Chapter 7: Indemmar
Afternoon lay broad on the dale as Elrohir tipped his waterskin under a lip of green-cut stone.
The rill nipped at his fingers and iced over his wrist, hurrying past as it fled toward Lórien's distant eaves. Better to endure Celebrant's bite at his source than the stranger waters further uphill. They had picked up the horse's trail beyond the wood, but after less than a league, its wild terror and the deep, springy turf forced them back to the Dwarf road beside the Celebrant: the most likely route for a weary messenger seeking the swiftest route home.
The dale, even so late in the season, should have been thriving yet the clumps of heather and whin remained unstirred, save by their boots or the errant brush of their sheaths. No birdsong emerged from the treeline along the far ridge. Only the slow drift of cloud across the sky, the hiss of wind in the long grass. A permeating unease suffused the air like smoke from a distant fire.
Of Lórien's messenger there had been no sign.
Aragorn paced the ground above Celebrant's spring, his brow furrowed. Again and again his gaze sought the line of the lowlands as they rose and fell, ever upwards, towards the foothills of Hithaeglir and the glen from which the Dimrill Stair rose. He'd chafed at Elrohir's measured advance all morning, but the no man's land of the dale too often provided easy passage to those wishing to move unseen through unwatched country, not all of them bent on an errand of mercy.
Nearer at hand and more pressing to Elrohir stood a finger of rock, thrusting up from the earth. Fully thrice the height of a man, it rose above the grassy sward like a bone from flesh. Its top was splintered, but its sides gleamed like ebony. Around and about the base, more Angerthas Moria runes in an even more ancient mode than those on Haldir's map had been engraved. The ascenders and descenders dipped and rose like knives. The aborted counters, spearheads. Nothing of beauty in them, only hardness and precision.
Though blurred by moss and weather, they ran:
Pilgrim or vagrant, friend or foe,
Seeking knowledge you should not know,
Should ye enter without leave,
And to treasure, unearned, cleave,
Beneath the mountain, dark and deep,
Thief, you will waken more than stone from sleep.
"What do you make of this?" Crouching at the base, Aragorn indicated a mark like the bare patches one might find on trees where a buck had left his challenge.
Closer inspection revealed no deer nor any wild thing had left such a mark. The repeated strokes of a knifepoint had etched a pale wound in the shape of a curling claw. The edges had not had time to soften. Elrohir did not touch it.
"This stone has lain here a long time," he said. "It is the stone of Dúrin. Of old it marked the sovereign border of the Dwarves' realm between here and Hollin."
Elrohir pressed his palm flat against the slab. It radiated coolness, though late afternoon was only now retreating from the dale, as if in eternal shade. His hand was very white against the slab and patchy with blood. Cracking black in the dark, in the snow. The cold. The wind. Green light seared across his vision.
He snatched his hand back. His fingertips, clean of blood, hummed. The lack of a telltale plume from his lips assured him he was in warmer country.
Praying Aragorn had noted nothing, he strode down to Mirrormere's edge where a patch of sun still lingered and breathed away the chill. He stood at the wide end of the mere, which narrowed as it thrust like the spearpoint into the mountain's shadow. Strange enchantments lay on these waters, it was said—and, indeed, could be seen. The skin of the water, unruffled by ripple or breeze, reflected a sky glinting with stars, the midnight hue of a queen's mantle despite the sun lingering above the mountains' teeth. Very dark and still was the water and worthy of its name though Elrohir could not make out his own form directly above it, only a vague shape, gaunt and grey, and the mountains looming behind.
"Elrohir?" By the rising cadence of his name, Aragorn had called him more than once. "Let us take some rest before the next leg."
Settling cross-legged on the grass, Aragorn drew his pipe from the pocket of his tunic. He packed the tobacco twice before he was satisfied with the draw. His concentration on the ritual put Elrohir in mind of a particular grey-shrouded conjurer bereft of his wide-brimmed hat. Aragorn, Lórien's cloak about his shoulders, might have been the wizard's pupil.
He lit the tobacco with a match, speaking around the stem. "The wind blows towards us."
"I said nothing."
"You had a look about you."
Elrohir accepted the packet Aragorn passed him. The lembas bread within was fresh and unbroken. A priceless bounty to travelers and a queenly gift. Arwen had dear friends among the Yavannildi.
"So," Elrohir said, nodding towards Aragorn's bare hand from which Barahir's ring of silver serpents and flowers had fallen. "What sweet and honeyed words won her heart?"
"She convinced me, truth be told."
Aragorn had believed his love a secret far longer than it had been. The whole of Imladris who delighted in fresh fodder had long bandied the tale of a mortal man in the first flush of his youth coming upon Elrond's only daughter in the twilight under the trees, like something out of ancient legend. The Evenstar, ever wary of her beauty, had long rebuffed all suitors until the youth, shy and tongue-tied at table, singing alone in the twilight beneath her window, caught her eye. That he proved the descendant of Beren Erchamion, doomed as that hero to wander until his fate was decided, was incidental. Arwen had sworn Elrohir, under penalty of castration, to never reveal chance had had little to do with their meeting.
"I am pleased for you."
"I might have delayed longer. The fruits of my labors are slow to flourish and ever more uncertain. I would not make her the woods-wife of a ranger nor see her shamed. These arguments, though, proved less convincing than I hoped." As if the memory of that fateful meeting came to him anew, Aragorn's face lost some of its worry lines. "She told me I was a foolish fellow, and though her life was eternal, her patience was not. In the end, she declared victory."
"She always did know her mind."
"Yes. She always knows, and her heart does not falter. Even when my own…"
The silence deepened, fraught with things unspoken. Aragorn retreated into his cloud of sweet-smelling smoke.
"Something troubles you," Elrohir said, "and has even before we learned of the missing messenger."
"What know you of indemmar?"
"What makes you ask that?"
"Why must the Elves always answer a question with a question?"
Elrohir lifted his brows at this uncharacteristic bit of impertinence. "Indemmar are mind-pictures. Men would call them 'visions' or 'echoes,' after a fashion, between two who are close akin or bound by love or fealty or dire need: a soldier might alert his captain to a danger, or a lover might appear to her separated beloved in a dream. They can be startling, if unexpected. Glass or still water strengthen them, make them more solid."
"There is more than learned lore in your words," Aragorn said.
"All of our family have a knack of it in some way or another: Arwen has a strong strain of prescience in her. Elladan is skilled at reading hearts and minds like the High Elves and Men of old." A pang of longing for Elladan's presence assailed him. The guard of the Wood would be changing now, Gildor, holding court in the lodges. Perhaps Elladan was there, attending the stories with a half-cocked ear.
"And you?" Aragorn prompted. "What is your gift?"
"Mine?"
No gift, for one thing.
The shadow on his heart. The thief of his sleep. The worst were the indemmar he stumbled on suddenly, or who had met violent ends and wore the shape of their wounds on them. Too often as a child had he woken to them: halted at the foot of his bed, unspeaking, with eyes unlidded and pleading.
Few, even among their family, glimpsed the veil between Seen and Unseen or received echoes from the Unbodied. Fewer still knew he could.
Even among Elves, particularly the more unlearned of their folk, such a 'gift' might be misconstrued as unnatural or, worse, the enemy's arts working on the weak-willed. After the Redhorn, he managed to shut them out entirely, closing his mind and dulling his senses with errantry. What physical exertion did not subsume, drink did.
Or had until two nights ago.
"I sometimes see things. I would not trust to such for counsel." He did not mention the rider he had seen on the high road. Aragorn was already too eager. "Indemmar are unruly and, within Arda, can be manipulated to serve purposes other than the sender's. Decisions made on something that might be rather than something that is can do more harm than good. All the more so if untrue."
"And what if they're true?" Aragorn demanded. "'If untrue,' you say. Then, sometimes, they are true."
"Sometimes."
"What then?"
If true, it is usually too late to alter in any case.
"Why this sudden interest in arcana?" Elrohir asked in his turn. "Deed and arms have long been your province, not philosophy and deep lore."
"Still water may augment these…visions, you say. That rings true." Aragorn fussed with his pipe, tamped and re-tamped more tobacco. Some of it spilled from his fingers into his lap, and these bits he collected, pinching them between his fingers. "I am ill-suited to rest. I had not been long in Caras Galadhon when Arwen—she always knows—suggested I sate my hunger for deeds by riding to the watch-posts along the Naith. But my venture did not settle my spirits. If anything, I felt more unquiet though I could not name the reason. On my return, I met the Lady Galadriel. She is as keen as her granddaughter, more so. She told me I might gain answers to my…uncertainties."
A rush and clatter exploded from the brush barely a dozen paces from them. A hawk, startled from cover, winged up into the sky. They both followed its progress until it shrank to a mere fleck amid the thickening clouds.
"You looked into the Mirror." Grandmother's scrying glass imitated the teachings of Melian from whom she had learnt the art, but like all of her designs, they could be both bounty and bane. Elrohir himself had never gazed into its depths and had no desire ever to do so. "What did it show you?"
"Many things. Things I hardly understand or remember. I remember a storm with crimson clouds. And a lady with eyes of adamant holding aloft a jewel with a heart of emerald fire. Then all went dark. I grew cold." His voice sank as one who speaks in a dream. "A grey road unfurled at my feet. Though distance made him indistinct, I thought I saw Haldir in the mist on that road. A moment and eternity passed ere the glass freed me from its vision. I daresay you will think me foolish for saying it, but neither storm nor lady frightened me so much as the sight of that. That terrible road."
He frowned down at his pipe. It had gone out. "I tried to put it from my mind. Haldir had enjoined me to revel in my betrothal bed—his words—when I last took leave of him. To spur myself to his door with tales of storms and roads, well. He would laugh himself sick. I went anyway. He was gone. And you were come, unlooked-for, out of the wild."
A storm. A jewel of emerald fire. Elrohir leaned back on his elbows as if he might distance himself from Aragorn's evocations and found firmer footing in earthier concerns.
"I suppose I ought to be flattered you waited long enough to greet us." Bitterness colored his tone, and he grimaced at himself though Aragorn took no notice. Gentler, he added, "The Mirror is not a guide of deeds. Such things as it shows are not writ in stone."
"I know. Perhaps, I have let fear become foretelling. But now, with Rocheryn…" Aragorn knocked the dottle out of his pipe against a stone.
Aragorn had only ever cleaved so readily to his adopted family. The family who had gone to great lengths to ensure he grew to manhood and did not stray into the Enemy's grasp. The family he as readily set aside the moment Haldir crooked a finger. But neither time nor distance, friction or appointed fate had managed to part them.
"Take heart." Elrohir clapped him on the shoulder and rose to stretch his legs. "He has you for a boon companion, so he is more fortunate than most. And if I know anything of Haldir, Mandos will do the utmost to keep so troublesome a soul out of his Halls."
"I pray you are right."
Violet shadows had crept well across glen and western end of the mere, and a fragment of storm wicking down from the heights pulled a discordant, jangling song from the grasses.
Aragorn shivered, chafing his limbs. "We're losing the light. We will make better time if we part ways here."
"You wish to be rid of me do you?"
"If mischance found the messenger, he may have been forced to lie up somewhere or retreat off the known road. If we each take one side and meet at the far end, we cover more ground in half the time. I will take the southern side, you the north. We will meet on the other side."
He waited neither for answer or agreement but set off along the nearer bank, passing into the long grasses with barely a rustle to mark his departure.
"On the other side, then."
With the shadows growing longer before him, Elrohir struck out for the northern bank.
Language Notes
Yavannildi (Quenya)- The corn maidens of Yavanna, the makers of lembas bread.
Source: Unfinished Tales
indemmar (Quenya) - "mind-pictures" or "visions"
Source: the Nature of Middle-earth.