Strange Fates by PerpetuaLilium

Lothlórien Fish Cookeries

The chapter title is by analogy to 'Greenland Whale Fisheries', one of the more excellent English-language sea-songs of the eighteenth and (in its familiar form) nineteenth centuries. Not too much should be read into this.

The form of the Laws and Customs being followed in Galadriel and Celeborn's Lothlórien in this fic follows the version in Morgoth's Ring in its insistence on extraordinarily strict monogamy and sacramentalisation or near-sacramentalisation of sex. The nature of this sacramentalisation is more animistic among the Sindar and Nandor of what is, after all, by some definitions a part of Rhovanion than among the Calaquendi and imminent Powers of Aman, or the Exiles, fresh of memory, in Beleriand. In Endor after the Breaking of the World stock and stone speak for the Valar, because they no longer have much to say for themselves.

Read Lothlórien Fish Cookeries

Síreth got to Eregriel’s talan at dusk, bearing from her day’s sport down by the Celebrant a large net, twisted and tied shut at its open end, weighed down with fresh-caught not-yet-gutted river fish. Eregriel was in meditation, her eyes half-shut, her long black hair held back in a loosely done queue. She stirred as Síreth’s feet came towards her, stood, smiled, her eyes glinting.

‘Is this more ingredients we have with us, then?’

‘Who would I be,’ Síreth replied, ‘to go down to the river and not catch some fish for you?’

Eregriel smirked, folding her arms, her hair blown up over her left shoulder in a sudden gust of north wind that rattled the branches. ‘You might be who you were last week. Do you remember? You were swimming and I was running on the bank. We got almost to the Tongue before coming back. To say nothing of fish, we were lucky to get back with—’

‘I remember, Eregriel,’ said Síreth with a grin. Eregriel gritted her teeth and sat down again on a long low bench of a bough, long legs tangling in the skirts of her thin green robes. She motioned for Síreth to come and sit next to her. ‘Did you not have a good day, Eregriel? You look a little faint and drear.’ The scales of the fish that she put down between them as she sat shimmered and sparkled rainbow and silver.

‘Last night I barely slept at all and this morning Ada was loud on his way out because of his hip. I actually feel fine, but by now I would sleep sooner rather than later.’ Eregriel’s father had hurt his hip slightly a few days ago and had been since then a little less than graceful, but people were saying that he should recover soon; if Eregriel said that he had been out all day—and Síreth indeed saw and heard neither hide nor hair of either of her parents, neither on this level of the talan nor by rumour from the one above—then he, or they, had probably been seeking counsel from the loremasters, and if so there were only a few things that that could be about.

‘Shall we prepare the fish before or after you sleep?’ Síreth asked.

Eregriel yawned and said ‘I want to hear about your day first. Did you spend it all by Celebrant?’

Síreth had become a little worried about this fatigue that Eregriel had shown of late. It was not simply a matter of not getting enough sleep from night to night, or if it was then Eregriel in her maturity, far more so than in their now-passed childhood, simply by nature and countenance needed more sleep than anybody else Síreth could remember meeting. It was in any case concerning but not in any manifest way more so than other species and elements of their lives. ‘I spent the afternoon by Celebrant,’ said Síreth. ‘In the morning I was at home reading books of Adûnaic grammar with Ada. I fear I will come soon to the end of my study of that language.’

‘Yet you will still have the Easterling tongue that you are reading to keep you company,’ said Eregriel, who, on her feet again, hands clasped behind her back with her silver ring shining in the muted light of the mellyrn in the twilight, was looking intently out into the woods where the glow of the day was failing.

‘Yes; and you, and the lore I have been trying to read with regard to our concerns,’ said Síreth. ‘I am afraid I did not do any of that to-day.’

‘I did,’ said Eregriel, turning to her with a wan smile. She was at least smiling, and Síreth felt a little less concerned about her, though more about whatever it was that had brought on such wanness. ‘Would it be all right with you if we talked about this a little later? I would rather we share some news of the day perhaps less connected to ourselves before we have eaten.’

Síreth nodded. Eregriel disappeared further up into the boughs in a flurry of skirts and a few minutes later returned bearing a portable brazier on which lay some flint, a few bags of spices, and a small jar of glimmering golden oil. Síreth unstrapped a knife from the side of her leggings and they went out to clear off the fire pit in a small glade where Eregriel was used to do her cooking. ‘Thank you so much for the fish,’ Eregriel said with a broader smile as they swept aside crinkled sheets of fallen leaves, hands rustling against the soft earth. ‘I need to cook enough for three and a half families for to-morrow, mine and the two in the telain on the other side of the glade and you. I had been meaning to make up a mess of pottage with some beans and onions that we have but I think that this will be a lot better.’

‘You’re welcome. How long have you had the beans and onions for?’

‘The onions are fresh, more or less; the beans we have had for some months now. As such…’ Eregriel let the statement imply its conclusion—the beans had seen better days—and smiled again. She put the brazier in the cleared-out fire pit and Síreth laid out the fish on a bed of leaves for dressing. ‘What news from Caras Galadhon? Were you anywhere near there?’

‘No, but we ran into Haldir and some of the others.’

‘How is Haldir?’

‘He is doing well.—I should go home when we’ve finished this, by the way. I want to do more Adûnaic with Ada, and Nana said earlier that there was something that she wishes to talk to me about.’

‘All right,’ said Eregriel, her face taut as she struck her flints into some dead leaves that she had stuffed into the brazier. ‘Would you fain spend to-morrow together, then?’

‘I think so,’ said Síreth, and smiled. She sighed as her knife cut through the first fish’s belly. ‘There was a rider from Rhûn requesting entrance to the Wood to-day, I heard,’ she said.

‘From Rhûn? Why?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘That could be the most exciting thing that has happened here since King Amroth drowned,’ said Eregriel darkly. ‘Did anybody say why this rider was there?’

‘Eregriel, that comparison was in poor taste.’ Síreth scooped out with precision the blood and guts of the rainbow trout, setting them down on a pile of leaves. ‘Once you get a fire going can you scoop out a hole to bury this in?’

‘Of course. I apologise for that comparison.’ Eregriel bowed her head, looking more contrite than Síreth wanted her to feel. ‘If you would go and get some sticks so we can build this fire up, I can take over stripping the fish for a little while.’

‘All right,’ said Síreth. ‘We can switch for a time, then.’ Eregriel shuddered with sudden indwelling laughter and moved to start digging as Síreth set her knife on the ground and, grey skirts trailing and fluttering behind her, went to gather long twigs and small branches to further feed the dead leaves in the bottom of the brazier now smoldering behind her. She took a cloth from a bag on her belt and fastidiously wiped the blood from her hands, taking special care around her silver ring, before bending down for the first handful. ‘Haldir did not say what the rider was doing or whether or not he had yet been granted entrance or turned away. What business an Easterling would have in the Golden Wood I have no idea. They have not troubled Gondor for some centuries as I understand it.’

‘That’s what I’m given to understand, too.—Ai, these guts are—er—’

‘Do you need help?’ Síreth took up and split apart a forked branch about the length of her forearm. With only a few green parts left in it, it would burn reasonably well, she thought, along with the thin dead twigs that she was gathering and sticking in her belt. Far better at least to get dirt on her tunic than blood and guts.

‘No, thank you. I have a cloth.’

‘All right.’

‘Something came to mind just now,’ said Eregriel after a few more minutes of wood-gathering and trout-stripping. ‘If this Easterling is for whatever reason suffered to enter Lórien, might you not be able to speak with him? How long is it you have been studying one of the dialects of Rhûn; two or two and a half years?’

Now that Eregriel was speaking in terms of years and things that they had spent years doing there was a somewhat different conversation that Síreth would like to have—or to come back to for they had broached it earlier—but it might have to wait until Eregriel was less weary and Síreth less flush from a day of fishing and swimming. There were still patches of wetness weighing down her hair and memory of the force of Celebrant was starting to course again in the muscles of her limbs.

‘I can read the language spoken to the south of Dorwinion,’ said Síreth, ‘at least with glossing; but so far as I have tried to speak it my accent is probably poor. Their writing system doesn’t transcribe into the Tengwar perfectly, and their phonotactics…’ She sighed and came back over with the wood. Eregriel was using her knife deftly, quickly divesting the trout of soft innards and sparkling scales. ‘In any case it looks as if some of these are about ready to start cooking.’

Eregriel looked at the fish stripped so far, four of them, laid out in a neat row on the bed of this year’s fresh golden leaves, their flesh pink as the eastern sky between the mallorn branches. ‘We can start with these,’ she said. ‘If we were eating these for ourselves we might have roasted them whole on spits, as we used to when we were young, but since this is for others as well we have a duty to be a little more…yes.’ She stopped and frowned. ‘We should stop with four, for now, and prepare the rest in the morning. It should be cold enough to-night for them to keep but I would not want to risk it after we’ve already dressed them.’

‘All right. Shall we put them on the brazier?’

‘Please,’ said Eregriel, turning to where she had nestled her bags of spices and bottle of oil between the roots of a young tree.

They cooked the fish one after another for about a quarter-hour each. In addition to the oil Eregriel had been using salt and pepper and turmeric, and asked Síreth to use them while she went back to her talan to see if her parents had yet returned. When Eregriel came back through the trees she was singing, and Síreth looked up to see that the light had gone from most of the sky, its lingering effects and lances still passing down beyond the spires of Hithaeglir, and a few stars now glinted through the softened gold of the dim eaves. ‘Na-chaered palan-díriël, o galadhremmin ennorath, Fanuilos, le linnathon’—the voices joined together now, two, five, ten of them or so, and Eregriel came back to the clearing, eyes half-closed, arms outstretched to the sky, with her parents and two telain’s worth of the other denizens of their little glade.

Síreth stood up and joined in the singing, glancing back and forth between the brazier where the third trout was now grilling and the sky where the first flames of the Elder Queen were stirring. Afterwards she greeted them and they chatted for a little while about the news of the day—more of the Easterling who had come, it would seem, to the far banks of Anduin and hollered and waved a green banner until the marchwardens along the river had taken notice. Nobody was quite sure whether or not they had decided to let him in. The green banner indicated peaceful intent in any case. Eregriel was quiet as they finished cooking and started eating, using small gilt utensils and wooden bowls and plates from a bag that her mother had borne over.

People who were older than Eregriel and Síreth and had actually been in Lórien for the unfortunate events of four centuries ago sometimes liked to point out that ‘A Elbereth Gilthoniel’ had not been commonly sung before the establishment of the Lady of the Garland and the Lord like a Silver Tree. These were people like Alachul and his wife Gennedril, who had dwelt in the Golden Wood since the Elder Days and still lamented Amroth terribly, so much so that they would go about whispering conspiratorially about it. Along with ‘A Elbereth Gilthoniel’ and the other hymns of the Lands under the Wave, it would seem, had come the line of thought that she and Eregriel were trying so hard to bring to some sort of finish.

‘How is the fish?’ Eregriel asked her father. Síreth for her part thought it was good, but could perhaps have benefited from a little more seasoning had they had more time to prepare it.

‘It’s very good,’ Súlvindon replied. There was a general murmur and nod, at which Eregriel looked a little embarrassed. ‘Did you catch these trout, Síreth?’

Síreth nodded. ‘I tarried by the Celebrant with my net after swimming this afternoon. Just another day’s work, so that you can save your beans and onions for the winter months, if they stay good until then.’

‘They probably will,’ said Eregriel, and then they were eating in relative silence again. Súlvindon was sitting on the ground between his wife and his daughter with his legs apart looking more or less unconcerned by any lingering sense of pain there may be in his hip. Mithgael leaned on Súlvindon. Bruilam and Lenhalab looked well, as did their parents, and Laeron and his family were bright and gay in the dwindling evening. When everybody seemed quite finished, the flesh partitioned off and the skeletons beneath laid beside the brazier with its quiet insistent embers, Síreth, looking across at Eregriel in the expectation of being joined, murmured a word of consolation and thanksgiving to the small bones. Eregriel joined in at once, knowing right well Síreth’s thoughts. It had been ninety or a hundred years ago, in one of their adolescent venturings up along Nimrodel towards the slopes of Hithaeglir, when the realisation clear and fair as the full fruit of Tilion had fallen down upon them like the withering wind of summer that stripped the foothills bare: Eregriel first had grasped her arm and brought her down to kneel with her in a copse. They had seen carrion there, a fawn killed, perhaps, by a warg or a bear, and its flesh had sung out to the earth for consolation. Síreth had tried to speak to it, little girl that she’d been, and Eregriel had said starting from later on that that was when she had known she was quite in love with her. For Síreth that had come later in the same day, as Eregriel had embraced her and sung to her by an old rope bridge. They had cried on their way home; they remembered differently who had started crying first.

Probably it had been the deer.

Síreth allowed herself at least this much solemnity.

‘To-morrow morning,’ said Eregriel, standing up and moving to collect the spices and oil and the dishes and forks and knives of those who had finished, ‘I will come back out here and dress and cook the rest of Síreth’s fish. Should we wish it to be it ought to be enough for the whole day, with perhaps some leafy greens or water chestnuts. I think that, having more time, if I can come out here while it’s yet early enough I can fry them. I do want to prepare something else as well.’

And a few minutes after that Síreth found herself standing up in the glade alone, or almost alone—for Eregriel was still tidying up, and from the glances that she gave from sky and pathway to ground debating within herself what to do with the still-hot brazier overnight, and Súlvindon was still sitting gazing at it with fixity.

‘Síreth,’ said Súlvindon.

‘Yes?’

‘I have a new position,’ said Súlvindon, ‘regarding your betrothal.’

Síreth sat again to listen, and Eregriel stopped and turned around at the edge of the trees. In the faint light of the nighttime’s stars and lanterns she was smiling. Síreth leaned forward expectantly, her silvery hair flickering across her face and flaming in the redness still coming up from the bottom of the brazier. ‘Perhaps I should say,’ said Súlvindon, ‘it is not so much a new position as confirmation, to you, that—’ he sighed and threw up his hands ‘—I, at least, have not been able to think of any impediment. There is of course the issue of children, and the question of fëar, what that might mean; yet I see nothing to indicate…’ –And he broke off, the way Eregriel often did.

Watching the red, dimming, phantasmagorical ember-fires, which were themselves somehow a consolation, Síreth said ‘Yesterday I found something that looked promising, in annals from the early days of Amroth, just scant years after the Last Alliance. I was very excited and very happy indeed and would have run to tell Eregriel but the loremasters told me that although one of the relevant names in the annals is considered feminine now, it is thought to have been gender-neutral at the time; so that was not all that I hoped it would be.’

Eregriel nodded, a studied motion. ‘When you said you had a new position, Ada,’ she said, ‘I hoped you meant since this morning.’ She tossed her hair back in the crepuscular dark, and the thought came more strongly than usual to Síreth’s mind that she would dearly like to run to her, to embrace and kiss her now. ‘We went into this knowing how difficult and complicated it would be, I aver.’

‘In six years we have done more than I would have expected,’ Súlvindon said a little stiffly. He got up and went to his daughter. ‘Would you like me to carry those home for you?’ he asked, pointing to the aftermath of the dinner lumped in her arms.

‘Thank you, Ada,’ said Eregriel with a thin grin.

Súlvindon went off down the path back to their talan. It was dim, with lantern-light in a diffused point at the other end; the path from here to Síreth and her family’s talan was lined with enchanted lamps, being longer, and she planned to make for it straight through the intervening woods. Looking to and fro she saw that Eregriel was still standing there at the clearing’s edge, her pale face limned in faintest orange. She came and kissed Síreth; she had apparently decided to be bold! Then she said ‘Before we sleep, let’s read and think of each other. If perchance you should get the chance to practise Easterling someday, I imagine you would be loath to have not done your utmost.’

Síreth nodded and grasped Eregriel’s hand in hers. ‘I will finish my Adûnaic book soon,’ she said. ‘We will spend to-morrow together, then?’

‘Together,’ said Eregriel. They parted, and waved good-bye to each other as they went out from the clearing along the paths to their telain. Their rings flashed in the lamplight.

A Question of Fëar

(Notes will be at the end for this chapter.)

Read A Question of Fëar

The leaves stayed yellow in profusion but had thinned and wilted in the Golden Wood’s attenuated winter. Síreth arose already tired. It had been about a month since she and Eregriel had been at last attacking the heart of the issue that had consumed their emotions and energies of late and in that time they had talked to three different loremasters, one of whom, the second in sequence, neither had ever met before.

*

‘This is Caledhrif,’ Eregriel had said on a day of a rippling wind out of the north, when they had stood at a wooden footbridge across Celebrant with the sward of the Tongue just barely visible around a bend when Síreth glanced off to the right. ‘Caledhrif thought this was an interesting problem.’

‘Where does your expertise lie, Caledhrif?’ asked Síreth, as Eregriel bobbed her head respectfully. Caledhrif stood at the northern end of the bridge in a long grey-white robe, with close brown hair and light green eyes, with a laconic smile and holding underarm a parasol stuck defiantly back into the wind.

‘I have studied the character of fëar,’ said Caledhrif in a sepulchral tone of voice. ‘This case presents an interesting question.’

They started walking as Caledhrif started talking—going north, up into the deeper woods of the Naith, older woods where the mellyrn had taken hold these past four thousand years. In Síreth’s younger days of broader curiosity, when the woods themselves had spoken to her, as they did now but more readily back then, she had had to go back to her grandparents who lived up by Nimrodel to pick their memories when she had been curious about the forest before those trees.

‘Marriage represents primarily the union of hröar. But fëar and hröar are held to be congruent, to the extent that the lore borne from Aman and Beleriand of old tells us that a fëa once unhoused will never be rehoused in a hröa of the opposite sex.’ Stopping suddenly, Caledhrif whirled, the wind rippling the parasol, and gave them an appraising look. So far, thought Síreth, here was a loremaster who was very good at telling them things that they already knew, that they had learned these six and a half years gone or still before, when they had been children being taught together in singsong by Nana and Ada, Mithgael and Súlvindon.

‘In the Grey Annals,’ said Eregriel, ‘we find a much stranger union of fëar.’

‘Of which of the tales of old do you speak? Many come to my mind.’

That did not seem like a fair question to Síreth, to whose mind it seemed clear, or approaching clarity, that it was the union of Thingol and Melian to which Eregriel was referring. In that case there had been an obvious difference from the normal course of a marriage far greater than that which was at issue here and now. Yet she had also heard somewhere that the version of the Grey Annals that existed in Caras Galadhon was of considerably greater antiquity than those in other parts of Lórien, and might contain some material that the copy held in the library to the south of Celebrant would not.

‘I speak of that union which would most immediately come to the mind of one reading the Grey Annals for the first time,’ Eregriel said, shaking a little.

Caledhrif sniffed—Síreth did not like that sniff—and said ‘The abnormality in that case was one which did not attend to the union of bodies, as Melian’s raiment was that of a lady of the Firstborn. The unions that created the peredhil presented greater problems in that respect. Melian was in any case female. The marriage could self-evidently be hallowed by the begetting of a child, as could that child’s marriage.’

Eregriel sat down on a mossy stump and slipped off one of her shoes to massage a sore spot on her right foot. The curve of that foot was smooth where it came out from the hem of her gown and its shape pale against the grey-brown earth beneath it. ‘So the divergence into the subject of fëar got us nowhere,’ said Eregriel. ‘We are, effectively, back to the fëa whose tale is told by the hröa, and Síreth’s and my hröar which are of the same kind; and forgive me, Caledhrif, but I wonder if you intend to render any sort of opinion on this subject beyond the obvious concerns that you have raised without addressing so far?’

Síreth bit her lip and moved to sit down next to Eregriel, who still seemed tense; it did not look as if the massaging was helping very much. The ground rose up towards the cut surface of the stump, levelled off long years ago after this tree had fallen to the predations of a thunderbolt, soft in burned and rotten roots. Gathering her grey skirts beneath her Síreth drew her knees up to her chest and looked quizzically up at Caledhrif, whose gaze had become diffident and somehow seemingly awry.

‘I think that your questions merit the answers I have given so far,’ said Caledhrif in what was probably meant to be an apologetic voice.

‘Other of the Eldar have had—this is not entirely without precedent!’ Eregriel shouted, springing to her feet. ‘Síreth?’ she asked, turning around, looking lost.

Síreth forced her voice down into evenness, her gaze at the triangular midpoint between Eregriel’s face and Caledhrif’s and the top of an old craggy tree that stood like a mangled finger against the blue-white sky. ‘Caledhrif,’ she said, ‘while we have not been able to find any instances of marriage between people of the same gender in Lórien for at least these past two thousand years, there were such instances in Lindon under Gil-galad and in the realm of Thranduil.’

‘King Thranduil abides according to a different custom than we do, a different manner,’ said Caledhrif, ‘and as such is free to see marriage as he pleases, but I would question whatever became of the couples involved in such stories.’

‘That the annals do not say,’ said Síreth. Could not but say it.

‘Fain would we learn why not,’ said Eregriel softly, ‘but I hasten to add that neither do the annals tell of the end of, say, a Bestedis and Bestedir. For all that we know the men who married under Gil-galad may live yet at Mithlond or in Eldamar.’

‘If you would find out,’ said Caledhrif in what was probably meant to be an encouraging voice, ‘I would suggest that you go search for them.’

Within minutes Caledhrif and Eregriel were shouting at each other. Síreth sat on the roots of the stump with her legs to her chest and her eyes boring forward, feeling in a flash a little bit of the weariness that was so often obvious in Eregriel’s mien. In another few minutes she was on her feet in spite of herself, hands raised up in a gesture of peace. Eregriel was crying. Caledhrif stood defensively.

Síreth put her arms around Eregriel and held her as her knees gave out and she came to the ground crying, and they lay together on the stiffening earth of autumn, and Síreth cared not that Caledhrif still stood here, Caledhrif who was after all only trying to help after the fashion of somebody whose interpretation of spirit and law did not admit of the type of help that they sought. After a time Eregriel stood up again and gave a stiff bow. Caledhrif looked confused.

‘Thank you,’ said Eregriel.

They went back towards the Celebrant, Eregriel trudging forward with her eyes cast low. ‘I’ll never be able to ask Caledhrif’s advice on anything again,’ she said. ‘This is unbelievable.’

‘It isn’t your fault,’ Síreth said, and it was really not. Whatever pall it was that had come down especially strongly over Eregriel of late had been in some form present for most of their lives. There was something saddening her or making her afraid. The silver on Eregriel’s finger caught the oblique half-hazy sunlight as she twisted her hands in and out and to and fro against the small of her back. She had her dark hair forward over her shoulders, so that when Síreth trotted in front of her she could see it hanging as if to frame and exalt her drawn face and the wise lump in her throat.

*

‘Daijóbu de aru ca?’ Síreth asked, much later in the day as they sat in Síreth’s talan. Síreth’s parents were making small conversation some platforms and ladders away.

‘What language was that?’

‘The Easterling dialect.’

‘Are you asking me how I am feeling?’

‘More or less. I was asking if you were all right.’

Eregriel twisted her lips and gazed up at the wide deep sky. ‘I think it would be wise to take a break of some time before we assay at addressing this part of the problem again,’ said Eregriel.

‘Yes,’ said Síreth. ‘We can work on the issue of law.’

‘The issue of law is resolved. It is obviously legal even if not actually practised. The Lady and Lord never claimed otherwise. If the first Noldorin King of the Elder Days could convince the Valar to sever his marriage—’ Eregriel spat this, as if the notion called out to all the rocks and trees of Ambar to rise up and rectify such a sin and wrong ‘—then, obviously, there is some flexibility, and we see now that such marriages have been entered into in the past.’

Síreth thought it was best not to bring up the subject of the Lady’s grandparentage right now. Eregriel might see it as a reinforcement of her point—the Lady herself was descended from an unusual, what Eregriel saw as an immoral union—but being reminded of it might also simply upset her.

‘We could simply try to say the oath of marriage and see what happens.’

‘Ada would not approve of that,’ said Eregriel. ‘Neither would either of your parents.’

‘That is very true.’

When evening fell Eregriel sang ‘A Elbereth Gilthoniel’ in a voice far more doleful than usual and, her shoulders pinched together and her head hanging like a pensive umbel of dark blossoms, took up some of Síreth’s parents’ flour and yeast and walked through the lamp-lit woods to the ovens nearest Síreth’s talan and her own. They glared in the dark from half a mile off, and Eregriel seemed to take some perverse sustenance of the mind from her own cringing at the sound of the evening voices.

Haldir was there; as Eregriel set to work, finally loosening a little, as she kneaded the bread allowing herself some minor interjections of gaiety between her grumbles and grimaces in the flickering furnace-light, they greeted each other. Síreth hung back a little, at the edge of the oven clearing, feeling a twisting coiling feeling in her lower abdomen. For a few moments she was not sure what it was, and then when she went and found a privy and came back she found it had lessened but not fully gone away. Whatever it was it was surely stupid. What should she say again? Sensen damé des.

‘What are you doing here, Haldir?’ Eregriel asked flatly.

‘Baking bannock bread,’ said Haldir.

‘Why are you baking?’

‘I have been taken off of the patrol of the river march and need to do something to occupy my time,’ said Haldir. ‘I am not as good at cooking, or baking, or things along those lines as you are, Eregriel, but I can do them in a pinch.’

‘Why were you taken off the patrol?’

Síreth was aware that Eregriel was inquiring after Haldir to distract herself from her own problems but right now there was really not much to be done. If Eregriel dwelt long enough in this state they would double or treble the length of their betrothal while only treading a circle. Anything that broke that circle was good. Once Síreth had asked her who her friends outside Síreth herself were.

‘Haldir,’ she had said, ‘could be characterised as a friend.’

And so Haldir explained, in a mildly frustrated tone of voice—but only mildly—that it was because the strength of the patrol up and down the river had been making the visitor from Rhûn nervous. Eregriel was either genuinely interested in this, either on Síreth’s behalf or her own, or was better at feigning it than Síreth would have expected. She asked a few pat questions and drew Haldir to elaborate. It seemed that said visitor was apparently expecting company and suffered a fear of something going wrong in any subsequent attempt to make contact that no amount of reassurance from the Lady and the Lord had been able to assuage.

Síreth was feeling slightly better about events of late. She sat quietly with them and listened as their halting and morose conversation went on and the bread, loaves and bannock alike, rose in the fires within. She went through some Easterling drills in her head, a little bit. The name for this particular language, in itself, was Mattógo.

From this conversation Síreth learned one thing that worried her and one thing that gave her somewhat greater heart. The worrying thing was that the name of the envoy now awkwardly and mistrustfully hosted in Caras Galadhon was Sogdash. ‘Sogdash’ was unpronounceable in Mattógo; hence Síreth doubted that that was his mother tongue. The comforting thing was that it seemed Sogdash was multilingual, speaking several of the languages of Rhûn along with passable Westron and rudimentary Sindarin. He might be worth talking to after all. Haldir did not know yet why he was here.

Go, go, go!—the sky seemed to be saying to her, but Síreth had no idea where the sky wanted her to carry herself or let herself be carried.

‘How goes your life?’ Haldir asked Eregriel now.

‘Tiring,’ said Eregriel.

‘And you, Glaeronien?’ Haldir looked up at Síreth, whose mind was drifting absolutely elsewhere and came back suddenly like a rockslide.

‘Well,’ said Síreth before thinking. ‘Tiring, though.’ She reached out for Eregriel’s hand in the darkness, hoping that Eregriel would accept such a gesture right now. She did, and they held hands in front of the oven’s orange glare, warm flesh to warm flesh and warm silver to warm silver.

Then at Haldir’s further questioning glance they explained how they had been going around looking for help in resolving that final impediment to their union—an impediment as Eregriel saw it, that of the perceived lack of clarity in the moral or spiritual realm. ‘The Powers preserve and forgive me,’ Eregriel said once or twice, and Síreth wanted to shout Yes, yes, yes!—the sky and the trees and the mountains have already forgiven you, and they speak for the Valar because after the Breaking of the World the Valar have little to say on their own behalf!—but Eregriel had always been like that, so high up that she could feel the sting of Aran Einior’s breath in her nostrils and the flames of Elbereth’s kindled flakes from the Maker’s originary anvil falling on her head like birds of living fire, and the ways of wood and world and water had always been ancillary to the form that the upraising of her soul’s song took. Sometimes Síreth thought that would better serve her herself to have that attitude, and better serve Eregriel to grow accustomed to the speech and habit of the earth. But Eregriel half-believed herself not made for Ennor. If Eregriel ever got near Belegaer it might very well be over then and there. The sea-longing might then straightway become unbearable. ‘The Powers preserve and forgive me,’ Eregriel said once or twice again, and Síreth knew, even Haldir clearly knew, how desperate she was for a plausible way out, a plausible method of assurance that they were, after all, all right by the Valar and the One. There was no reason to believe that their love was not. No reason whatsoever. It was the ceremony of marriage and that alone that was the sticking point.

*

The second loremaster was one whom Haldir had recommended and introduced, his great-aunt, one Saerhalab, an ebullient woman who dressed all in a gentle blue and lived near Cerin Amroth with her husband and son. Her talan was filled with scrolls and medicinal herbs and she was supposed to excel in anaesthetics. Obviously Síreth and Eregriel did not require anaesthetics, nor did they want to require them, but according to Haldir Saerhalab was a steady and practical and creative mind on issues of ritual and ceremonial law as well. Moreover Eregriel was feeling better by this time. She liked the weather this time of year. There was a stronger bite in the air and snow would be general outside the borders of Lothlórien at least as far south as the Gladden Fields. The mellyrn were a little gloomy and the elanor and niphredil had faded a bit for the time being but still the grass was green in the clearings and on the swards by the riverbanks.

‘Ask Ilúvatar for His blessing and it will be clear whether or not it has come upon you,’ Saerhalab said patly. Like most people in the Golden Wood she had heard of the strange girls who wished to wed each other, and according to Haldir she was generally approving of the notion and much more pragmatic in her approach to the lore than most.

‘I am not sure that would…’ Eregriel began, haltingly.

Síreth here decided to say what they had rehearsed, the argument that Eregriel would rather have not brought out. There was no reason why it would actually be needed against somebody like Saerhalab. There was no ‘against’ with Saerhalab; she had been unfailingly courteous and solicitous to them and even allowed Eregriel use of her cereal grains to make a mess of potage that they were eating. It was only that this would be a very good way of cutting off a line of argument that Síreth herself had made so far and Eregriel and Súlvindon had rejected.

‘We could,’ said Síreth, ‘hie away to some cottage far away from the sight of the Eldar and wed there and live out our lives in peace and solitude like Beren and Lúthien of old.’

‘But,’ said Eregriel, a little confused that they were following this script now, ‘for one thing, our families would, obviously, not approve of such a course of action.’

‘Right,’ said Saerhalab with a firm nod. ‘That is important to consider.’

Eregriel nodded back with a faint smile. ‘And it would not actually answer the question,’ she said. ‘Our fëar would burn our hröar away after a time, and we would be together and perhaps happy, but probably removed once and for all from the idea of at last knowing: Do we truly have Ilúvatar’s blessing? Our love is what it is, but it is uncommon enough that I have to wonder.’ She stood up and started pacing around with her hands clasped behind her. ‘Síreth has done much to assuage my concerns that we are doing what is wrong in Ilúvatar’s eyes. Really, I never had such concerns, although one is tempted to think that it does not comport with the design of nature. Rather, I wondered that, even if not wrong, it might not be precisely right.’

Saerhalab was nodding and her eyes were not actually glazing over. Síreth had to admit she was impressed.

‘There are so many things that Síreth and I could be doing that would be in direct contradistinction to the Music of the Ainur. Yet even the text of the ‘Laws and Customs’ received from lost Beleriand speaks of ‘strange fates’ alongside ‘ill chances’. Ours is a ‘strange fate’. There is room for us, even if as castaways, as set apart. But it says that for those Eldar marriage was not ‘the natural course of life’. One of the only groups for whom that was so. Can we simply ask Ilúvatar, and have Him give to us? I wonder. I would pray to Elbereth for guidance.’

At this point Eregriel did in fact incline her head and, unspeakably lovely with her dark hair falling beside and around her pale face so that her nose peaked out white against the silvery trunk next to which she stood, murmured an invocation.

For Síreth to never have that particular question answered: No matter; for Arda itself could answer her. For Eregriel to never know, in the way that she knew the songs of praise and invocation…—Let her try this in Mattógo, to see how clearly this knowledge was sticking in her head, and for that matter how clearly the practical use of the language was. Eregriel ni totté, settai cangaerarenu coto deshó.

‘It really is not a moral concern, but one of mechanics, and the nature of the invocation and the received blessing,’ Eregriel said.

‘If you try it,’ said Saerhalab, ‘you should be able to tell—for all marriages are so hallowed, are they not? All joinings of bodies. If you join your bodies…’ She trailed off. Clearly elaborating on that particular topic was not a prospect that Saerhalab relished. Síreth felt a twist in the stomach.

She would speak. This was what they were supposed to communicate. She cleared her throat.

‘Síreth?’ said Eregriel.

‘I aver that the blessing conferred upon any given marriage is a truth lived by and believed in rather than a fact demonstrable outside its own place,’ said Síreth in a low voice, shamefully aware of the lacunae of disapproval glittering in Eregriel’s dark eyes. Eregriel had never been particularly fond of this argument, in part because it, like that concerning the Lady, reminded her of what she—and in this case all and sundry—thought one of the most sordid tales of the Elder Days indeed.

‘Otherwise,’ finished Eregriel, and there was a fiercer urgency to her words than Síreth would have expected, ‘how could Ilúvatar Who created us and Who loves us possibly have stooped to hallow the union of Aredhel and Eöl?’

Saerhalab laughed. There was a lot that Síreth thought that she could discern from that laughter and not all that much that she wanted to. It was at least good-natured, and seemed to accept the point in the sense in which it was intended. The problem was that it betrayed a lack of inclination to address the implied question at this time.

*

The third loremaster was Sarnon. Sarnon was Síreth’s father.

‘Exchange the vows and see what happens,’ he said.

‘You, and my parents, rejected that solution out of hand years ago,’ said Eregriel.

Síreth’s mind was half on this and half on the practise of Mattógo that she had just finished. In addition to the passive she was also coming to some understanding of the causative. Let the ra go a-sa-ing if it so wished.

‘You believe in the will of Ilúvatar at work among His Children, right?’ said Ada. He seemed more pleased with himself than Síreth thought that whatever point he was driving at probably merited. Nana stood to one side writing on a little page with a charcoal stick, smiling to herself. She had probably imposed at least some of this position upon Ada. Síreth was grateful to her, even though Eregriel looked vaguely bereft about the direction the conversation was going.

‘Yes,’ said Eregriel.

‘Glaeronien?’ said Ada.

‘Yes, Ada,’ said Síreth. Go, go, go!—the trees were saying. The grass was saying it too. To Eregriel as well as to herself.

‘We study languages and lays to learn the ways of the Children of Ilúvatar who do not live like we do,’ said Ada. ‘The memory and thought of the Blessed Realm are dimming even in Imladris.’

‘East of Hithaeglir,’ said Nana, ‘they are all but passed away, if they existed even aforetime outside of the Lady, and even Doriath is fading.’

Síreth remembered Eregriel saying in frustration when they had found out about the marriage under Gil-galad of Helegon and Colvir: ‘If these had been Noldor of Aman the Blessed, born not in the clefts of Thargelion or Gondolin or the ports of Sirion or Forlond, then we would have an answer from this.’

Now Eregriel said ‘Fain would I hold to our own laws and understanding of the will of the One and the Powers.’

Yet, Go, go, go!—the trees now were shouting. Return, return, absolutely return, root, root yourselves as we are rooted, but go! Go, go that you may return! Go!

‘Atashi tatshi no bunca wa, conomama de ari,’ said Síreth. A mumble—it was a promise to herself, which she would repeat to Eregriel in Sindarin once her head stopped spinning. ‘Sósóriocu coso, eiga ni nareru.’

Slipping the bonds of their current situation—getting what some of the younger loremasters more given to apt phrases and smaller, more discrete chunks of thought might call a ‘fresh viewpoint’ or something of the like. It was tempting in its own right, and she could tell now that the trees would that she see to it.

‘Our culture will remain this way,’ she murmured into Eregriel’s ear, leaning against her. ‘Our imaginations might, however, grow and flourish, if…’

‘If?’

‘I would like to go to Caras Galadhon.’

‘To talk the Lady and the Lord again? I think that is important at this remove, yes.’

‘That, and I would like to meet this visitor from the East, and ask him about how things are done in the realms of Men, not to supplant our own traditions but to perhaps grow or change the way we look at them.’

Eregriel leaned back into her, nodding in acquiescence against her shoulder. Their hair tangled and twined in the crook of Síreth’s neck.

*

And so with those three days still salient in her memory she arose this day in winter and pulled on her leggings and put another pair and another chemise and a dress and some riding boots in a bag which she hoisted up over her shoulder. The wind from the West blew her hair stiffly silver out in front of her face as she walked to the clearing where was Eregriel’s talan. And Eregriel came down and joined her, and together they set out to Caras Galadhon to stay there awhile and find out what they could about things from the Lady and the Lord and Sogdash the visitor from the East. As Eregriel had said, if nothing else, it might clear their minds from the knots that six and a half years’ legal argument had got them into.

---

Chapter End Notes

Notes are at the end this time because I wanted to be unobtrusive about the translation of 'Mattógo' (actually something somewhere between contemporary and Heian court Japanese, with spelling differences to indicate that it's being spoken with a Sindarin accent and/or heard through ears accustomed to Sindarin) words and phrases.

Daijóbu de aru ca?=Daijōbu de aru ka?, ‘are you/are things all right?’ (Slightly more formal than this would usually be said. People tend to learn formal Japanese first.)
Sensen damé des=zenzen dame desu, ‘it’s all useless’ or ‘none of it will help’.
Eregriel ni totté, settai cangaerarenu coto deshó=Eregriel ni totte, zettai kangaerarenu koto deshō, ‘for Eregriel, that is something completely unthinkable, isn’t it?’
Atashi tatshi no bunca wa, conomama de ari. Sósóriocu coso, eiga ni nareru=Atashitachi no bunka wa, konomama de ari. Sōzōryoku koso, eiga ni nareru, ‘our culture will remain this way. As for our imaginations, their fortunes may flower’.
Mattógo itself=mattōgo, ‘proper/well-appointed language’.

‘Let the ra go a-sa-ing’ is a reference to a specific element of Japanese grammar (the causative can, depending on the ending of the stem, be the same as the passive except ‘sase’ or ‘se’ replaces ‘rare’ or ‘re’ at one point). It's also a reference to the Shibbloleth of Fem6;anor. I really like the Shibboleth of Fem6;anor. I may change certain aspects of the way I transliterate all this in later chapters, in which event I will go back and edit this one too.

Síreth's Japanese is not supposed to be as good as mine, and my Japanese is not as good as I would like it to be. I can provide kanji/kana readings for any of this upon request if anybody is interested.

Glaeronien is Síreth’s father-name (Síreth is her mother-name). Eregriel’s mother-name, incidentally, is Bronhedil. Síreth’s mother is called Ladbrith.

Teeming Faces

(Notes will be at the end for this chapter.)

Read Teeming Faces

Their arrival in Caras Galadhon was or at least seemed unbidden, with no pomp and nobody sent out to greet them, and Síreth was glad of this. The few times she had been to the city before the ceremony that had surrounded entering it had bothered her a little. Those had been times when Ada had with great pride presented new work reconstructing Taliska and Adûnaic texts, before he had decided to take some amount of time away from it doing other work a few decades ago. In those days there had been very much time in Lothlórien and not especially much to do with it, and so loremasters like Ada, loremasters of some skill and fame but not necessarily the kind that would see one’s name writ in the annals everlasting, had been given much attention and much praise. Now, it was not clear if anybody even knew that Síreth Glaeronien had come with Bronhedil Eregriel to go still further beyond Taliska and Adûnaic, to seek out understanding of a language and society of Men hitherto beyond the ken of the Eldar and beneath the notice of the Dúnedain. If they did it did not seem important enough to busy them from their daily tasks.

‘It would seem,’ said Eregriel as they wended up the hill towards the tree of the Lady and the Lord’s great gleaming talan, ‘that the peace and quiet that Lórien enjoys peaked around the time you and I were begotten—or, at least, the quiet did.’

‘Nations of Men are moving around in the Vales of Anduin of late,’ Síreth said, regarding Eregriel’s set and practised face as they moved through the milling groups of folk of the city. ‘Do not be morose overmuch.’ She spoke studiously, ruminating, turning over and over in her head an exact programme, an exact description of what they were to do, as practised and assiduous as that argument which had served them so adequately with Saerhalab. ‘We’re here to seek the Lady and Lord’s blessing to speak to the visitor from the East and see if the way we look at things may admit of any influence from the divers ways of the Second Kindred.’

Eregriel nodded. ‘I know. Still, it is very difficult…’ She leaned over and clung to Síreth’s arm, the dappled light that fell through the yellow leaves on to their green and grey sleeves playing as if to mix and mottle their existences together.

Looking around Caras Galadhon Síreth could not see very much that had physically changed since the last time they had come here. Some of the mellyrn were slightly taller, though the effects of Lórien’s preservation under the Lady’s aegis tended to somewhat attenuate their growth. In those that were taller and some of those that were not the arrangements of telain had changed, expanding or contracting or rebuilding, a reorientation of decoration and craftsmanship relating in almost a living way to the little growths and developing quirks of the trees. It was much like it was outside the city, but in greater profusion. The entire effect of the change was magnified in terms of assailing the senses all at once in a rush, but muted in terms of not standing out so strongly from the landscape as a whole. The people were not greeting them as they had once greeted her father but their attitudes did not seem to have changed very much from how it had been before when guests had not been entering. A few greeted them, including Haldir’s brothers, with whom Eregriel exchanged a few small words.

‘Would either of you happen to know under whose remand the visitor from Rhûn has been staying?’ Síreth asked.

‘Why do you ask?’ asked Orophin, who had never liked them very much for reasons that had always eluded Síreth.

‘Because,’ said Eregriel, ‘and Haldir may have told you this, we are here to-day because fain would Síreth relish the chance to have words with him.’

Orophin nodded slowly and tilted his head upwards a bit. ‘Nellas, I believe, would be the person you are looking for,’ he said.

Eregriel’s eyes widened and the lethargic look that their heavy lids had borne in the scant hours that had yet passed since midday momentarily vanished. ‘Nellas is in Caras Galadhon?’

Nellas was along with the Lady and Lord one of the very few elves in the Golden Wood who held within her firm and fast the memory of the Elder Days, and whose eyes in her long-past childhood had seen Beleriand. She was ancient and wise beyond the account of all but a few of even those who had dwelt in this forest since before the first rising of the Sun. Not a few times running in the woods of the Naith Eregriel had met her, and Síreth not a few times fishing or swimming in Celebrant or Anduin. Yet she held no love for the thousands of pairs of eyes and feet that infested Caras Galadhon or the areas along the lower Celebrant more generally, and made her home in the reverie of copses to the north where the Golden Wood melted away into the southernmost reaches of the Gladden Fields.

‘Nellas and this visitor, this Sogdash out of the East, will return to the city to-morrow or the day after,’ said Rúmil. ‘He was given to her to look after precisely because he said that he was ill at ease among several thousand of the Firstborn.’

If Sogdash was staying with her it was probable that either he had not immediately gained the trust of the Lady and the Lord or Rúmil’s account was right that he had little love for many elves at a time. From what she had gleaned from the stories over the years, it seemed to Síreth that not many mortals did.

‘If you would like to speak with him I would recommend staying in Caras Galadhon until they return, and if you can seeing the Lady and the Lord about this desire of yours before that happens rather than during or after,’ Orophin said. He bowed stiffly to them and the two hustled up a winding path towards where intermittent blasts of heat and light through the trees betrayed the presence of a clearing with an oven or a forge.

‘Fascinating,’ Eregriel said, slouching further up towards the great mallorn, her afternoon tiredness seeming to fall upon her again. Her left arm sloped steeply by her side down towards where she was grasping Síreth’s hand; she taken a step ahead of Síreth but seemed not so much leading as being led, be it by some sudden compulsion or half-glimpsed image of fate that acted upon her even through the lethargy that she had so often laboured under of late or simply by her desire to sooner get to somewhere where they could rest. That would most likely be a short pathway away from the hall of the Lady and Lord. Súlvindon’s brother and sister had twin telain there with their families, or at least they had the last time Eregriel and Síreth had been here. Since it had only been about thirty-four or thirty-five years Síreth did not think they were likely to have moved.

The quality of the light was changing, becoming warmer and more insistent as they went further up the great hill on which Caras Galadhon was built. At the same time the groups mingling in the pathways were thinning slightly with the natural rhythm of the afternoon.

*

Eregriel’s aunts and uncles and cousins had gone on a trip to the rills of Nimrodel, leaving their telain empty, and after explaining who they were to the denizens of the nearest brace of mellyrn Eregriel said that it was probably all right if they stayed there for the night. For the rest of the afternoon and late into the evening they sat together, reading aloud to each other from Eregriel’s family’s small but respectable library, except for a period just as the sun was setting when Eregriel went to chop and dress some vegetables for them from one of the city’s gardens. By the time Eregriel could no longer keep her eyes open they had reached about the halfway point of Pent Sarnas Tinnun, the flashily-written set-piece scene where the boats going down the Forest River capsized and Thalathir and Tinuial had to swim for it. Pent Sarnas Tinnun was so overwrought that reading it always cheered Eregriel up, and they went to bed happy and hopeful.

It was about halfway through the next day, when the sun had just passed its zenith, that word came to them that Nellas and Sogdash had indeed just now entered the city. Since Sogdash was a Man, and no adan either, there was far more excitement about this then there had been about their own arrival. By the time they were fully groomed and prepared for the day and had climbed down to the ground it seemed that Sogdash was already deep in counsel with the Lady and the Lord. Eregriel, who was in a more enterprising mood than Síreth had seen her in years—which did her heart good and relieved her greatly—asked a few passersby and ascertained that Nellas was nearby, in fact, just a little way up the path and around a bend.

They found Nellas sitting in a tree with no talan in it, gazing into a clearing that had once been used for baking bannocks and lembas and was now grown over with new grass. Nellas seemed to approve of this, for she had a pensive, indulgent smile on her face before she noticed them.

‘Well met, Nellas,’ said Eregriel, standing with Síreth in the clearing.

‘Eregriel,’ said Nellas, shrinking back a little bit and clutching the branch more firmly to keep from toppling out of the tree. ‘How have you been?’

‘Well,’ said Eregriel, and from the way Nellas’s expression changed Síreth could tell that the answer’s pat and not entirely honest nature was as transparent to others as it was to Síreth herself.

‘We have come to Caras Galadhon in part to talk to somebody whom we are told is in your care,’ said Síreth after a few more pleasantries. ‘Forgive me, but we had not been aware that you had a habit of caring for strange travellers.’

A slight effect of cloud drifted over Nellas’s face and she sighed up at the blue and white sky pied like a speckled bass. ‘There is a promise I made to myself a long time ago,’ she said, ‘that to the best of my ability whenever a mortal Man should happen upon such a land as ours I would help him and teach him in the way that I thought he should go. Sogdash feels about this city much as I do, if not for the same reasons. Lord Celeborn approved of the arrangement.’

‘I see,’ said Síreth. Eregriel gave a murmur of understanding and Síreth was arrested by the thought of the possibility that Eregriel knew more about Nellas’s past and life in prior ages than did she. She did not know what it was that Eregriel and Nellas talked about when they happened upon each other. Before now the three had only been all together once, and briefly, on a spring afternoon by the Falls of Nimrodel when Nellas had been singing to the birds and flying insects, Eregriel bounding like a hart in the foothills, Síreth immersed in and listening to the voice of the stream. ‘We and our parents are of the understanding that it may be worthwhile to gain the wisdom of new outlook on our lives by talking to Sogdash, if he will; it may also help me understand the dialects of his country.’

Then Nellas pulled back her brown hair in a loose queue and leapt from the bough to the ground. ‘That may be,’ she said, ‘and I would certainly ask the Lady and the Lord about it—were I you. How goes your betrothal, by the way?’

‘That was one of the matters about which we were hoping to gain a greater variety of views,’ Eregriel said. ‘The Easterlings may not know or honour Ilúvatar or the Powers in the way that we do, if they do at all; yet I hold out hope that understanding the way they, or any Men, look at things might give us some greater sense of the perspective in which Ilúvatar and the Powers operate.’ Síreth wondered what, exactly, Eregriel meant by this. The trees were quiet to-day but there was a definite brashness to the sky, a living brashness, what Síreth was not sure whether or not she would call an approving brashness. ‘Ilúvatar cares for and orders the lives of both types of His Children, after all.’

‘That is true,’ said Nellas, who used an ambiguous tone of voice that made her sound either impressed but not convinced or convinced but not impressed. ‘What I think is more important to the Powers is the fact that you have made a promise to each other.’

‘We intend to keep that promise as far the laws and customs of the world allow,’ said Eregriel, ‘and will certainly swear no other.’

‘I admire that,’ said Nellas, her gaze falling upon Eregriel’s ring where she held her hands clasped in front of her. ‘Promises are meant to be kept. Breaking a promise is something even a fox or a bear would not do. Foxes and bears make no promises so neither do they break them; they assert nothing so neither do they lie. In that respect, even if in no other, perhaps foxes and bears are wiser than Elves and Men. Your promise ought to be kept, now, and I think the Powers will look kindlier on that than if you broke it out of fear of what they might think. If you think that talking to Sogdash—who I will tell you is very pleasant and whose Sindarin has become very good over the past few months even if he does not speak the same Easterling tongue that you do, Síreth—would help you keep your promise, then I certainly think you should do so.’

With that they parted from Nellas, who seemed to have said her piece good and well enough for a setting in which she already felt anxious.

*

When on Nellas’s recommendation, relayed through Rúmil, they came before the Lady and the Lord in the great talan at the summit of Caras Galadhon, the Lady had an intensely interested and piercing expression on her face and the Lord looked exhausted and distraught.

‘We know wherefore you come before us this afternoon, Eregriel Súlvindonien and Síreth Sarnonien,’ said the Lady calmly, her gaze catching Síreth’s and almost certainly Eregriel’s also, questing, penetrating, turning and returning. ‘You wish to speak to Sogdash, who has ventured long leagues from the far plains of Rhûn to treat with us. You would speak to him regarding a language that you are studying, if he also speaks it, and regarding customs in the realms of Men that may give you new thoughts about the path that your betrothal has taken.’

Eregriel nodded and bowed. Síreth dipped her head, feeling an odd fear of breaking the Lady’s gaze.

‘Sogdash is with us for reasons of treaties, of alliances, of works of defence,’ said the Lord. ‘For two hundred years now the lands of Rhûn have fallen more and more under the dominion of a realm called Nacatscuni, whose ruler is now a Man named Haruca the Younger. He is Emperor, king and commander of kings.’

Those names were Mattógo! Nacatscuni—it was an interesting word; it was to say almost the same as Ennor. Síreth supposed the use of the word ‘Rhûn’ did make an assumption about geography that people living there would have no reason to. For them it would indeed be, relatively, a middle, as any place might seem to its own inhabitants. Rhûn to iu cotoba wa higashi to iu imi wo mottémas cere demo, motshiron higashi ni sundéru hito ni totté, higashi de wa nu…

‘Emperor Haruca,’ said the Lady, ‘should like to make peace with Gondor if he can. He would like to turn our current peace into an effective alliance against whatever powers may dwell in the north and east of his realms. He is not certain but he is attempting to ascertain whether or not this may be the Dark Lord.’ A cast of pall fell upon her. ‘It has proven more difficult to determine than in the past. Even the Wise have not yet been able to bring events of the past few centuries fully to light.’

And Síreth began to quake with fear, for it was as if the trees of the city were laughing at her. Why was the Lady telling them these things? Did she know that much—that she and Eregriel had even considered venturing beyond the Golden Wood and seeing for themselves how things were among Men and other Elves? Did the Lady see so far as to seek to impel them out among those strange laws and customs, to encourage them to make their fates stranger than they already were? There was a stony silence, as always, to the Lady’s own mind.

‘Do you wish to go out into the world?’ the Lady asked.

‘We do,’ Eregriel said softly, and Síreth could certainly not begrudge her the truth.

‘This must appear as a very sudden consideration to you,’ the Lady said.

Still unsure what the consideration was, Síreth nodded. Eregriel moved her lips silently, in almost the same languid and reverential way as in singing the hymn of the first stars.

‘It would do you good to speak to Sogdash,’ the Lord said.

‘Wherever you may go,’ the Lady said, ‘even now before everything has been settled it is best that you not do so alone.’ She smiled, and then added ‘Your rings prove that already’ in a voice that had Síreth not known better, had she had any reason to think this at all, had she dared to presume so to compass or imagine, she could have sworn sounded envious.

*

Still reeling from that which the Lady had suddenly ascertained and the fact of intrigue in great matters of states and peoples going on around them, they dined with Sogdash that evening, under the stars near the base of Caras Galadhon, in a clearing just inside the wall. He arrived just after they finished ‘A Elbereth Gilthoniel’. He was attired as one of the Galadhrim, if only for his stay here or with Nellas; a short man, he had dark hair on his head and in a semicircle above and beside his lips, and his skin was a golden-brown colour.

‘Good evening,’ he said.

‘Good evening, Sogdash,’ said Eregriel. ‘We have fish from the river, vegetable soup, rose blossoms, and some cured venison; also water, wine, and bannock bread.’

‘Thank you.’

They began eating in an uncomfortable silence. Eregriel was clearly waiting for Síreth to say something to Sogdash that would give them something to discuss. Finally Síreth said ‘Sogdash, Mattógo wo hanasemas ca?’

‘Hanasemas,’ he said, ‘tennó no catarucata na no des.’

‘Tennó?’

‘Aran. Emperor, Commander of Kings.’

Eregriel shot Síreth a querying look and laid silver-hallowed hand over silver-hallowed hand on the grass between them as with her other hand she took up a wine-goblet. ‘Sogdash speaks Mattógo because the Emperor speaks Mattógo,’ said Síreth, and Eregriel nodded knowingly, no doubt thinking of some manner of analogy from the First Age. ‘But, Sogdash, your own language is not Mattógo?’

Sogdash shook his head. ‘My language is called Tunsuga. I come from a land to the north of the inland sea, where there is good pasturage but the winters are harsh and there are not many fruits to eat or fish to catch. There we rely on livestock and move around with the seasons and trade in furs. The Emperor lives further south, on the seashore, in a city of fixed location, in a country of fishing towns and wooded hills. But our kin just to the west of us build cities along the trade routes that go to the Northmen and the Iron Hills.’

‘You would want to maintain the peace that allows that,’ mused Eregriel, ‘I am sure.’

Sogdash nodded. ‘Which brings us to why I am here. I trust the Lady Galadriel and Lord Celeborn explained that to you?’

‘Yes,’ said Eregriel, ‘they did.’

‘I was told,’ said Sogdash, looking straight at Síreth, ‘that you are one of the only people here who can speak Mattógo.’

‘That’s true,’ said Síreth, ‘although I fear my accent is terrible, and I can certainly far better read than speak it.’ Sogdash with practised stillness in his face did not disagree.

‘His Majesty the Emperor,’ said Sogdash, ‘is of the opinion that the Elves of this land are the most disinterested, the most farseeing, the best people on this side of the mountains to serve as interlocutors between us and the wild Men of Gondor.’ Eregriel and Síreth glanced at each other. ‘I do not know what you want from me, exactly, or what the Lady, Lord, and Emperor want from any of us, but I, at least, am willing to spend time working it out.’

‘Síreth and I are very used to spending time working out our affairs,’ said Eregriel. ‘We are still trying to do it. I hope we may soon learn to do it, finally.’

*

That night too they stayed in Caras Galadhon, sitting together in the talan of Eregriel’s aunt in silence, holding hands and gazing up past the lights of the enchanted lanterns at the stars that had been kindled over Cuiviénen when Arda had been young.

‘Do you think this may help us more than the loremasters did?’ Eregriel asked.

‘I would say that that depends on what you think that ‘this’ is going to be,’ said Síreth. She laid her head down in the soft crook of Eregriel’s shoulder and wrapped her free arm around her. Eregriel let her own weight bear them both down to lie together in that embrace, legs splaying in opposite directions. The winter night was a little cold even in Lothlórien but their robes were thick enough and their hearts were warm enough. Through the unfading penumbra of the Caras Galadhon night Síreth could hear evening voices and envision evening faces, telling them things that they ought to know.

---

Chapter End Notes

Limited Mattógo in this chapter. Rhûn to iu cotoba wa higashi to iu imi wo mottémas cere demo, motshiron higashi ni sundéru hito ni totté, higashi de wa nu…= Rhûn to iu kotoba wa higashi to iu imi wo motteimasu kere demo, mochiron higashi ni sundeiru hito ni totte, higashi de wa nu, ‘The word Rhûn means East, but to people who live there, it’s obviously not ‘the east’’. Mattógo wo hanasemas ca?=Mattōgo wo hanasemasu ka?, ‘Can you speak mattōgo?’ Hanasemas, tennó no catarucata na no des=Hanasemasu, tennō no katarukata na no desu, ‘I can speak it, because it is the Emperor’s way of speaking’.

Transverse Passage

Linguistic notes are at the end.

The content of the visions in this chapter is heavily symbolic, and I'm open to talk about it with anybody who is interested. Some of the imagery is derived from Japanese religious poetry of the Heian period, such as the weed-wrack and the full moon; the juxtaposition of these images is assocciated with the veneration of a bodhisattva called the Dragon Princess. There will be more on the burning figure later in the storyline.

Read Transverse Passage

Winter was nearing its end and the time for parting and embarkation was at last nigh. Eregriel had, to Síreth’s frustration, decided that the wait before setting out made well for more time in which to inquire after loremasters old and new, with whom she would spend long hours of night sitting up debating the finer points of issues really not related to her and Síreth’s predicament while Síreth sat with Sogdash and Nellas listening to the soughing of the wind through the trees and the meres and the stars. Eregriel still held within her the love for those stars that she always had but she seemed more subdued and earthbound of late than made Síreth comfortable. She was, it would seem, not looking forward to their sojourn in the realms of Men in the East, for all that they had agreed that on every scroll that they could write it out on it looked for all the world and more like a good idea and liable to help them find their way. The actual reasons for the wait, at least as Síreth, Nellas, and Sogdash understood them, were so that Síreth may hone her tongue on Sogdash’s fluent if not cradle Mattógo and that they may wait until the Brown Lands stood some chance of receiving at least a small boon of spring rain.

By the day when they were called back to Caras Galadhon Síreth could speak and understand Mattógo about as easily as she could read and write it, and Eregriel could speak, understand, read, and write it about as easily as Síreth had spoken it when they had first set out, scant months ago but already long out of proportion in memory. Insofar as such things could be measured, in any case; truly things were such that Síreth’s abilities fluxed from day to day, as did her resolve and as did her faith in anybody’s ability to see this through to a happy conclusion.

‘People to the north of the Tumshuc do not like His Majesty the Emperor,’ Sogdash had said to her one evening, sitting on the ground beneath Nellas’s talan as Eregriel, standing at the edge of a marsh of tall sedges, had sung the ‘A Elbereth Gilthoniel’ for the third time of the night—far more than usual it had been lately, as Eregriel tried and tried to strengthen the fortress of her heart. ‘They lived to the north and east of the sea in the former days but the peoples started moving during the last wars against the wild West-Men five centuries ago and those lands came into stern dispute. When the Cart-Men returned from the war they and their cousins retreated north, where they remain.’

‘Why do those peoples not like the rule of His Majesty?’ Síreth asked, and for him and for her own practise interpreted herself into such Mattógo as she had at the time been able: ‘Nasé ano busocu ga héca no caio wo cirau no des ca?’ It was lumpy and shaken, but there it was. So was her understanding, and Eregriel’s.

It seemed that Haruca had two years before denied a request from the group that Sogdash called the Cart-Men to migrate south-westward to join their kin, who they claimed lived between Dorwinion and Taur-e-Ndaedelos. It was very strange to Síreth’s mind that a ruler of Men might have the power to simply and without further fuss refuse assent to such a migration, in the manner of a bureaucratic decision among others, but there it was. And according to Sogdash it was not indeed ‘without further fuss’. It seemed obvious to him at least that one aim of the Emperor in forging a peace with Gondor, along with forging common cause against whatever enemy might be lurking even further in the East and North, would be the final settlement of what to do about these people’s concerns.

While Sogdash had been thus explaining to Síreth the lay of the land in Rhûn, Nellas had been of some help in getting him more accustomed to Lórien, though her own penchant for quiescence and solitude had estopped him from getting quite as thorough an initiation into the general rhythm of public life as he might otherwise have received. Nellas lived at the very outermost edge of the Golden Wood’s enchantments, where the nip of winter was keener, and she and Sogdash and Eregriel too all seemed to thrive on this in some way, to feel the duress and discomfort as a creation of Ilúvatar like any other, perhaps, or to welcome and nurse the sweet and lonely feeling of being here at such a time.

Eregriel had meanwhile been making arrangements with emissaries of the Lady and the Lord to have one final conversation about the matters of the heart that had fallen somewhat by the wayside of late before they left. What sort of consultation exactly this might be Síreth did not know but it seemed that Súlvindon had had a few words to say about it so she would fain hope that the Lady and the Lord would take it seriously and treat it plainly and with all kindness.

*

‘I had a dream last night,’ said Eregriel as they made off through the woods towards Caras Galadhon, ‘and it felt a long time coming.’

‘A long time coming?’ Síreth asked. She was not quite sure what Eregriel meant by this. Her own dreams had been a bit discomforting of late, filled with images far removed from the woods and the fields and the streams and the mountains, images of thunderheads and flames. There could be both fair and fell things about the flames, and the thunderheads might signify that her thoughts had turned to great matters, but even in her waking day the woods would tell her things that they thought it might help her to know and so she did not consider a dream of unclear import particularly significant or strong in her perception of what was really happening around her. It was far more the sort of thing about which Eregriel took care, and it always had been.

‘In this dream,’ said Eregriel, ‘there was a pair of birds flying up higher and higher into ever-rarer parts of the sky. Soon the sky broke and they were seals, of the sort that we saw in those illustrations in Levain Gaearon once, swimming through a shining sea. Then, and I wonder that this might not have been another dream bleeding backwards through my recollection into the first, the scene changed and I was in it, gazing at a little fire burning in a black pit.’

Their feet passed plodding and slow over the stiff brown-black loam of a path not commonly trodden. They were coming on close by Anduin now, parallel to whose banks they would travel until late in the day, when they would rest at the abode of an acquaintance of Nellas’s, provided he was there and not ranging in the woods, before continuing. Sogdash intended to arrive at Caras Galadhon to-night and was having to hurry himself.

‘That sounds like a talk worth having with the Lady, if she will,’ Síreth said.

‘That was my intention,’ Eregriel said.

As they passed over a short but steep hill and started down the far side Síreth stopped for a moment. Sogdash was a few steps back. ‘How are you?’ Síreth asked.

‘I can keep going,’ Sogdash said. ‘I wish that I still had my horse.’

‘We will be on horseback after we cross Anduin, will we not?’ Eregriel said. ‘I had heard that you have had a company encamped on the far side for the winter who will be accompanying us back to Rhûn.’

‘Right,’ said Sogdash as they started off again. ‘One does not make a journey like this alone—not if one can help it, not in a time of peace.’

‘I imagine,’ said Síreth, ‘especially if one is concerned that that peace be preserved. Casshocu no Tshíci wo sashicawasu no tamé ni sonaetsucé wo atsumecata wa ittai dou des ca?’

‘Aa,’ said Sogdash. ‘Dshitsu wa, amari wacaranu coto des cedo, nacama ga wacarimas.’

Síreth gave Eregriel a glance across a glade as they walked, making sure, if she could, that she understood, that she was following this at least as far as it went. Eregriel shook her head but raised her hand, as if it were leave to continue, and written on her face and confirmed by the gossip of the trees was the notion that she had caught herself up a little bit in her own tangle of thought, and the sun struck the silver on her finger and vanished into the shifting darkness of her hair, and Síreth’s heart was gladdened and set at ease, but for a lingering curiosity about where exactly Eregriel’s thoughts may be taking her now.

Nellas’s friend turned out to be absent and so they sat on the banks of a little stream, one of the smallest to flow directly into Anduin as far Síreth knew, and continued. By the time the stars came out and Eregriel’s voice went up quavering with the day’s exertion—A Elbereth Gilthoniel, silivren penna míriel, o menel aglar elenath!—they had nearly reached Caras Galadhon, a while earlier than Síreth would have expected—or, at least, its lights were glimmering through the boughs of the south-westerly trees, casting whitish silver upon the golden leaves.

*

A few nights later, the day before they were to leave Lothlórien, they stood in the Lady’s Garden, Eregriel stock-still as if listening for something, perhaps simply afraid of the power at play, the sheer beauty and glory that radiated around them, the light of Valinor in her eyes and countenance combined with that of the Lady’s conservation but not originating with her, their own light, native to Ennor, reflected and refracted and gathered and preserved here, to their eyes and their hearts no less in splendour. Eregriel too shone, with the light of awe and peace, and Síreth wondered if she herself was shining, though she was not so much afraid as joyful, aware of the power and the majesty of the place and the moment but disinclined to meditate on it overmuch when such could be gathered in diffuse form all around and would remain in this full flower in her mind’s eye while the world endured. The Lady was doing something with her Mirror, something ceremonial, perhaps out of the ordinary even for her, and as such perhaps what was causing this resplendence, which may very well be beyond even the usual state of being for the Mirror and the Garden. Síreth, though not in the same frame of reverent mind as Eregriel, was nevertheless conscious of the forces that brought it to bear, and so not knowing quite why she was not reacting the same way she tried within herself to pile up faith and wisdom, veneration of wood and hill and worship of the One, and thus to acquire a greater understanding, or a greater feeling of understanding, of her own self and her own business in this.

What she found there after several minutes as she stood still with Eregriel and the Lady moved her hands to and fro over the surface of the water in the bowl was nothing but love and faithfulness unshakable, as it should be, and being impelled along a twisting path beset with thorns and briars towards a destination unknown. There was nothing in that that she could not have seen already, that she did not already understand and apprehend and believe. She looked at Eregriel and Eregriel back at her, and so they stood gazing for another moment until the Lady’s voice impelled them to turn back, back to where she stood, back to the Lady of the Garland, of the Garden and the Mirror, who would show them the way of the world and who every day chose to break or preserve that way of the world with her own mind.

‘Come,’ said the Lady, ‘and look, if you will.’

Síreth had not been party to whatever discussions had led Eregriel and the Lady and the Lord to the conclusion that looking into the Mirror was how whatever Eregriel wanted to do before they left was to be accomplished. She would not say that this surprised her, exactly, but it was not a conversation of the sort that Eregriel had led her to expect.

‘I, too,’ Eregriel murmured to her, seeing it would seem the confused look on her face, ‘was not entirely sure of what to expect when we came here.’

‘Come,’ said the Lady again, and Síreth walked to the mirror, her feet moving softly and slowly through whole universes of trepidation and respect.

The Lady’s breath was on the water. Within it were, first, Síreth’s eyes. Her eyes were in the water. Then her eyes were in the sky. She was looking down from a great height upon the soaring spires of Hithaeglir, down upon the topmost snows of Gundabad and Menedhros where no feet of Elves or Men could find purchase, down to the west upon the plains of Eriador, fallow but for the vale of Imladris and a few scant townlands of Men and the fair country just on the near side of Elostirion where the periannath lived and whence much galenas came to Gondor. Her vision faltered and whirled away and the thunderheads of her dreams were here, towering and lowering and crashing around her as she sailed through the houses of lightning in the greyness and the blackness of the upper clouds. Below her was a lake that was a sea, and on its shore a shining city burning. Two turtledoves rose upwards from the smoke along with a sound of keening and lament. Her eyes followed the turtledoves further upward and outward from the world she knew as they traced a glittering arc, then plunged into another sea, a sea that was a lake, and faltered and perished and went to the bottom with the weed-wrack, as another set of turtledoves rose again from the city—suddenly in her mind again there was the city—and passed through a glistening golden cloud into—here her eyes went next—a strange landscape of evenly chequered pattern, back and forth from desert to sea, here water and there stone, altogether glowing and dancing like grain in a stiff west wind. There was Elostirion again, turned so that its palantír gazed upward instead of Westward, then reversed, turned upside down, twisted and broken, restored. Then the vision ceased in its broad focus and showed only the second pair of turtledoves continuing to fly upward through stranger and firmer and airier spheres, until at last reaching such a point as from which they could go no further, and sticking and abiding there for now, having turned into the full moon in a glorious spangled sky that turned as she watched into a green country, fair and faraway.

The Lady’s breath was on the water, and Síreth stepped away, bowed, and sat to think. The doves—she and Eregriel, she presumed. What might come to pass, the weed-wrack or the moon in the sky. It was too much to bear right now while Eregriel’s gaze met the water, while Eregriel crouched over and offered herself up to the visions of pasts and possibilities, imperatives and subjunctives, is and ought and may and must.

The Lady’s breath was on the water. Within it were, now, Eregriel’s eyes. Her eyes were in the water. Then were her eyes in the sky also? She was stock-still. There was nothing great or terrible about watching it from a sitting position on the sward except the waiting, the waiting and the trying to mull over what she herself had seen within. Was such a vision to be expected after all? She had heard but little about the workings of the Mirror, beyond the knowledge that it existed, which was itself not knowledge as immediately common, or commonly immediate, as somebody like Sogdash, had he known of it, might think from the image of the First Kindred that they liked from time to time to project to the Second. She wondered what Sogdash might be discussing with the Lord, assuming he was discussing anything with him and not simply waiting around for Síreth and Eregriel to return and rest for the journey beginning in the morning.

Eregriel withdrew slowly from the water, taking a few steps backward from the Mirror with a bowed thanks to the Lady, slower than Síreth’s had been. Then they sat together in pensive thought.

The Lady said nothing, only passed her hand over the water again.

‘Lady?’ asked Eregriel.

‘Yes, Eregriel Súlvindonien?’

‘Are we to….tarry here awhile, or…?’

‘You may stay and speak with me or take your leave, as you wish,’ said the Lady. ‘I must give both of you my thanks for indulging me this evening.’

How had they indulged the Lady? What part of this had done her more good than it had them? Looking at Eregriel to communicate her confusion again Síreth saw that Eregriel was just as mystified as she was, or was at least in such a state already because of whatever she might have seen. They would have to talk in some detail, dissect, perhaps, as Eregriel would a fish or small animal for the roasting.

Síreth tried to wrench her mind into a more comfortable consideration. The idea of dissection, of preparation of food, allowed her momentarily to try. She did hope that the telain near Eregriel’s family’s would not mourn her cooking overmuch these coming months and years. She knew that both Bruilam and Laeron knew more or less what they were doing with knife and brazier, at least.

Eregriel stood and Síreth was back in the immediacy of the existing time. ‘My thanks to you as well, Lady, for allowing us these visions,’ she said. ‘I for my own part will meditate upon mine to-night, and prepare to be seen off in the morning, though it grieves my heart to say my words of parting even for only a short span with the wood of my birth and home.’

‘As your loss, however temporary, grieves us also,’ said the Lady courteously.

Síreth stood and went to be with Eregriel as they wended their way through the Garden to the way back up to the main massing of Caras Galadhon. It occurred to her in a flash what a great and glorious thing was being entrusted to her, to them, even more than had already been clear. It was far from obvious that being allowed to gaze into the Mirror was something that was normally done at times like this, in part because there had never really been a time like this before, at least not since they, young as they were and only just now poised to acquire experience, had been born.

‘My thanks to you, Lady,’ said Síreth. ‘I will endeavour to represent your thoughts and those of the Lord as clearly as possible to the Emperor, commander of kings of the East, and use my own thoughts as wisely as I can in the task to which I have been appointed.’

‘Your work is to your credit, and we await your return,’ said the Lady.

They went up out of the Garden and on a sward outside the house of the Lady and the Lord they sat and waited for Sogdash, wherever he may have gone. Eregriel stared pensively up at the stars until Síreth tugged lightly on her shoulder, then looked over. ‘Would you talk, then, about what we have seen?’ Síreth asked.

‘Yes, I think. What did you see, Síreth? You looked first, and longer by a little.’

Síreth told Eregriel of what she had seen, but for now offered no interpretation, though elements were becoming clearer in her mind as she thought. There would likely be some danger in Nacatscuni, danger to Nacatscuni itself and its capital, which was she was told called Míaco, at least as much as to them. That brought her mind around, she must aver, to a certain fear.

‘What I saw was much like yours up to a point,’ said Eregriel. ‘I would not swear that the birds I saw were turtledoves because they were festooned with light on their wings. They flew as they did in your vision, only that your chequered country was a sea of light in mine with islands of shadow rising amidst it, then turned to a shadowy sea with a great island and a tower of light and cloud. It was in some ways a lot like the dreams that I have been having. I stopped to look into the darkness with the flame when I saw it at the end.’

‘What did you see in that darkness, other than the flame?’

‘I saw what the flame was.’

‘What was the flame?’

‘I tried to make it out. I looked to no avail. Then my eyes changed and suddenly I was in the pit with it, gazing right at it, and its face smiled at me. It was either Elf or Man, alive, in Mandos perhaps if I am allowed to indulge here in such speculation, and it smiled because it was giving me some approval.’

‘Do you have any indication of who it was?’ asked Síreth, who wanted very much not to be sceptical of what Eregriel was saying.

Eregriel shook her head. ‘I could indulge in speculation,’ she said. ‘I could bring up in my mind a number of theories but what I think is important is that smile.’

Síreth nodded and continued to sit there, unsure if what Eregriel was saying was really the Mirror’s work. Perhaps in each of their cases, to some extent, what it had reflected had been partially some aspect or another of Eregriel’s dream. Perhaps if that was so Eregriel’s dream held within it something of prophecy or the Powers, but Síreth would rather not entertain that right now.

‘You know, Síreth,’ Eregriel said with an air of confession about her, ‘you may not like this—I certainly don’t—but…’

‘What is it?’

‘Mattógo. I still do not, try as I might, speak or understand it very well.’

‘That is all right. You will have a lot of opportunity to learn if you want to, and I will interpret for you. Only—please do one thing for me in recompense.’

‘Yes?’

Síreth sighed. ‘Please guard my heart. So that I keep some perspective or longer or broader view in mind, if it ever seems to you as if I am fading from that or that is fading from me, please guard my heart.’

‘For as long as it takes,’ Eregriel said. ‘I promise you.’

*

When they set out from the Tongue the Lady and the Lord were indeed with them, standing in pure white on the shore. The provisions for the journey to Rhûn took up a boat on their own, not counting whatever the compatriots of Sogdash’s had gathered on the far side of the river. The morning was grey-blue, light but without much brightness to it, and there were mournful birds crying, but the trees were gladdened and rustled their bows in a cool diffuse breeze. Eregriel and Síreth, hand in hand, Eregriel taking the first step in apparent desire to please Síreth or make her proud—but needlessly, but needlessly!—stepped out into their boat, where Sogdash already sat, gazing down pensively at his feet where they rocked in the hull. When they had happened upon him again last night he had said that he had been discussing matters with a few people close to the Lady and the Lord but not with the Lord himself, who had earlier in the morning admitted to having spent much of the past few days and nights alone in his bedchamber reading old scrolls that he had read before on the off-chance that there might be something there of help. It turned out that there had been, and Sogdash now carried in his head, a prodigious memory as Síreth had found in recent months, a copy of a very route that he and the Lord had put their minds together to devise, one that skirted the worst of both the Brown Lands and Taur-e-Ndaedelos. He hoped that this way there might be less peril on the return, with, after all, two more people on the way. The Lord had for his own part been glad of information with which to bring his maps, now some eleven centuries old, into concordance with present realities. Sogdash carried also several packets of lembas, both as provender for the journey and, if any remained at the end, as a gift to the Emperor and his court.

‘Dshunbi decitemas ca?’ he asked.

‘Dshunbi decitemas,’ Síreth said.

The boats pushed off from the shore. Anduin passed slowly and softly beneath them. By the time Eregriel started mumbling supplications, eyes closed, hand in Síreth’s, ring on ring, they were a little less than halfway across. Looking up at this point Síreth saw, on the far shore, a little way up from where they were going to land but well within the distance of a short walk, a small encampment of horsemen, half-hidden by a small mixed copse of trees.

The boats scraped the pebbles on the far sore. Síreth disembarked and held out a hand to Eregriel behind her. They stood waiting for Sogdash to get out and for those rowing the other boat to unload its cargo. Síreth and Eregriel, shoulder to shoulder, stood listening to the orders being cried out for the unloading with their eyes fixed eastward, up the bank and away from the river. When everything was ready, the boats pulled out again. A few outriders from Sogdash’s group came, and they loaded the provisions on to a few old nags. Glancing back, glancing to and fro and altogether around them, they proceeded up the eastern riverbank, and left behind them the promise of spring in Lóthlorien, and all of the joy and safety of their home.

---

Chapter End Notes

Mattógo in this chapter: Nasé ano busocu ga héca no caio wo cirau no des ca?=Naze ano buzoku ga heika no kayo wo kirau no desu ka?, ‘Why do those tribes dislike the imperial reign of His Majesty?’ (Síreth is implying deeper-seated opposition to Haruca than she intends to.) Casshocu no Tshíci wo sashicawasu no tamé ni sonaetsucé wo atsumecata wa ittai dou des ca?=Kasshoku no Chiiki wo sashikawasu no tame ni sonaetsuke wo atsumekata wa ittai dou desu ka?, ‘Whatever is the way to gather provisions to cross the Brown Lands?’ Aa. Dshitsu wa, amari wacaranu coto des cedo, nacama ga wacarimas=Aa. Jitsu wa, amari wakaranu koto desu kedo, nakma ga wakarimasu, ‘Ah. The truth is, that’s something that I don’t really know, but my comrades understand it.’ Dshunbi decitemas ca=Junbi dekitemasu ka?, ‘Are we ready?’

Interlude in the Brown Lands

This chapter was written in a hurry, edited in a separate hurry, and is being posted from Tomisato, Japan, a day before I fly home to the United States.

No Mattógo this time, except for the translation of 'Brown Lands'--'Casshocu no Tshíci', Kasshoku no Chiiki, the same as last chapter. This is somewhat more modern Japanese than I would have preferred but it was more euphonious than other options.

The second and third myths that Sogdash mentions are forms of the Japanese Izanagi and Izanami myth and a version of the Tengriist creation myth, respectively, modified as best I could to fit Middle-Earth in the broad sense.

Read Interlude in the Brown Lands

They were in the Brown Lands, a welter of mud from the melt-off at the end of winter and scattered copses broken off from the greater mass of Taur-en-Ndaedelos. Síreth was getting tired easily lately, these last four days of travel having been particularly hard, without much to eat or drink other than the store of miruvor and lembas. She was surprised by how much she and Eregriel had come to expect at the least the chance of having other food available, the meat that the Men caught or the berries and roots that they prepared.

‘Good morning,’ she said to Eregriel, sitting down next to her on a large, flat, well-worn rock a little away from the Men for the first meal of the day.

‘Good morning,’ said Eregriel, who was looking up into a miserable-looking tree. ‘Do you think there is any means by which we might get some food from any of these trees…?’

‘The lembas is obviously far better,’ said Síreth, tearing into her piece. ‘Eat half of it now and we won’t have to stop again until mid-afternoon.’

‘I have become a little weary of it, I aver,’ Eregriel said.

This was disturbing to Síreth. Though she herself didn’t particularly care for having nothing else to eat, she would not call herself ‘weary’ of the lembas. Even for somebody like Eregriel, who loved to cook so much and could be expected to be more difficult to please, it should be the case that lembas would suffice not only to sustain but to delectate. That was what it was for.

‘Are you feeling well?’ Síreth asked, putting her arm around Eregriel’s shoulders, nibbling at the lembas that she held in her other hand. ‘I can tell the last few days have been difficult. Sogdash and his horse, even, are starting to tire.’

‘I am concerned,’ said Eregriel, her face long, ‘since we are tiring with him. I feel that crossing these lands may somehow be sapping something from us, the strength that we get from the country that is our own.’

‘You think so?’ Síreth was unsure that that was possible but the terrible quietness of even such trees as there were around her was worrisome to her. She leaned over, her head on Eregriel’s shoulder, moon-silver hair falling amidst wine-dark. Eregriel’s thin red lips parted and she made a sound of affirmation as she nodded. The sky above was cool and, while blue enough, had to it something of the sick lustre of a fish’s dead or dying eye.

‘We are bound more strongly to Eä than they are, for all that,’ Eregriel said. From past a sad copse a little to her left Síreth could hear the men talking and laughing. They, at least, were nothing short of delighted to have the lembas and miruvor. ‘I, at least, have longaday taken it much for granted that there are certain things we get from our ties to the land that the Lady and the Lord protect that elsewhere are beyond our ken.’ She pulled her knees up against our chest. ‘I worry of tiring, sickening, fading.’

Síreth understood now. ‘You have always held that within you, that fear,’ she said, taking Eregriel’s hands in hers. ‘Ever since that time with the dead deer up along Nimrodel.’

‘When was the last time you heard of somebody leaving Lórien and feeling like this as they passed?’

‘When was the last time you heard of somebody going out from Lórien in the first place?’ asked Síreth. Eregriel thought for a minute and then nodded. ‘Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ said Eregriel morosely.

Síreth waved off to the right. ‘Those Men over there will sicken and die as a matter of course and go beyond Eä to the Timeless Halls, won’t they?’

‘Of course,’ said Eregriel with a tone of irrevocable faith, inconsolable because it itself purported to be a consolation. ‘It is transmitted to us.’

And so,’ said Síreth, ‘might it not be possible that among the many other differences that sunder us, we who had never sat a horse in our lives before this past fortnight might not, even though we are of the Elder Kindred, be able to control them or ride on them for long without becoming confused and tired? Certainly we should not have as much skill with them as do Men such as Sogdash or Hlocpath who, to hear them tell it, grew up on horseback.’ Eregriel turned to her with a slight nod. ‘See.’ Síreth stood up and motioned for Eregriel to stand with her. They ate the rest of their morning’s rations of lembas and took swigs from the skin of miruvor that Eregriel held at her belt. ‘Better?’

‘Yes,’ said Eregriel. ‘I feel better.’

‘I know we set out imagining that the lembas would make us easy,’ said Síreth, ‘and it worries me, too, that it does not, at least not as much as we had expected, but I think there may be reasons for that other than something about its efficacy as such.’ She was feeling better now herself, and was less inclined to treat Eregriel’s upset over the lembas or over the travel or whatever it was as something out of the ordinary considering the situation. It had taken four days for Eregriel to learn to fully steady herself on her mare and a little longer for Síreth. The only one left for Síreth had turned out to be slightly taller at the haunches than what Hlocpath, an aging Man with nut-brown skin and hair who was the logistical leader of the expedition as Sogdash was its diplomatic figurehead, said would have suited her best. The parts of the journey that the lembas was supposed to ease, come to think of it, did not extend to the simple fact that they were passing through the Brown Lands, Casshocu no Tshíci, whose very existence as such was among the darkest, gloomiest, and most criminal of the Dark Lord’s old depredations. That was always going to be unpleasant no matter what they had to eat and drink. The idea of the lembas and the miruvor was to make it less unpleasant than it would have been otherwise.

‘Do you want to find Sogdash?’ Eregriel asked.

‘I would like that,’ said Síreth. ‘He and you promised to tell each other stories, did you not?’

Eregriel nodded. It was good. She was even smiling a little, which did Síreth’s heart good also. Under the ambiguous sky they clasped their hands tightly and set off towards the middle of the camp. ‘They also say the Men are gathering the snowmelt and the most liquid parts of the mud,’ said Síreth, ‘and distilling it by boiling so we can have something to drink other than the miruvor, to conserve it. We’ll be into the prairies east of Taur-en-Ndaedelos in a few days if all goes well, and then there should be proper streams once more.’

*

This seemed to further gladden Eregriel, and when they came to the camp they found that the Men, of whom there were in all about a dozen, had indeed managed to glean a good amount of fairly clean water from the fire and array of clay pots that they had set up. They found Sogdash and sat drinking with him. At first they alternated swigs of water and miruvor. Then the water alone, when it turned out to be off good quality and Hlocpath said that it should be possible to get more in the same way over the next few days because they would be passing through a steeply sloping area through which more snow should be melting off into the blighted plains.

‘I will be glad to get into the Emperor’s dominions,’ Eregriel said.

‘Technically,’ Sogdash reminded her, ‘this is already in the Emperor’s dominions. Remember that His Imperial Majesty lays claim to everything east of the Great River and south of the boughs of the Forest, until you reach the northern bounds of Gondor and of the Land of Shadow.’

‘The Emperor may lay claim,’ Síreth observed, ‘but he hardly exercises the claim other than by sending you. I think what Eregriel means is that she would fain reach somewhere where we may be greeted, be seen by other living things.’

‘Yes,’ said Eregriel, ‘and be treated with respect and fed and sheltered by other than the vicissitudes of melting snow from faraway parts of the forest and the strangled excuses for oaks that can find purchase here.’

Sogdash nodded. ‘I wish that too,’ he said, ‘at least to find pasturage for the horses. The oats that we have for them are very dry, may have a rot somewhere in them, and may sicken them if this keeps up much longer.’ He sighed and stretched his arms. ‘But,’ he said, ‘we do have it on good word from our trip westward and the maps on which I sketched out our paths with your Lord that we should very soon be entering better lands.’ Síreth thought this sentence, spoken in Westron, sounded fairly clumsy for its length, but it far outstripped even her Mattógo, to say nothing of her Tunsuga, so she could not really talk about it.

‘You said you were going to tell us a story,’ Eregriel said flatly.

Sogdash nodded again and laid his chin in his hand. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I did. Would you like to hear the story of the great camphor tree that grew where the Capital now is?’

‘If you would like to tell it, then by all means,’ said Eregriel.

Clearing his throat, Sogdash began. ‘A camphor tree is a great tree with pale bark, white flowers, and stiff leaves that have a perfume when crushed,’ he said. ‘A very long time ago, perhaps one, perhaps two thousand years—after the Last Alliance, certainly, and before the Enemy’s hold on our homelands found itself temporarily restored—there was one that grew where the Capital now is, on the south-eastern shore of the Sea.’ By which he meant, of course, Síreth reminded herself, the Sea of Rhûn. The idea of ‘the Sea’, unspecified and in common speech,  not referring to that which sundered the Hither Shore from the strand of Eldamar was one that she and Eregriel would certainly have a hard time getting used to. ‘The Sea’ in Sogdash’s use was simply a large lake without an outlet, at heart she thought a prosaic-seeming thing for all that it was a remnant of formerly-great Helcar and surely impressive in its own right. ‘This particular camphor tree,’ Sogdash said, ‘was large, even for a camphor tree, having a trunk at least five fathoms around and one hundred and eight boughs, it is said. There were spirits that lived in this tree, and when the ancestor of the Imperial House, who had opposed the Dark Lord when he had held sway over those lands, was walking by the shoreline he heard them calling to him.’

‘Ainur?’ asked Eregriel, who had been becoming it seemed more and more preoccupied with the possibility that some of the Singers other than the Istari might remain East of the Sea (that Sundered, not of Rhûn).

‘What were they saying?’ asked Síreth.

‘I do not know if they were what you would call Ainur or not,’ said Sogdash. ‘The story does not say. It does say that the ancestor thought at first that they were Elves, but they proved not to be.’

‘He thought they were Evair, one imagines,’ said Eregriel. ‘Like the inhabitants of Dorwinion, or some of the subjects of Thranduil.’

‘One imagines,’ said Sogdash, whom this distinction did not appear to especially interest. ‘The spirits told the ancestor of the Imperial House to depart from that place and return in four years, four months, and four days, according to the reckoning of the time. If the camphor tree still stood, he was to erect a shrine to the spirit.’ This was, in the first instance, for at least a few moments, worrying to Síreth. The last time any country within the ambit of her or Lothlórien’s knowledge had built a large shrine or temple in its capital had gone very badly. She understood enough about the culture of Nacatscuni to know that they had no such compunctions; in the case of the Men of the East rather than of the West the Dark Lord had overthrown their shrines long ago, and attempted to expunge from their minds whatever real or imagined beings they had taken to worshipping in order to have something other than Morgoth Bauglir. ‘If the camphor tree had fallen he was to build the capital of a kingdom there. When he returned, the camphor tree had sickened and died but its husk still stood upright. The ancestor of the Imperial House was confused, but the spirits returned and told him that it had thus given him possession of the land, and would return into the West whence it had come.’ And there was a point of contact and reference…!

‘Was he already a lord?’ asked Eregriel.

‘No. He was as yet only a smallholding farmer. It was a great burden for him to have to remove to that land. Yet they say he was descended from the Creating Spirits.’ Now that was interesting. ‘Personally, I do not think that it matters whether or not he was, since a Man is a Man, be he Eastern or Western or high or low of birth. Where I live a Man attains rank through either actively working to retain his boss uncle’s pasturage or making the effort to gain his own, but these are the sorts of distinctions that are important to the people in the Capital.’

‘They are important to us, too,’ said Síreth, feeling somehow a little silly about it, and also not being quite sure what ‘boss uncle’ meant.

‘There is,’ said Sogdash, ‘another legend that tells of how the Originating Spirit created male and female Creating Spirits to people the world with Men, after the Elves had awoken and gone west. They were the ancestors of Men but were not Men themselves. They were asked to make Men, and land for Men to live in. To this end the Originating Spirit gave them a jewelled spear, which they used to churn the waters of the Encircling Ocean until the country that in Sindarin is called Hildorién was formed along the verge of the Great Lands. Then on Hildorién they made Men. They gave birth to Men and spirits, but giving birth to a powerful spirit of fire the female Creating Spirit died. The male Creating Spirit followed her back to the Halls of the Dead, but she would not come with him, because she had eaten the food there. She tried to keep him there, but he escaped. Then the Originating Spirit said that for every ten Men who were caused to join her in the underworld, fifteen would be born to console her partner in the world of the living.’

At this point Síreth was becoming quite confused, although Eregriel still seemed very interested indeed. Síreth felt a little ripple of thought moving outwards from some undefined point and came to understand that she and Eregriel were both thinking of what one might expect, Míriel and, though not so much, Lúthien. It was with some effort possible to imagine Þerindë as a ‘Creating Spirit’ in a sense, and she had of course given birth to a fire spirit and died not to return—at least not then. Yet at the same time there was a world of apparent difference between all that and what Sogdash seemed actually to be talking about. She had a hard time seeing how there could be any relationship at all between that story and this, but even so…

Síreth imagined Eregriel, who had very strong feelings about this history, was getting agitated along with her interest.

‘That is the way the people of Nacatscuni proper tell it,’ said Sogdash. ‘Those of us who live on the northern plains know and confide that the Originating Spirit created the Eternal Blue Sky, which the people of Nacatscuni proper call Matasaburó—this is Manwë, if I am not mistaken.’ At this idea it seemed Eregriel was becoming more uncomfortable. ‘Eternal Blue Sky created many other gods, who made the lands and seas to save one of their number who wished to fly higher than Eternal Blue Sky but instead for his arrogance fell down towards the depths. But he was not grateful for alighting on the lands and seas, and, depending upon whom you ask, he may at that point have become, or may not have become, the Great Enemy.’

‘Can we continue this later?’ asked Eregriel softly. Her skin was blanched and her face was thin. Síreth was not particularly fond of what Sogdash was saying either, but she thought that if she was going to be an ambassador to these people, if they were going to be ambassadors to these people, it would do good to at least listen. She was about to tell Eregriel so when Eregriel said ‘It’s just that I would like to tell a story myself, relating to something you said earlier, about the Imperial House’s descent from spirits.’

‘Very well! Please do!’ Sogdash sat back and took a drink of water from the bowl that they had been passing around and which had for a few minutes now lain unused. They were almost to a point of having to fill it again.

Eregriel opened her beautiful mouth to tell the story of Melian and Thingol, of Lúthien—touching, but only touching, on Leithian, saving this for another day as she had made Sogdash save the rest of the Ainulindalë of his folk—and of Doriath’s rise and glory and fall. It was a distinctly shortened version of the story, mentioning only briefly the relation to it of the Lady and the Lord. Sogdash listened with interest until the end, when he asked two questions.

‘Why did Dior not…?’

‘Because the Silmaril had captivated him, he had only just then got it from Lúthien and Beren, and with what the Sons of Fëanor had done by then, it was unreasonable that they should have had what they wanted so easily,’ said Eregriel.

‘I see,’ said Sogdash. ‘I do know people who would have done the same. All the same it was a shame that they killed him.’

‘Very much of the Elder Days was a shame,’ said Eregriel, ‘and very little of it had any better options at hand, really, which was a still greater shame.’

Sogdash nodded solemnly and then said ‘I have another question.’

‘Yes?’

‘She left to ‘muse on her sorrows’? Melian, I mean, the Maia. ‘Muse on her sorrows’? Why would one do that?’

‘Because she was heartbroken.’

‘Yes, that much is obvious, but could she not have mused on her sorrows within the kingdom that she was protecting? Was there anything preventing her from leaving up her Girdle even if she did have to go?’

‘I am not sure that that would have been possible,’ said Eregriel sharply. ‘People have been debating the choices of the King and Queen of Doriath for six thousand years and they are no closer than ever to coming to conclusions on who did what wrong or whether there was any way to avoid it. Even people who lived also then like Nellas or the Lady and the Lord have different beliefs about it. Did Nellas not tell you any of this story?’

‘Nellas told me that Doriath existed and then fell,’ said Sogdash. ‘She did not tell me how.’

Síreth saw an obvious problem here, which had been a problem for most of their lives, which was Eregriel’s stiff-necked insistence on giving a fair shake and an understanding cast to both their own personal and cultural ancestors in Doriath and the Fëanorians who had destroyed it. Sogdash seemed very critical of both, and over the next few minutes of talk did not let go of his belief that Melian had erred in leaving Doriath after it fell, that she had broken some trust with her people in a way that he found almost as hard to forgive as Síreth was sure he would find Thingol’s treatment of his daughter when Eregriel got to telling him about that in greater detail. Finally Síreth spoke with a view to ending this.

‘Should we not speak more diplomatically?’ she asked. ‘I don’t think that it helps anything for us to be critical of each other’s stories.’

‘I do, actually,’ said Sogdash, but he sounded cheerful rather than angry. ‘This is a friendly personal talk, a debate between two bards, not a diplomatic parley. There will be more than enough time for that sort of thing when we reach the Capital. Besides.’ He spread his arm wide to indicate the blasted land, the mud and the stunted trees. ‘What else is there to do in a place like this but to talk with each other and to bemoan the fate that this world assigns some of the people and places in it?’

‘Bemoaning may not make it any better,’ said Eregriel in agreement, ‘but at least it helps us know what we ourselves have to stand on.’

Síreth was glad that she was feeling better about things.

‘Perhaps the Music of the Ainur might fit the stories that you were telling better, Sogdash,’ said Eregriel. At this time a cry went up and people started milling around, moving things back over to where the horses were. ‘But I think that we’re picking up the tents now, and moving out for the day. Shall I tell you as we ride, perhaps?’

Sogdash nodded. ‘I would enjoy that. I would like to offer a word of advice.’ He stood up and put his hands on his hips for a moment, then bent down and started picking up the implements they had been using for eating and drinking. ‘When you get to the Capital, do keep telling these stories. Make it clear that you want to learn about the lives and beliefs of the people there. Only,’ he said, glancing down to where they still had their hands intertwined, ‘do not make it too clear what it is that you want to get from your broadened understanding. I know that you are looking for new mirrors and new ways to understand what you yourselves believe—or know—for all I know you could as Elves have certain knowledge that we have not, as has been often claimed—but others might not know the same. They might think that you are trying to use their world as an excuse to do things that you do not know how to do within your own. Try not to give them any reason to keep thinking that, but try as hard as you can to keep up the sort of understanding we are building here. Stretch it out still further, if you can. The more open you are the more others will be open with you, within reason.’

He reached down to help them to their feet, but they stood up on their own and Eregriel gave him a little bow of appreciation, greeting, parting, continuation. Síreth smiled at him and he back at them. Then they all went out to do their part in packing up for the day’s ride eastward.

Soto

I’ve tried to institute a policy of explaining roughly what any significant stretches of Mattogó dialogue mean or are getting that either in the narration or through having Síreth interpret; I hope it works all right in this chapter and does not come across as too obtrusive.

My touchstones for this chapter were road narratives of the kind that Japanese literature has a lot of, particularly in the late medieval and early modern periods, which are in Japan very roughly 1300 to 1900 or so. I’m actually not as familiar with these road narratives as I am with certain other kinds of Japanese literature that I’ve been mining for structural and thematic elements in this fic so far, but I decided that I wanted to do something with them in the interests of making this part of the storyline more coherent and enjoyable than it would be otherwise—the experience of travel is something that I have a hard time really communicating in my writing without borrowing heavily.

Another thing I have a hard time with: Expository dialogue that doesn’t rely on certain speech conventions using which would make the characters’ registers seem far more synchronic than I want them to. I’m afraid I’ve had to resort to the infodump tactic in this chapter and may next chapter as well.

This chapter took a very long time to write and post. I've just finished my bachelor's degree and my personal life is very touch-and-go right now.

Read Soto

They came at last to a hill that had a sweeping look out over the sea, and Síreth was uncomfortable to find that her heart was sore. The whole journey from Lothlórien had taken seventeen days now of the three weeks that they had been expecting, and from what she could tell of the way Hlocpath spoke to his men they seemed to be on time at least as far as he was concerned, but Sogdash was a little more worried and his worries were starting to come off on Eregriel, who had a way of absorbing such things like leavened bread dipped in rancid milk. So it was that Síreth, heart sore at Eregriel’s worries, came to her on that spring night on that hilltop, where she sat with her long legs dangling out over a precipice, looking out over the sweep down to a narrow pebbly beach and the choppy waters.

‘No Belegaer, this,’ Síreth said, by way of a joke.

‘That’s not funny,’ Eregriel said. She pulled her knees up from the brink and wrapped her arms around them, and leaned forward to take on the character of those pictures of the children quick in their mother’s wombs that one found in the anatomical textbooks. The silver glinting on her ring finger was against the green-white of her moonlit sleeve. The tangles of her dark hair went down through the light almost until they touched the rock’s white surface. Síreth, seeing as she stood there a flurry of silent sobs, knelt beside her and reached out around her shoulders. She pulled her from the side into a light embrace and waited for a roiling moment before she cleared her throat and spoke.

‘As we have come so far away,’ Síreth said, ‘on my account and ours, I admit—I know that there is not much to be had for you alone on this journey, as there is for me alone and for us together, and I know well why that is a hard burden for you to shoulder—I wonder if it may help you knowing that very soon we will come to Nacatscuni no Míaco, the Capital of the East, and there may at least rest from so long a travel as this.’ Put that way it seemed almost meaningless, destitute of any real consolation and obviously at that, and she felt worse after she had said it, and hoped only that she had not made matters worse. But Eregriel nodded, her chin digging lightly into Síreth’s sloping shoulder, and pulled her closer, and it was just as well.

After a few minutes Eregriel spoke. ‘I fear that we have come far away, not only from our home of these past short years that we have so far seen, but also from a home of much longer years that we hope and expect may come,’ she said. ‘I am growing impatient to see any of this new way of looking at things that we were hoping to find out here, among these people. Sharing stories with Sogdash, that is one thing, but it was something more and more personal than that, wasn’t it, what we decided to come out here seeking?’

‘Of course it was,’ said Síreth.

And for that reason—and it was plain as the moon hanging enormously overhead them that Eregriel knew this just as well as Síreth did, and it was plain that it was like a sword through Eregriel’s heart also—far less than wider-ranging stories could they expect simply to be told what to do about that most pertinent and precious and personal thing of theirs. There was a thick ache thereat, working its way up through her, and feeling that ache she was moved with a sudden rush of overwhelming pity not only for Eregriel’s doubtless similar and possibly stronger ache but for a sort of echoing pain, a sort of reciprocity of substituted agony, that she felt suspiring in the land around them, felt the way she had not felt any such thing suspiring in the Brown Lands, indeed almost since they had passed beyond sight and sound and evidence of Anduin. It is piteous! this land at the edge of what they called the Middle Country was saying to her. It is piteous, poor and piteous! Cawaisó de awareppoi, cawaisó de awareppoi des…! But the voices telling her this were joyful in their telling, like it was a game, this life of hers, in which they had gained some amused participation.

*

The next day they moved closer to what was called the Outermost Wall. It was difficult to speak of these Walls for the men with whom they were travelling, used as they were to the wide open skies and steppes of the wild North-East below the Iron Hills, but Sogdash, he who among them best knew the Capital and its surrounding lands, tried to explain as best he could, although Síreth, bone-tired, and Eregriel, still doleful, had to give all they had simply to be able to listen well enough.

‘There are eight Walls surrounding the Capital. Cabé—you could say it is a term of ceremony and specified use not in the usual way, since it does not mean necessarily what you or I might mean when talking about a wall. The four innermost are entire actual walls that surround the Imperial Palace and various parts of the Capital; then there is the wall that protects the area between the Capital and its port; then two rings of defensive forts around the Capital; and then there is the outermost Wall, which we will be within by sundown if we do not meet with any mishap. That is the boundary of Nacatscuni.’

Sogdash said that Nacatscuni was about fifty to eight leagues from edge to edge, broader from west to east than it was north to south; he said that the land through which they were now passing was tributary to the Emperor and was called Wa. Wa was an empty land and sweet, its hills skirting the Sea of Rhun like green pennons, and it was up over those hills in a series of listing tablelands that once there had been a culture from which the books that she had studied for Mattogó had come. On that day only twice did they come upon any of the Children of Ilúvatar—Men, both of them, of similar stature and ilk to Sogdash and Hlocpath and the others if a bit sallower, their eyes turned up in expectant curiosity. The first was a boy harassing a dog with a stick by the roadside where it ran below a place where houses stood on terraces cut out of the hillsides and the hills and trees complained in resigned irritation. The second was a couple, man and woman, approaching that strange territory of old age, who sat at a little way-station where Hlocpath stopped to pick up some provender for the horses, a cluster of buildings along the very brink of the Sea, their roofs pitched at steep and odd angles, their floors melting and cascading into each other through sliding and ambiguous doorways. They sat on their knees with cups in their hands steaming, of aromatic tincture of leaves, ‘as the periannath are said to drink’, Eregriel said. They sat on their knees sipping from the hot cups, and when Síreth and Eregriel came up and stood nearby them waiting for Hlocpath to return, they nodded with the considered politeness that Síreth had learned was the custom here, and they spoke of past possibilities.

‘Hisashiburi des wa,’ the woman said. ‘Cono mitshi iósé ga arucu no wa hontó ni hisashiburi des wa. ‘Itshidai no tenmé no utshi ni sore wo miru deshó to omotta coto wa nu…!’

‘She says it has been a very long time, Eregriel, since any of the Elder Kindred came by this way,’ Síreth said, ‘and she did not expect to see so much in her lifetime.’

‘How much do these people know of the policy of the Emperor?’ Eregriel asked.

All right. That was right. Since they were getting closer, it would be good for Síreth to start taking care to more regularly ask such things of the people that they met. The man said something inconsequential and then the couple turned back, and Síreth nodded as they had, and from the spot on the ground where they stood by the horses reached up to peer at them over the wall supporting the raised floor of the house where they sat drinking.

‘Tennó heica ni taishi toshté meshidasareta cara Míaco ni icimas,’ she said, knowing painfully that there were politeness markers here that she was missing.

‘Aa,’ said the man, ‘sasuga tennó heica no sésacu.’

‘That is very like—as expected of the Emperor’s policy, that he would call somebody like me as an ambassador, Eregriel,’ Síreth said.

‘Caco ni, oshinabete mitsumitsu, shisuca ni, cono cuni ni sundéta. Na no ni, Cabicusai no Toshi ni modoranu tame nareba…’

‘He says that in the past people lived more or less quietly and secretly in this country,’ said Síreth. ‘But now, it is…something different, I assume, he thinks is necessary in order not to return to the ‘Putrid Years’. Or perhaps that is an official policy that he is citing. It is what he is saying in any case.’

‘Sudé ni shte, otsha wo nondemitara dó des ca?’

‘He asks, in the meanwhile, why don’t we try joining them in—that drink that they are having.’

Eregriel smiled at the couple—it did not seem forced, at worst a little awkward and out of place, out of balance, torn out of the moorings of some actual understanding, but at the same time longing, powerfully desiring a togetherness that would be painfully far from that of the hope for the West that Eregriel feared, it seemed, was already becoming too tenuous. She smiled but then she turned around and marked right back over to where the horses were, her body framed against the lightly chopping waves of the windy white-silver sea. Was it the Breath of Arda that she was following, the Breath of Arda out there for her to follow? The strange pink trees in the courtyard thought so; they told her so, almost insistent about it.

‘Tabi ni tsutsucesaru wo enu,’ she said softly, with some sort of sadness towards them—she could not help but continue this journey, was the construction that she was using. She had been told that this evening once they entered the country proper Sogdash would tell them some things very important to the last few stages of their progression up to Míaco. Up to the Capital—that was how they always put it. It was not a heart for them, as Caras Galadhon was; it was a head. As with Caras Galadhon there were things directing about it and things sustaining about it, but rather than directing because it sustained, it sustained because it directed. Or that was, anyway, the account of how the people of Nacatscuni proper saw it that Sogdash had been giving them. Yes, yes, he would tell them much more important and serious matter in the evening when they would bivouac just within the borders.

Síreth stood out on the roadside looking over the waters. There was just a little bit of a drop-off here, barely a yard of scree-slope down into the water; this was with the tide high and the waves rising but even so Síreth imagined that from time to time this section of the road must flood, and leave travellers stranded for days, even, perhaps, at way-stations like this. It was an uncomfortable thought. The wind was stiff and salty. Yes, all the salt of Celduin and Carnen and the rivers to the south and east that they were passing over built up here; it was truly the Sea in that respect at least, lacking any outlet other than itself.

Eregriel too had come out here from where the horses were. Her eyes were fixed afar off, and Síreth took her hand and squeezed.

‘I would like to drink some of that tincture,’ Eregriel said softly, ‘when we have time—and learn to make it, even, if I can.’

‘Maybe the grains they eat in these parts, too?’ Síreth suggested.

‘Even better,’ Eregriel said. She turned with a smile. Her lips brushed up against Síreth’s cheek, just for a moment, and then they turned back to the land and ran back in to see how Hlocpath and Sogdash were doing.

*

The passage of the Barrier of Wa was a small matter in the end. This Wall, such as it was, was called Iama, a name it was said of Oromë. The Emperor had recently changed the names of the systems of Walls to honour figures of worship, Aratar or analogues of Aratar, and there was dispute and discord over this, as Síreth might well have expected. Eregriel was very interested in investigating, interrogating, pulling and picking through and apart what these figures of worship were exactly, how they were worshipped, what was believed about them, what stories were told—all things that seemed a little out of place as they passed through the palisades along the road at what was called the Great Gate of Daté.

‘One thing that you should know,’ Sogdash told them as they passed away from the sea up towards a pass in the hills, up a well-travelled way between far towns of clustered timbers in fields that spread out amidst the sparse forests, ‘is that you will be hearing a lot of talk about the Emperor’s consort. Now it is up to you how much attention you would fain pay this talk but I should say what some of them are so that you do not believe you will have come into a herd of wild bulls unawares.’ Whence this herd of wild bulls? Síreth’s image in her mind was of a storming, clashing, crashing thing, something of that nature. That she supposed made sense enough—like the den of an adder, and she did not know if Sogdash would ever have seen an adder before.

‘People will often blame a consort for the failings of a ruler if they seem not to be in conformity with how that ruler is generally seen,’ Eregriel said softly. ‘People inclined to recriminate Melian, even, not only for leaving Doriath as has bothered you when we have talked about this in the past, but for matters that she tried to warn Thingol very much against. If that fades after a while we find the consort’s name pass mostly unremembered thereafter—Melian is an exception to this. It’s only a few consorts who have been better-loved, in our history. Míriel in the most ancient of times and few others.’ She turned her face to Sogdash and Síreth with a sharp grin on it through the rising wind. ‘I do not think that I will put stock overmuch in whispered words about the consort of a reforming ruler unless you, Sogdash, or somebody else in our confidence tells me that I should.’

Sogdash thought about this for a second and then laughed. ‘That is the way it is,’ he said. Eregriel did not seem to find this as funny as he did. ‘But I do think that Princess Saiaca is all right,’ he said. ‘Her name is Princess Saiaca and Hlocpath has reminded me that with ellith as with the daughters of Men indeed it is likelier than not her court that they would direct you to first.’

‘Her court?’ Síreth asked in sudden alarm. She had not heard about this before. She had her own court? Had it any power? Since when had this system been in place—and had the Lady and the Lord known about this? Had they, mightn’t they have sent a man with them? ‘I had never heard of such a division.’

‘Please,’ said Sogdash as they breasted the pass through the hills, ‘do not let it be cause for dole or anger. For this reason exactly His Majesty the Emperor I am sure will give Her Imperial Highness all the knowledge and power and honour that she may need to see this through—or he may simply break with the way these things have been done before and bring you into his own court.’ He looked from Síreth to Eregriel and saw that Eregriel was looking back at him with her eyebrows curled down sharply and her nostrils flared, her back high and orgulous. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘This isn’t the way where I am from but it is the sort of thing that people in the Capital put a lot of stock in. I am heartily sorry that this did not occur to me earlier.’

‘That’s all right,’ said Eregriel, slipping into a somewhat uncouth voice as she tugged at her horse’s reins.

‘Eregriel?’ Síreth said as Eregriel’s horse paced to a stop. ‘…what is the matter? Do you need to stop? Would you like some miruvor or lembas?’

Eregriel stood a little space but then cracked the rains and rode up to them, looking tired and a little lost, but eager, or something like eagerness anyway. ‘Things are all right,’ she said. ‘Absolutely all right.’

Síreth was not sure that she believed that but for now it was possibly best to let Sogdash go on.

‘Her Imperial Highness Princess Saiaca married the Emperor five years before he came to the throne,’ he said. ‘Since she was not of one of the Great Houses of the Palace it was thought at first that her children would not be able to inherit—that after the Now-Reigning Emperor the throne would pass to the child of an uncle or a cousin, a collateral line, or even perhaps a sister’s-son were he to have any. His Majesty Haruca the Elder had done away with that custom by which the Imperial House of Nacatscuni used to take many wives.’ Síreth heard Eregriel retching behind her; like a bard telling a story, in its excess she knew that it could not be real, but even so there was that feeling, an unease, as if they were frittering away the known constraints of their inability to talk the loremasters out of the circles that they had drawn around themselves only to find themselves in unknown constraints of downright evil custom. This was a fear that Eregriel knew far better than she did and she found herself shivering in irritation at something that was working its way around and around in her skin uncomfortably. She took a drink of miruvor herself and felt better as they went on. ‘That was a decision that met with a lot of anger—still more,’ said Sogdash, ‘when Haruca the Younger took the throne and within the week overthrew that law which said that his children would not inherit. He has one daughter, Princess Dshóruri—should his sisters not have sons, nor he one in the coming years, Princess Dshóruri indeed will be our Emperor. But there was an uprising against this by the Great Houses of the Palace and the other noble families that dwelt in the Capital. It was Princess Saiaca who ordered the lines of battle as the uprising was put down, and Princess Saiaca who sent the troops out beyond the Wall of Amesaburó to the castles where those nobles had repaired to after being driven out of the Capital.’

‘I see!’ said Síreth. ‘Well that is remarkable.’

‘What you will hear,’ said Sogdash, ‘or may, is that in the years since, while she has been controlling by and large the movement of coin and movement of troops within the country, she has been clearly favouring people of her family’s own station or stations like it—that is, the artisans within the Capital and some of the wealthier peasants without, that this is unjust and against the traditions, that she has colluded with her husband to favour tributaries and dominions in the North and far East over against the people of Nacatscuni proper, and that she ordered half of her handmaidens killed last year out of unjust suspicion of a plot against her. The first of these charges is true, the second depends entirely on one’s own beliefs, the third is false because His Majesty if anything has carried on the traditional favour shown to his own people only that ones living outside the Capital itself are higher in his regard, and the fourth is false because Lady Bíacuren was caught blade in hand and was known to be close to most of the others.’

‘A herd of wild bulls indeed,’ Síreth murmured. Was it so difficult for them to turn aside? Was it so difficult for this country to understand that joining in the Watchful Peace and the leaguer of the uttermost East and avoiding the sad disasters of previous centuries was for the best? She supposed she could not really begrudge them that; Gondor might hate it too, this notion, and they had suffered on Gondor’s account at least as much as Gondor had suffered on theirs.

‘Some will call her glorious, a hero of faith and justice, mystical, otherworldly, because she has directed public worship around new ends, closer to ends that may be familiar to you,’ Sogdash said. ‘This is probably not too much worth giving your consideration either, not because there is anything wrong with that way of looking at things but simply because you will probably not yourselves find it so. She is a leader of something that you already recognise, in contexts in which you might already recognise it or find it even perhaps mistaken. So you should not pay that much attention either unless it interests you to understand why the common people of the Capital believe as they do.’

‘It does,’ said Eregriel without hesitation, and Sogdash appeared surprised, but happy.

‘Very well,’ he said as the continued to descend into the country of great watery fields before them, terraced fields along long broad rivers, passing north past scattering towns to a spurred gullet of the coursing inland sea. ‘That being the case I would also note that any degree of closeness will not seem untoward here. It will be questioned why neither of you have husbands; you may feel free to say whatever you will as although the question is asked most excuses are, for foreigners, accepted.’ Síreth looked at Eregriel. Eregriel’s face was downcast. ‘In the Emperor’s dominions there are many kingdoms. There are some where women do not as a rule marry until much later than others; there are some in which a man may still take more than one wife or a wife more than one husband.’ Eregriel retched again; more subdued this time, it seemed real, and Sogdash with concern said ‘Tumshuc is not one of these but it is a land where a head of household is a mother’s oldest brother, not a father. There are lands where the line passes through the woman and lands where an estate’s inheritance is with the last-born rather than the first. There are lands where two of the same sex may be given in marriage and lands where their heads would have been lopped from their shoulders until the Emperor Hanasono decreed it otherwise. The people in the Capital understand all this. They have their own ideas—men and women to live separately, for the most part; visiting each other when married, with children living mostly with the mother and passing sometimes between; men as having authority, women having freedom of their own thoughts; the whole world lived within walls, mostly, rarely venturing out—and you will come to understand those as they understand others in their turn.’

‘I see,’ Eregriel said, her mind clearly in a state of tumult and unclearness.

‘There will be expectations that you will bow, in certain situations,’ Sogdash said. ‘There will not be expectations that you will respond to some of what people say to you in poetry—people will recognise that you do not speak the language well enough, certainly not the dialect of the Capital, which has some differences with the others—but you may be expected to understand it if others respond to you in poetry. Her Imperial Highness is from a literary family and should be happy to assign somebody to help you with that. You will be expected to…’

They passed on into that country of broad rivers and flat fields, a score in the surrounding hills with their sparse woods rising into fastness, and on the shore of the great inland sea the castles and turrets that surrounded a vast and colourful city began inexorably to approach them.