Strange Fates by PerpetuaLilium

---

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.

---

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?’