Home Alone: Forgotten in Formenos by Dawn Felagund

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Chapter 3: The Little Jerks

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Curufinwë Fëanáro Finwion has not thus far entered our tale, for he has been otherwise engaged. He has not borne witness to the tumult of packing trunks or the harbingering of the coming storm or the Wight or the Maia of Aulë with the incongruously soft hands. He has been at work: not in the forges or his workshop or his laboratory—not precisely speaking anyway. He has been busy in the kitchen.

Fëanáro is as brilliant in the culinary arts as in all others, but these he attacks with a dutiful surliness that do not mark his other creative pursuits. He has had these seven sons; it is his responsibility to feed them so as to maximize their growth, but he misses the days when supper consisted of a rabbit, a few potatoes, and a pinch of herbs cooked in a single pan over a campfire, just enough for Nerdanel and himself. Adding to his displeasure is the addition of his half-brother’s family. He had not wanted to host them on their progress; he’d gone so far as to confirm there was space enough for them all at the two inns in the village of Formenos, but Nerdanel had insisted. One could not have a sprawling, overlarge house—the consequence of engineering and architectural experiments, he’d pointed out, fruitlessly, not an inclination to harbor houseguests—and turn out one’s own family to an inn. According to Nerdanel.

And so the kettles on the stove are his overlarge ones, and each time he sights them, annoyance stings at a deep, unreachable place in his brain. Fëanáro at work is a whirl of activity, but his kitchen is as neat as a surgical theater, and the apron he wears a spotless formality.

Preparing the final meal before a long journey is a particular grievance to Fëanáro. Seven sons accumulate an endless parade of leftover foodstuffs, and Fëanáro detests waste. Therefore, each small container of pickled parsnips or curried turkey or chocolate-dipped cranberries must, in some way, be incorporated into the final feast lest they spoil before the family’s return. The result is several stridently boiling kettles containing a mélange of flavors that would challenge and delight the palates of Tirion’s most discerning epicureans. All of it is spiced to a high degree of heat for—after his name—Fëanáro cannot abide food without heat and finds it bland. He is a connoisseur of hot chilis and grows a rainbow of them in pots in the solarium. There is a single small saucepan off to the side, simmering merrily, that does not contain chilis. Fëanáro disdains people who cannot tolerate hot-spiced food, believing them to be dull and feeble, and he does not ordinarily accommodate them at his table—he has had his share of apprentices who stash food like squirrels in order not to starve at his table—but he has a soft spot for his two youngest sons, who cannot tolerate hot-spiced foods and whom he never expected to have (and so treats with an unguarded, uncharacteristic tenderness) and whom he claims are still developing their palates. Theirs is the supper, specially made, in the small saucepan.

But tonight he feels impatience even for them. Tyelkormo traipsed through the kitchen at least four times to conspicuously watch the sky from the back door, until Fëanáro barred him from the kitchen without giving him the satisfaction of reporting on the storm. There have been seemingly one thousand small inquiries from Nerdanel and Nelyo and Anairë. Then there were the twins—of the mild-spiced food in the special saucepan—who came unabashedly whining that Macalaurë was not allowing them to listen to a story he’d recorded on a memory stone and was playing for his cousins. The twins, knowing their father’s astonishment at their existence and resulting softness towards them, whined overlong about it and the unfairness of it and how Turukáno was being allowed and Turukáno was a real baby, until Fëanáro lost his patience and snarled, “If Macalaurë says no, it must be really bad. Now get!”

He has been snarling all day: at the endlessly traipsing Tyelkormo, at Curufinwë wanting some book, even at Nelyo inquiring if he could help. The twins left him with no doubt. He was in a foul mood, and as was his wont, he blamed it entirely on his half-brother.

Tomorrow, in a pair of conveyances, they would travel to Taniquetil. He would travel, along with his wife, half-brother, and sister-in-law, in the opulent carriage Nolofinwë had been taking on progress. The children would follow behind in the overlarge wagon that he used to ferry about his sizable family. The wagon was in dire need of new shocks, and the seat cushions were worn thin, but he would have preferred—and even intended—to travel in it, with the children. There, he could converse with Nelyo about their research, and Macalaurë would inevitably smuggle in a little flute or something nice to nap by, and he could quiz Findekáno on his studies and dwell on his shortcomings, and the twins would clamor into his lap and fall asleep with their little red heads under his chin. There would be noise and bickering and a range of unpleasant smells. But again, Nerdanel intervened and said it would look “odd” to ride in a dirty, shambling wagon with the children when he had a seat in one of the finest carriages in Tirion. So he would be feigning attentiveness to Tirion politics, politics that he had moved from the city to avoid. He is wearying of it already, and it hasn’t even begun.

So Fëanáro is short-tempered by the time the kettles of food are set out on trivets along the trestle table and the small stampede of relatives begin to arrive. The twins’ saucepan he sits at the end, where they can easily reach, with their bowls beside it that are stamped on the bottom with matching images of chipmunks.

The noise rises immediately. His family is large and noisy, but that noise takes on a different quality when his half-brother is here, a more swaggering, contentious air. Some of his sons are trying to impress and outdo their cousins; others are already wearied by the imposition of so many near-strangers into the sacred space that is Formenos: a place made to be entirely apart from the southern politics now literally in its midst. Nerdanel is doing her best to impose her calm upon the gathering, but it is like pouring a teacupful of water onto a bonfire: noble but ultimately ineffectual. His half-brother’s family are beginning with their unmannerly demands for salt and black pepper.

“I,” says Fëanáro with a marked deliberateness, “have seasoned the food as it is meant to be tasted.” His voice can scarce be heard above the noise, and after a few minutes, he watches Nerdanel slip into the kitchen and return with salt and black pepper.

“This is too spicy,” he hears Írissë whine to his thirdborn son. “I am going to burn my mouth!” Írissë is possessed of one of those unimaginative temperaments, Fëanáro believes, and makes a dramatic show of edginess to hide her mediocrity. Her inability to tolerate spicy food further cements this impression in his mind. Naturally, Anairë begins immediately coddle her, and Nerdanel shoots him a sharp look. She’d provided him with a meticulous list of preferences and restrictions the evening before, when he used the preparation of ingredients as an excuse to avoid part of his half-brother’s first evening in his home. Her list he’d immediately put in the compost.

Carnistir comes in, looking wild-eyed and with half of his unfortunately coarse hair sailing out from the side of his head. Turukáno begins bickering with him almost immediately.

The twins appear last. Only Tyelkormo as a child was capable of becoming so tightly wound so quickly. They feed off of each other like a pair of storms colliding over the sea. Feet that small should not make such a pounding, and their little high-pitched voices arc over the rest of the noise and become an incessant backdrop that is the auditory equivalent of a bright light shined directly into the eye. It sounds, to Fëanáro, not like words but like a nonstop Eeeeeeee, eeeeee, eeeeeeeeee!

Írissë tries to grab one as he passes and says, in the cruelty-honed voice mastered by little girls used to getting their way (and who suddenly aren’t), “The Wight, the Wight is going to eat you!”

One goes under the table, where an alarming snarl suggests one of Tyelkormo’s hounds has been interrupted at its repast, and the other pounds away in the opposite direction, still shrieking Eeeeeeeee eeee!

Nelyo—Nelyo, bless him—corrals them both, one in each arm, and they are almost instantly calmed by whatever he whispers in their ears. “But we can’t! We can’t eat spicy food!” That was Ambarto, the younger, conniving one. Fëanáro expects his youngest child to follow in his footsteps in oratory; he is persuasive, even though his rhetorical strategies thus far consist primarily of whining and yelling.

“You know Atar made you a mild dish. Go look for it and serve yourself some. He put your bowls right next to it.” With that, Nelyo sends them on their ways.

Macalaurë and Findekáno have gotten into a bottle of the spirits that Fëanáro makes every year from berries harvested from the junipers that grow in his garden. They are singing a traditional Yule feasting song but changing the words to make them inappropriate. He hears soup become poop and mitts become tits. Judging by her wide eyes, Anairë has also overheard. She is wading through waist-deep children—including the twins clamoring for their mild dish—to reach her son. Her nephew she won’t dare, but Findekáno will receive a sharp twist of his ear, assuming she ever manages to cross the room.

“Where’s our mild dish? Where’s our mild dish? Where’s our mild dish?” What Ambarussa lacks in eloquence, he makes up for in force. He does not need to push so rudely past others, but doing so conveys the urgency of their mission. “Where’s our mild dish? We can’t eat spicy! Everyone knows that!”

Nerdanel appears at Fëanáro’s side then, a bowl of stew in her hands. It is the hottest one, made with crispy fried duck and the last of the autumn’s berries, into which he’d poured the fullness of his culinary gifts. “You haven’t eaten yet,” she says. For a moment, the twined aromas of spicy and sweet soothe him almost into calm. The noise around him fades. Curufinwë’s elbow catches him in the small of the back, where he’d pulled a muscle last week lifting something in the forge, but the pain too is muffled like under feathers. He feels his mouth smiling at her, at Nerdanel, fiercely beautiful in ways no one else’s eye is keenly honed enough to appreciate. Only his.

And in that moment, everything will be okay. The carriage ride to Taniquetil will pass. She will change the subject from politics and even shape the conversation to allow him to talk about his work.

Taniquetil will be okay. As okay as it can be, anyway. She will make excuses for him when she must; she will hold his arm like anchoring an airship to the earth. She will steer him toward the Ainur he will be able to bear to see.

She is looking around the room. “This is going to be a lot of dishes to wash …” and he almost laughs. She is granting him a reason not to linger overlong with this half-brother.

The sprawling wings of his house were experiments in engineering: in using deceptively delicate materials, perfectly poised to bear the weight they were given. The Noldor used to build with heavy blocks and planks; much of Tirion is constructed that way. It was Fëanáro who untangled the play of forces that allowed his domicile to rise light and fair as the trees themselves, slender branches seeming to balance the sky. That is Nerdanel, what he learned of her: how to take the small and strong and make a soaring, protected space over him. He is in the process of spinning these thoughts into words of gratitude to her when something erupts into the place of peace she has made for him.

“—on purpose!” is all he hears. It is the voice of his second-youngest son, Ambarussa. He still marvels that children’s voices can go so high; it seems beyond even the range of their tiny vocal cords. The sound needles in his ear like a drill, and the contentment Nerdanel had bubbled over him collapses as sure as if he’d taken an axe to frail wood.

The twins each have a chipmunk bowl cupped in his hands. The lower lips of each pooch out in that sign of discontentment that, like crawling and grasping and whining, it seems small children do not need to be taught but arrive with instinctually planted in their brains. The saucepan has a telltale trickle down its side; someone has been served out of it, yet the twins’ chipmunk bowls are empty.

“If you want mild-spiced food, little baby,” says Tyelkormo in that taunting voice that Fëanáro hates, “then someone’s gonna have to barf it up. You’re too late. It’s all gone.” And behind him, Írissë smiles around the food she is shoveling enthusiastically into her mouth.

It would have been easiest for Fëanáro to take both hands and shove the kettle of spicy-sweet fried duck stew onto the floor. That was the end result, and perhaps it would have been less rage-inducing to simply see his hours of work and the sustenance made for his family turned into a stain on the carpet that would still be a ghost underfoot when the offending twins were grown men. But as it was, Ambarto—the younger and less forceful one—shoves Tyelkormo in the belly. It produces little effect. But when Ambarussa—the elder and rambunctious one—shoves his twin into their brother Tyelkormo, it is like the first innocuously bouncing pebble that unleashes a landslide. Ambarto, startled by the shove, drops his chipmunk bowl. It hits a leg of the table and shatters. Tyelkormo must shift a foot to keep immobile as demanded by his pride; one of his age and firmness of stature cannot be unseated by the tiny boys raging before him. But his foot comes down on a piece of glass—containing the chipmunk’s insipid little eye—which would not have been a problem, were he wearing shoes, but Tyelkormo stopped wearing shoes several summers ago, an affectation he picked up from Oromë and which Fëanáro hates. After all, this is not a house of Oromë; it is a house of Aulë, and pursuits are undertaken here that would burn and slice and dissolve the feet from the legs of one foolish enough to go barefoot.

But Tyelkormo is barefoot, and the chunk of glass with the chipmunk’s insipid little eye painted on it goes into his foot, and this is more pain than he is a man, so he hops and howls. He bumps into Curufinwë—as noted before when he struck his father in the back with this elbow, circling the table to ladle each option into a single bowl in hopes of besting his father’s own culinary prowess using the raw materials given by Fëanáro in what he imagines to be clever combinations—and Curufinwë sloshes hot soup onto Anairë, who yelps and flails her arm and knocks over a bottle of wine. The wine—not great stuff but also not the quality that anyone wants to see dumped unceremoniously across the table—glugs out into a growing puddle on the tabletop. Anairë grabs for the bottle, but it is wet and spins out of her hands and onto the floor. It douses Macalaurë on its way down and paints a pink stripe down the front of his white shirt. He yells more than is warranted; it is not a great shirt, but he is a dramatic. His hands fling high. Nolofinwë, always seeking to fix things and goaded now especially by first his wife’s yelp and now Macalaurë’s not-inconsiderable bellow of offense at the ruined shirt, lunges with a tea towel to save the day. He even yells, “I’ve got it!” in a way that, centuries later, will come to Findekáno’s mind when he hears that his father has rushed off into foolish, singlehanded combat with Morgoth. There is no way that that single tea towel has “got” anything.

But out of the way he shoves Carnistir and Turukáno, stunned silent from their bickering, each bouncing off of an elbow as he soars, tea towel extended, toes pointed and braids fluttering most picturesquely, to save the carpet from the assault of red wine. And he does; in surveying the aftermath, not a drop marred the carpet on his side of the table. Carnistir thumps harmlessly into his mother; Turukáno is not so lucky. He is not a particularly athletic child, and being flung upon the elbow of his exceedingly athletic father sends him a considerable distance through the air, wheeling and shrieking. He catches onto a kettle of the duck stew, the tempting aroma of which has only just recently lulled Fëanáro into a false sense of calm. He drags at its edge as he falls and upends the entire thing onto the carpet with a clang of the kettle and a wet slosh of stew.

There is a sudden stunned silence much like the muffled sound in one’s ears after the assault of a particularly strident noise. Even Nelyo is unmoving, unsure of where to go first in this Rube Goldberg of a disaster. Only Nolofinwë is even moving, patiently plowing back the wine from the table’s edge.

Around Fëanáro, all sense of calm and contentment and hope have disintegrated. As he watches his half-brother mop away the wine to save the ugly threadbare carpet of his host’s home, he whirls in the direction where the mayhem began. Ambarussa’s hands are still planted in the center of Ambarto’s back. Both boys’ eyes seem to take up half of their faces.

“Look what you did, you little jerks!”

Fëanáro is not unskilled in unkindness. He can make a person feel small and forge self-doubt with the same easy grace as he makes gems. He is not even necessarily opposed to insults, but they must be crafted insults, made as one makes an arrow to exploit the weakness in one’s opponent’s armor. This unthinking and uncreative insult sounds the full depth of his frustration. Both twins blanch, a smattering of freckles like paint flecks upon their faces.

Nerdanel brushes past him and takes a pudgy arm in each of her hands. “It’s bedtime,” she proclaims.

“This isn’t fair!” squeals Ambarto. “He—she—” A finger waves at Tyelkormo and Írissë, who at least has the good grace to stop gulping her stolen stew.

“We’ll discuss it later. Say goodnight, Ambarussa.”

“Good night, Ambarussa,” Ambarto quips before they are dragged from the room.