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Each day the glitter of Erreth-Akbe's sword passes the floor of the hall, its slender, alternating bright-dark marking the goings of the day, and, at chance, the phase of the moon. In a forlorn mood, Lebannen's gaze settles heavily on it, the dark needle piercing the sky; he feels as if the light is a thing being depleted, being drained and suctioned away to some other, secret place where it may be hoarded, its only point of access that puncture.
At throne, he smiles weakly, for there are no other places--no other places with the nature of bearing light, at least that he knows of. And so it proceeds, the goings of the day, and the voices of many men like so many tin plates, and his weariness, drained upwards into a secret place, whose location and existence both is betrayed by nothing but a prickling in the temple.
With fleet foot, he keeps from brooding, in this bright city of unbearable whiteness and colored banners so vivid they activate the senses--the nose tickles, the mouth waters--but the melancholy worn into his bronze body like varnish is unconcealable. Though approachable, gregarious, and generous with his smiles, he is crowned in his mourning clothes, and he wears them still, beneath the heavy lay of his gilt staterobe.
In the night, he is shrunken and thin, a king pared down, but he is, in imagination, or perhaps just in cognizance, his own possession. Still, he leaves by the window.
There are braids of vine thrown between the walk, strung between the parapets, for no reason but beauty, and to no sense but pleasure. In the night, he is soothed by these things, by the sweet wind and the noise of it passing through that multitude of banners and wreaths, everything muted, gentle, forgiving and unwatching. He feels the wind on himself, through himself, feels conduit to it, and he thinks, My kingdom.
The sword of Erreth-Akbe makes a white slit in his mind, the unbleeding wound of a spirit.
Havnor is a ramble of such half-formed things, grown into each other and in perpetual conversation, oaken walkways in discourse with the mossy paving stone, muted mosaics in rooftop gardens across which Queen Heru may have spun her consort. The high wall he walks upon ascends, and now those braided vines hang around him as an ephemeral, living curtain; he climbs a spare ladder set against the wall; he crosses beneath a clothesline; his slippered foot leaves a faint scuff on a window; he balances on a rail meant for the hands; he leaps.
All the while, the sword looms like an omen, beautiful, irrepressible. His body is sobered and his mind vaulted by this, and his share of happiness dissolves. There, having stolen to his highest tower, he looks at that sword, bore by the wisest of heroes, and his heart beats hard, overlarge in the wanness of his body. There is a friable quality to his interior matter: it is wetting with the beating of his heart, clumping up and trickling, compacting as the blood moves through his body. He will not name it as agony. He folds himself down against the tiling with a tender caution, catching himself on the coarseness of the brickwork, a friction on the hands and thighs, the buttock. He brings his knees to his breast, his temple askew against the one.
The sword, his sign, but it will not answer to him, nor he to it. I am not that anymore, he thinks, not a thing to be worn or to be bore, not an instrument any longer, though he is unsure of the substance to this thought, moving fleet and fine through his head, like a dense mist being urged across an otherwise clear sky. Perfectly frank, and yet illusory. He fears he knows very little, and he is so small, so pared down! Not even in his mourning clothes, now, but a white linen tunic and dark cotton pants, the warm exhalations of his body mingling freely with the world's open air.
He looks to attain some savor from her; the moon is bright enough to sear the eye, and still that polyphonic gust coming in from the bay, and the Sword of Erreth-Akbe lies nearly between his knees. Though he does not dare touch it--not by reverence, nor some other consideration, but simply in that the act is unneedful--looks intently at the length of it, at the crossguard, heavy, though by no means crude, and splendidly colored, silver though with a sheen of gold, a tone like sunlight splashed up about its grooves and hollows where the fine teeth of a feather-comb is marked in the metal, and there a twine of some unnamed herb, the images delicate, lordly, and full of an unvoiced promise; he imagines they'd change, were he to angle his head. It is not a very large sword, a noble one.
Erreth-Akbe's image rises from the still water of his mind, like miasmic heat-haze, and he sees his mutilated body, all strewn, ant-like, on the shore of Selidor, and his mind's eye draws no nearer to it.
He thinks of Maharion.
He closes his eyes, unused to this state of dreaming, of flight. He clasps the pouch around his collar, just at the sternum; he feels a formless shape through it, nearly piercing him.
Maharion, not yet aged, had sailed that westernmost sea, had passed through the Dragon's Run and watched dragons wheel overhead with fantastic wisdom, their brilliant bodies and the bellow of their speech marking the air in half-made tracks, runes undecipherable though meaningful, ephemeral, awesome. He had come beyond that, to the westernmost isle, in that westernmost sea--though unpeopled, his kingdom still. Theirs, a heartwound!
Maharion, sea-strewn and agonized, though with light stride, had scoured that quiet place for a man who makes no holler, no rasp of breath, unreturning of the love by which his only had called him. And he had found him, tangled with the heaving, billious body of Orm, visceral and animal, rippling with gouts of gaseous exhaust, blood blackening the beach and the bodies so that they appeared as one, a melding of the island awaiting the yawning gape of the sea.
He had left his trodden body with its mortal wounds--unbleeding, tawny with purulence and shining from the smooth-backed seabugs clambering upon him (his stomach tightens now), and had sought instead this sword so that its bright may pass over his thinning, mourner's face. It's a face that, imprecisely, bears Lebannen's features, the straight of his nose and the slight slant in the eyes, the dark brows upon the steep and slender ridge of the temple. And above that, a circlet, or a chain, or some other mark of Morred.
But before that, that slender face had bent over his heart's-brother. It had stayed with the dead man. Perhaps he had bore him on his knees, with the saltwater lapping up against his hip and thigh, perhaps he had kissed the skin, like aubergine, and felt some mealy dissolution of the flesh, and had wept long and hard, had cried his name and then muttered it.
Kissed his dark hair and wept, and did so alone, stranded by he who he had loved best. Imagining himself abandoned, and feeling as such, without believing the betrayal of the heart that had abandoned him. There, there on the sands of Selidor. He is the son and progeny of a mourning man, one who had shared in a profound love.
He feels restless, foul, unhappy, and his mind climbs beyond him, his feeling; he scrubs his face with his hands and bows his honor to that sword, as like does to like. It gleams in beckon, catching the line of his nose, an enticement that he wants not to characterize as wicked. His bronze-bright skin becomes itchy, as if beset with midges, both of them asking the other, wanting from the other what cannot be given by any thing, by any mind.
He shivers all down, the tower must feel it, and the sword does. He feels the loneliness of the worm or the parasite, that huge and pressing darkness of the body around him, molding-damp-warm, and he alone foreign, not it. Away, down, into this lovely white city, of men and minds who love and need him, into the clarity of the living, though to reject pain still feels a disallegiance. How small!
Having been made a king, needs must be made a man! Everything flickers around him dark and quick, the world illumined by the lightning of his mind, his feet beneath him and the sprawl of the tile, the banners and the vines and the windows. Oh, make him want it, not casting his sorrow on any bright hinge, not exuding his sickness on the tender valor of his station, his predecessors, and his love. Erreth-Akbe, the hero! Maharion, your strength!
He just can’t stop dreaming, and he weeps the helpless, meaningless tears of childhood into his bed linens, quietly gasping, and frightened by himself, that moonlight. And at the long end of this fear, as if standing at the mouth of a cave in which he lurks, he is balmed by some little draft of time, by the foreknowledge of ending--though by no source and no rationale. Madness in itself is quite sustainable.
He steals into a feverish sleep, and, come morning, eats well. At the noontime, for the briefest of moments, the swordlight touches his toe, shyly, warmly, and he has nothing by which to show his gratitude. The work is beyond his. With obedient humility, he endures the touch.