Chapter Three

"Knitting"

When Legolas arrived at his chambers in the Upper Regions, he found the door ajar and Giemsa, a she-dwarf, busily building the nights' fire in the grate. Startled by his sudden appearance, she jerked suddenly upwards and the flint box that was in her hands fell to the floor with a clatter.

"Oh." she said when she saw the burden he carried. She dropped her eyes. "I didn't realize you would be back so soon, Prince." She fidgeted, threw a few bits of tinder that were in her hands at the growing fire, then, seeing her chance for a hasty exit, paced past him toward the doorway, still looking down.

"Giemsa."

She stopped abruptly and turned around, folding her arms across her chest. She was painfully careful not to meet his gaze directly.

"I will need water and a kettle to heat it in. Some beetroot sugar or honey if you have it. A feather bedroll, and some blankets. And I'd like you to have the tub sent up as soon as you can."

She nodded once, smartly, and left. Legolas was left alone with his thoughts and the faint crackling of the fire in the near empty room. Carefully, he laid the unconscious woman on his bed. She was still breathing, albeit with difficulty, and her pulse was faint. If he could get her hydrated, she might survive. He stood up and looked her over, his eyes drawn again and again to the book she clasped in her cruelly punished hands. How she had come by the book was a compelling mystery. Her presence in Moria at all defied explanation. He knelt by the edge of the bed and gingerly eased the book from under her hands. Her fingers flexed instinctively and she whimpered once, in her throat, but did not wake. Legolas opened the book, searching for the text she had been reading from in the hopes of some sort of explanation. He riffled, turned pages, searching fruitlessly. The text was in a form of unknown Dwarvish, and was, for all intensive purposes, unreadable.

There was a rough knock at the door. Legolas folded the book in a square of cloth and placed it in his pack before answering it. Giemsa padded in bearing a collection of items in her stout arms. She set everything down on the rough hewn table-the only other piece of furniture in the room-and began to go through them.

"We had no sugar." She said, frowning slightly behind her reddish beard. She pushed a small clay canister sealed with red wax toward him, and a spoon made of carved horn.

"This is what we have."

Legolas broke the seal and surveyed the contents. Buckwheat honey. It was coarse, but would do the job. Giemsa handed him a large sewn skin, a small iron cooking pot, a dented copper tea kettle, and a stack of folded cloths.

"Here. Water, kettles, and some cloths for when the bath comes. The bedroll is here." she motioned at the bundle at her feet. "I could only find one blanket, so you'll have to make do."

"Thank you, Giemsa."

"The bath should be up in a few hours. Almost everyone is yet at the feast or it would be sooner."

"Thank you. That will be all, then."

Giemsa shot a glance in the direction of the unconscious woman.

"Frail as dust." She muttered under her breath, glancing up at Legolas. She shook her head, a pursed lip sneer on her face, as if she were inspecting inferior goods. "I hope she makes it, though even if she survives it is hardly worth the trouble. They never last long, their kind." She shrugged.

Finding little in the way of a response from him, Giemsa turned and ambled away, slamming the door with a bang behind her.

Legolas stared in the direction she had gone. After living among the dwarves for so long their often expressed disdain for the other races, including himself, had lost its sting, but it was still something he could never bring himself to understand. He wandered over to his bed where the woman lay in a crumpled heap and watched the pulse tick weakly in her thin neck. Human lives were ineffably short, a beat of a birds' wing; they sprouted and fell around him like wheat, it seemed. It was hard, to watch them, their bright loves giving way again and again as the wind of time blew through them and made them weak. So many of their lives were oftentimes nothing but unmitigated pain, but still they sealed it up in themselves somehow and carried it, on and on. He sighed. He was the rock, immovable and always the same, around which their lives washed like ocean water. But all of this did not matter because there was only one thing to do: The woman might not survive, but at least he could allow her to die with dignity, in a safe place where she could be warm and have someone to be with her and honor her in her last moments.

What would it be like, he wondered as he assembled supplies from his pack, to feel yourself fade, your body betraying you; to give yourself to the swallowing darkness without knowing for certain there were any arms open to receive you on the other side? He turned again and looked at her, studied the bony cage like architecture of her foot where it stuck out from under her cloak. A sense of deep respect swept through him and the thought: you are stronger than you look.

Everything was in order. Kneeling on the stone floor in front of the hearth, Legolas placed the empty teakettle before him and took off the lid. He took in a deep breath and quietly began the ritual he had performed so many times; on muddy battlefields, light-filled forest floors, on smooth marble floors safe within palace walls. The remembrances of so many years, different yet all the same, blurred together until they were no longer distinguishable. Trancelike, he poured water from an earthenware bowl into the kettle, just filling the bottom. He swirled the water around in the bottom of the kettle and emptied it onto the flagstones in front of the fire. He refilled the kettle from the bowl and repeated the motion, focusing all his senses and will into the water. Eyes closed, he filled the kettle for the last time and allowed it to remain. His hands closed around the palm-sized pile of finely chipped willow bark he had set out. Let the strength of the trees carry your pain, he thought as he released the bark into the kettle. Herbs were next, a mixture of dried leaves and flowers; the wild, summer life of the fields and meadow. He took a large pinch of coarse gray salt from a vial in his pack and placed it in the palm of his hand, rubbing it hard into his skin. He put his hands together and held them over the kettle, softly breathing a prayer for life, for healing. He opened his hands and the salt fell like snow into the water and disappeared. Legolas opened his eyes. The ritual was complete. He put the lid on the kettle and put it on to boil.

He was spooning honey into the earthen bowl when the woman began to stir. She did not open her eyes, but her hands opened and closed, and her fingers flexed, closing on air. The air rasped in her lungs as she drew in a croupy breath. With incredible effort, she spoke to him in a thick querulous whisper:

"Give me back my book. Take it when I am dead." She drew in another lungful of raspy air. The corner of her cracked mouth turned up slightly in a rueful smirk and she opened one crusted eye to look at him. "You will not have to wait long, Prince."
Legolas retrieved the book from his pack. He held in his hands it for a moment and ran his fingers over the intricate binding. Ancient power wept from the book like mist, speaking to him of awakening kings, newborn earth, and stone that had not received its curse. He held it a moment more before setting it down before her.

"Open it." she demanded.

"Where?"

"It does not matter." He opened the book for her and watched as she carefully placed one hand down on the gilded vellum page and swept over it with her bruised fingertips, sightlessly tracing the raised lines of the letters. Slowly, with great effort, she began to translate, whispering the words in halting Sindarin. Legolas listened to her in silence; the words that spilled from her broken lips were beautiful and made his heart hurt with the depth of their eloquent truth.

"Joy is sorrow unmasked." she said, in a whisper shaking with the last of her strength, "They are one and the same. The deeper sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. The cup that...holds your wine is the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven; and the lute that soothes the very core of your spirit is the same wood that was hollowed with knives." She trembled, her eyelids fluttering.

"When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight." Her dry tongue scraped in her mouth, the words choking off into a dull croak. She coughed wetly, and took in a harsh breath.

Legolas put his hand across the text where she had been reading. "You should rest now. You are wearying yourself with an unnecessary hardship." Blind, her cold fingertips ran over the back of his hand and found the letters on the other side of it. Her mouth moved silently, still translating. He grasped the book and began to pull it away from her. Her fingers pressed hard into the pages, still unwilling to surrender the book to him. A moment passed, and then she seemed to change her mind, snaking her hands back to rest at her side.

"It is just as well, for now." she said, letting him take the book and pack it away, "It is fitting that the last of my work be such nonsense, beautiful though it may be." She said this, but in her hunger numbed mind the words stuck and burned like tarred arrows, and endlessly she weighed them, first on one scale, then on another, until her mind tumbled with thought. "Remember what I have said, Prince. It is the last you will likely hear of it. The dwarves will never tell you the rest of it, they would kill you just for the hearing, if they knew." "Who are you?" Legolas said guardedly, "What is your name?" The womans' breath rasped several times, sharply in her throat. It was impossible to tell if she was laughing or sobbing. "You come from a fair race, Prince, but I could not put upon even you to carry the burden that is my name."

Legolas knit his brow, looking stern and grim. "Of all the burdens to carry in the world, the lightest is a name. I should still like to call you something, if only to honor the memory of your passing."

The woman sighed weakly. "I suppose it is your nature." For a while she thought in silence while Legolas sat beside her and watched the fire crumble into glowing ash. At last she turned one corner of her slit-like mouth up in a smirk. "Arwarthiel", she said, "Or Gwauriel, take your pick."

Legolas scowled deeper. "These are not fair names. I would have you choose better."

"Arwarthiel, then. It is the lesser evil, yes? It will be Arwarthiel, " the woman gasped. She shifted in her rags and the sound was like the sharp north wind in fall leaves. "Take heart, you will not have to bear the hearing of it long." She lay back to rest and catch her breath. With mute terror, she realized that she could not. A leaden weariness was sinking into her now, and her body was clay and her mind a feeble flame. Shivering with fear and effort, she forced her lungs to fill, and empty, again and again. The darkness was close around her now, and all it would take would be for her to falter once, just once, and she would be lost forever. Minutes, hours passed in gnawing pain and desperate effort. From a million miles outside herself she felt her body being moved, carried, and laid down again. The air was warmer, somehow, and she felt the golden weight of light on her face.

Legolas straightened a rumpled corner of the feather mattress in its new place on the floor and went to pull the kettle off the fire. He poured the contents of the kettle, now a dark amber color, into the earthen bowl and added some water to cool it to drinking temperature. He stirred the infusion to be sure the honey dissolved and brought it before her.

"Drink this. It will ease your pain." He slipped an arm behind her back and gently eased her up. Eyes closed, trembling like a newborn, she touched the edge of the bowl with her lips and sipped carefully, unsure of what was being given to her. The taste that met her was grassy and wild, earthily sweet and biting in a way that felt good to her parched throat. She began to drink greedily, desperate for moisture.

"Not so much, at first. You will be sick." Legolas pulled the bowl away from her and placed it next to him on the floor. Long minutes drifted by, punctuated only by Arwarthiels' labored breathing. Every quarter hour he gave her drink, admonishing her sometimes in Sindarin, sometimes in Quenya to go slow, to be patient with the healing.

Gradually, by degrees, warmth from the draught gathered under her breastbone and wrapped around her heart like gentle hands. She felt her lungs open, grow strong, and the peaceful stillness that came in the wake of her pain made her want to weep from sheer relief. In this stillness she drifted, the death-fear leaving her, and allowed herself to rest at last. Hours loped by and somewhere inside himself, Legolas knew that miles above him in the open air the sun was rising, spanning pale winter light over the snowy peaks of the mountain. His thoughts of light took him far to the east, to his homeland. There was the solstice festival now, and his father would have lanterns strung in the boughs of the great trees and the dark nights would glitter with songs, celebration, and new-fallen snow. He sighed. It was useless to dwell on what could not be, no matter how beautiful it was to think on it. He was better served to concentrate on the fulfilling of his vow and now, of healing.

Once again he brought the bowl to the woman's mouth and watched her drink, blind and helpless as an infant. Arwarthiel. He frowned at the name. Abandoned, forsaken one. What bitterness in her short life had caused her, standing even at the threshold between this world and the next, to willingly shoulder such a name? What did she hide by naming herself thus? Was she wanted? Dangerous? Or was she simply a refugee who had lost her kin through some accident or betrayal?

His thoughts were interrupted by harsh pounding on the door.

"Come in." he said, rising from his place by the fire. Two sturdy dwarves trundled in, carrying a polished brass bath full of steaming soapy water. They set it down in the center of the room with a bang, slopping water over the rim of the tub and onto the floor. One of the dwarves set a bundle of towels and a bucket of hot rinse water on the tabletop. The dwarf cast a curious glance at the prone figure lying sleeping on the mattress in front of the fire and then looked knowingly at his coworker with a sarcastic smirk. The other dwarf set down a bar of soap around which a thin cloth had been wrapped, nodded curtly at Legolas and smirked back at his friend. They left amiably, but through the closed door, as they walked away to their next assignment, he heard one of them sniggering.

"Don't elves know that you can never get the dirt off a worm no matter how hard you scrub?"

"Worm, nothing. That's the Princlings' new concubine. She's a pretty one, eh?" said the other, braying. Burning with indignation, Legolas turned away as their bawdy laughter echoed and finally died away.

"Pay no heed to them, they have idle tongues." he said, kneeling down next to her. If she heard him somewhere in her drifting sleep, she made no sign. "Besides, not all dwarves behave thus, or direct such malice against other kinds." His memory flickered to his friend, to the long proud line of Gimli and his fathers' father now resting in their tombs of polished stone. "Most are noble, and very brave." he added, his voice dimming. The woman shifted her head, her eyes moving back and forth under her eyelids. The corner of her mouth twitched and her lips soundlessly formed words that Legolas could not guess at. Leaning over her, he placed his hand lightly on her sternum. Her breathing was stronger and less labored, although even through the cloth that covered her he could feel pneumonia beginning to rattle in the deep caverns of her lungs. He sat back on his heels and undid the fastenings of his jerkin, pulling it off in one fluid motion. Rolling up the sleeves of his light undershirt up to his elbows, he considered the woman's ragged cloak. It was so filthy, and of such poor make that it was not worth saving. Moreover, she was deeply tangled in its voluminous folds; it would be difficult to find its closure without unduly disturbing her. It would be best to cut it off her, he decided, and once she was free, burn it.

He began in the bundled cloth around her neck, carefully working the blade of his ivory handled knife through it, stopping to tear it by hand where there it was too close to her skin to safely work with the blade. As he cut, the smell of the cloth rose to greet him; a pungent, sour tang of dried blood and ground in sweat, the dark mouldering smell that pervaded over everything in Moria. He had torn the cloth open to her shoulder now, revealing the hard angry knot of bone and tendon where her clavicle met the wasted muscles of her arm. Legolas set his knife down and grasped the free edges of the cloth and tore them briskly apart, dirt raining over his lap and the floor. Surprising even him, Arwarthiel roused with a sound of strangled grief, her feeble hands blindly flexing for the remnants of the rotten cloth in an effort to cover herself. Her eyes squeezed in pain and her mouth moved, at first voiceless but gaining momentum as she found breath.

"No, no, don't do this," she whimpered faintly, her words slurring and trailing off in her sleep-numbed exhaustion "you don't have to do this. It won't help, It won't change anything." Her eyes tracked furiously behind her eyelids, and she choked with voiceless sobs.

"I'm not going to hurt you, Arwarthiel." Legolas placed his hand on her sweating forehead. "It is not good for you to remain in these rags any longer-"

"Don't, please don't. Jenadorn, please. Don't force me." She writhed, unhearing, flexing her fingers. Her head wagged back and forth, denying, and her lashes were wet with her scant tears. She cried aloud in pain, a thin feeble sound of agony, and her hands clutched helplessly at the cloth between her legs. Legolas drew back in shock. Somewhere in her mind the memory of her rape was being played out, although if it had befallen her recently or far in the past it was impossible to tell. And human women, unlike elves, did not have the ability to die and end their suffering at the memory of it.

Arwarthiel gave a faint cry of pain and fear. "It hurts, it hurts," she hissed through her teeth, repeating the phrase over and over in her remembered terror as if it were a secret meant only for him to know. She shuddered twice like a fish trying to free itself from a deep-swallowed hook and still her ruined hands clenched and unclenched on the cloth. "Why do you do this, why?" Her words trailed off into an unintelligible garble of soft sounds that was like weeping only without tears.

Patient as the sea, Legolas waited as the herbs he had given her pulled her mind deeper into sleep. To pass the time, and to calm her, he sang a low sweet song about starlight and the snow falling and the blue and white world of winter giving way at last to the newness of spring. He finished his song and looked at Arwarthiel grimly. She was sleeping and still, but he was troubled by what he had witnessed, and the heavy weight of the knowledge of it made him feel sad when he looked at her.

He rose, and added a few more split logs to the fire before kneeling down beside her once again. At first he was afraid to touch her, but she did not stir when he gently moved her hands from where they clutched at the ragged edge of her cloak. Using the edge as a guide, he carefully slit the garment open the rest of the way with his knife and lifted it from her. She was naked under the cloak, her skin waxy and pale where it could be seen under the dirt, and the hollowness of her ribs and collarbone were painful to look upon. The joints of her knees and wrists stood out like wads of coiled rope and on the outside curve of her pelvis a compression ulcer blossomed like an obscene flower where the dark stone of Moria had bit her, purple and black and white against her numbed skin.

Bending low, he picked her up in his arms, her hair trailing on the floor like a banner, and eased her into the bath. The bath had been made for dwarves, it was vast in comparison to her, and Legolas had to support her in the small of her back with one arm to keep her head above the water. He sang as he bathed her, crooning a song he had heard other healers sing. It was ancient, he had heard, as old as the stars. It soothed him as he worked and as he opened his heart to it he felt himself healed of his sorrow. Bit by bit the dirt of Moria washed away and became a memory. Arwarthiel's cloak had long burned to ash by the time Legolas lifted her from the bath and wrapped her in clean towels that he had set out in front of the fire to warm. After she had rested for a little while, he treated the ulceration on her hip with lichen sap and wrapped her hands with gauze after treatment with the same.

She rested easier now, he thought, as he looked at her. Dressed in one of his spare undershirts, her wounds bound and clean, she seemed almost peaceful. Her color seemed better, her skin was a little less ashen, but he knew enough about the healer's art not to be overly hopeful so early. There was still the risk of infection, contagion, any number of things yet could rise up to assail her fragile body; she had not the strength to stand against any for long. Again he roused her to drink. Laying her back to rest, he studied her. There were few clues about her age, given her present condition. Heavy threads of silver hair wisped at her temples, coiling and mingling with the rest of ash blonde. The fine lines around her mouth and at her eyes could have been brought about, if not solely by despair and hunger, then by just about anything she may had been forced to endure in the last months. If she survived, perhaps then there would be time to have answers. He sat and rested on his empty bedframe and consigned himself, unhappily, to ignorance.