Surprise by Dawn Felagund

Surprise

Read Surprise

Nerdanel was our surprise; this I said as way of introduction to friends and strangers alike, for it was the only way to explain her existence without using that other word, that word edged with cruelty and regret: mistake. Nerdanel was our surprise, not our mistake. Let delight eclipse our qualms shamefully felt though never admitted, even to the other, but in a glance.

Let others speculate what might have changed had our surprise not come upon us. We--my wife Istarnië and I--will not. Many have been the mistakes of the Noldor.

But Nerdanel was not one of them.

~oOo~

Long before Nerdanel arrived, I never intended to be a husband much less a father. I was the most promising of Aulë's apprentices, once; I was on my way to being released from his supervision and allowed to practice on my own when I met Istarnië, a student of the artist's college in Taniquetil who aspired to become, of all things, an illustrator of lorebooks. Her current project--being done with intentions, like mine, of at last passing her apprenticeship--was to illustrate a book on the making of the stars, and she needed to see the window in Aulë's workshop whence the first stars had flown as silver sparks in order that she may paint it accurately for her book.

Of course, in the furor of those final days of my apprenticeship, I knew nothing of this until called from the forges--having not slept for three nights by then--to see Aulë in his study. My mind bleared by exhaustion, with thought left only for my work and my studies, I nodded without hearing much of what he said, for my mind was conjuring magic in metal. There was a young woman in the corner of his office, gazing from the window at the courtyard where the new apprentices were being lectured by a master about annealing techniques for different metals and alloys. She wore a long dress like the students of the Vanyar wear that was the color of Aulë's wine-red drapes; she had a hat perched on her head with a pheasant feather jabbing out from the side of it and hair the color of dark, late-summer honey. I thought her beautiful, I know; a fitting subject for a statue.

Her presence was interesting but not particularly relevant until I realized that my master's command--that to which I was blithely nodding--was to take three days from my work to show her what she needed to see of Aulë's workshops and land. "You have progressed well ahead of the others in your cohort," Aulë told me mildly when my sudden realization of the meaning behind his words must have given way quickly to a gleam of displeasure in my eyes, "and I thought you deserving of the reward of reprieve." I dared not to voice my protests, not with the lady in the room. He knew this. He smiled. Your work is not all that there is to life, and it is dangerous to forget that. That thought was suddenly bright in my mind, and I knew it came from him.

And so I spent three days following the aloof Istarnië, a golden-haired student of the Vanyar though "a Noldo by ancestors' fealty sworn prior to the Great Journey," in her own words. She wanted to see the window, of course, and took the dimensions of it and the room with a tailor's tape, and she wanted to see also the anvil that had been involved and ingots of the shape of those struck and the hammer, if I had it. She asked me questions about metalsmithing and took notes when I enthusiastically answered. She sketched constantly, and I quickly learned to take it as a matter of course as she sketched a hammer or a drape or my swiftly gesturing hands. "You have such passion for your work," she told me once in a distant voice, to which I answered, "And do you not?"

"Of course I do," she replied in the same mild voice, as though it was a matter of fact and, therefore, not worth expending the emotion to demonstrate further.

But nature took its course with Istarnië and me, and thoughts of her invaded my single-minded pursuit of my work, though I fought to suppress it, and less than a year after we passed our apprenticeships, we announced our intentions to marry, and only a bit over a year after the ceremony, Minyaní was born, and my work turned to making shovel blades and ploughshares, which brought food to the table and wood to the stove, if not joy to my heart. That duty was gladly taken over by my young daughter, and then Maikwendë, born only seven years later. Istarnië continued working at her paintings and worked with a few loremasters of renown, though not many. I beat out black steel banisters for the new homes the Noldor were building outside Tirion and kept my daughters in linen dresses and with lorebooks enough to keep their quick minds busy, and I thought of how the day I'd met Istarnië, I'd been unable to stop my work even to sleep, and I wondered at that. How quickly I'd set aside my life's work for these strangers! I watched the others in my cohort--once sent to me for remediation--surpass me and earn illustrious commissions and even begin taking on apprentices while I told bedtime stories and changed diapers and twisted hot black steel into practical shapes in my vice, a task that a forge assistant could be trusted to do.

Yet why did I not regret it?

But when Maikwendë drew near to her fortieth year, I realized that my time--and Istarnië's as well, for motherhood did not come without sacrifices--to excel in my field was at last arrived, and those of my cohorts with their illustrious commissions and apprentices and renown were themselves marrying and producing children, and it was their turn to languish while I flourished, only my arduous days in the forge were softened by a return at day's end to my wife and daughters, where their own had been to an empty room in the city and a lonely supper for one.

I made the right choice, I told myself over and over. I made the right choice, I made the right choice.

As word of our success spread, the commissions began to come for Istarnië and me both. I made a statue for one of the King's lords that was an alloy of my own development: a scarlet bronze with a bluish cast that had once stopped Aulë in the doorway to the forge, his hand pressing his breast, the artificer of the deep veins of metal in the earth, he who always had a critique readied upon his tongue, left for once without words. Another lord wished a golden circlet for his daughter's coming-of-age, and a well-known poet in Taniquetil required Light-catchers with crystals set inside of gold that would dapple the insides of his rooms with Light. With great joy, I worked, and for the first time, when an order came for ploughshares, I sent the messenger on down the road, to a young smith who I knew needed the work, and I celebrated that night with my family.

"Two daughters and a wife both brilliant and beautiful and work that keeps busy both hands and mind and puts bread upon the table: what a lucky man I am!" I hoisted my wineglass high, and laughing, Minyaní and Maikwendë mirrored me--for they were at the age where a second glass of wine with supper, for pleasure and not satiation of thirst, had become a treasured privilege denoting their maturity--and we all drank deeply, but Istarnië only sipped hers and honored Minyaní further by proffering a third glass, gladly accepted.

I thought not much of it. Istarnië liked to work late into the night, finding her inspiration in the silver hours, and the steady hands required by her work were betrayed by too much drink, and so often, she abstained. But this night, she went not to her workshop after supper but followed me to our bedroom, where I had intentions of retiring early in order to begin work again at the Mingling. "Mahtan," she said, sitting beside me on the bed as I removed my boots and placing a hand gently upon my arm. Still heady with wine and whelmed with happiness, I responded with passion, and tipped her back to the bed to kiss her full on the mouth. But her body stiffened beneath me, and when I paused, she slipped away.

"Mahtan, that is not why I have come," she said as she straightened her dress. "Your words this night came too soon, my love. I have suspected for some time but … but I saw a healer today. I am with child again and will deliver next winter." Her hand pressed her belly, and she did not meet my eyes. "I am sorry."

"Sorry?" I caught her in my arms and tilted her chin so that her eyes met mine. "It is nothing to be sorry for! It is joyful news! I am to be a father again!" But my voice sounded hollow even to me, and I regretted the ploughshares sent on to another smith this day: soon, I would need more bread on the table each night, more dresses, more books. Even as I gave reassurances that sounded false to my own ears, my first thought slunk beneath them and whispered in my mind: a mistake. A mistake. I held Istarnië close so that she would not see the dismay on my face, at both our circumstance and my reaction to it.

Amid my joy of the recent days, my passions for my wife had increased. No longer smothered by discontent at the meager work I performed, my desire for her flourished until it nearly equaled what I'd experienced in the earliest days of our marriage. Istarnië, so often aloof, could be convinced if one knew the right ways, and I had done well in learning them. Yet, also, I was cautious--knowing that three conceptions were not uncommon among Elves of our generation--and I took care to withdraw from her before final consummation. Yet not always. Clearly, not always, for there were times when our passions overwhelmed us to where remaining united bodily until utter fulfillment seemed inevitable; the opposite even painful to contemplate.

Utter fulfillment was precisely what had come to pass, I realized.

A surprise. The next day, I shifted my perceptions much in the way that a beam of light--being interrupted by a mirror--bends and darts in new ways; it is the same light, yes, but it shines upon a different corner of the room and banishes new shadows. A surprise, not a mistake. It is a surprise.

I accepted a commission for an iron washtub from a farmer to the north. I tried not to begrudge my unborn child the crafts left unfinished beneath a drape on my worktable, abandoned in favor of menial--but profitable--work. It is a surprise, I told myself again.

It. I realized that I had no feeling of the child. With both of my daughters, I suspected their existence before Istarnië had made her announcement to me, and I had known their genders, at the least, only a short time into her pregnancy. But this one, I did not. Slow awareness of its existence was creeping over me, but it felt no different than I felt in perceiving myself each morning, lying still in the bed with my eyes closed to all save the Light, which permeated red through my eyelids no matter how tight I squeezed them. There simply seemed to be more of me. My thoughts took a different cant or mulled and swirled in places I'd never bothered to consider before. As I walked to my forge each morning, my gaze was drawn to the north and east of the house, toward Tirion, where a single slender spire rose above the trees and the Mindon Eldaliéva blazed atop it like a fallen star. As I ate my midday meal upon the cool grass outside of the forge, listening to the faint voices of my daughters reciting history texts in unison to Istarnië, I found myself gazing toward the city and the light atop the tower. Else I'd pause in my work to check it from the west-facing window. The hair rose on my arms and I was in dread of what lay beneath that tower in Tirion, yet I could not look away.

Istarnië's pregnancy progressed, and she grew big in the belly, and she took to giving our girls assignments to read rather than listening to them recite. I found her in her study, at her easel, painting a color plate for a book, yet her easel was turned from the Light. She faced the window, where the Mindon blazed.

"Do you feel our child?" I asked in a voice not strong enough to hide my fear. She was painting the King as he'd stepped onto Aman from Eressëa for the first time, so long ago.

"Of course." Her brush moved frantically. Finwë's upraised sword--a crude strip of iron hammered thin with rocks--was a fiber of light upon the canvas. "She is another girl. You do not feel her because she is much like you. Save in one way only."

"What is that?" I asked softly, in dread of the answer.

Istarnië glanced at me with the hard, indifferent look to which I had become so accustomed across the years of our marriage. "You know, Mahtan. She is a girl-child, and she will have a woman's weaknesses. Husband, children." Specks of light flourished in the King's eyes, the precise hue of the Mindon blazing in her window: light pure and clear that strips the shadows from all, save the inexplicable dread that huddled in my heart.

~oOo~

Our surprise was born on a winter's morning, following the night of a traditional harvest dance when rumor has young Eldar wed in the shadows in the forest. The labor was long and difficult for Istarnië, who'd had no problems bearing either of our daughters before, but as the Mingling went to gold, a rosy-skinned baby girl at last arrived into the air, delivered into the hands of our midwife. With both Minyaní and Maikwendë, their first breaths preceded a lusty cry, but this little girl took her first drink of air and opened eyes startling gray, like the light atop the Mindon. And looked right at me.

"She knows her father!" proclaimed the midwife, and the child was passed into my hands so that the cord could be cut. The breath caught in my chest, I held my third-born daughter in my arms. She was bigger than her sisters had been, and the hair upon her head, I imagined, would be red-hued like mine and her eyes … she did not cry but she watched my face, and so silent were we both that Istarnië sat up in her bed to ask what was wrong.

"Nothing is wrong," I said, as I at last passed our daughter to her. "She does not cry, but she is otherwise healthy. This is a child who will know joy!"

"She will," said Istarnië. "For a spell."

~oOo~

Spring came, and pink blossoms showered the road to our house, stirred daily by the hooves of messengers delivered requests for commissions that, more often than not, delighted me these days. Rumor was spreading around the countryside and, most importantly, in Tirion that a metalsmith once an apprentice of Aulë did favorable work to delight the eye and mind. And then the day came when a message arrived bearing the seal of the King, delivered by a messenger who wore his colors. The King desires to install a corona in his hall in order to light the Essecarmë ceremony of his imminent son and requests a submission by each of the eminent metalsmiths in central Aman so that he may choose. All craftsmen will be given recompense, and those coronas not chosen will be used elsewhere in the palace or in the homes of the King's lords. As a former apprentice of Aulë and eminent in your own rights--

And that was all that I needed to read.

I will forever remember the day that I began work on the corona for the King, shaping metal rings within each other, garnished with delicate chain nets in which one might suspend small candles, giving (I hoped) an effect of dancing starlight wrought in flame. The day was hot, more akin to summer than to spring, and the garden outside my forge full of silence so thick that even my hammerfalls seemed swallowed by it. Enough to swallow a scream, I thought, but then there were hoofbeats on the road, shattering the silence.

Another messenger, I suspected, but it was not. It was our neighbor to the north, a farmer with citrus orchards, riding breathless upon his painted horse. "Mahtan!" I heard him call. "Mahtan! Hail!"

And stepping from the forge, the day exploded with noise.

Trees lashed upon a sudden wind, and a flock of startled birds burst into the sky. In the distance, I heard a growl of thunder, and, from the house, the rare, thin cry of my baby daughter. The farmer's mouth was moving, but I shook my head: I could not hear him. "The Prince!" he shouted. "The Prince is born in Tirion!"

Trees tormented by the wind seemed to thrash the tower, but the Mindon blazed, ever blazed, undimming. From the house, the baby cried louder.

I saw my visitor's nervous glance toward the house, and he was already edging toward his horse to go to the next house, where his news might be received with more acclaim. "Well, I'll leave you to get back," he mumbled and was gone not long after in a clatter of hoofbeats.

"The Prince," I whispered. I drifted back into the forge to look upon my corona, under which--if my work was of the quality that I hoped it was--that prince would receive his father-name. I imagined it filled with candlelight and could not. No, the light that burned within it was different, and standing beneath it was not the King and the Prince in his arms but my daughter--Nerdanel--and a black-haired youth. The light, it was clear and blue. The light, it was like

starlight
the Mindon

the white fire in that youth's eyes, and the baby that wept wasn't my Nerdanel but was held close in her arms, and the name that was spoken was that of a different prince, in a bright and beautiful voice that one could not help but to heed in the same way that a moth immolates itself within a candle flame: "And I will call him Nelya--"

The wind slammed the door of my forge, and I was startled from my vision.

My daughter still screamed. Where was Istarnië, who was supposed to watch her that day? When last I'd seen her, she'd been intently working upon a painting of the marriage of our King and the Queen Þerindë; she had not replied to my call, but often she does not. Yet our child--

As I began my walk to the house, the first fat drops of rain fell from the sudden dark clouds overhead. I began to run. The baby's--Nerdanel's--cries were obliterated by the storm, yet I could hear them still, in the place where the ears speak to the mind, and I could feel them, in the space around my heart. The rain fell in sheets, and I ran, and I did not know why but for the sudden terrifying certainty that my daughter was in danger.

But when I came to the nursery, she lay sleeping and, when I lifted her into my arms, she awakened and fixed her eyes upon me as she had on the day she was born, and I felt her wonder at the water on my face that was part rain, part tears.

Outside the window the world wept.

But Nerdanel smiled.

---

Chapter End Notes

Author's Notes:

The bit about the first stars flying from the window of Aulë's workshop comes from one of the most gorgeous passages of The Book of Lost Tales 1, "The Coming of the Elves and the Making of Kôr":

A bason filled with the radiance of Telimpë was by his side, and this he used cunningly in his craft, but now Varda stood before him and said: "The Eldar have come!" and Aulë flung down his hammer saying: "Then Ilúvatar hath sent them at last," and the hammer striking some ingots of silver upon the floor did of its magic smite silver sparks to life, that flashed from his windows out into the heavens. Varda seeing this took of that radiance in the bason and mingled it with molten silver to make it more stable, and fared upon her wings of speed, and set stars about the firmament in very great profusion, so that the skies grew marvellously fair and their glory was doubled …

There is no mention of this in The Silmarillion, but I've always loved the idea and so indulged in using it here.