An Intense Dislike of Elves by Himring

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Chapter 2

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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.