A Long Time Falling by Himring

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Nirnaeth Arnoediad

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I

He never had time to die—or, once the battle with Morgoth’s forces was fully joined, even time to think very much about the situation as a whole, I guess. He was commander-in-chief of all the forces from the East, military decisions were constantly being demanded of him, and he was also in the thick of things, frantically trying to keep track of what was going on, when most of the time it wasn’t clear at all, to anyone.  Again and again he also was occupied fighting for the life of those who immediately surrounded him. 

Once we had managed to survive the treacherous attack of Uldor at our backs—and fighting on two fronts at once didn’t just cause staggering losses to our loyal human allies, but also severe casualties among ourselves—we found ourselves being forced backwards step by painful step, first over the blood-soaked ground we had gained in the day’s fighting, then, deafened by the screams of our dying comrades and friends, further and further east along the way we had previously advanced with such burning anxiety at the unexpected delays. That brief glimpse of Findekano’s forces, which we had greeted with so much relief, in spite of their unexpected and alarmingly exposed position, was lost and could not be regained. The communication we had only just established with Turukano on the southern flank broke off. We took heavier and heavier losses. Eventually it became clear that we had no hope whatever of aiding our kin; we were fighting too hard to stay alive.

As we were forced east and further east, the extent of our defeat emerged. Morgoth’s troops poured after us. We tried to maintain order and communications among our troops as best we could but, despite Maitimo’s heroic efforts, it became more and more difficult to keep our ignominious retreat from turning into a complete rout. We fled over the plain, fighting one rearguard action after the other, and by the time we got to Himring, there was no rearguard anymore; too many of us had died. We were no longer strong enough to hold the castle or any of the fortresses on the eastern marches. We evacuated Himring, and the flight went on.

A couple of days beyond Himring, Maitimo turned to me in the middle of giving instructions about setting up camp and sending messengers to Carnistir and said apologetically: ‘I think I’ll have to take a short rest. I feel a little dizzy.’  I grabbed him just in time before he collapsed and lowered him to the ground; then I took off my cloak, folded it and put it under his head. ‘I’m not sure he has rested at all since the battle’, I said calmly to the alarmed faces around me. ‘It had to catch up with him some time. Leave him in peace as much as you can; just erect a shelter over him, will you? I’ll see about the messengers.’

When I returned a couple of hours later, they had put up a small tent around him. I entered the tent and sat down beside him. He was still oblivious, somewhere between sleep and unconsciousness. There was nobody else in the tent. I drew my dagger and considered cutting his throat before he woke up again, to the death of all his hopes.

II

 

‘This tomfoolery has cost us another cousin’, he says.  Before Maitimo on the table is the last letter he received from Findarato. It isn’t an especially recent or especially significant letter. Findarato didn’t write to either of us before he set out on his suicidal mission with Beren. I suppose, considering what has since transpired about our younger brothers’ goings-on in Nargothrond before Findarato left, that isn’t surprising.

The letter is smudged with tears. The smudges are dry. He lifts the letter up, holds it in his hand for a moment, and repositions it very precisely on the table.

‘Still, one can hardly blame Beren for Findarato’s death, when Tyelkormo...’ He stops. ‘And Curufinwe. Orodreth sent back another of my letters, unopened.’

‘He’ll think better of it in time.’

‘Maybe he’ll open my letters again eventually, but I doubt I’ll ever get a civil answer from him.’

His hand clenches suddenly, then slowly, deliberately unclenches again.

‘Tomfoolery, I said.  A bride price from Angband—the idea of it! But they got a Silmaril. They managed to get right into Angband and out again. And Morgoth has lost a Silmaril. I wouldn’t have thought it possible.’

‘Thingol, from what I’ve heard, certainly didn’t think it possible. But I suppose it was mainly Luthien, and Luthien is the daughter of a Maia.’

‘She’s also half Elda. And Beren, son of Barahir, is very much a hero, if the rumours out of Dorthonion are true, but has no special powers at all... Do you think that, maybe, after all Morgoth isn’t as invincible as our fears make him?’

He would very much like to think so. Of all of us, I think he was the one who least allowed himself to forget the doom that has been hanging over us ever since we arrived here in Beleriand. But after centuries of being doomed, he has tired of it, as one does.  He wants to lose no more cousins—or anyone else, for that matter. And there is one whose safety he would like to ensure above all.

III

 

We weren’t alone together all that often once we had left Mithrim, the three of us, Maitimo, Findekano and I. Almost the last time they met before the Nirnaeth, we sat together in Maitimo’s apartments in Himring and I played the harp for them. After they’d listened for a while, Findekano got up with an apologetic glance at me, fetched a brush and comb from the dressing table nearby, went and stood behind Maitimo’s chair, and began to brush his hair. I observed him, but did not interrupt my playing. I finished the exposition of the musical theme and segued into the first variation, which I turned into a hair-brushing tune, keeping time with the strokes of the brush. Findekano gave me another quick sideways glance, hesitated a split second, but continued brushing, his face calm and intent on the task, the strokes carefully rhythmical. Between us, Maitimo sat very upright and very still, his eyes following my fingers on the harp strings. A tiny smile curled in the corner of his mouth. Eventually Findekano was done. He put down the brush and dipped his hand into the smooth heavy sheet of Maitimo’s hair as one might into a waterfall. It pooled for a moment in his palm, before gravity caused it to flow down through his fingers. I finished my tune on a liquid swirl of notes. Maitimo turned slightly, leaned back a little, and looked up at Findekano. Their eyes met; then they both looked at me. We laughed, and I went on to play something livelier and more complicated.

Just a domestic scene. Except for that momentary look of proud ownership as Findekano scooped up Maitimo’s hair, the tenderness of Maitimo’s quick upward glance, even if somebody had walked in on us just then, they might not have noticed anything very much out of the ordinary.

They ended up having so little time together.

 IV

Generous cousin, I never thanked you as much as you deserved. And now I’m not mourning you as I should, because I’m so afraid of what is to come.

 

Findekano had to be dead. We hadn’t had accurate information yet; amid the chaos it was impossible to come by. But every rumour that reached us by means of stray fugitives affirmed that on the other side of the battlefield defeat had been even more disastrous and complete than on ours. And most of them talked about the death of the High King, although he was said to have died in a variety of ways.

Maitimo standing at the western edge of the encampment each time we stopped, leaning forward as if about to take off running into the night towards Hithlum. The way I’d seen him standing on the beach at Losgar, the night the ships burned, his boots lapped by the surf of the western sea, as if he was considering trying to swim back to Araman.

‘It’s happening again, Macalaure. It’s happening all over again.’

‘Maitimo. Even you can’t fight your way through all of Morgoth’s forces on your own. And Findekano needs the support of the whole army we are bringing, not just one or two of or even half a dozen of us. It won’t help him if we allow our troops to be decimated on the way before we get to him.’

‘I know.’

 

I had sat too long, alone in the tent beside my exhausted brother, dagger in hand. It might be more merciful if he died at this point, but if I was going to deliver the coup de grace, I would have had to do it quickly, without thinking too much about it. I would never raise that dagger now.  But I continued to sit unmoving, without sheathing it.

Maitimo woke up. His eyes focussed on the roof of the tent, puzzled. Gradually awareness and memory seeped back into his face. It was as cruel as I had thought it would be. His eyes widened in horror, his mouth opened, as if to shout or scream; then he caught hold of himself. His eyes half closed, his lips folded themselves rigorously into silence.

He sat up and saw me and it became obvious that at once he perceived the dagger in my hand and understood what I had thought of doing. He reached out, gently covered my right hand with his and put his head on my shoulder, silent thanks and a promise. Feeling the pressure of his cheek bone against my upper arm, I knew I had achieved exactly the opposite of my intention, although, at the same time, I was enormously relieved. He would not leave me.

Only afterwards did it occur to me that I would have had absolutely no explanation to offer to my other brothers or indeed the rest of our people, those of us who had survived, why I had killed Maedhros just when they expected him to deal with the consequences of the Nirnaeth for them. I had been thinking only in terms of my own compassion, my own sacrifice. I was as exhausted as he was, really.

V

 

The rumour was already out there, although perhaps not quite firmly entrenched, before I cottoned onto it. It hit me suddenly one afternoon, while I was sitting outside the tent sharpening my sword, passing the whetstone repeatedly along its worn edge. One man’s obscure remark, another’s disapproving look, another’s knowing grin came together in my mind and I realized what they’d meant, what people out there were thinking. It was almost funny, considering the lengths Maitimo had gone to conceal his relationship with Findekano, that rumours should arise about him now, when devastation at his loss had made him as chaste as the driven snow. However, I was not amused and certainly not at the direction the rumours had taken.

Vaguely, I recalled a brief period in my adolescence, when I had been beset both by vehement curiosity and fierce jealousy, as Maitimo first showed an interest in girls. It hadn’t lasted very long, for it had soon been followed by two discoveries, first, that no girl Maitimo got involved with ever came close to seriously encroaching on the relationship he had with his brothers and, second, that, despite superficial appearances, I was considerably less clueless about girls than Maitimo—at least in the one case where it really mattered, as far as I was concerned. But anyway, that had been Maitimo, when he was young— light-hearted, popular, attractive.

This was Maitimo, as he was now; this was Maedhros. I was even more familiar with his body now than I had been during our youth in Valinor, for, after Thangorodrim, I had bandaged just about every single inch of it, salved every bruise and scar. He had trusted me absolutely then; he depended on me now to steer him through the shoals of the night. Even if I had had the faintest wish to do so, I would have no more risked infringing that trust than I would have thought of molesting a child.

So how to deal with this rumour? Would not acknowledging it even to counter it tend to give it substance? And also, what should I say?

Maitimo and I shared a bed most nights. I had become the lightest of sleepers, attuned to every change in his breath. When the nightmares came, I would wake up with a jolt, turn round and grab him before the screams could emerge from his throat. When the tears started flowing, I would wait to see whether they stopped again of their own accord; if not I would take him in my arms and try to rock him to sleep.  It was almost as if we were in Mithrim again, except this time there were hardly any physical wounds; the collection of nicks and gashes he had acquired during the battle had healed quickly, as had the slash in my left arm that Uldor had given me before I killed him. Charmed lives, both of us—or cursed ones.  I wished Maitimo would talk more. Often he lay unmoving for hours in silent savage thought.

In the morning, he sat up, ran his fingers through his hair, rubbed his tired eyes and, in leaving the tent, transformed himself into a different person. Striding through the camp, he was every inch the intrepid commander suffering a temporary setback, ready with a plan for every contingency. Making use of Ambarussa’s contacts with the Laiquendi, he began to make arrangements for a guerrilla campaign in the woods of East Beleriand. If we could no longer oppose the Enemy directly, at least we would still harass his troops as much as we could.

He was lying to us, of course, not so much with words, as with every fibre of his body. None of his earlier contingency plans had envisaged a disaster on quite this scale; at best his plans were brilliant improvisations. Our people knew this really, but they lapped it up anyway. Even I, who didn’t need to be told that, as far as Maitimo was concerned, it was all over with us, was nevertheless surprised to find how good he managed to make me feel occasionally about killing a couple of orcs here or there—although of course we were inflicting only negligible damage on the Enemy. It helped that Morgoth seemed content that he had rendered us incapable of opposing any larger-scale troop movements through East Beleriand or giving real assistance to anyone in the West. He made no serious effort to chase us down. ‘We’ve got nothing left that he wants just now’, said Maitimo bitterly to me, in private.

In the end, I decided to do nothing about the rumour. Findekano was dead and I would never see my wife again—maybe Maitimo’s and my sexual reputations didn’t really matter. Weren’t we two sons of Feanor and so in any case capable of any crime? Wasn’t it more important that we, and particularly Maitimo, should still appear formidable? Why defend a virtue that people didn’t expect of us?

This, it soon emerged, was good tactics, but bad strategy. Much later, it occurred to me that I had also missed a warning sign. False as the rumour was, people had believed it because it pinpointed something about us that we ourselves weren’t quite aware of. Around Maitimo and me, the world was closing in, beginning to shut others out.