As Simple As Hunger

by D Des Anges

  In swift succession from this discovery, Hajar determined that her ‘train seat’ was a convex curve too great to be even the most over-stuffed of bench cushions, that there was wind on her face, and that the movement of her conveyance was wildly inconsistent with a train. It had more in common with the passage to the Frankish territories by boat.

  Almost immediately she discerned this, the image of a great white hanging sack filled with a dying horse in the morning gloom filled her mind, and any last vestiges of mystery exited.

  Hajar stared about her at an unfamiliar scene: she saw in the main clouds, leaping and thumping above her in the channels between the dark ceiling of tree branches. They formed white cracks among the seeming-black of forest against sky.

  Though the motion was somewhere between that of a ship and a horse, the speed far outstripped either. As Hajar saw little use in terror she instead turned her mind to the huge strides that the spider must be taking.

  It was a simple calculation, but she had no measure for the length of the creature’s legs. Her guess was an estimate based on a memory exaggerated by the fear of the moment, but she used it all the same.

  The beast had eight legs, and she had never before studied in close examination the manner in which spiders ran, being very slightly distressed by the motion of the smallspiders. But she assumed they must give use to all of their limbs, and that a forward-to-back motion of lifting and settling, like a horse, alternating sides, would be the most stable and logical for them to use—

  The distraction worked admirably, and with this train of thought and calculation Hajar was diverted from the greater questions for which she had no way of determining an answer. They faded, but did not vanish: where she was, where she was going, what would happen when the spiders reached whatever destination they intended, whether her companions lived, if they were carried upon the other spiders she had seen or left behind at the camp site to mourn or not mourn her capture, what had become of the horses, why the spiders had come upon them, and why the bloody arthropod-desiring thing that took hold of Benjon’s body had not delightedly seized upon one of the spiders at once.

  The parasite might not have been able to attend to the infection or transference of its essence to such creatures but surely it would have tried?

  The branches of trees whipped past above, and the great spider upon whose back she was bound squeaked and chittered and clicked in answer and chorus to squeaks and chitters and clicks that came from about, but Hajar heard no other sound. There were no calls, no cries, and there was no terrified whinnying. Perhaps her fellows had not woken yet.

  Perhaps they were dead.

  The rocking and jolting that had woken her, compounded by the passing of sets of eight through her mind in monotony became a soporific rather than wakeful, and stupefied her. Trapped, immobile, and warmer than she had been since leaving the boarding-house a week ago, Hajar became drowsy once more. Though she would never have thought it possible under such a circumstance, she slept.

  * * *

  Hajar slept and woke more times than she was able to keep track of.

  Sometimes it was light, sometimes it was dark, almost always the spider was moving. The angle of incline changed, once or twice to such vertical gradient that Hajar was afraid she would fall to her death; but the silken cords were strong and tight, and did not so much as loosen. The trees which passed overhead vanished and returned and changed in species and pattern and vanished again. But still Hajar had no notion of where they ran, or for how long they would go on running.

  Once the spider halted for what Hajar judged by the motions of the sun to be more than an hour. She could not think why this must be, but the motions of its legs and sudden changes in position, accompanied by the alarming throb of the huge abdomen on which she lay, gave her subtle indication.

  For the rest of this period of wakefulness she lay paralysed by the thought that her captor had been feasting upon one of her companions, and when she slept it was to dreams of her own death.

  She began to find her mind wandering as weakness overcame her limbs. First came the hunger, which assailed her with roars and rumbles and aches before fading to a dull pain in her stomach and finally lightness of the head, as if becoming convinced of the futility of its demands.

  Hajar recalled – slowly, and with frustration at the growing ineptitude of her mind – Benjon’s hypotheses regarding the starvation of the body, and its discernible effect. She made effort not to dwell too long on how he had set his mind on alarming experimentation on the rats that occupied his home, until distracted by the tendons of the human foot; many rats had perished in lethargic starvation to prove his hypothesis.

  With sinking despair, Hajar gave herself briefly over to the notion that they might never share another such exchange of alarming ideas.

  Thirst, which had been present as a nagging discomfort already, became a terrible burden. Her mouth filled with paste which had once been only saliva, and her head began again to ache as her throat dried. Benjon had never thought to deprive his rats of water.

  Hajar found, despite the urgency of need to catalogue the changing landscape’s small incursions on her field of sight, that it was easier and less painful to sleep. Sleep, as often and as long as she could, she preferred than to wake and feel hunger and thirst and fear gnaw at her respective organs like the very rats Benjon had so tormented.

  She had not before considered that she might ever feel kinship with a rat.

  * * *

  It was at the time that Hajar was coming to consider her life prior to being held prisoner on a spider’s back to have been a wistful fantasy that the day came.

  The spiders slowed their pace, and began to hop, and to climb.

  As they rose, Hajar was afforded at last the sight of where they had come, and it was very like something from a fevered dream. It was in fact so like madness that in her weakness and near-delirium, she could not be sure that it was not a dream.

  Between the spider’s hindmost legs Hajar saw the ground. It was flat, a plain that bore no trees for some miles. At the edge of the tree-line were visible great triangular stacks of felled trunks, like woodpiles writ large. The ground seemed littered with grooves and scars, runnels and channels whose purpose was quite obscure. Some of the wider ones seemed very like canals, filled with stagnant water upon whose surface scum was evident.

  Higher the spider climbed.

  She saw what it climbed now: an edifice constructed of the same cords that held her to its back, enveloping and connecting individual tree trunks. The cords ran angled in many directions, but forming precise geometric shapes. They made a framework comprised of interlocking triangles which curved away from the ground, rising into the sky.

  She could not be sure that it was not delusion, and her eyes had grown weak from lack of use. In the moment as the spider climbed and some of the great scale of the construction of that which it climbed came clear to her, Hajar thought it beautiful. She had not expected that the land of the arthropods could contain such elegance, such symmetry, such precision.

  Here and there cords wrapped about cords in great cables, and plunged to the earth much like guide lines to a tent.

  And then the spider upon whose back Hajar was tied plunged into some great aperture in the structure. Instead of the sky and the plain and the bafflingly beautiful, light-weight wall her eyes were filled with a complexity of cords.

  They ran past each other, layer on layer, above her head. It was as if a vast weaver had placed Hajar within a carpet she had chosen to create so loosely that it became not a flat fabric but a strange maze.

  Among the cloud of cords Hajar thought she saw hanging blots, and the image of the dying horse wrapped in silk came to her again. She thought she saw other shapes moving, like dark shadows against the white.

  There were tree trunks too, suspended in this great confusion of cords. They formed lines and shapes and further geometric patterns of exquisite precision, but Hajar had no time to examine
them and no strength to question their purpose or nature. The spider began to descend.

  Hajar looked up from her position: she saw more of the same, upside-down, and began to feel dizzy. She squeezed her eyes shut, and listened instead to the endless squeaking chatter of arthropod voices. Some were near, some muffled by the white clouds that surrounded them.

  She smelled, too, over the ripeness of her own body and the peculiar pungency of her spider steed, the potent stink of stagnant water.

  With a jolt and a tumble and several more changes of angle, the spider upon whose back she had made a too-long unwanted guest halted, upside-down. This left Hajar to fall against the weight of the silken cords: she opened her eyes to see homely wooden planks, carpeted with a loose weave of cords, a few feet before her face.

  The next thing to assail her sight was the face of a spider, very near. Its great jaws and sharp pointed … things … were in motion close to her belly.

  Hajar was exceeding thirsty, her mouth as dry as a desert, and her mind exceeding disarrayed, but she still found in herself the strength to shout, “FUCK!” in alarm at this development.

  The spider withdrew momentarily, but soon returned, its jaws working again.

  The cords that had bound her for so long began to weaken. As Hajar felt herself start to fall forward, she determined that she was not yet to be eaten, only released from her unwanted steed.

  She fell flat on her face on the wooden floor, which dipped under her weight as if sprung or suspended, rather than built upon the earth. Before Hajar could muster her strength to pull her cheek from the planks or brace her arms beneath her to rise, strong chitinous limbs reached under her armpits and lifted her as easily as if she were an infant. They placed her on her with curious tenderness upon her feet.

  Hajar’s legs had been out of use this past – it must have been near a week. They were unfed, unwatered, and had been thus far tightly bound. They therefore immediately gave response to this unexpected demand by collapsing out from under her and leaving her to jar her arms on the sprung floor.

  Once again, she was patiently lifted by spiderish limbs, and once again she fell, landing this time on her knees. She affected some semblance of uprightness as she pulled her headscarf blearily from her eyes.

  There came a great chattering and squeaking at this failure to stand, seeming from everywhere about her, including beneath.

  Above, four spiders hung by their feet from a far-off ceiling, their strange high voices raised in what seemed uncannily like dispute. At her own level lay Benjon, flopping as fishlike and weak as she, and Ferdinand, who had abandoned the attempt to stand and was sitting with his legs outstretched to patiently massage his muscles with sluggish hands.

  Out of some gap or crack or edge of the planking rose a great slimed, wet thing which looked like a stuffed sock, mottled in green and brown. It wheezed and squeaked with some excitement through a circular puckering in its uppermost end, and occasionally thrashed in unseen (and from the smell, unclean) water.

  It was warm, so warm that for the first time in a long time, Hajar wished she were not wearing her coat, and the sprung floor comfortable, but she blanched at her body’s desire to lie down and sleep yet more.

  “Ferdinand,” Hajar croaked.

  “You’re not dead then,” Benjon’s voice interjected, from the floor. The thing occupying Benjon drew him to his feet, and he seemed quite unscathed for his journey.

  Ferdinand threw him a filthy look.

  “Where are we—” Hajar began, but her enquiry was overcome in her throat as the great wet thing amid the planks reared up taller.

  It arced toward her.

  “FUCK. NO,” she blurted, trying to scramble away from it on her knees.

  But arachnid limbs caught her shoulders and held her in place before the wet, muscular creature as it leaned closer. Hajar wondered without feeling how it would devour her. Perhaps the orifice at its head opened to engulf prey whole; perhaps there were hidden means of puncturing her skin or ripping off her limbs.

  She tried to back away, but the strength of the spider far outstripped hers.

  The vast wet sock-thing brought its wrinkled aperture very close to her, but did not touch her. It moved along her body, from face to knees, and back to her face again. It then arched back and emitted a series of shrill and urgent whistles-and-squeaks.

  A creature she could not identify dipped, turned, and scuttled away among the cords at speed. It sat a little like a spider, but was the size of a man, and had huge bulging eyes and long forearms like crab claws, and was quite without tail. It stirred in her no recognition of a smaller cousin.

  She saw glimpses of its pale-green chitin through the woven walls of the chamber, and then it vanished from her sight. The spider released her, and Hajar fell to her hands once more.

  “What was that?” she murmured, expecting no reply.

  “It’s a leech,” said Benjon’s voice, unconcerned. “Benjon loathes occultist ‘doctors’ but has made a thorough study of their methods and at least three Methods proscribe the application of the small-leech or several to patients with fever. Or fits. Or headaches. Or gaseous stomachs. Broadly they seem to think a leech will cure anything. If in doubt, add more leeches.”

  “Application how?” Hajar balked, thinking of a shrunk-down version of the terrible thing which had examined her and its insertion into some orifice or other. None that she could imagine filled her with less horror than the any of the others.

  “They drink blood,” said the parasite which had the use of Benjon. “Kernowists and others think that bloodletting is the answer to everything short of death. An excess of sanguine humours. They are quite mad, of course. How would any creature have more blood than it needed?”

  The occupied Benjon roamed freely around the planks, gazing at everything with the same kind of fascination that she recognised from the unoccupied Benjon’s examinations of the new and wonderful. It was one of his habits which had first endeared him to her, but now it only struck a savage blow to her heart knowing it was not her friend who searched for fresh discoveries.

  “That thing is going to suck out our blood,” Ferdinand said dully, still working at his leg muscles. He was as hoarse as Hajar.

  “Good luck to it,” she said bitterly, “Mine is near enough dust now.”

  The green-shelled creature (Hajar cast a curious look at the occupied Benjon but he shrugged, none the wiser than she) returned through the maze of cords, laden with packages wrapped in what looked, as it came closer, like fur. The packages were passed to one of the spiders, which unwrapped each one on the floor and pushed them with startling gentleness toward Hajar and Ferdinand.

  The first package held a double-handful of some red berries Hajar recognised as edible from one of the more beautiful illustrated treatises she had been called upon to translate alongside her mother, though she had never tasted them. The next bore a selection of tubers, meticulously picked free of dirt; the next a clutch of eggs; the next a gasping and dying-but-not-yet-dead fish that looked very much like a salmon.

  As it gaped and flapped helpless and suffocating, Hajar thought again of the unfortunate mare suspended in her sack of silk.

  “Why?” Ferdinand asked, but Benjon’s occupied body was already pouring handfuls of berries into its open mouth. It was therefore all Hajar and Ferdinand could do to ensure they had any of the food so bizarrely presented, without the parasitised doctor gobbling it all.

  The leech gave out another almost indignant-sounding whistle, and was answered by a hiss from one of the spiders. The same spider reached out and unstrapped from the green creature’s back what were surely, unequivocally, and inexplicably four glass bottles of human manufacture. They were without stopper or cork, and filled with fresh water.

  “What if it’s—” Hajar began, but Ferdinand snatched one up the moment the spider laid down with ginger care before them the little glass clutch.

  “I don’t care,” he said, and took a swig.
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br />   It was not enough to truly fill Hajar’s belly, but she had read heavily of the poets of her mother’s land. There was frequent enough reference among their histories to men who had crossed deserts and arrived desiccated as dried skins, but alive, only to ‘burst their bellies with quenching their thirst’. She alternated unpalatable but welcome food for seeming fresh water mouthful by mouthful, and soon the whole of what had been brought to them was gone.

  One of the other spiders descended from the ceiling, and lifted an empty bottle from the debris their feasting had generated, between two of its thin strong legs.

  While Hajar watched, a little queasy from the unaccustomed satiety, the spider held the bottle toward her and pointed with a third leg to the glass vessel.

  It squeaked, a pronounced, clear sound, as if – Hajar startled – as if a man speaking to an idiot, or an Albionman believing this would translate Albiontongue for those who did not perceive it.

  She looked at the bottle.

  The spider squeaked the same squeak, and jabbed its third leg insistently at the bottle, rapping on the glass in its determination to draw her attention to the vessel.

  Squeak.

  Hajar said, “Bottle.”

  “What,” Ferdinand asked under his breath, “are you doing?”

  The spider turned to the spiders above it and engaged in some high-speed squeak-chattering with its fellows. There were a few hisses amid the chatter, and some way in the leech, in its channel, made a booming-low whistle to which the spiders responded in chorus with a hiss.

  The spider returned its attention to Hajar, and tapped the bottle again, almost quivering on its five remaining legs.

  Squeak.

  “Bottle,” Hajar repeated.

  Squeak.

  “Bottle.”

  The spider laid down the bottle, apparently satisfied, and with astonishing delicacy lifted up the empty shell of one of the eggs that Hajar had swallowed in her gnawing hunger.

  Click-squeak.

  “Eggshell,” Hajar said, strangely satisfied that the identifier came in two parts, even to the spiders.