Red Thread and Thorns by

Red Thread and Thorns

Read Red Thread and Thorns

The battle-caught, the raid-taken, the stolen, the shadow-beguiled were stripped and shorn on arrival to Angband, in what those who oversaw the proceedings were pleased to call "intake." "Assessment" was next, on which she would not think. She would think only on the silver and gold, chestnut, beech, black walnut, storm-black and twilight-grey, rain-red-sunset, copper-red, fire-red, garnet-spinel-ruby-red sheaves and swathes, braids and locs and tresses. The stuff of which her works were made.

For many of the taken, one shearing was all. Assessment, Testing and Assignment killed many, mutilated more, began the horrific process by which people became things that provided the right material for making orcs. Those with useful skills were geas-bound, periodically cropped, put to work. Allowed just enough autonomy to be useful, not enough for open rebellion or effective escape.

Some could not be changed, however persuaded, punished, pricked and prodded; hroa and fea too well matched, woven together too firmly to be picked apart, warped, re-woven. They served perforce regardless, made halt, voiceless, un-beautiful to look on. And shorn, again and again and again, until they found escape in death.

Sometimes she knew the Noldor taken. She tried very hard not to think about them. She had been taken in that first battle -- skirmish really. After the ships. Before they had met any Sindar. Before they knew that taken was far, far worse than death. When she could not avoid thinking of them, she knotted their names in her own hair -- never clipped or cropped or shorn. Not even trimmed.The hair they chained her with.

First she chose what to work with, for she had much to choose from, to combine: nettle and flax, wool of sheep, goat, sundry others; thistle-silk, spider-silk, silkworm silk and more. Then making and choosing tools to suit the material. Thorns, for carding, combing. Teasels, dry, not desiccated, bone -- of which there was never any lack -- for spindles and spindle-weights, heddles, cards, shuttles, needles, bobbins, bodkins. As she worked, she sang, hummed, a vibration in her throat more felt than heard, the words soundless.

Thistle, teasel, thorn to comb
Tangles from the taken shorn
Roving spin and ply with gloam
Knot and net the names forlorn
Hide the light beneath the loam
Weave the story, carve the horn
Shape the silence, shadows roam
Watch and ward though never worn

Makalaure would be ashamed of such poor songwork. She sang it anyway. For what good it might do.

Over time there were fewer taken, fewer trophies, thus less of carding, combing, spinning, more of plying, netting, weaving. Embroidery. Embellishment. Her tower looked only on air too smoke-and-poison thick for sky or stars or more than scattered light from what the yrch-kind called Burning-Face, the newer thralls the Sun, that she had never seen. Nor could she see the ground, the gates; her single view was north, not south.

But when the days were black as before the great lights rose, the mountains shook with the furnace-roar and the Master's wrath, she wondered if the end was near, who the victor. When her chamber trembled, shuddered, puffs of dust went up where stone met stone and iron, then grit, pebbles, ash straining gainst her red-thread wards; rain and ice relentless battered, lightning struck about the peak above her; those who brought sustenance and took works became erratic, terrified, absent, she knew the walls would fall. She busied her hands with braiding her last red skein.

She was not crushed in the collapse, but rescued, carried from the ruins into the sun, hair cut short and ragged, bound with a braid of red.