First, not enough words of thanks to everyone who is hanging in there with me for this story. I haven't been able to get through to some of your e-mail addresses to express my appreciation, so - thank you!
Title: The Tale of Marian
Chapter: 33?
Rating: PG13 this chapter.
Pairing: OFC/Haldir
Genre: Adventure/Romance/perhaps a little Angst
Timeline: AU, modern times.
Beta: None this chapter.
Feedback: Welcomed, appreciated. Constructive criticism always appreciated.
Warnings: Angst/ Some violence/hints of the supernatural.
Author's Notes: This is a work in progress.
Disclaimer: See Chapter 1 for disclaimer.
THE TALE OF MARIAN
Chapter 33 – Through Halls of Iron and Darkling Door
Watching women bicker can be an entertaining spectator sport, but Lindir and I sprinting into them headlong in the Lower Halls was not at all amusing.
"Did you KNOW about this?" Marian was accusing Vanimë heatedly. "How could you let him go down there? He's been down there for hours, hasn't he? Do you even know what it could do to him?" she ran on before Vanimë, hands defensively on her hips, could hope to respond.
"And you, of all people," she turned on Allinde. "Do you even know what you're about to get yourself into? Trying to trick the sentinels? Without telling anyone? Without giving anyone a chance to help you? Protect you?"
"Marian, no one needs to protect me," Allinde said in excitement. "You know what's down there. If only the sentinels would let us through, then we could. . . "
"Could what?" Lindir inserted as we came to an abrupt stop.
"Thank goodness!" Marian said, and grabbed my arm, pointing at the two resolute and still sentinels at the entrance to the lower hall. At the moment they had lances at the ready, apparently having fended Allinde off at least once so far.
"Tell them we need to get in there. Haldir is in danger!"
"I told you, no one is to enter, not even me, by LORD Haldir's own orders," Vanimë protested. "The sentinels will not disobey him."
"But WHY can't anyone enter?" I asked calmly, Lindir and I apparently the only rational people in the passage. "This hallway has never been guarded before."
"Rumil, there's a palantir down there," Allinde explained impatiently, "the one Cirdan gave to Haldir to signal when his ships were needed. He's down there now using it, he has to be."
"That's not possible," I tried to calm her and Marian. "The palantir is locked away. Haldir wouldn't try to use it."
"You KNEW about the palantir?" Marian's jaw dropped, and so did Allinde's, Vanimë's, and presumably Lindir's, though I didn't turn to look at him.
"Well I should think so," I replied defensively. "I was there, after all, when Cirdan gave it to him. Haldir tried to use it once after we came to Methentaurond, to test it, but he could not reach Cirdan. He found that the palantir was, shall we say, compromised.
"Compromised how?" Vanimë asked me, her eyes turning to slits. Leave it to Vanimë to get at the heart of the matter.
"A voice that was not Cirdan's; shifting glimpses of the dark past, and shadows, Haldir told me. Shadows that swallowed the light and a voice that beckoned him to lose himself in them. It would bare one's very soul, he said, if given reign. Haldir broke away from the stone, barely. It seemed to sap all of his strength. He told me that it must not be used, and we locked it away. The stone is useless. Why would he try to control it again? He said the way was closed.
"The way is closed - that's what he said to me," Marian cried out. "that night on his terrace, when he was exhausted. Rumil, he IS using it, or trying to. He must feel that he has to try."
"Remember what I asked you," Lindir said to Marian, putting a calming hand on her shoulder. She looked at him in panic and confusion for a moment, and then she nodded.
"Vanimë," Marian said more evenly, "would you betray Haldir's confidence, if you had to do so to save Haldir's life?"
"Haldir's life is not in danger," Vanimë responded, but now there was a note of hesitation in her voice.
Marian waited. "Would you?" she insisted.
Vanimë looked from one to the other of us. Finally, she answered Marian.
"Yes," she said decisively.
"Then you must do so now! The palantir is evil, Callo told me so. You know Haldir has been down there much too long. We must go after him! We can't delay any longer!"
A feeling of dread came over me as I remembered how tired Haldir had looked from Marian's window. We had found no sign of the Havens or any way to tell Cirdan of our intentions. Perhaps in his mind it had at last come to this, and despite his wisdom he had chosen to confront the palantir; alone, so as not to endanger anyone else. A last resort. Why had I not seen that, in desperation for our people, he might falter?
"Vanimë, I believe her," I said.
"As do I," Allinde added. "One of the palantiri has to be here. If it is the Orthanc Stone, there is no telling what of the Dark Lord's evil might linger within. Evil that was hidden so that not even Cirdan would see it, unless he tried to use it."
Vaminë answered with a sad smile. "Very well, but not even my word can release these sentinels from their vows. On their very lives they will allow no one to enter, unless Haldir himself gives the order."
While Vanimë spoke, I backed up far enough to look around the corners of the flanking passages. What I saw there gave me the encouragement to inch Marian forward and whisper in her ear: "When you see your chance, run for it." Then I stepped around her and approached the sentinels as closely as I dared.
"Lord Haldir is in mortal danger," I announced to them pompously. Inconsiderately, they ignored me and stared straight ahead down the passage. "As his Counselor, I demand that you let me pass." I stepped forward the last few feet to toward the entrance. As I expected, the sentinels immediately turned and crossed their extremely sharp lances across the passage to bar my way.
"Now!" I yelled, hoping that the others would take my lead. To my relief, Dieter and Arianna sprang around the corners of the corridors where I had seen them waiting and tackled the sentinels from behind. Taking this cue, Lindir and Vanimë jumped forward to struggle with their lances. I prayed no one would be hurt as I reached for the first sentinel. "I really am sorry about this. Oloro," I told him, and he slumped forward, his grip on the lance loosened enough for Lindir to remove it from his hands. I looked up to see Marian wide-eyed and frozen in place.
"Go!" I pushed her as I crossed to the other sentinel to repeat the suggestion that he also fall asleep. That nudged her out of her panic, and she ran past me into the passage.
"No, Allinde!" Lindir cried out, catching her just as she was about to follow Marian. "You must not look. Remember Callo's warning," he said more gently.
"I promise I will not look into the palantir, Lindir, but Marian needs my help," Allinde insisted, looking pleadingly into Lindir's eyes, then at all of us. No one could easily deny Allinde when she used those eyes. Besides, she was probably right.
"Then we will all go," Vanimë said, laying the last sentinel's head gently on the floor and picking up his lance.
i
It was the dimly lit corridor from my nightmare. Widely spaced torches flickered in the darkness, casting strange shadows across the ancient tapestries hung along the rock-hewn walls. The floor of the passage slanted down as I flung myself along the curved path, and the air grew cooler yet somehow thicker and more sinister the farther I went. Each wisp of air traced across my skin like a cold finger. Was it my growing fear or the chill and heavy air itself that made me slow, each step becoming more and more difficult?
Like my dream, I reached the top of a stair, its steps worn smooth by age. But where was Haldir? In my dream I had found him here and he had warned me back, away from the thick brown mist whose fingers now wafted up the stairs toward me. I paused at the top of the steps. Could I make myself go down into it? How far did the stairs go? If Haldir was down there, I would go, I resolved. I pulled one of the torches out of its bracket, gathered my skirts in one hand to keep from tripping and plunged down the steps – one – two – three – four. As I lowered myself into the dark murky deep, I felt like I was swimming through a thick soup, struggling forward, bending my will against a force that felt chillingly physical. I heard only the softest sounds behind me, muffled by the heavy air. Startled, I turned and swung the torch behind me, but I could see only a few feet back. The hair on the back of my neck rising, I turned again and swung the torch back down the steps, expecting at any moment to feel a bony hand on my shoulder. Why must all of my childhood nightmares, all of those scary movies I watched as a child, come back to haunt me at this moment, filling my mind with horrible thoughts of what might come next?
Had Haldir forced his way down the stairs this way, groping along the wall as I was doing now to steady myself, hoping that I wouldn't touch something that would make me scream?
I felt my way forward, hearing dull echoes both behind me and ahead. Just when I became sure that the stairs would go on and on, my hand went from touching wall to touching nothing, and the floor below my feet leveled off. Pushing my feet forward across the floor in fear of another stair or a drop, I dropped the skirts of the dress and inched forward with my hands and my feeble torch in front of me, chills running up and down my arms. So strongly did I feel that a malevolent presence was just before me that I nearly turned away, but the thought of Haldir down here in this horrible place hardened my will.
"Haldir!" I called into the dark, but my voice seemed to carry only a few feet, absorbed into the murkiness around me.
I stepped forward again, and my hands struck hard, cold metal. The torch in my right hand sputtered against the clammy surface. A chill, foul-smelling blast of air came through a crack in the metal, and blew out the torch. Utter blackness crowded in on me and I dropped the useless torch. Desperately I felt with cold, icy fingers for the narrow crack that the air had come through, and finding it, followed it down and up along the cold metal. A door! Would I find Haldir on the other side, or something much worse? Grasping to the sides of the crack at hip-height my hands found slippery, cold handles – the handles of those doors that in the movies, you're sure that the girl is an idiot of she opens them - and I pulled on them with all of my might. The crack widened and a sharp orange light shot through the darkness around me, brown particles of mist whirling in its glow. I heaved on the heavy doors again and they parted silently, as all elvish doors do.
How I wished that I had been wrong, that Haldir had not been in this dark vault, for that's what it was – a small round room with a curved ceiling hewn out of the rock, and at its very center a black pedestal holding a dark crystal orb. Haldir stood over the orb, his eyes locked upon it as though piercing through to its center, his hands black silhouettes ringed by orange light where he held it. The orb was dark one moment, then it cast its inner light orange and blue and then yellow, crackling and pulsing like static electricity across his haggard face and the vaulted ceiling above him. Haldir's shadow loomed and flickered on the wall behind him as if it had a life of its own. The room smelled of something that had been burned by lighting. So this was a palantir.
I had never seen Haldir look so utterly exhausted as he looked at this moment, older and almost completely drained of his luminous aura, as though the orb was absorbing his very being. His entire body strained and shook, his brow dripped with sweat as he struggled with the palantir. The dark mists floated heavily along the floor, swirling about his feet. It was so cold inside the vault that I could see the air Haldir exhaled. My heart began to beat faster than it's already frantic pace – this was very, very wrong.
"Lord Haldir!" I called, but he was so intent on his battle with the palantir that he neither saw nor heard me. Was he in a trance? I knew I had to break the palantir's grip on him. Yet if I pulled him away too suddenly, would I hurt him?
"Haldir!" I said again and stepped through the cold mist toward him, my skirts now dragging with moisture across the chill floor and my hands outstretched to touch him. All thought of my vain desires had left me and I only wished to hold him in concern and support, no matter how proudly he would resist such a gesture.
As I touched his shoulder the mist that was freezing my feet through my thin slippers reached its cold tendrils up and around him, snaking around his legs and his arms, lifting his hair into the air in tendrils and hovering menacingly in the air above. Desperate and terrified, I reached across in front of the palantir and grasped his arms, trying to turn him away from the glowing orb. Was it whispers I heard coming from the Seeing Stone?
The shadow of my arm fell across his eyes as I reached for him, cutting him off for an instant from the glow of the palantir. He staggered back as if a taunt rope had been cut, and he cried out something that I couldn't understand. Then with great effort he raised his head and saw me. He stopped in his tracks and stared at me, raking his gaze over me from head to foot. For an instant I saw the shimmer of some unknown pain in his eyes. Then he blinked and it was gone, replaced by a look of raw, cold fury. These were the ruthless warrior's eyes that the ballads sang of, yet they were more. There was something cold in his eyes that I knew in my heart was not his own, and I was truly afraid of him. I drew my hands away and stumbled back, his wall of intense anger hitting me, searing me like I was being physically burned.
What was wrong, I wanted to ask. What had I done? But such shock I felt that I couldn't.
"How dare you wear that gown! What are you trying to do to me!" he demanded in a raw, shaking voice so unlike his own, barely able to speak in his exhaustion and in the storm of his temper.
I didn't understand why, considering what he was doing here, he was so upset about a dress.
"I. . . . . I'm sorry." I forced the words out, trying to keep from trembling and backing away from him. "I found it in my room," I tried to explain. "If I've offended you by borrowing it, I'll return it at once. I've worn it with care, only for a little while; what harm have I done?"
"What harm?" he repeated hurtfully, advancing toward me until I found my back against the hard rock wall. "Do you think it makes you look like an elf? You have disrespected this garment by touching it. You will remove it and return it to me at once."
"Of course," I said, feeling debased and trying to keep my voice from breaking. "Come back to my talan with me and I'll change at once."
"Perhaps you did not hear me," he said smoothly and menacingly. "I said NOW."
"What! You want me to take my clothes off here, and walk back to my rooms in what?" I asked in disbelief. I looked desperately back through the doors but could see no one on the stairs. Where was Rumil?
"Come with me, away from the palantir. You're not yourself," I said to him, backing through the doorway and hoping he would take my hand and follow me away from that hideous vault.
Suddenly Haldir lost all semblance of control. His eyes glazing over, like lightening he gripped my arm painfully and pressed me against the wall with his thigh, pulled out a knife, and slit the ribbon down my front from top to bottom. I glanced down in horror as he pulled it down my shoulders and off of my arms, but neither the dress nor I had been damaged. I was left with nothing now but the thin, revealing peach slip hanging loosely about me. I kicked off the slippers quickly, hurt and humiliated. Surely he would not. . . . .
I looked up at him again in fear. In my dreams he shed his anger. In my dreams he apologized and I forgave him, and he drew me into his arms. In my dreams we held each other tenderly and consoled each other with soft touches and whispered explanations. But as always, it was only in dreams. . . . .
"Remove it," he ordered.
"I can't," I replied shakily, "Can't you see that I have nothing on underneath? If you'll only come back with me. . . "
Again he pressed me roughly against the wall, pulling up the slip to my knees, then to my hips, his hands gentle on the fabric, but unforgiving and uncaring on the bare skin beneath. I began to shake uncontrollably and turned my head to one side, my eyes squeezed tightly shut, gasping for breath and trying not to cry out. Haldir was an honorable elf, honorable above all else, my mind screamed. He would not do this! This was not happening! Something had hold of him, something was inside of him that wouldn't release him. Was it one of the Houseless that Callo had warned of?
"Let him go!" I screamed into the cloying mist.
All at once I realized that his hands had stopped their upward travel. I opened my eyes and turned my head slowly to see his eyes fixed on me, the maddened glaze in them clearing for a moment, then receding into despair. The mists fell away, receding into the dark, and all that remained was the static light of the palantir dancing across the walls. Haldir swayed, then pulled his hands back, examining them in disbelief.
So deeply was my heart injured, so crushed with humiliation was I that I could hold his tortured gaze only for an instant. "I only wanted to please you," I whispered brokenly.
"Marian?" he blinked in confusion and horror, as though he had just recognized me. Then he collapsed onto the floor at my feet.
I caught him as he fell, dropping down and pulling his head into my lap, hearing at last the sound of feet coming toward us down the stairs, and seeing the welcome white light of the lanterns wash across Haldir's gray and still face.
/i
Allinde and I were the first to reach Marian and Haldir crumpled at the base of the stairs. To Allinde's credit, she saw the palantir but instead went with me straight to Marian and Haldir's side. It was all we could do to pry Marian away from my brother enough to see that he was not dead, as I at first feared, but unconscious and with a pallor to his skin that struck me to the core. "He is alive," I told her, and we both wept with relief.
Vanimë and Dieter were not far behind. One look at Haldir and Vanimë handed the sentinel's lance to Dieter. "I will call Lomion, and bring a litter," she said efficiently, staring into the glowing vault for only a moment before leaping back up the stairs.
Dieter grasped the lance and entered the vault, staring wide-eyed at the palantir. Lindir joined him, lance in hand, and they circled the room warily. Arianna took Allinde's place at Marian's side, and Allinde rose and entered the vault behind them. I don't think Marian was even aware of her surroundings. She had eyes only for my brother as she shakily stroked his face, murmuring to him over and over, begging him to wake up.
No one noticed Allinde approach the palantir until she began to speak. "It is the right size, the right color," she said as she circled around it, her hand drifting along the pedestal's edge. "It must be gazed into from the correct direction," she told Dieter as he came forward to stare at the pulsating orb. "If one's mind is strong, the palantir can be bent to one's will, showing what the gazer desires to see: the past. . . . the present. . . . but never the future.
This is the Orthanc Stone," she intoned, the glow of the palantir reflected hypnotically in her eyes. Dieter reached out toward the palantir. Without warning she pushed him back and lifted a heavy metal cover from the floor, clanging it over the orb. The pulsing glow disappeared, replaced by the fair light of the lanterns we carried with us, and Dieter gasped as though released from a spell.
"It is flawed," Allinde said bitterly. "poisoned by the Dark Lord, inhabited by the Houseless. It has become a deceiver, as Lord Haldir would now tell you if he could speak. It must be locked away, never to be used again, never revealed again," she said to us all with conviction. Lindir came to her side in support.
"It will not be, I assure you," I rose and declared, staring down at my brother's unmoving form in Marian's arms.
"No one is to be allowed in this vault ever again, not even Lord Haldir or by his own orders," I told the groggy sentinels as they appeared, followed by Vanimë and Lomion with a litter. Disgruntled, they retrieved their lances from Dieter and Lindir, closing and barring the iron doors behind us.
"Marian, you must let go of him," Lomion told her gently but to no affect. "Adaneth, boe noch balar an hon," he whispered to her, "help us take him to my talan where we may care for him." Reluctantly she nodded, allowing Allinde to pull her away from my brother so we could place him on the litter, but his hand she would not relinquish.
I took Haldir's other hand as we placed him on a bed in Lomion's talan. It was the most pleasant of the healing rooms, with a large window opened to the fresh air of Lomion's terrace and a fountain playing outside. "He is still cold," I told Marian in distress.
"I know," she mouthed to me as Lomion drew blankets over Haldir and began speaking the healing words over him.
After a time Lomion drew back, slumping tiredly into a nearby chair. "He is struggling still, deep in a place I can reach but fleetingly. You must tell me what happened when you were alone with him," Lomion told Marian. She looked down then, seeming to realize that beneath the wrap I had placed around her shoulders, she wore only the thin silk slip of her dress. I hadn't wanted to burden her with questions before. Now she blushed with embarrassment.
"Marian, you must tell us. It could be important," I urged her. So she told us, haltingly, adding frequently that it had not been Haldir's fault, that he had not been himself, not sounded like himself, when it had happened.
"What is this dress, Rumil?" she asked me. "Why would it upset Haldir so to see it?"
"Well," I replied somewhat guiltily, "it was our mother's dress. She told us she wore it at the family ceremony when she bound herself to our father."
"Oh Rumil," Marian said. "It's your family's talan that I'm in; the wardrobe is yours. Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because Orophin wouldn't mind, because you looked beautiful, and I wanted you to be happy, and because I am a prying, stupid elf!" I apologized. Not in an age had I done anything that had caused such dire consequences.
"Rumil, you can't possibly think this is your fault," she told me. "You didn't know what Haldir was doing. No one did."
"I should have realized he would try to use it," I said, guilt and fear for Haldir tearing at my insides. "I should have stopped him."
"Enough," Lomion said. "I fear that whatever ill force entered Lord Haldir from the palantir may be within him still, refusing to depart. He feels deep guilt at his treatment of you, Marian, and for consulting the palantir though he learned it was treacherous, this I have felt; guilt that is keeping him from fighting as strongly as he needs to. Stay with him; your presence comforts him even as it pains him. I must rest now, and consider what more I can do for him."
"What more you can do? But he will recover, won't he?" Marian pleaded, grasping Haldir's hand to her heart.
"Whether he recovers or not," Lomion told us gravely, "depends largely on the struggle that he wages not only with the palantir, but with himself."
The morning light waxed and waned into evening, and Marian and I stayed by my brother's bed, talking quietly. At last I had to take leave of them for a time – I owed it to Haldir to help Vanimë keep preparations for our journey going until he awoke. Until, I repeated to myself, not if. I had to believe that Haldir would awaken: any other outcome was unthinkable. When I left them Lomion was once more at his side, and Marian had leaned over her chair and laid her head onto Haldir's pillow, falling asleep with his hand still held within hers. This comforted me greatly, whereas nothing else could. Haldir could not have had a better angel if a Maia herself was watching over him. Retreating down the steps from Lomion's talan, I softly joined the song of prayer that wafted toward the healing talan from all corners of the caverns, reminding myself that all the elves of Methentaurond were entreating the Maiar and the Valar to watch over my brother as well.
In fact Haldir did recover, but not in a way that any one of us would have guessed.
Vanimë and I labored into the night, the work keeping at bay our constant concern for Haldir. Returning to our silent talan with Vanimë, we paced back and forth. Finally admitting that I would not be able to sleep this night, I told Vanimë to rest as best she could. I left the talan and turned my steps yet once again toward Lomion's talan. Vanimë would come to sit with Haldir at first light.
Was this all I could do for him, sit at his bedside and wait? I thought to myself as I raised my hand to knock lightly at Lomion's door, that this was a pitifully inadequate thing to do for my brother. Yet, my long experience told me that there was a time for sitting, and waiting. Painfully, this seemed to be one of those times.
The door opened just as I raised my hand to knock. Lomion drew me inside with a finger to his lips, and quietly closed the door behind me. There was an air of excitement in his movements as he led me into the room where Haldir lay. Marian was now curled on the against Haldir's side, an arm wrapped over his chest in sleep. The pink slip was hung carefully in a corner, and Marian wore instead some white shift that Lomion must have found for her. Someone, no doubt Lomion, had thrown a soft blanket over them both, and lit a candle, above which a fragrant sprinkling of flowers and herbs floated in a bowl of water. Catching my attention, Lomion pointed at his own eyes with two fingers, and then turned them toward Haldir and Marian, pointing again. Tiptoeing softly over to the bed, I brought my head down near them and looked at their closed eyes. Though his face was still startlingly pale, Haldir's eyes were moving beneath his lids as one's eyes do when they are dreaming. Well, I thought, that was an improvement over not moving at all. Turning my gaze to Marian, I saw that she was dreaming also. But what was Lomion trying to tell me? Lomion nodded his head toward them again, and I looked closer, first at Marian, then at Haldir. Slowly I came to the realization that their eye movements were the same – moving in exactly the same direction, at exactly the same time. Whatever they were dreaming, they were dreaming it together. I put my hand in front of their faces, and felt their breath on both sides of my hand. They were breathing together. Remembering Marian's and Haldir's separate admissions that they dreamed of each other, hope surged within me for the first time that day; hope that in dreaming Marian could find Haldir wherever the darkness had taken him, and bring him back. I settled down into the chair opposite Lomion. This I could sit and wait for.
From "The Lay of Luthien", p. 218, The Fellowship of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien.
"Boe noch balar an hon.": "You must be strong for him," as near as I can translate (I'm no linguist).