The Loneliness of the Fishermouse by Clodia

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Coracle

As ever, many thanks to my patient beta, Ignoble Bard!

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~ coracle ~

When he closed his eyes, he saw again the white smudge of Celebrían’s face.

He had thrown himself onto his bed, which still smelled of spilt wine. The curtains had been drawn for weeks. He did not want daylight and the curtains were open in the sitting room if he needed starlight. It was a long time before he fell asleep.

It was a great deal longer before he really woke again. There were... periods of semi-lucidity, oddly dreamlike, when he stirred in the dark and ate a little of what had been left for him, without tasting it, and attended to the necessary functions, but he might as well have been asleep throughout. Whether he was dreaming or remembering, what Celebrían had seen played and replayed itself before him. The pass and the attackers and plunging down the Dimrill Stair – and her hair in the wind – and the brilliance of her eyes –

At some point he stirred and found Galadriel there. She stood by his bedside, looking down on him with a cool thoughtfulness that verged on melancholy. A misty sort of marshlight clung to her gown, turning her ghostly and pale, and her hair veiled half her face in a silken sheet of Vanyarin-gold. “Erestor,” she said. “You’re awake.”

It might have been still a dream. She was dreamlike enough. The distinction was blurring anyway. He waited for her to vanish or change into another shape.

Celeborn appeared soundlessly at her shoulder. He looked at Erestor gravely, bent his silver head in greeting and murmured something to Galadriel that Erestor did not catch. A sigh escaped Galadriel, stirring her hair. “Perhaps; but we did and he is,” she replied aloud, “now. We were very sorry to hear about Melinna, Erestor...”

“Shocked,” said Celeborn soberly. “A terrible thing.”

The years had not changed Celeborn much. He had been quicker to laugh and his smile lighter, once, and he had seemed youthful rather than ageless then. His hands were on Galadriel’s shoulders, his long fingers smoothing out imaginary creases in her white gown. Around him, the shadows blurred. Erestor closed his eyes.

“Galadriel,” he said, or tried to. “How do you restore colour to a tapestry?”

After a moment, when Galadriel did not answer, he rubbed his face and thrust himself up against the disordered pillows. Time was slipping away from him again: the now and the then, not really distinct any more, if they ever had been, all merging into one seamless, messy present. Shadows and ambushes and sudden death. There had been a time...

They were both of them frowning. He saw them as they had been then and now were too, brilliant and stern and unstained in the shadows of the long, bloody ages. The glorious ages, Glorfindel would have said. So they had been, for the Gondolindrim.

“Tapestry,” he said. “Colour. She was going to ask you. It’s faded. You know the one.”

Galadriel shook her head. “There is no way,” she replied. “I’m sorry.”

“There was. In Doriath.”

“No. There wasn’t. Or if there was, I never learned it. The Queen kept things from fading, I think. I’m sorry,” she said again, gently. “I cannot help you.”

Erestor stared at her. Then at Celeborn, looking grave behind her. The shadows swirled around them, and their shared past. Celeborn’s pale hair had been matted and he had been limping; he had argued with her, with Melinna, then.

“She chose it,” he said. “She chose to stay. Your daughter wouldn’t believe me. Doesn’t understand.”

Celeborn’s frown deepened; he seemed about to say something, and then to think better of it. Galadriel glanced up at him, exhaled another sigh and sat down on the side of Erestor’s bed. Her gaze was clear and frank and deeply sad. “She was very brave,” she told him. “We will not forget it. What she did for our daughter.”

“No, you don’t – that’s not –”

“She was always very kind to Celebrían. When Celebrían was a child... I know Celebrían was very fond of Melinna. It makes it harder for her. But what Melinna did was heroic –”

“Galadriel,” said Celeborn, his eyes steady on Erestor. “I don’t think he needs to hear this. Not now.”

Galadriel looked round at him, surprised. “What?”

“Maybe you should see if Elrond needs us.”

“I doubt –” said Galadriel, then paused and frowned again, seeming to see something in Celeborn’s face. She nodded, rising. “Very well. Stars shine upon you, Erestor.”

She left. Celeborn shook his head. “I thought –” he said, and lifted a shoulder helplessly. “It was very long ago. Doriath.”

Erestor passed a hand over his face. “And you’ve forgiven any of them?”

Celeborn was silent. Erestor slumped back against the pillows. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said bitterly. “I don’t want – I should have been there. Stopped her. Let your daughter fend for herself. It didn’t change anything, did it?” He saw Celeborn’s expression. “You’re not going to tell me I don’t mean that?”

“No,” Celeborn said quietly. “I know you do.”

They were both silent. Then Celeborn took a breath and asked, “Did you break the strings on Daeron’s harp?”

“Yes.”

“I thought it must have been you.” He did not hesitate, quite. “We mean to stay until Celebrían is healed. If you need anything. If we can help.” And then, almost gently, “I think it becomes easier. With time. We will all miss her.”

Erestor shut his eyes and did not open them again until Celeborn had gone.

The next time he woke, it was music that woke him, a silvery ripple of familiar sound. It was impossible to tell how long it had been playing. He had dreamed of it, and woken slowly, and come gradually to realise that he was awake and the harp was still singing. A fraction later, he recognised the song. He was on his feet before he really knew it. The other room was full of daylight, blindingly bright after so long in the dark; he swayed in the doorway and rubbed his dazzled eyes.

Glorfindel sat before the newly strung harp. It had lost something, a particular sweetness of tone, that its ancient strings had given it, but it still sang more sweetly than any other harp Erestor had known. O! tra-la-la-lally, here down in the valley...

He was singing the silly words very softly, almost too quietly to be heard. Erestor leaned against the door. He was shaking. Only when Glorfindel stopped playing and looked up in naked surprise did he realise that he was laughing too, roughly and helplessly, great sobs of laughter shaking loose from somewhere deep inside. Tears ran down his face. There was salt on his lips, in his mouth; he could taste it. He stumbled across the room and collapsed in the nest of nightingale cushions.

Glorfindel got up and came around the desk, peering down in concern, still looking rather surprised. Erestor waved him away impatiently and buried his head in the crook of his arm until both the tears and laughter had slowed. He wiped his eyes on his crumpled sleeve and drew in a long, shuddering breath. “Why that?” he asked. His voice was still dangerously unsteady, if muffled. He cleared his throat and tipped his head back, although his eyes swam too much to make out more than the blaze of Glorfindel’s hair in the morning sun. “Why did you play that?”

Glorfindel was leaning back against the desk, his arms folded, frowning. “I’ve never heard you play it. She didn’t like it. I thought...”

No painful memories. That was what Glorfindel had thought. It was enough to set Erestor laughing again, this time almost without tears. Glorfindel’s expression only made him laugh harder.

“All right,” Glorfindel said, when Erestor finally caught his breath. “What’s the joke?”

Erestor’s ribs ached. He took several deep, calming breaths, until his hands were almost steady. “Who wrote it.”

“What? Lindir did. Everyone knows that.”

“Wrong. I did.”

Glorfindel straightened in fresh surprise. “Really? But Lindir –”

“He’s a child.” He said it with more contempt than he meant. It was hard not to, sometimes. “A poet. Easy to lead. I told him – he was very young then, Gorthaur’s siege had just been lifted – he should make up something to greet visitors, I told him. I don’t remember who was visiting. Someone very serious, maybe Galadriel, maybe Men or Dwarves. He was full of grand epics even then. Even Daeron sang ballads and ditties, I said. I gave him some ideas...”

“Tra-la-la-lally? Seriously? Why?”

“It was a game.” Erestor leaned back among the cushions and stared up at the ceiling. The mad, bubbling rush of energy that had flooded into him with the laughter had worn off just as suddenly, leaving him only very weary. “I won it,” he added. “She wouldn’t play any more. She said she didn’t want to know what I could come up with that was sillier than that.”

Glorfindel was shaking his head. “I don’t understand.”

He wouldn’t. It was not the sort of thing that Glorfindel would find amusing. “It started in Eglador,” Erestor said anyway, “in Doriath, long before they ever carved Menegroth out of the caves. It was peaceful then. We’d just come down from the mountains – we were children ourselves, very young, everyone was young then...” He closed his eyes, remembering. “From Ered Luin. It’s gone now, where we were born. We crossed the grasslands and came to the forests and found the King and the Queen, all their lords and ladies too... they used to sing these unending panegyrics and paeans. You’d have liked it. We thought it was unbearable. I can’t remember – it might have been her idea – we made up our own, the most boring we could, and sang them, and the worse the songs were, the more they liked them...”

“That was the game? Where does Lindir’s song come into it?”

“They wanted to know – the minstrels, I mean, Daeron and Tinfang and Ivaeron and the rest of them – they wanted to hear all the songs and dances we’d had in the mountains. And afterwards, when we went wandering, they’d want us to tell them everything when we came home. They wanted to make songs out of it. They wanted to hear any songs we’d heard, the stranger the better. And elsewhere – among the Green-elves or on Balar – or in Nargothrond, when that was delved – or Ost-in-Edhil, afterwards – or anywhere now – everyone wants new stories, new songs... it became a game. To see what we could get taken seriously. She’d come up with these long, solemn, tedious things, then I’d make up endless nonsense ditties and stories. It got sillier and sillier. No one ever raised an eyebrow. We only had to say we’d heard them somewhere else, or long ago.”

Glorfindel’s mouth was open; he looked genuinely shocked. “That story about me meeting three Balrogs,” he said slowly. “They never told children that in Sirion. I said as much when I first heard it. They couldn’t have done. They never would. It was – the wounds were too fresh, the story was too – silly...”

“You didn’t guess? I’m surprised.”

He meant that. But Glorfindel had not known him or Melinna very well back then. He saw Glorfindel flush, rather angrily, and look away. It would have been easy to tease him. Too easy. If Melinna had been there, she would have said Glorfindel took himself too seriously, at least where his glorious past was concerned.

“The harp,” he said instead. “You put new strings on it.”

Glorfindel still looked less than pleased, but he exhaled and nodded. “Lord Celeborn mentioned it. He said – not much. That it should be done. I agreed. I was sorry to see it like that. I’ve never played a better one. And it should be played.”

Erestor remembered Celeborn and Galadriel as a dream in the dark. Sunlight changed things, made everything sharper and brighter and more starkly real. The cushions strewn all around him and the solid, polished side of his desk, against which Glorfindel was still leaning. The red carpet and the nightingale harp and all the tapestries that had been woven over the years. In the dark, he would have closed his eyes and let it all slip away. Let it blur into a fading, half-remembered dream.

He got up instead. He was still unsteady, but that would pass.

Nothing had changed while Erestor slept except the harp. Everything else was untouched, and growing dusty. The new harp strings were shiny, too much so, and when he plucked one, that slightly diminished sweetness grated on his ear again and made him want suddenly to tear out these strings too. He resisted it. But he did not sit down to play.

The bottom edge of the half-woven cloth was still a mess of blue unravelled wool. Behind the loom, the grass and leaves of fading Lórien showed blue too, where once a deep, true green had glowed against the wall. It was the yellow that had faded, she had said. Only the blue remained.

“Lord Celeborn said you were angry with her,” said Glorfindel. He was watching Erestor from where he still stood leaning against the desk. “For helping Celebrían, rather than saving herself. I don’t see why you would be. Seems like the right thing to do to me. Hard, but right.”

Erestor twisted his fingers into a loop of stray thread, and snapped it. He sat down on the weaving stool. “She didn’t help Celebrían. She didn’t help anyone.”

Glorfindel was briefly quiet. “So you are angry.”

Angry was not the right word. He thought it, almost said it, and then said nothing after all. If it was not the right word, it was very close to whatever the right word was.

“He said something else,” said Glorfindel. “Something she did once, or meant to do, that you stopped her doing –”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Glorfindel shrugged. “Don’t, then.”

He looked troubled, though. Erestor caught one of the loose ends and jerked it until the rest of the blue thread came free. He tied a knot in it, and then another.

“Doriath,” he said. “When it fell.”

Some things could never be forgotten. Some things should never be remembered. “She wanted to stay,” he said. “It was lost. The city was lost. Dior and Nimloth – he’d sent Galadriel to the treasury with the women and children, to protect them if she could – we were trying to reach them – the Noldor caught us on the way.” Hacked down beneath the stone branches of Menegroth’s carved forest. Bright Dior extinguished in his own blood. And Nimloth, screaming. “Everything was lost. We had to run. She didn’t want to. She wanted to stay.”

“Sounds like her,” said Glorfindel, rather distantly. “Don’t see how it matters, though. That was long ago.”

Erestor gathered up the rest of the unravelled wool hanging from the loom and began to straighten out the tangles, looping it from his thumb to his elbow and back again to make a skein, as he had seen Melinna do. He said nothing. After a while, Glorfindel came away from the desk and moved back towards the harp. “May I?”

“Mm.”

This time Glorfindel started up with one of his stately, antique dances, the sort he said they had played in Gondolin when it was in full flower. Glorfindel had played it for Erestor and Melinna before. It always made Erestor regret having visited Gondolin only when the city was already ruined, and having viewed it only from the vantage point of a very high eyrie before then. But from what the Eagles had said, it would have been unwise to venture closer. They had not wanted to be shut up in a secret mountain city, no matter how fine it was or how many old acquaintances from Nevrast they might have found there.

He had been pulling the blue wool taut against his arm; now he found the skein was too tight to remove, at least without twisting his wrist into an impossible position. He should have wrapped it round the shuttle instead. He sat there looking through the warp threads at the faded tapestry, not really seeing it, seeing instead Melinna’s frustration as she tried, over and over, to learn what the other women had said was her first and simplest task: how to spin.

The last shining notes of Glorfindel’s song were still fading when Arwen came in. She did not slam the door open, quite, but it hit the wall almost hard enough to leave a mark. “What did you say to her?” she demanded. “I wasn’t going to come now, because my grandparents said it wouldn’t help and you’d better be left alone and you weren’t really here anyway, not in your head, but I heard you talking. And the harp. What did you say to her?”

Erestor would have risen, but the skein on his arm bound him to the loom. He turned on the weaving stool instead. Arwen had advanced into the middle of the room and stood there fiercely, crackling with a kind of controlled fury. He looked at her wearily. He might have been impressed, at any other time, to see just how much charismatic presence she could achieve when she wanted. It ran in the family.

Glorfindel had in fact risen. “Arwen, child –”

“No.” She did not look at him. “He gets to call me that –” she levelled a finger at Erestor “– because he’s known me all my life, but you haven’t and you don’t. I’m not a child. Don’t call me that. Erestor, what did you say to my mother?”

“Nothing I didn’t mean,” he told her. “She shouldn’t have come.”

“Celebrían came –? When? Why?”

They both ignored Glorfindel. “That’s not an answer!” Arwen snapped. “She was getting better. She was. I didn’t tell my father, but I know it was something you said.”

Erestor shrugged and said nothing. Arwen’s bright eyes narrowed. “She wouldn’t even talk until my grandparents came. And now she’s talking about sailing. We’ll make her better, we will, but she’s talking about it. It was something you said. I saw your face. I heard you shouting at her.”

“You should have listened. Then you’d know.”

She stared at him. “You don’t even care.”

“No. I don’t.”

He thought, by the way her long fingers twitched, that she wanted to hit him. He almost wished she would. Glorfindel was looking shocked again behind her. “Melinna would have cared,” Arwen said through her teeth, as though she could think of no better way to hurt him. “She did care. That’s why she died.”

Menegroth flashed back into Erestor’s head, the darkness and the grief of it, exhaustion thrumming in every nerve and sinew. Blood drying on his hands that was not his own. If you must, he had said to her, I’ll stay. But I don’t want to die here. If you love me, we’ll go. And she had been so angry with him, afterwards, for so long. “Yes,” he said, almost steadily. “She did. She wouldn’t now, though.”

“She’s dead. Of course she wouldn’t!”

Glorfindel winced and put the heel of his hand against his forehead. He seemed tired himself, suddenly, and much older than usual. His golden youth was fading into agelessness at last. “Arwen, you shouldn’t –”

“Shut up, Glorfindel,” she said. “I’m not talking to you. Why won’t you tell me, Erestor? Would you tell my father? What if I really was Lúthien? Would you tell me then?”

“If you were Lúthien, you’d smile at me and I’d tell you anything you wanted to know,” Erestor told her with weary truth. “I saw her grow up too. But you’re not. No. I wouldn’t tell your father. I won’t tell you. Ask your mother, if you must know. Or your grandfather. He can guess. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“My mother doesn’t need the grief!”

“Then don’t. I don’t care.”

Arwen might have growled. She cast a sharp glance around the room. “Stop ruining Melinna’s work,” she told him, with a jerk of her head for the loom and the unravelling cloth. “It doesn’t just grow, you know.”

She turned on her heel and stalked out. “As if I hadn’t spent longer watching Melinna learn how to do it than she’s been alive,” Erestor said aloud. He began to work at the skein to free his arm. That ruined spindle must still be up there by the waterfall somewhere. He tried to remember seeing it when they were burying her, and could not. Maybe it had fallen in the water when he ran back to the house.

Glorfindel was looking at him oddly. “Don’t ask,” Erestor said.

“Celebrían came here?”

“At some point.”

“Why?”

“She wanted to tell me something. I didn’t want to hear it.”

“About –?”

“Yes, of course. What the hell else?”

The skein came free. He doubled it up, knotted it loosely and let it hang there. Then he got up from the weaving stool.

“Where are you going?” Glorfindel asked. He was rubbing a silver nightingale’s wingtip with his thumb, very lightly, almost absentmindedly. His expression did not suggest he was particularly reassured.

“To wash,” Erestor said. He felt lightheaded, still oddly tenuous, although the sunlight made it impossible to fall back into the haven of the remembered past. All he could remember was how bright the tapestry had been when it had first been first woven: how vivid the colours, how sharp their edges. The brilliance of the Queen’s smile. They had taken it from the loom and together they had hung it there and she had turned to him and said, done. We can leave Imladris now.

They had stayed longer than they had ever been in one place before. It had taken her that long to learn how to weave well enough. He steadied himself against the wall. “Change clothes. Take a walk. Clear my head.”

Glorfindel nodded. “Mind if I stay here?” he asked, turning back to the harp.

“If you want. Why would I care?”