It would be late in the morning before Anand’s caste finally joined the parade at its rear. Corra arrived and gave Anand a pack she had stuffed with food and articles he could trade. She saw that Yormu was weeping and took his hand.
“Yormu! Bitter tears do not commence a sweet journey.”
Yormu nodded his head, but like rain collecting in a leaf, his tears gathered to spill down his cheeks. Anand was touched by his father’s display. “I will see you soon, Father,” he said and stroked his back.
“I have something for you,” said Corra, “a present from someone.”
Corra handed her son a bit of folded straw. Inside it was a gossamer sash, the present offered to boys from admiring girls. Someone had labored over its delicate weaving for days.
“Is it from…?”
“Daveena, of course. She thinks only of you.”
Corra was tying the sash around Anand’s tunic when a crude doll sailed overhead and landed atop the seed comb of a stinkweed.
A tiny girl of five summers ran into the area set apart for middenites. Anand and his family looked at her and were charmed. She had chubby cheeks and tear-filled eyes. Her hair was a tumble of dark curls.
“They threw my doll over here!” she gasped.
“Who did?”
“Those mean boys over there. Have you seen her?”
The girl had an endearing lisp. Anand and his parents smiled.
“It’s up there,” Anand said, and pointed to the top of the weed. She ran to the plant to climb its slippery stalk but fell on her bottom. She stood and rubbed her seat and cried.
“I’ll get it,” Anand said, and he shimmied up to the seed comb. He dropped the doll to the girl and she hugged it. When he slid to the ground she asked his name.
“Anand. What’s yours?”
“Elora,” she said. “My doll is named Geeta. My father says we’re going somewhere to build a new mound.”
“We all are. Is your mother going too?”
“Yes. We all picked yellow lots. Mommy says that at the end of the journey they will give us some aphid candy.”
“Elora!” someone shouted.
Anand turned to see the girl’s parents were approaching. They wore palm-sized blades around their necks to signify the scraping-caste. It was their duty to remove mites and other parasites from the older ants.
“Elora, get away from that boy!” shouted the girl’s mother.
“Get away from him now!” the father shouted then ran to her and swatted her behind. The mother grabbed the doll and threw it towards Anand.
“My doll, mommy!”
“I will make you a new one. That one is polluted.”
As her parents dragged her off, Elora turned to look at Anand over her shoulder. “Good-bye, Anand.”
“Shh!” her mother hissed.
Anand felt an unbearable ache in his chest as he watched her go. She was the first Cajorite girl who had ever talked to him. His mother’s hatred for the Slopeites flared anew. At last, a guard with a nose pin called out, “Midden caste.”
Anand went to his father, who clenched his son. His mother did not hug him so hard. “My sadness is small. My heart is brave,” she said. He nodded, but he did not believe her sadness was small. She gritted her teeth to stop from sobbing. Over her shoulder, he saw Terraclon running towards him, out of breath and sweating. His eyes did not leave the ground to look into Anand’s own.
“Ter! I was hoping you would say good-bye.”
“I did not come to say good-bye,” said Terraclon reaching into his bulging tunic. “I have come to repay you for all the food you have given me.”
“Don’t be stupid. That was just sharing.”
“I have come to repay you,” insisted Terraclon. He handed Anand a package wrapped in cocoon shreds. Anand removed the wrapping to reveal a new knife. The blade was a whetted shard of quartz and was embedded in a handle of sunbaked resin. Anand knew from the handle’s design that Terraclon had carved it himself.
“I can’t take this!” Anand gasped. “You have labored over it for weeks.”
“I told you… it’s a repayment,” Terraclon insisted, and he wiped at his eyes. “My father’s calling,” he said, though it was not true. He ran off before he burst into tears.
Anand hoisted his pack onto his back and joined the others. A harness was fastened over his chest that was attached to the first of the middenites’ sand-sleds.
Corra watched her son as he trudged off. She remembered when he was a baby, a sweet and tiny creature who laughed with delight at every new discovery. Yormu had assumed that Britasyte women never cried and now he knew he was wrong. Corra shook with sobbing as she tried and failed to dismiss the fear that she would never see her son again.
Chapter 11
Royal Journeys North and South
The rear pincers of earwigs made excellent daggers. Yormu was removing the pincers from some dead earwigs whose misfortune it was to wander into the path of some returning foragers. The ants halted their parade, dropped their leaves and tore the earwigs into pieces they picked up and then dumped at the midden.
Yormu hated this work – a sheriff had used this kind of dagger to cut off his tongue. He was drenched with sweat and worrying about Anand when a sentry approached. As custom dictated, he pointed to the first middenite he saw.
“You,” said the sentry, “are drafted to serve Queen Polexima on a trek to Palzhad.”
Yormu showed the sentry that he had no tongue and led him to speak with Corra as she hung her slug sausage to cure in the sun. The sentry winced at the woman’s color.
“Your mate is needed for Queen Polexima’s journey,” he said while looking away from her eyes.
“Palzhad? How long will he be gone?”
“Twenty-eight days. It is your decision to accompany him if you choose.”
Since the parting of her son, Corra had been half-dead with melancholy. She welcomed any distraction and decided to accompany her husband to the most colorful and informal of all the Slopeish cities.
*
With happy thoughts of her trip, Polexima returned from a Sacred Wetting to the sunlit chambers that had belonged to Trellana. The queen would leave behind a supply of the precious fluid that the priests could set before the ant queen. The divine urine had to be fresh to be effective, but Queen Mother Clugna would arrive in time to assume her daughter’s duty.
The Royal Chief of Protocol, Zembel, supervised the final packing for his monarch. He was completing his task when Polexima pulled herself into the room.
“Good morning, Zembel. Any message from the pioneers?”
“No, Majesty. No messengers at all.”
“That’s the third day in a row.”
“Yes, Majesty, but the pioneers have ventured deep into new territory. The messengers may have fallen prey to any number of things.”
Polexima’s mood turned dark. She imagined the steaming corpse of her daughter, dressed in her most indulgent costume, being pulled from a sun kiln and unwrapped for eating. Pareesha cried from her crib.
“Would you bring her here, please?”Polexima asked, as she pulled down the top of her garment. The nurse brought over the baby, who was dressed in thirteen gowns that bound her arms and legs. Her face was a frightening red.
“Nurse, Pareesha is not hungry. She objects to being baked. For this journey, one gown will do with a simple slip.”
Polexima sighed and reminded herself that this daughter would be raised differently. This daughter will not be tutored by gray, fat eunuchs, she thought, and she will play in the outdoors with children from many castes.
On top of the mound, the procession bound for the southern-most queendom had been assembled since the night before. Polexima insisted that no more than a thousand soldiers, four priests and fewer than fifty servants accompany her. The queen and her infant entered into a large sand-sled and climbed a staircase to its throne. The procession lurched off with summoners at its head rubbing cicada wings so that the p
eople would draw to the side and bow. Yormu and Corra were the only middenites, and as usual they were at the tail of the parade.
Despondent, Sahdrin sat in his all-too-empty chambers. He looked out the window to see the procession as it squirmed away like a sleepy centipede. The two women he loved most had departed. In a few days, Queen Clugna, Polexima’s excessively cheery mother, would be arriving for her visit. The king complained of a headache and retreated to his chambers. The priests brought him nectar-liquors disguised in the jars of healing potions.
*
The cumbersome procession heading north came to a halt late in the day to erect the royal and priestly tents. Trellana was puffed with her new status and intoxicated with the pleasures of intercourse. The prince was a frequent lover but his real desire was not for his wife’s body, but that one of his inseminations would soon take root. This would free him to plant his seed elsewhere.
Though he hated being used as a draught animal, Anand loved travel by day. He had the bad habit of looking out at the passing landscape when he should have been keeping his eyes to the ground. In his travels with his mother, Anand had to wander under cover of night. In daylight he saw new vistas of intense beauty that were almost unbearable.
Two days after the rain, poisonous mushrooms had exploded into fat towers with light spews of stinking spores. The procession trekked through thickets of these mushrooms, stopping when they grew too thick and had to be uprooted. A day later, they collapsed in their own slime and gave rise to smaller blue mushrooms that were clear, like water. Ahead of the pioneers was a terrain of trees that were stripped, but whose upper branches sprouted leaf buds. The mysterious canopy tribes who attacked and ate leaf-cutter ants protected these branches.
Later the pioneers entered a sunless territory with thriving trees whose smell was damp and sweet. Anand had never seen a tree that was not a victim of ants. He sniffed the pleasant decay of leaves that trees had dropped by themselves. Under these trees, the sunlight took on a greenish color. In a few places it poured down pure and yellow on patches where weeds flourished and bloomed.
The journey continued under ferns, a plant unknown on the sunny Slope. Orange powder misted down from ribs of buds on the leaves’ unfurling undersides. Progress was slower, as the leaf-strewn ground was springy with loam that clogged the sleds’ scale-lined runners. Blocking the path were fallen logs rotting under moss and teeming with termites.
A hundred kinds of forest insects, many of which Anand had never seen, scurried or flew as the procession marched. When they stopped to rest under a bortshu sapling, the pioneers were captivated by chalk-and-jade butterflies as they emerged from a cluster of chrysalises. Young girls, briefly freed from their harnesses, ran over to wish upon the butterflies, who might take their wishes to the gods in their tree palace.
Anand was making a wish too when his ear was split by the soul-rending scream of a child. The scream ignited more screeches and shrieks as the pioneers turned and saw it: a monstrous lair spider. She had erupted from her trap door and targeted the child. Anand’s knees went weak as he saw the web-snare stretched high in the claws of her forelegs. Her dagger-like fangs glistened with poison under four of her eight eyes.
She thrust out and snatched the child with her snare. The victim was a spinning blur as she was wrapped in a silk cocoon. The spider sank her fangs in the squirming bundle before slipping back under her door to her lair.
The girl’s mother screamed without control as her father sputtered in panic. Hundreds of workers had seen the girl’s capture and were too stunned to move. They watched as the victim’s father fell out of line to plead with a sheriff. The sheriff was angry that the march had slowed.
“Please, Good Sheriff, help me rescue my daughter!”
“Keep moving. Nothing can be done.”
The father got closer to the sheriff, who turned away to avoid making physical contact with someone of the low scraping caste.
“But my daughter! She’s…”
“She’s at the bottom of a deep hole and so will you be if you attempt to rescue her. If she’s lucky the spider’s poison is melting her flesh and it will drink her soon.”
“But it could be laying its eggs in her. She will suffer for days!”
“Pray to Grasshopper,” said the sheriff, “and get back in your harness.”
The father ran to the spider’s trap and fell to his knees.
“Elora! ELORA!” he cried as he dug with his hands.
Anand felt as if his heart had been ripped out of him. The victim was the girl with the doll.
“Do you want to die too?” the sheriff asked the father as he pawed the soil. Panic deafened him to the sheriff’s words. They were not a warning against an attack of the spider, but the sheriff’s own blade. The father’s arms were reaching through the flap when the sword came down, chopping his head off. Anand and hundreds of others were stilled. The sheriff rode toward them on his ant. A scowl was on his face and blood flew from his sword as he waved it.
“Keep moving… if you don’t want to be next!” he bellowed. He traded his sword for his pole and used it to knock on the people’s heads until they were roused into marching.
Elora’s mother fell on her back and screamed. Her relatives ran to cover her mouth for fear she would further provoke the sheriff. Since the trek began, the lower castes had seen predators pick off several of their own, but not a child. Anand stole a glance to see skull-flies descend on the father’s corpse to lay their eggs. These had no chance to hatch, for soon, carrion roaches crawled from under a log to eat it all.
That night, as he used his pack for his pillow, Anand wept. He was haunted by the image of Elora’s smile. He felt he was drowning in water, surfacing and gasping, only to sink again. Not for another second could he tolerate knowing the girl was in the spider’s lair, alive and suffering with eggs hatching inside her.
He knew what he must do.
Chapter 12
The Longest Night
Anand pushed off the dead leaf he slept under to hide himself from night wasps. He grabbed a sharpened fly pole and a water bladder and raced into the night. An avenging spirit would not allow him to consider the aches that plagued him. Aiding his sight were luminous bark fungi that glowed soft blue.
Anand looked for the sapling whose branches were hung with empty cocoons. When he found it, he treaded softly to the spider’s lair. His ears pounded with his heart’s thumping. The sky, the trees and the air all seemed to pulse around him.
Circling in back of the trap, he was uncertain as to whether he could rouse the spider. If she was making a meal of Elora, the spider might be too content to take another victim. He probed the door with his pole by simulating beetle steps. Nothing.
Anand tapped harder on the door, then harder still. No response. A breeze picked up a leaf and scuttled it over the trap door. Anand blinked and when he opened his eyes, the spider’s back was to him, her rear-eyes taking him in.
She pivoted and Anand saw the snare stretched between her legs. She sprung at him on her hind legs, but he ran forward, not away. He thrust the pole through the threads of the net and between her fangs but missed. The point jammed in the side of her head but did not kill her. She was blinded in two eyes but she leapt again.
Anand dove over her snare and into her spiny legs. He battled to retrieve his pole as her legs batted him about. He plucked out the pole and held it flush against his chest. Pushing against the spider’s legs, he flipped her over. He turned to see her claws wave in the air. Before he could stab her, she pulled herself tight, rolled on the sand and was on her legs, at him again.
He crouched and waited as her forelegs stretched the net and her fangs parted. Just as she lunged he leapt up, thrusting his stick between her fangs.
The point pierced the spider’s head. She collapsed on him, her legs still twitching as blood seeped down the stick in oily globs. Anand felt her fangs as they grazed the skin of his neck. He gingerly shimmied out from under her to avo
id the glittering poison. He found the edges of the trap door and folded it back but could see nothing down the black cavity. What else was down there?
Shaking and coated in cold sweat, Anand crawled down the hole. He hurt himself when his knee jammed in something round with cavities on its surface. He handled it briefly and realized it was a human skull. As he crawled over more bones, he wondered how much deeper he would have to go. Sand grains fell on his back when he heard a faint wheezing. Was it Elora?
He sank down further until his hand touched a warm body. He stroked her hair, touched her warm skin. The girl was alive! He did not know if she could hear him in her paralysis, but he spoke.
“Elora, it’s me, Anand. I’m bringing you out of here,” he whispered. Anand tucked her frail chest under his arm and began his ascent. Crawling up with one hand, a rain of dirt fell on his head. Suddenly the lair’s walls collapsed. With his face and arms buried in loose dirt, he pressed the girl to his chest and squirmed up.
When he heard the chirping of crickets, he knew they would make it out – but he also heard the whipping of long antennae. Poking his head out, he saw white insects, three times the size of a man, tearing at the spider’s corpse. A pack of moon roaches had converged on the dead spider, but their antennae were far more alert to Anand. They hovered over the lair, excited by scents of ants and humans.
The moon roaches’ forelegs were strong and lined with sharp hooks. Anand knew they could clutch his body and chew his head off. He let a baby roach approach and fall on top of him. Grasping his dagger, he thrust under the insect and slit it to its head. As blood oozed down his face, he used the carcass as a shield and pushed his way out. As the larger roaches attacked, he slashed at their antennae, which fell and twitched on the ground. The senseless roaches wandered without aim and butted heads before stumbling away.
Anand pulled Elora out of the hole and set her on the ground. He freed her arms and limbs from the spider silk by pulling them over her head. A bruise was on the front of her thigh that spread to her back. When he turned her over, he saw where the spider had pierced her and laid its eggs. Some were bulging from the top of her skin and their transparency revealed the living spiderlings.
The Illustrated PROPHETS OF THE GHOST ANTS: Part One, The Roach Boy Page 7