Dedication
For Jim M.
What you said was so inspiring!
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Michael Colleary and Mike Werb for their expert analysis and suggestions. For their enthusiasm and support, he thanks Lawrence Bender, Caren Bohrman, Mike Dobson, and Janet Jeffries. Thanks also to Ann Howard Creel, Robb McCaffree, and Robert Rodi for their careful reading of the manuscript. Special thanks to Dr. Edward O. Wilson, the Second Darwin, for his magnificent contributions to science.
Epigraph
“Humans arose as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway . . .”
—Stephen Jay Gould, evolutionary biologist
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Map
Prologue
Part 1: The Roach Boy of Mound Cajoria, a Human-Inhabited Ant Colony of the Great and Holy Slope Chapter 1: The Lowliest Subject of the Sorceress Queen
Chapter 2: The Place of the Lowest Caste
Chapter 3: The Sorceress Queen of Mound Cajoria
Chapter 4: Surviving the Sting
Chapter 5: The Trip to the Swamp
Chapter 6: The Fission Lottery
Chapter 7: The Night of Inseminations
Chapter 8: The Roach Tribe
Chapter 9: Promises
Chapter 10: Departure
Chapter 11: Royal Journeys North and South
Chapter 12: The Longest Night
Chapter 13: The Ghost Ants of Hulkren
Chapter 14: The Anointing of Queen Trellana
Part 2: A Prisoner of the People of the Blood Chapter 15: The Living Death
Chapter 16: A Slopeish Queen in the Land of Ghost Ants
Chapter 17: Royal Insults
Chapter 18: Polexima the Slave
Chapter 19: The Chosen One
Chapter 20: A Scolding
Chapter 21: The City of Peace
Chapter 22: A Mystery Solved
Chapter 23: The Silence of the Gods
Chapter 24: The Powder Battles
Chapter 25: A Bawdy Spectacle
Chapter 26: A Mission for the Cajorite
Chapter 27: The Same Old Enemies
Chapter 28: Unleashed Demons
Chapter 29: The Loose Doctrine
Chapter 30: The Defensive Measure
Chapter 31: Mastering the Locust
Chapter 32: A Most Unwelcome Surprise
Chapter 33: Reunion
Part 3: A Warrior for the Termite God Chapter 34: The Dustlands
Chapter 35: Jatal-dozh
Chapter 36: A Growing Reputation
Chapter 37: Hulkro’s Prophet
Chapter 38: Conversion of the Mummifiers
Chapter 39: A Spinning Top
Chapter 40: An Afterthought
Chapter 41: Hulkro
Chapter 42: Into the Grass
Chapter 43: The Grass People
Chapter 44: Dneep
Chapter 45: The Return of Polexima
Part 4: The Son of Locust Chapter 46: A Remembrance
Chapter 47: The New Ultimate Holy
Chapter 48: A Boy to Lead Them
Chapter 49: The Tying of Sashes
Chapter 50: Hidden Feelings
Chapter 51: Strategy
Chapter 52: The Turquoise Infidel
Chapter 53: The Washing of Hands
Chapter 54: Pleckoo’s Prayer
Chapter 55: War
Chapter 56: The True War
Chapter 57: Tests of the Faithful
Chapter 58: Bee-Jor
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Map
PROLOGUE
Locust, the Sky God, was enraged with His Creation. Humans had come to dominate Mother Sand and, in their arrogance, built towers of Her grains that poked through Locust’s clouds. In His anger, he hurled a Great Boulder, sending up a dust storm that plunged the world into a freezing darkness that spared few beings. Surviving humans went underground, grew smaller, and waited for the Age of Dust to subside. When they reemerged, the humans starved, for all other creatures of red blood were extinct and plants and trees would be dormant for ages. Over a thousand eons, the humans who endured grew smaller and smaller still, shrinking to a ten-thousandth of their original size. They competed for food with the Sand’s other survivors, the six-and eight-legged creatures whose blood runs green, which had returned to their true, greater size.
Too tiny to ever threaten the gods again, the humans’ dominion over the Sand was regained when they realized their survival was not in warring with insects but in living among them. Different gods granted different tribes the knowledge that enabled them to deceive, infiltrate, and exploit the ants, but no race of men was more loved by the gods than the Slopeites, a semi-divine tribe, descended from Goddess Ant Queen and Her mortal consort, Rahtsu, the Warrior King. Ant Queen gave the Slopeites the holy leaf-cutter ants: the growers of mushrooms and the fiercest, most beautiful and useful of all insects.
—From the Oral Traditions of the Slopeish Priesthood
PART 1
THE ROACH BOY OF MOUND CAJORIA, A HUMAN-INHABITED ANT COLONY OF THE GREAT AND HOLY SLOPE
CHAPTER 1
THE LOWLIEST SUBJECT OF THE SORCERESS QUEEN
“Shit,” muttered Anand, the word that summed up his existence. He had been knocked to the sand by a blowfly as big as himself. It crawled over his prostrate body and mopped his face with its pulpy mouthparts. Anand kicked out from under the fly, then stood and used his batting pole to beat it back into flight. He wiped his face, and sighed before resuming his harness.
The morning was typical for him, stinking and noisy with hovering insects as he lugged a vat of human waste away from Mound Cajoria. The most merciless of gods, Sun, was shining with all His cruelty and Anand sweated and strained as he trudged through a stretch of scorching sand. He beat his feet over the flattest part of each sand grain and avoided those with edges that could slice through his sandals.
At last he reached his destination, a density of weeds on Cajoria’s northwest border. He looked up at a stalk of mint leaves and took a moment to rest in its fragrant shade. Once he caught his breath, he pulled back a leaf-tarp and dumped his loathsome cargo. The flies that had shadowed him dropped from the air to converge on the waste. The fattest of them buzzed her wings, scattering the others as she crowded them off the muck.
As one end of her ate, the other sank its abdomen into the moisture to lay an egg. In her compound eyes, Anand saw a thousand reflections of himself, indistinct and tiny, one of the countless masses. When the fly turned its iridescent body, he saw himself in a large and single reflection: a brown-skinned boy with defiant eyes, strong limbs, and hair as black and glossy as tar. He smiled to see his mustache had thickened. It prompted him to finger the fifteen chits he wore around his neck, one for each of his years. I am almost a man, he thought, but then he frowned.
What kind of life is this for a man?
Blowflies interrupted Anand’s thoughts when they flew back to fight over the waste. Their buzzing made his skull vibrate with a terrible ache. He wanted to kill the flies with the sharp end of his batting pole, but that privilege belonged to the sons of the hunting caste. And as for those hunters . . .
Where were they? They should have been there to slay these pests and then port their corpses to the merchants. From the faint sound of it, Anand figured the hunters were deeper in the weeds and locked in some delightful combat.
He wandered into the thicket to see what made them whoop and holler.
He followed their voices to a dandelion flower that had just turned to a great and towering seed clock. Under its leaves were several boys of Anand’s age surrounding a black, glistening centipede. The creature was huge and hairy and looked to be two-headed as it rose up on both ends and waved its hundred claws. Scattered over its loamy home were droppings full of bones and a skull from a human it had eaten.
“That’s the head, to the left,” shouted Skylo, a young man of sixteen with yellowish skin and leaf-green eyes. He pointed to the true head with pincers below its mouth, the points of which were beaded with poison. The boys ran under the centipede’s safer end where they thrust spears between its belly scales. Each puncture sent the creature into violent convulsions . . . but didn’t kill it. As it snapped and thrashed, it whipped the boys with its legs and knocked them to the ground. It rose up, turned on them, and then lunged with its pincers. The boys ran under leaf cover, laughing when it missed them.
Weak and leaking blood, the centipede wobbled as it poised to strike again but when its head dropped, the rest of its body collapsed on the sand. The hunters ran in with their swords. Skylo skewered its brain as the rest chopped off its legs. Nearby was a hollowed acorn that one boy played like a barrel drum. Another joined him and started a chant. The rest picked up the centipede’s legs and danced with them around the corpse.
As he spied on them, Anand was filled with an envy that choked him from inside. He wondered if he had ever known such joy in his life. His envy grew as he watched the hunters climb the stalk of the seed clock. Skylo was the first to reach the seeds and plucked a few by their stems. At their ends were the fluffy domes of threads that caught the wind. He widened his arms, waited for a breeze, then jumped.
Anand watched as the boy bobbed and floated before he alighted on a distant barley comb. After Skylo released the seeds, he bounced down the spiral of the barley stalk’s leaves. When he reached the ground, he ran back, eager to do it again. He paused when he noticed Anand peering from behind the pebble.
“Step out from behind that pebble!” Skylo commanded and Anand complied. He saw the hunter recoil at the sight of his dark skin and his rags.
“Why aren’t you at work?” Skylo asked.
“Why aren’t you?” Anand whispered, and turned away.
“What? What did you say?”
Anand was quiet.
“Don’t dare speak to me, shit-scraper, especially like that,” said the hunter, pinching his nose as if Anand stank. “Hang your head and apologize or we can find a centipede to throw you to.”
“I’m sorry,” Anand said, as he turned toward Skylo and knelt. After a moment of silent shaming, the hunter ran back to the others.
Anand was dragging his pole back to the vat when he heard a thump and a muffled scream. He turned in the sound’s direction and froze to see a bloodsucker flea with Skylo bleeding in its barbed fore-claws. The bristled, disc-like monster was five times as tall as a man, crouching on powerful hind legs. Anand felt his heart jump into his head, beating like the acorn drum in his ears.
The flea clamped its head around Skylo’s torso. A dagger-like stipe emerged from its mouth and plunged between his ribs. Dual suckers from deeper in the mouth slithered over the boy’s chest, then sank into the incision. With a sickening slurp, Skylo was turned to a bloodless husk. The flea’s body was translucent and Anand watched as its abdomen reddened and bloated with blood.
“Fleas!” Anand shouted to the others climbing to the seeds, but they were too distant and lost in their chatter to hear him. The bloodsucker dropped the shriveled corpse as tiny antennae popped from its head and waved their hairy sensors. The flea caught Anand’s scent, pivoted towards him, then crouched to spring. Anand knew it was useless to run. He dropped to his knees and held up the sharp end of his pole.
Anand jerked upright when the flea jumped. As the insect dropped on him, he thrust the pole upwards and pierced its middle. The flea toppled, pressing Anand to the sand, with its wound smearing him with human and insect blood. He was excited he had killed it, but he knew fleas traveled in hordes, so he reached for his dagger as he wriggled out. “Fleas!” he shouted, running towards the seed clock. “Fleas!”
Once the boys heard him, Anand raced to the open sand under cover of the lowest weeds. The hunters leapt to the sand to run and hide.
Dozens of fleas were plummeting into the weeds as Anand ran. He heard the hunters’ screaming and then their sudden silence as the fleas drained their blood. Zigzagging through a rain of fleas, Anand ran over the sand and reached the closest of the warning towers built among the weeds. He scrambled up a ladder to a platform under a wooden bell with a scent-bladder tied to a post at his right.
Anand slashed the bladder with his knife, releasing a powder of pungent alarm-scent, then grabbed the rope that trailed from the bell. As he swung up and into the air, a flea sprang at him. Anand raised his feet, kicking into the flea’s head and sending it into a spiraling fall. As the bell sounded a warning to the humans, the flea landed on its side, righted itself, and attacked again.
The flea was in mid-leap when an arrow pierced it, sending it into a spin. Anand jumped from the rope to the platform to see a leaf-cutter sentry ant rushing over the sand, its antennae a blur as they waved. Riding on the back of the sentry was its master, a human soldier from the border patrol nocking his bowstring.
Anand watched the ant’s antennae twitch in the direction of the fleas as she raised her gaster and sprayed recruit-scent on the breeze. Within moments, dozens of sentry ants and their human riders rushed into the weeds, flushing out the fleas. As the bloodsuckers jumped up, the humans pierced them with spears and arrows. The ants rushed to the fallen fleas and used their pincers to slice through their bellies and shear their legs.
Atop the platform, Anand caught his breath as he watched the fleas retreating north, vaulting over the weeds. Smaller ants without riders converged on the flea corpses, slicing them into pieces to haul away in a column. Surviving hunter-boys emerged from the cracks of rocks or pebbles they had burrowed under. Anand almost grinned to see one boy had lodged himself in the ribs of a fallen but poisonous mushroom and his skin was swollen with itchy bumps. A moment later, Anand was shaking, waiting under the bell as a group of officers abandoned their ants to climb the tower he occupied. Their honey-colored armor creaked as they took the rungs. Anand feared these soldiers more than he feared the fleas. He kept his head down as they mounted the platform and dared not look them in the face.
“Look up,” said their captain. Anand revealed his dark face and the clipped earlobe that identified his status.
“Good gods. He’s from the midden,” said a soldier, pinching his nose.
“And he’s got skin as brown as a roach-eater,” said another.
“This entire tower is polluted,” said the captain. “It will have to be chopped down and rebuilt.”
He addressed Anand but did not look in his eyes. “We must cut off your arm, middenite, for polluting royal property. Stick it out . . . left or right as you wish.”
From the corner of his eye, Anand could see the captain’s skin was so fair that he had blue blood pulsing in the veins of his temple.
“Good soldier, allow me to speak,” said Anand, staring down.
“What’s this?” the captain asked, surprised at the outburst. “You dare speak to me?”
“I sounded the alarm because others were under attack—it was not to save myself,” said Anand surprising himself. “Several hunter-boys died, but I see that some live—thanks to the keen aim of you and your men.”
“That’s true, Captain,” said a soldier in the back. “The survivors all pissed themselves . . . unlike this one.”
The captain sighed and stared at his sword with its cunning engraving of Mantis, the war goddess. “I’m not going to ruin my blade with the blood of some filthy middenite,” he said. “Come on, men. We must collect the husks of t
he dead and return them to their families. And you,” he said to Anand, “should praise Lord Grasshopper for His mercy.”
Anand knew not to thank the soldiers as they filed down, for even his gratitude was polluted. Besides, he had new worries. He would be late in returning to the midden. Despite it being the most reviled place in all Cajoria, he hurried home, wondering what punishment his foreman had in mind.
CHAPTER 2
THE PLACE OF THE LOWEST CASTE
It was only midday, but Anand’s father, Yormu, was numb with fatigue and his brown skin was slippery with sweat as he toiled in the midden, the place where both ants and humans brought their waste and enemy corpses. Yormu had spent the morning dissecting a dead tarantula, a messy and tedious process that always made him itch. Just as he was finishing, soldier ants—the largest leaf-cutters of all—filed in from the east with human and insect corpses held aloft in their jaws. They had come in triumph from a border skirmish with the men and ants of the Seed Eater Nation.
Yormu moaned as he watched the corpses pile up. The dead humans and their harvester ants were dumped together and would have to be sorted. The human dead had to be hauled to the swamp, but their ants, with their giant, seed-milling heads, would be salvaged for parts, food, and fluids. For Yormu, that meant opening the harvesters’ gullets to extract their puddings of crushed seeds.
He was frowning at the enormity of his task when sentry ants poured in from the Western weeds from the flea attack—even more corpses. These had to be salvaged right away since fleas were a favorite food of the military caste. Yormu suddenly remembered his son had been sent to the weeds. Had Anand fallen to a bloodsucker?
He would have shouted Anand’s name, but Yormu the Mute had no front teeth and only a stub of a tongue, the rest of which had been cut off by a sheriff. Yormu clutched his blade in panic and raced to the water station. He sliced a drop into a mushroom cone and snuck off to look for his boy.
Prophets of the Ghost Ants Page 1
