Anand and Daveena had yet to sight other Pleps or their roaches fleeing east. He sensed Daveena’s dread, which increased his own. He had no plan other than the hope that the grasslands of Dneep were more hospitable to roaches than they were to ghost ants. And if they could make it through, they would then have to travel in the lands of the unpredictable Seed Eaters who might let them journey west to Palzhad.
Anand knelt constantly on the roach’s head, jerked at its antennae, and over three days, he let it rest only long enough to drink. Daveena, strengthening with nourishment, took over for him when sleep could not be resisted. The mating-scent lure had been effective, but now, as the roach grew hungry, Anand peeled open the stick’s opposite end. This lure stank from fly larvae, the roach’s favorite food.
After days of open sand, the roach was steered into stretches of weeds where they traveled more slowly but stayed hidden from human view. The thickness of weeds came to an end at the moment Anand was about to succumb to exhaustion. Before them on a rise lay a new stretch of sand, and in the distance, a land of dried grass that rolled away in yellow hills. Was it a refuge, or did the low murmur of chirps portend something predatory? Above the grass at the moment was a twisting cloud of locusts. They seemed unable to decide on a direction as they dropped and scattered, then rose again, chased off by mysterious ground predators. Anand felt just as indecisive but he knew they needed a rest.
Tucked inside the belly scale, Polexima had been nauseated for what had seemed an eternity. She savored the few moments of sleep that came to her, sleep with its slippery dreams of comfortable beds, palatable food, and her legs restored to full powers. “I promise you this, Pareesha,” she whispered to her child. “I have suffered much, I may suffer much more, but I will return you to safety.”
Breathing had been difficult for the queen and little princess. When the roach climbed up rocks or inclines, it pulled its belly scales close as if to contain their usual contents, the roach’s own young. The scales had small holes punched through them for breathing, but Polexima lay panting until the insect was horizontal and the scale could open again. The insect was crawling to a slow stop when she heard Anand drop from the saddle.
“We’re resting,” he said and pulled down the scale. “We just have to get off this roach.”
“And I’d really like to get out of it,” she said and handed him Pareesha.
The mounds of Hulkren received notice that muck-covered infidels had escaped atop roaches. It had taken less than three days for the runners to spread the news through the network of tunnels that linked the Hulkrish mounds and their distant outposts. Warriors were to patrol for and kill all roaches and examine their undersides. They were to kill and preserve the corpses of the Britasytes, but were not to kill the yellow-skinned Slopeite or her toddler.
Days later, roach corpses on the empire’s peripheries piled up high, but no Britasytes had been retrieved. Mounted sentries on the grass frontiers had brief sightings of roaches speeding towards Dneep, but they were just as quickly lost. Roaches were swift and ants would pursue them only so far, but Pleckoo knew how to overtake them.
The Second Prophet led several regiments through ancient and neglected tunnels to Dneep. Without wall-torches, the journey was dark and tedious but the route was mostly unobstructed. For days, Pleckoo and his men lived atop their ants. They slept, and ate and performed all functions as the insects raced without resting, a speeding shadow parade. When his men grew tired, Pleckoo led them in chants that celebrated all of Termite’s holy names. “Each step we take brings us closer to Hulkro,” shouted Pleckoo. Nothing would stop them until they reached the tunnel’s eastern end.
Anand and Daveena woke from a too-short nap to resume their flight as the red sun rolled down a graying sky. The grasslands would not be reached until early morning. The roach, which had been tethered to a grass clump, was standing still with its wrapped antennae drooping on the ground. Polexima, clutching her stomach under a daisy leaf, agreed to reenter the belly scale and continue, but when the moment came to pull herself inside, she fell on the ground in deepest fatigue. Pareesha wailed and crawled on top of her mother.
“Perhaps it is best we sleep here one night before entering the grass,” Daveena said, looking at the queen’s face.
“Yes,” said Anand. “Perhaps that is best.”
“I am grateful for your compassion,” said the queen who looked charmed when Anand and Daveena held hands. As Anand assembled a leaf tent for Polexima, Daveena searched for a pebble where she could make a lean-to large enough for the both of them.
“Thank you,” said Polexima, as she watched Anand cut and shred a second leaf to line the bottom of her tent as a cushion.
“You are welcome, Mother,” Anand said, then saw her wince.
“It suddenly shames me to realize that I do not know the name of my rescuer,” she said.
He chuckled. “I am Anand. Do you need some water, Mother? Some food?”
“Why do you call me ‘Mother’?” asked the queen with a chuckle in her voice.
“It is the way of my adopted nation. ‘Mother’ is a term of esteem for all women who have achieved a certain age.”
“Why have you stopped addressing me as Your Majesty, though? I am your queen,” said Polexima as Pareesha crawled towards her and reached for breast milk.
“Respectfully, Mother, I had my reasons then. But I am a free Britasyte as well as a citizen of the Dranverite Collective of Nations. I am not a Cajorite, nor a subject of any mound on the Slope.”
Polexima was silent. “Dranverites? Our priests insisted there was no one but tree cannibals in Dranveria.”
“Like so many things, Mother, your priests were wrong about that. And not all tree dwellers are cannibals,” said Anand as Daveena returned, lugging a rotting grass seed that had succumbed to a delicious blue mold. Polexima looked thoughtful.
“Anand, I should like that you stop calling me that. My name is Polexima.”
“Very well, Polexima. This is my betrothed, Daveena.”
Daveena touched her hand to her head, then her heart, then bowed in the sign of esteeming. Polexima imitated her as best as she could, but it appeared to be the first time she had ever bowed to anyone. Pareesha took the moment to crawl away. Polexima looked astonished when the baby crawled to a pebble, then used it for leverage to stand on two feet.
“First time she is standing?” Daveena asked in broken Slopeish.
“Yes,” said Polexima, “I had feared she never would.” The roach girl and queen smiled as they shared the tender moment. It didn’t last though, as Polexima looked uncomfortable to have been so intimate with Britasytes.
“Sleep, Polexima, for we will rise well before the sun does,” said Anand as he finished the rigging of her tent.
“Morning always comes too soon in Hulkren,” said Polexima.
“Every morning is a blessing,” said Anand, “when you consider the alternative.”
He was walking away from her when she erupted with a question.
“Anand, what do you wish of me?” she asked. “I will not go a roach-step farther until you tell me why I have been rescued. Will you ransom me?”
Anand turned and pinned her with his eyes. He sensed her growing respect, even admiration, but more than a remnant of fear and revulsion.
“I wish for several things,” he said, being as measured as possible. “First, see for yourself what life is like among your subjects when you return. Stain your skin brown, wear the rags you wear now, and see the unending misery your nobles impose on their subjects. You will know that life for common Slopeites is as miserable as it was for you as a captive in Hulkren.”
Anand watched her swallow and clutch her head as if it throbbed with the worst ache. “We . . . we are not possibly so cruel as the Hulkrites,” she said. “We don’t hobble our people by cutting their tendons!”
“There is no need to cripple your subjects, Polexima,” said Anand. “They are already crippled—with the lies of
your priests that confine them to poverty. If your subjects did escape, where would they go? The insects of enemy nations would eat them, or human foes would kill them. It is only if they reach Hulkren that they might find a different life.”
She was breathing hard and he knew the truth of his words was a torture. “Polexima, listen,” he said, softening his words. “You have the power to change the Slope, to end the suffering of millions. Do not lament the past but live to change the future.”
“But there is no better way. We have the leaf-cutters and the most abundant food supplies of any race.”
“No, Polexima. The yellow ant and its mushroom are the most powerful of all the tools of the nobles’ oppression.”
“How could that be?” she asked, shouting at him.
He fixed his stare on her. “Why did the Hulkrites want your mushrooms, Queen?”
“To eat, of course. To grow strong.”
“The Hulkrites have plenty to eat. They are willing to take from the ants’ mouths, permitted to eat the dead ghosts and hunt other insects. I ask you again . . . why did Tahn want his women to have mushrooms?”
“I don’t know that he did!” she gasped. Her breathing grew shallow.
“Listen to the voice within you. Nowhere but on the Slope are families overburdened with ten, twenty, thirty children. They are a wealth of humans to the nobles, but the vast majority of them are fated to poverty and painful labors.”
“Fertility is in our race! Our blessing from the gods!”
“No, Polexima. Fertility is in your mushrooms.”
“Mushrooms?”
“In the Dranverites’ country, mushrooms are eaten by barren women. The Hulkrites want more children to make more soldiers. With mushrooms, Tahn was seeding his women with multiple pregnancies.”
Polexima clutched at her belly, at the three or four offspring of some Hulkrite kicking inside her. Anand was quiet and allowed her to recover. “I know you have suffered, Polexima. But if we survive, I will tell you more about my other country, one that strives every day to become a Promised World for all. Will you hear my tale?”
Anand’s sincerity pulled the queen out of her bewilderment.
“A promised world for all,” she said, suddenly calm.
A short time later, Anand dragged a pink clover flower to the lean-to and used its petals to cover the floor. Daveena returned from the weeds, clean and fragrant after using the sliced flower bud of a soap plant to scrub herself and freshen her mouth. Sleepiness weighed on the two like a great rock, but they were more inspired to partake of each other.
The full sight of Daveena, gaunt, balding and imperfect, filled Anand with a new wave of pity. He wanted his love to spread like a balm and end her suffering, to suffuse her being like a warm drink of the sweetest fermentation. Every kiss and caress and touch of his tongue was to banish all thoughts of the pit in Hulkren. She lay beneath him, relishing the ache of her broken hymen, and succumbed to the torrent of warmth that pulsed through her with his every thrust.
The two became one creature that was inseparable from the fabric of the universe. She wanted to give herself fully. When Anand tugged at her ankle, she turned and kneeled and set her head on her arms so that he might fill her to her fullest. As he cupped her breasts, she savored the cry in his voice and thought he would splash his seed inside her. But he did not want it to end.
He fell to his side and pulled her into the curve of his body where they sank into the petals, wet and tangled. He was still inside her, firm and throbbing and aching with joy. Both were certain they had never been this exhausted . . . but they repeated themselves a short time later. Now Anand could not hold back. With his release, it felt as if he had issued all the clouds of the sky on the first morning of Creation. The young lovers wept tears of happiness, grief, madness, and relief before sleep crept over them.
Later, Anand saw his mother in a dream, standing over the two of them. “You should never have stopped here,” Corra scolded. “You should have kept going, straight to the grasslands before you rested! Now you have endangered all your charges.” Anand woke from his dream and saw Sun was rising and stretching His pink arms. Anand roused Daveena with a kiss. She saw the worry in his face and it ignited her own.
The two scraped dew from the leaves for the day’s drinking water, then searched the roach’s belly scales for a breakfast of mites. Polexima was still in her tent, lying on the ground, her face full of peace. Pareesha, tethered to her mother’s ankle, had crawled outside the tent and was smiling at the Britasyte couple when they approached. They stretched their mouths with their fingers, which made Pareesha shriek with laughter. This woke Polexima, who poked out, her face wreathed by matted hair.
“Make haste, Polexima,” said Anand, lifting Pareesha with his right arm. Polexima leaned on the other as he led her to the roach and helped her inside the belly scale.
After a long patch of sun-bleached sand, Anand surmised it was still half a day’s travel to reach the golden slopes in the distance. Spread over the sand were the corpses of ghost ants and roaches alike. Anand realized this sand was a Dead Place, a barrier of some kind, probably a source of what the Dranverites called borax, which slowly dried insects from the outside in until they died of thirst. Anand steered the roach closer to living plants and away from the sand as Daveena clasped him, occasionally dropping her hand to stroke his constant erection. The memory of their first and perhaps only time together was wet and fresh in his mind but he knew he should not dwell on it—among the weeds there might be Hulkrish foot soldiers.
When the sun was at its highest, they reached the mouth of a dry creek winding gently down from the grass. On the creek’s sides were sandy banks leading to impenetrable grass that was tangled and noisy with other insects. It did not look habitable for humans. The only route was on the sand of the creek, which was tightly packed and would be easy for the roach to travel if it wasn’t poisoned with borax.
Anand was not sure at first, but a trace of something made him sniff the air. The roach’s antennae were whirling. Anand smelled men . . . and then the more vague scent of ghost ants. Should he risk a rush to the creek bed?
As usual, his mother was right.
CHAPTER 43
THE GRASS PEOPLE
Ahead on the dry creek were more rocks and islands of grass with stalks that curved in the breeze. When the grass bent, Anand spotted the Hulkrites jammed at the base of the blades.
“Hide,” Anand whispered in Daveena’s ear. She slid across the roach’s head and down its greasy side, then slipped into the belly scale with Polexima. Anand lay flat across the roach’s head. The Hulkrites pushed out of the grass.
In a moment, the air above Anand was thick with arrows that skidded over the roach’s oily body. The roach lurched after the humans, hungry to eat them. Anand slipped into the cavity under the natural helmet of the roach’s head. In darkness, he reached for the blowgun under his cape, then peered out again.
Hulkrites surrounded the roach as it pivoted towards one target, then reversed itself to chase another. The soldiers tried to leap atop the roach, but their boots slipped off the greasy chitin. Unable to attack it from above, they chose to bring it down to their own level. Using swords, they hacked at its thick legs. As concerning as that was, though, what caught Anand’s attention was a man in a jeweled mask that appeared from out of the grass, running with his sword held high.
“Shoot its eyes! Cut its feelers!” he shouted and Anand recognized Pleckoo’s voice. The soldiers rose on each other’s shoulders and severed the lashing antennae. The roach went into a frenzy as its eyes filled with arrows. It climbed over the Hulkrites and up a sandbank. As it neared the top, though, the sand crumbled. The roach fell and slid on its back. Unable to right itself, its legs jabbed at the air.
Anand was jostled, but looked out from under the roach helmet in fear of his woman’s life and saw that the females had stayed locked inside the belly scale. But the Hulkrites were climbing up and slipping about the
roach’s greasy belly and Pleckoo followed them on, trailed by a man in a captain’s helmet that Anand realized was Aggle of Culzhwitty. Both of them slipped on the grease and into each other, falling again before they righted. Pleckoo shouted orders through his jeweled mask and the soldiers attempted to open the scales, but all they accomplished was cutting their own palms on the sharp edges.
“Cover those holes,” Pleckoo shouted as he stood, “until they scream for release.”
Anand panicked as the Hulkrites stepped over the vents. He crawled up and rose with his loaded blowgun held under his chin. “If they aren’t already dead, you will kill Polexima and her child,” he shouted. “This roach will not open its scales while it lies on its back.”
Pleckoo stared at Anand as silence fell. The wind blew through the straws and made dissonant tunes on their raspy flutes.
“Cousin Anand.”
“Cousin Pleckoo.”
“My, how you’ve grown,” Pleckoo said in Low Slopeish. He signaled his men to step off the vents.
“And how you’ve grown powerful,” Anand responded in Hulkrish as he wanted all to hear. “You’ve done well for a collector of night soil.”
Aggle looked over at Pleckoo, puzzled.
“It is you who are so special, Anand. Hulkro chose you to test the faith of His followers, which has held, cousin. Indeed, it has grown stronger.”
“Is that what your wood-infesting god told you?”
“He did. For I am the Second Prophet.”
“You told it to yourself, Pleckoo, for no one is a prophet. Your god resides in no place but inside your head. If Hulkro wants us to know something, why not tell us all instead of speaking through one man? You kill, steal, and rape in his name, but your crimes serve no one but you.”
“My crimes? Is it a crime to free people from ignorance and slavery and turn them to the will of the One True God? If you want to speak of crimes, let’s talk about those of the Slopeites whose queen you’ve rescued, Roach Boy, in hopes that she will break you from your caste.”
Prophets of the Ghost Ants Page 29
