Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 54

by John Joseph Adams

  Brenneker never played by herself unless she was sure that she was alone. She played when Laurel played or at night when everyone was sleeping. When spring came that year, she played the mating song and waited, but no lover came. The next night she tried again, this time varying the tune and adding trills, but still no one came. Brenneker tried for several nights before she finally admitted to herself that there was no fault in her song, but that none of her folk dwelt in this faraway land and so there was no one to answer. But this reasoning made her feel unhappy, and she preferred to think that it might be some imperfection in her song, which could be righted by practice.

  As Laurel grew older, Brenneker noticed that the quality of their music changed. Whereas she had formerly been a lover of sprightly dance tunes, Laurel became more interested in old ballads and would sing as she accompanied herself on the lute. One of her favorites was “Barbara Allen,” another, “The Wife of Ushers Well.”

  She was often asked to perform at weddings and parties. She met other lovers of medieval music and even other lute players. Laurel would sometimes allow others to play her instrument, which drew a mixed response. If Brenneker knew the tune of the strange artist, she would pick along. If not, she held her strings silent, leaving the others to wonder how Laurel got such rounded tones where they only strummed dull, tinny notes.

  One summer evening Laurel took a blanket, the lute, and Brenneker to a woodsy place and sat down alone to play. She sang many of the old ballads, and then she would stop for a while and listen. Then she would play another song. Brenneker wondered at this until she heard answering notes from a recorder in a grove nearby. The two instruments played a duet, with occasional counterpoint melody, and then the recorder player drew near, and Brenneker saw that it was a young man.

  “Aha,” she thought, “Laurel plays to attract a mate.”

  The young man sat down beside Laurel on the grass.

  “I knew you’d come,” he said to her.

  She moved over toward him and he put an arm around her waist and kissed her.

  This went on for quite some time. After a while the two said goodbye, and Laurel picked up her blanket and trudged homeward, while her love went in the other direction.

  “Strange,” thought Brenneker. “She did not eat him.” This bothered the lyre spider until she stopped to reflect: “Birds do not eat their mates. Perhaps the humans are like birds, but I had always thought them more intelligent than that.”

  A few nights later, Laurel took her blanket and went to the grove again. The young man, whose name was Thomas, was there waiting for her. They played a few songs and then they made love. As she walked home, Laurel sang “Barbara Allen.”

  “And still she does not eat him,” thought Brenneker. “Their way of being together is different from ours. Yet I’m sure it must mean as much to them as ours does to us. Yet it seems so incomplete. Impermanent.”

  The presence of the human lovers made Brenneker more aware of her own loneliness. “If I could mate,” she thought. “I would make the most beautiful egg-sack, all of silk, and my eggs would sway to the music of the lute until they hatched. Then they would fly to neighboring trees and build their own lyres and play to me and I wouldn’t be alone anymore.” But when she played her love songs, softly on the night air, no lover came. She was used to it by now, but she never gave up hope.

  One evening the two lovers had a quarrel.

  “You must marry me this fall,” Thomas insisted.

  “But we have no money,” Laurel objected. “You are only an apprentice at your trade, and it will be a long time before you bring home a journeyman’s wage. I would not be able to go to the university to study music.”

  “We would get by somehow,” said Thomas. “You could take in music students and teach the lute. We could pick up a little extra money playing for gatherings.”

  “But I do so much want to go to the university,” said Laurel. “We could go to the city and both take jobs. That way we could be together and I could study for my degree.”

  “I can’t get as good a job in the city as here,” said Thomas, “and besides, you could not earn enough to support yourself and pay tuition. So you might as well settle here with me.”

  “There has to be a way for me to continue my study of music,” said Laurel, “and I intend to find it.”

  When Thomas left, he did not kiss Laurel goodbye.

  Laurel, thoughtful and concerned, put her lute aside and went to bed early. She did not forget to leave a window open, however, or set out milk to feed the fairy. Brenneker pondered their dilemma and could see no solution. While she was brooding over this, she heard the unmistakable sound of a lyre spider tuning up its instrument, and this caused her to listen intently. It was a curious song, having a haunting quality, a shadowing of minor key, but not quite. This was no spider song, Brenneker was sure, but it was definitely played by one of her own kind. She strummed an answering chord and the other player stopped in midphrase, as if startled. Brenneker played part of an old song she’d played many times at home. The other answered her with the refrain of the song, and so they played back and forth for a while, until the other stopped. Brenneker was somewhat disappointed that the song had ended, but a few moments later she discovered why. A gentle tapping on the sounding board roused her attention and she went to the F holes to peer out. The other spider, a male, had followed her music and had come to investigate. He clambered up the side of the instrument to her vantage point.

  “How lovely,” he said, “to hear the songs of home in a strange land. Tell me, Lady, how did you come here?”

  “By accident,” said Brenneker. “The humans picked my tawba stalk for a flute and brought me here. But I have never seen another of our kind here until now.”

  “I came in similar fashion,” said the male. “My name is Wisterness, and, until now, I had thought I was the only one of our kind that had ranged so widely.”

  “What was that strange tune you played? Is it in a minor key? I have heard none like it before,” said Brenneker.

  “It’s neither major or minor,” said Wisterness. “It is based on a modal scale like some of the Renaissance music I’ve heard you play. I’ve noticed that you sometimes play in the Dorian mode, which is somewhat similar. Actually, I was playing a southern mountain tune called ‘June Apple.’ The tuning is called ‘mountain minor,’ or ‘A to G’ tuning, among them, but it is actually the older double-tonic scale, based on the highland bagpipe tuning, or, according to some sources, the Irish Harp.”

  “My goodness,” said Brenneker, “you certainly know a lot about music. I haven’t heard half of those words. I do remember playing ‘Scarborough Fair’ in the Dorian mode, but that’s about the extent of my music theory.”

  “I may know more theory, but you are the better musician, Lady. I am always barely learning one tune and then going on to something new. Consequently my playing lacks polish. I have listened to your songs for several nights before summoning the courage to answer.”

  “I certainly have no complaint against your playing,” said Brenneker. “I thought it was quite beautiful. I am curious about one thing, though, and that is your age. I never knew male spiders lived much more than a few years, yet you seem quite mature and well read. Have you never mated?”

  Wisterness shuffled his pedipalps and appeared slightly embarrassed.

  “No, I never have,” he said. “There was one once in my youth that I cared for, but she chose to devour another. Then one day I followed a woodsman to listen to his song, and I was carried off in a load of wood and eventually came to this place. Since then I have devoted myself to the study of humans and their music, but it has been lonely at times.”

  Since it was not the mating time, Wisterness left after awhile and went back to his lyre, which was strung in a hollow tree not far from the window, and he and Brenneker played duets most of the night. But sometimes she paused to listen to the piercing modal sweetness of Wisterness, as he experimented with different tu
nings from the lonely southern mountains.

  • • • •

  The next morning, Laurel did not sit down to her music at the usual time, but instead put on her coat and went out with a purposeful look in her eyes.

  The next day, at the practice hour, a younger girl came to Laurel’s door carrying a lute under her arm, and Laurel taught her a lesson. It was “Green-sleeves,” a favorite of Brenneker’s, and she played along at first, but the student had troubles, and they kept stopping midverse and starting over until Brenneker decided it was more pain than pleasure and gave it up. Before the student left, she counted out a small sum of money, which Laurel put in a large jar on her dresser. This money, Brenneker learned, was to go toward Laurel’s university tuition.

  As the weeks passed, more students came, until Laurel had five beginners to teach. One student came twice a week from a distant township. Sanger, the old instrument maker, still came by once in a while to teach Laurel a song, but she had long ago surpassed him in musical skill, and he never charged for his “lessons” anymore. His fingers had grown arthritic and he could not play as well as he had in the past. He no longer took students, which made Laurel one of the few teachers of the lute in her part of the country. The money piled up slowly in the jar, but it was nowhere near enough, and sometimes Brenneker would overhear Laurel arguing with her father at night about her plans to go to the university.

  “Even if you get a degree in music,” he would say, “that doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to support yourself. Why not study something practical that you can find a good job in?”

  Laurel agreed to take courses in handicrafts and midwifery to pacify her father, whom she still depended upon for support, but her heart belonged to music, and she refused to give up her plans for further study.

  When she saw Thomas now, they both avoided talking about future plans, as this always provoked a fight, and he did not come to see her as often. Brenneker fretted about this, as she saw Laurel suffering in silence. When Laurel played, Brenneker sometimes wove her mating song into the web of sound hoping that Thomas would hear and return to renew his love. But he did not hear, or if he did, he didn’t come.

  One warm spring night, Brenneker alone played her mating song hopefully to the open window, and after a short time Wisterness came, tapping shyly on her sound box to announce his presence.

  “You must come out,” he said, “for the sound holes are too small for me to get in.”

  Brenneker had failed to recognize her predicament. As a young spider, she had entered through the holes with ease, but now she was bigger, and therefore trapped within the lute. She forced her legs out the F holes, and she could feel the tantalizing closeness of his belly fur, but try as they might, they could not negotiate across the wooden barrier.

  Finally he said, “Brenneker, I fear our love must go unconsummated, for you can’t get out and I can’t get in. But then perhaps it’s better that way, for even if we could somehow manage to mate, we could not partake of the deeper sharing, with you in there and me out here.”

  And so he left sadly. She did not hear his song for several days, and then one day the wind carried the distant strains of “Billy in the Lowground” to her window. The sad Irish mode echoing in the lonely Appalachian melody, told her that he had moved his harp farther away to avoid the pain of their unsatisfied need. He was too far to answer any of her musical questions or play the counterpoint games.

  One day, Laurel invited Thomas over to her home. She was very anxious to share a piece of news with him.

  “The university is offering a music scholarship,” she said. “There will be a contest and I intend to participate. If I win, my tuition would be paid, and if we both found jobs, we could be together while I go to school in the city.”

  Thomas thought about this before answering and then said, “It’s not the money that really bothers me, it’s your attitude. I get the feeling that I am not as important to you as your music. I want you to be happy, but I don’t wish to play second fiddle to a lute.”

  “But my work is as important to me as yours is to you,” said Laurel. “The truth is that neither of us wish to make the sacrifice of our career goals to be with the other.”

  “I had hoped our love meant more to you than your music,” said Thomas, “but I see I was wrong.”

  “It means equally as much to me,” said Laurel, “I just don’t think I should be the one to have to make the sacrifice of my career. There is no reason you couldn’t get a job in the city. It would not be forever, only a few years. Then we could come back here and you could take up where you left off.”

  “I don’t see it that way,” he said. “In a few years I would be behind everyone in my training and I’d be competing with younger men whom they don’t have to pay as much. If I stay, I have opportunity for advancement in a few years.”

  “Well, I suppose we will part, then, when the summer’s over,” said Laurel. “I shall miss you terribly, but that’s the way things work out sometimes. There is one last request I want to make of you, and that is, will you accompany my playing when I go to the contest?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” said Thomas. “It would be adding insult to injury if I participated in the very thing that takes you away from me.”

  After Thomas left, Laurel cried. She went to bed early and even forgot about the milk for the fairy. This did not disturb Brenneker very much, for she had lost her appetite listening to their argument. She was pondering Laurel’s problem in her mind (it seemed strange that humans could have barriers to love more complex than her wooden cage) when she heard a strange grinding noise as of a small drill emanating from one corner of the lute. She scampered to the source of the sound and stood watching the smooth surface of the unfinished wood as the sound come nearer. Suddenly a little bump appeared in the surface, and then the bump dissolved in a small pile of sawdust, and an ugly, bulbish head poked out of the newly formed hole. Brenneker pounced at the woodworm but missed as it pulled back into its tunnel. Frustrated, she stood tapping at the hole with her forelegs, as the worm withdrew and burrowed in a different direction.

  “You must leave,” said Brenneker to the worm. “You are destroying my home and Laurel’s lute.”

  “There is plenty of wood here for both of us,” came the muffled reply of the woodworm. “You may have the rosewood, and I’ll eat only the spruce.”

  “But I don’t eat wood,” said Brenneker, “and you shouldn’t eat this lute. There is plenty of other wood that you can eat. Leave my home alone. You are destroying a musical instrument. Have you no appreciation for music?”

  “Hmm, yes, music,” said the worm, whose name was Turkawee. “I’ve never cared for that funny-sounding stuff. Leave it to the birds, I always say.”

  “You ignorant barbarian!” exclaimed Brenneker.

  “I think spiders are more barbaric than our kind,” said Turkawee, “for spiders eat their cousins the insects, and even their own mates. You should take care whom you go calling a barbarian.”

  “Philistine, then!” snorted Brenneker. “You obviously have no concept of a higher culture than your own.”

  “Culture, you say?” said Turkawee. “That’s a term my snooty Aunt Beetle used to use. She was always admiring the wings of butterflies. She knew an artist who made pictures of the wings. She ended up stuck with a pin to a corkboard because all her interest in culture led her to follow a butterfly too closely into a collector’s net. Culture is also for the birds, I say.”

  Brenneker, having no answer for this, retreated to her web and played the angriest song she could think of, which was a military march. The worm ignored her and continued gnawing at the wood of the lute.

  Two days later, Brenneker was surveying the damage done by Turkawee. She was dismayed to find one part of the sounding board completely riddled with holes. She set about to mend it, binding the remaining wood with the steely white thread that she extruded from her spinnerets. The patch was actually quite strong,
perhaps more so than the surrounding wood, but the discrepancy in the surface weakened the instrument structurally. The tension of the lute strings could cause the instrument to break, if the patch didn’t hold.

  Brenneker returned to her web by the sound posts and fell asleep. She wasn’t used to making so much new thread, and the effort had drained her strength. In the night when she awoke, she called many insects to her supper with song, for she was ravenously hungry due to her exertion. The next day when Laurel tuned up the lute to play for a wedding, Brenneker noted with satisfaction that the patch held. But the ravages of the woodworm continued.

  Old Sanger, the instrument maker, when he heard that Laurel intended to enter the scholarship contest, came by the house to offer his advice. He had played in competition in the past, and he knew what sort of artistry was apt to attract the notice of the judges and what displays of skill might sway their opinion.

  “It is always a good idea to include in your repertoire a few songs that are not well known and played by everyone. And in the songs that are better known, try to display some different interpretation or more rare harmony. A few classical pieces in your presentation are in order, and playing a duet, or having someone accompany you is essential; so be sure to play your arrangement of ‘The Ash Grove’ with that young man-friend of yours. Your counterpoint harmony mixes very well with his recorder, and such a presentation will be sure to impress the judges. They will be looking for that particular blending of tones that displays your sense of harmony not only with your partner but with yourself and the universe.”

  “Poor Laurel,” thought Brenneker. “What will she do without Thomas’ accompaniment?”

  Laurel said nothing to Sanger about her falling out with Thomas, and after he left she practiced “The Ash Grove” unaccompanied and tried to develop some new variations on the old theme. Brenneker was tempted to play the recorder part, but since to do so would reveal her presence, she contented herself with her usual practice of playing in unison or one octave higher than the melody.