The West Wind Quartet by Himring

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Chapter Four: Departure

The economic downturn hits East Beleriand, and a sidelined character gains importance.

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I

I stood on the walls of Himring and surveyed a landscape ravaged by seven years of intermittent warfare.  The Marches had not suffered as badly as Ard-Galen—I had heard that nothing grew there now and they called it Anfauglith. But it was bad enough, and from the walls of Himring the damage was especially visible, for during the past years enemies had been encamped below more often than not. Again and again, grass had been churned into mud and newly planted gardens uprooted. Any attempt to plough or hoe turned up rusty metal and charred bones.

That morning, as I sat nursing my mug of scalding hot mint tea, Oderen had spoken to me hesitantly:

‘Do you think perhaps it might be time to leave?’

I had almost dropped the mug straight into my lap, tea and all.

‘Leave? How—leave?’

We were back in private quarters. Fuel was now to be had, if not plentiful. Besides, it was summer, and there was no need for heating. There had been no major raid by the enemy for a couple of months. The raids seemed finally to be slackening off, and the pass of Aglon remained closed.

Oderen looked most uncomfortable. Then he said, almost at a whisper:

‘You have learned a lot from the son of Feanor. But...’

‘But...? What are you implying? I revere Maglor as my teacher and as an outstanding musician, as I certainly should, no more than that!’

‘I know. That is bad enough’, said Oderen unhappily.

I stared at him. He flushed an unbecoming colour, twisted around as if he had acute stomach ache and murmured something incomprehensible. Finally, I distinguished among the mutterings:

‘...Kinslayers....cursed...’

‘You were not so quick to call them that when they kept the enemy from the walls!’, I said sharply.

He looked away and didn’t answer. My anger subsided. I looked thoughtfully at Oderen.

Despite the danger, the cold and the shortage of food, I had flourished in Himring. Oderen had not. At a time when, during emergencies, even a lot of the existing furniture had been broken up to feed the fire or to make more arrows, there had been no call for ornamental wood-carving. Oderen had done some crude carpentry, maintaining catapults, mending broken ladders and the like, but little enough even of that. Mostly he had fought on the walls and had hated every minute of it. It was, in truth, no wonder that he wished to leave.

As for this business of the Curse, it was not the first such muttering I had heard, now that my kin had discovered that Maedhros had been able to ensure the survival of the majority who had reached Himring, but could restore neither peace nor former prosperity. People were remembering what many had been happy to forget as long as things had gone well: rumours that the Feanorians were doomed by the Belain for ill deeds done on the other side of the Sea. Other Sindar were talking of leaving. Indeed, some had already headed for Doriath as soon as opportunity offered.

These were thoughts I myself might have had, once. In Brithombar, at a time when I had not even laid eyes on more than maybe two dozen Noldor and never had a private conversation with one,  I had blithely talked of Kinslayers, as if all that meant were that they were different from us, brutal, unpredictable, slayers of our kin, and not that they were our kin, too. But that had changed irreversibly the moment Maglor walked into the inn in Maglor’s Gap, pulled out that stool and sat down in front of me. I was the only student of Maglor the Singer on record on this side of the Sea, and so, to the extent of my limited capabilities, I had become his heir—and because Maglor the Singer was not separable from Maglor Feanorion, I would never again be able to regard kinslaying as something that real elves just did not do. I thought of Sindarin escapees from Angband killed by their own relatives out of fear that their escape was a ruse and they had been sent by the enemy to spy us out or worse. To be sure, that was nothing like what had happened at Alqualonde, but the pretence that we ourselves were incapable of killing other elves was just that, a mere pretence.

But my change of heart on the subject had been due to circumstances that did not apply in the same way to Oderen. Could I blame him for sharing the opinions of our people? Oderen, I thought, had been unusually tolerant, really. If Maglor had not taken me on as a student, we might well have had left Maglor’s Gap by the time the attack came. Oderen had sympathized with my elation at being being taken up by Maglor and had shown pride in my progress; he had been honestly delighted by my success as a performer at Maglor’s side at a time when Oderen’s own career was at its lowest point.

I had known many a Sinda and many a Noldo, too, who paid lip service to his wife’s craft, complimenting her profusely for her efforts, but would not have been at all happy if, like me, she had suddenly transformed herself from a dilettante, an amateur—even as an entertainer, let alone as a musician—into a serious professional and appeared to outstrip him in the public eye. Although, in music, I remained an accompanist, in our marriage I would now never again be quite the compliant accompanist I had once been, but I did owe a lot to Oderen, I decided.

Did I, however, owe it to him to leave?  For that would mean deserting Maglor. And how could I possibly desert Maglor?

That evening, Maglor said to me: ‘You are having difficulty keeping your mind on the music, Emlinn. I have known you to have no difficulty at all in concentrating in the depths of winter, at the height of the siege, when your fingers were frozen and it was likely we would be dead within the next couple of days. What can it be that is troubling you now?’

I had not meant to let my distraction show, but now that he had spotted it, I felt bound to answer him. Trying to express things in a way that would not offend him, I told him of my dilemma as honestly as I could. He was silent for a while.

Then he said: ‘I’ve taught you all I could teach you. The rest you must teach yourself.’

‘You want me to go!’, I exclaimed.

Had I only deluded myself, thinking I had become necessary to him?

He scowled at me a little.

 ‘I train up the perfect accompanist and, once I’ve got her, I can’t wait for her to leave? Talk sense, Emlinn! But as your ex-teacher, I would prefer my student to be in a safer place. I’m not so sure there are any safe places in Beleriand now, but we Feanorians are hardly experts on this kind of thing... If your Oderen can find a place of safety, good luck to him.’

I looked at him—that bright, direct Noldorin gaze that had so daunted me at our first meeting, the face that had become so familiar in all of its moods over the past years—and thought of all that he had shared with me.

‘You are not just my teacher, Maglor,’ I said, ‘you are my own true lord. I do believe that my heart recognized you when you walked into that inn, even before you chose me as your student. Teachers can be put aside or outgrown—but I would not break faith and leave you, my lord.’

‘Is that so?’, he asked me quietly.

My face grew hot. There was a sour taste in my mouth.

‘You think because I am a Sinda—because I am the daughter of a ship’s chandler—because I am a woman and a wife...’

‘Oh hush, Emlinn! I am thinking none of these things. But you are a musician. If you wish to serve someone else beside the music, if you wish to serve me, you will, I think, still serve me best by serving my music. It is, after all, the best part of me. Do you remember how you scolded me once for not taking on other students beside yourself?’

‘But I was wrong! You told me why...’

Besides, that was not how I remembered that particular conversation.

‘I wonder. I thought that the watch over Angband must have priority—but my watch on Angband failed anyway. I thought that the place was not safe enough for a school—and now there is no place in Beleriand that is truly secure, and those centuries of peace have gone to waste. Maybe I thought it was a penance, that I should not seek to perpetuate myself in my students, having been denied children—but if it was a penance, it does not seem to have been accepted.’

‘Maglor!’

‘I have entrusted you with my music, Emlinn. It is there, in your head. Take it to safety, if you can.’

 

II

It occurred to me that Maedhros might be displeased at my leaving Himring; after all he had wanted my company for his brother. But I had spent too many hours sitting across from a tired man with a book on his lap to be still in awe of Maedhros. When he summoned me, I approached the interview with far less trepidation than I would have felt at the prospect of encountering Elu Thingol or even our own Lord Cirdan.

By now, though, I should have known to expect the unexpected from Maedhros. He got up from behind his desk to meet me. His face was very serious.

His first words were: ‘You behold me shamed, Mistress.’

I blinked.

‘In the days before the Siege’, he continued, ‘I would not have seen an artist of your skill depart Himring after years of service without remuneration that should have done both of us honour and equalled your talents.  Now—you have seen it—I am the lord of poisoned wells and salted fields. We are only just beginning to recover. More than half the treasury has already gone in payment for food, weapons and wood to Belegost, Nogrod and Ossiriand, and more will soon follow. I cannot even give you horses—we have too few left and you will need to return those I will lend you for the journey. Maglor has told you that we have arranged for you to accompany a mission into Ossiriand so that you will be able to travel under guard?’

‘Not yet’, I said.

‘Truly dispossessed is he that cannot reward good service as he wishes to’, said Maedhros .

He reached out and laid a small but heavy bag in my palm. Whatever he might have just said, it clearly contained more coin than I had held in my hand before at any one time in my life. But before I could open my mouth to tell him so, he had turned away to his desk and when he turned back, he held a book.

‘And there is this’, he said.

I hastily put the bag of money away and took the book from him.

‘For some reason’, Maedhros said, ‘he thought I should be the one to give you this.’

I opened the book. The gloriously messy sprawl that was Maglor’s draft of the West Wind Quartet had been carefully copied in an orderly hand, with alternative scorings in footnotes, neatly cross-referenced.  I leaved through the pages. I acquired a smattering of musical knowledge, Maedhros had told me. I should have realized, I thought, that sons of Feanor did not do things by halves. He must have been able to follow far more of our conversation than I had given him credit for. Of course Maglor had insisted that Maedhros should be the one to give the book to me. If I had been given it by Maglor, I would have been so preoccupied with the content that I would never have stopped to consider the question who had penned it. I reached the last page and looked up. He misunderstood my expression.

‘All I had time for’, he said regretfully.

‘It is the most precious gift you could have given me,’ I said.

‘You will see it performed as it should be’, he said—not a command or a challenge, but with complete confidence.

 

 III

Maglor accompanied us to where Maedhros’s messengers and their guards waited for us, a short way down the hill. He stopped a little way off, just out of earshot. Oderen eyed him uneasily.

‘I would beseech you to take care of my student or thank you for your efforts to keep her safe’, said Maglor to him, ‘but that would perhaps be a bit inappropriate, wouldn’t it?’

Oderen looked as if he did not know what to make of this.

‘My brother Maedhros gave me this to give to you’, said Maglor.

He took out a carpenter’s plane and held it out to Oderen. It seemed to be a very simple tool, but by the look on Oderen’s face I could tell it was perfect of its kind.

‘Why, thank you, my lord’, he said.

Oderen still uses that plane, and in all those centuries it has barely needed sharpening once or twice. Maybe it was made by Lord Curufin or perhaps it had been brought from Valinor itself.

Maglor turned to me.

‘Don’t forget’, he said to me, ‘to relax the shoulder and the back.’

He lightly touched my shoulder. Then he went back up the hill to the castle.

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Chapter End Notes

 

Some of the events during and after the Dagor Bragollach are not recounted entirely in the sequence in which they are told in the Silmarillion in Chapters Two, Three and Four of this story. However, I'm not sure how uncanonical my arrangement actually is, for in the book some of these events seem to be told in geographical (that is, West to East) order rather than in chronological order and I find it difficult to sort out which is which. My interpretation of the events, no doubt, is slightly AU in any case...