The Prophet of the Termite God

by Clark Thomas Carlton

  “Khali Talavar!” Jakhuma shouted at him. “Why have you halted?”

  Pleckoo had not realized he had stopped; he was paralyzed for the moment with the old hatreds as he pondered his former life in Cajoria’s midden. He resumed dragging the sand-sled forward and somehow, through his fatigue, they reached the Petiole’s end and the broad expanse of the border weeds. Ahead of them was a density of camps that filled the air with the stenches of humans. Refugees were interspersed through the weeds, which they had cut down or uprooted or trimmed for materials to make shelters. Some of the hungriest were eating the weeds to fill their stomachs, or chewing on their roots for some starch and a little bit of water. All in the camps looked bored, exhausted, and then nervous with suspicion as they sighted an onslaught of new arrivals.

  Pleckoo pulled up, then halted behind a camp that was a mix of youths of different races, just sprouting beards, and all of them wearing the rags of slaves. They were looking over their shoulders as they divvied up the lymph from a hairy rain beetle, whose misfortune was to emerge from its burrow in the middle of their camp.

  “Get back,” said a tall and spindly young man in Hulkrish, after he licked lymph off the back of his arm. “This is our place. We’ve nothing to share with you.” Pleckoo could see that the surrounding camps were looking at these boys and their feast with envy. He could see that beyond these camps were many, many more refugees crowding the weeds, and some were drifting forward in hopes of sharing in something to eat.

  “All right,” Pleckoo said, dropping the reins of the sled. “That’s your place. This is ours.”

  “When are they letting us in?” shouted Jakhuma to the boys, stepping forward as she pulled back the hood of her garment.

  “No one knows,” said Tall and Spindly.

  “How many have they let in?” she asked.

  “We don’t know that they have let anyone in. Yet.”

  “You don’t know,” said Pleckoo with contempt. “Who would know?”

  The youths shrugged and returned to their eating. Pleckoo’s despair was giving way to the sweet rage that sharpened his mind and strengthened his limbs. He inhaled deeply, then yanked up his sword to reveal its dark, lethal blade. “Out of my way!” he shouted, his blade whistling as he brandished it at the refugees. They fell away to make a path for him.

  “Where are you going?” Jakhuma shouted over the baby in her arms. “You can’t leave us alone!”

  “Don’t move from there,” Pleckoo spat, turning to face her.

  “But if you leave us, we . . .”

  “I said don’t move!” he shouted in his natural voice, and the force of his words shocked her as he pointed his sword. She lowered her head, and he disappeared into the parting crowd.

  The mass of refugees grew thicker as Pleckoo ventured deeper. These first arrivals looked even weaker from hunger, mute with it, and he saw resentment in their eyes as he stomped through their camps. It was twilight when he reached an encampment of what looked like pubescent Hulkrites, lying on rag-sacks. He brazenly stepped into the middle of their gathering and they stood, circling him, as they reached for weapons in their loose tunics of filthy silk.

  “You are in our place,” said the largest and oldest of them. He stared at Pleckoo from under a thick mass of spiraling, yellow curls.

  “Your place, yes,” said Pleckoo after a silence. He lowered his sword.

  “What do you want?” asked Curls in a voice on the verge of deepening.

  “Only to pass,” said Pleckoo, resuming his higher pitch in case they might recognize his voice.

  “I wouldn’t go any further,” said Curls. “It’s dangerous. Do you have any food?”

  Pleckoo was wondering who these yellow-skinned boys were. Curls spoke Hulkrish without an accent. He was likely the son of a native Hulkrite, perhaps even a relative of Tahn.

  “I might have some food. Have you seen any Slopeites?” Pleckoo asked. “Have they come here? Passed any messages?”

  “There are no Slopeites just beyond,” said the boy. “The Slopeites’ country is further west. Those are Bee-Jorites on that mound, called Palzhad.”

  Slopeites in the West? So the Slope has been split in two!

  “When are they letting us in?”

  “We don’t know if they are.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Why are you here?” said Curls. “And where are you from? And why do you carry a black glass sword from Foondatha and ask so many questions?”

  Pleckoo was quiet. All he could guess was that these boys had escaped from a mound in Hulkren where the Faithful to Termite were no longer welcome.

  “Let us say I found this sword,” Pleckoo said. “And that all of us left Hulkren to seek a new life in Bee-Jor.” Pleckoo made the slightest bow of his head. “I’m going to see what’s beyond. And find out when they are letting us in.”

  “Don’t go too far,” said Curls. “Unless you’ve got some leaf-cutter kin-scent.”

  Curls and the others stepped aside, and Pleckoo entered into narrow paths that wound between grass stalks until he reached a place of low-lying plants he had to crawl under. Leaves of the plants ruffled up with a breeze from the south-blowing wind. Maybe the leaf-cutter ants won’t catch my scent, he thought.

  He walked up a grade to a clearing between mallow plants where he could look down and see the border wall, constructed by ants of their dung and reinforced by humans with a barrier of piled sand grains. As he walked towards the wall, he hoped the ants were distracted so that he could climb over it, and find a workman’s site or an outcastes’ settlement—and a tub full of leaf-cutter kin-scent. The quiet and darkness emboldened him until he saw the slightest wave of antennae and then the head of a sentry ant above the wall. When the ant crawled to the top of the barrier, he could see it was without a human sentry on its back.

  The ant’s antennae whirred into a blur and its body shook to release recruit-scent. In a moment she was joined by a stream of sentry ants, some of which carried human riders. Pleckoo was unsure of what he was seeing in the dark; the riders did not look like yellow-skinned sentries from the military caste, but were darker and wearing what looked like red quilting over crude armor.

  “Get back!” shouted one ant rider in common Slopeish. “Get back or die!”

  “When are they letting us in?” Pleckoo shouted through his cupped hands.

  “Get back!” shouted the ant rider as a burst of ants poured up and over the wall and sped towards Pleckoo. He turned and raced back to the weeds when he heard ant-steps closing in and felt antennae brushing his neck. Around his waist he felt the tips of an ant’s mandibles, and then heard the rip of his robe as he escaped the ant’s grasp.

  A cluster of dried barley stalks was ahead of him. He dove through a narrow opening inside the stalks, then stood and pushed into their center with all his strength. The retracting stalks made a cage around him as he worked through them to their other side. The ants climbed up the stalks and over each other as Pleckoo pushed out of the barley. He ran, crawled, and climbed over a rough patch of sand, turning for a moment. No ants! They lost my scent, he thought as he entered a thickness of protecting weeds on the edge of the camps. Praise Hulkro!

  When he found his way back to the camp of the Hulkrish boys, the cloth around his face was clinging to his sweaty skin. Dizzy and out of breath, he fell to the ground on his knees.

  “We told you not to go,” said Curls. The boys behind him were laughing, something that increased as Pleckoo pivoted in their circle.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing. It’s just that someone looks like a whore trolling for customers—with her dark little rump on display. Does it cost extra to take the back entry?”

  “Don’t speak like that to me!” said Pleckoo, reaching behind him to feel the rip that exposed his backside. He reached for his sword and took the crouching position.

  “We’ll speak any way we want,” said Curls. “We’ve got our own swords.”
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  The boys stood and extended their blades towards his chin. Pleckoo looked around at them and then rapidly blinked. He was feeling strangely empty, then utterly depleted, when he became mindful of something that had climbed up his legs.

  “No need for that . . . brothers,” he barely managed to say. “We could and should help each other.”

  Something sharp entered his calf. He suppressed his urge to scream and fell to the thin coat of loam on the sand. Picking up the hem of his garment, he saw chubby little creatures that had clamped on each of his calves—grass ticks! He reached for one and felt the double-sided saw of its mouth tearing his flesh out as he pulled. As Pleckoo wrenched out the other, Curls used the end of his sword to stab the tick through its belly as it wobbled on its back and waved its skinny legs. The stabbing ache of the wounds rolled up Pleckoo’s legs and through his torso and he fainted. When he came to, he was looking up at the young Hulkrites standing around him, chewing and slurping in indifference. He tried to rise and could not, as if his legs had turned to stone, and fell hard on his naked bottom.

  “I can’t walk,” said Pleckoo. “Can I stay here until morning?”

  “You can,” said Curls. “You said you might have some food. And you did.”

  Pleckoo looked to the left of him and saw the legs and the mouth-saws of the grass ticks and realized that the rest of them were being devoured by the Hulkrish boys. He looked at the punctures in his legs and saw no bleeding, courtesy of the ticks’ styptic potions. Crawling to the camp’s edge, he reached a dying dandelion and pulled down one of its leaves to lay on as his bed. Wake me from this nightmare, Lord Termite, he prayed, then fell into a fragile sleep.

  Pleckoo was dreaming of drowning in a pit filling with rain when he woke with a start to find his face covered with the morning’s dew. He shook loose from the water and gasped for breath. It was still dark, with the sun on the verge of rising. Now was a better time to make his way back to the women—they had food. He slid down the leaf, which soaked his garment and shocked the skin of his exposed behind.

  The trek back was nerve-wracking as he tiptoed through the sprawl of refugees in the dark. They were asleep under camouflaging leaves or blades of grass that blended all too well with the ground. He stepped on more than a few sleepers, who roused to grab or even bite his ankles, then got lost as he made his way south, having to weave through the camps to find the Ledackis. It was late afternoon when at last he heard their wailing near the wreck of their sand-sled. All its contents were gone. Jakhuma wiped at her tears with the back of one hand as Kula held the other.

  “Who did this?” Pleckoo asked.

  “We forgot to ask their names,” spat Kula.

  “I’ll kill them! I’ll cut their heads off and hang them in the weeds!”

  “Very brave of you.”

  “Where’s the baby?” he asked. Jakhuma pointed to a bundle under the sand-sled. “They tried to take him too,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Why do you think?” she said, and then made a gnawing motion with her mouth.

  “What did they look like?”

  “Like anyone who hides his face in a sack.”

  “You let this happen,” said Kula as she rose. “You left us—two women and a baby—alone among all this human garbage. You’re useless!”

  Pleckoo froze, then quaked with rage.

  “I’ll make you useful,” he said, then punched her in the eye. She buckled, gasping as he raised up his sword. “I’ll kill you and feed you to the starving.”

  “Get away from her!” Jakhuma shouted. A piercing scream erupted from her as she leapt on Pleckoo, toppling him. He grabbed her with both arms, rolling her over, then knelt on her chest as she struggled for breath. He reached for his sword and raised it over her throat, then felt something piercing his back.

  “Drop that blade unless you want this one to sever your spine,” said a man behind him. Over his shoulder was a young and muscular Ledacki, whose black face was scarred from too many beatings.

  “Cut me and I’ll kill her!” shouted Pleckoo.

  “Get off her and I might let you live.”

  Pleckoo felt the sword point leave his back. He rolled away, springing up with his sword to face a Ledacki of only eighteen summers. His blade was crude—an ant mandible with a handle of twine—but he held it with the skill of a trained soldier.

  “You’ll leave these women now,” said the man in Hulkrish. “You’ll leave this place now.” Other Ledackis with black skin and green eyes were coming up behind him with pikes and knives in their hands. Pleckoo backed away and heard the giggles of onlookers, realizing his buttocks were still on display. He pushed and slid and stumbled through the crowd when he toppled into a clearing near an upright pebble in a pit being used as a latrine. After gathering the loose cloth behind him, he tied it into a knot, then crawled up the pebble. He looked south, back to Hulkren, over the heads of a lake of refugees, in search of a truly empty place—a place where he could hide from everyone and pray to his god and hope for a sign of where to go next.

  Chapter 13

  The First Assembly of Bee-Jor

  The beauty of Britasyte music was never soothing to Anand but it transfixed him. Much of it was sweetly sad, but lots of it expressed astonishment and a touch of fear—so much like the life of his wandering tribe. At the moment, his people’s music was making him anxious, because it kept turning his mind to the one person whose existence was forever linked with his own. Anand chided himself for asking his clan of Entreveans to venture into a defeated Hulkren to invite the bee people of Bulkoko to join them in his fledgling nation. And under the pretense of being the best, most loyal Britasyte wife, Daveena, his goddess, the gorgeous thing that completed him, had joined the caravan. Now the Entreveans were making their way through territory where surviving Hulkrites were a possible threat, as well as their freed slaves and captives, many of which were not returning to their home nations but were gathering as refugees in the Weedlands near Palzhad.

  Anand looked out the window of the stadium’s tent, where they had completed preparations for the assembly’s spectacle. The Fallogeth clan of Britasytes was playing for their largest audience ever, behind an array of amplifying-cones that brought their music to the back of the stadium. Behind the musicians was the tall and mysterious structure that Anand had ordered constructed and then wrapped in a patchwork of red canvas to conceal it.

  The Cajorites, sitting for the most part in stands assigned to their old castes, were quiet before the wanderers’ music. The look on their faces showed that many were ill at ease with roach people and their strange clothing and stranger performance. But many of the men knew this music and were captured by it; they bobbed and wobbled their heads as they entered a trance induced by its frantic and multiple rhythms. The music was completely alien to women, only a few of whom might have heard strains of it when they hid in the weeds near the Britasytes’ shows to catch glimpses of their forbidden carnivals.

  The roach women were not dancing on a platform above their men as usual, but Anand could see they were straining with the urge. “It would not be seemly to dance,” he had to tell them, “on what will be a somber day. Dancing will excite the Cajorite men and rouse the envy of their women. They will want your jewelry and resent you for your beauty and talents.” The women were doing as Anand had instructed them, sitting to the side of the men and clicking finger drums as they swayed and chanted a rhythmic prayer to Lord/Lady Roach.

  Terraclon approached Anand in a simple and somber cassock dyed with a concentrate of small-leaved indigo, red clay, and a concentrate of green acorns for a deeply black effect. In his arms were the three pieces of Anand’s costume for the day, which included his turquoise tunic and matching trousers, the latter of which had to be let out to make room for the thick bandages wrapped around his swollen legs. “Thanks, Ter,” said Anand as he pulled off the loose garment he was wearing, and so revealed his Dranverish under-armor in all its interlocking intricac
y—a sight that always dazzled Terraclon.

  “Thanks? After you see what I’ve made you, I’m going to need a little more than ‘thanks,’” said Terraclon.

  “You look a little somber today,” said Anand as he pulled on the trousers. “That cloth is blacker than tar.”

  “Didn’t you say it was a serious occasion? I’m wearing something as dark as death—the lightless night that knows no end.”

  “It does set a tone.”

  The third piece of Anand’s ensemble was the cape, which looked all the more red in Terraclon’s arms against the black of his cassock. “I’ve been working on this for a while . . . and I’m going to miss it after I give it to you,” he said. He took the garment by its collar straps and unfolded it with a quick snap of his wrists, so that it flew up, then fluttered down. Anand grabbed his chin and looked doubtful as Polexima struggled towards them to have a look at the brilliant thing that was sparkling on the floor. The cape’s red had been amplified with a spatter of shimmering discs cut from the chitin of the scarlet lily beetle.

  “You don’t like it?” asked Terraclon.

  “I . . . I love it. It’s just a bit . . . much.”

  “Much? Much too what?”

  Polexima was taking it in, clearly captivated. “It’s very beautifully done,” she said. “But perhaps a bit too . . . showy . . . for today.”

  “And for the New Way,” said Anand.

  “But you asked for something very red!”

  “I did. But it’s envy-making,” Anand said. “Too beautiful to belong to just one person.”

  Terraclon gulped and Anand realized he had hurt his friend.

  “Here,” said Anand. “All I need to do is wear it this way.”

  Anand tied on the cape so that the plainer side of it was on the outside.

  “Yes,” said Polexima. “Understated now. Just a hint of sparkles that are glimpsed when it moves . . . intriguing.”