The Last Entwife

1. Fleeing Fire

They had traveled for centuries, sending songs of love and growth into the roots of the land. Humming old tunes and murmuring to one another, the Entwives had planted gardens and taught those quick, temporary beings – humans, dwarves, elves and a smaller people who would become hobbits – that all wealth, all food, came from the soil. Richen the soil, they taught. Richen the birds, the bugs, the crawling, inching tiny things living in the dirt, and the earth will feed you.

Orchards and gardens grew in their slow wake, and the fields overflowed with the treasures they wrought; in the sun the ripened wheat shimmered, a gold more beautiful than the mineral hoards of dwarves and men. The hedgerows winked with berries, deep blue and red beyond the sparkle of precious gems, and the flickering aspens fluttered silver leaves when the rain fell. Emerald green carpets of soft grass rippled under the wind.

The Entwives bent low to the ground and their delicate, twig-like fingers thickened; their smooth bark roughened and moss grew in their crowns. Unlike the males of their kind, they had never been striders. Their eyes and their thoughts were with the growing things that gathered around their knees, and their work took deep concentration. Less and less often did they stand erect and look to the horizon.

They assured one another they were easy to find. The autumn wind carried the rich, tangy smell of their orchards for a hundred miles. The earth smelled different where they had passed: loam and legume, wine and cider, hay stacks and sheaves of wheat. The smell of bread followed the Entwives, and the breath of beer, taverns, harvest feasts.

In only a day or two, they knew, their quick-walking husbands could come right to them. They were easy to find.

But they aged as they bent over their work, and a little worry took seed inside them. Surely nothing had happened to the husbands? Their tall husbands, stronger than trees, were the shepherds of the forests, striding along the mountain ridges unbothered by snow and wind.

But the husbands did not come.

In their gnarled toes and knees an ache to return to their home lands grew, and the Entwives began stepping carefully, slowly, toward the place where they had last seen the Entmen. Their journey hither had been full of the passion of their purpose, teaching and growing and gardening. Now time and age had gotten ahead of them and they found their feet sunk deep in the gardens they had planted, while their hearts were moved to their old land.

Mothers and daughters looked at one another and saw they had become old. They spoke to each other of sons and brothers gone into the forests with their fathers, and a terrible regret gripped them. They hurried.

If Entwives could be said to hurry.

The planets danced in the dome of nighttime, and the constellations moved from house to house, as the Entwives traveled toward home.

Until at last they came to an ocean where no ocean had been before, and they stopped in dismay. Here was a land where none of their skills were wanted.

The Entwives stood on a cliff above the blue expanse, and the great ocean's heavy, salty breath blew over them. In it they smelled a thousand unfamiliar things. They felt discouraged and old, tired from so much traveling. The mist curled around their feet and wove wreaths in their hair and they began to doze, their imagination reaching for what would grow here. They dreamed of gardens under the waves and creatures fathoms below. They smelled distant islands on the wind and heard the gulls crying to one another. The ocean murmured like the wind washing through a thousand miles of forest canopy. Its salty breath sang to them; its rumble and hush rested them. They slept.

* * *

It is said that the Entwives were swept from Middle Earth when Sauron found them in the plains above the Anduin, and that he enslaved and destroyed them; thereafter, the orchards and ripe fields they had loved withered. Noisome, oily pits of effluvium from the Dark Lord's evil industries fouled the springs and the streams so that nothing would grow again. Only midges and amphibious beetles survived there, feeding on one another, and the waste was called the Brown Lands.