The Tapestries by Dawn Felagund

Chapter 11

Her back was to me, and intent upon her work, she did not sense my approach. I have learned to sense other spirits in my time here—time that I cannot measure in years or hours but that stretches and folds and rises like bread dough—learned to look for the faint brush of color like paint diluted in a wash of water: violet, green, blue. My mother, though, had a shape like a body. Her dark hair fell unbound in waves down her back; her fingers were pale and agile, quick as bees darting between flowers. Yet I saw her spirit as well: bright white, like the hot center of steel fresh from the furnace, raw and beautiful.

I might have called to her but for the tapestries, slipping to a floor I’d conjured in my thoughts: a blue shade of marble that I’d always adored, found only in northern Aman. The tapestries were piled high around her, and even as I watched, other bright spirits were whisking them away, to hang them in the halls and make them into history.

One caught my eye and I went to it. The bobbins and threads hissed between my mother’s fingers as she worked, oblivious of me.

They say your heart can break, and I have always hated that saying. Macalaurë—always the poet—was fond of it, of “broken hearts” in his laments or even those that mixed the figurative with the more bodily: “My heart torn from my chest,” he sang once, and I stood up in the middle of the song and shouted for him to stop. “Hearts don’t break!” I said. “They are not made of porcelain!” I’d dropped a bowl from the table at my side onto the floor to demonstrate. Only later did I realize that Macalaurë had made the bowl too; it was one of the few of his awkward crafts of which he was not so ashamed that he refused me to display it. “And if your heart tore from your chest—why, you would not be sitting here now!”

Here, in the halls of Mandos, I have no heart to break. Yet it did. And I suddenly understand what Macalaurë had meant, why his face hadn’t become stricken as had been his wont in those days but instead turned dark and defiant, and he’d argued with me in front of his mother and brothers and proclaimed me a naïve fool.

Me! I’d been shocked at the time, and he’d been punished for a week for his insolence.

The tapestry beneath my fingers was off my beautiful Maitimo tied to a table in one of Moringotto’s dungeons, his flesh flayed raw and burned. He’d vomited from the pain. He’d held it in his mouth and thought to end his agony by drowning himself. Only he’d turned his head at the last moment and spat it onto the floor.

I will not fail our people again.

Beneath that was a tapestry of Carnistir trying to show Maitimo how to fight with a sword in his left hand. Tyelkormo and Curufinwë cast forth as traitors from their cousin's halls. Telvo holding Pityo’s body as he died and oblivious to the shadow of the enemy behind him and his own life so close to ending. Macalaurë trying to soothe the burn on his palm with saltwater and weeping, endlessly weeping, into the sea.

The servants of Námo were coming and taking them one by one, and I understood that history was happening. Time trudged onward, marked by tapestries. The tapestry of Maitimo was taken from my hands and whisked away, and I would have wished for such torment upon my own body if I knew it would free my son.

But I knew that he would survive. The other tapestries spoke of that. For a while, anyway, until the flames beneath my mother’s fingers took shape and returned him to where he had come: from fire to fire.

The tapestry was whipped from her finger and into the pile beside me even as she was beginning another.

Holding him in my arms by the river on the day he was born, I had envisioned no ending for my beautiful son Maitimo—certainly not one like this. I had envisioned an ending for none of them, and if I had known—

Mother? I called. Perhaps she had seen it; perhaps that was why she was here.

Hush, Fëanáro, she said with the practiced brusqueness of the mother she’d never had the chance to be. Just watch.

Beneath her hands, a new tapestry was taking shape. I used to read to you, she said, even when you were an infant, before the weariness took me to Irmo and the foresight brought me here. I read to you of the Ainulindalë, and I believed that you heard—and understood—me. Your eyes, they were so bright on mine. And I would read to you again and again of one part, to hold it true in your heart, to trust none among our people, nor the Valar—for deceit, as you have learned, is part of all of us—but to trust just this one thing:

“ ‘And thou shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.’

So said Eru, who made us all and guides my hands now as I record the history of our people.”

Beneath her hands, a new form was taking shape of three lights and three destinies—earth, sea, and sky—subject to be coveted by none, even the greatest of the Ainur, and I saw that all the dark things that I had done and that had been done against me had led to this, to the safekeeping of the Light that would heal the world.

Do you see, my son?

This one was set aside, for it would be hung at the world’s breaking, and that was still a long time away. Or maybe it was not. Time is funny here. But I sat at her side and rested. And waited. Waited for my children to arrive, one by one. Waited for fate to be realized, bit by bit. Waited for the call that I had been born to hear, for the world’s breaking and remaking, in which we would all play a part, even me, even the Fallen: I would be raised up beside the greatest of my creations. I would again kindle Light.

Beneath the hands I conjured for myself—hands that had held my children and loved my wife and brought wonder to the world—the tapestries said as much.