Not So Stories by David Thomas Moore

Author:David Thomas Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd

How the Ants Got Their Queen

STEWART HOTSTON

LONG AGO, WHEN human people were only just building their first towns, the ants were already masters of the city. In those days they studied architecture and engineering as grubs, emerging into their communities with the skills to build whatever their desire suggested to them.

Their cities were grand palaces in the desert, arcing bridges through the jungle canopy; at all times, they kept nature at bay without overwhelming it. In the hearts of their cities they stored all that was needed to survive the dry season, those times when even the seeds slept under the sand, dreaming of water.

The ants lived as they wished. No ant told another what to do. Each found in those around them something of value and traded it for what they needed. It may sound like Paradise, but it was well after that time; and to be even-handed, it should be said that the ants, who came then in many tribes, were quite capable of warring among themselves.

There were times when one tribe might grow wealthy beyond what was needed to survive the drought, and in doing so would spread their influence to others. It wasn’t unheard of for one ant to name themselves king or queen, emperor or even god (even ants are capable of believing their own publicity). Yet while these self-appointed rulers lorded it about, ants from sunrise to sunset carried on with their business undisturbed by such aggrandisement.

If there is one tale of the ants in those times, it was that each did as they pleased: a hero ant, if there was such a thing, was one that persuaded ten others to work together.

Our story isn’t about that.

Our story is how everything changed, and what happened after.

One day came the first of the pangolins. At that time, the pangolins lived in another land, and although the ants and pangolins knew of one another from of old, their ways of living had grown apart—each had more or less forgotten about the other’s existence, except in rumour and stories, more myth than truth.

The pangolin is a wondrous creature, warm blooded yet covered in scales, a cunning hunter but often acting alone. The world called it ‘pangolin’ because it was capable, if it felt under threat, of rolling up into a ball, its scales facing out to protect it from harm. It faced many dangers—being neither very large nor particularly fierce—yet it was clever and knew how to look after its own interests.

Looking back at that time, historians are in universal agreement that the pangolin’s most remarkable quality was its tongue.

The tongue deserves a description all of its own. It was long. Not like the hummingbird’s or moth’s, but excessively so, attached deep within its throat at the sternum, giving the pangolin a control over its tongue that was the envy of all the other creatures in the wild.

The pangolin, blessed as it was with its prodigious tongue, believed itself favoured among all creatures, and used it to prove that point.

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