The Prophet of the Termite God

by Clark Thomas Carlton

  Grasshopper smiled at Medinwoe, who felt his skin transforming into something warm and shining. He looked at his arms and legs and feet, and saw that his skin had turned from yellow into a pure golden light, as if dipped into a sunbeam. He was floating again, rising to join his god, who reached into His chest, opened it, and allowed Medinwoe to enter, where the two became one.

  “I must rid the Promised Clearing of all but yellow people,” said Medinwoe/Grasshopper to himself as he accepted what he had always known: that he was the direct descendant of Lord Grasshopper, who by divine right would occupy the weeds on the edges of the place known as Hulkren and purge it of all its impure beings.

  Chapter 9

  A Quarter Moon Spitting Out Stars

  The priests quieted when Nuvao entered the antechamber of the storage rooms, where they were cataloguing their depleted stocks of potions and their ingredients.

  “Is his Most Pious in the back?” Nuvao asked of Frinbo, who sat at his carved desk, with its inlays of opalescent beetle chitin. Before him was a coarse sheet made from a sun-dried ant’s egg and next to that was a pen in a pod of wasp-gall ink.

  Pious Frinbo frowned as he rose, froze, and then grimaced when six of the Dranverite’s armed guards entered—then parted to reveal Anand on crutches. Terraclon followed after him.

  “I suppose it would be pointless to tell you this place is forbidden,” said Frinbo, “to all but ordained priests.”

  “It would be,” Anand said.

  “Even the royals are not allowed here,” said Frinbo.

  “If they had been, they’d have known how you concoct all your so-called potions.”

  “I’ll permit you, Commander,” Frinbo said, then pointed with his chin at the guards. “But not those dark things, with their weapons at the ready.”

  “You will permit us all. To ensure my safety.”

  “Would you have Pious Dolgeeno come and meet us?” said Terraclon. “Please.”

  “Well, I believe we’ve had a little miracle,” said Frinbo. “A request ending with a ‘please.’”

  “Yes. Please have him join us,” said Terraclon. “Unless he’s defecating, or otherwise engaged in something that stimulates that particular orifice.”

  Frinbo struggled to look indignant, but couldn’t help smirking. “And why, if I may ask?”

  “We are requesting a tour,” Anand said. “Of your . . . your . . .”

  “Of what?” Frinbo said, looking very much annoyed.

  “Of our records,” said Nuvao. “Of all that has been written down.”

  “And the ingredients in the potions—what we call formulas in Dranveria. All this knowledge should belong to all people.”

  “Commander Quegdoth,” said Frinbo, raising his chin. “Would you want all people, even the lowest-born and the steadfastly stupid, to have access to the most dangerous information?”

  “Dangerous to whom?”

  Frinbo was quiet, then turned to Nuvao. “What else have you been sharing with the commander, Nuvao? His eyes are dilated.”

  “I gave him the mildew,” said Nuvao. “Combined with an extraction of claw root for his pains. He was suffering. Terribly suffering.”

  “I would say he is doing much better,” said Frinbo.

  “It’s not my first time,” Anand said.

  Nuvao smiled to see that Anand was giddy, and leaking little chuckles as he looked around the bright, cheerful chamber with its walls of pink crystals on one side, and its shelves full of scrolls on the other. Anand delighted in looking at the old, round priests, who glared at him as he took in their elaborate necklaces and the shifting sheen of their polished silk garments. He was fascinated by the individual hairs of their long eyebrows, which they had taken pains to curl into little knots at their ends. One priest recoiled from Anand as he fingered his dangling earrings, crafted from blue scorpion shells, all while attempting to hide his writing with the drape of his sleeves. Nuvao could not help but laugh, which he muffled with his own sleeves.

  “What can you bring me that is something like a primer?” Anand asked, then sharply clapped his hands—a happy sound that the priests did not care for at all.

  “A primer?” asked Frinbo.

  “Yes,” Anand said with a radiant grin. “A scroll for beginners who are just learning to read and write.”

  “I can help with that,” said Nuvao as he searched among the shelves. Anand looked lovingly out the windows and at the pink quartz walls, and burst into his happiest smile. “This rosy light coming in through the walls reminds me of Dranveria,” he said.

  “They have rose quartz in Dranveria?” asked Terraclon.

  “They have entire buildings made of it . . . including the Hall of Peace in the capital. And so are the university palaces, which are set atop the mound.”

  “A what? A university?”

  “A place of high learning. They have many rooms like this, full of scrolls where histories and ideas and stories are written down. You’d like the scrolls about clothing and its history.”

  “Clothing has a history?”

  “Yes. It’s called fashion. They have rooms full of scrolls with colorful pictures that are dedicated to documenting its changes over the centuries. You could lose yourself for days, Ter.”

  Nuvao stepped down from a ladder with a scroll and pulled out its pages. “This is typical of the first scroll anyone will see first when being initiated into what we call record-keeping . . . or writing, to use the forbidden word.”

  Anand looked at the pages and took in their rows of tiny yet elaborate drawings. “These are not simplified letters,” he said, using a Dranverish word. “These are pictures, I assume, that stand for sounds, and sometimes look like the objects they represent.”

  “Exactly,” said Nuvao. Grabbing Frinbo’s ink pen, he dipped it in the funnel of the pod to wet it. “Here is how you write your name,” he said, replicating five of the page’s drawings, repeating two. One drawing looked like rows of teeth inside a circle, two were like worms tied into knots, one resembled a quarter moon spitting out stars, and the other was a human foot with a swollen big toe. It took multiple dippings of the implement before Nuvao was finished.

  “That is . . . very time-taking,” Anand said. “Now I understand why Dolgeeno was working so furiously.”

  “How do you write your name in Dranverish?” Nuvao asked.

  Anand dipped the pen and rendered the five simple letters of the Dranverish phonetic system that spelled his name in the time between two heartbeats. Nuvao was stunned.

  “That’s it? Those little scrawls?”

  “Yes. Here is how you write ‘Nuvao,’” he said, and completed it just as quickly.

  “And my name?” Terraclon asked.

  “That would have two of these in the middle for the harder ar sound,” said Anand as he finished the writing. “I will learn this Slopeish way of writing. But for now, we must all learn to write something that will be engraved in stone monuments settled throughout every mound in Bee-Jor—before the palaces and at the dew stations and in the markets. The largest of these will be set in the stadiums. Something will be written in Dranverish at the top, in Slopeish in the middle, and drawn in pictures at the bottom.”

  Anand looked up to see Dolgeeno waddling tentatively into the room, looking as if he had almost drowned in fermentation.

  “You requested my presence?” he said.

  “Yes, Pious. Each day, at every mound in Bee-Jor, the high priest of each mound will have something he needs to read out loud after the mound has been summoned in morning prayer,” Anand proclaimed. And, with that, his plan took the first of many, many steps.

  Chapter 10

  Disguises

  Polexima was slowly rousing from a nap she had not intended to take, and felt almost glued to the mattress by the return of dark, sorrowful feelings.

  In the chaos of creating a new nation, there was little time for mourning; but her mind was ruled in these quiet moments by losses that could not
be counted. Her favorite son, Nuvao, was alive and safe, but all the others had to be dead, their remains digested and discarded by ghost ants. As they were soldier-princes, she was never allowed to be close to any of her sons, who were plucked from her lap as soon as they could carry their first little weapon. It was not their faces as young men that she remembered, but those when they were tiny babies, blinking at the world in both fear and delight. Back then, they were as hungry for physical warmth as they were for food. She could barely remember them as they got older and were formally distanced from the company of women. After a certain age, she only saw her boys at functions and ceremonies where they treated her courteously, awaiting the moment they could break away and indulge in drink with other men. Watching them from a distance in the ballroom and the feasting hall, she saw that they spoke with the same voice, wore the same uniform, and laughed in the same way at jokes whispered in a tightening circle.

  Her mind, beyond her control, repeated her sons’ names in the order in which they were born. She remembered, as if it were a moon ago, when each of them was wrapped by the priests in a yellow blanket and handed to her as a set of twins or triplets, as she was mourning for their tinier sisters who were dead from injections of a wasp’s venom. Now she was wishing that all her sons, like Nuvao, had chosen the little idol of Ant Queen over the toy sword when it was offered to them by Dolgeeno in the ritual of the Third Age Chit. Her pain deepened further when her mind turned to other dead relatives killed by Hulkrites: her father, her brothers, the sister she barely knew, and innumerable cousins, nephews, and uncles. “Peace is their greatest passion,” she said aloud to herself, repeating something she had heard Anand say about his adopted land of Dranveria. How she longed to experience this place he had told her about, where war was never glorified and avoided when possible.

  After scolding herself for her indulgent sadness, she pulled herself up from her bed and nodded to the idol of Cricket that was dark and glossy with a fresh staining of berry juice and set at the front of her chamber’s altar. “Hail to Cricket, Defender of Peace,” she said three times, and then promised her goddess that before her reign was over she would place the idols of Her at the forefront of every altar in Bee-Jor. For now, it was time to return to Anand and to duty. He was expecting her in his chambers near day’s end to discuss his plans for the assembly and the restoration of order in Bee-Jor. Just how could he manage that?

  “I’d like to walk by myself,” she said to her Cricket novitiates, who nodded as they helped her through the flaps to the outside walking ring. As she walked, she saw something like normal life as the ring emptied of its tradespeople, merchants, and servants with their empty baskets or carts or barrels. Those who passed her were still not used to the sight of their once majestic queen, who dressed now in the plain guise of a priestess to a neglected deity. They thought it odd to see her walking by herself in a slow but steady way, instead of riding atop a bangled carrier ant with an entourage of gaudy priests. Still, the people stopped and bowed, and allowed her to pass before proceeding on their own way. Some even walked backwards so as not to show her their offending backsides.

  I am still their queen, she thought, and felt something like a smile on her lips. The people were also doing something new: smiling back and meeting her eyes. Some of it, she was sure, was out of derision for her strange, self-humbling appearance. But it seemed for the greater part that they smiled out of warmth and appreciation, perhaps a real love instead of a fearful respect. They knew that their queen had suffered as a captive in Hulkren, then done what she could to save them from extermination by Hulkrites. But the Cajorites seem less sure about this process to bring them—all of them—into something uncertain called the New Way.

  The same warm reactions were not coming when she reached the war widows in their bright white gowns at the decks of Sun and Moon worship. The widows had been gathering there to wait for the divine moment that both the lunar and solar deities might be visible in the sky, to allow a glimpse of their loved ones in the World Beyond Stars. When they were soldier-wives, the women would have stopped and pulled to the side, bowing gracefully for the passage of Queen Polexima. Now they gave her the sideways glare and pretended not to see her. News has spread that I sided with the Dranverite and the untouchables against their cousin-women, she thought. Good!

  Polexima halted for a moment in order to look at the widows and challenged them to acknowledge her. “Good afternoon . . . Bee-Jorites,” she shouted at them, and allowed herself the smug satisfaction of seeing them bristle. A few took awkward and shallow bows. From out of the middle of them, she noticed three women wearing disguises from some long-ago masquerade ball. A woman dressed in the imported robes of a Seed Eater queen came towards her, followed by a woman in something that a seamstress imagined was a Britasyte costume. She was followed by a third woman, dressed in the tunic, antennae, and leggings of a little boy with a stick ant between his legs. The three stood as a wall to block Polexima, folding their arms under their masked faces.

  “Good evening . . . all,” Polexima said, mildly alarmed. “What charming costumes. Is there a ball tonight?”

  “We are not Bee-Jorites, and it is not a good evening at all,” said the woman dressed as a Seed Eater from under a ropy, orange wig. “But it’s about to get worse for you, Your Majesty.” Polexima was trying to determine who the woman was from her voice when she felt a blow to each of her cheeks from the other two. As Polexima reeled, the Seed Eater impersonator shot out her fist to land on Polexima’s nose, and drew blood. Polexima gripped her staff harder and attempted to swing it at her assailants when they grabbed it from her. The Britasyte imposter knocked the queen to the ground and raised the staff’s pointed end to jab through her robe.

  “They’re attacking the queen!” shouted a passing worm monger and her mud-covered daughters. As the worm monger pulled Polexima to safety, her assailants were attacked by rough laboring women. These were no strangers to violence. The worm daughters were a noisy mass of aggression, and took running leaps at the costumed widows, knocking them down, beating their faces with grubby fists, and scratching with their filthy nails. A one-armed daughter used her dark, dirty head to smash in the face of the widow dressed as a boy, then clamped her teeth around the woman’s nose.

  The war widows advanced into the fray when Terraclon arrived, foot guards at his back. “This ends now!” he shouted as the guards raised their blowguns and threatened the darts. The widows backed off, and the attackers were arrested. The masks were ripped from their faces as their hands were tied behind their backs. Terraclon went to Polexima and pulled her to her feet as she took in the faces of her attackers. She knew each of them, second and third cousins, who glared at her in rage before they were dragged off to a cage, cursing her to an eternity of torture as they went.

  “No more walking alone for you, Majesty,” said Terraclon as he examined her robe for damage.

  “I suppose not,” Polexima managed to respond.

  “First time you were ever in a fight, I imagine.”

  “You imagine right. But I am sure it is not my last.”

  “Something you need to know, then,” he said, reverting back to his laborer’s accent. “Next time, when you know you’re going to be attacked, you throw the first punch. Even if it’s three of ’em. Should have punched ’em one, two, three—square in the nose. While they’re stunned, you kick them—where it hurts, if they’re men.”

  “I could not possibly do that. That is most . . . unseemly.”

  “Majesty, it’s stupid not to defend yourself,” Terraclon said, and he handed the queen her staff before they resumed walking. “Let’s get a sharper point on the end of this staff, and some side blades. Next time you’re threatened, you jam it through their guts.”

  When they entered Anand’s chamber, Polexima saw that he was lying at the edge of his bed so he could be close to his visitors. Terraclon helped Polexima reach the bed as Anand flipped through a series of renderings made on scratch paper
. Standing near his bedside and looking impatient were Pious Frinbo and other priests, as well as the foremen from the builders’ and stonecutters’ castes.

  “Polexima!” Anand shouted when he realized she was beside him. As she got closer, he gasped with alarm to see her nose was bleeding.

  “What’s happened to you?”

  “I have learned an important lesson today,” she said. “And I have been a bit stupid. I am wiser now and will not allow you or anyone else to spend one more moment on this minor incident.”

  “All right, then. Someone, please, get a chair for Her Majesty,” said Anand. “You’ve arrived at a good time. We are finalizing our plans for the assembly.”

  “Something tells me this will not be the usual ceremony,” Polexima said.

  “No,” said Anand. “But it will be the same in one way: we will use it to set an example. Murder must never be tolerated.”

  “Agreed. Nor even the threat of murder—like from those two louts from the midden we heard from today.”

  Anand was quiet, his eyes looking left, then right, when he suddenly gasped. “Dad! My dad!” he said aloud to himself. “Messenger!” he shouted across the room to the young men waiting near the door. “Ride a speed ant down to the midden, and summon Yormu the Mute and return him here.”

  “To the midden, sir?”

  “Yes, that’s where you’ll find him. He is a celebrated veteran of the War of Hulkrish Aggression. Treat him with all due honor.”

  Polexima saw worry in Anand’s shifting eyes. “I’m sorry, Polly. It’s my father—I’m worried what those miserable shits might have done to him.”

  She watched Anand as he panted, then steadied himself, before he picked up two of the drawings, considered them, then proceeded to draw some more, finalizing a vision of the structure he had in mind. He was finishing the final sketch and explaining his vision to Polexima just as daylight was ending. She was stunned by the simplicity of his plan. Why had it never occurred to her or anyone else on the Slope to do this? How much simpler it would have made things!