by Adam Roberts
‘There you go, lad, bach,’ said On, the first of the dwarfs to arrive. ‘You hop into that, and paddle with all your might.’
Tori was endeavouring to coax Gandef into the other spare coracle. ‘What about the ponies?’ Bingo asked, as he tried to hold the breastplate steady in the water whilst leaning over the edge of the bank.
‘They’ll have to make their own way home, see,’ explained On. But Bingo barely heard, because he had half fallen into the shallow craft and was now several yards offshore, drifting rapidly downstream. He tried paddling, but the arching of his back the action required hurt his spine. He tried lying on his back, and doing a sort of behindways underarm paddling, but it was rather ineffectual. He tried lying on his front, but the sharp rim of the breastplate jagged into his throat. In the end he forced himself to endure the pain in his back, and laboriously paddled and paddled until he was at the far bank. There was nobody around. There was water inside his boots, and his clothes were sodden. He hauled the coracle on to the bank and trudged for an hour upstream with the coracle pulling in the mud. Finally he found the party, settled round a campfire, wizard and all.
The following morning, after another filling breakfast from Biorn’s store – honey-glazed smoked kippers, honey on toast and honeyed orange juice – Bingo felt a little better. ‘Where now?’ he asked. ‘Into the forest, is it?’
‘That’s right, laddo,’ said Mori.
They packed and marched two abreast, towards the line of trees. But Bingo’s jaunty spirits evaporated as they walked into the wood under a tangle of branches that served almost as a gateway, and along a mossy, chilly path. It was very dark. This forest was nothing like the brittle but sunshiny forest of Lord Elsqare the elf. This was gloom in tree form. Fungus grew in broad-peaked clumps beside the pale, speckled tree trunks, looking like nothing so much as old cheese. Everything that Bingo’s fingers or face touched, or that touched him, felt slimy.
‘What a horrid place!’ he declared.
‘Truly,’ agreed Mori, who was walking by his side. ‘This is the evil Mykyurwood. You see those elms over there?’
‘Yes.’
‘They’re oaks.’
Bingo examined them. ‘They look quite like oaks,’ he said. ‘Have they taken the form of elms?’
‘Partially,’ said the dwarf. ‘Enchanted, look you. And those ash trees?’
‘Oaks,’ said Bingo.
‘Good guess,’ said the dwarf.
‘Not really. When you look a little more closely you can see they’re not really ash. They’re oak.’
‘It’s true,’ said Mori, ‘that it’s not a very effective enchantment. But a shape-changing enchantment it is, nonetheless. The wood is filled with mystery and danger.’
‘And must we go through? Cannot we go round?’
‘It’s the most direct route,’ said Mori morosely. ‘Besides, I thought – that is,’ he added hastily, looking around to see if any of the other dwarfs had overheard him, ‘that is, our King Thorri thought – ahem – that we’d enjoy the sensation of something over our heads. Almost like being underground I, he, thought. ’Course, it’s not so pleasant inside, is it? And there are spiders.’
‘I don’t mind spiders,’ said Bingo haltingly. This was a lie.
‘I don’t mean little spiders,’ Mori clarified, ‘not knuckle-sized ones, or fist-sized ones. I mean spiders as big as you. Twice as big.’
‘Should I have to face that peril, I’m confident that my hobbld courage will see me through,’ Bingo replied. This, also, was a lie. A rather bigger lie, in fact.
They walked for the rest of the day and in the evening they camped beside a sluggish, gooey-looking stream that bisected the path. ‘Best not get wet in that water,’ Mori advised. ‘Enchanted, I daresay, boys, see. We’ll find a way over tomorrow.’
That night they slept uncomfortably, and in the morning Mori stood beside the little stream and pondered how they might cross. ‘We could hew a tree, p’raps,’ he suggested. ‘Make a bridge? Or should we try our coracles again?’
But Tori was a scoffer. ‘Are you kidding, boyo?’ he demanded. This was, presumably, a rhetorical question. ‘The stream’s an inch deep, if that. You can’t float a coracle in an inch of water! And what would be the point. ‘Let’s just wade out and walk over. Wasting time chopping down a tree? Ap-surd. Ap-surd.’
‘No no no, Tori boyo,’ insisted Mori. ‘This is the Mykyurwood, see, and its precincts are enchanted.’
‘Its what?’
‘Precincts,’ Mori repeated warily, and with a slightly questioning inflection.
Tori laughed scoffingly.
‘Its,’ said Mori petulantly, searching for a better word, ‘its grounds, its demesne, its general area – it’s all enchanted, see. You don’t know what might happen in that stream! It might put you to sleep, bach. It might be a magic stream.’
‘And it might be just an ordinary, piddling, inch-deep little dribble that we can walk through,’ said Tori.
‘I invite you,’ Mori said hotly, ‘to try.’
‘And try I will,’ said Tori.
He stood at the side of the stream, placed one foot in the water and paused. The water wetted his sole but barely touched the side of his boot. When nothing happened, he turned a victoriously leering face back at the party, and stepped his other foot into the stream. In a trice he was on his back thrashing and kicking his legs up, and before anybody could react he was travelling rapidly downstream, disappearing between the trees. The tiny brook seemed, impossibly, to have become many feet deep, the water much blacker and much, much more rapidly flowing. ‘Help,’ gurgled Tori. ‘Help!’ But he was disappearing into the distance between the lowering trees, and his voice was soon obscured by the roaring of the great and, now, foaming torrent. Boulders flicked past the party, from left to right, caught in the spate.
And then they were standing in the silent gloaming once again, and the stream seemed to be nothing but an inch-deep dribble.
‘Axes,’ said Mori, after a long silence. ‘Axes, everybody.’
‘Should we go after him?’ Bingo asked in a worried voice. But the dwarfs assured him that it would be a foolish business leaving the plain forest path in search of anything at all, even a valued comrade and brother. ‘We’d all perish, you see,’ Mori said. ‘Perhaps Tori has drowned, or perhaps he’ll be washed out of the forest into the River Sprinting that flows through the eastern lands. Either way he is beyond our help.’
They tried chopping down one of the trees that grew alongside the path, but it was an awkward business. The bark was extremely tough and leathery, and it put out some disgusting slimy extrudence, so that the dwarfs’ axe blades slipped and skidded instead of cutting into it. After two hours of exhausting and futile swinging, the dwarfs sat in a gloomy circle.
‘Could the wizard help us?’ Bingo wondered.
But Gandef seemed to have entered a sort of senile fugue state. He smiled and waved when they yelled at him, but nothing they could do – not loud noises, not mimes, not drawing in the ground with a stick – could make him reply.
‘His deafness is much worse now,’ said Mori. ‘Almost complete.’
‘Complete?’ asked Bingo.
‘Indeed,’ said Mori. ‘What did you expect? It’s hardly going to get any better now, is it?’
‘That doesn’t mean it’s going to get worse, though. You’re acting as if you’ve always expected him to go completely deaf.’
Mori looked at the soddit as if he were a moron, and then seemed to recollect himself. ‘Of course, you don’t know, la. See! I’d almost forgotten you weren’t a dwarf! Funny that. Familiarity, I suppose. Got used to you, I have.’
‘I don’t know what?’ Bingo pressed. ‘What is it I don’t know?’
‘Never mind that,’ grumbled Mori.
‘No – seriously. What? You lot have been keeping something from me the whole way along. What is it? Why precisely are we trekking to the Only Mountain?’
‘Gold
,’ said one of the dwarfs in a desultory tone.
‘But it’s not gold, is it?’ said Bingo. ‘Come along, I’m not a complete fool. I know it’s not gold, I just don’t know what it is. Why are we going?’
‘Gold,’ grumbled Mori. ‘Just gold.’
‘Uh!’ said Bingo in despair, and he got up and marched to the edge of the enchanted stream. The trickle looked so inoffensive. The distance from bank to bank was no more than ten feet. Could they not leap over? No, of course they could not.
He returned to the group. ‘If we cannot build a bridge of wood, then we must build a bridge of something else. There are boulders embedded in the mud alongside. Why not roll those out and use them as stepping stones?’
‘An idea,’ said Mori, rousing himself. The six remaining dwarfs and the soddit hauled and heaved and pushed one of the boulders out of its position, and rolled it tortuously until it sat in the stream. Nothing changed.
‘You two,’ said Mori, to Failin and Gofur, ‘hang on to my arms.’
They got into position. Gingerly, Mori reached out with one leg and placed a foot on the side of the large stone. Everybody held their breath. But nothing happened. ‘Here goes,’ said Mori, and pushed off with his other foot. But as soon as this foot left the mud of the streambank there was a great rumble and the boulder shifted position. Foam curled up on its leading edge. Failin and Gofur hauled back and Mori sprawled on the dirt.
The stream was quiet once more.
‘I suppose,’ said Bingo, ‘that we need to cross the stream without anything being in contact with the water.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Mori glumly.
‘What now?’
‘That creeper,’ said Bingo. ‘Do you see it? Hanging down from that branch over the stream. Could we reach it?’
‘With one of these sticks maybe,’ said Mori, picking up a soggily dead branch lying beside the path. ‘We could hook it, draw it to us. You’re thinking we could swing across?’
‘Yes,’ said Bingo.
‘You go,’ said the dwarf. ‘You’re lighter than any of us. If it won’t hold your weight, it won’t hold anyone’s. But if you get across, I’ll give it a go.’
Bingo wasn’t happy with this plan, but he couldn’t deny its basis in the physics of mass and weight.
The dwarfs caught the creeper easily enough, and pulled it towards the nearside bank of the little rill. ‘I’ll take a run-up,’ said Bingo nervously. He paced back along the path, turned, and started running towards the stream. Or, to be precise, not really running. It was more hurrying, a little frenzied scurry. He grabbed the creeper, swung through the air with a wail, pulled up his legs so that they didn’t trail in the water, and found himself rising through the air on the far side.
‘Let go, boyo!’ shouted the dwarfs behind him. ‘You’re over! Hurrah! Let go! Try and roll with the landing when you come down.’
‘Right you are!’ squealed Bingo.
But he couldn’t let go of the creeper. His hands seemed glued to it. The stick the dwarfs had used to fetch it was still attached, lower down. Nor, as his trajectory reached its highest point, did he swing back down again. The leaves that brushed against his body seemed unpleasantly gooey. He found himself almost horizontal, wedged in a mass of adhesive foliage many feet above the ground.
‘Help,’ he cried.
But there was no help. From where he was Bingo could see little: the dark dappling of the forest canopy overhead, his own hands glued to a strand of what, now, he was less prepared to call ‘creeper’. There was a rustling sound beside him.
‘Hello,’ said a snide voice in his ear. ‘What have we here?’
Bingo turned his head.
Squatting on a taut grey thread amongst the leaves sat the biggest spider he had ever encountered. Its fat woolly body sprouted legs at jagged angles, thick leathery black legs, eight of them. It’s worth dwelling on that fact for a moment. Not two legs, mind, like normal beings; nor even four after the manner of some of the mild-eyed beasts of the field. But a wholly superfluous and frankly alarming eight. That’s right, eight. Nasty, eh? Oh yes. The creature’s abdomen curved at the end. Its pinched face wore two twitching mandibles over its v-shaped lips, like a surreal moustache improbably and unpleasantly alive and moving. It had eight eyes, although six of these were small and clustered to the left and the right of the face like pimples. But the two main eyes were huge and red, like glass globes filled with claret, and light played curious spiral effects on anything reflected in their spheres. The spider’s face had, despite all of this, a peculiarly human cast, as if a tubby person were wearing fat red glasses.
‘Come visiting, have you?’ sneered the spider. ‘How pleasant of you. Or perhaps you’ve come colonising, eh? Trying to occupy and exploit the territory of honest working spiders?’
‘Not at all,’ said Bingo, trembling. ‘No, no.’
‘Which is what an imperialist would be bound to say. And speaking of being bound, are you cold there? Shivering? Let me wrap you.’
With dexterous movements of its great fat body the spider hurried round and about Bingo’s body, spooling thick thread from its hindquarters and manipulating this with its two hind legs – which were spindlier and knitting-needlier than the other six. In a moment Bingo was swaddled all about. Only his right arm, still stuck to the strand (which wasn’t, it seemed clear, a creeper after all), was outside the spool.
‘Let me go!’ he squeaked.
But the spider had no intention of letting him go. Tutting to himself, the spider smeared a secretion on to Bingo’s hand to release the glue, and then tucked the free arm down at his side and swirled it around with another loop of cable. Luckily for Bingo – as it turned out – he did this hurriedly, and as he picked up the little soddit and started transporting it through the treetops the cable sagged and Bingo got his arm free. But the canny soddit kept it at his side, for fear that the spider would bind it again if he noticed it was loose.
Bingo was carried a long way into the forest. All through this bumpy, unpleasant journey he was racking his brains to think of a way of signalling to the dwarfs – to warn them of the danger, and to prompt them, perhaps, to rescue him. But he could think of nothing, and as they arrived at the spider’s commune he saw it was a needless task. Seven figures were dangling from a branch, each of them wrapped tightly in spider cord: six of these were dwarfs, and one was a wizard.
‘Good grief,’ said Bingo.
‘Hello, boyo,’ said the dwarf nearest him. It was Frili. ‘You here?’
‘What happened to you?’
‘We saw you getting stuck, see, and Mori shouted that the best plan was the one with axes in it. We dwarfs tend to prefer plans if they’ve got axes in them. So we hurried to our packs, only these here spider boys had spread sticky thread across the path, about six inches up. We all fell, got our shins and our boots caught in it. We might have ditched the boots and got away, but beards is a different matter. So then they were all over us, see, and here we are.’
‘At least,’ came a voice from further along the dangling line – Bingo recognised it as Mori’s – ‘at least we’re over the enchanted stream. Carried over by the spiders, see.’
Bingo found it hard to take much comfort from that particular development.
The spiders were scurrying about from branch to branch, from fibre to fibre. They were an imposing-looking bunch. Where most people are content to grow beards from their faces only, spiders enjoy growing beards from all of their many legs. In addition to which they had bristles, thick black stubble, sharp-looking lashes, and other forms of shorter hair all over their bodies. They produced a great deal of silk, strands thick as wool which they wove into a number of things, only some of them liable to kill. Their scarves, for instance, were quite highly sought after: warm, if slightly creepy personal adornments. Sweaters, socks, blankets, furniture, roofing tiles, boots, wigs, farming implements and swords, all were knitted by the tireless spiders. Some of these products, frankly, wo
rked better than others; but they were all traded by the spiders with the glum, rather deprived peoples who lived east of the Mykyurwood. The spiders also undertook special jobs for customers who were prepared to pay over the odds – they might, for example, go to people’s houses and cover everything with gossamer cobwebs as an April Fool’s joke. Or if a woman were abandoned at the altar by her shiftless groom, a spider would be called in to cover the bridal chambers and the bride herself with cobwebs, so that she could feel properly miserable.
But their trading life had not endeared them to the populations of the open plains. Rather the reverse, in fact. People, not to put too fine a point on it, hated them. Not all people, but most people. Worse, the few people who actively liked the spiders were – there’s no other word – weirdos.2 All the reasonable people hated the spiders with a reflex hatred. They flinched, they shrieked, they ran away, they said things like, ‘Eee! Ugh! Ugh! Ugh! Rachel! Rachel! Can you get in here and help me, there’s an absolutely enormous spider in the front room—’ People traded with them, of course, because people will trade with anybody and anything if the anybody or anything has something they want. But people thought them flesh-creepingly horrible.
Which they were. Even the nicest of them.
This climate of opinion had wrought its work upon the spiders’ souls. The spiders of Mykyurwood were bitter. They had been non-specifically bitter for many years, until one of their number had returned from his travels with a number of socialist tracts and keyworks,3 and the whole commune had become politicised. The spiders had changed from being simply bitter, to becoming envious, chip-on-shoulder lefties.4 They were sharply aware of the general anti-spider prejudice of society, the oppressive ideological construction of spiders in Upper-Middle-Earthian culture in which ‘spider’ occupies the position of hate-figure, the ‘other’ by which the fascist state defines its own social identity – and why? Why? Let me tell you, comrades, only because spiders are archetypal proletarian individuals, tireless workers whose exploited labour benefits everybody – pest control, weaving and textiles – make no mistake, comrades, it is rampant imperialist legism, that’s what it is, unreconstructed hairy fangism. Well, comrades, it’s time spiders banded together, formed a union, took their protest to the streets. Spiders of the world unite! We have nothing to lose but our sticky threads.