Esgaroth

Quenya: There is only one Quenya word in this chapter: Aulëonna. It means Dwarves.

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It was a chill morning in autumn. Many people went about wrapped in furs to keep out the bite of the cold. In this weather, the Elf was almost the only person in the whole of Laketown who was sweating. But there was a good reason for that. Dûrfîn the Elf was the smith of Esgaroth. The blazing heat of white hot metal and of the furnace heated to a blaze by the bellows his assistant pumped, all gave him a very good reason to be sweating.

Today he was repairing a ploughshare, for one of the families who farmed for a living rather than fished. It had blunted on a large stone, and its front end had bent slightly, so that it no longer worked correctly.

Swinging his hammer, Dûrfîn stretched to his full height and then brought the heavy thing down on the dented part of the metal. Sparks scattered everywhere, flying across the room, the metal made a protesting noise and straightened a little. The Elf looked at it critically, his head on one side, and then swung the hammer again. The metal bent a little further down towards the flat, and more sparks flew everywhere. It was nearly flat now. Two more blows and Dûrfîn wasn't exactly pleased with it, but he thought it would do. Taking his tongs he gripped the metal firmly and plunged it into cold water. Living on a lake certainly had its advantages. Dûrfîn didn't need a trough, there was simply a rectangular hole cut in the floor of the room. Steam erupted from the lake water, it hissed and bubbled.

After a minute or so, when the steam was dissipating, Dûrfîn removed the metal from the water and laid it against the left wall. Its owners could come to collect it later.

"What else?" He asked his assistant, who, aside from pumping the bellows, was also his encyclopaedia of work that needed to be done. The boy paused to think, then said "Nothing."

Dûrfîn nodded. His arms ached now, he had been swinging that hammer since the morning.

"Boy can go now." He said, and then began to tidy up his tools onto their hooks as the boy scampered away. He put out the fire and gathered up his pieces of scrap metal, putting them in their box. Then he stepped out of his smithy and closed and locked the door. His eye fell on the Lonely Mountain, standing tall and majestic over Esgaroth, and he muttered under his breath "Aulëonna!"

The Dwarves frightened him. He had been in Esgaroth for over a hundred years now. At first when he had come, fleeing out of the East soon after the Dragon's attack on Dale and the Lonely Mountain, he had wandered the streets of the frightened township of Esgaroth, without a penny in his pocket, and no way of getting lodging or food, unless he relied on someone's charity.

Then he had passed the smithy. It had been worked by someone called Tharn, then. Tharn had been beating out a knife for his son, laboriously striking the steel to flatten it. It hadn't been going to be a brilliant knife, either. Dûrfîn could see the impurities in the metal, and the mistakes that the smith had made. He had always had an uncanny gift for smith craft, that he had never understood. He had watched silently for a while, and then, at last, could contain himself no longer. "Smith does it wrong!" He exclaimed.

Everyone stared at him, and one man in a long black coat said "Who are you to accuse our smith of not knowing his own craft?" The voice was undisguisedly hostile.

"Dûrfîn is a Noldo!" Said Dûrfîn. He had come to that conclusion after observing the Teleri, and hearing about the Vanyar. He was nothing like either.

"You don't look like a smith to me." Said the man, looking him up and down, seeing the ropy scars across the Elf's face and his thin frame, and hearing his hoarse voice.

"Let him try, and make a fool of himself!" Some one laughed. The smith wasn't exactly pleased to let an unknown Elf touch his tools, but he agreed in the end, when his knife was finished.

And so Dûrfîn entered the smithy. He took the tools, and chose some steel from the pile of scrap metal that the smith kept. And he began.

He heated and twisted and hammered, he cooled it and repeated the process. Over and over again, until his knife was finished. And it was undoubtedly better than the smith's. Leaf bladed in the style of all Elven weapons, it shone and glistened in the light. Indeed, it almost seemed to make its own light.

Everyone stared at it in amazement, and Dûrfîn felt smug, although he couldn't help noticing where he could have made it even better.

Someone fetched the Master, who compared the two blades, looked at Dûrfîn's hungry face, and immediately offered him a bargain. He would do smith work for the Master, and in return the Master would give him food and lodgings. Dûrfîn, who needed both, had accepted.

For eighty odd years he worked for the Masters of Laketown, and came to realise that he had let himself in for virtual slavery. He was well fed enough here, but if her ever decided to leave, he would once more be a penniless waif, and his features didn't exactly speak for him. His face had three knotted white scars diagonally across it as though they had been inflicted by a gigantic whip. One crossed the left corner of his mouth, one just missed his right eye and scored through his eyebrow, and one ran across his crooked nose. These scars - and others that didn't show on his face - continued on down his body. One marred the palm of his left had so that he had difficulty holding things with it.

And the the Dwarves had come back. Bard had killed Smaug the Dragon, hitting him with the last of his arrows in his one vulnerable spot.

Dûrfîn remembered the water in which he had almost drowned. He couldn't swim, but neither could he walk through fire. The water had steamed and hissed and bubbled, like it did now when he cooled his work. He had clung tightly onto a piece of wood from the town, and he had kicked away from the blazing fire. But when the Dragon had crashed into the lake, the surge had sucked the wood from his fingers, and left him floundering. It was luck alone that a boat had happened to be near, and the people upon it had helped him in.

During the Battle of the Five Armies Dûrfîn had assiduously avoided the Wood Elves. Simply enough, he didn't like being with other Elves because they always looked at him with pity.

Alright, Men did that too, but they would also look at him with fear, and with condescension. And awe. Dûrfîn could dazzle them with his odd skill in the smithy, where he could not dazzle the Elves.

He had used the blade that he had preserved with care all these long years. An Elf had tossed it to him in Angband, and Elf who was a member of the army of the Valar. He had it because he would not come with the Elf, he had been to frightened, but the Elf did not want to leave him without any means to defend himself. He had kept that blade all these years. It was a blade from Gondolin, for it glistened blue when enemies were present. It was a shortsword, small and serviceable. Dûrfîn was fairly competent with it.

When Laketown was rebuilt, Dûrfîn said to the new Master "Dûrfîn is not going to stay with the old agreement. If the people of Esgaroth want his services, they must pay him for them."

The new Master agreed. And for a whole human generation the Men of Laketown were proud of their smith. He might sound odd, and talk a bit funny. He might be an Elf, but he could do the best metalwork outside of Erebor. And that was saying something.

But recently the Dwarves had taken it as an affront to their pride that the Men of Esgaroth had a smith who was an Elf, when there was a whole mountain of Dwarves next door. Whenever the Dwarves ran into Laketown Men, they always seemed to be showing off their craftsmanship and ability to them, and that frightened Dûrfîn. He did not want to be wandering out in the wild again.

Suddenly, as he watched, the whole top of the Lonely Mountain burst into flame. Pieces of it flew in all directions, flaming and red, and there was a deafening explosion. Dûrfîn had just enough sense to throw himself down flat before the shock wave reached Laketown. As pieces of wood began to fall on him and a deafening wind filled his ears, he thought he saw something black and sinuous dive into the smoking ruins of the mountain's crest.