The Prophet of the Termite God

by Clark Thomas Carlton

“I’d go with you if I knew how to fly.”

  “Start learning,” said Anand.

  “Really?” asked Terraclon in a happy shock, his mouth agape.

  “Start today. We need a pilot for every locust we have.” Anand turned to the pilot before him. “Is this locust fresh enough to fly back to the Southeast border?”

  “Yes, Commander. I believe so.”

  “Then make room.”

  Anand was climbing up the locust’s leg when he noticed a messenger racing with all his speed towards him, wildly waving his hands. “Commander! Wait!” the boy shouted. “You must wait!” The boy was out of breath, barely able to speak.

  “What’s the matter, young defender, that you’re giving me orders?”

  “A message from Palzhad. They think they’ve got him!”

  “Who?”

  “Pleckoo!”

  “Say that name again.”

  “Pleckoo! They’ve captured a man who fits every description. They’re porting his cage here now.”

  Polexima staggered, dropped her staff, then fell on the ground to sob. Trellana did not know if her mother was crying out of fear or relief or both. Anand and Terraclon looked at each other, stunned by the news, and panting.

  “Send a message back,” said Anand with a tremble in his voice. “Twenty guards are to accompany this man—who might be Pleckoo—in his cage back to Cajoria. And they must never leave him out of their sight. Tell them he must be kept alive.”

  “Why do you want him alive?” asked Trellana. “Cut his throat and be done with it. You can identify the corpse later.”

  “If it isn’t Pleckoo I’d be killing an innocent man.”

  “I know why you won’t gut him,” whispered Terraclon.

  Anand was silent, then gave Terraclon a look that was a grudging acknowledgment . . . and a warning to keep quiet.

  “I’ll be back as quickly as possible. Ter, I need you to look after Polexima.”

  “Of course.”

  “And learn how to fly.’

  Anand and the pilot flew off without even looking at Trellana. She turned to look at Terraclon, the strange, dark-skinned outcaste, as he comforted her mother, who rocked and cried as she relived some memory. Sahdrin watched his wife in silence, sighing as he rubbed his false eye before signaling to his servant to lift his drink-bag for a swallow.

  “Well, I suppose this Pleckoo person must be something awful,” said Trellana to dispel her own discomfort. “I am glad he will be gone from Palzhad by the time of my arrival. Let us get on with this procession, shall we?”

  As Anand flew towards the southern end of Bee-Jor, he could see little below him. The only thing in his head were visions of his cousin: Pleckoo, the proud and ambitious middenite he had toiled with and shared his dreams. Pleckoo, the humiliated reject returning from Venaris with a bloody defacement. Pleckoo, the warrior wearing the White Paint of Submission as Tahn’s rising favorite. I will clear my head, Anand determined. They reached the Tar Marsh where Anand looked down at workers engaged in the dangerous, messy work of gathering tar, so much in demand for the building of better shelters by newly prospering Bee-Jorites. “Turn north and keep east of the border wall,” he said to the pilot, who veered the locust into a turnaround against the south-blowing wind. But as Anand forced himself to search for signs of Seed Eaters massing to attack, he was still imagining his cousin behind him, stalking him in the air with an obsidian arrow aimed at his neck. And as for obsidian . . . was it Pleckoo who cut my leg from the bottom of our sand-sled?

  As they flew above the border wall, Anand looked down at the Seed Eaters’ innumerable villages that were far from their ant mounds. Clusters of hollowed pebble dwellings were squeezed between nearly every clump of the barley grass that grew in broad patches between their oak trees. Anand could just make out a band of hunters in one village, standing atop a flat rock as they shot their arrows up at his locust, unaware of its human riders. One arrow climbed up next to Anand and seemed suspended for a moment before he plucked it out of the air to regard its making. It was imported—made by the Beetle people from their pine wood. And it had to have been sold to them by Britasyte traders—a thought which made him frown.

  To the west, he could see Mound Culzhwitta, and over the border wall on the east he saw what looked like the first of a military encampment on the Seed Eaters’ side. Here and there were a few cages full of ants, and he sighted scattered soldiers in their brown chitin armor as they supervised the digging of their sacrificial pits. But that’s a feint, he decided. Barely anybody there! Just enough harvester ants at the border to deceive the leaf-cutters into growing giants. The south wind was blowing harder when they reached Mound Eglosso where to the right, over its border, was another modest Seed Eater camp. One more ruse.

  Anand counted four more feints, one next to each of the next four border mounds, until they neared Mound Shishto. It’s got to be Shishto they’ve set their sights on, he thought. He sniffed the air for the scents of Seed Eater soldiers and harvester ants, expecting that the real encampment would make itself obvious soon. The pilot steered them over an expanse of scrubby oak trees, and then arced up when they reached a cluster of mature ones. Several of these were hundreds of years old, wrapped in chunky armor-like bark and barely compromised by the leaf-cutters.

  The largest and most magnificent of the oaks had a thousand undulating branches that spread from a broad and ancient trunk. The branches on the tree’s eastern side extended over the border wall to the Barley Lands. Under these branches, Anand could make out tawny-skinned women working in teams of three to roll away the acorns. On the Bee-Jorite side, the acorns were far more abundant, covering the ground by the tens of thousands. All of these acorns were neglected and rotting or infested with the grubs of the long-snouted weevil. Why do Slopeites let acorns go to waste? Anand asked himself. That’s food for a hundred thousand down there.

  Mound Shishto came into view. It was wider and lower than most leaf-cutter mounds, a reminder that it had been built and occupied by Seed Eaters and their harvester ants before it was “annexed” and rebuilt by Slopeites. It had only two crystal palaces at its top, with a third at the beginning of its construction. The uppermost rings were typical of Slopeish building, with pink rectories and black-sand barracks, but the dwellings on the lower rings were in the Seed Eaters’ style, and included houses with walls of chipped quartz on the lower levels and hovels with roofs of acorn caps. Anand looked east into the further distance and felt a growing discomfort in his stomach. He smelled or saw or heard something that tightened his gut, even if he could not yet identify it. As he looked down at the border, he saw nothing but scattered villages. No feint here! The real encampment is nearby, but deeper in.

  “Further east and lower,” he commanded the pilot.

  “Over the border, Commander?”

  “Yes, but be ready to turn around.”

  The pilot turned to look at Anand briefly, his face betraying his apprehension at the moment the locust made a brief halt of her wings and plummeted before resuming flight. Reaching for the upper and outside segments of the locust’s antennae, the pilot changed her pattern, and Anand sighted a clearing near a patch of bright green. That’s got to be it! As they got closer, he looked down and saw just a few ant cages and a mere squadron of Seed Eater soldiers whipping the slaves of a pit excavation. It’s just one more feint, he realized, but a little further inland. From where are they planning to attack?

  “Back to Cajoria,” he commanded when the locust continued towards a patch of clover with pink and white blossoms.

  “She’s not obeying!” said the pilot.

  The locust made an abrupt landing in the clover, landing on a sprig, which collapsed under her. Anand and the pilot were jarred and thrown forward. The locust righted herself and was already eating as they reseated. Anand looked to the sky and saw the sun was rolling lower.

  “We have to let her eat, Commander,” the pilot said. “She needs the water.”

&
nbsp; “She does,” Anand said. “But we’re not safe here.”

  They waited, listening to the locust chew, when they heard the twang of strings and then the whoosh of arrows, followed by the sound of boots on sand.

  “Shit!” Anand said. “Up! Up!” The pilot clamped his hands at the antennae’s roots, which sent the locust bucking and into short jumps before it took an erratic flight. Anand looked over his shoulder at the encampment’s soldiers taking aim. Some soldiers were opening the cages, releasing their ants and mounting them. The pilot leaned in when, at last, the locust straightened its flight, veering upwards as Shishto’s border wall came into sight. The locust flew hard, and Anand was almost relieved as she neared the top of the wall, then crashed into its peak. Stunned or dead, she slid down the wall’s slope of sand and ant droppings. Anand and the pilot were dragged after her in the tangled ropes of the saddle rig. The hot pain of his leg wounds was reignited as they bumped down the wall.

  “Are you all right, pilot?” Anand asked when they came to a stop.

  “I think so,” said the pilot as he strained to pull himself from the stirrups and reins. Anand crawled over the dying insect to see Seed Eater villagers filtering out of the barley grass with crude pikes at the ready. They feigned a threat with their weapons and weakly shouted at the invaders. Their tongue sounded like a violent snorting and throat-clearing. All of them, including the women, wore little more than a rag or some woven straw to hide their genitals. Their cheeks were sunken, their rib cages were visible, and their arms and legs were no more than bones wrapped in shriveled skin.

  “You can have this,” Anand said to them in Britasyte, Dranverish, and Slopeish and then pointed to the locust with an opened palm. They understood his gesture if not his words, and converged on the locust, using their pikes to stab into its abdomen. After making punctures, they yanked out circles of chitin, then dropped to their knees to hungrily lick at the dripping lymph. When it stopped dripping, they thrust their heads inside the cuts to continue slurping. Anand and the pilot looked at each other, ashamed to witness such an extreme display of starvation. An old woman emerged from an acorn-capped shelter, and walked weakly towards the locust with a sling over one shoulder. As she got closer, Anand realized she was not so old. Inside her sling he could see the thin arms of a withered and skeletal baby that was sucking at her withered breast.

  No one made room for the woman to partake of this sudden feast. She stood nearby, pacing with despair, pleading for her share.

  “Why are they excluding her?” asked the pilot.

  “She has no husband. Maybe she slept with someone else’s and her child is a bastard. I’m going over to her. Look out for me.”

  The pilot nodded, and raised up his blowgun to protect Anand as he unsheathed his sword and strode to the locust’s end. Anand heard the weak crying of the woman’s infant as the villagers turned and stared at him. Some of the men shouted at Anand and threatened him with their pikes. When they came too near, Anand used his sword to knock their weapons from their hands, then motioned them with a sweep of his sword to step back. They quieted to watch him raise his blade over the locust’s abdomen, then chop at its end until it fell away.

  Picking up the end by the ovipositor, Anand walked towards the starving mother and held it out to her like a great cup. She reached for it, struggled with its weight, then sucked deeply of the lymph. Inside the cup were two partially formed eggs, which she squeezed up and out of the tube to chew on. She looked Anand in the eye and nodded her head in thanks. The others in the village were warming to him and nodded their thanks as well. Someone with a second piece of cloth wrapped around his head, perhaps their chieftain, was saying, “Shpeebo, shpeebo,” and pressed together his hands in the motion of gratitude. Suddenly, Anand heard the clacking of a wooden bell and looked to the pebble tower to see a sentry with an orange helmet rise up from what must have been a nap to sound a warning that spread through the grass.

  The barley stalks behind them were twitching and bending with new arrivals—harvester ants were crawling out in their speedy, jerking way with armed riders on their backs. Those are the soldiers from the feint, Anand realized. He looked at the ants with their massive heads and bearded mouths, and panicked when he saw them turn and raise their legs to shake their abdomens.

  “Run!” he said to the pilot, and they scrambled up the collapsing border wall in hopes of reaching the other side.

  Chapter 26

  Mound Shishto

  Anand felt arrowheads hitting his armor and falling away as he and the pilot scrambled up the loose sand and ant droppings that tumbled out of the wall. The pilot gasped in pain and lost his footing. Anand turned to see an arrow had pierced the man’s calf. Both were coughing from the toxic spray of the harvester ants, which stabbed into their lungs with its tiny needles. Their eyes flooded with tears, and Anand felt as if a burr was stuck in his throat.

  The pilot’s leg gave out and he slid down the wall’s rough slope and lodged behind the locust’s corpse. Anand dropped to the locust, and using it as a barrier, he raised his blowgun above it and targeted the attackers. His darts landed in the opened mouth of one bowman and the cheeks and chins of others. They went into spasms, violently shaking and losing control of their ants. Anand knew more soldiers on brown ants would be racing up to replace them.

  “Can you climb?” Anand shouted to the pilot.

  “We have to,” he said. The two resumed painful ascents up the crumbling wall, when the pilot reached for a sand grain that dislodged and he slid again. A new barrage of arrows sailed towards them. One whizzed past Anand’s ear and broke in the wall. The pilot screamed when an arrow pierced his hand. Anand grabbed the pilot by his wrist and pulled them up, using his pain-wracked legs when an arrow grazed Anand’s neck and lodged between his helmet strap. He raised his heel on a shelf of quartz, which snapped. The two men slid again.

  A shadow was over Anand when he realized a mass of yellow ants was crawling down the wall. Ten, twenty, and then thirty leaf-cutters were pouring over his body, some stepping on his face with their scratchy claws. The leaf-cutters had raced into battle, stirred by the odors of harvester ants. Immune to the harvesters’ toxins, the leaf-cutters reached their enemy and sheared away their antennae and clipped off their legs to leave them immobile. The harvester ants attacked the leaf-cutters by clamping on to their stout abdomens to insert their stingers, but the leaf-cutters were overwhelming. Arriving Seed Eater bowmen jumped from their embattled ants. Some men were caught by the quicker leaf-cutters and screamed when they were made limbless. They were silenced when they became headless.

  More leaf-cutters crawled over the wall as a stream of harvester ants wove out of the barley grass to confront them. Anand struggled to flatten himself and cover his face when he heard voices and realized Bee-Jorite sentries had arrived on antback. “Down here! We are Bee-Jorites!” Anand shouted. Men wearing breathing filters and quartz goggles dropped from their saddles and threw down rope loops to pull him and the pilot up to safety. As they were lifted up, more of the wall crumbled beneath them and left an even larger rupture. Once on the Bee-Jorite side, Anand and the pilot were carried to the underside of a watchtower, where they were set on mattresses of bound grass.

  “Thank you, Bee-Jorites. Tend to this pilot’s wounds and then patch that section of the wall as quickly as possible,” said Anand to his rescuers.

  The men surrounding him were slow to react.

  “Come on, men. Quickly. We can’t have the Seed Eaters accuse us of invading their country! We’re not ready for war.”

  “Sorry, Commander,” said one of the astonished men. “Just realized you is Vof Quegdoth!” The men bowed to Anand, then ran to the break in the wall. They hastily piled up sand grains and pebbles and resprinkled the ant pellets on its eastern side.

  Anand looked over at the pilot, who lay on his mattress, shaking and taking shallow breaths as his wounds were bandaged with egg-cloth. When Anand’s lungs cleared and his eyes sto
pped stinging, he rose to join the others in the wall’s repair by passing sand grains up a chain of workers. The defenders tried and failed not to stare at their leader as he engaged in common labor.

  After the wall was patched, Anand stood atop it and peered down at the village and its wretched people as they reemerged from their shelters. They wandered in hesitation through a wealth of ant corpses that would feed them for moons. Anand sighted the starving woman and her baby as she used a hand axe to sever a head from a dead leaf-cutter, then rolled it back to her shelter. Helping her were some sickly, stick-like children who had barely the strength to move their limbs. Too, too many children everywhere on this Sand, Anand thought. And not all of them wanted.

  He looked to the sky and saw the sun was low in the West. “I’ll need a locust, first thing in the morning,” he said to the border sentry in charge, a man with the dark skin and hair of a laborer and the splotchy skin of a tar worker.

  “Yes, Commander,” said the sentry, meeting his eyes. “Will you join us for supper?”

  “What?”

  “The evening meal, Commander. Will you join us, if you’re spending the night here?”

  “Oh. Thank you. Yes.”

  “I am Defender Utchmay. An honor to serve you.”

  Food was the last thing on Anand’s mind, even though he realized his stomach was noisy with hunger. He was relieved when sometime later an ant-drawn coach arrived near the watchtower to bring them to the mound’s main artery.

  “Can you ride?” Anand asked the pilot. “Are you hungry?”

  “Yes to both, Commander.”

  “I should ask your name.”

  “I am Omal.”

  “Defender Omal. Thank you for your brave service today. You have suffered much for our country.”

  “I would do it all again, Commander. For Bee-Jor. And the Son of Locust.”

  The coach brought them to a station where they boarded an ant train carrying working people home. As they were riding up the merchants’ rings, Anand saw Shishtite war widows in tattered yellow dresses. Some were returning from the market to modest homes. A few were idly sitting outside on pebble benches and minding their children or fingering prayer beads. When they noticed Anand, they began shouting to each other and he heard them call him “the Alien” and “the Dranverite” and “Polexima’s Seducer.” Some came forward to stare at him when the train halted to drop off passengers. The widows pelted him with rotting mushrooms and human filth from chamber pots.