Once the acorns were positioned in a loose chain, the soldiers and common people filtered back and around them, keeping swords, arrows, and blowguns at the ready. The refugees stared at these Bee-Jorites in fear and awe. After they left, the hungry went to examine what had been left behind.
The gift was a very mixed lot. Some of the acorns were green and too firm; some were desiccated and shriveled, and many were old, rotten, or moldy. A few were aged, dried, and perfectly golden and would yield a fine and nourishing flour once their hard shells were broken. Others were beautifully infested with weevil grubs while some were hollow and rattled with the dust of grub corpses.
“Who has sent us these acorns?” Jakhuma asked in Hulkrish to one of the last of the returning solders, with a face as dark as her own. He did not understand her until she repeated it as “Who gives food?”
“Commander Quegdoth of Bee-Jor,” said the man in Slopeish, a tongue that was not unlike Hulkrish. “And Queen Trellana and King Nuvao of Mound Palzhad,” he added.
“Quegdoth,” she said to herself. I know that name. Wasn’t he a Hulkrite?
The refugees on both sides of the acorn chain peered at each other through the gaps between them. Jakhuma looked at the seeds and knew they could not pull them in—they would have to step into the Hulkrish camp and push them from the other side.
“Ledackis!” she shouted. “Push half these acorns into our center. Leave half for those jaundiced termite-eaters over there. Watch your backs!”
Sebetay summoned several men in his vicinity. “Come on!” he said, taking out the curved dagger made from the ghost-ant mandible he had smuggled out of Hulkren. “Keep weapons at the ready!” he shouted. The Ledacki men approached a ripe yellow acorn and turned its sharp point away from them. They made threatening war hisses as they followed Sebetay to the seed’s other side, forced to step over and through the scattered detritus that had marked their camp’s lines. As they pushed the acorn into their camp, they were rushed by yellow-skinned assailants making the Hulkrish war whoop. “That’s ours!” they heard in Hulkrish voices.
Sebetay felt a spear’s tip under his shoulder blade. He spun and howled, and bared his teeth, then whipped up his blade to slash at the face of his attacker and cut off his ear. The man fell to his knees and screamed as Sebetay kicked him under his chin and sent him flying into his fellows. Other yellow skins rushed the Ledackis with a mix of axes, pikes, and daggers.
“Get these seeds into our camp!” Sebetay shouted to the boys and women, who obeyed and took over the rolling as the men turned to defend themselves. As the bobbing, erratic acorns were pushed into the camp, Jakhuma was jostled in the panicked throng. The acorns upended, then fell as they were rolled, threatening all with their sword-sharp ends.
“Look out!” Jakhuma screamed to a cluster of Ledacki boys when their backs were rushed by a gang of Hulkrish youths raising clear swords of ghost mandibles. They thrust at the little Ledackis, surrounded them, and pushed the smallest of them hard into an acorn’s spike. The boy screamed when his back was pierced. When he fell forward, a pike was thrust in his chest. Sebetay ran towards the Hulkrish youths, raising his dagger to distract them, then threw himself up, rolling in the air to kick through the head of the tallest youth with the toe spikes of his boot. The youth fell, the toe spike stuck in his bleeding skull. His eyelids fluttered before his face went still. His fellows grabbed him by his arms to pull him away, when Sebetay used his curved dagger to chop through their wrists, their hands falling and twitching on the sand. The Hulkrish invaders pressed through a gauntlet of attackers, wildly waving their swords as they were threatened with a wall of jabbing pikes. Those that were pierced were held in place, so that Ledacki swordsmen coming from behind could saw off their heads with the serrated mandibles of meat-ant swords.
When the brawl subsided, Jakhuma saw that a good number of acorns had been rolled into their center, but at what cost? She pushed through the shocked and wailing crowd to the camp’s barrier to take in the number of dead and wounded. Her gasps turned to weeping when she saw that the corpses included that of a young mother, still clutching her baby in swaddling. Jakhuma lifted the infant and it felt all too light. From her bright underclothes, she saw it was a girl, a girl whose eyes were all too big. When the princess pressed the infant to her chest, she knew in an instant she was forever bound to the little creature.
Not far from her, a few wounded Hulkrites, boys on the verge of manhood, crawled or limped back to their own side. One young man carried a corpse over his shoulder, using him as a shield. “You cannibals won’t be eating my brother!” he shouted. Jakhuma looked at him with pity, then realized she did not know where Kula was. “My servant! Where is my servant?” she shouted. “Kula!”
“Over here, Princess,” Kula said, descending from the tumbleweed in a brief rain of its flaking bits, and flicking them off the face of the baby, which she held in one arm.
“How is No Name?”
“He lives.”
Kula opened the dirty blanket that held the baby. His eyes were closed and his arms and legs seemed too still. Kula opened one of the little fists he was making and Jakhuma watched as his tiny fingers curled back together and his eyes blinked open.
“I must eat and drink—to get him some milk,” Kula said.
“And some milk for this little one too,” said Jakhuma, showing Kula the stick-like baby. “Maybe I can make milk. I will pray to the Cloud Goddess.”
“Pray, yes, Princess. But if you want to make milk, you need someone to suck hard on your nipples. Five or six times a day.”
“A baby?”
“Not strong enough. An adult. I would rather not do this . . . if you don’t mind.”
“I’ll do it,” said a man behind them. Jakhuma looked to see Sebetay behind them. The sweat on his face made his scars more pronounced and shine with a strange beauty. He looked depleted after the conflict and was still catching his breath. “Not in a disrespectful way, Princess. As my duty. To save this young baby who is a beloved member of our scattered tribe. I will do whatever you ask.”
Jakhuma nodded. The five walked to the center of the camp where the acorns were already in the process of being sawed and cracked open. The infested ones were harvested of their weevil maggots. Many of the maggots were dead and moldy, many of them were dried and flaky corpses. One acorn held some smaller wasp-gall maggots, which were alive and plump and had turned the inside of the seed into a crumbly and tasty pulp.
“Ledackis!” Jakhuma shouted. “Pregnant and nursing women will feed first. Give them these fine, squirming maggots.” Her voice shocked the baby in her arms, whose arms trembled as she burst into a delicate sobbing. “I am sorry, little one,” she said while looking into eyes as dark and sad as a lonely night. “I have no milk to give you yet. But I will make . . . or get you some. And I promise your dead mother, whoever she was, that I will bring you to some better place.”
The dried and golden acorns were opened last. The men used hand-axes to hew chunks from their soft, powdery centers. Jakhuma joined the other women in shaving the chunks into chips and bits with the edges of knives and swords. She tasted one of these chips and found it pleasantly starchy at first, followed by a bitter aftertaste that dried the insides of her cheeks. When all the acorns had been emptied of their nourishment, the princess ordered the shells to be moved. “Bring them to the edges of our camp to make a wall,” she commanded. The Hulkrites turned from processing their own acorns to sneer at the Ledackis as they raised their fence of shells. When it was completed, Sebetay and other men gathered up the severed heads and limbs of the Hulkrites and threw them over the fence. The Hulkrites screamed in horror or keened with grief as they examined the faces of their dead. Their surviving men reached for their weapons, threatening a new feud. Instead they chopped up the bodies of the dead Ledackis on their side and returned the gruesome favor.
The sun was setting when Jakhuma handed the infant girl to Kula to nurse, as Sebetay held Khali Talava
r’s baby. I must stop thinking of him as that Hulkrite’s baby, she thought. I must give him a name. She loosened her clothing and climbed up and into the tumbleweed to survey the camps before darkness took over. All across the camps, she saw that acorn shells had been used to create a patchwork of border fences. As she looked deeper south and then north, she realized the dark-skinned refugees had somehow gathered and consolidated in camps on the east side. The light-skinned people had all migrated into camps on the western side including people of Hulkrish, Slopeish, and Seed Eater stock. Of all the distressing things she had seen that day, this new development disturbed her most . . . and she wasn’t sure why.
She looked up to Mound Palzhad as the dying sun spread its light on its delicate palaces. A meager parade of ants was returning with the yellowed leaf cuttings of autumn. As Jakhuma looked west and over the wall of acorn shells, she saw the yellow-skinned worshippers of Termite as they nursed their wounded and prayed over their dead in their native tongue. The Hulkrish words ignited memories that sickened and frightened her. She could smell the breath of the cruel rapist who had taken a liking to her, and forced her to share his mattress when he was home from wars. He had never called her by her name, had never told her his own, and each time he released into her, he squeezed her breasts until she shrieked from the pain. Jakhuma shook the memory out of her head and looked back to the palaces of Palzhad, as their crystals glowed with a bloody red from the last of the crimson light.
How can that be Bee-Jor? she wondered as she listened to the Hulkrites’ droning prayer-songs on their knees before a chip of wood. How can that place over there be a paradise on the Sand if we are supposed to share it with those people?
She stared at the palaces until their silhouettes disappeared in the blackness of night.
Chapter 32
Homecoming
“Kill me . . . kill me . . . kill me,” Pleckoo rasped to the heavens, for he had little voice left and was sure that all his screaming through the night had torn his voice box into bloody shreds he had coughed out of his throat. Darkness was lifting, and through the bars he could see it, the most repulsive of all sights: Mound Cajoria, the place of his birth and his long suffering as a shit worker. Cajoria should have been his greatest prize, the mound he would have cleansed of both its filthy ants and its idolatrous Mushroom Eaters before reconsecrating it as Halk-Pleckoo, a place for the faithful. Instead my unholy cousin is ruling from a crystal palace and waiting to exact his vengeance on me. The sight of the sunlit stadium on the mound’s south side filled Pleckoo’s empty stomach with little demons that vomited fire inside him.
“What’s that?” said the voice of Butterfly Goiter below him as they tethered fresh ants to the reins of the sled. “You want us to kill you? Before you’ve had breakfast?”
“Why would you want to be killed now, little Pleckoo?” said Sewn Shut, looking up. “They’ve got so much planned for your homecoming.”
“Right. From what we heard you’re getting an assembly—and it’s all in your honor, Pleckoo! Everyone from mounds all over Bee-Jor is coming—just to see you.”
“Maybe after that you can die. Haven’t heard how yet. Won’t be bathing you though—too quick and a bit too usual.”
“I’ve heard that if it’s a sunny day, they’ll be putting him in a sun-kiln.”
“No, not the sun-kiln, because then we can’t hear him scream. I like this idea of nailing him to a pole until he dies of thirst. And then we lacquer him and attach his mummy to a plaque to hang in the markets as a warning against termite worship.”
“Whatever they do,” said Goiter as he entered the cage and climbed up the ladder to feed Pleckoo, “we’ve got our own plans. I’m thinking of ripping off his ears and fingers and selling them as trophies.”
“Not a bad idea. Wonder what we could get for his balls?”
“Not sure. Probably get a better price if we keep them together as a matching pair.”
The guards sniggered as Pleckoo was forced to suck down the bladder. He felt the tightness of the ropes as he squirmed with panic while imagining the knives of the guards coming towards his body. It reignited his worst memory, of losing his nose with its endless bleeding and the radiating pain that burned through his face for days. As the sled was tugged into the weeds of Cajoria’s outer rings, he panted and mouthed all of Hulkro’s names in ever quicker rounds. The laborers working in the weeds were shouting to each other, running out to the route to jeer him.
“Look! It’s Pleckoo, the Termite’s catamite!” shouted one old man as he hobbled up on crutches and revealed the single tooth in his mouth as he grinned. “Catamite, catamite, catamite!” he repeated, and others took up the chant along the route. Foragers, hunters, and dew gatherers left their work to stare at the passing cage and to shout and spit and laugh. “Welcome home!” shouted a hunter, who held up a moon roachling that scissored its mandibles. “We’ve prepared a right nice feast for you, Pleckoo! Or rather, we’ve prepared for some things to feast on you.” The jeering increased to an ear-jabbing din until it all turned quieter. The insides of Pleckoo’s ears were as battered as every other part of him, and finally, it seemed, they were failing. He hoped the silence meant that he was deaf now and that blindness would be next, followed by the loss of touch and then . . . death. Soon he would feel nothing and be free of the ropes, free of humans, free of the Sand. Have you killed me, Hulkro, taken me home? I beg you . . .
But it wasn’t death. It was sleep . . . or something like it. He woke with a start when the cage was shoved off the sand-sled to tumble, over and over. He felt his head nearly snap off his neck and heard the crack of its bones, then heard a harsh ringing in his ears. He was upside down when his stomach tightened, then released its contents all over his face, filling his nose and stinging his eyes before he was righted at a dew station on Cajoria’s lowest ring, just above the flats. The cage was near to one of Anand’s new stone structures, with its scrawls and pictures that related his laws. A mob was gathering to curse and shout and spit at the cage with so much sputum that Pleckoo could barely see through the bars.
Something shifted within the crowd when they quieted and parted to allow the passage of a smaller mob that looked both strange and familiar. They were clean and decently dressed but he slowly realized he was looking at his cousins, uncles, and aunts from the midden. After staring at him in a hateful silence, they pulled away for another arrival: a man and woman he was slower to recognize as his mother and her husband. Their hair was cut and combed and their bodies were thicker with nourishment. Here was the man he had called “Father” with a trimmed beard and a dyed tunic, the man who had groped him in the middle of the night, who had grabbed him in the weeds and pushed his head to his crotch and then beaten him for resisting. And now that man was grimacing in rage, brandishing a bright, new dagger and ready to make the first cut. His mother was shaking when she looked in her son’s eyes, then began convulsing as she bawled.
“Pleckoo!” she shouted. “You have shamed us for eternity! Your sins poison us in this life and the World to Come! You have made me the mother of a Hulkrite! Of the worst Hulkrite! A demon worshipper who would have slaughtered his own mother! I cannot live with this shame! I am taking my own life . . . but not until I see you suffer for your crimes and die.”
“We always knew you was worthless,” shouted his father, “that you would bring us shame. But this is the greatest shame of the ages, the shame that knows no end.”
His mother came towards the cage when the guards blocked her. She straightened herself and turned to face the growing mob. “I renounce this man! I disown him!” she screamed. She turned back to Pleckoo, grinding her teeth and jutting her chin. “I don’t know you, Pleckoo of Hulkren, you man-whore to Hulkro!” she screamed, and then spat a great, sliding gob at the cage, then collapsed into her sobbing as her husband went to pull her up.
My mother is a victim of ignorance. Her stupid words mean nothing to me. My mother hates me—so what, he told himself.
But then his eyes ached and were making tears. He felt a trembling as his lungs tightened and his body spasmed. I will not sob like a weak woman before them, not these middenites. Please, Hulkro, if You are going to rescue me, please do it now.
“Go ahead and cry like some little girl seeking pity. You’ll get none of it from us, you man-slut,” shouted his father. And with that, he turned his back on Pleckoo.
The crowd began shouting, “Man-slut,” in unison when Pleckoo smelled a sweet, woody odor. “Thank Hulkro,” he rasped to himself, relieved that his prayer was being answered: the smell of fresh pine was Hulkro manifesting as the Great Wood Eater! At last, He was arriving with a sweet drink of soothing turpentine and would free Pleckoo and carry him up to the World Beyond Stars. The crowd stopped their chanting and was parting, but instead of his god flying towards him on lacy wings, Pleckoo saw a train of carrier ants lugging a cargo-sled. Guards in red-stained armor were sounding thorn horns. “Make way for Her Highness!” the guards shouted, and the crowd turned silent and bowed their heads as Queen Polexima rode up on a bangled ant. Pleckoo did not recognize the hairless woman he saw through the bars, someone who was dressed in the preposterous garb of a Cricket priestess. She came closer to the cage with her chin up, her lips stiff, and her eyes unblinking as she stared through the bars. Her chest was heaving and her teeth were clenched in rage.
“Make way for Their Piouses Dolgeeno and Terraclon,” shouted another guard. Pleckoo looked in disbelief to see a draped and powdered riding ant with prayer sashes tied up its legs that supported both Dolgeeno and Terraclon, the latter with stripes painted on his brown face. Both men were dressed in the purple garb and jewels of the Ultimate Holy! In the center of all his pain, Pleckoo felt a chilling envy to see that Anand’s only friend, that ridiculous, flitting butterfly, had been raised to the level of highest priest. Polexima turned from the cage. “It is him,” she said to the priests. “It is Pleckoo of Hulkren.”
The Prophet of the Termite God Page 28