“How much farther?” Fingon called into the wind. “How much farther can you bear us?”
The eagle’s cruel, hooked beak did not move, but his great voice echoed in the minds of those that huddled upon his back.
“I am Thorondor, Lord of Eagles. My wing beats are the crack of mountain thunder and when I stoop to kill it is the strike of lightning. My wings span thirty fathoms and my strength is the strength of the rising storm. I can carry you as far as is needful.”
“Thirty fathoms exactly?” said Fingon. “And how much do you weigh?”
Thorondor blinked his golden eyes. “What?”
“We’ve been doing some calculations back here,” Fingon said, oblivious to his confusion. “The average harpy eagle has a wingspan of about a fathom and can carry its own body weight – say twenty pounds – for short distances. If we were to extrapolate your weight and scale linearly, you’d be able to carry our combined weight with ease.”
“But the matter is vastly more complicated than linear scaling,” croaked his cousin. “Based on wingspan and weight, an unladen eagle would induce a velocity change on air of almost eight miles an hour – forgive the approximation, I don’t have parchment or sufficient blood – and would require a tremendous amount of energy.”
“Factoring in the additional weight of two adult Eldar-“
“-plus armour but sans several litres of blood-”
“-the energy requirements would be ludicrous. And that’s without getting into the tensile strength of muscle, bone, etcetera.”
“You understand,” said Thorondor slowly, “That I am a maia of
Manwë, cloaked only in the seeming of an eagle?” He was remembering again why, Oaths and murders aside, he found the Noldor such a thoroughly disagreeable people.
“Well yes,” said Fingon the Valiant. “But that’s no excuse for the crafting of a shoddy fana.”
“O Heirs of Finwë,” said Thorondor. “Behold! For we have found precisely how far I can carry you and the limit has nothing at all to do with the power of my wings and everything to do with the limits of my patience.” He folded his wings and dived towards the mushroom patch of tents that marked the Noldor’s camps upon Lake Mithrim’s shore, his passengers clutching tightly at his feathers and at each other.
They landed in a hurricane rush of wind that tore several tents from their moorings, and the raking of great claws that tore great furrows in the brown earth of the lake’s shore.
”Right,” said the Lord of Eagles, turning his head to peer at the elves upon his back. “Fuck off.”
The stag’s head snapped up, long strands of autumn grass still hanging from it’s mouth, but much too late. Celegorm had already loosed his shot and the arrow took it in the ribs, just behind the foreleg. It fell kicking, sharp hooves scuffing at the drifts of damp, dead leaves, but the shot had been a good one and it had stilled by the time Celegorm and Huan reached it.
He field dressed it there in the clearing, the bright stink of fresh blood and offal mingling with the flat scent of wet earth and vegetation.
The bird watched him from the canopy, bright eyes following every flash of his hunting knife. “For me,” it said, flapping down to alight upon the heap of discarded viscera. “For me, for me, for me.”
“For you,” Celegorm agreed, hefting the carcass.
“Here,” said the crow. “Here, here!”
To an archer as skilled as Celegorm, orcs died as easily as deer. So do elves, added a treacherous, tickling voice at the back of his mind, but he paid it little heed. He wasn’t Maglor to write ballads or Maedhros to flagellate himself. He was a hunter and he’d known as long as he could hold a blade that all things died much the same.
“For me,” said the crow, when the battle was done and all was gone to stillness. “For me, for me.”
Celegorm let it have its due.
“Here,” said the crow. “Here! For me! For me! For me!” It alighted upon the corpse’s foot only to flap away again when it groaned and twitched.
“Not for you,” Celegorm snapped as he drew close enough to recognise the crest upon the armour, and then the figure’s waxen features. Caranthir’s ruddy face was corpse-pale, his eyes blown black from side to side with shock and pain, but he still lived. Enough to fumble weakly for his own weapon as Celegorm knelt over him and drew his knife to cut away his breastplate. “Be still,” he said.
“The battle?” Caranthir rasped.
“Lost.”
“Our brothers?”
“All far better off than you. Be still, I said,” he added as Caranthir tried to rise.
“For me,” the crow repeated sullenly.
“There’s a whole mountain of corpses for you to pick over,” Celegorm snarled over his shoulder. “Get gone before I use you for fletchings.”
“Here,” the crow croaked, somewhere high above.
Celegorm could not bring it into focus, saw only a blur of flat grey sky and clawed black branches. The snow had leeched the pain out of his wounds and would leech all else away soon enough.
“Here,” said the crow, again. “For me?”
“Why not,” Celegorm rasped. It was hard to speak, harder still to laugh but he did both anyway. “For you.”
But when they were landed, Maedhros the eldest of his sons, and on a time the friend of Fingon ere Morgoth’s lies came between, spoke to Fëanor, saying: ‘Now what ships and rowers will you spare to return, and whom shall they bear hither first? Fingon the valiant?’
MisbehavingMaiar: Tumblr Archive 