“He wants to know if we were comfortable last night,” said Daveena.
Anand nodded his head and heard Daveena say, “Dagh, shpeebo.” Yes, thanks. He felt something behind his legs, and realized they had been brought chairs. A table in some loose cloud shape was pushed before them; it was covered with splat-shaped platters bearing roasted seeds steeped in different juices to dye them all the colors of the rainbow. The emperor shouted down at them.
“We are commanded to eat and drink,” said Daveena. “For he wants us alive and well.”
“Dagh, shpeebo,” Anand said, and the emperor almost smiled. As he spoke, Anand took in the details of his costume and felt unsteady.
“He wants to know if Dranveria is going to give him any more trouble,” said Daveena.
“What trouble have they had?”
For the first time, Anand saw that the emperor had hands when he lifted up some spangled sleeves from the folds of the garment. One hand was enormous and clubby looking, with fused fingers, and the other was thin and skeletal. He made a motion of waves.
“‘Dranveria has never warred on the Holy Barley Lands because they are protected by the Great Freshwater Lake. But lately I have reports of more and more Dranverites in their floating wooden houses coming closer to my shore. Are these houses full of soldiers?’”
“No. They are called ships in Dranverish—large boats—and they are full of lake harvesters—the men and women who gather the treasures of the waters to sell and eat.”
The emperor raised his abnormally high eyebrow even higher as the translation was completed.
“‘The Dranverites have conquered the Mushroom Eaters and the Stink Ant people. When are they planning on conquering us?’”
“The Dranverites have not conquered the Slope, nor the Stink Ant people,” Anand said. “And they will not conquer you.”
The emperor cocked his head, looked with suspicion on Anand.
“‘You told me yourself that a Dranverite sits on the throne of Cajoria. And the Dranverites have tested us recently. When we retook our mound of Glixict from the Stink Ant people of the Sycamore Stands, the Dranverites invaded our reacquired territory and polluted it with their red hunter ants. They evicted my subjects after infecting them with a sleeping potion and then dumped them like trash at the old border. One of my subjects is missing.’”
“Your Highness, the people of the Dranverite Collective Nations did no such thing. The Stink Ant people of Glixict were forced into Dranverish lands. The Dranverites evicted your people so that the Stink Ant refugees could return to their homes. I assure you, the Dranverites offer peace to your great nation and the chance to be friends. That is a message that your missing subject will return with in the next year.”
“‘Offers of peace do not come without a demand. Now that the Dranverites have conquered the Slope, they will use it as a bridge to circumvent the lake and steal my empire.’”
“No, Your Highness. Dranveria did not conquer the Slope. They will not take your nation.”
“‘You mean my empire!’”
“Yes, your empire.”
Volokop blinked in the silence and cocked his head as he gathered his thoughts. His next words were quieter.
“He asks if you know their king,” Daveena said, more quietly.
“Dranveria is not ruled by a king. They are not ruled at all. They are governed by an elected council. Their current head is a woman known as the People’s Agent.”
Anand heard Daveena use the Britasyte words for govern, agent, and elected. Volokop grumbled.
“He does not know these words—I do not know how to translate them,” Daveena said to Anand.
“The People’s Agent is the voice of all the people; she represents them, speaks for them, but does not rule them. They chose her as their leader. She leads them, relying on their wishes.”
Volokop laughed in a slow, deep way as Daveena finished her translation.
“‘Do you know this she-voice?’”
“I have met her, yes.”
The emperor looked at his priest and the both of them shook their heads in disgust.
“‘This notion of letting people rule themselves is a dangerous one, bad for them, like giving a baby a blade of razor-grass as a toy. You, Dranverite, will take a message to this People’s Agent. Tell her we have slaughtered the Hulkrites. Tell them the Slope is ours, and that they must abandon all aspirations to it. Tell them they must withdraw this Dranverite they have placed on the throne of Cajoria or we will send them his bones in a bag. Tell the Dranverites to stay in the lands beyond my lake, or we will drive them and their red ants over the Edge of the World to fall for eternity.’”
Daveena paused in her translation. “Be careful, what you say next,” she added in her own voice. “Find some agreement with him.”
“Majesty, yes,” said Anand, forcing a shallow bow. “I will relay your message on my immediate return to Bee-Jor. But I speak the fullest truth: the Dranverites have not conquered the Slope. And they will not conquer your Barley Lands.”
The emperor shook his head before speaking, looking at Anand as if he was little more than a mischievous brat. Daveena was breathing hard as she relayed his words, her eyes wide with panic.
“‘No, little roach-eater. You will not return to Bee-Jor. You will take my message to Dranveria now.’”
Anand was silent. He nodded his head in subservience.
“I will bring your message to the Dranverites, Your Majesty. As soon as I return my wife to our families in Bee-Jor.”
“‘Impossible. We are preparing for war. Your wife will be safe here, with us, as my guest. You will go to Dranveria now. And if the Dranverites are concerned for the lives of the Mushrooms Eaters, they can host them once we drive them out.’”
The emperor’s head disappeared, dropping below his collar. Anand and Daveena watched as a slit in the garment opened to reveal an old and almost naked man, who hobbled towards them wearing nothing more than a vast loincloth around his body, which was a complete mass of deformities. His arms were both swollen and atrophied. One side of his chest was puffed and lumpy while the other revealed his rib cage. His legs were the strangest thing of all, huge trunks of bulbous, ropy flesh with calves that looked pregnant with adults. The voluminous garment he had left was more of a shell for his body than a tent. He came closer in his heavy waddle, towards Anand, who tried and failed not to react to his jarring appearance. The emperor grinned with his lopsided mouth, delighting in the shock he had produced and laughing in a slow way that made his deformities jiggle. When he turned towards Daveena, he bent his head and got too close to her. She turned her face away from him, having felt and smelled his breath as he spoke.
“He says, ‘Do not worry about this big, beautiful girl with her skin like the night while you are gone. I will take very good care of her . . . and the little one who lives inside her.’”
The emperor shouted to the bonneted attendants lining the wall. They threw back their hats, then raised their swords from out of their robes. Anand reached for his blowgun when he felt a sword piercing his back.
“He says to drop it,” Daveena said, then gave with a cry of pain when the tip of a blade pricked her own back.
The emperor was standing before Anand now, his skeletal hand extended.
“He says, ‘I know exactly what that is. And I thank you for bringing us one,’” said Daveena as she panted in fear. Anand breathed hard and looked into the dark green of the soldiers’ eyes surrounding him. He took the blowgun from around his neck and handed it to Volokop, who stared at it, amused, as he considered its function. Anand felt something damp and heavy fall over him. The soldiers had thrown a wet blanket over his head that reeked with the poisonous stink of the harvester ant’s war spray. He was sick and dizzy in an instant. When he fell to the floor, his limp body was picked up and stuffed in a box with holes in its lid.
“Daveena,” he tried to shout, and felt his lips move, but no sound came from his throat.
The last thing he heard was her shrieking his name as she fell on the box and grasped at its lid.
The emperor’s guards had their blades in Daveena’s back as her shrieking turned to sobbing. “Where are you taking him?”
“I have told you. He is on his way to Dranveria.”
Lord Madricanth, no! The Seed Eaters will trample over Bee-Jor without Anand in command.
“But you can’t! It’s unwise! He’s not safe there!”
“Madame Roach Rider, I can do anything I want. Never tell me otherwise. I am the emperor,” said Volokop. “Do not worry, Sweet Darkling. Once he has passed my message, he can return. Part of my message will be that if he is killed or wounded, they will be inviting their own destruction. Let me show you your home while you are our guest here.”
Volokop signaled to one of the servants who waited nearby with a simpler garment for him, a floor-length robe of shimmering orange cloth that Daveena recognized as a Britasyte product. His body trudged up the short staircase of the palace sled with a series of thumps. He invited Daveena to sit next to him, patting the divan’s cushion with something like a polite smile, as if she were his wife or daughter. The sled veered around the throne to another tunnel with an entry shaped like a worm squirming from a star. The tunnel turned dark before the sled entered a chamber that had been divided with a wall of bars. Bonneted guards stood on the far sides of what Daveena realized was a cage for a hundred people.
She looked through the bars and saw the silhouettes of men and women who were pacing and muttering prayers against the amber light of a large quartz window—they were also on display to the public. The prisoners came to the bars and looked at Daveena and the emperor with a mix of fear and curiosity. As she got closer she could see the prisoners’ skin and clothes and recognized them as Slopeites. All had yellow-white skin and were wearing expensive if greasy-looking garments. The women were the highborn wives of officers and royalty, and the men, from their purple robes, were priests. As her eyes adjusted, she saw that all of them had scabby, nubby patches where they should have had right ears. The smell of putrefying flesh assaulted her nose, and she looked at the left of the cage to see a pile of corpses in neatly stacked piles. The dead were still dressed in their finery, but rotting and stinking.
“These are my guests from the mounds they call Dinth and Habach in the Slopeites’ tongue,” said Volokop. “I await their ransom, but have received no message from the Mushroom Eaters. I really can’t afford to feed them anymore,” he said, followed by a phlegmy laugh that sounded like choking. “We sent a message to Venaris through your roach people that we held these prisoners. We were hoping to negotiate their return, but it seems that message was not delivered.”
“If you paid to send this message through the Britasytes, then they delivered it,” said Daveena, who was shaken, breathing hard. “I am sure these people have been forgotten, with all that has happened on the Slope . . . rather, on what used to be the Slope.”
Volokop sighed in an exaggerated way. “So. My prisoners no longer have value. They look important, but perhaps they are little more than garbage. Maybe I should just toss them in a pit with some moon roaches as a bit of entertainment for my subjects.”
“I don’t speak much Slopeish but I will make some inquiries,” said Daveena as the guards pulled out something like a drawer at the bottom of the cage and pointed to it.
“If it please you,” said the emperor. Daveena realized she was to lie at the bottom of the drawer to be pushed through a slot. She complied and stepped out of the drawer on the other side of the bars. The Slopeites looked at her with a silent hatred, then just as soon turned away to ponder their own misery. She looked to her right, at the pile of corpses, and wondered how they had died.
Will I die here too? How long will I wait?
“You will be well taken care of while I am gone,” said Volokop. “When I get back we can chat again.”
“Your Majesty,” Daveena shouted at him as he climbed his sled. He turned very slowly to look at her.
“May I ask . . . where are you going?”
“To prepare for war, of course. To squash the Mushroom Eaters and exterminate their yellow ants.”
“If you destroy the Slopeites and kill all their ants, there will be no more Slopeish cloths and clay vessels and mushrooms. And no more of the . . . procheskya brezen.”
Volokop froze. “The seers’ slime? What do the Slopeites have to do with the slime?”
“It comes from inside their mounds—scraped from the ceilings of the ants’ mushroom gardens. By their priests.”
He was silent, coming towards her again, making a slow descent down the sled’s ladder with his misshapen legs. “You have lied to us.”
“I am telling the truth.”
“But the Britasytes have lied to us! For centuries! They told us the slime was gathered by the tree people of Kozendor from the tops of redwoods that scrape it from the chin of the Moon.”
Daveena was silent, looked away.
“Your husband said half the Slopeites live in the West, yes? And half live in this Dranverite nation of Bee-Jor on our border. Is that correct?”
“Something like that,” she said.
“Then I will take this Bee-Jor as mine. And leave the West to its old ways.”
Chapter 37
Strange Ideas
Terraclon couldn’t enjoy a single moment of flying his locust with his head pounding with so many worries.
He had seen the Seed Eaters’ gathered troops all along the eastern border, their harvester ants being gorged, saddled, and stilted for war. He swooped low over the camps to see the sacrificial pits they were digging. Rag-clad laborers were hauling sand grains and baskets of soil atop their heads, which they dumped atop rising piles. From what Anand had told him, these piles would be pushed back over the laborers themselves, once they were murdered at the pits’ bottoms and had barley seeds rolled on top of them to grow from their decaying flesh. On the east side of the pits he saw erections of the wood-and-straw idols of their moon/war god, mounted on a night-blue mantis. The camps were crowded with laborers but had few soldiers. As Anand had told him, these were all feints. One of them would swell to become the real point of attack, but he had yet to see which one.
Hesitant to fly further east, he knew he must when he picked up the sweaty scent of Seed Eater men. It was a stink like rotting onions, a smell he knew too well from his days in the midden. He looked over his shoulder at the squadron that followed him. Most of the twenty locusts and their pilots were dutifully flying behind him, but one had been lost to the locust’s fatigue or hunger. The squadron veered around Xixict, the mound Anand had returned to Emperor Volokop. He saw but a few harvester ants crawling from under the mound’s rain shield. The ants and humans had just established their colony and were likely low in both numbers. The ants he saw were small, and they struggled with the corpses of dead leaf-cutters, which they ported to their outdoor midden.
The smell of men got stronger, and mixed with that of the Great Freshwater Lake with its essence of algae and mud. Just south of the lake, Terraclon saw a growing human presence over a grassless clearing. He promptly signaled for the squadron to fly up to avoid detection. As his nose had told him, the real army was here, a mass of hundreds of thousands, with just as many ants waiting inside an uncountable sprawl of cages. The Seed Eaters’ plan, so obvious from above, was to draw the Bee-Jorites to multiple feints near the South, while their real attack would be on the North. Terraclon felt something like a sharp punch to the stomach when he realized the enemy’s true intention: they were going to take Cajoria. They’ve figured out where our capital is! Chop off the centipede’s head and kill the rest of the body!
He signaled a return to Mound Shishto with a slow turn of his palm. The flight back was an easy but anxious one, and the bright sun of the Southwest stabbed at his eyes. As the mound came into view, he prayed to Cricket that Anand and his caravan had returned, at last, from their foolish mission. It
’s less than half a moon before the Barley people attack. And Anand, my brother, you are still out there!
He felt his back and arms tensing with a new wave of worries, something that passed into the locust when her flight went awry. She dove, then rose, then tilted and jerked. He gritted his teeth, then relaxed both his jaw and his grip, righting the locust with short strokes of the antennae, which steadied the speed of her wings. Just as she settled on a smooth current, his eye was drawn to distant sparkles. My prayers have been answered! he thought when he sighted a chain of brown crawlers, and behind them, jewel-crusted sand-sleds making their way west.
“Anand! Thank Cricket!” he said, and smiled for the first time in days. He raised his fingers and made a circling motion to signal the squadron to spiral and land. As the locusts circled lower and made crawling stops, the border guards of Shishto rode out to meet them.
“Quegdoth and the roach people are returning!” Terraclon screeched after landing, and just as soon, he regretted using such a high and excited voice. “Dismantle the wall!” he shouted, forcing a deeper and more commanding tone.
The guards looked at him in silence and then away in shame.
“Quegdoth is returning!” Terraclon shouted. “The wall must be opened!”
“Who are you?” one of them asked, a dark-skinned man whose face had been a scowl all its life.
“Oh. Good Shishites, forgive me, as . . . I forgive you. I am your . . . Ultimate Pious Terraclon,” he said, unconvinced of it himself and trying to look imperious. He remembered he was in a pilot’s simple garb and was without so much as a cape. “I, uh, yes . . . this,” he muttered as he reached into his tunic and pulled out the amethyst medallion that marked his office. “Blessings of all gods upon the people of Shishto. Karikshus al quikshi-bya Shishto-teela,” he added, making up some words that sounded like the holy tongue. This triggered bows of the head and set the guards to action. Commands were passed in the words of working men’s Slopeish as the pilots led the locusts to the nearby crowding cages for rest and wet straw.
The Prophet of the Termite God Page 33