Full of Wisdom and Perfect in Beauty by Gadira

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Interlude IX: Master of Doom

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“Wait, Níniel! Go not alone! You know not what you will find… and I…”

The enthusiasm with which Hannon had attacked the speech began to falter as he became aware of the older man’s furious stare, until it died abruptly.

“No, no, no! You are wrong again! You skipped one line, the one that begins with ‘What is the way?’Are you doing it on purpose, or what?”

“Yes! I mean, no! I’m… I just forgot… I am sorry!”

The apology sounded believable enough, as he now looked at the verge of turning tail and running as far as he could from the room and this whole wretched business. Since Kamal -or Prince Vorondil, as he had to be addressed since his marriage- had accepted the responsibility of organizing the representation of this play about Túrin, the hero of the First Age, he had become as obsessed with it as if his reputation was somehow linked with its success or failure. He had suffered no other to be cast in the main role, forced all of them to rehearse every day, agonized over every tiny detail, and his temper had become increasingly erratic whenever something went wrong. If Hannon, Hiram’s brother-in-law, was present on the rehearsal, at least one yelling match was always guaranteed. The younger man was a terrible actor, his grasp of Elvish almost non-existing, and though his role didn’t have that many lines, he usually forgot half of them. To make things worse, the angrier Vorondil became, the greater was his brother Hiram’s amusement.

“Oh, I think you miscast the lad. He is obviously not comfortable in his character” he intervened now, not too concerned with hiding the sarcasm in his voice. “Maybe you should recast everybody yet again.”

Elendil let his glance wander towards Lady Eluzîni, who was lying on the floor, gazing at the ceiling. As he did so, her blank stare became alive for a moment, and she rolled her eyes at him.

Oh, no, he mouthed in silence. During the first month, when Vorondil had forcefully enlisted them for his grand project, he had changed his mind almost daily about the roles they should perform. Elendil had been Thingol, then Orodreth, then Húrin -who had been eliminated from the final version- and then Gwindor, before finally ending up with the role of Beleg. Eli had suggested that he should play the role of Mîm the Petty Dwarf, as this would cause sensation in court, and when her cousin had refused point blank to consider the idea she had accused him of not wanting to be upstaged. She was the only one who still had the ability to see the humour in this dreary endeavour, perhaps because she was also the only one who had managed to secure the role she wanted: that of Glaurung, the Dragon of Morgoth. Originally cast as Finduilas, the fair Elven princess, she had found her terribly boring and refused to collaborate.

“Oh, perhaps you should do it, then!” Vorondil shouted. “Come here and do Brandir, too, if you can do it so well!”

“I am sure there is no need…” Lady Kadrani, Hiram’s wife and Hannon’s elder sister, tried to intervene. She was the one who was eventually cast as Finduilas, and she was trying to look the part, wearing more makeup than what Elendil would have believed possible in anything but a painted statue. Maybe she would be a better dragon than I am, after all, Eluzîni’s malicious voice had whispered in his ear the other week. “It was just a tiny mistake.”

“No, thanks!” Hiram did not seem to have even heard her. “Being killed twice by you is already more than enough. If I end up playing all the characters you kill in the story, the Court will start wondering if perhaps we do not get along.”

Back when Hiram had been cast as Saeros and Brodda the Easterling, they had joked about it indeed. It had still been early enough in the process for that.

“Please, give me another chance. I will do it correctly this time,” Hannon begged.

“I am sure you will.” Kadrani’s vivid red lips curved in an encouraging smile. Her brother returned it briefly, then pressed a sweaty palm against his eyes, as if in furious thought. He took a long, deep breath.

“Let us start from the beginning of the scene. On the count of three. One, two… three!”

Silence.

“Míriel!”

“What?” Everybody’s gaze became fixed upon the Princess of the West, who was sitting on a chair, absently sipping spiced wine from a cup. She looked back at them, as if she could not understand why they were so interested in her.

“That was your cue!”

“Perhaps you should have warned me beforehand. I was so bored that I had ceased paying attention.”

Vorondil’s face became red.

“Oh, do not look at me like that. I never wanted to be in this stupid play.” Míriel swallowed the last of the cup as she stood up, with a languid air to her movements. “This Túrin Turambar is the most foolish hero I have ever heard about. Master of Doom! Ha! He believed he had mastered Fate, and Fate beat him at every turn. How pathetic is that?” “Míriel, beloved…”

Elendil watched their argument in silence. He was now a much better observer of her behaviour than he used to be during his brief but disastrous courtship of her. As he grew used to watch her acting around the man who was now her husband, as the pain had receded into the background and then disappeared, he had realized that, in many occasions, her apparently erratic and capricious behaviour served as a cover to do things that would exasperate or humiliate him in front of others. Maybe she loved him sincerely, in a way, but a dark part of her soul was also eager to make a fool of him.

As she had made a fool of him, too, he thought, still haunted by the memory of that Erulaitalë of years ago. His mother had been right; he had been fortunate to escape the orbit of such a woman.

“Míriel, please!”

“Then again, you do play him very convincingly, my dear.” She was smiling now, with that smile which Elendil had once been glad to see, but now for some reason made him shiver. “Well, let us begin, then. Er… Did you not offer to lead me to him?”

Hannon blinked in such a clueless way that Hiram had to visibly repress a snort.

“No, no, no, that is not what you had to say now!”

“I am sorry.” Míriel sat again. “I have forgotten my lines.”

Liar, Eluzîni silently mouthed in the direction of Elendil. He nodded. She was always pretending to forget her lines, either because she wished to see Vorondil lose his temper, or because she was looking for an excuse not to come to any more rehearsals. But Vorondil’s experience as a husband was beginning to show with the years: he never, ever rose to her provocations, and always remembered to beg abjectly whenever he wanted something. Perhaps that was the reason why his temper was shorter and shorter when it came to other people, Elendil speculated idly.

“Look, there it is. You begin with ‘is this the way?’, as you come in fast, as if you were in a hurry, your eyes darting around as if looking for something…” On the floor, Eluzîni was pretending to fan herself to take the heat away from her face; under the cover of her large red fan, she began pulling faces as the rest gathered around the Prince’s piece of paper to look at the lines. One of them was such a good imitation of the mixture of pompousness and grovelling in Vorondil’s current manner that Elendil could not suppress a smile.

She would be such a good actress, he thought, once again regretting that her face would be hidden under a hideous mask during the entire play. It was true that this particular story did not contain any female characters who could do her justice, as it was a sad tale of the First Age, full of those grim women and weeping maidens that she found so unappealing. If the King was not so interested in the old days, they could have been reviving some Númenórean comedy, maybe one of those that were so popular during the reign of Ar-Abattarîk, and she would be able to shine. He remembered the day when she had done comic dancing for them, in the Lord of Hyarnustar’s Armenelos residence. Hiram had found it a little too scandalous, but Elendil had secretly thought that he would not mind seeing it again. Now, he would definitely have changed it for all the Túrins and Nienors in the world.

“Right, on my cue! One, two, three!”

Vorondil’s voice brought him back from his thoughts of the Prince’s cousin dressed in red gauze and moving her body in an improper manner. After only a short while, however, his resolve to pay attention devolved into renewed apathy. Princess Míriel had decided to behave as if she knew her lines, but now it was Hannon who had forgotten them again. Hiram was teasing him so much that his wife accused him of trying to make him nervous on purpose, to which he argued that it was Vorondil who was doing that with his foul mood. In the end, they managed to trudge onwards to the part where Nienor found Turin’s body, but then Míriel claimed that she could not get into her character properly if Vorondil was not lying on the ground for her to react to.

“But, beloved, I am directing! I cannot direct from the floor!”

“Then stop directing while I am playing my role!”

“She has a point”, Hiram intervened. “I think you would do more good lying on the floor than standing there making Hannon forget his lines.”

“I make him forget his lines?”

“I do not know about that, but fair is fair.” Eluzîni intervened. “I have been lying on this wretched marble for what seems like hours. Perhaps they were actual hours, I do not know. All I know is that my back is hurting, and yours should, too.”

“You will not have to lie when we have the dragon, only hide behind it and move…” Vorondil’s voice trailed away at an imperious look from Míriel, and he shook his head. “Very well, I will lie on the floor if that makes you feel better, my dear.”

Elendil knew about lying on the floor. They had rehearsed his death scene endlessly only last week, though at least in his case he had the benefit of Prince Vorondil not being able to direct himself into distraction. On the other hand, he had Eluzîni trying to make him slip in the worst possible moment and force him to repeat the scene again. Her dragon had been nowhere near that part of the story, and yet she was there every day, as if she derived her greatest entertainment from seeing him fall to the hard floor time after time.

Then again, a voice said in his mind, you are not in this scene, either, and yet you are here. But it was not the same, he told himself, for Vorondil had been meaning to rehearse earlier scenes as well. It was not Elendil’s fault that they would not have the time to do so anymore.

With a wince, Eluzîni was struggling now from her prone position, propping her weight on her elbows so her ribcage would be free to do what she referred to as her impressive dragon voice. And impressive it was, if one considered the enormous difference between it and her usual voice, though the volume still had to be adjusted and enhanced when the huge dragon mask arrived.

“Hail, Nienor, daughter of Húrin! We meet again ere the end. I give thee joy that thou hast found thy brother at last. And now thou shalt know him: a stabber in the dark, treacherous to foes, faithless to friends, and a curse unto his kin, Túrin son of Húrin! But the worst of all his deeds thou shalt feel in thyself.”

Míriel staggered back, for a moment looking for all the world as if she had seen something horrifying. Though Elendil knew she was acting, this had been so eerily similar to the true fits in which she would see her waking visions, that he had to consciously suppress a start. Some were not so successful as he was: Lady Kadrani and her brother both looked shocked, and even Lord Hiram did not seem so mocking now.

“Farewell, O twice beloved! A Túrin Turambar turún’ ambartanen, master of doom by doom mastered! O happy to be dead!” Violently, she tore herself away from the bodies and took flight. The direction was wrong, as Vorondil had decreed the precipice to be right by the chair, but nobody said anything about it. Even Hannon forgot that he had to speak, until his sister nudged him and he jumped to his feet.

“Wait! Wait, Níniel!”

“Wait? Wait?” Míriel laughed, a chilling laugh full of contempt. “That was ever your counsel. Would that I had heeded! But now it is too late, and now I will wait no more upon Middle-Earth.” Her arms opened wide, as if she was beckoning Death itself into her embrace. “Water, water! Take now Níniel Nienor daughter of Húrin; Mourning, Mourning, daughter of Morwen! Take me and bear me down to the Sea! It is… too late” she repeated, her voice dulled to a whisper, a tear rolling down her ivory cheek.

For a while, nobody moved nor spoke. The resulting silence had a thunderous quality to Elendil’s ears. The last repetition was not in the original text, he thought, but he could not see why that should matter to anyone, not even to someone with Vorondil’s standards of perfection. That scene had been… he could not find words at first to describe it. Only when the Prince struggled to his feet, and everybody found their voices back, he felt himself regaining his wits enough to pinpoint it: the scene had been hers, in a way that whatever she chose to speak or do became the correct version, and nothing else.

He shivered.

“Míriel, dear… beloved… it is nothing. I am here.” Vorondil crooned in her ear as he cradled her in his arms, as if she was a child. Her tears did not stop falling, and Lord Hiram shook his head.

“I think we should call it a day”, Elendil spoke then, for a moment feeling, for some twisted reason, that he was still responsible for her. “The rehearsal has been long, and it is starting to take its toll on us.”

Nobody argued against this, not even Vorondil, who carefully helped her to her feet, an arm laid across her shoulder for support. As they abandoned the room, Hannon followed them from the corner of his eye, torn between relief and shocked fascination.

“Poor thing”, Kadrani muttered. Lord Hiram fulminated her with his glance.

“She is the Princess of the West. That talk is treason.”

“But I was just…” Her cheeks reddened; even under all that makeup, her embarrassment was visible. “She… I did not mean…”

“Father needs help preparing his next Council session. We should depart” he cut her, before she could finish her sentence. Both she and her brother followed him to the door, leaving Elendil and Lady Eluzîni of Hyarnustar alone in the room.

“Excellent!” she celebrated, while she struggled to sit on the balls of her feet. Her gaze fell on him, her lips curving in an expectant smile. “Can we have a drink now?”

Elendil was busy. He was very busy, and this absurd Court play was consuming so much of his time that not a day passed by without him cursing the hour in which the King and the Prince had conceived this stupid idea.

“I cannot see why not”, he said.

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

There was still some wine left from the Princess of the West’s jar, enough to fill two cups, if not to the brim. Of course, they could have had someone bring more, or even relocated to a more pleasant spot, but everyone in the Court knew that they should not be disturbed during rehearsals, and they wished to continue taking advantage of that for as long as possible. Though at some point they will begin wondering what we could be rehearsing on our own, Elendil thought, his embarrassment growing as the truth of his present position began dawning in his mind. Courtiers would gossip. And Lady Eluzîni…

Eluzîni’s position, when it came to Court gossip, was at the same time infinitely weaker and infinitely stronger than his. There were already all sorts of things being said about her, and she could count on anything she did being distorted in the foulest ways. On the other hand, all that gossip seemed to have made her invulnerable to more gossip. As she had put it once -on the same day she had danced, if Elendil remembered well- it was possible that, after a while, some would tire of always hearing the same stories about her, while others might begin wondering if things could have been blown out of proportion by jealous slanderers.

He, on the other hand… there had been no gossip about him, at least since the Princess confessed her love for other man right in the middle of a feast. Even there, his role had not been precisely that of a womanizer, he thought, trying to isolate and somehow defuse the shame he still felt whenever he remembered about it. He was the laughable fool who had his betrothed -they had never been betrothed, but tales grew with time- stolen from under his nose.

Would any Court gossip involving Lady Eluzîni and himself make things better, or worse? At once, he found himself wondering where that foolish thought could have come from. Surely, Court gossip had never made things better for anyone.

“Who would have said it? My cousins seemed shocked to discover how good an actress the Princess of the West is.” Eli smiled, drinking a sip of the wine in her cup. “Perhaps they never watched her as closely as you did.”

This came so close to what he had been thinking before that he was forced to hide his surprise.

“Knowing is not enough” he argued, sitting down next to her. “Sometimes, it is hard to know when she is acting, and when it is real. That scene she played... it could have been real. It could have been in the past, or it could have been in the future.”

“Or, as Lady Kadrani would put it when she is in treasonous mood, poor thing.” She made a grimace. “Though not as much as some seem to believe. But enough about her; I am done committing treason for today. Do you think that my dear cousin will have his play finished in time for the summer feast?”

“I hope so”, he replied, glad for this change of subject. “I will be quite relieved to be able to put this behind me.”

“Really?” Her lips curved in a pout. “But I am enjoying myself immensely! We should do this more often. Pretending to be someone else is fun enough, but watching them fumble around and make a mess of it… oh, it is hilarious!”

“I fail to see what is hilarious about this constant bickering, fighting and repeating.”

“That is because you are the most boring person I have ever met.”

“Thank you.” He drank from his wine, using the cup to hide his face. His voice sounded even, with a touch of dry humour that he had perfected from his various interactions with her, but deep inside he was feeling strangely dejected.

“Then again, sometimes you can be boring and funny at the same time. Lord Ithobal’s nephew, the short one who was Overseer of the Palace Gardeners, never laughed, but he had a way to make others laugh. Only, I was never quite sure whether it was intentional.”

Oh yes, another entry in her unending list of lovers. Had she bedded all of them, as the most malicious whisperers said, or was it more slander? But if it was, why would she talk about them so much?

And why was there a heavy weight in his stomach whenever she mentioned one of them, with the blissfully innocent air of someone who did not know how much harm she could be inflicting upon herself? It was not his problem what she chose to do with her reputation, after all.

“You seem to be bothered by something”, she observed. Elendil blinked, thinking about his next move. It looked easy enough: all he had to do was smile, and claim it was nothing important.

“Have you ever thought about marriage?” he asked instead. Her eyes widened, and for a moment his widened as well. Had he really said that?

“Are you proposing to me, or merely trying to insinuate something?” she asked coolly. This choice, as far as Elendil was concerned, was a death trap.

“Well, I was simply… wondering if…” He drank half of the cup in one swallow, and felt the warmth of the wine spreading through his body, giving him courage, perhaps, but no ideas about what to say. He should never have been alone with a woman. “You do not seem… interested in it, while most women of your age are.”

“And men”, she retorted, staring pointedly at him.

“Well, I know I will be married someday, whether I am interested or not.” Whenever they finally managed to decide who the second best option should be, he mused. “But I… I could not help but wonder about you, because you… you are a wonderful woman, beautiful and clever, and you have many admirers.” From the corner of his eye, he saw that his compliments had not mollified her, and felt tempted to give up. What was he doing, anyway? “If you were able to… I mean, does any of them see you as a prospect, or just… I do not know, in your situation, what kind of proposal… “Pathetic. He was a fool, far more than he had ever been where the Princess Míriel was concerned. “I am sorry. I did not mean to offend you.”

“You did not mean to offend me?” She shook her head in amazement. “By asking me if I am able to marry? By all the Baalim, this is as offensive as one could ever hope to be towards a lady!”

“I am sorry”, Elendil repeated. He had not been very articulate, but she still had managed to figure out the gist of his rudeness.

Then, her hand covered her mouth, and she made a soft noise, halfway between a groan and a snort of dry laughter.

“But perhaps I should believe you. If someone could be this clueless without meaning to offend, it is you.” In normal circumstances, Elendil would not know whether to feel insulted, but at this moment, his relief that she was still talking to him drowned any other consideration. “Well, I will tell you something, then. In my life, I have met many decent men and I have met many idiots. “Figure out which of the categories fits you, she might have added, but it was already implied in her look. “I have not wished to marry any of them so far. And why should I? I can live on my own, my uncle’s money pays for everything, and if my father has not been able to deplete the coffers of the House of Hyarnustar with the things he is usually up to, I doubt that I could manage that feat in a hundred lives.”

“I see…”

“However.” Her voice deepened, and for a moment it reminded him of the inflection she gave to it whenever she was playing the dragon in their rehearsals. “If I had wanted to marry, I could have had my pick of the noblest men in the realm. As you say, I am beautiful and clever, and I am also rich and from the line of Indilzar. Oh, yes, my father and my mother are not married. And yes, she was a dancer.” That was what he had been thinking as she spoke, but damn it if he was going to say it now. “There was a time when nobody used to care about that, but now it has become the latest fashion to think that bastards are the result of a violence done to the marriage bond. “She laughed, but it seemed to him that she did not look very amused. Her grey eyes had lost the spark that he had grown used to see there, and he began to realize the full extent of his mistake. “Well, what is it to me? My father never married any other woman. No marriage bond, no violence. As far as anyone knows, she could have been the love of his life.”

But she wasn’t, the thought fluttered, unsaid, between them. Suddenly, he wanted to do strange things, like holding her close and telling her that it did not matter to him, or perhaps even falling on his knees and asking for her forgiveness.

As if evoked by the similarity of this thought, the words that his mother had said to him long ago echoed in his mind.

Let her know that you still love her in spite of everything, and that you will never love another. Fall on your knees and beg her to take you back.

Never, he had thought then. And he had meant it.

What did he mean now?

“My… mother and my father did not marry until after I was conceived” he said, after a long while. “He did not tell her who he truly was and pretended to be a merchant of Sor who had entered priesthood. Many years later, when he came back and she realized the truth, she stopped loving him. They live together to keep the appearances, but their marriage bond is dead.”

“Really?” She looked genuinely surprised. “And I who thought that your family had always been the holiest of the holy! The untouchable paragon of virtue for us mortals to aspire to!”

There was a touch of bitterness in her tone. Could it be…?

“That” he said, as firmly and as intently as he could make his voice sound,” is all nonsense.”

She smiled. As she did so, he saw the spark again, twinkling in her eye for a moment before disappearing so fast that he had to wonder if the light had played a trick on him. But no, it had definitely been there.

“Well, then. Maybe you are not so boring as I had hought.”

And before he could realize what was happening, she stood on her feet, kissed him, and walked away.