Pleckoo drifted into a light sleep when he woke to the ant’s stirring. He was woozy as he clutched at the antennae, which were active, probing, and he fought to stay seated. The ant crawled, but her path was erratic, zigging this way, then zagging the other as she searched for a trunk trail that had been scattered by the storm. Pleckoo realized she was not taking him east to Urtkess, but back to Fadtha. “Shit, shit, shit!” he shouted.
Balancing himself, he stood on the ant’s skull, raised his sword high, then thrust it through her brain. After he pulled the sword out, he licked the nourishing goop off it and felt his hunger ease. He slid down the ant’s face to the ground, then used his blade to cut through the chitin of her abdomen. The ant-flesh was thick and pleasantly tart. With his strength returning, he made packages of it with a sectioned mallow leaf to feed and water him on his foot journey. Fashioning his cape into a crude backsack, he loaded it with his packages and tied it around his neck. He scooped out more ant-lymph and sucked as much as his stomach could keep down.
“Thank you, Lord Termite,” he said, bowing to express his gratitude, when he saw the mask he had taken from Fadtha-dozh. Moisture had swelled its wood and its inlays of minerals had fallen out or were loose. As he walked, he scraped out the rest of the bright jewels and pocketed them, knowing that a gaudy mask would draw too much attention.
The morning’s journey east was a perilous one as he slid and slipped over mud-smeared sand grains, some of which were so large he had to crawl or pull himself over their sharp ends. He veered around clusters of weeds that portended dangerous mud pools, and lost his bearings when clouds obscured the sun. It was almost evening when he reached an open place where a cluster of worms had surfaced, then died from sun exposure—a rich feast for hundreds. But why haven’t the ghost ants come to devour these? Or the Hulkrish foragers that ride them? He gorged on the worm flesh, which made him sleepy, almost content, then fell into a deep and dreamless sleep on a bed of grass cut from a cluster of fescue.
The following day, as the sun brightened the world, he sighted what he hoped was Urtkess-dozh. As he hiked, the sand grains got smaller, were easier to walk over, and the weeds thickened. Something glinted mildly in the distance, and as he got closer he saw it was a ghost ant, dead and tucked into a bank of sand grains. A short distance away was another ant, lying on its back and exposing its last meal of what might have been the yellowish pulp of a dead leaf-cutter ant. Anand! he thought. Has he killed all our holy ghost ants?
More ant corpses crowded the path ahead of him. Around one with punctures in its abdomen was a scattering of human corpses. They were Hulkrish soldiers, stiffened now, with their white paint breaking into crackle patterns and their armor gouging into their dead flesh.
As he got closer to the weeds of the mound’s outer rings, he heard snoring, and then found a circle of men. They were Hulkrites of Slopeish stock, lying on filthy beds of pulped honey grass that had stained their skin and clothing green. All had abandoned their armor, likely left in the nearby watchtower they had slept in to avoid drowning in the rain. Near them was a nutshell basin, stained with the liquor that had fermented inside it as well as the pestles they had used to grind the grass.
“Drinking during the day!” Pleckoo blurted out, scolding them. One of them roused, a man whose upper teeth were at an extreme angle and gave his mouth a bizarre overbite, made stranger still with his green-stained lips.
“What’s that you say?” said Overbite in Slopeish.
“I s-s-said . . .” Pleckoo stuttered in a higher pitch to hide his identity, “that I’m . . . I’m thirsty, would like a d-drink . . . today.”
“Didn’t leave you none. Go harvest some grass for tomorrow’s drink and we’ll help with the pulping. Looks to be some good stands out there, some sprouts from the rain, just a bit west of here. All the ants are dead, so you’ll have to haul it yourself.” He nodded towards a travois.
“I’ll . . . I’ll do that,” Pleckoo said.
“What mound were you from?”
“What? Oh . . . Venaris.”
“Venaris? With all them awful priests sticking their pricks where they don’t belong? No wonder you left.”
“H-how many Hulkrites are here?”
“None.”
“None?”
“You heard me. One, maybe—if that’s what you’re calling yourself—but I wouldn’t advise it. We’re Hulkrites no more. Not Slopeites neither, since they aren’t likely to take us back as anything other than offerings to Mantis at the next assembly.”
Pleckoo gulped, looked into the distance, and then hung his head as once again the gloom of defeat descended on him in dark, heavy waves. He slumped, wondering if it was possible that grief could kill, for surely he had to be dying.
“Aww,” said Overbite with a grin. “Even sadder than the rest of us, are you? Take this.”
Overbite lifted a squeeze bag from his side that was a third full of drink.
“You honor me, brother,” Pleckoo said, and surprised himself when he grabbed the bag and drained it of its acrid goop. He felt only a mild effect from the fermentation, and strangely, it deepened his despair. Looking up at the sky, at Hulkro, he said, “Forward,” to himself, then trudged to the distant shelters where he might find an empty hovel and collapse on something soft. The mound itself was still and quiet—not a single living ant was crawling up or down its arteries.
The path ahead of him was becoming a meandering snarl of dead ghost ants when he saw the first women of Urtkess, who were walking in clusters. A few appeared to be of Slopeish stock—women abducted from Palzhad—who had divided into their old castes as they walked. Another cluster of women were yellow-skinned natives of Hulkren in rich dress, and another group was of varying complexions: assorted, beautiful prizes stolen from conquered lands. All of them were heading north, wearing their clothing in layers and dragging sacks behind them bound to poles or with baskets they balanced on their heads.
“Where are you going?” Pleckoo shouted at one group, led by a woman with a scowl on her brown Slopeish face.
“What business is that of yours?” she asked, and then reached for the handle of the sword tucked into her waist sash. Pleckoo noticed all these women had swords or daggers at their sides. Impudence! he thought. Women carrying weapons! They have lost all respect for men!
Breathing heavily, he blinked, made a humbling nod.
“I am sorry, sister. I am just a stranger to this mound who no longer recognizes Hulkren. I’m lost . . . in many ways.”
“Lost is the right word,” said Scowl, avoiding his eyes and continuing her march. “There is no Hulkren anymore. These are just the Dustlands.”
Pleckoo could not imagine hurting any deeper, but the woman’s words cut a new wound.
When he reached the first of the pitched shelters on the flats, he was pained to hear a baby’s screams. He looked up at the huts on their wobbling rain stilts and crawled up the ladder of one as the crying got louder. Pulling himself through the shelter’s flap, he found not one but two babies, completely naked, lying on the rough floor. One boy was dead, the other was soaking in his own urine.
Hulkrish babies abandoned! And sons! He heard screams from yet another baby in a neighboring hut. When he looked out the flap and down, he saw a cluster of light-skinned Slopeish women heading north. With them were freckled women of the servant caste who had resumed their old ways and carried their mistresses’ burdens.
“You! Woman!” he shouted at one, a beauty with long, wobbling earlobes that had once held a fortune in jewels. “There are babies up here, Hulkrish babies, that are starving and thirsty!”
“So?” said Earlobes.
“So? So they need your help!”
“Not my problem,” she said.
“But they are boys!”
“Exactly.”
“But their fathers are Hulkrites!”
“Sorry,” she said with an angry grin. “But I don’t have time to strangle any Hulkrish babies.” Th
is was followed by a chuckle from the others and then looks of open contempt for Pleckoo. He looked down at the infant before him, who cried but had no tears to shed. The baby was not pretty but was snub-nosed with long, thin nostrils. Pleckoo felt a strange mix of love and pity, which surprised him because all his life he had hated babies as noisy, needy little grubs.
After unfastening his cape, he reached for one of his lymph packages and bit its corner to make an opening and then pressed it into the baby’s open mouth. The baby sucked from it and was pacified, and was quickly asleep. Pleckoo envied the baby and felt a sudden overwhelming drowsiness. “Sleep again?” he said to no one at all as he resisted lying down. I could sleep the rest of my life away.
Determined to stay awake, he picked up the baby, wrapped it in a filthy blanket, and tied it over his shoulders before descending down the shelter’s ladder. He made his way up the rings and to the main artery and looked up at the mound’s peak. Something, perhaps the invisible hand of Hulkro, was pushing him towards the crystal palaces; perhaps he would find a reserve of Hulkrish soldiers who would greet him as their Prophet Commander. It would be a strenuous climb to the top without an ant to ride. And as for the ants, they were all too abundant—abundantly dead and crowding his path, which grew steeper.
Standing before the slitted portal of the main palace, Pleckoo was unsure about entering. The translucent sand grains allowed him some vision of the chambers’ interior and he saw movement within of what had to be men. But what kind of men? They appeared to be dressed in warriors’ whites! He slipped through the wax-embedded cloth to a short tunnel and heard muffled voices. Taking a deep breath, he pushed through the second slit and into the throne room and gasped to see hundreds of Hulkrites dressed in the White Robes of Pure Faith.
But something was wrong.
Only a few of these men were wearing armor under their robes, and none were coated with the White Paint of Submission. They pointed at Pleckoo and murmured as they took in his muddied officer’s clothing, his damaged mask, and the sling that held a baby. He looked over the men’s heads and up the long flight of stairs where he expected to see a relic of Sacred Wood with a termite track. Instead he saw distant figures sitting on grimy amber thrones. The vast room went quiet when a man of forty or so summers rose from the central throne to stand on unsure feet. The chamber went quiet, and Pleckoo felt heat and sweat from under his mask.
Using a jewel-encrusted rod, the man made a painstaking descent to the middle of the stairs. Pleckoo thought from the man’s white complexion that he might be a faithful Hulkrite wearing the Paint of Submission. Without thinking, Pleckoo bowed his head, as if he were back in Cajoria and standing before someone of higher caste. The man shouted at him in a tongue he did not know.
“Do you speak Hulkrish, sir?” Pleckoo asked.
“I do not,” said the man. “But I can if I need to. Who has dared to enter our palace?”
The man descended further, ever so slowly, down the next of the 123 steps. As he got closer, Pleckoo saw he was not wearing white paint but had a complexion that was so pale it revealed the red of his blood. He had been a slave who was hobbled, likely with a cut to the tendons in his heel. Now he stood before Pleckoo as a king of some kind.
“What is your name, masked one?”
“I have no name,” Pleckoo said. “I was known as Come Here.”
Slave King smiled, almost laughed. “Come Here, yes, a very common name among us. Where were you from before you were enslaved?”
“I . . . I don’t know. I never knew my mother.”
“But you speak Hulkrish with a Slopeish accent.”
Pleckoo hesitated—aware that he was blinking too much in the holes of the mask.
“My . . . my master was a Slopeite before he wore the white paint.”
“But now you want to be with us.”
“Yes. I heard Slopeites are allowed here.”
“As our slaves, yes. Why do you wear a mask?”
“You would not want to see what my master did to my face.”
Slave King came closer, looking at the baby in Pleckoo’s chest-sling as the crowd’s whispers turned to louder murmurs. Women appeared from the kitchen with rolled-up leaf platters of food, hobbling in with the usual pained expression.
“Have you brought us a gift?” asked Slave King.
Pleckoo blinked. “A gift, sir?”
“The baby. Is it for us?”
“Y-yes. It is, sir.”
“Let me see.”
Pleckoo pulled back the cloth of the sling and revealed the baby’s face, which was peaceful and sweetly yawning.
“Too ugly to raise,” said Slave King as he reached for it, signaling to the kitchen women. “But I’m sure he’ll taste as good as any other.”
“No!” said Pleckoo, who yanked the baby away and backed into the portal. As he squeezed through the slit of its cloth he felt hands grasping at his ankles, trying to pull him back. Once he made it out, he ran down the main artery, weaving between ant corpses as the baby woke and cried in his arms. An arrow flew over his head and he knew the men in the palace were outside and chasing him.
As he neared the flats, Pleckoo’s lungs were bursting and his legs were wobbling. When he could run no more, he veered off the route into a thicket of finger grass where he found an upright pebble he could lean against to hide. He collapsed against the pebble and then coughed and wheezed until eventually he caught his breath. As the baby cried, Pleckoo rocked him while singing the Termite’s different names as a lullaby. Just as the baby quieted, he heard the louder screaming of women.
Setting down the baby, he peered over the pebble and through the grass to see two women with the black-purple skin and the bright green eyes of the Meat Ant tribe of Ledack. They watched as their sand-sled was hauled away by several yellow-skinned women who had assumed its reins.
“What’s happened here?” Pleckoo asked the Ledackis as he stepped out.
“They’re stealing our sled!” said the taller of the two.
“It’s our sled now,” shouted one of the yellow-skinned women in polished purple silks. She turned and thrust out a costly sword made from a serrated queen-bee mandible rooted in an amber handle. The woman snarled and buzzed as she used her sword to cut the air, her companions following her example.
“Drop those reins!” Pleckoo shouted, rushing to them, raising up his own sword.
“I am a witch-daughter of Hulkra-tash,” said the woman in purple silks, spitting at Pleckoo over her extended blade. “My spit will sicken and kill you!”
“I’ll risk it. You took this sled from her?” he asked in Hulkrish.
“She’s as black as a lair spider,” said Spit Witch in unaccented Hulkrish.
“No one’s skin color gives them the right to steal from another Hulkrite,” he said. “Drop those reins and keep walking . . . if you want to keep your limbs.”
Spit Witch and the other two made buzzing sounds through their clenched teeth as the three of them raised their heavy swords. Silly women, Pleckoo thought. Using his own sword he knocked their blades out of their hands and they flew into a grass cluster.
“Run! Before I cut all your clothes off,” Pleckoo said. Silently, the women walked backwards, then turned and ran. He looked at the Ledacki women, who met his eyes in an immodest way.
“Thank you, Good Hulkrite,” said the older and taller of the women. “If there is such a thing as a good Hulkrite.” Her companion nodded at Pleckoo. Both were dressed in a faded finery of painted egg-cloth but they wore it in the Ledack style, as a loose wrap that started at the head. He looked at their small and filthy hauling-sled and its cargo box filled with crude jars and rough sacks and hopefully . . . food. The sled’s runners had worn and missing scales, and its twigs were graying and riddled with holes.
“Where are you going?” Pleckoo asked.
“To Bee-Jor, of course,” said the taller one.
“Bee-Jor?” he repeated in disbelief.
“Yes.
A land of endless honey, where the ants bring sweets and roasted meats to hammocks in the shade, where no one has to work and . . .”
“Yes, yes, yes . . . I know what Bee-Jor is. And just where do you think you will find it?”
“To the North somewhere, in the land of leaf-cutter ants. Locust the Sky God has put his son on the Slopeish throne and brought paradise to the Sand.”
“Who told you this?” he asked, slowly aware that he was speaking to a woman of remarkable beauty with a long, slender neck and high, arching eyebrows. Her eyes were as bright and green as a new caterpillar.
“Everyone knows . . . just as everyone knows the Hulkrites were defeated by Vof Quegdoth, the Son of Locust, who has given a powerful magic to the Grass Men of Dneep to kill the ghost ants of Hulkren.”
Pleckoo was stunned, breathing hard, feeling as if a wasp was inside him and about to rip from his stomach.
“Were you in the battle?” the tall woman asked.
Pleckoo hung his head, slumped.
“Do not be ashamed. If you did not fight, then you were wise . . . you are alive.”
“I fought!” Pleckoo shouted, and then looked abashed when he saw fright in their widening eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said, lowering his voice. “Are you not Hulkrish women? Wood sisters?” he asked.
“We are not! We were captives of the Hulkrites! Thrown into bags when they raided our country. Ledack is no more. Our Meat Ants are no more.”
“How do you know you’ll be welcome in . . . Bee-Jor?”
“All who worship Bee and submit to the Son of Locust are welcomed in Bee-Jor,” said the shorter woman. “It’s a place where anyone can start over . . . maybe even a Hulkrite.” Pleckoo thought her no less appealing with her long-lashed eyes and her thick-lipped mouth in a tight and perpetual smirk. Her tighter wrap hinted at a voluptuous figure. A new wave of dark emotions silenced Pleckoo, made him slump.
The Prophet of the Termite God Page 4