Pillar of Stillness by PerpetuaLilium

Chapter 1

The wind was rising, and the sea lapped against the high slopes and surged over the low slopes. Rough were the rocks on the soles of her feet, rough and already a little slippery here and there with the surging turning apocalyptic foam, but her eyes were open and her heart was pounding and fixed in her mind was the idea of mercy. Behind her were the hills and vales and cities, drifting now amidst the weeds and welter of the depths of the sea or plunging headlong into the yawning fissures of the breaking world; ahead of her was the holy mountain, still and unchanging under the press of the inrush, and as she picked her way up over rockslides it filled her gaze, dark and ponderous.

            Still below her burned the offal of the sacrifices. The whole of the island was a sacrifice now, and as she wildly scanned the recesses her mind looking for some way not to pity it, some resignation to this fate or some sour grapes for that the King’s Men surely had gone into the abyss, she could find nothing to harden her heart, only a twisting and twisted sadness and a wild impetus for salvation. It was personal, selfish in a way, but, she tried to convince herself, not selfish for her own sake but for that, as a symbol, of her history and her people. Her father was dead, and her not-her-husband was gone into the furious West, and her sisters had still been burning on that profane altar when the waves had broken over it, and they all tumbled together through the watery wild that had so been their undoing, yes, from the time of Tar-Aldarion until now. Yet she remained, even if only for this moment, remained as the sea was closing in, remained with open eyes that had never been occluded even in the split-instants in which Amandil’s had failed him, remained earthbound and rooted, clinging to these dubious rocks.  Perhaps it was as Erendis had said two thousand years ago. Yes, clinging to the rocks against the raging storm—after all, she had her pride. It was not much, was perhaps not even virtuous, but she bore it still in her heart and kept it held down as hard as she could so that with unquaking hands she could offer it up to Heaven.

            There was a stitch in her side, tearing into her like a scalpel, a syringe, a sacrificial dagger, and she divined from the acrid smell amidst the salt that the wetness in her skirts was not entirely water. The summit was still at least five hundred yards away and the path was getting difficult to make out as the detritus of the lands below were carried up to crash against the mountainside. Her voice might no longer serve her to offer up the prayers at this rate, no matter how sharp and willing and still and wary her mind and her heart remained. Life was trickling from her hands where she had slipped and fallen running from the ruin of the city, still hoping then that she could pray for a more general mercy, and from her feet where she had torn them on these crags, when a thick-soled sandal had slipped and fallen away, skittering down the slope as she in a wild moment of young delight had run after it almost into the advancing waves.

            She had no idea when it had ended, really no idea since when it had been all over. Desire for imitation of the Elder Kindred—yearning for immortality over the Western horizon, riches over the Eastern and Southern and Northern—pillage and lawlessness, faithlessness and hate. Once even the man who was not her husband had been there for her, would have been here with her had he been by now as he had been then, when they had sat in the plum trees in the garden, gobbling down the carmine-purple flesh, the juices trailing over the soft skin of pointed chins, giving thanks for what bounty there was, wishing in their young hearts but not grasping out with ragged hands for more. Once, as the wise-women had said of old, they had been naked and shining in the light of the new sun, before the Lords of Darkness, and the flights to the West, and the swords, and the ships, and the armaments and armadas. Once they had all been Middle Men.

Her breath groaned without voice. The wind took her voice and scattered it. Her feet only trod. Her feet only pounded. Below her was solid earth and around her the shifts and whirlwinds.

            Hills were for quarries. Rivers were to furnish water or to turn wheels. Trees were for boards. Women for…

            The mountain was for itself only, itself and Eru, Who was its ground and lynchpin and fixture, Who existed it.

            She was still about four hundred and fifty yards from the summit, she reckoned, when she realised, with a sort of cool sadness about this understanding, that she had never once, never for an instant, believed in Eru.

            She was four hundred and thirty yards, or four hundred and twenty, when she realised with a delirious giggle that it didn’t matter. That was not what it was to be Faithful.

            And after all, the mountain was still here. Eru was there at the other end of her voice.

She reached out her voice even though it could not be heard, reached it out with the courtiers and the townsfolk, the shepherds and the woodsmen, the fishers and the ostlers—the sailors, even the sailors—behind her in mute chorus as they fell. As they all must fall, crying out loud, screaming for dear life, screaming out in faith through death towards the bottom of that abyss, the final end of the final descent that awaited them. She reached out her voice to what was waiting there and she made it exist within the anatomy of her throat and brought it down across the anatomy of her eye. Within her mind in this moment she brought Eru into something like being as if in thanks for the idea that He had created her.

            Her hands and feet were chapped and cracked and the tips of her toes and fingers torn. Her gown was ruined, her diadem long-gone, the consort’s diadem made in mockery of the regnant’s crown. There were three hundred and fifty or four hundred yards to go and to the West a great cloud had risen, and below it the universe warping. All around her the overwhelming torrent. All around her the idea of death. A father and son battered almost into unrecognisability in the roughness of the currents’ music. The broken-off top of a monumental spire. A shipwreck. An effusion of books from some library whose lore haply would remain in the darkness of the seabed forever. Everything was surging around the mountain and the final realisation hit her. She was learning all sorts of things about herself to-day. The final realisation. She laughed. She would be unable to reach the holy place, no matter how hard she tried, because in the joints of her legs there was something out of balance, in the joints of her knees something knocked awry earlier in the scrambling climb. She would be unable and so she had to try as hard as she could.

            She kept climbing. Eru was speaking to her in every breath. Nonexistence was calling her name louder than the launch of a Westbound cruise missile, the brass of a military band.

            Here it was, for the men, the Númenor they had wanted, falling, falling. Would Erendis be grimly happy in the Timeless Halls to see that, if nothing else, she had been proven right?

Númenor fell to the bottom of the sea and beyond and Míriel climbed in desperation beyond despair, with strength beyond hope, with that which she had found years ago and was only understanding now. It had been with her after her father’s death, in the descent into living nightmare that was her cousin’s reign, in the small-seeming defiances, the refusal to take to his bed, the refusal to surrender her library, the refusal to answer to ‘Ar-Zimraphel’. Refusal refusal refusal. It made what she had agreed to seem paltry in comparison.

            What she agreed to had been to stay alive, and it had not seemed like a small sacrifice. How many times had she indulged in the cockles of her heart a private grotesquery, a fantasy of marching straight into the temple, straight up to the foetid altar, taking up one of the daggers, slashing Gorthaur’s filthy throat no matter that it would probably do no good, and ramming its point into her breast herself?

            No, far greater had been the suffering that she had accepted instead. And for what?

            No, best not to try to answer that now. She was here. She was here. She could see this through in the end. Praise to Eru. Praise to the inrush of that very authority that was tearing down her world. –Yet praise to the ground beneath her feet as He took it from her inch by inch. –Praise to the wave. –Praise to the Land of the Star. –Praise to life and death, to living and dying keeping the Faith, Faith beyond…—Whatever she had gone through then, once again, there it had been! And she would keep coming back to that. When she watched the sacrifices. When she watched that man haul people up before him for reading books in the tongue in which they had been written and turning them over—the people and the books—to suffering and death at hands that there was absolutely no reason whatever to give any kind of trust. She had held some hope when he had sailed to subdue Sauron. She had thought that might teach him something about the way real evil was, the path down which he had been propelled since far too young an age. She had longed to tell him so, to tell him that she could no longer even recognise him, not see the slightest glimmer of the boy with whom she had played hide-and-seek and japed on their bumbling old fathers to be rounded on with bumbling old good-natured laughs. It had not been so. He had learned. She had got at least that part of what she had hoped for.

            No, what had sustained her was not hope. All hope had gone and gone early and without consolation. Everything that had been happening since then had bored deeper and deeper into her heart and ripped out, root and branch, any chance she ever possibly could have had of believing.

            No, not that. It was otherwise—something else, that which was beyond the loss of hope, beyond what had ripped apart her happiness, beyond the fact of the surging disaster. That was what crushed and sustained and terrified and delighted her now.

            Yes, she was the last, was she not? The last, the last. If she went now might it end? Might the seabed stop sliding, the waves stop surging, the world stop breaking, the light stop dying? Might there be once again some rock to which she might affix herself, rock below silt, silt below water, fathom and fathom, almost a league?

            Yes, that might be so. Whether or not she would fall—that was out of her hands. What remained for her was small, pitiable as she hoped for some pity, and its presence was as much mercy as hope allowed. Beyond hope she raised her voice to beg more. The wind carried it away and the waves surged free. She clambered up a boulder and sat down, her eyes still fixed on the summit as she shouted for joy. Then she turned and with the determination of thirty-three centuries met the idea of Uinen’s and Ossë’s embrace.