Strange Fates by PerpetuaLilium

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Teeming Faces

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

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’.

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