rulers make bad lovers by Chestnut_pod

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Chapter 6: Elwing

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Elwing knew Eärwen meant to make up for her missed presentation at court that evening. She meant to introduce Elwing to her father Olwë, still king in name — Elwing’s own twice-great uncle. If it went well, she might introduce her to a handful of trusted advisors, a scattering of important officials.

Elwing meant to introduce herself.

She meant to do other things beforehand, too, since Eärwen had seen her ensconced in her chamber, fed, and showered with needles and thread and hemp-leaf-bound books to while away the hours until dusk, and promptly left to dress for court. She had left no attendant. Elwing could not remember the last time she had been left to entertain herself in her room. Surely it was before she first bled, when she grew tall enough that her feet no longer swung when she sat upon the rough-hewn throne at the head of Sirion’s council table. Only Galadriel had thought to treat her like a child after that, and then only when it suited her.

Like mother, like daughter, she thought. Well, she had not been a child for many years, and she did not mean to spend another day uselessly in sleep. Her heart cried out across the strange and spellbound land for Eärendil, and found no answer. If he should return, she wished to be ready for him.

The room boasted an alcove behind sliding paper doors, filled with wooden chests of clothes. She riffled through them, searching for anything similar to the clothing she wore at home – had worn at home – to no avail. She folded the last of the rectangle-cut robes back into its chest, and paused at an electrum glint on the raw silk. A long, silver-gold hair had worked its way into the weave. Elwing tugged it out and held it up to the light, where it shimmered.

Sighing, she wrapped it around her finger and left the small coil atop the garments in the chest.

The washroom had a mirror, and she set about making herself seem as foreign as she could before it. She untied her hair and let it fall in coils down her back. She bound the loose, wide-legged trousers she had found at the ankle, so they mimicked those she had worn in Sirion, and tied a short robe over that. She looked a fool, but how would the city people know?

Dressed to draw attention, she hid from it while she stole down to the docks. So early in the morning, the shadows of the twisting streets were thick enough to flit through unnoticed, if one were beloved enough of the darkness.

The great harbor of Alqualondë was not so shadowy. Elwing paused in the crook of a side-street spilling out onto the grand quay, straightened her robe, and stepped into the early sunshine.

The fishers were long gone with the tide, and little wavelets lapped at the broad white paving stones of the promenade and the blue-barnacled legs of the jetties. Only the great ships remained, and the pleasure craft, and a few swift, narrow-keeled messenger ships awaiting their lady’s word. Clinker-built and carvelled, they creaked and chuckled at the gentle swells, their sails furled like banked clouds except where the spire of a lateen scraped at the sky. They shone against the water in bright pinks and yellows and greens reflected back with a sea flavor, a mass of flowers floating against the harbor wall.

Few were about to see her walk openly down the promenade where hawser ropes coiled and seabirds made displays at empty buckets. She nodded at each head that swiveled to look at her in her odd costume, with her curling hair loose down her back, and walked on, feeling their gazes between her shoulder blades. None hailed her, yet.

Instead of calling out herself, she counted boats, pretending she played the old game of guess-the-ship with Eärendil, trying her eye on the draft and capacity of each. That sea-going yacht, some rich Elf’s toy, might hold thirty while it crossed a calm Belegaer. That two-decked galley was a more likely prospect; it might hold a hundred or more and brave rough seas. That full-rigged fluyt had seen storms but might easily be made sound again, and carry many tons of food through all weathers. That dhow, twenty spears. That child’s toy with its painted sail would stay safe in harbor.

Enough portage for an army lay at anchor here, she reckoned.

The many-colored ships and the lap of the waves drew her eyes to the sea again and again, and when the smooth sandstone flags of the quay changed suddenly to unpolished granite, she almost stumbled. Catching herself, she returned her gaze to the promenade before her, and stopped short.

White fingers clawed for the sky. Bleached ribs stabbed the earth. Pale pinions strained towards the sea.

Several moments passed before Elwing could fix the flow of impressions into a coherent image. Before her, spars and beams of some strange, smooth, pale material were fixed into the ground, twisting and reaching into the air like the ghostly club fungus which sprouted in Sirion’s forests after a rain. They were not aligned in a neat grid, but there was a clear order to their placement, though every time Elwing shifted, a new aspect seemed to emerge: feathers, seaspray, flames, each imbued with an uneasy urgency that belied the lambent glow of the white matter. Leaning closer, she noted a swirling grain – wood, then, after all, though she had never seen wood white as new bone, nor yet any so smooth and torqued, as though someone had carved ivory from an oliphaunt the size of a house into shapes like driftwood.

The whole patch of jarring gray granite and white objects was not more than ten paces square, jutting baldly from the promenade with no fence or decoration around it. Elwing narrowed her eyes. It discomposed her. It reminded her of the way the Silmaril’s searching light speared out from between her fingers when gripped in her fist, or perhaps it recalled the storm waves at Sirion crashing against the breakwater. She paced around it, watching the images shift.

The other side was not so bone-white. The spars showed grayer – weathered, it seemed – and were cracked and warped in places. The cracks almost hurt to look upon, crevasses in the uncanny smoothness of the wood. Some spots, she noticed, looking deeper into the thatch, were black. Burned?

It took an unexpected effort to step further into the square. Elwing squared her shoulders and drew a breath, and almost choked on it when a deep, musical voice spoke behind her in a language she could not understand. She resisted the urge to whirl around and turned slowly to see who addressed her.

An Elf no taller than herself, with spun-gold hair in a close-cropped cloud of curls, dressed in fine masculine Noldorin clothing, looked at her quizzically, and repeated his indecipherable question.

She spread her hands and half-smiled in the universal gesture of incomprehension.

The Elf cocked his head and, in a Quenya accent that could etch diamonds, said: “Not Telerin, then. Yet I see you find the memorial affecting.”

Elwing dipped her head, half a greeting and half agreement. “It captivates me,” she agreed. “It is very beautiful, and very sad.”

“You are a stranger here,” he replied. “Do you know what it remembers?”

Elwing breathed deeply, steeled herself, took control of her face. Now that this fellow with his gleaming hair had approached her, the sailors and promenaders were drifting closer.

“I am stranger than you know,” she said. “Yet across the sea the arts of our cousins are still remembered in song and story. The Swanships burned on our own shores, besides, with such loveliness they say the flames appeared as sculpture. I wonder how the pieces that remained came to be here.” She dropped her voice, darkening its tone. “Moreover, we know well the first Kinslaying and its consequences.”

The little crowd stared at her, the salts in their work clothes as well as the gorse-headed lord. Skin prickling under her improvised attire, she wondered which of her breadcrumbs they would pick up first.

“A cousin—!”

“Did you see them?”

“You mean–”

“But how came you here?”

“—first Kinslaying?”

All of them at once, it seemed.

The lord held out his hand, and some quieted, but another, a dark-haired sailor with bare feet and fish scales sticking in shimmering panoply up her arms, sneered at him and stepped forward, mouth working around some unknown quantity of questions.

Oh, a dynamic, Elwing thought to herself in mental imitation of Idril’s dry tones. We do so appreciate a dynamic.

Idril would say such things when Elwing still begged her to sit at her right hand in council meetings. Every bard remaining in Beleriand had sung the Lay to her upon stumbling into Sirion’s ramshackle glory – every bard save one – and woven Lúthien’s journey before the minds’ eyes of the council and their little queen. Greens and blues and browns for her grandparents, and this part in deathly gray, the path to Mandos, the bitter taste of determination and quest, and, depending on the singer, recrimination. By the time she was no longer little, and had made of “queen” something quite different, no one could notice a dynamic as well as she.

The beat of her heart settled into the galloping rhythm of story. She ducked her voice under the first syllables of some further demand from the scaly-armed captain and sang, in the granddaughter of a voice that had moved gods:

“‘Long are the paths of shadow made
Where no foot’s print is ever laid,
Over the hills, across the seas!
Far, far away are the Lands of Ease,
But the Land of the Lost is further yet,
Where the Dead wait, while ye forget!’”

A little of the joy of those evenings in the garden courtyard of the Queen’s House, open to the slapdash market square, slipped into her voice, and a little of the trackless paths of the three-year sea. From some locked drawer, Elwing cast out her ease, her babies in their ship-cradle rocked by Ulmo’s waves, as a fisher casts out a line, and having beguiled her catch, let bite her hook — the screams, the blades, the babies’ faces lit with flame, two small boys lying still in a forest, covered over by the unpitying snow.

She had to work the translation, rather, but when the last notes of "forget" rippled out upon the pier, she thought she had made her point.

A few gulls cried out into the silence before a member of the crowd spoke. The surly captain darted a glance at the lord, and seemed to decide that any words would do, if spoken first.

“Are you the ghost of that allottance-jumper who sang a ditty to Mandos and left without a by-your-leave? It's only that otherwise I can’t see how you have much to say to us about forgetting the dead.”

“Don’t speak foolishness, Nissaratë,” someone hissed from behind her. Elwing’s mouth twitched.

The captain, whose sneer was apparently equal-opportunity, grimaced in the hisser’s general direction. “I think it’s rich that you-–”

“Shut up, Nissaratë,” a different voice snapped. A slight, dark-haired woman stepped out from the captain’s shadow, fists and jaw clenched. “We remember what you think. There are obviously more important things afoot.”

She faced Elwing and tilted her chin up to look at her — she stood shorter even than some Men of Sirion.

“I am Voranna of the Repudiators’ host, though no Kinslayer am I,” she said. Elwing saw her pulse fluttering in her throat. “You are someone, and you have your story, and I expect you will tell us more just as soon as you can. But tell me first — I believe you when you say you are from across the waters – tell me, do you know my son? Do you know my ruddy-haired Urundil, who marched in the train of Nolofinwë? Did you meet him on your strange shore?”

Elwing bit her tongue. Voranna’s eyes, fixed on hers, glinted with desperation under their Treelit sheen. Which was worse, she wondered. Should she say she had known, or known of, a Rustil, a Rusdil, an Urdil, and even a Rusnil, and a full hand more besides of copper-topped Noldor from who knew which host, with names no parent gave them, who stumbled to Sirion and were given a roof if they showed willing? Or would it be better to evade the interrogation, the running-through of every particular of every unlikely candidate? To avoid enumerating the personal qualities of Rustil, Eärendil’s child-healer, who had died in Gondolin by Balrog-flame, or Urdil the fletcher, whom Elwing had seen die by the sword of another Noldo during her flight to the clifftop? To keep back the knowledge that the greater part of the Noldor who survived the journey to Beleriand were dead before she was even born? Which was the kinder decision, and which the more useful?

“I knew none by that name,” Elwing said, as gently as she might. “Your son would have taken a name in the tongue of the Sindar. Some I did meet, or hear tell of, whose names ring alike. I must warn you that of their number, some have died by the sword, and some by Melkor’s malice, and still others passed away before my birth, in the noontide of the Noldor in Beleriand. I knew few well, for when I was young, we were uneasy neighbors, and when I was grown, few remained of any host, and many made themselves my enemies.”

Voranna dropped her gaze. A sea mew screeched from a mizzen yard. Even the belligerent Nissaratë held her tongue.

“I did not think death should dog the footsteps of the Noldor so closely,” Voranna said at last. Her mouth twisted. “Nor that they should find themselves among enemies.”

Someone in the growing crowd snorted, and Voranna visibly stifled a flinch. Elwing searched the cluster of faces, and found more than a few sneers. She began to formulate her next sentence, but was cut off by a loud clap. Startled, the mutter dissipated.

Nissaratë brushed the scales from her hands, not looking at Voranna. “The best use of our time is not asking after every Kinslayer who may have come to Endórë one by one.”

“No,” interjected the golden-haired lord, “I expect not. Why came you here from so far, Lady?”

“And what do you want?” asked Nissaratë, clearly discontented by the theft of her last word.

Elwing smiled at them, the queen’s smile.

“I come with my husband to treat before the Valar, who brought me to this place and season. I did not mean to come so far, but as they have tied my life to their whim, I mean to make them answer for it. My want is for my life, and my request is for the lives of my people. For though I was taken up out of the reach of my enemies, we are yet abandoned, my people and I, to be destroyed. Our deaths stain their hands. They must answer.”

The smile stayed in place, though at least seven pairs of eyes looked askance at her. A few mutters about the relative usefulness of the Valar’s aid and her relative sanity reached her ears.

“I do not seek aid,” she said, still smiling. “I demand redress. And I shall have it, for their own law recognizes the justice of my claim. Shall I tell you more?”

Nissaratë, the lord, and at least three others tried to speak at once. Through, it seemed, the sheer force of lung capacity, Nissaratë won, and stepped closer to Elwing than she liked.

“The help of the Valar comes at a high price,” she said. “Tell me, nameless cousin, why should they care for you, on your distant shore?”

“I think what she means—” broke in the lord, and was himself interrupted by Voranna.

“She said what she meant,” she said, with some asperity. “But I agree.”

Nisasratë aped shock, and Voranna visibly restrained herself from rolling her eyes.

“You should tell us your name, cousin. And I would rather not speak of the Valar, whose curse lies upon my son. But—” her eyes flicked up, to the memorial over Elwing’s shoulder. “Would you tell us about them? About your people, and your homes across the sea?”

“That is what I said,” said Nissaratë, and this time Voranna did roll her eyes.

Elwing took a step closer to Nissaratë. “What in particular may I tell you?”

Nissaratë’s eyes darted to the side, and she shifted her weight back, swallowing. Elwing was about to step back, having made her point, but Nissaratë’s gaze returned, and she stood straighter out of her ironical slouch.

“What did you eat?” she asked. “What sort of things did you cook?”

Elwing’s eyebrows rose involuntarily, and she did not quite manage to catch them. Nissaratë scowled, but held her composure.

“My nephew was a ship’s cook before the Kinslaying, up and down the coast and even to Avallónë,” she said, and paused to clear her throat. “When he comes back he’ll like to hear about some new dishes.”

She stepped back, and paid careful attention to peeling another fish scale off her arm. The stiffness of righteousness seemed to drain from Elwing’s body like the tide out of the estuary at Sirion, one finger at a time. The creaking of the boats bobbing in the harbor returned to her ears, as familiar as the calls of the unusual seabirds were strange.

“My sons loved steamed mussels,” she blurted out, surprised even at herself. “The blue kind with orange flesh. One wanted them the usual way, with onions, and his brother always wanted them without. But the onions go in the pot first, so if we wanted to make both of them happy, we would have to have two pots on the hearth.”

A sharp tingle in her nose made her stop. She bit on her tongue, invisibly, as Idril had taught her to do.

Nissaratë eyed her mistrustfully. “So you lived on the coast, then?”

“In an estuary,” Elwing replied.

“Did the mussels there have nacre too?” asked a new voice, a much younger Elf.

“Yes, they were beautiful inside, and some even grew pearls, blister pearls. Always duller out of the water, though one could varnish them to make the shine last.”

Voranna looked interested at that. “Was that done commonly? Was it for jewelry, or decoration…?”

The lordling cleared his throat. “Perhaps we might continue this conversation with seating,” he suggested, making an elegant gesture towards an unprepossessing stack of crates, quite as though he stood in some grand parlor.

Elwing laughed, and the knot of people before her breathed out a sigh in one body, it seemed, and one or two people chuckled with her.

“Sound advice!” she said. “But first, may I learn your names?”

Nissaratë took the lead and ensured the Teleri were introduced first – fishers and dockworkers, mostly. The Noldor – for that was, clearly, who they were – introduced themselves one at a time, casting anxious glances towards the blond lord. For a moment, it seemed as though he would not introduce himself, but Elwing gave him a prompting glance.

“Ah,” the lordling said. “I am Arafinwë Finwion. I lead the work of those Repudiators who seek redemption through labor. You must have come to know my wife.”

There was a beat of silence. Elwing might have known, in retrospect — that hair, that bearing, that air of command. Many questions crowded her throat, but, Elwing thought, they could, and perhaps should wait. Now was a chance to speak to many of those who controlled portage and Alqualondë’s new fleet – such as it was.

She only replied: “Let us do sit and speak awhile, as you suggest,” and found her arm taken, quite to her surprise, by Nissaratë, who began to walk her towards the boxes.

“You mean to say you usually eat shellfish with onions?” she demanded. “No, wait to answer — what is your name?”

Elwing had almost jerked away when Nissaratë’s brawny arm wrapped around hers, and the little hairs on her arms still stood up. The captain’s voice had been so disbelieving, so offended — she found herself laughing again.

“Always!” she replied. “And my name is Elwing.”

“Well,” Nissaratë said, “Elwing, why would you spoil seafood like that?”

Elwing put a hand to her cheek, where the muscles ached. She parried, lightly, and Voranna asked another question on oysters. Nine Noldor and Teleri sat together around her, listening to her spirited defense of minced onion on oysters, and asking questions about harvest and sustaining the shellfish populations, and what the tides were like, and who sailed, and what birds rested on the masts at harbor. Someone sang a snatch of Telerin sea shanty, and Elwing sang one back in Sindarin, and a shared chorus melody was discovered, and Arafinwë Finwion was overcome with excitement and demanded they sing the full songs.

All afternoon, the words came easier than she would have thought, while the tide rolled back in, rocking the boats that might yet serve her cause.