Offering by Perching  

“You know the Lord of the Eagles,” Fingolfin says.

Fingon sets down the map in his hands. Across the table, Fingolfin holds open a scroll, his thumb tapping against the parchment. “We have a passing acquaintance,” Fingon allows.

“I want you to pay a visit to the south of Mithrim. I have a report here of a number of missing sheep.”

Fingon spends several seconds attempting to connect the dots and failing. Pushed by Fingolfin’s deft hand, the scroll slides across the table and bumps against the map. Fingon opens it to Shortages of the following materials are expected, et cetera. We beg aid, particularly of a diplomatic nature, et cetera. We believe the culprit to be an Eagle.

“They believe wrong,” Fingon says.

“Nevertheless,” Fingolfin says. “I was thinking you could stop off on your way to Dor-lómin.”

Fingon looks down at the map, at the drawing of the south of Beleriand with its dark forest and the isle which the Sindar say was once an arm of Tol Eressëa. His last few days have been lost to poring over reports of other people’s adventures. “We shouldn’t delay when our people are in need. I’ll go at once.”

“I am the culprit,” the Eagle says, “as you put it.”

“What?” Fingon says. “No. Aren’t you here to track the culprit down?”

“I don’t see how I would track myself down.” The Eagle’s head turns. His yellow eyes are the eyes of an animal, and he uses them to look far beyond where he and Fingon stand on a hill to the sheep in their pasture below. “Or I do, but it would not make for a long exercise. Here I am. I have tracked myself down.”

“But why do it? You can’t have thought the sheep wild. They’re clearly fenced.”

“What has fencing got to do with it?”

Those animal eyes are turned on Fingon. If they were disturbing, fixed on the sheep, fixed on him they’re merely strange. All at once, he understands. He can’t expect the hands of Manwë himself in Middle-earth to know all the ins and outs of Elven life. They have greater concerns.

So he bows to the Eagle and says, “There’s been a misunderstanding. The sheep you’ve been eating are under the care of Elves, kept safe for their wool and later slaughtered for their meat and skin. When you eat them, we lose all the clothing and parchment and food we expected to get out of them. You hurt us.”

“There’s no misunderstanding. I understand. But I am hungry, and the sheep are fat and easier to catch than goats in the mountains.”

“You hurt us,” Fingon repeats.

The Eagle shifts on his talons. Fingon would like to think it guilt or at least realization, but it seems to be only idle movement. The Eagle’s eyes drift away again to the pasture, and he says, almost casually, “Do you not hurt the sheep when you kill them? It’s the way of the world.” And he leans forward and lifts his great wings, and the wind of his sudden takeoff knocks Fingon to the ground.

Rolling onto his elbows, Fingon watches the Eagle race over the pasture. The Elves who have clustered near the bottom of the hill to catch a glimpse of him scatter backwards. One leaps onto a stile and shouts as the Eagle plucks up a bleating sheep, wheels in the air, and carries it off with him south towards the mountains.

Some of the Elves run up the hill. “Are you hurt, my lord?” Fingon’s retainer Tuilas says breathlessly, and Fingon pops to his feet.

“Of course not. An Eagle of the Elder King wouldn’t hurt me.”

Tuilas draws near enough to brush grass off Fingon’s arm. “But he would steal sheep.”

The same Elf is still standing on the stile. Mavwen is her name, and it is her sheep the Eagle has just taken and her land Fingon and his party pitched their tents on last night. “I haven’t been sleeping,” she confided in him after he’d spent some time reassuring her that the Eagle she’d spotted could only be here to help. “Just when I thought I’d built a life in these new lands, this happens.”

She’s still shouting. She steps down and kicks the stile. Fingon’s stomach sinks.

Mavwen isn’t angry with Fingon, or if she is, she doesn’t show it. That night she still hosts a planned gathering of all the Elves within a day’s journey to come meet the prince and speak with him about their livestock and sing under the stars well into the night, and she serves dinner fit for a king, which in these parts, in these days, means mutton. None of it does anything to improve Fingon’s mood. “The Eagles’ ways are mysterious,” he tells her not because it’s the easy answer, though it is, but because he has to believe it’s true.

“If it were anything else, it wouldn’t matter. I could shoot it,” Mavwen bemoans. Fingon takes in a breath, sharp enough to hear because Mavwen raises her hands. “I won’t! That’s what I’m saying!”

“They’re the servants of the Elder King,” Fingon says anyway.

“You know their lord. You could appeal to him.”

Fingon’s lips pinch with regret. “We’ve met once. I would take it to him if I could, but I don’t know how.”

“Will you not try?” Mavwen says, and at last there is censure in her voice.

Fingon slips away early to go to the pasture. Away from the torches and the chatter, he feels as if there is ice creeping into his fingers and toes. For a while he cannot think why. Then he thinks that if the Eagles are willing to pillage the carefully tended sheep of Fingon’s people, they are cruel creatures, and that Manwë who rules them is cruel, too.

Strange, Fingon corrects himself, and different, but strange and different are little better. He hadn’t realized until now how the ground steadied under his feet after he met Thorondor, steadied because of his faith that the Eagles would not let the worst happen to them. To evil end shall all things turn that ye begin well, the Doom goes, and so that quest to Thangorodrim almost went, but Thorondor stayed Fingon’s arrow. If Thorondor’s actions that day were not a fundamental part of him but a whim, as likely as him deciding one day to pluck a few sheep out of their pastures, then on what hope can Fingon stand?

For the moment, he doesn’t. He sits down in the grass and allows the sheep to come close and to look at him with their eyes stranger than the Eagles’, and he prays.

At some point he begins to dream. Thorondor carries him, and Maedhros lies naked and gaunt against him, and he is wishing he had a cloak with which to keep Maedhros warm. “This is your mind. You may have what you want,” Thorondor says, and suddenly Fingon does. The cloak is thick and gray and made of wool. Fingon lays it over Maedhros. His hand finds the tourniquet around Maedhros’s arm, and he holds it so that he will know if it comes loose.

“I don’t know why you’re imagining him in this state,” Thorondor says.

“He’s alive,” Fingon says. “He’s alive because of you.”

Thorondor’s wings beat. Fingon rocks and somehow keeps both himself and Maedhros steady. In other dreams Maedhros has slipped out of his grasp. Thorondor says, “It was a good deed, and so I came. What are a few sheep next to that?”

A sheep bleats in Fingon’s face, startling him awake. It is still dark, but the chatter in the distance has gone quiet and there is dew on the grass and on Fingon. “What are you next to that? But what does he mean?” Fingon asks the sheep. He’s better suited to the task of pondering this than to the task of doubt, and soon enough he thinks he understands.

It only takes him a few minutes to reach his camp. There Tuilas runs out of their tent to meet him. “Where have you been?” they demand. “It’s nearly dawn. I was about to send out a search party.”

“You would’ve found me quickly. I only went to visit the sheep,” Fingon says, and he smiles and adds, “Don’t worry when I disappear again! I’m going into the mountains to find the Eagle’s eyrie.”

“Alone?”

“I know. But I must. The people here asked for diplomatic aid. I’m going to provide it.”

Fingon and his party spend a morning hauling a large flat stone to the top of the hill, and by midday Tuilas is laying a freshly slaughtered sheep across it. “Are you sure this will work?” Mavwen says, staring.

Fingon, who’s been lost in thought contemplating the logistics of sending gold and sheep to southern Mithrim to make up for their losses, snaps to attention. “The Eagle will keep his word,” he says and does not add that the Eagle’s word was, “That’s an odd idea. I suppose. I will try it once, at least.”

Tuilas whistles. The Eagle, as agreed, appears out of the sky to land before the stone. The wind of his wings whips the Elves’ hair back from their faces, and Fingon takes a second to arrange his braids before he steps forward. “What are a few sheep next to what the Eagles have done for us,” he says, “next to what we hope that they will do for us? The Lord of the Eagles has spoken of his desires through you and through my dreams, and I have heard him. You will no longer need to steal our sheep out of our fields, for we will feed you. Please accept this offering of thanksgiving to you and all the Eagles and the lord of your lord for your friendship in these hither lands.”

Fingon bows, and Tuilas bows too and steps aside. The Eagle dips his head to rend the flesh of the sheep with his beak, and when he has taken a bite he looks up. It will never not be strange to be pinned down by an Eagle’s eyes, but now that Fingon understands better what is behind them, he is glad of the feeling. Here are Manwë’s hands in Middle-earth, willing to deal with the Noldor even in their exile, and for such little payment in return. The Elder King has not forsaken them.

“Well,” the Eagle says. “Well. This could work. As long as you do not stop giving such flattering speeches.”

Just before Aredhel reaches the stable where she will leave her horse so she can climb the stairs to Gondolin’s gate, she meets Turgon flanked by Duilin and Egalmoth. “Whoa,” she says to her horse, reining him in, and the others do the same. “You look grim,” she says. “Is something the matter?”

“Apparently,” Turgon says, “Thorondor is plucking sheep out of our pastures.”

Aredhel stares a moment, and then she laughs. Once she visited Dor-lómin and was regaled by the tale of Fingon’s adventure in Mithrim with a troublesome Eagle, though troublesome was not the word Fingon used. Turgon thought the whole affair ridiculous, convinced that Fingon had been duped by a wild Eagle living far from his lord and a fanciful dream, and Aredhel thought it ridiculous too but for different reasons. She is not nearly as surprised at this turn of events as Turgon must be.

“See? That’s how I feel, my lady,” Duilin says and is silenced by Egalmoth’s glare. With a smile at Duilin, Aredhel nudges her horse around so that she can ride beside Turgon, and as they start again at a walk, Duilin and Egalmoth fall in behind them.

“What are you going to do?” Aredhel says.

Turgon doesn’t answer straight away. He doesn’t know. So Aredhel says, “Let me talk to him. I’ll tell him off for you.”

The faint grimace on Turgon’s face grows deeper. He and Fingon have the same problem. They’re both too reverent of the Eagles to realize that they’re only people, and like other people, sometimes they need to be taken to task for their bad behavior. But to say that in Gondolin would almost be to commit blasphemy.

“I’ll tell him to stop for you,” Aredhel corrects herself, “and if it makes you feel better, you may tell him I was too headstrong for you to control and you had nothing to do with my impudence.”

“I would not,” Turgon says, and a moment later, “You may try.”

Aredhel urges her horse into a trot. “Don’t you worry,” she calls over her shoulder. “I’ll show you how to handle them.”

That same year, the people of Gondolin put a new festival on their calendar. At first light, they begin the slaughter, and as the sun lifts over the mountains, the Eagles swoop down in force to be presented with their offering. “I am glad to accept this gift of the people of Gondolin, a most generous people,” Thorondor tells Turgon and tucks, dignified, into the dead sheep laid out for him.

Aredhel, standing a little distance away with Idril at her side, fumes. Idril casts her a longsuffering glance. Aredhel says, “It’s Fingon’s fault. He spoiled them and now there’s no reasoning with them.”

“Maybe not,” Idril says, “but they’ve done so much for us. Is it so evil?”

After a while, Thorondor raises his head and tilts it, and Aredhel sees that he’s satisfied in the way she might be after a particularly delicious meal. “Is there more?” he asks.

They really are just people, but nobody but her can see it. Tomorrow, Aredhel decides, she will take her horse and ride out to the mountains and pretend she can’t hear the Eagles who sometimes call down to her. Maybe for a few hours she will feel herself free again. For now she watches as Thorondor is hastily served a second course.

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