The Spider's Tale
an excerpt

The world of the musicians, of the wife and husband, hadn’t always been this strained. Well, Dorse has always been a bit petulant and prone to tantrums. They were his artisitic tattoo, the markings on his soul that identified him to all about that here is an artist, a maestro. He had been marked thus since he was young, traveling with his father and brother, with his aunts, mothers and sisters. They traveled the trade routes drawing on their experience on the maritime routes to book tours on the caravansaries, the trade routes that meandered through the inlands that connected the interior, cloth and thread rich interior with the coastal routes beyond the mountains, beyond the desert. It was during his travels in the desert that Dorse had met Yohn. They were both much younger than they are now. Just into their adult shoes, just able to travel along the beaconed lanes on their own. They had both been opened by the others’ voice. She sang. Her whole family sang but not the way Dorse did. She sang like all the girls of the desert sang: with their whole being.

It had taken more than one skin of the hot liquor Hamana called Wive’s Keen to get Dorse talking about himself.
“It was the most eerie sound, my friend, Dorse slurred over the space between their cushions. Those voices, rippling and flying on the wind across all that sand. I really thought it was the desert itself singing, Nana”. Hamana was too drunk to flinch from the endearment this time. “Have your heard it? Those chords, the pure tones. Ya know those monks, the kept boys for their voices. They think that’s the most, ya know, the most beautiful sound. They’re wrong ya know. It’s the girls, the girls in the desert singing to each other, talking their hearts to each other in that strange sound they make for singing. So beautiful. She was so beautiful that singing girl.”
Hamana had also been struck by her looks. Not for beauty but for bearing. There was nothing like the surety of the stride of a spider, it was said. And Yohn was—is—a Spider. No matter what happened to her here at the top of nothing.

“Tell me again, partner, why you tortured me and the others by stuffing yourself into this crack at the top of the world? Are you Dragon hunting?”
Dorse lolled on his cushion and sputtered in what Hamana assumed to be a laugh. “There’s a beacon near”, he said, without humor. “ I thought it would make it easier for her”.
Hamana shivered in the sudden chill. The firelit room seemed to suddenly have been caravanned into winter, into it’s dark, it’s cold. He expected to see his breath silvering the air in front of him.
Dorse turned to him suddenly, his face creased in a pattern Hamana had seen only once before. “She cried herself sick, ya know. Sick. Days and days of it. I didn’t think it would ever end, not in a good way. I thought she would cry herself out of the world. I thought she would use the beacon and find her way home. I wanted her to go home. She needs to, ya know. She needs to get back to the singing, that singing she used to do, Nana. I don’t know what to think about it anymore, Na. Nothing. Not no more. Here it was.” He’d said “Na”. The Keen had taken him over and he was as drunk as he would ever be and still be able to rehearse the players in the morning. “And now she’s sick. In her head she’s sick”. Hamana pulled the quilts over himself and his friend. “Oh, Na, what are we doing here? What are we doing all the way here in the Dragon’s Eye? She’s sick and I just thought, ya know? I just…” Hamana slipped into sleep on the smooth tones of his friend’s lament.