"She only takes the ones that quarrel," said Vesna Oake, tying up a plum branch on the third terrace of Ostrich Stair, her mouth full of bast twine. She said it the way a person mentions weather. Then she went on tying.
Vesna's day starts before the light reaches the orchard wall. She checks the lower ladders for web, because the arachne strings her lines across the cliff face at night, and a fresh line is nearly invisible until a plum leaf hangs from it. She carries a wooden spoon for lifting threads away without touching them. She salts the ladder feet. She rubs her palms with crushed tansy, which the terrace families do before any climb, and which Vesna admits does nothing for the thread but keeps her hands from shaking. By midmorning she has picked two baskets and lowered them on a rope pulley to the sled at the bottom. The arachne has not shown itself. Only the lines say it is near: a long silver warp from the top of the wall to a split in the slate, humming faintly when the wind turns.
The first appearance comes a little after noon. The arachne comes down the warp head first, with a woman's torso hanging from a spider's body the color of dried plums. The abdomen is the size of a wash tub and the eight legs are jointed like carpenter's rules. Her face is narrow and freckled, with a high brow and black hair knotted in a bun. She wears a necklace of snail shells strung on her own silk, and one front leg is missing its last joint, healed over in a smooth knob. I measured her span from a distance with a surveyor's cord, pegged at both ends and read against a ruler: eleven feet from tip to tip across the legs. She looked at Vesna, looked at the basket, and took one plum from the top. Vesna did not move. That is the rule on the terraces: leave the top plum of every basket, and never pick a fruit that has been touched by a leg.
The second appearance is at the end of the day, when Vesna carries the last basket down through Umber Gap, a narrow cut that the families named in the old tongue for a word meaning "shelter," though everyone agrees it is the darkest passage on the cliff. The arachne is at the far end now, working a new line with the stump of her short leg, drawing silk across the opening. She does not turn. Vesna ducks under it. I followed her down, spoon in hand, and at the foot of the wall looked back once. The line across the gap had caught the last sun, and a single plum stone hung in it, spun in silk, turning slowly.
- Classification
- Weaving monstrosity, half woman, half spider
- Habitat
- Orchard cliffs and slate gaps
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 11 ft leg span
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Terraced cliff orchards
- Binomial
- Araneola texens
- Diet
- Fruit, moths, quarrelsome intruders
- Temperament
- Watchful, orderly, territorial