The Work of Small Hands by Dawn Felagund

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The Funeral

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I come to my father's palace sometime later, shabby, as Anairë was careful to avoid when dressing me. But I have given my pearls and my gloves to two little girls orphaned during the Kinslaughter and think it a worthy sacrifice. With dusty shoes and raiment in disarray, I climb the long stairs that I'd once bounded up with the carefree joy of youth that assumes that joy will last forever. The stairs that I'd ascended with Arafinwë to announce our betrothal. My first pregnancy and each after. And now--

The main hall is lit only with candles for, I will learn, my father has torn down and cast into the sea the lamps that were a gift of Fëanáro and were counted as the most beautiful in the city. His influence is everywhere, I see; the mosaic floor made of iridescent bits from the insides of oyster shells was of his hand and mind as well. With subtle alteration of color, he formed the shape of a ship rising upon the crest of a wave, and as one moved across the floor and the light shifted, the waves seemed to turn and the sails billow, and many times, my breath was caught at the beauty of it. The corner of the floor has been shattered, a hammer lying abandoned in a pile of shards of shells. My father's work, I know. The ship lies untouched, but in the candlelight, the effect of motion is lost, and the illusion is as still and silent as the city.

In the middle of the floor lies my brother upon piles of pillows that I recognize as the finest from my mother's parlors. Alpaher's head lolls in my father's lap, and the King, the man I thought incapable of weakness or tears, sobs without end and lets his tears wash the face of his beloved son, as though his grief will destroy death, and my brother will rise again unscathed.

I have never before seen death, and I linger at the back of the hall, unnoticed and afraid. Alpaher has been wrapped in his finest clothes, and I see no mark or wound upon him yet know by the bloodless pallor of his face--and the memory of Arafinwë's words--that it lurks beneath his clothing where it now shall never heal. The candlelight casts his face in ruthless shadow even as it dwells poignant as a spark upon the marriage ring upon his right hand. The light of fire upon metal reminds me of his death and his loss and the hand by which both were delivered. I close my aching eyes and wonder if there are tears left to fall.

"Eärwen?" Surely that feeble voice belongs not to my father, but we are alone in the hall, and I open my eyes to find his face turned to mine, cheeks glistening with tears. "Eärwen, you have returned?"

"I have returned," I manage to whisper after a moment.

"Come and see him," my father says, "for Uinen shall soon take him, and only our memories will remain. I am afraid--" he says, and then he stops. He passes a hand over his face, as though by dispelling his tears he erases also his fears. His voice is low, but in the high and wide hall, it carries to me nonetheless. "I am afraid to forget his face," he says at last, and against the fear and pain in my heart, I cross the floor to my brother. I do not want to remember him like this, I realize, even if it means I must forget his face. I wish to run from there, from Alqualondë--but to where? The darkness has no end, and there is no place left to run.

I hesitate then. But wisdom passes across my frantic thoughts like a cool hand upon a fevered brow. Go not to the dead but to the living. The voice of Wisdom, I realize, with a smile strange and secret in the midst of darkness, sounds a lot like Anairë. Is that not why you are here?

So I take not the cold and insensate hand of my brother but the warm, living hand of my father, for Alpaher is beyond me now, but my father may yet be healed.

~oOo~

"Since you have returned to us," says my father at supper that night, "then we have decided that Alpaher's funeral will be tomorrow."

He only picks at his seaweed salad. At the other end of the table, my mother--always a small woman--appears to have shrunk on herself, her shoulders hunched inward and her chin upon her chest, the tablecloth beneath her stained dark by tears. The plate of food before her is untouched.

"That is--" I start to say well, but it is not well, to commit one's lost brother to sea. I swallow hard and suffice to nod.

Supper is a spread like none I have seen since just after the Darkening, before we in Tirion realized fully the implications of an utter loss of light. There is seaweed salad and cold shrimp in spice and a crab soup and tuna cooked scalding hot on the outside and still cool and red in the middle. Ulmo's great weeds are bountiful, for they have lived long without light, and his fish among them; those of our people not immobilized by grief are proud to row in small boats to collect food for the rest of us.

I am trying my hardest not to appear as ravenous as I am. I take careful, measured bites of salad. I sip at my soup. I think of my brother; my appetite diminishes. One of the maidservants serves me a filet of tuna, but its insides--flayed and red--remind me too much of the violence upon these shores. I see Alpaher's pale face and his raiment carefully arranged to hide the wound in his belly, and I think of this fish draw from the water and similarly sliced open, and I push the meat aside. But my fingers--tremulous with hunger--will not stop picking at my salad.

"We are glad that you have come home to us," says my father in a flat voice as the maidservant bears away most of the food to be given to the compost.

~oOo~

We have never had cause to develop funerary traditions, so giving our dead to the sea was something borne of the Kinslaying, a feeble attempt at both symbolism and closure, attaining fully neither. It started, it is whispered about the city, when a husband and wife perished both in the slaughter, and the husband was caught by the waves and taken to Uinen's bosom, and his daughter gave also her mother to the sea, wishing that her parents should not be parted, even in death. Now, our people line the beach each day at the low tide, when at last they are ready to bit farewell, and leave the dead for Uinen to claim and cradle with hands of foam, and come the passing of the high tide, one who returns to the beach finds it empty of living and dead like.

I do not sleep well the night before in the bedroom of my girlhood. Once upon a time, I collapsed upon this bed with a smile splitting my face: He loves me! Once upon a time, Arafinwë knelt beneath my window with a small harp and coaxed me from dreams with song because he wished to watch the morning Mingling upon the sea--but only with me at his side. Once upon a time, a week before our wedding, Arafinwë sought to climb the wall to my window but ended up cutting his arm on an outcropping of sharp rock, and so the evening meant to be spent in the bliss of love was spent instead binding his wound and trying to wash his blood from my bedclothes before the servants found it, and how we'd laughed at that! "It is my due," he said, blushing, "for seeking such a right without marriage."

At last, doomed to insomnia, I rise from the bed and go to the balcony. With the sea and the sky an indistinguishable wall of darkness, I might be seated at the edge of the world.

Tirion seems very, very far away.

We are glad that you have come home to us.

How easy it would be! I think. How easy to stay here and allow my grief to well and to forget the problems of the Noldor and care for my own people. I think of my brother dead in the hall behind me. His wife keeps vigil at his side this night. My sister, I think. My sister … not Anairë. Not Anairë with her quick voice and her proud neck and her pointy shoes. It is easy to believe that. I want to believe that.

I should stay.

I am summoned some hours later, so it must be morning. Two white-cloaked Vanyarin healers stand in the hall. Alpaher has been laid upon a stretcher, the pillows discarded in a heap in the corner. The only sound in the vast hall is the gentle murmur of unceasing weeping, its source unknown for it comes from everyone at once. Sometimes, it sounds like my voice. My throat is raw and sore.

The healers move with haste through the streets. There will be others after Alpaher to commit to the sea, and they have not time to dawdle. Already, Alqualondë smells faintly of death. The streets are empty this early in the morning save the procession to the beach: the fleet-footed healers each followed by a clump of mourners staggering as fast as their grief will allow, clutching hands and weeping with sorrow-hoarsened voices. In front of me, my father walks with long strides, a lantern our only source of light and swinging at his side, casting odd and shifting shadows across the cobbled street. My mother clutches his arm. Her foot catches a swatch of shadow where a stone is missing from the street, and she falls, and he does not notice. He keeps walking, fast, after the healers and the body of his son.

She is on my arm now, so I must have gathered her from the street, though I do not remember it; my arm is around her waist, and I am all that holds her up. She is too light in my arms. Artanis as a young girl did not feel so frail. It feels like an age to trudge across the sand. I concentrate on lifting my feet high so that I do not have to think of similar trips across this beach, chasing young Alpaher, shrieking, to the sea, where Ossë rose against us and knocked us both from our feet and Uinen caught us and cradled us and bore us back to dry ground. The dunes are a mosaic of light and shadow and, at times, the contrast deepens, and I know that we pass other families, like ours, committing their dead to the sea, their lanterns turning the shadows on the sand to black. I do not look up to see then. I concentrate on walking; I listen to the mutter of the sea and let it drown the sounds of grief.

And then my mother stops, and I have no choice but to look. My brother is laid upon the sand; my father has collapsed at his side, silver hair pooled upon a chest that no longer rises with breath. Alpaher's wife--my sister--weeps alone. And there is the sea, presiding over it all: an endless expanse of black, the same hue as the sky but without stars. The sea is calm, as though it, too, is in mourning. The waves are capped with orange sparks from our lanterns.

In voices barely louder than the surf, the Vanyarin healers read the words prepared in haste for these ceremonies. They try to speak slowly and with feeling but their voices have the threadbare sound of those long ago exhausted, for whom sorrow has become rote.

Unprovoked, my thoughts arrive suddenly at Anairë, pacing the kitchen with a candle stub in one hand and a parchment in the other, reading aloud to herself about the dangers of drinking from streams in the forest with so many animals dying, nodding at some points and scowling at others, marking changes upon the parchment with a quill kept tucked in her hair.

But this is my brother's funeral. Tirion is far away.

Uinen, take this child of the sea to your bosom, and may Ossë bear him gently to the arms of Ulmo, and may Ulmo learn his face so that he may speak unto Námo of the grief of this day and the beauty of this spirit now committed to his Halls. May he be chosen to walk among us again with a heart cleansed of the hurt done against him.

Manwë, grant us the strength to commit this day to bitter memory.

Alpaher's wife has broken the strand of pearls around her neck, given by him at their betrothal, and she is scattering them about his head and trying to fold them into his hands, but his hands have gone stiff with death, and they will never again close in answer to her touch. The Vanyarin healers are done with their rites and give their condolences to each of us in turn, but none answer; I suppose that they are used to that. My mother groans and swoons against me. I hold her up, though my arm aches even with her meager weight.

The other mourners leave the beach in ragged clumps, and their loved ones--our dead--line the shore. Father will not move, though my youngest brother tugs his sleeve. The sea washes over Alpaher's feet. His knees. His waist. My arm has gone numb from my mother's weight. The sea is at his chest. My eyes sting, so I close them. Upon my feet and aching, I dream.

I dream of a lady in the water. She is clad in water streaming unceasing like silver silk and her hair is dark and slick like the kelp that traces filigree upon the foam. Her hands are pale and soft. Her hands are the foam of the sea, and she is gathering Alpaher into her arms; she is kissing his death-pale face. Water streams from her eyes, seawater or tears, I do not know: both taste of grief. I am sorry, my child. I am sorry. Come home with me.

And I awaken with a start.

My father is collapsed over the place where Alpaher's body was laid, now only an impression in the sand framed by pearls.