rulers make bad lovers by Chestnut_pod

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Chapter 8: Anairë

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From above, the swallows made themselves an inlay over the pale flagstones of the great square, a pretty mosaic of nest-building.

From Anairë’s right hand, Intyallë of the Glassblowers cleared her throat. Guiltily, Anairë turned from the window and drew her eyes back to the great university lecture hall in which some two hundred delegates sat, and bickered, and proposed grand plans, and got absolutely nowhere. This had been the situation for two days now.

On the one hand, this meeting was a marvel. Each guild, each neighborhood, each major House, even each principal laboratory — every organizing unit of Tirion, including the handful of small villages remaining in the hinterland, had sent a representative to the echoing lecture theater to debate the involvement of the Noldor in any strikes against Melkor in Middle-earth. The message went out in the evening, and overnight, the little collectivities that made up Tirion’s society hammered out their positions on the matter and chose the persons best able to represent them before–

Well. That was the other hand, poised to slap. Who, or what, should they present before?

“We have each of us sworn personally to Queen Anairë, and follow where she goes!” barked the representative of the East Gate neighborhood.

“But that is the point, honored Helwarin,” rejoined the head of the Flutemakers’ Guild. “She has decided that we are here to present our own opinions and come to our own, collective decision about where to go!”

Helwarin gestured emphatically at Anairë, as if to drive home the fact that she presided over the proceedings, and had in fact made her own position quite clear. It was undeniable — Anairë sat near the lectern, and the attendants currently attached to the King’s House had even dragged in a baldachin of velvet, dyed crimson with cochineal from the eastern outlying villages.

“I think you will find,” interjected the representative from the university in which they bickered, which had admitted its second class of new students since the Darkening that very year, “That Queen Anairë did not decide that we should decide; that entirely defeats the purpose of deciding ourselves…”

A very young delegate from the Flats interrupted that circuitous tirade, and Anairë, sighing internally, had to step in and remind them all that they were operating under rules of order. The intervention did not make her feel particularly like the lecture hall hosted a symposium for self-determination and free will.

The swallows outside flew because dusk neared, and the summer insects rose with the plumes of warm air breathed out by the stones. This particular debate had been circulating as water circulates a drain since the swallows’ morning flight, with a brief pause to retire from midday’s desultory heat.

Before the break, the Scouts’ representative, a very young person of the sort who thought everything Fëanorian was automatically superior, had accused Anairë of instrumentally sharing knowledge vital for any kind of informed decision — an obvious grab for power. Anairë, hungry and cross and trying desperately not to show it, had agreed to step back and cease adding the facts as she knew them when relevant, only for it to become very clear that she was the only person present who knew anything about present events. The young Scout had then switched to accusing her of strategically withholding information, supported by the delegate from the principal sapphire-synthesizing laboratory, who simply seemed frustrated that there was so little information to be had, regardless of whose fault that was.

After rejoining the session, quite the opposite issue had arisen. The Scout had apparently decided over lunch that, being as the true ruler of Tirion had departed over the seas, the only proper course of action was to do so as well, and damn the naysayers. Anairë had not expected that anyone would be so enthusiastic about a plan to charge into danger that they would try to ride roughshod over the entire Repudiators’ Quarter, much less suggest that that was her will.

Her will being the looming oliphaunt in the lecture hall, the current circular discussion was, perhaps, to be expected. She gripped the lectern tighter and sent a despairing sort of mind-wail across the miles to Eärwen, who would certainly be annoyed by it — and indeed, she received back a cross nudge that stung her nostrils.

Her moment of sniffling inattention let the Flats delegate jump in out-of-order again. Before Anairë could issue another reprimand, however, Intyallë imposed herself.

“Look here,” she said, standing from her seat and turning to make good use of the theater’s acoustics. “The issue at hand is one thing. Queen Anairë is correct: we simply cannot repeat the tragedy of six centuries ago, when our people sundered from one another and left rifts yet-unhealed, projects abandoned, families bitterly separated. It is right that we should meet together and decide as one people what our course will be.”

Anairë watched her look around the room, and noted who nodded along and who scoffed.

Intyallë continued. “Yet we have not approached a solution to this quandary, because it is also the case that, as when apprentices broach their ideas to their guildmasters, one person holds disproportionate sway in this room.”

At last it comes out in the open, Anairë thought to herself. For centuries, she had dreaded the challenge that, it seemed, must inevitably come – that she was a usurper, a pretender, a failure. Now that it was here, however, she felt a sense of lightness, relief, almost wonder, just as she had the evening before in the courtyard, gazing upon her city in its self-directed masses.

“Queen Anairë has led Tirion well these six hundred years,” Intyallë said, with a stern glare around the room that Anairë did appreciate. “We have much to thank her for, including her insistence that we all share in the responsibility of deciding our next steps. However,” she continued, beginning to pace, “It is that thankfulness that poses such a difficulty to us! When she speaks, some are too eager to listen — and some are far, far too eager to disregard anything she says! If she goes, some will feel compelled to follow, and if she stays, some will feel compelled to stay. Her presence disturbs the balance of the workings she herself set in motion.”

Someone had said it! Indeed, Intyallë had said it kindly and well. She clearly meant to go on, but Anairë had once been a dancer, and she knew how to seize her moment. She stood.

“Well then,” she said, and her voice wavered just a tad, but she shaped her hands in a dancing posture, and it steadied. “I believe I must abdicate. I— I do abdicate.”

She reached up to where the baldachin’s gold tasseled trim hung over her head, missed by a handbreadth, and hopped slightly to fist a great hank of velvet and yank as hard as she could. The canopy did not slide from the frame, as she had half-hoped it would; rather, she overbalanced the frame and sent the whole thing crashing down on its side with a velvet-muffled clatter.

The hall resounded with silence for just long enough that a slightly hysterical titter from the upper rows could be heard, then exploded into uproar.

Anairë felt a bit like laughing deliriously herself. No one would hear her over the din of hundreds of Noldor in full cry. She noticed that Intyallë stared at her with her stately mouth hanging slightly open — what in the world had she wanted with that speech, if not this? A giggle worked its way out of her throat, and Anairë had to breathe deeply through her nose to suppress its companions.

Should she try to calm the assembly? The moderator was responsible for keeping order, but, after all, she had just resigned as moderator for all of Tirion! She had quit! It was no longer her job.

A hard pounding began to sound. After initially mistaking it as her own heartbeat thumping in her ears, Anairë noticed movement she traced to the venerable representative from the East Gate, banging her staff of office on the floorboards.

“Enough!” she cried, and slowly, the roar settled to a buzz, and then to a hum, and then to a tense, expectant silence.

“Queen Anairë,” said the representative. “I am Helwarin, Gate-Warden, your vassal. I swore to you before the Moon first rose, when you took up the rulership of Tirion in the Darkness. Do you not remember?”

“I remember,” replied Anairë. She remembered with the clarity of crystal, as all Elves did, and she recalled Helwarin’s pledge with the swooping terror of falling from a horse.

“How can you abdicate?” Helwarin asked her. “We are sworn to you.”

She meant the East Gate neighborhood, Anairë was sure, with its apartments full of priestess-dancers and performers, a stronghold of support these many years, but she was also sure that the plaintive question echoed silently in many more hearts.

“I release you,” she said. “You have been loyal, Helwarin. You and your people helped rebuild the city and hold it fast against our losses. You swore to me when you saw me attempt to take up the reins my family threw aside. But I have never been more than a substitute, a makeshift replacement.”

A murmur of protest rippled about the hall, heartening in its own way, but unwelcome at the moment. Anairë raised her voice over it.

“I do not wish to rule in this matter of a war,” she said. “Guildmaster Intyallë is right. I believe I would repeat the mistakes of my husband and my father-in-law, and yes, my brother-in-law, were I to try to decide who should stay and who should go. There is not enough of Tirion left to disregard the feelings of those of us who remain. I release you from your oath. I abdicate.”

“But how can you?” cried Helwarin. “It has never been done before!”

“Well…” came a hesitant voice from near the middle. It was the Scout, uncharacteristically tentative.

Anairë gestured impatiently at them — she was no longer queen, and so her gestures could be as peremptory as she wanted — and the Scout grimaced, but spoke louder.

“Technically,” they said, in a tone which, Anairë was sure, they did not know was just like Fëanáro’s, much as they might enjoy the knowledge. “Technically, Prince Arafinwë abdicated his claim by marrying Princess Eärwen of the Falmari. He really should be king here, especially considering the Repudiators look to him, but…”

Helwarin made as if to say something angry, but Intyallë forestalled her.

“Come to think of it,” she said, “Did not the Princess Findis also have a claim, as the eldest child still in Aman?”

“Y-yes,” said the Scout, reluctantly.

“She just– left,” offered the representative from the Flats.

“She did,” agreed Intyallë. “She left for Taniquetil with Queen Indis and the lady Amarië and has not returned to the city since. We have all left her alone, essentially. I do not think any here would argue that she still maintains a right to rule us.”

None chose to do so at that moment. Instead, Anairë felt the unnerving sensation of several hundred eyes at once turning to look consideringly upon her.

“Your friendship with Princess Eärwen is well known…” Intyallë said, almost wheedling.

“You want me to follow Finwë’s path?” Anairë asked. “Eärwen may be my meleseldë, but Prince Arafinwë is still very much alive.”

Intyallë, to her scant credit, looked somewhat abashed.

The Scout twisted their mouth. “You could just leave,” they said, and Helwarin actually began to stride down the stairs of the lecture hall, staff gripped meaningfully.

“Teach your tongue respectful speech, Singenáro! You ought not dare to suggest that Queen Anairë be banished from Tirion for six hundred years!” she exclaimed. “Delegate or no, I will see you scrubbing dishes in the East Gate refectory for a month!”

Anairë held out her arms. “Peace!” she called. “Enough! I am no longer Queen Anairë, and I will leave — I would like to leave, for a while! — but I would rather it not be for six hundred years. I was a dancer here once, and I would fain be one again. I grew up in the East Gate before I wed into Finwë’s House and do not wish to be banished.”

Mumbles sprang up and died down across the hall. A few Elves activated the blue-white sconces on the walls, apparently for something to do with their hands while they thought.

If, previously, facing Helwarin, Anairë had thought of the rush of panic that came from falling from the saddle, she felt now the distinct sensation of sitting securely on a bolting horse one could not compel to stop, only, perhaps, steer a little so it did not break its legs in a ditch.

“I propose an option,” suggested a new speaker. Anairë spared a moment to be satisfied that someone at least followed protocol, then called out, “Speak!”

The person stood, revealing himself to be the newly appointed steward of the university students’ union, about the Scout Singenáro’s age, but much quieter.

“I propose two hundred years or as long as the war takes, whichever is sooner,” he said. “That way, you– she– cannot possibly sway our decision. A baby born today will not know her influence until they are grown, if it takes two hundred years. And if the war ends first, then it does not matter.”

He sat back down with a thump, visibly shivering. Anairë waited a moment for any immediate objections.

When none materialized, she said, “That sounds fair?” unable to quite help her questioning tone.

A few heads nodded in the audience, but none spoke again. Anairë waited again. It became clear that no one else was going to suggest another next step.

“I should swear, then,” she said. Pushing down the habitual flinch at the thought of oaths took but a moment; it disappeared beneath the rising tide of excitement lapping at her breastbone.

More nods. Arien sank to the proper level for peering through the clerestory window at the top of the hall, rubbing out faces with golden dust motes. It made Anairë’s next words easier, somehow.

“I abdicate the throne of Tirion,” she began. “I release all vows, promises, and oaths made to me as Queen, and all objects and responsibilities vowed, dedicated, and sworn to me in that role. I abdicate on behalf of myself and of my children. I swear to go first to Princess Eärwen of Alqualondë — I suppose! If that helps! — and to forswear the city for two hundred years or until such time as the war that looms concludes. This I swear in the presence of Tirion, and in the sight of Bright Arien, and in the faith of Nessa.”

Each word dropped from her lips like a little stone, smooth in the hand and rough on the teeth. She felt lighter from the absence — light enough her head spun.

“Your oath is witnessed,” replied Intyallë. The theater echoed her words in jumbled chorus.

Anairë reached up to detach her circlet from her hair. For lack of a better place to put it, she let it rest on the lectern, where it slid precariously before the book-ledge checked it.

She and the lecture hall then proceeded to stare at each other with the startled, wide-eyed expectancy of deer caught in torchlight. Slowly, a practical thought surfaced through the surprised, half-hysterical happiness.

“I have to pack,” she realized. “I need not go immediately, surely?”

“Wait,” someone else cried — Anairë’s secretary, who had been Nolofinwë’s. “What about all the Queen’s Orders?”

A hubbub broke out as more people realized certain pragmatic details thrown into disarray by the loss of another royal.

Anairë looked from one corner of the hall to another – people gesticulated at each other, brandished quills, tried to wave or gesture to her, shouted to be heard and only added to the general din. A few knots of people bent their heads together in keen conversation, and some strode about tapping compatriots on the shoulder, seeking to impose some order on the chaos. Intyallë kept sending her little glances. Two minutes ago, it was her charge to wrench this group back into a semblance of discipline, just as, six hundred years ago, it had been her charge to wrench the ragged remnant of the Noldor into a pale imitation of peace.

She glanced at her crown, crooked on the lectern, its jaspers and red agates yellowed in the late Sun-light. Looking back at the rising benches, she caught one of Intyallë’s looks, and, smiling, flicked her a jaunty salute.

Ten strides took her to the door, five more to the Great Square, the swallows still flitting between the dark wooden eaves.

The costermongers snuck curious peeks, but did not approach her. Anairë sniffed the air and followed her nose to a stall selling butter-slathered, lime-lashed corn grilled over charcoal – a delicacy that made a terrible mess unbefitting a queen’s cheeks and chin. The last time she had eaten one, she thought, was when she played truant with Findekáno when he barely came up to her waist, so many years ago she refused to count them.

It was the same stallholder after all this time, she noticed, Findekáno’s favorite round-cheeked Elótë, by now surely Arda’s greatest master of grilled maize. She stared at Anairë as she approached, but did not cease turning the cobs over on the grill.

Anairë ordered a skewered cob dusted with dry cheese, insisted upon paying with a handful of red po beads, and let the butter grease her lips.

She had just begun to contemplate how she should go about removing her things from the King’s House when hoofbeats clattered on the flagstones, startling the birds into swooping tangles.

Anairë easily recognized the first gray mare to emerge into the square as one of the relay horses between Tirion and Alqualondë, carrying one of the regular post riders, but found the intent obscure. It was not time for the recently renewed daily delivery of messages from the land of the Teleri, and this was no royal entourage either.

A second rider, a palace guard she vaguely knew from visits to Eärwen, emerged on a tall bay, ponying a silver-muzzled old gelding alongside. Its rider clung to the tall horn of a cow-working saddle rather than the more standard arched-pommel style usual in Tirion, clearly unused to riding. Anairë followed the line of the novice’s arms up to a set face, and curling black hair shot through with silver.

Oh, thought Anairë. I thought I might have one evening with no responsibilities.

–

Uncharitable first reactions aside, Anairë overflowed with gratitude at whatever snit of Eärwen’s had banished Elwing to Tirion to speak with the Repudiators and seek word of her husband.

Simply walking out of the lecture hall had not been well-received, as Anairë admitted she had known it would not. Someone had to sign off the large-scale labor rotas that kept corn and beans flowing into the workhouses, and then sign off on the distribution of the same when it had been pounded into masa or fermented into chicha. Someone had to perform the daily, weekly, monthly, yearly rituals that pleased the Maiar and the priestesses and the people — and, potentially, the Valar. Someone had to mediate between feuding laboratories and hold weekly public audiences. Someone had to receive the reports of the outlying towns and manage the strained lines of trade and communication between the Noldor, the Vanyar, and the Teleri. Someone, in fact, had to be the Noldor, as a body, when embassies from Eressëa or Taniquetil or elsewhere arrived.

That someone had been Anairë for six centuries — in fact, the ritual dances had been her purview for far longer, ever since she married Nolofinwë and became a princess of Tirion. Therefore, Anairë had spent a full day in the lecture hall trying to hammer out who should take on those responsibilities, while also trying to prevent a mob of multifarious curious or furious Noldor from eating Elwing alive.

Elwing, as it happened, seemed to thrive on being the center of a great deal of semi-hostile attention. Anairë watched it happen at least three times: a group of like-minded Noldor would approach her, wanting something, and Elwing would wrap a mantle of glamor around herself and seem almost to glow, or draw the eye through some secret magnetism. She would speak in that voice that would sound hoarse or husky in conversation, but when raised to address would ring out deep and piercing, so all her words would hang in the air, only falling slowly into silence. One group had left quite evidently starstruck, one thoughtful, and one seething, according to what they had asked of her.

Each time, once they had gone, Elwing had once more been a quiet assemblage of angles and hair tendrils, rather awkward in her native grace, and, to Anairë’s eye, young. That first day, no one approached her alone, and she approached no one.

Then, the next day, as the talk turned from panicked practicalities to the philosophy of whatever sort of new system they meant to cobble together, she began to suggest solutions for Anairë to propose to the gathered delegates. A high council, a separate set of judges, the importance of formal papers, the vital nature of clerks. This was a voice of significant experience, Anairë discovered — and others, watching her from the corners of their eyes, discovered it too.

All that second day, while Elwing stuck close to her elbow, heads of neighborhoods and clans and laboratories drifted up to them and probed Elwing on her prior experience leading alongside a whole fractious city of other leaders.

These conversations tended to go better than when one of Anairë’s ladies had tried a friendly chat in the bath Elwing’s first night in Tirion, when Elwing’s awkward reserve had made things almost unbearably uncomfortable. Speaking about matters of technical expertise brought out the sharpness in her eyes and some well of hard-tempered competence. At times, there would be a bump — not quite understanding the already labyrinthine bureaucracy it took to keep Tirion in corn, shocking a delegate silent by asking who was prioritized when rationing healing supplies — but Elwing took them in her stride. Her suggestions circulated the room and reared their heads in discussions two degrees removed from the initial interlocutor.

When Anairë was not wholly occupied with her own discussions, she thought of how much this glimpse into the ruthlessly functional political workings of Sirion told her of Elwing herself.

The representatives of Tirion tottered towards a consensus about consensus by the end of that second day: a schedule had been put in place for yet more delegates to be selected to draft the formal documents Elwing had so insisted upon, which would lay out what a kingdom might do without a king.

That was enough for Anairë. Sitting as a delayed exile in the hall where, only a few days ago, she had been queen, trying to help create queenlessness, was worse than the transition from dancing priestess to princess had been, if better than that from princess to ruler. Two days ago, she had abdicated and sworn to leave Tirion, not to set foot again on the white-walled alleyways or buy its buttered ears of corn again until peace or two centuries came to pass. She had done it of her own will, but her heart yearned for a clean break, not this dragging-out of the shroud of power left over from her husband’s family.

She and Elwing stepped out of the university and into the lambent night, where the starfire caught the diamond dust drifting in the cracks between the red tiles of the roofs. They set out towards the King’s House — someone would have to decide what to do with the building! — and Anairë clenched and stretched her fingers as they walked across the Great Square, bounced on her toes.

Elwing glanced at her, but seemed able to tell that her restlessness was benign.

Anairë, compelled to reassure her anyway, just in case, said, “Are you weary? I might like your help in packing away my things tonight, for I wish to be on my way.”

“I am not weary,” Elwing replied. “Though I imagine it will take more than tonight to remove the contents of this building.”

Anairë realized their strides had fallen into synch, one step each per flagstone. “Yes,” she mused. “But I do not think many of the contents of that house are mine. Some, I imagine, properly belong to Tirion itself. I will travel light, as I once did — I look forward to it! And that which is not Tirion’s and not mine… well. It was left behind, and so cannot have been of much value.”

From the corner of Anairë’s eye, Elwing frowned. “Are all things left behind less loved?” she asked, but they reached the door of the King’s House, with its gossip-primed attendants, before Anairë had to answer.