By Stars' Light by Erfan Starled

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Chapter 7

 

*** Twenty years later ~ The Mereth Aderthad ~ Eithel Ivrin ***

 

“Don’t you think they sound eerie?” Galadriel asked. She tilted her head, considering. “Wonderful, though…”

 

Finrod took a deep draught from the generous cup in his hand. His uncle had provided nothing but the best for this occasion and he was making the most of it. He wondered if it had been traded from the Falas Lord, Círdan, or if it came from the new vineyards in the Taras foothills. The inconsequential thought would do for conversation but it could not distract him from the pictures the music conjured.

 

Their Green brethren’s songs were disturbing. His shore-dwelling kin had sung in manner both like and unlike to this high, light tune. These harmonies were wilder and less formal, harder to predict and less repetitive. Almost less tuneful, but with a pattern that grew in his awareness as he listened. The plainer lyres sounded crude at first, deceptively so, for they swept the listener up into a world of tree and brook and wove their spell just the same as their ocean-loving cousins had once done with their harps. When one of their number passed close, he called out softly and asked, stumbling slightly over the unfamiliar words, “Of whom do you sing?”

 

“Denethor.”

 

Finrod’s questioning look invited more. “He fell, against the Enemy you guard against. Long it took us to cross the mountains into the west, and grievous was his loss when Thingol asked our aid. But he could do no other than answer and so Amon Areb saw his end.” Contemplatively, the three of them listened by the lakeside until the end of the plaintive elegy. Galadriel and Finrod able to make out some of the words thanks to their new-learned Sindarin as the singers of Ossiriand told the tale of that bitter, desperate fight. Their accents were strange compared to the Sindar’s, and their dialect differed.

 

“We were pleased when you drove the wild things out with your coming. They ran where they willed too long in all the lands about, unchecked by any outside the Elven holds, until you came,” he said with shy, gentle approval before moving on.

 

Not all their companions were so comfortably gracious, but all were here with one interest in common – Morgoth’s defeat, and until that could be achieved, his effective containment. Mablung and Daeron, whom King Thingol had sent, seemed charged to be more witness than emissary in their role. They maintained a courteous but reserved manner and had said little so far in the discussions about treaties and leagues, committing their King to nothing. They listened watchfully, and it was easy to guess that they would report back most carefully on all the doings of these fighting incomers.

 

The song was over and Maglor was speaking in rounded accents that carried clearly. Courteously, he used the speech of Beleriand that all might understand him. “The song of Denethor told of the first battle joined here.” His hand circled gently to indicate the lands all around. “May we not now hear tell of the Second? It seems fitting to our purpose…”

 

He looked to the King quite calmly for permission. Was he proposing that he himself sing Fëanor’s tale? Maedhros kept his peace, rather than encourage his brother to raise their father’s ghost and all its bitter memories in this company. Before Fingolfin framed his answer, a voice rose from a different quarter.

 

“I cardi yar carilmë nauvar lindi tenn' Ambar-metta.”

 

The Quenya fell at odds with the Sindarin the Noldor were speaking at this gathering for the sake of their guests. The words travelled easily across the quiet of the clearing. But puzzled Sindar or Laiquendi guests were not the concern of those at the King’s table who leaned forward anxiously.

 

This festival marked expedience as well as common celebration after a score of years spent patiently building and consolidating their guard, their livelihoods and their dwelling places further north. Fingolfin deemed it time to reinforce the relationships that Fingon and Maedhros had mended and sought to put their forces to the best use he could, by mutually agreed resolve.

 

To break open wounds barely healed, to inform the Sindar of the Noldor’s recent history, in what was meant to be a gathering of hope for the future, would turn it into bitter failure. Fingolfin, about to speak in the ear of a nearby lieutenant, was cut off by a muted outburst from Fingon.

 

“What does he think he is doing, quoting Fëanor, today of all days? That speech can do no good here!”

 

The story of the flight was not one that any of the Noldor had cared to spread among their new neighbours. On the heels of a bitter enemy they had come with the waking of the sun and driven the foe to ground and kept him there. The wanderers of the Hither Shores had observed with awe and given them warm welcome. The true story was not public knowledge in Beleriand.

 

Most of the Noldor wanted to keep it that way. Others had counselled that their history be made explicitly known. They wanted to detail all they knew of Morgoth’s evil. Knowledge of his sly sowing of mistrust and suspicion would serve as due and prudent warning. A different caution had advised against it. He was known to be the Enemy. What more was needed? The rest could only harm their welcome here and divide their peoples.

 

Fingon made to order the speaker stopped, but found a hand on his shoulder.

 

“Leave him be.” Finrod now had his uncle’s full attention along with his cousin’s. There were officers of the King ready in a moment to do his bidding in the matter, but Fingolfin was undecided and forebore to give any orders to interfere.

 

Fingon, less patient, snarled with real anger in his voice, “We are here to make this peace a useful one. The North needs a unified effort, and stirring up old wounds between us is not going to achieve that. Let alone what these others will think!”

 

“Hush, cousin. Or they will wonder why you try and silence a singer…”

 

“You brought him, you stop him, if you don’t want me to!”

 

“Only wait a little. I doubt he will do anything to disrupt our cause…” Detachedly, he wondered if it was a more personal fear and guilt, than concern for the wider company’s fellowship, that made Fingon so defensive.

 

Maglor stepped forward and even with a handful of words cast the suggestion of a spell over the crowd, in just such manner as his father had. “Calyaro? You had something to say?”

 

Fingon subsided. The minstrel could not be silenced without reason, and they had none to give that would not betray them.

 

Calyaro walked oblivious of tension – or perhaps merely ignoring it – into the centre of the greensward stretching along the young Narog’s quietly bubbling course. His grey eyes wandered the throng. He glanced at Finrod, whose attention was firmly arrested. Finrod saw him take in the hand holding down an angry Prince Fingon. Faintly questioning eyebrows and a slight pause was all the concession he made to royal disapproval.

 

Turning back to Maglor he brought his mandolin up into both hands and plucked softly at the strings to test them.

 

When Fingolfin sat back, folding his arms, without a word, Fingon shook off his cousin’s hold and they relapsed into an attention far tenser than that of an audience expecting to be pleased.

 

People fell back to give the musician a small space to himself. He looked around and repeated the quote in Sindarin, “The deeds that we do shall be the matter of song until the last days of Arda.” He plucked another string, and then another, touching the pegs, and then the tuning became something else altogether as his fingers flexed and drew in earnest on the mandolin.

 

Major chords floated up exuberantly to fill the branches of the trees that crowded the banks to the west. They echoed off sheer rock to the north and mingled with the water’s own song. The energetic notes bounding skywards mimicked the high hopes of this gathering, with all their suggestion of creation bursting with life and beauty.

 

Calyaro suited him, Finrod thought, and he listened as the notes ran and grew and died only to grow again. Then, suddenly, the music jarred him as the rich pattern included an uncomfortable discord. He wondered if damaged hands were fumbling a difficult transition. A minor chord crept mournfully into the mix, and a second ominous dissonance, clearly no mistake: all the more shocking after the harmonies that had filled the air.

 

Clashing notes grew impossibly loud from so delicate an instrument, louder again and harsher on the ear, underpinned by a swelling base-line that filled his head and pounded uneasily in his body’s bones. High above the base cacophony, a tinkling descant and creaking string evoked the ripples of the sea against ships moored in harbour and then abruptly it all fell away into a silence that might stand for an ending – or a betrayal and a breaking of faith.

 

In that stillness a more martial thump began a new theme before the puzzled audience could shake off the startling effect of the awkward prelude. Keeping heavy time on the wood with his palm, forming his accompaniment from the strong chords of the opening passages, Calyaro opened his mouth and sang.

 

He sang of a people arriving in a new land. Of courage and determination and of horrors ranked in enmity against them in a great battle under the stars. Of attack, counter-attack and a wild pursuit. And in the end, a King surrounded undaunted, last survivor against the wielders of bitter fire, wounded unto death and rescued too late.

 

He sang of rocky shelter on a mountain pass, and a spirit so fiercely bright that it fled in fire to the firmament seeking Ilúvatar himself, to burn in the heavens sundered from kin until the ending of the earth.

 

He had written it in Quenya, but the poetic Sindarin translation he supplied at intervals over a softer holding thrum did not break the mood, but seemed rather to embrace the Sindar with the sorrow of his tale and the tale of courage of his fallen King. As Calyaro sang to the sky and finished the last cadenza his fingers carried the notes of the last phrase into an echoing fall of minor keys. When he lowered his eyes, the stars’ light seemed reflected in them still.

 

Finrod thought himself grown fanciful in the grip of the unearthly music.

 

Calyaro addressed Fingolfin in the silence. “He was my King. And I will see that he is remembered in song for so long as Arda lasts, even to the end of days.” He looked around. “I call it Nainië Elenion. He died as he lived, and I miss him.” With that, he walked away into the trees.

 

“He is in your service – can you not teach him some deference?” asked Fingon, ruffled.

 

“I’ll speak to him. But no-one told him to stop. Don’t worry – only those who were there will guess what that first part told. And none of us is going to say anything.”

 

Calyaro’s song had told of the battle against Morgoth’s creatures and of Fëanor’s death, but the voiceless prelude could only be the story that came before: the creation of the Silmarilli, the battle that took the ships, the ending of that voyage in betrayal at Losgar.

 

The sung elegy had spoken to them all. ‘Make the journey worthwhile,’ it said to Fingolfin’s people. ‘He’s dead and gone and Morgoth would gladly see you riven against one another to the undoing of all the Eldar.’

 

To Fëanor’s followers it spoke more simply. ‘Make his death and all his actions count, else the cost has been too great by far.’

 

Fingolfin signed for more food to be taken around, and wine to be poured anew, and slowly voices took up conversation. Singing of a different kind started up. Only then did he turn to scowl at his nephew. “Be sure you speak to him soon.” 

 

Chapter End Notes

 

Translation and names:

 

Mereth Aderthad – Feast of Reuniting

 

“I cardi yar carilmë nauvar lindi tenn' Ambar-metta.”

“The deeds that we do shall be the matter of song until the last days of Arda.”

(Lit. The deeds that we do shall be(come) songs until the end of the world.)

 

Nainié Elenion – Stars’ Lament 

 

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