rulers make bad lovers by Chestnut_pod

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Chapter 5: Anairë

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The glassblowers were the first to fall into step behind Anairë and Maldanar, who had begun to prance the instant Anairë and her attendants passed through the two great valley oaks that marked the processional avenue into Tirion.

For what possible preferment could they be hoping? Anairë wondered, as she focused on sitting Maldanar’s airy trot with grace and solemnity, rather than simply posting it like a sensible person. Next came the usual first column, Anairë’s own East Gate neighborhood, then the flutemakers’ guild, and the dyers, and the Flats, and all the rest of the guilds and associations and districts of Tirion. Even those from the Repudiator’s Quarter, who nominally recognized Arafinwë as king and rotated between Alqualondë and Tirion with the seasonal reparations work, had their place. With each new addition, Maldanar pricked his brassy ears as though he liked nothing better than leading Tirion in its much-diminished glory back into the city after ceremony.

Perhaps he did, Anairë thought, for his dam and her sire and his sire had carried her in state before the people, back and back through the generations to dear blood-bay Sáhuoron, who had been the last horse to carry her when she rode beside Nolofinwë at the Mingling, and the train of the city wended through the oaklands for a score of miles, rather than a mere handful.

It took half an hour for Anairë to reach the walls at the head of her people. As much as she could, she had kept an eye on the widely spaced oaks and golden grass of summer, and had caught a flicker or two of the little Maiar who lived in the sagebrush, and a glimpse of a doe that glinted in the sun. She had nodded solemnly to each of them, for she would likely not have time to greet the keepers of Tirion’s surrounds for days. Her attendants had come with briefs for her to read on horseback! It was a continual marvel that a city one-fifth its former size could generate so many squabbles and engineering problems and minor explosions.

Anairë huffed a quiet laugh, keeping her face schooled — though Maldanar flicked an ear back at her. She carried the makings of far more than a minor explosion. Even whatever machinations the glassblowers were planning would likely wait after she lit that fuse.

She passed through the gates. After a few days without constant traffic, the diamond dust from the walls frosted the streets with an even layer of sparkling grit. Anairë sighed – the dust was a perpetual nuisance that scratched window glass and caused dangerous glare at midday. She hummed a little mist over Maldanar’s eyes to protect them from the dazzle and turned onto the main avenue that led to the High King’s tower and Finwë’s house.

Her own eyes she protected with a black gauze veil, sighing a little in relief as the particolored blaze diminished. She blinked. Without the glare, a set of depressions suddenly jumped into relief in the dust. Footprints, broad and soft-soled, staggered unevenly down the road. Heart in her throat, Anairë gave Maldanar leg until his hooves fell in line with the traces of who could only be Elwing’s questing mariner. Who else would have broken the city’s holy emptiness? They scattered into drifting motes of light beneath Maldanar’s feet.

Her heart began to pound. Maldanar arched his proud neck and collected his trot even further, as though her racing pulse commanded him to dance. Beneath her veil, she let herself show a little more smile than would have been expected of her. She and Maldanar smothered this spark with every propulsive hoofbeat, but she would strike another one, when she was ready, when it was time. Well might Maldanar perform – she would take her own stage soon.

The white walls of Tirion echoed past, as though she passed through theater wings from one stage to another, as though a dancer weary of a long-running show had found an unexpected trapdoor and begun to run towards the distant strains of a new melody. Anairë, who had danced ten thousand miles when the world was young without repeating a step, and whom circumstance had whirled into one unending, funebrial pavane these six hundred years, felt her feet itch at the prospect of a new performance.

Finwë’s house appeared at the end of the avenue, and Anairë urged Maldanar forward. They burst into the Great Square with its white stucco and its dark balconies of wood, where Fëanáro had made his Oath and turned all the music of her world sour and plodding. This once, her eyes were not drawn to the flagstone where Nolofinwë had stood and watched his brother and done nothing, but backwards, to where the people who loved Tirion flowed into the Square and filled it with the last breaths of the sacred silence.

María the priestess of Vána brought her the ram’s horn. Anairë laid a steadying hand on Maldanar’s neck, brought it to her lips, and blew.

In the open quiet after the great blast, she unwound her veil, squinting a bit against the Sun-light on the white-painted walls. She smiled, and Tirion smiled back.

Perhaps their cheeks ached at the unfamiliarity too.

“Next year in wholeness,” she called, and Tirion called with her.

When the last echoes faded, Anairë held up her hand. The crowd rustled.

“You hunger and thirst and wish to clean the dust from your feet,” she said, projecting her voice till it rang from the walls of the Square. “I have news that will not wait for another dawn, news I must urgently tell each and every one of you, for it concerns us all. It will not wait the night, but it will wait for you to eat and wash. Go light your fires and draw your water, and return at sunset. Change is upon us.”

–

Bathed and re-dressed, Maldanar curried and cooled and put away, and nineteen urgent dispatches reviewed and sent on their way, Anairë sent for a box to stand on in the square. It was, by now, second nature to ensure she did not appear before Tirion flat-footed, in house shoes and dance clothing, but it was still not yet second nature to command others to bring the apposite fittings of royalty. That had been Nolofinwë’s assiduous duty. Her attendants would likely bring a baldachin and a carpet with a pile visible from the city walls, but this they could do without her asking for them.

Arien’s late arrows pierced the dustmotes hanging in the open windows, swirled up by some activity below. Anairë went to see.

The enterprising peddlers had already set up stalls around the square, selling hastily ground madia yuhu and cups of the glorious whitebark raspberries and salal berries and blackberries of midsummer. When Nolofinwë had courted her, she had made him buy her acorn porridge from just such a stall, and laughed at him when he fumbled with the small coins and asked for a spoon with which to eat his portion.

If the costermongers were out, so should she be. Anairë shook her head, and went down from her tower to find her box.

It was still — almost — second nature to emerge from the doors of Finwë’s house, see the audience, and lift up her arms to begin a dance. "Almost" was enough to keep her face and body well schooled, and her step steady as she climbed onto the hastily carpeted and draped platform in the center of the square. Her heart beat its wings like a hummingbird, droning in her chest. She turned to face Tirion, feet sinking unsteadily into the rug, which indeed boasted a pile to get lost in.

Each guild and district had bought its cups of berries and settled into more or less distinct clusters arrayed in a semicircle before her. The press of the square made the whole populace of Tirion diminished stand out in their numbers as the procession in its pomp and disunity had not — the scrim of dark heads like foliage over the varied trunks of a forest in its barks, whispering and creaking and difficult to take in in its entirety. How astonishing that they should be so many, that the city should feel empty to her when the seven or eight children born since the exile had to be boosted on parents’ shoulders, and the experimental ceramics laboratory commune had to stand almost behind her in order to fit into the space. How astonishing, really, that they had all done what they had been doing these many centuries now: listening to a command she issued on the basis of what little information she possessed, and organizing themselves to meet it as best they could.

That familiar feeling of fungibility stole over Anairë again — she could be any one of the crowd; she was a prop whose work could be done by any other — yet, for once, it did not leave her gritting her teeth and steeling her spine. It fizzed. It settled in the folds of her throat and lingered, warm.

She surveyed the crowd, the left-behinds and the stayed-behinds, and the ones like her, who were both and neither. They surveyed her back.

Then, as she had not done since she was a young woman who danced for Nessa and none other, she raised her arms and called out the simplest prayer she knew, that asked for attention from her people before any other; that asked for oneness.

Each spot in the square where the religious orders gathered ruffled their feathers at the change in proceedings, but she was aware of the other patches of person-forest where it seemed some wind swayed them forward, and others where snatches of responding song echoed back to her.

The prayer was short. She sang out the last note, folded her hands, and spoke.

“I bring tidings,” she began, “And I do not invoke the Valar to hear them, for this is a matter for ourselves first, if not ourselves only. This is a matter for widows, a matter for orphans, and a matter for all the world only after we have had our say. We have a decision to make, and I would that we make it for ourselves.”

A buzz darted through the crowd and back. Anairë breathed into her belly.

“A ship has come out of the East and landed in Alqualondë.”

The roar she had expected did not come. A silence held the square and every person in it such that the clicking of the roof tiles settling in the evening’s cool could be heard over her heart, still pounding. She went on.

“On it sailed a queen and her consort, enemies of Morgoth, grandchildren of that Lúthien before whom Mandos bent his will in single exception. They come to plead before the Valar for their children, who are lost, and their land, which is broken. As a token of safe passage, they bear a Silmaril.”

The silence crested into cacophony at last. Anairë could see even the gap-toothed mouths of the few small children who had never seen the light of a Silmaril or known Tirion before its emptying opening in cries of shock. Others, she thought, looking around at the faces cast into high shadow by the setting Sun, were crying out in anger or joy; still others seemed simply to be crying. The noise went on and on, ebbing and swelling and eddying around the square. It was beyond her power to quiet it. She sought out instead some island of steadiness.

Near the front, the head of the glassblowers’ guild seemed to be praying to herself, but, being a follower of Vána Flower-Robed, did not seem as perturbed by the crowd as many. She caught Anairë’s eye, and when Anairë held a finger to her lips for silence, she hummed a clear note, just audible over the din. One by one, her colleagues and journeyfolk took it up, and their neighbors the Repudiators noticed, and, slowly, another silence spread across the crowd, as pockets of leadership took it upon themselves to redirect their consociations.

Anairë watched the quiet crest and run across the crowd, each eddy of authority its own pocket of calm. She fingered the stiff brocade of her skirt, fit for a queen. Tirion quieted itself for her, mastered its passions, marshaled its thoughts, waited to ponder and deliberate together. Almost, she wondered—

It was time to speak again.

“I do not remember the Journey to Aman,” she said, and hoped that the crowd would have patience for her clumsy, borrowed words. “I know, however, that the decision to journey onwards, through loss and peril, was made in plebiscite. I know that I am in the presence of many who do remember those days and those decisions, who scorned to follow the words of a king without demur.”

All at once, the sun slipped behind the city walls, and the houses grew blue and pink with twilight. Anairë shivered once, hard.

“I am not the ruler my husband was,” she said, before all the people she had never once called her own. “I could not decide this question alone an ever I were. Instead, I pose it to you, to the city of Tirion, to the free-thinking people of this land.

“Elwing, queen across the sea, wishes to redeem the guilt of the Valar, and through them, redeem her land and her people from evil. I say the guilt is not solely on their hands, but stains ours as well. I say the Valar cannot act alone. I say the choice is upon us: remain as we are, a half-city, a half-people, in exile in our homeland, while others fight the battle we helped begin, or take up once more our part in this long and wicked working and this time, finish it.”

Her throat itched with dryness. She licked her lips, and drew breath enough to send her voice over the cooling violet air filled again with voices.

“I choose for myself,” she cried. “I cannot choose for you. Tirion, what shall we choose?”

Her question rang out, floated, and after a heartbeat of shocked pause, dissolved in the hubbub of argument. Anairë stiffened her spine against the urge to sag. The evening air rasped at her throat, and she thought longingly of the little-apple juice the costermongers sold in deerskin pouches. She looked out at the tumult of the crowd and steeled herself to shout again, to take back up the reins she had let slacken.

Before she had done more than take a deep breath against her bodice, she noticed the eddies again — riptides in the waves of the square, people parting to let pass the first elder, or the Guild-Head, or the leader of the clan, or the principal investigator of their work-group. These came towards her on her dais as they would, striding or shuffling or running, but all came with a purpose.

First to reach her was the head of the glassblower’s guild. The woman kept her peace while the rest of the elect caught up with her. Anairë watched her greet each, murmur some words to them, tone and meaning lost in the noise. They fell into a loose huddle behind her, the square and the crowd at their backs.

At last, the guild-head stepped forward and stared at her with a directness that shocked through the centuries of deference as the first winter’s rains shocked the washes.

“Intyallë of Tirion, Head of the Guild of Glassblowers,” Anairë acknowledged.

Intyallë bowed, though not deeply. She gestured around herself at the many people Anairë saw so frequently in court, somehow fresh-faced in the dusk.

“You know the leaders of the city,” Intyallë declared. “Queen Anairë, you have done well to call upon us. We will choose together.”