Sword and Arrow

Chapter 39

Everything hurt.

Aragorn floated in and out of consciousness and all he could feel was pain. So much pain that he wished he had died instead.

Cold and pain. That was all he could feel.

Freezing river water took him where it would, both numbing his senses and causing his many wounds to flame.

After what felt like an eternity of drifting in that blasted river, Aragorn washed up on what felt like a rocky shore. He couldn't move. He couldn't open his eyes. It took all the energy he had to keep living.

What could have been minutes or hours later, he felt a nudge on his side. Aragorn groaned and opened his eyes to slits that let in the bright sunlight. It made his head hurt.

A horse's head was nudging his side. A quite familiar horse's head, in fact. Aragorn forced himself to open his eyes wider. If he wasn't mistaken, this would be the horse that he had ordered to be set free from the Rohirrim stables. Brego had been his name.

Aragorn groaned again and blinked, raising a weak hand to wipe the mixed blood and water off his forehead. Damn, he was a mess. Sure, he had been in many accidents and had been wounded in many battles before, but he had never done anything as bad as this. And he wasn't as young as he used to be, either.

Slowly, Brego kneeled beside Aragorn. How had the horse even managed to find him? The myths about Rohirrim horses being magical could almost be true, passed fleetingly through Aragorn's head as he slowly pulled himself up onto the brown horse. Aragorn clutched at the reins, still leaning forward against Brego's neck as he sat in the saddle. Brego rose to his feet (or hooves) and took a few careful steps forward, allowing Aragorn to redistribute his balance. Of course, Ranger horses are like that too. Honestly, Aragorn would not be surprised if Rohirrim horses and Ranger horses were the same.

Here, the canyon surrounding the river had flattened out into a hilly slope, and Brego made no trouble of climbing out of it and cantering across the plain. Aragorn merely had to touch his week hand to Brego's neck for the horse to immediately veer to the west, seeking out Helm's Deep.

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By the afternoon, Aragorn was sitting up straight in the saddle. The sun had dried off his clothes, and while that meant he was no longer sopping wet, the dried blood from his many wounds had stuck his clothes to his skin. His shoulder had been scraped raw and was now red with blood, both dried and wet. Aragorn had done his best to bind the wound with a scrap of cloth from the bottom of his jacket, but it wasn't much in his current state. It took all he had to stay in that saddle.

Aragorn was more than half sure that there was dried blood at the corner of his mouth, staining his beard red, and at his temple, matting his hair. His forearm was wrapped in another makeshift bandage to try to stem the bleeding from a huge gash that had been given to him by a stone protruding from the river.

Atop all these physical wounds, a great emotional wound had been dealt to him: Mellann was missing. Aragorn couldn't believe that he had let himself lose it, but it was gone - and while he had surveyed the relatively shallow river, he had seen no sign of the glimmering metal.

As faithful Brego carried him across the dried plain, something caught his eye: a great host, still far away, clad in black. Aragorn's blood ran cold. There were thousands - no, tens of thousands in that army. He could barely make out the tattered banners they held aloft, but there it was: the White Hand of Saruman, stark against the black cloth.

Saruman was marching. Helm's Deep would have to stand strong - and it was a stronghold that hadn't been tested in decades. And if the Uruk-Hai reached the fort before the Rohirrim...