The Prophet of the Termite God

by Clark Thomas Carlton

  Volokop, enraged, could not see any messengers from atop the plant—he looked through the weeds to see his army and their ants clustered along the lakeshore’s edge, slipping in its mud or climbing its marsh plants. How unbecoming of the Sand’s greatest military power! How long must we wait here?

  Polexima looked to the locusts above her which were flying north and south in a narrow oval. “Masks and goggles!” she commanded, and she and Punshu raised their own to their faces. He lifted his mask briefly, to spit out blood, and stuffed some cloth ripped from his clothing into the raw gap in his teeth.

  “Northeast!” she shouted, raising her sword and pointing. The roaches followed her single file, their riders calling to each other as they traversed low, rounded rocks, moist soil, and a thicket of gray-green marsh salvia. When she reached the sand route and saw fresh ant droppings, she knew that Volokop and the tail of his army had passed and were not so far ahead. She could smell the lake just beyond, and heard the rippling of its surface when the wind blew. Punshu pointed to the sky, and she saw the locust scouts had joined in a pair again, confirming her position was correct and that the roaches were aligned from north to south. One of the locusts spiraled down and landed before her.

  “Just in time, Majesty,” said the pilot, who had blue paint on his face. “This locust was about to give out.” As the locust crawled off to drink at the shore, Polexima turned to look in the sky behind her, searching its clouds, when an arrow flew past her, its fletching grazing her face.

  “Bowmen, reverse!” she shouted, then struggled to turn in her saddle and face an attack from the East.

  Keel was furious and pushed away some boys who tried to roll his bulk into a travois and haul him from the battle. “Fuck off,” he shouted at them, then stood to rejoin his sons to pull their rope. As it tautened, they felt the stake give in the distance. A leaf-spattered tarp peeled back to reveal the chasm they had excavated from Shishto to the lakeshore. Some Seed Eaters were caught in the tarp and were folded into it. Others were skidding to the chasm’s edge, failing to stop and falling in. Most of the enemy reached the chasm, then stepped back. A moment later, they turned and ran.

  Ants erupted by the hundreds of thousands.

  Leaf-cutters crawled over and up and through each other to catch and dismember the invading soldiers. Keel placed a hand to the bloody gash in his cheek, and watched the commotion of ants and listened to the screaming within it. The Seed Eaters had their limbs sheared off and their torsos cut in two. Some of the ants had already picked up the shredded bits of the bodies and headed back to dump them in the middens of the border mounds. One poor Seed Eater was sheared of all four limbs, but still had his head. He was alive and screaming as his torso was held high, clutched atop the mandibles of a leaf-cutter who marched him past Keel and his sons. They laughed until they were breathless. The Seed Eaters captured in the tarp were squirming within it, looking for an exit, when the defenders ran over to stab them through the canvass.

  The leaf-cutters continued as a dark yellow flood that swarmed over the wall to destroy the Seed Eater soldiers and their ants in their own lands. When the last of the leaf-cutters left the chasm, it seemed, finally, the invasion was over.

  “Shit, boys,” said Keel from the right side of his mouth. “We didn’t get to kill a single Seed Eater. But I bet we gets to deal with their stinky corpses.”

  Volokop was uncomfortable. The saddle-throne’s restraining straps gouged into his flesh as his ant climbed down the mugwort. The roaches must have moved on, he decided as his driver regained control and veered the ant back to the sand route. The stilted ant riders had salvaged half their mounts and were speeding along, catching up with the elite force. The emperor looked up to the sky and saw the sun at its zenith, and figured the first wave might be at Cajoria by late noon and he would arrive by early evening. I hope the Cajorites have had the good sense to abandon their mound by now. We’ll need some place to sleep tonight.

  A messenger ant reached him, but the boy on his back would not meet the emperor’s eyes.

  “Imperial Majesty . . . we . . . we . . .”

  “Yes?”

  The messenger opened his mouth and the emperor heard something like words but they got lost on a passing breeze. The sun seemed to dim and the emperor had a feeling of shrinking inside himself, as if he were nothing but a poppy seed inside a rattle.

  “I await your response, Majesty,” said the messenger.

  “Repeat the message.”

  “The captain of the Thirty-ninth Division informs you that an uncountable number of leaf-cutter ants have invaded and are advancing and have destroyed the Fortieth through Ninetieth Divisions. The captain urges an immediate retreat of our remaining forces.”

  The emperor coughed.

  “Your message . . . Majesty.”

  “Where are the First through Thirty-eighth?”

  “Unaccounted for.”

  The emperor kept coughing, unable to speak, as convulsions rippled through his deformities. He finally tapped the driver on his shoulder. “Turn our ant around and quickly. We are going back to Worxict.”

  The attackers coming from the East towards the roach brigade were not skulking, but out in the open. As they came closer, Polexima saw that they were common villagers, whose only weapons were shard daggers and crude pikes that were nothing more than sharpened barley stalks. The look on their faces was more terrified than terrifying. Goading them from behind were sentries, shouting commands and kicking them in their withered behinds.

  I couldn’t possibly shoot at these pathetic people, she thought, until a serious arrow lodged in her chest plate. She felt dizzy again, getting too little air through the filter over her blood-filled nose. As the sentries aimed arrows, the villagers rushed the roaches and tried to climb the sharp, greasy bristles of their legs. Others made human pyramids to reach the riders and those who got to the top attempted to stab them. Punshu cut off their heads from their skinny necks as he danced around the saddle in his grip boots. One attacker was up and lunging towards Polexima when she took her new sword and thrust it into his meager chest. After he fell, she looked around her and saw hundreds more coming, distracting her and the other riders as distant bowmen shot their arrows. The roaches were pivoting now, panicked, and crawling out of position as the villagers converged on them, attacking their legs with pebble mallets.

  Polexima was stuck in the saddle, struggling to rise in it, when she heard a buzzing from overhead. “Thank Cricket,” she said inside her breathing mask, then wiped sweat off her goggles. Eggshells fell and exploded, releasing fine powders. Soon, the ragged villagers’ army was coughing, then seizing, then shouting, then weeping. They wandered in blindness, colliding and attacking each other, shouting at themselves and using their fists to bang their skulls until they fell on the ground to bang some more. Some were rolling around, violently wrestling with invisible partners, or each other. Others screamed at the heavens, then down at the ground as they tried to peel their own skin off with their nails or daggers. Some bumped around, screaming in panic from sudden deafness and hoping to hear their own voices as they tore at their ears. One man was licking the air, over and over, while another man stopped yanking out his own hair to yank out someone else’s.

  Datura madness. May I never know this agony, Polexima thought.

  Unable to shout her commands or risk breathing the powder, Polexima raised the flat of her sword over her helmet. The tethers were thrown and hooked, and the roaches held their position in a field of screaming madmen that were madness making.

  She looked up to the sky, in search of Terraclon, who was on one of these locusts overhead. She both resented and admired him for what he had wrought. I will never underestimate that one again.

  Terraclon looked down at the roach brigade, assured of their safety and their position after swooping low enough to see that the powders had taken effect on the unexpected attackers. “Bring us up!” he shouted within his filter, and the swarm followed his
lead and flew west above the sand route until they saw the head of the Seed Eaters’ procession. They were racing east in retreat to Worxict.

  Or somewhat racing. At the head of the parade was a grandly decorated and cumbersome ant that the procession was too respectful to overcome.

  I can guess who that is. He leads from the back during the attack, but races at the front during the retreat.

  “Spiral and follow,” Terraclon commanded. The swarm circled above the head of the procession as it continued east.

  Volokop looked up at and gasped when he saw a swarm of blue mantises spiraling above him like some great sky flower. He wondered if Night Mantis had sent them as a protective escort to surround him. The ant was slowing again—for no reason—and so were the ants behind him.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked the driver.

  “I don’t know, Majesty. Maybe hidden roaches again.”

  Volokop turned to see the procession bunching up behind them, crowding the sand route. His ant came to a halt, and those behind him could not go further either. He looked up as the mantises lowered and realized they were locusts—with human riders on their backs.

  So it’s true—they fly on locusts. He felt his heart drop and splatter.

  “Arrows!” he shouted. “Aim at those locusts.”

  “Spiral lower,” Terraclon commanded his pilot, and his locust lowered until he could see an enormous man seated on a throne strapped to his ant’s thorax. Volokop! And he had seen them—Bee-Jorites mounted on locusts—as he was jostled in the crush of his forces piling up from behind.

  “Spiral up,” Terraclon shouted as they aimed their arrows. He punctured a thigh pod on both its sides until it emptied its orange powder as his drop signal. He slit the rope behind his saddle, which snapped to unload the chains of aphid shells. They landed and exploded around Volokop, and through the stilted ants behind him and the divisions after them. The swarm continued their flight above the sand route to drop the rest of its bombs on the forces behind them.

  “Turnaround! East!” Terraclon shouted, and looked below as both harvester ants and Seed Eaters trembled with palsy. The riders slumped or fell from their saddles and the ants twitched and pivoted in place. The massive ant that carried the emperor had fallen off its legs and to its side. Volokop, in some massive orange garment, was jiggling like an algae pudding. The stilted ants crashed around him, and their riders fell from saddles to wander in madness, walking and jumping, it seemed, with arms outstretched, as if trying to catch their own heads floating away from them.

  “Land,” Terraclon shouted, and the locust circled to a halt and was guided to Volokop. He looked down at this man, this emperor, strapped into his fallen throne, and was astonished by the mass of his deformities. “You’re coming with us,” he said, “and when you’ve regained your sanity, you’ll arrange to return our Commander General, Vof Quegdoth of Cajoria of Bee-Jor—also known as Anand of the Britasytes.”

  Terraclon gritted his teeth—he ached to hurt this man, to use his sword and slash at his bountiful flesh.

  The emperor was deep into madness, his eyes rolling, and Terraclon knew he had not been seen nor heard by him. He watched as the emperor gurgled a stream of words and then tore at his garment, covered in fish scale sequins, as if it were a spider attacking him. When the garment was undone, Terraclon saw that the man’s legs, like his chest and part of his neck, were a swollen mass of folds, clumps, and ropy growths. His testicles were each the size of a baby. He weighed as much as six other people, and could never fit on a locust saddle.

  “Pious,” said the pilot, pointing up. The locusts above them were releasing a yellow warning powder. The rest of their army is returning from the West, will be here soon. He looked over at one of the fallen riders of the stilted ants, a young and refined-looking man in beautiful armor of golden beetle chitin. He was shaking, sobbing, talking to himself in his madness. Terraclon felt pity for him and, strangely, affection.

  “Him!” he said. “We’ll take him! He’ll tell us how to get back our commander.”

  The pilot threw Terraclon a coil of soft rope and he tied the young man’s hands behind him, then his ankles, before raising him up to the pilot to set in the cinching cradle behind their saddle. Terraclon was not sure what to shout as his next command.

  “Home!” he finally said, and they flew up and into the swarm. He looked west to see the last of the Seed Eater army, retreating by the tens of thousands from a swarm of leaf-cutters chasing them east. As the locusts flew west, the roach brigade crawled under them and all made their way to . . . Bee-Jor. “To Bee-Jor!” he shouted.

  Yes, Bee-Jor lives another day. But what about its founder?

  Chapter 43

  The Place Where Priestly Magic Ends

  Pleckoo spent his first day beyond the northern wall in the center of a fuzzy mint plant. After squeezing through its dried and bristly outer stalks, he collapsed in delight in its lush center. It was glorious to be free of the ropes, to move his arms and legs again, and lie down, even in the confines of the plant. He plucked one of the green leaves and chewed on it, to quench his thirst and fill his stomach even as it numbed his tongue. The mint’s aroma made the plant a safer place to hide since it repelled most insects but he was frightened when there was a sudden shade. A milkweed butterfly had alighted on the plant’s top to flirt with its faded flowers. She found no nectar and resumed migration to her winter home in the South.

  Pleckoo plucked more leaves to make a bed of them and then lay down to luxuriate in the downy softness of their tops. Stretching and napping, he stared up at the blue sky with a pleasantly empty head, as the clouds performed a slow dance to the music of the wind. I’m staying here all the rest of my life, he thought. Why do I need other humans? When the sun neared the West, he stood and used the veiny underside of the leaves to scrub and scrape his body clean. It was then that he noticed his arms and legs had atrophied. I’ll get strong again—stronger than I’ve ever been, he thought. As he felt his head and chin, he was heartened to know his hair and beard were returning.

  The coming darkness brought a chill that ended his idyll and reminded him of his plight. I need clothes! I need weapons! I don’t even have a knife! He stacked several mint leaves atop each other as a layered blanket and nestled under them, but he could not get very warm. Looking up through the sprigs, he could see the eastern rise of the orange moon reflecting the rays of the bloodied sun. The sight did not fill him with hope or comfort. As the moon rose higher and whiter and the night got colder, Termite stood like an old and stern grandfather over him, ready to swat him with a withered hand. Hulkro, You are a cruel god, he thought, if You are even a god at all.

  Tree crickets, numerous in the autumn, slowed their chirping as the chill deepened but they were no less annoying as they screeched in unison. Pleckoo shivered inside his leaves, and stuffed his ears with bits of them in hopes of finding quiet. Slipping into a shallow sleep, he dreamed one of those dreams where he was aware he was dreaming . . .

  He dreamed of that beautiful time on a warm evening when he had commanded hundreds of thousands of Termite warriors—men who looked at him with both fear and admiration. They had herded uncountable ghost ants to the Slope to devour its idolators and purify its sand with green and crimson blood. Pleckoo, riding a gorged and magnificent ghost ant, reached the watchtower, where the Roach Boy had commanded his pathetic defense. Pleckoo’s laugh had tickled the stars and made them squirm, when he could see his cousin on the tower’s platform tearing out his beard and howling in defeat. The men were chanting the round of Hulkro’s names as they chopped at the tower’s legs, then clapped and stomped when it toppled and crashed into flying pieces. Pleckoo dismounted from his ant as his captains reached into the wreck and drew out the body of the one who had called himself Vof Quegdoth. Now it was Little Cousin Anand who slumped in his captors’ arms, half-alive, with his head bent and his hair covering his face as he was dragged before Pleckoo.

  “Look at me,” Pl
eckoo commanded, but Anand refused to raise his head. “Look at me, Roach Boy!” he shouted. Slowly, Anand lifted his face, which had taken on a heavenly brilliance. The light of his skin lit up the red of his garments and the faces of the men who held him.

  “Look upon Me!” shouted the glowing figure as He flipped the men who held Him into the sky with flicks of His fingers. He grew in size and increased in brilliance as He sprouted termite wings from His back.

  “I heard what you thought! You thought Me cruel and doubted my existence!”

  “Forgive me, Termite, I . . .”

  “I have delivered you. Instead of thanking Me you have insulted Me.”

  Pleckoo looked around him as the night turned black as tar. All had vanished except himself and Hulkro, who was winging into the night sky to perch on his lapis throne. Pleckoo tried to fall to his knees and beg for forgiveness, but there was nothing to fall onto. He was floating in space in complete silence, watching as his hands, his arms, and the rest of his body crumbled and dissolved. This is it, he thought, terrified that all that was left of him were words. Hulkro tests the faithful, Pleckoo heard, as if it was whispered by the wind . . .

  He felt a cold, wet kiss on his ear that woke him from his sleep. Stumbling out of the leaf blankets, he felt his heart pound to the point of exploding; but he knew he had not died. He burst into tears and wept and felt ashamed, imagining that he looked like some sad little child. Tiny beads of dew had grown on the sprigs of the mint stalks, and glinted with bits of moonlight. Afraid at first, he braced himself, then dared to look at the moon in its western descent. “Your will be done,” he said. Clouds floating over the moon stretched into arrows with their heads pointing north. “North,” he said aloud.