They camped at the foot of a tremendous uplift of stone as naked and wet as a newborn cub. The sea surged against it in great explosions of white spray swept inland by the wind. It salted the sand and the rock and the clifftops and it wet their clothes and chilled their bodies.
He felt Ogaz shivering beside him. Saand lay a little apart. He looked at the tusker and at the shorthorn and he felt as if he knew them from another time, like a clairvoyant who experiences their premonitions as memories and so searches their memory for future happenings. For a brief moment he knew that if he got up and went down the beach he would find the surf filling a fourth set of footprints along the strand. But no, there were only three in their camp. Only Ogaz and Saand and himself.
He shook his head. He needed food.
Ogaz cracked a crab taken during their run up the beach. It was the only creature they had seen all day. He handed Orc a share and sat back on his haunches with his share in his hand and his face toward the sea and the world wet and churning in his eyes.
Orc ate and watched Saand. She laid with eyes closed and hands beside her thighs, one palm down to the earth and one up to the sky.
"What's she doing?" said Ogaz.
"Listening," she said.
Orc listened too. To the waves crashing and a tongue of surf gurgling into a narrow channel at the uplift's bottom, and in the lulls between the swells the whispering of foam sinking into the sand.
"What's she hearing?" said Ogaz.
"More of you than I would like." She opened her eyes and sat up with one hand behind her and the other wrapping a bent knee. The vines around her horns wore salty droplets more numerous than their leaves, and their tiny creatures hid from the wind.
Ogaz gave her a third of the crab but she didn't eat.
"You don't like what you hear," said Orc.
She shook her head. "The farther away we get the quieter his voice. Far enough and I will not hear anything at all."
He didn't say anything to that because he did not yet understand it. He pinched crabmeat out of the broken carapace and put it in his mouth. He licked each finger in turn and as he scraped the shell for whatever was left he watched her eyes pick their way up and over the uplift ahead.
"They are up there somewhere," she said.
"Your elves."
"Yes."
"What do you know of them?"
"Only their works. Did your brigadier not teach you of them.”
“No.” He tossed the shell away. “She was busy teaching me other things.”
"What works?" said Ogaz.
"Horrors I’ve seen cast into the river."
"What kind of horrors?"
She closed her eyes as if not to see them. "You will know them if you see them. Stay away."
"Why?"
"Because I said."
"Why? Ogaz must know."
"Do you wish to become a tree? Be silent and do as I say."
Ogaz turned to Orc. "Ogaz does not always understand shorthorn. Does she say Ogaz becoming tree?"
"Yeah."
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"Already Orc is mad. Now Ogaz must also nurse shorthorn."
She began to tend the garden growing on her head. "Joke if it helps you cope. When the time comes do as I say. And if I am not there to say anything then you just stay as far away from them as you can get."
At dawn they mounted the uplift to the snout of a winding wadi of dead falls and empty pools. An impassable ridge pushed them left. It was spiked by horned pinnacles like the backbone of some slumbering [worldeater]. Then one of the pinnacles was black and gray, not red and orange, and as they came under it they saw it was a tree growing straight out of the rock. Its roots curled around and clasped the red stone as if that dead and dry land might run away from its grip at the first chance. Half a mile on and another tree grew out of the ridge. And another. Then the ridge collapsed on itself in a pile of broken blocks and it revealed a forest thicker and taller than any they'd seen or imagined. It thrust upward in narrow columns of perfectly straight up and down trees, black bark paneling over the silver phloem shining between like the scales of fish charred over driftwood fires. Their trunks naked of leaf and limb for fifty feet or more and their canopy so full no daylight penetrated its skirt. A thick gray mist gathered in their shadows with moist fingers drifting out into the wastes that recoiled wherever they found sunlight.
The air smelled sweet and earthy from wood freshly cut. Orc heard the voices of orcs and the thick and heavy chunk of an [ax] against timber. At the forest's edge, nearly invisible in its shadow and immaterial against its mass, a small band scraped and cut at a freshly felled trunk like scavenger birds slashing beak and talon into the flank of a dead leviathan. Dust swirled skyward in a yellow haze like smoke from a pyre for a creature older than any orc or human. A survivor of droughts lasting centuries and dry lightning stabbing at its crown and beetles boring its barks seeking good wet heart to hatch their young, felled finally by a few orcs acting like men.
A sow stood over the fallen giant with the handle of an [ax] in her hand and its blade against the ground. Her other hand wiped across her brow and she looked around at her fellows and the landscape and when she saw him coming she swung the [ax] onto her shoulder and shouted, "Musheater!"
Others turned. Some grunted and nodded. Most looked at each other then back to their work. He saw they dug narrow and deep pits like the postholes he helped dig for the [brigadier]'s teagarden. Several rounds wider than he was tall were set side by side to form a kind of platform on the ground. Stout limbs were driven into the earth and fixed to a ship's tackle of lines and rigging roped over the limbs of the nearest tree.
Glad Nizam's [weird] strode out from the operation. "Look brothers, savior musheater coming for saving."
"Take me to Glad Nizam," he said.
"Redblood giving orders now? Glad Nizam is too soft. We harden you up."
Some of the orcs around them laughed. He looked at them. What little sympathy he felt for them evaporated in the desert sun. "Your home is poisoned. Your brothers at the maw starve to death. You left them there."
The [weird] smiled. "Musheater sees much but not what's before him." He lifted a hand toward the forest. "Good growing here. Good eating also. Hare and deer and fowl. Enough for all orcs, even those at maw."
Saand said, "Tell me you have not taken from this forest."
"Much for taking. Much for sharing. Musheater worrying about poison? No poison here."
Orc put his hands on his waist and spat on the ground. "What does Glad Nizam plan to do about those she left behind."
"Musheater is so sad. Maybe he goes and brings them here."
"Half can't walk. The half who can would die on the trek."
"So so sad. Maybe musheater grows food for those starving? Mix up mush. Start camp of his own like woman who reared him."
"The land is poisoned. Your home."
"Our home. Or is musheater more woman than orc? Weak die, woman. Weak always die so strong survive. This is brotherhood. Way of the camps. Half who aren't walking and half who're dying know this. In beating hearts they know. You want to help? Go bring up others. They who walk still. Good eating here keeps strong strong."
Saand placed herself between them. "No. We must get away while we can."
The [weird] laughed. "Get away? Get away? Glad Nizam making new orcdom here. Shorthorn getting what she wants, yes? Orcs leaving Madlands."
She looked at the trees. "If you bring your followers here they will follow you no farther."
The [weird] stopped smiling. He whistled short and sharp. Four brownskins came up with boarding axes in their hands.
"Tell them about turning into trees," said Ogaz.
"Shut up," she said.
Ogaz tapped Orc's shoulder. "Tell about dwarf's magic orc rock."
Orc looked around at the desert then along the hard line demarcating it from the verdant forest. The arid red rock and the black loam. The long wind and the gray mist. He looked up the trunks of the tall trees. The water dripping from their boughs. In the venerable arches made by their overlapping limbs he saw a mastery of living and growing unmatched anywhere in the world.
He told Ogaz, "Don't leave her."
"What are you doing?" said Saand.
He couldn't make himself care about these orcs. Saving their dying land was beyond his skill. Yet there before him were the lands of those whose acumen for growing life was measured beyond all others. He shoved through the brownskins and walked into the forest said to belong to elves.
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> +1 [Awareness]: ...if that's so then cutting away one's land is a kind of selfmaiming... (4/10)
> +1 [Rage]: They knew what he was and they hated him for it. The only one reared to be what his folk had been, now he embodied the knifeedge they would need to traverse... (10/10)
> [Rage] Title Gained: [Remnant] They way of the camps is not the way of orcs. True orcs are masters of their hate.