ID-UKHTHÂZ- The Endurers
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"I thought the day would not come," sighed Radagast, shielding his eyes with one hand against the mid-morning sun. His small bird chirped and spread its wings, nestled in the folds of his hat.
"I am glad you decided to stay the winter. It has been a harsh one, and gladly at an end," Meisar agreed. With Gandalf she would have exhausted herself trying to keep up, but Radagast was am ambler, still unsure of his steps within the Lonely Mountain. They stood in the slow-shifting shadow of the dwarven guardians that flanked the gates of the city, on bended knee, axes drawn.
"Unusually," stated Radagast plainly. The tiny hedgehog he carried in his robe made a high-pitched sound of agreement. "Else I would have returned to the forest sooner. I don't think I have been of much aid to you, my queen."
Meisar blinked up at the late spring sky, absorbent powder-blue with wisps of clouds. She could almost feel the warmth, of the way the sun baked the tiles and stucco of Dale, exuberant with commerce at midday. There were new walls going up around the edges of the city, workmen on scaffolds, dwarves bringing stone and iron in carts drawn by auroch and ox.
She lowered her head under the gauzy hood of her spring cloak. "On the contrary, Radagast. You have done me more than you can imagine."
"The path to my forest home should be clear by now. I would stay if you wished it. I have enjoyed this mountain's many natural offerings." The wizard put a finger into his ear, squeaked it, still wet from the hot-spring baths. "Gandalf I am afraid has his callings. I do not know where it shall lead him now."
"He is called the wandering wizard for a reason. But for you Radagast, I suspect that home has a stronger pull."
"Oh indeed," Radagast agreed cheerily. "I need the forest as much as it needs me. I hope I have not been too far missed by my brethren there."
"I once lived in a forest, a beech grove north of the Troll-Shaws, for a time anyway. I know you probably think it strange for a dwarf," Meisar remarked with a retiring self-consciousness.
Radagast shook his head in disagreement. "Some say the same of myself as a wizard. Alas, the truth is you have an uncanny gift, Queen Meisar. The ways of nature are not unknown to you, which is a blessing among dwarves if you ask me my opinion. It should be put to good use."
Meisar turned downward to the churning flow of the waterway below, a group of washerwomen coming out from behind the base of the stone statue, querulous in their Khuzdul, to gather water for their wash. Radagast watched as they hung full buckets on long rods and slung them over their shoulders, tirelessly. One of them looked up, caught him in the eye and glared. Radagast checked his robes for bird droppings, self-consciously.
"I have taken it as my creed as queen," Meisar continued. "That I am to be useful in all that I do. We are not an idle people, we dwarves. There, see, the washerwomen have their sense of purpose, and with pride they go forth. You are right. I should have pride in the capabilities nature has endowed me with." She could hear their familial laughter and kvetching as the laundresses went on their way back into the mountain. "Therefore, I shall fulfill what I can, while my more important capabilities are idle."
"Stubborn, my queen, but not idle," Radagast gently reminded. "You may yet know the fruits of your labors, and all the sweeter they may be."
"I wonder sometimes about this world, Radagast," Meisar sighed. "You say my child, should it come, is of importance in this world, and that is why you help me so. The world is changing. You know it. I see it in your eyes that you do, even now. It feels like being a pawn in some great game, never knowing where next we will be moved, and for what purpose."
Radagast made a sound like a dog's frightened whine. "A fading of some great power, perhaps even magic itself," Radagast suggested worriedly. "A fading of some great power. A rise of another perhaps. Whether it is a dark or a light power I have yet to see."
"And if it is a dark one?" Meisar questioned, without really wanting to know the answer. "Some great summoning. There was a battle at this mountain not long ago. I do not suspect you know anything about what ends it served? Or do you? Tell me, what have you seen? I have only felt, and feeling counts for less some imagine."
"Do not trouble yourself, my queen," Radagast encouraged nervously. The hedgehog crawled up on his shoulder and peeped down at Meisar, as if to smile at her condescendingly, the prickly little ball.
"She troubles herself quite enough," a familiar voice chuckled even more edgily. Gandalf swooped between them, walking abreast on the terrace, to the annoyance of a klatch of dwarves behind them.
"We thought we might miss you. We came to see you off, Gandalf," Meisar said. "Maybe you can answer that question then. You have been a part of this world longer than any of us. You have seen things we have not seen, we dwarves."
"Have you exhausted all of my friend's potions and spells? With no luck of that kind?" Gandalf diverted carefully.
"All but one," Meisar answered. A final test, and maybe then two. "A last chance, I suppose."
"Not a last," Gandalf protested. He placed his hand a final time on Meisar's shoulder as they arrived at the gate and the farrier whistled him over, shodding his horse. "Keep your eyes and your ears, and your heart, open. You have a gift. Listen to what it tells you, even when it does not speak."
"Dis will be unhappy to see you go. You have kept her most excellent company," Meisar remarked clandestinely.
Gandalf smiled. "I may have fulfilled my purpose, however unintentionally."
Together the three of them watched the queue of merchants with their wagons, all uniquely carved, and mostly empty at the end of the day, wait to come back into the mountain. His great shire horse trotted back to him of its own accord once the dwarven farrier on the other side of the gate was finished with him. He stroked the steed's long nose and mounted in a single smooth swoop of gray robes.
"You have succeeded admirably here, presiding over such bustle and determination, and rewards," remarked Gandalf. "But there is much that remains to be seen still. Perhaps we shall in time."
"Time? You are one to speak of time. You have walked this earth for thousands of years. What is eternity to me is but a moment to you," Meisar countered upward.
"And each is precious, every moment, every second. Now ask yourself, my queen, do you occupy these times with worry and melancholy, or with the force of love? Radagast may give you your due respect for the gifts of an earthy kind that you possess, but the greatest gift is the love you have given your husband, the king. You must never temper that. It will determine all."
"Sometimes they feel like they are twisted in together, the love I have and the pain I bear," she admitted. Radagast's hedgehog squeaked at her with tiny sad black eyes.
"Be what it is, use your gift, for it is such a blessing. What you endure is its own blessing, whether or not you choose to see it." He swerved the horse to face the road, tail whizzing past her and Radagast, tickling their nostrils with the horse-scent. "Remember your gifts, your wisdom. And let others use theirs."
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II
"Perhaps my other peignoir," Meisar dictated to Bertha with indecisive melancholy, her night wardrobe pulled entirely from the drawers at her armoire, Bertha searching out another. "Hold it by the fire. Let me see it in the light."
As Bertha laid the garment out for her, knocks on the door came simultaneous and eager. Pushing past Oliada, who hissed at them, Siv and Brynja poured through, clattering with disagreement.
"You're not even married. You really shouldn't," sniffed Brynja. Meisar looked between them with a silent demand for an explanation. It was too late for them to be out.
"I make leave?" asked Oliada, blocking their path with her spear.
Meisar nodded no, reluctantly.
"Maybe no, but I have my charms," Siv gave Meisar an approving survey, standing by the fire in her daytime under-linen, flustered, putting her robe on in a hurry. Her hair was full of flyaways in need of tending.
"Emli had this made for you. She insisted I bring it," Brynja announced. "Me, not Siv. She came anyway." She handed Meisar a bundle wrapped in paper from the seamstresses' guild, stamped shut with their seal. "She said you were in need of something new for about the chamber. She knows you're missing him so. And don't worry she says. Sometimes Gloin was tired at the end of long days and she felt the same and.."
"I desire him much and would have him to me. These charms working or not," Meisar interjected gently, taking the package from Brynja's hands, patting hers gently. In it lay a robe of samite and overlaid in pink lace, spider's-silk gossamer, the softest, the least opaque, and a nightgown of snowy-white lawn with eyelet ruffles at the neckline and sleeves.
"Well sometimes you need a bit to tempt him back," cooed Brynja. "Make him remember his love for you by hook or crook."
"Hook or crook, you? All a man need is rails and tails," Siv cackled. She lifted her skirt above the knee to adjust the garter on her stocking.
"I told you not to come, Siv. Emli'll be cross with me if she knew," scolded Brynja. "Freyda would be here but she is very laid up now. The babe should come within the week they say. She wishes you would visit her tomorrow if you can and-"
"Enough with that. Don't cha tell me no when I come bearin' gifts too," grinned Siv. She plopped herself on the bed, pulled the stopper from a little black urn. Myrrh filled the air. "Rub it in your sweet spots love. It won't burn, I promise."
"I don't suppose you would know," Meisar retorted lightly. She sat on the bed next to her, considered the potion. "For potency or otherwise? I think the whole of this mountain must know of my predicament now."
"Here we come to help that predicament then. We both know how wee dwarflings are made, and he won't be able to resist you. See if the raggedy wizard can come up with something better. I doubt it," quipped Siv again, chuckling in amusement of herself.
"Rub this on your feet too. He'll be suckling your toes like the spout of a wine-skin," Brynja giggled, opening a jar of sweet-smelling salve, lathering it on her hands.
"I could do without that," Meisar said, recoiling at the thought.
"Don't decline so fast, before you've tried it," Siv smirked, impishly.
"It'll soften them either way," Brynja said against Meisar's scolding glance toward Siv, drawing her foot into her lap and coating it in the cold, sweet lotion, rubbing it in vigorously. Siv leaned over on her stomach, face in her hands, legs bent at the knee behind her, twirling a jingling little bracelet around her ankle, over her daffodil stocking.
"Nori gave it to me," she boasted.
"Mind your reputation, Siv. You are one of my ladies in waiting, remember," Meisar advised, wiggling her foot against Brynja's efforts. "And if you must do whatever it is you do, find a secreted away hall somewhere."
"Like Dwalin and Freyda? Might not want another hurried wedding now; I wouldn't encourage me."
"I encourage nothing, except prudence, maybe even chastity, if you can manage," Meisar warned.
Siv waved her off flippantly. "I'll refrain. I'll not be wearing no second-hand dress that's for certain."
Meisar sat up on the edge of the bed with the two of them. "I have but one other thing to employ from Radagast's trove, and maybe Yavanna will look upon me with pity and grant what I desire more than my life itself."
Brynja rubbed her knee in silent sympathy, her brown eyes lowering with uncanny sadness. She held her hand as Siv continued to ring her ankle bracelet and preen. She lingered on what Dis has said to her in the chamber of records, Gandalf's silence tacit.
Siv might understand. But Brynja wouldn't. She liked her pretty shoes with the jeweled buckles but she was too earthy, too simple, to understand the spell of any stone. To comprehend corruption.
Could she even understand now that it was working through her? Her dimples, her smile, could never comprehend how it was hurting her the same. Perhaps.
When they left she rubbed the new softness of her feet, sweet as a baker's stall, the myrrh beginning to dull just a bit. She rubbed what was left of it over her knees and between her bosoms. She tugged at the eyelets of her dress to let it fall over one shoulder and open a small sliver at the front laces, the myrrh still on her skin. Beneath the lace housecoat the nightgown felt like a whisper of warm wind upon her skin. She crossed the room and opened the small pouch full of fragrant resin. Radagast had given her a small stone bowl to burn it in. She emptied the chunks.
Dragon's blood. The resin of dracaena. Blood red it was and like a pair of sinister eyes when it smoldered in the bowl in two embers first then many, veins of it like rivers of blood as it caught and smoldered. Radagast had confided that women burned it in their bedrooms to tempt an errant or cool lover back to his place. The spicy-sweet of amber and vanilla filled the room, hints of something sultrier at its base.
The bells and whistles blared above, signaling the end of the evening shift. It ended when the moon was in the sky and there was no sliver of sun left. She paced the chamber as the resin smoldered. The second whistle sounded, calling the sentries to duty for the second-quarter of night shift. Midnight, the men-folk called it. Under the mountain it mattered less.
But it still mattered. The sun would come up and they would be engulfed again, by duty and governance. She considered herself once in the mirror before retiring, her gown of ivory lawn with its ruffled eyelet neckline and wristlets, neckline dipped just below the collarbone and broadly. It was less opaque in the candle and sconce lights than her others.
She crawled beneath the blankets on her side of the bed with the resin lowly smoldering, and closed her eyes.
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The flicker of light woke her as it spilled in from the parting of the curtains at the foot of the bed, a blink at first, then she shielded her eyes and stirred.
"Thorin?" His weight at the edge made a small dip by her feet, waking her more fully. He was seated at the foot of the bed, shucking his boots in silence. The light framed him, his dwarven sort of austerity of form, head bare of crown, his robes of state put aside, leaving only tunic and vest. She moved stealthily and with a timorous slowness on hands and knees to the edge of the bed. He set aside his leather front-laced vest. Sighing, she reached to touch his back near the center.
A temperate rumble reverberated quietly from the back of his ribs, meeting at the spine she could feel the bumps of light as her touch lingered over his tunic. She raised herself quietly to sit, curling an end of Thorin's hair on her finger, searching for the clasp of his back-plait in the thick mane.
In silence still, he leaned his head back, skimming the soft crown of her hair with his cheek, her fingertips on the back of his tunic not quite touching skin. Fingers gentle but suddenly impatient freed his braided lock from the clasp. His lips parted in seeming want of words, but none came, and instead they curved upward in his modest way, one that made him look as if the source of that smile was unknown to all but him. Even now.
"Meisar…" he turned, needful, toward her. He brushed his lips tightly against hers, his beard softly raking her upper lip. "You yield such sweetness more precious than gold, my queen." He placed a hand upon her cheek and coaxed her full of unspoken need toward him, fingered the bead in her braid. "I put this bead in your hair in solemn oath that I would love you always. Forgive me. I have not loved you as you should be loved these past days."
"Several is enough that you come to bed and we are not a part of each other." She found his temple plaits, removing his beads to deposit in their small dish at his bedside. "These are pulling at your temples so. You shouldn't braid them so tightly."
She ran her fingers over the thick strands of hair still wavy from his temple plaits once she had un-braided, her thumb grazing at the rim of his ear. When he shuddered softly, she halted, with impunity.
"I had not realized how much more gently you managed to do so," Thorin breathed. He rubbed his cheek against the back of her hand. "Jewel of my heart, I have taken of that awful fenugreek root for weeks now. Your king is a restless bull chewing the cud in the fields. But for love of his queen, yes. I would continue." His lips found her thumb warmly and took the tip of it within their austere frame, giving her a light suckle. "I owe you all things, not the least my atonement, here and now."
"For the awful taste and that I am still not with child, it has other useful properties." Her knuckle caressed the edge of his beard below his lip.
"Oh?"
She withdrew and shed the pink lace-edged housecoat. The heat of the fire and the sconces warmed her skin through the flimsy lawn. "The growth of hair being stimulated, Radagast says. Your beard is softer and longer than last I felt it." She kissed the soft patch of his chin, slim mouth finding the tip of her nose with playful atonement.
"Two days hence since I kissed you last," Thorin smiled gently. "Is this true?"
"Aye, it is."
"Shall we find if it has changed since last I kissed you? Tell me..." he extended a needful kiss to her mouth, pressing teeth around her bottom lip. Her arms snaked around his neck and kissed him a long while, as his hands found her sides and clutched the fabric until it was damp from the moisture of his palms.
"I have not seen this. Is it new?"
"Aye," she nodded, playing with the ruffled edge at her neck as it fell with pointed grace from one shoulder. "Emli thought I was in need of something new. Do you like it?"
"It is a lovely dress and you shall thank Emli on my behalf. But I be much pleased by out of it all the same." He slipped a timorous hand below the ruffled collar of her dress, its coldness making her stiffen there beneath his touch. The rush of breath slipped past her lips at the sensation of his beard, soft now, growing strong. The abrasiveness was in his hands, drawing away from her chest, finding the hem of her shift and sliding it up her thighs, considering her flesh, in all of its voluptuousness.
"A new candle too?" his nose twitched against the rising ribbon of smoke from the corner. The ember glared at him from her vanity.
"It is the resin of Dracaena. Some call it dragons' blood."
"A loathsome name," Thorin stiffened at its utterance. Timorously, he leaned his head back against her untangling, her combing one inch at a time from the bottom up, silent as stone. The tip of her nose brushed the back of his shoulder, breath warm through his tunic.
"We have not had much luck with dragons, this line. My great-grandfather and my great-uncle were killed in their halls by a cold-drake, leaving my grandfather as king. He took his people here, thinking it the best of places that a new and great kingdom might rises from the ashes of old. He was right- for a time anyway."
He turned to her, heavy with contemplation. "My grandfather was… not always right."
"Nor are any of us."
"But my father, Meisar. My father… was not taken by the things my grandfather was," his cheek slid against the smooth crown of her hair. "His grounding was firmer. Oft I think of how fond he would have been of you. It was never about anything for him, except a pure heart, love. Love. It should have saved us then, and it didn't."
"It will now. We are here for its sake." She slumped with sudden timidity as Thorin's eyes grew sad and drawn toward her. "Will you come and lay with me now?" she asked quietly, stroking the side of his face. His eyes were closed in melancholy silence. "I would like it."
The stilled hand was seized in his and the palm worshipfully kissed in a great rush. "These hands have shown me only kindness. They are so beautiful," he sighed heatedly into her hand. "I would do anything for you. I do love you Meisar. With all my heart. I love you so much I cannot bear to see you so burdened. If it is for my sake, I beg you, do not be."
"We are king and queen, you and I. Little is for our own sake, my love. Except this love. This love. It is ours alone."
"I wish I had known," she said, somewhat sarcastically. He lay his head at the joining of her thighs, ever the welcoming pillow, her lap.
"A rather peculiar incense you are burning," he commented, meeting the two stubborn embers that were like red eyes with the blue of his own.
"To entice a One back where he belongs."
"I see." Thorin ran a fingertip over the bump of her knee, under her dress.
"Well, has it?"
Sitting up, he doffed his tunic wordlessly. Meisar let a high breath escape her lips in unmasked want, shaken from scalp to toes in tingling waves, with the warm, musky scent of his bare chest close to her again and the coarse homecoming of his skin to hers.
"Is that a yes?" she asked, resting her head against the taut side of his neck, stroking his collarbone, the sinews of his throat extending and sweetening like the strings of a lute when she dotted kisses from his earlobe to the basin of his shoulder where it met the clavicle. "Did you miss this?" she whispered. He held the arm that was draped across his opposite shoulder close against his heart. Her blunt nails curled and felt for the beat.
"Feel my heart, mizimel. Let it tell you the answer."
Yours is not the only heartbeat I seek to touch. But it is here, and real, and everything I am.
There, she felt his mouth amble lower, down to her throat and Thorin's stilled breath. "I should have been loath to leave this bed, with all that I am burdened by elsewhere." When he managed to divest her completely, he found her flushed with need cheeks to toes.
As soon as the tips of her fingers found their way to loosen the waist of his breeches his weight was on her and she was against the pillows and apart for him, and he had completed the duty for her in a rush of snapping laces and kicking the offending garment aside. She flipped the hair back over his shoulders as he poised over her.
"You are far sweeter than this dragon's blood." His kisses journeyed from rolling plain to peaks of range, a faint trail of myrrh leading him the well between her bosoms, his face there willfully buried and tickling the secreted ravine with a brush of beard. He sunk into her skin with little want of surfacing. He grasped her waist at the obliques, kneading, aligning himself to her torso-to-torso and rocking hips against the bony mound of her pubis to ready her in due time.
The ardency with which he claimed her left her grasping his hair for leverage, reflexively strengthening her hold against his shoulders, his back as his undulations quickened and his breath at a madder pace. Thorin persevered for lost time, his strokes long and ardent, so that she was bending her knee and holding fast under it with one hand to open herself completely and take him, ever deeper, like the mines themselves, never fully plundered until there remained not a drop of precious stone. I have nothing left to give now, only myself.
His hair flung itself up over the back of his neck and shielded them in a fragrant veil. The denseness of his frame rocked her into a rolling pleasure, once and again rising up, regaining his grip on her waist until he shifted once again and held her, palm-to-palm and pinned on the pillow beside her head. The intense blue of his eyes went to black and brilliant sapphire again with his zenith, its fade stubborn. Her undulations rolled up into his and like a dying flame licked by hot wind, burned and rose again and again. When he finally collapsed on top of her, there was no breath nor flood that could quench it, even then.
"I beg of you, Mahal, do not leave my queen so bereft," his lips, parched, made a similar sound in pleading, to the ceiling. She cupped the side of Thorin's neck and felt the wild pulse of him, a throbbing trail that led from neck to the hard line of his clavicle and to the epicenter where it was pounding in his chest beneath his skin. He had the finest, subtlest sheen of perspiration that exuded his excited, sharp scent in the afterglow. He exhaled once, dotting the bridge of her nose and her brow with consoling kisses.
"Should we seek the Creator's guidance or that of our own? We are given the gift of sense, and of wisdom, no?" Meisar lay beside him and gazed upward in the dying sconce light. Inscribed, enshrined above the bed, she remembered. The heart of this mountain is not a cold stone but the warmth of a queen.
"What do you mean?" Thorin murmured.
She propped herself on her elbow beside him, bidding him to sip water from the beside pitcher. "I am exhausted by these queer charms and potions too. That awful green paste, and the swamp-water poultice. To say nothing of your chewing root like a cow."
"Aye, they tire me and make me want to heave. Alas, I seek answers as you do, wherever they are. I look to the portents and even to the stars, and beyond our borders," Thorin extolled.
"What about within them?"
As she stroked his hair, he sighed readily. "You have seen the old chamber of records? Gloin told me Emli saw you follow Gandalf there."
"I did." Her heart coiled up in her chest and felt like it would stop beating. She focused on the thick silken touch of Thorin's hair, the growth of his beard softening it. She traced the outline of his furred chin with her fingertip.
"It was grand in Thror's time," remarked Thorin. "He was not much of a reader but he collected many volumes of the Histories of Middle Earth. Mineralogy, guides of gems, alchemists' fools'-gold, even poetry."
"It is a slow process of rebuilding," Meisar remarked, hesitantly. "Other priorities are paramount, I do wager."
"So you would think," murmured Thorin, rolling to lay on his side and resting his head where it had been so happily pillowed, in the still-fragrant well of her chest.
"Gandalf was there," Meisar admitted quickly. "Searching some scrolls your grandfather was unhappy about years past. Concerning the Arkenstone. I know not what for. He... remains cagey with even myself, though I know so little of the king's jewel. A shame he has gone from us today. Else you might have asked."
"An unbearable curse," he growled, her fingers catching in his hair as he whipped his head up in anger. "I should have had it destroyed, before…"
Her heart settled inside, in spite of Thorin's shift toward dissoluteness. He rested again against her heart and calmed. A half truth was still a lie but it would do for now.
"The past is past. All we have now is the time that remains. What shall we do with it?" Meisar soothed the taut smoldering anger that was stiffening his limbs against hers, his heart stirring in the peak between her ribs. "Would you have it be in love or in despair?"
"I shall never be apart from you, Meisar," he kissed the tip of her nose. "Never. That is what I choose. I choose you, always."
"And I you."
"It is not a duty, this," he said as they lay quiet in the afterglow, lightly covered in summer-sheets. "To make an heir or not to. Your company here is more than I deserve."
Sheltered by his thick hair, indistinguishable from the blankets the way it spread and fanned across her chest, she exhaled deeply and let her chest go concave beneath his head. The beat deep within the mountain echoed his heart in perfect alignment. The beat was stronger than even the rumble of the forges, their periodic blasts and clangs. She had made up her mind. A half truth was still a lie but for the greater good worthy of all.