Part V: The Joys of Plumbing
Faith didn’t go to sleep when Gandalf and Bilbo did that night. She stayed up with Beorn when he took the first watch. He wasn’t much for talking with her, lacking Gandalf’s patience and Bilbo’s enthusiasm. He tended to be very gruff, and spoke in short sentences, without Gandalf’s thoughtfulness, or Bilbo’s sometimes over-flowery language. When Beorn had something to say, he came right to the point and said it, without any concern for phrasing things in a way that might not offend (as Gandalf often did) or was in any way poetic (as Bilbo sometimes tended to do.) Much of the time that they shared together was spent in silence.
She did go to bed at about ten o’clock, by her watch, to catch a few hours sleep. She was awakened much later by the sound of Gandalf adding more wood to the fire. She got out of her bed to join him for the rest of the night, continuing her language lessons. She wished for a moment that she had Dawn along. Buffy’s brat of a sister might be annoying at times, but she was good with the language thing.
Gandalf noticed her checking the time on her watch, and asked to see it. He seemed to grasp that it was a timepiece fairly quickly. He was fascinated by the device, watching the regular changing of the numbers as it counted the seconds away. That led to spending a little time with Faith teaching him the symbols for the numbers on her watch, and to Gandalf teaching her more about numbers and counting than what she had picked up from Bilbo that day.
Gandalf was intrigued by all her modern gadgets. He very quickly learned how her lighter worked, and seemed to understand the underlying principles of its operation, even if he had never seen anything quite like it before. He was delighted by the penlight on her key-ring. Faith wasn’t sure if she adequately explained what the cell phone was to him. She had felt a little trepidation about showing him how it was also a camera—being able to show a Watcher a picture of a demon was so much simpler than trying to describe it too him, so all the Slayers carried around camera phones now. Gandalf was startled by the flash when it went off, and amazed to see the picture of himself on the small LCD display, but he didn’t seem to be disturbed by it. In some ways his delight at all the things she showed him reminded her of Giles, when presented with a new book, written in a language that he was unfamiliar with.
The pattern was set for the following days. Faith would usually walk along beside Bilbo while they travelled, listening to his stories. He had stopped talking about his own adventures, and started to tell other stories: the quest for the Silmarils, wonderful jewels created by Fëanor and stolen by Melkor; the tale of Lúthien and Beren; the fall of Númenor. She wondered if the stories he was telling her were part of the history of this world, or just stories.
The weather warmed slightly, melting the snow that was on the ground, and turning the road they were following to mud for a time, but it quickly dried in the bright and sunny days. The temperature still dropped well below freezing at night. Gandalf and Beorn seemed both cheered, and worried by the warmer weather. It did make the travelling easier, but they were concerned that it might come to a sudden end.
By night, Faith would stay up for the start of the first watch with Beorn. Sometimes he would transform into his bear shape, and move off into the darkness, doing a patrol around the perimeter of their camp. She used the moments of privacy that gave her, enhanced by a blanket strung up on a line stretched between tree branches, to take care of things like bathing, using water from a pot heated over the fire, and some soap that Bilbo had provided for her. She used the same water to wash her socks, and underwear, and left them to hang by the fire until morning to dry. That tended to give her a slightly smoky odour during the day, but it was much better than the alternative. In a couple of weeks she’d have another problem, and she didn’t think her language skills would be up to asking about “feminine hygiene products” before then. She supposed that she would have to “go on the rag” to use Spike’s phrase. Faith was even less pleased with the toilet arrangements, than she was with the bathing. More than once, while she squatted behind some bush, Faith swore to herself, that if—when—she got home, she would never take toilet paper for granted again.
After bathing and doing her laundry, Faith would catch a few hours of sleep before waking again to spend the early morning hours with Gandalf. No one asked her to take a watch herself, and she didn’t ask. She was still a stranger to these people, and one with a strange story about having fallen out of the sky at that. She wouldn’t have trusted anyone who told a story like that, why should she expect them to?
They had been travelling for a week before Faith saw any more sign that they were not the only people living in this world. Early one afternoon she sighted a narrow wisp of smoke rising above a grove of trees. When they got closer she saw that someone had built a fence surrounding a cultivated field. The harvest had taken place some time ago, and only the stubble remained from whatever crops had been grown there.
Beorn took them to a gate in the fence. A path led from it toward a house built from rough-hewn logs. The smoke that Faith had seen earlier rose from a stone chimney at the side of it. Gandalf and Bilbo dismounted their ponies as Beorn opened the gate. They led their mounts up the path to the house, with Faith bringing up the rear.
Beorn called out a greeting, and the door opened, just a crack at first, and she could see the eye of someone peering out to see who had come visiting. They only looked for a second, before the door was thrown wide open, and a woman came bustling out, clearly happy to see him. “Beorn!” she called, followed by some rapid jabbering that Faith couldn’t follow. Two young children—a boy and girl—followed her, looking nervously at the strangers on their doorstep. Faith didn’t think that the girl could have been more than eight years old, and her brother was younger.
Beorn introduced Gandalf, Bilbo, and Faith to the woman. Bilbo gave the woman a little bow, and repeated the phrase that he had first taught to Faith, so she did the same when her turn came, though she still wasn’t entirely sure what it meant.
The woman, whose name was Marjukka, invited them all into the house. From Beorn’s introduction Faith knew that she had never met Gandalf before, but she recognized his name, and she treated him with great respect. The boy and the girl were introduced as Jaska and Asla. The children seemed to be quite shy around Faith and Gandalf, though they apparently knew Beorn well enough. They were fascinated by Bilbo, who was barely taller than they were, and so Faith figured he was the least intimidating of the strangers.
The cabin was much nicer on the inside than Faith had expected it to be, based on what she could see from the outside. The main room was a combination kitchen/dining/sitting room, with a large stone fireplace, as well as what looked like a cast-iron cooking stove, and a sink with a hand pump for water. The floor was wood, polished smooth by many years of foot traffic. There were doorways leading to side rooms, and a ladder leading up to a loft in which she could see child sized beds.
Marjukka bustled around, doing a quick cleaning—though Faith couldn’t see why: the place looked plenty clean to her, the way it was. Faith found herself a chair, and sat—mostly listening, and smiling and nodding when anyone addressed her—letting the others tell Marjukka where they had come from, and where they were going. Faith wasn’t sure what they told Marjukka about her, but the children’s eyes got big when they looked at her, with looks of wonder on their faces.
With the initial introductions out of the way, Beorn went back outside to tend to the ponies, and Marjukka sent the boy Jaska with him. After they had gone, she went to a door beside the fireplace, and waved for Faith to follow her. She took Faith into a room, one wall of which was made up by one of the stone sides of the fireplace itself. The most interesting thing about the room though, was what was beside that stone wall: a bathtub. Hallelujah! It was really more like the bottom half of a large barrel, but a bathtub it most certainly was.
There was a tap in the stone wall, and when Marjukka opened it, hot water started to spill out into the tub. Faith figured that there must have been some sort of warming tank built into the fireplace. There was also a hand pump, that Marjukka explained (not without some difficulty) would let her mix cold water with the hot from the fireplace, to get the bath the right temperature, and also, after turning a valve, allow her to refill the tank in the fireplace wall, so that there would be more hot water available for the next person to take a bath.
Marjukka left her, and Faith quickly stripped out of her clothes, and climbed into the tub. The warm water felt absolutely wonderful as it surrounded her. She just wanted to soak in it, bask in its sensuous warmth, let it soothe away the knots and aches in her muscles. “Oh, this is better than sex!” she told the room, safe in the knowledge that even if the people outside heard what she’d said, they wouldn’t understand it.
The little girl, Asla, came into the room after Faith had been soaking for a few minutes. She was carrying a stack of towels, what looked like some sort of clothing made of a flannel-like material, and on top, a coarse metal comb. “These are for you,” she told Faith. She started to gather up Faith’s discarded clothes. “Mamma will wash your clothes.”
“Thank you, Asla,” said Faith. “And thank your mamma too.” That last sentence was a mixture of English and whatever the local language was called, but Asla seemed to understand her about as well as Faith had understood Asla.
Once Asla had gone again, Faith got down to the proper business of bathing herself, washing all the nooks and crannies of her body that hadn’t had a proper cleaning for over a week now. Once finished with her body, she got busy washing her hair, and using the comb Asla had brought to remove the tangles from it. The soap she had to use was something she wouldn’t have even considered using on her hair, if she’d been at home—it was worse than the stuff they’d given her in jail—but after a week without washing her hair, she couldn’t be choosy.
She used more of the hot water from the tank in the fireplace to rinse her hair after she had washed it, and then she had climbed from the tub and used one of the towels that Asla had brought to dry herself and her hair.
When she was finally finished, she shook out the folded flannel outfit that Asla had given her. She was somewhat chagrinned to discover that it looked rather like a “granny gown,” though Faith was certain that her grandmother never would have worn such a thing. She didn’t really have much choice. It was either this, or skin, and she really didn’t have much of a feel for how these people would react to that.
Marjukka’s husband, Teuvo, came home while Bilbo was having his turn in the bath. He had evidently been out hunting, for he was carrying a brace of rabbits with him. Beorn didn’t seem to be very happy about that, and there was a bit of an awkward moment between him and Teuvo, but nothing came of it. Faith had the impression that this was part of a long standing disagreement between the two of them. Marjukka took the rabbits and muttered something to Beorn and her husband that Faith could have sworn meant “Oh grow up!” She carried the rabbits over to what served as her kitchen counter and set about skinning and cleaning them.
Beorn introduced Teuvo to Gandalf and Faith, and again Faith saw that Gandalf’s name was known to these people. He seemed to be a little puzzled by how Faith was dressed, until Marjukka pointed out Faith’s clothes, hanging to dry by the fire.
Dinner that evening consisted of rabbit stew, fortified by bread and other things from the traveller’s stores. Faith noticed that Marjukka had kept a portion of the vegetables that she had cooked separate from the rest when she was making the stew, and these went to Beorn. It seemed that he was a vegetarian, which struck her as very odd for a man who spent so much time as a bear. For herself, she was glad to have some meat back in her diet: the stew was excellent.
Everyone sat around the fire after their dinner, and Bilbo regaled them with a story from his adventures. Faith’s grasp of the language was improving, so she was able to understand more of what he was saying now. The children listened with rapt attention, as he told them about how he has sneaked into Smaug’s lair, and escaped with a golden cup. How the dragon had discovered the theft, and scorched the side of the mountain, trying to catch the thief. How Bilbo had discovered the chink in the dragon’s armour, and the news of that chink had been delivered to Bard in the Dale so that he could slay the dragon, and so that Thorin could reclaim his throne under the mountain.
It was time for everyone to go to bed when Bilbo came to the end of his tale. Bilbo was given Asla’s bed. Faith was too big for Jaska’s bed, so Asla was moved to share her brother, while Faith got the floor between them. Marjukka had offered her own bed, and seemed quite upset that she couldn’t offer better, but Faith assured her that the floor of the loft was a vast improvement over the ground that she had been sleeping on.
Gandalf also refused the offer of Marjukka and Teuvo’s bed for himself. He and Beorn (who was too big for any of the beds) spread out their bedrolls on the floor of the main room. Soon, everyone was asleep.