Chapitre 4: Printable

Combining his remarkable skill in swimming with the roping talents he had acquired from his uncle André, Samouard swiftly released himself from the sack and swam underwater for seven lieues, until he judged himself distant enough from the Château de Locqueholles to emerge from the watery abyss without that his erstwhile captors perceived him. The nearest land was two lieues distant. Observing wrily that he did not possess Elouine’s talent for transforming into a seabird when far from land, the intrepid hobbite made a supreme effort, and pulled himself to shore, where he collapsed, passing out of time and knowledge.

When he awoke, he found himself surrounded by masked outlaws dressed in Lincoln green.

“Would you care for some venison?” said the leader. “It’s not quite first-rate, since we ran out of Mordeaux when the tarques confiscated it several moons since. But I hope it will serve.”

“To a starving man I am sure it will be more than adequate,” laughed Gamgès, and promptly threw himself on the rather rare meat his benefactor held out to him.

“To whom do I owe this favour?” he inquired.

“I am Guillaume de Ferni, contrebandier de tabac,” replied the outlaw. “Parbleu, I was so frightened by your uncut foothair that I very nearly left you for dead. Though you still seem very strange to me; outwardly, you resemble a vagabond utterly devoid of sartorial talent; yet within you are an epicure de premier ordre, I deem.”

“It is a marvellous occupation you have,” said Samouard, evading the implicit question. “If you don’t sell your merchandise you can always use it yourself. As for my foothair, I made a vow not to cut it for a year after Luthienne obtained for me admission to the chambers of Mme de Magot, queen among farmers’ wives. But speaking of years, exactly what year is it?”

“What year? You ask of me what year it is?”

“Yes, I ask of you what year it is.”

“How do you not know?”

“What do you wish?” laughed Gamgès. “I have been in such fear of my life, having eaten but four meals today, that I cannot distinguish ‘Calendrier du steuard’ from ‘Champignon au limpé.’”

“This is the year 1829 of the computation shirienne,” replied one of the smugglers.

Samouard smiled sadly. So he had been in durance vile for fourteen years. Did his former bride Rosédès even realize that he was still alive?

The leader regarded Gamgès appraisingly. “Do you have any talents?” he asked at length. “Other than gourmandise, that is – at which it is well-known that all hobbites excel.”

“I am one of the best mariners in the western half of the mer Endorienne,” replied Gamgès without hesitation. “I will show you. I will execute a ciryanturade à triple lurtz upon your vessel, and if I fail, you can kill me.”

“Excellent,” smiled de Ferni. “I have not killed anyone in weeks.”

Gamgès laughed immoderately, and performed, not a ciryanturade à triple lurtz, but a quadruple élendillage à niénorette fricassée.

“You’re hired,” said de Ferni, when he had recovered from his complete stupefaction. Naturally Samouard – or Éarendeau le marin, as he preferred to call himself – fairly promptly became the /de facto/ leader. He determined to exploit his new status to find the isle of Monte Fato; but permitted no sign of this purpose to evince itself. He carefully counted the days after the abbé’s death, recalling that the savant had predicted that Durin’s Day would arrive 23 days after said death. (Frodia of course knew all calendars – save the New Computation that proved his downfall – by heart.)

“Our food supplies are running somewhat low,” he remarked, when he realized that the Day had dawned. “Does any island nearby offer good game?” Of course, he knew the answer well, given his exact recollection of every detail upon which the abbé had instructed him.

“Why yes; the isle of Monte Fato,” said Gamlino, an old retainer from Eriadorsica.

/Bingueau!/ thought Gamgès. “Then we should surely head there,” he suggested aloud. “If M de Ferni wishes it, of course.”

M de Ferni merely grunted, and so the decision was put into effect. “Now,” reflected Samouard as they set sail, “I will learn whether Frodia’s teachings regarding Monte Fato are sure as Shirdonnay or cheese from Brie – to use a rustic proverb of which the good abbé would certainly not approve.”

The outlaws followed every order given by the Donnelandais (as they called their new leader) with joy, almost with ravishment, so clear, precise, and reasonable were his instructions. The sea was calm, and of an azure as deep as the coat of Alatar, and the silmarils of Érou illumined the heavens with the lustre of Valinor. In due course, Gamgès’s desiring gaze beheld, soaring above the liquid sapphire of Ulmon, the flaming summit of the isle of Monte Fato. Strange and marvellous shapes he saw, resembling bits of lava that had cooled and lay like dragon-forms out of the /Haradric Pipe-weeds/. Samouard devoured with his eyes the mass of rocks that passed from vivid pink to dark blue. Never had a gambler whose entire fortune was in jeopardy experienced, at the toss of a die, such anguish as now agitated Samouard in the paroxysms of hope – nay, not the King of the Sorcerers and Éarneur at the pinochle of destiny. When the ship landed, Gamgès, despite his habitual dominion over himself, could not restrain himself from leaping to shore first; had he dared, he would have kissed the soil of the island whereof he had dreamt as one dreams of a mistress.

“I will go alone in search of game while the rest of you set up camp and fish and try out the Monte-Oiolosseo wine,” he said aloud.

His companions were content with this plan, and so Gamgès, having regarded them for a moment with the sad and indulgent smile of the superior man, set out alone for the island’s summit.

“In two hours,” he thought, “these people will leave with fifty floquerins, to risk their lives in attempting to obtain another fifty. Were they to receive five hundred floquerins, they would spend them with the pride of Ar-Pharazon in one night in Rivendeau. Today hope impels me to despise their riches, which seem to me to the deepest misery; tomorrow, perhaps, disappointment will move me to envy their misery. Oh no!” cried Samouard. “The wise and infallible Frodia will not have erred in this one matter. And it were as well to die, as to live this pitiable life.” For Gamgès, who three months ago desired only liberty, had already had enough of it, and aspired to wealth. The fault it not his, but that of Érou, who has given us the strange gift that impels us never to be satisfied, but always to strive for more, be it indeed beyond the circles of the world or merely in one of the 647 bordels of Brie.

However, on a path lost between two columns of hallucinogenic mushrooms, and where, in all probability, befurred foot of hobbite had never trodden, Gamgès arrived at the point where he supposed that the glittering caves of Monte Fato must have existed – for he beheld certain rocks bearing a vague resemblance to the Pouquémons feared by our superstitious ancestors. From time to time, however, these signs disappeared under the mantle of the mushrooms and groves of cannabis that flourished there like one of the gardens of Harad al-Guimilzoûr. In due course, the signs ceased altogether, coming to a halt before a single mighty stone that stood like a finger of destiny: the twentieth rock. “And now,” he cried, remembering the story of the dwarvish fisher Pedro at the gate of Ckazade-doûm, “Open, cantaloupe!”

He hesitated for a moment, realizing that to match his puny force against that massive monolith would be the folly of a lone balrogue that durst measure his strength against that of the Valards in the War of Spleen. Then the moon opened on the horizon, and the old thrush shrieked as a light beamed down, illuminating a keyhole in the stone. Suddenly recalling the instructions given in Sauron’s will, Samouard boiled the thrush in his Monte-Oiolosseo wine. After a delightful repast, he then – following Frodia’s instructions to the tengwa – used the remains of the thrush to make a very serviceable key.

He pushed and the door opened. And he beheld … nothing but igneous rock. So it had all been a chimaera; or possibly Elrond had arriven and seized the treasure for himself. But then Samouard remembered that the treasure was in the furthest corner of the second opening: an opening so narrow that it was veritably a crack of doom. Another might have despaired in that subterranean abysm; for Samouard, on account of his living for years in the sepulchre of the Château des Locqueholles, no darkness existed. Having penetrated this opening, he gazed at a shining mound of glittering splendour. And, did any doubt of the abbé’s veracity remain, it must have been removed altogether by the portrait of the Eye of Sauron that overhung the cornucopia of wealth. Gamgès recognised it easily; the wise Frodia had drawn it so many times!

He reached down and found a very large white gem. From Frodia’s descriptions, he recognized the Arquenpierre, and was filled with amaze. The mere fleeting glimpses of treasure which he had caught as he progressed had rekindled all the fire of his heart. He ran his course through the caverns with the trembling exaltation of a man verging on madness. After being duly impressed by the umbrella set with the Naouglamir, a large gilt flagon of Ent-draught (which, as everyone knows, serves as an excellent companion to all kinds of escargots), a coat of Elvish mail, the Tarnhelm, Gourthand the talking sword, three rings for the Elves, seven for the Dwarves, nine for mortal Men doomed to the trépas, and four out of the original seven palantiri, he beheld the heart of the treasure: the One Ring. Following the thread of inductions, that thread which, in the hands of the abbé Frodia he had seen guide the intellect so ingeniously through the ménégrot of probabilities, he soon divined the nature of his discovery, and its implications for his plans.

“This Ring,” he thought, “will give me the charm and savoir-faire to beat down all resistance, break the last defenses, and, if I wished it, cover all lands in a second darkness. For Sauron let a great part of his own former éclat pass into it, so that he could rule all the others. With it, I can command all the other Rings, and all that has been wrought with them will be laid bare, and I will be irresistibly fascinating to all who encounter me. This infernal – or celestial – treasure shall serve my plans of vengeance well!” He smiled and placed the Ring on his finger, and felt an amazing combination of aristocratic stylishness and diabolical magnipotence surge through his very being, like a heady dream induced by an over-indulgence of herbe à pipe. To celebrate, he opened the flagon of ent-draught, unwrapped the escargots, and fell to, hardly noticing that, as he consumed the entois beverage, his height increased by almost a metre. After the meal, he knelt, clasping his trembling hands together, and murmured a broken prayer to Érou.

When he finally managed to drag himself out of the cave, his pockets bulging with but the smallest portion of his newfound riches, the sun was already setting below the horizon. That night was one of those nights, at once rapturous and terrible, that this man of the violent emotions had already experienced two or three times in his life.