Chapter 124
Legkeds
Ogo
What a mood my orcs were in! Several songs were sung at once. Laughter rumbled in our chests. Eyes shone bright over smiles. Several orcs massaged fractured tusks. Beneath armor, every limb was wrapped in bandage. Blood dripped from a healing wound at my side, but I wasn’t the only one staining the snow red. In the far north, a long trail of blood lay behind us. Even the golem cracked smiles while his totem legs plowed the snow. In this place, there would never be spring.
“What were they called?” said the golem, translated by Jix.
“Scarpadae.”
“Orcs are tougher than they look.”
“Is your vision starting to crack? You should get that boulder of yours checked out.”
“No other creature I’ve seen would have survived such an encounter.”
“We trade or we fight. The barrels are running low anyway.”
On we hauled our carts, filled with traded treasures. Only a few carts still had barrels of beer. In the vast white of white sky and white land and white wind, we hoped to find our last destination. We made good pace, with high morale after our recent battle. Somewhere in the short days we saw things move before us.
White legs, two stories tall, came striding toward us. Squinting, I could see hundreds more pairs. The snow was thin between the bottom of our boots and the ice beneath. Those legs moved over the land in strides as wide as mature trees were tall.
I halted our trek as one pair of legs came right up to me. The knees bent, and a torso which resembled a furry monkey, descended as though from clouds. The torso was no bigger than I, yet its arms were as long as its legs.
It spoke with a voice that bordered on a shriek through cracking ice, and once again Jix applied mental strength to translate. “Orcs in the flesh. You lot are a long way from home.”
Dozens of pairs of legs trundled over. Their torsos hung high, and they peered down at us. What curious monsters. And in the barren world here, how did they subsist? What food was there? What shelter? What water?
The standing legs moved by us like pendulums. They strode along our carts, and long arms swung down. Spear-long fingers poked at our treasures in the carts. Around Hawkin’s barrels, their limbs glowed with chimeric colors as they tapped against the ethereal labels.
“Come,” I said.
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Beneath the falling gazes of those gathered monsters, I tapped a barrel to share with these strange creatures—these supposed legkeds.
∞
The legkeds squatted amongst us, and their legs formed sharp arches. Their smaller torsos against such long limbs made them appear like spiders. Several barrels of beer were now tapped, and we drank from blocks of ice crudely carved by teeth and tusk into chalices.
The legkeds were ravished with beer! Judging by the expressions of my orcs, I wasn’t the only one amazed by their thirst. Their taste for the beer even surpassed goblin fervor. What I couldn’t trade with the hostile scarpadae would most certainly go to the legkeds. They were sure to eagerly trade.
“This is all you have?” said an elder legked. His gaze had settled on our carts.
“We’ve left a few barrels in cargo, but this is the last of our trade.”
“We’ll never have anything to trade with you. We don’t keep anything.”
“How do you survive?”
Jix wasn’t able to translate so quickly. She and the legked spoke back and forth for less than a minute before she at last turned to me. There was a word she had trouble translating, and she couldn't interpret their gestures. She threw up a waving hand, seemingly baffled into irritation.
Overhead, barrels were passed from legked to legked. They dazzled over the colors and checked thrice each barrel for last shy drops of beer. Meanwhile, the sky grayed with dusk. Fur came to find me and groaned as he slumped beside me.
He unraveled his cartography supplies into the dust of the snow. With ink he had to thaw in his palm, he began expanding his master map of its missing north. He moved on to replicating the expansion onto scroll-rolled copies. Of the colors on his maps, the swaths of blue in the west drew my focus. I couldn’t help but grin when I saw the gold letters that spelled Ogo upon the sea.
A heavy sigh blew between my tusks.
Fur gandered at me and said, “You’re the one that chose to take us by land.”
I put my hands behind my head and closed my eyes. Cold wind wicked my armpits beneath my armor. “Do you remember the burnt orcs?”
“I thought you didn’t want to sail to Fiberthorn cove again.”
“I want Barnacle-eyes to sail there for me, but that’s not it. It feels killing to be so far from water. I wonder if all orcs feel that way.”
Fur grunted. He capped his bottle of ink and wrapped his fist around the bottle.
“This is as far north as we go,” I said. “I want to smell the salt again; feel the wind; hear the seabirds; hunt the fish.”
“How will you continue trading by land?”
“By hire and by command. How else?”
After a moment, with eyes to the sky, Fur said, “Night comes quick here.”
The clouds must not have been so thick during the day because the stars were bright and filled the sky. The torso of a striding legked blocked a path through the stars. It crossed in mere moments at astonishing speed.
Its silhouette passed over the constellation of Filtic’s frayed mallet. Images suddenly came to mind of the orc’s lore. I saw him, centuries ago as tales told, beating his own face with his mallet on the eve of horizon-long battles. The wood of his mallet lent him the chance at unparalleled speed, and where the edges frayed, the wood was stained red. He knocked upon the enemy faster than the rhythm of beat war drums. To such a large orc, battle was like putting down nails in soft wood.
Ah, such stories!
“You seem relaxed,” said Fur.
“This is our last point of trade. Then we’re seabound once more.”
The plume of my breath dissipated, revealing the stars. I felt a weariness come over me. As my blinks became slower over the constellation of Filtic, my eyes roamed the other constellations and stars, and I mused that there were still more shapes to make among them.