The Small and Secret Things by Dawn Felagund

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The Conscript

A conscript of Maedhros fleetingly meets his lord on the night before the Nirnaeth Arnoediad. This is a fairly long piece--four double-drabbles and a tribble--but it begged to be written, so I obliged.

Notes on obscure canon follow in the endnotes.

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I. The Messengers
I am just returned from sowing the fields when I see the two horses tethered in front of the house. Drawing nearer, the design on the headstall stops me so suddenly that I nearly topple to my knees: an eight-pointed star wrapped in flame. The device of Nelyafinwë Maitimo--legend, hero, kinslayer--now Maedhros, the Dispossessed King, the lord of Himring.

The door is shut--odd, for it is spring and even if the wind remains chill, it sweeps away winter's staleness and that is reason enough to keep the door open. My sister and brother crouch at threshold, tears on their faces, though my sister is old enough to make an attempt at hiding hers, at appearing brave.

I gather them in my arms. "What is it, huh?" but I am already catching snatches of conversation, of my mother's voice bubbling with tears--

too young his father's heir just of age last moon needed for the harvest come autumn

--but the door explodes open, for the messengers of Maedhros have far yet to ride and cannot delay. "If you kept him," one calls, "you'd stand to lose him and the rest. Think on that."

And they are gone.

II. The Book
I have a book written by Nelyafinwë Maitimo in Aman. It is about the classification of flowers.

It passed to me, as best we can figure, from Turukáno--once a student at Lambengolmor--to Findaráto his friend to Angaráto his brother to my father, who kept the meager gardens in Dorthonion, and then to me, who has little interest in flowers but savors the slow, twisting dance of Tengwar across a page.

That the lost Prince Maitimo understood beauty and indulgence as perhaps we never will again is evident in the luxuriance of detail about so trite a topic, and the book was useless even to my father in Dorthonion. But at the corner of one page is a smudge, a thumbprint that--had it been discovered--would have been declared a blight, the page begun anew. Over the course of my life, upon arriving at that page, I fit my thumb to the imprint of his. Even now, mine is much smaller, and if I squint closely, I can see the whorls that make it uniquely his.

Some of the Moriquendi see our fates in the lines upon our hands. I wonder--studying his--what fate they would see?

III. The Message
The document left by the messengers was not written by Maedhros--instead by a scribe--but the signature at the bottom is his. His name is different now--denoting ugliness, utility--and his left-handed script is more economic than that once wrought with his right, but I know that flourish beneath the vala, and it is his.

The message is plain: I am being conscripted.

"Each household under the lordship of Maedhros Fëanorion is to send one male into the military service of their lord, to defend the realm against Morgoth."

My father was made lame in the Dagor Bragollach and so--heart thudding violently inside my chest--I realize that will be me. The bookish son of a farmer without even the courage to present a silver ring to the maiden down the lane … it would be laughable, if I was not so terrified.

The messengers left also a sword.

"He shall report to the gates at Himring within three moons' time. He should bring his weapon."

The sword is brutal in its simplicity. The Noldor, it seems, forewent concern for beauty in arms when they lost the will to feign empathy in their summons to the same.

IV. Himring
Even in the summer, Himring is cold; I am grateful for the fur-lined cloak that my mother insisted I take. My father called Himring ugly--having seen it once--but it is not so ugly as dull. Utilitarian.

Not that I have much time to look in my first days there. I am numbered with vegetable dye upon my tunic and sent from place to place, to ride horses and spar and shoot arrows, until a not entirely unkind swordmaster gives me a slip of paper with a house upon it and tells me to await further orders.

There, a busy housemother shoves a bowl of stew before me, chattering all the while, but I am too exhausted to listen. Others near me in age and stature shuffle to the table, eat, and shuffle away again. Their eyes are bleary with disbelief and fear. I imagine I must look the same.

We are each permitted two personal effects. I brought a letter from my father and the book about flowers. I read it after dark, the moon my light. Surely the man who named roses and the man who plots war against an unassailable foe--they are not the same?

V. Fire
I see him once in my time here, the night before we are to leave for Mithrim. Restless with worry, I hear the curfew tattoo and don't bother to find my street home. The moon is full and high amid the stars.

Then there is a man on the path before me, high-ranking by his elegant raiment, and even in the meager moonlight, I can see that the unrestrained hair spilling over his shoulders is blood red. His face--painted in moonlight and shadow--is beautiful.

He leaves his company and comes down the street toward me. I wonder what I will see in his eyes? The man who took me from my parents, my home, with a stab of his signature, or the man with whimsy enough to name flowers? I imagine the stories I will tell my children and grandchildren, should I survive tomorrow's ordeal, about my single sight of the lord and hero Maedhros Fëanorion. How small I feel in his approaching shadow, how young and helpless and inconsequential, beside one with the courage to challenge Morgoth.

I lift my eyes to meet his. He has brothers, nieces and nephews; he had students once, in Aman. I wait to see sign of that, of regret for what his decisions will do to the sons and brothers of others. Awareness of what we will sacrifice for him.

I want him to see me.

But he does not.

I stumble back with what I see instead: a single-mindedness driven by an impetus he cannot control, something larger and more powerful even than he. Fire, I realize. There is fire in his eyes: once ablaze, set on a course that it is driven to finish, no matter the cost, until all is ash beneath it.

All is ash, even him.

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Chapter End Notes

Today's Word:

tattoo ta-TOO, noun:

1. A rapid, rhythmic drumming or rapping.
2. A beat of a drum, or sound of a trumpet or bugle, giving notice to soldiers to go to their quarters at night.
3. A display of military exercises given as evening entertainment.

Tattoo is an alteration of earlier taptoo, from Dutch taptoe, "a tap(house)-shut," from tap, "faucet" + toe, "shut" -- meaning, essentially, that the tavern is about to shut.

Notes on Obscure Canon:
Lambengolmor occurs in HoMe 11 in the essay "Quendi and Eldar" where it is said,

Though Fëanor after the days of his first youth took no more active part in linguistic lore and enquiry, he is credited by tradition with the foundation of a school of Lambengolmor or 'Loremasters of Tongues' to carry on this work….Of the school, the most eminent member after the founder was, or still is, Pengolodh….

Pengolodh (who went on to be a lord in Gondolin) is the reason that I made the connection to Turgon and onward to Finrod, Angrod, and the father of my OMC.

The mention "I know that flourish beneath the vala, and it is his" is in reference to the Tengwa that serves as the letter m in Sindarin. My knowledge of the Sindarin forms of writing in the Tengwar are lacking, but I believe that Maedhros's name would be written as:

Only his handwriting would be much prettier. :)