by Adam Roberts
Bingo’s first thought when he realised the seriousness of his predicament was to be thankful that his right arm was free of the binding. But a long and unsuccessful attempt to unpick his cords left him with nothing but broken nails. The cord was too strong, and too sticky. He cast about, but all he could reach with his free arm were handfuls of leaves.
Bingo decided the thing to do was to negotiate his and the dwarfs’ way out of captivity.
‘Hey!’ he called. ‘Hello! Excuse me!’
One of the fatter spiders broke off from the general spider mêlée and brought his glistening spider face close to Bingo’s. ‘Yes?’
‘Sir, I was wondering, O mighty spider,’ said Bingo, his voice warbling a little, ‘if I might be permitted a brief word with your mighty and dread monarch – king or queen, I, alas, do not know, but whichever powerful ruler leads your folk. If that’s all right with you, sir.’
This is entirely the wrong way to speak to spiders.
For a long time the spider’s huge red eyes simply regarded Bingo. The soddit could see his own face, smeared through a weird arc, twice over, looking back at himself.
Then the spider said: ‘Well, in the first instance, I might question your automatic assumption I am a man – I might, I say, ask that, were it not patently the case that your assumption is grounded in a gender essentialism, an unreconstructed masculinism and phallogo-centric privileging of the male. As it happens I am a male, but my gender is of no political relevance.’
Bingo didn’t really follow this. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Good.’
‘And in the second instance,’ the spider continued, ‘your whole statement is premised on the idea that our collective is hierarchically governed by a fascist-style dictatorial monarchical individual, and would be insulting were it not so patently an archaic hangover from an exploded ideological practice to become almost postmodern in its irony.’
Bingo tried to digest this, but it sat uncomfortably in his mind like raw eggs in a queasy stomach. ‘Exactly,’ he said uncertainly.
The spider, far from mollified, seemed to become more furious. ‘If that isn’t typical of your pin-eyed, scrawny, running-dog, web-destroying imperialistic lackey-mentality enemies of the eight-legged working classes,’ he said, and lumbered away.
‘Where’s he going?’ asked Frili.
‘Off to get his leader,’ said Bingo chirpily. ‘I think. I’ll do a quick parley and get us out of here.’
But one hour turned to two, and Bingo came to the conclusion that the spiders were going to leave the party dangling there until they died. ‘Do you suppose,’ he asked Frili, ‘they intend to eat us?’
‘Unless they intend using us as festive decorations,’ the dwarf returned.
Bingo pondered.
‘Mori!’ he called. ‘Mori! We must get through to Gandef. He can save us with one of his magic spells! He can save us.’
‘Your optimism is touching, my lad,’ returned Mori. ‘If misplaced. But, bach, I’ll have a go.’
The wizard was sleeping. How he could sleep at a time like this was beyond Bingo’s comprehension. But sleeping he was. Mori shouted and yelled, but no sound penetrated the wizard’s ear. ‘It’s as I said, boyo,’ the dwarf called. ‘He’s deaf as a rugby ball.’
‘Wait a mo,’ said Bingo.
He stretched out his free right hand and grasped as many leaves as he could. Using his muscles in ways he had not used them before, he pulled with all his might, and slowly his bound pendant body began to move in an arc, a little away from the proximate body of Frili and a little into the air. He hauled. Sweat came. He moaned with the effort, and hauled some more. When he was perhaps forty degrees from the perpendicular, he let go. Swinging back to his former position he collided, breath-removingly, with Frili. Frili grunted in surprise but did not move; nor did Failin, On, Thorri, Gofur nor Mori. But Gandef, at the far end of the row, was propelled suddenly into the air.
‘Eh?’ he said, popping awake. He swung up, paused, swung down and Bingo felt himself jerked up again. ‘Quick,’ he squealed. ‘Gandef! Help!’
Swing up, pause, swing down, clack.
A moment later Gandef’s crotchety voice could be heard. ‘Liberties! Hey! Wo-oh!’
Swing up, pause, swing down, clack.
Bingo’s third swing upwards attracted the attention of the spiders. They came nimbly hurrying over branch and thread to stop the motion. ‘What are you doing? Stop that!’ they said, grabbing both Bingo and Gandef with their powerful forelegs and halting the swinging motion. ‘Dangle good,’ they abdured.
‘We demand to speak to somebody in authority,’ squealed Bingo. ‘Or it’ll be the worse for you! One of our number is a mighty wizard – he will enchant you! Let us go, I warn you.’
The nearest spider’s great red globe eyes were unreadable. They stared at the soddit, and all the party. ‘Which of you is the wizard?’
‘What?’ shouted Gandef, abruptly and crossly awake. ‘What was all that commotion? Why can’t a wizard have a little nap?’
‘Gandef!’ shouted Bingo. ‘Do something!’
‘Your hearing spell!’ yelled the dwarfs.
‘Why can’t I move my arms?’ the wizard complained. ‘Why is everybody mumbling? Is this some kind of dumb show?’
Several spiders clustered around the wizard.
‘Ah!’ said Gandef, fixing one with a stern glance. ‘Is that you, Mori?’
Bingo’s heart sank.
‘A pie, I think,’ said the wizard meditatively. ‘A liver pie. And for desert, a cherry pie. In fact, to save time, just bring me a liver and cherry pie.’
‘So,’ said one of the spiders. ‘This is your wizard, you say? He seems a little blind. And a little deaf.’
‘A little,’ Mori conceded. ‘But you don’t want to get him riled, believe me.’
We have,’ this spider announced, retreating to a slightly higher bough to address the whole group, ‘had a discussion concerning your fate in the Committee Ordinary, which requires a simple majority for its decision, although the final motion may have to be ratified in a higher forum with a two-thirds threshold.’
The dwarfs and the soddit had fallen silent. All except Gandef, who was singing, ‘Fair and fair, and twice so fair, as fair as any may be, the fairest shepherd on our green, a love for any lady’ in a warbly voice.
‘Our dilemma,’ the spider announced, ‘has to do with an earlier motion of solidarity with the bearded-oppressed of the world, passed during the spring session of the General Council of Working Spiders last year. Clearly your wizard, and you dwarfs, fall into this category. Can we assume that you too have experienced oppression and struggled under the hammer of anti-beardist antagonism?’
‘Oh yes,’ said the dwarfs.
‘And that you have never been tempted, basely, to remove you beards and ape the imperialist decadence of smooth skin?’
‘Oh no,’ said the dwarfs, in unison.
‘It may be possible,’ said the spider, ‘to rehabilitate you. Our workshops may be able to knit you artificial limbs, four for each of you, to wear about your torsos. And we do have certain ocular accessories, fashioned with red glass, that you could wear. But your eighth member, the beardless one …’
Everybody turned to look at Bingo.
‘… his clothing and his lamentably smooth face would condemn him, even if his crypto-feudal vocabulary had not already done so. Is he a dwarf? We’ve not seen his like before.’
There was a certain amount of confusion amongst the dwarfs at this. ‘No,’ cried some. ‘Yes!’ cried others. ‘Certainly he is!’ bellowed Mori.
The spiders conferred.
‘We are not convinced,’ said the lead spider. ‘It seems to us that either he is the odd one out, and that the rest of you are comrades-in-beards (perhaps he is a ninth-columnist,5 a spy sent amongst you), or else – and this is as yet undetermined – you are all of the same party, pin-eyed insurgents, enemies of the workers, and that all your beards are false.’
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br /> ‘Nonsense!’ bellowed Mori, his tightly wrapped body twisting a little on its thread. ‘None of our beards are falsies, look you! Tug away, tug away on any of our beards, and you’ll find nothing but good working-class facial hair. None,’ he added, ‘of your bourgeois false beards here.’
A smaller spider, with a slightly speckled belly and back, twitched forward. ‘I’ll take you at your word comrade,’ he said, and scurried sideways until he was directly in front of Gandef.
‘Ah, Bongo,’ said Gandef, his eyes twirling. ‘You know what I hate? “Howdy doody”. Ridiculous phrase.’
‘What,’ said the spider, ‘is it saying?’
‘Nothing,’ said Mori hurriedly. ‘He – eh – had a knock on the head, and his wits are a little disordered. But they’re still to-the-core proletarian wits, even in their disarranged state.’
‘If you cut a hole in the top of a turnip,’ observed Gandef, ‘you can put a candle in there.’
‘Test his beard!’ called the spiders further back.
The spider in front of Gandef reached out a forelimb, and grasped Gandef’s luxurious grey beard.
‘Oi!’ objected the wizard.
The spider yanked down. Gandef’s beard came away in his claw.
Bingo gasped.
The bald, liver-spotted chin of the old man waggled in the breeze. ‘Chilly,’ he declared. ‘What happened to my beard? Is that it there?’
The spiders had huddled together in a conference. One of them scurried along the length of the bound and dangling dwarfs, tugging on each of their beards in turn. None other instance of dwarfish facial hair was removable. After further discussion the lead spider turned to address the group.
‘We have decided on clemency,’ it announced. ‘We shall eat most of you, and lay eggs in the beardless ones.’ With this they scurried away.
‘Oh dear,’ said Frili, after a while.
‘I don’t understand,’ pressed Bingo. ‘What happened? Why was Gandef wearing a false beard?’
‘He wasn’t wearing a false beard,’ snapped Mori.
‘Then why did his beard come away in the spider’s claw? Was it magic?’
‘No,’ said Mori. ‘Simply a sign of ageing, look you.’
‘I don’t understand,’ repeated Bingo.
‘When you get older,’ Mori explained wearily, sometimes you lose your hair. Humans and soddits sometimes lose their head hair. Wizards – eh, um, they sometimes lose their beard hair.’
‘But all at once? In a great clump?’
‘They’re strange that way,’ Mori mumbled. ‘Wizards.’
‘This is daft,’ said Bingo. ‘Something’s wrong. This doesn’t make sense. There’s something you’re not telling me. In fact, there’s a whole range of things you’re not telling me.’
‘It hardly matters now,’ said the dwarf. ‘We’re to be eaten. You’re to have eggs laid in you. And so we come to our sticky end. Dew.’
Bingo was silent for a while. He was trying, with his free hand, to force apart the thick strands of spider silk at his waist and flip his fingers inside his waistcoat pocket. ‘Things may not be beyond all hope,’ he announced. ‘When I was underneath the Minty Mountains, I – chanced – upon a Thing®. A magic Thing® in fact. Perhaps it can help us.’
This caused a great stir amongst the dwarfs. Or, to be precise, it caused them to stir as much as was possible, which, given that they were all bound extremely tightly by spider silk, was not very much.
‘Why didn’t you tell us about this before?’ Mori demanded.
‘I was shy,’ said Bingo.
‘Shyster,’ retorted Failin, ‘more like.’
‘Shy – like a fox,’ opined Gofur, with disgust in his voice.
‘I wanted to keep it to myself, that’s all,’ insisted the soddit. ‘But it is definitely a magic Thing®. Sollum was awfully keen to get it back. Murderously keen. Maybe it can help us out of this pickle.’
‘Can you get it out of your pocket?’ asked Frili, wriggling to try and rotate himself so as to see Bingo better.
‘It’s tricky,’ said Bingo, squeezing his fingers into a spike and thrusting them between the tight cables. He could, just about, get his forefinger and middle finger through. Indeed, he was a luckier soddit than he knew: his spider captor had freed him from the sticky thread that he had mistaken for a swinging forest creeper by smearing a chemical desolvent over his hand and arm. Some traces of this remained on his skin, or else his right hand would have stuck fast to the threads and he would have been trapped. As it was, the tightness of his bonds meant that he could barely reach inside his pocket with two fingers, and could tantalisingly only just touch the Thing® inside.
‘Wait a mo,’ he said.
‘Hurry,’ said Mori. ‘I can see the spiders through the leaves. I think they’re gathering their eggs.’
Bingo scissored his two fingers, and felt the Thing® jiggle around at the bottom of his pocket. He tried several times to cup his forefinger nail underneath it and scoop it round, but it kept slipping away. A grotesquely obese purple-grey spider clambered past them on his way somewhere else. Bingo’s heart was thudding.
‘Almost,’ he said.
He tried bending one of his fingers in line with the normal action of a knuckle, and bending the other finger in the opposite way, so as to produce a finger pincer. But such finger distortions are achievable only by guitar players, and Bingo was no such person.
‘Almost,’ he said.
Then, with another little tip of luck, the Thing® slipped into place between his two fingers. He drew it out very slowly, easing it past the confining threads, and when it was clear he closed it into the palm of his hand.
‘Let’s have a look,’ urged Frili.
Bingo held up the Thing®.
‘Ooo!’ said the dwarfs. Even those who couldn’t see it. ‘Ooo!’
‘Do you know how it works?’ Bingo asked. ‘Do you know what it is? When I was trapped under the Minty Mountains it helped me orient myself. I don’t know how, but it seemed to help me run faster, and helped me run in the right direction.’
‘This is one of the famous Things® of Saron,’ said Mori, in a hushed voice. The feats you speak of are the least of its accomplishments. The Evil Sharon made it in the mighty workshop of Dumb, and it has been long lost to—’
‘Never mind that now,’ interrupted Bingo. ‘Do you know how it works? They’ll be back to lay eggs in me any minute now. Is there something I can do with it?’
‘All right, boyo, all right,’ said Mori in a sulky voice. ‘I was only giving you some of the background, la. It’s a powerful Thing®, is that. Powerful magic.’
‘Do you know how it works, though?’
‘Well,’ said Mori, turning the word from something uttered in a brief moment to something spoken over several seconds. ‘No,’ he concluded finally.
‘I do,’ said a small voice.
‘Well that’s no use to us, is it?’ snapped Bingo. ‘Why didn’t you say so right at the beginning instead of – hold on, hold on, who said that?’
There was silence.
‘Me,’ said the small voice.
‘Who?’
‘Thorri,’ said the voice, even smaller.
‘You know how it works?’ asked Mori incredulously. ‘How do you know how it works?’
‘It’th jutht one of the thingth that we Kingth have to know about,’ said Thorri.
‘Well?’ prompted Bingo.
‘It hath many functionth,’ said Thorri. ‘The evil Tharon who forged it built many magic athpects into the devithe. But the motht important one is itth powerful magic of oppothed reverthibility.’
‘Of what?’
‘Of,’ Thorri repeated in a still smaller voice, ‘oppothed reverthibility.’
‘OK,’ said Bingo. ‘Never mind what it’s called. How does it work?’
‘You thpeak your wordth through the Thing®,’ said Thorri. ‘And it will make the reverth of your wordth the truth.’
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nbsp; ‘The reverse of my words?’ asked Bingo.
‘But it mutht be a thtatement!’ urged Thorri. ‘Don’t uthe the Thing® to make a conventional wish – it will only reverthe the wish and make it the thing you wish for leatht in the whole world. A thimple statement. The thpiders are coming!’
‘The spiders are coming,’ echoed Bingo. But Thorri was only speaking the truth. The spiders were indeed marching towards them, and with them were some egg-stocked females with uncomfortably determined expressions on their spider faces.
‘Well, here goes,’ said Bingo. He brought the Thing® up to his mouth, and spoke directly through it. ‘The spiders are coming,’ he said.
And, as soon as he finished saying it, the spiders were marching in exactly the opposite direction, determinedly hurrying away from the party.
‘Blimey,’ said Bingo.
But this was a weak spell. As soon as the spiders realised they were going in the wrong direction they stopped, slightly puzzled, turned their fat bodies around on their eight legs, and started making their way back towards them.
This – although Thorri didn’t have time to explain the point – is the other important thing about the magic Thing®. Its magic does indeed consist in reversing the truth value of statements spoken through it, but its magic also depends on the subtle balance of all the magic force in the whole world. It is not infinitely capable. If one were to speak something huge enough through the device – say, ‘The earth goes around the sun’ – it might very well exhaust its magic in trying to make the reverse true. As it happens, in the many thousands of years since it was made its magic had waned considerably. When it was fresh from Sharon’s workbench, it might, just perhaps, have had the magic power to spin the sun around the earth, with all the cataclysmic consequences of that action. But now, separated from its creator for so long, it could come nowhere near achieving so massive a reversal. Instead it would do the best, or the worst, it could. It might reverse the direction of the earth’s orbit – such that the earth comes around the sun – or it might (if even that required too much magic power) simply fuse, close down, break, and its magic would drain out of it. Accordingly it was to be used with extreme caution: the unwary user might break it, or might do themselves, or the whole world, great damage.