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I proudly present to you my brand new and simply excellent beta: Still Anonymous. You can get to her heart-warming stories featuring Asfaloth via my 'favourite authors' section!
On with the show: (oh yes: I'd love some feedback to keep me warm on long winter nights!)
Chapter 4It was hundreds of years ago now, but she still remembered as if it were yesterday. The day the landslide of changes that had overthrown her old life had begun. It also brought fond memories of her other family. The ones she had grown to love as if they were of her own blood, in spite of the great differences between them that had, in hindsight, never been fully bridged.
The Hawali people had made camp on the eastern shores of the Great River, that winter. Being a nomadic tribe of musicians, acrobats and scribes, they held a gathering every few years, in order to strenghten ties between families, pass judgements and share stories and songs. Asa Khel Rhaw was in a truly foul mood today. It was drizzling and the cold October winds came chasing across the plains of Calenardhon. Not a very pleasurable time to be outside, especially if one's purpose there was gathering horse droppings. Normally, she would have been happy to leave this less entertaining kind of menial work to her younger sister or sister-in-law, but as both happened to have caught the shaking fever, the job fell to her. Along with doing all the laundry for three families with, in total, four young children in the icy river.
She had been busy with that all morning, and when she was finally done and proceeding to hang it all up in a nice windy spot, the rain had started, and it turned out they had run out of fuel for the campfires. So here was Asa, renowned artist and scribe throughout Middle-Earth, proud member of the High Council of the mighty Hawali people, bare-handedly flopping horseshit into a large, not nearly full basket. She fully agreed with the evil genie within her that she had every reason for being irritated.
She straightened her back and sighed. The surroundings were inspiring, though. In the west, across the Anduin, she could just make up the looming shapes of the Misty Mountains through the rainclouds. All around her a sea of long yellow grass waved in the wind. It was only interrupted by the backs of the horses, like moving cobblestones in every color, and by the tents, about a bowshot away. Both horses and tents were numerous and of good quality. Many coloured banners with family insignia floated above the camp. The Hawali were a wealthy people. She could easily make out her own family banner, a red cedar tree on a field of green.
It was a symbol from the south, where the Khel Rhaw originally hailed from. They had moved to the North just after Asa's coming of age, for reasons that were, as her mother had once said "entirely political, and not for you to meddle in". She felt guilty even thinking it, of course, but her extreme sense of discretion was one of the things she had disliked in her anne. The old woman had taken the matter to her grave. Another of Ondali Khel Rhaw's faults had been her stubbornness. The North had brought the family only cold, wetness, and ill luck, but she had always flatly refused to turn back. Even when pneumonia ended her life during the second of those vicious winters they had had the pleasure of spending here. Asa utterly disliked the Northern lands. Always raining, always cold, even to such extremes as freezing and snowing. She had never seen snow or ice before, and after the initial amazement and wonder, she had swiftly decided they were something she could have done without. After five years, her yearning for Harad had not lessened a bit.
Her gloomy contemplations were interrupted by a stir among the tents. Stretching her neck for a better look, she distinguished her older brother Renac coming towards her. She ran to meet him.
"Brother, what is going on?"
He smiled broadly, knowing how she welcomed the opportunity to interrupt her work.
"Gods, sister, you look like a heap of dung yourself! Go wash and change into your best clothes, important visitors have arrived and the council will gather with them after they have eaten."
"Who could that be? Certainly not another representative from the King?"
" No, better!"
Asa raised her eyebrows, unable to think of anyone more important than a messenger from the King of Gondor visiting the camp in this unholy weather.
"Speak up!"
"The Half-Elves! And don't start rambling on how I should not believe old wives' stories. I have just seen them with my own eyes. Looking really strange and beautiful, exactly alike, and as real as you and I."
Asa didn't even bother to answer him, she simply started spurting towards the camp, basket, dignity, and brother forgotten in her hurry to get decent for what promised to become the most interesting meeting of the entire winter.
It had not taken her long to scrub all remains of her unpleasant task from her hands, and change from her oldest tunic into much cleaner robes. She had even managed to get her sister Alawi to rise from her sickbed and make the required elaborate knot in her headscarf. Covering herself completely with the one cloak she still possessed that did not smell of horse, she left Alawi's tent for the central square. In spite of the weather, which had now changed from a drizzle into a positive downpour, it was crowded with men and women, all obviously having dropped whatever they were doing when the guests arrived, now trying to catch a glimpse from what was happening within the council tent. Shoving some wildly excited children aside, and being let past by the others, she managed to enter it. It was the largest tent in the camp, big enough to contain the twenty council members, a man and a woman for every family present. She proceeded to take her place in the outer circle behind her brother, who was already seated on his own cushion, animatedly talking to his neighbour. She cleaned her throat and waited for him to turn around, which he did almost immediately.
"They will be here any moment, Salac says they want to discuss the mountain-apes* with us. Apparently, they seek our military assistance in keeping the passes of the Misty Mountains open."
"And what will the Khel Rhaw standpoint be?"
"We will hesitantly approve."
"I do not see what we have to gain in the matter. There will only be more combat in the crossing of the mountains, than when we choose to just cross them by ourselves."
"These Elves are very powerful in the North. Their friendship is an excellent recommendation at the court of Fornost."
"I see. I will go talk to..."
She never got to finish that sentence. Thawinac, oldest member and the chairman of the council walked in in the company of two men, so alike in appearance they seemed mirror images. Both were absolutely beautiful. She had no other word for it, though they had nothing effeminate in their appearance. They were lean and elegant, but in the broadness of their shoulders, there was a hint of long years of living the life of a warrior. They did not look like any men she had ever seen before, though. In Harad and Gondor, a full beard was an important symbol of masculinity. No man in his right mind would seriously consider cutting it off. These two, however, had such smooth faces they had to have shaven it off for some reason. On a closer look, there wasn't even a blue sheen from cut hairs on their faces. They couldn't have grown beards if they had tried. Their shoulder-length black hair was intricately braided and decorated with small silver jewels. Just visible underneath it were the tips of ears that were subtly different from normal ones. And their eyes. . . to her, they seemed older than anything she had ever seen, speaking of the joys and sorrows of places and times unimaginable to the likes of her. She felt dwarfed by their mere presence. In fact, they made her feel very uneasy. A sick feeling of dread and foreboding settled upon her and extinguished the joy she had been feeling at their appearance. Her stomach seemed to dance within her belly and she had to restrain herself from getting up and leaving.
Thawinac's introduction and the rest of the meeting passed in a haze. She had to restrain herself from staring at them constantly, but never felt at ease untill she was looking at them, only to have that feeling replaced by irrational fear while she was actually looking. One time, she found the eyes of one of them them directly fixed upon her. She no longer dared to look after that. For once, she found it a good thing her older sibling got to do all the talking. The only decision made that day was postponing the decision untill the day after tomorrow, so when the council was dismissed, she made a hasty retreat to her tent, brushing off her friend Malani by saying she had probably caught Alawi's shaking fever as well. Malani didn't really believe that, off course. Asa had literally never been ill in her life.
* In my humble opinion, orcs are an unknown species in sunny Harad. So a Haradi who knew apes would probably describe them like that.