“I have your woman, Anansi’s child. When I am done with you, I shall tear her flesh. Her meat will taste sweeter than yours.”
Spider made the “hmph!” sound people make when they know they’re being lied to.
“Her name is Rosie.”
Spider made an involuntary noise then.
In the darkness, someone laughed. “And as for eyes,” it said, “You have eyes that see the obvious, in broad daylight, if you are lucky, whereas my people have eyes that can see the hairs prickle on your arms as I talk to you, see the terror on your face, and see that in the nighttime. Fear me, Anansi’s child, and if you have any final prayers to say, say them now.”
Spider had no prayers, but he had rocks, and he could throw them. Perhaps he might get lucky, and a rock might do some damage in the darkness. Spider knew that it would be a miracle if it did, but he had spent his entire life relying on miracles.
He reached for another rock.
Something brushed the back of his hand.
Hello, said the little clay spider, in his mind.
Hi, thought Spider. Look, I’m a bit busy here, trying not to be eaten, so if you don’t mind keeping out of the way for a while…
But I brought them, thought the spider. Like you asked.
Like I asked?
You told me to go for help. I brought them back with me. They followed my web strand. There are no spiders in this creation, so I slipped back and webbed from there to here and from here to there again. I brought the warriors. I brought the brave.
“A penny for your thoughts,” said the big cat voice in the darkness. And then it said, with a certain refined amusement, “What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?”
A single spider is silent. They cultivate silence. Even the ones that do make noises will normally remain as still as they can, waiting. So much of what spiders do is waiting.
The night was slowly filled with a gentle rustling.
Spider thought his gratitude and pride at the little seven legged spider he had made from his blood and spittle and from the earth. The spider scuttled from the back of his hand up to his shoulder.
Spider could not see them, but he knew they were all there: the great spiders and the small spiders, venomous spiders and biting spiders: huge hairy spiders and elegant chitinous spiders. Their eyes took whatever light they could find, but they saw through their legs and their feet, constructing vibrations into a virtual image of the world about them.
They were an army.
Tiger spoke again from the darkness. “When you are dead, Anansi’s child—when all of your bloodline is dead—then the stories will be mine. Once again, people will tell Tiger stories. They will gather together and praise my cunning and my strength, my cruelty and my joy. Every story will be mine. Every song will be mine. The world will be as it once was again: a hard place. A dark place.”
Spider listened to the rustle of his army.
He was sitting at the cliff edge for a reason. While it gave him nowhere to retreat to, it meant that Tiger could not charge, he could only creep.
Spider started to laugh.
“What are you laughing at, Anansi’s child? Have you lost your reason?”
At that, Spider laughed longer and louder.
There was a yowl from the darkness. Tiger had met Spider’s army.
Spider venom comes in many forms. It can often take a long while to discover the full effects of the bite. Naturalists have pondered this for years: there are spiders whose bite can cause the place bitten to rot and to die, sometimes more than a year after it was bitten. As to why spiders do this, the answer is simple. It’s because spiders think this is funny, and they don’t want you ever to forget them.
Black widow bites on Tiger’s bruised nose, tarantula bites on his ears: in moments his sensitive places burned and throbbed, swelled and itched. Tiger did not know what was happening: all he knew was the burning and the pain and the sudden fear.
Spider laughed, longer and louder, and listened to the sound of a huge animal bolting into the undergrowth, roaring in agony and in fright.
Then he sat and he waited. Tiger would be back, he had no doubt. It was not over yet.
Spider took the seven-legged spider from his shoulder and stroked it, running his fingers back and forth across its broad back.
A little way down the hill something glowed with a cold green luminescence, and it flickered, like the lights of a tiny city, flashing on and off into the night. It was coming toward him.
The flickering resolved itself into a hundred thousand fireflies. Silhouetted and illuminated in the center of the firefly-light was a dark figure, man-shaped. It was walking steadily up the hill.
Spider raised a rock and mentally readied his spider troops for one more attack. And then he stopped. There was something familiar about the figure in the firefly-light; it wore a green fedora.