On Tides of Light by potorov  

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AURË RÚSËO

Bring out the book. Read it to the end.

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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.