[Year 1106 of the Trees. The forge pit]
[Eol POV]
The pit was too hot.
Which was, of course, the point.
Eol wiped sweat out of his eyebrows with the back of a forearm already slick with more sweat, and peered into the cherry-red heart of the fire. Charcoal, banked high, fed by a pair of goat-hide bellows the carpenters had put together for him from a design he'd sketched in the dirt.
In the darkness of a world that had never known a sun, the forge glowed like a captured star. It was the brightest thing in the settlement, by a considerable margin. Children crept up to the edge of his work-yard just to stare at it. He had to shoo them back twice a night.
Inside the glow, a fist-sized lump of ore sat on its charcoal bed. It had been copper-coloured when he'd put it in. Now it was something brighter, wetter, threatening to become something other than rock.
"Tavor." His voice came out harsh from the heat. "Mould."
The young Lindar at his elbow lifted the stone mould, Eol's own design, two pieces of soapstone carved to clamp together with the shape of an arrowhead cut into the join. Simple and rough, but it would do.
"Is it ready?" Tavor whispered.
"Watch."
Eol reached in with the tongs. The ore had slumped. Little beads of bright metal were sweating out of the darker stone around them.
He pulled it clear.
A single bright drop fell off the tongs and hit the ground, sizzled, set grass smoking.
Enough.
"Now."
He tipped the crucible.
The metal ran. Not much metal, but enough to fill the mould with a small, terrible, beautiful hiss, and a thread of steam rose up between them.
They waited.
Tavor was not breathing. Neither was Eol.
A very long minute later, or thirty seconds, the heat did things to his sense of time, Eol pried the mould apart.
Inside lay a lump of bright metal, still hot, roughly the shape of an arrowhead. Misshapen and pocked and full of flaws. If you squinted, it was an arrowhead. If you were being honest, it was something that wanted to grow up to be an arrowhead and hadn't quite made it.
They stared at it.
"We did it," Tavor whispered.
So.
Eol took the lump out of the mould with the tongs, set it on the anvil-rock, and tapped the flattest surface with a stone hammer. It rang.
It was metal.
He had made metal, in a pit, with his own hands, without any help from any god.
He turned his face away from Tavor for a second longer than he needed to, and said, when he trusted himself, "It is terrible."
"Master —"
"Don't master me. I have one arrowhead, Tavor." He held the lump up to the light. "It is terrible. And it is ours. Write it down. Which ore. How long in the fire. How much charcoal. How long before we opened the mould. Every step."
"We don't have, I mean, we can't really —"
"Scratch it on bark. Memorise it. I don't care." Eol set the arrowhead aside with reverence he would not admit aloud. "Now another. Better this time."
Tavor scurried.
Eol stood for one more moment looking at the little misshapen lump.
[Year 1106. The training clearing. Morning]
[Celestia POV]
Five of them were on the ground.
Which was four more than Celestia had expected, to be honest. She had thought at least one would stay up through the third set. She had been mildly optimistic.
"I can't anymore," one of them gasped. A Lindar boy she'd known since he was small enough to ride on his mother's hip.
"Then lie there," she said brightly. "And rest."
A groan of collective misery.
"How is this supposed to make us stronger?" another one managed from the grass. "It just hurts."
Celestia rolled her shoulders back and looked down at them. She was not breathing hard. She had done the same set three times through, before they had even arrived this morning, not out of cruelty but out of honesty. Nothing she asked of them was anything she wouldn't do herself. That was the one rule she had taken from Selas and kept without question.
"It will make you stronger," she said pleasantly, "because pain is the body telling itself to get better at what it's doing. It is a small and stupid language, but it is the only one your arms and legs speak, and if you do not listen to it, you will stay exactly as small and stupid as you currently are."
"That is not supposed to be encouragement."
"It is observation."
She looked past the bodies on the ground.
At the treeline, a small group of young women were picking wildflowers. Or, more accurately, a small group of young women were pretending to pick wildflowers while watching the drill.
Celestia had arranged this herself, two days ago, over three cups of something herbal and a long quiet conversation. Four of the Lindar girls, two of the Tattyar. Each of them had a particular boy on the ground in front of them. Each of them had been asked, casually, if they would care to take a walk along the northern path at the silver hour.
It had worked better than she had hoped.
The boys in the dirt had noticed the girls within about thirty seconds. She had counted.
"Well," Celestia said loudly, stretching her arms over her head. "Since we are done for the morning, I suppose we should go and talk to our audience. They'll be curious. You know how they are. They'll want to know what you managed."
The boy on the ground, Aerion, that was his name, lifted his head about three inches. "Audience?"
"Mm." She did not look at the treeline. "I'm sure they came for the view of the lake."
He turned his head, following her gaze, and his whole body went rigid.
The Lindar girl at the treeline had very long silver hair and an absent, uninterested look carefully pasted over a face that was in fact watching Aerion with close attention.
"Up," Celestia said to Aerion quietly. "Now."
He scrambled.
The boy beside him groaned, and then saw where Aerion was looking, and found enough energy in his limbs to get onto one knee.
The third got all the way up.
The fourth leveraged himself off the fifth's shoulder and stood.
The fifth, being more principled, remained on the ground and declared he would die with dignity. Celestia stepped over him.
"Another set," she announced.
Groans, but they did it.
They did it better than they had done any of the earlier sets. Their forms were sloppier with exhaustion, but they were moving. They were trying. Because six pairs of eyes were watching from the treeline, and the first law of young men across every known species was that they would sooner break their own backs than be seen lying down by a girl they were hoping to impress.
Celestia watched her trainees push through a set they had ten minutes ago told her they could not possibly complete, and let a small satisfied smile move across her face.
There we are.
If we wanted the young men of the Avari strong, the fastest road was to make strong men desired. The girls would do the rest. They would not even know they were doing it. They were already doing it, in fact. She had seen two of them at the treeline straighten their shoulders when Aerion got up off the ground.
She could work with that.
The whole culture of the Avari was being forged right now, she thought, and most of it was being forged by men with hammers and men giving speeches, and almost none of those men seemed to notice that what the women decided was beautiful was going to shape what the men decided to be.
So Celestia was quietly deciding what the women would decide was beautiful.
[Year 1107. The council fire. Evening]
[Selas POV]
I called them together not for orders, this time, but for teaching.
It was the first time I had tried to stand up before the whole settlement and hand them something I had been keeping mostly to myself.
I had a lot to hand them. I had practised the words on the rocks at the far shore of the lake more times than I could count. Tonight I was going to see how they landed.
"Everybody here," I said, "knows that no family has more than four children."
Nods.
"I am not sure that is the law of the world," I said. "I think it is a consequence of something. And I think we can change the consequence."
Silence.
"Our Light," I said. "The Light that is in us, that makes us glow in the dark, that makes newborns shine like candles in their mothers' arms, that keeps us warm in cold and steady in hunger. That Light is not nothing. It is not decoration. I think it is what we are, at least, part of what we are. Energy of some kind. Eru breathed it into us when he woke us, and it is in us for as long as we live."
I had their full attention now.
"And we bleed it."
I let that sit.
"All day. Every day. Out of our skins, into the air, into the ground, into the world. We shine, and we pay for shining. Every one of us, every moment, all the time."
I turned toward Mireth, who was seated at the front of the gathering with her usual small bag of herbs on her knee. She knew what I was going to ask. We had talked about this for weeks.
She nodded slightly.
"Now," I said, turning back to the crowd. "Here is my thought. A child, in the womb, has to come from somewhere. The Light of that child must be drawn from somewhere. And the somewhere it is drawn from is —"
"The mother," someone said from the crowd. A woman's voice.
"The mother," I agreed. "Yes. The child takes from the mother's own Light. That is what is in the child. That is how a baby is bright when it is born, and does not have to learn to shine."
More careful nods.
"So consider." I moved to pace, because I could not hold still any longer. "A mother who has borne four children has already given four children's worth of her Light to the next generation. And in between, all her life, she has been bleeding Light into the air around her."
I turned back.
"By the time she has given four children, there isn't enough left, not to make a fifth, not enough to keep her safely alive through one more pregnancy. So her body stops. That is the limit. Not a decree, not a rule, just arithmetic."
I saw the idea land on different faces in different ways. Some shocked. Some already running ahead of me and arriving at the conclusion before I said it.
"But."
The word came out hard.
"But — what if we learned to stop bleeding?"
Silence.
"Watch this," I said.
And I did, in front of them, what I had practised at the cove by myself for so many years.
I pulled my Light inward.
In the starlit dark, I faded to a shadow among shadows.
I held it.
I held it for a full count of sixty, longer than was comfortable, because I wanted them to be certain that I had not simply stepped into a shadow.
Then I let it go.
The Light rushed back out of me all at once, brighter than before.
Gasps again, and a murmuring that was not quite uproar but was climbing toward it.
"It is not easy," I said quickly, before the murmur could rise any higher. "It takes practice. Months, for most. Maybe years. I could only hold for ten heartbeats the first time I ever managed it at all. But everyone can learn."
I looked at Mireth.
She stood.
She walked into the center of the ring, turned, and faced the crowd.
Then she pulled her Light inward. More slowly than I had. Less completely. But the crowd could see it happening, the soft glow around her dimming, drawing down into something contained and private.
The gathering went absolutely silent.
"I am not as far along as Selas," Mireth said calmly. "Not nearly. But I have been working at it for months. And the change is real."
She held the compression for a long moment, letting them look. Then she crossed to the nearest training post, a thick beam of seasoned oak sunk into the ground for sword practice, and struck it with the heel of her palm.
The post shuddered. A crack ran up its length from the point of impact.
Mireth was not a warrior. She was a healer of average build who had never trained for combat in her life. Every person in that clearing knew it.
She turned back to the crowd.
"Light retention does not only preserve what we have," she said. "It changes us. The body grows denser. Faster and stronger. The reserves that once bled away into the air now feed muscle and bone and sinew from the inside. Over months, over years, the difference compounds."
She released her Light, and her familiar soft glow came back. The crack in the oak post remained.
"But that is not why I asked to speak."
Her voice shifted. Softer now.
"If mothers learn this," she said, "there may be enough Light left for a fifth child. Or a sixth. I do not promise. I hope. We will learn together. Any mother who wants to try will have my hands with her when she does."
I stepped forward again when it had ebbed enough that I could be heard.
"And there is more," I said.
Some of them groaned, good-humouredly, because they had had enough new ideas for one night. I let them have the laugh, because the next thing was going to be harder.
"One more thing. This one is harder to hear than the last one, and I am going to say it anyway."
I waited.
"In the forest, you have all seen it. A strong tree bears large fruit. A weak tree bears small. A fast stag sires fast calves. A small bird lays small eggs. That is not a rule I have invented. That is something every hunter and every gatherer among us has known their whole life."
"It is also true of us."
A long pause.
"The children of strong, clear-minded, capable parents tend to be strong, clear-minded, and capable. The children of the weary and the neglectful tend to struggle. That is the way bodies pass themselves on. Not a curse and not a blessing, only the way we are made."
"Selas —" one of the elders began.
"Let me finish. I am not saying anyone here should not have children. I am not saying anyone here is less than anyone else. I am saying, we are building something. We are building the first generation of the Avari. We have one chance to do this well."
I spread my hands.
"So train. All of you. Become strong. Become skilled. Become steady of mind and clear of eye. Not because I am telling you to. Because the children you will have in a hundred years will be the children of the people you become. The better you are, the better they start. That is all. That is the whole of it."
A murmur went through the crowd. Different from the earlier ones. This one had weight.
I watched it move.
Couples glanced at each other. Watched, and looked away, and watched again. I saw one Lindar woman, who had been standing loosely against her husband, straighten a little and study him, not coolly, not critically, but as though she were seeing him as the father of her not-yet-born grandchildren, and deciding, very privately, that she was pleased. I saw him notice her noticing, and, equally privately, stand a little straighter.
It was happening on faces all over the clearing.
I had said a hard thing. I had said it plainly. And the Avari, to their credit, were not flinching from it. They were doing the math themselves.
So.
Let it be plain, then. Let it be work that everyone did together. Let strength, from this moment on, not just be useful.
Let it be beautiful.
Let it be desired.
The Avari could become a people who did this on purpose. I would not have to force it. They would do it because they wanted to, and because the ones they loved wanted them to.
That was the foundation.
Everything else was going to be built on top of it.
[Year 1108. The Elders' circle. Evening]
[Maethor POV]
Maethor had been awake at the first awakening.
He did not often say this out loud. You didn't need to, when it was true. The other elders knew it. The young ones could feel it when he walked past. He was not proud of it, particularly. He had simply opened his eyes with a great many others on a shore where nothing yet had names, and he had been there ever since, and so had the lake.
He loved the lake.
He loved the slow-moving stars above it, and the songs that rose without plan in the evenings from the huts nearer the water, and the quality of silence that came to the shore in the long hours when no one was singing.
He loved his wife, whom he had met before he had met any word for her. He loved his three daughters, and the many granddaughters and grandsons they had given him, and he loved the trees on the southern slope where he liked to walk.
He had refused the Journey because he could not bear to leave any of that.
He had thought, when the boy refused, that the boy had understood the same thing.
Maethor was no longer sure.
The boy.
He still thought of Selas that way. It was not unkind. Selas was a boy, to Maethor.
A boy who could command a room. Maethor acknowledged it without grudge. When Selas spoke, people listened.
When Selas worked, other people began working beside him. It was a true gift, and the Avari had been right to choose him, and Maethor would not be the elder who stood against that choice.
But.
But tonight the circle of elders had gathered, as they did each month now in the timber-beamed hall Selas had required them to build before any other public building, and the talk around the fire had gone again to the same place it always went, and Maethor had listened, and Maethor now had things to say.
"The decision to stay was the right one," one of the younger elders was saying, whose name was Faeldir.
"Who argues with that?" said another. "Look what we have."
"Look what we have," Faeldir agreed. "Walls. Fields. Fire-pits that make metal out of rock."
"I saw."
"Before Selas, none of us had even asked for these things. Now—"
"Now," Maethor said quietly.
Every head around the fire turned toward him.
He did not speak often in these circles. When he spoke, they listened. He had earned that, the long slow way.
"Now we have all those things," he said. "Granted. And they are good things, most of them. But I want to ask all of you a question, and I want you to answer it honestly, which is a thing that is difficult when the boy is very charming and most of our children adore him."
A ripple ran through the circle, uncomfortable. Nobody disagreed.
Maethor folded his hands on his knee.
"We refused the summons of Oromë," he said. "We refused it because we did not trust him. We refused because he came from far away with warnings of dangers and promises of safety, and we said to him — no. That is why we are Avari."
Slow nods.
"Now." Maethor looked around the fire, face by face. "Selas tells us there is a darkness coming. He tells us to train our children with bows and with spears. He tells us that Oromë was right, in that one thing, that something terrible is moving in the north, and that we must be ready for it."
Silence.
"Do you see it?" Maethor asked. "Do you see the shape of what he is saying to us?"
"Selas is not the Vala, Maethor."
"No. He is not. And I am not accusing him of being one. I am asking you to notice that we refused the summons because we did not trust fear, and now we are arming our children against the same fear, at the word of a young man we chose five Years of the Trees ago."
A longer silence.
"Maethor." It was Thoron this time. Thoron, who had been first to stand behind the boy on the morning of the Sundering, and who had not wavered since. His voice was steady. "You are using the boy's own argument against him."
"I am."
"Cleverly."
"I don't mean it cleverly. I mean it honestly. If we are a people who refused to bow to fear, then let us refuse to bow to fear. All of it. Including his."
"And if the darkness is real?"
"Then it will find us, and we will meet it, and we will either live or not. But let us not become what we refused to become. Let us not live crouched over our weapons, staring at the horizon, waiting for a blow that may never come, teaching our children to be soldiers before they are singers."
Another elder, whose name was Talagan and who had a habit of deflecting serious moments with humor, cleared his throat. He was not smiling now.
"Maethor. I hear you. I do. But." He gestured out toward the settlement, and something almost wistful crossed his face. "I look at what we have built in five Years of the Trees. I look at what those children down there know how to do with their hands and with their minds. I look at the copper in their hunting points. And I think, whatever else is true, the boy has been right about more things than any of us would have predicted."
He paused. Glanced at Maethor with a half-shrug that was more honest than apologetic.
"Including some things I laughed at when he first said them."
"Being right about copper," said Maethor, "does not mean being right about war."
Nods moved around the circle, some for him, some for Talagan. The circle was split, as it often was these days.
"I do not want him removed," Maethor said carefully, because he wanted to be sure the room understood what he was and was not saying. "He leads well. He has earned the place he stands in. I am not his enemy."
"What are you, then, old friend?" said Faeldir, not unkindly.
Maethor thought about it for a moment.
"I am the voice that reminds him," he said at last. "That we refused the summons. That we refused it on principle. That a people who will do anything to survive will, sooner or later, become something that is not worth surviving."
He let that sit.
"If I do not say it, who will?"
Nobody answered.
The fire cracked. Somewhere in the settlement, a child was laughing. The lake, as always, was quiet.
Thoron nodded slowly, not in agreement but in acknowledgment.
"Say it, then," he said. "And keep saying it. And we will weigh it, each of us, every time you do. That is all that can be asked."
"That is all I ask," said Maethor.
The circle moved on to the next matter.
But the thing he had said stayed in the air over the fire for the rest of the evening, the way smoke stays in the rafters of a hall after the fire is low.
Selas was not there to hear it.
Maethor suspected that someone, later, would tell him.
That was all right. It was meant for him.
[End of Chapter 7]
Glossary
Time
Years of the Trees — The unit of time in the age before the Sun and Moon, when Arda is lit by the Two Trees of Valinor and the stars. One such year is roughly ten mortal years.
Silver Hour — The hour when Telperion's silver light is dominant in Aman. Used among the Avari as a time-marker for the beginning of a working day.