Tales of Older Days (6/8)
Title: Tales of Older Days (6/8): Adventures of a Most Lurid Kind
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, A Sentient Tree, A River-daughter. Reappearing in this chapter: A Joker, 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: An Urchin in the Old Forest and Our Heroine in the Void... just where can we go from here?
Wordcount: 3572
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 ~
... light bursts in dazzles and starry showers upon an Elf drowning beneath a bloody tide... east of Bree, a horde of Dwarves seethes over every inch of the countryside... in the town itself, an alewife is awoken by a rap at the door, sharp and short in the grey before dawn... up in The Prancing Pony’s most expensive lodging-room, an elegantly attired and very beautiful lady recalibrates a set of intricate designs scrawled over a dressing-table mirror, her hair stirring restlessly in its golden tresses...
~*~*~
... and sitting on a broad stone threshold under a mossy hillside, Miss Gogollescent Ferny was still sulking.
Erestor’s disappearance the previous evening had left Gogol and the dragonet in the custody of old Tom Bombadil, he of the blue coat and yellow boots and alarmingly bulbous hat. Gogol had been too tired to do more than unenthusiastically finish off her mushrooms (on the principle that one never knew where one’s next meal was coming from) and stumble into the bed provided, a deep mattress piled with white blankets in the low stone chamber at the back of the house. Old Tom had beamed unnervingly round the door, pointed out wash-basins and ewers of hot and cold water in an unnecessarily meaningful way, and deposited the sleepy dragonet on the flagstones. The dragonet had blinked its innocent blue serpent-eyes, yawned widely and stretched each silver limb in turn; and then it had uncoiled itself in a scaly slither that somehow ended up with it curled up right in the middle of Gogol’s bed. When she tried to suggest, with a couple of pointed kicks, that it should sleep by her feet if it must sleep on the bed, it hissed and bared its sharp little teeth in a puff of white frost.
It was surprisingly heavy. She had regarded it with disfavour and grudgingly assumed the pretzel position common to everyone in the possession of an entitled animal. The dragonet’s claws were still smugly kneading the blankets as she fell asleep.
She had awoken a mass of aches and bruises, as stiff as a corpse and about as eager to get up as one. The dragonet was nowhere to be seen. A frost-rimmed and rather tattered depression in the blankets indicated the site of its former nest, however; and when Gogol tottered out of the chamber, she had found it sitting on its haunches on the long polished table and snapping morsels of cheese from the fingertips of her colourful host.
This had not improved Gogol’s mood. Nor had the discovery that breakfast involved parsley and stale bread. Now she was sitting on the doorstep staring east, or at least in the direction she believed east to be, and feeling dismally sorry for herself.
Don’t make a nuisance of yourself, the Elf had said. She folded her arms resentfully. As if she would!
She managed almost an hour before exciting vistas of promised Elvish cities melted in the boredom of moping around Tom Bombadil’s suspiciously barrow-like home.
Her host was in the flower garden with the dragonet and a bowl of cheese, apparently trying to teach it to sit up and beg. Gogol, watching, suspected sourly that the dragonet was trying to train him to dispense food at the merest suggestion of a whine, and doing so with rather more success. He had left off his coat and his hat, although his big yellow boots glowed against the grass, and a crudely twisted ring of green leaves sat on his thick brown hair. Gogol was pretty sure he wasn’t watching her. She sidled into the house.
It was quiet inside and smelled faintly of soap. Patches of sunlight and shadow lay chequered over the flagstone floor. She wasn’t going to make a nuisance of herself, def’nitely not. Don’t try stealing from Iarwain. Well, she weren’t going to do that neither! She was just going to have a look round. There wasn’t any harm in that.
She slid open a heavy oak drawer and stretched up on her tiptoes to peer inside. Folded blankets met her eyes. Nothing daunted, Gogol ventured a quick rummage, which confirmed (disappointingly) that folded blankets were in fact all the drawer contained. Maybe she’d have more luck with the big chest under the window.
Atop the chest squatted old Tom’s hat, its creases and tatters giving it an oddly alive air, like a sleepy black cat. It was sitting in a sunbeam and warm when she picked it up.
She tried it on. It was too big for her and slipped down over her ears. She liked it anyway.
She bent down to investigate the lock on the chest (always a good sign, locks) and was still crouched there fiddling with it when a sinister shadow fell over her. On the other side of the window loomed her host, peering in. The dragonet bobbed unsteadily on his shoulder, clawing at the air.
“Ho there,” came his deep voice ominously, “what be you looking for?”
Gogol squeaked and put several feet between herself and the chest. “Nuffink!” she said. “I ain’t - I were just - uh...”
The hat fell over her eyes. She snatched it from her head, clutched it against her hammering heart and took to her heels.
~*~*~
Iarwain ben-Adar, also known as Tom Bombadil, watched the urchin scurrying down the chalky path into the Old Forest and shook his brown hatless head.
“She’ll regret that,” he remarked to the dragonet, in a language considerably older than any tongue currently to be heard in Middle-earth. “Still, it’ll keep her occupied.”
The dragonet smirked.
~*~*~
Melinna could never quite remember what happened next. It went something like this:
she was drowning in scarlet, in a froth of blood and strings of ichor, swamped by the undertow from glutinous dark islands
- drowning and choking on iron and struggling against the mountainous weight of a monstrous ocean, lukewarm and gelatinous, matting in her hair and clotting in her clothes -
the sodden skirt of her gown like leaden weights round her legs
- through her head roars the tide and the magpie chatter of His laughter: high-pitched, cracked into madness -
a blinding dazzle of light bursts upon her: brighter than starlight, too silver for the sun
- and she found herself floundering against ropes on a gleaming deck, an Elf-fish caught in an Elf’s fine net, coughing up blood.
It burned in her throat. She was soaked right through, the blurred imprint of her hands slippery on slanting wood. Her hair blocked out everything else in a curtain of dripping dark braids. Blood congealed gummily in her eyelashes. She rubbed the back of her stained wrist against her face and spat out blood clots.
The ground moved, and tipped up, and the air rushed cool around her. She knotted her fingers through the ropes and clung to the net, her blackened skirts slapping at her ankles. Wind howled in the sails, the rigging creaked - but there was light all around, as brilliant as the Moon rising for the first time, as the first dawn that followed, as Valacirca viewed from Udûn’s twilit ruins - and peering out between her matted braids, her eyes tearing, she saw no sailors, only wavering flame.
“Hang on there!” came a cry. “Up we go!”
And...
... the deck falling away, all the breath jolted out of her as the ropes pulled taut, spinning dizzily from the mast...
... into view rose slowly the ramparts of night.
She was open-mouthed, staring. Almighty peaks and mountainous deeps filled her eyes, all brilliance and ice, the darkness vivid. Roiling shadows prowled all around, and through the turbulence flashes of blue or yellow or burning pink could be seen, as though this was the midnight underside of a daylight sky and beyond lay breaking dawn or sunset’s fire or a sunny afternoon. Upwards sailed the white ship, up through dark layers of air, away from the oceans of blood and the maimed Vala enthroned on the bloody shore. It streamed scarlet froth.
Ahead and far above, distant lightning flickered over a tracery of vast walls, of shadowy towers monstrous in their immensity. Pinpricks of light glimmered against the dark, stars set in great lanterns and suspended from the heavens.
The ship sailed onwards. Melinna was utterly without words. She sank back into her own wet skirts, a puddle of sodden cloth cushioning her against the taut rope mesh, and watched the night drifting endlessly past.
It was an age or a heartbeat before the ship crested the lightning. Below lay the uncertain line of the wall: on one side, darkness and a deep well of crimson; on the other side, the blues and brilliance of a bright new day. Slowly the ship’s path levelled out and Melinna in her net swung back into line with the mast, until the hems of her blackened skirt dripping through the net brushed the deck once more. Red rivulets ran in all directions over the glowing wood. The air crackled with electric discharge; it was very cold and she found herself shivering in her wet clothes.
At the helm stood a tall figure, a mere outline against the flame of the ship, which blazed with particular intensity about his person. His back was to her.
She remembered that he had spoken in Sindarin. “Hey there!” she called. “What just -? how did I even -? where -?”
The helmsman neither turned nor spoke. Melinna’s eyes narrowed.
“It’s young Eärendil,” she said, “isn’t it? We all saw the light when Ancalagon fell.”
No response. She tried again, more sharply. “How’s Elwing these days? Your son still misses her.”
At that, he did look round, the smooth planes of his face cast into sharp relief by the glow of the stone bound to his brow. Melinna had last seen it setting light to the beauty of Dior’s daughter, a point of clarity amid the Nauglamír’s gaudy riot of colours, and it shook her more than she would have thought to encounter it again in Eärendil’s possession, passed out of the hands of Lúthien’s line. He was scattered with stardust, his hair and his broad shoulders glittering beneath the heavy dark.
His eyes glowed. “We miss them too,” he said, gently, and that was all.
~*~*~
Daylight burned behind thick curtains. Lady Inez had spent all night and a substantial amount of the morning poring over her mirror, and her mood was almost as foul as her face was fair. The candles were guttering, not that Lady Inez needed candlelight particularly, when the glass cleared at last in a flash of smoking sigils.
She said aloud, “Finally!” and pushed back her eager golden hair.
At first, only a tangle of green could be seen. It sprawled across the glass in a confusion of branches and brambles, long curling willow leaves layered thickly on grass. Brown running water flickered among gnarled and ancient trees.
Lady Inez bent closer. Here came that wretched little thief now, clumping along the riverbank.
She tracked its progress for a while. There was no sign of the dragonet, which made her frown. Nor could she see the second of the two meddling Elves. The thief had acquired a piece of elderly and ridiculous headgear, and looked like nothing so much as a huge hat propelled along by a pair of battered old boots. As she watched, it yawned and sat down against a particularly monstrous grey willow.
After a moment, the thief’s head nodded forwards. The hat tumbled from its head, bounced off those scrawny knees and fell into the river, where it sailed serenely away.
Woods and a willow-lined riverbank. Friends in the area, the Elf-woman had said...
Lady Inez jolted upright. “Iarwain ben-Adar!” she exclaimed, and swore.
~*~*~
The rest of the voyage along the sky-wall was silent. Eärendil the Mariner, whom she had known once as a child, did not seem inclined to speak and Melinna was too shaken by all these ghosts arising from the past to force conversation. She huddled in the rope net and stared out over sculpted cloudscapes, over vistas of land unscrolling in greens and browns and miniature towns and pockets of shadow and silver pools of far-flung oceans so very far below.
On sailed the ship. It glimmered in the sun.
In the distance, presently, a white point appeared, growing into the gleaming tip of a tall spire as the ship’s path slanted downwards through clear skies. Wisps of tattered clouds surrounded it. Then Melinna rubbed the blood from her eyes and saw not clouds but wheeling flocks of seabirds, and heard the echoes of their squalling cries drifting faintly on the breeze.
A single bird flew up. It was white and grey and as it coasted towards the ship, its size became apparent: it was very large and its wings cast a shadow wider than any Elven armspan. It drew in its wings and swooped down to the deck -
- and there stood a woman gowned in white, fair Dior’s daughter, her hair settling in a dark feathery flutter around her slim shoulders. The wind still whispered under her grey cloak.
Elwing’s movements were quick now, and birdlike. “What’s this?” she said to Eärendil. “Where have you been? What have you caught? Whatever’s happened?”
She came lightly over the deck, her starlit eyes curious. “Melinna!” she said; and then again, her melodic voice rising into alarm, “Whatever’s happened? How can you be here? You’re covered in blood!”
She had been so young when Melinna had seen her last. She had been a girl barely married, her sons mere babes, already shouldering the weight of the settlement grown up around the mouths of the Sirion. Even then, Melinna had only been able to see the child carried out of Doriath’s ruin in Galadriel’s arms, and her brothers, who had died there.
So long ago. She was reaching up to Melinna, her arms pale.
Melinna thrust through the rope net to grasp Elwing’s hands and met only empty air. The bird-woman was only a ghost from the past after all, a winged phantom without substance. But it was Elwing who fell back in confusion, her face a mirror of Melinna’s surprise.
Melinna struggled to find words. “They said you were alive,” she managed. “In the War - after the War - we were told you lived, you’d come safe to Valinor - Galadriel wept - was it a lie? Are you dead after all?”
Elwing’s eyes were very wide. “Not I...”
“I saw the Dark Lord toying with her in the Void,” said the Mariner at the helm. “We should sail on to Mandos. However she came to be there, Lord Námo and the Valar must know.”
~*~*~
Gogol was dreaming of trees, of struggling endlessly through an endless forest, a labyrinth of green curtains and grey bark. She was pushing past shoulder-high stands of moss, her coat dragging over the lacy frills of lichen. Brown water swirled over her boots.
Little Man-thing, came a dry, creaking voice. Water-filled monster... land-thief and destroyer, gnawer and biter and breaker and rootless... I have you, little Man-thing...
Cracked old trunks rose up around Gogol in a shudder of wood. She turned on her heel and found her way barred. Wind ruffled through the boughs.
“Uh...” she said, hunting vainly for an exit.
I shall sing you roots, Man-thing, whispered the voice. I shall plant you in my valley. You will drink the Withywindle and the sweet sunlight. I shall make a sapling of you, a straight sapling rooted in rich earth.
“You talkin’ to me?” said Gogol. “I ain’t no tree!”
She tried to take a step back and discovered she was transfixed, her boots unmoving. A mass of white wormy threads unravelled from the much-scuffed leather, thickening at once into knotted and bulbous roots. When Gogol tried to move, her clothes cracked. The brown of her coat and her ragged trousers was stiffening into bark.
Her yelp of surprise flew up into the boughs, which smothered it. She dropped to her knees and tore desperately at the roots tangling themselves around her ankles, until shooting pains in her legs made her abandon the attempt. She knelt panting in the waterlogged grass.
“Stoppit!” she protested. “Whoever you are! Lemme go!”
Rise up, little Man-thing, new sapling, came the creaking voice again, remorseless. Send your roots deep into the earth. Spread your branches beneath the sun.
“I ain’t no tree!”
Now she was being dragged up by the tug of invisible fingers in her hair, dragged upwards into straightness, her arms and her splayed hands drawn taut over her head. She could feel her body stiffening. The breath creaked in her wooden ribs.
She managed to squeeze out a last panicky cry of “Help!” before her eyes filmed over, and then her mouth with bark.
It was dark. It was so dark and she could hear the whispering woods and the dry creak of laughter -
- and water, running ceaselessly -
It was rising up around her, a cool tide sloshing where her feet should have been, soaking into her conjoined legs. She could feel wetness and rising cold. But there was a new voice now come into the whisper of the woods, a silvery song of streams and of lakes lying still beneath starlight and of the ripple of rivers falling clear from the hills. And that creaking laughter had fallen silent.
At last the song ceased. “Willow,” came a woman’s voice, young and merry, “old Willow, grey old Willow-man, what have you here? What new mischief is this?”
Gogol strained after sound and caught the merest hint of a dry grumble. She heard the woman’s bubble of laughter clearly.
“Will you have me fetch the Master? Let the child go!”
As if in punctuation, a light blow struck Gogol’s side. Then the film over her eyes cracked open and she could breathe again, and clear from her throat the mustiness of dust and soil. She stumbled and almost fell, her wooden stiffness giving way. The bark was peeling from her clothing and she was no longer bound to the ground by roots sprouting from her boots and feet.
She was knee-deep in river water between great gnarled roots, the thick woody toes of a thirsty tree straining over the grassy bank. Behind her and above her arched the shadow of the tree itself, huge and ancient, creaking under the weight of its own green crown. Slivers of sunlight glimmered through twisted branches and lay gold beneath rippling rills.
A woman stood there: slim and fair, her hair falling bright around her white shoulders like the sun in the river. Her gown was silver as a fish’s mail, scaled and imbricate, and old Tom’s hat perched snugly on her yellow head. The river lapped lovingly at her waist.
“There!” she said. “Now let us come away! For the Great Willow is restless and has little love for the children of Men, as you have found. And I would know who you are, and how you came to be wearing my husband’s hat!”
~*~*~
“... so that’s what we’re going to do,” finished Erestor. “Got that?”
The alewife, sitting sleepily on a long bench in her cold, shadowy kitchen, blinked once or twice and then managed a reasonably enthusiastic nod. It seemed to have been a very long morning since she had first been awoken by the Elf’s knock at the door. Her initial alarm had quickly vanished, as it became apparent that the Elf had come neither for revenge nor to return her unsatisfactory niece. She had found herself scurrying around her candlelit kitchen, the shutters still discreetly shut, hunting up a breakfast for the Elf and surprising even herself with her sudden generosity. He hadn’t even offered to pay for his meal.
“Give up on your wife, go back for Gogol and the, the, the dragon, and then head for this Imladris place,” she parroted. “Uh. Where’d you say you were going to meet her, again?”
“In a empty barrow above a valley marked by two standing stones,” said the Elf patiently. “It’s about five miles southeast of the north-gate of the Barrow-downs and quite easy to find, especially if you’re not looking for it. I told her to replace the stone over the entrance as a precaution, just in case anyone else comes along.”
He was leaning against the patched-up door, which bore the splintery scars of Mili the Dwarf’s forceful entrance. His face was in shadow. Kat Ferny peered uncertainly up at him.
“Oh,” she said. “What did you want me to do?”
“Why, nothing,” said the Elf, “now that you’ve provided me with this excellent breakfast. I only came back to Bree to rescue my wife. But since I’ve discovered she’s dead already, there’s no point in hanging around. You won’t tell anyone anything I’ve told you, will you? This is very important. No one must know.”
Under other circumstances, Kat Ferny might have been shocked by the Elf’s callousness. As it was, she was far too busy assuring him that she would never dream of breaking a confidence, and that she most certainly had no intention of (for example) running across Bree to The Prancing Pony as fast as her legs could take her, just as soon as the Elf had left town. No indeed. What a thought!
The Elf’s dark eyes glinted. “Good,” he said. “Then I can leave Bree in your capable hands...”
On to A Shade Repetitive
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