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Fic Excerpt: Small Mercies, Part IV
As promised, here is an excerpt from my ongoing Haldirfic. I thought about posting this chapter in its entirety, but it still needs some sprucing up.
It is not Manwe he seeks after he has made his decision, but Nienna, Lady of mourning and compassion. Her halls are dark and desolate and filled with the furtive rustle of bats' wings and their conspiratorial chittering as they sidle and seethe in the eaves and unlighted crevices, but there is solace there, and wisdom, and she is not so hard as Manwe, so unstinting in her views. She will offer him counsel if he asks, and if he does not, then she will leave him to his meditations.
So he descends into her gloomy hall. His vessel he has left in quiet repose in Galadriel's gardens, and free from the constraints of flesh, he is as the sun in the firmament, a spirit of ethereal luminescence that floods the darkness before him and seeps into the shadowed cornices to expose moths with dusty wings dark as midnight, their antennae tenebrous and twitching in the sudden assault. They startle and take wing at his approach and flutter before him like a vanguard of cinders and ash, erratic and desperate as they fled the searing, white light.
Nienna's vassals, too, are accustomed to the dark, and they shy and squint from within their cowled robes. "Greetings, Olorin," they murmur, and bow respectfully, palms pressed together and fingers steepled outward. Nothing more. These are halls of grief and endless mourning, and they have little strength for speech. Tears and laments and strings plucked upon the lyre are the lingua franca.
"And to you," he replies, and bows a head he does not have before he remembers that he has left it pillowed on the soft grass of Lorien.
The vassals leave him to his devices, and he follows his vanguard of moths whither they choose to lead him. Nienna's halls are vast and dim, and their mistress, though steadfast in her sorrow, holds to no routine. She is found by happenstance, more often than not, drawn to where the sorrow is bitterest. He will find her when he finds her, and so he surrenders himself to the journey.
Though his spirit drifts, his mind does not. It races with prospects and roils with possibilities. Fragments of his conversation with the Lord and Lady of the Wood replay in his mind, as do fleeting images. The splendor of the sun in the Lady's hair; Celeborn's somber dignity as he listened to his wife; the aching emptiness in Haldir's eyes; the plodding gracelessness with which he had taken his leave, stiff and indifferent and capable of only cold courtesy.
He can claim no great intimacy with Haldir. Though he had been a frequent visitor to Lorien and a guest of many houses, his business had been with the Lord and Lady, and Haldir, though ever-present, cordial, and ready with a helping hand, had been only the marchwarden, aloof and unremarkable and ancillary to his purposes. Their conversations had been few and brief, pleasant but easily forgotten when the music and spirits were high and the wine flowed freely.
A man of honor he was, this he knows. He was in Lorien, recovering from his battle with the balrog, when the call for volunteers went forth. He knows he was the first to answer, to take up sword and bow at his liege's command. He knows the risk he accepted, the sacrifice he offered when he stepped forward. It was the risk accepted by the others who came after him, some far younger and more innocent to the cruelties of the world. It was a risk that came with the mantle of marchwarden, a hazard of duty that none could escape.
Most of those who had volunteered had fallen, stabbed and pierced and hewn by hostile blade and trampled in the foul mud by friend and foe alike. The mud-caked, grimy hands of war-ravaged Men and the surviving elves had pulled them from the sucking mud and piled them onto wooden carts, and the strongest of them had raised the shovel as they had once raised a sword and dug for them a common pit that kinder tongues had called a grave. No shrouds, no biers, no incense to mask the rot of corrupted flesh, no sweet, beloved voices raised in prayer and lament. Legolas had volunteered to escort the bodies of the vanguard to Lorien with a small host, but neither Theoden nor Aragorn could spare the men, and the elves could not bear to sunder the brotherhood of the dead, and so it was decided that the dead would lie as they had fought: together. Those survivors who had had kin among the slain had said their farewells and collected what mementos they would, and then the sainted dead and their weapons had been consigned to the pit with as much solemnity as could be managed.
They had shared a common fate, and all had done so at the behest of the Lady and Lord they so revered. Equal should have been her grief for those she had lost, and yet it was not. Grief is neither just nor fair, and it loves who it will. He knows this from experience sweet and hard. Countless souls has he met over the long course of his life, and while he has extended care and courtesy and good faith to all, few has he loved. Aragorn he counts as the best of men, good and right and just and tempered in his might. Gimli, son of Gloin, and the stoutest-hearted of the dwarves. Galadriel, the Lady of Light. Bilbo and Merry and Pippin and Samwise Gamgee.
And Frodo Baggins. Frodo he loved best of all, the sweet, wide-eyed young hobbit who had dreamed of adventures as a boy, and who followed him like a faithful pup whenever he visited the Shire to avail himself of its fine pipeweed and even finer company. Frodo, who had begged to hear his tales, and who had found himself at the center of the greatest adventure of the ages. A boy he had been when he had set out from the lush, green hills of the Shire with a damned Ring in his pocket and cheerful, determined Samwise at his back.
A boy he had been when in a moment of exasperated haste, he had volunteered to carry the doom of Arda to the fiery heart of Mount Doom, young and small and so painfully naive, so trusting in the world's kindness and the skills of those whom Lord Elrond called the Fellowship. So brave he had been, standing among those so much larger and louder than himself, and so unaware of the road upon which he had so carelessly set his feet.
He had come to manhood not with years, but with footsteps. Each step had burdened him with cares and hardship and experience unasked for, and the Frodo that had been rescued from the barren, blackened slopes of Mount Doom had borne scant resemblance to the merry, bright-eyed, inquisitive lad who had set out from Bag End on a warm summer night. He had been dull-eyed and battered and dirty, streaked with soot and the hard, black scree of the slope. The ragged stump of his finger had wept blood and promised infection without immediate tending, and when he had spoken through cracked and blistered lips, his voice had been a hoarse croak. Gandalf was no longer an invitation to glad communion, but a broken lament for a kinder history now forever beyond him.
Nine-Fingered Frodo the songs and tales had called him thereafter, and they had made his heroism seem a merry thing, a grand adventure for children and dreamers. The tales and odes are deserved, and he begrudges not a single pint or voice lifted in honor of his deeds, but the stories are but pale imitations of the truth, and they have turned from the sordid reality of those long, dark days of dust and blood and woe.
They mark well the nine fingers and diligently enumerate the lost and fallen, but they speak not of the melancholy that had settled over Frodo's bones like a caul and aged him before his time, nor of the increasing isolation with which he had surrounded himself. Sam, stubborn until the end of his days, would not be rebuffed and stayed by his side until the end, and Merry and Pippin, too, were his brothers, united by a common grief, but the rest had been kept at a prudent remove. No Harbottles or Bracegirdles or Proudfoots had passed over his threshold, and though he had written feverishly in his books, few letters had he sent. Gandalf had still been a welcome and honored guest at his table and hearth, and they had shared countless meals and cups of tea, but the welcome had not been as warm as memory had once counted it.
His wound will never fully heal. He will carry it for the rest of his days, he had told Elrond once. Glibly, he now realizes, but hindsight has always been a pitiless, mocking gift. He had had no idea how prophetic those words would prove to be.
Aragorn had battled the poison with the skillful application of athelas, and Arwen had ridden to beat its tainted course through Frodo's veins, and Elrond had grimly battled the darkness with tinctures and poultices and murmured exhortations for him to return to the light. They had thought it a victory when Frodo had opened bruised, sunken eyes and struggled upright in bed, and so it had been, but not one complete. Though they had bested the poison, a remnant of the coldness introduced by the piercing bite of the Morgul blade had endured, and over the years, it had conquered him, had burrowed through flesh and bone to embed itself within his heart.
Frodo had never been unkind, never spoken a hard word or turned from a soul in need, but he had been undeniably changed. He had been colder and more somber and less inclined to laughter or merriment or the raising of a dram at the Pony. On the rare occasion that Sam could coax him out of his hobbit hole, he would sit at the table, his hands curled around his stein, its contents untouched. When someone proposed a toast, he would raise his stein, but it had always been the first to descend, and while he listened to the bawdy talk and raucous laughter, he seldom spoke.
He had hoped that a sojourn in Valinor would ease Frodo's cares, and it had, after a fashion. Color had returned to his pinched, pallid cheeks, and words and breath had come more easily to him, but laughter had remained a distant companion, and his wound had still pained him on the anniversary of its infliction. On those days, Gandalf would find him at the pools of Este, sitting on the narrow bank and gazing blankly into the still, limpid waters, hand pressed to the scar beneath his linen shirt and kneading in absent, pained circles.
Thin, bloodless lips had curved into the memory of a smile. I looked into Galadriel's mirror once, he had said, soft and mournful and inexplicable, and Gandalf had not understood, anymore than he had understood the shudder that had gripped his old friend as he had closed his eyes and bared his throat to the warming rays of the sun.
He had not understood, but his love for the hobbit had been as fierce and inextinguishable as a balrog's eternal lash, and so he had returned the fragile smile and settled beside him, and thus they had passed a companionable hour with Frodo's head on his shoulder and his hand tangled in a mop of brown curls.
He could hardly bear to look at Frodo in the end, pared to the bitter pith by constant pain and endless melancholy. Age had carved deep grooves into his face and rounded his shoulders and frosted his hair, and so strongly had he favored Bilbo in that last year that Gandalf's heart had throbbed within his chest, caught between fond memories of his old friend and despair at the fate of his nephew, who had once possessed a laugh that sweetened the very air on which it danced.
He would have lifted that burden from him if he could, would have erased the years he had not lived from his face and eased the ache in his bones and lightened his heart. Perhaps it is the same for Galadriel. War is easy when it is a game of maps and numbers and faceless men moved like chess pieces by their kings and captains, but that ease vanishes in the face of ruined men and scorched earth and orphaned children clinging to a passing skirt. What was so quickly ordered as best and wisest and most necessary when she was a hundred leagues away, shielded from battle by the cloister of Lorien and her splendid tower, might well have revealed itself as foolish, cruel depravity when Haldir had emerged from the dim serenity of Mandos to find neither eager smile nor joyful heart waiting for him.
Love wears many faces, and he suspects that she loves Haldir. Not as a wife reveres a husband--that gift is but for Lord Celeborn alone and is as unshakeable as the foundations of the earth--but as a friend. He was the longest-serving of Lorien's marchwardens, as familiar a fixture in the Wood as the lights in the trees and the winding stair and Galadriel's mirror, with its secrets hidden in moonlit water. He was her shadow whenever she wandered the wood and her escort when stewardship summoned her to Imladris. Bonds of intimacy are well-forged when they are unfettered by time, and he was a much a member of her house as the daughter and grandchildren that had flowered at her feet and played in the long hem of her gown.
Or maybe she is moved to her present course, not by Haldir, but by Anariel, the wife he left behind. Some look to survivors and call them fortunate, but this is not so. The suffering of the dead is ended, but those left behind must endure and rebuild with less than they had before, must refashion their world without that which made it theirs, and the lives they raise from the dust seldom bear resemblance to the one for which they had so bravely fought and vainly sacrificed.
Galadriel is a lady, fine and proud, and a warrior, fiercer of heart that many men, but before all these titles and beneath these mantles, she is first a woman, and she, too, has tasted love's giddy savor. She has known fear and the wretched pang of farewell, though Celeborn had returned to her, unscathed and enriched by his travels. Perhaps she glimpsed the specter of what could have been in Anariel's anguished, pleading eyes and tear-stained face. Grief ravages. It devours. It haunts. Though Eomer has slumbered in his tomb for one hundred generations, Gandalf's ears still ring with the echo of his despairing cry when he had discovered Eowyn tangled amid the bodies and thought her dead, and his heart still remembers the breathless, yawning emptiness that had seized it when the Mouth of Sauron had ridden forth and tossed Frodo's mithril mail at him, a pristine, white rumple of fabric hurled like an accusatory stone.
It remembers, too, the savage flash of joy when Aragorn had loosed his blade and repaid the creature's jeering, black-mouthed insolence by parting its head from its shoulders. In truth, his heart savors this recollection, sordid as it is, though he would admit this to none but Illuvatar. Justice swiftly served is sweet, indeed.
It is not Manwe he seeks after he has made his decision, but Nienna, Lady of mourning and compassion. Her halls are dark and desolate and filled with the furtive rustle of bats' wings and their conspiratorial chittering as they sidle and seethe in the eaves and unlighted crevices, but there is solace there, and wisdom, and she is not so hard as Manwe, so unstinting in her views. She will offer him counsel if he asks, and if he does not, then she will leave him to his meditations.
So he descends into her gloomy hall. His vessel he has left in quiet repose in Galadriel's gardens, and free from the constraints of flesh, he is as the sun in the firmament, a spirit of ethereal luminescence that floods the darkness before him and seeps into the shadowed cornices to expose moths with dusty wings dark as midnight, their antennae tenebrous and twitching in the sudden assault. They startle and take wing at his approach and flutter before him like a vanguard of cinders and ash, erratic and desperate as they fled the searing, white light.
Nienna's vassals, too, are accustomed to the dark, and they shy and squint from within their cowled robes. "Greetings, Olorin," they murmur, and bow respectfully, palms pressed together and fingers steepled outward. Nothing more. These are halls of grief and endless mourning, and they have little strength for speech. Tears and laments and strings plucked upon the lyre are the lingua franca.
"And to you," he replies, and bows a head he does not have before he remembers that he has left it pillowed on the soft grass of Lorien.
The vassals leave him to his devices, and he follows his vanguard of moths whither they choose to lead him. Nienna's halls are vast and dim, and their mistress, though steadfast in her sorrow, holds to no routine. She is found by happenstance, more often than not, drawn to where the sorrow is bitterest. He will find her when he finds her, and so he surrenders himself to the journey.
Though his spirit drifts, his mind does not. It races with prospects and roils with possibilities. Fragments of his conversation with the Lord and Lady of the Wood replay in his mind, as do fleeting images. The splendor of the sun in the Lady's hair; Celeborn's somber dignity as he listened to his wife; the aching emptiness in Haldir's eyes; the plodding gracelessness with which he had taken his leave, stiff and indifferent and capable of only cold courtesy.
He can claim no great intimacy with Haldir. Though he had been a frequent visitor to Lorien and a guest of many houses, his business had been with the Lord and Lady, and Haldir, though ever-present, cordial, and ready with a helping hand, had been only the marchwarden, aloof and unremarkable and ancillary to his purposes. Their conversations had been few and brief, pleasant but easily forgotten when the music and spirits were high and the wine flowed freely.
A man of honor he was, this he knows. He was in Lorien, recovering from his battle with the balrog, when the call for volunteers went forth. He knows he was the first to answer, to take up sword and bow at his liege's command. He knows the risk he accepted, the sacrifice he offered when he stepped forward. It was the risk accepted by the others who came after him, some far younger and more innocent to the cruelties of the world. It was a risk that came with the mantle of marchwarden, a hazard of duty that none could escape.
Most of those who had volunteered had fallen, stabbed and pierced and hewn by hostile blade and trampled in the foul mud by friend and foe alike. The mud-caked, grimy hands of war-ravaged Men and the surviving elves had pulled them from the sucking mud and piled them onto wooden carts, and the strongest of them had raised the shovel as they had once raised a sword and dug for them a common pit that kinder tongues had called a grave. No shrouds, no biers, no incense to mask the rot of corrupted flesh, no sweet, beloved voices raised in prayer and lament. Legolas had volunteered to escort the bodies of the vanguard to Lorien with a small host, but neither Theoden nor Aragorn could spare the men, and the elves could not bear to sunder the brotherhood of the dead, and so it was decided that the dead would lie as they had fought: together. Those survivors who had had kin among the slain had said their farewells and collected what mementos they would, and then the sainted dead and their weapons had been consigned to the pit with as much solemnity as could be managed.
They had shared a common fate, and all had done so at the behest of the Lady and Lord they so revered. Equal should have been her grief for those she had lost, and yet it was not. Grief is neither just nor fair, and it loves who it will. He knows this from experience sweet and hard. Countless souls has he met over the long course of his life, and while he has extended care and courtesy and good faith to all, few has he loved. Aragorn he counts as the best of men, good and right and just and tempered in his might. Gimli, son of Gloin, and the stoutest-hearted of the dwarves. Galadriel, the Lady of Light. Bilbo and Merry and Pippin and Samwise Gamgee.
And Frodo Baggins. Frodo he loved best of all, the sweet, wide-eyed young hobbit who had dreamed of adventures as a boy, and who followed him like a faithful pup whenever he visited the Shire to avail himself of its fine pipeweed and even finer company. Frodo, who had begged to hear his tales, and who had found himself at the center of the greatest adventure of the ages. A boy he had been when he had set out from the lush, green hills of the Shire with a damned Ring in his pocket and cheerful, determined Samwise at his back.
A boy he had been when in a moment of exasperated haste, he had volunteered to carry the doom of Arda to the fiery heart of Mount Doom, young and small and so painfully naive, so trusting in the world's kindness and the skills of those whom Lord Elrond called the Fellowship. So brave he had been, standing among those so much larger and louder than himself, and so unaware of the road upon which he had so carelessly set his feet.
He had come to manhood not with years, but with footsteps. Each step had burdened him with cares and hardship and experience unasked for, and the Frodo that had been rescued from the barren, blackened slopes of Mount Doom had borne scant resemblance to the merry, bright-eyed, inquisitive lad who had set out from Bag End on a warm summer night. He had been dull-eyed and battered and dirty, streaked with soot and the hard, black scree of the slope. The ragged stump of his finger had wept blood and promised infection without immediate tending, and when he had spoken through cracked and blistered lips, his voice had been a hoarse croak. Gandalf was no longer an invitation to glad communion, but a broken lament for a kinder history now forever beyond him.
Nine-Fingered Frodo the songs and tales had called him thereafter, and they had made his heroism seem a merry thing, a grand adventure for children and dreamers. The tales and odes are deserved, and he begrudges not a single pint or voice lifted in honor of his deeds, but the stories are but pale imitations of the truth, and they have turned from the sordid reality of those long, dark days of dust and blood and woe.
They mark well the nine fingers and diligently enumerate the lost and fallen, but they speak not of the melancholy that had settled over Frodo's bones like a caul and aged him before his time, nor of the increasing isolation with which he had surrounded himself. Sam, stubborn until the end of his days, would not be rebuffed and stayed by his side until the end, and Merry and Pippin, too, were his brothers, united by a common grief, but the rest had been kept at a prudent remove. No Harbottles or Bracegirdles or Proudfoots had passed over his threshold, and though he had written feverishly in his books, few letters had he sent. Gandalf had still been a welcome and honored guest at his table and hearth, and they had shared countless meals and cups of tea, but the welcome had not been as warm as memory had once counted it.
His wound will never fully heal. He will carry it for the rest of his days, he had told Elrond once. Glibly, he now realizes, but hindsight has always been a pitiless, mocking gift. He had had no idea how prophetic those words would prove to be.
Aragorn had battled the poison with the skillful application of athelas, and Arwen had ridden to beat its tainted course through Frodo's veins, and Elrond had grimly battled the darkness with tinctures and poultices and murmured exhortations for him to return to the light. They had thought it a victory when Frodo had opened bruised, sunken eyes and struggled upright in bed, and so it had been, but not one complete. Though they had bested the poison, a remnant of the coldness introduced by the piercing bite of the Morgul blade had endured, and over the years, it had conquered him, had burrowed through flesh and bone to embed itself within his heart.
Frodo had never been unkind, never spoken a hard word or turned from a soul in need, but he had been undeniably changed. He had been colder and more somber and less inclined to laughter or merriment or the raising of a dram at the Pony. On the rare occasion that Sam could coax him out of his hobbit hole, he would sit at the table, his hands curled around his stein, its contents untouched. When someone proposed a toast, he would raise his stein, but it had always been the first to descend, and while he listened to the bawdy talk and raucous laughter, he seldom spoke.
He had hoped that a sojourn in Valinor would ease Frodo's cares, and it had, after a fashion. Color had returned to his pinched, pallid cheeks, and words and breath had come more easily to him, but laughter had remained a distant companion, and his wound had still pained him on the anniversary of its infliction. On those days, Gandalf would find him at the pools of Este, sitting on the narrow bank and gazing blankly into the still, limpid waters, hand pressed to the scar beneath his linen shirt and kneading in absent, pained circles.
Thin, bloodless lips had curved into the memory of a smile. I looked into Galadriel's mirror once, he had said, soft and mournful and inexplicable, and Gandalf had not understood, anymore than he had understood the shudder that had gripped his old friend as he had closed his eyes and bared his throat to the warming rays of the sun.
He had not understood, but his love for the hobbit had been as fierce and inextinguishable as a balrog's eternal lash, and so he had returned the fragile smile and settled beside him, and thus they had passed a companionable hour with Frodo's head on his shoulder and his hand tangled in a mop of brown curls.
He could hardly bear to look at Frodo in the end, pared to the bitter pith by constant pain and endless melancholy. Age had carved deep grooves into his face and rounded his shoulders and frosted his hair, and so strongly had he favored Bilbo in that last year that Gandalf's heart had throbbed within his chest, caught between fond memories of his old friend and despair at the fate of his nephew, who had once possessed a laugh that sweetened the very air on which it danced.
He would have lifted that burden from him if he could, would have erased the years he had not lived from his face and eased the ache in his bones and lightened his heart. Perhaps it is the same for Galadriel. War is easy when it is a game of maps and numbers and faceless men moved like chess pieces by their kings and captains, but that ease vanishes in the face of ruined men and scorched earth and orphaned children clinging to a passing skirt. What was so quickly ordered as best and wisest and most necessary when she was a hundred leagues away, shielded from battle by the cloister of Lorien and her splendid tower, might well have revealed itself as foolish, cruel depravity when Haldir had emerged from the dim serenity of Mandos to find neither eager smile nor joyful heart waiting for him.
Love wears many faces, and he suspects that she loves Haldir. Not as a wife reveres a husband--that gift is but for Lord Celeborn alone and is as unshakeable as the foundations of the earth--but as a friend. He was the longest-serving of Lorien's marchwardens, as familiar a fixture in the Wood as the lights in the trees and the winding stair and Galadriel's mirror, with its secrets hidden in moonlit water. He was her shadow whenever she wandered the wood and her escort when stewardship summoned her to Imladris. Bonds of intimacy are well-forged when they are unfettered by time, and he was a much a member of her house as the daughter and grandchildren that had flowered at her feet and played in the long hem of her gown.
Or maybe she is moved to her present course, not by Haldir, but by Anariel, the wife he left behind. Some look to survivors and call them fortunate, but this is not so. The suffering of the dead is ended, but those left behind must endure and rebuild with less than they had before, must refashion their world without that which made it theirs, and the lives they raise from the dust seldom bear resemblance to the one for which they had so bravely fought and vainly sacrificed.
Galadriel is a lady, fine and proud, and a warrior, fiercer of heart that many men, but before all these titles and beneath these mantles, she is first a woman, and she, too, has tasted love's giddy savor. She has known fear and the wretched pang of farewell, though Celeborn had returned to her, unscathed and enriched by his travels. Perhaps she glimpsed the specter of what could have been in Anariel's anguished, pleading eyes and tear-stained face. Grief ravages. It devours. It haunts. Though Eomer has slumbered in his tomb for one hundred generations, Gandalf's ears still ring with the echo of his despairing cry when he had discovered Eowyn tangled amid the bodies and thought her dead, and his heart still remembers the breathless, yawning emptiness that had seized it when the Mouth of Sauron had ridden forth and tossed Frodo's mithril mail at him, a pristine, white rumple of fabric hurled like an accusatory stone.
It remembers, too, the savage flash of joy when Aragorn had loosed his blade and repaid the creature's jeering, black-mouthed insolence by parting its head from its shoulders. In truth, his heart savors this recollection, sordid as it is, though he would admit this to none but Illuvatar. Justice swiftly served is sweet, indeed.