Journeys of Vása by Dawn Felagund

III. Bureaucracy

Fingolfin tells a young loremaster of crossing the Ice and the first sunrise.

But as the host of Fingolfin marched into Mithrim the Sun rose flaming in the West; and Fingolfin unfurled his blue and silver banners, and blew his horns, and flowers sprang beneath his marching feet, and the ages of the stars were ended.
"Of the Return of the Noldor"

III. Bureaucracy

He is an earnest-faced youth, reminiscent of my son Findekáno when he was still innocent and young, and enamored of knowledge for the simple sake of knowing it. The meeting was arranged by Findekáno, who seeks ever to assuage his brother Turukáno as a convoluted means (I suspect) of earning forgiveness for Nelyafinwë. The lad is a student of lore under Turukáno's esteemed tutelage; his name is Pengolodh.

He bows to me, very proper, though he is hasty in getting to work and does not spend much time on pleasantries. Findekáno has likely told him that I have little time to spare; it is a late-winter morning of short, dark days, and I suspect that Pengolodh will be dismissed before noon. He has not much time at all. "I am compiling remembrances and lore about the crossing of the Helcaraxë," he says, taking a proffered seat and licking the tip of his quill. "I am interested in your recollections, my lord." He is tall; his eyes are vivid and gray. I think of Curufinwë in his youth, with the brilliance but not the madness.

"The Helcaraxë," I muse. "That is a broad subject to cross in a single meeting." Arafinwë, I think, would have been amused by my pun. Curufinwë would have rolled his eyes.

Pengolodh lets slip a sniffle of laughter before clearing his throat to cover it. Loremasters are dignified and not prone to laughter. Doubtlessly, he thinks this, and I imagine that he will berate himself for his faux pas later. "Perhaps, my lord, we shall begin with what means you took to assure the survival of your people?"

I nod. "That is a reasonable place to begin, certainly." I pause. His quill hovers above the parchment; his eyebrows are knit and almost a single entity. Inside his leather shoe, I can see his toe tapping, and I think again of Findekáno, who in his youth so often bore my wrath for his impertinence. Turukáno had the poise and patience that his brother lacked. This lad must be brilliant indeed, I find myself thinking, for Turukáno to bear his peccadilloes long enough to serve as his tutor. Or--with a smile--maybe that is why Findekáno favors him.

I relieve his anticipation and begin to speak. "I survived the Helcaraxë," I say, "because always have I been extraordinarily good at bureaucratic tedium."

He chuckles but--as I noted earlier--he is very proper and quickly realizes his blunder, though this one will not be so easily disguised behind a cough. His eyebrow lifts. "Bureaucracy … my lord?"

"Bureaucracy, Pengolodh," I answer, and I think that this is a lesson that he will not learn from the elegantly wrought lore of Rúmil and Elemmirë--certainly not Curufinwë--as I explain, "Note this: at the heart of every Noldorin drama is bureaucracy."

~oOo~

I mean it half as a joke--Arafinwë would be proud; Curufinwë would be shocked (though he would hide it well)--but there is truth in it too. I possessed not my eldest brother's skilled hands and swift wit, nor did I possess my younger brother's easy affability and effortless cheer. I used to think often that Arafinwë and Curufinwë were a delight to my father, while I was useful. They were the intricate paintings gazed upon with love and the wine sweet upon the tongue; I was the straight-backed chair necessary for prolonged and comfortable enjoyment of both.

There was honor to be had--in theory--in being chosen as my father's chief counselor (whilst pretending that I did not know that Curufinwë had been offered it first), but the reality was that it was a sustained misery punctuated by occasional dilemmas and triumphs, the latter of which could never be fully enjoyed against a backdrop of all else gone awry or outright wrong. Nonetheless. This, I explain to young and earnest Pengolodh, was the Helcaraxë. At any given moment, it was difficult to pinpoint any complaint that was decidedly grievous in nature versus merely irksome. It was very cold, of course, and windy, and the snow tended to blow in our eyes, and once or twice, my nostrils froze shut before I learned to keep my face buried in my muffler. But the Eldar are hardy--the Noldor hardier yet--and Turukáno had seen before our departure from Tirion that everyone brought furs and blankets since we could not anticipate the climate of the Outer Lands. Being dark, certainly (we thought), it would also be cold. We were hungry too, but we had coimas in considerable quantities, and while rather unsatisfactory gustatorily, it gave us energy enough to move a fair distance each day across the Ice. Then, of course, there were the emotional travails: the resentment felt towards those who had brought too much or not enough; the grief of those who had left loved ones behind; the tendency toward unrelenting despair after weeks of cold and dark upon a featureless, forbidding landscape.

"And that is where bureaucracy proved useful," I explain to Pengolodh, "in providing a distraction. With enough distraction, there is no room for despair." I watch his quill scratch my words into Tengwar.

Each person had an appointed role. Some distributed food while others took a headcount at various pre-determined points during the march. Others took excess furs and blankets and saw them given where they would be useful. Still others yet were responsible for pitching rugged tents, others yet for taking them down, and still more others for maintaining record of whose turn it was to use them. We had a few healers who were assigned to care for the frailest and most despondent among us, with the goal of making them at least able to be useful. Distracted.

Of course, there were dilemmas along the way. The ice broke beneath our feet once. Elenwë was lost, as were others.

We kept marching. We kept ourselves fed and sheltered and warm and cared for; we kept to our routine and did not stop, even for grief. Some cried in the night. I appointed a few to tear our unused summer robes into handkerchiefs and see them distributed because frozen tears often led quickly to frostbite, and our healers' efforts were spread thin as it was without asking them to tend afflictions brought on by lack of care.

I explain all of this to Pengolodh, who has stopped writing and regards me with his mouth open a little. When he sees me watching him, he clicks it quickly shut and begins scribbling again in haste, although I have the feeling that he does what Arafinwë used to do when wishing to look busy at lessons while really lost in completely unrelated thought and simply writing his name over and over and over again.

At last, he sets down his quill. "That sounds bleak," he says.

"It was," I agree. "But there again was a lesson learned during the interminable councils of my father's court, or endless engagements with stacks of ledgers, or ceaseless debate about seemingly meaningless minutia: That the bleakness--even the agony--is worthwhile in the end. That we believe that our slow march has a destination. 'A candle in the window,' we used to say in Tirion, meaning that one can withstand a long journey by thinking of the house at the end of his road, and the candle in the window. And, of course, all that stands behind it."

"Or we say that the Sun will rise again," says Pengolodh with a small smile.

"Indeed," I say, "the Sun rose for the first time as we stepped off from the Ice. That was what we walked toward: new light, new beginnings. New hope."

"A candle in the window," says Pengolodh wistfully.

"And all that stands behind it: that Light trumps Darkness. That the Valar failed us, yes, but learned the error of their ways and gave light to our road. Saved our kin from this dark land from life lived forever in the shadows. That Noldorin hands need not grip swords and be stained by blood but can also give light and beauty to the world. That forgiveness is ours to have."

Pengolodh taps his quill against his lips and thinks on what I have said. He is young; he has never known a day without a sunrise, and I can see by the dreamy distance in his eyes that he imagines himself beside me upon the Ice, standing in a throng of my silent followers as we watch the new light arc slowly over us. Silver ice is ablaze with reflected fire. We lower our hoods and shuffle off our cloaks and bask in warmth of a sort that we have long forgotten. Beneath our feet, the ice recedes, and flowers unfurl from the barren earth.

"The first sunrise," Pengolodh muses. "What sight it must have been." He finds my gaze with startled eyes still so full of youth. "And what an undertaking as well! Imagine the bureaucracy it must have taken to accomplish that!"

And we laugh together, loudly, until a startled Findekáno appears to make sure that everything is well. Even then, all of my pride and poise cannot banish the levity from my voice. But then, why should I allow it to? Why else have we come here, if not to laugh freely?

Outside, the noon Sun sits high in the sky, doing her slow work on melting the icicles outside my window.

Chapter End Notes

The following are translations of the Quenya names used in this story (in order of appearance): Findekáno: Fingon Turukáno: Turgon Nelyafinwë: Maedhros Curufinwë: Fëanor Arafinwë: Finarfin