#anadune

“Don’t sound too eager,” said his father dryly.

There was no one else in the world who could interrupt him twice like that. Azulzir gritted his teeth. “Your pardon, sire.”

 “These murderers are waiting on the same thing. My pardon. Do I not owe it to them to consider granting it? ”

“Fifteen hundred,” said Azulzir. “Some innocent. I’ll spare my consideration and sympathy for them, I think. These here are assuredly guilty.”

“So should we kill the guilty lightly? One who can deal out death without seeing it forgets, perhaps, what it is.”

The private audiences with his father had been hard to sit through for as long as he could remember – since he had been a small child and Belzagar the King, even. His father had always transparently wanted to be elsewhere, and Azulzir had always had a hard time sitting still. But they seemed to drag on even longer these days. He’d once aspired to emulate his father’s thoughtfulness. Now it seemed like incompetence and indecisiveness masquerading as wisdom.  Agonizing over your choices didn’t make you wise, his mother liked saying; making the right ones did.

Why had she married him, then?

Because she could make him a King.

  Azulzir’s toes were wearing a groove in the floor. Abattârik was still talking. “In the societies of our ancestors, it is said, tradition held it that the one who pronounced the sentence carried it out as well, or stood in witness.”

“There’s no backing for that. Historically, I mean – there are no recorded executions by the puppet mortal governments during the Age of Elven Servitude, and none among the Free Halethrim either. The gravest penalty was exile. Before that we have no written records, but there are references - in Of Eiodeer to the treason of Breshwa, in Linna Lis Tremin to the fall of Scardol – to executions that’d be closer to vigilante justice, really, and certainly not by any central authority. People know they can get all sorts of nonsense taken seriously if they claim that our forefathers believed it.” He paused for breath. “And why is it that only an execution prompts you to wax poetic about the obligations of the throne? Every tax we support, every law we approve – those are paid in blood too. If the one who pronounces the sentence should carry it out, perhaps we should spend all our time running around in small villages, witnessing the consequences of our policies.”

His father’s lips twitched. “Perhaps you should.” 

That deserved a response, but his mind was elsewhere. “Now that I think of it, in Of Eiodeer there’s a reference to vengeance as ‘crime by tradition and nature’, roughly translated, which suggest that there was a tradition of laws and that it precluded executions. There’s a historian who thinks ‘crimes against custom and spirit’ would be a closer translation-” 

“Azulzir, I am not interested in this,” said his father. 

He swallowed. “I ask your pardon again, sire. If that’s everything -” 

A wave of the King’s wrinkled hand. “Go. Enjoy yourself. The gardens are lovely this time of year.”

If he’d been speaking to his mother that would have been a none-too-gentle reprimand, a stinging reminder that his priorities were too driven by his passions for a man who would be King. But his father spent several hours each day in the gardens, and likely meant it sincerely.

“Thank you. By your leave.” 

It would be unforgivable incompetence to go anywhere, even to the garden. If there was trouble at the execution tonight – and it wasn’t unlikely – someone present to give orders could be the difference between a grieving crowd swiftly quelled and a full-scale riot. What orders those would be –

- but that was a hard question, and he caught himself getting absorbed in the question of legends instead. No evidence that their forefathers had held executions. That did not mean it shouldn’t be done, of course – the early Men had been illiterate, disorganized, and easily overawed, and they had paid for it again and again. The moral legitimacy of his Kingship could not rest on its precedents in ancient history. What he wanted to draw from the legends was something else. A sense of heritage, perhaps, untainted by the interlude of Elf-worship and its attendant willful complacency. ‘Custom and nature’ or ‘tradition and spirit’? You could not translate a history without changing it… 

“Azu!” 

His mother, of course; no one else used the diminutive. 

“My lady Queen. You might wish to stop by court and persuade the King not to pardon tonight’s conspirators, either in a fit of pity or in terror the city will rise up again.” 

“It won’t,” she said coolly. “The opposite, I think; we can’t afford a show of weakness.”

“I probably should have argued that point,” he admitted. “Got distracted by the inconsistency in Father’s justice, instead.” 

“Any decision the King makes is just by definition,” she said.

“Right. And if he changes his mind, physics changes around him so he was right both before and afterwards. Why do we even bother maintaining such an extensive intelligence network, when he cannot choose wrongly?” 

“Azu.”

“Sorry.” 

“If you had as much contempt for your subjects as you have for your superiors, I’d fear you’d make a monster of a King.”

 That stung. “I don’t,” he protested.

“I know,” she said.

 “I’m trying to help them, in a roundabout way, trying not to get caught up in anger over this or that treason, trying to keep in mind that the decisions that matter most aren’t the ones closest to home – if this weren’t happening in Armineleth, we’d be letting the local governor handle it, it wouldn’t even rise to our attention.” He hesitated. “I told Father I’d save my sympathy for the innocent.”

“You have met my great-aunt Khopacha. Belitzir, in our tongue, but she was never called that. Owned forty shares in the Great Southern Fleet and twenty in the consortium that claimed the southern horn. She gave meagre gifts, for a woman with the wealth of kings. Once I asked her why. She was saving, she said, for an expense worthy of her. It became a habit, and no luxury was ever sufficient to justify abandoning it. Then she died.”

“That’s a parable,” he said cautiously. 

An impatient flick of her head. “Technically no, because it actually happened. Guess my meaning anyway.”

“Death is a travesty brought on by Morgoth, and as long as it endures in the world everything is vain and pointless.” 

“Clever. No.”

“If I save my sympathy for people worthy of it I’ll never find them? So I might as well sympathize with people who aren’t worthy of it – no, that doesn’t follow, it might be that always sympathizing is much worse than never sympathizing, even if I accept your premise. Or that I should be assigning sympathy based on some criterion other than worth.” 

“Interesting. Not my intent, though.”

He bit back an exasperated dismissal. This was infantilizing. “Tell me.”

 She must have read the tension in his shoulders and decided he meant it. “Contempt is a habit. So is sympathy. Habits are easy to establish, hard to abandon. Are you choosing them because they will allow you to win an argument and feel clever, or because they are traits you wish to see embodied in Our King?”

He leaned his head against the stonework and closed his eyes. “If I’d said that first,” he said slowly, “you’d have said ‘no, try again’ to see what else I came up with.” 

“It would be a poor mind that could only entertain one understanding of a story at a time.” 

“Right.” He hesitated. “Do you need me around tonight?” 

“There will be no problems,” she said. The King’s word was law but the Queen’s word was fact; he felt the abrupt dissolution of his worries.

“I might go anyway.”

“I think that might be wise.”

She left. He watched her reach her rooms before racing off toward the University to pick someone’s brain on the translation question. Only a few people stared oddly as he made his way through the streets; most of the rest had long since taken his gait for a new court fashion and self-consciously adopted it themselves. 

(The uneasy thought sometimes crept into his mind that, were the revolutionaries to get their way, were there no throne for him to inherit – or had he been born to a different position – the gait would get him mocked and the contempt for authority would get him killed.)

In the greatest university of the greatest country of the world, it is rare to earn admittance before the age of one hundred, and unheard of to earn it before fifty. None surrender their positions. Minor nobility of the House of Elros frequently find themselves here, at the respectable heart of Armineleth, and they will endure for four hundred years and grant the university stability in the same manner that enough anchors will keep a ship still on the raging sea.

 I will stop with the nautical metaphors, since I know very little about the ocean and I’m virtually assured to get things wrong. But I imagine that storms can rage so strong that they drag the anchors across the reefbed, killing precious corals in their wake, and above the waves the ship finds itself committed to stability and therefore poorly equipped to ride out the storm.

That, then, is the air of a university in turmoil.

  And it was making it difficult to concentrate.

I had chosen to write my dissertation – a life’s work, by the high standards of the University, rapidly growing into two dozen volumes – back when the academic study of Adûnaic had been a marginal field, and a vaguely shameful one. I had been young and idealistic and devoted to giving the language of the people academic prominence. My Quenya was sufficient to match the scholars of that tongue, and I would vehemently debate them in the classrooms  and in the lecture halls, in the academic quarters for the poor associate lecturers and in the rowdy streets of the Golden City. 

It was funny to think that had been only a decade ago.

Since then, I’d discovered two problems with my courageous stance for the common people: firstly, that the common people did not care at all whether their dialects were the subjects of dusty unread books on shelves, and secondly, that Adûnaic was not nearly as heroic an area of study as I’d imagined. I was born, I suppose, a generation too late.

Or three.

The real fight, now, was in the streets, and it was ugly, and I had found politics… poorly suited to the skills I’d cultivated supposedly for partaking in it.

People skittered through the hallways silently, or talked far too loudly, in the brash Adûnaic of the streets. Windows facing the streets had been boarded up – there hadn’t been riots, not in this part of the city, but the scholarly work herein was too valuable to risk… 

It felt like an ocean breeze teasing the back of my neck, like a avalanche occurring so far away I could barely hear it. I watched the people scurry through the hallways and worried… 

and realized that obviously I was going to get nothing at all accomplished today. Every scholar has days like that, and we all have different methods of handling them. One of my colleagues, a silver-haired woman with fingers that trembled when she picked up a pen (she was well past the age when, by the teachings of the Valar, we ought to lay aside our life), had caught me pacing anxiously ten years ago, when I’d been new, and explained that the only crucial thing was to find a method of handling it. “Some people go boating,” she said, “some compose sonnets, some dunk their head in cold water. I have sex, personally.”

I had heard such things spoken of, but not in Quenya – it was the language of poetry and antiquity, and hearing it used to express such a crude sentiment was shocking. I’d blinked at her in astonished silence.

“You have to be more careful when you are old and creaky,” she said, “but I assure you that it is still possible. And there’s no better cure for writers’ block – or headaches.”

I’d been blushing so furiously that my skin nearly caught on fire. Even thinking of it, years later, had provoked such a reaction. I’d had difficulty explaining why I was blushing at her funeral. 

My personal ritual for unproductivity was to walk through the streets of Armineleth. Right now, though, that felt dangerous. Like adding wood to a fire that was already blackening the stone of a firepit. I paced, instead, around the bookshelves. It was a large library. One could get an excellent day’s exercise just by circling the outer fringes of the shelves.

__________________________________________

She was new here. I was more sensitive to that, perhaps, because of the recent unrest. But I like to think that, regardless of how caught up I had been in my own theories, regardless of how little I’d been expecting to find newcomers in the politics and sociology department, I’d have noticed her.

She stood out.

Not her outfit, which was utterly appropriate, suffering all the unsual indignities of over-worn scholars’ robes, splattered with ink on the sleeves. Not her hair, tied up elegantly in a scholar’s bun. And not – later she would press me on the question, but I would always answer with integrity – because she was beautiful. I did not notice such things. I never had.

I noticed her because she had no idea what she was doing. 

The first time I circled the department she was wandering down the shelves with a history in her hands, examining the classification system as if she’d never seen it before.

The second time she’d given up. And yet her conscience, apparently, had not permitted her to put the book in the wrong place (that I would never have forgiven her) so she’d seated herself in a nook and begun reading it.

The third time she’d given up on that also, and was flipping through the pages like a schoolchild searching for the pictures.

Perhaps there was something else to her; perhaps I am not ordinarily so observant. In any event, I halted on my meaningless meanderings and said, “Hello.  I am Ûrîphel, of the linguistics department, studying under Minluzîr. Are you newly employed here?” 

The book settled at once into a more natural position in her hands; her posture changed, and her eyes flickered across the room like a commander taking in the position of the enemy.

Then she let the book slide out of her hands. I winced and reached out to grab it before it could slap obscenely against the desk.

That required closing the distance between us, rather impudently; I suppose I should have apologized, but the girl had nearly dropped a book and our sudden proximity was the least of my concerns. 

“Gimlîth,” she said, “joining the department of mathematics.”

I waited for the name of her loreguide, but it was not forthcoming. Neither were her qualifications. That should have been enough, given my state of constant tension, given the state of modern politics, to make me doubt. 

Instead for some reason I said, “welcome! Let me show you around!” and reached out to give the book back. When she misinterpreted the gesture, taking my arm, I did not correct her.