~ by Anna Rajagopal
“Pippin, where’s Frodo?” Merry anxiously queried, touching his cousin’s right shoulder-blade. “He was here a second ago.”
“I don’t know,” Pippin responded, shrugging those previously-mentioned (and otherwise-notoriously amiable) portions of his young frame, too enthralled in observing the appealing spectacle of Rose and Samwise Gamgee graciously opening their numerous and attractively-wrapped presents before the excited ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’ of the eagerly assembled hobbits, and the affectionate chuckles of Gandalf and Bilbo (the custom of gift-giving having been modified since the Quest to possess more modern-day qualities), under the expansive wedding tent.
“Well, I’m going to go look for him,” Merry relayed, ignoring the fact that his relative portrayed no evidence of having heard him. “He seemed perfectly happy when Rosie threw her bouquet.”
So saying, and oblivious to the Wizard’s knowing perception, he hurried from the congenial sounds of gaiety, now suddenly frivolous and raucous to his ears, and paced swiftly down the verdant slope to the spot where he knew the Ring Bearer would be languishing. He knew this because he and Sam had often found Frodo there following the hobbits’ return to the Shire. It was a sheltered, grassy nook beneath gnarlingly welcoming trees, canopying a clear, inviting pool that sparkled and pirouetted with the thousand bubbles of its gurgling foam and rippled so clear at the verges that one could see the pepper-speckled minnows as they flirted and kissed the pebbles down on its gravelly bottom. And when the sunlight hit the homely bark just right of an afternoon or a morning, you could imagine that you were back in Lothlórien, with Galadriel just about to sweep around a corner. Merry figured that that was why Frodo liked it.
“He shouldn’t be pining so much,” he muttered to himself. “It isn’t good for him.”
Not that much had been good for Bilbo’s heir, since the Ring had come into his possession, Merry reflected gloomily. Sam had disclosed to him how he had seen his master standing at the top of Mount Doom, dirty and bloody, with all the agonising desolation of fire around him, not even Frodo, really, but something terrible and beautiful, worthy of awe, as he had turned to his gardener and pronounced, “The Ring is mine”, and then, the bitter scorn of evil on his lips, set it upon his finger.
Yes, Merry deemed, it would take some very special medicine to restore Frodo to his old, charming self.
He had gained the alcove, and there as he had expected stood the Ring Bearer, one hand against a woodsy comforter’s sturdy skin, curly dark head bowed in a manner that blatantly betrayed crying. He crossed the foot-worn path, approaching his cousin on the left, and Frodo raised his head at his relative’s cheerful “Hullo”. His once-fall-apple cheeks were pale, resemblant of a statue in an elvish garden, exquisite but chilling, and his formerly sparkling blue eyes remained flushed and still. He glanced upwards at Merry with an air that betokened no interest, only instinct, and the older hobbit decided that desperate measures were in view.
“Now Frodo, you’ve got to get out of this,” he scolded. “You’re going to make yourself sick.”
“I am sick,” Frodo replied.
He wasn’t going to argue that point.
“What happened this time?” he enquired on the verge of annoyance. “You seemed perfectly happy when Rosie threw her bouquet.”
Frodo’s hand pawed fretfully at the tree bark, and Merry spontaneously winced as the stub of the Ring Bearer’s second finger connected with its roughness.
“I was just thinking,” his cousin murmured finally.
“You’re always thinking. You seem to do that more than you do anything else, even eat and sleep. It’s not natural, Frodo.”
He released the trunk defeatedly.
“I know it’s not natural,” he admitted. “But then, what about me is natural?” He said it with a sort of parched laugh that froze Merry to the core, glancing up at him with eyes that did not mirror the moment’s rising of his marble cheeks.
Merry determined to snap him out of it.
“What caused this new mood?” he demanded tersely, then, as Frodo averted his comely, elfin profile once more away: “Come on, tell me.”
“It’s not something I want to talk about,” the other demurred.
“Well, you’re very well going to talk about it,” Merry retorted. “I didn’t follow you half the way to Mordor to see you ruin yourself with regret. You did what you could. No one could have thrown that Ring into the Cracks of Doom, and it was thanks to your decency with Gollum that it finally went. Do I have to smack you against a wall to get it into your head?”
The slightest rumour of a smile played about the Ring Bearer’s full lips, but it swiftly departed.
“It isn’t regret,” he answered in a low voice. “I have practically settled with myself on that score.”
“Well, I’m glad you’ve done something,” Merry said. “What is it then?” The next second, he believed he possessed a suspicion towards the truth, and didn’t mind expressing it in all its callous glory.
“Are you jealous?”
Frodo stared at him.
“What?” he exclaimed, though still quietly. “Me, jealous? How could I be jealous of Sam?”
“Well, not jealous, exactly,” Merry modified, seeing that his cousin was affronted. “But, perhaps, wishing you could have the same thing.”
“I’ve never cared more than the usual for Rosie,” Frodo said. “You know that. And even if I had, I certainly wouldn’t have continued, after learning that Sam loved her.”
Merry suspected that his relative was evading the point.
“Not Rosie,” he patiently explicated. “But the joy she brings to Sam. The happiness they have together. That’s what you want. You feel that if you had that, you could forget…” he faded off, and then, to the vast surprise of the furiously blushing Ring Bearer, appended: “Maybe you’re right.”
Reverting his gaze from the peaceful vista of cultivated fields and comfy hobbit holes visible through the leaves, he grinned at his staring cousin.
“See, there’s already colour in your cheeks, just at the thought,” he amusedly indicated, and Frodo reddened further.
“Now,” he said, striding a short distance to settle atop a root, “all we have to do is find the proper hobbit maid, and Gandalf can arrange a royal Ring Bearer’s wedding. Which girl do you like?”
His cousin appeared slightly abashed at this breezy arrangement of his future.
“I don’t like any of them-I mean, in that way,” he mumbled confusedly, shocking the elegant hobbit heir of yore while he twisted his fingers. “And even if I did, they wouldn’t care for me, if I asked them.”
“What?” marvelled Merry. “Why wouldn’t they care for you? You’re their top-most hero. Who saved the Shire and Middle Earth from complete destruction, and themselves from being carried off by orcs? And who is also the handsomest hobbit in the Shire, in Bree, or whatever place you care to mention?”
“Not to mention the fact that the majority of those places are considerably lacking in hobbits,” his relative rejoined, now really smiling.
“Don’t you know that Gandalf said you’re the finest hobbit anywhere, and really special?”
Frodo was modestly silent, but he nevertheless looked pleased, and Merry, watching him, judged that the Wizard’s assertion fit the truth far better than his own. “Handsome” truly wasn’t the word for the Ring Bearer as he leant against that tree with a portion of his old easy grace. “Beautiful” was certainly more like it. An elvish prince, not a hobbit lad, reclined before him, if you ignored the feet, and he was so completely lordly and enviable, even in his gloom, that Merry felt he should fall to his knees in front of his cousin and kiss his hand.
“No hobbit maid is worthy of you!” he exclaimed, startling Frodo, who had been contemplating Gandalf’s words and wishing he could be worthy of them.
“What?”
“What you need,” Merry enthused, “is an elf.”
His relative’s cheeks re-attained their fall-apple hue, but with far more guiltiness apparent than predictable disconcertion at such a lofty idea. Merry instantly sniffed intrigue.
“What? You’ve fallen in love with an elf maid already?” he insinuatingly interrogated. “Is that why you’ve been pining away? Has she refused you? Where did you meet her in the first place? Who is she? And won’t she be too tall for you?”
Frodo responded to this barrage of questions by lifting of his sculpted chin and a gaze toward the alcove’s egress path.
“Let her tell you herself,” he said softly, his face dreamlike. Merry rose and peered along the lengthy lane. A girl was approaching glidingly down it, her pale sapphire slippers advancing across the common dirt as if they parted the gold-tipped grass blades in Rivendell, and all every-day chatter of chubby bird and breeze-tossed twig seemed to cease at her passing.
She was a maiden no taller than Frodo, with skin as pearl-fair as Arwen’s and eyes as mystically blue. Her raven-feather locks rivuleted athwart her diaphanous blue bodice with the serenity of midnight seas, caressing her breast’s silver lavaliere, and one slender hand bore a ring constructed of mithril, rendered prominent by its glistening emerald device.
“Who is she?” Merry whispered in his cousin’s ear, as the girl neared them, the delicacy and dignity of an elf in her walk, but, nevertheless, the self-consciousness of a damsel when she smiled shyly at her hobbit suitor, and then somewhat confusedly at his companion.
“She is Artanis, the daughter of one of Lord Elrond’s Honour Guards,” Frodo uttered back, “named for Lady Galadriel herself. Her elfdog licked my hand as I was going past her at Aragorn’s wedding, and that is how I met her. I proposed to her then. She said it would have to be secret because her father would never agree to her marrying a hobbit, even though she is so small.”
“Why is she so small?”
“Some complication before her birth,” Frodo explained. “She will never get any taller.” His tone sounded triumphant, Merry thought.
“Gandalf spoke with Erowid, her father,” his relative continued. “Attempting to show him that our marriage would be the best occurrence for both parties, since Artanis would never again be forced to feel different. He told me that if he had succeeded in changing his mind, she would come to me the afternoon of Sam’s wedding, at this spot.”
“And she has,” he concluded almost wonderingly. “She has.”
Merry studied his blissful features and resolved that he would emit no syllable regarding his own surprise, delight, or curiosity at present, but leave Frodo to his love.
Artanis now beamed before them, like a Valar statuette, and questioned mellifluously in Elvish. Merry understood her by context and that scanty collection of various Sindarin phrases acquired during the Quest.
“He is my cousin, Merry,” Frodo elucidated in the Common Tongue. “You surely saw him at Aragorn’s wedding.”
“Oh, yes!” Artanis’s cerulean eyes sparkled, and she warmly clasped Merry’s bashfully extended hand. She possessed the open innocence of a maiden who has not as yet commenced unearthing what it means to be an elf.
“He came down to comfort me,” her lover explained.
“Did you need comforting, meldanya?” she queried, gazing up solicitously at him and touching his still faintly pallid cheek.
“Well,” Frodo murmured, “I was rather afraid, you know-at first-that you weren’t coming.” A trifle clumsily, he took her hand.
Merry sensed the strained atmosphere.
“Well, uhm, I think I’ll go…see…how the presents are coming,” he excused himself, hastily departing, and nodding almost curtly to his cousin’s heartfelt “Thank you, Merry”. He breasted the slight hill. From above, the lively sounds of the sustained wedding celebrations floated downwards to him like the pungent flavour of good hobbit wine, once more exhilarating and pleasant.
But for Merry, far the most delightful sensation of romance was that that emanated from in the leafy nook behind him, as an elf maid’s lips met a hobbit’s, and the Ring Bearer, for the time, was cured.