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Three thousand one hundred and fifty. I tried to remember my history lessons. Three thousand one hundred and fifty would make him born around one hundred and thirty years before the start of our Current Age. Which meant he'd been ten years old or so at the time that the Kingdom of Gondor was founded.

That was a humbling thought. I felt like I was paddling down the River in the presence of History.

I asked, "Have you lived at the Falls all that time?"

"No," he said, "I haven't lived there long at all, really. Only one thousand eight hundred years, probably."

Only, I thought. I tried to think of what was happening in Gondor one thousand eight hundred years ago. Atanatar II might have been King, but I wouldn't have bet on it. "So where were you before?" I asked him.

"Above the Falls. My first house was three miles above the Great Rock."

The Great Rock, I supposed, might mean the Tindrock, the Isle of Tol Brandir. The island in the shadow of which I had died. I shivered.

I ordered myself to ask him something else. To think of something, anything except for my death. "Why did you move house? Is it a regular thing? Every couple of thousand years?" I dug my paddle into the water with more force than usual and watched as the water droplets falling from the paddle sparkled in the sun.

"No. Most of us only ever have one house. But that was when – what I told you about before happened." He dropped his voice to an almost inaudible whisper. "When I tried to bring back the one who had drowned."

I cast my mind back and vaguely remembered what he was talking about. Very early, perhaps even in those first few minutes after I'd awakened, he had said something about how he'd been able to bring me back because I hadn't drowned. That he'd tried it before with someone who had drowned, and the River hadn't liked it. "It's all right," I said. "You don't have to talk about it."

"No, the River doesn't mind me talking about it, I don't think. Though you never know."

He glanced around and still looked decidedly nervous, but yet he dove into his narrative. "It was one of those times when I'd got lonely, you know. Like now. I was out collecting and I found him above the water, caught by some rocks. A Dwarf. Fairly young, I think, at least his beard was pretty short. I don't think he'd been dead long; nothing had started eating him yet."

I thought, Many more comments like that and I'm going to be sick. I fought against the urge to scratch, as I was hit by the illusory but maddeningly vivid sensation that River fish were nibbling at my flesh. My brief stint as a corpse floating down the River had probably ensured that for the rest of my life I would have nightmares about corpses in water.

"Go on," I said.

"Well, you see, I remembered about silverweed. I'd seen them using it on the battlefields to save the ones who were dying. Sometimes ones who were already dead. It grows all along the riverbed around here, so I took him back to my house and tried it out. But - "

"Yes?" I prompted quietly.

"The River wasn't happy. Before the spell was finished It sent a wave and – and tore down my house. I never saw what happened to the Dwarf, but he hadn't come back yet, so I guess he didn't know anything about it. I hope. And the wave took me and it dropped me down the Falls."

I stopped paddling and stared at him as we kept drifting along. "You fell down the Falls?"

He gave a little, unhappy grin. "Yes. Just like you. Only you don't remember it, do you?"

I thought about it and tried to remember, but mercifully came up with nothing. Plummeting down a thousand foot waterfall was not a memory I wanted to treasure.

I took up my paddle again. "No. I don't."

"Probably a good thing. Anyway, I was washed along for quite a ways and finally thrown out of the water. But then I told the River I was sorry and I guess it was all right, because It let me come back in again. So that was when I started this house, below the Falls."

He turned to face forward again, and whispered, "There, look. We're passing the tree. This was where I turned around."

Svip fell silent after that, huddled down in the boat so that only his head protruded over the line of the gunwale. He had stopped paddling. I supposed he was worried at crossing into this other's territory, and I wondered if the other could have sensed him more easily if he were paddling. Were their senses keen enough for the other to pick up Svip's scent just from the sweeping of his paddle through the water?

I tensed up a bit in sympathy with him, half expecting an enraged green being to leap up out of the water and attack us. But all I saw was a turtle swimming past, and all I heard was the haunting call of some lonely bird.

To our right a dark-watered stream appeared, cutting its way through the grass to melt into the River. There it was: Hosvir, the farthest north of the Mouths of Entwash. Silently I recited their names to myself, picturing the sunlit schoolroom where I'd had to memorise them: Hosvir and Hjalmar and Heidrek, Gilling and Geirthjof and Glammad, after the six brothers of Hjarmendacil.

I wondered, if I had remained dead, and the news of my death had reached my people, whether some feature on the maps would ever have been named after me.

We had passed Hjalmar, the Second Mouth, before Svip sat up straight and started paddling again. Presumably, I thought, we had passed now out of his fellow water being's territory. But though he seemed more cheerful he still didn't speak, and this time I was too wrapped up in my own thoughts to ask him anything.

What would I find when I reached home?

I was not going to think that Minas Tirith might already have fallen. I simply refused to accept that possibility. The fall of Minas Tirith would have been an event of such enormity, surely even Svip would have heard about it. No, I when I got home the City would still be there, and so would Father and Faramir, and we would still have our chance to send the Enemy scuttling back into his wastelands.

If my hopes were justified – if Minas Tirith yet stood and the foe was not yet at our gates – was there a chance I could organise a rescue expedition, to attack the Fortress of Isengard and rescue or avenge Merry and Pippin?

I could not go with the expedition myself, of course. But if I could convince my father of the truth of Saruman's treachery, would we not be well advised to send a force to attack him, enlisting the support of our allies of Rohan along the way, rather than waiting for his creatures to strike at our backs?

One could argue that such a plan would leave too few men to guard Minas Tirith against the East. Yet if we waited, might we not be in worse peril, if Saruman caught the men of Rohan by surprise and we found ourselves trapped, with enemies striking from West and East at once? Besides, at the same time as we moved against Isengard we could call upon Uncle Imrahil to support us along the River. With Rohan to ride on Isengard and Dol Amroth holding the River with us, I felt sure we could stand our ground against the Dark. If only we moved fast enough to strike first.

The difficulty, I thought, would lie in convincing my father and brother that Saruman had turned against us. I did not like to think of how Faramir would feel when he realised the truth of it. He had always admired the Wizard Lord greatly, second only to his adulation of old Mithrandir.

Father, too, would be loath to believe it. I thought back to the times when Saruman had visited Minas Tirith while I was growing up, and how he and my father would sit up late at night in Father's study, talking politics and drinking old wine and laughing over Saruman's witticisms, sharp enough to flay his victims alive. As I grew older they would often let me join them, and I remembered how important I had felt at being included in their conversations – though my chief concern had usually been that I not disgrace myself by falling asleep over the wine. Father had even let Faramir stay up past his bedtime and listen to them sometimes, which he would never have done if our guest had been any other Wizard than Saruman. Normally Father hated it when Faramir trailed around after the Wizards – particularly Mithrandir, whose visits always left Faramir longing to go chasing off on some magic quest or another. I could probably recite by memory – though not nearly so perfectly as Faramir could – Father's lecture about how running around in Mithrandir's shadow would just get Faramir killed and deprive Gondor of another warrior, when she so badly needed all of us. But Saruman was different, and Father hadn't minded it when Faramir listened to him. I remembered my father saying once that the Lord Saruman dwelt in reality and understood the world as it was, not like the rest of these Wizards who only saw the world as they wished it to be.

My father thought of Saruman as a friend, and my brother, unless some great awakening to the ways of the world had hit him since last we talked, still believed that Wisdom was invariably allied with Good. It would be a personal hurt to both of them, when they learned that Saruman had turned to the Dark. Yet I was sure they would trust my word on it.

It was fortunate, I thought, that I had more proof of the matter than just Gandalf's report. If the Grey Wanderer's word were all the proof we had, Father would say that Mithrandir was jealous of Saruman's position in their Order and was spreading lies in a bid to overthrow him. But I had heard, from the last Orc I slew below the Falls, that the Orc war party had included "cursed White Hand Isengarders," whose master had sent them to kill the rest of us but bring the halflings to him. Was that not proof enough?

Of course a devoted defender of Saruman could argue that the Orcs' "master" did not have to be Saruman himself. It could be one of his underlings, who had turned to the Shadow without the Lord of Isengard's knowledge. But that did not sound like the great Saruman the Wise. More like Saruman the Gullible.

Something moving in the distance off to our left jolted me into the present. An instant later Svip and I both hissed simultaneously, as if we'd planned it out beforehand, "Orcs! Get down."

Both of us dropped, crouching down to the bottom of the boat to make ourselves as invisible as possible. From the brief glimpse I had got, it had not looked as if the three dark shapes a little ahead of us on the Eastern skyline were looking in our direction. But I had seen little more than silhouettes and I could not be sure.

What little planning we had done for the eventuality of running into Orcs was to hide and try to make them think the elven craft was abandoned, drifting down the River on its own. And if that failed, the remaining plan consisted of "we fight them." Or, I hoped it would in reality be "I fight them and Svip stays in the boat and keeps out of the way," but I doubted that I would be that lucky.

At the moment I'd seen the Orcs, my paddle had been on a downswing, cutting through the water. Now I crouched frozen with my left hand gripped around the paddle and the paddle still sticking out from the boat. I dreaded to pull it back in, lest the movement or a flash of sunlight off the wet paddle should draw the Orcs' attention down on us. Of course if they got close enough they could not fail to notice that what held the paddle in place was not an oarlock but rather my hand. But I hoped that from a distance the dark leather of my gauntlet would blend in with boat.

An idea came to me, but I did not dare move enough to carry it out.

"Svip," I whispered.

"What?" he hissed back.

"I'm going to untie the Elven cloak from my belt. I've got the Horn of Gondor in it; if you grab the cloak when I get it loose, I'll make sure the Horn doesn't fall and bring them down on us. Try to spread the cloak over us as much as you can. The Elves in Lórien said these cloaks will make the wearer invisible, or something like that." As I said it, I felt immensely stupid. Yes, I thought, something like that. Instead of two people huddled in the bottom of a boat, we will instead look like two people huddled in the bottom of a boat underneath a cloak.

Svip inched toward me while I struggled, one-handed, to untie the knotted cloak. When he got close enough he reached out to help. After entirely too long, the last of the knots came loose. It was a good thing that Svip was there, for I would almost certainly have dropped the Horn of Gondor and alerted the Orcs to our presence if I'd had to juggle both portions of the Horn one-handed. I cautiously lowered one half of it to the floor of the boat, and Svip did the same with the other. Then he took hold of the cloak and started trying to spread it out, all the while without making too many large, sudden movements.

Now my feeling of helplessness was magnified a hundredfold. Still crouching there trying not to move, and now able to see nothing but the grey mistiness of Elven fabric, I wanted to leap out of the boat and charge the Orcs. At least then I would be doing something, instead of just waiting.

We drifted on. I listened desperately, but no sound of shouting Orcs assailed my ears. I thought I might have heard Orcish voices, just at the edge of earshot, but certainly nothing moving near to us. Nothing that sounded like Orcs who had just found a pair of village idiots hiding under a cloak.

The minutes dragged by, giving me the sensation that instead of moving through time at the normal speed, we were creeping through it like flies trapped in a puddle of treacle. The faint hint of Orc voices faded, leaving only the occasional frog, and the rustling breeze.

At last enough time had passed that I thought it must surely be a legitimate strategic move to check whether the enemy was still in view. Not even my brother, or Aragorn, could say I had acted with too great haste or rashness this time.

I whispered to Svip, who was huddled down at the far end of the cape, "I'm going to check on them."

"No," he whispered back, "I'll do it. I'm smaller; it'll be harder for them to see me." He thought for a while, then added, "I'll tow us into the reeds and hide the boat, then I can do a reconnaissance."

I nodded, thinking to my surprise that it might not be such a huge drawback to have Svip along on this voyage after all.

Keeping under the cloak for as long as possible, Svip crawled to the starboard side and then slipped out into the water, in a lithe, slithering move like a fish escaping a fisherman's boat. A moment later the Elven boat began to move forward with more purpose than before. Svip had taken hold of the rope still tied to the ring on the prow, and was pulling the boat along.

I heard reeds scraping along the sides as we came to a stop. Then Svip's almost inaudible voice: "Wait here, I'll look around."

I resisted the urge to tell him to be careful, knowing how much I hate it when people say that to me. Presumably even Svip, impractical though he might sometimes appear, knew that caution was appropriate when sneaking around looking for Orcs.

I pulled the Elven cloak off me and sat up, finding myself surrounded by reeds so thick that I wondered if the boat were balancing on top of them rather than floating in the water. With painful carefulness I moved my left arm, which had fallen asleep, and finally brought the paddle back into the boat.

I wondered how long I should wait before deciding that the situation had fallen apart and going to look for Svip.

Fortunately, I did not have to make that decision. After only a few minutes, my strange green comrade appeared, swimming through the reeds. With only his head visible, I thought that if I did not already recognise him, I would have had no idea what he was. From only a little distance, the most likely identification of him would be as a gigantic snake. Hopefully, I thought, that was what Orcs would think as well.

He grabbed hold of the boat's side, and grinned at me. "Couldn't find any sign of them," he reported. "I think we're back in the water. I did smell Orc in the nearest really shallow bits, but it didn't smell fresh."

Svip towed us back out of the reeds, this time with me contributing my paddling to the effort. When we reached the main channel again he hopped into the boat and we continued on, as if our voyage had not been interrupted. But now we left the cloak of Lórien spread out, for greater ease of throwing ourselves under it if need be.

Twice more that day we encountered Orcs. Once I spotted a larger party of them, perhaps fifteen or twenty, heading south along the Western shore. It was shortly after we passed Heidrek, the Third Mouth of Entwash, perhaps forty miles from the Falls of Rauros and Svip's home. The sight of these Orcs on the West shore filled me with dread, for more than our present predicament. The more of Sauron's creatures that felt free to wander the Western bank, the more it looked as if all of our land was soon to be over-run. Or had been over-run already.

We were still a good distance behind the Orcs when we saw them, and had time to take up our posts once more beneath the Elven cloak. This time I did not have to freeze with my arm and paddle sticking out of the boat. The brutes' loud, harsh voices fell heavily on our ears as we floated past them. But despite my pessimistic predictions which sent my right hand creeping toward my sword, none of the Orcs waded out toward us. Judging from the tones of their voices, our craft elicited no more than minor interest.

The third time, as evening drew in, we did not see the Orcs at all. But Svip suddenly pulled in his paddle and whispered to me that he smelled them, strongly, just ahead. The River, at this point, was dotted with little islands, some apparently actual dry ground and others hillocks of muck and reeds. We ducked under our cloak again and drifted through the murky twilight.

I still was not entirely convinced that our safe passage was due to the cloak of Lórien rather than to the Orcs being unobservant. But it would be foolishness to discard a potential weapon before it had been proven not to work. Unless some Orc were to pull the cloak off us and inquire what we thought we were playing at, I was willing to accept that the cloak did what the Elves of Lothlórien said it did.

Without Svip's keen senses I did not smell any Orcs, but I did smell woodsmoke and hear the crackling of campfires. Their voices reached us again, and an occasional guttural laugh.

We journeyed for perhaps another hour after we had emerged from the cloak that third time. Only a faint hint of light was left in the Western sky when we pulled in to another thick screen of reeds. Svip and I had decided against spending the night on land, for we could not know when some band of Orcs might come strolling through our campsite. Besides, there was little point in it, since Svip would just go sleep in the water anyway.

We tied the rope around a clump of thick-stemmed reeds, and settled in for the night.

Svip dove underwater to fetch our dinner. To have risked a fire would have been absurd, so I resigned myself to a meal of raw fish, much to Svip's delight. It was not the first time I had eaten raw fish, or for that matter raw frog, raw lizard or raw snake, when the rigours of campaigning required it. But I would have been just as happy not to renew my acquaintance with it.

My comrade returned with a couple of fish and some weeds that he assured me would put the finishing touches on this particular delicacy. He was right; it was not all that bad. It was at least better than lighting a fire and announcing our presence to the forces of Darkness.

Svip made his bed in another clump of reeds next to the boat, his pillow a hillock of mud and the rest of his body in the water. I worried that he'd slide underneath and drown, but Svip assured me he had plenty of experience of sleeping in the water without dying.

I was left with the Elven boat for my bed. With Svip's pack as a pillow and the cloak of Lórien as a blanket, I should have been comfortable enough. Certainly there was more comfort in it than in many surfaces on which I had slept.

That did not stop me from spending a thoroughly unpleasant night.

I could feel the cold of the water seeping through the hull. The air was thick with the dank smells of rotting vegetation.

I could not help thinking of the last time I had been lying down in this boat.

I lay there with the Elven cloak clutched around me, ordering myself not to be such an ass about this. There was absolutely no reason why it should bother me. All I had to do was just forget about it.

A nightmare image came to me that the boat had just been waiting, all day, to claim me for its own. That when I closed my eyes the boat would take me, and dawn would find me a corpse, laid out cold and pale with my funeral goods heaped up about me.

In my mind I snarled at myself, Shut up and go to sleep.

I rolled over, seeking in vain a position that was comfortable enough to lure me into sleep.

I don't know how many times I did that, but once I set the boat rocking badly enough that it whacked into Svip.

His voice hissed irritably out of the darkness, "Do you have to do that?"

"Yes," I growled, and flipped onto my other side to prove it. I resisted my impulse to tell him that if he didn't want to put up with me being a restless sleeper, he shouldn't have insisted on bringing me back to life and trailing after me like a puppy.

I thought, There's a philosophical statement for you. Into every life comes the time to make the choice: whether loneliness and wanting someone to talk to is a greater or lesser evil than getting smacked in the head with a boat when the Man in said boat rolls over in it.

I scowled up at the black sky and the few glimmering stars.

I was not sure where waking ended and my dream began. Which made the dream all the worse.

I was once more floating down the Great River. It was still night, but more stars were visible overhead, without the dank haze that rolls up out of the marshes. I lay on my back, and though I could not move, I could feel that my hands rested together over my chest.

I thought that I lay in a boat, yet there seemed to be water above me and all around me. The water gleamed with a strange, cold light, as if moonlight had been trapped within it. Panic jolted through me at the realisation that the water was over my face. I tried to gasp, tried to cough, tried to breathe. Tried to sit up and get out of that water before it choked off my life. But I could not move, and when I thought about it I found I felt no need to breathe. I felt as if I had never breathed. As if there had never been anything in my life except the glimmering water and the cold, joyless light.

The boat, if boat it was, suddenly seemed to slow its course. Then someone appeared above me, beyond the gleaming water. I could see him clearly, the icy glow of the water turning his face as pale as a corpse.

My brother Faramir gazed at me, anguished despair in his face. I could not hear him, but as I lay there longing to cry out, to speak to him, I saw his lips move as he spoke my name.

Of a sudden, I did hear something. From the way he started and whirled as if to face an enemy, my brother heard it too. The call of a horn, long, loud and clear. It was a call that I knew full well, for it came from my own Horn, from the Horn of Gondor.

I was no longer in the boat. I was standing next to my brother, with the water rushing against my legs. I reached out and grabbed Faramir's arm, but he did not seem to notice me.

The Horn sounded again, its cry wild and twisting, the echoes bouncing off one another until they sounded like the horns of an army.

Faramir yelled into the night, never looking at me, "Boromir! Where is your Horn? Where are you going? Boromir!"

Other sounds rushed at us from the dark shore. Trumpet calls. The yells of Men in combat, and of darker creatures. The clash of blades and armour and the hollow whistle of arrows in flight.

Faramir started through the water toward the shore, then a huge splashing behind us caused him to turn once more. He drew his sword, and I moved to do the same, only to realise that I was not armed.

The glimmering light had gone, but I could still see my brother's beloved face, as he waited grimly for whatever came at him from the darkness. His face betrayed no fear, but I heard him whisper, "Boromir, where are you?"

I awoke. The first shock of waking sent me sitting up in the Elven boat and reaching wildly for my sword.

There were no trumpet calls. No shouts and clashing swords, and nothing splashing through the River. Nothing but Svip snoring quietly from the reeds.

I sat there, shaking. After a few minutes I forced myself to lie back down, once more staring up at the sky.

I wished I could cry, but the dread that shuddered through me seemed too deep and cold for tears.

Just a dream, I told myself.

Yet, I knew, there was no such thing as "just a dream" in my family.

It had been just a dream that sent me forth from Minas Tirith to begin with, on the quest that led to my death.

Just dreams that I knew came to my brother and our father, more often perhaps than they would ever admit. Dreams and waking visions that spoke to them of our country's fate, and that gave them that pale, haunted look as if some unspoken horror devoured them from the inside.

If those dreams came to them, why should they not also come to me?

Faramir and I had spoken of it many times. His theory was that I did have the same dreams, only I was too pigheaded to pay any notice to them.

Well, I thought, you should just be pigheaded again. It's only to be expected that you're having nightmares. What did you think would happen, when you're sleeping in your own damned funeral boat?

Yet I could not stop seeing my brother's face, as he brandished his sword and grimly faced the dark.

He's all right, I told myself. Even if it was premonition, even if he is in combat at this very moment, he will be all right.

"Faramir," I whispered. "Please be all right."

The river grasses rustled in the breeze, as I lay there and watched the stars.