7 #2
“Stay here, hold this keep, and show us that you are as devoted to your people as you claim to be. Show us you are not swayed by your elvish blood.”
“I am not an elf,” he said.
“No,” said Methud. “No, you are not.” But the way he looked at him, it was clear that Dathor was also never going to be an orc.
After Dathor was dismissed, he made his way through the tents, through the orcs who made up the foot soldiers of the army. No one called out greetings to him and he did not call greetings to others.
Of course, he’d never belonged anywhere.
Maybe with her, but only in moments with her, too. He certainly did not belong with her now. If he had ever thought he could belong with her, he’d thrown it all away with what he’d done to her in that chapel.
But it was the way of things.
Everything he’d said to her was true. Once the orc army had known he knew about this place, they said it was a natural target, because his familiarity would give them advantages.
And it was a test, of course.
If he objected, it meant that he wasn’t loyal, and there were always tests, everything was a test, because he wasn’t one of them, and no matter what he did, they were never going to accept him.
So, he couldn’t object.
And then, he knew it was Aerhril, that some orc was going to ravage her, and he wanted to object, and he tried to think of how to object, but he couldn’t.
So, he’d done the best he could. He’d gotten himself into this commander position by manipulating anyone he could, making threats, calling in favors, doing all manner of underhanded things.
It was true that he could, when he wanted, talk people into things.
It was true that he had, somehow, talked his way into the confidences of the High Chieftain of Arzakh, in only six years in the country.
It was true that he had been part of the early plans of invasion, and that he had urged invasion, had been one of the voices in the High Chieftain’s ear, telling him it was the right thing to do.
But this was mostly because he wanted to come home.
He hated Arzakh, because it was a bleak and difficult place, because he was miserable there. The country of Arzakh was a cruel sort of world where the land cracked open often, shaking and spilling up molten liquid rock. It was a place of ash and dark and heat.
Not all of it, obviously, because there were farms and there were streams and rivers and the sun shone there and all of that.
But one never knew when the ground beneath one’s feet was going to crack open and spew fire. It happened. It was a volatile place.
He couldn’t say if it was just being around that volatility that made the orc society the way it was, sort of brutish and concerned primarily with strength and prowess.
Or perhaps it was what happened to people who never had a real chance to build anything before it was violently destroyed. Perhaps that tended to mean that you learned to tolerate a certain amount of nastiness, expected it, did not think to question it.
Listen to him now, thinking thoughts like this, thinking of the orcs the way the elves thought of orcs, the way he himself had always been thought of, that orcs were just evil and nasty brutes.
Orcs were not evil, but then Dathor didn’t think anyone really was. However, he could not deny that the orcs and the elves behaved differently.
The orc culture was about survival. The elves, on the other hand, had not had to worry about surviving for a very long time, and this meant they had the privilege of thinking beyond survival. They could be moral.
Orcs took it for granted that nothing would be fair. Nothing in their world ever was.
Elves, on the other hand, had lived in a world where they could conquer the worser elements of nature and impose a certain amount of fairness on the world. So, therefore, they believed in fairness. They believed that when things were bad, they could get better.
It was less in the north than the south, but then things were easier in the south than the north. The world was more brutal up here.
The more brutality there was in the natural environment, the less a person had the privilege to contemplate the niceties of morality. It seemed to be the way things were, and Dathor could not deny it was true.
Elves were not superior to orcs.
Elves had just been luckier than orcs and had taken advantage of such luck to put themselves in a superior position.
Still, it could not be denied that certain things were observable.
Elves expected people to be decent and punished them when they weren’t.
Orcs celebrated whoever was capable of beating everyone else into submission.
Elves made laws and built complicated governments and had steam engines and gaslights and all manner of things.
They had a lot of things that the orcs didn’t have.
Once an orc found himself on the other side of Rathog Pass, he was stuck with the orcs.
There was no way back across the pass anymore. Findas paid mercenary soldiers to patrol the place, to shoot the orcs on sight, using those newfangled revolvers. The death was quick and clean and easy.
After Dathor had found himself stuck over there, in that wasteland of a country, he had wanted to come back.
It wasn’t about her. He hated her. He mostly hated her.
He thought about her a great deal of the time, and he fantasized about making her cry, but actually making her cry had been less satisfying than he had hoped it would.
It wasn’t about her.
It was only about comfort. It was better here, in Lothnehil.
Maybe it was about the principle of the thing, how it was mad that Findas was sending the orcs away after years of living amongst the elves. Or about how Dathor himself was a citizen of Lothnehil, born and raised there, never having known any orcs his entire life.
Whatever the case, he had made up his mind to come back, and oddly, the easiest way was this war.
The orcs’ High Chieftain listened to Dathor, and Dathor found himself saying things like, “We need guns,” and “We can win against them if we surprise them. They’re all soft and easily frightened, elves are.
We just roar in their faces with our gray skin, and they’ll all roll over and beg us to leave them be. ”
And somehow, some way, this meant having conversations with the high commanders of the army, and this meant making trade deals with elf businessmen, buying up guns and gunpowder and all manner of things.
But he’d done it now.
I’m home, he thought, looking up at Foxglove Peak. I’m home, and I fucked her, and I killed him. It’s done.
Yes, there was nothing more to worry about. The war did not need to be his problem, not anymore.
He could forget all about that.
He could just be here, rule this place, sleep in his uncle’s bed and drink from his uncle’s goblets and lord himself over the elves who would cower from him and his faction of orc men.
This was enough.