Bee-Elves by darthfingon

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Bee-Elves 1

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The Hithaeglir, as the locals call the mountain range, could rival the Pelóri for height and majesty.  Cutting across the earth as far as the eye could see, sheer rocky faces rose up before us with their fringes of wayward trees.  Hazy blue-grey peaks disappeared into the clouds like towers to the heavens.  The view as we approached, breaking out on a trail from the woods, was nothing less than breathtaking.  Such glorious, wild lands.  Nowhere in Valinor is like that place: wide open hills under an infinite blanket of sky, surrounded for miles on all sides by echoing wilderness.

"Well, that'll be a dog's labour to cross," said Canamírë.  He spat on his hands and rubbed them together, trying to wipe away some of the grime, then spat again onto the grass and cleared his throat with an ear-grating hack.  He truly was a most uncouth individual.  Of course, I should likely have expected nothing less, having found him in a prison.

"And what lies on the other side?" I asked him.

He shrugged, picked his teeth, and made some indefinite mumbles.  "Can't right say.  Never been this way..."  His voice trailed off into a grunt.

"Cuiviénen?"

"Can't right say," he repeated

As a source of reassurance, Canamírë left much to be desired.  He seemed to have a terror of giving anyone false hope, and thus refused to advise on anything he did not know for absolute certain.  But as a guide, he had not yet failed.  Even having never been here before, he knew as well as I did what waited for us across the peaks of the Hithaeglir.  We both knew the story: how Lenwë and his Nandor turned back at the sight of those looming teeth of ice and snow.  If the lost Nandor were on the other side of these mountains, then Cuiviénen could not be far.

"We suspect we shall discover soon enough," I said.  "Let us carry on."

"Due east," Canamírë told the porters in that other language of theirs.  Then he said something about south, and finding a river.  I was able to pick out words here and there, and little slivers of phrases.  This language, Sindarin as Canamírë called it, was not so different from our speech of the West once one learned to listen past its choppy structure overcrowded with lazily buzzing consonants.  It reminded me of bumblebees.  Privately, I sometimes thought of the Sindar as Bee-Elves.

The two porters nudged our ponies forward, and Canamírë and I continued on, setting a slow pace with the sinking sun at our backs.  Somewhere in the forest he had found himself a walking stick, which he used to beat down the grass ahead of us as we walked, side by side.  He said nothing.  At first, early in our journey, I had found him to be a talkative sort, but he soon grew silent.  Perhaps he had run out of things to say.  He had once been a merchant, after all, and was accustomed only to speaking to others for short periods of time.  He had used up all of his conversation with me within two weeks.

All I knew about Canamírë were his hard facts.  He had been born in Tirion and followed my brother Fëanáro out of Valinor as part of the elite group of Fëanáro's most fervid supporters.  Thence he came to Hisilómë: Nolofinwë's domain.  When he first told me his story, I had smiled at the synchronicity of fate.  He had already served my two brothers, each in turn.  Then he became my guide.  Canamírë was bound to my family in his own, strange way.  He knew my brothers, and also my sons.

He had made a quick fortune trading salt in Hisilómë before turning his eye further afield, bringing exotic spices and rarities from the warm lands of the south and east to the hands of Noldorin kings in the north.  That was where he had been when Hisilómë fell to Melkor's demons: safely away in the south.  He had returned to find a city in ruins, his home destroyed, his wife gone, and no sign of his son, daughter, grandchildren, or anyone else.  All of his life had disappeared.  Having heard this story, I found myself unable to fault him for his few eccentricities, his bluntness, or his silence.  Here was a man who had lost everything.  It was a wonder he was still sane.

Or largely sane.  He never would tell me what he had done to land himself in prison.  His murky hints on the subject suggested that what he had done was perfectly legal by Noldorin standards, and he had been surprised to find the Nandor objecting so vehemently.

I looked at him as we walked, stealing sideways glances as he stared at the ground.  I wondered, as I had wondered many times previously, what he had been like in more peaceful times.  Who had Canamírë the merchant been, as opposed to Canamírë the prisoner and Canamírë the outlaw?  He would have looked different at home in Hisilómë.  Here in the wilderness his hair was dry as straw, bleached brown by the sun, and he let it fall in careless tangles down his back.  The skin on his face and lower arms was weathered tough and red-brown, but beneath his shirt he was pale as any courtier.  Perhaps once, long ago, he had looked as if he belonged in noble households.  No longer.  He had become dirty and coarse, spattered with mud, spotted with stains, and smelling of old sweat.

His inelegance never failed to make me question my own appearance.  Every time he scratched at the dust on his skin or pushed his soiled hair back out of his eyes, I could not help but adjust my hood to better hide my face, and check my clothing for dirt.  If we came to a stream and he splashed a little ineffective water over himself in place of properly bathing, I would take the time to wade in and wash every part of my body.  I washed my clothes.  He did not.  I remained reasonably confident that I did not look as bad as he.  But there we were in the middle of the wild lands with no such luxury as a mirror, so who could say?

~

That night we camped in the foothills of the Hithaeglir, and I tried yet again to strike a conversation.  "How many Nandorin kings do you suppose there are, Canamírë?"

He grunted as he stared at the fire.

"One?  One high king?  Or do they have a number of lesser princes that they follow?"

"Hundreds," said Canamírë.

"Hundreds of... kings?"

"Their system is not like ours," he explained.  "We organise our lands into kingdoms covering vast areas, and a Noldorin king might rule over thousands of people he never meets.   A Nandorin king is king of his village only.  In the next village or tribe, he is no more important than any man.  Each kingdom is very small and contained, and each king has limited power."

"Now that is silly.  Be it necessary to command the Nandor as a whole, who will rule them if they have no single high king?"

Canamírë looked up from the fire to smile at me as if he were amused by such a practical notion.  "And that is exactly why the Nandor have no high king: so no single man has the authority to speak for all of them."

"But why should they want such chaos?" I asked.

"It's in their history," said Canamírë.  "They were all called Teleri once, you know.  And then they became Nandor when one man, Lenwë, refused to cross these very mountains.  After that...  Well.  You know how one crack in the glass is all it takes for the whole thing to eventually shatter.  After Lenwë's refusal, the Teleri shattered.  Elwë and Olwë remained kings as we Noldor understand the term, but outside of those two groups, the shards of what had once been the largest of the Eldarin kindreds went scattering across the land.  Now they are so divided it would be impossible to put them back together again.  The disparate tribes have come to value their freedom too much."

He paused long enough to prod the fire logs with his foot: a practice that always made me nervous.  He always came too close to catching fire.   The toes of both his boots were already charred from doing this too many times.  "Course, a similar thing happened to the Noldor," he continued.  "Some followed Fëanáro, some followed Nolofinwë, some followed your sons and nephews...  Reckon you had the same divisive problems in Tirion after we left?"

"No," I said sharply.  How rude of him to even suggest it.  With Ingwë on my side and Fëanáro out of the picture, no-one would dare try such foolishness.  "But what you have told us only proves that our mission is valid, Canamírë.  These people have been wallowing in error for far too long.  One has need of structure in one's life in order to flourish.  One has need of proper leadership.  One has need to be part of the large group.  It is obvious that they all must come to Valinor, where they might live in peace and prosperity under High King Ingwë.  We are all of us Eldar.  We must therefore all be Eldar together: Vanyar, Noldor, and Teleri alike."

"And how many kings have you met so far, and how many have you told of this plan?"

"Three.  But that is a decent start.  Three and several minor chiefs who might be kings.  We will find the rest of them."

"If you say so," was all he said in reply.  Then, with a yawn, he lay down beside the fire and pulled his cloak over his body, covering his face.  That was the end of that conversation.

~

The first king I met was the king of the Noldor: Findetáro, son of my nephew Findekáno.  He instructed me to call him Ereinion and spoke Quenya very poorly for someone of his high birth.  That was during the second year of the war, after Eönwë decided the Eldarin kings were too valuable and expressly forbade Ingwion and me from participating in any sort of battle.  So we remained on an island in the south with Findetáro Ereinion and conducted the business of war from there.  For a time, at least.

The second king I met was, in fact, no king at all, but rather a Sindarin prince acting as lord of his people.  They had come, they told me, from the land of Lestanórë, which had once been ruled by Elwë Singollo but now lay in ruins.  Lestanórë had 'shattered'.  After Elwë's death, its people ceased to exist as a united whole.  Some went south, some went east, and some simply disappeared, never to be seen again.  The prince I met had travelled east, in search of a company of rebels who had fled Lestanórë under the leadership of a known outlaw.  His goal was to find them and bring them back under the proper rule of a Sindarin king, which is to say, him.  However, after nearly three years of painstakingly slow migration, his party had abandoned their journey and decided to settle on the shores of a northerly lake.  That was where Canamírë and I found them.

The prince, some nephew or cousin of Elwë, was named Celeborn.  And although he did not know it, he was my son by marriage.

The third king was Nandorin.  I refer to him as the third because I did not know he was a king until that night in the foothills when Canamírë told me about the Nandorin system, even though I met him before I found Celeborn.  I thought him a chieftain at the time.  He was head of a large village in the land called Ossiriand, west over the mountains from Celeborn's lake.  His village was where I found Canamírë imprisoned.

~

I could have wept for joy the day we crested the rise of a mountain pass and I saw, for the first time in nineteen days, flat land on the horizon.

"A-ha!" Canamírë shouted, turning to grin at me.  "Told you we'd not die in these mountains."

I allowed him a thin smile.  No, we did not die in those mountains.  We merely froze half to death, scrounged for roots and edible leaves amid the cliffs of inhospitable rock to keep from starving, sustained scrapes and bruises, tore our clothes, and lost one of the ponies thanks to a broken leg.  We did not die, but those nineteen days of stumbling blindly through an uncharted mountain range might as well have been a year for the misery they caused.  I still marvel that we survived at all.

"One more night up here," Canamírë continued.  "Tomorrow we should be down in the lowlands again."

And so we were. By the next afternoon, the hills had flattened out around us and the crumbling rock segued into scrubby forests, which in turn gave way to a meadow of sweet-blooming plants that looked like clover grown waist-high.  This meadow's surfeit of vegetation made it almost as slow to cross as the treacherous mountain trails had been.  The disarray of stems whipped and tangled our ankles, staining our clothing green in retribution for every broken leaf.  The blossoms made a pleasant tea in the evening, though, and our remaining pony ate the plants whole with such enthusiasm that one might have thought she was attempting to double in size.

On our third morning of meandering in a south-easterly direction, we came to a great river flowing down from the north.  It was as wide as its brother Sirion I had met in the west of Endor, and just as fierce.  Only the crossing of Sirion had been aided by boats, of which now we had none.  This river was too deep, too wide, and too fast to safely swim with all of our belongings.

"Cuiviénen lies to the south," said Canamírë.  "We will need to cross at some point, but it needs not be now.  We can continue south and see if we come to ford."

I nodded in agreement.  Canamírë was the guide, and there was nothing else I could do.  He stood beside me with his hand at his brow to shield his eyes from the sun, looking slowly from east to south as if the shape of the land might give him a better idea of exactly where we should be headed.  To the east, across the river, the horizon was edged with a strip of hazy blue-green that announced the presence of a vast forest.  To the south, more trees awaited.

"Shall we try to reach that forest tonight?" I asked, nodding to the south.

"Might as well," Canamírë answered.  "Gives us a goal to work toward, if nothing else."

He hitched his pack up higher on his back, a gesture that all of us now repeated countless times every day in the absence of the second pony, and we started off again southward through the clover.  By sunset we had reached the forest's edge.  The Sindarin porters set up camp, if one can call four thin bedrolls clustered around a fire a 'camp', and Canamírë went about his usual business of preparing our supper.  That night, we slept under the rustling leaves instead of the light of the stars.  After so long out in the open, it felt almost like being indoors.

The dream that came to me was a pleasant one.  I was back in the seaside house at Alqualondë with my wife.  But it seemed that hardly anything had happened in this welcome dream before I woke with a start to one of Canamírë's hands clapped over my mouth and the other holding me by the arm, silently urging me not to move.

"Shh!" he whispered as soon as he saw I had woken.  He released his grip and gestured with his chin to the far side of the clearing.  I lifted my head just enough to find what he wanted me to see, and froze as I did.  Three shadowy figures had gathered around our packs and appeared to be rummaging through them.

"Nandor," Canamírë explained.

On a quick glance around, I could see that the two Sindarin porters were also awake, watching, but had not moved.  Looking back to the Nandor, I understood why.  The three of them were armed with long spears.  Any sudden movement from us and resulting overreaction from them could end badly.

After a long and tense while, during which I hardly dared to breathe, one of the Nandor turned to look at us.  He seemed unsurprised in the least to find us awake and staring back at him.

"Má," he said.

Canamírë and I did as we were told and sat up to raise our hands above our heads; the Sindarin porters followed our lead and did the same.  The Nandorin man frowned, looking confused.  Canamírë and I exchanged a glance.  Perhaps the word meant something different in the Nandorin language than it did in ours.

Now that we were all awake and sitting upright, all three Nandor granted themselves an invitation to stare at us as if we were some manner of curiosity.  I stared back in return.  They were odd-looking fellows to be sure.  All of them had their hair done up in a number of small plaits, decorated with feathers, shells, stone and wooden beads, and bits of leather.  The one who had spoken to us wore a small leather flap over his lower regions, but the other two appeared to have no such modesty.  The one to his left wore a skirt of feathers that covered little, while the one to his right wore nothing at all save some decorations on his arms and around his neck.  All of them bore abstract marks painted in black, red, and grey on their chests, arms, and legs.

I could not help but stare at the naked man as he and the other two came close to examine us.  He stood directly in front of my face and leaned over, touching my unbound hair, my foreign clothing, and my skin.  He poked my cheeks and felt the width of my nose, and I could do nothing but shudder with discomfort at the sight of his intimate areas so plainly on display.  The one wearing the flap must have noticed my embarrassment.  He also must have been their leader, because he smacked the naked one across the chest while barking a handful of words I could not understand.  Chastised, the naked one retrieved a small tube of animal fur from the pouch that hung about his neck.  He fit this over his penis, tying it in place with a thin leather thong.  The clothed one nodded in approval, and both of them returned to their business of prodding the intruders.  I did not know what to say.  As a result, I said nothing.  Fur tubes apparently passed for adequate apparel among these Nandor.

After what felt like half an hour of examination, during which all three Nandor pinched and poked and sniffed and patted the four of us, I finally risked whispering to Canamírë.  "Do you suppose they will take us to their King?"  If nothing else, after being forced to endure sitting eye to groin with a Nandorin warrior, I believed I had the right to meet their King.

Canamírë replied with an exaggeratedly uncertain face and mouthed the words, Not the best time.  The man in the feather skirt appeared to be trying to undress him.

Perhaps it was not, but meeting kings was exactly why I had started on this absurd adventure in the first place.  And it was obvious, from my very intimate point of view, that the King of these people needed to be met.  They were wild and unclad, running about the woods as animals.  What sort of life was that for noble Quendi?  These were exactly the folk I had set out to find.  Now that I had found them, it was imperative that I persuade them to seek the glory of Valinor.  They were wretched savages.  They needed to be redeemed.

I was about to speak to Canamírë again when the Nandorin man in leather gestured to his fellows  and the three of them removed from our presence to huddle and whisper amongst themselves.  I could hear nothing of what they said, but from their posture I could see that the mood had shifted from curiosity to suspicion.  They huddled only a moment.  When they returned, their faces had taken on far less innocent expressions, and they held their spears at the ready.

"Adreg!" said the leader.  He pointed to the forest's edge, stomped his foot, and glared at us as if daring anyone to defy his order.

Even without understanding the language it was clear what his order was.  We were being evicted from Nandorin property.

"Do you suppose we ought try reason with them and request an audience with the King?" I asked Canamírë as we hastily rolled up our beds.

"No," answered Canamírë.

"But-"

"No."  He gave a sharp nod toward one of the porters, who had just engaged the feather-skirted warrior in a game of tug-of-war for ownership of the bedroll.   The feather-skirted man growled, bared his teeth, and held up his spear.  The porter quickly surrendered the match with a respectful bow.

In light of that scene, I had to agree.  We fled the forest as quickly as we could, before the Nandor decided to appropriate any more of our belongings.

"Perhaps on the return?" I suggested.

Canamírë grunted.  "We'll see."

~

We did not camp again that night, but, once out of the forest, kept walking due east until we reached a cliff at the edge of the river.  This left us with two problems.   We could not go east without swimming, and we could not go south without once again trespassing on the land of the angry warriors with a dearth of clothing.  All we could do was wait until dawn and hope that a solution revealed itself by light of day.  A sandbar in the river, perhaps: a shallow area where we could easily cross without having to swim.

As it happened, something did appear, and it was a thing none of us had expected to see.

"Is that a... a bridge?"

Canamírë squinted down the golden-pink ribbon of the river at the sun's first light, and I immediately stepped up beside him to see what he had noticed.  Indeed, a dark line appeared to span from bank to bank some miles downstream.  We shared a surprised glance.  Even if it was not a bridge, it was something worth investigating.

We set out toward it, with Canamírë in front shouting instructions back to me and the porters in both languages.  "Stay to the shore.  We cannot risk entering the forest again; the Nandor know we are here and will be watching us.  Careful!  The rocks are slippery."

Here, the shore was neither grassy nor sandy as it had been before.  Along the brushy edge of the forest, the river was bordered with rocks and roots. A spit of gravelled beach appeared at times, allowing us to walk easily, but just as often we would be faced with a cliff of hard dirt or a snarl of roots protruding from the bank.  Within an hour we were filthy from climbing over the roots and wet to our thighs from having to wade when we could find no foothold in the dirt cliffs.  Our progress was so slow that it was late afternoon before we finally came to the bridge.

It was like no bridge I had ever seen.  I was familiar with simple bridges spanning bank to bank in a single arch, but those could only ever be built over narrow creeks.  This river was far too wide for such a thing.  By Noldorin standards, any bridge here should have had at least five stone supports plunging down into the water.  This bridge had none.  In fact, it appeared to float on the river's surface.  As we came closer to inspect it, it became clear that this was exactly what the bridge did.  It floated.  Composed of hundreds of logs all tied together and bobbing in the current, the bridge used the very water for support.  It appeared to be holding up well enough.  From the weathering of the logs, it was not a recent addition to the landscape.

"Suppose nobody travels by boat hereabouts," said Canamírë.

I had not even considered that, but it was true that the bridge acted not only as a bridge but also as a blockade.  A boat could not pass without first destroying it.  Whether or not this was intentional or merely a side effect of the bridge's simple construction, we had no way to know.

Our remaining pony flatly refused to step onto the swaying, shuddering bridge, so we allowed her to swim while the Sindarin porters carried the baggage.  As we crossed, it became evident that the bridge had not been built and then abandoned.  It was still in use.  Every so often, we would see a new log in among those that had weathered, which meant that the bridge was under frequent repair.  No wood was broken or rotted.  This raised questions about whose bridge it was: who had built it, and who used it?