The Flowering

Elboron

I think I told you before that nobody could ever really explain Fíriel. Only Father ever really understands, but even he couldn’t explain her to anyone else. They say you can’t explain colours to a man blind from birth. Where Father and Fíriel are concerned, they alone see the colours and all the rest of us are blind; there are no words which can make us understand  what they feel. Only a very few people even know the colours exist; apart from Mother and myself, perhaps only two.  

I can only tell you a few of the things that I remember. It may help, a little, to explain how Fíriel came to leave Father and leave Ithilien. And if you think a young woman leaving her father’s house is a small thing to make so much trouble over, it only shows how little you understand. Imagine a man cutting off his own right hand, or a lark tearing itself out of the sky, and you might begin to  understand better.

Where did it begin?

I can remember Eldarion’s early visits to us well enough; like a number of other well-born boys he came to study with Father, and perhaps to breathe a freer air than the King’s son could enjoy in the City. Though he was friendly and did not stand on ceremony,  I was never at ease with him as I was with Elfwine, once we’d exchanged the necessary quota of broken teeth and black eyes. Although Eldarion never stood on his dignity, the idea of giving him a black eye was unthinkable; there was always a kind of remoteness about him, as about his father, which forbade familiarity. The only person to whom he unbent entirely was Fíriel, perhaps because Fíriel, who was only six or seven when Eldarion first came to us, was the only person except Father who wasn’t in the least overawed by either his rank or his manner. She treated him exactly as she treated anyone else who was not-Father, with a kindly imperiousness and a confidence born of her own complete and happy security. She welcomed him into her little world without a shadow of foreknowledge that he was the one fated to tear it apart. As for Eldarion, I don’t think that he saw her, at first, as anything other than a charming and amusing child.

When did that change? So often it’s the little, unimportant things that carry meaning. There is a tiny scene which comes to my memory, as bright and real as a vision conjured by an elf minstrel, whenever I think of Fíriel and Eldarion. It is an evening in early summer; the song of the birds is just  beginning to take on a sleepy note and the shadows are lengthening. The moon is already well up, but pale silver rather than golden as he will be when the sun surrenders him the sky. The grass is still vivid green, not burnt-tawny as it will be in high summer, and the gardeners have been cutting the lawns, so that the sweet hay-smell conquers even the fragrance of Ithilien’s flowers. I am very aware of the hay-scent because I am lying with my face in it, pinned down by Eldarion sitting on my back, while Fíriel trots solemnly to and fro collecting and covering me with grass-clippings. Quite why she thinks this is necessary I don’t know, but she is as unmoved by my protests as Eldarion is by my squirms. I am saved by a dryly amused voice from far above asking the identity of the unfortunate victim that Fíriel and Eldarion seem intent on burying alive; the weight on my back disappears as Eldarion scrambles to his feet, and a pair of strong hands takes me under the arms and heaves me upright in a shower of grass. When I have blinked the grass-seeds out of my eyes and sneezed several times I realise that it’s Father, and that Fíriel is already beside him, holding protectively on to his arm, and the two of them have that air of indefinable completeness that they always have when they’re together. Eldarion apologises for my grassy state, and Father says, still dryly, that while he’s bound to do all he can to fulfil the wishes of the heir to the throne, he hopes that these will not extend to having his own son and heir forcibly transformed into a compost heap. Eldarion says that this is by no means his wish, but that he dared not disobey the will of Lady Fíriel; Fíriel gives him a queenly smile of approval and says that he’s quite right. Father chides her mildly for her forwardness, but Eldarion intercedes for her, she beams at him and offers him her free hand, and shortly afterwards, the supper bell summons us all back to the house.

Was it then that Eldarion first became truly aware of her?

Soon after that he went away, and with Father being away so often, and for so long, on his embassies, that was the end of Eldarion’s lengthy sojourns in Ithilien. The next thing I remember, which seems important now, has nothing to do with Eldarion directly, but it has stuck in my mind as the day when Fíriel was first made starkly aware of her probable fate. It may seem strange that it didn’t happen earlier, but, as perhaps you understand by now, the idea of her separating herself from Father seemed unthinkable to anyone who had ever seen them together. You might as well have asked her to stop breathing.

It was Túrin who did it, not surprisingly, for he was a great disturber of our peace.  From time to time, even when very young, he could display the same unerring awareness of truth as Father had, though Father never expressed it as brutally as Túrin always did.

It was another summer evening in the garden; perhaps that’s why the two scenes go together in my mind. I think I was on my way back from archery practice when I came across Fíriel leaning against a tree, with five-year-old Túrin at her feet. She told me, with a weary smile, that she’d agreed to watch him while Eldis, his long-suffering nurse, kept a tryst with Beleg, of the guard. (Eldis and Beleg fondly imagined that neither Mother nor Father knew about their affair, and had sworn Fíriel and me to secrecy. Fíriel and I honourably refrained from saying a word to Mother, but we knew perfectly well that she knew all about it and only tolerated it because Beleg’s intentions appeared to be honourable, which turned out to be the case.) In point of fact, watching Túrin was the last thing anybody would have wanted to do, because he was lying on his stomach, painstakingly taking a beetle to pieces. I have no doubt the beetle was dead before he started – Father had forbidden him to torture living creatures, however lowly, in terms that not even Túrin dared to disobey – but it was still an unpleasant sight. To distract ourselves, Fíriel and I turned our eyes towards Mindolluin, watching as the setting sun turned the snow on the distant peaks from dazzling white to pink, and conjured a last diamond flash from every window in the topmost  towers of the City.

            ‘How many times will we see that sight in our lifetimes, I wonder?’ I murmured as I gazed.

            ‘As often as there are summer sunsets, I suppose, and never tire of it,’ she replied softly, taking a deep breath. ‘Elboron, I could never, never leave Ithilien. I sometimes think that I would choke in any other air, like a poor fish snatched out of the river.’

            I smiled at her; I knew what she meant. Then Túrin, who had not appeared to be paying the slightest attention to us, looked up and said in a tone of withering scorn, ‘Of course you wouldn’t. The air’s the same everywhere.’

            ‘It isn’t!’ retorted Fíriel. ‘No other air has the sweetness of Ithilien’s; even the King says so, and he’s travelled more than any other man alive, so it must be true. And I shall never leave Ithilien, never.’

            ‘You will,’ said Túrin. ‘You’ll have to leave when you get married. You can’t marry anyone in Ithilien because there’s nobody in Ithilien important enough to marry you, so you’ll have to go somewhere else.’

            ‘I shall never get married if it means I have to leave Ithilien, so there!’ said Fíriel furiously.

            ‘You will, they’ll make you,’ replied Túrin with infuriating calmness.

            Fíriel gave me an anguished look. ‘They couldn’t make me marry anyone, could they, Elboron? And leave Ithilien?’

            ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘Father wouldn’t let them.’

            ‘He would,’ said Túrin. ‘They made Mother leave Rohan and Aunt Lothíriel leave Dol Amroth, and they’ll make you leave Ithilien whether you want to or not.’

            ‘Mother wanted to come here! She wanted to be with Father, she didn’t mind leaving Rohan!’ said Fíriel.

‘But Aunt Lothíriel didn’t want to leave Dol Amroth,’ retorted Túrin. Fíriel and I exchanged a guilty look, because we knew Túrin was right, though nobody in the family ever admitted it out loud; Aunt Lothiriel was the unhappiest person we knew.

‘I would never leave Father, and Father wouldn’t make me! He couldn’t!’

‘Take no notice of him, Fíriel,’ I said. ‘He’s only a baby, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Anyway, you’re too young to worry about it yet.’

‘Huh!’ said Túrin, with horrid conviction, and returned to his beetle.

‘Watch him for me, Elboron,’ said Fíriel, and turned and ran away as if pursued. I knew she had gone to find Father and I knew that Father would console her as far as he could, but Father was a truth-speaker, and the truth was that he was the highest noble and the highest minister in the land, after the King, and that the marriage of his only daughter, even if she were not beautiful enough to drive men mad, was bound to be a matter of the greatest concern to the whole kingdom, and as soon as you thought about it seriously, her not getting married seemed an impossibility.

Túrin’s words had shattered the bright invisible walls that had held Fíriel secure, and not even Father could rebuild them as they had been. Perhaps he didn’t want to; unlike  her, he knew that they couldn’t last for ever.    

* * *

After that there was a long time during which Eldarion seldom if ever saw Fíriel, once he began to spend more and more time in the north kingdom which he was destined to rule. Perhaps he forgot her, or remembered her only as that charming child. Father, I know, assumed that one reason for sending Eldarion to Arnor was to acquaint him with the daughters of some of the nobler houses of the Dúnedain, since it was universally believed that they carried the purest blood of Númenor. Father carried that blood too, of course, but he never imagined that his children, sprung from both Gondor and Rohan, would be accorded comparable status. This did not worry him in the least, for though he revered tradition as much as anybody, he thought of us as belonging to a new and different world, whereas the King and his kindred perforce sought to preserve the purity of the world from which they came. By all accounts the King thought the same, but unbeknown even to the King, it seems that Eldarion did not.

Meanwhile, Fíriel forgot Eldarion. As the Rose of Ithilien grew to her full flowering she acquired enough admirers to turn any girl’s head, but she treated them all, from the goatherds of the Ithilien uplands to captains of the fiefs, with the same sweet, polite indifference, sharpening to exasperation if she considered they were interfering with her life’s work of protecting Father. Songs in praise of her beauty were sung from Belfalas to the Lonely Mountain, but if they were sung in their presence she would listen with the same resolutely controlled irritation as Father when somebody tried to flatter him. The only time I ever saw an intended compliment find its mark was when a gnarled and elderly merchant from Dale told her how very like Father she looked. Fíriel blushed and gave him a smile that any man in Gondor would have given ten years of his life to receive, and for the rest of the merchant’s stay she treated him with a graciousness which he took as a great compliment to himself, while being very puzzled by the surly looks he received from the rest of the household.

‘Why should they praise me for being beautiful?’ she asked me one day in something approaching fury. ‘If I am so, it’s no doing of mine. If they praise anyone, they should praise Mother and Father for  making me as I am.’

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask her if people should also blame Father and Mother for my lack of brains and Túrin’s temper, but her eyes were still flashing steel, and I thought better of it.

So time went quietly on until Father’s last great mission to Harad and the East, which took him from us for eighteen months, longer than he had ever been away before. I had mixed feelings about this; I missed him sorely, but I was too absorbed by my first attempt at governing Ithilien – even with Mother discreetly supervising everything I did – to feel the time hang heavy. Mother bore the separation patiently, locking her pain in her own heart, but  Fíriel’s misery was like a grey cloud over the household. She was still aware of Father, indeed we watched her anxiously all the while, knowing that if Father were in any kind of trouble she would feel it; but even if she sensed that all was well with him – and this embassy, exhausting as it was, went well – when they were far apart she lived in a quiet, perpetual winter of her own. She would do anything you asked of her willingly enough, but we all missed the vividness of both her anger and her laugh. One thing did make me smile nonetheless: Mother once came upon a small serving maid sobbing in a corner and asked her kindly what afflicted her. ‘Oh my lady,’ sobbed the child, ‘Lady Fíriel hasn’t lost her temper with me for three weeks now and I don’t know what in the world I’ve done to deserve that!’

Through the colder months Fíriel was most often to be found sitting in the deep embrasure of one of our south-facing windows, gazing wistfully into the distance, with Father’s house dogs at her feet radiating sympathetic gloom as only dogs can. When the days began to grow longer she took to riding by herself, causing Mother and myself some anxiety. We did not fear for her safety, knowing that nothing and no one in Ithilien would harm Fíriel or allow her to come to harm, but we were disquieted  by her secrecy, for she would be up before the Sun and return long after moonrise, and in answer to questions would only shake her head. I said to Mother that if it were any other girl, I would assume she was meeting a lover, but with Fíriel this was impossible; Mother agreed with both propositions but could suggest no other solution.

At long last the message came that all was done and Father was on his way home. The news must have run ahead of the messenger, because all Ithilien erupted with joy that same day, and I knew that Father would have a princely welcome without any effort on my part, for it had become a tradition: if Father had been away for any length of time, anybody who could possibly manage it would call the day a holiday and go down to the riverside to welcome him back, with whatever music, food and (especially) drink, flowers and/or fireworks they could produce. Father had never made these celebrations official, but he was touched by them and had never forbidden them either, although we as a family would far rather have had him to ourselves from the moment he set foot on the eastern shore.

Amidst the general rejoicing, the sweetest thing to see was the change in Fíriel. Everyone else, even Mother, was simply happy, but when Fíriel heard the news, even if it only confirmed what her heart had told her already, it was like seeing winter pass and spring come in a single day, or like a hoar-frosted tree bursting into leaf and blossom all in a moment: the very air around her seemed to quiver with her joy. She abandoned her solitary rides and offered her assistance to me and Mother in anything we cared to ask of her, but it was enough for us simply to see her in such bliss; I even swallowed a few brotherly remarks about how valuable her proffered assistance would have been when I was struggling with the cares of our little country earlier in the year.

A day or two later the same messenger brought me a letter from Father himself, announcing that he would return the next day and that he was bringing us a distinguished guest, none other than the Prince Eldarion, who had happened to be in the City when Father returned and had begged leave to accompany him, as he had been so long away from Ithilien and cherished such happy memories of it. The request could not, of course, be denied, but Mother and I were hard put to conceal our disappointment, and Fíriel fairly spat with fury like an angry cat. Father was Ithilien’s, ours, and most particularly hers, and no intruder, even the King himself, much less the King’s heir, had a right to come between them. There was nothing else for it, however, and when the day came – a lovely day in May, almost worthy of the occasion – we reluctantly dressed with all the uncomfortable magnificence we knew was expected of us (Father and Mother both hated display, and we children took after them) and rode down to the Crossings amidst a press of people quite prepared to give at least one cheer for Prince Eldarion, if it would serve to prolong the holiday.

I don’t know why it was, but when the barge finally arrived, though I was as pleased as anyone else to have Father back and was intensely relieved to find that despite the long strain and anxiety of the past months he looked exactly as usual – he never seemed to change much – after I had convinced myself that all was well with him, my attention fixed on Eldarion, as he engaged in a courteous contest with Father concerning who should disembark first. Eldarion won and stood aside, and Father stepped ashore to be immediately engulfed in a tide of little girls bearing posies of flowers. They were the female element of our school, and any attempt to restrict the presentation of flowers to Father to just one of their number had met with such cries of woe from the rest – together, I’m ashamed to say, with pinchings and pullings of hair – that Mother, after exchanging hasty messages with Father, had decreed that they should all take part. As a result, Father’s attention was distracted during the time he took to disentangle himself, or perhaps he would have seen what I saw and taken the warning. For I saw Eldarion’s eyes fix on Fíriel just as Fíriel’s fixed on Father with a blaze of welcome that transfigured her from something merely beautiful to something scarcely of this earth, and I realised with a kind of panic that for one mad moment Eldarion thought that welcome was for him. He smiled, he stepped on shore, he held out his hands – and as Father freed himself from his garland of little girls, Fíriel darted forward, quite unaware of anything or anybody else, and was in Father’s arms.

She did not know that she had just sealed her own fate, but I knew, and I wished bitterly that  Eldarion had never come to Ithilien, never at all.