Just and Equitable Government by Himring

Chapter 2

Russandol made a small ugly noise as the impact travelled up his arm. The wooden practice blade sailed away into a clump of nettles. Russandol lurched sideways and collapsed into a heap onto the ground. Makalaure had been right, of course; it had been too early to try this yet.

‘Russandol!’

My cousin lifted up his head, his face streaming with tears of pain. I reached my hand down to him in concern. He flinched and gasped as if the words were being squeezed out of him:

‘All right. All right! I did it. I burned those ships. Every one of them, with my own hands. I did it to stop you hounding me. Now will you quit?’

I stared at him, dumbfounded. It occurred to me that I ought to be deeply offended, if not for my own sake, then for the sake of Father and Turukano and all those others. But this was just too absurd. This kind of cart-before-the-horse logic was totally unworthy of either of us.

It seemed that Russandol himself was only just beginning to feel how much of an idiot he had just made of himself. He was flushing a most unbecoming colour under those angry scars. His eyes held a pleading expression as if he wanted to beg me: Please tell me I didn’t just say that! But his lips were pressed tight shut.

I thought: So it was true what Turko said. I thought it was. You didn’t lay a finger on a single torch, did you? You didn’t take part in the burning at all. But you think you might as well have done it, that it is exactly the same as if you had. Russandol, I can tell you, I’ve been dealing with six cousins who did take part in the burning and it is not the same thing at all. Or I could tell you that, if you were willing to discuss it with me—which, very clearly, you aren’t. It is a very lonely feeling, Russandol, to be able to guess what you’re thinking and not to be able to talk to you about it.’

Maybe it was the wrong way to handle this, but I couldn’t help it; I reacted exactly as I had reacted on previous occasions, during embarrassing incidents which had involved various body fluids: I pretended I had noticed nothing out of the ordinary.

‘Get up’, I said.

He shut his eyes—as if he were trying to make me go away, like a small child—and didn’t move.

‘Get up’, I repeated, ruthlessly. And then I used the magic words, although I’d promised myself not to resort to them again: ‘The Noldor need you.’

It was, officially, the reason why I’d risked my life to save him. I still thought it was true, in the main. But each time I said it, it was beginning to sound more like a grotesque over-simplification.

Even the sight of his unconscious, mutilated body had galvanized the Noldor—if anyone had forgotten that it was the Dark Foe who was our true enemy, they remembered it now. But in the meantime I had realized that some of the ways in which the Noldor seemed to need Russandol I was not at all happy about. I did not wish to be saying, even implicitly, to Russandol:  You have to survive so that Turukano can go on hating you with a clear conscience—especially as I was beginning to suspect that Russandol would not have seen all that much wrong with that argument.

Maybe this time the magic words were not going to work. Russandol opened his eyes, but his expression was hard and unyielding.

‘The Noldor!’ , he said. ‘The Noldor need me like they need a…’

It seemed he could not think of any comparison that was uncomplimentary enough. He made a savage gesture with his left arm to express his inarticulate fury; somehow it gave him enough energy to rise to his feet. The words had worked their magic again, after all, but their power only went so far. Russandol stood, teetering, and I grabbed him quickly to stop him from falling flat on his face.

‘Look at my track record’, he said weakly, his voice full of bitterness.

I felt the tremors running through his muscles: the sharp shocks of pain, the slow shudders of exhaustion—and that, I knew, was another thing I had not truly been invited to share in. Half enviously, half disapprovingly, I thought that Makalaure would have waded right in where I feared to tread: would have pulled Russandol closer, stroked him like a sick animal and crooned soothing noises in his ear, ignoring his brother’s faint resistance, his profound shame at even being touched. It was the privilege of a brother—it was also the privilege of one who had been told about Thangorodrim but who had not seen it.

Russandol stood strained and trembling in my grip like a horse that ought to be put down. Nobody should be able to do such a thing to anybody, but Melkor had done it to one of us—and it was Russandol who he had done it to, Russandol who had had a grace that even dimmed and muted as it had been in those last years in Tirion had seemed essentially his own, much more a part of him than the acclaimed regularity of his features. Now Melkor had taken both from him and…

I gritted my teeth. ‘I think you’ve had enough for one day’, I said, as calmly as I could.

I went home to my father, still failing to be angry. But when I woke up, the Lake of Mithrim looked as wide as the Sundering Seas—and it seemed there was no boat to ferry me across. With a sinking heart, I looked at the trackless waste that was the shore. I did not feel the strength in me to make that cold crossing again.

‘I would not wish even a son of Feanaro to suffer such a fate’, Turukano had said, on one of the rare occasions when he broke his grim silence. ‘I’m glad you put a stop to it. But the truth is, he brought it on himself. It was his own decisions that put him up there. And now he is a wreck; that is all that is left of him. Wake up, brother. Russandol needs help even to wipe his own behind—and you think he is the solution to our problems?’

I did not confide to him that Russandol had said some of the same things to me, in almost the same words. I did not agree with either of them. But by both sides I was being told to keep away and so, finally, I did.