Shadowland. Spider World 06 by Colin Wilson

Within a quarter of an hour they were back on the road, with the air full of birdsong. Behind them, the Sun was only just above the still surface of the lake. And above them, perhaps a hundred feet in the air, flapped Niall’s self-appointed guardian, the raven.

The clarity of the morning and the sight of the snowcapped mountains against the blue sky caused a rising bubble of happiness that was like intoxication. Here on the slopes of the mountains, the leaves were beginning to turn brown, and some had already fallen; it was Niall’s first experience of the beauty of autumn.

The road they were following was so overgrown with grass that it was no longer clearly visible. But the captain seemed to have no doubt of his direction, and Niall soon concluded that he possessed some kind of inner compass. Where there seemed to be a choice of two ways, he chose one without hesitation.

Niall himself was experiencing that pleasant sense of wide-awakeness that he often felt in the early morning. Back in his palace, he was usually awake before dawn, and went to the roof to watch the sun rise. On a clear day he could see the outline of these northern mountains against the sky. Then he experienced this same feeling of excitement and optimism, as if he was on the brink of some marvelous discovery. Now the excitement was so strong that it was almost uncomfortable, and he felt he was beginning to grasp its full import. It was not simply a feeling of physical or emotional well-being, but a recognition that the world, when seen with this wide-awakeness, is entirely good.

Another thought caused him deep satisfaction: that he was not only enjoying wearing the thought mirror with its concave side turned toward his chest, but was at last becoming accustomed to it. Wearing the thought mirror was rather like swimming — more difficult than walking on land, but more exhilarating.

This was evidenced by the fact that, in spite of his increased concentration, he was aware of the presence of nature spirits in the woods. As they approached one huge, gnarled tree, whose bark was so thick and knotty that it looked as if it had been carved by a sculptor, he thought he saw an old man sitting among the roots; but when he looked more closely, the shape vanished, making it apparent that this must be its resident spirit. And in one place where the trees were spaced widely apart, yet so tall that the air was green and shadowy, he saw several more old men whose faces were so similar that they might have been members of the same family.

It was clear that the captain could not see them, for he never gave them a glance. The reason, Niall realized, was that spider perception is limited by a basic interest in nature as a source of food. Therefore, anything else was ignored.

In one sunny clearing, the air was loud with the buzzing of insects; its source proved to be the bloodstained bones of some dead animal that were covered by large fat bluebottles, many an inch long.

As they approached, the buzzing ceased as the captain paralyzed them with will-force, then paused for a few minutes to eat them one by one, his tarsal claw picking them up as delicately as if they were sugared cakes. He even offered Niall one, but Niall smiled politely and shook his head. “Thank you, but I have only just eaten.” Unaware that this was intended as a joke, the spider went on crunching the faintly buzzing flies with gusto.

Niall was puzzled by the state of the bones, which were shattered and fragmented. The only way this could have happened was if the carcass had been dropped from a great height. But this was hard to credit, since the creature was the size of a cow.

The captain read Niall’s mind.

“It came from the sky.”

“But what dropped it?”

What the captain conveyed to Niall’s mind was an image that seemed to be of some kind of bird, but with a face that resembled a turtle.

“Where I was born the slaves called them ‘oolus.’ ”

The word was accompanied by an image like an egg, which confused Niall even more.

The sight of the cracked, broken bones disturbed and disgusted him. He asked: “Is it dangerous?”

The captain’s reply, compressed into a terse image, could be translated as: “Not for me.”

Ten minutes later, they passed a decaying log covered in twists of orange fungus. Niall was gazing at it, enchanted by its bizarre beauty, when he noticed a tiny round face, as orange as the fungi, peeping at him from under the log. It was yet another tree spirit, and Niall was aware that he would not have noticed it if his senses had been less alert. His concentration made everything more interesting, or rather, made him aware that everything he looked at was more interesting then he supposed, and that our human senses are too dull and narrow to see it.

Crossing a stream in the middle of a wood, they stopped to drink, and the spider paused at the side of the running water, enjoying the sunlight that covered the ground in fragmented tree shadows. In a human being, its state of mind would have been called laziness, but in a spider was merely an expression of its lack of sense of time. Niall sat down on a rock, and took the opportunity to transfer his consciousness to the raven, which was perched on a high branch.

Since meeting the captain, Niall had been concerned in case the spider saw the raven as a potential meal. But he seemed to sense that Niall had his reasons for wanting the bird to remain alive.

From behind the raven’s eyes, Niall could look down on the gently rolling landscape of the foothills, which became suddenly steeper to the north, forming a clifflike wall. The bird, he noticed, enjoyed playing host to his consciousness, which gave its world an extra dimension, and responded to his suggestions like an extension of his own body. Suddenly, Niall could understand how easily the Magician could control the minds of birds, and use them as spies.

Since the captain seemed to show an inclination to rest in the dappled shade, Niall caused the bird to launch itself from the branch and fly upward. Its powerful wings soon carried it to a height of a quarter of a mile, enabling him to see that a few miles ahead, the apparently unbroken wall of cliffs contained a gap, from which a broad stream flowed. This obviously had been formed by some geological upheaval, and then smoothed and deepened by the river. Running northwest, it might have formed a shortcut to the Valley of the Dead, except that its slope was uncomfortably steep and ended in a jagged pinnacle like a finger pointing at the sky. The top of this pinnacle glittered as if it contained a very bright light.

On the near side of this valley, on a level with the skyline, Niall was interested to observe a ruined town or village with a broken wall, which reminded him of the coastal town of Cibilla. Like Cibilla, this place obviously dated to the days before the spider conquest.

Niall was tempted to get the raven to overfly it, but rejected the idea, since the captain might wonder why they were pausing for so long.

He was right. The spider had moved into the shade of a great conifer, and was waiting patiently for Niall to emerge from his reverie.

The road had now disappeared completely, but the direction they were following led them downhill and into another valley with a lake that was about two miles long. The grassy plain beside the water was easier on the feet than the rough mountainside, and if it had not been for the spider’s dislike of water, Niall would have been glad to stop for a bathe. As it was, the uphill road out of the far end of the valley gave Niall his first ground-level sight of the gap in the mountains.

Niall pointed to it, and asked the captain if he had ever explored it.

“No. There would be no point, since it leads nowhere.”

Niall persisted. “That is a pity, since it would shorten our road by many miles. Are you sure it leads nowhere?”

He had in mind the notion that the inhabitants of the ruined town might have created some steep and narrow path that led downhill to the Valley of the Dead.

“I cannot be certain, since I have never been that way.”

Niall sensed, nevertheless, that the captain found the idea of a shortcut agreeable.

This is why, more than two hours later, when they were close enough to the valley to hear the sound of rushing water, they made no attempt to find a way across the river, but turned left into the valley whose dark cliffs, lined with horizontal veins of dark blue and purple crystal, were more than a thousand feet high.