Aerin and Broddun by Himring

Part I: Chapter 1: Reading the Signs

Reading the Signs

Prompt: Sign Language

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Brodda has decided to call it marriage. Later on, that word will carry meaning, although it will never mean what it should. It cannot.

Here and now, swarthy skin and rough black hair translate into nightmare, oppression, force. Any Easterling touch, any outstretched hand causes Aerin to recoil. Blindly, she flees to the outhouse, seeking refuge in noisome solitude.

Slowly, regaining her vision, she learns to read other signs again: uneasily lowered female voices in the background, hesitant gestures of assistance. Broddun sets a piece of honeycomb in a wooden bowl on the table near Aerin’s elbow: sympathy without words.

Part I: Chapter 2: Turning and Turning Outward

Turning and Turning Outward

Prompt: Body Language

Read Part I: Chapter 2: Turning and Turning Outward

Morwen

It is some time before Aerin can slip away to see Morwen. Hastening through the dark, she fails to frame words in her mind but there is no need to speak: she opens the door, Morwen looks up from where she broods by the dying fire, Aerin throws herself on her knees and hides her face in Morwen’s lap. Morwen’s long, strong fingers clasp her shoulder.
‘Brodda calls you wife’, Morwen says. ‘We have neither shield nor spear to defend our people. Use it as you can! Make the name serve you.’
‘I lack courage,’ Aerin mumbles.
‘You do not.’

Broddun

Unnoticed herself, she saw Aerin slip out of the house after midnight. Almost, Broddun opened her mouth to cry out and stop her. She did not.
But in the early morning Aerin returned, as quietly as she left. Today, she has changed. Always Aerin of the House of Hador moved with a dignity Broddun admired, even in fear and pain. Now, though, there is an air of new purpose. Before this, Aerin was turned inside, enduring. Now she lifts her chin and unobtrusively studies the faces of women and men.
Aerin has plans. Unlike Brodda, Broddun, his sister, sees it.

Part I: Chapter 3: Learning the Language

Learning the Language

Prompt: Speech

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Brodda speaks fluent Sindarin with a heavy accent, Broddun, his sister, only a few words of Adunaic. Aerin learns the speech of the Easterlings from Broddun. It involves a lot of pointing and dramatic gestures. Easterling speech has strange and difficult sounds; Aerin almost chokes trying to distinguish two of its consonants. Broddun bursts out giggling, looks remorseful and quickly hides her grin behind uplifted hands. Never mind—it is still a far kinder sound than the drunken jeers of Brodda’s warriors in the hall. Months later, Aerin remembers and understands what it was she said.

She begins laughing, too.

Part I: Chapter 4: Mapping the Past

Mapping the Past

Prompt: Drawing (Communication by Drawing)

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Migration

 

Easterlings do not write, but they do keep records. Broddun draws Easterling signs on Edain parchment with an Edain pen, mapping the tribe’s trail through time and space to Dor-lomin. This symbol means: Here fishing was good, that one: Here we saw the white stag. But the entries grow darker. Here orcs ate three and eight, meaning: three people, eight cattle. Lorfang died in ambush, killing three. In autumn, plague came from the east.

Studying the map, Aerin sees how Morgoth’s creatures harried the tribe toward the Blue Mountains until they crossed. Does Broddun see that, too? Should she say?

 

Battlefield

 

Anfauglith is a mess of black symbols. ‘Ulfast died’, says Broddun, pointing at her map. ‘Ulwarth died. Uldor died. Many died.’

‘Close kin?’ asks Aerin, after a little hesitation.

Broddun lifts first both hands together, then one hand and two fingers.  It takes Aerin a while to work out what she is saying:  seventeen clansmen died—that is how far Brodda was from succeeding to the chieftainship before the Nirnaeth.

Aerin does not know what to say. Her father, Indor, is missing: presumed fallen at Serech beside Huor.

Broddun is watching her face. ‘Bad battle’, she says forcefully. ‘All bad!’

Part I: Chapter 5: A Degree of Creative Accounting

Prompt: Writing

Read Part I: Chapter 5: A Degree of Creative Accounting

Aerin keeps accounts. She writes words and numbers in a thick narrow ledger and shows them to Brodda and his advisers. It is a kind of magic, Broddun thinks. Aerin writes—and a small jar of honey disappears off the shelf in the pantry without leaving a trace. Aerin writes—and a chicken that was pecking in the yard vanishes into thin air.
Morwen’s dependents will share meat and broth tonight. Asgon’s mother will have honey in her potion to soothe her racking cough.
‘You will be caught’, says Broddun, touching Aerin’s wrist. ‘Give me that jar. I will go.’

Part I: Chapter 6: Don't!

Prompt: Mind Reading

Read Part I: Chapter 6: Don't!

Broddun is to marry Lorgan? Aerin is horrified. So is Broddun.
Aerin sits beside Broddun, who lies face-down on her bed, shuddering with suppressed sobs. Broddun, she thinks guiltily, is unlike other Easterling women—almost as one of the Edain.
‘If it were not for me, you would have married him without hesitation,’ she says sadly, voicing that thought.
Broddun hoists herself on her elbows.
‘What do you know of me before you came?’ she hisses. ‘Do not presume to read my mind!’
They take turns dropping hints into Brodda’s ear: Broddun is irreplaceable here! The marriage is narrowly averted.

Part II: The Turn of a Hair

A second drabble sequence, written to the prompts of the Tolkien Weekly Sounds Like challenge.

Prompts: Sounds Like (Hair): hare, hare-brained, hair-breadth, hair-raising, err, heir, heirloom, hair

Read Part II: The Turn of a Hair

 

Names of the Hare

They walk together in the evening by the brook, quietly. It is never wise to attract attention. Startled, Aerin sees Broddun bring up her sling, a simple but efficient thing of leather and horsehair. A well-aimed stone whizzes into the shadows.
‘Look’, says Broddun, holding up her prey and continuing an earlier language lesson. ‘Long ears—a hare. Short ears—a rabbit.’
‘Hare,’ repeats Aerin in Easterling.
She reaches out and runs her finger along a long elegant ear. Oh faint heart! Her people captive, starving, dying—and here she is, in tears over the sudden death of a hare.

‘You grieve. You grieve over Master Hare.’
‘I’m foolish,’ says Aerin, drawing her hair over her face. ‘I’ve never hunted for a living.’
‘Not so,’ says Broddun. ‘There are words to say. People forget—because the old died on the road and in battle, because we do not know these lands. Strawhead Country, they say and do not show proper respect. But I was taught. I forgot until you reminded me.’
Aerin listens as Broddun recites the many names of the hare.
And in the thin stew ladled out to the thralls at noon there’s just a bit of meat.
 

Stirring (Hares in Echuir)

‘Women! More hair than wit, all of them,’ says Brodda.
So certain of that is he that he ignores all evidence to the contrary, right under his nose. He delights in outwitting Lorgan, but when things go wrong in the house…
‘It was an accident,’ says Broddun firmly and her brother believes her.
‘I’m sorry,’ says Aerin humbly. ‘Such a hare-brained idea!’
The only thing Aerin regrets is that she let herself be caught but Brodda accepts it.
Although it can be easy to fool Brodda, it is never safe. Only a glimmer of suspicion—and Aerin meets his fist.

It is spring, finally. Shy hares go crazy, come out of hiding and chase each other round the meadow in broad daylight. They kick and strike out at each other!
Aerin, too, feels the sap rise in her veins. She wants to run like a hare, toss her hair, jump and shout in the pale sunlight. She knows she is too old, weighed down with responsibility—her youth was gone in the blink of an eye, a casualty of war. But still her legs twitch…
Broddun sees the wild look in Aerin’s eyes with alarm.
‘Take care, sister! Stay safe!’

A/N “Mad as a March hare” in Sindarin would apparently be” mad as a hare in Echuir”. Echuir spans late winter and early spring and translates literally as "Stirring".

At the crossing

On the bridge over the laughing water where once the elven king went riding, all in white and silver, swarthy Broddun raises her arms wide, sighing: “It’s so good to be home!” A moment later, she catches herself and gives Aerin a self-conscious look.
Confined to Brodda’s stockade, pale-haired thralls soothe aching pride and smarting backs by whispering among themselves that the battle was lost only by a hairbreadth. Nearly, very nearly, the Easterling invaders got their just deserts, killed for their treachery.
But to Aerin, death to all Easterlings no longer spells a fair outcome or a happy ending.

They might mingle in time, straw-headed Edain and black-haired Easterlings, and become one people, although not in one generation, Aerin thinks, nor in two. But they are caught, beyond their own devices, in a war of others’ making; it will not happen and Aerin, being Hurin’s cousin, should be glad.
Never does the gulf between the two peoples seem as wide as when the Easterling lash descends brutally on another ill-fed, overworked boy. A scream—skin breaks—and again Aerin stands helpless, watching. But whenever Aerin finds herself huddling together for warmth with Broddun, it seems a mere hairbreadth between.

A/N: The elven king is Fingon--in CoH, Turin is described as having watched him ride across the bridge over Nen Lalaith ("Water of Laughter"), the stream flowing past Hurin's house, all clad in white and silver.

 

A son or daughter

She was taking precautions, knew they were not infallible. Now she faces a decision; it must be made before Brodda realizes.
She would gain status in Easterling eyes as mother of Brodda’s heir. If she sought power for herself—power to do good—this might be her chance. But Aerin remembers the sombre face of the true heir of Dor-lomin. She remembers her father’s pride in the House of Hador—and Morwen.
The deliberate fall off the top of the ladder to the hayloft almost kills Aerin. Brodda’s child, her child, becomes a red smear on the hard earthen floor.

Broddun grimly nurses Aerin back to health. The two women hardly talk for months. Come winter, they are out late, gathering wood. Aerin looks up at trees delicately outlined against a golden sunset.
‘So much we inherit and bequeath is enriched only by sharing—still we remain deadlocked in a struggle over possession’, she murmurs. ‘Broddun, I wouldn’t have hated my black-haired child—feared for it, yes…’
Broddun makes an inarticulate sound, throws her wood on the ground and stumps off. Aerin, aching, stiffly bends to pick it up.
Broddun, returning, says sharply: ‘Give me that! No, all of it.’
 

Morwen lives

‘My hair stood on end, I tell you!’ says Sador. ‘I was convinced he was going to run her through. But Lady Morwen didn’t bat an eyelid. She just stood tall and straight, in the way she has, didn’t yield an inch and, in the end, Brodda spat a curse and rode off—overawed, although he tried not to show it.’
Aerin shudders. Another narrow escape!
‘Here’, she says hurriedly. ‘All I have for you this time, my friend, I’m sorry!’
She watches the poor man limp off, painfully, with that small sack. Morwen has nobody else left to send.

‘You can say what you want about Brodda’, says the grey-haired Easterling. ‘He’s an upstart—but the man has courage. I wouldn’t want to go near the White Witchwife myself, but Brodda dared to build his new hall right at Nen Lalaith...’
‘Morwen Eledhwen is as easy to kill as any other,’ says Lorgan softly. ‘A fire set to her house at night would do it. But it does not suit our master that she should die, just yet.’
The old Easterling feels the nape of his neck prickle. ‘Our master’! Some things are more fearsome than the White Witchwife.
 

Left behind

‘Three days ago’, says Sador, ‘just after midnight.’
Morwen was right to leave, erred only in staying so long. Aerin herself told her so. But, although Aerin saw her rarely, feared for her constantly, for twenty years it was Morwen that lent courage to all of them.
‘She could not let you know the time of her going,’ says Ragnir.
Aerin nods. She looks at them, faithful retainers, abandoned because unfit for the road. Brodda will not let her take cripples in. Her eyes sting at the sight of blind Ragnir’s white hairs, Sador’s once-skilful hands grown clumsy with age.

Brodda roars and sends men after her.
‘They have a good head start,’ says Broddun. ‘I think the men are to make sure Morwen is really gone.’
Aerin nods. Brodda is, in truth, relieved and the Easterlings have not discovered the secret path south yet.
‘No news?’ she asks, nevertheless, each morning.
‘No news,’ says Broddun, hugging her.
No news is good news, for there can be no message of safe arrival, but Aerin has nightmares of her kin erring through the wilderness, astray.
Meanwhile, she obtains for Sador a week’s food and shelter in return for carving kitchen spoons.
 

What kind is it?

Broddun’s heirloom is an animal carved of bone she wears around her neck—the only thing she still has of her mother’s, for when Broddun left, she did not know there would be no returning, although well enough that the outcome of war was uncertain.
Alone at night, she takes the pendant out to look at. The creature is elegant, stylized, secretive. Sometimes it seems fierce, snarling, predatory, sometimes dignified and powerful.
Brodda is tough, a survivor. Broddun disagrees with her brother about so many things, but he is nevertheless her mother’s son who shares Broddun’s earliest memories, without words.
 

Here goes nothing

Broddun cannot help envying golden-haired Aerin. However harsh her fate, she is not the foreign outsider in Dor-lomin. She walks familiar paths.
‘I have no heirlooms—no possessions at all,’ says Aerin, smiling at her. ‘It is all Brodda’s or my people’s—for the most part, both Brodda’s, by conquest, and my people’s, by right and need, and so doubly not my own.’
Broddun looks at her uncertainly. Is this justified reproof? Should she apologize?
Aerin cups her hands around emptiness.
‘See? All I have of my very own, I share with you.’
Understanding, Broddun carefully clasps those outstretched hands.
 

Death walks through the door

Aerin recognizes him, although it is long since she saw him last. He has Morwen’s hair, Morwen’s eyes. The missing heir—but, unlike Morwen, he sees all, understands nothing.
Tonight, everything falls apart. Brodda crashes across the table before her, his neck broken.
‘I would beg your pardon, if I thought this churl had ever done you anything but wrong.’
When is a rescue not a rescue? When it comes twenty years too late and there is nowhere to go.
It should not have ended like this. Aerin grabs a heavy platter and tries to shield Turin’s carelessly unprotected back.

Hardly a kindly old man, her brother—but greying nevertheless and killed at his own hearth without having lifted a weapon other than his tongue, no matter that the house stands on debated ground.
There is no choice for Broddun. She grabs the carving-knife and launches herself at the murderous stranger. Shouts arise around her, violence.
It is Asgon who runs her through, whose ailing mother she helped more than once. He does not recognize her in the melee, glimpses a broad Easterling nose, black hair, the knife.
Broddun dies at home, her cheek pressed against the earth of Dor-lomin.

Part III: It Ends in Fire

After Turin and Asgon have left, Aerin sets fire to Brodda's hall.

Read Part III: It Ends in Fire

The men were dead, like Sador, or gone, like Asgon. It was the women and the children who gathered around Aerin, looking for guidance where surely there could be none, for all guidance was now proved vain. But she did not hesitate and sent them for brushwood and kindling and they hastened to fetch all they could find and pile it against the walls of Brodda's hall and the high fence of the thralls' compound. With rakes and pitchforks, they tore down what they could reach of the thatching and scattered it. Those who were weaker, the young or the very old, poured on tallow and oil and threw on top anything they could find that might make the fire catch more easily and burn more fiercely once it caught.

The women and children worked speedily and efficiently, asking few questions of Aerin. Instead, almost as if out of habit, they looked to one of the older girls, a short stocky girl with honey-coloured braids who seemed to have taken charge and, in a husky but resonant voice, gave directions to anyone who was briefly at a loss, returning to her own task with undiminished energy.

The girl's family was related to Aerin on the mother's side. In years gone by, Aerin had kept as much distance between them as she could. No need to alert the Easterlings to the fact that Indor's daughter had a mother as well as a father. Aerin had not wanted any closer or more personal hostages held by the Easterlings against her good behaviour; it was more than enough that her entire nation was held hostage, as it was. So she had studiously ignored her mother's second cousin and, when her cousin's daughter grew up, she had secretly rejoiced that the girl was strong and healthy and not pretty—for those were all qualities that helped ensure survival in the harsh conditions of life in Dor-lomin under the tyranny of the Easterlings—but rarely even exchanged a word with her.

Now Aerin was surprised by the girl's air of authority and quick wits, but gratefully welcomed her competent assistance. She herself worked among the rest as best she could. And then they were ready. They set fire in all four corners of the new wooden hall Brodda had been so proud of and in many other places, along the walls and the fence and among the thralls' huts.

Flames leapt up, licking hungrily at the logs of the buildings, and spread. Aerin watched only to make sure that the fire had well and truly caught; then she turned to the women and children and spoke to them.

'Now scatter,' she said.

It was the best chance she could offer them. The smoke of the fire would alert the Easterlings more quickly, perhaps, but as there were no near neighbours, with any luck the burning would consume most of the evidence of what had happened here before any of them could get here. It would also destroy her carefully kept household records. The thralls' huts, being most flammable, would burn right down to the ground. The Easterlings would suspect much, but have few hard facts to go on, and they could not know how many had escaped alive. There was no road to freedom for this remnant of her people but, scattering, they might be taken in by others of their kind, singly here and there. They would be harder to trace and at least some might escape retribution.

They looked at her and at each other, the old, the women and the children. A nod here and there, as they understood her intention—and already they were beginning to disperse, some of them leaving at a run, although it was doubtful that they could sustain it for long. Unlike the rest, the girl with the honey-coloured braids stood her ground. Instead, she took a step forward towards Aerin.

'But, lady, you are coming with us!' she said.

'No', said Aerin.

'But...!' the girl protested, wide-eyed. She suddenly looked much younger and a great deal more scared.

'When I told Turin I was too old and too weak to survive in the wilderness, I was not lying or exaggerating', Aerin explained quietly. 'I'm not strong enough to lead the life of a fugitive. Nor could I easily be hidden anywhere. I am too well known among the Easterlings.'

Aerin locked her knees tight and stilled her hands so they would not be seen to tremble. She looked at the girl, her second cousin once removed--so brave and sturdy, even in her fear. Such a lovely strong jaw. If it had been permitted to her to have a daughter...

Oh, she loved this girl with all her heart. It was a pity that she could not recall her name. It was age that did it and terror and exhaustion, clouding her brain, hiding her young cousin's name from her because for so long she had not dared to speak it. She leaned forward, reached out and pushed at the girl's shoulder.

'Go', she said. 'Go, you. You must take over now, girl. Go quickly.'

The girl stood as if rooted to the spot; then, with one painful, rending sob, she tore herself away and ran after the others, towards the forest. Aerin looked on until she disappeared. Behind her, flames crackled and hissed. Aerin felt the heat rise at her back.

She walked around the burning hall to the main entrance and went inside. Already the smoke had seeped in and hung among the rafters. She slowly moved in the direction of the dais, threading her way among overturned tables and the dead bodies of Edain and Easterlings, people she had known.

She had been going to fetch Brodda's great axe from his chamber—the one he had not had to hand because he had been killed unexpectedly at his own dinner table. She had been thinking of making a last stand with it in the doorway of the burning hall when the Easterlings arrived on the scene. Not that she was much of a fighter, but every moment they lost killing her would be a moment gained for Turin and Asgon on their way to the mountains and, if she managed to kill even one Easterling, it would be one less on their trail...

But when she reached the place where Broddun had fallen, knife in hand, sprawling among the wreckage, the spurious strength that Aerin's fury and her determination had lent her suddenly deserted her completely. Her legs began to tremble so hard that she abruptly sat down where she stood. Her back ached violently and there was an equally fierce pain at the back of her head. Her arms felt as if she could not lift a feather. It had been foolish to imagine she could wield a battle-axe. And it was hard that she and her sister-in-law should die fighting on opposite sides after they had been good friends and allies for such a long time...

There had been grey in Aerin's hair for years now. She had never quite recovered her full strength after her miscarriage. There still had been the occasional beating from Brodda, too...

Turin... She rather thought she had saved his life in the melee in the hall, although she doubted he had realized. Arrogant. Accusing her of cowardice. And, yes, she had always been afraid of large dogs, still was, couldn't help it. But she had certainly intercepted that blow at his back with her tray, a blow that might have got to him otherwise. It would have to do...

'I'm sorry, Morwen...'

But even Morwen could not ask for more of her than this.

The smoke was growing thicker. It was dark in the hall and very hot and it was getting quite hard to breathe. Aerin crawled over and tucked Broddun's skirt down over her knees. Then, because, there was nothing else left to do, she reached out and took Broddun's hand. The knife dropped to the floor. Aerin gently held Broddun's lifeless half-curled fingers.

'I'm glad I knew you, Broddun.'

---

Chapter End Notes

Canon implies that it was Aerin who set Brodda's hall on fire and that she died there, although it's not explicitly stated as a fact in the text of Children of Hurin and the Unfinished Tales and I'm not aware that Tolkien spells it out anywhere else.

 

(This is the end more or less as I had originally planned it, although I had abandoned the idea of writing it down for a while, when the drabble sequence took me in unexpected directions.)

Extra drabble: As little might be thought

Broddun, Brodda's sister, faces evidence of Brodda's physical abuse of Aerin.

The title is, of course, taken from the passage about Maglor's fosterage of Elrond and Elros, but there is no explicit reference to them and the parallel is not exact.

Read Extra drabble: As little might be thought

At first, she thought Aerin had stumbled and fallen. She reached down to help her up, when Aerin’s silent but palpable flinch taught her she was wrong. She spotted black bruises along Aerin’s wrists.

She had tried to convey her disapproval by traditional means, but her brother was deaf to any hint, as if he could not conceive Broddun might have an opinion about Edain, and hints were all she dared. 

Neither night nor day would heal this wound. No trust could grow. Yet she knelt, whispering in her language: ‘Sister, sister!’

And ‘sister’ Aerin repeated in Easterling after her.

---

Chapter End Notes

"Traditional means": the idea is that in this society women had very few enforceable rights, but social pressure and shaming could still be employed to prevent some excesses. Disapproval could be signalled silently. However, the situation in Dor-lomin means that this no longer works as it did and Brodda in particular is the kind of person subtleties are lost on.

Originally written for Tolkien100, for the prompt "Night heals"