A Rustle in the Grass

by Robin Hawdon

  With a cold anger glinting in his eyes Black Sting sped across the top of the mound to join the battle. He could see that his soldiers' puny stings were quite useless against the thick hide and plumage of their attacker, but somewhere in the back of his mind he had an idea that the creature was not totally invulnerable and that, if any ant had a chance of finding its weakness, he had.

  As he approached the huge, earth-stained talon upon which the bird was standing, Black Sting roared to the frantic soldier-ants around it to make way for him. With relief in their eyes they fell back to allow their leader to pass. He ran at the bird's leg and leapt at its ridged surface just above the smooth, hard curve of the outer claw. Withholding the use of his sting, he threaded his way up the limb between the lunging bodies of the soldiers upon it and reached the lower fringes of plumage encasing the thick upper leg. Once on the overlapping, ribbed surfaces of the feathers themselves he could make easier progress and he climbed higher and higher, closing his mind to the suffocating odour of the beast which now assailed his senses. He could feel the movements of its body like earth tremors beneath his feet and he was dimly aware of the shouting and the turmoil falling away below him, but he did not pause to look, sticking grimly to the task of climbing ever higher towards his goal.

  Halfway up the flank he sensed danger as a large shadow flitted repeatedly across his vision and he realized the bird was flapping its wings as it fought to maintain its balance on the mound's crest. He changed course slightly away from this threat to climb the steep, overhanging curve of the creature's breast, and soon he was past the wings and the colour of the plumage under his feet changed from a rich, golden brown to the shimmering green and black of the neck. Now came the most hazardous part of his journey, for he was suddenly taken by surprise as the sky spun dizzily over his head, his weight shifted, threatening to topple him from his grasp, and the air rushed past his body. He realized that the bird was making another of its lunging beak-stabs at the ground beneath. Black Sting hung on grimly for an interminable moment, as the shouts and the spatter of flying earth sounded once more around him, then he was soaring upwards again to the same dizzy height. He did not wait for the ride to be repeated a second time, but, with the last remains of his strength, he heaved himself up the final stretch of the giant's neck and on to the crest of its head.

  It must have been here that the Tawny Killer-Bird at last became aware of his presence, for suddenly all motion beneath him ceased and he could sense the creature pausing in its work as it tried to determine what the small irritation on its brow might be. It shook its head to try and dislodge it and once more Black Sting had to cling on for dear life to avoid being flung to the winds. But nothing was going to deter him now for he could see his goal in front of him – that one single organ that he instinctively knew was the beast's only vulnerable spot – the glistening, translucent curve of its eyeball, longer than his own body and partially hidden from him by the fleshy stretch of its protective lid.

  The Tawny Killer-Bird stood motionless again, seeking to discover if the irritation was still there, and Black Sting seized the opportunity. He ran forward over the edge of the brow to the very corner of the gleaming orb where the two lids met. There he spun round, clinging to the fine strands of down at the edge, so that the base of his abdomen hung poised over the glassy surface of the eye itself. The bird, sensing the movement, instinctively closed the protective shield of its lids but Black Sting held on, awaiting his moment. As the lid inquisitively parted again he struck downwards. The point of his dark, curving sting pierced the transparent surface of the eye's cornea and sank, half its length deep, into the soft, moist texture. The lids immediately closed again, trapping Black Sting's body between them, but if anything this gave an added impetus to the jet of poison he sent squirting deep into the tissue of the eye. Then he struggled frantically to free himself from the crushing grasp around his abdomen before the reaction came.

  Perhaps it was as well that he could not do so immediately, for he may well not have survived the ensuing eruption of sound and movement that followed his attack. With a screech that split the heavens the huge bird reared upwards, its wings beating the air into a miniature whirlwind, its talons pounding the earth in a frenzied dance of rage and shock. It half slithered, half flew down the side of the mound, its claws tearing still more earth from the ravaged surface, and then flailed around distractedly amidst the grass as it sought to ease the burning pain in its eye. Black Sting clung on with all his force as earth and sky spun around his head in a demented blur. He was aware only of a holocaust of sound and wind and motion which seemed to have no end, until suddenly the pressure around his body was released and he was falling dizzily through space, turning over and over, until he finally hit the ground with a thud that shook every particle in his body and immersed him in a welcome, oblivious darkness.

  They carried his inert form with tender care back to the shattered mound. Past lines of silent, watching ants they brought him, past the black earth-falls and the tumbled piles of stones, up the corpse-strewn flank of the hillock and into the sanctuary of the darkness inside. Down into the depths of the earth they took him, until finally they laid him in an innermost chamber, bathed and tended his battered body and performed their secret ant's rituals. All through that day and the following night they mouthed their ancient orisons to assist his own formidable recuperative powers to do their work.

  At one point late in that long night there came a message to the chamber and a hush fell over all the ants there. They lowered their heads and drew back their feelers in humble reverence as a huge, regal form loomed quietly in the dark, paused for a moment beside the still figure, whispered with some of the dignitaries present and then melted away again back to the Royal Chamber.

  Then at last, some time in the morning of the following day, Black Sting stirred, sighed, twitched an antenna and finally moved his head to look around him. It took some time for him to realize, in the numbed confusion of his mind, that the darkness was not in his head but about him. He knew that something catastrophic had happened but he could not remember what it was. He sensed the quiet movement around him and felt the dull pain in his body but knew not the source of either. Then, as he tentatively stretched his bruised limbs, testing them, he was aware of a presence approaching him and of Dew-Lover's voice growling at his side.

  'Are you awake, leader?'

  'Where am I? What's happened?' murmured Black Sting.

  'You're safe,' came the answer. 'We brought you back. You're all right.'

  Then he sensed others approaching and he heard Great Head's voice coming out of the unreal depths of the darkness: 'How are you, brave soldier? You've had a terrible fall. How are you feeling?'

  Then he remembered. He remembered the Tawny Killer-Bird and all that had happened. He tried to raise himself up saying, 'What happened? The bird – what happened?' but the effort caused a searing pain through his head and he fell back swooning again.

  'Stay,' said Great Head. 'You must rest. There is nothing to fear now. The Killer-Bird will not trouble us again for a long time.'

  Black Sting thought of the many dead and wounded of his kind, caught in the bird's onslaught. He thought of the fearful damage done to the mound above his head. He remembered the threat of the red ants, now so much more dangerous with the colony in its maimed, vulnerable state. 'There is so much to do,' he murmured.

  'Yes, yes,' replied Great Head calmly. 'But not now. There is plenty of time. First you must get better. Here: the Queen of Queens has sent some of the last of the honey-dew to help you in your recovery. Eat now, and rest and later we shall start afresh.'

  And he slept again, dreaming weird, hallucinatory dreams that spoke of worlds and powers and happenings far beyond those about him.

  11

  He was battling alone with a gigantic spider. It towered above him, slashing clumsily at him with its huge mandibles. But he evaded them nimbly. He felt strong, alert, unafraid. The darkened undergrowth arou
nd was his terrain and he used it to advantage, darting from stem to stem, lunging unexpectedly from behind a leaf, undaunted even by the further looming shapes of more spiders approaching behind the first. He picked his moment and leapt forward, clinging to the beast's hairy leg and swinging his abdomen up, up, until the sting pierced the soft underside of his opponent's thorax. With a hiss and a shudder the creature wheeled away and staggered off into the shadows and he turned to meet the next one. Again the confrontation, giant and midget, the sparring, the thrusting, the advance, the evasion. And again the final nimble sally, the unexpected thrust, and the victory of skill over brute force. And so on, monster after monster, confronted, challenged and vanquished, until the dawn came and there were none left to fight and he stood there, master of the ground.

  And he cried out: 'That is my purpose! To challenge evil. To confront our foes. To battle with all the strength and skill and courage that is in me and to defeat the enemy one by one, until there are no more left to defeat. Or perhaps even until I myself am defeated and must perish. Surely that is my purpose?'

  And the Voice replied: 'Yes, it is possible that is your purpose. But remember that your enemies too have their purpose. And to them, you are the enemy, you are the evil. And they too will be ready to fight until they perish. And it may be that the fighting will go on until there is no one left to fight. Who is there who can fight for the end of the fighting – can you tell that?'

  And he could not. And he was alone again, struggling into wakefulness, trying to remember whence the Voice had come.

  12

  The three ants had not rested until high-sun that day, when sheer exhaustion had forced them to halt for a while. They had chased a woodlouse out of a crevice in a dead tree branch lying off to one side of the trail and there, in relative security, they had dozed uneasily by turns while one or other of them had kept watch. The wind had risen early that morning and the sun had retreated behind a racing barrier of wild spring clouds. The trees of the forest had come to life, whispering, groaning, gesticulating at one another. It seemed to the ants, unused to being in the centre of such a vociferous uproar so far from the shelter of their mound, as if the woods were protesting at their own intrusion, that every crash and whistle was directed specifically at them, and the thought had given an added urgency to their scurrying feet all through the morning. When they finally rested no one slept easily through all the continuing noise and movement, as Dreamer's own disturbed murmurings and stirrings testified. Joker chaffed him about his dreams as they set off again on the trail.

  Snake's Tongue was even more silent than usual as he led the way along the well-defined route. Amongst all the commotion of the wind around him he was concentrating on using greater than ever caution, for the signs were more and more obvious that the red ants commonly frequented these parts. There was still less evidence of other forms of life around, and the converging side trails were becoming more frequent, each one adding its own trace of the distinctive red ant spoor to the general scent on the main track. Strangely though there was no further sign of any red ant parties themselves and paradoxically Snake's Tongue found this rather disturbing, though he did not communicate his worry to the other two.

  Despite their aches and their nervousness at the display of Nature's forces around them, the three were working well as a team now. The various trials and dangers they had encountered had fostered a trust and a mutual dependence between them. Each one knew the others' worth, each had proved his courage and justified the faith placed in him, and there was an unquestioning acceptance of one another's role in this lonely mission.

  They had been on their journey now for an entire revolution of the sun and although their encounter with the spider had temporarily replenished their food supply, they were beginning to wonder how much further they would have to march. The terrain had been changing gradually throughout the morning. The ground had been rising imperceptibly but steadily, the trees becoming less lofty and less dense, allowing the undergrowth beneath more scope for growth and variety. The scents of unfamiliar plants and bushes wafted past the ants' antennae, foreign bird calls sounded from time to time in that other world above their heads and even the soil had a texture and a smell that was strange to senses so conditioned by the riverside habitat. They travelled for a further period, the ground rising more and more steeply, until they could see ahead of them a broad expanse of light and sky where the trees appeared to come to an end. The wind dropped as they approached this boundary, as if heralding a significant arrival, and with a mounting sense of anticipation the three cautiously climbed the final slope, until they broke out of the trees and the undergrowth, mounted a further rising, grassy space dotted with budding gorse and heather clumps, and finally came to a halt on the crest of a ridge which for all they knew might have been the edge of the world.

  It was not, of course, but it provided a vantage point on a part of the world that was altogether unfamiliar and astonishing. They were standing on the summit of a bank that was perhaps twice the height of their own base mound. Below the bank the land was level and stretched away to an infinity far beyond the range of their limited vision. From this ground a series of scents and sounds new to their experience reached their quivering senses: the smell of peat and dry moorland turf; the lonely cry of the curlew punctuating the ceaseless, ecstatic trill of the skylark; and the secret, distant message of the wind stalking the wide heath.

  But more startling than all this was what lay in the foreground. Only perhaps two large tree-lengths from where they were standing, rising out of the flat, rippling grassland like a great rock anchored in the sea, stood a vast ant mound. Higher and wider than anything within the capabilities of their own species to construct, it was a monstrous edifice of mingled earth and sand, pine needles and dead grass stems, broken here and there by uneven patches of living grass and the occasional sprouting flora which had taken root upon its surface. And upon this surface, teeming in their hundreds, mounting and descending in purposeful, ordered lines, spreading out across the surrounding countryside in lordly phalanx and with arrogant step, were the enemy they had come to find.

  Dreamer stared in wonder at the astonishing sight. It was a revelation to him that there were members of the same order of life as himself upon the earth who could exist so differently and in such a different landscape.

  At his side Joker too was staring. 'Not afraid of much, are they?' was his eventual whispered comment.

  And certainly the red ants exhibited a confidence and a lack of caution which indicated that they did not have much to fear within their domain. Apart from a few lone, stationary figures placed at strategic points about the mound, who were obviously sentinels, there was very little attempt at either concealment or precaution on the part of those out in the open. Then, on closer observation, the watchers noticed that these groups did not consist solely of the big russet-bodied insects. Most of the larger parties progressing backwards and forwards from the mound consisted of a central core of smaller, brown-hued members of their own or a similar species, surrounded by a cordon of the red ants. And it was these poor, oppressed creatures who were evidently burdened with most of the colony's tasks of heavy labour, while their escorts merely acted as guards and supervisors. It was the smaller ants who transported building materials, waste matter, food and supplies back and forth; it was they who cleared trails and excavated drainage channels, who dug the tunnels and repaired the surface of the great mound, who in fact performed all the menial and domestic tasks under the haughty eye of their warrior masters.

  'They're using them as slaves!' whispered Dreamer appalled.

  'That's why they took the larvae from the riverside colony,' muttered Joker. 'To breed them as workers. Idle lot, aren't they?'

  'Not so very different from our own system,' said Snake's Tongue. The others looked at him curiously. 'We just have a worker caste instead of using other species.' But he did not elaborate on the statement.

  Dreamer considered the idea w
ith interest. It threw a new light on its exponent. Little by little he was learning more about the strange, reticent personality who was leading them and each new facet came as a surprise, as if somehow it was a quality inappropriate to a purely military being.

  Snake's Tongue meanwhile had returned his mind to another subject of more immediate import. It was puzzling him that, even accounting for the apparent lack of caution on the part of the alien ants, the three had been able to approach so closely without encountering any of them. The sense of unease which had been troubling him during the last stages of their journey now redoubled. He stared ahead towards the huge mound, trying to discover why none of the otherwise ubiquitous activity was happening in their direction. It seemed that, at a point roughly halfway between themselves and the hillock, the various expeditionary parties were being diverted to other directions. Then, with that sinking feeling in the stomach which always accompanies the realization of an awful truth, he suddenly understood. He turned, slowly and calmly, almost knowing what he would see.

  Sure enough, behind them, evidently having emerged from the trees at the forest edge and effectively cutting off all chance of escape, stood a motionless rank of perhaps twenty of the enemy. Utterly still and silent, they watched like strange deified apparitions who had appeared from nowhere to stand in judgement on these rash intruders into their kingdom.