Threnody for the Dispossessed by Kenaz

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Symphony

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"Oh," he said.

I had rendered a great minstrel speechless. And all I had done was show him my harp.

"Daeron, it is exquisite..." He admired it with his hands hovering above the neck, as if he could not quite bring himself to touch it. "I haven't seen such an instrument in a great many years."

"I envied the one you brought to Eithel Ivrin. Despite the skill of Doriath's luthiers, the Noldor always managed to outshine us in the beauty of their instruments."

"Beauty matters little if the player lacks talent."

I rolled my eyes. "You cannot possibly suggest--"

He smirked and shook his head. "No, I am not that modest. It was merely an observation. I have known many lackluster musicians to wield lovely instruments."

Again, I thought of my reluctant student with her precious and poorly-played harp.

"The one I carried when we met, I lost to Glaurung's flames when he breached the lowlands. A minor casualty, considering the magnitude of our losses that day."

A pang of self-reproach rang through me. I had never been a soldier; I had not been trained to the sword, or even the bow beyond hunting. Since my youngest days, I had been held in reserve as a keeper of memory: I recorded the great deeds of other men, and burnished them, prepared them for the annals of history. Maglor, for all his crimes, had been as much a warrior as a bard. He had even been a king of his people, however briefly or reluctantly. The longing in his gaze caused the strings of my harp, always sensitive to the vicissitudes of my own emotion, to shudder beneath my fingers. Surely in Valinor such a wound as his might be healed, and he might play again. Or would the Valar insist that he bear the scars in perpetual reminder of his crimes? I wouldn't have thought it beyond Maglor himself to insist on such a penalty-- the martyring strain of his remorse ran deep.

"May I?" I asked, taking his hand between my own. The seared flesh of his palm and the pads of his fingertips looked like melted wax, angry and red. I remembered the skillfulness with which this hand had once plucked a harp, and how adroitly it traversed my skin. Ridges and valleys of ruined flesh passed under my touch, and I tried to imagine what course my life might take if I had taken such an injury and could not play. "Does it hurt?"

He shook his head. "It did for many years, but over time, it grew bearable, and eventually stopped. In some places, it is highly sensitive, and in others, I can hardly feel a thing."

"Does it bother you when I do this?"

"No. It is soothing, actually."

"Did you ever try to play again?" I tried not to pay attention to the fact that I was massaging the ridges now, kneading the shining skin, stretching out the fingers one by one. It felt entirely too intimate, but I could not bring myself to stop.

"For a long time, I couldn't. I had no desire, to begin with-- any impulse to create had been ripped from me entirely-- but even if I had, the pain was too great. As the pain subsided, I tried again, but I was unaccustomed to the clumsiness of my fingers on the strings. It frustrated me too greatly, and after a time, I stopped trying. I thought it seemed only just that I should forfeit the skill. So many others lost so much more."

This statement irritated me for a reason I could not place. "Didn't I say that self-pity does not become you?"

"You didn't think pride suited me, either," he noted, a wry grin playing at the corners of his mouth. "I cannot please you in either case."

His fingers closed around my thumb. Flustered, my face grew warm. After a long moment, he showed mercy enough to let me go.

"And your music?" he asked, kindly looking at the harp rather than my face. "What is the last composition you have made?"

"Nothing of note," I admitted reluctantly. It was the truth, of course, but I had been loath to admit it. "Nothing that has truly moved me."

"Then you have grown complacent," he challenged, leaving me stung with disapprobation.

I had, of course. I had cast myself adrift in a sea of apathy and ennui, bemoaning that no songs came to me when once I would have gone out in the world and sought the songs myself. Begrudgingly, I answered, "perhaps," but his canny grey eyes discerned the truth.

I had no right to ask him, but I did: "The Noldolantë-- sing it for me."

His eyes glittered like salt-rocks, hyaline and hard. "You know the story already, and I am not fit to sing."

"Thingol asked me to bear witness when Angrod, Finrod, and Galadriel spoke their parts. But it is not the same. Those who heard it speak of it still. Even absent, your echo remained."

He reclaimed his hand and shifted his weight to lean away from the harp. "I will not sing that song again, nor will any other; I destroyed the last fair copy long ago."

My astonishment-- my horror-- showed clear on my face, and I made no effort to arrange it into something more subtle. I could not imagine destroying such a masterful work. Even the least of my compositions, the first foolish bleatings of a besotted mooncalf, I had kept-- well, save those I had written for Maglor. I did not ever wish to hear my early work again, and cringed to think of the flowery prose and sentimental treacle I had then considered poetry, but they were my history, the children of my head and hand and heart.

He wagged a finger at me in reproof. "Love not too well the work of thy hands and the devices of thy heart...." A stunted sound followed this thought from his lips, like the jarring discord of metal on stone. "I could not sing it again. I had not the right. It was not my story alone, and I did not feel that I could justly tell the tale. It was an arrogant undertaking: who was I to sing of the woes of my people, who had been culpable for so many of them?"

Not knowing how to answer, I said nothing.

"For all that it was celebrated," he went on, "it lacked something. It lacked joy. Each time I sang it, it left me more morose than the last."

"Of course," I quipped, "Those of the house of Fëanor are renowned as a joyful people."

My heart seized at the smile on Maglor's face, sweet and rueful, honest and without guile. "Oh, but Daeron, we were joyful! For all the sorrows in this world that I have known or caused, I have known great contentment as well, fleeting though it was. And I would like to think that perhaps I have sometimes given joy to others." his face looked far away, lost in reverie, poignant and proud.

And I whispered, so as not to shake him from fond hopes: "Tell me."

Talking a last look at my harp, he walked over to the window. "I am told I was born singing, and that I rarely cried. My first memory is of Nelyo's face, looking down at me from above, as curious as it was annoyed. He picked me up, very gently and with great care, and walked very slowly down to the road to our house and laid me between the roots of a tree. No one had consulted him, you see, on whether or not he wished to have a brother, so he decided I ought to go back whence I had come--" He was nearly wheezing with laughter now-- "which, as near as he could tell, was from the marketplace in the middle of Tirion. But as he wasn't allowed to walk so far alone, he left me at the road, hoping someone else would come along and take me the rest of the way. Nelyo said later that father emerged from the smithy and immediately saw the guilty expression on his face and told him that he would drag him by the ear to the market and trade him to some Vanyarin farmer for a goat unless he told him where I was.

"We knew love, Daeron. Great love. Can you imagine what it is to have six brothers? I was never alone--" he turned from the window, his face half-lit and radiant, grinning crookedly. "For good or ill, I was never alone."

As he mined the ancient stores of his memory for the jewels of early joy, I played for him. I tried to capture the sound of hammer on anvil and chisle on stone. I tried to give him his mother's laughter, and the mysterious language of twins.

Music and memory transformed him, years falling away. I could have been standing beside him at the roaring mouth of the Narog where it rushed from the pool, watching the stars dance on the water and in the sky, admiring the play of moonlight on his face and reveling in the warmth of his hand on the small of my back. Abruptly, he stopped and looked at me with eyes wild and alive, a first faint glow of color rising in his cheeks. "Outside!" he demanded, and bounded out the door of the little cabin before I could even react. I picked up my harp in one hand and a chair in the other-- the stiff-bottomed one I had come to think of as 'my' chair-- and followed him. He ran to the edge of the glade, stumbling, and I feared for a moment that he had snapped at last, a frayed string too tightly wound, but then he halted in a patch of sunlight, gazing up to the sky through the canopy of the trees. He spread his arms wide and let it illuminate his face. The brightness of the sun had brought my tears, I told myself, but I made no move to wipe them away.

"Too long has my voice been filled with sorrows," he rasped, eyes closed against the glare. "It will hurt. It will burn like a fire, but it will be a healing fire, and I will bear its heat gladly."

And then, Maglor opened his mouth, and he sang.

I will not deny that I blenched at those first awkward sounds. His notes went both flat and sharp as the collected sediment of centuries of disuse shifted in his throat, but he showed no embarrassment or self-consciousness. He sang through the mire, and slowly, his lungs recalled the feeling of fullness, his throat remembered how to open, his tongue found its place in his mouth, and his breath awoke to the joy of spiraling out into the world. His pitch returned, clear and perfect, deeper and richer than my own, and then came strength and volume. At last the notes spun off his tongue in that expressive vibrato that had enchanted me so long ago. He sang of witnessing Maedhros' first kiss and Curufin's birth. He sang of the happy sounds that ruled their home in those bright and careless days, and my fingers struggled to keep up with his tune.

The story of Caranthir teaching Curufin to walk came next, and then of Celegorm teaching Aredhel to ride. I heard of Curufin's first successful effort at the forge, and of the Ambarussar switching their tunics to confuse their mother, and fooling no one. Images appeared like living shades before me and I thought: this... this is what it means to sing, to set thoughts of love into music. I could all but see the silver thread of his words spooling out of his mouth.

He moved about the glade, carried by the momentum of recollection, sculpting his words with his hands as they hit the air. His hair fell about his face like a swath of night, and I remembered how he had looked bent over his harp all those years ago, with his head cocked and his eyes closed, as if listening enraptured while his instrument imparted erotic secrets, hands working over the strings as if bodily pleasure issued from the touch. I had imagined that I was seeing the face he made in his throes, and it had both embarrassed and intrigued me. Later, when I had seen that expression from a more personal vantage point, I found I had been correct. That had been the difference in our music then, as it was now: I had the mastery over words and their shaping while Maglor's raw emotion brought the words to life. With each new tale, each minute revelation, my heart opened to seven children who had been robbed of the chance to be masters of their own fate: here, in reflected joy and refracted memory, was a song of mourning for potential lost and talent wasted... an elegy for those who had fallen unmourned by all, save the one man whose burden it was to keep their memory alive. Here was, at long last, a requiem for the sons of Fëanor, a threnody for the Dispossessed.

Verses took shape, solidified. I committed them to memory, and plucked their counterpoint from my mind. When he began to repeat them, I joined him, and we fell into rhythm with each other, music passing back and forth between us like breath. A duet, after all, is not so different from making love: the give and take, the anticipation, and the precipitous rush toward resolution. We may sing with many people, but we know when we have found the one whose voice blends so perfectly with our own that we are no longer two singers wending separate melodies together, but one voice raised harmonic in love.

The last note rang out through the air, carrying out over the trees and drifting toward the bay. Maglor whispered my name. The heat of his mouth filtered through to my blood, his tongue running over my lips before dancing with mine...the bright clash of teeth and his breath on my cheek...my whimper a circling melisma around his low groan. A new song began, one with deep roots in the past and arms reaching toward an unknown future. Together, we sang it.

"May I walk you back?"

Night had encroached, and I was both energized and spent. Maglor's song-- our song-- spun round in my head. It never occurred to me to refuse, not when the taste of him still in my mouth was so new and yet so distantly familiar, and so utterly intoxicating.

Behind the veil of mists obscuring the ship emanated the rhythmic sound of the wake slapping up against its sides. As we moved down the strand, the mists parted. The body of a great white swan stood out in stark relief against the dark water, its tethering lines pulled taut, a captured bird fighting its bonds and ready to take flight. A moment later, I realized that Maglor was no longer a step behind me, and then I heard the sound of retching and turned to find him on his hands and knees, vomiting onto the sand.

In my delirium, I had not taken into account that this was the first time he had seen a swan boat since he had set a fleet of them alight. I had not stopped to to consider that for him, this would be a reminder of his misdeeds, and a painful reversal of the day. Our entire venture seemed suddenly ill-conceived: though the Valar had sanctioned this journey and Ulmo himself seen me safely from shore to shore, Ossë, wilder and less forgiving than Ulmo, might still sink the ship in fury, or set us to drift upon the doldrums in the great watery void between there and here. And that assumed the crew didn't mutiny once they realized who they carried and leave us both stranded in this inhospitable place. The Valar had a black sense of humor to send Maglor on a ship with a Telerin crew.

Misery had twisted his features into a mask of dread. His body folded in spasm and he retched again. I turned away, a token gesture at allowing him the dignity of being sick in peace.

"Manwë must be enjoying quite a laugh at my expense," he wailed after wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.

"No," I pronounced emphatically, though I could practically see his mind conjuring up all manner of scenarios for his return, not the least of which would be the High King of Arda extending this offer of hope only to pull it out of reach at the last.

"I cannot possibly board that ship." He recoiled from it as from a snake about to strike. "Even if it would bear me-- and I set no great store that it would-- its crew will sooner tie me to the keel and let me make the journey below the waves than abide my presence."

"Come," I said, slipping a hand under his arm. I did not posess the words to reassure him. He rose weakly, without protest, and leaned heavily against me. "We are not leaving tonight. Let this be another day's concern."

I rifled through his cupboards until I found the bottle of spirits-- he had said it was tonic-- and steadied his hand with my own when his tremors threatened to slop the liquor over the side. The bite of alcohol hit my nose, bringing with it the smell of anise. I poured myself a cup for good measure; I had already developed a taste for the stuff. Maglor's narrow bed groaned under my weight, the only sound in the room as I waited for what I knew must eventually come.

He drew in a sharp breath and released it mutely. "Never in my life was I more my father's son than in that moment." Regret marred his brow now, and I wondered if it was regret that he had, in that moment, been his father's son, or that, ultimately, he had not. "I was not his heir," he continued, "nor was I his favorite-- that was Curvo. Neither the youngest and most eager to please, nor the strongest of will. And whatever else might be said of me, I was not the cruelest."

I thought of Lúthien and her abduction and felt ancient ire rise.

"Ah, yes," he said with a rueful twitch of his mouth. "You must assign that dubious honor to Tyelkormo."

These words were, perhaps, the hardest I have spoken, and yet for his sake I forced them through my throat: "Yet it was not always so. Once, even Celegorm knew gentleness." I sang to him the verse we had sung together while the sun had still reigned in the sky, of a child with a hound and a horn, beloved of Oromë, and the raucous cacophony he had crafted in a house full of joy.

Maglor's head grew heavy on my shoulder. After a time, I shook him gently, and bade him go properly to bed. He did not need to ask me to stay; I just did. The bed was too narrow to be comfortable for us both, and I lay blinking in the dark, waiting to feel his breath turn slow and even between my shoulder blades, but the rhythms of sleep did not come.

Darkness, I have found, breeds confession, and words slip more easily from lips unseen: "Did you ever think to abandon your quest?"

"Every day."

"If I had been there-- in Doriath-- would you have--"

His silence was both deafening and damning.

"You are honest, at least."

His head moved against my back, a slow, dull, nod. "Yes. I am honest."

The full weight of history may be too much for any one man to bear alone. The role of the Loremaster is to become a surrogate for history, to remove the sting of its immediacy and spread its burden to us all. Yet sometimes, it is time to look to the horizon rather than to the shadows which follow us. I took his hand and placed it against my heart. Soon, Maglor slept, and I listened to the tide of his breath go in and out until at last I, too, fell asleep.

Maglor eventually came, if not unwillingly, then uneagerly. I lured him with the song, reminding him each time he balked of Nerdanel's smile or Maedhros' laughter. In the end, he came. He brought nothing with him, deeming he possessed nothing of import. "I am burdened enough," he told me, "without the dross of my half-life here to weigh me down further."

He did not falter until we reached the strand, and great head of the swan was revealed against the bright sky. The Telerin crew stood in ranks on the deck, waiting. I took him by the hand and pulled him. By accident or providence, the jolly-boat had slipped its moorings and floated just off shore, and I waded toward it, tugging him with me step by hesitant step. The water rose to our knees. To our hips. The din of the sea rose up all around me like a wall of sound.

"Daeron--"

I could hardly hear him over the noise of the tide, the unending rush and roar of the wake. The cold caress of fish scales crossed my skin, and with it, the jangling chime of mail. Kelp twisted around my ankles and held me firm to the sandy floor of the bay even as the current pushed and pulled against me. My mind's eye filled with shades of blue and green and the radiance of nacre. My mouth opened, and the thunder of a breaking swell resounded... I had become the shell to which a child puts his ears to hear the ocean...the empty house...the vessel.

Like Manwë, Ulmo spoke within and without, and I closed my eyes to listen. His words echoed through the surf, rising thunderous from unseen deeps and accompanied by mighty white shell horns, a sound like the blood in the veins of the earth, the heartbeat of the sea. I spoke with a voice far greater than my own, in the tongue of the rains and the rivers and the floods: No theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in the One, nor can any alter the music in His despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but Eru's own instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not. I took Maglor's face in my hands, and I repeated those to him words again and again. Through distant eyes, from some great height, I watched his tears fall to meet the brine, and I took them into myself.

"My father claimed that in Aman we came through bliss to woe." His voice was small now, and far away. "The other now we will try: through sorrow to find joy; or freedom, at the least."

"Yes." Ulmo's embrace was subsiding even then, like an ebb tide, returning me to myself. He had claimed a sliver of me for his own, and left the imprint of his presence behind: a delight in the sea I had not previously possessed.

"Will I find forgiveness?" Maglor asked, sodden and shaking.

"Forgiveness is not for me to give," I said, in a voice that was both my own, and not. I turned him to the West so that the sun might warm our backs. Together we would devise things more wonderful, and raise our voices in some new chorus of the Song. "Mine is but to bring you home."

"Home," he whispered, and in that word was contained all the music of the world.

"Yes," I told him, "Home."

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