[Child of the 7th Age]

OOC -- This second part of this post actually belongs to Mark 12_30. It had to be shifted to keep the chronology straight.
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The broken down stone building with its ample crew of small residents soon became known as the "Workhouse". Shortly after the children had been transferred, Nitir and several members of the hobbit council had met with the Orcs listening to their list of requirements and demands.

The Orcs had insisted that some productive occupation be found to keep the children busy. "If these baby rats are going to eat," growled the captain. "they'd better do something useful."

The older ones, and these were defined as children eight and up, were to work a good part of the day in the fields and places where trees were felled. Since the bulk of guards were concentrated there, this proposal was acceptable to the Orcs. It meant they could keep a close eye on the young ones which seemed to be their chief concern. Quietly, however, Maura made sure that the children were assigned tasks in a location near their parents or other close kin.

Working in the fields with the crops was not that different than that which they had done in Gondolin. Hours were longer and conditions worse, but at least those laboring would have the satisfaction of seeing something develop from a tiny seed into a plant.

The felling of the great pines was another matter. This turned out to be a problem not only for the children, but also their parents. The work was difficult and dangerous. It was also very depressing. To fell a group of trees to make way for two or three fields was an understandable necessity. To do this work for week-upon-week, without seeing anything growing in its place was disheartening. The Orcs seemed far more concerned with hacking down large stands of timber, rather than planning what productive thing would actually grow there.

For miles around the encampment, as far as the eye could see, there were plots of land with sawed off stumps and great trunks on the naked earth. Ban had once confessed to his wife that doing this work for months on end made him feel little better than a murderer. One of the scariest things to Maura was that some of the children actually didn't seem to mind helping in this destruction. After noticing this, the hobbit council decided to rotate people, both children and adults, between the fields and the timber ranges. This was better than condemning someone to unending labor among the tall pines.

But there was another problem with the timber. The Orcs insisted the hobbits use a technique they called "slash and burn." This meant the broken stumps and trunks laying fallow would be burnt, ostensibly to enrich the soil. Whatever enrichment might occur seemed unimportant to the Orcs. Their main delight was in seeing the flames lick up to the sky, and hobbit children doubling over as they coughed and choked and their eyes ran red and weepy. Even worse were those times when the flames went totally out of control. Then, men, women, and children had to run fiercely to get out of the way of the blaze.

Finding "productive" work for the younger ones was even a greater challenge. A few were asked to act as messengers for the Orcs. Nitir absolutely hated this. The guards were loud, foul mouthed, and unpredictible. Too many times, the little ones ended up with a swat on the head or a kick in the behind. Others had the unenviable task of carrying water or food out to distant areas where trees were being forested. Nitir felt uncomfortable leaving these children alone with the guards. She was never wholly certain what was going on. Sometimes the children would come back with bruises, or acting more like Orcs than hobbits. She found this depressing.

And then there were the very little ones. If the children had been at home, they would have been toddling along behind their mothers or fathers. They would have played at the same work that their parents were doing, and learned a great deal in the process. But now they were separated from their families. And there was no way that Nitir was about to send these little ones into the fields on their own.

Nitir tried to delay this part of the Orc's command, saying she would find work for the youger children later. But then, one morning, Durshkakh had come to the workhouse, thrown her against the wall, and threatened to kill one of the babies if things didn't change.

By that afternoon, Nitir had set aside a small plot at the side of the Workhouse for the little ones to plant seeds and help weed. Toddlers as young as one year could be seen crawling about the bed learning to tell weeds from vegetable sprouts. With the help of one of the few older women still alive, she also set up a project where children were taught to gather hemp and then twist it into ropes which could be used by the hobbits in their work.

And a kitchen was set up, where soups and stews were made and sent out to the fields for lunch. To Nitir's surprise and dismay, the Orcs discovered that some of these delicacies were actually not too bad. Too often, the food ended up in the stomach of an Orc rather than where it was supposed to go.

Her most popular project, however, involved the forest and stream. The Orcs had not yet gotten around to cutting down the trees to the west of the camp. So one last contingent of children were regularly sent upstream to gather turtles, frogs, birds' eggs, and fish to supplement the camp diet. Childen who were Stoors especially clamored for this task. Nitir suspected that a good number of the five-and six-year olds actually spent the day swimming in the clear waters, but she was not about to question this as long as the Orcs were content.

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More than once, Lindo had wondered why Nitir had assigned him to feed the babies while Zira and Azra ran after toddlers and helped with the older children. Kemba laughed at him saying he knew far too many songs and far too few of the babies' names. Lindo reasoned he didn't need to know their names to feed them, but then, if they had been horses, he would have known their names by now. But now he was glad to be assigned to the babes. He could sing, and try to make songs, as he fed and changed and burped the squirming, ravenous little hobbitlings. Sometimes their mothers and fathers managed to get away and came in to help. And he was, after all, slowly learning to tell them apart.

Nitir's concerns about the older children, together with his own boredom over the lullabyes, set Lindo to composing songs in his head. One afternoon he stood in the Workhouse door, baby in arm and another tied in a pouch at his waist, nudging crawling babies gently away from the door with his foot, looking out at the garden, and composing gardening rhymes in his head.

He nudged at Nitir's mind, perhaps rather rudely, but he could sense that she was relaxed enough to open her mind that day. She started in surprise, and turned to look at him as she dodged after a one-year old that was busily eating a clod of dirt. Why did they all do that? It really bothered him. Quickly he sang the new song in her mind, and then released her thoughts. She laughed and sang them aloud. He sang along, correcting and helping, and soon there was a small chorus going amid much laughter.

Seeds no weeds
In the furrows by our burrows
Dirt for hobbit feet
And for the roots, the toes for fruits
While flowers by the hours
Give us vegetables and fruits
Crunchy roots to eat, and leaves
And tasty fruits to please.

It was nonsensical and silly, but he hoped that the children would get the hint, and eventually learn to work and wait for good fruits and vegetables to eat instead of munching on the dirt. Nitir laughed, thinking that the children would always eat the dirt, but she liked the song.

As soon as Nitir and some of the children had mastered the song, Lindo turned back inside. When it wore out, he'd have to think of a new one, but he was more worried about the messenger children and the ones working in the fields and in the falling pine groves. He couldn't teach them songs about the Kinslaying or the Curse of Mandos but he had to come up with something. He thought and thought.

He started working on children's songs about the two Trees of Valinor in the hopes of restoring respect for the fallen pines, and was struggling to come up with something about Idril's purity and grace and beauty, and put it into a verse that a child could sing.

What came instead was a song about the wind, and how if you stood on the side that the wind was coming from, the smoke from the burning forest would not blow on you. It wasn't what he was hoping for, but he suspected it had come to him for a reason, so he offered it to Nitir, and she was glad of it. It made Lindo depressed. He went back to thinking about Idril, and tried pirating some lines from other poems. It was days before he had anything at all, and even that was too short and he didn' like it. He did make up some short songs about hunting frogs and fish, and these were immediately popular. But that was not the troublesome topic.

But that night, he spent with Nitir, and they planned some late-night singing for the children. Nitir was concerned about the hobbit-children's sleep, but she knew they needed some uplifting.

On a whim, about which he was afterwards stubborn, Lindo added several short "hymns to Elbereth" to the songlist. Nitir thought they were a little too complicated, but she stopped arguing once she saw Lindo's determination about them. Lindo told them not to sing them in front of the orcs because it would make them angry, but to sing them as they walked or worked or waited for sleep.

Maura was pleased to hear the hymns coming from the Workhouse, even if at first Lindo was the only one singing. But over the weeks that changed, and more of the older children were able to join in and sing along. They sang softly, but somehow the sound traveled through the whole camp anyway.

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[ August 13, 2002: Message edited by: Child of the 7th Age ]