“Why do you speak through that mask?” the taller woman asked.
“I am hiding my wounds,” Pleckoo said. “They are sickening to look upon.”
“You should go to Bee-Jor,” said the younger woman. “The Son of Locust is a great healer who has married the Mushroom Eaters’ sorceress queen. Together they have a godly magic that can restore eyesight to the blind and hearing to the deaf.”
“And grow new limbs for the crippled,” said the older one. “Slaves can stand straight again after bathing in the queen’s magic urine.”
“The Son of Locust,” Pleckoo said as he felt pangs of what he had to admit was a bitter, thickening envy. “If Locust is this man’s father, then who is his mother?”
“A human woman: the Empress Quegdoth of the Red Ant people.”
“Empress Quegdoth?”
“Yes, she’s a direct descendant of Goddess Bee. Her son, known as Vof, is the Glorious Founder on his divine mission to unite all peoples of the Sand and bring the Thousand Year Peace.”
Pleckoo tried to control his breathing. Rage and fear and envy had replaced his blood, his breath, his very being. How has this ridiculous story, this heresy, come into existence?
“Are you all right?” the woman asked.
“No, I . . .”
Pleckoo fell to the sand and bawled like a battered child. Anand sits on a throne in a Slopeish palace and is worshipped as a god! Pleckoo was filled with shame when he looked up to see the women staring at him. They watched him in disgust as he stood, picked up a disc-like sand grain, and rotated his entire body to hurl it. The grain ricocheted off a dried grass blade and hit his mask, dazing him. He spasmed, then dropped and let out a harsh mewl of pain.
“Let’s go,” said the taller woman to her companion, and the two resumed the reins of their sled.
“Wait,” Pleckoo said, struggling to rise. “I’m sorry. I was—I was taken over by some ill spirit. It’s left me.”
The two were quiet, ignoring him, and kept trudging.
“Please,” he said. “Let me accompany you. Women should not be alone on journeys. Not in these . . . Dustlands.”
“So says the Hulkrish warrior,” said the taller woman, turning in contempt.
“I will protect you,” he said, crossing his chest with his sword where it caught the light and glimmered. “I am good with this.”
She stopped and stared at him, looked at his deadly and beautiful blade. “Have you a name?” she asked.
“A Hulkrish name—one I will no longer use.”
“Black sword,” she said. “Khali talavar in my old language.”
“Khali Talavar,” Pleckoo said. “And your name?”
“Jakhuma Samra, Modee Kee Ladack, formally.”
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“It means First Princess of the Central Kingdom,” said the younger woman, bowing. “My name is Kula Priya. It means beloved servant.”
“You may call me Jakhuma,” said the princess to Pleckoo.
“Jakhuma. Let’s gather the swords of that Hulkrish spit-witch and her friends,” said Pleckoo. “And someday, I will teach you how to use them.”
The two women looked at each other.
“We should like to learn,” said Jakhuma.
“Wait one moment,” Pleckoo said, and ran into the finger grass. He returned with a bundle in his arms.
“What is that?” Jakhuma asked.
“Not what. Who,” said Pleckoo, looking deeply into the woman’s eyes.
“A Hulkrish bastard,” said the princess. “The offspring of some Termite-worshipping rapist. It will only slow us down. Is it yours?”
Pleckoo seethed and bit his tongue with his molars before speaking.
“No. But he’s a baby,” he said. “If we leave him here, he’ll be eaten.”
“All the Hulkrites’ bastards are being abandoned,” said Jakhuma. “Why do you care about this one?”
“I would bring them all if I could,” said Pleckoo. “They did not ask to be born. Shouldn’t everyone be allowed a chance to live in Bee-Jor? Especially an innocent baby?”
Jakhuma was silent.
“We have no milk to nurse it. But we’ll carry it a ways. Take these reins, and start pulling, Khali Talavar, but before you do . . .”
She went to the sand-sled and returned with a jar of soap weed unguent and a thorn brush with harsh bristles. “You are not going anywhere with us until you remove what remains of your white paint.”
Pleckoo looked at his arms and legs and saw a patchwork of peeling white flakes. He stepped away from the women, hid behind a grass clump, and removed the paint with the unguent, wiping his skin clean with his cape. He was naked and drying when Kula approached him with a garment painted with swirls of red and yellow.
“Put this on,” she said. Pleckoo froze, his hand covering his face.
“I cannot. That is a woman’s garment.”
“It is a man’s garment if you wear it. You can’t go to Bee-Jor dressed as an armored Hulkrite.”
Pleckoo took the garment, which would cover his head as well as his body, and pulled it on. Underneath it, he could at least wear the back and chest plates of his armor. The garment had openings in its sides to leave his arms free for use of his sword, and he could adjust the cowl to cover his lower face and be free of the mask that scratched his skin. When he emerged from the grass in his new guise, the women approved even as they heard the squeak of his armor when he walked.
“Now pick up those reins and pull,” Jakhuma said, and Pleckoo obeyed, feeling humiliated and strangely comfortable at the same time. It felt familiar to be someone’s submissive again, but peculiar to take orders from a woman, especially one with darker skin than his own. Bide your time, Khali Talavar, he thought as he tucked the ropes under his armpits and let them press against his chest plate. He peered sideways at the suddenly haughty First Princess of the Central Kingdom of Ladack as she strode forward, her servant a few steps ahead to help her mistress over the rougher sand grains.
As Pleckoo lugged the cargo-sled, his anguish gave way to anger and put strength in his arms and legs. He was not trekking to this so-called Bee-Jor ruled by the Son of Locust—he was going to the place where his half-breed cousin sat on a Slopeish throne. And Cousin Anand’s blood would spatter that throne once his head had been whacked off his neck. As Pleckoo marched, he turned to an inward chanting of Hulkro’s names to soothe himself but another name kept working its way into the order—a name he could not dispel.
Anand, Anand, kill little Cousin Anand.
Chapter 5
The Bee People
Daveena worked with the roach wranglers in detaching her sand-sled from the ailing insect that could no longer pull it. It was the second roach to have died on this journey, even though they were less than three moons old. Perhaps its breathing ventricles were blocked with mud from the recent rain, or it ailed from some poison in the Hulkrish dust; the wranglers were unsure. This was the first time the Entrevean clan had traveled in Hulkren, which some were already calling the Dustlands again.
She bowed to Madricanth in prayer as the roach was freed. “Thank You, Sweet Roach Lord, for lending us Your offspring,” said Punshu, her sled’s driver, as he wrenched the saddle from the insect’s thorax and dropped it to the ground. He was a fierce-looking boy of twelve, with long hair in ringlets that covered most of his back. Punshu was glowing with pride that he had been reassigned to drive the sled that carried the wife of Anand the Wasp Rider, Commander General of Glorious Bee-Jor. He watched with Daveena as the freed roach revived for a moment, its antennae weakly twirling, before it crawled off slowly, like a sleepy baby, to die. The wranglers returned with a fresh roach from the pack at the caravan’s tail and fitted it to the sled’s reins.
“We’ll help you with that,” said a wrangler as Punshu hoisted up the saddle.
“It’s all mine,” said Punshu, who looked determined to show his clan he was as strong and capable as any adult. He
set the saddle’s under-cord around his neck to free his arms, then climbed the rope ladder attached to the roach’s thorax. The wranglers held the ends of the roach’s antennae to steady it as Punshu slipped the saddle on the end of the thorax and secured it with its over-cord. Seating himself, he pulled back the antennae until he found the sensors that allowed him to guide it. Daveena noticed this new roach was larger and stronger than the last and she admired its chitin, which glistened like wet lacquer. She realized from the insect’s size that it must have recently feasted on dead ghost ants and, from its fetid meaty smell, the carcasses of Hulkrish men.
After Daveena checked the tethers, Punshu prodded the roach’s initial steps to test the harnessing. “Ready!” he cried, and his signal was passed up to the caravan’s head. Thagdag, the Entrevean’s chieftain, appeared atop the lead sled, with his long, waxed mustache rising up like roach antennae from his lips to his ears. He sounded his thorn horn twice, and the sleds resumed what had been an unnerving journey.
Daveena looked at her copy of the simple map Anand had drawn into some scratching paper. It was mostly accurate and included landmarks like tree stumps and prominent rocks, but it did not predict the puddles and mud traps they had to veer around after heavy rains, nor the weeds that had expanded to block them. The worst obstacles were some nearly impassable gullies they had to bridge with planks that needed to be reset every forty roach steps.
Daveena almost welcomed these challenges since they took her mind off her husband and his own uncountable adversities. It had not occurred to him or to her just how complicated and perilous a trip into a newly liberated Hulkren might be, especially after a long and unseasonable rainstorm. As for these bee people of Bulkoko, would they willingly follow a band of roach people to a strange land? Anand had told her, “They hated their masters in Bulkoko, I am sure they hated the Hulkrites more. I believe they will welcome the chance to live among us.”
“But everything has been upended,” she had countered. “How can we be sure this is a safe place for them—for anyone? And what do you know about these Bulkokans? They could be vicious cannibals or complete degenerates. You’re inviting strangers to a disordered mess—with angry enemies on every side.”
“Uncertainty is the only certainty in life,” he had said—and ended the conversation.
Anand, Anand, Anand, she thought to herself in her lonely sand-sled, and felt sadness, irritation, and then an irrepressible longing for this boy who refused to live an ordinary life. And for the fifth or sixth time that day, she felt a bodily hunger for him, yearning to push her hands inside his garments and shuck them. How much she wanted to see his dark and glistening eyes as they stared into hers with his fiery want, to feel his arms as they yanked her down to their mattress and wrapped around her waist, to feel the hardness of his muscles under his hot skin as his ankles wrapped around her own. Breathing quickly, she remembered the feel of his lips on hers, of his hot tongue in her mouth, as his fingers probed and readied her to the point where she ached for his blissful onslaught. His first thrust always brought relief, and then led to a spiraling ecstasy that forced her to close her eyes. Whenever she opened them, she saw him looking at her, pleasuring in giving her the deepest fulfillment.
She shook her head, rousing herself from her reverie. We have a mission. And I am pregnant, she thought as she watched Punshu bob on the saddle.
“Punshu, it looks like a very good hauling roach,” she said to make conversation.
“It is a fine roach, Madame Anand,” he said over his shoulder. “The antennae are a little spiky to hold but they respond well.”
When the caravan reached the peak of a stony grade with few plants, Daveena climbed up the storage chest to raise the roof-flap for a good view of what had to be Halk-Oktish. Anand had described it to her as a larger but shorter mound with a modest collection of palaces at its peak, most of them in ruins. Anand, she thought again, and her longing was renewed and made her feel weak and a little ashamed. She returned to the hollowing of beads to string them, and realized she had accomplished but a few bracelets and the beginnings of a necklace on this journey. It was late afternoon and the clan would need a place to camp before darkness descended.
The caravan halted when they sighted a lush cluster of weeds that could hide the sand-sleds in their depths. Several scouts donned camouflage of baby roach costumes and crawled in a scattered band, imitating the erratic, circular path of roaches. They entered the weeds to see if they were free of Hulkrites or other human enemies as well as predatory insects, spiders, mites, and ticks. As they waited for the scouts to return, Daveena heard the buzz of honeybees and looked up to see some flying overhead. The sacks on their hind legs were not yellow with pollen, but with the dark brown propolis they mixed with their wax to make a glue to build or repair their dwellings. The bees turned south, then dropped over what was likely a hive tended by the mysterious Bulkokans.
“Daveena,” shouted Worela, wife of the chieftain, her abundant jewelry shaking like a bead-chain drum as she walked. “You speak the Seed Eaters’ tongue, yes?”
“I do.”
“Thagdag wants you and the other two-tongued to approach these bee people and see if we can find a common tongue.”
“These are an eastern people. I don’t know that they will know Yatchmin,” she said, using the Seed Eaters’ word for their language.
After the sand-sleds were set in a circle under the weeds, the clan’s children were gathered in its center. The girls were handed materials for making jewelry and the boys were set to music practice on drums and other instruments. A contingent of men was left behind to guard the children as the roaches were released from the sand-sleds’ tethers.
The beehive was approached with the women riding atop the roaches and the men alongside on foot as their protectors. An increasing number of bees, making their way home at the end of the day’s foraging, were a helpful guide. The women steered the roaches through a winding path between towering stalks of dying sun daisies with hairy, brown leaves and limp flowers that resembled murdered spiders at the end of spikes. As the men of the clan walked, the light armor they had taken to wearing rattled under their loose clothes. They had bows at the ready, quivers full of arrows, and swords at their sides—weapons they were allowed to display in Bee-Jor as well as in this strange land. Some men at the tail of the procession walked backwards, anticipating the appearance of hidden aggressors. Here and there were dead ghost ants, testament that the Dneepers had done their job and left an effective poison.
As the bees increased in number above them, the parade continued up a path that revealed the strange sight of a towering cube composed of thirteen sheets of interlocking wood. As they got closer, they saw that between the sheets were massive discs of six-walled cells of wax. Masses of bees were climbing over these cells and engaging in a variety of activities. The bees bent their heads, either to deposit something, take something out, or feed something in a cell. The sight got even stranger when a cluster of bees from the middle crawled backwards down a series of ladders.
Daveena realized these backwards crawlers were not insects, but humans disguised as bees. Their costumes had black and ocher bands on their baggy trousers and had jackets of bee fuzz as their tops. On their backs were pairs of wings and on their heads were short antennae, which bent at the pedicle. The roach people advanced until they reached open ground to see that the hive was built atop a large and sturdy cage that housed a few hundred people. The Bulkokans on the ground were excited, shouting and buzzing among themselves, as the hive workers hurried their descent. The captives gathered at the bars of the cage, standing on each other’s shoulders to see the visitors. Daveena gasped when she saw that within the cage there were grass roaches, identical to their own. Some roaches were crawling at the top of the cage’s bars and others were on the ground, bearing roachlings on their backs as well as human children.
So it is true! she thought to herself. Bees and roaches have no quarrel and can live with eac
h other. This is what kept the ghost ants from attacking and eating the bees. The roach Daveena was riding, a female, was raising its wings and exuding its bright, sharp perfume in flirtation with the males in the cage. One of them was interested and responded by raising its own wings and then pivoting backwards to display its abdominal spikes. It’s a good sign! Daveena thought as she raised her hands up the antennae and pulled to keep the roach from assuming the mating position.
The Bulkokans were clamoring now, shouting to the roach people in an unknown tongue, when two little Hulkrites in transparent armor emerged from a nearby twig-and-leaf hut. They were without the white paint—too young for it, perhaps—and looked groggy and roused from a spirit-induced nap. They shouted at the Bulkokans, it seemed, for disturbing their sleep. A moment later the little Hulkrites jumped in shock to realize a mass of visitors on the backs of roaches had gathered behind them. They responded by reaching into their quivers to nock their bows, then realized they had no arrows. They raised little swords against a sizable army whose arrowheads glistened with a dark poison.
Those are just children, Daveena thought of the Hulkrites as she dismounted and joined the other two-tongued women. They were Queestra and Ulatha, who worked in the jewelry markets as fortune-tellers, and wore necklaces that held a seer’s orb as their pendants. Queestra spoke the Carpenters’ tongue and Ulatha spoke the best Slopeish.
The little Hulkrites were shaking as they attempted to look fierce. They did not respond to Slopeish or the Carpenters’ tongue. Daveena noticed that one boy had reddish hair edging out from his helmet and the orange-tinged skin of the Barley people. “Can you understand my words?” she shouted. Behind him, the Bulkokans were watching, loudly whispering in their own language, which was thick with the vibrational sound of bees. The boy was quiet, then lowered his sword, vaguely nodding.
“You are from the Barley Lands?” Daveena asked. He wanted to answer her, but he looked at the other boy, a pale yellow Hulkrish native, for permission.
The Prophet of the Termite God Page 5
