4. Early Moon
The first thing he noticed about Finduilas’s private chamber was its smell. It was a deep, hothouse scent; he guessed her luxuriating in a tub, reading careless on a bed surrounded by wilting lilies. He could barely see the contours of the place in the low light, clusters of flat candles here and there, floating in basins, a harvest moon framed by the open garden doors. After a while, his eyes grew accustomed to the murk and he could see the signs of her presence spread haphazardly: a book left abandoned on a table, a cloak lying careless on the back of a chair. He went around the room, looking at things without touching them, feeling like an intruder in this place full of her and her scent.
In the edge of his senses, he heard her come in, and turned around before she spoke.
“Welcome,” she said. She was still wearing the same white dress, and the candles gave it a yellow sheen, like a ghost’s garment.
“My lady,” he answered, bowing.
“Now, no need for that.” She strode towards a sideboard and took out a glass decanter. “In private I shall be Finduilas, and you shall be Denethor.” She turned back to him. “Drink?”
He raised an inquisitive eyebrow. The decanter was full of a liquid as dark and thick as sorcery. “It depends on what you have to offer.”
She grinned. “Oh, it’s just made of fruit.” She paused. “Well, mostly fruit, anyway.”
“Maybe later.”
“I think you may have been here too long,” she said as she poured herself a cup. He chuckled softly. “See?” she added.
“Not long enough for what I have been sent to do, nonetheless,” he said, serious again.
She walked past him, towards the open doors. He could see the motions of her body, lean and elastic. “Will you come with me into the garden?”
Her profile was silver in the moonlight, her glass flashing in one hand, the other hand extended towards him. He liked this, he realised; he liked the slow warmth he felt when he saw the sheen of her eyes and when he heard her be sharp and smart and serious. He liked, he realised, this self-assuredness of her, the quiet, focused intensity of her wants. Her fire was a tight red blaze.
“If you wish it,” he said, and walked up to her, linking his arm with hers. They stepped out onto a stone path, winding through thick grass and beds of overgrown plants, a melee of flowers and leaves reaching for the sky.
“Let us sit by the pond,” she said, and guided them under green tunnels, across patches of grass where tiny white flowers shimmered like stars. “This is an old garden,” she said, close to him in the near dark. “And it is said some of its flowers are the last scions of Elven blooms planted here by Mithrellas, my foremother.” She turned to look at him. “Do you believe that?”
“I do,” he said, sincere. He doubted any Elven garden could be equally full of this strange, treacherous loveliness. He felt a deep ache of longing for his city, for its white parapets sunned in the mild spring.
“Let us sit there,” she said, and they walked into a clearing where the path spun down in a
spiral into a large round pond, sunk into a low stone basin. Hyacinths grew tall around it and roses faded on dark bushes. Frogs croaked amidst the lily pads, floating on the black water.
“Why did you bring me here?” he asked as she sat down on a wide grassy step raised above the pond, his hand courteously holding hers.
“I told you,” she said as he kneeled down beside her on the soft earth, his arm brushing against her naked one. “To tell you why I wish to marry you.” She took a sip of her drink, the moon glinting off her cup and her silver bracelets.
“Why do you?”
She seemed to consider this for a moment. “Because I want to.” She turned to him. “I think that is the best reason.”
“We all have wants,” he said, and regretted it immediately. “I am sorry,” he added. “I did not mean to—”
“Why should you apologise? Is it not true?” Her face was close to his, and he could feel the scent of her hair.
“It was impolite of me.”
She put down the cup on the grass and slipped her hand close to his. “It does not make it any less true. You are not used to apologising to the people close to you, are you?” Her voice dropped to a probing whisper. “It does not become you much, do you know?”
“Would you rather I be uncouth or discourteous?” Her face was a handbreadth away from his.
“You and I are alike, Denethor. Those close to us have to take us as we are.”
A frog croaked at their feet. “How do I think I am? What make you of me?” he asked.
Her eyes focused on his; in the deepening night they were the colour of mother-of-pearl. “I think you are serious. I think you care about what is important; not all understand that. Am I right so far?”
He nodded. “Carry on.”
“You are careful and fastidious, because someone has to be. And you know when you are right, even when all others think you are wrong. I know, because that is also how I am.”
“Are you like that?”
When she spoke her voice was soft, like the sheen of her dress, a blade wrapped in silk. “I am. I know my own mind.” She paused, their faces close. “Would you know what I mean, were I to ask you if you can see into the future?”
He felt a keen kinship with her, deep and serene like the course of a river. He would take her to Minas Tirith, a stray thought told him, and they would sit together atop the Tower in the dying sun, and they would see how the clouds ran to the end of the world.
“I would,” he said. She reached for her drink again and took another sip, her cup damp in the hot night. “But—”
“But why did you not stop it, if you knew what would happen, is that what they say?”
He hardened. “If they listened, mayhap they would.”
“As in the legend,” she said, “of the man in the Land of Gift with the gift of foretelling.”
“And whose prophecies were all ignored,” he finished, with a dash of grim humour.
She sat with her hands around her raised knees, a smile on her lips. “Who wishes to hear of their own doom, and of the cracks in the wall, and of the feet of clay of their bright statues?”
“Are you that harsh?”
She turned back to him. “Am I not?” In the night she was a ghost moth, alighting by the rose bushes.
“You have seemed to me to be kind and generous in my weeks here.”
She sighed. “We are given but one life, to do with it as we can. So let it be easy. But I want too much for true kindness.” She was resigned, resolute. “That was why I asked you. Because I want you.” There was a quiet, focused intensity to her now, a slender white flame in the dark.
“Why?” he asked, genuinely puzzled. Her words seemed to be somehow foreign, as though she were speaking in some ancient tongue, haltingly translated.
“Because of what I make of you. Because of what you told me of Minas Tirith.”
“What of it?” he asked.
She was close to him again; he could hear the sound of her breath. “I knew you loved something as soon as I met you. Then you spoke of it and I knew it was your city, that you loved it so deeply and so much.”
“Many Men have loved many places, and strangers do not judge them fairer for that. Perhaps you would not like the city if you were to go there.”
He knew her meaning was different, but he said his piece nonetheless. He was enjoying this still, for all the heat and the sticky feel of his clothes against his skin. He liked being here in the rising dark by the water and the flowers, conversing quietly with unseen faces.
“You mistake me. I liked that you loved something so much. I liked that you did it so quietly. And I know that if I were to go into your city, I would be able to feel your love, now that I know of it. I would walk through those streets and squares you spoke of and feel that someone loved them, that someone had a great, eternal longing for that place.”
Something bubbled up inside him like the waters of an old and bitter fountain. “Did you think perhaps that I could love you as I love my city?”
She did not answer and he felt oddly unhappy. “I am sorry,” he said. “This time I truly am.”
There was a note of puzzlement to her voice when she replied. “Why should you be?”
The shifting moon cast a silver sheen on her hair. Some part of him thought, sudden, that he would like to see her comb it. “I feared that I had hurt you. Despite what you implied in your letter, I cannot read you as well as I do others.” He smiled a little. “There, I concede a grudging defeat.”
She let out a chuckle. “I do not know if I should be pleased with my victory, if displeased with what you think of me. Do you judge me so senseless that I would be hurt over so small a thing?”
“So you say you were not hurt then but are hurt now?”
She slid one hand close to his over the dew-slicked grass. She was focused wholly on him again, her languid body and her shiny eyes wrapped around a thorn of will. “Do you care if I am hurt?”
He sighed inwardly. “I do. I did not expect to, but I do.”
She shifted her position, uncurling her long limbs and then sitting like a tailor in front of him. He noticed the glint of an anklet above her left foot. “Let me tell you a story,” she began. “There was this book I read once, when I was a little girl, about a make-believe land where there lived a King’s young son. He went on a great journey, where he saw quite a good deal of things and met quite a good deal of characters, but the point here is that he met a fox in a field, and this fox told him about how friends tame each other.”
“What a peculiar choice of words,” said Denethor.
“‘Tame’? But that was precisely what it was.” Her eyes were wide and knowing. “You see, the fox told him that at first he was just another young boy, indistinguishable from all other young boys, and she was just a fox, indistinguishable from all other foxes, but it they tamed each other, then he would find her unique amongst foxes, and she, find him unique amongst young boys...” She trailed off, her fingers tapping the fabric of her dress.
“Why did you tell me this story?”
Their eyes met and she said, “That was what I wanted, you see. No, I tell a lie, what I wanted when I read the book was for the boy to stay with his friend the fox instead of going off in the quest for his rose.” There was a note of amusement to her voice. “But I wanted to tame someone. To have such a friend, a most special of friends, who would be different from all others and find me different too. You may judge it foolish if you want.”
Relief sprang up inside him. “No. That, I understand.” Friendship was clear to him, devoid of masks, pretences. He had felt a need for it keenly sometimes, an unexplained memory of an absent friend. He recalled a time when he had stalked, sulkily, through the Citadel, after being wounded in a skirmish in Poros and heard his mother’s complaint, a carried whisper, lamenting his discontents.
He opened his mouth, shut it, then spoke again. “Is that what you want? For me to be your friend?”
She looked at him, serene. “You are here.”
“But—”
“Of your own free will.”
He paused. Six stars and a moon were shining on the pond, but where they sat it was now dark, a diffuse blue light peering in through the tangled limbs of overgrown trees. “Yes,” he said. “Of my own free will.” He recalled sitting with her, days ago, telling her of the Tower, bone-white, gleaming in the dusk. “Why marriage, then? Why that kiss in the barge?”
He could not see her mouth clearly in the shadows, but he though she might be smiling.
“The kiss? That was to draw your attention, like one may call and wave to another across a busy street — someone one wishes to see, to talk to, and who is about to slip away...” She grew distant under the din of the cicadas.
“I shall be here for some weeks still. I was unlikely to have jumped into the canal and swam all the way back to Minas Tirith.”
Her hand rose, dropped down. “Oh, I doubt even you could endure a swim back to Minas Tirith,” she joked. “There boredom alone would be quite unbearable. But no more of this foolishness. I wanted to stop you from slipping away, which you were doing, were already doing. You were beginning to endure.”
They were silent for a moment, the only noise the soft susurrations of a midnight garden, the splashes of diving frogs.
“It is seldom that I find myself at such a loss, but I do not know what you mean.”
“I seem to be putting you in those straits quite often, don’t I? I meant to say that you were starting to simply endure your stay here, to get your task done and be gone, uncaring of whatever else might be happening around you if it were no concern of yours. And that was why I kissed you. To make you consider other... possibilities.”
“There, you succeeded, though other means might have been equality effective.”
Starlight glinted off her hair, her jewels, the glass by her side. “Perhaps, or perhaps not. Sometimes you have to make use of a certain boldness.”
“It was nonetheless discourteous, if I may say so.” He felt an unwelcome blush creep into his face. He did not like the words she had spoken, though he was not quite certain why; they reminded him of those golden, uncaring creatures who knew about boldness but not about consequences. He did not like to see her in their company, even if only by association.
“Here, you may say as you please. And it was not my intention to be discourteous. I do not take what I want wily-nily — that is not only discourteous, it is rather vulgar, do you not agree?”
He nodded, fervent. “I do.”
“I did it,” she went on, “not because you looked inviting, close to me on that barge — though I have to say you did — but because I wanted to put us on equal footing. To make you sit on your side of the board, and consider your pieces.”
A hot, sticky breeze careened down the trees, rustling leaves.
“Could you not have been—”
She sounded amused. “Meeker? Milder?”
“More tactful,” he said dryly.
She let out a short chuckle. “Put yourself in my position, faced with someone like yourself. You said something about tact to me, a week or so ago.”
He let his mouth twist into a small grin. “That it is something used by those who do not wish to be honest, or cannot afford to. But—” He paused. “I am ill-suited for marriage, tact or the lack thereof notwithstanding. I should have told you that after your proposal in the ship.” He said it quick and sharp, knowing that one swift cut hurts far less than several shallow ones.
She failed to react, still calm, self-contained like a recumbent cat. “No, I am the one who should have told you the fullness of what you are dealing with.”
His body tensed, alert. “And what would that be?”
“It is your choice. You can leave now. Go back to your chambers and carry on with your work here and eventually you shall go back to your city and we shall never speak of what passed between us again. Or you can find out about what has been happening without your knowledge, and never be able to ignore it again. What is your choice?”
He could feel her watching him, and for a moment her mind was clear to him, the knowledge that he would never be able to resist such a thing, that he had to pick at scabs and read half-opened letters. It did not displease him, somehow, that she had him in such a clever, subtle trap. He had never understood the meaning of conceding a graceful defeat, because he had never seen how a defeat could be graceful, but he did not feel vexed at being bested now.
“You know full well what my choice is,” he said. “You knew it before you even spoke.”
She brushed his words off. “Did I? Let us go back into my chamber then, if my guess is accurate.”
“It is,” he said, and drew himself up, his limbs protesting after lying against the hard ground for so long. She took his proffered hand, snatched the glass with the other and stood up in a fast, fluid motion. He could smell grass on her dress, and in the weak light the whites of her eyes were bluish and liquid.
The walk back to her chamber was swifter that the walk into the gardens, and once they were back in, the doors into the garden wide open into the stifling night air, she offered him a seat at a small round table covered with heavy velvet cloth.
“Let me light a few lamps, so that we may see better,” she said, and he made to get up again.
“I can do that.”
“Without knowing where anything is? I thank you, but I am better suited for it.” She retrieved a tinder box from a cupboard and a long thin piece of kindling, and walked around the room lighting hanging oil-lamps, their coloured glass cases reflected on her face as the oil ignited. On the table, her abandoned drink was smooth and dark.
“Excuse me for a moment,” she said once she was done, and vanished into her bedchamber through the communicating door. He waited for a moment as the scent of burnt wood dissipated, and watched her return, a much-folded paper in her hand.
“Here,” she said, walking up to him and handing him the paper. “I think you will find this to be of great interest.”
He unfolded it, his stomach icy with premonition. His father’s flowing script unravelled under his fingers. He read it in a single, hurried gulp.
Finduilas was still standing next to the table, cool and knowing and composed. “Impressive, for a piece of paper,” she said. “Would you not agree?”
He folded the paper again, his gestures tight, mechanical. When he looked at her his face was unemotional. “I think I may have some of that drink you offered after all.”
Tbc...
Footnotes: mostly fruit — so says Nanny Ogg, referring to a drink of similar contents, in Terry Pratchett’s Witches Abroad
the man in the Land of Gift with the gift of foretelling — the Middle-Earth equivalent to Cassandra, the character from Classical mythology who was given the gift of prophecy and the curse of having no one believe her warnings
We are given but one life, to do with it as we can — in case you’re really interested, this is the scene referenced in my fic The Resolution
let it be easy — from the line Death comes once, let it be easy in Carl Sandburg’s poem Finish
a make-believe land where there lived a King’s young son — and that would make him The Little Prince, no? Just to be mind-numbingly clear, the story Finduilas tells is a Middle-Earth version of one The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint Exupéry
lamenting his discontents — from Ivy’s discontents in Diana Wynne-Jones’s Fire and Hemlock
Impressive, for a piece of paper — from Hayao Miyazaki’s screenplay for Princess Mononoke, adapted by Neil Gaiman
Needless to say, none of the material I quoted belongs to me; it is being used for non-profit purposes only and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. If you find anything I forgot to reference, please contact me and I will add the footnote immediately.