Prophets of the Ghost Ants

by Clark Thomas Carlton

  “I am already free of my caste without having to murder the innocent. I rescued Polexima with the same hopes you have: to show the Slopeites a better way.”

  “The way of roach people? We can’t all be thieves and dancing whores.”

  “Listen to me. After the Fission, in the country of the lair spiders, we learned of a free people, the Dranverites. They have no castes. Peace and knowledge are their passions. The welfare of all is their greatest aim.”

  “Do these Dranverites worship Termite as the One True God?”

  “They allow everyone to worship any god.”

  “Men cannot be united as brothers until all accept Hulkro as their only god and Tahn as His First Prophet.”

  “Hulkro is no truer than any other deity,” shouted Anand. His fury blazed like a pit fire. “Why must it be your god or nothing?”

  “Because Hulkro says so.”

  “So say we all,” his soldiers intoned.

  Anand shook his head, laughing through his nose. “I say piss on Hulkro, shit on Hulkro, for Hulkro does not exist! Let him smite me himself for denying his existence.”

  A dread-filled murmur rolled through the Hulkrites. Some looked to the sky in fear it would crumble apart to fall and crush them. Pleckoo opened his palms to quiet his men.

  “Hulkro does not comply with the summons of a blasphemer,” said Pleckoo. “Warriors of Hulkro,” he shouted to his men. “Aim your arrows and shoot this worshipper of roaches.”

  Anand would not die without some attempt to foil Pleckoo. At least the Living Death for him, Anand thought. He raised the gun to his lips and the dart pierced Pleckoo’s neck. A moment later, a crude spear knocked the gun out of Anand’s hand.

  To his surprise, the spear was not a Hulkrish weapon. Another flew at Pleckoo’s limp body and entered his thigh. Anand turned to see an army of alien soldiers, in armor of straw, as they filtered through the grass, dozens at first, and then hundreds. Their flying weapons cut down the Hulkrites. They attempted to retaliate, but the men pouring from the grass had shields before them, from chin to shin, which they locked together in a wall to make their advance. The men behind them had bows and arrows, which they shot over their advancing front to pour down on the Hulkrites.

  Coming from the east on the dry creek was a train of mounted roaches. From the soldiers’ armor and the color of their faces, Anand knew these men were not Britasytes. Whoever they were, he welcomed them as the enemy of his enemy if they weren’t shooting arrows at him. Pleckoo’s men knew they were overmatched and those that remained raised their prophet’s body over their shoulders and ran off, even as Anand slipped under his dying roach’s head to avoid the spears and arrows hurtling over him.

  Anand peered out once more to see fleeing Hulkrites that fell to the rear get captured, lifted and eaten by roaches that tore off their screaming heads. He turned to look at these strange Grass Men with their fair-skinned faces. They did not pursue the Hulkrites once they fled the creek, but laughed while watching them run. A few of the grass men scaled the dying roach with spiked boots and headed for Anand. Using their spears, they pried back the head shell and yanked him out by his feet. He was dropped to the ground and surrounded by curious soldiers.

  The Grass Men looked disgusted to see his white skin and Hulkrish armor, but were confounded that he was wearing a roach-scented garment and had spikes on his footgear like their own. Their confusion was made even greater when some realized that the white on his skin was cracked and revealed a different color underneath. One of them sniffed him, then yanked on his ear and Anand smacked him with the back of his hand. The man responded by stabbing him in the leg. Other Grass Men grabbed Anand and tied him to a long spear they could sling over their shoulders.

  Riders on roaches gathered three in a column and plowed into the dying roach, turning it over. The belly scales fell open and out rolled the three. Daveena landed on her bottom and looked at Anand in panic as he swung on the spear. The attackers were intrigued by her brown skin and curious about her baldness. They did not touch her.

  Polexima rolled out, face down, clutching her daughter all the while. The queen shrieked when someone tried to right her and see her face. She rose to full height, became her most queenly and shouted, “Please, do not touch me or my child,” in her noble dialect. The attackers looked very confused now—this woman had skin and hair as fair as their own and they seemed to understand her words. They stared at Polexima in awe and one of them ran for their leader.

  Anand was stripped of his armor and underclothing as he dangled from the spear. The attackers tugged his hair and beard and poked and prodded as if to see if he had the same things they did and in what proportion. “Stop it, please! You’re hurting me!” he said in Hulkrish, Slopeish, and all his other languages.

  They didn’t stop.

  “Untie that young man,” commanded Polexima and the Grass Men followed her order. She was astonished to look at a people who had complexions and hair like her own, colors that matched the surrounding grasses. Their eyes, like her daughter Trellana’s, were close to their long, thin noses. For reasons Polexima could not fathom at the moment, it was most disturbing that they spoke the same language.

  A man she assumed was a leader stepped forward with a cube-shaped miter spangled with silver pyrite. The front of the hat featured a spiky wheat head.

  “Who are you, Child Bearer?” the leader asked.

  “I am Polexima, queen of a great and powerful country who can bestow many riches. Who are you?”

  “We have expected you for a thousand moons, Queen. I am King Medinwoe of the Dneepers.”

  “We have suffered much as prisoners. Can you give us refuge?”

  “Of course, Majesty, but that termite-worshipper must be killed,” said Medinwoe pointing to Anand.

  “My servants are harmless and will remain with me. You must treat the wound of the boy. He is not a Hulkrite, but is like the brown-skinned woman, a Britasyte. They are also roach people.”

  “Perhaps we have misunderstood you. Brown skins who live with roaches? What odd country is that?”

  “The Britasytes and their roaches are wanderers in our domain.”

  The Dneepers laughed. “Next you shall tell us that the yellow people live among ants,” said Medinwoe.

  “Why, of course they do,” said Polexima. This only renewed the laughter.

  “We should like to learn much more about your country, and discuss when we can leave for it ourselves.”

  Polexima was not sure how to respond to that. It was best to ask those questions later. For now, she simply said, “Will you take us to your capital?”

  “Just as the gods have destined, Majesty,” said Medinwoe with a bow of his head.

  CHAPTER 44

  DNEEP

  Anand smarted inside and out as the grass people returned to their city. Polexima was sitting on the lead roach’s head with Medinwoe who had given her soft cushions for her bottom, a bladder of barley liquor, and sugar crystal suckers for her and her daughter to lick. Anand and Daveena were riding behind the roach in a travois that bumped along the path. He resented that Polexima’s royal bluster had impressed these strangers and turned them into her submissives. Who is she but a lame woman of few abilities whose accident of birth was to be a queen? he thought. Some lesson is to be learned here.

  The dry creek and its sands were but a brief memory as the Dneepers went deep into their grass country, a rigorous journey that included long and fatiguing inclines on narrowing paths. The grass seemed like an ever-stalking wall and the air was like breathing seed gruel. The strangers to the land were bored by the lack of scenery, for the charms of Dneep were few. After his leg wound sealed over, Anand and Daveena took relief from the monotony by retreating deep inside the roach’s belly scale to lose themselves in long and furious lovemaking.

  The Dneepers feasted Polexima and her “servants” in the evening, but their diet was simple. It included the dreaded, bitter roach eggs, grasshoppers, and a few
of their swarming cousins, brown locusts. These were followed by a salad of the tender shoots of sweet-and-sour grass mixed with minced green onion. The most palatable food was saved for last, seed kernels that had swelled in barley syrup.

  After the meals, the Dneepers piled up eggs of lightning flies in tiny clearings. The people squeezed tight around this light to chat and make music. Anand could hear distant singing through the grass in innumerable villages and surmised this country was more populated with humans than any other on the Sand.

  One night Medinwoe quizzed Polexima about the glories of her homeland. Anand, intent on mastering Dneepish, frequently interrupted to demand definitions of unknown words.

  “Why are the Dneepers so attached to this grass? Wouldn’t you prefer to occupy some of the Hulkrites’ open space?” he asked.

  “We yearn for that open space but we cannot cross to it with our roaches. The Poison Sands are all along our eastern borders and they dry the blood from our insects. The roach you were riding would have died by morning if it hadn’t been killed. For thousands of moons, we have attempted to take back Hulkren from its shifting occupiers. The Termite worshippers are our latest obstacle.”

  “But I saw you defeat them,” said Anand. “And quite soundly!”

  “We are invincible near our grass, but without our roaches we are vulnerable to their ants in open spaces. Our Promised Clearing is coming, but it is not without battles,” said Medinwoe, nodding towards the queen.

  “The Promised Clearing?” Anand asked.

  “Yes. Finally, as promised, our queen returns to lead us. Is the Clearing so truly beautiful?”

  Polexima looked to Anand for guidance. He made the vaguest nod of his head. “Yes,” she said. “It is beautiful.”

  As they spoke, Polexima and Anand became more attuned to the nuances of the Dneepers’ language. It was close to the Slopeish that Polexima spoke among royal kin, but was even closer to the Holy Tongue of the priests.

  “Medinwoe, would you tell me the names of your gods?” she asked.

  “We love Grasshopper the most,” he said. “He is our provider, the one we go to for mercy and protection.”

  “Do you honor Madricanth?” asked Anand.

  “Not all conversations are meant for your ears, Anand,” said Polexima. He sensed her real objection was the mention of the roach god.

  “Respectfully, Polexima, you must make them for my ears,” said Anand. “I will need to speak the nobles’ dialect if I am to persuade the Slopeites of the need to face the Hulkrish threat.”

  Medinwoe looked at them quizzically. “Is it the custom in your country for royals and commoners to speak with such familiarity?” he asked.

  “No, it is not,” said Polexima.

  “But it will be soon,” said Anand. He watched her wince.

  “This idea of being equals with . . . you is still quite new to me,” she whispered to him.

  “You’ll never get completely used to it,” he said with a wry smile while patting her hand. “I still struggle with my impulse not to see you sallow-skinned people as my natural inferiors.”

  Polexima gasped. Then, for the first time in many moons, she laughed.

  Gezhulzha was a vast city of grass weavings. Only its natives could find their way through its shifting mazes of dwellings and its thin and twisty paths that were too narrow for roach-riding. Its citizens did not labor hard for food, but they worked constantly at the rebuilding of their shelters and at the task of keeping the paths clear—far from trees, the Dneepers had no lacquers or shellacs to preserve their walls of grass.

  Polexima and her companions were led to Medinwoe’s palace in a precious clearing. It was made obvious that such a free area was the most extravagant of all luxuries and the multitude of Medinwoe’s staff were constantly engaged in battles against grassy intrusions. In the middle of the clearing was a modest house of scarce pebbles, chiseled to lock together and set on a platform to stay above rainwater. The “palace” was not even the size of Polexima’s chambers in Cajoria. In fact, it was one rectangular hall divided into rooms by grass panels.

  Medinwoe puffed and strutted while showing off his prized dwelling. As Polexima, Anand and Daveena followed him, they politely feigned admiration for the dim place of little refinement.

  “Please let us know if we can add to your comfort,” said the emperor, pressed to imagine that anything could be missing.

  “I shall be quite comfortable,” said the queen as she compared the room to the horrors of Hulkren. “You are very gracious, Medinwoe, I should like . . .” Suddenly, Polexima felt a warm trickle on the inside of her thigh, a trickle that flooded her being with apprehension.

  “I do apologize,” she said, “for my water has just broken.” She was dreading this birth more than any other. Anand looked in her face and could tell what she was thinking: she would be giving birth to children whose faces would resemble those of a Hulkrish rapist.

  And who knows what color these babies might be.

  Two days later, Anand was invited to Polexima’s chamber. One infant was feeding at her breast. A Dneepish wet nurse held two more. A fourth had not survived.

  “Are you well?” asked Anand, for it was the Britasyte custom to inquire of the mother’s health first and then ask about the sex of the baby.

  “I shall be better when I am ugly and mustachioed,” said the queen, “and unable to bear more children.”

  “What sex are they?”

  “Two are girls,” said Polexima, smiling. “And no priests are here to submit them to the sting ritual.”

  Anand was curious to know the color of the infants and went discreetly to the wet nurse. “May I see?” he asked.

  The infant’s face was a yellow-white. Polexima sensed the source of his curiosity. “Yes, Anand. They are yellow. I am certain whose children they are—the one they call Prophet.”

  “The one they called Prophet,” said Anand.

  She clasped her throat.

  “Is he . . . dead?”

  “Pleckoo, the one who came after us, is his successor.”

  “Pleckoo? The noseless one?”

  “You knew him?”

  She paused before answering, grimaced. “I’m afraid I knew him a bit too well.”

  “I am . . . so very sorry.”

  “Are you sure Tahn is dead?”

  “I am sure. I slit his throat, then crushed his heart beneath my heel.”

  Polexima jolted.

  “And then I slit the throats of the rest of the Hulkrish captains who were visiting Zarren. Some fifty or more of them. All but Pleckoo.”

  She blinked in silence. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t want to frighten you. Daveena does not know yet. Let me tell her in my own way.”

  “Certainly.”

  “I must congratulate you, Polexima. But I must mention that we need to hurry back to the Slope.”

  “Why the haste?”

  “I know the Hulkrites. I know Pleckoo. They are crippled now, but their rage against the Slope will only make them stronger. We have no time to lose before they gather to slaughter every Slopeite. Daveena will help you care for these little ones on the way back. Perhaps the Dneepers can provide you with a wet nurse for the journey.”

  “Anand, we cannot bring these babies back to the Slope.”

  “Of course we can. It will be difficult but . . .”

  “No. For their own safety. These are not Sahdrin’s children. If my kin and the priests learn these infants are the union of a Slopeish queen and the Hulkrite’s prophet they will be drowned and thrown to the ants.”

  “You could just . . . leave them here?”

  “I must leave them here. For now. I have judged these Dneepers a decent folk. This brood will be well cared for.” She was silent as she looked at the face of the baby she nursed. “They should never know who their father is. For their own safety.”

  “Then that will remain our secret.”

  She nodded her
head as tears came. Anand wiped at a few of his own. A dark, sad silence passed, but it was one in which he felt forever linked to her. She reached for his hand and it felt warm in his own.

  “I will make my best effort to leave soon,” she said.

  “It won’t be so soon. The Dneepers will need to organize.”

  “The Dneepers?”

  “They’re coming with us. It may be an accident, but your coming here fulfills a Dneepish prophecy. At some point, a band of Dneepers left this land to find a new home. They are correct to believe that you are a descendant of those pioneers. They expect to follow you back to the Slope, to a promised land of space and sunlight.”

  Anand paused, looked at her with utter solemnity. “We must hurry to prepare the Slope for the invasion of the Hulkrish army,” he said. “Slopeish military methods will not be adequate. A new army must be trained and its soldiers must come from all castes.”

  Anand could count six ridges in Polexima’s brow as she accepted the truth—a devastating war was imminent. Pareesha toddled towards her mother, looking jealous of her new sister and desirous of the teat.

  “That’s a very interesting idea,” said Polexima.

  Anand shrugged his shoulders. “A foreigner with outside knowledge will have to lead them,” he said.

  “I do believe you are putting yourself forward.”

  “Did you have someone else in mind?”

  “I don’t know. Someone just a bit, you know, more mature and experienced.”

  “I was a defender in the Dranverish army, the most powerful force on the Sand. And I came to Hulkren not only to free my people but to spy on the Hulkrish warriors — to learn their ways in order to destroy them.”

  She stared at him, eyes wide and unblinking.

  “All right then, Anand. It may be the slightest bit not queenly to ask this . . . but just how did you manage to slit all those Hulkrish throats?”

  The following evening, Anand and Daveena dined with Medinwoe and Polexima in the palace. Sitting with them were the summoned princes of the grasslands, all stuffed tightly in the dining hall. Following the final course of soaked seeds, Medinwoe looked directly at Polexima and asked his question.