Rebuilding by clotho123

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Rebuilding

This is a sequel to my short story, Footnote to the Akallabêth, which although half a joke when written has bred plot bunnies.  However all you need to know is that story assumed Tirion was destroyed when the Valar caused the army of Ar-Pharazôn to be swallowed by the earth.

The name Kôr is from Tolkien’s earliest writings, I have borrowed it as the name for Finarfin’s new city.

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When someone pushed the tentfold aside he thought that it must be Eärwen.  The tread was too light for Finrod, Amarië had gone to fetch supplies from Valmar, and there was no-one else likely to enter the king’s tent without asking leave first.  The king thought that was rather silly, after all he’d never been stiff necked, but the swallowing up of their fair city by the earth seemed to have made the Noldor determined to stand on ceremony, as though by this means they could keep some of their dignity.  He could not begrudge them that.

“Be with you in a minute” he said, still trying to decipher Lady Tindë’s handwriting.  She was a leader of the Restored Avari, and still fairly unpracticed at writing, he would need to send back a reply soon if he was not to seem haughty.

“Good.  Are there any refreshments?”

Finarfin turned round.  “Findis!  My apologies, we are not prepared for guests here.”

“I am family, Arafinwë, this is not an official embassy.”  Nonetheless Findis looked very much a king’s daughter, even seating herself on a folding chair, before a rough wooden table, in a tent in front of a series of muddy trenches which were intended to be a new city one day.  Finarfin was assuming that if the Valar objected to his plans they would send a message rather than try to drop a hint through the weather, but it had been raining a good deal.

“Nonetheless” Finarfin said, “you must let me offer you refreshments.”  Wine was on hand, and water to mix with it, but only bread and some cured meat for food.  Eärwen would have told her husband not to worry and made all easy with a few well chosen words.  Had it been almost any other guest Finarfin could have done so himself.  He did not know what to say to Findis, nor why she might have come.

The truth was that the children of Indis had never been a very close family, and since the great Exodus those that remained in Valmar had been all but strangers.  Lalwen’s return a few centuries into the Second Age had not changed that.  Finarfin had visited her on Tol Eressëa, and she had refused to talk about Middle-earth except as a subject of scholarly study.  She wrote to him regularly, long chatty letters that revealed very little.  He wrote back, politely, studiously avoiding all painful ground. 

Findis had been married and gone from Tirion while he was still young, and ever after had seemed a visitor in their father’s house.  Since the Noldor had been rent apart he had grown used to thinking of her as entirely Vanya.  She seemed so still, despite the dark hair inherited from Finwë.  Her plain blue dress and the plaits of her hair both followed the style the Vanyar used for working or riding, her accent was of Valmar; and though he had once thought of himself as much Vanya as Noldo that had had had to change after the Valar had commanded him to take up the rule of the Noldor in Aman.

“Have you come with a message from Mother?” he asked. 

“No, Mother is still with Estë.”  Indis had accepted an invitation to go and work on an expansion to Estë’s gardens some time since.  “I think she would come to Kôr if you asked her, at least for a time.  I think she would be pleased if you did.”

Finarfin put that aside for future consideration.  He knew his mother had never altogether forgotten she had once been Queen of the Noldor, but she had not lived in Tirion since her husband’s death.  He would be pleased to see her in Kôr, but he would need, he thought, to see her in person before he could judge whether she would truly wish to come.

“Perhaps I will, when we are ready to plan gardens,” he said.  His sister’s next words were bald. 

“I can help you too.”  Findis met her brother’s eyes as if expecting a challenge.  “I have skill in architecture.  I would like to use it to help build the new city.”

This was not something Finarfin had expected.  He took a moment to order his thoughts.  Not even the War of Wrath had fully mended the deep rift between Noldor and Vanyar.  It was not a rift born of resentment but of sheer Vanyarin incomprehension.  As far as he had ever been able to tell, Findis shared it.

  “Any hand and mind will be welcomed for the rebuilding,” he said.  “The Noldor will be glad of whatever you can bring, and so will I.  Yet speaking as brother to sister, may I ask, why now?”  Why not when the streets lay dark and empty and the Noldor walked without song, looking away from what they might see in each others’ eyes.  Where had she been then, his sister?  In Valmar, with her untempted children.

Findis answered almost without pause, she must have been expecting the question.  “I have let Fëanáro keep me from our father’s people long enough.”

“Fëanáro has been gone these many centuries.”

“Fëanáro was on every street in Tirion.  Even the flagstones spoke his name.”

“Yes, Tirion was filled with his works,” Finarfin agreed.  “Was that all that kept you away?”

“All?”  said Findis.  “He had left our house when you were born, Arafinwë.  You did not grow up beneath his eyes, did not have him mock your Vanya blood when father was not there to hear him.  You did not share a house with a brother who made it plain he thought you had no right to life. No right to have ever existed.  And the worst was the times when it was hard to wonder if he was not right.”

“He was not,” said Finarfin flatly

“You can say that now, and I can say it now, but when I was young how could I not wonder it?  Even when I was a child Tirion was saying he was the greatest of all our people.  Even as a child I could see he was first in Father’s love.  He could do no wrong in their eyes, what was there to tell me that he could be wrong in what he thought?  Later when his works blazed through the city, too many words said in his praise seemed a denial of us.  Of course there were always the followers who approved his every word, but worse still were the ones who condemned his acts and yet would excuse him by denying us, by saying, ‘If Finwë had been content with his one child…’  But that part at least you know.” 

Yes, he did.  He had lived with it also.  “Did you ever speak to Father of this?”  he said.

“Of course not.”

“No.”  He had never been able to face what their father might say, and it seemed his older sister could not do so either.

“I thought only on what it did to me”, Findis said, “I did not think until long after on what it had done to you.  Not that I ever heard you spoken ill of.  But what did I hear, in Valmar, in those days when the Trees blossomed?  That you loved your wife and your children and were often in Alqualondë.  Nothing else. 

“No scholarship, no great works of craft or song.  No work in the Council, no hand in planning, in building.  Even then I knew it was not lack of talent. 

“And you never would press a point.  Until everyone was used to discounting you, even your children had no habit of listening to you...”

Finarfin threw up a hand “Enough!” 

“I’m sorry,”  Findis said.  “That was going too far.”

He would never forget.  None of them had heeded him, not even after Alqualondë.  None.  And he still had no answer to the question: why not? 

Ironically he had understood his brother’s family better.  Fingon and Aredhel had shed blood at Alqualondë.  Turgon had been unwilling to part from them.   Fingolfin…

I know you have the right of it, but I cannot leave our people to the death Fëanáro will bring.  He is mad, and a fool, and even if there is nothing I can do, I cannot leave them.  

Yes, he had understood that.

But his own children, his half-Telerin children, who had heard the truth of what had been done, seen what the hearing had done to their mother, heard the condemnation of the Valar, and yet chosen to go on…. He still could not understand why.  The one time he had tried to talk to Finrod about it they had both ended up near speechless with pain and he had still had no answers. 

“You were not there,” he said. 

Not there in Tirion on that torchlit night, not there on the strands north of Alqualondë.  Not there before Fëanor’s words had brought doom to the Noldor, not there after when the remnants tried to remake their lives, not there, never there.

“No,”  Findis said.  “I was not there.  I was the one who fled.  Let myself be driven from Tirion by Fëanáro, and those who thought Fëanáro’s pain worth more than all our lives.  They would deny my right to be a Noldo, very well I would become a Vanya.  You and Lalwendë, you may have tried to diminish yourselves, tried not to come in his way, to be targets he would think beneath his scorn, but you were there.  And Nolofinwë, well, he was the only one of us who made a stand.  The trouble there was that he never knew when to stop.”

She was utterly tactless.  She was all too right.

“Even now, there has not been an end to it.  Even the Valar, with all that happened, with all who were lost, who is the only one they have ever been heard to mourn?  Fëanáro.  Because he might have made more works of art!  Even now among the Vanyar, oh they do not say it to my face, but I know it is said.  ‘If Finwë had been content with his one son….’”

Finarfin stood up, slamming his right hand flat to the table.  “My people do not say that.  Not anymore.”

She matched him.  “Good.”

“I have heard what is said among some of the Vanyar,”  Finarfin said, “although they do not say it to me, nor I think to Ingwë.  Well, only a tyrant would look to control the words of others.  It is unpleasant and unthinking, but best ignored.”  It was easier to say this now, there had been a time when the words would have cut far too near the quick, but he would not declare all whose speech did not please him his enemies.

“As to the Valar…” he said, “I do not believe they think as we do.  Our lives are not much to them, a thread in the tapestry, a note in the music.  But a work of great beauty, such as we may make once in thousands or tens of thousands, such a work is a truly great thing to them.  Fëanáro was more like them than he would ever have acknowledged.  That is not my way, nor will it ever be.”

“Good,” said Findis again.  And then, “Is that why Kôr will be further from Valmar.”

“In part.  I do not resent the Valar, but the Noldor have learned as much from them as they ever will.  I hope you will come to Kôr, Findis.  It would be good for the Noldor to have a share in you, at least for a time.”

“I think after so long a stay in Valmar my husband cannot grudge it if we live with the Noldor a while,” Findis said.  “And it is more than time I got to know my father’s people once again.”

“Then come and be welcome!” said Finarfin.  Moved by some common impulse, they did not exchange a polite salute, but struck hands like folk who sealed a bargain.