Spin Songs for the Sea by heget

Spinning Songs

Read Spinning Songs

Eärwen has a distaste for spinning flax, as the thread breaks in her fingers, and even when she successfully spins it, she can see and feel all the slubs of her inferior work. Her mother laughs and promises that it is nearly impossible to spin a purely smooth thread, and will make no difference in the weave. The cloth will be for sails, so all that matters is the strength of the thread and the tightness of the weave.

Her mother sings as she spins for sailcloth, and Eärwen learns the new tunes and words. The songs are about Lady Uinen gathering clams and seashells, or brushing minnows gently out of her hair, or seducing her wild husband Ossë to forgo a storm to come into her arms and enjoy the feel of her fingers on his beard. Her mother has to explain what a beard is, and uses the goats as an example. The maids titter and laugh over that song, so Eärwen decides there must be something especially humorous about beards when they are not on goats. Her aunt, Ilsë, and her wife teach Eärwen other songs, the ones from the Powers, so that the cloth will not rot in the wet and it will catch the wind. Eärwen’s mother praises her niece’s wife as the most skilled of all the weavers in Alqualondë, whose enchanted sails never fail to find even the slightest breeze. The maids chime in with how there is no better in all of Alqualondë, and while the weavers in other cities embroider tapestries to fool the senses or craft smoother and finer cloth, none are as perfect for ships and the demands of wind and wave. Aunt Ilsë laughs at how this praise reddens her wife’s cheeks, tucking a blue flax-flower in her hair and brushing a soft kiss across her cheekbones. “Some are best at spinning the thread, or weaving it. Others are best at using it,” says Ilsë with a knowing wink to her young niece. “Do not be discouraged if your work is not the finest. A ship needs much canvas, and no single weaver can provide it all.”

"And you have greatly improved," says Eärwen’s mother, holding up a piece of Eärwen’s thread between her fingers to the gentle silver glow of Telperion.

Eärwen smiles, and her mother hums the next song. It is one that the girl learned the other day, about ducklings following their mother through the streets of Alqualondë. It is a humorous song of everyone politely moving out of the way or helping the ducklings over the city steps so they won’t be separated from their mother as the ducks travel down to the docks. Her favorite verse is when the ducklings and their mother cross the path of her father, and King Olwë bows to the waddling waterfowl and politely wishes them a good day and a gentle swim. She easily believes such an event happened, for it is exactly in her father’s nature.

When Eärwen sings together with her mother, aunts, and their maids, the task of making sailcloth is no longer onerous.

Coda

Request prompt from juliana, what happens immediately after this story:

Read Coda

Eärwen’s head overflows with song, the tunes sloshing around like water in an overfilled bucket, spilling over the sides as droplets of dripping notes and stray lyrics to soak her thoughts. She carries the songs from the sewing room as she leaves to her next lesson, skipping through hallways of pearl inlays and tiles brightened by red coral while humming and whistling these smattering of melodies. She sings fragments, unable to hold them all, as she turns each corner, needing to set them free. They snarl and slip through her mind, hopelessly tangled, overlapping like the wake of ships against incoming waves. Half-finished lyrics float into the pale vaulting of Alqualondë’s palace and echo down the passages that glimmer like mother-of-pearl. Faintly the parts blend together, a mermaid’s sweet sorrow intertwined with the call to trim the sails, the chorus to the crab dance against bright rising notes that mimic splashing water, even a short rhyme about ducklings waddling to the shore. Eärwen slips out of the palace and runs down the private pathway to the royal docks still singing, challenging the raucous seagulls to a musical duel as she struggles to remember the last line of her aunt’s shanty. “Up aloft from down below!” she hollers as she hops onto the dock, swinging her arms to mimic the heaving of halyards.