“If so, he is a very small miner.” Anthony gestured at the hole.
Balkis glanced about her, her apprehension growing. “I see other such heaps in the distance. These miners may be small, Anthony, but they are many.”
“Let us see if they have brought up more of what you call gold.” Anthony bent to dig in the pile of loose dirt. “Another! And another and another …” He gathered up a score of nuggets, then broke off with a yelp of alarm. Balkis leaped backward with a scream, for the miner came climbing out of the hole—a miner with six legs and long antennae above faceted compound eyes. It was an ant as big as a fox, an ant whose mandibles looked like the tusks of a forest boar.
“Run!” Balkis cried.
Anthony started running, but with reluctance. “Surely there is nothing to fear—it is so much smaller than we!”
“I assure you it is large enough to kill a man, or even an ox!” Balkis called back. “Have you never seen an ant pull a twig five times its size? Run as though the hounds of hell were at your heels!”
And well they might have been, for the ant gave a high chittering call as it charged after them, and dozens more came pouring out behind it.
Anthony ran.
CHAPTER 11
True to Balkis' word, the ant ran twice as fast as they, and so did its mates. The air filled with chittering as ants came pouring from other hills, darting across their path.
“There!” Anthony pointed toward a spire of rock off to their left, only ten feet ahead. “Surely they cannot climb stone!”
Balkis had seen ants climb vertical tree trunks, but these were so much larger that perhaps they could not stick as well—and they were almost at her heels. With a cry of loathing, she swerved after Anthony.
The ant swerved, too, and its mandibles caught in her robe. She screamed and yanked; the cloth tore, and she ran even faster.
Ahead, ants angled to cut her off. Others closed in from the sides.
Anthony shot up the spire, finding handholds with the ease of a mountaineer who has spent his life among sheer rocks. Eight feet up, he reached down. Mandibles clashed behind her, and Balkis leaped. The ant ran up the stone right behind her, but she caught Anthony's hand, he lifted as her feet scrambled, and the ant fell back, too heavy in truth for the acrobatics its smaller cousins managed without noticing. But more ants crowded around, more and more, pushing their front rank up by sheer mass of numbers.
“They will reach us yet!” Anthony unlimbered his sling.
“That will do little good against such a horde!” Balkis cried.
“We cannot sit and wait for them to come! You fight with your weapons, and I shall fight with mine!” Anthony set a stone in the cup and whirled it around his head.
It would buy them time, if nothing else—and Balkis needed time indeed, to craft a spell.
Again she stalled. She floundered after a rhyme for ‘come,’ but while she floundered, Anthony called out,
“And sleep within your deep and earthen bower!”
The tide of insects ebbed astonishingly as the ones at the back began to sink into the ground. They scrabbled for a foothold, but the soil gave way beneath them faster than they could dig. The ones that had been standing on them touched the ground and immediately sank, too. In minutes there were no ants visible, only churning earth; then it, too, was still.
“Quickly, down!” Balkis started climbing toward the ground. “Before they can dig their way out!”
“No, wait!” Anthony reached down to catch her wrist, pulling up to stop her. He pointed ahead, and Balkis, looking, saw a buck burst from a screen of bushes. A dozen ants shot after it, moving so fast their legs were blurs.
“No, look away,” Anthony said grimly.
“I have seen beeves slaughtered, and deer butchered.” Nonetheless, Balkis looked away as the ants surrounded the deer. She heard their furious chittering and its single bleat of terror.
“There is naught to see now but a mass of ants,” Anthony reported.
Balkis turned back in time to see the throng of ants break apart, each with a slab of meat in its mandibles, gliding away toward their anthill, much more slowly now but still as fast as a human could run, leaving only a picked and gleaming skeleton behind them.
Balkis stared in horror and shivered with the chill that wrapped her back and shoulders.
“We dare not move at all in this valley!” Anthony said with a shudder. “How came we so far alive?”
“It was early morning,” Balkis said. “Perhaps the ants do not come out until the sun does.”
“Oh, for a cloud!” Anthony groaned.
The earth began to churn again, all about the spire, and antennae began to poke through.
Instead of increasing, what overcast there was lifted— and they saw a grim granite castle lowering at them atop another hill.
“This is why they have built their strongholds!” Anthony cried. “Not against one another but against the ants!”
“If we can reach that fortress, we shall be safe!”
Anthony swept his hand in a gesture including all the ants who were rising about them again. “How are we to wade through these?”
Inspiration struck, and Balkis cried, “The nuggets! It is not us alone whom they chase! Oh aye, they want meat, but they lust after gold far more! Throw the nuggets, Anthony! Throw them as far and as hard as you can!”
Anthony groaned. “You know not what you ask! Never have I seen such nuggets as these, only the golden pebbles in the stream! I have dreamed of having fortune enough so that my father and brothers need never toil again, and so we might journey as the traders do to visit fabulous lands such as Maracanda!”
“You shall gain your wish without gold!” Balkis cried. “Labor shall not harm your kin, and we are already on the road to Maracanda, with many fabulous sights on the way, I doubt not! Throw the gold, Anthony, please!”
With a groan wrenched up from the core of his soul, Anthony threw a lump of gold as high and as far as he could. The ants must have scented it somehow, for they turned and charged after it as it passed overhead. It fell to earth, and the ants piled into a churning, heaving heap, fighting over the ounce of metal.
“Quickly!” Balkis cried. “We must flee!” She scrambled down and ran toward the castle. Anthony dropped, leaped, dropped again, landed three yards behind her, and caught up quickly.
Behind them they could hear the frenzy of chittering slacken, settle, then boil up again, louder than before and still growing. Balkis risked a quick look over her shoulder and saw half the ants racing after them; the other half lay in bits and pieces, with a lone specimen limping toward his burrow to put the nugget back among the tailings.
“Throw another nugget, Anthony!” she cried. “Nothing else will slow them enough to save us!”
Anthony looked, saw the vanguard halfway to them already, and could have sworn the ant in the lead was the one who had first chased him. Ridiculous, of course, when they all looked alike. But they were coming fast, so with great reluctance, he took another nugget from his pouch, whirled it in his sling, and sent it spinning over the heads of their pursuers.
The result was electric—each ant turned as the lump of metal passed overhead, the ones in front scrambling over the ones behind, who were slower to scent the gold. Within moments they were all racing away from Balkis and Anthony. The winner pounced as the nugget fell to earth, and all the others pounced on him. Again they piled up, churning and tearing at one another, their chittering filling the air—but the heap was only half as high as the one before.