Through the year or more that followed, both Éowyn and Faramir had occasional glimpses of a world once known and now forgotten.
~o~O~o~
Faramir's return, a se'en-night later, was greeted with much relief by all. Where had he been? the other Rangers wanted to know, but Faramir's memory was hazy. Young Firion had told them of Mithrandir's appearance, and of Faramir having been sent on a quest, but what this quest was, neither of them could tell.
Boromir was the first to notice the change in his brother's behaviour. For at least a week or two after his mysterious adventure, he seemed relaxed, refreshed almost, though somewhat melancholic, as if yearning for something. He had always been a kind and gentle man, who in another time and place would have been a brilliant scholar, devoted husband, loving father, rather than a soldier. But now Boromir had more and more frequent glimpses of the man his brother should have been, had he not been worn down by duty and the fighting of a brutal war not of his choosing.
Some of the Ithilien Rangers noticed a change too. Their captain was often quiet and thoughtful – no change there. But occasionally he showed sparks of levity, as if he'd been offered a window into a kinder, gentler world. He himself had occasional day dreams of a world where family was not overshadowed by politics, and enjoyment not snatched beneath the shadow of imminent destruction, but indulged in at leisure, with the hope of more to come on the morrow.
He also took to humming – snatches of melodies, some slow and hauntingly beautiful, others quick, and lively, yet others filled with majesty. Among the Rangers there was a young man, Carandol, who was a talented lutenist, and often accompanied the others in their drinking songs. He was particularly taken with Faramir's creations as he called them, and asked why Faramir did not learn to play them on his hautboy, or teach others to play them. The answer was cryptic; the tunes were not his to claim credit for, the captain explained. Damrod also caught him singing – the captain's favourite seemed to be a melody of gentle beauty, which would always elicit a slightly melancholic smile, as if it brought forth a memory of a happy time now lost.
Damrod asked him about it one day, as Faramir idly hummed it while fletching arrows. Did it not have words?
"I think it did, but I have long since forgotten them. The overall mood, yes, the details, no."
"What was it about?"
Faramir gave a wry smile. "Taking the most beautiful woman in the world into one's bed."
Damrod snorted. "The tune doesn't sound at all like that sort of song."
"Ah," came the reply, "But this is the sort of woman one would happily lay down one's life for – or better still, live the rest of one's life with."
Damrod wandered off, shaking his head, and puzzling over the strange ways of officers, and of lords, and in particular, lords who were officers.
The occasional flashes of levity remained, though. One night he watched the Rangers singing catches and rounds (mostly with altered words of their own invention, many of them bordering on the obscene). He laughed heartily at the spectacle, then (during a lull) mentioned to Damrod a game he had a vague memory of having once come across, though where, he could not quite remember. (It occurred to Damrod that these lapses were strange, for normally his memory, like the rest of his mind, was as sharp as a knife.) Always on the search for new ways of entertaining the men (cards and dice always had the potential to turn nasty), Damrod suggested the captain teach them, and Faramir was happy to oblige.
The game had simple rules – each player in turn suggested to the next man round the circle a suitably maudlin, tear-jerking song, or work of high and noble passion and sentiment, the words of which were to be sung to the tune of the cheeriest and most ridiculous ditty the player could come up with. (Or vice versa – humorous words to a maudlin tune worked just as well). The winner was then chosen by popular acclaim. Faramir made the first suggestion, a relatively easy pairing, in the knowledge that poor Anborn couldn't carry a tune in a bucket. Anborn struggled manfully, while the rest of the Rangers howled in derision and pretended to stuff their cloaks in their ears. He in his turn landed Mablung with the lilting The Lass who loved a Soldier to the tune of a double-time march. Mablung, being gifted with a fair tenor voice, gave it his best, but he couldn't resist the temptation to draw out the particularly sentimental turns of phrase with a schmalzy, lingering tremolo, which made rather a mess of the rhythmic precision demanded by the march.
Round the circle the suggestions and songs went. Faramir himself took the lead for a while, his warm and agile baritone making light work of adapting The Lay of Leithian to the tune of that Dol Amroth dock-side favourite, The Harlot's Hornpipe. Damrod drew the classical Ballad of Uinen and Osse, to the tune of another famous Dol Amroth tavern song, the chorus of which centred round the wonders of Uinen's tits. Not surprisingly, given that both songs were about the beautiful Maia and her indubitable charms, he got the words scrambled, and the ancient epic poem of Uinen gained some quite unscholarly additions (which tickled his captain no end, having been forced to study the original Quenya as a boy).
However, when in turn Damrod passed the singing on, he inadvertently gifted the match to Angrim, who gave a masterful rendition of The Merry Widows' Pleasures (and the Lads who Pleasured 'Em) to the tune of The Maiden Traduced, lingering in an almost sobbing tone of voice on each drawn out phrase and falling cadence to most tragic effect (no matter which parts of the widows' or lads' anatomies, or the unlikely combinations thereof, were being described at that point).
It turned out that books too were now seen through the slightly altered consciousness of memories of things just out of reach. He would read of ancient loves between Elves, sealed for all eternity by the binding of two Fëar. And part of him would think "I yearn for that – no, it is not that I yearn for that, it is almost that I had it once, and lost it, and now wait for it again." The yearning had a solidity, a reality to it almost like his dreams of the great wave of Numenor. It made him think almost of the belief he had read of, in some of the cities of the distant east that were fabled to lie beyond the steppes roamed by the nomadic bands of Easterlings, of souls born and reborn over the centuries. Perhaps in a previous life, his Fëa had found its one, and now he awaited her return. Then he laughed at the ridiculous turn his thoughts had taken.
~o~O~o~
For Éowyn and Éomer the change was stranger still. "Fey-touched" people said of them. The story was not widely bruited, but still whispers passed around, of two children whose lives were under threat, hidden from sorcery in a remote homestead, cast under a spell of forgetting. For the most part the two of them kept their own council, gradually adapting to the world in which they found themselves. It was perhaps easier for Éomer, who fell into life in an Eored as if it brought to him a comforting sense of a life he knew from somewhere before.
But Éowyn was hit hard. The life she now led was hard, in a very physical way. The hall, however grand the carvings, was cold through the winter and hot in summer, and the smoke from the fire pit seemed to infiltrate every corner of the living quarters. There never seemed to be enough hot water to wash properly – either herself or her clothes. She felt as though she walked the cold passageways surrounded by a faint miasma of wet dog – and unfortunately, the wet dog was her. In particular, she chafed against the restrictions placed on women. Even as a noble-born woman, there were huge limitations on what she could do. She only felt truly free when listening to the bard sing lays of the deeds of ancient shieldmaidens, or when she slipped out in the early hours of the morning to spar with Éomer, using wooden swords. After these sparring sessions, she would feel the strangest of mixed emotions. Part of her would feel her soul was soaring, having been set free from the petty restrictions of her day-to-day life. But part of her would catch a glimpse, just out of reach, of a world in which this life was hers all the time. And also, incomprehensibly, of a pair of grey eyes glittering with challenge, and then with good humour, and of a child's voice piping "A real knight would kiss the lady's hand."
The court was a very masculine environment, and what little concession there was to teaching her a woman's place in life fell to the housekeeper, and to Lady Hilde, Marshal Elfhelm's wife (who, truth be told, wasn't terribly good at this either, as she herself had no truck with the notion of a "woman's place"). But Éowyn's riding improved beyond measure, and (to Hilde's immense surprise) she was able to make herself useful, especially as the number of Riders wounded in orc attacks increased. For it turned out that she was as skilled at sewing together torn flesh as she was unskilled at embroidery. Still, she dreamt of her imagined world where women's lives were not circumscribed, where she could prove herself the equal of any man. And at times, it felt, not like a dream, but like a vision of some pre-lapsarian world where women really were free.
Several of the young Riders tried their luck with her – courting her respectfully for she was the king's sister-daughter. And while she acknowledged that some of them were passing fair, for some unaccountable reason in this land of blond and red-headed warriors, her dreams were haunted by a man with dark hair, coming undone from its binding, a few strands blowing across his cheek. Moreover, she found herself largely unmoved by the massively muscled body of a man strong enough to tame a wild stallion, and carry a lance while wearing full armour. Again, her dreams told of a man who was lithe and lean, not a muscle more than he needed for the wiry strength his body held. And when the men, in their cups, boasted in song of their own exploits, she found herself imagining a man with a dry wit and self-deprecating sense of humour. The sort of man who would allow her to laugh at him, so long as he knew she was happy to return the favour. The sort of man who could be a fool for love, and allow her to be a fool too.
But soon, all thoughts of courtship and even the soft caresses of her dreams had to be buried deep within her, never to be acknowledged, like a camp fire covered with turfs at the rumour of enemy scouts. The king's counsellor, Gríma, haunted her footsteps, and she no longer felt safe. She took to sleeping with her dagger beneath her pillow, and even went so far as to set up a cot in her room for her maid to sleep in. Soon even during the daylight hours she found herself trying to ensure she was never alone.
Gríma's evil influence affected her brother too, and it broke her heart to watch it. She had a sense, half remembered, of an easier life while they grew up, one where he grew into a gentle giant of a man, brave and decent, but friendly and open, with a ready laugh. Gríma's court (for in truth it was Gríma's court, not Théoden King's) turned him in on himself, mistrustful, guarded, cautious with people. He remained brave and decent at heart, but now a smile was rarely seen on his lips. And he became quick to anger. Most worryingly, when angry, his judgement was not always as good as it might have been. She feared for him. He was (perhaps without even realising it) engaged in a dangerous game with a master manipulator, one who did not lose his own temper, but fed on the emotions of others to further his own aims.
When the Steward of Gondor's eldest son passed through Edoras on his journey north, she was struck by a wave of familiarity. He reminded her strongly of someone she thought she had once known, though how, hidden in the remote farmhouse near the Mering Stream, she would have encountered any Gondorian nobles, was beyond her. At the same time, he was familiar and yet not so – he seemed to prompt in her a yearning, but not for him. For a brief moment, a half imagined fairy tale resurfaced in her mind, of a quieter, gentler man, yet one of unbending strength, one she could trust, not to protect her from the world, but to stand beside her as an equal as they faced the world together. She shook her head and put such foolishness from her mind.
The brief visit seemed to spark something in her mind, for from then on her vague dreams of a lithe, dark haired man took on a more solid form, giving her a more detailed picture. Sometimes he was simply there as a solid, reassuring presence, gentle and kind, sometimes she woke with immense feelings of merriment, sometimes he made her laugh (unlike the grim, unflinching warriors she was surrounded by, this man did not seem to take himself seriously). Sometimes he sparred with her in her dreams, paying her the respect of giving no quarter. Sometimes they would fight side by side against unknown enemies. And sometimes she woke, fevered with desire, acutely aware that she had just had a dream no maiden should have, of a degree of vividness no maiden should be able to conjure.
But these dreams were at odds with her daytime existence. Gríma redoubled his efforts – she found herself fending off endless attempts to catch her alone in the quiet antechambers and lonely passageways of the palace, and more than once she came upon Gríma whispering to Théoden King that surely his sister-daughter was to be kept as a precious jewel to be bestowed upon a lord on whose council the king could depend. It was done subtly. The worm was clearly playing a long game. He never explicitly said that he was the man he wished the king to consider. But when Théoden responded by suggesting nobles who might be worthy of Éowyn's hand, one by one, Gríma ruled out various alternatives… too old, too reckless, too rash, too distant from Edoras. The man she needed, he hinted, was one who had the king's ear, and who would not prevent her from nursing her beloved uncle in his dotage. And in the dark passages, Gríma would drop hints directly to her that even if the king could not be talked round, it would only take the smallest of changes in fortunes in the Mark to gift him the power to force her hand without the king's say-so.
This campaign of slow but inexorable attrition scared her so much that she even asked Éomer to list those of his comrades of sufficiently noble standing that Théoden might consider them a suitable match. A marriage of convenience to a man whom her brother could vouch for as a decent and honourable soldier was preferable to a forced marriage to the worm. She might dream of a man with grey eyes and dark hair who would fight by her side, but dreams, she was increasingly coming to realise, would not protect her in her waking hours. She even contemplated a dalliance with a merchant or squire, in fact any man whom she deemed to be kind and respectable and hard working. In the best scenario, she would fall with child and force her protectors to agree to a marriage; even if she did not, at least she would have the memory of lying with a man of her choosing before the worm could force her. Then she would find herself close to tears because nagging in her head would be a voice that said but it should be so much more than this… And she would brush the tears away angrily, because however real her dreams seemed, they remained just dreams.
Those odd feelings of familiarity she had had when Boromir rode through Edoras resurfaced when another man of Numenor came to the Golden Hall. The mysterious stranger was indeed tall, dark-haired, with grey eyes - her brother had found him, in the unlikely company of an Elf and a Dwarf, hunting orcs on the rolling green plains of the Eastfold. This time, the sense of familiarity was stronger, and for a while she fancied herself in love. At last, here was a man to whom she could give herself, who would save her, who would offer her status and renown. (At the back of her mind, a voice nagged gently that this too was not what she sought; she needed a man who would treat her as simply a fellow soldier, not a man who stood like a statue of an ancient king upon a pedestal. The voice told her that she should seek the man she had dreamt of, who could make her laugh. But again, worn down by war and the shadow and Gríma's presence, she dismissed that voice as idle fancy.)
The illusion of love was sufficiently strong that when the man of Numenor spurned not just her love but her status as a warrior by taking the paths of the dead with his male companions and leaving her behind, she dressed herself in her brother's old gear and hid among Elfhelm's Eored, taking the road south to the battlefield and death.
As she rode, words came to her: here stands one who desires to defend this land, the people and the ground. She now knew them to be from the lay of the Battle of Celebrant, but when she thought of them, she always heard them in her head, not in the voice of the king's bard, but in a different voice. A warm, gentle baritone, the voice of a scholar, the voice of one who spoke the Tongue of the Mark as a foreigner, who halted slightly, whose different vowel sounds gave it an exotic tinge. And again, she felt that strange yearning, the yearning she had mistaken for love in the case of Aragorn.
~o~O~o~
In Ithilien, Faramir fought on two fronts: both the enemies of his land, in mortal combat; and the councils of his father, with carefully chosen words (councils in which he had increasingly less faith as time went on). The brilliance of his father's tactics continued undiminished, but Faramir feared that the tactics were being increasingly pressed into the service of a strategy which had a central flaw. And still he, too, got flashes of a past life.
There was, for instance, the day when he took a gash to his leg. As the corporal who had taken over as company healer stitched it (while Faramir bit down on a chunk of wood), again he had a vision, one so vivid it almost took the pain away. No coherence to it – but images sparking against his closed lids, of a woman with grey-blue eyes and dark lashes and long golden hair, crawling through the dust of a far distant desert to tend the wounded. Then later, as he lay fevered and in pain, for a moment he was comforted by the sensation, almost real, of golden hair flowing round him like water. Gradually, over the weeks and months, this image became almost his constant companion and comfort. Osgiliath fell. The vision of that golden hair flowing round both of them was his last conscious thought when the Southron dart pierced his side upon that ill-fated retreat.
~o~O~o~
On the battlefield, as she faced the dark shadowy king, his cold crown glittering above nothingness, his robes tattered, as he rose from the wreck of his fell steed, Éowyn brought to bear all she knew of the art of the sword, and more, knowledge she sensed she had hidden within her. When her shield arm was shattered, somehow she knew to hold her sword in a high guard, and a voice – that same warm baritone voice – said to protect her legs. And somehow, when that small hand reached up from where he lay on the ground, among the fallen, and stabbed the fell king behind the knee, she knew exactly how best to take advantage of the way he staggered, and she thrust her sword home.
As she fell to the ground, her shield arm in agony, her sword arm simply… numb, dead, her last thought was of dark hair escaping from its braid and blowing in the wind.
~o~O~o~
When Faramir turned and saw her in the garden of the Houses of Healing, the sight of her flowing gold hair came to him as if from his recurring dream, like an ancient friend. And when he told her that he had seen flowers fair, and maidens fairer, but none as fair as she, it was as if he had already said those words to her in a past life. And as if he knew that the winning of her would not be easy, but that it would bring joy beyond price.
She looked at him, and saw the lithe, strong figure of her dreams… and panicked. She would not make that mistake again. Not the same mistake as Aragorn, the mistake that had taken her so close to death.
But slowly, over the days that followed, he calmed that panic, gentled her, most of all, made her laugh for the first time in so, so long. Treated her as his equal, talked with her, listened to her. Sang to her, recited poetry (this made her laugh, so incongruous a picture it painted). Promised that when they were both well, he would spar with her. (Would he be skilful? She wondered. Or fast? Certainly, if his quick wits and lightning repartee were anything to go by, he would be tricky. But then, so too could she if she chose.)
Eventually a day came when he spoke plainly of his love, and asked her to marry him, and she realised that this was right, this was the man she loved, this was the man she had waited for.
And he took her in his arms and kissed her under the sunlit sky, and he cared not that they stood high upon the walls in the sight of many.
~o~O~o~
AN:As always, thanks to all who have taken the time to review! (Especially those not logged in who I can't PM individually).
For those of you who want to know what half-remembered something or other sparked Faramir's song game, it is of course "One song to the tune of another" from that Radio 4 classic, I'm sorry I haven't a clue. Google Graeme Garden singing "killing me softly with his song" to the tune of the can can to get a sense of how it goes!
As I said in the tags on AO3, this is all about "Having one's authorial cake and eating it." It's choose your own ending time…
If you like the idea of them living happily ever after as Prince and Princess of Ithilien you can stop here (safe in the knowledge that in this version Éowyn will remember the concept of the hypocaust from school history lessons, and insist one gets installed in the newly rebuilt Emyn Arnen, along with chimneys and ideally indoor plumbing).
If, on the other hand, you think Éowyn yearns for a world where she can be herself (and stop smelling of wet dog), and Faramir yearns for Radio Three, I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, hot showers, comfortable (and capacious) double beds and central heating, then read on…
TBC