I walk beside him through the snow by day and I lie alongside him by night. We are seperate, yet in this extremity we become one thing. One hand cares for the other, as the old saying goes.
Another day's toil is done, watching my back, and now he is sleeping. The sound of Amlarad's deep breathing is as familiar to me as my own. In this small hide-covered shelter we are as close as twins in the womb. We are entwined by air. His outbreath becomes my inbreath. We pass the shuttle of breathing between each other, weaving an intangible cloth of ourselves.
Close enough, that his sleeping movement is a wave that ripples onto me, so that I in turn must move. We are a slow ebb and flow, until our languid dance no longer knows cause or effect. So many days and nights together that now I scent my own fragrance melded with his. The precious orange oil I have carried from my home bleeds into the layers of perfume that are him - the traces of the tobacco from his pipe, his worn leather clothes and the pine resins of the north woods. They enrich the musk of him so that not one could be removed without destroying the unique whole. Does he notice that his tobacco has entangled itself onto my skin? That our scent, even more elusive than breath, is curling together?
The edges of us that I hold so rigid begin to blur in this harsh environment - Arnor, Gondor, man, woman, northerner, southernor, free, oathbound ...
Outside the wind rises, pushing the falling snow against the shelter. It is instinct that finds me burrowing even closer to the main source of warmth, this big northerner, now softly snoring. The sound is not unpleasant... like the call of deer far in the distance. There can be no foolish modesty, no bodily embarassment, amongst close-living companions.
His bulk is a comfort - a harbour - though I would only admit this here, in the dark, in the space of my own thoughts. I close my eyes and begin to doze in the last hour of the true night. I still hold the scented threads of my thoughts as I slip towards sleep. Descending into dream is like descending though the layers of a well-crafted perfume. The top orange note that is my own, opening out into the richness of the lower notes of his scent. Familiar perfume and warmth and dream mingle as I finally relax into the ebb and flow of breath and bodies.
But there ... below the musk of him. The forest awakens the true base note of reality. I am the startled doe that lifts her head, aware on the edge of senses that her wood has changed to danger. Something other comes. Beside me, Amlarad begins to shed all that is familiar. He becomes oakmoss, fern, the rich dark scent of the forest floor. Beneath Amlarad runs the forest, in him and he of it, wild, vast and unknown. The earth of him.
In my doe's eyes he opens his own. I realise with shock that his grey eyes have never been the grey of man-made steel ... but the grey of the deep water in a northern lake. There is nothing civilised or shaped by man's hands here. I lie beside the spirit of the northern forest. Some child of Orald.
No light-stepping elf, singing amid the trees. Amlarad reveals and revels in the earth and the trees themselves, the vitality of the seasons coursing through him.
I am terrified and I am entranced. I am drawn to drown in the uncaring, ever-providing, never-ending forest. His presence calls me to yield to the earth I lie upon, let it drag me into itself. My sleeping furs change to a mossy bed, my fingers and toes begin to quest like roots. I am merely mortal, overwhelmed by the forest, its decay as sweet as its life. For one moment, before fear and reality snap me back , the boundaries of myself seem a transient affectation. Amlarad calls me, like a hunter charms the doe to the arrow, like scent calls a lover. The spirit of the northern wood whispers that life is enlivened by surrender.
