What was it like? you want to know. The change. You’ve climbed a long way to my cave to ask me this. You’ve scrambled up steep inclines, clambered over boulders, and forded streams to stand before me now. You linger at the mouth, keeping what seems like a safe distance, not wanting to get too close—and, really, who can blame you? After all the stories you have heard, the same ones that enticed you, though they were meant to warn you off. No wonder you are hesitant, perhaps even afraid. It took some courage to come here.
So, all right then: What was it like to be transformed into what I am now? I’ll tell you. It was like a sundering. A splitting. Icy lightning cleaved along my limbs. At the same time, my skin was turning fruit-rind tough, dully reflective like obsidian, and punctured by small hairs the size and strength of claws. My eyes, which had been simple, forward-facing, like your own, grew bulbous, twinned themselves, then twinned again, so I could see in all directions, move in all directions, suddenly, on my new legs, so skeletal and gnarled, crouching as though poised to spring, my mouth a brace of hollow fangs, my whole body a shadow machine made for subterfuge, attack, blood-hungry scuttling. A wriggling, armored, poison star.
Around me, in that celestial banquet hall, a scattered gallery of faces gaped. Even the face of the goddess who had wrought this change in me. Everyone was speechless, frozen, subsumed by thick silence except in one far-off corner where, among the rafters, a trapped bird fluttered, clicked, and flailed. I remember I could smell its juicy, delectable panic. I could almost taste its fatted heart.
But how did I come to be in that august hall in the first place? Until the contest, I’d had nothing at all to do with the gods. I was phlegmatic, resplendent in the plump allowance of my human flesh, that tender stuff that swathes your bones as it used to do mine. A shepherd’s daughter, I was as ignorant of greater things as any of the sheep around which our world of grass, wool, dung, rutting, milk, butchery, and slippery birth revolved. I learned the skill of weaving from my mother, and I remember her hands shuttling across her loom, moving sometimes too quickly for me to see. Learning warp and weft, I copied and quite soon surpassed her, first for speed, then for the richness of my patterning. My art. Beneath my fingers, colors danced, threads slid through one another, vanished, then reappeared, intertwining to create designs and images so marvelously subtle and complex that after a while people began visiting us just to stare at them. I came to be especially renowned for crafting scenes that could be seen as beauteous or comical, gloomy or tender, praising or dubious at the exact same time. It was said you could spend whole hours tracing with your eyes the lineaments of one of my creations and still not exhaust all the paths down which your gaze could go.
To apprehend such intricacy was to see a world brought into being out of blurry fluff. And such an experience, some opined, granted ordinary mortals an interior spaciousness, a vibrant stillness normally reserved for the divine. From a tangle of mere yarn, I salvaged sense, order, and possibility. Each piece became a doorway. Or perhaps even a covenant.
How did I manage this? I have, if I am honest, absolutely no idea. I don’t know any more now than I did then. My hands moved, and the forms arose. Sometimes I felt them coursing like a song throughout my living architecture, a blue wind blowing or a strange light in my chest. But when I put the shuttle down, I was only a dull girl again like all the rest. If anything, I was even more lumpen and stolid than the preponderance of lumpen, stolid youth. I was no beauty certainly, my face retaining all my life a squashed, deflated look such as newborn infants and too-ripe vegetables often possess. My voice was just an ordinary human croak, not the mellifluous cadence you’re listening to now. Nor were my tastes and desires in some way distinguishing. I had a pet lamb I preferred to sleep beside. I had a fondness for figs so acute that in the season I once stuffed myself so full of them I vomited. I broke dishes through carelessness, which caused my mother to beat me and cry (two of her most common pastimes, both together and apart). I stole honey by sticking my bare hands into the pot, believing somehow I would not be caught. I was, in other words, neither wise nor clever, except for my freakish ability with thread. And so I did not know better. Predictably enough, I grew proud of myself. I boasted of what I could do. That I could surpass anyone with my dexterity, my skill. Even the gods? someone once had the nerve to ask. Yes, I said. I believe I scoffed. I could surpass even the gods.
Most likely I was drunk on purloined liquor at the time. But still, I should have taken better care. The retribution was not long in coming. A challenge from the goddess of handicraft, wisdom, and war: Let us both do our best work at the loom, and may the greater fabricator win.
The gods resemble human beings only when they want, and when they do, they are not bound by scale or substance or much else. That is to say, one moment they might be mistaken for an ordinary man or beast, and the next they have grown larger, more fantastical. Suddenly they sport wings. Their garments are a different cut or hue. Their hair is adorned in another style. They’ve shifted from man to woman and then partway back again. For this reason, they often carry a signature object to identify themselves. In the case of my goddess, this was a chalice made of gold.
When she appeared to me, her cup came first, assembling itself out of the air until it hovered before me where I sat picking grit from underneath my nails. I was in the room where we all slept, alone at that hour of the afternoon, shirking my duty to help my mother make our evening meal. My father’s house was low and ramshackle, a roof of thatch over a hard earth floor. A few rude furnishings. Mats made of straw for sleeping on. The goddess, when she’d finished calling herself into being in that place, looked around her and sneered. When she spoke, it sounded like a hearth fire burning, all crackle and flickering.
You have been telling people you are better skilled than I, she said. She did not look at me. Her utterance was not a question. Dull though I was, I knew I should not deny what she had claimed. I grasped that contradicting her would not go well for me. And so I nodded and muttered, Yes, Mistress, hoping that was how you were supposed to address an assemblage of the fundamental elements, a spiral of mystical dust. I think I sat up straight and dropped my gaze. It hurt to look at her. She seemed to be laughing at me, though she gave no outward sign.
I’ve come to challenge you, she said, to a contest. My brother will be judge. I want to know if what you say is true. Come to my great hall one week from today. Then we will see.
She did not give me a chance to refuse. Requests are not the business of her kind. They give commands. Nor did she say how I should get to her abode, what I should bring with me, or anything else before she caved in on herself, crumpling like an expanse of golden foil, growing smaller and more compact until she disappeared. But just in case I thought she was a dream, she left behind a set of gold footprints stamped into the earthen floor. They glimmered in the light and didn’t fade. I ran to tell my mother what had happened, and she cried and struck me hard across the face, as was her wont, then hugged me close and cried some more.
All through the week that followed, we made offerings at the goddess’s altar in our village, asking her please to relent, to spare me from the summons she had made. I had to walk from our house to the temple on my knees and let the priests throw rotten fruit at me. None of it helped. A week later to the day from when the goddess first appeared to me, I found myself suddenly in her banquet hall, seated at a loom. The room was filled with people whom I did not know. Across from me, the goddess sat at her own loom. Everyone had gathered around her to watch. The contest was about to begin.
What happened next? I’ll tell you if you want to stay—though I must point out that the sun is getting lower in the sky. The shadow you cast stretches out in front of you far enough to join up with the gloom inside this cave, and you have a long way to travel home. You had almost forgotten yourself, listening to my tale, and now I think you do not want to leave without hearing how it ends.
Very well then. I sat there at my loom entirely motionless. For many minutes I could not even remember how to weave. My hands seemed to be built from clay. My brain was a bundle of straw inside my skull. The goddess meanwhile moved her hands fluidly, her expression unconcerned. She was surrounded by a bevy of admirers, eerily handsome people who swayed gracefully like reeds or columns of smoke as they inclined their heads to graciously inspect her work. They spoke together in a language that I did not know and which sounded like clear water flowing over stones or wind traipsing through branches. All around us the great room was vast and cool, built out of timber painted dusty red, the vaulted ceiling carved into the forms of flowers, fruit, the faces of strange beings who did not look kind.
I watched the goddess for a while. She did not glance in my direction once, but I could tell she knew that I was looking at her and she was taking pleasure from ignoring me. She said something lighthearted to her gathering, and all those standing near her laughed obligingly. And suddenly within me flared a flame. Or maybe that is the wrong word. I felt, down in my stomach, a rage at being so baldly humiliated. I was overtaken by ferocity. Almost without knowing what I was doing, I began to work, not a familiar design but one I’d never made before. The pattern moved through me, an angry constellation, a defiant array. My hands flew with a certainty that did not, could not, have belonged to me, as if all the fury anyone had ever felt against the gods was flowing from a subterranean hoard into my work. Eventually the elegant companions of the goddess noticed. Some of them glanced up, then drifted over to my corner of the room. I felt rather than saw them shift, so intent was I on my task. Soon more of them came to stand behind me, and I could tell from how they murmured in their sibilant tongue that they were not indifferent to what I was doing. Nor could the goddess completely ignore the shifting tide among her guests. She did not demonstrate it openly, but underneath I knew that she was souring like milk.
And I was glad. Stupid lump of gristle that I was, I thought that winning such a competition was desirable. I did not understand that even if you scramble upward and achieve what you set out to do, there’s always something else, something greater going on behind the screen. Another hidden dimension where the real game is being played. Afterward, when you look back on the events, this other plane seems obvious. But at the time you simply could not see it, didn’t know that it was there.
How long we practiced our weaving I truly cannot say. Sometimes it seems like this was all the labor of a single afternoon. Other times I seem to recall a procession of days and nights, sleeping on a bed of silk, and eating food spun out of light. But at some point the work was done. I sat back in my chair, and someone reached over to wipe my brow. I had by this time a crowd of partisans surveilling my artifice equal in number to the goddess’s. The hall was thus divided when the goddess’s brother appeared, looking on that occasion like a fox that walked on its hind legs and wore robes made of leaves. He greeted his sister, but no one else, then sauntered back and forth between our stations. First he looked at her work. Then at mine. He looked again at hers. And then again at mine. From where he stood beside me, I could see a slow smile spread along his mouth until his two rows of sharp, predatory teeth were bare. He cocked his head and looked at his sister, as if to say: I’m sorry, my dear, but you’ve been outdone. And everybody understood. My work had proved superior. The goddess bowed, accepting the verdict. Then she stood and came across the room to see the composition that had bested hers.
And what did the fibers stretched across my loom display? An image of the goddess herself seated at her loom in all her resplendence. The outlines of her features, however, were a little slurred and canted so her luminosity became slightly grotesque, though not so obviously that a viewer could declare for certain she was being mocked rather than praised or venerated. Somehow, I think, this made the impact worse. The goddess stared stone-faced and silent at the tapestry in front of her. Color drained out of her cheeks, then rose anew. Her eyes lit up. She turned to look at me. It was the only moment in our brief acquaintance when her gaze truly met mine. I understood: This matter had been between the goddess and her brother from the start, some bet they’d made, some prank he’d played on her. I was only ever incidental to the proceedings, if I could even be called that. A pawn, a counter on a board. I’d never even know the rules by which they played. I opened my mouth to protest or beg for mercy, I wasn’t sure which. I tried to kneel and found I couldn’t move.
That’s when it happened. In an instant, I was changed into a monstrous, eight-legged fabulation as big as a large dog.
How piteous, the spider child! How awful her fate!
I think I climbed the wall and ate the bird. I remember the satisfying burst of salt heat, the thick ooze that funneled through my newly hollow teeth into my pulpy innards. I recall I clung there for a while upside down, swaying in the soft currents of air that snaked among the beams. I then turned back toward the ground and, paying out a single tensile length from the aperture that I discovered in my abdomen, descended into utter pandemonium. The goddess’s guests ran about, their beauty made ridiculous by fear. Only the goddess and her brother stood still in the middle of the floor and laughed as I immobilized and wrapped up several of the attendees to consume later. Finally I heard her brother say to his sister, That wasn’t very nice.
They laughed again.
I suppose not, the goddess said. But I can’t change her back. You know the rules.
That’s true, the brother said. His fur was shifting between red and gray. He looked now more like a wolf than like a fox. But I am going to give her a gift if you’ll allow me to. After all, this is partly my fault.
All right, the goddess said. What gift do you want to bestow?
I’m going to give her back her voice. Her language. That way she can tell her tale. Learn to do another kind of weaving, if you will.
The goddess seemed to consider this for some time.
That’s good, she said finally. I give you my permission. But . . . And here she paused briefly. Make her voice beautiful. Charming to listen to. Give her not just rudimentary speech. Give her the gift of eloquence, so people will listen attentively to what she says. I think that would be fun.
Her brother nodded. And with that, I found that I could speak again. The first thing I did was apologize profusely, groveling before them. (It was not easy to lower myself to my belly with so many legs.) I begged to be given my human form again. They only laughed. Then the goddess grew suddenly many times larger than me, and, taking a broom that she conjured from a nearby wall, she shooed me out of her front doors. Go home, she said, and she closed and locked the great gates after me, the metal bolts sliding into place with a final sound. I looked around me at a barren, rocky waste shrouded by mist and punctuated by snarls of stunted trees. I had no idea where I was or which direction I should go. There was nothing to do but walk, so that is what I did.
I wandered then for many days. As I traveled, I sang a tuneless song to comfort myself in my awful loneliness and fear. Eventually, after skirting obstacles and scurrying down steep slopes, I came to the valley that had previously been my home. The people there shrieked when they saw me. They fled and pelted me with rocks, which damaged my hard outer shell and gave me sores that later oozed a blueish-blackish paste. I thought my mother and father might still be kind, might recognize me even then and take me in, but they fled like the rest. So I ran away too—out of the village where I had been born, out of the pasturelands entirely. After more walking and climbing, I arrived at this mountaintop and found this cave. I retreated into its cool mouth, its damp passageways with veins of mica glinting in the walls, and here I made my home among the small, blind creatures that are native to its perpetual dimness. How do I live, you want to know? Not very well, if truth be told. Sometimes, at night, I steal out and go down into the valley. I raid the pens of sheep and goats, the chicken coops, biting down on the arches of their necks, injecting my elixir to make them go limp. I drag them back up to my lair, spool them in my twine, and drain them slowly until they are nothing except bones and desiccated skin.
But that is not what I prefer to eat. Having gained a taste for it from early on, I find the class of meat I used to be clad in myself most to my liking. It’s rare, though, that I can pluck it from its bed. People in this region have grown cautious. They don’t leave their children unattended anymore. But sometimes brave, foolhardy characters will come to me. They’ve heard the stories and want to witness the truth for themselves. They always come well-armed with knives and clubs, as you have obviously done. They intend only to cast eyes on me and learn if it is true that I can speak, that I was once a human being like themselves who was transformed thus for the crime of pride. They feel sure that if they keep their distance and don’t cross beyond the light, they’ll have nothing to fear.
Once they arrive, however, they find that they cannot resist the temptation of asking me a question. Or perhaps a few. And while they are enraptured by my answers, following the sinew of my tale, there’s time for me to cast a single thread silently about their lower legs, encircling them so when they try to step away, they find they cannot. See? My threads, fine as they are, are both sticky and strong, and so the more you struggle, the more you are entangled in them. Then, as you are panicking, quick as a whip, I fling another length around your arms as well, and then another, and another, so that all those weapons you carry about your waist or slung across your back cannot be used. It’s then that I advance. Sashaying forward, I prepare to perforate my visitor. And all the time I never cease using my last gift, my eloquent speech, to lull you to your final sleep.
