The Calling

The weather has sent the gulls inland.

They are calling and wheeling above the tall white walls and their cry cuts like a knife.  They carve white gashes in the leaden clouds and the wind thrusts them aside in its attempt to keep them out of the city.

For reminders of the sea are not welcome here.

I stand and watch, heedless of the attack of raindrops spattering my cloak, and envy them their freedom.

If I could choose, would I then be a gull to drift on the wind and fight the currents?  Scream my rage at the sky and skim over the mocking waves? Be free from the world that binds me and soar higher than the hope of men can bear them?

I will never know.

For love and duty tie me to these cold walls and I am kept closer than any captive in their care for me.

Soon my attendants will tell me that the wind is too strong and the rain too wet and that I might become ill and they will lead me indoors, where the air smells of dust and polish and antiquity and I will be left to be a footnote on a family tree; daughter of, wife of, mother of – with no thought for who I am or what I could be.

Later, I will go to my little ones and remove the black surcoats that mark them as their father’s sons, condemned from the time they were breeched to the service of a rigid destiny.  I will laugh with them and play with their carved soldiers and their wooden bricks and remind them that they are children.  And only when they tire, will I sing to them the songs that the sea sang to me, to let them know that there should be more in their lives than harsh stone and hard obligation.

The wind sings in the cracks and swells the white curtains, like the full sails of the craft that bore me up the Anduin, taking me from the openness and warmth of the coast and depositing me, a gift of love, in the cool decorum of the city.   Outside, the clouds tear across the sky, allowing the silver light of the moon to slice across the floor, showing me a world where not all is controlled and regulated.

At first – at first, I felt loved and safe and the walls were like arms treasuring me. The sun was warm on my hair and I flew above the Pelennor in his ship of stone.  When did it change?  When did the vessel grind on the rocks and founder?  I fling myself like a spring tide against his white cliffs, but they stand unmoved and I drain away. It is not the sea’s way to surrender, but our tide ebbs.

And the shadow grows, like a canker.  It is eating him.  It will devour my sons.  They will stand against it as the land stands against the sea, but they are powerless to halt its relentless hunger.  I have seen it in my dreams.  

Once, the night contained love and desire and I saw the faces of my children’s children, safe in a bright land green with promise.  They would play beside my childhood sea, sparkling with the blue of summer; studded with sails of white and red and gold.  The breakers would foam at their feet and entice them into its cleansing waters.   Yet now I see a sea as black as pitch.  My ship is driven before it and my sails are shredded.  And a dreadful eye burns at the masthead and its fire consumes my will as it rips me asunder with cruel relish. 

Even should my sober lord spend a lifetime in his tower, he will not see that he cannot control the tempest that blows across the world.  I pity him.  He was not meant for times such as these.  The strength he yearns for is adamant in stone and steel – he cannot see the power in the wind and the waves.  He does not understand that in renewal is the surest resistance of all.

He will come later and watch me, fire fading from his eyes, yearning for something that once we had in the days before his father died, before the manacles of the Stewardship took him away.  He will see the sea-longing in my face and smell the salt wind in my hair.

He does not like it when the gulls come.