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

by Clark Thomas Carlton

  “I won’t whip you, Roach Boy,” said Keel. “Your blood might blind my eyes. Why are you so late?”

  “I was caught in the flea attack. I had to sound the alarm.”

  Keel addressed Yormu as he struggled to stand. “Your bastard’s a liar, Yormu, like all Roach people. Now get back to it, both of you, or I’ll dock your mushrooms for a month.”

  Anand watched with concern as his father limped back to the corpse piles, then returned to his usual work, the cleaning of chamber pots. He reached for one with a lid that had a quartz inlay of the emblem of Cajoria’s sorceress queen. Inside it were contents that were rather less elegant.

  As he scraped, then washed it, Anand was coming to understand that royal night soil was as malodorous as any commoner’s. Lost in his thoughts, he had not realized a pack had gathered behind him. When they pitched sand grains at his back, he turned to see who provoked him.

  It was his usual enemies, led by Tal, the eldest son of Keel. Since his father had become foreman, Tal had grown fat from stuffing himself with insect salvage. He had great and drooping cheeks, giving the impression that his chin and buttocks had switched places. He looked over his shoulder to see that his father and the men were distracted in the distance.

  “Those are royal pots, Roach Boy,” said Tal, “and they’re for decent Cajorites to clean, not some roach-eater’s son.”

  Anand’s anger felt like maggots feasting inside him. Not a day passed in which his mother was not insulted. He was aware that all the boys had dropped their tasks. Like manure flies, they were buzzing around the two, ready to revel in the roach boy’s weekly humiliation.

  “It’s not me who stinks,” Anand said. “It’s the shit on your breath, Tal. Maybe your mother could make you a proper breakfast instead of reaching between her legs.”

  Anand took a chamber pot and swung its contents into Tal’ s face. Tal was doubly startled; he was not used to defiance and now he was blinded and choking on excrement. As he scraped at his face, the others rushed Anand and grabbed his arms, stretching them back.

  “It’s time you were dead, you brown bastard,” said Tal. “Time to wash your kin-scent off you and give you to the ants!” He kicked Anand with a powerful thrust to the stomach.

  “I can’t breathe!” Anand managed to wheeze, but his words were lost in the howling laughter. He blacked out and went limp as the boys threw him head first into the vat. He sank to its bottom.

  The boys fell to the ground in laughter. They waited for the moment he would pop up, covered in muck, to run towards the scenting tubs. They waited a moment, and then another, and then the laughter stopped.

  Something was wrong. They searched each other’s eyes.

  “Someone better pull him out before he drowns,” Tal whispered, worried that he might be executed for destroying royal property.

  But no one reached for Anand. They watched and waited for him to emerge. The muck was all too still.

  Chapter 3

  The Sorceress Queen of Mound Cajoria

  As Anand lay at the bottom of the vat, the foraging ants continued their climb up the mound on the essential task of delivering their leaves. After skirting the midden, they passed through 127 levels where different castes worked at specific labors. The first rings were the colorless slums of the laboring humans, an expanse of one-room shelters built on stilts and made from sand grains glued together with ant dung. Nearer to the mound, the leaf-cutters crawled through the rings of craftsmen and traders. These castes were privileged to live in two-room hovels of sand bound by sulfurous tar.

  At a higher elevation were the treasure-stuffed homes of the merchants, constructed from white sand fused with fragrant resins. At the next level were the black sand barracks of the soldiers and above these were their generals’ austere mansions. On top of these, and in marked contrast, were the priests’ ornate rectories. These were fashioned from grains of rose quartz and embedded with images of the Cajorites’ gods.

  Finally the foragers reached the crystal palaces of the royal family. As the ants marched over these magnificent structures, their leaves reflected in a golden lacquer. The palaces encircled the mound’s opening, which was guarded by four ants with giant heads that locked and unlocked as a living gate.

  Once inside the mound, the ants descended to deliver their leaves to the dark, deep chambers of the chewing ants. This caste would make a rough carpet by shearing the leaves into tiny pieces. Smaller ants, the fungus growers, would chew these pieces into a fine paste, fertilize it with liquid manure, and then infuse it with threads of fungus. The threads would stalk and fruit into the sacred mushrooms, the staple food of both the ants and the human parasites that lived among them.

  Once they made their delivery, the foragers exited for a second trip and more leaves. They spiraled past a stately train of silk-draped riding ants with noisy bangles clasped above their claws. Atop the lead ant was Queen Polexima, the most important human in all Cajoria. She and her entourage were just returning from the essential ritual she practiced each day as the mound’s sorceress.

  In the ninth month of her ninth pregnancy, riding had become difficult for the queen. Two things were on her mind as she entered the tunnel that led to her palace: lunch and a comfortable seat. Once in her chambers, she sat down to savor a sun-baked swamp fly as her servant informed her of the flea attack.

  “Good gods,” she said. “Did anyone die?”

  “Eight hunters… all of them boys,” said Mulga, a woman from the servant caste with freckles as numerous as stars.

  “Children? How horrible.” Polexima pushed her food away, having lost her appetite. She tried to hide her moistening eyes.

  “Majesty,” said Mulga, somewhat shyly. “Your hair could use a bit of brushing.”

  “Oh, thank you. Bring me my toiletries, please.”

  In a hand mirror fashioned from the wing of a water beetle, Polexima saw her yellow-white hair was now streaked with silver. Her pale skin with its golden undertones had grown more wrinkled about her eyes and mouth. After thirty-nine summers, she saw that she was somewhere between being a fabled beauty and a faded one. “What did you expect?” she muttered to herself, “that it wouldn’t happen to you?” Suddenly, the queen dropped the mirror and clutched her belly.

  “Mulga…” she gasped.

  The queen’s tone frightened the servant as well as the twenty others in the chamber. They were as still as stone as they stared at their queen.

  “Yes, Highness?”

  “It’s time.”

  The servant continued to stare.

  “Mulga, will you run and summon the priests, please?”

  “Yes, Majesty. Apologies.”

  As her cushion soaked with fluid, Polexima’s mind flooded with painful concerns. She exhaled sharply and calmed herself as Mulga scurried through the vast chamber and its furnishings carved of amber. To reach the outside pathways, Mulga crawled through a short tunnel, then pushed through a portal whose flaps kept the ants out.

  Standing under the shade of the mound’s rain shield, the servant tied on her band of antennae before entering a dense traffic of ants and humans. She was trembling when she stopped before a gathering of others from her caste. They were picking up the day’s drinking water at the royal dew station where a man wearing a bucket shaped hat stood on a sand sled and used a broad knife to slice water from a barrel.

  “What’s wrong with you?” asked Mulga’s sister, who served the crown princess.

  “The Queen – her water’s broken.”

  Everyone gasped. The dew collector dropped his knife. Some fell to their knees and others fainted. All of them turned to their gods in prayer.

  They should have been praying for the queen’s health and blessings for the new heir. Instead, they were praying she give birth to a male, or at least a female whose life would be brief.

  Chapter 4

  Surviving the Sting

  “He’s drowning!” said a shaky voice some distance from the vat of ex
crement. It belonged to Terraclon, a stick of a boy, who squeezed through the circle of Anand’s abusers. Terraclon was held in almost as much contempt as Anand, and his presence repulsed the others into stepping away.

  Terraclon thrust his arms, as thin as a mosquito’s needle, into the vat. Using all his strength, he pulled Anand out but sent the vat tumbling. Anand coughed and flopped in the filth. The other boys scurried back to work just as their fathers noticed the commotion.

  Yormu felt stabbed to see what had happened to his son. How many times had they thrown him in a vat this month? Yormu was running towards his boy when Keel grabbed his arm.

  “Don’t run to him, Yormu. He makes his messes. Let him clean it up.”

  Yormu clenched his fists with rage. If only he could speak his mind! He wished for a tongue so long and sharp it could lop off Keel’s head.

  After Anand and Terraclon refilled the vat, they removed their muck with a bath in the scenting tubs. As Anand sank under the dome of water, he imagined the time he could leave Cajoria and return in the trappings of the richest trader. He would go to the Cajorites’ priests to purchase Keel, Tal and his other tormentors. Afterwards, he would sell them to an enemy nation where, for the rest of their lives, gawkers would pelt them with trash in pits at public showings.

  The boys were drying off when they heard a hubbub among the middenites. All had left their work to gather and stare at the top of the mound. Banners were hanging from the rain shield’s edges.

  “Look, Anand,” said Terraclon. “Yellow banners! The queen is giving birth again. You know what it means if it’s a girl who lives.”

  “Fission,” said Anand. “A new princess may mean a new colony.”

  Terraclon shuddered. “Don’t say it out loud, Anand!”

  “Why not? Fission would be a good thing.”

  “Fission is never good. It tears families apart.” Looking away from Anand, he added, “And friends. Tears them apart, too.”

  “The people of this mound are starving. It’s better they divide than die.”

  A northern breeze sent dead leaves and dust whirling over the boys. Anand sniffed the air and savored the strange scents of some distant land. He had no fear of being forced to a new colony for a few more months. As the most miserable boy in the most miserable caste, any change was welcome.

  *

  Queen Polexima was used to giving birth to twins and triplets. It was more difficult with this single infant, whose enormous head was crowning.

  “Push, Your Majesty,” said the midwife as the mound’s high priest, His Most Pious Dolgeeno, arrived with his entourage. A man of fifty-three summers, Dolgeeno had small eyes lost in a heavy face. He had three, sometimes four chins. It had taken his priests a good part of the day to dress for the royal delivery. Their pollen-powdered faces of yellow contrasted with cassocks of deepest purple. As hats, they had agreed on miters over fuzz cones, but they had fought and fussed over necklaces and bracelets before deciding to wear them all. Dolgeeno led the other priests in a chant circle around Polexima’s bed as her baby broke through. The midwife gasped.

  “Show it to me,” said Polexima.

  The midwife hesitated before picking up the infant and turning her to the sight of the others.

  “Good gods,” said Polexima, “a girl!”

  The queen could not hold back tears. Flooded with emotion, she had not realized her legs were apart when Dolgeeno glanced between them. He had done so only for the pleasure of humiliating her. Her hatred for him flared as he approached with his knife. He severed the umbilical cord, held the infant upside down, and slapped her buttocks to make her cry.

  Polexima saw that the baby was large and strong and perhaps could survive the poison. Please, Grasshopper, let her live, she prayed to the god of riches and mercy.

  The infant was freed of her placenta as the jaw of a patrolling sentry ant broke through the greased flap of the chamber’s window. Alerted by the newborn’s odor, its antenna slid through the window in search of an intruder it would have to kill.

  “Hurry, please!” the queen said.

  “That sentry is too large to break in,” said Dolgeeno.

  “But she’s spraying alarm-recruit scent,” Polexima shouted back. “Smaller ones will get through!”

  “My good queen, I have never lost a baby to sentry ants,” said His Most Pious, immersing the infant in a basin. Once the baby was doused in kin-scent, the ant moved on. Dolgeeno nodded towards something buzzing in the corner.

  Strapped into a twig frame, a living mud dauber wasp was lifted onto the shoulders of the priests and brought to Dolgeeno. He held up the baby and pressed her buttocks to the wasp’s stinger, which glistened with poison.

  Polexima had witnessed this ritual eighteen times and had seen seventeen daughters die. The newborn would expire in a moment or live to wail in agony. The wasp fluttered its clipped wings as its stinger pumped its toxins. Dolgeeno pulled the infant away. She made tiny fists and squirmed.

  Polexima’s heart sank as she watched the infant shiver, then grow still. Suddenly, blood rushed to the girl’s face and turned it a deep pink. Her little body spasmed and she shrieked.

  This daughter would live.

  “Thank you, Lord Grasshopper!” said the queen, collapsing into her sheets.

  “The gods have found this baby worthy. She shall be called Pareesha,” said Dolgeeno, naming her after the south wind goddess. One of Dolgeeno’s men handed him a bladder of aphid milk. He smeared a bit of the sticky syrup onto the newborn’s lips.

  “May the days of Princess Pareesha be sweet and may her descendants be numerous,” sang the priest. When the infant stopped crying, she was set in an amber rocking crib.

  Polexima drifted into a shallow slumber as she waited for her family’s visit. She knew one of them would be very unhappy.

  *

  Making their way through the mound’s tunnels were the new baby’s father, the Warrior King, Sahdrin (informally known as His Highness the Legless), and his daughter, the Crown Princess Trellana. They sat together on a couch set over the thorax of a carrying ant. Behind them, on their own ants, were twenty of Trellana’s twenty-one brothers, most of whom were twins or triplets. They laughed and sang as they sucked from bladders of honey liquor.

  Accompanying the procession were hundreds of tiny grooming ants that clustered about the princess as Trellana had mixed her perfume with queen-scent, the potion that sparked grooming behavior. The little groomers crawled on her trains and her towering but unfinished coiffure with their mouths opened to offer their regurgitation. The king looked at his daughter with his one good eye and saw that, as usual, she was pouting. She had been summoned prematurely from a day with a hairdresser who had fresh gossip from the neighboring mounds.

  “Are you well today, my pretty?” Sahdrin asked.

  “Certainly I am, Father.”

  “You do not seem excited to have a sister.”

  “Well, yes, of course I am excited,” she said with all the enthusiasm of a corpse. “But I am not excited at the idea that I might have to leave you within a year.”

  When they reached the queen’s chambers, Sahdrin’s servants helped him down and plucked off his false legs so he could pull himself through the portal. Once inside, the king was refitted. He swung towards his wife on crutches carved from cricket femurs and set his hand on her arm.

  “Was it a painful birth, Polly?”

  “The most painful since Trellana,” said Polexima. “But I have the comfort of knowing it shall be my last.”

  The king swung himself toward the crib to see the second female heir. Trellana was still completing her entry, slowed by her ten-layered costume. As the servants brushed grooming ants from her trains, she fanned herself with the clipping of an eye moth’s wing. She waited for the commoners to draw away before floating to the crib. Peeking over her fan, she saw the baby’s features favored the queen.

  “Congratulations, Mother. You have done very well.”

 
“Thank you, Trelly. Her arrival will make us a little less sad when you leave,” said Polexima, attempting to sound sincere.

  “She shall be very pretty,” Trellana said, pursing her small lips, glossy with green paint.

  “If she becomes even half the beauty you are, she will be very lucky indeed,” said Sahdrin.

  Polexima rolled her eyes. The king believed Trellana was a great beauty, but he was alone in his opinion. With her tiny, close-set eyes, she looked very much like her father, something no one with any tact ever pointed out.

  “That’s a rather ambitious coiffure,” said the queen as she looked up at her daughter’s jewel-embedded tower of hair.

  “It’s what they are wearing at the Kulfi and Goojinet mounds,” Trellana said, continuing to stare at the baby.

  “I always have a learned orator in my chambers when I get my hair done,” said Polexima. “Perhaps you should be learning more about our history now, of the kinds of difficulties you and your pioneers might encounter.”

  “Oh how tedious, Mother. We have plenty of people to address any complications.”

  “It’s not tedious. As you get older, you’ll realize there are advantages to cultivating yourself. You should be learning our poetry and sagas, our—”

  “But I’m not old, Mother,” Trellana snapped. “You are. I should like to enjoy my youth before cramming my head with the words of your ‘learned blatherers.’”

  No curiosity, Polexima thought, as Trellana frowned and fixated on a crack in her fingernail. The princes entered the room, drunk and noisy, and their sloppy entrance allowed the unwanted grooming ants in. Some of these ants surrounded the crib and frightened Pareesha with their offers of vomit as they crawled over her face. A servant swatted the groomers away then brought the baby to the queen. Soon the newborn was rooting for milk and as Polexima nursed, she broke into a folk tune from her native mound of Palzhad.

  Little one, life is short,