“What is your name?” It was the first time she had spoken to him.
“Niall.”
“A name of good fortune.”
Niall failed to understand her. “Why?”
“You have earned the favour of the spiders. There can be no greater good fortune.”
She took his arm and led him along the quay. The dock workers continued to stand to attention as they passed. They were, he observed, even bigger and more powerful than the sailors; he had never seen such muscles.
He asked diffidently: “Where are we going?” She looked so stern and purposeful that he half-expected her to ignore him. But she seemed to accept his right to question her.
“To the harbour master’s.”
She indicated the square, grey stone building at the end of the quay. Like the quay itself, this was in a poor state of repair, and its windows had been bricked up. The commander knocked on the door. In a moment, it was opened by one of the wolf spiders, which stood aside for them to enter. After the glare of the sunlight, it took Niall’s eyes a few minutes to adjust to the darkness. He seemed to be in a large, empty room that smelt of damp and decay. Only a little light was admitted through cracks in the roof. He almost stumbled into the big wolf spider.
A cobweb sloped down from the rear corners of the room to within a few feet of where they were standing. In the centre of this web, looking directly at them, was a black death spider. It was smaller than the wolf spiders, and its black, shiny body was more bulbous than theirs. The single row of black eyes extended round its head like a row of beads. These, and the folded poison fangs, gave the face the same frightening, inscrutable expression he had observed in the spider he had killed.
Niall experienced an uncontrollable rush of fear, which communicated itself instantly to the spider. He could feel its will probing his own — not in the clumsy, inexpert manner of the wolf spiders, but with a subtlety that betrayed a sharp intelligence. What terrified him was the thought that the spider might be able to read his mind, and discover that he had killed a death spider.
His instinctive response to the probing was to become passive, and to blank his mind. The death spider was attempting to enter his brain, exactly as Niall had entered the brain of the tent spider. Since there was no point in resistance, Niall’s reaction was to duplicate the mental vibration of the tent spider. In effect, he became the tent spider as naturally as a chameleon changes colour.
He could sense that the death spider found this puzzling. It half-recognised the vibration, but found it strange and unfamiliar. Its brain transmitted a communication to the brain of the big wolf spider; it was a single impulse, like a signal, and therefore as easy to interpret as a facial expression. It was saying, in effect: “He seems to be an idiot.”
The reply-signal was a dubious gesture of assent, as if it had said: “I’m afraid so.”
If this exchange had taken place in words, Niall’s feelings would have betrayed him. Both the wolf spiders knew the truth about him. In the crisis of the storm, his mind had communicated directly with theirs, and no dissimulation was possible. But in the swiftness of the exchange of mental impulses, he had no time for fear, or even for relief that the wolf spider had not betrayed him.
The death spider turned its attention to the commander. Its will issued a blunt command: “Take him away.” A moment later, Niall was out in the dazzling sunlight, unable to believe that the danger was over.
She noticed that he looked shaken.
“Were you afraid?”
Niall nodded. “Yes.”
A gleam of sympathy came into her eyes.
“You don’t have to be. They treat their servants well.”
Niall wanted to ask more questions, but she cut him short. “I have to report to my captain. You’d better go and wait for your family to arrive.”
Niall wandered back to the end of the quay. The sailors had all disembarked, and the ship was empty. No one seemed to pay him any attention. He asked one of the dock workers when they expected the other two ships. The man shrugged and said: “soon.” And since neither was in sight, Niall walked back along the quay. The big wooden tower-like structure now seemed to be in operation, and he was curious to see what it was used for.
He found it in a kind of inner harbour. A ship was being unloaded there. It had a flat bottom and was broader than the ship on which Niall had sailed. It was obviously a cargo vessel, the deck divided into bays to prevent its load from moving around in heavy seas. These were full of sacks of coarse brown cloth. A wheel at the base of the wooden structure made it possible to manipulate it over the ship, and a square platform was then lowered down to the deck on ropes; when it had been loaded with sacks, it was raised again and swung back onto the quay, where the sacks were loaded into a cart. To Niall, it seemed a miracle of engineering, and he sat and watched its movements with fascination.
He was also intrigued by the man who was supervising the unloading. He was much smaller than the brawny dockers who surrounded him — scarcely taller than Niall. He wore a shabby yellow tunic and a hat of peculiar design, with a peak that protected his eyes from the sun. He gave orders in a rapid, sharp voice, but with a strange accent that Niall found incomprehensible.
The man was obviously not a docker; neither did he seem to be one of the sailors. Idly, Niall tuned in to the little man’s mind, and knew immediately that his speculation had been correct. This man’s thought-vibrations were active and chaotic, quite unlike the disturbing, ant-like passivity of the sailors and dockers.
As he tried probing further, the man looked around uncomfortably, aware of this attempt to invade the privacy of his head — as Niall’s own family would have been. A moment later, he glanced up at Niall. For a moment, Niall thought he was about to speak; then a sailor carrying a sack blundered against him, and the little man exploded with impatience. “Look where you’re going, you flea-brained oaf!”
But ten minutes later, when the last of the sacks was unloaded, he climbed up the ladder and walked straight up to Niall. Niall, who was sitting on a capstan, looked up at him guilelessly. The man had a sharp, thin face with a large beak of a nose, and an almost bald head. He placed one hand on Niall’s shoulder, peered into his face with mock aggression, and said:
“What the ‘ell do you think you’re playing at?”
Niall said: “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“You understand all right.” He sat down on a sack, then said in a friendlier tone: “Where you from?”
Niall pointed. “The great desert.”
The little man said: “Oh, you’re one o’ them, are you?”
Niall asked: “What are you called?”
“Bill.”
“That is a strange name.”
“No it’s not. Where I come from it’s a perfectly normal name. What’s yours?”
“Niall.”
“That’s not a name, that’s a river!”
Niall found his conversation as baffling as his accent. From his smile, it was apparent he was joking, but the joke was incomprehensible.
The little man looked at him from under lowered brows, as if trying to make a decision. He stared so long that Niall began to feel uncomfortable. Then the man said: “Who taught you to read minds?”
Niall answered readily: “Nobody taught me.”
“Oh, come on!”
Niall found this puzzling. Come on where?
The little man decided to try a new line of questioning. “When did you arrive?”
“Half an hour ago. I’m still waiting for my mother and brother. They are out there.” He pointed to the sea. As he did so, he saw that both ships were now in sight, about a mile offshore.
Again the little man stared into his eyes for an uncomfortable length of time. Niall was now anxious to get away to meet the ships. He stirred impatiently.
“Do it again,” the man said.
“Do what?”
“What you did before.”
It seemed easiest to comply, so Niall stared into the man’s eyes, tuned in to his thought waves, then deliberately used his own mind as a probe.
The little man looked startled. He shook his head and said quietly: “Well, well, well.”
Niall understood that. “Well what?”
“I don’t know what the crawlies’ll do when they find out.”
“Crawlies?”
“The black bastards. The spiders. Creepy crawlies.”
“What do you think they’ll do?”
The little man placed the ball of his thumb on the palm of his other hand, and gave a violent twist. He meaning was perfectly clear. Niall felt his face grow pale. Now he no longer felt anxious to hurry away.