The Chief in a Village by Himring

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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?

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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.