Xanadu by bunn  

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Weave a circle round him thrice

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The sky was dark and angry as a bruise. Waves were pounding on the cliffs, flinging white gouts of spray high in the air. The air was full of the smell of salt and seaweed, and the roaring of the waves.  

Inland, a mile or so, perhaps,  thunder muttered deeper and darker than the voice of any wave. 

Most of the villagers had closed up their shutters against the blast. Only Bessie Newbert was out, huddled in the lee of her cottage, keeping a watch on the closed sluice-gates, lest the waves crashing against them should break the oaken timbers and threaten the fishing boats within. 

No mortal ship could live on such a sea. 

The golden ship that leaped through the green waves towards the black and jagged line of the coast was no mortal ship, nor was its captain a mortal man. 

******************************************************

Finrod brought the sail down as the shingle bank loomed ahead, and let his ship decide where to beach.  She was a crafty thing, a long sea-wisdom built into her lines, and she was spun of starlight and enchantment as much as the wood of any tree.

Her light hull ran up the beach and rested out of the greedy reach of the waves, and he leaped down onto the shore. 

Bessie Newbert started, then made a very good attempt at pretending that an elf-lord stepping ashore out of the maw of a killer sea was quite in the ordinary way of things at Porlock Quay.

“Mornin’” she muttered, pulling down her waxed hat over her eyes. 

“A good morning!” he replied, with a wild grin. His bright hair was swirling around him, his pale and pointed face was wet with salt-spray, and his clothes were white and gold. His sleeves caught the wind and flew like gilt-edged banners behind him as he walked. 

 “Like a prince out of Araby”, Bessie told her two best friends, later, when the storm was gone and they were settled with a pint of porter before each of them, to exchange news of the storm.  It was clear on their weathered faces that they didn’t believe her, and she searched for words that might convey the image glowing in her mind’s eye for a moment, before it began to slip from her mind like a dream.

*****

Finrod searched the trees tossing in the wind on the slopes of the tall hills ahead, watching for signs. 

He could feel things long asleep moving in the trees, and under the stone beneath his feet.  

With caution, he began to climb the steep and stony path under the leaning trees, ignoring the bitter pelting of the sudden hail that stung his face. 

He could feel the centre of it all ahead of him, seething like a cauldron: if he turned his head he could feel the power of it against the side of his face, as if he were standing by a fierce bonfire, though there was no light or colour to it yet. 

He could feel a rush around him, as if there were other people hurrying up the lane, though most eyes would not have seen them.

Finrod did.  He saw their wet clothes, the shells and dark trailing piece of seaweed, and knew that what lay ahead was calling in those dead of strange fates at sea.

 He would not, himself, have called them people: they were the memories and hopes they had left behind upon the land when over the many long years they had sailed away, into storm or fog or black heaving waves. 

As he walked among them and watched, they faded into one another, becoming younger, becoming older: their clothes changing in a moment from broadcloth to homespun, to furs or leathers, their faces full of a kind of confused longing. 

In the hedges, long wicked fingers were reaching, pulling and pinching.  The remembered people gasped and leaned away from them, and their faint voices took on an angrier pitch. 

Finrod held out a hand to send them on their way, back to the sea, or the deep tunnels under rock. 

On an open hilltop sighted through an opening in the trees, Finrod caught a glimpse of small faded figures dancing, and recognised them as ancient spirits that had once been elves, caught from shadowed forgetfulness into a moment of waking and remembering.  Their eyes seemed full of old autumn leaves as they watched him pass, and they moved weightlessly, like ghosts.  

This was not Finrod’s land, had not been for uncountable years, and yet they knew him.  He had walked this way, now and again, through sleepy golden summer eves and through chill starlit winter nights. 

He had thought no harm could come of it. 

Now it was time to make amends. Other elves might risk walking in the Hither Lands, now and again, even in these latter years. But Finrod had always given his heart too freely, meddled too willingly in other lives, and he had been forbidden to return.  

Now, bitterly, he understood why.  As he climbed, he began to speak words to the wind, words of calming and of unbinding. 

It was not enough. 

The trees above the muddy path began to half-wake and sing in the storm-winds, telling of endless years of whirling, straining autumn gales.  Finrod waved to silence them, but they did not attend him. They were dancing to the sound of another voice, a younger voice: the voice of a Man.

A massive elm, long dark branches leaning  across the way, sang a darker song. Beneath the layers of rot, sleep and sod under the tree roots, in caverns far under the steep hills, dark horrors that should have been forgotten long ago were moving, searching with sightless heads for the power that had woken them.

Finrod could feel the sharp tendrils of hoarfrost burning cold in the deeps, ice forming in the endless dark that should have been a cool untroubled refuge for those that fear the Sun. 

“Hush,” Finrod calmed them, banishing the ice.  Striding swiftly up into the woodlands he elaborated on the theme, weaving enchantments of sleep and stillness with all the authority of one who had died in darkness, and returned, reborn, to the light. 

It took him some time to find the heart of the storm, among winding lanes and green fields, steep oak woodlands touched with the first gold of autumn, all while soothing a whirl of memories and faded spirits, goblins and pixies all pulled tense and full of power as a bowstring about to be released.

But he found it at last, a  small  isolated farmhouse built of stone and whitewashed cob  that clung to the sloping edge of a narrow, hawthorn-edged field. Below it on the hillside, lay a scatter of small stone byres and barns, from which the sound of voices and the calling of distressed cattle. 

Here was the centre of the spell. He shook his head, and began to make his way around, following the path the wind took in great whirling circles. 

He made three wide circles around it, climbing the precipitous fields and ducking past hunched hawthorns with hooked branches snatching at his golden sleeves, leaving them tattered.

Strands of Finrod’s shining hair caught in the black thorns, but he went on, weaving enchantment with all his skill and power, until he had wound enough of his own art into the place to bring a kind of uncomfortable peace to it.  

His spells webbed each tree, reached high into the sky above. 

The thin soil and old, flawed, weary rocks, hummed faintly, below the ability of human ears to hear, lulling the bitter anger of the things beneath into dreams of darkness long past. 

The wailing, plucking wind died, and the storm was gone, leaving behind a grey mist. 

The voices on the wind were silent. The spell that had called the malice of the world into an old and terrible form was suspended.

The trees were barely visible, faint filigree shadows against the wet air that caught in glittering beads of water in Finrod’s golden hair. 

Finrod himself shone with a warm clear light.  Even with his greatest care, that light did not illuminate the wet dark trunks or the hard-grained stone.

He took a deep breath, and went down the narrow lane to knock upon the door under the heavy oak lintel. 

************************************************************

The young man who came to the door was wearing a crumpled shirt and his dark wispy hair was pushed up into a tuft on one side, as if he had been sleeping on it.  His large round eyes had an odd unfocussed look. 

For a long moment he looked at Finrod, wordless.  Then he blinked, lifted a hand to rub at his forehead, as if he could not quite believe his eyes. 

 “You,” he said, in a low voice with a catch to it, as if it was worn with much speaking.  “I remember you! Or... do I not remember you? I ran down to the river in the dawn light, when all the town slept.  You glittered in the sunlight. The river was bright with the sunrise, and the air thick with birdsong, and at your hand the river lifted into a bridge of living water and the singing was in a language that I knew. I thought I dreamed... you look no older, and yet I am a man grown.”

“A good day to you, Sam,” Finrod said gravely. For he knew he must address an enchanter with the greatest care, even if he was not entirely sure that the enchanter was fully aware of the kind of art he was making. 

Most of the children of men of this Age would have forgotten him entirely by now. The voices and faces of the elder race faded from the minds of men by the light of the midday sun, through the complex harmonies of bells, lost in the many voices of the market and the endless years that were worn away by air and water. 

But not this one. Sam had remembered, though Finrod had not seen him since he was six years old. 

 

The young man frowned. “Nobody calls me Sam. I go by Coleridge.  Col, to my friends.” 

“Col, then. I hope I am still numbered among your friends,” Finrod said. “Is this your home?  May I come in?”

Coleridge stepped back, making a vague gesture of welcome, and leaving the door open. “No... no, it’s not my house.  I was struck with a malady while walking along the coast, and my friend, a farmer here, offered me a bed for the night.  He has gone out to tend to the cows.”

Finrod nodded, hoping that this friend would not cause complications by coming to join them, ducked through the low doorway and closed the heavy door behind him.

The house had thick stone walls, and the small room was dark, with one small window and an inglenook fireplace with wooden benches either side of the hearth. A quill pen, a small ink-horn and a notebook lay where Coleridge had set them down.

Coleridge pushed them aside and sat down on one of the benches, so Finrod sat upon the other. 

“What are you writing?” Finrod said, knowing the true answer already, since he had been battling the effects for half the crossing. 

“Oh, a poem.  Well, a psychological curiosity, I suppose I might call it.  I was half-asleep when I began to write, filled with passionate visions: attempting, while barely waking, to record the poetry of my dream. But there is nothing good in it.”

“Nothing?”

“Too much faulty glitter of expression, too abstract and mystical, full of shadowy nobodies.” Coleridge said, rubbing uncomfortably at his shoulder, which seemed to pain him. “Quite indiscriminate use of elaborate and swelling language and imagery. I have such a high idea of what Poetry ought to be, that I find I cannot conceive that such things as...

“My dear man, I protest!”  Finrod interrupted, since Coleridge was becoming excited, his round face pink and his mobile features working. His words were eloquent but his voice slurred as he spoke them.

The wind was whistling outside once more. Finrod made an effort to appear relaxed, even when the head of an undeniable goblin, snub-nosed and bat-eared, appeared for a moment at the window behind Coleridge’s head. 

“This self pity does not become you,” Finrod said bluntly. 

Coleridge stared at him, his eyes moving from Finrod’s eyes, to his hair and clothing. Finrod was not entirely sure how much he could see, but clearly whatever he perceived was startling. 

“It does not,” he agreed with a sigh, blinking rapidly.  “I’m prone to the self-indulgence of pitying myself: a terrible vice. I tell myself: I have sought  so long to make my words into the lovely shapes and the sounds intelligible of that eternal language... What language... I cannot tell, what language are you speaking now, pray, tell me? What language did you speak to me beside that river in the sunrise of my childhood?” He could see the glaze of confusion over Coleridge’s mind: he was half-drunk with it. No wonder ghosts and goblins were drawn to such erratic power. 

“Ah, my dear,” Finrod said, almost under his breath. “In another age you might have been a great enchanter.”  

“A great enchanter?  A great blow-bag, say rather: full of words and wind.  And yet I look at my words and I love them.  Well, sometimes I do. But you... you know nothing of that, surely. You’re from... somewhere very far away.”

Finrod nodded.  “I conjured visions to please a laughing child, not knowing what path I was laying before you. I... I should regret it.  I’m not sure I do. But all the same, I must undo it all, if I can. ”

“This path, if truly you gave it to me, which I doubt,  has been a switchback, full of thorns and brambles,” Coleridge said bitterly, but rather more coherently. “My very body is pulled this way and that, and I am shot full of pains. I soothe them with laudanum, but it’s not enough.  I thought, when I brought my wife and baby boy back to Devon that we might make shift to raise a living from the soil, but I find digging a terrible labour for the back. Sometimes the pain shoots right through from my ear all the way down. Walking helps a good deal, both to the troubled mind and body, and so you find me here. In fact... How did you know that I was here?”

“You aren’t hard to find, just at the moment,” Finrod told him. “I have ways of searching that are closed to most people.” 

Coleridge frowned and his large bright eyes narrowed. “Just at the moment?”

“I looked for you when spring came again, beside your otter-river,” Finrod said. Did Coleridge know what he was calling on?  Or had he worked entirely by instinct? “But you did not come, and I could not see where you had gone.”

Coleridge grimaced. His eyes wandered towards the roof beams as if he could see something moving there. “My father died. I was sent away to school in London. My mother and my brothers had not the funds for me to travel home for holidays, so there I stayed.” 

The memory Finrod could see behind his words was layered with hurt and hunger.  “You must have missed the river,” he said gently. 

Coleridge made a helpless gesture with his hands. 

“The river, Ottery St Mary, my mother, home, good fresh wheaten bread, to wander freely alone in the woods and not among the crowds... Ah, school makes for gloomy duty. But there were many many books to read, and that was a solace. I love to read, and have read almost everything—a library cormorant, indeed!”

“I’m glad you had books to comfort you. You take this laudanum often, for your pains?” 

“I have done for many years, when needs must. It leaves me langorous and floating in darkness, full of horrible phantoms of goblins and ghosts and... other things I don’t like to talk about.”  He shrugged, then winced and rubbed at his shoulder through the crumpled shirt. 

“I had near forgotten, but now it comes back to me... how you called fruit from the trees and bread from the ground, long ago.”  Coleridge held up one hand ruefully.  “I had the thought to do the same, to be fed and watered by God’s almighty hand. But I am not blessed at such work. It’s all very well for elfin voices, it seems, to call apples from the tree, but all I have harvested is, Ha! very small potatoes.”

“Instead you have spun words from the very valleys in the rocks,” Finrod suggested. 

Coleridge groaned. “So I have, but it’s a weak and wounded way of life to rely upon the vagaries of the Press for the very necessaries of life!  For myself, my wife, my babe! I grub for sonnets to sell to feed the debt collectors, and they are poor things indeed.”

“The debt collectors?”

Coleridge smiled.  “Aye, but many of the sonnets, too.” 

“What is a debt collector?” Finrod asked, temporarily distracted by a concept that did not have a direct parallel in his experience. 

“A kind of  blood-sucking insect,” Coleridge said bitterly, and then after considering Finrod for a moment, elaborated. “A man who chases other men for money owed, the original sum compounded many times so that the intended repayment is never sufficient.”

Finrod was aware, at least in the abstract, of the concept of money.  He could also read a great deal from his friend’s memory and emotions. “Ah,” he said.  “A servant of the Enemy.”

Coleridge laughed. “In a way. Though — I must above all things be fair! — they are not aristocrats, they are neither rich nor powerful, and they, like me, dine mostly upon mean bread and small potatoes. They are only instruments, and so I feel I should blame them less than my heart bids me.”

“You have, then,” Finrod suggested with caution, watching warily for counter spells, “a great dislike of princes.”

Coleridge gave a tired laugh. “In the abstract, and based on their behaviour. A greedy man is a biting horsefly, but a greedy aristocrat will crush you and not even turn to look. Who then should I dislike more? But I do not remember any greed from you. Why have you come back to me, Finrod?  Why now, when I had all but forgotten you?”  

Finrod’s heart ached to say it, but there was no choice. “I left something with you, something I should not have left behind me,” he admitted. 

Coleridge frowned.  He seemed much more coherent in his thought now.  Perhaps the laudanum was leaving him. “I don’t remember that. But then, I was only six... or perhaps seven? I’ve always been lax about losing things.  I’m afraid it will be long gone, whatever it was, lost in the fields around Ottery St Mary, or on the long road to London.”

Finrod gave a sudden surprised laugh. “Alas,” he said. “The thing I left with you is not of a nature to slip from a pocket or be left behind in a carriage.  I showed you marvels: it’s an easy thing for my people. I did it almost without thinking. But the power of it has caught into your mind and stayed with you. I see it now: you haven’t lost it. I followed it here: I could see it with my eyes closed in the fog, like a flame.”

Coleridge leant back against the settle and scrubbed a hand through his curling hair. His eyes were turned away, and his mind reflected a flare of anger, half-hidden in the smoke that half-obscured his mind.  “You left me—a power? I think I would have noticed! My powers are my own, I’ll thank you!”

“None the less, I did. It has grown entangled with your own native powers of mind, and those, I could see even when you were a little boy. They are not small.”

“I feel quite puffed up with the compliment,” Coleridge told him, his voice making it quite clear that he meant the opposite.  “Yet if I have some power of yours, and it’s entangled with my own abilities, is it still yours? Perhaps it’s mine.”

To this, Finrod, if he was honest with himself, had no good answer, and yet the stormy skies could not be ignored.  “I should have left you as you were.  I should not have interfered.”

“And yet you did. I don’t see why that’s wrong?”

Finrod sighed, because the idea tempted him still.  “In another world and time, it might have been possible. We should have walked through the ages hand in hand together, Man and Elf, and perhaps then... but that future was lost a very long time ago. I dream of it sometimes.”

“It seems a bright dream,” Coleridge said, and although Finrod, with all his ability had chosen to allow it, it was clear that he was calling the vision from within Finrod’s mind, a vision that lay beyond words. “I thought that dreams were where you live and walk beneath the trees.”

Finrod shrugged. “I fear that there are debts and duties of a kind even for elf-princes.  We cannot have all that we would wish for.”

“I thought,” Coleridge said unhappily, and it seemed the anger had dropped away, “that you at least would be free.”

“I am free to choose the path I walk,” Finrod said.  “And so are you.”

“I could keep this power that you speak of?” 

“I can’t take it from you, unwilling.”  In truth, he could, probably. Finrod was an elf-prince returned from death, an expert in enchantments, Coleridge was a mortal poet.  But such behaviour was against the principles of his House, and verged on Morgothry. 

Instead he asked “Has the thing I left with you, brought you happiness?”

Coleridge ran both hands through his curling hair, which did at least do something to settle the unruly locks. “Happiness? I've looked for happiness in life as best I can—but happiness in life is a terrible elusive beast wouldn't you say? Or perhaps you wouldn't.  In America they made a law and call it each man's right, to pursue happiness. You know, I thought of going there, once.”

“You planned to cross the Sea?” Finrod had heard of the Americas, but generally tried not to think about them. He found their location in relation to his own home confusing: subject to the kind of mathematics that made Celebrimbor excited. 

“We planned to build a new society, in America,” Coleridge told him, his face lighting with the force of the idea. “A pantisocracy - you’ve heard the term?”

“I confess,” Finrod said, “I have not.”

“Oh... from the Greek, of course.  Equal government for all: we would have all property held in common, all work apportioned equally and all decisions made together, with every individual having their own say. We failed, of course, the ideal being as far away, I now think, as the evening star— and yet, I still believe it could be possible, if only men could be found to commit their all to it.”

“I too once thought to make a new life across the Sea,” Finrod smiled, because the memory was a very old one, and Coleridge was so very young.  “I followed a wild hope.”

“A democratic hope?” Coleridge asked with sudden interest, pinning Finrod with a sudden intense glance as if all the wild power of the storm was pulled in and directed at Finrod. 

It was oddly like the feeling of coming to the notice of a Vala, long ago, in the days of their great power, before they had lost so much of themselves into the endless turning of the world and the burden of the years. 

“Not really,” Finrod said, with something of an effort. “Though democracy is an old word, and old words have many meanings.”

“That’s why I invented pantisocracy,” Coleridge told him with a self-mocking smile. “Nobody comes to it with preconceptions.  But didn’t you tell me, long ago, that you were a prince of elves?  I can’t see that there’s much democratic about princes. Let alone pantisocratic.” 

Finrod shrugged. “I am called a prince, and yet I have been subject to the power of the people. We have a saying: a king is he who can hold his own. Only the Enemy commands those who would not willingly obey, and nobody will obey a prince who cares nothing for his folk. Or so I believe.”

Coleridge sighed heavily.  “I wish I could say we had gone even so far! Democracy is even now not accepted as a universal good, let alone pantisocracy. Certainly not here in Britain, nor even in France, though in France they have made some strides towards it. I hoped for more, but... lately things have not gone so well.”

“I’ve heard something of that. It seems to lead to a good number of arguments.”

“Arguments, perhaps,” Coleridge said, leaning forward passionately, his dark eyes snapping. “But isn’t that better than for the great mass of the poor to have no voice in their lives?  Why, a poor thin and starving child can pass a group of gentlemen at their dinner, and if she speaks to them to ask for food, she is turned off a nuisance! There’s no justice to it.”

“That doesn’t speak well of those gentlemen.”  It was not a surprise to Finrod to hear such things. He was very fond of the race of Men, but he had few illusions left about the way they often conducted themselves. They could be far better than Elves, he thought, and worse than orcs and occasionally these qualities combined in the same person. But did Coleridge mean to force his ideals upon the world? If he had already determined on that, then Finrod’s quest was already at an end,.

“It does not speak well of them! Most certainly, Finrod, it does not. But since one cannot rely on a gentleman to behave like a gentle man, there must needs be a way to hold him to account. And if there is one thing I'm convinced of: there are very few, if any, who are fit to hold power over another person.”

“When those you govern rise up and tell you that, it bites hard,” Finrod said ruefully. “At least, if you are one who tried to keep all his people fed and protected.  Though I failed at that, in the end. But not for want of trying.”

“I cannot agree that you have any right to call yourself a prince, or that you have any power over me,” Coleridge said. “I know no evil of you, Finrod, indeed, I do still count you as a friend. But to come after so many years demanding the return of a gift you gave me? I have little of my own, and of what I have must be devoted to my baby boy, my wife, my family. I will not entertain the idea, Finrod, you must see that! 

Finrod had feared this might be the sticking point.  “So you will take this power for your own.  What will you do with it?”

Coleridge paused. “Indeed, I ... I do not know.  What does it do?”  

Finrod carefully did not sigh, but his heart lifted in relief. Col, who had been little Sam, once, did not know his power, and did not wield it willingly. 

“Many things. It can raise crops, or winds, summon aid from the waters, create illusions and build palaces. I followed the storm you conjured in your sleep across the sea: the waves will be lashing the coast even now.  The trading-ships of the Bristol Channel have been tossed like autumn leaves: not all have weathered it.”

“The storm I... I summoned no storm?”

“Not consciously,” Finrod told him. “But a storm came, none the less.  To one who holds such powers, the perils of fogging the mind are considerable. I can show you a few ways to calm your mind, but you must beware your own strength.”

“I suppose I must,” Coleridge said, startled. “It is an obligation, then, this power, as well as an ability.” 

“Oh yes. And have you thought what might happen if someone takes it from you?”

Coleridge blinked. “Is that possible?”

“Force is always possible, and I’d counsel you to beware of that, too.  But I gave it to you without intending to. Once minds touch, things may pass between them unintended.  Beware, most of all, of children, for their minds are unfinished and unformed, and may have a strength that will surprise you.  It might sleep, as it did in you, like a seed planted that unfurls at last to grow many years later.  But I can’t guarantee it ” 

“So I cannot take laudanum or strong wine, lest drifting through my own thought I summon up some fearful tempest. I must beware dreams, and be wary of embracing  my own child?” Coleridge summed up. “I begin to think, Finrod, that this power you have left with me may be less desirable than I hoped.  And yet... I have had so little authority over my body and my own life, that to give it up...  to give up the hope of all that could be done with it?  Oh, this is a terrible painful cleft to be stuck in.”

“In another world,” Finrod said, unhappily, “I would have great gifts to give you. But this is the Age of Men. There’s little that I am permitted to give. I have already overstepped the boundary.”

“I did not mean to solicit a trade of presents,” Coleridge told him. “Only that it’s hard to see your path when everything is upturned from how you understood it.  I see this gift you gave me, all unknowing, is responsibility as much as blessing — if it can be called a blessing at all.”

“I can heal your aching body,” Finrod offered cautiously.  “And I may, perhaps, find a way to banish your blood-suckering debt collectors.”

Coleridge’s bushy eyebrows went up in evident surprise. “Can you indeed!” 

“I am permitted to change little things, here and there. But I implore you, Col, let me lift from you as much as I am able of the power that summons storms and ghosts.”

“I could keep it,” Coleridge said to himself, slowly, as if tasting the words. His eyes were downcast, his round face and brilliant mind unreadable. “I could go out into the world a Power, commanding the children fed, the wars ended and the slaves freed.”

“You could certainly try. You might not have the strength. It’s not easy to hold any thinking being to the path you think they should choose, no matter what enchantments you hold in your hand. A few people, perhaps. A whole people? Only if your will is trained to domination, and you do not sleep.  It is hard to be a king.”

Coleridge laughed suddenly. “A king!  And would that not be a fine joke, and contrary to the spirit of pantisocracy, that I should raise my voice over all others?  Can I not share this gift freely?”

“I counsel you,” Finrod said levelly, “to consider what use might be made of it.  You would wish to free slaves and feed children, but the gentlemen you spoke of, who complained of the annoyance of the hungry child...”

Coleridge made a wordless explosive frustrated noise with his plump lips, then bowed down, hands upon his forehead. 

“Take it, then,” he said, after a moment. “Take it, damn you Finrod, and hide it somewhere beyond the stars, far from the hands of men. And if a Pantisocracy should one day come to be, I shall call on you to bring it back, to be shared for the good of all. Will you hear me?”

Finrod stood up, his golden hair barely clearing the low beams of the room, and leaned forward to place a long hand upon Coleridge’s rosy cheek.  

“I will hear you,” he said. 

The elvish power was wound with the man’s own considerable talent of word and vision, and untangling it was less simple than Finrod had envisaged. It was like uprooting a living, growing thing, with roots and leaves and flowers. It coloured Col’s vision, as well as wreathing through his emotions. Finrod could not bring himself to leave him blind, and so found himself leaving behind more of the root than he had meant to.

At last it was done. He took as much as he could of the rheumatism along with it: a gnarled, chalky knobbled thing that contrasted sadly with the golden strength of the winding roots. He was not able to get all of that free, either, but he did as thorough a job as he could manage. 

Then he folded pain and power together into a fine-woven bag, stitched with runes of ward and sleeping, and pulled the string closed to keep them safe. 

Coleridge’s eyes were pulling closed, as if he were on the edge of sleep again.  As Finrod watched, they closed, and he slumped sideways onto the settle, curling up like a small child in relaxed comfort.  His notebook fell to the floor with a soft thump, showing, for a moment as the paper moved, the first roughly-written lines of a poem : “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan...”

Finrod smiled.  He put an extra log onto the fire, and in the flare of light, examined a set of creamware tea-cups, carefully displayed with obvious pride upon a shelf. He picked up a cup between two long fingers, and inspected it, before returning it with care to the shelf. 

Coleridge turned slightly in his sleep, and began to snore a little. 

Finrod quietly opened the door and went out.  He took the bag, pulled out a pinch of pain, and began, as he walked down towards the quay, to sing: a small song, almost unnoticeable among the tumults of the air. 

Far away in Staffordshire, Josiah Wedgewood, industrialist and astonishingly successful maker of creamware pottery, picked up a letter from his desk. 

The letter was from a failed newspaper editor, a poet and thinker, who had never quite found a niche that would pay his bills. It would, Josiah thought, be a fine thing to be not only known for his innovations in creamware, but also to help his friends, as a sponsor of the arts.