“I have something for you,” she said in a faint voice. She offered him a new doll of woven grass fibers. He took it and looked at the faceless head.
“Thank you,” he said and returned it. “Will you take good care of her for me?”
“Yes,” she said and smiled. “But he’s a boy. His name is Anand.”
“Oh.”
“I heard you, Anand.”
“Heard me?”
“In the spider’s lair. I wanted to say thank you, but I couldn’t. Thank you.”
“You are very welcome.”
He wanted to kiss her cheek, but instead he had to jump off the sled. He appreciated that they had risked so much by carrying him the last two days, but he knew he should not stay long among a caste above his own. He was walking away, sore and stiff, when Elora’s mother called after him.
“Good-bye, Anand,” she said, and he saw that she was weeping with gratitude.
As Anand passed the other castes, they whispered and pointed at him. Some even smiled and he realized news of his deed had spread. He approached his own caste with trepidation. Sure enough, Keel, Tal, and the others looked as grim as ever as they lugged their load. Both father and son shot angry looks at him.
“Get into the harness, hero,” Keel said and spat. “Some people will go to any length to steal a couple days’ rest.”
Anand shrank, expecting Keel to lash his face, but instead he saw a faint smile. Once Anand had resumed the harness, he saw that the others, even Tal, regarded him with a quiet admiration. Anand’s position in the harness had changed as well—he was no longer on the far outside of the arrangement, but closer to the middle.
Change is possible, Anand realized. Which got him thinking, How much change is possible?
The day came when the procession slowed for good. In the distance, Anand could see sheets of sunlight on the edge of a clearing. They were leaving the forest for a meadow, but were halted by its dense grasses. Sentries relayed the orders down the tail of the parade until they reached the midden caste. All were told to set down their burdens and bring their axes and saws. “This is the place,” Dolgeeno had said. The royal tents were erected quickly on stilts above some open sand. Trellana went into a tent to prepare for her Anointment as Queen the following morning, whereafter she would make the first of her Sacred Wettings.
The laboring castes hacked at grasses and plants and heaved with lever-shovels to hoist up roots to extend a clearing and their temporary plots. The midden caste was assigned to create their own separate clearing with a path to the center. As they worked their way out, Anand watched flushed-out grasshoppers leap up, then plummet when they were targeted by idle soldiers with bows and arrows. He looked over to see Prince Maleps and his hunting party making their way up the new path, the sun-kiln caste following after him to retrieve and haul off the grasshoppers to roast for the next day’s feast. Anand’s mouth watered at the thought of a crunchy roast, but he knew the best they might hope for were some barley seeds. He patted his growling stomach and went back to work.
Once a path to a temporary midden was completed, the caste was summoned to collect a neglected pile of commodes. “Back to our usual work,” said Keel. “But if we get done in time, we’ve been permitted to construct a pen tonight we can hide behind if we wish to witness the anointing tomorrow.”
“Imagine, everybody . . . a day off,” Anand said, and nobody boxed his ears for impertinence.
On the morning of the Anointment, the seeded ant queens were released from their cages, although they were still leashed to stakes in the sand. Within the radius of their confines, the queens began digging burrows that would eventually become the first mushroom chambers. Soon, they would drop their fungus pellets in the moist sand and lay the first eggs, so it was urgent that Trellana be anointed and begin her most important function. When Sun neared his zenith, drumbeats summoned the pioneers.
After a light bath in some captured dew, Anand walked with the midden caste to the Annointment and allowed himself a tiny bit of pride in membership to the Slopeish nation. All were in a rare good cheer as they carried their barrier in segments to the clearing, even as delicious smells of roasting insects and green onions wafted their way. Setting up at the back of the crowd atop a flat rock, the middenites watched through slits as the pioneers gathered before the royal tent.
Glittering on the royal platform were the new Mushroom Thrones of carved and jewel-encrusted amber. The priests arrived on stilts, lugging an upright drum of quilted human leather. As they pounded it, a thick puff of mist went up and Dolgeeno appeared on the platform in a glistening, honey-yellow garment and his tallest miter. His arms were smeared with drone semen and his face was powdered with golden pyrite.
“Your queen and king,” said Dolgeeno in the common tongue. Maleps appeared from the tent in great finery: billowing trousers and a broad-shouldered jacket of sun-colored silk. His antennae were wrapped with threads of gold. He held out his hand and Trellana appeared. She was in a simple gown of pollen-stained cloth that was slit up the sides and wore short, functional antennae. Her hair was combed to fall down her back and her only adornment was yellow face powder. The crowd bowed before them as she and Maleps crossed a bridge to the platform.
A priest set a basin bulging with an amber drop on a stand before Dolgeeno. “Behold Queen Trellana,” he bellowed, “direct descendant of Goddess Ant Queen.”
“You may look upon me,” said Trellana, and the crowd raised its eyes. She sat on her throne. Dolgeeno presented the basin to her.
“Ag kwilkshus, bok kwilkshus,” he sang in the holy tongue and she thrust in her arms and coated her hair. Combined in the oils were the individual scents of the surviving ant queens.
“Behold Trellana, Sorceress Queen of Dranveria, a New Colony of the Great and Holy Slope,” sang Dolgeeno. Anand joined the crowd in falling to their knees as Trellana descended to the new burrows.
Trellana turned her back to the first burrow’s opening and waited for the young ant queen to appear. The ant did so promptly, roused by the intense scents of the anointment. She ran her antennae over Trellana’s body and accepted her as the first of her “daughters,” and allowed her to squat at the entrance.
As the priests held the panels of her dress, Trellana urinated. She had drunk a great amount of water and was happy to release some of it, but she had to save enough for the other burrows. She was ready to stop in midstream when she gasped in pain and continued to piss it all away. Dolgeeno went to examine her.
A dart had hit her naked shoulder.
Trellana fell on her side, her eyes glazing over as a dart pierced Dolgeeno in the neck. He stumbled as a hard rain of darts poured down on the crowd.
Behind the barrier, Anand watched in confusion. He realized the pioneers were under attack, but from where? He turned and saw movement near the surrounding grasses, only to realize something had pierced his chest.
It was a dart. He tried to pluck it out but his limbs went dead and he fell off the rock and rolled to the ground.
Anand felt as if his bones had been ripped out of him. His breathing was shallow and his eyes could see, but he could not blink nor move his limbs.
Around him he heard screams of panic as the pioneers fled into the grass only to encounter new flanks of attackers. From the corner of his eye, Anand saw a faceless army of humans riding in on blood-red hunter ants. Seeing the crimson insects, Anand couldn’t help but wonder if his powerless body would be roasted alive in the sun-kilns of these attackers.
Were these the legendary Dranverites?
Cajorite soldiers attempted to group and fight back, but the attackers’ darts pierced their armor and they fell with the rest. Some pioneers escaped the ambush and scrambled south to the trail, but as they slowed to catch their breath, darts poured down from hidden shooters at the tops of ferns or saplings. In less than a few hundred heartbeats, every last pioneer had been subdued.
One of the attackers’ captains supervised the destruction o
f the inseminated queens. Soldiers on foot arrived with clusters of smaller hunter ants on leashes whose mandibles and stingers were free. They were given enough rope to descend into the burrows and sting the leaf-cutter queens to death. When the leashed ants reemerged, it was with pincers full of blood, a leg, or other pieces. Afterwards, the human soldiers went into the burrows to make sure the egg-layers were lifeless, and the few eggs they had laid were severed in two. The royal and priestly tents were looted and, once emptied, their ropes were cut and their panels disassembled and piled into wagons.
Within the passing of a breeze, all that was left of the Cajorites’ presence was the clearing they had cut, the Cajorites themselves, and the platform where the Mushroom Thrones had sat.
Anand had landed in a painful position with his head on a rough sand grain. He could not shift his eyes, but was positioned to watch the attackers as they scuttled over the paralyzed bodies sprawled through the clearing. The mounted officers gave orders atop their sleek and gleaming ants. These ants were not steered by lures, but by manipulations of their antennae with the rider’s gloved hands. The mandibles of the mounts were sheathed and their stingers were muzzled.
He could hear the attackers speaking to each other through grills cut in their visors in an unknown tongue. From the number of high-pitched voices, Anand was sure that some must be boys. But he couldn’t tell, as each soldier wore a skillfully linked armor that covered every part of their bodies. Dangling from a cord around their necks or in their hands were repeating blowguns with soft magazines that were pulled through a slit in the barrel to align their cartridges.
A large hunter ant, painted with stripes, crawled over Anand on its way to the platform. On its saddle was someone he assumed was their commander as the helmet was different, topped as it was by a tall rod with a yellow banner. The commander rode onto the platform, removed the visor . . . and revealed herself as a woman with deep brown skin.
Anand would have registered shock if his face could register anything. A woman as their commander, and one as dark as any Britasyte! he thought. How could someone of such low caste end up in such a position? He soon realized that the high-pitched voices he had heard belonged to women, not boys, and that this was a mixed army of males and females. As the commander spoke in her strange language, Anand felt the authority of her words even if he didn’t understand them. When she finished speaking, her soldiers slapped their chests to acknowledge her orders.
Each of the red soldiers chose a Cajorite. Anand saw a faceless soldier approach. As the soldier unsheathed the thinnest of swords, Anand appealed to his maker before entering the Spirit Realm. The soldier used the heel of his boot and tipped Anand’s head back to expose his throat.
The blade did not come down in a deadly swipe. Instead, it started below Anand’s tunic and ripped it open. The headband that held his antennae was snapped. His sandals were removed, and once Anand was completely naked, he was lifted over the soldier’s shoulder and brought to cages of very foreign design.
The cages had arrived in a train pulled by creatures Anand had only heard of: enormous weevils, round and fat in appearance, with thick and powerful legs. Their long, curved snouts followed mating scent in the turbans of people whose translucent ears were larger than their heads. Underneath the cages, Anand saw four orbs that were connected in pairs by a rod that the cages floated upon. These round objects rolled in the way that a ball did.
Anand was laid out on finely shredded hay on the cage’s floor. Other paralyzed Cajorites surrounded him. All he could do was listen and stare at the ceiling. When the floor was covered with bodies, the cage moved off in a fluid way. It would have been pleasant to Anand if he were not terrified. Next to him was what sounded like it might be an older pioneer who rasped as he or she struggled for breath. A man inside the cage walked towards the rasping and into Anand’s view. The man had skin that was as blue as the iris flower and a cone-shaped head with yellow sprouts at the tip of its crown. He shifted the head of the rasping pioneer to normalize the breathing.
The blue man then took oiled rags and set them over the prisoners’ eyes. Strangely, at the moment Anand’s vision was blocked, his fear abated. Perhaps he would not be killed and eaten. Whoever his captors were, they were concerned about his eyesight.
Maybe they want me to see their world.
PART 2
A PRISONER OF THE PEOPLE OF THE BLOOD
CHAPTER 15
THE LIVING DEATH
Over the next uncountable days, the train of cages rolled and rolled. Twice a day, the blue man—who Anand came to think of as the cage keeper—would make his rounds among the paralyzed and raise up their heads in order to squeeze diluted insect-blood down their throats through a tube from a feeding bag. Once a day he came by to reset the rags set over their eyes. Every other day, the soiled hay was replaced.
With an inability to move, talk, or see, Anand experienced tedium so extreme it was more excruciating than the sting of any insect. Sleep and wakeful times became indeterminate from each other. His inner-mounting anguish turned to rage and violent fantasies against his captors and the Cajorites that had forced him on this trek. He imagined reaching into the mass of Dolgeeno’s face and ripping out his skull. He wanted a pair of stone boots to crush Maleps and Trellana into a bloody pulp.
Finally, on what might have been the thirtieth day, Anand felt something different in the cage’s movement. The round objects were rolling over a surface of some regularity, perhaps a terrain of smooth, dried mud. He knew it was night from the chanting of crickets. As the train slowed, the sound of a human crowd increased until it gushed like water in a stream. Finally . . . they had arrived somewhere!
The cage keeper removed the cloth from Anand’s face. In the periphery of his sight through the cage’s bars, he made out torches of tiny cages with glowworms squirming inside. The light was faint, but hurt his eyes which had been in darkness so long. It was joyous to see again, to see anything, and the light illuminated strange faces with stranger features. Some of these strangers entered the cage.
Two women lifted Anand and set him on a canvas stretched between poles. The purple-skinned woman at his head had four breasts with orange nipples. Her second pair was set symmetrically under the first. Her green-skinned partner looked like a Slopeish woman, but her costume was completely foreign. Her hairstyle was a hundred thin braids and her garment was made from flatworm leather. Like the Slopeites, these women wore pairs of false antennae, but they were well fashioned, almost like jewelry.
When the four-breasted woman was asked a question, she nodded her head and used the Britasyte word for “yes.” Anand heard her use the Slopeish words for “penis” and realized they were talking about his genitals, something that made them smile. Their discussion about his body continued as they pointed to his thighs, his arms, and chest.
They brought him to a bathing station where he was set in a tub made from a weevil abdomen. If he could, Anand would have smiled at the four breasts of the one woman as they swayed in unison with her gentler movements, then battled each other when she scrubbed in circles. In the water, Anand smelled the kin-scent of red hunters.
As the women dried Anand, he caught glimpses of a growing crowd. The event had the feel of a festival as they gathered to look with fascination at the invaders from the land of yellow ants. The red ant people were no less strange to Anand—their faces and body shapes were far beyond type, and their skin as varied in color as the spring flowers of a meadow. The females stood among the males, the children among the adults, and the dark walked with the light.
Strange!
Anand was moved back to a cage and set on its straw. Aphid syrup was trickled down his throat and he was left with another cloth on his eyes. Other Cajorites were laid next to him. When the cage was filled, Anand heard its gate being closed and a new sound—the gate was being lashed tight with ropes. Why? Anand asked himself. To keep something out?
Outside the cage he heard humans and ants patrollin
g, but further off was a gathering in song. The distant music was eerie and intricate, rich with harmonies. From the clatter of ankle bangles, Anand knew these were a dancing folk, like those in his Roach Tribe. One of their tunes sounded like a Britasyte song that celebrated the end of a trek.
Who are these people? Anand asked himself. He was suddenly sure that the reason they had washed him, then examined his body was because they intended to roast and eat it. They had lashed the cage’s door so that “the meat” would not be stolen or escape. As Anand thought of them carving him up, he trembled. It was the first movement his body had made in a month.
CHAPTER 16
A SLOPEISH QUEEN IN THE LAND OF GHOST ANTS
Far to the south, and deep inside a ghost ants’ mound, Polexima was sick with rage and fear. She could barely eat the revolting food thrown to her in the darkness, but she knew she must consume it to have milk for her baby. Most of the food offered was the regurgitation of the ghost ants, and it likely had human as well as insect remains in its gritty gel.
Pareesha cried without end in the black chamber she shared with her mother and the Palzhanite ant queen. The layer-of-eggs was listless for several days, then died over several more. For all her life, Polexima was raised to never consider the death of any ant as a sad event, even a queen ant, but the passing of this ancient egg-layer deepened her anguish. Contrary to the hopes of the Hulkrites, the queen ant had not eaten what smelled to Polexima like her usual predigested food. But Polexima knew the egg-layer would not open her mouth unless the food was offered by daughters prompting her with their antennae. At least she won’t lay eggs for these demons, thought the queen.
One day—or perhaps it was night—she listened as the stone at her chamber’s portal was pushed aside. Some ghost ants, summoned by death-scent, entered and carved up the corpse of the ant queen with their long, sharp mandibles. Unlike leaf-cutters, ghost ants apparently ate their enemies and did not drag their dissected corpses to middens. Polexima listened in the darkness as the ants commenced their noisy mastication. Others ants followed, and soon after, every bit of the ant queen had been removed and consumed.
Prophets of the Ghost Ants Page 10