On the Starlit Sea by Idrils Scribe

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Chapter 9: Comfort Item

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“Redhron made this especially for you. A fine cook, but a temper like a dragon.” Glorfindel breaks off some of the honeyed flatbread, and presses it into Elrohir’s hands. “You will answer to him if you send it back untouched.” 

Glorfindel looks stern, but his eyes still hold mirth - a hollow threat then, merely a new tactic in his ceaseless struggle to get food into Elrohir. 

The Elvish bread smells delightful, but where Elrohir’s stomach used to sit a tangle of raw nerves writhes all the way up his throat. “This will keep until tonight.”

“Tonight you will have a hot meal.” Glorfindel sets a cup of wine down on the chest before Elohir with a soft click. Sweet-scented steam wafts up. “Elrohir …” he is openly pleading. “The Nemir is well-supplied, and you look so gaunt. Let us put some flesh on your ribs before Elladan takes fright at the sight of you.” 

A low blow, but it hits home. And so Elrohir forces down the wine and some bread. It really is very good, and after a few bites his stomach settles. He manages half the loaf, in the end.

Glorfindel’s relief is palpable. “Come now!” he says, rising. “Time to meet our shipmates!”

“Wait,” Elrohir says, and turns to his saddlebags, lying in a messy heap in the corner. 

He tamps down the sharp sting of grief -- where is Ot now? -- and digs for his scimitar. He unwraps the sheath from his stained and battered sword belt and girds it over the silver-studded Elvish one so the sword hangs on his hip in easy reach. The weapon’s familiar weight is a small solace. He has a knife in his sleeve, but now he takes out a second one and slips it into his boot.

Glorfindel watches these proceedings with something like sadness. “You need no weapons.”

At that, Elrohir raises an eyebrow. “Do I not, with Umbar in hot pursuit?”

Glorfindel does not answer, but steps closer, and tugs the collar of Elrohir’s undershirt until it sits flat and even underneath the tunic. “There. A proper Lindon seaman.” 

Up on deck, the open ocean is an ever-shifting dune-sea of azure and indigo, strewn with diamonds where the morning sun sparkles off the wave-crests and the Nemir’s foam-white wake. 

Elrohir breathes deeply, filling his lungs with the strange scents of salt and spray.  A desert indeed, and the Nemir a tiny swell-tossed haven amidst the vast and lifeless beauty of waves and clouds. 

High overhead snowy gulls and gold-dusted gannets perch on the ship’s yardarms. They dive from the yards into the water and dart up once more with writhing silver in their beaks. Elrohir leans his back against the railing and tips his head back to watch them flit between the white expanses of the sails. Even higher up, at the dizzying top of the main mast, flies a bright pennant, a white swan-ship sailing waves of blue. 

The ship is a hive of bustle and toil. Glorfindel leads him past clusters of Elves in shirtsleeves, busy painting, caulking or scrubbing the already spotless deck. Others are preparing for battle. They pass a weaponsmith bent over his grindstone, drawing across one sleek Elvish blade after another until the edges gleam keen and hungry in the sun. A circle of fletchers are sat on the deck. Their hands are a blur to the rhythm of their song, bundles of white-fletched arrows stacked all around them. 

Elrohir means to greet them but the smile withers on his face. Out there, where sea and sky meet, a red sail looms. Umbar is coming. 

Fear leaps snarling at his throat. He rushes to the railing to watch white-knuckled how the Black Eye billows in the stiff east wind. 

“Come,” Glorfindel will not let him linger there. A firm hand steers him away and up to the quarterdeck.

“Ah, Elrohir. A sight for sore eyes!” Galdor’s smile is wide and bright as he puts a fatherly arm around Elrohir’s shoulders. “Look, Alphalas! His mother’s image!” 

“I beg to differ, sir.” On Alphalas’ forearms a pair of tattooed birds swoop up into her rolled-up sleeves. The strange little creatures - bright cobalt blue and topaz - flit about in constant motion as she underlines her words with bird-quick gestures. 

She lays a sun-tanned hand against Elrohir’s cheek - not unkindly - and turns his face this way and that. “Fatten him up a bit, and he could pass for Elrond!” 

The first mate has mirth in her eyes as she exchanges wit with her captain. Galdor may run a tight ship, but it seems a happy one, too, and at these Elves’ pure and honest joy Elrohir cannot help but smile back. 

As it turns out, both Elrohir’s parents have served on the Nemir , or perhaps the ship Galdor commanded before this one. Galdor and Alphalas manage to amicably quibble about the details, but the pair of them wholly agree that Elrohir should head to Lindon for a navy stint as soon as his parents will let him. He receives this Elvish career advice with a polite bow, because what should he say?

The morning gets even more confusing when they step off the quarterdeck to meet the crew. Glorfindel takes Elrohir the length and breadth of the ship, a deluge of introductions. 

Complete strangers embrace him with tears in their eyes, gushing that he is this or that relative’s very image. A laughing sailmaker takes him below deck through one of the great grates, into a white-timbered hold to show him where his mother’s hammock used to hang when she was the bosun. Several people hike up their shirts to show him the scars of wounds his father once healed. 

All manner of gifts are pressed into his hands, so many that he has to stuff his pockets to bulging to hold them all, and then Glorfindel’s pockets, too. A bewildering collection of leaf-wrapped hard candy, seagulls carved of ivory, a vicious-looking metal implement - “here, lad, a marlinspike of your own!”, a silk scarf in strangely shifting, opalescent colours, and a grey hood apparently made of “good Lindon fleece, keeps those ears warm!” 

Glorfindel laughs his golden laugh as he keeps steering Elrohir up and down ladders and into the various holds. Elrohir thanks and greets and smiles until his cheeks hurt.

Without a doubt Glorfindel is in cahoots with the Nemir’s dragon-tempered cook, because he times their visit to the galley precisely at noon. The fearsome Redhron turns out to be a rotund fellow with a dimpled smile, sole ruler of his narrow, sweltering realm dominated by a black iron stove. He seems quite jovial, but he just happens to have an improbable serving of fried fish left, and isn’t Elrohir just the man to keep it from going to waste?  

He is belching a little behind his hand as they climb the ladder back to the main deck. Once he finds his feet again, a silver-haired Falathrim drops her rope-splicing work and rises from her seat upon a coil of cable. 

Elrohir is no judge of Elves, but even he can tell that this one is ancient. Her braid is white as ivory against her sun-tanned skin, and that fair face would look neither old nor young on a Mortal woman. Her eyes are a strange pale blue, and the eerie depth of her gaze leaves no doubt that here stands the oldest being on this ship. 

By way of greeting she takes Elrohir’s hand and lays in his palm a pendant on a string of grey Elvish rope. 

He holds the thing up to look at it. Green, gold-flecked jade, the size of his knuckle. Like all Elf-made things it is fair, but the shape is strange. A perfectly formed octopus with each curling arm sculpted down to the suckers, an unfathomable expression in its obsidian eyes. 

“This is a holy amulet,” the Elf-woman says in Andûnaic, barely understandable through her heavy Sindarin accent. “Wear it.”

“Why is it holy?” 

“In your tongue He is called Ossë. He can be kind, and then we of the Falas call Him Yssion, the Foam-lord, and show Him in the shape of a gull. But He has another face: Gaerys the Dreaded, Eight-armed Stirrer of Storms.”

At once Elrohir’s nose burns with temple-scent - incense and scorched skin. The jade grows heavy in his palm, and he battles a wild impulse to throw it overboard. “What sacrifices does the Stirrer command?” he asks, dread heavy on his heart. 

The old seawoman only stares in confusion, but Glorfindel understands well enough, and steps in at once. “We give the Lord Ossë our Song. He wants nothing more.”

Oh. Elrohir fumbles to salvage the conversation, “I thank you for this gift, mistress…”

“Falver.” At his look of expectation - Elves go by two names, he knows by now - she adds, “I cannot give you my mother’s name, for I have none. I awoke when the first Elvish voice Sang by the waters of Cuiviénen.”  

Elrohir bows deep and long. “Well met, Falver the Motherless.”

She bows back, and insists on slipping the string around Elrohir’s neck. She shortens it until the pendant hangs over his breastbone. Then her tanned face opens into a grin, and she hooks a finger behind his collar, deftly dropping in the stone so the cool jade comes to rest against his skin. 

“His good will be upon you, Son of Celebrían,” she says, and returns to her ropes.