It is with a curious attention to detail that I observe the levels of hopelessness advance within myself. I had thought that the intellectual certainty of destruction was sufficient to chill the heart and mind, the simple reality of knowing Gondor doomed, and accepting it -- but now I find that there are colder deeps yet, stronger and more fiercely rushing tides to overwhelm the soul.
The day was well enough at its beginning, with enough of a fair sky to falsely promise a dream of peace, and I had been exhausted enough at the close of the previous day's rounds to sleep without dreams myself, so my humours were well enough as well, at least to my own estimation. By midmorning, however, I was beginning to feel that same sort of prickling thunderstorm-pressure in my bones and brain that usually accompanies the onset of menses and decided it was time to take an intermission before I broke something -- or someone. (Some of it, no doubt, was due to unwontedly acute hearing and one-too-many repetitions of the subvoiced cry, "Oh no, it's Healer Gurthang!" My task was to prescribe medicine, not pretend cheerfulness, the ingrates.)
We had our own little garden on one of the roofs, with small trees in pots and troughs of medicinal herbs and flowers. The orange firelilies were exploding in their last burst of glory before winterkill, and there was an illusion of Old Gondor as the orange-leaves rustled and the small plump fountain-dragon spat mockingly into his overflowing basin in the wall. There the Healers of the Houses were wont to remove for their own healing of mind and refreshment of body. My friend Huor of Herbalists was there, and had already kindled the hypocras beaker, so the spiced, watered wine was warm and fragrant when I filled my beaker.
Gelmir of Bonesetters lay on one of the benches with his arm over his eyes, comatose -- to my mind, wasting all the good of the garden-space; but perhaps he found it impossible to rest under the same roof as all those who suffered beneath our feet. Mendelvor was also there, clutching his horrible concoction of burnt grains, small beer and grated cheese. He swore that it was what the heroes of former Ages had drunk to give them strength, before going into battle or setting out on great Deeds, and could cite the classics to prove it -- but we had all tasted it at one time or another and I knew of no one who had not come away convinced that either our transcriptions or our translations of the works of Westernesse were gravely flawed.
We talked quietly so as not to waken Gelmir, and because of the glowering eastern sky.
"So what's this I hear about Ioreth throwing your pens on the floor?" Hu shook his head, grinning.
"I threw them on the floor. And out the window, and into the hallway, and I think some of them lodged in the fan-vaults, too."
"Well, that's what I thought she said -- but surely I'd heard it wrong, so I corrected."
"Ah! Is that what you do with our prescriptions? 'Correct' them? Remind me to check everything I send you from now own!" I looked ostentatiously in my sash for a stylus and brandished it warningly at him.
"So what happened? The Wild Women of the Washery were all in an uproar."
"Well, you know I'm sinistral, right?"
"--No, left," Mendelvor said, as tradition demanded, straight-faced.
"--and since Gaerin went down to the forts I was given a Gammer to tidy my office and generally keep me in line. Well and good, well and good. But--!" Rolling his eyes melodramatically Hu continued, "She insisted on reorganizing my desk. Scroll-weights in a stack, I can live with -- just unstack 'em. Scrap vellum in a little box? I can adjust, though it wastes time opening the box every time I want to jot something down. An odd little antiquity from the cellars to hold my seals and sealing-wax and a melting-lamp is rather nice, actually. But--! Then. She Moved. My Quills." He said this in such a deliberately ponderous and doomladen tone that I could not help laughing.
"Poor Hu, with your feathers all ruffled!" He shook his head dolorously.
"You laugh. I suppose you cannot help it, because of your name. But imagine: there you are, alembics happily a-bubble, and you see some odd green hue where you hadn't been sure what you'd see, and you daren't look away lest you miss anything else, and you reach for your writing implement -- and it isn't there. So you fumble about, like a drunken spider, all down the table top as far as you can reach, and you find it not. So you take a quick glimpse to see if it's rolled off the edge, and it hasn't, and then you spot it, on the other side of the room, reunited with all its brothers as if they were back on the goose-wing of their birth, and there's no way you can reach it from where you are, and if you turn around you'll miss something, and you know you won't remember accurately everything you did when you go to reconstruct the experiment and it's all hopeless. So you cry."
He panted and wheezed for breath, and I said admonishingly, "Air is a very important element, Hu. Always consume at least a thousand breaths of pure vilya every hour of the day. But be sure not to consume to excess, lest your wits become too airy and float away." He tried to flick dead leaves at me, but the wind defeated him.
"At any rate, I'd just got them nicely arranged about once more, and I came back to find her gathering them up again! A sort of madness took hold of me, and I grabbed them back. I said, 'I need them where they are,' and she said, 'Now, now, don't be a brat, young man,' and something went with a bang, so that it was as though there was another Huor standing beside me shaking his head, and I was him, but it didn't make a difference to the other Huor. I started throwing them and shouting, 'Take them! Go ahead, put them in places where I can't get to them if it makes you happy! Why not out into the Circle?' and she called me a badly-brought-up foreigner and said I needed a nap and some soup."
"Did you feel better?" He shrugged, with a rueful smile answering, "For a little bit. Then I needed to write something down and had to climb on a chair to get a quill from off the top of the bookcase."
The hour-bell tolled, too soon for believing, and Gelvor rolled to his feet, groaning, to straighten his robes.
"Do we have to go back?" he lamented. "I hate amputations. I've got three to do, and perhaps four. But what can I do to set a bone when there isn't anything but splinters left?"
"They could repair that in Númenor," said Mendelvor, broodingly. "They could put mithril rods in and ruel-bone to fill the gaps and keep off corruption until it grew aright."
"You sound like Emeldir the Ancient, going on about Westernesse." Huor had come to Gondor from Lossarnoch, and sometimes missed things.
"Well, of course! She was my Master. And she's right."
"About what?"
"Everything."
"What, that they could store up lightning in glass and direct it to burn holes in stone? Come off it, Mendë, you don't really believe that?"
"Children, children," I said chidingly. "Duty's clarion doth call us down once more."
"Aye, aye, Healer Gurthang," replied Hu with a flourish. I set my arms and brows in fierce warning. "What? I think it fits you perfectly. It would be better if you were Chirurgeons, but--"
"All right, I've had it --" and I drew my stylus again and threw it with lethal accuracy.
"Oh, a pen! Thank you, I need them!" Hu said with glee, bending to pick it up from the shrubbery where it had bounced. I started laughing so hard I couldn't breathe, as did Mendelvor, leaning on my shoulder for support. Even in the midst of it I wondered that we could feel such mirth -- which felt so much like true mirth, though unjustified -- in the path of the storm.
As we roared in a mad humour a shadow like a cloud seemed to pass over the sky, though there had been no clouds save in the dark East, and a note like a trumpet-call from a nightmare shivered down through the clear air, cold and thin and high like sleet to the soul. We froze where we stood, my colleagues and I, Mendelvor's hand locking onto me like a death-grip, Hu's swarthy complexion going bone-dull, our laughter choked in our throats as though all breath had been cut off by aerial poison.
Even after the sun returned we remained still, like the storybook trolls we had disbelieved as children, caught by the dawn. I can only speak for myself, but I had heard in that shriek all my dread and formless fearing set out as though sound were dark paint to delimn every evil that might befall a mortal woman. And beyond that, a colder, crueler evil still: the crushing of spirit, into pain and confusion and frustrated longing for all eternity, the emptiness of a Void that longed to crush all light into itself . . . The phial in my sleeve burned my wrist with its coldness.
"What. Was. That --!?" I managed to spit out, as though the words were phlegm. Hu only shook his head, as did Gelvor, but Mendë, still clinging to me, whispered a single word. It took him several tries, his lips working without sound, as though he or we were deaf.
"Hellhawks." He rocked a little on his heels, and swallowed hard, shivering, before he rallied, to say with a feigned rationality, "That's what they're talking about. The men on my Ward, the ones from the outer forts, when I have to pry them from under the beds at midnight. --Maybe I'll join them instead."
"But what are they?" I demanded, outraged that the world should produce such obscene surprises to appall the Wise and Learned. Gelvor shrugged.
"Do we really want to know? Come on, back to work." As we followed him,
meek and silent as ghosts, I noticed that -- though none of us had put
it out -- the flames of the wine-warmer were cold and dead.
NOTES:
Gurthang -- "Death-Iron" -- is the name of the soul-drinking sword from the legend of Turin which takes the lives of its wielders, aka Anglachel.
Hypocras is the English translation of a Westron word meaning 'wine diluted to a healthful consistency and enhanced with beneficial herbal supplements, named after a legendary Healer of antiquity.'
Mendelvor's drink is from the Iliad. It also is reminiscent of the compounds of proteins like dried ground whey that bodybuilders employ -- personally, I think there's an untapped market for dried ground grubs there, if they were catchily advertised in weightlifting magazines.
Lalaith: "Laughter" -- the nickname of Turin's baby sister whose death due to Morgoth's bioweapon was a particularly traumatic event in the life of Hurin's son.