Dezoch had fled the scene of battle the instant he had recognized the doom the Eoetheod represented.  Abandoning his command and tribeman, he’d made his way northwest along the banks of the Limlight. 

It was a good plan.  The horsemen would be occupied with the main battle for an hour of more.  He would cover two leagues in that time.  Dezoch would also kill several Balchoth who tried to follow him and escape death.  His chances were better alone.

He’d reached a marshy bend in the river where he could hide in the reeds, cattails and sedges.  And waited for hours while the flies and mosquitoes tormented him.  Now dusk was creeping over the land.  Dezoch slowly crept out of his hiding place, quietly padded up the river bank to the low bluff at the edge of the grasslands.

It was quiet.  The ground did not tremble beneath the hooves of the northern horsemen.  He was alive.

The coming night was not a time for sleep.  That would be a luxury that the men of Gondor and the riders from the north would partake, well earned after their decisive victory.  No, Dezoch knew that he had to make his way back to the Anduin, to the Undeeps.  That was easily thirty, perhaps forty leagues distant.  At best he would make eight leagues tonight before dawn reddened the skies.  Then he would need to find a place to hide, some shallow ditch, a cleft in a low rock outcrop.  All the next day he would wait, unwilling to be seen by scouts.  And so it would go for at least four days.

He had enough dried meat and crude field biscuit to last him.  There might be more if he scavenged the dead at the first battle with Gondor.  His plan decided, Dezoch set out at a steady lope as the sky darkened and stars began to glimmer. 

He reached the Anduin in five days, tired, ragged, hungry, but alive, leader of an army of one.  The rafts from their crossing nearly a fortnight’s past were beached on the great river’s western shore. 

He was not alone. 

The shore was home to wounded survivors of the first battle, laggards who never went beyond the landing areas, and a few like him who had somehow managed to escape the defeat at the Field of the Celebrant.  He would round them up, cross the Anduin on what serviceable rafts were present.  Once on the eastern shore any other latecomers would be absorbed.  He would take them back to the southern eaves of Mirkwood and Rhovanian beyond.

With the massive losses of men, Dezoch resolved to do his duty to repopulate his people and provide comfort and sympathy to the many widows.  He would be father to many children who would be back someday to settle the score.