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There are two of them. Two of them, each alike, alike in every way. That is what the Lindi of the riverlands whisper to each other, when they meet beneath the trees of their woods or pause upon the riverbanks to drink, or bathe.
Two of them, the hunters born of fire, who walk these woods and loose their feathered shafts and bloody their hands with the butchering. The hunters from across the sea, hair of flame and eyes made of fire also. Twins, enkindled in the same moment, and alike in every way.
The hunters, the Lindi say, are fierce as wolves. The twins stalk, together and apart, through the scattered lands between the rivers, beneath the trees. They hunt with arrows, with spears, with knives. They hunt afoot and mounted, they hunt with dogs. They are princes, the Lindi say, born to leadership; they’ve brought with them others like them, others with fires glowing silver and gold in their eyes. But the hunters, just alike, are the ones of whom the stories are all told. Everyone has a tale of meeting them, of meeting one or the other by chance in the wood, among the silver boles and draping shadows. The stories cannot all be true. But how to know which ones are, and which are fabulist?
“Just alike,” a hunter had whispered him the tale of her encounter with them, and pointed to her face in the water’s rippling surface. “Just alike, just like my reflection there.”
He had looked at her reflection mirrored in the water and seen how it wavered, seen how it shifted, and deformed, and changed. It had looked little like her face.
“Their eyes were a beast’s eyes,” she had told him. “Their eyes were the stag’s eyes, and their eyes were the wolf’s.”
Which one, he’d wondered, had been which?
He thinks of that reflection now as he stares into the eyes of the hunter born across the sea, who stands among the trees below him and stares back. The Golda’s face is twisted, like the woman’s face had twisted in the water. It has shifted, it has deformed and changed; but it is not water’s doing, but fire’s. He is scarred upon one side, his skin melted into ropes of shining silver like his eyes.
The grey-elves call these returned from across the sea lachend, the flame-eyed, for the coldness of the gleam which lives behind iris and sparks in pupil when the light dances over it there. Poesy, that word; their eyes are bright, not fire. But this one is flame-eyed in truth, he thinks as he stares unafraid. (Though should he be? He is not sure. Should he be? Perhaps.)
In these eyes, he sees not the silver and the gold which they say is the living memory of a realm of light made blessed. He sees instead the leap and twist of red and devouring flame, the memory of pain instead of bliss. The Golda’s eyes flash it back, like a beast’s among the dark underbrush might. A red glow, hiding deep inside his pupil, the memory of flame. There is defiance in the set of the Golda’s jaw, an arrogance which invites and challenges at once. The wolf, and the stag.
Look at me, look your fill, see what I am.
He does. He looks until he thinks he understands. Ealcala has never been one to be satisfied by ignorance; he seeks, and wanders, and looks, and asks too many questions. He looks at the scarred elf, looks until he has both answers and also more questions than he’d started with.
This Golda is a son of fire, with hair the color of the copper torc the Lind-man wears, finials twisted into complicated knots. This Golda was birthed by fire, sired by it. He is all aflame, and the wood loves and fears him at once, for fire is the forest’s foe. The Lind-man stares, and he wonders: is the other scarred upon the other side? If they are just alike, they must be images in mirror. Put together, and make a whole.
The scarred one is beautiful, and terrible, and wonderful, and strange.
“Ealcala,” he says, touching his chest. He leaps from this branch to stand beside the Golda, landing on the mosses without a sound. “Which one are you?”
The Golda’s lips twist up into a smile which sinks down into Ealcala’s throat and sits there, cold as water from a spring, tasting mineral. Cold enough to be painful, in a sweet and lingering way. The smile is strange and beautiful, for how the scars upon his face twist with it. Fire’s memory, graven in silver.
“Which one,” he says in answer, “do you think?”
✴
Ealcala kneels in the loam, a brace of rabbits splayed open before him. His knife-blade, good dwarf-steel traded for so many years before it is now worn to thinness by much sharpening, is bloody in his hand. He will strip the skins from the rabbits, take them to the man he knows who tans and cleans leathers and furs. He will bury the offal near the roots of a tree; the meat, he will roast for eating, and share out as needed.
He hears the brush of the Golda’s boot, and knows he has only heard it because the hunter wished him to.
Ealcala lifts his head, and meets the fiery eyes.
“Do you know yet?” the Golda asks.
The Lind-man’s lips twitch once and he rocks back on his heels. The knife is in his hand, but he holds it as one holds a tool, and not as a weapon. “I know.”
He has asked. In every meeting with the others of his people, chance or by design, he has asked, he has turned the conversation to the tales of the twin hunters from across the sea. He has gathered all the stories together like a posy of flowers picked by other men, and strung them together with his own twine string of knowing.
Every story is a little different. The details vary. The names. The intentions, and the choices. But enough remains the same between them; each story, he thinks, is part of the whole. He can fit them together and find the places where they overlap and join and make a picture which is something like the truth. Truth in a mirror; as true as a reflection, wavering on the surface of a river.
“And?”
“You are the younger,” Ealcala says. The Golda lifts his chin and gestures, as if to request Ealcala say more. His hair is the color of Ealcala’s torc, copper-pale. His brother’s is darker, the stories say. Just alike. “The one upon the ship, when it burned. The one with hair like copper fire, where his brother’s is old blood.”
“Amrod,” says the hunter. Perhaps he smiles. “Here, I am named that.”
“And what are you named elsewhere?” Ealcala asks; but the hunter has turned and melted away again into the trees, gone upon a breath.
Ealcala is a Green-elf, a Lindi of the riverlands. He could follow; he could lay chase. Into the dark spaces between the trees, where Amrod’s hair will be a blazon the color of autumn, the color of the wings of that butterfly they call by a word which means wanderer. Ealcala could find him, if he tried. There will be traces, faint but there to be seen; the bruising of Amrod’s feet light upon the mosses, the brushing of his clothing soft on the bark. A leaf just bent. A twig a little out of true. A stone turned up to show moist soil upon the face now gazing outward.
He is a Lindi. None will see him in his wood if he does not wish it; and none may hide from him here. He could ask the trees, and they would tell him where Amrod has gone.
He could lay chase, as he halfway wonders if Amrod wants him to do. But instead, he bends himself to finishing his task upon the forest floor, to clean and strip the rabbits he has hunted with his hands. He stands and digs a hole between the roots of the nearest oak; and in the hole he buries the offal. The tree will eat of it, as the elves will eat the flesh, and all will grow stronger for the sacrifice.
But when Ealcala stands to go, he leaves behind one of the rabbits, dressed for cooking and laid out upon a flat stone. A handful of gathered herbs -- wild onion and garlic, sharp mustard greens, small round berries like scarlet gems -- are arranged beside.
When he returns later, the rabbit is gone, the herbs with it. There are no tracks as of an opportunistic beast; the bones and flesh of the rabbit are not torn in tale-tell shreds upon the forest floor. And on the stone where he’d left his kill a brooch of gleaming copper sits, wrought as wings which cradle in their heart a moonstone egg.
✴
Ealcala wears the brooch Amrod had left for him. He wears it pinned as closure to his cloak in place of the penannular twist of metal he had used before. Just above his heart, just below the soft place at his throat where the pulse beats hot beneath the skin. He can see it gleam in the corner of his vision as he walks the woods, as he moves among the small and scattered settlements of the Lindi. As he cooks upon his fire, and as he sharpens his knife, and as he fletches his arrows. As he darns his cloak, and winds new leather around the wood of his long-knife’s sheath. He sees it, like the afterimage of something too bright, dancing always at the edges of his vision.
He thinks about the scars. Silver lines, twisted ropes. He thinks about the pain they must have caused, despite their strange beauty. Amrod had endured it. Amrod’s voice holds the memory of smoke in its burling rasp. A voice made for threats and for endearments, and for the place where the two begin to overlap.
Two of them, just alike.
Ealcala has never seen the other, but he knows that isn’t so. How could there be two such creatures in this creation? Is the other scarred? He was not upon the ship. He did not burn. His feet were on the dry land of the shore when his brother went to the flame.
Is the other scarred?
Probably, Ealcala thinks. But if he is, he is scarred where it does not show. His wounds not a copy of his brother’s, but their reflection.
The elves from across the sea work in fine metal, Ealcala knows, and in glass, just as do the dwarves in their halls beneath the mountains. They have silvered glasses in frames that can be held in the hands like polished scales, like chips of crystal or of perfect ice. He has seen one, once, and he had looked at his face caught in the frame, and had wondered if the face he’d looked at was the one that others saw.
He wonders many things, does Ealcala. The others tease him sometimes and say he should have been a Golda, and that he should have crossed the sea to the lands of bliss where the trees shed light like golden pollen, and walked at the feet of the ones who’d come to bring them there, and asked all his endless questions of them, leaving the other Lindi to the singing silence of their wood.
No one asks him where he had acquired the brooch.
He does not go looking for Amrod. The copper-haired hunter appears when he wills it, and that seems to Ealcala to be fitting and to be meet. He is not Ealcala’s prey, that the Lind-man should stalk him, and lay in wait among the dark trees, and see him by sign and spoor as though tined antlers should spring from the copper brow.
But he is not surprised when Amrod finds him again.
“You wear it,” says the voice the color of the honey alcohol they brew, dark and amber-gold and touched with fire.
Ealcala looks up, and finds the eyes upon him just as he had the other times. Amrod stands in a patch of golden shadow where the sunlight has filtered itself between and through the sieve of leaves; his leathers are dappled in it, patterned in that light. His skin is dappled too; aware of Ealcala’s eyes on him, Amrod lifts his chin and gazes back with eyes unnervingly too-bright. And Ealcala looks, and looks his fill, and drinks of it like cold spring water.
“I wear it,” he says at last, and touches the brooch with two fingers in a brush of caress.
“I made it,” Amrod says, the words laid between them like the brooch had been. Something left there, to be picked up or not, by Ealcala’s choice.
“It is beautiful,” Ealcala says, but his eyes remain on Amrod, and not on the winged gem. He watches as a muscle jumps in Amrod’s temple, sure sign of a tight-held jaw. “Why do you look for me? Why do you always find me?”
“I do not know,” Amrod answers, and Ealcala wonders if Amrod lies to him, or to himself. There is an answer which sits between them, unspoken. He could say it himself, and answer his own question so that Amrod knows it too.
“Which one are you?” he asks instead, standing slowly from where he has been sitting, cross-legged on a low sweep of branch. His soft boots scuff the loam, and a smell of pine and mould goes up. “The wolf, or the stag?”
“Must I be either?” Amrod answers in return, his head tilted. Hair like burnished metal slides over his shoulder and catches in the ‘broidery of a star. “Must I be anything another names me?”
“No. Names are only words by which we’re called.”
The snort of sound the Golda makes is bitter as gall, and it catches at Ealcala’s breath. “My mother told me that my name was the truth of her heart; and if I hated it I would one day choose another, or be given one, and that would be the truth of mine.”
“And did you? Choose another.”
“Yes,” he answers after a silence long enough that Ealcala thinks he will not speak. “You ask many things, Ealcala of the Lindi. One day you will ask something and you will not like the answer you are given.”
“Probably,” he admits. “Should I stop asking, for fear of that day?”
“Another question. That one, I will not answer,” Amrod says. “Answer it for yourself.”
When he melts away among the trees again, Ealcala is no more surprised than he’d been by Amrod’s appearance. This is the way of the scarred hunter. To appear, to vanish, to seem no more than a dream, or half of one. Perhaps he is not here at all, but is only a spirit’s haunting. Perhaps his feet never touched the soil of these lands, but burned to ash upon the ships in truth. He is both of these things at once -- real, and not. Ghost, and living. He stands upon the place where all stories meet; and who can say what the real one is?
Ealcala touches the copper jewel, and knows Amrod is very real; and very much alive.
✴
“You never look for me.”
Ealcala glances to the side, and sees Amrod back among the trees, keeping pace with him. The Golda’s stride is smooth and matches his own in time and pattern; perhaps that’s why he had not heard it. Darkness and light in turn pass over Amrod there among the boles, stripes of shadow and of gleam in ever-shifting pattern.
“No,” Ealcala says.
“I have heard your name,” Amrod tells him softly. “They say you look for everything, they say you ask too many questions.” He laughs, and it is not quite a pleasant sound. “They say you should have been a Noldo. But you do not look for me.”
“Why should I, when you always find me first?” Ealcala responds. “The moss doesn’t race the trees skyward hunting for the sunlight, yet it thrives just the same.”
Only silence answers him.
✴
The boar’s heavy body twists and thrashes, its jaws flecked with foam and blood.
Ealcala’s arrow pinked it; but the wound is not enough for a killing blow. He stands waiting, his hands filled by his spear, his knife, and he watches as the boar shakes itself until the arrow dislodges like a thorn removed, the slim shaft falling to splintered wood beneath its hooves. The boar will charge him in a moment, and seek to bloody its tusks in Ealcala’s flesh.
He will leap into a tree, if he cannot fix the boar upon his spear. He will escape it, but he will lose his prey. Stubbornness keeps his feet upon the earth for now, and he stares into the maddened, rolling eyes of the heavy animal, and smells the heavy musk of its body along with the wetness of torn earth and the metal smell of blood.
The moment is fixed, and holds, the hunter and the boar across the open space. Ealcala sets himself, braces his spear-butt upon the earth. And not a moment too soon; the boar, knowing him for the source of its pain and fury, gathers muscles in a bunch and explodes forward, all fur and violence.
The arrow strikes it in the back of its neck. With a squealing roar it twists, bends itself into an arch; its chest is exposed, its soft belly. Ealcala takes the chance it gives to him, and his spear sinks deep into the heavy hide, and finds the heart, and twists. It drives itself along his spear, foam flashing from its muzzle; but then the eyes go glazed, and blood comes from its mouth in a hot rush over his hands, and the boar dies.
“You hunt such prey alone,” says the now-familiar voice, and Amrod steps from out the trees. His bow is in his hand, an arrow hung between his fingertips unnocked. “Without dogs to bay or catch, without a partner to bait or stick or drive.”
Ealcala, panting, feels the thrill of bright adrenaline thrumming in his veins. His hands are hot and sticky with dark blood; the tusks had come so close, but not quite close enough. His muscles throb and his breathing comes short; but he is uninjured. He stares at the dead animal impaled upon his spear, and looks to the Golda behind, standing in the brightness of the sun. His hair looks like a pale flame, twisting around his face.
“I aimed for deer,” Ealcala admits, and laughs in a breathless way. “I found the boar instead, or it found me. I seldom hunt with a partner.”
“I seldom hunt without.” Amrod moves with a delicate economy of effort, sliding forward across the violence-rent earth to kneel at the boar’s side. He grips his arrow-shaft and twists, and pulls; the head comes free, daubed in blood.
“And yet I never see the other with you,” Ealcala says, wiping his hands upon the grass. There is blood beneath his nails, and blood like ink spreading through the creases of his palms. “You always come to me alone.”
Amrod’s hand is hard as iron when it grips Ealcala’s jaw. He swallows hard, breath catching in his throat, and looks into the eyes boring back into his and knows, at last, whose eyes they are. They are the hunter’s eyes, yes, but they are also the eyes of the haunted.
“Would you want me with my brother at my side, Ealcala?” Amrod asks softly. “Would you want me only as one of a twain, split in half and marred by the difference? Defined,” he says, “by otherness.”
An old bitterness inflects the words, an old grief, a pain which is so sharp it has turned and twisted and become an anger like a coiling lash.
“No,” Ealcala says. He cups Amrod’s jaw in turn, his fingers curling over the smooth ropes of cicatrice and sliding across the glossiness of them, like silver, like metal worked by the flame. “I only want you.”
✴
The furs on which they make their bed are smooth and yielding-firm, and warm against his skin.
So are Amrod’s limbs, his arms and thighs, the shift and flex of his torso. The scars curl lower than the face and throat, they dip beneath the clothing where it hides them like a secret; Ealcala’s fingers and his palms trace them out as though they’re words in the written tongue that the elves from across the seas brought back with them. As if there is meaning there encoded in them, in the patterns that they make, there for Ealcala to find if only he knew how to read it.
Amrod is twined around him, there in the quiet bower Ealcala led him to, a place where the thickets rise in thorny hedges and yet there is a place at their heart, where the sun shines through. They laid their furs in the middle of it, to make a nest for their loving. Their naked skin is striped in little scratches where they’d pushed through to the center place, too urgent in their hunger to be wary, and had caught themselves against the brambles.
Flesh to flesh, their clothing long since discarded; they are teeth to throat and lips to lips as well. Amrod tastes of salt sweat and smells of leather and of blood; he rolls against Ealcala in a mindless way, gripping the Lind-man’s body as if to sink closer and to overlap him, to climb into his flesh as they had forced their way between the thorns. Ealcala gasps and returns the passions in kind, his fingers as hard upon Amrod’s muscled hips and buttocks as the Golda’s are on him. It is nothing like a battle, what they do here, and nothing like a hunt. Ealcala’s hands smear sticky blood across Amrod’s chest; he tastes it when he puts his mouth upon the hunter’s neck in that soft place where the pulse beats so close to the surface.
The yielding furs are soft enough beneath his back when Amrod at last moves to pin him there, and rocks himself against Ealcala in a slow and slippery slide which teases and makes promises, fulfilling none of them.
“Ask your questions of me now, Ealcala,” Amrod whispers in a voice rich and rough with smoke, stroking the words against the point of Ealcala’s ear. “Ask me. Let us see how you like this answer.”
“Will you have me?” Ealcala asks on a breath, as he knows Amrod wants him to ask.
His only answer is a tearing moan as Amrod buries himself in him. The hunter is heavy against Ealcala, a solid weight which presses him against the earth, draped along his hips and chest. The hunter is hot against Ealcala, his skin too warm, almost with fever, with the memory of burning. They slide against each other, slick with sweat.
“I like this answer,” Ealcala says, soft with laughter as he’s taken there upon the forest floor, as Amrod’s prick moves in him in a long and shuddering wave. He clutches at the blades of Amrod’s shoulders, standing out from his back like wings, and he arches up to meet each thrust of Amrod’s prick into him.
“Then maybe today is not the day I told you would someday come,” Amrod whispers, and grips Ealcala’s hips so hard that later, he will find the prints of Amrod’s fingers blooming on his skin. “Aren’t you fortunate.”
Flaring pleasure pulses through him as the Golda fucks him, both of them panting hard and raggedly. The small sounds of their pleasure are a song in Ealcala’s heart. He is full, filled up, and there are no more questions in him. This is his answer, how Amrod fucks him, how Amrod pins him there against the furs and makes everything else stop.
They come together, Amrod’s scarred hand moving on Ealcala’s prick as their bodies rock and strive and chase the shudders of their twinned need. They come together with a crying shout and a moan and a shudder of their flesh, and when Amrod lifts away from him afterward, Ealcala misses in that instant the certainty of the feeling, the fullness. All that remains is instead only the sticky warmth left behind to dry there, and go cold.
Amrod lays beside him among the furs, and a shaft of sunlight pierces through from above to paint him in strokes of fire. His skin gleams like the metal that his people work, and his eyes are closed. Ealcala, his body sore in that pleasant aching way, moves to lay along beside his lover, and strokes the tips of his fingers along the lines of his ribs.
“Fated,” Amrod whispers, without opening his eyes. Ealcala is silent, listening and waiting. This, he knows, is an answer to a question he has not asked but has been asking all along. “The name I was named in another place. Umbarto. Fated.”
✴
He does not see Amrod again, though he never stops expecting to.
There are two of them, just alike. He’s only ever seen the younger, with hair like the copper torc Ealcala gave to him in their bower between the thorns. They say the two are just alike. Mirrors of each other, in every way. Ealcala suspects that it is nothing more than truth, slantwise in a glass. The reflection is not the thing, but only how it’s seen.
✴
The day Amrod dies, he feels it when something between them snaps. His fingers brush the copper jewel he wears just below the soft divot of his throat, the wings a swan’s wings, the gem they cradle like an egg, or like a star.
It is the day Amrod had told him would eventually come.
Will you ever come back again?
He stops asking it that day. He stops asking, but every time he finds himself alone in the darkest parts of the woods, he looks into the shadows for a glimpse of hair braided into a ribbon of fire, for eyes that burn like a stag’s, or a wolf’s.
“It is a prophecy, and not a name,” Amrod had said to him that day.
“A name,” he’d answered softly, “is only a word by which we’re called.”
