A Minor Act of Reparation by Himring

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Chapter 1

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The idea was his own, but he had little faith in it. It had been a passing thought, coloured with the irony of its obvious inadequacy, but somehow, unlike other such passing thoughts, remained. Only an idiot would have mentioned it to Earwen—but he was, clearly, an idiot.

For a moment, in the painful silence that followed, he thought she might be about to jump right into his face—she had always been on the small side and those sea-green eyes flashed up into his from beneath her silver diadem in a most threatening manner—but something about his expression must have made her reconsider.

Nevertheless, he did not expect her to speak about his preposterous suggestion to Olwe—and yet she must have. When Earwen sent him the message that his plan had been set in motion and Cirdan himself had agreed to supervise the project, you could have knocked Maedhros over with a feather.

‘Do you really want to do this?’ asked Fingon quietly.

‘I’m not sure,’ replied Maedhros honestly. ‘Now she has gone to the trouble to set it up, I feel I should at least attempt it. Even if maybe she has deliberately set me up to fail. But I pr…’

Fingon quickly put a finger across his lips.

‘Never promise!’

‘Even if all I am promising is not to promise?’

‘Especially not that!’ said Fingon, smiling.

Maedhros sighed and burrowed deeper into Fingon’s embrace. It was still his only safe place and he lacked confidence in anything outside its charmed circle. Nevertheless, a safe place to hide was not enough, he also needed to face outward as he could—and if there was any chance at all that he might achieve a minor act of reparation in the eyes of the Teleri, as Earwen’s invitation appeared to indicate, there was really no question: he must venture out and beyond, down the Calacirya to the bay of Eldamar.

‘Lend me your valour, love; I’ll need it.’

‘You’ll have to leave me some, if I have to let you go,’ replied Fingon, smiling still, but to himself he thought that it was not courage that Maedhros lacked—not exactly that.

‘There is still a little time left, I think’ said Maedhros apologetically. ‘Not much, but…’

‘I will not regret time spent—as long as you remember to come home afterwards. I had my own peace to make there, once.’

 

Maedhros was grateful that Earwen, or Olwe, had not chosen a boatyard in Alqualonde itself. It was a small place in a village a little further up the bay to the north. There was a crowd outside the gate, when he arrived on foot, conducted by Earwen, and they were watched closely as they went in, but none followed and inside, beyond the gate, only Cirdan awaited them.

He knew Cirdan, of course. They had spoken face-to-face a few times in Beleriand, but not since before the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, well before the Fall of Doriath. Few messages had passed between them after that, before the end, and those had been indirect or terse, often both. He had pondered what it might mean: that Cirdan had apparently volunteered. Cirdan had not been present in Alqualonde at the time of the Kinslaying nor had he had any ships burned at Losgar. For all that, he could hardly be regarded as impartial and it might be that he was inclined to take a darker view of the Sons of Feanor even than the Teleri of Alqualonde—and with reason.

But Cirdan greeted him civilly enough and, while Earwen was still present, they discussed only practical matters. Earwen had arranged everything with admirable efficiency and all their needs were catered for—until the project was over, one way or the other, there would be no necessity for either him or Cirdan to leave the boatyard for any purpose, unless they wished to do so. Not that Maedhros was actually forbidden to leave the grounds, but he did wonder a little whether he was being protected from outside interference or was being put under a kind of moral quarantine…

He did not raise that subject, however. Instead, when Earwen left, he faced Cirdan squarely and said: ‘Cirdan, I don’t know whether you are aware…?’

Cirdan looked a question—unsurprisingly, for there might be a great many things to be aware of in this matter, to be sure!

‘Even before I lost my right hand,’ confessed Maedhros, ‘which put most matters of craft straight out of the question for me in Beleriand—even in Valinor, when I still had two hands and the leisure to be trained and the very best of teachers—I was the least skilled among my brothers in any work that required the shaping of things... And now that I have regained my second hand, I still have not re-learned even as much skill as I had before. I am not the most promising of students, Cirdan.’

Cirdan nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, equably, ‘I had heard that about you—or something of that. That was, in part, what made me agree to be your teacher.’

Cirdan had agreed precisely because he was not a promising student? What did that say about his intentions or the likelihood of failure?

And yet the first lessons went well enough. They studied the timber together that Earwen’s minions had stacked for them and the tools provided. Cirdan’s explanations were concise and clear. Maedhros listened attentively and watched closely, when Cirdan began demonstrating the use of each specialized tool: hammers and chisels, adzes, saws...

Cirdan went through each task step by step and Maedhros did not find it difficult to follow. That was not as reassuring as it could have been; it had never been at this stage that he had failed previously, in his youth. But nevertheless there was a kind of relief in it, the feel of his brain slipping into gear, the old pleasure of learning something new.

Bow and stern, starboard and backboard, rudder and mast…

The days slipped by and then—too soon!—came the hour when Cirdan downed tools, stood aside and said: ‘Now you.’

Keel and plank…

His first attempt, he saw, was sure to leak as a sieve. He began taking it apart again without even asking for Cirdan’s verdict and started over. Cirdan did not comment. He sat on a crate, with Maedhros in full view, for the most part, and had begun whittling discarded bits of timber to pass the time.

Bilge and gunwale…

His second attempt got some way further, but before long he decided that this too could never become a serviceable vessel: it would ship too much water in high winds and steer like a drunken mumak. He shook his head and looked at Cirdan for confirmation, who merely nodded. He seemed to have been whittling quite a fleet of miniature boats, while Maedhros worked. Maedhros took everything apart again and started anew.

Bow and stern…

The third time he persevered, past the point at which his gut feelings told him this could not be right. He could not endlessly be ruining good timber! And surely this attempt was at least better than the first two. Stubbornly, he tried to make adjustments for previous mistakes and soldier on.

But inevitably, finally, the moment came, when he had to step back and take a look and…

‘Cirdan,’ he said sadly, ‘this isn’t a swan ship. It is, at best, a goose.’

‘A very unhappy goose with severe stomach ache, I’d say,’ agreed Cirdan.

‘I cannot build a swan ship,’ admitted Maedhros. ‘At most, I could manage a little skiff.’

Cirdan came and stood next to him, studying Maedhros’s sad wrecked goose of a ship.

‘It was only you who thought it had to be a swan ship,’ he pointed out, as if it should have been obvious all the time. ‘Try for the skiff.’

Maedhros took a deep breath.

I wish I could return at least a single swan ship to you, he had incautiously said to Earwen, even if I had to try and build it with my own hands.

He had known all along he could not do it, of course—build something that even Olwe had said he could not build again. He had not been sure what they wanted of him, Earwen and Olwe and Cirdan, when they took him up on it. Perhaps, he had thought, they merely wanted to demonstrate that truth—that the Feanorians had destroyed something they could never have built themselves. That, he thought, he could handle. Stubbornly trying to do the impossible was what he was famous for. Humiliation he could do in spades.

But now it seemed that they might not want him to fail, but to succeed. He began to allow the idea that those Teleri who kept coming in small groups to the gate to watch him work from far off for a while and then left again—who he had been ignoring all the while—might not be coming merely to watch him make a spectacle of himself: the fool Noldo who actually thought he could build a ship better than a Teler could. Cirdan, sitting patiently on his crate and whittling, might be really waiting for him to get it right…

It should have been the easier task by far, that skiff. Only a moment ago, he had believed he could do it. But now his stomach clenched, for now he could no longer afford to fail.

 

Not that he had been careless in any way before--but now every bit of wood, every nail became the focus of achingly painstaking attention to him. He imagined he felt the Teleri's gaze burning into his back, as he bent over his task.

'I simply can't stop now', he said to Fingon, who had come to find out how he was getting on. 'I have to complete it, do you see?'

He was not sure he had really offered Fingon any convincing explanation and, although he cast about for words to express the necessity, the urgency of it more clearly, in the end he just gestured helplessly again at his stacks of recalcitrant wood.

Fingon, studying his face, not the timber and tools scattered about him, said: 'I see.'

He took Maedhros by the arm and leaned forward a little until their bodies touched. The light contact grounded Maedhros, as the texture of oak under his fingers or the grip of an axe handle had not been able to. Tension rushed out of him, leaving him light-headed. He forgot Cirdan's watching eyes and allowed himself to rest briefly, weightlessly against Fingon. Fingon's breath sighed in his ear. Then they both remembered discretion and retreated a little from each other.

Fingon went and stood in front of Cirdan.

'I trust that all is done for good that is done here, old friend', he said.

'I would not have lent myself to it, if I had not believed it was being done for good,' answered Cirdan. 'I have not forgotten that--despite all that happened after--the first time I heard of the Sons of Feanor, they were getting an army of orcs off my back--although it seems your cousin has forgotten it.'

Fingon nodded. He took his leave of both of them and went away and left them to get on with it. A swirl of blue cloak--then the gate of the boatyard shut and he was gone. Suddenly it was difficult to believe--alone in this Telerin boatyard--that Fingon was alive and safe and within reach. It was foolish. He had only just been here, after all, and threatened in veiled terms to tackle the whole of Telerin aristocracy for Maedhros's sake if it became necessary. He might still be within shouting distance--at any rate, all Maedhros had to do, if he wished to catch up with him, was run after him...

Maedhros determinedly swallowed down his surge of grief and fear, as he had in times past, and turned blindly, stubbornly back to his appointed task.

'Stop!' said Cirdan sharply.

Maedhros froze.

'You're not in the right frame of mind for work, just now. You would mar more than you mend. Come here and sit beside me.'

Almost, Maedhros rebelled. But then he came, pulled up a crate and sat beside Cirdan.

'Watch!' said Cirdan and Maedhros obediently lowered his gaze to Cirdan's hands. Cirdan was whittling another boat. It was larger in scale and a lot less elaborate than some of the other ships he had carved, almost a simple skiff... And Maedhros understood that Cirdan was giving him a hint, showing him what do do next. He wondered how many such hints he had missed. Once the formal lessons had ended, he had found it difficult to look very closely at Cirdan at all, he realized, his perceptions dulled and blurred by ancient burning shame.

Cirdan caught his gaze and held it.

'I cannot be seen to touch your work,' he said. 'There are those who might believe, if I laid my hands on it, even if it was only to guide you in the smallest matter of craft, that it was all my doing, not yours. Do you understand?'

'Yes,' said Maedhros. 'Thank you.'

That night Maedhros woke up to the sound of the sea. It had been there all along, of course, the waves of the bay of Eldamar rolling in and gently lapping the shore when the wind was in the west, more strongly and noisily when the wind turned and blew from the east. He had noted it when he came, but had not listened to it, and then become oblivious to it, immersed in his task.

It occurred to him, as he lay awake listening, that he had hated and feared the sea ever since they had embarked on blood-stained ships at Alqualonde and that he had ignored those feelings. There had been other, much more important things to hate and fear in Beleriand. If he had been conscious of an unexpressed dislike of the sea at all, he had dismissed it as a childish instinct to shift the blame from themselves where it mostly lay. Now as he finally acknowledged the emotion, it began to fade.

He thought of his brother, still wandering along the shores of Middle-Earth. He had seen the Great Sea as something that separated them completely, before, but tonight the thought that he and Maglor might both be listening to the sound of the waves together at the same time, although continents apart, seemed to bring a kind of comfort...

The sound of the sea stayed with him as he rose to continue his work in the morning.

And then, suddenly, despite all the false starts, all the mistakes and doubts, he was almost done.

Cirdan clapped Maedhros on his right shoulder, which had come conveniently within reach as they both were straightening up from bending over the hull.

'See?' he said. 'You were not nearly as difficult to teach as I thought you might be!'

Cirdan wrote a letter to Earwen. Maedhros sent a message to Fingon: 'Coming home soon!'

Maedhros finished caulking the boat and added a protective layering of white paint. When the paint had had time to dry, Earwen and her minions arrived and threw open the gate. The boatyard that had gradually become a private space shared between Cirdan and Maedhros was suddenly public again. Together, they loaded the boat onto a cart and set off for Alqualonde.

All along the road, Teleri came out of their houses to see the boat that Maedhros, son of Feanor, had made with his hands and the son of Feanor himself walking behind the cart, slow and upright, in the workman's clothes he had worn in the boatyard. Some went silently back inside and shut the doors, but others followed on behind. By the time they came to the harbour with its great stone arch, where Olwe awaited them, in full regal panoply, there was a large crowd at their backs.

The sun glittered on the marbled quartz of the arch and on the waves.

'It is not so dark, this time,' thought Maedhros.

'Enter now this space at the invitation of the King of the Teleri,' said Earwen formally.

She was dressed all in Telerin fashion--no silver diadem today--and he saw that she meant to be seen acting as the princess of the Teleri in what was to follow, not the Queen of the Noldor. He inclined his head and walked on, towards the quays.

At Earwen's nod, Maedhros seized his boat and with the help of her assistants lifted it off the cart and positioned it on the beach, on the edge of the water. Earwen kilted up her skirts, spat in the palm of her hands and gave the boat a strong shove, so that it slid forward into the waves. Quickly, she waded in after it, climbed into the boat and seized the oars. Under the expectant eyes of Olwe and the assembled Teleri, she rowed a little way out to sea, then she turned around and came back.

As she set foot on the beach again, she raised her voice so that everyone would be able to hear and proclaimed: 'She's alive!'

'She's alive!' King Olwe responded, formally acknowledging her verdict with royal Telerin authority.

Maglor and Curufin might have had a field day, thought Maedhros, discussing what that sentence meant--to the Teleri themselves and to the rest of the world. To Maedhros, who had caught himself patting the hull encouragingly once or twice as his work on the boat neared completion, it mostly meant that his offering had been accepted, the work of his hands had passed inspection and made the grade. The relief was overwhelming--so great that he could even spare a regret that his brothers were not there to have that discussion, could not possibly be here...

Improbably, there were even one or two cheers from the crowd behind them.

'It's still just a boat,' he thought. 'I do not pretend to have made up for anything else.'

'What do you want to call her?' Olwe asked Maedhros, who had not been expecting that question at all and was rather stumped by it.

He had imagined the boat, having been handed over and accepted, was all theirs now, to do with as they willed.

'I sometimes thought of her as my ugly duckling?' he said tentatively.

No, that was a bad move--Olwe was frowning.

'The Cygnet, then?' he tried, guessing wildly. No, surely that was even worse!

But Olwe was nodding!

'The Cygnet it is!' he announced.

'It will be recorded thus', said Earwen and Maedhros saw that she, too, was relieved. She, too, had taken a risk, he thought; if this venture had miscarried, she would have laid herself open to reproach from many on all sides that she had not left well enough alone. 'I will inscribe the name on the bow of the boat myself.'

More cheers.

Maedhros turned around. Ah, there was Elrond! And he had a cloak over his arm, with a Feanorian star embroidered on it, small but distinct. It must have been him doing the cheering, then? And beside him--the one Teler he hadn't been thinking of at all during the past weeks--why hadn't he? Maglor's wife.

She met his gaze quizzically. Then she stepped forward, pulled out her flute and began to play.