The Chief in a Village by Himring

Chapter 1

Feanor Disrupts Gathering Female Relatives Refuse To Attend

This chapter is set during the days of rising tension between Feanor and Fingolfin in Tirion and, apart from the usual suspects, also features Lalwen, Finwe's second daughter, as well as, briefly, Angrod and his wife.

Quenya names: Characters: Angarato (Angrod), Eldalote (Edhellos), Feanaro (Feanor), Findekano (Fingon), Irime (Lalwen), Maitimo (Maedhros), Nolofinwe (Fingolfin)

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I am standing in a forest of vases. They are all cylindrical, slender and tall—some of them tower above my head all on their own, others are arranged on plinths of various sizes. At first sight, you might think they were all the same colour. But they are also all subtly different. Not only are they of different height and different diameter, but none of those shades of greenish, brownish grey is exactly alike, and there are almost invisible patterns to the glaze that puzzle the eyes of the beholder.

There is something oppressive about this regimented pottery forest. Standing in its centre, at first I felt a ridiculous urge to lash out and knock some of the vases of their plinths, hear them shatter on the floor. Fighting the temptation, I moved stiffly, keeping my arms rigidly at my sides and turning carefully to observe the vases in different directions, from different angles.

But as I lingered there, making myself pay attention to details of shape and glaze, I was increasingly struck both by the amount of deliberation and skill that had clearly gone into this arrangement of pots and by the decided refusal to be merely decorative that they embodied. The potters of Tirion have had much time and leisure to hone their craft, and the great houses of the Noldor contain much work of theirs that is not merely functionally perfect, not just beautiful to look at, but has that added quality to it that makes it a true work of art. But what my aunt Irime creates is art of a different kind.

It is not designed to be functional. It is not beautiful in any conventional way. It is an art of rejection, an art of denial. Standing in the midst of it, I am seized by the fanciful idea that although this clay forest is situated in Tirion, here and now, it is not of Tirion, or rather that it is both in Tirion and not in Tirion at the same time. It is oppressive, but it is also liberating as if, in stepping into it, I had briefly stepped outside the constraints of my life as Prince Findekano of Tirion.

Thoughtfully, I look through and past those glazed pottery tree trunks at the domestic scene that unfolds beyond it. Father and Aunt Irime are taking tea. For the moment, they are both choosing to ignore my abrupt departure from the tea table, although I’m sure I will hear about it from Father later. I imagined I had taught my son better manners than that. Conversely, I will gain points for at least being polite enough to pretend an interest in Aunt Irime’s pots. The thought will not cross his mind that it could be more than pretence; he has never managed to be more than polite about Aunt Irime’s work himself.

My misbehaviour hasn’t stopped him in mid-flow, at any rate. He is bending her ear on the subject of the iniquities of Feanaro again. From the moment we sat down and Aunt Irime poured the first cup, past insults and injuries came bubbling up again and insisted on being reported in every circumstance and detail. It never seems to occur to Father that, if Irime had a personal interest in carrying on the feud with Feanaro, she would probably not be ensconced in this plain, if spacious, workshop tucked away in one of the less prosperous quarters of Tirion. Certainly, she would not be refusing to set foot in the Palace except upon the explicit royal command of Finwe. Of course, he is convinced that it is Feanaro who has driven her out. He has chalked it up as another black mark against Uncle Feanaro.

There can be no doubt that she loves her brother. There is never a hint that Father’s visits might not be welcome. She brings out her best tea pot for him. She bakes his favourite biscuits, every time. And she sits patiently listening to him as he tells her all the things that Feanaro has done to him and to Tirion since his last visit.

He loves her, too. But he still calls her Lalwende. He hasn’t noticed that she rarely laughs anymore.

***

Am I being unfair to him? After all, he is hardly the only one who is upset by recent events. I’m pretty angry myself.

Maitimo was so happy to see me last night! It was only coincidence that Angarato and I happened to enter the Great Hall exactly at the same time as he did, but as soon as he saw me, his eyes lit up and he greeted me as enthusiastically as if I had unexpectedly returned from a year-long voyage of exploration, and Angarato as well. We stopped right there, as Maitimo began eagerly asking us questions: What had we…? Did we still…? How was…?

I wanted to answer him: But, Maitimo, I was here all along. Where were you? If you had made time to drop by any time during the past year or so, you’d know the answers to all these questions. But he was so earnest, almost frantic, in his efforts to catch up with our lives that my objections and reservations melted away and I answered him openly. He lapped up all the details and wanted more. Almost, I could have believed he missed our close friendship, our daily association, as much as I did.

We were so engrossed in our exchange that neither of us immediately noticed the commotion near the centre of the hall. But it spread out in ripples through the crowd and, even before it quite reached us, Maitimo’s head went up like that of a horse already bridled too severely that feels a brutal tug on the rein. We looked around quickly, but of course, by that time, what was happening had happened and was already almost over.

Some of the guests were retreating as if they wanted to get out of range of the conflict, others surging forward as if they wanted to witness the spectacle or show their support. In the midst of it all stood Uncle Feanaro and Father facing each other—and the expression on everyone’s faces, Feanaro’s superciliously raised eyebrows and thinned lips, Father’s incredulous hurt glare, all of that made it  only too clear: Feanaro had just chosen to deliver yet another deadly insult in front of a large and mixed audience.

Maitimo mumbled something that with a lot of goodwill could be considered a hasty apology and headed straight for the pair of them with the determination of a stable hand who rushes to close the stable door after the horse has already bolted. Anything I might have been going to say died on my lips.

‘Don’t look so disappointed, Findekano! Our cousin, the great diplomat, has bigger fish to fry’, said Angarato cynically.

He had already held back rather more than I did during the previous conversation. His moods have soured considerably ever since Eldalote firmly refuses to accompany him to any family gatherings. I don’t particularly like blood sports, she told me, sharply, and even if I did, I would disapprove of them in the drawing-room.

Our cousin, the great diplomat, had meanwhile reached his father and mine. Feanaro shrugged off his hurried enquiry dismissively and left him standing there. Maitimo addressed himself to my father instead. Knowing Father, what he actually replied would have been reasonably polite. Unfortunately, however, his facial expression and physical attitude were highly eloquent even to those who, like me, could not hear what he said, and what they expressed was: What do you want from me, whelp? If you cannot restrain your father, you have no business interfering.

Never mind, Father, I thought, that if anyone demanded that I should restrain you, you would imagine the natural order of the universe had been overturned.  And no, it is not the same thing, but it is not as different as you imagine either.

Cold-shouldered by Nolofinwe, Maitimo hurried after Feanaro. And for the rest of the evening, standing with Angarato in gloomy near-silence near the door while Angarato was calculating how soon he could decently make his exit, I watched my clever cousin make a fool of himself trying to ride herd on Feanaro. It was not just that the horse had already bolted, he had never stood much chance of stopping it from doing so even if he had been standing right next to it all the time.

Uncle Feanaro is a genius in this as in so much else—one of the things that makes him so difficult for Father to fathom. Insults so accurately aimed and wounding that anybody else, but especially Father, would have to have been plotting them hours, if not days in advance—Feanaro comes up with them on the spur of the moment and utters them almost as spontaneously. Father knows this, but it does not make it easier for him to be on the receiving end.

Sadly, Uncle Feanaro is not also a genius at making apologies. Not to put too fine a point on it, he utterly lacks talent in that category. And although Feanaro is probably the most hard-working of all the Noldor—which I do not think everybody realizes—he only deigns to work at things he is already good at and has an aptitude for. We used to manage to take his apologies as read. Somehow. With a great deal of effort. Until we stopped.

Maitimo, last evening, was trailing around the room after Feanaro as he talked to people here and there and, in doing so, he persisted in trying to pour oil on the troubled waters. I watched my cousin run through his repertoire and could pretty much imagine what he was saying as if I had been within hearing distance: a sensitive listener offering sympathetic nods and perceptive comments, delicate compliments and reassuring smiles. It was as charming a performance as usual, but oddly empty. He must know he was being ineffectual, that his efforts might even be counter-productive, for he seemed to be irritating rather than soothing Feanaro who occasionally made an impatient gesture, as if he might be about to swat his son and heir like a fly and barely restrained himself.

I am not saying I could have done any better than Maitimo myself. As far as I was concerned, the only method of dealing with Feanaro that promised to be effective at this stage was kidnapping and gagging him, stowing him away in a remote cellar and sitting on him. As tempting as that was beginning to sound, it would have confirmed Feanaro in precisely the kind of conspiracy theories his brain seemed to be busily spawning.

Feanaro beat Angarato to it, suddenly making up his mind to leave and heading imperiously for the door. Once again, Maitimo was left to scurry after him.  I was convinced that my cousin had completely forgotten me by then.

He was almost out of the door when he stopped and half turned, looking over his shoulder. His gaze urgently scanned the crowd. Finally, it alighted on me, and I realized it was me he had been looking for, having failed to realize that we had hardly moved from the spot where he had left us.

He attempted yet another reassuring smile. It went badly wrong and slid off his face like a rotten egg. For a moment, he just stood there, looking tired and quite desperate. Then, he made a small gesture that said: It doesn’t matter. And he turned around again and went out.

Suddenly, I was furiously angry with him. What doesn’t matter, Maitimo?! You never even gave me a chance to say I miss you! And do you think you’re the only one who can see we appear to be heading straight towards disaster? Do you think you’re the only one who is afraid?

But I was too well-brought-up to yell such things across a crowded room—despite the fact that my father and my uncle hadn’t hesitated to make a public spectacle of themselves the very same evening. I blame you for that, too, Maitimo.

***

Not so very long ago, I would have said that of course my relatives were all quite impossible, but that they were impossible in the best possible way. Was I just being stupid and blind? If not, whatever has happened to us?

Frowning, I stare at the mysterious near-invisible patterns on Aunt Irime’s pots as if they could answer my question, while Father’s complaints go on droning in my ears. Briefly, Aunt Irime looks up and smiles at me as if she knew what I was thinking, before she devotes her attention to my father again.

 

Chapter 2

Fingon Has the Blues.

In Beleriand: Turgon, Aredhel and Idril have left for Gondolin, so Fingon is left to deal with his father's reaction.

Quenya names: Turukano=Turgon, Feanaro=Feanor,  Angarato=Angrod, Aikanaro=Aegnor, Pityo and Telvo=Amrod and Amras, Findarato=Finrod, Nolofinwe=Fingolfin

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My father took Turukano’s departure for Gondolin hard. I do not think my brother was conscious of how hard he was taking it. All afire with the vision of his hidden city and blinded by ardent hope to the thoughts and doubts of others, Turukano did not perceive how my father with one glance had taken the measure of his son’s determination and suppressed all possible objections.

Ulmo had spoken, it seemed. My father had withstood the Wrath of the Valar in order to follow Feanaro, but Feanaro was dead and gone. Now, as father and as King, Nolofinwe did not feel he could go against the will of a Vala who offered survival to any of his family and his subjects.

And yet he felt their desertion keenly. Doom or no, it betrayed a lack of faith in his judgement and guidance that hurt his pride. Moreover, the former allegiance of Nevrast was weakened and diminished and that hurt rather more than just his pride. Yet he swallowed his pride and sacrificed all other considerations to the chance of safety for his beloved children and his only granddaughter. He let them go without a single complaint or utterance of self-pity.

They went and with them went Glorfindel and Ecthelion, Duilin and Galdor and Egalmoth and others. I was to miss them all sorely, even Salgant—especially Salgant, who had always been good for a laugh and a joke or two, even if his puns were something terrible.

And so, of his closest relatives, my father was left only with me. He did not unburden himself to me. I would not have been his chosen confidant, even if he had wished to do so, and Fingolfin, High King of the Noldor in Endore, was past wishing to admit the full extent of his hurt to anyone.

But he wanted me by his side—and that he let me know in no uncertain terms. No sooner had I reached Dor-lomin after our last leave-taking than a messenger arrived summoning me to Barad Eithel. I dropped any plans I had formed and quickly made my way northeast to support my father, only to find that this was to be the first of many similar journeys. He summoned me again and again. I found these summons almost impossible to dodge, for what I might have tried to refuse my father, I could not refuse to the High King, and what I might have tried to refuse the High King, I could not refuse to the desolate father.

At first, of course, I did not even wish to dodge his summons. But as time went on and my father tried to keep me permanently in Barad Eithel, impatient of any attempts I made to delay my return there just a little longer, I found myself having to delegate more and more of the actual governance of Dor-lomin to others. Year by year, I felt the reins slipping from my hands. It was not that my representatives were not trustworthy or that Dor-lomin was misgoverned, as far as I could tell—it just no longer felt as if it was truly myself who was handling affairs. And so, when the time came, I handed over Dor-lomin gladly to Hador Lorindol of the Edain—much in the same spirit as a boy might hand over his beloved toys to a younger brother on going off to school, taking comfort in the confidence that at least they will be cherished by another, even if he can no longer do so himself.

As the eldest of my siblings, I had, of course, always been my father’s heir apparent, and the train of events beginning with my grandfather’s death had quickly made that more than the empty word it had seemed in Tirion. But now my father began harping on the matter. I suppose that was logical enough; the loss, for now, of Turukano meant there was no readily available alternative, and the prophecy of Ulmo would have reminded him sharply of the risks he himself was facing. Having been used to running things largely my own way in Dor-lomin, I found the tasks my father now increasingly devised for the heir of Hithlum a somewhat thankless proposition. Status as heir seemed to come with a lot of responsibilities but without the corresponding powers to match them.

On one occasion, I immersed myself, on my father’s orders, in the adjudication of a complex litigation over fishing rights in the upper reaches of Sirion that had been simmering for decades. It took me months to make myself familiar with all the ins and outs of the position of the five parties involved. I finally worked out a compromise that I hoped was fair and acceptable to everyone—only to have one of the parties appeal over my head to my father and to have my judgement overridden by him.

I was sure my father had his reasons. Unfortunately, it did not seem to occur to him that he had not sufficiently explained them to me, that maybe he should have done so and, what is more, that it would have been better if he had warned me in time if he considered I was taking the wrong tack in my investigation rather than undermining the standing of his appointed judge. He only looked baffled and irritated when I ventured to hint that all this would probably have been self-evident to him if I had not happened to be his son. Unfortunately, it was not the first comparable incident.

Being the heir, it turned out, involved other complications as well. My father was now desperate for more grandchildren, it seemed, and started badgering me about the absolute necessity of producing an heir of my own. This, I felt, was both unduly pessimistic and unduly optimistic. How likely was it that both of us would be killed in battle so quickly one after the other, except in the course of a defeat so absolute that there would be nothing worth speaking of left to inherit?

My father reminded me, pointedly, that there were more ways of getting killed in Beleriand than in open battle and started to trot a whole parade of possible brides past me at every opportunity. One of them, Erien, was by way of being a friend of mine and, becoming aware of this, my father began thrusting us together in the most embarrassing way. I was very much disconcerted, both by his stubborn insistence and by the marked reluctance I felt to engage in any of this. I looked around me and noticed something I had only been subliminally been aware of, before.

The birth rates of the Noldor in exile were very low. On the face of it, the Noldor of Hithlum might be staunch optimists who claimed to believe that Morgoth could be successfully contained and, with a bit of additional effort and luck, overthrown. But their patterns of courtship gave the lie to this. Betrothals were prolonged for no obvious reason, there were few weddings, and even fewer of those who did marry had children. Whatever they claimed, my people had not forgotten the Prophecy of the North. Or at least those who lived in the border countries had not—I believed birth rates might be somewhat higher in Nargothrond and perhaps also, now, in Gondolin.

Standing on the walls of Barad Eithel and looking down and across the valley of Sirion, I was surprised to realize how trapped I felt. Was it just being reminded of the Doom that had done this? Surely I had not really been naïve enough to believe it was done with and forgotten? And that the fabled freedom of Middle-earth was riddled with constraints of every kind was hardly news, either. What was so alarming and confining about marrying Erien? We liked each other, after all, even if we were not exactly in love, and would do well enough together. And could I really argue against my father’s reasoning that an heir was needed? It wasn’t as if I had an unconquerable aversion to children!

No, I decided. I was simply overworked. That ugly little tussle over fishing rights had unnerved me. What I needed, clearly, was a break, a holiday. I would go and visit Angarato and Aikanaro and see how they were getting along… I looked toward Dorthonion and, immediately, before my inner eye, there appeared a mental image of a whole string of my father’s messengers pursuing me all the way to Angarato and Aikanaro’s front door, only too keen to haul me back to Barad Eithel to heir’s duties and marriage.

Dorthonion, I decided, was simply not far enough. I needed to go farther away, somewhere my father’s messengers would take a lot longer to find me. Somewhere I could lose myself a bit, somewhere like East Beleriand. Indeed, why not visit Pityo and Telvo? If Findarato and the others could afford to go there for field trips of one kind or another, why not I?

Chapter 3

A Visit with Amras and Amrod

Fingon is welcomed by Amrod and Amras. A conversation he has with Amras almost makes him change his mind. Nevertheless he insists on heading off into the forest alone.

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Telvo and Pityo welcomed me more warmly than I would have expected, considering I had arrived virtually unannounced.  I had departed from Barad Eithel rather precipitately, having allowed my father’s grumbling and heavy-handed hints that I ought to beget an heir first—before irresponsibly going off on extended journeys, that is—to push me into some rather pointed answers. I decided to go while the going was good, before it occurred to him that he might explicitly forbid me to leave. Taking the road south and east, I seemed to sense black clouds hanging over the Ered Wethrin behind me, and it was a while before I lost a slightly itchy feeling between my shoulder blades.

But Telvo and Pityo seemed to treat the unexplained sudden appearance of their cousin as unremarkable, except as it provided an occasion for an impromptu banquet, a hunt lasting three days and, after that, a more lavish and well-organized feast attended by a few of the more important Noldor of the district.  When I informed them, a little apologetically but firmly, that I had the intention of going on a journey of exploration by myself, they took me to a store room and insisted on re-equipping me from head to toe. I was rather startled to begin with, but soon realized that they knew what they were about. My gear was tried and tested in the border warfare of Hithlum, but I had already observed during the previous hunting trip that Pityo and Telvo had learned a lot from the Green Elves about survival in the woods of East Beleriand. I was very much impressed with the quality of their bows.

It was Telvo who saw me on my way. We walked through the fields of the small settlement above  the banks of Gelion that clustered around the manor house where we had stayed—my cousins tended to move back and forth between a number of these rather than confining themselves to a single base—and entered the woods. The road in this direction, well-kept and well-used where it entered the forest, dwindled into a mere trail before we had gone on for more than half an hour.

Telvo, who was walking a little in front of me, dressed in hunters’ green, stopped, turned and smiled at me. I understood that this was the point where he had decided we would say our farewells.

‘Thank you! I can’t begin to tell you how much I appreciate the hospitality you’ve showed me’, I said. ‘And you’ve showered me with gifts—I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve all this!’

Telvo grinned.

‘Well, it really is in our own best interests, you know! When the time comes that our big brother hears of this and reproaches us and asks how on earth we could permit his favourite cousin to walk off all alone into the woods without so much as a single scout or guard, at least we will be able to say in our defence that we gave him the best equipment we could provide!’

He grew serious.

‘And besides, valiant cousin, you must know quite well what you did to deserve all this! We may not have thanked you, properly, ever—indeed, I’m not sure you ever really got thanked by anyone, for those who have the best manners among us were sadly distracted at the time—but none of us have forgotten what you did. Pityo and I certainly haven’t!  And, compared to that, the gift of a mere hunting-bow is a trifle not even worth mentioning.’

He looked deeply embarrassed after this outburst, but added, earnestly: ‘Good luck, Findekano! I hope you find whatever it is you are looking for, out there!’

And with that, he stepped sideways off the path and almost immediately vanished, in a manner worthy of a Doriathrin border scout or a Green Elf—as if the forest had sucked him in. I blinked, and he just wasn’t there anymore.

‘Thank you’, I called out a little uncertainly, not entirely sure whether he could still hear me.

So he believed that Russandol would start worrying about me as soon as he learned where I had gone. He was probably right, and the thought warmed my heart. Maybe I should not be heading off into the wilds like this? I was already in East Beleriand. Maybe it was finally time to visit Himring, instead?

There could be no doubt that I was indeed still Russandol’s favourite cousin. The reserve he had shown for a while after Mithrim had worn away, almost entirely so. Evidence of affection was easily come by—his letters, his visits, his gifts—and yet there remained the occasional reticence…  And he remained oddly shy about inviting me to Himring, indeed so strangely reluctant to see me there that you would have been forgiven for imagining he indulged in disreputable practices in its cellars—except that by all accounts the manner of life he led in the Marches was so blamelessly heroic as to be almost boring.

I had written to him, since Turukano’s departure, and received letters from him, but I had always hesitated to say anything to him that could be interpreted as criticism of my father, in writing or even in actual words, and I had found myself skirting an increasing number of topics, recently. I wondered what he had read between the lines. But if I went to Himring now, if I told him everything—I might not even need to spell things out and…

No. Not yet. I would go there later, afterward, as soon as I was ready.  What was all the fuss about anyway? Findarato had gone exploring all alone among the foothills of the Ered Luin, and he had been quite safe. What was likely to happen to me?

Having made up my mind, I headed deeper into the forest.

Chapter 4

Being In Tune With Nature Is Sometimes Overrated

'What is likely to happen?' asked Fingon and headed off into the Wild East. Well, you could tell he was in for a nasty surprise, couldn't you?

(Are you one of those people who think Noldor aren't in tune with nature? Don't count on it.)

Warning for violence towards the end of the chapter.

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I felt something lightly touching my cheek, as if someone was trying to draw my attention to something.

Findekano.

I reached up and caught a dry beech leaf between my fingers. It rustled in my grasp. I frowned at it, puzzled.

Findekano.

I looked around and tried to see where the leaf had come from. Who was calling me?  Was someone calling me?

My eyes blurred. Then my vision shifted and cleared. Not far from me, on a small rise, stood a tall beech, its branches lifted up wide to embrace the clear blue morning sky. Autumn had coloured its leaves, few of which remained green. The rest were red and yellow and brown, but mostly red.

Staring at it, I remembered beech woods green with spring above a river bank and among them, someone observing me…  Above a river bank in Dor-lomin… In Dor-lomin, red among the beech leaves…

‘Russandol!’

Startled by the sound of my own voice, I sprang to my feet. A wood pigeon flapped its wings in alarm and flew away into the trees. Suddenly, I was wide awake.

‘Russandol!’

What was I doing here? I was supposed to be on my way to Himring to talk to Russandol and then go home to Hithlum and marry Erien, wasn’t I? Instead of which—where was I?

Evidently: in a clearing in a wood somewhere in East Beleriand. Outwardly, there was nothing wrong. Physically, I felt all right, healthy and clean, and my kit, all the gear Pityo and Telvo had given me—but how long ago exactly had that been?—was well-maintained. Only a few moments ago, I would have said I was all right in every way, that I knew precisely where I was coming from and where I was going to, but those certainties were fading fast and, with them, somehow, the memory of what it was I had thought I knew.

I remembered—fragments. I remembered listening, listening deeply to the song of earth and stone. Had I listened too deeply and, in listening, forgotten to go home? And just how long had I been listening?

I stood, frantically chasing elusive memories inside my head and glaring at the trees, as if they were all conspirators bent on withholding a vital clue. Then, abruptly, I gave up and started dashing around the clearing instead, grabbing my things, and getting ready to leave as fast as I could. It had become quite clear to me that I had no way of reconstructing how much time I had spent aimlessly wandering here and there at the foot of the Ered Luin, it seemed, but one other thing was also quite clear: it was far longer than I had intended and I was long overdue to be somewhere else, several somewhere elses, in fact. When I returned to Barad Eithel, I was sure my father would chain me to the wall in my chamber and refuse to let me pass the front gate for the next several decades.

Not that I would get anywhere very fast by running off wildly into the trees. But just now I felt panicky. I had to get out of this clearing at once or the forest might somehow succeed in ensnaring me again. I would run, for now. Later, I would stop and get myself oriented, and then I would make a more considered dash for it.

***

I did manage to get myself more oriented during the course of the day.  In fact, I found that the first surge of panic had concealed from me that I retained a firmer grasp of the geography of my situation than I had feared. But my memories were still hazy and I could no more comprehend than before how I could have allowed such a thing to happen. Could it be that inside every Noldo there was concealed an Avar—scratch him and the right circumstances would bring him out? Or had I been much more seriously depleted than I had believed and the forest had somehow seeped in through the crevices and into the empty spaces?

By then, of course, I was no longer about to make a dash directly for Himring or Barad Eithel, for I had discovered the orcs. That is, I had come across their trail, a substantial one, which led northwest—indicating that these were not just a few strays, but a full horde that must have slipped through, across the mountains from the east rather than from the north, bypassing the patrols in the Marches. And I realized that I had known this, had felt them passing by to the north of me, acutely sensitized to the pain their steps were causing the forest as they trampled through it just as I had felt the deep-seated wrongness emanating from Angband much more strongly than I would have in my normal state of consciousness—but I had not felt impelled to try to do anything about either the orcs or Angband, so passively attuned to the earth that I could only suffer with it and was unable to find the will to take action.

I was feeling humiliated and ashamed already but that was nothing like the horror that gripped me when I thought of this. Had I, wallowing in self-pity, managed to forget that my people were under attack, under constant threat—no matter that we preferred to call it a Siege?  If in Valinor I had somehow disappeared, slipped through the cracks—that would just have been my problem, really, mine and my family’s, despite the added complication of high visibility that went with royal status. But here, in Beleriand, it amounted to outright desertion.

Not that I was wasting any more time on self-reproaches—at the same time as  I was considering all  this, I was already tracking the orcs with as much speed as elementary caution would allow and trying to work out what to do. Could I alert Telvo or Pityo to them? No, I thought, they were likely to be much too far away—or at any rate the closest of their settlements I was aware of was. Moryo might be closer, in fact, but was still too far away. Technically, I was in Ossiriand, probably, but I my cousins had told me that the Laiquendi tended to give Moryo’s southern borders a wide berth. That must be why nobody else seemed to have noticed this incursion of orcs yet or taken steps to counter it. With luck, it also meant that the area was so sparsely populated that the orcs had not found any victims yet.

I tracked them for the rest of the day and through the night and another day. At dusk, unexpectedly, I heard some of the orcs coming back along their own trail. They were making unusual noises, for orcs:  quarrelling, of course, but almost sluggishly, as if their heart wasn’t in it. They sounded exhausted and anxious. I concealed myself in the undergrowth. There were about a dozen of them, some wounded and all showing the whites of their eyes. I shot the four that looked strongest and fittest with Telvo’s excellent bow before they even realized where the attack was coming from. The rest I mostly dealt with by means of some quick footwork and my sword and dagger.

It was neither particularly heroic nor in any way merciful but I could not afford to let any of them survive if I could prevent it. They might be in disarray now, but they were still dangerous: to anyone they encountered unawares or defenceless, obviously, but particularly so if they had managed to ensconce themselves somewhere in the wilds where they would be hard to dislodge. I hoped the state they were in meant that whoever they had encountered had not suffered too many losses.

I hoped in vain.

---

Chapter End Notes

 

Rather superfluous note: Maedhros has red hair. I seem to have a habit of mentioning this in my stories (including A Bridge in Dor-lomin).

Chapter 5

This Part Has Too Many Dead People In It

Fingon follows the trail of a horde of orcs in Eastern Beleriand and meets someone he had not expected to meet.

(Warning:  note chapter title!)

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The village lay in a strip of no man’s land between the zones of influence of the Laiquendi and the sons of Feanaro. It was not exactly large, but not small either, except by comparison with the miles and miles of unsettled forest around it: an irregular patchwork of fields surrounding a few dozen cottages close to a minor tributary of the Ascar.

I will not pretend that we had been entirely consistent about it, but governance among the Noldor in Middle-earth was a matter of consent by the ruled as well as dynastic considerations. We were essentially rebels after all and, besides, the kind of war we were engaged in would have been too difficult to conduct while attempting to control the unwilling at the same time. Some of us were more autocratic in temperament than others, obviously, but we had not usually stopped anyone from simply leaving or striking out on their own—not as long as there were no loud complaints from the Sindar or Naugrim whose vicinity they settled in.

This particular village was, you might argue, an object lesson why not too many of the Noldor had chosen to go their own ways—although of course that was only hindsight and perhaps a cynical way of viewing things. They had simply had spectacularly bad luck, after all. They were nowhere near the territory currently controlled by Angband—what must have been the odds against that particular horde of orcs stumbling across them? Unless, that is, the Dark Foe had somehow found out and the orcs had been sent… But I really do not see how he could have known.

We are Noldor, though; at least half of that village was Noldorin.  Where the Noldor are concerned, it is never safe to rule out spectacularly bad luck as a very real possibility. There is that.

I do not mean to say, of course, that they had just been sitting there in the wilderness, dreaming of peace until their fate overtook them, quite the contrary. For a village their size, they had clearly put unusual forethought into their defence, conscious of their exposure; the surrounding palisade and ditch were well maintained. They had had warning, too, for it seemed they had managed to get almost everyone inside the palisade in time and bar the gate.  I had come across evidence for a couple of small skirmishes as I approached, but no sign of anyone being surprised out in the fields. Probably, they had had some kind of watchers posted—or scouts.

And they had fought. They had fought fiercely, making the most of any advantage they could get. Orcs lay in piles around the gate and filled the ditch. Breaking through had cost the enemy dearly.

But the orcs had not been stopped by the discovery that their prey had teeth. The Dark Foe has tampered with the orcs’ minds and instincts but they do tend to calculate the cost and try to preserve their own lives when they are free to do so. Probably, in this case, they just could not believe that such a small village could be putting up such a stubborn resistance—perhaps they had imagined that if only they could get through the gate, things would be easy after that. Or perhaps they had been sent, after all. But I do not see how Morgoth could have known!

I climbed through the hole in the gate and faced the first barricade. The houses near the palisade had been torched, probably by the inhabitants themselves, trying to render the area impassable for the next few hours. They were smouldering still. 

The villagers had fought every step of the way.

I had seen a lot of violent death since first setting foot in Beleriand. You get used to it. You don’t get used to it.

It could have been worse, I suppose. When it was over, the orcs had run, too shocked by the extent of their losses to linger over their victory. There had been no orcish fun and games. But even so, violent death leaves little dignity to the dead, most of the time.  I would have liked to avert my eyes as I picked my way through the wreckage. Instead, I looked the bodies over carefully where they sprawled, right and left. There might be signs of life, someone who was not entirely dead. Also, these were my people, and it seemed that I was the only witness to the end they had met in Middle-earth.

Before they had run, the orcs had killed them all, every single living being in the village. The depth of the silence surrounding the place had instilled fear in my heart as soon as I approached the gate. I kept listening hard for any sound but there was nothing. The voice of a single blackbird fluting in a small plum tree between the cottages sounded impossibly loud and brash.

I came to the village square. The corpses lay thicker there, both elves and orcs. It had ended here.

She lay half propped against a pile of splintered wood, the remains of a wagon that had formed part of the last barrier. She was wearing men’s breeches and a plain tunic of tough leather, her hair securely braided out of the way. The shaft of the halberd she had wielded had slipped from her grasp. Dead orcs were strewn about in a rough half circle before her feet.

She must have terrified the orcs. Having brought her down and succeeded in fatally wounding her, in her case, unlike the others, the orcs had not dared to make sure or finish her off. They had just left her there to bleed her life out, slowly.

I had not thought about her very often, during the last years. When I had thought of her, I had envisaged her in her workshop in Tirion, making mysteriously significant pots as she always had.  I knew that was an illusion, of course, just like thoughts of my mother presiding over the dinner table or Aunt Earwen singing. As memories they were genuine enough but to imagine that things were going on just the same still in Tirion unchanged was utter self-deception. It was to ignore the consequences of our departure and deny the inevitable feelings of mutual betrayal. But it was tempting, very comforting, to imagine in the turmoils of Beleriand that those we had left behind were leading idyllic lives, unaffected by time, change or politics.

Only, she was not in Tirion at all. She was here, in Beleriand. And I had not known it, not until this moment.

I dropped to my knees before her.

‘Irime’, I said, in a strangled voice.

She opened her eyes at the sound of her name.

‘Findekano’, she said, recognizing me, and, as I stretched out my hands to try and check her wounds and see whether I might be able to save her, she said sharply: ‘No! Don’t bother. Go find my son! Find Gil-galad.’

Chapter 6

The Failure of the Feminist Agenda in Beleriand

Lalwen (Irime) is said to have followed her brother Fingolfin to Beleriand but we don't seem to hear of her arriving there or indeed doing anything at all in Middle-earth. Tolkien being Tolkien, this doesn't actually need explanation but I'm not the first to try and explain it anyway..

Warning for character death in this chapter.

Read Chapter 6

Irime’s directions were clear and concise. I found Little Gil right away where she had hidden him, in a hollow space under a loose hearthstone in a cottage nearby. She must have given him something to make him sleep and not draw attention to himself.  When I pulled his basket out of the dark hole, he barely stirred.

She cannot have counted on an errant nephew to find him there. When she hid him, she must still have thought there might be survivors. I grabbed the basket with the baby and raced back to the village square.

This time I insisted on having a look at her wounds, ignoring her protests.

‘I tell you there’s no point’, she muttered crossly as I cautiously removed cut and torn fragments of blood-caked leather.

‘No’, I agreed. My voice was steady now. ‘I don’t think I can save your life. An expert battle surgeon in Barad Eithel—just possibly. But I out here, I don’t stand a chance. You’ve got as many holes in you as a sieve, and if I make a serious attempt to do anything about this one here in your side I’m fairly certain I’ll just kill you straight away. But if you let me, I can try and slow the blood loss and buy us a bit more time.’

After that, she subsided and let me get to work. I did as much as I dared. Then I sat back on my haunches and rubbed a blood-stained hand across my forehead.

Her eye-lids were drooping. She was dazed with pain and thoroughly exhausted, and it seemed cruel not to let her rest. But she might well not wake again. I had not put her through this ordeal only to let her drift off in her sleep.

‘Irime’, I asked her, ‘how come you are here?’ I hesitated; then I added: ‘Father said you had remained behind in Tirion.’

She opened her eyes wide and glared at me. All traces of exhaustion had disappeared.

‘He tried to forbid me to come’, she said—and even centuries later, her voice was filled with wrath. ‘He wanted Anaire to come, wanted that so much. A wife belongs with her husband and children, he kept on pleading.  With tears streaming down his face! As if it wasn’t evident that the woman was married to Tirion as much as to him! Anaire—and abandon the city she had grown up in and given her life to like a pair of old dilapidated boots by the side of the road?! She was far too good a housewife for such disorderly proceedings! And all the while Earwen was standing right there with her face white as a sheet, not daring to utter a word because she wasn’t a Noldo. She gave Anaire the courage to go on refusing, I think. 

He wanted Anaire to come. But me—me, the one who wanted out of Tirion so badly, even before the Darkening, that on some days, when the foul compromised peace of Valinor seemed to hang over the city like Midsummer in a swamp, I felt the overwhelming temptation to throw open the door with a crash and rush all the way down the Calacirya, screaming like a maniac!—me, he tried to forbid to come.

He had decided I was frail: artistic, weird, not up to it. It wasn’t worth arguing with. I did the only possible thing. I went home, put on men’s clothes and followed you.’

‘You followed us’, I repeated.

There had been so many of us when we left—the overwhelming majority of the population of the city of Tirion—and although we were noticeably fewer by the time we had reached Beleriand, there were still far too many to pick out a face in the crowd if the person in question was trying to stay concealed. Irime had already been used to wearing workmen’s clothes in her workshop to lug around those heavy tubs of clay, to stack pots and fire her kiln. She had been leading her reclusive life for quite a while before our departure. The times when she had been much in the public eye as the king’s daughter were long past and, even then, how many had seen past the long flowing dresses and the jewellery and the sparkle? Without the princess’s outfit, Irime’s features were strong and not particularly feminine.

‘But Irime, he wouldn’t have sent you back. He couldn’t have, after Araman… Did you tell no one? Nobody knew?’

She was staring past me, not seeing me, I think.

‘There were so many times, on the Ice, when I almost made up my mind to reveal myself’, she said. ‘When Elenwe died, how much I regretted not having done so yet! Only, it never seemed quite the right moment. I put it off. And then I put it off again.

‘And then we reached Beleriand. And I watched, watched as the heroines of the Crossing, Irisse and Artanis, crawled meekly back into their gilded cages, doing as they were ordered to. I wouldn’t let him do it to me. I am a daughter of Finwe! I am not somebody’s prop or an ornament on somebody’s mantelpiece.’

‘All that freedom we had been promised! The wide realms of Middle-earth! And then it came only to this: that they would keep trying to erect another Tirion in Beleriand, that they would slavishly copy the ways of Aman in exile.’

‘But I would rule, at least, and if it was only to be the chief in a village. I would not be imprisoned in high royal estate, in Hithlum…’

‘Irime’, I said, trying to soothe her, not knowing how. I was distressed at what I was hearing, but just then I was even more worried about the effect all this was having on her.  Her anger had seemed to revive her, but now it was as if she was scarcely able to contain it as those past resentments took hold of her, so strong still after all the time that had passed…

She remembered my presence.  She looked at me and frowned. She peered over at Gil, still quietly sleeping off whatever drug she had given him in his basket. I moved the basket closer. Her fingers touched the rim.

‘You will bring up my son as your own’, she said. ‘Promise me that.’

‘Yes, Irime, but… Who is his father?’

It was the wrong thing to say.

‘Who is his father?! You will not promise me to look after him before I tell you who his father is? Is it not enough for you that I tell you he is my son?!’

‘Irime…! Irime, no! Don’t!’

My cry of warning came too late. In her fury, she had made a violent movement towards me. Something inside her that was already torn tore further, and my makeshift bandages slipped. There was a terrible sound and a lot more blood—and then all the anger and pain went out of her, together with her life.

‘I just thought Gil would want to know’, I whispered.

But she could no longer hear me. Only a moment ago, she had been the daughter of Finwe, brimming with energy and tension, as monumental in her wrath, in her own way, as my father or even Feanaro. Now I was merely holding a dead woman in the village of the dead.

One of her braids had come free and flopped across my arm. I saw she had tied a bit of yellow ribbon into it. Maybe it was no coincidence that the hairstyle she had worn into her last battle was reminiscent of the one notoriously associated with Fingon the Valiant. Maybe she had tied that ribbon in it to give her courage.

‘If I were truly valiant, you would not have died like this’, I said.

The sound of my voice was ugly in my ears and I realized I was weeping. I wept bitterly there for a while. In Tirion, I had prided myself on my superior sensitivity and perceptiveness, flattering myself that because I was capable of appreciating her art, because I was able to see things my father was missing, Irime and I had a kind of understanding, a deep affinity.

But she was of my parents’ generation. I had admired her, but it had not occurred to me that she might require my support. And she, in her turn, had not trusted me. When it came to it, to her I was just one of the family, one of the Others—no more than that.  And so, when she was killed, I had been oblivious, had not even realized she was nearby. I had not moved a finger to help her.

I calmed down after a while and thought that maybe she had been right not to regard me as her natural ally. Yes, I had understood some things about her, but we were not two of a kind. It showed clearly enough in the different motives that had led us here, into this patch of wilderness. We had both been trying to escape and in that much we were perhaps alike—but with me, the escape had been meant to be purely temporary and its extension accidental, just a blip, so to speak. Irime, on the other hand, had ended up deliberately cutting herself off from the rest of us, a decision she had maintained for centuries, whatever her intentions had been to begin with.

If she had taken me into her confidence, during the Crossing on the Ice or after our arrival in Beleriand, I thought I would have sympathized. But would I really have understood? And whether I understood or not, would I have consented not to tell my father that his favourite sister was venturing forth without any of the protection her family could give her, into uncharted territory? Perhaps I might have, but not without a severe struggle of conscience or without doing my very best to dissuade her.

It occurred to me that I would not be able to ask either Irisse or Artanis about gilded cages or tell them what Irime had said.  Irisse was immured in Gondolin. Artanis was almost equally inaccessible in Doriath, within the bounds of the Girdle of Melian, where a kin-slayer cousin could gain no admittance.

Meanwhile, I was alone in the middle of miles of forest, with too many dead people and a baby—the first time I had ever had the sole responsibility for a child quite this young.

Chapter 7

Fluff Among the Ruins

Fingon finds a baby-sitter and gives Gil-galad his epesse Ereinion.

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After thinking about it, I decided to carry as many of the dead villagers as I could into the largest house facing the square and set it on fire before I left. It seemed the best I could do for them by way of a funeral. As I collected them, one by one, I studied each of them, asking myself what they might have been to Irime--and especially I looked at the faces of the men, wondering which, if any, of them might be Gil’s father. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, none of these men who had died in a desperate fight bore a striking resemblance to a peacefully sleeping baby.

In between these sad trips to and fro across the square, I kept checking the basket. Presumably Irime had known what she was doing when she dosed little Gil, but I had no idea how long he would sleep or how he would feel when he woke. Already, I felt myself getting anxious. Although I had moved it a little to the side, safely out of the way, the basket looked somehow incongruous, sitting there among the wreckage—if only because it represented the aspect of the situation that I was perhaps least qualified to handle.

Gradually, I cleared the village square and worked my way back up the street toward the gate. As I bent to pull a Sindarin woman who was still clutching the splintered handle of an axe out from under the orc who had fallen across her legs, I caught a hint of movement in a darkened doorway to the left—merely the shifting of a shadow and a whisper of sound.

Might there be a survivor here that I had missed? I straightened and carefully stepped around the dead woman.

‘Friend?’ I asked, tentatively. ‘Mellon?’

There came something between a snarl and a scared whimper and the sound of a smaller creature hurriedly backing away. I entered the cottage and, when my vision had adjusted, I saw him more clearly: a young dog, little more than an overgrown puppy with long ears and lanky legs, pressed trembling into a corner between the cupboard and the wall but trying to look defiant, with bristling fur and bared teeth.

‘Friend’, I said again, soothingly.

Belatedly, he realized I wasn’t an orc or any other kind of threat. He stopped trembling and gave another despairing little whimper. His back hunched, his ears drooped, his tail stayed firmly tucked between his legs—a picture of utter canine misery. Clearly he was terribly ashamed of himself. It was not so very difficult to guess why. The other dogs of the village I had seen had died fighting beside their masters.

‘No, no’, I told him. ‘Don’t go blaming yourself, Mellon! Look at you—you can hardly have been fully trained yet!  I’m sure your master wouldn’t hold it against you.’

He looked completely unconvinced by this. I sighed.

‘I guess we both haven’t done very well, this time around. We’ll just have to do better next time, won’t we? At least you are still alive to try, you know.’

I reached out to him, offering him a comforting pat, but he was having none of it. He backed away slightly and looked past me, trying to ignore me.

I left him alone for the moment and turned back to the Sindarin woman. Maybe it was she who had been his owner. I pulled her clear, lifted her up and began carrying her away.

It seemed the dog had made up his mind to follow, though. I heard him behind me, trying to be unobtrusive, but so clumsily that I thought he might be hurt as well as inexperienced. I had not spotted any wounds, back in the cottage, but they could have been hidden underneath his fur.

I turned around. Immediately, he tried to hide, slinking behind a broken rainwater barrel.

‘You are quite welcome to come along, Mellon, you know. If I’d realized you were ready to come out of there, I would have asked you to.’

He stayed behind the barrel. But when I went on, he came trailing after me, less cautiously, and by the time we reached the square he was quite close behind me. The Sindarin woman must not have been his owner, after all. It was me he was following. That became evident when I deposited her with the rest and went to check on Gil again, for he came right after me without a pause.

I found a strip of roasted venison in my pack and held it out to him by way of formal introduction, and after a little hesitation he made up his mind to accept.  He even allowed me to run my fingers through his thick grey fur to give him a quick once-over. I concluded that an orc had got a nasty kick in at some point which had left him with a couple of cracked ribs and a number of bruises. Otherwise he seemed fine.

He was very relieved when I stopped touching him where it hurt and had to go and lurk a few feet off for a while to get over things. But then he came back and gave my fingers a brief lick to show it was all right. A good-tempered, polite dog, when he wasn’t frightened out of his wits, I thought—and had an idea.

‘Mellon’, I said and showed him Gil in the basket. ‘Sit. Sit and watch.’

He sniffed uncertainly at the rim of the basket. Then he decided, yes, he could do this. With a sigh, he settled down to watch the baby in the basket. I had found myself a baby-sitter.

***

It took another two trips back and forth, while Mellon dutifully sat and watched, before Gil finally regained consciousness and sleepily blinked up at me. That stuff Irime had given him must have been really strong. Sleepy blinking, I was to find later, was not exactly Gil’s style. He managed to get his eyes properly open and focused, first on the end of my braid that was dangling above his nose, then on my face. 

Well, they talk about love at first sight, although that is probably not what they mean by it. Up until that moment, Irime’s son had been to me a baby, a relative of mine: a responsibility. But when his gaze fixed on mine, curious and unafraid, at once he became just Gil. He didn’t look like anyone else to me, neither of the Noldor or the Sindar, not even like Irime, although I did notice that already he had a distinctive version of the Finwean family nose.

Suddenly, it seemed rather unimportant to me who his parents were.  The idea even appealed to me that Gil was one of a kind. I cleared my throat.

‘Welcome to the house of Finwe, Ereinion’, I said.

He emitted an inquiring gurgle, tried to move his arms and finding, to his mild disgust, that he could  not get awake and coordinated enough to fight off the blanket that covered him, he gave it up as a bad job and went back to sleep. I decided he had accepted the epesse.

***

I carried Irime into the house last of all. I laid her in the middle, with my blanket folded under her head, and covered her with my cloak. I scattered kindling about and rags smeared with tallow. Then I shut the door and set fire to the thatching in several places. It had been dry weather for quite some time and the flames caught easily.

I did not stay to watch. I collected from the other cottages anything that might come in helpful for the journey or for taking care of Gil. I was lucky, of course, that Gil was weaned; otherwise I would have been scrambling to find a wet nurse where there could hardly be one, for miles.

Then we set out, the three of us, myself, the baby and the dog. We did not head for Himring, although of course I now would have had another very good reason for doing so. But I no longer wished to speak to Maitimo right away.

I did not think Maitimo had ever known Irime well. She had sided with my father against Uncle Feanaro early on—not that Feanaro would have encouraged her to do anything else—and she probably had not had much contact with Feanaro’s sons even before she withdrew entirely from court. But that was more or less beside the point. Maitimo would still have been distressed to find that she had been killed and died virtually on his doorstep. However, the truth was I did not really want to talk to anyone about Irime—Feanorian or not—before I had spoken to my father. I had no idea what to say to him or how to put things, only the urgent feeling that nobody else ought to learn about the circumstances of her death before he did.

Besides, Maitimo sometimes had the inconveniently long memory of the older relative. If I went to Himring, I ran the risk of being reminded of all the times I had proclaimed, when my sister was still very young, that children were a horrible nuisance and I would never, ever have any myself. Ereinion might be whisked out of my arms to be taken care of by more competent persons before I could do so much as open my mouth. But it was me Irime had entrusted him to and I was determined to hang onto him.

It was flying in the face of common sense, but we headed straight for Barad Eithel.

---

Chapter End Notes

The doggy part of this chapter is dedicated to Alasse, for whose birthday it was originally written.

Chapter 8

Enough Exposure to Last a Lifetime

Having gone AWOL, Fingon unexpectedly returns to Barad Eithel with bad news and a baby. Confronting his father represents a serious challenge to his social competence.

Read Chapter 8

‘Fingon!’

Berion stared at me as if I was an apparition that had just materialized in front of the gate. For a moment, he stood there, thunderstruck; then he came running down the ramp, cloak flying.

‘My lord Fingon!’

He half opened his arms as if he was about to throw them around my shoulders. But right away he remembered the respect he considered due to my superior station in life and dropped them to his sides again.

‘He will be so happy to see you, sir!’ he said breathlessly. ‘Overjoyed! Yes, yes, all of us! We were afraid…  We thought… Where have you… No, don’t tell me! No, no, come, he must see you—I must take you to him at once!’

His hands came up again, as if he was half considering grabbing me and dragging me bodily up into the castle and into my father’s presence.

I felt a bit overwhelmed by such an effusive welcome. It had not been an easy journey—any part of it—and the previous night had been one of the more difficult ones. I had gained enough experience by then to be almost certain that all Gil was suffering from was gripes, but Gil himself had been not disposed to take things so lightly. He had howled as if he was suffering the attention of the master torturers of Angband, refusing to be soothed by any means I could devise.

By the time he had finally succeeded in passing enough wind to relieve his poor little belly, he had driven me into near panic. Mellon, of course, had picked up on our distress and was whining, adding to the cacophony. When morning came, we were all worn out. Gil had fallen into exhausted sleep in the sling in which I carried him, tucked inside my cloak. I, however, had pushed straight on, reasoning that we were so close to home that it was not really worth stopping to recuperate. It occurred to me now that that might have been a serious miscalculation.

‘It is very good to see you, Berion’, I said. ‘I trust all is well here? So my father is in residence?’

‘Yes, yes, he is here, and the border has been quiet, more or less—nothing more than the usual incidents. But, sir, please, you must come and speak to your father without delay!’

‘All right, Berion, if you think my father is ready to see me just now, but are you sure that…?

Berion looked flabbergasted.

‘If I think your father is ready to see you! Of course, he is!’

Once again, he barely restrained himself from grabbing me. I allowed myself to be rushed through the gate and up the steps to the main entrance. As we passed, heads turned and a murmur rose behind our backs, but Berion shooed me onward before I could do more than nod to anyone. I did not start putting up any resistance until I saw exactly where he was taking me.

‘Berion, that isn’t the way to my father’s private apartments. You’re not taking me to the Great Hall, are you?’

‘He’s in the Great Hall, yes. What does it matter where he is? Please, sir, he’ll have my head, if I don’t take you to him immediately and be quite within his rights to do so, I’m sure.’

‘Oh, come on, Berion, you’re exaggerating. But if he is in the Great Hall, you know, that means…’

By now we were right in front of the door.

‘My lord’, Berion begged me, almost in tears at the thought of any further delay to the reunion of father and son. ‘Please!’

‘Oh all right, Berion. Take care of my dog for me at least, will you?’

It seemed Berion had not even properly noticed Mellon yet. He looked startled, but nodded.

‘Mellon, stay’, I said. ‘Berion…’

But Berion had meanwhile opened the door. I took a look inside and started back, but Berion’s feelings finally got the better of him at this point. He gave me a shove between the shoulder blades and I almost stumbled forward into the hall.

***

Berion meant well, of course, but I should not have listened to him. It was terrible, a disaster.

Everyone was there—and I mean everyone and his wife and her kid brother and possibly the nanny and the family pet as well, if I had had time to look. Most of the population of Hithlum seemed to have crammed itself into the Great Hall that day.

As for my father—of course I don’t need to have that pointed out to me—he had been very much afraid I had gone missing for good and he would never see me again. I cannot even argue that he was wrong to be afraid. It was still a mistake to haul me over the coals for it in public, though.

I think he hardly even raised his voice. It was just in my imagination that the echoes chased each other round and round the rafters of the hall, as all the people inside listened with bated breath. Evidently, I had been the bane of my father’s existence ever since I had had the lack of consideration to be born and since then I had unrepentantly continued to commit one callously irresponsible act after another.

I swear I had had no plan, had not planned it in any way. During my hasty journey across Beleriand, whenever I had not been worrying frantically about Gil’s needs and whether I was taking care of him adequately, I had been racking my brains what might be the best way to tell my father about Irime. It might briefly have crossed my mind that it was a pity that although I now had a child to raise, that was not likely to stop my father from badgering me to marry—in fact, I admit that it did cross my mind—but that was all.

But when the word heir recurred for about the fifth time during his animadversions on my character—or maybe it was the sixth or the seventh or the eighth—I lost my temper and self-control completely, without warning.

I shouted: ‘I’ve brought you an heir!’, yanked Gil out from under my cloak where up until this moment he had remained completely unobserved in his sling by Berion, my father or anyone else, and held him up for all to see.

My father fell abruptly silent, in mid-sentence. Gil, who had heartlessly gone on sleeping while his foster-father received the worst tongue-lashing of his life, was rudely awakened and naturally began protesting loudly and vociferously. And I watched the faces before me as everyone—every single one of them—jumped to the wrong conclusion.

I opened my mouth and tried to say something. It was inaudible. Gil, experts in childcare have since assured me, was actually a relatively peaceable child, but when he was thoroughly roused he had the organ of a future battle commander. I tried to say something else, but his yells drowned out the sound of my voice altogether.

I decided I had had enough public exposure to last me a lifetime, clutched the yelling infant to my chest and precipitately fled the scene.

Chapter 9

Just Show Me the Way to the Nearest Balrog

Fingon has failed rather spectacularly to communicate Gil's true parentage to his father. Will he do better at the second attempt?

Read Chapter 9

 

At that point, of course, I was still going to explain everything, just as soon as Gil had stopped yelling, as soon as I had managed to gather my thoughts. Meanwhile I beat a hasty retreat to my rooms, which I found unchanged, unstaffed and badly in need of a good dusting. I bolted the door behind me, but I had to unbolt it again right away for Mellon, who had caught up with us and scratched at the door, asking to be let in.

Gil had calmed down a little in the meantime. I walked the rounds from room to room, rocking him in my arms, and tried to calm my own feelings by concentrating on practical considerations, looking at the furnishings of my bachelor’s apartment in an unfamiliar light. How appropriate were they for a small child’s new home? When Gil had sobbed his last sob and began to wriggle, wanting to be let down, I improvised a pen for him in a corner, with Mellon to keep him company. Then I systematically began moving all sharp or breakable objects upwards, out of reach.

My father did not arrive until several hours later. I had not expected him to. Whatever the major occasion was that my arrival had so spectacularly disrupted, my father would consider that as king and host he owed it to his guests to see it through to the end. No doubt, once he had recovered his lost composure, he would have carried on as if nothing had happened.

There came a single, imperious knock on the door. He waited a little, apparently lost patience, tried the handle, found the door bolted and knocked again, a sharp rat-tat-tat. I reached the door and silently opened it. He strode into the room, turned and faced me.

He had not taken the time to change since the ceremony. His dark blue robes glittered with gold and were lined with ermine. In here, it made him look overdressed, as if the room was a size too small for him. His demeanour was regal; Feanaro, who had very little sympathy for the need of others to maintain face, might have used the word stuffy.

He looked, every inch of him, Fingolfin Finwion, High King of the Noldor in Ennor—but I knew him too well. His shoulders were just a little bit too tense. That jutting chin was held just a little bit too high. This was much the way he had looked, once, when he had suspected that the next blow Feanaro was going to deliver was going to be below the belt. I myself rather suspected that in time that expression had also become an almost irresistible temptation to Feanaro to deliver just such a blow. However, I was not Feanaro, and it had the opposite effect on me.

I looked at my father and saw he was afraid. He was steeling himself for some kind of devastating declaration from me, a withering denunciation of his weaknesses: Nolofinwe, the father who drove away his children, who was somehow incapable of hanging onto his family. Of course, if that was what he feared, logic might have suggested that he should try apologizing or take back some of the things he had just said to me in the Great Hall. But my father was less straightforward and logical than he liked to think; clearly, that idea had not occurred to him.

Nevertheless, I had no wish to launch any accusations. It was true that my father had a strong tendency to go by the principle: if it works, don’t try to fix it. It was also true that sometimes that principle carried him too far so that it blinded him to the fact that something was not, in fact, working. It carried him too far that time in the palace in Tirion when he made the mistake of accusing anyone who was toying with the idea of leaving Valinor of disloyalty to my grandfather—a serious mistake on more than one count. I was not happy with my father that day—not that I think that constitutes an excuse for Feanaro drawing a sword on him.

So indeed my father was not, generally speaking, very imaginative or a great innovator. However, there is also a great deal to be said for people who just keep things together and keep them going. My father had done just that, for a long time, under very difficult circumstances. I had no interest in chalking up all his mistakes and oversights against him.

But if I told him about Irime… If I told him what she had said before she died, if he saw—as he would—that I had a certain amount of sympathy with her position… It would be Irime’s denunciation, not mine, but I would still be the one delivering it. He had lost so many already: his father, his wife, his brothers, his son and daughter… And I had seen his hurt and bewildered looks, as at the time when Finwe followed Feanaro into exile: Why do they keep doing this to me? I keep trying to do the right thing—and they keep doing this to me.

He was finding my silence difficult to endure. His mouth tightened; the strain showed around his eyes. But it seemed he had no words for me—could merely anticipate the blow that was about to fall.

I am going on too long about this, explaining too much. The truth is much simpler: this was the point at which Fingon the Not-so-Valiant chickened out completely. When it came to it, I realized I had rather fight a troop of Balrogs any day than tell my father that he had lost his favourite sister: that she had died in anger and rejected him before she died.

‘Wait’, I said to him. ‘Wait here, please.’

And I went and fetched Gil.

‘This’, I told my father, ‘is Ereinion Gil-galad.’

I settled Gil in my father’s arms and instantly turned him into a doting grandfather, as I knew I would. Well, technically speaking, a doting uncle.  Did details of genealogy matter all that much, really?

Somewhere in Mandos, Irime was probably foaming at the mouth.

‘I’m really sorry, Irime’, I said silently to her, as I watched my father cradle her son in sleeves embroidered with gold and gently touch the tip of Gil’s nose with the tip of his finger. ‘I’m almost certain that when you made me promise to bring Gil up as my own son, you didn’t mean I was to mislead them into thinking he was actually mine. But it’s not as if you had given me a message for my father or detailed instructions. If I tell him, you know, just tell him as best I can, he won’t understand. I sort of understand, myself, but not well enough to explain to him. And it’s not as if he could do anything about it now to make amends, you know, not even if he did understand. Because you’re dead and in Mandos, and he is here in Beleriand, among the living.’

***

I did not really expect to get away with it, of course. It seemed obvious that I was simply borrowing trouble. But I kept my mouth stubbornly shut and, to my astonishment, they let it pass.

At first I could not entirely understand it. True enough, I had made it clear that I did not wish to discuss the matter. But if anybody had insisted on an answer, if my father at any time had demanded the whole story or if anyone had asked me, point-blank, who Gil’s mother was or whether I really was his father, I would not have held out for long and I would not have lied.

They did not. It was really quite incredible, but when I listened to their oblique hints in silence and ignored their tentative queries, they actually seemed relieved and changed the subject. Some of them, including Berion, had apparently decided that I was a newly bereaved widower whose grief was still too recent to bear discussing. Others, who had been in the Great Hall when I arrived and had had time to think about what they had observed, seemed to have worked out that I might be concealing something other than that, but they still had decided they would prefer not to know. None of them, I am sure, guessed about Irime—how could they have?—and of course there was Gil’s Finwean nose, which only grew more pronounced as he became older, visible proof of his descent.

They adored Gil. They took him collectively to their hearts. They cooed over him, queued up to be allowed to hold him and showered me with presents for him. I tended to take him with me wherever I went, especially at the beginning, before I had time to make other arrangements, and nobody raised an eyebrow to see the Prince of Hithlum enter the council chamber with a baby on his arm, because apparently that was exactly what they wanted to see. And it was not just Gil they wanted to see, it was me.

My unexplained disappearance, coming at a time when Turukano and Irisse had already left, had shaken them badly. Because I had been struggling so hard with my own reactions to the exodus, I had overlooked that what they needed was not so much for me to try and replace, somehow, all those who were now gone—which of course was impossible in any case—it was reassurance that I was still there for them. And then I had seemingly deserted them, too. What was required, now, was a sign of commitment, a show of faith, and that was what the sight of me with Gil on my arm was to them: proof that I had not given up on them. They were not inclined to delve too deeply into how it had come about. They were too afraid I might take it into my head to disappear again, taking Gil with me.

I could have told them of course that I had never intended to leave them for so long in the first place and that I had every intention of not letting it happen again. But that would have entailed confessing how much I had lost myself in the woods of East Beleriand and that, I saw now, would not just have been embarrassing, it would not have been politically wise. The revelation would have so unnerved everybody that they would have insisted I was to be accompanied by a bodyguard of fifty every time I went and stood under a tree. Nor would bringing up the subject of a disgruntled princess be entirely advantageous under the present circumstances, when everyone felt an instinctive need to huddle together.

In spite of all the expectations and anxieties that I saw focussed on myself and, although I now had parental commitments on top of my other duties, I found things, somehow, easier to handle after my return. Of course, to some extent it was just the fact that having to take care of Gil from day to day stopped me from brooding. It also provided me with an effective strategy for dealing with my father. If things got too tense, I could defuse the situation by taking Gil and putting him on his lap.

So, in a sense, my father was proved right. What I had needed was an heir. It has to be said, in his favour, that he never actually made that point, though; he was too busy thinking up ways of spoiling Gil.

Gil, sturdy by nature, proved pretty much un-spoilable. He lapped up the attention and seemed to thrive on it. But my conscience smote me on his behalf. And it was not only that I was worrying about the difficult series of conversations we were going to have to have when he was old enough that he had to be told about his mother.

‘Ereinion’, I said to him, as he lay sleeping in his cot, in the middle of the night, when nobody else was around to hear. ‘Your mother named you Gil-galad, Star of Radiance, but you could have lived out all your days in obscurity. It was I who unwittingly made you the Shining Star of the Noldor, my heir, their great sign of hope. That is a heavy burden for anyone to bear, let alone a small child. I hope you will not find it too hard. I hope you can forgive me.’

Mellon came and sat on my feet.

Chapter 10

Break Out the Violins

So Fingon disappears somewhere in East Beleriand and reappears in Barad Eithel, producing an heir like a rabbit out of a hat. What does Maedhros think about all this? And what about that woman Fingon was supposedly going to marry?

Read Chapter 10

Dear cousin,

I am afraid the stars are still obstinately refusing to shine over the hour of our meeting. Belegost has reported yet another colony of orcs on its northern border. Moryo is naturally incensed at the orcs’ lack of cooperation with his excellent policies for removing them and requires a little tactful support. It seems that once again the location is difficult of access, and attacking it will pose tactical problems. I had to inform your father that I deeply regret being unable to leave the Marches at present and that my promised visit will have to be postponed again.

I hope all is well in the west and that this finds you in good spirits. I am sending you another scarf. This one, I am told, is woven from the hair of a kind of mountain goat. It’s warm.

Forgive my repeated delays, I pray you, and remember with affection your cousin

Russandol

When Russandol had not seen me for a while, thoughts of the Ice resurfaced in his mind, it seemed, and he became prone to sending me rather diffident gifts of scarfs, gloves and furred boots, as if his shivering cousin might still be in immediate danger of frostbite. The scarf he had sent this time was not only remarkably light and warm, but also pleasantly silky to the touch as I ran it through my fingers. I wrapped it around my neck, although I did not feel cold, and put the letter away in its ornate wooden box with the others, pausing to consider how much had gone unsaid between us since we had last met face-to-face. Then I wrote:

Russandol,

As yet your former student is still struggling to remember your lessons in patience, but if I hear much more about those orcs of yours, I will have to come and take a look at them myself—and I am not nearly as tactful as you are!

Many thanks for the scarf.

Your affectionate cousin,

Findekano

I had not seen Russandol since before the journey in East Beleriand that had yielded such un-foreseen results. Almost immediately upon my return, we had received the news that Thargelion was suffering an incursion of orcs from the East. It was not an all-out attack and Carnistir was at no time in danger of being overrun, but there had been persistent attempts at infiltration by small bands of orcs that tried to establish themselves in the caves and ravines of the Ered Luin.

Perhaps the horde that I had encountered south of the Ascar had been a harbinger or the first move in this new campaign of Morgoth’s—for there could be no doubt that this was another plan hatched in Angband. It proved once again that although we had succeeded in blocking the main gates of Angband and stopped him moving troops in significant numbers into or out of the fortress we had neither managed to locate all of the smaller exits nor prevented Morgoth’s messengers from passing unobserved, especially if they took a northward route. He seemed to have encountered no obstacle in summoning these orcs from their strongholds somewhere in Eriador or further east. Coming on top of the usual minor clashes in Ard-galen and Lothlann with which Morgoth kept testing our vigilance, the situation in Thargelion had tied up Russandol’s attention for years.

But in the end, he did arrive, riding through the gate of Barad Eithel on a day of fitful spring sunshine. As usual his gaze first lit on my father in acknowledgement of his host; then it found me where I stood next to him. He gave me a quick searching look and a swift smile, dismounted with customary grace and greeted us with all the grave courtesy he considered appropriate to public occasions.

As so often when he came, there was no opportunity for truly private conversation right away. We exchanged a few words on the edge of meetings and receptions, wine glass in hand, nothing that could not safely have been overheard by any stranger. I was half waiting for Russandol to mention my visit to Pityo and Telvo, but he did not—either officially, in council, or during those brief exchanges. I might have begun to wonder whether they had not notified him of my visit, unlikely as it seemed, and whether he had been aware of my travels in East Beleriand at all—except that, as the discussions around the council table went on, I caught him unobtrusively slipping me information that he thought I might have missed due to my absence during the crucial period. So my absence at least he had been well aware of and had decided it needed to be treated with discretion.

I asked myself whether he had been expecting me, in Himring, when Pityo and Telvo had told him about my arrival in East Beleriand. While I lost myself among the trees, had Russandol been waiting for the cousin who had never come? I studied him worriedly over my wine glass. He returned my gaze steadily and calmly continued talking about the cultivation of garden peas and the shifting patterns of Hithlum cuisine until I was able to pick up the thread of the conversation again. Then he gave me another of those brief smiles, as if to say: It’s probably all right, you know, although I can’t really promise anything. It was  a very Beleriandic kind of reassurance, but subtly comforting, nevertheless.

When we finally succeeded in extricating ourselves, it came almost as a surprise. I woke up to the fact that for once there was not a handful of other people trailing after us and almost caught Russandol by the elbow, stopped myself and instead quickened my step. He followed me around two corners until we came into a walkway leading to the garden. Then suddenly he stopped dead just behind me.

‘So’, came his voice from behind my back, ‘that is Ereinion.’

In the first rush of relief at getting away, it had slipped my mind a little that Russandol had not actually met Gil yet. Gil was older now and very lively and active, and I had thought it advisable not to strain his good manners too far. So I had decided to spare him and us any of the longer sessions and entrusted him to Erien for the duration.

A little way ahead, the covered walkway in which we were standing opened up into a walled garden and, on the lawn in its centre, almost as if it were a prearranged display, Gil was playing fetch with Mellon, while Erien hovered on the sidelines, keeping an eye on him with the routine of long practice. Erien had taken to Gil with an enthusiasm that had initially been fuelled by relief, as it turned out.

‘I like you, Findekano’, she had said to me, speaking more frankly than she ever had while my father kept trying to push me into proposing to her, ‘and I could like you even more if you were more interested, if you know what I mean. But all this royal business? It’s not for me. I would have done my best to do my duty if you’d asked me, but I’m so glad you didn’t!’

I must not have looked very intelligent at this point, for she gave me a sympathetic look and reminded me: ‘You were brought up to it, you know.’

I had discovered my jaw had dropped and was hanging open and hastily shut it. If I had somehow managed to get through this whole sorry mess without losing Erien’s friendship, I had decided, it would be extremely ungrateful to look that gift horse in the mouth, especially if the gift included a mother substitute for Gil in the same package.

Now Erien kept watch as Gil hurled the stick again and Mellon bounded across the lawn to fetch it—while Russandol was fixedly regarding Gil. What was he thinking?

‘Yes,’ I said to him, rather uncertainly, ‘that is Ereinion.’

Russandol did not take his eyes off Gil. He took half a breath and said very quietly, as if reminding himself: ‘His mother meant a great deal to you.’

Put like that, it was actually quite correct. And yet, as soon as he spoke, although I had kept my silence so stubbornly with everyone else, I felt the irresistible urge to tell him all about it—about Irime, about the trees, about my father, everything. It did occur to me that I would be facing serious problems if Russandol, as head of the House of Feanor, decided he had objections to Gil’s status as heir, but even that could not stop me.

I was about to spill it all out, when he stopped me himself, inadvertently. He abruptly lowered his head, turning a little away so that all I could see was a waterfall of hair and the outline of his jaw, and said, even more quietly so that I almost could not understand him: ‘I’m so glad you decided to come back.’

I stared at the back of his head, dumbstruck. There were shades of yellow in his hair and of orange and quite a lot of brown, but mostly it was red, the colour of beech leaves in autumn. Because of everything that had happened afterwards, until this moment I had completely forgotten the autumn leaf that had awakened me from my Avarin dream in the forest of East Beleriand and the sight of the beech tree that had given me back my memories and returned me to myself. Now, all at once, I saw that tree vividly in my mind’s eye and, superimposed on that image, a vision of Russandol’s face as he leaned against a grey stone wall, eyes closed, lips unmoving, although something persuaded me he was silently saying my name. But that was ridiculous. As far as I knew, neither Russandol nor I had ever shown the least talent for osanwe.

Unlike my father and the people of Hithlum, Russandol had had some idea where I was or at least where I had gone but it appeared that he, too, had feared I was not coming back. I tried to pull myself together and struggled to answer him. I wanted to say: But I never wanted to leave you! I did not think I could. It was not you I wanted to leave. All that only happened because you were not here.

This was clearly true, so evident that it should have been easy to say. But the words felt unaccountably bulky in my throat and stuck in my mouth. I could not get my tongue around them.

Looking back on that scene, I can see now that part of the difficulty was that I was trying to say it without using my hands. It would have been so much easier if I had dared to reach out to turn his face gently back to me. Although that is not to say it would have been safe—our hard-won privacy was still in full view of anyone who might have happened to enter that walkway.

Later, much later, he said, speaking into the crook of my arm: ‘I would have been out combing those hills for you, if I had thought I had the right to do so. But if you had decided to walk away from it all, who was I to gainsay that decision? Even if it did not seem like you—much more like something I might have come up with…’

‘You don’t walk away from things’, I said to him.

He raised his head and regarded me quizzically. But I was not to be fazed by unspoken allusions to Losgar.

‘You don’t’, I repeated.

‘Maybe not enough?’ he asked me. ‘Or only from the wrong things? In any case, not for want of thinking about it…’

‘But did you lean against a wall and think about me?’ I asked him.

‘All the time, of course’, he answered.

‘Maitimo…!’

‘All the time’, he insisted, his eyes alight with laughter. ‘Propping up walls and thinking of you is my main occupation in life. Did you not know?’

Just call me Fingon the Obtuse and be done with it, but it is not as easy as you might think to recognize that the reason you do not wish to marry anyone else is your cousin—not if that same cousin is the one you are so afraid of losing in any of a number of horrible ways that you find it difficult to think straight about him—not if that same cousin has developed a habit of standing just out of reach and a series of well-repressed, very apologetic flinches has led you to the conclusion that after all that has happened he cannot really stand to be touched by anybody, but especially not by you: a conclusion that seems very plausible, under the circumstances, but happens to be almost entirely wrong. I had made myself not be angry with him about things he clearly could not help; however, it caused a certain amount of blindness.

When he rode through the gate, I had felt my heart lurch, had felt the impulse to launch myself at his neck and just hang on regardless, but that feeling was all too familiar and told me nothing new. After all, long ago, when I had nothing to fear but my father’s reproof for my lack of manners and Turko’s kicking me under the table in retribution, I had done just that, on several occasions. I suppose you could call it a clue that my worst nightmare was not the one in which I accidentally dropped Russandol off Thangorodrim or the one in which Balrogs tore him apart before my eyes, but the one in which I was left wandering the rooms of Barad Eithel disconsolately, knowing he was dead, and could not wake up. But it left me clueless.

If anybody had told me that I loved my cousin more than any woman, I would have answered: yes, of course, and that might have set me thinking. But I was not in the habit of talking about Russandol, of my fears for him or of my need of him, for it would have been disloyal to even hint to anyone that the head of the House of Feanor—my father’s most important ally or mightiest subject, depending on how you looked at it—might perhaps not be completely mentally stable. Neither could I very well confess to my people that a stalled conversation about garden peas with a Son of Feanor could make me stronger and more confident in a way that their fervent protests of devotion could not.

Russandol stood there a moment longer, his head bowed, just out of reach; he did not look around, did not read my lips and understand what I was trying to say. And then he left my side again—left me feeling achingly bereft again. I blinked away tears of confusion and saw that, this time, he had not gone far: he had merely walked out into the garden, unhurriedly, and was kneeling in the gravel, introducing himself to Gil.

Chapter 11

Gil-galad meets Maedhros

Originally written for Keiliss on the occasion of her birthday

Read Chapter 11

‘Gil’, my minder and mentor called out softly across the garden.

I looked around to find out what she was trying to draw my attention to and saw him coming towards me. He was, in a word, striking: so very tall—and that unusual hair colour. Maybe it was because I was so young that the stump of his arm and that trail of faint scars across his face merely seemed other exciting characteristics of this remarkable stranger as well.

He towered above me for a moment. Then he swiftly, lightly, knelt down before me on the gravel of the garden path, bringing my face closer to his, and regarded me intently.

‘Good morning, Ereinion. I am Maedhros, son of Feanor, a cousin of yours. I don’t know whether you have heard of me?’

I thought he was the most exotic person I had ever seen and I was eager to impress him, so I could not resist showing off a bit:

‘Of course I have! You are the Damned Kinslayer.’

There was a moment of silence. I strongly began to doubt my wisdom; maybe I should not have repeated what I had overheard that Sinda say in the marketplace. There had been such force, such intensity behind it that it had caught my interest and imprinted itself on my memory; only maybe it really was not a nice thing to say…

Then Maedhros smiled. It was a smile that warmed me right down to my toes and dispelled my anxiety.

‘Yes. Very good’, he said. But then he added; ‘You don’t know what that means, do you?’

My doubts returned. Father wouldn’t like it if I went around saying offensive things to cousins and, besides, the stranger had a nice smile.

‘No’, I admitted. ‘They aren’t rude words, are they?’

‘No, they aren’t rude’, Maedhros said. ‘But I think it would be better not to repeat them to anybody else.’

I was puzzled and, clearly, it showed.

‘Think of it like this’, he explained. ‘There must be things that you have done that you would prefer other people not to be reminded of?’

Before my inner eye, the fragments of a broken chamber pot, previously full, appeared—right in the middle of one of Grandfather’s precious Valinorean carpets. I shuddered slightly.

‘Yes’, I said, with feeling.

The corner of Maedhros’s mouth twitched, but he went on, seriously:

‘There are a number of people who would be distressed if you reminded them of this.’

‘I see’, I said. ‘I am very sorry I reminded you, and I won’t mention it again.’ But I felt compelled, in all honesty, to add: ‘I still don’t know what the words mean, though.’

It was, after all, fairly obvious that this strange member of my family hadn’t broken any chamber pots, whatever he had done.

‘I know, Ereinion’, said Maedhros—and it occurred to me then that he had had the saddest eyes ever, all along. ‘I do apologize for not telling you. You see, I hope you will never really find out what they mean.’

So that is what I remembered when I saw what he had done at the Havens of Sirion.

Bonus ficlet: Interlude - Evening

A glimpse of the end of a day during Gil-galad's early childhood, before he was sent to Cirdan.

Set  a short time after the end of "Chief in a Village".

Characters: Erien (OFC), Gil-galad (Ereinion), Fingon, Maedhros, and Tevildo the Seventh (an original cat character)

Rating: Teens (PG), for Mature Themes

Fixed length: 4 x 100 words in MS Word

Read Bonus ficlet: Interlude - Evening

Erien sighed as she unlocked the door, grateful to be home. In the hall, she kicked off her walking-shoes and pulled on warm slippers. Already, an imperious miaow had notified her that the resident cat, Tevildo the Seventh, had registered her arrival and demanded immediate food and attention.  Soon he was winding around her legs, reinforcing his demands.
‘I hear you,’ she said and smiled. However insistent, a grown, healthy feline was still less wearing to take care of than an energetic toddler.
Just a little broth, she thought, and then a nice rest in a chair by the fire...

She loved Ereinion. She had taken over his care at the times when he couldn’t be with Fingon quite voluntarily and she knew, already, that in the future she would look back on that decision with undiminished gratitude.
But Ereinion wasn’t merely a daring and imaginative boy, he was a Finwean. Who would have thought that would become obvious in a child so young?  Like Fingon—always a joy initially, but so hard to keep up with—all of the House of Finwe burned a shade too brightly.
And so, when evening came, Erien was glad she could go home.

Tonight, she had thought she would have to stay longer. Prince Maedhros had only just arrived; Fingon would wish to spend this evening with his friend. Instead, he had appeared in Ereinion’s rooms just as Erien was persuading Ereinion to go to bed—with Maedhros in tow.
Ereinion seized his chance. ‘Bedtime story?’
‘If you’re good!’ Fingon promised.
In no time, Ereinion was in bed in his nightclothes. Fingon looked across at Maedhros.
‘You told Father about ungrateful First Cat,’ Ereinion said hopefully.
‘That one was especially for him,’ Maedhros answered. ‘But, listen, Ereinion, here’s a story just for you…’

Renowned war-leaders of the House of Finwe sitting, one to the left, one to the right, on the edge of the bed of a child, telling bedtime stories...
Erien, curled up now at home by the fire, Tevildo purring on her lap, smiled again. But, abruptly, her mood sobered. Caring for Ereinion had thawed parts of her that had been frozen so long she had no longer been aware of it, since the Crossing of the Ice; she was thankful for that.
But we were promised songs, not survival. And I fear one day there will be songs about Gil-galad…

---

Chapter End Notes

Written for the Gratitude Challenge at the LOTR Community Challenges on LiveJournal.

The challenge asked for a drabble or multiple drabble on the subject of somebody being grateful or ungrateful.

This was originally an idea for a chapter of "The Chief in a Village", which I had regretfully decided not to include. At the time, although I would have liked my OFC Erien's point of view to be better represented, I thought it would unbalance the story too much. Since then, Erien has acquired more back-story, which appears in "Naurthoniel", but I kept the reference to that rather vague here,  to avoid the appearance of gratuitous fridging for those who haven't read that story.
There is an allusion to "Bed-Time Story" in there as well.

 

Bonus ficlet: A Dog Called Mellon

A small incident at Gil-galad's court in Lindon.
On elvish memory and animals' life spans.

Warning for reference to death of a pet.

Read Bonus ficlet: A Dog Called Mellon

It was a known fact that all Gil-galad's dogs were called Mellon.

'I guess it's because you elves live so long,' said a member of the Numenorean ambassador's staff, in a misguided attempt at empathy. 'You've probably had so many dogs that you can't tell them apart anymore!'

Berion, on one side of the hall, froze. Erien, on the other side, felt her eyebrows trying to rise up almost to meet her hairline. Both of them remembered the time when the original Mellon had died. Young Ereinion had been utterly devastated and the whole of Barad Eithel had been plunged into mourning with him for three days.

For many elves, if not most, the time came when, the first time, a loved animal companion died and the elves came face to face with how incommensurable its natural life span was to theirs and the long Ages of Arda. They all dealt with it in their different ways.

The Numenorean ambassor, by the expression on her face, was aware that an apology was in order, but was trying to work out where the focus of the apology should lie so as not to, somehow, make matters even worse.

But Gil-galad's face remained calm.

'No,' he answered. 'They are all called Mellon because they are all true friends of mine. And I remember all of them perfectly well. I don't need a different name to distinguish them by.'

The current bearer of the name, hearing Gil-Galad mention his name, came bounding up to him and sat on his master's feet, his tail thumping the floor.

---

Chapter End Notes

"Mellon", of course, means "friend"--and the word is best known for being inscribed on the Gates of Moria

Bonus ficlet: The small rain down can rain

A glimpse of Fingon with a very young Gil-galad.
And of Gil-galad, remembering.

No warnings.

Read Bonus ficlet: The small rain down can rain

The wind drives the rain into the room. Fingon closes the shutters and returns to his desk. On the desk: a stack of reports and the box containing Maedhros's letters. Beside Fingon's chair: Ereinion's cradle. Fingon sits down again. Before he begins to read, his foot gently sets the cradle rocking. During the third report, Ereinion gets restless. Fingon picks him up and carries him around the room in his arms, singing a soothing song about rain.

 

I recognize that song! Father sang it to me, says Ereinion. He realizes it is also a love song and begins to wonder...

---

Chapter End Notes

The prompt "arms"  had reminded me of the lyrics of an old English song that I am fond of (and that has inspired me on other occasions). The title is taken from it as well.

Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow,
The small raine down can raine.
Cryst, if my love were in my armes
And I in my bedde again!

(This is apparently the oldest version of the lyrics. There are also slightly different versions out there.)

Originally written for Tolkien Weekly as fixed-length (100 words) and also posted independently on AO3 (where I rated it Gen).