By Stars' Light by Erfan Starled

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Chapter 5

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*** Lake Mithrim ***

 

He woke to a chill in the air. The sun was not yet set over the Mithrim range, but it would not be long before it disappeared and fog set in.

 

The sun’s reversal to an eastern rising had generated great puzzlement and not a little alarm, in turn allayed by the regularity of its new path. No-one had tired of seeing dawn transform ugly fog into a golden landscape. The children delighted in running at the few squirming patches that briefly survived, dispersing them with flailing arms. Meanwhile, it was the western horizon that turned orange as the sun’s low-slanting rays found their way through the mountain passes.

 

He looked around. Calyaro was sitting a way off, in easy line of sight, but not near enough to disturb. A hint of amusement on his face faded quickly but it had changed his appearance to something more familiar. He had been older than Finrod and all his immediate cousins, but not by much. Enough to be an adult while they were yet children, much younger than Glorfindel.

 

Seen from the eyes of childhood, he had always appeared assured and a little reserved. Calyaro had long been part of Fëanor’s household, employed to teach the children, especially Maglor. Later, he had stayed on, still playing for the household and their guests. Finrod, loving the music, had seen him as a quizzical presence to be respected – part of the background of life in Tirion, somewhat remote from his own orbit, but someone who might indulge a child’s request for favourite songs when he had the time and inclination. In hindsight, that reserve was probably only the measure of distance any tutor would need to adopt with seven strong-willed, intelligent and not always well-disposed pupils. At the time, his musical skill made him an object of considerable awe and his personal presence had added to that.

 

Finrod quirked his brows, annoyed to be the cause of amusement. He led the way to the royal enclave, more than ready to get to the bottom of his reappearance.

 

Once arrived he purloined a fowl from one of the cooking pits of the King’s guards. Fowl and fish seemed to be their interminable diet at the moment. No-one else was around, though he could hear Aredhel singing to Idril in their makeshift tent-cabin – a matter of branches interwoven, laid stones and a lining of blankets. The King had been furnished with a similar, if larger, arrangement and improvements to both happened all the time, as willow and hazel wands were cut and woven for matting or walls, and straight lengths of branch supplied to enlarge the structures.

 

Their most precious possessions now were not jewels but axe and saw, chisel, hammer, and spade – the means to find ore, smelt metal, and work wood. Already he had seen searches commence for flax and reeds and woodland vines with the provision of fibre in mind for rope, cloth and cord. If he hadn’t insisted on bringing along tools as well as swords…

 

He cut a drumstick from the charred, goose-type bird, sat on a split log and gestured to Calyaro to help himself. Hungry, Finrod ate, skin and all, uncaring that hot grease slipped over his hands and dripped onto the grass.

 

Where had Calyaro been? Why had he been lingering on the north shore? Methodically, Finrod scoured the bone clean, glad to eat before the night’s fogs thickened about the lake. The bitter miasmas irritated the lungs and spoiled taste, though moonrise would thin them down.

 

He had finished and Calyaro’s time had run out.

 

“This,” he said, conversationally, stretching out his legs, “is a fighting base. Not that Valar-forsaken hell-march which brought us here. So you can now account for yourself. Why were you skulking near our camp? Did you not return to your lords as I thought? I did think Maglor would have taken you in.”

 

Calyaro wiped his hands clean, though he looked as if he could have done with finishing his meal and eating three more like it. The brown hair, still damp, was bound back in better order, giving him an oddly unfamiliar appearance, neither member of court nor apparition of the wild. He looked younger and vulnerable in the thick linen shirt and the wool breeches that hung loose on him. The red hues showed up the pallor of his thin face. Had he spoken even one word since Alqualondé?

 

Sometimes, after the Ice swallowed someone and they could not thread rope down the contorted channels, they could still hear the lost one’s weakening cries. Finrod heard them still in nightmare. In the killing cold it had been gross foolishness, but two or three always stood vigil, offering words that carried uselessly away on the wind, while the rest went slowly on.

 

At times, it had been Calyaro who waited with him while Finrod called hoarsely down. When there was no longer a reply, Finrod would feel a hand on his shoulder to bring him away, the living touch augmenting Calyaro’s silent presence. They would walk away after the others into the white wilderness with only numbness for comfort.

 

He felt angry at the memory, as if he betrayed all the Telerin dead by his impulse to gentleness.

 

“Enough. I can hand you back south of the lake with a request royally endorsed that they keep you there. And before that, I’ll see to it that you give up this silence or answer to my guards’ persuasion.” The threat was ugly, and disturbed even himself considerably hearing it out loud. He not only meant it but could do it without compunction. He wondered just how much Alqualondë had changed him.

 

Calyaro moved one hand in negation. “I will not put your guards to that trouble.” The voice was not the hoarse mumble Finrod expected after his long withdrawal. The words were offered at the same pleasant pitch he remembered, though they emerged slowly. He met Finrod’s inspection steady-eyed.

 

“Where did I go? To see Maglor. Prince Maglor,” he amended. “Why did I return? I suppose I could have gone anywhere, but I am not one for travelling alone in the wilds.” A slight gesture might have been rueful deprecation of his earlier state. “Where I go does not matter, save only that I will no longer follow the oathsworn.” The amused, assured elder who watched him wake by the lake had vanished, leaving his expression blank and uninformative. That was all he said, delivered as if it were entirely sufficient.

 

Again, the impulse to anger rode Finrod. He was painfully reminded of Fingon. Both he presumed guilty at Alqualondë. Both had been silent on the matter thereafter, both performing later heroics without counting the cost to themselves.

 

The Haven’s slayings were not to be written off by such means. He ached for the chance to sit once more on the harbour wall and watch Hlápo fly past in his dory. He had not imagined such a physical feeling of hurt to be possible where there was no injury. It tore at his guts and left a gaping hole where his insides should be.

 

Calyaro made that subtle forestalling gesture again, palm up-turned, and with more difficulty added, “I went to ask Maglor – Prince Maglor – for his account of my lord Fëanor’s death.” He looked pensively at the twilit lake where thick, black tendrils of mist were settling, writhing like things alive. He shrugged. “He gave me a change of clothes, but as you saw they got rather mired in the rain. I can see why your guards were suspicious. I suppose I should have spoken to them.” The after-thought might have been intended as an apology.

 

“And this long silence?”

 

Calyaro went very still. “What we did – was not a thing we should have done.” He looked at Finrod with strained eyes. “Words did not seem sufficient for such a tale, for its grief and its guilt, and nothing else seemed worth saying. I will tell you how it was, if you want, though it can only cause you pain.”

 

Finrod gave him the slightest of nods.

 

Calyaro took on a distant look, as though he were seeing beyond the dim, tree-fringed waters stretching away in front of them. “Fëanor resolved on taking the ships ourselves. He was sure King Olwë could not stop so many of us. He said the Teleri could do little to prevent us, if we were determined. He denounced them for denying us passage in such a cause, and said they could build others to replace those we took…

 

“We made it to the ships easily, since we had been withdrawn out of their sight for a time. They did not know our intent, and thought we were only come to argue. We pushed aboard past the sailors, and set about making sail, shoving them away when they would have stopped us. Some of us fell when they pushed back. Then, seeing us fall, they deliberately cast us down. Those in the water could not swim, but still the Teleri threw us off.”

 

Calyaro stopped and touched his tongue to dry lips. “That was when Fëanor ordered us to use our swords to prevent their attempt to stop us.”

 

Finrod, revulsed yet nonetheless riveted, held out a water-skin. A swallow, and Calyaro took up the tale again.

 

“We obeyed. But the rigging was unfamiliar to us and they found it easy to cast us down once they fetched bows and axes. They cut loose the ropes we stood on and the ropes we clung to, and tilted the spars to hang straight down. Those that did not fall, they picked off with arrows. Over the cries of the wounded, Fëanor ordered us to cut the archers down to protect those they threatened next – but he would not break off or surrender our claim so that we could help those who were drowning, or to tend the injured on deck.” Grey eyes, staring at Finrod, did not see him.

 

Finrod, horrified anew by the recital, believed the pain that cracked his voice.

 

“He ordered us – he ordered us to continue the fight when we stopped to help those who cried out, drowning or injured or about to fall.” He touched his tongue again to dry lips. “Then he cursed us for faint-hearted cowards and traitors. It was madness to persist after the first resistance but he would not listen. I argued with him, but in the end none of us refused him.” He touched the back of his hand to his cheek, as if in memory of a blow.

 

The spate of words had run dry on that last bald confession, swallowed by a silence filled with images neither cared to dwell on, of bodies strewn in angular heaps across railings and decks, and hanging dead in the rigging like obscene, tangled flags.

 

“It would have been the greater part of valour to defy him,” Finrod said. His dispassion belied his feelings. He longed to blame only Morgoth’s intrigues for that push and shove struggle that escalated into killings, but he could not. He held them all responsible. Fëanor, Calyaro, Fingon, and the rest.

 

Calyaro was looking at him with raw guilt and loss alike on his face, stripped by this telling of all semblance of his more usual calm. Perhaps, thought Finrod, the dead and the bereaved were not the only casualties of that fight.

 

Fëanor had burned too brightly, had gathered all manner of souls to his orbit and kept them revolving about him in his brilliance and his verve for life, though not always wisely or kindly. Passionate, energetic, inventive, consumed with curiosity and love for his family, Fëanor had been white fire that drew moths to their death even while the blaze consumed itself – leaving ashes and destruction in its wake.

 

“You know he was fond of that charge of cowardice. He used it as an accusation in every speech he made, before and after that particular piece of madness, against anyone who disagreed with him.” He took a deep breath, as if he had been shouting, though he only spoke quietly. “And I tell you this, when he called my father a coward, he lied.”

 

Words and raw feeling alike rang in the intense silence.

 

“I never said I followed him out of wisdom. He was not difficult to love.” For the first time, Calyaro avoided looking at him.

 

“And this makes you less responsible?” Finrod spoke with justice and princely authority. It was the weight of his anger that invested the reversal of their roles with harshness. Years of full adulthood in Tirion had not moved him out of a comfortable respect for Calyaro but Alqualondë and Finrod’s responsibilities erased all trace of it.

 

Calyaro made no answer to that but he winced.

 

“You went to see Maglor? Have you proof of it?”

 

“Only this.” He unwrapped the swathe of thick, oiled wool. The wrapping was new. From it, he drew forth the same instrument as before, as if it were a precious child. This time it emerged entire, the long swan-neck gracefully intact, the pegs in place, the body restored with paler patches. It gleamed with repeated polishing.

 

“He bade his craftsman mend it in token of thanks for my service to his father.”

 

He gave it up most reluctantly to the outstretched hand but did not for even a moment gainsay the demand.

 

Finrod turned the mandolin over in his hands. Only a musician, obsessively equipped, could have provided the seasoned wood for patches, carefully weathered and thinly honed, the matched pegs that held the strings fast, the glue that would bind and not fail under stress, and most extraordinary, the new strings. Rare and precious commodities indeed.

 

To give Calyaro camp-space would cost little, except that this singer threatened his calm. Finrod was not ready to come alive again, not yet ready for grief. Calyaro reminded him of Fingon’s guilt, of rage and of dead boys. Yet he would not force even one such as this back to those who were bound by that oath, not against his will.

 

Something went out of him then, some ugly tension though his anger remained. “Take it.” He held out the mandolin. “Make yourself useful and you can stay.”

 

Calyaro, too, relaxed slightly. What had he feared? Living alone? Being bound to the oathsworn sons of his deceased lord? He looked as if was choosing words carefully, but in the end said simply, “Thank you, my lord.” He moved a hand, tilted his head, in the merest suggestion of a courtly bow.

 

Finrod made a weary gesture. “I do not want your thanks.” Or your court manners, he thought. “Just – earn your keep like the rest of us.” Preferably somewhere out of the way. “You can go – and take that bird with you. It needs eating. And tell the guards to see you furnished with somewhere to sleep.”

 

Finrod stared after the retreating figure and hoped the moon would rise soon. Silver-bathed, his dreams would be less vivid. He did not want to dream of Hlápo staring at him over Fingon’s shoulder, or watch a nightmare sword pulled free, leaving a boy dead who should have been flying on the wings of the wind.