[mark12_30]

Child's Post

It was the afternoon of the second day. Many hobbits still did not know the fate of all their family members. Loremaster knew they’d started out with over a thousand hobbits. About eight hundred had made it through the rescue. These survivors were now scattered between twenty-one different ships.

Family-after-family had been split up on the night of the rescue. Children and others needing assistance had boarded first. Parents, brothers, cousins, and aunts had only followed after they'd finished fighting. There’d been no way to guarantee that members of a single clan would find their way to the same ship.

Now Loremaster, along with Cami and Andril, were trying to take all the broken pieces and reassemble them. Everyone was helping in this gigantic endeavor. Skiffs churned back and forth between the various swanships, carrying children to parents, and cousins to cousins. Khelek and Veritas sat up late into the night, speaking mind-to-mind with the other Elves who were tracking down missing hobbits. Andril had spent the better part of the first day searching for several lost children. She’d scoured the main deck of all the ships, with little luck. The hobbrim had finally found her stowaways tucked away asleep inside the cargo hold of the Star, where they’d wandered to play with the sea cows. Angara and Bird had worked hardest of all, making so many flights to bring little ones back to their families that their wings were beginning to ache.

Loremaster gave Cami a long list that he’d created weeks before to keep track of all the members of the community. She added little notes in the margin to show where everyone was and what had happened to them. When she wasn’t visiting Rose, or playing with Gamba's boys, Cami could usually be found up on deck going over her long lists. Check by check, and name by name, she could see that the community was beginning to regroup.

But there were, she noted, too many spaces with comments of a different type. Terse phrases conveyed the sad story of the many who had been left behind in the tombs. ‘Taken in the selection,’ ‘killed in the battle for the Locks,’ died fighting guards in the main cavern’—--the list went on and on. It was not easy to look about and see so many missing, especially when it happened to be a dear friend or spouse.

Yet few hobbits grumbled or complained. Freedom carried a price. They knew that when they’d agreed to the rescue. At least those who died fighting had done something useful with their lives. For the next five days, the hobbits found themselves sometimes grieving and sometimes celebrating, as they gradually learned the doom of each member of their community, and families joined together to prepare for the landing at Meneltarma.

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One evening several days later, Cami was up on deck, chasing Asta and Roka and Ban as they romped about with their games. After they'd all collapsed into a pile with laughter, Ban crawled into her lap, so she could teach him a letter or two from the schoolbook she kept nearby. Gamba peered over at the pair intently with a puzzled expression on his face.

The boy wasn't sure whether he should say anything, but then Cami caught his gaze and asked him directly what was wrong.

"I don't know how to say this." Gamba struggled for words. "Ancalimon calls you a master of lore. So does Idril. But you're nothing like any wise woman or wise man I've ever met or heard about. What makes you so wise?" He shrugged and was about to go off.

"Gamba, get back here," Cami asserted sharply. "You don't say something like that and then walk off, without talking about it."

The boy looked uncomfortable but sat down next to Cami. "I don't know, my brother is going to be a loremaster. I love him, but he's nothing like you."

Cami nodded her head. "I expect you're right, about being different, I mean." She thought back on her conversation with Idril.

"But who says masters of lore have to be all the same? Do you know how many different fish there are in this world?" Cami looked out to the sea. Whoever made this place must have loved differences very much, because there are so many different fish, just fish alone, that you could study your whole life and never know them all." Her voice was filled with wonder as she looked out at the grey veil of dusk which had slipped over the waters. At that instant in the deep waves towards the west, a great dolphin breached and came slapping down again with great majesty and grace."

"So you and Phura are different fish?" queried Gamba, interested in spite of himself.

"I expect so. He's probably a dolphin, grand and glorious, and I'm a minnow darting in and out of the bigger schools, but I expect we each have our uses."

The boy scratched his head and thought about that. "Not everyone has to be a dolphin?" he asked. He was genuinely puzzled. That didn't seem to be anything he'd learned about before.

Cami laughed, "Oh, no, how boring that would be, if we were all the same." she assured him. Then she turned about and excused herself to leave.

Gamba sat and thought for a very long time about exactly what those words meant for him.

[ November 08, 2002: Message edited by: mark12_30 ]