Compass by Adlanth

Compass

Read Compass

Aerin is eighteen when the Evil Breath comes; she falls ill, but recovers quickly. She has never held herself to be brave, but it seems she is fortunate.

Because she is young and alive and glad and afraid, she does the brashest thing she has yet done: she goes to a young man, her own age, a cousin of Hareth visiting from Brethil, a youth who has ever smiled at her and seemed to love her, and she takes him to a meadow in the hills. He has a broad, homely face, with too large teeth and a crooked nose, but his smile is beautiful. His hands are clumsy on the lacing of her clothes, but then so are hers on his breeches; he is very gentle, and looks at her in open wonder as he lies back on the damp grass of the meadow.

Ten days later, he is seized by fever; two more days, and he dies. 

*

At first, she is too stunned to grieve. Then the plague truly takes hold of Dor-lómin, and she is too busy - tending to her father, then to her kin, doing all the chores that need doing. Too busy, too exhausted to grieve - and to notice the changes that come over her.

When she does, it has been seven weeks. She startles awake one morning, and she knows, and lies there, pressing her face into the pillow, nauseous, her heart hammering in her chest. Then she rises, works tirelessly all that day, goes again to bed long after the sun has set, and lies awake all night.

Several such days and nights elapse. Then, one evening, as she sits at a wake - three dead, in a single household. Sador of the lamed foot welcomes them, Indor’s own cousin, whom Aerin has always loved. The dead are his younger brother, and his brother’s wife, a refugee of Dorthonion; and their child. Many people have gathered in memory of them, from the house of Hador and Bëor both; too many. It is too warm inside, and Aerin, feeling faint, leans against a wall. A hand touches her elbow, and she looks down. Besides her is Beleth, daughter of Bregolas; she is a small, brisk, stout woman, with black and grey hair braided in a crown, stern in appearance. Aerin has never spoken to her before, save in greeting, has always been faintly afraid of her. ‘Come,’ she says.

They go outside. The air there is cool, bracing.

‘You are ailing,’ Beleth tells Aerin. Her Bëorian accent is strong, her gaze steady and knowing. ‘Not of the plague.’

Aerin’s shock must be plain to see, for Beleth speaks again: ‘I have had four children,’ she says, ‘and nieces and cousins. I notice such things. Besides-‘ and she makes a sour face then, lips quirking down, ‘one of my grandchildren seems to have wandering feet, open eyes, and a loose tongue. Don’t be grow so pale! I am the only one she told.’

Aerin lets herself be led to a little bench by the house. It is close to a window, and she glances at it wearily, but the shutters are drawn close, so that only a little light spills out; besides, they have begun singing inside. Beleth sits beside her.

‘There will be help for you if you desire it,’ she says. ‘It may be hard to fathom now, when times are so hard, but trust the word of one who came empty-handed and hungry to your land, and yet lives now.’ Aerin remains silent, and Beleth takes her hand, and goes on more quietly. ‘And if you do not wish it… there is help also to be found.’

The next day, Beleth’s eldest daughter Gileth comes to Aerin. She brings honey cakes for Indor, still ailing in his bed, and for Aerin she has a bundle of herbs wrapped in fabric. ‘Mother says you might want these.’ Her round, brown face is very like her mother’s, but her smile is more ready. She relays Beleth’s instructions: what to drink and when, and when to know that things are going ill.

*

But things do not go ill. There is pain and there is blood, and for a few days she feels faint. Then her vigour returns, as sap in a tree in spring. With so many ill, there is much work to do, and she throws herself into it, carries wood and mends clothes and brings food to the sick.

Weeks pass. Still the plague does not relent. Túrin falls ill - then Lalaith. When Sador comes to her father’s house, weeping and scarcely able to speak, Aerin runs to Húrin’s house.

While Húrin and Morwen dig a grave, Aerin tends to Túrin, who writhes and whines in the depths of his fever. She bathes his brow with cool water from the spring, and untangles the sweaty sheets from him, and lifts him up to feed and clean him. Outside, Húrin howls.

And what is she, who mourns for Lalaith and not for her own? Yet she finds she cannot mourn what has not been, cannot regret what she has chosen. She has never held herself to be brave, but she is hale and free and for now her strength is hers to spend as she wills, in succour of those she loves.

*

She goes to Beleth then, asks to learn her craft. The older woman is glad, eager to teach. She tells Aerin the name of herbs and their uses: roots and leaves and stems and bark, against fever and coughs and lesions of the skin, catarrhs and bad bellies, for the soothing and fortification of the spirit. She never tires, knowledge spilling out of her; only once or twice does she falter. ‘We had this plant in Ladros,’ she says, her mouth twisting, her eyes suddenly distant. ‘It does not grow here in your land.’ But then she straightens, smooths her hands over her apron, takes another phial or bundle of leaves.

Aerin learns not only herbs but the craft of knives and needles: how to take flesh apart and mend it again. She, who elsewhere quakes at the sight of blood, learns to remove infection, sew and dress wounds.

Midwifery also. By the time Morwen’s pregnancy begins to show, Húrin is gone to war, will not return. Then, by ill chance, when her pains take her, Beleth is away, who is Morwen’s closest kin and the best of Dor-lómin’s healers: so the task falls to Aerin. She is there to steady Morwen as she paces by the fire, and to coax the babe into the world, reluctant as it is. She cuts the cord and she cleans her, this small, red-faced, wailing, beautiful creature with Húrin’s hair curling upon her brow; and she holds her while Morwen sits upon the blood-soaked sheets, her black hair in tangles, hiding her face - and weeping, weeping, weeping. 

*

Beleth does not long outlive tidings of the war. Two of her three sons have gone with Húrin, and neither has returned. ‘Enough,’ she says, muttering to herself. She grows gaunt, so that at once Aerin sees how much Morwen resembles her aunt; her hair turns white. Rían’s disappearance breaks her at last, and she takes to her bed and does not leave it. They say that in the dark she speaks to her husband, her brothers, all those she left in Dorthonion. ‘I did my best,’ she says. ‘Not enough.’

After her death, Gileth gives some of her belongings to Aerin: bottles and dried plants, a well-used mortar and pestle, the scrolls she has filled in a small, tidy hand.

‘She wanted you to have them,’ says Gileth. Beleth’s eldest daughter knows only a little of her mother’s craft, of healing the body; instead she has turned to the uplifting of spirits, has a head full of tales, remembered or invented, of songs and jests for the delight of the nieces and nephews that ever follow her and cling to her skirts - though she says these more rarely these days. ‘Use them well.’

*

Beleth has taught Aerin which plants to use, and also which to avoid - those that kill swiftly and brutally, and the more insidious ones.

After Brodda takes her to wife, Aerin lies abed, open-eyed in the dark, too sore for sleep. Silently, she recites to herself the names of poisons. For herself, for Brodda - which is to say for herself also, for surely if any mishap befalls him then his wife will not live long.

Still she lives. For Indor her father, whom shame and guilt already devour - that he was too old and too ill to go north, that he could not keep Brodda away -, who soon dies, whom she buries herself. For Morwen thereafter, who would surely starve without her help, and for her child; for the memory of Húrin whom she loved. For those who remain of the house of Hador, proud and fair and glad once, for the knowledge bequeathed to her, which she now must use. She has never held herself brave and she is not free, but she endures.

For herself. For herself.

*

Little by little she claws back what she can. Brodda lets her exercise her craft: whatever queer customs they might have, the Easterlings know the worth of a healer. At first he has her guarded by his men when she is called or else sets out into the hills and woods to gather what she needs, then by his kinswomen, sisters and aunts; at length, seeing her meekness, he lets her go alone.

By night or day, she goes to tend to those who need her. For some she can do nothing save perhaps assuage pain, ease death; but others she does help - setting aright joints pulled out of place, cleaning wounds, cooling fevers.

And women come to her, asking for what Beleth once gave to her. Women taken by force, broken or angry; mothers of hungry children, who fear to see them starve; women too young or too old or too alone. Women who need her help, who want it, who will not tell her why.

Most are of her own people, daughters of the house of Hador, who know her and trust her, or else near kin from the house of Bëor. Then, once, an Easterling girl: not much more than eighteen, very comely, travelling from the shores of Mithrim with her grandfather. Gold glints at her wrists and on her fingers, and her dark braids are sleek and long; she will not look at Aerin, glances contemptuously at the dim little room in which Aerin works. It is the old man who explains, with faltering words, what she has come to ask. He would have brought her to one of their own healers, he says, but they do not know enough of what grows here, in those strange western lands…
It would be easy to turn them away, claim ignorance. Instead she tells the old man that she is lacking spirits, that he must fetch some, ask the thralls. Once he is gone Aerin leans closer to the girl, who still withdraws her gaze.

‘Is this your will, or his?’ For such things happen, Aerin knows, girls who might have wished things otherwise, forced to avoid dishonour by their kin. But the girl wrinkles her lip, and now her flashing eyes meet Aerin’s.

‘He could not make me,’ she says. ‘I am the daughter of our chieftain, and he is only my mother’s father.’ Then she looks away, and again draws cold pride about herself.

She tells the rest, swiftly: what she calls an imprudence, a night’s folly, a confession to her mother, and her mother’s father having knowledge of a healer of the thrall-folk, whose silence might be trusted… She slips a bracelet from her wrist, places it before Aerin, holds out her hand.

Fear - perhaps a little pride - twists at Aerin’s belly. She should deny this girl, who knows too much, comes into her house and makes such demands, who is so proud and spoilt and full of scorn, who will not love her, whom she dislikes, who is the daughter of the enemies of the Edain - this girl who is young, whose lovely, tight-clenched jaw trembles minutely, whose left hand wrings the rich fabric of her embroidered skirt.

But she does not. The girl leaves and is not grateful, will likely never be - her pride stung too sharply from having been at the mercy of a woman who is little more than a thrall. Yet how could Aerin do otherwise? This was a choice she only ever wanted to make for herself, not for others - and if she begins now then she will never know peace. She would, if she could, drive this girl and her kin out of Dor-lómin, grind Brodda to gristle and bones - but she will not do this.

Not she, Aerin, who every month makes this choice again, fighting against her body - so hale and eager, rich soil, wanting to make more of itself. She struggles against it, wages war - proves mistress, until the moon returns, of this at least.

*

She works; she heals, with all that Beleth has taught her, and a little more of her own devising. The smell of some root or leaf is always on her hands now, under the nails; Brodda mocks her for it, but in his eyes she can see that he knows her worth and half-respects it, and hates her the more for it. She tends young and old, man and woman, examines their sores and listens to their breath, feels their pulse beneath her fingertips, lets labouring women crush her hand in theirs. She takes no payment, or very little - whatever will save the giver’s pride. She has never held herself to be brave, and she is not proud herself. Besides, she needs not have more: whatever Brodda may unleash upon her within their bedchamber, he will not suffer his wife to seem hungry or poor. Little things: a woven scarf, a bundle of herbs, and the twine to bind them; a honey cake, very small and very sweet. From Sador, whose sister’s child she has helped to deliver, she receives a box, made of scavenged wood - poor material, but assembled with care, with not a whit of metal but fine dovetail joints, and carved all about, even inside, with leaves and roots and flowers, each recognisable, the labour of so many hours, days, weeks. A poor thing, a thing worthy beyond measure.

*

A woman stops her on the path, once. They are alone, and the other woman is tall, and gaunt, with wild yellow-grey hair, and rheumy eyes. Her hand falls heavy on Aerin’s shoulder, and Aerin lifts her eyes, wondering what ails the woman.

Then she is pushed back, hard, and as she stumbles the woman spits into her eye.

‘Murderer,’ she says. Her voice is harsh, raspy, but not loud. A weary voice. ‘I know what you do.’

Aerin wipes the spittle from her face. Her heart beats loudly in her throat. In the distance, dogs bark. She fights the urge to cast down what she carries, and flee.

‘I help those who ask, no more,’ she says.

The woman laughs mirthlessly.

‘That makes no difference. Brodda’s lady-wife indeed. How many of our kin have you slain? I thought you of the kin of Galdor and Hador Lórindol and Marach of old, but it seems you have renounced their name.’ Her mouth twists. ‘Now you do the Easterlings’ work for them, stamp us out as well as any of their pikes and axes. When none of us are left of the Edain, will you be happy then? Mistress of Dor-lómin you shall be then, when none but you are left the memory of our house!’

Aerin reels back as if struck. She recognises the woman now: wife to one who went north with Húrin, and herself skilled with the axe, so that she would have gone also if not for the child in her belly. Soon after it was born, that child died; as had its siblings in the days of plague. Aerin would pity her, but knows pity from her would stir her from scorn to fury. She flees then, away from the path and through the brambles, though her skirts are torn and boots muddy; the woman’s laughter and her curses echo in her ears.

That night, Sador comes to her, for the poppy seeds he has begun to need. He comes after dusk, on a day when Brodda is known to feast with his men, and remains in the dark. In those moments, not seeing his face, Aerin can hear the traces of her own father in his voice; or she can imagine him younger, not quite so gaunt and white, and herself a child, coming to him with news and gifts and laughter.

She tells him what happened. She has never been afraid to share her fears with him. ‘You were right to escape,’ he says. ‘I have heard of her. She has an aged mother she must tend, but people say she drinks, and then goes out with her axe, to chop wood, and really to start fights. Someday…’ He shakes his head. ‘You must not take her words to heart. She speaks from the pain, and not the truth.’

Still that night Aerin lies awake, thinks of vanished memory, a blotted future; thinks that she might be traitor to both.

But day comes. In its light, she knows better: the need and the pain of what is now, not what has been or will be, and what she owes them.

*

As for herself, she is inexplicably, unfailingly hale. Still she suffers, in other ways. She has become such a twisted thing, she sometimes think: ever bending and bending, as a tree in the wind, under Brodda's will - yet for some things she will not yield, and pays the price. One day she comes to Morwen, with a little bread and cheese from her own stores. She sits before the fire, unlaces her shift. Morwen makes no sound, but she shakes her head, and her mouth twists; then she begins rubbing unguent into her skin, to soothe the welts which Aerin cannot reach. She is matter-of-fact, efficient; still her touch does not hurt, and that is enough.

Then she is done. Aerin draws up her shift. Morwen looks down at her, with unreadable eyes. Then her fingers brush against Aerin’s temple, and she leans down, and kisses Aerin’s forehead. A swift, simple touch, so rare in Morwen. In all those years, Aerin has seen her kiss Nienor so perhaps once or twice. She thinks that she might weep in thankfulness; but instead heat seizes her, in her throat and breast and low in her belly, a heat so sharp it is almost pain. When she lifts her head, and presses upwards to claim Morwen’s mouth, the other woman does not pull away.

Afterwards Morwen cleans them both. She reaches for her shift, but Aerin takes her wrist. ‘Not yet,’ she says. It is a summer day, and although Morwen’s house, with its old timber and stone, warms slowly enough, heat has eventually seeped into it over the weeks, and now they both lie naked upon the bed.
Aerin remembers the day of Húrin’s wedding - another bright day in summer. Alongside Rían, she had been among the little maids tasked with helping Morwen don her attire - a green gown, much embroidered with blue and white after the colours of the house of Bëor. Beneath it and her linen chemise, Morwen’s body had been sleek and lovely, her limbs round with slim muscle.

Now she is different: too thin, in spite of Aerin’s best efforts, so that the bones show; with rough hands and scarred skin, and the marked, slackened flesh at belly and breast that tell of Túrin and Urwen and Nienor. There are a few silver strands in her hair, and faint lines around her mouth; she too has endured, and she is so very beautiful thus that something catches in Aerin’s throat, and she thinks she might weep. Suddenly she wants, and wants, and wants, in a great, indeterminate surge - wants so very badly to be Morwen’s daughter and to be husband to her, and to live in this body, that is well-worn and at peace with itself.

That night she shares Morwen’s bed again, though chastely. In the night, Nienor, eleven yet still in need of comfort, comes between them, settles easily with her back to Aerin’s chest. Aerin feels the weight of her, her warmth, listens to her steady breathing. Their hair mingles on the pillow: Nienor’s is as bright as gold, as yellow lilies, and although Aerin’s has gone a shade paler, you cannot easily tell where one begins and the other ends.

She thinks of old Sador, humming as he worked on a toy that she, a girl not even eight, had brought him, weeping in distress; his old careful hands putting the wood together again: Making is good, but mending is a fine thing also - a better thing, for some. 

*

Years pass. Aerin plies her craft, repairs for half a day, or half a night, to Morwen’s house and to her bed. Nienor grows, ever more lovely, and strong, her father’s daughter, with his chin and eyes and laughter; for she laughs, somehow, this ill-named girl. Nienor ought to grow in a place where she might truly bloom; she is a lonely girl, but not by choice, alone but not reserved, and ever eager for tidings of the world, for laughter and for song; she should be elsewhere.

Elsewhere. Aerin has never dreamed much of the world outside Dor-lómin. Even in her days of deepest despair, she has not thought of escape to some other land, to Brethil or the wild lands to the south, but to the Dor-lómin that was, the country of her childhood.

Yet now whispers come: on the western banks of Sirion, they say, the power of the Enemy is stayed, and ebbs back. Perhaps there is a way south.

It seems a dream to Aerin; yet some do leave. Some flee in the night, without a word, but a few tell Aerin. Beleth’s daughters do. Aerin empties Sador’s box, gathers all the herbs and powders she has collected over the years, hands them to Gileth, whom she meets in the hills.

‘Should you not keep these?’ Gileth asks. She will be fifty in a few years, and resembles her late mother more and more.

Aerin shakes her head. ‘I will find more. Your mother taught me well.’

Gileth’s sisters will join her later, along with a few Hadorian women, fleeing scattered through the woods and the hills and the passes of the Ered Wethrin. For now only the youngest stands there with her son. Aerin knows Hireth a little; she was born in Dor-lómin, mere weeks after Beleth and her kin had arrived there; and she came to Aerin once, ten years past, after one of Brodda’s kinsman had laid hands on her. Aerin helped her then, and also a year ago, when hunger stalked among the thralls, and Hireth feared she would not be able to feed one more child. Another she lost unwillingly, despite Aerin’s best efforts. Yet here is the child that was born, whom Aerin helped deliver, standing by his mother: a boy of four, much given to day-dreaming and babbling. He has the yellow hair of his Hadorian father, taken as a thrall and beaten to death by his masters a month past, and his father’s blue eyes, which he now raises towards Aerin, smiling uncertainly; Hireth has named him Dírhaval.

‘Will you be safe?’ Aerin asks.

‘We will have to be,’ says Gileth. ‘Better risk hunger and cold and the beasts of the wild than this slow grinding death. And we’ve done it once before, though to flee a different peril.’

She watches them leave: the two women with their packs, slow and steady, and the boy trotting behind them, exiles and the children of exiles. Dírhaval’s yellow hair whips about in the wind. Whatever becomes of this scion of the house of Hador, Aerin knows, whether he dies or lives, he will at least be no thrall; and as he walks away he turns back once, twice, thrice, to look at Aerin and raise his hand in farewell.

*

Morwen and Nienor will leave also. Not now - but soon, after winter’s end or in a moon’s turn, whenever it is safe. It will be for the best.

It will be best. Meanwhile Aerin steals whatever hours she can, and spends them in Morwen’s company, by her side or in her bed. Sometimes, while Morwen sleeps, Aerin imagines herself widowed, and the two of them growing old in Morwen’s quiet house by the stream. The weeds would grow wild and Nienor their daughter would grow tall and beautiful and they would grow old. A foolish dream.

Sometimes she thinks she might flee with Morwen. She would not be welcomed where Túrin has gone, where Morwen intends to go, but perhaps she could share some of their path. Go to Brethil, perhaps. She has no kin there, but perhaps even strangers among the Haladin might be kind to her…

One evening, on the path that leads from Morwen’s house and through the woods, she sees old Sador. He has grown very white, his hair in wild disarray, and very gaunt, and his teeth are but jagged stumps; yet he smiles at the sight of her. She takes his arm, and they walk together.

‘Should we leave, Sador?’

He laughs, rough and kind, then coughs.

‘Not old Labadal. But you are young enough still, lady. Perhaps you should.’

‘Not I,’ she says. ‘My heart is too faint.’

‘Or your roots too deep.’

About them the wind whistles in the trees, and the path is strewn with leaves: copper and amber and fawn. Beautiful, but slippery underfoot, and so they go slowly, Sador careful and weary. He clasps her hand in his, grown gnarled and too stiff for work; but not too stiff for kindness or comfort.

‘We cannot all be like our lord,’ he says quietly. ‘Travelling to lands he would not name, or marching off to war. Nor even like the little lord, to be the guests of elven-kings.’

‘No,’ she says, and almost adds: or like Morwen, like Nienor. Perhaps Sador understands all the same. He says nothing, knows better than to ask her to betray their lady’s counsel; but he holds her hand a little tighter, although it must pain him. Her own pain, that raw wound in her chest, eases a little. The bones of his arm and hand are very sharp under his skin, against her own, and his foot drags in the dirt with every step.

Such small steps, here between the fading trees pressing about the path. The wind is cold, and the leaves rise before them, and her grief is sudden and strong and sharp, as she thinks of his hemmed-in life, and her own. She has never held herself to be brave, and still- Yet it is a sharp thing, but a brief one; there is so far to go still, before night falls. This has been her life, their lives: what little earth was compassed by their stumbling feet; the touch of a hand on hers; and her own, proffered when she dared, that others might go a little further.