Prophets of the Ghost Ants

by Clark Thomas Carlton

The one-eyed man running in the distance was trotting back now, shameful of his cowardice. He dropped to his knees, aware that the Hulkrites were snickering at him and probably planning some humiliation.

  The recruits all fell to their knees, too, and as instructed, they made a promise in their different languages. “I surrender my life to Hulkro,” they said. Anand said it in Slopeish.

  It was the first of many lies he would tell the Hulkrites.

  CHAPTER 35

  JATAL-DOZH

  Ghosts were supposed to be made of something like fog. The men who grabbed Anand and yanked him to a distant tunnel’s entry had fingernails that gouged his skin. They threw him to the tunnel’s floor and cursed him in a language that was somewhat intelligible and shared Slopeish words. The recruits were doused with the kin-scent of ghosts and had antennae jammed on their heads. Prodded by swords, the recruits were forced to run through the black tunnels. The only light was from torches set at distant junctions where crude signs with pictographs indicated different destinations.

  The recruits were herded down a tunnel with a sign depicting the primary opening at the top. As they progressed, the tunnel filled with the traffic of ants and humans. Though it was dark, Anand marveled at the size of the passing ants which could support several human riders. Every man he passed was an armored warrior. He did not see any women. The new recruits chugged up a long and exhausting incline, but to their eventual relief, daylight seeped into the tunnel as they reached the top. Anand emerged from the dark to the gruesome spectacle of daily life among the Hulkrites.

  Jatal-dozh was a noisy tangle of activity. Its people were living in endless tents on and around the mound, but they were in the process of emptying the sand-and-lacquer dwellings of their ancient dust to make them habitable. Everywhere warriors were practicing with weapons or betting on matches of hand-to-hand combat. Some warriors bid on slave girls and children at an auction. Semiprecious minerals were used as currency, as well as arrowheads and daggers. A few men were openly engaging in intercourse with their new purchases.

  Before Anand knew it, a ghost ant was behind him and rubbing his antennae for kin-scent. He stepped back and turned, shocked by his first view of the transparent ants in daylight. Even their legs and antennae were like some living quartz with a vague green tint. He saw tubes inside them pumping with green blood as well as the digestion of the day’s meal.

  Visible in the thorax of the probing ghost was a reddish pulp that might have been the remains of humans. Only the ghost ant’s massive eyes had color, a bright yellow-green. Anand surmised that these eyes were excellent for night vision, but were useless during the day, allowing in too much light. The ants looked to rely on their long, always whirling antennae during the day to make their way and seemed sluggish unless prodded.

  The ant came closer and Anand knew it was best to submit to antennation. He looked into its hideous mouth with its sharp, crystal mandibles. He thought of what must have been his mother’s paralyzing horror when she looked up, then was swallowed by one of these abominations. Someday I will kill every one of them, he thought.

  The Hulkrish men were painted white and their bodies were covered in armor of their ants’ ghostly chitin. Through the transparency, Anand could see this armor left them vulnerable. It was not reinforced with spider-web cladding, nor was it coated with layers of sun-cured shellac. The wearer’s joints were naked instead of protected by panels of scales.

  As Anand pondered this, a band of warriors sucking from a mead bag surrounded him. They were joking about him and he gathered from a few words that it was about the darkness of his skin. They pointed and laughed at his darker penis. Another warrior appeared who seemed to admire Anand’s buttocks. They encircled him and pressed in.

  The situation felt all too familiar to Anand, but he was free to respond in a different way. The band guffawed when he crouched to the ground with his hands in a defensive pose and readied himself to spring. The circle pressed in closer.

  Anand scurried and spun like a whirly-bug as he kicked at throats and stomachs. As the gottallamos had taught him, he never turned his back on any one of them for long. A tall, stout soldier snatched at Anand and he scuttled to the other side. A second soldier, with a rag covering his face, caught him and pushed. When the stout soldier cocked back a fist to slug him, Anand dodged the blow, grabbed the man’s arm and used the momentum to jerk him onto his belly. Leaping on the stout man’s back, Anand waited for him to rise, then used the leverage to spring outside the circle. As he backed away anticipating a new attack, the men turned to him in silence.

  Suddenly they laughed. Some sank to their knees or clutched at their bellies as their laughter turned to roars. The stout soldier burst through them, his face twisted in fury. He charged at Anand, who fell on his back and thrust his legs into the stout man’s belly, kicking him over to skid on his face.

  The laughter swelled again and attracted a growing crowd. The stout man rose to renew his attack, when he was ordered to desist by the one with the rag on his face. Anand saw this man’s helmet had a third antenna to denote a higher rank.

  The man removed the rag to speak to Anand, who tried not to recoil. The man’s nose had been grossly disfigured and its pink cavities were more pronounced under a white coating. Even with his face covered in paint, Pleckoo was recognizable to Anand. All my plans will come undone if he recognizes me, Anand thought. He steadied himself, knowing that in Cajoria his father and his best friend had not recognized him through the thick beard and thicker hair that hid the clipped lobe of his ear. Anand kept his head bowed, but not too low. It was best to be submissive but not obsequious.

  “Can you understand my words?” asked Pleckoo, first in Hulkrish and then again in Slopeish.

  “I know the Slopeites’ language,” said Anand affecting a Dranverish accent. “I also speak Tjamedi.”

  “Tjamedi? What tongue is that and of what people?”

  Anand spoke a few words in Dranverish. He said, “You poor bastard with a cave for a nose.” He did not follow up with a translation. Instead, he said in heavily accented Slopeish, “The Tjamedis are a people of the distant northeast. I am the first Tjamedi to learn of the love of Hulkro and the holy war of Tahn the Prophet. My hope is to bring his message to my people.”

  “Really,” said Pleckoo. “You are an interesting young man. I suspect that Hulkro brought you to me for a reason.”

  I’m sure he did.

  Soldiers appeared with acorn barrels full of paint made from sap mixed with chalk powder. Pleckoo beckoned Anand to come closer, and when he did, he was suddenly slapped with broad brushes. He gasped as one brush tickled his penis. Another slapped his face and soaked his hair. The last strokes went up his legs and through the cleft of his buttocks. Now he was as white as any of them and reeking of the ghost’s kin-scent. As he stood drying, Pleckoo turned to him again with eyes full of both suspicion and admiration.

  “From whom did you learn of The Prophet?” Pleckoo asked with a cocked brow. Anand wanted the story to appeal to Pleckoo, but was unsure of what to tell him. A new story with its own life spun in Anand’s head. Before he could examine its details, it marched out of his mouth as automatically as ants drawn by recruit-scent.

  “I was wandering west in search of Bee-Jor through the Red Pine Country wearing beetle kin-scent I had bought from Britasyte traders,” said Anand. “But I was captured by Slopeish soldiers who enslaved me for their war on the people who ride the wood beetle.”

  Anand saw his reference to Bee-Jor was not lost on Pleckoo.

  “After I was caught, I learned the Slopeites’ tongue from the low caste attendants in their camps,” Anand continued. “The Slopeites forced me to cart off shit and corpses. From one slave, I heard the legend of The Prophet and his glorious Termite God, Hulkro. We came across the Dustlands together, but my companion was lost to a lair spider on the journey to the Brackish Lake.” The details of Anand’s story surprised even himself.

  “Since when do Sl
opeites enslave others outside their tribe?” asked Pleckoo. He had never been stupid, thought Anand.

  “I was an object of amusement, a novelty,” said Anand, “because of my accent and strange ways. I knew they would kill me before they returned home. It was while they were at battle that we freed ourselves and fled.”

  “Your Slopeish is good,” said Pleckoo as he stroked his thin beard with its flaking paint.

  “I have always had a skill for language,” said Anand, bowing after making a boast. Around another Slopeite, Anand found himself returning to the old manners he detested, the ones that reinforced humility.

  “Then you shall learn Hulkrish quickly, as Slopeish is a corrupt descendant of it.” Pleckoo was lost in thought for a moment. “The Prophet will be interested in hearing more about Tjamed,” he finally said.

  “It is a place of tremendous wealth where the mounds themselves are made of yellow pyrite and the ants have a golden chitin. Sadly, its uncountable millions worship idols other than Hulkro,” said Anand. Pleckoo’s eyes dilated with the mention of mounds of pyrite, then narrowed at the mention of idols.

  “Hulkro desires that all the people of the Sand leave the darkness for the light of His holy love,” said Pleckoo. “Come. You shall join the other recruits and begin your training. Have you a name?”

  “Vof Quegdoth,” said Anand. In Dranverish, the words meant truth and vengeance.

  Which I will exact soon.

  The new recruits slept in leaf tents and spent their first days immersed in language lessons. Since everything was done by rote, Anand assumed the Hulkrites did not know of writing. The teachers were warriors who instructed them first in military terms. The first word taught was “sword” which was the same word as in Slopeish. The recruits’ duty at night was making weapons, arrows in particular, which they assembled under the dull lights of a torch or two.

  Later, the recruits were given ghost mandibles, which they would use to make swords. Anand was unsure of what the binding strips were until he smelled them and realized it was human leather. The Hulkrites’ swords were large, heavy, and graceless. Anand was already skilled in the use of weapons, but he pretended some ignorance when instructions began and kept his mouth shut when he disagreed with the instructor.

  Other recruits were frightened to mount the ghost ants on the day they trained to ride them, but Anand only pretended nervousness. Like leaf-cutters and hunters, the ghost ants had no natural saddles at the back of their heads where a rider knelt. Instead of man-made saddles, the Hulkrites wore rough knee- and toe-pads that locked with the fine hairs on the crevice between the ants’ eyes. Like the Dranverites, the Hulkrites had gloves with fingers that were infused with potions to press to different segments of the antennae.

  The Hulkrites’ ants were faster and more deadly than red hunters, but less easily controlled. The ghosts could be halted by banging fists on their skulls, but when an ant was incited to war by another insect, or was alerted to a food find, there was almost no controlling it. For this reason, the Hulkrites engaged in battle in the same way the Slopeites did: their ants waged a separate war on enemy ants while the humans fought each other from on top or below.

  When they had achieved some measure of control over the ghost ants, the new recruits were engaged in their first exercise. For purposes of military training, the Hulkrites kept colonies of the axe-head ant. Axe-heads were great and fierce and the only ants that posed a worthy challenge to ghosts. The recruits were to face a mock army of seasoned warriors mounted on the dreaded axe-heads. Both sides would have blunted arrow tips, dull twig swords and shields for the mock battle.

  Despite his attempts to stay inconspicuous, Anand was appointed the captain of the recruits as he was clearly the most talented member of his cohort and he spoke the best Hulkrish. On the day of the exercise, Anand looked at his men, some only boys like himself, as they braced for the conflict. It was rumored to be a fierce match, with the mock enemy nearly as ruthless as a real one. The recruits understood that they could die if they fell to the spearlike mandibles or knife-sharp skulls of the axe-heads, and no one would care.

  Only the strong were respected in Hulkren.

  It would take a morning of riding before the recruits reached the battlefield. Before they mounted, Aggle and some others ran off to vomit or empty their trembling bowels. Anand said nothing, but he did not smirk, either—he understood their apprehension.

  The sun was high and glaring when Anand and his cavalry sighted the enemy. He had read about axe-head ants in Dranverish histories, but was not prepared for how ugly and fierce they looked. The ants were properly named, their great heads square in profile and much like an axe with a razor sharp edge at the front. They had long, straight mandibles that could pierce from a distance. Sitting on top of them was a well-trained army who hurled insults at the approaching recruits. Under a tarp on the sidelines were the recruits’ instructors, sitting in judgment.

  “Look at the women who ride such pretty ants,” screamed a distant enemy. “Let’s eat these women for breakfast and feed their bones to our axe-heads,” cried another. “Let us slay these women and then fuck their corpses on the sand,” shouted a third.

  From the height of his mount, Anand could see that as sharp and long as their faces were, the top of the axe-heads’ skulls were flat platforms. Their riders had to sit low and far in back in saddles on the thorax. Anand searched his mind and recalled his readings. He remembered a description of a Dranverish battle against an army on axe-heads. How had the Dranverites won? His mind kept searching.

  Like a true enemy, his opponents weren’t going to give him time to figure things out. They let loose with a barrage of arrows with blunt ends to knock the recruits off their mounts. Anand dodged one arrow, but a recruit to his rear took one in the chest and fell. He ran after his ant and tried to remount by crawling up the spikes of its legs, but the ghost was too quick. Anand couldn’t worry about one fallen man—it was fight or fall himself. He aimed his arrows with what would have been deadly accuracy but all of them flew over their enemy in their low saddles even as they were urging their ants forward.

  “Forget your arrows! Drop the antennae, use your shields!” shouted Anand. “Let the ants clash, leap on the skulls of the axe-heads and use your swords on their riders!”

  A short moment later, axe-heads and ghost ants could no longer be controlled. They had smelled each other, and now they raced to battle and become entangled. As he had suggested, Anand and his men deflected arrows with their shields. His own ant locked mandibles with an axe-head who used her sharp face to cleave the ghost’s head and kill it.

  Anand realized his ant was about to be flipped over and he could be crushed under it. He jumped off the ghost and onto the flat skull of the axe-head, swinging his blunted blade down at its rider. He smashed once, twice, to each shoulder, then kicked the enemy off. Once anyone had fallen, they had to flee the entanglement for fear of being sliced or pierced, so that was one less foe to Anand. He looked about, then leapt to the head of another axe-head. He landed on the skull and thrust his sword at the rider who tried to rise. The man dodged the weapon, but Anand kicked him in the chin and down to the fray to get tangled in ant legs.

  The other recruits followed Anand’s example, seeing that their opponents were vulnerable at a low angle on their mounts. “Thrust your swords through the axe-heads’ skulls!” Anand shouted, and rammed his own blade into an axe-head’s brain. The others followed his example, killing all the axe-heads, and then turned their arrows on the human enemy as they fled on foot. It was not at all what their opponents had expected. When a trumpet sounded, the exercise was ended.

  Among the corpses of their ants, Anand’s men turned to dressing some minor wounds as they waited for dismissal from the chief instructor. He was a distance away with the other warriors from the battle, bathing in tubs of ghost ants’ abdomens to wash away the axe-head scent. Anand and his men froze in fear when the chief instructor and his men marched towards t
hem, weapons in hand, as if ready to slaughter them. When they reached Anand and the recruits, they raised their swords as if to hack off their heads.

  “Who would have expected that . . . from recruits!” snarled the chief instructor through a mutilated, lipless mouth. The instructor stared at Anand, who tried to avoid looking at the man’s eternally bared teeth.

  “Did I do something wrong, Instructor?”

  “Yes.”

  “What, sir? I did what I thought was right. We did defeat you.”

  The instructor’s ragged snarl turned into a gruesome grin. “No recruits have ever won this exercise, Quegdoth. You weren’t expected to. This was just a trick, boy—a test for cowardice.”

  Anand smiled and gave a modest nod.

  Though they had to walk a great distance, the recruits floated back to Jatal-dozh on a cloud of laughter. Aggle walked with Anand, arm clasped around his shoulder, in a display of affection that would have had them whipped on the Slope. Once again, Anand saw admiration in these young men’s eyes and he gloried in it.

  He thought he might like it too much.

  I’m not here to become a Hulkrish hero. I must remember that.

  Moon was small in the sky when they reached their tents, but the victory had made them tireless. Anand could not sleep and spent the time savoring his win. It was so sweet, like an everlasting lozenge of aphid sugar. When a shallow slumber came, he dreamt of Daveena and the soft patch between her legs. Just as he was about to bed her, she took out a sharp sword and poked it into his chest.

  “Get up and follow me,” said a manly voice. Anand awoke and looked up at an officer’s messenger.

  “Where?”

  The messenger just pointed, and when Anand looked up, he shuddered with fright. Anand had been summoned up to the sand-and-lacquer palaces of Jatal-dozh.

  Did Pleckoo have a sudden remembrance of him?

  CHAPTER 36