The Strands that Bind by AdmirableMonster

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The Chemister

There was a pond near the northern border of the Old Forest that Chalcedony’s father said he used to play beside when he was a child, but none of the Shire children were allowed to go there anymore.  It was said to be poisoned.  There were no fish living in it now, and no plants, and several stray cats had gotten very sick.  Some of the nearby hobbits maintained that it was enchanted, because the cats had nearly “danced themselves to death,” but Chalcedony felt that this lacked evidence.

If the fish and plants were dying, poison seemed to be a much simpler explanation, and by all counts, before she was born, Old Man Sharkey had gone around poisoning everything.  Her da said that Uncle Sam had taken it particularly hard—he used to go fishing there with the mythical Mr. Frodo.  Some of the places that Old Man Sharkey had hurt had healed over the years, and some were in the process of it, but the little pond was not one of them.  No one even dared to go there.

Chalcedony liked Uncle Sam very much, and somehow this pond had captured her imagination.  She didn’t get too close, but she did sometimes hover well back from it, peering at it from a distance and wondering whether there were some way it could be healed, or if it would forever be a place of death now, which seemed very sad.

Because she thought about it quite often, it wasn’t very surprising that she dreamed about something like it that night.  A little too old now for her parents to read her to sleep, she usually curled up with a book—either one from her own house or one she had borrowed from Elanor—but tonight she took the necklace and a little leather-bound notebook with her, thinking she might sketch it or take some preliminary notes before examining it with the lens apparatus the following day.  She was certainly not planning on falling asleep the moment she tucked herself into bed.

It is like seeing a view through a dark window stained with grime, at first, browned and blackened and smudged, but the view wavers and comes slowly into focus.  She is looking at a small hand encased in a thick glove of some dark material and holding out a tube of glass.  (She is dreaming, clearly.)

Nimruzimir frowned, feet unsteady on the wet sand, crouching by the water’s edge.  The glass beads of his necklace he had wound carefully about his wrist, and they knocked together with a slight noise as he bent to submerge the test tube.  He had learned his lesson well enough from some of the burns he had received when he was younger; now he would not even take samples from the ocean without some sort of protection.

“You really think it’s contaminated.”

“Do you doubt me?”

Lilóteo sighed, and Nimruzimir glanced up at his lover.  “No,” he said.  “I just wish I did.  And where would it have come from?”

“An abandoned outpost, I imagine.  I have it on good authority that there was a site nearby that produced weed-killers and fertilizers.  Many of the colonies have been withdrawing towards the central authorities in the north and the west, and I find it difficult to believe that they would have sufficiently contained the poisons.”

A grunt, not quite an obscenity.  Lilóteo frowned, walking back and forth.  “I guess I should start going door to door to see if anyone is willing to be physically examined.”

“If the children start getting sick, they probably will be.  People will not move until they see a threat, and by then it is often t-t-too l-late.  There.”  He stoppered the tube and tucked it away at his belt.  “Come.  Th-There are s-several more locations I w-would like to test.”

A hand dropped onto his shoulder and squeezed.  “Nimruzimir,” Lilóteo said quietly.  “This is good work.  You know that, right?”

The sense of comfort was greater than he had expected, and he found himself turning to lean his head briefly against the larger man’s chest.  “It is n-n-necessary work,” he said, and his own voice sounded so dry and clipped to his ears.

The window seems to frost over, clouding as if crystals of frost are forming across it.  Chalcedony stirs and half-wakes, but the room is dark, shadows playing along the walls.  Beyond, faint white starlight filters in, terribly distant, and then melts away to become lights too bright to be fire, glittering fiercely on black water beneath a flat stone bridge.

Nimruzimir frowned at the flask, pushing his glasses up his nose.  The liquid appeared to be clear, but he had prepared it meticulously.  How it would help them to know for certain if there was, as he suspected, quicksilver present in the reservoir, he did not know.  Would the children stop playing there?  Would their parents finally listen to him, stop shooing him away and whispering witch behind his back?  Or would nothing change at all?

The latter, probably, but at least he would know, one way or the other.  He picked up the vial containing the water he had harvested from the reservoir, in a hand that trembled slightly too much.  He paused, trying to recall, but he had taken his tonic.  He might not have had a meal today, though, come to think of it.  Well, he’d get something after finishing up here.

He took a deep breath, steadying his hand to the best of his ability as he tipped the vial of water into the flask of dissolved coal tar extract (corruinë, the Elvish texts called it, or some modification thereof).  A drop of the water still splattered on his counter, which was not ideal, but he supposed it could be cleaned up.  More pressing was the fact that he had immediately seen the liquid inside take on a pale violet.  Over the course of the next little while, it steadily darkened in hue.

So he had been right.  Quicksilver contamination.  He stripped off his gloves inside out and wondered what he ought to do next.  One hand went to his eye, slowly fingering the tender bruise around it where the father of one of the ill children had struck him.  It stung rather less than the memory of the mother scolding her husband for striking a woman.

* * *

Morning sunlight speared through the curtains; Chalcedony winced and blinked, rolling over with a groan.  The necklace glittered on her pillow, looking like nothing so much as a string of droplets of murky liquid.  Beneath the beads, the pillow-case looked stained.

Chalcedony rolled away from it, staring at it.  It could have been a dream, she told herself; as much as it had unsettled her, it hadn’t felt—ugly.  It had been queer and strange, the world seen through a darkling glass, but it had not felt—she groped for the words.  It had not felt the way Uncle Sam had described the Ring.  It had not felt like the way Uncle Pippin had described the Seeing Stone.

(It did not look foul, not precisely—eerie, perhaps, the shadows clinging to it oddly.  It did not feel fair, precisely, either, but it did not feel foul either.)

Gingerly, she brushed her fingers across the top of it.  Nothing happened, not even a static shock.  Gaining a little courage, she gathered the beads up quickly in her hand and then tucked them back into their metal case, which she put back into the wooden case.  She took a deep breath.  She needed advice, and she needed it from someone who would not react too energetically when she explained what was going on.

* * *

Uncle Sam was working in his garden when Chalcedony arrived.   Chalcedony was a fair gardener herself, and often helped out with it.  She enjoyed herself here.  It was quiet and remote, and she didn’t have to talk to anyone if she didn’t want to. She could even get away with wearing one of her ma’s old aprons while she was doing it.  She’d had a whole story ready, about how it would keep the dirt off better than anything else she had available, and Da didn’t have anything like that—but Uncle Sam hadn’t even asked, he’d just nodded at her and set her to weeding the carrots.

Now the necklace made a heavy weight in her apron pocket.  She couldn’t help feeling oddly guilty about it.  Something inside her was telling her that he would tell her that she must give it up, and the things she had already seen frightened her, but—but it was hers.  It was her necklace—her very first necklace—and as much as the visions disquieted her, she wanted to know more.  More about Nimruzimir, about who he was, where he was—or where he had been—and how the necklace had gotten from him to her.

“Uncle Sam?” Chalcedony said, and she heard her voice quavering a little, which she had no patience for.

He looked up with a wide smile, rubbing his forehead with the back of his hand.  “It’s good to see you, lad.”  

She twisted a hand in her hair, which was growing long, then in the next moment wished she hadn’t.  Her father had made a few noises about her cutting it, but recently she had managed to avoid drawing attention to it. Uncle Sam didn’t seem to notice, at least.

Shifting back and forth on her feet, she shoved one hand deep into her apron pocket and clutched at the box.  “I have something I want to talk to you about, sir?”

Sir wasn’t what she usually called him, but she felt all out of sorts, too hot for comfort, once again as if her own skin were a heavy sweater.  To her relief, he didn’t comment on it, but only nodded to the basket lying beside him.  “There’s another pair of gardening gloves in there.  It’s always better to talk while you’re doing.  Come help me weed.”

Thankfully, she nodded and joined him.  A few minutes of very vigorous weeding settled her mind a little, brought the beat of her heart to a more reasonable tempo.  “I found something,” she blurted.  “In the cellar.  A necklace that Da was going to give Ma, but he never did—it came from Gondor, he says.”

“Mmm.  From Minas Tirith?”

“He didn’t say, but I guess so.”

“It’s a beautiful city,” Uncle Sam said quietly.  “There are many things out that way that you should see some day, Boromir.  It’s hard to say why, exactly, but it makes you think different—like being in a story—and that thinking different helps.”

Chalcedony pursed her lips together.  She did want to see Gondor, very much, but it also wasn’t going to help her to talk around the thing she wanted to ask.  “I think it’s making me see things,” she blurted out, in a wobbly voice. “The necklace.”

Uncle Sam set down his trowel.  “What kinds of things?” he asked neutrally.

She took a deep breath and sat back on her knees, rubbing her sweaty palms on her apron.  “A Man—a Big Person.  It’s like I’m seeing his…memories?  When I touch it.  Sometimes.”

This time concern did flicker in his eyes; he settled back on his knees.  All his motions were calm and careful, and Chalcedony remembered how much the animals loved him.  No wonder.  “How does it make you feel?” he asked at length.

“Frightened,” Chalcedony mumbled, looking down at her front.  “But—but also curious.  And I don’t think he’s a bad person?  It seems like he’s trying to heal the land, and I, I, I was hoping that maybe I could learn something that would help some of the places in Buckland and in the Shire.  But—” She sighed sharply.  “But curiosity can be a problem, can’t it?  I mean, look at Uncle Pippin and the Seeing Stone.  But I don’t want to give this up, it’s mine, but not—not like the Ring was, not like that, I don’t think.  It doesn’t feel like it’s magically mine, it’s just—”  She was making a terrible hash of this.

Uncle Sam blew out his breath and wrinkled his nose.  “Well, this is a right pickle,” he said.  “Lad, how would you feel about giving me the necklace for a bit while I write a letter to someone who might be able to give it a good look over?”

She put her hand on the little box and squeezed.  “You’d give it back after that?  I mean, if it’s not evil?”

“I surely would.”

“All right, then.”  She put out her hand and passed the box over to him; Uncle Sam’s shoulders seemed to relax a little, and it was only then that Chalcedony realized that that must have been a test.  If she couldn’t give it up—

Sometimes people said Uncle Sam was a little bit stupid.  Next time Chalcedony heard anyone talking like that she was going to knock them down.  “Who are you going to write to?” she asked.

“Someone Mr. Frodo and I met in Minas Tirith, some years ago.”

“A Man?” Chalcedony brightened up eagerly.

Uncle Sam’s smile went a little peculiar, and a little forlorn.  “No, he’s not a Man.”

She frowned.  “I don’t understand, I thought there were only Men in Minas Tirith.”

“These days I’m told he lives in Erebor with the Dwarves.”  Sam’s eyes went very bright.  “Boromir, it’s time for you to meet your first Elf.”

Chapter End Notes

“corruinë”, “round blaze” (with thanks to calimë for the translation) is intended to evoke pyridine, a simple chemical compound comprised of a single ring deriving its name from the Greek “pyr” meaning “fire”.

*Ter*pyridine, a derivative of pyridine, has been used in some cases as an indicator for mercury (also known as quicksilver) [Shunmugam, Raja, et al. "A highly selective colorimetric aqueous sensor for mercury." Chemistry–A European Journal 14.13 (2008): 3904-3907.]

Cats “dancing themselves to death” is an observed phenomenon in areas badly poisoned with mercury waste products; mercuric compounds build up in the body and act on the central nervous system, causing convulsions, and cats are affected before humans because of their lower body mass.

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