A Day in the Life of a Retired Kinslayer by Lipstick

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Chapter 1

It isn’t quite raining when I decide to go looking for my brother.

Over the headland, the sea cuts in deep and the land above it is high and airy. The hills are jagged and stories cling to their blue peaks like the mist. In the caves of Moel Llywydd King Arthur’s knights sleep on until the final battle. A night spent on Carnedd Ugain will make one mad or a poet. In Castell y Gwynt the four winds meet when urgent matters need discussion. Above them all stands Y Wyddfa, the Place of the Eagles, the grave of a giant, the holy citadel of the mountain kingdom.

Without the mist, what I am looking at is, of course, the shattered revenant of a fiery mountain extinct before even the Quendi woke and looked up to the stars.

Beneath the slate and straw and russet of the mountains, the Irish Sea coils inward. The rocks on the beach are the same deep blue grey of the hills, smoothed by the tide. A wide sweep of yellow sand extends out into the bay. Everything about this landscape has been designed on the grand scale.

A figure looks tiny against this backdrop. The figure in the outsize duffel coat pacing the wet sand without leaving footprints looks like a fly on the surface of the moon.

“I brought you some tea.” I say.

He continues pacing, staring into the waves.

“It has honey in it.”

My voice takes on an annoying pleading whine of it’s own accord. One-sided conversations are terrible for keeping natural inflection.

“Not singing today?”

“No I am listening.”

I nod, which is pointless, because I am standing behind him.

“What do you hear?”

“The sea,” My brother replies in the tone of one very weary of talking to the stupid.

“What does it say?”

“Can you not hear it?”

“I can hear – the tide. The rush of water.”

“It is the music of the Ainur. The music of all the days of the world.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“We are standing above it looking down into it. That does not seem right, somehow.”

“Do you think we should be in it?” I say.

“We would get wet. And you cannot swim.”

“Does it seem like we are standing outside the music?

Because I feel that all the time, brother.

“It has got quieter,” he says, after a while. “This morning the music was very loud, but now it has faded.”

"The tide has gone out." I reply.

"Oh," he says. "Oh. Maybe that means we shall find my Silmaril again."

"I am not really in the mood for another singeing."

"Hmm," he says. He kept his scars. I lost mine somewhere down the line. I looked at my hand one morning and they had gone.

"Does it seem strange to you?" He adds. “She made the stars and she hurt our hands.”

“I never really thought of it that way.”

Maglor took being burnt much more personally than I did.

I prop the flask of tea against the rock and leave him to his listening.

The mortal men who gave this defunct volcano its stories were called the Ordovices. That is what the Romans called them. We do not know what they called themselves, for they neglected to write it down. It is somewhat of a mystery what they ate. The historians who have been eager to scrawl their name across the flat maps have never accounted for how they survived in the inhospitable wilderness.

We survive because Maglor is a lunatic of means. Thanks to a kindly hospital administrator he was given a state benefit claim in 1993. His doctor sent up a small packet containing a post office savings book in his name and his wedding ring. Maglor cried a bit when I gave him the ring back. He expressed no interest in the small piece of card crediting him with nearly ten thousand pounds.

It meant we could pay farmer Morgan a little each week for the caravan. I could get my brother some warm clothes for his daily beach excursions. We eat well enough. Both of us enjoy cooking for each other. We have a radio so we do not completely forget we are part of this world.

Every so often, we receive visits from concerned others. The doctor comes once a week to check Maglor’s health and to lose to him at scrabble. We occasionally receive visits from a mole-like woman with thick glasses and an overly cheery disposition who claims to be his social worker. She does not play scrabble, but she sometimes brings us useful presents. The last one was a rail pass. She has a minor obsession with taking Maglor shopping. He has never granted her this wish, but she continues to, as she puts it, work towards it. Once a well dressed man with a hint of Birmingham in his accent drove his car right up to our front door and introduced himself as Mr Canafinwe’s psychiatrist. He left us with unsightly tire tracks through the field and traumatised sheep. Two weeks later a letter arrived in some bizarre approximation of English, giving his professional explanation for the 20,000-year-old phenomenon that is Macalaure.

I return to the caravan, make myself a cup of coffee, leaf through a few pages of a book I picked up in Porthmadoc library. It is called 1984 and is supposed to be a classic. It is a little mortal for my tastes.

Porthmadoc is named for Prince Madoc. He is not accounted for in the family trees of the royalty of these parts, although he is always called a prince. Modern researchers believed him to be a Viking. All that is known is that in 828AD he sailed west from these shores in search of peace and accidentally discovered America. Madoc is believed to be a celticisation of an older name.

Madoc was, of course, myself. We all find our own paradise.

The drizzle turns into a full-blown storm. As it begins to grow dark, the wind gusts Maglor in through our front door. He is dripping wet and clutching two plastic bags.

“You are soaking wet.”

“I know. I’ve been out in the rain. I did the shopping.”

“How did you…you don’t have any money.”

“Mrs Richards said to give you this.”

He hands out an envelope looking a little awkward, like he is waiting to be told he did something wrong. It contains, as I expected, the bill.

“Well,” I say. “Put on some dry clothes and show us what you brought.”

Maglor looks down at the shopping as if he feels getting dry to be an unnecessary distraction.

“It is not good for you to be cold. You are…well you are not as strong as you could be.”

“I do not feel cold.”

“That is not good either. Besides, you will make the carpet rot.”

Maglor submits and goes to change. He hangs his sopping clothing neatly over the shower tray, then pads back barefoot to his treasures. He pulls out the contents of the little blue bags over the dinette table at the back of the trailer. He ignores my attempts at towelling down his damp hair.

“I thought we would have potatoes and fish for tea.” He says. “The potatoes are from Pembroke which is down south from here. It’s flatter and very green. The soil is naturally rich in nitrates because it used to be under the sea. The fish is from Scotland and it’s soft pink – look – that means it hasn’t been fed food dye. Most salmon is bright pink but only because it has been dyed that way. A lot of people prefer bright pink fish which is strange…”

Mrs Richards does know an awful lot about her foods. So now, it would appear, does Maglor. And I am willing to bet, before I get any supper tonight, so will I.

“This is coriander. It’s good in salads, so Mrs Richards says. She gave me a bunch free because in China people believe it gives the eater immortality.” Maglor smiles. “She thought I should have a discount. Oh and this is for you.” He hands me a piece of waxed paper.

“I thought we should have some cheese. So we went through all the different cheeses on the counter and decided this one was best.”

I look down at the orange-rimmed cheese and wonder exactly how long it took to reach that decision.

“Aberdovey Amber,” He says. “For you. It’s got ginger in it.”

“Lunatic.” I say, still wringing his hair with the towel. “Absolute loony.”

“And if we had cheese I thought we would have to have apples…”

Maglor continues his excited inventory of the week’s provisions. Then he curls up on the long sofa and falls fast asleep.

I rinse out the empty flask I find at the bottom of one of the carrier bags, put the groceries away, and settle down on the opposite sofa. He rarely sleeps for more than an hour in the afternoons.

I have missed him terribly. It is only now he is back I realise how much.

When I am sure Macalaure is soundly asleep, I kneel down beside him and give him a good sniff. He smells a little salty from his day on the beach, but otherwise healthy. Our habit of sniffing each other to check our health status is a little, animalistic, for many mortals, but it is by far the best way to find out if anything is wrong.

Sick elves smell bad. We don’t get smelly from poor hygiene like humans, due to a lack of necessary bacteria. But when we get ill, we smell rotten.

It is received mortal wisdom that elves do not get sick. I have been told this myself on occasion. While it is true we are not prone to the frequent bursts of snotty grottyness that punctuate mortal existence, we do get unwell. We have big souls, sometimes too big for the world to contain us. When that happens, our souls turn inward and attack our bodies. Fading, I believe, is the euphemistic term for it. I hate the word. It implies tearstained maidens pinning away for lost loves in turrets. It is a very pale and gentle phrase for the ugly process of being eaten up from the inside out.

Long after my hroa recovered from its trials detained at Morgoth’s pleasure, my soul was sick. I could put oil in my hair to disguise the dullness, cream on my face, but I could not hide the smell, even though I bathed four times a day. When I first brought Macalaure here, he smelt terrible. Which is not surprising considering he had been locked in a basement for ten years. What is perhaps surprising is that he survived that long. Then again, we’re tenacious bastards us Feanorians.

He survived, and what is more he survived with his ability to be entertained by the minor obsessions of the local shopkeeper intact. He always said the first rule of being a poet was to know when to shut up and listen. For the accursed, I often feel very lucky.

Now he smells good, and his strength has returned. The brightness has come back to his eyes and his hair is shiny again, although it is still very tangled. I could tidy his hair for him. I like this idea, and so I head out on another of my moonlight excursions.

I like walking in the dark. Even on cloudy nights there is always enough light for an elf to see by. The rain is still lashing down and the wind still gusting. But the movement in the air makes it alive, the spray hits the harbour walls, white, crashing, the night is full of strength and glory. To walk through this frenzy, warm in a thick coat and boots, makes me feel powerful. It reminds me that once I too was terrifying.

They cannot tell, for there are no records, how long ago it was a storm like this raged, when the grey waters of the sea clawed back the lands that had already been tainted with too much history. There were people there then, huddled in their stone homesteads, as water covered the earth, and fire filled the sky, and a red-haired cripple ran for the remains of his tattered life. There were people there, because they tell the story to this day.

Then again, they say all cultures have their flood myths. It is also whispered among those who know that Anatar’s involvement in the Numenor catastrophe was an invention of later scholars. One can see how it would make the tale more appealing to mortal ears.

Tonight, chaos reigns. Things are breaking down, coming apart, being thrown to the wind. Dissipation. I am standing in the gap between cause and effect, and anything is possible. The world is full of enchantment, and that is my natural territory.

About five miles along the coast from our home farm is a large commercial trailer park. It styles itself a holiday village, and most of its inhabitants are visitors from the industrial north. I jump over the peeling wooden fence that separates farmland from caravans, and make my way to the large wooden building in the centre of the park, illuminated like a lighthouse.

The laundrette is cosily warm, and smells heavily of soap powder. That will bring you back to earth, Mr Milord Prince of the drowned and forgotten.

I am after fabric conditioner. The little packets they sell for twenty cents. It is what kept my coppersmith’s mane tame in New York, that and Vaseline. The coming of the sun and the creation of redheads must have been one of the discordant themes in the great music. I find the dispenser, and remember I have not brought out any cash. Unlike my brother, I am not going to have much luck asking for an IOU. So I climb on top of the washing machines and begin taking the dispenser apart.

He may have followed me in here, or if he may have just wondered anywhere for a few moments of being alone. The man was pitifully non-descript, with the grim anonymity mortals adopt when they wish to avoid trouble. His clothes were faded and poorly cut. He could have been anywhere between twenty-five and forty.

I cannot explain what happened next.

The man had walked to the far corner of the building, hiding now, hiding always. I swing my legs over the machine, jump down soundlessly, and walk through the bright light towards him. Down comes my hood. With a flick of my left hand my hair comes loose, braids like serpents, right down my back. Yes, I really am this tall. I am so much bigger than you. Even wrapped up against the winter, you can see what is under here. You know you will never see its like again.

I wait until I am standing right in front of him. Slightly too close. Very much between him and escape.

“How much have you got?”

The face that looks down on him is Miriel’s face, for I took very much after my grandmother in looks. Fingolfin never forgave me for it.

So do not worry. I am not a man, and I am fairer than any mortal woman. You would be a fool not to.

He turns out his pockets. In loose coins he has exactly eight pounds and seventy-three pence.

I put it in my pocket and kneel down before him.

It takes less than three minutes. He tastes a little stale. Camping trips do not make for over-cleanliness. Once he gets used to the idea of having his member in an alien being’s mouth, he is almost embarrassingly eager. I wonder how he would react if he knew I was a killer. He thrusts quite forcefully against me, but I know how to handle this, I know how to rock my head back so it moves him along. I am good at this.

I feel almost hypnotically calm. Like when they gave me poppy-tea and reset my ankle bone. I saw them break it. Somewhere, I even registered it hurt. But it did not matter at all, and that felt wondrously safe. I feel safe like that now. I feel so completely in control.

It’s no shock to me when he buckles a bit and comes. I swallow. He looks like a spaceship hit him. I stand up and walk around him, careful to avoid any contact. He takes a few deep breaths, does his flies back up, and walks away into the dark. He got more escape than he bargained for tonight.

I rinse my mouth out at the sink. I know I do not want to think about what just happened. I make a very good attempt at doing just that.

I could just have asked him for twenty pence.

The storm is still raging when I head for home, but the night no longer feels enchanted.

“Your breath smells strange.” Maglor is peeling potatoes when I return.

“Chewing gum, brother.”

He makes a face.

“It’s nasty. It’s trying to be something, but isn’t.”

“Mint?” I say, taking the gum out of my mouth and putting it in the bin.

Maglor watches me.

“You didn’t have to throw it away.”

“That’s what you do with gum. You chew it, and then get rid of it.”

“Why?”

“Because, because…Macalaure…”

He looks up at me.

“I do love you, you know. So very, very much.”

I don’t think he expected me to hug him. He feels stiff and strange, but I don’t know what else to do.

He looks a bit confused when I let go.

“I can’t peel potatoes.” I say.

“You can season the fish.”

We make supper together.

AND NOW THE SHIPPING FORECAST ISSUED BY THE MET.OFFICE AT 0015 FRIDAY 26 MARCH 2004.

Maglor’s hair is still slightly damp. He’s cuddled against me, under the blankets. He smells like fresh laundry. The curtains are open, and the stars are out.

THE GENERAL SYNOPSIS AT 1800
ATLANTIC LOW MOVING STEADILY NORTHEAST EXPECTED 100 MILES WEST OF BAILEY 998 BY 1800 ON SATURDAY. MOVING SLOWLY NORTHWEST LOOSING ITS IDENTITY.

Maglor cannot sleep with the curtains closed. He gets nightmares in enclosed spaces.

THE AREA FORECASTS FOR THE NEXT 24 HOURS :

He discovered the shipping forecast, and we listen to it now every night.

VIKING NORTH UTSIRE SOUTH UTSIRE
SOUTHERLY IN EAST AT FIRST, OTHERWISE WESTERLY 4 OR 5, OCCASIONALLY 3. OCCASIONAL RAIN OR DRIZZLE. MODERATE TO GOOD.

We could be on a ship. In the dark, we could be floating through space and time.

LUNDY FASTNET IRISH SEA.
SOUTHWESTERLY IN SOUTHEAST LUNDY AT FIRST, OTHERWISE WESTERLY BECOMING VARIABLE, 3 OR 4. OCCASIONAL RAIN OR DRIZZLE. MODERATE TO GOOD.

It’s a very calming thought.

Chapter End Notes

If anyone really needs to know what the shipping forcast is, you can find it here.

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