The torch-making caste entered with a few lights made from the last of the lightning-fly eggs, but most of their torches were chips from glowing bark fungus and had a weaker light. As they set up the torches in the wall holsters, the messenger reappeared through the portal, looking panicked and out of breath. Polexima looked at Anand as he tamped down his alarm.
“Did you find Defender Yormu?” he asked.
“I did, Commander. But he is unable to travel here. It’s best you go to him, sir. Some speed ants are docked outside the portal.”
“Excuse me, Polexima,” Anand said, and left as quickly as his wounded legs would let him.
Anand and his guards leapt off the ants that had brought them swiftly to the emptier hovels of the midden. It felt strange and haunting to walk under and through the lightless dwellings of his childhood. They had the familiar sounds of noisy family arguments, and the wailing, always, of someone being beaten. One more thing to outlaw, he thought to himself. He reached the hovel he had grown up in, and looked up its ladder for signs that his father was inside it, when he heard raspy breathing at the ladder’s base. Under a low-growing cluster of purslane, he saw his father’s legs. Anand moved the leaves back, took his fungus torch, and held it to his father’s head. He saw that his face was a bloody pulp with one eye so badly swollen he could not open it.
“Dad! What’s happened?”
Yormu grimaced as his hands showed Anand where his rib cage had been throttled, and its bones fractured.
“Dad . . . this was no accident! Who did this to you? Was it Keel? Tal?”
Yormu shrugged.
“You don’t know?”
Yormu nodded. Though it pained him, he took the rag from his tool pouch and placed it over his face.
“They were disguised?” Anand asked. Yormu nodded.
“But we know who it was,” Anand said, looking in the distance towards Keel’s own hovel, where they had likely returned for the night. It was the largest in the midden and the only one with a light in its window. “You can’t live here anymore, Dad. You’re staying with me. You have no choice in it! We’ll find you other things to do.”
Anand turned to his guard. “Good Defenders, I need you to find or fashion a stretcher and gently bring this brave veteran up to my chambers where he will stay until he recovers.”
“Are you thirsty, Dad?”
Yormu nodded.
“We need water!” Anand shouted to some passing middenites. They came closer and he recognized them as Zlok and Wartra, the parents of Terraclon, coming from the dew station with water bladders. They were still dressed in rags of filthy eggshell cloth and their feet were strapped with sandals of straw.
“Why should we share our water with you?” said Zlok.
“Water belongs to all,” said Anand. “My father needs some. Now.”
“We needs all we got,” said Wartra, contempt in her words as she glared at Anand.
“And just what have I done to offend you?” Anand asked, rising.
“What haven’t you done? You’ve turned our lives downside up. We was fine in the old way, as good as anybody else in the midden. Now we got shit and trash workers who think they’re better than us, coming down here to work from some fine house in their fancy clothes.”
“Our life’s gotten harder, Roach Boy,” said Zlok. “You took our son from us; he hasn’t set foot here since you made him a priest. He was supposed to take care of us when we get older. Last time he was here, he looked at us like we was something he scraped out of a chamber pot.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have beaten his ass every day,” said Anand. “And he’d want to take care of you.”
The three were silent, staring at each other. Never forget, Anand, he told himself, some will choose the same misery over the promise of change. Anand walked towards them, and grabbed a bladder from Zlok. “I’ll return this,” he said. “Thank you.”
As Anand held the bladder and squeezed its water for his father, he looked up at the shelters at Keel’s hovel and imagined he might have seen his shadowy figure looking out its window.
I’m not sure how or when, he thought, but someday, I will have just cause to tear your spine out of your back, Keel, and use it to whip your sons to death.
Chapter 11
Squatters
Medinwoe woke the following morning atop a bed of shredded grass. At his sides were the other Dneepers, some still in a profound sleep, regardless of the sharpening sunlight. The king’s legs were wrapped tight with lengths of chewed egg-cloth that was fragrant with remnants of some Slopeish liquor. The torture of the infestation had ended and in its place was a web of wounds that were aching but scabbing over. This was a smaller agony he could abide.
In the near distance, he saw the blue locusts tied to weeds, their heads covered with hoods to keep them in darkness. The pilots were returning from a foraging, where they had gathered bundles of grass shoots and clover that held beads of dew, something to both water and feed the locusts. These men were followed by a hunting party, who sang happily as they returned with bits of a slaughtered ghost ant, a little food scout. The scout was a reminder that at least one of Hulkren’s southern mounds had yet to be exterminated. The hunters cut up the abdomen and made crude plates of its transparent chitin to portion out its watery flesh.
Captain Dziddens noticed Medinwoe was leaning on his arms to raise his head as he yawned. The captain walked towards the king with a plate of the fresh goo that sparkled in the brightening sun. “Can you eat, Your Highness?”
“Please,” said Medinwoe. “But I am more thirsty. If you’ve scraped some dew this morning, I would gladly drink it.”
Dziddens shouted in Low Slopeish to the other pilots, who rolled over the lidded barrel that contained the morning’s dew, then cut into the water with the attached trowel and offered a drop to Medinwoe. As the king’s head cleared, he remembered the day before: the unbearable itch, the erupting mites, the attack of some degenerate army . . . and then the rescue by the locust pilots. A deeper, richer memory overwhelmed him when he remembered the dark, fungal liquor he was given to drink. This concoction had turned the day’s suffering into a delicious feast for all five senses, and then brought him his divine revelation. Medinwoe was deep in the memory of his vision when he felt his shoulder being shaken and realized the captain was speaking to him.
“King Medinwoe,” he heard. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, yes, excuse me, Captain Dziddens. I . . . I was lost in thought. What did you ask me?”
“We want to know when you might be ready to ride and return to Bee-Jor. It will take a full day, if the South wind is not too strong, to reach the border. We will likely have to spend the night there before flying to Cajoria in the morning.”
“Help me stand, please,” the king said, and he extended his arm. As Dziddens helped him rise, he felt painful flares over his legs, as if his wounds were all attacking each other. It could only get worse to sit in back of a pilot during a long and bumpy flight. “Before we fly, Captain, it might help if we had more of that liquor you gave us before the surgery. What was that?”
“It is called, I believe, the Holy Mildew. It is said to be a gift from the gods to the Slopeish priests.”
“Holy, yes. Indeed.”
“We were told not to drink it ourselves—that it would be dangerous to fly under its influence.”
“Would you have any more of it?”
“I . . . I believe so, sir.”
“Then bring it right here. And I will rouse the men and tell them we are flying out today.”
Dziddens hesitated. “As . . . as you like, sir. Commander Quegdoth instructed us to do our very best to serve you.”
As Captain Dziddens had predicted, the South wind slowed the return to Bee-Jor. Locusts were difficult if not impossible to fly in formation, but could be coaxed into something like a chevron. On the flight back, they frequently overtook each other as leader, or would suddenly drop for water or rest and had to be
prodded back into the air. Two stubborn ones remained behind, and their pilots had to be moved to other locusts. The pilots clung uncomfortably as trios on the saddles for two, and slowed the locusts with their added weight.
Medinwoe, seated behind Dziddens, was for the second time savoring the thrilling intoxication of the Holy Mildew. The delights of flight enhanced by this drink were impossibly beautiful, and chills ran down his spine. The locust, of its own accord, dropped out of formation and landed in a patch of thriving weeds including clover, dandelions, and newly sprouted mallows with yellow-green leaves.
As the locust munched on a sun-spattered salad, the king felt an inner mounting ecstasy as he considered this extraordinary country, his Promised Clearing, bequeathed to his people and to him as king. He laughed without restraint when Dziddens prodded the sated locust back into the air, where it fought to fly in the strengthening wind. Dziddens struggled to steady himself when the locust was flipped by a sudden gust. For a moment, Medinwoe fell out of the saddle and dangled from its tethers before he pulled himself back to his seat. The look on Dziddens’s face was both frightening and funny as he looked over his shoulder, all wide eyes and gaping mouth with its veiny red insides and wagging uvula. All of this made the king laugh harder once they righted.
The sun was sinking above the ledge of earth when they neared the borders of Bee-Jor and, further east, those of its crippled mother country, the Holy Slope. But something else, something strange and shifting and stinking, had infiltrated the Promised Clearing—an infestation of some kind.
“What wild thing are we seeing down there, within those weeds?” Medinwoe shouted. “It’s an invasion of some kind.”
“I’m not sure, sir, but it looks like. . . . people. Let’s take a look before the sun gets swallowed. We have to land soon—this locust already senses the dark and resists my prods.”
Dziddens prodded the left antenna forward and the right to the side, which sent the locust into a jerky spiral over the weeds. Medinwoe’s ecstasy turned to a sudden and intense rage as he realized that tens of thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of refugees fleeing Hulkren were squatting in his new land. Why are they coming here? he asked himself. Instead of returning to their old countries?
The captain steered the locust up and south, to land in a sandy patch that had been powdered with a ring of marigold dust as their place to spend the night. The king and captain dismounted to find a squadron of pilots had already prepared a camp and were hooding the locusts’ heads as others scavenged for an evening meal.
Medinwoe looked into the distance and felt anger storming inside him, as if his eyes and ears were leaking lightning. In the near distance he sighted more of these raggedy refugees trudging to Bee-Jor’s borders. He got a closer look when Dziddens tethered his locust to stalks of cup grass, and roused a napping trio of dark-skinned women in colorful wraps. The three stood and stared in a frightened silence at the red-cloaked pilot and his blue locust. With no words between them, the refugees knew it was time to go. They piled their possessions back into their cargo-sled as a baby in swaddling started bawling.
Medinwoe struggled to step forward and stare at the three, these blackish figures who had brought their spawn into his Promised Clearing. The tallest of them had broad shoulders and piercing, hate-filled eyes and her—maybe his—lower face was covered with a cowl.
That one is trouble.
Pleckoo had been napping, but now he was awake and alarmed to see men landing in the nearby clearing on flying insects, and shouting to each other in Slopeish. At first look, he thought the insects might be night wasps, but then realized it was still daylight. As more of the insects landed, he saw that they were mottled blue locusts.
They fly wasps at night and locusts during the day!
One of these locusts was coming near him led by a yellow-skinned Slopeite in a red tunic; it was an obscene and offensive crimson that Hulkro would detest. Just behind him was a struggling old Dneeper who stared at Pleckoo and the Ledacki women with an open hatred. The women were still tired and had a pained look on their faces.
“We must find someplace else to spend the night,” Pleckoo said to Jakhuma and Kula Priya. “These people don’t want us here.”
The three looked up to see the last of some locusts and their riders almost fall from the sky, landing at their camp’s center and sending up a yellow powder. This flying army of Slopeites was a combination of dark and light faces, and some he recognized as men of the blinders’ caste in their crusty rags. At least half of them, the crippled ones, were the hated Dneepers—those yellow-skinned grass people who had repelled him in his hunt for Anand. How has my unholy cousin managed to ally with them? Then again, they are a roach people too.
Anand. The hunt for him was showing promise. Pleckoo could taste Anand’s blood in his mouth . . . then realized he had bitten into his own lip.
Chapter 12
The Camps
Pleckoo’s feet were aching, gouged by sand grains through the broken soles of his boots. His chest was chafed from the reins of the sled, and the front of his thighs burned with soreness from the long, bumpy trudge . . . and it was still just morning. The two women had never offered to take over the load, nor had they agreed when he asked them to take a turn. “We were going to ask you if we could sit on the sled,” said Jakhuma. “Since we are not used to so much walking.”
“And we are carrying your baby,” said Kula Priya.
You stupid useless women should be hauling me, the Second Prophet of Hulkro!
“Just why did you pick this baby?” asked Jakhuma.
“Yes, why? He is kind of ugly. Snub-nosed,” said Kula.“As I have told you, I would have rescued them all if I could have,” Pleckoo said, then realized, with a faint shock, why this baby had aroused his pity. Snub-nosed!
“You’ll be glad to know this one’s got a good appetite. He’s gotten heavier since I started breastfeeding him.”
“You have milk?” Pleckoo said.
“It came last night and he latched right away. Maybe Goddess Meat Ant wants him to live.”
“Maybe it’s the grace of the Son of Locust as we get closer,” said Jakhuma.
Goddess Meat Ant! Son of Locust! Heresies! he thought to himself, and regretted he could not scream it aloud. For a moment he thought about forcing the women to pick up the reins by threatening his sword’s sharp end . . . but now was not the time.
A darkly sweet and oily smell was in the air as they neared the Tar Marsh in the East. In the distance he could see the shadowy rise of the Great Jag’s boulders in the West. They had reached the southern end of the Petiole and were close to that wretched place he hated most, the Slope—now known as Bee-Jor. What a ridiculous name for a nation! Pushed to the sides of the channel were the ravaged corpses of ghost ants, all of them broken into pieces, drained of their lymph and robbed of the contents of their abdomens. Their legs, antennae, and shattered chitin were strewn like so much garbage. The sight of dead ghost ants made walking even harder for Pleckoo, as each corpse was a reminder of the Night That Had Gone So Wrong. He had traveled up this channel, so sure of victory, and a short time later he had been forced to retreat down it in utter defeat.
Sweat was stinging his eyes when he sighted Mound Palzhad, rising above yellowing weeds that were taller over new, green plants thriving for the moment in rain-dampened soil. As they got closer, the spectacle of the palaces dazzled him as they glinted atop the ancient mound in the golden sunshine of the afternoon. The beauty of it was taunting; Palzhad should have been his prize possession, the first of the Slopeish mounds annexed by the Holy Hulkrish Empire. The more he looked at the palaces, the more it felt like he was lying under them, crushed into a puddle of flesh and blood. “Hulkro tests the faithful,” he said aloud to himself.
“Khali Talavar!” he heard from behind him. Jakhuma and Kula had stopped walking, and were staring at him, startled.
“Yes?”
“What did you say?”
“I said nothing,” Pleckoo said.
“We both heard you,” said Kula. “You muttered the name of the . . .”
“Termite God,” whispered Jakhuma.
“Did I?” said Pleckoo. “Force of habit.”
“We will not hear it again,” said Jakhuma. She cocked her head quizzically as she looked up at the mound. “Bee-Jor is an old place,” she said. “It looks like it could belong in Hulkren.”
“That is not Bee-Jor,” said Pleckoo. “That is Mound Palzhad. It was the southernmost mound of the Slopeites. And all mounds in Hulkren once belonged to the United Queendoms.”
“All mounds? Really?” she asked. “And how do you know this?”
“Everyone knows this,” Pleckoo said. “Didn’t you?”
Pleckoo looked left, then right, and saw tattered bands of refugees coming up behind them from the East and West. He turned and looked in back of him, and saw even more from the direct south. Most he recognized as slaves of Hulkren in their rags of grass fibers or chewed egg-cloth, but some of the women wore the castoffs of their former mistresses. Nearly all these refugees were hobbled at an ankle or hamstrung above the calf, and all looked weak from hunger and overwork. As the mound got closer and glimmered with promise, they tripped as they walked, drunk with hope, looking up instead of ahead at what they thought was an abode of the gods.
How sickeningly foolish, Pleckoo thought. He remembered how he had been taught to worship Sahdrin and Polexima and their horde of sallow, overfed children—these supposed descendants of the gods who did nothing but eat, drink, and dress up in their dwellings constructed by slaves. And each day Pleckoo was forced by the midden’s idols keeper to nod towards these palaces in a prayer of thanks after receiving his meager mushroom ration. But are the Sallows still in charge here? Pleckoo wondered. Or has Anand bathed them all for execution and put his roach people on the thrones?
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