Work Text:
Rómenna, S.A. 985
Erendis walks through the port, at night, when it’s quiet and all have gone home. There are few sources of light, but the crescent moon is more than enough, even for her tired, old eyes. The harbour is larger now, than when she last set foot on it, so many decades before, to deliver a bough of oiolairë to a man she thought she loved. She did love him, she corrects herself, as she stops for a minute to appreciate how the few torches reflect golden upon the cold, silver-tinged water. The water softly laps against the piers, murmuring a lullaby of sorts. A nightbird she does not recognize lets out a cry. Such beauty, she thinks, grudgingly.
No one knows she is here. She left Emerië many nights ago, on foot, the whimsy of an old woman or the despair of a madwoman, she does not yet know. Her clothing is simple, made of the good sturdy linen of Nindámos, and the soft, warm wool of Emerië. The only riches upon her body are a thread with her wedding ring hanging around her neck and the diamond upon her brow, the one that Aldarion gave her a lifetime ago, when they both thought that she had won his heart. She only uses it at night, though. She may have lost her mind but not her wits and she does not want to be robbed or accused of robbing. The stone belongs to her and, after her, it will belong to Ancalimë and her children, and her children’s children.
She knows Aldarion is coming and she wants to see him one last time. Her beauty has fled, while he, most likely, is still strong, hale, handsome as the sun. She feels ashamed of her disheveled, grey hair, her old, sagging skin. But she knows that this is but a ridiculous feeling, in a ridiculous life. So much time wasted for the both of them… if they could not have been lovers, they should have been friends, for their child’s sake. But both were too hard, too proud.
She reaches the end of the pier and turns back, tracing back her steps to the inn she is staying. But this night, as she reaches the first houses, she sees a movement on the water, on the sandy beach beyond the rocks, where the boys go to play each afternoon, despite the wintry winds. Wrapping her cloak tighter around herself, Erendis walks to the sand, and then, near the water’s edge. Such beauty, she thinks again, as she glances up to the night sky.
She is cold but not sleepy yet, and so, she sits down on the sand and absently weaves her fingers through the seaweed at her feet. She closes her eyes, to better hear the sea, and when she opens them, a woman stands in the sea, right before her, water to her hips, breasts generous and bare, hair like the seaweed Erendis caresses.
Erendis hastily tries to rise, but Uinen smiles and speaks. “Let yourself be, daughter of the pastures. You need not rise for me.”
Erendis still rises. “My Lady Uinen,” she says, bowing her head.
“We both knew you would come to the sea, in the end, didn’t we?” Uinen says.
Her voice is deep and gentle, echoing the murmur of the waves.
Erendis nods, even though she is not sure the thought had ever crossed her mind.
“You await Aldarion to say goodbye.”
Erendis feels the heat of anger at the presumptuousness, but the awe of the presence of Uinen drives that wave away before it breaks into haughty words. “I do,” Erendis admits, meekly. “I want to ask for forgiveness.”
“You do not.”
Despite the shock at Uinen’s boldness, Erendis finds herself nodding in assent. “I do not want his forgiveness. But I would like to make peace, before I leave this world. With my daughter too.”
Uinen waits, searching Erendis’s eyes.
“I left her a letter. I wanted to tell her how deeply I had loved her, even if my hardness against her father had caused her pain, at times.”
“Why didn’t you tell her yourself?”
“Talking is hard.”
Uinen laughs, warmly, generously. “Write her again, send her one of your poems, then. And come back tomorrow.”
She disappears into the sea, mysterious and beautiful and Erendis is left stranded, wondering how a goddess of the sea can know about poems that a woman of the country may have written.
~~~
The next day, Erendis returns to the beach, passing through the harbour without stopping to enjoy the beauty of the night. The moon is just a little brighter, the wind just a little colder. She sits on the sand and waits for a long time, watching the moon rise in the sky, turning to a colder, whiter light, looking smaller but fiercer. She wonders about the stories of how the sun and the moon were made. Anything seems possible, after last night.
“Mmm,” she hears, drawing her attention to the water. Uinen is there again, naked again. It is like a cruel joke, her beauty, robust and hale, reminding Erendis of all that she is no more.
“Mmm?” Erendis inquires.
“The stone upon your brow is an unlikely ornament for a woman who wants to pass for a peasant.”
Erendis assents with a nod but remains silent for a moment.
“I am still a queen, you know,” she says at last. “Even if in name only. And…”
“And, Tar-Elestirnë?”
“I wear it because I want him to recognize me, the day he returns and we finally meet for the last time.”
“Why do you want this meeting, child? And do you really believe this will be his last voyage?”
“It is said so. Aldarion is many things, but not a liar.”
“And then you’ll be together, a happy couple?”
Erendis shakes her head. “No, never again.”
Uinen submerges her head. Erendis tries to fathom if she is still there, under the dark water, or if she has left, like everyone else has left her.
But after a long time, the maia rises again from the sea, now wearing some sort of vestment made of sea things.
“It is good that you do not harbour illusions. Aldarion was never anyone’s and certainly not mine.”
“Why have you shown yourself to me?” Erendis asks. “You should despise me, for all the enmity I’ve declared about you. How jealous I was...”
Uinem scoffed. “No… I don’t despise you, poor Erendis.”
“Poor?”
“Aren’t you, love?” Uinen smiles and glides forward, now emerged from the water till her thighs. “Life was cruel to you. And you were hard in return.”
Erendis nods. “You seem to know a lot.”
“I spend a lot of time hearing the prayers and curses of saylors. Their woes, their gossip, their stories and tall tales.”
“I was never really jealous of you, lady. But I did use your name as a repository for all my insatisfaction with my husband and his wills. It was easier to blame an absent goddess than to break a marriage...”
Uinen shakes her head. “That much I easily gathered. The sad part is that, in the end, the marriage floundered all the same.”
“I was so angry. So alone. And I felt that Aldarion had betrayed our marriage worse than if he had lain with another woman.”
Uinen keeps very still, her eyes set upon Erendis, waiting for more words, but none come, and so the maia speaks.
“And yet you brought him the oiolairë…”
“I did… I thought he would go out on his adventure, be satisfied and come back to me, to us all. How stupid I was.”
“Now, child,” Uinen chides gently.
Erendis scoffs. She is an old woman, not a girl who needs endeerings. And yet, Uinen’s voice is tender and warm, like a mother’s.
“It is stupid to try to change people, that much I have learned,” Erendis says. “It is late and I am cold,” she adds, rising to her feet.
Uinen gently touches the water with her fingertips. “Be off then, warm yourself and rest. Be back tomorrow.”
~~~
“The star on your brow is gone,” Uinen says gently as she emerges from the water, on the following night.
Erendis has not sat there for long. “I left it behind,” she says, “for Ancalimë. Sent it to Armenelos with the poem you ordered me to write.”
“Why?” Uinen kneels, submerging herself until only her head is visible.
“Because it is something from her father and from myself, something that will show the world that she was made in love, and that she is radiant, beautiful, strong and powerful. And so will her children be, one day.”
Uinen sighed. “Power… that has always preoccupied you. The power you thought I had over Aldarion, the power you wanted to keep about your own fate and that of your daughter’s.”
To avoid Uinen’s piercing eyes, Erendis gazes at her empty hands. “He came today, as I am sure that you know.”
“Yes.”
Erendis closes her eyes, her heart aching, but her mind comforting her, reminding her that she is coming to her last days and that she did what was most difficult for her.
“Lady,” she says. “I am tired, so tired. So much time spent hating Aldarion, suffering from loneliness, feeling guilty for not loving my child enough to overcome the pain…”
Uinen starts humming a lullaby of sorts as she moves closer to shore. She is, again, stark naked, beautiful and strong. Even at an arm’s length, Erendis can feel warmth radiating from her, where she expected the coldness of the sea.
Uinen walks closer and kneels in front of Erendis, placing her hands on her shoulders. Soothing warmth emanates from those two spots, running down through Erendis’s cold bones.
“His heart was still hard, wasn’t it, child?”
Erendis nods, closing her eyes. As she does so, images of dark green-grey flood her mind. The bottom of the sea, she realizes, with kelp waving as the grass moves under the wind in Emerië.
She sees Uinen in all her grace, dancing in front of her, in small, graceful gestures. The cold words of Aldarion’s greeting are still with her, but a weight is lifted from her heart. She remembers to breathe and as she does so, the spell is broken and once more she is sitting on the cold sand of a deserted beach, with a maia who represents all that she has hated kneeling before her.
“What…” Erendis feels at loss for words. She feels like praying, like saying a poem to Uinen’s beauty, to the peace she felt in her underwater realm.
Uinen caresses Erendis’s cheek with her knuckles. Again the warmth floods her, but this time she is not taken into the vision.
“The seamen, they love me not only because I quiet my husband’s wraths,” Uinen says, “but for other motives as well. Not many know that I was not originally from Ulmo’s house, but rather from Irmo’s.”
“The lord of dreams and soothing.”
“Yes. I cradle them and nurse them in my domains until they are ready to go to that other Fëanturi.”
“Mandos…” Erendis suddenly is afraid. She came to Romenna to die, because she knew her days were ending, and yet, now that she has seen a way for her end to come, she grasps on to life as a crude, unready savage. “Lady, please, not yet,” she begs.
Uinen withdraws. “No one ever enters my realm against their will. You are free to go and find another end.”
Erendis takes Uinen’s hand. She is afraid, but she needs more of what she felt underwater, that peace is not like the stagnant life she has led away from the world, that warmth that is not ephemeral as a lover’s embrace. She feels as if, with only a few more breaths, she could find an answer, a meaning, the thing that she has lacked for most of her life.
“There was a girl I loved, after Aldarion,” she says.
Uinen listens, holding her hand.
“She was sent to my house and I loved her. And I betrayed her, by begging Aldarion to return to me.”
“She travelled the seas, and is safe with her people.”
Erendis looked into Uinen’s eyes. “I confess you a sin against an innocent, against love and against myself, and you offer me words of comfort…”
“You have suffered enough, child.”
Erendis shakes her head, still afraid, but in her heart timid hope blooms. She was courageous in leaving Aldarion, but she has not exercised much bravery after. It takes her a moment to realize what has to be done.
She lunges forward, into Uinen’s arms and holds on tight to her, shivering despite the warm arms that close around her shoulders.
She breathes in deep gasps until her heart settles. Then, a poet until her last day, she utters her acceptance, whispering into Uinen’s ear her last poem.
“Endless with brightness,
light-engorged,
I would die with you,
in your beauty submerged.”
She sinks, sinks forever, strong arms holding her, a whirl of foam and bubbles around them as they move through the light and shadows. The water doesn’t burn her lungs, her limbs do not try to flail, her voice does not falter as she repeats the lines, over and over until they reach the bottom, far and away from the quiet beach, and Uinen carefully places her to rest on the sandy seafloor and rests a kiss upon her lips. Then she sits by her side and cradles her head, combs her hair with her fingers, singing a lullaby until Erendis finally sleeps, content.
Finis
Abril 2020