An Intense Dislike of Elves by Himring

Although I’ve never seen anything like it, the fortress enthroned on its hill looks exactly as I had imagined it, walls thick, towers high.  But it’s full of Eldar.  No surprise, that—after all, it’s supposed to be the military headquarters of the campaign against Morgoth in Eastern Beleriand, which is the reason I’m here. Still, I’ve never seen so many Eldar at once before. They only ever came in small groups to Estolad, to inspect us or gawk at us, depending on the dignity they accorded themselves. We were told that there were more of them out there, where we couldn’t see them.  For a while, whenever I walked in the woods around Estolad, I kept whirling around, imagining silent sniggers in the bushes. I never spotted anyone.

Here they are in plain sight: manning the walls, exercising in the courtyard, hurrying busily along the corridors. I remind myself firmly that I used to be opposed to our people allying themselves with the Eldar for sensible, utilitarian reasons—even if I have been forced to reverse my position. It had nothing to do with feeling uncomfortable around Eldar. I can deal with it.

Assuming that I will be permitted to, which seems less certain, now I see how many troops this Maedhros already has... How much can he need another soldier? At least I had no trouble being admitted and, in fact, I was kicking my heels in the guards’ room for less than half an hour, when I was told that Prince Maedhros wished to see me. As I arrived unannounced, that must surely count as quick, in a place this size. The guard show me into a room. I guess it’s medium-sized; to me it seems huge.

‘Lord Amlach? Welcome to Himring. I’ve heard reports of you,’ the tall elf looming up in the middle of the room says.

He has?  Well, from one point of view, that’s good.  I certainly want my future commander to be keeping track of Morgoth’s machinations. On the other hand, what he has heard might make him less inclined to take me on. And does he know how very much “Lord” is just a courtesy title these days?

His face doesn’t show anything except polite attention. Those bright eyes are meeting mine without flinching or a sign of discomfort. I guess, haughty Feanorion that he is, he thinks he can deal with any problem I might pose.  It makes a change, though—although, come to think of it, the guards didn’t seem all that impressed when they heard my name either.

He looks just a little willowy in those dark grey clothes; but elves do, of course, it’s deceptive.  There’s something jutting out near his hip... Oh, yes, he’s a cripple, isn’t he? Some absurd story about a giant eagle—was it that the bird pecked off his hand?  I should have taken the trouble to gather more information about him, before I came here, but I left in somewhat of a hurry and, in any case, by that time nobody was keen to answer any questions of mine.

I respond, as formally as I can, in my best Sindarin. As I do so, I notice the desk behind him. It’s piled with parchment leaves, covered in writing or blank, and notebooks, all sorted into tidy stacks. It seems a lot of writing goes on in Himring. We exchange a couple of courtesies; I refuse his offer of a meal and a rest before we continue our conversation.

Then he says: ‘You’re the first of your people to venture so far into the northeast. May I ask what purpose brings you here?’

This is the part that I’ve rehearsed over and over to myself—not so much in order to put it to him, but to try myself to make sense of the events that overturned all my convictions, all my hopes and plans within less than a day. He listens attentively. I speak almost too fast, ending slightly out of breath.

‘So you took the fact that Morgoth’s messenger had impersonated you in his attempt to turn your people against us as a personal insult to yourself’, he summarizes.  ‘And now you wish to fight Morgoth, whereas before you had advised against it? I understand.  But pardon me for asking—that does not quite explain why you are here. Those of your people who have opted for taking part in the war against Morgoth have so far moved west, not north.  It was my cousin Finrod whom you first followed to Estolad, after all.’

‘I was told that you had chosen to build your fortress here, in the north, so as to be in the forefront of the battle against Morgoth.’

‘So now you have had your mind changed for you, you’re impatient to join the fighting? But I hear your Uncle Aradan has established himself at my uncle’s court at Eithel Sirion, with others of your kin. Himring is not closer to Angband than Barad Eithel. Why not join your uncle?’

 I hesitate. His gaze meets mine. Steady grey eyes. The sons of Feanor, they said.  They are not like us. They are proud and fierce. And their voices implied other things as well. Estolad was supposed to be quite close to their territory, the territory of the youngest of the sons, Amrod and Amras, that is, but if Amrod and Amras also came and inspected us, I never met them.

‘I wish to fight Morgoth. I still do not particularly like elves.’

He does not look surprised or offended. He looks as if he’s waiting for me to continue. But what else can I say?

‘You may have heard—my people call your cousin Finrod Nom. It means Wisdom.’

Now his eyes widen slightly.

‘I see. You came looking for someone less wise.’

Is he laughing? Nobody warned me that the sons of Feanor might have a sense of humour. If I had one once, I seem to have left it behind in Estolad. But he certainly seems serious and sober now.

‘You came all by yourself? Is there...anyone else?’

When I told them it had not been me who stood up at that council and argued against fighting on the side of the Eldar, their eyes started sliding away from me. Those who had been most sceptical about the Eldarin tales of the Enemy in the North were the quickest to start avoiding me. It was some of the most fervent adherents of Finrod and his teachings who thought at first that I was simply lying. But when they saw that their Eldarin friends were inclined to believe the tale, they, too, began to treat me as if I had a contagious disease. Two days later my wife, with our unborn child, left for her parents’ house.

‘There is nobody else.’

‘I see.’

There is a moment of silence.

Then he says: ‘I foresee a possible conflict of interest.’

I blew it. What a fool! What made me think that this elven prince would appreciate plain speaking?

‘From what you’ve just told me,’ he continues, ‘I gather you want to fight Morgoth as effectively as possible, and that is why you wish to take part in a combined effort—but otherwise what you really want is to be left alone. However, you realize, you would be the first of your kind to enter my service, although not the first I have ever seen. As your people appear to be moving into Hithlum and Dorthonion, I expect that your kin will play a considerable role in any military campaigns to come. It is important for me to learn who the people are that my uncle and cousins are allying themselves with. If you become a member of the garrison of Himring, I will be subjecting you to a series of interviews, trying to find out all I can from you about the Edain. Are you prepared to put up with that?’

Oh. He isn’t refusing to take me on. Interviews? I don’t want to be interviewed. Talking to Prince Maedhros just now has exhausted me so much I feel I can barely stand, and we’ve been talking less than half an hour. But being regularly interrogated by Prince Maedhros isn’t as bad as being sent away, because I haven’t, really, anywhere else to go.

Yes, I want to avenge Morgoth’s appropriation of my identity. But it is not only that. He has added injury to insult; he took my identity and didn’t return it. I am ostracized among my people. If I go to Barad Eithel, the very best I can hope for is that they will say we told you so, but it is more likely that they will shun me, as they did in Estolad. Because they could not distinguish Morgoth’s emissary from me, they can no longer distinguish me from Morgoth’s emissary.

‘I am prepared to put up with that.’

‘Good. Then I suggest that you have that meal and rest that I mentioned earlier, and we’ll take it from there.’

The first interrogation didn’t take place until more than a week later. Maybe he wanted to give me time to settle in. I didn’t feel very settled at all, and the prospect of the interrogation unsettled me even more.

Following his summons, I entered his study again. This time, I found him behind his desk and he invited me to sit across from him. There was a jug of wine and a glass and a plate with thin slices of fine white bread in front of me. I eyed them suspiciously.

‘Answering questions is thirsty work’, he said. ‘But you can have water, if you prefer.’

Without waiting for me to respond, he got up, poured a glass of water from a carafe on the sideboard, set it down beside me and returned to his chair. He took up a large thin book, opened it to the first blank page, dipped his pen into the inkwell and looked up at me.

‘You’re going to write my answers down?’

‘I’m taking notes. I may want to go over some of what you’re going to tell me later. You may also say something I want to tell my relatives and I might want to tell them exactly what you said.’

I felt rather overwhelmed at the idea of my words going into a book.  I was also tense because I would have to talk about Estolad now, touch on everything that was still raw and hurting.

Maybe he guessed. What he said was: ‘Begin with the times before your people came to Beleriand.’

That wasn’t so bad. I started telling the old familiar stories, and it was almost as if I were telling them at the camp fire. He allowed me to get into my stride and tell them at my own pace, in my own style. His pen scratched on the parchment. When I’d come to a halt, he began asking me questions, and I realized that I’d been telling the stories as I would tell them to other Edain and that there were things here that one of us would understand as a matter of course but Eldar did not. That was interesting. I began explaining. The hour allotted to the interview was over before I knew it, and the level in the wine jug had sunk by an appreciable margin. The water glass was empty.  I supposed he had decided to postpone all the difficult questions till next time, softening me up.

I got up.  I was reluctant to admit it, but I’d almost enjoyed this hour. It had turned out to be easier to handle, at any rate, than the rest of the week, which, despite some reassuringly familiar weapons training and exercise routines, was somehow scarily alien, even the most mundane activity indefinably different when done  together with and in the presence of Eldar.

As I walked to the door, an obscure resentment seized me, at the suggestion that hadn’t, in fact, been explicitly been made by anyone: that this elf, this Feanorion, should be so much more enlightened than my own people.

I turned round and demanded: ‘How can you be so sure I’m not a servant of Morgoth?’

He looked up from his book of notes, slightly startled, but answered me readily, as if the question was of the kind you might discuss any day, at any time.

‘I’m not, of course. I can’t be. It seems an unnecessarily elaborate way of setting up someone to infiltrate my house, though, and I don’t quite see what Morgoth would have to gain from having a spy who was bound to attract so much attention. And forgive me for mentioning it, you seem unhappy in the way I would expect Amlach, son of Imlach, to be unhappy rather than a servant of Morgoth—the misery of those who have been to Angband is often of quite a distinctive kind...  If you are a servant of Morgoth, I’m guessing you don’t know it.’

The idea that it was possible to be a servant of Morgoth without knowing it was a new one to me. I found it extremely disquieting.

He saw it and added: ‘I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Morgoth’s methods can sometimes be very subtle, but his goals almost never are. If you find yourself with the blood of your kin dripping from your sword, you know you’re a servant of Morgoth.’

I really should have exhibited more curiosity, found out more about him early on. I took that supposedly reassuring comment at face value, completely missing its double-edged irony, and was very slow to understand what it was he’d said to me that day. But then, I hadn’t ever met anybody quite like him before—certainly not those Eldarin followers of Finrod who descended on us with the best of intentions, determined to bring the light of knowledge to our benighted selves.

Our interviews proceeded at a leisurely pace, at irregular intervals. We did not, as I’d expected, at any point steer a straight course towards the politics of Estolad and the house of Marach—the things I’d imagined he really wanted to know—instead, we discussed them in a rather roundabout manner along with just about anything else.

Once I broke off in the middle of explaining the rules of a children’s game to him and asked him: ‘You cannot really be interested in this?’

‘It’s fascinating’, he replied. ‘I don’t know how it is for you, but when I first saw Edain, I was struck with how different you were, how strange. But that first impression soon wore off. All those superficial dissimilarities my imagination had latched on to at first were after all just that, superficial. When it came to the heart of the matter, you talked like us, you walked like us; all in all, your way of life appeared much more familiar than that of dwarves. But the more I listen to you, the more I begin to realize how much difference the way we experience time makes.  For you it is essentially bounded, for us it is unbounded within Arda—or used to be, before we came away from Valinor. It informs everything you do, everything we do in little, but noticeable ways.‘

I frowned.

‘Before you ask me,’ he said, ‘yes, I do think it is relevant. Those little ways, they add up. All that may determine your views of a situation in a way we do not immediately understand, and those views can lead to actions that could blindside us, if we expect you to act as Eldar would... We were here.’

He pushed his book across the desk towards me. I saw he had drawn a diagram of the initial position of the players at the start of the game. We continued.

I hardly ever saw him outside those sessions. He had handed me over to one of his captains, and that captain in turn had assigned me to one of his companies. I learned my new duties quickly enough to fulfil my tasks competently, but I did not make friends. They were Eldar, I was not.

So we went on, until one day, when Maedhros had summoned me again and I had sat down as usual and begun talking, I realized something was different. It did not immediately occur to me what it was, and then I knew. What was missing was the sound of his pen, scratching on the parchment. At first it had disconcerted me, now I had become so used to it that I’d stopped registering it, until now I was struck by its absence. I looked at him. He was sitting there almost as always, listening attentively, but he had not opened his book. The lid was in place on the inkwell next to it.

‘You’re not taking notes’, I said.

He returned my gaze calmly.

‘I don’t need any more notes’, he said.

For a moment, we sat there, looking at each other, then I jumped up and walked to the door. He said nothing. I turned around. He was watching me. He would do nothing to stop me walking through that door.

I admitted to myself that I had come to depend on these sessions with Maedhros. They were the only occasions when I got to talk about the things that had been important to me in my old life, in fact, almost the only occasions when I got to talk about anything at all except the bare necessities. Some of the Eldar in my company had asked me questions to begin with, but I had not been in a mood to answer, and now they left me alone. I also admitted to myself that I had known perfectly well, as the sessions got fewer and farther between, that he was partly laying them on for my sake now, making time for me. Fascinating the Edain might be, but he could not engage in a long-term research project. In another life, one that included less of Morgoth, he might have.

If I walked out through that door, he would not summon me again. I was no longer a novelty. I was not even a rarity. Although I was the only one of my kind in Himring, there were after all loads of us, all over Estolad and Hithlum and Dorthonion. I represented nobody but myself. I was just one soldier, if a little brawnier than others and rather more short-lived. There was no need to keep me sweet.

He would not go on nursemaiding an Adan who wouldn’t even acknowledge that he wanted his attention. But I couldn’t acknowledge it, not even by simply sitting down again and pretending nothing had happened. My pride wouldn’t allow it. It was too much like asking for charity.

‘I still dislike elves’, I told him.

‘Intensely’, I added—and walked out.

I soon learned that Eldar were like Edain in more ways than was altogether pleasant. Perhaps I hadn’t been entirely aware that those talks with Maedhros, irregular as they had been, had also formed a protection. As long as the Eldar in my company thought that Maedhros took an interest in me, although they didn’t feel impelled to make any friendly overtures, especially when I turned out to be gloomy and taciturn, they also avoided any hostile ones, even sarcastic remarks. Once they concluded I had lost Maedhros’s favour, I discovered to my cost how much of an outsider I was and that the laws of the pack functioned among the Eldar as well as the Edain.

It wasn’t the truly popular and successful ones that turned on me, of course. It was those who were not quite the real thing and who desperately wanted to be who decided to demonstrate their superiority by making clear to the outsider that they considered him the scum of the earth. I had once been popular and successful myself; if I had not been, maybe I would have been able to handle it better.

Or so I told myself in an attempt at self-justification, after I had completely lost it and dangled the Sinda who was my chief tormentor out of a window for a few seconds by his hair. I knew quite well it was no excuse; all I had had to endure was a barrage of snide remarks and a series of increasingly noisome pranks. For days I stalked about my duties stiff with fear that any moment I would be summoned and summarily dismissed from service, maybe by Maedhros himself, than which there was no worse humiliation imaginable.

But it seemed the Eldar were even more like Edain than I had thought. Although the atmosphere in the barracks was definitely below freezing point, apparently nobody ever officially informed the authorities about the incident. I say officially, because they waited just long enough for nobody to be able to prove there was any connection at all; then the unit was dispersed. The Sinda ended up in one company, I myself in another and most of the others in a third one. In my new unit, they’d obviously decided I was not worth getting into trouble over.

After that, for a long time life became—mostly—boring.  To some extent that was as it should be, of course. Sieges are very boring. Sieges that have begun long before you were born and look set to continue long after you are dead are doubly so. It was Maedhros’s task as commander to ensure that we were sufficiently bored, for if he had allowed us to become too interested in anything except the northern horizon, we might have forgotten to watch for signs of danger from Angband. On the other hand, he also had to stop us from becoming too bored, for that might also have diminished our alertness.

Even in Himring, even among the Eldar, for whom time is unbounded, there were some that bored more easily than others—those who had no families, those who had no craft or art to pursue in their leisure hours.  It was they who tended to volunteer for the northern patrols and, eventually, I joined them, spending the following years out on patrol as much as I could. Life on patrol was not necessarily exciting, but at least we tended to move forward steadily, rather than remaining cooped up in one place.

On the other hand, there were those moments of acute danger and terror, irrupting suddenly into the long uniformity of guard and patrolling duties, when we did come across any of Morgoth’s creatures.  I was too young to have been involved in fighting before our people entered Beleriand, so it was now that I fought and killed my first orc. It was a less satisfactory feeling than I had imagined it to be, but at least I had begun doing what I had set out to do.

Sometimes Maedhros was with us. I suspect he would have come oftener if he could. My first impression was how very much he fitted in with the other Eldar, in contrast to myself, who remained an outsider as before. Later, when I realized that that wasn’t quite right, I attributed it to the necessary isolation that goes with the position of command. Not that he made much of it—we deferred to his decisions as a matter of course, and he never needed to draw a line. It was only much later that I realized that he fitted in too well. Unlike the others, who were less controlled, he never struck a wrong note.

There was his famous vigilance, of course. No nodding off on guard duty when Maedhros was with us—you knew that suddenly he’d be looming up right in front of you, not even reproachfully, but gauging the exact degree of your sleepiness with one long look, and you’d be blushing right down to your toes. But he treated me just the same as everyone else.

It took a long time, at least as measured by the Edain, but eventually something like camaraderie developed between me and those I kept being thrown together with on patrol. It was the jokes that I noticed most. At first, my Sindarin, fluent enough for ordinary communication, wasn’t quite good enough to understand them at all. After a while, I managed to understand the words, but lacked the background to make sense of them. Later, I understood what they meant, but didn’t consider them at all funny. The day I finally laughed at a joke, a split second after all the others, everyone turned round and looked at me. Maybe they had concluded that Edain weren’t capable of laughing. If so, they seemed quite happy to be proved wrong. Most of them grinned.

I lay flat on my back in bed and felt worse than I had ever before in my life. However unhappy I might have been at times in Estolad and in Himring, I had always enjoyed good health, if not the health of the Eldar. I had relied on the strength of my body without thinking about it. Now it had deserted me. The pain in my left leg and side was constant. Most of the time I managed, in part, to block it out. When I didn’t, the pain was intense enough to make me weep. The Eldarin surgeons hesitated to give me too much pain-killer, not knowing how it would agree with my physiology. For the same reason, I hesitated to take even the amount they allotted me.

It was little consolation that we had managed to dispatch the troll who had caused the damage. It had fallen on me in its death throes, crushing my thigh bone and my hip into a mass of splinters. I’d been carried back to Himring on a stretcher, largely unconscious. I wished I’d remained so.

The door opened, and Maedhros entered the chamber. I had not seen him since my accident. He had not been with us when we encountered the troll and had been absent from Himring upon our return—or so I’d been told, not having been in any position to take any interest in his whereabouts myself.

‘Amlach’, he said and moved around to where I could see him without having to move or strain my neck. ‘They’ve told me what happened to you.’

I nodded.

‘I’ve talked to the surgeons. They’ve concluded that there is no chance now that your hip will heal well enough for you to walk again without a crutch.’

‘I could have told them that right away. In fact, I did.’

‘So I was informed. However, you are no surgeon yourself, and my surgeons considered it their duty not to take your word for it. They are unfamiliar with fractures and the process of their healing in Edain—they sent messages to Dorthonion to enquire. If they have inflicted unnecessary pain on you in their efforts, I am sorry for it. They meant well.’

‘I know. It doesn’t matter.’

‘Amlach, you have served me well...’

‘How can you say that? I came to Himring to fight against Morgoth. In all the years I’ve been here, how much have I achieved? I killed a few orcs. I helped to kill a troll, which did for me. I’ve never really fought Morgoth, and now I never will.’

‘There are those who would say that helping to maintain a siege successfully is a greater achievement than taking part in a pitched battle in which all may be lost at one throw.’

I opened my mouth.

‘Don’t bother to argue with that. If we should have attacked Morgoth outright during the time of your service with me and did not, it is my failing and not yours. I say you have served me well, Amlach. But it is true that your physical condition will not allow you to fight and serve as a soldier any longer. You came to Himring to fight Morgoth. Now you can no longer do so, do you wish to leave?’

I just stared at him.

‘I owe you for your services, Amlach. If you wish to leave, I will take care that you are conveyed wherever you wish to go as safely and in as much comfort as possible, and I will also give you the means to set yourself up there. Perhaps you wish to go back to Estolad. Or you might want to go to Eithel Sirion—I know your uncle has recently died but I believe that there are still relatives of yours living there. Or you might want to move to the southern slopes of Ered Wethrin where others of your relatives have settled.’

Years after my arrival in Himring, I had sent a couple of brief messages to my Uncle Aradan and my cousin Magor. Maedhros’s messengers to Barad Eithel had carried them for me, together with other messages from Noldor and Sindar who had relatives or acquaintances in Hithlum. I had received equally brief answers, and a tenuous contact had been re-established. They had not visited me or I them.

I thought of arriving in Hithlum, a place I had never been to, a cripple unable to walk, imposing on relatives I hadn’t seen for decades. I closed my eyes. They were swimming with tears.

‘I still intensely dislike elves’, I heard myself say, desperately. Oh, fool! Fool!

There was a moment of silence.

‘Truly?’, Maedhros asked. ‘What a fine, well-honed dislike that is! It would almost be a waste to take it among Edain where you could not fully practise it!’

This time, the laughter in his voice was unmistakable. But it felt good. It wrapped itself around the sore and aching parts of my soul like a fine linen bandage. I felt his touch on my shoulder, comforting.

‘You are most welcome to stay, if you wish it’, he said.

 ‘Thank you’, I said without opening my eyes. The tears were threatening to seep out under my lashes.

‘I think I should come back and discuss this with you another day. You are, I feel, in worse physical condition than I was led to expect. Perhaps I should not have subjected you to this conversation at all just yet, but I thought you might be worrying about the future.’

‘I was.’

It is the end of a long summer day. I lean exhaustedly against the battlements and turn my face gratefully into the evening breeze. Then I look at Maedhros.

‘Thank you.’

It was he who carefully helped me up the steep, narrow steps, when I complained to him that I was feeling stifled. Down below, the heat still hangs in enclosed rooms and will not depart.

‘You’re welcome’, he says, smiling. ‘We cripples must stick together.’

I gape at him. I haven’t thought of him as a cripple in years and years. He has no trouble comprehending my astonishment.

‘There’s a trick to it’, he says, smirking a little. ‘Whenever I need to do something that needs two hands to do, I start looking as regal as possible, as inexpressibly noble as if I would never think of dirtying my own hand with such an insignificant task. Usually, someone takes the hint and steps in and does it for me.’

I snort.

‘I have a feeling that trick works for you better than it would for me.’

‘Maybe’, he agrees. ‘For now, a greater mystique attaches to the name of the house of Feanor than to the house of Marach. However, in time—who knows? But look on the bright side. It saves you having to try and look inexpressibly noble. You have no idea what a pain that can be.’

Behind us, two servants climb up to the battlements. One carries two folding chairs, the other a folding table. Maedhros directs them where to set them up and assists me into one of the chairs.  I sit and consider him and myself, as he thanks the servants and dismisses them.

I may not have grown wise in my old age, but I have certainly mellowed. I made friends with Bronadui, one of the surgeons who tried to save my hip joint and, once that failed, tried to reduce the pain and discomfort I was suffering to manageable proportions. The unusually high tolerance he has shown for being yelled and grumbled at has encouraged me to believe that elves may be healthier than Edain, but make just as bad patients when there’s something wrong with them.

Bronadui has even introduced me to his grandchildren. They have learned to avoid my bad leg when climbing into my lap. They are fascinated by my wrinkles and my thinning white hair.

I gave Maedhros a graphic and detailed description of all the ills that may attend Hildorin old age, from incontrollable shaking to memory loss to incontinence to dementia. As I did so, I reflected that I would never have been quite as frank about my fears when talking to a fellow Adan. Maedhros took it all without batting an eyelid and promised me that, if any of these threats materialized, he and Bronadui would see me through. I guess, when you’ve seen Angband, you’ve seen it all; no evidence of physical or mental frailty can shake you.

It is not the standard Eldarin reaction. Some of those who used to go out on patrol with me, regard me with pity and awe as if I had been struck down by the wrath of the Valar; others have adjusted rather better. Thankfully, none of the worse blights that I described to Maedhros have befallen me yet.

I know he devotes extra time to me because he thinks I will die soon and, in Eldarin terms, I certainly shall.  How it would have offended me once, to be the object of his consideration for such a reason!  It has ceased to bother me.

When he realized that during all those years in his service, I had never acquired more extensive skills in reading and writing than were required for dealing with guard schedules and reports, he began to teach me how to read for pleasure. He brought me short, easy texts that he hoped would interest me and would discuss them with me the next time he visited. It helped to pass the time when I was completely bedridden and in pain and, by the time I was able to get out of bed, I had developed a taste for it.

Just recently, he brought me an extract from the records he made of our conversations in the months when I first came to Himring. It astonished me. I could not remember having discussed these subjects with him at all. When I talked to him about it, I found he seemed to remember a lot of what I had said word for word.

‘Did you ever really need to make those notes?’, I asked him. ‘Or were they always just a ploy to demonstrate to me that you were taking these interviews seriously?’

‘No, I was taught to believe in keeping record’, he said. ‘And those notes have come in useful once or twice already. They may be even more useful...later.’

I look at him thoughtfully, as he sits down across from me. The sunset touches on his hair, making it seem even redder than usual. I was deplorably lacking in curiosity during my early years in Himring, but even I could not shut my ears completely to what was common knowledge there and I have learned more in recent years.  I know now that I had far more reason than I guessed to oppose the alliance between my people and the Eldar against Morgoth, and yet I am now certain that I was wrong to do so. It is my one regret now, not that I failed to avenge my own injuries on Morgoth, but that when he finally moves once more against my adopted people, I will no longer be there to oppose him.

I suppose it is mere chemistry of the body, reacting to his smooth skin, the litheness of his movements that in an Adan would signal youth, but sometimes I feel almost a little fatherly toward this man, who lost his father centuries before I was born. I thought four decades was a long time to pay for my mistakes; he’s been paying for about four centuries now. Eldar may experience time differently, but they still have to get through every moment, every hour, one after the other, as we do.

He gives me that straight, direct look that has always concealed as much as it revealed. It suddenly crosses my mind for the first time that to concern himself with my welfare soothes him. Of all the inhabitants of Himring, I am the only one who shall die of completely natural causes and it is almost certain that I will do so, before the Curse on the House of Feanor has a chance to strike again. He will in no way be responsible for my death; he can simply do his best for me, freely, without fear of impending guilt.

It would have humiliated me once, to think that it would be my mortality that might serve him best, a trait that is after all in no way individual, a trait which I share with all other Edain. It still is not the way I would have chosen to serve him, but if that is the way I may serve him, I will serve him so.