by Neil Clarke
“Who are you?” she asked. “Where did you come from?”
His lips moved again and for one sharp moment Rela thought he might answer, but the only sound he made was a hiss of pain. His eyes closed. He sank into himself, his breath slowing, his head lolling to the side, and he was silent.
At a gesture from Rela, the spiders closed the cocoon over his chest and shoulders and neck, and finally stitched the silk across his face and the crown of his head. Those spiders trapped within moved beneath the silk in roving lumps.
Rela cleaned her knife and tucked it into its sheath. With the stranger’s brown face hidden, his strange clothes piled to the side, the gasp of his voice and what he could not say caught now within a soft cocoon, she could almost pretend her hands weren’t shaking.
There was nothing she could do for the man but let the spiders heal him, if they could, if his body was not so broken it couldn’t be stitched together again. She waited until she was certain the spiders were settled in the cocoon, then left the platform. She paused again at the junction of three bridges and looked up. The day was growing brighter, colors shifting and deepening as the sun climbed.
The sky was falling, shedding pieces of itself like old skin, but even children knew not to ask why the wardens did nothing. Not a year had passed since six skywardens had fallen to their deaths. Most of the people of the forest had never known anybody to die; the elderly and ill wrapped themselves in cocoons to sleep and heal and one day, in a distant future, emerge as young and fit again, however long it might take. The weavers had hoped to heal the skywardens too, but the rootwardens had emerged from their hollows and taken the broken bodies from the aerie before the spiders could weave a single cocoon. They claimed, later, the unlucky skywardens had been shattered beyond what any long sleep could heal. It had been decades since the forest had held even a single funeral, and now it was holding six, all at once, for strong young men and women who had climbed too recklessly and too high. From every corner of the forest people had gathered to watch the six flat boats float the river, lined with torches and draped with flowers, from the boundary roots in the east to the western caves. Funeral spiders on delicate threads had dropped to the boats in a fine pale rain, burrowed into the shrouds and emerged, scattered again into the forest. Some onlookers had flinched away, closed their eyes and held their breath; others opened their mouths and welcomed the quick stinging bites on their tongues.
Rela had watched the funeral with Kef and their daughter Marun. She hadn’t known it then, but it was the last night they would spend together as a family, the last time she would sit beside her daughter and hold her hand, listen to her breath and know she was well. They had looped thick vines into swings above the river, and they hung, embraced by a low mist that never dissipated, their eyes hot with smoke, and they let the funeral spiders crawl over their lips and across their tongues. Rela had felt a rush of dizziness with the first bite, a spike of aching fear and the rush of sickening vertigo, the terrifying last moments of one young warden’s life, but it passed.
Marun had asked, “Does it always feel like that?”
Rela had been to only one funeral before, long before Marun was born, and that had been an eccentric old woman who had refused the comforting promise of sleep. Her memories had been as green and familiar as the forest itself, sunlight and shadows, a teasing mist of dew on skin before it was gone.
“I don’t know,” Rela had said. She did not lie to her daughter. The skywardens who had fallen had been Marun’s friends and partners, and the only thought in Rela’s mind had been cold relief that it had not been another day, another part of the sky, and Marun who had fallen.
The next morning, Marun and two other young skywardens had climbed the barren apex branches of the Dusk Man, one of the forest’s oldest and tallest trees, and disappeared through a tear in the sky. They never returned. The skywardens who remained refused to climb anymore. There was occasional talk, throughout the forest, of training new wardens, sending them up with ropes and hooks and tools to heal the sky, but more often now the gossip turned to wondering if perhaps the skywardens refused because they knew there was nothing to be done.
Laughter echoed below, and Rela startled from her memory. A spider nipped at her thumb. Rela released the rope and made for the ladders.
The forest darkened as she descended, and the canopy filled with the sounds of an ordinary morning: weavers talking and singing as they worked, spiders clicking eagerly, the coursing of collected water spilling into wooden troughs. Shouts echoed as builders hoisted a repaired bridge between two trees, ropes and wooden slats swinging, filling a blank space with a curved line; their rasping saws dusted the morning with the scent of fresh-cut wood. The aerie was more crowded below, not only with weavers and their spiders, but with sleepers in their hanging cocoons. Oblong white sacs lined every branch, swaying on every bridge, every platform, their colorful painted portraits turning in and out of sight. Rela spotted a pair of painters retouching a family of cocoons hanging in a cluster like pale berries, and she thought, for a moment, to ask them where Kef was working today, to find her, to grasp her hands and lean close, her lips to Kef’s ear, and tell her about the stranger.
The urge was a fleeting burn on her tongue, like a child’s dare to taste a scrap of fallen sky, and she could not imagine how Kef would reply. She could not remember when they had stopped carrying each other’s secrets and began instead hoarding their own. She did not even know if Kef had noticed.
The painters raised their hands in uncertain greeting. Rela turned away before they could call out, but somebody else had spotted her. Approaching from the other direction, moving briskly along a bridge, was Pira, an elder weaver with threads of spider-silk white in her hair. She wasn’t alone: following on the bridge were two rootwardens. Their faces were hidden beneath deep hoods of woven bark and muddy leaves, and the planks of the bridge groaned beneath their steps. It wasn’t unusual to see rootwardens high in the trees anymore, not as it had been when Rela was a child and they had kept themselves apart, emerging rarely, and only at night. People whispered, when rootwardens passed, that they ventured higher now because the trees were rotting on the inside and driving them out.
“Rela, there you are,” Pira said. She spoke softly, and she smiled. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Panic that almost felt like relief squeezed Rela’s chest. Somebody had seen, she thought. Somebody had seen and sent for the wardens.
But Pira went on before she could speak. “There was a great deal of fall over the Sisters last night,” she said. She tilted her chin and sunlight caught her face. The Three Sisters were a cluster of trees beneath one of the weakest patches of sky; they stood at a bend in the river, well away from where the stranger had fallen. Pira said, “They could use your help, if you can spare the time. They’re quite overwhelmed.”
Lips pressed together, Rela nodded, swallowed and looked away from the rootwardens. She could not see their faces beneath their dark hoods, if they had faces at all, but she knew they were watching her. One touched the rope with its thin hand, and Pira’s spiders, clinging beside her, recoiled and scattered. The warden’s fingers were like reeds the color of still, murky water, damp and slick but strong, and Rela half-expected to see the rope disintegrate at its touch. “Don’t let it touch you,” Rela’s mother had said, when she was a child and gawking at the first rootwarden she had ever seen, a memory long since faded like an old portrait, but vivid now, surprising in its clarity. They had been collecting pitcher flowers in a pond near the roots of the boundary trees, where caves breathed cool air into the forest and water dripped in distant echoes. Rela loved plucking the soft pink blooms from a curtain of vines and tipping the nectar into her mouth when her mother wasn’t looking. When the rootwarden had appeared, a dark shape in the shadow, tall and grim beneath the arch of a black root, Rela’s mother had grabbed her hand so hard her fingers twisted together, and she had said, “Don’t let it touch you,” though it was across
the water and did not seem to notice them at all. Rela had asked, in her childish innocence, why her mother was so scared, and her mother had said, “I’m not scared,” and then she had said, “We’re done here,” but she hadn’t moved until the warden was gone.
“Rela? Are you well?”
Pira’s voice was warm, kind, and her green eyes soft with understanding. Rela felt the chance as a tug at the back of her throat, as the hesitation before flinging a net or throwing a spear, knowing the fish or frog or bird might escape if she waited too long. She could tell them, Pira and the rootwardens and anybody else who might overhear. They would think her mad, confused by grief, mourning a lost daughter, but she could take them to the stranger and ask her spiders to split the cocoon and let his blood flow.
The rootwardens would take him away. They would drag his odd brown body down from the aerie, careless as hunters dragging the marsh frogs they speared. He would vanish with them into their caverns, as the fallen skywardens had vanished before, and Rela would never have a chance to speak to him.
“Is there something wrong?” Pira asked.
Rela smiled. Her spiders nipped and clicked at the back of her neck. “No, of course not. I’ll go at once to help.”
She nodded to Pira before hurrying away. Across the bridge she looked back. The rootwardens had turned their hooded faces to follow her, dark smudges of brown in the morning light.
The weavers at work in the Three Sisters did not need Rela’s help, but one, with familiar pity in her voice, sent her to the Red Guardian to weave a cocoon for an old man who had been putting off sleep for too long. His joints were swollen, his hands unsteady, his eyes cloudy. Rela helped him across the last long bridge to a platform clinging snug to the tree’s red trunk. The old man fussed and squirmed as the spiders began to work, and he did not calm until Rela asked him which of the cocoons hanging around the platform belonged to his family. He could not remember all of their names, and the paint of their portraits had long since leached away, but sharing their stories soothed his worry.
“It will be good to see them when we wake,” he said. The spiders were creeping delicately around his shoulders and neck; he twitched his head, chased a faint itch. He exhaled, and frowned, and said, “If we wake.”
“You will,” Rela said. “We all will. Close your eyes. There’s no reason to be afraid.”
The old man huffed but did as she said. A small black spider eased itself beneath the silk at his neck to place the final sting, then he was sleeping. The spiders closed the cocoon over his face, spun a rope from the crown of his head and, with Rela’s help, lifted him to hang beside the sleepers who had been his wife and brothers and children. A painter would come to give him a face in a day or two, when the silk had stiffened and dried, and his portrait would be a splash of fresh bright color until time and age washed it away. The funeral spiders would nest in the fine threads of the cocoon, and those pale blind creatures would be the old man’s only company while he slept.
Rela stayed at the Red Guardian for the rest of the day, working alone to repair damaged ropes and cocoons, speaking to no one but her spiders. She did not let herself even look toward the nameless tree where she had left the stranger to heal. When twilight fell over the forest, she left the aerie with the other weavers, nodding at those who bid her a good evening. By the time she reached the Bearded Frog, the tree where she and Kef hung their home, the forest was filled with warm yellow light and smoke from cooking fires. Rela stepped off a spiraling ladder and onto the branch that held their pod, climbed down to the web beneath and sent the spiders to their nest. She felt naked without them crawling over her arms and shoulders, without their sharp, quick legs pricking her skin.
The scent of something rich and pungent drifted from inside. Kef was making supper.
“Rela? Are you hungry?”
Kef always sounded as though she was on the verge of laughing, even when she was serious; it was the second thing Rela had noticed about her. The first had been the light of her water-green eyes as she stared up at the sky. They had met on a fine, warm day years ago, when Rela had found Kef in a nest of tangled branches high above the aerie, lying on her back amongst white flowers and purple berries growing from the tree’s cradled patches of soil. Rela had said, “You’re not supposed to be up here,” and Kef had laughed and said, “Do you ever look at the sky? Look at the sky and tell me what you see.”
Rela checked that the spiders had food and collected buckets of water to carry inside. Kef took one from her and kissed her cheek. “I thought I might see you today, but they said you were helping at the Sisters.”
There was a moment, again, the heartbeat hesitation before a frog’s fearful leap, and Rela thought she might tell Kef about the stranger. But it had been so long since the laughter in Kef’s voice had been accompanied by a smile on her lips, since she had hummed while stirring supper in a pot and touched Rela’s hand with paint-flecked fingers, and those days grew ever rarer, stretched apart, dew drops on a silk thread.
“I was on the Red Guardian,” Rela said. “There was an old man.”
Kef withdrew her hand to return to the fire. “Supper is ready, if you’re hungry.”
They filled wooden bowls with soup made of fish and mushrooms. Kef spoke about her day, about the woman whose portrait she was preparing to paint, the stories and memories that though Kef’s brushes of silk and bristle would cover a fresh cocoon while the woman slept. Every cocoon was unique, every portrait singular. Kef had hoped, once, that Marun would follow in her footsteps, as Rela had hoped she might take a liking to the spiders. But Marun had chosen the sky.
There was still a seat for Marun at their table, and the hammock where she had slept as a child still hung high on the curved wall. She had not lived with them since she had joined the skywardens and moved to their tents in the east where the sky grew from fat gray branches, and they had long since traded away her childhood clothes and toys, but traces of her remained: the dried old vines she had braided in mimicry of Rela’s weaving, the knife she had forgotten the last time she came for dinner, a broken harness she had brought one evening to share and laugh about how close she had come to falling.
Rela’s appetite was gone. She scraped leftover soup into the pot and said, without turning, “I have to see to the spiders.”
The night air was warm and heavy with mist. All around the forest glowed with soft light, and the evening was hushed, but not silent, never silent. Insects chirped and clicked, birds called, and somewhere above there were bursts of music and laughter. A marsh frog bellowed, its deep, throaty cry carrying like a horn. The night smelled of smoke and spiced fish and boiled fruit, all of it mingled with the rich, mossy scent of the trees.
Rela climbed to the edge of the web and stretched out face-down, arms folded beneath her chin. The ropes pressed into her stomach and chest. A few spiders scurried to greet her with light pinches before settling into the hollow at the small of her back. Below, softened by smoke and mist, torches lined bridges with golden flames, and the river was a fat lazy snake curled around the roots.
The web swayed as Kef came to join her. She sat, legs dangling over the edge, and rested a hand between Rela’s shoulders.
“Sometimes I wonder if it would be easier,” Kef said, but she did not finish. She toyed with the fine hairs at the base of Rela’s neck; her touch was light, her palm warm. Rela could no longer identify the shades of unhappiness in Kef’s voice, but she knew where those words led: if Marun had fallen, if they had a body, if the shell of their daughter had drifted past shrouded on a funeral raft, if there were spiders in the forest with Marun’s blood in their bites.
Kef exhaled, and her hand on Rela’s back stilled.
“Do you remember when the Ugly Twin fell?” she asked.
Rela lifted her chin. She could see the gap the tree had left when it died. Its taller, straighter, more sturdy sibling remained, curiously alone where it towered over lesser trees. The Ugly Twin had been a gnarled, damag
ed thing, broken and healed so many times it was impossible to know which of its many trunks had been the original. Nobody had lived in the Ugly Twin for generations. Its sleepers had long ago been moved to safer corners of the aerie, its bridges cut away, its ladders and platforms left to rot, every link to the forest severed. The wardens had been guiding its slow, inevitable collapse for as long as Rela had been alive.
The Ugly Twin had toppled in the night ten or twelve years ago. The great tree had not died quietly. It had twisted and groaned against its own weight, against the unwilling support of its nearest neighbors, against its proud, handsome twin. Marun had climbed into their hammock, shaken them awake and said, “I can’t sleep. It’s too noisy.” Rela and Kef had taken her outside to watch and listen. Their neighbors were up too, huddled on their own webs, talking in quiet voices. It had been a clear night, unusually dry and free of fog.
When the Ugly Twin fell, it fell slowly, a tilting dark silhouette against the flat gray sky. Moments later the deafening roar reached them and a shudder passed over the forest, set bridges swaying and pods twisting. Marun held tight to Rela with one hand and Kef with the other, and for some time nobody spoke.
Then Marun had said, her little girl voice soft and high, “What happens when all the trees are too old to live?”
Kef smoothed a hand over her hair. “Young trees will take their place.”
“But what happens when those trees die too?” Marun asked. “Will we have to live somewhere outside the forest?”
“There is nowhere outside the forest,” Rela had said. It was what her own mother had said to her when she had asked where the water came from and where the river flowed, and what it was the rootwardens guarded so jealously in their damp caves beneath the boundary trees.
Marun had frowned and said, “Is it sky forever?”
Kef laughed. “Forever and ever, caterpillar.” Marun had considered this answer and found it satisfactory, and she asked if they could go see the fallen tree in the morning.