OSDIZ- The skill of the seed
Thank you Weliann, Stahly93, Angie, cyndiag, citadela and anon guest for your feedback this week. So grateful to have you as readers.
Dwarrow Scholar lists the word "osdiz" as referring to seed in both the grain/crop sense and the reproductive sense, which is fitting, because I think this will really serve as a metaphor for what Meisar is feeling about her own fertility as the months go on. I did a bit of research on hanging gardens and with the Lonely Mountain as a reference space (both as presented by the films and as described by Tolkien), I think the concept I was going for might work. I agree that dwarves growing crops, even on a small scale, is strange and daunting, but that's part of what makes it interesting to speculate about. On one side, they're an insular culture that I could see jumping at any chance to be more self-sufficient. OTOH their habits and customs are dug in deep and cultivating food isn't one of them. I guess that's the push-and-pull they're going to have to contend with.
When morning came, there was no sound to disrupt the cocoon of sleep and of the drawn bed-curtains, no mindless, endless clattering in their antechamber of the maidservants or their households and councils.
The furs were drawn up to her shoulders and covered Thorin to just under the pits of his arms. He lay snoring face down into edge of his pillow, a sleep that could only have been had after a long journey where rest was scarce and less comfortable than one's own bed.
Even when one's own bed held his queen also, ever needful. But to him, in her own words, she could never say just how. As needful of his mere presence as the work of his seed. When he woke, in the middle of the night, she stirred him with her hand so that sleep would not conquer him again and he would have her, again. Before the sounds of the morning began to filter in, they had thrice been joined.
And still it felt like wanting him all over again, the pining that she had last felt on the hard ground of the Great East Road, when she could not have him at all. All she wanted was to touch him...
Hair veiled his sleeping face messily. She lay her head upon his back just below his shoulder blade and absorbed he slow thump of his heart. She lay half-awake and listened to him sleep, possessively. Her head on his back seemed to keep him soothed and snoring. She relaxed into the heady scent of his hair, spilling over the naked expanse of his upper back.
So long as he slept he belonged to her. His body and his comfort and his need.
Eyes drifted open wearily to find her at his side, threading sleep-knotted hair gently through her fingers. The straining corner of his eye felt her kiss, feather-like at its edge, her gentle plume of breath unwinding down his jawline. She kissed brows and hairline, kneading his shoulder in her fingertips. A sound escaped him almost reminiscent of a boar's snort.
"I did not mean to wake you," she said, apologetically.
Thorin rolled and turned her over to lie on her back. He had slept a few hours without interruption and seemed refreshed. Leaning over her, his hair sprinkled at her cheeks. This pure, exuberant, wanton joy. How in the morning now she could be as sore and as slick for him as the first night they bedded together. He had been away too long, and the previous night had not afforded either of them much in the way of sleep. She secretly pondered whether it was his absence that made the possessiveness and the desire in her for his company alone grow so strong her fingers urged to pull him back, keep him there by her side. As if they were still paupers in a long-lost exile, roosting like pigeons together under the eaves of an old house, unnoticed, with no care in the world except the warmth of the moment.
As he lay on his back she rolled again in tandem with him, draped herself intently over the length of his body, his left arm cast back in a careless sort of restfulness over his head, leaving the other free to wrap around the small of her back and draw her close. Her arm slid up to hold fast against his neck, feeling the quiet pulse of the vein there, the line of sinew on his throat, all the life thrumming through him.
He stirred lightly with the coverlets twisted around both of their hips, holding them together. "I would not have been imparted of it my queen, but it seems you have an admirer in the Lord of Dale." He murmured sleepy kisses into her temple. "He is tenacious indeed, coming to my kingdom when I am absent it."
"It was not for no cause." She parsed her forehead over his chin, the bristles stirring a ricochet of needful tingling from there to her feet.
"Indeed," Thorin seemed to quip.
Beneath them the bed groaned long and loud as she scooted herself over and close to him, pressing flush her lush breasts and belly to his hard sinewy front. There seemed no lightness to it; it was all hunger and acute movements that drew her body to his again. "Does that offend you, my husband?"
He nudged her shoulder back so that she lay on her side and he could face her, his elbow propped up pensively on the pillow-top, her cheek retreating to rest on her own, covered in a tendril of hair come loose from her braid. The fingers considered her skin, playing on her shoulder. He ran their tips lightly over her body, each path his fingers made new and wonderful. "No," he said finally. "But I err toward a lack of trust in him still. He was Thranduil's chess piece, ever willing to thieve upon our heirlooms at his behest."
"You assume Bard can be as easily moved around?"
"Unless you can tell me differently," Thorin said with a suspicious sharpness.
The edge to his tone was met with Meisar flinging back the furs and rising edgily from the bed, crossing the room to the writing desk. He found himself quite savoring the indignant way her sumptuous backside jiggled. Glaring back at him, she yanked on the long negligee she had discarded over the chair the previous night before pawing through the stacks on the desk.
"Siv records all official meetings word for word," Meisar assured, passing a thick stack of parchment toward Thorin, standing off the side of the bed, arms crossed and hard-eyed. "No secrets, my love."
He thinks he is to be availed of an easier audience in me, but he was wrong... mostly. That is no secret.
"None," Thorin agreed, apologetically. He gazed at her in her slightly opaque robe that showed the every curve of her, the faint fire of her burning-bush through the pale muslin. "Would you return?" he requested, pushing aside the rumpled covers on her side of the bed and clearing a space for her. "I miss your company already."
Her arms dropped with a relenting sigh. "I miss yours also." She sat back down on the bed in a quiet surrender. How ardently she wished to be completely yielding. Thorin sat up behind her and laid his chin upon her shoulder, the bristles of his beard prodding through the muslin intently. Fingers curling lovingly around the side of her throat from behind rotated her head to kiss.
"You are far more diplomatic than I. I trust in your judgement."
My judgement? I miss you every second you are apart from me with such a fire Thorin. It burns me. Needful, needful woman. Fool.
"So you'd think," she answered, less enthused. "Surely the council has availed you of the current situation. I spoke with Bard privately truth be known. He is uncertain of where the restlessness in these lands originates. But the lifespans of men do not always let them see the rhythms of this world the way we do. I told him as much. He praises my wisdom, but the praises of men do little to flatter me."
"The Iron Hills will send a hundred west to us, with a train of provisions as gratitude, in spite of Bard's... caution," Thorin reclined and took her back to rest with him again. "They suspect more will arrive with summer. This I know. And of your ideas. The Brotherhood of Stone are considering it very closely."
"Is it an undue notion?"
A serene, whimsical look she found as uncanny as ever came about his face, smoothing the lines at his forehead it seemed so pleasant a thought that entered him. He nuzzled his forehead to hers and pressed it gently. "In the Shire, my darling, there was such joy and pride about things that grew. I found it a soothing pastime to be a part of the hauling of the corn and of the pumpkins in the autumn, so I think it not a bad concept for a dwarf to become acquainted with the simple joy of it." He pushed the film of muslin away from her left bosom and kissed it. "It is truly a radiant thing, the life that is in this earth."
"I would that other things were imbued with life, Thorin. But for the good of the kingdom, I will do what I must in its absence. Is not spring the time of life renewed? Should not green blessings rain upon me also, as they do upon the earth? I fear I cannot-"
"Many green blessings will come, and you will show the dwarves of Erebor how to make them grow. They may find it odd at first, but if lean times come to the world of men, they will thank you for it, heartily."
"That wasn't what I meant, Thorin."
He could see the muscles in her throat tense. "Then we should save this talk for the duties that come with the day," he soothed. "This is our time now, my queen."
"If only… all the time could be ours." Meisar lay still and serene if weightily in body and in soul (it seemed so, inexplicably so), upon him, her heavy lids drawn to a close. The peak of her forehead nestled against his chin, her entire upper body swathed over his chest. She paid homage to the thick line of his collarbone with ephemeral, unguided kisses. Thorin gently rubbed her back, more soothing than needful.
"Dearest Meisar, I would have nothing else but time. If only I were young again, a king in exile, that I would have spied you in the Blue Mountains and fallen in love with you then. But time, mizimel, is ours now." He was trying to assure her of something, but he wasn't sure quite what. There was a melancholy way she fingered the bead in his braid. He gave bearded pinpricks of kisses to the bridge of her nose. "Speaking of time, were not the Brotherhood of Stone to meet you in their chambers?"
Meisar let a quick mercurial puff of breath against his neck. "They tell me they are always late."
"I have heard that also."
"Of all the duties in the world that are now mine to fulfill, I consider none more important than the one that keeps me by your side."
"Then I shall not leave you again, if it can be helped."
"Find a way to help it," she said, without a hint of playfulness.
Thorin sighed into the pillow of her chest. "I shall, for the labor of the travel is theirs next. The young lord Stonehelm wishes nothing more than to embrace you as his good aunt. He tells me that there is none he would rather call kin than the one who has brought my life and my happiness back to me."
"I would bring so much more to you than that," she sighed, deeply. The young lord was not his emissaries. Perhaps he spoke his heart to his own kin and namesake, if none other. "But if I cannot do so, I would best make myself useful in other ways." Some magnetism seemed to fuse her in his arms, but fighting it every inch, she pulled away and opened the bed curtains to the day.
.
The chambers of the Niddînaban, in the guild-hall quarter, were much as they were: important and willing to display it, but almost intentionally without ostentation. Their guild-hall was larger than those of other guilds in spite of their smaller size, but sparsely decorated, stacked from floor to ceiling in their volumes against one wall, some of the books as tall as wide as they were. When Meisar arrived she felt assured of her timeliness; the Brothers seemed to scramble ahead of her to place their drawing boards out on the enormous stone table that dominated the chamber. Siv trailed her with her arms full of empty parchment.
The white-headed guild superior, Audun, was two-hundred and thirty years of age but moved with a strength and swiftness from one apprentice to the next, laying out their plans just so. His knees didn't crack like Balin's when he bent to kiss her ringed hand in greeting. Audun, other dwarves, including Balin, had whispered to her directly or indirectly, was more akin to reckoning with new ideas than even the younger of his guild-brothers. Directly under him were Felman, Nyi, and a very stocky and gruff construction captain appropriately named Bildr, whether at birth or not even the queen dare not inquire. The apprentices were lads, several at least, but their faces changed often enough with the Brotherhood's assessment and re-assessment of their skill.
"When you first summoned us, my queen, I believed your hesitation in proposing what you did came from a notion that what you desired was too complex too pursue. You overestimated the complexity of such a project. Especially in light of what it has taken to restore the damage done this kingdom by that wretched Smaug," Audun pontificated. His tone was both cheery and stentorian; perhaps it was condescending. Meisar blinked in silence toward him.
"I certainly have not been an engineer in my lifetime, enough to say what was complex or not in its art."
"Nor am I or any other dwarf I know for gardening, if you'll beg my pardon, your majesty," Bildr added.
Audun smiled, more auspiciously. "The restorations on several manses that remained to be repaired have been completed, thus freeing our time and our labor to other pursuits. Though my colleague is correct in pronouncing a garden a queer pursuit indeed, I rather like the idea. I've decided to take this up. Come, majesty, and see this which we have drawn, roughly."
The apprentices laid out the enormous drawing paper on the table for their view. Audun took his pointer and directed Meisar's attention. "Ascending steps with trenches six-foot deep or so, for the soil deposit, carved into the side of the mountain here, with staircases along either side for access," he pointed on the elaborate drawing of the mountain's façade. "Pulleys here, able to bear considerable weight in raising soil or lowering excess stone, and utilizing the flow of the water to do so, which is also convenient to quench the… plants." The edge of the last word sat stickily on the dwarf's tongue.
"A number of dwarves still seek work, many of them new to the city. The mines are not quite what they used to be after all. We could prioritize their labor," Nyi suggested.
"I have been giving this great thought, and providing that your majesty may provide us some guidance in certain matters, I would like to begin soon. It is not a terribly complex engineering feat. Only the utilization of this... terraced garden, is the more daunting task. I will rely on you, majesty, to say which can and cannot be grown in such a setting."
Meisar traced a finger over the drawn path that led up the front gates, their proud warriors refurnished, ever watchful. "I had a stone hovel once, and a garden. Till the soil properly you will have potatoes, carrots, leeks and pumpkins for fall, grapes if the summer is hot and dry. We could have strawberries and blackberries, blueberries, by this very summer."
"Our queen is a farmer, is she? Peculiar," remarked Felman.
"A dwarf who wishes to survive coming winters is peculiar?" she said sharply back. "It may be unconventional I know, but if becomes a necessity, you shall be glad for it."
"I mean no untoward word, my queen," Felman protested, ruffled. "I suppose it could be practical. After all, we need nourish ourselves. And if Bard of Dale will not..."
"He did not quite promise that, and certainly not out of ill will. But we are better prepared than not. I promise you good sir you shall see it worth your effort," Meisar assured him more gently. "I take it we will meet again to be certain of these plans?"
Audun offered her another courteous bow. "Expecting that your majesty can procure the funds, we can begin at any time."
.
"Emli, I am going to need your assistance imminently on something," Meisar entered her antechamber intently. The dwarrowdams were gathered, idly. Siv was rubbing Freyda's hands with the lotion she had nicked from Rivendell in her bodice. The air in the chamber was perfumed with jasmine. Freyda's forge-callouses were splitting on the heel of her palm.
"Naturally," Emli perked up, haughtily.
"The Brotherhood of Stone have agreed to take up a project of mine. The funds however, are my duty. Or yours, perhaps," Meisar said.
"A project? What sort of project?"
"Hanging gardens on the mountainside. To procure some of our food. I will supervise it closely."
"You don't say," remarked Aroin. "Never heard of such a thing."
"They can begin as soon as the funds are procured for the labor. It is April. We will need to plant for the summer crop soon. What can you do, Emli?"
Emli flexed her fingers over a stack of silver coinage. "I am certain my powers of persuasion may move the necessary metals. I have a very gaudy necklace, all diamonds, which I wish to be parted with, for a sumptuous price also, and there are buyers, my queen."
"My gratitude to you, Emli, is ever eternal," Meisar said, rubbing her shoulders from behind. "Alas, that is only a part of it. I will need all of you ladies. As of this day, each of you will earn your place in this household. Idle times shall be no more."
A groan from a few of them piqued her sudden irksomeness. "This household is a queen's household. We have a kingdom to run. We have much to do. We must do all that…"
"There's something off-kilter 'bout ye Meisar," Eda remarked. "You are rather intense, my lady."
"The only thing off-kilter, Eda, is what seems to be happening around this kingdom, and beyond. First my husband must leave for the Iron Hills on this business, and now it comes to us. I shall not be idle. I shall not... there is much I wish to provide this kingdom with. That which I have control over I would..."
"My dear queen, what ails you?" Eda pleaded again, concerned.
"Many come to us, and this project of mine is not the only business we will have to attend to," she said officiously, shrugging Eda off with a flick of her shoulders. "I am arranging this household officially from now on, with duties for each of you according to your strength."
"Fair enough," Freyda agreed, shrugging. Eda wrapped her palms in bandages soaked in a minty ointment.
"Eda, Virta," Meisar directed. "It is reported that there is a shortage of healers. With an increase in population we will need more. I put it to you two to recruit any dwarf with a skill in the healing arts, and to see to training those who wish to become part of the guild. The king has already assured that Oin will be a part of this effort as well."
"Can't hurt," Eda agreed, cheerfully. "Only heal."
"Brynja, you are the tenderest-hearted of all my ladies. You must counsel the new arrivals, assess their needs, speak with them, see where their strengths can be utilized under this mountain. I encourage you to prod them toward contributions in the gardens. We could use any and all hands which are not engaged at current in their own craft. Even the most suspicious tribes will be warmed by your simple grace and decency."
"Thank you, my queen," the young dwarrowdam gushed under her simple braids.
"Freyda and Gyda- the skill of your hands at your crafts will serve you well. I am assigning you to be ambassadors to the guilds which your skills represent. See that they are kept provided for their needs in their work."
"So many things. Perhaps it is best if you ease your mind and body and consider... well, at least one other thing," Emli intoned quietly. "You're going to exhaust yourself otherwise."
"Do you think I do not think of that constantly?" Meisar snapped back. Emli jumped a good yard from her chair, to Aroin's pointed amusement.
"Is it the pains from… has it come again? I'll fix you some remedy for the aches," Eda offered cautiously.
"No, thank you," Meisar answered with a returning patience. "But alas it has come every month, and I expect it will again."
The silence was terse and readable in the room.
"I shan't worry about that, love," Eda counseled. "You've only been married a few short months. Dwarves are stubborn, even in their coming to be."
"The way nature works I thought it might be quicker," Meisar confided unhappily.
"You are all of... 160?" Eda's face settled into an awkward line when the number slipped past her lips. "Plenty of time. Well, time anyway. Shan't worry, my queen."
"Aye, and look at Brynja. You think Bofur can keep his hands off of her? She's got none yet either," Virta ribbed.
"Certainly cannot keep his hands off, or other limbs," Brynja blushed, lowering her head. The dwarrowdams all giggled. "No babe for me yet, though I hope for one, and give Yavanna my devotions in hopin' I might be blessed." She leaned over and touched Meisar's shoulder comfortingly. "I keep you in my devotions equally, Meisar."
"Sweet girl," Meisar leaned her cheek onto the back of Brynja's hand.
"Mahal has made you for each other, and for a cause. Sometimes, knowing the impatience of we dwarves, He makes us wait, to teach us a lesson about the nature of the world, I suppose," Emli counseled, more calmly.
"Well I think it's right fair what the queen wishes us to be about if there isn't a dwarfling to come now," Brynja piped up. "After all, if this isn't the home of all dwarves who wish it to be, what are we? Take care of our own, isn't the lady princess right?"
"We may be of the same Creator's hand and speak a common tongue, but see if you can't get the Ironfists and the Stiffbeards from being at each other's throats if they're going to be under the same stone here," Aroin murmured dispiritedly.
"What 'bout me?" Siv finally whined. "Did'ja forget already 'bout Siv?"
She smiled and tucked the flyaway hair of Siv's back into its peak. "All the same, Siv, my good scribe, all the same for you. You and I will be spending much quality time together."
.
The relentless clack and clang of digging and the occasional clearing blast on the mountainside went ever on for days and days once Emli had cajoled the vaults to open to her cause, days turning into weeks. From the gate, she watched shifts of dwarves go up and down in droves, ever diligent. They were at home in the stone, with their mattocks and hammers. She hoped fertile soil might be as welcomed to their working hands. Cleared stone came down at all hours in mining buckets, turned by the power of the falls near-side.
She was afraid the constant racket and occasional rattle of a blast would disturb the dwarves inside the city. But she found that aside from sloshing Donbur's great soup pots at his cart, or frightening the occasional dwarfling, it was nothing they were not accustomed to, after the restoration efforts, anyway. She went daily to the site to gauge its progress, sitting patiently while she was hauled up to the higher terraces in a mining bucket while the steps and ladders were carved out on either side. The dwarves working the site peered over and were agog at the sight of their queen calmly unfolding herself and climbing out to greet them as if she had just been unpacked whole from a parcel. Bildr had become more akin to her presence and brought a blanket for her to line the bucket lest rock dust get on her clothes by the end of the first week. He offered his hand to help her stand again.
The terraces themselves were carved into the swell of rock jutting from the mountain to the right of the front facade, waterfall just left of the project, and the rise of the spur due right was low, so the sun could spill over it. Audun and Nyi were quite pleased by the geological luck of it. The gardens could not be build at the ground level so dwarves would have to climb or be conveyed up, but it was a small price to pay for the efficiency of the space. The people of Dale came to watch the progress from the terrain below. They scavenged the spared rock and carted it back to the city to keep up the walls. It was a trade they all understood.
.
At the end of April, when the ground was softened from the spring rains that came ever quenching down for days on end, they rode east. When she and Thorin went to the Great Hall of Dale with Emli and Gloin to negotiate with the farmers for a share of their soil, there were no farmers. But Bard was there. Four farms to the east were abandoned. The soil and the seed were theirs for the taking. The spare rock from the terraces was payment enough. He glanced out the window at the rising wall that looked out over the east.
They set out the next morning before dawn with seventy wagons, two hundred Broadbeams and their coal shovels. Blacklocks, Ironfists and Stonefoots, forty each, rode armored rams with weapons displayed and the royal banners raised. Meisar rode a goat also, being swifter and fiercer than a pony. Thorin would not allow her leave otherwise, without a strong guard of the fiercest clans and five Blacklock spear-men, and Oliada. The goat felt like solid muscle beneath her. A war beast.
Letting his greatest treasure into the world, she supposed, was like sending her to war. She had let him go and now it was his turn, if only for a day. Fred, Raincloud and Redcoat held back and trailed them, noses to the ground. Their senses of the world were not like hers, too ground into their natures to fade it seemed. She could still trust in them.
The first farmland they came to lay un-planted, the rich scent of earth coming up out of the ground itself, impregnated by rain. Meisar came down from the goat and let the hounds lead her around the perimeter of the field. They yowled as they did when they smelled orc on the ground.
Oliada's throat convulsed ahead of ululating in warning, drawing her spear, but Meisar pulled Orcrist from its scabbard and the blade was silver, not blue. Her heart dropped into her stomach, settled, and seemed to lift again in relief.
"It is orc, indeed," Meisar said quietly. "Long gone, but they were here."
Behind her, Siv was already dispatching a message back to Erebor with the raven they had brought in its cage.
Dwarves gathered their shovels from the wagon beds and poked at the fallow ground. Shovel blades wrenched into the earth and began to pile the dirt around in timid mounds. The way it crumbled and sifted and fell through all seemed foreign to mattocks, hammers and shovels used to harder substances.
"Help me, Siv," she said, finally. "Take my cloak." Siv had just flung the cloak back over the saddle of her goat when Meisar tossed the heavy extant robe to her also, the velvet outer petticoat, so that she was at ease in her kirtle, bodice and inner petticoats of simple linen.
"My queen, what in Mahal's name?" Siv fanned herself, shoulders exposed in her green spring gown, still showing gooseflesh in the cool spring air. She hopped after Meisar with the garments in her arms. "I brought me feather fan if you're over-heated," she said, half-desperately.
"I cannot sit on my goat in dotage while they labor all the day and ruin the topsoil," she said, determinedly to Siv. "I must find a shovel. See if one of the Broadbeams over there have an extra one."
Siv obeyed with reluctance and came back dragging the handle of a shovel behind her in her fingertips, bopping the metal edge over the pebbled ground at the edge of the farm field. "You're mad, my queen. Knew it from the day you tried to gouge me poor eyes out."
"Well you shouldn't have gone flapping your mouth about things that are not your business. And now you are amongst my foremost ladies. So give me the shovel, please."
"Like you always are tellin' me. You're gon'to get a reputation, my queen," Siv quipped.
When she looked up again she realized they were all staring at her, fixing extant garments over the rump of the goat. "Already have one, I'm afraid, for better or worse, Siv." Meisar took her place at the end of a line of dwarves eagerly digging, wrenching the bodice upward with the sides of her arms as subtly as possible. Only Thorin would ever know how lush, how sumptuous and pink and warm she was underneath there, Thorin and only Thorin. The thought of him loosened her grasp briefly on the handle; she could not afford to be a hostage of her own furious, possessive desire, not now. But want, I do. Only him.
Wretched woman, when did you ever need anyone but yourself?
The Broadbeam with the puffy bearded cheeks beside her gazed incredulously at the sight, removing his woolen hat to dip a bow. "My queen?"
"Master dwarf, I wish to join you in your labors if it is not repellent to you. Might I show you something?" She gently took and guided the shovel of his in her hand and turned the soil sideways then upside down, mixing it as if it were ingredients in a bowl.
"As the queen under the mountain commands," the dwarf acquiesced. All down the line they were dipping in bemused curtsies that went in a jagged wave until the end was reached. Dwarves across from her in the other digging line whispered. She mashed and turned the soil under the blades of her shovel as if the encouragement of the movement could itself propel the dirt to fertility, like she had done in her little garden all those years before. She instructed the dwarves in the voice that had once raised sleeping bodies from a campground with orcs leagues away and whipping their wargs. But kinder, patient. Maternal. 'Amdul.
If I could propel myself somehow too. If Mahal would see my good intent, my will to make life wherever I can. Grant me life, my Creator, his bride Yavanna. Let us both be the givers of fruits.
"Like this," she explained. The Broadbeam followed her movement precisely and passed it to the next dwarf down the line. Soon coal shovels all down the line and into the next ones strategically pierced the top soil a hundred times over and churned it, cutting across and down before it was scooped up and deposited in the wagon beds. Seeds that were left were collected and placed in pouches. Carrots and potatoes; their roots came up sometimes with the dirt.
"Why does our gracious queen labor as a common dwarf in these places with us?" the Broadbeam finally inquired, timidly.
"Perhaps at my very core I am as common as you are and hardly too haughty," she sighed after a consideration. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Siv pretending to look busy, watching the hounds go about their movement, still ever hostile to her, clawing at her skirts. Shall Mahal look upon me favorably for my humility or chastise me for rejecting my queenly duty? She gave the dwarf beside her a reassuring glance as she wiped her forehead of cool perspiration, as moist as rain on her skin by now. "And because one shovel is one more, and I would like us to be back on the road to Erebor before dusk."
"Did we forget lanterns?"
"No," she assured quietly. "Only a precaution, my friend."
.
There had been whispers all over the city of the strange project the queen had commissioned, of her with a coal shovel in hand hauling dirt in one layer above under-linen, whispers that were shunted back to a place of lesser importance the second week of May, when the first tide came in. Dwarves arrived in numbers of a hundred or more from the Iron Hills as expected, but there were more Stonefoots too.
They set up camp in one of the old treasure halls that the first wave of Stonefoots had vacated, by Brynja's efforts found housing in the quarters newly completed in the disused mines. Brynja was hustling, ordering pallets and blankets again, negotiating with the Great Kitchens to keep them fed. Siv tailed Meisar to daily meetings with the Brotherhood of Stone and the provisions offices, too afraid of Oliada still to cause much mischief, other than when Nori came and conveyed her at midday like clockwork for stolen kisses in the nooks behind forefathers' stone forms.
Stiffbeards driven from the White Mountains milled in the foyers, sweating in their winter furs. They wore yak bones around their necks and quarreled with the Ironfists, who resented being under the mountain amongst Durin's Folk just as strongly, but had seen poorer times in the Orocarni's northern ranges where they dwelt. Poorer times and darker days, the lone woman who came with their train had said to Meisar herself, veiled face clinquant with silver coin beads. Her eyes, like Oliada's, were narrow, dark and harsh but the dwarrowdam held Meisar's hands quietly, pleadingly in her own until her kinsman called for her, glaring.
Thorin was busy from sunup to sundown dealing with their numbers, adjudicating their disputes, budgeting for work and sustenance in addition to that of the rest of the kingdom while Bard tried to keep the grain at even keel in coming in as the summer opened.
"I have found many o' the Eastern kind willing to offer their labors in the hanging gardens, though they find it most peculiar, except for the Stonefoots," Brynja reported. "Tryin' to explain to them what it is we are trying to do... they're not much for the natural world if it don't involve stone or gems, and the Stiffbeards and the Ironfists among them can be very disagreeable toward cooperating with Durin's Folk. Luckily I am a Broadbeam, and we get along with most everyone," she smiled.
"How many refugees, Brynja?" Emli inquired.
"Two hundred. Seen men coming to the gates of Dale all ragged too. Less numbers than dwarves, but no better appearing."
"We plant this week," Meisar said. "We plant this week and by summer's first days we shall see the fruits of our labor, I hope. I shall supervise. If my absence perturbs any of you, come to me."
"It is arduous laboring digging in the dirt, bent over like a old crone. Your... feminine workings... may believe you to be so," cautioned Aroin.
"Nonsense," countered Eda. "Vigorous activity bespeaks the lady's strength and bearing. A dwarven mother must be robust in her energies. The body does not reward dotage."
"Nor does it reward overwork, a woman's way," Aroin protested again.
"I am a healer, Mistress Aroin, tending on dwarven mothers long years. I think I would know," Eda snapped.
"Let us not argue this now," Meisar admonished them both. The possibility of either stung like a slap.
.
"For you," Dis said, presenting her with a brimmed hat made of straw, strands of ribbon woven in, whimsically. "Ibrizbundnekad. You'll be needing it, trust me."
She plunked the hat playfully on Meisar's head as she dressed. A simple blue dress was laid out on the bed, front-laced bodice, a linen apron of woven fabric with tiny gray flowers sprinkled over it. Dis sat on the bed and examined the peculiar garments; the dress she had saved from her earlier days, along with the green traveling dress and tartan cloak, though the ratty tunics were long discarded. "I hear you will be up in the gardens guiding the Ironfists and Stonefoots in the work of growing strawberries and carrots. With everything else to concern yourself in that situation, you'll not want a burn on your face. Your skin has become so lovely."
"Being under this mountain constantly will do that," she smiled back at her. "Supposing we all need fresh air sometimes, maybe it will do some good."
"You impress me so, sister."
"How so?" Meisar adjusted the floppy hat on herself in the mirror; it curved low into her eyes.
"With your initiative of course," Dis answered serenely.
"I did not expect it to be so far received. We are hardly growers."
"Exile taught us some of it, and the Stonefoots fish and harvest mushrooms at the very least. I am very much inclined to self-sufficiency though, so much as we can do so. One never knows when it may be all we have to rely on."
Dis was helping her lace the back of her dress when Aroin came blustering in search of at least one of them.
"Good gracious, what are you wearing?" Aroin inquired. Meisar smoothed the apron down over the front of her dress, awkwardly, which came to her shins, and the sleeves left her arms bare to above the elbow. Her feet were also bare except for summer shoes, thatched straw and leather, purchased from the cellar market. Dwarves wore them in the common baths to avoid fungus of the toenails.
"Well I'm not going to wear ermine in the gardens, Aroin, or velvet this time of year."
"The gardens?" Aroin repeated, the cocky eyebrow cocked.
"Somebody has to show them how to tend the crops. They'll wither otherwise. We are planting beets, and strawberries today."
"You are very peculiar my queen."
She stood and faced Aroin stonily. "You look much as you did the day you arrived here," Aroin remarked again. "How will they know you to be the queen?"
"I am without a beard, first of all," Meisar reminded her sharply. "How would anybody know now or ever? The queens of old were hardly seen, even by their own people. I am a different queen, whether I want to be or not."
"That you are," Aroin relented. "Maybe we'll be all the better for it."
Aroin wrung her hands in faux dramatics. "Sit down then, my queen, will you at least? Let me fix your hair so you don't pin those braids under your knee if you'll be toiling about in the dirt."
"Much appreciated," Meisar acknowledged. Playing nice with Aroin made Gloin more amenable to her requests, she found.
"Well," huffed Aroin purposefully. "At least you're not going about in your kirtle and petticoat like some mannish peasant lass in the summer's dog-days. Don't think I didn't hear about that." She wrapped the braids in a secure crown about the top of her head. "Don't think the entirety of the kingdom didn't either. But, with the exception of some of the snootier Longbeards, most seem esteemed of our strange little farmer queen. They find your habits and your ideas very incredulous, clan to clan, but I think, like spring, they are warming to you."
.
Meisar buried her hands into the soil and anchored herself, its warm embracing earthy touch engulfing her to the wrist. The dwarves watched with bated breath as her closed eyes seemed to take her elsewhere, waiting for her direction, as to how the strawberries would come from the seed in their purses and grow. Siv tiptoed along the stone edge of the gardens, avoiding the dirt, passing out written instructions, Meisar's own directive. Strawberries would grow from this soil. Strawberries for the ones already living to sustain themselves on. Little pity could be reserved in her now for a dwarf that did not even exist yet.
The dirt had been packed into the long deep roomy trenches on the terrace levels, assessed and planted under her supervision with the seeds of beets, carrots, potatoes, several sorts of berries, tomatoes, sugar peas on wooden stalks, garlic bulbs and parsley.
Dwarves trod around her in the rows, all neatly labeled, shedding their boots. Their bare feet wiggled in the soil as if they had never felt it before. Longbeards were the most incredulous toward the notion the queen was pressing on with, and while Broadbeams had a practical affability toward to the idea, they had grown very little if anything on the barren slopes of Ered Luin. The Stonefoot refugees, known to fish for sustenance in the lush river valleys of Ubraz-Ul and to forage for wild-growing food, were the most amenable to the notion. Sixty-eight Stonefoots were lodging in an empty treasure vault, as large as some manses beneath the mountain. These dwarves had eyes like bats, able to see in the worst of light. Sometimes they stayed in the gardens well beyond sundown. When Meisar was in earshot, they stopped whispering about the terrible things they had seen when they were forced up out of their mountain halls. Sometimes, one elderly Stonefoot confessed, it was why they were comfortable working in the dark, for he had seen in sunlight what true darkness was. His kin had shushed him and the dwarf said no more.
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"My queen commands such admiration and respect, even of such an ancient guild as the Brotherhood of Stone. I fear it may usurp my own influence. And of the people. Your presence in the gardens has been of a warming influence to them."
Redolent of warm earth, she sat, dirt-stained, on the edge of the bed. She kicked off that flat shoes she had donned. "Never. You are the last of Durin's Line, a king reborn. I am still just me."
"You are the queen of the king of Durin's House, and not the last." He sat on the footstool next to the bed and reached to find the fastening of her stocking, discovering there was none. Her feet, and her legs, were both bare, the dirt peeping up between her pale toes. There were blisters on the soles of her feet.
"My jewel should not subject herself to this," Thorin scolded lightly.
"I wish to be a part of it," she protested. He filled the basin and began to wash her feet with warm water. When she came back in the evening, sometimes after the retiring of the sun, in her blue dress with the apron stained in dirt and green, Thorin seemed to smile so easily and wistfully.
"You look like a pink-cheeked Hobbit lass," he hummed. "Out in the fields beyond the Shire. What a merry sight."
"Do you miss it?" she wiggled a curious toe in his direction. He kissed the top of the clean foot and rubbed his beard over it.
"As one would such a pastoral peace," he sighed. "Alas, I am home, where I belong, and I have you. Perhaps, merrily, we shall at meet again."
"I would like that," she offered, sighing. Hobbits had already intrigued her.
"They tell me it is very uncanny, my little queen. They tell me she is simple and green, and good to those who are good to her," he half-sang. His hand slid up her bare leg, misted light in the perspiration of the day's labors, beneath it her skin tingling and peaked, in anticipation of the touch she had come to desire as deeply as air itself. Soon enough as she began to mew and moan he bid her lay back and pushed the skirt up all the way to her chest, kneeling beside the bed, running hands stained in quill-ink over the soft expanse of her belly, leaner a bit with her labors, still ever zaftig, soft and welcoming to his touch. The palm slid under to cup breasts beneath the damp fabric and she cried out with need. Only then did she hear the most-desired sound of his belt and breeches shrugging off, his weight and warmth sliding over her, possessing her as she could only truly possess him. Adjusting the pillow under her she opened herself to him and to the hope, that he would come, foremost of all places, into the warmth sheath of her and want for no more, that his troubles, like hers, would be soothed by their togetherness. And he would want for no more.
When he pushed his arms up from the pillows to relent after his zenith, small strong hands were on the narrow of his back, drawing him to soaked flesh again, though he was spent and growing pliant, nodding against her with his flesh in surrender.
"Again?" his dark thick brow crooked down at her. His temple braid in her fist anchored him and tugged him down to kiss her feverish hot mouth.
"Yes!" She tugged the braid more vehemently.
"Adyum, I will require a moment to… regenerate."
He knew her need, or thought he did. She wriggled out from beneath him and let him braid her hair while his body rested, letting his energy pool where it was needed more ardently.
She lay on her back beside him and rode, as if she were laid in a boat in calm water, the ephemeral trembling of the bed underneath with their exhausted heaving breath, together, but only slightly, perfectly, uneven. "Aye, I know, but hold me then, Thorin, and kiss me." Pools of need girded by that austere hazel-topaz pride, her eyes. Never had she seemed laid so bare.
"How can that dwarrowdam I met, too austere to blink, be so tireless in the bedchamber?" he teased. His fingertips traced the ridges of her skin along the spine, fingering along the bumps the way he played his harp. A moiety to him, her body and her soul. She shuddered into the depth of his embrace.
The silver tendrils of his voluted, dipping from the crown of his head to veil her cheek, the lines of his forehead smoothing over her. She nuzzled her face against his beard, softer in texture even with the slightest of growth, and she took his wonderful, abundant long hair by handfuls to tug lightly at then gently stroke back from his cheeks, his shoulders.
"How could anything be as pleasing as to be with you, just like this?" she inquired, cloudy-eyed, her gaze fixed into the blackened pools of his own eyes. Thigh over hip, mutually, squeezing, they were together again, face to face and panting. He let her to guide, to glide over gently with fingers and her mouth to stimulate one inch at a time, his shoulders, pectorals, the pulse points of his neck and armpits. Lush thighs encapsulated his hips and would not relent in their grasp. A finger curved up to stroke her rose-diamond about its fleshly veil, wrenching between them ahead of a new joining.
"Mablith," she teased in a drawn breath, clasping palm and fingers over the pillar of him. "Only my king shall know this unending thirst." She stroked the firm heat of him again and again as he did the same on her most sensitive of flesh. He rippled against her, rapacious, her own fervent need long insatiable. His was more considered, but still, she could tear a sigh from his body that shook him from the depth of his chest to his toes, all ten scraping wildly against the sheet, flexing, straining upward and outward and down again. I alone. Her pride could swell inside as easily as it could be shattered in a thousand pieces no one would ever know, in the course of a day.
"And only I shall ever love you like this," he breathed. She could feel his palm settle in the crook of her knee and gently ease it away from the other, rolling them both over, and opening her to his pursuit again. She steadied her hand beneath her own thigh, raising knees higher toward her chest and bracing there. With the sharp tug of the muscle where thigh and groin met she could feel the pull of her intimacy widening itself from furred edges to the very center of her, and Thorin, happily channeled between them and rising over her, quietly sighed his readiness again. He made love to her in long considerate strokes. He spent in her with such ardency even a second time around that she allowed herself to hope, almost.
.
Strawberries were sprouting low on the ground on the bottom level of the gardens by the first week in June. Great fat strawberries, firm and red, their green caps ripe on the vines. The dwarves plucked them and examined them as if they had never seen such a thing, as if their presence was brought forth by magic. Yrsa and Anbur came to the terraces and ate them straight from the patch when they were ripe, smearing small smiling bearded faces with the sticky red juice of them. She watched the dwarfling girls and loved them more than she had ever looked with that affection upon any child, and not merely for their kinship to her. They brought baskets back to Urdlaug for strawberry pies.
Meisar taught them how to water appropriately and how to plant, making sure the crops were not too close or too distant, and the root ones kept apart. The Stonefoot women made her bracelets for her ankles and earrings in their vibrant bead-work. They called her khatad-athane. Orange queen. Oranges were a tart fruit that grew in the drier reaches of the Orocarni, they explained, colored like her hair. Khatad, the dwarf-women said, as they considered the strawberries in their hands, longing like vinegar under their tongues.
Thorin took her into bed at night with the dirt still under her nails, streaking the broad back she wrapped her arms around and felt every give and strain of. He stroked the sun-warmed ripples of orange hair spilling all the way down her back, fragrant with summer earth and breeze. It reminded him of the Shire. The grass beneath his feet, warm, in the season that the nightmares and sweats had finally begun to cease. The hobbits grew and harvested all around the year; Bilbo preferred the indoors to the toil of the pumpkin patch or potato field, but the harvest festivals were rarely missed. But Bilbo Baggins, for all his good ways, could have never soothed him like she did. Indeed, he loved Bilbo in his own way. But never in the way his length could edge along the springy down of her that gave way to the smooth inner flesh, feel her sigh when he sheathed and shudder with every small movement.
Bilbo had dabbed his brow of sweat, braced timid hands against the violent shudders of his body when the dreams became too much to bear. He thought of Meisar, barefoot in the dirt in a simple dress and twin plaits, how hobbit-like the sight. Maybe they were not so different after all. Except in one way. He could smell the sun on her hair even at night.
.
"There should be pride in my heart for this," Meisar said, looking up at the gardens in their colorful bloom. She could see a pair of dwarves coming down the ladders on the side with woven baskets full of berries and a tray of tomatoes fastened as a hat would be on top of the head of the next. They had already planted the lower gardens for the fall, with leeks, carrots, potatoes and even a small corner for pumpkins.
She turned her face up toward the pristine summer day and let its warmth ride through her. Her skin was already growing tender from its rays, day after day. She could hear children shouting and screeching in laughter, at their games far over the borders of Dale. They swam in the crystal pond outside of Erebor.
"What stunts that pride so, sister? You have done an extraordinary thing." Dis was garbed for summer as much as she could bear to be, in a muslin gown of ebony and fern, the wire headdress giving her face its heart shape though it was pallid again. The sounds of the mannish children over the gate made her smile.
"Yes, but if I could have anything in the world, if I could make anything grow at all..."
Dis's hand gripped hers and held it tight against the side of her; the sound of the children rising in cacophony again made them both brace. "I know, sister. I know..."
.
Meisar looked up as the door opened to her chamber, expecting Siv with the Elvish lotion to soothe her sore feet, splitting at the heel from the early summer heat and stone. Instead it was Freyda, not with sweat from the furnace of June above or even down in the forges but tears, spilling right from her eyes, red from crying. There was sweat though too when Meisar embraced her, sweat enough to stain her own dress. Her hands were chapped and almost bloody. She smelled of iron and fire and salt.
"Been in me forge is all. Just wanted to come see ye and..." her quavering deep voice trailed off in what seemed either frustration or the normal girlish anguish she had come to expect.
"Freyda, what is it?"
She blustered a breath that hesitated on the edge of her words. "Yer focusing so much on them things that grow up in the gardens and down here I'm withering right!" Freyda complained. She eyed Freyda's arms, stronger and thicker-muscled than they had been even at the start of the season, and gave her a doubting eye. While Meisar's ruddiness and freckles had come back, she was pale in comparison from being under the mountain, down in her forge.
"Withering? I have seen you very glad it seems. Perhaps I was wrong. I thought Dwalin saw you oft now, almost every day?" she held Freyda's hands and she winced; a bloody seam opened.
"Then you've been right neglecting us!" Freyda whined in a sudden burst of unhappiness. "Your own ladies, Meisar!"
It stung, but it was true. All she had ever thought about even when they were together at night was Thorin. Thorin and guarding shins with linen wraps against the prickly vines of the strawberry plants. The progress of the carrots and potatoes she could not see. Dwarves coming and going with supper for another day.
One day at a time she had told herself on other matters. Freyda cast off her tunic and apron and lay in her underlinen on the rug, exhausted. She hugged Fred and Redcoat's pillow bed under her chest, lowered her forehead to the cool stone floor in shame.
"I am sorry, my queen. Gajut men," she heaved.
"You are forgiven, and perhaps you are right. I have relied on you for so much and I can only think of..." she buried her own head in her hands, craning her neck to meet Freyda in her tired eyes. "What ails you, my friend?"
Plucking a dog hairball distastefully from her bodice, Freyda thought and then began to speak. "Meisar, yer the queen. Can't ye…?" Her eyes clouded frustrated with desperation. "Do something... to... move him? To me. In true."
"Tell him to marry you?"
Freyda nodded vaguely.
"You know as well as I that no dwarf can be urged into marriage, and if you think I have any power to prod Dwalin of all dwarves, you overestimate me sorely."
"Ah, Meisar, I only want what ye have. I have it already, inside. But it takes two ye know, to be truly one with another. Tell me ye know what I mean. What is that sorta love like?"
"You seek me to tell you what love is? I've had a swift course in learning the nature of it. I know it. I just… can't explain it. There's no words that come to me."
Freyda's eyes were soft through her tears. "When I see the way he looks at ye, Thorin, I know what love looks like. I've seen it in his eyes too, Dwalin's. M'no fool. I love him so. I just want to be with him, always. Certain ye know the feelin'."
"More than ever," Meisar agreed, quietly.
"Doncha know the loves of our lives have been hurt too great? They need us."
Perhaps we need them even more. Are we all fools in love or is it our destiny, our reward, our GREED?
"We don't know how much we need it until we have it."
"Aye," Freyda shook her head. "Thorin's a king but what is Dwalin? A soldier. Thorin's right hand sure, but alas, a mere soldier. What's he got? Balin? **He's so far older, m'queen. Dwalin's years'll follow his many times over when Balin's gone to the Halls of Waitin'. I know he's afraid of being alone. I don't want him to be."
"Emli is right, and so is Brynja. Patience matters. A dwarf like Dwalin cannot be pushed. A soldier's first instinct is to push back," Meisar advised.
"Been patient I have long enough! What must I do? Surely, ye can help me, somehow. Could even Thorin have a go at him?" Freyda pleaded, her hands clasped together as if in prayer to her, begging a miracle. One I cannot even provide myself, foolish iron-smith.
"Been a selfish, possessive love I know," Freyda admitted, dolefully. "It's the nature of being a dwarf and loving."
A selfish, possessive love. Perhaps we understand each other's hearts after all.
"Not always," Dis interjected gently. None of them had even seen her come in; she was like a ghost again, too quiet on her feet for a dwarf. "The way that a woman loves someone, whether it is her One or her brother, is a way that none who are not our kind can understand. Thorin'll be no good in convincing Dwalin of his duty. Only Freyda can do that. But… we can help in our own way. I have an idea," Dis grinned.
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Ibrizbundnekad- Sun Hat
'Amdul- Maternal, motherly
Mablith- Stiffness That is New/Fresh
**Just another note, I'm going by movie-verse ages here. I am aware of canonical ages but I like their brotherly dynamic in PJ's work.