The Chief in a Village by Himring

Chapter 9

Just Show Me the Way to the Nearest Balrog

Fingon has failed rather spectacularly to communicate Gil's true parentage to his father. Will he do better at the second attempt?

At that point, of course, I was still going to explain everything, just as soon as Gil had stopped yelling, as soon as I had managed to gather my thoughts. Meanwhile I beat a hasty retreat to my rooms, which I found unchanged, unstaffed and badly in need of a good dusting. I bolted the door behind me, but I had to unbolt it again right away for Mellon, who had caught up with us and scratched at the door, asking to be let in.

Gil had calmed down a little in the meantime. I walked the rounds from room to room, rocking him in my arms, and tried to calm my own feelings by concentrating on practical considerations, looking at the furnishings of my bachelor’s apartment in an unfamiliar light. How appropriate were they for a small child’s new home? When Gil had sobbed his last sob and began to wriggle, wanting to be let down, I improvised a pen for him in a corner, with Mellon to keep him company. Then I systematically began moving all sharp or breakable objects upwards, out of reach.

My father did not arrive until several hours later. I had not expected him to. Whatever the major occasion was that my arrival had so spectacularly disrupted, my father would consider that as king and host he owed it to his guests to see it through to the end. No doubt, once he had recovered his lost composure, he would have carried on as if nothing had happened.

There came a single, imperious knock on the door. He waited a little, apparently lost patience, tried the handle, found the door bolted and knocked again, a sharp rat-tat-tat. I reached the door and silently opened it. He strode into the room, turned and faced me.

He had not taken the time to change since the ceremony. His dark blue robes glittered with gold and were lined with ermine. In here, it made him look overdressed, as if the room was a size too small for him. His demeanour was regal; Feanaro, who had very little sympathy for the need of others to maintain face, might have used the word stuffy.

He looked, every inch of him, Fingolfin Finwion, High King of the Noldor in Ennor—but I knew him too well. His shoulders were just a little bit too tense. That jutting chin was held just a little bit too high. This was much the way he had looked, once, when he had suspected that the next blow Feanaro was going to deliver was going to be below the belt. I myself rather suspected that in time that expression had also become an almost irresistible temptation to Feanaro to deliver just such a blow. However, I was not Feanaro, and it had the opposite effect on me.

I looked at my father and saw he was afraid. He was steeling himself for some kind of devastating declaration from me, a withering denunciation of his weaknesses: Nolofinwe, the father who drove away his children, who was somehow incapable of hanging onto his family. Of course, if that was what he feared, logic might have suggested that he should try apologizing or take back some of the things he had just said to me in the Great Hall. But my father was less straightforward and logical than he liked to think; clearly, that idea had not occurred to him.

Nevertheless, I had no wish to launch any accusations. It was true that my father had a strong tendency to go by the principle: if it works, don’t try to fix it. It was also true that sometimes that principle carried him too far so that it blinded him to the fact that something was not, in fact, working. It carried him too far that time in the palace in Tirion when he made the mistake of accusing anyone who was toying with the idea of leaving Valinor of disloyalty to my grandfather—a serious mistake on more than one count. I was not happy with my father that day—not that I think that constitutes an excuse for Feanaro drawing a sword on him.

So indeed my father was not, generally speaking, very imaginative or a great innovator. However, there is also a great deal to be said for people who just keep things together and keep them going. My father had done just that, for a long time, under very difficult circumstances. I had no interest in chalking up all his mistakes and oversights against him.

But if I told him about Irime… If I told him what she had said before she died, if he saw—as he would—that I had a certain amount of sympathy with her position… It would be Irime’s denunciation, not mine, but I would still be the one delivering it. He had lost so many already: his father, his wife, his brothers, his son and daughter… And I had seen his hurt and bewildered looks, as at the time when Finwe followed Feanaro into exile: Why do they keep doing this to me? I keep trying to do the right thing—and they keep doing this to me.

He was finding my silence difficult to endure. His mouth tightened; the strain showed around his eyes. But it seemed he had no words for me—could merely anticipate the blow that was about to fall.

I am going on too long about this, explaining too much. The truth is much simpler: this was the point at which Fingon the Not-so-Valiant chickened out completely. When it came to it, I realized I had rather fight a troop of Balrogs any day than tell my father that he had lost his favourite sister: that she had died in anger and rejected him before she died.

‘Wait’, I said to him. ‘Wait here, please.’

And I went and fetched Gil.

‘This’, I told my father, ‘is Ereinion Gil-galad.’

I settled Gil in my father’s arms and instantly turned him into a doting grandfather, as I knew I would. Well, technically speaking, a doting uncle.  Did details of genealogy matter all that much, really?

Somewhere in Mandos, Irime was probably foaming at the mouth.

‘I’m really sorry, Irime’, I said silently to her, as I watched my father cradle her son in sleeves embroidered with gold and gently touch the tip of Gil’s nose with the tip of his finger. ‘I’m almost certain that when you made me promise to bring Gil up as my own son, you didn’t mean I was to mislead them into thinking he was actually mine. But it’s not as if you had given me a message for my father or detailed instructions. If I tell him, you know, just tell him as best I can, he won’t understand. I sort of understand, myself, but not well enough to explain to him. And it’s not as if he could do anything about it now to make amends, you know, not even if he did understand. Because you’re dead and in Mandos, and he is here in Beleriand, among the living.’

***

I did not really expect to get away with it, of course. It seemed obvious that I was simply borrowing trouble. But I kept my mouth stubbornly shut and, to my astonishment, they let it pass.

At first I could not entirely understand it. True enough, I had made it clear that I did not wish to discuss the matter. But if anybody had insisted on an answer, if my father at any time had demanded the whole story or if anyone had asked me, point-blank, who Gil’s mother was or whether I really was his father, I would not have held out for long and I would not have lied.

They did not. It was really quite incredible, but when I listened to their oblique hints in silence and ignored their tentative queries, they actually seemed relieved and changed the subject. Some of them, including Berion, had apparently decided that I was a newly bereaved widower whose grief was still too recent to bear discussing. Others, who had been in the Great Hall when I arrived and had had time to think about what they had observed, seemed to have worked out that I might be concealing something other than that, but they still had decided they would prefer not to know. None of them, I am sure, guessed about Irime—how could they have?—and of course there was Gil’s Finwean nose, which only grew more pronounced as he became older, visible proof of his descent.

They adored Gil. They took him collectively to their hearts. They cooed over him, queued up to be allowed to hold him and showered me with presents for him. I tended to take him with me wherever I went, especially at the beginning, before I had time to make other arrangements, and nobody raised an eyebrow to see the Prince of Hithlum enter the council chamber with a baby on his arm, because apparently that was exactly what they wanted to see. And it was not just Gil they wanted to see, it was me.

My unexplained disappearance, coming at a time when Turukano and Irisse had already left, had shaken them badly. Because I had been struggling so hard with my own reactions to the exodus, I had overlooked that what they needed was not so much for me to try and replace, somehow, all those who were now gone—which of course was impossible in any case—it was reassurance that I was still there for them. And then I had seemingly deserted them, too. What was required, now, was a sign of commitment, a show of faith, and that was what the sight of me with Gil on my arm was to them: proof that I had not given up on them. They were not inclined to delve too deeply into how it had come about. They were too afraid I might take it into my head to disappear again, taking Gil with me.

I could have told them of course that I had never intended to leave them for so long in the first place and that I had every intention of not letting it happen again. But that would have entailed confessing how much I had lost myself in the woods of East Beleriand and that, I saw now, would not just have been embarrassing, it would not have been politically wise. The revelation would have so unnerved everybody that they would have insisted I was to be accompanied by a bodyguard of fifty every time I went and stood under a tree. Nor would bringing up the subject of a disgruntled princess be entirely advantageous under the present circumstances, when everyone felt an instinctive need to huddle together.

In spite of all the expectations and anxieties that I saw focussed on myself and, although I now had parental commitments on top of my other duties, I found things, somehow, easier to handle after my return. Of course, to some extent it was just the fact that having to take care of Gil from day to day stopped me from brooding. It also provided me with an effective strategy for dealing with my father. If things got too tense, I could defuse the situation by taking Gil and putting him on his lap.

So, in a sense, my father was proved right. What I had needed was an heir. It has to be said, in his favour, that he never actually made that point, though; he was too busy thinking up ways of spoiling Gil.

Gil, sturdy by nature, proved pretty much un-spoilable. He lapped up the attention and seemed to thrive on it. But my conscience smote me on his behalf. And it was not only that I was worrying about the difficult series of conversations we were going to have to have when he was old enough that he had to be told about his mother.

‘Ereinion’, I said to him, as he lay sleeping in his cot, in the middle of the night, when nobody else was around to hear. ‘Your mother named you Gil-galad, Star of Radiance, but you could have lived out all your days in obscurity. It was I who unwittingly made you the Shining Star of the Noldor, my heir, their great sign of hope. That is a heavy burden for anyone to bear, let alone a small child. I hope you will not find it too hard. I hope you can forgive me.’

Mellon came and sat on my feet.