Chapter Seven

Aragorn was getting more and more upset by the second. He walked over to the closest place next to the cliff edge that he could reach, which happened to be between two boulders. He yelled out Legolas’s name over and over, pausing only briefly to listen for an answer.

Elladan and Elrohir, while anxious to hear Legolas’s return call, looked at each other with sadness in their gray eyes. Elladan shook his head. What had happened to their friend, they had no idea, but they knew it probably wasn‘t good. However, neither felt that his spirit had departed Arda.

“I think that Legolas’s failure to answer us has something to do with those howlers,” Elladan commented softly to his twin.

“I am afraid that you are right,” Elrohir replied. “it would be too unrealistic to think that those things are down there where he should be, and they are not responsible for him not answering Estel’s calls to him.”

“You believe they have him.” It was a flat statement.

Elrohir nodded. “They must.”

Elladan didn’t answer, because Aragorn was approaching them.

“He does not answer my calls. Those howlers must have taken him.” The man’s tone reflected his barely contained anger. When his brothers did not answer him, he frowned at them. “You agree.”

Knowing that trying to offer encouragement for Legolas’s safety would be in vain, Elladan said, “Yes. That seems logical, at this point.”

“Then we must hurry,” Aragorn said, as he turned and headed up the trail.

“Estel, we do not know that they have taken him that way,” Elrohir said. “They may have gone back the other way.”

The ranger shook his head. “I don’t think so. They came from up there,” he pointed toward the top of the mountain, “so I think that is where they live, and that is where they will take him.”

There was nothing to do now but to continue heading upward and hope, as they had before, that the two trails would eventually join up.

~*~*~

The first thing the elf was aware of was a swaying motion. It reminded him of floating in the Forest River at home and being rocked by the gentle current. Surely he was not in the water. He didn’t feel wet for one thing. ‘Then where am I?’ he asked himself. However, try as he might, he couldn’t get his mind to snap out of the fog it seemed to be encased in.

Slowly an intense pain began to make itself known. There was no fogginess about the aching throb in his left shoulder. ‘Was I shot?’ He couldn’t remember being in any kind of fight. Perhaps he had been ambushed. Again the fog in his mind kept him from working out what had happened that had caused the pain he was feeling.

He also couldn’t figure out why his mind was in such a fog to begin with. He had awakened from unconsciousness before, and he had now come to the conclusion that he must have been unconscious and not asleep, and never had he felt quite so out of it like this. He had always been able to snap his mind back into focus very quickly. ‘Why am I so groggy?’

As the fog began to clear a bit, he tried to pry his reluctant eyelids open. It didn’t help much when he finally accomplished the feat, because all he could see were two hairy, black sticks moving back and forth in front of his eyes. He frowned, not having a clue as to what those things could be. The fact his head was hanging down, and he was looking at them upside down didn’t help matters any, though Legolas decided that even if they, whatever they were, had been right side up, they would have looked pretty much the same.

Then the stench hit him, as a foul odor was driven into his face by the wind. Howlers! More fog lifted in his mind, and it all came back to him in a sickening flash. He had been on the narrow ledge, working his way along, when those horrid creatures had shown up.

The clarity of the memory of being bitten, biting back and swallowing the howler’s blood slammed into his memory. He almost gagged at the thought of it.

It was then he realized that he was tied up and suspended from something, a pole of some kind most likely. Legolas tried ot figure out how he could possibly be carried in such a way along the narrow ledge.

There was no way to know without being able to see more than what he was looking at right then, so he forced his head back even more until he was looking directly below him. It made more sense, when he saw that the ledge had widened to about a foot and a half.

He was being carried somewhere. That was obvious. To be eaten! The elf felt a shudder go through his body at that horrible thought, and he wished he hadn’t remembered any of it. ‘No,’ he corrected himself. ‘I would not know I need to escape, if I did not know what is planned for me.’ The thought that he had at first tried to make friends with the howler came to him. Either way, believing himself a friend or knowing he was a captive, the end result would have been the same.

As much as he wanted to raise his head up to ease the dizziness that was now vying for his attention, he did not want the howlers to know he was awake, so he closed his eyes and tried to think of something else.

What had become of Estel, Elladan and Elrohir? Had they been attacked and killed, and...? Legolas shuddered again. He squeezed his eyes tight. ‘Please, Valar, no. Let them be safe.‘ The archer took a deep breath, not willing to think any longer on that dreadful prospect.

More questions pushed their way into his thoughts. Had they escaped the howlers attention? Were they now in a desperate search to find him? Legolas fervently hoped that the answer to the last two questions was yes.

A thought now occurred to him that had gone unnoticed before. He was sure that the howler he had first seen had spoken to him in perfect Westron. Surely that had been his imagination, an hallucination brought on by---what? There had been nothing in his journey along the ledge that would cause such a thing. And he had not hit his head on the way over the cliff.

He tried to bring forth the sequence of events that happened on the ledge. It soon came to him that he had bitten the howler and swallowed its blood before he had heard it speak. That had to be it. The blood was making him think he heard what he had not really heard. There was only one problem with that logic: he distinctly remembered the creature whispering into his ear a mere second or two after he had ingested the liquid. It was not near enough time to cause such an hallucination. Did the howler really speak to him?

Legolas was tempted to ask and see if he got an answer, but he decided staying quiet right now was his best course of action. He would have to satisfy his curiosity later. For now, he just listened but only heard the same chattering he had heard when the first howler had shown up on the ledge behind him. ‘It must be their native tongue,’ he mused.

Just then a huge gust of wind knocked him into the side of the cliff. He hit on his right side but the impact traveled across his body and jarred his left shoulder. It was already screaming at him from having his body hanging below his up- stretched and weight-bearing arms.

The elf bit his lip to try and stifle a groan, as a sharp pain lanced through his shoulder and down both his chest and back. He held his breath, waiting to see if the howlers had heard it. When they did not seem to notice, he let his breath out slowly. The raging wind must have covered the sound he made.

Five minutes later, Legolas realized that the howlers had not been fooled by his attempt to appear unconscious.

The creatures stopped their forward movement and stared to climb up onto the rocks above them. They smoothly pulled the elf up with them, first raising his upper body and then his legs, back and forth. As he was finally leveled out and started forward again, Legolas heard a voice near he ear. “You have not fooled us, elf. We know you are awake.”

Legolas’s eyes flew open. He had to lift his head in order to see the howler’s face, which was mere inches from his. “How is it that you can speak in the common tongue?’ Legolas inquired. It was perhaps a silly question to ask, considering the predicament he was in, but he couldn’t resist.

The only answer he got was what might pass for a laugh. It sounded more like a squeal. Then the howler, who Legolas surmised was probably the leader, of this group at least, walked up ahead and disappeared from sight in the swirling mist. The others soon followed, toting the elf along like so much baggage.

Legolas, realizing that they must now be on the same path that Aragorn and the twins were traveling, tried to peer back down the trail past the howler, who was shouldering the back end of the pole. He couldn’t even see the last howler in line, so he slowly lowered his head. Having it hanging down the way it was hurt his neck, but trying to keep it level was even worse.

The archer wasn’t anxious to reach the howlers’ home, knowing what awaited him, but at the same time, he wanted this painful journey that had him hanging from a pole, to end. He would figure out what to do next, when they reached their destination.

~*~*~

“I heard a voice on the wind,” Elrohir said, cocking his head and listening intently. He then looked up and asked, “Did anyone else hear it?”

“I heard something, but I can’t say for sure it was a voice,” Aragorn answered. After hearing Elrohir define the sound as a voice, the ranger hoped it was his elven friend calling out to them. “Could it have been Legolas?”

“I do not know, Estel,” Elrohir answered and frowned when Elladan shook his head.

“I do not think so,” the elder elf commented. “It did not sound...,” he paused, searching for the right word, “elven to me. I cannot explain it any better.” His tone was almost apologetic.

“Then who could it be?” the ranger asked, clearly puzzled. “No one else is on this mountain but those howlers. It must have been Legolas calling out to us.”

“We do not know if we are alone, Estel,” Elladan said. “There may be others here besides the howlers that we know nothing about.” It didn’t seem probable, but it was possible. After all, they had seen only a small part of the mountain and traveled only a tiny piece of that.

No one commented further, because no one gave even the briefest thought that the voice could belong to a howler. If the idea had come to any of them, it would have been dismissed immediately as totally ridiculous.

“We need to keep moving,” Aragorn urged, as he started forward again, passing Elrohir and taking up the lead position.

~*~*~

It was no more than a few yards up the trail, when Aragorn stopped and bent down into a crouch, resting his weight on the balls of his feet. He put out his hand and lightly touched the snow in front of him.

Both twins dropped down beside him. “What have you found, Estel?” Elladan asked.

“Footprints. From the look of them, I would say they were made by those howlers, and there are a number of them.” He continued studying the tracks and then shook his head. “This is odd.”

“What? Elrohir asked.

“Look here,” the man, now in full ranger mode, said. “Most of the footprints are basically the same. You can see that they have trampled over each other’s tracks. That’s reasonable, if there are several traveling in a single line. But here,” he pointed again, “there are two sets that are deeper than any of the others. They cover some of the tracks and are in turn covered by others. So they must be in the middle of the line. The howlers that made these deeper tracks are carrying something heavier than just themselves.”

“Some sort of provisions perhaps,” Elladan volunteered.

“Or an elf,” Aragorn said, as he grabbed a handful of snow and threw it down. “They were down there with him. I’m convinced of it. And if they are carrying Legolas, that means he is probably injured and unconscious. He’d never let them take him otherwise. We must hurry.” There was an uncharacteristic note of panic in the man’s voice.

This time neither twin tried to offer any alternate possibilities. Their brother was probably right, and they both shared his sense of dread and urgency.

All three headed off as fast as they dared in the icy conditions. The weather seemed to be against them, though. The snow was now almost as thick in the air as the misty fog, and the trail was getting more and more treacherous.

The need to rush mixed with a dangerous path was not a good combination. Still, the three brothers did not slacken their pace. All of them knew that time was of the essence and could well be running out for Legolas.

TBC