10. The head statue
Author's note: those who have read my stories Sins of the Past and Tears of Blood will likely notice the irony of something Narvi and Celebrimbor will mention at the end of this chapter
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When two weeks had passed, Narvi felt that it was time for following a minor Dwarven custom that she could do during the mourning. Being a guest of Celebrimbor, she was entitlted to make a gift for him as a sign of her gratitude for having been allowed and honored to be his guest.
"But what could fit a Elven Lord in terms of a gift made from a Dwarf? I know from an early age that the two races have very different tastes, and I doubt that it might even fit into the rest of the house…" Narvi thought as she took a small walk inside the house. Looking around, she saw that it was the smaller hall leading to the two chambers where he had his family altar and another store room which currently was empty at the moment.
"Hmm...yes, maybe a head bust might fit in here...just need to find something as a motive…"
With a plan forming in her mind, Narvi went to the family altar to see if she could find a good image of his family to use as a idea for the motive.
"Good thing that he has a small footstool here...I may be tall for a Dwarf, but I am still smaller in height than those over-grown Elves! Why they could not be given a more reasonable height is beyond me..."
The altar was reasonable simple, made of marble and rather small to be easy to move around if needed. A couple of candles, made from bee wax, was at the front and she carefully moved them aside. Just as she remembered from the house tour, the few family images that had survived the passage of time was there. Perhaps one of them could be a good base for the head statue. It was fairly easily to see who his father and grandfather was, Celebrimbor had perhaps taken after his mother Astarë a bit more in the shape of his face and nose along with her more greyish-blue eyes, but the similarity between the three was there. A drawing of two red-haired Elves, twins from how similar they looked, smiling sadly. A silver-blond male Elf, having a sort of proud look on him as he drew back a arrow to shoot. Another dark-haired Elf sitting at a desk and looking annoyed as if he just had been interrupted in counting the money in front of him.
"Oh? This must be his aunt Maedhros that he mentioned four days ago...good Maker, what happened to cause those horribe scars on that poor Elven Dam?! Surely not all of them are the result of battles…?" Narvi gasped in shock and faint horror when she saw the drawing of Maedhros. Sure, some of her former beauty could still be seen, but the way the scars marred her face was a clear hint to how the rest of her body must have looked under her clothing.
"No, no...I can not use her as model for the head statue, it might bring up bad memories for him...hm?"
One portrait drawing was set much much further back than the others. Narvi had to reach over the small table to get hold of it. Similar to the drawing of Maedhros, the male Elf was deeply scarred and had darker red hair in a unkempt mass, but there was something different about him: being drawn in profile side-view, only the left side of his face were shown, making the V-shaped scar from the ear and alongside his jaw on his face clearly visible, yet there also was a cold and merciless gaze in the black eyes. In fact, despite that it was only a portrait, his back eyes was so bewitching that a person could not look away. For a short, single moment the male elf caught in the portrait almost seemed to come alive and about to turn his whole face towards Narvi.
"Scary...but who is he? He looks a wee bit like lady Maedhros...her son? But why would both mother and son be that scarred?"
Narvi remembered the old stories about the War of Wrath, how the fury of both sides in the War had wreaked havoc on much of the land, the northern areas torn asunder, rivers formed or destroyed, mountains and hills changed. How most of the land west of the Ered Luin, the Blue Mountains, as well as a large part of the central part of the mountains, was laid waste and soon after sank beneath the waves. The two great Dwarf cities of Nogrod and Belegost had also been ruined, forcing their populaces to flee.
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A few hours later, it was time for dinner. During her stay so far, Narvi had offered suggestions to the cook on how to use rare spices from the East. Like today, it was chicken with a curry sauce and spring vegetables.
"A custom of gifting the host something?"
"Yes, if the guests have no money or something else worthy as payment, we are to craft somethong for the host instead," Narvi explained after drying off her mouth and fastened the face veil back so she could look at him without feeling that that she was breaking a rule. After all, given the manner their first meeting had happened, him seeing her face would be excused as a legal mistake because of the circumstances by Dwarven standards, since it hiding your face with a veil was the last thing you would think of when you had been kidnapped by slave traders.
"Khelebrimbor, remain still for a moment, please."
"Huh?" Celebrimbor wondered in surprise over her words. Then, seeing her pick up a divider caliper from a pocket in her dress, he remained still as requested, letting her take measurements on his head from different angles. He guessed that her gift was going to be something made from her work as a stonecutter, if she needed to do this to get the right measurements.
"Shall I tell one of the stone masters what kind of stone you might need?"
"A smaller block of marble would be preferable, I saw a fitting one in a corner of the stone on the left side of the market."
Celebrimbor knew which shop she meant; some parts of his own house had actually came from that shop owner and since that Elf owned him a small favour, perhaps that marble block would be perfect for that task.
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The next following weeks, Narvi kept herself busy with working. She might only be five years after coming-of-age for the Dwarves, but there was no doubt about her skills. There had been a true Grand Stonecutter Master sleeping in her from the start at birth and now it was fully awakened. The Dwarves were not named the Children of Stone for nothing, which Narvi now proved. Once she knew the idea of a how a finished work might look, she refused to stop working until that it was close to the vision she had.
"She truly is skilled…" whispered one of the female servants as they peeked inside the room by the door, trying to catch a small look of what Narvi was creating.
"Did she not say something that she is just fifty years old…?"
"What?! That young and already this skilled?" whispered another in shock. It was true that Narví still was fairly young by both Elven and Dwarven standards, but the natural talent in her made up for her youth. Because Narvi was standing with her back towards the door, it was hard to see what she was creating.
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About two days before the Dwarven merchants from Khazad-dûm would arrive to Ost-in-Edhil, Narvi was finally finished.
"Narvi, it is time for dinner soon. Do you think you can take a small break to eat a little?" Celebeimbor asked after knocking on the door. He heard the sound of her moving around.
"You can actually enter, Khelebrimbor. The statue is finished."
Placing his hand on the door handle, he slowly opened the door to take a look on what Narvi had created for him. Although her face was hidden behind the smaller shawl she had used during work to not breathe in stone dust and to hide her face from the eyes of men, he could tell from her green eyes that she was smiling in understandable pride over finishing her gift.
"The house servants here have been having a lot of fun the last weeks in guessing what you have been mak…"
Suddenly stopping walking, Celebrimbor stopped talking in shock at seeing what the head statue actually looked like:
The deeply scarred and from life-long starvation hollow-cheeked face in a such manner that it was nearly impossible to see that it was slightly heart-shaped, the mass of tangled and unkempt hair, the cold glace in the eyes...
Despite it being white marble, the resemblance to his dead cousin Rûsa was as well made as if Narvi had seen him in real life. In fact, the marble eyes seemed so real that for a moment, Celebrimbor believed that Rûsa actually had returned to life.
"What is wrong? Did I choose a wrong model…?"
It alarmed Narvi to see how pale Celebrimbor suddenly had became at the sight of the head statue. Mentally praying to Aulë for help, she hoped that she had not done a serious mistake in choosing which one of his dead family members as model, but the black eyes of that heavy scarred, male Elf in the drawing portrait had not given her any rest, not with the way his eyes seemed to haunt people even from a simple drawing.
"No, no...there is nothing wrong with the model...I just...was not prepared on how similar you have managed to make it look like my dead cousin who died in the War of Wrath alongside his mother, my aunt…"
Celebrimbor took a deep breath to calm himself down, pushing down the horrible memory of seeing Maedhros embrace Rûsa in death, as if she wished to protect her long-lost son against possible enemies in their dying moments. She had mentioned very little about what she had gone thought in Angband, but she had indirectly revealed the truth about her son by that she had been pleading and begging in her sleep when she had nightmares about the newborn Rûsa being taken away from her.
"You can...place it at the family altar if you do not want to shock the servants with it…" Narvi offered while Celebrimbor carefully took a better look at the head statue.
"Do not feel ashamed over the model you chose, lady Narvi, in fact I am actually happy over that you did choose Rûsa because this statue and that drawing are the only portraits done of him…"
Narvi raised an eyebrow in confusion over the strange name for an Elf and Celebrimbor was quick to explain that it was a dialectical pronunciation of the Quenya word Russa, which meant Red-haired, as he could not exactly explain why his cousin was named such.
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He could tell from his uncle's pale face as they rode that it was not good at all. Everyone had believed Rûsa to be far too weak to try and escape, and yet he had managed it. First by tricking the guards outside his tent, then by taking Eärendil and his twin sons hostage. But why he had chosen Maedhros as a new hostage, no one could really guess.
"Of all the people to take as hostage...my poor sister, who already is ill in so many ways…!" Maglor said aloud in fear. He had told Celebrimbor that Maedhros most likely was secretly dying, her body giving up after all those years of fighting as a warrior and the Oath drawing on her spiritual strength as well.
"Do you think the shocking reveal of my cousin actually having been alive all those years, as a servant of the Dark Lord, might even be the cause of her failing health lately, uncle? I mean, looking back at all those battles where the Warg Rider was present, Aunt Maedhros was said to look strangely drained for some reason…"
Maglor looked at his nephew for a moment.
"You mean that the Dark Lord and Sauron might have used some sort of dark magic on her while she was forced to carry Rûsa? Yes! I have been thinking such thoughts, especially after seeing how she have looked the past two days after that Rûsa was captured! A dark magic which steals her own life and keeps her son alive in exchange!"
There was tears in Maglor's grey eyes, and as he spoke, Celebrimbor could hear that his uncle was worried for both Maedhros and Rûsa. Even if they had not known about his survival for very long, the family instinct told them both that Rûsa needed to be protected. Being the Warg Rider, either voluntarily or by force, made him the target of a far bigger danger than he might even know about.
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Dinner was a somewhat quiet affair, mostly because of the simple reason that Narvi was very tired after working on the marble head statue every day in several weeks and hardly had energy for little more than smalltalk while they ate the baked potatoes and belonging sallad of fresh vegeables. Still, Celebrimbor praised her skills and told her about his paternal grandmother Nerdanel back in Valinor and how she was a famous sculptor, said to have such skills to make statues so lifelike that people thought they were real at first, and if they did not know her art, tried to speak to them.
"Sounds like we could have been sharing work experience if it had been possible," Narvi smiled behind her veil, to which Celebrimbor agreed. He had been only a few years away from his coming-of-age ceremony when the Darkening of Valinor happened, and it had been a very quiet family event because Maedhros had been captured only a few days before.
"Yes, I am sure that she would have liked to meet you, lady Narvi."
Once dinner was finished, they bid each others good night and left for their chambers. Since the Dwarven merchants from Khazad-dûm were to show up in Ost-in-Edhil in two days, it was for the best that she was well-rested and ready to meet them.