The Eagles' Cleft

Gildor's POV

FA 511

"Gildor wake. Please wake"

I could have ignored the insistent voice that valiantly tried to shake me out of the darkness my consciousness clung to, but there was a tiny thread that tugged at my mind. I opened my eyes and tried to shield myself, but the thread was gone as soon as I gave in to its prodding.

"Voronwe" I whispered.

"Yes"

I did not need to ask what had happened. It was only a moment ago it seemed. The connection I had become so used to was gone, as if someone had extinguished a candle in a room I had not been aware had been dark except for that light. I fumbled in that darkness but could find nothing, least of all words.

"The eagles flew down" Voronwe said "They brought his body"

A long night had passed during which no one had managed to wake me. So the eagle had carried him back up. There was a half-finished cairn already, with the endless drop behind it. I could not even see him a last time. So I scrabbled at the stones and shifted them into a finished cairn until my hands bled. I didn't know what I had said, but they left me in peace, most of them. Tyelca helped, and Voronwe and Elemmakil came too, after a while. I could not send them away. They had as much right, maybe more, as I to be here. At one point I was left alone, crouching at the foot of the cairn and wondering why our places had been reversed. I wished they all would just be sensible and flee, but they acted as if the demon's fall had saved us completely. Why did they not finally go, go down?

But I should stay here. I had not been there the one moment I should have, and he had been alone. Why did they not leave? – Because he had made me promise to lead them. But who could have heard that? No. The stones were cold and dug sharply into my brow as I bowed my head to the cairn. I had a knife. There was the vast abyss just a few steps away. I could simply stop and follow where he had gone-.

I looked up only when there was a rush as of rising wind, and the air was whipped around me. It would be the last straw if we got caught up here by a blizzard. A fat lot of good his death would have been then.

There was no blizzard. The eagle was back. He shifted, picking his claws up so as not to shift the stones we had so laboriously gathered and heaped. Then he stood with his great wings slightly spread, staring down on me.

"Don't"

I had never spoken to a great eagle before. But weariness and grief made me a poor talker, even to so mighty a creature. The desperation inside me had grown cold on waking, and I shook I don't know if with cold or anger.

"Don't what?"

"Jump" the eagle said dryly "I'd be faster anyway"

"You did not catch him"

The eagle took a step towards me. I could have climbed on his back and he would scarcely have felt any weight. But I could feel no fear of him. I found myself wondering if that giant beak of his could not accomplish in a second what I found no courage to do.

"I have no power against a fire-demon"

"No" I agreed "And he paid"

"He made a decision" the eagle pointed out "Wisely, and brave"

"And what will it bring him?" I asked bitterly "Endless waiting in dark halls? Far from your wide blue skies"

"It is not only blue skies that I fly" the eagle returned "Our master has not forgotten you. And neither will his sacrifice go unnoticed" He turned a sharp, gold-coloured eye to the cairn, then cocked his head and looked at me.

"You say" I whispered "Unnoticed by whom? I remember the doom. You fly, but we are here. Not even the echo of your lamentation – those words will not have escaped you?"

I would not cry. Not now, not here, not before this eagle. I turned away, part of me wondering what had killed my reason that I spoke thus to one of Manwe's own birds. The wind was cold and sharp here, stinging like ice. Abruptly it stopped. Something powerful was suddenly very near, nearer than I wanted it. I whipped around, the impulse to run sending my heart into my throat. There was nowhere to run. I was cornered between the cairn, impossible to leap, and the eagle's wing, cupped over and around me. He had stepped around me with no more notice than a soft breeze. The extended wing did not only shield me from the icy wind but also from sight of the others. My injured leg shook painfully in protest at the clumsy turn. I looked up into the eagle's eye, trying to remain upright.

"I am only a messenger, not an interpreter" the eagle said softly "Maybe it will comfort you to know that he will not have lost the world he loved and died for forever"

He ducked his head, twisting around as if to preen himself. For an instant his beak was but a hand's breadth from me. He seized one of the golden feathers that grew on the inside of his wing. Compared to the rest of his feathers these were small, but when he clamped one in the tip of his beak I saw it was as large as giant vulture's wing-feather. It took a long moment staring at the eagle's face close to mine until I realized I was supposed to take the feather. Time seemed frozen. Then I reached out and took it, and the eagle stepped around the cairn towards the edge. With the protection of his wing gone, the wind was back. He glanced back at me once, and then dropped over the edge. His widespread wings caught the wind and he was borne upwards without a single beat of his wings until he banked at the far edge and propelled himself up and away.

What then had the messenger meant in telling me that? I could find no hope in the obscure words, but still I clung to them. The feather was strangely warm in my hands. After indeterminable time of staring at it I knelt by the cairn once more. I drew my knife, but though I longed to cut somewhere else I only cut a thick strand of my hair. I wound it around my hand and felt for the braid with the raven's feather. With a determined motion I cut that off, too. I blinked tears from my eyes and laid the black feather into the slight upward curve of the broad eagle-feather. It fit in neatly there. If I turned it around, only the eagle's feather was visible. I wrapped the two quills with the strand of my own hair. My hands shook, but I managed to knot the ends tightly. I took one of the dead and bleached branches that were all that remained of a pine that appeared to have once stood here and wedged it between the stones of the cairn so it would stand upright. With the braid dangling from the black feather I fastened the two to the branch. It was the way the rhevain marked the places of their dead, but it seemed the only appropriate thing to do for me. I stared at the feathers and hair fluttering in the sharp wind blankly for a while.

I think I was aware that the others called my name. I ignored them without really meaning to, but there was nothing to make me turn. I could have frozen right there, and I would not have minded. Only Faire's whinny shook me out of that state. The sky had darkened. Time had passed. I turned away from cairn and feathers and walked towards her as in a bad dream. Some of the cold terror left when I touched her, feeling her warm solidity and breathing her scent. The confrontation with the eagle had consumed all my strength it seemed. My leg gave out, and I sank down beside Faire, holding on to her foreleg to keep upright. The shoulder she had bitten into thrummed painfully. I closed my eyes, but a little later came the command to move. I took it up without wanting, without feeling. Because I had promised.

I realized I could not mount Faire.

"My lady" I whispered, and she dropped down on one foreleg cautiously among the sharp rocks, bringing her back into manageable reach. I pulled myself up painfully, and she fell into step with the train.