The Illustrated PROPHETS OF THE GHOST ANTS: Part One, The Roach Boy

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The Illustrated PROPHETS OF THE GHOST ANTS: Part One, The Roach Boy Page 1

by Clark Thomas Carlton




  The Illustrated

  Prophets of the Ghost Ants

  Part 1

  The Roach Boy

  By Clark Thomas Carlton

  Illustrations by Mozchops

  Copyright © 2011 Clark Thomas Carlton

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by MOZCHOPS

  http://m0zch0ps.deviantart.com/

  eBook edition by eBooks By Barb for booknook.biz

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Map

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  1. The Lowliest Subject of the Sorceress Queen

  2. The Place of the Lowest Caste

  3. The Sorceress Queen of Mound Cajoria

  4. Surviving the Sting

  5. The Trip to the Swamp

  6. The Fission Lottery

  7. The Night of Inseminations

  8. The Roach Tribe

  9. Promises

  10. Departure

  11. Royal Journeys North and South

  12. The Longest Night

  13. Mound Palzhad

  14. The Ghost Ants of Hulkren

  15. The Anointing of Queen Trellana

  About the Author and Illustrator

  For Jim M.

  What you said was so inspiring!

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The author wishes to thank Michael Colleary and Mike Werb for their expert analysis and suggestions. For their enthusiasm and support, he thanks Lawrence Bender, Caren Bohrman, Mike Dobson, and Janet Jeffries. Thanks also to Ann Creel, Robb McCaffree, and Robert Rodi for their careful reading of the manuscript and to Polly Grose, who made the illustrated version possible. Special thanks to Dr. Edward O. Wilson, the Second Darwin, for his magnificent contributions to science.

  “Humans arose as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway…”

  Stephen Jay Gould, evolutionary biologist

  PROLOGUE

  Locust, the sky god, was enraged with His Creation. Humans had come to dominate Mother Sand and, in their arrogance, built mounds of Her grains that poked through Locust’s clouds. In His anger, he hurled a Great Boulder, sending up a dust storm that plunged the world into a freezing darkness that spared few beings. Surviving humans went underground, grew smaller, and waited for the Age of Dust to subside. When they re-emerged, the humans starved, for all other creatures of red blood were extinct and plants and trees would be dormant for ages. Over a thousand eons, the humans who endured grew smaller and smaller still, shrinking to one-ten-thousandth of their original size. They competed for food with the Sand’s other survivors, the six- and eight-legged creatures whose blood runs green.

  Too tiny to threaten the gods again, the humans’ dominion over the Sand was regained when they realized their survival was not in warring with insects but in living among them. Different gods granted different tribes the knowledge that enabled them to deceive, infiltrate, and exploit the ants; but no race of men was more loved by the gods than the Slopeites, a semi-divine tribe, descended from Goddess Ant Queen and Her mortal consort, Rahtsu, the Warrior King. Ant Queen gave the Slopeites the holy leaf-cutter ants: the growers of mushrooms and the fiercest, most beautiful and useful of all insects.

  —From the Oral Traditions of the Slopeish Priesthood

  PART ONE

  The Roach Boy of Mound Cajoria,

  a Human-Inhabited Ant Colony

  of the Great and Holy Slope

  Chapter 1

  The Lowliest Subject of the Sorceress Queen

  “Shit,” muttered Anand, the word that summed up his existence. He had been knocked to the sand by a blowfly as big as himself. It crawled over his prostrate body and mopped his face with its pulpy mouthparts. Anand kicked out from under the fly then stood and used his batting pole to beat it back into flight. He wiped his face and sighed before resuming his harness.

  The morning was typical for him, stinking and noisy with hovering insects as he lugged a vat of human waste away from Mound Cajoria. The most merciless of gods, Sun, was shining with all His cruelty and Anand sweated and strained as he trudged through a stretch of scorching sand. He beat his feet over the flattest part of each sand grain and avoided those with edges that could slice through his sandals.

  At last he reached his destination, a density of weeds on Cajoria’s northwest border. He looked up at a stalk of mint leaves and took a moment to rest in its fragrant shade. Once he caught his breath, he pulled back a leaf-tarp and dumped his loathsome cargo. The flies that had shadowed him dropped from the air to converge on the waste. The fattest of them buzzed her wings, scattering the others as she crowded them off the muck.

  As one end of her ate, the other sank its abdomen into the moisture to lay an egg. In her compound eyes, Anand saw a thousand reflections of himself, indistinct and tiny, one of the countless masses. When the fly turned its iridescent body, he saw himself in a large and single reflection: a brown-skinned boy with defiant eyes, powerful limbs, and hair as black and glossy as tar. He smiled to see the whiskers on his chin. It prompted him to finger the fifteen chits he wore around his neck, one for each of his years. I am almost a man, he thought, but what kind of life is this for a man?

  Blowflies interrupted Anand’s thoughts when they flew back to fight over the waste. Their buzzing made his skull vibrate with a terrible ache. He wanted to kill the flies with the sharp end of his batting pole, but that privilege belonged to the sons of the hunting caste. They should have been there to slay these pests and then port their corpses to the merchants… but where were they? From the faint sound of it, Anand figured the hunters were deeper in the weeds and locked in some delightful combat. He wandered into the thicket to see what made them whoop and holler.

  He followed their voices to a dandelion flower just turned to a great and towering seed clock. Under its leaves were several boys of Anand’s age surrounding a black, glistening centipede. The creature was huge and hairy and looked to be two-headed as it rose up on both ends and waved its hundred claws. Scattered over its loamy home were droppings full of bones and skulls from humans it had eaten.

  “That’s the head,” shouted Skylo, a young man of sixteen with yellowish skin and leaf-green eyes. He had recognized the true head from the pincers below its mouth, the points of which were beaded with poison. The boys ran under the centipede’s safer end, where they thrust spears between its belly scales. Each puncture sent the creature into violent convulsions. As it snapped and thrashed, it whipped the boys with its legs and knocked them to the ground. It rose up, turned on them, then lunged with its pincers. The boys ran under leaf cover, laughing when it missed them.

  Weak and leaking blood, the centipede wobbled as it poised to strike again. When its head dropped, the rest of its body collapsed on the sand. The hunters ran in with their swords. Skylo skewered its brain as the rest chopped off its legs.

  Centipedes were inedible, but Skylo set about severing the head from its body. This he would deliver to the Cajorite priests who would reward him for its precious poison. Other boys joined him and hacked until the head fell away. Nearby was a hollowed acorn that one boy played like a barrel drum. Another joined him and started a chant. The rest picked up the centipede’s legs and danced with them around the corpse.

  As he spied on them, Anand was filled with an envy that choked him from inside. He wondered if he had ever known such joy in his life. His envy grew as he watched t
he hunters climb the stalk of the seed clock. Skylo was the first to reach the seeds and plucked a few by their stems. At their ends were the fluffy domes of threads that caught the wind. He widened his arms, waited for a breeze, then jumped.

  Anand watched as the boy bobbed and floated before he alighted on a distant barley comb. After Skylo released the seeds, he bounced down the spiral of the barley stalk’s leaves. When he reached the ground, he ran back, eager to do it again. He paused when he noticed Anand peering from behind the pebble and stopped to scowl at his dark features.

  “Why aren’t you at work?” Skylo asked before he noticed Anand’s earlobe was clipped, the mark of an outcaste. Skylo winced, regretting he had addressed this boy at all.

  “Why aren’t you?” Anand whispered, and turned away.

  “What? What did you say?”

  Anand was quiet.

  “Don’t dare speak to me, shit-scraper, especially like that,” said the hunter, pinching his nose as if Anand stank. “Hang your head and apologize or we can find a centipede to throw you to.”

  “I’m sorry,” Anand said, as he turned toward Skylo and knelt. After a moment of silent shaming, the hunter ran back to the others.

  Anand was dragging his pole back to the vat when he heard a thump and a muffled scream. He turned in Skylo’s direction and froze to see a bloodsucker flea with Skylo bleeding in its barbed fore-claws. The bristled, disc-like monster was five times as tall as a man, crouching on powerful hind legs. Anand felt his heart jump into his head then thump in his ears.

  The flea clamped its head around Skylo’s torso. A dagger-like stipe emerged from its mouth and plunged between his ribs. Dual suckers, from deeper in the mouth, slithered over his chest then sank into the incision. With a sickening slurp, Skylo was turned to a bloodless husk. The flea’s body was translucent and Anand grew nauseous to watch as its abdomen bloated with blood.

  “Fleas!” Anand shouted to the others climbing to the seeds. They were too distant and lost in their chatter to hear him. The bloodsucker dropped the shriveled corpse as tiny antennae popped from its head and waved their hairy sensors. The flea caught Anand’s scent, pivoted towards him, then crouched to spring. Anand knew it was useless to run. He dropped to his knees and held up the sharp end of his pole.

  Anand jerked upright when the flea jumped. As the insect fell on him, he thrust the pole upwards and pierced its middle. The insect toppled, pinning the boy to the sand. As the flea died, its wound smeared Anand with human and insect blood.

  He knew fleas traveled in hordes, so he reached for his dagger as he wriggled out. “Fleas! FLEAS!” he shouted, running towards the seed clock. Once the boys heard him, Anand raced to the open sand under cover of the lowest weeds. The hunters leapt to the sand to run and hide.

  Dozens of fleas were plummeting into the weeds as Anand ran. He heard the hunters’ screaming and then their sudden silence as the fleas drained their blood. Zigzagging through a rain of fleas, Anand ran over the sand and reached the closest of the warning towers built among the weeds. He scrambled up a ladder to a platform under a wooden bell with a scent-bladder tied to a post.

  Anand slashed the bladder with his knife, releasing a powder of pungent alarm-scent, then grabbed the rope that trailed from the bell. As he swung up and into the air, a flea sprang at him. Anand raised his feet, kicked into the flea’s head and sent it into a spiraling fall. As the bell sounded a warning, the flea landed on its side, righted itself, and attacked again.

  The flea was in mid-leap when an arrow pierced it, sending it into a spin. Anand jumped from the rope to the platform and saw a leaf-cutter sentry ant rushing over the sand, its antennae a blur as they waved. Riding on the back of the sentry was its master, a human soldier from the border patrol. The man’s thighs gripped his saddle as his hands readied weapons.

  The ant’s antennae picked up the smell of the fleas. In response, it raised its gaster and sprayed recruit-scent on the breeze. Within moments, dozens of sentry ants and their human riders rushed into the weeds, flushing out the fleas. As they jumped up, the humans pierced them with spears and arrows. The ants rushed to the fallen fleas and used their pincers to slice through their bellies and shear their legs.

  Atop the platform Anand watched, and caught his breath as the fleas retreated north, vaulting over the weeds. Smaller ants without riders converged on the flea corpses, slicing them into pieces to haul away in a single column. Surviving hunter-boys emerged from the cracks of rocks or pebbles they had burrowed under. One boy had lodged himself in the ribs of a fallen but poisonous mushroom and his skin was swollen with itchy bumps.

  Anand shook, waiting under the bell as a group of officers abandoned their ants to climb the tower he occupied. Their honey-colored armor creaked as they took the rungs. Anand feared these soldiers more than he feared the fleas. He kept his head down as they mounted the platform and dared not look them in the face.

  “Look up,” said their captain, who took note of the boy’s rags. Anand revealed his brown face and the ear that identified his status.

  “Good gods. He’s from the midden,” said a soldier, pinching his nose.

  “And he’s got skin as brown as a roach eater,” said another.

  “This entire tower is polluted,” said the captain. “It will have to be chopped down and rebuilt.”

  He addressed Anand but did not look in his eyes. “We must cut off your arm, middenite, for polluting royal property. Stick it out… left or right as you wish.”

  The captain unsheathed his sword, his favorite weapon ever, and then looked at it with regret. Once he had used it on this outcaste, he would have to throw it away. From the corner of his eye, Anand could see the captain’s skin was so fair that his blood pulsed blue in the veins of his temple.

  “Good soldier, allow me to speak,” said Anand looking down. “I sounded the alarm because others were under attack – it was not to save myself. Several hunter boys died, but I see that some live – thanks to the keen aim of you and your men.”

  “That’s true, Captain,” said a soldier in the back. “The survivors all pissed themselves… unlike this one.”

  The captain sighed. He wanted to punish Anand, but he liked his sword more with its cunning engraving of Mantis, the war goddess. “Come, men. We must collect the husks of the dead and return them to their families. And you,” he said to Anand, “should praise Lord Grasshopper for His mercy.”

  Anand knew not to thank the soldiers as they filed down, for even his gratitude was polluted. He had new worries. He would be late in returning to the midden, the most reviled place in all Cajoria. As he hurried home, he wondered what punishment his foreman had in mind.

  Chapter 2

  The Place of the Lowest Caste

  It was only mid-day, but Anand’s father, Yormu, was numb with fatigue and his brown skin was slippery with sweat as he toiled in the midden, the place where both ants and humans brought their waste and enemy corpses. Yormu had spent the morning dissecting a dead tarantula, a messy and tedious process that always made him itch. Just as he was finishing, soldier ants, the largest leaf-cutters of all, filed in from the east with human and insect corpses held aloft in their jaws. They had come in triumph from a border skirmish with the men and ants of the Seed Eater Nation.

  Yormu moaned as he watched the corpses pile up. The dead humans and their harvester ants were dumped together and would have to be sorted. The human dead had to be hauled to the swamp, but their ants, with their giant seed-milling heads, would be salvaged for parts, food, and fluids. Yormu was assigned to open the harvesters’ gullets to extract their puddings of crushed seeds.

  He was frowning at the enormity of his task when sentry ants poured in from the West from the flea attack – even more corpses. These had to be salvaged right away since fleas were a favorite food of the military caste. Yormu suddenly remembered his son had been sent to the weeds. Had Anand fallen to a bloodsucker?

  He would have shouted Anand’s name, but Yormu the M
ute had no front teeth and only a stub of a tongue, the rest of which had been cut off by a sheriff. Yormu clutched his blade in panic and raced to the water station. He sliced a drop into a mushroom cone and snuck off to look for his boy.

  Close to home, Anand was slowed when his route was overwhelmed with the caste of ants that gave the leaf-cutters their name. The foraging ants had stripped leaves from a distant tree and were returning to the mound with their pieces. The ants paraded past him with their leaf shards up high, providing Anand with some flickering shade.

  As Anand was jostled in the foragers’ traffic, a few dropped their cargo to rub their antennae and sniff the pair he wore in a headband fashioned from straw. Anand’s antennae, like his skin and clothing, were coated in the ant’s kin-scent. “Yes, I’m one of you,” he muttered as they identified him as one of their million sisters before moving on.

  Yormu exhaled in relief to see his son’s distant figure as he struggled to emerge from the foragers’ parade, but his eyes popped when he saw the boy’s rags were drenched with blood. “Don’t worry, Dad,” Anand shouted. “I’m not bleeding.”

  Yormu sniffled, wiped away a tear, and ran to his son to hand him the cone. The boy’s mouth was fuzzy with thirst and he sucked down the drop in an instant. He was eating the cone when Keel, the foreman, tromped over with his whip. “Yormu!” he shouted. “Who said you could bring water to your bastard?”

  Keel was the largest of the middenites and had a lipless slash of a mouth. Like all in his caste, his right ear lobe was cut off to identify his polluted status but his left lobe was newly clipped to distinguish him as foreman. Good with the whip, he lashed Yormu, who fell to his knees from the force. Blood surfaced from gashes in his back as Keel raised the whip again. Anand threw himself between the men.

  “Whip me if you have to whip someone!” the boy shouted. No hint of fear was in his voice as his eyes pierced Keel’s. The foreman lowered his arm.

 

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