Emissary by Uvatha the Horseman

---

Difficult People

---

Chapter 10 – Difficult People

Palan said something unkind, poking fun of his coauthor and rival astronomer. There are methods to compute an angle of a star above the horizon, Palan and his rival's. Palan favored precision. Urzahil supported the rival.

The instructor lost it, red faced and spitting. "Did you not hear me? I said my method was better.

"The precision doesn't always matter, like when you're on the deck of a ship at sea where you can't take as precise a measurement anyway." said Urzahil.

"I'm worried that you're not clever enough to understand my theory. Or perhaps you couldn't be bothered to read the reading at all."

Urzahil got defensive. "Perhaps a baseborn member of the aristocracy more likely to be a rebel and reject the established order?" That was unfair, Urzahil wasn't a rebel at all. He wanted to be part of the established order.

-o-o-o-o-o-

After class, Urzahil saw his Diplomacy teacher in the hall and ran to catch up with him.

"I wanted to ask you something. Let's say you're in diplomatic negotiations with another nation, and someone on the other side says something that's grievously insulting. What do you do?"

"You pretend you didn't hear. Usually these things are an accident. But if it was intentional, you don't want to take the bait. Stay focused on the subject at hand. Give short, factual answers. The minute you lose your temper, you've lost."

-o-o-o-o-o-

The next day, Palan asked Urzahil to stay after class. Urzahil thought he was going to apologize, but he acted as if nothing had happened.

"I have something for you." He recited lines in an ancient tongue. "Recite it back to me."

Urzahil did, and asked, "What is it?"

"It's a fire-lighting spell. Not everyone can make it work."

That night while working in the kitchen at the Boiling Frog, Urzahil waited until he was alone and spoke the fire lighting spell over the stub of a candle. Nothing happened.

He wanted to ask his instructor what he'd done wrong, but hesitated. He could hear Palan saying, Not everyone can do it.

-o-o-o-o-o-

On the last day of term, as they were leaving Númenorian History, Ardamin pulled Urzahil aside in the hall.

"I'm getting a group together to celebrate our last night of freedom before Exam Week. I thought we'd go down to the waterfront and play Silver Penny again. Want to come?" Ardamin winked.

"I can't make it. Maybe next time." Urzahil feigned indifference.

"Didn't hear me? I said we're going to play Silver Penny. You loved that game last time we played, and you might get to see Kyna again."

Urzahil couldn't even think about risking a silver penny on a roll of the dice. That was more than he made in a week, and he couldn't afford even a few coppers for dinner or a bed. He was glad Ardamin didn't know.

"Thanks, but I can't make it. Maybe next time."

-o-o-o-o-o-

Every day during Exam Week, Urzahil spent the entire day in the library, preparing for exams. The final exam for Diplomacy would be a role-playing exercise, he didn't even have to think about it. Númenorian History would take work to prepare for. Caldûr taught it as a series of stories, but there was still a long list of names and dates to memorize.

Coastal Geography was like Diplomacy and Númenorian History, only with maps. Urzahil wasn't worried about Astronomy either. He would never navigate a ship by the stars, given the motion of the waves made him ill, but he could tell time at night by the height of the constellations above the horizon, and whether they were rising or setting. It ought to go fine.

It was Sindarin he was worried about. Everyone else in class seemed to speak it fluently. He'd memorized whole lists of root words, and while he could read Sindarin, the spoken language raced past him, with no more meaning than the sounds of wind and the water.

The instructor hadn't told them what to expect, but Ardamin's older brother, the future Tar-Castamir, had taken Sindarin the year before. He said the instructor wrote a few sentences on the slate board, and the students wrote the translation on paper and turned it in.

If the exam was written, Urzahil thought he could pass it. Throughout exam week, he put as much effort into studying Sindarin as he did into the other four subjects combined.

-o-o-o-o-o-

Urzahil finished work in the late in the evening. He was wiping down counters in the kitchen, and waited until the Innkeeper, was in the front room, before he lit a covered lantern from an ember in the stove and set it on the back step. No light escaped from the shutters latched over it's the glass sides. He opened the kitchen door and set the lantern on the step leading to the kitchen garden behind the tavern.

"Urzahil, are you about done? I'm ready to lock up for the night," Allard called from the common room.

Urzahil ducked back inside and pulled the kitchen door shut as quietly as he could.

"I'm just finishing up." He rinsed out his mopping-up rag and hung it near the stove to dry.

Urzahil collected his things, said goodnight to Allard, and stepped out into the darkened courtyard. The door clicked shut behind him, and he heard the bolt slide home. He waited until all the lights in the tavern were out, then circled around to the kitchen garden and collected the lantern from the back step. No light escaped from the covers over the lantern as he crossed the yard to the stables.

He reached the safety of the darkened barn and set the lantern on the ground between the horses' stalls, and opened one of the covers. Somewhere between the tavern and the barn, the lamp had gone out. Only the tip of the wick glowed orange, and as he watched, it winked out. He cursed under his breath.

He couldn't go back to the tavern to light the lantern, the common room had been locked up for the night. He couldn't study by moonlight; the moon was waxing, but not yet bright enough to read by. The Sindarin exam was tomorrow, and he was ill-prepared for it. He needed a spell to light the lamp. Palan had given him a fire-starting spell, but he hadn't been able to make it work. Maybe he hadn't tried hard enough.

The lamp was a shade against a dark background. He knelt beside it. He couldn't see the wick at all anymore, he could only guess where it was. He knelt in front of the lamp and pictured the wick in his mind, the frayed cotton string, charred at the end, still warm. He gathered all his thoughts, focused them like a clenched fist, and spoke the words of the spell with all the authority he could muster. Nothing.

He sat back on his heels and puffed out his cheeks. After a moment, he gathered his thoughts and recited the spell again, his shoulders hunched with the effort. Some sorcerer he was, he couldn't even summon up an orange speck on the end of the wick.

He smacked the earthen floor in frustration. It took a few minutes to calm down. When his breath had slowed to almost normal, he tried again, his will like a clenched fist. He spoke the words for the third time. Yellow light flared up and flooded the floor around his feet.

Suddenly nervous, he looked in the direction of the Inn. Hopefully Allard had already gone to bed, or if he hadn't, he hadn't looked across the Inn yard and seen the yellow light in the barn. Urzahil had never asked permission to sleep here, and had done a certain amount of sneaking around to avoid being noticed.

Hours later, when he finally snuffed the lamp and climbed up to the hayloft, the stars had wheeled around in the sky, and the bells tolled two hours into the Midnight watch.

-o-o-o-o-o-

Urzahil opened his eyes to full daylight and let out a yelp. What time was it? The Sindarin exam might already have started.

He pulled on yesterday's clothes, slid down the ladder, and hit the floor running. He was almost out the door when he remembered the horses.

He hesitated. It wouldn't hurt them to stand in dirty straw for half a day, but it would be cruel to leave them hungry and thirsty. With a curse, he saw to the horses as quickly as possible, giving them hay but no oats, and a bucket of water apiece. It should be enough to hold them until he got back that afternoon.

He tossed the water bucket aside and bolted out of the stables, through the Inn yard, and into the street.

The towers rang six bells, the time when the exam would start, just as he was just reaching the edge of the University. Minutes later, he stumbled into the Sindarin classroom, sweating and so out of breath he was coughing. He was the last to arrive. His classmates were spread out over the student benches, paper and ink pots arranged between every student.

The slate board had been wiped clean for the first time since the beginning of term. All that remained of the lists of vocabulary words, verb stems, and grammar diagrams were smudges of chalk dust on the grey-green slate. In a few minutes, Chaered would arrive and fill the vast, empty space with complicated lines of Elvish poetry which, even in Númenorian, didn't make a lot of sense. Urzahil drummed his fingers. He'd crammed for this exam for days. It ought to be manageable.

It wasn't like Chaered to be late. About ten minutes after the exam should have started, they heard the sound of footsteps in the hall. They had the accelerated pace of one who is late.

Throughout the classroom, writing boxes were being opened, paper rustled, and ink bottles uncapped. Urzahil opened his writing box and dug through the steel nibs until he found the narrow, flexible one he used to write Tengwar cursive. He chose a wooden handle and jammed the heel of the nib into it.

The Sindarin teacher appeared in the doorway, looking disheveled, with his arm in a sling.

"What happened to you?" someone asked.

"I was late to class so I ran down the stairs two at a time. I missed my footing on the bottom step and took a header. A word of advice, if that happens to you, don't catch yourself with your hands. Happily, the Infirmary people patched me up in record time." He wiggled the fingers poking out from the sling.

"However, until my wrist mends, I can't write the lines on the slate board, and more to the point, I can't grade your translations. That means that, for the first time ever, this will be an oral exam. I'll speak a line of Sindarin, and you translate."

Urzahil's mouth went dry. He was doomed. He could not pass an oral exam in Sindarin, and he was going to fail this course. He would have to retake it, which meant he would have to take a heavier course load later. He didn't think he could manage six courses at once. He had to pass this test.

The exam began, and each student was called in turn.

"sí nef aearon" "here by the ocean"

"na-chaered palan" "gazing into the distance"

"o galadhremmin ennorath" "from tree-tangled middle-earth"

"silivren penna míriel" "white light slants down jewel-like"

"o menel palan-diriel" "from the firmament, gazing afar"

Then it was Urzahil's turn. Chaered spoke the words.

"In gil ernediaid menel[1]"

The passage sailed by him in a rush of beautiful Elvish gibberish. Urzahil froze. He didn't recognize a single word.

They began the second round of recitation, and it didn't go any better than the first. He was seriously rattled, and his hands were shaking.

On the third and final round, he pulled himself together and gave it his best shot.

"O menel aglar elenath", the teacher said.

He knew this one, it was on the tip of his tongue, just out of reach.

"Come on, Urzahil. O menel aglar elenath. It's not that hard. Think about stars and the night sky."

Urzahil couldn't do it. A long minute went by, and someone laughed. Finally, he was dismissed and allowed to sink down on to the bench, his face burning. The next student was called, Mírdan, the one who only attended University because his father made him.

"sí di'-nguruthos" "here beneath death-horror", Mírdan recited perfectly.

When the exam was over and everyone was getting up to leave, Urzahil took a slate and stylus from his satchel and wrote out the line he hadn't been able to translate.

o men-el agl-ar el-en-ath

The word for 'star' appeared twice. The second instance was followed by suffixes.

el star

el-en stars

elen-ath all the stars

That was it! 'elenath' meant 'host of stars'. The phrase meant, "from something star something host of stars."

He studied the syllables around the first instance of 'star'. 'men' meant 'region' or 'neighborhood'.

men-el region star

That didn't make any sense. Yes it did, 'menel' was an archaic term in Quenya for 'firmament'.

So what was agl-ar? 'ar' usually meant 'high' or 'noble'.

ar-wen noble maiden

ar-nor noble land

ar-tano[2] high smith

ar-an noble man, king

But that didn't help him translate 'agl-ar'.

As a suffix, it modified the word before it. When '-ar' was used as a suffix, it meant 'extreme', just like '-on' mean 'a lot'.

Urzahil was reduced to guessing. What did the Elves say about stars? 'The countless stars in heaven's field'. No, countless was different than noble. How about 'the glorious host of stars'?

agl-ar glorious

"From the firmament, the glorious host of stars!" Urzahil shouted in triumph.

A group of students in the hall turned to stare at him. Chaered was with them, he must have heard, too. His face burning with embarrassment, Urzahil shoved the slate into his satchel.

---

Chapter End Notes

[1] "The countless stars of heaven's field"

 

[2] A name Sauron used during the Second Age when he lived among the Elves.