A Gentle Soul – The Penultimate Chapter

I promised to take a month between stories after the last chapter, but that night I finished the tale (in my head). The chapter after this one is all there ready to get into the computer. This chapter took a bit more work. I will finish this story before getting back to Rachael and A Second Chance: Dawn.

Part of the way through Southfarthing, the party decided to stop for the evening meal. The brothers Grimm were upset that they hadn’t been able to write a story all day.

Ruth pulled food out of the magic bag, and to her surprise there was something new there. It was a piece of waxed paper, and it had the corners folded so the contents would not leak out. Ruth sniffed it, and found that it smelled like her mother’s stew. But it was a miserably small portion, barely enough for two men, or one hobbit. And how would she cook it?

Reaching into the bag again, she pulled out a tin pot. She shrugged her shoulders and started to pour the contents of the bag in, expecting it to cover the bottom of the pan. Instead more and more stew came out of the package, until the pot was full. Apparently the bag was bigger on the inside than the outside.

She put the packet in her scrap pile, and next got a lid out of the bag, and set the pot on a hot rock at the edge of the fire. It smelled better and better, and soon the fire was surrounded by four hungry hobbits and two men.

Up until now a hot meal for the group had been melted cheese on a bread roll. This feast seemed special. The hobbits had thought they were getting meat three days earlier, when Drogo speared a rabbit through the rear legs. He brought it to Ruth to kill and clean, and instead she healed the wound, with the rabbit hopping away to the disgust of all four hobbits.

Dinner tonight was served on trenchers, flat pieces of bread that sopped up the gravy, making the plate a part of the meal. Each man had two helpings, and the hobbits: well they just kept reaching into the bag, pulling out one trencher after another, and then scooping more stew onto it. Finally Bodo got the last trencher (so he said) and found the pot empty. Not to be put out, he folded up the trencher and wiped the inside of the pot to sop up the last of the gravy.

“Goldberry makes a fine stew,” Pippin said, as he laid back, his hobbit appetite sated for once (which means he was full to the nose, to use an old hobbit expression.)

It was still light, but the hobbits were all soon snoring in harmony as Ruth gathered up the cooking gear to take down to the river to wash. The two men just stared at her, apparently not even considering helping out. Then Jacob giggled.

“What?” Ruth asked.

“It’s just that you have … well, a smear of ash from the fire on your face here” (he showed by pointing to his own face) “and here, and a little more over here.”

“Ruth in the Cinders,” Wilhelm said, giving a title for a story of a girl who had to work hard in the kitchens. Ruth just walked away. She loved listening to them shoot ideas back and forth and see a story somehow came out at the end, but the pot was not going to wash itself. And she wanted to wash her face, too.

When she got back, Ruth had been renamed Ella and it was turned around too, to Cinderella. Jacob was just suggesting that the evil witch who made her cook and clean and sew should instead be a wicked-stepmother, with two particularly ugly daughters who dressed in silk, while Ella was in rags.

Ruth just listened in fascination as a pumpkin became a coach, mice became horses, and a rat became a coachman. For a while it was garden snakes that became the footmen, although that soon changed to lizards. There was a fairy godmother, and a beautiful dress with golden slippers. That last detail stayed in the story until it was finished and Will was reciting it to the hobbits, who had woken just as the sun was setting. He told Jacob later that a glass slipper just sounded better.

The next morning there was a breakfast. There were hobbits: of course there was a breakfast. After it was cleared up and packed away, Merry approached Ruth. “You know, we would be making much better time if you didn’t stop to heal everyone along the way.”

Ruth had gotten into the habit of stopping in at any farmhouse or hut where she detected illness, something her magic allowed her to do from a considerable distance. The brothers didn’t mind: there was usually a hot meal served by the grateful patients. But the hobbits couldn’t benefit from that, as they had to stay hidden.

A couple times Ruth would be eating her stew or gruel in a hut and would look up to see one of the hobbits taking a big spoonful from the pot while the hosts had their backs turned. So lately she told the superstitious rural folk that they had to put four bowls out on the stoop for her ‘magic’ to work. The bowls were always licked clean an hour after the meal.

But she agreed. Her healing was slowing them down to half the pace it should be. They weren’t even to the village of Tharbad, where they would join the Great Southern Road. But she just couldn’t allow herself to walk away when she saw people in pain, or dying of something she could cure. Sometimes the cures were easy and quick: just holding the gnarled hands of an old person in hers could wipe away 20 years of arthritis in a few seconds. Other times the wasting disease would mean a delay of a full day as Ruth cured the person, and then fell into a deep sleep herself to recover. And to make it worse, at those times the hobbits and the brothers had to look after themselves for meals.

“I can try to go faster,” Ruth told the hobbit, “but I don’t think I can just walk away from a sick person. You know, with a power comes a responsibility.”

“I guess,” Merry answered, “but maybe you could just not go looking for them.”

They made good time that day, with few farms, and none of them harboring an ill person. They stopped at a little civic camping place that had a finger-sign point south to Tharbad, followed by a 5.

“The five means five hours,” Jacob explained. “That is at walking speed for most people. I think our cart is moving just about that fast. We should be in the village by supper time. I wish we had money to go to an inn. I am dying for a cold beer.”

“I have money,” the girl said. “Many of the people I heal have given me a copper or a silver. You may each have one beer, along with a second one that you will not drink from, but wander outside to where the hobbits can split one. We will order food up to our rooms, so the hobbits can each enjoy good pub food. I don’t know how we can explain the need for seven bowls when there are just three of us, though.”

“No problem,” Jacob said. “We tell the servers that we have four big friends coming a bit late, and they want us to have the food ready for them. No one will suspect anything when the food is gone. All they care is that they get their coppers.”

With a plan in place, they made good time the next morning. It was the brothers who caused the delay this time. There was a young woman tending a flock of about 12 geese, herding them towards Tharbad. When the donkey cart pulled alongside, and they politely nodded to each other, the woman insisted that she was a princess, forced to work as a Goose Girl. She even twirled about as if she had a gown on as she drove her flock to the town market.

That resulted in the Goose Girl story that amused Ruth and the hobbits, who by now were forced to hide in crannies in the wagon, due to the busier traffic on the road. The Goose Girl of the story actually was a princess, who had been sent from the castle with her maid to marry a distant prince. The maid decided that she didn’t want to be a maid any longer. She forced the princess to switch clothes and horses with her, and is assumed to be the princess when they get to the distant land. It is then that the real princess is sent out to tend the geese. In the end the King learns of the plot, and orders his son to marry the real princess, the goose girl, and punishes the maid.

Ruth marveled at how a chance encounter with a slightly addled girl could be transformed into such an entertaining tale. The Grimm Brothers were a real treasure, and their stories made the travelling time seem to go faster.

When they got to Tharbad Ruth immediately knew she could not leave within a week. She could just feel so much sickness around her in the small village. They booked rooms for the week, depleting much of her cash, but the enterprising brothers finally proved their worth by convincing the tavern owner to let them tell their stories to the crowd.

They had a tips jar, and pennies flowed into it all night long. At the end of the second night they were told that their meals were ‘on the house’ because the pub was full of people wanting to hear the tales. They were even standing in the street, listening in at the window, and the enterprising barkeep made sure that his barmaids would take orders from out there as well.

Ruth, meanwhile, went out into town every day, and knocked on doors, asking if anyone needed a healer. Of course, with her powers, she knew they did, and got right to work healing them. In a very few cases the people were too poor to pay, but Ruth healed them anyway, telling them they could pay her when they had the money, even though she knew people of that social strata would never have money.

At the end of the week the three went to the owner and tallied up the fee. Ruth had made more money than ever from curing the paying sick people, and the brothers were not asked to pay anything, since the bar had done more business in that week than in the prior three months. The barkeep changed all the Grimm’s tips into silver, since they had amassed a huge number of coppers.

Then they were back on the road again. One of the regulars at the bar had been named (or nicknamed) Duck, and he was notoriously ugly. His face had been kicked in by a horse, and not set properly, so it was lopsided, and he always spoke with a sneer. The fact that he only had one front tooth, and a few at the back, also added to his look. He was balding in the front, and entirely on the left side of his head. The brothers were barely on the cart leaving town when they decided to write a story about him. Ugly Duck became the Ugly Duckling, and by the time the story ended it bore little relationship to Ugly Duck.

They rode south for two days, when Bodo popped his head up. I smell hobbit. And not us. There are other hobbits nearby. We should take this turn off, and then go towards that copse of forest.

In the forest the donkey cart rolled into a clearing, and a dozen or so hobbits there froze, to become invisible. And the ploy worked with the Grimms, but Ruth and the northern hobbits could see them. Ruth pulled the cart up to an older-looking hobbit near a sawing machine.

“Good day, kind sir,” Ruth said, looking him in the eyes. “I wonder if you might have some information. We are on a quest.”

“You can see me?” the hobbit said. “And you four boys. You aren’t from around here, are you?”

She was named a hobbit-friend by Tom Bombadil and Goldberry,” Drogo said.

“I don’t know of them,” the old hobbit said. “Ain’t natural people being able to see us when we is hidden. What is this quest?”

“We seek the Entwives,” Ruth thought the hobbit’s eyes narrowed as she told the mission, but only for a second. “Do you know of them, or have you heard of them being anywhere else.”

“We don’t know no ‘Entwives’,” the old hobbit said. “But I maybe heard of them further south. Many days south of here.”

“Okay,” Ruth said. “We shall have to seek them out there.”

“Any chance of getting second-breakfasts here with you,” Pippin asked.

“We don’t do no second breakfasts,” the old grump sneered. “And we don’t feeds them that don’t work.”

The northern hobbits were astonished. Partially by the refusal of the southern hobbits to provide simple courtesy in sharing a meal, but even more so by the news that these people did not know about second-breakfasts.

Ruth drove her cart away from the sawmill operation, and they headed towards the sideroad. When they reached that, she heard a small, squeaky voice: “We are the Entwives.”

She looked down, and there on the sideboard of the cart, was a small green woman, less than 10 inches tall. You could only see her from the waist up, with the rest of her embedded in the wood. She pulled her legs and finally they popped out of the wood. “Maple, not my favorite,” the tiny woman said. “I much prefer ash or poplar.” She was naked, although so small it didn’t seem odd.

“Did you say you were an Entwife?” Ruth asked. The Grimm brothers were crowding around her, looking closely at the fairy. Ruth wasn’t sure if it was because she was so small, or because she was so naked. She suspected the latter.

“Yes, although we haven’t heard the word for years. The old hobbit keeps over 100 of us in his grove, where we have to tend his trees. We make them grow at triple the normal rate, so he can continually harvest wood from the copse. He calls us dryads.”

“We are on a quest to find the Entwives,” Ruth told her. “We want to take you back to Fangorn to bond with the Ents.”

“Fangorn,” the dryad whispered. “That is like heaven to us. A few of the oldest remember it, but the rest of us only know of it by their stories. My name is Borea. Could you take us back?”

“I want to, but I don’t know how,” Ruth said.

“Do you have money?” Borea said.

“Yes, quite a bit,” Ruth said.

“Well, for our people to move, we must move within wood. We die within hours if kept from trees … or Ents. So we need wood to travel. The old Hobbit has wood. Normally he doesn’t sell it except to other hobbits of his type. But he does have needs for man-money from time to time. He has a hobbit-friend of his own that will go into town and buy supplies.”

“Would he sell to us?” Ruth asked.

“If he needs money he will. And if you say the wood is for the northern hobbits, then he is more likely to. He will ask a quarter silver per board. How much silver do you have? He will not take coppers.”

“I only have four, so we could buy 16 boards, and take 16 of you away,” Ruth said.

“We have eight silver,” Jacob said. “So that is another 32 boards.”

“That is all your little cart will hold,” Borea said. “I’m afraid you will have to walk.”

They continued making a plan. Stealth was needed, as the old hobbit should not know that some of his sylphs were escaping. As the wood was being sawn for the order, Borea would dart from tree to tree in the copse, with her sisters leaving their tree and flying into the boards being loaded into the cart. Borea was going to stay in her place in the handle of the cart, and invite another younger Sylph for the other handle. The backboard of the cart was also large enough to take away someone. There could be as many as 51 Entwives fleeing.

“What about food for all of you?” Ruth asked.

“We are fed through our trees, or the wood we inhabit. You need not worry.”

The plan was put into motion, and Ruth again drove her donkey’s down the little lane. The old hobbit saw them coming, and stopped work on his mill again.

“What do you want,” he snarled. “I told you the Entwives are all far to the south.”

“Yes,” Drogo said. As the eldest hobbit in the group, he had been appointed spokesperson. “But when we were here last several of us noticed your fine hobbit wood. We have some man-silver, and would like to buy it. It is well known across the country that your wood is resistant to rot, and lasts a long time in hobbit holes.”

“That it does,” the old hobbit said. “I didn’t know that our fame had reached the north. How much wood do you need? Or more importantly, how much man-silver do you have? I am running short of man-silver, and could use a bit more.”

Bargaining took several more minutes, with Drogo getting the 4 per silver price, although he did have to feign turning around and leaving to get that price. The old hobbit started up the mill, and two of his helpers started loading wood into the wagon. As soon as they turned their backs, a sylph would appear and disappear into the wood. The old hobbit was too busy concentrating on his cuts to notice.

Within an hour the 48 pieces were cut, and the old hobbit scooped up the dozen coins from off the tree stump where Drogo had been told the leave them. “Now git,” he said. “And don’t come back looking for more. This man-silver will last me for years. I don’t plan to start trading again in the future.”

“When the cart was on the road, with hobbits and humans walking alongside, a curious humming could be heard from the wood. “My sisters are singing,” Borea said. “They are happy. We are returning to our Ents. You have to realize that we have been over 1000 years without male companionship.”

“How exactly do Ents and Entwives ‘do it’,” Jacob asked.

“Jacob! That might be a bit personal,” a shocked Ruth said.

“No, no. It is quite all right,” Borea said. “When we get to the Ents, one Entwife will leave her piece of wood here, and transfer to the Ent. We expect most of them will be asleep, probably pretty deeply. But as long as they have not become a tree, then we can still mate with them. Of all the creatures on the world, the Ent/Entwives have the greatest disparity in sizes. And as females we live in our Ents for the rest of our lives.”

“I won’t detail the union itself,” she continued, “but basically we have to go into a knot in the wood of the Ent. We ‘do the deed’ and then pull back and wait. Conception happens every time, and then there is a period of 60 years before the Entling is ready to be born.”

“You are pregnant for 60 years?” a shocked Ruth commented.

“Yes, but it is not really the Entwife who is pregnant, as the Entling develops in the Ent, and not our body. After the 60 years, it will drop off the Ent, and fall to the ground. We then move the Entling far enough away from the Ent so that it will receive light and water, and care for it for the next 200 years, at the end of which it will join with a new Entwife and mate with her. The Entwives simply clone themselves, although not from the mother, but a nearby Entwife.”

“It seems complicated. And time consuming,” Jacob said.

“Well, it is what we are used to. And time to an Ent is different from humans and hobbits with their short little lifespans. We live for eons. In fact we expect when we get back to Fangorn most of the Ents will be so deeply asleep that it will take them several pregnancies before they waken. Having young Ents around when they do will energize them. I don’t expect many Ents to be awake for the first 200 or 300 years. But we can mate with them while asleep, and once they bud an Entling, we will mate them again. We hope there will be three or four Entlings when the Ents finally awaken.”

“You can tend to that many Entlings at once?” Wilhelm asked.

“Oh yes. It can actually be quite boring tending just one. Human mothers tend several children at the same time, don’t they? Entwifes are the same. We like it when we have several Entlings at different stages.”

“What do you do to raise them,” Jacob asked.

“The most important thing is to transplant them if they need to be in a different area. They need sun in their leaves and water for their roots. In a dry year we bring water to them.”

“I can’t imagine that a creature your size can carry very much water,” Ruth said.

“Heavens no. Carrying water?” Borea giggled. “We don’t carry the water. We go underground and sing it to the roots of our Entlings.”

They proceeded in such a manner all the way back to Tharbad, where Ruth again noted a dire need for a healer. The Brothers were greeted warmly by the tavern owner, who immediately offered them free rooms, if they would tell their tales.

Ruth immediately went into the town and began visiting the ill and injured, slowly restoring her hoard of coin. The Entwives and wagon were put into the stables. They needed little tending, so long as the wood was dampened every other day, to prevent it from drying out and killing the Entwives. The hobbits, as might be expected, just disappeared, coming out for meals and to sleep in Ruth’s room. (She was used to sleeping near the little people, since her time in the forest.)

The next morning the healer woke with a pain in her back. She healed herself, and then investigated. There was a hobnail in the bed about the size of a pea that irritated her back as she slept.

The tavern owner was busy preparing for the fair coming up in a few days, and instead of fixing the problem just had seven more mattresses brought up and piled on Ruth’s bed. That night she again had trouble sleeping, even though she was much higher than before. A mattress in that inn was rather thin, about two inches, leaving Ruth floating 16 inches above the bed, which was less than comfortable.

For the rest of the day, a slight tapping could be heard in the room, but any maid entering would see nothing. As soon as she left, the hobbits would come out and start to work again, using their hammers to try and pound the nail into the wood. Two of them, Drogo and Bodo were miners, and they took turns hitting the nail. Merry and Pippin took over occasionally, but were less adept at driving the hobnail into the wood.

Just before dinner that innkeeper came into the room, with the biggest man Ruth had ever seen. He barely was able to get through the door, with his huge, muscled body. He carried a hammer.

“I need the extra mattresses,” the innkeeper said. “People are coming in for the fair, and we are going to set up a space above the stables. Most will sleep on the floor, but I can get a copper more if they want a mattress. Kon will fix the problem. He is the inn blacksmith.

Kon didn’t say much. Well, anything. Maids carried away the extra mattresses, and the man-mountain felt the hobnail, which had been driven half way into the wood by the hobbit hammering. He took his own hammer, bigger than any hobbit, and struck the nail once. When Ruth looked, she saw that his single blow had set the nail a good half inch into the wood.

“Thank you kind smith,” she said. Kon just nodded to her and then squeezed out through the door to the room. As soon as the smith and innkeeper left, hobbits started to appear.

“One blow did more work than all the swings we made,” an amazed Pippin said.

“Bah,” Drogo answered. “Given time we would have solved the problem. But this does mean the lady can sleep tonight.”

The Grimm brothers, who were doing both matinee and evening readings were thrilled to hear of the tale.

“The Healer and the Hobnail,” Jacob said. “A new story.”

He and his brother then rattled off ideas for the story, thrilling Ruth that she herself was going to be in a tale. After dinner the brothers went back to the inn for another show, and Ruth went out to make a few more healing calls. That night the exhausted healer came back to her bed and collapsed into it, not even realizing that the hobnail was gone.

It was two nights later when Ruth finally got a chance to listen to the Grimms in the crowded barroom. The owner allowed her to stand behind the bar: there just wasn’t anywhere else to stand. She was surprised to hear the story called The Princess and the Pea, which was a variation on her story. In it was a princess, and the hobnail had become a pea.

At breakfast the next day, she asked the brothers about it. “Yes, it is your story,” Wilhelm admitted. “But don’t think it isn’t you in it. We just felt a princess worked better for the story. Consider yourself a princess now.”

Ruth laughed: “I am just a poor farmgirl. I shall never be a princess.”

“You might be,” Jacob said. “And if you are, what a story it will make for us.”

“I think we will leave tomorrow,” Ruth said. “Let the barkeep know. I’m sure he will want to get these two rooms open for the rest of the fair.”

Ruth had only a few calls that day, and went to the fair. The hobbits accompanied her, knowing that it would be easy to be hidden in such large crowds. Ruth had again amassed quite a hoard of silvers and coppers, and she went into the fair with glee. She found some amazing cloth from the east, including something called velour, which had the feel of fur, but was much thinner. She bought two rolls in contrasting colors, wondering if she could make it into a dress.

Her other major purchase was at the inn itself. She bought a pony cart and a pony from Kon, who managed to conduct the entire sale without speaking a single word. It helped that she had run her hands over those muscular arms, healing little tears and breaks inside to ease the smith’s arms while at the same time removing the exhaustion he was feeling from all the work the fair had brought him.

That night hobbits moved the wood from the donkey cart to the pony cart while the stable boys slept. Early the next morning the Grimms got their coppers changed to silvers, with the innkeeper glad to have more of the small coins to use as change. The Grimms were leaving with a good collection of silver, while Ruth was nearly broke. But she could make some coin healing on the way home, while the brothers probably wouldn’t get a chance to perform again.

They were barely out of the town when Jacob leaned over to Ruth and asked. “When you were telling us all about the stories you didn’t know, you mentioned a weaver with a funny name.”

“Rumpelstiltskin,” Ruth said. “And he was a spinner, not a weaver. Why?”

“I just think he has to have a tale of his own,” Jacob said. “I was thinking of that old hobbit that sold us the wood. He would make an excellent model for the spinner, wouldn’t he.”

“Well, Rumpelstiltskin was a man, not a hobbit,” Ruth ventured. “But with that aside, then yes, there are many similarities.

And the quest continued homeward.