A Visit to Purgatory
So, with a free day at my disposal and being, for the moment, on top of my programming class homework, I decided to go through my graveyard files in search of old, unfinished fics that I might be inspired to pick up again.
The piece below was written shortly after one of my trips to Ireland (maybe 2009?), specifically to Sligo. I had outlined this entire *sprawling* epic about the Dagor Dagorath, told from multiple first person POV's, wherein the forces of the Eldar are marshaled at the onset of the Final Battle, and old wounds and grievances must be dealt with... there were entire plot threads about Maglor retrieving his brothers from the Halls of Waiting and dealing with the fallout of his family's legacy; culture shock for those who had stayed in Middle-earth into the 21st century and returning to a Valinor which, in many ways, remained a land unchanged by time; there was a whole romantic arc about Beleg and Haldir, and Beleg coming to terms with his extremely complicated relationship with Turin, who lives again to fulfill his destiny... you get the point: BIG STUFF.
Too big. The fact that only one chapter of it exists after 5 years ought to be a sign that it's time for me to run up the white flag and admit defeat on this one-- it's Just. Too. Big. And I will never write it. Maybe someday I'll write up a really detailed backstory/primer and then attach little ficlets to it if and when they worm their way out of my brain, but I can say with a large degree of certainty that the mega-epic that I had envisioned will never come to pass. And that's ok! I'm much more invested in seeing Ionnath through than fighting with an unwieldy beast that only ever existed in a bunch of lists and outlines and a single finished chapter.
I workshopped this with some friends a couple of years ago in the hopes that it would spur me to action, but if that group can't get me motivated (and to them: *thank you*), well, then it's really time to just consign this one to Kenazfiction Purgatory. It does sort of stand on its own, in a way, but it was but a small part of what I had originally imagined. So in the spirit of letting go and moving on, and hoping that future days will prove more fruitful than those past, I offer the following:
Desolate Winds, Part I: Over the Wandering Sea
RPF, Silmarillion/Lord of the Rings
Rating (this part): PG
Atop the mountain Knocknarea, Queen Maedb stands upright in her tomb, sword in hand, facing her enemies in Ulster. For two thousand years, she has patiently waited to take her vengeance.
Well.
A girded goddess in vigilant repose certainly makes for a better drama than an unruly wife who filled the idle hours between stealing her neighbors' cattle (which were plentiful) with the cuckolding of her husbands (who were likewise). In this world, so unlike the one into which I was born, truth rarely surpasses fiction, so Maedb rose from sticky-fingered virago to warrior-queen. This is the way that legends grow, tentatively as spring shoots, plastic and mutable. Somewhere along the line, I may have insinuated that carrying a rock to her burial place would bring the bearer good luck; stone by stone, a hummock became the mighty cairn on which I now stand, my eyes, like Maedb's, facing Ulster: everyone wants to be part of a legend, and everyone likes to imagine a change in their fortunes, even if only to rattle the banality of their existence. Legends have power, and legends build things-a bard's reputation, a tomb.
Eventually I grew weary of the story I had crafted, of the acclaim to which a faithless wife and petty thief had risen. I penned new verses and sang them here and there, and soon everyone knew- or at least believed, which, in the minds of Men is very nearly the same thing- that Maedb had been killed by a slingshot and a well-aimed piece of cheese. An ignominious way to go, no doubt; at least, I thought so. It was certainly a fitting end. Maedb's infidelity was no skin off my back-- I'd not asked her for constancy, and I'd had plenty of lovers of my own-- but I never again had another bull so fine as Finnbhennach.
A word to the wise, should you want it: the poet will always have the last word; provoke his ire at your peril.
Maedb, it should be said in fairness, has paid me well for services rendered: her resting place affords me a view of Sligo's coast, and far out to sea, too far for the eyes of Men to fathom, the water glows with the supernatural radiance of a star trapped beneath the waves. But a man can't spend every hour of every day standing on top of a mountain, staring at a light in the sea. At best, it's impractical. At worst, morose. So I keep a small house in Carrowmore, on property I bought two hundred years ago when land was a pittance, and now the Office of Public Works grants me a tax abatement to maintain the megalithic graves there. I would have done so in any case; the last of the Dúnedain lie beneath those passages, their exquisitely rendered memorials now faded to primitive dolmens. Time may build legends, but it erodes stone.
My voice is in high demand at the Monday night seisiún at the Harp Tavern, where I am well-known for my renditions of traditional songs. I should hope so, considering I wrote so many of them. The Harp draws a pleasant mix of locals and tourists, and the stone floors and low ceilings make the dimly-lit room homely and cheerful rather than stifling. It's good craic, as they say. The regulars know my mood by the songs that I choose: Finnegan's Wake, if I'm feeling fresh, I am Stretched on Your Grave or Éamonn an Chnoic if I've taken a maudlin turn. They keep a bottle of Redbreast 15 year old behind the bar with my name on it: Ailill Ó Deoradhain. If you knew me, you'd agree it's a fair joke. I'll play in Sligo for a decade at a stretch, then announce that I've gotten a job in America, disappear for thirty years or so-- traveling abroad sometimes, or simply wandering south to Galway, or east to Dublin -- only to return some time later, claiming to be my own son (or grandson, or nephew), and bearing the tragic tale of my own death. Sometimes, I've died after a prolonged illness; sometime I've died in my sleep of old age. Lately, I was said to have died in America after falling from a scaffolding at a construction site in Woodside, Queens. Since death awaits me only in the tales of my own telling, I may as well give myself some variety.
In this way, centuries have passed.
Over the years, some have suspected my true nature. The Irish still have romantic and fantastical notions. Only once, however- many, many years ago now-has anyone come right out and asked me. She was a butcher's wife and a fisherman's daughter who claimed to see leprechauns and fetches and bean-sidhes. "Ailill, is it?" she asked, lips wryly pursed and brow arching over cynically narrowed eyes, "That's also the word for 'elf,' you know." I gave her a wink, and told her yes, I knew. After a prolonged silence, she huffed a sigh, rolled her eyes, and poured me another measure of whiskey. I was never entirely certain if I had dispelled all doubt in her mind or only fueled her suspicions; we never spoke of it again. I wish we had. It would have been nice to have someone who knew. A half-life of lies and secrecy exhausts both the heart and mind, and my soul was already well beyond weary.
The Spring of 2017 blows in cool and rainy, day upon day of that famed Irish weather that turns the country so vividly green. I watch storms roll in over the bay, squalls hovering above the water, above that place where I have for so long cast my gaze. I've nearly exhausted another cycle in Sligo; I am thinking perhaps I'll try London this time and lose myself in the city. Last time, it had been Carna. Carna has music in its bones, and I have spent a good deal of time there some decades ago. I had even gotten myself something of a protégé-a young man named Éamon, who possessed a finer memory for song and tale than any mortal man I have known since the last of the Men of the West passed on. In some places, the old blood breeds true, though its strength is greatly diminished. Yes, perhaps in Autumn I'll go to London. I find it harder of late to be too far away from the Light in the water, but I have no choice: people will notice that I never age; questions will be asked. It will not do.
This is the bent of my thoughts when I realize that I am not alone.
"Hallo there!" a voice calls up to me, jaunty, though with the husky timbre of age. An old man has rounded the path and is forging his way steadily up the steep pitch just before the mountain levels off. He is dressed in a Barbour shooting jacket, tweed breeks, and thick wool socks with pheasants embroidered on them, the very picture of highland gentry. He leans on his walking stick, but his steps are spry and his pace does not slow even as the path angles upward. "Are we the only ones about today?" he asks, looking around. Benbulben rises behind him, a hulking shadow against the horizon, and a patchwork of fields unfolds below in all directions, but no other pilgrims have progressed through the grey haze of the morning. "Well," he says in answer to his own question, "I suppose this weather doesn't much encourage a trek, does it?"
His accent is not Irish. It is not an accent anyone here would recognize, and despite the long hike and the years betrayed by the hoary thatch of hair sprouting on his chin, he is not the least bit winded. The hairs on the back of my neck begin to rise.
"I know you!" he crows, though he modulates his volume now that he has reached the summit. My heart trips in its rhythm. "I've seen your face on posters all up and down O'Connell street!" His eyes glint mirth and mischief. "Fancy that! I've come quite a distance, climbing this mountain with a rock in my pocket -" He fishes about in the pocket of the waxed canvas coat and produces a common grey stone- "and my good luck, I meet a local legend." His eyes, perspicacious and shining, lock on mine.
I smile wanly, but all the while my head is reeling. He turns and takes the final few steps toward Maedb's cairn. Without fanfare, he sets his rock, small and grey and unremarkable, down among the others. Back still turned, he says, very softly, "well met, Ailil Ó Deoradhain."
A gull shrieks overhead. I am struck by the urge to hurl myself down the side of the mountain. But I don't; I simply speak his name.
"Olórin."
"It's been a very long time," he replies, turning, his unearthly effervescence settling into an equally unearthly stillness. A smile opens up across his face, placid and generous, once he has appraised me from my closely-cropped hair to the well-worn hiking boots on my feet. "You look not one whit different."
I suppose that a haircut and a pair of denims have done little to alter my appearance in the great scheme of things. All in all, it is rather an anticlimax as far as reunions go, but my heart is still in my throat. I take a breath and steel myself. I am about to hear the resolution of a long tale for the very first time. Many generations have come and gone since last I heard a story of which I did not already know the ending. "Have you come for me?"
He nods. "Yes.
"I have missed this place," he says, bridging the chasm of my silence, and I am grateful for the simple kindness in his face in this guise of an elderly tourist in country clothing. It suits him. "The world is much bigger than it once was. But I find, sometimes, that I truly miss the company of Men. Ages have passed since I have walked among them; I find their intensity invigorating; the flames of their spirits blaze so briefly and so bright."
"Am I the last of my kind, then?" I don't think I can stand the suspense much longer, and my voice comes out in a bitter demand. After millennial silence, I want to know what business he has with me here, and now.
"No."
Olórin is attuned to my reaction, first shock, and then gutting sorrow. All this time, I had assumed I was alone by circumstance, but no: I am alone because I am anathema. I truly am Ailil Ó Deoradhain: Elf in exile.
"Some of the Avari established colonies in Iceland. Thranduil and his folk settled in Finland, where he still finds Trolls to hunt. Alatar and Pallando have gone to them."
"And you have come to me."
He looks beyond the bay, beyond the sentient spark in the deeps, past what even my eyes can see, to the land of my birth. "A shadow has fallen on the land of light, and a storm long ago foretold now gathers in the West. Yes, Kanafinwë, it is time. You have been summoned home."
I sink to my knees, and the wet moss spreads a damp chill through the denim. The earth is tilting, and Maedb's tomb towers above me. I imagine thousands of stones tumbling down and burying me, the harridan's revenge pressing the last breath from my lungs. For a moment, I wish that they would. For all the years that I have dreamed of home, now that I am to leave this place, I am tempted to refuse the summons. Rage and despair, defiance and remorse, all foment within me like the tempests I have watched blowing in across the bay, swiftly and violently. My tongue grows thick in my mouth as Olórin waits for my response. But I have none, I am struck dumb. After all, what have I to return to? My brothers are dead, my name is held in scorn... and I have been living among Men for so long that I cannot even fathom what it will be like to be amongst my own kind anymore. I had put all hopes of redemption far from me for all these many years, believing that it would never come to pass, for in all the sagas of the Elder Children of Iluvatar, there is none more reviled than that of Fëanor and his sevens sons, who rebelled against the gods and slaughtered their kin, and I alone remain to bear the burden of that story and all that happened in its wake.
But that's the bloody way of myths: a bard can plant the seed, but he cannot train the branches to his design, nor prune the budding shoots if they wind on paths not of his choosing. It has long been my province to craft the stories of other peoples' lives, to sing others into legend, and suddenly my song is being sung to me by a voice that is not my own. My legend, my very history, is being rewritten by forces beyond my control.
But I suppose it is unreasonable for me to complain: after all, I turned a cattle thief into a goddess... and in a fit of pique murdered her with a wheel of cheese.
The title is taken from the poem The Unappeasable Host by William Butler Yeats:
The Danaan children laugh, in cradles of wrought gold,
And clap their hands together, and half close their eyes,
For they will ride the North when the ger-eagle flies,
With heavy whitening wings, and a heart fallen cold:
I kiss my wailing child and press it to my breast,
And hear the narrow graves calling my child and me.
Desolate winds that cry over the wandering sea;
Desolate winds that hover in the flaming West;
Desolate winds that beat the doors of Heaven, and beat
The doors of Hell and blow there many a whimpering ghost;
O heart the winds have shaken, the unappeasable host
Is comelier than candles at Mother Mary's feet.
The piece below was written shortly after one of my trips to Ireland (maybe 2009?), specifically to Sligo. I had outlined this entire *sprawling* epic about the Dagor Dagorath, told from multiple first person POV's, wherein the forces of the Eldar are marshaled at the onset of the Final Battle, and old wounds and grievances must be dealt with... there were entire plot threads about Maglor retrieving his brothers from the Halls of Waiting and dealing with the fallout of his family's legacy; culture shock for those who had stayed in Middle-earth into the 21st century and returning to a Valinor which, in many ways, remained a land unchanged by time; there was a whole romantic arc about Beleg and Haldir, and Beleg coming to terms with his extremely complicated relationship with Turin, who lives again to fulfill his destiny... you get the point: BIG STUFF.
Too big. The fact that only one chapter of it exists after 5 years ought to be a sign that it's time for me to run up the white flag and admit defeat on this one-- it's Just. Too. Big. And I will never write it. Maybe someday I'll write up a really detailed backstory/primer and then attach little ficlets to it if and when they worm their way out of my brain, but I can say with a large degree of certainty that the mega-epic that I had envisioned will never come to pass. And that's ok! I'm much more invested in seeing Ionnath through than fighting with an unwieldy beast that only ever existed in a bunch of lists and outlines and a single finished chapter.
I workshopped this with some friends a couple of years ago in the hopes that it would spur me to action, but if that group can't get me motivated (and to them: *thank you*), well, then it's really time to just consign this one to Kenazfiction Purgatory. It does sort of stand on its own, in a way, but it was but a small part of what I had originally imagined. So in the spirit of letting go and moving on, and hoping that future days will prove more fruitful than those past, I offer the following:
Desolate Winds, Part I: Over the Wandering Sea
RPF, Silmarillion/Lord of the Rings
Rating (this part): PG
Atop the mountain Knocknarea, Queen Maedb stands upright in her tomb, sword in hand, facing her enemies in Ulster. For two thousand years, she has patiently waited to take her vengeance.
Well.
A girded goddess in vigilant repose certainly makes for a better drama than an unruly wife who filled the idle hours between stealing her neighbors' cattle (which were plentiful) with the cuckolding of her husbands (who were likewise). In this world, so unlike the one into which I was born, truth rarely surpasses fiction, so Maedb rose from sticky-fingered virago to warrior-queen. This is the way that legends grow, tentatively as spring shoots, plastic and mutable. Somewhere along the line, I may have insinuated that carrying a rock to her burial place would bring the bearer good luck; stone by stone, a hummock became the mighty cairn on which I now stand, my eyes, like Maedb's, facing Ulster: everyone wants to be part of a legend, and everyone likes to imagine a change in their fortunes, even if only to rattle the banality of their existence. Legends have power, and legends build things-a bard's reputation, a tomb.
Eventually I grew weary of the story I had crafted, of the acclaim to which a faithless wife and petty thief had risen. I penned new verses and sang them here and there, and soon everyone knew- or at least believed, which, in the minds of Men is very nearly the same thing- that Maedb had been killed by a slingshot and a well-aimed piece of cheese. An ignominious way to go, no doubt; at least, I thought so. It was certainly a fitting end. Maedb's infidelity was no skin off my back-- I'd not asked her for constancy, and I'd had plenty of lovers of my own-- but I never again had another bull so fine as Finnbhennach.
A word to the wise, should you want it: the poet will always have the last word; provoke his ire at your peril.
Maedb, it should be said in fairness, has paid me well for services rendered: her resting place affords me a view of Sligo's coast, and far out to sea, too far for the eyes of Men to fathom, the water glows with the supernatural radiance of a star trapped beneath the waves. But a man can't spend every hour of every day standing on top of a mountain, staring at a light in the sea. At best, it's impractical. At worst, morose. So I keep a small house in Carrowmore, on property I bought two hundred years ago when land was a pittance, and now the Office of Public Works grants me a tax abatement to maintain the megalithic graves there. I would have done so in any case; the last of the Dúnedain lie beneath those passages, their exquisitely rendered memorials now faded to primitive dolmens. Time may build legends, but it erodes stone.
My voice is in high demand at the Monday night seisiún at the Harp Tavern, where I am well-known for my renditions of traditional songs. I should hope so, considering I wrote so many of them. The Harp draws a pleasant mix of locals and tourists, and the stone floors and low ceilings make the dimly-lit room homely and cheerful rather than stifling. It's good craic, as they say. The regulars know my mood by the songs that I choose: Finnegan's Wake, if I'm feeling fresh, I am Stretched on Your Grave or Éamonn an Chnoic if I've taken a maudlin turn. They keep a bottle of Redbreast 15 year old behind the bar with my name on it: Ailill Ó Deoradhain. If you knew me, you'd agree it's a fair joke. I'll play in Sligo for a decade at a stretch, then announce that I've gotten a job in America, disappear for thirty years or so-- traveling abroad sometimes, or simply wandering south to Galway, or east to Dublin -- only to return some time later, claiming to be my own son (or grandson, or nephew), and bearing the tragic tale of my own death. Sometimes, I've died after a prolonged illness; sometime I've died in my sleep of old age. Lately, I was said to have died in America after falling from a scaffolding at a construction site in Woodside, Queens. Since death awaits me only in the tales of my own telling, I may as well give myself some variety.
In this way, centuries have passed.
Over the years, some have suspected my true nature. The Irish still have romantic and fantastical notions. Only once, however- many, many years ago now-has anyone come right out and asked me. She was a butcher's wife and a fisherman's daughter who claimed to see leprechauns and fetches and bean-sidhes. "Ailill, is it?" she asked, lips wryly pursed and brow arching over cynically narrowed eyes, "That's also the word for 'elf,' you know." I gave her a wink, and told her yes, I knew. After a prolonged silence, she huffed a sigh, rolled her eyes, and poured me another measure of whiskey. I was never entirely certain if I had dispelled all doubt in her mind or only fueled her suspicions; we never spoke of it again. I wish we had. It would have been nice to have someone who knew. A half-life of lies and secrecy exhausts both the heart and mind, and my soul was already well beyond weary.
The Spring of 2017 blows in cool and rainy, day upon day of that famed Irish weather that turns the country so vividly green. I watch storms roll in over the bay, squalls hovering above the water, above that place where I have for so long cast my gaze. I've nearly exhausted another cycle in Sligo; I am thinking perhaps I'll try London this time and lose myself in the city. Last time, it had been Carna. Carna has music in its bones, and I have spent a good deal of time there some decades ago. I had even gotten myself something of a protégé-a young man named Éamon, who possessed a finer memory for song and tale than any mortal man I have known since the last of the Men of the West passed on. In some places, the old blood breeds true, though its strength is greatly diminished. Yes, perhaps in Autumn I'll go to London. I find it harder of late to be too far away from the Light in the water, but I have no choice: people will notice that I never age; questions will be asked. It will not do.
This is the bent of my thoughts when I realize that I am not alone.
"Hallo there!" a voice calls up to me, jaunty, though with the husky timbre of age. An old man has rounded the path and is forging his way steadily up the steep pitch just before the mountain levels off. He is dressed in a Barbour shooting jacket, tweed breeks, and thick wool socks with pheasants embroidered on them, the very picture of highland gentry. He leans on his walking stick, but his steps are spry and his pace does not slow even as the path angles upward. "Are we the only ones about today?" he asks, looking around. Benbulben rises behind him, a hulking shadow against the horizon, and a patchwork of fields unfolds below in all directions, but no other pilgrims have progressed through the grey haze of the morning. "Well," he says in answer to his own question, "I suppose this weather doesn't much encourage a trek, does it?"
His accent is not Irish. It is not an accent anyone here would recognize, and despite the long hike and the years betrayed by the hoary thatch of hair sprouting on his chin, he is not the least bit winded. The hairs on the back of my neck begin to rise.
"I know you!" he crows, though he modulates his volume now that he has reached the summit. My heart trips in its rhythm. "I've seen your face on posters all up and down O'Connell street!" His eyes glint mirth and mischief. "Fancy that! I've come quite a distance, climbing this mountain with a rock in my pocket -" He fishes about in the pocket of the waxed canvas coat and produces a common grey stone- "and my good luck, I meet a local legend." His eyes, perspicacious and shining, lock on mine.
I smile wanly, but all the while my head is reeling. He turns and takes the final few steps toward Maedb's cairn. Without fanfare, he sets his rock, small and grey and unremarkable, down among the others. Back still turned, he says, very softly, "well met, Ailil Ó Deoradhain."
A gull shrieks overhead. I am struck by the urge to hurl myself down the side of the mountain. But I don't; I simply speak his name.
"Olórin."
"It's been a very long time," he replies, turning, his unearthly effervescence settling into an equally unearthly stillness. A smile opens up across his face, placid and generous, once he has appraised me from my closely-cropped hair to the well-worn hiking boots on my feet. "You look not one whit different."
I suppose that a haircut and a pair of denims have done little to alter my appearance in the great scheme of things. All in all, it is rather an anticlimax as far as reunions go, but my heart is still in my throat. I take a breath and steel myself. I am about to hear the resolution of a long tale for the very first time. Many generations have come and gone since last I heard a story of which I did not already know the ending. "Have you come for me?"
He nods. "Yes.
"I have missed this place," he says, bridging the chasm of my silence, and I am grateful for the simple kindness in his face in this guise of an elderly tourist in country clothing. It suits him. "The world is much bigger than it once was. But I find, sometimes, that I truly miss the company of Men. Ages have passed since I have walked among them; I find their intensity invigorating; the flames of their spirits blaze so briefly and so bright."
"Am I the last of my kind, then?" I don't think I can stand the suspense much longer, and my voice comes out in a bitter demand. After millennial silence, I want to know what business he has with me here, and now.
"No."
Olórin is attuned to my reaction, first shock, and then gutting sorrow. All this time, I had assumed I was alone by circumstance, but no: I am alone because I am anathema. I truly am Ailil Ó Deoradhain: Elf in exile.
"Some of the Avari established colonies in Iceland. Thranduil and his folk settled in Finland, where he still finds Trolls to hunt. Alatar and Pallando have gone to them."
"And you have come to me."
He looks beyond the bay, beyond the sentient spark in the deeps, past what even my eyes can see, to the land of my birth. "A shadow has fallen on the land of light, and a storm long ago foretold now gathers in the West. Yes, Kanafinwë, it is time. You have been summoned home."
I sink to my knees, and the wet moss spreads a damp chill through the denim. The earth is tilting, and Maedb's tomb towers above me. I imagine thousands of stones tumbling down and burying me, the harridan's revenge pressing the last breath from my lungs. For a moment, I wish that they would. For all the years that I have dreamed of home, now that I am to leave this place, I am tempted to refuse the summons. Rage and despair, defiance and remorse, all foment within me like the tempests I have watched blowing in across the bay, swiftly and violently. My tongue grows thick in my mouth as Olórin waits for my response. But I have none, I am struck dumb. After all, what have I to return to? My brothers are dead, my name is held in scorn... and I have been living among Men for so long that I cannot even fathom what it will be like to be amongst my own kind anymore. I had put all hopes of redemption far from me for all these many years, believing that it would never come to pass, for in all the sagas of the Elder Children of Iluvatar, there is none more reviled than that of Fëanor and his sevens sons, who rebelled against the gods and slaughtered their kin, and I alone remain to bear the burden of that story and all that happened in its wake.
But that's the bloody way of myths: a bard can plant the seed, but he cannot train the branches to his design, nor prune the budding shoots if they wind on paths not of his choosing. It has long been my province to craft the stories of other peoples' lives, to sing others into legend, and suddenly my song is being sung to me by a voice that is not my own. My legend, my very history, is being rewritten by forces beyond my control.
But I suppose it is unreasonable for me to complain: after all, I turned a cattle thief into a goddess... and in a fit of pique murdered her with a wheel of cheese.
The title is taken from the poem The Unappeasable Host by William Butler Yeats:
The Danaan children laugh, in cradles of wrought gold,
And clap their hands together, and half close their eyes,
For they will ride the North when the ger-eagle flies,
With heavy whitening wings, and a heart fallen cold:
I kiss my wailing child and press it to my breast,
And hear the narrow graves calling my child and me.
Desolate winds that cry over the wandering sea;
Desolate winds that hover in the flaming West;
Desolate winds that beat the doors of Heaven, and beat
The doors of Hell and blow there many a whimpering ghost;
O heart the winds have shaken, the unappeasable host
Is comelier than candles at Mother Mary's feet.