Earth-spider: two characters that the eighth-century court applied to local chiefs it had not subdued, one at a time, in passages always set long ago. The chronicles describe such people as long-limbed and cave-dwelling, and a historian writing in 1919 argued that the descriptions were reasoned backwards out of the name rather than the name out of the people. Centuries later the same word was given to a creature killed in a mound by Minamoto no Raikō, in an episode that also explains how a sword came to be called spider-cutter. The records of the first kind were written by the side that won, and nothing on these pages treats them as a description of anyone.