Anand watched as the sled’s young driver turned over his shoulder from time to time to check on him and Daveena as they huddled behind a grass shield. Punshu’s wound was healing under a purple splash of styptic paint, and he looked even prouder now that he was in service to both the Master of Night Wasps as well as to his wife and the mother of his offspring.
Up high in their cushioned seats, Anand and Daveena leaned against each other, savoring each other’s warmth; but both were disquieted as they looked over the shield at the startling sight of countless refugees. The masses surrounding them had heard that the Commander of Bee-Jor was parading through them, and they cheered him, shouting, “Quegdoth!” Many of them bowed as he passed, extending the flats of their palms. Others prayed to Anand, their hands clasped upright. The foot soldiers, grass shields at their sides, stayed on high alert as they marched beside their commander with dart guns at the ready. They were stacked at their thickest alongside the queen bee’s cage, to protect her as the future provider of honey to Bee-Jor. The queen bee was calmer for the moment, and even her attendants seemed soothed as they rode atop her, one of them nestled in the fuzz on her back. In back of this sled were the Bulkokans, uncomfortably stuffed into Hulkrish cargo-sleds, pulled by the roaches they were found with in their prison.
The shouts of “Quegdoth!” subsided as they neared Palzhad’s border walls and the camps whose refugees had been among the first to arrive. Some hailed Anand, but others were pleading with him. “Feed us!” and “We are dying!” shouted women, clutching skeletal babies or the thin wrists of children whose bellies were swollen after eating nothing but roots and leaves. Anand gulped.
“Why have they all come here?” Daveena asked. “Instead of going home?”
“Likely they have no home to go to,” Anand answered.
The crowd’s shouting increased as the sleds approached the border wall. “Let us in! Let us in!” they chanted in Hulkrish. In the near distance, Anand saw patrolling leaf-cutter ants crawling up and down the length of the border, one dropping off a dung pellet to reinforce their scent-wall. Men of the Palzhanite building caste disassembled the humans’ wall of loose sand-bricks to let the caravan enter. Alerted to the roaches, the ants’ antennae flew up and twitched, and they scattered back and up to the mound in a frenzy, leaving retreat-scent in the air.
As the sleds and roaches passed through the wall’s opening, the chants of “Let us in” faded; but inside his head, Anand heard them just as loudly. Clouds blew over the moon, and a chill crept in on a breeze turning into a wind. The sudden quiet of Palzhad’s outer, abandoned rings disturbed Anand, and he was strangely overcome with dread. Daveena, seeing this, pressed the warm back of her hand to his cheek.
“You’re worried,” she said.
“Always.” He sighed. “Those people back there are starving. But we can’t just let them in. We can barely govern the ones that live here.”
“Perhaps we can at least feed them . . . until you decide what to do.”
“At the moment, I’m sure they’re tearing up the locusts we left behind.” He smiled at her, touched by her compassion for outsiders. “I missed you, Daveena. Felt like half of myself went missing.”
“I missed you too,” she said, and took his hand. “Like the bees miss flowers.” Their mouths meshed in a bloom of warmth as they gave in to each other’s pull and felt the whirl of the evening’s stars around them.
Per Anand’s instructions, the caravan arrived at its usual clearing in Palzhad’s northern weeds, where Britasytes conducted their markets and staged their carnivals. The sleds pulled into their customary circle, but set the cage with the queen bee into its center. The exhausted Bulkokans left the discomfort of the Hulkrish cargo wagons and surrounded the cage of their queen bee, but they were too tired to gather any bedding from the nearby weeds. Anand ordered the foot soldiers to gather grass and mallows and shred them for the Bulkokans. They fell on the shreddings in silence, and showed little interest in the food and water that passed through their camps. All they craved was rest after being dragged over the long passage of sand. When the camp quieted, Anand returned to his sled, where Punshu waited below with its draw-roach, guarding Daveena as she grated some dark amaranth seeds she had gathered from the nearby growth.
“Are you hungry?” she asked as she lifted the grater to reveal the coarse powder she would soak with some syrup.
“Not for that,” he said with the most appealing smirk.
“It’s been a while,” she said as he pressed next to her.
“Far too long,” he answered. They smiled as their breathing quickened. “Punshu, we’re going to need a little privacy,” he shouted down to the boy.
Punshu looked up at Anand with a grin. “Privacy? Why, whatever for?”
“Can you sit up here, guard the sled for a bit?”
Punshu climbed to the seat of the riding ledge as Anand was closing the shutters to the cabin. Inside the cabin, he turned and saw the stiff and bloated body of a strange boy lying on his matrimonial bed. And the cabin didn’t smell so good.
“I forgot we have a guest,” Anand said. “And just who is he?”
“He was guarding the Bulkokan’s cage—a Seed Eater before he took up with Hulkro. The bee people weren’t so happy with him. They attacked him with venom-daggers when they got the chance.”
“Why is he with us?”
“I felt sorry for him. And he speaks the Bulkokans’ language.”
“I’m sorry for him too. But he is on our bed.”
“We have other places to make love,” she said, and pointed with her chin to the floor hatch.
“You’ll have to be on top,” he said through a smile.
“Why?”
“My legs are awfully stiff at the moment,” he said as he undressed. “You don’t
want to know why. And I don’t want to discuss it.”
Pleckoo’s heart raced as he listened to the voices and the footsteps above him. He heard Anand detaching his armor, and the rattle when it dropped to the floor. Anand was going to be naked—completely vulnerable! Pleckoo heard the sweet murmuring of the woman as she was undressed. He would wait for the moment they were lost in pleasure, then crawl out to sever their heads.
The hatch was lifting above him. His heart thumped. Shit, they’re coming down here! He saw a strange thickness wrapped around Anand’s legs as they dangled in the portal. Pleckoo pulled up his own feet before they made contact. From above, he heard the mangled grunting of the boy on the bed—he was emitting short blasts of muffled screams—trying to warn them! “Anand! Someone’s down there,” the roach woman shouted.
At least I’ll get his foot, Pleckoo thought, and positioned his sword with his right hand as he readied to lift the escape hatch with his left. He would have to make a sure, hard stroke, given the confines. He held his breath, swiped, then scrambled out of the sled’s bottom as he listened to Anand howl.
From between the rudders, Pleckoo saw the legs of Anand’s guards as they converged on the sled, climbing up its sides as it rocked. When Pleckoo saw an opening, he crawled, then ran, to a thicket of nearby weeds. He heard shouting, knew he had been sighted, and heard the whoosh of arrows and the vague whistle of darts aimed at his back. Zigzagging, he ran through the weeds and up to the outer rings of Palzhad’s shelters. He entered an area of what looked like the laborers’ slums; but it was abandoned, quiet, with shelters that slumped on splintering rain poles. Exhausted and out of breath, he heard the shouts of guards behind him and ran to the sturdiest shelter, found its ladder. As he crawled up its fragile rungs, they broke under his feet. He climbed the rest of the way using only his arms. After pulling himself inside the decrepit hovel, he felt it wobble from his weight. Catching his breath, he looked through gaps in the floor planks to see guards passing under him, arrows at the ready. He muffled his breathing, waited.
Thirst returned, as well as a sharp ache in his stomach and lungs. He had counted five soldiers in search for him, and four
of them had given up and were returning. He waited until the fifth returned before he began his descent. The ladder’s splinters pierced his hands, and then it snapped and he fell into a thin cushion of crumbled leaves. After a look around the darkness, he continued his hike up the neglected rings when he had a new worry: he heard the sound of marching ants. They’ve smelled me! I’ve got to get kin-scent or they’ll tear me to shreds!
As ant steps grew louder, Pleckoo ran faster up the rings. At the next few levels were large wooden houses, shellacked and sitting on raised platforms of chiseled stone; but these areas were abandoned too. Up he went through weeds to the next ring. He felt hope when he emerged from stands of hairy fleabane to see houses of sand and tar atop pebble platforms, where the Palzhanite midden caste was living in a relative splendor. In the midst of the houses, in their outdoor common space, was a torch of glow-fungus that illuminated an altar as well as the nearby vats of a dew station. Next to these were scenting tubs covered with waxed canvas to prevent their content’s evaporation.
Pleckoo heard the voices of the houses’ inhabitants, and strangely, their singing, as he skulked to the dew station. A woman with a baby in a backsack was cutting a slice of water from a barrel to scrape into her seed-basin. Pleckoo remembered he was a stranger, dressed in a strange garment, and it would frighten her if he approached. He hid behind an altar full of Slopeish idols, even as that repulsed him. After waiting for the woman to leave, he quietly approached the dew barrels. Just as he peeled back the lid of a barrel and inserted his sword to lick a drop, they appeared—sentry ants!
I should have bathed first! he scolded himself as he looked at the ants with their thorny, heart-shaped skulls and whirring antennae. He knew if he had a chance that he should not run from them, but into them.
Chapter 16
Family
Pleckoo ran towards the first sentry ant and ducked under its pulsing, sawtooth mandibles. The ant’s antennae were searching downwards as she pivoted, unable to snatch the intruder beneath her. He scrambled to stay under her, away from her mouth, as he was bandied between her forelegs. Other sentry ants converged on the both of them, and he felt a soft whipping from their antennae as they probed him, piled on, pressed in. The air around him grew poisonous as he looked out from under the ant at dark walls of angry, scissoring mouths. What can I do?
The ant he was trapped under was immobile in the thickness of converging sentry ants that crowded and crawled on her. He felt her lowering, crushing him as his neck and arms were pierced by the thin, hairy spikes of her undercarriage. Struggling to breathe, Pleckoo worked his sword up the segment that connected her head to her thorax. Screaming in fear and panic he sawed back and forth in his confines, his arms aching, until the head was severed and broke away. When he looked up the opening he saw a dark mass of ants crawling over the severed pieces. The only place to hide now was under the sundered head—he slithered and pushed himself beneath it, and felt the lash of antennae on his legs before he could pull them in.
The sand felt rough against his chest plate as he pushed out from under the head to grab a breath. An antenna from the largest of sentry ants brushed his face. She lunged for Pleckoo, and her force pushed the severed head away, exposing him to the mass of excited ants. He crawled towards, then under, this new attacker, when he felt the ends of her mandibles as they scraped at his armor’s back plate. One mandible snipped off the bottom of his garment and the other hooked into its top. He was yanked up, and shook back and forth in her jaws when he noticed he was above a scenting tub.
Raising his arms, he slipped out of the garment and fell on the tub’s edge sealed with a waxed canvas. The tub’s canvas was too taut—he did not sink into its water. Antennae probed his face as he bounced on his knees, broke through the canvas, and sank into the doming water. Though the water was cool, the sudden sensation of suspension was soothing. A mass of hostile ants surrounded him, but here, for a moment, he was back in the womb, and innocent to a world of pain. I could stay here forever, he thought—until the moment he needed to breathe. Panic grew inside him but so did the pull to some other place, as a pleasurable delirium set in. I’m happy here, he thought. I never want to leave—even if I am dying.
But leave he did, when he felt a firm grip around both his ankles. He was pulled out of the water and over the tub’s edge, to land on his back. As he gasped for air in the spreading water, he saw human legs. Through them he saw that the ants had moved on.Slopeish faces were peering down at him, faces that looked as dark as his own. “Can you hear me, cousin?” he heard a man say in what sounded like laborers’ Slopeish.
Pleckoo rose on his elbows and looked around. Though it was dark, he could see that the man who spoke to him had two clipped earlobes, one of which marked him as an outcaste, and the other which distinguished him as the midden’s foreman. Strangely, he was well dressed. His garment was made from dyed cloth and had neatly cut and stitched openings for his arms and head, and his antennae were not the usual straw but were well-fashioned carvings with intricate designs. Standing next to him was the caste’s chubby idols keeper, who held a fungus torch. He was wearing the yellow sash that conferred his status, but it was tied around what looked to be a blue tunic of very fine making.
Torches for middenites? Fine clothing? Behind these men stood other members of the caste, including mothers holding babies as well as a few children who stared at Pleckoo, curious about him. These women, as well as the children, were not poorly dressed either, but were wearing an abundance of draped cloth as well as beaded necklaces and chitin bangles. Somehow they had all gotten hold of combs and head-soap and turned the masses of tangled filth on their heads into hair. The men were holding a strange tube near their mouths; Pleckoo guessed these were the dart shooters.
“Can you hear me, cousin?” the man repeated, and Pleckoo realized his black glass sword was in the man’s grip.
“Why do you call me ‘cousin’?” Pleckoo responded in Slopeish.
“Your ear is clipped. You’re a middenite, right?”
“Yes,” Pleckoo said, and realized his wet hair had exposed him.
“What mound are you from?” asked the idols keeper. Both these men spoke in the slower, softer Palzhanite way, out of the right side of the mouth.
Pleckoo hesitated. “Gagumji,” he said.
“Gagumji? So you’ve escaped.”
“Escaped?”
“Yes, left the No Longer Great Nor Holy Slope.”
“Right,” Pleckoo said, still catching his breath, “to come and live in Bee-Jor.” So it’s for certain: the Slope has been divided into two nations. The men behind him relaxed, lowered their tubes. “Who . . . who rules here?”
“Commander Vof Quegdoth, the Son of Locust, rules all of Bee-Jor,” said the foreman. “But the Widow Queen Clugna sits on the throne of Palzhad. Who rules now in Gagumji?”
“I no longer know,” said Pleckoo, who had never known the names of that mound’s king and queen. “I just knew I had to leave.”
“How did you lose your kin-scent?” asked the idols keeper.
“And what strange garment is this you were wearing?” said the foreman as he picked up the torn pieces of the Ledacki frock with the end of Pleckoo’s sword.
“I . . . I don’t want to speak the truth,” he said.
“Why not?”
“It might offend you . . . you’ll consider me polluted.”
“Our worry is that you are a loyal Slopeite,” said the idols keeper. “How did you get here?”
Pleckoo decided the best thing was to tell as much of the truth as possible.
“I asked a caravan of roach people to bring me here. They said they couldn’t, that I was the property of the royals of Gagumji and they would be forced to surrender their treasures, even their lives, if they were caught smuggling human cargo. I offered them all I had if they would hide me in their caravan and take me to Palzhad.”
“And what did you—a poor middenite—have that the Britasytes wanted
?” asked the idols keeper with a furrowed brow.
“Weapons. Fine swords, taken from Hulkrish corpses on the edge of the Dustlands . . . as well as their armor, boots, and the like.”
“Like this sword?” said the foreman as he raised up Pleckoo’s blade.
“Like that one,” Pleckoo said. “To ride in their caravan, I had to remove my midden rags and take on roach-scent. Before I left their caravan, I bathed that stench from my skin. I bought that Ledacki garment from a Britasyte trader who said it was soaked in leaf-cutter-scent. I didn’t realize it carried a foreign kin-scent until it alarmed the sentry ants of Palzhad. I should have remembered not to trust Britasytes.”
“Do not speak poorly of roach people in Bee-Jor,” said the foreman.
Do not speak poorly of roach people?
“How could you ride with the Britasytes?” asked the idols keeper. “If Slopeish sheriffs had seen you traveling with them, you would have been killed for escaping.”
“I rode for days hidden in a secret compartment. They got one under each of their sand-sleds—a place they hide themselves when under attack. It’s where they hide their goods.”
The foreman and the idols keeper looked at each other.
“You’ve come a long way,” the foreman said, and extended a hand, which Pleckoo used to pull himself up. Wobbling on his feet, he felt faint from hunger.
“I would be in your debt if you could spare me a mushroom,” Pleckoo said.
“Don’t know about that,” said the foreman. “Can you walk?”
“I can.”
“You are immodest,” said the idols keeper, who signaled to a woman near him to surrender her shawl. Pleckoo realized he was naked from the waist down before a group of strangers. All he had on his chest and back were remnants of Hulkrish armor. He wrapped the shawl around him, then followed the foreman into a house among the cluster on the ring.
The Prophet of the Termite God Page 14
