They Can Nearly Talk by Chestnut_pod  

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Chapter 13

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The egg cart rattled and bumped its way along the road into Merrilosto. I gave up trying to read the letter in my pocket and gazed around me. To my right, Urundil’s house and workshop passed by in the shade of the oaks. As we approached the town, I peered into the doorway of Alparenë’s building, wondering if I might be able to see the horses I knew stabled in the back of the courtyard. Turning into the central plaza, I caught sight of the three stories of Elquessë’s practice, still faintly disreputable with Elquessë’s tiled plaque hanging at an angle, with the strong, elegant bones of the place showing through beneath the whitewash. I hopped down from the cart.

“I will be seeing you soon, Doctor Heriel,” the driver said, and I nodded, lifting my bag down.

“You and Valimahen, third on my rounds,” I replied. I patted Valimahen’s neck and walked up the steps into the waiting room, where the wooden benches and disarrayed desk greeted me along with a waft of orange blossom from the courtyard beyond.

Elquessë popped her head out of the surgery. “Oh, Hyamessë! I thought you must be Alparenë coming back from the west county.” She cocked her head. “Were you not expected the day after tomorrow?”

I laughed. “Yes, I came back early! I thought no one would protest an extra pair of hands in the surgery.”

“Indeed not! Although, if you have the time, I have a case I was going to attend to this afternoon which you might like to take…?”

“Let me drop my bag upstairs. Then, yes, I would happily go out and reacquaint myself.”

Elquessë nodded and smiled, but looked hesitant. “Afterwards, I suppose I will see you in the evening, and we can discuss your time in the city?”

“Yes, certainly. For now, where should I go?”

Quildatal was beside herself to see me again, and I laughed as she butted me with her head, almost sending me sprawling into the hay. Hanging onto her short mane, I reminded her of all the things of which horse-hearted people should remind their mounts: namely, that she was the smartest, prettiest, most comfortable mule in Aman. Several chunks of carrot later, I tacked her up and led her out into the bright sunshine of summer in Ránanandë. I turned Quildatal’s nose into the golden hills and she ambled off, smooth as butter from Ilimmállë’s creamery. I settled my hipbones into the saddle and felt her arch her neck like a destrier and step higher. The daunting thought of that dinnertime conversation faded under the sunlight.

I knew the farm Elquessë had sent me to, a family affair with vines, oaks, a few cows, and some goats, but I had never been to the precise corner I now sought. I took a turn through the vines where grapes ripened in the sunshine, following the contour of a gentle hill towards a small stream, trickling slowly in the dry season. A small adobe cottage stood in the shade of a black oak, surrounded by a neat vegetable garden covered over with squash leaves and greening sweetcorn.

I set Quildatal to grazing outside the bounds of the garden, for I did not trust her not to test how well corn husks served as mule fodder. Mounting the low steps to the cottage door, I knocked.

A smiling Elf opened it at once. “The young leech!” he exclaimed. “I expected Doctor Helwáriel, but I am pleased to see you.” He held out his hand, and I saw a tattoo on his wrist: the crest of Finarfin in a circle of wings, a common adornment of old soldiers. I clasped his hand in delight.

We went through the usual conversation of campaigners meeting one another for the first time: where had we served, and when, and with whom? When had we come home, and via the sea road or the dark one? Eventually we came to names and origins: he was Kilinulo, originally of a small town not so far from my home of Orvambo, only a few peaks away. We laughed to find each other here, so many miles and centuries away from our hometowns.

“Oh, I have kept you on the threshold,” Kilinulo said at last. “Please, come in.”

Stepping into the cool of the thick-walled cottage, I was struck by the glitter of glass. Dark green, blue, and gold gave the impression of sitting in a high Valinorean corrie, looking up into the gauzy lights of Varda’s skirts. I leaned over a table laden with such shards, sharp edges limned in blue and gold in a pattern like the scales on a butterfly’s wings.

“I have never seen glass like this,” I wondered. “What is it?”

“This is a gift from the owner of this cottage,” Kilinulo replied. “The eldest daughter of the family — my great friend Elennolwen. We studied together in the cloister of Roaring Valleys, watching the stars. She left with the army too, but she came back on the dark road, while I took the short one.”

I bowed my head, recognizing his grief. “What did she do to the glass to make it glitter so? It is like a peacock feather.”

“Only buried it! Long and long ago, when she was only a little girl, she broke a whole shelf of glassware and buried it as trash. I moved here thanks to the generosity of her family when I returned, and I found it as I was digging up the dirt for my garden. There it was, transformed. It is an art of time, circumstance, and chance.”

At his nod, I picked up a shard, tilting it back and forth in the light. I had spoken truly when I compared it to a butterfly and a peacock, I found, for the play of colors depended on the angle at which I held the glass, not the pigment within it.

As I gazed at it, Kilinulo said, “I have buried more beyond the garden fence. Different shapes, different colors. Every so often I will dig some up and see how it has progressed, if different patches produce different patinas. There is nothing yet, so I think it must take great quantities of time, Ages.”

“I suppose now there is time,” I murmured, and Kilinulo nodded solemnly.

“I promised her parents I would stay in the cottage until Elennolwen returned,” Kilinulo said solemnly. “Whether that is next month or ten thousand months from now. Surely I will discover much in that time.”

I stared again into the refracting play of color, only to be distracted by a tinkle, then a crash.

Kilinulo cried, “Sían!” as I jumped.

A calico cat had knocked a glass phial off the table it stood on, breaking it into three large pieces. I pressed a hand to my mouth, horrified. Kilinulo only sighed.

“Hold right there, nuisance,” he said, and went to sweep up the glass. The cat, pleased that she had my undivided attention, only licked the guilty paw. Kilinulo glanced up at me and saw my stricken expression.

“Worry not,” he reassured me. “It will simply go back in the ground, and I will see how the patina develops with more time.”

As I watched the cat, waiting to swoop in if she seemed liable to knock over more art, I noticed that some of her calico patches were actually zones of hairless skin, shiny with scarring. She watched me equitably as I stretched out a hand, gently resting it on her head. She also had half of an ear on the right side, I realized, and her tail was as crooked as an oak branch, broken in at least two places at some point in the past.

One did not often see creatures hurt like this in Aman. I rubbed under her chin, wondering at her story. Kilinulo returned from the garden and I turned to him with a questioning expression. He smiled and called Sían over to him. She jumped from the table and walked over to him easily enough, though with a hitch in her gait. He scooped her up and brought her to a different, clean-topped table near a south-facing window where the light was good and I could examine her.

“I expect you can see that my little lady here has had a hard life,” he said, pointing to her ears and tail. “It has been a long time since she incurred these injuries, but I worry they still pain her. I never learned to speak the tongue of beasts as the servants of Lord Oromë do, so I cannot ask.”

I laid my tools on the table and reached out again to the little cat, holding her firmly down by the shoulders and telling her to behave, for I would be gentle and as quick as I could, which would be quicker if she cooperated.

“Would you tell me how she came by these hurts while I check her?”

Kilinulo hummed while I prepared to take Sían’s temperature. Quite normal, I read, and he began to speak.

“I was in nearly the first boat to ship over,” he began. “We landed on Balar — I think your group landed later on, when we had made a beachhead farther north.”

I nodded and began checking Sían’s ribs and palpating her stomach. I had not been sorry to escape seeing Balar, where it was known that the ruins of Sirion were visible from the harbor towers. It made sense that the little calico was not Aman-born; it was not so unusual for soldiers to bring back keepsakes of their time in Middle-earth, even living ones, even large ones like horses.

Kilinulo continued, “So, the first time I left the boat was to explore Sirion. Of course, King Gil-galad had explored it right after, looking for survivors. I met some of those, on Balar — not many. But we were looking for a beachhead ourselves, and Sirion had that wonderful harbor. So we went to see what could be repaired, or salvaged, of the docks.”

All Sían’s organs were properly sized and positioned. I switched to her mouth, checking her teeth for plaque and damage. She meowed in protest, and I sang her a little calmness. Some calm would not go amiss for myself, for I did not know, but could guess, what Kilinulo must have seen.

“It was… I am sure we both saw worse, afterwards, as we marched north, and after all, it had been four years since the attack, and time and weather had done their work. There were no bodies any longer, only some bones we would turn up where some… part had been missed. But mostly it was soot and rotting wood, every now and then an old toy or a cooking pot. I kept seeing this flash out of the corner of my eye down in the ground, however, these gleams in the dark holes where the doors used to be. It made me terribly nervous.”

He reached out and stroked Sían. “Eventually, I decided I had had enough, and I charged screaming into the door of a fallen-down house where I had seen a pair of those watching lights. It was full of ash, of course, so I failed to spear any Orc, but blinded myself in the cloud and made myself sneeze to boot. Certainly, I was never so foolish again. When I recovered, I saw Sían in the corner under some fallen beams, puffed up to twice her size, which was nothing. She was a skeleton. She wouldn't let me get near her, nor even the leech who had come along for the horses. We figured the last time she saw an Elf, they burned down her home. None of the survivors claimed her, so her people must have died and left her behind. I saw her broken tail, her broken leg, those burned patches on her sides. I still think it must have been that she belonged to the house I found her in, which collapsed when the Kinslayers burned it, killing all but her. I have always wondered how she survived.”

I ran a light hand down that stiff back leg, finding the seam of a badly healed break. Sían laid her ears back and I sang more peace into the air between us. Rubbing around the break, I could feel the knotted muscles that compensated for the crooked bone, surely sore and strained. Her tail was much the same, though it seemed those breaks had not been as major. Kilinulo was right to wonder: animals and Children easily succumbed to injuries far more minor than these under the care of healers, much less abandoned in a blighted ruin.

“However did you get her onto the ship?”

Kilinulo gazed down at the little cat. “I fed her when I could. She was starving; I doubt she really learned how to hunt as someone’s pet, and there was little game even for a working barn cat. Sirion was better than the lands around it — we figured the Silmaril had kept it fertile, the Silmaril and the river Sirion — but it was not that much better. She did not trust me, but I had fish and lembas from Queen Elwing in my rations, and that was too much of a temptation even for a cautious cat. Eventually, right before we left Balar to establish camps in Nan Tathren, I drugged it with help from the leech, and she woke up on board ship.”

“Oh, she must not have been happy about that.”

“Furious! It took a week before she would come out from the box we had brought her on board in, and a month before she would leave the sailors’ cabin. But I kept feeding her, always with a bit of lembas. I thought it might help that Queen Elwing was the one who had made it, and she was, maybe, something like Queen Elwing’s cat, if cats recognize Elf-queens.”

I hummed, now inspecting those bald patches on Sían’s sides. Inside, I wondered if I could not presume to ask Queen Elwing herself, or at least ask Poicasíma to do so — if the letter in my pocket said what I hoped it said. But Sían had the bulk of my attention. Healed as they were, I winced to look at her ropy scars, unable to stop imagining how she had come by them. Burns undeniably: flaming rafters? Falling embers? Simply the heat from the conflagration devouring her home? But they were healed now, and Sían reacted not at all as I gently danced my fingers over them.

“Look at her now,” I said. “Happy for me to touch her all over. Creating havoc, just as a cat should. These old burns do not seem to bother her at all, only the healed breaks.”

Kilinulo asked a few anxious questions about those. I answered as best I could, then requested silence while I examined them in the fëa. The breaks whined with a small but constant pain, better for the warmth of the sunlight, worse for heavy use the day before chasing a rainbow mote cast through a glass shard. It irritated Sían, but she thought little of it except on the worst days, I could tell. Healed long ago, it was no use re-setting the leg or the tail.

I straightened up and let Sían go. She lashed her tail in disgruntlement and hopped off the table handily enough, disappearing through a door at the back of the main room.

Pointing to her halting but purposeful passage, I said, “As you can see, she is not terribly hindered by the injuries. There is nothing I can do to heal the breaks at this late date, but I can certainly suggest some solutions for the lingering discomfort. In the leg it mostly comes down to keeping the muscles relaxed, while the two in her tail can be managed on wet days with medicines.”

I showed Kilinulo how to mix my draughts with Sían’s food, feeling pleased, not for the first or last time, at how my education in Beleriand meant I could easily leave strong medicines behind with animals who would benefit from them. He prepared a small dish for her right away, using, to my slight disappointment, a plain earthenware saucer rather than one of his gleaming glass experiments.

Sían, drawn by the clink of pottery, came trotting back out, her poor mood at her manhandling forgotten in the face of a meal. We laughed at her a little as she sniffed suspiciously at the pile of shredded dried fish, some habits clearly dying hard, then fell to with a will.

Kilinulo touched my shoulder, and I turned from watching Sían eat her medicine to find him holding out another cup which smelled of wine.

“Do you care to stay a while longer and reminisce some more?” he asked, and I accepted gladly.

We sat on his stoop and watched the bees buzz in and out of the great golden flowers of the squash, taking sips of the wine, which I thought I could recognize as a coastal Black Pine varietal. Quildatal cropped at the grass, swishing her thin mule’s tail at the flies.

Kilinulo sighed happily. “It is certainly not much like the gorges I grew up in.”

I laughed in agreement. “No, too much grass and not enough goats. I did not expect to find another comrade here, so far away!”

“Ah, but there are all types in Ránanandë,” Kilinulo said. “What better place to try out a new way of living than here? Aman will never again be what it was before the war. People are coming now, not leaving.”

“You know there is a Noldo living outside of Merrilosto?” I asked. “Someone who was at the docks of Alqualondë.”

“Everyone knows that,” Kilinulo said. “I cannot say I would have him mind Sían if I am called to the university about my glass, but what does it matter? He lives in Merrilosto; I live here. If Sían ever graduates from breaking glass to breaking chairs, perhaps I will see him then.”

Sipping at my wine, I watched Quildatal some more. “The distance helps, I think,” I mused.

“Too far to bother, too close to ignore?” suggested Kilinulo wryly.

I thought it must be something like that. Sían padded out of the house, her meal apparently having entirely absolved us for the various indignities visited upon her. Kilinulo stroked her spine as she passed by. The bees buzzed. We drained our wine and said farewell, and I went to fetch Quildatal. Together, my mule and I crossed some of that distance and passed back into Merrilosto with the last of the afternoon.

The summer evening cast its lingering shadows as I groomed and fed Quildatal and left her with a last nuzzle and carrot chunk in her stall. Crossing the courtyard, running my fingers through the fountain bowl, I could see Elquessë and the housekeeper laying out the evening meal. I remembered with a start that I had found it daring when Elquessë hired a female cook, not just for the bread but for all we ate: myself, Alparenë, Elquessë, our ragtag trio of women leeches. I wondered if even The Clarkia in Alqualondë could boast as much. Then the scent of roast trout with plums wafted out into the courtyard, and I dropped my musings and hurried inside. Alparenë and I entered at the same time, Alparenë from the surgery.

“Welcome!” Elquessë exclaimed. “How wonderful to have my assistants both back again. Sit, eat.”

So we sat and ate. Throughout, I felt Elquessë and Alparenë casting glances at me, each unsubtle in their own characteristic way. Alparenë broke the stalemate.

“So, did you decide to go to Alpalondë to live?” she asked bluntly.

Elquessë assumed a hangdog expression and said, “It is a city full of points of interest, although I have found a much fuller scope for my research here, outside of the pull of political interests–”

“I did meet your cousin,” I laughed. “I also met with the editor who wrote to me with the offer. When I came back today, I admit I was as yet undecided.” I fingered the edge of Poicasíma’s letter in my pocket. I thought I knew what it must say — but either way, my choice was made.

“Well?” interjected Alparenë.

“No, I will not be moving to Alqualondë.”

Elquessë sat back in her chair with an explosive sigh. “I should not have doubted you, Hyamessë! Since I first met you, I could tell you had a good head on your shoulders, not to be swayed by adventure or ambition.”

“On the contrary!” I protested. “I believe I have come to see that the adventures I find here are the kind for which I am fit. My patient today said it: too close to ignore.”

Dryly, Alparenë asked Elquessë, “Does your diatribe against ambition mean you will not show Heriel the gift you made to convince her to stay?”

Elquessë blustered a bit, but drew a wrapped package from beneath her chair and passed it down to me. I worried at the cloth wrapping, wondering what in the world Elquessë might think to give me.

The cool ceramic plaque read, in beautiful lettering, “Hyamessë Heriel, P.A.L.” It was twin in every way to the one that blazoned Elquessë’s name across the front of our house. I stared at it, tracing the capital hyarmas with my finger.

Elquessë, usually so confident, moved her head back and forth a little in uncertainty.

“Thank you,” was all I could say, clutching at the rough, unglazed corners. “Thank you.”

Dinner went on after my revelation. Even Alparenë toasted to my new status as partner without rancor — after all, I had been here first, and surely her turn would come. We stayed at the table until late, while the summer stars sidled in through the windows.

At last, Elquessë departed, claiming an early appointment, and Alparenë and I decamped to the chairs near the fireplace, cold for the season. I wished I could go upstairs and read my letter, but it would wait. Companionably, Alparenë and I stared out the windows at the starlight playing on the water of the courtyard fountain.

Eventually, Alparenë said, “I truly supposed you would prefer to stay in the city. It seems to me that all my generation stayed. And you have seen so much more of the world than I, to be content here, in the countryside, with us.”

I hummed. “Your city is beautiful. But I went looking for a home, and well,” I spread my hands, taking in the scarred table, the overgrown courtyard, the breakfast room, and the company. “Quildatal likes it best here.”

Alparenë snorted. “And your plum publishing offer?”

“It so happens that all the stories they were interested in were my stories of leeching in Ránanandë, so I had really better stay here to write them. Who would have thought?”

Alparenë shook her head at me, but held her peace. By silent accord, we finished our drinks, nodded a goodnight, and drifted to our respective beds. I placed my boots right where my feet would land in the morning. At last, I pulled out the letter and unfolded it, glancing through the lines that read just as I expected: that Poicasíma was sorry I had decided to leave Alqualondë and return to Ránanandë, but that Elven lives were long and the ferry route short, and the Noldor had not done much worthwhile in the land of the Falmari, but they had invented the concept of the long-distance relationship. I turned the paper over and pulled out my pen. As I did, I somehow seemed to become aware of Ránanandë itself stretching out in the darkness beyond my window, with the road leading past Urundil’s home, and Sister Turkanta’s boardinghouse, and the creamery on the point. Tomorrow meant the ferry to Filitambo, then the riding rounds down the coast, where the dry grasses would rustle golden along the sea cliffs and the redwoods would hold the morning moisture as mist until late afternoon. The next week would be much the same, and the next, and the next, and at the same time, I would find cats who survived Kinslayings, and donkeys owned by Kinslayers, and drunken bulls, and clever mules, and sometimes foals whose destiny lay in the lands I had marched over as a soldier looking for some purpose.

Perhaps I could have sat there indefinitely, dripping ink off the nib of my pen, but that I remembered that in the morning before the ferry I had promised to stop by and examine Valimahen the egg-cart horse. I smiled to myself. One sentence would not hurt and would serve as a letter and a draft in one. I wiped my nib, rewetted it in ink, and began to write.

In the years immediately after the war, there was not much for an animal leech to do but to go out into the hinterlands and see if one might find a small portion of that purpose and, strange though it may sound to say it, harmony which had attended the army of the Valar.

Then I lay my pen down, closed my eyes to the silver shining of the antler on my chimney, and slept.

 

The End.

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Chapter End Notes

Thank you all so very much for accompanying me through Hyamessë's early adventures! Like James, I am sure she will go on to have many, many more. Extra thanks here at the end to Zdenka, for being a great bird owner, to everyone who commented along on AO3 as I experimented with the actual-WIP format, for the encouragement and excitement every week, and to all the creatures great and small who cameoed and inspired their counterparts here.