Havens by AdmirableMonster

  The autumn winds are not yet chill, though the scent of sea-salt on the breeze gives them a briskness unique to Sirion.  Dírhaval taps out a dreamy rhythm on the inside of his elbow, thinking of ways he might pen a verse to be performed this evening at one of the bonfires.  Harvest festivals bring groups of people from far and wide, and he dreams of his poems traveling back with the folk of strange lands, spreading his words and his name across the world.

“Poet!” someone calls, and he blinks the cobwebs from his eyes.  A woman in soft dyed green robes is calling out to him from her stall, where she is surrounded by stacks of beautifully-woven baskets.

Waving a wistful farewell to the wind, Dírhaval obeys her summons.  “My lady?” He is no bard, and his bow is a little awkward, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

“I want to purchase a poem for my sweetheart,” she says.

This is the first time anyone has asked Dírhaval this, but he is not unwilling.  “I am sure I can pen a lovely one,” he replies.  “Are you offering me a basket in trade?”  In truth, they are very lovely, and he could use a new one for fetching and carrying around the house.

“Aye.”  The woman puts her hand on a fetching basket of light browns and greens, woven  in a swirling, diagonal pattern that makes Dírhaval think of a cable-knit sweater.  “The willow is from Nan-tathren.  Elves plucked it, they say.”

“Elves?” There are Elves in Sirion, but outside of a few other places in Beleriand, Dírhaval has never heard tell that they trade much with Men.

“The survivors of Gondolin.”  The woman nods.  “So they say.”

Leaving Nan-tathren is not an escape, except perhaps from memories.  Pengolodh is young and fit, and he takes no horse, when there are others who need it more.  His boots are old and worn, but they were made in Gondolin, and he would rather have the blisters than part with them, though he starts regretting this when he steps in a puddle not three hours into the first day’s journey.  He distracts himself by thinking about how he will describe what must be the final journey of the Gondolindrim.

The land has become less harsh as they have moved slowly southwards, like birds seeking a winter home.  Only they do not know what home they seek, and their flight is not towards but away.  Pengolodh sighs, contemplating his wet boot, and tries not to think of what he has left behind in the Echoriad.  (It was not his whole life, he tells himself fiercely.  He has his words, doesn’t he?)

The road winds wearily along before him, and he wonders if their flight will ever end.

The cranes are flying south, great grey wings passing overhead in a dream-like rush.  Pengolodh shields his eyes and looks up at them.  At first there are only a few, passing overhead one at a time, but soon the entire sky is filled with feathers.  A few drop, catching the wind and fluttering down like leaves, and Pengolodh catches one.  It is half the length of his palm, made of soft zipper-like spines along a light, central backbone.  He thinks, before he catches himself, that Maeglin ought to have studied birds more often, for the cleverness of their feathers sealing up against the damp and the rain.

The cranes move swifter than the weary refugees.  Within only a few hours, the sky is empty.  Pengolodh feels the loss with a queer acuteness.  He concentrates on putting one foot in front of the other and tries not to imagine what it would be like to fly, untethered, in the blue sky above the weight of the earth.

The cranes come to Sirion every year, a good omen.  Dírhaval often sleeps lightly, and it’s a good day when he wakens to the soft susurration of thousands of wings.  This year is no different; he’s out of his cozy bedroom in an instant and looking up.  The first cranes are often the biggest, those whose youth and strength and eagerness outstrip the more sedate pace of the others.  It will take hours for them all to pass on to the harbor, where they will begin their dances.

Someday, Dírhaval wants to write a poem that will capture the graceful dances of cranes choosing their mates.  Every year, he thinks he has it; every year, it slips through his fingers, but he always goes back, hoping.  He has a good feeling about this year, and he watches the cranes fly by as he breakfasts on hot porridge in front of a little fire in the main room.  His mother and sister wake a little later and join him.

“I wish the cranes came every day,” Egilona says.  “Then I’d never have to make breakfast again.”

Dírhaval huffs at this insult.  He does his fair share of the chores.

“Look,” Mother says, moving to the window.  “That one is hurt.”  She pulls her shawl closer about her thin shoulders.  “I don’t like such an omen.  What do you think it means?”

Following her, Dírhaval peers out.  The injured crane has landed right in their yard, limping slightly and dripping feathers.  “I think it means I will discover what cranes like to eat,” he says.  “Don’t worry, Mother, I’ll see that it’s all right.  If it made it this far, it will survive, even if it needs a helping hand.”

The refugees keep to themselves, trying to avoid interactions with other travelers, Men or Dwarves.  They have seen no other Firstborn in a long time (and ought they even to trust those?  Maeglin and Salgant betrayed their own.) Pengolodh leans, as he has done for months, into his role—the sole surviving loremaster of Gondolin.  Never having intended to acquire such a portentous epessë, he feels he does not live up to his duties, but he tries. He is summoned, at times, by Idril, primarily to witness her councils with the remaining lord of Gondolin, and he takes careful and copious notes.

One day, during a particularly long march, Pengolodh spots a shrine to Ulmo on the side of the ancient road.  Everyone is moving slowly, and silver moonlight glitters on the still waters.  He has nothing to offer, and from hearing Tuor’s story during their long and lonely journey, he knows that the people of Gondolin have failed their god in any case, but Pengolodh is a child of Nevrast, and he misses the shrines and surety of his youth.

He kneels before the wide bowl of collected rainwater.  Beyond it is an ancient statue, made perhaps by a Mannish artisan, all covered in soft green moss and unrecognizable.  Pengolodh dips his head to pray and then realizes he has no idea what to pray for.  So for a long time, he stays like that, knees growing cold and cramped, and eventually, he dips a hand into the font of water and drinks from it, cool and clean and not salted at all.

Let us find peace, he thinks eventually, and he rises, walks away, and does not look back.

Days after the cranes, the Exiles of Gondolin enter the Havens of Sirion.  Dírhaval is out in his tiny fishing boat—poetry feeds the soul, but one needs to feed the body as well—and the Sun is nearly down, when the light at the top of the queen’s keep shines forth.  She is young, their queen—three years younger than Dírhaval and with Elvish blood besides—and maybe not wise, but she is also loved.  For safety’s sake, the folk of Sirion do not generally advertise Elwing’s jewel: it is only brought to the topmost tower when the mariners are returning from afar, but as far as Dírhaval knows, all the mariners have already returned from this year’s voyages.  It is growing perilously close to winter, after all.

The bells do not sound, as they might if there were danger, though.  After puzzling a little, Dírhaval turns the Lunteth for shore.  She has a full belly and is lying low in the water, and it takes him a good half hour to ground her and bring in the day’s catch, during which time the light has kept up its steady gleam.  He would ask Egilona or their mother, but they must have gone out to find out and haven’t returned yet.  Finally, wild with curiosity, Dírhaval makes for the town center.

Their little cottage lies near the outskirts of Sirion, so to reach the center, the easiest route is to follow the main road that winds down from the north.  As he vaults the low stone wall that runs along both sides of the road, he stops.  There is a procession still slowly winding its way into the town, though it is clearly the tail end—perhaps the light was revealed to lead any stragglers toward the keep—and at the very end even of that, just across from where Dírhaval has cavalierly joined the road, one of the weary travelers is sitting, staring glumly at his feet.

He looks up and flinches at Dírhaval’s sudden arrival—a smallish sort of person, in ragged robes like the ones that the archivists wear at the lorehouse that Dírhaval frequents during winter afternoons when he wants to make a little coin scribing old texts.  His hair is a queer black shot with silver, but his face is unlined; he looks, if anything, younger than Dírhaval.  

As he scrabbles for a pair of abandoned old leather boots, Dírhaval holds up his hands, flat, palm up.  “Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you,” he says gently.

The young man stares as if he doesn’t understand.  Then he touches his ear—pointed, Dírhaval realizes with that gesture—and his throat and makes a series of increasingly frantic hand motions.  

Dírhaval didn’t know Elves could be deaf—he’d thought they were all perfect, immortal beings, but there is nothing perfect or immortal-seeming about this evidently frightened and weary traveler.  And without a shared language, it’s a little difficult to reassure him.  Maybe Dírhaval should just leave him, but it’s full dark by now, the rest of the group has gone on, and Sirion may be a safe haven, but nowhere in Beleriand is wholly without danger.  

After another moment’s thought, he bends down and takes off his own boots—even from here, in the fading light, he can see that the Elf’s boots are worn right through, which is probably why he stopped—the road grows rocky as it enters Sirion, and for someone who has already been walking for a long time, it must be painful.  Dírhaval goes barefoot often enough not to mind too much, though he wouldn’t ordinarily do so this late in the year, but he’s been sitting in a boat all day.  He’ll be fine.  Mutely, he holds out the boots.

A frown.  The Elf reaches puts out a hesitant hand, and Dírhaval puts the boots into it.  Then he points toward the light of the keep.  Slowly, the Elf pulls on the boots and totters to his feet.  Though still wary, he allows Dírhaval to offer him an arm and leans against him.  Even in Dírhaval’s boots, he’s limping.  He taps Dírhaval’s shoulder, getting him to look, and mouths, clearly, in Sindarin, Thank you.

Sindarin, of course.  No wonder he was so confused; Dírhaval tried to speak to him in Taliska, which is mostly a Mannish language.  Most Elves in Sirion can speak both, but who knows from how far afield this one has journeyed?  Dírhaval’s Sindarin is quite good—he needs it for his work in the lorehouse, and he tries speaking again.

“I’m Dírhaval.  Can you understand me if I’m speaking Sindarin?”

The Elf squints at his face, then brightens a little and nods.

“I won’t do you any harm.  I’m only a poet, fisherman, and scribe of odd jobs,” Dírhaval explains, relieved to have partially surmounted the language barrier.

Nod.  The Elf puts a hand on his own chest and mouths a word that Dírhaval is fairly sure is “loremaster.”  Then he mouths it again and makes an accompanying hand gesture.

“You’re a loremaster?”  He tries the hand gesture as well, and the Elf gives him a faint smile, then another nod.  “I know many loremasters.  I scribe in the lorehouse sometimes, and I scribble verse about the lore I find there.”

The Elf, thankfully, relaxes a little more at that, but after another few steps, he gives a little cry and falls against Dírhaval.  A rapid inspection reveals that Dírhaval’s too-large boot has probably slipped, and now the poor loremaster has twisted his ankle.  Dírhaval sighs, inspecting it.  The loremaster winces and tries to take another step, but Dírhaval stops him.

“Don’t, you’ll hurt yourself more,” he says.  Taking the slim foot out of the boot to inspect the ankle, he realizes that the ankle is not the only injury—the bottom is cut up, bruised and bleeding.  He’s walked far too long on it already, but Dírhaval doesn’t think he can carry him the whole way to the keep.  “You need rest,” he says.  “Listen, come home with me and tomorrow I’ll get Dínaras to lend us his donkey to take you down to the keep.  You’ll really hurt yourself if you keep trying to walk on these injuries.”

The loremaster juts out his chin as if he’s going to be stubborn, then winces and looks down at his foot, sags, and nods slightly.  Thank you, he mouths again, with a simple hand gesture that Dírhaval hopes he’ll be able to remember.  He’s good with languages, but he’s never really tried to learn the gestures the Elves use.

It occurs to Dírhaval as he boosts the loremaster carefully across the wall that he’s already acting as if they’re going to be friends.

Pengolodh squeezes his eyes shut and tries to translate Rúmil’s Ainulindalë from written word into gestures.  He can’t stop a pained cry vibrating through his throat, and the poet—Dírhaval, the Man who gave Pengolodh his bed the night before and offered him food the morning after—lays a large hand gently on his uninjured shin.  He blinks eyes open, and it lets the tears slide down the inside of his nose.  His feet have been hurting for days, and it seems terribly unfair that it is the beginning of healing that is causing him the most pain.

Dírhaval looks up at him, pausing patiently.  Pengolodh shakes his head and gestures to him to go on.

“I can wait,” Dírhaval says, brushing his dark hair out of eyes as blue as Tuor’s.  “Elves are made of hardy stock.  It looks as if you trod in broken glass at some point but your feet healed around it.”

Pengolodh can believe it, though he has no memory of it.  The supposedly flawless memory of his people has escaped him, or there is something about the fall of Gondolin in specific that has broken it in him.  It infuriates him, sometimes—he is a witness, the last remnant of the great lorehouse of Gondolin in Beleriand—and he cannot trust his own recollections.

“I need to remove the glass and clean the injuries.  You could take ill.”

Elves don’t take ill, Pengolodh wants to say, but he’s not sure it’s true.  He has seen so many of the Firstborn die over the past months—years, maybe, he isn’t sure.  He is no healer; he doesn’t know what has killed them—injuries, poisons, simple shattered grief.  He thought, once, he would lie down himself and not rise again, but something stubborn inside him won’t give up like that.

“Just do it,” he says, his hands automatically echoing the words his lips are shaping.  Dírhaval squints at him, eyes going back and forth between his lips and his hands.  Pengolodh wants to be back among his own people, where he will be understood—Idril must be worried by now.  He is their history, after all.  He clutches at his own elbow, his nails digging in.

“No one is going to hurt you anymore,” Dírhaval says, and Pengolodh wonders if he misunderstood.  “But this is going to be painful, and I don’t want to make it worse.  Doing it slowly will make the pain less.”

“I do not care,” Pengolodh enunciates as clearly as he can.

Dírhaval snorts.  “Elvish heroes are rather foolish,” he says lightly, and Pengolodh’s ears twitch back in surprise.

“I am no hero,” he says stiffly.

“Do you not hail from Gondolin?” asks the Man, and Pengolodh wets his lips in a nervous gesture.  At his minute motion, Dírhaval looks a little embarrassed.  “So all the neighbors are saying—that it is the great heroes of Gondolin who arrived last night and caused the beacon to be lit.  I have told no one you are here, for I think they might want to gawk, and you’re tired and hurt.  I’ll take you to the keep later.  I—” here he pauses.  “I can take you now, if you prefer.  It was a little foolish of me to think of trying to heal you myself, I suppose.  You must have much better healers with your own people.”

Leave now?  Leave immediately this quiet little cottage where he woke in airy white sunshine, where two kind women offered him thick porridge sweetened with cream and honey—better fare than he has tasted since Gondolin, in truth—where no one needs him to witness their sorrow, write their grief, bear on his back the entire history of his people?  Pengolodh’s hands clench into shaking fists, and he shakes his head, ears flattening right to his head.

“Hush,” Dírhaval says, rubbing a hand across his knee.  “If you want to stay, you shall stay.  But then you will have to put up with my clumsiness.  I’ve healed many a horse of—” here a word that, interestingly, Pengolodh did not know, “—but little healing have I done of Men, and none of Elves.”

Pengolodh nods slowly, letting his fists unclench.  “Go slowly if you want,” he says, hesitating to voice a more complicated thought when he cannot be sure how well the Man lip-reads.  He gets a sparkle-eyed smile in response to that.

“Thank you,” Dírhaval says, and he turns his attention back to Pengolodh’s feet.

The lorehouse is a comfortable place for Dírhaval to be.  Ever since he was young, he has been coming here, searching for stories, searching for histories.  He knows the way the light filters in through the thin rectangular windows high above the shelves, and he knows the peculiarities of its organization—a consequence of fifty years of different archivists, all with their own ideas on the best way to find tomes.  What he doesn’t know is where to look for any writing on Elven gestural systems.

The Elf—his Elf, some part of Dírhaval is already insisting proprietarily—has finally been taken to the keep.  Dírhaval himself brought him over.  Dínaras kindly lent not only his donkey, but also his cart for the Elf to rest in.  He was clearly being missed—within a few minutes after their arrival, several of the refugees, and the queen herself came out to greet him.  Just as clearly, the Elf was a little overwhelmed by the attention, and before he was swept away, he asked Dírhaval to come back for him later.

So Dírhaval is waiting for him—the lorehouse is close to the keep, and it’s a convenient place to explore ways to better communicate with a new friend.  Two of the other loremasters—all of them Mannish, for somehow there have been no other Elven loremasters in Sirion before this one—are helping Dírhaval search for the information.

He’ll find it, he knows.  Elves are long-lived, and Dírhaval is quick to learn.  He’s already thinking of the few gestures he’s learned in the past day and thinking about ways one could write a poem with one’s hands.  What would the equivalent of a rhyme be?  Rhythm, now, that translates easily, but rhyme will need to be translated.  Perhaps his Elf will have some thoughts?

They can write to each other, he thinks, that will make the learning easier.

“Dírhaval!” one of his friends shouts.  “I’ve found a book on it!”

A map, Dírhaval thinks joyfully, a map to carry him closer to t(his) new, shy loremaster.

The Moon is setting into the ocean, making a pretty picture, especially framed by the window of Dírhaval’s little cottage.  The soft crackling of the little fire behind Pengolodh completes it.  He has been spending a great deal of time here.  He has never really known any of the Secondborn before—there were none in Gondolin, of course, and he has no recollection of knowing any when he was a child in Nevrast.  Besides, his memories of Nevrast are distant and dream-like; he hardly feels as if his life began before Gondolin, and now Gondolin itself is nothing but memory.

These Secondborn—Dírhaval, Egilona, and their mother Hildoara—are cheerful and playful.  Stockier and hairier than Elves, they are nevertheless beautiful in their own way, overflowing with joyful strength.  At times, they break out into song—and Pengolodh had half-forgotten that that is a way one can live.

Dírhaval taps on his shoulder and when he looks over, holds out the tail end of some multicolored yarn he has been spinning, with a questioning air.  They have already repeated this performance several times—all three Mannish occupants of the cottage seem to do a great deal of spinning this rough, warm yarn, and they often need a spare pair of hands to help them with it.  It’s an easy task, and it forces Pengolodh to silence in a way that actually calms his nerves and focuses his mind.

He puts out his hands and lets Dírhaval wind the yarn around it, then turns his face back to Moonset.  This is one thing he lost when he traveled to Gondolin—the sea.  Pengolodh grew up on these shores—though much farther North, of course—and despite Tuor’s tales of Ulmo, he has not felt the god’s presence in many long years.

He feels it now—the weight of a kind, yet wild and distant, regard.  He remembers, this time with perfect clarity, the way the thin ice used to crackle beneath his feet as raced along the shore ahead of Salgant, perfectly free and perfectly secure in the knowledge that his nurse would never allow harm to come to him.

When he turns his face away from the window, his face is wet with salt water, and with his hands tangled in the warm yarn, he cannot hide the tears.  He sees it the moment Dírhaval realizes, the way the Man’s face changes.  But he does not speak, with words or gestures.  He reaches into the yarn and tangles their fingers together, soft and warm.

Pengolodh cries as he has not cried since he was a child, and if it is someone else who holds him close and comforts him—well, still there is someone there again.