Once upon a time, in one of the rare moments of peace known during Charlemagne's reign, a knight-errant was roaming the land. He had not had any deeds to perform for years, and was contemplating returning home that day as he rode towards the village. It was an average-looking village next to an average-looking forest, and his spirits fell at the thought of the deeds he would not be performing in this village.
As he approached the village on his mare, he was hailed by the villagers. "We are saved," came the cries, "the king has sent one of his paladins for us!" They were certain he was one of the king's greatest champions, though they had never seen any, so gleaming was his untried armour.
"Nay, I am not one of the Twelve," the knight replied, "but I will do what you ask of me."
So the villagers explained that a giant spider had taken up residence in the forest, spinning its webs, and that their hunters had not been returning. The knight promised to slay the foul creature. He left his horse in the village and entered the forest.
He found himself the path to the spider's nest, treading with care. But the further he penetrated, the denser the strands of webs became, until he could no longer cleave through them without getting his arm stuck. FTS, he thought, in the Old Frankish that people used to think in before there were Frenchmen, and turned to leave. To his dismay, the path behind him was now blocked by web as well, since the threads he had cut had somehow come together again.
It was a time of despair for the knight. He remained suspended in an awkward position, his back resting in a hammock of web and his limbs held by threads as if he were a marionette. For 127 hours he lay there, subsisting only on the web he could chew by stretching his neck. He discovered it was most nourishing; he felt stronger than ever before. Determined not to waste his state of strength and health languishing in web (he had somehow forgotten the threat of being eaten by the spider) he focused his mind on ways of escape.
So it was that he had his first epiphany off horseback in years - he would become a spider. After all, spiders could move unrestricted over their own webs, and he saw no reason why they would not be able to walk over the webs of their own relatives and friends when they went visiting. Pleased with his ingenuity, the knight slept.
Thus began his new life, where he would spin webs in the day and exercise his incipient limb buds in the night. As he changed, the world changed before him, as if with his three pairs of nascent eyes he could see better. Slowly he became aware of the other, for the web was a pattern in which lay hints and thoughts and entire stories. He learnt to read it like a quipu, and in reply spun his own quips.
Before he had noticed, he had become a spider, for he could move about at ease within the intricate network of webs. As he explored his new world he saw freshly woven web, and he knew that the she-spider (he knew her gender from the texture of her webs) knew of his presence, and she knew he knew she knew. She had left him many messages, jokes, traps and warnings, but she evaded him. He replied to every single one of them.
One day as he stood composing for her a poem, she appeared before him, wrapped in a robe of web resplendent and iridiscent in the sun sifting through the canopy. It would have been love at first sight, but he had already fallen in love with her during their wary correspondence.
Theirs was a courtship of the web, with which he regaled her with tales of his deeds, mostly unembellished, and serenaded her with ballads, mostly by substituting her name for whatever human name had been in the folk song. In return she told him of her world, a world of nature and uncertainty.
Though her silken dress was alluring, he yearned to see her beneath that veil. After months of exhortation and unravelling he succeeded in parting the web that was both armour and chastity belt. A night of unparalleled passion followed.
Then she ate him.
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