The Brides of Death by heget

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The Brides of Death

Nóm has many questions, but he never asks about the wreath Andreth wears in her hair, the white berries of the mistletoe, the needles of the yew, the star-like purple nightshade flowers, and the white clusters of celery or carrot in place of the water dropwort. White flowers and white berries are popular to make into flower wreathes to crown a head, and the bright purple and yellow of the wise-woman’s flowers show dramatically against her dark hair. Perhaps he thinks they were chosen for their beauty. It is the same wreath that Adanel wears, and every Wisewoman before her, the mistletoe and yew and many changing flowers. Andreth weaves in the bright yellow flowers of the golden chain tree, for they are easy to find and pair nicely.

The dangers of the starving years on grass peas, how fearful her people were when they no longer had even the vetches with their tiny blue flowers to survive on, are long gone. Now only the animals eat it, mixed in with rich grains, fat off the summer grass in the highlands. That her people even have cattle and herd animals is thanks to the generosity and protection of Nóm, of Lord Finrod. But no longer do they fear the wasting paralysis from the only food that would grow in famine and drought, even if Adanel adds their tiny flowers to her own wreath in remembrance.

Andreth touches the wreath and wonders if he does not know all are deadly to eat, but then he is an elf. Perhaps he knows and says nothing, as all his kindness.

Or perhaps elves are like birds, that some can eat safely the berries of what would kill cattle or men. Yet the stories say the mistletoe and yew and spindle with its bright pink flowers and bright orange seeds are the elven trees, that along with the star purple nightshades and bell-like muted purple belladonnas they are the first gift from the forest ghosts. She has told Nóm of how her people first met elves long before entering Beleriand, the shy and strange Avari and Silvan as they journeyed west, and how at first her people had mistaken them for the spirits of trees walking about under shadow and leaf. Nóm had smiled then, and whispered the secret of the Tree Shepherds in her ear. She did not tell him that Aegnor had already spilled that knowledge to her, and taken her to highest crest near Lake Aeluin so he could point out the faintly moving crown of one of the Ents strolling among the pines in the far distance. She told Nóm of how her people had also mistaken the elves for the ghosts of their departed ancestors returned to see and help the still-living.

It had been a comfort to think the elves were but dead spirits of men. Some lore holds they still are, only born with souls cleansed of the memories of their human lives. If this is so, and Nóm is true in that men’s souls are to leave the confines of the world while elves are trapped until its death, then she wonders if the lore of elves as reborn souls of men would be so because they clung too hard to some part of their past life, or as a punishment. Andreth knows this belief is false, is heresy, but it would have been a comfort, would have been a hope.

The elves of the trees and dark shadows had rarely ventured beyond those trees, but they had taught her people to speak and to sing. They had offered gifts, none more precious than the first.

Nóm said that in the wisdom of the elves, instructed to them by the Great Powers of the West, that mortality was the Gift of Men bestowed upon them by the One. Andreth hides her laugh as the yellow and purple flowers sway above her brow, the white berries fall from the wreath to her lap.

The first gift the elves gave her people was the kindness of death, the release from torment.

All Wisewomen wear an imitation of a bridal wreath twined with pieces of death, not to allude to their own mortality, but because they are the holders of lore, and the death brides are their true mothers. There are no death brides in Beleriand, not since the last, but the Wisewomen remember them and their sacrifice, even as their stories are forgotten in the years of freedom and peace.

When men had first awaken, and the Great Evil had found them, the Great Liar had turned them from the voice of the One. He sent his envoys among the people, his cruel overlords and their orcs. He raised those among the people that offered him devotion and enslaved the rest to work the fields. There had been a great river where men had awoken, or two. The stories agree on the existence of a river, and the houses of mud-brick baked under a hot sun. The stories tell of how the river or rivers had emptied into a sea, and that it would flood irregularly, sometimes barely covering the fields in black loam, or rush in with a sudden onslaught of water as the Great Enemy tried to silence the murmur of the voice of the Lord of Water, wiping away men and fields and houses. The land had been flat, but mountains in the distance, home of the dwarves and elves, were echoed by great piles of brick and earth. Andreth does not remember their purpose in the stories, if the great structures were built as palaces or tombs or just monuments the Enemy demanded to assuage his pride. The stories are clear about the envoys that came each year, mounted on giant wolves and horses clothed in black, envoys with swords and orcs and chains to pick a young man or woman from each village, a sacrifice that was never seen again. Every year the envoys came, during the last harvest, and every year they left with a sacrifice. Sometimes the envoys lied and said the young woman, for the stories stressed as years went on it was women nearing marriageable age that were preferred, were being gathered to be presented as brides to the Great Master, or to join the wives of the overlords. They wanted the prettiest and healthiest, and they did not care if the woman had a husband or child already. Adanel believes the creation of orcs is behind these stories somehow. Andreth prays not. A great honor to be chosen, lied the envoys, but over time the people of the villages learned not to trust. Each time the sacrifices had wept and begged not to be taken, their families had protested, and the envoys took them away anyway. They never returned.

A particularly cruel envoy that came each year to one village would laugh as he rode in, his eyes shining like a cat. He would demand a feast before he left, a mockery of a wedding feast with the chosen victim beside him in the seat of honor dressed in her finest clothing, gorging himself on the bowls of beer and grain and slaughtered calf. Once he and his troops finished the feast, sated on the food the village tried to store away to survive the oncoming winter, he would throw the chosen sacrifice on the saddle in front of him and ride off laughing over the sound of her tears. On the last day of harvest, the village would prepare and sing funeral songs for last year’s victim. They knew from other villages that trying to hide potential sacrifices would just bring an army to raze the entire village, or salt sown into their fields. But when the laughing envoy came, the person he chose and dragged away in chains did not cry. In stony silence her family watched, and her brothers did not protest as the orcs and evil men threatened with their blades. Throughout the feast the young woman stared up at the sky, avoiding the sneers of the soldiers, the crude jests of the orcs, and mounting frustration of the laughing envoy as he was ignored in the only way the villagers knew how to defy him. “I will take you to the feet of the Great Master, and you will not be silent then,” threatened the envoy. But the young woman only swallowed the leaves in her mouth, pulled a purple flower from the crown that had been placed in mockery on her brow, and waited. The dull sensation of pain was all she focused on, not the fear of the fate awaiting her, and her eyes were as bright and unfocused as the stars behind the clouds.

Her brothers had gone to the ghosts of the ancestors high in the mountains, up where the dark pines blocked the harsh sun, to beg for a way to escape the dark god and deny his envoys their sacrifice. Through the night they waited, heads bowed in desperation, and when they woke at their feet were plants to cause pain and death. Rings of yew needles, white berries of mistletoe, nightshade and dropwort and spindle and belladonna and vetch and golden chain, all were gathered in neat circles like the rings of mushrooms. This was the offer to the family that begged a salvation for members taken by evil. Into the food that was served during that feast, hidden in the boughs of flowers on the table, and woven into the wreaths on brows were mixed the poisonous plants. Hidden among the ripe berries were the white mistletoe, among the wild carrot was the marsh-grown dropwort, belladonna and nightshades next to columbine and innocent scabious flowers. It would not stop the envoy from returning the following year on the last harvest to claim a new victim, but the orcs he arrived with were different and his face did not smile. Coldly a daughter of the victim’s family, cousin of the unsmiling girl last year, said that she would be this year’s chosen, and she hid the stems to black and white berries behind her, licking the bitter taste from her tongue. Through the feast that followed she hid her grimaces of pain, and the envoy mistook signs of her distress for fear of him and his great wolf that feasted on the still-dying calf before them. The animal’s painful cries and the wolf’s snarls were the only sounds during the feast, for the villagers watched in solemn anticipation, and the jesting envoy was troubled.

"If you displease me and my master, I shall return with fire and swords, and this village will be no more. Nothing will grow in your fields; no one will remember your names to wail them through tears."

"I go willing," said the young woman, "eager to be his bride," and her face was as pale as the dress she wore.

She died on the journey to the great hand-built mountains, and the envoy cursed and whipped his great wolf and denounced the frail bodies of men and their freedom of death.

The following year he arrived on the first harvest of the season, anger dark on his brow. The sister of the girl from last year, her hair combed up in braids twined with white mistletoe and her eyes unnaturally wide, smiled at the envoy. “Your bride is here,” she said, “though you are too early for a proper feast. We do not wish to disappoint the Great Master, so we will provide what we can.” Her smile was mocking and bitter, and she held up a skein of beer laced with honey from azalea flowers. With a laugh she drank deep, and shouted, “Come, I wish to share my laugh with your master.” The envoy threw her onto his saddle and rode away without a word.

That night the village packed what few belongings they could, watching to see if the envoy returned before the dawn. As the other villagers harvested in their fields, waiting for the envoys to come while stocking up on the poisonous flowers and yew needles to weave and hide in the clothing of the chosen sacrifices, this village left the crops to rot, only the tiny vetch-flowers to sprout next year before the orcs razed it with fire and plowed it with salt. Over the mountains they fled, blessing the courage of the girls that had walked unflinchingly to death, defying the Great Enemy with crowns of flowers.

The sisters had a young brother, grandfather or great-grandfather to Balan the Old. Andreth thinks that’s what the stories tell, for Bëor would be still too young to have been born in the first cities of men. There is no memories of their names, the sacrificial ones, only their songs of farewell. But the Wisewomen remember and honor them.

Nóm thinks Andreth is unmarried, but in her darkest moments she thinks she married death many years ago. She is waiting for his wolf to come so she may laugh in the enemy’s face. She recalls Adanel’s story, that once men lived forever like elves, before the Great Liar convinced them to turn away, to build great mountains in his worship and sacrifice their children for his desires. Andreth wishes she could hang a white or yellow flower across his iron crown, slip poison into his drink, make him sleep forever. The Enemy cannot die, alas.

But he cannot follow men when they die or hold their souls to the wretched earth.

The Gift of Men, Andreth thinks, as she flicks a white berry into the fire.

Chapter End Notes

The idea is inspired by the "Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth" - especially the rejected "Tale of Adanel" in HoMe X :

"...And we did his [Morgoth's] bidding, and more than his bidding; for anything that we thought would please him, however evil, we did, in the hope that he would lighten our afflictions, and at the least would not slay us. For most of us this was in vain. But to some he began to show favour: to the strongest and cruellest, and to those who went most often to the House. He gave gifts to them, and knowledge that they kept secret; and they became powerful and proud, and they enslaved us, so that we had no rest from labour amidst our afflictions.")

A relatively common twist to stories about maidens sacrifices to dragons is where the victim is dosed with opium or poison to dull away the pain and/or weaken the dragon so the knight can slay it afterwards. Combined with thoughts about the Athrabeth and what the discussions before the one recorded would have been led to this story.

Nóm of course is the name the People of Bëor called Finrod out of respect (and probably affection), meaning Wisdom in their tongue. Adanel is Andreth's teacher, a fellow Wisewoman of the House of Marach. Treebeard mentions the pines of Dorthonion in The Lord of the Rings.

 

Poisonous plants chosen mostly at random (though I tried to stick with European or at least not American native species, and ones that can cause fatalities, though the climate range inconsistencies are shameful): mistletoe, yew, azalea, grass pea, golden chain tree, spindle, water dropworts, black and bittersweet nightshades.

 

I'm not saying Hildórien was Mesopotamia (or Harappa or the Yellow River Valley or almost any site of the beginning of human civilization), but the emergence of agriculture around a river within distance of mountains is common to real-world human history and I see no reason for it not to be the same for Edain. The ziggurats might be pushing it.

 

That envoy that was thwarted by the ancestors of Bëor may or may not have been Sauron. And yes, the ending is a call-forward to Lúthien's greatest feat, flower symbolism and all.

 

There's a lovely fanart inspired by this story found here.

 

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