Chapter 35. Time and Talk

Ulrich counted the time by the meals the hobbit brought, a total of four more meals after that first at noontide—dinner, breakfast, dinner, and breakfast again—that Ferdi carried down into the depths beneath the Citadel. The guards no longer argued but simply exchanged pleasantries with the hobbit as they admitted him to Ulrich’s cell and locked him in, to pass an hour or two talking. 

 ‘Do they beat you when I leave?’ Ferdi said near the end of the fourth meal he brought, breaking into the middle of a story the Man was telling.

 Ulrich stopped, blinking in astonishment. ‘Beat me?’ he said. ‘I do not take your meaning.’

 ‘For talking,’ Ferdi said. ‘ ‘Tis so quiet, as I heard the Lockholes in the Shire were. There, if you broke the rules, they would beat the hobbits in nearby cells as well as the rule-breaker, or so I was told.’

 ‘They have not beaten me,’ Ulrich said. ‘I’ve done nothing to deserve a beating, after all.’

 ‘Maybe you ought,’ Ferdi said whimsically. ‘Perhaps they’d let you off with a beating and dispense with hanging.’

At Ulrich’s dumbfounded look he laughed. ‘Told you I was daft,’ he said. ‘So oft in this White City of stone I’ve heard folk speak of “the punishment fitting the crime”. Seems to me you’d give up your life if you’d taken a life, aye, I can understand it though it would not be our way...’

 ‘I’d heard that no hobbit has ever deliberately taken the life of another,’ Ulrich said.

 ‘Men, now, that’s another matter,’ Ferdi said, and though his tone was light his face was sober. ‘A horrid thing.’

 ‘Oh?’ Ulrich said quietly.

Ferdi was silent a few moments, and said, ‘I still remember the face of the first ruffian I ever shot dead.’

 ‘Yes?’ Ulrich encouraged when he did not go on.

Ferdi shook himself as if to shake off the memory. ‘He was choking a friend of mine at the time,’ he said in dismissal. ‘I had no choice in the matter.’

 ‘But it haunts you still,’ Ulrich said shrewdly.

 ‘It was a life,’ Ferdi snapped. ‘A living, breathing person, who had kin, a mother, sisters, perhaps...’ He shook his head and said lower, ‘It was not my life to take, and yet take it, I must.’

 ‘So says the King’s executioner,’ Ulrich said. ‘He does not glory in his position.’

 ‘You have spoken with him?’ Ferdi said in surprise.

Ulrich chuckled without humour. ‘Many’s the time,’ he said. ‘We met at a banquet years ago and struck up a friendship. My oldest son was born the same day as his middle son, and closer than brothers the two became...’

After a silence, Ferdi said briskly, ‘In any event, it seems a hard thing to me that you should hang when you’ve not taken a life... or have you killed Men in your past?’

 ‘I have taken no life,’ Ulrich said. ‘I helped to capture ruffians, who went on to hang, so in a sense my hand was in their deaths, but it was my friend the executioner who did the deed.’

 ‘A ruffian, capturing ruffians,’ Ferdi mused. ‘Doesn’t sound right, somehow.’ He breathed deeply and stretched. ‘In any event, they ought to shut you up here in this dark place for some weeks or months, administer daily beatings, deny you food and water, break your fingers and set burning torches against your flesh... but they ought not to hang you.’

Ulrich stared at him for a long moment, then said, ‘Do you feel better now?’

 ‘Quite,’ Ferdi said. ‘Have been wanting to say it for some time, you know.’ He put his arms behind him and stretched again. ‘Now I can put it behind me. I know you did those awful things to my cousin, and to others, and you ought to pay for your deeds.’

 ‘And so I will,’ Ulrich said. 'So I will.'

 ‘I take it back,’ Ferdi said suddenly into the silence that followed. ‘I could not stomach locking anyone away under layers of stone, not even for a day. It chills my heart just to sit here an hour at a time.’

 ‘At least hanging’s quick,’ Ulrich said. ‘Break your neck as you fall, and they say you feel naught.’

 ‘I beg to differ,’ Ferdi said. ‘If you don’t break your neck, you feel quite a lot. Believe me.’ He rubbed at the scar under his chin.

 ‘In any event, it might not come to that,’ Ulrich said pleasantly. ‘They might just decide to lock me up here for a year or ten, to pay for my crimes, though it’s not often heard of. It’s simpler just to hang a criminal, much less expense in the long run.’

 ‘How likely is it that you’d be spared?’ Ferdi said.

 ‘Well...’ Ulrich said, and then decided to speak the small hope he nursed. ‘Elessar was my friend, for a long time. He has not spoken to me since they put the shackles on.’

 ‘I’d noticed that, yes,’ Ferdi said.

 ‘He might be keeping away from me, so that no one murmurs “undue influence” should the jurors decide to spare my life,’ Ulrich said. ‘If there were no hope of reprieve I do believe he would visit me, or at the very least send word.’

Ferdi stiffened and did not speak.

Ulrich noticed. ‘What is it?’ he said.

 ‘I do bring word,’ the hobbit said reluctantly.

 ‘What word do you bring?’ Ulrich asked quietly, his heart sinking within him as his last hope faded.

 ‘I am bid to remind you of how he’d come in the dark between middle night and dawn, and how the two of you would go out and fish together in the summer silence,’ Ferdi said slowly, staring straight before him. ‘How you’d row him to the city, and he’d stand on the dock to watch you as you floated away into the misty dawn.’

He looked to the Man. ‘What does it mean?’ he said.

 ‘The trial will be today,’ Ulrich said tonelessly, his mind still spinning at the suddenness of it all, even though he’d steeled himself to expect naught else, ‘and the hanging at dawn, tomorrow.’