Three Black Islands by Idrils Scribe  

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2. On the Ice

Chapter warning: dog deaths in the second scene (below dotted line)

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Cape Forochel. Summer of the year 1500 of the Second Age.

“Do the peaks still stand?” Telperinquar leans forward so eagerly that his head almost hits the whale rib serving for roofbeam. “Can you tell us the way?”

This Lossoth hunting camp sits on the very tip of Cape Forochel, a clump of sealskin tents teetering on the edge of the sea ice. The last human habitation before the vast desolation of the northern wastes, and reportedly the home of the only living being who has seen the peaks of Thangorodrim since the War of Wrath.

The wind bites to the bone even in high summer.

The coming of their small expedition caused an upheaval among the encamped clan. The woman they seek is a respected elder, a priestess of some kind, and they seemed very protective of her. 

The elder’s abode is the finest and largest among the tents, its sealskin walls painted in swirling motifs of red and dark ochre. Only after much pleading were they admitted, accompanied by a stern-looking woman who did not speak, but quietly crouched in a corner.

From her seat atop a snow-white polar bear fur, the Lossoth elder eyes the pair of Elves with wariness. Deep lines cut her wind-tanned face. The branching web of ridges and grooves folds her skin like scorched leather. She sits very still, her hands hidden in the long sleeves of her sealskin parka.

Númenóreans do not age so wretchedly, but these Lesser Men make a harrowing spectacle. Telperinquar hovers between compassion and unease. He pities Mortals when he meets them, which is but rarely. Some among the Mírdain take Mortal apprentices, out of pity or for coin, but none ever make it to second rank before their inevitable grave. Telperinquar never taught any himself - he has no heart for such doomed undertakings.

“Do not ask this of me, Deathless One!” The elder has a clear voice, though her Westron is warped by the Lossoth’s accent. “I have seen many winters, and many lives lost on the ice. My heart misgives me. Turn back south, to your stone houses and your fields, or you shall meet a bad end.”

Many winters. Telperinquar cannot meet her eyes. He does not have the heart to tell this wretched creature that he is older than the very existence of winter.

“Cold does not affect us, Mistress,” he coaxes instead.

“I speak not of cold.” Her pupils are milk-white with cataracts, but they spark like embers in the red light of the seal-oil lamp. Somehow, she knows he has been staring at her.

She is proud, and she scorns his pity.

“Near blind I may be, but I serve the Mother of the Deep, She who sends the seal and the whale to the hunter. Her wisdom preserves us, and Her counsel to all Men is clear. Do not seek that place. Turn back, for your own sake!”

Now Telperinquar notices the patterns on the tent’s walls, dark wave-forms shot through with strands of red seaweed, almost hair-like in its feathered length. The motif returns in the intricate beading of the elder’s parka. Her many necklaces are a wealth of varicoloured shells.

Uinen.

Uinen has always been fond of coast-dwellers. These Lossoth are wise to venerate Her, but surely She does not speak through so strange a vessel as this Mortal crone?

The old woman certainly is no Tuor. Still, Telperinquar hesitates.

“Name your price,” Annatar cuts in. “We shall make you rich.”

That word seems to mean little. “I am old. This summer shall be my last. Come winter, my bones shall lie beneath the ice.”

“Would you not leave your children gold?”

“Bah, gold!” The elder makes a gesture of contempt. “Such useless metal, too soft for making knives!”

Telperinquar lifts his Mírdain-made dagger from the sheath. He has foreseen this, and brought a few spares.

”This steel cuts even walrus ivory,” he praises, holding the long knife out to her. “The edge will never dull, not even for your great-grandchildren.”

She does not reach for it, but is silent for a moment.

“I brought harpoonheads, too,” Telperinquar raises his offer. “Enough for each hunter in this camp.”

The cloudy eyes narrow, and at last, she nods.

Telperinquar smiles. He was always good at bargaining. Everyone has a lever, and he has found the one that will move this old woman.

Life in this icy land is harsh. A flock of children runs between the tents while their mothers scrape seal hides, babies at their breast. A large clan, and the hunters must somehow feed them all. Before she passes from this world, the old woman will give her descendants all the help they might get.

She gestures at the silent woman crouching beside her. The attendant takes the knife from Telperinquar, and accepts the offered package of leather-wrapped harpoonheads.

She spreads the wrapping open and inspects the barbed, vicious things. Telperinquar always honours his bargains: the finest steel the Mírdain can forge glitters cold and blue. These lethal points will bite deep into a thrashing seal and hold it fast. At the elder’s nod of approval, the attendant folds the wrapping and hides the knife and package away in the wide sleeve of her parka.

The elder leans back against the folded bearskin that serves as her backrest, and her voice takes on the sing-song tone of a storyteller.

“In the summer when I was a lass of twenty, a great heat came down. The sea-ice melted away. We could find no seal to hunt.”

This old woman is no Elf-minstrel, but she has a strong mind, and Celebrimbor can see the indemmar within. The images feel alien, tainted with mortality, like drinking oil instead of water. Still he takes them to himself.

He sees hollow-cheeked children wail with hunger as the last food goes to the hunters. Sled-dogs slaughtered for meat. And over it all like a menacing cloud, the approaching polar winter.

“Our hunting party followed the narwhal in our kayaks. Hunger drove us further north than ever, beyond the knowledge of our living Elders, further than our oldest songlines recall.”

He can see her as she was then, young and strong at the paddle and harpoon, the black cable of her braid untouched by grey. As he watches, he commits the landmarks of her journey to memory.

“North and north until we saw them on the horizon.”

The image in her mind is small and shimmers in the vast blue distance over ice and sea, but it makes Telperinquar gasp.

He has heard the three mountains of Thangorodrim described in a thousand songs, but never saw them with his waking eyes. They still exist, and this Mortal woman has shown him how to reach them.

“Did you approach!?”  

“Ai!” she hisses, her grooved face a mask of pain. “Do not make me speak of it! That shore is cursed. Evil spirits walk even in the light of summer. Flesh melts and Men are driven mad.”

“Surely you can tell some-”

“See then, if you will not listen!” The elder snarls, and pulls back the long sleeve of her parka.

In the reddish oil-light Telperinquar first believes she is wearing some glove of thick, knotted material in bright pink and purple. Only then does he realise he is looking at her skin. The fingers are stumps, covered in webbed scars thick as cords.

The Curse.

His gorge rises at the sight. The Mortal strangeness of this woman and her people seem to close in and choke him like vapour. Swallowing sour bile he gropes for some familiar thing, and rests his eyes on Annatar’s Elvish face.

At once Annatar’s mind pours into Telperinquar’s smooth as warm honey. Peace, Telperinquar.

Telperinquar. Gone is the politely distant ‘my prince’ of their days in Eregion. The realisation snaps Telperinquar out of his stun. Even if they never find the mountains, at least one good thing has come from this expedition.

A soft smile plays on Annatar’s lips. They are not called the Sickly for naught, He thinks into Telperinquar’s mind.

The elder should lack the senses to perceive their osanwë, but somehow she knows. Her sightless eyes hold his gaze unflinching.

She lowers her sleeve, and the clouded eyes find him once more. Her voice is like the Vala Mandos proclaiming doom.

“Hear me, Deathless One. The three black islands are no place for the living.”

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Sea-ice beyond Cape Forochel. Seven days later.

 

Telperinquar never thought he would long for the Lossoth encampment. Strange as those people were in their blatant mortality, this world of ice is yet more alien.

The darkest hour of the polar day has come. The midnight sun low at the horizon drenches the ice in a scarlet twilight through which their dog-sledges seem to float like vessels adrift in a frozen sea of blood. 

Incarnates have no senses that can perceive the Curse, but must read the traces of its effect. Ainur possess other ways of seeing. Annatar must perceive the radiation in the air, the particles slowly corrupting all living flesh down to its very atoms.

The signs are everywhere. They came on slow and small, easy to overlook. Occasional deformed seals amidst the shoals resting on the ice. A missing flipper here, a twisted tail there.

Now what few seals remain are all misshapen. Telperinquar watches a skeletal pup with a deformed maw. The wretch roots for its mother’s teat, but it cannot suck. Milk sprays through its cloven lips to run down the crusted fur at its chest. The pup bellows with hunger as it slowly starves to death.

Overhead flaps something that looks like no seabird Telperinquar ever saw.

The dogs whine and grow uneasy. These teams of sled-dogs are the finest Mírdain steel could buy. Apparently there is an art to mushing, but Annatar saw no need to learn from the Lossoth who sold them the dogs. As soon as the man was out of earshot Annatar spoke a single word in Valarin, strange and grating to Elven ears, and both teams have run obediently ever since.

Now Annatar drives them forward once again, with a Valarin hiss that runs like an electric shock up Telperinquar’s spine. They do not speak as they glide side by side, ever further north in the blood-red light.

But a few miles further, their sledges slow once again. This time Annatar’s hiss fails to drive the faltering dogs forward. The once steady rhythm of their leaps breaks and scatters. In the middle of Telperinquar’s pack one falls limply to the ground and is dragged along by its harness.

“Hoooo!” Telperinquar leaps off his sledge and runs to the front to inspect his team, while beside him Annatar’s sled stutters to a halt.

Telperinquar’s lead dog is a clever feather-tailed bitch with bright blue eyes. As he approaches her she whines and vomits at his feet, spreading a stench of sour seal fat. Then Telperinquar notices the trails of fluid running down the hind legs, looking blackish in the strange light. Around her the other dogs stagger, lie down, panting and whining. Dark pools seep from their bodies and begin to freeze into matted clumps against the snow. The scent is unmistakable.

Blood. 

“What is wrong with them?”

“Acute radiation sickness.” Annatar’s tone is even as he descends from his sledge, eyes on his dying dogs. “The intestines always fail first.”

Telperinquar reels. The old woman was right!

He doubted her, allowed himself the comforting belief that perhaps her memory had failed in her dotage, that slow descent into humiliating senility that strikes some Mortals as the house of their mind crumbles. Now he knows her tale about these lands was true.

Immortal flesh can bear the Curse. Even now Telperinquar’s own body works to heal the damage inflicted by every breath of tainted air. Annatar’s fána is not flesh at all, but merely the manifestation of His will.

They both stand apart from these wretched, dying creatures, moving unharmed through this cursed land where the very air and water are poison.

“We brought a medicine kit,” Telperinquar yanks open the drawstring of his pack. “We might brew-”

“They are beyond saving,” Annatar cuts him off. In the red light of the polar midnight, his golden eyes and hair look washed in blood.

“You knew.” The cold knowledge fills Telperinquar’s chest with ice. “You knew they would die, and you brought them all the same.”

“We needed their speed.” Annatar bends to unbuckle his panting lead dog from its harness. “From here onward, we shall pull the sledges ourselves. It is not much further.”

The beast lies limp beneath his hands. He moves on to the next dog without looking at Telperinquar.

When Telperinquar does not step in to help, Annatar turns with a questioning gaze. “They are but dogs, and short-lived ones at that. What does it matter if they die now or in a handful of years? They have served a noble purpose.”

“Did you not come to Middle-earth to care for its creatures?”

Annatar looks him in the eye, wholly focussed on him, and Tyelpë is uneasy under the weight of that golden-eyed gaze. Away from the eyes of the Lossoth, Annatar has abandoned all pretense of Elvishness. The heavy furs he wore at the encampment have dissolved into thin air, and now his fána wears the gilt-edged robes of purple silk he would wear in Ost-in-Edhil. The polar wind whips the fine cloth around his chiseled body. 

“My aim is to bring progress and order to all Middle-earth, not each individual beast and bird,” Annatar says, in a tone in which a wise teacher might explain harsh truth to a beloved but naive student. “The advancement of science requires sacrifices, Tyelpë.”

Telperinquar shudders at the sound of that intimate name in Annatar’s mouth. Does he want Annatar to shut up, or keep calling him that forever?

Annatar lays a hand against Telperinquar’s cheek. He wears no gloves even in this flesh-eating cold, and yet his palm is hot, a sharp contrast with the icy gale. 

Telperinquar’s shameful lust roars back to life like a forest fire. He must wield all his long mastery of body and mind to press down the desire that threatens to overwhelm him even here, even now.

To distract himself he lowers his eyes to the writhing dog at his feet. He must agree with Annatar now, and be thought wise, or rebuke the Maïa, turn back south, and show himself a petulant child who cannot bear the requirements for his own plans.

And oh, how sweet is the esteem in that golden gaze, that elegant hand against his skin!

He bends down, and unbuckles his lead dog’s harness. The beast lies on her side panting, her muzzle a half-frozen mess of bloody foam, and does not even raise her head as he slips off her collar.

The sun has climbed higher when they move on, pulling their sledges across the polar desert side by side. Clouds have rolled in, merging ice and sky into a single sphere of sinister opalescence without a visible horizon. 

Behind them the dead dogs are a grey pile in the white nothingness, slowly receding in the distance amidst ghostly swirls of ice-dust. The cadavers could not be buried, not with the ice underfoot frozen hard as adamant.

Childishly, Telperinquar wishes he need not turn his back on the heaped corpses. The skin between his shoulder blades prickles as if the carcasses might leap up to give chase and maul him, their dead flesh possessed by malevolent spirits whose voices a more superstitious man might hear in the piping howls of the polar wind.

Annatar is silent beside him, but when Telperinquar looks aside he smiles.