Clad Much in Grey by Lindariel

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Webs of Shadow

The Mithrim share another secret of their grey cloth with Alatáriel.

Golassiel and Alatáriel headed downwind toward a huge wooden cauldron at the edge of the glade. From a clay hearth nearby, two Elves were shoveling large smooth stones out of the fire and plopping them into the cauldron. Water fountained and steam roiled as the hot rocks hit the water. As they got closer, Alatáriel noticed a large wooden spillway leading into the upwind side of the cauldron. Two more Elves stood there, unpacking large nets full of egg sacs and tipping them cautiously down the spillway into the steaming cauldron.

A fifth Elf stood by with a long smooth paddle, alternately stirring the mixture with it and smacking the surface forcefully. As they got closer, Alatáriel saw the great round scars on his face and heard him say as he slapped at the water, "may all the minions of the Great Enemy perish thus!" Alatáriel shuddered. No Elf hröa should be marred by such unholy scarring. He stepped back with the paddle resting over his shoulder, watching her warily. She wondered if he had seen her inability to control her reaction to his injuries.

Her shudder reaction owed itself to more than a face full of battle wounds, though. These eggs were the get of Ungweliantë Laureyulmo, coëval in wickedness with the Great Enemy, and they did not deserve to live. But because they were only eggs rather than giant eight-legged horrors, her pity at their fate was stirred up despite herself. She was going to have to find some way to quietly forget the implications of this part of the processing.

This close to the cauldron it was impossible to ignore the scent rising from the water. It smelt acrid yet familiar to Alatáriel, and she sniffed it cautiously. "Is that wood-ash lye?" she asked. Golassiel looked at her blankly. "Ashes dissolved in water," she amended. The Mithrim dialect was just enough different from the Falathrin one that she felt unsure of her speech again.

"Yes," said the scarred Elf, stepping up and stirring the cauldron again. "Clean ash from cookfires only," he said, "and fresh water. Also a flower." Alatáriel couldn't tell if he were being shy, efficient, or patronizing.

"Lady Alatáriel," said Golassiel, "this is Rethandîr. He is our lhê-herdir, the master of the threadmaking. He will answer your questions here and send you on to the reeling point. I must go ahead and see that all is in order there."

"Thank you, Golassiel," she said as Golassiel strode off upwind, and then "él síla lúmena vomentienguo, Rethandîr," Alatáriel said, turning to him with all the warmth and gratitude she could summon. Rethandîr nodded, but she noticed a flash of surprise in his eyes. He did not expect I would speak his language this well, she thought. He thinks I am just one of the foreign Elves.

Alatáriel approached the cauldron, carefully circling so the steam did not blow into her face. The roiling mixture now looked grey and slick, like a fetid soup with a dozen giant grey-haired heads bobbing in it. "I understand spinning and weaving, but I can see that this is a different process," she said. She stifled a moan as her gorge rose. "Are you cooking them to clean them?" she managed to get out.

"To soften them," Rethandîr replied, "so the short fibers on the outside can be drawn away. There is a gum on the fibers, and the bath helps remove that. It also lightens the color of the silk a bit without lightening the darkness the fiber casts."

"Draw away? What is beneath the short fibers?"

"A spider spins a single long lhê. The outside of the eggsac becomes damaged as it hangs in the trees, and the outermost layer breaks apart. We pull off those short loose pieces with our hands. It is not good for making into yarn. Then we wind off the single long strand beneath."

"How long do you cook them?"

"Three times through 'The Meeting of Melian and Thingol,'" replied Rethandîr.

"Then I will leave you to your singing," Alatáriel replied, thankful she had found such a graceful way to exit the smelly premises.

"Over there," nodded Rethandîr, "you will find the reeling station. It does not smell nearly so evil."

Alatáriel nodded back, and said "thank you for your teaching," over her shoulder as she hurried off in the direction Rethandîr had indicated. A low sound of singing was her only reply.

The reeling station looked much like the scouring station except that there was a table next to the great wooden washtub full of eggsacs and water. Another Elf stood next to the table, leaning over the cauldron and stirring the contents using a stout straw whisk. There was no steam on the water, the acrid scent was much less strong, and the water looked clean. There was no sign of Golassiel.

As she dabbled at the eggsacs, the worker's whisk snagged several individual fibers. She stretched her hand above her head and the fibers stretched parallel. She repeated the dabble-stretch move a few times until a fiber from each eggsac had been caught and stretched. Then she did some quick manipulations with her hand to firm up and even the bundle of stretched fibers. She turned to the table, holding the whisk out before her steadily. On the table stood a wooden reel with a curlicue of dried vine mounted next to it. The Elf pulled the bundle of fibers off the whisk, looped them through the dried vine, and wrapped them around the reel. As she began to crank the reel the bunched, medium grey fibers of spidersilk began to unwind from the eggsacs and wind smoothly onto the reel.

Alatáriel noted how the scouring had lightened the color of the eggsacs. As the spidersilk dried its color evidently grew even lighter; several reels on the table were already full of dried spidersilk in a beautiful, if blurry, dark silver grey. "What happens next?" she inquired, completely fascinated.

"The reeled lhê is twisted into a fine lain and then plied with taw," replied the silk reeler. Alatáriel struggled to keep up with the unfamiliar technical terms. The words were just close enough to their Quenya equivalents that Alatáriel thought she understood. The individual lhê, the silk filaments from several reels, were twisted together to make a fine silk lain, thread. That much made sense. But "plied with taw"? Were they really mixing spidersilk with wool? So that was the secret of those unique grey cloths the Grey-elves of Mithrim wove! She stood watching the reeler without even seeing her work, so struck was she by this new idea. She had to admire the practicality and the genius of it: kill off the enemy, but respect it as a natural resource and create from it an entirely new thing with its evil qualities turned to good use. Wool for insulation from cold and damp, and spidersilk for durability, suppleness, and above all the repelling of light; the implications for natural concealment were enormous.

As she contemplated this new idea, Golassiel reappeared. "Would you like to see the woolworkers now?" she asked Alatáriel, gesturing in yet another upwind direction.

"I would like to see how the lain is made," Alatáriel replied, "and how it is plied."

"You will see that tomorrow," Golassiel said, "but today there is fleece preparation and spinning. Come see that now." Alatáriel suspected she was being managed, but she was also curious about how the Grey-Elves worked with wool. She thanked the silk reeler and, still thoughtful, accompanied Golassiel through a hazel copse without hearing a word she said. On the other side of the copse lay an outdoor work area between a small wooden building on one side and a longer, taller one on the other side. It was busier than the sailweaving workshop she had fostered at Eglarest, and it was familiar ground: it reminded her of the Telerin weaving atelier where her mother and grandmother oversaw the entire sailmaking enterprise at Alqualondë. Many Elves, male and female, were at work, some striding to and fro with baskets of fleece or skeins of finished yarn, others standing or seated in groups. She saw combing, spinning, plying, and skeining all taking place at once. She breathed deeply, appreciating that even the open air smelt like woolworking here.

A nearby group seated in a small circle was combing, separating the locks of shorn fleece into short fluffy fibers and long straight ones. She approached. "May I try?" she asked the closest of them, holding out her hand toward the basket of unprocessed fleece in the center of the group. They all paused, looking at her curiously until one of them handed over her combs to Alatáriel without a word.

Alatáriel sat down in an unoccupied chair and eyed the basket for a moment. It was filled with individual shorn locks of wool, some white, some black. She chose from the mixed basket only the black locks and commenced loading them onto a comb. The others fell back into the rhythms of their work, glancing at her from time to time; she knew they did not expect her to know what she was doing. But wool combing would be second nature to a (half-)Telerin princess as long as there were sails to weave, and it happened to be one of the textile processes she was really good at, so she enjoyed showing off a little bit for them.

Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh went the combs in her hands, and the fibers collected like magic into their two groups. The long outer coat fibers were charcoal black and slightly crimpy. The short undercoat fibers were delicate indeed, short, fluffy as down, and a beautiful shade of pale grey; as she removed them from the comb, she imagined them firmly spun and then plied with spidersilk to make an exceptional weaving yarn. Even though it was obvious, she held up the grey puff and asked the group "where do these go?" The woman who had handed her the combs shyly pointed to the right basket. She looked around the group, and all of them were smiling. Mission partially accomplished, she told herself, emptying the second comb of its bounty of black fibers and depositing it in the correct basket.

The sun westered as Alatáriel sat with the woolworkers teaching her how the Grey-Elves handled their fleece. One woman offered her a smooth linen cloth to place across her lap. When the basket of grey wool was full, they broke their silence for the first time; they began to sing for her, teaching her a song that seemed to make the puffs stretch smoothly into lengths of fluffy sliver with barely a touch from the workers. It seemed to be in the same lilting dialect as Golassiel's song earlier, and Alatáriel wondered if these were some of the folk of Doriath. When she tried to speak to them in her best Mithrim dialect, most of them just looked blankly at her while one or two answered in broken phrases. She soon gave up trying to converse and focused on learning the work.

Someone handed her a distaff in an unfamiliar shape, with a ring at the bottom and a carved swan at the top, and showed her how to dress it with the sliver. Three of the spinners gave her slender beechwood spindles with diminutive whorls, one of burnished clay, another of carved bone, and the third of some smooth green stone, and showed her how they used the distaffs and spindles together. She soon learned how to spin a fine, tight, consistent thread using this tool set. The familiarity of the work, the comfort of shared purpose, and the sweet pleasure of learning something new caused the time to fly past, even without conversation.

Alatáriel suddenly realized that Golassiel had reappeared yet again. How many times does that make, Alatáriel tried to recall from outside her awareness, which was still revolving about her core like a spindle. Golassiel looked at her, a question in her eyes. Alatáriel stood up, offering the tools back to the woman next to her. The woman took the cloth and wrapped it around the spindles and distaff, handing the packet back to Alatáriel with a nod of her head. Alatáriel nodded back at her, smiling broadly, then said to Golassiel "I think I have seen enough for one afternoon. May I go to my lodging now? I want to write this all down while it is still fresh."

"Of course. Soon it will be time to cease work for the day. Come this way," Golassiel invited, walking across the clearing toward a stand of alder trees in the near distance. Alatáriel's head swiveled as she scanned the grassy floor of the glade, looking for the platform Golassiel had mentioned earlier. The Elves of the Falas did not sleep on platforms; they slept on the ground or in tents, or in buildings, or on boats -- in fact, almost everywhere but on platforms. She wondered if the platform in question was meant to have a tent erected above it. That might be practical, she thought, in places where the ground was cold or marshy. But the ground here seemed fine, firm, and entirely appropriate to a lightly forested area in the early summer. Further, she sensed no sign that platforms had obscured any of the olvar nearby in the past growing season. Why would platforms be needed here? And if they were needed, why did she not see any signs of one?

Alatáriel turned to Golassiel with a question on her lips that remained unvoiced as Golassiel clambered up a rope ladder beside the bole of a particularly large alder tree. Looking up, she saw the ladder led to a platform half-hidden in the leafy branches of the tree; this must be the talan where she had been invited to lodge. She sped up the ladder behind Golassiel, wondering what it would be like up there. She had never slept so high above the ground outdoors before.

Emerging through a hole, Alatáriel first saw Golassiel standing on a smooth wood floor nestled among and supported by many small branches. "Is this a talan?" she asked, laughing. "I expected it to be on the ground."

"Yes," Golassiel replied, "that is our word for it. It is safer to sleep up here than on the ground." She showed Alatáriel how to move and affix the low walls that screened two sides of the talan. The walls were about waist-height, basketlike and easy to handle, woven of a combination of alder wattles and bands of the grey cloth. They looked rustic in construction but were very hard to see clearly on account of the grey blur that was becoming very familiar to her eyes.

"I will come for you when it is time to eat," said Golassiel, stepping off onto the ladder.

Alone, Alatáriel looked around the talan carefully. The first thing she noticed was a fluffy blur near the bole of the tree where a grey feather blanket was laid out. Suddenly remembering the first of her day's encounters with the uses of spidersilk, she drew back a corner of the blanket gently, admiring how light, soft, and supple it was. Underneath it were a quilted linen pad for sleeping on and a plump pillow.

She was relieved to find her traveling pack beside the pallet. Egg gathering, scouring, reeling, twisting, plying, featherwork, fleece quality, combing, spinning, and song -- I must write this down before I forget it all, she thought. She was already beginning to formulate what she wanted to set down about her observations as she rummaged through her bag for her journal. Without her portable desk it was going to be hard to write quickly or neatly. She set out her ink and journal on the talan floor and nibbled on the end of her swan quill. Should she write first about the feather blanket, the healing plants, the local fleece type, or the origins of spidersilk? "Some observations on the etymology of textile terms in the tongue of Mithrim," she wrote, and smiled. Maybe she was turning into a linguist after all.

 

Chapter End Notes

hröa -- body (Q)

Laureyulmo -- The Drinker of Laurelin's Light (Q)

lhê-herdir -- spidersilk-master (S)

él síla lúmena vomentienguo -- a star shines upon the hour of the meeting of our ways (Telerin)

lhê -- spidersilk, filament (S)

lain -- thread (S)

taw -- wool (S)

olvar -- plants (Q)

talan -- platform on the ground (Q); platform in a tree (S)

In the European Middle Ages and afterward, before clocks were common, it was not unusual for a written recipe to phrase durations of time in terms of the recitation of familiar prayers (e.g., "boil it for three paternosters"). Here I have had the Grey-Elf refer to the singing of a well-known Doriathrin song as a duration marker. If this were a Star Trek fanfic I'd probably have picked "Row Row Row Your Boat," which is much shorter than the ten-minute ballad I imagine "The Meeting of Melian and Thingol" to be.

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