The Golden Spider
Chester and Monia quietly gazed at the brilliant golden spider laid out before them.
“...A spider.”
A spider. How on earth were they supposed to eat this?
Granted, Chester had a strong enough stomach to devour all manner of bugs if the situation called for it, and he felt no particular revulsion at the idea of eating insects. When there was truly nothing else, he had even eaten centipedes like noodles, and he could snack on grasshoppers without a second thought.
Even so, this spider—larger than a human torso—left him completely stumped on how to prepare it.
He gave it a light touch. Beneath the soft fur, he felt a hard shell.
“...It's hard.”
Of course a spider would have a hard exterior—it was an arthropod—but how often did a person actually look at a spider and think of it as hard? Even the toughest ordinary spider would be crushed if a child simply poked it.
Monia reached out as well, only to brush the fluffy fur and shudder as if a chill had run down her spine.
“It doesn't have venom, does it?”
“...There's a picture drawn here.”
On the leaf spread beneath the spider was an illustrated explanation of the creature.
“Hmm. It says it's not an insect-eater—it eats fruit. And it only lives on the Summit. Living somewhere nature is abundant, with no competitors or predators, it's sluggish and doesn't even have any weapons to defend itself.”
“But there are the People of the Summit.”
“They only go after these things after surviving the winter. A year... no, the Floating Island takes several years to circle the ocean once, so from these spiders' perspective, the People of the Summit only bother them once every few years.”
“Ah, so they might not even register as predators.”
“Right. Anyway, no venom, so we can eat it.”
But how best to cook it?
Chester and Monia sank into deep thought.
“W-well, should we shear the fur first?”
“Hmm. Let's. Cut it up and roast it... no, wait. No.”
Chester looked over at the kiln they were using for smoking.
“Let's just use this kiln, like I said earlier.”
“Hm?”
“We'll put the whole thing in and steam it.”
As he spoke, Chester pulled out a piece of firewood. He brought the blazing brand close to the spider and moved it carefully, just enough to singe the surface.
The spider's fur curled and blackened, but because the shell itself was golden, the creature never lost its luster. The fur had caught and scattered the golden light, making it sparkle; once the fur was gone, the color looked a little duller.
While Monia scraped away the scorched fur with a knife, Chester opened the kiln lid and cleared a space inside for the spider.
The spider was huge—torso-sized, plump with meat—but it was still a spider. When they folded its legs and curled its body, the bulk shrank considerably.
They tucked the rounded spider into the kiln and closed the lid.
While the spider slowly cooked in the heat, Chester and Monia waited and talked.
“What about the warehouse? Build it as planned?”
“Hmm. Winter weather won't be back for a while, so building it as-is would be fine... but it still makes me uneasy.”
Of course, on the Floating Island—where little out of the ordinary ever happened—most of their conversation was about work.
“Should we build it into the ground? Dig down and...”
“Ah, like you mentioned before?”
“Yeah. I brought it up when Ant dug that burrow. We dropped it because the workload was too much.”
“We can't get stuck on a single warehouse forever.”
“True. But with the hail and the wind... as hard as it is, I think we should prepare for the chance we still can't escape the island by next winter.”
“Then shall we take it slow and build the warehouse gradually? We won't need to stockpile that much preserved food for a while anyway.”
“Let's leave only the underground storage from the tree warehouse and clear the rest out.”
“Okay. It's a shame to tear it down, though.”
“Can't be helped. We'll demolish it later—after we finish the ground warehouse and move everything over.”
Once they had more or less settled the warehouse talk, they moved on to the next topic.
In the past, Chester had often thought things through alone, decided on a solution, and simply had Monia follow along. As time passed, that happened less and less; more and more, they worked out solutions together through conversation.
“Once the weather warms up, we'll practice sailing too, right?”
“Yeah. We'll have to. It's a shame we couldn't salvage a decent boat from over there.”
“They were all wrecked.”
“There was a boat hanging off the side of the ship... so it must have been an easy target for them.”
The beach was still a mess. The villa destroyed by cannon fire, the stones that had been torn up and scattered across the shore, and the bamboo salt farm that had been smashed along with everything else.
Winter had kept them pinned down, so they had left the beach as it was—and that, too, needed cleaning. They had chipped away at it a little over the past few days, but there was still a long way to go.
“Right—what did Black Wind say right before he left?”
“He told us to look forward to his baby being born?”
“Huh? Then why did he make that face?”
“Weird, right? When I said of course we'd be waiting, his expression got strange.”
“Something going on?”
“Probably just more of their unique culture. Something to do with babies... In my village, when a baby was born, all the women who were producing milk raised the child together.”
“Whaaat?”
“It was a poor village, remember? If you weren't eating properly, you could give birth and still not produce milk. It was a custom for cases like that.”
Chester gave a short laugh.
“So at first I thought I had three moms.”
“Hehehe. Well, I can see how you'd get that idea.”
“The first person I ever called Mom was someone from another house—and that really shook my mother.”
Imagining Chester's mother watching her son call another woman Mom, Monia made a complicated face. It was funny, yet when she thought of how his mother must have felt, it also seemed serious—an awkward expression born of not knowing whether to laugh.
Reading her face and laughing as if to say she was overthinking it, Chester turned toward the kiln, from which a delicious smell was beginning to rise.
“Oh, the smell's getting really rich. The gamey reek of the bear meat is completely gone.”
“Wow, this is—wow. How do I even describe this?”
Catching the scent of the spider drifting from the kiln, Monia stared at it with a startled expression.
“I've never smelled anything like this.”
“You neither?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I have no idea what it's going to taste like.”
“What is this? The smell is incredibly deep, but it isn't foul—it's fascinating. I feel like I can taste it just from the aroma. Is that what they call flavor? And yet it doesn't cling to your nose for long; it fades cleanly, so no matter how much you breathe it in, it never gets overwhelming. But it still makes you hungry.”
“Even if you put it that way, I still don't get it.”
“Honestly. It's going into your mouth—pay a little attention.”
This time it was Monia scolding Chester.
At last, when the aroma had grown rich enough, Chester opened the kiln and pulled the spider out.
The once-golden spider had turned brown from the heat, and it gave off a fragrance incomparably stronger than the scent that had been seeping out while it was sealed inside.
“...How do we eat this?”
“Hmm, looking at what's written on the leaf, it seems you eat the legs. You break them off and chew them like crackers?”
“Can our mouths even handle that? The shell looks even harder after roasting.”
“It says the meat inside is what's delicious, so we can just eat that.”
Chester extended his knife and cut off three of the spider's legs.
The moment he severed a leg, something watery poured out in a stream. Seeing the plump meat filling the cut surface, Chester carefully worked the knife and peeled away one segment of shell.
The instant the shell came free, the leg meat—losing its support—seemed about to sag downward, then rebounded with a springy bounce.
“Wow.”
“What the...”
After peeling the remaining two legs as well, he handed one each to Monia and Ant.
The three of them stared at the glossy spider-leg meat, swallowed the saliva that rose unbidden, and bit into it all at once.
“Oh, it's a little sweet.”
“...!”
—Woof! Woof!
Unlike Chester, who finished his assessment with a simple “a little sweet,” Monia began to tremble all over the moment she took a bite, thrashing in place.
Then she shouted.
“Don't you dare sum this up with ‘a little sweet'!”
The first thing out of Monia's mouth was a scolding aimed at Chester's bland reaction.
“Ah, well.”
“Seriously! Just you wait! Once we get out of here, I'm going to stuff you so full of delicious food you'll burst! Let's see if you still talk like that then!”
She kept railing at him even as she devoured the spider leg.
“It's good! Spider is good!?”
Watching her, Chester cracked open another leg and handed it over; Monia took that one too and polished it off.
“You're not saying anything but ‘it's good' either.”
His remark did not seem to reach Monia's ears at all.
Chester watched Monia eating spider legs while laughing and crying at once, and Ant lunging to eat even the shells, and leisurely ate his own share of spider.