Noldolantë by Dawn Felagund

I. Nelyo

"--eight, nine, ten. Ten! Ready or not, here I come!"

I uncover my face and spin around. The garden behind me is empty and very, very quiet. The leaves of the beech tree against which I'd hidden my face whisper with secret laughter. I scowl at them and press my fingers to my lips, but the wind surges harder, and if my brother betrays himself with a sound, then I do not hear it.

Nelyo is eight years older than me--nearly twenty!--and very clever, but I will find him this time before he makes it back to the beech tree. All it takes is a touch with a single finger and he wins, as he has in too many games past. Every game past. I prowl around the tree, nervous about wandering too far, checking every place I can think to hide, even as I know that he would choose none of them. I hear a noise behind me and whirl, prepared to leap at it, but it is a robin skipping across the flagstones, and when I flinch in its direction, it flutters into the beech tree and chatters angrily at me.

"Sorry, sorry," I say under my breath, and suddenly, the silent summer day is full of noise--birds and leaves and wind and squirrels--and none of it Nelyo. I hear myself growl with displeasure. My footfalls are thunderous. I lurch to a stop, rooted to the spot, afraid to move any further and certain that he is going to leap out at any moment and make a dash for the tree. Certain that he is going to win again, and no matter that I am just his little brother, I cannot abide with that. Atar will ask after our games--he always does--and I will be forced to again admit defeat, and he will make a sympathetic, insincere noise, and Amil will pet my hair, and Nelyo will try not to look triumphant, but he must be! I want to know what that feels like.

I imagine that triumph must sound the like the cornets that blare Grandfather Finwë's fanfare--sparkling noise upon still air, romping and crashing like the light-kissed waves at Alqualondë--that makes your chest feel like it might burst wide open. I shiver at the thought, and my eyelids flicker shut.

And the summertime noise is disrupted by the sudden pounding of my brother's feet. He is halfway to the tree already, hand outstretched and teeth bared, prepared to win again. His long legs have devoured half the ground yet remaining before I have even flinched into action. With a shriek, I leap for the tree, for him, for elusive triumph.

My foot catches a flagstone, and Nelyo and the tree are tipped from my vision. Flagstone fills my vision, and I am in the sickening clasp of gravity, being dragged to the earth, with barely time enough to raise my hands to keep my face from smashing the rock. Nonetheless, my chin hits the ground, my teeth split my lip, and I feel the skin peeled away from both knees.

The scream of anguish that explodes upon the still summer air is nothing like triumph.

Nelyo veers from the tree; his long legs carry him to me instead. Pain sizzles along my entire body and blood drips into my palms with the rhythm of my heartbeat.

Thin arms--still a child's arms--gather me from the ground. From inside the house comes the noise of banging doors; Amil or Atar or both have seen, and comfort is imminent. Yet I weep.

A tremulous voice buzzes against my ear. Slowly, he rocks me, but I hear his heart pounding where my head rests on his chest, as I slowly soak his tunic with my blood. He is singing to me the first thing to come to mind: the silly song that Atar devised to teach us our Tengwar. Atar sings it bright and merry but Nelyo's voice is low and full of hurt, like he is taking my pain and making it his own. It is a song of comfort: warm and insidious, like the flush one gets inside after swallowing a cup of hot tea, and the pain subsides; the pain is almost gone by the time Amil comes running across the flagstones toward us, and the bleeding, almost stopped.

II. Tyelkormo

Music swirls behind me, the only thing loud enough to overwhelm the roar of one thousand voices. I sit at the long table on the dais at the front of the room, my chair turned backward, facing the wall. Every inch of Grandfather Finwë's hall is splendid, an example of the skill of the best craftspeople among the Noldor, but I have found that the bare wall behind the royal's table is quite plain, nonetheless, and dull to stare at.

It is my begetting day. I am twenty-five years old today; halfway to my majority. The party is being held in my honor. Supposedly.

But it is not my name coursing with the force of flames around the assembled crowd. Tyelkormo. Tyelkormo. All eyes, words, and thoughts--indeed hearts--are turned to the squirming, squalling bundle currently ensconced firmly in my father's arms. Tyelkormo. My grandfathers--who are jointly hosting the party in my honor, supposedly--stand at either side, their faces tipped down and, judging by their writhing smiles, babbling and cooing in that insufferable way of even the most stalwart adults when encountering a baby. Tyelkormo. Amil is beaming. Tyelkormo, Tyelkormo! A line winds around the room: people waiting to greet the baby, being distracted during their wait by Grandmother Istarnië and Nelyo. I clap both hands over my ears--

Tyelkormo!

--but it does nothing; that name--Tyelkormo--ricochets around the inside of my head endlessly, endlessly, endlessly.

With a chirp and a rumble, the flute and the drum end the song, and everyone is applauding. Rather would I have been with the musicians tonight, and Atar was on the verge of granting it, but Grandfather Finwë had insisted: "Nay, it is his begetting day, he should not be among the laborers!" and laughing at that. So I stare at the wall. Better than staring at my baby brother Tyelkormo. He has enough people staring at him not to need my eyes too.

The musicmaster is introducing the next song, the Circle. The Circle is always played at begetting day feasts; it is supposed to symbolize the connection we each have to the other through conception, birth, and life. It hadn't made much sense when Nelyo had explained it the first time. Now it just seems stupid.

I don't turn to look at everyone assembling into a circle for dancing. A few sharp discords bite at the mild noise of everyone shuffling into place as the harpist tunes her instrument. The musicmaster is stalling for time, I know, waiting for everyone to join the circle, though I doubt he'll notice that I am not present. Tyelkormo is there; that will be enough.

A warm hand envelopes my shoulder, and I startle. "Macalaurë," whispers Grandfather Finwë's voice into my ear, "your Grandfather Mahtan and I should like to have you in the circle between us, where we can acknowledge that you connect our families."

I shake my head. "No, that is Nelyo, as the eldest, or Tyelkormo"--my voice breaks on his name--"as the newest. Not me."

Wisely, Grandfather Finwë does not attempt to dispute this but, with a smile, takes my hand and leads me to my feet and onto the floor, where all of the Noldor are standing, hands clasped, in a ring save my family, which is clumped into a chaotic knot.

Grandfather Finwë leads me into their midst, and they smooth as though by magic into a line, hands linked like the others, with me at the center, bracketed on either side by my grandfathers. Their large hands--that I should grow near so big in the next twenty-five years!--clasp my shoulders.

And somehow, Tyelkormo gets dumped into my arms.

I open my mouth to protest, but Atar and Amil are already being shuffled into place beside their fathers, and the musicmaster is starting the count, and the first bright chords of the Circle are exploding into the room. Hundreds of feet begin to step in unison. "The only time that all of the Noldor move in step!" Grandfather Finwë laughs over my head to Grandfather Mahtan.

And Tyelkormo sleeps. Perhaps he is wearied by so many eyes on him, so many hands wanting to hold him and voices wanting to sing to him. How does he sleep through the music? I am not sure, but he does, one little hand having escaped his wrappings and sticking straight up in the air toward my face, fingers clenched into a little fist. "I understand both those things, little brother," I whisper to him, "the sleeping and the fist." The music roars around us. I hold him close; I let him sleep.

III. Carnistir

He thinks that I don't know he's there.

But I do: right there, under the marble bench and half-hidden behind a potted plant. He does blend into the shadows well with his black hair and dark tunic. Only his glittering eyes give him away. Every time I whirl Vingarië past, I see the spark of light upon dark eyes, spying and staring.

He's been following me all week. At first, I didn't know, and I went about my business like no one was watching: picking my nose and breaking wind without discretion, eating a half-melted chocolate that I found on the kitchen floor (though I first dusted it and removed the piece of Nelyo's hair stuck to it). Receiving a messenger who bore two silver betrothal rings, one of which I intend to present to Vingarië tonight, and taking them often from my pocket when I thought I was alone.

Until this night, Vingarië has been in Alqualondë, finishing another year at the music school, and our only contact has been letters sent by messengers. They must be, I imagine, quite tired by now. We've been composing a song together; the hope (unspoken) is that it will be our wedding song, and our correspondence has been as frequent as the stamina and mounts of our messengers will allow.

I have been humming the song all week, whenever I am alone. I am humming it now, as Vingarië and I circle the courtyard, as I am gathering my courage. I heard Carnistir humming it, as he played alone the other day, stacking blocks and knocking them to the ground again, rocking. Humming. And that was how I knew that he followed me.

He does not hum now. He is as still as the shadows save the sparkle in his eyes. Why does he follow me? I know not. Carnistir has never been much interested in me. His devotion belongs to Nelyo and his mischief to Tyelkormo; he adores Amil and worships Atar. He does not much mind me.

My humming breaks into wordless song, and I hold Vingarië close in my arms. Her voice lifts and twines with mine in the way of two ribbons upon a breeze: lifting and swirling and falling and winding up tangled. We stand motionless in the courtyard, under witness of only the stars and my brother. A hand steals to my pocket and touches the rings. Now is the moment when I must ask …

But keen ears detect from within the house the sound of Atar descending the steps, calling impatiently for me. He will first search the family rooms and then come to the courtyard. My hand slips from the rings, and the song falters.

And from the corner of my eye, I see a shadow dash from beneath the marble bench, half-hidden by a potted plant, silent and invisible to the unsuspecting eye. It is only when the shadow has entered the house--mostly out of earreach of all save Atar--that it begins to wail.

My fingers again brush the rings. Vingarië's and my song rises to its rushing conclusion; her voice buzzes against my mouth as I kiss her lips; we are alone again to sing and love and will be for some time yet, as my brother has willed. The song has ended, but my voice goes on. It has something yet to ask her.

IV. Curufinwë

I boggle. "What is it?" I ask.

Curufinwë sits in that prim way of his before the contraption that he has insisted that I see. I had been quite grouchily marking theory exercises for my mentor at the music school. Had Curufinwë not disturbed me, I would be nearly finished by now. Instead, I am standing in Atar's empty laboratory on a chilly evening in just a short-sleeved tunic, debating between using my hands to rub warmth back into my arms or massage away my growing headache while Curufinwë presents a contraption that seems made entirely of scrap metal and bristles like a thornbush made of steel.

The contraption is … I cannot understand it. Not in this state. My hand flutters to my forehead and rubs without much effect. Curufinwë explains.

"This," he says, pressing a hand to a metal disk, "is a tin plate. This is a piece of piping from the bellows. This--"

"Atar will be angry," I interject, feeling childish and petulant, "if you took apart the bellows."

Curufinwë gives me a look as though he is the one married and employed, with a house of his own, and not a child who, just last night, I had to carry up the stairs to bed. "I replaced the piece that I took," he says, "with one better."

"Ah. Of course." I clench my fist to keep it from wandering again to assuage my aching head.

"Anyway. This"--he strikes a flopping piece of metal with the flat of his hand--"is a saw." It makes a low spwoong sound, and I wince.

"I know all of that, Curufinwë. Once, I studied in Atar's forge, you know, and I did my share of chores in the kitchen." And I know that--no matter what you say and no matter that you are his favorite, at the moment at least--he will be angry when he discovers that you are nailing together his forge tools and his cookery to make … this. Whatever this is. "I would sooner you tell me what its purpose is, and why you have called me here to look at it."

"Why, it is a gift for you," he says with the innocent hurt that, coming from a small child, makes my heart ache with guilt for my doubt. He picks up two small hammers that I recognize also from Atar's collection of tools. "Watch me."

The hammers rain lightly upon a row of bottles, and a stream of notes trickle like water across stone. His hand snaps out on occasion to strike one of the pipes or the tin plates or the assorted bits of metal that look like demolished tin snips (oh, Curufinwë, you better hope you're Atar's favorite!) and he palms a hammer long enough to strike the saw with his fingertips. Spwoong. Spwoongwawawa. A zip with the handle along the row of bottles, and a shivery glissando raises the hair on my arms. By the pinched look of concentration on his face, he has worked harder on this song than the strange contraption that elicits it. He keeps rhythm upon a can filled with bolts, from the sound of it, then a can filled with sand. His hands are everywhere at once, the sounds romping with each other, madcap, about the tiny room.

He is breathless when he finishes. Though I have seen my brother hoist hammers too heavy for me but not his scrawny child's arms, he is brought low by a simple, flawed song played upon garbage. "It is not your begetting day," he says, "or a festival, but I finished building it and thought--" There, he stops. Wanly, he gestures at the ugly, unruly device, and I know that he awaits my appraisal of--and my mark upon--it.

I am not quite sure what to say about it. I tilt my head, as though that might make it look better.

"I have an idea," I say as Curufinwë's face begins to fall, hearing displeasure in my long silence. "Atar's begetting day is in a week, and I have been struggling with a song for him--"

Curufinwë's face splits into a grin, remarkably unrestrained. "Really? You will play it for Atar?" he says, and I think that if I'd smiled and informed him that his contraption had in fact wrought the Music of the Ainur, then he could not be happier.

"Yes," I say, and already, I am hearing my song to him rendered in metal and glass. My skin prickles with anticipation, my fingers already beginning to twitch in the shapes of chords. My mentor's students will have to wait a few days yet for their marked theory exams. "But there is one condition," I say to Curufinwë, and he waits, guarded, for me to go. "You must help me play it." At the wide smile upon his face, I trust that this will not be a problem.

V. Ambarussa

I put off returning to my father's home as long as I imagine that he will tolerate; longer than the standards of etiquette, certainly, but Atar has never been one to appreciate etiquette. A year prior, I answered the birth announcement with a note scrawled about a performance and a symphony in the final stages of completion and this and that obligation, and I knew that he would see the haste in my hand and understand. He does not need to know that I have since sat in the house, alone, unable to produce anything. He does not need to know that the haste came not from productivity but from a drive to dispatch as quickly as I could the pain that his words brought me.

Atar is a father again. Twice a father again. And after too many years of marriage, still, I am not.

He was just as surprised as I; this, I detected in the letter announcing that Amil was with child again, even if I have not Atar's proclivity for languages and undertones in texts. "A fortuitous accident," he called it when last I saw him; he was in the midst of his greatest project yet and surely didn't have the time to devote again to children. Laughing at this to show that he jested, but I saw the doubt in his eyes that he could make it work. Five sons was impressive; seven unheard of. "I'd never have thought it possible," he said, to which I laughed, "But Atar, nothing undone is impossible," wielding his own tiresome rhetoric against him as once he'd wielded it so often against me.

Yet it gives me hope. That I will myself become a father is so far undone, and therefore, not impossible.

When my brothers flocked to Amil's side during her pregnancy, I closed myself in my house, pulling curtains snug across the windows and barring any inquiry with excuses. I am busy. I haven't the time. Vingarië is in Alqualondë again, ignorant of her husband's despair, and I wander an empty house from where the music has gone, wringing hands that once seemed unable not to manifest a song--indeed, once there were too many songs, too many songs to sleep or pause even to eat--and pitying myself.

In the silence of the house, I realize that I do not know how I feel about Atar and his newest sons. My brothers. I do not know, and this frightens me. It frightens me to consider that I might be bitter toward my own brothers; envious of my own parents. How terrible can I be?

When Vingarië writes to say that she'll be returning within the week, then I realize that I no longer have a choice. I awaken one day, alone in my silent house, and dwell overlong on tasks that don't need doing until Telperion is deepening and evening is nigh. The ride to Atar's house beyond the city gates is a familiar one, and I can almost forget my dread. Dread! Yes, I dread that I will be so overwhelmed by jealousy that I will hate my brothers on sight. That this will prove why I am not yet a father: I do not deserve to be one.

Mists are rising from the earth and the Lights are mingling when I arrive at the gates. They are chocked open, and the garden is in disarray, and though it is late, there is not yet a curl of smoke indicating that supper has been started. I turn my horse into the paddock with the others--mud caking their coats for neglect of brushing--and forgo knocking at the door. Atar's house is almost as silent as mine, and this disarms me: Is this not the home of now two young children, probably just beginning to walk and babble, that should be full of scampering feet and laughing voices and the sorts of cries that announce scraped knees?

For a long while, I stand and listen. The urge to call out quickly passes; for weeks now, I have spoken to none save myself, and my tongue was not wont to unlearn this habit. Instead, I walk on silent feet through the house and listen: nothing. I can hear my own breathing and the rush of blood in my veins, so quiet is the house.

But then, there is a trickle of sound: so subtle and unformed that, for a heady moment, I think that the music in my mind has returned. I stop and close my eyes and listen--but, no, this comes not from within. I follow the sound up the stairs, where the thread-thin voice grows louder. Someone is singing, but not in words: a song familiar like I've heard it before; a song that awakens an ache of nostalgia near where lies my heart, so keen that I clench my fist to my chest to assuage it. But it will not cease--not the ache or the song--and I follow the voice that brings it.

Nay, voices. Two children sing in voices so alike that they become as one, and how they knew how one will progress in their wordless song, I cannot answer. The same has been asked of Vingarië and me; how we can play together as one when, in fact, we are improvising. Perhaps the answer was given long ago, when the Music of Eru unfurled throughout the heavens and made Arda and all within it, including our hearts that loved each other.

I come to my parents' bedroom. It is a mess: clothes tossed upon the floor and tangled with toys. Two toddlers have been besting their wearied parents, who never expected more children to raise and re-formed their lives around that certainty. Indeed, both Amil and Atar are stretched across the bed, atop the bedclothes with shoes still on their feet, lying in each other's arms as I remember from my earliest memories, coming to this very room with a tear-streaked face and nightmares to recount to summon them from dreams.

But they are not alone: at their heads sit the toddlers they never expected--red-haired, like Amil, and as bright-eyed as Atar--with a hand each upon our parents' hair. Their voices just learning to babble are low and sweet, the song they sing spun of instinct, and love, and lullabies: every lullaby Atar has ever sung to us, shifting seamlessly from one to the other.

In my mind, the music answers. A harp swells; a xylophone chuckles lightly. My fingers began to move slowly in the patterns they will play.

When the day comes when I will hold my own firstborn child--and one day, it will--then this is the first lullaby that I will sing.

VI. Fëanáro

"Macalaurë!"

The storm tosses harder, and for the briefest moment, Fëanáro loses his footing upon the deck. The confident rhythm of his footfalls--as confident as would have been the Telerin mariners whom they've dispatched from their ships--trips and falters, but quickly, he squares his shoulders again and moves on. The sodden heads that line the railings are dark-haired; the light in their eyes dimmed. "Macalaurë!" he calls again, and he turns to a young woman who wraps the railings with both arms, her mouth quivering with queasiness as the storm plays with the ships. "You! Have your seen my son? It is his turn to sit on the watch."

Her eyes avert to the clouded skies. "No," she says. "No, my king, I have not."

Fëanáro strides away. "King!" he shouts to the rain. "The King is dead! That is why we are here, recall. The King is dead!" A wave surges under the ship, and he staggers, almost falls. "Murdered! Dead!" Using the impetus of his near upset, he continues down the deck, but the confident rhythm of his footsteps has faltered. There is a roar of thunder, and in its wake, the sly word drunk, in a whisper, carried upon the wind. Rancor bristles the hairs on his arms and makes his blood surge so hard that the sound of his heartbeat drowns the rush of the rain. But he cannot tell which of the misery-lined faces has said it. "Macalaurë!" he shouts again and staggers on.

Descending into the hold, he finds Curufinwë and Maitimo kneeling outside the door to one of the cabins, hands clasped between them like they are children again, certainly not kinslayers still with blood under their nails. Neither hears Fëanáro approach, though he does not come quietly, and he opens his mouth to ask why they are not in the scullery, as he'd assigned them, when his blood slows enough that he can hear the music.

Music? It is not even music. It is noise. A pastiche of sound. An ancient song of comfort hastens into a begetting day march, into the song that Macalaurë wrote for his wedding. There is cacophony of the delightfully hideous sort that once Macalaurë played with Curufinwë for Fëanáro's own celebration, then slowing into a lullaby so familiar that Fëanáro's lips shape the words: over and over, these themes--and others--surface and surge and repeat. They are achieving coherence; winding into a single entity that is at once all that they have left behind.

All that we have lost. Fëanáro presses fingers to his lips. Did he speak? The door is in front of his face; his knees force apart his sons' linked hands. The song is coloring into lament. So many moments of joy, gone to gray!

"No!" he shouts. He thinks again of the sweet waters of Cuiviénen and the sight of unclouded stars; maybe his voice even makes sense of those thoughts? He is not sure. Hands are upon him, but he shakes them free. He lifts his fist. He pounds on the door.

The music stops.

But in his heart, it will never end.