Clad Much in Grey by Lindariel

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Their Hideous Webs

Mithrim, Year 7 of the Sun; early summer

Alatáriel hears astonishing stories about the history of Middle-Earth.  Content warning:  a lot of spiderbabies die.

This chapter incorporates the Vintage Literature challenge prompt "tale within a tale" and the Vintage Poetry challenge prompt "alliterative verse."

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The Grey-Elf swung her leg over her horse and leapt down lightly as Alatáriel pulled up beside her in the grove of alder. Alatáriel watched her guide's grey cloak, which seemed to blur as it fluttered in her wake. It would be well worth her own semblance of bowing to Fëanorion manipulation, she thought, if she could learn why that blurring happened. Grey-Elves living among the Noldor around Lake Mithrim, contacts of her cousin, had promised to reveal the secret of the cloth the Noldor admired so much, their light silver-grey stuff that reputedly hid the wearer from casual view. Golassiel had led her to this isolated enclave half a day's ride south of the lake with the understanding that all Alatáriel's questions would be answered here.

Alatáriel leapt from her own horse, relieved to be away from the simmering hostilities around Lake Mithrim for a few days. The claim that no one else in the family understood clothmaking well enough to make sense of the explanation did happen to be true, but that just made a convenient cover for the request that she go. She was sure Russandol had shunted her off on this errand to get her away from all the jockeying for position that was going on ahead of the family council her cousins and uncle had called. Already the run-up to the council had proved to be fraught with rivalries between the House of Míriel and the House of Indis. Russandol had always been kind to her, if a little formal, back in Aman; but the Oath, followed so soon by his horrific ordeal with the Enemy, seemed to have turned his kindness into more of a mask than the former ease of his oldest-cousin manner. And as for the other Fëanorions, especially Carnistir, it was clear they did not want her either her or Teleporno around. Teleporno had just shrugged and set off to visit the Grey-Elven boathouse at the mouth of the southern tributary, where she would probably have to go to fetch him when she got back. Having no horse in the Noldorin race for fiefdoms made it easy for him to ignore all the politicking that was going on. But perhaps if she came back with information that was helpful to her cousins she could bargain for something of value in return.

Two horse-handlers appeared from deeper among the trees. Golassiel spoke briefly with one of them before they led the two horses away, then said, "come, lady, and refresh yourself before I show you the work." She gestured toward a nearby pair of trees with a low table nestled between them. Eagerly Alatáriel headed toward the promise of a wash and something to drink as Golassiel continued, "we have arranged for you to sleep on one of our telain until you are ready to return to your family. Your pack will be placed there, along with everything you need to be comfortable eating and sleeping with us."

Alatáriel looked around. Not far away, under another stand of trees, four Elves sat around a large basket nearly full of something fluffy and grey. Alatáriel tried to focus on what they were doing with their hands, but her eyes kept slipping out of focus. "What are they doing?" she asked Golassiel. "May I see?" Golassiel nodded, and Alatáriel drew closer to the workers. She sat down, close but not in their way, and tried to concentrate on what was happening.

Each woman had a large wooden spool of some dark substance. That, Alatáriel realized, was the source of the visual disturbance. By the way they handled it, the substance was some kind of thread or yarn, but it was hard to see. The basket contained what appeared to be normal down from some small grey bird. The women were using bone pins to open the plies of their supply of yarn, then securing bits of the down into the twist of the yarn. Once she had augmented a length of the yarn with the down, each woman wound the fluffy length onto a wooden yarnwinder. The yarnwinders of fluffy yarn were easy enough for her to see, but the unaugmented yarn continued to elude her sight. She watched the women carefully for a few minutes, focusing on their hand movements.

When she could contain her curiosity no longer, she turned to Golassiel standing nearby and said, "I understand how they are doing it, but what are they making? And why is the yarn so hard to see?"

"They are making yarn for summer blankets," Golassiel replied. "The down is shed by young moorhens that live around Lake Mithrim. If you will come with me, we can answer all your questions at length."

Alatáriel, remembering her thirst, got up and followed Golassiel toward the low table. A large heap of what looked like packing cloth lay on the ground nearby. A washbasin of grey burnished clay and a jug of water stood on the table along with some folded towels. Alatáriel knelt and began to pour water into the basin. As she looked at the basin, an image began to move across its surface. She blinked, trying to clear her vision, but the image persisted. She saw a pair of hands throwing a shuttle across a Noldorin loom, weaving an indistinct grey web. A bright silver ring with a white stone adorned one hand. The ring glinted once, and the image dissipated. As the afterimage of flashing light burned behind her eyelids, she wondered why the water had reflected an unbidden image again, and wondered even more what the image could mean. Abruptly she plunged her hands into the water, splashing to disrupt the smooth surface. Quickly she rinsed her hands and face, then dried herself with the soft linen towel, all the while feeling Golassiel's eyes on her.

Golassiel beckoned to a half-dozen Elves waiting nearby, then knelt at the table across from Alatáriel. Two cleared away the washing things as two others set down trays of food and wooden tableware. Another filled their cups with pale yellow wine from a clay calph before leaving the rest of the jug on the table. The sixth approached slowly, bearing a large net bag with something grey in it.

"This is why you are here today," said Golassiel, pointing to the thing in the bag. It looked like an egg, or perhaps a very large cocoon. The bearer moved closer, so the egg was almost in Alatáriel's face. It was almost spherical, larger than a melon, and fuzzy to look at. It was not just the frayed tendrils reaching up from the surface, waving as if in a light breeze through the meshes of the sturdy net, that made it look indistinct. There was something unaccountable about how difficult it was to focus on the details of the egg. Although its tendrils shone like spun glass, at the same time the thing seemed to emanate a slate-grey shadow.

"This is it?" she asked Golassiel. "This is the secret?"

"This is where it starts," Golassiel replied. She nodded to the Elf carrying the egg, who carried it away again and disappeared among the trees.

Alatáriel selected a crunchy oatcake and spread it with soft cheese. She said "what is it?" just before she bit into the cake.

"Dead spiders," Golassiel replied dryly.

Alatáriel choked on her bite of oatcake. When she had governed her throat again, she said "what? How can that be? That egg is enormous!" She sipped at her pale yellow wine, which tasted of flowers.

Golassiel smiled, with a twinkle in her eye. Alatáriel was sure her reaction had been anticipated and enjoyed. "Allow me to explain." She drew a long breath as Alatáriel took a moment to be grateful that Golassiel had learned to speak passable Quenya. The northern Telerin dialect the Grey-Elves normally spoke was somewhat different from the Falathrin one Alatáriel had been learning these last seven years, and she did not want to miss any detail of this intriguing development. She crunched her oatcake again, with relish and anticipation.

"There have always been giant spiders in the vales of Ered Gorgoroth. They were as big as the largest of hunting hounds. During the Great Journey, the Tatyar lived for a time in Neldoreth. They fought the spiders often, destroying their eggs when they could. At first they only slashed them to pieces, but then one of Finwë's people, a woman named Míriel, became curious about the fibers and asked that the egg sacs be left whole for experimenting. By the time my clan came over the Ered Luin the Tatyar had worked out how to process and twine the silk. In that short time between our coming here and the Tatyar leaving, the Tatyar taught us many crafts, including the making of spider-yarn."

Alatáriel nodded, a little dazed. Her family in Aman had rarely talked about the time of the Great Journey, or about any time in the past; they were more interested in the present, and in developing their skills. At Eglarest, Círdan's reminiscences of his past had taught her something of the early Quendi, but they were short and infrequent, and he wrought no overarching sense of history into them. Golassiel had just given her the largest consistent piece of Elvish history she had ever heard; the world shifted, then fell back into place, and for the first time she felt an emotional kinship with this mortal land, a sense of origin, of home.

Golassiel's voice found a way through the cosy blanket of belonging that had just dropped around her. "Lady? Did I use a word wrongly?"

"No, your Quenya is very good," Alatáriel assured her. "I was just imagining the past for a moment. You said 'spider-yarn.' I understand that a patient spinner can make yarn out of almost any fiber. But that does not explain some of the properties of the cloth you weave with spider-yarn."

"That is true. There is more to the story, but we must skip forward many years." Golassiel sipped at her cup and shifted more comfortably into place. Recognizing the signs of a storyteller settling down to a good yarn, Alatáriel put down her oatcake and poured more wine into both their cups. Whatever it took to get this story, she would give it gladly. Golassiel nodded slightly in thanks for the wine and drew a deep breath before beginning again.

"I did not think it important before," Golassiel said thoughtfully. "But since your people have taken an interest in spider-silk, I have begun to make a song about it." She began to sing in yet another Telerin dialect that sounded more courtly than the northern speech Alatáriel had become accustomed to hearing in Mithrim.

When the world lay     all wan and dim,

blessed not by sun,     before moon's rise,

silver starlight     on darkness shone,

the tangled terror     athwart our trail.

Clusters of clumps     clung to branches,

the spiders' spawn     in spinning wrapped,

sustaining all still     by sticky webs

a nursery of nebs     come not to birth,

the frothing foes     of future wars.

Alatáriel wondered if this were the Doriathrin tongue Círdan had mentioned to her; the tune reminded her of something she had heard long ago in Lórien, almost like birdcalls turned into speech. "It is far from finished," Golassiel sighed, "so I will tell you the rest of the story without song." She paused to drink deeply of her wine.

"Not long before the first rise of Ithil, I went with a small egg harvesting party to the valley beneath the Ered Gorgoroth. We moved cautiously, seeking first the webs that gave warning of the spiders' presence. But since our last trip the vales had changed, had become shrouded in dark so thick the starlight was no longer visible. We blundered into webs much larger and darker than we had ever seen; they seemed to capture and multiply the regular shadows into something more ominous, and we began to wander aimlessly among them, despairing of ever seeing the stars again. In doing so we fell afoul of three spiders that were many times larger than the ones we had always known. Fortunately, the sight of these monsters so horrified us that we immediately set to shooting at them before they could close with us. They were unafraid and did not protect themselves from our arrows, but it still took many to slay them.

"We searched the immediate area for egg sacs, and when we found them they were enormous. We cut down all the ones we could locate, but we had only our packbaskets with us, no containers big enough to carry these bigger egg sacs. We managed to drag them out of the deep darkness on our cloaks, but it was such hard going that we decided to work up some netting to carry them.

"As soon as we came across a patch of nettles, we piled the eggs up in a heap, gathered up the nettles, and settled down to make the netting."

"I have never seen that done with nettles," exclaimed Alatáriel. "Will you show me how?"

"Tomorrow or the next day, lady, if you wish," Golassiel said, her voice prickly. "But it is not important now."

"Please," Alatáriel replied, "forgive me for interrupting. Do continue with the story." She poured more wine for Golassiel.

"We sat down under the stars and began processing the nettles we had gathered. Soon the thumping of the stalks took on a rhythm, and we began to sing as we worked.

"While we were thus diverted, a horde of baby spiders suddenly swarmed us, scuttling up our backs and arms. One of the egg sacs had been mature, and the eggs had all hatched at once. They were the size of ducks, with eyes like flies and sharp beaks and stings where the earlier spiders had none. There were dozens of them, and they were very fast. It was terrible, bloody slaughter to dispatch them all. We prevailed, but three of the party were poisoned by many stings, and they would not have survived to return home had not there been a healer among us.

After we cleared away the spider bodies and tended our wounded, we resumed the netting work, producing large slings to carry the eggsacs. Once we got closer to Doriath, out from under the shadows of the mountains, we noticed there was something special about the eggs." Golassiel moved over to the large heap next to the table and whipped its cloth cover aside.

The heap consisted of giant eggsacs. Each was comprised a cloud of fibers like a giant cocoon and had one or more hole in it through which glabrous eggs, each a greenish yellow and about the size of a full-grown person's head, were faintly visible. The spidersilk fibers were very dark grey, almost the color of charcoal, and they gleamed in the afternoon shade as if covered with pine resin. The longer Alatáriel tried to focus on the heap, the less well she could see the eggsacs.

"Ohhhh," Alatáriel breathed. "So what I saw before was not an egg, but an egg sac."

"A very small one, yes," said Golassiel. "These are more typical."

"Are they... safe?"

"These are safe, yes. After the unexpected hatching of the venomous spiders, we changed the way we harvest the eggs. Nowadays the egg sacs are parboiled immediately, before we transport them."

"Does that not damage their fibers?"

"Not a bit. A lengthy boil is part of the treatment, as you will see. That first brief boiling serves only to slay the spiders, and then they are brought here safely, intact, to be processed into cloth. These sacs here have all been breached, so they will not produce the highest quality thread. We will save them for making regular clothing. The highest quality thread we are working on today will become cloaks, clothing for scouts and hunters, and tents and curtains -- anything we want to be especially protective against enemy eyes.

"Before I take you to the scouring, do you have any more questions?"

"Yes. Why is it so hard to focus on the eggsacs?"

"We are not sure, but some have suggested that the silk from those spiders actually devours light, or perhaps it produces dark."

Aha, thought Alatáriel. Their secret really is a mystery! "Why did the spiders get bigger and poisonous?"

"Queen Melian says it is because they are the offspring of the great spider, Ungweliantë in your tongue, who hid in those mountains for a while after the Enemy's servants threatened her. She mated with the local spiders, and her offspring are much larger and more dangerous than their sires. They have spilled into the plain south of the mountains, and now the area is called Nan Dungortheb, the Valley of Dreadful Death. Harvesting parties have to be much more cautious nowadays; we only harvest when Anor is in the sky."

"What remedies are there for their poison?"

Golassiel hesitated, then switched to her own tongue. "Green plantain leaves, if they are in season, to help draw out the poison; otherwise a paste made of powdered walnut hulls. Willow bark or oil of lavender for pain; oil of peppermint to reduce the swelling and increase the blood flow," she summarized. "But nothing heals the scars entirely," she said more quietly, rubbing her upper left arm. Switching back to Quenya, she said "I am sorry, I do not know their names in your language."

Watching Golassiel remember what surely must be her own injuries from that raid, Alatáriel's stomach roiled. "I think I understood all that," she hastened to say. It was a good thing her Falathrin studies had involved so much herblore. The names of healing plants seemed to differ less between the two dialects than many other words did.

"Shall we move along to the scouring area, then?" Golassiel inquired.

Alatáriel looked down at her abandoned, half-eaten oatcake. "Yes, please," she said. "I think I would rather walk than eat right now."

 

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Chapter End Notes

telain (S) -- platforms set in trees as habitations

calph (S) -- a serving vessel for beverages

Tatyar -- an ancient name for the second tribe of Calaquendi, the Noldor

Known textile-related terms in Tolkien's invented languages are few, but there is a word for silk (samin) in both Qenya and Quenya, and silk and silken textiles are mentioned more often than any other textile type. However, the words for weave (lan, Middle Primitive Elvish), twine (lia-, Quenya), and spidersilk (lhê, Sindarin) all seem related to lan, the Primitive Elvish word for warp or stretch. In other words, early textile terms can be construed to support the idea of spinning and weaving with spidersilk. Discovering this etymological relationship helped me understand what must have made the silky cloth of the Grey-Elves of Mithrim so special.

The description of making feathered yarn for summer blankets is based on a traditional textile technique of the Pueblo nations of the American southwest.