Disclaimer: I do not own any part of LOTR.
Even when I was young I knew that others believed something was missing in my family, something that made us different and wrong. Because there was no man in our household the people would talk, and their talk hurt my mother and my aunts. They would not have cared if they had been called whores, every one of them, for it was no more than the truth. But the truth was painful when Rookheeya heard the word 'murat' follow her daughter, for murat means mongrel in our tongue, and in the eyes of the tribe that was what I was; a child born out of wedlock or contract, a bastard child, and a child whose father was not known. I was a mongrel and the boys of the village made sure that I knew it. "Who is your father?" they would yell after me as I passed them by, hooting when I appeared to pay them no heed. "You have no father."
And that was the truth as well. Whoever my father had been I would never see him; alive or dead he lay to the South where I would never go. I would never know his name or his nature or why he had come to the dark forest to serve the One, or if or how he had died, and I would never know if he had been kind or cruel. I would never know if he might have loved and married my mother or abandoned us both, and in more truth I did not care. My mother and my aunts were father enough for me, and perhaps more than other girls of the tribe had. All I know for certain of the one who sired me is that he could have been a Southron, for my skin was the colour of sand, lighter even than the wild honey of my mother. There were few of the tribe who were paler than I was, and they did not live in the village at all.
The village children would sometimes climb the hills on either side of the rocky valley that they lived in and they would look over the side, holding their breath for fear of catching the disease that plagued the ones who lived in there, standing in the spot where men of the village would sometimes stand to lower down food and other supplies on a rope. There were about twenty of them down there in all, I learned, and sometimes they would not see the children looking down on them and sometimes they would, but they would never do anything. They could show no anger for their faces were wrapped up, and they had no fingers left to throw stones with. They would only shuffle about, often hiding themselves away in the shadows, curled into themselves like animals do when they die under the hot heat. Sometimes you could hear them weeping, dabbing at their eyes with their own bandages.
I remember that, for one time, and only one time, the village children invited me to come with them, and because my mother had told me to try to make friends I agreed. I was so young, but I climbed up the hills with the others and we stood and looked down into the valley, covering our noses with our sleeves so that we would not breathe in the fumes that would make our own flesh crumble and wither away. The other children whispered to each other as best they could, not quite daring to raise their voices in that dry dead place, and the eldest of the boys, Issan, told me that a few years before many of us were born these people had caught the crumbling disease and had been driven out of the tribe to this valley, away from their families and friends, never allowed to return.
I felt very sorry for them. I could not think of living without my mother and my aunts, all of my noisy cousins and even my uncle by marriage, and I hated the very thought of losing my fingers and toes and face. I asked Issan in my innocence how the village elders had known that the people had had the disease.
"Because their skin went pale, as pale as sand." He grinned at me, and the other children all giggled at what they must have known would come next, acting out their parts as if they were in a temple play. "If we pushed you down there, you would not look so different from them."
I stared at him, I remember, as my eyes began to water from more than the hot sun. I wanted to hit him, but I was afraid that he would hit me back, and he was taller than me. I was afraid that he would do as he had said, and that he would push me down into that valley and that they would all throw stones at me so that I could not climb up again and I would have to stay there forever. "You're wrong," I told him, and he sneered.
"Is that so? My father says that it will not be long before you are driven down there by the elders, you look so much like a crumbling one yourself, and he is right."
That I could not bear; I turned quickly so that none of them would see me crying and I ran as they all laughed out loud. I ran all the way back to our home, and I threw my arms about my mother and she threw her arms about me, and she asked in surprise what was wrong as I wept into her skirts and my bond-aunts gathered about us in amazement. When I wailed of what the children had shown me and said to me Ishara cursed Issan and his father in the same way that she cursed her husband – a curse upon their bones and scrotums – and trod about the room in anger, and Werru called him a little beast, a lying pig for having been so cruel to me; Benti said nothing, but she pressed her lips together and frowned as she bent her head over her work, and it would be only be three days after that terrible day that she spoke to me for the first time and took me to the temple and helped me to find peace. But they could not have been as angry and as sorrowful as my mother was as she rocked me in her arms and stroked my hair and let my tears soak her breast.
And then I did not cry out in sorrow but in pain, as my mother's fingers, not gentle but sharp now, pinched the skin and flesh of my arm. I pulled away from her, or tried to for she would not loose her grip on me, and she made me look at her as she spoke. "Did you feel that? Did it hurt? Good. If you truly had caught the crumbling disease, you would feel no pain if you were cut or burned. Until that day comes, you are not a crumbling one, understand? The colour of your skin does not matter, and you should not let it matter to you. You will never cry in front of those fiends again, do you hear me?" She let go of my arms and clutched my face as she spoke those last words, and I only then saw that she was crying too.
It seemed unfair to me then, and harsh even now, but Rookheeya wanted more for me than just survival.
If she or Ishara ever did speak to Issan's father I do not know what they said, or if they were listened to, but from then on Issan was my deepest foe, even if he did not know it for a time. After that day I would sometimes play with the children of the village and when we were older we spoke civilly enough, for a time, but I never again sought to win their friendship. They were like owls who would face you one moment and turn their heads away the next, showing you the flat rejection of their backs.
I chose instead to play with my cousins, and indeed we became a noisy tribe unto ourselves. Alamon, the eldest and something of a fiend, was our leader only because of his age and his imagination, for he created wonderful stories for us to re-enact whenever we could escape the work our mothers set for us. We would play at being gods and demons, kings and warriors in the market place and even around the great temple, and I do believe that the village children watched us with something approaching envy. How good it is to belong to a group who accept you and who defend you against those who had made you cry! You feel as if there is nothing in the world that can harm you, for you have friends at your back that will support you and never abandon you. They will never make you cry in anger or in fear or in sorrow.
There were no tears shed in our games except when we fell in running and scraped the skin from our elbows and knees, and then there were always hands to help each and every one of us upwards and run on, pulling at our wrists and elbows not with spite but with happiness and eagerness. When the little ones were old enough to be trusted to us we would carry them with us, for Bilhah knew that we would never let harm come to any of them, and I would often play a princess or a sorceress while holding a baby on my hip, waving a stick in my other hand for a sceptre or a wand.
There were times when our little tribe would clash with the boys of the village and after taking my charge back to my aunt and running back to watch the fray, I would stand with my girl cousins and urge them onwards in my role as the first of the Blue Spirits, an old blue scarf of Bilhah's tied about my waist. That was always my favourite role in our games – the other Blue Spirit was played in turn by Dinah and Daron, twins and my two favourite cousins, only ten days older than I – and since I was one of the eldest and as Alamon had no interest in the character it was always mine. Sometimes I would even beg for Ishara's staff to wave and cast spells with when I was old enough to carry it, and she would let me have it with great good humour and I would tie ribbons about the top and imagine that I melted rocks and called down the lightening with my very gaze. Once when Issan's group of boys clashed with our group and Issan himself was holding Alamon down and rubbing his face in the dirt, I sprang to my cousin's defence and forsook magic to hit my foe very hard over the head with the staff, so hard that he fell backwards onto the ground with the tears that I had knocked out of him bursting from the corners of his eyes. That earned me both his enmity and the awe of his followers, as well as a scolding and three slaps from Rookheeya and a threat from Ishara that I should never have the staff to play with again if I behaved in such a way, even as she smiled with her eyes.
But for us there was work as well as play, and I could not avoid that labour. There were sheep and goats to be fed and tended to, and as soon as I was tall and sturdy enough to lead one of them by the nose I spent much time out among the herd with my mother, who took particular charge of our small but sturdy flock. We would sit on the green hills that looked over the sea of Rhûn, making bracelets out of stray scraps of wool and singing children's songs of the nature of the world. Then there was flour to be ground, wool to be spun, bread to be baked, food to be cooked, prayers to be said; there were times when we would go to market to sell or buy, and times when one of the sheep or goats would be killed by Rodren for us so that we would have meat for a while. We would fill lamps with animal fat so that we would see at night and make rope from the goat hair we cut from them.
Then there would be times when we went to the sea to bathe in the waters, but at other times we would heat rain or stream water for baths. Those were good nights, clouded with fragrant steam as the sisters poured hot water over their heads and rubbed each other with oils from the market and as they dried my hair into a sparking cloud about my head. We would clean the nails of our fingers and toes and scrape out our ears, scrub our faces and our backs with pieces of light stone taken from the shore to be rid of dead skin. I would sit on my mother's lap until I outgrew it and then beside her, and I would watch as Werru would run a comb through Ishara or Benti's hair, and how they would close their eyes in pleasure at such grooming. They would plait each others' hair once more and my mother would plait mine, placing kisses on my head as she did so, her lips soft and warm in each parting.
These times would come before the great festivals of the temple, when all of the tribe would put on their best robes and assemble to pay homage to one god or another, one for every month of the year, save for Renna and Laban, for death and mourning have no place at a celebration. There were delicious foods to be cooked and eaten, and in the light of the fires the women were allowed to put off their headdresses and toss their heads and let their hair shine in the light of the Sun or the Moon. There were sacred dances and songs for the honour of each god or goddess, danced by dancers clad in bright colours, and certain offerings to be made on their altar, and a ceremony involving their special animal. My mother and I would hug each other in joy as a trained eagle would be released into the sky as a tribute to Salim, and Werru would smile as a specially chosen moth would hatch from its silken shelter in front of us all and spread its wings and fly away in praise of Uttu. A captured fish would be poured back into the sea for the Lord of Waters and a deer set free for Naani, Lady of the Dance and of life eternal, and hounds and horses were raced for her lord Ouran, god of the hunt. It was wonderful to see the muscles move beneath the skin as the animals ran and to call to in encouragement to the dogs as they coiled their bodies and sprang out for another bound. I do not know a time when I did not love dogs, the friends and helpers and defenders of Men. I longed keenly to have a pup of my own, but I could only watch the powerful hounds and ache to stoke their gleaming pelts with being rebuked or snapped at.
And then there were the days when the Moon would cause blood to flow from inside my mother and my aunts. When the blood came to each of them in their turn they would rest until it ceased to flow, forbidden to do any work or to fetch or carry anything. Ishara and I would do the work of that person during that time, and my oldest bond-aunt never complained that she had no break from labour. She would only show me how to bake the special sweet cakes that a woman must eat during the time when her body prepares for life anew, the cakes that she herself would never be allowed to eat. They were made with honey and other good things, and I longed for my own moon blood to come so that I would be allowed to sit in leisure and eat such treats as much as I wished.
And also when my mother or Werru sat talking quietly to each other I was perfectly welcome to clamber into one lap or another, or to sit at their feet as they told me stories between cakes rather than between tasks. They told me tales of the very beginning of Rhûn, of how our people had woken in the lands where all life began, and that they found the land good and chose to stay and made their lives here for many long years. They told me of wars and battles and of love; of the divine ones and the tainted mortal men; of the Malaaikah who wedded a divine one and bore the Morningstar on earth, and of how the Morningstar gave her love to a mortal and faded into shadow and loss when his time came to die – that was Werru's favourite story, though she would always sigh with sorrow as she told it, dabbing at her eyes.
Rookheeya would rock me upon her knees and speak of her own favourite story of a different version of the Morningstar; that it was not a woman at all, however divine she was, but a man who had lost his sons in a violent war for the Jewels of Light; and he was so distraught that he and his wife travelled all the way to the feet of the gods and goddesses and begged for them to cease the fighting, and the immortals were so touched that they agreed to lend their aid. And they set him in a ship high in the heavens with one of the Jewels upon his brow, and every night he sailed the skies before returning once more to the white tower where his wife lived as each dawn approached. I liked this story more, as it ended happily – though it was never said what happened to the sons - and I loved the thought of being able to travel among the stars and look down upon the earth below, and I would always reach for my mother's hand as she 'sailed' her fingers high above my head, capturing it and earning a kiss for my triumph.
Ishara would roll her eyes as she served them another plate of cakes, and when I begged her she would sit down and tell a tale of woe and a doomed family: of a brother and sister separated, never knowing each other, and both cursed by an evil dragon, the brother to betray his friends and the sister to forget everything she ever knew; of how they met all unknowing and wed and she conceived, and he defeated the dragon which had cursed them both but was wounded, and how his sister remembered all the days of her life and threw herself into a great river to drown, and the brother fell on his sword. But she would comfort me by saying that the woman did not die but was washed up on a distant shore and bore her children, a boy and a girl, and she raised them with no need of any man and taught them to need the aid of no one, and they both became the guardians against deception and treachery, and their mother turned into a fish and went to the sea. She would smile and shake her head, and say that the tales of the West were often more interesting than our own, if less true.
But my own favourite tales, and there were many of them, were of the Blue Spirits, the two figures who were as much a part of our folklore as the immortals themselves. In the tales they could be young or old, one man and one woman or both men, and they had no fixed names, but always they were close friends, and always they came from the West, and always they did good and wise things in the fables, and always, always they were clad in blue. They carried carved wooden staves in their hands and worked wondrous feats, stopping warfare and teaching peace and showing their wits through a thousand and more wonderful tricks. Stories had been told of them for more lives of Men than could be counted, and I adored every one of them. As I grew older I made up my own stories and chanted them to myself as I tended the flock and churned milk to cheese and ground wheat for bread, delighting in my own tales and the plots that I made up. In my day dreams I truly was one of the Blue Spirits, travelling throughout the land with my closest friend and companion, living all our days in adventure. I even fancied that my own staff would be made of some dark, exotic wood, and that my blue robes would be the colour of the sky above, trimmed with the darkness between the stars of the Queen of Heaven when night fell. And I imagined my companion as possessed of everything good and true in my life, full of love and strength and kindness and wisdom, neither man nor woman but a mix of both, my mother and my father and myself all in one.
I gave my secret friend a secret name, a name that came to me one night as I lay awake, a name of my own imagining: Pallando The only trouble with this dream was that I could never think of a face to go with this great friend. I walked beside a featureless character through the plains of my mind, shaped by the words of my mother and by my own imagination. It was a pleasant dream, to journey into the lands that my mother spoke of, and wake to find myself once more at her side, safe from all harm and danger, content in the knowledge that I would never truly leave her. How could I really wish to leave? I did not think that I would ever be willing to go away forever from our village and hills by the sea, or the loving warmth of my family. How could I know that my dreams would not fade but would grow as I grew, until they could not be contained and spilled into the waking world?
Note: Malaaikah means 'angel' in the religion of Islam. The 'crumbling disease' is, of course, leprosy.
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