Voice of the Mountain (2)

[fascinationex]

Note: crossposted at AO3

---

It isn’t as though Bilbo forgets the heart beat of the mountain -- he cannot, it would be like forgetting his own feet, so deeply is it embedded. But he does lose track of its significance.

There is too much going on. At first there is Thorin’s ongoing refusal, and the hard wild look in his eye that haunts Bilbo terribly. And then, continuing the terrible trajectory of this whole situation, on the same day that they receive news of the orc horde travelling swiftly toward them, headed by Azog, Dain Ironfoot arrives from the Iron Hills.

“I’ve always found Thorin to be the more reasonable,” Gandalf says, half irritated and half despairing, as the throbbing beat of the mountain is drowned out for a moment by the creak and thunder of the approaching dwarves. There are many of them. Bilbo can hear them with his ears but he can also feel them moving, the whole streaming mass of their army, stomping on the dirt.

At first Bilbo thinks Gandalf is making a tasteless joke. 'Reasonable' isn't how Bilbo would describe Thorin normally, but especially not now. Not given Thorin’s current state of unhinged gold-fever.

Then Dain kicks his war hog into a scrambling, heavy-bodied trot, descending one of the mountain’s shallower slopes. He’s big for a dwarf, and heavily armoured, and apparently made almost entirely of solid muscle beneath that.

The hog isn't struggling, but Bilbo knows that even farm pigs are stronger than they look. It shakes its head, tusks jutting into the air.

“How are we all,” Dain asks cheerfully.

Confusion answers him.

Then about ten seconds later, he threatens to water the mountainside with the blood of the men and elves gathered there.

Gandalf’s efforts at diplomacy are high-handed and not very effective, as usual. He must get awfully sick of sticking his nose into new, volatile situations and having people rebuff him, Bilbo thinks. It hasn’t stopped him yet, of course, but -- well. He just must be sick of it by now.

The mountain throbs. Bilbo shakes his head, much like the hog. He's trying to concentrate on the byplay between Dain's fierce -- and easily roused -- temper and Gandalf's general attitude of being done with dwarves forever, and the mountain wants him to pay attention to the troops arrayed behind Dain. He knows they're there. He can't ignore them.

He thinks that, had it just been the men, some kind of tense agreement may have been come to -- but the elves make that impossible.

Thranduil, in particular, seems to be a sore spot for every dwarf out here, and he doesn't do a single thing to mitigate it.

His elk bursts into motion, striding to the front of the assembled elves. They move fluidly out of its way, breaking formation only in as much as they must to let it past, and then closing again like water behind it. Bilbo barely hears their boots on the hard-packed dirt, but he knows how many of them there are and exactly how they’re moving.

They seem confident, but there are plenty of dwarves out there, beyond the rise. The elves have time and skill on them, but the dwarves are hardier, more heavily armed and very, very strong. Bilbo knows exactly how many there are of each on the whole mountain, and he thinks neither of them should be as confident as Dain and Thranduil pretend.

Thranduil says nothing, in the end, which is probably just as well. Unfortunately, he says nothing because he’s practising that long, narrow, judgemental stare he likes so much. His haughty face wears it well.

He isn't sure about Thranduil. But even though Dain might froth and scream about his faithlessness, but Bilbo finds it hard to imagine a good rationale for a king to risk his own people against a dragon just to help a monarch with whom he was so obviously on poor terms. That situation is more nuanced than the dwarves give it credit for.

Cynically, Bilbo notes that he didn’t see Dain offering his people up to join Thorin’s quest, either.

Although...

Dain, true to Gandalf’s description, seems disinclined to be reasonable about any part of it.

De-escalation isn't a skill the lords of this land come equipped with, apparently

“If he chooses to stand between me and my kin,” Dain says -- roars, really, over the heads of those gathered below, while the men shift warily and the elves stand, straight-backed and inexpressive, “I’ll split his pretty head open -- aye, and see if he’s still smirking then!”

Thranduil, Bilbo thinks, from his spot between two much taller archers, is only smirking because his needled pride will let him show no other expression in the face of Dain’s pure, unbridled hostility --

-- but then it occurs to Bilbo that Thranduil might actually be exactly petty and shallow enough to smile like that because the dwarf thinks he’s pretty.

It’s hard to tell, with Thranduil.

Dain is easier to read, Bilbo thinks, but he isn't sure he likes him much, either.



The battle, when it comes, is fierce and terrible, and he loses track of many things.

He does not lose track of the thunder of the mountain in his head. He can't. It's stuck there.

It is not like reading histories at all, for those always paint battle as a thing that occurs only after a great deal of planning and strategy and people -- usually men, in Bilbo’s books -- out-thinking one another carefully.

Instead, here the dark, fell things of the world come pouring across the plains and suddenly they are just there, with very little warning and only the most rushed and chaotic plan. They sweep through all the ranks of elves and men and dwarves -- and one small hobbit -- like the tide washes over a rocky coastline.

The noise alone is tremendous, and the heat and the rush and sheer helpless terror of it all is overwhelming.

Bilbo has, as the dwarves say, "seen battle". He has fought in skirmishes, he has killed spiders and bashed orcs. But he has not seen battle like this. Not this titanic clash of wargs and orcs, a rush of wet fur and sour-smelling armour, of rusty blood, broken steel, of limbs and whole bodies churned up in the mud.

He steps, once, in the face of a man. His big toe catches on the poor, sightless-staring thing’s lip, and smooshes it out of shape when he stumbles.

It is a strange, cooling, damp sensation on his toe, and the shock of it makes him look down into the man's blank eyes. There's blood clumping his eyelashes together. Bilbo can feel the pressure of his teeth against his toe.

The feeling does not leave him in the wake of the battle. And for weeks after, that is what wakes him from a sound sleep, breathing fast and curling his feet in toward the rest of his body, cringing from the ghost of that sensation. Teeth on his toes, cooling damp lips, the catch of skin, clumpy eyelashes -- he never forgets it.

And as he picks his way across the field of battle, doing what he can where he can, sliding in and out of sight with the help of the little magic ring on his finger, the mountain hums to him. It doesn’t much care about battle -- as far as it is concerned, blood and bodies are a very natural thing and good fertiliser for the cloak of greenery it wants in the coming spring, so different from these many years of dragon fire and desolation -- but it does care about him.

More than once, Bilbo thinks: where is Gandalf? Where is Kili? Has Bard fallen? and he knows exactly and immediately, as long as they’re still on its slopes or at its foot. And he knows, too, about the goblin coming up behind him with a raised axe, about the narrowed eyes of an opportunistic orc.

So he does not forget about the mountain. He cannot. It won't let him, because it never stops, never slows it's steady, thumping, relentless beat.

But it is not until much, much later, when Gandalf and the members of the company who are still well enough to stand are crowded into the tents of healing, that he has to remember what it means.

The healing tents are a little dimmer than the others. The healers, both dwarven and elven, prefer lantern light to torches. It is one of the few things upon which they agree: they don't want burning fat and acrid smoke in their space, dirtying things up and obstructing the breathing of their patients. Thorin and Kili and Fili have been taken to the largest and, probably, nicest, of the tents to recover from their wounds. The lantern light makes them seem less pale than they actually are, but it doesn't do much for the rest. All three of them sick and gritty and woozy with medicine.

Bilbo can still hear the mountain, but he only remembers what he and Gandalf discussed at all because Gandalf turns to all of the dwarves crowding into the tent, too close, each worried for Thorin and Kili and Fili just like family, and very seriously he says over all their babble, “Which one of you is it, then?”

He is greeted with blank, confused staring.

“Who hears the mountain?” he demands. Silence. “Is it Thorin, then?”

Bilbo shrinks back at this, stung with the sudden memory of his conversation with Gandalf.

“Is it Thorin, then?” Gandalf prompts. Thorin scowls with all the energy he has, which isn't much, but says nothing.

The remaining dwarves, on the other hand, break out in loud conversation the moment they get over their shock. As usual, ‘conversation’ is secret dwarven code for ‘shrieking argument’.

They are in consensus, though, with Balin when he says: “If one of us had been able to hear the mountain, do you think he’d have kept it a secret from all the rest?”

Gandalf looks confused and annoyed for half a second before his eyes land on Bilbo again.

Then he goes still.

“Well,” he says, slowly and contemplatively, all the expressions fading from his face.

Quietly, Bilbo cringes. The mountain responds to his anxiety with what feels like a kind of dull confusion. The killing is over, mostly. It doesn't understand the danger. Thoom, it pounds, not very comfortingly.

“Well. I’m sure it will come up, eventually.” He pauses. “More than one thing, I should think,” he adds.

With this absolutely baffling comment, Gandalf takes himself off and leaves the dwarves in noisy chaos behind him.

It must be nice, Bilbo thinks, being a wizard. You can just hop up leave any conversation whenever you please, having had the last word, and being certain nobody can stop you from going. He can think of a number of tea parties past when this special skill might have come in handy.

“If it is some member of our company,” Thorin says, laboriously, from what is not quite his death bed after all.

It is hours after Gandalf’s exit, once he has dozed fitfully and woken again and had some disgusting concoction slathered painfully over his wounds by Oin. The argument has wound down among the others, and Bilbo has been shamefully silent.

“It would not... That is. There is no danger, now, in coming forward.”

He meets the eyes of the company members with his jaw clenched tightly, but Bilbo thinks the words must cost him something. The implication that it would have been wise to remain quiet, before, is lost on nobody standing there. Thorin was wild and selfish in the grip of his madness, and Bilbo does not think it’s just cynicism that makes him think that anyone else claiming to hear this ‘voice of the mountain’ (which is, after all, not much like an actual voice) would have gone over... poorly. Even, perhaps, had that been Kili or Fili.

Still, Bilbo remains quiet. He’s not sure where even to begin, and he still doesn’t know that he even likes the steady beat of the Lonely Mountain in his head. Not that it’s going anywhere now, he supposes.

Not so lonely now, are you, you great silly thing? he thinks sourly. The mountain makes no response. It is, after all, only a mountain.

“From what the wizard says,” Balin comments delicately, “it is certainly making itself known to someone. It would be best, I think, were it a member of our company after all -- and not one of Dain’s soldiers.”

There is some uncomfortable shifting at that. None of them has done so much and come so far just to hand their home over to a dwarf of the Iron Hills, who offered no soldiers to help them claim it from the dragon in the first place.

Dwarves have no great love for outsiders. This Bilbo knows very well indeed. Again he wonders if he should speak.

He could keep it secret for a very long time. It wouldn’t be hard. They aren’t that subtle.

“I don’t suppose,” Nori says slowly, “that it could be a man? Or...”

Their pale, sick-looking king goes yet paler, hearing what Nori has not yet said. “It is not an elf,” he snarls, with all the vehemence he can muster from his sickbed.

Nori raises his hands in a placating gesture. “I’m not saying it is, it’s just, it’s the elves Gandalf’s been among, isn’t it?”

“Elves don’t have stone sense,” Bofur points out and the whole party relaxes a little. “...I think,” he adds, uncertainly.

“Well... we’d know if they did, wouldn’t we?” Fili wonders. He is reclining, but the sweat on his face shines in the ruddy lantern light. He looks unwell.

There is a long silence, so grim that Bilbo feels he doesn’t have a choice but to speak.

“It is not an elf,” he says quietly, watching the rise and fall of Fili's chest. He's alive yet, he thinks. Bilbo isn't sure what he'll do if any of them fails to make it, after all this. Something drastic. Something ill advised.

“‘Course it’s not,” Gloin blusters, to the immediate, vocal agreement of several other of their number.

“And what do you know of it?” Thorin demands sharply. The harsh sound of his voice in the crowded tent quiets the others immediately. Bilbo knows of very little else that will do it.

Bilbo is not even slightly intimidated by Thorin’s manner. The time for that has passed, thank you very much.

But he stays silent anyway. He wants to say ‘I don’t,’ but the lie won’t come. It freezes in his chest, thick and heavy. Inexplicably, Thorin’s gaze sharpens, as though he can smell Bilbo’s discomfort rising like an encroaching storm. That, Bilbo thinks, would make this the very first time Thorin shows any capacity for empathy.

“You know who it is,” he says. He sounds terribly sure, and as usual every other dwarf in the room is swayed by his certainty. They are all looking at Bilbo now.

“Well?” Dwalin prompts. It sounds like a demand, but the time for being afraid of that, too, has certainly passed.

The only things Bilbo is still scared of -- the only things he might be scared of ever again, he thinks -- are himself, and how he might drive them all away.

But he certainly has not come this far by being a coward about things that scare him.

“Me,” he says, lifting his chin and meeting Thorin’s eyes. Funny, he’s never quite noticed but -- he and Thorin have eyes of exactly the same shade of blue. What a thing to notice. What a time to notice it. “It’s me. I’m hearing it.”

There is a dull, baffled silence. “That’s not something to jest about,” Dori says disapprovingly into it.

But Bilbo is still holding Thorin’s gaze and they can all see he is serious.

“That’s how Gandalf knew. I asked him about it.”

This seems to stall them all for a moment.

“Well, but hobbits don’t have stone sense, either!” Gloin protests, as though he knows the first thing about hobbits. Bilbo half wants to tell him that he has more sense of all kinds in his big toe than all of the company’s members put together, including the bloody wizard.

He bites his tongue on it. That won’t be the slightest bit productive. It will make them more defensive. He knows it.

And well, also... “There’s, er, something about that,” Bilbo admits. “It didn’t seem terribly, well, relevant, when we set out, but I suppose, in light of --”

“Spit it out,” Thorin demands, looking quite as though the waiting for Bilbo to finish might just finish the job the pale orc’s sword started.

“Right,” Bilbo says, and then he proceeds to do exactly... not that. He stuffs his hands in his pockets and rocks back on his heels. “That is... er...”

He isn’t ashamed of it, but it feels so terribly awkward now, when he understands so much more how great the value is that a dwarf places upon his kin.

At the beginning of the quest, well. Well.

A hobbit considers his home and his family extremely important, of course, but it is more the family unit as a whole that has value -- the importance is in the having of it, the reliance on it as a pillar of their social structure. A dwarf, on the other hand, values his family in the most intensely personal way possible -- like an organ, like something that can only be removed by cutting deep, by cracking open his stone-strong bones and rooting around in his chest cavity.

Any relationship is very intense and very personal, and although Bilbo doubts he’s closely related to any of the company, he’s probably a distant cousin, somehow, so... He cannot help the feeling that they will take this intensely personally, however they may feel about it.

“Well. You see. That is,” he says.

“Were you going to finish any one of those sentences,” Nori wonders. His mouth is going to get him into trouble one day. More trouble, even.

“Well. Hobbits do have -- they, that is, we, we have a kind of sense for things in the earth, bit like your -- although this isn’t at all what I mean to be telling you all.” He rubs his face. “I am. Well, the long and the short of it is,” spit it out, Bilbo, “I’m not entirely hobbit stock, you see.”

There. It’s out. He’s got it out of him now, and it can’t choke him anymore. “Little wonder, I should think,” he goes on bracingly into the strange silence that follows inside the tent. “No true hobbit in his right mind would have signed up for that--”

“Is that why your ears are all pointy then?” Kili asks, leaning from his cot and over his exhausted brother to peer at Bilbo better.

Bilbo stops talking at his interruption. He knows Kili has seen other hobbits, but it occurs to him that he probably never laid eyes on one before their company came to the Shire last year -- and that Bilbo is probably the only hobbit he’s paid any attention to at all. “I... no, all hobbits are... my ears are actually less pointed than regular h--”

“So you’re part, what, part of the race of men or something?”

“Bilbo’s a man?”

“What does this have to do with --”

“Dwarf!” Bilbo yells, over their obtuse speculation. He takes a deep breath and it feels strange and shaky. Thorin’s eyes are still fixed upon him. They feel heavy. “I realise that you are all aware, I make a poor dwarf, but my father -- my natural father -- was one, and --”

He quiets now, realising that the whole tent has fallen quite silent again.

Some of the wind leaves him at the stillness. “I am sorry, but that’s the truth,” he says, looking blankly over Thorin’s shoulder now so he doesn’t have to meet that heavy, heavy gaze. His eyes settle on the oiled canvas wall behind their bedridden leader. “And you may ask Gandalf, if you need to, which --”

“Baggins,” says Thorin, cutting him off. His voice is as harsh as it was when they first met, and there‘s a cold and suspicious light in his eyes. Of course there is. “It isn’t one of our names. Do you take a matronym, then, instead?”

“Baggins,” says Bilbo, knowing he must be careful here, what with dwarves and their honours and shames, “is the name of the hobbit who raised me as his child, and who I have always called father. We aren’t, that is, we weren’t, blood. He was married to my mother."

It is such a cold way to characterise his relationship with Bungo Baggins, who has never been less a father to him than any blood relation might have been. But such things count -- not necessarily more or less, but differently, in the Shire.

“You don’t look like a dwarf,” says Gloin mulishly, and although he is the only one who says it like that, Balin nods along, and so does Dori.

“You say Gandalf--?”

“You can ask him," Bilbo repeats.

He isn’t surprised that Gloin immediately gets up to find him and bring him back to the tent.

“I’m sorry,” Bilbo repeats, helplessly. “I did not think--”

“You did not think you would ever have to say it,” Thorin says, quite harshly.

Bilbo doesn’t know how to answer him, because he is right. But not in the way he sounds.

At first, Bilbo could not have imagined either the relevance, or that any of their number would want to claim him as even the most distant kin, and was aware that it might seem dangerously... intentional. Ingratiating. Manipulative. And they began so harsh and suspicious. And then -- it never did seem relevant, until it was. Is. Until it is.

So Bilbo shrugs. Let Thorin think whatever brooding, uncharitable thing he will. Bilbo never has much luck changing his mind on purpose. Nobody does. It is Thorin.

“Awfully good of him to raise someone else’s boy,” Dwalin says dubiously.

But Bilbo shakes his head. “No, it was -- I was planned. My mother went to look for a different sire because my father could not have a child. It’s not so strange, in the Shire,” he adds, because wider experience of the world at large suggests to him now that it is very peculiar everywhere else. Even the elves, normally so open-minded about such things -- they are very strictly monogamous. Very, very strict indeed. “Although not everybody thought she was right to pick someone other than another hobbit...”

But now Dwalin looks a bit perturbed in a different way.

Dori, too, has a fretful air. “No dwarf of any honour,” he begins unhappily, “would leave his own child to be raised among strangers.”

Even Fili and Kili seem unsettled at the idea, and as they are both dosed up on whatever concoction Oin has given them, and also apt to shake off concerns about common propriety, Bilbo knows that this must be very serious indeed.

“Oh, erm. I don’t think he knew, really.”

“Are you --” Ori makes a horrified, scandalised noise, and then keeps going, leaning forward like he cannot help himself, “are you saying your mam stole a baby?”

Bilbo twitches. “Aunt Mirabella does always say it like that,” he mutters to himself. “But really, a body doesn’t conceive a child without--” he pauses. Flushes. “Well. Ehem.”

“But he doesn’t know,” Dori insists. “Your sire could be here, right in this camp, and not even know he has a child.” He sounds increasingly close to hysterics.

“Well. No,” Bilbo says, “since my mother never went further than Lindon or Rivendell -- he’d have been one of the Blue Mountains... look, anyway, this is hardly the point--”

“It is very much the point,” Nori interrupts. “Sod hearing the mountain --” several dwarves look at him as though this statement seems quite contentious them, too “-- kin’s important. And most of us are from the Blue Mountains now --”

“Unless you lay with a hobbit lass some fifty years ago, you needn’t worry about that,” Dwalin points out.

Nori pauses. Looks at Dwalin, then Bilbo, then, cautiously, Dori.

A moment later he begins counting something off on his fingers and Dori makes a noise a little bit like a teakettle boiling over.

“Nori,” he says, in a tone that is a potent combination of rage and despair.

“It seems a hopeless case,” Bilbo hears Gandalf say from somewhere nearby, in the weary and exasperated voice he uses when he’s being herded somewhere he does not much want to go, “since you won’t believe me unless you choose to anyw-- Master Gloin, I am quite capable of walking on my own!”

“You go slowly, though, don’t you,” Gloin says, shoving open the tent flap and casting Gandalf and himself in the light of the lanterns within.

“Well,” says Gandalf, peering down at the dwarves all looking up at him expectantly -- and a little hostilely, in some cases.

“Well?” growls Dwalin, who is chief among those who look most hostile, if only because Thorin is too tired and injured to muster the energy for any truly spectacular glowering. “What say you, wizard?”

And Gandalf sighs. “What reason do you have to think Bilbo is lying on this matter? Preserve us from the stubborn suspicion of the dwarves,” he adds.

“And save us from the riddling of a wizard asked for a clear answer,” Thorin snipes back. His injuries haven't affected his tongue, Bilbo notes distantly.

“He tells the truth,” Gandalf says, “although how I am to convince you when he will not --”

“Who,” Fili interrupts, leaning up on his elbow heavily -- Kili shifts his own weight to accommodate him, moving without being asked, but still leaning his weight against his brother, “Who is it?”

“That's right! We could all be cousins!” Ori speaks up. He sounds both apprehensive and excited about the idea. Bilbo is exhausted from battle and his head hurts with the thunder of the mountain, but this time he nearly smiles anyway.

“Distant cousins,” adds Nori, whose counting must have been finished at some point. Bilbo assumes it has come to nothing. He doesn’t say it unkindly, at least.

“Why,” says Gandalf, leaning on his staff, and there is a strange, pleased light in his eyes that Bilbo doesn’t like, “are you not named for your sire, Bilbo?”

“I am,” Bilbo says slowly, but he cannot figure out why Gandalf sounds so pleased all of a sudden, when he was weary with them all twelve seconds ago. He knows how Dwarves of family groups take similar outer names -- Dori, Nori and Ori are one excellent example. But nobody’s name here ends ‘erin’, and Bilbo cannot see what other relevance it should have.

He ...almost does not want to give the wizard the satisfaction just on principle, however. He hesitates.

“Don’t be shy, Bilbo -- I’m sure Balin has it in his contracts, doesn’t he?” he smiles, kindly and innocent. Yes, Bilbo definitely mistrusts that expression.

“I suppose he must, if he’s kept them,” Bilbo agrees, because of course he signs his name with his full name, and even initials his clauses ‘BFB’.

Balin has indeed kept them, it turns out, beneath his clothes and tied next to his body in a grubby pouch, right along with a money sack that Bilbo has never seen. It is all wrapped up, sealed with wax at one end and, beneath that, enclosed in oilskin, so when Balin pulls out all the company’s contracts they are only slightly water damaged around the edges. Dwarves, Bilbo thinks in the split second it is revealed, and with a flash of unbearable fondness, have ingenious ways of preserving things you didn’t even know you wanted.

The company’s contracts are all spilling across the floor before Bilbo can even decide how wary to be.

He knows when Balin gets to Bilbo’s, because he mutters to himself as he goes through its pages, squinting in the lantern light. Ori peers over his arm curiously, and then Balin gets to the final page and goes quite still.

There’s a long silence.

“Well?” Gloin demands, sick of watching the satisfied expression grow across Gandalf’s face as the silence goes on and on and on.

Wordlessly, Balin hands the page directly to Thorin, who must then guard it from Kili’s nimble fingers. When it's clear he won't be able to steal it directly, he begins his efforts to crawl over Fili and on top of Thorin just to see. Dwalin grabs Kili by the collar before he can worsen anybody’s injuries, but not before he knees Fili in the rib. There is a gasp and a curse from Fili, which is immediately drowned out by Thorin’s much louder and more violent swearing.

It isn’t in any language Bilbo knows well, but swearing is pretty much always identifiable no matter the language -- and the secret tongue of the dwarves has sort of an easy rhythm to it, really. It’s a wonder more people don’t pick bits up by accident, if you ask Bilbo.

Then Thorin barks, “Frerin! It says Frerin!”

The whole tent explodes into cacophony, almost none of which Bilbo can hear clearly over the sheer roar of sound that the dwarves can produce, all together, in their enclosed space.

“Nice to keep the mountain in the family, I suppose,” Gandalf muses peacefully, and somehow his is a voice that cuts through dwarven bellowing at any volume.

Bilbo looks at the chaos. He thinks of his own relatives, of Lobelia and Otho, particularly, and Bag End, and he says, slowly, “I think... that might depend on the family.”

Slowly, creakily, Gandalf begins to laugh. It is rapidly drowned out by the yelling.