A Handful of Seawater and a Cheekful of Salt by Isilme_among_the_stars  

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To she who knows

It seems to Maglor as if Círdan’s ship has sailed him into a dream. Nerdanel brings Maglor to an estate both familiar and strange that he cannot accept as home.

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The floor lurches and it leans.

The ship has come to rest. Phantoms of storms with waves like great walls of water crashing violently over the deck haunt Maglor still. He huddles against wooden planks curving bow-like against their supporting ribs, like the thoracic cavity of a great beast. He has been swallowed whole by a dragon, consumed by a whale.

“I do not think he should be alone,” Celeborn tells a woman with well-muscled arms and eyes like green jewels.

She had rushed across the floor and knelt before him. Her curled brown hair had caught the light that streamed through the hatch, turning frizzy fly-away strands to copper. She had run a trembling hand softly along his cheek and whispered, “Makalaurë.” And he had told her that was not his name.

“Have I no say?” Maglor objects.

The woman looks at him, her green eyes sad. She is Nerdanel. She is his mother. She is a lie. His mother belongs to a time long ago and a land far away. “I am afraid you have not,” she says. She swipes the back of her hand hurriedly across the crest of one cheek and looks away. She has done this several times.

When she asked him, “What, then, should I call you?” he had shrugged. He did not like to hear the voice of his mother on her lips.

Círdan lowers himself to lean against the hull beside Maglor. “What would you choose, if you could?” he asks.

“I know not,” Maglor says. He has not known his mind in a long while and it is hard to follow one’s feet in the belly of a ship.

“Go with her, then,” Círdan says.

Maglor doesn’t reply. The deck beneath his folded legs stretches on for miles and miles and the bulkheads either side crowd close. It is distracting, and unsettling.

“Randir is the name he prefers,” Celeborn is telling the woman, but it is not a name. It is a description. He knows not what else to be. And there is no longer any name he has a right to.

The woman comes close again. Maglor searches her as if they were at a masquerade and he sought a chink in a mask through which it could be discovered who lay hid beneath. She is his mother and nothing is real.

She bids him stand, to walk out of this stuffy hold, and accompany her home. How can he stand when the deck and walls keep shifting? How can he walk out into a land beyond this lurching beast when such a place may not exist at all? The ship has sailed him right out of the world and into a tale, outlandish and strange.

Maglor is pulled to his feet — she is as strong as ever his mother was — and he can traverse the treacherous planks, swaying like a drunkard, if he is careful. He goes with her. She might not be true, nor really his mother (she is both, he knows, and isn’t that mad? To know a thing, and still think it untrue?). Still, he goes.

The woman turns a tight, careful smile upon Celeborn. “You have my thanks,” she says.

Celeborn, tall and silver, surveys her with a level gaze. “We are kin, of a kind, Lady Nerdanel,” he says. “I merely act as familial obligation requires.” He is not warm, but his eyes, as they flick over Maglor, drench with pity. It is a terrible thing. Maglor could drown in it. He could fall into its disquieting depths and never surface again. What a wretch Celeborn must behold.

“You trivialise your restraint and magnanimity, my Lord. They have not gone unmarked,” the woman says. She guides Maglor inexorably forward.

“Farewell, Maglor,” Círdan says with the kind of sincerity that suggests he means it.

That is not his name. He has no name.

✦

The woman pushes a solid, ornate door open. It creaks. Behind is a room rich and elegant. “Your brothers are not home, I am afraid,” she says. “They will be glad of your return.”

“I have no brothers,” Maglor tells her.

“You have six,” she corrects.

“They died.”

She purses her lips and makes no dispute.

Maglor’s eyes devour whitewashed walls hung with oil paintings. They roam over thick, dark beams that span the ceiling and falter over a thousand not-quite-familiar homely touches. Fine, intricately patterned carpets adorn the floor and he bends to feel their thick pile. He runs fingers over the walnut grain of an ornate set of drawers scattered with half-worked gemcraft. His breath clouds upon the marble of an abstract sculpture. Its style is unmistakable. Maglor has seen its like in all states of completion, from rough blocks to polished perfection, from his earliest days. He turns sharply to the woman who stands in the doorway regarding him with curious eyes.

“Always you have had an eye for fine things Makalaurë, my magpie,” she says.

“I will not call you mother,” he accuses.

“It bothers me little what word you use. I care only that you stand here before me, living and breathing. Name me anything at all.”

Maglor laughs bitterly.

He breathes. He follows unfeeling feet. Is this living?

“What would you choose?” he asks.

She tilts her head and watches. Her eyes are as deep as the ocean and as unfathomable. She knows. Oh, she knows so much. “What would I choose? As you are Ranyamo, then I am Istarnië.”

Istarnië, the woman names herself. She who knows.

On the long walk from Avallónë they spoke seldom. Sometimes the land was planted with sighing fields of wheat, and sometimes their path wended its way along waters that chattered and rushed, and sometimes the way was stony and steep, and sometimes it wended under the cool shade of ancient forests. All passed by without note or remark. Day after silent day and night after silent night Maglor walked and Istarnië watched. She watches in the way that he has wandered: habitually, incessantly, perpetually.

Maglor turns away. He does not like her eyes on him. She watches and watches, and she knows enough to fill oceans. He can see the depths in her eyes.

“Stop,” Maglor says.

She doesn’t look away. “You shall have to be more specific, my darling.”

Maglor does not like to be watched. “I am tired,” he says.

Istarnië leads him to a large bed with tall posts, swaddled in thick, velvet curtains. She says, “I know you have not slept for some time.”

The curtains are soft and so is the bed. He doesn’t know how to sleep on a bed so soft. He might sink through feather pillows and comforters. He might drown. He might disappear.

She tells him the room is his. It has been since it was built. The room recalls to him something of Himring and of the bed there in which this body slept, when it belonged to an elf that deserved his name. The room is a lie.

Maglor lays on the bed and counts the whorls in the beams on the ceiling. He does not sleep.

✦

The night is riddled with the unquenchable light of the stars hanging like drops of lurid silver, like beads of mercury amid the unbreakable dark. Maglor glides down stairs. He ghosts through unoccupied rooms. He drifts.

The house is made of memory. It is new, and it is old. Incongruous ephemera of well-worn, left behind lives nestle amid alien comforts, new-wrought and strange. Each bring a stab of heart-twisting recognition, like a blow to the gut, sending Maglor spinning, spinning, turning, drifting out of place. He could float away. He could drift like a feather on the breeze. Or sail like a mote of dust amid the firmament of stars and celestial bodies, the only real thing in a vast world of make believe.

Maglor is blown, incorporeal and weightless, into the night. His toes scrape cobblestones and trip over dewy grass. No longer does he follow his feet, but is dragged, stumbling, behind them. The grounds are sculpted into familiar, alien shapes and Maglor drifts and he turns and he falls to his knees and keens at the lurid, argent lights.

Even the stars are strange.

“Ranyamo?” Istarnië stands framed in the doorway with the warm glow of candlelight at her back. She holds forth a shawl. “It is cold, love,” she says.

Her feet leave impressions upon the grass for she walks solidly through the world. Maybe she is true and Maglor is not. Maybe he is only a dream imagining himself real.

They gaze at the stars, soaked in dew from the grass on which their bodies lay. And Maglor could reach out and pick them like berries if he tried. He could squeeze and burst their silver skins between finger and thumb until they leaked pure light, starlight staining his fingers.

Maglor remembers a small hand held high, weaving through the night air. It made paintings of the stars as they shone through soft fingers. A young voice sang half-remembered snatches of sweet, melancholy song.

“I had a son. He was not mine, and yet, he was.” Maglor’s voice drifts, weightless, up to the stars.

“I know,” Istarnië answers. “We have met.”

Above, the pinpoint bright lights begin to fade as the unbreakable dark fritters away, melting to blue as beautiful as sapphire.

“He had a brother. A twin. They were not mine to love, yet I loved them.”

“I know,” she says.

Maglor turns to Istarnië. Her dew-damp hair is a rich red-brown. There is sapphire reflected in her ocean-deep eyes. “There was good,” he beseeches. His mind is full of swords and blood and futile pursuit. “Amid the sordid and terrible, this, at least, was good.”

“I know,” she says, and her eyes trained upon his are round and sincere and not to be borne. It is better to look at the sky.

“How did you know?” he asks.

“Of you and Elrond?” Istarnië asks. She shifts her shoulder until it touches his.

Maglor shifts away. “To find me,” he says.

“Word came after your ship docked.”

A tremor had thundered through the ship before it stilled. Círdan clattered down the ladder speaking of disembarkation. Maglor held fast to a bulkhead like a pleura clinging to the hold's wooden ribs. “Not yet,” he pled.

Light tracked across the scuffed planks of the deck and crept up the thoracic curves of the hull. Light dimmed and died and sparked to life again where it had begun. Celeborn knelt before him. “It is time to go.”

Maglor’s voice stuck in his throat. He swallowed it down like a lump of dry bread. The light travelled and faded and came and went and came and went. Maglor’s legs cramped. Then Istarnië came. It felt like little time at all.

“How long was it?” he whispers.

“Too long,” she answers.

Time unspools like twisted wool springing from a spilled bobbin bouncing across the weaving room floor. Time coils tight like a thread spun and wound by the wheel. Time means nothing at all.