The Strands that Bind by AdmirableMonster

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Jellied Potatoes

“Ma, can I borrow your dress?”

“What do you need my dress for?”  Chalcedony’s mother popped her head into the bedroom.  Chalcedony hoped and prayed she wasn’t going red in the cheeks, because she had a perfectly good reason for the request, and it had nothing to do with her desire to wear a dress, any dress at all.  Her hair tickled the back of her neck, making her feel self-conscious and elated at the same time.

“It’s for a—an experiment,” she explained.

“One of those dreams of yours?” Over the past week, Celebrimbor and Annamir had accompanied her back home to Brandy Hall, and Da and Uncle Pippin had been only too excited to host an Elf, even if he was the most piratical and least graceful Elf anyone could have imagined.  He wasn’t much trouble. He spent most of his time smoking outside or sleeping outside, or occasionally asking if he could take a look into the library.  That part was a bit more troublesome, as the library was Chalcedony’s refuge when the cellar wasn’t, but she had enough to be thinking about and getting on with, in any case.

Annamir was more trouble than his master, or at least Chalcedony thought so.  He had a habit of popping up when she wanted to be alone and was surprisingly good at ferreting out her hiding places, to her displeasure.  And she just couldn’t read him.  There was something about him that didn’t seem like a normal cat, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it, and no one else seemed really to notice.

“Yes,” she managed in response to her mother.  Back at home, Celebrimbor had started making gentle inquiries about the ‘foresight trance’ that he had mentioned.  Da had muttered something about wishing that he had Frodo here—which didn’t mean the Frodo who was nearly Chalcedony’s age, who gave her the oddest feeling if she thought too much about him—it meant Frodo Baggins, who had sailed away over the sea before Chalcedony was born.

Frodo Baggins, the hero of the War of the Ring, whose absence still seemed to be felt by everyone, most especially, somehow, Uncle Sam.  He worried Chalcedony, sometimes, or perhaps it was more accurate to say that she worried at him, like she might have worried at a loose tooth.  It was hard to keep from thinking of him, hard to keep from seeing his touch smeared across so many places in the Shire, his ghost hovering at Uncle Sam’s and Aunt Rosie’s shoulders.

Elanor had met him, when she was very young, but her memories weren’t much use in painting a proper picture of him, and somehow the adults just whispered about him as if he were dead.

Anyway, he wasn’t here, and Da had gone hunting in the library by himself.  He hadn’t found much, but he had found a little.  There were some records, mostly in the Took family, of women and girls who had seen snippets of the future.  “Only women, though,” Da had said, rubbing his forehead.  “A few stories call it fairy-sight, which I suppose everyone thought was a reference to the Took Fairy Wife.”

“A corruption of foresight isn’t impossible,” Celebrimbor said, leaning over his shoulder and looming, his silver eye gleaming like a lamp in the dimmer light of the library.  “Or perhaps it’s coincidence.”

“Funny that it’s all girls, though,” Da said, sounding puzzled.  Chalcedony had slipped away at that point.  Nimruzimir wasn’t a woman, she was certain, but he also wasn’t a hobbit, or hadn’t been.  But she—she wasn’t a woman either, she told herself, no matter how much that thought made her stomach ache.  She was Boromir, and it might feel like a knife to her breastbone to think such a thing, but what else was she to think?

There was no way out of being the person you were.  (Was there?  She brushed aside thoughts of caterpillars becoming butterflies.)  And even if Da was puzzled, he and Ma certainly seemed to believe in Chalcedony’s dreams.  Maybe they were something different from fairy-sight, but they were real.  They were definitely real.  Nimruzimir was real; he had to be.

“It’s a good, thick cloth, and it’ll keep anything from splashing my skin,” she told Ma, shaking herself out of the reverie.  “And it fits me, and I can move in it easily.  I can’t put an extra pair of trousers over my trousers.”

Ma sighed.  “If you ruin this faithful old dress, I will tan your hide, child,” she said, which just made Chalcedony smile.  Neither of her parents had ever struck her, or any of the other cousins, and she was perfectly confident they never would.

“I promise I will protect it,” she said solemnly, telling herself again quite sternly that she was only taking it because her dreams of Nimruzimir told her that you ought to have an extra layer of covering as a precaution in a laboratory, just in case.  But the thought of being able to wear a dress whenever she wanted thrummed through her system with a wild feeling she refused to try to put a name to.

“Good.”  Her mother patted her shoulder.  “Oh, go on then.”

Chalcedony couldn’t keep herself from hugging the dress tight to her chest.

* * *

With the necklace looped around her neck or wrist at all times, the memories rise up at odd ones, without any seeming pattern to their arrival.  She dreams of a woman in white, mouth shaping incomprehensible syllables.  Rain falls from her eyes towards the earth, and Chalcedony stirs in her sleep.

The weather could hardly have been worse, Nimruzimir thought, blowing on his reddened hands to warm them as he paced back and forth at the end of the dock.  And who knew what poisons lurked in the rain lashing across the land, this near to the coast?

All of which was a distraction, of course, from the main point, which was that he would have to speak with someone.  Nimruzimir did not like speaking with people, particularly with people he did not know.  Lilóteo could have done it, he supposed, but something stubborn inside him rebelled at the thought.  Although perhaps he ought to have told Lilóteo where he was going, he thought, a little guiltily, particularly when the weather was so execrable.  But Lilóteo was a grown man, he would be fine.  He was not Nimruzimir, to jump at shadows.

(Those shadows laugh; a gleam of red eyes focus on him, unblinking. Damn his foresight.)

It was not that late in the afternoon, but the heavy clouds piled high upon one another made the shore nearly as dark as evening.  Fortunately, perhaps because of the foul weather, he did not have to wait long before a little fishing craft pulled up at the dock.  The fisher seated in the front and calmly wielding her oar was clearly not the descendant of one of the colonists, with that straight black hair and round face.  Probably for the best.  Nimruzimir steeled himself and moved forward.

She maneuvered the craft neatly into the dock, securing it before she started to climb out.  Nimruzimir hovered, uncertain whether he ought to offer aid.  He had never found it facile to interact with people.  Somehow, frustratingly, no matter how simple the world full of metals and poisons and flasks became, the world of people remained a terrible mystery.

Faintly, as she turned back to her boat, presumably to unload her catch, he said, “Exc-c-cuse m-me?”

She turned to him, eyes flickering along him up and down, and he held himself rigid, trying not to flinch.  “Who are you?” she asked bluntly; she did not speak Adunaic but Dunlendish.  Nimruzimir had a sudden queer sense that his vision had inverted itself; he could see his mother’s round face above him as she whispered a story to him in her native tongue, an old fairy tale about a princess who turned herself into a prince and rescued a girl confined in a tower.  He had not spoken Dunlendish in years, other than a furtive word or two when necessary to help a stranger.

He managed to stammer out something that he hoped sounded like an apology and then stalled.  How could he explain the rather complex nature of his errand when he could hardly recall how to structure a complete sentence?

The woman looked at him impassively.  He licked his lips, wondering if he had ever known the Dunlendish word for the thing he needed.  Finally, he managed to scrape together what he thought was, “Plant? I give money for plant?”

“Plant?”  She shook her head and said something, pointing at the boat.  It took him a minute to force rusty brain muscles to realize that she had said fish.

“No,” he said, shaking his head.  “No fish.  Plant.”

She laughed and said something that was probably uncomplimentary.  

“It’s important,” he said urgently, falling back into the island’s language with some despair.  “I m-must have s-seaweed.  I n-need it for the g-growth m-medium.”

She raised her hands in an expressive shrug and then waved them as if to shoo him away.  His heart sank into his boots.  It was not so immediately urgent, perhaps, but a delay might nonetheless be detrimental.  For all he knew, the fish piled high in the bed of her boat might already carry quicksilver poison within their veins.

A hand fell onto his shoulder, and he nearly jumped out of his skin.  “What are you trying to ask her for?” Lilóteo demanded, and he sounded quite cross, for no reason that Nimruzimir could discern.  

“I—I—I have heard it given several names.  Red algae is the one I know the best, but I have no idea how to—”

Lilóteo turned to the woman and said something in a few broken phrases that nevertheless were more put together than Nimruzimir’s halting attempts.  She looked at him quizzically, but nodded slowly, putting out her hand.

“She wants payment,” Lilóteo said.  “I didn’t bring my coin purse.”

An odd oversight for him, Nimruzimir supposed.  He himself did not have much coin, but he had at least thought to prepare for this interaction, and he had hoped he might be able to form a more permanent contract.  He pulled out the ring he had stowed in his pocket for this purpose.  “It is real gold, though the stone is only glass,” he said, holding it out.  “Can you tell her that I will give her more if she is willing to continue supplying me?”

Lilóteo made a face that he could not read, tugging on his beard.  After a moment, he said another few words.  The woman took the ring, holding it up to the light and turning it over.  Nimruzimir’s stomach clenched queerly at the way the light played on the funny zigzag housing for the bead.

After a moment, the woman nodded and said a few words, gesturing at the boat, then at Nimruzimir.  Lilóteo crossed his arms, but nodded and said something back.  Nimruzimir caught the words for ‘now’ and ‘home’, or perhaps it was ‘house’.

The woman threw her arms into the air, then gestured expansively to the mess of fish in the boat, talking too rapidly and with too much of a slur to her words for Nimruzimir to catch anything.  His face burned.  Here was Lilóteo translating his own mother tongue for him. Abruptly, he wanted terribly to hide, but he had no choice right now.

“Come on,” Lilóteo said, a little gruffly.  “She said we can have some of it now, if we want to pick it out ourselves.  The rest she’ll deliver to us.”

Nimruzimir followed his lead, and they made their way down to the small fishing boat.  The fish were indeed covered in the gluey, red strands that Nimruzimir recognized as the algae he needed to complete his recipe for the growth medium.  Of course, he did not have much that would be useful for conveying it other than the pockets of his greatcoat, but they would do for the time being.

There was another point, however, that he still felt was needing resolution, and that was the way that Lilóteo seemed uncharacteristically gruff, even for him.  Nimruzimir, who generally did not have a particularly stellar record of noticing the emotions of others, was quite proud of himself for having observed this.  Of course, just observing it did not leave him with the knowledge of what to do with that observation.

Surely he ought at least to indicate that he had noticed?  “Is s-s-something the matter?” he hazarded, as he got down to sit at the edge of the dock so that he could reach out to collect the algae from the cargo of fish.

Lilóteo turned to him, eyebrows drawing down and together, the corners of his mouth twisting in a rather ugly manner.  “Really, man?” he snarled, and Nimruzimir took half a step back at the unexpected force of it.  “You fucking vanished without a word!  I thought—” He cut himself off.  “I ran out without my fucking hat, my fucking handkerchief, or my fucking coin purse, because I thought you might be lost or dying or gods forfend taken by one of the wraiths, and here you are trying to bargain for equipment when you don’t even speak the language!”

“I d-d-do speak the language,” was all that Nimruzimir could find to say.  “I j-j-just—I m-m-mean m-m-my m-m-mother w-w-was—”  It was suddenly difficult to breathe; he felt frozen in a way that he could not account for.  “I’m…I’m…s-s-sorry?  I d-did not th-think y-you would…be angry?”  He found he had to speak through gritted teeth.  His forehead was sweating, a cold sweat, and his throat was so tight that swallowing had become painful.

Lilóteo shut his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.  He appeared to be taking a deep breath.  Nimruzimir cringed, not quite trembling.  “You—you d-did not have to c-come to f-find me?” he quavered.  “I d-did not m-mean to be a b-b-bother.”

“Gods,” sighed Lilóteo, and he no longer sounded so terrifyingly, all-encompassingly loud.  “Nimruzimir, I was worried.  Forget worried, I was scared out of my mind.”

“Scared?” Nimruzimir echoed in confusion, some of the fizzing adrenaline in his veins starting to ebb.  “What is there to be afraid of?  I g-grew up h-here.”

“Which would definitely protect you if the wraiths found you, or the members of the Faithful who think you a blasphemer, or…” He trailed off, sagging, his hands still working—perhaps automatically—to gather up algae.  “I probably overreacted, but, fuck, man, you could have taken the time to tell me where you were going.”

“I—s-suppose I c-could.  I did not think it would—I did not realize you would—I am sorry.”

Lilóteo rotated his bad shoulder, as he often did when he was under stress, and deflated a little more.  “I’m sorry for yelling.”

“Well.  I s-suppose neither of us b-behaved in the manner the other would have p-preferred, so that makes us—even, perhaps?”  Hesitantly, he reached and brushed his fingers across the top of Lilóteo’s hand.  Lilóteo nodded jerkily, and turned his hand over, taking Nimruzimir’s.

Their reflection shimmered in the water by the boat, red strings of algae falling from Nimruzimir’s coat pocket.  One had caught on his hand and, though he had not noticed it when he reached out, now stretched across their clasped hands like a string or rope binding them together.

Certainly worth the cost of the ring.

* * *

Chalcedony found that as she saw more of Nimruzimir’s memories, her curiosity grew, putting out shoots and roots beyond what she had expected.  She still wanted to know the things he knew (he had known?  so far she had no idea when he had lived, or whether he lived still, or whether, somehow, impossibly, the necklace was sending her visions of things that had not yet happened), but she also wanted to know more about him.  The things that he had learned about being himself, not just the things he had learned about making the universe work for him.

Of course, she very much wanted to learn the things he had learned about making the universe work for him.  In this particular case, she already had a very good idea of how she might perform a similar experiment as the one that filled her dreams at night, and it might even lead to the rebirth of Uncle Sam’s pond, if it worked.  (She didn’t dare to dream that if it worked on that pond, it might work on others, as well.)  But she was stuck on the matter of the seaweed.

The Shire was, rather unfortunately, nowhere near the seaside.  Chalcedony had never seen it, though she had seen shells sent back.  One big pink-and-white conch shell sat in the kitchen window of Brandy Hall, where the sunlight struck it just so.  Da said that Frodo had sent it to them from the Grey Havens.

The shell was lovely, and there were some other smooth pebbles and round crystals as well that had come from the sea.  But seaweed?  Who would think to send seaweed?

If she were older, perhaps she could simply have traveled to the Grey Havens herself.  But she was too young, and in any case, that would take such a long time.  She stalked back and forth across the kitchen.  There were reams of potatoes piled high in the pantry, and the sugar-tin was full, and clearly mocking her.  If only she had something that she could use to make a proper jelly out of the potatoes and sugar, but Nimruzimir had used seaweed, and now she was back here again.

“Boromir, love, why are you pacing back and forth through my kitchen?” her mother asked, popping her head through the door. 

Chalcedony felt herself going red in the face.  “I wanted to make…potato jelly,” she said, shuffling her feet.  “To feed mushrooms.  I know that sounds ridiculous, but…”

“I’ve never heard of mushrooms growing on potatoes,” Ma said thoughtfully.  “But I suppose they could do.  What’s the trouble, then, lad?”

“It has to—to jellify, but the only way I know how to do that is with seaweed, and there isn’t any.”

“Seaweed!  What sort of cookbook have you been looking in?”

“No, it’s something that I…” she trailed off.  She hadn’t spoken to her mother of this, really, though she knew Uncle Sam had sent a note round to her Da.  “I just sort of found it out.”

“Well, you don’t need seaweed to make jelly.”  Ma patted her arm.  “I don’t care what sort of queer mushroom food you’re trying to make, you can just make it as a sort of aspic, if you need it to set like that.”

Somehow, this had not occurred to Chalcedony—the idea that it might not have to be exact, that if she could just get it to set at all, it would probably behave well enough.  She was a decent enough cook, herself—they had a few folk round to help out in the kitchen sometimes, but you couldn’t be a hobbit and not know your way around a kitchen by the time you were half-grown—but she had been stuck thinking of this particular thing as Nimruzimir’s alchemy.

It wasn’t magic, though; she ought to have known better than to think of it that way.  Nimruzimir himself might have scolded her for that, if he had been here.  No—she mustn’t be silly.  Nimruzimir didn’t know of her, not at all, wherever he was or had been, and he never would.

The thought gave her a surprisingly sharp little pang, but she set it aside in a box next to the one containing her feelings about her name and who she was.  The important thing was that Ma was quite right.

“Do you think you could help me with the mushroom food, then?  I need to do some experimenting.”

“That sounds fascinating.  I would be delighted.”  Ma grinned, her nose wrinkling up with pleasure.   “Although usually I’m feeding us the mushrooms, not the other way round.”

Chalcedony wondered if she had spent too long hiding in the cellar, instead of with her own mother.  A little treacherous voice whispered to her that perhaps Ma wouldn’t be so upset, if she found that she had a daughter, instead of a son.

No, she told herself sternly, she was named for a famous hero.  The other thing was—was just a passing fancy.  She would work this out.  She would be the son her parents could be proud of.

(Would Nimruzimir have scolded her for that thought, too?)

Chapter End Notes

Modern growth media are based on agar, which is derived from red algae. Potato dextrose agar can be used to grow fungi. Agar is a better jellification agent than the western equivalent because it’s stable up to higher temperatures, but people were still doing growth cultivation in places that didn’t have access to it until it became more globally known. Chalcedony doesn’t need to be perfect to get her experiment working.

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