4
Memory
There was a time in Mirkwood, as there were many times, it was remembered vaguely, not with the weighty salience of finality, but the passing memory of continuity.
It was a day hazy with autumn, gentle wines of russet and disorganized poetry beneath the boughs of late bloom, and now hazy also with the years between. He recalled this as it was a day they spent outdoors, sweet marvel of fruit and maturity—Mirkwood was a brighter place then.
The stream was not as ebullient as it had in new spring, it gurgled, reflection was cast; their ripples showed distortion—this was the way of time.
"So Little Greenleaf, who do you want to marry when you grow up?" his father's affection had always been evident, affection and pride in his only son; the child fingered the wild flowers, they were lush and full, on the brink of decline, but they shone with the moment, for the moment.
"I know! I want to marry Naneth." He named that irreplaceable feminine influence in every child's universe; in his eyes, there was no woman fairer.
Thranduil chuckled, a low sound, dulcet and goldenrod. "Ah, but Little Greenleaf, Naneth is already married to me."
"Oh, alright then." Legolas furrowed his brow as he tried to think of another being he was remotely likely to marry.
"Mirithil will do then."
"Mirithil, are you certain?" Thranduil recalled a certain little elfling who had crawled into his arms, recalcitrant and petulant as his nanny had refused to allow him to eat more than three spoonfuls of maple syrup at breakfast, he disagreed with her reasoning that more was too rich for little elflings like him. He reminded Legolas of Mirithil's shortcomings.
"Well, no. not Mirithil then." He fell silent, absently stroking a dandelion that bobbed and bowed to his ministrations.
"I know. I'll marry someone from far away. Someone I have no bad memories of." With that decision he snapped the dandelion's stalk and tucked it into his father's hair, "There; that matches with your hair. It is prettier than your crown too."
Laughter filled the glade, much like the ripples heard before, then a high squealing joined it as Thranduil scooped his son into his arms and twirled him."
"I'm flying!"
His hair was amberous and gold, shot with red in the firelight; the Hall of Fire was alight with celebration as Lindir sang, his harp played the accompaniment that buoyed his song.
Elladan and Elrohir swirled amongst the rest of the couples, their dance partners were as exuberant, Lirel was typically sanguine and carefree, Aithilin was usually more reserved, she had blushed when Elladan extended the invitation of a dance, as Estel had noticed.
He watched Legolas who had elected not to dance; his composure seemed unbreakable, Estel wondered at his reasons for coming to Rivendell. He seemed worn, he appreciated solitude, but mostly, he emanated that quietude that Estel could never really touch, never really put into words; he was uncertain of the other, this other who appeared to him as all uncertainty.
He was uncanny; he belonged to shadow, as much as the dark belonged to him. He belonged to day, to the dawn, but his hair flickered as it did now, between dusk and morninglight.
The harp was an otherworldly holiness. Lindir's raising of lyrics born of legend were words arched over the cathedral of history and myth. Mostly myth—Estel could not imagine the multitude upon multitude of years collected in the weir of time gone.
He spoke, "What do you think of Rivendell, Legolas?"
Eyelids fluttered, they hid blue, very blue; his eyes were indigo in the amberish light, clear like an open sky, perhaps the sea.
"Peace, it is like lake, I find; a large one, where horizons are not easily visible…but the perimeter is still there." He breathed and shifted, linen rustled, barely perceptible to Estel's ears.
"But I find… if you ignore them, the expanse is lush and wide beyond fences and mountains, here it is wide and wider than the sea."
Estel's eyes widened.
"Or I might simply call it restful, which is good. There is nothing anyone could wish for here."
He smiled, a slight upturn of the corners of his mouth.
Estel thought perhaps the sentence sought completion, and its owner was in search of more that the restfulness of Rivendell.
He shook his dark hair from his face where it had fallen.
"Yes, most would say that." Hesitation found him and held him for a moment. It passed.
"But what would you wish for? You say there is nothing but…"
"You see much. And I wish for much." The voice was placid and subtle. It was like a forest, with dark shapes falling out, long and distorted on the floor.
"I hope you do not see this as dissatisfaction."
"I just want more than mortal pleasures."
"But you are immortal. You're an elf."
"My world is mortal. Middle-earth is mortal."
Estel fell silent, he lapsed into it and it swelled about them, like honey, slow and suffocating, sweet with ripened mystery.
"Do not trouble yourself. I am happy, just not complacent."
He turned to look at the other; so much older and yet seemed not so—elves, that was their way; unless, unless one paid attention to the eyes, peerers found more depth than they were willing to scale.
This one's eyes were blue, very blue; the air was a rush of foamy song, rising, glancing the rafters, embers glowed bright as legends were awakened, elves found much time for memory. Estel often found himself caught between the human lust for the present, speed and action—there was not enough time—and also the need to delve deep into the past, his own, those of others before him, and the far removed ghosts that were collectively named predecessors, too many to be singled out—he had been raised amongst elves.
He would have drifted out on a sea of song, all alone if not for the weightless hand that alighted on his shoulder; a presence he felt immediately.
"I think we might both be livelier on this night…have you ever been out to the gardens here, at night, when it is quite deserted, if I may say so? Have you?"
He shook his head in reply, the apparition blazed burgundy—firelight, he reminded himself dazedly, Estel had almost forgotten Legolas' presence, yet he had not noted an absence.
The pair wound through the crowds that thinned as they drew near the exit; the door opened, outside was the corridor: long lean and winding. And beyond that as they stepped under an arch was the night, all-eclipsing, gentle, lulling and wakeful—inky with pinpricks of cloistered diamonds.
The elf glowed slightly as was typical of them. Estel melded cleanly into the night—he had never felt so much a part of such a great magnitude.
He was mortal, this was their gift: they always returned to the earth, voluntarily or no.
The grass was singing in fervent rushes, blades almost bursting with the season's generousity. Beneath their feet the grass grew. Tread lightly, Estel told himself. Why though? It was just a fleeting thought: tread lightly. And so he did.
"You humans do grow fast; you were a mere child on our last meeting."
Legolas seemed to offer a smile as accompaniment to his words; one Estel felt more than saw; the elf had his back to him.
They traversed the garden path; poppies were alight with dew: pearls in the elf's illumination. Estel wondered if Mirkwood could be as dark as rumour implied: it was inhabited by elves, creatures who seemed solely composed of light and music.
"I do not recall," he replied.
"I doubt that not. You were young. Very young."
"And then I grew up." Estel seemed to grapple with the vowels; there was nothing much he could say.
He hid a smile as he bent over to caress a lily's white face. It was as the dwarves who visited Rivendell not long ago had remarked to him once out of the earshot of the elves: they speak in riddles and then laugh at you; Middle-earth is their plaything.
Doubtless the elves still heard. They had a manner uncanny to those who were unfamiliar with them.
Settling delicately on a stone walled fountain, Legolas began again.
"When I was younger, very much younger, Mirkwood was a brighter place. Like Rivendell, only there were no walls entailing our realm, and the magic was wild in every pool every leaf.
Dol Guldor was not yet the terror it is now."
"When you were a child…?" Estel perched next to him, huddling up against the dark."
"It was a long while ago; before your memory or your father's"
"And the darkness…it is not like this?" Estel gestured vaguely, as the object of his comparison was vague and uncontainable—the night.
"It is…oppressive. Adar has not wavered, but our time has." He tilted his face toward the sky.
Estel clasped his hands in his lap, expression lost in shadow.
"If you would be so generous as to allow me, let me recount better times." He grew dreamy, walking down the paths of dream, oft-tread, they seemed as Estel noticed, Legolas paid less attention to all that was around them.
It was a long rambling tale, no fact, but now mired in myth, clouded by feelings, and the years in between, inflections revealed by tone, glory hindered by the lack of better words.
He spoke of life and truth; he spoke of clarity: ponds and open skies, eyes and lyrics, the lute; he spoke of dependence and independence, a child: golden-locked and bright eyed; he spoke of the fight: brutal, then the crying: sobs, from there was born anger and vengeance; he spoke of weariness; he spoke of surrender: elves fleeing to the sea, and succumbing, whilst others entered the Halls of Mandos; he returned to the present; a sigh.
A sound like running water, like wind and wings, like night; a sound that made Estel feel similarly.
Then he laughed as silence resumed its stiff curtain: an almost high-pitched sound, serenely lush.
"I am afraid I have made us both moody and lacklustre for no reason at all."
"I suppose so." Estel thought for a moment, neither spoke, just breathing, casual, meaningful, amplified by the dark. "I have heard of the spiders in Mirkwood. Are they quite as formidable as reputation assumes they are?"
"Well, actually, yes." They embarked on a conversation revolving around the fearsome eight-legged carnivores of the sweltering dark, Legolas recalled Elladan and Elrohir's similar morbid interest in them.
"Yes, they do enjoy killing orcs and things." Estel agreed.
"They do have their reasons."
"They hide their sadness so well."
"To let it rest is the best consolation."
The lilies pandered to the moon's beams; they grew, they sang, swelling Illuvatar's Song.
The garden was a mercy. Bles't and christened; nameless and therefore free.
Dark shapes conversed late, late into the night.
Night was bereft of time; neither counted the hours.
The Bruinen flowed on; all paths lead to the sea.
-
A mood is a beautiful thing as Estel first began to discover; how to see beyond a face in colour: incandescent and fair.
-
And the only failings of lilies are that their season be all too short.
Cometh the autumn they wither.
Next spring finds renewal; forgetfulness of the last cycle, they do not remember the face that tended to them.
But the lily is pure so long as it is, and it will continue to be even after men cease to have eyes and eyes cease to see.
Elves know this with their immortal eyes.
-
Elves are not omnipotent.
They learn as well, and they need the passing of days to be shaped by the earth.
This was how the earth was born. It was conceived, and a mind surfaced, it was shattered as it opened its eyes, and it returned, stronger for all the seams holding it together, and memory that collects history so that the mind might make reference and hold it dear in latter days.
-
Estel never knew the entire course of education that flowed through him that night. He knew it many years later: memory.
By then time had worn him down, and built him anew: Aragorn.
Of last night:
There were epithets of joy and litanies of sorrow and then there were long rambles, flights of fancy and the mellifluous vowels flowed on and on, dimming and lowering as night began to fade and permit dawn; these were treasured—the only possession capable of lasting millennia, and therefore the only thing elves ever lay claim on: memory, unfading even as stone has crumbled and language been unwound to sound and fury.
There will still be memory.
However, wine does tend to loosen memory's grasp of time, and one's perception of the minutes water and run into each other. Morning arrived after twelve hours of dark; for some it had been the stretching of a moment, unsegmented and loose, for others it had been a dream, with no beginning and no end, just unregimented forever glimpsed at once a while.
Estel reflected on this, the reply he had received from numerous individuals concerning that night in the Hall of Fire, so many other occasions celebrated there; all diverging and converging in some way, life was all some kind of history, nothing existed but the present, created through lessons learned and salvaged from the past. How beautiful.
And there are some days that pass by in flashes, bright and full, like a flower so bursting with joy and fruit that it is at the brink of withering and failure and death.
This day was one of them: precision and speed faster than the eye could track.
Archery.
He was not particularly good at this, which was probably why Legolas was so adamant on teaching him.
Archery was a craft Legolas had shown an aptitude for since childhood, it was the woodwind personified, arrows were a decent, unbrutal weapon, soaring without vanity, straight and clean and their wings were gifted to them by the wind that bore them. There was that familiarity of it, gracefully modest; a harp crafted for more practical purposes.
The bow favoured patience over willful aspiration, which was the main reason contributing to Estel's ineptness with it.
Dawn had brought four figures to the archery grounds, Elladan and Elrohir had been reluctant initially to participate in what they deemed an unworthy cause, after all, they were competent as instructors, but eventually agreed. Estel had only been too keen, there was an inextinguishable want to learn in him.
Flight was crooked and it embedded itself firmly into the earth.
Another was strung and set loose.
"Not so fast. Concentrate on the target."
Swift and wayward.
"Here, let me show you. Your stance…" he knelt on the slightly damp earth, and grasped both wrists then replaced them on the bow.
----
Ten arrows. A brightened sky, fully warm, the sun was an inquisitive one as it spied upon the goings-on far, far below its lofty perch.
"Was that better?"
A slight nod followed in response.
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Another arrow accepted the challenge offered by the board, edging closer to the middle, a small red spot.
He was less careless in aiming as the day progressed. The midday heat wedded intense sunshine to the redolence added generously by fresh blooms.
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By nightfall he was thoroughly worn-out, but satisfaction accompanied this ache that was making itself known, satisfaction from more than one individual.
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