Records of an Inquiry Into Unlawful Conduct in Angband Division C-134-B by kimikocha  

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Another postscript.

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24 Úrimë, SA 3264
Excerpts from the third statement of the witness Nárelótë, a bookbinder of Eregion, offered freely to Sakalkhôr, a scholar of the Historians’ College in Númenor — yes, E., darling, I know, I swear I will finish copying all of my notes for you as soon as I have the opportunity. There is just so much for me to write!

[Interviewer’s note: We met again the next day to talk more about the people she had gotten to know in Angband. She said it felt good to be able to speak of them freely, and reflected that perhaps the reason she didn’t begrudge Sauron his forgiveness — despite bearing him all hatred herself — was that since he and that friend of his that she forgives even less were accepted, she finds herself less anxious in telling others about her past. Because if that monster and that bastard who killed Ecthelion can have a place here, clearly no one else has any business giving her any trouble about hers. And I do notice that she seems less and less hesitant about admitting to feeling anything positive about anything associated with Angband around me. Especially after I told her about the Queen’s Guard of Númenor, whom everyone rather suspects are orcs, and no one with an opinion worth hearing makes a fuss about it.

Oh, how fondly I recall the muscled thighs of Oronyéni! The glory of her shoulders — the way they flexed as she lifted me above her head one-handed! If any of your team are headed back to Armenelos, kindly tell them to tell her that Sakalkhôr remembers her well.

And yes, yes, yes, E., I will finish transcribing the full version as swiftly as I may — I was writing with a new style of pen that has a different type of ink, and did it so fast my own handwriting is hard to read, and there are so many notes I have to copy overall — really, dearest, I’m trying my best, but I only have two hands! —S.]

On Ozûtalai, and the Fëanorian of his clan.

The first thing I noticed about him was that he spoke some Quenya. Badly. But the funny thing was, you could tell exactly where he learned it. Because he had the ridiculous Fëanorian lisp, and he had a lot of swear words — except the funny thing was, he never swore in Orcish. Later I found out for certain that I was right, because he introduced me to the one who taught it to him — his brother’s husband, who was a former soldier under Makalaurë captured in that very first battle where Fëanáro was killed, and had the absolute gall to tell me I spoke Quenya wrong. Ughhhhh!

[Interviewer’s note: She uttered the last sound at length and with an air of great frustration, waving her hands excitedly.]

I was so sick to death of people with the nerve to tell me I spoke my own native language wrong! First that monster Sauron with his articles and his tenses that not a real person alive actually uses the way he used them, and now this? I told him that he could go seat himself upon a distaff and spin, and that I’d use his innards to knit a scarf. He stared at me and then burst out laughing, saying that was the best response he’d gotten. Then he asked if he could use it in a song, ooh, I could have killed him! Though it turned out to be rather catchy. He was no great bard, but he had a hobby of writing filthy comic songs that sounded unobjectionable if you weren’t listening to the words. And he was one of my people, that is, of the Noldor, and I appreciated that, even if he practically never covered his head and was of the kind that Þpoke our language like thiÞ.

We ended up talking a lot about what had happened since he was captured — he knew some of it, but not all, and very little of Gondolin. We wept. He spoke reverently and wistfully of Lord Maitimo and his husband, King Findekáno the Valiant, who rescued him — somehow everyone knew the story, even though technically no one was allowed to talk about it. Even the Orcs respected Lord Maitimo, and they had a name for King Findekáno that basically translated to “short-thing-that-makes-the-incessant-noise-of-ringing,” which I truly, truly hope someone in Mandos has been good enough to tell him. Those two were the stuff of legends, all the way across Angband, and there were those who would ask if you’d ever seen them once they found out you were of the same people, and some who’d be excited for even my paltry offer, which was that I had seen King Findekáno once from a great distance across a crowd. I shudder to think how it would have hurt them to learn what Maitimo did later. I know it shocked me when I learned, though I had not been raised to view him as a legend, and had only acquired the habit trapped in Angband as I was.

Ah, but what to say of Ozûtalai? He was kind, and he was steady, and he tried to befriend me when no one else could stand me. If I don’t speak of him as often as I might, it is only because I still…

[Interviewer’s note: Tears filled her eyes. I refilled her cup and offered her a handkerchief, which she declined, already having one of her own.]

Thank you. I know he must be dead now; his people don’t live so long. But I wish we hadn’t been separated. He saved my life when the floods came, threw me up into the limbs of a tree before the waters caught us, and he was gone. I screamed at the trees to catch him, and then I screamed for Ulmo or Ossë or whoever it was to let him go — and oddly enough, the waters calmed, but I couldn’t find him. I looked, for as long as I could, and I found the stick he’d had made for me, but not him. Not anyone.

And the ground was moving, and I couldn’t keep — I had to keep moving because things were falling down the slope from above. I felt so guilty about it. And I begged my gods to save him, I swore at them that if they would hear only one of my prayers, hear this. They never answered when — when I was with her, but I like to think they answered me with this. I don’t know if I believe it, but I hope. I did shout at them very loudly, and I cursed at them a little too. I met a priest of Ossë once who said he thought he’d have appreciated it.

I still have the marks of his clan on my upper arm, and across my chest, I didn’t mention that part. The way this works is, it doesn’t matter if you recognize someone or not — if they have the same marks as you, you are family. I keep hoping that I might see the same ones, one day.

[Interviewer's note: She stopped for a moment, then offered a wan smile.]

…After all, the rest of my family is dead. So my husband is in desperate need of in-laws.

On Hithriel and her son, Lûghakh.

Hithriel was born there! Can you imagine? I told her she was a slave, and she looked at me as if I’d told her the soup was wet. She had never even seen the sky. She thought the stars were something in a song. Elentári! Of course I had to show her. I made her sneak outside with me one night when I knew Morgoth’s clouds were supposed to be thin, and she stared at them, entranced, for an hour. Every elf loves the stars, you know. We were born under them. Seeing them is as comforting as hearing a spouse’s heartbeat.

Her little one, Lûghakh, I taught him a song Sorokendo wrote about a goose that is extremely rude if you know Quenya, and he sang it for the whole workroom, and only I knew. Hithriel found out years later. She has still not forgiven me.

[Interviewer’s note: Sorokendo was the name of Ozûtalai’s elven brother-in-law.]

On Draumâkil.

Ooh, she hated me at first. I could tell. And the feeling was mutual. I had just lost everything — no, scratch that, everything had been taken from me, my home, my family, even my own clothes, and this creature of Morgoth’s had the nerve to look at me sideways for being upset about it? She didn’t speak a word of Quenya and so I spoke to her in a very thick Gondolindhrim dialect, very slangy, and said very unkind things that she didn’t understand and no one could translate. Even though she didn’t understand what I was saying, she knew.

And still she lied for me, and was punished for it. And she counted. Every single time that bitch took me, for years. I lived it, I knew how often she made me… but I’d never done the arithmetic. I’d lost track of time, really. It felt like it had been going on forever, and like it would never end.

Nine hundred and four — that’s almost a thousand. I had to turn and stare at the wall in the infirmary for a while. That number still doesn’t seem completely real.

—I did learn later on that Sauron’s estimate was even higher, yes. As much as it pains me to give him any credit whatsoever, he’s almost certainly correct — he wasn’t in the habit of getting things wrong, and I know there were periods she left out. But nine hundred and four is the first number I learned. It was given to me by a woman I started out calling names I shall never repeat, who still chose to do everything she did for me, and it is the one I choose to remember.

I never lost the cord. I have no idea what “grey fibrous matter” you found, but that’s not it. I still have it here, well-preserved and tucked away in a box.

Later on, she bullied me into acquiring a taste for pickled herring. She did this because she thought I was too thin, a determination she made on the basis of a highly technical method that involved pinching my arm until I squawked. I still eat it sometimes at home. This is my revenge on my husband for his cheese habit.

On Halkiran.

He was exactly the sort of person you expect to be Sauron’s chief secretary. No sense of humor whatsoever, utterly insufferable, wrote procedures for everything — I could imagine him drafting a treatise on the proper way to use the latrine. Tell your searchers to inform me if they ever find such a treatise. I shall laugh. He did draft a very long and very serious treatise on the proper way to be whipped in Angband, of which he kept the original and gave me a copy when Sauron ordered him to give me lessons.

The way I found out about the lessons was, he called me into one of the quiet rooms and read out the order, then gave me a copy of it, then informed me that He Would Now Proceed to the Reading of the Treatise, and gave me a copy of that, then handed me a slate and told me I Should Make Such Notations As Would Assist Me. And then, because I was crying — no one had whipped me since that woman, and I could see the whip on his belt, and it was worse by far than hers — he handed me a handkerchief and reiterated that This Was To Be Done Not For the Purpose of Punishment, But For the Purpose of My Welfare Alone. And that No Strokes Would Be Delivered On the First Day, Which Would Be Devoted Only to the Reading of the Treatise, That I Might Make Myself Ready for the Commencement of the Lessons. And that While the Presence of a Healer Was Not Required, the Purpose Not Being Punishment, One Would Be Provided Straightway If I Desired It.

I was not consoled. I cried most of the way through The Reading Of The Treatise, and took no notes whatsoever. I’m sure the hideous thing still exists somewhere in the archives, though whether it’s in any state to be read is an entirely different question. There was a correct posture — leaning against the wall with your forehead resting on your crossed wrists — and a whole slew of techniques you could use to overcome the pain, none of which I was in a fit state to hear. And probably other things that I missed. I never read the whole thing. When Halkiran was done, he said that I could take whatever time in the quiet room I needed and that the next lesson would begin at the same time tomorrow, and left me alone.

I did try to read The Treatise, but I couldn’t. I got as far as the direction that you strip to the waist and felt like I was going to faint. I fled to the washroom with my paperwork and threw up in the toilet, and then I couldn’t bring myself to open the door. I was terrified. It felt like everything would be real if I opened the door, and I couldn’t face it — I stayed on the floor and cried and just sat there, everything swirling around my head. I stayed there all night. I didn’t sleep.

The next day Halkiran came to the door, and he had a healer with him. I was dizzy and sick with fear — I thought I would faint. I begged him not to make me take my clothes off. He looked deeply uncomfortable and said that no one takes their clothes off; they only strip to the waist. The healer, who was an elf of my people with her head covered, said that a reinforced apron may be provided which covers the front of the chest at the request of the one being whipped, and that no one would be looking at me lasciviously — it is like it is in the baths, she said, everyone bathes together and no one looks, it simply isn’t thought of that way. And she also said that Halkiran, who looked very constipated by then, was a very honorable fellow, and would never contemplate harming anyone in that way.

I was not very consoled. But my hysteria lessened enough that I was able to stand and follow him with the healer to the quiet room, where he did in fact turn and pointedly stare at the unfinished manuscripts while I readied myself. It still felt horrid, that skin-prickling feeling all down my back, though the apron does in fact cover the entire chest and also the sides — I understand its primary purpose was to keep the tails away from the rest of the torso, though under the law there was to be no question asked about why someone desired it and I’m sure some used it for modesty.

Then I leaned against the wall, and started to cry after a few moments. I felt so sick. He tried having me practice some of the techniques he’d written down, and I even tried, but I just couldn’t. All I could think about was what was going to happen. Finally I told him to just get it over with, just do it, and when he hit me I screamed and fell to the ground.

The healer said, “Stop.” You can’t beat someone who’s on the ground.

He replied, “Obviously.” And then he said he didn’t know what to do, and he wasn’t sure he was the right person to do this, and that he was going to go talk to Sauron. Which terrified me, because I thought that meant Sauron was going to end up supervising or even whipping me himself, and everyone knows Sauron’s reputation. What would Sauron do if I couldn’t take it? How much worse would it all be?

So I said that he didn’t have to, that I was fine, and that I would do better, and I got up, even though I was sick and dizzy and my back still hurt and I couldn’t imagine a way in the world for me to take this and hold still. To which he said I was a poor liar, and reached for my elbow — I recall feeling terror because I thought, I don’t know what I thought, I think I thought he was going to restrain me for punishment or something, and then I fainted.

I woke on the floor. Someone had put me onto my back. I could hear people talking in low voices as if from far away, coming closer. Everything was grey. It had been a long time since I’d last fainted, and I heartily disapproved of it. I felt so, so nauseous, and my heart was racing. I turned over and retched; then I felt even worse, like I didn’t even have the strength to push myself up enough to lie back down. Someone did it for me and then lifted my feet back up onto what I later realized was a footstool with a cushion on it, then put a cold cloth on my face.

I said I was cold. Someone — it took a minute or two for me to realize it was the healer — said they were getting a blanket for me, and then someone put something over me that I later realized was a quilt Halkiran kept in his office and slept under when he worked late.

At first it didn’t help, but as my head came back, it started to. Halkiran was standing in the corner looking even more humorless than usual, and then he went outside to talk to Sauron. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could hear their voices. I tried to get up, but the healer wouldn’t let me. She told me that she would help prop me up on some cushions and that I could drink sips of water, but that I wasn’t to get up until she deemed it safe. And then she asked what had me so worried.

I had been cheered because she was of my people, but in that moment I thought she was hopeless. How could she possibly not know?

I didn’t answer her. What could I have said?

She didn’t ask again. She only said, “Whoever it was, they aren’t in this room,” and gave me the water. I don’t know what she knew. I’ve wondered since. Sauron did not seem to register to her as a matter of concern at all.

Halkiran came back in a while later. He told me, in his usual style, that The Lessons Would Continue, But Under Different Instruction, and that I Was To Rest For the Remainder of the Day. Then he looked at his quilt, and at me under it, and apparently decided it was beneath his dignity to ask for it back. I kept it three days. He never mentioned it.

I found his report later. Four pages, of course, because why say something in three sentences when you could say it in ten? It did not actually say that I was a poor pupil. It said the method was unsuited to the subject, that the fault lay with the instructor and not with the one instructed, and that he recommended someone she did not fear.

I was furious. I’d spent years disliking him for something he didn’t actually say. I had to start all over.

Yes, I still tell people that he complained I was a poor pupil. I think that is entirely my prerogative, as this is my story, and not his.

On Uzhunahhan.

Uzhunahhan was the next one they found to give me lessons, and he was even worse. Have you ever heard the phrase ‘kill someone with kindness’? That was the essence of Uzhunahhan, who to my great misfortune was terribly, terribly kind. Imagine having all your entrails pulled out of you slowly with kindness. That was his method in its entirety.

The first thing he did was very gently sit me down and let me know, in a very solemn voice, that Halkiran had spoken truly when he said this was for my welfare, but that he hadn’t told the whole of it: which was that a suggestion had been floated from Morgoth, one which Sauron was very concerned about, to hold a grand feast celebrating the fall of my city, where some of its captives would be brought before him, and that it would go better for anyone who could bear what was done to them without being noticed.

If I had feared before that my doom was upon me, I was certain of it now. I didn’t throw up this time, but I hid in a quiet corner of the archives with a pot in case I did. I sat on the floor, put my head on my knees, and tried to breathe, feeling very dizzy.

Someone showed up and put Halkiran’s quilt on me. I don’t know who it was.

I didn’t sleep that day. Or eat. The next day, someone came and brought me to the infirmary. I went with them, but I scarcely knew what I was doing. Everything felt numb. I sat on the bed and stared into space, still wrapped in that same quilt.

Assurakûn came to see me there. He asked my troubles, and I told him. He held my hands and said very, very quietly that there was nothing to be done against an order which came from Morgoth, but that I had long since proven the measure of my strength, and that he was certain I could do this and would make my ancestors proud. And then he must have spread the word, because everyone else came to see me too. They sang to me, and fed me all manner of broth and meat, and offered me suggestions which were completely unhelpful, like “Don’t think about it.”

I will note that it was universally agreed that I had well proven my mettle in the way I had suffered that woman, and that some of them found it both baffling and amusing that I should be so frightened of the lash after that. I was, in fact, teased a little about it. I won’t even pretend that I didn’t appreciate it. It made me laugh. It made everything feel much less frightening, in the moment.

I have a strong suspicion that the word was leaked further, because I later heard a couple of things about other Gondolindhrim putting themselves through ordeals in order to practice… That might have something to do with why the idea never came to fruition. I got the feeling that Morgoth didn’t like it as much when people were prepared for what he did to them.

When I was well enough to go back, Uzhunahhan began the lessons again, very slowly. The first day, I only stood at the wall. The second, he showed me the cat and let me hold it. The third, he touched it to my back without striking. Every step announced in advance, with great gravity, so I had all night to lie awake dreading it.

On the fourth day of the second week, he decided the trouble was that I didn’t understand how small a thing a single stroke was. So he had the healer give him one, there in front of me, to show me. I begged him not to. He told me, very patiently, that it was nothing; that he’d had a hundred in his life and never thought of one of them after. And then he took off his shirt and leaned against the wall and the healer laid one across his back, and he didn’t so much as move, and thanked her.

I was sick on his shoes. He was very gracious about it.

A few days later he went to his superiors and told them he was making it worse, and he didn’t know how to make it better. I didn’t find that out until long after. Nor that it was Sauron himself who eventually broke the tie and gave the order for Namešha, after what I gather was a long and rather heated argument, and a vote that became a stalemate. I have added it to the list of things I hold against him, on principle.

On Namešha.

Namešha was a secretary of the sixth rank, senior, and should have been far higher. He was better at the work than anyone I ever met there, his hand was beautiful, and he could take down a conversation in three languages faster than it was spoken. The trouble was that he could not keep from making jokes about everyone above him, and some of them were very funny, and some of them were heard.

He kept a little box by his desk full of disciplinary orders, already written out in his best hand, with blanks for the offense and the number. When his superior gave him a certain look, he’d take one out and ask, very cheerfully, whether he should just send himself down. Most of the time they told him to put it away. Sometimes they told him to go ahead, and he’d fill it in himself and they’d stamp it. Once in a great while they said, “Bring that here,” and he’d stop smiling, and bring it, and then act apologetic for maybe a day or two. He told me the sorrier he was, the prettier the handwriting. I never saw one that wasn’t beautiful, but there were some that had the most elaborate calligraphic script I’d ever seen, more flourish than words. Those, from what I saw, were mostly reserved for the times he offended Mírlach, who was if possible even more humorless than Halkiran, and twice as stern.

Namešha made fun of everyone. Halkiran, the archivists, the healers, Sauron himself, behind his back, with an impression of him I won’t describe because I can’t do it justice. There was only one name he wouldn’t joke about. The first time I said it in front of him, he clapped his hand over my mouth so fast I didn’t see it move, and shook his head at me, and didn’t say anything at all. Then he took his hand away and asked if I minded that he’d done it. I said I did. He said he was sorry, and that he’d do it again.

The first thing he ever asked me, when he’d read my papers, was whether I was really an interpreter.

I said of course I was. I was very capable of interpreting. I spoke Quenya and Sindarin and the speech of Gondolin and some Telerin and the… elvish artist’s approximation of Valarin, and by then a good deal of Orcish, mostly rude. He said yes, but was I really an interpreter, and looked at me, and waited.

So I told him. I was a singer. I had been a singer in Gondolin; I’d sung at the Place of the Fountain, and once on the steps of Gar Ainion, for the feast of the Gates of Summer. I’d studied under the lord Salakanto, whom everyone thought of as a great bore and the greatest composer in the city, which he was, both, and who stayed with us all the way north when he could have run.

He asked me to sing something.

I said, like what? And then I realized I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d sung anything properly. I’d hummed, of course; we all do; I’d sung to myself over the cloth when I thought nobody was listening, and with the division sometimes, when they sang. But not properly. Not with my whole chest, as if it mattered. It had been years. I hadn’t noticed. That was the strangest part.

I should explain about my voice, because you won’t understand anything about those lessons if I don’t, and because I am not going to be modest about it.

I don’t sing like the singers in the old songs, the ones who could enchant the birds out of the trees. I am not that kind of singer. My voice is low, and very strong, and it carries. Salakanto used to say that some singers make a room fall silent, and some make it stand up, and that I was the second kind. I don’t sing to make people weep quietly into their cups. I sing to make them stand and shout. It’s work, real singing; it’s the whole body, the breath from the bottom of you, every muscle. People think it’s all in the throat. They’re wrong.

And I don’t sing with a dozen voices at once, like a choir in one throat. I never could. I have exactly one voice, and it’s mine, and whatever power I have comes through it or not at all. Some stodgy elders think that makes my voice lack Elegance and Refinement. I think that makes them lack good taste.

So I stood up, there in the secretariat, and sang him the song we used to sing coming home over the mountains, when you came out of the pass and saw the white city down there across the valley, all its towers catching the light. It’s a walking song. It rocks, like a horse under you. Anyone can sing it. I sang it the way it’s meant to be sung, which not everyone can, and by the second verse half the secretariat had stopped work to listen, and by the last refrain, someone was tapping the time on a desk.

When I finished, Namešha said, “Well. That changes things.”

He didn’t start the next day. He made me wait three days, which I thought at the time was cruelty, and which I understand now was to let me eat and sleep and stop shaking. Then he took me down to one of the quiet rooms, with the same healer who’d been there with Halkiran, and shut the door.

I asked him once, later, why the quiet rooms were so quiet. You could shout yourself hoarse in there and nobody in the next room would hear a thing. He said it was because they used to be the torture chambers, a long time ago, and that the Lieutenant had built them so nobody could hear anybody else. And then he said that nowadays it’s where they do the quarterly accounts, so in a sense, not much has changed. I didn’t know whether to laugh or be sick. I did both, a little. Then I sang, as loud as I liked, because nobody could hear.

But that was later. The first day, he didn’t say anything about the room. He just told me how it was going to go.

He said that he had read Halkiran’s treatise, all of it, twice, and that he was going to ignore most of it. He said nothing would happen until I started singing. If I wanted it to stop, I could put up my hand, and it would stop, and it would start again when I put my hand down and sang. He said I could curse at him as much as I liked, in any language I liked, as long as I picked the song back up afterward. He said he wasn’t trying to make me quiet. He was trying to make me keep going.

And he said one more thing: that he’d go as far as ten in a day, and no further, and that this wasn’t about what I could take. It was about what he was willing to do with his own arm. I said that seemed very convenient for him. He agreed that it was.

Then he asked me how I stood when I sang.

Nobody had ever asked me that. Halkiran had wanted me with my forehead on my wrists against the wall, hunched over like a beaten dog, which is no way to breathe, let alone sing. I showed Namešha: feet apart, shoulders down, head up, the breath low in the belly. He looked at me for a while, and then he said I could put my palms flat against the wall, so I wouldn’t fall forward, but that I was to keep my head up. And I did, and for the first time since that wretched treatise, I could breathe.

The song was my choice. I picked a stonecutters’ song from the quarries above the city, the kind the masons sang to keep their hammers together. It goes in pairs: one voice calls the line, and everyone answers it, and the hammers fall on the answer. Namešha learned the answer in about a breath and a half. He has a good voice, I’ll grant him that, low and warm; if he’d been born in Gondolin, they’d have put him in a choir and he’d have spent the whole time making faces at the conductor.

So he called, and I answered, and on the third call, the first stroke came, right where the hammer falls.

I didn’t fall down. I expect you to write that down somewhere. No, write it so I can actually read it: I didn’t fall down. [Interviewer’s note: I did it. Yes, I know, very unprofessional of me, shush — S.] I said a word I won’t repeat, and then I said several more, in Orcish, at length. Orcish is a wonderful swearing language; you can really do so much with the consonants. He waited until I’d run out. Then he called the line again, as if nothing had happened, and I answered, a little late and very flat, and we kept going.

I got through three that day. On the third, I put up my hand, and it stopped, just as he’d said. I stood there with my hand up and my back on fire, breathing, and nobody moved, and nobody said anything, and nothing happened. That was the strangest part. Nothing happened, because I’d said so.

After a while, I put my hand down and sang the last verse by myself. He didn’t strike me again that day. He said three was a fine number, and that the masons only needed three good blows to split a stone.

I told him that was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. He said yes, he’d made it up just then. I laughed. I hadn’t laughed in that room before. I hadn’t known that I could.

We went on like that for a while. Three, then four, then five, on the good days. Some days I put my hand up after one and stood there and shook, and he’d wait, and talk about something else, and then I’d sing again. Some days I didn’t sing again, and he’d say that was fine, and we’d go and get something to eat.

It was somewhere in there that he mentioned the apron.

He did it in the middle of a story about the archivist who’d sat on a pot of glue. Halfway through, without changing his voice at all, he said that if there ever was a feast, nobody there was going to be handing out aprons. He said he wasn’t going to ask me to take mine off. It was mine to wear for as long as I liked. He said what I did about it was up to me, and he wouldn’t mention it again. And then he went back to the archivist and the glue, and I laughed in the right places, and didn’t hear a word.

The next lesson, he came in, said good morning to the healer, and took off his shirt.

He was wearing, on the outside of his trousers, a pair of drawers. Drawers! Over his trousers! And they were covered — I mean covered, every inch — in embroidered forget-me-nots, blue, with little yellow centers, so close together you couldn’t see the cloth between them.

I stared at him. The healer stared at him. He looked down at himself as if he hadn’t noticed anything unusual and said that his grandmother had made them, and they were lucky, and that luck didn’t work if nobody could see it. He said if anyone was going to be looked at in that room, it was going to be him.

I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the floor. The healer had to sit down too. She put her face in her hands, and her shoulders shook, and when she finally looked up, she said, very seriously, that she’d need to examine the drawers later, for medical reasons. He said they were at her disposal.

He wore them every lesson after that. I never asked whether his grandmother had really made them. I’m still not sure I want to know.

That was the first time I saw his back.

It was scarred, all of it, from the shoulders down to the waist, old scars, white and raised and crossing over each other in a way I’d never seen on anyone, not even in the infirmary. I’d seen backs after forty. This wasn’t that.

I thought of the little box beside his desk, and all those beautiful slips, and said something about how many of those it must have taken.

He laughed. He said no, no, those were nothing; they hardly ever leave a mark, and when they do, it fades. He said this was from a bit of foolishness, a long time ago. And then he went back to telling me about the archivist, and the glue, and how they’d had to cut him free of the chair, and I didn’t ask.

I took the apron off a week later. I didn’t decide to, exactly. I came in that morning and took it off with my shirt and put them both on the bench, and stood at the wall with my palms flat and my head up, and waited for my heart to stop pounding. It took a while. Nobody said anything. Namešha was in the middle of a story about Halkiran and the Lieutenant’s inkwell, which he’d been promising me for days and refusing to finish, and he kept right on telling it.

When my heart had slowed down, I started to sing.

He never mentioned the apron again. Neither did I. I did, eventually, get the end of the story about the inkwell. It was worth the wait.

Over all those weeks, I sang him every work song I knew. Rowing songs, reaping songs, a song for fulling cloth that I’d learned from my grandmother, which has thirty-one verses and gets ruder with every one. He learned all of them. He was a terrible audience; he laughed in the wrong places on purpose.

Then, one day, he asked if he could teach me one of his.

It was an orcish song, very old, older than Angband, he said; his mother’s people had sung it in the far north to call the herds home across the snow. It’s built on a drone, one long low note that goes on underneath everything, like wind over the ice, and over that, a melody, high and thin, like a voice calling from very far away. You can’t sing it alone. Or rather, orcs can; a good singer can do both at once, the drone and the call, out of one throat. I’ve heard it. It’s uncanny.

I can’t. I could sing the call, though, and he could hold the drone, and so we sang it together, he underneath and me on top, and it was the most beautiful thing I’d heard in Angband. I made him sing it with me four times in a row.

Then I insisted on trying the drone.

I’d rather not describe the noise I made. I will tell you that Namešha laughed until he had to sit down on the floor, and the healer laughed until she had to leave the room, and that I kept trying for three more lessons, out of pure stubbornness, and never got any closer. He said I sounded like a reindeer with a cold. I said he’d never seen a reindeer. He said he didn’t need to.

The day I sang him one of Salakanto’s, I didn’t plan it. It just came out.

You have to understand what Salakanto was to me. When I came to him, I was young, and loud, and I sang everything my own way, and half the masters in the city had told me to stop it. All right, one, but he was argumentative enough for half, and I could feel the disappointment radiating from the rest when the quality of my overtones never matched the quality of my one voice, on its own. They had all spent forever and a half trying to fix it.

Salakanto never did. He’d listen to me take some old piece and turn it inside out, and nod, and say, “Yes, that’s yours now,” and then, very mildly, ask me whether I’d been resting my voice, because he worried I’d ruin it pushing so hard. He was always worrying about that. And one spring he handed me an aria he’d written, about a girl who will dance to nobody’s tune but her own, and said it was made for singing however I liked, and that I was to look after my voice while I did it.

I sang it at the Gates of Summer, the year before the end. I was very good.

I sang it to Namešha in that ugly little room, with my palms flat on the wall and the healer watching, and I didn’t take it down a step, and on the last note, I held it until the lamp flame shivered. He didn’t strike me during it at all. I didn’t notice that until afterward. When I asked him why, he said some things you don’t interrupt.

He paid me in stories, too. He knew everybody’s secrets, all of them embarrassing. Get through a verse without stopping, and he’d tell me what Mírlach did at the midwinter feast. Get through two, and I’d hear about Halkiran and the treatise on the proper means and methods for cleaning the privies, which, yes, exists, and is exactly as bad as your most wondrous imaginings, so I very much hope you find it. I’d have done a great deal more for those stories than I’d ever admit, and he knew it, and used it shamelessly.

It was around then I found out he’d been laying them on lighter for me than he would for anyone else. One of the other secretaries let it slip; he’d seen Namešha practicing, and he could hit a great deal harder than that when he wanted to. I was stung, I’ll admit it. I marched up to him and told him that if he was going to teach me, he could do it properly, and not coddle me like a child.

He said it was his arm, and he’d lay them on however he liked with it.

I couldn’t argue with that, which made me angrier. I sulked for a day. I whined to Assurakûn about it, and he listened with mild sympathy and then matter-of-factly said a number of things, like that he should certainly hope I wasn’t being taught by the sort of person who’d lay the strokes as hard as they could. And a number of annoying facts about my build and the musculature in my shoulders, which somehow led into an admonition to eat more pickled herring, which I liked, and blood pudding, which I vehemently did not, and to do more exercises of my upper body, which I was wholly uninterested in.

So I let it go, because both of them were right, and because Namešha had started telling me about the time Sauron’s ink was mixed with something that made it smell of fish for a week, and I wanted to know how that ended.

And then he started asking me to sing more quietly.

Everyone thinks soft singing is easy. It isn’t. It’s the hardest thing there is. Any fool can make a loud noise; to sing quietly, and keep the note true, and the tone full, and the breath steady, so that it carries to the back of the room on nothing but a thread, that takes everything you’ve got. Salakanto used to make me sing whole pieces at a whisper until I wanted to throw the music at him.

So it was a challenge, and I love a challenge. Quieter, then quieter, then under my breath, so the healer couldn’t hear, and then so that Namešha couldn’t either, and then not out loud at all.

I kept singing. Nobody could hear it but me.

The day I got through all ten without making a sound, I didn’t notice it was over until he put the cat down. I’d been somewhere in the middle of the third verse, thinking about whether there’d be fish at supper.

He said, “That’s ten.” And I turned around and looked at him, and he was grinning like a fool, and the healer was grinning, and I realized what I’d done.

A few weeks before, I’d spent a whole night on the washroom floor because of a page of instructions. And now I’d stood there for ten and thought about fish.

I pulled my shirt back on — I’d got used to being without it, but not THAT used! — and I flung the door open, and I sang the rest of the song out loud, the whole thing, as loud as I could, all the way down the corridor and into the secretariat. Half of them got up to see what the noise was. Namešha told them I’d just been promoted. I hadn’t. But I felt as if I had.

After that, Namešha said the lessons were mine.

He said ten was what he’d promised to teach me, and I’d learned it, and from here, whether we went on at all was up to me. He’d keep coming to the quiet room as long as I wanted him there. He’d stop the day I told him to. And he said that if I wanted to go on, there was something I ought to know first, and he wasn’t going to dress it up.

He said that if the Lord of Angband ever took it into his head to do the thing the Lieutenant was afraid of, there would be no ten. No healer. No putting up your hand. He said there was nothing either of us could do in that room that would make it bearable, and that anyone who told me otherwise was lying to me. What he could teach me was how to keep myself, while it happened. That was all. It wasn’t nothing. But it wasn’t everything, and he wanted me to know the difference.

I asked him how he knew.

He was quiet for a moment, which for Namešha was a very long time. Then he said, quite cheerfully, as if he were telling me about the archivist and the glue, that a long time ago, before he came to the secretariat, he had done something very foolish involving a song, and it had come to the wrong ears. And he was told that since he found himself so amusing, he could go on singing for as long as it lasted, and that if he stopped, it would be taken as the truth of his heart, and he would pay the price accordingly.

So he sang.

I asked him how long it lasted.

He said, “It stopped at sixty-three.” And then, after a moment: “It wasn’t meant to. Stop, I mean.”

I asked him who stopped it. He smiled at me, and said that was a very good question, and that there was a new girl in the copying room who had spilled a whole jar of sand into the Lieutenant’s correspondence that morning and had to pick it out grain by grain, and did I want to hear about that, and I understood that this was the end of the conversation.

I did want to hear about the sand. But I didn’t laugh as much as I should have.

I thought about it for a long time afterward. All those lessons: the singing, the picking up the next line, the keeping going. He hadn’t invented any of it for me. He’d learned it the hard way, alone, all at once, with no one to tell him what to do, and then he had spent weeks in a drill hall with a straw dummy so that he could teach it to me gently.

I kept going to the quiet room after that. Not every day. Once a week, then once a month, then whenever I felt I was getting rusty, which he said was like a musician practicing scales, and which I said was the most ridiculous comparison I’d ever heard, and which was, I have to admit, exactly right.

The feast never came. The time for it passed, and nobody said anything, and then a year went by, and then another. You know what I suspect is the reason it never happened. I don’t know if that’s true. But it did come in handy, the time Sauron corrected my grammar and I told him how right he wasn’t and what he could do with his corrections.

He stared at me for a good long time — and not even with his own eyes! Because I’d said it to his back, and he didn’t even turn around. He just conjured one of those creepy fiery eyes of his about three feet from my face to stare at me. And then finally he told me to hand him a blank half-sheet.

Before I even handed it to him, he did something with his hand and the words appeared in fire, burning themselves into the parchment in an offensively beautiful script along with the sign of the Eye. And then he simply went on walking out, steady as you please, only stopping to say something to Halkiran, who — I will give him this — looked alarmed.

I looked at the order. Insolence to the Lieutenant. Ten. A whole bunch of flowery language citing the exact provision of the Codes. And the Eye, still smoking a little.

I didn’t think about it. I got up and walked out after him, right on his heels; I couldn’t have been more than a few steps behind. The corridor was empty. There’s only the one way out of that end of the secretariat, as far as I know, and it’s a long corridor, and he was nowhere in it. Creepy bastard. I swear he amuses himself doing things like that.

Namešha caught up with me halfway to the disciplinary office. He’d run, I think; he was out of breath. He didn’t try to stop me or slow me down. He just walked beside me and talked: that I knew how to do this, that I’d done it a hundred times, that the officer on duty was a friend of his and a decent sort, and that I should sing something good. I told him I knew what I was going to sing. He said of course I did.

The officer on duty was an enormous old orc named Tapašu, with a voice like gravel rolling down a hill, and when he saw Namešha he groaned and asked how many slips it was this time. Namešha said it wasn’t him; it was me. Tapašu looked at me, and at the Eye on the order, and then at me again, and said, very respectfully, “What did you say to him?”

I told him. He laughed so hard he had to hold onto the doorframe.

The healer on duty was a stranger to me. But just as I was taking off my shirt, the door opened, and in came my healer, Maiwendë, the one from the quiet rooms, a little out of breath herself, and said she’d traded shifts. I don’t know when she found the time. I didn’t ask.

So I put my palms flat on the wall, and I put my head up, and I sang Salakanto’s aria, the one about the girl who dances to nobody’s tune but her own. Not out loud. Nobody heard a note of it. I didn’t move, and I didn’t make a sound, and when Tapašu said, “That’s ten,” I was in the middle of the last verse, and I finished it before I turned around.

He said Namešha had never once managed it that quietly. Namešha, who was waiting outside, said through the door that he’d heard that.

It didn’t even break the skin. I’m not ashamed to say I was a little disappointed.

When I came out, Halkiran was standing in the corridor, holding a ledger, as if he’d been passing by on the way to somewhere else. There’s nowhere else down there. Uzhunahhan was behind him, and two of the archivists, and a copyist I barely knew. Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Halkiran looked at me, and said, “Satisfactory,” and walked away with his ledger in the wrong direction. Uzhunahhan told me, very solemnly, that my ancestors would be proud. I didn’t have the heart to explain to him how elves feel about such things. I said thank you.

When we got back to the secretariat, nobody had done any work. I could tell. The ink had dried on half the pens, and one of the copyists had been staring at the same page so long he’d copied the first line three times.

And Namešha went to his desk, and took the box of slips, and took out a stack of them, all written in his most beautiful hand, the one with all the flourishes, and presented them to me, very solemnly, with a bow. He said that the student had surpassed the master: in all his years, he had never once told the Lieutenant what to do with his corrections. He said I would be needing these.

I never used a single one. I have the feeling it was because Halkiran’s attempt to teach me had frightened him so badly that he never dared send me down himself, and everyone below him was unwilling to risk his evil eye by doing it for him. I’m quite sure I earned one or two, though when I complained about it Halkiran gave me a look, sat back in his chair, and proceeded to drone me to death about all the provisions of the Codes which taken in their entirety supposedly said I hadn’t for some obscure technical reason. Namešha still used his slips, and claimed it was good for his circulation and besides, what would the discipline officers do without his visits to brighten their daily drudgery? And then he winked and said it was good to save them up for a special occasion, something that would really go down in history.

I never found the occasion, but I kept the slips all the same. All the way up until I left, and when I did, I took one for good luck. I still have it. It now hangs from one of the rafters, folded up very small and tucked into a silk envelope I sewed and embroidered myself. Yes, it is a charm to keep away evil spirits, threatening them with the things I will say to them if they dare to cross our threshold.

It was only later, lying awake, that I thought about the number. Ten. He could have written anything. He wrote ten.

Here in Ost-in-Edhil, a respectable length of time after he returned from Númenor, I tracked him down and asked him why. He said, “Use what meager reserves of intelligence have been allocated to you.” I told him that he’s gotten a lot ruder since Angband, which he has. He told me I’d gotten uglier. I asked him if he regretted it. He said, “Not in the slightest.”

He is, as I’ve said, utterly intolerable.

I asked Namešha once why he was so loyal to Sauron, when he made fun of him all day long. He only smiled at me. I asked the others. Nobody would tell me. I have my suspicions. I refuse to entertain them.

When the end came, and the hosts of the West broke the mountain open, Namešha didn’t stay. He came with me, and with Ozûtalai’s clan, south through all that fire and ice. He walked beside me, and talked, the whole way. I think it was the only thing that kept some of us going. You can’t despair properly when someone is telling you about the time Mírlach sat on a pot of ink.

Then the floods came, and I’ve told you how that ended. I looked for him, too, as long as I could. I didn’t find him.

He was half-elven, half-elf and half-orc, and nobody knew how long that would let him live. I like to think it’s a long time. I know Elrond is still alive, after all. I like to think he’s out there somewhere, still talking, and that some poor stranger by a fire is hearing about the archivist and the glue, and having someone laugh at their stories in all the wrong places.

On Calarastor, her husband.

Their meeting.

I met him on the road south, after the floods. I had one shoe that worked and one that didn’t, and a stick, and nothing else. He was one of Gil-galad’s soldiers, rounding up stragglers like me to take to Lindon before something worse found us. He was enormous. He was built like a door. He has not stopped talking from that day to this one.

I decided at once that he was a fool, and I told him so, at length, in Orcish, because I thought nobody there would know it. He listened to all of it with great interest and asked what language that was. I told him it was old Gondolindrin. Very old. Very rude. He seemed delighted. Then he looked at my shoe and said, “That’s not going to make it to Lindon,” and sat down in the road and fixed it. I told him he’d done it badly. He had not done it badly.

He asked before he touched anything. Before he handed me a cup, before he took my arm on a bad slope, before he lifted me down from a horse: “I’m going to put my hands here, unless you say otherwise.” It reminded me of Namešha, but unlike with him, it drove me mad. I asked him why he was asking all these questions. He asked, with great sincerity, if I wanted him to stop. I realized right then that I didn’t, which I refused to admit because it was ridiculous, so I took a page from Sauron’s book and went off on a tirade about his grammar. To which he shot back, wasn’t my use of that one Quenya article just a little bit, just slightly irregular?

Oooh! You can imagine how I felt about that! I wanted to thump him with my stick, but that would’ve meant I lost. So instead, I told him at great length about the difference between Quenya from books and Quenya as real live elves with real actual tongues speak it. He listened with evident fascination and then asked me to tell him more, which was not the point, but I told him anyway.

The Sindar.

The Sindar are completely mad. Let me tell you what they are like. There was a human in that company, a man from Dor-lómin, and on the fourth morning he stood up on the far side of the clearing and bellowed across it, “CALARASTOR! HAVE YOU GOT ANY RAGS? MINE’S COME ON EARLY!” And my husband, who was not my husband yet, bellowed back, “WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?” And the man shouted, “MY BLEEDING! MY MONTHLY! YOU KNOW!” And Calarastor shouted, “I DON’T BLEED! WE DON’T DO THAT!” And the human shouted, “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU DON’T DO THAT? YOU’VE GOT A—”

I won’t repeat the rest. They had the entire conversation from opposite ends of the clearing, with every word you can imagine, in front of the whole company and all of us refugees. Everyone else went on eating breakfast as if this were perfectly ordinary, except for one or two others who were of my people and also turned red as ripe cherries. I knew what they were talking about, I’d been in Angband for years, but I’d never heard anyone discuss it quite so… loudly. I pulled my cloak over my head and nearly died of mortification.

In the end, the human said elves were very lucky and it wasn’t fair, and Calarastor agreed that it wasn’t, and went and found him some clean linen. Then he came back and asked me what I was doing and why I looked like that and if I was all right. I said I had no idea what he meant.

Refugees from Angband.

One night a woman from Nevrast, who had lost everyone, said that anyone who came out of Angband alive had bought their life with someone else’s, and ought to be turned away at Lindon’s gate, or worse. Calarastor told her she should be ashamed of herself, and that whoever came out of that place had earned a bed and a meal and nobody’s questions. Everyone went quiet. I kept my sleeves down. I thought: it’s easy to say that about people you’ve never met.

There was a river, I don’t remember its name, in flood like everything else that year, and one bridge still standing over it for a day’s walk in either direction. We came to it at dusk. So did a clan of orcs coming down from the other side of the valley, perhaps forty of them, with their old people and their children and everything they owned on their backs.

You’ve never seen anything like the two sides of that bridge. Our captain had his soldiers in a line with their swords half drawn. Their young ones had spears up and were shouting the sort of thing young ones shout. Someone behind me said orcs were all the same and there was only one way to deal with them. Everyone was hungry, everyone was tired, everyone had lost someone, and every one of them was sure the other side had come to kill them. And the bridge was only wide enough for one people at a time to cross.

I looked at them, and I saw that they were carrying their elders. That’s what decided me. Carrying your elders is not what you do on a raid.

So I walked out onto the bridge. Calarastor grabbed for my arm, the first time he ever did that without asking first, and I told him exactly where he could put his hand, and kept walking. I stopped in the middle, put back my sleeve so they could see the marks on my arm, and gave the greeting you give to a clan you aren’t feuding with. It’s sung, partly. I’m a very good singer — by elven standards. I trained under the great masters in Gondolin. I sang at the Place of the Fountain and even on the steps of Gar Ainion. But in Angband, I had a very hard time singing the parts that included the deep rumbling sounds orcs can make in the throat. It’s not an anatomical matter; Sorokendo could do it, and he tried to teach me, but I never quite mastered it. It didn’t matter; I could sing it well enough to be recognized. I knew what it would cost me, with everyone watching. I did it anyway.

Everything went quiet. Then their eldest mother had herself carried out to meet me, a tiny old woman named Tešmuwa with no teeth and the sharpest eyes I’ve ever seen, and she looked at my marks and asked whose they were. I told her. She said she knew that clan; they’d shared a hunting ground once, three generations back, and quarreled over it. I said I hoped she wouldn’t hold that against me. She laughed until she coughed.

We sorted it out between us, standing on that bridge, while both sides glared at us. They see in the dark better than we do, so they would cross by night and we by day. We had some grain; they had dried meat and knew where there was a ford two days south. We traded. One of her grandsons, a big angry boy with a spear, kept telling her elves couldn’t be trusted, and she hit him with her stick and told him that she’d trust a woman wearing those marks before she’d trust him with a cooking pot.

I asked her if she’d seen any of my clan. She hadn’t. She said she would ask after them, wherever she went. I believe she did. I told her where I was headed so that if she ever found them, she could tell them where to find me.

When we were done, she looked at me a long time and said I could come with them, if I liked. She said a woman with those marks would never go hungry in her clan while anyone had food. And I stood there and thought about it. I want you to understand that. I thought about it. On one side, people who’d take me in because of the marks. On the other, people who’d seen them, and might not.

I thanked her, and I walked back.

Nobody said anything for a long time. The woman from Nevrast was staring at me. Some of the refugees stepped back from me as I passed. Our captain looked at me as if I’d grown another head. I thought: well, there it is.

Then Calarastor came and stood next to me. He looked across the bridge at the clan, and back at me, and said, “Old Gondolindrin, huh?”

I said yes. Very old. Very rude.

He said I’d just walked out between two lines of drawn weapons and talked forty people out of a war over a bridge, in a language nobody else here could speak, and that if anyone in this company had a problem with where I’d learned it, they could take it up with him. He said it loudly. Then he asked me whether I’d teach him the greeting.

Finally, he asked what I’d said to her. I told him I’d said he was my idiot, and that she wasn’t to mind him.

He said, “I’m your idiot?”

I said that was the part he was taking from all this?

He said yes. It was the only part he’d understood.

Other matters.

I told him, eventually. Not everything. Enough. I told him I was afraid that I was bound to her, the way my people say you are bound to the first one you lie with, and that if I was, I couldn’t give myself to anyone else, and I would rather die than be hers.

He went very quiet, which for him is a thing so rare you notice it. Then he sat down in front of me, so I was looking down at him and not up, and said, “It doesn’t work like that.”

He said a bond is made by two people, both of them reaching for each other, and that nobody can make one by taking. He said what she did was rape, every time, and that rape doesn’t bind anyone to anything, because there was nothing of me in it to bind. He said if I’d been bound to her, I’d know it, the way you know your own hand.

It was comforting for a moment or two. But then I thought — not a day goes by that’s not informed by what she’s done. I once stepped on a nail and thought I’d faint from fright, and she never even bit the soles of my feet. I have an irrational dislike of women who look like her. I hear a voice in the crowd and start to sweat. Somehow it got worse after I left Angband, which makes no sense at all, but there you go. There were days when I’d look at my body and see only a map of everything she did to it. And wasn’t that—

Wasn’t that an awful lot like what they say marriage is like? That when they’re not there you still feel them on your skin, their taste in your mouth; that your thoughts pull toward them like a weight seeks the center; that all your thoughts are of them, them, them?

He listened to all of it and then, with a wry little smile, said, “By that reckoning, I’m married to the Nirnaeth.”

I hadn’t thought of it like that before. I had to think on it for a while.

Later on, he asked if I could feel her answering when I thought of her. I shuddered and said, “I should certainly hope not!” To which he said, with immense confidence, that it couldn’t be her, because she would have answered. It was the wound she had made, not the woman herself.

Which was a dreadful thing to say, because immediately I thought: ai-ya, what if she starts talking! I told him it was not consoling at all, and asked him what he knew of it anyway, being unmarried himself.

He said that if I ever asked him, I could let him know mind-to-mind if he was wrong.

I told him that was the worst proposal I’d ever heard. He said it wasn’t a proposal. To which I said, with great offense, “It’s not?!”

So I married him. My only regret is that I am forced to admit, mind-to-mind, that he was right.

Married life.

He collects my insults. Sometimes he comments on them, in my head, while I’m coming up with them. He always has a favorite, which changes every three to five years. He enjoys a good argument, though he’s quieter about it than I am. He thinks I am brave and clever and even somewhat formidable. I think he is ridiculous. I love him more than anything in the world.

I told you how he talks. He has never once in his life been quiet when he could be talking. Now that we are married, he talks to me from the next room, or when he’s on the walls with the guard, or three streets away, about the weather and the birds and what the other soldiers had for lunch and whether I think it will rain. When he was sent to the coast on an assignment, he talked to me from the coast. I would be sitting at my press, trying to set a line of gilding, and suddenly there he’d be, telling me about a crab.

When he was gone, he chattered me to sleep. Which, of course, means I can’t even complain about it properly anymore!

I feel some of his questions before he even asks them, and answer him faster than words. When we’re out and there’s a woman who looks too like her, or sounds too like her, or a shadow between the houses looks like it might sprout teeth — he is there, asking if I want him to act like a door. He has never stopped asking, and I have never asked him to stop. Then faster than a tongue can utter the word ‘yes’, he’s there at my shoulder, built like a door, always willing to stand between me and the world.

And then he starts talking about cheese. Or the price of onions, which in fairness are a scandal.

…And yes, I told him he was built like a door. He was absolutely delighted. He calls himself my door now. I told you that he’s absurd.

Sometimes, when things are bad and he’s not there, he asks if I want something else of his instead. And he’ll send me what’s in front of him: the feel of his own hands on the blanket; the sound of the rain on the roof; the cold of the floor under his feet. Something that is here, and now, and not there. He never sends it without asking. I’ve never once said no.

I don’t know how he knew to do that. I asked him once. He said he didn’t know either; he just thought that if I was somewhere bad, I might want to know where he was.

When we first came to Ost-in-Edhil and took the house, I came home one evening and found he’d carved my clan’s marks into the lintel over our door. I asked him what he thought he was doing. He said that if any of them ever came looking, they ought to be able to find me, and that a house with those marks was a house where they were family.

[Interviewer’s note: She stopped for a moment, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief. Then she took a sip of her tea.]

His own father died in the Second Kinslaying. His mother died in the Third. His sister went with the host of the Valar to Valinórë. He has one cousin left that we know of, who has come to visit a couple of times from the Greenwood. So you see, he really is in desperate need of in-laws.

I taught him the greetings, as well as I could. The one for clans that aren’t feuding. The one for kin met on the road. And the one you sing when your own family comes home. He sings that one every time he walks through the door.

He can’t do the low parts. He has decided this is a matter of practice, and so he practices, in the garden, at dawn. The neighbors’ dogs have started joining in. One of the neighbors once came to ask if he was all right. I told them he was just fine.

Between you and me, he’s getting better. Don’t tell him I said that.

The rest is ours.

On Gothmog.

I never met him in Angband, because we were all under the impression that he was dead. Good riddance, I thought.

But you couldn’t escape him there. He was everywhere, the way the dead are in a house where they were loved. Bakharma, who never smiled at anyone, went soft about the eyes when she spoke of him. Orcs who’d served under him would tell you he knew their names; not their unit, their names. The old soldier in the ward told me the Prince once sat on an upturned bucket in the rain for an hour listening to him complain about his boots, and then had his boots replaced. I said that was ridiculous. He said yes, that was the Prince.

They told me he would take another’s punishment on himself if he thought it unjust. A prince! Taking a lashing meant for some soldier he’d never met! I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. And then I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

And they told me something else, more than once, in different words. That if the Prince had been alive, what happened to me would have ended in a week. Someone would have gone to him, and he would have listened, and that would have been that.

I asked Sauron once, here, whether that was true. He said, “Yes.” Nothing else. Not a word.

You must understand what he was to us. He led the host that came over the mountains to burn my city. He killed King Findekáno in the Nirnaeth; in Angband they spoke of that as a great and noble duel, and honored the King for it, which I suppose was something. He commanded every army that ever marched out of that mountain. He was its prince. And at the Fountain, in the last hour of my city, he fought Ecthelion, and Ecthelion died. We sang of Ecthelion. We will always sing of Ecthelion. And the one who killed him is in every one of those songs.

So, yes. Good riddance.

Then, while Sauron was off sulking in Mordor, Gothmog walked into Ost-in-Edhil, very much not dead. He mentioned in passing that Annatar was Sauron, as if everyone knew. He seemed genuinely surprised to learn that some people hadn’t. Sauron is not nearly as subtle as he thinks he is. I hear he sulks if you tell him so.

I went to find him. The Prince, I mean. I told him all of it, every word. I shouted some of it. He listened to the whole thing without interrupting, sitting down so I wasn’t looking up at him, which I also resented. And then I asked him things, and he answered them.

Did he lead the host against Gondolin? Yes. Did he know what would be done with the captives? Most of it. Did he think it was wrong?

He said that, at the time, he did not. He said that he had understood his father as one lord among several, ruling those beneath him as he saw fit, and the lords of the West as no different at their base, only perhaps more fortunate in their numbers and wealth.

I told him that was blasphemy, and a lie besides, and several other things I won’t repeat. He didn’t argue. He said he understood why I would see it so, and that he didn’t expect me to see it any other way.

He didn’t tell me he’d had no choice. He didn’t tell me he’d secretly thought otherwise. He didn’t tell me anything to make himself look better. I kept waiting for it, and it didn’t come.

He said that he was sorry he hadn’t been there. He said he understood that I would never forgive him for Ecthelion, nor for any of the rest, and that he would not ask me to.

Some people say it’s all an act. I don’t think so. Everyone in Angband said this was exactly what he was like.

I did learn one other thing, but only by accident. I’d been thinking about that wretched treatise, and I asked him, out of pure spite, who had decided that forty was the most strokes anyone could be given at once, and why not thirty-nine, or fifty. He said Sauron had written it into the Codes, and that he himself had argued before his father for it. I asked him why forty. He said, “Because my father thought a few hundred was reasonable, or a hundred and twenty with the knout. I saw what that did, and Mairon had data on it. We had to argue him down.” Then he went back to his tea, as if he’d told me what time it was.

I actually felt better after talking to him, and have never forgiven him for that either.

On Assurakûn.

The first thing Assurakûn ever gave me was a biscuit, very hard, and the first thing he ever told me was that my ancestors didn’t want me yet. I wanted to throw the biscuit at him. I didn’t, because my hunger was starting to overcome me, and because I suspected, correctly, that he’d only give me another.

He made a tonic for me, later, when I’d lost too much blood: iron filings steeped in wine. It tastes exactly like licking a sword. No, I have not actually licked any swords. You be quiet. He’d stand by the bed until I drank all of it, and he’d stand there as long as it took, and he had more patience than I did. He kept it in a brown bottle he’d labeled, in his beautiful neat hand, For the Gondolin One, Twice Daily, No Arguments. I argued anyway. It made no difference.

But what you really need to know about Assurakûn is the stones.

There’s an orcish game, played on a board scratched into a plank, with black stones and white, where you try to trap your opponent’s chief before he can reach the edge. Assurakûn played it with the long-term patients, to pass the time, and one evening he asked if I wanted to learn. I said I supposed so. He beat me in about forty moves, very kindly, and explained where I’d gone wrong.

That was his mistake.

I beat him four days later. He was so surprised that he made me play again immediately, and beat me, and then I beat him, and by the end of the week, the whole ward had stopped pretending to sleep so they could watch.

He kept a tally on the wall beside the medicine shelf, in two columns, his and mine, one mark for every game. Bakharma said it was a disgrace to a clinical environment. She said that every week, for years. She never once made him wash it off.

The columns stayed neck and neck the whole time I was in Angband. Whenever I pulled ahead, he’d come back with some dreadful new opening he’d been working on in his head all week, and whenever he pulled ahead, I’d go away and think about nothing else until I’d found the answer. Patients who’d been discharged would come back on their days off to see who was winning. Draumâkil kept a side wager going in the division. By the time I left, both columns had reached the floor and started up again in a second row underneath.

Officially, I was one behind.

I want it recorded that the last game was interrupted before it could be finished, and that I was winning it.

[Interviewer’s note: She was very firm about this. I have recorded it. —S.]

On Bakharma.

Bakharma frightened me more than anyone in that infirmary. She never smiled. She called me “the Gondolin one” for a year. She also knitted.

I don’t knit. I never learned; in Gondolin I sewed, and I embroidered, and I sang, and that was more than enough to be going on with. But I know cloth, and I know handwork, and I can tell you without any knitting at all that Bakharma’s socks were the ugliest things I have ever seen. Lumpy. Uneven. Heels that sat halfway up your ankle. Holes where there should have been stitches, and stitches where there should have been holes. She made them by the dozen and handed them out to every patient in the infirmary, without a word, as if they were bandages, and every one of us wore them, because the infirmary was cold, and they were warm.

I couldn’t stand it. But I wasn’t fool enough to tell her so.

So I asked Draumâkil to come and visit me, the next time I was in, and to bring her knitting. Draumâkil could knit like the Valar themselves had taught her. She sat by my bed and made a sock, a perfect one, smooth as cream, while Bakharma did her rounds. Bakharma went past four times. The fifth time, she stopped, and stood there, and finally asked, very gruffly, what in the name of anyone’s ancestors Draumâkil thought she was doing with that heel.

Draumâkil told her she’d been doing hers wrong for years.

I thought one of them would kill the other. Instead, Bakharma pulled up a stool and sat down, and they argued about heels for an hour, very loudly, in the middle of the ward, while all the patients pretended to be asleep and listened to every word. Draumâkil came back the next week. And the week after. Neither of them ever called it a lesson.

The socks got better. Not beautiful; Bakharma’s socks were never going to be beautiful. But the heels sat where heels should, and the holes went away. And one day, months later, Draumâkil came to visit me wearing a pair of lumpy grey socks I didn’t recognize, and when I asked her about them, she said they were payment, and told me to mind my own business.

She wore them until they fell apart.

I found out, much later, who taught Bakharma to knit in the first place. Someone she’d served with, long ago, by the fires on campaign. I’ve met him since. He’s even worse at it than she was.

On Yarûkh.

Yarûkh was a healer of the fourth rank, and I don’t think I heard him say a hundred words in four years. Not because he was unfriendly. He simply never said anything that didn’t need saying. He’d come and look at your stitches, and nod, and go away, and somehow you’d feel better.

Patients told him everything. I think it was because he never interrupted. Old soldiers would tell him about their battles, and their wives, and their dreadful feet, and he’d sit there and listen, and change their bandages, and say, “Hm.” I once saw a sergeant confess to him, in tears, that he’d been secretly afraid of the dark since childhood. Yarûkh said, “Hm,” and left a lamp burning by his bed every night after that. Nobody ever knew who’d put it there but me.

There was a running wager in the ward about whether he’d taken some kind of vow. Draumâkil said he was saving his words up for something. Assurakûn said he simply didn’t like most of us, which I think was a joke. Bakharma said he was the best healer she’d ever trained, and that if the rest of us talked half as little, we’d get twice as much done, and nobody argued with her.

He said one funny thing in all the time I knew him. One. It was during one of Bakharma and Draumâkil’s arguments about heels, at the very height of it, with the whole ward pretending to sleep. Yarûkh walked past with a basin, and stopped, and said one sentence, very quietly, and walked on.

The ward went completely silent. Then Draumâkil fell off her stool. Bakharma had to go and stand in the corridor. One of the patients laughed so hard he tore his stitches, and Yarûkh came back, without a word, and stitched them up again.

It is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. I’m not going to tell you what it was. You had to be there, and you weren’t.

[Interviewer’s note: I asked her three times. She would not tell me. —S.]

On Gûrzalam.

Gûrzalam was an old soldier in the bed by the wall, with a wound in his side that wouldn’t close and more stories than anyone I’ve ever met. All of them were dreadful. I mean that in every sense: badly told, much too long, frequently obscene, and almost certainly untrue. He told the one about the troll and the wheelbarrow at least once a week for a year, and it was different every time.

He called me “little needle.” I told him not to. He kept doing it.

He also cheated at knucklebones, openly and without shame. If you caught him, he’d say his ancestors had nudged the bones for him, and that it was very rude of me to argue with the dead. I caught him every single time. He never stopped. I think, by the end, the game wasn’t really the point, for either of us.

Sometime in my second year, he decided I was his granddaughter.

He didn’t ask me. He simply started introducing me that way to anyone who came by. “This is my granddaughter, the little needle.” To his visitors, to the other patients, to Assurakûn, to Bakharma, who had known me a great deal longer than he had and said so. He said that didn’t signify; he’d decided, and that was that. When his real grandchildren came to visit, he introduced me to them as their cousin. They took it very well. One of them actually did look part-elvish. And one of them brought me a tiny seed-cake.

So I started calling him Grandfather. In Orcish, properly, the way you’re meant to say it to your mother’s father. The first time I did it, in front of the whole ward, he was so surprised he forgot to cheat, and lost.

When Sauron called me into his office and frostily asked if I wished to give input on the disposal of the items that woman had used on me, or if I would prefer he burn them all, I took the gown, and unpicked every seam of it, and made it into things for the little ones, Gûrzalam’s real grandchildren among them. I have never used a seam ripper with more relish. And out of the last scraps, I made Grandfather a little silk pouch for his knucklebones, so that his ancestors would have somewhere comfortable to sit while they cheated for him. He kept it until the end.

He told me, too, about the Prince: how the Prince had once sat on an upturned bucket in the rain for an hour, listening to him complain about his boots, and had his boots replaced. I’ve told you that one already. It’s the only one of his stories I ever believed. It was the only one that never changed.

And he was there the day she came into the ward. He stood up. He wasn’t supposed to; his wound wasn’t closed, and Assurakûn had told him a hundred times to stay lying down. He stood up anyway, by the wall, and stayed standing the whole time, and I didn’t understand why until long after, when I read the records and found his name.

I asked him about it once. He said he’d only stood up because his back hurt from lying down, and then told me about the troll and the wheelbarrow again.

That time, there were three trolls.

On Surkimâghan.

There was an accountant who saved my life by being annoyed about cloth.

His name was Surkimâghan, and he worked in the stores, and he noticed that my division was drawing fine cloth against no order, and that my ration-tag wasn’t being presented at the hall for days at a time, while my count was being met. Most people would have shrugged. He couldn’t. Numbers that didn’t add up offended him personally. So he kept asking questions, of more and more important people, until one of them was Sauron.

I met him, later, when I was a secretary. He was the most tiresome person I have ever known. He corrected the way I ruled my columns. He corrected the way I wrote my sevens. He once returned a ledger to me with a note pointing out that I’d blotted a single line, and that while it hadn’t affected the figures, it had affected his peace of mind. It’s not hard to see why Sauron listened to him — they both were afflicted by that sort of lunacy.

I thanked him once. Properly, I mean; I went to his desk and told him that I knew what he’d done, and that I owed him my life. He looked at me as if I’d misfiled something, and said that he had only reported a discrepancy. And then he corrected the way I was standing, which was apparently blocking his light.

I read the records, of course, as soon as I could. He didn’t only report a discrepancy. When the Lady found out what he was doing, she caught him in a corridor, and he had to hide for two days before he could get to the Lieutenant. Two days. That fussy little man with his sevens. I never told him I knew. I don’t think he’d have liked it.

Here’s the other thing I know about Surkimâghan, and I’m only telling you because it’s been three thousand years and he can’t possibly mind now. Once, looking for a ruler, I opened the wrong drawer of his desk, and found a book of love poetry. Very old, very worn, and very, very romantic. Full of his notes in the margins.

He came back while I was holding it. I have never seen anyone, orc or elf, turn quite that color.

I put it back, and said I hadn’t seen anything, and he said there was nothing to see. And I never mentioned it again, until now. But afterward, he stopped correcting my sevens.

On Urukišha.

After the captain was sentenced, and before the Lady’s hearings began, I had a visitor in the infirmary I’d never seen before.

She was very old, older than anyone I’d met in Angband, and blind, and carried in a chair by two great-grandsons who looked terrified of her and with good reason. She wore hides with a great ruff of fur at the collar, and glass beads worked into old patterns, and she carried an iron staff that she used mostly to poke the great-grandsons when they went the wrong way. They set her down beside my bed, and she sent them out, and they went so fast they collided in the doorway.

She asked if she could touch my face. I don’t know why I let her. I suppose because she asked. Her hands were very dry and very light. When she was done, she said, “So that’s what you look like,” as if it confirmed something.

She told me she had sat in judgment on the captain, and that while the court sat, it had stood where my clan would have stood, since I had none, and that she had seen to it. I didn’t understand what that meant, then. I understood it later, when I read what she’d said.

Then she asked me what we ate in Gondolin.

I told her. I may have gone on a little. I told her about bread, and honey cakes for the feast of the Gates of Summer, and roasted chestnuts, and pears in wine, and little fried fish from the river with lemon, and I was halfway through describing the cheese when she held up one hand and said that it all sounded very thin.

And then she called one of the great-grandsons back in, and he was carrying a little clay jar, sealed with wax, and holding it at arm’s length.

She told me that her clan had kept the same brine since before any orc was born under a roof. That every generation added to it and drew from it, and that her great-grandmother’s great-grandmother had carried it out of the north, and that there was nothing in it that was not also a little bit of her ancestors. That they put fish in it in the autumn and took them out in the spring. And that she had brought me one, because I was owed a clan’s care, and I didn’t have one yet.

Then she broke the seal.

I don’t know how to describe the smell. The great-grandson had his face buried in his sleeve, and he’s an orc; orcs can smell a cooking fire two valleys away. The patient in the next bed got up and left. And she held it out to me, in her two dry hands, very gravely, and waited.

So I ate it. What else could I do? It was an honor. It was compassion. Her ancestors were in it.

I’m not going to describe that either.

She asked me how I liked it. I said it was unlike anything I’d ever eaten in my life, which was true. She was very pleased. She said that was what everybody said.

Then she asked me to sing something, so I did, and when I’d finished, she said I was much too loud, and to sing it again. So I did. And again. By the third time, she’d fallen asleep in her chair, and the great-grandsons had to come in on tiptoe and carry her out without waking her.

She came back twice more before I was discharged. She brought the jar both times.

On Šunilukkái.

There were balrogs in Angband. You’ve heard the stories, I expect, and most of them are true: they’re enormous, and they burn, and the air goes hot and strange around them, and the first time I saw one in a corridor, I flattened myself against the wall and stopped breathing.

It stepped aside for me.

I nearly dropped my scrolls. Balrogs don’t step aside for anyone. They don’t have to. But this one stopped, and moved to the other side of the corridor, and waited until I’d passed, and only then went on. I found out later his name was Šunilukkái, and that he’d been warden of the Prince’s Guard, and that he’d served the Prince since before the sun. I have thought about that corridor more than I should.

But what I really want to tell you about is the cats.

The secretariat kept cats, for the mice; there’s nothing a mouse likes better than an archive. Yes, I know about granaries, be quiet. They were working cats, and they went where they pleased, and they had all the dignity and none of the manners of a lord of the Noldor. And cats love warmth. And a balrog is among the warmest things in the world.

So the cats loved Šunilukkái.

He’d come to the secretariat sometimes, on some business of the Guard’s, and stand in the doorway while he waited for whatever he’d come for. And the cats would come from every corner of the room. One would climb his leg. One would settle on his shoulder. One, the fat grey one who ran the archive, would drape itself over his other shoulder like a fur collar. And there he’d stand, this great terrible creature of shadow and flame, perfectly still, so as not to disturb them.

Once, he stood in that doorway for an hour after his business was done. Three cats were asleep on him, and he wouldn’t move them, and nobody else had the authority to. Mírlach came past twice and pretended not to see. Namešha laughed so hard he had to go and stand in the corridor. Halkiran very carefully wrote something down; I’d give a great deal to know what.

I don’t know whether balrogs can look embarrassed. If that one could, he most certainly didn’t. Between you and me, I think he liked it.

I’m not sure if the same is true for Sauron, who walked in that day and sneezed. The expression of disgust that followed is the closest thing I saw to a spontaneous expression of emotion from him ever, in all my years in Angband.