Into the domicile on the far side of Tumnu-dûm steps the young Dwarf, after scuffing his boots still muddied by the road from Dale on the step outside. There he pauses—to wait for his host to invite him further, yes, but also to look around with a hum and a sigh as he unclasps his cloak, draping it over his left arm; the heat of the fireplaces already hitting him.
More than fifty years it’s been, he thinks, since he’s set foot in this hall, but what he remembers of it is still true: it is spacious, finely furnished, and gives every sign of being owned by a Dwarf of great means and status.
Yet even so—it feels and smells like a forge.
“Get in here, boy—don’t just stand around.”
The Dwarf who lives here and who now calls to him from his squat rocking-chair by the parlor hearth is one Domarr, son of Grímarr. Maurr remembers him as a broad red-beard with a lined and ruddy face and an enormous wart under one eye, with creased and calloused hands that could tie a knot in a hair-fine metal thread gripped with two dainty tweezers as sure as they could cuff the side of a youngster’s head hard enough to knock him on his behind. He’s an Iron Hills Dwarf by birth, tough as their reputation makes them out to be and very easy to picture as one of the Five Hundred, with a heavy mattock and great burden on his back, marching without need for rest—though by the time young Maurr, still then a scruffy-bearded and bright-eyed apprentice, knew him, he had settled here at Erebor many years, and many years had he taught students like him the art of making garments forged of metal rings.
More recently they’ve seen each other than Maurr was last at this private residence. When Maurr last marched home with his unit, a little less than ten years ago now, Domarr ‘happened’ to be at the Front Gate, and he watched the soldiers take off their helmets to gaze with joy on their home, the Mountain. They exchanged some friendly words at the time, though Domarr’s tried to sound gruff; though he was old, he was unchanged, the same rust-topped curmudgeon as he ever was.
Not so now, though it takes Maurr a second to realize it. The fireplace roars so hot that cast over everything in the room is an intense, deep red, including the old Dwarf’s unbound, thick locks. And so with all painted crimson by the light, it takes him a few moments of looking to realize that, sometime in the last decade, his hair has turned white.
Even so, Maurr is not the only one who is staring—and it is Domarr who asks, incredulously, “What’ve you done to your beard—and your forehead?”
Maurr’s good hand reflexively flies up to the latter, covering up the bruise that he, apparently unsuccessfully, earlier tried to paint over with his mother’s cosmetics. Much easier to answer his first question, in a tone he tries to make casual: “I’m wearing it short now.”
Domarr leans back, tsking. “You look ridiculous,” he declares, before gesturing at a round stool opposite. Maurr pulls it up and sits on it, leaning forward with his forearms on his knees, head a little lower than Domarr’s, supplicatory. That seems to please the old Dwarf, who continues, “But you came promptly, to your credit.”
“Aye,” Maurr smiles. “How can I be of service, Master Domarr?”
Domarr grunts, squinting at him for a long moment. “A letter came to me, in fact, asking me if I might be of service to your family.”
Maurr blinks. “I haven’t heard about that, I’m afraid.”
“Hummm. You will. But first,” and Domarr leans in again, “you’ll tell me if you’ve kept up your armorsmithing.”
That elicits, of course, a hesitation, then a nervous laugh. “Ahh… I’ve not forgotten how to do it,” Maurr chuckles, “but—the distinction of being your least accomplished apprentice I would hazard I still hold.”
The old Dwarf shakes his head slowly, with disgust. “How old are you now, boy? A hundred-and-five?”
“Not quite, Master Domarr, but about.”
“A hundred-and-five, and no masterwork?”
“Not yet, no.”
After a long, indignant stare, Domarr sniffs. And then—creakily, very creakily, with a stiffness that like the white hair is new, Domarr heaves himself out of his chair and shuffles to a shelf on the other side of the room. “A clerk of the Coffers wrote to me,” he begins, “about a request put to him by your father’s youngest. Blída, if I remember rightly.”
“Ah, aye, but—his outer-name’s Bíld now,” Maurr calls across to him, softly.
“What?” Domarr asks, looking back at him in bemusement—that lasts but a second, as he seems to swiftly decide he is too old to care either way. “Regardless—it was about the property of a Dwarf named Melgrum.”
Maurr blinks again and leans further forward, surprised and excited. “Ah, hm! Arlis’s great-grandfather.”
“There was something about that,” Domarr grunts, drawing from one shelf a steel box, off the top of which he blows a puff of dust. “A great-grandaughter on whose behalf your family petitioned, hoping some family heirloom might have survived the dragon.” He hobbles back to Maurr, who is now perched well forward on his stool, eyes wide and excited; Domarr sighs. “That office keeps meticulous records, it seems.
“Twenty years ago or so I went to the auctions. Some pieces they were selling that day, trinkets uncovered in the excavation of new homes o’er a collapsed block, unclaimed by descendants and so seized by the crown. I picked up a little something that day that now I’m told was dug up at the old address of this Dwarf, Melgrum-father-of-Lagís.” He rests the box on his knee; from a chain around his neck which Maurr had not even seen, hidden as it was under his thick beard, he unhooks a tiny key that he fits to the lock. And he lifts the lid and turns it.
Resting on a cushion of fabric inside the box is a broad, round belt buckle, shallowly but very intricately engraved with entwining geometrical patterns of a style that seems, to Maurr’s first glance, extremely antique—similar he thinks he’s seen illustrated but almost never on apparel. Once gold had been inlaid in the grooves, but this had been rubbed away with time; yet the steel looks to his eye tarnished with no more than a bit of dirt, wholly unrusted, though bent out of working shape by some crushing impact long ago. Steel, he thinks—but there’s something unfamiliar about the texture and color, and he reaches to lift it up and inspect it in a little better light. But Domarr snatches the box away from him, tutting.
“It is Khazâd-steel,” the old Dwarf explains, “infused with mithril.”
Not only does Maurr’s bottom nearly fall off the stool, his eyes near fall from their sockets. “Infused with mithril!”
“Aye,” Domarr murmurs, turning the box back to himself and gazing on it. “It was made in Khazad-dûm... before mithril would have been thought wasted on a buckle. From its looks, before the coming of the Firebeards and Broadbeams, possibly. And probably carried by this Melgrum’s great-great-great-great...” he peers up at the ceiling and squints, flicking out his own fingers and mumbling as he counts, “great-grandfather, when they fled.”
Maurr rubs his beard and then his eyes as he carefully reseats himself, amazed. “From Khazad-dûm, maybe even the First Age,” he repeats. “Durin’s beard...!”
“It is the sort of buckle that would have held up faulds and tassets,” Domarr continued, “though the leather must have rotted away before even your Arlis’s eight-times-great-grandfather’s memory.”
Maurr’s hand wipes once more down his face and beard, this time revealing eyes shining bright and excitedly at Domarr. “And this—you will return this to Arlis, Master!?”
The answer to that, a sharp scoff. “Hardly!” Domarr answers, letting the lid snap closed again. “This became the King’s property, as salvage, and became mine at no little cost to myself.” Again he sniffs as he relocks it, little key disappearing into his beard; “I had a mind to restore it. A project to challenge me in my retirement.”
Maurr settles back with a sigh, though the smile of wonderment remains on his lips. “If anyone in Erebor’s worthy to do it, Master Domarr, it would be you.”
His former apprentice’s praise earns only a little grunt from him, and Domarr returns to staring at him, eyes in a squint—which, it occurs to Maurr with a little pang, might not be only from dubiousness, as he notices the cloud of cataracts forming in them. “You are right about that,” he mutters. “But I dithered a little too long, it seems. All of a sudden, I find myself startlingly old.”
Maurr still smiles, though crookedly. “Not that old yet, surely,” though it sounds like what it is, a platitude.
Domarr shakes his head, grumbling indistinctly. And then he lifts the box to point with it at the young Dwarf across from him: “I will give it to you, and you will restore it and make the faulds and tassets to match.”
At that Maurr’s mouth falls open. “What?”
“Aye, you, lad. ‘The least accomplished apprentice’, as you put it, you may be. But still you are an apprentice. You will do it and then bestow it on Lady Arlis, if you please. Or you won’t do it, and then no one will, and I’ll take this buckle with me as a grave-good to sleep under the Mountain for ever.”
“Wh—No!? That’s hardly sane!” Maurr’s hand slaps again to this forehead, smudging concealer onto his palm. “There’s other smiths, your other apprentices—”
“No. You or no one,” Domarr repeats, laying the box in his lap again. “I am a spiteful old Dwarf, Maurr son of Bóurr. I will have my way or none.”
Maurr swallows, eyes dropping to the box, then back up to his old master’s eyes. “Why? I am a terrible armorsmith.”
Now Domarr leans forward, one hand clutched atop the box, eyes cloudy, yes, but fierce. “Because you are a terrible armorsmith, lad! You lack ambition! Content to live off Mother’s wealth and put no effort into increasing it, play a little at making things and then run off to adventure in the army—lazy, sloppy, using humility and jest as a cover not to apply yourself.” He shakes his head again. “You cannot leave it to other Dwarves to learn and carry on our traditions. Our numbers are few now; you must do your part carrying them yourself.”
Under that beratement Maurr listens a little sheepishly, though he is not wholly cowed. Instead he frowns with worry and thought, rubbing the back of his neck as he looks away and then back. “A… relic of Khazad-dûm’s a lot to gamble on your worst student shaping himself up, Master Domarr.”
“Indeed, it is. And perhaps it will be just enough to make you take it seriously. You are a hundred-and-five,” Domarr huffs. “Do you plan ever to be married?” He doesn’t have to wait for an answer, for the blush Maurr feels light on his face suffices. “Ha! And can you be proud to dream of that with no masterwork to your name? Your parents may be able to pay for the acquirement, but you must buy your partner’s respect yourself.”
Domarr couldn’t hope to guess at the thoughts Maurr has in response to that—but even so, some part of them reach him, and he hesitates. At last, “I—With respect, Master Domarr,” he begins again, finding his own voice a little thick in his throat, “I do not think I can do it.”
“Ah, but I am the elder and wiser Dwarf, and I think you can.” Domarr is only a little less harsh as he leans back in his chair. “The secret even you have not realized is that you are capable. You have patience, sense, talent. Your flaw is that you do not apply yourself.”
Maurr’s head bows, and he pauses again. “That may be, Master Domarr,” he says quietly. “But—I still don’t think I can do it.”
Domarr takes a breath to snap at him, but he doesn’t quite get to it, for Maurr shifts the blue cloak he’d folded over his left arm onto his right and extends towards him his hand. The firelight reflects off it, gleaming: the left hand wrought of metal, to replace the flesh-and-blood one he lost. As beautifully crafted as that prosthesis is, the sight takes Domarr aback, and he has his turn to sit in quiet consideration, of his plans, that prosthesis—and what must have happened to his apprentice, that he returns to the Mountain wearing it.
And yet, in the end, Domarr shakes his head and grunts, “That matters little. Your right’s your hammering hand. You can still do it.”
“Master Domarr—”
Domarr’s free hand bridges the distance between them, grasping Maurr’s forearm; that is still flesh, and Domarr’s grip is still firm. “I will help you.”
Maurr says nothing for a good while, though he must swallow more than one lump. “Arlis,” he at last attempts to resume, trying for a conversational tone, “is also an armorsmith. If this relic was rescued from Khazad-dûm by her ancestor, perhaps she should be the one to restore it.”
Domarr wrinkles his nose, perhaps a little in distaste at this last attempt to get out of his challenge, but the greater part in thought. “I’ll allow her to assist you, if she’s willing,” he concedes. “If only because you are down a hand and I do not have forever.”
You’re not yet that old, Maurr wishes to say; you have time yet to do it yourself. But he can’t bring himself to; he knows it to be false, just as he knows what a full head of white on an old Dwarf means. “Then,” he says instead, “if you insist, Master… I’ll try.”
“Good,” says Domarr, leaning back again, this time with a weary weight. “... I am too old to forge any more great works of iron and steel. But what I can rehammer is an apprentice who turned out poorly. You are our greatest works, after all,” his voice quieting a little as he looks at him, “and the measure by which masters should be judged. And I cannot go to my ancestors easy, knowing I will be judged by the failure I leave behind.”
“Good to know that I’m a failure,” Maurr chuckles, an earnest but feeble jest to cover up the thought of the Halls of Waiting.
“You are,” says Domarr, bluntly. “But the failure is mine.”
Maurr laughs again, wanly. “That thought depresses me more than the other one.”
“Good. Perhaps it will motivate you to begin immediately.”
“All right,” Maurr sighs. “I will.”
