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

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Time’s glory is to calm contending kings, / To unmask falsehood and bring truth to light

An extract from Ovid, just because.

Why, rejoice, victor? This victory will destroy you.
Alas, how a single night cost you your kingdom!
Now day had dawned: she sat with hair unbound,
Like a mother who must go to her son’s funeral.
She called her aged father and her loyal husband
From the camp, and both came without delay.
Seeing her condition, they asked why she mourned,
Whose rites she prepared, what ill had befallen her?
She was silent for a long time, and hid her face in her robe
Out of shame: her tears flowed in a running stream.
Her father here, her husband there comforted her tears
And begged her to tell, wept, and trembled in blind fear.
Three times she tried to speak, three times desisted,
And a fourth time, gaining courage, still couldn’t raise her eyes.
She said: ‘Must I owe this to a Tarquin too? Must I speak,
Speak, poor wretch, my shame from my own mouth?’
What she could, she told. The end she suppressed:
She wept, and a blush spread over a wife’s cheeks.
Her husband and her father forgave her being forced:
She said: ‘I deny myself the forgiveness that you grant.’
Then she stabbed herself with a blade she had hidden,
And, all bloodied, fell at her father’s feet.
Even then she took care in dying so that she fell
With decency, that was her care even in falling.
See, the husband and father throw themselves on her body,
Regardless of appearances, grieve for their mutual loss.
Brutus approached, and at last, with spirit, belied his name,
Snatching the weapon from the dying body,
Holding the blade dripping with noble blood,
Fearlessly he uttered these menacing words:
‘I swear by this chaste blood, so courageous,
And by your spirit that will be a divinity to me,
I will be revenged on Tarquin the Proud and his lost brood.
I have concealed my virtue for too long.’
At these words, lying there, she moved her sightless eyes,
And seemed to witness the speech by a stirring of her hair.
They carried her to her funeral, a woman with a man’s courage,
And tears and indignation followed after her.
The gaping wound was seen. Brutus, with a shout,
Gathered the Quirites, and told of the king’s evil act.
Tarquin the Proud and his children fled, a consul took up the rule
For the year: That day was the last day of kingship.

Translated by A.S. Kline.

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From: Sam Park <lilsparky@hotmail.com>
Sent: August 29, 2001, 1:54 AM
To: Len Toller <len.toller@yahoo.com>; Samantha Park <spark3@jacaranda.edu>
Subject: Ter conata loqui ter destitit

Len sweetheart,

I know you felt all of it earlier. I’m sorry. I couldn’t make it into words then, and I didn’t want to keep pouring it into the bond the way I was, so I’m trying to make it into words now, which is apparently the only thing I know how to do. I’ve started this at least three times. If it’s incoherent, that’s why.

The DA’s office finally called back. They’re not moving forward with the charges.

The deputy DA, the one I met with twice, the one who told me across her desk that she believed me, called to say they’d “reviewed the case thoroughly” and decided they “couldn’t meet the burden.” I asked what that meant. She said a jury would have questions. She said I accepted a ride from him. She said I’d had a drink at dinner, earlier, hours earlier, ONE drink, which I told them because they asked and because I was trying so hard to be honest about everything. And she said I admitted — she used the exact word, admitted — that I let him sleep on the couch. OUR couch, in OUR HOME, because he came back and said he was more tired than he thought and didn’t trust himself to drive, and you know how I feel about people driving when they shouldn’t — and what was I supposed to do, make him sleep in his car? Hostis ut hospes init penetralia Collatini: comiter excipitur. So I made up the couch for him and showed him where the guest bathroom was and made sure he knew where to find the stuff for tea and coffee if he wanted it, and then I went to our room and crawled into bed.

And apparently all of that is the reason they can’t prove it wasn’t consensual. She said a defense attorney would make it look like I cheated on you and then lied so you wouldn’t be angry with me. I told her our marriage isn’t like that, you’re not like that, and she said it didn’t matter. Consolantur aegram animi avertendo noxam ab coacta in auctorem delicti: mentem peccare, non corpus, et unde consilium afuerit culpam abesse… I guess no one in the DA’s office ever read Livy.

She said there was “just not enough physical evidence of force.” Quid faciat? Pugnet? Vincetur femina pugnans. Clamet? At in dextra, qui vetet, ensis erat. Effugiat? Positis urgentur pectora palmis, tunc primum externa pectora tacta manu!

She told me I called him ‘darling’ and ‘dear’ in emails. I told her that’s just how I talk. I say that to literally EVERYONE. Sakalkhôr did it too! Most of his correspondence is like that, including with his colleagues! I told her to look at the rest of my emails and she’d see how often I do it, or ask literally anyone, and she told me it wouldn’t help.

She said she was very sorry. She said she believed me, personally. She said that twice, like it was supposed to help.

I asked if I could appeal. She said it doesn’t work like that. It’s their decision, and it’s made.

So that’s it. That’s the whole thing. The report, the exam, the hours of interviews, telling it again and again to people who wrote it down and looked at me like I was some sort of space alien, and the answer is that none of it was enough to even try.

And he gets to just go on. The university won’t do anything, because it happened off campus. I pointed out that students see him alone, and they said they had to respect his rights. So he gets to keep his job, working right over there in poli sci, and I’m supposed to move my office and change my schedule and take a leave of absence if I can’t handle it. He doesn’t even have to stay away from me at work. He only has to stay away from our house. And he still has friends who are my friends, or were, or who haven’t decided yet, which is somehow worse.

‘Per tibi ego hunc iuro fortem castumque cruorem, perque tuos manes, qui mihi numen erunt, Tarquinium profuga poenas cum stirpe daturum. Iam satis est virtus dissimulata diu.’

I keep thinking: I thought I did everything I was supposed to do. As soon as he left, I called 911. I didn’t shower. The police came, and I talked to them. I went to the hospital, and let them do everything. I answered every question, even the ones that made me want to crawl out of my skin. And it still comes out like this.

He gets to live his life, and I get to live with the consequences of his actions. As do you — I know how hard this has been on you, and seeing it breaks my heart. I hate how much of it you had to feel. And I’ll keep on saying this for as long as it takes: None of it was your fault. Not for being away at a conference, not for being unable to reach our 911 dispatch before he was gone, nothing. You don’t control the 911 system, and it’s not designed to take calls from other jurisdictions. You are not the reason no one came; you are the reason I wasn’t alone. And I am not the only victim of what he did that night. I love you more than words can say.

Okay. I’m going to stop, because if I keep going I’ll start crying again, and I can’t type when I’m crying.

So here’s the other thing, because you know this is how I cope, and right now I need very badly to think about something that happened a very long time ago to somebody else.

I finished the pages from the box. The last bundle, the ones in Sakalkhôr’s hand that aren’t in any catalog. Len, these aren’t in ANYTHING. I’ve been through every index of the College material I can get my hands on, and every reference in the secondary literature, and these interviews are nowhere. He never filed them. He kept them. And then you kept them, for three thousand years, and never once mentioned them to me in any of my lives, which I am choosing to find mysterious rather than annoying, but only barely.

As sources, they’re a nightmare. An oral account, given late at night, over (by Sakalkhôr’s own admission) a second bottle of wine, about events three thousand years before. If a student brought me this I’d tell them to be very, very careful.

But the details are good. She describes the secretariat with the senior secretaries seated by the door, and that’s a detail nobody would invent; it’s too boring. And her description of Melkor, in those last years: the foot, the burned hands, the gloves. It matches the traditions, but she isn’t describing a figure out of legend. She’s describing someone she saw in a doorway, wearing his clothes wrong. I don’t think there’s another eyewitness account like it anywhere.

And then there’s the name. Everywhere else, she calls him “Sauron,” and she clearly means it as an insult. In two of these accounts, and only these two, she calls him “Mairon.” Neither she nor Sakalkhôr remarks on it. I’ve read it ten times now. It isn’t an accident; she was much too careful a speaker for that.

The lullaby I can’t stop thinking about. She was a trained singer, and she’s describing an Ainu singing in many voices at once, and she clearly understood exactly what she was hearing. She says it was the most beautiful thing she ever heard. Then Sakalkhôr asks if she ever tried to sing it, and she says no. She doesn’t think she could. She’s never tried. As a historian, I want to know everything about that song. As a person, I think she was right.

I have so many questions for you. Sakalkhôr says you wept when you saw her. You’ve never told me about her, not once, in any of my lives, as far as I can remember. Which, okay, is kind of limited, but still. Will you tell me now? Did Sakalkhôr ever tell you why he didn’t file these? You don’t have to answer any of it. But I’m going to ask anyway, because I’m me.

OKAY. Something nice. I promised myself I’d end on something nice.

I got you the tie. Natural History won, sorry, Met. It’s dark blue, with tiny dinosaur skeletons on it, and if you look closely, one of them is a stegosaurus wearing a little hat. Nobody at the gift shop knew why it was wearing a hat. You’re going to wear it to every conference this year. I’ve decided.

I can’t wait to fly home tomorrow. I have never wanted to come home so badly in my life. All I’ll be thinking about is getting off that plane and seeing you at the gate.

<3333 I love you. Stay up with me if you can. I don’t think I’ll sleep tonight anyway.

Your Sam.

~*~

A document written in the cipher of the historians of Númenor. The longhand form used to transcribe notes into a complete text, not the shorthand cipher used to take the notes. I don’t see a fully decoded form anywhere in the bundle, but I can read this one just fine, and it seems very complete.

I am so tempted to publish a paper one of these days explaining how to decode the ciphers — or at least, some of them. Gods, can you imagine what it would be like for the world to finally be able to read the archives of Númenor, in their true and complete form? It would change so much of what the historical community understands about SO MANY THINGS that happened after the reign of Ar-Gimilzôr. Not to mention that it would finally get that contingent that insists it’s all dummy text just because they can’t crack it to shut up. The only problem would be the methods section — what am I supposed to say? ‘My ancient husband always shares his memories of Sakalkhôr teaching it to him if I ask and not only did it work, it actually jogged my own memory, and anyway here’s what you can do to crack it’?

I guess I could try to get someone (ahem) to publish it after I’m dead (again). Or release the code anonymously on the internet — although, selfishly, I have to admit that I’m really reluctant to give up something like this without getting credit. Especially since it looks an awful lot like I’m going to have to get another job.

…Is it horrible of me to sort of wish he’d hurt me worse? I keep thinking, maybe they would’ve tried if he’d hurt me worse. Maybe then what he did to me would’ve mattered.

I’m sorry. I was trying so hard not to think about it.

The problem with publishing the ciphers is that alongside the archives, you have documents like this. I mean, obviously I’m not about to try and publish this one, I just want you to tell me all about it. That’s different from telling it to the entire world. It’s one thing when I’m writing about some cavalry officer at Vindolanda begging his commander to send more beer, or how the Brittunculi (vae victis to all my British friends, who now have a new nickname) don’t mount in order to throw javelins; it feels different when it’s dealing with the vulnerability of people some part of me can actually half-remember.

<3 Your Sam.

32 Quellë, SA 3267 — conversation with Nárelótë of Eregion.

Stayed up late talking last night (today is the thirty-third of Quellë). She informed my husband that she likes me more than she likes him, then laughed and relented and put a blanket round his shoulders. I am glad the two of them have made up. My husband, the darling sweet fellow with terrible opinions on history, wept when he saw her — he truly thought every one of those who did not make it through the hidden passage was dead. Nárelótë let him know in no uncertain terms how absurd she found this notion — by what stroke of lunacy, she demanded, would a conqueror slaughter every one of those he conquered to a man, leaving none from which to extract labor, or tribute, or taxes, or ransom? No one, she declared with immense confidence, would do such a thing.

No one, indeed.

I refrained from disagreeing with her. It was their time to speak about the fall of the city they once called home, and I did not wish to overshadow it by speaking of the orders I saw Pharazôn give, or the things I saw him do.

But after my husband went to bed, Nárë and I got to talking. We stayed up late into the night, speaking of all manner of strange subjects over two bottles of Dorwinion.

I haven’t figured out what to do with the records of what we talked about. I will not be sharing these, or sending them to the archives.

S.

The senior secretaries sat by the door. I thought it was strange when I first came: Halkiran and Mírlach and the others of the first rank, at their desks right inside the entrance, so that anyone who came in had to go past them first, like doorkeepers. In Gondolin the important people sat furthest from the draught. I supposed it was some old custom. I didn’t think about it again.

The door they sat beside, at the far end of that row of desks, was Sauron’s.

You hardly ever saw him. You heard him. His voice would come through that door, perfectly level, saying somebody’s name, and whoever it was would get up and go, and the door would open for them before they reached it. I never once saw him touch the handle. I’m not sure he knew where it was. Sometimes he didn’t bother with his voice at all, and one of those eyes of his would simply appear in the air, the fiery ones, and hang there over somebody’s desk, looking, until they noticed. You’d be ruling a ledger, and you’d feel it, and you’d look up, and there it would be. You got used to it. You never got used to it.

The lamps in the secretariat never needed oil. Nobody filled them; nobody trimmed them; they just burned. Half the pens wrote by themselves, if he wanted them to. And there was a little black side table, about knee-high, that held his inks and his spare pens and his sand, and it walked. On chicken feet. Scaly, yellow, three toes in front and one behind. It followed him from room to room, and when he wasn’t there, it wandered, and the cats hunted it. You would be working, and a side table would go past at a dead run, with the fat grey archive cat after it, and everyone would go on working as if nothing had happened. If anyone was ever bold enough to ask the Lieutenant about it, and I promise you no one was, the official position was that the table did all of that entirely of its own accord.

[She laughed for some time at this. It was the last time she laughed that night. S.]

The first time I went into his office, I wasn’t sent for. Halkiran gave me a stack of papers to bring him, and I knocked, because I was raised properly. The door didn’t open. Instead, one of the eyes appeared, right in front of my face, at about the height of my nose, and stared at me.

I stared back. I didn’t know what else to do. I’ve thought since of all the things I might have said to it. In the end I explained my business, to an eye, in the air, like a fool, and it listened, I swear it listened, and then it was gone, and the door swung open on its own.

After that, I was sent for. He needed letters written in Quenya, in a proper hand, by someone who wrote it as it ought to look; that was why he wanted me, and not one of the others. He’d send an eye. It would come and hang beside my desk, and I’d sigh and put down my pen and go.

They were letters to the Havens of Sirion, where whoever had escaped my city had gone. I didn’t know, then, who had. I still didn’t know, for a long time after. They offered ransom for captives from Gondolin, by name. He’d dictate, walking back and forth, and I’d write, and the names were people I’d known. A cousin of a friend. A man who sold pears in the market below the Tower of the King. Once, my own teacher’s name. I wrote every one of them in my best hand.

He dictated in Quenya the way you’d find it in a grammar, and when I wrote it the way real people say it, he corrected me. The first time, I argued. He went to a shelf and took down a book, and opened it to the page, and showed me. It was Rúmil. I told him Rúmil was wrong too. He looked at me for a long moment and then dictated the sentence again, his way, and I wrote it his way, and it was wrong. When we finished, he read it over and said, “Adequate.” That was early in my first year in the secretariat, before the lessons. I still wrote things his way, then. I’d learn.

I found those letters, years later, when I was going through the archives. They’d never been sent. They were filed away, every one, sealed, in my handwriting. I don’t know why. I’ve never known.

But I was telling you about the office.

You have to understand that it was the most beautiful room I have ever been in, and I have been in the halls of the King of Gondolin. Every wall was wood, inlaid, from the floor to the ceiling: dark woods and pale woods, ebony and walnut and pear and something almost white, fitted together so closely you couldn’t find the seams. And it was all pictures, and all of them lies. Cupboards stood half open, with books inside, and an hourglass, and a lute with a broken string, and rolled maps tied with ribbon, and none of it was there. The edges were shaded, the way an object is shaded by the light, so they seemed to stand out from the wall; I learned later that you do that by scorching the little pieces in hot sand before you set them. The first time I went in, I reached for one of the books, and my fingers met flat wood. He saw me do it. He didn’t say a word, and I am certain he enjoyed it.

There was one inlaid cat, curled asleep in one of the false cupboards. The real cats hissed at it.

His desk was dark wood, very plain, very fine, and it stood on long legs like a heron’s, grey and jointed. When it was still, it folded them underneath itself, the way a heron does, and sat. When he wanted it somewhere else, it stood up and walked there. His ink was red, a dark red, the color of old blood, and when the light caught it, it shimmered a little. Nobody was allowed to mention that. On a shelf beside the desk were jars of tea, labeled in his hand, and an iron kettle with no fire under it and no hearth anywhere in the room. I wondered about that kettle. I didn’t find out for a long time.

And there were books. A great many books. Among them, more grammars of my own language than I had ever seen in one place, which explained a great deal.

The light came from nowhere. There were no lamps that I could see. It was simply light, warm and even, the way it is on a cloudy day.

There was one more thing.

In the far corner, at an angle so that you couldn’t see it from where he sat, there was an alcove, and in it, a bed.

I noticed it the first time, and every time after. It was the only plain thing in that room. The wood was good, and the joinery was perfect, but it was a little paler than the rest, as if it had been there less long, and there was nothing in it. No pictures. No false cupboards. No cats. Nothing that walked. It was just a bed, a bed fit for a king, with a black coverlet, and the linen turned down beneath it.

The linen still had the creases from the press. It always did. Every time I saw it.

I used to think nobody ever slept there.

[She was quiet for a long while here. S.]

We had rules for if the king ever came. I’d been told them my first week. If you’re not in his way you stand, at once, and bow your head, and you do not raise it until he’s gone. If you’re in his way, you get out of it, and get down on your knees if it looks like he might pass within a desk’s length of you. Closer, your forehead touches the floor. If he addresses you, you prostrate yourself: your body flat on the floor, forehead to the ground, arms extended before you with your hands palms up. The same was true if you addressed him, but it was also understood that you were never under any circumstances supposed to do such a thing. If he sends for you, you don’t go to him; you go and find the Lieutenant first. I learned them the way you learn what to do if there’s a fire. I never thought I’d need them. He hadn’t left the throne room in years, everyone said. He kept his guards around him day and night.

He came alone.

It was an ordinary afternoon. I was ruling a ledger. I didn’t hear him come in; nobody did. I only knew because the room changed. The lamps seemed to go dim, and then everything was lit from the doorway, with a light that wasn’t lamplight, cold and white and gold all at once, and every shadow in the room swung around to point away from it.

I knew who he was immediately. Everyone did. I don’t know how to explain that. You simply knew.

He was very tall. His robe was black velvet, silk velvet, the deepest black I’ve ever seen, the kind that drinks the light, and that was a fortune in dye alone. It was lined with cloth of gold, and the lining showed where it shouldn’t, because it was fastened wrong. Hooks and eyes, all the way down the front, and every one of them caught in the wrong place, so the whole robe hung crooked, pulled tight across him on one side and gaping on the other. I noticed that first. Isn’t that strange? I’ve thought since that I noticed it first because I couldn’t bear to notice anything else.

He wore a mantle over it, lined with sable, and it was slipping off one shoulder, and he didn’t seem to know that either. He had a boot on one foot. On the other, the foot he’d been wounded in long ago, there was only a stocking, black silk, and he walked on that foot as though he’d never once allowed himself a stick. His hands were wrong too. On one, the glove, fine black leather, hung half off his fingers, as if he’d started to pull it off and forgotten. The other was bare; I never saw where its glove had gone. Both hands were burned black, and he didn’t seem to know.

And on his head was the crown.

I won’t describe it. I’ll tell you only that it was iron, and that the light came from it, and that I didn’t look at it, not once, not directly. You understand why. Every one of us who came from my city understood why.

By the door, the senior secretaries were already on their knees, foreheads to the floor. The rest of us stood. I didn’t. My stick was against the wall, out of reach, and I froze in my chair. Namešha hauled me up by the arm and hissed, “Head down,” and I put my head down, and then he didn’t let go. He held on to my arm the whole time, so hard I had bruises the next day, though he knew perfectly well I could stand. I’d stood at a wall for him a hundred times.

Morgoth said, “Where is he?”

He meant Mairon.

Nobody knew whether he’d spoken to us. Nobody moved.

So I saw it all from there. The floor. The hem of my own robes. Feet. Shadows, all of them pointing away from the entrance. I heard more than I saw.

Halkiran was on a ladder. He’d been fetching ledgers from the high shelves, an armful of them, and he was trying to get down. You could hear him trying, the ladder creaking, the books shifting, too slowly. You cannot get down a ladder quickly with your arms full and your head bowed.

The king said, “Stop writing.” Nobody was writing. Every pen in the room had stopped. “Who are you writing to?”

Then he was at the ladder. I saw his shadow move across the floor toward it, very fast. I heard it go over. I heard the ledgers hit the floor, all of them at once, and Halkiran with them, and something in him cracked when he landed. I heard that, too.

He tried to get up. That’s what I remember most. Not to get away; to kneel. I could see the edge of his sleeve from where I stood, and his hand, pressed flat against the floor, trying to push himself up onto his knees so that he could put his forehead to the stone, the way you were supposed to. He never managed it.

The king’s shadow went up the wall, and came down, and went up again. I heard every time it came down. Halkiran didn’t cry out. He made sounds, but not that. Ink had spilled from somewhere, one of the pots on Halkiran’s desk, knocked over when the ladder fell, and it ran across the floor in a thin black line until it reached the edge of what I could see, and stopped there, and after a while there was something else in it that wasn’t ink.

It came and went, in bursts, the way a storm comes and goes. He’d stop, and the room would hold its breath, and he’d say, to nobody, “He always comes when I call. Why hasn’t he come?” Once he said, “It’s too loud in here.” There wasn’t a sound in that room but him. And then it would start again.

Then Mírlach moved.

She was the most senior of us after Halkiran, and the least fond of people. She never smiled; she corrected everyone’s ruling, mine more than anyone’s. She went forward from beside her desk on her knees, not quickly, and I saw her robes go past the edge of what I could see, and then I saw her go all the way down, her body flat on the floor, her face against the stone, her arms stretched out in front of her with the palms open. She was lying between him and Halkiran.

She said, “Lord of All, your servant begs leave to send for the Lieutenant.”

Her voice came up off the stone, a little muffled, and it was exactly the same as when she read out the minutes.

He said, “Send for him? You know where he is.” And then, quieter: “He’s mine.”

I heard the blow. I saw her slide across the floor, into the leg of a desk.

And then I watched her get back up onto her knees, and go back to the same place, and lie down flat against the stone again, between them. And she said it again, word for word, and her voice was thick, and it was perfectly steady. “Lord of All, your servant begs leave to send for the Lieutenant.”

That was when Orndae went.

She was the newest of us, a copyist, the one who’d spilled the sand into the Lieutenant’s correspondence. Part elf and part orc, and so small you could lose her behind a stack of paper. I saw her out of the corner of my eye. She went along the wall, behind him, close enough to touch his cloak, and out of the door, and I don’t think anyone breathed until she was through it.

I’ve thought about that a great deal. She had to go nearer to him to go past him. Nobody told her to. She just went.

It felt like an hour. Namešha told me later it was less time than it takes to sing a verse.

Mairon was there before Orndae was.

I don’t know how. I’ve never known. I heard no footsteps in the corridor, and Orndae can’t have reached the quiet rooms and come back in the time it took. But the light in the room changed again, and there was a second light in it now, warmer, the color of a forge, and at the edge of what I could see, there were his boots. The Lieutenant’s boots. Orndae came in a long moment afterward, so out of breath she had to hold the doorframe, and went down on her knees where she was.

He said, “My lord.”

That was all, at first. His voice was perfectly ordinary. It was the voice he used to read out the day’s orders.

Then he said, “That is my secretary, my lord. What has he done?”

The king stopped. I heard him stop. Everything stopped. And then, I think, he forgot that there was anyone else in the room. I couldn’t see his face. But I could see his shadow, and it had turned, all of it, toward the Lieutenant, and it didn’t move again.

Mairon didn’t ask a second time.

He went to him. I heard him cross the floor, past Mírlach where she lay, past Halkiran. And when he spoke again, it was a voice I had never heard him use, and never heard again. It was very soft.

“Look at you,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

The king said nothing.

“You could have called for me.”

I raised my head then. Not far. As far as I dared, which was not very far at all, and Namešha’s hand tightened on my arm until I thought the bone would bend. But I saw.

He took the king’s hand, the one with the glove hanging half off it, and drew the glove back up over the fingers, carefully, one at a time, the way you’d dress a child’s hand on a cold morning.

Then he took the other hand, the bare one, in both of his, and lifted it.

The skin was black, all of it, dry and hard as old leather, and it had cracked across the knuckles where the fingers bent, and the cracks were red. It must have hurt him terribly. He hadn’t seemed to feel it at all, the whole time. Not until Mairon touched it. Then the fingers closed, very slowly, around Mairon’s.

Mairon bent his head and kissed it.

Then he said, very low, “Come. It’s quieter in my rooms.” And he led him across the room, past all of us, to the door of his office. The king went with him the way a sleepwalker goes. The light went with them. The door closed.

Nobody moved for a long time after that. Then everybody moved at once.

Someone ran for the healers. Someone else knelt by Halkiran and didn’t touch him, because nobody knew where it was safe to touch him. Namešha let go of my arm at last, and I found I couldn’t feel my fingers.

They carried Halkiran out on a board, and he didn’t wake.

Mírlach would not be carried. She got up off the floor by herself, with her nose broken and her lip split and blood all down the front of her robe, and stood there swaying a little until she was sure of her feet. Two of the third rank tried to take her arms, and she looked at them until they let go. Then she walked out of the secretariat on her own feet, holding a handkerchief to her face, and on the way past the copyists’ desks, she stopped, and pointed at somebody’s ledger, and told him his ruling had gone crooked in the third column. Then she went to the infirmary.

Later that afternoon, the Lieutenant’s door opened.

Only a little. Only wide enough. Nobody went near it. And out came the side table, on its chicken feet, very carefully, carrying the iron kettle from his office, with steam coming out of the spout, and a jar of tea.

It went to Uzhunahhan, who was the most senior of the upper ranks left in the room, and stood in front of him until he took the kettle and the jar. Then it turned and went across the room to the door, where Orndae was still sitting on the floor where she’d fallen, and stood in front of her, and opened its drawer.

There was a piece of black nougat in it, wrapped in paper. The good kind, with almonds, from the south.

Orndae just stared at it. She told me afterward she was afraid to touch it. So the table took a step closer. Then another. Then it nudged her knee with the open drawer, quite firmly, the way a dog does when it wants you to throw something. She took the nougat. The drawer shut itself. And the table turned around and trotted back into the office, and the door closed behind it.

I never got so much as a crumb from that table, and I’m still a little bitter about it.

Uzhunahhan made tea for all of us, there in the secretariat, from a kettle with no fire under it that had come out of a room with no hearth. I didn’t think about that, then. I was too glad of the tea. It was a long time before I learned how that kettle was heated, and understood that he’d heated it that afternoon, in there, with the king beside him, and sent it out to us.

The door stayed closed until morning. When it opened, the Lieutenant was at his desk as if nothing had happened. My arm was purple where Namešha had held it.

I went to the infirmary that evening, to bring Halkiran his quilt.

He was awake. And the Lieutenant was there, sitting beside the bed, holding a cup of tea so that Halkiran could drink without lifting his head. I stopped in the doorway. Neither of them saw me. I heard the Lieutenant say one word to him, very quietly. He said, “Good.” I never heard him say it to anyone else, before or after.

Then he got up and went, and passed me in the doorway without a glance, as if I weren’t there. Perhaps I wasn’t, to him, just then.

I put the quilt over Halkiran’s feet. He looked at it, and at me, and didn’t say anything. Neither did I.

Mírlach was back at her desk four days later, long before the healers wanted her there. Her nose was never quite straight again. She never mentioned it, and nobody ever dared to.

And I finally understood why the senior secretaries sat by the door.

The next time the Lieutenant sent for me, I looked at the alcove. I couldn’t help it. The bed was made, the coverlet smooth, and the linen still had the creases from the press.

It always did.

[She did not say anything more about that day, and I did not ask. S.]

—

There was another time. When the war in the West was truly starting to turn, and everyone knew how it was going, and nobody said so.

An eye came for me one morning, the way they always did, and hung beside my desk until I sighed and put down my pen. When I went in, the writing desk came trotting out of its corner to meet me. Did I tell you about that? He kept a little desk in his office for whoever was taking dictation, so we wouldn’t have to write on our knees. It had chicken feet, like the side table. It came when you came in, and settled in front of your stool, and folded its feet under itself like a hen on a nest. I was never sure whether we were meant to find that charming. I did, a little. I never told him so.

He was walking up and down while he waited for me, the way he did when he dictated. And I should tell you how he dressed, because you won’t understand any of the rest if I don’t.

He wore black, always. Not the black of our robes in the secretariat, which was good enough, but went a little brown in strong light, the way cheap black does. His was the true black, the kind that drinks the light. The robe was fitted close through the body and crossed over at the breast, right over left, and at the collar you could see the edges of everything he wore beneath it, one inside the other, like the leaves of a closed book: a band of black velvet, a band of black damask, and innermost, a narrow line of white linen, worked all along its edge in tiny black stitches, squares and knots and little stars. I asked a merchant of the Edain about that embroidery once, years later, here. He’d never seen anything like it.

The velvet was cut in a pattern, so that when he turned, the light caught some places and not others, and you saw flowers you hadn’t known were there. At the waist, a belt, buckled like a man’s sword belt, with a pen case of tooled leather hanging from it, and a little inkhorn. From the waist down, the robe fell in pleats, a great many pleats, to about the middle of his calf, with trousers and boots beneath. Riding clothes, really. Walking clothes. He could have taken the stairs three at a time in them, and I suspect he often did, when nobody was looking.

His forearms were bound in cuffs of black leather from the wrist almost to the elbow, lacquered until they shone, and closed with a row of small black buttons, so his sleeves would never touch the ink.

And the pleats. I counted them once. Forty-four. And every one of them, on the inside, where you couldn’t see it, was dyed red. Not a bright red. The red of his ink, the color of old blood. When he stood still, he was black from his collar to his boots. When he walked, the pleats opened, and the red showed in the depths of them, a flicker at every step, and closed again.

He was walking that morning. I remember the red.

He was writing to the host that had come out of the West. I didn’t know, then, what the letter was for. It wasn’t a demand. It wasn’t a threat. It was very careful, and very courteous, and it was addressed to the captains of that host by their titles, in proper Quenya, and some of those titles I knew. I wrote it as he said it, and he walked, and the red came and went, and I think he had got as far as the third page when he stopped.

He stopped in the middle of a word. My pen was still above the page.

Nobody had come in. There had been no knock, no messenger, no sound at all. He stood there in the middle of the room, quite still, with his head a little turned, as if he were listening. And then he said, very quietly, to no one in the room, “I’m coming.”

The heron desk folded its legs and sat down. My little desk backed away from me, into its corner, and tucked its feet under itself. The cats were already gone; I hadn’t seen them go. And the light in the room went dimmer. I’m almost sure of that.

He went out. The door opened for him. It stayed open until I left, then closed behind me.

He was gone three days.

The door stayed shut all that time, and no eyes came. The side table waited outside his door, and wouldn’t move from it, not for anyone; the archive cat came and sat down in front of it and stared at it for most of an afternoon, and it didn’t so much as twitch a toe. And the senior secretaries drank their tea cold. I noticed that, and didn’t understand it. Three days of cold tea, and not one of them complained, and not one of them explained.

On the fourth morning, the door was open, and he was at his desk.

He didn’t send an eye for me. He sent the side table, with a note in its drawer, in that red ink: my name, and nothing else.

When I went in, he was sitting at the heron desk, and he didn’t get up, and he didn’t walk. He was dressed differently. His robe went all the way to the floor, and there was more of it: layer over layer, damask over velvet over silk, and over all of it a long, loose outer robe of black velvet that fell straight from his shoulders and hid the shape of him entirely. His collar was fastened up to the throat, a high, stiff band, closed with two small buttons under the chin. He always came back from the throne room fastened to the throat; we’d all noticed that, years before. That was nothing. But he wasn’t wearing the cuffs. His sleeves were long, and loose, and they fell over his hands, and his hands lay in his lap, and he never lifted them.

He didn’t move at all. Not once, in all the time I was there. So there was no red.

The light was dimmer. I remember the walls most. All those false cupboards, the books and the lute and the sleeping cat: they need good light, you understand, to look real, because it’s the shading that does it, and in that dim light they had all gone flat. You could see that they were only wood.

The pens wrote by themselves the whole time. I’d seen him do that a hundred times, to show off. That day, I don’t think it was showing off. The side table poured him a cup of tea, and set it beside him. He didn’t touch it. It was still there, cold, when I left.

He dictated a notice about winter rations for the elvish thralls in the lower forges. In short sentences, and quietly; his voice was very soft. And I wrote it the way it ought to be written, the way it’s spoken, and waited for him to correct me, and he didn’t. Not once. I wrote the whole thing my way, and he read it over, without lifting it, and said, “Adequate,” and let it stand.

Two days later, an eye appeared over Orndae’s desk, and she jumped so hard she knocked over her sand. And somewhere behind me, I heard Namešha let out a breath.

He never went back to the letter to the host of the West. I found it in the archives, in the last years, when I was going through them for something else. Three pages, in my own hand. It stops in the middle of a word.

So did a great many things, those last years.

[She poured herself more wine here, and then, after a moment, poured more for me. S.]

—

I saw Morgoth one more time.

It was at the very end. The host from the West was at the gates, or near enough; you could feel it in the stone, a shudder now and then that came up through your feet, and dust sifting down from the ceiling onto the ledgers. Half the secretariat had been sent elsewhere, to the forges or the walls or the stores, and the rest of us were copying what we were told to copy or helping to seal things up in the archives, and nobody talked.

Sometimes, when the Lieutenant was in the throne room, one of the senior secretaries went up and waited outside the door. I’d known that for years. I’d never asked why.

That day it was Mírlach. A runner came down from her in the afternoon, a boy from the guard, out of breath, with a message: a blanket, and quickly. There was only one blanket in the secretariat, and that was Halkiran’s quilt, and Halkiran had gone down to the lower archives that morning and not come back. Everyone else was elbow-deep in something. I was the only one with my hands free.

So I took the quilt off the back of his chair and folded it over my arm, and went.

I had never been that far up. Nobody went that far unless they had to. The corridors got wider as you climbed, and higher, and colder, and emptier. There used to be guards on every landing, everyone said. There were none now. Once, the whole mountain shook, and I stopped with one hand on the wall and waited for it to pass, and when it had, I could hear something very far above me, like a great many people shouting, or like the sea.

The last stair opened into a hall so wide that I couldn’t see its sides. There was no one in it.

At the far end were the doors.

On either side of them, the mountain had been carved into a beast. Each was a bull, taller than three men, with great folded wings and a man’s face, bearded, crowned, looking straight ahead. They had been cut from the rock of the walls and never separated from it. From the front, each stood on two legs, square and still. From the side, it was striding, and had four more. I counted five legs, from where I stood.

Between them, the doors were wood, black, and bound across with bands of iron, one above the other from the floor to far above my head, and every band was a picture. Armies marching, in ranks, every soldier the same. Towers, and ladders against them, and men falling from the ladders. Lines of captives, roped at the neck, walking. Peoples bringing gifts: horses, cloth, bowls heaped with something, a bear on a chain. And at the center of the doors, larger than any of it, the king, climbing a mountain, with the bodies of his enemies under his feet and the stars above the peak. There were three bright stones set into his crown.

The right-hand door hung from a single hinge. Its top corner had come away from the frame and dropped, so that the whole leaf leaned inward, and the king on it leaned with it, his mountain tilted, his stars askew. The frame beside it was split from top to bottom.

Through the gap, just inside, in the shadow of a column, there was a faint light, standing very still. It was Mírlach. She saw me, and came forward a little, out of the shadow, and the light from inside the room caught her face, and the little crook in her nose that had been there ever since.

I went in. Only a few steps. It felt very strange.

She held out her arms for the quilt, and I gave it to her. And while she was taking it from me, I looked.

The floor was black stone, polished until it was like water, so that everything in the room stood on its own reflection. Channels had been cut into it, running the length of the hall in straight lines, and fire ran in them, low and steady, without smoke. It was the coldest room I have ever been in. My breath showed.

The columns were black, and each one was many-sided, like the cells of a honeycomb stood on end, and they stood in ranks, close together, the way they grow in the rock; I learned later that they do grow that way, in fire-mountains, and that someone had only to cut the mountain away from them. They went up, and up, past the reach of the light, and I couldn’t see where they ended. I couldn’t see a roof at all.

Along the walls, cut into the rock, another procession was walking toward the far end of the hall, people after people, each in their own dress, carrying gifts. Between the columns hung tapestries, very old and very fine, in gold and red and black, too far and too dim for me to make out. Except one.

It lay on the floor. It had come down from its hooks, and nobody had put it back, and it lay in a long heap between two columns, half unrolled. What I could see of it was a great pillar of light, falling, and fire beneath it, and the sky behind it torn. Around the border were beasts. I don’t know what they were. Lizards, I’d have said, but as big as houses, some with crests along their backs, some with long necks like swans, some with feathers. They were running from the fire. One was looking back at it.

One of the columns, near the fallen tapestry, was cracked, a single black line running down it from higher than I could see to the floor.

At the far end of the hall, steps rose to a dais, a great many of them, and on the steps were furs: black and brown and white. Above the steps, very high, was the throne. It was the mountain: it came up out of the rock behind it, the same rock, the same black, as if it had always been there and someone had found it. Behind it hung a cloth of black velvet, worked in gold. Nobody was sitting on it.

The light in that room didn’t come from the throne, or from the fire. It came from the floor, at the foot of the steps, and it was white, and it threw the shadows of the columns upward.

There was someone singing.

I had been hearing it, I think, since I came through the door, the way you hear water in a house and don’t know you’re hearing it until you stop to listen. It was very soft. It filled the whole room anyway; the stone carried it, up the columns and out into the dark where the roof should have been, and back down again.

It had no words. Not in any language I know, and I know a good many. I’m not convinced there were words in it at all, maybe only sounds, the kind you sing to a child who’s too young for words, over and over, rising and falling. A lullaby. You’d know it for one anywhere, in any tongue. Every people has them, and they’re all the same shape.

And it was sung in more voices than I could count.

You have to understand what that means, to someone like me. The great singers of my people sing that way: three voices from one throat, four, the best of them five, woven together so that you hear a whole choir in one singer. It takes centuries to learn, and most never do. I never could. I’ve told you that. I have one voice. So I know, better than most, what I was hearing. Every one of those voices was moving on its own, and every one was true, and they came together and parted and came together again without ever once losing each other. There was no strain in any of it. No reaching. And every one of those voices was gentle, every one, all the way down to the lowest, which I felt in the floor more than I heard.

It was the most beautiful thing I have ever heard.

At the foot of the steps, on the bare stone, the crown was standing upright. The light came out of it. Beside it were the two of them.

Mairon was sitting on the floor, with his back half against the lowest step, below the furs. His hair was down and tangled across his shoulders and his face. He had a loose robe of black velvet pulled close around him, over his chest. One bare foot showed below its hem, on the stone, with a sliver of his ankle above it. A little way off, on the floor, one of his boots was standing by itself, quite upright, as if he’d stepped out of it and gone somewhere. I didn’t see the other. There was a shadow along his jaw, half under his hair, that might have been the light. His eyes were closed. He looked tired.

The king was kneeling in front of him, bowed down over him, the whole great length of him folded, with his face pressed against Mairon’s breast and his arms around him, holding on. He held on the way a child holds on to its mother. His hair spread out over both of them and over the stone. His hands were bare. I could see them where they gripped the back of the velvet, black, and cracked across the knuckles.

Mairon had one hand on the king’s back, at his shoulder. The other was in his hair, moving through it, slowly.

He was the one singing.

Mírlach turned, with the quilt over her arms, and went toward them across the black floor, and the faint light of her went with her. She didn’t look back at me. She didn’t need to.

I turned around and went out through the broken door, past the king on his tilted mountain, and down the stairs. I didn’t run. You don’t. But I went down a great deal faster than I’d come up, and the singing came down with me for a long way, fainter and fainter, the stone carrying it, until I couldn’t tell any more whether I was hearing it or remembering it.

When I got back to the secretariat, I sat down at my desk and copied what I was told to copy.

Halkiran asked me the next day where his quilt was. I told him Mírlach had it. He looked at me for a moment, and didn’t ask again. I went and brought him an extra quilt I’d made from scraps a long time ago, when I was a seamstress, because the rows were cold and we were only issued the one blanket. I never asked for it back.

[I asked her whether she had ever tried to sing the song she heard. S.]

No.

I don’t think I could. One voice of it, perhaps, if I tried. Not the rest.

I’ve never tried.

---

Chapter End Notes

Sam’s Latin quotations come from two classical accounts of the rape of Lucretia by the king's son Tarquin, the story that Roman tradition held led to the overthrow of Rome’s kings and the founding of the Republic. Most are from Ovid’s poem Fasti (Book 2) (English; Latin); one is from the historian Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita (Book 1) (English; Latin). The Ovid in particular I find has a way of staying with me.

• Subject line (Ovid, Fasti 2.823): Ter conata loqui ter destitit. "Three times she tried to speak, three times she stopped."
• On the couch (Ovid, Fasti 2.787–8): Hostis ut hospes init penetralia Collatini: comiter excipitur. "He enters the home of Collatinus, an enemy in the guise of a guest: he is graciously received."
• On consent (Livy 1.58.9): Consolantur aegram animi avertendo noxam ab coacta in auctorem delicti: mentem peccare, non corpus, et unde consilium afuerit culpam abesse. "They attempt to console her, distracted as she was in mind, by turning away the guilt from her, who was forced, onto the perpetrator of the crime; that it is the mind sins, not the body; and that where there was no intent, there is no guilt."
• On “physical evidence of force” (Ovid, Fasti 2.801–4): Quid faciat? Pugnet? Vincetur femina pugnans. Clamet? At in dextra, qui vetet, ensis erat. Effugiat? Positis urgentur pectora palmis, tunc primum externa pectora tacta manu!" "What can she do? Fight? A woman fighting will only be overcome. Cry out? But in his right hand he held a sword to silence her. Flee? Her chest is held fast by his pressing hands—the first time a stranger’s hand had ever touched her breast." (The exclamation point in the Latin is Sam's editorial addition.)
• On the actions taken and not taken (Ovid, Fasti 2.841–4): Per tibi ego hunc iuro fortem castumque cruorem, perque tuos manes, qui mihi numen erunt, Tarquinium profuga poenas cum stirpe daturum. Iam satis est virtus dissimulata diu. "By this brave and pure blood—I swear it—and by your departed spirit, which shall henceforth be a divine power to me, I vow that Tarquin, along with his entire lineage, shall pay the penalty. Too long has my true mettle remained concealed." The oath sworn by Brutus to revenge Lucretia's rape.

(The author cobbled these translations together from various English editions and Google translate, as the author has no Latin. The author begs the gentle reader's forgiveness for any unintended errors.)