Month: May 2017

misbehavingmaiar:

beruthielthequeen:

misbehavingmaiar:

Only once since the beginning of the world had he crossed the sea.

They had taken him on foot across the desert, chained between two horses like a slave, down the Harad Road and across the Harnen, passing through kingdoms and villages where he had been worshiped as an avatar of god, the Eye of the Sun. Never once did he stumble or tire. When the king’s men left him unattended in the panic before a sudden sandstorm, he had weathered it alone, eyes shining in the false red night and shrieking winds, as if he belonged there. 

But the sea had broken him; though he saw little of it, chained in the hull of a galley, where he sweated and lay limp in his bonds, shivering and panting with fever as they pulled farther from the shore. The waves around the fleet were fierce and belligerent, as if they knew, and hated, the cargo born to Anadûne, the Gifted Land. 

The sickness left him only when they reached port; and though the dust of a hundred miles lay grey on his caracal skin, he walked proudly as they paraded him through the streets of Armenelos, by far the greatest prize won in Ar-Pharazon’s conquest of the East. He’d not flinched at the stones hurled, the jeering left him unfazed. And when called upon him to perform tricks for the pleasure of the crowds, he changed shape obligingly, and as a great lion had lain at Pharazon’s feet; the tame sorcerer, the warlord humbled. The King had bidden him then to sing for the pleasure of his Queen, Tar-Miriel, who looked on him ever with distrust, and loathing, and did not meet his gaze. He had done so, though she closed her eyes in discomfort, his voice as deep and rolling as the heart of a mountain, as finely tuned as it been in the Beginning. From thence he had been called often to sing for the court’s amusement, and amaze them with secret knowledge of the world and his craft. He’d been made cup-bearer, canny of all poisons and plots long before they reached the throne and having their trust at last, he’d told them still of other things. 

“…Out of the Darkness was the world made, and Darkness alone is worshipful, being the womb of creation where the spark of life was nurtured. Only one has dwelt in and gained mastery of the Dark, and in it that Lord may yet make other worlds to be gifts to those that serve him, and so increase their power without end.’ 

Who is the Lord of the Darkness?’ the King had asked– and still bound in chains of gold, Sauron had told him: “It is he whose name is not now spoken; for the Valar have deceived you concerning him. They have put forward the name of Eru as the true god, the One all-knowing; but that is a phantom devised in the folly of their hearts, with which they seek to enchain Men in servitude. For the Valar claim that they alone are the oracle of this Eru, whose words bind them with false dichotomies and condones their continued tyranny over earth. But he that is the world’s true master shall yet prevail, and he will deliver you from this phantom: his name is Melkor. Lord of All, Giver of Freedom. And he shall make you stronger than they.”

From slave to entertainer, from minstrel to cup-bearer, from cup-bearer to royal advisor he’d climbed, all in a handful of decades. The rites of the faith he’d invented from whole cloth he taught to the king, and besotted, Ar-Pharazon had bid him teach it to the masses of Anadûne. So it was he’d become a figure nigh equal in power to the crown: Zîgur, they called him, the right hand of Ar-Pharazon, high priest of the Temple of Freedom.  

And this was good; he’d gained much more and in a shorter time than he’d dared hope at the onset of his ruse. Willing captivity had brought him close to the heart of the West, the perfect launching point for his chief mission.

He’d done it single-handedly, at half his power, with only his wits and the vulnerability of Men to aid him. Now he found himself once more at the center of a delicate web of deceit, royal favor, distrust, and manipulations, of subtle surrenders and plays for power, as he wound the threads ever tighter about the necks of his former captors. 

Oh, politics was a clever game, a potent game, and he was terribly good at it now. He thrilled at the dangers and the complexity of its rules, and he played against opponents whose very existence opened a boiling, dark chasm in his heart– casting each and every one of the Edain into it would bring him the keenest, most hideous pleasure. 

But he had not accounted for the long silences between games, both impossibly fast, at the breakneck pace of humanity, and a crawl of mundane hours. He was without allies, surrounded by a vastness of water that was a surer prison for him than any iron cell– and every day he spoke the name of his Beloved as though he were a present god, who might at a whim reach down and answer the prayers of his supplicants. But Melkor was not looking down on him from above, and he would not reach out a hand from the Void to touch his servant, except in the dreams he both cherished and feared. His likeness loomed shining at the heart of his Temple, but the gold of his skin was only metal.

 It was well that plots and machinations were all about him, for the silence that fell while he was alone was unbearable. The echo of the sea could be heard even inland, reminding him that if he did not succeed in going forward, he would wither here alone. 

---

That silence dogged him in the sultry hours after noon, as the duties of his station came to a pause. He’d been half the day at the King’s side speaking of matters of loyalty and surveillance, pulling up the treacherous weeds of Faithful dissent from the ranks, gathering the trustworthy close to the throne, and carefully gardening around the Queen’s untouchable kin and her appointed public servants, so that they had no real power within the law. The waiting lords would now have their hour with King, receiving benefits or councils according to their due– matters beneath the Zîgur. Now there stood a drift of time before the evening services, when fires would be lit, and fingers pricked, and the drops of ceremonial blood offered up to the Giver of Freedom in smoke. He had nothing to occupy him until then. 

As he swept down the hall from the council chamber, a pavilion of the royal gardens beckoned to him enticingly with its quiet sounds and reprieve from the grasping ambitions of Men. To the east, the balcony faced the great temple tower and its shining dome, and westwardly it overlooked the river valley flowing down from the Pillar of Heaven. His feet took him along the white path through the walls of flowers; lilies and orchids, musk and tea roses, poppies and waxflower, myrtle, mint, euphorbia, and sea lavender as purple than the heavy robes he wore draped over one shoulder. There were flowers here he’d not seen since his stay in Umbar, on the golden banks of a brown river, brimming with life. 

Quietly, almost unawares, he found a song pouring from his lips, slow and sweet as dripping honey. It was a song about the joy of rain in the desert, the replenishing life it brought, the serenity of the open sky; a nomad’s song, from the sailors of the Dune Sea beyond hills of the coast of Umbar. 

He’d come to the final stanza when he realized he was not alone in the garden– there was a woman here, whose presence had been drifting high above, where he’d mistaken it for an eagle. She was tall and darker than many in the capital city; straight-backed, though there was something almost timid in her demeanor, shy and quiet as a wild cat.  

Sauron blinked his slit-eyes slowly, and gave a slight bow. “Forgive me, my lady. I did not mean to disturb your solitude– I thought myself alone.” 

She had been singing.

Though half her mind had soared above on borrowed wings — now fled, too far away to reach again, the eagle finding its way to the sea — she knew, as she fell back wholly into the base earth of her own flesh, that she had been singing. The words tasted bittersweet on her tongue, the melody one which stirred her blood to a warmth she had not felt since first she had set foot upon the deck which would carry her to this place.

It was a very old song. And there had been another voice twining with her own, a lower basso rumble underlying her sweet-honey contralto.

She blinked. Her heart ached in her chest with the aftermath of the song still carving runnels into her flesh; and her vision was blurred. She blinked again, and this time she beheld him. A masculine presence, was the Zigûr, a heavy strong-featured head surmounting a broad smith-crafter’s chest. She was minded of the great tawny lions which sunned themselves with dangerous indolence upon the heat-baked savannas which lay to the south of the Dune Sea. Leonine was his presence, and leonine had been the deep chuff of his voice as he sang, and as he spoke his courtesies to her now.

She remembered, all in a rush, the stories and songs her mother had taught her, telling her to keep them secret to herself, to keep them as precious and as treasured as jewels in a cask. It was not a safe faith to hold in one’s heart; but less safe still would be to hold it upon one’s tongue. Not safe at all, in a land which lay beneath the benevolent yoke of the Adûnaîm.

“My lord Zigûr,” she said quickly, her eyes dropping from his face. Hesitant, she shaped the words of old, old prayers, building them anew with the inadequate bricks of this tongue the Adûnaîm had taught to hers. His temples had been thrown down before she had been born, but she spoke the words which had once been spoken there. “A Tamar, zâira ninud….”

Silence gripped and shook her, an old, old anger coring through her bones with molten steel. Her back held sword-straight, she sank to her knees before him and bent, pressing her brow into the earth at his feet. The old words flowed again, this time in a tongue which never had been spoken on this five-pointed isle…until they had sung that old, old song together among the foreign flowers which grew here, transplanted into strange soil.

Her mother’s tongue, and her mother’s mother’s… but not hers except as heirloom, too precious to ever use.

He let her pray uninterrupted, though he could provide no solace for her longing, and no answer to her devotion. To refuse her reverence would have been an act of incredible disrespect; the orisons were older than his inheritance of them, and the language a comfort to one far from home. 

When she’d finished, he lowered his hand and traced an eye on her forehead, acknowledging and consecrating what had been offered. “Fire carries thy words to the dark, and the dark keeps them,” he intoned, and turned his palm upward to help her rise.  

“You have a lovely voice, anâkali, and you speak a lovely tongue,” he said in the Umbarim vernacular. “I came here to enjoy the silence, but what you have given me is unexpected, and much sweeter; a reminder of times past. What may I call you? And what is your tribe?”