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

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An ending.

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52 Quellë, SA 3267

Sakalkhôr of Númenor, historian, to his darling Nárelótë of Eregion, who will never let him hear the end of it if he doesn’t use this antiquated form of address, even though he is a modern man of the isles and is not, unlike her, PRACTICALLY OLDER THAN THE SUN, all greetings and good will—

No, seriously, do I still have to do this? It was more fun when I was writing letters to my schoolmates, who didn’t write back and CORRECT MY GRAMMAR. Yes, of course I speak Quenya like it’s from books! It’s a dead language in Númenor! There hasn’t been an elf on the isle in… technically only five years, fine, but before that it had been a full hundred and sixty! That’s a long time for humans! And Tyelpë was only there for what, an hour? Two? Exactly as long as it took him to show up, demand his husband, and leave with him, during most of which, I understand, he addressed everyone not in Quenya but in Adûnaic, and fluently enough to leave the court quite flustered. And even if he had spoken Quenya, I have PERSONALLY heard you say that his barely counts as a proper sample, þince he þoundþ like thiþ! Þo there!

And yes, I am going to call him Tyelpë when I am speaking Quenya, because he has told me twice that “Tyelperinquar” makes him feel like he’s talking to his father. And no, I am not currently calling him “Lord,” because he has asked me not to, and has done so more recently than the last time his husband threatened me with death for failing to address him by his title. You, dearest friend, may be in charge of ensuring I do not offend Tar-Mairon/Annatar/Whatever his name is today any more than one must by simply existing in his vicinity, but I am still in charge of keeping myself in the good graces of Celebrimbor, and I am doing my best to keep him happy. (And why am I not allowed to write to you in Sindarin? You’re married to a Sinda! And my Sindarin is factually more in need of practice than my Quenya, no matter what you think!)

But all of that is neither here nor there.

I have the feeling this letter will reach you long after the news it brings, which means I am writing it almost entirely to insist that you tell me all about your reaction. Within my lifetime, Nárë darling. I will be absolutely furious if you forget to tell me until after I am dead. I assure you that I will haunt you, and there is no disciplinary slip in the world that can stop me. Consider this your strongly worded encouragement to tell me promptly. Why not as soon as you receive this? You could start right now!

But on the off chance that my courier is faster than the subject of my tidings, and because she is not leaving until tomorrow morning (if she can, given the floods), and because I know how you feel about being given only half a story, dear talkative magpie, I shall tell you about the most fascinating chance encounter my husband and I had on the road last night.

You will recall that we left you in high spirits and a light drizzle, my husband on his good grey mare and I on that piebald monster the stable in Ost-in-Edhil insisted was “placid,” which it is, in the same way a sack of rocks is placid, until you need it to move. The drizzle lasted two days. On the third it became rain, and on the fourth it became the sort of rain that makes one reconsider every decision that led one out of doors, and by the time we came down out of the hills toward Tharbad, the whole sky had settled onto the land like a wet cat onto a lap and refused to leave.

Have you ever been to Tharbad, Nárë? I suspect not; I suspect you have more sense. Let me describe it to you anyway, because I have been sitting in it for a day and a half now and I must have SOMETHING to show for it.

You come down off the last of the hills and the land simply gives up. It goes flat and brown and wet, all at once, reeds and sedge and standing water as far as the eye can see, with little islands of willow and alder sticking up out of it like the heads of swimmers. It is not, I am told, supposed to look like this. The old woman who runs the ferry house (I shall come to her; she deserves her own paragraph, possibly her own volume) informs me that her grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother remembered when the hills were forest from here to the mountains, oak and beech so thick you could walk a day without seeing the sky, and that it was my people who cut them down for our ships, and that this is why the rain now runs straight off the hills and into her kitchen. She told me this while handing me a bowl of soup. I said I was very sorry. She said it was a bit late for that, and gave me more soup. I have been thinking about it ever since.

Through all this marsh runs a road. A causeway, rather, raised up above the wet on great blocks of dressed stone, wide enough for two carts to pass, perfectly straight, and very obviously built by someone from home: it has the look of every Númenórean harbor wall I ever leaned on as a boy, as if the stones themselves were faintly offended by their surroundings. It runs on for miles across the fens, with the water lapping at both sides, and at the end of it, on a hump of higher ground that is the only dry place for a league in any direction, sits the ferry house. And beyond the ferry house is the river.

I have seen a great many rivers, darling. I have never seen one this angry. The Greyflood was not grey when we came to it; it was the brown of strong tea, and it was moving faster than a horse could gallop, and it was carrying things. Branches. Whole trees, roots and all, turning over and over like a child’s toys in a bath. Once, a hen house. (Empty, I hope.) The noise of it was everywhere, a great endless roar under everything, so that you felt it in your teeth. My husband, who of course hears none of it, said he could feel it in the ground through his boots, and that he did not like it, and for once in my exceedingly contrary life I did not argue.

The ferry is a great flat barge, broad as a barn floor, which in sensible weather is hauled back and forth across the water on a cable as thick as my arm. In this weather, it sits on the near bank, chained to an enormous post, with the cable drawn up out of the water and coiled like a sleeping serpent, and the ferrymen sit in the ferry house and refuse to move it for anyone. We were told this by a young man of about fourteen with tremendous eyebrows, who informed us that his uncles had taken the last crossing at noon and nearly lost the barge doing it, and that his grandmother had then said a word to them which he was not permitted to repeat, and that there would be no more crossings until the river said otherwise. I asked when that might be. He looked at the river, and then at me, with deep pity, as if I had asked when the sun might be persuaded to rise in the west.

So we stayed.

The ferry house itself is built of stone below and timber above, very old, very thick, and very low, as if it is crouching against the weather, which I suppose it is. The roof is reed thatch, heavy and dark with rain and furred green at the eaves, with a hole at the peak where the smoke goes out, or is meant to. Inside it is all one long hall. A hearth runs down the middle of the floor, a long trench of stone with a fire burning along half its length, and above it, from the rafters, hang fish, and sausages, and bunches of herbs, and a great many wet cloaks steaming gently, so that the whole place smells of peat smoke and wet wool and drying fish and thyme. Along both walls are wide sleeping platforms, piled with sheepskins and straw-filled mattresses, and above them a loft for the family. At the far end, behind a wattle screen, are the animals: the family’s cow, two goats, our horses, and some chickens who have opinions about the horses. You eat at a long table by the fire, and you sleep in a row with strangers, and nobody minds, because outside is the river.

It is dark, and it is crowded, and it is smoky enough to cure a ham, but it is still better by far than some accommodations I’ve had.

We were not the only ones caught, of course. The river had been rising for two days, and the ferry house had been filling up the way a net fills with fish, and by the time we arrived it held a small and peculiar congregation.

There was my courier, Gellín, whom you will meet when she hands you this letter, and who is a young woman of the Edain from somewhere near the Baranduin with a face like a closed door and a seat on a horse like she was born on one. She had ridden down with us so as to carry my letters north from here, which at the time seemed an efficient arrangement, and now means that she has spent a day and a half watching me write, which I do not think was in her contract. She is playing knucklebones with the boy with the eyebrows. She is winning. I believe she is cheating. I have decided not to look into it.

There was a priest of Ossë. I want you to imagine him, darling, because he is a delight: a tall, weathered, tremendously bearded man from somewhere on the southern coast, in robes that were once sea-blue and are now the color of the bottom of a harbor, with little shells and bits of sea-glass braided into his beard, so that he clicks faintly when he walks. He has been traveling the rivers for twenty years, he says, blessing the crossings, because Ossë takes an interest in all the water that ends up in his sea, whatever Ulmo might say about it. He spent most of yesterday afternoon standing on the bank in the pouring rain, shouting at the river. Not praying. Shouting. He told it, among other things, that it was a disgrace to its father, that it was showing off, and that if it did not calm down he would personally see that Ossë heard about it. The river paid him no attention whatsoever. He came in soaked to the skin, very cheerful, and said it had been a good conversation, and that rivers in flood are like young men in love: there’s no reasoning with them, but they like to be told. I thought of you. I think you would get along.

And there were two Dwarves, out of Khazad-dûm, going south with four ponies and a great many very heavy, very well-lashed crates which they would not discuss. One of them is broad and silent and has, as far as I can tell, not stopped mending a single harness strap since we arrived. The other is younger, and talks, mostly to my husband, which surprised me until I understood why. The Dwarves have a language of the hands, it seems, a secret one, and he had noticed my husband signing to me across the table, and could not leave it alone. He wanted to know where it came from, and what it was for, and whether my husband had learned it or been born to it, and whether it was the same among all the Elves. My husband told him all of this very patiently, in the way he tells everything, and then asked, very politely, whether he might see a little of theirs in return. The young Dwarf went red to the roots of his beard. The old one put down his harness strap and looked at him. And that, so far as I can tell, was the end of that.

My husband says he is going to find out anyway. He says he has been told no about a great many things over a great many years, and that very few of the things he’s been told no about have stayed secret. I believe him. I also believe the old Dwarf knows exactly what he’s thinking, and I am very much enjoying watching the two of them not look at each other.

So that was the company, as the light went out of the second day: the ferry family about their business; my courier fleecing a child at knucklebones; the priest, steaming gently by the fire with his beard clicking; two Dwarves with their mysterious crates; my husband plotting; and me, at the end of the table with a candle and my ink, writing to you.

And then the door opened, and the rain came in, and something behind it groaned like a ship’s timbers in a gale.

It was, as it turned out, a camel.

I did not know that at first. At first I knew only that the door had blown open, and that a great deal of rain and darkness had come in through it, and that out of the darkness came a noise I can only describe as what you would get if you poured a sack of gravel down a well and the well objected. It went on for some time. Every head in the hall turned. The cow, behind her screen, said something I refuse to try and render in Quenya because I would do so in the style of my native language and you, my dearest, would undoubtedly correct me on it. One of the chickens fell off its perch.

Then a figure came in out of the rain, ducking under the lintel, and then another, and another, and I realized they were orcs: five travelers in long cloaks of grey felt, so heavy with water they hung like wet sails, hoods pulled low, with a great shaggy dog pushing in between their legs and shaking itself all over the priest. The last of them came in leading on a rope the source of the noise, or rather its head, which was all that would fit through the door.

You will have seen camels, perhaps? I had, or thought I had. There are camels at Umbar, and a pair of them used to live in the menagerie at Armenelos when I was a boy: tall, haughty, one-humped creatures with legs like a heron’s and the expression of a duchess at a bad party. This was not that. This was a camel the way a bear is a dog. It was enormous, and shaggy, and dark brown, with a coat as thick as a sheepskin rug hanging off its neck and its forelegs in great matted ropes, and on its back, when they finally coaxed it in sideways through the stable door at the far end, were TWO humps. Two! Like a pair of hills! I was so astonished that I said so, aloud, to the room, and the largest of the orcs, a very tall, very broad, very quiet person who was leading it, looked at me for a long moment and then said, in excellent Westron, “Yes.”

There were three of them, it turned out: the big two-humped one, a smaller one of the same sort, and a third that was something in between, with one long lumpy hump like a badly packed bedroll and the temper of a tax collector. I asked the quiet orc whether it was a different kind. He said it was a cross. I asked between what. He said, between a camel with one hump and a camel with two. I said I had not known that was possible. He looked at the camel, and the camel looked at him, and I had the distinct impression that they had both been asked this question before and had come to an understanding about how to answer it, and that the understanding was: as briefly as possible.

I asked what they kept in the humps, and whether the two humps kept different things, and he said, “Fat,” which I thought was rather disappointing, honestly. I had been hoping for water. He said everyone hopes for water.

Now. The noise. The camels did not stop making it. Not the whole evening. They made it while being unloaded, and while being rubbed down, and while being fed, and while being looked at, and, as far as I can tell, while thinking about any of these things. It is a long, groaning, gargling roar that seems to come up from somewhere around their knees, and it is LOUD, Nárë. It is so loud. And I am ashamed to say that the first time, before I had thought about it at all, I was so astonished that I simply sent it across to my husband, whole, the way you might grab someone’s arm and say “listen to THAT.”

He went very still. Then he turned and looked at the camel for a long time. Then he turned to me, and signed, slowly and with tremendous dignity: Perhaps there are advantages.

I laughed so hard I had to put my head down on the table. The quiet orc looked at the two of us and, very nearly, smiled.

Their coats, by the way, come out in handfuls. They are shedding, it seems, or beginning to, or the rain makes it worse. Underneath the coarse outer hair there is a down as fine and soft as anything I have ever touched, softer than lambswool, softer than the best you showed me in your workroom. I asked whether I might have some. The quiet orc took a fistful out of the smallest camel’s shoulder, as easily as picking a flower, and handed it to me. You will find it folded into this letter. I am told it can be spun. I am also told, by the quiet orc, that you will know what to do with it, which at the time I thought was a strange thing to say, because I had not yet told him anything about you.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

It took the better part of an hour for the hall to rearrange itself around them. The camels had to be fitted in behind the screen, which the cow regarded as a personal betrayal; the ponies had to be moved; the chickens had to be found. The orcs’ cloaks were hung from the rafters with the rest, where they dripped steadily onto the hearthstones and steamed like a row of small kettles. And then there were five more people to feed, and only one pot.

The old woman of the ferry house looked them over, all five, from one end of the line to the other, with her arms folded. She had opinions about orcs, it turned out, which she aired at some length and in some detail, in a dialect I could only half follow, though I caught the words for “thieves,” “my sister’s goats,” and “three summers ago.” The orcs stood and listened to all of it with perfect courtesy. When she had finished, she sniffed, and went to the pot, and filled five bowls to the brim, and banged them down on the table in front of them, and told them to eat before it got cold. So I gather that’s settled.

The Dwarves were another matter. When the orcs came in, the old Dwarf put his harness strap down, and did not pick it up again, and the young one stopped talking. Nobody said anything. The orcs took the other end of the table. For a while the hall was very quiet, except for the camels, who did not care. I don’t know the whole of what lies between those peoples, Nárë; I suspect you know more of it than I do. But I know what it looks like when two sets of people sit at either end of one table and each decides how much of the past they intend to bring to supper.

It was the dog that broke it, in the end. It went straight down the bench to the old Dwarf, laid its great wet head in his lap, and sighed. He looked at it for a long moment. Then he put his hand on its head. A little later, the young Dwarf passed the salt down the table without being asked, and one of the orcs, the youngest, a girl, passed back a twist of something dried and dark and fragrant to put in the soup, and by the end of the meal they were arguing about the best road south of the Gap. I would not call it friendship. But it was supper.

I asked the camels’ names, around then. There were none. The camels were “the big one,” “the little one,” and “that one.” I was so appalled that I said so, and the quiet orc, very gravely, invited me to remedy it. So the big one is now Vëantur, after the first of our captains to sail back to Middle-Earth, because it is enormous and looks as though it has crossed an ocean. The little one is Erendis, because she is beautiful and clearly does not want to be here. And the cross-bred one, with the temper and the single hump, I have named Gimilzôr, after the king who burned the books, purged the literati, and banned the Elves from Númenor, because it is ill-natured and spits. My husband says this is petty. My husband is correct, and I regret nothing.

My husband, meanwhile, had made a discovery. He had been sitting at the end of the bench, reading the room the way he does, watching mouths by the light of the fire, and missing a good deal of it in all that smoke, when one of the orcs, the older woman who seemed to be in charge of them, said something across the table to the youngest, without speaking. With her hands.

He sat up like a hound. And then he signed something to her, in the Elvish way, and she looked at him, very surprised, and signed something back, and he answered, and before I knew it the two of them were deep in conversation, in whatever strange, half-borrowed tongue of the hands they had worked out between them in the space of a few minutes, while the rest of us looked on. They had hunting signs, she told him later, through me, for when you must speak and must not be heard. And another sort, older, from the mountain, which her grandmother had taught her, for when you must speak in a room where someone dangerous is listening. My husband asked her what mountain. She looked at him for a moment and said, “The old one,” and he did not ask again.

I watched the two of them for a long time. I have not often seen him so happy among strangers.

And it was then, while the plates were being cleared and the fire was being built up for the night, that the youngest of them, the girl who had passed the herbs, began, very softly, under her breath, to sing.

I should tell you, before I go on, that the dog does have a name. It is Ari. I asked. I was told at once, by all five of them, in a tone that suggested I had asked something very obvious, and I gather that Ari is a person of considerable standing in their household, which the camels are not. Ari is at present asleep across my feet, and has been for an hour, and I am becoming afraid to move.

But the singing.

It was very quiet at first. She was sitting by the fire with her knees drawn up, mending a strap, and singing under her breath the way you do when you’ve been practicing something for so long it has started to practice itself. And I wasn’t listening, not really, until something in it caught at me, the way a smell can catch at you and you turn your head before you know why.

It went up, and up, in a long climbing call, the way the elvish songs do, and then it dropped, and dropped, into a sound I can only call a growl, low and rolling and tremendous, so low you felt it in your chest. And then it climbed again.

And I KNEW it, Nárë. I knew it. I have heard that song before. I have heard it sung at the door of your house by your large and enthusiastic husband, with his arms full of onions, while every dog on your street joined in. He cannot do the low parts. He does them anyway. It is not the only time I have ever seen you look at him as though you wanted to put a pillow over his face and kiss him at the same time, but it is among the most dramatic of these looks.

It’s the homecoming one, isn’t it? The one you sing when your family comes home. She had the low parts, of course. She had them easily, the way he never will.

I sat there with my pen in my hand, dripping ink onto my page, and I thought: it’s a common song. It must be. Every clan must have one like it. There must be thousands of orcs who know it. It means nothing.

And then the woman who’d been signing with my husband put up her hands to say something else to him, and her sleeve fell back, and on the inside of her forearm, in a band from the wrist almost to the elbow, were marks.

I have seen those marks, too. I have seen them carved into the lintel over your door, which I walked under no more than ten days ago. I have seen them on your arm, when you pushed back your sleeve to show me, very proudly, as if you were showing me a medal.

I am a historian. I know what coincidence is. I sat very still and told myself so.

And then the last of them, who had been sitting a little apart from the others by the fire with his feet stretched out to dry, turned to the young Dwarf, who had asked him something I didn’t catch. A compact fellow, shorter than his companions and not nearly so broad, though no Elf would call him slight, with a long dark braid over one shoulder and the sort of face that seems to be on the verge of a smile even when it isn’t. He said, in a voice like warm honey: “Oh, that reminds me. Have I ever told you about the archivist and the pot of glue?”

Nárë, I stood up. I stood up so fast I knocked over the ink. Ari woke and barked. Everyone in the hall looked at me, the Dwarves and the orcs and the priest and the old woman and my courier, and my husband, who had felt the whole of it go through me like a bolt and was staring at me with his hands half raised.

And I said, out loud, to a stranger, in front of everyone, in a voice I am told was rather high: “Are you Namešha?”

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he smiled. And he said, very pleasantly, “That depends entirely on who’s asking, and what they’ve heard.”

So I told him who was asking. I told him my name, and that I was a historian of Númenor, and that I had spent a great many evenings in Ost-in-Edhil in the company of a bookbinder of my acquaintance, who had told me, among a very great many other things, about a box of disciplinary slips written in the most beautiful hand she had ever seen, and a pair of drawers embroidered all over with forget-me-nots, and an archivist, and a pot of glue, and how they had to cut him free of the chair.

He did not say anything for a moment. He did not smile, either, which I had not yet seen him fail to do. He only looked at me, very steadily, across the fire.

Then he said, quite quietly: “Is she well?”

I said that you were. I said that you were alive, and well, and as rude as ever, and that you had a house in Ost-in-Edhil, and a husband built like a door, and a press, and a great many opinions about everyone’s grammar, mine particularly. And as I went on he put his hand over his mouth, the way a person does when they are trying very hard to keep something in, and I stopped.

After a while he took his hand away and said, in a perfectly ordinary voice, “Does she still swear in Orcish?”

I said that you did, constantly, and that I had learned a good deal of it from you that I had subsequently been asked not to repeat at dinner.

He laughed then. It was not quite steady. He said, “I looked for her. After the earth shook. As long as I could. I looked for all of them.” And then, before I could answer that, he turned and said something to the others, very quickly, in their own tongue, and every one of them was suddenly looking at me.

The woman who had been signing with my husband was the one who spoke. Her name is Kelušena. She leads this little party, and she does so like a captain on a deck. She looked at me as if I were a horse she had been told was sound and suspected was not, and said, in Westron, that a great many people in the world had heard stories, and that I would forgive her for wanting more than a story.

So I asked for something to draw with. There was nothing at hand but my spilled ink, which by this time had run across half the table, so I dipped my finger in it and drew, on the boards, the marks from over your door, as near as I could remember them.

She looked at it for a long time. Then she pushed back her sleeve and laid her arm beside it on the table, so the two lay side by side. They were the same. I am a little proud of how close I got.

She did not say anything after that. She sat down. But I noticed, later, that she had found a cloth and wiped the table clean all around my drawing, and left the drawing.

And then they told me why they had come.

Nárë, I don’t know how to write this next part to you except plainly, so I will. He lived.

Ozûtalai lived. The water took him, and it did not keep him. It threw him up on a hillside a long way south of where it took him, half drowned and with a broken arm, and he lived. And when he could walk, he went back to look for you.

They have a song about him. They have a great many songs, I gather, about a great many ancestors, and this is his: the song of Ozûtalai, who was steady of heart. Ninatta sang me some of it, in their tongue, with Namešha putting it into Westron beside her a line behind, and I will not pretend I have it right, but this is the shape of it.

It begins in the mountain, with a young man of their clan who could hear the heart of anything that lived, through any wall, and who said of everyone he met that they were not so bad. Even the ones who did not deserve it. Even, the song says, the captive Elf who would not eat from their hands, and called them names in her own tongue, and wept over the needle she was given. He fed her when she was slow. He made her a kerchief from scraps when hers was taken. He told her what her heart was saying when she would not say it herself. (A hare, Nárë. A hare that has decided to fight the hound. They have kept that line, for three thousand years.)

And then there came the one whose heart did not beat. That is what they call the Lady. They say he never once heard a heart in her, nor in any of the things that came with her, and that it was the most terrible thing he ever knew. She set her creatures on him for no fault at all, and he stood, and did not cry out, until he fell. And the Elf who had called him names, the song says, had been so moved by his goodness all that time, though she had refused to admit it, that she folded the kerchief he made her, and set it down, and offered herself to the one whose heart did not beat so that he would live.

He went to his mother, and to his mother’s brothers, and told them that he owed her his life. They said it was so. And from then on, the song says, she was his sister. He said that she should bear the marks, and she received them from his mother, who became her mother; and from his elders, who were now her elders. She took off her kerchief among them, and only among them. She learned their songs, and sang them as well as she could, though she could only sing in one voice. She braided his hair in the fashion of her city, and he braided hers in the manner taught him by his grandmother, and she wept and kissed his hands. She kissed the hands of his elders, who were now her own, and brought her wealth back to them as would any virtuous daughter.

And at the end of the old world, when the water came, he threw her up into the branches of a tree in hopes of saving her life; and the water took him.

And then he lived, and went back. He searched the hills where the water had been for as long as he could, calling the greeting into the wreck of the world. And in all that time he found one thing: a kerchief of scraps, one of the basket ones, caught in the branches of a drowned tree a mile from where he’d lost you. He thought it meant you were dead. He kept it anyway.

Years later, a toothless old woman of another clan, who had been asking after his people everywhere she went, found him. She told him that an Elf with his marks on her arm had sung the greeting on a bridge in the flood year, and gone west toward the Elves’ last country by the sea. And before she went, the old woman said, the Elf had declared that she owed a debt of life to her brother whom she loved, and that if he or his kin ever came her way, they would be welcomed as family. And he went. He went west, across all of Eriador, in those years after the end, when an orc on those roads was killed on sight. He did not get through. The song does not say how close he came. Only that he was turned back, and turned back, and came home at last with the kerchief still in his shirt.

He lived a long time after that. He had children, and his sister had children, and he told them about you every winter by the fire, and taught them the greeting you sang so badly. And he died an old, old man, still with the kerchief. And there the song stops. Not ends, Kelušena says. Stops. Every time. And her grandmother, who is the eldest of the clan now, said when she heard the rumors brought by Namešha, who is very old even if he doesn’t act like it, that if there was any chance at all of giving it an ending, then someone of his line should go and see. So they made plans for several of them to make the journey, at a time when they had a load of soda to sell, to see if they could find you.

When Ninatta had finished, Kelušena went to her pack, and took out a small box, wrapped in oiled cloth, and set it on the table in front of me, and opened it.

It is very small, darling. Smaller than my hand. Faded almost to nothing, the colors gone to browns and dusty pinks and a sort of yellowed white, and pieced from scraps no bigger than my thumbnail, with tiny stitches, so many stitches. Where it has worn through, someone has mended it, many times, over many lifetimes, with different threads. Kelušena says the dry of their country keeps it. He carried it until he died, she says, and since then, whenever one of his line goes very far from home, they carry it for him.

I did not touch it. But I told them, then, that you had found his stick. That you found it in the wreckage, and kept it, and have it still, and that I have seen it in a corner of your workroom, polished smooth where your hand goes.

Nobody said anything for a while. Then Tehiptilla, who had not spoken since the camels, made a sound I cannot describe and then went back to see to the animals.

Kelušena closed the box, and held it in her lap, and did not put it away again for the rest of the evening.

I asked Namešha, later, how he had come to hear of you at all, so far away. He said it was very simple. He keeps a stall in the market at the foot of the great stair in the city, these days, under an awning, and writes letters for people who cannot write them themselves: to sons in the army, and to creditors, and to sweethearts, and to the tax office, which he says is the same as writing to a sweetheart, only with more flattery. And a salt trader, back from the north in the spring, had dictated a letter to his brother, and in the middle of complaining about the price of everything in the Elf country, had mentioned that there was a house in Ost-in-Edhil with an orcish clan’s marks cut over the door, bold as you please, and that the woman who lived there had sung at some festival or other so loud that his mule bolted.

Namešha says he wrote the rest of the letter without hearing a word of it. He says it is the only letter he has ever written badly. He says he charged the man half price, out of guilt.

Then Ninatta, who had, I think, been bursting to ask this since she came in out of the rain, wanted to know: does she really sing with only one voice?

I said that you did. I said that it was the strongest voice I had ever heard come out of anyone. And I said that your husband sings the homecoming greeting to you at your own front door, every single time he comes home, with all the dogs of the street joining in, and that he cannot do the low parts, and practices them in the garden at dawn, and that the neighbors have begun to come round and ask whether he is quite well.

They laughed at that, all of them, even Kelušena, a little, though she tried not to. Namešha laughed until he had to wipe his eyes. Ninatta asked whether she might teach him. I said I was sure he would be overjoyed, and that the neighbors would probably pay her.

My husband, who had been watching all of this with the particular stillness he has when he is following everything and saying nothing, got up then and fetched one of my spoiled pages, and turned it over, and drew them a map. A careful one, as he does everything: the road north from here to the Glanduin, and the way up into Eregion, and the city, and the street, and your door, with the marks drawn over it, small and exact. He put in the best places to water the camels. He put in the name of a stable that would not refuse them. He signed to Kelušena what each of the marks on the map meant, and she signed back, and asked him questions, and he answered, and when they were done she folded it very small and put it inside her shirt, next to the box.

I tried to give them a letter for you, too, to carry. Kelušena looked at me, and then at my courier, who was at that moment relieving the boy with the eyebrows of what appeared to be his entire supply of buttons, and said that they would very likely be faster. I said that I had been thinking the same thing. So I have kept this, and written it all out instead, and if Gellín beats them to your door after all, then at least you will have had some warning, and can put the kettle on.

And then, Nárë, I am afraid I did what you would expect me to do, which is that I got out a fresh page, and a fresh pen, and sat down across the fire from Namešha, and did not let him go to bed until the fire was nearly out.

You must understand my position. Here was a man who had been a secretary in the Lieutenant’s own office, in Angband itself, in the years of its greatest power. Who had walked its halls, and read its papers, and written them, and knew its people, and had been there when it fell, and remembered all of it, and was sitting across from me in a ferry house eating soup. Imagine, darling, if you had spent your whole life reading about a city in fragments, in ash-stained scraps, in the reports of its enemies, and then someone sat down beside you at an inn and said, “Oh, yes, I used to work there. What would you like to know?” I have colleagues who would sell their grandmothers for an hour of it. I have colleagues who would sell MY grandmother. …I even have to admit that I probably WOULD sell my own grandmother.

So I asked him everything. And he answered everything, in the worst possible order.

I would ask him about the administration of the Lieutenant’s office, its ranks and its procedures, and he would tell me about a copyist who once tried to smuggle a cat into the archive in a document case, and how it got out in the middle of the quarterly accounts. I would ask him about the Codes, and how they were drafted, and by whom, and he would tell me about the year someone put salt in the Lieutenant’s tea, and how nobody ever found out who, and that he would take the secret to his grave, and then wink at me. I asked him about the fall, and he told me about the archivist and the glue. Twice. It is a very good story. I see why you liked it.

But in among all of that, Nárë, if you are patient and keep your pen moving, there are things. I asked him what Ozûtalai was like, not in the song, but as a man, and he went quiet for a while, and then said that he had walked beside him all the way south from the mountain, in that terrible year, and that Ozûtalai had carried his own grandmother on his back for most of it, and a stranger’s child for some of it, and never once complained, and talked to the grandmother the whole way so she wouldn’t be frightened, and told her she was lighter than a sack of feathers, which she was not. He said that Ozûtalai sang the whole way too, very badly, and that between the two of them, they kept a good many people walking who would otherwise have sat down by the road. He said that when the water came he was still trying to get through the area of the landslide. He said he looked for him, too.

I asked him about the treatise on the cleaning of the privies. He said that it absolutely exists, that he has read it, that it is forty-one pages long, with diagrams, and that the diagrams are the best part. I asked if he knew where it might be. He said that if it is anywhere, it is in the archives under the mountain, and that if the people digging there find it, they are to send him a copy at once, as he has always wanted to read the appendix. There is an appendix, darling.

I asked about the drawers. The forget-me-nots. I asked whether his grandmother really made them.

He looked at me for a long moment, very solemnly, and said, “Did she ever ask?”

I said that you never had.

He said, “Then I’m not telling you.”

I asked about the scars on his back. I am a historian, Nárë; I could not help it. He smiled at me, and said, “Oh, now, that’s a very good question,” and then told me about a copyist who once spilled an entire jar of sand into the Lieutenant’s correspondence and had to pick it out grain by grain. I knew then that I was not going to get anything further, and so I let it go, and I am a little ashamed of having asked, but only a little. You told me that story, too, about the sand. I didn’t understand it until I watched him do it.

He asked me questions too, in return, the whole time, about you. What your house was like, and your husband, and what you sang now, and whether you still ate pickled herring, and whether you were happy. I told him everything I knew. He listened to all of it with his chin in his hand. When I told him you had a disciplinary slip hanging in a silk envelope from your rafters, to frighten off evil spirits, he laughed so hard he nearly fell off the bench, and then went very quiet, and then asked me which one.

I said I didn’t know. He said it didn’t matter. He said he knew which one.

It was very late by then. The fire was down to coals. The priest was snoring with his beard clicking faintly every time he breathed out. Gellín had won every button in the house. My husband had fallen asleep against my shoulder some time ago, with his hand still half-curled in a sign he hadn’t finished making. And I had filled eleven pages, both sides, in shorthand, in the smallest hand I own, and I would have filled eleven more if Namešha hadn’t looked at the coals, and then at me, and said, very kindly, that he was an old man and needed his sleep, which is the most transparent lie I have ever been told, and I spent many years listening to every word spoken by the late usurper in the royal court of Númenor.

And so here we all still are.

It is the afternoon now, and raining, and the river has not gone down so much as a finger’s breadth. The boy with the eyebrows reports that his grandmother says it will turn tonight. His grandmother says this, I am told, every night. Kelušena walks out to the end of the causeway every hour to look at the water, and comes back, and says nothing, and sits down with the box in her lap. Ninatta is practicing the greeting by the fire, very quietly, over and over, the low parts and the high, and I have caught Tehiptilla, out by the camels, practicing it too, under his breath, when he thought nobody could hear. Gimilzôr spat at the priest this morning. The priest says he forgives it, and that it was a good spit, and that Ossë would have approved.

My husband and Kelušena have been signing at each other since breakfast, and I have not understood a word of it, and I do not think I am meant to. The young Dwarf has been watching them, with an expression of the most terrible longing, and the old Dwarf has been watching him. I think my husband is going to get his secret after all, darling. Not today. But someday.

Namešha has borrowed my second-best pen, and some of my paper, and I have not seen either again. He is sitting in the corner with his back to the wall, writing something, and smiling at it, and covering it with his arm every time I go past.

They will go north as soon as the water leaves the causeway, and Gellín will go north at first light tomorrow whether it has or not, as she has informed me she is a better swimmer than a camel. I do not know who will reach you first. I find I do not much care. Either you will have this letter in your hand when they knock, and know who it is, or you will open the door on them with no warning at all, and then I shall have missed both, and I shall never forgive the world for it.

Because we cannot come, Nárë. I want you to know that I wanted to. I sat up half the night arguing it with my husband, both through the bond and in signs, in the dark, so as not to wake the house, which is the only way I have ever won an argument with him, and I did not win this one. We are promised south. You know to whom, and you know what he is to my husband, and what my husband owes him, which is everything. My husband says that we gave our word, and that we will see your face when we come back north, and that if I am very lucky, you will have told me all of it already in a letter, at length, with all the grammar corrected. He is right. I hate it when he is right. I wanted to see your face.

So you must tell me, instead. All of it. What you said when you opened the door, and what they said, and whether you sang the greeting, and whether your husband did, and whether the dogs joined in, and what you did when she showed you the box. Within my lifetime, Nárë, darling, dearest. I am counting on you.

Your devoted friend, who will be counting the days, and who is NOT practically older than the sun, and is getting more practically mortal by the minute,

Sakalkhôr

P.S. The camel down is in the folded page. Do not let your husband use it to polish anything.

P.P.S. Namešha has just handed me what he has been writing, and asked me to fold it in with mine, and I have done so without reading it, which you must understand is the single most difficult thing I have ever done in the service of friendship. There is a slip of paper with it, too, in a silk envelope he apparently had on him the whole time. I did not open that either. He says it is for a special occasion.

—

[Enclosed, in a beautiful hand:]

Nárelótë,

I hear you have a husband, and a house, and a press, and a disciplinary slip in your rafters. I hear you are still rude. I am glad.

I looked for you. I thought you would like to know that.

I am bringing some people who have been looking for you a great deal longer than I have. Be kind to them. Be rude to me, I have missed it.

I saved the best one. You’ll see.

N.

—

[Enclosed, a disciplinary slip, written in a hand with more flourish than words:]

Offense: Being alive, for three thousand years, without informing the undersigned.

Number: Ten.