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A Healer's Tale  by Lindelea

Chapter 13. A Pony of a Different Colour 

Merry slid from his pony’s back and turned to help his aunt down. When she would have gone to the well, he stopped her, politely but inexorably leading her to a mossy bench in the neglected garden, taking off his jacket and laying it down to guard her clothing, seating her with great courtesy. From the inaction of the hobbits surrounding the well, he knew with terrible, heart-tearing certainty that they were come too late. There was no need for his aunt to haunt her dreams with the sight that awaited her. He’d seen drownings before.

 ‘Stay, Aunt,’ he murmured as she made move to rise. He circled her with his arms, laid his cheek against hers, and added, ‘We’ll bring him to you by and by. But stay here, for now.’

Cheeks wet with tears, she nodded. While everything in her screamed to run to the well and fling herself in, to pull her littlest from the waters’ icy grip, at the same time she felt as if she might never move again. They were come too late. It was too late, and there was nothing to be done.

As Merry, feeling strangely numb and cold as death must be, moved to the well, more ponies pulled up in the yard, though their riders remained in the saddle, seeing Paladin so still and stiff at well’s edge. The sense of urgency was turning into something more solemn and funerary. Merry looked down into the depths, his heart crying out bitterly within him. Again he rued that they had stayed at the inn in Whitwell, to spare Eglantine the worry of putting up her fine and fancy Brandybuck relations in addition to all the others who’d come to celebrate Paladin’s natal day. By the time they’d arrived at the farm (having missed the birthday breakfast because Merry’s mother had awakened with an aching head) Folco had already taken Pippin off, to “keep him out of the cake batter” while noontide preparations were underway. But Merry had been given no other choice; it had not been his choice to make. Now all he could do was to make the best of a bad situation.

Staring down into the blackness, he shuddered. Too late by far, there was no sign of his young cousin at all. Pippin must have sunk to the bottom. ‘We cannot leave him there,’ he whispered, somehow forcing the words past the lump in his throat that threatened to choke him.

No one seemed to heed him.

He heard the sounds of mourning and looked up to see Eglantine, motionless where he’d left her. She’d thrown her apron over her head and was sobbing as several of the hobbits who’d taken ponies gathered awkwardly around her. Pimpernel was there, throwing her arms around her mother to join her in weeping; young Ferdibrand had taken her up behind him on his pony and so she arrived before her sisters. Merry looked to Frodo’s white face and staring eyes, his shaking hands, and repeated, ‘We cannot leave him there.’ His fingers sought the top button of his shirt, and then the next, and the next.

 ‘What’re you doing, lad?’ Ferdinand said. Paladin never moved, nor took his eyes from the waters that had swallowed his son.

 ‘We cannot leave him there,’ Merry said again, divesting himself of his shirt and laying it over the edge of the well. He took the rope from Ferdinand’s slack grip and tied a loop, then stepped into it. ‘If you lower me slowly, it won’t disturb the water so dreadfully as if I just hang over the side and let myself fall in.’

 ‘Your father...’ Ferdinand said.

 ‘We will not leave him there,’ Merry said through his teeth. ‘In any event he’d have to be brought out, and the sooner the better, for his mother’s sake.’ He climbed over the stone surround and Ferdinand hastily grabbed up the rope, divining that the teen would jump into the well if he had to.

Moving as one in a dream, Paladin also grasped the rope, and they began to lower Merry, just as Saradoc’s slow pony jogged into the yard. ‘Merry!’ the teen heard his father cry, but no more than that. Saradoc had seen too many drownings, himself, and likely realised, from the lack of urgency, that this was a recovery and not a rescue.

Merry shuddered as the icy waters touched his feet and the water rose slowly to embrace him, causing him to suck in a gasping breath. At last he was treading water, though quickly numbed. He shouted up at the heads that edged the circle of light above him. ‘Slack!’

Ferdinand nodded and paid out rope, and Merry took a deep breath, let it out again, and dove. Blackness was before his eyes and his heart hammered in his ears before his fingers found the bottom. He felt in every direction, finding nothing for his efforts, before he was forced to seek the surface again. His head broke into the air and he gasped, his chest feeling tight. More heads ringed the circle of light, their features undistinguishable with the bright sun behind them, but his father’s voice called down. ‘Merry?’

He shook his head, blowing out mightily, sucking in air, blowing it out again so that he’d sink quickly to the bottom, and then he dove, to grope around the sides of the well. Nothing.

His father called out when he surfaced again, but he had no answer to give, or rather, his answer was to dive a third time. This time when he surfaced, they gave him no choice. While he was still taking in air, they pulled up on the rope. First the slack was gone, and then he was rising, though he grasped at the slippery stones to stop himself. He would have slipped out of the loop to continue his search, but he couldn’t, now that it had tightened around him to bear his weight, bearing him indeed, out of the darkness and into the light.

 ‘No!’ he gasped in protest as the hands reached out to haul him over the side. ‘We cannot—’

 ‘No use drowning yourself, my lad,’ Saradoc murmured in his ear. Esmeralda was there, wrapping a blanket around him, and Paladin was sitting slumped against the stones of the well, his face buried in his hands.

 ‘How will we get him out?’ Ferdinand said.

 ‘We’ll send down a tween,’ Saradoc responded, ‘with a long pole. We won’t put him in the water, mind, but hold him suspended just above. He can poke about in the depths until he finds... and then we’ll know where... and we’ll be able to...’

 ‘I’ll do it!’ Frodo said tersely, and though Bilbo would have protested he was already stepping into the loop of rope they’d removed from Merry. Though his face was deathly pale, his jaw was set and his eyes flashed fire. ‘Where’s a pole?’

They wrenched loose a rail from the fence and with this in hand, Frodo was lowered into the well. The hobbits afoot had arrived by this time, and Pearl and Pervinca had joined the group of wailing hobbit mums and lasses surrounding Eglantine.

Merry had recovered enough from his efforts to stand, and clutching his blanket around him, he leaned on the stone surround, looking over, to watch Frodo’s efforts. Frodo, from living in Buckland for a goodly part of his first score of years, knew the drill for probing the depths.

Folco was blathering to the hobbits near him, how it all had come about. They’d been playing “fox and hare”, with Folco chasing his young cousin over hill and down dale, a game that delighted young Pippin and kept him nicely occupied and out of the kitchen when cakes were baking. They’d run into the yard, and Pippin had been thirsty. Folco’d been thirsty as well, and after they’d hauled a bucketful of water from the well, one of them had had the bright idea of throwing a stone down to see the splash.

One thing led to another, and soon they were competing to see whose splashes were the largest. Pippin had dragged a large and heavy stone to the edge of the well, lifted it up (with a little help from Folco), balanced it on the edge... But as he looked over, the stone overbalanced before he was ready to let it go—and it pulled him down into the well with a great and terrifying splash. Folco had tried to haul Pippin up again with the bucket, but the rotted rope had given way, and so he'd picked up fallen branches and dropped them in the well while Pippin clung close to the side... 

At a nearby gasp, Merry looked up in surprise, for Frodo hadn’t found anything as of yet. The healer’s apprentice had a look of shock on her face; perhaps she was about to faint? As he moved to support her, Woodruff murmured, ‘Branches.’

No one seemed to notice. Louder, she said, ‘Branches! Master Folco said he shoved branches down... where are the branches?’

The realisation struck Merry like a thunderclap. There had been no branches in the well!

 ‘He’s not there!’ he gasped.

 ‘What’re you talking about?’ Ferdinand said irritably, his eyes still fixed on Frodo.

Merry seized Ferdinand’s arm, his warming blanket slipping unnoticed to the ground. He shivered without feeling the cold. ‘He’s not there!’ he said more forcefully this time. ‘I don’t know how it comes to be, but this is not the well! There are no branches! Not even under the water!’

 ‘What?’ Ferdinand said, leaving the care of the rope to Saradoc and the others, taking Merry by the shoulders and giving him an unconscious shake. ‘Speak sense, now, young hobbit!’

 ‘I felt all about,’ Merry said, his words tumbling over each other in his eagerness. ‘Surely I would have noticed branches! But there was naught, just water and cold stone!’

 ‘Dinny!’ Ferdinand shouted, loosing Merry and taking Paladin by the arm, hauling him bodily to his feet. ‘Dinny, he’s not there!’

Paladin blinked, his wits slowed by grief. ‘Not there,’ he whispered. ‘Did someone haul him out already?’

 ‘Listen to me, ye daft Took,’ Ferdinand shouted. ‘He’s not there! ‘Tis the wrong well, I tell you!’

 ‘What?’ Paladin said, staring over the edge at Frodo, still probing the depths though he’d looked up momentarily at the jerk on the rope.

 ‘Folco!’ Ferdinand shouted, forgetting the careful, proper speech he practiced among his wife’s Bolger relations and lapsing into nearly unintelligible Tookish, as was still spoken in the high Green Hills. ‘Folco, tha benichted tween, hie thasel’ he’e, an’ noo, I wot thae!’

Folco, bewildered, had no idea what was required of him, until Paladin advanced on him, seized him by the arms, and bellowed, ‘Folco! ‘Tis the wrong well! What smial, now? Stir yer addled brains to thought, young hobbit, and stir them well!’

 ‘The door was grey, I tell you,’ Folco quavered, ‘and the garden overgrown, the fence broken down and...’

 ‘Grey,’ Merry said in sudden realisation. ‘That could be blue or green, then...’

Paladin and the others stared at him. Vigo Boffin, Folco’s father, said slowly, ‘So I’m told. It’s all grey to me...’

Woodruff said sharply, ‘Colour-blind? You’re colour-blind, and your son after you?’

 ‘I am,’ Vigo said. ‘We are.’

 ‘The old Goodenough Farm,’ Woodruff said breathlessly. ‘That’s been abandoned these past five years, for the Thain’s not yet found a tenant who can pay the lease. The smial’s door is green!’

Ferdinand grabbed up another rope someone had dropped nearby, and ran to his pony, Paladin right behind him to grab the pony tied up next to Ferdinand’s. They vaulted into the saddles in the same breath, galloped out of the yard, hurtling the broken-down fence in their haste.

Saradoc took Woodruff’s hand and they ran to claim the nearest pony and were soon pounding after. No doubt all the rest would follow on their heels.

When they reached the Goodenough Farm, Ferdinand and Paladin were already bending over the lip of the well, and Paladin was shouting encouragement. ‘Hold on, Pippin-lad! We’ll soon have you out of there!’

Saradoc stopped long enough to lift Woodruff down. As she hurried to the well, he took the time to collect the skittering ponies and tie them securely before making his way to the well. From his experience, he figured there was time for such niceties, for it appeared they must wait for a teen or tween to arrive and be lowered down. Pippin, apparently, was too cold and exhausted to slip the loop about his waist to be hauled up, or perhaps too affrighted to let go whatever it was he was clinging.

Merry arrived soon after, and Ferdinand, Paladin and Saradoc carefully lowered him down, that he might not descend too precipitously and injure the child clinging so precariously to the branches and the mossy stones at the bottom of the shaft. By the time more hobbits rode into the yard, Bilbo and Frodo among them, they were already hauling away at the rope to bring the twain out into the warm sunshine.

A cheer arose as they helped a beaming Merry over the lip of the well, shivering Pippin clasped securely in his arms. Immediately blankets were wrapped around the lad and Woodruff began her examination. Merry felt a blanket wrapped around him and was suddenly aware of his mother beside him, her face wet with joyful tears. In that moment the reaction hit him and his knees buckled... it had been so close, so very close. Pippin had been clinging to the slippery stones, buoyed up by the branches Folco had thrown down, but he'd been so cold, so very cold, nearly asleep when Merry had reached him. Had the child lapsed into slumber, he'd have drowned.

 'Don't cry, Mum,' he said as Esmeralda eased him down with his back against the well. He reached out a trembling hand to her cheek.

 'I might say the same to you, son,' she whispered, laying a kiss upon his forehead, and he suddenly realised that tears were leaking from his own eyes. He wiped at his face impatiently.

 'Safe,' Saradoc said, crouching on Merry's other side to embrace his son. He'd seen enough drownings and near-drownings to pronounce his verdict even while Woodruff still thumped and listened to Pippin's chest. 'You brought him out safe, and in good time. I'm so very proud of you, Merry-lad. So very proud.'

Just before Woodruff pronounced the lad's lungs sound, and that Pippin was apparently undrowned and unharmed, Bilbo came up, hard at Frodo's heels, to say, ‘I trust, young Pip, that you made the biggest splash!’

 ‘I did!’ the youngster piped. He got no further than that, however, for seconds later he was enveloped by his weeping mother and sisters, and Paladin’s arms encircled all, and after a long moment the good farmer’s voice rose over the babble of voices that ensued.

 ‘Come now! We have a celebration to be making!’





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