Beating the Bounds by Kenaz

West

The light in his solar at this time of day was so gloriously golden it reminded Erestor of Laurelin, or of the first time he had witnessed the rising of the sun. Today, the beams spilling through the casement filled him with a sense of foreboding. He had once believed he had seen Arda’s blackest hour, but countless other hours had passed since then, and he had seen lands sundered and restored, borders drawn and redrawn. Now once again they stood on the precipice of annihilation: yet the sun rose, and the sun set, and in the time in between it burnished his birch floors and the desk at which he worked. Breezes teased his papers, and the Bruinen’s laughter lifted his spirits.

There was much a man could do when he understood the lay of the land, could see it in his mind’s eye from above and below and from each point on the compass. There was much a man could do when he had lived through three Ages of the world, and had seen its making, and unmaking, and remaking. Erestor had long since abandoned the drawing of maps for other tasks; his understanding of the land and its history made him valuable for many things: knowledge of the terrain had allowed him to offer Elrond advice on Imladris’ location and defenses; familiarity with the trade routes had made him a sharp negotiator. Remembering the stories few lived to recount? A lonely skill, that, but never without use.

Elrond’s latest request had not called upon any of these long-honed skills, but he had delivered it with such a heavy heart Erestor could never have denied him.

At the end, he would became a mapmaker again.

The facility remained in his hands even after many years set to other purpose, and he needed few instruments: he was not surveying new realms, but illustrating those already known. His pens never wanted for cleaning, but his rules and calipers did, and the knob raising his drawing board complained when he turned it; it had forgotten it possessed any other purpose than flatly holding contracts and correspondence. He took his time in selecting the stock: good vellum to withstand the elements, and hold to up under frequent rolling and unrolling, folding and unfolding.

Last of all, though he did not need it, he retrieved his compass from its oiled wooden box. Despite time and disuse, the brass barely had a patina. The hinges on the cover and sundial and sights still yielded to his touch. The crystal had been lovingly buffed and bore not a single scratch to mar its clarity. The compass rose gleamed as boldly as the winged rays of an ancient sun. He looked at it for a long while before setting himself to his assignment.

Erestor worked quickly; the task had not called for a large or detailed depiction, and this was not the first time he had been called upon with little warning to draw a safe passage for the forlorn hope.

He finished, sighed, and set it aside. The angle of the light had lengthened.

His hands still itched to work. He hadn’t expected that. He set another sheet of vellum on the drawing board. Laid paper would have been more than suitable for his purpose, but no, it would be nothing less than vellum. He did not draw for Elrond now, but for himself. He took in a breath, held it, released it, and began.

He did not hear Elrond enter, but after a time he perceived the man’s presence, a sort of compelling benevolence that shifted the air around him. Like Fingolfin. Like Fingon. Strong blood ran true.

“I have finished,” he said, but the lord of Imladris had already lifted the piece from where he had left it to dry: a map of lands to the south of the hidden valley, the detail of all known passages through the Hithaeglir, of Celebrant and Nimrodel’s secret inlets into Lórien, of each curve of the Anduin from the Old Ford to Osgiliath. A map leading to Mordor.

Elrond held it up solemnly, an offering to the sun, letting her light illuminate it. "May this guide them well.” After a long silence he added, “You are still working.” He presented this as an observation with the room to become a question.

“Something for my own eyes,” Erestor answered, knowing Elrond would not press.

And he didn’t; he rolled up the map he had come for and crossed to the door. Already the light had shifted, darkened, lost its gilt edge.

“You tread heavily on old trails, my friend.” The words were not spoken in judgment. Elrond had been privy to many of the dark circumambulations of Erestor’s mind over time, but he never attempted to follow: he understood that the paths, while sometimes intersecting, were not his own. “I worry for you. You cause yourself unnecessary sorrow.”

A rueful smile flit over Erestor’s face. He leaned across the desk to light a lamp. “Beating the bounds, my father called it.” His father had been right; the pain did help him to remember.

Elrond watched him for a moment, opened his mouth as if to speak, but in the end he nodded and closed the door, leaving Erestor to walk the borders of his memory. After all, nothing but memory remained.

His pen spoke when he could not: Here is Tirion, it said, where we were born. And Taniquetil, where we danced at the feet of the Valar, you and I.

Here is the Helcaraxë, where we nearly died.

Here are the Ered Lómin, where the moon first rose, and where we watched Fingolfin’s banners sail.

Here is where we beheld the dawning of the sun.

Here is Mithrim, where I briefly dwelt with hope in my heart, and Thangorodrim, where my hope fled and yours returned.

Strokes of ink angled and swirled across the page. He cross-hatched foothills, stippled forests. His pen moved down the paper and to the left; south and west by the compass’ reckoning, if had he used it, to Nargothrond, where he had long ago learned the art of surveying in the darkness beneath the earth, and where sanctuary had been sought and given.

And there… Ard-galen, or the Gasping Dust, as it was after called: the place where his heart had been broken, though he had not been present to see it turn from green to blood-red to blackened desolation. A blank space; nothing had remained after the battle there, nothing but bones and ruin. He traced the longitude with his fingertips, the whole of the line from Nargothrond to the Anfauglith.

“Here be monsters,” he whispered, because his grandsire had been right all along.

The map was not to scale; it lacked the precision and detail that had once made his reputation. It didn’t matter. He knew now even the best of maps were not always truthful; the mapmaker picked and chose what to include, and what to leave off. Some things were made small, others made simple. A few trees stood for ancient forests; the teeth of impassible mountains were defanged by the cartographer’s pen, shrunken into scallops of ink. The place where tens of thousands of men fell, a mighty king not least among them, became a vast and featureless plain.

He recalled the painting in Fingolfin’s hall in Tirion, the one he would glance at from the tail of his eye because he had found it both glorious and inaccurate. Had he ever been so callow, so foolish? Of course he had. In his arrogance he had failed to understand that a map’s power did not lie only in its ability to show things as they are, but also in its ability to show things as they once were.

To show things as they might have been.

To show things as a man wished they might be.

He leveled the drawing board and opened the circumferentor. He raised the sights as the last of the sunlight ebbed out of view. He turned the housing incrementally, listening to its soft clicks, until the guiding arrow was set in its place. The needle bobbed and swung before finding its home and hovering there.

The needle hovered over the north, but Erestor’s body followed the guiding arrow, turning toward the direction he travelled always in his dreams: West.

Then Erestor looked up.

Chapter End Notes

Erestor’s Quenyan name, Eressetor, comes courtesy of Darth Fingon, by way of Dawn Felagund's story "By the Light of Roses," by way of Oshun’s story "Summer's End." His pseudo-Quenyan nickname, Restor, is all my fault.