There was deep-seated contempt and watchfulness in the mean eyes of the slight, limping figure who made his way as quickly as possible through the cobbled streets of Bree. The last light of the setting sun cast deep shadows on his sunken cheeks below high-ridged cheekbones. His gaunt look was matched with the flickering hatred and scorn in the bottom of his restless, pitch-black eyes. He was originally from Dunland, and his associates in Bree knew him only as ’The Southerner’. He had other names for other types of encounters. It did not matter what his real name might have been.
The last house of Bree before the Southern Gate, just next to the Gatekeeper’s lodge, was a small ramshackle cottage with an unkempt yard and long, uncared-for lawn, surrounded by a thorny hedge. The yard was littered with abandoned carts and other trash. The Southerner walked past the house to take a look around the Southern Gate. The watchmen of Bree had long been wary of Bill Ferny and his mysterious visitors, and The Southerner always wanted to see that there were no watchmen around to notice his visits whenever he went there. The caged, mistreated hound on the stairhead of the house started barking like mad whenever anyone walked too near the hedgerow. It started it’s hellish barking again when The Southerner walked past the opening.
The Southerner nodded with grim satisfaction to see that there was nobody around. He turned and walked through the opening in the hedge, limping towards the door as quickly as possible. The dog seemed to lose it’s mind entirely when it saw him approaching. It barked and growled, jumped against the bars of it’s cage and tried to bite them. One look from The Southerner’s mean eyes and the dog’s behavior suddenly changed. It whimpered and backed down against the bars in the back of the cage, tail between it’s legs, desperately looking around for a way to escape that wasn’t there.
The dog was a good guard against the watchmen and other nosy people.
The door to the house wasn’t locked. The hound had made such precautions unnecessary. The Southerner stepped into the only room of the house and slammed the door shut behind him. It was very dark in the room, because the only window of the house was closed with a wooden shutter, and the only other light came from a single tallow candle on the table. The three men in the room knew who it was because the cracks on the shutters were large enough to reveal the yard and Bill peeked through the cracks every time the hound started barking. The Southerner pulled himself a stool and sat at the end of the table with two other men. Bill Ferny was standing by the window. It was a meeting of ’The Council’ of Bree – three of the most influential notorious characters of the town and The Southerner, the spokesman for the mysterious Sharkey, whom nobody else had ever seen.
”Bill?”
Bill Ferny seemed to start a little by his voice and wrung his hat in his hand, like a mischievous boy being questioned by a stern father.
”The hobbit is still in Staddle. Hard to say how long he plans to stay there, but I have people keeping eye on things. You don’t need to worry at all.”
”In other words the little rat might be holed up there until spring”, said the third man in the room. ”The hobbits are notorious for outliving the hospitality of their hosts.” The man had deceptively smiling eyes and calm manner. He was puffing a long pipe filled with locally grown pipe-weed. Breeish pipe-weed was inferior to any brand grown in the Shire, but he refused to smoke ’rat-weed’, as he called it. His name was Coddle.
”Indeed, Coddle”, The Southerner agreed, almost politely. The fourth man didn’t say anything. He just stared at the table. His name was Parsnip, and most days he worked as a guard for the Bree Watch, but today he was off duty. If his superiors ever found out he frequented Bill Ferny’s house he would lose his job in a heartbeat, but he wasn’t too concerned with that. The pay was lousy compared to what he could earn on the side, but to the others it was very convenient to have eyes and ears inside the Watch.
”And you are sure the hobbits have loads of gold and silver and jewels hidden in the Shire somewhere? And they will pay all that money to get him back? That is Sharkey’s plan, right?”
The Southerner could barely conceal his contempt when he looked at them. Sharkey. It was a stupid name, but very convenient for his Master’s purposes. Sharku, ’old man’, was how the orcs under Orthanc had called him, and it was the name The Southerner had first used when he arrived in Bree many years ago. And of course the stupid blockheads in Bree had misheard it. But all things considered Sharkey was a far more suitable name to use here. It sounded like a typical nickname of a Breeish thug. Like Coddle.
Before moving to Bree The Southerner had been one of Sharku’s most trusted servants in Isengard for a long time. A genius, that’s what he had always thought of the Master. Sharku could see in the future and plan ahead for years, decades, centuries even! And how he had everyone fooled. The chief of the White Council, the guard of Isengard, the protector of the Free Peoples, the destroyer of Dol Guldur – nobody suspected him anything less than a most formidable and powerful ally of Gondor. And yet, nobody had the slightest idea of all that was going on in the caverns underneath Orthanc, concealed by the lush gardens of Isengard, where the Master had been experimenting and breeding a new breed of orcs for decades now. The process was sped up with arcane alchemy and cross-breeding, and each generation of orcs was stronger, faster, smarter and more obedient than the previous. When the Master was ready, he would have produced something the world had never seen before, a race superior even to the Uruk-hai Sauron had bred in Mordor, a breed that could endure sunlight. The Master’s secret weapon in the coming war. The Southerner felt very privileged to be part of and privy to Sharku’s plans, which would bring everlasting peace to the Middle-Earth.
”Indeed, Coddle”, he repeated. ”But you should all remember that gold and jewels are just a means to an end in Sharkey’s complex plan. We want to open the Shire to the Men of Bree, to exploit it’s riches for the betterment of all, so that this beautiful land can grow and prosper.”
He received somewhat tame cheers to that from the men in the room, so he continued:
”And you three, as the heroes of the coming revolution, will all become very rich and powerful beyond your wildest dreams, and worshipped by all!”
The applause was much more enthusiastic now. The Southerner had to sometimes remind himself that these dim-witted fools, these tools lacked almost all imagination and foresight. They only lived in the moment, like spoilt children. Which didn’t change the fact that he needed them to fulfill the Master’s plans.
”But the ransom!” Bill Ferny exclaimed. ”One hundred thousand silver farthing’s worth in gold and jewels! I can’t even imagine what all that could buy. Do the hobbits really have that much? And will they really pay that much to see Paladin returned to them?”
The Southerner gave him a stern look. ”You bet they do, and you bet they will. Or do you doubt the wisdom of Sharkey’s plan?”
”Of course not… but…”
In reality the question was irrelevant to The Southerner. He did not care one whit what the hobbits were willing to pay for the hostage, if anything. The Master wasn’t interested in hobbit gold. There were other parts of the plan already in motion, parts that these men didn’t need to know about. The men in this room were only useful tools to be used and then discarded. What happened to them afterwards was equally irrelevant to The Southerner and his Master.
(Author’s note: The Southerner depicted in this story is not the same person as the ”Squint-eyed Southerner” in The Lord of the Rings. Bill Ferny, on the other hand, is the same character as in the book, as a younger man here.)
