God, I Pity the Violins by StarSpray

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Chapter 2

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It was clear that Quynh had expected to find it easy to adapt to whatever changes the world had undergone in her absence—it was what she had been doing for centuries. But it was one thing to accept and adapt to the changes as they came, and quite another to wake up in a world utterly changed from the one you knew. So Maglor's lessons kept getting cut short when she lost her temper and stormed out of the room. Reading in particular was a large stumbling block. Quynh was not entirely illiterate, but she was not prepared for just how heavily the world now relied upon the written word. By contrast, things like plumbing and practical use of electric appliances came easily, and often with a great deal of delight. And alarmingly but not altogether surprisingly, she was very interested in the advancement of weapons technology. Maglor was distinctly lacking in that area of knowledge, and he had no real interest in fixing it.

"And what happens if you need to defend yourself, or your village?" Quynh demanded when he told her this.

"Defend the village from what?" Maglor asked. "There are hardly bands of marauders going around pillaging, these days." He paused. "Well, not in England, anyway."

"And yourself?" Quynh demanded.

"I defended myself against you rather well, and weaponless. But I am not a soldier or a warrior, I am a musician. I tossed my sword into the sea eons ago."

Quynh didn't flinch, but her eyes darkened. "That was a stupid thing to do." Maglor just shrugged, and distracted her from the subject by pulling up a world map, so she could be outraged at the geopolitical state of the world instead of at his lack of a fully-stocked armory.

The next day it rained, dark clouds rolling in off of the choppy sea. Maglor squinted out of the window and wondered if it was his imagination, or if some of the larger waves out at sea had arms and shoulders, and if the thunder sounded just a little like laughter. He hoped Norindo had found adequate shelter; the little dog had not come around that morning. Quynh kept away from the windows and huddled on the sofa beneath several afghans, with a mug of hot chocolate—at the moment her most favorite thing about the modern era—close at hand. Maglor went to boil water for athelas. "You keep boiling those leaves," Quynh remarked when he returned with a bowl into the parlor. "What are they?"

"Kingsfoil," Maglor said. "It is useful for calming the mind and spirit." As he spoke he set the bowl down near the mug of hot chocolate, so that its clear, clean scent could permeate the room. "Music helps also, I have found. Do you mind if I play?" Quynh might have nodded; it was hard to tell beneath the blankets.

He brought his driftwood harp into the parlor and set up by the window, where the rain lashed against the glass. It was an uneven and wild rhythm but Maglor had mastered it long ago. He picked out the notes to a song out of Númenor, that he had heard in Gondor soon after its founding, when he had wandered into its ports, wondering at the storms that had wracked the coast and brought a small fleet of ragged ships hurtling out of the West. It was a song to Uinen, a plea for her protection and mercy against the whims and violent delights of her husband. Maglor had no thought that Uinen might hear him, let alone answer—she was likely gone away back into the depths that were her own delights, or perhaps back upon the Straight Road to the Shadowy Seas or the shining Bay of Eldamar. But it was a good song, and he was in the mood for old things, out of a world long lost and forgotten.

Once that song was ended, his fingers kept playing of their own accord, other songs that he had neither thought of nor played for years beyond counting, forgotten until his fingers found the notes on the harp strings, and the words fell from his tongue almost unbidden. They were songs from the Elder Days, when the world was quieter and greener and, somehow, both bigger and smaller at once. He had not been young, even then, but now he began to truly feel his age, older than the hill upon which his little cottage stood, and weary, and aching with homesickness.

A result of speaking with Uinen, no doubt. Delayed a bit as he had focused all of his thought and attention on Quynh, but now rising up with a vengeance. He wanted to go home—but the mere thought reawakened other memories, and his left hand hurt as it had not hurt in many an Age. He flinched and his fingers fumbled on the harp strings, ending the music in a sudden discordant jumble of sound as he drew his hand back to his chest. He was vaguely aware of Quynh sitting up on the sofa and asking him something, but the roaring of the sea was suddenly in his ears, and the howling of the wind and the smell of smoke and sulfur and—

The warmth of steam on his face, and the smell of wind over the wide grasses of Lothlann cut through the memory. He inhaled deeply and blinked his eyes open, finding Quynh there with the bowl of water and athelas leaves held out in front of her. "What happened?" she asked, as Maglor took another breath. "Your hand…"

He looked down. The scars from the Silmaril had never really faded, in spite of his hand otherwise healing fully. Mostly they were just unsightly—but even then it was little effort to weave an enchantment of concealment about it, in addition to the other ways Maglor slipped through the world unnoticed. Now he shook his head as he rubbed at his palm with his other thumb. "It is an old injury," he said. The words came out shorter and sharper than he'd meant, but Quynh took no offense—but when she met his gaze her own dark eyes widened as she took several quick steps back. It seemed all of his usual cloaks had fallen away. Maglor looked away, catching sight of his own reflection, a ghostly image of the Eldar of ancient days, in the window panes, eyes burning with ancient Light. He closed his eyes and turned away.

Outside the rain lashed against him, and the wind whipped his clothes and his hair around him, almost howling in his ears. There was definitely laughter in it, a wild and joyful sound. Maglor walked to the top of the path leading down to the beach and stopped. The hill was not quite a cliff, but it was close. He stared down at the churning waters for a while, his mind whirling; he stood half in memory and half in the present, the smell of rain mixing with the smell of smoke, and the salt on this lips coming from both the sea and from blood. His fingernails dug into his palms, small pinpricks of pain that did little to ground him. He closed his eyes as the rain increased in intensity. Once upon a time he might have vented his frustration in trying to sing the storm away—but that way lay only exhaustion and madness, even if the storm was not directly conjured by Ossë.

Eventually the wind changed, and the rain began to lessen. The storm was moving away, down the coast and toward the open seas to the south. The tide was rolling out as well, leaving behind the beach below him strewn with flotsam and jetsam. He could see quite a bit of garbage, but also a fair amount of driftwood, which he collected out of long habit and the vague idea that he might make things out of it. Occasionally he did—one such sculpture had been a particular success, and bought him the cottage. Maglor wiped rain from his face and inhaled deeply the scents of wet soil and sand and salt. That did more to bring him back fully to the present than anything else, and he took a few more breaths before turning back to the house. He would go down to the beach after the rain ceased entirely.

Quynh was in the kitchen examining some of the cans he had in his pantry, and she gave him a rather unimpressed look when he came in, dripping all over the linoleum. "You're going to get sick," she said, "and I won't nurse you."

"I don't get sick," he said, as he started to make his way to the bathroom.

Quynh made a disbelieving noise. "You don't get sick and you don't grow old. Can you be killed at all?" she wanted to know, as she put the cans away.

"Slain ye may be, and slain ye shall be: by weapon and by torment and by grief; and your houseless spirits shall come then to Mandos. And so we were—most of us." And with that he escaped into the bathroom, where Quynh could not question him further, and turned the shower on to near-scalding temperatures. His palm throbbed once again as though the old hurt was awakened by the mere mention of the Doom, though it had long ago been put to rest.

The rain subsided by late afternoon, and as the tide went out Maglor grabbed a few trash bags and made his way down to the beach. Norindo appeared from somewhere, muddy and cheerful, to romp around his feet as he walked. Quynh followed behind, although she stayed far away from the water, back on the dunes. Maglor was surprised she even came down the hill, but the grim look on her face suggested that she did not like being afraid of anything, even something so worthy of it as the sea.

As storms usually did, this one had brought a great deal of flotsam and jetsam up onto the beach out of the deeps. Most was trash—bottles and cans and bags, and Maglor gathered as much of it as he could find, stuffing it into one of the trash bags to be dealt with later. The glass he did not put in the trash but instead moved to a miniature cove near to the path that led up to his cottage, where tide pools formed and where he could leave the jagged broken bottles to be washed by the waves and rubbed smooth by each other and the rocks to become round and smooth bits of sea glass. It took years, but he already had a lovely collection in a series of jars that he kept on the windowsill in the music room to catch the light. He had vague ideas of using them in a sculpture or something. Mostly he just liked the way they looked. Then he went back over the beach to find interesting shells and pieces of driftwood.

"You have a whole small building full of that already," Quynh said as she got to her feet to follow him back up the hill.

"Yes, I know." Maglor stacked the new pieces of driftwood outside in the new sunshine to dry. "None of them have spoken to me yet." Quynh squinted at him, evidently unsure whether he meant it literally or not. Maglor offered her a smile, and turned away to try to coax Norindo inside. It almost worked, until something in the garden caught his attention and he darted off, barking excitedly.

The rest of the afternoon and the evening passed uneventfully. Maglor continued to try to get Quynh interested in reading for its own sake, with limited success, although she seemed happy enough to listen to him read aloud. "Are all of these made-up stories?" she asked as she perused one of his shelves, picking books off of it based on the cover, more than the title.

"Over there, yes," said Maglor. "I have non-fiction on the other bookshelf, though I don't suppose you'll be terribly interested in biographies of Mozart, or books on art history. Some of them are a bit dense."

"Yusuf would," Quynh murmured. She pulled a book down, seemingly at random and frowned at the cover. "Shakespeare? But he didn't write books, he wrote plays."

"And a fair amount of poetry," Maglor said. "You're holding a collection of his sonnets. Though mostly people nowadays know him as one of the most famous English playwrights of all time. I just recently saw a production of As You Like It in London." He paused. "Did you…know William Shakespeare?"

Quynh snorted. "No. We went to a few performances by the Lord Chamberlain's Men—the funny ones." She glanced up at Maglor, eyebrow arched. "Did you?"

He grinned. "We met once when I passed through Stratford-upon-Avon, and had a lovely chat about poetry. That was still early in his career. I did see many of his troupe's performances at the Globe, before I departed for the Americas."

"We may have been there at the same time," Quynh said.

"The world is, at times, very small," said Maglor. He watched Quynh replace the book of sonnets and peruse the rest of the shelf. "Have you dreamed of your old companions?" he asked after a few moments. The idea that they all dreamed of one another when apart was more than a little intriguing to him.

"We only dream of each other until we meet the first time," Quynh said. "But…there are two new ones. One is a man and the other a young girl—very young, very new. The man, Booker, is in Paris. The girl is Nile…she is with Andromache. But I cannot tell where."

"Do you suppose they are also dreaming of you?" Maglor asked. Quynh nodded. "So either you go to them or wait for them to come here. This Booker does not sound terribly hard to find—what's he doing in Paris?"

Quynh pulled down a book as she wrinkled her nose. "Drinking, mostly." She put the book back and took down another. "I don't know this word. Hobbit?"

"That's an enjoyable tale," said Maglor.

"But what is a hobbit?" Quynh asked as she brought the book over to him.

"Listen and find out," he said as he opened the book, thinking of the much older copy tucked away safe in a chest, wrapped up carefully in cloth and in spells of preservation, written in letters and language now forgotten by all but a handful of the Quendi who still walked in the world.

Quynh was, in spite of herself, delighted by the story. They were up most of the night because she insisted that Maglor finish reading it. And then the next morning she was humming the tra la la lally song. Maglor knew many more verses to it, of course, and he taught them to her as they sat in the sunshine in the garden with their breakfast. Afterward, Maglor said, "I need to go down into the village today to pick up a few things. Would you like to come?"

It was a bright day, cloudless after yesterday's storm, which seemed to have washed the world clean and left it fresh and fragrant, all the colors just a little brighter than before. The villagers were all out and about, many of them preparing for the upcoming Midsummer celebrations. Coming out of the little shop with their arms full of groceries, Maglor and Quynh were intercepted by the librarian, Mrs. Adams, who greeted them with a beaming smile and eagerly introduced herself to Quynh, before turning to Maglor to tell him about an auction that was going to be held to raise money for some local youth programs, the details of which escaped Maglor. "…and I know you dabble a bit in sculpture, isn't that right? So I thought I'd give you a pamphlet—here, I'll just tuck it in this back, shall I? And if you have any bits or bobs lying around that you'd be willing to donate to the cause, do let me know. You can bring anything down to the library. And of course I hope you'll come down to the fete! There's going to be a pie contest and live music—young Ted Livingston is really very talented on the saxophone—and games and—oh, and a raffle!"

"Thank you, Mrs. Adams," Maglor said, seizing a moment when she paused for breath. "I'll certainly see if I have anything suitable for the auction."

Mrs. Adams beamed at him and thanked him profusely, and then as Maglor managed to extricate himself and Quynh from the conversation she added, "Oh! An acquaintance of yours is in town, at the Livingstons' bed and breakfast. Dora said he was asking about you and the cottage at breakfast this morning."

"Oh," Maglor said. "Thank you for letting me know, Mrs. Adams." He wasn't quite sure how to ask for more details about this supposed acquaintance—especially since Mrs. Adams clearly had the information second hand—so he could only watch her bustle off down the lane to find more people to recruit into helping with some aspect of the fete.

"Were you expecting someone?" Quynh asked, peering up at his face.

"No."

"Do you have many…acquaintances?" she asked as they set off up the hill back to Maglor's cottage.

"Yes, of course. But if you mean do I have any that would drop in unexpectedly—well, I can think of only one. And he would not bother to stay a night at the local bed and breakfast to fish for gossip about me before hand."

Quynh's eyes narrowed a bit. "Is he another like you?" she asked.

"Mm. Yes."

"How many of you are there?"

"Very few, and growing fewer by the century. Ours were the Elder Days, and they ended long ago."

"Are you going to tell me what you are?" Quynh asked.

Maglor laughed. "I told you last night, and this morning! Don't you remember? The book spoke of the Light-elves and the Deep-elves and the Sea-elves that crossed the Sea to Faerie in the West, before some came back into the Wide World? Those were the Deep-elves, who came back to fight a war that we might even have won, if we were not so foolish and prideful. How do you think I was able to teach you all those other verses of tra la la lally? It was always a silly and ridiculous song, but there was great power in such things, once upon a time. Its purpose was not only to make fun of visiting dwarves."

"But that was only a story!" Quynh protested.

"Yes," said Maglor, "it was a story—and it just so happened also to be a bit of history, so long forgotten that nowadays people read The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings and believe it only made-up."

"So…you are an elf," said Quynh.

"Yes." By this time they had made it into the kitchen, and Maglor was busy putting things into the fridge.

"One of the Deep-elves. What does that mean?"

"One could say it refers to the depths of our knowledge—we were always eager to learn all there was to learn. It could also be that we were always fond of digging into the earth to find gems and ores, for we were craftspeople, for the most part." He shut the fridge and frowned at the magnets on its doors. "We still are, I should say. I am the last of the Noldor remaining in the Wide World, as The Hobbit puts it, but the rest dwell safely back across the Sea in Faerie, going on making and learning and no doubt squabbling among themselves."

Quynh raked her fingers through her short hair, leaving it standing on end in unruly tufts. "I did not understand half of what you just said. Are you going to explain more plainly?"

"I don't know how," Maglor admitted, laughing, feeling a little helpless. "I've never had to explain it before to someone who didn't already at least partially understand."

"Well, why are you the only Deep-elf left?" Quynh asked. "Why didn't you go back to Faerie with all the others?"

Maglor shook his head and turned away from the silly cartoon dog magnet he had been staring at without really seeing. His hand twinged. "Some Exiles are not permitted ever to return home," he said. "If you want to read about it, I have a copy of the Quenta Silmarillion somewhere." Quynh made a frustrated noise. "It doesn't really matter." This made her snort, clearly disbelieving. "I was thinking of lasagna for—" Maglor cut off at the sound of a knock on his front door. Quynh went very still.

It was probably only Daeron, Maglor told himself as he made his way to answer the door. Only if it was just Daeron why did he feel so nervous? There was a knot in the pit of his stomach and the hair on the back of his neck was standing on end, his instincts all screaming that it was not Daeron come bearing a bottle of wine and a notebook full of musical notations he wanted another opinion on. But he could not imagine why.

It was not Daeron at the door. Instead it was a mortal man, with dark skin and close-cropped dark hair, dressed in neat slacks and a button down shirt and sensible shoes. His smile was probably meant to be disarming. "Can I help you?" Maglor asked. He heard Quynh moving about behind him, and could only hope that she hadn't armed herself.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Smithson," said the man. He held out a hand. "My name's Copley. I think we need to talk."