Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ The Two Gundams ❯ The Pass at Cirith Ungol ( Chapter 8 )

Chapter 8: The Pass at Cirith Ungol

“We have to climb that?!” Frodo stared in dismay at the steep, narrow staircase that wound its way up the relatively sheer face of the cliff above the road leading to the ancient fortress that guarded the lower pass.

“Yes! Yes!” Gollum whined. “Up the stairs we must go, to the tunnel! It's the only way!” He scampered up the first few steps and then scrambled back down to grab Frodo by the hand. “Come! Come!” He tugged Frodo up the steps and the exhausted hobbit stumbled after him.

“Not so fast!” Sam protested. He scurried after them and slapped Gollum's hand away. “He doesn't need your help.” Sam then grasped Frodo's hand himself and proceeded to lead Frodo up the steps at a more sedate pace.

“I can walk on my own, Sam,” Frodo wheezed, but when Sam released his hand, he proceeded to crawl rather than walk up the steps. Sam let him crawl by and then followed close on his heels, ready to catch Frodo should he slip on the damp stones.

Hadeya brought up the rear. “This could take awhile,” he muttered.

The trip up the steep staircase was slow and tedious, and with the sky completely masked by the thick black smoke being spewed out by the volcano, there was no way to judge the passage of time except the increasing tiredness of their muscles. Hadeya called a halt when he deemed it close to sunset.

“Let's get some rest,” he said, shrugging out of his pack when they reached a reasonably wide ledge.

Frodo immediately collapsed, gasping for air. “How much farther is it?”

“Not far!” Gollum assured him.

Sam stared up the sheer cliff, where the stairs disappeared into darkness. “You can't be serious! I can't even see the top!”

Gollum scowled at him. “It's not far!” he repeated decisively. “Stop discouraging Master!”

“Me?!” Sam choked out. “Who do you think you are, you little maggot?! I've been more help to Frodo on this journey than you'll ever be! You're just a whiny, smelly burden on the rest of us!”

“Sam,” Frodo interrupted wearily, “do we have any food left?”

“Yes, Mr. Frodo!” Sam dug into his pack and produced two packets of leaf-wrapped lembas bread. He handed one to Frodo. “We've plenty of the elven waybread left.”

Frodo bit into the unappealing wafer without much enthusiasm, but he munched it steadily, much to Sam's obvious relief. He offered the other packet to Hadeya.

Hadeya shook his head. “No, thanks. I can last awhile yet without food. There are one or two advantages to being a demigod.”

Sam scratched his head. “About that... I thought Mr. Heero was your father.”

“He is. But my mother is the goddess Freya, so I inherited many god-like traits from her, among them immortality, which allows me to go without food for a long time if I need to.”

“So you can't die?” Sam squinted in confusion as he pondered this concept.

“I can be killed,” Hadeya said, “but I won't die of natural causes.”

Frodo had not appeared to be paying attention to their conversation, but now he straightened up. “I have not heard of the goddess Freya before,” he said.

“Freya is the goddess of love, beauty and fertility,” Hadeya replied. “Although she was working hardest on the fertility part when she met my father,” he added with a snicker.

Sam blushed. “Umm... They weren't acquainted before then?”

“No. My father and the rest had just come to Asgard on vacation. They stayed just long enough for Zechs to have Alexa and for my father to knock up my mother.”

Sam's blush deepened. “They weren't married?”

“Gods don't normally marry mortals.”

“Wait a minute!” Frodo interrupted. The conversation seemed to have re-energized him. “What do you mean Zechs had Alexa? Zechs is a man! Didn't they just adopt her?”

“Well, that's kind of a complicated story, so let me just say that magic was involved. Alexa is the genetic offspring of Treize and Zechs, and Zechs gave birth to her. I wouldn't ask Zechs about it if I were you, though. He's still a little ticked about how he ended up pregnant in the first place.”

“I think,” Frodo said faintly, “I don't want to know more.”

Sam nodded vigorously. He munched on a piece of lembas bread as if it were actually tasty.

They all managed to sleep a little bit, despite being balanced rather precariously on a ledge above a steep drop. But it was still extremely dark when Hadeya declared it morning and said they should get moving. They started once again to climb the stairs, the hobbits frequently having to use their hands to get over some of the steeper places because of their small stature. But after what seemed like forever, they finally clambered up onto a ledge with no more stairs above it. A narrow path led off to their right, creeping along the cliff face before disappearing into a narrow cleft in the rocks.

“The trail!” Gollum squealed. “Just as I promised! And after the trail is a tunnel and then we will be there!”

“We'll be where?” Sam demanded.

“There's a door,” Gollum called vaguely over his shoulder. “Follow me!” He dashed off down the trail and plunged into the rocks.

“I don't trust him,” Sam muttered darkly. “He's up to something.”

“He's kept his word so far,” Frodo said tiredly. “Let's just keep going.”

They trudged stiffly down the trail after Gollum and everyone heaved a sigh of relief when they left the exposed cliff face behind them. But the narrow, twisting trail between sharp-edged rocks was not a lot better than the path along the cliff. Everyone's hands and the hobbits feet were torn and bloodied in any place that had managed to be left unscathed by the climb up the staircase. But at last they came to a dark opening between two rocks from which issued a stench so foul that everyone stopped to gag and Frodo wretched up what little food he had consumed to that point.

“I can't go in there!” Frodo rasped, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

“But we must!” Gollum cried. “This is the way in!” He dashed partway into the cave and then dashed back, grabbing Frodo's sleeve. “Just a little farther!” He dragged Frodo into the cave with surprising strength and they disappeared into the darkness.

“Hey!” Sam shouted. He darted after them, disappearing into the dark as well.

“Oh, great!” Hadeya exclaimed. “This is just what I need! Blundering around in a stinking cave in the dark looking for two wretched hobbits! I completely deserve to get laid after this!” He marched into the cave and immediately ran into something sticky. “What the hell?” He swiped at it and his hand came away covered in thick sticky strands. “This is not good,” he muttered. “Given how thick these strands are, this must be one hell of a big spider. I imagine it would find a hobbit a yummy snack.” He sighed. “Well, I suppose I should probably prevent that.” He forged ahead into the cave. “Frodo! Sam! Where are you?”

A faint shout that might have been Sam's voice echoed out of the darkness.

Hadeya hurried in that direction, tripping over unseen rocks and slipping in patches of icy water. “I should really have had Uncle Quatre teach me how to make light balls!” he muttered. “Sam!”

“Mr. Frodo!” Sam's cry was just a short way ahead.

“Gollum!” Frodo's voice echoed weakly off the cave walls. “Which way have you gone? Goll…” Frodo's shout cut off with a startled grunt, followed by a strange skittering sound.

“Mr. Frodo?” Sam called. “What's happened?! Mr. Frodo!” A brilliant flash of light illuminated the cave, revealing a glittering tangle of thick spider web. Sam was holding aloft Frodo's little vial of liquid that Galadriel had given him and light as bright as the sun poured out between his fingers. Directly above his head, a giant black spider about the size of an elephant crouched in the web, Frodo's unconscious form dangling from two of its legs. “You let him go!” Sam shrieked, waving Frodo's sword.

The spider scuttled back from the light, taking Frodo with her.

Sam slashed at the web, somehow managing to cut a major strand and the spider lost her grip. She dropped heavily to the floor of the cave and charged at Sam, leaving Frodo on the floor behind her. Sam hacked away valiantly, doing practically no damage.

Hadeya sighed. “Excuse me, but could we all just take a moment?”

“No!” Sam cried. “She killed Mr. Frodo!” He charged forward and the spider smacked him aside with one hairy leg. Sam dropped the vial and the light went out.

Having seen where it fell, Hadeya walked over and picked it up. Then he planted a foot on Sam's chest so he couldn't get up. “Sam,” he said calmly. “Spiders eat live prey. Frodo is not dead. Now would you please quit making such a fuss? I'd like to have a conversation here.” He turned to the spider. “Good evening, Mistress. How are you today?”

The spider settled back on her hind legs and waggled her forelegs. “Well enough, although I was hoping for a better meal than orc tonight.” Her mandibles clacked as she spoke.

“I daresay,” Hadeya replied, “but it would be very inconvenient for me if you ate my companion.”

“If I ate all three of you,” the spider responded, “you would be less inconvenienced.”

“That's a good point, although one might consider death to be a huge inconvenience.”

“Very true.”

“Is there something I might offer you in exchange for not eating us?”

“Well…” the spider clacked her mandibles thoughtfully. “I have grown too large to escape this cave. The trail down the cliff face is too steep for my weight and the orcs have blocked the other end of the cave with an iron-bound door. If I could escape through that door, I could make my way somewhere that has better foraging.”

“As it happens,” Hadeya said, “we need to go through that door. If you showed me where it is and I am able to open it, I would have very little reason to close it behind me.”

“And if you cannot open it, you will have no escape from my web and I can eat you.”

“That sounds fair.”

“What?!” Sam spluttered.

“I think Mistress Spider has made a very reasonable offer,” Hadeya said. “I think we should take her up on it.”

“But what about Mr. Frodo?!”

“Your companion will awaken in a few hours,” the spider said. “I have heard that my venom leaves a splitting headache and pronounced nausea, but I have not heard of any other ill effects.” She scuttled to the side. “See for yourself.”

Hadeya let Sam up and he raced to Frodo's side. “He's so pale!”

“It's the lack of breathing,” the spider said.

“You said he wasn't dead!” Sam waved the sword at her threateningly.

“He's not. The blood coagulates in dead prey. I hate that.”

Sam pressed his ear to Frodo's chest. “His heart's still beating.” He went very still. “And he is breathing! Just very slowly.”

“I told you.” The spider turned and scurried down a side tunnel. “The door is this way.”

“Come on, Sam.” Hadeya shouldered Frodo and started after the spider.

“How can you trust a creature like that?” Sam whispered anxiously.

“I've trusted worse,” Hadeya replied casually. “And besides, she might be one of Loki's children, which would make her my cousin.”

“Your cousin?!” Sam choked.

Hadeya shrugged. “I have scarier cousins.”

They followed the spider down the long dark tunnel until it dead-ended against a thick oak door bound with stout iron bands and studded with sharp spikes. A large iron lock was embedded in the planks.

Hadeya deposited Frodo on the ground and leaned over to examine it. “Well, this isn't much of a lock.” He pulled out his belt knife. “I think the blade should be thin enough.” Carefully, he inserted the tip into the lock and felt around. There was a faint click. “Ah!” He wiggled the knife around some more and was rewarded with another click. “Just one more, I think.” He probed for a while longer and there was another soft click, followed by the louder clack of the door unlatching. “There we go!” He sheathed his knife and scooped up Frodo. “Mistress Spider, would you care to go first? I imagine you have a grudge or two to settle with these orcs for locking you in all these years.”

“That is very thoughtful of you,” the spider said. She scuttled past them and squeezed through the door.

Hadeya gave her a bit of a head start. “With any luck, she'll clean out the orcs in our path and we should make it into Mordor undetected.” He put the vial in his pocket, extinguishing the light. “Nevertheless, there's no reason to announce our presence. Let's go.”

“Where do you suppose that wretched Gollum has got to?” Sam wondered aloud. “I know he led us into that spider's lair on purpose.”

“Undoubtedly,” Hadeya agreed. “He probably hoped that she would kill us and then he could just pick over the discarded husks to reclaim the ring. I imagine he'll lay low now that his plot has been uncovered. Even Frodo is unlikely to think the best of him after this.”

The rough passage they were following abruptly exited the mountainside, but it was hardly any lighter outside the cave than inside. They continued up the path, which occasionally had rough-hewn stairs up the steeper places.

Sam craned his neck, looking ahead. “I don't see that spider. What if she's waiting up ahead to waylay us?” A startled cry up ahead made him jump.

“I think not,” Hadeya replied. “It sounds like she's stumbled across the orcs.”

A chorus of hoarse shouts and the rasp of swords being drawn echoed down the path.

"It's Shelob!"

"How did she get out?!"

Hadeya put Frodo down. "Keep an eye on him. I'm going ahead to make sure no one makes it down the trail past Shelob." Leaving Sam behind, Hadeya ghosted up the trail. Just around a slight bend, the trail widened out into a narrow plateau as it approached the entrance to a rundown fortress. Moving much faster than one would have expected for a creature of her bulk, Shelob was skittering back and forth across the plateau, clouting orcs in all directions and stabbing them with the sharp curved spine at the bottom of her abdomen. The orcs whacked away at her desperately, but the barbs on her legs deflected their swords easily. Hadeya jumped into the fight. "You don't mind, do you, Mistress Shelob?" he shouted at the spider. "It's been awhile since I got to kill anything and it's been getting on my nerves. I think I'm starting to take after my father," he added with a chuckle.

“I can respect your father's sentiment, especially where orcs are concerned.” She caught one in her mandibles and bit it in two, spurting black Orc blood everywhere.

Hadeya hacked off an orc's head. More orcs poured out of the fortress to join the fight, but between the two of them, Shelob and Hadeya finished them off.

“You didn't save any to eat,” Hadeya noted.

“They taste bad,” Shelob said. “But from here, I can get down into the forest, where there is better game. And if I go south, I can get fresh Easterlings. Very tasty!”

“I wish you the best, then.” Hadeya bowed politely.

“The same to you,” Shelob bent her forelegs, dipping into a slight bow before scurrying off through the fortress gates.

Hadeya went back to get Sam and Frodo. “There must be a way into Mordor through the fortress up ahead. Shelob went that way. Come on.” He shouldered Frodo again and started back up the trail with Sam on his heels.

Sam stared when they came out onto the plateau. “That's a lot of orcs!”

“Yes, indeed,” Hadeya said. “The fortress should be empty.”

They went through the gates and entered a small courtyard. It was cluttered with broken furniture, and reeked of things neither of them wanted to identify. The only other exit from the courtyard was a door into the keep, so they went in. The inside of the keep smelled even worse and included gnawed bones and stinking refuse along with the broken furniture. Decaying stairs wound up from the floor of the long common room. Since they did not see any other exits, they climbed the stairs to the next floor. A dying orc with its arm sheared off stared at them blankly when they reached the next landing.

“It looks like Shelob went this way,” Hadeya said. They continued up to the next landing, where a rickety wooden door that looked like it had only recently been ripped off its hinges lay inside an open doorway. On the far side of this room, a wide, iron-banded door stood wide open, revealing a desolate red landscape, with the lava-spewing volcano visible in the distance. “And here we are,” Hadeya said gravely. “Mordor.”

“That's a most inhospitable looking place,” Sam said mournfully. “And I think we won't find a drop of water to drink out there.”

“You're probably right,” Hadeya said. “Let's look for supplies before we go. And we should probably snag some orc armor and disguise ourselves. We're a little too attractive to pass for orcs, I think.”

So they put the unconscious Frodo in a corner and hid him under a pile of rags and scrap wood. But as they were about to go searching, Sam stopped with a frown. “Maybe we shouldn't leave the ring with Mr. Frodo while he can't defend himself. All kinds of nasty creatures seem to be attracted to it, and this close to Mordor, I bet there are a whole lot of very nasty creatures.”

“That's probably true.” Hadeya reached under the pile hiding Frodo and felt around. “Ah, here it is.” He pulled out the ring, dangling it from its chain. “Do you want to carry it?”

Sam eyed the ring uncomfortably. “I don't know if I should. It's whispering at me.”

“Really?” Hadeya eyed the ring. “I don't hear anything. Oh, well.” He shoved the ring in his pocket. “Let's go. I don't want to stay here too long.”

A quick search of the fortress turned up a skin of water, several skins of a foul-tasting brew that was probably intoxicating, and some very moldy bread.

“I think I'd rather starve than eat that,” Sam said when Hadeya showed him the bread.

“You think that all up until your belly's flat up against your spine,” Hadeya said. “And then you're suddenly very happy to have even moldy bread.” He tucked it in his pouch. “I don't think there's anything else worth taking. Let's collect Frodo and move out.”

But when they returned to the upper floor, they found Frodo sitting up in the middle of the junk they'd hidden him under, searching himself with a look of horrified panic on his face. When he saw them, he leaped to his feet with a strangled cry.

“It's gone! The ring is gone! The orcs must have it!”

“It's all right, Mr. Frodo!” Sam said as encouragingly as he could. “The orcs haven't got it. We took it with us just to be safe when we had to leave you here.”

A suddenly suspicious look sprang up on Frodo's face. “You took it?! And you left me here?!”

“Just for the moment, Mr. Frodo!” Sam said hastily. “We didn't know when you would wake up from the spider's venom!”

“The spider?!” Frodo's frown faded to a look of confusion. “In the cave?”

“That's right! There was a big spider in the cave and she stung you. But Hadeya convinced her not to eat us and we were able to escape.” Sam drew himself up. “Gollum led us into that trap on purpose! I told you he couldn't be trusted.”

Hadeya pulled the ring out of his pocket and held it out. “Here's the ring, Frodo.”

Frodo snatched it out of his hand and quickly slipped the chain over his head, clutching the ring against his chest. “Thank you!” he whispered. “I'm sorry to be this way. It's just…”

“No explanations necessary, Frodo,” Hadeya assured him. “Put this on.” He held out a reeking cloak and a shirt. “I have a helmet for you, too.”

“What for?” Frodo eyed the clothing with distaste.

“We have to cross open country that is likely crawling with orcs. We need to look like them. So get dressed. I want to get moving before the sun goes down completely.”

Frodo stared toward the vague outline of the door. “There's sun?”

“For another hour or so.” Hadeya pulled a tattered shirt over his head, followed by some banged up chain mail. He whipped a stained cloak around his shoulders and plopped a closed helmet with a narrow grill for his eyes on his head. “How do I look?”

“Hideous!” Sam declared. “What about me?”

“Very orc-like.”

Frodo managed a smile as he put on his shirt and cloak. Once he had his helmet settled on his head, they set out. Slipping out through the open doors and hurrying along a twisting path that wound down through the steep foothills, they rather quickly came upon a wide road of crushed red rock.

“I don't like the looks of this,” Hadeya muttered as they crouched behind some boulders next to the road. “This road looks well-used. And I see a lot of campfires. There's a huge army out there and they're in between us and that volcano.”

“What are we going to do?” Sam asked worriedly. He looked anxiously at Frodo, who was leaning against the boulder breathing hard.

“Well…” Hadeya rubbed his chin. “We'll do the best we can, but since we look like orcs, we may have to act like it at some point. But for the moment, this road is going in the right direction, so we'll take it.” He looked up at the sky. “But not right now. It's sunset. Let's get some sleep.”

They went back up the trail a little way and then off to one side, finding a fairly flat spot between a trio of boulders were they had something that approximated shelter. Frodo immediately fell into a deep sleep.

Sam squirmed around, trying to find a comfortable position. “Do you think we'll make it, Hadeya? All the way to Mount Doom, I mean.”

“We'd better,” Hadeya grumbled. “Getting this far and not going all the way sounds too much like coitus interruptus.”