let the gods intervene
for I suspect the heaven of our mad God
might be a paltry thing, next to the heaven I’ll make of earth
when I am its immortal king.
- x
i. Azu’d been chafing for the crown for the last forty years. It did not stop him from fighting for our father’s health with every ounce of his peculiar intensity, and it did not lessen his grief as our father, nevertheless, grew sicker.
Dying is ugly.
Fifteen years, the King had been in decline, fifteen years that had reduced him from a presence that drew every eye to a crumbling, clumsy one from whom courtiers politely averted their glance. A memory like a trap, my father had once possessed, though he’d set it loose on harmless trivia. He mistook me for my grandmother, for a doctor, for a courtier, and then ceased noticing me at all; Azulzir spent far more time at his side than I did, but in the last year the King only remembered his name twice.
He did not remember it on his deathbed. “Eärcalo?” he said instead, sometimes, when his words were intelligible at all; more often he seemed not to realize we were present. At first Azulzir tried to correct him. Toward the end he tried to appease him.
“Eärcalo?”
“Gimilzagar”, Azu would say, our father’s intimate name, the one he’d abandoned on taking the crown. But the one Eärcalo, his brother, would have called him. “Are you well?”
“No,” he’d said. “I am not well. Do I look it? Don’t lie to me!”
Words were hard to come by, in my father’s chambers, in the year that he died. No matter how little I moved or spoke I was always short of breath. Azulzir too, apparently, because he took a while to find the words. “You don’t look well.” He didn’t. The wrinkles had burrowed their way though his cheeks to leave deep creases. His skin was dry and all his teeth were false.
“You look the same as always.”
My brother smiled at him and did not say anything.
“Are you here to kill me?” His hands closed around Azulzir’s, tightly. I saw my brother flinch. There was still surprising strength in them.
He swallowed. “Do you want me to?”
A laugh. A harsh, husky, breathless laugh. “No. No. Azu –”
And I saw the delight and relief in my brother’s eyes, saw his hands tightened around the King’s reflexively, in gratitude -
“Azu,” he said, “I don’t want to die.”
In Anadûnê we do not believe that death is a blessing. That’s what the Elves teach us, when they descend from paradise to visit. I am not sure if all the Elves believe it, or if the ones who don’t are not permitted to depart the Blessed Realm’s blessed shores. The Elven gods keep their subjects on a short leash.
The Elves, who are deathless unless they choose to die, say that our unwilling death is a blessing. We, who watch our mothers and fathers through the bitter last decade, beg to differ. We, who research the workings of the body and the mysteries of the spirit, trying a thousand different things in the hopes that we’ll stumble - through sheer reckless determination – across the one we need.
We did not stumble across it in time.
Azu tried, as I said, with all his terrifying will. There were a thousand doctors willing to sell us a remedy, of course, and some of them could even parade before us a dozen test cases on whom they claimed their remedy had worked. But there has been, for several hundred years, a prize purse of half the wealth of the Crown for the man who cures involuntary Death, and the brightest minds of centuries had beaten their brains against the question and come away without an answer. And died themselves.
Azulzir – an idealist, you know, able to recognize our father’s naïveté but not his own – had thought we’d solve it. I am not sure when it realized that we wouldn’t, not in time.
When the doctors said that we were out of time, we were all beside him. The sun rose and my father stirred unhappily, cried out for water, stared unseeingly at the servants who rushed in to bring it. I suppose I was hoping for one last lucid moment. I did not get one. He lingered, while the Sun rose in the sky, and his breathing softened as the Sun reached her zenith and he had a terrible coughing fit as she reached the horizon. At dusk he stopped breathing.
My brother, our King, did not weep. That would have been improper. The chamber was crowded with witnesses. He took our father’s hands and said the words that have sufficed in place of prayer, here in Anadûnê for the last three hundred years.
“We were not made for death,” he said, “nor born to die.”
I took our father’s other hand. It felt unnatural already, going stiff and cold in mine. I glared at my brother. If he had given a long speech it would have been appropriate for me to match him, but he spoke only a few words, so I had only a few. “Death is the last work of the Enemy,” I said, “and to end it will be the greatest work of our people.”
And then we all watched the new King.
It took him a moment. Longer than he should have waited, really. It is crass to look eager at your father’s deathbed, but weak to wait too long. I have better instincts for that kind of thing than Azu; usually he looks to me for cues, and we joke he’ll be a puppet-king, but today he was not looking for cues and I don’t give them where they won’t be heeded. Puppetting kings is about knowing where they won’t be pushed, even for their own good.
Eventually my brother stood. We exhaled in grateful unison, and I uncurled my fingers from my father’s. “The King is dead,” we said. “Long live the King.” A dozen voices in unison. Soon it would be a hundred. Soon it would be all the nation.
Dying is ugly. What an odd rite of passage, for those who would be leaders of our empire. Azu told me, a few years later, that he was grateful for it. It meant that each of them took office by staring the enemy in the face.
ii.
“You should marry before you become King,” I’d said to my brother twenty years earlier, only a week before he met the woman who would become his wife. I cannot claim either influence or precognition, because I said it to him at least once a month. “If you think the candidates are intolerable now, imagine what they’ll be like then – and you’ll be busier.”
If I’d met Arossë I’d have known instantly that she was an excellent choice, and then I could have claimed both influence and precognition. But he’d met her himself, at the university. The story had been satisfactorily romantic as it actually happened, or else they’d had the good sense to embellish it before it even reached my ears. She’d gotten into a screaming fight with the entire department of First Age linguistics over whether Pengolodh had mis-glossed several firsthand documents from Estolad, and whether they could instead be translated in a way that provided independent support for Andreth’s account of human mortality. The linguistics department at the university was stubbornly behind the times, both because the Andustalië took such interest in it and because the field had a stubborn prescriptivist tradition that entirely precluded engagement with the vernacular, which was where everything progressive was happening.
At least, that’s what Arossë apparently shouted at the whole department, calling them willfully negligent cretins and calling linguistic prescriptivism the worst idiocy of all those attributed to Fëanor. At that someone had predictably called her a war crimes apologist and she had said that a society that treated the killing of Men as a crime a fraction as serious as the killing of Elves would name every one of us complicit in crimes ten times as terrible as Alqualondë and anyway murdering Elves wasn’t really that bad, they came back. The debate had been disbanded to give cooler heads a minute to prevail, and she’d burst out of the council chambers, happened on my brother, and vehemently made her case to him.
Later she’d claimed she’d had no idea who he was, and explained herself only because he seemed sharper than anyone inside, and more willing to listen. “Liar,” I said gently when I heard that part of the story, and she shrugged in careless acknowledgement. “It plays better that way. People want to believe that they could have stumbled by chance on the Crown Prince and seduced him with an impassioned rant about the value of mortal lives –”
- which they could, really, but it wouldn’t end in a marriage proposal unless they were of the line of Elros and of an extraordinarily powerful family -
“I’d have married her anyway,” Azulzir’d objected, when I said this to him once. “I wanted her, and I’m honorable, and –”
“And we wouldn’t have let you,” I said, “you’re going to be King.”
“You can have it,” he’d grumbled. My heart twanged. He shouldn’t say things like that. He didn’t mean them. Just because I’d never consider marrying for love when millions of lives rested on the wisdom and stability of my choices, just because I had the instincts that no centuries in court had managed to instill in him, just because his reckless and extraordinary intensity was better suited to a generalship, or a powerful advisory position –
“It’s a very suitable match,” I said instead, “you’ll have to threaten to abandon your responsibilities over some other imposition.”
“Don’t,” Arossë said, cheerfully. “I want to be a queen.”
I think my brother was slightly hurt at that, as he’d spent his whole life frolicking in the polite fiction that women threw themselves at him for his looks and charm. But he had at least the good sense not to show it, and to stop halfheartedly offering me his office whenever it inconvenienced him.
iii.
It would have been predictable for jealousy to arise between the two of us, so I went to lengths to avoid that. If I threw Arossë into new responsibilities a bit carelessly, it was because it was in our mutual interest for me to know the limits of her capabilities.
“Your mother does all this?” she said, once.
Azulzir forgot sometimes, but I never did, that the open secrets within the family were genuine secrets outside them. My father’s brother Eärcalo died before he could take up the crown. My father would never had any part in it, would have given his own life protecting the crown prince. My mother had thought Eärcalo ill-suited for leadership.
They hadn’t looked, while investigating. We sing of Lúthien, we sing of Idril, we sing of Elwing; it is a cultural fascination elevated to a devastating blind spot. We believe beautiful women incapable of evil.
“Yes,” I said, “my mother does all this. You won’t be alone, though, you’ll have me.”
She took it as a threat. Which was good. I wanted Azulzir in power and I was not in fact her enemy, but if she trusted me she was too trusting. The university did that to people: it taught eloquence, taught the dance of intellectual freedom with treason or blasphemy, let the nobility glide near various forms of radicalism, grow out of them, and grow into leadership with the compassionate pragmatism of the better sort of ex-revolutionary. Azulzir’d grown into himself in university. Arossë clearly had, too. But spending too much time around sincere people made you believe in sincerity, and in court sincerity paid its dividends in futility. Hollow, failed exertions of power. I’d seen enough of them.
Arossë did not trust me, which was wise.
I dressed down on her wedding day, though I was not done assessing her capabilities, because spiteful childish jealousy was not what I was trying to cultivate between us. She wore a dress modeled off the great golden sculpture of Andreth in the city square. It was an excellent choice, politically and aesthetically. My brother was enraptured.
Andreth, people murmured, who the Elves had desired. Arossë corrected them whenever she was given the chance. Andreth, wise-woman, who had written our stories, who’d made her voice so fiercely known that a thousand years later, as Anadûnê started to piece together our history, we’d still been able to hear us. Andreth, the first to tell the Elves the truth: the brevity of our lives was not a gift, and they need not keep pretending that they envied it.
“You should have predicted,” I said to her later, “that they’d leap the other way. Andreth who the Elves desired – that is the story everyone knows, and the one that will spread the fastest. You cannot be subtle with messages that don’t suit peoples’ preconceptions. It’s on you, if people don’t read you the way that you want to be read. And Andreth died childless.”
She was still radiant with the delight of a bride fresh from the most luxurious honeymoon an empire could provide. She glared at me, but with no intensity. “You really are a scold.”
“If you only take advice from people who make you feel good about yourself –”
“Azu,” she said, “debates public perception and the implications of various subtle décor choices with me but also acts as if he likes me.”
“I like you,” I said impatiently, “that’s why I’m telling you this.”
“It’s on you if people don’t read you the way you want to be read,” she mimicked me, toying with a stray curl. “Lominzil, I don’t mind the testing, but is there anything that would convince you I’ve actually passed it?”
“When we cure death and my brother rules the world forever,” I said instantly.
“No,” she said. “Then you’ll be more maddeningly jealous of him than ever.”
“I’m not jealous of him.”
“When we cure involuntary death and my husband rules the world forever,” she said, “he’ll find another ambition easily. They come to him like breathing. I don’t understand people whose ambitions could be fulfilled. I have no idea who you’ll be afterwards.”
I was breathless for a moment. “No one,” I said, “has ever told me that the problem with that particular ambition was that it was too limiting, and once fulfilled would leave me at loose ends.”
She kissed me before leaving. Her dress was some stunning translucent fabric, her hair tumbling loose of its pins as if even her stylists were struggling to keep up with the pace of hairstyle-destruction of lovers on a honeymoon. She was wearing expensive southern perfumes. It could have been sisterly, but wasn’t.
I decided I wasn’t sure if I’d put too little effort into ensuring we were not rivals, or too much of it. She danced away into my brother’s arms.
iv.
Azulzir’s finance minister spoke Adûnaic in council meetings with barely a trace of an accent, but whenever the conversation turned from currency it became obvious that he was badly out of his depths. The words for hobbies, for humor, for storytelling, for family – those had evidently not been covered in his crash course on the vernacular, and without them he was visibly discomfited. I enjoyed it, not at all guiltily. For two thousand years that was how it had been for anyone raised on the tongues of Men.
It was a minor state dinner. I had nearly skipped it, and Arossë, though at my brother’s side, was clearly absent in spirit. The conversation was dominated by the gregarious new governor of Umbar, who spoke Adûnaic natively and was clearly delighting in the advantage it gave her over the Armineleth old guard. Everything was playing out exactly as Azulzir – no, Ar-Adunakhor now, the first King to take his name in Adûnaic instead of in Quenya - had intended it. The change in the official language of court from the Elven to the Adûna tongue had been hailed as a populist move and condemned as a sacrilegious one. The Elves had arrived with vague threats from their gods and departed in a flurry of foreboding words delivered with the bored, smug superiority that only Elves could muster. Their departure conveniently weakened his political rivals. The shakeup at court conveniently made it more meritocratic than it had been in several generations, as his advisors naturally filtered themselves for ability to read the writing on the wall and learn the damned vernacular.
It was embarrassing, really, that it had taken his decree to make it so. In what kind of country could the nobility not even understand the language of their subjects?
“My liege,” the governor of Umbar said, and with a scraping stir the room came to attention, “our people have received your rulings with joy, and saw me off on this journey in hopes of still a greater boon –”
So she wanted money. The King should probably at least pretend to pay attention, but I didn’t need to; I let my face settle into bland, unreadable dignity, and my mind wander to more interesting topics. The governor of Umbar wanted money. The governor of Gondor wanted money. The governors of the nation proper wanted money, too, and had the stronger claim, since it was their fiefdoms Ar-Adunakhor had disrupted so thoroughly and their families whose legacies and power base and life works he’d set adrift in one mild procedural stroke. He could afford to accommodate all of them financially. He probably couldn’t afford to do so politically. They said a King set the pattern of his next two hundred years in his first five.
“If that’s true,” I had said to him as we’d choreographed the coronation, “yours will be eventful times.”
“I hope not,” he said, because it sounded wise. We both knew it wasn’t really true. He itched for troubled times. Anadûnê itched for them. Two thousand years of slow unfurling in the carefully trimmed garden of the gods, paradise just outside arms’ reach. People started to itch.
“Kings in particular,” I’d teased him, “Being unaccustomed to not getting what they want.”
The Kings of this nation had not gotten what they wanted, any of them; if they had, they would still sit the throne.
“It would be the war to end wars,” the governor of Umbar said eagerly, and I wretched my attention back to the abundant food and overeager company that was making this dinner so stifling.
“I hope that’s not supposed to tempt me,” the King said severely. I kept my face unreadable. Ambitious didn’t mean warmongering, but the governor needed to figure that out for herself if she was going to be valuable here.
But her eyes lit up. “You’re a historian, Your Grace. Tell me, do you think Sauron’s gone forever? Are you confident the Valar won’t decide again that Morgoth’s served his parole? Have you ever asked yourself –”
“I am not sure the weapons for a war against Morgoth or Sauron would bear much resemblance to the ones we’d use to pacify Umbar.”
“Ironworking,” she said, “is not a weapon but the idea by which all weapons are devised. Same with the printing press. Same, if you permit it, with these railways – and with the mechanism that powers them. Your grace – this is something Valinor will never have.”
Now we were listening.
“The continents of Middle-earth,” she said, “are older than Anadûnê, older than Valinor; they were formed before the first and greatest of the wars of the Valar and Morgoth. Years beyond counting, thousands of thousands, passed in that time, beneath the pillars of the old world, and creatures roam it whose bones, turned to stone by the times, we are now uncovering. The plants of that time have been compressed into firestone, which burns for days. Nothing in Anadûnê – nothing in Valinor – has that kind of energy density. And so the steam engine could only have been invented in Umbar. But now, my liege, we can bring it here.”
Arossë was easy to read, and was listening as if the words were raindrops reaching the lips of someone dying of thirst. I glared at her. It would give the King a weaker hand in our negotiations, and now the governor was turning her presentation towards the most receptive member of her audience, ignoring the King himself.
He coughed, gently, and she embarrassedly snapped back toward him, still talking a mile a minute. “It’s not speculative, your grace. It works. Scale will take time, the locals are dreadfully slow at building them, but it will be possible, when we’re done, to reach Mithlond from Cuivienen itself in two days.”
Even Azu permitted some delight to escape onto his face, at that. “How much?”
She flinched and did not answer. “And some people think we could fly with them. They haven’t worked out how, yet, not exactly, but it ought to be possible, there are a few proposed plans and perhaps if we combined the best elements of each – we’re calling it Project Eagle.”
A stir around the table, more forceful than the one prompted by the extraordinary implications of the project itself. The great Eagles were the servants of Manwë, lord of the airs, king of all the Elven gods. To build a mechanical contraption that would mimic the flight of birds was practically to demand his wrath. To call it that –
Arossë laughed. “Someone values their cleverness too highly, and their life too lightly.”
“Let the gods intervene,” said the King.
