The Last Thing He Said

The man on my back lost his horse. I lost my man. In a human mind, I suppose it made sense to give us to each other. In my mind, though, the injustice is an insult atop an injury. I should have been permitted to chose my next man as I had before- to use his smell and the way he stood, how he looked at me- to decide who was smart enough to take care of us both, who was too heavy or too hard with the mouth-iron or the boot-irons to be worth the work. I’d found one I liked- big, but not too big, gentle, smelled like hay- many seasons ago. We got on well, my man and I, but the last thing he’d said was “Go now, run!” and, like my mare’d taught me as a colt, I did as my human asked even though the salty, metal-smelling blood frothed out of his mouth and his eyes fell closed. I wanted to take him with me, but he wouldn’t let me, and bound as we are by Felarof’s oath, I had to leave him there.

When I went back in the daylight once the fires were gone, I couldn’t find him, or even his smell. He’d just… vanished. Someone else’s man led me inside the stones, promising hay. I know that word, ‘hay’, and ‘water’, and ‘bed’ and many others, no matter how many times men have called me stupid in the sun runs since my man got lost. I’ve often thought that if I could speak as men do I would correct them, but they are men, and the one who understood without words is gone. What would be the point?

Wherever we are going smells foul and feels worse, and the new man knows it as well as I. He keeps going though, just like they all do, depending on us to keep their hides out of warg jaws and away from orcs. Say what you will about animal intelligence, I know that word, orcs, in their language and mine and I don’t like it. None of us do, and when one of them says it, a shiver I’m quite sure none of them feel passes through the whole herd. Some of the men smell of fear and the bitter tang of it makes me toss my head to wave it away. The new man probably thinks it’s a fly, not noticing that the only things stirring in this wasted place are ashes and the same dark things that my man tried to kill.

Did they take my man, those dark things? I asked this new man as best I could, but we do not know each other yet. Perhaps you know. The other men respect you and do that funny head droop when you come among them. You feel different, too, like you understand us better than the rest. Are you like us? Do you hear the wind talk to the trees as a storm comes in? Do you taste which hills gave us the streams and what flowers grow on their shores? Do you get tired of the gossiping flies in the barnyard and wish the birds would come more often to talk of real things, of true things, of the gods and what they see from the blue above where we cannot go? Can you help us through this new evil place? Do you know, man who smells of the north wind, where my man has gone?