Chapter Three Hundred and Fifty - The Amazing Spidermom

It took a bit of back and forth to convince the nice spider not to cocoon me to bring me to Mommy. In the end, I managed to convince them that if I was cocooned, I wouldn’t be able to speak at all since speaking in spider required some movement which I couldn’t manage if I was all tied up.

One of the smaller spiders was voluntold to go fetch the spider matriarch, and I decided to retreat towards the safety provided by my friends and all the soldiers around them.

“That seems to have gone well,” Amaryllis said.

“Really?” Caprica asked. “Because we’re still surrounded by obviously hostile forces which we can’t number and whose strength we can’t determine.”

“But Broccoli was able to talk to them,” Amaryllis argued. “Which means that either she’ll be able to convince them that we’re friendly, or they’ll presume that we’re as innocent and harmless as she is.”

“Hey now,” I said, defending myself. “I can be harmful.”

Amaryllis patted me on the helmet between my ears. “Yes, you’re very intimidating and harmful,” she said.

I pouted.

“Don’t worry, Broccoli, I’m sure you’ll be intimidating one day, if you work very hard at it,” Awen said comfortingly.

“All of this aside,” Caprica said. “What did the spiders have to say? And what was with the... dancing you were doing? Is that how they communicate?”

“It is,” I said. “They speak with their limbs a lot, and with those clicks. It’s a pretty simple language, I think. They don’t really have a grammar, so to speak, so you kind of need to interpret everything on its own merits.”

“Interesting, but not what we’re here for,” Caprica said.

“Right. They sent a spider off to get their matriarch. Or I think it’s their matriarch,” I said. “It sounds like someone important to them.”

“A leader of some sort,” Caprica said. “Maybe we actually can negotiate. If we can’t though, I’m certain we have the manpower to press through. We have proper soldiers here, Sylphfreean soldiers, not some untrained rabble.”

I noted the backs of the nearby sylph straightening a bit. So, they were listening in on us. Caprica had to know that. “Uh-huh,” I said. “But negotiation would still be better than fighting, I think. If only because I don't want us to get covered in webs and spider ichor. I can probably clean it, but it's gross.”

“Time’s a concern as well,” Amaryllis said. “If things turn hostile, we may have to fight our way out, which will likely take a while and could even reveal our advance to the pirates. On the other hand, if we can successfully negotiate passage, we will be able to move rapidly, possibly even with a local guide.”

“We’ll manage,” I said. Glancing back over the heads of the soldiers around us, I noticed that the spiders were standing a bit less stiff than usual. A number of them were rubbing their legs together, which didn’t mean anything, so I guessed that they were just quickly grooming themselves, like someone running a hand through their hair before an important meeting. “I think she’s arriving.”

There was a skittering sound coming from deeper in the forest, just loud enough that it carried over the breathing of the soldiers. Some of the spiders started to click excitedly and they started to sway from side to side, some limbs rising and falling in what was almost a dance.

They were basically chanting one word, over and over again. “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!”

A dozen new spiders poured into the clearing, clinging to the massive trees. Most were smaller than the spiders we’d seen already, but almost all of them carried a bundle on their backs.

With quick and practised motions, the smaller spiders laid out long threads of silk which went taut with hard twangs. Others set down what were obviously wooden drums with skin tops and still others jingled and jangled as they tied maracas to the trees.

“What are they doing?” Caprica asked.

“Those are musical instruments,” Awen said. “A bunch of them.”

The clearing quieted down and the spiders retreated, only far enough that they were half-hidden in the shadows and where they could watch us with gleaming eyes. A surruration of shifting sounds came from the ground ahead of us, and soon a spider came walking around the largest of the trees.

She wasn’t walking vertically along the trees like her children had done, maybe because despite the enormous size of these trees, she was still too big to grab onto them.

Mommy was three times as tall as I was, with mandibles longer than my arms and eyes as big as my entire head. She was covered in fine, bristly hairs on her legs and back and even around her torsos which twitched slightly as she moved.

The gigantic spider came to stand in the clearing across from us, then her long limbs reached out and very gently touched the long silken threads connected to the instruments around her.

There was a strange moment where she tested each string, one at a time, the drums thumped and boomed, the strings hummed like violins, the shakers above rasped and clattered.

“Iiii am... Mom-me!” the spider said through the means of drum-beat booms and violin strums.

“Well, that’s something I never expected to see,” Amaryllis muttered.

“Was that in a language everyone understood?” I asked.

“Yes, if barely,” Amaryllis said. “She has a bit of an accent.”

“I think she’s doing very well, considering,” I said. “Let me go talk to her.”

Amaryllis touched my shoulder. “Be careful, please.”

“I will,” I promised. “Besides, if she went through all of this trouble to talk, then she must have something to say, right?” Stepping out from between the soldiers, I took a few steps towards Mommy, the huge spider, then I made a few quick gestures, with some clicks added in for good measure. Just to be safe though, I spoke to her aloud at the same time. “Hello, Mommy, I am... uh, Broccoli Bunch, a non-food friend.”

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“Yooou... arre innn myyy trreeees,” Mommy said with her many instruments. Her eight eyes were focused on me. “Yooou arre... NOT theee ot-her foooood.”

“That’s because we’re not food at all,” I replied.

Mommy the spider tilted her entire body slightly. “Yooou look smaaal... like fooood,” she said. “Buuuut not liike ouur fooood.”

“That’s because we’re not from around here.”

“Frrooom beyooond the treees,” she said.

“Exactly!” I cheered. “We’re not from around here. We’re looking for people who are from here. A group of stealers. People who have flying... uh...” I hesitated. There wasn’t a word for ‘airship’ in spider, which probably made sense. “Houses,” I settled on.

Mommy bobbed her entire body up and down. “The prooomise-breaakers,” she said with a click.

The click was repeated by all of her many spider friends as a short-lived cacophony.

“Who are the promise-breakers?” I asked.

Mommy turned and pointed behind her and towards the south, more or less in the direction we were headed. “Theeey aree froom the stooone home.”

“And they broke a promise?” I asked.

She bobbed again. “Theey saaaid they wooould neeever reeeetuuurn. Yet, theeeey are heeeere.”

“Are they people like us?” I half turned and gestured to the group behind me.

“Smaaaall foooods, yes, buut nooot like yoou.” The spider leaned forwards. “Taaaller. With flying hooomes and louuud maaagic. Theeeey tauught mee woooords, buut theey broooke the prooomise.”

“What was the promise?” I asked.

“Thaaaat alllll whooo staaands in theeese trees are ouuuur fooood. That noo oone wouuld live in theiiir stoone hooome anymooore. Thaaat my childreeen wouuuldn’t be huuunted.”

“Oh,” I said. Something in Mommy’s body language said that last was the part that hurt her the most. “I think I know who’s responsible. We’re here because they hunted some of our flying homes, and took some of our family. We’re here to take our homes, and the people they took, back.”

Mommy tilted to the side, one of her legs crooking in a sort of ‘go on’ gesture.

“We don’t want to fight you, Mommy. These are your, um, trees. So, how about you let us pass, and we won’t cross your forest again?”

Mommy considered it. “Buuut wee couuuuld eaaat youuu.”

I nodded. “You could. But we don’t want to be eaten, so we’d fight. And then some of your children would be hurt. We’re pretty tough, you know? If you let us pass without issue, then we might be able to do something about those people at the stone, if they’re the people we think they are.”

The giant spider tapped the tip of one long leg against one of the strings spanning the clearing with a bassy thump. “Yeees,” she said at last, one claw running along a string to create the word. “Yooouu wiiiill saaaave myy chiiildren foor me.”

“Um, yeah,” I agreed.

The spider bobbed up and down and clicked happily. Her children did the same, until the forest was filled with echoing clicks. “Gooood. Leave as sooon as yoouuur dooone. Or beecoomme fooood.”

With that, Mommy stepped back and turned around a large tree. Her children rushed ahead, grabbing her instruments in a flurry of motion before skittering after their mom.

The others watched us for a few seconds more, then they tugged on strings and zipped up into the canopy above or climbed around trunks until, finally, we were alone in the forest.

I let out a long breath, relieved at the sudden absence of giant spiders. Still, the fact that they’d disappeared so quickly and quietly was somewhat unnerving.

Carefully, I stepped back and returned to my friends. The formation was still holding, but it was clear that the soldiers were beginning to relax, even if it was just a little. “That was stressful,” I said.

“You did well,” Bastion replied. “That large spider, Mommy, you called it? That would have been a challenge to face even prepared as we were, and a few of the other spiders seemed tough to fight as well.”

Caprica nodded along to the assessment. “We’re fine to carry on, then? I’m not entirely sure I heard everything it said correctly.”

“She said we could. As long as we take care of the people at the stone. Which I’m guessing is an important place nearby? There’s supposed to be a tower, right?”

“Yeah,” Amaryllis said. “Lightning Watch. Weren’t you supposed to ask the palace for information about that?”

Caprica cleared her throat to cover the red splotches growing on her cheeks. “We should head out then, we don’t know if we can trust the spiders not to try and grab a few of us while our guard is down.”

“We’ll change up the formation then,” Bastion said. “We’ll be operating with fewer scouts, only those I trust to be able to sneak past the spiders. And we’ll be moving slower. I doubt we’ll be reaching the tower before tomorrow morning. Maybe even in the afternoon.”

Caprica grimaced, but nodded all the same. “The Royal Pride is waiting on our communication to start its baiting manoeuvres. We have that amount of time, in theory.”

“If we can’t cross the forest again,” Awen said. “Then how will we get to the ships with the hostages?”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s a good question.”

“We won’t want to fight the spiders on the way back,” Bastion said. “We might have to wait at the tower for the ships to come around and retrieve us.”

“That sounds kind of dangerous,” I said. The pirates would be on the lookout for ships, certainly. I didn’t want them launching to fight the Beaver Cleaver especially if I wasn’t onboard.

Bastion started to order people around into a new formation, this one much shorter than the last, and I ended up next to Caprica, surrounded on all sides by watchful sylph soldiers. My friends were right behind us, of course.

We started to move, and this time, all eyes were looking for the signs of a sudden spider attack.

***