#almariel

-----------------------

Almáriel had heard tales of the Exile, of course; there wasn’t a child of the Andustar (born in the east though they might have been or not been) who hadn’t. She had been one of the fortunate ones, one of the children born in the Andustar after Tar-Palantir took hold of the Scepter and permitted the Andustari to return to the home that had been barred to them for so long. Construction had been slow, and the house Almáriel had been born in was not equal to the station of her family, but her mother had insisted upon it, and Almáriel would have been proud to have been born in a cow shed, if it meant she could claim to have been born in the Andustar.

Like every Núnatan her age, Almáriel had no memory of the exile from the west—it was beyond her power to recall events that had taken place so long before she was born. She had the tales from her grandmother, whispered to her in the night as though the very retelling would bring misfortune upon them. It wasn’t the Ñoldor’s Exile from the Undying Lands of which she spoke, though Almáriel knew that tale, too. The Faithful had more than one tale of exile to recount, unfortunately—they had many tales of defeat to relate to the younger generations, always hoping the younger would be able to avoid the pitfalls the older had fallen victim to.

Ar-Zimrathôn was old and ailing—who knew how the story would have changed if he had died a few years sooner, or his health had been better. Ar-Sakalthôr, then Prince Sakalthôr, was obsessed with bringing the “savages” of Middle-Earth to heel, and rarely set foot on Númenor—according to the records, Ar-Sakalthôr wound up spending even less time on Númenórean soil than Tar-Aldarion of old. This left the old king’s grandson to deal with “unrest” in the Andustar, and the old, ailing king gave his young, vital grandson a great deal of latitude.

Gimilzôr was an absolute monster, but no one had known that at the time. They soon learned.

It was terrible enough to hear recounted: the burning, the arrests, the trees so heavily laden with swinging corpses that their slender trunks began to bend. Terrible enough to hear tell of the forced march and the corpses piled up in roadside ditches, of utter desolation and the privation of the soul. Even when Tar-Palantir was king and Almáriel was growing up in an Andustar restored to the Andustari, the countryside bore scars that told a harrowing tale.

She couldn’t imagine it.

She didn’t want to imagine living through it.

But Tar-Palantir was not immortal, and his heir had been usurped by one who was in many respects Ar-Gimilzôr reborn.

“Almáriel, you’re certain this path isn’t heavily trafficked?” Isildur asked in a low voice as they made their way carefully through the narrow path in the reeds.

Almáriel nodded absently, pushing aside the branch of a young cypress tree as she made progress down the path. “I would scarcely be doing what I was asked to if I hadn’t ascertained this path was safe. This path takes us directly to the sea; the shoreline is thin up ahead, only a few feet of sand and rock before you reach open water.” Beneath her feet, the ground grew soft and wet, little pools of water forming in her footprints. Almáriel paused briefly to take off her shoes, smiling when she heard Isildur pause to do the same—he was catching on. “There’s no place to land a ship and the fishing’s poor, so fishermen don’t come here. There’s a riptide just offshore too strong for most to escape—there have been reports of deaths here in the past few years—so few beachgoers come here. We should be alone.”

“I’ll defer to your judgment,” Isildur muttered, but Almáriel could sense the skepticism leaving his mind. “Now—“ they were nearing the sea “—let’s see what kind of vantage point we have.”

The afternoon sunlight scintillated on the choppy surface of the Great Sea. Never did the sight of it fail to make Almáriel’s heart ache, though these days the longing seated in her heart was tainted with the unease of a land in thrall to a blasphemous man. The water was remarkably clear as polished glass at the stony shoreline, displaying a sight that made Isildur gasp softly—and truth be told, Almáriel still wondered at it, even having seen it so many times now.

Hardly any fish, but that hardly meant the narrow strip of shallow water before the sea grew dark and deep was empty. Sprawling beds of fluffy sea lettuce swayed gently in the current, glowing in the afternoon light. Sea urchins with spindly, delicate spines, wine-violet at the base and fading to pale pink at the tips, bristled down a little deeper. Silver-dark mussels clustered, empty abalone shells glimmered iridescent, and sand-crusted sea sponges cushioned. There were a smattering of fleshy, golden sea stars, and spotted crabs scuttled in the forests of sea lettuce.

“Amazing,” Isildur breathed, watching the shallows raptly. “I wish I’d known of this place sooner.” He caught her eye and smiled conspiratorially. “If there had been any place like this in the Andustar, our parents would have had bind our hands and feet and carry us away.”

Almáriel rolled her eyes and smiled. “You’d have stepped on a sea urchin and we would have had to call a physician to pull the spines out and treat you for the poison.” And that was if they weren’t transported back to the time of life when he was forever complaining about her being taller than him. “We had plenty of adventures in the Andustar.” Her eyes strayed south, and her smile vanished. “Now, we have work to do.”

He sobered. “Yes, I suppose we do.”

In Almáriel’s grandmother’s tales, women were scouts and messengers, the quiet and the light-footed who could pass unseen where men could not. At times she wondered how much of those tales were true and how much were fancy woven up from the undiluted stardust of her mind. Stories weren’t just stories. Stories had germs of power in them that could sprout into something rooted in the physical world even if every last word of them had been false.

Almáriel had been coming here every afternoon for the past week and a half. As she motioned Isildur to follow her to her habitual perch—a cypress tree with roots half in seawater—she bade him watch for what she watched.

Far away, three ships sailed out of one of the quays of Rómenna, great, lumbering beasts, their sails each printed with a glittering golden sword—the sigil of their great and illustrious king. “Three every day, at this time,” Almáriel murmured. “When the weather is clear, at least. I don’t dare make the trip when it’s foul—it’s more than my life’s worth to find out if I wouldn’t be swept into the water.”

“Father wouldn’t ask you to,” Isildur assured her. “We don’t look to create martyrs.” A shadow that had no origins in the tree overhead fell over his face. “The question now is what their purpose in leaving is.”

“That is your area, not mine. I’ve been no further into Rómenna than the neighborhood where we went to live, and that so far on the outskirts you can’t really call it ‘in Rómenna.’”

Isildur sighed heavily. “The ships are all manned by King’s Men—natives of Rómenna, mostly, but more men from Armenelos than I would have thought; I’d not thought that there were too many men in Armenelos that knew how to sail.” His voice curdled on the last word, and Almáriel could well imagine the thought twisting in his mind. ‘May their inexperience drown them.’ “They’re very close-mouthed.”

She tilted her head, frowning up at him with eyebrows raised. “You’ve not gotten anything out of them?”

“I’ve heard rumors from other sailors in Rómenna.” Isildur tossed his head, his jaw working furiously. “Rumors. The consensus is that their destination is Umbar.”

And once they finished massing there, and their purpose in leaving three ships at a time was fulfilled, then…

Then what?

They stood and watched those three ships sail east, until they were swallowed by the horizon and the light upon the water was taking on a golden cast. It was… It was not exactly unwelcome, being out here, so far from any city, so far from any other people. Almáriel pressed the side of her head to Isildur’s shoulder and listened to the seagulls cry. She entertained a fancy, briefly, that the shallows before them, so teeming with life, were Uinen’s gardens and the Lady might rise up from the water and greet them, but that was a fantasy, and she banished it as such. The Núnatani had given too mortal an offense to the Powers for even their servants to greet even the Faithful.

“We should start back for home.” The light on the water was mixing golden with ocher, and Isildur’s voice was as softly hesitant as she had ever heard it. “I wouldn’t like to try your paths after dark.”

“No.” Her voice was a stranger’s, faint and brittle. “Nor would I.”

He wrapped his arm around her shoulders as they stepped back upon the winding path, and Almáriel was glad of any comfort he might give her. Perhaps she was more touched with foresight than she had thought, but certainty of a certain idea had coiled around her heart like metal wire: they would all be short of comfort in the days to come. That was the lot of exiles, no matter who they were.

------------------------