Si la mar fuera de leche by Chestnut_pod

---

Chapter 1

---

Vardamir and Tindómiel’s nurse sang the children’s song about Elwing-Who-Called that used “struck” as its rhythmic refrain. Elwing’s beauty struck Eärendil, the Feänorions struck Sirion, Elwing struck the waves, Elwing struck the deck, Elwing’s plea struck the Valar, the Valar struck Beleriand. Even quiet Vardamir, almost too old for the nursery and properly fluent already in the new Adûnaic, clapped along with it.

 

Elros listened from the threshold. Nurse Losseth had a lovely voice, and he dearly wished she would stop singing.

 

“You said this was a song about Attû’s family, but he’s hardly in it,” said Vardamir, always the analyst, once they had finished clapping.

 

Losseth chucked him under the chin. “I’ll sing you the song about your attû riding the wave onto the Lindon shore with his army and his brother behind him, if you want a song all about him,” she said. “But then Tindómiel will say that her grandmother the bird is hardly in it! Whatever shall I do to please you both?”

 

“Sing about Uinen getting seagulls stuck in her hair!” Tindómiel demanded, tugging on Losseth’s sleeve.

 

“All she cares about is birds,” said Vardamir with disgust, but Elros saw him starting to smile as Losseth sang the opening lines about Uinen waking up to gulls in her bed and gulls on her head, Tindómiel enthusiastically burying her chubby hands in her cloud of tightly curled hair.

 

Although when Elros left his morning audiences all he had wanted was to take breakfast with his children, he found that what he wanted now was space and the sea.

 

With the soft footfalls that — a decade after his Choice — had not yet left him, Elros stole away down to the First Harbor.

 

--

 

No one watched what his dear Zamîn called the Erstwhile Royal Sieve, or hunted for shellfish along the single long pier. The natural cove where the ragged ships of the Edain had first landed on their barren and still-dripping Gift was too sacred to play in, too rough to fish in, too secondary to immediate survival to receive honor in daily attendance or architecture. It was quiet.

 

Elros took off his outer robe and sandals and waded into the water, past the breakers, casting a careful eye across the harbor mouth for currents sneaking past the seawall. A handful of kittiwakes nested on the sheer eastern wall, right in time for late spring. Out of long habit, Elros made a note of them to tell the older children about, in case any nest had more than two eggs.

 

That might be less necessary this year, he thought, with the new fishing fleet entirely ready and the first barley harvest planned. Let the birds have their young. Let him, for that matter, reduce the number of falls and cuts he was called upon to treat. He was reminded of the need to establish a boundary to the west -- it was high time to have something resembling a sea border laid out, if only to keep the fishers from drifting into the barrier islands while following the shoals.

 

Perhaps this year he would order them to the north, instead, where whales and seals would provide not only meat but oil to keep the slender stands of saplings clinging to the new topsoil unmolested come winter. Now would be the time to start off, as the great ices began to thaw. He made a note to consult with Galor of the fishers’ guild on the topic. Had they repaired and made ready any of the Great Ships that could withstand such a far voyage? On the other hand, he had no diplomatic relations with the Lady who ruled to the north of Alqualondë. Northeast would be best, then, and perhaps they could seek a trading relation with the Men there.

 

The sun glimmered off the ripples beyond the breakwater. Elros breathed and swayed with the waves. This was his home, his body beyond his self. His people would explore the waters and come back with more food and, once there was food enough, other wonders. No thrum in their bones would drive them where they would not otherwise go. The knot in his chest loosened, and he cast out his mind across the island, looking for those he might know, exploring still the new limits of his new strength.

 

Out to sea, something niggled at his awareness. Elros opened his eyes. The mind he sensed felt -- strange. Familiar yet not. Was there a small craft sent from Aman coming to the wrong harbor? He should warn them, if he could. It approached quickly. He strained his vision to see what could be found on the horizon.

 

And there --  

 

From out of the west flew a pelican, white and black against the blue sky, growing ever larger as it neared. As high above him as the spire of a tall ship’s mast, it banked hard to the left. Down it went in the lancing way of its kind, wings half-spread and then scissoring closed in the moment before impact. Elros stumbled back in the water, but the pelican bore through the waves a body’s length before him, the water hardly disturbed. It surfaced after only a moment, gular pouch shedding spray.

 

Bobbing on the water before him, the bird raised its wings, shaking spangles into the air, their span greater even than Maedhros’ height, Elros thought, and certainly his own. No wild thing had ever come so close to him. Its eyes nictated and then cleared, and Elros found them grey, and deep, and sad.  

 

“Lady,” he said. The pelican said nothing.

 

Elros looked into Tindómiel’s eyes, and Elrond’s, and his own. Poetry aside, he found little in them to inform them.

 

“Are you here as a messenger?” he asked, the push and pull of the waves around him suddenly coercive, threatening. “Lady, does your coming foretell a crisis?”

 

The pelican said nothing.

 

“Lady Elwing, does danger fly behind you? Or some great news out of the West? Have the Valar some command for the Men of Númenor?” Elwing-- the bird-- his own-- she looked baleful, riding the ebbing swells, those eyes set impossibly into her knife-bladed skull. The shifting sands had rooted Elros’ feet to the seafloor and, indeed, he felt restrained, as an arrow nocked yet not set to flight, like a horse tethered in sight of water, but kept away.

 

The pelican said nothing. If Elros moved towards her, he would be up to his neck in the swells. She rose and sank with each breaker that reared up and fell behind him. Elros found he could hardly hear their crashing.

 

“Why are you here, Lady?” he asked, finally.

 

The pelican said nothing.

 

“Why are you here?”

 

A strand of soup kelp nudged against his hand, and he grasped it unthinkingly. Winter’s child Tindómiel preferred the crisp, crackly sheet weed, but Vardamir had eaten it as his first solid food and loved it still. That polity to the north of Alqualondë had sent it, along with guest sea-farmers, somehow surmising their plight. The lead grower had carried a letter with recipes written in Cirth that tasted of childhood, and a feather for signature.

 

“Have you nothing to say?” His throat tightened. The bird made no sound, no motion, but her feet were working hard below the surface to keep her from drifting towards shore on the swells. Elros could see them sculling furiously.

 

“You’ve never come before,” he said. “Even though--”

 

Though songs were sung about her by her own grandchildren. Though a hundred children and infants had been rescued from starvation by the arrival of her people, sent to them with sea vegetables and oyster banks made by artifice. Though Galor had used money that might have been for food instead for burnt Umbar to paint her face and hands on the figureheads of his boats.

 

“Why are you here?” he asked again, his voice rising, hardly noticing as the hard-fought kingliness was knocked away by the waves and the swelling tide in his chest. “Why are you here? Why?” he cried, and could not stop crying out the word, though he hardly knew what he was asking any longer, only that any reply would not answer what he meant.

 

“Why?” he almost screamed, and flailed the rope of kelp he still clutched against the water, coming within a hand’s breadth of her great beak.

 

At last, she moved, a startled snap of her head, and Elros smacked his hands against the water, beyond words, as she lifted off, her wings coming up in sharp angles and then boneless curves, her feet pushing against the water.

 

It was not until she was high into the air, so far away she might have been a gull or a tern, that Elros found it in him to call after her, “Go, then! Go!”

 

The waves tugged and pushed at him, unsure if they wished him to be swept out or forced back to shore.

 

He was still standing in the water, the tide risen to his collarbones, when he saw the curled prows of the Elven murre-ships, come on schedule at the full moon to trade.

 

Though he ran in a manner unbefitting a king back to the King’s House and made a greater than normal effort to speak with each merchant captain as they made the climb from the Second Harbor, the pelican who had flown ahead of them was not there.