Bechel Challenge - untitled work in progress, chapter 2
Title: who the f*** knows?! chapter 2.
Rating: G, but trending towards darker topics.
Characters: Berúthiel, OFC.
Word count: ~2500
Summary: Our intrepid young Umbarian lady and her strange cat friend continue their journey.
If nits are spotted, please to pick them. This underwent less proofreading than I'm wont to do.
TOC: Chapter 1.
I shivered beneath an overhang, my bare left foot tucked unceremoniously under me between my right calf and thigh. The one thin blanket I’d packed, which I sat upon rather than wrapped around me, did little to avert the ground’s chill. I’d not realized before this traveling that, of night air and night ground, the latter was easily the colder. Still, I made no fire, no glaring beacon for the pursuit. The dawn had made its way over the ridges to the northeast, but warmth would lag behind light. I rather wanted to jump up and pace, but I was already spent from walking hard all that night, as I’d walked for three nights prior since slipping away from town. Despite the cold, I was nearly dozing with my back against the stone when my companion came into view.
Even trotting along with my now holey sock dangling off her back, Yaulë managed to look collected and graceful. As I sat up hastily, the cat addressed me in her accustomed mind-voice: «The hounds were closer this night, but I eluded them still.»
I nodded, worried. Notwithstanding the strange delight of traveling with a speaking cat, her acquaintance had been beneficial in that I’d surely have been caught on my second night out if not for her. Yaulë was full of schemes and insights and apparent knowledge of many things. Since our meeting three mornings before, she’d taken it upon herself to help me evade my father’s men and hounds, leading them astray whilst I traveled by night. During the day, we hid ourselves in some thicket or crevice and slept. Waking in the late afternoons, we would eat and prepare for the coming night’s journeying; then I would tie one of my socks to Yaulë, and, using a stream to conceal my scent-trail for a mile or so, I’d go one way while she went another. She’d explained that she would go low to the ground for a ways so that my sock, rank with my own scent, would drag and catch in the brush. Then she would straighten up and move to rejoin me, careful that the sock now touched nothing, leaving the false trail at a dead end somewhere. Each afternoon we’d choose a distant landmark at which to meet, and she always found me around dawn even when I hadn’t managed to reach the spot.
”And you really don’t think we would be better off crossing over the mountains?” I asked. The state of Umbar ran from northeast to southwest, along a narrow strip between the coast and the top of the mountain range. My intent when I’d set out had been that to pass over the range to the Haradric side of the border, thinking that might be more likely to deter pursuit. The cat, however, had discouraged this, and she now did so again:
«I’m afraid not, Nehtanë. Your father’s houndmaster, charged with returning you safely to his house, won’t be put off by a sparsely-guarded border shared with a reasonably friendly nation. Besides, the other side of the mountains is quite different from what you’re used to; without the sea to moderate the moods of the climate, the heat is hotter and the cold colder. If you crossed now, you’d find only the high desert, and that is a cruel place-scalding days, frigid nights.»
“I’m already cold,” I volunteered. “I’m cold all night as I walk, and I go to sleep cold.”
«Yet this cold is very little. You’ve hardly packed for it, let alone for that which would await you in the Haradric night. I maintain my earlier counsel: wend northeast, into Gondor.»
This was where I had a difficult time trusting Yaulë’s counsel, though I fancied her wise. I protested for the fourth or fifth time, “I despise Gondor!”
She sat down before me, and I began to untie the cord that held the sock in place just behind her bony shoulders. Her tail swished languidly, up and down. «Of course. You’ve been taught to. And now, after being taught that, you’ve suddenly been told to stifle your contempt and marry a prince of that land. I would be more concerned if you didn’t despise Gondor. But, it’s not merely a place of ports and ships, as this Tarannon’s boasting would imply. It’s a large country, and there are mountains there, too-and marshes, and great vast grasslands such as you have never seen here. Given your strong objections to marrying into the line of Gondor, it is also the last place anyone will expect you to go. Go right into the jaws of the enemy, and they shall be blind to it. You’ll pass for one of them with your exceptionally Númenorian looks, too.»
Yaulë didn’t blink nor stir as I worked the knot loose and reclaimed my sock. She felt like such a fragile creature, her bones jutting small and sharp under her silky hide, but all her actions suggested an energy and endurance I could not fathom. She’d been moving all night, much harder and faster than I had, cleverly laying a false trail at the same time, yet I could barely discern any weariness.
Yet again, I felt ashamed of myself for being weak and clumsy, for complaining-even for questioning her. No human person had ever evoked this manner of response from me, and in fact I felt mostly scornful of them. I was also used to some measure of deference, being a child of noble lineage, but this cat offered neither homage nor demand.
Yaulë sat a few yards off and began to groom herself, twisting around like a wire sculpture to run her tongue down her own spine, and abruptly I dared ask for the first time, “Why are you helping me?”
She stopped, the pink tip of her tongue protruding for an instant against her snowy fur, but even that did not look comical on her. Then she tucked the tongue into her mouth and straightened up and answered, «I mislike what your people would force you into. Are you a servant? Are you chattel? What person with her own mind left to her would consent to be such a thing, simply because she wears a female body?»
“Trust me, I don’t want to! But I think I see now why many girls do it. If they don’t do as they’re told, they’ll wind up nuns or beggars or worse, or wandering the land like me-except that none of them have you to help them.”
«Surely one of such self-awareness and insight is worth my helping,» suggested Yaulë, resuming her grooming.
Feeling rather flattered, I lay down on my side with my head pillowed upon my pack. Now I was almost dozing, and the dawn’s light finally moved far enough west to cast itself upon the cat. I was still in shadow under the overhanging rock, but Yaulë was vivid against the now sharp greys of the highlands. There were spots, too, of russet and green, where plant life still clung, but no white besides her could be seen. More blurry were the green hills, and still more so the blue-grey haze of sea and mist and sky. I finally had to venture the question: “What are you?”
Her grooming did not falter. Though her mind-voice needed no tongue, it was reflexively strange be spoken to by somebody whose mouth was otherwise occupied. «It would seem I’m a cat.»
“Yes, but you told me yourself, you suggested-no mere cat I’ve met can speak as you do.”
«True.» Yaulë fell still and looked up at me, the light sparking in her emerald eyes, her gaze unnerving. «Nehtanë, what have you been told of the beginning of the world?»
“They told us that the gods all composed a Song that was to make the world. The pitch of the notes foresung what everyone would do, whether it was bold or cowardly or sensible or foolish, and the length of the notes foresung the kind of being: the shortest notes were the petty creatures like the ants and worms, and the longest were all those who spoke. The gods started getting tired, so they broke off their notes when they sang of mortal Men, even though they held all their notes for the Elves as long as they could because they favored them. But there was Melkor, the Giver of Life, and he held his notes for us just as long as all the others held their notes for Elven-kind. And because Lord Melkor still sang for us, when the others would have sacrificed us for their own sake, there was a great war among the gods.”
Yaulë watched me, very still, wearing the vibrant hooded gaze I’d come to recognize as her smile. «Did Lord Melkor have any friends?»
“Oh, yes, he had a whole army of spirits.” Sensing my companion’s approval, ridiculously happy on account of it, I rolled onto my back and gazed sleepily at the brightening sky. There was some other white besides the cat there, but only one clump of clouds floating in off the sea. “His lieutenant was Annatar, who tried to win back the people of Númenor to his ways. But some of the people were still loyal to the other gods who’d cheated us, and they got their gods to send volcanoes and earthquakes and great waves to snuff us out. Luckily, some of our ancestors survived. The enemy did, too, and they founded Gondor and Arnor. But Lord Fuinur, the great-great grandfather of my great-great grandfather, he was one of our most godly people, and he helped to found Umbar here.”
«I see,» Yaulë murmured. She prowled over to me and lay down on her belly, her flank flush against mine, which was the first time she’d touched me excepting the incidental touch involved in fastening and removing the sock. I’d always loved the proximity of regular cats, but I hadn’t dared to treat this one as I’d have treated them; for Yaulë was a person, and one didn’t just go around casually touching people whom one respected. I tried not to show my delight, lest I embarrass myself yet again.
«I gauged you a worthy person of a noble line, and I find I am vindicated,» she went on. «There are few in the northwest of Middle-earth who now honor the lords Melkor and Annatar. I should know, Nehtanë. I’ve seen the entire history of mortal Men unfold-yes, and that of Elves, and of all that came before, even when the earth was rife with flame and devoid of life.»
Now wide awake, I raised my head to stare at the cat. Since I’d accepted already that she was communicating with me, the content of her current message was little harder to swallow. “You’re not mortal?” I whispered, understanding then that I’d already suspected it: “You’re a spirit?”
«More or less.» She peered at me with her intense green gaze, then crawled up onto my chest to sit there purring. All of her body vibrated, and it reverberated through my own body. «Don’t be afraid. In my current state, I have little power other than my wit. That I have used to aide you because I believed, rightfully, that you were proud and clever-and, as I suspected, you are the descendant of one of the most powerful devotees of Lord Melkor in the Second Age.»
“Did you know-Lord Melkor?” I managed.
«Not well. I was never so great as to gain the counsels of such a being, but I did abide in his courts and espouse his cause, and that of his second after him.»
“But you were there when he was, when all the Primeval Wars happened?”
«Yes.»
I breathed deeply, feeling Yaulë’s small weight on my chest. “And was there a Song, like they say?”
«No, and yes. There was an act of will, which created. A song, well, that term is purely metaphorical-I mean, it stands in for something else. The Gods of the West, they sang one thing, and Lord Melkor dared contradict them; and that was as a pillar thrown up against the light, casting long shadows over the Song. And it was better that way, because without the Darkness the Light would have been monolithic, meaningless.» Yaulë still purred against me, soothing, yet there was something almost unbearably intense about her then.
Unable to tell whether I was upset or elated, I fought to keep my chest and throat from contracting enough to force the water out of my eyes.
«Speak to me,» she suggested.
What? I thought, bewildered and distrusting my mouth to answer. My thought seemed to brush against something.
«Not as Men are wont to speak, but as I do. It isn’t a thing two mortals can do between them, but you and I may, if you’re willing.»
I closed my eyes, unable to gaze unflinching upon the intensity of the situation, and tried to think at Yaulë. Hello. Hello? Is this how I do it?
«I can’t hear you. Just pretend you’re talking as you normally would. Don’t tense up. If it’s truly something you do not want to say to me, I won’t hear
it.»
Embarrassed, I overcompensated with a rote recital of a rhyme taught to children to aide in enunciation: Shutters chattered in the wind, so steward up the ladder went, against the gale to fasten them, but fell and to the morgue was sent.
«Well, it may not come now, nor even overnight, but you are capable of it.»
Still not daring to open my eyes upon the cat again, I fell asleep experimentally testing phrases and timbres in my mind. They entered my dreams: there I stood in the courthouse with an accused man between me and Yaulë, and I thought over the clamor as some verdict came, That’s me, except I’ve never owned that red robe; I was attempting to weave at the loom, and I thought to her, I hate this most when the wool is dark and it’s got teeth in it; a colony of ants began to eat the cat as she stared with a stiff and vacant visage, and I thought, I just asked them to tea! This wasn’t supposed to happen… I struggled against the tyranny of sleep, jolted half awake, and felt the warmth of the small form still on my chest-«Yaulë?»
«Yes,» came an equally sleepy voice.
My hands came up of their own accord, the right a pins-and-needles sort of senseless from being partly tucked under me for warmth, and settled on the cat’s soft, bony back.
_________________ NOTES
The creation accounts are my own typically Melkor-centric derivations.
As has occasionally been known to happen, I think proceedings at the end of this chapter trace some unintended thematic derivation to Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.
Rating: G, but trending towards darker topics.
Characters: Berúthiel, OFC.
Word count: ~2500
Summary: Our intrepid young Umbarian lady and her strange cat friend continue their journey.
If nits are spotted, please to pick them. This underwent less proofreading than I'm wont to do.
TOC: Chapter 1.
I shivered beneath an overhang, my bare left foot tucked unceremoniously under me between my right calf and thigh. The one thin blanket I’d packed, which I sat upon rather than wrapped around me, did little to avert the ground’s chill. I’d not realized before this traveling that, of night air and night ground, the latter was easily the colder. Still, I made no fire, no glaring beacon for the pursuit. The dawn had made its way over the ridges to the northeast, but warmth would lag behind light. I rather wanted to jump up and pace, but I was already spent from walking hard all that night, as I’d walked for three nights prior since slipping away from town. Despite the cold, I was nearly dozing with my back against the stone when my companion came into view.
Even trotting along with my now holey sock dangling off her back, Yaulë managed to look collected and graceful. As I sat up hastily, the cat addressed me in her accustomed mind-voice: «The hounds were closer this night, but I eluded them still.»
I nodded, worried. Notwithstanding the strange delight of traveling with a speaking cat, her acquaintance had been beneficial in that I’d surely have been caught on my second night out if not for her. Yaulë was full of schemes and insights and apparent knowledge of many things. Since our meeting three mornings before, she’d taken it upon herself to help me evade my father’s men and hounds, leading them astray whilst I traveled by night. During the day, we hid ourselves in some thicket or crevice and slept. Waking in the late afternoons, we would eat and prepare for the coming night’s journeying; then I would tie one of my socks to Yaulë, and, using a stream to conceal my scent-trail for a mile or so, I’d go one way while she went another. She’d explained that she would go low to the ground for a ways so that my sock, rank with my own scent, would drag and catch in the brush. Then she would straighten up and move to rejoin me, careful that the sock now touched nothing, leaving the false trail at a dead end somewhere. Each afternoon we’d choose a distant landmark at which to meet, and she always found me around dawn even when I hadn’t managed to reach the spot.
”And you really don’t think we would be better off crossing over the mountains?” I asked. The state of Umbar ran from northeast to southwest, along a narrow strip between the coast and the top of the mountain range. My intent when I’d set out had been that to pass over the range to the Haradric side of the border, thinking that might be more likely to deter pursuit. The cat, however, had discouraged this, and she now did so again:
«I’m afraid not, Nehtanë. Your father’s houndmaster, charged with returning you safely to his house, won’t be put off by a sparsely-guarded border shared with a reasonably friendly nation. Besides, the other side of the mountains is quite different from what you’re used to; without the sea to moderate the moods of the climate, the heat is hotter and the cold colder. If you crossed now, you’d find only the high desert, and that is a cruel place-scalding days, frigid nights.»
“I’m already cold,” I volunteered. “I’m cold all night as I walk, and I go to sleep cold.”
«Yet this cold is very little. You’ve hardly packed for it, let alone for that which would await you in the Haradric night. I maintain my earlier counsel: wend northeast, into Gondor.»
This was where I had a difficult time trusting Yaulë’s counsel, though I fancied her wise. I protested for the fourth or fifth time, “I despise Gondor!”
She sat down before me, and I began to untie the cord that held the sock in place just behind her bony shoulders. Her tail swished languidly, up and down. «Of course. You’ve been taught to. And now, after being taught that, you’ve suddenly been told to stifle your contempt and marry a prince of that land. I would be more concerned if you didn’t despise Gondor. But, it’s not merely a place of ports and ships, as this Tarannon’s boasting would imply. It’s a large country, and there are mountains there, too-and marshes, and great vast grasslands such as you have never seen here. Given your strong objections to marrying into the line of Gondor, it is also the last place anyone will expect you to go. Go right into the jaws of the enemy, and they shall be blind to it. You’ll pass for one of them with your exceptionally Númenorian looks, too.»
Yaulë didn’t blink nor stir as I worked the knot loose and reclaimed my sock. She felt like such a fragile creature, her bones jutting small and sharp under her silky hide, but all her actions suggested an energy and endurance I could not fathom. She’d been moving all night, much harder and faster than I had, cleverly laying a false trail at the same time, yet I could barely discern any weariness.
Yet again, I felt ashamed of myself for being weak and clumsy, for complaining-even for questioning her. No human person had ever evoked this manner of response from me, and in fact I felt mostly scornful of them. I was also used to some measure of deference, being a child of noble lineage, but this cat offered neither homage nor demand.
Yaulë sat a few yards off and began to groom herself, twisting around like a wire sculpture to run her tongue down her own spine, and abruptly I dared ask for the first time, “Why are you helping me?”
She stopped, the pink tip of her tongue protruding for an instant against her snowy fur, but even that did not look comical on her. Then she tucked the tongue into her mouth and straightened up and answered, «I mislike what your people would force you into. Are you a servant? Are you chattel? What person with her own mind left to her would consent to be such a thing, simply because she wears a female body?»
“Trust me, I don’t want to! But I think I see now why many girls do it. If they don’t do as they’re told, they’ll wind up nuns or beggars or worse, or wandering the land like me-except that none of them have you to help them.”
«Surely one of such self-awareness and insight is worth my helping,» suggested Yaulë, resuming her grooming.
Feeling rather flattered, I lay down on my side with my head pillowed upon my pack. Now I was almost dozing, and the dawn’s light finally moved far enough west to cast itself upon the cat. I was still in shadow under the overhanging rock, but Yaulë was vivid against the now sharp greys of the highlands. There were spots, too, of russet and green, where plant life still clung, but no white besides her could be seen. More blurry were the green hills, and still more so the blue-grey haze of sea and mist and sky. I finally had to venture the question: “What are you?”
Her grooming did not falter. Though her mind-voice needed no tongue, it was reflexively strange be spoken to by somebody whose mouth was otherwise occupied. «It would seem I’m a cat.»
“Yes, but you told me yourself, you suggested-no mere cat I’ve met can speak as you do.”
«True.» Yaulë fell still and looked up at me, the light sparking in her emerald eyes, her gaze unnerving. «Nehtanë, what have you been told of the beginning of the world?»
“They told us that the gods all composed a Song that was to make the world. The pitch of the notes foresung what everyone would do, whether it was bold or cowardly or sensible or foolish, and the length of the notes foresung the kind of being: the shortest notes were the petty creatures like the ants and worms, and the longest were all those who spoke. The gods started getting tired, so they broke off their notes when they sang of mortal Men, even though they held all their notes for the Elves as long as they could because they favored them. But there was Melkor, the Giver of Life, and he held his notes for us just as long as all the others held their notes for Elven-kind. And because Lord Melkor still sang for us, when the others would have sacrificed us for their own sake, there was a great war among the gods.”
Yaulë watched me, very still, wearing the vibrant hooded gaze I’d come to recognize as her smile. «Did Lord Melkor have any friends?»
“Oh, yes, he had a whole army of spirits.” Sensing my companion’s approval, ridiculously happy on account of it, I rolled onto my back and gazed sleepily at the brightening sky. There was some other white besides the cat there, but only one clump of clouds floating in off the sea. “His lieutenant was Annatar, who tried to win back the people of Númenor to his ways. But some of the people were still loyal to the other gods who’d cheated us, and they got their gods to send volcanoes and earthquakes and great waves to snuff us out. Luckily, some of our ancestors survived. The enemy did, too, and they founded Gondor and Arnor. But Lord Fuinur, the great-great grandfather of my great-great grandfather, he was one of our most godly people, and he helped to found Umbar here.”
«I see,» Yaulë murmured. She prowled over to me and lay down on her belly, her flank flush against mine, which was the first time she’d touched me excepting the incidental touch involved in fastening and removing the sock. I’d always loved the proximity of regular cats, but I hadn’t dared to treat this one as I’d have treated them; for Yaulë was a person, and one didn’t just go around casually touching people whom one respected. I tried not to show my delight, lest I embarrass myself yet again.
«I gauged you a worthy person of a noble line, and I find I am vindicated,» she went on. «There are few in the northwest of Middle-earth who now honor the lords Melkor and Annatar. I should know, Nehtanë. I’ve seen the entire history of mortal Men unfold-yes, and that of Elves, and of all that came before, even when the earth was rife with flame and devoid of life.»
Now wide awake, I raised my head to stare at the cat. Since I’d accepted already that she was communicating with me, the content of her current message was little harder to swallow. “You’re not mortal?” I whispered, understanding then that I’d already suspected it: “You’re a spirit?”
«More or less.» She peered at me with her intense green gaze, then crawled up onto my chest to sit there purring. All of her body vibrated, and it reverberated through my own body. «Don’t be afraid. In my current state, I have little power other than my wit. That I have used to aide you because I believed, rightfully, that you were proud and clever-and, as I suspected, you are the descendant of one of the most powerful devotees of Lord Melkor in the Second Age.»
“Did you know-Lord Melkor?” I managed.
«Not well. I was never so great as to gain the counsels of such a being, but I did abide in his courts and espouse his cause, and that of his second after him.»
“But you were there when he was, when all the Primeval Wars happened?”
«Yes.»
I breathed deeply, feeling Yaulë’s small weight on my chest. “And was there a Song, like they say?”
«No, and yes. There was an act of will, which created. A song, well, that term is purely metaphorical-I mean, it stands in for something else. The Gods of the West, they sang one thing, and Lord Melkor dared contradict them; and that was as a pillar thrown up against the light, casting long shadows over the Song. And it was better that way, because without the Darkness the Light would have been monolithic, meaningless.» Yaulë still purred against me, soothing, yet there was something almost unbearably intense about her then.
Unable to tell whether I was upset or elated, I fought to keep my chest and throat from contracting enough to force the water out of my eyes.
«Speak to me,» she suggested.
What? I thought, bewildered and distrusting my mouth to answer. My thought seemed to brush against something.
«Not as Men are wont to speak, but as I do. It isn’t a thing two mortals can do between them, but you and I may, if you’re willing.»
I closed my eyes, unable to gaze unflinching upon the intensity of the situation, and tried to think at Yaulë. Hello. Hello? Is this how I do it?
«I can’t hear you. Just pretend you’re talking as you normally would. Don’t tense up. If it’s truly something you do not want to say to me, I won’t hear
it.»
Embarrassed, I overcompensated with a rote recital of a rhyme taught to children to aide in enunciation: Shutters chattered in the wind, so steward up the ladder went, against the gale to fasten them, but fell and to the morgue was sent.
«Well, it may not come now, nor even overnight, but you are capable of it.»
Still not daring to open my eyes upon the cat again, I fell asleep experimentally testing phrases and timbres in my mind. They entered my dreams: there I stood in the courthouse with an accused man between me and Yaulë, and I thought over the clamor as some verdict came, That’s me, except I’ve never owned that red robe; I was attempting to weave at the loom, and I thought to her, I hate this most when the wool is dark and it’s got teeth in it; a colony of ants began to eat the cat as she stared with a stiff and vacant visage, and I thought, I just asked them to tea! This wasn’t supposed to happen… I struggled against the tyranny of sleep, jolted half awake, and felt the warmth of the small form still on my chest-«Yaulë?»
«Yes,» came an equally sleepy voice.
My hands came up of their own accord, the right a pins-and-needles sort of senseless from being partly tucked under me for warmth, and settled on the cat’s soft, bony back.
_________________ NOTES
The creation accounts are my own typically Melkor-centric derivations.
As has occasionally been known to happen, I think proceedings at the end of this chapter trace some unintended thematic derivation to Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.