—Well-named — well-named, my brave one—
It is his nightmare come upon him at last, the darkness, the choking
slime, the webs of burning cold and icy fear that wrap his mind and flesh
and drag him down beneath the surface of the mire, no longer the forebodings
of a heart worn down with the dread of the hunted but a most present and
palpable thing. The taste of blood is on his lips, not his own, as though
dropped from the ravens' beaks that mocked his dead, — but warm, arterial,
and fresh, liquid as the tears he cannot shed where it has sprayed over
him in the struggle. It tastes no different from his own, strangely enough…
The cold that consumes him is that of deep, deep water, rising from
the dark of stone fissures far from the sun's heat, and he can barely draw
breath against the chill, as it were against icy water breast high, can
barely force his dry throat and cracked lips to shape the sounds his mind
remembers. But it does not matter. There is no beauty left to his voice,
which is a thread so rough and ragged as to be indistinguishable from a
moan of pain, to the outer sense. It does not matter. The song is in his
thought, whether it achieve the tremors of the airs about them or dies
in smothered silence. And in his thought it burns like a drawing flame,
bright and high and clear in the changeless night.
It is not a question of him willing them to hear it, or not — he could
not shield his thoughts from them now, willed or no. His thought is bare
to them, beneath the veil of the King's protection, as theirs never is
to him, unwilled, and nothing of his mind is concealed from them, unless
they turn away in mercy, or in shame — or in fear. But this they could
not turn from if they wished — as they do not: this gift of song that fills
the dark with memory, the cold with dreams, strange dreams not their own,
memories far in a distance illusory and deceptive, long past in time, or
yesterday…
It is bitter to lie with bodies unmarred, uninjured, and helpless: if
they were wounded, broken in battle it would be less grievous to them,
for that at least would have meant some accomplishment, some payment exacted
in return for their fate. But they were taken without a blow, to flesh
at least, when the memory of evil done and innocence shattered with blood
and fire broke through their King's defenses — but in truth they were doomed
long before that, watched in lazy cruelty and allowed to make their way
as they thought unobserved, until it suited the Master of Wolves to bring
them in to his dominion, his stolen stronghold, and bow them as thralls
before that which was once the King's own high throne … They cannot touch,
and this is perhaps the hardest, that no warmth of friend's hand, no bodily
mercy may be given, not the lifting of another's head from the cold stone
nor the gentleness of a futile caress that eases no injury and alters nothing
of fate.
The King's working has gathered them all in, Noldor and Sindar and mingled
Kindred — and mortal as well, whose weakness and lesser race have been
hidden from both outward sense and sorcerous searching, in a working so
subtle and delicate that the Necromancer has not even noticed it, as he
believes that all concealments were torn away in the triumph of his song
over the King's. When they were first set here it was dreadful beyond word
or thought, stricken with overwhelming power, held by blood-guilt not even
their own more strongly than the claws of their captors. None had thought
or heed for the other, only for his own despairing horror and shame, none
took thought for the frailty of the least among them — save the King, who
had already done so, for them all, still sheltering them from Sauron's
worst workings and the full power of his dark vision, and who even in those
brutal moments of binding worked to save them, still and silent to outward
sense, yet bending his remaining strength to weave protection about them.
As once on the Ice of Helcaraxë he did a thing never before attempted,
let alone accomplished, and as there with the aid of his sister and brothers
and with many more in freedom, brought safely through many more than would
ever have been believed, through that gulf of despair — so here he builds
and shapes a working of power that is unlike anything ever told of, nor
can scarcely have been imagined, even as the Necromancer stands before
their naked helplessness taunting them with promise of pain to come and
the far greater pain of possibility of freedom — at the price of faith
betrayed.
Already they have been held in a weave of his making, the spell of disguising
that changed them into the semblance of their foes, so that all now know
the touch of his power, even the one who has never known magic ere now:
from this foundation, crumbled to dust, he binds a shield to screen their
thoughts from the Wolflord's burning gaze, hiding their names and selves
from his mocking contempt … and this he strengthens most of all about the
mortal who lies stunned beneath a blow that crushed one ancient beyond
his understanding and wise beyond his ken, folding a guise of Elven beauty
and age around this Sickly One, hiding the outlaw's infamous features from
Orc and sorcerer alike, even as he hides the one other thing which would
betray them upon the moment from hostile sight and touch: the golden Ring
that is the badge of his own royal House and the emblem of their Doom.
When the flesh-eating bonds were first set upon the Man, he roused a
little from his stupor, stirring to look up at the torch-lit vaults that
loom high overhead in the darkness, horror creeping into his eyes as he
came to clearer comprehension of their fate, and he twisted his arms in
vain attempt to escape the power of the chains that seared him, and his
breath came quicker in gulping gasps like that of a panting bird taken
in nets, before his long-accustomed self-mastery reasserted itself and
he recalled the skills of suffering in privation and danger, quieting himself
to wait, though there be no escaping this time. But worse yet was to come,
for the chains of iron spell-sealed with words of pain and burning were
but the least of the bonds destined for them, Eldar all as their Enemy
believed, and hence requiring additional bindings to chain hither spirit
as well as flesh, prevent the fëa from slipping its house and
fleeing like one hunted into the dark, away before the hunters have noticed
his escape…
The web of death-wrought spells and evil power that now spread through
the deep place of the Wizard's Isle was beyond terrible, tendrils of burning
cold and strangling decay winding around each form that lay sprawled at
pillar's footing, not stopping at body's bounds but seeping into the interstices
of the hröa, setting bonds of stilling and changelessness upon
the flesh, that so might endure without sustenance or exercise of limb,
held in slow passing long past even Elven power to endure — and linking
them flesh to flesh, so that what one knew, all should know, each in his
own body. It was maddening, even to the Firstborn, even to the Noldor with
their greater might of will that outmatched their lesser Kindred as those
outmatched mortals: it was madness, to one who ere this day had
never known the touch of magic that was not of kindness as well, never
battled save with iron and edge against the power of the Void.
Against its ingress he flailed frantically with all useless strength
of body and of mind, wrenching in the witless panic of a beast paw-snagged
in snare, the frenzy that rives limb from frame in its wild flight. Soul-breaking
was nigh him, for all his disguise, and then the King did a thing beyond
belief or comprehension, changing the Necromancer's working so that it
became a part of his own working, without the sorcerer's least awareness.
He wove a song of joining, of flowing as of tides returning, and
a power to draw it at his will even as the Moon draws the Sea, and into
that he bound their names, and wove it into his own fëa — and
fastened it to his Enemy's design. And after that the torches went, and
they were given into the keeping of the Dark.
And thus they were bound, body and spirit, into a terrible bond of Death
and cruelty, and at the same time woven into a weft of Life and love, and
their lives kept from the Void, but not enchained: for they could break
from his holding if they willed it, and give over to the greater might
of the Master of Wolves, and buy their own lives at price of his breaking,
and the breaking of Nargothrond thereafter.
Into this weaving the mortal too is bound, held in torment and in mercy
at once. He has no power to affect the weft, not even the power that the
King has given back to them, to share among them all such strength and
sensation as they will — to choose to give, or to withhold, for he will
not take — but they give to their lord unstintingly as they are able, with
which gift he in turn rebuilds ever the veils of protection that enmesh
them all. Being but Mortal, he can only receive, cannot even understand
what has been done to him, any more than a hurt hound understands the work
that is done by its master to clean and sew and bind its wounds.
Yet he understands that it is a gift, and he marvels at the trust which
the King bestows on them all, even upon himself, for he too is free to
speak, for the King's power does not lie in mastery and domination, but
only in sustaining and healing. It is something that they turn away from
in their own minds, from their lord's helplessness and the fact that they
could easily unmake his workings, as if from the nakedness of body that
matters not, all being alike naked; but the mortal does not know enough,
or has not the taint of the Revolt's guilt to shame him, and he wonders
greatly and in great amazement, and so honoring them all he causes them
to see that there is no need to shrink from this knowledge of frailty and
gift of faith unbroken.
At first they dreaded most his weakness, and that he, having aught to
gain, and aught more to lose, being so brief of life, would fail first
of all. And now, to their sad shame, they know too well this is not so
…
He has come to that one last thing, the fear at the back of all nightmares,
the dread above all others that he chased death like a hound to escape,
and is brought to in the end. And now that he is here, in bonds, a captive
in the toils of his own worst enemy, it is not such a great matter after
all — indeed, terrible as it seems to them and among those thoughts of
his which they avoid in fear, it seems almost to be a dark jest to him,
that after having risked such horror and danger to escape this Lord's power
and wolf-shaped warriors, he should walk of his own free will into their
grasp, and lie down meekly in chains who slew Orc and Warg without number
that would make him thrall. It has the taste of Doom to him, and he is
calm now.
He does not blame them for it, any more than they blame him for the
dreadful Oath which has returned to strike them after so many long years
of the Sun. He is in fact grateful for the mercy that protects him from
recognition, masking him as one of them to the eyes of the foe, concealing
his different form and fëa in the likeness of their own, so
that none guesses here is the one for whom their Master hunted long years
in vain. And from this knowledge too they shrink, finding it painful to
bear, that he is content with so little, having enjoyed so little
in his brief flash of life beneath the Sun.
The cold of the Pit deep below stone and river's surface would kill
him and in short order, did not the weft allow him to receive their power
in shared measure, replacing what shivers from him: the Master of Wolves
knows not that he is mortal, but stone and iron cannot be deceived or tricked.
It is not ease, any more than their own greater strength gives them
ease or comfort, merely the ability to survive what mortal frame could
not otherwise bear. Ensorcelled metal burns the skin in torment ever-renewed
to swift-healing Elven flesh, but far more harsh to weaker mortality that
does not repair as fast as it is seared; but he does not complain, though
he could lose his hands did they not pour their strength and healing through
the weft. And that is torture too, of another kind, the warring of powers
in his body, rending and mending at one instant: that which is usually
dispersed over long time, and subtle, now stark and present to the senses.
Sometimes the madness comes upon him as it comes on them all and he struggles
against the bonds, tearing his galls deeper until the King, if he has the
strength, stills him with a touch of his will.
It is worst, strangely, to lie upon worked stones for him: if they were
rough, unhewn, or better yet the uncovered earth, he would not mind it
so much, but to die upon a slab of polished rock so far from the world
of things that grow and change, no matter how smoothly-shaped, is torture
to him as though he were one of their Sundered Kindred who haunt the woodland
twilight, mourning the dim times of the Stars before the Sun and Moon,
making no works of stone or metal. The only ease that the King can give
him is to sever his awareness to great extent from his bodily self, so
that pain is dulled together with all sensation … and this too is bitter
mercy, for it is harder for him than all the rest to be in darkness, since
he cannot see with spirit, and he is completely blind here, and even pain
seems better than all loss of feeling when there is nothing to anchor the
mind to the world. But of this too he does not complain, only sinks deeper
into the morass of unmoving, isolate despair, unless they open to him Elven-sight
through the weft and draw him into their circle that he may share their
light.
When the King is strong enough it is not in question, for he does it
without thought or hesitation, as he would change the fashion of his speech
to the manner of whatever Kindred he came among — but during a dying, and
after, when he is still shattered with the pain he has taken into himself,
he cannot always do that, and it is as much as he can manage and more to
hold the weaving of his protection around them at all, and it is left to
them to maintain his workings in so far as they can — or will. And that
is the hardest of all — to willingly open thought and heart to one foreign
beyond comprehension, though friend, to allow such mingling of unlike spirits;
it is repugnant without any conscious will or rejection, as to drink oil
rather than water would revulse the body. And there are other burdens,
beyond the strangeness and the disquieting tenor of his soul-light, for
when he is within their hold they cannot shield their own pain of spirit
and weakness from him any more than he can hide his mind from them at any
time.
And yet he does not despise them for it,
these mighty Elven-lords who are fallen so far as to be indistinguishable
from himself in the dark that clothes them all, fearing the wolf that is
their death, fearing death, fearing the act of dying, fearing the Justice
that awaits them upon their homeward return, ashamed of fear, ashamed of
their very shame and loathing themselves for it — loathing him for witnessing:
no more does he hold them in contempt for being less than either he or
they had imagined than does their King …
His anguish is like a sword, like a clear
crystal spire or a single note of sorrow rising unbroken to the farthest
reaches of the world, the deepest heights of heaven, it is not for himself
alone, or for his sundered love, or even for his lost people merely: it
mourns them
too, making no distinction between Firstborn and Secondborn,
Eldar and Atani, mourning them who lie here caught in his fate as he is
caught in theirs, and all who have been caught in the Doom of the Noldor
together — the dead of Ard-galen and the dead of Alqualondë, the sorrow
of mortal mothers whose sons come not home from the long Siege and the
grief of Elven-maids whose lovers are gone beyond the Western Sea … all
are alike to him, he comprehends no difference in their sadness, and this
is mystifying to them, and at first insulting, and now — after the long
lightless hours without number, after the first dying and the second dying
and the third, after every tangled merging of spirit half-unwilled — it
is still strange to them, but they are only mute with awe now, and receive
the gift unquestioned.
He does not know — cannot know — what they
do for him, how they have undertaken in most deliberate fashion to die
for him, who is their King's life-price, though unpayable, unredeemable
in end; how they take it upon themselves to call the wolf with its sharper
sense for weakness, the sense that comes with wolf-shape, that would otherwise
be drawn to him first of all as it is drawn to the least powerful among
them, discerning with some mingling of powers both outer and of spirit
that he is not able to seal his will as they are against its darkness …
how they take it in turn to slip from the shield-wall of the King's working
and kneel, naked in spirit, before the dark mastery of the wolf when it
comes. Surely it is beyond mortal understanding, these contentions of fëa
and
fëa,
battles of power that have no bodily measure, deeds that have no corresponding
gesture. —Surely it must be so.
Three are gone, and now the fourth's turn
approaches with the slow radiance of eyes that stalk between the pillars
of the tower's foundation towards them. The last taken was a Sindarin youth
who came to wonder at the King's city and stayed to build it and left it
with his King, his soul not bound to wroughten caverns but to that city's
soul. He made no struggle, giving his pain into the King's care at once
unresisting, and his dying was almost easy, nor for him alone.
But he is proud, this Lord of the West, who
once rode with great Tavros in Aman and in whose honor set forth to hunt
the hellwolves many a time on this Shore, and deeming himself hardier in
spirit than the child of Twilight born after the Rising of the Moon, he
sets himself to stand the strain, and to fight by whatever means are yet
left to him. Not entirely absent from his mind is the thought that when
he comes before the Master of Spirits he will be able to return without
shame, proud before his fallen fellows, and before their kindred-foes …
nor indeed is there absent a certain relief, as one who goes out of a smoke-filled
hollow to face death in the clean wind, that he is not bound to the mortal
in spirit now but alone among his own kind at the last—
He spurns at the wolf with his heel and hears
the snick of fang on fang as the connecting blow jars down his leg, and
the sickly lambence vanishes briefly as the beast's eyes close at the impact
— and then quick as a swordsman's backstroke his ankle is seized and crunched
between great teeth, and as the shattered bone is dropped to the floor
his other foot is swiftly taken and crushed, before he can recover from
the pain to strike again, and there is an end of that. The breaks
try to rebuild themselves, setting stony webs across the gaps, sealing
the torn vessels and purging away the misplaced blood, muscles working
the ends into proper alignment as his soul-pattern demands — yet that is
only more anguish, without hope of sufficient time for achievement. But
he has known worse wounds in the field, stood against the Lord of Fetters'
host for full this Age of the Sun, and he turns his thought from the ruin
of his limbs and stands resolute in soul. The King urges him to surrender
up his pain, but he ignores the request: it is his duty to serve, not the
other way round, and he will do so to the end, he vows.
But the wolf straddles him completely, coarse
hair brushing against his calves as it waves tail in pleased anticipation
of his anguish, while venom drips from its panting tongue warm and ice-cold
at once, dissolving his skin like acid to bare flesh where it runs across
his cheekbones, looming above him thrice his weight and more — and he is
daunted beyond his power to comprehend by his own helplessness, the consciousness
of which only now is made fully clear to him. There is no escape —
save through those jaws. His soul cannot flee and fade: the spellforged
mesh that webs him sees to that, as the corrupted chains that sear his
wrists likewise hold his hröa fast. Until his body is too broken
for his
fëa
to shelter in, like a house burnt and fallen under
a darkened sky, he must remain here, utterly passive, yielding to the wolf's
will in flesh however he strives to stand apart in spirit.
When its eyes bore down into his own, and
the green light of them shines down on his breast, revealing his own pale
body to him after time unmeasured, he falters, and in weakness he arches
back his neck, so that the lifebearing vessels will be pressed closer to
the surface of his skin, and perhaps the lure of the beating blood will
draw the beast-nature to a swift kill. The snuffling nostrils blow against
his throat, before the burning tongue licks at his ear and into it as an
affectionate hound will do, and he jerks away as the delicate structures
within are melted like wax in a flame, though his fëa
strives
to rebuild them according to its innate pattern from his enormous reserves
of strength. Half-deafened to its panting breath now, he cringes, offering
his throat yet again … but the wolf is, he begins to perceive, far older
in spirit than he himself, no matter when its hröa was shaped,
by fell sorceries as well as birth of blood, and it laughs at his pitiful
effort to tempt it.
Still in mockery of dogs' affection it nuzzles
his cheek, carrion breath shivering his hair as he strains for breath himself
in his terror, and then carelessly sets razor-tips behind his scalded ear
and rips free the side of his face from hairline to chin. Doglike, it jerks
muzzle up to bolt down its prize, and the green glow vanishes again for
a moment as eyes close in the swallowing. He cannot even scream — agony
courses over his skull like a flood of molten ore, irrevocable, undeniable,
and in the shock his will slackens and his grasp fails and he allows the
King to draw away the pain from him, and with that greatest part of the
burden lifted some large part of the dread goes, too, and his mind is yet
his own.
But it serves him nothing to stop the wrecking
of his body, nor the wolf's evil glee at his disarray, and it noses curiously
along his frame as one might linger over a tray of sweetmeats, pausing
before making choice of this dainty before that. His heart is hammering
with the slow, forceful strokes of hammer upon anvil, indeed slamming his
ribcage against the stone with every blow, and the waves of fear coursing
through his veins and flesh have driven out even sensation of pain from
his wrists and ankles. He grits teeth as the venomed muzzle nudges into
his unarmored belly, shamelessly between his thighs, and then he grunts
in surprise as his leg is gripped high and he shaken as a small animal
might be shaken, with no more effort than he might shake water from his
hands. Blood wells from the punctures, warm on his chilled skin, and it
is no more than a dull ache thanks to the King's power, but he begins to
sink under the unfolding revelation of his doom…
Twisted half-sideways, blinded by the poison
running into his eyes (or is it his blood? or both? he cannot tell) — he
does not know what the wolf is about at first, when he feels the hot breath
on his back and hip together, and then a growing pressure until he thinks
that he must break like a dead twig in it, and then a pulling that is as
sharp as it is swiftly over, and he is tossed down flat again, uncomprehending,
until he feels the sudden wet heat dropped heavily upon his thighs, hears
the snarling snap of jaws closing again and feels the rent torn wider,
hears his own skin ripping like silk and knows, most terribly,
knows—
The Enemy's beast delves deeper into his
entrails, dragging out more of that which never should have been uncovered,
feasting greedily upon his soft parts while silent tears course down his
face, uselessly diluting the coating of venom, running into the low heat
that marks his head-wound — for it has come to this: that all of his valour,
his deeds and workings in the Leaguer, and the still-dearer works of his
hands all these long years of his life, the songs and the crafts and the
fair works of knowledge, fairest of all, are worth nothing
in the
teeth of the wolf. He is nothing, no more than a carcass yet warm,
a lump of meat that has not yet stopped twitching, and his brave thoughts
of defiance melt away like frost beneath hot breath…
—Now, little one, will you heed? Will you give my Master what he
seeks? Ere it grows too late, and yet your life may safely keep—
He laughs, then in his heart, despite it
all, that the Master of Wolves should be so foolish as to judge him such
a fool, that saw the Light of the Trees, for he knows only too well that
his body is past mending and that soon his spirit will be evicted from
this dwelling, the only and the first it has ever known, and gone beyond
the ken of Middle-earth's shadows…
—Not so, child, not so, ancient is our Master and wise beyond your
little wisdom: no need for fëa to bide in flesh first-formed!
The seduction of the wolf-being pours into
his opened mind like the venom that drips into his opened body:
—Need not be thus, weak and fragile of flesh — rather be fleet of
form, swift-strong and nothing-needing, free of all care, even as us—
He knows it for lies, even if truth: even
if made wolfshaped in form his spirit would not be free but further fettered,
doomed to tormented Unlife without ending for the ages of Arda, no hope
of rest and mercy in Mandos' Halls — but the dream encloses him of might
and dark-maned muscle, cold eyes pitiless seeing all in darkness, strength
of jaws to rend as now he is rent and taken—
Help me! he cries, to whom he does
not know: the Powers from whom he turned his face so long ago or the King
who already spends what he has not to shield him from the worst of the
storm, or the comrades whose strength stays the King in his Workings —
but the Stars are gone from him, the Sun unthinkable here and the Moon
beyond sensing in this abyss, and his friends recoil aghast at his temptation
— one who fell not back before Balrogs is retching in horror at the thought
of being offered such a choice himself and knowing not what answer would
follow — and the King has no more strength left for sharing past what he
expends already.
—Shadows charge down stony banks heedless of the night's bitterest
cold, too cold for snow even, hurtling upon the warm-light-lure that summons
them faster than falcons' flight to fall on the spirits that fumble at
bowstring and spear-haft, poison melting soft flesh as fangs rip and sunder
soul from body, the hot heart's blood a slaking and a maddening to thirst
at once, and best and most savory of all, the fear that satisfies as no
fleshly taste ever may—
Help me, he whispers in the Void that
surrounds them, knowing there is no help and that he will fail this test,
fail of his pride where if he had kept silent and fought not he might have
won through to the last, his heart weeping in shame and sickness at what
he knows he shall do.
And then as though from the hands of the
Kementári there is a gift of gold, leaf-gold, treelight as from
Laurelin, bright as hope in the dreadful dark of the Crossing, defending
him if only for an instant by shaking the wolf-vision's grip on his mind
and allowing his soul to pull away. For one deaf to the voice of the wolf
in their minds and blind to the visions shared helpless between them has
yet heard his faint whimper of breath, calling aloud in foolish weakness,
and has answered from his own weakness in the feeble imitation of the King's
working that is all he can offer, a song that is all he can remember in
this hour, whispered back with memories of life and warmth and love…
It is a little song, a foolish song, a song
for a child much younger even than he whom the memories show hearing it,
singing of the seasons turning; and the gold is not the true light of his
birthplace after all, not even mallorn-gold, but only the plain yellow-gold
of birch and beech in autumn remembered with the clarity of childhood,
not so bright in truth, only by comparison to the dark around them, the
dim gleaming of a mortal soul—
Like a houseless ghost he turns to that faint
strange light and lets it enclose him, not shrinking from the foreign timbre
and hue of it, asking nothing now, accepting all as a wounded warrior fallen
from blows accepts the gift of a fellow's shield, shared against the lethal
arrow-hail of an Enemy that will break through in the end, regardless.
The wolf-song of slaughter and cruel betrayal fades into the sheen of a
fire-warm evening, where a tall woman, taller still in the remembrance
of childhood and gold as a Vanyar lady but with mortality written in her
planed bones, her face that is already lined with sun and wind, moves about
the hall, singing softly but steadily as she works … she comes now to sit
beside the low pallet where he rests, unsleeping, sick with anxiousness
that has no cure but time, and not even that is sure, and calls one of
the great hounds to come lie down beside him, and he puts his arms around
the friendly beast, and as she sits she sings of harvest and the Sickle
swinging to reap the sunlight's sheaves…
Yet her hands are busy with less peaceful
tasks, for she sharpens swords as she sings, the ring of the blade like
a bell-note chiming slow upon each stroke of the whetstone, and her hair
is not woven in fairness or falling free as an Elf-woman's would be, but
drawn back in a single simple braid like a warrior's before battle, and
the steady strength of her arm in its moving tells that this is a task
she knows most well, (and a fearful thought comes to him, and thus to them
all: Should someday the Vanyar turn to war, what then? what dread befall?)
and thus her song of comfort seems belied … yet still she sings of golden
fields and forests gold—
—but the wolf shakes him as a fox shakes a hare in its jaws, and his
will is shaken too, and the golden leaves are swept away in an icy blast
of North wind, and darkness, eye-haunted, pours over the land with its
wailing song … Winter takes hold of the earth, the winter of Angband, where
the creatures of Morgoth may roam its night in strength and inflict their
own deep torment on the small frail lives that struggle through its cold…
But the song speaks of Winter too, of snow
bright as silver under the Moon, and stars that burn like silver flames
in a still clear night, and a deep shelter for the little squirrels that
sleep and dream of Springtime loves beneath the snows, beneath the earth,
until the time to rise and run like melting snow…
(…and down a hill of pearl and silver under
a sky where the Moon is ringed with a blue-green crown and every twig is
wrought of wonder, comes One more lovely than the stars above her, uncaring
of the dark, and fearless in her mastery of the ways of going, and praise
and love of all things living are set forth in her dance…)
But Spring is hunger-time as well, when the
deer starve, too weak to gather from the growing plenty, and the wolf grows
sleek, and the sad winterkill lies like discarded rags beneath the greening
branches, and the sodden rains wash down little tufts of fur into the mud,
and on the lintels of the house-door the holy symbols painted there fade
softly, melting into the gray stone of the doorposts to fall like white
tears onto the great stone of the threshold…
But after when the granite glitters in the
morning sun, the tall woman comes with white clay in hand, to renew the
Stars on either side, and to reach easily the lintel-stone where memory
sees the Eagle-shape before her strong fingers sweep out the wings above
the door, and she gives him the clay too, so that he may trace the Kindler's
Gifts on either post where the stone is low to the ground, showing him
how to work it into the rough surfaces where lichen has eaten away — and
it comes to him that symbols not carved in cavern rock but painted in soft
earth may be repainted elsewhere, and borne more easily perhaps that way
to many lands, and it seems to him a strange wisdom too late learned —
yet one that his King has long whiles known…
And Spring is planting-time as well, and
the heft of wood for fallen fences now rebuilt, and songs of readying and
hope, and a dark man, gray-eyed, broad of bone, laughs as he hoists his
plough upon his shoulder and leads the way to the far field, where friends
wait with the steady oxen and at his side his hounds bound and bark, and
coming to the runoff stream that spills where hill and hill converge, hounds
leap over, and the man catches him up in a quick embrace and in one long
stride bears him easily across to the planting before setting him down
so that he may race the dogs to the fallow land—
—but comes the remembrance that would not willfully be given entrance:
the strong arm stilled, hand-hacked in the rank mud of the lakeshore, the
singer lost beyond war and mountain, all songs and smiles ended—
He falters, not in his chanting but in his
thought, which is all of pain now, and only stern determination presses
forth the words that have lost all meaning to him, and he cannot give any
longer what he does not have, can only keep with barest edge from being
swept beneath the Shadow himself, and ironically he must wield pain to
counter pain, setting his mind upon the fire that leashes his hands, the
dull press of cruelly-cold stone against his bone's weight, to bolt the
doors of memory against that sight, that recollection—
But now he can return good for good:
he gives back a memory of a time of fire and hell when that lost hand dragged
him up, stumbling, from thick mud and the snares of reeds, in an hour when
all his Firstborn power failed him, when hope itself failed him, and all
he dared look for was to be slain before capture — and mortal might shattered
their foes and saved them there that hour.
And true it came to naught at ending, for
are they not here? but it was good while it lasted, and well-done,
and in the workings of Eru it may be that a twelvemonth, a year, a score,
an Age are no different in their worth, and the gifts that have been given
back and back again, of faith, of help, of rescue, of wisdom, are so deeply
woven together that there is no separating them to lay in balance-scale
— this debt for that, this gift weighed against that one,
deed for deed in uncaring calculation — that is for strangers who
do not trust each other, for strangers whether of one blood or not, knowing
that they will wrong each other, and laying up store of deed-words to justify
themselves in that day. He has not abandoned them, as they abandoned
their own in Aman so long ago, as they too were abandoned on the northern
shore; there is no room for blame or reckoning between them, he sees that
quite clearly now, and shows him so—
—and the song strengthens, rhyming of the
turned earth and the green shoots rising…
And this time the wisdom is clearer, though
fragmented, as though seen by lightning-flash, sharp and stark and piecemeal:
It does not matter. Everything wears to an end in its time, and most
things end swifter than slower, and the stars that Elbereth set ages past
are no less real, and no more so, than the white stars of the dogwood blossom
in the woodlands of a spring morning, that are measured in days and fall
to earth, and whose place will be taken anew by others in future springs,
for ages of the world. If he had but time — but time shall be his,
to understand these things, and to set all that he has been given into
its proper accord, until he is no longer bound by grief and confusion to
cling to what he could neither comprehend nor grasp forever in this hröa
… the Halls of Awaiting hold no dread or sorrow for him now: he has
already entered them in thought, only the thinnest threads yet binding
him to this darkness, and almost in bored disdain the wolf gives up the
assault on soul and puts all its attention to its meal.
But there is no triumph here, no pride of
victory: his mind is mazed, crushed with the struggle, barely more of reason
left than an animal's, he longs only for peace, for escape, for rest from
the confusion and pain — but it is not yet for him, and still he must endure
his dying, though it cannot be very much longer. His body is consuming
itself from within, too, in its vain efforts to repair what could never
be remade this side of the Sea, and there is more cold than pain left,
more strangeness than anything else, that seeps through the muted
link to his own flesh, and the soul's image and understanding of its dwelling
that every being — Eldar, Atani, kelvar and mayhap olvar —
holds from earliest days, is destroyed.
But in the light he clings to there is gentleness
and grace of that pity that can only look on hurts and lacks power to undo
or ease, but does not turn away: as a boy cradles a hound, bear-broken,
while his father waits with tear-wet gaze and unsheathed knife for farewell's
end; or as the man lays a stone-smashed falcon whose shattered wing has
reft it violently of its high dominion, sling-shot wrecked for no good
reason save that it lived, and was, and flew free, down beneath
the cover of the heather where the earth and the life that it holds will
take its ruined dwelling back to fashion others, as it will someday take
his own…
…or as, perhaps, more like, one who sees
the dread lord of the forest, the red stag, mighty as a storm wind, with
fell branched antlers full a tall man's armspan wide, brought low and staggering
with venom from a chance-loosed arrow, sent without thought of need nor
followed upon as a true hunter will follow through hardship and danger
to bring to completion the kill, still dangerous though purblind from the
arrow-poison, terrible in his slow failing until pity's sure hand sends
a clean dart clear through the glazed dark eye with a single sung note
of passing—
He clings fast to the pity that is given
him, to the thought of shelter under the strength of earth, deep-dug holts
beneath the roots of trees, worn to smoothness by the flickering generations
of woodbeasts whose lives are measured in seasons, not ages; the narrow
safety of a badger's den, musky and rough with the tumbled dirt but not
foul as venomed slaver and cruel sorceries. Panting, he rests in the hold
of friendship that scorns not fear nor weakness, as when the starveling
fox, dragging on three legs with snare-severed paw, lies foam-muzzled in
the shadow of its own den, safe from the clamor and ruckus of ravagers,
though death's stilling cold creeps through its blood inescapable; until
at last he can attend the music again and receive the last gift of memory
that may be given, the recollection of peace, of quietude, of…
…twilight falling like amber, no fierce brightness
of Sun to leap across the sky like trumpet cry, no white Moon mithril-bright
to reproach with memories of stolen sails, but a soft haze of warm-cool
dimness, not dull or livid but a shading from brightness to shadow that
is like the dreaming of all colors, and all beautiful. Ferns deep and sheltering
in a shadow that is the sleep of greenness, as far from the 'bright' of
that name as might be, and yet still latent that gemlike hue, to return
born anew in the distant dawn…
…it is a memory of finding, a dream
of waiting, of rest without anxiety, moving through the hushed woods as
the light changes from rich and heavy golds to a still-richer cloud of
periwinkle and dim azure without fear of losing the way, to a place well-known,
where the water runs beneath trees like pillars of living stone, gray and
warm in the familiar shade, where the leafy vaulting overhead is so dense
that the moss grows deeper than the finest carpet, and the little hillocks
that make inlets of the stream beside its swifter passage are overwhelmed
in softness…
…there one waits, in perfect trust, in the
deepening of evening, reclining among the fragrance of growing things,
the gift of greening that flourishes and changes and dies and is ever renewed,
giving food as it is food itself, taking sustenance from that which is
sustained by it, mystery amid Mysteries of the wounded world that cannot
be Denied for all its pain, while small salamanders creep over the hills
to them vast, hollows and handfuls of rich dark soil under ancient carpet
of leaf-litter to hunt still-smaller insects, and the little owls flutter
from their day's sleep to wakefulness, and the slow unmeasured time draws
on to the longed-for moment, when Love beyond all hope or deserving comes
to bid him rise and dance…
When the vast jaws close with exquisite,
taunting gentleness about his spasming heart and tear it out in a sudden
snapping recoil, his soul does not even mark its severing, for his mind
rests beside an eddy of a stream he has never known, a calm pool of Esgalduin
deep beside the mossy banks, clear upon stones, and before his dreaming
eyes is the first vision of his people, returned to him far beyond any
memory of his own holding, for he sees in the sheltered water the deep,
deep blue that is the vault of the free heavens, not dark of stone, and
Night that is without shadow of fear, and — beyond any taint or wounding
or harm — the faint clear light, reflected, shivering in the slight breath
of the water's slow stirring, of the first Stars…
Only slowly does the realization come to
him that there is nothing to ignore, nothing to turn from now, no din of
pain and darkness beating at his will, that he is free now of the Necromancer's
chains, that no longer does his fëa inhabit that over which
the wolf still snarls and gulps. He is too weary for fear, for horror,
at being unhoused — it does not seem to matter much just now, after the
horrors that have tempted him — but there is a wrongness, akin to
coldness were he in flesh yet, a sense of being naked beyond the nakedness
he has worn these long hours without number, that troubles him deeply.
He sees the lights now of his friends, those
who remain, the warmth of body and soul together as should be, of which
he has been so harshly robbed. He longs for the same shelter, but theirs
are defended against him by the nature of their existence: to contend with
them in such attempted robbery he would have to be far other than he is,
one raised in nobleness and the paths of wisdom, who while yet forsaking
them in folly has not forsaken all, nor forever, and who has been long
led by one whose wisdom and nobility is beyond compare in this sorrowful
land. Reluctantly he turns away — and his mind is drawn by another light,
unfamiliar yet oddly not so, a light that shines out flaring in the mirk
of the Pit like the flaring of a banner in the morning sky—
How could they have been blind to his brightness?
to the clear unwavering light that reminds him of the mingled light of
the Trees, when Laurelin closed her golden blossoms and Telperion's brilliance
slowly waxed to fullness, neither silver nor gold but both together, the
most beautiful of hours — the lure of it is irresistible, drawing him to
itself, his own light mingling with the mortal's now without any sense
of difference to repel him. Before he was too wounded to care of the difference
or to resist, when flesh blinded him and breaking, broke his spirit. Now
he is stronger than his rescuer, even unhoused in this unnatural state:
his advance cannot be repelled by the younger will — and he is drawn,
not
repulsed. The mingling of their lights is intoxicating, luring him to drink
deeper, forbidden or no—
But unresisting the other permits him free entry, would not bar him
even from full possession of his hröa,
fearing nothing of his
spirit after all that they have endured. He is welcome, though the
welcomer does not know what such trespass would do to him, no more than
does the naked ghost that longs for entry. —Perhaps, unresisted, uncontested,
there would be no harm done even to a mortal body, perhaps not even to
the soul, where another, freely harbored, might rest without injury to
either until both be at last cast forth by fanged hunger. It is tempting
— but he is no creature of the Shadow, nor unreasoning raw appetite and
hunger, to take what may not rightfully be given nor accepted: he will
not like a reckless moth dash out that which draws him, destroying himself
in the doing of it. Reluctantly he withdraws into the Voidlike cold of
the pit—
—Hither, friend—
That call is like the rising of the sun — his soul cannot but turn to
it, and be caught by its warm radiance. To the King's measureless spirit
he flies and is taken therein without harm on either part, he is held and
thanked and blessed, and his name returned to him from safekeeping, as
one might take a messenger bird in hands and bespeak it with a caress before
sending it forth in freedom to follow duty. There is no reproach for the
folly of his pride, no silent demand for shame in the memory of torment
taken — only boundless gratitude and joy at victory over the Shadow, and
the brilliance heals his confusion and loss so that though incomplete he
is not wounded, and his fëa forgets its nakedness as though
he were one of the Beautiful Ones who never took bodily form in Arda.
Free, he wings forth from the light that once he followed through a
darkness terrible beyond thought, through coldness of flesh and spirit
that he had thought would never be matched upon this earth — and as this
last dark was so much the worse than the other so much more glorious has
the light which guarded and guided him through become. It is Mystery, complete
and comprehending him, and he understands that which he cannot explain,
that the weakness of Love and Life is beyond all power of the calculating
Dark to measure, and the strength of its helplessness,
infinite.
He returns to the strange other light one last time, still drawn
beyond his willing — yet not without it — to merge one last time before
final parting forever, not to take, but as a traveller, not thirsty,
well-equipped, may slip hand softly beneath the surface of a clear welling
spring and fill palm, not to drink but to marvel at the wonder of that
living crystal, before returning it to its source undiminished, unpolluted,
stirring no trouble from the depths of the sand to cloud its purity. There
is no resistance this time either, neither fear nor aversion, only kind
welcome as spirit merges — yet in that touch he perceives a stain like
a swirl of black mud tainting the dancing waters, a darkening shame and
sorrow that he has tasted blood
— not at the involuntary contagion,
the accidental press of unwilled matter against his own, but at something
that is far other: the knowledge that he most willfully accepted that taste,
and relished it, and swallowed what he might of it, the blood of his comrade
spurting from torn limb in sacrifice to his quest…
He finds it strange that he should be so consumed by such a little thing:
but it is torment that he who has forsworn all flesh in honour of Life
should not merely taste it but relish it, seeking not only any sensation
in the diminishing of the dark, but also the red savor so long forgone,
hungering in his famine like a hound straining at the kill before the hunts-master
tosses its due … Yet he does not seek to conceal it before them, neither
his taking of the lawless pleasure nor his self-disgust, vain though such
attempt would be.
—How shall he begrudge him such small ease, or turn away in disgust
from one who stayed him through bitterest temptation and the shock of his
breaking? There was blood in the water of the Fen, but they drank from
its puddles regardless, even as they steeped hair and surcoat in it to
ward against the flying cinders and shrags of nameless coal, once alas
named indeed! that hailed against them on the North Wind.
With the impress of this memory he allays the shame, pouring his gratitude
and pity out like cleansing tears to wash away the clotting filth, easing
the hurt of spirit which in turn eases the taut efforts to draw breath
against the chill — he remembers that, distantly, that sorrow was as harsh
upon the body as any injury, while he yet lived. And in that thought he
recollects again those who cannot depart as he, and his fëa is
troubled for them, and he lingers as though he might accomplish something
of defense or rescue, rather than risk ensnarement in the dark meshes of
the Wolfmaster's sorcery.
—Fly home, dear friend! Do not fear for us — for me —and
so strong is the command that he cannot refuse it, not in dark overmastery
but in the surety of faith that burns through it. His soul turns from the
place of its dispossession without further trouble and hurtles towards
the West like a bird of passage but far swifter, along roads that no wolf
shall stalk nor arrow cleave, safe and free of the black night that encompassed
it.
And still the mortal sings, his voice a tuneless tattered thread in
the darkness, his spirit a steady-burning flame like the light over banked
coals in a hearthplace, chanting the childish song of a land as vanished
as those days of his life, of the small birds settling to their nests in
the brier, and the frogs making merry in the mud of the marsh, and the
Boat of the Moon sailing overhead to fish back the stars where they fall
into the lake from the summer sky … yet somehow it is not unfitting that
one born before the Sun and Moon were sent forth should be sung home by
a children's song, by one but a child himself, and though they pass
his kind may yet endure though he perish — for that is the truth
of his song, not a foolish certainty of winning or returning in glory,
but only a quiet hope of enduring, of doing as well as might be
during the brief day, and resting at evening in the end.
The golden woman sings in his memory, but
her hands sharpen sword blades, and her smile is gentle in its sadness,
thinking of her lord who readies with her aid to go to the King's War for
this season, and perhaps he will come home to her again, as after past
seasons … the dark-haired man who comes to kiss the nape of her neck beside
her warrior's braid, stilling the stone and the iron in her hands with
his own, to reach then to where his son and his faithful hound lie sleepless
and to smooth the troubled faces of each, taking the boy's right hand in
his own right hand and smiling into his worried eyes, his own gaze promising
nothing false of the future save the unending strength of his love…
Until at last the song is ended, and the singer shudders in his bonds
and gasps for breath in darkness, and they bow before him in spirit but
dare not touch the flame that burns in lonely brilliance in the Shadow,
to their great shame and heartsickness; until their King gains back so
much of his strength after time unknown that he can speak, flesh shaping
breath with more effort than ever shaped stone or metal, and whisper his
acclaim:
—Well-named — well-named, my brave one—
…and one of them again finds courage to reach forth, extending his will
to draw the mortal into their circle, not left without to be wondered at,
but sharing their thought and dreaming and wordless speech. There is the
inevitable shudder of the foreign touch, the sad recoil that they regret
as they make it, but then it is over and he is one with them again, as
it should be. This time it is easier, and again they do not know if it
be the oftener doing that makes it so, or if each time it changes him,
so that he is a little less strange to them and the otherness of
him lessened. And this time some of them wonder, so that they all must,
if perhaps it does not change them
as well? so that as the younger
becomes more like the Firstborn, perhaps they too are more akin to this
Secondborn child, and so the distance grows ever less…
It does not matter.
They hold him, swathing his tormented shell in bindings of warmth and
sleep so that his pain is more of memory than presence, stilling the tremors
and muting the flames of endless healing that scorch his wrists, weaving
runes of peace and warding about his flesh that will last for a little
while at least, until the King recovers enough to remake the working properly.
He is their treasure, theirs to defend against wolf and works of
evil power and despair, the last child of those who looked to them once
almost as gods, trusting their leadership and laying down their lives at
the King's command, and they will not let him go into the dark before they
have fallen to the last, futile though it be in ending.
And they are eight now in the pit beneath the tower, the place where
the foundations of the high place sink into the stone of the once-fair
island, bound in earth and water past the hope of air and fire ever again,
King and Companions, High-Elven and Grey-Elven, Mortal and Undying, all
alike — refusing to curse the Light, though they will die for it, gaining
nothing, in the place where wisdom and strength and age and renown mean
nothing — they are one Kindred now, at least for a little while, at least
so long as they live in this broken land of Middle-earth…
And when they die, though they lose him from their company forever,
his name will not be lost, nor those of his people — they will remember,
so long as Arda endure, though they will never be able to explain to those
who remained behind, what perilous beauty they found the other side of
the darkness and the Ice, never those to know what worth had the dreadful
price, nor to share in what they received there, the terrible gifts: awareness
of brevity, and the preciousness of a moment; joy between
sorrows; and strangest and most terrible of all, understanding of death
from
one mortal yet Elven-wise, acceptance of death as a gift given — the Gift
of Men, which is now also theirs—
June 29, 2002