The Tapestries by Dawn Felagund

Chapter 9

The day I died. TheBattle-under-Stars. I did not want to face it, not so soon. The pain of death was still upon me, or the memory of it anyway. It was just yesterday. Just last century. Just last year. A mere moment ago.

I did not know, but it was too soon.

But the halls of Mandos had diminished around me with the same cruelty as a naughty child’s fist closing upon a fly, trapping it. Better to tear the wings from it when the little creature tired. I tried to leave the Hall of Tapestries, but it spiraled ever inward upon itself, trapping me closer. My spirit—without the bonds of a body—bloated the fill the space. I willed myself back amid the grapes and roses but gazed only upon tapestries. Tapestries stretching beyond infinity, long as the years of Arda. The strands of my spirit wove themselves amid them, amid the recollections of fire and blood and smoke and death. They became part of my spirit. My spirit became part of them. But that was the way, wasn’t it? A mark upon history, and history’s mark upon me. They were above me, below me, all around me, stiff and unmoving as in death. And I had no eyes to close. I had to see.

The Orcs had come suddenly, but of course, we were prepared. Nelyo and Tyelkormo had organized training with both blade and bow, even for the women. Curufinwë and Carnistir had found deposits of ore in the hills, and we had weapons again, however crude. This they did without me, for I was crippled in my paranoia, working alone in my makeshift forge, always with my back to the wall, always with a blade at my side.

The histories say that victory was easily won for us. We had superior knowledge and techniques for working with alloys, and our blades were strong and perfectly balanced. We approached battle plans with the same detached coolness as we’d once approached mathematical equations and problems in engineering. But no matter the preparations and wisdom brought to battle, war is never easy. Many were left widows or orphans that day. For the first time, we had to devise methods for dealing with burials. Awkward funerary customs began to evolve. We learned the hard way about the nature of decay and its effects on the water supply. On us. We grew used to a stench in the air.

I saw one of my children wounded for the first time: Carnistir, ambushed by Orcs and his forearm sliced open. I’d been fighting back to back with one of my lords, and I left him to save my son, to drive the beasts from him. “Atar,” he said, “I am fine.” Carnistir had always been ambidextrous, and he’d switched his blade to his left hand with ease and pulled away from me, cutting away the remnants of the enemy. With naught but corpses around him, he was tying off his wound, racing off to fight elsewhere. Behind me, with a scream and a blade through his gut, the lord alongisde whom I’d been fighting was slain.

After the battle was over, a frenzy remained upon the people. They raced about, turning over bodies and wailing over the faces they wiped clean of mud. They defiled further the Orcs we’d killed. Some spoke of vengeance, of pursuit.

Like a magnet gathering stray bits of iron, Nelyo brought them control again, gathering around him with red-rimmed eyes and war-lined faces turned to his. He’d been as beautiful as a beacon in armor still with a bit of luster that made him appear as one of the silver stars tumbled from the firmament.

“Pursuit,” he said, “is futile. We have won, and now we must return to our wives and children and comfort our friends and those who have lost. We have shown our strength and will now live in peace, but we should not dare Moringotto so close to his own lands. We know not what secrets he keeps, the mightiest of the Ainur, buried beneath the mountains.”

I had led them here, but he kept them, my eldest son who had once betrayed me in thought, next betrayed me in voice, and now met my eyes over a sea of heads turned in his direction, and I feared that he was about to betray me in deed.

My voice rang like a rock tumbling down the side of a mountain. “I think that we should pursue.”

With a ripple, the faces turned to me, and I saw in their eyes: He already had betrayed me. The kingship was mine in title only; by the mistrust and condescension in the eyes of my people, I saw that I no longer truly possessed it. Nelyo did.

“Atar,” he said in his patient voice, his armor gleaming dully at me, “we have won.”

“The Silmarils,” I said, “still lie in the hands of the enemy, and is that not why we have come here?”

“Is it?” Nelyo asked, and I realized that I was in direct contradiction of what I’d said on the steps of Tirion: of pursuing freedom and purpose. Could those things be confined into something as tangible—albeit wondrous—as a Silmaril? Faces turned from me. The people were shifting on their feet. They wanted to collect our dead and go home, to begin the long process of mourning and the even longer process of rebuilding our fallen society. Nelyo’s brothers were gathering around him, speaking in hushed, quickened voices. Like a pesky insect, I’d been brushed aside and forgotten.

Next, I was alone excepting for my rapid, panting breaths and the crunch of stone beneath my feet, running north. Need I relive this? My own death? I stood before the tapestries. I recognized my mother’s work, her careful stitches so fine that even the offal splattered upon my armor shone like it was still wet. She was subtle: The three peaks in the distance were as dark as the night sky and so rarely seen, but a thin sheen of starlight had settled upon them. I remember noticing that, pausing, pondering. The clouds overhead were disintegrating, and the starlight was glazing the land. I almost stopped but for the thought of Light lost: Light held in the undeserving hands of Moringotto.

“In loving detail” we say of artists who cherish and know their subjects with such intimacy that the details speak of life beyond paints or threads or molded metal. In loving detail, my mother had woven the tapestries of my death. As she must have done during the year before I was born—memorizing the growing swell of her belly, treasuring each of my smallest movements—so she did for my death. Only my death took not a year but a few minutes. I wonder if she begrudged me that: a year of such tenderness, such consideration, many hours of labor, and all of it wiped away in a matter of minutes.

The whips of the Valaraukor cracked the air and tore open my flesh. Strangely, it didn’t hurt as the tapestry said it should. At the sight of my wounds, I felt a tightening inside me that would have been a wince had I a body to devote to such tiny luxuries, but then, my body was numb, all crackling energy. I had bled very little because most were cauterized almost instantaneously. The whips were of flame hot enough to slice through my armor; the air smelled of cooked blood.

But I had fought. I had fought and almost won; I had taken down one of the Valaraukor and was making progress on the second when two more arrived, and my left arm was hewn down to the bone. Still I fought, and the thought had come to me—a raw impulse along nerves unfiltered by decorum or propriety—that I was doing a heroic thing. And staring into the tapestry of that final moment before I heard a shout behind me and my sons arrived, I realized that this was perhaps the last truth that I had known. And it had been true; the tapestries did not deny it.

And—I died.