Naurthoniel and the Heroism of Housekeeping in Mithrim by Himring

Chapter 2: Through the Dark of Mithrim

The night grew darker still. Not only was there no moon but sulphurous clouds were emanating from Angband again and many of these came drifting south- and westwards across the sky above Mithrim. They were black as soot and obscured most of the stars.

Moreover, the way the Sinda was leading Naurthoniel was well away from the lake shore, from open areas and the more well-trodden paths where they might have been spotted by watchers or had an accidental encounter with anyone out on more legitimate business. She headed deep into the woods, into thick undergrowth, into the cover of a tangle of branches and leaves. Naurthoniel began harbouring the unworthy suspicion that she was also being taken on a tour of all the thorniest brier patches in Mithrim.

She was not exactly lost—she still knew which way the lake lay, although she was less sure precisely how far it was away. But this territory was quite unfamiliar to her and, flame-eyed Noldo or not, she could see very little. She dodged another thorny branch and tried to peer into the shadows ahead.

Scouts had reported evidence for the increasing presence of spies—orcs and others—in Hithlum. Anyone they encountered out here was more likely to be Sindarin than anything else. But some of Morgoth’s spies had once been Sindar.

She wore a long dagger strapped to her side and had been instructed in its use. At Alqualonde, she had drawn blade, but before she could spill as much as a single drop of Telerin blood, a Telerin arrow had struck her deep in the right shoulder, and after that she had spent most of the rest of the battle behind Ceredir’s back, doing her very best not to hamper his sword arm or to faint. She was not sure how she felt about that—most of the time she was inclined to think that it made her just as much of a kin-slayer as Ceredir, only with less to show for it.

Later, in Beleriand, she had spent the campaigns against Morgoth struggling with the supply side of things, which was difficult enough under the circumstances to keep her from getting involved in actual combat. As martial heroes went, she was an amazingly good house-keeper, one who could even do without the luxury of a house, at a pinch. But what then was she doing out here in the dark, with a Sinda whose name she didn’t even know?

Call me ‘Huntress’, the young Sinda had said when she first turned up with a brace of rabbits, venison for the pot to trade in return for Noldorin goods. She had said it with an edge of bravado that suggested to Naurthoniel that among her own people this might be a title she hadn’t quite earned yet. They had agreed on a mutually satisfactory exchange, which had been followed by others, all mutually satisfactory, at least as far as Naurthoniel could tell, all carefully and politely negotiated.

She had no reason to distrust the Sinda. It was true that she had received no acknowledgement whatsoever of the supplies she had secretly sent around to the other side of the lake, except for Huntress’s assurances that she had faithfully delivered them as promised. But what had she expected? A gushing thank-you letter of the kind that they had been taught in Tirion to pen after their begetting-days? They had no real reason to be grateful, those over there--in fact, no reason to be grateful at all.

And if she did distrust Huntress, what could be more foolish than venturing out here in her company where she was completely in her power? She had a healthy respect for archery now and did not doubt that Huntress would be able to disable or kill her with her bow and arrows before she got anywhere near her with that dagger, even without help. Those would have been unthinkable thoughts to have of a fellow Elf, once. Even now, they still filled her with burning shame.

Huntress would not have needed to lure her out here if she wanted the contents of the basket for herself. She had already had it in her possession from the moment she picked it up outside the hut. She could just have walked away with it without waiting for Naurthoniel. And there was even less reason to suspect her of playing an even deeper game.

Naurthoniel stumbled after Huntress down a slope into a deep dell and tried hard to suppress a fit of coughing. This dip in the land was sheltered from the wind, and the fumes from Angband had settled here and lingered.
‘Don’t worry, you can cough freely. Nobody can hear us’, said Huntress as Naurthoniel almost choked.

‘Are you sure?’ asked Naurthoniel in a hoarse whisper.

‘Quite sure’, said Huntress.

She was Sindarin. She was also very young, thought Naurthoniel, but nevertheless she gave in and coughed. She was coughing still when they emerged on the other side. Huntress shared a soothing draught of water with her from the flask she carried, and the cough finally subsided.

‘Thank you’, said Naurthoniel awkwardly and was suddenly fervently grateful after all for what she had been spared at Alqualonde, although in being so she felt acutely disloyal to Ceredir. Not that the Sindar of northern Beleriand resembled their distant relatives of Alqualonde all that much, really…

‘Tell me about Tirion’, said Huntress, after they had walked on a little.

It was how Naurthoniel paid her for her help, even more than by the gift of a few small items of forged metal: a brooch, a short, sharp knife, a handful of pins. She did not at all want to think of Tirion just then, walking in the dark among the trees of Mithrim, but she had to pay her dues, so she tried hard to concentrate while straining at the same time to listen for sounds of movement around them—pointlessly, because Huntress would almost certainly hear anything suspicious long before she did.

She began in a low voice: ‘We had an inn in Tirion—perhaps more of a tavern, really, although we kept a few bedrooms for travellers as well. My mother had grown weary of being in service at the palace and wanted to set up independently. So Prince Feanor gifted her some of the capital outright and gave her the rest as a loan on very generous terms and, together with her savings, it was enough to buy the property, a well-placed site in an outer suburb of Tirion, and build on it. The prince and his family would pass that way when they came into town from their homestead nearby and sometimes they would stop and stay for an hour and Prince Feanor would say, by way of a compliment and as a joke, that his investment had paid off exceedingly well…’

‘No’, said Huntress, ‘tell me what it was like!’

Naurthoniel stopped. Although Naurthoniel was speaking Sindarin or at least using words as they would have sounded if they had existed in northern Sindarin in that sense, she suspected that Huntress had not understood very much of what she had just been saying. She would not say so; it seemed to be a matter of pride with her to pretend she was simply not interested in what she did not understand. Further south on the coast, in the cities of Brithombar and Eglarest, the Sindar probably knew all about capital and property and loans, but not here.

‘The inn was quite a large building’, Naurthoniel tried again. ‘Most of the ground floor was taken up with the dining-hall and the kitchen and scullery. The bedrooms for the guests and for the family were on the first floor. The walls were white-washed, and the roof was tiled. In the front-yard, we had set up benches and tables where guests could sit outside in fair weather. The street was paved. We had strung coloured flags across above, to make it look more inviting and attractive. We were famous for our cinnamon buns…’

‘It sounds exciting’, said Huntress.

She did not seem to be joking. She lived in northern Beleriand where Morgoth’s forces were a daily threat. In her young life, she had seen the first sunrise and the first moonrise. And nevertheless she thought the description of a humdrum inn in Tirion sounded exciting, just as Naurthoniel once, on the other side of the sea, had thought tales of her people’s march through Endore wonderfully thrilling.

Naurthoniel did not know what to say. It struck her that she had been using the past tense, but the inn might still exist, on the other side of the Sea, and even be flourishing. If it was, it would not be famous for its cinnamon buns anymore; she was the one who used to bake them.

‘Why did you leave?’ asked Huntress bluntly—for the first time.

She was young indeed. None of the older Sindar asked that question straight out, although you could see them thinking it, sometimes. Naurthoniel could not have answered her even if she had been able to speak freely. There had been a sufficiency of reasons at the time, she knew. It would not have been possible to stay behind. But none of those reasons, it seemed to her, could now be convincingly explained to a young Sinda in the middle of the night in Mithrim.

‘Morgoth killed our king’, she said.

It sounded really rather lame to her, although Finwe’s murder had certainly been one of the reasons and had come as a great shock to her. But Huntress appeared to accept her explanation. They went on in silence