Disclaimer: I do not own any part of LOTR.
The people of Dorwinion were so loud! They talked constantly, true, as all of the race of Men seem to do, but they also spoke with such voices that anyone passing by them could hear their conversations. The men and women of our tribe talked to each other in low tones when outside our houses; but it seemed that they simply didn't care if any heard them or if any would wish to. The maidens were the worst, walking along in little groups with their skirts flaring out about them, whispering so loudly that there was no point to it; their laughter was horrible. When I first heard them cackling away about some meaningless thing I though that they had hurt themselves, they sounded as if they were screaming. But no, they were laughing about some ribbon that one of them had found in a place she had not expected it to be.
They were all so tall as well; it was as if we had stepped into a land of giants. There were very few there, save for the children, that I did not have to tilt my head up to speak to. They looked down on me without meaning to, and there was some place in not my heart but my stomach that hated them for it. Whenever we went among them we would dart about like fretting horses, skirting around those who strode past us as if they might trample us under their booted feet. Their cloaks would smack us on our legs or even our chests when they blew in the wind, and once when I was standing behind a maiden a gust blew her straw-like hair out and into my face and I had to fight not to splutter and claw it away from me.
Their hair, though, their hair was very fine, and it often caught the eye as it fell about them if they were men or girls unmarried. It was long and straight or, if it was curling, it fell only loosely in waves like the surface of the sea, and it was many different colours. We could walk through the streets and see so many shades of brown it was as if we were in a forest, and once or twice there would be one with hair not quite the colour of blood. On the other side of the sea people might say it was a sign that they had been conceived during the time when their mother's moon blood had flowed and that their tempers flared as hot as fire, if you believed such stories. There was also the legend that those born with red hair were gifted with the Sight, but none of these red headed people seemed to possess the gift of prophecy and they stamped along like any of their fellows with none of the mystique of the few seers that I had ever seen.
I did not see many of them on our first day in the city for Alamon told me to stay in the wagon while we were being taken to the place set aside for foreign traders; and once we reached the place there was such a crowd of our own people debating which stalls and storing places the men should have that it was evening before Alamon and I could rest, and it was too late then to go and look at the city even if Alamon would have let me. I had to wait until the morning of the next day to see more of the white faced men and have my first sight of their pale women and children with dots all over their skin, cast there by the Sun.
They were curious about us, but not as curious as we were of them; people like us were a common sight in the area that was assigned to foreigners. Still, many of them asked questions in their loud voices; some of them had met Alamon the year before when he had come with his father and remembered him and they were polite, asking us how old we were and what our families were like. Some were not so courteous. Once in the first days of our stay, when I was fetching some spices from our stores, I saw a pale man talking to Alamon and my cousin returned him a quiet answer in Westron but I could see that he was angry. When the man was gone I asked him what had happened, and he told me that the customer had been asking if I was his slave girl, since I dressed so differently from all the other women. He'd told him to tell anyone else who'd thought of asking such a question that I was his younger sister. I was somewhere between outraged and amused myself, but I took care to say nothing and I kept my knife fairly visible at my waist for the next few days. I wondered what they thought of us, of our people, if they believed every woman was property and that every man was willing to sell anything.
They would come to our market place every day. There were the men with silver in their beards who would debate with the older merchants about their stocks of wool and cotton, and there were the shop owners who would bargain for spices and give us herbs in return. There were nomads come in from the brown lands with the skin of our people and the hair of pale skins who wanted leatherwork and pretty saddles for their fine horses, or fur to trim the tunics that they wore. There were fisherman who would barter for rope, and the women would come in number for items like oil and dried fruits and other things for cooking. Our stall and our stock were visited by younger people, particularly young unattached women who were drawn to my tall, strong cousin, or who were reassured by the sight of a woman of their age with a face they could see. They would point to things that they wanted and mime until they learned that Alamon could speak quite good Westron, and then they would put on their dumb show for me instead. A few of them remembered him from his first trip and would tease him about certain things he had supposedly done that made him glance at me in panic, but I would just smile and go on fetching things or rolling out the wool bracelets that those girls so liked. They were speaking so quickly most of the time I could understand very little of what they said in any case.
The new ones among us stayed in the space allotted to us for some time. We did not quite dare venture out into the sea of tall buildings around us, forming a maze of streets that we had never encountered before in our home. These buildings of stone - as pale as their makers - had two or sometimes even three stories. There was always a secret fear that one of them would crumble and fall over, crushing you beneath it. In quiet times I would watch the upper levels of the houses that surrounded our temporary world and wonder what went on behind those windows; what could people possibly do on a second floor that they couldn't do on one where your feet were at least on the ground? We hesitated to make our way into that mass of towers fearing we would get lost or ambushed in some way since there were so many places to hide or disappear. We would sit by the fires at night and sing chants and try to pretend that these were not sung to keep the shadows and whatever might live in the maze away. Still, my curiosity was already making me want to take a look at what lay beyond our own well trodden borders by the time the new bride, Ennia, came to me and asked me if it was possible that she was expecting, a suspicion I soon confirmed.
"We will have to get you good things to eat," I told her, "good food early on means a strong, healthy child!" We decided that we would have to go out into Dorwinion itself to buy things that I knew were important to an early pregnancy; our group of merchants and traders had been living on things like lentils and dried meat and she needed fresh greens, salad and fruit to help the baby on its way. Telling her husband of the reason behind our need to leave the stalls was enough for him to send us on our way with a blessing, but we needed someone to come with us, to speak for us. One of the merchants pressed his son Attar on us, and we three set out.
If there had been only two of us instead of three that day I am certain we would have soon turned back, overwhelmed by what we saw. I felt very sorry indeed for poor Attar; Ennia and I could walk close together and that gave us some comfort, but he had to march along and look as if nothing was wrong even when passers by stopped to look after us. Worse, he had to translate for us when we at last reached a shop that looked as if it had what we needed. He had never learned the Westron for such words as pregnancy or baby, and we had to mime the reasons for wanting the fruit and vegetables that we pointed to while the keeper of the shop stared at us as if we were mad. We had gathered quite a crowd, and by the time we came away with our purchases Attar looked as if he wished for Hee-un to make the sea rise and swallow the whole city with all of us in it.
Then he had to stamp after us as we grew more curious and slowly climbed one of the hills that the city was built on, and stand by as we stared at the view, at the streets and the squares and the roofs, the flow of the river that cut the city in half, the gleam of the sun upon the fountains and the green of the vineyards to the north and west. We shared out some of the apples we had bought and ate them while pointing to the south and the plains over which we had come, making out the dark line of the great wooden wall that separated Dorwinion from what would become the 'brown lands', where the nomads with white gold hair came riding in from. We watched the merchant trail that led to the West, carrying the barrels of wine that made the region so famous. And our eyes kept returning to the city in the midst of this green, old and slightly faded but still elegant and majestic. Ennia even said that she half wished her child had been conceived there, in such a place of beauty. But at last Attar was annoyed enough that he ordered us back to our market place and we went with perfect obedience, eating the last of our apples loud enough to annoy him even further.
Poor Attar would be annoyed even more, for he soon became the supposed guardian of a larger group than two; once we had told the other women of our trip and what we had seen some of them wanted to come with us if we went out again. With their husbands' blessing five other women joined us, and we had some very merry times as we walked about the streets with our surly shadow in our wake. We visited the docks where fishing boats and merchant ships from other ports of the east came in and unloaded cargos of fish and cotton and kakaw and sun fruits and many other good things. We went back up the hill and spent a while looking at the lay of the land, and looking to the West as well and wondering what lay in that direction, where none of us would ever go – and we learned to speak of it quite freely, even in my presence. We looked at the rich vineyards and the work that went on in them and smelled the scent of crushed grapes upon the air.
We found little treasures in little streets, tiny images of women set in small alcoves that the people bowed to without even knowing why, but which we knew enough to recognise as the Queen of Heaven, the Earth Mother, the Eternal Renewal, the Dancer and other familiar figures from our beliefs. We found the fountains that Kala told me of and sat by them and dabbed clear water on our wrists and temples to cool ourselves, more out of custom than from any real need to recover, and we saw symbols beneath the water, on the stone itself, that could only mean Hee-un. I wondered who had put all these things there and if these people really believed as we did, that they had not forgotten the gods who had made them.
We went to stalls run by pale women and one or two of the older ladies would strike up conversations with faces that they remembered through many years of coming to this city. It was easier to find green things for Ennia with the friendship of the ladies, and sometimes their daughters would be introduced to us so that another generation could learn to make ties with the people from the other side of the sea. Ennia and I never quite knew what to say to these girls who seemed almost like over grown children, never mind that we could share very few words. From what I could tell they were almost always talking of young men and making themselves pretty for them and where they would meet and what they would do there and who would choose who for a spouse as time went on, which was all very strange to us. Our women did not flirt as these did, we did not entice men to us with ribbons and scents, we would not giggle and whisper whenever a young man passed us, or at least not where they could see us. Our women knew that they would marry where their parents willed even if those who would be wives had more choice in the matter, and that with any luck they could fall in love after they were married, or if they did not like their husband they did not have to share his bed too often. All the silliness that these chattering maidens indulged in seemed pointless to us, even if we never said so. Even a concubine might not engage in such behaviour as they did.
They asked us questions about ourselves, with their mothers and our older companions as translators. They were surprised that Ennia was already married and pregnant, perhaps because they wed later than we did, and they wanted to know why I did not cover my face. I was surprised the news had not spread, considering the fuss the guards at the wall had made over it. They giggled at my robes at first; I did not learn why until later when Alamon told me that whores in this part of the world often dressed in red and yellow, and I felt more hate in my stomach than ever when I thought of the sign of my holy office being seen as a invitation for a night between my legs.
When they learned that I was all but a midwife they stopped giggling and started asking me about things like love potions and fertility charms that made me want to burst out with giggles myself; anyone who tried to go to Kala for such a thing as a love potion would be laughed out of her house, though she did know remedies to restore potency in men and women. One of them even asked me if I could read the future.
"No," I told her. "I can do many things, but I cannot do that. I do not have the Sight."
She frowned while one of my friends translated that last part, for I had slipped into our language for it. "You are sure? How do you know that you do not?"
"I know," I assured her, and all of us who had come from beyond the sea nodded. "If a person is touched by Loren then everyone will know it, and most of all they will know it. I do not have the Sight. You are more likely to have the Sight than me." And this was true, for her hair was red like fire itself and she really was the most otherworldly being I had ever seen, save for the fair ones.
We went to what was once their part of the city, though many of them had left and now lived on the outskirts, as if reluctant to be penned on all sides by Men however well they might or might not get on with them. We looked at the lovely buildings now filled so very often with Men – Men who somehow, impossibly, shared some of the beauty of the long lifes, dark haired and grey eyed, but still Men – fashioned so delicately they seemed to be made out of spun glass or even sugar, and they touched my heart in some sad defeated way. They looked so fragile, as if one good hot gaze from the Sun would make them melt away, the ones who had built them and once lived in them fading as well. I ran my hands over walls and door frames that had been carved perhaps a thousand years before and had by some magic never weathered, but looked as if they might start crumbling any day, beautiful as they were. We were even allowed into one house to look around and every room yielded a new sight to make us lose our breath again: paintings on the walls so very lifelike, carved wooden ceilings, such glass work in the windows as we could hardly ever dream of even with all the skill of our glass makers. And this in a relatively ordinary house, built more lifetimes of Men ago than I could guess or fathom, perhaps built when the Blue Spirits had come to the land, perhaps even soon after the gods themselves had made the world! It was like breathing in a very myth that was as tenuous as a moth's silk, all too easily torn away.
The only thing of theirs that was solid was that wall that we had passed through. It had been built for strength and it had lasted for centuries, and there were stories that it was enchanted and would not suffer any to pass it uninvited; the magic of the long-lifes went so far as to keep out all that they did not desire.
We watched them as they glided through the city, the divine ones, fairest beings that ever I saw. It was like a dream to see them working side by side and speaking to ordinary men and women and the mortals talking back to the immortals, as if it were the most common place thing in the word to be in conversation with one who was walking the earth before your distant ancestors were born and did not even look it, save in their eyes. It was harder to tell who was more lovely, their men or their women, sometimes I could hardly tell the difference between them. I often looked for their children - girls going with their mothers to market, boys accompanying their fathers to see them do business - but after days and days of search I began to think that any offspring this exquisite race brought forth had all been born long ago, and there would be no more, ever.
We admired them from afar but we did not dare address them. To us they might as well be malaaikah who had flown down from on high and deigned to tread upon the earth. The people of Dorwinion were used to that splendour, perhaps even had a little of it running in their veins, but we were not those people. We stayed away from them as we would stay away from cranes if we were frogs, and they seemed to ignore us as horses ignored lizards. That was what we all thought, anyway, even if we were wrong.
There was one day when I was sitting with Ennia by a little fountain that we both liked on the side of a fairly busy street and with stairs behind it leading up to a higher level on which more buildings were built, sharing a sun fruit between us. Attar was with us, and he was by then comfortable enough in our presence that we shared the fruit with him and he did not grimace when we began to talk of when the baby might quicken and what she might call it. He even loosened the collar of his tunic to dab some cooling water on his neck and merely stared at two maidens who giggled at this sight in such a manner that they quickly hurried on their way. Ennia was asking about whether Kala might have been here in her day, for I had told her all about my teacher's time in the city save for her deeper trouble with the two friends she had left behind. I had just begun to say that Amdír might well have brought her there to tell her stories, for it was comfortable and shady, when I saw a fair one walking right across the street towards us. I stopped talking and stared at him, and I wondered in a stupid way if he actually was Amdír and had overheard us talking about him. Of course it was not possible, it was foolish to think so. There were still many long-life men in the city, what were the chances that this one would be the one from a lifetime ago?
I had managed to keep my mouth shut, and I was rather pleased that I kept it shut still when the fair one stopped in front of us – and it was Amdír, I very soon learned, after all my thoughts that it couldn't be – and asked me in our own tongue, very respectfully, how Kala fared, as if he had only spoken to her the day before and had not seen her in the market today and wondered where she was. Kala had never told me what Amdír looked like, why would she have seen any reason to do so? All I could think in the breath I took after he had asked his question was that I did not blame Kala if she would have wanted to lie with him. I couldn't help it. Up close, to deny that he was beautiful would have been to deny that fire was hot or water wet. They just were, as he was.
I was certainly not Kala, and I hardly knew how to talk to someone like Amdír even after all my teaching, so the encounters that I had after that day with him were few and mostly made up of questions. We were in the company of others most of the time; both Alamon and Attar were wary of the interest that was being taken in me and made certain that I was surrounded by my friends. I often did not even look at him because he was beautiful and I was angry again, this time at myself for admiring him and wanting to look at him again and again. I don't know if he had any desire to befriend me at all, really; it was more as if he felt it would be rude of him if, having approached me once, he did not continue to talk with me. Or perhaps it was because I was the only way he could learn what he wanted.
He asked me about her, what had happened to her after she had left Dorwinion and where she had gone, the places she had visited and the things she had done. There were many years to explain, for although she had promised to write to him there had only been a few messages and then none. He told me, in that strange tranquil sing-song way of his that Kala had mimicked so well, that he still kept the letters but that he had never shown them to Turambar.
"What did Turambar do when he learned that she had gone?" I remember asking him. I had honestly wanted to know what had happened to Kala's friends, one who might have been her lover if only she had let him. Most of the people from Kala's past seemed merely like characters in a story to me, even her own mother, but Turambar and Amdír had been more real, standing out perhaps because they were so different from anything else she had told me of. "Was he angry?"
"He was very angry. After accusing me of driving her away, he would not speak to me for many days, months. He wedded his betrothed, but I feared that his marriage might be harmed if he had news of her, so I never told him that she had written to me. I do not think that he could have endured that."
I wanted to know if he was happy or if he had spent his years waiting in vain for Kala to come back. I asked to see him – I did not want to meet him, just to see him. One morning I rose before anyone was awake and met Amdír on the edge of the market in the waking of the Sun, and he took me through the streets to the street corner where we could see a wine merchant's shop. Out of sight of the entrance, we watched an old man open the doors and begin to make all the preparations for the day, fetching out tables and benches with the help of a golden haired young boy who called him grandfather. I asked if that was him and when Amdír said yes I feasted on the sight of the man who had loved my teacher and who might still love her, for all I knew, and on the child that might have been her grandchild. Turambar did not look unhappy, but I remember thinking that he looked older than Kala, for all that he was younger than her. And I remember wondering whether or not I should tell Kala of this, whether I had that right to remind her of the life that might have been.
Amdír stole me away on another day near the end of our time there to walk along the shoreline and talk more, this time about what Kala had taught me in our time together. I think that he quite enjoyed hearing about Kala's ways of making sure I learned things and how she behaved in her position as an important and independent woman; it gave him some kind of peace and he even smiled. And I told him about my mother and my aunts that were my mothers too, since he made no objection. It was good to talk about them and how much I loved them, and how much I missed them. For once he did not ask questions, he merely listened.
We walked so far that we had climbed the southern hill of the city before we stopped to look at the land, as Ennia and Attar and I had done on our first excursion. I made some comment about how lovely the city looked and how I would be sad to leave it, even though I was looking forward to seeing my family again. I looked up at him and, because I knew almost nothing about him even after some hours of talking together, I decided that I would ask him if his family lived here or elsewhere.
He was looking at the water as he replied, "They have gone across the sea."
"They are on our side of the water?"
"No, no…" He shook his head, and turned right about and pointed to the West. "At the edge of this land, far beyond here, the very edge, there is a greater body of water than this, greater than all of the land of this earth put together. My kin have travelled beyond that."
"Will they come back?"
"No."
"But…you stayed." I looked along the line of his arm and thought about a stretch of water larger than the earth. I have to say I could hardly imagine it, but then I thought of our sea but bigger and it made sense, in some way.
"Yes," and when I asked why he said that this sea was his home. Was. He could not have left it then. I told him that I did not think I could leave my mother behind for good at all, or let her leave me; why had his kin left? He looked out on the sea again, and at last he said, "A home, when it is not a home any longer, is just a place. And they could not stay in that place any longer."
"Why did it stop being their home?" It was so strange, these words; as if, having pulled me apart to see what I was made of, he was now bound to answer my desires.
"All things stop being anything in time. And time is all that we have. Time enough to see things that were dear to us change and fade and darken." Now he looked to the South, and even from here in this place of light and divinity we could see a hint of darkness, like the darkness at the corner of the sight of an eye. "To see walls built and reinforced to keep out that which encroaches and taints."
"Not all of my people enjoy the sight of the Shadow." I felt slighted, but I did not move away from him. He looked around at me and I hope that I met his gaze without looking weak. He nodded and did look as if he was sorry for having said it.
"The people of the eastern coast; they are your people. You are a good people, you are not like those from further east."
I reminded him, with some satisfaction at catching him out, that he had befriended Kala too, an 'Easterling' woman; but he claimed that, being an isha, she had cast off all association with those who served the One; and then he seemed to remember that my mother and aunts were ishan too and asked me how that came to be. If he knew as much about ishan as he claimed to then he would know that was not a question to be asked by a man, but my mother had never been ashamed and why should I be?
I had never had a need to before, so it was the first time I had ever told my mother's story and my story, if not fully. Perhaps it was fitting that he was the one I told it to. I sat on the barrier that separated that part of the hill from the part below it and I told him how my mother and aunts had suffered and endured and triumphed. I did not tell him anything about the man in blue so it was not the full story at that time, but it was enough; he brought it closer to being full by telling me the names of the places I described, Dol Guldur, Mirkwood, and telling me who had led the attack on the fortress: fair ones that he called Eldar, so ancient that they had lived before the dawning of the Sun!
Then I told him things he could not add to, things that my mother and my aunts had done for me, my life not as my own but as their actions and teachings. Stories, lessons, slaps, kisses, prayers, quarrels, forgiveness, the pinch and the embrace, in the market place and outside the temple, sending for Kala and sending me to her. My training again, but with the words of my mothers that came between.
Amdír seemed to drink it in. He closed his eyes to savour my words. When I had finished he sighed as if he had taken a deep cool draught and been satisfied by it. "When I first saw you, Adahni, I could not help but think of Kala even if it was clear you were not her daughter by blood. Not just because you wore the same robes. You were not her, but you were like her. Your mother…your mothers are the best of the race of Men. They are alight for but a short time, but how they burn. How you burn."
We walked back to the market after that and he took his leave of me, taking my hand even as Alamon glared. I did not think that I would see him again after that, but I was wrong. On the last day when we had packed up whatever wares we had left and were departing he came to the market place again and put a piece of folded paper into my hand, and told me to give it to Kala and that he was glad to have met me in the same breath. If he thought any thing else about me or the one he had written to he said nothing of it. It was a disappointment compared to the storyteller of Kala's tales, but perhaps that was simply Amdír's life by then, disappointment and stagnation in a home that was entrancing but no longer his.
In my mind's eye, I see Dorwinion's culture as something along the lines of Constantinople – which is, intriguingly, what Peter Jackson wanted for Minas Tirith – if on a slightly smaller scale, and with a general mish mash of human cultures, Dunedan and Northern with some Elves left in. The Elves themselves are probably another general mish mash of Noldor and Sindar with perhaps more of the latter; I have great trouble keeping track of which group was living where at which point. The nomads are (again) a mish mash of Rohirric blood with Northern stock and some 'Easterling' blood thrown into the mix for variety; think Vikings mixed with Mongols, only they herd sheep and breed horses instead of raping and pillaging and conquering places.