoned the Mûmak a short distance away, realising the difficulty of evading pursuit with a creature the size of a house and given to frequent earth-shaking trumpets. So it had been an exhausting, slow journey through the forest undergrowth all day, trying to avoid the hunting parties, with Lurkh draped across his companion's back and weakly whispering vicious, guttural insults into his ear. Ghurz was unflappable; he hadn't understood most of the offensive words. Now it was night.

'Did you hear that?' he breathed.

Lurkh nodded. 'Do nothing.'

Earlier in the evening, they had seen an orc take the men at their word. He had stumbled into the clearing, arms raised and hollering endearments, only to receive his fair and equitable treatment at a range of sixty feet. From the clearing there was a jingling of stirrups as the men mounted up and moved on. After a moment of dead silence, an
owl hooted cautiously, and on cue the rest of the nighttime chorus struck up again.

'I think it's time we said goodbye,' said Ghurz, a propos of
nothing.

Lurkh blinked, then sat bolt upright and winced.
'What? You'd leave me alone to make my way south, and me with my broken bones and twisted ankle? You vicious swine.' He mused for a moment. 'You're getting better at this orc stuff.' He scowled.
'I've decided to go north, you see. Back to the mountains.'
Ghurz stood up awkwardly and shouldered his pack. 'Maybe I'll try to find my mam and dad. Tell them I tried my heritage, and didn't like it.'

Supported on a branch, Lurkh rose to his feet and spat. 'You think that'll work? Now? Weren't you paying attention back there, boy? Red balefire, big noise, death of our employer? The world has changed – it's going to be bloody Men all over, building towns and farming and chopping down trees and mining again, and ruining all the old good places for us.'

Ghurz half-turned, and Lurkh grabbed his leg.
'And, when we're all gone, they'll tell stories about us. Stories. They'll... they'll turn you into a bedtime story, boy. And that is all that'll be left... You know what the elf said? He said plans were in motion...'

Ghurz did not know, nor did he want to hear. He gave a rueful smile.
'Look, I've just got to go north. I know you're probably right, like you were right from the start, and there's nowhere good left. But there's a chance that there might be, I don't know, something waiting there for me there. Anything, really. So I've got to go north. You see?'

Lurkh thought about what Meneaer had almost told him that night in the forest, and he thought about what might be waiting for the younger orc in the north, and finally he looked at Ghurz's broad, hopeful face. His resolve failed, his anger faded.
'You'll never... bahh. If you really intend to... you'll be careful heading north, won't you, and avoid the humans and all? Just because it'd be a shame to see you waste that greasy hide of yours after I've saved it so many times,' he finished defensively.

Ghurz nodded, and grinned. There was a moment of winding-down, of tension relieved.

The older orc looked Ghurz up and down critically. 'You were a bloody terrible orc, all in all. But maybe you could make a good man.'

Scratching his ear, he added: 'Standards are lower.'
'And you, Lurkh... you've got more human-ness in you than you'd ever admit.'
'S*d off. S*d off. I wouldn't lift a finger to save a human from a nasty death... oh. Point taken.'
'That wasn't ex-actly what I meant... close enough, I guess.'

They clasped hands briefly and avoided eye contact. Orcs are uncomfortable with formal courtesy, which may explain why they have never invented, among other things, the doily. Then each hefted a pack and shuffled their feet.

'Well,' began Ghurz. 'Well... if you're ever up the Misty Mountain way, you'll be very welcome. Just ask around for the
farmer whose face scare all the kiddies.' He bared his teeth in a broad grin.
'Thanks,' said Lurkh. 'Although I can't see it happening. And... Ghurz? If you're ever down south, where the hot desert meets the boiling sea and the air is like an oven...'

Pause.
'Yes?'
'... you'll be a bloody fool. Goodbye, then...'

With that he turned and trudged off, back bent under the load, leaning heavily on a branch for support and, Ghurz suspected, effect. And the two met never again in the living world.

As Ghurz turned his face to the distant north, seeing already the jagged dark shapes against the stars, feeling the night air on his skin and hearing the sounds of the sleeping world, he took a deep breath and began to sing softly and badly. It was an ancient and simple tune, known to all races and peoples, and it began like this:

'Show me the way to go home...'

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And so came to pass the end of the War of the Ring, and so began the reign of the King Elessar. A king wise, just and long-lived was he, who held dominion over lands from the mountains to the sea. Justice and peace flourished under his rule, and the land basked in a new golden age.

Upon one clear autumn's day he was in the palace orchard, receiving visitors from his throne set under the trees, as was his wont. As the last delegation backed out of his presence, bowing and fawning, the royal historian wandered across the leaf-strewn lawn clutching under his arm a large sheaf of manuscripts. He was little changed by age, except that now his hair was snow-white, and he affected a pince-nez
perched on his nose and leather patches on his elbows. The King smiled warmly.

'My old friend! Our resident historian! How goes the work?'

The historian bowed deeply, letting a sheet slip from his grasp. He snatched wildly at it, teetered off-balance and hastily regained his dignity.
'My lord,' he intoned breathlessly, 'it is complete. A full history of the War, excluding nothing. From the forging of the Ring to the Last Battle, um, including appendices. It has been the work of over thirty years.' He paused. 'It has been
compared in its scope and vision to the Quenta Silmarillion.' The old man blushed silently at having
committed the scholar's sin of pride.
'Oh? I must confess I never read that. Started it once, but... Anyway, let us have a look at this book then...'

The historian dumped the manuscript in the King's lap, who appraised it silently for several minutes, leafing through it and offering the occasional comment.
'Mmmm. Like the title.

'You drew all the maps yourself? Marvellous...

'Hehehe. I remember that time. To tell the truth, I nearly sh– well, I was pretty frightened...'

And finally: 'What is this?'

He had reached the appendices, and was stabbing a shaking finger at the page. The historian adjusted his pince-nez, and leaned in to look.

'Ah yes, yes, Appendix G. "The Incident Of The Educated Orc" - a story of some interesting particulars, if little
instructive value. I had quite a bit of trouble finding people to talk about that...'

All the King's previous affability had drained away. He sat lofty and dispassionate upon the throne, a carven statue made flesh.

'You will remove this section and all mention of it from your
manuscript immediately.'
'But... the information is all accurate, I... ' The historian was flustered.

The King leaned in close to him, and was human again.
'For pity's sake man, that little con-artist made us all look
like fools,' he growled. 'He made me look a fool, to
have trusted an orc... He ruined the life of a high elf-lord! They tell me Lord Meneaer has become... odd... since the accident. He keeps himself alone... None of it should have happened!' He slapped the arm of the throne in anger. 'Oh, but if we had killed those monsters when we had the chance...'
'Many that live deserve death,' observed the historian sagely. The aphorism had appealed to him, and stuck in his memory. 'Can you give it to them?'

There was a reflective pause.
'Yes, I believe I can. I employ a hooded man with an axe who actually specialises in it. I'm the king.'

And then, as a graphic illustration of his power, he held the manuscript up by its spine, spilling bookmarks and place-holders and, to the historian's horror, he neatly ripped out the pages of the offending appendix. For a moment his noble brow darkened.
'And that orc – so clever, so tricky – he can return to the element he crawled out of...'

He ripped the first page in half, crumpled the pieces up small and popped them in his mouth, chewed for a few seconds, then swallowed.
This was repeated for each of the sheets. There were several minutes of silence, but for the sounds of muffled champing. Somewhere in the orchard, a late windfall thumped gently to earth. Tiny birds twittered and swooped among the branches. At last the King swallowed the last
scrap, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and smiled sadly at the historian, who was wringing his hands and looking piteous.

'You have written a fine text, with every kind of colour and
movement and greatness. Let it not be marred by... irrelevancies. It may help if you think of me as your editor.'
'Sire, you are my king, but I must...'

A raised royal hand silenced him.
'And I'm sure we can arrange for the reproduction of many, many copies of this fine document. Your words would be read until the end of days...'

The old man's mouth opened slightly.
'...your name, I am sure, would acquire some certain prestige...'

Now the aged historian was trembling slightly, like a hound who can smell a plate of giblets.
'... just so long as you forget the episode of the orc. Erase
it from your memory.'

The historian looked up at his king, and slowly, nervously, he smiled.
'I'm sure I can manage that, my lord.'
'Excellent.'

'It probably wasn't very important anyway.'

The Final Appendix
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