Eminently Unsuitable by Himring

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Chapter 1

 

(Names: Russandol=Maedhros, Macalaure=Maglor, Feanaro (Atar)=Feanor, Findarato=Finrod)

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Finrod:

The hunt had been successful more quickly than expected. Soon there was venison enough to stock the larders of Himring for a week, so Russandol sent the hunters home with the pack horses, while we stayed behind with a couple of bottles of wine and a basket of apples and pears to keep us company. It was the tail end of a warm, sunny afternoon. A light breeze whispered in the branches of the forest.

We led the horses up a creek and found a suitable clearing where the banks were lushly covered in soft green grass interspersed with daisies and buttercups. Macalaure sat down by the water, pulled out his new harp from its wrappings and began to tune it. He’d been experimenting, trying to construct a small portable harp that would have a richer tone, less thin or shrill, and he thought with this prototype he had finally succeeded.

Russandol and I moved a bit further away from the creek and busied ourselves with the food and the wine. Russandol brought Macalaure a beaker of wine, and I sliced a pear for him. He thanked us both politely and dreamily went on fine-tuning the strings, endlessly looking for the absolutely perfect pitch, it seemed.  With an instrument such as the fiddle, this would surely have earned him a brutal assassination within the shortest period of time, but if you play the harp, you can get away with such things. The tentative notes blended in discreetly with the rustling of the leaves and the other small sounds of the forest.

Russandol and I had some wine ourselves and shared another pear. Our conversation soon grew desultory. Our day had started early, and the morning had been one of vigorous exercise.  I lay back in the grass, murmured another word or two and dozed off; in my mind, the breeze among the trees, the sunlight and the flowers wove themselves into a shimmering, pleasant dream.

I don’t suppose my nap lasted very long. I drifted back into waking as gradually as I had drifted into my dream. Russandol still sat beside me, but he had drawn up his knees and rested his head on them, his arms lightly hugging his ankles. His face was turned in my direction, as my face was turned towards him, but he was not looking at me.

I blinked drowsily and then, with a sudden small stab to the heart, I was reminded of Amarie. It takes very little to remind me of Amarie, and at first I thought it was simply the sun on the daisies.  Then I realized it was not.

Russandol’s eyes were half-closed. He was clearly miles away. His face was as relaxed and happy as I had ever seen it, his lips slightly parted and soft as if he was about to kiss the summer breeze.

When we still lived in Tirion, Russandol had caused a certain amount of distress and confusion among the female population, because he seemed to be permanently uncertain whether he was just being polite and charming to them for the greater good of Tirion or looking for the future mother of his children. He seemed to be sorely puzzled by the matter himself, and I occasionally sensed that he was barely stopping himself from asking out loud whether he might not be permitted a special dispensation to skip the part that involved looking for a wife and just go straight on to having the children.

Russandol’s hypothetical children, whether engendered by parthenogenesis or not, had unfortunately been one of the casualties of the events that followed our grandfather’s death. Russandol, the only one of us who had never had to overcome a visceral dislike of screaming babies or recalcitrant toddlers—unless he had got all of that out of his system before any of us was around—, was clearly never going to permit himself to father a child under his present circumstances. The same instinct that made him respond to other people’s children would prevent him from passing on the burden of his inheritance to one of his own. We had lost many more tangible things at the time, but still—it was a pity.

And yet, it seemed that at last Russandol was in love. There had been no hints either from himself or Macalaure on the subject, and I had heard no rumours. Was it a Sindarin woman who had had something to offer him that Valinorean ones could not?

His eyelids moved a little, indicating perhaps a return of awareness.

‘Dreaming of someone?’, I asked him in what was meant to be a gently teasing tone.  I was ready to show my sympathy and perfectly willing to enjoy—vicariously— the love affair of another, my own love being so far away and inaccessible.

At once I regretted having spoken or even having betrayed that I was awake. His eyes jerked wide open, and all that silent bliss evaporated from his face in an instant. Oh dear.

‘I wasn’t asking you to tell me her name’, I said hastily.

On hearing that, he seemed to compose himself. He smiled a small smile.

‘I’m not going to.’

‘Is she...unsuitable then?’, I asked, aware that I wasn’t being entirely tactful, but spurred on by rampant curiosity.

He raised his eyebrows at me. ‘Are you sure you’ve phrased that correctly?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘You think I’m suitable for anyone, such as I am?’

It was true that Russandol was no longer by any means Tirion’s most desirable matrimonial prize. I frowned and sat up.

‘Well, I guess as I’m your cousin, you might say I’m prejudiced. But I think the lady ought at least to be given the chance to consider the offer...’ I regarded him suspiciously. ‘You’re hedging, aren’t you?  I was right in the first place. She’s in love with somebody else or married or...something. Isn’t she? Somehow unsuitable.’

For a moment Russandol’s face was completely expressionless. Then suddenly he smiled at me in a way that obviously had nothing to do with me at all, but everything with whoever we were talking about.

‘Eminently unsuitable,’ he said gently.

I blinked. Oh my.

...in a room in Nargothrond, a lady said to her tailor: ‘I must, must, must have an eminently unsuitable gown!’

...in a palace in Gondolin, the musicians stopped playing and, as the thundering applause began, one critic said enthusiastically to another: ‘I love this; it’s so, so...eminently unsuitable!’

...on the slopes of Taniquetil, a Vanya knelt in rapture amid the snows and cried out: ‘Praise to you, Varda, for the eminent unsuitability of the stars!’

I blinked again. I was staring at Russandol, open-mouthed. He was regarding me with a hint of anxiety, I thought, but mainly with amusement. His lips twitched.

Not knowing what I was about to do, I suddenly heard myself burst out: ‘Russandol, why did you swear that thrice-damned oath?’

He went very still. Then he replied slowly, cautiously: ‘I’m not sure I can answer you. My memory of that day is unreliable. Too much grief, anger and fear—it has blurred the outline of events. Any explanation that I could piece together may not be the correct one.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I think I saw my father looking at me, and in his eyes I read the question—or seemed to read it: Why is he dead and not you? And I had no defence against that. And so I swore the oath without question, quibble or amendment... You see’, he appealed to me, ‘I was really thinking only of myself—that Atar was demanding the rest of my life in payment...  It didn’t even quite penetrate my consciousness that I was helping him drag my brothers into it as well until it was too late. And it certainly would not have crossed my mind at that moment that I might be involving anyone else’, he hesitated and then added, with a wry smile, ‘except, I suppose, Morgoth...’

‘What a lousy excuse!’, I said bitterly.

He reached out and very gently touched my cheek with the tip of his index finger. I realized it was wet with angry tears.

‘Does it matter so much?’, he asked me softly. ‘Alqualonde and Losgar—what happened there might have happened even if we had never sworn the oath. We would probably have followed Atar anywhere, obeyed any of his commands, even without the oath. You could almost say the oath was an unnecessary dramatic flourish...’

‘You don’t believe for a moment that it doesn’t matter! You are saying that just because you are the kind of person who can’t see anybody weep without making soothing noises!’

‘Yes’, he admitted. He hesitated. ‘Findarato, why are we having this conversation now, today? Why did you not ask me that question, say, at the Feast of Reuniting or when I visited you in Nargothrond?’

‘Because I am your cousin and I was prejudiced, Russandol. I thought I knew you and that I knew that you were bound to swear such an oath if Feanaro demanded it of you.  So it seemed more kind and tactful to pass the matter over in silence. I was even proud of my sensitivity and tolerance. But today I’ve discovered that I don’t know you as well as I thought, and all I thought I knew of you is thereby thrown into doubt. And so my vaunted tolerance and tact may be merely another form of the contempt that familiarity breeds. And I tell you today, Russandol, it enrages me that you swore that oath. It makes me absolutely furious that you could imagine that your father would have been willing to exchange your life for our grandfather’s, if that choice had been offered to him. And what makes me want to tear my hair, stamp my feet and throw things is that, even if you were right about Feanaro, you should have accepted his judgement without another thought for anyone else you loved, anyone else who loved you, or anyone else you might be going to love in the future!’

I heard my voice shaking. He was regarding me patiently, warily, like a fox who has several kinds of courage, but not the courage to gnaw off the limb that holds him entrapped—no, he was like a fox who has already chewed off his leg and found that all he has managed to escape to is a larger trap with more wriggling space, and now sits bleeding.... I had to close my eyes in distress at that thought and felt more tears of outrage welling through my lashes. He made no more consoling noises. I guess he thought I had refused them once and for all.

I opened my eyes again. The shadows of the trees were lengthening across the clearing. They would soon be expecting us in Himring. Russandol and I would sit at the supper table in the hall with the others, and I could already see that, regardless of the conversation we had just had, he would be the same gracious, cordial host he had been last night and every night since I had arrived. Suddenly, I couldn’t face the prospect.

‘I am not going back with you’, I said.

‘I can see why you might not want to,’ he answered. ‘Will you permit me to send a couple of guards after you to accompany you wherever you choose to go? I don’t expect any attacks from the Enemy around here, but it is still not safe to travel alone.’

‘No’, I said. ‘I’ll be going south and east, not north, and I won’t want company for a while.’

He accepted that, too.

I got up and went to my horse. Macalaure arose from where he was sitting by the creek and came over to me.

‘Here, for you’, he said and held out his new harp to me.

I looked at him and realized that Macalaure, the abstracted, head-in the-clouds musician, had probably been following every single word of our conversation.

‘Thank you’, I said. It seemed an ungracious manner to accept such a generous gift. It clearly was my day for being rude to Feanorians.  I slung the harp over my shoulder by its strap and got on my horse.

Russandol had followed me and stood a little way off. I looked down at him. He silently offered me the basket with the remaining fruit: five apples, two pears.

What, I wondered for a moment, had impelled me so strongly that I had carelessly ruined the promise of a perfect afternoon with unavailing reproaches and bitterness? Then I remembered. I opened my mouth to try and tell Russandol more clearly but could not find the words.

‘I still think the lady should be permitted to know,’ I said instead, ‘eminently unsuitable or not. If I were her, I would want to know.’

‘Would you, cousin?’, he asked sadly. ‘Lousy excuses and all?’

I shrugged helplessly. ‘Yes, I would.’ And suddenly found myself on firmer ground. ‘But even if you don’t tell her, thank you for showing me.’

He regarded me with sincere astonishment. I raised my hand in a gesture of farewell to both of them and turned my horse south and east.  I looked back only once. They were standing close together, Macalaure having moved around to Russandol’s right side, as he always did—empty-handed now, both of them, the redhead and the dark one, watching me go.

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Pitting against my opponent Sauron all that I am and all that I know, everything good and strong that I have encountered in the world, I grasp at the memory of sunlight on the grass and of Russandol’s voice, ablaze with the contemplation of his unnamed love. ‘Eminently unsuitable’, I hear him saying, joyously, as he  transforms  a denial of intent, a prissy expression of disapproval from inside out, until it becomes a paean of praise, a hymn of dedication and devotion.

‘Beat that, snake!’ Sauron doesn’t even try. He can’t. There is so little he can counter directly, I’ve learned. He slithers away, veers, slithers back and attacks me with the memory of blood on the streets of Alqualonde.

 

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Chapter End Notes

 

Within the series, this comes after Bridge in Dor-Lomin (or rather the first half of that story), which mentions the visit of Maedhros to Nargothrond and also suggests something of the nature of Maedhros's daydream. It precedes Looking at the Stars—Maedhros does not take Finrod’s advice about 'permitting the lady to know', until other circumstances impel him to.