“There’s no need for that,” Daraul said. “These are only savages from the desert.” He said it without contempt, merely stating a fact.
One of the men said: “Then what are they doing here?”
“I don’t know. It’s orders from above.”
As if relieved of some burden on their attention, the men turned away and ignored the newcomers. Some were eating food from bowls, others were sewing or repairing sandals. The room was warm from the heat of their bodies and smelt of sweat.
Massig touched Daraul’s arm. “If you like, I’ll look after them and find them somewhere to sleep.”
Daraul looked at him with the same blank incomprehension that he had shown when Niall offered to get out of the cart. Massig put his hand on Niall’s shoulder. “He’s a friend of mine. We’d like to talk.”
“What about?” Daraul asked.
“Oh, all kinds of things — how we got here, for example.”
Daraul shrugged, still looking baffled. “Oh, all right.”
It struck Niall that Daraul, like most of the other men in the room, was of a low degree of intelligence, but in no way hostile.
During the next half hour, Massig found beds for them. They had to carry oil lamps and walk along a black corridor to some remote part of the basement. In a big, musty-smelling room there were dozens of beds in various states of disrepair. Fortunately, their legs seemed interchangeable, fixing into wooden sockets, so they were able to assemble three relatively undamaged frames. These they carried back to the main room, Massig helping Siris with hers. Another dusty room revealed piles of ancient mattresses stuffed with fragments of rag, while another was filled with blankets, many rotting with damp. Niall was too tired to care. Siris yawned so much that they left her lying on Massig’s bed while they went in search of pillows — these were made of wood and covered with a thin layer of leather; when they returned, she was fast asleep.
Next Massig took them to the communal kitchen; this was uncomfortably hot, due to a huge iron stove which had been stoked with firewood. There seemed to be an abundance of vegetables, and even a big metal bowl filled to the top with some dubious-looking meat. Niall was too tired to cook; he settled for a bowl of a green coloured soup from a tureen on the stove, with a chunk of hard brown bread. This tasted far better than it looked — in fact, was so full of interesting flavours that he went back for a second helping. Their beds were erected in a corner of the basement room, and they sat and ate with their backs propped against the wall. The man in the next bed to Niall looked at him in a friendly way and said: “You’re too thin. We’ll soon fatten you up.” It was a remark he was to hear constantly during the course of the next day or so. It was not simply a jocular comment, intended to make conversation, but a serious observation, stated with deep conviction. Among the charioteers, eating seemed almost a religion.
While they ate, Niall listened to the conversation that went on around them. He was hoping to achieve some insight into the minds of the human inhabitants of the spider city. But he soon grew bored. The men seemed obsessed by various games — many of them played a game that involved a handful of carved wooden sticks — and talked endlessly about a long-awaited match between the charioteers and the food gatherers in two days’ time, involving some kind of ball. There were times when Niall had the hallucinatory feeling that he had accidentally tuned in to the collective mind of the ants. Yet for all their obvious lack of intelligence, these men seemed good natured and kindly enough, and once they had become accustomed to the presence of Niall and his companions, treated them as if they were all part of a large family group. After a lifetime of reliance on himself and his small family, Niall found this sense of communal identity rather pleasant and relaxing.
As they ate, Massig described how Kazak’s city had been overrun. The story was soon told. Two days after Ulf and Niall had left for home, the antherds had failed to return in the evening. A search party, led by Hamna, had also failed to return. The next morning, when Massig woke up, he found himself unable to move. . . Niall could already guess the rest of the story. The spiders marched straight into the city, led by one of the antherds, who was terrified out of his wits. No one stood a chance. Many men were killed. In Massig’s opinion, this was not because they showed signs of resistance, but simply because the spiders were hungry. A number of children were also killed and eaten. The rest had been taken away, and were now here in the spider city under the care of nurses.
There seemed to be hordes of spiders — hundreds of them, mostly the brown wolf spiders (whom Massig called soldiers). It was they who organised the long march to the sea. Massig admitted that this was less of an ordeal than he expected. They were well fed, and when anyone showed signs of exhaustion, the spiders either allowed them to rest or ordered them to be carried on improvised stretchers. When the prisoners arrived in the spider city, all were in relatively good health.
Massig described how they were paraded in the main square, in front of the white tower, and the mothers reunited with their children. But this was not to last. The men were divided into groups and assigned to various tasks. Some became food gatherers, some agricultural workers, some city workers, some — like Massig — charioteers. The women were not separated; they were taken, all together, to the central part of the city reserved for women. For, Massig explained, women were revered in the city of the spiders. Among spiders, the female is more important than the male — she often eats him after courtship. The spiders found the human system of treating women as household slaves deeply offensive to their natural instincts. So women were trained to be the masters, men the servants. Since the women of Kazak’s city had become accustomed to domination by the males, they would have to be re-educated. Until they learnt to assume their new role as masters, they would be kept segregated from their husbands.
Niall asked: “And what about the children?” He was thinking of his sisters.
“They’re kept in a nursery not far from the women. But the women won’t be allowed to see them until they’ve been re-educated.”
Massig had now been here about a month. The work was hard but he had no serious complaints. Every morning the charioteers had to report to the square at the centre of the Women’s Section; their job was to take the overseers to work — some to the fields, some to the docks, some to other parts of the city. It was not a bad job, especially if you could get the city run. The dock run was the hardest, and Massig suspected he had been assigned to it as a punishment; one of the women had overheard him referring to — here Massig looked nervously around and lowered his voice — referring to the masters as “spiders”.
Niall was puzzled. “But what’s wrong with that?”
“They say its disrespectful — talking about them as if they’re insects.”
“But I met a man in the docks who called them crawlies,” Niall said.
“Sshh!” Massig looked round in alarm, but no one was listening. “Who on earth was that?”
“A man with a funny name — Bill, I think he said. . .”
“Oh, he’s not one of us. He works for the beetles. His name’s Bill Doggins.” He said it with contempt, and Niall was secretly amused at the way Massig had already learned to identify with his fellow workers.
“Billdoggins?”
“Bill Doggins. He’s got two names for some reason. The men who work for the beetles says it’s an old tradition.”
Veig leaned forward and asked in a low voice: “Do you think there’s any chance of escaping from here?”
Massig looked horrified. “No! Not the slightest. Where would you escape to? They’d simply hunt you down. But why should you want to escape? It’s not a bad life here.”
“Well to begin with, I don’t want to be a slave.”
“Slave? But we’re not slaves.”
Veig asked ironically: “No? What are you?”
“We’re servants. That’s quite different. The real slaves live on the other side of the river. They’re all idiots.”
“Why, what’s wrong with them?”
“I’ve told you — they’re idiots, quite literally. They look like monsters.” Massig did an imitation of a man with a slack jaw, glazed eyes and blubber lips.
“Why do they want slaves if they’ve got servants?” Niall asked.