rulers make bad lovers by Chestnut_pod

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Chapter 11: Anairë

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Anairë opened her eyes to the pearly light of an Alqualondë morning filtering through the walls and windows of Eärwen’s chamber. Beside her, Eärwen slept soundly, washed with silver.

As every morning, Anairë cast her mind through her responsibilities for the day. For the first time since her marriage, no flood of duties sprang clamoring to mind. She rolled onto her back and pushed her light coverlet off her chest and belly, where sweat already prickled. Through the open window, massed thunderheads threatened a summer storm that would at least break the heat.

If it came, she would not be responsible for ordering flood control measures, assessing damage, or distributing aid. Nor would her actions or inactions be judged by all the city. If it did not storm, still no particular task awaited her. Anairë lifted her right hand and let it flap loosely back onto the mattress, as if to test its idleness.

Eventually, she must renounce the ritual aspects of her queenship — but it would be unwise to travel to the monoliths that served as the closest hallow to all the Valar, if a summer thunderstorm warned. She lifted and let fall her hand, thudding against the bedclothes.

Eärwen stirred beside her, shoving her own blanket all the way down past her hips. Half-asleep in the innermost layers of her court dress, she looked young and small, a princess in truth. Then she blinked her silver eyes open, and was again sharp and sleek and cool, a winter fox in the summer heat.

Anairë gently kissed her mouth and helped fold and stow away the mattresses and coverings for the day. Eärwen’s servants had laid out clothes for both of them: full court attire for Eärwen, with extra layers of linen to protect the fine silk outer robes from sweat, and for Anairë, one of the Tirion-style redwood bark skirt-and-cape sets she kept in Alqualondë. Dressed and coiffed, Eärwen proceeded to the King’s House to meet her own list of innumerable responsibilities without so much as hinting that Anairë find any for herself.

The increasing closeness of Eärwen’s second-story bedchamber drove her downstairs, where the paper walls stood open to allow for cross-breezes and the heat rose out of the high-ceilinged rooms. The bathing chamber emitted a scent of rosewater, and the garden courtyard played host to a flock of spotted towhees raking at the groundcover. An Elf Anairë recognized as a fluid dynamicist on sabbatical from Alqualondë’s university buffed beeswax into the already-gleaming boards of the floor and gave her a quick, shallow bow from her crouch.

“The other lady is in Princess Nerwen’s old rooms,” she said when Anairë hailed her, pointing across the garden, then returning to rubbing vortex streets onto the floor.

Anairë drifted in that direction. The door was half-open, though she could not see Elwing through the gap. She rapped lightly on the frame and entered at the quiet, surprised, “Come in,” from within.

Neatly dressed in what Anairë recognized with a pang as one of Galadriel’s left-behind indigo day robes, Elwing knelt at a low desk with a writing brush and blank book. At Anairë’s entrance, she pressed a piece of fine blotting paper over the words — quite a natural movement, and one that hid her Tengwar from Anairë’s eyes.

“Good morning,” Anairë greeted her, and moved to kneel before her.

“Good morning,” Elwing replied, smiling slightly.

They listened to the towhees whistle and chirp. Elwing did not pick up her brush again.

“I am surprised to find you still here and not attempting a daring escape into the city,” Anairë ventured after a sufficiently awkward pause.

Elwing’s mouth quirked up farther. “I find myself surprised that you have not yet found yourself a piece of business to attend to with great assiduousness.”

Anairë sighed, then laughed despite herself. “Eärwen did not provide any such task, and I find that without a schedule, I am lost. I know I used to fill the hours somehow, before rule and children.”

Elwing hummed. She had dragged one of her sleeves in the ink, Anairë noticed, though the dye was dark enough to mostly hide the spots. The whole robe still smelled very faintly of cedar, from the chest it had rested in these many long years since it was left behind by its owner, perhaps disregarded, perhaps repudiated. Though Elwing knelt, still the hem puddled around her ankles, for she was not so tall as the lady it had been made for.

“Allow me to guess: she left you in your room with some books and some sewing?”

Anairë laughed, startled. “A fellow victim of her idea of peaceful entertainment, I see.” She placed her hands on her knees and pushed to her feet, holding out a hand for Elwing to take. After a moment, she did, and allowed herself to be raised up, tucking her paper away in that ink-splotched sleeve.

“Come out to the city with me,” Anairë said. “I have a better idea. We will get you some proper clothes.”

Elwing’s eyebrows rose, but she followed without demur, sneaking along behind Anairë as she crept through the freshly-waxed corridors stifling giggles, slipping out into the high-walled tangle of service streets behind the royal complex. Anairë led her up Alqualondë’s twisting streets away from the ocean, keeping to the shadows when she could, feeling the body-warm air slipping down her throat as though finding some natural equilibrium. Passerby cast glances at them but did not disturb them, and finally, Anairë found the narrow gate flanked by dusty-berried junipers.

She paused before the knocker of wave-smoothed bone, breathing deeply, composing herself. Beside her, Elwing stood quietly, sharp eyes following the steep street on its dive to the ocean. Anairë knocked, and the door opened of its own accord into the half-wild garden with its white scraps of fabric fluttering from branches and stone lanterns.

She led Elwing down the short stepping-stone path to the low-roofed house that Ninkwitāllë had called her own since the first settlement of the harbor, before the city crept up the foothills towards her. To the right, where the flags flew particularly thick, a hollow clamor rose, its source invisible. Beckoning to Elwing, Anairë stepped carefully among the sorrel until a sharp-edged ring of a trough appeared at her feet, a cairn of stones at the center. In the deep-worn track that encircled it, a boulder rolled of its own accord, rumbling to itself, wearing the chasm imperceptibly deeper before their eyes.

Elwing watched the stone circle and circle, eyes wide. Anairë clapped her hands and bowed, closing her eyes against the low reverberation of the stone carving itself uncaring into the bedrock of the hills. Elwing imitated her.

“You might not bow to it, young one; it’s your cousin,” came a voice from behind her, and Elwing gasped and whirled, almost losing her footing on the edge of the trough.

Anairë turned and bowed, as deeply as she had bowed to the Maia wearing its purpose into the earth.

The woman in front of them smiled a close-lipped smile, deep-set eyes dancing behind their Treelit shine. Swan feathers danced at the end of the white leather thongs tying back her black hair, and her robe was of white linen so fine the deep copper brown of her skin showed through like the sand beneath an unfurled wave, smooth and unblemished even by a navel.

“Ninkwitāllë Unbegotten,” Anairë said, and straightened from her bow. “My young friend needs clothes.” Elwing opened and closed her mouth, struck speechless for the first time in Anairë’s experience of her.

Ninkwitāllë hummed. “Did you think I lacked for entertainment, Anairinkë, and thought to bring me the talk of the town to dress?”

Belatedly, Elwing folded into a bow even deeper than Anairë’s, and Ninkwitāllë laughed and stepped forward to raise her up, hardly rustling the round sorrel leaves around her feet.

“Well met, littlest kinswoman of Gondō the Circler. The town is abuzz with gossip about you -– and I must admit, I have not yet grown immune to tales of great quests, nor yet to making clothes. Come into my workshop.”

So saying, she led the still-silent Elwing into the cool shade of her house, shutting the door on the low grinding. As always, being inside her home was akin to standing inside the churning white spume of a breaker. Lace frothed from worktables, while bleached linen billowed over the flung-open windows, casting spots from its cutwork, and lengths of sugar-pale silk spilled from table edges.

“Sit,” Ninkwitāllë said, and gestured to where a white-robed apprentice, half lost against the white rush of the rest of the room, knelt at work on a length of bobbin lace so intricate the eye grew lost in its twisting paths. Ninkwitāllë made a gesture, and the apprentice rose and left their lace pinned to its pillow, vanishing into the back of the house.

“Tell me how you dressed in your home — my old home. You wear that robe well enough, but I can see it is not what you like, and it could like you better, too. What does little Elwë’s great-grandchild wear when she dresses herself?”

After a false start, Elwing said, “The dress of the Grey-elves at the Sirion-mouth; the clothes my mother wore that were brought out of Doriath for me. Later, I wove the cloth myself from our own flax and wool. I did not dye it, usually; I liked the white.”

Ninkwitāllë twinkled at her. “I do too,” she confided, and Elwing giggled, unexpectedly sweet, surprising even herself, Anairë thought, watching as she brought her hand to her mouth, feeling out the edges of her smile.

“Will you show me?” Ninkwitāllë asked, and Elwing nodded, began to tap a beat on the mats, a breathing rhythm, and when she began to sing it became a loom rhythm, and the fabric spooled out from her lips before Anairë’s eyes, bunching into loose trousers, cuffed at the ankles, a light tunic down to the knees, long sleeves over graceful arms, an embroidered collar over which a silver-haired Elf-woman looked down at them and smiled. Elwing stopped her beat, and the ghost and all her raiment wisped into the white foam of the workshop.

The apprentice reappeared before anyone could ask who the ghost had been, with a pad of thick paper, a charcoal pencil, and three other students trailing behind them on no pretext Anairë could discern. She tucked a smile back away where it belonged.

“So,” Ninkwitāllë said, taking the paper and pencil and beginning to sketch, “Four of the trousers and six of the tunics for everyday and one set for special occasions. Most in dark colors, because you are practical, and some in white, because you like it. Come with me — you can choose the fabric for the finest.”

Elwing rose and allowed herself to be led by one of the apprentices to the accordioned racks of cream and ice and eggshell cloth, while Ninkwitāllë sketched on and Anairë sipped the jasmine-fragrant tea another apprentice brought out to her.

Eventually, Elwing returned with a thick true-white silk damask patterned with seabirds confrontory in foliate rondels, at once formal and free — the work of an Alqualondë weaver almost certainly. Elwing stroked the breast of one of the birds where the weft shone smooth, carefully freeing her fingers when their callouses snagged the silk. Ninkwitāllë nodded in approval, but Elwing clutched the bolt to her almost regretfully, loath to lay it down or keep it close.

“I have no way at all to pay you,” she said. Anairë bit back an offer — Elwing had said it very simply, with neither regret nor shame, only a statement of fact.

“Nonsense,” said Ninkwitāllë. “You will come to my workshop to sing my apprentices every piece of clothing you can remember, so I can make clothes the likes of which have never been seen on this shore. That will be payment enough.”

Elwing twisted her mouth. “I may not dwell long in Alqualondë.”

“Nonsense,” said Ninkwitāllë again. “I lived here before the city came — and you are my good neighbor’s little cousin, if it comes to that, staying in its home. Eärwen cannot object.”

As if to protest, Elwing opened her mouth again, then shut it. Anairë could guess what she had meant: Eärwen was a little fish compared to what Doom the Valar might bring down upon her head, walking uninvited on the shores of Aman. But she kept her counsel, and so did Elwing, and the moment passed. Ninkwitāllë took her pronouncement as fact — as she often did — and the shop suddenly bustled with measuring tapes and shears and bolts of hard-wearing linen held up against pretty woven trims.

Laughing, Elwing held up her arms to allow Ninkwitāllë herself to wind a tape around her waist. Two pieces of paper fluttered down from her sleeves and landed in little tents near Anairë. She picked them up.

A graceful hand with letters rather larger than Anairë was accustomed to announced that the papers were a petition, addressed to the Princess Eärwen and King Olwë, from the people of Alqualondë and residents of its surrounds. These concerned parties called for a hearing for Queen Elwing of Sirion and the people of all Middle Earth, whom she represented, on the matter of aid for the Children who claimed all Elves as siblings. Anairë read the stipulations and explanations with half a smile, impressed despite herself by its — admittedly diplomatic — nerve. Elwing watched her impassively.

“So you were quite prepared to go rabble-rousing, after all,” Anairë concluded upon reaching the blank space below Elwing’s polished signature. The second page was simply another copy, as dignified and free of error as the original.

Elwing replied with her funny birdlike shrug, while Ninkwitāllë left off her measurements and reached out a hand for the papers. She outright grinned as she read, then knelt where she stood to sign her name with a flourish in her grease pencil. Her apprentices fell over themselves to sign below her.

Gumption or not, Anairë felt compelled to caution Elwing. “You must understand that half the city will throw this back in your face, and, moreover, that it will not obligate the Swan Throne in any meaningful way.”

Elwing gave her a close-lipped smile that progressed to a grin as she spoke. “Then I will rely on the other half and be content in the knowledge that they will, at the least, annoy the Swan Throne very much.”

Ninkwitāllë burst out laughing, and Anairë had to chuckle too.

“Very well!” she said, and signed her naked name neatly below the apprentices.

–

She knew how Elwing did it, but it had still felt surprising to agree to return to Ninkwitāllë’s workshop in three days’ time to collect the copy of the petition, which the apprentices had promised to offer to clients and neighbors. Doing it was easy, the simplest thing in the world, as was spending those days traveling by Elwing’s side through Alqualondë’s mazy streets knocking on doors and asking others to pass petitions along. Sometimes shipbuilders or cooks or sailcloth weavers did indeed throw the petition back in her face, or begin to scream at her as soon as they registered her gold-woven braids, but many times they did not, and opened their doors slowly wider and wider as Elwing spoke of home and hope and repair.

In between the knocking, she showed Elwing the many small jewels of the city: fish markets glowing coral-pink with salmon, the greenways preserving the grand redwood groves of the land before the city came in a network like veins, small shrines to Uinen with shingled roofs that mimicked the swell and fall of waves, tidepools full of giant green anemones and deep purple urchins.

With Elwing, she could efface herself, be only the more-experienced tourist, the respectable organizer, the older friend like an aunt or elder sister, seeing the city through eyes both new and knowledgeable.

Then, at night, she might come home to soothe Eärwen’s grumbles — Eärwen, who had been so particularly attentive, as though she were a patient half-healed but still deserving of concern. They would bathe together, dress each other’s hair, lie down to sleep together touching at the palm and knee and ankle, to be close in the equally close heat. She would be Anairë, and only that.

Today, however, she found herself without Elwing and without Eärwen, and could not lose herself in the play of roles to which, she learned with dismay, she had become so accustomed that she could hardly conceive of a self uncovered by a well-fitting mask.

Only Maldanar seemed familiar, cropping lazily at the tall pasture around the temple boundary where Anairë had left him. They had set out early and ridden easily down the road from Alqualondë, but the days were still warm, and his saddle blanket had left a square of sweet-smelling sweat on his back. Anairë rubbed him down with a handful of grass, checked his hooves for stones, and finally stood chest-to-chest with him, Maldanar straining his neck down to catch a few more mouthfuls over her inconvenient embrace.

At last, she could delay no longer. She patted Maldanar’s neck a final time and waded through the seeding grass towards the monoliths, where it suddenly became as well-behaved as if it had been mown by Tirion’s most dedicated gardeners.

The blossoms of a few scant weeks ago no longer peeked above the short grass — only seed pods and drying flower spires waved in the hot breeze. Anairë’s front teeth ached, the crystals in them responding on some particulate level to the sigil-graven stones that formed the circle. The jumbled pile of offerings she had so rudely left behind was gone, with no sign of its passage.

She breathed in deeply, feeling as though she had to push her ribs out against some great fist.

“Well,” she said, in the absence of a better beginning. “Here I am. I do not expect I shall return quickly, if at all.”

Her nose began to run, responding to the twinging in her teeth. She sniffed angrily. As priestess-consort to Nolofinwë, the temple had been as the parlor of a friend, full of lively interest and slightly formal familiarity. Nor had Nolofinwë mentioned such animus in his visits to the temple where the rulers of Tirion made good the bonds between city and Powers. Then again, he had been invested formally, if surreptitiously and hastily, upon the departure of his father for Formenos, leaving the city behind adrift, cut loose from its marriage with fate and dance and weather and more. Anairë never had, only moved from priestess to queen with the gradual addition of papers to her desk and no ritual to gild them. Moreover, she had been remarkably impolite the last time she had set foot here.

She forged on. “I renounced the crown of Tirion,” she announced to the listening air. “I have renounced it for myself and my line, and if any should quibble with my right to do so, they must be released from the Halls of Mandos or returned from across the sundering sea first.”

Another deep breath, pressing her tongue against her two front teeth. “Tirion remains in good relation with the land and its Powers. Tirion rules itself and will decide for itself how to honor its relations and its kin-ties with the forests and fields. I am no longer Tirion, if I ever was.”

So saying, she sat down hard on the prickly meadow-cover, startled by a sudden release of tension. Even Arien’s glare seemed brighter, somehow, embellishing the grasses’ seed heads with afternoon bronze.

“Was that all?” she asked, a little dazed, as she might have asked a secretary unexpectedly relieved of all petitions before the evening bells began to toll.

Only Maldanar’s contented munching answered her. Then, looking about the circle, she spotted a little bird, a red-winged blackbird, alight on the mossless menhir engraved with a floating feather. It cocked its head at her, examining her with one beady eye. Having completed its inspection, it let loose a torrent of song, that liquid descant of its kind so familiar to the marshes of Alqualondë and the little lakes of Tirion’s oaklands both. It echoed — strange reverberations in the flat, wide-open meadow.

Anairë rose to her knees, then to her feet. Slowly, she approached Manwë’s monolith, hands out in front of her as though she feared to fall in the dark. The blackbird watched her, periodically ducking its head to groom the yellow edging of its noble red badge.

Before the stone, she stopped. From outside herself, she watched herself perform the first steps of the first dance-prayer she had ever learned, arms liquid like the wings of a wild goose or swan. Then she stopped and brought her hands together, breaking the step.

The blackbird took wing, but only to the next stone in the circle, graven with Varda’s radiating star-cradle. She danced a few steps of her favorite of Elentári’s dances, the sickled bends of the Calacirya’s orison, then brought her hands apart.

The next stone was Ulmo’s, shining as though wet in the dry heat. She lapped at the edges of her body, broke the dance. After that, the blackbird led her to Yavanna, then to Aulë, then to the rest, one by one, in a silent procession around the circle. By the time Anairë reached Nessa’s stone with its incised spear-tipped antlers, she was panting, as though she had run a race or performed a full act on Tiron’s stages, though she had only begun a few of the simplest dances she knew.

She paused before Nessa. Heaving breaths, she reached out as though to touch the stone, although the blackbird chirped sharply before she made contact with the rough surface, its edges rippling in a heat-illusion dance. Before she had ever dreamed of a crown, or a husband, or even of a silver-haired princess of the Teleri, she had dreamed of the dancing-grounds and the fleet-footed, doe-headed Power who seemed to move in her marrow, her nails and neck.

“Melesta, Helinyetillë, Nessa Arrow-Fleet, Dancer to the Great Theme, Guider of the Thrown Javelins,” she whispered, and felt a shivering laugh in the mineral of her wrists and knees.

“I renounce no vow I made all wittingly to you,” Anairë said. “Today I only relinquish those promises made under the exaction of duty, not those made in joy and full will.”

The blackbird puffed his red epaulets and screed his approval as Anairë danced the flitting, leaping dance of the deer before the stone, careful of her feet despite her weariness. He lifted his dashing wings to fly away when she flicked her last sharp gesture, but she called after him, panting, “No! Stay!”

Hands on her knees, she felt shocked at herself between gasps, albeit the blackbird was likely only a messenger. He curbed his flight at her call, in any case.

Effortfully, she rose to her full height to face him, and made a more proper curtsey, as a dancer would give after a performance.

“I beg a boon,” she said, and all of a sudden felt the humming, tooth-clenching pressure of attention resume. She buckled slightly, then bore up under it.

“Thank you,” she managed, in the hopes of giving some sort of positive impression. The blackbird fixed her once more with his beady eye, hopping in place above Nessa’s stone.

“My young friend Elwing fears for her husband,” she said, and carefully did not say, I myself am wildly curious. Greatly daring, she continued in the vein of Ninkwitāllë: “She is your niece, of a kind!”

The blackbird cocked his head at her almost at a right angle.

“I ask on her behalf,” Anairë finished, feeling herself rushing a little, “Where is Eärendil, son of Itarillë and Tuor, and when may she see him return home to her side?”

Silence from the meadow. The blackbird fluffed his wings once, then again, and warbled his call.

Anairë let her shoulders slump, sighing, and turned to tear Maldanar away from his midday meal. At the very edges of her hearing, the blackbird’s cry echoed again, still strange, only this time it did not fade away like waves from a dropped stone. Rather, each repetition grew in magnitude until it was no longer recognizably a bird’s call at all, but the sort of sound that passed audible comprehension and became a tide of the body. Against the roaring tug at her sinews, Anairë found the presence of mind to recognize Oromë’s horn at use as a herald’s instrument. Her ears had been allowed to hear the announcement of some judgment at the Máhanaxar, as had not been heard since the Doom, though she could not guess its content.

As the last earthquake tremors of the Valaróma dissipated and made room once more for elucidative thought, Anairë found she’d been given the answer — as well as a gushing nosebleed. Eärendil must have completed his mission indeed and come before the Valar enthroned to plead for his peoples, stirring the Powers to some rapid judgment.

The blackbird chirped gaily and flew away, only a cheery meadow bird, while Maldanar’s ears stood pricked interestedly forward, but showed no sign of fear. The horn blast of Oromë must not have been nearly so loud outside the temple stones. Unsteadily, Anairë made her way back towards Maldanar, dashing the blood from her upper lip with the blade of her palm. Only when she had left the circle and stood checking Maldanar’s girths by rote did she recall the second part of her question.

“But wait!” she cried, half turning to look back at the temple. “When will he come back?”

Maldanar craned his head around, and, with clear asperity, said, “Look for him in Alqualondë in four days’ time.”

Anairë jumped half a foot in the air, and Maldanar imitated her with significantly higher elevation, the whites suddenly showing all around his eyes and his hair and tail standing up as though he had been put out to pasture at midwinter.

Biting back an imprecation which, while no more than usually blasphemous, was likely a worse idea than usual at the moment, Anairë held out her hands and tried to soothe him while he pranced sideways and tossed his head. Eventually, she managed to catch the halter she was glad she had put on him that morning for the mere pleasure of seeing the turquoise tassels against his smooth golden cheeks, and whispered into his flat-pinned ears, stroking the silky skin of his jaw between the bones. Gradually, he stopped dancing in place and let his ears come forward to half mast, though he trembled and blew air through red-tinged nostrils as though he had run a race.

Anairë stayed on the ground and walked him slowly to the road, still murmuring soothingly and holding his head down so he did not leap again. She mounted up, though he made it difficult for her, and gave him his head so they pelted down the road back to Alqualondë only just carefully enough to avoid coming to grief. For, if the Valar had seen fit to terrify her horse to deliver their message, she might at least let him run the fear out, that it might be delivered faster.