The Prophet of the Termite God

by Clark Thomas Carlton

  A tall, sinewy middenite with a quartz knife took on the task of making exact cuts, separating the elytra and the head, and then he carefully lifted the parts away to be gently coated with a clear gel of resin and ant vinegar to preserve their inner gold. Once the pieces dried, they were wrapped in thin sheets, then coarse, ugly blankets as if to disguise their beauty. “We will wait for the Britasytes to pass before selling this treasure,” Glip said, then looked to the sky and the sun’s position to see that it was late morning. “To the stadium,” he said, and men and boys packed up all they had salvaged that day, loaded up their carriers, and made their way on a path to the shady side of the mound.

  To the stadium? For an assembly? Pleckoo wondered.

  As they made their way through a thicket of browning ranunculus plants and new green seedlings, Pleckoo picked up the faint odors of humans in the weeds south of the border. He thought of Jakhuma and Kula and the snub-nosed baby he had saved from death, and felt vaguely hurt by their last confrontation. Why all these womanly feelings? he thought, scolding himself when they reached the mound’s stadium. The stands were empty but the arena was milling with people. As they got closer, Pleckoo realized this was a market. He recognized different castes of people at stalls or on plots, offering certain goods or services associated with what had been their station in life.

  Glip led them to the market’s edge where they unfurled leaves on the fine, worn sand, then laid out their morning’s work under a stall they pitched and covered with canvas for shade. Near them were mushroom workers who traded fresh piles of capped, thin-stemmed fungus from inside the mound. The blinders’ caste, in their crusty rags, had troughs full of damp ant eyes, as well as stacks of the eggshells from which new ants had emerged. The blinders’ biggest prize, being haggled over at the moment, was a tender, leaf-wrapped nymph that had been born with wings—a potential rival to the ant queen, but also something good to eat. The sun-kiln workers had brought one of their crystal ovens with them and were accepting mushroom doughs, raw seeds, midges, and other captured game to roast, then return for a share. Further down were cloth makers next to tailors and then there were the craftsmen offering sitting stools, baskets, rugs, and hammocks.

  “This food is ours to sell?” Pleckoo asked Moosak as they set out their bowls of mushroom paste.

  “Yes,” he said with his grin turning to a prideful smile. “If it ends up in the midden, it belongs to us. We can keep or trade.”

  “Who decided this?”

  “Vof Quegdoth, of course. It started with his arrival as commander of the People’s Army when all the old rules were set aside for the war effort. Since then it’s been sanctioned, part of the New Way. What one worked at in the old way is now one’s to sell, the Great Redistribution.”

  Pleckoo noticed that many of the people who were buying appeared to be the yellow-skinned widows and children of the vanquished military, while some were palace and priestly servants. Moosak opened one of the basins of mushroom paste, and its scent filled the air and attracted passersby. A woman with yellow skin wearing widow’s whites stood with a tired and stooped servant who was ordered to approach Moosak. The servant’s skin was richly wrinkled. She glanced briefly at Pleckoo, winced at the scarf over his face, then turned to Moosak.

  “How fresh is this paste?” she asked.

  “From this morning,” Moosak said. “Sample.”

  The woman dipped in her finger and licked it, then turned to the widow, who nodded. “My mistress wants the basin.”

  “What have you?”

  The servant pulled up her basket whose top was covered with used clothing, most of which was threadbare and dirty. Moosak shook his head as she pulled out a series of garments before reaching a man’s fine sleeping tunic and a pair of loose trousers made of a dyed yellow silk and polished to a sheen.

  Moosak shook his head. “No. No yellow.”

  The woman pulled up more yellow garments before reaching the bottom of her basket, which had a cluster of jewelry and a few loose but precious mineral bits. She held up a small but perfect cube of gold-colored pyrite. Moosak could see she had others like it.

  “Need three,” Moosak said, and Pleckoo was surprised. Pyrite traded for a bowl of mushroom paste? They were settling on two cubes when an argument broke out at the nearby stall of the mite-scrapers’ caste. The chubby, eight-legged parasites they had scraped from the leaf-cutter ants were in three piles, which included plain, sugared, and powdered scallion. A scraper woman was on her feet and using the sharp flat trowel around her neck to threaten a young man with yellowish skin and a shaved head. Pleckoo recognized him as a priestly novitiate.

  “I saw you!” said the scraper woman as the wattles under her chin quivered with her rage. “You slipped extra ones under your cloak!”

  “I did no such thing!” the young priest yelled back at her, haughtily lifting his chin as he backed away. Pleckoo detested him immediately for the way he spoke, as if he was clenching a stick at the back of his teeth. He was a pampered little mite himself, soft looking, with a belly under his yellow garment. When he walked, he wobbled atop his platform sandals and his toes were adorned with rings and their nails were long, polished, and filed into spikes. Pleckoo had never been so close to a priest. It was one more mild shock in his day to find one doing his own marketing.

  “Just what has it come to!” the young priest was shouting, holding up a stinger-ended walking stick with his free hand. “When a holy man must endure the insults of a low-bred scraper . . . and a female at that!”

  “Here’s how it goes, you sallow bloodsucker,” the woman shouted as her kinsmen joined her. “You’ll gimme those mites back, or you’ll pay for ’em.” The priest, gritting his teeth, clumsily attempted to poke her with his stick, but her kin were exhaling through their dart guns. The priest fell, spasmed, and his belly shook as his basket spilled and his stick rolled away. The mite-scrapers pulled off his cloak and searched through its inner pockets until they produced the mites he had stolen. The priest lay naked before the crowd except for a swaddling of cloth around his middle. Sentry ants arrived with men in sheriffs’ armor on their saddles. Before they dropped to the ground, they threw their saddle ropes to Moosak and Pleckoo to tether their rides. Pleckoo lowered his face, but peeped up to see that these were not yellow-skinned elites from the military caste but men with skin as dark as his own.

  “Who witnessed this crime?” the first of them asked, and a number of people raised their hands. Pleckoo broke out in a sweat. As much as he hated priests, Pleckoo feared this one was about to lose his nose.

  “One moon in a cage,” said the sheriff to the priest.

  “B-b-but I’m a priest!” shouted the holy man, trying to regain control of his tongue.

  “And I’m the peoples’s sheriff. Resist and it will be two moons.” The sheriffs grabbed the priest, bound his wrists together, then remounted their ants, forcing the priest to walk behind them on a rope leash. Moosak and others ran out and grabbed the items the priest had dropped. They did not keep them for themselves but ran after the sheriffs to return the articles. That’s the strangest thing yet, thought Pleckoo. He turned to see that the mite-scrapers were walking towards the midden’s stall with skewers of mites in all three flavors. They were not looking to trade for food, but were very interested in the wrapped packages that contained the morning’s darts.

  The lower castes are no longer powerless, Pleckoo thought, nor poor nor starving.

  Moosak returned to the stall with his irrepressible grin and a toasted, sliced pine nut under his arm. He set the nut on their leaf, cut the string that bound it together, and let it fall into neat slices before handing a bit to Pleckoo to savor.

  A very strange feeling came over Pleckoo: he liked it here in Palzhad. In Bee-Jor. From above, he saw a blue locust flying north with its legs trailing a yellow ribbon.

  “What’s the yellow mean?” he asked Moosak.

  “That’s a message from the palace,” said the boy as his
grin took leave. “Someone must have died.”

  Chapter 18

  Ingratitude

  “Thank Madricanth you were wearing these bandages,” Daveena said as she unwrapped them from Anand’s ankle.

  “Madricanth had nothing to do with it,” he said. In the early sunlight, they looked at the scabbed-over gash made with a fine and sharp blade. The attack of a mysterious assassin from the safety compartment was disturbing enough but Anand was tormented as he considered the elegance of the attacker’s weapon. Was this just some random refugee striking out in fear or hunger? Or was it a Hulkrite who had known him in the Dustlands and was seeking revenge for the Termite God?

  “How is our guest?” Anand asked. “Maybe when he gets his tongue back he can tell us about our other visitor.”

  “Odwaznee’s swelling has gone down,” said Daveena. “I thanked him for you—let him know he saved your life. But you might do it yourself.”

  Do-Tma, the Entrevean’s Two Spirit, arrived in a cloud of heavy perfume. The initial scent was pleasant, but a moment later Anand felt a mild nausea. Do-Tma climbed up the sled’s ladder to check on the wound he/she had painted with a styptic derived from root-borer beetles, and then wrapped with strands of spider-webbing.

  “It is healing well,” he/she said. “The thick white pus is the good milk of the Roach Lord’s healing spirit. He/She was with you as you slept, Anand. Blessings of Madricanth on your ankle. You should toss Him/Her some of your grated amaranth as an offering.”

  “Blessings of Madricanth,” Daveena repeated. She looked at Anand as he remained silent. The Two Spirit stood over them, making the motion of the six claws of the Roach to complete his/her blessing before he/she left.

  “That perfume he/she wears is sickening,” Anand said.

  “Sickening? It’s the Holy Scent of our Roach Lord.”

  “It’s like being buried under flower petals. It makes me queasy and gives me a headache.”

  “You have my sympathies. Why didn’t you echo his/her blessing?” she asked, sharpness in her voice.

  “In Dranveria, we do not consider it wise to mix worship and healing.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the outcome of someone’s condition has nothing to do with gods or spirits. Do-Tma’s potion keeps a wound from festering because of its ingredients, not because of any magic.”

  “Are you saying he/she is a fraud?”

  “A fraud knows when he is deceiving others. I believe the Two Spirits are sincere. They are just wrong . . . often enough.”

  “So he/she is ignorant?” said Daveena as she filled an offering bowl with the grated amaranth.

  “The Dranverish word is superstitious. It means to believe in something not rooted in reason or knowledge.”

  She put the bowl under her arm and glared at him as she went to the ladder.

  “Don’t throw away our amaranth,” he said. “It’s wasteful.”

  She gasped, dropped the bowl.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You’re scaring me,” she said from behind her sleeve.

  “Scaring you?”

  “Yes, Commander Quegdoth. It scares people when they are told that everything they believe in is a lie. Next you’ll be telling me that Madricanth is dead, killed by some Dranverish god.”

  He sighed. “I don’t know that Madricanth ever existed to be killed by some other god. I think . . .”

  She put her hands over her ears. “I don’t want to hear what you think,” she shouted. The both of them realized that Britasytes, Bee-Jorites, and Bulkokans were turning from their morning tasks to watch the commander argue with his wife.

  “Know this, Daveena,” Anand said as he took her trembling hand. “You always have my love and protection—if not that of the Roach God.”

  The priests of Palzhad approached Anand and Daveena’s sled, a mere seven men. They reminded Anand that Palzhad was an emptying mound, further diminished by the war and the raid that had brought Polexima into Hulkren. Three of the priests were quite old and struggled as they walked in their beaded but shabby robes. Behind them were some stronger acolytes with shaved heads who carried a long stoppered vase on their shoulders. In back of them were men of the barrel makers’ caste who hauled nutshell tubs on runners.

  “Per your request, Commander,” said Pious Ejolta, who wobbled on his box-sandals. He looked pained, as if the events of the last seasons had broken his bones into sharp sticks that cut him from the inside. “We may not have enough kin-scent for the new arrivals.”

  “Not enough?”

  “This war with the Hulkrites has depleted all our potions as well as our ants and supplies. It will be moons before we can replace everything.”

  “Thank you, Pious,” Anand said, falling into his refined Slopeish. “The Roach Clan has been gathering dew all morning for our beekeeper guests. Please prepare the baths and we will do what we can.”

  Anand watched as the priests went through their ritual of blessing the leaf-cutter kin-scent as it was scraped into the tubs. As the acolytes did the physical work, the elders did a slow and crooked whirl around the tubs while chanting the ancient words.

  Punshu arrived, escorting Ulatha, the Britasyte fortune-teller who could speak with the Bulkokans in the Carpenters’ words. Daveena joined Anand as they approached the bee people, in hopes she could learn some of their strange and buzzy tongue. As for the Bulkokans, many of them were still asleep. A few of them rose, turned to the queen bee in her cage, and made a shallow bow before they tore apart some roach eggs to eat as their breakfast.

  “Now that is a strange sight,” said Anand as he and Daveena watched someone other than Britasytes eating such a reviled food. The bee people buzzed quietly among their own, glancing at Anand with indifference as he stood nearby with his interpreters and his ever-present guards. Annoyed by their refusal to acknowledge him, he wondered what justified their arrogance.

  “Peace and bounty upon you,” Anand finally shouted to their turned backs. “Is there a leader among you? Someone I should address first?”

  After the words were translated, a few Bulkokans spoke among themselves before one of them finally rose, looked annoyed with Anand, then slowly weaved into the center of their camp. Six of the tallest Bulkokan men rose from the center and stood with banded staffs. They walked slowly to Anand, their kinsmen pulling aside to let them pass. Inside this circle of men, he could see a seventh person who struggled to keep apace. When this odd grouping stood before Anand, he made a shallow bow. The men had orange-brown skin, ginger hair, and dark green eyes with a fold over the upper eyelid. Their lower faces were strangely heavy and their lips were stiffened to give them a haughty air.

  “Welcome to Bee-Jor,” Anand said. “I am Vof Quegdoth, the military commander of our new nation. Who am I addressing? And by what title?”

  The men with staffs stepped aside to reveal a short and very round woman. She was dressed, like the others, in the usual bee camouflage, but her hair was thickened with a pale yellow paste, perhaps royal jelly, and piled in a mass of stiff curls above her head. She did not look at all like a royal personage except for the upward tilt of her nose and something like a scepter she cradled in her right arm. Nodding at Anand, she spoke in a sure but soft voice that resembled the humming of bee wings, as she used the words of the Carpenter Nation.

  “I am zaz-Ladeekuz,” said Ulatha, interpreting her words. “Of the Bulkokan Nation. These are my husbands: zuz-En, zuz-Andozep, zuz-Hoknayz, zuz-Opz, zuz-Spurjen and zuz-Mantaz.”

  “What does zaz and zuz mean?” Anand asked. “This must be a title of some kind.”

  Ulatha spoke with the woman, who nodded her head, confirming terms. “You are correct, Anand. Zaz is queen, zuz is king.”

  Anand bowed.

  “Only six kings?” Daveena whispered.

  “Bow, please, everyone,” Anand commanded, trying not to smirk. “These are royalty, and will be treated as such.”

  Ladeekuz nodded, apparently satisfi
ed by the acknowledgment of her status.

  “Your Highness, we are honored that you have accepted our invitation to live in our nation as a free people,” said Anand. “But we do need to discuss the place where you will establish your residence.”

  Ladeekuz frowned, pointed to the trees that were visible in the near north. “We cannot live here,” she said through the interpreter. “Those trees are sick and ugly. We want a strong and beautiful tree, one that is mature but not too old, and close to other good trees to expand our nation.”

  “Those are but a few of the trees in Bee-Jor. This mound of Palzhad is one of fifty-one. You could live on one of our mounds, near a tree. To live under one is unwise. Falling acorns might kill your people, and fallen leaves will smother their homes.”

  Ladeekuz and her husbands shook their heads, then spat when Ulatha finished her translation.

  “We are not ground dwellers! We are tree people! And we would never live near an ant mound, much less on one.”

  “But from what I know of you, some Bulkokans lived on the ground and others lived in a tree above them—near your beehive—before you were taken as slaves into Hulkren.”

  “The Icanthix lived in the tree!”

  “The Icanthix?”

  “Our enslavers, our captors—the ones who forced us out of our tree palaces and down to the ground. We were grateful to the Hulkrites when they destroyed the Icanthix—grateful until the Termite worshippers forced us into a cage and informed us their Blind One had enslaved Goddess Bee and killed her consort, Grass Roach.”

  Anand was quiet as he watched Ladeekuz and her husbands relay the indignity of their history with faces both angry and sad.

  “For how long were you under the rule of the Icanthix?”

  “Two thousand four hundred and thirty-seven summers, and the sixteen days of autumn. Many more of us, deeper in Bulkoko, remain under Icanthic occupation. We will liberate all my subjects when the time is right.”