The Sun is Falling

Children of the House of Hurin lived on tales as much as on food; for a family whose purpose lay in sworn trust to a line of kings which only madmen and idealists did not think exist, words were as important as sustenance.  Faramir took to them with a verve that defied comparison.  Long before he could speak, he would tell stories with the rhythm and inflection of words.  Boromir remembered hearing, through his mother’s closed door, the burble of wordless stories and Finduilas’s husky musical laugh.

Delighted.  She sounded delighted.  Sometimes he would try to make her laugh like that, but even before Faramir’s birth had left her ill and dragged the bitter homesickness up from the depths of her to choke her breath, she had never been so free with him.  She looked at him and saw his father.  He tried, at six, hollow and ringing with Ecthelion’s death, to remember when he figured this out, and wondered if he should have felt anything save numb to realize he couldn’t recall a time when he hadn’t known.

Perhaps that was why the tales had never taken hold of him as he had his brother.  Hearing them, he wondered what had made the kings so great; wondered what taxes they had levied, and how they had spent them; wondered how they had administered justice, by what gently inexorable march of precedence they had kept the ponderous progress of society spiraling forward, rather than simply circling.  He wondered why the women waited at home, singing mournful songs, rather than using their wits and hands to help themselves or their lost loved ones.

  

The tutors his parents sent to teach him grew tired of his questions.  It was lore, not mathematics.  Stop asking so many whys and wherefores, stop asking after so many irrelevant details.  Boromir, who had already learned to pick his battles, stopped asking.  He stopped listening, too.  His marks plummeted.  He learned not lore, from old Numenorian men with books as dusty as their idealism was shining, but history, from yellowed pages between well-worn covers, some written by hands of those who had been there and others by those who had studied them.  

In his mind, these too left questions, writ bold in the empty lines of parchment where no pen had scratched.  Always his mother and father each had their own story to tell of arguments they had.  So too had his grandfather, but the books told only the stories of Gondor and her allies.  He wanted more - needed more, for these books of history spoke not of tragic love or glorious vengeance but of strategy and infrastructure and other such practicalities, and his grandfather had taught him well that in such things lay his own purpose.

The stories remained, of course, a steadier background even than the ever-restless winds.  Certainly he didn’t mind them - they occupied a tired mind after a long day, and the words were beautiful.  One among them, though, struck deep and there stuck.

It was Faramir who asked, one winter’s night when he was two and a half and Boromir just shy of eight.  Already set against boys of ten and twelve in weapons-work, he’d let himself into the familiar warm quiet of the nursery only for his little brother to interrupt his sought-after solitude with an approaching wail of “It’s not FAIIIIRRRR!”

The door banged open, admitting Luva, the First Folk nurse who minded Faramir as she had his elder brother, and the child himself, still wailing about some slight.  Boromir drew back from the low-banked fire’s circle of dim light, knowing Luva would have seen him but not wishing to be drawn into their argument.

“It’s NOT - ” began Faramir again, when Luva grasped him firmly by the arms and grimly set him down on the hearth.

“No.” She shook him. “It isn’t.”  The boy opened his mouth to bellow, and she shook him again, not hard but doggedly. “Make it fair.”

Silence fell abruptly.  Boromir slipped out of his not-really hiding place to put a hand on Luva’s shoulder.  She covered it with her own; her palm was rough with calluses, and her thumb stroked his wrist absently.  He gave her a brief close hug and started to take half a step toward his brother, but Faramir, as ever, shrank back, shy of anyone save Finduilas and Luva, and still staring wide-eyed at the nurse.

Rejection, regardless of source, always hurt a little, but he paid it little mind, padding instead to one of the three worn armchairs ranged around the fire and curling into it to watch the embers while Luva spoke in a low voice to his little brother.

After a moment, she picked the little boy up and dropped, with a sigh, into the chair across from Boromir.  He flicked a glance and a tired smile at him.  She returned the former with a moment’s thoughtful stare, and the second tersely, and silence fell again for the space of a few heartbeats until Faramir ventured, timidly, “Tell me the story about the white bull?”

Luva grew still and held her silence for long enough that Boromir, dragging himself out of drowsiness, wondered bewilderedly if perhaps he ought tell the story, or if that would undermine her authority - perhaps Faramir really had misbehaved.  On the other hand, though he knew the story by heart, he had never heard from her lips the story of how his ancestor, and Faramir’s, had slain by spear a great bull of the wild white cattle known as kine, on some distant shore, and as a trophy of the danger he had risked and the triumph he had won taken from its head the horn that now hung at their father’s hip.

Her voice saved him.  Low and quiet, in the slow, thoughtful, matter-of-fact voice of her people and the heartbeat cadence of their storytelling, she told him how they held the white cattle sacred.  She told them of their lives along the shores, of the shells they used for currency, of the wars and truces between them, a patchwork quilt of peoples united by the bright threads of the rivers and the kine.

She told them how the men of Numenor returned, and kings rose and fell, armies carrying blades of steel forever eating away at her people’s lands until, at last, the kings vanished and a Steward it was who came to the great white bull’s shore, with a retinue of archers.   Boromir didn’t know if his brother was too young to catch it, but he heard the sorrow and the anger in her steady voice as she related how the Steward and his men slew with arrows the bull who confronted them on a narrow spit of sand while his herd fled.  He took long to die, she said; he passed kneeling, his blood staining the pale sand red and threading crimson ribbons through the clear shallow water.

The Steward took one of his horns, and left the rest to waste, a casual insult to her people that could not have been crueller had he calculated every piece of it.  She had spoken to his brother, but she looked at him then; he had thought her asleep, and nearly started at the suddenness with which her dark gaze fixed him.

“Your kings conquered our lands.  Your soldiers killed our warriors and raped our women and killed our children, and your grandfathers killed the white cattle.  Time has replaced our language with its own, but we remember that the horn is sacred. To bear that horn is to bear two worlds, ours as well as yours.”

She didn’t tell him to remember that.  If she did, it might not have struck so deep. Eight years later, when his father placed the horn in his waiting hands, the weight of it tugged that deeply-rooted barb and thereafter the tug of its braided leather strap across his chest and the cool hard brush of it against his hand served as a sharp reminder.

It is not fair; make it fair.  He could not bring back the white bull, or any of its kin, nor make right the wrong done the First Folk over so many centuries, a life-age of the world ago.  That served only as all the more reason to give all he had so that such things might never again come to pass.

At night, sometimes, he dreamed of the white bull, its shaggy chest bristling with arrows, standing out of billowing mist against a bloody sunset.  They moved so slowly he could not see it move, but every time he dreamed that dream, both bull and sun, both bull and sun had sunken further toward the sand.