The Chief in a Village by Himring

Chapter 4

Being In Tune With Nature Is Sometimes Overrated

'What is likely to happen?' asked Fingon and headed off into the Wild East. Well, you could tell he was in for a nasty surprise, couldn't you?

(Are you one of those people who think Noldor aren't in tune with nature? Don't count on it.)

Warning for violence towards the end of the chapter.

I felt something lightly touching my cheek, as if someone was trying to draw my attention to something.

Findekano.

I reached up and caught a dry beech leaf between my fingers. It rustled in my grasp. I frowned at it, puzzled.

Findekano.

I looked around and tried to see where the leaf had come from. Who was calling me?  Was someone calling me?

My eyes blurred. Then my vision shifted and cleared. Not far from me, on a small rise, stood a tall beech, its branches lifted up wide to embrace the clear blue morning sky. Autumn had coloured its leaves, few of which remained green. The rest were red and yellow and brown, but mostly red.

Staring at it, I remembered beech woods green with spring above a river bank and among them, someone observing me…  Above a river bank in Dor-lomin… In Dor-lomin, red among the beech leaves…

‘Russandol!’

Startled by the sound of my own voice, I sprang to my feet. A wood pigeon flapped its wings in alarm and flew away into the trees. Suddenly, I was wide awake.

‘Russandol!’

What was I doing here? I was supposed to be on my way to Himring to talk to Russandol and then go home to Hithlum and marry Erien, wasn’t I? Instead of which—where was I?

Evidently: in a clearing in a wood somewhere in East Beleriand. Outwardly, there was nothing wrong. Physically, I felt all right, healthy and clean, and my kit, all the gear Pityo and Telvo had given me—but how long ago exactly had that been?—was well-maintained. Only a few moments ago, I would have said I was all right in every way, that I knew precisely where I was coming from and where I was going to, but those certainties were fading fast and, with them, somehow, the memory of what it was I had thought I knew.

I remembered—fragments. I remembered listening, listening deeply to the song of earth and stone. Had I listened too deeply and, in listening, forgotten to go home? And just how long had I been listening?

I stood, frantically chasing elusive memories inside my head and glaring at the trees, as if they were all conspirators bent on withholding a vital clue. Then, abruptly, I gave up and started dashing around the clearing instead, grabbing my things, and getting ready to leave as fast as I could. It had become quite clear to me that I had no way of reconstructing how much time I had spent aimlessly wandering here and there at the foot of the Ered Luin, it seemed, but one other thing was also quite clear: it was far longer than I had intended and I was long overdue to be somewhere else, several somewhere elses, in fact. When I returned to Barad Eithel, I was sure my father would chain me to the wall in my chamber and refuse to let me pass the front gate for the next several decades.

Not that I would get anywhere very fast by running off wildly into the trees. But just now I felt panicky. I had to get out of this clearing at once or the forest might somehow succeed in ensnaring me again. I would run, for now. Later, I would stop and get myself oriented, and then I would make a more considered dash for it.

***

I did manage to get myself more oriented during the course of the day.  In fact, I found that the first surge of panic had concealed from me that I retained a firmer grasp of the geography of my situation than I had feared. But my memories were still hazy and I could no more comprehend than before how I could have allowed such a thing to happen. Could it be that inside every Noldo there was concealed an Avar—scratch him and the right circumstances would bring him out? Or had I been much more seriously depleted than I had believed and the forest had somehow seeped in through the crevices and into the empty spaces?

By then, of course, I was no longer about to make a dash directly for Himring or Barad Eithel, for I had discovered the orcs. That is, I had come across their trail, a substantial one, which led northwest—indicating that these were not just a few strays, but a full horde that must have slipped through, across the mountains from the east rather than from the north, bypassing the patrols in the Marches. And I realized that I had known this, had felt them passing by to the north of me, acutely sensitized to the pain their steps were causing the forest as they trampled through it just as I had felt the deep-seated wrongness emanating from Angband much more strongly than I would have in my normal state of consciousness—but I had not felt impelled to try to do anything about either the orcs or Angband, so passively attuned to the earth that I could only suffer with it and was unable to find the will to take action.

I was feeling humiliated and ashamed already but that was nothing like the horror that gripped me when I thought of this. Had I, wallowing in self-pity, managed to forget that my people were under attack, under constant threat—no matter that we preferred to call it a Siege?  If in Valinor I had somehow disappeared, slipped through the cracks—that would just have been my problem, really, mine and my family’s, despite the added complication of high visibility that went with royal status. But here, in Beleriand, it amounted to outright desertion.

Not that I was wasting any more time on self-reproaches—at the same time as  I was considering all  this, I was already tracking the orcs with as much speed as elementary caution would allow and trying to work out what to do. Could I alert Telvo or Pityo to them? No, I thought, they were likely to be much too far away—or at any rate the closest of their settlements I was aware of was. Moryo might be closer, in fact, but was still too far away. Technically, I was in Ossiriand, probably, but I my cousins had told me that the Laiquendi tended to give Moryo’s southern borders a wide berth. That must be why nobody else seemed to have noticed this incursion of orcs yet or taken steps to counter it. With luck, it also meant that the area was so sparsely populated that the orcs had not found any victims yet.

I tracked them for the rest of the day and through the night and another day. At dusk, unexpectedly, I heard some of the orcs coming back along their own trail. They were making unusual noises, for orcs:  quarrelling, of course, but almost sluggishly, as if their heart wasn’t in it. They sounded exhausted and anxious. I concealed myself in the undergrowth. There were about a dozen of them, some wounded and all showing the whites of their eyes. I shot the four that looked strongest and fittest with Telvo’s excellent bow before they even realized where the attack was coming from. The rest I mostly dealt with by means of some quick footwork and my sword and dagger.

It was neither particularly heroic nor in any way merciful but I could not afford to let any of them survive if I could prevent it. They might be in disarray now, but they were still dangerous: to anyone they encountered unawares or defenceless, obviously, but particularly so if they had managed to ensconce themselves somewhere in the wilds where they would be hard to dislodge. I hoped the state they were in meant that whoever they had encountered had not suffered too many losses.

I hoped in vain.

Chapter End Notes

Rather superfluous note: Maedhros has red hair. I seem to have a habit of mentioning this in my stories (including A Bridge in Dor-lomin).