Si la mar fuera de leche by Chestnut_pod

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Chapter 6

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As a child in Sirion and the Feänorion warcamp, the fires of Thangorodrim had faded all but the brightest stars, turning the night sky a sickly pink. As a young adult, just years or months before his Choice, the fierce storms and strange flames wielded by the Ainur against Morgoth had blotted out even those, leaving only Eärendil and the flensing light of the Silmaril. It was only as Tar-Minyatur that Elros had known the sable velvet of a black night and the coruscating scatter of Varda’s jewels at rest upon it. Vardamir would never know aught but his name, but Elros remembered the stars anew any chance he could. 

 

So by moon- and starlight, he left the hasty camp to its dreaming and stole to the steep lip of the cup valley. 

 

Tilion was kind. While by day the white glare of the boneyard might terrorize a child into running miles to home crying of her ancestors’ nightmares, by night the Moon drenched it in blues and grays and silvers. The fish swam again under the wash of luminous starfire, and the skeleton of the whale leapt and dove once more. 

 

Elros slipped over the edge into the dell, and found his lungs straining to hold his last breath, as if he slipped in truth from a boat into the sea. He exhaled, deliberately, and inhaled the silvery air. His feet met the ground with a crunch. Surprised, he glanced down. Sea biscuits, the skeletons of brittle stars, and the glorious jewelbox cases of urchins carpeted the ground beneath his feet in such profusion that there existed no place to step without crushing some reminder of the deeps, except treading on the rare bare patches where, shielded from the wind, the shadows of ribboned sea plants remained pressed into the sand. 

 

It was as though one of Vairë Ever-Weaving’s tapestries had come to rest on his island to tell the story of its former inhabitants. Elros imagined Vairë weaving himself, at this very moment, into her images of history, mirroring the living tapestry at his feet, reflecting it back and forth through time. 

 

Time flowed strangely around him for a moment, and the sea plants rose up again from where they had been laid low, turquoise and sapphire shadows in the starlight. Then, someone sniffled very loudly from inside the moon-rinsed ribcage of the whale. 

 

Elros startled, and peered through a gap in the bones to find, huddled in a patch of shadow behind the whale’s immense skull, Meril. She looked thoroughly miserable, a hunched assemblage of pointy pre-pubescent discomfort, gazing right at him in dismay. 

 

“Meril,” he called, as softly as he might. “Why do you sit at the heart of a whale while all our party sleeps?” 

 

Meril mumbled something wet and inaudible, and tipped her long locs forward to hide her face. Elros sighed. 

 

He took a crunching step forward, wincing at the smashed imprint of his foot. Another step, and he disrupted the long-preserved stamp of a kelp frond. Another stride, and he wiped away the remains of a pugnacious crab, fierce claws shattered under his heel. On the third step, he stopped flinching at the obliteration he left behind him and made his way steadily to the great skeleton, ducked under the ribs, and knelt before Meril. 

 

“How now, child?” he asked. “Are you hurt?” 

 

Meril made an attempt at a bow, but -- being already on the ground, squeezed beneath a giant spine -- succeeded mostly in wrapping herself more tightly into her disconsolate ball. 

 

“No, my lord,” she said thickly. 

 

“Something is clearly wrong,” Elros replied. “Else you would be asleep in camp, preparing to return home on the morrow.” 

 

Meril’s shoulders heaved, and she buried her face in her arms. She mumbled something mostly unintelligible, but Elros caught, “think I am an idiot,” towards the end. 

 

Elros felt the urge to reach out and comfort her as he would Tindómiel, this daughter of his Númenor, but he had no desire to distress her further. He was not her father, after all. 

 

“Ah,” he said instead, keeping his voice even and gentle. “I do not think everyone will think you foolish. Even Galor Guildmaster followed you, did he not? We Men have had much to do with dragons, of late. Who, moreover, could fault you for finding such a wonder as this?” 

 

“But it is not a dragon, my lord,” Meril said, with that air of a child telling an adult something so disgustingly obvious they could not believe it was necessary to say aloud. Elros had thought it unique to Vardamir, but perhaps it was inborn in all children around that age. “I made all this trouble for nothing, and took hands away from the fields, and everyone will be terribly angry.” She sighed as though the world were ending again before her eyes. “And my friends will laugh at me, too,” she concluded, dolefully. 

 

Elros smiled, glad that Meril was still speaking to her feet and that the dark hid his face. 

 

“I promise they will not,” he said. “Your friends will be relieved that you have returned safely to them with a story to tell until you are all old and gray. As for the rest, how will they be angry when I tell them how Meril, first rose of Númenor, found the site of our great city to come?” 

 

Meril looked up from her arms. Though tear tracks streaked her face, her eyes rounded in confusion. 

 

“What do you mean, my lord?” 

 

“It has been my thought all night,” he replied. “Would it not behove us to live farther from the sea, not clinging to the edge of this isle as though always looking back at the homes we lost? What is more, all felt the holiness of the Meneltarma, and it is well to honor what is holy with our closeness. And look what you have found! A sweet spring, a defensible hill -- in the shadow of the holy mountain but not trespassing on its slopes -- in sight of the sea but near the center of our new home. I tell you first, Meril, for you led me to this idea -- and the whale, if it has a ghost that can hear us. If not, it is yet a sign that much else lived joyfully here before us.” 

 

Meril seemed to be pondering this. She cast about the valley, eyes shining in the dark, then looked him in the eye again. 

 

“But, my lord…” Her voice trailed off. Elros nodded encouragingly. “But really,” she said in a rush, “How did the whale get here?”

 

Elros pursed his lips, then gestured at the steep walls of the valley. “I imagine it came up when Númenor was lifted from the seabed. Do you see the form of the land here? A high hill, and this deep depression. I would venture that the whale and these other creatures were swimming in this well, surrounded by the relatively shallow water, when the island was raised. They were carried up together and were trapped.”

 

Meril’s eyebrows knit together. She looked up at the whale’s body arcing over her, the shadows of the ribs shifting down her face. 

 

“But the Valar lifted Númenor up,” she said. “It was a present for us.” She seemed close to tears again, her voice thickening, lip wobbling. 

 

“Did they mean to make the whale die?” she demanded. “Or did they only forget, and the whale died because they forgot?”

 

Something uncomfortable shifted in Elros’ belly. Meril looked at him as though he would have the answer for the Dooms and fates of the Valar, rather than only his own old wounds and questions. 

 

“The Valar do not forget, except a-purpose,” he responded slowly. “Things had to be moved aside, for us to walk and live on our gifted land.”

 

“But why did the whale have to die?” Meril repeated. “I thought the land was supposed to be empty.” She really was crying again now, a few tears glinting in the moonlight. Elros put his hand to his heart. 

 

“I do not know, rose of Númenor,” he said. “The gifts of Valinor come at a high price.” 

 

At last, he let himself reach out to the girl, holding out his hand in the air, purposely doing away with the command in it. Meril hesitated, then took it. 

 

“Think of Armenelos-to-be,” he said. “If you have children, they might run to the city fountain and tell stories of when it was a mysterious spring like the ocean on dry land. Think how beautiful we might make this place.” 

 

Meril continued to gaze at him for a moment, then slowly let go of his hand. “I suppose it will have to be paved over, to be a fountain.”

 

“I suppose so.” 

 

All was quiet. Between the ribs of the whale, the stars had shifted in their nightly dance, peeking through different bones. Meril did not speak for long minutes, and Elros watched the constellations shimmer, waiting. 

 

“I think I would rather live in Rómenna all my life,” she said, eventually. Elros looked down at her, but Tilion’s progress had left her face in shadow, and he could not make out her expression. “I would be sad to hear people forget the whale had been here.” 

 

“But you and I will remember, will we not? The day Meril discovered a dragon.” 

 

Meril did not reply, only made a motion of the head that might have been a nod. Elros waited for her to say more, but she kept her counsel.

 

“All this is for the future,” he said, when the silence had stretched. “For now, we should sleep. We must leave early to reassure Rómenna and your friends. You of all of us should not be awake so late at night.”

 

He stood, noticing again the crunch of bones and shells underfoot. After a moment, Meril stood too, scrubbing her eyes on her sleeve. He smiled, and hoped she could see it in the wavering starlight. 

 

“Come, we will have to jump for it to make the edge.” Something like a smile flickered on Meril’s face, perhaps at the thought of her king scrambling up the valley wall like a child after gull eggs. 

 

“On my mark,” Elros said, deciding to play the role to the hilt. “Go!”

 

They ran, and leapt, and clambered out onto the slopes of Armenelos, Meril giggling stuffily. Behind them, a broad path of crushed shells and smeared imprints led to the heart of the whale. Cloven so, the dell seemed less a pocket of ocean remembered, and more a curiosity, a pile of bleached bones wearing away in the unfamiliar air.

 

Elros saw Meril settled in the center of camp, then spread his own cloak on the edge of the ring of sleepers, in earshot of the valley spring. He slept, and if he heard mournful whalesongs in his dreams, he had chosen mortality, and mortal memories fade.