“Trellana has been granted a prophecy,” shouted Queen Omathaza. “A vision confirmed by Pious Dolgeeno in his own conversation with the gods.”
Dolgeeno stepped forward and, looking upwards, threw up his arms. “Rise up, righteous women of the Holy Slope,” he shouted. “Rise up and take what is ours: the gold shed by Sun, the jewels dropped by Grasshopper. Take them, all you can, and wrap them around your arms, your legs, your neck, and your heads. Pin them to your ears and nostrils! Slip them onto your fingers! Work them into your hair! And stuff them into your pockets!”
Dolgeeno shut his eyes and chanted quietly in the holy tongue as he bobbed his head while retreating into the clutter of the idols. Trellana and Omathaza bowed with palms pressed together to Grasshopper and Ant Queen. Afterwards, they stood on tiptoes to relieve the idols of their swaddling of jewelry. The chains and ropes of true gold were transferred to their own necks and arms and ankles until they could bear no more. The loose jewels and bangles were stuffed into the pockets of their gowns.
The rest of the women solemnly went to the other idols as well as those of the chapels. They bowed before each of the 113 deities and then quietly transferred their treasures to themselves. When all the idols were shorn of their treasures, the women did not return to the pews, but stood in the aisles and waited. They linked each other’s arms, clattering with jewelry, as Dolgeeno pushed aside the idols of Grasshopper and Ant Queen to reveal a passage.
“Holy sisters and mothers,” shouted Trellana. “We love our country, our ants, and our people. Our gods have set us at the center of the Sand to manifest Their glory and fulfill Their perfect order. We have displeased our gods, broken that order, and created the chaos that plagues us. I have seen the way out. I have seen what we must do to strengthen and please our gods. I know what we must do to restore our country.”
Trellana looked out at the women whose heads were raised as their jewel-bedecked bodies swayed in unison. They were sobbing in ecstasy as they looked upwards, their hands raised, catching rays of hope and grace.
“The restoration of the Holy Slope begins with the destruction of Bee-Jor!” shouted Trellana as hatred sharpened her booming voice. “Let Bee-Jor fall into foreign hands and be trampled under foreign boots! Let its sands be overturned and polluted by unholy ants! Let its infidels fall to the bearded harvesters to be stung and poisoned! Let Bee-Jorite hearts be shredded by Seed Eaters’ arrows and their throats slit open with Seed Eater swords!”
Dolgeeno took Trellana’s hand as she looked to the ceiling, left and right, her eyes flashing as she saw her visions. “Let the ants of Bee-Jor suffer and succumb to the Yellow Mold! Let the mounds of Bee-Jor rot and implode!” she shouted. “Let every last insurgent die! And when they are dead, we will be ready to destroy the Seed Eaters, retake the East, and reunite the United Queendoms of the Great and Holy Slope!”
The joyous sobbing of the women increased. They sounded on the edge of climax as their bodies shook with the divine spirit that had entered them.
“Are you ready, daughters of Ant Queen?” Trellana shouted.
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” shouted the women as they raised their jeweled fists and gasped and spasmed in a collective release of cries and laughter.
Dolgeeno took several torches from the hands of the idols. “Rise, take a torch, and walk with me, Holy Sorceresses!” he shouted. “The blessings of your urine must leave this darkened land.” He handed Trellana and Omathaza a torch, then raising his own, he turned his back and walked up the corridor of idols until his dark garment blended into the blackness. Omathaza and Trellana turned their backs, raised their lights, and walked after him. The rest of the women took torches from the sconces and quietly walked up the altar’s steps to follow.
Dolgeeno reached a yellow curtain at the altar’s back, and rolled it up with a drawstring to reveal a dark portal. He entered it, his torch dimming as it bobbed. Trellana followed after him, and felt she had stepped into the sweetest dream. The torch showed her the walls of a rough tunnel, and a rougher floor she knew would tire her legs and twist her ankles. But she was eager to march, no matter the distance, even as she was swelling with the babies of an outcaste. The gods would guide her, as much as her torch, to her husband—her true husband—who would join her side and fight to reclaim everything that was theirs.
Chapter 40
The Latecomers
Pleckoo was alive to see another sunrise lighting up the dew beads on his cage. He remained tied to the cage’s bars above the floor, wrapped inside the rope cocoon, and expecting the moment the guards would enter and force a tube of glop down his throat. He would open his lips and allow them to do so, determined that they would never again jam the tube into what had been his nose and empty its contents down his windpipe. That had plunged him into a choking panic that was the worst thing he had ever suffered . . . and lately he had suffered so much.
The feeding/watering was late, but so much else was different that morning. Through the bars he could see the Cajorites heading east in loose formations. They carried swords at their sides, blowguns around their necks, and had rectangular shields of stained straw on their backs. Ants that neared the soldiers skirted away, repelled by the scent. Interspersed with the marchers were women and boys hauling cargo-sleds full of food and beverage containers, as well as more mysterious contents—pods, bladders, and barrels, as well as darts and arrows. They are off to war in the East. But why?
As he thought about it, a war made sense. The Seed Eaters knew this new nation of Bee-Jor was depleted and barely under rule; but looking at these marchers, they were eager to get to the border and hungry to fight. And why wouldn’t they fight for what they’ve won? They could never go back to the old way—any more than I could. Then it occurred to Pleckoo that the Bee-Jorites had to fight. The Seed Eaters did not want slaves or converts to their religion; they wanted land where they could relieve themselves of their masses, and soil to grow more seeds.
From their clothing and skin color, he saw that the Cajorite soldiers marching east were bands of mixed castes and both sexes. Women fighting in wars! The last of them, as usual, were middenites, but this time it was not because they were forced to the back of the queue. They were last because they were marching from the distant midden. Pleckoo knew most of their faces, and saw that they were the first of the soldiers that looked scared. These little shit-scrapers stayed home for the last war, but now they want some glory—some glory that might win them a dwelling up the mound.
It was strangely quiet, but for a breeze that rustled the nearby tar weeds, with their chunky yellow flowers that bloomed through autumn and had the sharp sweet stink of the Tar Marsh. Pleckoo’s thirst was growing as bad as his hunger, when finally Butterfly Goiter stepped out of the supply shack and reconstituted some powdered lymph with the morning’s dew. He spat in the drink before he filled the bladder, then winked at Pleckoo. “Suck it all down, Prophet,” he said after entering the cage and climbing the ladder to feed him. “Suck it like it was the prick of your Termite god—all you can take. We don’t know when we’ll be back to feed you.”
Pleckoo believed him. I’ll drink whatever they bring me and more, he thought, and gulped it down until the bladder was shriveled. His stomach bloated and chafed anew against the fibrous ropes that trapped him, and he struggled to keep down the meal. The Cajorite guards who kept a constant vigil around him were more active that morning, as they tested their blowguns and the sharpness of their swords, and tightened the bindings of their shields. Always there had been ten guards, day and night, but by late morning all had left for the war but one—a boy with barely some whiskers on his chin. He was the one they called Stubby for his short, deformed arm; the boy whose usual task was to bring them food and drink.
When the breezes ended, Cajoria got even quieter. The brightening sun was unseasonably warm, and Pleckoo feared it would dry him out and scald the skin of his face. What if these Bee-Jorites lose and don’t come back? he wondered. What if the Seed Eat
ers find me and learn who I am? What kind of tortures do they practice?
From his bed in the palace, Yormu looked through the window at soldiers in loose groupings as they marched down the artery. Some of the men wore scavenged pieces of what had been the armor of the old military caste. They had also appropriated their handsome bows and ornate quivers as well as their swords with hilts of amber. Some had taken Slopeish shields and covered their carvings with a wash of red. They’re going to war! War against the Seed Eaters!
The veterans of the Laborers’ Army may have appropriated the old military’s regal trappings, but they weren’t riding ants into battle. The ants themselves were nowhere to be seen; were they hiding from all of the roach-scent? There were just a few midden ants heading downward that morning, with trash from inside the mound. Yormu guessed that Terraclon and Polexima had planned a surprise offensive; if ants were included in their forces, the enemies’ harvester ants would smell them coming and alert the Seed Eaters to an imminent attack.
Yormu was struck with a powerful memory, one that was painful as he recalled its details. As a boy in the distant border weeds, he had seen harvester ants incited to war. They spiraled frantically as they gathered their numbers in a dense circle that sprayed a poison that had almost killed him as he worked in the weeds that day. For the next moon, he felt as if he had no lungs, just a raw hurt inside when he breathed.
Aching from this memory, Yormu could not lie still. He got out of bed and rubbed all the bony places on his back and legs that were sore from lying too long. He was still aching on his right side, from where his ribs had been broken, but it felt good to stretch and walk a bit. A palace servant entered to bring him a breakfast of morning dew and a sweet porridge of the moistened gratings of a dried evergreen berry. The servant, Mulga, had yellow skin and thousands of splotchy freckles. She was annoyed to see him out of bed.
“Good Worker,” she said, then corrected herself. “Honored Defender Yormu—you are not supposed to leave your cushion. By order of Commander Quegdoth.”
He sighed and attempted to mouth words she might be able to lip-read. No, I can’t lie there another moment, he wanted to say as his arms flew. I’m needed!
“Back in bed!” shouted Mulga, raising a finger like a truncheon. He shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and pointed out the window at the marching soldiers. Women and older boys and girls were following after the soldiers, hauling the supply sleds.
“They’re off to fight the Seed Eaters,” she said. “All of them, even Queen Polexima and that dark-as-night Terraclon, that one who used to sew and prance around in priests’ robes before he got obsessed with weapons and locust-flying.”
Yormu attempted to say his son’s name but he had no tongue to tap the roof of his mouth for the “en” and “deh” sounds.
“Oh,” said Mulga. “Anand, as you call him. No. Quegdoth’s not back yet. I believe he’s why they’re going to war. Rumor is that he’s dead and so’s his roachy wife. They say the Seed Eaters’ Emperor Volokop put them in a big round cage for his entertainment—a cage loaded with velvet ants. This Volokop is some deformed monster who watched the cage roll around until your Anand and his woman were exhausted, then stung to death. We heard their bodies were thrown in a pit after that, with seeds tucked into their arms.”
Yormu blinked at Mulga, then grimaced. He wanted to slap her across one cheek, then backhand the other. He grabbed the top of her arms and shook her as he tried to shout. You are lying about my son! My beautiful son! But all he emitted were shrieks and gasps—what sounded like a baby’s attempt at words. Mulga was frightened and recoiled from the pollution of his grip. “Keep your hands off me!” she screamed as she dropped to the floor and twisted away to break his hold. “All I’m telling you is what I heard!” He was angrily sobbing, pacing, and for a moment she looked at him with pity, then backed away and rushed from the room—probably to a scenting tub, he guessed. He looked at what she had brought him.
I must eat to get strong! he thought. I am going to this war!
He sucked up the thick, white bulge of the porridge from its bowl, then looked around the chamber for his boots, tunic, and antennae. My weapons are at home, in the midden, he remembered as he dressed. As he limped through the palace’s halls and empty chambers, his anger built on itself as the ache in his side flared. The palace was disturbingly quiet as he wandered its halls in search of an exit. He passed but a few servants, most of them older, or women, and didn’t see a single guard or messenger. Everyone’s left for the war!
When he found the servants’ portal to the outside ring, it was agonizing to squeeze through its cloth diaphragm as it pressed against his ribs. Once he was out, he staggered to the trail of the midden ants and had to wait for one. He turned and antennated one of the few, which had a scraggly clump of spent soil in her mandibles. She dropped her load to open her mouth and feed him. As a bubble of regurgitated mushrooms grew from her crop, he climbed up her legs, then carefully mounted her between the dangerous thorns of her thorax. He held tightly to the tallest thorn at the front to anchor himself, and pressed his lower back to the base of the thorn behind him. The ant resumed her load and Yormu rocked and strained to hold tight as she took him to the midden.
No one, not even an emperor, can hurt my son! he thought as the pain sharpened on his side.
Pleckoo looked through the bars at the occasional old woman who arrived at the dew station, then left in disappointment after seeing the morning’s water had been taken to the eastern border. The occasional midden ant passed his cage on its way to dump some invasive fungus, or the corpse of an insect intruder. Stubby, the little guard, was bored and humming to himself as he paced in a circle around the cage. Later, he practiced his archery with a bow designed for his shorter arm, on a straw target he set barely six paces from himself. Even then he had trouble hitting the target, much less landing an arrow at its center. He grew bored with his bow and arrows, and by noon he sat on a pebble bench outside the twig hut, after retrieving some chopped gnats rolled into fruit leather from the shed. After eating his lunch, he yawned, then leaned his bow and arrows against the bench. He napped with his longer arm over his face to block the sun from his eyes.
Pleckoo was envying Stubby’s ability to lie down when an ant came near with a face like a bearded man. As the ant got closer, Pleckoo saw that the beard was just a piece of spent and shaggy substrate from a mushroom farm. Riding on the ant was a man without a saddle or a means to steer it. Pleckoo heard a painful cry as the man slipped from the ant and fell to the sand, gasping as he crawled into the tar weeds. Pleckoo, barely able to move his head, strained for sight of the fallen stranger but he had disappeared. Was he someone come to taunt or torture him, now that the cage was barely guarded? From the cage’s other side, he heard voices and the footsteps of a group of men. He strained his neck to turn it slightly and shifted his eyes to see them.
Eight or nine men came into his peripheral view, though perhaps some of the shorter ones were boys. All had a lumbering gait and large, thick arms that swung like clubs at their sides. They had crude swords tucked in their belts and blowguns around their necks. Strangely, all of them wore pointy sacks of egg-cloth over their faces, with roughly cut eyeholes. “Good morning, Pleckoo,” shouted the largest of them. Pleckoo, recognizing the voice, broke out in a sweat as heat flashed through his body. It’s Keel! Keel and Tal and his other sons! They’ve come for me now that everyone’s left!
“Can I help you, Good Bee-Jorite?” asked Stubby as he rose up from his bench, addressing Keel and squinting from the sun as he fumbled for his bow and an arrow. “No one is to talk to the prisoner.” Stubby frowned, then froze when he saw the men’s faces were covered with hoods. “Why do you hide your faces?” he asked, and loaded his bow and aimed.
“What a precious little bow,” said one of the others, and Pleckoo recognized Tal’s voice. “Made for a precious little freak with a precious little arm.” Tal looked up into the cage and came forward. “
Hello, Pleckoo. How’s your homecoming been?”
“Get away from the prisoner,” said Stubby, stretching his bowstring tighter.
“Or what?” said Tal. “You’re going to beat me with your stumpy little arm?”
“Or I’ll split your face with this arrow. What do you want?” Stubby asked.
“Nothing. Just wanted to say hello to our cousin from the midden before we head to the war.”
“Then you best be moving on,” said Stubby. “You’re late as it is.”
Tal and Keel looked at each other.
“Move!” shouted Stubby as Tal raised his hood with one hand, and then raised his blowgun with the other. The arrow flew. Tal arched backwards and fell on his backside. “Oww! You mangled little prick!” he screamed. He yanked the arrow out of the right of his forehead where it had jammed between his skull and scalp. Blood soaked the hood and turned it red. Tal pulled it off to reveal his face as blood beaded over his brow, then rolled down his cheek. “I’m gonna rip your little arm off and stuff it down your throat,” he shouted as he stood up, then lunged. Stubby scrambled for another arrow and was reloading when he fell to the ground and twitched. Keel and his other sons had targeted the little guard with their blowguns. The boy was rolling on the sand, foaming at the mouth, as piss soaked his tunic.
“We gotta kill him now,” whispered Keel, looking around for witnesses.
“Be glad to, Dad, but why?” asked Tal.
“Because he saw your face, stupid,” said Keel. “He’ll talk.”
The Prophet of the Termite God Page 37
