The Sandglass Runs by Dawn Felagund, NelyafinweFeanorion

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Plunge

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My cousin is still wearing Nenya, and I can’t help but wonder if some dregs of whatever power Tyelperinquar put into the ring is still at work because the Glittering Sands Resort and Spa has an ubiquitous shine of artificiality that belies being constantly battered by wind-driven sand and saltwater. The ring glitters on her hand as she gestures at a pair of palm trees bending to perfectly frame the sea for patrons of the juice bar and then beyond to where a pleasing arc of reef makes the emerald-blue sea calm enough, in her words, “for children to frolic and bathe while their parents nap in one of our fully serviced open-air villas.” We are being given a grand tour slick with the same marketing lingo from her brochures. Every now and then, her husband pipes up and restates something she said in less lustrous terms.

“The sea is really calm there,” he says. “Because of the reef. Which also has a lot of pretty fish.”

“I have scheduled you an outing on the reef,” says Artanis, “with our best snorkeling guide.” Her voice has always been low, almost manlike, but like all of Arafinwë’s children, seems to always brim near to laughter.

All of Arafinwë’s children except Artaher. Artaher is like the riddle where you’re told not to think of elephants, and so naturally, all you can think about is elephants. I was—am—determined not to render him the assistance to which I’ve been assigned, and so naturally, all I notice is him. His hair is completely unbound, falling arrow-straight to the middle of his back. The Arafinwions except Aikanáro always had fair, almost flyaway hair, and the breeze off the sea keeps blowing it into his mouth. He’s always tucking it behind his ears. His cream-colored tunic is old-fashioned and looks out of place over cargo shorts, but someone had the good sense to give him a shark-tooth necklace and a pair of sandals, which makes him look remarkably like the Teleri who work the docks and peddle drinks on the beach. He says almost nothing. Actually, he says nothing; he says even less than me. (Because I have said one thing. When we were getting off the boat and the smell of the day’s catch hit us, Findekáno—behind me on the gangplank—said, “Whew! Carnistir farted!” and I retorted, “You farted!” but that’s been the extent of what I’ve said today. Artaher manages to be more taciturn than even that.)

Artanis leads us down to the beach, where a row of lounge chairs illustrates to me the full absurdity of all of us being present here. If I’d brought my pocket palantír, I could have tested it to communicate with the person at the other end of the row of chairs from me. We take up half the beach, just our ridiculous family. Even Findaráto has taken a few days off from campaigning. The Noldorin Congress is in recess and the schools are on summer holiday, so the next most inaccessible relatives—Anairë and Nelyo—are here as well. Only Amarië didn’t come. When I asked, she shrugged and reminded me that, since she doesn’t believe in marriage anymore, even though she lives with Findaráto and “enthusiastically shares his bed” (her words—I’m long over her but would still rather not know about it), she’s technically not family, nor is she fully certain that the Tol Eressëan workers at my cousin’s resort aren’t being exploited to provide Noldorin landlubbers with a “fantastical escape divorced from the rigors inherent in our new democratic system.” She’s my best—my only—friend, and I wanted her there for my sake, but our friendship has no allowance for sentimentality and I didn’t know how to say this and maintain my dignity, so I growled, “Fuck that shit,” and she got excited and read a draft of a poem about the evils of escapism to me, and then I went home to a trunk full of Findekáno’s shirts and left the next day.

I grab the chair on the end and immediately slide it away from everyone else. Artaher goes to the other end, but when Eärwen realizes where I’ve settled, she offers the chair next to me: “Honey, why don’t you take this one next to your cousin?” Nelyo and Findekáno end up separated, which my brother doesn’t seem to mind but Findekáno protests, so there is another reshuffling, and once everyone’s settled, we’re one chair short, and Artanis’s husband is left standing. “Oh, I completely forgot to have one set up for you!” Artanis says, and it’s a few minutes before one of the beachboys drags one down the sand for him. “Well I was supposed to take that group out to the reef but they never showed up,” he offers by way of apology for her mistake. She’s explaining to Anairë about how they refine saltwater to do the laundry in, to sustain the limited water resources on the island.

A beaming server begins bringing cocktails. “Oh, I think you’re mistaken, we didn’t—” my mother begins, but the woman cuts her off with the plunk of a glass and, “I know everyone’s favorites. Trust me,” and a wink.

“Trust her!” Artanis agrees with a deep chortle.

The server brings me a whiskey neat. I sip it: It’s from the distillery on a frigid, damp island off the coast of Araman. I decide to trust her.

Next to me, Artaher ends up with a glass of miruvórë so golden that it might be distilled sunlight. Findekáno has already taken off his shirt and has been given something bright blue and in a big bowl, which he has halfway finished. Two more gulps and he’s done, whooping down to the sea and, once waist-deep, diving in. Findaráto hesitates for only a moment before jogging down to join him. Anairë and Eärwen go arm-in-arm, deep in conversation. Arafinwë waits for my mother and Nelyo to slather each other’s backs with sunblock before the three of them walk down together. Artanis shouts at a beachboy who’s setting up an umbrella wrong and takes off down the beach, leaving her husband to stare after her with uncertainty plain on his face as to whether he should follow her or join her family. He finally walks down to stand at the water’s edge.

I sip my whiskey. “You should get in. The water looks delectable.” I borrowed that word from Artanis on the grand tour; she’d used it to describe the complimentary breakfast.

Artaher turns to face me. He has not undressed or even removed his sandals. His golden hair fans against the dark green cushion of the chair. There is something in that motion—in the turning from one’s back to curl on one’s side—that feels uncomfortably intimate. His new skin is pale and unmarked by so much as a blemish. “You’re the swimmer. Not me.”

I have schooled myself out of humiliation, or so I thought. I used to wear my embarrassment as plainly as, apparently, I broadcast my emotions, going red in the face and my tongue—already a useless slug much of the time—feeling as though it had swelled to fill my mouth. Námo schooled me out of that too—but don’t feel soft emotions for him. He did so by humiliating me, frequently and thoroughly, to where shame became as a limb overused past the point of exhaustion, until it’s gone senseless and limp. Or I thought he had. But when Artaher mentioned swimming, I felt the familiar sensation of my stomach bottoming out, the way I remember feeling when jumping off cliffs with my father and brothers. The flush started in my chest, over my sternum, and heated my neck like a tree catching fire. He couldn’t have known I was a swimmer. I swam in Helevorn, long after he’d exited my life for his own small realm on the other side of Beleriand. No one knew that I swam in the lake except my daughters and Taryindë, because I dove off the rocks outside my house and no one dwelled in my house—no servants, no councilors—just my family. My eldest daughter would watch me sometimes from the rocky beach; she was apt to worry.

This remark about the swimming, it was like a pinprick after a sword gash, but this is how it began, back then, with the little observations that no one could have known but me. “Carnistir, I’m sorry you were released by your calligraphy tutor, that’s a shame.” Angaráto: one night when our parents were drinking wine and discussing court politics in Arafinwë’s sitting room, and we middle cousins had nabbed a bottle of cooking sherry from the kitchen and were passing it around under one of Arafinwë’s topiary abortions. And Tyelkormo, wide-eyed and guileless, “You were released from calligraphy? What did you do? Does Atar know?”

No one knew because I hadn’t told anyone.

I realize I’ve also flopped over on my side to face him. “Stop this shit now,” I hiss. “Not again.”

His eyes were two wide panes of blue in his face, his confusion and unease plain even with my mind clamped shut. “Carnistir, I—”

“No. You think I don’t remember? What you and your brothers used to do? Listen in on my thoughts and then weave them into conversation with others like I’d trusted you with my confidences? I knew no better, and you took my pathetic ignorance and made it into your joke.”

“Carnistir, I—”

“Don’t even start, you little mottled mushroom fucker.”

My brothers used to enjoy my insults; they would rile me up just to bring them on, and their laughter—bright with their love, their love for me, no matter how strange and sour and worthless I was in every other way—would bathe me cool and clean like the waters of Helevorn many years later, when our laughter came less easily.

Artaher’s reaction was different. The bridge of his nose flamed pink, and his glass-bright eyes narrowed with anger.

“Listen! Stop interrupting me!”

His own voice had been reduced to a hiss. Beyond us, our family played in the sea.

“I know perfectly well what happened! But I meant nothing by it. Taryindë told me, in Mandos.”

I used to read my messages each morning in my study overlooking the lake. The terror, the hate, the bloodshed, the malice—from Morgoth and from us. Plans from my brother for a war machine; a debate over how long it takes to starve a company of Orcs; the chemical construction of poisons. Images assailed me from Valinor: leaping from a cliff, my stomach bottoming out, with Tyelko whooping behind me. My father scolding me in the forge and Curufinwë squeezing my hand under the worktable. Losing my virginity to Taryindë in my childhood bed and later sobbing my terror to Nelyo that she might have fallen pregnant. Macalaurë making rude limericks about me and me throwing a handful of peas at him right as our mother came in, and I got in trouble and he didn’t. The twins, tiny and still damp from birth, being placed in my arms, and my father saying, “Relax, they won’t break.” In my study overlooking the lake, I crumpled the messages in my fist like, by crushing them, I could break apart the shells that spoke and looked like my brothers and free what was lost but surely still there? Every day, I left those messages on my desk for Taryindë to use to start the fire in our bedroom later that night. The door to my study opened directly onto the path that led down to the rocks. I would discard my boots under my desk, but the rest of my clothes came off as I strode to the rocks’ end. The lake plummeted away there, its bottom out of reach of all save, perhaps, the Telerin pearl divers, but we’d left them slain on their shores. Naked, I dove in. The water closed, dark and cold, upon me with the force of a blow: Tyelkormo’s fist to my temple when I shouted, “We cannot go to save him!”

You’re the swimmer. Not me.

This water, when it closes upon me, is as warm as my bath and flat as a mirror, thanks to Artanis’s fucking reef. I plunge into it, and that old motion is still there, as though I’ve never changed bodies, of pulling myself through the water. There is a slight current, but I fight it out past the reef, where the waves begin to break over me so that I choke and sputter with most breaths. I pull and pull until my arms ache, and my family is small on the shore behind me.