Thieves' Triptych by Dawn Felagund  

I.

The loremaster sat at her [at his] desk, one desk amid a row of ten, one desk amid a column of ten, one desk amid a tile of one hundred in a tessellated tower.

Each desk held a jumble of books at its back and a tidy sheet, four handspans by two. The loremaster took his seat at his assigned desk.

The loremaster had come to Eldalondë a decade earlier to record her [his] name as an apprentice in the book in the building that stood before the tower. A week earlier, a girl who had learned Quenya just from eavesdropping at the quays, who would have been marked a prodigy had she been a boy, who would have gone to Eldalondë as an apprentice loremaster had she been a boy, had died of a sudden pox and was given a hasty burial worthy of a common girl, her name never recorded, just a chunk of stone flaked with mica to mark where she lay and wink in the setting sun as though suppressing a secret.

The loremaster's particular task was to runnel the Quenya in the jumble of books at the back of the desk into a single tidy page, four handspans by two, into words fit for the Númenórean people. The loremaster's particular task was a single moment in the life of Tinúviel, when she stood with wide, wet, unblinking eyes, her beautiful face enough to still the Dark Lord so that Beren could do his work with crown and blade. The Tinúviel of the jumble of books was inscrutable as the Valar; she did not speak or dance or sing; her feet did not dent the earth; she was an adornment; she was just a pair of wide, wet eyes and a colorless face and a rosebud mouth in the fashion of beauty; she was like the Allfather, setting a blank page upon which could be enacted the greatness of [M]men.

The loremaster was always swathed in bindings, always poxed with ulcers beneath, always short of breath when climbing to her tile in the tower or when contemplating the wide, wet eyes of Tinúviel, always boxed into the shape of a man.

The loremaster whispered her pen across the lip of the inkpot; ninety-nine identical whispers answered, and the workday began. The loremaster set her [his! his!] pen to the page. Lúthien Tinúviel met the eyes of the Dark One. She opened her mouth

II.

"and sang in the face of the Dark Lord," Bilbo whispered.

He always thought the act audacious. Not merely brave—that was when you had to knock at the door of crotchety Mistress Mugwort to beg leave to retrieve your goblinball from her primroses. Audacious.

Bilbo Baggins, however, was not audacious nor even particularly brave (more than one of his goblinballs moldered at the roots of crotchety Mistress Mugwort's primroses); he was not terribly Tookish and was indeed more a grocer than a burglar, so there was no singing in the face of what lay slumbering in the furnace-light he spied before him. He managed just a whisper—actually more a thought timed upon an exhale.

Lúthien was half-god, half-Elf. She should not need to prove a thing! Yet Beren persisted in leaving her behind. Bilbo had always hated that part of the story, the leaving behind. It stirred an ire in him that he could not explain. Then she strode into Angband and, red-mouthed, breath gusting in the Dark Lord's face, sang him unconscious, and she proved her father and Beren and all who doubted her (a grocer! indeed!) wrong.

"Sang in the face—" Bilbo crept forward.

A'glimmer with gold, reddened with rubies, plated with platinum, embedded with emeralds—with each padfooted step, Bilbo exhaled a fragment of poetry that would someday make up the tale of this moment when a gentle-Hobbit from Bag End faced down a dragon.

The dragon shifted and a single gold coin dislodged itself from his opal-pale belly. (Scaled with sapphires!) It bounced down the pile, the way an apple dislodged from on high will knock about between branches, before it landed nearly at Bilbo's feet. It took only a finger, outstretched to its fullest, to flip the coin soundlessly into his palm.

As he stole back down the hall, the coin grew into a cup, the gentle-Hobbit into a burglar, the glint of bravery into the audacity to rob a dragon. He could almost imagine the hushed room, the telling of the tale

III.

"of the king, under the mountain, and his burglar."

The king was gaunt with hunger—they all were—but still upright, still undaunted, still with eyes like the sun on the sea. The winds whistled around the eaves of the hall, winter unyielding to spring. An infant wailed, too young to have learned that one straightened his shoulders under pain. All the same, the babe's mother buried its face in her neck, ashamed.

The scop walked forward, footsteps loud in a hall of bestilled song. Hollowed eyes watched him go, glinting like stars upon the dark. The winter would recede, the ice soak into the earth and the corn rise to greet the sun; the people required a song to remind them to straighten their shoulders and take the next step forward.

But the scop knew that those cavernous eyes increasingly looked West. west, west. The scop tried to reshape the word upon his tongue to belittle it but could not. It always beckoned, like a spell from the deeps of time, helped by a land that yielded less year by year and gave old stories a shine of hope that firmed into truth with too many tellings.

The tale of the king, under the mountain, and his burglar—such was a tale of the ordinary turned extraordinary, just what the people needed to hear to bear up a while longer under cold and hunger. Just what the people needed to hear to put old men's hands to oars, to coax women into boats while children clung to their skirts, to set out West.

But the scop's role was not to inspire. It was to teach, to guide, to warn.

The tale of the king, under the mountain, and the burglar was indeed one of a warrior, altogether insignificant in size but provided with a bitter sword and great courage. It was not enough.

The scop spoke. The warrior faced the dragon. The warrior was wounded and died. There is no reward in thieving what is not yours to have. The people filed silently from the hall, huddled against the cold, their empty bellies a shout where their heart should lie, the west a boil of clouds: another storm to come and hold the spring at bay.

Summer did eventually arrive but passed too soon to winter. Thin soil skirled across Geatland. The wind found no flesh to bite and rattled instead among the ice-rimed branches of the trees. Brambles snarled where the corn had gone. A dragon-headed ship strained at a water-logged rope, broke free, and though no eyes remained to mark its passage, spent the better part of the day heaving and being battered back by waves but heaving again until it slipped, with the sun, into the West.

Chapter End Notes

The line in section III, "altogether insignificant in size but provided with a bitter sword and great courage," comes from The Hobbit, "Inside Information."

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