| Chapter 9 |
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I used to have a girlfriend in Cambridge who liked to go shopping. Whenever we stepped inside a clothes shop, assistants would materialise from nowhere and ask us if we needed any help. Some of them may even have genuinely wanted to help us, although most were typical of the British Shop Assistant breed who think they lose a little bit of their soul every time they have to be nice to someone. We, of course, always said we didn't need help, even if we did, because not only do the British make stroppy sales assistants, they make stroppy customers, too.
Orc bookshops are nothing like Cambridge womenswear shops.
I opened the door, and found the place practically deserted. There were two other customers, both orcs (of course) who were perusing the various shelves, but there was no-one anywhere who looked at all like they might want to serve anybody.
This was fine by me, because actually I didn't really want to buy any books. Well, OK, maybe I'd get a couple on criminal law if they had any, as a present for SKUP; my main purpose, though, was to use the establishment as a resource centre. A quick check affirmed my belief that, like the road signs I had seen on my way, the text was all in proper letters and not the triangular thingies that the orcs of yore preferred.
First, I went to the travel section. It wasn't all that big, orcs not being to enamoured of tourism, but it did have some useful general guides to the continent (the name of which, incidentally, is Wilsonia1).
One of the first books I found had a large map which folded out of the cover, so I studied this to begin with. Wilsonia is shaped vaguely like a pear lying on its side, with the stalk pointing West. On the South coast is the port of Scrab, which has the only major commercial airport and is the main transportation hub. About half-way up, and slightly to the right, is MEKTO, standing astride a large, navigable river. In the far North are the mountains, the Southernmost portion of which are those occupied by the HA. These were the only three bits of Wilsonia to which I had been.
So: mountains aren't really very hospitable places, which is probably why they weren't inhabited prior to the arrival of the HA. What other areas of Wilsonia were likely to have had only a sparse population at the time the former slaves returned?
Well, in the West, just North of the bit that sticks out, there is a rather extensive area of marshland which would probably be quite unpleasant an abode compared to the plains. There are more mountains along the spine of the sticky-out bit, too, although they aren't as tall as the HA mountains, being more like big hills. They could still be somewhere that a displaced people might have to settle, though. Also, taking a cold view of the evidence, the coastal areas to the East and Southeast would probably have been depopulated over time by the persistent snatching raids of the trolls and ogres, and would therefore be amenable to repopulation.
So, my next step was to see if I could find any books describing the orcs who lived either in the marshes, up the spine mountains, or on the East/Southeast coast. My aim was then to learn whether they were fully aware of their past, or whether they had mislaid it like the HA had.
The orcs on the coast turned out to be fairly civilised, as a result of human and some elven influence. One of the novels I came across, My Neighbour Laurèndel, was actually quite humorous; it concerned the trials and tribulations of an orc living in the suburbs of the port of JATHmat upon the arrival of his well-meaning but thoroughly incompetent elven neighbour. I'd have bought a copy, if I hadn't been worried that the eponymous hero might equally well have been me...
The orcs of the marshes and the spine mountains were much harder to find anything out about. None seemed to write books, and none of the people who did write books wrote about them. They weren't mentioned in what passed for an encyclopaedia in this part of the world, nor were they mentioned in any of those general reference books of human origin which had made it to the shop.
Disappointed, I decided I ought to give up and go get something to eat. I had skipped lunch, reasoning that by doing so I would be able to eat dinner no matter what under-cooked flapping beastie they served me up; I was consequently ravenous. I picked up the books I was buying for SKUP, and approached the sales till.
I rang the bell.
With almost decent haste, the shopkeeper emerged from behind a curtain, carrying a small dog.
"Why are you wearing a patch?" he asked.
"My optician told me it was a good idea. I thought it was unnecessary at first, but then I saw the light."
"Must have been a blinding insight... You want both these books?"
"Yes please. I was looking for something about the orcs who live in the marshes, or in the Western mountains, but I couldn't find anything."
"That'll be because we have nothing on those subjects."
"Do you know anyone who does?"
"Yes, I do. Kamhala VAD would probably stock them."
"Where's their shop?"2
"31, MEKTO Street."
"MEKTO Street? MEKTO has a MEKTO Street? How unusual."
"No, Scrab has a MEKTO Street. Kamhala VAD lives in Scrab."
I paid for the books.
"Tell me," I said, as I waited for my change: "why do you have a pet dog? I've never seen an orc with a dog before?"
The shopkeeper sighed. "Being so close to the railway terminus, we get occasional humans in here. I don't know why, but some of them seem to think that they can walk out without paying for their books. KEKki here makes them think twice."
I looked at the animal. It was a short-legged, scrawny, grey-white creature with raggedy ears and a pug-like face.
"I'm probably missing something, but it seems to me at first glance that your dog isn't really up to the job. I can probably kick it further than it can run."
Without saying a word, the orc bent below the counter and pulled out a small, leather harness. He fitted it swiftly onto the dog's back, despite the animal's protestations, and tied onto it a small book from a display on the counter. He passed me a ball.
"Throw that out of the door," he said.
Well, the door was ajar, so I did.
The dog shot off after it as fast as its little legs would carry it, the book bouncing about in the harness on its back. The animal reached the door, went through, and -
WOOF!
The noise wasn't made by the dog; it was made by the large bolt of electricity which shot out from a metal plate at the side of the jamb, striking the dog and knocking it flying.
"So, are you thinking of taking any of my books now?"
The dog was lying on its side, wisps of smoke rising up from its body.
"I take your point," I said. "It seems a bit of a waste of a dog just to demonstrate the principle, though."
"Oh, he's not dead, he always lies there for half an hour or so afterwards, smouldering. He'll be fine tomorrow. Or maybe the day after. I expect."
I left the bookshop and pondered my options. I had come to something of a dead end insofar as my quest to find out whether the HA were unique in their purging of the past was concerned. Still, it didn't really matter; I could write up my report without having to find out. As for my conspiracy theory, well I still felt it possible that I was being set up somehow, but then again perhaps I was being ethno-centric with regard to the Virginian humans? Maybe their reasons for sending me to the HA were perfectly rational - to them? After 300 years, there had to be some major differences in perspective between their culture and mine. I was simply being a little paranoid.
There was a tap on my shoulder. I turned around, and recognised one of the orcs who had been in the bookshop when I arrived.
"I overheard you saying you were interested in the people from the mountains," she said.
"That's right, I am. I want to find out what they know about their past; it's for part of some work I'm doing."
"My husband has been to the far North. He spent 438 days living with the ZefVAG people of the plains beyond the mountains. Would you like to meet him?"
My heart leapt. The HA word for "free" is ZefEN, and the Zef prefix is used to attribute the quality of being free to a concept. VARG means "lots of people", which is near enough to VAG phonetically to make a plausible mapping. If this tribe called itself "free people", they must implicitly know that at one point they hadn't been free.
"If you like, I can come back later when you've made up your mind," said the woman.
"No, no, don't, please, I'd very much like to meet your husband. Unless he's in Scrab or somewhere."
"He's a short walk from here in our workshop. His name is REEgor."
"I'm RICHard. What's your name, if you don't mind my asking?"
"It's ALgazur," she replied, "whether I mind your asking or not."
I was given no immediate indication of what REEgor made in his mysterious workshop. ALgazur went down some steps the basement of a house on a quiet street, and got him to come up to talk to me. He was covered in bits of wood shavings, so I assumed he was some kind of craftsman constructing furniture or whatever; then again, maybe he'd fallen in a tub of sawdust a couple of weeks earlier and hadn't got around to brushing it off yet.
"Why are you wearing an eye patch?" he asked.
"My optician tried out some sensitive new equipment on me, and in the light of that it became necessary."
"New equipment? You probably went to LEDAM, then; he must have taken a shine to you."
"Your wife tells me that you spent some time in the far North."
REEgor said nothing.
"Well, er, if you did indeed do so, I was wondering if you could help me. I'm studying some orcs who live in the mountains - the HA. Have you heard of them?"
"The HA? No, can't say I have. The only mountain people I came across were the Gemmenites, and they were the laziest, filthiest, foul-smelling folk I've ever encountered."
"But you liked the ZefVARG?"
"ZefVAG, it means `free people', yes; they were all right. They were primitive, though. They used to go fishing for their food, but they hated water, so they were unhappy at lot of the time. The only really annoying thing about them was that they kept taking my shoes with them on their little boats."
"Why did they do that? Some kind of superstition?"
"No, it's to save them if they get into trouble. If the sea turns their boat upside down, help will soon be at hand because `hey, that man's got my shoes!'"
"Oh, I see, it all makes sense now." If only. "Why were you so far from MEKTO, by the way?"
"Because that's where the ZefVAG live. I wouldn't have been able to show them how to make boats if I'd only gone up the road, would I?"
"You're a boat-maker?"
"You want a boat made?"
"No..."
"Then what's it to you?"
"How do you get your boats out of the cellar?"
"I don't make very big ones. Do you want to know about the ZefVAG or not?"
"I do, please. In particular, I want to know something of their history."
"History? Well I can't really help you there. All I know is that after the ogres were made to release them, the tribe was granted the most icy, frozen wasteland on Wilsonia upon which to build their homes, and yet the people still preferred it to being under the ogres' tyranny."
"So they know they were once slaves, then?"
"They weren't once slaves. They were all born free. Their ancestors were slaves."
"That's what I meant, really, sorry. What do they think about ogres?"
"They've never met any ogres."
"No, but the ogres enslaved their ancestors."
"They didn't. You've got that wrong. The ogres' ancestors enslaved the ZefVAG's ancestors."
"I see. So today's ZefVAGs bear no grudges towards today's ogres?"
"Why should they? Today's ogres haven't done anything wrong."
Orc society may be far less advanced than Western society on Earth, but in some ways they're way, way ahead of us.
I've been thinking... Many Australians of European origin are descended from criminals, but on the whole Australians are very law abiding. Not only do they feel no shame for having ancestors who were transported from Britain as punishment for wrong-doings, they do not hold present-day British people responsible for bringing the rather flimsy charges which were often used to justify shipping largely innocent men to Botany Bay.
I guess this rather blows a hole in my wishy-washy "we can learn from the savages" moralising of the paragraph-before-last. Dang. That'll hit sales in the Mid-West.
So, I had my answer. The HA attitude of forgetting the past probably wasn't to do with any disgrace they felt for having been enslaved, because other orcs had been in the same situation and felt no disgrace at all. Nor was obliterating the past something all the orcs did.
Furthermore, the manner in which I found this out could not easily have been set up by the Virginian authorities. It was very unlikely that they would position people in every bookshop in the city centre, ready in the event of my paying it a visit.
I took dinner at the station restaurant, which, I had discovered, served a selection of real food in addition to orc food. Virginian railway termini are far more pleasant than the ones in Britain: the fact that they never had to handle steam engines means they don't have vast glass roofs that are so high up you can't tell what the horrible green stuff growing on them is. Unfortunately, Virginian railways offer no better catering than those back home, and so I still found that I was eating pies containing unidentifiable meat of indeterminate age. Oh well, at least I could be fairly sure it was reasonably dead, I suppose.
I now began seriously to doubt3 my conspiracy theory. Let's imagine the meeting at which the Virginians decided where to send the Earthling anthropologists due to visit them. These guys are sitting around a big, big table which is covered in papers and dominated by a large map. They're trying to figure out 27 potential sites, and it's going to be something of a balancing act. On the map are little coloured flags showing potential places of interest. The most important ones are in red, the next-most important are in yellow, and the least important are green.
They decide they can't use up all the red sites at once, because there are other batches of anthropologists who will be coming through later. Maybe they pick about a third of them. They then go though the yellow sites, discarding those which are geographically or anthropologically close to the red ones. This gives them another third, say. Finally, they go through their checklist of societies they absolutely have to send people to, but haven't yet, and see what green sites match them. Maybe a large continent has no representative, or maybe there's no-one going to a polar region. Oh, look, we haven't picked any orcs. Are there any orcs on green sites? Ah, yes, there's one lot here, the HA, for whom we seem to have an ethnography. Has anyone yet been scheduled to go to Wilsonia? How about we send some poor sap there, then?
There is no need to imagine what the meeting was like on Earth where the fieldwork opportunities were shared out, because we already know that those people present at it got the prize ones. Therefore, the rest of us were left with the dregs, and that's how I wound up with the HA.
The only thing that nagged me about this was that I knew there was someone else studying orcs: one of the Oxford anthropologists. If there were 15 Virginian types of homo sapiens plus several human societies worth looking at, was there really a need to send two people out to study remote tribes of orcs? Hmm...
Religion!
The humans on Virginia may be a bunch of irredeemable atheists, but that doesn't mean the orcs are. Whenever a large group of refugees comes to live nearby, there's a reasonable chance that missionaries will appear too just as soon as they have stopped rubbing their hands in glee. Perhaps I could find something interesting in the records of religions which were around at the end of the time of darkness? By now, I definitely wanted to know why the HA had abandoned their entire past. Perhaps they were somehow manufacturing an artificial "darkness" for their "out of darkness comes light" philosophy, to make their former existence seem darker still?
Of course, deciding to check out religions and actually checking them out are not the same thing...
I returned to the bookshop, but found nothing useful on the subject. I would have to seek out some kind of temple or monastery or something, however given the time available to me I adjudged that success was unlikely. Nevertheless, I did buy volume IV of the laudable but misconceived Encyclopaedia Virginia, which had a tolerable bit in it about deltoid script. Well hey, the chances were that if I did find some religious document dating to pre-English times it would be written in triangles, right?
Needless to say, I didn't. I found a couple of old places of worship, but was politely told that access to their records was conditional on my not having bathed for five years. I tried to tell them that if they added up all the days upon which I hadn't bathed, it did indeed come to well over five years, but they were thinking specifically of the most recent five years. Thoughtlessly, I had indeed washed myself during that period. Blast!
My trips to churches were not without some minor reward, however, in that I managed to ascertain the nature of the local religions. Basically, their adherents believe in a whole slew of greater and lesser gods, the actions of whom are beyond the feeble understanding of mere people4. This would seem to indicate that wherever the HA "out of darkness comes light" thinking originated, it wasn't from an existing major creed. Furthermore, the rather stoical reliance on faith required by a "there's these gods, see, and they just do things" doctrine would explain why the HA hadn't found it too hard to resist whatever missionary forays they were subjected to in the years following their resettlement in Wilsonia.
On the way back to the hotel, I dropped in on my optician. He hadn't repaired my glasses yet, but did try to sell me a monocle using the argument that the ready-made glasses I'd bought beforehand were being worn out unevenly, as I was only using one lens. He assured me that I'd notice the difference just as soon as I took my patch off. I assured him in turn that I was sadly unfamiliar with the laws of physics prevailing in this part of the universe, and although I appreciated his point of view nevertheless I didn't need a monocle because I would be getting my proper glasses back shortly.
He glanced nervously to a shelf behind me. On the way out, I sneaked a look at it; sure enough, my glasses lay there untouched. A luggage label attached to them read, "17".
Heigh ho.
It was possible, of course, that my glasses were remaining unmended at the behest of MEKTO's governor, in an effort to keep me in the city until I had discovered the information I was supposed to discover. It was also possible that I had already discovered it, but the authorities didn't know (although if they were shadowing me, doubtless they'd have picked up ALgazur and REEgor for questioning and debriefed them). It was, though, highly probable that I was deluding myself with a belief in my own importance, and that my suspicions of a conspiracy were, like most such suspicions, due to a profound lack of understanding of how the world works.
I still felt uneasy, though.
The article from the Encyclopaedia Virginia was written in a pretentious prose that I assumed was intended to convey some kind of academic authoritativeness, but which instead came over as merely pompous. Nevertheless, it did have a table in it which listed the various deltoid symbols and their meanings. Basically, deltoid script used an alphabet, rather than an oriental-style set of ideograms; this meant that I need only refer to the table to interpret each triangular form as a phoneme. There were about 160 symbols in total, mostly representing sounds at varying degrees of loudness, but with a few for numerals, punctuation and (no, I don't know why) pronouns.
Armed with this, I decided to try the antique shops of MEKTO.
The antique shop of MEKTO was operated more along the lines of an up-market, second-hand junk yard. Bits of furniture were littered about, each serving some secondary function as a place where stuffed animals, badly-executed paintings, cloudy glassware or clothes for the fashion-unconscious were stowed. There was a strong smell of mustiness throughout, which was powerful enough to mask out the standard rancidness that would normally be expected to dominate in a room containing orcs.
I was the only human present, as usual, but this time there were lots of other people around. Some were browsing, like me, but others were bringing in things they hoped (perhaps optimistically in some cases, particularly the woman with the box of exposed camera films) would be bought by the shop's proprietors. In one corner an auction was going on, the prices rising in the rather haphazard amounts that I had come to expect when orcs came in contact with numbers. All in all, it was refreshingly busy scene.
I found the books between the elephant's leg and the Scrab porcelain. They were in no order whatsoever, the only attempt at making it easy to search them being that the spines were, in the main, facing outwards.
Eagerly, I scanned the titles for deltoid script...
Less eagerly, I looked for something else to scan, as none of them showed any deltoid script whatsoever...
An orc strode up to me. "You ought to have to pay for that," he said.
"For what?" I protested.
"For reading all those books' titles. There must be half a novel's worth of writing altogether."
Being a millionaire, I decided to give my effrontery genes an outing.
"Well let's be generous and say there's a whole novel's worth of words there. How much would reading that cost me?"
He rubbed his chin, his brow furrowed in thought. "The plot would be rather disconnected, and it's all second hand, so probably something like 11 pennies."
"11 pennies. Very well, so why don't you charge me 11 pennies and then you can stop bothering me?"
"I can't charge you 11 pennies."
"And why not?"
"It's not my shop."
Ah, yes: I'd clearly fallen into the old "foolishly think that the person who comes up and says you ought to pay for something is the shopkeeper" trap.
I smiled. "Just before I pull your nose off, could you tell me whether you've seen any books with triangular writing on them during your wanderings?"
He grabbed his nose, like he thought I really was going to remove it, which is just as for him well because I was indeed sorely tempted. "Obviously you didn't read all the titles," he buzzed, and pointed to one of the middle shelves before scuttling away from the mad human.
I bent down and examined the words more closely. Although I had already scanned for deltoid script in the area where the orc had pointed, I hadn't actually read any of the titles; I was simply looking for triangles. Sure enough, upon further inspection I found an old-looking volume entitled Collected Pre-Anglian Poetry. I took the term Pre-Anglian to mean "dating from before the time when those humans from England came over", and looked inside the cover.
Everything was in deltoid script, apart from the introduction. I was on the point of reading said introduction when a voice behind me spoke, in orcish.
"If you think you're going to get that for half price just because you're only using one eye, you're wrong."
I turned round. "Are you the owner of this shop?" I asked, politely, also in orcish.
"No, I'm not the owner."
"Well in that case why don't you join the other lunatics meandering about the place, and leave me in peace?"
"Because I work here."
"Oh. Well that would be a good reason not to, I suppose. Can I buy this book?"
"How would I know? You might not have any money."
"I'll put it another way: I want to buy this book, and I want you to tell me how I should go about doing it."
"Well first you find a sales assistant..."
"Done that."
"Then you tell the sales assistant that you want to buy the book..."
"Done that."
"Then the sales assistant tells you how much it costs..."
"Which is?"
"29 pennies."
"Do we bargain?"
"We can, but it won't come to less than 29 pennies."
"Let's not bargain. Then what happens?"
"Then you pay and go home."
"Right, I understand. Are there any more books in here with this triangular writing on them?" I showed him what I meant.
"There might be, I don't know. One of the customers could have one hidden inside a pocket."
"Are there any more books with writing like this for sale?"
"No."
"Very well then. This 29 pennies can be in the form of a florin and five pennies, can it?"
"Yes, but..."
"But..?"
"But I'll need a book from you, to fill up the gap you left."
Uh? "A book. From me. You need a book from me to fill up the gap."
"Yes. I'll tell you how much we'll pay for it, and knock that off the total."
"You didn't mention that I'd have to give you a book."
"You don't give us it, you sell us it, and yes I did mention it: I said you pay and then you go home."
"So paying involves giving you some more stock, as well as pennies?"
"No, it involves selling us it. Are you addled?"
"Right, right. Well hold on..." I removed from my bag the Encyclopaedia Virginia, volume IV, and tore from it the page with the deltoid script translation on it. "How much for this?"
He took it from me and thumbed through it. "It's a new book, but someone seems to have vandalised it... 11 pennies?"
"Do I bargain?"
"Yes."
"10 pennies."
"No, you bargain by increasing the price."
"12 pennies."
"That's better. 11 pennies."
"Done."
He smiled. "So, that's 29 pennies for this book, minus 11 pennies for this book: you owe us 18 pennies."
"That's one shilling and sixpence, then..." I took the coins from the pouch I kept in my jacket and handed them over. "Transaction complete? There's no tax to be added on? No surcharge for the wear and tear on your shelf of having removed a book from it? No separate fee for all the air I've breathed since entering the shop?"
"No, all that's included."
"How very civilised." I turned to leave.
"Just a moment," he said, in English. "Can I look at your watch?"
His eyes widened in amazement when I showed it to him.
"I've never seen anything quite like that before," he said, impressed.
"It's digital," I explained. "Where I come from, lots of people have them."
"How does it work?"
"Tiny batteries inside."
"Mallett cells?"
"No, they're a different kind of battery; you can't get them very easily in these parts."
"Let's hope they don't run out then."
Ulp! "Yes, that would be rather inconvenient."
"Well, if they do run out, come here and we can sell you a complete new watch."
"I'll bear that in mind. Why have you switched to speaking in English, by the way?"
"Oh, I was going to say something to you that doesn't come out very well in orcish."
"What was that?" I had a feeling I would regret having asked.
"Well I noticed your watch had no hands on it, and I was going to offer to sell you one."
"You couldn't do that in orcish?"
"The hand I was going to sell you was the second hand."
"So?"
"So this is a second hand shop!" He grinned widely.
Yes, I was right; I did regret having asked.
Back in the hotel, I began deciphering the poems.
After an hour or so, I found that I didn't need the translation table any more, but I resisted selling it back to the junk shop to reunite it with the rest of its family - I'm not quite that cheap.
The introduction informed me that the entire book was made up of original pages from other books that were a lot older. The practice of old was to stitch pages together using copper wire, which was very strong and stylish but good for only a couple of hundred years. The book that I had bought was a rebinding of several of these much older books, a fact that was confirmed by the different layouts and fonts employed by each of the component parts.
As suggested by the title, Collected Pre-Anglian Poetry was a collection of ancient poems. The turgid prose, creative spelling and interminableness of it all put me very much in mind of Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon classic. Come to think of it, perhaps Beowulf might have been written as a result of some incursion by Virginian creatures into Dark Age Northern Europe, since it has a couple of rather nasty monsters in it and the hero gets offed by a dragon at the end.
But I digress... The first epic I read concerned a love affair between a king and the wife of another king. At one point, both kingdoms were threatened by a third kingdom, and the two kings had to join together to beat off the enemy, and as a result they became the best of friends. The king who was knocking off the other king's wife decided that he ought to confess his affair because he couldn't bear to cheat on his friend, who dearly loved the woman. Upon hearing the news, the cuckolded king summoned his wife, asked her if it was true, and, upon hearing that it was, had her put to death in some grisly fashion involving very hot arrows. He then forgave his friend, and the poem ended.
It wasn't the sort of thing which would please a feminist, and it had nothing to do with the HA, but I was glad to have read it successfully. I had confirmed my suspicion that in the past orcs were monogamous (or at least royalty was); I had also learned that I could actually translate this stuff.
Unfortunately, the most important thing I had discovered was that doing all this took me absolutely ages; it was dark by the time I finished. The next day, I would hopefully be able to collect my glasses, and could then head for home before Lakka rented my hut out as a warm, cosy place in which people could keep animals about to go into labour.
I awoke early the next morning, and decided I would start work on the second poem in the book; if I went along to the optician's around 11 o'clock, he might feasibly have opened his doors by then. Maybe if luck was really with me, he'd take off my eye patch, too.
The second poem was much harder to decipher than the first. It used many very difficult-to-understand words, the meaning of which I had to guess at. It contained about a dozen symbols unknown to the Encyclopaedia Virginia, mainly as conjunctions. I almost gave up on it all and went on to the third sub-book, but I knew I'd have to figure it out eventually just in case it had a lead concerning the HA; I persevered.
This time, the story concerned two warring tribes, the GAZH and the MIlakTAR. Both were powerful, and many smaller tribes paid tribute to them and sent them warriors. Sometimes, the GAZH would gain the upper hand, and sometimes the MIlakTAR would, but always the other fought back. Things continued like this for generations.
Too many generations for me... I skipped the middle third of the poem, where it was harping on about which tribe switched allegiance when and what the names of the victorious commanders at the battle of so-and-so were. I did notice that both MEKTO and Scrab got a mention, so could deduce that geographically it was set in this part of Wilsonia, but since this is the most hospitable bit it's hardly surprising that it's where the orcs came from.
I picked up the story in the middle of a list of MIlakTAR conquests. After a few more pages, things were looking bleak for the GAZH. The MIlakTAR had taken many CrICH of land from them and -
CrICH?
I reached inside my pocket and removed the coin that MOllok had loaned me. I'd meant to give it back to him after showing it to Mike and Margaret, but I hadn't quite got around to showing them it, so hadn't quite got around to returning it. There, in small, deltoid letters around the rim, were words I could now read: Conquered in the reign of RAZdalan - 63 CrICH - Praise the gods. So these weren't coins, they were tokens of ownership, like land deeds. Was there a RAZdalan mentioned somewhere in the poem? If so, MOllok was a GAZH or a MIlakTAR.
Excitedly, I went back over the pages I'd ignored, looking for names. Well, there were names aplenty, of course, but was one of them a RAZdalan? Other orcs may well have used the same CrICH system, so there was no guarantee that the GAZH or MIlakTAR had anything to do with the coin I was holding. If they did have, though, ooh..!
Then, I saw it: RAZ Dallan, warrior king of the MIlakTAR for four years during which time 913 CrICH, including 15 villages, were captured from the GAZH. The spelling was not exactly right, but then there were sentences in the book containing the same word twice with different spellings so RAZ Dallan was actually quite a good match.
The story suddenly became a lot more interesting than it had been for the previous three hours.
Three hours? I looked at my watch: 11:30 - I really should go and see the optician. Darn!
I decided the optician could wait.
So, the GAZH were in trouble. Their habit of constantly betraying their allies, by sending all non-GAZH soldiers out to die first while the GAZH stayed back waiting for the moment when the battle was already won, had finally cost them their support. Their client tribes were in outright rebellion, and the MIlakTAR were poised for victory.
What I read next made my blood run cold.
And so, GREhalta sent unto the ogres of JASANG,
A cargo of rich tapestries and oils and Elven spices,
And jewellery and cured beef and marble figurines,
And silver, and promises of lives.
The ogres came in their ships of fire and stone,
With iron swords and mighty axes wrought with death.
GREhalta and the GAZH attacked by night,
The ogres of the East attacked by day,
And scorched and charred was the land of the MIlakTAR.
It continued in this vein for several verses more. The allies of the MIlakTAR deserted, fearing that the ogres would turn on them afterward if they gave cause. Other tribes joined in the assault, eager for a share of the spoils. Eventually, only the MIlakTAR stood alone. They fought valiantly, but the combined forces of their enemies prevailed; finally, their soldiers surrendered to save the lives of their families.
You've guessed the rest: the ogres enslaved the lot.
The ogres already had slaves, of course, having been raiding the orcs regularly for thousands of years. Now, however, they had a whole tribe of them - more than they needed. That would keep the other orcs safe for decades to come. What amazing good fortune - unless you were a MIlakTAR.
Or, should I say, unless you were a HA.
I closed the book. So, I had my answer. The HA, as the MIlakTAR are now known, were sold out by the GAZH. What it came down to was that they were enslaved as a result of the treachery of their fellow orcs. They must have really, really hated them...
Putting this together with what I had already found out, I could reconstruct what probably happened thereafter. I knew for verifiable fact that after several centuries in captivity, the HA finally took up arms and rebelled against the ogres. Much fighting later, they defeated their oppressors, liberated themselves and the other enslaved orcs in the process, and then all returned to Wilsonia.
Here's the supposition... If the HA had battled for years against the ogres before finally gaining victory, they would be wise in the ways of warfare, and, like every generation of people who were ever involved in major armed conflict, be determined that it Must Not Happen Again. However, they would be living in close proximity to the very people who had set them up, and knowing this would inevitably lead to problems further down the line. Children who had not tasted the bitterness of war might see battle as a noble or glorious undertaking, and decide to avenge their ancestors. Therefore, in order to protect their children from themselves, the older HA perhaps unanimously agreed to tell them nothing of their history. As far as they were concerned, several generations earlier the period of darkness had ended, and now they were in the light. They had new lives now, and were determined to be able to live them without threat of war.
As for the CrICH coins, well there were two possibilities.
Possibility one: MOllok's ancestor at the time, and that of the woman in NemDAK, couldn't bear to part themselves from their coins because their families had kept the things hidden throughout centuries of slavery; they weren't about to destroy them now they were finally free. After all, a CrICH is a fair-sized piece of land, and maybe one day it could be reclaimed.
Possibility two: the coins were the deeds to the land the HA were eventually settled in. The story of their belonging to ancestors from before the time of darkness is made up.
Hmm, it had to be possibility one. The coins referred to land conquered from before the GAZH perpetrated their act of wickedness, so the date and location were both incompatible with possibility two.
It all hangs together, then.
Well fancy that.
On my way to the optician's, I considered whether or not the Virginian authorities also knew the true history of the HA, and concluded that they most probably didn't. As far as the Governor of Wilsonia seemed to be concerned, the HA were like the Biblical Israelites; a displaced people comparatively recently removed from slavery, looking for a place to settle. Indeed, the governor was perhaps aware of that very analogy; maybe it was exactly what he wanted to impress upon me? However, did he know about the deeper background of the HA's situation? Was there a copy of the same epic poem that I had read, somewhere on his shelves?
It didn't matter if there was. Without MOllok's coins, there was no way he could tie the HA to the MIlakTAR; the crucial piece of evidence was unavailable to him. He had readily accepted my hypothesis that the HA spoke the language they did because they were made up of individuals with a variety of linguistic origins, whereas I knew now that the reason they spoke like the people of MEKTO was because their ancestors hailed from the area.
Well, well, well... The ethnology I was brought here to write might actually be of interest to Virginia's anthropologists, as well as to those of Earth!
Ten years or so ago, I took my younger sister to a firework display at a football ground near York. There was ample seating, and we all got a great view of the pitch (where the event was taking place). About two thirds of the way through, my sister complained that her seat was too hard, and would I mind swapping. Being the big, tough, elder brother, naturally I agreed.
Moments after exchanging seats, I was hit by a falling rocket which dislocated my shoulder.
I have always used this incident as irrefutable proof that I have no psychic powers whatever. Nevertheless, as I approached the door of the optician's to collect my glasses, something told me that I was in for a surprise.
Surprised I was: the optician was lying in wait, and the moment I entered his room he pounced on me from behind the door and ripped off my eye patch.
"If you wanted it back that badly, I could have sent it by courier," I gasped, rather shaken.
"It doesn't hurt so much if it's removed in a swift, unexpected fashion," explained the orc. "You've hardly noticed any pain at all, have you?"
"That's true, I haven't. On balance, though, I'd prefer a few seconds of stinging skin to death from heart failure at being mugged by an optician."
"Well, I thought you'd survive, otherwise I wouldn't have risked losing my fee. Now, can you see out of that uncovered eye properly?"
I closed the good eye and had a look around. "Yes, it seems fine now."
"That's what I was hoping to hear. Most people would still find daylight too strong and it would be agonising to them, but you must be made of sterner stuff."
"It's just as well I am, because if I weren't then at this very moment you would be trying to figure out how to extract an ultra-violet torch from your rectum."
"I wouldn't try to remove it; I've always wanted people to think the sun shone out of my backside. Now, your glasses..."
"Are they ready?" Perhaps the fact that I had called in on him earlier when they weren't would have put him off.
"Yes, they're ready. I had to adjust the frames a little, because they weren't a standard shape, but they should still fit that dinky little human nose of yours."
To my amazement, they did fit. What's more, the lenses were perfect for my eyes - better than the ones I broke. OK, so I looked like John Lennon, but I could see!
I paid the full fee of 73 pennies. No doubt SKUP would complain when I told him, arguing that I could have sued for having had my eye zapped, and he'd probably be right. Still, I was grateful enough and in a hurry enough to eschew such legalities, and I headed back to the hotel to pack.
I returned to OLtic with renewed purpose. My Mullinger Mark III Ox was purring beautifully as I sped up the well-built roads through the outskirts of MEKTO. I could now tie up practically all of the loose ends which had been bothering me from before I left the village. I knew where the HA had come from, how their social organisation had evolved, and even what a CrICH was. I wasn't being set up by the Virginian authorities for propaganda purposes, and my research might actually be substantive enough to impress my peers. All this, because of a chance meeting in a bookshop and a lucky find in a clearance warehouse. How fortune had smiled on me (mind you, I'd paid for it with a fried eye).
Indeed, as I sped out into the countryside, a glorious sunset glowing over the plains to the West, I could think of only one small question to which I had not, as yet, found an answer: why was the HAIKAG bald?
1 No prizes for guessing whether the name was invented by orcs or humans.
2 One of the beauties of the Yorkshire dialect is that the third person plural is used as if it were third person singular when referring to individuals whose gender the speaker doesn't know. Of course, if you're not from Yorkshire it probably sets your teeth rattling. Sorry.
3 That's "to seriously doubt" for American readers.
4 In other words, they're random.
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21st January 1999: ltlwo9.htm