Swan Song by Ithilwen

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Dagor Aglareb

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Chapter 7 – Dagor Aglareb

Maglor did not understand how seven months could pass both so slowly and so very quickly simultaneously.

His wife's belly slowly grew rounder, her breasts fuller. Then the day came when Aurel placed Maglor's hand on her abdomen and he felt a faint fluttering beneath her skin, quick and soft, the first early stirrings of their child in her womb – and in an instant, everything changed. Until that moment, he realized, her pregnancy had not seemed entirely real to him, but there was no denying the truth now: something new had come into both their lives, and soon everything would be changed as a result. He had pretended to be pleased, but the feelings those subtle movements beneath his hand had evoked were in fact panic. I am not ready for this! I do not know how to be a father! But of course he could not say that to his wife, and his child-to-be hardly cared. So he spoke to his brother instead.

"Stop fretting, filit. I dare say you will figure things out as you go. It's not as though you are entirely unused to young children, not after growing up with five younger brothers."

"That's hardly the same, Russandol."

"A baby is a baby, filit. Hard though you may find it to believe at the moment, yours will be no different."

"But babies grow. However am I going to teach a child?"

"The same way Father taught us, I expect – by example."

"And just what sort of example am I going to be capable of setting for my son? What lessons will I be able to impart? Book knowledge? The value of perseverance and hard work? Independence? It's possible I won't even be able to remember my son's face from one day to the next! He'll think me a laughingstock, Russandol."

"No, he won't. The rest of us will teach him those things. You will have other lessons to impart."

"I wish I could believe you –"

"Hush, filit. You worry too much."

Somehow Maglor did not find his brother's reassurances at all reassuring.

Then the day arrived when he touched Aurel and felt for the first time, not merely their unborn baby's movements, but a small bright spirit brushing against his own through the bond he shared with his wife. And for the first time the child he could feel stirring inside her womb felt like his child, an actual person rather than simply a vaguely threatening object, and Maglor laughed at the wonder of it. Though he remained worried about his ability to live up to the challenges fatherhood promised, his anxiety was now accompanied by a growing eagerness to meet this new small person he'd helped create. Perhaps, he decided, his brother Maedhros was right after all. In any case, he now had more pressing matters to be anxious about.

He was alarmed by how much energy the pregnancy seemed to be draining from Aurel. She was so tired by the end of the day! And more and more her attention seemed to be focused inward. Surely this could not be normal, this fatigue? He discussed his worries first with Aurel, who reassured him that everything was fine, and then (suspecting his wife was not being entirely truthful) with his mother, who laughed.

"Carrying a child is hard work, son," Nerdanel told him, smiling. "It was no different with me when I was pregnant – and your father was just as concerned then as you are now, that first time when I was carrying Russandol. By the time you came along, thankfully he'd learned better. Just be there for your wife, and do what you can to ease her discomfort, and try not to worry so much. This is normal."

"But surely I'd remember it if you had looked like this when you were carrying my younger brothers!" Maglor replied, realizing as he said it that in fact he had few memories of his mother's pregnancies.

"You were a child then, Káno. Children seldom notice their parents' difficulties, for they are too wrapped up in themselves. You knew that I was there for you, which was something that as a child you took for granted; you simply did not notice when I was tired."

"Oh," Maglor replied. He had hoped his childhood memories, as unreliable as he knew they could be, would at least provide some reliable guidance as to what to expect over the coming weeks; it was disturbing to realize that even had his memory been perfect, they would not.

And so he waited, and he fretted. There was so little he could actually do! His attempts to help his wife more with her work as often as not only increased rather than decreased her burden (and everyone else's), and so hardly proved helpful. Suspecting that Aurel would take comfort in her mother's presence at such a time, he'd tried to encourage a reconciliation between his wife and her parents, but that had come to nothing. At his urging Aurel had written to he mother, inviting her to come and be present for the birth of her first grandchild; the reply Aurel later received warmly invited her to return home for her lying-in. That the invitation did not extend to her husband was plain. "I suspect that once their grandchild is actually here, your parents' hearts will soften," Maglor told his wife consolingly, while inwardly he kicked himself for only managing to make an already painful situation worse.

He found himself limited to simple things: retrieving items from the floor so Aurel would not have to bend down to pick them up herself, helping her rise from their bed and from chairs, carrying heavy things for her, massaging her back when it ached. Then by pure chance, Maglor discovered one genuinely useful thing he was able to do.

As their child grew it developed a positive delight in kicking, much to Aurel's discomfort. One evening when the two of them were lying together in bed and the baby's vigorous kicking was preventing Aurel from resting, a memory suddenly surfaced unexpectedly in Maglor's mind: his father singing to quiet a cranky infant Caranthir. Maglor softly sang the simple melody to his wife, and to his surprise (and Aurel's delight), the kicking quickly stopped. He wasn't always able to remember the tune, but from that evening on, whenever he did remember it, Maglor (grateful to be of some real use at last) gently sang his wife and unborn child to sleep.

Afterwards he'd lie awake for a while, listening to the soft sounds of his wife's breathing while wrestling with the jumbled symphony he still heard in his mind, trying to impose some order on it and bring forth a new thing, as he had once done so often so very long ago. But the music always managed to slip from his grasp in the end.

*******

It was a week past their child's begetting day, in the middle of the morning, when Aurel finally went into labor.

Maglor was relieved. Finally there was an end in sight to the seemingly endless waiting! He knew Aurel had been dreading this moment, and so he tried to be encouraging, but privately he had little understanding of her anxiety. Childbirth was, after all, a natural process; women's bodies were fashioned for it. How difficult could it truly be?

He soon found out.

To Maglor's eye, Aurel's labor did not at first seem so bad. She was obviously uncomfortable during her contractions, but they seemed to be nothing she could not bear easily enough, and they were spaced fairly widely apart. As he suspected, she had been worried over nothing.

But then the contractions gradually became stronger, much stronger, and he winced inwardly when he heard his wife groan with the pain of them. And they kept coming closer and closer together, giving her less and less time to recover in between. Morning slipped into afternoon, which in turn slipped into evening, and sill there was no child.

"What's wrong?" he whispered to Nerdanel, who was holding Aurel's hand while the midwife was checking her.

"Nothing," Nerdanel whispered back. "First children are often reluctant to come into the world. I labored over a full day with your brother Russandol."

A full day! She can't possibly stand that! Maglor thought, appalled, as the midwife told Aurel, "You're making very steady, if slow, progress. It shouldn't be too much longer."

But it was after midnight before Maglor found himself sitting behind his wife supporting her while she pushed their child out into the world. With each contraction her arms gripped his hard enough to leave bruises, and as she bore down, the strain of her efforts forced a cry of agony out of her and contorted her face into an expression Maglor could scarcely recognize as belonging to his wife. I can never ask her to endure this again, he thought as the midwife said, "Just two more good pushes, Aurel, just two more." How did Mother bear this, not just once, but six times?

And then he felt his wife stiffen as she pushed again, and Maglor watched in wonder as first a head, dark and slick with birth fluids, and then a small bluish body slowly slipped out from between his wife's legs. And then Aurel went limp and fell back against him, a look of elation mixed with exhaustion on her face, as their child's first cry pierced the night air and the midwife announced, "You have a beautiful daughter."

Beautiful was not a word Maglor would have chosen to describe the small, wailing creature the midwife laid onto Aurel's bare stomach. Her skin wrinkled and smeared with blood and a white, cheeselike substance, her head oddly misshapen, and still attached to her mother by a ropy blue-white cord, his new daughter seemed more Orc-spawn than elf-child to her father's eyes. But Aurel, Nerdanel, and the midwife were all delighted with this new arrival, and Maglor admitted to himself that his resentment of the pain his wife had endured to bring this seemingly unpromising creature into the world was probably biasing his judgment.

He quickly revised his unfavorable opinion later when, cleaned and swaddled, his baby girl was placed in his arms for the first time.

"Are you disappointed that she's not a boy after all? I know you were looking forward to having a son," Aurel asked him later, as their child suckled contentedly at her breast. Maglor brushed a stray lock of hair away from his wife's cheek and leaned over to kiss her tenderly.

"Of course not. She's lovely. And after so many boys, it's good to have a girl added to this family. Although it's going to be hard to name her; I can't just slap something suitable onto 'Finwë' now, as I'd originally thought to do."

Aurel smiled. "I'm sure you'll manage something appropriate."

"I'm not so sure; after watching the struggle you went through to force her out into this world, the only name that came to me was 'Orchwen' – but that's hardly fair to her. It's not her fault her arrival was so painful. Forgive me, love, but until today I thought battle the sole province of men; I had no idea that women fight their own wars."

"We do indeed," Aurel murmured as she looked down at her daughter. "But ours end in a sweeter victory than yours. Tell me, Káno, did any of your own battles ever yield such a marvelous prize as our little Aewen?"

My battles ended in nothing but desolation, Maglor thought sadly, but aloud he said only, "So our little one already has a mother-name? That's good; at least we'll have something fitting to call her while I'm struggling to come up with a father-name that won't completely embarrass her when she's grown."

"You have time," Aurel reassured him. "The naming ceremony won't be for a few days."

"Good, because I'm probably going to need all of them," Maglor answered.

But to his surprise, he didn't. He watched as his wife and daughter fell asleep together, worn out from their earlier great struggle, and when dawn broke and the first rays of the sun lit his new daughter's face, the name suddenly came to him, shining and perfect as that first morning light. And so three days later, when he stood before the family at her naming ceremony, Maglor gave his new daughter the father-name Tuilir, Song of Spring, for he sensed that her arrival indeed marked a change of season for them all.

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Chapter End Notes

Russandol ("Copper-Top") is a nickname Maedhros was given by his family, on account of his copper hair.

Fëa – "Soul"

Filit – "Small bird." A childhood nickname my Maedhros gave to his brother Maglor.

Orchwen – "Orc Maiden"

Aewen – "Bird Maiden"

Tuilir – "Bud Song." Both Quenya and Sinadrin have two words for spring: one for early spring, and one for late spring. The latter has the stem "bud" as its root, so a poetic translaton of Tuilir's Name would be "Song of (late/budding) Spring"