The Walls on Amon Ereb by Himring

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Chapter 1

 

In this series, Caranthir is conceived of as telepathically and empathically gifted. This idea was originally added to fanon by Dawn Felagund in Another Man's Cage, I believe.

Also, although only Amrod appears in the story, Amras is conceived of as being still alive (rather than burned with the ships at Losgar).

(Names: Ambarussa=Amrod and Amras; Carnistir=Caranthir; Feanaro=Feanor; Macalaure=Maglor; Maitimo, Nelyo=Maedhros; Pityo=Amrod; also Amil=Nerdanel; Atar=Feanor.)

 

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I

Maedhros:

A lonely outcrop of stone. Looking towards a row of low hills marching towards the west. Facing a wall of tall mountains in the east across leagues of forest. Caranthir came here, driven from his dwellings by overwhelming force. Here he took refuge and raised strong walls. True to his heritage, he took part in the building himself, was involved at every stage from the first plan to the topmost stone crowning the battlements and, although he did not work alone, it is chiefly of Caranthir that the walls talk to me, for I am his brother.

Caranthir, the walls on Amon Ereb sigh. Caranthir delved earth. Caranthir ferried stone. Caranthir raised us. He fenced himself in. He fenced the world out. Where is he now? Where has Caranthir gone? Come back, Caranthir, let us shelter you. We will shield you. Nobody shall enter here against your will! See how thick we are, how strong! How well you designed us, Caranthir!

But my brother Carnistir is dead, dead and disposed of, his body hurriedly buried in an unmarked grave on the outskirts of Doriath. When the deadly blow fell, there was nothing to stay it, neither stone nor iron. I saw him carried out of the gates of Menegroth. His side had been laid open all the way down to his thigh.  Shredded skin, torn flesh, crushed bone, the body that had housed a son and a brother, a builder of castles and a Noldorin prince, lay unprotected on the bare ground, under the starless sky.

He will not return to Amon Ereb. He will not need walls to shelter him again, against that world that began to be unkind to him so much sooner than the rest of us. All those hours we spent pacing back and forth, when he was a baby, with a ceaselessly howling Carnistir in our arms, taking turns, Atar, Amil and I, never quite realizing that it wasn’t wind or teething or any of the other myriad of grievances that afflict small children that were hurting him, but our own thoughts, our own anxiety, mounting as his face went purple and throbbing veins seemed to stand out on his forehead and temples, threatening apoplexy. However collected we strove to appear, however calm we kept our voices and hands, his infant mind was too perceptive to be deceived, wide open and defenceless against our fears...

And when we finally did realize, shouldn’t it have taught us our own limitations? Should we not have learned humility, we who could not keep ourselves from hurting our closest kin with a mere thought? Instead we took a fierce pride in him and closed ranks around him, whenever any outsider dared to call him strange or uncouth. He was ours and special. And Carnistir surmounted his early difficulties, imbibing  Feanorian pride as much as the rest of us, and went on to fall in a bloody and pointless battle that ought never to have taken place.

When the fatal blow fell, I wasn’t beside him.

 

II

A long time earlier, in Valinor:

‘Amil...?’

‘Things are not going well, Maitimo.’

That much was obvious. I waited for her to speak again. She sat. There was tea in the pot, so I poured her a cup. She wrapped her fingers around it, as if to warm them, but did not drink.

‘I have come to the end of myself’, she said. ‘Maitimo, I’m leaving.’

Leaving Atar, she meant. Leaving us. I was absolutely stunned, speechless, and, at the same time, not at all surprised.

‘Your father’, she said, staring into her cup, ‘is inexhaustible. I will say this for him, however he acts towards others, he does not nurse grudges against me. As soon as the storm of his anger has passed, it is all sunshine again. And he expects me to have forgotten and forgiven, too. But you know what I’m like, he’ll say. I do. And once I could. Once I thought I was inexhaustible, too...

‘Maitimo, this woman I’m becoming is not me, is not Nerdanel. You have seen me. I spend days hiding behind a locked door, spoiling clay and ruining stone, trying to regain the strength to venture out, and when I think I finally have, at the smallest jolt, my hard-achieved equilibrium tilts and overturns again. I cannot stop love from leaking away; worse, I cannot stop bitterness from seeping into the emptiness it leaves and, if I have lost the strength for good, I still retain the knowledge how to hurt. It makes me afraid how easy it has become to inflict hurt, knowingly...

‘If I wish to remain Nerdanel, I must remove her from Feanaro.  He will let me leave, if I insist. But, Maitimo,’ she appealed to me urgently ‘he will not let me take anyone else. If I’ve hardly been myself, recently, I haven’t been much of a mother either. But I would not have chosen to leave Ambarussa, this early in their lives, or Carnistir, ever, if I had a choice. And yet I cannot take them without causing precisely the kind of conflict I am trying to avoid by leaving!’

How could I help promising her what she needed to hear?

‘I will be there, Amil.’

 ‘Will you, Maitimo? I know you have your own disagreements with Feanaro...’

She looked at me hopefully. For a moment, I felt a touch of resentment, almost malice—as if to say: if you plan to desert us, why should I grant you absolution in advance? But the impulse disappeared as soon as it had surfaced, for what she said was true.

This drooping, defeated woman on the other side of the table was not the brave, strong mother I remembered from my early childhood, the woman who had carried me on her hip for hours without complaint in our family’s wanderings across Valinor, who had been capable of out-arguing Feanaro without even needing to raise her voice. How and when had this happened? Could I have done more to prevent it? Was it because we were sons, all seven of us—would it have helped if even one of us had been a daughter?  But could even a daughter have supported her adequately, when things went wrong between husband and wife as they had done?

Looking at Nerdanel now, the shadow of Nerdanel that had been, and considering the slow wasting of courage, the failure of good intentions, the fading of hope, I seemed to feel myself grow insubstantial, my hands at the ends of my arms oddly weightless, ineffective, weak, as if the heavy oak table between us had grown more real than either of us.

‘Maitimo?’

‘I will be there for them, Amil.’

 

III

Amrod:

We’ve always disliked this place—ever since Carnistir first settled here and began fortifying it. Oh, it was logical enough to pick this spot, a prime example of Noldorin strategic thinking. If we ourselves had never considered doing so, perhaps we were unduly influenced by our friends among the Green Elves, who regard Amon Ereb as ominous and unlucky. They would, of course; this was where Denethor fell in the First Battle and, whatever else may have happened since, they haven’t forgotten.

It was the obvious place to withdraw to in order to lick our wounds after Doriath. It was the only Feanorian stronghold to remain garrisoned, even if Carnistir had withdrawn almost all his troops when we made our bid for the re-conquest of the North. Weakened even more than we had been by heavy losses so soon after our crushing defeat in the Nirnaeth, not knowing whose hand might turn against us in retribution for Doriath, we retreated south, until we arrived here and stopped, temporarily out of reach of the Enemy. Since then, we’ve begun wondering how much licking some wounds can stand.

We remain encamped at the foot of the hill, leaving the fortress itself to Maitimo and Macalaure. Whenever we make the climb up to speak to them, our heart sinks, as if grief shared were not grief halved, but grief doubled. This evening, it is my turn. There is nothing particularly urgent or sensitive about the information I need to impart, just an update on the supply situation, and I could wait or send a messenger, but I resist the temptation.

The guard informs me that Macalaure is busy, but Maitimo is free to see me. I’m not sure that that news doesn’t make things worse. We know Macalaure has been worried about Maitimo, although he hasn’t discussed his fears with us and we’re not sure we aren’t better off not knowing. But things being as they are, I make my way to the hall.

Although the guard at the door raises his voice to announce me, Maitimo doesn’t come forward. He remains standing halfway across the room, by the steps that lead up to the dais, close to the wall. What is he doing there? Dusk has already fallen in here. He should have sent for lights.

As I approach him, his gaze fixes on me and our eyes meet.

‘I promised Amil to look after you’, he says abruptly, instead of a greeting.

It is as I feared. This isn’t going to be an easy conversation.

‘And so you did,’ I reply sturdily, nevertheless.

‘Did I?’

He’s referring to our current situation, of course, but I’m having none of it.

‘Of course, you did, don’t you remember? You gave up your apartments at the palace immediately and moved back in with us for good. We weren’t altogether grateful, I can tell you. I suppose we’d been allowed to run wild a bit, Atar and Amil being distracted, but we thought that we were very adult and had outgrown supervision. Then, suddenly, there you were, checking up on us again that we were wearing clean shirts and had washed behind our ears.’

 ‘I’m sorry to have caused you inconvenience.’

‘I’m not saying we didn’t appreciate the return of regular meals...’

He smiles faintly. I see it and take courage. Maybe it’s time for a bit of plain speaking?

We used to be so much in awe of him. It’s not that we considered him infallible, certainly not after his mistakes had landed him in Angband. But even his mistakes seemed to be larger than life. We would not have dared to feel pity for him, even when he returned ill and maimed.  We saw how even our unruly older brothers obeyed him, when he chose to command, and it would not have crossed our minds to dispute his decisions ourselves. But that changed at the time of Doriath. Too much changed at the time of Doriath.

‘Nelyo,’ I begin and hesitate.

‘Yes?’

‘We do not think we should stay here, at Amon Ereb. We feel exposed here, too visible. We do not think you should stay here either. It doesn’t seem to be doing you any good...’

I stop, embarrassed.

‘Go on. What are you suggesting?’

‘It is clear now that the Laiquendi will not take steps against us to avenge Dior as they avenged Thingol on the Dwarves. They know us too well, we have friends among them, they have more sympathy with our motives, and they do not wish to compound the kin-slaying...’

I stop again and wince. He regards me steadily.

‘And so?’

‘We think we should return to the woods.’

There is a moment of silence.

‘We don’t want this place held against us, if we can prevent it’, he says thoughtfully.

I knew he wasn’t going to agree. He’s going to try and stick it out in this Valar-forsaken pile of stone.

‘We’ll have to leave a moderately decent garrison here’, he continues, to my surprise. ‘But otherwise, I think you might be right. Perhaps our family is no longer best served by walls of stone at this point. There aren’t enough of us left to defend them, and they will just let the Enemy know where to find us...’

He stops and looks sadly at the wall next to him. Then he reaches out and lays his fingers against it, very gently, as if it were the soft cheek of a child.

If anyone had told me an hour ago that Maitimo was changing Carnistir’s nappies and singing lullabies to him long before we were even thought of, I would have replied that that wasn’t news. But just now, as I see him touching the wall that Carnistir built, the awareness of that shared history suddenly becomes far too vivid and immediate for my own peace of mind. It’s not so long ago since I saw our brother Carnistir spill out his guts in Doriath.

I seize the warrior’s hand that used to rock the cradle and pull it away from the wall. Then I grasp his wrist even more firmly and, without further ado, I turn and drag Maitimo out of the hall and down to the gate.  It’s not until we’ve reached the courtyard that I stop, feeling my breath labour as if I’d run a mile. Above us, the first stars have come out.

‘What’s the hurry, Pityo?’, he asks, behind me.  ‘I agree that we should leave, but we can hardly do so tonight, can we?’

His voice sounds so normal and matter-of-fact, I could almost believe that I’ve been imagining things. But the tears pricking my eyelids tell me that I haven’t.

 

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Chapter End Notes

 

Tweaks to Canon (not fully researched):

As far as I can see, there is, in fact, no hint in the canon that Caranthir was the driving force in the garrisoning of Amon Ereb. However, Amrod and Amras could have done so before Caranthir fled south and apparently they hadn't.

The sojourn of Maedhros on Amon Ereb is apparently envisaged as taking place after the Fall of the Havens of Sirion rather than before them. However, it looks to me as if it might be an alternative account to the survival of the sons of Feanor as fugitives in the woods of East Beleriand rather than a sequentially later event.