This thought was passing through his mind as his eye caught a blur of movement at the edge of his vision. Then he was hurled forward on to the ground with such force that the breath was knocked from his body. Powerful forelegs seized him and turned him over; his arms pressed to his sides, he was lifted clear of the ground. He screamed as he found himself looking into black, featureless eyes, while unfolded fangs were raised to strike. Instinctively, he froze, hoping to disarm the aggression by immobility. Then claws seized him from behind; he felt the pannier removed from his back, and a loop of sticky silk passed around his body, pinioning his arms.
When the first shock had passed, he became oddly calm. It may have been the humanoid look of the faces that reassured him. They might have been intelligent lobsters, with the faces of old men. At close quarters, the hunting spiders had a peculiar, musky smell which was not unpleasant. When unfolded, their fangs were terrifying; but when folded into the chelicerae, they looked not unlike two elaborately curled bunches of hair at the end of a beard. After those first few terrifying seconds, when Niall expected to be injected with poison, he understood that they had no intention of harming him, and allowed them to see, by his passivity, that he had no intention of trying to escape.
The spider that held him raised his body clear of the ground so the other spider could tie his ankles. Whilst moist, the silk had an elastic, pliable quality; yet although scarcely thicker than a blade of marram grass, it seemed virtually unbreakable. Niall’s ankles felt glued together.
When his arms and legs had been secured, Niall was swung over onto the spider’s back, and held there by its pedipalps — the nearest thing a spider possesses to a pair of arms — and then, suddenly, they were in motion, flying over the hard ground at a speed that made his head whirl. The spider ran with a loping motion, so Niall bounced up and down with every long stride. When, periodically, he seemed about to fall sideways off the velvety back, the spider reached up with its forelegs, without breaking its stride, and readjusted his position. Behind them ran the other wolf spider, carrying Niall’s pack.
Niall had often seen the camel spider — or solifugid — travelling across the desert at this speed, looking like a ball of windblown grass; he had never expected to look down on the ground as it flashed past his eyes at fifty miles an hour. He tried turning his head sideways and focusing his eyes on the horizon; this made him feel less dizzy, but the bumping of his head against the spider’s back made it impossible to keep his gaze fixed for more than a few moments at a time. Finally he closed his eyes, gritting his teeth, and concentrated on enduring the jerky motion that made the blood roar in his ears.
Then, quite suddenly, he was lying on the ground, and there was a face looking down at him. A moment later, he recognised the familiar smell of his mother’s hair as she held him tight against her and kissed his face. Then Veig helped him into a sitting position and held a cup with water to his lips. His mouth felt dry, and his throat was full of dust, so he coughed violently when he tried to swallow. He realised that his hands and legs were now free, although the skin was torn where the sticky web had been pulled away.
His senses cleared; he realised he must have fainted. The spider on whose back he had travelled — the largest of the four, and obviously the leader — was standing there, looking at him with its featureless black eyes; the line between its mouth and the folded chelicerae looked like a pair of downturned lips, pursed in disapproval, while the row of smaller eyes below the main ones looked like some curious disfigurement, a row of shiny, black warts. It was not even breathing heavily.
Veig said: “Do you feel strong enough to walk?”
“I think so.” He stood up unsteadily. Siris began to cry.
“They say we have to move on,” Veig said.
The contents of his pack, he saw, had been emptied out on the ground, and one of the spiders was examining them one by one, prodding them with its foreleg or with a pedipalp. It picked up the metal tube, looked at it briefly, and tossed it down among the prickly pears and dried bread. At the same time, Niall felt the mind of the big spider probing his own. It was trying to observe his reaction to this search of his belongings. But its insight was crude and uncomprehending. It probed his mind as clumsily as the other spider was examining the contents of his pack, as if prodding with a blunt finger.
Then its attention was distracted; the other spider was looking with interest at the folded sheet of spider silk Niall used as a sleeping bag. The big spider went and examined it carefully, and Niall could feel the impulses of communication that passed between them. Their language was not verbal; it consisted of a series of feelings and intuitions. Neither of them could say: “I wonder where this came from?” but what passed between them was a questioning impulse, accompanied by an image of the death spider that had vanished in the desert. Simultaneously — their minds seemed to work in concert — both spiders recognised that this silk was too old to be the death spider’s balloon, and they immediately lost interest in it.
Suddenly both spiders became alert. Niall could see no obvious reason for this sudden vigilance. The big spider hurried off to a nearby thorn tree. When Niall looked more closely, he could see that they had spun a web between the lower branches and the trunk. A big grasshopper had jumped straight into it and was struggling frantically. It made no sound — the spiders in any case were deaf — but the vibrations of its panic had instantly communicated themselves.
While they watched, the big spider paralysed the grasshopper with one swift jab of its fang, detached it from the web by biting through its strands, then proceeded to eat it. It was obviously hungry.
Niall took the opportunity to ask the question that had been constantly on his mind. “Where are Runa and Mara?”
“They took them off in balloons.”
“And the wasp and the ants?”
Veig nodded towards the spiders. “Inside them,” he said drily.
A moment later, a violent blow knocked him forward on his face. One of the spiders was standing over him, its fangs extended ready to strike. When Veig tried to sit up, it pushed him down again with a blow of its powerful foreleg. Veig lay passively, looking up at the exposed fang that hovered threateningly over his face. Once again, Niall felt his own mind probed by the leader, which had now finished its meal. It wanted to gauge his reaction to the threat to his brother. Niall was glad that his chief emotion was anxiety; he felt intuitively that any sign of anger or aggression would have been punished instantly.
When it had made its point — that talking was not allowed — the spider moved away and allowed Veig to sit up. Then it prodded Niall with its pedipalp and indicated the contents of his pack; it was clearly an order to replace them. As Niall did this, he again felt the mind of the leader probing his own. He observed with satisfaction that he was able to keep his mind empty and passive, and that the spider seemed satisfied.
Five minutes later they were on the move again. Siris looked weary and drained of emotion. Niall could sense that she was still in a state of shock at the death of her husband, and separation from the girls. He could also sense that her delight in seeing him again was neutralised by a feeling of despair that he was now a prisoner. She seemed to feel guilty, as if this was her fault. Niall longed to talk to her; but under the continual surveillance of the spiders, this was impossible. The spiders moved fast, and they expected their prisoners to keep up with them. Now, at last, Niall could understand how they had covered so much ground. For them, human walking speed was an unbearably slow crawl. So the prisoners were forced to move at a trot, while the spiders marched alongside at what was, for them, a leisurely walking pace. At first Niall was hampered by the pack on his back, which bounced up and down. When the leader noticed this, it took it from him, and one of the others was made to carry it. It was a relief to be free of the burden.