Prophets of the Ghost Ants

by Clark Thomas Carlton

  “Might you know of any relatives of ours?” Lasku asked. “Of anyone from the Pafentu clan?”

  “I did not know many Panfentus,” Anand said. “They had vanished before I was born. Some of their women married Entreveans, of course. I believe we knew a Cherra, married to Kilgot—he was a good drummer and she was known for her carpets which had good likenesses. Cherra had all daughters, if I remember, and her sister, Mexantee, was a dyer who made cloth that sold well among the Carpenter people. Mexantee had all sons, and one of them, Somby, was a celebrated hunter—he was good at drawing out earthworms.”

  “Cherra and Mexantee, yes. I believe they are your fifth cousins,” said Pizhyot to his daughters.

  “And were they dancers?” asked Valoha, somewhat snidely.

  “All Britasyte women are dancers,” said Anand.

  “So their fathers put them out there, naked, to dance in front of strangers in these traveling shows?”

  “If a girl is pretty and talented, she can gather a lot of treasure dancing for the outsiders. The girls are never completely naked. And they are well protected.”

  The daughters’ stiff faces said that they disapproved. Their father smiled, but looked somewhat uncomfortable as a silence fell across the table.

  “I’ve seen dancing in this nation,” Anand said, looking to Dwan’s family. “I don’t believe it is discouraged.”

  “It is not discouraged,” said Hopkut.

  “Nor is nudity,” said Dwan.

  “Did any men dance in the spectacles?” Valoha asked.

  “Men? No,” said Anand with a chuckle.

  “And why not?”

  “Women on the Slope and in the Barley and Pine countries are not allowed to attend the carnivals. Even if they could, women would not pay to see dancing men.”

  The daughters looked at each other and giggled. Belja had been following the discussion with great interest when they heard a rap on the window. She opened the pane to accept a scroll tube from a grave-looking messenger wearing a startling white bonnet.

  “From what father has told us,” said Lasku, “the women danced and made the costumes. They also prepared the food and drink the men sold to the people they called ‘sedites’ as well as the jewelry and handcrafts. Is that correct?”

  Anand felt mildly under attack. His anxiety was mirrored in Belja’s face as she read the scroll.

  “And is it not the men who keep the money?” Valoha asked. “While the women are at work all day, don’t the men play music and go off hunting and lounge around drinking cannabis liquor while making all the big decisions?”

  “I . . . I believe you already know the answers to these questions,” Anand said. “It has always been as you describe.”

  “But should it be?” Lasku asked, cocking her head.

  Anand was rescued when Dwan spoke up. “What’s the matter, Mother? Bad news?”

  “I’m sorry,” Belja said, rolling up the scroll. “It’s an invasion again, to the northeast. A thirty-four day journey. Some unknown tribe is crossing the Salt Flats, a people with sand-covered ants and very hostile. They raided the Tegenet nation on their way here. We must leave tomorrow.”

  Anand figured he must have looked sad as Pizhyot rose to pat his shoulder.

  “Please, stay with us, Anand, and you won’t be lonely. My house would be graced to have a Britasyte guest.”

  “Thank you,” Anand said in Dranverish. “But I should like to go to this war.”

  Everyone was quiet. Dwan broke the silence.

  “Anand, we do not war on anyone. As is often the case, we are taking a defensive measure.”

  “Then I should like to go to the defensive measure,” Anand said and puffed out his chest. He was deflated when everyone chuckled.

  “It is not a good idea,” said Belja. “The learned elders would miss you. Your best contribution is in teaching them your language.”

  “I suppose,” said Anand, but his head dropped. When he looked up, it was with pleading eyes. “I’ve worked hard with the elders and we’ve made some good progress. Wouldn’t you agree I have been very cooperative . . . so far?”

  Dwan squinted in suspicion. “Yes, Anand, you have been very cooperative. Are you implying you may not be?”

  Anand didn’t answer right away, and instead took a bite of his mashed gnats. “Certainly not,” he said, making eye contact with no one. “Though a break from our studies might be . . . beneficial. Is that the right word?”

  “Yes, that’s the right word,” said Lasku. “He’s a clever little Britasyte, this one.”

  Belja folded her arms and stared sideways at Anand before speaking. “Perhaps Anand is right,” she said. “Maybe the linguists will agree to accompany us on this latest measure and serve as its documentarians. On the journey there, Anand can continue to impart his knowledge.”

  Anand took that as a yes— which meant he was going off to war. Remnants of the vision that had appeared to him months ago were returning again in greater clarity. Would the Dranverites teach him their military ways, cover him in their armor and grant him his own weapons?

  Would he ride upon a red hunter?

  CHAPTER 27

  THE SAME OLD ENEMIES

  Atop the Cajorite mound, Trellana stretched in her favorite lounge chair wearing a gown so soft and light she could barely feel it. Her toenails were being clipped and buffed and at her side, the kitchen servants were presenting her with over fifty choices for breakfast on fine platters of rainbow quartz. She was taken with a damselfly larva which had been delicately butchered, colored with poppy extract, then rearranged to look like the adult it might have become.

  “I’ll have this,” she said and a silk bib was set around her neck. The servant was hand feeding her with tongs when they heard creet-creet through the portal.

  “The hairdressers!” Trellana said, clapping her hands excitedly.

  “I’m afraid not,” said the voice of an old woman. Trellana’s face fell when servants helped in her Grandmother Clugna. Was she more stooped than the last time Trellana had seen her, or bearing some inner weight? Clugna made no attempt to smile at her granddaughter or pretend any warmth.

  “Good morning, Trellana. May I join you for breakfast?”

  “Certainly, Grummy. This is a surprise.”

  The servants ran to an amber lounge chair and pushed it towards Trellana’s own.

  “We are so very relieved that you’ve been returned safely. I understand your ordeal was trying,” said the old woman.

  “Trying? Grandmother, I was tortured. We must retaliate against these Dranverites immediately. I should like to leave them all limbless and unable to squirm while we pull out their livers through a tiny puncture.”

  “I know you have been traumatized, but I must tell you what’s befallen your mother and Palzhad.”

  “Whatever it is, it could not be as awful as what happened to me.”

  “And to the other pioneers, Trellana. You were not alone.”

  “But I am a royal. The indignity was unbearable.”

  Clugna frowned and pushed away her strained pond scum.

  “My dear girl, your mother has been captured, perhaps killed.”

  It entered Trellana’s mind in an instant that she could become Queen of Cajoria, the most envied mound on the Slope. Clugna frowned when she saw Trellana smiling. “Well, Trelly, I can see you’re just . . . destroyed.”

  “Destroyed, yes, many times over,” said Trellana. Just as she was imagining the glories of her second anointing, a runner brought news from the emergency conclave at Venaris: the mound’s custodians were to dye new banners to fly over the queendom. The cloth would be dyed with human blood.

  “War! Wonderful! When do we march on Dranveria?” Trellana asked.

  “No, my dear,” said Clugna. “They will march south into Hulkren. That is where your mother is.”

  “No, Your Majesties,” said the messenger. “The wars will be in the east and west.”

  Trellana pouted.
Clugna gasped.

  Yormu wanted to die. Ants were piling up aphid corpses in tall, sticky towers in the midden, all of which would have to be scraped for their syrup. With a new war on the east, he knew that the aphids would be replaced by piles of human and ant corpses. He turned in the direction of Ganilta, The Holy Tree Top, where the gods looked down on their mortals. Yormu thought about a scrubbing bath in unholy water so that the ants might take him.

  Keel noticed Yormu’s desperation and had seen his pondering the suds of the tool-washing basin and sent him to Glurmu, the caste’s idols keeper. He tended the altar on the fringe of the weeds where he received offerings of food for the gods. Since Glurmu was the fattest of all in the midden, it was no mystery to Yormu as to where the food ended up.

  “Don’t commit the ultimate sin, Yormu,” said Glurmu as he took Yormu’s mushroom ration and set it before the dolls on the midden’s altar. “If you kill yourself, you will go straight to the Netherworld. Roaches will eat your heart out every day and drag you by your own intestines over hot and jagged sands. The next day you’ll be whole again, and it will start anew for eternity! Fulfill your duty, Yormu, especially at this time of war.”

  Yormu got on his knees, bent his head in prayer, and then offered his arm. Glurmu jammed a tube of razor grass into Yormu’s artery and pumped it until his blood filled a bowl which was set before a woven doll of Mantis.

  Yormu stumbled back to work. He had begun the dissection of an aphid when he smelled the noxious war-scent from the harvester ants of the Seed Eater nation. Without a breathing filter and weak from blood loss, Yormu fainted and fell.

  “Get up, Yormu,” said Keel, winding his whip. “No faking your way out of work.” The whip lashed over Yormu’s chest and he twitched in agony. Watching from the vats, Terraclon ran over. He bowed his head towards the foreman, using his antennae to brush his face and halt the whipping.

  “I will bring this man back to health,” Terraclon said, “and have him back soon at his duties. If you whip him again he will die.”

  “He is already going to die,” Keel said. “It’s a waste to give him rations.”

  “Then I will share mine with him,” said Terraclon. “Please, sir. I will look after him and keep his shelter.”

  “So you’ll be like his wifey?”

  “No,” said Terraclon, hanging his head in shame as Keel gave out with a bellowing laugh. “I will be like his nephew.”

  “Go ahead, take up with him,” Keel said between guffaws. “I hope the two of you will be very happy.”

  Terraclon picked up Yormu and carried him back to his shelter. Terraclon returned a short time later with his few possessions. Yormu was shamed that other middenites might assume Terraclon was sharing his mattress, but the boy had made a show of bringing his own bedding by carrying it on top of his head in a roll.

  “I’ll look after you as best as I can,” said Terraclon as he chewed Yormu’s mushrooms for him and spat them into a bowl he could slurp from. “But you can’t die. You can’t let Anand come back here to find that both his parents are dead. Will you promise me?”

  Yormu tried to nod but he also wanted to shake his head. He had no desire whatsoever except to be rid of the hundred pains that crawled over his skin and gnawed him from inside. He shut his eyes to remember Corra’s face the first time she nursed their newborn son and looked at both of them with her warmest smile.

  CHAPTER 28

  UNLEASHED DEMONS

  Anand assumed the habit of bowing to a scroll tube before uncapping it and pulling out its pages. He had wondered if the Dranverites held books sacred, then remembered one of the statues destroyed at the parade of idols was the Book God which had also been smashed into powdery bits. Dwan and Belja were reviewing maps as the scholars readied ink and paper in an academy wagon making its way out of the city. Anand looked up from his reading as they passed the stadium.

  “Scholar Babwott, what was observed by the ritual at the stadium—when all the gods were destroyed?” Anand asked in Dranverish.

  “You mean when all the idols were destroyed,” said Babwott, as he tucked the ends of his long mustache into his collar. “It is called the Celebration of Colors. To answer your question is to tell you the history of the Collective Dranverite Nations and United Peoples.”

  “Is there a book of this history?”

  “There are a hundred thousand books of this history.”

  Anand slumped. “No one could read that many books in ten lifetimes.”

  “No. But perhaps it is time you read one book on our journey north. It is titled The Loose Doctrine of Dranveria. It is what we read in public gatherings in lieu of religious scriptures. It contains a concise history of Dranveria and the Code of Moral Conduct.”

  “I should like to read it today.”

  “It will take you many days to read it, especially as you have one obligation when you do so the first time.”

  “Yes?”

  “You must make a legible copy of it.”

  “So that I may keep it for myself?”

  “No. So that you may destroy it when you are done.”

  Anand frowned, then shook his head. “One day I hope to tell everyone of the wonders of this place and the kindness of its people, but . . .”

  Dwan looked up from his map, cocked his head. “Speak freely, Anand,” he said. “It is the Dranverish way.”

  “Your customs are so strange.” Anand felt heat in his face.

  “They are strange to you,” Dwan said. “We learned long ago that people’s beliefs and customs are rooted in their circumstances. We may like, dislike, or even object to their customs, but we never judge anyone as wrong unless they wrong others.”

  “What do you find strange about me?” Anand asked.

  “Everything,” Dwan answered and smiled warmly.

  “And have I wronged you?”

  Dwan hesitated.

  “No, but . . .”

  “You obviously object to something!”

  “Anand-shmi,” Dwan said quietly, taking him to a corner. He bowed towards Anand and then continued. “The concept of cleanliness and what is proper varies from people to people. Perhaps next time we go to the latrines I can show you how most people here clean themselves afterwards. Your habit of using your heel to wipe yourself and then dragging it through the dust is . . . unfamiliar to us.”

  Anand was dead still. He had wondered why Hopkut had been washing his right boot from the inside out every day. Under his paint, the color of new grass, Anand felt as if the sun were burning his face. As the wagon continued down the main artery, they passed the cage of leaf-cutter ants and their tiny mound as men and women exited with carts of sterile eggs.

  “Who is your sorceress?” Anand asked. “Does she live in that cage?”

  Babwott consulted the Britasyte dictionary.

  “Our sorceress? We are not possessed of one.”

  “Your urine sorceress—the one that leaves her magic essence that enables leaf-cutters and humans to live together without fear of Yellow Mold.”

  “We have many women in the Leaf-Cutter Union who provide the anti-fungal you describe.”

  “Many women?”

  “Yes, Anand. Though it cannot be explained, the urine of some women—never men—is a destroyer of the Yellow Mold fungus.”

  “These women are not considered the descendants of Goddess Ant Queen?”

  “No one is a descendant of any god.”

  The academy wagon reached the outskirts of the city where it joined with the military caravan. It was almost evening when the wagons stopped in an area of few plants and no insects that was very far away from trees. In the distance, Anand saw a great pit, the walls of which were coated in black.

  “What is this place?” Anand asked.

  All were quiet and turned to Hopkut who had been silently sitting in the corner, reading.

  “A fire pit. I am a fire master,” Hopkut said. “Before we deal with the human invaders, we must deal with an
invasion of venom sprayer ants.”

  “Venom sprayers?”

  “Venom sprayers have never been domesticated by humans. When attacked, they spray a poison so toxic a human will be blinded and paralyzed and likely eaten. We will need fire to make a poison to kill these awful ants.”

  “What is this ‘fire’?” Anand asked.

  Babwott met Anand’s eyes and translated the word into Britasyte.

  “Fire!” Anand whispered, and his head was pumped with hot blood. “Fire is real?”

  “It is very real,” said Dwan.

  “Fire can be made? Why would anyone do so?”

  “We celebrate those who devote their lives to making peaceful fires, for it provides us with many gifts,” said Babwott. “Hopkut is an honored citizen of Dranveria.” Hopkut looked both pleased and uncomfortable to be the focus of so much attention.

  “Is it hard to make fire?”

  “Not so hard,” Hopkut answered. “But it is both hard to keep going and hard to control.”

  “We will all be participating,” said Dwan. “Making a fire is not without dangers. If you wish to join us, you have been advised.”

  A short time later, men and women descended on rope ladders that unfurled to the fire pit’s floor. Wagons loaded with finely shredded twigs backed up to the pit and dumped their contents. Afterwards, wagons with chips of wood were unloaded on top. Down in the pit, Hopkut supervised the arrangement of the chips on shreds. When he liked the composition, thick twigs and then branches were arranged on top as the final layers.

  A strange contraption made of wood was lowered after that. It looked like an enormous bow and arrow whose point spun in the divot of a block. Above the pit, barrels with mysterious contents were perched on the rim.