Navigator

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Fíriel leaned her head out of the kitchen window, ignoring the chill that winter had brought to Rómenna, and peered down the path that led to one of the main roads. A light dusting of snow made the city seem cleaner than was usual; people said that the overcrowding of Faithful had made the haven almost squalid, but Fíriel was too young to remember it any other way. The wind caught her black hair, done in two maidenly braids, and whipped it southward.

She was anxious because her father should have come home before dark. Dusk was falling, and it could be dangerous to be found on the street so late. The men who kept watch over the doings of the Faithful would ask questions. Her father, Orontor, would tell her that such fears were the work of Sauron and a chain to his will. Fíriel was no longer a child, though, and she knew the whispered rumors of torture and death. The laws of Númenor did not require one to belong to the King's Men, but the opposing party lost too many to false charges of treason or conspiracy to suppose that there was any real tolerance left.

Finally, she spotted a man in a dark blue cloak coming up the path. He carried a borrowed lantern that bobbed and cast strange shadows on the snow. Fíriel shut the casement at last and darted to the door.

"Attô!" she called in Adûnaic, the public language. "What kept you?" Then he was close enough for her to see the heaviness of his step, as if some great weight rested on his shoulders. "What happened?"

"Hush a moment, I beg," he answered somberly, and hugged her on the doorstep. She could smell the damp wool of the cloak and the lingering scent of good candles, the sort that the wealthy used because wax did not smoke as much as tallow. Orontor had been visiting the house of Lord Amandil again. Fíriel returned the gesture of comfort, needing no foresight to know that her world was about to change.

She waited half an hour in the silence Orontor wished. They set bread and fish on the table. He began, this time in the banned Sindarin tongue, "When word goes forth that Lord Amandil has left Númenor, it must seem that he journeys to Middle-earth. In truth he will be bound for Valinor, for the court of the Valar."

Orontor had been a mariner once, before Fíriel's birth had taken her mother and he was left alone to raise a daughter. He had served both Amandil and his son Elendil as ship-captains, and their families had remained friends through many difficult years. Fíriel dropped her knife in dismay.

"But the Ban…"

Orontor sighed. "The Ban holds indeed that no mortal may sail west out of the sight of land. Amandil believes we must risk it for the same reason Eärendil once did: They have need of a messenger."

"Why?"

"War is coming between Ar-Pharazôn and the Undying Lands." It was unspeakable blasphemy, as well as folly, but the King who worshipped the Lord of Darkness could no longer surprise Fíriel. She said nothing. After a pause, Orontor added, "I want you to join Elendil's household—it is the safest place, now, until the last Faithful set sail for Pelargir."

It took her a long moment to absorb what he had said. Her voice shook when she spoke next. "You're going with him. You're risking the Ban."

"Aye, iell-nin. With two others." His face took on a pleading expression in the semidarkness. "I was a good navigator once. I can be one again, though I have spent these last years drawing maps for my livelihood. Amandil needs me. He would not ask, but he cannot sail so far alone. He cannot take only men who still sail under the King's orders—it would arouse suspicion. He needs my help, for the sake of Númenor."

"You didn't ask me!" she retorted, her voice rising to a shout. "How could you tell him you would go, on the same day! Did you even think of what I would say?"

"So I did," Orontor told her. "But you are a grown woman—as you have reminded me yourself, at times." He smiled slightly, but she was in no forgiving mood. "You no longer need me to stay here—if you did, Fíriel, I would not leave you for the sake of Arda and Menel. But now…"

The worst of it was that a part of her could see the logic of her father's argument, even the inevitability of it. Amandil would need companions on such a voyage, and skilled they must be to sail in unfamiliar waters. There were so few people of any sort that the leader of the Faithful could trust with knowledge of a mission like this.

"It is an act of treason," she said more quietly. And it would be suicide, she knew: a desperate plan that the deliberate Lord Amandil would not have undertaken save at direst need. She could well imagine the destruction that might result if the Valar were forced to defend themselves. Middle-earth had been won at last only by the drowning of Beleriand, though it was home to both the Elves and her own ancestors. "Would Amandil ask Them for mercy?"

Orontor nodded. "Perhaps by betraying Ar-Pharazôn to the Lords of the West, we can yet save Númenor from Their wrath."

He left it at that for the night, and retired to bed without working on the maps that he drafted and sold to other mariners. The disruption of routine did not suit Fíriel, who liked to sit in the same room and keep her father company while she did the mending or read a book. She soon realized, however, that Orontor could not have worked that night; she had no sooner begun the history she was reading than she gave up in frustration. She could not concentrate with her father's doom shadowing her thoughts. She stood up and looked at the maps instead.

They were beautiful, even the unfinished sketch of the Umbar coast that a ship-captain had commissioned in preparation for his journey there. Orontor's hand was precise and confident, copying exactly from the book of charts he had used as a guide for years. Fíriel suddenly seized the worn folio and flipped through its pages. It was as she had known anyway: no mortal had ever journeyed into the uttermost West, so there could be no chart of the lands forbidden by the Ban.

But wait. Tucked away in the sleeve of the back cover was a square of parchment so old that the edges crumbled as Fíriel touched it. It was not a working navigational map, bearing no indications of ocean depth or current. Longitude and latitude were not marked. Instead of a scale of leagues in one corner, someone had drawn arrows between the landmasses and written the distances above them. By the right-hand edge, the familiar five-pointed outline of her country was labeled Númenór. In the center, another island-shape was Tol Eressëa—this one detailed with the names of towns and havens—and on the left was the long coastline of Aman.

It looked as if some curious mortal, in the days when Elven ships still visited from the West, had asked one of the travelers to describe the place where mankind did not go. The elf had obliged with what must have passed for a rough sketch among such skillful-handed people. Fíriel carefully removed it from its hiding place and set it in the center of her father's desk. When she put the folio back in place, she dislodged a scrap of paper. It said, in her father's hurried handwriting, Why wishes Capt. map of West? Then a handful of tally marks.

"Ai," she said quietly, and her eyes filled with tears. She supposed that Orontor had been keeping record of how many mariners asked him to supply a map of the Undying Lands; war on the Valar would take enormous preparation, and it could not be hidden from everyone. She wondered that the ship-captains had been foolish enough to offer commission to one of the Faithful—surely spies and rebels, as the King's Men called the Elf-friends, could not be trusted even with the most trivial part of mobilization? Perhaps they thought Orontor would not recognize the significance of it; they were certainly ignorant enough to think that the map they sought existed in Númenor. Orontor had declined the work, naturally. He had almost certainly told Amandil about the requests.

Fíriel sat down in her father's chair and tucked her feet up so that she could rest her head on her knees. She must have dozed off, still crying, because she awoke when Orontor came downstairs.

"I didn't hear you come up," he explained apologetically.

It had occurred to Fíriel that she was about to lose that sort of loving concern forever. She had given her father to bring word to the Valar, because Amandil needed a navigator. She wondered if anyone else would listen for her step on the stairs at night.

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Note: The maiden Fíriel appears in The Lost Road (HoMe #5), where her father Orontor is mentioned as having departed "on a mission from which he might never return, or return too late." This sounds like an early form of what would later become Amandil's mission to the West in Akallabêth. So I've salvaged him to be one of Amandil's three companions.