An Intense Dislike of Elves by Himring

Chapter 3

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.