Looking at the Stars and Counting the Hours by Himring

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Chapter 1

 

Using both Quenya and Sindarin names, including all the range of names of Maedhros I'm aware of: Maitimo (mother name, referring to his good looks), Nelyafinwe (father name, referring to him as eldest grandson of Finwe), Russandol (epesse given by his grandfather, referring to his red hair), Maedhros, surnamed  the Tall (Sindarin, the name he acquired in Beleriand), Nelyo (nickname current in Feanor's household), Feanorion (patronymic, simply referring to him as son of Feanor); also Fingon=Findekano, Maglor=Macalaure.

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i

Fingon: 

The death of my father devastated me.  His loss in itself would have been a terrible blow, but that he should have died in an attack that amounted to suicide was soul-destroying; it so clearly showed not only his personal despair, but his belief that all that we had attempted in our war against Morgoth was in vain—and yet the task to continue those efforts had now passed on to me as his heir, for Morgoth must be fought, with hope or without it. That all had not been well between me and my father otherwise did not help. Although he himself had been too shaken with grief at the death of his brother Feanor to sustain any lasting grudge against his nephews, he seemed to feel that loyalty should somehow have exacted such a grudge from his sons. So did my brother Turukano—and I wondered whether Atar would have ridden forth as he did, if it had been Turukano or Irisse by his side and not I. Neither of us had seen my brother or my sister for years; we had heard that Irisse was lost to us.

By the time my cousin Maedhros was able to extricate himself from his besieged fortress of Himring and leave it in the care of his brother Maglor to come and see me, depression had thoroughly settled in. By day I performed my new duties faithfully enough, but dully and by rote. In the long evenings, I sat staring blindly at the fire and drank too much wine.

Maedhros arrived full of strategies and battle plans, as was his wont, and began holding forth on them almost right away. However, the first time he got a good look at my face in private conversation, he stopped in mid-sentence and after that all such subjects of conversation were strictly relegated to official occasions. When we were in private, he turned himself determinedly from Maedhros the master strategist into my cousin Russandol, and tried everything he could think of to entertain me, to distract me and to cheer me up.

It did not work. He ran the gamut of my known interests, both those I had recently pursued in Beleriand and those he had instructed me in long ago as a child in Tirion, from hunting to harp-playing to calligraphy, but I declined to participate fully in any of his suggestions, tagging along politely to any event or activity he organized for me, but then disappointing him by standing and gazing abstractedly into the middle distance. Each time, I would feel his gaze on the back of my head, turn and see his worried frown.

In a corner of my mind I was soothed and warmed by his efforts. My vanity was flattered by his attention. A more cynical side of me was amused, watching Maedhros the diplomat putting himself through hoops to get a grip on the mind of the cousin whom he had, knowingly or not, manoeuvred into the position of High King, when he had yielded up the crown to my father. But all these thoughts were a long way away; between myself and ordinary day-to-day emotions, between my cousin and myself, sat black and impenetrable the cloud of my depression.

Russandol proved stubborn. He postponed his planned departure and risked direct attempts at consolation. Talking at length about my father to me was indeed hazardous; it skirted on so many hurtful subjects between us. To stop him in his tracks and defend the privacy of my grief, it was enough to drop an oblique hint at unmentionable subjects—oaths, betrayals and violent death—and he would wince and give up for the day, leaving me secretly ashamed.

But he was persistent. He would try again, and eventually this led to outbursts of angry tears, shouting and slamming doors. I suppose he was making headway, but it cannot have felt like it at the time.

The final evening arrived; he told me he would have to leave for Himring early the next day. I was staring at the fire again, the level in the wine carafe lower than it should have been.

‘I wish you wouldn’t go’, I said; I was able to unbend that much.

‘You don’t know how much it hurts to see you this way’, he said, ‘but I’ve tried all I could think of, anything that I thought might help, except...’

His voice trailed off. Clearly, I was meant to ask the obvious question, but I couldn’t muster any curiosity.

‘I wonder,’ he said quietly, ‘you might send me off to the dungeons for lese-majesty or worse things. On the other hand...’

I raised a tired eyebrow. It was hardly an invitation, but he chose to take it as one. He came and sat on the couch beside me, put his arms around me and kissed my cheek. Getting nothing much by way of reaction, he ruffled my hair and smoothed it again.

‘Little cousin, you take things so hard’, he said, and slowly went on kissing and caressing me, whispering endearments into my ear. 

In itself, every touch, every kiss, every loving word was no more than cousin Nelyo had at one time or another quite innocently given a homesick child long ago when I was staying at Feanor’s house for my education, but of course I no longer was that child. To the pure all things are pure, but, in hindsight, I doubt that even Russandol, who tends to have a better opinion of me than I deserve, considered me quite as pure as that. What he was doing was giving me a chance to reject him without acknowledging what it was he was offering; he was going slowly mostly because he was ready to break off at any moment at a hint from me. 

At the time, however, such subtleties were beyond me. Befuddled with grief and alcohol, all I was aware of was that at some point I seemed to have gone from passivity because I couldn’t be bothered to move to holding still because I didn’t want him to stop. It was not obvious to him; he sighed, released me and began to get up. I made a childish sound of protest; he sat down again and went on, more explicitly sensual only by cumulative effect, his hesitations, I guess, only half-intentionally teasing my increasing arousal. When he tentatively released me the second time, I clung to him and moaned.

‘I suppose,’ he asked me, ‘as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb?’

His voice was unsteady. I didn’t answer his question, but helped him take off my clothes. Afterwards I slept more deeply than I had for months.

When I awoke, I turned and expected him to be there. He was not, and I became aware that it was late in the morning and that I had a faint memory of his lips brushing mine in a dream some time earlier, without quite waking me up. I got up. In my dressing room, I encountered a servant who had just set out breakfast for one.

‘Where is my cousin?’, I asked.

He looked surprised and alarmed. ‘Your majesty, Prince Maedhros left for Himring hours ago.’

Of course I’d known, and of course I’d forgotten. How very Nelyafinwe—arch-manipulator of others for their own good, he’d carefully left his move to the last evening and scheduled an early departure, so that now we wouldn’t be seeing each other for months. Rage boiled up in me. Unlike Maedhros, I’m not known for my diplomacy; for a moment I actually considered dashing after him and dragging him off his horse and into the nearest bush to have it out with him. Indiscreet even for me—it would have been rather difficult to explain to the thirty soldiers of his escort. 

Meanwhile, sensible or not, it felt surprisingly good to be furious with Russandol—as if a bout of healthy anger was just what I’d needed right then. I realized the servant was still staring at me and looking increasingly unhappy. I smiled at him and was surprised to find my smile genuine.

`I see. There’s something I forgot to tell my cousin, but no matter. I’ll send a letter.’ Rather lame and perhaps unworthy of a former student of Nelyafinwe’s, but it would suffice.

I returned to my bedroom and acknowledged that perhaps Russandol had not been entirely wrong after all. My emotions might be more confused than I’d realized; it wouldn’t hurt to take a bit of time to sort them out. I went over to the bed and looked at the side where he had lain. On the pillow, I found a single long red hair and twisted it round my fingers. Without warning, I burst into tears. I curled up on the bed and wept for my father for a long time, clutching the pillow as if somebody was about to snatch it away.

Things went better after that. I might not have recovered my optimism, but I did rediscover my love for our people and my sincere wish to do well by them. I was touched how grateful they were to see me more myself; it made me work the harder for them. In the evenings, I would still sit, quiet and exhausted, and look into the fire, but now I was envisioning red hair in the flames and the light of Maitimo’s eyes; I listened for his voice whispering my name in the crackle of the burning wood. Sufficiently intoxicated by memory and imagination, I dispensed with the wine. 

How Atar would have disapproved. While he was alive, I wouldn’t even have allowed myself to imagine that such feelings were possible. Yet now that he was not there to be hurt by anything I felt and did, I found I felt no shame, no guilt, not over this.

A whole year went by like that. Although regular messages passed back and forth between Himring and Hithlum, they were businesslike, including no more than warm cousinly greetings. Once or twice I had tried to think of a way of encoding a more personal message but failed. Producing any kind of tangible evidence at this stage, beyond the single hair which I carried with me everywhere, neatly sealed into an unobtrusive slip of parchment, seemed a step too momentous to undertake on my own.

ii

Fingon: 

Until yesterday, when I arrived at Himring and saw that hair and those eyes again— but I was being High King Fingon, who is paying Prince Maedhros an official visit; I didn’t dare to look too closely. Only now do we find ourselves alone together, during a brief gap in what looks as if it will continue to be a punishing schedule, and it’s already almost noon. The door closes behind his steward; I listen for the sound of the latch and receding footsteps.

I take a deep breath, but it is he who speaks first. ‘You look much better than you did last time we met. I’m glad.’

‘Yes’, I say, ‘being in love helps.’

There is a brief silence. I lift my eyes and look him straight in the face. We are only a couple of steps apart. I think he has paled a little, but I’m not sure.

‘In love?’, he asks quietly.

‘With you, of course,’ I answer, ‘who else?’

He looks at me wide-eyed. His lips move—maybe that’s my name they’re shaping, but no sound emerges, and suddenly I’m horribly afraid that I’ve completely misunderstood what happened the year before.

However, it’s not in my nature to back down easily, so I go on bravely, forcing my tone to be light, even humorous: ‘Ai Russandol, I hope you’re not planning to kiss me only when I need comforting—for otherwise I’m going to need a lot of comforting!’

His eyelids flicker; that snail’s trail of moisture on his cheek is a tear.

‘Oh love, it’s you who need comforting, I think’, I exclaim, dismayed. I take him in my arms and find he’s trembling from head to foot.

No, I haven’t misunderstood at all, he’s mine for the asking, my love, my cousin, but nevertheless this isn’t going as I’d expected. I thought that all I needed to do was to convey to him that I couldn’t care less that the customs of the Eldar don’t envision love between males or between cousins. I imagined that as soon as I gave my explicit consent to the affair, he would take over as usual, my cousin Nelyafinwe. Instead of which I find I’ve literally swept him off his feet. I kiss him quickly, for consolation, and then more thoroughly, to claim him for myself, and feel him melting against me like wax.

Plain people, conventional wisdom has it, are made beautiful by love; nothing like a star-struck expression to improve upon a nondescript face. When Maitimo, who once upon a time in Tirion was the most beautiful of Finwe’s grandchildren, leans back in my arms to gaze at me with his eyes full of hope, utterly without reserve for the first time since forever, he looks—almost—ugly. Why are the scars on his forehead and cheek suddenly so obvious? It’s because he trusts me, because he no longer is making the effort to hide, I realize. But it comes as a shock to me, for it seems I haven’t seen his sorrow this clearly since just after Thangorodrim...

When I brought him from Thangorodrim, when I bent down to ease his abused and tortured body off the back of the giant eagle into my father’s arms, Maitimo’s pain conquered us all, my father, my brother, my sister, my cousins. It wasn’t that we calculated how much of his anguish would pay for involving us in the kinslaying at Alqualonde, how much for marooning us in Araman, how much for subjecting us to the terrors of the Helcaraxe. The mere sight of his savaged flesh wiped all accounts and all thought of accounting. That anyone, even Morgoth, could do such a thing to one of us, to one of our family, to our Russandol, was a horror that immediately demonstrated to us the limits of our imagination. Despite everything, we are a close-knit family, after all.

I’m sure that none of us ever really forgot that moment, the sight of him, but it was Russandol himself who tried to make us forget. Before he had regained control of his body to any significant degree, teetering on the brink of sanity, he had already begun to try to wrench control of the way we perceived him back to himself, and how we connived at his efforts—even Turukano, even Angarato!—at the same time as they allowed themselves to become infuriated by his machinations to extract forcibly through a calculated act of humility a forgiveness that they had already freely given him. Whether he understood their reactions at all, constantly threatened as he was at the time by mental and physical collapse, was unclear to me, but it hardly mattered. It had never been a conscious decision, surely, merely the honed reflexes of Nelyafinwe, sometime courtier and politician in Tirion, kicking in—or perhaps, deep down, the instincts of Nelyo, brilliant son of an over-exacting father? In any case, a forgiveness that was offered to him alone, and not to his brothers, would have been unacceptable then—resignation on that count came later, and not easily.

I who had cut him off the cliff face of Thangorodrim, who hovered at his bedside, who helped him retrain his left hand to compensate for the loss of his right, witnessed all the humiliating details of an agonizing return to life more closely than anyone, except perhaps his closest brother, Macalaure. But having refused him death by my hand in Angband, I also had a greater stake in his being whole and well than anyone else. So I distanced myself inwardly, in self-defence, while outwardly I unflinchingly dealt with festering wounds, nightmares, chamber pots. When he first departed for Himring, I wanted him so badly to be completely recovered that I took any reassuring words of his at face value, and when we met again, I was careful never to look beyond.

And now here, only a kiss away—that beloved face and all the old pain that he isn’t even thinking about just now and that nevertheless is so obvious once I allow myself to look for it. I find my hands beginning to clench behind his back, as I am finally forced to acknowledge what I permitted myself for so long to ignore—that I never did entirely succeed in rescuing my cousin from Angband—and that what I left behind wasn’t just the wreck of his dead white hand.

Russandol's eyes are asking me whether I'm planning to kiss him again and, if not, what happens next? He is beginning to look a little anxious; I’m afraid he might guess what I’m thinking. I gently brush my lips across his forehead so as to conceal the expression on my face.

‘Russandol,’ I say tenderly, ‘I’m afraid I was too impetuous as usual; this is hardly a safe time and place. Do you think we can maybe continue this—discussion tonight?’

It is true; this door doesn’t bolt and our time here alone will soon be over. Reminded of this, he visibly pulls himself together, steps away from me and runs his hand through his hair.

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘yes, I will come for you.’

iii

Fingon: 

The afternoon runs its course, and now there is only the evening reception to get through. After the speeches, we separate and mingle. Between snatches of small talk, over the shoulders of various local dignitaries, I watch Maedhros the Tall weaving his way across the hall of Himring. In fact, he isn’t really so very much taller than anyone else, it’s the way he carries himself that makes him stand out among the crowd. He walks gracefully like a dancer, every step daring onlookers to regard him as a cripple, pain concealed in plain sight, effortlessness the result of meticulous effort. The stump of his right arm is carefully neither hidden nor permitted to look obtrusive. He smiles warmly at his dependants and allies as he goes, stops, stays and moves on. He is never over-formal as Father was sometimes wont to be, indeed he’s posing as a plain-dressed, plain-speaking lord of a grim border fortress, but there are grace notes, a delicate bracelet sliding down his wrist, a calligraphic scroll hanging in a well-chosen spot on the wall behind him, subtle reminders of civilization and Valinor. My brother Turukano wrote to me that he would rebuild Tirion in the valley of Tumladen, wherever that may be. Maedhros doesn’t need stone and mortar to make you see Tirion; he sketches it in, casually, with a gesture of his hand.

Angarato in his wrath once called him a fake, but that only shows that of all of us he was the one who knew him the least. He is Nelyafinwe Maitimo, he combines the genuine warmth of his mother Nerdanel with Feanorian passion and charm, and what compromises him is not lack of authenticity. The strength of Nelyafinwe was always his willingness to use, even exploit himself, his weakness that he did not know where to stop. He does not know how to spare himself and so, although he has spent so much of his life, in one way or another, trying to protect people, in the last resort, he does not know how to spare others either. Now the performance that is Maedhros sustains him, but also undermines him. It is a precarious act of balance; he cannot afford to falter.

Briefly, our eyes meet across the room, and the trappings of Middle Earth fade away for a moment. I see him suddenly as a vessel of light, less bright than a Silmaril, less enduring than a Silmaril, more tarnished—but who cares about Silmarils? My love, my light, when you first illuminated my life, when I came to your house as a lonely child, it was like the first sunrise, long before I ever saw the Sun. How infallible you seemed then, how unfailingly kind! Since then, you have proved to be neither, Feanorion, but now, in the gathering dark, you are my one remaining star—almost all I’ve got left to steer by.

I blink, and normal vision returns. A dark head interposes itself between me and Russandol.

‘Guard your eyes, Sire’, advises Maglor softly.

I open my mouth to make a cutting remark; then I realize he is right. I really will need to work on my discretion, but I’ve never had this kind of secret to keep before.

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about it,’ I say firmly.

He smiles. ‘Of course not,’ he agrees. ‘I find I need a breath of fresh air and would appreciate your company. Will you come with me?’

I intensely dislike the raw chill that constitutes fresh air on a Himring evening—it reminds me too much of the Ice up north—but if Macalaure wants to warn me off his brother, then I’d better let him have his say, so I follow him outside into the growing dusk. Despite asking for my company, he doesn’t speak and his face is turned away from me, so it is I who ask him: ‘You disapprove?’

‘Disapprove?’, he answers. ‘When it was you who brought him back from Angband—not just his body, I mean? Even then, although you didn’t requite his feelings, it was most of all you he came back for, I think.’

I watch the way he lifts his head, shaking off or defying something.

‘I will approve of anything and anyone that keeps my brother’s mind off Angband—and off the Oath.’ He looks at me and frowns painfully. ‘It is difficult for us—even more so, now Morgoth has broken the Siege. There is too much despair in his love for us. He thinks he should have stopped us from swearing the Oath, from slaying our kin in Alqualonde—on most days, that seems to weigh more on him than being mired in the Oath and the kinslaying himself—and of course, we all wish he had, even Tyelkormo, even Curufinwe, although they would never admit it. It makes them the more bitter, that they do. But I do not think he could have stopped any of us. ‘

‘Even if he hadn’t had that ingrained habit of never contradicting Atar in public... He would always go along with him, as you know, then try and pick up the pieces afterwards, behind the scenes. The one time he did try stopping us, at Losgar...’

He hunches his shoulders. ‘Something I think you have not been told’, he says. ‘It was I who threw the first torch into the ships at Losgar. Atar was shouting at Nelyo, and for once Nelyo was shouting back, giving no quarter. I saw Atar’s face, and I grew afraid. I thought he was going to cut Nelyo down where he stood. I panicked, grabbed the torch from Atar’s hand and tossed it into the nearest ship. All I could think of was stopping their quarrel, before Atar went for Nelyo; it was only when the torch hit the deck that I remembered what it would mean for you...’

I close my eyes and think of Feanor as I last saw him, in Araman, not long before Losgar. Unfortunately, it is not too difficult to imagine Russandol being cut down by his beloved father. I swallow bile.

‘I was going to ask you to be kind to my brother’, Macalaure says; his beautiful singer’s voice is shaking. ‘I’ve argued my case really well, haven’t I?’

I reach out and touch his shoulder. ‘Better than you think,’ I say, ‘but don’t tell anyone else, Macalaure.’

‘The same goes for you’, he says more calmly. ‘I knew before you did—but don’t let anyone else see it. Not unless you want to have to start watching your back around Tyelkormo and Curufinwe all the time rather than only occasionally... In their own way, they are as protective of him as he is of them. They hate to think him weak, and their definition of weakness is not generous.’

I recall weeks, no months, of intensive rivalry at Russandol’s bedside, divided by the fears we shared, a constant struggle—mostly silent, always polite, ridiculous, of course, but never at all funny—over who would get to change the next bandage, who would spoon the next bowl of soup into his mouth, who would sit up and watch in the small hours of the following night.

‘It is you who are generous, Macalaure’, I say, although almost at the same time I have a mental image of him with a torch in his hand.

 

iv

Fingon: 

Russandol comes to my chambers after the reception is over.

‘There is a good view of Wilwarin to be had from the top of the northwest tower’, he says, not quite looking at me. I’d like to show you. Will you come with me?’

I raise my eyebrows and go and grab my warmest cloak. We walk side by side through the silent corridors, reach the tower and begin to climb the stairs. On the third floor, he turns aside into what is clearly a disused guard room. On the hearth, a fire has been lit. He goes and adds another log to it.

Two floors of locked store rooms beneath us, the door to the tower bolted at the bottom of the stairs and the excuse of star-gazing, transparent as it is, since the northwest tower is not especially high—since noon my cousin has re-learned caution with a vengeance. He also has re-learned doubt, it seems. He seems very preoccupied with the fire. I myself feel a strange awkwardness, as if I’ve already felt too much, too strongly today.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘There were no arrangements. I hadn’t...expected to need them. I managed to get away earlier to light this fire, but it doesn’t really seem to have done much good yet. I know how you hate the cold.’

‘Take me in your arms’, I whisper, ‘and I promise not to complain about the cold.’

He stands still for a moment in front of the hearth; then he turns and looks at me. ‘Findekano,’ he asks me, almost formally, ‘do you really wish to burden yourself in this way?’

‘I found myself wondering today’, I answer him, still very quietly, ‘why I did not protest more, Russandol, when you first went East with your brothers, why I did not insist that we should stay together—even though you forsook me as much as I did you. Had we not already suffered separation enough? No doubt we each of us had our reasons; they seemed good at the time. But I had not learnt the bitter lesson of Middle Earth yet: that time inflicts wounds as much as it heals them.’

‘Now those years in which we might have taken time to learn our way around each others’ hurts are lost and gone and I find myself counting as I never did before, in hours, minutes... I fear, Russandol, that I will not be with you long enough again for the question of burdens even to arise—not this time and not next time, assuming there is a next time.’

It’s been a long day; I suppose that is why, although it’s such a poky little room, the floor seems to be miles across. Didn’t I promise Macalaure to be kind to him? Is it kind to be talking to him like this? I sigh.

‘As soon as we’re apart again, with the whole extent of Anfauglith between us, all I’ll have to sustain myself once more are memories of you, Russandol. If necessary, I’ll make do with the ones I have, but I would really prefer to replace them by something better than the memory of your ministering to a tear-sodden log of wood, if you don’t mind. If it comes to that, I would prefer to offer you better memories than this, also...’

‘Tear-sodden log?’ Those shadowed grey eyes light up. His lips twitch. ‘Aren’t you being a little harsh?’

I catch hold of his shoulders and hug him tightly. ‘Russandol, let me love you back. Please.’

He kisses me and I feel my knees sagging slightly with relief.

‘Steady.’ His arm snakes around my waist and holds me up, and we exchange a wry smile at the reversal of roles.

‘So you require me to be memorable, do you?’, he asks, ‘What if I don’t feel quite up to the challenge?’

‘Oh, you are memorable, whatever you do’, I say, realizing I mean it, literally; I must be really far gone, but then I knew that already...

‘Double standards?’, he goes on teasing me, ‘You make quite a memorable wooden log yourself. I must admit, though, this...feels better.’

‘Does it? Good... And this?’

‘You’re shivering’, he says, after a while.

‘It’s not the cold’, I protest.

‘I’m not entirely sure I believe you’, he says, ‘Wait a moment.’

He goes and drags the bedding off the guard’s bed in the corner and clumsily tries to drape it around me. The prickly, lumpy old eiderdown keeps sliding off my shoulders. It makes me laugh, and we end up in a huddle on the hearth rug, grinning.

When Feanor heard the Doom of Mandos pronounced on him and his kin, he promised us that at least we would forever be glorious in song. Maybe Macalaure will write a song about Maedhros the Tall, although it doesn’t look as if anyone will remain alive in Beleriand to sing it. Or maybe the song will somehow reach Valinor—but what would they make of it over there, how could they possibly understand?

My heart, I know now, sings Nelyafinwe Maitimo Russandol. It’s a silent song; it has no words, for it is forbidden even to use those names of his in public in this country, just as the whole language we shared in our youth has now become our family’s dirty secret. As for our love, it is forbidden altogether, twice over. Whatever Feanor said, it is impossible to accept any of the steps of the dance of disaster that brought us to this point, the violence, the betrayals, the overwhelming losses, as if they could truly be considered a price worth paying for anything—however much I would like my own desire to be meaningful beyond the here and now. The song in my heart will justify nothing, compensate for nothing—and I fear that in the end it will prevent nothing.

We’re making love in a pile of damp bedding on a dusty hearth rug in an icy guard room in a forlorn outpost in a war we’re going to lose—and I only wish that were the worst of it. But, he is, after all, Maitimo. His eyes gleam in the firelight, a cascade of red hair sweeps my face and neck, his touch warms me like nothing else could.

‘Ai, Findekano,’ he murmurs—the sound of his voice sweet and low above the crackling of the fire.

He takes the longing from my tongue, returns it, deepened, until it flares cruelly beneath my skin. My fingers dig into his back, I am gasping for breath, while my brain feverishly goes on recording textures, angles, colours, scent, in order to recall them later, in solitary nights. Nothing‘s all right, it cannot be, but in the circle of my arms he’s perfect.

Eventually, we go and look at the stars.

 

v

Maedhros:

I walk on salt-white sand beside a black sea under a starless sky and know I’m dreaming. I think I hear someone call my name, turn round and see Findekano come racing after me along the shore. Instantly, of course, I find myself rooted to the spot; all I can do is stretch out my hands. He comes rushing towards me, hardly slowing down at all as he approaches, and I glimpse on his face the fierce determination with which he faced every challenge that had to be met, the expression I saw on his face as we parted before the Nirnaeth. He cannons into my chest, braids whipping across my neck, his chin jabbing my collar bone. There is a sweet, hungry moment, while I’m simply moulding myself around that impact, knowing I will not touch that firm, familiar body again in waking life.

But already he is changing, bruises, slashes and burns spreading across his face and his shoulders, as he gradually turns into the mangled corpse he became because I failed to save him that day. His eyes remain open, though, fixing on mine with the same urgency that drove him earlier.

‘Maitimo,’ he says, ‘aure entuluva! Day will come again!’

His voice is clear, compelling, as they tell me it rang out in the morning over the battle field. It has been reported to me what he said and how Hurin answered him in the evening. I look into his eyes and, for a moment, almost believe it: that those words don’t just represent the defiance of the courageous in defeat, but that they are a truth meant for me as much as for anyone else.

Unnoticed, however, the black sea and sky have been boiling up a storm. A huge wave breaks over us and suddenly I find myself waist-deep among the surge, struggling against the winds and the tide that are trying to rip Findekano’s body out of my grasp. His lips are still moving, but I can no longer hear him speak for the roar and hiss of the waters. My right hand slips, and he is wrenched away, sucked into the pitch-dark inferno; no trace of him remains.

‘Findekano!’, I scream,’Fin...’

I sit bolt-upright, one-handed again and sore-throated, having screamed myself awake. Macalaure crouches on the other side of the camp fire, his harp in his hands, watching me anxiously. Our eyes meet. He hesitates, then reaches forward and plucks a single chord in a minor key. The notes’ sad question slices through me like a clean sharp blade, and I open my mouth. But now I am awake, I find once again that I cannot weep, cannot scream, cannot even utter the name of the one I have lost, although it still lodges in my throat like broken glass.

Maybe another day will come, but not for us.

 

vi

‘There you are.’
‘Yes... You heard what I did?’
‘Yes, they did tell me what you had done to yourself—and to others. But Mandos released you in the end.’
‘So he did...’

‘Russandol...?’
‘Yes?’
‘I know I shouldn’t try to push at this point, but... You returned late. The world grows old. See, the Sun is weary. Can you feel how the air has grown colder, even in the Gardens of Lorien? I had hoped to spend some of the time that remains with you—well, all of it, really...’
‘You’ve been waiting for me, then?’
‘Yes, I have. Of course I have. Shouldn’t I have been?’
‘Should you have been waiting? You’re asking me that, of all people?’
‘Why would I be asking anyone else?’

‘Will I wake up under a bush in Beleriand again and know I’ve lost you?’
‘Maitimo...! Not this time, no. I am here—and so are you.’
‘I can feel your heart beating under my fingers. Yes, hold me. Let us sit here a little while. And then you can tell me what to do and where to go...’

 

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Chapter End Notes

 

Allusion to song text of Leonard Cohen near end of section iv.

Some of the plot structure of this story is taken from ford_of_bruinen's Memories of Findekano, although I believe I did something rather different with it.

The idea that Maglor might have torched the first ship at Losgar to stop the confrontation between Feanor and Maedhros from becoming violent is taken from a fan fiction story that I had read several months previously (on HASA?), but have not been able to find again since. If anyone can point me towards the author and title of that story, I will be happy to cite them here.