Praying for Lightning by Himring

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Chapter 1

 

Using Quenya names, mostly (Maitimo/Russandol=Maedhros, Macalaure=Maglor, Turukano=Turgon, Feanaro=Feanor, Arafinwe=Finarfin, Findarato=Finrod Felagund, Findekano=Fingon)

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I

I sit on the bed, cross-legged, a blanket draped across my bare shoulders. The fire throws light and shadows onto the walls. Beside me, almost touching my left knee, Russandol lies asleep, his hair fanning out across the pillow.

Love affects us in different ways, Russandol and me. I feel have waited so long for these nights... For only a year, says a dry, schoolteacherly voice in my head. Forever, another, more impassioned one responds—they are probably talking about different things and are both right. Now that we are finally here together, I don’t want to take my eyes off him. I don’t want to stop listening, even if there is nothing to hear, his quiet breath inaudible over the crackle and hiss of the fire.

Russandol, on the other hand, seems to feel that this is as safe as it is going to get here in Middle-earth—the two of us together behind the thick, well-defended walls of Himring, myself within arm’s reach of him, and his own body between me and anything that might come through the door, locked and barred as it is—and his brother Macalaure also behind the same thick walls, in a guest chamber not too far away. Anxiety briefly relaxes its grip on Russandol and he dozes off. Even so, there is something watchful about his sleeping form; he lies so very straight, as if he had aligned himself exactly parallel to the side of the bed.

There is nowhere else I want to be, no other time, just here and now. I just want to trace those familiar lines with my eyes all over again, from his forehead all the way down to the arches of his feet, resting my gaze on each curve and hollow of his body. But tonight the past won’t leave me alone. Maybe it’s the unabashed greed with which I’m indulging my eyes that, by sheer, forcible contrast, evokes the memory of the time when I thought I never wanted to see him again...

II

 

I stumble the path down to the beach in haste, my eyelids sore with exhaustion, my head continuing to churn with fruitless thought. Turukano is somewhere behind me. My father awaits us below. Otherwise the beach is almost empty.

‘They’re gone!’, Atar greets me, when I finally reach him. ‘They upped sticks hours ago—simply got on those ships and left!’ He’s got that old, familiar look on his face, half enraged, half vindicated. Look what Feanaro did to me! Sometimes I think he must have had the same look on his face when he was a toddler, the time Feanaro accidentally on purpose stepped on his toy cart and Atar rushed off to complain to Grandfather about it. It seems oddly inappropriate now, when our world has changed so much in the last few days. But we’re all still struggling to adjust and I suppose it’s unreasonable to expect Atar to develop a whole new set of facial expressions overnight.

I take another look at the empty beach, as if it wasn’t obvious enough. Then I narrow my eyes and peer out across the water, as if I were trying to catch sight of the receding ships. ‘Umm, yes’, I manage and cringe inwardly. I have once again failed to display proper filial indignation at my father’s treatment at the hands of Feanaro.  At this moment, Turukano arrives and is, of course, gratifyingly vocal.

If Atar only knew that this time his wayward eldest son is not trying to find excuses for his uncle and cousins. This time what I’m trying so hard not to say is something completely different, but I cannot afford to say it, because it is so plainly irrational. For the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the forsaken beach, devoid of Feanorians, and the empty harborage was:  ‘Oh good. They’re gone and they’ve taken those cursed ships with them. That means I don’t have to look at them anymore.’

I suppose if we had taken the same decision as Uncle Arafinwe, I could permit myself to think that with perfect impunity—except that I would not be thinking it, because I would be on my way back to Tirion, not standing here on this desolate beach. But Atar is bound to follow Feanaro to Middle-earth, not just by his word—although, knowing Atar, that itself might be enough—but by that whole messy tangle of emotions that ties him to his father and his brother and seems to have gone finally altogether toxic at Grandfather’s death. (Did Melkor know what he was doing to us, I wonder, when he killed Finwe? Did he attack Formenos for another reason apart from stealing the Silmarils?)

Atar is going to Middle-earth to prove to Feanaro and the ghost of our grandfather whatever that will prove, our people are going to follow him there, so it is my duty to want those ships back where they were yesterday (or, since there are no days now, at the time when everyone lay down to rest), for the ships offer the safer passage. But as for myself...

I wasn’t all that surprised that I turned out to be capable of killing people. I suppose there was always that bad moment during the hunt when the animal stops being a live creature and becomes meat and fur and bones to give warning how easily life can be extinguished. Although that doesn’t mean that the battle in Alqualonde, its kaleidoscopic sequence of brief moments of clear frozen horror interspersed with minutes and hours of complete, brutal confusion, wasn’t profoundly disturbing in itself, it was the aftermath and the gradual revelation of what had really been going on in Alqualonde that hit me with dizzying force and struck me to the core.

I had dashed into battle in the sincere belief that I was rescuing my uncle and my cousins from an unprovoked attack. I was innocent enough as far as that went—although, was I? Just why had I been so convinced that the Teleri were more likely to be the attackers than the attacked? Because of rumours that only a few days earlier I had dismissed as fabrications without much hesitation?

And if I had known that my uncle and his sons were trying to steal the Teleri’s ships? Whether wantonly provoked or no, by the time I arrived the battle was fully joined and the danger my relatives were in was real enough. Would I have stood by and let them be killed, because they were in the wrong? Would I have taken part on the side of the Teleri, because they were in the right, at the cost of killing some of my own people, if not Feanaro and his sons themselves?

I found myself completely incapable of answering these questions. That I could not answer them shocked me even more deeply than the memory of what I had done.  It made me sick to my stomach.  It made me loathe the mere sight of the stolen ships.  All the way to Araman, I avoided my uncle and my cousins as much as I could. Now they are gone, but the unanswered questions remain.

Those questions also seem to make returning to Tirion completely impossible, even there were no other reasons to stop me from doing so.  To return to Alqualonde, try to make some kind of reparations, let myself be executed for my role in the battle, if Olwe should wish it—perhaps. To return to Tirion and stand in front of my mother, not only as a killer, but a killer completely uncertain what crimes he is capable of—inconceivable.

With a great effort, I try to collect my thoughts and find myself on the shore of Araman gazing sightlessly out over the waves, hearing Atar and Turukano beside me agree that Feanaro will send the ships back to us as soon as he’s got to the other side. I listen with dull surprise that, for once, I should be the one of us three who is most suspicious of Feanaro’s motives. Already, I doubt that he’s going to send the ships for us. Is that because I, too, am now a killer, a criminal? As I turn away from the sea, I think briefly, sadly, of Maitimo, who seemed so much himself before he became just a Feanorion, someone who takes oaths and steals ships. But that was in another country, before the world changed.

III

 

Feanaro didn’t send the ships for us, of course, although, as we learned later, if he had already made that decision when he left us, he hadn’t told Maitimo or any of his other sons.

For a while, there in Araman, I think I had lost the will to live, struggling with my unanswerable questions. Mandos had prophesied death to all of us, and death seemed an appropriate punishment for the killers of Alqualonde. But losing the will to live turned out to be not quite the same as wishing to die. And, in any case, I hadn’t thought it through properly.  I found that out when we resumed marching northward and got to the Helcaraxe.

The first of us to die was not myself or any of my people who had drawn sword with me in Alqualonde. She was a woman who had attached herself to Findarato’s followers. Paper-thin and fragile-looking, Ninde should have been prevented from coming with us in the first place and must have been worn out already by the weary march through Araman. Once we’d reached the Helcaraxe, it was not long before she slipped on the ice and pitched headlong into the freezing water. By the time we managed to pull her out, her heart had stopped.

Findarato could not believe it at first. He knelt by the icy rim with her body in his arms, her hair still streaming water, and was desperately calling for a fire, for towels and dry clothes, until one of the healers gently pulled her away and closed her eyes. The shocked expression on his face when he realized he had lost one of the people he had assumed responsibility for beyond retrieval remains deeply imprinted in my memory, even though this was only the first of so many deaths that were to follow.

‘Feanaro’, my father merely said in profound anger and, in that moment, I whole-heartedly agreed with his utter condemnation of my uncle and everyone associated with him. My rage helped to warm the bitter, cold feeling of desolation that had filled me at the sight of that slight, frozen figure and my cousin’s grief. It also served to drive away my suspicion that somehow I had not done as much as I should have to avert such a course of events.

However, that spurious comfort was not destined to last very long. The next time I slept after that, I dreamt that I had pulled Maitimo from the waters of the Helcaraxe. In my dream, I knelt on the ice, as Findarato had, and Maitimo lay across my thighs, a dead, cold weight, his hair coiling around my legs like sea weed, eyes closed, face white and still. I awoke to the feeling of ice forming on my eye lashes and on my cheeks and knew that I’d deceived myself and my father. Nothing remained of my righteous fury against the Feanorians; the dream had completely extinguished it.

And yet, oddly, that dream, although I did not like to dwell on it or speculate what it meant, resolved something for me. I stopped going over the events that had brought us to this point in my mind over and over again. Whatever Mandos had said, I would not simply allow myself mindlessly to lurch into disaster, taking others of the Noldor with me. Instead, I would devote all my strength to fighting the ice for the life of every single one of our people as best as I could, every step of the way. Death would be postponed for as long as it was in me to delay it.

IV

 

Maitimo, of course, wasn’t dead, as I’d feared.  The next time I saw him was both like and unlike my dream. White, cold, emaciated, but breathing, if only barely so, I held him tight against me and watched blood seep through the makeshift bandage I’d applied to the stump of his arm.

We never did discuss Alqualonde... The one time he mentioned it to me can hardly be called a discussion.

‘Go away! Have you got nothing better to do with your time than feed soup to murderers?’

‘No.’

His seething rage dies, but perhaps only for lack of physical strength to sustain it. He tries to lift his hand, fails. His voice is a thin, pain-wracked thread of sound.

‘Findekano. This is Middle-earth. I know there are people out there who want this food, people who deserve it. Why don’t you go and give it to them?’

‘I’m fairly certain your brothers would object. No— don’t bother to answer that... Russandol, you can say whatever you like, but in the end I am going to make you eat that soup, all of it. Now open your mouth, before it gets cold.’

He closes his eyes for a moment.

‘You mean that, don’t you?’

‘I do.’

 

When I rescued Maitimo from Angband, it wasn’t because I was trying to earn his undying love and gratitude, although I suppose that is, after all, what I got—well, the undying love, anyway. I wasn’t even thinking of him as someone who had to be won over. With Feanaro out of the equation, for good or ill, I somehow had complete faith that, if Maitimo could be physically retrieved from Angband, he would do what was necessary to get us out of our impasse. Nevertheless I wasn’t entirely certain who it was I was going to find. If even I felt so changed that I didn’t feel confident I would recognize myself if I looked in a mirror, what would the recent sequence of events have done to Maitimo?

None of that, however, had prepared me for what I found in Angband nor for what came after that. For a while it seemed I was going to have to learn a whole new language for my cousin, parsing bewildering outbreaks of anger and opaque silences as best I could.  Even now, it seems I’m only just beginning to learn to read some of the ways his emotions express themselves.

V

 

Most kinds of attention Maitimo tends to dispense on the basis of perceived need, not as a reward. Conversely, neglect in him is usually not intentional or a punishment, but a matter of mistaken judgement or oversight, slippage. Sometimes I wonder if things would have gone differently, if, during those last years in Tirion, I had had the chutzpah at any time to stand right under his nose and shout up into his face: ‘All right, all right, but I need you, too!’ Naturally, I didn’t. I wouldn’t have known, then, on what to base such a claim. I was adult now, wasn’t I? I could hardly maintain I still needed a teacher and I ought to be able to get along without my eldest cousin’s guidance and protection now. If he didn’t want my company anymore, that, surely, was that.

A lot of people had far fewer scruples. Half of Tirion seemed to be clamouring for his attention. He tried to turn himself into a kind of social glue that held the upper echelons of the Noldor together, I think. For a little while, it seemed to work, but he spread himself thin and it weakened him. He was trying to satisfy everyone and ended up satisfying nobody. And in the end, when Feanaro shouted, he jumped.

No, I do not think anything I did could have affected that outcome in any way. Obedience to Feanaro was a spinal reflex in his household. It was not that they never dared to disagree, but, for them, consent was automatic, dissidence required careful thought. When the crisis broke, they had no time to think. Feanaro was pretty overwhelming, even on a good day—and when he finally erupted like a volcano, it wasn’t just his sons, after all, who jumped, most of the other inhabitants of Tirion did as well...

But the slaughter at Alqualonde is still exacting retribution from us.

All over Maitimo’s body, there are clusters of scars, scars that should have healed over completely by now, but obstinately refuse to fade. While the loss of his hand has never quite ceased troubling me because I was forced to cut it off myself, so that sometimes I seem to feel it like a nagging ache in my own wrist, I have stopped thinking of those scars as mutilation or disfigurement, except when I make a conscious effort to look at them, not as a part of Maitimo, but as evidence of what has been done to him. And yet, it can’t be denied that Maitimo’s body resembles a parchment with Morgoth’s handwriting on it, making up in crude legibility for what it lacks in elegance or style, a stark record of pain suffered in the past, a persistent reminder of ongoing pain, a brutal threat of pain to come.

For a while, as we learned new things under the sun, made our home in Middle-earth and encountered people, Elves, Men and Dwarves,  who had never even heard the name of the place, it was possible to forget Alqualonde a little. It was even possible to doubt that the Valar would not relent—surely they would not doom all of Beleriand for our sake. But the Siege of Angband is broken. We have begun to die again... We shall die, Mandos prophesied, in battle, by treachery or of grief. My heart wrenches at the thought of that last. Maitimo... I have too vivid a perception of what dying of grief would be like.

Valar, let me die in battle.

No, wait...  

I’m really only just learning the vocabulary and the grammar of Maitimo’s love for me. Only a couple of days ago, I didn’t know that whether I am beside him or not makes a difference to how soundly he sleeps...  And it wasn’t, really, until tonight that I realized why, when we share a bed, I somehow always end up on the side away from the door, as if this might be the night when the castle of Himring falls to the Enemy and it is in defence of me that he is preparing to make his last stand.

They sometimes call me the Valiant, my physical courage such an established fact that it has become a bit of a joke. In some ways it is easier to be brave if you’re not sure that anybody really loves you, loves who you are rather than what you are, son, brother, cousin, prince or king... I’m beginning to be certain of Maitimo in a way that I didn’t expect to be certain of anyone, ever. These days I tell him what I want not to plead for his attention, but because I trust him that he wants to know.

It is causing my perception of myself to shift. It ought to be a happy feeling and mostly it is, as I if I were being lightly dipped in gold. But at this moment—because we two are Noldor, because Maitimo is also Maedhros, son of Feanor, because Himring will not fall tonight, but eventually it almost certainly will —it shakes me and I feel my throat constrict.

Payment for Alqualonde will bankrupt me, either way. I guess it was always meant to.

VI

 

‘I knew you had to be exaggerating when you claimed you loved to watch me sleep’, he remarks quietly. ‘But if you were going to get this upset, you should just have shoved me in the ribs.’

When I don’t answer him right away, he sits up, in one fluid motion, his shoulder lightly brushing mine. Now our faces are only a couple of inches apart. He is frowning a little.

‘What ghosts have visited you tonight?’

‘I was thinking it would be good if we two died struck by lightning at exactly the same moment.’

He regards me without surprise, as if that were a familiar line of thought.

‘I suppose we could pick a lone pine on a high hill, wait for the next thunderstorm to happen by and see whether Manwe will oblige us.’

‘That would be an interesting experiment. I wonder how long I would manage to remain standing there before I started frantically dragging you to safety.’

‘Actually, I think it was high treason for me even to suggest such a thing to you.’

‘High treason?’ Not even in bed does he forget that I am his king, although I wouldn’t be, except for his abdication. ‘What a political animal you are, love.’

He gets up and goes to add another log to the fire.  Owing to Russandol’s concern for my comfort, this must by now be the best-heated room in all of Himring. Still kneeling by the hearth, he looks over at me.

‘Are we about to have a rational conversation about death? If so, I’d better put on some clothes.’

‘Rationality resides in your clothes?’

‘When the subject is death, it does. Proximity just makes me want to cling to you for several hours.’

‘I’ve sort of tried rationality already’, I say. ‘It didn’t work very well. I think clinging might be the way to go.’

He comes back and perches on the edge of the bed. His fingers cup my cheek. I turn my head a fraction to kiss his palm. He kisses my other cheek, very gently, almost as if he were soothing a frightened child, as his hand wanders to the back of my head.

‘Hmm... That feels nice.  But...’

‘But?’

‘You know, coming from somebody who has just threatened to cling to me for several hours, it also feels a bit...tentative?’

‘It’s been a long week for you’, he says softly. ‘I’m beginning to question the wisdom of my scheduling. There is another early council session tomorrow. I suspect I was trying to spend as much time in your company as possible, at the risk of boring you to tears. I didn’t expect to occupy your nights as well. I should have tried harder to come up with an excuse to cancel it.’

So he thinks he’s worn me out? Does he believe it’s making me morbid and that’s why I’m succumbing to thoughts about death tonight? And, if he does, isn’t that rather a case of the pot calling the kettle black?

‘Slander and heresy,’ I answer firmly. ‘I’m sure it’s an important session which under no circumstances should be cancelled.’ I run my fingers down his back. ‘But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t time for a good bit of clinging yet. Whatever else one might say about these chilly autumn nights, at least they are long... I want you, love. Badly.’

He makes a small sound; it might be a laugh or a sob. I feel his arm tighten almost convulsively around me, his fingers closing in my hair. He lowers his head and I feel his lips hard and urgent against the skin above my collarbone. His need matches mine. I clasp him against my chest, lean backwards and draw him down on top of me.