The Sandglass Runs by Dawn Felagund, NelyafinweFeanorion

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Zurb Zurb Zurb

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My arms are trembling when I pull myself up on the dock. I collapse into a wet heap for several long moments, enjoying the solidity of land beneath me, until I realize that my head still thinks I’m in the water and is reeling with the motion of the waves. It is twilight, a cornflower sky stained pink in the west, where I know Námo’s servants are enacting a discordant farewell song to Arien and listlessly capering out their delight at the coming dark. Eärendil is drawing nigh to the moon, almost full, in the east. The light of both cast a shimmering road upon the sea.

My, aren’t I poetic tonight.

Artanis informed us earlier that we had dinner reservations at the finest of the several restaurants on the resort. I can hear music—not the jolly, percussive sounds of the Tol Eressëan Teleri but violins and harps—music made for Noldorin tourists—and the clink of crystal and silver, and the hush of voices. There is a muted golden glow of candlelight spilling from windows open to the sea. After my swim, I’m ravenous, but I’d sooner eat one of the fish just recently keeping me company than join my family in there. It’s just as well. She probably forgot to include her husband in the reservation; he can have my seat.

I haul myself to my feet. It’s been a long time and a different body since I swam so far, but I remember the staggering walk of my first steps ashore. My daughter used to meet me on the rocks and catch my arm so I wouldn’t fall back in, which did happen a few times. No one is here to see me now so I weave with—

I stop. I was mistaken. Someone is here.

Artaher. He’s pulled up a chair on the dock and is drinking another glass of miruvórë. Actually, judging by the fumes about him, he never stopped. I imagine the smiling beach server bringing him glass after glass after glass. “I know everyone’s favorites! Yours is to get blind drunk! Trust me!”

I stand in front of him, shirtless and dripping, my feet set apart to keep me from staggering. “What.”

“I wanted to apologize about earlier. I know what my brothers and I did to you when we were younger—”

“And what you perpetuate with your little sycophant Pengolodh, who thinks I chose to hate you with the same lack of consideration I’d use to choose a hat.” I want to stay angry with him; I want to rouse him into an argument.

“Pengolodh was Turukáno’s sycophant.”

“And your brother’s by extension.”

“Yes, but Findaráto had nothing to do with this, and his good graces didn’t extend to me. Pengolodh wasn’t exactly kind to me either, from what I hear.”

“Well, you did have the most successfully concealed kingdom after Gondolin and choose to announce it by building a fucking bridge to your front door.”

He breathes deep. His eyes flutter closed. I recognize the gesture from therapy: He is counting to ten. I tap my toe along. When he reaches ten, he says, “The bridge was—not now. That’s not what I came here to say. I came to say—what we did to you—that was all Angaráto and Aikanáro. And your brothers. And … me. I accept my role in it.”

“Don’t bring my brothers into it. They laughed at your jokes but if they’d known what you were doing—”

“Well, I’m sorry for what was done then, more than you’d know, and it certainly wasn’t my intention to make you think I was doing it again now.”

“Why were you talking to my wife?”

“In Mandos?” He laughs. Drunk and less inhibited, he sounds a lot like Findaráto without inspiring the sense that one should be tiptoeing around him while simultaneously groveling and finding oneself wanting. “Because she cornered me one day and unleashed the full force of her wrath upon me, for how I treated you. For the damage I caused to our people and then allowed the Doom of Mandos to be blamed instead of taking responsibility. I see why she rode into battle with you. I wouldn’t want to meet her with a sword.”

Taryindë. She would do something like that, yes. Briefly, her image flits across my thoughts, in her dark violet cloak, feet wide apart, a bright sword in her hand, standing over the dark heap that was me. It’s no memory—I was unconscious after a fall from my slain horse—but how I know, somehow, it must have been. The lacuna between that moment and when I woke, groggy and sore, and knew she was gone, I allow to stand, unexamined. She was the only one who knew, fully anyway, about what happened with my cousins. Nelyo knew bits and pieces, and all of my brothers would have remembered my humiliation but would have had no idea how Arafinwë’s sons discovered I was in love with Amarië to set me up to propose to her. After my confrontation with Angaráto about Doriath, I started to tell Nelyo, but frustrated by me already, he cut me off. “Do you realize how foolish it sounds, Carnistir, to claim you’re disrupting the peace between Eldarin nations because you’re still sore over a childhood prank? You need to move on,” and I never came close to confessing it again.

“I’m sorry I’m not her.” I start at Artaher’s voice, barely audible and hesitant. “I know—I know you came to the Halls, thinking she was being released. I can’t imagine your disappointment to find me instead.” He tips back the last of his miruvórë and tosses the glass into the sea. It sparkles once, twice before it becomes just another glitter of moonlight on the waves. He reaches beneath his chair. “Here. I brought this for you.” It is a bottle of the whiskey from Araman.

“You steal booze now?”

“I’ve always stolen booze. It was my contribution to the—” He stops. He was about to bring them up again: his brothers and mine, the five of them inseparable and somehow, even though I was right in their midst, they never considered me. “My father used to think it was Aikanáro.”

I uncork the bottle and take a drink straight from it.

He rises and sways on his feet without the excuse of having swam in the sea for the past several hours. “Won’t you sit?”

“Don’t be stupid,” I tell him. “I’ll feel ridiculous with you sitting at my feet like you’re my grandson listening to me creak on and on about the Years of the Trees, and I don’t want you standing and looming over me either. It’s creepy.” We both end up sitting on the edge of the dock with our feet dangling toward the water. I couple tips of the bottle, and it matters far less that it’s Artaher I pass it to. He’s more of a stoic about it than I expected; he doesn’t even wince when he swigs it. “I didn’t think it was Taryindë,” I say. “I’m supposed to be your mentor. That’s why they sent me.”

“Mentor?”

“Don’t ask me. We’re supposed to be ‘aligned.’ That’s what my therapist says. I think it’s probably a creative continuation of Námo’s punishment—excuse me, rehabilitation—of us both because I can’t think of a single thing you and I have in common.”

The bottle comes back to me. I hold it up to the moon and watch the light quaver in its depths like a silver coin. I salute the Silmaril and drink long.

“I think we have a lot in common.”

I wipe my mouth on the back of my hand. “Bullshit.”

On an empty stomach within an exhausted body, intoxication is swift. Artaher is—confiding in me?—it seems? I hear his voice going zurb zurb zurb off to my right, but what he’s saying doesn’t make any sense. Sickness. He speaks of sickness, a word I learned from Haleth when her healers brought out people on litters from behind the stockade. The sick, she said. I could never read the thoughts of Mortals, not like I could Elves—else the treachery of Ulfang would never have happened—but I sensed a miasma, a distortion about them. I learned from her about this sickness that would take her people from time to time. They all fell to it from time to time, some worse than others. Some—many—most?—died from it.

I shove the bottle into his chest and force myself to focus. He interrupts himself to gulp from it and shoves it back at me. “—I’d be sick with it, with the future, paralyzed by what I saw. It was like being told to cross a meadow, and you know there is one trap in the meadow, but it is hidden in the grass. You will never find it. And every step you take, you worry if that is the single small action that will touch off the mechanism and set the thing into motion that will snap your leg in two. Only imagine that the trap sentences someone you love, or your whole family, or your whole people to an awful death. I couldn’t get out of bed. That the fate of others should depend on someone as stupid and pitiful as—”

I let his voice fade back into zurb zurb zurb. My bones suddenly felt as soft as warm wax. I sag against him.

Briefly, the zurb zurb stops. An arm slips up my back and around my shoulder.

When I fell from my horse at the Nirnaeth, unconsciousness was not instantaneous. Darkness closed upon the edges of my vision; I tried to wave it away like one might banish a cloud of blackflies. My horse was screaming as it died. My hand stretched up against a bone-bright sky.

Unconsciousness presses at the edges of my vision now. I drink again and dare it to come nearer. The hand rubs my back; another takes the bottle from my hand as I raise it again. A new set of memories emerges. Touching. Being touched. I haven’t been touched since returning to this body. My mother and brother have hugged me, perfunctorily, like they fear they might hurt me. They used to cradle me with abandon. For a long while, I was the smallest one. And Tyelko would press against me on cold nights.

And Taryindë: a hayrick in autumn, the festival muffled in the village behind us, a flask of nabbed spirits passing between us. “Keep close,” spoken under a pretense of keeping her warm. Her arm around my back, under my tunic; my arms both around her, kissing, the flask dropped and forgotten; we’d kissed before, we’d practiced on each other, but this was different. Her hand on the inside of my thigh and my hand on the ties to her tunic—

“—no, you are drunk—”