On Tides of Light by potorov  

Now Eärendil had bidden Elwing await him upon the strand of Eldamar, for he would take the peril of that errand upon himself alone; and she obeyed him, though her heart misgave her. He went up alone into the land, and she stood in the surf until the last sight of him was gone. But Eärendil had reckoned without the gulls.

The white birds of that coast are birds of Ossë, and talkers. All morning they went crying north above the foam, and their gossip came at last into the Swanhaven, where the people of the quays kept the old habit of listening. Before noon three swan-boats came south under sail, low and swift upon the water, their white prows carved as swans, with long necks, beaks of gold, and eyes of gold and jet. Elwing, seeing them, knew their shape at once, though never in her life had she seen one whole. Her people had kept drawings of such ships. In every drawing they were burning.

The mariners came ashore and looked at her, but did not speak. She had nothing to show them. The Silmaril was gone from her breast and bound upon her husband's brow; and she stood upon the sand of the Blessed Realm in a salt-stiff cloak with nothing at all in her hands. She had only her voice, and her face. One hand remained hidden in the fold of her cloak until they were near. Four small crescents reddened its palm where her nails had held it closed. Then she opened it and made it still.

Her face was enough. An old shipwright named Astoron went down slowly upon his knees in the wet sand, and the others after him; for in the turn of her head and the set of her mouth they had seen Elwë Singollo, whom they had followed to the Sea and left upon the far shore, and whom they had mourned for an Age of the world without ever once being told how his story ended.

"Lady," said Astoron, "whose child are you?"

"I am Elwing," she said, "daughter of Dior, son of Lúthien, daughter of Elu Thingol, who was Elwë your king. I bring you the tidings for which you have waited. You will not thank me for them."

They brought her north in the middle ship. When she stepped aboard, the hull settled by a finger's breadth beneath her, and only then did the strand begin to fall behind. The mariners asked her nothing upon the way. They were afraid of the answers, and they wished their king to hear them first.

Alqualondë is built beneath a vast arch of living rock, hollowed by the Sea, and the lamp suspended beneath it has never gone out. Elwing passed under it at evening. Beyond, the Swanhaven rose in pale terraces, with the mansions of the Falmari and the palace of Olwë faced in sea-pearl against the cliffs. Gold and silver lamps hung above the quays; diamonds and pale opals, old gifts of the Noldor, caught the starlight in the pavements. Children ran along the sea-wall to see the incoming ship. Then Elwing saw places where the jewelled pavement had been scrubbed and was still a different colour from the stone about it. She understood what had happened there, and was silent.

Olwë came down to the water himself. He was very old, as the Eldar of Aman reckon age, and grief had made him patient rather than gentle. Time, which is said to mend all wounds, had not passed beneath those weary eyes; so healing had not followed it. He looked long at her.

"You have my brother's face," he said.

"I have."

"Then he was slain."

"He was slain."

Olwë stood still for a while. Then he said: "Come up into the hall. Speak, and do not soften it. I have waited an Age for tidings, and I will not have them made kind."

She spoke for seven nights. Afterwards the loremasters of the Falmari did not count those nights as seven. They counted them as waves, because that was how they came in: each gathering far out in dark recesses, each taking longer to arrive than the last, each washing further up the shores of the soul.

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She did not begin with war. She began with wood, because that was where it began.

She told them how Elwë had wandered into the trees of Nan Elmoth after his friend Finwë. Lost among trees, he stood bound in enchantment for long years, under the starlight with Melian's hand in his. His kindred had gone up and down the shore calling his name, until at last Ulmo bore away those who would depart. She told them how Elwë had gotten lost but was neither slain nor made forgetful. His life had simply been elsewhere during that time. She had given them the grace of mercy, if only for a moment.

That was the first cry, and it was one of gladness. It rang through the hall and along the terraces, among those standing in the shallows in the dark. It carried over the quays and down the shore, though those who made it did not yet know what else their voices would be asked to carry. Yárawë, the oldest woman in the city, had walked the whole length of the Great March and remembered Elwë's voice giving orders under the stars beside a river whose waters ran sweet, in a country whose name faded into twilight. She put both hands flat upon the table before her and laughed aloud.

Elwing told them of Menegroth: the Thousand Caves under Esgalduin, its exquisite halls adorned with birds and beasts of stone, its towering marble columns that disappeared into heavens, and the mighty beeches of stone that were crowned in halos of shimmering emerald light. Elwë had taken the name Thingol Greymantle, King of Doriath and held dominion over this realm while making Melian his queen. She wove her Girdle about the wood, barring all who came against her will unless a power greater than hers compelled it; and for a long while that realm endured.

She spoke of Lúthien dancing in Neldoreth in the spring, and of the mortal Man who came through the Girdle out of the North with nothing to name but hunger and courage, and looked at her, and was undone.

Then she spoke to the tale's end: of the Silmaril cut from the Iron Crown; of the hand smitten off by the jaws of the Wolf; and of their desperate flight from the nethermost deeps. She told of the death of Beren, and how his beloved died of an unbroken grief; of the song of sorrow she wove before the knees of Mandos, which moved the unmoving heart to pity; and of the doom that was there granted to her. For she revealed that Lúthien had chosen the fate of Men, forsaking the Firstborn, and in the end had passed with her beloved beyond the circles of the world, where none among those listening were fated to follow.

That was the second cry, and it had no gladness in it at all.

When the hall had quieted, a voice from somewhere near the back asked the question that everyone there had been holding: did Elwë ever know, at the end, that Olwë had never ceased speaking of him? Did even a single word, message, or sign ever find its way to him from Alqualondë? Did he truly meet his end without knowing his kin still loved him deeply?

"I do not know how he could have," said Elwing. "These shores were always beyond the reach of our line."

That was the third cry, and it was the smallest. It was not a wail. It was the sound of several thousand people breathing out at once in a stone hall.

Then Olwë wept. The hall wept with him, and Elwing had to stop. She reached for the table because the floor seemed to move beneath her. Astoron set water beside her. Olwë raised one hand when she tried to speak again, and no question was put to her until she herself lifted her head.

The lamps burned down. Beyond the doors the tide turned, filling each hollow it had left in the sand.

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By the second morning the harbour had stopped working.

That was the first outward sign, and the chroniclers set it down before any other, for it had never happened in the history of that people. The swan-boats did not leave their moorings. Cloth waited half-woven in the sail-lofts, and the blacksmiths let their forges darken. The healers and bakers worked, for hurt and hunger did not stop; but they left their doors open so that they might hear. In the sheds along the north quay a great hull, three hundred years in the making, stood untouched with chalk-lines still upon her, and the sawdust of the previous morning lay where it had fallen until the rain came in and made it paste.

Word went out along the coast, and the coast came in: from small havens and harbour-settlements, from the pearl-beds and the salt-flats. They filled the hall, the terraces, the sea-wall, and the quays. When there was no room left, they stood in the shallows and had the words passed back to them along the water, sentence by sentence, in a murmur that ran a mile into the dark.

They had never seen Beleriand. While they listened, they built it out of what their hands already knew.

The Falmari knew that Brithombar and Eglarest had not been made in the image of Alqualondë. No pearl-faced mansions climbed their cliffs, and no diamonds lay beneath every foot. Yet when Elwing spoke of the Havens of the Falas, which Círdan the Shipwright had raised upon the western sea, they knew the work. Astoron heard in her telling the long argument between hand and timber before a keel lies true. A sail-weaver near him touched the awl-callus in her palm when Elwing spoke of canvas strained against the western wind. Those who kept the harbour could read the care given to timber, sail, a wounded hand, and bread carried down before the dawn watch.

Alqualondë was more radiant, and Morgoth's hosts had never stood before its gates. That difference was not erased. But the Havens had required the same consent of many hands before any ship could depart. When Elwing told them that Morgoth came down upon the Falas after the Nirnaeth, they did not diminish those cities by making them poor copies of their own. They saw ship-houses, halls, and quays: a beauty made of another substance, with lives ordered around its keeping. Then they saw it cast into the Sea, a life's work going out upon the tide in pieces.

Astoron put his head down upon the bench before him and remained so for a long while.

Some there remembered Círdan from the Great March. He had stayed behind to seek for Elwë when the others sailed, and they had not seen him since.

"He lives," said Elwing. "He is upon the Isle of Balar. He built the ship that brought me here."

Yárawë said aloud, without meaning to, "Nowë." Then she covered her face, because she had not used that name in an Age and had not expected to need it again.

So it went, all that night and the next. On the first night Elwing had stood without support. On the third Astoron set a chair behind her, though she would not use it. By the fifth she kept one hand beneath the table, because it trembled whenever a door opened and a child's silhouette appeared, threatening to shatter what little remained of her strength. Her voice remained clear. Yet each morning it took longer before she could make herself pass beneath the harbour arch again.

Mothers heard of children and looked at their own. Mariners heard of the drowned and watched the black water at the doors. When Elwing told of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, she told also of Húrin standing alone while the day failed about him and no road of escape remained. Each time he slew one of Morgoth's guard he cried Aurë entuluva: Day shall come again. One fell, and he lifted the axe again. The words went with the next blow, and the next. Seventy times an enemy fell and the cry was renewed before they took him alive.

Astoron's thumb moved once along a scar in the bench, then again. Yárawë counted under her breath and lost the number, began once more, and stopped. Elwing told them of Anfauglith, of the hill raised from the uncounted bodies of slain kinsmen, where grass grew green because they lay beneath it. The hall made no sound at all.

Afterwards Yárawë could not remember every name that Elwing had spoken, but she remembered the grass. Astoron remembered the curve of a hull at Eglarest and the hands that had laboured to bring it true. Thus Beleriand entered Alqualondë: not through a likeness of wealth or peril, but through the work by which a place becomes habitable and beloved.

Then came the fifth night, and Elwing did not spare them, because she had been told not to.

She told them how Thingol was slain by Dwarves of Nogrod in his own halls, in the deep places of Menegroth, for the Nauglamír bearing the Silmaril, in halls delved by their kindred of Belegost. She told them how Melian sat long in silence beside his body, and afterwards withdrew from Middle-earth; and with her departure the power of the Girdle was taken from the wood. She told of the host that came out of the mountains and sacked the Thousand Caves, and carried the treasure of Doriath away over the fords. She told them what a carved beech of stone looks like with its lamps broken.

The Silmaril for which Thingol had been slain had descended at last to the woman standing before them; beneath her cloak the place where she had worn it was bare, for the stone was bound now upon her husband's brow.

Then she told them about the Oath.

She told them that the sons of Fëanor came to Doriath in winter because the same Silmaril was there. Dior her father died upon the steps of his own hall, fighting his own kindred, and Nimloth her mother with him. Elwing had been a small child; and her two brothers, Eluréd and Elurín, were taken by servants of the sons of Fëanor and left in the forest in the snow to starve. Maedhros repented and sought them, but they were never found. She did not know to that day whether they had been long about it.

Then she told of Sirion: the broken peoples of Beleriand gathered at the river-mouth, the remnant of Gondolin and the remnant of Doriath and the remnant of Círdan's folk, keeping a small good life in a callous world. Their Oath had found us and sown death upon the haven in the grey of morning; the third slaying of Elf by Elf.

"They came into our harbour," she said. "They killed us upon our own quays, and in our own houses. I denied them the Silmaril until the cliffs stood at my back. With no way forward, I resolved to surrender both my body and the jewel into Ulmo's halls. I did not think I would come up. I am not sure that I did, entirely. I could not save my sons at Sirion."

Here her voice could not be found. She had spoken the ruin of kingdoms without faltering, but the two names would not pass. And the silence of the hall was broken by the weeping of the young; they knew not its name, for sorrow walked unbidden among them long before it was called by word. Ere the dusk fell, sorrow saw no strangers left within Alqualondë’s gates, for grief no longer hid in silence.

"Elrond and Elros," she said at last. "Their fates are unknown to me. After Ulmo's halls took me, duty bore me west, beyond even the mercy of seeking them."

She looked at them all: those in the hall and upon the terraces, those standing in the shallows in the dark.

"You have been told that what was done here was a madness that happened once and passed. It did not pass. This was the first. There were three: the same house, the same Oath behind the swords. What was done to you upon these stones was done again to my grandmother's people in their caves, and again to my people in their harbour. You mourn a wound that is an Age old. Across the Sea there are those for whom the last harbour has not stopped burning."

Wrath came up through that gentle people like a squall out of a flat sea, and for the second time in its ancient history Alqualondë knew wrath. Voices were raised in the hall that had not been raised in an Age. There was talk of Tirion, of shut doors and debts. Vencáno, a young lord who had been nine years old on the night of the Kinslaying and had found his father afterwards among the boats, stood and said that the Noldor should be made to hear this telling, every word of it, upon their knees; and that he would go up himself to see it done.

A hundred voices went with him. For four heartbeats the whole hall might have followed.

"Fëanor called his anger righteous," said Elwing. "From it he made an Oath."

"Do not use him to take my anger from me," said Vencáno. "I have sworn no oath. I have drawn no sword. My father has not returned to me."

"He has not," said Elwing. "I will not take that from you."

Vencáno stood with both hands upon the table. The hall did not quiet. Men and women who had been children on the bloodied quay named punishments; others answered them; and some who had not spoken in all the preceding nights began at last to speak. Elwing did not rebuke them again. She remained among their voices until dawn.

Near dawn someone by the doors called for torches.

"No," said Vencáno.

It was not loud. Those nearest him heard, and then those beyond them. He took his hands from the table and sat down. He did not forgive Tirion. No one required him to.

The torches were not brought. By degrees the voices failed. In the silence the Sea could be heard beneath the hall, lifting against the stone and withdrawing. What little dawn there was entered through the open doors and found them still there.

Nainië. 

That was the day of weeping.

For a long while no one spoke.

Then Yárawë said, "I remember when the island came back for us."

She had not raised her head. Her hands lay open upon the table, and her heart was laid open by her words.

"We had waited for Elwë. We had called until the woods gave no answer. When Ulmo came again, we said that we could wait no longer. Nowë would not leave the search. Others would not leave Elwë. We boarded. They remained upon the shore."

Olwë had been looking through the open doors towards the water.

"I loved my brother," he said. "And I went."

He said no more at first. The Sea moved beneath the hall. At length he put one hand upon the table beside Yárawë's.

"I do not repent our coming. Ulmo returned for us, and we had waited long. But I will not make our leaving light because we had cause."

He looked at Elwing, through sorrowful eyes made unclouded, for bearing that grief forward had returned its sight.

"For an Age I have mourned the hour of our parting. I kept it unchanged, thinking thus to preserve his memory. Yet he did not remain where I had left him. He lived. He was loved. His people built what I never saw and endured what I did not hear. An Age befell our kin, and all the while I remained in the shadow of a single hour."

Until then, whenever Olwë looked at Elwing, his brother's face had come first. Now he saw the woman who had crossed the Sea without her sons and stood through five nights speaking the grief of others before she could speak her own.

Others in the hall followed his gaze. The wrong done in Alqualondë did not grow smaller; the scrubbed stones remained beneath their feet. But for the first time, the grief of Beleriand stood among them without being made to answer for their own.

Their reasons had crossed the Sea with them. From the shore, love departing and abandonment had the same shape upon the water.

What had borne Elwing west was not what had borne Olwë. She had been cast from a burning haven and gone on because the only road by which help might reach her sons led away from them. The two departures were not alike. Yet from the ruined haven no one could see the road that had led her farther west.

Elwing's fingers closed upon the edge of the table.

"If they live, they may know only that I did not return."

She had said their names once. She did not say them again. She went out and was sick over the side of the quay.

Olwë followed her. He took off his own cloak and put it about her shoulders. He did not tell her that her sons would understand. He had no tidings with which to make that promise. He stood beside her without speaking. When her knees failed, he did not bid her rise.

Afterwards, what Elwing had told them returned in another order: the long watches under stars, before the Sun and Moon; the first Orcs coming out of the North into a country with no walls; the Girdle; Menegroth, not only a king's house but the stronghold to which the people of Doriath came when the woods were unsafe; spears kept beside doorways; children taught which paths might be walked after dark; lookouts hooding lamps before a door was opened.

For two days the harbour was full of people who could not look at their own houses. The very old took it hardest. Some of them would not come out at all. It is set down that in those days the customary greeting of that city, which was a wish for fair water, went unspoken, because no one could say it.

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Olwë found work for their hands. He could not send a word backward across the Sea, nor place his love at last within his brother's keeping. But Elwing had crossed with names that no one in the West had yet received.

He asked Elwing for the names of those lost in Beleriand.

She gave them from evening until the middle of the night, standing, without a book, because there was no book. She named her father, her mother, and her brothers. She named the lords of Doriath and the captains of Gondolin; and then she stopped naming lords, for there had not been many lords, but of other folk there had been thousands. She named sail-weavers, smiths and healers, herb-wives, boys who carried water, and the woman who had taught her the names of shore-birds. Tathren. Nedhil. Baraneth. Círeth. Maenil. Lothril, who had been fifty years old and had a laugh that could be heard across the estuary. She named them for six hours, and the city stood and received them one at a time. No one sat down, not even the oldest.

Three loremasters wrote as she spoke. One set down each name, another repeated it until Elwing assented, and the third carried the filled sheets to the end of the table. Above the first page the eldest had written *The Dead of Beleriand*. No one yet disputed the words.

At last she came to the end of what she had.

"I do not know the rest," she said. "There are more than I ever knew the names of. I was a child when Doriath fell. At Sirion I had children of my own, and still I was running."

"Do not close the roll," said Olwë.

Then he asked who among them would keep one name after Elwing was no longer there to speak it. Astoron came first. He laid a finger beside Círeth and said that she might come to his house. Yárawë chose Lothril, being fond of a laugh. Vencáno took one of Elwing's brothers and would not say why. Thereafter the households came to the table one by one. They did not call the lost their own. They received the names so that each might be spoken at table and hearth when the year returned.

Astoron sent his daughter to the storehouse for the white shell lamps used when the Sea did not return a body. The name of the dead was cut into the shell, and the light was given to the ebb. That night the old observance was offered to those who had died beyond the reach of their kin. Oil came down from the houses. Sail-weavers twisted thread for wicks, and styluses passed from hand to hand along the sea-wall. Each household carried its chosen name to one lamp.

She had not spoken two names among the others.

Elwing had not chosen the swords at Sirion, nor the cliff, nor the Sea that took her. But when the Sea returned her to Eärendil's ship, she had chosen the westward road. Behind her were Elrond and Elros, perhaps living; before her lay the only help she knew for them and for every other child beneath the Shadow. Therefore she had gone on. No greatness of the need made the going feel less like departure. Every league west had been a league she had consented to put between herself and her sons.

When Elwing came down to the sea-wall, the Falmari were filling the shell lamps with oil and scoring names from the roll into their white sides. Two empty shells stood before her. To leave them dark seemed another abandonment. To kindle them among the dead seemed to bury her children with her own hands.

Elwing took up a stylus. Its point touched the first shell and stopped. A woman came near with oil, and Elwing drew both shells beneath the fold of her cloak as though she had only made room upon the wall. Eärwen saw the tremor before it was hidden. Beneath her father's table she too had held one wrist with the other hand.

She came to stand beside Elwing. She did not ask what names Elwing had been unable to write. She had heard Finrod, Angrod, and Aegnor named among the fallen, and Orodreth, Angrod's son, after them. Galadriel alone had no ending in Elwing's tale and no road home that her mother could see. Eärwen asked for a third shell and a stylus. Upon the shell she wrote one name.

*Galadriel.*

"No word has come from her," said Elwing.

"None."

"She may yet live."

Eärwen looked down at the name. "She may."

Then she lit the lamp.

Before she set it upon the water, Eärwen kindled a taper at its wick and held the taper out. Her free hand closed about the wrist that bore it, but the flame still trembled. She did not hide it.

Elwing wrote *Elrond* upon one shell and *Elros* upon the other. When she took the taper, its flame passed above the first wick and would not catch it. Eärwen laid her hand beneath Elwing's, bearing its weight without taking it from her. Elwing lit the first lamp. From that flame she lit the second.

The two mothers set the three lamps upon the ebb. The water drew them apart before it carried them through the harbour mouth, and none could tell which flame would last longest.

The roll still bore the heading *The Dead of Beleriand*. Yet Galadriel, Elrond, and Elros went out among the other names, and no hand drew them back.

So it was done that night, and has been done in Alqualondë each year since upon the same night. When the year returned, every household spoke at table and hearth the name it had received. Twilight and tide bore witness to Eldar grief along those eternal shores: monuments built of mercy and flame, borne upon the ebbing tide. Quietly and without herald, grace found her way through the endless darkness.

When all the named had been taken, ten thousand households still stood upon the sea-wall with empty hands. Those households took lamps with nothing written upon them and set them upon the water for someone whose name had gone wholly out of knowledge. Year after year the nameless lamps were more than the others.

That night the tide carried out more light than the harbour had ever put upon the water at one time. Singers began in the same week to make the music that came to be called the Requiem of the Lost. The Falmari had spent an Age singing their own loss. The old lament did not cease; other grief entered the music beside it.

On the seventh morning a messenger came from Valimar. Eärendil's plea had been heard, and the Powers were gathering the Host of the West. Of Eärendil himself the messenger would say only that he remained before Manwë.

On the seventh day, before Elwing could ask what they already understood she would ask, the shipwrights and sea-lords met, and they said no.

They said it without heat, which was worse. They said: We swore no oath and will swear none. We are not a people made for war. The one time war came to us we did not know how to answer it, and our children died upon the sand. Our ships were taken from us with blood in this very harbour, taken north and burned at Losgar for kindling in sight of those whom the Noldor abandoned.

Astoron, who had wept for Eglarest, laid one hand upon the table. Ships were not goods, he said. They were the work of the heart, and their like would not be made again.

Vencáno, who had been quiet for two days, said: "Where were the Powers when the swords came here? Let the West carry itself over upon its own feet."

The shipwrights had wept for six days; now they sat with their hands flat upon the table and said no. They had given the labour of those nights and begun the work of remembrance. They would not give the ships. By then the lamps had passed beyond the harbour mouth. Some would have gone out; of the others no one knew.

Elwing let them finish. Then she stood.

"A host is gathering in Valimar," she said. "Without your ships it has no road across the Sea. Those who remain in Beleriand will be left beneath the Shadow. I do not ask you to be soldiers. I would oppose the placing of a sword in any Telerin hand before the Valar themselves. But I ask for passage."

"They took our ships," said Vencáno.

Elwing looked at Astoron's hand upon the table. The nails were split, and old pitch lay black in the creases though the harbour had been idle for a week. She looked beyond him at the scrubbed stones of the doorway.

Her hand moved beneath her cloak and came to rest over the place where the Silmaril had lain.

She heard her own words again: *Without your ships.* It did not sound like a request.

She had come through every night believing that, if only they understood the need, the ships must follow.

What right had she to assume that they must?

"They did," she said. "Nothing will make that untrue. Nothing will give the dead back their morning, or put the ships again beneath the hands that made them. I spoke as though the greatness of the need had already judged your answer. It has not. The ships are yours."

No one moved.

"I can tell you only what lies beyond the Sea. Círdan is there. The grey people of the woods are there, my father's people and your brother's people, and thousands beside them. They are alive tonight, and they have no word that anyone in the West remembers that they exist. My sons may be among them, or they may be dead. I do not know. If you refuse, the need remains. I will not therefore call your refusal faithless."

Vencáno stared at her. "You would bear that answer back?"

"If it is your answer."

She sat down.

Still they did not answer her before the Sun had gone. Astoron's hands stayed flat upon the table until the hall was empty.

At sunset Eönwë came to the harbour, and Eärendil walked beside him. He and Elwing spoke alone beneath the arch whose lamp had never gone out.

Manwë had granted to Eärendil and Elwing, and to their sons after them, the choice of which Kindred should claim them. Eärendil asked Elwing to choose first. She answered for herself alone: for the sake of Lúthien, she would be counted among the Firstborn. Eärendil then chose likewise, for her sake.

Eönwë told them that Vingilot would be hallowed and borne to paths no mariner had sailed. He did not tell them what return those paths allowed. Then Eärendil departed from her once more.

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That night a new star rose.

They were upon the quays when it came, half the city drifting out of the hall in ones and twos with nothing decided, because none of them could bear to go home. The lamps of naming were beyond sight. Elwing had followed two of them until she could no longer distinguish them from the others, and then had watched the outward scatter until distance took all certainty from her. She did not know whether the lamps of Elrond and Elros still burned. The Sea was black and quiet, and the sky had nothing new in it.

Then above the dark shoulder of the world, where there had never been anything at all, a light came up. It was not any star they knew. It was white and steady, and after a moment it began to climb.

Yárawë saw it first, for her sleep had long been light and she looked at the sky more than other people. She did not cry out. She reached sideways, took hard hold of the wrist of the man beside her, and pointed. The pointing went along the sea-wall faster than any word could have gone. In the space of a minute every face in Alqualondë was turned upward.

No one there knew what it was.

Elwing stood among them upon the wall. "That is my husband," she said, and her voice went out of her like something breaking.

She had not known where to look. She had put him ashore and let him walk alone into the land; and for seven days she had told the sorrows of other people in a loud, clear voice while holding her own behind it until the telling was done. At sunset he had returned only long enough for them to choose, and then had gone from her once more. Now the Silmaril rose above the Sea. As the light climbed, she saw beneath it the small dark shape of Vingilot, sailing where no sea lay.

She knew no more than the herald had said. She did not know whether that road would ever bring him down to her, or whether their meetings would be granted only in passing. She did not know whether Elrond and Elros lived. For a long while she watched the light. Then she looked east along the dark water where the two lamps had gone. Above her Eärendil climbed; beyond sight before her were her sons. She stood upon the wall between them, with no road to either.

No one cheered. Some wept. Some covered their faces, and some watched until their necks ached. The light restored none of the names spoken that week, and no ship had yet been given.

The darkness had not lessened. It was no longer the only thing in the sky.

After a long while one voice near the boat-sheds began the lament for Elwë, an old song made in the first years after the Crossing. They had never sung it after learning how his tale had ended. It passed along the sea-wall, climbed the terraces, and came back through the town. No note changed.

Before it came round again, Astoron had left the wall.

He went into the dark north shed and lit one lamp. Rain had blurred the chalk-lines upon the unfinished hull. He dried the strake with his sleeve, stretched the line anew, and sharpened an adze. The first blow sounded scarcely beyond the door.

He struck a second time.

Before the lament came round, a lamp was lit in the next shed. A sail-weaver came in carrying her awls and said nothing. A little later someone swept the rainwater from the floor. No one called it a decision. Across the harbour most of the sheds remained dark.

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Eärwen, daughter of Olwë, had come down from Tirion on the fifth night. Until the lighting of the lamps she had not spoken, and even then she had offered Elwing no counsel.

She had sat at her father's left hand while Elwing told of the house of Finarfin. Angrod and Aegnor died in the fire of the Bragollach. Orodreth, Angrod's son, fell when Nargothrond was broken. Finrod Felagund, her eldest, King of Nargothrond and most beloved of the house of Finwë, gave up his crown to keep an old promise. He went into the dark with ten companions, was taken beneath Tol-in-Gaurhoth, and there slew a werewolf with his hands and teeth so that Beren son of Barahir, chained beside him, might live. Galadriel remained beyond the Sea, and no message from her had reached the West.

Elwing could not tell which names came to Eärwen as tidings and which as confirmation, for Eärwen's face did not alter. But Elwing had brought her one thing no herald of death could have brought. She had knelt before Eärwen's chair and spoken quietly, so that the hall did not hear.

"That Man was Beren," she said. "He lived because your son kept his word. He wedded Lúthien, and their son was Dior, my father. Lady, I am one life that came of it. I stand in your father's house because Finrod Felagund chose to keep faith with a mortal Man when no victory could be promised him. He did not know about me. He could not have. Only Beren came out alive to tell of it."

Until Eärwen came to the sea-wall, Elwing had mistaken the stillness of her face for a strength that grief could not enter. Then she had seen one hand close about the other wrist to steady the taper.

Now, beneath the new star, Eärwen turned in the crowd and went back up into the hall. Her father followed her, and the sea-lords followed him, and after them came those who had not gone home.

"I will speak only for myself," Eärwen said. "I have paid for that shore already. I will not make the payment a reason to abandon it."

She sat at her father's left hand again.

For a while no one answered. Then Astoron came in from the north quay. Chalk marked one sleeve; a pale curl of fresh-cut wood clung to his hair. He laid his hand upon the table as he had done when he refused Elwing.

"The hull in the north shed was laid down before most here were born," he said. "We kept making her after we had forgotten what passage she was meant to serve."

He looked at the shipwrights.

"A ship can only release what stands on a shore by bearing its weight."

No one moved to answer for him.

"I will finish her," he said. "I offer my hands. I do not offer yours."

The sail-weaver who had brought her awls stood. "You may offer mine now."

Another shipwright rose to say that his eldest hull would not take the strain of the Great Sea and that he would not send her. He could make spars for two others. The sail-weaver named the canvas she could finish. A blacksmith offered fastenings, and a rope-maker cordage. A provisioner named the stores she could release without leaving the harbour bare. Each spoke to the measure of a craft, and then sat down.

Some offered nothing. No face was turned towards them.

Vencáno came forward.

"If a ship goes first," he said, "I ask for her helm."

"Why?" said Olwë.

"Because my father died upon this quay. That is why no other may choose this for me. I choose the first helm."

He stood before the King, still angry.

Then a mariner came beside him and offered to take the foremast. Another offered to tend the sheets. A woman whose brother had been slain upon the quay offered to master a second ship, and her mother remained seated and wept. One by one they came. No mariner was named by another. No one who kept a seat was questioned. When at last no more rose, Astoron and the sea-lords reckoned the ships, the hands, and the stores.

There were enough.

Olwë looked at Eärwen, whose three sons had died in Middle-earth and whose daughter still remained there. He looked at Vencáno, who had not ceased to grieve his father; at Astoron, who had offered one hull before there was a fleet; and at those who had not stood.

Then the King of Alqualondë gave judgment in his own hall, where the stone in the doorway was a different colour from the stone around it. Three sentences were afterwards cut into the harbour arch.

"We will bear no sword," he said. "We will choose to serve. We will sail."

Olwë gave the first helm to Vencáno.

Thus the wrong done in that harbour was not avenged, and not forgotten, and not forgiven. The ships were still ships over which blood had run. The hands upon their ropes would remember. But the next voyage began with Telerin hands freely laid upon wood, line, sail, and sheet, and no oath commanded them.

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So it was that the Falmari did not go to war, and yet the Host of Valinor crossed the Sea.

They took no armour and bore no swords, and no Falmari set foot upon Middle-earth. They made one condition besides: the white ships would remain under Telerin hands. Their own mariners stood at the helms, in the tops, and upon the sheets, and carried the Host of the West across the Sundering Seas.

No levy was made. In each household a mariner spoke or remained silent for himself. Some ships stayed at their moorings because their masters would not take them east; some because hands enough had not come; some because a harbour, too, must be kept. No door was marked for remaining shut. By the appointed tide, mariners enough had come.

The Vanyar came down out of Valimar in gold and singing, and their trumpets filled the road with glory. The Falmari fleet came out beneath the arch of rock in silence: white upon white, more ships than Elwing had known were in the world, without banner, drum, or war-mark of any kind. The singing upon the shore went quiet as they passed.

The old shadow went aboard with them. They sailed beside the Noldor who followed Finarfin, not the sons of Fëanor, and still their decks held the memory of Noldorin swords. At the helms the Falmari gave their orders; the Noldor carried them out. No song passed between them.

On the morning of their sailing, the shipwrights went down before dawn and painted upon every departing prow the same grey device, at no king's command: a mantle, for Elwë Greymantle, whom they had left upon a shore an Age ago, and for whom, in the only way now left to them, they were going back.

Astoron painted the first. When it was done, he sat upon the slipway and could not rise for a while. The younger shipwrights worked around him. One mixed the grey; another steadied the wrist of a man whose hand had begun to shake. No one told Astoron that he must stand.

The fleet went east out of the light and into the dark that the Falmari had feared for an Age. It carried no promise of return. It opened a road west for any of the sundered kindreds who might still be reached.

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Long years the white ships kept the eastern waters, and no Falmari set foot upon the land. The war moved north beyond the sight of the fleet. Smoke came back upon the wind; wounded people came down to the coast; tidings contradicted tidings. Masts were replaced. Sails were patched and patched again. Young mariners who had first crossed under another's hand learned to take the watch alone.

At the last, noon went white.

Light struck every sail at once; a moment later the sound reached the fleet. Blocks leapt against the masts. Ash marked the canvas. The Sea drew away from the coast until drowned stones showed black, and then returned above the quays of the Falas.

The Falmari had borne no swords and set no foot upon the land, but ruin found them upon the water. The easiest course was west, away from the breaking shore.

Vencáno put his helm east.

He gave no command to any other ship. His own answered beneath his hands, and for a little while only one white prow pointed into the ruin. Then a second turned. Three more came after it. Ships already deep with wounded held westward; no signal condemned them. Those that still had room followed one by one.

They lowered boats where streets had been and hauled up whoever reached a hand. They laid gangways into water against walls whose doors opened beneath the tide. Morgoth had fallen. Behind the ships, Beleriand went on drowning.

When Tol Eressëa came into view, many ships put in there. The Telerin masters carried the damaged hulls onward to the yards of their making; when that first landing would bear no more, other vessels went with them.

After the long westward passage, those ships came into Alqualondë before dawn, riding so low that the black water seemed already laid across the lower banks of oars. Salt had dried white above the waterlines. Sails made in the Swanhaven were patched with cloth from tents, cloaks, and banners whose devices no one upon the quays knew. As they passed beneath the great arch, the hanging lamps poured gold across torn canvas, and every crystal in the broad pavements cast that light again upon grey blankets and empty hands. The splendour did not soften what had come ashore. It made visible how little those aboard possessed. Reeds were caught in the seams of garments. People slept where rope should have lain. Others stood as if they had forgotten what standing was for.

No trumpet announced them. The first sound from the ships was the knocking of one loose block against a mast.

Victory came ashore with blankets about its shoulders and carried children who did not wake when they were borne from the ships. There were Sindar of the woods and havens; people of Gondolin and Nargothrond; remnants of the Noldor under many houses and under none; and those who had fled once, twice, or so often that they no longer answered when asked of home. Some carried keys. Some carried cups or tools. One man came ashore holding the hinge of a door. Few had anything for which a house remained.

For most, the Swanhaven was a first landing and not a final home; when they had strength, many would pass to Tol Eressëa. But first their names had to be recorded, their wounds washed, and places found for sleep. Healers took over the boat-sheds nearest the quays, while bakers carried bread down the jewelled walks. Beneath the hanging lamps, scribes worked upon sailcloth when paper failed. The queues ran from the harbour arch to the palace stairs. Blankets were counted in the morning and counted again at noon, and the two numbers never agreed.

The Falmari went down to receive them. Along the quay, when one mother's arms began to fail beneath a sleeping child, another slipped her hands beneath them. Together they crossed the stone. Alqualondë asked no one to be healed. Neither would it let them pass unseen.

For years ten thousand households had kept one name apiece beside their lamps. Now they passed among the people coming ashore and asked those names.

Sometimes there was an answer. More often someone had known the named one, had seen the house where they dwelt, or could say only that they had still been alive when winter came. Most often there was nothing. Then the household went home after dark and lit the lamp again.

On the third day Astoron came to the end of one line with a short name in his mouth, and found her.

She wore a grey blanket, and dry roots of river-reeds were caught in one hem. She was thinner than any Falmari had believed one of the Eldar could become. Astoron said, "Círeth," and she looked up.

That was her name.

Astoron looked at the living woman and remembered the shell he had set upon the water year after year. Only then did he understand what Eärwen had done upon the sea-wall. The lamp had carried grief out upon the tide, but it had not sealed Círeth among the dead. It had kept a place for an answer.

She had not died at Sirion. When the armed companies came down upon the haven, she had gone into the reed-beds with half her household. They came out three days later, when no one remained to seek them, and afterwards went north with Círdan's people. Elwing had not seen them. No tidings had passed west.

Astoron tried to tell her that her name had been spoken at his family's table whenever the year returned. He was not a man who explained himself well. He reached the word *table*, stopped, and looked at his daughter. She finished for him. Then she asked Círeth whether she would come to their table. Círeth said that she would.

The scribe brought out the roll made from Elwing's telling. He took a knife to the heading *The Dead of Beleriand* and scraped until the parchment shone thin. Then he wrote, in smaller letters, *The Names Spoken in Alqualondë*.

Yárawë went through the lines four times. No one answered to Lothril, and she did not find the face she sought. The last mariner of the Falas told her that the Shipwright had not come. Círdan had filled every vessel he could with those willing to depart and sent them west; then he had turned again towards Middle-earth, for his people would yet require ships and someone must remain to build them. He sent no gift, and no message but one sentence, which the mariner had been required to learn without changing a word:

"Tell them I will come on the last ship."

Yárawë did not ask when the last ship would sail.

Upon the eastward voyage the Telerin mariners had kept the helms while Finarfin's Noldor obeyed their orders. Now, upon the westward return, they carried Exiles: some who had followed Fingolfin over the Ice; some born beneath the mountains of Middle-earth, who had never seen Alqualondë; some bearing names that opened wounds before any deed of their own could be known. The old shadow had crossed the Sea with the fleet. It did not vanish when the gangplanks fell.

For a while the Falmari helped them ashore without meeting their eyes.

A woman born in Gondolin wore an iron key upon a cord. It opened, she said, a workroom now beneath the Sea. A widow of Alqualondë whose two brothers had died upon the quay set bread before her, stood looking at the key, and took the bread away again. The Noldorin woman made no protest. After a little while the widow returned and set it down once more.

The two women ate at the same table. When winter came, they mended a torn hanging there together.

At another door a Noldorin child was admitted while her father was asked to remain outside. A shipwright shared his tools with a smith of Gondolin for three years before asking his name. Vencáno ate beside those who had followed Finarfin and left any room in which the sons of Fëanor were defended. No king proclaimed a day upon which forgiveness began.

***

When the year came round, the singers performed the seven movements. Those newly come from Middle-earth did not always enter the hall. Some stood outside. Some departed when Sirion was named. Some endured the whole and afterwards could not speak until morning. Círeth attended once, then stayed away for nine years.

The Falmari had made Beleriand out of Elwing's telling: green beneath unbroken stars, lamps still burning in Menegroth, and light lying untroubled upon the water of Eglarest. In their song the tide at Eglarest sounded against the round stones of Alqualondë, and in Neldoreth the night-birds had voices borrowed from the Sea. The survivors corrected what they could bear to hear. The next copy changed. Other errors had no name yet.

The headings changed also. The first copy had named the movements in Telerin. Círeth asked how they could name a song for the dead in words many of the dead had never known. She was right. They set the names down again in Quenya, which the Falmari and many of the newly come shared; but no one said that all the lost had spoken it.

The singers attempted an eighth movement and could not keep it.

One master made a triumph of the fleet's return. It was performed once. When its last chord ended, three households were still standing beside lamps whose names had received no answer. The city would not hear it again.

Another made a lament so beautiful that no one who heard it doubted her skill. It left no room for Astoron returning to his shed, for a child born after the drowning, or for laughter heard unwillingly through an open door. Those who had lived through the night would not sing it twice.

A third made a plea for every voice together. Its final chord resolved into a brightness that no one in the hall recognised.

On the night of its third failure, the youngest singer asked whether Húrin had known that day would return.

No one answered at first.

Then Yárawë said, "No."

"Why did he cry it?"

Astoron had come from the north shed with an adze in his hand, its haft newly bound. He laid it upon the table beside the unfinished score.

"The cry did not fell them," he said.

"No," said Yárawë.

"The axe did."

The singer looked at the blank final stave. "Then what did the cry do?"

Astoron touched the haft once, where his hand had darkened the wood.

Yárawë looked towards Astoron when she answered, though she seemed not to know that she did so.

"It told those who heard why the axe rose again."

The master of song struck out the bright last chord. She did not replace it.

The words that remained were singular.

*Áni etelehta.*

Deliver me.

No choir knew what bound the person beside them. No voice could promise another's release. The master set no music beneath the words and gave no note upon which all must end.

Since then the singers of Alqualondë have performed seven movements. At the end of **OMENTIË** they stand and do not sit down.

Then the eighth begins.

No singer begins it. The doors are opened.

The people go out beneath the harbour arch and walk beside the water with shell lamps: those bearing lamps with names first, and after them those bearing lamps upon which nothing is written. Each bearer carries a separate silence. Most find no answer. They set the lights upon the ebb nevertheless.

The eighth movement has no fixed music. It goes out with them.

Afterwards the shells are gathered where the water returns them, or they are lost. The city goes home. The lamps used for the vigil are dried and put away. Other lights are kindled for ordinary need.

Between one vigil and the next, Astoron placed an adze in the hands of the smith born in Gondolin and showed him how the Teleri joined a keel. The Noldo spoiled the first piece of timber. Astoron rebuked him, and on the following morning gave him another.

The second piece was spoiled also, though less badly. On the third morning the smith came before Astoron and swept the bench. Astoron laid down a third piece without being asked. Neither spoke of the first two. By winter the chalk-line of a keel had begun to lengthen across the floor.

Círeth's household ate twice each week at the house of Astoron's daughter. They disagreed over the names of winds and over whether a mast should sing when it was properly stayed. Once Círeth left in anger before the meal was served. The next day she returned for a knife she had forgotten, and remained to mend a torn sail.

The widow of the quay and the woman with the iron key quarrelled so bitterly in the spring that neither entered the other's house for a season. At harvest the widow fell from a ladder. The Noldorin woman came when called and stayed through the night. Before the winter storms the widow gave her a key to the house. She did not ask for the iron key in return.

At first each such deed stood alone. No one knew whether another would follow it. But after a while the next deed did not always find an empty place. A tool had been laid ready. A door expected a knock. Bread was cut for one more before the guest was seen. None of these things promised the morning. They gave the next pair of hands somewhere to begin.

Children were born who knew Beleriand only through incompatible voices. Ships were repaired. Bread burned. Songs were corrected and corrected again. Some friendships failed. Some wounds opened upon an ordinary word. The star crossed the sky whether anyone watched or not.

The next year the seven movements returned. The smith of Gondolin stood beside Astoron, both their hands scarred by the same adze. Círeth and Astoron's daughter still did not agree whether a properly stayed mast should sing. The widow and the woman with the iron key stood three places apart. When **MITTARË** began, grief came among them no smaller than before. It did not find them as it had left them.

At the end of **OMENTIË** the doors opened. Somewhere upon the sea-wall one voice said, *Áni etelehta.* Farther down another spoke the same words, not in answer, but as a petition of her own. Then another voice took them up. They did not become a chorus. They passed by hearing, as one lamp showed the next bearer where the water could be reached.

The lamp-walk opened another year.

Sixty years after she landed, Círeth entered the hall upon the night of the vigil and stood before the singers.

"You should let it go," she said.

No one mistook what she meant.

"I was at Sirion. You were not. Every year you give the country back to me in voices it never had. Your light lies wrongly upon the water. Your trees make the wrong sound. You have held my wound open in both hands and called it keeping faith."

No one answered.

At last Astoron's daughter rose. She had been young when Círeth came ashore; now she was keeper of the vigil by the consent of the households.

"Tell us to stop," she said, "and we will stop."

Círeth stood for a long while. Her mouth opened, but no word came. The hall waited. No king, mariner, loremaster, or singer spoke into the silence for her.

At length she crossed to the book and laid one finger upon the passage concerning Sirion.

"Not this," she said.

The master of song closed the book. The passage was not sung again. In later copies its place was left open; no one supplied what Círeth had taken away.

She went out with the others. At the sea-wall she chose a lamp with nothing written upon it. Behind her the book remained closed upon the lectern, and no one reopened it merely because she had joined the walk.

Círeth knelt upon the wet stone, holding the shell until the cold had entered both knees. Then she set it upon the ebb. Her hands remained above the water for a moment after the weight had gone.

When she stood, Astoron's daughter was beside her, but did not touch her until Círeth reached first.

That touch did not answer every silence. Círeth had returned and corrected the song. Those whose names had vanished could not.

When the year came round again, Astoron's daughter remained upon the sea-wall after the named lamps had gone, holding one nameless light between both hands. Yárawë remained with her.

"We do not know where those whose names are lost may be," Astoron's daughter whispered. "We do not know whether any road returns them to us."

"No," said Yárawë. "We have no tidings."

Yárawë looked at the small light between the younger woman's hands.

Then she said, *Áni etelehta.*

Astoron's daughter spoke the words after her. The same words did not make the same prayer, and neither claimed to know what the other asked deliverance from.

She set the lamp upon the tide.

Farther along the wall another voice spoke, and another pair of hands lowered a light. No choir gathered the words. The harbour filled with small lights going outward. Dark water lay between them and widened as the tide drew them apart. Above them Eärendil climbed his accustomed road.

Elwing did not walk in Alqualondë, but she never missed the vigil. After Eärendil was set upon his road she went north along the shore, and there the white tower was built for her. The sea-birds came to her there. During the long years in which the fleet kept the eastern waters, she learned their tongue, having once worn their shape.

In the evening she climbed into the wind and watched the light rise over the edge of the world. When it came, she went to meet Eärendil upon white wings. She always had much to tell him.

Once each year she began with the harbour. One year she told him that the blank place at Sirion remained and a new ship had touched the water. Another year a child learned the names of winds from more than one shore. At every vigil the named lamps and the nameless went upon the ebb, and nobody stopped.

In the twilight of spring, amid gossiping gulls, familiar sails filled the horizon. In that brief respite, reunited with her love once more, she never spoke of a promised dawn. She spoke of the countless glimmering lights, each holding total darkness at bay, each fiercely bright upon the boundless dark sea, though dawn made no such promise to them.

Aurë entuluva. 

Dawn shall come again.

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