The Prophet of the Termite God

by Clark Thomas Carlton

  “You mean it will fall to the refugees massed on our border,” said Anand as he looked from her to the darkness that had fallen on Cajoria. They were seated in the dark on the Sun and Moon decks, surrounded by his guard keeping watch on the grieving war widows. “Polly, there should be a number of women at Palzhad who can provide this anti-fungal—the daughters of concubines and other illicit unions. All we’d need do is introduce roach eggs into their diet.”

  “How would we find them? And how would we know they had this power? And would they eat roach eggs? Slopeites have been told for centuries that they are a poison that only Britasytes can ingest.”

  “Until we sort that out we can export urine from you or some other queen. This is not a rare substance.”

  “But it’s more than that, Anand. A mound needs a queen and a king, to lend it stability and continuity—especially in a time of change.”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “Palzhad is a poor, weakened queendom that has never recovered from the Hulkrish raid. At the moment, it faces the threat of refugees and some problematic Dneepers. What royal could we ever get to rule there?”

  “I would,” said a voice from behind them.

  They turned to see Trellana standing near a tunnel portal. The maidservants with her were pulling out a second figure, King Sahdrin, who looked disturbingly fragile. Each of his movements was a feeble struggle, as he was lifted up to assume his crutches.

  “You would live in Palzhad?” asked Polexima with a doubtful chuckle.

  “I had planned to,” said Trellana, “when we thought you were lost. It was to be the home of all the Fission pioneers returned from that vile little nation with its savages on red ants.”

  “Trellana, you are married to me,” said Anand. “And I govern from here, with your mother.”

  “But there is no longer a need for me to be here. Not for the next eight months.”

  “You are . . .” said Polexima.

  “Pregnant, yes. Inside me are at least one, maybe more, little dark-skinned eyesores.” A maidservant handed her and the king their drink-bags.

  Anand stood as he watched them suck their liquor. “Do not speak that way of my children. Of our children. Why are you drinking spirits?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “You won’t. Until our children are born. And then you can turn them over to a milk nurse—one who will not indulge in spirits.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Trellana. “Fermentation will do them good. It will give them a happy womb, and make them the kind of babies that sleep well.”

  “Spirits will impair their vision and hearing and give them small heads—make them stupid. At the moment we have enough stupid royals.”

  “Do not speak to my daughter in that tone,” rasped Sahdrin. “Polexima enjoyed spirits while Trellana was in the womb.”

  “Obviously,” said Anand. “Excuse me, Polly.”

  Trellana looked at Anand as if she were about slap his face with her drink-bag.

  “Your ignorance can be forgiven but you are now informed,” Anand said. “I am determined about this. In Dranveria it is a crime for a woman to drink spirits during a pregnancy . . . and it will be a crime here as well.”

  “I will drink what I want,” Trellana said.

  “Not if I lock you in a cage.”

  Anand watched her fume and purse her lips as Sahdrin hobbled towards him, staring with his good eye.

  “You would not dare!” shouted Sahdrin. “I may be nothing more than some ancient sack of flatulence, but I will use the last of my pathetic life to stop you from caging my daughter!”

  “He would dare,” said Polexima. “And I’m sure he would be kind enough to lock you up with her. The people of Dranveria are wiser than we. If they have determined that drinking fermentation during pregnancy is bad for a child, then they are right. I have always sensed this was true. I did not drink when I was pregnant with Nuvao.”

  “So not drinking results in an effeminate son?” said Trellana.

  “Not drinking results in kinder children—who are smart and want to learn things,” said Anand.

  Trellana was quiet for a moment. “I would give up spirits for the next eight months,” she said, “if I could reign over Palzhad.”

  Anand was quiet, wondering what she really wanted.

  “Say yes, Quegdoth, and I’ll have one last night of indulgence,” said Trellana before she took a deep draught from the drink-bag. “I think the distance would do us both some good.”

  Anand looked to Polexima, who cocked her head and shrugged. “I have an idea,” said the queen. “I’ll need to speak with her brother. If the two of them can agree on something this might just work.” Anand signaled for a messenger to fetch Nuvao.

  “I would agree to just about anything to get away from here,” said Trellana.

  “Then agree to stop drinking,” said Polexima. “We will need your full presence to discuss this matter.”

  “If this is my last night of drinking, then I will enjoy all I want,” said Trellana, signaling to her servant to bring her more.

  Chapter 24

  Not a Cage

  I should just jump forward, impale myself on his blade, and end my life, Pleckoo thought. But he couldn’t; his limbs were shaking, his mouth went watery, and then he vomited. The crowd backed away as he fell to his hands and knees to empty his stomach, and then he shook with dry heaving. They were screaming, poking him with their weapons, kicking his behind. As he looked up at them, he felt a slime dripping down his chin. “I am not Pleckoo!” he tried to shout, and heard himself as someone weak and womanly as he stood and wobbled.

  “You are not Vleeg of Gagumji!” he heard from No Longer Silent, whose blade was piercing his tunic.

  “Don’t kill him!” Glip shouted. “Tie him up! We’ve been told he must be kept alive!”

  Two men grabbed Pleckoo by the ankles and yanked him sharply; he fell forward and onto his face and felt his skull smack against the sand. His wrists were grabbed and pulled behind him and he screamed as his arms were nearly wrenched out of their sockets. Ropes gouged deep into the skin of his wrists as they were bound, and then he felt the agony of being pulled to his feet with the loop of his distended arms. The kerchief was ripped off his face as he was pushed through the maddened, screaming crowd, with all of them waving knives and swords. They grabbed the hair on his head and that of his beard and yanked it out by the handfuls. He was stripped of his garments, even his loincloth, and pushed naked to the exit as they stomped on his toes, kicked his legs, and spit on him until he was covered in gobs. When he was pushed out of the tabernacle, he saw a cage perched atop a sand-sled, waiting just for him.

  They suspected all along, he thought, and planned this! But why is this cage on a hauling-sled?

  Inside the cage were several men waiting with coils of rough ropes. They reached down for Pleckoo, jerked him up by his armpits, and then dumped him on the cage’s floor. The cage was surrounded by the crowd who jeered and cursed as Pleckoo’s limbs were spread, then tied to the back of the bars. The ropes were wound hard over his limbs and torso until he was covered in them, a second torturous skin. He could only move his head, which looked upwards as he prayed to any god that would listen. “I can’t breathe!” he shouted when he felt the constriction of his chest as his breathing went rapid and shallow.

  The cage was growing darker when he saw young men climbing up its bars, shouting their curses at him. When they reached its top, they pulled up their tunics and showered him with their piss. As soon as they descended, new boys took their places. The crowd shook their fists, shouted their curses, and hawked their phlegm and spat.

  The sled lurched, and he saw it was being pulled further up the mound where the higher castes could start a new round of humiliations. Young men climbed up the cage again and Pleckoo felt the ropes dampening. The shrieking and screams grew louder and felt like pine needles, piercing his ears until they pricked his brain. His breathing grew more and more shallow unt
il he felt flashing waves of a sharp pain over his skin, and then a spastic trembling of his bowels before he lost control of them. A darkly sour stink filled his nose before he entered a stupor that softened the world and turned it into a distant nightmare.

  It was sometime near midnight when he roused to a ringing in his head. He attempted to clamp his hands to his ears, then remembered he was bound up like the wrapped prey of a spider. He looked down at the cage and saw the piss-wet floor glimmering in the moonlight, then he looked out and saw a quieter gathering of nobles around him. Over their heads he could see the grimy walls of one of Palzhad’s palaces, and he realized he was at the dew station of the topmost circle of the mound. The people who surrounded him spoke softly and were well dressed, the remains of the mounds’ royals and its war widows, priests, and their servants. The boys among them were not crawling up the cage to piss and spit on him, but he could hear the hatred in their voices as they loudly whispered insults like “the murderous filth worker” and “Termite’s catamite.”

  Pleckoo strained against the ropes but it was useless. It was an agony to hang on the bars with the ropes’ fibers violently scratching into his skin. Among other pains, his mouth was completely dry from thirst. Quietly, two men approached the cage’s door after it was opened by the guards. Pleckoo recognized the men as the sheriffs from the market. One of them carried a drinking bladder with a long tube at its end.

  “Hello, Pleckoo,” said the one with the bag whose neck bulged with a butterfly-shaped goiter.

  “That is not my name.”

  “Really? You are not Pleckoo, the noseless middenite from Cajoria who claimed himself as the Second Prophet of Lord Termite?”

  Pleckoo was quiet. I will not deny that.

  “I can’t hear you,” said the sheriff. “Are you not the Commander Prophet Pleckoo, the Chosen Successor of Tahn the First Prophet?”

  Pleckoo could not speak. Please, Hulkro, inspire me, he prayed.

  “A simple ‘no’ will do,” said the second sheriff, a man with one eye sewn shut. “If you want to save yourself.”

  “Only the One True God decides who speaks for Him,” Pleckoo rasped.

  “Drink this,” said Butterfly Goiter, who held up the drinking tube of the bladder.

  “What is it?”

  “Water.”

  “Why give me water? Why not just kill me?”

  “Because it’s against the code. You are wanted alive until you are proven guilty.”

  “What will you do with me?”

  “We’re bringing you to Cajoria. To be identified,” said Sewn Shut. “Would you happen to know anybody there?”

  One more unbearable shame, Pleckoo thought. My demise will be in Cajoria.

  “Why Cajoria?”

  “It’s where Commander Quegdoth governs, the capital mound. We’ve got a few places to stop along the way,” said Butterfly Goiter. “I’m sure quite a few people would like to make your acquaintance.”

  Anand is in Cajoria, Pleckoo thought. Where they’re taking me. He shut his eyes and there was a sudden silence and a delicious sense of plunging. Soft lights flickered within the blackness and a fallen log rolled up to him, covered with scales of blue glow-fungus. Hulkro crawled out of the log in His aspect of the Termite King and raised His lacy wings. “Stay strong, Pleckoo,” He said with a voice that vanquished the pain. “And know that you are not in a cage. You are in a cocoon.”

  Chapter 25

  Growing Giants

  Trellana was arriving in her sedan chair on the edge of Cajoria’s ant-riding course, surrounded by servants and 123 trunks of essentials that were coming with her to Palzhad. She had been up all night, going through all her possessions and deciding which she could do without and which she could send for later. It had taken the palace servants all the morning to pack her trunks and then port them to the sled dock.

  “That was just exhausting,” she said to her parents as her chair was set down.

  “We will miss you, Trelly,” said Sahdrin, and she saw that his face drooped more than usual.

  “You don’t have to miss me, Daddy. Come with me. It’s not like Mother will miss you.”

  “I cannot,” said the king. “Perhaps when I feel better. If I ever feel better.”

  “I am sorry you will not get to share my little adventure,” Trellana said with a smile she knew revealed her excitement.

  “Trelly, I have told you,” said Polexima. “You should lower your expectations. Palzhad is not like Cajoria. It is likely even more different since the war. They are far less reverent to royalty. And they are fond of some much older traditions of which, I am sure, you are mostly unaware.”

  “I will make it my own,” said Trellana. “And set an example. I imagine the Palzhanites will welcome a young queen from the North, someone who can bring charm and splendor back to their mound. I imagine they would just adore, as anyone would, an elaborate and traditional anointing ceremony. Perhaps we can invite some royalty from the Old Slope.”

  “I imagine that what the Palzhanites would really welcome is a steady supply of queenly urine,” said Polexima. “So that their ants can continue to defend them against these refugees from the South . . . as well as enemies in the East and West.”

  Trellana winced at her mother. She was wearing the most ridiculous cricket robe yet—this one was the bright green of the tree-leaf crickets who thrived in the late summer.

  “Mother, did Terraclon sew something new for you? Out of some very stale cloth?”

  “This actually came with me years ago when I first arrived at the mound—a gift from your grandmother, an heirloom. She wore it during the Nights of Awe that celebrated Cricket and Moon and the other nocturnal goddesses. That’s a feast they still celebrate in Palzhad.”

  “And you wore this to say good-bye to me.”

  “To say good-bye to her,” said Polexima. “My mother, your grandmother, who was a devotee of Night Singer. It would do you well to honor Cricket at Palzhad. When you are unsure of your way, you should look to Her, ask for Her guidance.”

  “I am sure I will be praying to Her on hot summer nights when Her offspring get too noisy.”

  “The sled is coming,” Sahdrin said as the train of hauling ants came into view. The riders seated at the head of the ants slowed them with the new technique of scented gloves applied to different segments of the antennae. Trellana was mildly shocked and deeply annoyed. The ants were not hauling the Royal Sled of the Mound of Cajoria with its three-tiered cabin. Instead, it was a lesser vehicle, a priestly conveyance, which was not even the carriage of His Most Pious.

  “They’ve brought the wrong sled,” Trellana said. “Unless this is the one for my trunks.” She heard the sound of marching and turned to find a formation of foot guards making their way towards them like a living fortress. From out of its middle, Anand appeared with that vulgar, mincing Terraclon at his side.

  “You have ordered the wrong coach,” Trellana said to Anand.

  “I have not,” Anand said. “We are taking precautions.”

  “Precautions? Why?” asked Polexima.

  “It may be nothing—but there are reports that some of the ants of our eastern mounds are growing giants in their nurseries.”

  “Seed Eaters preparing an attack? In the autumn?” said Sahdrin.

  “I am sure they think we are weak and vulnerable after the war,” said Anand. “In any event we will need to get Trellana to Palzhad as quickly as possible. While we still have locusts, what I really think is that she should fly there and let the trunks come later.”

  “I am not flying to Palzhad on the back of a locust,” Trellana said, and glared at Anand, whose skin seemed darker in the sunlight. “You are just making up this noise about an eastern threat to deprive me of a procession suitable to my rank.”

  “Yes,” said Anand. “I live only to deprive you.” He looked at her with barely stifled hatred. “You cannot take all these trunks on your journey to Palzhad.”

  “Why
not?”

  “You can take as many as fit in the sled’s trunk storage. And no, we will not be arranging a second train to port the rest of your dresses and jewelry and whatnot to Palzhad.” He turned to his guard. “Defenders, take good care of Princess Trellana, soon to be Queen Trellana of Palzhad of Bee-Jor. Be ever alert.”

  Half the guards stepped forward to join Trellana’s procession, leaving the other half to guard Anand and Terraclon.

  “These guards are all going with me?” she asked. “All these men?”

  “Two are women. And yes, they are all going, in addition to your royal guard as a part of your protection.”

  “You mean to keep an eye on me.”

  “No. To keep eyes on you. Thirty pairs exactly.”

  They heard a faint buzzing and looked up to see a loose formation of locusts coming from the East. They landed in their usual, haphazard way. The pilot of the one falling closest to Anand was jarred by the landing and nearly fell off of his saddle. He straightened his helmet gone askew before slapping his chest, and then patted his locust’s head as he addressed Anand.

  “Commander Quegdoth,” he said. “We have sighted Seed Eater armies gathering forces in their west.”

  “Near which mounds?”

  “At least two including Callabeeth and Eglosso.”

  “And likely Zerabel, Xixict, and Shishto,” said Polexima. “They have already taken Dinth and Habach, whose people we are still relocating. Those are the seven annexed by the Slope in the last two centuries.”

  “You mean stolen,” said Anand. “The Seed Eaters are taking back what used to be their mounds.”

  “I suppose stolen is the right word. But they are Slopeish—or rather, Bee-Jorite—mounds now, occupied by hundreds of thousands of our people.”

  Anand turned to Terraclon. “Ter, I’ve got to get up there, see for myself. The Seed Eaters feint an attack at one place, then pounce on another. I’ve got to determine where they’re really attacking.”