“I have,” she answered with a chuckle.
“Are they nearby?”
“They will be soon and just in time. A gathering of all the clans! You’ll never guess who’s being honored.”
Seven days after the lottery, Anand woke to the happy sounds of a spring thunderstorm. For the castes that labored outdoors, rain meant a holiday spent inside. It wasn’t all fun and rest, though, because by late morning, when the storm had passed, the Slope’s poorest inhabitants had to avoid pools of deadly mud and try and salvage their shelters.
When it was dry enough, the royal messengers fanned through the mound’s flats on their mud skates. One of them came to the midden’s edge and rubbed a cricket leg to summon Keel and the caste’s idols keeper. The two were given important information to pass to the rest of the caste.
Terraclon was out of his shanty and making mud mushrooms with some midden girls. They were about to eat them when Anand appeared and offered some proper food, a pickled butterfly egg. The girls looked at him and ran off screeching, “Pollution! Polluted food from a polluted boy!”
Anand just shrugged and turned to his friend. “Have you heard the message from the royals, Ter?”
“The ant nuptials are tonight,” said Terraclon, his brow ridged with anger. “Princess Trellana’s consort has left Mound Kulfi. Once he arrives, Fission takes place. Those who are leaving must gather their possessions and the tools of their duties. That would be you, I guess.”
“It is. Why are you so sour?”
“I’m not sour,” Terraclon said, taking Anand’s offering. “Just wondering why you were so stupid as to pick a yellow lot.” Terraclon’s father poked out from their shanty to scowl at his son, who dropped his head and turned to his home.
“He doesn’t want me eating this,” Terraclon said, and lobbed the egg to Anand.
“But . . .”
“I have to go.”
Anand nodded sadly. He took the egg back to his own shelter, wincing as he heard his friend being beaten, the sound haunting him all the way home.
“The ant queens mate tonight,” Anand told his parents as he entered their dwelling.
“Then you’ll be leaving soon,” said his mother. Yormu strained not to weep as Corra looked at the rug they were sitting on. It was a skillful depiction of the evening’s ritual as observed by a rug maker from a lifetime ago.
“I have always wanted to see leaf-cutter nuptials,” Corra said. “But this is the perfect opportunity—we have someplace to go while the Cajorites are distracted.” She went to a lidded clay barrel that reeked of roach scent.
Anand grinned when he realized where they were going.
While Yormu held his nose, Anand and his mother laid out the oiled leaf ponchos they wore for secret travel. After night fell, they would sneak off to visit her Roach Tribe, the filthiest people on Mother Sand—who Anand saw as his true family.
That afternoon, Sun emerged, harsh and angry, to dry the sand and bake the mud to a hard surface. When He yielded to His sister, Moon, She rose in a cloak of colored mists.
Deep inside the Cajorites’ mound, the blinding castes prepared for the exodus of the virgin ant queens, which were oily and stank of mating-scent. Since their last molting, their wings had unfurled to full size. Outside the chamber, masses of their sterile sisters roamed the tunnels, anxious to push the queens out to their destinies. The night sky was buzzing with swarms of drones from the other queendoms that were eager to inject their semen.
Polexima and the royal family, dressed in evening silks, took seats near the edge of the mound’s opening where a feast had been laid out. “Do we really have to be here?” Trellana asked her parents after yawning. She was disappointed that there were few guests from the nearby mounds to see her gown or her latest dazzling coiffure.
“Trellana, this may be the only time you ever witness ant nuptials,” said Polexima. “It should be a thrilling spectacle.”
“I should just die if I were to miss out on any thrills,” said Trellana, and yawned again.
Drones landed and began clawing at the mound’s opening, attempting to get at the virgin queens. The priests used poles to shoo these drones and send them back to the sky. Far below, the blinders slid open gates and the virgin ants emerged one at a time. Nooses attached to tethers were thrown around the joint that connected an ant’s head to its middle. As the virgins passed, they were splashed with luminous paint. At the other end of the tethers were the human anchors that would retrieve and cage the queens once they had been inseminated.
Cries went up as the first virgin appeared, her wings fluttering above the mass of sterile escorts. She launched herself in the air, her wings a blur of light, as she soared into the cloud of buzzing drones.
A small drone reached her first. While continuing to fly, he clenched her abdomen with his mandibles and rubbed her underside with his legs to inject his seeds. Other drones crowded onto the tether and it came down in a slow crash, sending the priests running. Slowed by her excessive costume, Trellana was caught by the rope and knocked to the carpets. Her coiffure collapsed when it was dragged through a platter of grub dip. Polexima laughed as servants ran to clean off the princess.
“Mother, please!” Trellana hissed.
“It’s funny, darling. Why don’t you show our subjects that you can laugh at yourself?”
Trellana let out a harsh, mock laugh. She then stomped off to her chambers with her handmaidens and a hundred grooming ants crawling after.
Outside the mound, near a pond marsh, an occasion of far less seriousness was getting underway.
CHAPTER 8
THE ROACH TRIBE
It had been several moons since Anand and Corra had seen her people. As they got farther from Cajoria, her heart grew light and she sang. She walked briskly, but still, Anand trotted ahead, turned and shouted, “Come on, Mother, hurry!” They followed stones and plants, which had been smeared with roach secretion, until they reached the edge of a marsh.
From out of a thicket of flowering clover, a massive insect appeared. It was shining and greasy and glimmered with moonlight. It could not fly, but its red-brown body was sheathed in armor-like wings and its triangular head was handsome, like a mantis. It rose up on powerful legs as the shorter of its two pairs of antennae probed Anand for roach-scent.
Slopeites thought roaches were hideous, but Anand saw them as the most beautiful of insects, and this one’s legs had the thick femurs of a strong rider. Atop the roach was a human, who looked high and tiny as she halted the insect by tightening then clipping its reins, which drew together the larger antennae. Auntie Glegina dismounted and ran towards Anand to hug him. He saw that she still shaved her head in mourning for the husband who had been murdered years ago. Her arms reached up for Anand from under a cape thick with roach scent. Glegina’s head was topped with false antennae wrapped with blue ribbons.
It took Anand time to get used to the odors of his mother’s people. When his aunt kissed him, he smelled the acrid breath that was typical of the tribe. It was something he would stop noticing once he had eaten their foods but for now it was still an adjustment. It didn’t help that Glegina hugged him too hard.
“Auntie Gleg, you’re squeezing the life from me,” he gasped.
“Only because I’ve missed you so much,” she said in Britasyte. “Do you want to take the reins?”
Too excited to answer, Anand quickly climbed up the roach which was fitted with a rope ladder. Sometimes a roach took tumbles and they could not be righted, but they were more exciting to ride than ants. It was a strain to wrap thighs around the protrusion on the natural saddle at the backs of their heads, but roaches were fast and nimble and easier to guide than any ant with pulls on the reins.
As they drew closer to the camp, Anand could hear the drums and group-songs of the tribe. The drumming made his heart race until it thumped in unison with the beat. The roach reached the peak of a grade and the riders looked down. Spread out on a dried mud flat and lit up by
glowworms were the combined clans of the Britasyte tribe. Surrounding the camp were three corrals with roaches of various sizes. The insects were tethered to each other in elaborate webs.
The clans danced around a cage of lightning flies whose abdomens flashed with the beats of drums. Aphid punch tinctured with Holy Mildew was passed to the crowd by Da-Ma, the revered Man-Woman who scooped it from a cauldron. He/she wore a festival costume fashioned from the spotted wings of the green moon moth and the protuberant codpiece of a Slopeish general. His/her eyes widened as Anand and his mother approached.
“Now comes a boy of mixed blood,” Da-Ma said, giving Anand the scoop. “Drink deeply, son of two tribes, for your journey commences.”
“What journey?” Anand asked, blinking at Da-Ma who he could see had already entered the Spirit World as his/her pupils were large and shining. Several times Anand had drunk the spirit of fermentation, but he had never ingested the black mildew of the Slopeites’ priests. He knew he was freer amongst the Britasytes, but Anand still turned and looked at his mother, who nodded her approval. He took a long drink. The punch was sweetened with juice from the phantom berry, but it was bitter all the same and he shuddered as it scorched his throat. He saw that his mother took but a sip, knowing she was responsible for returning her son.
A moment later, Anand had the sensation that his head had dissolved and blown away with a breeze. His feet grew into the ground like a tuber and his arms were sprinkled with stars. Feeling strong and weak, grounded and dizzy, he heard thoughts from the insides of the heads around him. Paralyzed by panic, he was sure that his quick-beating heart had switched places with his tongue.
“Don’t be frightened, Anand,” said Da-Ma, with a comforting smile. “No one here wishes you any ill. You are safe in the arms of Madricanth.”
Madricanth was the one and only deity worshipped by the Britasytes, though they paid service to hundreds of others. Madricanth had a roach’s body and a human head, and like Da-Ma, was both male and female. Anand felt cold and hot and had a sudden vision of the world splitting in two: half was colored with the blue and black of night, the other half with the yellows and greens of day. The two halves appeared as the arms of a warm embrace that Anand entered into.
Anand blinked and the vision disappeared. He was dizzy, but back at the camp, wobbling on his feet. He looked into the faces of his mother and Da-Ma.
“Now you occupy both Mother Sand and the Spirit World,” Da-Ma said. Anand nodded in bliss. Everything was the same, but shimmering with an inner light—the spirit that resided within all things. He was lured to the dancing by a tribal song as the clans danced in a fever, pivoting as they threw their arms to the moon. Anand was picked up by the music’s five-part harmonies as if they were a wave of water. He felt free, like he was floating down a warm stream, when suddenly he was ripped into a different realm.
A startling vision made its way around the dance circle: a large girl of seventeen. She had broad cheekbones, wide and liquid eyes and an expression both defiant and vulnerable. At first Anand was sure that there were a hundred of her, but a second later, her image had folded back into one—was she real or an apparition? She danced outside the circle in a way all her own. As she moved, her full breasts and limbs had an effect that transfixed him. He was wracked with a painful yearning and a sickness that would forever infect him.
The girl caught Anand staring and stopped dancing to scowl at him. He was devastated. He stared at the ground, then looked up at her with a wounded longing. Realizing he was sincere in his admiration, her pouting lips battled each other, then burst into a smile. Her teeth were large and perfect, and she suddenly had the beauty of the moon emerging from a rain cloud.
Anand smiled, too. He had the overwhelming urge to lie down with this girl and free her from her garments. When he imagined removing his own clothing, he was all too aware of what he was wearing: the crude brown rags of secret travel. He looked at his poncho, looked back at the girl, and saw the dancers had swept her away. His mother tugged at his sleeve and they walked. From the look on her face, Anand could see his mother did not like this female.
And for some reason, that made him want this young woman more.
As a member of the Cajorites’ lowest caste, Anand was forbidden to wear dyed cloth or expose more than his face and hands. As he walked with his mother, he gawked at the finery of the Britasyte boys. Their red-brown capes were all the same, made from greased cloth and fashioned after roach wings. But under their capes, the boys’ legs and arms were bare. Around their middles were tunics that were tight like a second skin and dyed in brilliant colors.
His envy of finery faded and his desire to see the girl became the greatest need of his life. Her smile sang a melody inside him, and her eyes blazed like a memory of the sun. He reeled and fell when he was overcome by a mildew-induced vision of the two of them coupling on the back of a flying moon moth. He could barely hear his mother when she said, “We must pay our respects to the chieftain,” and pulled him to his feet.
The two went to the platform where Corra’s third cousin, the fat and jolly Zedral, sat on cushions with the other clan chiefs surrounded by a bounty of gifts. Anand and his mother bowed their heads before she removed an impressive cluster of ant eggs from the jar on her back. Anand wondered where and how she had obtained them since they were forbidden as food to all but Slopeish nobles. Such were her mysteries.
Zedral passed the eggs to his daughters to prepare for the feast. He was suddenly serious as he looked at Anand.
“Boy of Two Tribes, do you know why you were named ‘Anand’?”
Anand looked at his mother. “No,” he said. “Anand means ‘worker’ in the Slopeish tongue.”
“But in our old tongue it means something else,” said Zedral. “It means ‘spanner,’ a link between two worlds, like the bridge that runs through the Tar Marsh to the Dustlands.”
“If I had a choice, I know which world I would live in,” said Anand in bitterness and looking back at the revelry around them. The mildew diminished inhibitions and he was surprised by his own frankness. He could see that Corra was crushed with sadness and did not hide tears that came like a sudden rain. She placed her hands on her son’s shoulders.
“We know it has been a trial for you to live on the Slope among the Cajorites,” said Zedral. “But someday soon you and your mother will return to our fold. You will be our interpreter and inform us of the mushroom-eaters’ ways. Because of you, our tribe will prosper and be safer in its wanderings.”
“But we could never leave my father behind. He is shunned by his caste. He would die of loneliness.”
“My heart is touched by your devotion,” Zedral said, then turned towards Corra. “You have raised your son among the Slopeites, but he has the pure soul of a Wanderer.”
Zedral was somber as he turned back to Anand. “You know that in the view of the Slopeites, your father is not possessed of himself. He is the property of Sahdrin and Polexima.”
“I will never accept that my father can’t roam with us,” Anand said. “We will find some way.”
“If we were to adopt him, we would be accused of sheltering a fugitive. The Slopeites would use that as an excuse to rob us, even kill us. At least with you, as a boy of mixed bloods, they have no claim on you once you reach manhood.”
“They will be glad to be rid of me,” said Anand, fingering his precious age chits. “And I of them.”
“When do you turn sixteen?”
“In six moons.”
“That time will pass before you know. You will sit beside me tonight when the feast commences.”
“I would be honored . . . but why?”
Anand was mystified. It was usually the richest traders who sat by the chiefs, the ones who succeeded in their deals by clever ruses.
“You will see,” said Zedral and smiled. “Now go and dance and work up an appetite and I will speak with your mother.”
Anand hurried off without looking to Corra for permiss
ion. He knew her face would be a tangle of sadness and jealousy, an image he did not want to bring with him.
Anand reached the dance circle and moved to a song sung in the Britasytes’ eighteen-tone scale. The words were ancient and spoke of the beauties of the wandering life—of landscapes yet unseen, of foods untasted and music not yet heard. He was pushed and prodded in the writhing mass of bodies, breathing the scents of sweat, perfume, and roach secretion. He could have lost himself but he was intent on finding the girl.
As the lightning flies flashed, Anand grew punchy. He fell out of the dance circle and landed on his bottom. The dirt did not seem firm and he felt as if he were sinking in a black mist. Something like both the sun and the moon was growing before him, blooming like a flower made of light. It was the face of the girl as she stood over him, looking down and softly smiling. The ground beneath him was solid again.
“First time you’ve drunk the mildew?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. His felt as if his heart was crawling up his throat on six legs.
“Are you all right?” she asked, her face both chiding and full of concern.
“I am well, thank you,” he said, suddenly too formal.
She extended her hand to him and he took it. It was as warm as the mushroom bread his mother pulled from a sun kiln. As he stood up, he dove into the lake of her eyes.
“You are Anand.”
“Yes.”
“You might ask my name,” she said, and playfully pushed him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, afraid that everyone was looking at them. He was sure that it was not just people, but the grass, rocks, and stars that were staring. Was anyone? He glanced around. No, they were all dancing or chatting.
“What . . . what is your name?”
“Daveena.”
Anand was quiet again, but inside, a windstorm was howling.
“Are they not used to conversing at your ant mound?” she asked.
Prophets of the Ghost Ants Page 5
