The Prophet of the Termite God

by Clark Thomas Carlton

  The foreman’s house was larger than the others and its sand-grain walls bound with tar were stained with a wash of blue that was brightened by the light within it. They entered through a flap to a room that was luxurious by midden standards, and very well lit. On one side of the wall was a large piece of decomposing bark that was moistened to sustain a healthy growth of scaly glow-fungus, and it illuminated the opening to a second room. Pleckoo looked around at the foreman’s vast family, seated on a comfortable floor of fine grass shavings. They looked at him with almost no expression, just a mild curiosity. The family included a number of adult men and women, as well as children and elders. All were seated around a fresh basil leaf piled high with a variety of foods. Against the walls, he saw twig structures stacked three high, which supported hammocks. On the wall next to the glow-fungus was a fine piece of embroidered cloth draped to cover a household shrine—something that was likely filled with Slopeish idols.

  “Sit. We were just starting supper when you came,” said the foreman, and his children made a space for Pleckoo. They were quiet as they stole glances at the hole in the middle of his face, but strangely, did not seem frightened by it.

  “I am Glip,” said the foreman. Your name?”

  “Vleeg,” said Pleckoo, giving the name of the eldest of his dead brothers.

  “How did you lose your nose?” Glip asked. Pleckoo covered his face with his hand as, once again, he was reminded of the most painful moment of his life. He worried they might judge him as a thief.

  “There’s no shame in it, Vleeg. Unless you did it to yourself.”

  “In truth, my nose was taken from me. By a sheriff.”

  “Were you stealing?”

  “A mushroom. A single rotting mushroom that someone threw in a trash heap for return to the ants. I was starving.”

  “Those days are over,” said Glip. “The Savior-Commander has ended these kinds of cruel punishments.”

  The Savior-Commander!

  “Welcome, brother,” said a man across the way. “I am Brother Kelvap, escaped from Mound Ensmut.”

  “Welcome, Vleeg,” said the man at the leaf’s point. “I am Brother Mlor, escaped from Mound Kwatgray.”

  Pleckoo looked at both men, and gulped as they lifted up loose kerchiefs tied around their heads to show him they both were noseless—victims of some sheriff’s vicious whim. Next to them was a third man, also wearing a face kerchief that had a fine embroidery of crickets eating a cannabis leaf. He did not lift his kerchief, but nodded at Pleckoo, who wondered what deformity he was hiding; perhaps something to do with his mouth since he did not speak.

  “We are not offended by your face,” said Glip. “But if you would like a kerchief to cover your wound, my wife can get you one.”

  “Yes,” said Pleckoo, and Glip’s wife went into the other room and returned with a square of fine cloth with hemmed edges.

  “It is permitted to hide one’s face now?” Pleckoo asked. “The sheriffs at my old mound would have punished me a second time for hiding the mark of my crime.”

  “It is allowed now,” said Glip. Pleckoo folded the scarf in half and tied it just above his ears so that the front was a loose half that would allow him to eat and breathe.

  “We have no mushrooms tonight,” said Glip’s wife through a giggle as she and her daughters set down glazed bowls in the middle of the leaf. “We have better food.”

  She speaks poorly of the sacred mushroom. Interesting.

  Pleckoo looked sideways at her face, which was decorated with thin blue stripes. On top of her black and lustrous hair was a clip fashioned from blue beetle chitin in the shape of some insect—a locust? Looking at the spread of food, he recognized that the largest bowl had reconstituted curds of ant lymph mixed with a minced onion shoot; the lymph might have been from Hulkren’s ghost ants. Around the lymph curds were piles of neatly cut winter pickles, including burdock root, asparagus stalks, green mustard seeds, and strips of sour purslane, all with the aroma of garlic and barley vinegar and sprinkled with flecks of dried chili. One of the offerings was a dried aphid that had been coated and preserved in its own sticky sweetness. Also present were fresh meats of roasted ringtailed earwigs and the tender abdomen of a freshly emerged autumn cicada.

  “How . . . how did you come on such bounty? Have the middenites of Palzhad always eaten this way?”

  “No, Vleeg. We have always eaten better than others on the Slope, but this is the New Way. We don’t rely on royals anymore to give us what they will of their mushrooms. You’ll see tomorrow—if you want to join us at work. Let’s give thanks to the Lord.”

  The family joined hands. Pleckoo was startled when his left hand was taken by the young boy on his left while an old woman on his other side searched for his right. He took her hand and glanced at her face, which bore a small and constant smile below her cloudy eyes; she was blind! Why was she allowed to live if she could contribute nothing? He felt the dry, scaly skin of her hand in his, but felt a warmth coming from it. Warmth seemed to flow from everyone in this room.

  “Lord, thank You for all Your blessings and for this new one today: for Your beloved son, Vleeg of Gagumji, has escaped the cruelty of the Slope and come to join our family.”

  Pleckoo glanced around at all the faces as they looked up and regarded him, not with fear or disgust, but with something he could not quite identify. What was it?

  “Welcome, Brother Vleeg,” Glip said. “You have come home.”

  Pleckoo was trembling, and felt a tightness in his throat. He willed himself to stillness, breathed deeply, and held his head erect. I must take control of myself, he repeated in his mind. Attempting to look fierce, he sat erect and remembered he was a man, someone who never gave into mawkishness when an explosion of feelings overtook him. He bent his head to hide his watering eyes. Shaking and weeping before this circle of strangers, he experienced something so rare in his life that he was uncertain of the word for it. Then it came to him: it was kindness.

  “These are not tears,” Pleckoo said as he sobbed. “This is not weeping I bring to disgrace your dinner leaf.”

  “No,” said Glip. “Those are tears, and they are sweet and quenching like the first rains of autumn. Your weeping is a sweet song of sadness that we all hear, that we sing as a single family. Be not ashamed, brother, to show us your feelings. We have endured your sadness too, and are honored by your tears.”

  “Thank you, for your welcome and your . . . kindness,” he said, and felt his shoulders shaking from an unstoppable sobbing.

  Glip nodded. “Before we eat, let us offer our food to the One who guides us, protects us, who saved us and provides for us. He is forever invited to all our feasts.”

  Pleckoo watched as the others picked up whatever food was before them and held it up to the covered shrine. The silent man with the cricket kerchief went to the shrine’s curtain and rolled up the embroidery to reveal the idols. Pleckoo’s vision blurred before he could make sense of the carved deities. In the greenish light he saw vivid orange wings, a long and black body with indigo stripes, a head with bulging eyes—a night wasp. Riding on its back was a carving of a dark-faced man in blue-green robes who held a bow and arrow. In the back of this idol, the shrine’s wall was painted like the night sky with spatters of six-pointed stars. Glued in the middle of this sky was a second idol of a human-faced, blue locust with its wings/hands spread in the protective mode. To the side of this shrine were two smaller ones that contained idols of Madricanth, Bee, Cricket, and Mite.

  “We offer our obeisances and our food to you, Vof Quegdoth, who sits in bliss at the locust feet of Father Sky, and readies to fulfill his promise to end the Great Trial of the True People of the Slope.”

  Pleckoo stopped breathing. At first he felt a sudden rage, and then a crushing sadness. Vof Quegdoth, the Son of Locust? Vof Quegdoth is Anand the Roach Boy! His father is Yormu the Mute! And Anand will end the Great Trial? The Hulkrites endured the Great Trial, not these stupid Slopeish slaves of Ant
Queen!

  As Pleckoo looked at the idols, the sound of a swarm of night wasps was in his ears and he tried to shake it out of his head. Darkness fell on him, like an errant acorn that conked his head and laid him flat. Once again, he was falling, falling, until he landed with a painful splat on the roasting sands of the Netherworld. Night wasps had lined up in an eternal queue to sting him in his eyes, his ears, on his lips and tongue, until he could bear consciousness no more.

  It was black inside the house when Pleckoo awoke. He gasped, looked around the darkened room. Light was leaking from a sheet over the wall fungus and he remembered where he was: among the midden caste of Palzhad in their foreman’s house. I must have fainted, he thought. His body was gently swinging when he realized they had set him in a hammock. They had removed his boots and underneath him was a soft cushion and over his chest was a softer blanket. Lying back, he remembered his shock and his disappointment that these people who had clothed him and shared their supper were worshipping his unholy cousin as a god. But as the Prophet Tahn has spoken, “The unbelieving should never be hated for their ignorance, only for their blasphemy.”

  He quietly rolled out of the hammock, and thought of sweeping up some of the jewels in the shrines before running off—an idea that seemed completely foolish a moment later. An even more foolish notion was that he could stay in Palzhad and hope his true identity was never discovered. Where had they put his boots? His sword? Below the hammocks he saw the middenites’ footwear—boots, not sandals!—and sighted a pair that would fit him under an empty hammock. He grabbed them and pushed out of the door’s slitted covering to the darkness and to the next journey.

  “What are you doing with my boots?” he heard, and saw Glip walking towards him from out of the darkness, his hand brushing against the dagger in his holster.

  Chapter 17

  What It Has Come To

  “Just out to take a piss,” Pleckoo said. “I don’t know what they’ve done with my boots—just borrowing this pair.”

  “Just coming from a piss myself,” said Glip. “I’m wearing your boots. Wanted to try ’em out. Look better than they feel. These are not boots for people who walk. These are for riders on ants.”

  Pleckoo saw the top of the boots he had stolen from Fadtha still carried the white gleam of treated ghost-egg leather. “Right,” said Pleckoo. “The soles are thin—almost gone.”

  “After your piss, get back to the hammock and sleep,” said Glip. “We have a long day ahead of us.”

  As Pleckoo wandered back from the weeds, part of him was still tempted to run—but to where? To Cajoria, where everyone in the midden knew him? Just the idea of another journey was exhausting. I’ll stay here a bit and get strong, he thought, or until Hulkro shows me otherwise.

  Sometime later, sunlight made a soft entry through the translucence of the house’s sand grains. Pleckoo expected to hear the glok-glok-glok of the idols keeper sounding the wooden bell to summon the midden to the dawn prayer, but it never came. Instead, Glip’s family got up slowly, stretching and yawning before they wandered outside to begin their morning ablutions. “Blessed day,” they said to each other, and also to Pleckoo. They returned at a leisurely pace to dress, and then used blue paint sticks made from beeswax to decorate their arms and faces. The silent man with the cricket kerchief returned with a fresh mint leaf rolled up under his arm, which he unfurled as a platter for the breakfast.

  “Eat,” said Glip’s wife to Pleckoo after he returned from a trip to the nearby weeds, pointing to the leftovers from the previous night’s feast. He was relieved to see that the idols in the shrine were covered up again, so he wouldn’t have to offer them his food before eating it himself. As he finished his breakfast, Glip’s wife came to him with a pair of sturdy but broken-in boots and a used tunic suitable to a tradesman. The garment was stained and a bit worn, but as Pleckoo pulled it on he still thought it too fine a thing to wear while cleaning chamber pots. Glip entered the house and nodded at Pleckoo before speaking. “We are leaving for work now, Vleeg. Grab your breakfast and join us, if you will.”

  If you will? He’s giving me a choice!

  Pleckoo emerged from the house to find a crowd of men from the other houses talking quietly among themselves. They were not dreading the day ahead but seemed willing to begin it. The men had travoises and sand-sleds full of empty clay jars, as well as hollowed wood barrels and nutshell and seed basins. Hung around their necks were tubes for the blow-darts. At their sides were crude swords made from mandibles of ants and other insects, which they wore openly, proudly, and without fear of punishment. When the men saw their foreman approach, they acknowledged him with nods. The idols keeper stood nearby, and opened his arms and looked to the clouds. “Praise Father Sky,” he said, “the Lord Creator, for the gift of another day.”

  No prayer to Ant Queen or Mantis, Pleckoo thought as the men looked to the heavens and repeated the blessing. Glip stepped forward and the rest followed him out, then down the mound’s main artery. Pleckoo followed at the back as they passed through at least twenty uninhabited rings on the mound’s elevation, and then nine more through its flats. They continued through Palzhad’s infamous overgrowth of weeds until they reached the ghostly ruins of what had to be the home of the middenites, when Palzhad had been a crowded mound in the center of the Slope. In the daylight, Pleckoo looked up at the remnants of shacks on their rain poles, including the one he had hidden in, and then at a grime-covered whipping pebble in what had once been a common area. He winced as he remembered his life in Cajoria, and felt the nettles in his back from the merciless whippings of Pictolo, the foreman, and later those of his nephew, Keel. From behind him, Pleckoo heard the steps of ants in a downward parade. He turned to see several midden ants of different sizes carrying a variety of refuse in their mandibles.

  The men traveled along with the ants to a clearing where they entered the true, working midden. On its edge were sturdy worktables chiseled from flat rocks. Across the midden were the usual piles of ant dung, a scattering of termite and other wings, insect legs and corpses, as well as spent substrate from the mushroom chambers.

  The midden ants dropped off their trash and Glip looked satisfied with the arrival of some newly dead leaf-cutter ants that could be salvaged for food. The men were set to work on their dissection in the shade, and Pleckoo was given a short saw of serrated quartz. He was assigned to split open the ants’ abdomens and then scrape out the paste of partially digested mushrooms. The paste was to be pressed into basins, which were sealed with a cutting of waxy purslane to keep it moist. As he worked, he wondered where the chamber pots were cleaned; was there a separate midden for them? He assumed that task was how they were ending the day.

  Working alongside him was Glip’s son of eleven summers, Moosak, who Pleckoo thought of as Little Grinner. Moosak used a small, lacquered mandible knife to cut the purslane leaves into lids to seal the basin’s contents. Always grinning, he scooped up some of the paste to eat and encouraged Pleckoo to do the same. Pleckoo looked around—where was Glip? Surely he would take out his taloned whip and punish them for stealing.

  “It’s all right,” said Moosak. “We eat when we’re hungry.” And then Pleckoo remembered: he had not seen a whip at Glip’s side. Pleckoo ate some of the mushroom paste, which had taken on a richer, earthy taste. It was good—like so much of what he had experienced in Palzhad. It’s not life in palaces or fighting for glory on ghost ants, but it’s not the old way. At the other tables, the men were scooping out ant lymph and packing it in barrels, or kneading it with paddles in the sun to coagulate for curds.

  “Why are we doing the salvagers’ work?” Pleckoo asked Moosak.

  “We are salvagers,” Moosak said. “And middenites—and hunters or defenders too. No set castes anymore.”

  “When do we clean the chamber pots?”

  “Never.”

  “Never?”

  “Everyone cleans their own chamber pot—if they use one.”

  Plec
koo was ready to ask more questions when he saw something strange and frightening making its way to the midden. The leaf-cutter ants had made chains of themselves to tug the corpse of a red-banded millipede into the midden. The men got out of the way of the ants, and when they released the corpse it uncoiled stiffly.

  “This is a good day,” said Glip. “We’ll need the masks and the dried milkweed.”

  At that, some of the boys ran off. Half of them returned a short time later with the breathing masks that Slopeish soldiers wore when battling the Seed Eaters and their poison-spewing harvester ants. Pleckoo was astonished—breathing masks for middenites? And why wasn’t the millipede being turned over to the priests so they could extract its poisons and other potions? Moosak and the rest of the boys returned with bundles of dried milkweed stems in their travoises. The men used their smallest, finest knives to cut the milkweed into short, exact slivers. After donning the breathing masks, they took the slivers to the millipede’s corpse and inserted them into the small pores above its legs, to soak their ends in a clear poison, a substance which had a strangely sweet and fruity scent. At the same time, Glip worked carefully to remove the more poisonous claws from inside the millipede’s mouth, which held a thicker liquid. The slivers he inserted into this poison were marked with a bit of berry dye as something more lethal.

  The slivers dried quickly in the sun, and were being carefully wrapped in eggshell paper, when something bright and glinting made its way into the midden. The men cheered to see the ants pulling a gold-and-crystal beetle towards them. Its legs had been sheared away but its little antennae were waving, indicating it was still alive. The last time Pleckoo had seen one of these beetles was several summers past, in the Cajorian midden. He was captivated then by its strange beauty, and just as entranced now. The elytra were like great, oversized shields of quartz, which sparkled with a richness of gold from underneath. “This is a very good day, thank Locust,” Glip said while looking at Pleckoo. “Vleeg has brought us these blessings. We must dissect this beetle carefully and coat its parts quickly with the preserving potions.”