The Harp by Himring

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Chapter 1

 

As explained in Praying for Lightning, Fingon had an ominous dream concerning Maedhros early on during the crossing of the Helcaraxe. When he arrives in Beleriand, his most pressing concern is to make sure that his cousin is alive and well rather than confronting him about the burning of the ships.

[Names: Feanaro=Feanor, Maitimo=Maedhros, Macalaure=Maglor, Findekano=Fingon, Turukano=Turgon, Findarato=Finrod, Nolofinwe=Fingolfin, Itarillle=Idril] 

 

In the end, it wasn’t an easy decision. There were some things that others would have questioned that he never did:  whether rescuing an oath-bound son of Feanaro could really be the solution for the difficulties that the Noldor faced, whether it was worth risking his own life on the off chance that such a rescue might be possible. Those kinds of doubts were already dealt with, done with, before they could arise.

The need to go and try to rescue Maitimo was not a conclusion that he had gradually arrived at. It had been his first instinct, the moment he realized that they had turned their backs on Maitimo when they had turned away from the gates of Angband and that from then on every single step had taken them further away from him. Bypassing conscious thought, before horror or grief could register, he felt the adrenaline rush into his body, impelling him, pushing him, to turn around on his heel and run, run all the way back to those gates and—do precisely what? The onslaught was so strong that for a moment he rocked on his feet with the impact, but he caught himself and stood still, unmoving, trying to assimilate what he had just been told.

They were so late! Their effort to struggle free of the ice had been so great that when they finally achieved it, their feet had seemed winged and the wind of their going carried them forth into Beleriand at great speed. But here, everything had happened and life had ground to a halt long before, while they were still laboriously picking their way through cracked ice—or even before that.

He looked at Macalaure’s pale tired face and the dark hollows of his eyes and saw there evidence of another kind of laborious struggle. The impulse to rush off all on his own, he thought, was an immature, childish reaction. However long it had taken them, they were here now. Together, they would do the sensible, necessary, obvious thing.

He soon found out how wrong he was.  Around him, he saw the heroes of the Crossing of the Ice falter. They had partly been driven on by the need for revenge on Melkor, partly by the need to prove themselves to Feanaro, who had dared to despise and betray them. Now, both their targets seemed to have been removed. Melkor was ensconced behind walls they had not learned how to breach. Feanaro was even further out of reach, and his grieving and bewildered followers, unforgiven as they were, were no adequate substitute, insufficient for the envisaged scene of vindication. 

Deprived of their twin goals, the descendants of Indis and their followers lost their momentum. Grief, pain and exhaustion caught up with them. They alighted on the gravelly shore by Lake Mithrim like an albatross on flat ground—magnificent in the air, but, once down, unable to launch themselves again.

He found the Feanorians no easier to deal with.

‘What precisely does your father want of me?’, Macalaure asked him. ‘Three times we’ve met, supposedly, to negotiate and each time I listened to a long string of recriminations until he ended up insulting Atar’s memory so badly I had to break off and leave. Findekano, I can’t un-burn those ships. I would if I could. And despite what your father seems to think, I don’t have Feanaro hidden away under my bedstead where he can’t get at him.’

‘You need to make some public gesture’, he said vaguely, hopefully, desperately.

‘What kind of gesture? And if your father repeats even half of the things that he said to me in public where my brothers and the rest of our party can hear him, there’ll be swords drawn—and not a reconciliation. I can’t risk it.’

***

‘Are you suggesting my complaints—our complaints—are unfounded?’, his father asked with a dangerous edge to his voice.

Turukano didn’t need to say anything. Their eyes just met and he thought ‘Elenwe’. Words died in his throat.

***

‘I don’t know,’ said Findarato slowly. ‘Look at our people, Findekano, they need food, they need rest, they need care. I’ve heard that my great-uncle, who was thought lost, lives and rules some way to the south.  We could go there, I’m sure he would assist us.’

‘And leave...the others here?’

Findarato’s normally gentle voice turned steel. ‘Didn’t they leave us?’

***

In between unproductive discussions, at first more as a way of calming himself than anything else, he began to plan the un-planable. He discreetly procured a couple of weeks’ worth of dried rations for a single person, travelling. Quite openly, he tried to track down any Sindar he could get hold of and find out anything that was known about Angband beyond its gates. He learned little; none of it, of course, was good. ‘Nobody comes back from Angband’, the Sindar said. Except, it seemed, they sometimes did—but that did not make good hearing either. More by guesswork than informed knowledge, he assembled bits and pieces of gear that might prove useful and stacked them neatly beside his bed.

He did the rounds again: Macalaure, Nolofinwe, Findarato—Findarato, Nolofinwe, Macalaure—and was no further forward. He wasn’t handling this well, he concluded. He was making things worse, not better, for the more they kept telling him it was impossible, the less easy it was for them to budge.

He found himself listening to each of them in turn and thinking: Yes, but don’t you see that that is exactly why we need to rescue Maitimo first?  So that we can try and sort out the rest!  But they didn’t see it and, although his own conviction was bone-deep, he couldn’t seem to get it across, not even to Macalaure. Least of all to Macalaure, because the subject was obviously such a painful one that Macalaure reacted each time he heard Maitimo’s name spoken as if he had just been viciously attacked. The idea briefly crossed Findekano’s mind that perhaps it was only he himself who couldn’t bear to try and solve this sky-high mountain of intractable problems before he had at least attempted to rescue his cousin, but he dismissed the idea impatiently, almost angrily.  

He lay awake at night, eyes wide open, muscles clenching and straining, and tried not to think about Angband. It got more difficult rather than easier.

By their own lights, he saw eventually, they were right. It wouldn’t be sufficient just to drag his family in his wake, even if he could manage it, for the Noldor were split from top to bottom. It would spell disaster to try to attack such a powerful enemy in unfamiliar conditions with an army in which not only the leaders, but the troops themselves deeply resented and suspected each other.

He began drafting and discarding messages in his head, a letter to explain to his father where he had gone. But at the same time he began to be very much afraid. It wasn’t so much Angband he was afraid of, although the few things he had been able to learn were enough to freeze anyone’s marrow. He was afraid now that he might end up not going. Too much time had passed since that moment when it would have been so easy to rush off to Angband that he had had to force himself not to give in. The underlying compulsion had not lessened, had, if possible, even intensified, but he had had time to think, to become aware of other points of view. Now he would have to start off in cold blood, consciously ignoring other claims on him, flying in the face of acknowledged common sense.  And Maitimo...  But he was getting as bad as Macalaure.

He was alone, sitting on his bed long after midnight, his thoughts having chased themselves through familiar circles to a standstill, when his gaze fell on the harp forsaken in a corner. Music was as far from his mind as it had been ever since they arrived; nevertheless, he picked it up and turned it over in his hands. As Noldorin harps went, it wasn’t fancy: the soundboard of spruce, the rest of the frame of maple wood, no inlay and not much carving beyond the graceful curves that allowed the harp to fit more snugly against his left shoulder. He had brought it all the way from Valinor, although he had found that he had no memory of having taken the decision in Tirion to put it in with the rest of his luggage. It must have been on impulse, in an optimistic moment that seemed as inexplicable now as it was forgotten.

During the Crossing, the harp had narrowly escaped being sacrificed for firewood at least three times. He’d hung onto it because he’d decided its advantages for morale just barely outweighed its value as fuel. The notes of an instrument, even when the strings were plucked by fingers stiff with frost, would steady shaking voices, and when songs with words would no longer serve, because mentioning anything at all had become just too unbearable, a tune would still cut across the pain.

He’d played lullabies to Itarille long past the time the child was asleep until he saw Turukano’s stiff shoulders, too, relax a little. He’d played wake-up songs after periods of rest—Are you sleeping, are you sleeping?—to help accelerate the heartbeat and get the blood flowing more quickly in sluggish veins, there being neither light nor warmth to mark the beginning of day and renewed effort. Nothing complicated, nothing artistic, but it had served.

Now he went through the familiar routine of tuning the harp and ran his fingers across the strings, picking out phrases and chords at random. Gradually, they coalesced into a recognizable melody, a nonsensical counting song that they had sung as children to accompany a game that involved much chasing and yelling:

One, two, three—

what’s for tea?

Four, five, six—

gammon and spinach.

Seven, eight, nine—

pumpkin pie.

Ten—

come and fetch me,

come and fetch me!

 

He played it again, and this time he softly sang the words: Seven, eight, nine—pumpkin pie. Ten—come and fetch me! For a moment he sat quite still. Then his hands reached out and grabbed his bow and quiver and a couple of other things that lay ready beside them, and his feet walked out of the tent.

With dream-like confidence, he made his way past the guards without being questioned or—apparently—noticed. It was only when he was well outside the perimeter of the camp that he stopped to consider what he was doing. He realized that he was still clutching the harp in his left hand, that he had never written the letter to his father, that he had left about half of the carefully assembled equipment behind.  He wondered whether he ought to turn back now and start out again properly tomorrow.

But who was he trying to fool? He had no idea at all how explain things to his father. He had no plan. He did not know what he might need. For all he knew, a harp might come in handy. So he walked on straight ahead into the dark.

***

Later, he pulled strings off the harp to make a tourniquet.

Chapter End Notes

 

Originally, I was thinking of a German nursery rhyme which translates literally as: I’m sitting here and cutting up ham, and whoever loves me will wave to me; I’m sitting here  and cutting up bacon, and whoever loves me will fetch me away. I decided that my adaptation had better drop the words love and cut.

Thanks to January’s SWG Newsletter, of course, we now have reliable information on what song it was that Fingon sang on Thangorodrim.

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