Canto 33 – Dance of the Two Spiders
Naylund Smith was dressed in a formal silk jacket with an embroidered Japanese-style phoenix raising its wings across the chest and turning to flaming ashes on the back. A white chord ran down the left leg of the blue silk pants and ended in an embroidered white spider, the first time Ged was to see the White Spider’s personal logo on anything.
Ged couldn’t help but admire the strong-looking, erect posture of this amazing man. He wore a gold earring in his left ear; his head was shaved and hairless except for white eyebrows, a white bun at the very back of the head, and a white goatee. The man’s iron-gray eyes glared like the stare of an eagle. Only the golden walking stick hinted at any weakness in the man, and he never seemed to lean upon it.
“The web of space is locked in an ever-expanding spiral dance,” said Naylund as ceremonial armor was strapped to Ged’s arms and chest. “The spiders that move from strand to strand are merely a counterpoint to the great dancing flow of the web itself. When spiders contend for space on the web, then the dance reaches its most violent and most beautiful point. I cannot help you with the next few steps of the dance. The prophecy says that you will be victorious, but no prophecy is ever absolute unless it can be proven to come from God himself.”
“You sound like I am about to have some kind of duel,” said Ged cautiously. “I thought this was just a welcoming ceremony.”
“It is that. It is also deadly serious.”
Little Ham Aero Junior was brought to Ged dressed in a milk-white kimono, and an embroidered white spider picked out in light blue covered the heart. The female attendants left him with Ged.
“I am to stand with you, Ged-sensei,” the boy said.
“Did Frieda teach you to speak so well?” Ged asked the little Nebulon.
“No. I learned your language long ago by telepathy.”
“Why didn’t you ever teach it to your mother?”
“She hardly ever spoke to me. I was nothing but a reminder to her of the shame of her servitude.”
“I’m so sorry for you, Junior.”
“Don’t be. Now I belong to you and you belong to me. I will stand at your side and die rather than leave you.”
“A very handsome and noble child,” said Naylund. “He deserves to be treated well by you, Ged.”
“Don’t worry, Naylund-sensei. I am learning to love my nephew too.” Ged smiled at Junior.
Naylund motioned to Ged to leave the tent where he had been dressed in armor. He was now done up in the armor of a Japanese daimyo or feudal lord, a samurai. He had everything but the demon mask on him.
As Ged, Naylund and Junior stepped out into the arena, 40,000 people cheered. Ged was stunned to see so many people. Being a spacer meant being alone more often than with other people. He’d never in his life been with so many at once.
“Behold! The so-called White Spider,” said a man across from Ged in the arena. He gestured with a silver katana sword to Ged and his two companions. “What do you say that I test this gaijin? Do you really believe he is the white spider?”
The crowd roared that they did believe.
“Well, we shall see,” said the man, drawing his katana in front of him.
“He will now try to kill you, Ged,” said Naylund. “If he succeeds, he will kill the boy and me as well.”
“But, wait!” said Ged. “I am unarmed!” He sounded panicky.
“According to prophecy,” said Naylund, “that’s not supposed to be a problem.”
“I am the Black Spider,” shouted the man. Ged noticed his black silk robes bore a red spider-symbol on the chest. “I will kill you now, Ged Aero!”
The man charged at Ged with lightning speed. He was obviously martial-arts trained, and knew precisely what to do. Ged tried to dodge, but the katana came down on his right shoulder in a perfect arc. Ged’s right arm was neatly severed at the shoulder.
The crowd gasped. Ged fell to his knees gasping also. Junior tried to run to him, but Naylund grabbed him and firmly held him.
“Patience, little one. Ged must pass this test himself.”
Ged’s mind swirled, but fixed on an image from his mind implanted there when Tara helped him return to his rightful form. His inner eye sharpened and fixed the image with crystal clarity. Immediately the arm grew back into place. The crowd was silent with shock.
“So!” said the Black Spider. “You are a magician! It will help you not! I have killed many magicians before you.”
Ged didn’t bother to listen. Power was surging through him. He could feel the rightness of each shape as it came to him.
“Tara?” said Junior, amazed at what he saw. Ged had changed first into the lithe figure of Tara Salongi so that the bulky clothing and armor would fall away. Then, as the nude female Ged stepped free of the binding clothing, he was already turning into the fearsome raptor dinosaur from Don’t Go Here.
“Try this!” cried the Black Spider as he leaped onto Ged’s scaly back and tried to sever the saurian head. Ged’s clawed foot nimbly came up and swept the attacker off, as easily as a horse knocks flies off his flanks with a twitching tail. The other clawed foot found the Black Spider as he hit the ground, the wicked hook slicing into the flesh of his stomach.
The Black Spider wobbled to his feet again, defiant and angry. His intestines began to droop out of his wound. “Good trick, spider, but I’m not beaten yet!”
Even as the Black Spider was bragging, Ged remembered one other beast he had been forced to kill and eat. He morphed almost immediately into a Samothracian Shadowcat, one of the most difficult creatures he had ever hunted. On the colorful planet of Samothrace, with its many xeno-flowers, shadowcats had developed the ability to change color so masterfully; they could practically disappear from view. As soon as the first paw touched the sand of the arena floor, Ged shimmered and disappeared.
“What? Where…?” cried the Black Spider, swinging his sword wildly. Attacks battered him from three sides. Ged it seemed, had turned into the wind. It looked like puffs of air were slashing the Black Spider; until finally, the sword fell from his hand and the Black Spider fell dead and thoroughly bloodied. Ged remained invisible so as not to disgust the crowd as he replenished himself by feeding on the flesh of the enemy. He also ate his own severed arm before he finally reappeared in his own form.
Naked, he quickly dressed in the samurai armor once again, though not bothering with the many straps and ties. The crowd was utterly silent, which left Ged wondering what it meant.
Shen Ming approached solemnly, holding two sheathed swords in his hands.
“You have done well, my son. Take your swords of office.”
Ged humbly received the swords from Shen-sensei. He bowed. There was a beautiful silver katana with a white ivory pommel and a smaller golden wakizashi with a blue woven pommel. The crowd now began to cheer riotously.
“I have defeated the Black Spider?” asked Ged of Naylund.
“You have defeated the first of many Black Spiders, Ged-sama. We will never be at a loss for villains.”
Ah, irony again! It ends up being anything but simple. You can write in simple, adjective-and-adverb-free sentences as Hemingway did, and still manage to convey deeply complicated and thoughtful ideas. One might even suggest that you can create poetic ideas in mere prose, dripping with layers of emotion, conflict, theme, and deeper implied meaning. You can also write prose in the intensely descriptive and convoluted style of a Charles Dickens with many complex sentences and pages-long paragraphs of detail, using comic juxtapositions of things, artfully revealing character development, and idiosyncratic dialogue all for comedic effect. Prose is a powerful and infinitely variable tool for creating meaning in words. Even when it is in the form of Mickian purple paisley prose that employs extra-wiggly sentence structure, pretzel-twisted ideas, and hyperbolically big words.
The worst experience I got from this summer’s food delivery came at the hands of a fellow school teacher. I had to deliver faculty lunch to an elementary school in the last week of summer school classes. It was a large lunch with two bags of burgers and a tray loaded with drinks in flimsy cardboard cups. It was a short drive from the restaurant to the school. But when I got there, it was a school with many entrances and kids playing on two different sides of the building. I went to the door I thought the Uber navigator was directing me to. I knocked. When I got no answer, I called the lady who ordered everything. I told her I was at the west door. She told me that I had to find the main door on the south side of the building. So I managed to juggle the two sacks and the easily spillable drinks to three different doors on the south side, all locked. I called again and was told I must have the wrong building, so I went to the school building across the street and found an office building with only kindergarten and daycare kids present. I called again.
How Mickey’s Brain Percolates
I tend to do a lot of thinking about thinking. I pay attention to what sources of input and images I use to bring the old brain to a boil. It is entirely possible to turn into a malevolent moron in this age of Trumpalump Twitter Twit-Tweets if you pay too much attention to its anger-inducing misinformation and rage-ranting. So I have to limit how much I think about calling Trump and the other elephant-heads names. I enjoy it, true, but I really don’t want to become a malevolent moron.
The anti-moron medicine comes in the form of remembering who I used to be and how problems were solved as an educator, mentor, and advocate for young people. I remember how the times I used name-calling and anger in place of problem-solving tended to only make the problem worse. If you deliberately brainstorm solutions to the problem instead, I have found that after you test several solutions and have them spectacularly fail, your persistance eventually yields a solution that works.
So when I think about how to proceed with the daily problems of life, especially the age-old question, “What the hell am I going to write about today?” I find that I tend to leap out of the box, think all around the outside landscape, and seize on something silly in a very round-about and experimental manner.
The things I choose to write about in book form are all based on my own real experiences. But I have the unfortunate gift for having an overdose-level vivid imagination. So my books are about fairies and ghosts and aliens as well as the kids I have taught, the people who raised me, and the people who have always surrounded me. I write about ideas in some depth, but always from a sideways viewpoint that reflects my beliefs in non-violence, rationality, and love.
My mind works like a match in a firecracker factory. But I try not to use it for evil. And now that I am done revealing the secret of how Mickey’s brain percolates, feel free to tell me how stupid it all is and call me whatever bad monkey-names you can think of for me. I can take it. And when I take it, I most likely will use it to make something surprisingly good. Mickey-brain tea… now there’s a weird, wild, and wonderful metaphorical brew.
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