Disclaimer: I do not own anything in the Lord of the Rings. Nor in 'The Red Tent', which helped to inpsire much of the first part of this story.
It is so hard to tell stories of people who, it would seem, never did anything very special. My mother and her sisters never left the village again, staying for the rest of their lives among the hills and having no more adventures or journeys, and who could be interested in a little tribe on the Western shore of the Sea of Rhûn? Yet for many years that was all my world, a small world, a world of cooking and weaving and spinning, of the hot Sun and the cool caves, of brightly coloured tents and wooden market stalls, of goats and sheep, of the great temple with the statues of the gods and goddesses, of cheese and bread and lentils and onions, of the embraces of my mother and my aunts and the love they had for me. Children grow up quickly in that hot land, but I grew and yet still remained a child. Instead of one mother I had what seemed like four or five mothers, filling our house that was built into a cave wall with talk and scolding and laughter, with smells of cooking food and the heavy scent of wool ready to be spun, with songs and stories and lullabies. I kept part of my innocence even when I became a woman, because I had grown knowing that whatever I did, my mother and her sister and her bond-sisters would be there, behind me, ready to help me up when I fell.
If you wish to tell the story of a woman, you must first know what she held dearest. That is no trouble for me, for I knew that first in all their hearts came I, and their sisters. Even Bilhah, who was the mother of four children by the time I was born and would have many more over the years that followed, doted on me. The next that came were their gods, as it should be for all true worshippers. You could tell a great deal about my mother and aunts by the gods they chose as their own. Rookheeya loved above all the Queen of Heaven in every shape and name, as did all women, but she also held in her heart a special place for the Queen's consort, Salim, Master of the high heavens and the blue sky. The Men of Rhûn, whatever the peoples of the West might say of them, have a deep love for their homeland and for the sky above it. We call ourselves 'children of the blue sky', and blue is the luckiest colour in Rhûn, though it is rarely worn. And of course, my mother had a special affection for that colour, for it was a man in blue who had given me life, and it was a patch of blue sky that had led her from the darkness into the Sun once more.
When they had learned Ishara's name, one of our people would rightly think that her favourite goddess was Ishtara, the Fruitful One, the Lady of the Earth for whom she had been named, as I had been named for Adah. Such thoughts would be wrong. Ishara saw no reason to worship the goddess who had given her name to her but who had neglected to give her fertility as well. Bilhah, with her many children, was Ishtara's loyal worshipper; instead Ishara paid service to Laban, the Keeper of the courts of the dead, who decided on the fate of each soul that came to him once they had passed from life. It pleased my oldest bond-aunt to think that there was some justice in the world beyond this. Werru saw herself as a servant of Laban's wife, Uttu the Weaver, who captures the world and time in the cloth that she makes, for Werru was a weaver herself and believed in the fabric of life; and Benti lit incense in honour of Laban's sister, the kin to the god of Death, Renna the Sorrowful.
Each of my aunts, my mothers, was different from each other. Each of them treasured some different part of me; each of them taught me a different way to see the world, my world, our world. My mothers; although they are gone, they are still with me. I carry them in my words and in my thoughts, in my face and in my hands, in the very braids upon my head. There are still times when I think of them and find it hard to believe that they are no longer alive; my aunt Bilhah and my bond-aunts Werru, Benti and Ishara, and my mother Rookheeya.
Bilhah had been small and slight when she was a child, though you would never think it to look at her after she was married. She seemed always to be pregnant or nursing, and when she visited our house we could mark the swell of her belly or the growth of the baby that she carried on her hip at that time, the latest in the brood of my many cousins. She was plumper than my mother by the time that I was old enough to notice, with big breasts and thick ankles, and half a head shorter, but still the two sisters looked very much alike despite the different paths that they had walked, with their almond shaped eyes and strong jaws and the gesturing of the hands that they shared. Bilhah told me that in my baby years I could not tell the difference between them, and so she would watch over me while my mother slept and I would never raise a whimper.
My blood-aunt was one of those women who could change from foolish to cunning and from playful to calm with great swiftness. Talking to her she might have seemed to have no thought beyond her home and her children, but there was far more to her than motherhood. It was she who taught me my numbers, having learned them from her merchant husband, and in some ways she was very much a shrewd merchant's wife. It was because of this shrewdness that she was able to bring me treats that I would not have had but for her; dried figs and honey dates, and even sometimes fruits that were not in season. I tasted pomegranate and cucumber because of Bilhah, and when I ran to her when she visited us, as a little girl, it was as much to see what she had brought me as to greet her. My mother often complained that she spoiled me but Ishara and Werru saw no harm in Bilhah's gifts, though often they would take part of the sweets into their own keeping so that I could be made to behave by the promise of them when my blood-aunt was not present.
Bilhah smelled of yeast, like my mother did when she was brewing and baking, but she smelled of other things as well – of milk, both her own and that of the goats her husband owned, and of the musky spices that she handled each day, and of barley water. When she hugged me all this would meet my nose in a rush of scent, and I would sigh and cuddle closer to her. She was what none of my bond-aunts nor my mother was – fat and soft, her flesh more like a cushion, and I liked to fall asleep upon her lap when her belly was small enough for me to do so, and when there wasn't a jealous cousin bawling to take my place. At other times I would press my ear to her stomach to feel my newest relative pushing against her flesh and against her skin. She was different from all of my aunts, from my mother, because she carried life inside her, and I loved her for it.
She was different, for she was brave in a way that my mother and her other sisters would never truly know. Each time she conceived and put on her red robes once more - a colour that only the soldiers of Rhûn and expectant mothers are permitted to wear – she knew all too well that once more she would risk choking out her last gasps upon the birthing bricks, her life wrung out of her to bring this newest child, living or dead, into this world. Like a man who goes into battle there was every chance that she would die in agony, or perish in the days after the birth, and yet I never saw her wearied or sad in all her years of bearing. Men truly cannot know this kind of bravery, nor women who have never had children – you cannot find it until you are the one on the bricks, the midwife before you and your sisters who become your throne around you, your body ripping your child out of you. But Bilhah found it, and because of that she walked as a seasoned warrior does – as one who had seen the prospect of her own death, more than once, and who was aware that she might see it again in time to come.
I would never know her quite as well as those I lived with. She had her own life, a life outside our little house, a life with a husband who gave her children that might kill her with every pregnancy, and that husband and those children had a right to her love as we did. Each time we bade her farewell and she retreated to a home that was not ours, I felt a pang at her leaving, but the pain was not as great as when my mother or my bond-aunts went away for a time. I knew that she would always come back in a few days. I did not yet know a time when I would not see her again.
Save for my mother, I never knew anyone of any of the Free Peoples of the world quite as wilful as Ishara, or as stubborn. Werru was soft spoken and meek and Benti said little or nothing, but her rejection by her husband and the shadow that broke others had forged the will of my oldest bond-aunt into something unbreakable. I do not think that anyone ever managed to get the better of her in an argument, not even Rookheeya, for Ishara had a mind that was quick even before she had learned to live on her wits alone, and a tongue that could be sharp as a knife one minute and as sweet as honey the next. She was the one who would go to the market to buy, trade or bargain for food or other things, a large bag slung over her right shoulder and a sturdy walking stick in her left hand so that she should not stumble and fall under the weight of what she brought back. When I grew older and taller I often went with her so I could take part of her load off her withered shoulder and arm, and so that she could lean on me as she walked, and she would say that I was better than any stave or crutch.
As well as sharing stubbornness with my mother, Ishara also shared her distaste for men, as I have said before, but even more so. Rookheeya loved Rodren and was fond of her nephews, but Ishara held little or no regard for men in general. Unlike my mother she claimed to have respect and love for only one man and that was her own father, who had died when she was a girl, and what she had seen of males in the time since then gave her no confidence. At times she would say loudly, making Werru laugh nervously and Rookheeya chuckle and even Benti stretch her lips in a thin smile, that women needed men to make babies and to lift heavy objects, and for little or nothing else.
She held her greatest hatred for her former husband who had shamed and disgraced her before the whole tribe, saying she was worthless as a wife and worthless as a woman, and he had been the one who had given her to the troops himself. Whenever they passed in the village, as they did sometimes, she with her bag and he with his new wife or one of his two concubines following obediently in his wake, she would meet his eyes coolly and refrain from bowing her head, as a woman should do to an important man of the tribe. Then she would whisper a curse on a certain part of his body, under her breath, barely moving her lips. And perhaps her curses worked, for his wife only ever bore him one child, a daughter, and his concubines failed to conceive, and people muttered that he was sterile.
For all that Ishara hated men, she was built rather like one herself. She had big hands and feet and wide shoulders, and her narrow waist and the large hips that her husband had foolishly believed would bear an army of sons were hidden by the loose robes she chose to wear. Her voice was deeper than that of an ordinary woman as well, and her breasts were as flat and puny as a child's, and her nose and mouth seemed too large for her thin face. Quite a few in the village called her the man-woman, with a woman's body but a man's mind and voice and temper. Some even muttered – no doubt encouraged by that dog of a man who had married her for a few short months – that she was a hermaphrodite, a freak of nature, with a member between her legs as well as breasts, however small they were. My strong bond-aunt would simply laugh at their talk, for she knew that none of them dared to prove what they whispered, not least because they feared what she might do to them in revenge. She was as strong in body as she was in will, was Ishara, and before she had been burned she had proved it on the long march by carrying anyone of the women who was too weak or ill to walk on their own. Even when I was growing up, with her limp and her withered arm, she could still lift a grindstone with hardly any aid, and once when she had been arguing with a stall holder and he had taken a swing at her with his stick, she wrenched it from his grasp with her good hand and beat him with it until the hard wood broke upon his shoulders and until he was begging for mercy.
Ishara was cold to many people around her, even the women of the tribe, but she made up for her coldness to others by showering us all with her love. She saw my mother and her bond-sisters as the true sisters that she had never had, and but that it would have raised Rookheeya's ire she would have called me her own daughter, as a replacement for the one she could never have. I think that it was Ishara who nurtured in me certain wildness, a disdain to bow my head or to lower my voice in the presence of men. Ishara had no patience for many of the traditions of the tribe, nor for the duty and obedience that men expected of women; another reason why she despised them. "Men are obedient and dutiful to each other because one is more important than the other, or richer, or some such thing. We women must be obedient, simply because we are women. What does that obedience do for us?" I can still remember her deep throaty laugh as she threw her head back and basked in the Sun upon her face. "Not a great deal, Adahni, my dear, I can tell you. Not a great deal."
Ishara was not the only one of the four who defied the elders by refusing to wear a veil across her face. Benti and Werru, though they had far more to hide than other women, had gone through too much to be ashamed of themselves, even if they hardly ever left the cool of the house, and Rookheeya saw no need for it. I never took to wearing one myself, even after I was old enough to do so. But Ishara also hated to cover her fine dark hair, which she considered to be one of her best features, and instead of simply ignoring the stares of the people she would often seek out their gazes and delighted when, woman or child or even man, they dropped their eyes from her own. It seemed to her that it was a fine thing to be a woman beyond the reach of men.
As eager as I was to go to my mother or Werru or Bilhah when I was sad or happy, Benti I shied away from when I was still stumbling in trying to walk, and that was not so much because of her face and her white eye as because of her silence. The rumour in the village was that her tongue had been cut out as a delicacy for the shadowed ones to eat; those of them who had known her as a girl seemed to have forgotten that she had never spoken to anyone greatly save for Inna, and now that her sister was dead Benti's desire to speak had gone with her. My mother and Bilhah and my two other bond-aunts were content for her not to talk, knowing as they did what she had suffered, but with the cruelty of a child that had just finished being a baby I was less understanding. When I had found a pretty stone or when I had hurt myself in falling I would run to Rookheeya or Bilhah, Ishara or Werru, but not to dark sad Benti, sitting in her corner and spinning all the while, spinning string as fine as spider's web. If she was pained at the way I shunned her she never said anything of it, even when I was older, but she often watched me so closely that I would go outside just to escape her gaze.
It was not until I was about seven that I actually heard her voice for the first time, creaking like the boards of a stall, asking me to go to the temple with her. I was astonished that the silent woman in the corner could actually speak, and then I was terrified, but glares from Rookheeya and Ishara and even a frown from sweet Werru meant that I did not dare to refuse, so I took Benti's hand with reluctance and we set out. I did not like the feel of her hand against mine, it felt far too dry, and it was all I could do not to pull my own away from hers. I thought that the ugly black marks on her skin would pass to mine, and I feared it as well.
We walked to the temple side by side and we spent much of the morning there, and though I do not remember that time I do remember that we returned hand in hand again, and I no longer wished to pull away from my quiet bond-aunt. When she went to the temple after that, once every seven days, I would always go with her.
When you grew to know Benti, if she permitted it, you would learn that her silence was as precious as an oasis, and her words came to the ears like a cool drink, despite their lack of use. If she let you see, you would see her wisdom, and her understanding. She watched and listened to her family as she spun string for Werru to weave, and she would hear our thoughts and our wishes. She listened to what we had to say, and her cool dry hands would rise to grasp and hold ours, or would rest upon my head when I buried my face in her lap and wept when I was sad and did not wish to speak, and stroke my hair. We made a gift of all that we dreamed to place before her, as if making an offering to one of the goddesses that she so loved.
If Benti spoke at all, she spoke of the divine ones, those that the Men in the West of Rhûn still worshipped, serving the One of the South more out of fear than willingness. When certain days in the year came she would sing the praises of the lord or lady of that day, her voice high and keening, and when any of us was sick with fever or illness she would sit by the side of their sleeping mat, muttering prayers to the goddess of healing. When she blessed me or any of us it was with the grace of the divine ones. In another life Benti might have been a priestess, dressed in mists of silk and her lovely face completely veiled, a mysterious servant of the temple. I never saw her in anything but the heavy garments that she and Werru made between them, and her loveliness had been taken away by her scars, but she moved with more dignity than the silly virgins in the temple ever did, and with more grace, bought with a terrible price.
A trip to the temple with Benti always went like this: first we would make our obeisance to the Queen of Heaven and the Lord of the Skies, the statue of the Lord handsome and stern, the Queen beautiful and smiling with her arms held out to you as if in welcome. Then Benti would buy some incense with the coins that Rookheeya always handed to her wordlessly at the door of our house – even when times were hard and there was less bread, though thankfully there was never a time when we had no bread, there were always coins enough for Benti's incense - and we would make our way to the alcove where the statue of Renna the Sorrowful stood, tucked away in a shadowed corner of the temple, as it should be. Benti would prostrate herself on the floor, made of some strange black stone, before the goddess, and stayed in that position for many heartbeats – I, sitting on my heels as I did, once counted near to a thousand before she sat up. We would begin to pray once she did so. Benti always prayed without a word, not even muttering under her breath as my mother and my aunt and my bond-aunts often did, as silent in this as she was in nearly everything else that she did. When I was a little girl I would speak my prayers loudly, as all children did who had not yet learned to keep their thoughts to themselves, but young as I was I had no reason yet to pray to Renna for anything. I was loved and treasured; I did not yet know grief or its meaning.
While Benti was silent with a bowed head I would look at Renna, as if the sculptor had caught her in the very act of lifting her mourning veil to wipe away her tears with her free hand. That hand stopped just short of her face, I remember, leaving the tears intact; three small diamonds – they had to be small, ours was not a very wealthy village – forever about to drip further down the dark stone of her cheek. I always dared to think that she was beautiful even in her sadness, for few look lovely when they cry, save a goddess.
When Benti was finished praying – I knew the litany though I never heard it: for her mother, for the friends she had seen die in Dol Guldur, and most of all for her dead sister – she would strike a spark to light the sticks of incense, and place them in the holders set around her that she took from the altar. I hated the smoke, for it caught in my throat and made me cough and the smell of it made me feel sick, and so I would always move backwards and to the side of her to be quite free from it. Benti did not mind. There were times in that little alcove when she hardly seemed to recall that I was there, not out of spite but because she was so caught up in her own memories. The smoke would rise up around her, cloaking her in mist, hiding the scars on her hands, seeming to ripple around her like the rise of water itself, drifting across her face and her clear eyes, both seeing and blind, without tears as she gazed up at the weeping face of the goddess. When I think of Benti that is always how I shall remember her best, a figure in the midst of smoke, distant, ethereal, half way to the next world.
Werru liked to tell me that when she was my age she had the most beautiful teeth ever seen – "Like tiny pearls, they were, each one perfect!" And then she would open her mouth to show the ruin within and grimace wickedly at me, and I would giggle, and so I never saw what was left of her teeth with any sort of disgust. Her nose had healed more or less by that time, though it would always be crooked, but there was nothing to be done for the state of her mouth save for chewing herbs to take away the pain. Werru learned to smile with her lips and not her teeth, since even the most good humoured grin on her face looked a little like the snarl of a predator. Those who could smile in return without staring were rewarded with her laughter and her gentle voice and her kindness.
My youngest auntie was only fourteen years older than I, and she had ceased to grow in height when she was eleven, and so I was quickly able to outgrow her. My mother and my other aunts towered over her and so did I when I was old enough; from behind it was hard to tell who the child was, she or I, save that she covered her head for the first years of my life and I did not. Rookheeya and Ishara could easily have picked her up when they embraced her but they never did so, and it was only later that I learned that Werru did not like to be handled by anyone larger or taller than her. Such contact brought back memories of the days when her first blood had come, and when she had become the prey of the soldiers – men who take children into their beds are damned in my country, but any woman, no matter how young, is seen as fair game…to the men, if not to the women. Werru, like Benti, rarely went out, but this was because she was timid of what she might see and of who might see her, and might pick her up and hold her down and take what he wanted. Rookheeya and Ishara spoke of their time among the men without flinching, but Werru never did.
But Werru was not sad as Benti was sad. Her voice was often raised in song as she worked at the loom that the sisters bought with the money they had earned, and she smiled enough for all of us. Her sweet nature had been bruised by her rapes of the past, but it bloomed anew like a damaged flower when the rain comes. When I sat at her feet as she wove the cloth that we would make into our clothes she would show me how the world came into her weaving, how the warp and the threads were the land and the people, and her fingers were in place of the fingers of the great goddess. "Think of the world as cloth," she would say, passing the shuttle through the threads, "and then think of it, stitched into a glorious robe, made to sit on the shoulders of the Queen of Heaven, made to her design. Think of our history as colours in the weave, and ourselves as stitch marks, so small as hardly to be seen. We live and breathe and die as the gods will, made in the image that they ordain." Ishara would often scoff at this belief, though never in Werru's hearing, for she had a great respect for her younger bond-sister and the strength that sustained her. It was what kept her from cowering in a corner and whimpering, it was what kept her naming the goats and sheep that we bought and sheared, teaching me to do the same. It was acceptance.
Werru smelled constantly of the spun wool that she handled, and wisps of it clung to her and made strands of her hair crackle like sparks and stand out from her head. At times when I touched her those sparks would pass to me and make both of us squeak in surprise and then laugh, giggling like the children that we were. She would sit me upon her small lap and let me pass the shuttle through the threads myself, guiding my small hands with her larger ones, telling me of the great weaver and of how she brought the gift both of weaving and of history to mankind, so that we might be warmed both by cloth and by the remembrance of deeds past and long ago. Benti would often join us, spinning string as fast as Werru needed it, and when Werru was not teaching me to weave or Benti instructing me how to spin they worked fast together, never looking up from their hands, hardly pausing in their labours. There were times when my mother would whisper loudly that they made it a race to see who could out do the other, and that it was better than watching a hunt. Their hands would move so quickly it hardly seemed true, like the legs of the lizards that scuttled through the rocks, running from those that would hunt them. The loom would clatter through the air and the wool would rasp and the women would breathe, and there would be no other sound but peace.
In long, hot afternoons when my hands are empty I think of Werru, sitting at the loom that was hers, running her hands across the warp with all the tenderness of stroking a lover's face, busy and content. She was happy to sit where she was, hardly seeing the outside world, worshipping Uttu in her own home with each cloth that she finished, her dark eyes shining above her crooked nose, her jaw constantly moving as she chewed the plants that brought relief to her pain. Whenever I smell wool or see the work that she so enjoyed, I am able to dream that I am back sitting on her lap, and hearing once more about Uttu the Weaver.
And Rookheeya. What can I say that could tell what I thought of her? She was my mother. The centre of every girl's life should be her mother, and Rookheeya was the centre of mine. To the village and the people she was an attractive eccentric who bore the lashes of a slave upon her arms and carried herself with the air of a harlot queen; to me she was a goddess, divine, beautiful, all knowing, all adoring. There was no love that could have been greater than my love for her, or her love for me.
Rookheeya reeked of the bread and the beer that she made, and our goats and sheep that she tended and sheared and cooked, smelling of comfort and assurance and safety. Her hands smelled like the scented oils that she used to help plait my hair, not even permitting her bond-sisters to do the job that by rights belonged to a girl's mother. Werru might teach me to weave, Benti might teach me to spin and Ishara teach me to see without a cloud of tradition and obedience, but my mother was the only one who would teach me to braid and coil my hair upon my head. My very first memories are of gentle fingers pulling at my freshly washed curls, coaxing them with a cold pick into the braids that would run from my forehead and temples to the nape of my neck until my moon blood came, and then the braids would be made so tight that parts of my scalp might be seen between them, if I took my headscarf off outdoors. I must have whimpered, but she was so careful that she never once pained me.
Like her sister did with her own children, Rookheeya would carry me about on her hip from place to place, hardly letting my feet touch the ground, and so I was unsteady on my feet long after many children had found their legs. She made up for this error by making sure that I would learn to speak properly. She and all my bond-aunts and even Bilhah spoke to me not as a baby but as they might to someone of their own age, and before I was more than a year old I could reply, with hardly a stumble. I learned to walk at last upon her hands, and I learned that I could cry upon her shoulders.
As I aged hers were the arms I always sought out. I loved my mother's embrace, when she would bundle me up into her arms and my feet would leave the ground and she would swing me about, her skirts and mine rippling as we moved, as if we danced. She was so light on her feet, and she taught me to be light on mine. At the time of the new Moon we would dance in the night around our home, clapping our hands, singing to encourage the Moon to return to the earth. My mother would let her hair out and it would flow in a lion's mane about her head, and her tawny eyes would flash, and her teeth would show, sharp and white. The light of the Moon would gleam upon the skin of her bare arms and upon her scars. She loved to dance so.
My mother would bake me breads of honey and fruit and onion, trying to feed me as much as she wished to, glaring at Bilhah whenever her sister brought the sweets that she could not get for me. She wanted only the best that could be had for her daughter, her only child. She dressed me in cloth made from the softest wool and braided bright ribbons into my hair. She taught me to scratch out words and to read words as well, for her father had been a scribe and she had won pieces of knowledge off him, like pieces of bread given to a beggar. She scolded me when I disobeyed her or any of those who lived in our home, and when I saw what I had done wrong she would hold me close and praise me for seeing. With a fierce desire for me to see beyond the borders of our people she told me all that she knew of the lands beyond the village, to the West and to the South. She told me of her time in the place called Dol Guldur, holding my hands and making me, young as I was, swear to remember. And I remembered. I always remembered.
I loved my aunt Bilhah and my bond-aunt Ishara and my bond-aunt Benti and my bond-aunt Werru above all the gods, but even above them I loved my mother Rookheeya. She was my mother, she was my father, and she was me.
Sorry for taking so long. Settling in to university can be a bit of a trial.