In Neldoreth, the Muddy Season by PerpetuaLilium

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Chapter 1

I grew up in Vermont, where winters that melt to springs as suddenly as that described in the story of Beren and Lúthien happen quite a bit—although for presumably non-supernatural reasons. This creates so much meltwater and thaws so much ground frost at once that the slopes of the Green Mountains experience an effective fifth season delineated solely by extreme amounts of mud. ‘Mud season’ traditionally occurred in very late March and early-to-mid-April but now tends to start somewhat earlier for obvious (and unfortunate) global climatic reasons; experience of mud season is used as something of a cultural marker for people from Vermont and neighbouring parts of the Northern Appalachians.

And so, I decided to give Doriath a mud season, because that made the entire story of Beren and Lúthien’s meeting feel—to me—a lot more immediate and real. Also, Lúthien here can dance in snowshoes. Considering what else she’s capable of, I don’t really think this is a bridge too far.

This is my first work in the Tolkien fandom since I was ten and wrote Aragorn as a space adventurer. Many thanks to my wonderful beta reader.

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She was dancing unconcerned in the pre-dawn winter cold when she heard it, the voice calling out from behind the beech-boughs from which the thick snow was melting.

Winters had been harsher since the Enemy’s return to his old stronghold directly to the North. That which had once been her favourite season, when the land shimmered in the oblique glint of the neverending starlight, had become a hassle, a hindrance, simply too much to bear. It could not go on for as long as the latitude and elevation of Mother and Father’s kingdom would normally have countenanced. And so Mother had taught her this trick, a sidestep in the stream of time, simple as such things went, and she was enjoying it very much. She danced, her chilly legs shuffling beneath her fluttering skirts blue in the suffused dawn-light that had come with winter’s harshness back then. She danced, her hands extended hieratically beside her in the by-now-familiar gestures. She danced, letting her voice rise up towards the cold canopy of Neldoreth as off away from the glade her friend’s pipes wailed and whistled, resounded. The snow cascaded down from the trees in clumps running into torrents.

And so indeed she was dancing unconcerned as around her the seasons changed and the sounds of voice and flute and falling snow rumbled and echoed and soared.

Then into that music came another theme, ragged, parched as with years of thirst and sorrow, soughing through the thick branches and thinning snowdrifts. At first only the vowels were clear, the consonants lost amid the music—an ‘ee’, an ‘oo’, then a ‘yeh’. If it was supposed to be the tongue of Doriath, it seemed heavily accented, perhaps a northern dialect, and for a moment her friend ignored it, though her own pique was raised, and with it a prickling interest.

(She did not, as yet, suspect that within the span of the next hour her life was about to become a whole lot harder, a whole lot stranger, a whole lot more fate-bound and legendary.)

‘Daeron?’ she asked.

He stopped. ‘What is it?’

‘Do you hear that?’

He fell silent beyond simple lack of speech, listening; she took up her song again unaccompanied for a moment. A wind now was blowing from the south-west, stiffly shaking still more sparkling snow from the shuddering trees.

Tinúviel! now the voice came—or she would have thought the word was tinúviel, though it was still just a little bit indistinct. Tinúviel. –Yes, that was it. She pursed her thin lips, confused.

‘Is…is that somebody shouting ‘nightingale’?’ she asked.

‘It sounds like it,’ her friend whispered.

‘I am sorry,’ she said, ‘and much would I rather tarry here a while, but there are more woods to wake, and I have to see what this is all about.’

And so she stepped forward without him—he would stay, and see that this part of the woods was quickening properly once she had passed beyond it—down a narrow track where the deer’s hooves had packed down the snow. Had she been younger, and less practised on her toes, it would almost surely have been quite treacherous; the track was almost dun against the ground, very hard and slippery. Bit by bit her friend’s pipe faded in the distance behind her. She raised up her own voice again and the trees answered; she moved and swirled her legs and folded and unfolded and turned and unturned her arms as she walked over that sheen halfway to ice and the woods responded. That tinúviel responded also,following her through the trees. She would be afraid, perhaps, and certainly even more confused than she was, but for some vague notion growing within her that thither lay a track to something even faster-stuck and more changeless than the rites and ceremonials of Menegroth, certainly than the off-kilter seasons that Neldoreth had acquired these past few centuries.

‘Tinúviel! Tinúviel!’

She turned. She was at the edge of the next glade, still singing. The sky was still grey. Here the snow had already half-melted away and green shoots were poking out of the thick black loamy mud that spattered her snowshoes as she walked into it. She turned and saw him there, crying out, lurching forward, looking half-mad, as if come from sleeping in a bed of cattle dung. His dark hair was unkempt and came about to his shoulders; his face, drawn, hollowed-out, but still possessed of some enduring if worn-down care and strength. His clothes were rough and he bore a sword.

And a beard.

Oh.—Yes, that had been—yes, she dimly remembered, from last summer…

She started, by instinct abruptly pulling up her hand, certainly not one of the motions of the magic dance. ‘Tinúviel,’ he said, and his voice was tired but clear. Clear raving—she never had heard of such a thing, nor thought to any trenchancy about the possibility of a Man passing the Girdle to rave clearly or otherwise, yet here, suddenly, overlying and coinhering with curiosity, she felt at this one’s coming a thrill of sudden hope. She had not really been paying terribly much attention last summer, and had fled at his call then; but she was ready to treat things differently now. He, tall, almost exactly her height, put his arms about her and swooned over her, bearing her nearly to the ground; she, a little annoyed, but impelled to endure beyond anything like fear in figuring out what was happening right now and what she was to do about it, helped him on to the ground and then sang a song that bore him out beside the flow of Esgalduin.

While he slept she released more of the spring around and bid farewell for the day to her friend, who was going back to Menegroth to do some more of his endless work in Father’s service. He and the Naugrim had been greatly keen for one another’s council of late, on the subject of a certain decorative work for the hall of one of the villages out on the easternmost verge of Region, just within Mother’s Girdle.

‘What are you going to be doing out here?’

‘Continuing in the work I am doing,’ she said, which was true enough; there was still more singing to be done, even as she tried to figure out from where and for what reason this strange Man had passed into the realm.

He woke up after a fairly short spell, while she was gathering cold clear water from Esgalduin in a wooden cup. ‘Tinúviel’ was what he said when he awoke.

‘How are you?’ she asked. Coming closer to him, without the shock of that first embrace upon her, she realised fully how he stank. He smelled of movement, exertion, travel, the sort of smell she got running with her friend to the very borders of Neldoreth and back on summer afternoons, but worse, and seemed half-starved. To think that he had come here nevertheless, had walked through that fog where none of the Secondborn’s feet yet had—beyond the simple intrigue of coming face to face for the first time with one of his kindred, that was truly interesting. In truth, she was impressed.

‘Like I have not slept in weeks,’ he said. ‘I should not think this at all sufficient, but for your beauty here with me.’ That, at least, she had heard many times before; that was charted territory, a category of thought that she could reach out and touch as it loomed above her. Her feet should feel firmer now but she still felt as if the ice and mud of Neldoreth had fallen out from under her, stripped away methodically as the winter at the songs Mother had taught her, as the illusions of mind and heart at the songs Mother and She of the Garland sang together, and left only the rumored waters that lapped around the Foundations of Ambar. He took the cup of water with gratitude. The depth of that gratitude sent her reeling.

He groaned and said ‘My body is aching.’

Finding a patch of plausibly dry earth thick with new shoots on which to spread her skirt she sat down beside him, looking over the river whose ice before them yet continued to crack and drift away. ‘Willow bark for maladies,’ she said, ‘against pain and to strengthen the heart.’

‘I know that.’

‘My apologies,’ she said, with a grin. She wished the fishing weirs could be of some use this time of year. At this rate they would have to forage around for nuts and berries alone if he wished for any meat to return to his bones.

 ‘There is no need to apologise,’ he said. He finished the cup of water and stood up abruptly. There was something, she noticed, far-reaching, far-flaming, guttering in his eyes, despite their mortal dullness. He was a Man! Soon enough he would decay into dust. He was, should have been, absolutely elsewhere. ‘Tinúviel!’ he said. ‘At last, we meet!’

His voice was awfully soft for a person of such cast and countenance, and he was smiling as he extended down to her a thick hand chapped from the winter and muddy with the newfound spring. Remains of what had been a glove were dangling between his fingers. Did he want her to take this conversation seriously or not? Was he taking it seriously or not? She was tempted to think that ‘both’ was good for answer to the second question, ‘neither’ to the first, yet that manner of dissembling, that level of irony, seemed somehow inappropriate. Something round and churning, something immense, was shuddering in her head. She was trying to shake it free so she could take it, and see it, and love whatever it was, and take it around with her all the days of Arda; she was trying to take it out of herself so that she could understand its meaning to her.

—No. Best not to be too serious quite yet, not faced with the haggard joy of this haggard traveller, somehow confounder of the Girdle and traverser perhaps of even Nan Dungortheb (like the mortal Lady scant years ago; which might seem to him the days of old; slim was the chance that they would stand here like Mother and Father in Nan Elmoth while Neldoreth grew old around them, and she scarcely even stopped to wonder why that possibility had even come to mind). Best not to be too serious, as she let him pull her upright and they danced a merry jig there on that sward until his starved and exhausted strength failed him and he fell again.

He was only stunned for a moment this time. ‘Who are you, mortal Man?’ she asked as he stirred once more. She was sitting down again, this time getting her dress quite muddy. All the better—it was a day of earth, somehow, a day for running and dancing and singing and revelling in spring’s instantly vouchsafed blessings, such as they were.

‘Beren,’ he said, ‘son of Barahir.’

The name Barahir seemed of some vague familiarity. One of those who warred against the Enemy alongside the Doomed, perhaps, or else one of the Lady’s people who (again possibly like him) had passed through the Valley of the Spiders?

They went and gathered nuts and berries together. He insisted on coming with her; there was definitely some sort of pride at work within him, even in his current sorry condition. As the first sky of spring began to bleed pink at its grey edges she teased out of him his story; it was not that he had been withholding before so much as that the more nuts and berries they found for him to eat the more power of body and mind he had at hand with which to explain himself.

She danced for her own delight around a spinney while he bathed in Esgalduin and when he was finished they sat with him in washed and sopping clothes, which he said he minded not, and built a fire between them. Soon enough he said he was dry after all, and the wetness of the snow and the mud was leaving the folds of her dress also.

‘—and so you wanted to be a loremaster, but it was decided you were not—well, right of temperament, or…?’

They had been talking for an hour, and it was morning. The stars in which she had still spent by far the greater balance of her existence had hidden themselves away and the Sun had fully shown herself; to the Starkindler whom Mother and Father had met in the ancient times she offered up a quiet prayer as again her feelings lurched and an inchoate premonition began to take real form.

‘Or right of birth. Entirely apart from the fact that I am simply not nearly clever enough, I had to be the leader of the House. By that time it would have done no good to be our loremaster anyway, for we had fallen to wrack and ruin in the end.’

‘Are you really the outlaw who has fought alone against the Enemy in the highlands for the past three years?’

‘Until last summer. When I stumbled here you were the first fair living thing that I had looked upon save birds and foxes in all that time.—And,’ he said, ‘the most fair.’

Something about this conversation felt preternaturally innocent to her, in that his words were a little halting, a little calculated, but guileless, the calculation as it were failing, unless its intended effect was to beguile her by virtue of its, and it would seem his, sheer ingenuity and transparency.

‘I had not laughed nor cried for many a year before passing into the borders of this realm,’ he said, and a darkness came swiftly upon him.

‘We of the Doriathrim,’ she said slowly, feeling the great wheels still turning, turning, inside her head and inside her heart, now, turning like the wheel of the year that shed its iterations like the centuries’ beech leaves that formed the upper layer of the mud beneath them, ‘do not as a matter of course go out into the wars of Beleriand. We stay, and protect ourselves and whatever we may. We could protect you here, Beren son of Barahir—if it was permitted, and if you would like to rest from your troubles as you may.’

Yet as she realised something great and terrible, realised something that would endure as long as Arda, realised that already they were falling in love, she realised too that things could not remain this way forever, nor was Doriath the Blessed Realm. Through the mud and the last few clumps of snow the path along Esgalduin back to the bridge and gates of Menegroth lay still dim, a sinuous track into comfort of mystery and darkness.

‘How I would like to show you the salmon weirs in the summer, Beren son of Barahir!—and the tapestries in the halls of Menegroth.’ And she sang.

‘Your singing, whenever it may be, Lúthien Tinúviel!’ he said.

‘The nightingales, too, in Menegroth. I would dearly love for you to hear them, to see those halls.’ She stood gazing fixedly down the dark track, and his gaze inexorably followed hers. ‘I want to see more of your endurance, Beren, and your solicitousness, and the overflowing feelings that the warrior has had to keep sealed.’

‘Joy,’ he said, matter-of-factly, softly, as she saw the beloved things passing down that track in the muddy undergrowth, ‘curiosity, and tenacity. Fain I would see how one can be as tenacious as you in peace.’

Something was overturned within her, upended so completely that upon looking at him again in the morning light she could not help but gasp. He gasped too, as if in a call-and-response.

‘I would,’ he said, ‘dearly like to have a rest, if I can.’

They nodded to each other. She walked away as the day began to see what else needed to be done. And the flickering half-seen vision within her, like flowers, blossomed madly and died, leaving only a dim fruit of destiny that was beyond her sight or his, descending into the umbra of a love that carried all the ponderance of irrevocable fate.