IK KURDU- The Heart
.
On the morning after his birth, the child was named Brundin, after grandfather and uncle. Eda and Virta kept mindful watches through the night, finding his health robust, his appetite even more so. Meisar came before dawn, before a morning's worth of council and court needed immediate attentions. Balin had stayed the night, grunting over a sore hip as he pattered across the kitchen hearth, slowly grinding the fragrant beans for a jug of Southron Swill.
"Dwalin is a happy father made," he beamed, eyes bleary but alive with joy. "He glows with pride." He embraced Meisar over a warm drink to greet the day, brought the jug to the bedroom to share with many a willing guest.
Brundin lay in a swaddling basket on the bed next to Freyda, tucked protectively under her arm. She was bleary-eyed and spent, wincing in pain with every slight shift. But for the child, she was stubbornly alight. Her fair hair and Dwalin's nose and hard brown eyes gazed back at her, considering his surroundings as curiously as a newborn might be expected to.
"It will fade eventually," Emli assured her of the pains. Sitting in a chair at Freyda's bedside, she encouraged her to eat some warmed over porridge when Eda picked up Brundin for a wash and a change of linen, holding the spoon while she quaffed what was on it a few times before settling back on the pillow. Emli was worse for the wear, her beard frayed, her hair with more than a few burrs knotting up in the back. Her eyes were ringed in red from lack of sleep.
"You stayed?" Meisar asked, herself yawning wide.
Emli nodded tiredly. "We took turns, a few of us. She will take some time to regain strength after that ordeal. Eda gave her some stitches that she best lie and rest with, if she doesn't want them coming asunder."
Dwalin shuddered on the opposite side of her. Emli gave him her customary half-smile. "Best you ask little of that matter, Mister Dwalin. It is crude woman's work, and bless the Creator we were given the gall for it."
"I sorely lack it," Dwalin quipped back at her, stroking Freyda's head. "M'lass, ye are a warrior."
"I am so sore," Freyda moaned quietly. She looked like she had been trampled under a wagon's wheels, her hands bruised from gripping, her braid lank with old and new sweat. "I want a bath so."
"Rest," Emli ordered. "Regain your strength, for you and the child equally. We are here."
"Is he perfect?" she groaned lightly.
Emli squeezed her hand. "He is."
"Perfectly hungry, again," Eda barged through with the quibbling baby. She and Virta helped Freyda to roll up on her side over a pillow, as they held Brundin to her to nurse.
"Good that he is latching well, even with me holding him," Eda remarked, relieved. Brundin's suckling was loud and eager. Dwalin watched him take of her milk and smiled, before Balin came about with a cup of Southron Swill for him and he drank of it without an afterthought, clacking his tongue at the aftertaste. Brundin meanwhile had finished his breakfast and was grunting in Balin's arms. A raucous belch issued a projectile stream of regurgitated milk onto Balin's tunic.
"You are in for something new, brother. Aren't we all?" chuckled Balin, pursing his lips in a stab of regret, Meisar rising in silence to take the empty cups away.
By that very morning Freyda was well enough to sit and hold Brundin on her own. Dwalin had never left her side, and sat behind her at the head of the bed to be assured of her steadiness, and to allow himself a few moments to doze. With a soldier's readiness he was snapped awake with every grunt and wail. Meisar came again after councils ceased, the guard of dwarrowdams changing from Emli to Gyda, equally sleepless, and skittish when Brundin was offered to her to hold.
"Never held a baby before," she confided sheepishly to Meisar as they looked upon him, Meisar steadying a hand under Gyda, who was cradling him in the chair at the bedside.
"Nor have I."
Freyda stirred at the sound of a door, and feet, too many feet. Onar came boisterously through far on the other side of the lodging, quieting swiftly as he entered the room and blocking the path of the door with his arm so that Lofar, Vigg, Vestri and finally Hepti bunched up behind, shushing each other in turn. Brundin began to howl again nonetheless, and Onar crowded over Mizri with his cadre, as she changed his bottom-swaddling once more. Adina was on the other side of the quarter, tirelessly washing and boiling the used swaddles in a cauldron sharp with lye soap that filtered through and lightly steamed the air.
"Best you watch out," Mizri advised, removing the soaked swaddling. On his back with chubby, determined limbs curling up and stretching out impatiently, he regarded the new company blankly and went on crying.
"Let us see!" pleaded Lofar.
Mizri stepped aside. Lofar's curiosity was rewarded with a spray of wee to the face.
"I think that means sod off," teased Vestri. Lofar shuffled off to wash, bristling.
"It's what ye get. It's a babe, what'd ye think?" harrumphed Freyda from bed. Mizri brought Brundin to her. She nodded for Onar to come over.
"Father, come see this fine lad ye have for a grandson."
"Fine? Me Freyda darling, he is perfect." In Onar's arms he seemed content after a short while. The Boar's pride swelled in the high color of his cheeks and in the wild eyes that were suddenly blinking back tears not unlike his daughter's own.
"Tan menu selek lanun naman. Someday, when ye are grown. Sigindashat," Onar took between his thumb and forefinger Brundin's outstretched hand, letting him grasp on. "A strong arm," Onar chuckled lightly. "Maybe they will throw a mean hook too."
Leaning down, Onar placed him lovingly into Dwalin's arms when he began to grunt and scowl. "Look out for this one. He's got yer temperament already."
"Between you and Dwalin he ought not worry for a soft temper," Freyda said. Eda was ready to check her stitches, give her a placket of healing herbs to hold there, to stave off an infection. Onar stepped out, Meisar following, and Brundin was laid in his cradle after falling asleep in Onar's arms.
Freyda hissed in pain on the other side of the divide. The sound woke the baby from a light sleep, and set him to wailing again. Meisar lifted Brundin from his cradle, so dense and heavy in her arms he could have only been Dwalin's own. Freyda's blonde hair on his little head made no difference toward that quality. He balled his tiny fists and swatted them about, up toward Meisar. She swayed back and forth on her feet to try and calm him but he carried on, until she rested the bottom of her face against the top of his head, nuzzled and soothed, breathing out against the crown of his hair. He had a soft smell like lotion or powder. By the time Brundin buried his face against her chest, she was lost in him. Only as he began to cry again did she come forth back into reality, recognizing her lack of attention to his demand to be fed punctually.
"M'queen," Dwalin mumbled quietly behind her. She turned around, Dwalin's arms out for the child. In his father's arms he was little more calm. Dwalin's tattooed thumb brushed a bit of fuzz from Brundin's forehead and smoothed over his brow. The crying stopped. He was dwarfed in Dwalin's arms, cradled right on the inside of one, head rested against Dwalin's elbow. Dwalin took careful inventory of the child's facial features, for the hundredth time it seemed. When there ceased to be any sign of distress, he smiled down on him.
"He is your son, truly, Dwalin," Meisar remarked, touching the fair crown of his head. "A beautiful boy, the most beautiful I have ever seen."
"Aye, is he?" Dwalin asked earnestly.
"I have very few others to compare him to, but I will say that is a yes."
Dwalin looked up at her sympathetically, wordless, his child's grunts reduced to ongoing coos. He jostled him lightly in the crook of his elbow, tattooed thumb gripped in the child's fat fingers. The scent of hot beef and mushroom stew floated through the door, followed by Donbur and Virta, and Thorin.
"Is that?" Thorin beamed over Dwalin's swaddled treasure. Dwalin put him to Meisar's arms so he could throw his about Thorin.
"We have called him Brundin, nadad. Oin and Eda both say he is the picture of health," Dwalin assured. "Thorin... I..." He could ill contain a rapturous beam. Only Thorin's steady on his shoulder seemed to stave off that queer instinct that was to weep, even for joy.
"Bless you, child. For you will always have my love in addition to your father's," Thorin acclaimed over him.
"And mine," added Meisar, stroking the child's cheek. He twitched his broad little nose in response, taken back to Freyda then by Eda, who was sure he was meant to eat as oft as he could.
Thorin's hand slipping into hers gave a light squeeze. She knew he had seen the suspicious flush in the whites of her eyes. "Come, my queen, let us have a walk together. It is late. We best leave them for the night."
.
They walked together along the narrow bridge toward the throne, in the quiet of the settling night.
Solemnly she held to his arm, in silence for a long while.
"I rescued a baby troll once," she said at last. "She was an orphan I found in the wilderness, near starved. You'd be surprised how small they are as newborns. Like newborn fawns almost."
"I never thought about it much," Thorin shrugged.
"One morning she tried to bite me. I plunged an ax into her throat. She could have eaten me whole then she grew so fast; I should have known, but..." Meisar thought on it again, and Thorin saw her blink back a small tear. "I thought she was the only child I would ever have. Well, there were some rabbits after that, and dogs. Perhaps I was right all along."
Thorin caught her when she nearly swayed. He sat her down on the throne in the vast empty hall. From afar, she noted the withdrawing of the sentries that guarded the doors behind the throne and the enormous doors down the sky-walk, and they were truly alone. She could hear only her own heart beating in the thick silence, in spite of the scurrying above and beyond of dwarves beginning to retire from the long day.
"Your tenderness is a gift. I see you care for Freyda the same as you did such a spiteful little creature, and with heart that I perhaps lack." He knelt beside the throne and rested his cheek against her hand. She let the stubborn tear drop from her eye with the longing that suddenly consumed her. To take him inside her, take his pain and his fear away. To take all his bitterness into her and make him whole again. She wanted a part of him inside her that she feared, more and more each day, that she would never have.
"What is a queen who cannot give a kingdom its heir?" she pondered aloud. Thorin's hand stiffened from stroking hers.
"Am I not a king? Do I not sit now upon my throne?" he murmured.
She smiled down at him. "It seems I am the one sitting here at the moment."
"As rightfully you may. You are the queen under the mountain. My queen."
"I think they all may despise me for it, Thorin. Or you someday, for marrying me."
"You have been exhausted these weeks. It's clouding your mind, Freyda's child and her condition and-"
Bowing her head, she bit her lip. "I've made up my mind, Thorin."
"About what?"
"Perhaps it is Mahal's will that I will never be a mother. I've decided to accept that as it is. None of the potions or charms, no efforts have made any difference. So I will have you, and you will have me, and it's all I ever will need."
"Meisar-"
She ran her hands slowly over the smooth rests of the throne's arms, before tucking them punctiliously beneath her. "Thorin, we have many years before our time comes to be stone again. Your cousin will have time to grow up, and prepare to be king."
He rested his hands on her trembling knees, rubbing close together against each other beneath her skirts. "I did not think you would give up so easily."
"If you think this has been easy, you haven't been paying attention."
.
Thorin returned to the council hall for a late advising. Elsewhere, Erebor buzzed, the mood buoyant, the night carrying through on so warm and fresh a breeze dwarves were out on the terraces in droves, strolling. When a child was born in Erebor, it was a rarity enough to be widespread news. Merchants offered horns of mead at half their usual pricing, and the jewelers were advertising marriage beads and jeweled combs for the bride's trousseau. Toymakers hawked aggressively. It excited the dwarrowdams and the children, even the stalwarts like Lulia, who came up with her sisters to swoon. Meisar passed them without recognition, growing dizzy by the moment, from holding her breath in an effort to stop the tears from coming. A dwarf couple selling figurines and poppets gossiped together at a stand. Meisar eavesdropped, waiting for the lift to start. Her legs were so tired they could barely carry her up the stairs to their chambers.
"The queen's lady in waiting but what of the queen?"
"The shepherdess well tends her flock but there shall be no spring lambs."
"A pity."
"A folly, really."
.
Dis found her crumpled on her chaise lounger aflood in tears.
"Sister! Sister?" Dis swept in, robes billowing behind, spring-green. Meisar didn't move. Face-down, her head was buried atop her arms, using them as both pillow and shield. Dis shook her and she rolled over, reluctantly. Her eyes were narrow slits from swelling with tears, and angry red. She forced herself to look into the maternal robin's-egg orbs of Dis's, placid, but stubbornly melancholy. Her own stung.
"He is perfect, Dis," Meisar sniffled half into the cushion. "Brundin."
"Hm, I think he rather looks like Dwalin," Dis quipped.
"I must have missed you then," Meisar murmured solemnly.
"I paid a visit while you were sitting on that dreadful quibble of the weavers' guild," Dis explained. She stroked Meisar's tangled hair.
"What is a queen who has no child? A pity or a folly?"
"Neither."
"But a tragedy nonetheless. I ache, Dis. I... accept what is true. But I hurt."
"Courage, my dear sister. This is not the end." She pushed aside a lock of hair soaked in tears away from Meisar's concealed cheek, still pressed to the pillow stubbornly. Her grip on it beneath her loosened.
"So you think," Dis said. "But I say differently. Come," she nudged Meisar up hard by the side of her ribs. "Come now."
"Leave me be," Meisar breathed unevenly.
"Get up and get your cloak on," Dis demanded suddenly. "It is time."
"Time for what?" Meisar reluctantly rose, her head buzzing from lack of sleep and crying.
"Wipe those tears. Dry your face. You are the queen. You must never let them see you weep," Dis said harshly. She strode across the room and took their cloaks from the peg upon the wall. She threw Thorin's over her shoulders, his summer-cloak, sky-blue with little tassels on the ends. It was slightly large for her, the hems below her feet. She drew the hood up, swept Meisar's over her back and shoulders as she stubbornly lay on the lounger.
"It is time. I have seen enough," Dis repeated, her face set like stone. Hands almost as strong as a man's own hauled Meisar upward from behind, under her arms. Dis's impatience frightened her enough to move without thinking. Dis twisted and bundled her hair in a hurry under a crocheted snood, tugging roughly at her scalp. She threw up the hood of her cloak. They left the royal quarter in a haste.
"Where are we going?"
"I'll tell you when we get there. But before we do, perhaps it's best we keep ourselves out of sight." She pressed several coins of great value into Oliada's hand and sent her to the Blacklock women's market stall once they reached the cellar market. Most of the merchants had retired for the night; Blacklocks were the odder sort though.
Oliada returned with a pair of veils, black muslin, with strings of jewels drawn across in elegant drapes and finishes. Two Blacklock dwarrowdams, veiled like the women of the Haradrim, huddled quietly together, their stand hung with strings of gold coin and fine textile. Half for silk, half for discretion, Meisar understood suddenly, watching Oliada give them a silent nod. The eyes of the Blacklocks regarded her in passing with stiff curiosity. Their mistrust was a gift. Oliada had been right all along.
"A fine day that I should find you mired in your grief. I was ready, you see. Mahal makes us so, for all purposes," Dis continued, drawing the veil over Meisar's face. The jewels on it were lightweight but clinquant. She did the same herself, so that they were no more recognizable than any of the cagey Blacklocks under the mountain. Oliada was sent off to rest a bit.
"There shall be no more weeping soon. I am sure of it." Dis's steps were brisker than they had ever been once the lift had descended to an all too familiar level. Her black veil snapped as if in a wind from her speed.
"I've a mission long waiting to be fulfilled, and it is ready to be. I'll need you with me," Dis answered.
"What mission?" Her breath grew hot under the cover of the Blacklock veil, under which only her eyes were visible. They came to the gates of the necropolis, two sentries parting, paying them silent reverence. They opened the gates for them.
"People pay their respects at all hours, sister. But best it be a pair of crones from the East, and not the queen and princess. These sentries are not as silent as their Eastern kin," Dis explained in a whisper once they had passed the first level of graves, and descended on brisk feet through the dark, carrying their lanterns high.
"And do we pay our respects then?" Meisar rubbed her hands anxiously on her cloak, feeling their clamminess grow, the small pills of wool damp on her palms already.
Dis stopped and turned to her sharply. "Do you think I was here all of this time weeping and drowning in self-pity, sister? I pay my respects, certainly. But now it is by action that I remember my sons, and keep alive a legacy for them."
Before their tombs she bent and kissed their facades, and drawing her girdle and pouch, laid their lockets upon their graves. "See me and bless me, my sons, for now I do what your uncle could not in his time."
From the pouch, she withdrew from it a chisel. "At the cost of your lives, but not your line."
"What are you doing? You cannot..." Meisar stepped forward between her and the line of tombs, her voice brittle in opposition. "These are your sons'-"
Gently, Dis maneuvered off to her side, a cool hand upon her cheek soothing her wide-eyed disbelief. "It is not my sons' I would disturb. That is a grave sin, you know," she admonished. "Nay, let me to my brother's."
"It is sealed in. How can you?"
Dis tapped the edge of the tomb's door with the chisel, methodically. "Praying in the dark, they say. Weeping at the foot of their graves. Enough of that, yes, but I had my purpose for all the time I spent here. I am as resourceful as anyone still. But some things are better kept to myself and trusted others."
"What others? What is this?" Meisar pleaded, throat taut. She could feel something rising in it, too acidic to let rise further. She pinched the back of her throat shut.
"Tomb or womb, it is all sealed up for the worst and must come undone now." Dis edged the chisel into a particular spot and a brisk "crack," not quite ominous made her smile determinedly to herself. "You will see it is for all good that I do this."
"What is it you are doing?" Meisar's heart began to pump too fast for her liking. The heartbeat that rang in her chest seemed to align with something close, so close the shaking of her ribs was coming from the outside as well as in. The bile slowly ebbed down in her throat again, letting her breathe.
"Mooning about is not my forte, truly. I've chipped away the door to this one, my brother's, for months," Dis confessed, her eyes steady on rolling the chisel along the lines of the grave's outer slab. "Cracking the mortar around the edges. It is stiff work, but I managed to get it last week. I've just been waiting..."
"But it is empty. It is not his," Meisar protested.
"It is not empty."
With queer strength Dis pulled loose the stone that sealed the tomb and set it upon the floor with Meisar's help when her hold faltered from its weight and breadth. As soon, she bent down and wriggled on her stomach into the hollow of the empty tomb, her feet barely touching the ground. When she withdrew she held in her hand a brilliant stone of a thousand subtle hues beneath its smooth white exterior, each more beautiful than the next with every flinch of her hand as she examined it in the low light of the lanterns. Even their weak percolation against it did not dim its radiance.
"Here it is, sister. The thing that wrought us this misery. Is it not a beautiful lie?" Dis held the Arkenstone aloft. The way it lit her eyes the terrible, awed anguish in them washed over the ethereal blue.
"It is beautiful," Meisar said, low, frightened. It was so bright it nearly blinded her. "But I was told it ought lie here for all times. Why are you taking it out now?"
"Here for all times? No, no. There is someplace else it needs to be. Don't you know it?"
"It is time to stop with the word games, Dis, and tell me what you are doing." Her stomach began to curl in a tight knot within her body.
Dis cupped the stone in her hands. "There were mines just down there," she alluded to the abyss at the edge of the octagonal platform upon which the royal tombs were lain. "Mines that were so rich in gold. They tapped so far down that the miners and engineers would say the light from the other side of the mountain would soon shine through if they dug any deeper. Or perhaps they would dig to the entire other side of the earth. They had no conception of where it would end. It did not matter to them. My grandfather's greed did not preclude his generosity to his own, and as long as they were reaping it alongside their king, they were happy not to look that far ahead."
"I have my answer," Dis assured. "With the blessing of others far wiser too."
"When the potions did not work? When Eda said you were perfectly healthy? Perhaps only a confirmation of what I already knew. Gandalf sought scrolls that may have confirmed what I suspected since I was a girl, that this stone was a curse."
"I summoned him to help me with-"
"Yes, you did, but this was the answer all along. He knew why you had summoned him long before he arrived here then. Perhaps he even knew why in the first place. But his certainty is rarely given so freely, and so Radagast came. Radagast the Brown, a sort with a strange talent for certain. Once everything he had brought in hopes of helping your conception failed you, we knew. We all did. We agreed. And I was set upon my mission."
"You should have told me. Or Thorin. How can you be so certain?"
"The Creator did not send you to be my brother's wife so that you could buttress me or give him what happiness he has now, deserved or not. Do you think a dwarf would serve such an idle purpose? The Creator made you for a king so that our line would carry on. That is the business of kings. But it demands something in return, this mountain itself. The truth is, our good fortune ended right down there, when they dug the heart from this mountain. It has cursed us ever since."
She opened Meisar's hands, cupping them together, the way Bira would when she was young to fill her palms with birdseed. There, she placed the Arkenstone. "You hold it in your hand now. Return it, Meisar. Return it. When you return its heart, it will return yours."
"As if you've heard it from Aule's own lips you tell me to do so."
"I do not need to. You are here to hear it. You feel it, right there in your hand, don't you? Would the Creator have sent a wife to my brother, a queen, who did not have that special sense? Who could not feel it now as you do, enough to know?"
"Know what?"
"It is the heart of the mountain. It wishes to return to its place. Does it tell you so? Just listen. Close your eyes and listen. And tell me what it says even if it does not speak the words, and I will trust what you tell me."
It beat furiously in her hand, lifeblood rushing through her hot like molten lead from its surface, invisible. Its weight pulled her down, down, down, until she was on her knees and shuffling on them over the hard stone toward the edge of the raised platform high above the abyss. Dis caught her by the shoulders and gently nudged her back before she went over, her eyes never once opening.
"It is throbbing so, Dis," she whispered, eyes screwed shut.
Dis laid her hand to the smooth exterior of the stone and squeezed it. "Nay, I feel it not. It is like ice, so silent and dead."
They gazed together into the darkness below, so black and infinite it had no echo. Meisar held the stone tight in her grip; the weight of the whole mountain itself could have been laid in her palms the weight crushed her there so. Her knees buckled. Tears welled in her eyes.
Inside she could detect only emptiness, no cause for tears, only a torrent of memories much like those tears, unstoppable, stinging. The emptiness she had known once, the emptiness of the sky along the Greenway on a moonless night. A field in winter, her hands chapped from the bite of the wind. Alone. The road from Ered Luin east, Bombur and Bira and the children all still sleeping, her tears freezing on her face on a cold November morning. She hadn't looked back, not once.
Her girl-troll in a pool of blood in her hovel, black stinking blood on her dress. Her own screams of anguish unanswered, unheard. Dead dwarves on the outer edges of Mirkwood, her feet bare and bloody, dragon-fire and ash on the faces of the living, her poppet covered in long-dried tears and soot. Fred in his grave on the mountainside. She did not weep for the dead then, no, no. IT WAS SO EMPTY INSIDE SHE COULD NOT.
Like the abyss below itself, deprived of its own heart.
She let the stone slip from her fingers. The light of it tumbled down and down into the dark, until there was no more of it. They didn't hear it hit bottom.
"I've given it back its heart. Mayhap now it shall give you yours," Dis said, embracing her close.
"Did you think of what we shall Thorin of this?" Meisar sunk into the warmth of Dis's arms, feeling herself nearly too weak to stand at all.
"We do not. Certainly not you. I will handle it when the time is correct. He will be told. But I urge you to see what may come in the days that follow this. You may find it unnecessary to say anything at all. It will not matter, for the means justify the ends."
"I hope you know what you're doing, Dis."
"It rends of us only dark things," Dis whispered. "I have done in good faith what I have done, and I think, my dear sister, your troubles may be at an end."
.
Tan menu selek lanun naman- May your forge burn brightly
Sigindashat- Grandson