The Chief in a Village by Himring

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Chapter 7

Fluff Among the Ruins

Fingon finds a baby-sitter and gives Gil-galad his epesse Ereinion.

After thinking about it, I decided to carry as many of the dead villagers as I could into the largest house facing the square and set it on fire before I left. It seemed the best I could do for them by way of a funeral. As I collected them, one by one, I studied each of them, asking myself what they might have been to Irime--and especially I looked at the faces of the men, wondering which, if any, of them might be Gil’s father. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, none of these men who had died in a desperate fight bore a striking resemblance to a peacefully sleeping baby.

In between these sad trips to and fro across the square, I kept checking the basket. Presumably Irime had known what she was doing when she dosed little Gil, but I had no idea how long he would sleep or how he would feel when he woke. Already, I felt myself getting anxious. Although I had moved it a little to the side, safely out of the way, the basket looked somehow incongruous, sitting there among the wreckage—if only because it represented the aspect of the situation that I was perhaps least qualified to handle.

Gradually, I cleared the village square and worked my way back up the street toward the gate. As I bent to pull a Sindarin woman who was still clutching the splintered handle of an axe out from under the orc who had fallen across her legs, I caught a hint of movement in a darkened doorway to the left—merely the shifting of a shadow and a whisper of sound.

Might there be a survivor here that I had missed? I straightened and carefully stepped around the dead woman.

‘Friend?’ I asked, tentatively. ‘Mellon?’

There came something between a snarl and a scared whimper and the sound of a smaller creature hurriedly backing away. I entered the cottage and, when my vision had adjusted, I saw him more clearly: a young dog, little more than an overgrown puppy with long ears and lanky legs, pressed trembling into a corner between the cupboard and the wall but trying to look defiant, with bristling fur and bared teeth.

‘Friend’, I said again, soothingly.

Belatedly, he realized I wasn’t an orc or any other kind of threat. He stopped trembling and gave another despairing little whimper. His back hunched, his ears drooped, his tail stayed firmly tucked between his legs—a picture of utter canine misery. Clearly he was terribly ashamed of himself. It was not so very difficult to guess why. The other dogs of the village I had seen had died fighting beside their masters.

‘No, no’, I told him. ‘Don’t go blaming yourself, Mellon! Look at you—you can hardly have been fully trained yet!  I’m sure your master wouldn’t hold it against you.’

He looked completely unconvinced by this. I sighed.

‘I guess we both haven’t done very well, this time around. We’ll just have to do better next time, won’t we? At least you are still alive to try, you know.’

I reached out to him, offering him a comforting pat, but he was having none of it. He backed away slightly and looked past me, trying to ignore me.

I left him alone for the moment and turned back to the Sindarin woman. Maybe it was she who had been his owner. I pulled her clear, lifted her up and began carrying her away.

It seemed the dog had made up his mind to follow, though. I heard him behind me, trying to be unobtrusive, but so clumsily that I thought he might be hurt as well as inexperienced. I had not spotted any wounds, back in the cottage, but they could have been hidden underneath his fur.

I turned around. Immediately, he tried to hide, slinking behind a broken rainwater barrel.

‘You are quite welcome to come along, Mellon, you know. If I’d realized you were ready to come out of there, I would have asked you to.’

He stayed behind the barrel. But when I went on, he came trailing after me, less cautiously, and by the time we reached the square he was quite close behind me. The Sindarin woman must not have been his owner, after all. It was me he was following. That became evident when I deposited her with the rest and went to check on Gil again, for he came right after me without a pause.

I found a strip of roasted venison in my pack and held it out to him by way of formal introduction, and after a little hesitation he made up his mind to accept.  He even allowed me to run my fingers through his thick grey fur to give him a quick once-over. I concluded that an orc had got a nasty kick in at some point which had left him with a couple of cracked ribs and a number of bruises. Otherwise he seemed fine.

He was very relieved when I stopped touching him where it hurt and had to go and lurk a few feet off for a while to get over things. But then he came back and gave my fingers a brief lick to show it was all right. A good-tempered, polite dog, when he wasn’t frightened out of his wits, I thought—and had an idea.

‘Mellon’, I said and showed him Gil in the basket. ‘Sit. Sit and watch.’

He sniffed uncertainly at the rim of the basket. Then he decided, yes, he could do this. With a sigh, he settled down to watch the baby in the basket. I had found myself a baby-sitter.

***

It took another two trips back and forth, while Mellon dutifully sat and watched, before Gil finally regained consciousness and sleepily blinked up at me. That stuff Irime had given him must have been really strong. Sleepy blinking, I was to find later, was not exactly Gil’s style. He managed to get his eyes properly open and focused, first on the end of my braid that was dangling above his nose, then on my face. 

Well, they talk about love at first sight, although that is probably not what they mean by it. Up until that moment, Irime’s son had been to me a baby, a relative of mine: a responsibility. But when his gaze fixed on mine, curious and unafraid, at once he became just Gil. He didn’t look like anyone else to me, neither of the Noldor or the Sindar, not even like Irime, although I did notice that already he had a distinctive version of the Finwean family nose.

Suddenly, it seemed rather unimportant to me who his parents were.  The idea even appealed to me that Gil was one of a kind. I cleared my throat.

‘Welcome to the house of Finwe, Ereinion’, I said.

He emitted an inquiring gurgle, tried to move his arms and finding, to his mild disgust, that he could  not get awake and coordinated enough to fight off the blanket that covered him, he gave it up as a bad job and went back to sleep. I decided he had accepted the epesse.

***

I carried Irime into the house last of all. I laid her in the middle, with my blanket folded under her head, and covered her with my cloak. I scattered kindling about and rags smeared with tallow. Then I shut the door and set fire to the thatching in several places. It had been dry weather for quite some time and the flames caught easily.

I did not stay to watch. I collected from the other cottages anything that might come in helpful for the journey or for taking care of Gil. I was lucky, of course, that Gil was weaned; otherwise I would have been scrambling to find a wet nurse where there could hardly be one, for miles.

Then we set out, the three of us, myself, the baby and the dog. We did not head for Himring, although of course I now would have had another very good reason for doing so. But I no longer wished to speak to Maitimo right away.

I did not think Maitimo had ever known Irime well. She had sided with my father against Uncle Feanaro early on—not that Feanaro would have encouraged her to do anything else—and she probably had not had much contact with Feanaro’s sons even before she withdrew entirely from court. But that was more or less beside the point. Maitimo would still have been distressed to find that she had been killed and died virtually on his doorstep. However, the truth was I did not really want to talk to anyone about Irime—Feanorian or not—before I had spoken to my father. I had no idea what to say to him or how to put things, only the urgent feeling that nobody else ought to learn about the circumstances of her death before he did.

Besides, Maitimo sometimes had the inconveniently long memory of the older relative. If I went to Himring, I ran the risk of being reminded of all the times I had proclaimed, when my sister was still very young, that children were a horrible nuisance and I would never, ever have any myself. Ereinion might be whisked out of my arms to be taken care of by more competent persons before I could do so much as open my mouth. But it was me Irime had entrusted him to and I was determined to hang onto him.

It was flying in the face of common sense, but we headed straight for Barad Eithel.

Chapter End Notes

The doggy part of this chapter is dedicated to Alasse, for whose birthday it was originally written.

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