Legends of Belariath
Roquai
Hobbit Travels
Day 1 – Hour 1
Tohm set out early. It was only third late lunchtime by the time he put both feet to the road and went on his way when his tummy grumbled at him. Breakfast had been a light one. He licked the extra salivation off of his lips at the thoughts of the first, second, and third helpings of blueberry bagel, thickened ox milk, two kinds of cheese, a couple of jams, an plateful of fried tomatoes, sweetbread, and for the capper, sweetbread mash. That morning’s simple meal felt like it had been a month ago. The warmth of the hot mash had left his heart and had run to the top of his body. Vertical rays from the sun were heating his pate, but the hobbit’s quick trotting feet kept a constant breeze flowing through his cotton peasant clothes.
The refreshing tease of the artificial wind helped ease his quarrelsome hunger and his mind. It makes his thoughts drift backwards, literally – to his knapsack on his back, stuffed to the brim by his daughter with cakes and bottles of dandelion wine and water, but then he drifts even further back, over the last ten minutes of walking, then farther, back to the inn.
‘Ne’er woulda gone of this bloomin’ trip if that gobbie hadn’t been so damn keen,’ he thinks. Mind you that halflings have soft tongues and gentle habits. The word “damn” is only apart of Tohm’s vocabulary in times of distress. This quaint farmer doesn’t want to see anybody damned. The tender tug of a pampered stomach distracts his conservatism.
‘Not fer a dozen bushels of pipe stoof (stuff).’ In actuality, Tohm would have given blood to have even one bushel of his precious pipe stuffing. All of the imaginary ailments that have followed him from Shallowbank were caused by lack of smoking, or so our hobbit thinks. And he’s probably right. Halflings don’t normally leave home without a backpack filled with it. Tohm blames his lapse in essential memory on the superstitious belief that the pipe dropped out of his mouth the previous night, spilling ash on the floor, and brought him a week of bad luck. In this instance, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy
The face of the goblin he refers to was a sharp one. It chiseled its way into his mind like a nightmare since he met the little witch a few days ago. Tohm stopped carrying all of his cash around on his person since that afternoon. He later found out that the goblin, whose name he cannot and does not want to remember, pilfered his pocket during the time it took to convince him to run this errand for her. Tohm has been ten mehrials lighter since then and the thought brings tears to his eyes, thinking that a big green thief is eating his dole. He wipes a fat wet spot out of the corner of his cheek and moves on.
Her words had been quick and precise. And probably untrue. She gave him a note and a direction and a purpose. Although he’d never tell Othelia, his priceless and only daughter, of the debt he made while playing blackjack with an eerie nymph, he had to make it up. Not so much for himself, but for his offspring. Not many around these parts had use for fresh and clean food since they at out of that trough they called the Lonely Inn bar. As a result their produce rotted before it had a chance to be sold. Tohm ditched nearly seventy mehrial – his entire wage since he arrived at the inn – trying to luck out and hit big. He failed.
The goblin girl promised reward and Tohm ate her words up like ambrosia. Another chance is all he could ever ask for. He thanked the girl after she robbed him and left. That was three days ago.
He had the last of his earnings with him – twenty-two coins and eight coppers. He left everything of value in trust to Othelia so she could sell it at the pawnshops for wage and travel money in case… Tohm didn’t come back.
The hobbit swallows the lump at the top of his throat, tightens the grip on his knapsack, and quickens his step.
Days 1 - 4
The days are uneventful. He has plenty of food. His rations allows for three meals a day which is far too little in the hobbits opinion, but Tohm eats enough in those three meals to sustain even the largest of races for at least one day. It’s plenty to keep his small body running like a high-octane motor.
Supporting his hummingbird physiology, Tohm, when on the road, sleeps four hours a night and hardly a blink during the day. Nervousness plays the largest factor in this. The young farmer in no stranger to work and the inherent danger that waits for anyone of strenuous vocation. Ditches and briar patches are his best allies when night falls. The hobbit travels in lowly places where trouble is least wary to lurk, as if by instinct. It pays off, for the halfling bypasses fly-by-night marauders and ambushing bandits and highwaymen by the score, and even Tohm is unaware of his rampant success. No unwitting biggun has gained the upper hand from THIS hobbit on this trip.
Couer d'Lane was one day and two night’s journey away before the first notable event struck our hobbit.
The same day…
Tohm meets an impasse. A wide, unfordable river crossed by a single ferry and one mean looking captain who mans the tollbooth. Tohm has stayed tucked away, out of sight until now, behind several trees and some grasses. The man would do nothing and say little to the hobbit if he spotted him, but watchful makeup in Tohm’s psyche tells him otherwise.
These choices are of little consequence. Tohm cannot afford the toll anyways. There is only one solution that this hobbit knows, as any hobbit would know, and a plan is drawn and executed as easily as the hidden halfling draws his breath.
He waited for a good seventy minutes before moving from his spot. The one in the tollbooth exited through a small portal in the rear of the wooden blockade and took a short walk to the dock some fifty yards away, through tall grasses riveted with wagon wheel tracks and a single path of trodden dirt down the rough center. Tohm waited time and darted along the side of the knell, running low between the tall grass and the forest brush. At the end of the dock the toll master was untying the thick ropes he used to anchor the rather large shuttle.
The shuttle itself was the perfect size. The deck is high enough above the water and wooden siding is at the right angle where anyone immediately beside the boat would be hidden by its own mass from the people inside it. But he had to act quickly to use this to an advantage.
The captain let the thick rope splash into the choppy water below. The instant the gruff human turned his back the hobbit’s flit feet dart forward from the dense growth and toward the docks.
The big dinghy bobbed into the water as the captain took post at the rear of the ship. There were no other passengers. Although Tohm isn’t questioning his luck, running full speed for the edge of the water before the ship pulls into the current, the toll master’s reason for his departure is that he is having lousy business on this side of the river and is looking for a change of pass on the other side, willing to risk the harassment of the local hoodlums if it means squeaking a few mehrial’s off unlucky travelers. Luckily for Tohm, hobbits rarely pay taxes.
Tohm quickly and noiselessly wades into the muddy riverbank as the back oar dips into the water like the tail of a buoyant whale. The human looks forward, squinting at the opposite riverbank across the hundred-yard stretch of turgid water, churning the murky sediment below. The hobbit keeps his head above water as he walks along the mud. His lightweight and wide feet allow him to walk on top of muck that any others would get stuck in. Tohm takes a breath and ducks under the water to avoid taking a hard shot from the oar, the circular motion impeding his way to the rope he intends to cling to.
To his horror, the captain suddenly rows. The boat no longer slides an inch at a time but it quickly gains half a foot in front of the submerged hobbit. His eyes bulge and his legs give a strong kick, propelling his body forward and under the wooden rudder-paddle that batters the water above his head, launching himself at the back of the small ship and the sunken end of the rope that flaps a few feet in front of him. He zooms toward his target like a missile with both hands outstretched. Just when he thinks that the tail of the rope is between his palms and snaps them around its end, the torrents made by the rushing water snap his lifeline away again. He gives a grunt of effort and kicks his little legs. If he can’t reach the rope and pull himself to the surface then he stands a good chance of being bopped in the head by the paddle as well as being thrown into the river’s current. Both possibilities are very real and very likely to the halfling’s paniced mind and the thought of drowning powers his feet even harder.
But today must not be Tohm’s day, because the human has hardly even begun to row. The front of the boat catches into the main current of the river and the captain dips the oar deeper into the water and puts his back behind the shoving. The boat lurches ahead. The rope pulls the same trick, only yanked out of his fully secured hands by the power of the moving boat in front of him. Tohm looks at the surface of the water just a couple of feet above his head. It dances and shimmers in the sunlight, murky from silt and broken by the splashing of the single paddle. Desperately, he windmills his arms and forgets the immediate dangers. Bubbles rise up from the halfling’s throat as he rises to breath and, on cue, the artificial current of the driving force of the boat sucks at his kicking feet and drags him in reverse. What seems like an eternity to the frantic hobbit is only a blink of the eye for us. He swims up and gets nowhere. The whirlpool of surging water engulfs his feet and yanks him further backward. Tohm feels the side of the oar brush along his flailing calf. Just when he thinks he’s about to pass out from a lack of oxygen, he is clunked on the back of his head by the paddle and all goes black.
Later…
Blue filters through the cracks in his eyelids. There is a sickening moment where Tohm thinks that he may still be underwater and that he is dieing, weightless, as his body has lost the fight. Consciousness and kinesthetic awareness filter in behind the blue, which is just the harmless sky above him, bringing feeling and motion back into his exterior limbs.
Some time after he regains control over his extremities he sits upright. The upper side of his body that was facing the sun, just now dipping below the tree line, is dry, while his lower half is wet. Having a squishy bottom makes him shudder and almost giggle. Almost giggle, because the moment he has that impulse another one rears up that screams, “YOU’VE STILL GOT WATER DOWN THERE.” Tohm isn’t sure of what to make of the lung-wrenching sensation until he keels over, his tiny convulsing chest pressed against his knees, thick spats of watery mucus hacking up from his tubes. He does that for about half of an hour.
When the little guy comes to he sees that he rests a dozen steps away from the docks. He looks around wildly, thinking that somehow he floated back to the knell, which he came from. But there is no roadblock behind him and the riverbank is unrecognizable.
Tohm struggles to get to his wobbly feet. Standing allows him to see his surroundings a little better. There rests the dinghy, tied and floating at the shoreline. The captain is nowhere to be seen. On the opposite side of the river is the harbor he made that fateful departure from. Tohm smiles gently. He will only later come to realize that the only way he could have made it to shore was through the mercy of the ship’s captain. For now, no other being in sight, Tohm slips away as he so often does, slinking slowly along the edges of this clearing until he feels safe again on the open road.
Day 5
The lights of Couer d'Lane made the hobbit’s small heart feel warm again for the first time since he set off on this journey. His food this morning was crushed and soggy and unappealing. The toll master, although he was generous enough to save young Tohm’s life, lifted his wines and left him only with one skin of water and five pounds of mushy bread to chew. As a result, Tohm forfeited all five lunches today and wasn’t looking forward to dinner unless he could find this shore town before he was forced to bed. The warm glow of a few small tavern establishments had signaled to the gleeful halfling that food and rest were fast approaching.
He didn’t ask directions like he should have and only followed the clues he had been given at the Lonely Inn by the goblin girl. Walking down narrow and deserted stone streets, Tohm scratches his head looking at the signs that swing high above him, looking for this apothecary. Tohm only had a faint idea of what it actually was so did not expect a part of his memory to help him distinguish the structure if he saw it from afar.
Footwork paid off. During the second hour of his search, in an area of the town where all of the streets and buildings had a gentle downhill slope, he made out the exotic text on another overhanging billboard.
It read, “Ye Olde Apothecary.”
He scampered across the causeway and nearly slammed into the door nose first. Only instead of his face, a pudgy fist shot out and rapped on the lower panel an innumerable number of times, praying that someone let him in.