Prophets of the Ghost Ants

by Clark Thomas Carlton

  CHAPTER 57

  TESTS OF THE FAITHFUL

  Years before, following the death of the caste’s old idols keeper, Pleckoo had been summoned by the demi-priests to a clearing in the weeds. They had set up a grass shield between themselves and an untouchable with lighter skin to ask him questions as they tossed an oracle bone. They had selected one other middenite, Glurmu the Floppy-Eared, and performed the same ritual in search of a new sub-shaman to preside over the outcastes’ altar.

  Pleckoo won the position. He would get to wear a yellow sash and have parity with the foreman. It had been a time of famine, a time of even less joy, but Pleckoo was ecstatic over his recent elevation. “All my life I have felt as if I belonged somewhere else,” he said to Anand on his final day of washing chamber pots. He bragged that he was leaving on a journey for the Holy Mound, where he would train for his new responsibilities. Once there, he met the outcaste acolytes of other mounds and one of them stole what little stash of food he had.

  Venaris had fewer mushrooms for its laborers than Cajoria, and all but its priests and nobles were starving. One night when Pleckoo could bear his hunger no more, he stole a rotting mushroom from a pile being returned to the ants. The sheriff who caught him was supposed to cut off his hand, but he found him too good-looking and decided on his nose.

  Pleckoo did not return to Cajoria with a yellow sash, but with a blood-soaked rag tied around his face. Gone forever with his nose was his smile. He seldom spoke to anyone unless it was to demand they get out of his way.

  Anand asked Corra if he could take some of their food to the shanty on the midden’s outskirts for pitiable bachelors where Pleckoo had withdrawn. When he saw Anand approach with a leaf-bag bulging with mushrooms and sweets, Pleckoo burst into sobbing. When Anand set the bag down and went to comfort him, Pleckoo picked up the bag, hurled it away, then kicked Anand to the sand and beat him until he was bruised and bloody.

  As Anand flew closer to Pleckoo, the next memory of him was so vivid it was like a dream from which he had not awakened. Anand remembered the day when Pleckoo, sometime after receiving his fourteenth age chit, turned on his father when he attempted another public beating of him for hoarding his mushrooms. In front of all standing in the rations line, Pleckoo broke from his father’s grip, pivoted, and backed away as his face filled with rage. He crouched, then charged his father, knocked him down, then knelt on his chest as he struggled for breath. “You are not my father!” Pleckoo shouted. His fists made a bloody pulp of the dark face of a man who bore him no resemblance, a man who had groped him at night on his mattress. As Pleckoo’s mother pleaded for her son to end the beating, others whispered of the time she had returned from the weeds, wailing and in torn rags and insisting she had not been raped by drunken, yellow-skinned sheriffs.

  Anand’s mind jumped to the moment when Pleckoo had argued with Keel before the Fission Trek. “I told you, I will not go,” Pleckoo had shouted in utter defiance. He had puffed out his chest and declared, “I will go to Bee-Jor!” Pleckoo had not wilted under the laughter of the others but sneered at their ignorance. That day, Anand wanted to ask Pleckoo if they could run away together. The two of them would have ended up in Hulkren, where freed from the Slope’s conventions, Pleckoo would have forgiven his cousin’s darker skin. Anand knew that deep in the Dustlands they would have bonded for eternity in their hatred for the Slope. I would be fighting with him, Anand thought. Tahn would be alive and ruling over the Slope and I would be a husband to Hulkrish women.

  The shock of Anand’s realization jolted him back to his mission. The last Hulkrites and their ghosts had raced to the top of Jatal-dozh and were circling the opening under its raised rain shield. Above them, Anand led his wasp riders in a counter spiral. He looked for Pleckoo among the Hulkrites, then saw his masked figure atop his massive ant, attempting to control her.

  The Hulkrites were losing the struggle to steer their ghosts, which strained to attack the bitter guard-ants who clustered under the dome of the mound’s opening, their giant heads locked together. One ghost could not be held back and her mandibles stabbed the head of a bitter guard-ant—she exploded and set off her fellow guards. Their bodies fell away as the last of the bitter ants poured up from the mound and rushed to the ghosts who nabbed them with their mandibles to raise and swallow but instead were destroyed by an explosion that ripped through their heads.

  Why was he so stupid to lead his men to this death trap? Anand asked himself as he sighted Pleckoo, directing with one arm and shouting commands through his mask. Anand signaled the wasps to land and crawl to the opening. Under the rain shield, Pleckoo had dismounted and was herding his men on foot to the opening’s edges. They were not taking the spiraling stairs for humans, but throwing themselves off the opening’s rim. Blue lights flashed as bitter ants attacked and exploded, their smaller sisters arriving to carve up and cart off the Hulkrites’ corpses. They’re killing themselves! Anand realized.

  “Stop! Don’t do it, Pleckoo!” he shouted at his cousin as he prepared to take the last plunge. Pleckoo halted before the rim, looked at Anand, then stepped forward. Anand raised his blowgun, inhaled and blew.

  The dart pierced Pleckoo’s neck. He raised his arm to pluck it out but it spasmed before he slumped and fell to stillness with his head hanging over the opening’s edge.

  Anand dismounted from the wasp, ran to his cousin. He pulled the dart from his neck, raised his head up and laid out the folded limbs of his body. “I cannot let you die, Pleckoo. You have fallen, as far as any man can fall, but I love you, cousin. I always have.”

  Anand bent down his ear to hear if Pleckoo was breathing. When he pulled away, he looked harder at the masked face below him, suddenly unsure. Anand’s heartbeat boomed inside him as his breathing grew shallow. He reached for his dagger and cut the mask’s ribbon. Under the mask was a face with a missing nose. Anand pushed back hair to reveal two unclipped ears.

  “Aggle,” said Anand, and it felt as if he had lost the war.

  Pleckoo was naked, crawling over rough sand grains and through water-smoothed pebbles towards the rough, black waves on the edge of the Brackish Lake. As a harsh wind blew, he felt the weight of the world on his back, crushing him to something less than the stinking pond scum before him. At last, this cruel joke of life will be over, he thought as he reached the mud ringing the water. He tried to rise and walk over the deepening slime but fell on his face with a painful splat. Mud and algae clogged the cavity that had been his nose and he rolled over, choking and coughing. He looked into a sky emptying of stars and fought the urge to sob but his body shook with a venomous grief and he fainted into a tarry darkness. He came to in a fog of pinpricks and determined to slither to the choppy water. He paddled to pull himself in and drink the water’s poisons when a sharp wave picked him up and threw him on shore. He banged his head on a pebble and watched the world spin around him and dissolve.

  Sudden sunlight hurt his eyes as he looked up with a start. The Brackish Lake was gone and in its place were two altars set side by side. One altar was ornate and sparkling, set in a thicket of fragrant flowers. A quartz platform was covered with statues of the Slope’s hundred idols coming to life and beckoning with multiple arms and kind faces. Grasshopper poured an endless stream of jewels from his six arms, honey oozed from Bee’s golden cups and Mantis offered swords of gold with jewel-encrusted grips.

  The other altar was a plain and empty platform with a single block of wood. Its only features were a termite track and the vague scent of turpentine.

  “Choose,” said a female voice behind Pleckoo, a voice of seductive warmth.

  Pleckoo looked to the two altars and then to a mountainous rise behind them. “You must choose now,” said the voice, and he felt warm, invisible hands pulling him towards the Slopeish idols. Mite was rising up from the platform, fat and jolly, seated atop a multiplying feast for thousands.

  Pleckoo looked at the gray, dead wood of the other altar.

  “I choose Hulkr
o,” he said.

  The Slopeish altar succumbed to a fast-growing mold and melted into slime. Hulkro manifested as the Great Blind Drone, crawling out of the wood block and shaking wood dust off His wings.

  “Hulkro tests the faithful,” he said. “And you, Pleckoo, my Living Messenger, have passed the greatest test of all.” Pleckoo watched as Hulkro flew up and disappeared into the brightening blue of the morning sky. Lowering his eyes, Pleckoo looked out on the lake’s water dancing with pink-and-orange sparkles. The sun was rising, proud and gaudy, and splashing its gold on clouds growing thick and muscular.

  Pleckoo slipped and slid through the mud before his feet found dry sand. Something sharp was tapping at his ankle and he realized, he was still wearing his sword belt. He unsheathed his weapon which reflected the orange sky, then looked to the heavens for guidance. Go south, said the voice in his head when a riderless ghost ant raced up from behind and probed his shoulders. “Eat me,” he said, closing his eyes as he turned and let her antennate him. She smelled/felt the scent of a ghost sister under his filthy skin. Pleckoo opened his eyes, stepped forward, pulled himself onto her mandible and climbed atop her head. He had no gloves to guide her. “Take me where you wish,” he said, as she crawled off, her antennae waving in search of prey or a sister’s trunk-trail.

  As the pilots hiked with Anand to the Slope, they grew giddy as they wove through the corpses, collected Hulkrish weapons, and relived their triumphs. The Grass men among them talked of sending for their families. The Slopeites talked of their new dwellings in the old chambers of the military caste. Some laughed as they imagined the widows and children of the noble soldiers leaving with bundles for the shanties of the rings. Anand frowned at his men in disapproval.

  “Men, save your laughter. The families of the military caste will be compensated for their losses. In the meantime, I must remind you this war is not ended until we have exterminated every ghost ant and freed every slave in Hulkren. Only then can we build the New Country.”

  A silence passed.

  “Commander, do you know yet?” a Slopeite asked.

  “Know what?”

  “The name of our new nation.”

  Anand rubbed his chin. “We must invite the men and women enslaved at the Hulkrish beehives to be honored guests at our mounds. We will need their know-how if we are to have free and plentiful honey in the Free State of Bee-Jor.”

  CHAPTER 58

  BEE-JOR

  Waiting for Anand at Palzhad were hundreds of messengers and a thousand requests. Among those waiting were Terraclon and Yormu. They were bandaged but smiling as they waited their turn in what seemed an endless queue.

  Slopeites who had fled north were slowly returning. Some reported contact with Dranverish sentries on red ants that did not administer the Living Death, but allowed for refuge until the conflict subsided. Anand learned the Seed Eaters had sustained their border agreements with Bee-Jor but the Carpenters had absorbed the mound of Gagumji, were planting pine seeds, and were poised for more conquests of the divided Slope’s crippled west. The Britasytes learned that the Carpenter Nation was furious with Vof Quegdoth for forcing them into war.

  I suppose they have a point, Anand thought wearily. But they would have dealt with the Hulkrites eventually.

  Among the last in the queue was Pious Nuvao, Polexima’s son, who approached Anand with gravity. “I risked my life to escape and relay that a reserve of Slopeish nobles and military elite lie in wait for you at Venaris,” said Nuvao. “They intend to torture you to death, dress you in your mottled robes, then parade your corpse on a cross through the rings of every Slopeish mound.”

  Anand donned common rags before informing his soldiers they would not be marching past Venaris but to it, where they would fight a different enemy. The Laborer’s Army was diminished but they had Hulkrish weapons and roach-scent to repel any mounted attackers. Laborers who had been too cowardly to fight in the Hulkrish war were offered the chance to join and attack the Holy Mound.

  When the nobles’ scouts related that Anand was returning with an emboldened army that outnumbered their own, surviving princes and nobles fled into the night. They dispersed to all the western mounds that Anand designated as the Old Country, to what the Bee-Jorites called The No Longer Great Nor Holy Slope. At Venaris, the Laborer’s Army was unopposed.

  As the Army marched out of Venaris, women and children in the rings dropped their tasks to cheer the soldiers who had saved them from the Termite demons. They cheered even louder when these same men marched down the mound with the priests before them, their arms and ankles bound in cuffing grass. The clerics were forced to wear their most beautiful robes and their gaudiest miters, the ones saved for the feast day of Mantis.

  His Ultimate Holy Pious Dolgeeno had been cuffed as well as leashed around his neck. He was set high on the platform of a sand-sled. Anand sat with him, surrounded by his guards. Terraclon was given the leash to hold.

  “Why this, after I complied with your every wish?” asked Dolgeeno.

  “I am sorry you find it humiliating,” Anand said.

  “You said we would have two separate nations.”

  “We will, but you’ve been down in your cathedral, plotting my assassination. It appears I shall have to contend with some secret reserve of royals and military who will attempt to reclaim our portion.”

  “And what will you do with me?”

  “You will live. You are the Ultimate Holy Priest of the Slope as well as of Bee-Jor and as long as you are, you will carry out your duties. Of course, you will do so from Cajoria, as my guest.”

  “You mean as your hostage.”

  “However you choose to think of it. It does not matter to me.” He nodded towards Terraclon. “I should like to introduce you to someone, this young man who holds your leash.”

  Dolgeeno’s eyes squinted in contempt. He barely looked at Terraclon.

  “His skin is dark.”

  “So is mine. Again—it matters not. His name is Terraclon and he is your novitiate. The priesthood is now open to all who aspire to it. Terraclon will succeed you as the Ultimate Holy of both our nations. He will return Madricanth to your pantheon as well as revive the cults of Locust and Cricket.”

  Terraclon had not anticipated that. His knees went weak and he lowered his head to keep from blacking out. “Me? The Ultimate Holy? Why?”

  “Brother, you have played an invaluable role in my life. Without your love for me, I would have despised all Slopeites, hated them to the point that I might have let the Hulkrites tear them into bloody scraps.”

  Terraclon, overcome, felt as if dust was in his throat as he tried to speak.

  “Besides . . . you’ve always had a taste for pageantry,” said Anand, “and Bee-Jor will have pageants.”

  Anand took Dolgeeno’s fabled tourmaline and set it around Terraclon’s neck. “Ter, as Dolgeeno schools you in his knowledge, I will school the both of you in the principles of something called The Loose Doctrine of Dranveria. Together, we will build a nation based on inclusion and equality for all.”

  Terraclon was still trying to recover. “And with much better clothing, I hope.”

  “Just wait until you see Dranverish fashion,” Anand said through a grin. “I think you’d look good in red.”

  Some days later, the Dneepers were assigned one last mission to finalize the war. They were not to return to the Grasslands until they had stopped at every mound in Hulkren with the exhumed barrels of the potion known as the Yellow. Anand flew on a locust to meet with their caravan headed to the northern mound of Fadtha-dozh, still active with ghost ants. He handed a map of Hulkren to Medinwoe to identify its 107 mounds but warned that there might be new ones with wild ants.

  “After liberating and warning the slaves, open a barrel of the Yellow and set it at the base of each mound. When your roaches have left, the ghost ants will appear. They will find the Yellow irresistible and take their fill. The potion is sweet, slow-acting and utterly fatal. The ghosts wi
ll pass it to each other’s crops until it reaches their queens. Once an ant has been contaminated with the Yellow, it is no longer edible to humans.” Anand thought a moment, then added, “But spare Jatal-dozh,” he said. “Or rather, Mound Jalal as it was known.”

  “Not Jalal?” asked Medinwoe. “It may still be full of bitter ants.”

  “Yes,” said Anand. “Which may be of some use to us.”

  Before saying good-bye to the Grass Men, Anand extended his gratitude with words moistened by happy tears. The Grass Men had been obedient and brave, having followed him without question to capture a night wasp and steal its scent in order to infiltrate their nest and tame them. He knew the Grass Men would be meticulous in their final assignments. Medinwoe promised to bring Polexima’s children to Bee-Jor on his return and Anand promised Medinwoe he would prepare the Promised Clearing for its new occupants. There, they would return to learn practices called farming and insect husbandry.

  Daveena was much on Anand’s mind as he completed his last task for the day, knowing that when he returned to Cajoria he would share a mattress with her for the first time in weeks. He flew east and searched for the Entrevean caravan he had sent to Halk-Oktish to invite the Bulkokans and their hives to Bee-Jor. From above, he saw what looked like his and Daveena’s own sand-sled. His heart leapt in excitement, then flipped into injury. What was she doing with them? When the caravan halted to freshen the roaches’ lures, Anand surprised Daveena by landing his locust next to the sled.

  “Good travels, beloved wanderer.”

  “What are you doing here?” she asked him, coming to the window. She was trying to look angry but her eyes danced as she fought back a smile. He was reminded of the first time he saw her.

  “I was going to ask you the same,” he said, noticing her face and body were thicker with pregnancy.