The West Wind Quartet by Himring

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Chapter Three: Himring Besieged

Maedhros waves his sword around to music and then sits down and reads a good book. You thought I was joking, didn't you?  Also contains some discussion of Art with a capital A--and the maximum amount of embarrassment I could squeeze into a single chapter.

Warning: This chapter contains a couple of references that probably should be labelled "Adult" for sexual content (and also for mentioning torture). To conclude anything from this about the general character of the chapter, I feel would be rather misleading (see above).

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I

It ought to have been chaos. Himring was overrun with refugees from Dorthonion, Aglon and Maglor’s Gap, not to speak of Maedhros’s own people from outlying villages who had also sought shelter within its walls. But someone—or perhaps several someones—clearly had a genius for organization, and it even seemed as if Himring might have originally been built with just such a purpose in mind. We were, by this stage, far too exhausted and bewildered to fend for ourselves in any way, but one of the steward’s staff took us in hand and, amazingly, space was found for us.  There was a pallet for us to lie on, large enough for two. There was water to drink and to wash with. There would also have been food but, before it could be made ready, we’d already collapsed on to that inviting pallet and were sleeping like logs.

I awoke to the light of early dawn. Oderen was still sleeping. Unlike me, he had briefly been involved in actual fighting, but had sustained no more than a scratch on his ribs, which had been treated and bandaged by the healers of Himring. We had both been tremendously lucky. I left him asleep and had a look around. There was already quite a lot of activity going on in the courtyard. In a corner someone was handing out pieces of bannock and mugs of steaming herbal tea.

Soon, I was feeling considerably better, and my thoughts turned to Maglor. Presumably, the last thing on his mind right now would be rescheduling that music lesson, but still... I didn’t know whether I wanted to make sure that he was all right or tell him that I was at his service, if he wanted me for anything, but in these unfamiliar surroundings I felt the urge to go and look for him. I found him more quickly than I anticipated, for as I was making my way to what I had been told were his quarters, I met him hurrying down the stairs. He was holding a small fiddle in his hand.

‘I’ve no time right now’, he said, as soon as he saw me. But when he saw my somewhat crestfallen face, he added: ‘Is there any trouble? You can come along, if you like.’

I assured him I was all right and trailed after him. He clearly knew his way about the place very well indeed. We ended up in another courtyard that seemed to be some kind of exercise yard. It was filled with a large number of guards and soldiers embarked on a bewildering variety of military activities. In the far corner, there seemed to be an open space and, even as we arrived and Maglor began weaving his way across the yard, a tall red-haired man walked out into the middle of that open space, sword in hand, and began to run through a series of slow sweeping movements that seemed to be some kind of fairly complicated exercise.

I learned later that Maedhros routinely did this set of exercises every morning at this hour and that Maglor knew them well, because when he’d visited Maedhros in Himring previously, they always practised them together. Maedhros, however, was obviously not expecting Maglor that morning, in view of yesterday’s events, and had not waited for him. Maglor, with me trailing after him, reached the edge of the open space. Maedhros was apparently completely focussed on his exercises and seemed to take no notice of him.
Maglor tucked the fiddle under his chin and began to play a slow searching tune. Maedhros did not pause in his movements, his legs and arms moving in an unbroken, intricate pattern. He might not have heard those first couple of notes at all. But it soon became clear that Maglor was synchronizing the notes of the tune with Maedhros’s movements, that in fact the tune was designed to accompany the set of exercises.

They ran through the whole set together. Then they repeated it. Then—and it was impossible to tell which of them had initiated it, Maedhros or Maglor—they speeded up and went through the whole set more quickly. They repeated it. They speeded up again. Maedhros’s movements, so slow and deliberate to begin with, began to resemble an exotic dance, as the sword wove in and out and drew arcs and straight lines in the air. By now, all over the courtyard, everyone had interrupted what they were doing and was watching Maedhros.
Maedhros and Maglor speeded up again. And then they went even faster. It became difficult to follow the movement of the sword with the naked eye. They went faster than that, and it seemed incredible that anyone should be so quick on his feet. They went even faster than that, and now just to play the fiddle so quickly and precisely as Maglor was doing was a noteworthy feat. As for Maedhros’s face, it was a pale blur, and all that could be seen of the sword blade was a reflex of light that danced around Maedhros like a spark of fire.

It was not only an amazing display of skill. It was a work of art, beautiful, the more so, as the man himself was not. For he was after all marred, crippled. I altogether forgot for the moment that all this was about war, too, as much as the ugliness and horror outside the walls; I was thinking of dragonflies I’d seen dancing over pools in the woods of Neldoreth. Suddenly, Maglor played a long drawn-out note and, right in the middle of that whirl of speed, Maedhros came to a halt and at once stood still as a stone, the blade in his hand slowly sinking towards the ground like a leaf drifting down from the branch of a tree. In the ensuing silence, all the bystanders let out their breath in a collective sigh.

Maedhros sheathed his sword and came towards us. He seemed to be breathing more shallowly and quickly, true—but well short of panting.

‘Thank you’, he said to Maglor. ‘A bit showy, perhaps, but under the circumstances, good for morale, I think.’

‘That’s what I thought’, said Maglor.

The brothers exchanged a brief smile. Then Maedhros spotted me, lurking behind Maglor’s back.

‘Well met again, Mistress Emlinn’, he said. ‘I trust your needs have been taken care of?’

‘Yes, my lord. Thank you, my lord’, I murmured.

‘There have been further developments during the night, which I need to discuss with you’, said Maedhros to Maglor and, turning to me again: ‘Will you be able to find your way back to your accommodation alone, Mistress?’

‘I don’t think she knows her way about yet,’ said Maglor.

One of the guards took me back to Oderen, while the brothers went off in the opposite direction. I looked back over my shoulder and saw them climbing the steps up to the battlements.
 

II

‘I don’t think that sounds quite right’, I said. ‘Maybe more like this?’

I plucked a sequence of three chords to show him what I meant.

‘No, I understand what you are saying, but that’s not quite right either’, said Maglor.

He frowned in concentration, then inverted the chords.

‘Maybe like this?’

‘Yes!’, I said enthusiastically and Maglor smiled.

Then there was a discreet tap on the door behind us. It opened and, without looking around, I knew it was Lord Maedhros. My heart sank right down to my toes.

***

Maedhros, it seemed, had not expected the outer fortifications to hold out very long–nor had they. But before they fell, the inhabitants of Himring had driven all the cattle and other animals they kept within the inner walls, culled anything edible from the kitchen gardens, mown all the grass for fodder, cut down any shrubs for fuel and burnt anything left in the outer ring so as not to yield any advantage to the advancing enemy. Food and fuel had already been strictly rationed within the castle since the earliest days of the attack.

And so, surrounded on all sides, we had settled in for a siege of indefinite length, with no expectation of help from any quarter. From other regions of Beleriand, for a long time there was no news at all. Every morning Maedhros and Maglor were seen walking the circuit of the walls, gazing east and south and west, but they could learn nothing of the fates of their brothers, their cousins or their uncle, however much they strained their eyes to try and pierce the intervening woods and mountain slopes.  Nor was there news from any of our own kin. Looking out across fields and meadows that seemed to grow nothing but orcs as far as the eyes could reach, it was difficult not to doubt whether even the Girdle of Melian could withstand such an onslaught.

It would have been easy to give in to despair, but Lord Maedhros did not seem to know the meaning of the word—not yet, not then. He was indefatigable. Organizing the defence, spurring on his soldiers, taking the brunt of the attack himself if he could—he was continuously on the move. It became the most familiar of sights to see him rush along the walls or across a courtyard, sword in hand—except he actually seemed unhurried, so fast and controlled were his movements, and the speed at which he was going became obvious only when you looked at the people who were trying to keep up with him.

Maglor was sometimes with him, a couple of steps behind and struggling to keep breathing evenly, but as often as not, Maglor had his hands full fielding another attack on the opposite side of the castle, for where there were so many enemies, there was need of more than one able commander.  Maedhros’s confidence in his brother’s abilities and those of his other captains seemed to be as complete as his faith that he himself could handle whatever Morgoth chose to throw at us. So calm and competent did he seem that, after hours of battle, often the only sign of dishevelment he would show was his hair—his one remaining vanity, I would guess, from the time when he was considered good-looking. As the unrelenting attacks went on and he countered each of them—fending off one frontal assault on the gates after another, thrusting back orcs attempting to scale the walls on ladders, spotting sappers at work and blocking their access—his hair that had been tied straight back to begin with would gradually work itself free until it billowed about his head as he ran and turned, like a fiery cloud. Once or twice, during a minor lull, I saw Maglor catch him in flight as it were, and with quick, practiced movements, tie his hair firmly back again, while Maedhros stood with patiently lowered head, as if at a familiar routine—and then, with a quick word of thanks, was off again.

When the first full-scale attack had abated somewhat, I received the lessons in self-defence Maglor had promised me. Together with every remaining man, woman and child in Himring who had not had a chance or had not bothered to acquire the necessary skills, I was taught a few basic moves to render us less helpless in the face of attack. Those moves were to come in useful much later, in Eregion. Learning how to use my newly-acquired Noldorin dagger more effectively, I also remembered Maedhros’s comment about distant relatives and had a quiet word with the instructor. He gave me a thoughtful sideways look, but showed me where to stab myself to make an end quickly, at need.
 

As it turned out, in Himring things never got as desperate as that or indeed desperate enough that the defence had to call on my rudimentary skills with the dagger. Instead, during attacks, I was hard at work either fetching and carrying pails of water and stacks of cloth for bandages for the healers or—more dangerously—hauling cauldrons of boiling oil and pitch, quivers full of arrows and even more pails of water up narrow stairs for the use of the defenders of the walls and assisting the walking wounded on their way down. Being by no means indefatigable myself, by the time another attack had been repulsed, I was usually ready to drop with exhaustion. I had become used to seeing the wounded, the dying and the dead—as much as one does at any rate, for at odd moments the horror of it all would still get through to me, leaving me feeling sick and dizzy.

But nevertheless, as Maglor had promised, there was music. There were intervals when, for whatever reason, the enemy did not attack, although rigorously maintaining the siege—whether they were themselves exhausted, whether they hoped to lull us into a false sense of security, or whether they were trying to wait us out until we ran out of food and fuel. And as soon as the first such interval occurred, Maglor rescheduled the skipped music lesson.

Summoned to his rooms, I arrived, nervous and slightly incredulous, to find him matter-of-factly tuning his harp.

‘You lost yours, I know’, he said. ‘Have you had a chance to replace it yet?’

‘No.’

‘I thought not. Try this one for size, will you?’

And so the lessons went on, whenever Maglor could make time for them—except that they seemed gradually to be turning into combined practice and composition sessions, for Maglor began to turn me loose on pieces he was actually working on at the time. He would explain his ideas and we would try them out to see if they produced the desired effect. Sometimes it was just my musical skills that were not up to properly executing them, but sometimes he would spot a flaw in the score itself and correct it. It was unbelievably thrilling... Astonishingly, sitting next to Maglor with my fingers on the harp strings, it was almost too easy to forget that Morgoth’s troops were still encamped outside.

The only fly in the ointment, as far as I was concerned, was Lord Maedhros. With frightening regularity, sooner or later, the door would discreetly open behind our backs and Lord Maedhros would slip into the room. Murmuring a brief apology, he would perch on a chair far enough away so as not quite to infringe on our space and, for the rest of the session, out of the corner of my eye I would see the outline of his tall figure, sitting there, almost unmoving, listening, watching. It unnerved me and I found it difficult to ignore his presence and go on playing. At first I suspected that he somehow disapproved of me. Maybe he considered that I was not a suitable companion for his brother? Not well-born enough, not Noldorin enough—or maybe simply because I was female and Maglor was married? But Maedhros was always meticulously polite on the rare occasions when he addressed me.

Then I began to fear Maedhros might be taking a personal interest in me of another kind. You may well raise your eyebrows. I must confess I don't know just how I came to entertain this ridiculous idea. I was not significantly more physically attractive then than I am now—they called me "The Dwarf" at school in Brithombar, and it was not always meant kindly... And this particular Noldorin prince had had his first sight of me as I was being hauled out from under a cart in the middle of a battle-field, muddy, tear-stained and retching my guts out. It was hardly a first encounter designed to leave a lasting impression of charm and grace.

Partly, I am sure it was simply that I myself couldn't help feeling out of place, playing at being a musician with Prince Maglor in his princely apartment. The outbreak of the War and our flight to Himring had forcibly reminded me of what, over time in Maglor’s Gap, I had managed to forget: how high Maglor was in station above me, how vastly more experienced both in music and in life in general. My fears that I was outclassed in every way by the situation in which I found myself latched onto the person of Maedhros—as the owner of Himring and brother of Maglor, he seemed somehow to stand for the vast gulf that separated me from my teacher.

However, perhaps I had also spent too much time as an entertainer in the taverns of Eglarest and Brithombar, listening willy-nilly to more fanciful—and more malicious—gossip about Prince Maedhros than I myself would have chosen to engage in. When the wine and spirits flowed, there was no end to the speculations about what exactly had or had not been done to him in Angband. The lack of liaisons or acknowledged romantic inclinations on Maedhros’s part led to heated discussions among seasoned tipplers whether or not, after Angband, Maedhros was still capable of the act. I’m afraid some of all that must have rubbed off and I came away harbouring a sneaking suspicion that there was something slightly murky about Maedhros’s sexuality.

Not that any of this had ever been confirmed closer to home. Rumours in Maglor’s Gap if anything hinted that Maedhros never stayed in bed long enough to have time to use it for any of its conventional purposes and, if he ever ran his eyes over a woman’s body, was sure to be checking it for concealed weapons.  As for the good people of Himring, to hint that anything was wrong even in the slightest with their great hero and only hope of survival would have been to risk a lynching. There were people in Himring at the time of the siege who would give you dirty looks if you so much as mentioned that Maedhros was one-handed.

‘Left-handed’, they would insist, frowning anxiously, ‘he’s left-handed.’

They seemed to believe that any comment implying a lack in Maedhros might somehow jinx his luck and bring the forces of Angband down on us. But superstition was rife in Himring during the siege, of course, as it is in all such places.

Meanwhile I continued blinkered by my fears, cringing inwardly whenever I imagined I felt Maedhros’s gaze on me, until a chance-heard snatch of conversation, a few muttered words that passed between the two brothers before the door had fully closed behind me, finally made the scales drop from my eyes.

‘Sorry’, said Maglor to Maedhros, ‘this time, we were completely stuck, you see, and had only just come up with a solution...’

Yes, yes, of course, it should have been obvious all along, but you know me, when I have my head full of music...!  Maedhros had never had the intention of dropping in on our music lessons at all. What was really happening was that our sessions continually overran, because Maglor and I lost track of the time and so, inadvertently, they encroached on times when the brothers had previously arranged to meet—privately, that is, not for the purposes of war or government. It was only Maglor’s boundless enthusiasm for music, which often made him go right on playing even when his brother’s arrival reminded him of the time, that had concealed this blatant fact from me—and Maedhros’s aristocratic good manners which stopped him from voicing any comment or complaint in front of a comparative stranger like me.

“Utter mortification” is completely inadequate as a term to describe what I felt as soon as I realized. Not only had I had the shocking rudeness repeatedly to monopolize the time of my noble host’s brother when he wished to have a conversation with him in his own home, but I had added further insult by suspecting him of the basest of motives—and unspecified kinkiness. The only mitigating circumstance was that he could not possibly guess just how absurd my suspicions had been. At least I had kept my foolish mouth tight shut and not said anything to anyone... But nevertheless I felt I owed Maedhros an apology for my lack of common courtesy.

This, however, was easier determined than achieved. Although, from then on, I began trying to exert gentle pressure on Maglor to finish the lesson as soon as possible once Maedhros had walked in through the door, whenever I attempted to open my mouth to try and actually address the matter in so many words, I experienced a severe case of lockjaw. It was only on the third occasion, when my unobtrusive attempts to curb Maglor’s enthusiasm had failed completely and Maedhros and I ended up leaving the room at the same time, that I finally found my voice.

I saw his back about to disappear down the corridor to the left, wrenched my jaws apart, dashed after him and yelped:

‘Lord Maedhros!’

He turned around at once and courteously waited for me. I stumbled to a halt in front of him and peered up at him. He towered far above me in the gloom, swathed in a thick, black, voluminous cloak. The chill of winter was beginning to bite, the days were growing shorter, the fire on the hearth in Maglor’s room had been positively tiny, and there was neither heating nor lighting in the corridors of Himring in those days of fuel rationing.

I opened my mouth and was, once again, forcibly struck how idiotic I had been to assume, even for a moment, that this sombre and remote being might have any designs on me whatsoever. Unfortunately, the impact of that consideration completely scrambled my vocabulary and wrecked my grammar. Lord Maedhros looked intrigued and bent down as if to hear me better. It could hardly have been the first time he had been addressed by stammering underlings, but maybe I had just plumbed new depths of incomprehensibility.

I discovered it is not physically possible to die of embarrassment—not unless you have a previously existing heart condition. That way of escape being barred, I tried again and must have produced something more comprehensible this time, for he suddenly looked enlightened.

‘But, Mistress Emlinn, there is no need at all for you to distress yourself!’, he exclaimed. ‘Trust me, I know my brother—and the day that he stops playing immediately when I enter the room is the day I will start worrying about him! Indeed, although I see you do not realize it, I rejoice to see the two of you so hard at work on his music, even now.  Because of the unfortunate circumstances of your arrival at Himring, I am afraid I did not extend the welcome to you that your skills deserve. But I have long wished for someone like you to settle in the Marches, someone with the knowledge and skill to engage in a discussion of music with Maglor at his own level...’

Startled, I gazed into his eyes, but could detect no mockery, no polite exaggeration. He seemed quite sincere.

‘When I first realized that my brother might be a musical genius,’ he explained, ‘I took care to acquire at least a smattering of theoretical knowledge—I wished to ensure that he would receive the right schooling and training. But I am no musician. There are those in Himring who know how to play an instrument pleasingly enough—but you have heard them, I think!

It has burned my heart—my brother is acknowledged the greatest singer of the Noldor, but, over the centuries, the arts have flourished in Doriath and in Nargothrond, while Maglor’s Gap was famous chiefly for its horses... I suggested to him that he should found a school, but he seemed to think that the place was not secure enough—and recent events, I suppose, have shown him to be right. Maglor, I am sure, would still be the greatest singer of the Noldor if he was marooned all by himself on a desert island, but there is no doubt at all that even he finds that inspiration flows more easily when he has a sympathetic audience. Your knowledge and love of music have been a bright light to us during these dark days.’

He smiled at me. The smile lit up his face and, for the first time, after all those abstruse imaginings of the past weeks, he looked to me like someone a woman might possibly fall in love with, given the right circumstances. I remembered that in Tirion, reportedly, they had. When he saw that I was too dumbfounded to answer, he smiled again and, turning around, went swiftly up the corridor, heading towards whatever task next required the attention of the master of Himring.

I stood still, staring after him. Maedhros thought I was a musician—not, of course, a musician of the first rank like Maglor himself or those others whose names were spoken with awe even among those who had never heard them, Daeron or Elemmire or Ecthelion, but nevertheless a true musician of the second rank, not just someone who knew how to play an instrument pleasingly enough of an evening or a fairground entertainer with more pretensions than talent... It was no more than Maglor himself had told me, of course. But I knew that Maglor wished to encourage me, so I had perversely insisted on subtracting more than half of any praise I received from him and counted his equally unsparing criticism double. Besides, Maglor, when in full flow, was a true egalitarian—none of us, as far as he was concerned, was anything but a lowly servant of Her Grace, the Lady Music.

But Maedhros, although clearly more approachable than I had ever imagined, was concerned mainly not with me or even with music, but with his brother, and so I found myself trusting his assessment where I had passed off Maglor’s own words with something of a shrug. I was the real thing. Maedhros had said so.
I tried for some common sense. We were in the middle of a siege. We could all die tomorrow and the orcs of Angband, I reminded myself, wouldn’t care in the slightest whether the woman they butchered was a musical adept or an inexpert bungler.  It did not work. I felt a wide foolish smile extending itself across my face. There, in that gloomy, chilly corridor, I glowed.

III

Maedhros took to bringing a book with him when he came to Maglor’s rooms.  He would enter, sit down, rather closer to us than before, and immediately open the book, propping the pages open on his knees as a clear signal that he did not expect our sessions to stop for his sake. How much reading he actually got done at those times was another question. Sometimes those pages turned very, very slowly. Indefatigable Maedhros might seem, outside, among his soldiers and his staff, but by the time he reached his brother’s rooms he was often completely exhausted, too tired even to go to sleep, and now that I was no longer afraid to look at him, I could see it. His eyes would drift away from his book, and he would be staring blindly at nothing. Then he would come to himself with a slight jerk, his gaze would gratefully fix on his brother’s face and, after a moment, he would lower his eyes to the page again.

Some of those books, I think, were familiar friends. Once, I saw him brush his fingers along a book cover as another might caress the silky ears of a favourite dog. When Maedhros abandoned Himring after the Nirnaeth, I have heard that he ordered fire to be set to the library and the archive, because he would not risk leaving any information that might be of any use to the Enemy. To Erestor, that is one of the great tragedies of the First Age; he speaks of it with tears in his eyes. We do not know whether in fact any more books were lost then than at the Fall of Nargothrond or Gondolin—nobody outside the halls of Mandos now knows how many books the library of Himring contained. But that Maedhros should have forced himself to destroy them by his own command is what breaks Erestor’s heart, more than the destruction wrought by orcs or balrogs of whom no better could have been expected.

I do not think myself that Maedhros loved his books so much that he would not have grieved a great deal more for the loss of all those people, dying within the brief space of  a couple of days like flies. When, towards the end of winter during the siege, there was no kindling left for the fires in the hospital wing, he offered pages from his books to the healers to light the fires. He selected the pages carefully and ripped them out himself, but I saw no sign of regret on his face.

Reclining in his chair in Maglor’s room, letting our professional chit-chat wash over him, together with fragments of tunes, barely sketched-out harmonics and bass lines, as well as the occasional dissonance, followed by mild profanity, he seemed visibly to revive. 

‘No, no, no!’, Maglor would exclaim vehemently, getting passionate and argumentative about a semi-quaver as he never seemed to get about anything in real life, and Maedhros would look up and, with affectionate amusement, smile and relax in his chair, until eventually he would go away to sleep a little. Or until a sudden alert came, a messenger from the guards on the walls—and then instruments and books were dumped aside unceremoniously, as we rushed off to take up our various parts in the defence, different as they were, and I saw Maedhros miraculously transmuting himself into a tireless hero with nerves of steel again, the unbowed spirit of Himring, as he leapt lightly down the stairs.
And Maglor? His brother’s tacit permission seemed to have rendered him completely shameless. Sometimes he wouldn’t acknowledge Maedhros’s arrival in the room at all, so immersed did he appear to be in the intricacies of the West Wind Quartet. And yet, for all Maedhros’s sincere belief that it was collaboration with me that made Maglor’s inspiration flow so freely, now that I had discarded my own prejudices against Maedhros, I thought that was by no means the whole truth of it. Often, the brothers hardly exchanged a word, but, once Maedhros had entered, gradually, imperceptibly, Maglor’s posture in his chair would shift, until, although it was still me he was talking to as before, he seemed to be playing for his brother.

Maglor liked applause as much as the next performer. We had begun to perform together now, in the Great Hall of Himring where more and more the population of the castle gathered to share warmth and the benefit of company, to shield themselves against the rigours of winter as well as the threat outside the walls. Food, fuel and alcohol of any kind all being rationed, words and music were the only comfort that was still to be had freely, and our offerings were most eagerly received.

Maglor was a past master at gauging his audience’s mood, whether they wanted to laugh and forget or hear their own praises sung to bolster their confidence. Sometimes what they needed was an opportunity for tears, a safe reason for weeping. When Maglor tenderly sang of their childhood sweethearts waiting for them down at the corner of the street in Tirion long ago, even the hard-bitten veterans of Maedhros’s border patrols sobbed unashamedly and then raised a storm of clapping and yelled for an encore.  I would covertly watch Maglor and see a positively unholy gleam of satisfaction in his eyes.  It was political, too, of course. “A bit showy, but good for morale”, as Maedhros had said on that first morning after I had arrived in Himring.

But the general applause seemed to scratch only the surface of what drove Maglor the artist. I have been told that you could blindfold Mablung and spin him around until everyone else would have been dizzy, and he would still be able, infallibly and without hesitation, to point to where north was and where west. I would never claim to be as infallible as that, but having passed that winter in the company of the sons of Feanor, if anyone had asked me where the music in Maglor came from, I would have pointed towards Maedhros. Would Maglor have still been the greatest singer of the Noldor if he had been marooned on a desert island? Maybe so—but more certainly if he had had Maedhros with him. Looking back, I thought that, in Maglor’s Gap, dutifully observing his share in the watch on Angband, Maglor had greatly missed his brother’s company, even though they were not so very far apart, and that, even if the siege were lifted, he would not willingly leave his side again.

I have heard many among the Noldor claim with utter conviction that it was the pain and loss of exile that transformed Maglor from an outstanding artist into a musical genius. They hear their own grief mirrored in the Noldolante and ignore most of the rest of his work, crying: “Behold! How true it all is! Yes, that it is exactly what we suffered. It is Great Art indeed!”

I would not wish to cast any doubt at all on the status of the Noldolante, which I myself consider unsurpassed, but I do seriously doubt that pain and grief themselves ever produce great art, although I admit that often they may seem to. All that pain and grief on their own can produce is silence—or incoherent screaming. What makes great art, I would say, is what the artist still has in reserve to pitch against his grief.  And in the case of Maglor, I would guess, it was mainly Maedhros. And so, when Maedhros died...

There had been more than this once, I am sure, although I know little of that, for he never spoke of it to me. There must have been his wife. And he must have loved his father. They must have been a close-knit family, Feanor and his sons, for why else would Maglor have sworn the Oath? And there were the unimaginable splendours of Valinor, all they had to offer to an artist. But so much of that had been lost and more than lost.

As the winter deepened and the siege lengthened, the three of us huddled closer and closer together about the now empty hearth, in the grey light of day or under the faint blue gleam of a rare Feanorian lamp. There were no more fires at all except in the Great Hall and in the hospital wing, and shivering cold had become the price of privacy. Wrapped in several layers of cloaks, Maglor and I plucked the harp strings with stiff fingers, until practice warmed them, our hands protected by fingerless gloves, and sternly ignored the complaints of our empty bellies.

But the music! I had heard Daeron sing for Luthien, I have since heard the best musicians from Balar to Laurelindorenan, but I had not heard the like before and shall not hear its like again. For so much of his thought had Maglor begun to share with me in those days that, in my mind, I heard not the music he actually wrote but the music he wished to write, sharing with me a dream woven of harmony and rhythm—and, this being Arda Marred, even with the greatest musicians the reach of inspiration is never quite matched by execution.

The dream wrapped itself around me so that, now, during the attacks, even when one of the wounded died before I could get a healer to him or a stray arrow whistled past me, missing me by only by an inch or two, Maglor’s music seemed to interpose itself between me and the horror of it all. I wondered at the morality of this, but decided to accept it as a gift. For would any of the victims of violence be helped at all, if I froze like a rabbit before a snake? And if it was an illusion like this that helped me to function more effectively, would any of them care?

---

Chapter End Notes

 

Sindar probably don't have pre-existing heart conditions unless maybe they are thralls that have escaped from Angband. That line has to stay, though, until I can think of anything else that could make a Sinda drop dead from embarrassment.