Fountain, Flower, Sword by Kenaz

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Chapter 1 - Ecthelion

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"I, too, loved Ecthelion, you see. But he broke with me. He had found another that he held more dear. A runtish lad of unexceptional birth who I, myself, taught to hold a sword." He laughed bitterly. "You can imagine how galling it was for the Lord of the House of the Flower to be defeated by a mere and untitled stripling he himself had trained up!

-From Marchwarden: Hidden Hero

 

 

“I must rest.”

 “Not yet. Here, let me help you.” Her body is dead weight in his hands.

 “Please, let me rest.”

 “Soon.” He tries again to steady her on her feet. “Now you must walk.”

 He calls out to his father, only a few strides ahead of him but barely visible in the brume. The wind rises and swallows his words. A shout behind him demands that he either go on or move out of the way. He steps aside; she will not walk and he cannot leave her.

 “They’ve lit a fire!” Her voice, breathless and childlike, is not her own. Its timbre chills him as deeply as the cold.

 “There is no fire here, Mother. The snow is playing tricks on your eyes.”

 But she does not --  cannot--heed him. “I will just stay for a moment.” Her eyes, glassy and over-bright, fix on something only she can see. “It is warm here.”

 “There is no fire, Mother. Please, you must walk. Get up.” His patience, like his strength, is waning. How far ahead has Turgon gone, he wonders, and his father? Where is Glorfindel? Glorfindel was always right behind him. Someone pushes past him and does not stop.

 She goes limp in his arms—like a stubborn child, he thinks—refusing to stand. His anger overwhelms him and he releases her, his arms now trembling from their burden. She collapses in a pile on the snow.

 “I think I shall stay.” A fey light plays across her face and is gone. Snowflakes settle on her lashes and in the corners of her eyes. She does not blink them away.

 “Leave her.” It is his father. His father, grey-faced with strain and grief. “She is already lost to us.”

 He howls: “No!”

 The wind bites at his lips, whips away his words.

 His father kneels, pulls the glove from her hand. Her fingers—those fine, slim things that had danced so gaily over flute and harp— are black to the knuckle. He cannot bear to look, and so turns away, watches the endless stream of hunched forms lurching forward from darkness, into darkness. When he looks back, the gold band has disappeared from his mother’s ruined finger, secreted away somewhere in his father’s coat. He has wound her cloak tight around her like swaddling. Like a winding cloth. He sees rather than hears the words his father whispers to her before he rises, the movement of his lips, the vapor of his breath unwinding from his mouth.

“Come,” his father compels him, turning his back on his wife. After a few paces, he throws back his head and keens to the starless sky. Grief rends the last bit of music from his father’s soul.

 He would vomit if his stomach had not been so long empty.

 

Time passes.

He mindlessly follows the steady rhythm of snow crunching beneath boots.  Sometimes sleep beckons, and he fights it as he has never fought anything before. Do not fall behind, he chides himself. Do you think Father will carry you if he could not carry Mother?

Taunting winds rise from the unseen quarters, thrashing ice across his face, blinding him. He hunkers down, waits for it to pass, but when he stands again, he can no longer see his father, nor their path.  He calls out in terror.

"Here!” His father’s voice— but what direction?

It comes again: “Here! I am holding out my hand!”

His arms swim through empty air. A tentative step. He flails once more and—

“There, yes! Step closer now.”

“I cannot see the way—”

“—If we fall behind, we will be lost.” 

Another step. His gloved hand finds his father’s, holds tight. He is a man grown, yet now  to clasp his father’s hand, to be led like a child, is a comfort, perhaps the only comfort left to him. They move together, bracing against the wind.

The ice groans, shifts beneath his feet. His father’s grip loosens; he closes his own more tightly. For a moment, the entire world is balanced on the head of a pin, waiting for the slightest stirring to upend it.

 “Stay where you are. Do not move.” 

The silence now is leaden, impenetrable. There is nothing but him, his father, and the ice.

“Drop my hand.”

“Father, no!”

 “You must. Now, Ehtelë. Let go.”

 His father’s voice holds no anguish. Its calmness is as uncanny as the silence that engulfs them.

 He lets go.

 They hold in perfect stillness, waiting, watching. Time unfurls around them like an endless white ribbon.

 Still he quakes when the rumble of thunder rises up around him, quails when the barrage of a sudden storm obliterates the preternatural lull. He looks up, but the sky holds only darkness and unfathomable mystery.  He looks down and—

His father does not scream, only gasps in surprise as the ice gives way beneath his feet and he vanishes  into the black abyss below.

No...no...no... 

Strong arms wrap around his body from behind and reel him back, drag him away from the chasm opening before him.

No...no...no...

His heart flies into his throat, and he feels the ice crack—

Ecthelion’s body pitched forward as he came awake, dizzy and disoriented, his ragged breath rending the night’s silence. It took a moment to regain his wits. He cursed aloud and hastily lit the bedside lamp. When the flare of light failed to entirely dispel the horror of the dream, he threw back his sheets and rose from the bed to shake off its remnants.

The fire in the grate had guttered out. His breath lingered in the air and the sweat of fitful sleep chilled on his skin.  He padded barefoot across the cold slate floor and into the withdrawing room, where the glow from his lamp glinted off wine bottles and off the silver-worked goblets abandoned on a table. One of the leadlight windows creaked on its hinges, ushering in the night air as it swung to and fro. He went to close it, repressing the urge to swing it hard enough to shatter the panes. Pausing with one hand on the window, one hand on the casement, he let the wind buffet against him, catching his nightshirt like a sail. Either the chill would clear his mind, he thought, or it would drive him back to the warmth of his bed and force him to attempt sleep once more. Below him, the bright disc of the moon rippled and swayed in the broad pool of the fountain that gurgled and spouted in defiance of the cold.  An unusual occurrence, that: a full moon at midwinter. He should have marked it; perhaps its strange tides influenced men’s minds in the night.  

The cold, the creaking hinge, the moon, the wine: little wonder the night had gone as it had. The lords of Gondolin had marked the longest night of the year with a solemn feast in Turgon’s great hall. Later, he had marked the turn of the wheel with his boon companion and overindulgence in drink. Glorfindel had offered to stay afterward, but then, didn’t he always? Perhaps I should have let him, he thought. Glorfindel, after all, was no stranger to his maudlin turns. But it would have been unkind to extend an invitation that promised much but yielded little, and he had taxed his friend’s patience on that front more than was meet.

He poured the dregs of Glorfindel’s goblet into his own and returned to the window.  The world was empty and still. Snow blanketed the vale and turned the peaks of the Crissaegrim to forbidding teeth of ice. The great courts of the city had been swept clear, but a crust of fine, white powder built up around window ledges and on the leeward sides of the balusters and capped the marble statues of the Valar in the Gar Ainion.

The appearance of a figure approaching the fountain drew his attention.  The figure—a man, he saw, and a stranger to him—paused at the basin of the fountain, and Ecthelion wondered irritably what unearthly hour it was that these fools were still about.

Unlike the Noldor with their protracted feasts and conspicuous dignity, the Sindar who had followed Turgon out of Nevrast marked the quarters and cross-quarters of the year in their own fashion, with customs the Noldor on on the whole found primitive.  For instance, they took to the sea on the longest, coldest night of the year. His first season in Vinyamar he had watched dumbfounded as hundreds of young men shirked their clothing, made a reckless dash down the steep escarpments tracing the coastline, and ran into the water in naught but their skins, invoking the name of Ossë like a battle cry and singing all the while. The young women, at least, had shown better sense, choosing to thumb their noses at winter huddled tight together around small holly-fires, watching the spectacle below them with undisguised mirth. Though their exodus to Gondolin had taken them far from the sea, the Sindar still pursued their frigid revels, though now they perforce ventured beyond the walls of the city to dunk themselves in the mountain-fed springs and brooks of the vale.  

Save, of course, for a handful of bolder lads— young men just on the cusp of maturity with all the brashness and untried mettle of the newly-grown— made their seasonal ablutions not in the streams of the Tumladen, but in the fountains of the city. The better, Ecthelion assumed, to shock their elders and display their bravado.  Though certain of a man’s assets, Ecthelion considered scornfully, were hardly best displayed in cold water. Turgon, far from being shocked, found the demonstration “in goodly spirit,” a sentiment Ecthelion did not share, if only because he was at least nominally responsible for the care of the fountains and the safety of the fools who abused them.

So a late-coming idiot, then. Though the young, he supposed, found it never too late for idiocy. It was what made them young. The trespasser stopped almost directly below his window and began to disrobe. He did it thoughtfully, folding each article and setting it above him on the fountain’s retaining wall. The usual practice had been throw one’s garb aside haphazardly as one rushed to the fountain and boosted a comrade over the walls, shoveling up shirts and tunics and trousers in indiscriminate handfuls after their romp. But not this one. That alone caught Ecthelion’s attention, but the body revealed held it: pale in the moonlight, lissome with fresh maturity, crowned with a tumble of dark hair left unbound.  

Once atop the wall, the young man cringed against the kiss of cold air on his skin and chaffed his arms. Framed in the window, Ecthelion’s flesh prickled in sympathy, and he braced for the inevitable splashing and shouting. The young man, however, stood silent and tall, raising his arms to the sky as if he would embrace it, and something in Ecthelion’s heart turned at the sight. He affixed the image in his mind, this solitary youth honoring the night, offering himself to the water and to the moon.  

The boy dove head-first into the basin with such facility that he made barely a sound or a splash.  Ecthelion, however, whispered an imprecation: the water in the pool was barely a fathom deep. Far too easy to imagine a neck snapped, a skull battering against the fountain’s stone floor. Not that the potential for injury stopped any of the others; but then, the others didn’t make their assault on the fountains in the middle of the night, alone. He waited, but he could not see the boy’s body in the water for the darkness.  What could possibly have possessed him to take such a ridiculous risk? Ecthelion’s heart raced, and not for the first time that night, he felt pinpricks of fear on the back of his neck.  A bead of sweat traced a swift path down his ribs. He leaned out the window, staring down into the pool, willing the water to reveal something, anything.  The fountain burbled merrily on as if it had taken no notice of the boy’s presence at all.

Fool! How quickly could he reach the stairs and cross the square to the fountain? Should he call for help? He had opened his mouth to shout an alarm when the pale form of the stranger broke the surface. Echthelion heard the rush of his own breath even as the youth in the fountain exhaled.

He watched with a mixture of relief and consternation as the young man pushed himself back onto the wall. Emerging from the water, Ecthelion beheld now a true child of Ossë, water glinting like diamonds on his skin, kelp-like hair clinging to his neck, his breast, his back. He faced the fountain’s center and bowed low, something Ecthelion had not seen done before, and scuttled back down to the square to dress. Even from his vantage, Ecthelion could see the goosebumps on his skin, the muscles contracting to stave off shivers. Ossë’s child he may have been, but not impervious to winter’s chill. All the same, he drew on his clothes with the same care with which he had disrobed, as if this were no foolish caper to him, but an act of reverence, to be undertaken with sobriety.

Ecthelion never did discern what caused the stranger look up at just that moment, but his eyes locked on Ecthelion as if some impalpable force had impelled them. Ecthelion was too flustered to even step back from the window.  Righteous indignation blossomed, and he remained where he stood as much for his own ridiculous stubbornness as for anything else, daring the man to demure.

But the stranger did not demure. Far from appearing startled or ashamed that he had been caught out, he held Ecthelion’s gaze boldly, and then he smiled. Simply smiled. And it was that which drove Ecthelion at last away from the the window, from the draught, from the vision in the night. He closed the window tightly behind him, swiftly drew the curtains, swallowed back the dregs of the wine, and beat a precipitate retreat.