Part IV: You’re Not From Around Here, Are You?

After they had exhausted all the things around them for Faith to point at, they moved on to verbs. Faith would mime an action, and Gandalf would give her the word for it. By the time the sky started to brighten Faith had learned maybe a hundred words. Not enough to carry on a conversation, but good enough for some basic communication…about at the level of one of the old text computer games that Andrew liked to play when he was feeling retro: “Go north,” “take stone,” “kill demon” sort of thing. The demons that they had fought seemed to be called ‘orcs’ but Faith wasn’t sure if that was a generic name for demons, or the name for that particular breed.

Gandalf put an end to the language lesson by indicating that he was going back to bed. “You sleep,” he said to Faith, pointing back to her own bedroll.

“No sleep,” said Faith, shaking her head.

Gandalf looked dubious, but he didn’t argue the point. Faith figured that that was largely because she didn’t have the vocabulary to understand any argument he might make. He shook his head in resignation, and went to wake Bilbo.

Faith could only understand a few words from the conversation that they had. Not enough to even get the gist of what they were saying to each other. She didn’t know if Gandalf was telling Bilbo what a great girl she was, or if he was warning him to keep a careful watch to make sure that she didn’t try to slit his and Beorn’s throats while they were sleeping. She didn’t think it could have been the latter, because Bilbo smiled quite happily at her, after Gandalf had lain back down in his bedroll to get some more sleep.

It looked like Gandalf had told him about their language lessons, because Bilbo picked up right where Gandalf had left off teaching her things.

Bilbo started to prepare breakfast when the sky got bright enough that he could see what he was doing. Faith tried to make herself useful, fetching water from a nearby creek and other things, while Bilbo taught her a bunch of words having to do with food, and its preparation.

The sun peeking over the horizon, combined with the scent the cooking breakfast awoke Gandalf and Beorn. They all ate a breakfast of pancakes, with butter and honey, washed down by a hot tea-like drink, also sweetened with honey, before they broke camp.

Once again, Faith found herself walking along beside Bilbo. Among other things, she didn’t have to look up so much to look at him. Seated on his pony, the smallest of the three, his head wasn’t much higher above the ground than hers. As the morning unfolded, he slowly told her the story of the journey that he was on. She gathered that he had left his home, somewhere far to the west, travelling with several companions. They’d had many adventures, facing orcs and other things, that had culminated with a great battle some distance to the east of here. And now Bilbo was on his way back home. There was a lot more to the story than that, that Faith couldn’t begin to comprehend. She’d had to keep interrupting Bilbo, to ask him to repeat things using simpler words, and explaining what they meant to even get as much of the story as she had.

They crested a hill in the late afternoon, and Faith could see out over a broad valley, with a range of mountains visible far to the west, that dwarfed the mountains to their north. “The Misty Mountains,” said Bilbo as he pointed to them. Faith guessed that they were still many days’ journey away, if that was even where they were going. She had learned that their immediate destination was Beorn’s home, but she had little idea where that was. She had gathered from Bilbo’s story that it was somewhere between the mountains, and the forest, which meant that it might be close, but she had the impression that they expected to be travelling for many more days yet.

They stopped to make camp while there was still a couple of hours of daylight left. After another meal of bread, honey, trail-mix, etc. Bilbo removed a large book from one of his saddle bags, along with a pen and a bottle of ink, and started to write in it.

After he had filled a page, Bilbo called for Faith to come over to him. He flipped back to the beginning of the book, and showed her a page with a map drawn on it. He started pointing out places on it, that she recognized from the story he had told her. He pointed out the Misty Mountains, that she had seen that afternoon, and Mirkwood, the enormous forest whose northern boundary they were skirting. A river was shown flowing southward between the mountains and the forest. Bilbo pointed to a place between the river and the forest. “This is Beorn’s home, where we are going.” What Faith actually understood of of what he said was more like “Beorn home, we go,” but that was good enough to understand what he meant.

“Where we?” asked Faith.

Bilbo pointed to a place near the north-western corner of Mirkwood. “We are here.”

Faith examined the map for a moment, and pointed to a spot about half way between their current location, and a small river that was shown flowing into the forest. “We fight orcs.”

Bilbo nodded enthusiastically. “That’s right.”

Faith gauged the distance that they had travelled from the river bridge in two days, compared to the distance remaining to Beorn’s home, and figured that they still had a couple of weeks’ journey ahead of them, assuming that the map was drawn to an accurate scale, and the terrain would be as easy to cross as what she had experienced so far, and the weather remained fair. Something like a heavy snowfall could quickly change that though.

Gandalf had been watching her and Bilbo with the map. He came over to them. “Where are you from?” he asked, waving his hand around the map.

Faith shook her head. “No on…” She paused, not knowing the word for ‘map.’ She pointed to it. “What is this?”

“This is a map,” said Gandalf.

“No on map,” said Faith.

Gandalf seemed to accept that readily enough. After a quick conversation with Bilbo, too quick for Faith to follow any of it, he took Bilbo’s book and pen, turned to a fresh page, and started to draw. Faith realized that he was drawing a new map, showing a much wider area. Faith recognized the main features from Bilbo’s map taking up a small area in the north of it. Here was the final proof that she wasn’t on Earth anymore—maybe thrown back into the distant past, or something—not that Faith had really needed any: the continent that Gandalf had drawn didn’t look like any of the ones that she knew. Gandalf turned the book to her when he was done. “Is your home on this map?”

Faith shook her head. “No on map,” Damn! How did you explain to someone you were from a different world, probably a completely different dimension? Something like that would be hard enough to explain, even if anyone here spoke English. With the sort of vocabulary she had learned so far, it was impossible.

She turned the pages back to Bilbo’s map, and pointed to a spot about a day’s journey to the east of the river bridge. “Fall sky here.”

She looked at Gandalf, expecting to see outright disbelief on his face. She didn’t see it. There was what she took for a healthy level of skepticism, but he didn’t seem to be rejecting what she said completely. He turned back to his own map. “Are you from Valinor?” he asked, pointing off to the west of what he had drawn.

“Never heard of it,” said Faith, which of course, no one understood. She tried again. “No on map.” She swept her hands all around the boundaries of it, and shook her head. “No map.”

Gandalf was clearly puzzled, but he too seemed to see the futility of trying to get any explanation from her using the limited vocabulary that they had to work with. He closed up the book, and told Bilbo that it was time to start preparing dinner.

Faith had started the day thinking that Bilbo was some sort of servant for Gandalf or Beorn—he did seem to be the one who took care of most of the cooking and cleaning and such—but she had quickly disabused herself of that notion as he had told her his story. She wasn’t entirely sure what he was to the others, but it was clear that he wasn’t their servant. He took care of the cooking because he liked to cook, and he wasn’t shy about giving out orders to the others to fetch water, or firewood or any of the other things he needed in the course of making dinner.

Gandalf and Beorn followed Bilbo’s directions with a good cheer that made it clear that they weren’t his servants, either. They were three companions, sharing a common journey, each doing his own part along the way.

Beorn seemed to be their guide. He had transformed into his bear form at several times during the day, and gone loping off to scout the road ahead of them. Gandalf seemed to share in the guide duties, and Faith had seen last night that they also shared the night watch duties. She had seen that they were both formidable fighters too, and if there were other things like those orcs roaming around this world, that was something that any travelling party would need.

She had also learned that Bilbo called himself a “Hobbit,” and that he was from a place called Hobbiton, in the Shire, both of which he had pointed out to her on his map. Gandalf was an “Istar,” which she gathered meant something more than “old man.” There was nothing old about the way that he moved, and at times she had felt that there was some great power within him. There was something about Bilbo too. Not necessarily a power of his own: maybe it was something that he carried. It made her nervous, but short of giving him a thorough frisking, she couldn’t think of any way to find out what it was. She didn’t think it could be anything very important, though.