beruthielthequeen:
@misbehavingmaiar
Anadûnê was a star of five points. She had seen it drawn out upon a map; and she had seen it, too, through the eyes of a great seabird wheeling high above, wings spread to the thermals. It was a star of five points, and so a star of five points – not eight, never eight – was embroidered upon its banners, engraved upon its fine, high doors.
In the center of the isle, or near enough, there was a mountain, the Pillar of Heaven, Minul-Târik. It, too, was a star of five points when seen from above, five long ridges of stone spreading out from the central base. It was said there was an altar at the top, a degenerate thing dedicated to the gods of the Nimîr, but she had never seen it and expected she never would.
Her ship had landed at Rómenna. The passage had been long, and distinctly unenjoyable; the sea smelled to her heavy and decaying, nothing like the clean, dry winds of her homeland. The salt reek of the waves had sickened her, or their ceaseless, grey and white movement had; and she had curled miserably below decks and longed for the umber and gold of the great Dune Sea upon whose verge her city had rested, longed for the cool blue shadows of evening and the hot, sharp vibrancy of day.
They had looked at her strangely in Rómenna, jabbering to each other in the Adûnâyê which was and was not like the Adûnâyê she knew; the rhythms had been strange, the words. The vowels had seemed longer, the consonants clipped off as though bitten between sharp teeth. She had not understood them, but she had understood enough. They looked at her, at her clothing and her hair and her skin, and knew her for foreign. She had never felt so alone as she had upon that reeking dock, nor so stripped down naked and vulnerable.
Upon her arrival at last in Armenelos, however, she had quite quickly learned how much more alone and vulnerable a woman might be. Her betrothed husband Tarannon Bâr n’Sakal, a man of noble birth and of many victories in the conquests of Umbar, had looked at her as a man might have inspected a mare for his stables. Not once had he looked at her with any softer expression, through all the long and all but incomprehensible ceremony which was their marriage, through all the long and all but unbearable night which followed it, nor in all the long and interchangeable days since then.
There were gardens at her husband’s house in Armenelos, though they were not like the gardens she knew. She walked in them, all the same. There were birds in the gardens, tiny red ones called kiriniki which were much beloved by the men and women here. Raucous white gulls wheeled always overhead, and larger birds, ospreys and sea eagles with far-reaching eyes which she loved to borrow and pretend she was as free as they. She missed the britti of her homeland, the muted brown bird sometimes called a desert lark. She missed the little pink pimchee flowers. She missed the long-legged desert cats, and the black crows breasted in white. She missed air which was not wet; and she missed good sweet mint tea.
She missed eyes which did not look at her and see only strangeness. She missed the sound of voices speaking like her own.
She wore black, in this new land, and jewelry of silver set with amber and nacre from her homeland. She wore her hair in tight braids, pulled back and away from the bones of her face, and she wore a head-covering of thin silk held in place by silver combs. She would not ape their foolish garb with its stays and bindings and its brightness; and she would not be a pretty, all but silent kiriniki. She was britti, she was a long-legged desert cat. She had been Tamar Margoliantë; in this new land she renamed herself Béruthiel.
There was only one here who was of her lands and might understand; but he was so far above her as to be unreachable. He might just as well have been across the sea in the east, for all she could speak to him. Or all she could even try. The Zigûr, the wizard he was called. She had known him – known of him, by other names. Giver of Gifts was one. Eye of the Sun, another. Her mother had told her the stories; but the great Lord in his fiery manse in Mordor had fallen before Béruthiel-who-had-been Tamar had been born.
She walked in the gardens at the palace of Ar-Pharazôn, her husband having been called to a council. It was a great honor, she was cognizant of it; and knew further she had been brought only as an ornament to his power. So too had he brought his horse, a proud-necked Umbarim stallion the color of beaten gold. So too had he brought his slaves. Or his other slaves, the ones who wore their collars and chains more openly.
But she had not been invited to the council, of course, but been left to her own devices once her purpose had been served; and, left to them, she had found the gardens. With half her mind soaring above on the wings of a sea-eagle, she could walk their twisting pathways, graveled in pale stone, and forget. For a little while.
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.”
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