Prophets of the Ghost Ants

by Clark Thomas Carlton

  “You assigned the Entreveans to a mission,” she said.

  “You are a Plep. And you are supposed to be waiting for me in Cajoria.”

  “If I’m married to you, I’m an Entrevean. And our clan has been given an important mission. I don’t want Bee-Jorites or Britasytes thinking I have special privileges as your first wife.”

  Anand suddenly understood and was pierced with sadness.

  “You don’t want to be there for the ceremony,” he said.

  “No.”

  “But it was your idea.”

  “It was.”

  “Daveena, you know I will always hate her.”

  “Yes.”

  “Fly back with me. Someone else can look after our sled.”

  “No, Anand.”

  She turned from him to hide her distress before she met his eyes. “Because I love you, and thousands need you, you must go through with this. But now that the time is near, I find the idea of the two of you . . . it feels like a flea piercing my heart.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and he truly was. The two were silent, then looked away from each other.

  “Promise me something,” she said, lifting her eyes to his.

  “Anything.”

  “When that . . . time . . . comes, you will close your eyes and think only of me.”

  “I promise. I only ever think of you.”

  “I don’t believe that,” she said with the mildest of snorts. “Our first time was not your first time.”

  Anand was silent, looked away. Daveena crawled up the locust’s leg and into her husband’s arms. He cradled and kissed her and rubbed her swelling belly in the crisp autumn air. He looked to the sky and the tatters of gray clouds blowing in. He knew from the sun’s position that he must leave now in order to make it to the Slope on time and partake in the first official function of the Free State of Bee-Jor. When Anand was back in the air, he did not feel whole. He had left half of himself with Daveena, the half of him that had been happy.

  As Anand flew over Bee-Jor, he saw that everywhere, it was calmer. The corpses of the ghost ants had provided the people with a bounty of food that would last for many moons, long enough to learn the Dranverish methods for food production. The scuffles over housing were ongoing but for the moment, the neighboring Seed Eaters posed no threat.

  Regardless of the peace, Anand knew his real work had just begun. Defeating the Hulkrites was far easier than the building of a new nation. Slopeish merchants and craftsmen, who had burrowed in their dwellings to protect their hoards, had to be urged out of hiding to renew the flow of commerce. Anand would have to contact the Dranverites and invite their ambassadors to bring inseminated red hunter queens before the leaf-cutter ants could be phased out, a process sure to invite resistance.

  When Anand landed atop Cajoria, he saw women in widow’s whites scowling at him as they strolled over what had been the royal decks for Sun and Moon worship. Many widows of the military castes had killed themselves and their children rather than allow the dark-skinned victors to live near their chambers. A few widows had attacked the new class of soldiers with knives or attempted to poison them. Some soldiers wanted to kill these women on the spot, but Anand ordered their imprisonment instead. He sighed, knowing that one of many things he would have to explain and institute was a justice system.

  As he stared back at the scowling women, Anand suspected they fidgeted with daggers under their robes. I can never be alone again, he thought, and must always be on alert. And as if he had commanded them with his thoughts, loyal soldiers surrounded him. Each considered it an honor to act as the living shield that absorbed an assassin’s weapon.

  Polexima had assumed her new role as Bee-Jor’s Priestess of Cricket. She was conducting funeral rites for the thousands of Cajorian dead when a messenger arrived at the altered cathedral. Vof Quegdoth sent warm greetings and requested she prepare her daughter for the nuptials. Priestess Polexima would officiate at the ritual with the holy person of Anand’s roach tribe. She hobbled in her robe of polished straw towards Sahdrin’s darkened chambers where Trellana had gone to live with her decrepit father so that they could drink fermentation from morning to night.

  Polexima’s nose was smacked with the stink of overflowing chamber pots as she entered her daughter’s bedchamber to find her slouched and staring at the wall as a servant filed her nails.

  “Good gods, it stinks in here, Trellana!”

  “The servants aren’t emptying the pots.”

  “And they won’t be. Quegdoth’s first edict was that all citizens of Bee-Jor are responsible for removing their own waste.”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “Oh, I’m quite certain you have been. He is coming. His holy person and his family are descending to the cathedral.”

  “I will kill myself rather than go through with this,” Trellana said. She threw herself on the bed and pulled fetid blankets over her face.

  “But you agreed to it.”

  “I was drunk.”

  “When are you not drunk?”

  “I want to go west and live with Cousin Prettana in the Kobacynth Mound.”

  “Mound Kobacynth is under attack from the Carpenters. The entire west will soon be under siege. Is that where you want to take your children?”

  “They can stay with you.”

  “They are your children.”

  “But, Mother—he’s a Dranverite! Supposedly he’s as dark as night under his powder.”

  “He is your moral, mental, and physical superior. Marry him, Trellana. He has promised that you can live in the palace, with all your usual comforts.”

  Trellana sucked from a bowl of spirits until she coughed on them. “Why me? Why must I always suffer?”

  “You don’t know a thing about suffering. This marriage is not about your happiness. If you care about anyone other than yourself, you will fulfill your duty.”

  “My duty is to myself.”

  “Fine. Pack a trunk. Leave. I’m sure you can scrounge up a hovel on the flats. ”

  Trellana fumed in silence, then reached for a second bowl and slurped it up. “Bring more from the best casket,” she shouted, flinging the bowl at her servant. “I’m wedding the Son of Locust!”

  A short time later, Trellana was in a dark haze, wearing her finest gown, sitting atop an insect being lured to the cathedral. What am I riding on? she wondered as she considered the strange gait of the creature that sent the ants scattering. Before she realized it was something other than an ant, she was helped down and pulled through the portal’s flap to some very strange sounds when it occurred to her she might have been riding on a roach. The Dranverite had invited clans of roach people, as well as foot soldiers of the lowest castes who sported swords and blowguns in a holy place. The Britasytes had brought instruments and were making a frantic music they danced to. Dancing roach people in the cathedral! “Desecration!” she shouted, but her outcry was drowned in the din.

  No Slopeish priest was at the altar, but her own mother—a woman!—was there with a dark-skinned person of indeterminate sex. Someone had replaced the idol of Mantis with an idol of Madricanth and his/her consorts were Locust the Sky God and Cricket, the goddess worshipped by the fatuous Palzhanites.

  “Blasphemy!” Trellana screamed through her veil as the cathedral quieted. Her cries were ignored as Cricket novices stood at her side to hold her up. The dark roach priest (or priestess?) conducted half the ceremony in an ugly language sung to garish melodies. Polexima conducted the second half in a bizarre ritual that involved the rubbing of insect wings against femurs as Cricket’s different names were invoked: Night Musician, Defender of Peace, Wisdom Queen. Trellana heard her mother spouting nothing about the joyful union of a man and woman, but there was gibberish about the uniting of peoples, the equality of races, a new era of love and tolerance.

  At one point, the Priestess of Cricket and the Two Spirit took the sash of Trellana’s garment and tied it to that of the Dranverite. She barely re
alized he had been standing beside her. His face and hands were powdered with yellow pyrite, which made him gorgeous, even divine, in appearance. When Trellana’s veil was pulled away and she could see him more clearly, she found herself both enchanted and repulsed. He thrust a honey-sweetened egg wafer in her mouth, then ate the one that had been smashed into her own limp fingers. She passed out again.

  Trellana awoke in her own chambers sometime later. They smelled sweet and she realized servants had exchanged the chamber pots and rubbed the floors with a fragrant flower essence. Vof Quegdoth was across from her, in a simple tunic, sitting and looking out the window. How handsome he is, she thought, no longer certain of who he was. He wasn’t puffy like a Slopeish royal but was lean and sinewy. Under his taut skin were rippling muscles that she didn’t know humans possessed—Maleps didn’t look like that out of his clothes. She wondered why the Dranverite looked so sad.

  Anand cast a forlorn gaze out the window, saddened because his father would not attend the evening’s wedding feast. Yormu had motioned with his hands that he could not stay inside a crystal palace, much less live in one. He shook when he looked up at their distant ceilings, seemed frightened by the opulence. He kissed his son’s cheek before he left to sleep in his hovel at the midden.

  Anand watched as his father’s hunched figure disappeared in the crowds of the wedding celebrations. As Anand had ordered, great spaces on all levels had been cleared for everyone to gather. The clearings were crowded with celebrants who paraded idols of old and new gods on palanquins. Some worshipped the Lord of Fire and Nephew of Bee, while others chanted to Quegdoth the Godling and Master of Night Wasps. The new deities were all fashioned to look like Anand and were dressed with facsimiles of his mottled blue robes. He laughed to himself, none too quietly.

  “What’s so funny?” asked Terraclon, who had entered without announcing himself. Anand looked at his friend, standing tall and imperious in yellow robes. His arms flared out to display brocaded silk so abundant its folds gathered in puddles around his feet.

  “Terraclon, they think I’m a god.”

  “You will have me to remind you that you are not,” said Terraclon, who had taken on something of Dolgeeno’s accent.

  “And you, shit worker, will have me to remind you of your own humble origins,” said Anand as he affected the royal accent in kind.

  “I’m as royal as any of them,” said Terraclon, returning to the harsh accent of his old caste. The two friends grinned at each other, then turned to look out the window. Anand smiled to see the Britasytes being tolerated by the crowds as they paraded their idol of Madricanth up to the highest level. They set it on the place where Maleps and Trellana had once sat on thrones to enjoy torture spectacles. Anand turned from the window to see Trellana awake and squinting at him in drunken anger.

  “Will you excuse us, Ter?” Anand said.

  “Excuse you?” Ter asked, cocking an eyebrow.

  “It’s a polite way of telling you to go.”

  Terraclon rolled his eyes and made a mock bow before floating off in a cloud of silk. Anand turned to Trellana.

  “Good evening, Trellana.”

  “There is nothing good about it.”

  “I regret having wedded you as well, but it serves our purposes.”

  “What purposes? Why not just send me to die in the west?”

  “This was not my idea, it was my wife’s. She realizes, as you should, that transitions are best when they are gradual. Many of your subjects still accept you as their queen. Most accept me as the new ruler. They have even elevated me to divine status, something I will have to decline. Silly, isn’t it, this idea of me being the Son of Locust? Why, it’s almost as silly as when they thought you were a sorceress descended from Ant Queen.”

  “It is not silly at all. I was born to rule . . . it is the duty of my caste.”

  “Castes have come to an end. This is Bee-Jor now and no race will ever dominate another. Not here.”

  Anand saw her face grow long and sensed her grief.

  “I will never love you,” he said, “and you will never love me. But perhaps we will both love our children.”

  He breathed deeply with regret as he looked away, then back at Trellana. Her breath was acrid from thorn-root liquor, but he knew what he must do.

  “Your mother has told me you are not in a time of bleeding. It is with all gentleness that we must fulfill our duties as sovereigns. We should remove some of our clothing and . . .”

  “Yes, I know how it goes from there,” she said. She started to pull up her garment, then stopped and glared at him. “You murdered my husband,” she shouted. “You murdered our kings and princes and our military caste.”

  “The Hulkrites killed them. Or most of them anyway. I told them how to save themselves. They ignored me.”

  “Yes, of course, the infamous washing of hands. You know your arguments were purposely weak.”

  “They decided on their own strategy,” said Anand. “Would your husband have fought on foot and smeared his body with roach secretions? Would you?” Anand nodded toward the lower part of her body. “Please, Trellana. Let’s be quick about this. I apologize for this . . . intimacy . . . we shall have to engage in from time to time.”

  She lifted her garments and sighed. After Anand dropped his tunic, he turned to see her pinching her nose with her fingers. His face was dusted with gold, but he knew the hue of his buttocks was something else entirely.

  “Is that the normal color of a Dranverite?” she asked.

  “We are all different colors,” he said.

  “You repulse me,” she spat out.

  “I am not so fond of you.”

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s see if it’s true.”

  “If what’s true?”

  “That dark skinned people are savages who keep their women in ecstasy.”

  “Our goal is not ecstasy,” Anand said as he climbed atop her. “It is to make children.”

  Anand could not look at her and closed his eyes as he needed someone else to think about if this was going to succeed. He tried to think of Daveena, but that seemed obscene. He turned to memories of his afternoons with Jidla, which was more helpful. He was yanked from his trance when he heard Trellana gasping with pleasure and saw her eyes were open. She grabbed him by his head and yanked him to a kiss.

  “No! No kissing!” he said, wiping his mouth. She laughed as he closed his eyes, exerted himself. It was over quickly.

  “Thank you,” he said as he rushed to his clothing, never more anxious to leave a room. Trellana sat up looking smugly satisfied, but a moment later her nose was in the air and she scowled.

  “Was that the best you could do?” she taunted. “I felt nothing. Perhaps you’re saving yourself for that little butterfly that was here. What’s his name—Terraclon? Just wait until I tell the world—the Destroyer of the Hulkrites, the Tamer of the Night Wasps is one of those. Would you mind dressing my hair before you leave?”

  Anand froze and pinned her with his eyes. All his old hatred was burning again, threatening to become a wildfire.

  “It occurs to me that you are a victim, too,” he said, “of this ridiculous system where people are born to their stations in life. You’ve little idea of how ignorant and incurious and mean-spirited you are.”

  “You’ll find out just how mean-spirited I can be,” she said, sitting up and grabbing a hand mirror to grin at her image. He was quiet a moment as he tied his garment. But then he smiled.

  “What are you simpering about?” she asked.

  “You know—this was not the first time we’ve touched,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The first time I touched you, by accident, was in a rolling cage in Dranveria.”

  Trellana jerked up, backed away on her mattress. She held her breath as Anand picked up a string and tied his hair back. He turned in profile to reveal his ear with its missing lobe.

  “Yes, little darling,” he said,
dropping all pretenses of a Dranverish accent. “You tried to have me executed, torn into little pieces, merely because I brushed your arm.”

  He smiled, even more broadly now, as he sat on the mattress and waited for the moment of realization. Her eyes grew wide as her face blanched and her body shook. She screamed as she ran from the room and hurled herself into a scent tub. Anand watched as her servants stared at her as she thrashed and shrieked in the dome of water.

  Anand was clenching his teeth to keep from laughing when a guard squeezed through the portal with a shining red tube.

  A Dranverish message scroll!

  “Where did you get this?” he demanded of the guard.

  “Someone on a locust, an impressive young man named Dwan, gave it to me. He said it was from the People’s Agent of Dranveria and that it was very important you get it.”

  “Where is he? Tell him I’ll be right with him!”

  “He did not wait. He flew right away.”

  Anand was crushed with disappointment. To see Dwan on this day would have been like a rich sweet at the end of a feast. Now the day was ending in confusion.

  “Thank you,” Anand said, taking the scroll. He saw the insignia of the People’s Agent. The letter was addressed to Lick-My-Testicles.

  “Uh-oh,” he said as his mouth went dry. His stomach rumbled with dread as he uncapped the tube and read:

  Anand,

  We must reconsider membership of your new nation of Bee-Jor within our collective for an indefinite time. If what we have heard about your war with the Hulkrites is true, we must express our utter dismay at the means by which you achieved victory. We are most distressed by your careless use of fire in warfare, especially as it appears you used it to promote your personal religious beliefs. We also question the name you have given your new nation, which is likely to attract a migration of displaced people you cannot possibly absorb. We are reinforcing our own Buffer Zone at this moment in anticipation of . . .

  Anand could not read the rest of the letter. All his joy was gone and in its place was the same anguish he had known all his life. “Is there anyone on the Sand who understands me or appreciates what I have done?” he asked of no one at all. A moment later, he chided himself, for it was not the Britasyte way to ever take pity on one’s own self. No matter how long and difficult the next journey, he must prepare for it . . . then take the first step.