The Work of Small Hands by Dawn Felagund

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Queendom

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Now, though, there is a question of exceeding importance, hovering with all the frail tenacity of mist, in the candlelit room.

Who now rules the Noldor?

It was Finwë, but Finwë abdicated and then died.

It was Nolofinwë, but Nolofinwë is now departed.

It should be Arafinwë, but Arafinwë has followed his foolish brothers into exile.

Not one of our children remains: not wise Turukáno or strong Artanis or gracious Maitimo. All that remains is we, the wives and mothers of those always overeager to assume command, to become red-faced and tempestuous over rhetorical questions of inheritance and rights. Who now has the right? Better yet: who wants it?

“You are the Queen of the Noldor,” says Anairë, abruptly, to Indis. The mist dissipates; there is the question. I know Anairë--have known Anairë--better even than some of my children, I suspect. It was Anairë who soothed the fears of a quivering, fearful bride-to-be, then mother-to-be. It was Anairë who tossed her arm around me and laughed at my whispered, “Will I like it with Arafinwë?” squeezing me in an intimate embrace of friendship like none I’d ever known in childhood--born the eldest with only brothers after me--and saying something about ecstasy born of pain. I do not remember her exact words; they were scattered by the intrusion of my nervous, pounding heartbeat, but I do remember: from pain, ecstasy is born. I hadn’t believed her then; I do not find myself believing her now. Arafinwë was always gentle, and I’d believed him incapable of causing pain.

I know Anairë and know the brashness of her voice--the abruptness of the question--is not designed to hurt or offend: After all, it was aimed at the most resilient of us, whom I have never seen weep, even when she was told of Finwë’s death. So like Anairë--tender, brutal Anairë--to hurl her stones at she who is least likely to shatter from them!

Indis gazes steadily at Anairë, who sits draped in a shawl; I see the tassels on it trembling and know her to be afraid of her words so carelessly plunked into our midst. But nothing in Indis’ face or eyes reveal anger, and she replies in a level voice, “I am a widow now. I have never been a Noldo.”

"Yes, Anairë,” says Nerdanel, her voice hoarser than usual and her eyes tired, “you are the last Queen of the Noldor.”

“Nay,” says Anairë, smiling crookedly. She turns to me. “My husband departed days ago. That right belongs to Eärwen.”

“I do not want it.” My voice is a whisper, barely ruffling the air in the room. Anairë and Nerdanel speak with the brisk confidence of the Noldor; Indis, with a grace none of us can approximate. The sea and the sky--I am the sand beneath their feet, trod upon and unnoticed. Anairë stares at me, with her forehead wrinkled. “You said--”

“I said I do not want it!” I cry out, and my voice cracks and dissolves into laughter. Nerdanel shifts uneasily; Anairë scowls. Indis’ expression remains mercifully unchanged; I want to fall into her, to drown in her sweet, placid restraint. Inside, emotions must occasionally surge, but outside, I might have just blurted out a recipe for biscuits for all the ruffling of her face. I try to trap the laughter behind my hands, but it squeezes through my fingers in graceless brays. Anairë is patting my shoulder now, and I see droplets of water on my wrists and know myself to be crying. But I laugh! I laugh at the irony of this: The wives of men who have sundered themselves from their own blood in a battle over the right to rule this kingdom; now, we fight over the right not to rule. I wonder if we will be likewise sundered.

Anairë clasps me and shushes me like I imagine she must have done once with her children, when they tripped and scraped their knees on the stone path or awakened in a tangle of sheets and senseless nightmares. But I lean into it; I allow it: A Queen of the Noldor does not weep upon her sister’s shoulder.

“She is not a Noldo either” comes Nerdanel’s timid addition. I snort with laughter, feeling suddenly derisive and wishing to wound this woman who had the opportunity to control him and did not; always with her logic, trying to rule that madness that was Fëanáro with it too. And failing. But that quickly, the resentment disappears as though it never was, and I want to clutch Nerdanel and let her weep with me. For she lost a husband and seven children, and they will be damned for their oath, whereas mine walk with no burdens upon their backs, though they go into darkness.

“It is wise, perhaps,” says Indis, “to allow this matter to lie for now, until the grief has passed. Perhaps we shall discuss it anew, tomorrow.”

Anairë’s voice buzzes close to my ear. “The people need a leader now; we are not alone in our grief.”

“Then I believe the new leader of the Noldor has just spoken,” says Indis softly, “since you are the only one to see past your own pain to the needs of the kingdom.”

Kingdom? Queendom, now!

I sob with laughter.

“We will sleep on it” comes Anairë’s quiet reply, bowing to Indis’ delicately brutal logic, burying her face in my hair to comfort me--who laughs--while she silently weeps.

~oOo~

And so the days become weeks. We meet often, hoping that one of our number will lay claim to the queenship--she would be uncontested--but no one ever does. We work as a sort of council in the meantime, fumbling our way through leadership. We have seen our husbands do this but never expected to be asked to do it ourselves. Why, when the House of Finwë was so full of competence and ambition? Someone was always poking his hand above the heads of the crowd to volunteer--me, me, me!

I awaken sometimes and think it a bitter joke: What could possibly have taken our husbands and all of our children from us? There are fifteen children between the three of us; what could make them all leave, in a space of less than a week? Nothing! My better sense cries that it must be a dream. I will turn over and Arafinwë will be asleep in bed beside me, lying on his side with his fist near to his mouth, sleeping (Indis once told me) as he has since he was born. Findaráto will be bustling to his lessons and Artaher will be sleepily emerging from his chambers and wondering aloud about breakfast and Angaráto and Aikanáro will be tugging on their boots as they run--longbows in hand--to meet their cousins outside and Artanis will likely be lecturing one of her brothers about the value of quiet contemplation over ceaseless ruckus.

It used to be that I would fold my head in my pillow and wish for a moment more of silence. Now I want all of those moments back.

I have to force myself to awaken now, rising from bed and feeling as though coated in heavy syrup, perpetually dragging me down to luxuriously painful indolence. I have to force myself to break the silence of the house. I rustle my gowns and stomp my shoes as I dress; I bang pots together as I attempt to make my breakfast. On the occasions when some silly oversight leads to a ruined breakfast, I throw the pot against the wall and shriek and weep--just to break the silence. I run up and down the stairs. I fall. I lie at the bottom, staring at the ceiling, breathing as hard as I can, to drown the silence.

The silence, the darkness: it seems surreal, as though I wander alone in blackness without end, where the vastness swallows any sound I try to make. This is what the Void is like, I think sometimes, before I can choke the blasphemy from my thoughts, striking a flint and lighting a candle to provide feeble, quivering light that dies before I even find the motivation to rouse myself enough to leave the frail circle of illumination it gives.

On this morning, I awaken to find Anairë at my bedside. The last time I awakened to such a sight, I’d overslept and Arafinwë had sent her to my chambers, and she’d waited for me to awaken to tell me the news: I carry a child! A daughter! and how we rejoiced!

Now, her hands are clasped in her lap; her hair is skinned back from her face, so tightly that her eyes are slightly elongated by it. She has made an effort to appear collected, to appear in control; I sit up, realizing that she comes with tidings, and they are bad.

She takes my hand. “Eärwen,” she says, and folds me into her arms.

~oOo~

Better that he had died than this.

Better that he had ended upon the blade than to be so named: kinslayer.

I think: I would kill him myself, with hands around his throat, and rejoice in the light leaving his eyes. I pound my fists into the mattress; my whole body is black and blue in places from such rage, wielded against myself in absence of a suitable enemy, in absence of him.

And the knowledge that--with my awful thoughts--I am no better than he.

But I am forced to wonder: What crossed his thoughts, in my father’s beautiful lamp-lit quay? What drew his thoughts to bloodshed? What did he think of, as he thrust his blade--that gash of light at his side--into the gut of my little brother? What did he think as Alpaher’s blood washed over his hands? Had he wrenched the sword from him, moving on, to do it again? And again and again and again?

Kinslayer!

I weep and pound my fists into the mattress.

Here, while we deliberated the best manner in which to install lamps in the streets, Alpaher died in the bed he’d shared with this wife of less than a year, the wound in his belly non-lethal, at first, but slowly poisoning his body with its own fluids until he thrashed and burned with fever and died as blazing a death as will eventually befall my brother-in-law.

In truth, I knew not whether Arafinwë had wielded that blade against him, but he had been there, and that was enough. He’d been there and stood not on the side of the defenseless--my tenderhearted husband who’d rescued baby birds fallen from the nest and splinted their tiny, broken wings with dowels and strips of silk torn from his own robes--not on the side of those who shared not in the sick fascination with the implements and arts of war that possessed the Noldor. He'd stood on the side of the wrongdoers, the evil, the kinslayers.

I tried, at first, to stride from the city on foot, to return home. How else was I to go? Hire a Noldorin carriage, a Noldorin driver, to transport me to the wounded heart of Alqualondë? Barefoot and in my nightdress, I made it past the gates of the royal square before Anairë overtook me. I slapped her Noldorin face. She caught me and tucked me underneath her arm like a piece of baggage and dragged me back to the house.

She wrapped me in blankets and held my nose until, craven and afraid to die, I was forced to gasp for breath, and she poured a draft down my throat. I choked on it and sprayed it in her face, but she repeated. She repeated until I was too tired to resist, until I could feel it turning my blood to lead, and I struggled no more and slept.

In cruel dreams, I hear my husband come home to me. I hear the front door creak as it opens and then clicks shut; I hear the unmistakable rhythm of his footsteps on the stairs. I imagine him loosening his robes as he walks, as is his habit. Arafinwë has never been comfortable in the raiment expected in the Noldorin court; hungrily, I will tear it from him and let him rejoice in nakedness, claiming his secret places for my own. He will laugh and plunge his fingers into my hair; I hear the bed creak as he falls upon it.

I open my eyes, my heart quickened by eagerness, but it is only Anairë, with more draft.

She puts food in my mouth and holds goblets of cold water to my lips. She carries me to the bathroom. My flesh smells rancid, of hate and sweat and grief, and so she strips me and puts me into my own bathtub and washes me, and I fight her, sobbing, ashamed. She was at all five of my children’s births, and so she knows the intimacies of my body--as I know hers--but the puerility of having to have my body soaped by her, in gentle circles, while she cups my head like a baby’s! I squeal and kick, raising the water in frightful splashes, but she does not relinquish until I am clean, and then I am removed from the tub and the humiliating process begins again with the towel, until I am dry and left, swaying on uncertain legs, naked, clutching the towel to myself in a final futile attempt at modesty, to contemplate her.

I want to spit in her face, grind my heel into her toes, but I lack the energy, and so I stare into her eyes. What do I see? Pity? The thought makes my heart leap, affronted, and my tired fists clench until my fingernails bite crescent shapes into my palms. But, no, that is not it. She reaches out and touches my cheek, pushing the wet, tangled mass of my silver hair from my face, and as I tip into her arms, I realize what it is that makes her eyes too bright in the meager light of the lamp.

Sorrow.

“I have sent word to your father, by way of a Vanyarin messenger,” she tells me, stroking my hair. I wait for the tears to come--my eyes burn in anticipation--but they do not. I lose myself in the simple joy of being held by someone, of warmth of a body close to mine. I close my eyes and force my reluctant hands to let go of the towel and my arms to slip around her instead. “I am making arrangements to have a carriage brought for you, but it is difficult at the moment, as the Vanyar are giving most of their resources to your people, to healing the wounded and the grieving, to rebuilding. To relinquishing the dead. But they have agreed to spare a carriage to transport you. I understand that you want to go home, for your brother’s ceremony.”

I think of my poor little brother, lying dead in Alqualondë while my parents and his wife weep over his body. Now tears begin to roll from beneath my closed eyes, but the rage is gone: Grief is a still silver surface for me, puckered by the occasional teardrop like rain, undisturbed by the black beasts of anger, now swimming too far beneath its surface to be detectable as even a ripple. I think of the Bay at low tide, when I would sit in my father’s arms as a little girl, and the surface of the water was as flat and clear as a mirror. We’d watch the storms come in from the sea, watch the raindrops begin slowly, dimpling the water in increasing intensity until it looked like hammered tin and was no longer flat and peaceful. I whimpered and squirmed in his arms, but he shushed me. “It will return to the way it was, only it will be greater now, because of the rain,” he said, and his arms were so strong around me that I hadn’t a choice but to believe.

Anairë and I hold each other for a long time before I speak. “No,” I say at last, toying with her raven hair where it tumbles down her back in rare disarray. “Leave the carriages for the wounded and the dying. I will wait.”

~oOo~

I lie in my bed that night and sudden grief crumples my body.

He is gone!

He is gone for good now. For even if he returns to me--in forsaking the road or in death--I could not accept him back.

He is gone.

And my children …

I sob. My children.

~oOo~

I cannot stay in this bed.

Anger and grief fill me until I think I might explode. Surely, this is too much for a body as small and frail as mine? It leaks from my eyes and nose; my pores again fill with the sour stink of grief. I clutch the bedclothes, but that is no good: I last clutched them like this for a far different reason, the night before the doomed festival, with Arafinwë poised above me, my legs clasping his narrow hips, mindless of whether the children would overhear our passion or what the servants would think to find the bedclothes torn by my fists.

Passion and anger--how alike they are in that they both generate the overwhelming need to explode.

I heave myself from the bed. I cannot sleep here, not with the torment of such memories. Arafinwë and I gave each other our virginity in that bed; our children were conceived there. The Arafinwë I married--barely past his majority and so quick to smile--cannot stand beside the Arafinwë he has become, with fire-bright eyes like his half-brother and my people’s--my brother’s!--blood upon his hands. And neither am I willing to brand my memories with such a foul label: Kinslayer.

I wander the halls, a woman cast adrift, wringing my hands and weeping. I find myself at Findaráto’s door. I press my palm to it. How many times have I stood here, exasperated, not realizing the gift that was the certainty of my eldest son on the other side? Knocking: Findaráto, the charwoman will be here any moment now, and you’ve yet to bring your washing downstairs. Findaráto, do return that book to your cousin; your father and I are wearied of bearing his poisonous looks whenever we visit your uncle. Findaráto, please help your brothers get dressed for festival. Findaráto …

I once caught him here with Amarië, their golden hair disheveled and lips reddened from kissing. She yelped and quickly gathered the bodice of her gown closed; he blushed and pulled the blanket to his waist, and I ducked from the room. They were going to marry; they were going to announce their betrothal at any moment, once the excitement of the festival waned. I wonder if she walks with him now or if she mourns, like I do. With the thick wedge of night between my home and hers upon Taniquetil, it is hard to imagine that I am not alone in my grief, that it might be shared, even in a measure, by she who was near to becoming a daughter to me.

Even Anairë, the sister that my parents never granted me, is distant to me.

I open Findaráto’s door and ease inside.

I am not accustomed to seeing the room without light; even when he slept, Findaráto never closed his drapes. At times, he would remove them entirely, when he was working on a painting or a sculpture and wished nothing to hamper the light. (How I would fear him in those times! For his eyes became as empty-bright as his uncle’s--only when I called his name, he would turn to me like he’d never been gone, a smile teasing his lips. “Amil, do not look so, as though you have seen a wraith when it is only I!”) Now the room is dark and looks larger than usual--I realize that this is because he has taken almost everything with him.

There is a small bag--it must have been filled to bursting--that he dropped without realizing it on his way out, its contents spilling across the floor. Among the items is a porpoise made out of cloth and given to him by my father when he was first born. The poor thing survived every ordeal of Findaráto’s early childhood, clutched in his arms; it is threadbare and beyond cleaning in places. I pick it up and drift to his bed, left in uncharacteristic disarray, and lie among the bedclothes last warmed by my son’s body. His scent envelops me: It is warm and comfortable, like the smell of fresh-baked bread.

I lie there and cannot will myself to label him as evil. Your own blood! I cry softly and add my tears to the soft flesh of the cloth porpoise, added atop the many infantile tears cried into it before by my son, until at last, I sleep.