They Can Nearly Talk by Chestnut_pod  

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Chapter 4

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Another of these cases unique to Aman began during the first autumn of my life in Merrilosto. I was called out by pigeon early one morning when unseasonable heat quivered behind the eggshell morning like a full and fragile yolk ready to spill. The message was in a large and emphatic hand, insisting on the presence of the “young horse leech” at once. It mentioned that it was an obstetric problem, but not the nature of it.

Happy enough to be on my way before Arien unveiled her full and scorching glory, I packed my bag, saddled Quildatal, and set off towards the farm in question, which lay just beyond the last cottage in Merrilosto. It was a prominent breeding operation for pleasure and sport horses and took pride in having sent beasts to Middle-earth during the war. That ended quickly, given the conditions, but I still felt a certain warmth towards the mistress of the place, whom I had only seen from the shore of Beleriand, leaning on the railing of a Telerin ship while her horses were unloaded.

Quildatal and I made good time — still enjoying the smooth showiness of her fine gait — and a farmhand pointed us to one of the outer fields. I tied Quildatal firmly to a hitching post in reach of hay and water in order to avoid her over-inquisitiveness with a horse friend, who might well kick, and enjoyed the brisk walk through the paddocks. Grand horses of all colors cocked sleepy ears at me as I passed by, or gnawed thoughtfully at their buckets in anticipation of breakfast. Crows gathering for the coming winter flashed their glossy jet feathers as they winged over the paddocks in search of their own breakfast.

The owner stood alone in the last field before a small patch of oak woodland, radiating fury even from a distance. This field showed more signs of hard use than the others, the last of its dry grass trampled down and the dust raked up in horseshoe drifts, rather like a commons after the market has passed. Next to the owner stood a fine blue roan mare who looked none the worse for wear, with one lazy hind hoof cocked and her lower lip hanging down.

I pushed through the white gate and hailed the owner, who gave me a stiff nod.

“Ruanel,” she said, by way of introduction. “Doctor Heriel, I have quite a serious problem here.”

I nodded to show my willingness, though I was puzzled as to what could be wrong with the mare, who hardly twitched her tail at the flies.

“Oromë’s hunt passes through my wood,” she said, nodding over the white fence to the carefully maintained patch of oak woodland that balanced the cleared pastures of Ruanel’s operation.

“They keep the deer down; they leave a haunch or a skin in thanks. They bless the wood, and I have never had any quarrel with them, for they are great lovers of horses.”

Ruanel seemed to swell with rage. “And then, I am roused from my meditation in the small hours by a trumpeting to wake the whole town, and I come out in my nightdress to find some gold-shod spawn of Oromë mounting my best broodmare, whom I put out here specifically so she would not attract any of the stallions during her heat!”

A Maia of Oromë mounting an ordinary horse? I glanced again at the mare, who seemed, if anything, more relaxed than before. Any sign that she might be the crux of a tricky theological question about the debatable incarnate nature of Ainur was absent. Even Melyanna had courted her incarnate husband, if centuries of eye-contact could be labeled courting. Asking her about her experience was certainly out of the question; the rumor was that she had yet to regain a semblance with a human larynx.

“Can you tell yet if she is pregnant?” Ruanel asked, breaking into my incredulous musing.

If she was mounted last night, she might not yet have even conceived, I thought. I relayed as much to Ruanel, who scowled harder.

“When would you be able to tell?” she demanded.

“Perhaps thirty days, or thirty-five,” I replied. “Manually, that is — if the sire is, as you say, a Maia of Oromë…”

I trailed off, and Ruanel, impressively, made an even more sour face.

“I tell you, Heriel, I had plans for this year! A new foal by Maldanar for those good straight legs and depth of chest, with Ulofánë here providing the cleverness and temper, and now– what? The most beautiful foal in all Ëa? Will it sing and dance before the Doomsman for the quality of its oats?”

Finding no answer within myself, I provided the mare — still calmly watching the proceedings — with a strengthening draught and fled.

Ruanel was not to be put off, however. Between my first visit and the second at thirty-three days, I received at least one pigeon a week detailing the infinitesimal changes Ruanel saw in Ulofánë’s appetite, attitude, and vaginal discharge. On that thirty-third day, I returned to the farm, palpated Ulofánë’s uterus, and concluded that she was indeed pregnant. The mare herself seemed entirely well, while Ruanel was nigh-apoplectic with ire.

I prescribed exactly the same course of treatment that I would give to any other mare in foal: extra feed, gentle exercise, and some precautionary vitamin courses. Ulofánë was young and thus not quite at the level of the storied Rochallor or the steeds of Oromë’s hunt, who had lived long lives beside their Elven riders and grown wise in their company, but she was already cleverer than your average run of horse. Whenever I met her, I received the distinct impression of smugness.

As the autumn wore through its gold, I began to receive other impressions as well. The first clue was the seeming rapidity of the pregnancy, or at least, of its sensible signs on Ulofánë. She was not a small mare, but she began to walk heavily and show a bulge in her barrel far more quickly than I would have expected. The second clue were the flowers, and they might have been the first, except that Ulofánë and her retinue of loyal broodmares — who might have been, in their devout admiration, the third clue — ate them almost as soon as they sprang up. They were not entirely unlike coltsfoots in their cheery yellowness, and not entirely unlike orchids in their bewitching scent, yet they appeared entirely new to me, and they seemed to lend a gloss and vigor to the mares who ate them. Most distinctively, they formed only in the hoofprints of Ulofánë, or in the short grass she had cropped.

The autumn passed into winter, and between my other cases, I returned to Ruanel’s farm and looked in on Ulofánë whenever I had the chance. The sense of health and vigor that radiated from her seemed stronger every time, and the flowers in her wake thicker. Even so, I worried over the heaviness of her gait and the size of the foal I could feel when I examined her. Every so often, I would come across the imprints of horseshoes in the field, where the broodmares grazed unshod. Once, I crouched to place my hand over the imprint, and found that even my long fingers did not span from caulkin to caulkin.

To hear bards tell it, every prince is the tallest Elf who ever lived, and every lady the fairest sight under the stars — but watching golden flowers spring up to shine in the winter rain from the hooves of an ordinary mare reminded me of the look in the storytellers’ eyes when they spoke of Elwing of Sirion and of Lúthien Tinúviel. What did it mean that a small god of horsekind had approached a mare in a field? What should we expect from the foal? How was I in any way qualified to make decisions in this case?

I did go about my business and treat other patients while Ulofánë’s foal grew, but my mind remained always on her. Ruanel insisted that the matter be kept quiet, so that gawkers and devout sorts would not crowd the farm and disturb the horses, but I itched for advice. When, one clear and chilly night near the new year, I heard the horns of a hunt blowing through my third-floor window in the garret of Elquessë’s home, I sat bolt upright.

The habits of the war had not yet left me. My boots sat where my feet fell upon rising from bed, and my clothes were the work of a moment. Quildatal laid her ears back at being woken from her mulish dreams, but a Fëanorian lamp and a frost-sweetened winter carrot convinced her to amble towards Ruanel’s farm, ears pricked towards the haunting strains of horns and the belling of hounds.

We went straight to the broodmares’ pasture, where yellow torchlight flickered at the stars. Elves and horses milled about the fences, crunching in the frost, their buckskin and knives a strange contrast to the neat white-painted boards. They cast me glances that did not linger, a light in their eyes that could not be explained by torches or Trees. A few had braces of jackrabbits slung over their saddlebows, while others knelt around a stag, his throat cut, carefully separating the meat and hide.

Quildatal did not flinch at the smells or sights, but followed some sense of her own through the hunt. I kept my eyes between her ears, unnerved despite myself by the atmosphere, both like and unlike the war camps I had known. The Elves moved with a special lissomeness in the shadows, while the air thrummed with an urge to run and keep running beneath the stars shining overhead, picking out the points of the fallen hart in unsparing silver.

Eventually, we reached the fenceline. The herd of broodmares that usually followed Ulofánë stood in the corner nearest the gate, quiet and calm but alert, circled together. Ulofánë, her sides swollen, stood nose-to-withers with— well.

There is little more peaceful than the sight of two horses grooming one another in a field. There is little more terrible than the sight of a warhorse bearing down, turning one’s body into the tightening peg of a drumskin to resound at each iron-shod footfall. The stallion standing by Ulofánë, still as he was, reminded me of the cavalry charges I had withstood when I found myself in the wrong place at the wrong time. I swung down off Quildatal, but hesitated to move into the pasture. My body screamed danger at me.

As I stood pressed against Quildatal’s shoulder, an Elf came to stand next to me. She wore her black hair in twin braids tucked through the belt that held her quiver, a short recurved bow slung over her shoulder.

“It is like watching the bear lumber out of its den when you were just picking toyons in the thicket, isn’t it?”

I nodded dumbly.

“He is Nahar. He sang cavalry at the Hunter’s side, in the time before time.”

“What does he want with a fine sport horse, now that Thangorodrim is broken, and all evil is ended forever?” I whispered.

The Elf next to me hummed. “Hounds may mob a wolf from its den, but the pups may hide until the dogs are gone. My lord foresees more hunts, and riders to ride to the horn. Riders need mounts.”

I watched the spirit of the cavalry charge lip at his mate’s withers. Ulofánë looked calm as ever, but I worried sorely about her foal — and about the wolves of the world.

A tap on my shoulder startled me from my reverie. The huntress had walked to the party skinning the hart, and now returned with his antlers. Wondering, I saw that what I had taken for the silver glint of moonlight on horn was in fact pure silver, branches and points gleaming blue.

“From my lord,” the huntress said. “One for you and one for Ruanel. Come, take it.”

Slowly, I reached out and grasped the antler at its base, then gasped. On a broad plain before a white city rode a white figure on a white horse, white light streaming against a cloud of darkness. The image faded, though I blinked my eyes in dazzlement. The antler, heavy, shone against the skin of my hand.

In the morning, bleary-eyed, I decided to stop ignoring the situation. I told Elquessë everything and asked for leave to travel to Tirion to consult with the professor of equine anatomy who had overseen my education. Elquessë, after she had overcome her shock and hefted the silver antler in her hands, gave me permission, and I set off the next day on the river ferry.

Professor Lelyalma was pleased to see me and overjoyed to explain the latest innovations she had made in horse midwifery to an interested audience. For three days, she took me to the public stables where the dray horses and omnibus-drawers rested, and we delivered a multitude of foals in more ways than I had dreamed possible. In the evenings, I watched the medical students in the anatomy theater at the University of Tirion, refreshing my memory of the layers of muscle and skin and flesh.

I returned with the spring seemingly at my heels, prepared to swoop in like the departing swallows when fall rolled around. However, a few scant months later, almost a year to the day since I arrived in Rananándë, Ruanel pounded on the door to Elquessë’s practice near midnight. Elquessë, who slept on the ground floor, came up the stairs to my attic room in a tearing hurry and shook me out of bed and into my boots.

As Elquessë hurriedly harnessed her Mórikano to the dogcart and I gathered up my Sindarin and Nandorin draughts and my Noldorin surgical instruments, Ruanel explained that she had come upon Ulofánë straining in the pasture, a good two months before her time. I was not entirely surprised — indeed, I had meant to go out the very next day to see her, for I was concerned by the apparent size of the foal. A premature foal was only more concerning.

In the dogcart, Ruanel cantering alongside us, Elquessë and I discussed how to proceed.

“You are by far the more skilled with horses,” Elquessë said. “You should lead, regardless of what we find.”

The thought of directing my employer about a foaling alarmed me slightly, but I had ordered around princes of my own people when they thought to concern themselves with my battlefield surgeries. I sketched out a plan of attack. Ruanel’s farm was all that was professional; if she had called for the leech, she had already tried stacking Ulofánë’s forequarters, repositioning the foal, and manually tugging with the contractions. Time would be of the essence when we arrived, if the foal was still alive, and this was not a spontaneous abortion brought on by the death of the fetus.

As I had expected, Ruanel led us to a spacious loosebox with a ramp in the corner. Ulofánë, however, was not on the ramp, but lying on her swollen side, dark with sweat, straining fruitlessly. Elquessë and I exchanged a look. I stripped to my breastband, washed my arms, and went to investigate.

The foal was not breech, at least, but as I followed the legs and feet through the birth canal, my heart sank. The little muzzle, which should have rested between the knees, was absent. Instead, I felt the chest wall, and, straining to reach, the torsion of a neck twisted backwards along the little animal’s spine. Each time Ulofánë’s uterus contracted, the pressure on the neck increased. Not only was the foal as large as I had feared, the malpresentation made delivery almost impossible. I could, perhaps, get a noose around the jaw and pull the foal’s head around, providing counter-pressure against the chest, but considering the time we had taken to arrive and the time Ulofánë had been laboring before Ruanel found her, we were certainly out of time for any games of tug-of-war.

My jaw clenched. If the foal were already dead, the best thing to do would be a grim kind of surgery: dissecting the foal in the uterus so Ulofánë could deliver. As I groped along the torqued neck, however, I could feel slight movement, a flutter of a pulse in the neck veins. There was a possibility the foal could be delivered alive, if we were quick about it.

I withdrew and washed my arm, watching my hands steady on the soap. I would have thought they would be shaking, but I felt eerily calm. The vision of the white rider on the white horse floated in my mind’s eye, and a steadiness suffused me that felt half-alien.

“Ruanel,” I said. “Please make ready a large table covered in a clean sheet. I am going to conduct an operation the Haladin of Beleriand called a Harethan section. It is a large and dangerous operation, but it improves the chances of the foal and the mare living, instead of at least the foal certainly dying.”

I did not add that I had never performed one, nor even seen it done on a live animal, only a dead woman, searching for clean water too close to a battlefield. But I knew the anatomy of a horse inside-out, had performed abdominal surgeries for colics and twisted bowels, and I had clean cloths, good instruments, a quiet barn — all the things I had lacked during the war. And I had the drive of the battlefield too, not to let one more creature in my care die than I had to.

Elquessë looked grim, but did not gainsay me, and readily followed my instructions to charm clean the table and prepare the instruments while I gathered the various draughts I needed. It took all three of us women singing to get Ulofánë onto the table with her legs up, where I poured a potion taught to me by one of the cowherds of Talath Dirnen down her throat so she ceased her contractions and slept. None of us had the attention to spare for a song of sleep or of muscle relaxation.

Elquessë shaved a wide swathe of flank and belly and placed a clean drape, and I took a deep breath to steady my nerves as I palpated to find the position of the foal. My heart beat hollowly in my ears, but my hand holding the scalpel remained miraculously steady.

Ilmarë, I thought, out of habit, then checked myself. Oromë Horse-Master, I prayed instead. Steady my knife; guide my aim. You want this foal so badly; help me get it.

The first slice revealed I had not forgotten my anatomy. Ruanel, who had been steadfast until then, broke into a sweat and turned away. Elquessë whistled, her trick to part the blood like waves, and I reached into the incision, past the layers of muscle and fat, to the uterus, where the outline of the foal’s hind legs told me where to cut again. Every part I had seen in dead horses in the operating theater and in the detailed engravings in my textbooks flashed before me. Two strokes opened the uterus, which gushed forth blood in a quantity that made my heart leap.

“Lord of Horses, so help me, you bastard,” I muttered, and kept cutting, my fingers steady.

The foal was visible in its caul. Had I made the incision large enough to pull it out? I thought so — hoped so. The hind legs were in reach, a safe place to pull. The foal was as heavy as a grown Elf, however, and slippery, and I swore.

“Ruanel, you have to turn around and help me pull it free,” I panted, and to her credit, she did, sallow and moist as a cheese, but strong in her grip as we hauled at the legs and Elquessë gently ruched and guided the edges of Ulofánë’s flesh around the body.

We wrestled the foal free at last and Ruanel and I gently lowered it to the stable floor. Immediately, Ruanel set to pulling loose the caul and clearing its nose and mouth of fluid, rubbing it down with a twist of straw. I turned back to Ulofánë, who needed my attention far more than the foal, which at first glance seemed healthy, though as unconscious as its mother from the sleeping draught.

Without the goal of the foal, the wound in Ulofánë’s belly somehow looked worse than ever. The sweat rolled down my back, but my hands remained steady. The placenta had already detached and so could be removed easily. With my finest needles and yards of catgut, I sutured the layers of the uterus, then the flesh and skin, leaning as close as I dared to keep the stitches tiny and even, while Elquessë held things in place and poured the cleansing and healing libations I had learned from the Sindar over at my command, to counteract the inevitable contamination of the abdomen from the opened uterus. At last, the last stitch placed, Ulofánë’s flank looked no worse than if she had cut herself on a fence, only a neat sewn line to show where we had wrestled out the foal.

With Elquessë lifting her head, I gave her another draught by mouth to keep her sleeping and promote healing. Then I turned to the foal -- a filly, I saw.

Ruanel had remained silent while Elquessë and I focused on Ulofánë, but when I turned, she motioned urgently for me to come.

Had I not known, I would not have guessed the foal had arrived two months early, so large and well developed was she. She showed none of the usual signs of prematurity, nor any obvious deformity or injury that might have caused the early labor. She was not yet awake, however, and her breathing was stertorous and slow. That pulse that had alerted me that she yet lived could be seen in the swollen veins of her neck, weak and uneven. Ruanel blew into her nostrils and pressed on her chest to no avail.

Elquessë continued tending to Ulofánë while I took Ruanel’s place. Whistles and snatches of song did not revive her. Her pulse and breathing grew ever slower, ever fainter.

I swore under my breath between blowing, then gave up on propriety.

“You gold-shoed nag, you rawboned keffel; come here, you crowbait screw, you warg!”

As I pressed again on the foal’s chest, a bugle sang out. My heart, already pounding, had no way to react further, so I simply kept swearing, a litany of all the foul words in four languages I had learned in Beleriand and a few more childhood favorites. With my fëa, I pushed hard at the flicker of spirit in the little scrap of horse, as though I was singing true songs of healing. The foal’s heart kept beating, just.

Ruanel gasped. I kept at my labors, though all my hair stood on end and my ears flattened despite themselves.

The curvet and the caracole had somehow lifted the latch of the loosebox and stood in the stall, radiating dread.

“Stop that, or at least do something to help,” I snapped, and almost fainted when cavalry itself nudged me aside with his muzzle.

The great stallion touched his nose to his foal’s and whuffled, the most familiar noise in the world. He nosed at the little body, still wet and scrawny, gave it a rough lick, and nudged again. The foal’s ear twitched, then her forefoot, still in its golden slippers. I gasped. Nahar licked at her poll like a mare, his tongue spanning almost her entire cheek, and snorted warm air into her nostrils again. This time, the foal opened her eyes.

“Oh, Ilmarë,” I whispered. Nahar flicked an ear at me. “Master of Horses,” I corrected myself.

The warhorse himself kept licking at the foal’s head and neck, pushing at her with his enormous head. I could have watched forever, but Ulofánë still lay on the table. While Nahar worked on his foal, I worked on her, until I felt confident she would rise up from her sedation no worse than wildered.

Elquessë put her hand on my shoulder, and I looked up to see her nodding at the corner of the loose box. As Nahar pushed, the foal finally got her gangling feet beneath herself and made a wavering attempt to stand.

From then, all went better than I could have dared hope. Mare and foal alike seemed to take no ill effects from the traumatic birth. Ulofánë required some targeted singing to prompt her milk to come in, but come it did, and the foal prospered on it. Elquessë and I monitored her incision carefully, bathing it, dressing it carefully, and singing over it almost daily until it closed. As with all roans, the hair over Ulofánë’s wound grew back solid, a black stripe across her belly that marked the site of healing. The yellow flowers no longer filled her hoofprints, but her pasture was thick with them nonetheless where her foal, blue roan like her dam, but already showing signs of graying like her sire, followed her.

As often as I could, I continued to visit Ruanel’s farm. Each time I returned from my rounds, I would mean to go out on a fine morning, only to awaken the very night I arrived to the sound of hunting horns. A silvery glow always lit my hands as I laced my boots, emanating from the antler that hung on the chimney. Quildatal would wend her way through the gathered Hunt, and I would stand and watch Nahar and the foal investigate one another under Ulofánë’s watchful eye. They would run under Tilion’s light, the foal as fast as a grown racehorse, thundering beside her sire, and I would marvel at them and wonder at her purpose.

One evening, when the foal was grown to a yearling filly nearly as tall at the withers as her mother, the same huntress who had given me the antler tapped me on the shoulder. I started, broken from my reverie, but the huntress held her finger to her lips when I tried to ask her what was towards. Instead, she nodded her head to where other hunters field-dressed another stag. I turned and saw the fleet hounds gnawing at the offal, the bones carefully separated, the antlers silver in the moonlight, the cuts of meat already hanging over fires. I saw too when the bones gathered themselves back into a frame, growing cartilage and veins, delicate as a textbook engraving, followed by the tidal roll of muscle and fat, a dissection in reverse. Dun skin and white hair spread across the flesh and deep eyes sparkled beneath proud antlers in what had been a skull, moments before. I swallowed hard.

The stag stepped, light as leaves, away from the fire, and the hunters, many with deer blood smearing their mouths and hands, knelt in reverence. As the stag passed through the hunt, he grew until he was more massive than the largest charger. In the pasture, the horses and the Maia of mounted warfare bowed their heads. Oromë passed through the fence without seeming to notice its presence and lowered his muzzle to the foal’s.

The huntress, her hand still on my shoulder, leaned in to whisper in my ear.

“He has come to take her to the Eastern Lands, where her line shall never fail, no more than the line of Lúthien the Brave, though it stand against evil itself. Dyrstig, He has named her, the daring one.”

“I do not know that tongue,” I murmured, and the huntress laughed.

“It has not yet been born, though it has been sung.”

The foal — Dyrstig — butted the great stag gently, then took a step towards him. Ulofánë whickered, then neighed, tossing her head, but did not follow. The stag lifted his head and began to run. Around me, the Hunt sprang to its feet, stowing meat and weapons, taking up the leashes of dogs and swinging onto horseback. The horns sounded again, almost drowning out the thunder of hooves as Nahar and Dyrstig followed the stag in his caracole. Oromë again passed through the fence as through a barrier of mist, but Nahar leapt it, and Dyrstig followed him, almost floating over the tall white planks. She tossed her head on landing and pranced, a blue shadow among the others. The stag kept running, flashing pale between the trees. The hounds and riders flowed after him, a river of belling and trumpeting. In but a moment, only Ulofánë, Quildatal, and I remained by the pasture.

My hand rose to my throat, as though to make sure my heart still beat. The night seemed stiller than still, more silent than silent, in the wake of the Hunt. Ulofánë heaved a heavy sigh. Stiffly, I climbed through the fence and went to her, stroking her ears and neck. I do not know who took more comfort from it.

From that night, though I hear the horns of the Hunt betimes, they no longer wake me. Once in a great while, however, I will dream of a far green country of rolling hills, where herds of horses run below flashing banners, and open my eyes to that untarnished antler gleaming on the wall.

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Chapter End Notes

(Just in case anyone is wondering, the damline of Shadowfax starts out Ee/aa/Rr/Gg.)