After the biscuits were done baking, the deci-chiefs took them back to their villages to distribute to the families under their charge. The Lyucu guards, curious about the taste of the moonbread, wanted to save some for themselves. But Ra Olu presented them with a special batch.
“Honorable Masters, these are for you to enjoy. My wife and I personally oversaw their preparation to be sure that no brazen peasant dared to spit in them or to spoil them in some other way,” Ra Olu said.
“And I took out the slips of paper,” said Lady Lon. “If you aren’t used to eating moonbread, you might get them stuck in your throat.”
“If all the savages were as thoughtful and obedient as you,” one of the Lyucu thanes said, spitting bits of bread and filling in Ra Olu’s face as he munched and talked, “we’d have many fewer problems.”
Ra Olu didn’t even bother to wipe away the spittle as he kept on smiling. “Your Honor is absolutely correct.”
When the village families broke open the biscuits on the night of the High-Autumn Festival, they saw to their surprise that in addition to the inked messages on the front of the slips of paper, some of the blank backs of the paper slips were also filled with brown letters. Lady Lon had painstakingly written these messages using an eyebrow brush and fruit juice ink, which remained invisible until the heat of baking caramelized the sugar in the juices.
Families gathered around these slips of paper to read silently, and then they swallowed the slips.
The promised invasion of the Big Island was going to commence in another six days. Airships intensified their patrolling of the sea lanes south of Rui and Dasu to prevent another sneak attack by underwater boats like the one that had allowed Than Carucono’s forces to gain a foothold on Rui back in the spring.
No one was watching the sea north of Rui and Dasu. After all, the captured Dara soldiers had, after much torture, confessed that they had never heard of any underwater volcano routes north of the islands.
But to the north of the islands, a small flotilla stealthily crept closer. These ships had set out from Wolf’s Paw a month earlier, heading straight north until they were far out of sight of the usual shipping lanes. Then they had turned west until they were north of Rui and Dasu. The flotilla consisted of modified merchant vessels with large holds and carried little weaponry.
Their mission might be war, but they weren’t warships.
Puma Yemu, master of sneak attacks and stealthy raids, had organized this mission. With funds from the marshal, he had gone to Wolf’s Paw to buy merchant vessels and recruit desperadoes willing to do anything for hard cash. The cargo the ships carried would make anyone blanch.
Because Puma needed absolute secrecy, only when the ships were at sea did he reveal to his crew what they were carrying, and more than a dozen had thrown up immediately, and a few had even dived into the sea to avoid having to live with the ship’s cargo for a month.
“Get dressed,” Puma Yemu ordered. The moment of truth had arrived.
He lowered the fine wire mesh from on top of his helmet to drape around his face. Like a beekeeper’s veil, the mesh protected his face and neck. His hands and feet were wrapped in strips of linen to prevent the exposure of any skin. A heavy canvas smock and thick leggings covered the rest of his body. The crew of the rest of the fleet were similarly dressed and lowered their protective veils as well.
“Release!”
The instruction was passed to the other ships by flag signal. Sailors held their breath as they pried open the heavy cargo doors with long bamboo poles. Then they dove to the deck and lay with their bodies curled up to make themselves as unexposed as possible.
Dark clouds emerged from the cargo holds, buzzing like an angry swarm of bees. However, the insects that made up the swarms were not bees, but locusts, each twice the size of a grown man’s finger.
For weeks, they had been swarming inside the hold, feasting on the grain that the crew dumped into the hold via sieved openings daily as well as the bodies of their dead insectile comrades. They bred and multiplied in the darkness, shoving against each other, crawling over each other, making the ships hum as though they were alive.
Prime Minister Cogo Yelu had carefully bred those locusts from the eggs left behind by the destroyed swarms in Géfica. These were the largest, strongest locusts Dara had to offer, and they were hungry, very hungry.
The locusts, freed from their hold, scented the air and detected the presence of land nearby. Land, and vegetation. The swarms rose from the ships, joined together, and, like a dark thundercloud, headed south toward the fields of Rui and Dasu.
The plague of locusts descended upon Rui and Dasu like a typhoon.
Chittering, rasping, rustling, rumbling, the locusts devoured everything in their path. They swarmed over the fields—red, green, gold—and drained them of all color and shape save the tan of bare soil and skeletal, bare branches stripped of all leaves. Rice, wheat, sorghum, taro, sugarcane, grass, weed—everything was ground up by millions of mandibles and then disappeared into millions of winged stomachs.
The Lyucu warriors tried to fight the locusts at first, but what could war clubs and axes do against a beast with innumerable heads? The garinafins tried to make a stand against the storm with fire breath, but even with thousands of locusts fried in each flame wave, more kept coming. Trying to fight the locusts was like trying to fight the sea itself.
Eventually, skin blistered and blood oozing, the Lyucu warriors had to retreat into their tents and seal the flaps while the Dara peasants cowered in basements. The two islands became the domain of insects, as long-haired cattle stampeded and garinafins took off.
Overhead, flocks of birds circled in wide, placid circles as if observing a surging sea that had nothing to do with them.
On the third day, after the locusts had swept over the entire island and denuded it of all vegetation, after they had turned on each other to fill their insatiable appetites, only then did the birds finally dive down and begin the process of cleansing the islands of the insectoid plague.
Afterward, as the dazed Lyucu warriors and Dara peasants emerged from their hiding places, they saw a wasted world in which all the crop fields and grazing pastures had turned into a lifeless desert.
For some reason, while the granaries in many of the villages had been sealed tightly ahead of time and preserved their contents against the plague, the haylofts and sheds where feed for the long-haired cattle and garinafin were stored had been left open, and the locusts had mercilessly devoured the entire supply of feed for Lyucu beasts of war.
The villagers nodded at each other, finally understanding the message that had come to them in the moonbread: Seal up your granaries with wax and clay.
A few deci-chiefs, terrified of the consequences, revealed the truth to Pékyu Tenryo. Soon, the heads of Lady Lon and Minister Ra Olu hung from the gates of Kriphi, a warning for any who dared to engage in sabotage against the Lyucu.
“They think they would starve us with this trick,” said Pékyu Tenryo, his hands shaking from anger. “I will show them what starvation truly means.”
The order was given that the granaries would be opened so that the stored rice, sorghum, and wheat would be given to the garinafins and long-haired cattle as feed.