Tales of Older Days (7/8)
Title: Tales of Older Days (7/8): A Shade Repetitive
Author: Clodius Pulcher *cough*
Characters: Erestor, A Heroine, An Urchin, A Villain, A Dragon Cub, HenchDwarves and Others. Appearing in this chapter: A Mariner, A Bird-Princess, Various Anonymous Valar. Reappearing in this chapter: An Alewife.
Rating: PG-13.
Book/Source: LotR, Silmarillion
Disclaimer: I am not J.R.R. Tolkien and I make no money from this.
Note: To ignoblebard and gogollescent I owe inspiration and encouragement, as ever. MEFA 2010 Second Place (Genres: Humor: Incomplete).
Summary: Poor Mili. No one ever listens to a sensible henchperson, right?
Wordcount: 3988
it was a dark and stormy night | the patter of tiny feet | indulge your local narrator | sleep under stone | inez and the machine | adventures of a most lurid kind
~ a shade repetitive ~
“Ma’am,” said Mili, “I can’t help but think -”
“When I require your opinion, I shall inform you,” said Lady Inez precisely, without removing her eyes from the sweating alewife. The bright intensity of her observation appeared to be causing Kat Ferny some discomfort. “Until then, be so good as to remain silent.”
Mili tugged his beard sourly and shut up. “Thank you,” said Lady Inez and mentally added another fortnight’s worth of creatively exquisite agony onto the Dwarf’s eventual sentence. “Where were we?”
“On the downs, yer ladyship,” said the alewife nervously. “That’s what the Elf said. He’s gonna take Gogol and the dragon to this Imladris place, and they’re meeting on the downs -”
“‘In a empty barrow above a valley marked by two standing stones’,” quoted Lady Inez, who had a very good memory. “Did he say why?”
The alewife sweated harder. “No, yer ladyship. He just was.”
Mili was practically bobbing on the iron toes of his big boots. “Ma’am,” he hissed, apparently unable to bite his tongue. “If I might just -”
“No, Mili. You may not.”
“But -”
“No.”
The urchinous thief had been in the Old Forest and unaccompanied not an hour ago: this much Lady Inez knew for a fact. She might not be so fortunate as to have any reliable and competent henchpersons in her employ, but she could trust the report of her mirror and thus her own eyes - even if the mirror had failed to display the whereabouts of the dragon. Lady Inez assumed, and was not happy about this assumption, that it was in the possession of that most colourful of gentlemen, Iarwain ben-Adar, someone she was not at all keen to encounter again in person. His fashion sense was atrocious, for one thing. But perhaps he would shepherd the wretched thief to the barrow and then leave it there. That would be quite in keeping with Iarwain’s general outlook on life, thought Lady Inez, who considered Iarwain both thoughtless and hopelessly jovial. The alewife’s information had banished any lingering doubt from her mind that Iarwain and his flighty river-wife were the ‘friends’ of whom that meddling Elf (the one currently lying pink-haired and comatose in a Dwarvish wagon) had spoken the previous day.
It did not occur to Lady Inez to wonder how the second Elf had reached the conclusion that his wife was dead. She would have supposed, had the thought flickered into her mind even for a second, that the Elf had learned of his wife’s capture and seen how hopeless it was to oppose her captor. Long years of political practice had instilled certain habits of thought in Lady Inez’s head and even such more recent upsets as had caused her to resort to a head both elegant and golden had failed to wholly disrupt them. Besides, the Elf-woman was dead in all but name. It was perfectly rational for the second Elf to cut his losses and carry the dragon off to Master Elrond Half-elven at Imladris, where Lady Inez could not hope to follow. What he might want with the wretched thief was an utter mystery, of course.
The pressure of keeping his mouth shut was turning Mili red-faced behind his beard. Lady Inez’s gaze fell coldly on him.
“You may recall your compatriots from their fruitless search, Mili,” she said. “This good lady will lead us across the downs to this barrow. If, that is -” for the alewife had opened her mouth in alarm “- she wishes to receive her just reward for this day’s work.”
“But ma’am -” said Mili, all anguished frustration.
“No buts,” said Lady Inez. Her hair lay quiescent on her shoulders in its gleaming tresses; she stroked it thoughtfully, provoking a sound oddly reminiscent of a subvocal purr. “Oh, but you will remain here to guard the wagons and my belongings. I think you and six other Dwarves will be more than sufficient for that. Don’t you?”
~*~*~
The blood had all but dried when the ship sailed into the harbour at Mandos. It was starting to flake off Melinna’s skin by then, although her hair hung sticky and matted against her neck and her garments were stiffening into a kind of dark starchy crispness. Fading stains traced the impression of her initial landing on the gleaming deck, like the liquid rings left on tables by damp cups.
Eärendil the Mariner began to unfasten a huge knot of rope from the foot of the mast. “Ready yourself,” he said.
The net descended. Melinna found herself settling on the deck in her stiffened skirts, a white rope mesh falling gently round her. Eärendil would not look her in the face. She felt, absurdly, like some submerged statue rescued from a shipwreck and brought safely to port. She let Elwing help her to her feet and then stood there unsteadily, remembering how she had found Dior’s daughter as insubstantial as mist on reaching out to her from the net.
Elwing was looking at her with bright, troubled eyes. She said, “This is Mandos. Fëar are solid here. They seem so, anyway.”
Melinna said nothing. She walked into Mandos with Elwing, hand in hand.
If the Halls were real, Melinna’s memories afterwards were as fluid and unstable as those of meeting Morgoth in the gory Void. She remembered Elwing and the cool touch of Elwing’s hand, Elwing’s grey cloak and white gown brushing the ground and whispering like ruffled feathers. There might have been fair archways and courtyards tangled up with flowering vines and murmuring flocks of other people, less seen than heard, and only half-heard at that. Melinna bit her tongue experimentally and experienced a flood of salt and iron, but perhaps that was only the aftertaste of drowning in seas of frothing blood.
The blood was gummy between her toes. Later she would remember treading stickily on white stone.
Elwing led her through the Halls to a space so vast that its boundaries were hazy, if it was even bounded at all. Melinna saw gardens rolling off into the bluing distance, and huge unfamiliar trees, and people walking blurrily in the shadows of their branches; then she looked again and saw instead amassed drapery everywhere, the tapestries wrought so finely that the slightest stir of a breeze from some open door made the images seem to move. A rush of admiration seized her, then covetousness: she wanted to meet such weavers and wring all their craft secrets out of them, if that was even possible. Galadriel, she thought, and Galadriel’s daughter would die happily to see this.
There was a stone seat there. Elwing indicated it with a gesture and settled neatly on the ground nearby, tucking her pale feet under her. She was arranging and rearranging the silky folds of her billowing clothes, anxiously, like a seagull preening its disordered wings.
Nothing happened, for some time.
Presently Melinna became aware of voices murmuring somewhere just on the edge of earshot. What they were saying could not be made out, although the general tone was uneasy. She thought she saw movement flickering in the shadows of the tapestries, but there was no one there when she turned her head. Elwing sat up straight, looking suddenly alert.
After a while, Melinna realised that someone was asking a question. What did she think she was doing here, they wanted to know. This was all very irregular. Fëar had no business making their own way to Mandos, especially when they weren’t even properly dead. Couldn’t she just have caught one of Círdan’s ships, like everyone else?
“I wasn’t trying to get anywhere,” said Melinna. “I was -”
She stopped. She remembered walking on bloody shores and the Dark Lord’s madness and Vingilot’s voyage atop the midnight ramparts of the sky. But she could not remember how she had come to be there.
“Eärendil found her in the Void,” said Elwing, pleating her cloak with nervous fingers. “We knew her and her husband, you know, at Sirion. They were my father’s friends...”
Yes, thank you, said someone. That was common knowledge and by the way, Dior and Nimloth sent their regards. No, Melinna couldn’t see them. Or the Queen, or King Thingol. Or Daeron. Or - look, she could take it as read that this was not the time for a grand reunion, because there were more important things to talk about right now. Like whatever she had been doing in the Void. It wasn’t precisely a prime tourist destination, you know. Most governments washed their hands of any citizens stupid enough to travel there.
“I can’t remember,” said Melinna. “I was just - there.”
Murmur, murmur. Melinna got the impression that the number of people gathered just off-stage was growing. There was something oddly prosaic about this interview, for all its strangeness; she was not at all sure why, but the sensation was both calming and reassuring. It was a moment before someone suggested that she should take a look at this.
“Take a look at what?” she was about to say, when a puff of mist blew up before her. It cleared and left the air oddly glossy, like a window into somewhere else.
She looked and saw:
a yellow-haired woman in a scaly gown leading by the hand a scrawny urchin mostly hidden by a high-crowned battered hat. They were walking up a white chalk path towards a garden bright with flowers where a plump old fellow sat crooning to a silver cat-sized creature in the sun. He glanced upwards and winked, for all as if he knew he was under observation, then bounced to his feet with a merry whistle for the approaching woman and the visibly reluctant urchin. In the grass, the cattish creature uncoiled its lithe lizardy limbs and snapped a set of sharp little teeth in a display of ostentatious indifference, twitching its feathery eyebrows smugly.
“Oh,” said Melinna, staring, “wait...”
Iarwain ben-Adar and Goldberry the River-daughter she recognised at once, of course. It took a little longer to identify Miss Gogollescent Ferny and the dragonet disporting itself in Iarwain’s garden on the edge of the Old Forest, whither she had dispatched them before going to her fatal meeting with Mili the Dwarf’s mistress. The whole tale was starting to come back to her now. Why the urchin was wearing Iarwain’s hat, though...
“... there was... a Machine?” Melinna said slowly. “And Dwarves. And a woman, Inzil- Imezil- well, some Númenórean name. Inez, she called herself. She had a dragon’s egg, but it hatched. I was taking the dragonet and the urchin to Iarwain, but we got sidetracked. And I wanted to talk to her anyway. But she had a Machine...”
She remembered the Machine vividly all of a sudden: the reddish glitter of the crystals and those unpleasant hieroglyphs incised into the glass, too precisely to be a meaningless scrawl of sinister symbols, as she had seen on the werewolf isle of Tol-in-Gaurhoth and in the depths of the Dwarvish mithril-mine. She remembered the brass gears shifting as the lock clicked shut. And the slow burning glow and then a wrench -
Her mouth twisted downwards. “She seemed to think it would kill me,” she added. “Did it?”
No, said someone, not really. Although death was liable to be a common side-effect of separating the soul from the body and would no doubt follow in due course. If Melinna had been looking for a shortcut to Valinor, well, she couldn’t have found a better one, short of actually dying. It was all very irregular, they thought, and they sounded rather cross about it. Most people had the decency not to die until their deaths had actually been woven. Besides, there was a distinctly sticky situation developing back in Middle-earth and Melinna could have been very useful there. It was really rather imperative that the dragon (and ideally a great many other dangerous trinkets) should be kept out of That Person’s hands.
The thoughtful pause that followed this remark filled up with murmurings of a rather excited nature.
“Well,” said Melinna, when no one seemed inclined to relay any conclusions to her, “you could always send me back there. Couldn’t you?”
The murmuring ceased abruptly. They could, someone said severely, but it was their standard policy to discourage people from getting themselves frivolously killed, on the basis that they had better things to do with their time than to spend it resurrecting silly Elves who’d let perfectly good bodies go to waste. They weren’t operating a revolving door policy around here, thank you very much.
On the other hand, said someone else, it wasn’t as if she’d need a new body...
More excited whispering. Melinna had realised by now that she was dealing with a committee and managed, just, not to roll her eyes. At least she had sat on enough council meetings of one sort or another to know how they went.
“You sent Glorfindel back,” she pointed out. “You even gave him a new body.”
Glorfindel was a special case, said someone, rather repressively. They didn’t want to encourage people to think of death as a temporary inconvenience.
“I thought I wasn’t dead,” said Melinna. “You just said as much.”
Elwing was looking up at her with round shocked eyes. She grinned and added, “I won’t tell anyone.”
Someone sighed. Well, they said, perhaps they could make an exception just this once...
Melinna let out a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding.
“That would be very much appreciated,” she replied, as sweetly as she could. “Though I’d be grateful if you didn’t make me sail there, like Glorfindel. I think that would make me a very delayed reaction.”
Glorfindel was a special case, someone repeated. They had thought it would be good for him. Melinna remembered Glorfindel as she had first known him and was inclined to agree.
~*~*~
There were three Dwarvish wagons standing stolidly in the sunny stableyard of The Prancing Pony. One contained the Machine; one contained the various artefacts and jewels recovered from the cold-wyrm’s lair; and one contained everything a Dwarvish war-party might require to travel up the Greenway into the ruined North and back. An armoured Dwarf with a gleaming Dwarvish war-axe stood just as stolidly before each wagon, just in case any more of the locals might have mistakenly thought this a good moment to take to thievery. Three other Dwarves were stationed in the relevant parts of the Inn itself. In consequence the atmosphere was as taut as a laden washing line and liable to snap at any moment; such, at least, was the impression conveyed to Mili when the innkeeper crept out nervously to imply a muted desire to complain.
Mili was not in the best of moods. All the same, ‘those most highly placed should walk all the more humbly’, as the elders said. He nodded gravely and murmured polite platitudes through his beard and let the innkeeper leave believing that such martial measures would be dispensed with on Lady Inez’s return - which, for all Mili knew, was true.
He made the rounds of the sentry-posts again. Nothing interesting had happened since the last time. He was starting to think Lady Inez had been right.
She did tend to be, of course. All the same...
He was standing in the middle of the yard looking out into the dusty street. He wasn’t seeing it. In the dark of a stormy night, the Elves had drawn their swords to protect a stranger for no reason that Mili could see and they had refused to give the brat up even when Lady Inez herself had gone reclaim her property. Mili didn’t know why and he couldn’t think why either, except that Elves were flighty, whimsical creatures who needed no reasons for anything they might do, but he found it very hard to reconcile that earlier stubbornness (worthy of a Dwarf! thought Mili) with this sudden surrender and retreat.
He turned abruptly on his heel. The Elf-woman had been breathing when he had checked on her that morning. She might be useful as a hostage or a bargaining chip, not to mention whatever ‘tests’ Lady Inez had planned for her. Better make sure she still was.
They had cleared a space amid the artefacts and laid the comatose Elf-woman’s long body down in a nest of cloaks and spare clothing. Her pink braids fanned out luridly around her pallid head and her breathing, which was very slight, stirred a single hair across her face. No sign of recovery, then. Mili looked steadily down on her.
He was troubled.
The Elf-woman had brought it on herself. She had meddled with other people’s business and protected a thief and shown no remorse whatsoever. That she was female altered none of this, although it was particularly shocking behaviour from a member of the fairer sex. All the same, he could not quite shake his unease.
He would convince Lady Inez not to run any ‘tests’, he decided. He would find a respectable physician and see if anything could be done for the Elf-woman. That would be the right thing to do. Even if one was dealing with an Elf and a thief, one had to do the right thing. That was what distinguished Dwarves from Elves and Men and Orcs. Dwarves did the right thing.
Unexpectedly, the Elf-woman drew in a sharp, juddering breath and started to cough.
She did so noisily and violently, as though trying to dislodge dust in huge lungfuls from her narrow chest. Her eyes were squeezed shut, but she thrust herself upright and then doubled over spluttering, tear-tracks trickling to her chin through the fine dusty veneer that had settled on her face overnight. It flashed through Mili’s mind that he should thump her helpfully on the back, or at least fetch a glass of water. She sounded hoarse.
“Ma’am?” he said. “Are you -?”
The Elf-woman screwed up her eyes open and peered up through sticky lashes. She seemed dazed. Mili took a step forwards.
“Ma’am -” he started to say, and saw her eyes shift just as the dark burst in.
~*~*~
Elsewhere, Mili’s fair mistress was pleased with herself, and showed it.
It had not proven hard to find the barrow of which the second Elf had spoken, although the alewife contributed approximately as much to this endeavour as Turgon of Gondolin had done at the battle of Nirnaeth Arnoediad; that is to say, she succeeded only in delaying the inevitable. She also limped, whimpered, protested and went into mild hysterics when they passed between the standing stones and approached the ivy-clad slab that barred the barrow’s entrance. Kat Ferny, unlike her niece, was well aware of the sorts of horrible things that supposedly haunted the Barrowdowns. Lady Inez ignored the woman and observed with satisfaction the scrapes and dislodged pebbles that indicated a recent occupation of the barrow. Best of all, she was almost certain that Iarwain ben-Adar was nowhere in the vicinity. It was just as she had thought: he had delivered the thief and left it there, if he had bothered to come at all.
Momentarily Lady Inez contemplated mimicking the Elf’s voice to lure the thief out. Then she decided there was no point in wasting any more effort than she absolutely had to on such a wretched little beast. “Bari,” she said, “behind that stone lurks a thief and a piece of my property. Retrieve them for me. Preferably - but not, in the case of the thief, necessarily - in one piece.”
The Dwarf saluted. “Yes, ma’am!”
The stone was hauled aside. Into the dark ducked Bari the Dwarf.
They waited. The sounds that emerged from within the barrow were not indicative of a successful thief-taking expedition. Lady Inez’s eyes narrowed.
“Bari would appear to be having trouble,” she observed. “Fith, take four Dwarves and go to his aid.”
By the time Fith stumbled out again, collapsing cold at her feet with his white face frosty, Lady Inez already knew the Elf had lied. She looked down upon the fallen Dwarf and was almost angry enough to say so. The hungry seething gold of her hair said it for her. If her mirror had been before her at that very moment, she would have seen hairline cracks appearing in her perfect complexion and become angrier still. She needed to conserve what forces she had, which was really the most aggravating thing. Orcs she might have thrown away without a second thought, indeed often had done in the past, but Dwarves were not so easily replaced.
She would have to fetch them back from the Barrow-wight herself. Preferably, she added darkly to herself, without doing undue damage to the despoiled Barrow-wight. Lady Inez still thought raising all those rotting royal corpses had been one of her better ideas.
The nearest Dwarf uttered a yelp and jumped back. A skeletal hand was clawing its way up Fith’s leg, apparently attached only to a bony, disembodied arm. Someone had already damaged this poor Barrow-wight. Lady Inez thought she could guess who. A slight sigh escaped the alewife as she fainted.
“If so much as a word concerning this passes Mili’s lips,” said Lady Inez, with awful precision, “and I mean a single word, I shall remove his beard one hair at a time. And then his skin.”
She pushed back her hood and went down into the dark.
~*~*~
But Mili, when Lady Inez returned to Bree in icy fury with all the Dwarves she had led onto the Barrowdowns, but neither thief nor dragon in her hands, was in no state to utter any grimly self-satisfied ‘I told you so’s. From some way off they saw the smoke, a fine grey plume twisting up into the purple dusk above the town. Lady Inez halted and looked up through narrow eyes. Even at this distance, she thought she could smell the black powder that provided the principal ingredient of fireworks and other such pleasantly explosive devices. She had had several pounds of the stuff in one of the wagons.
The smell grew stronger as they approached The Prancing Pony. Explosions could be heard. There were townsfolk everywhere, running with full buckets or gathered talking excitedly or just gaping at the display. It was not The Pony itself that was on fire. Rather, the yard was ablaze with towering yellow and green flames, for all the frantic ministrations of the innkeeper and his stablehands. Lady Inez had guessed correctly: her wagons were burning.
She marched right up to the edge of the flames and stopped there only because someone gasped. Her hair was growling. “Where,” she demanded, although the answer blazed before her, “is Mili?”
As though in answer to her summons, a small form stumbled out of the inferno. He was bruised and frazzled and in possession of neither beard nor bristling eyebrows; and his once shiny helmet was dull with soot. Blood and a dull, spreading contusion marred his brow. He collapsed slowly at Lady Inez’s elegantly shod feet.
“Ma’am!” he said hoarsely. He clutched a blunt knife between his hands; his wrists were still fastened with rope. Acrid smoke poured off the leather and metal of his battered armour. “Gone - the Elves - they’ve gone - heard them talking - thought I was out cold - took the ponies - set fire to wagons - others dead - left me - gone - took the Road - straight to Imladris, beat us there...”
His voice trailed off, possibly because he saw Lady Inez’s face.
“If that pair of wild Avari think they can outrun me,” she said, very calmly, “they will find out they are wrong. And I will make them sorry. Gentlemen, we are going to leave Bree.”
And then, when the Dwarves only stood there staring at her unravelling, angry tresses, she spun round furiously with a suddenness that startled them. A close observer might have seen her shadow took a moment to settle back into that of a cloaked woman. “Now!”
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