It was the old [brigadier] who'd named him Orc. He a ragged thing torn from the bosom of a dying sow. She a [scholar] and a [farmer] and a [fighter]. For sixteen years she made him in her image as humans do with all things like and unlike them: placing their world in the cosmic center, clearcutting its forests for farms, forcing their god to walk on two feet and eat with two hands and think with one hairy head because that's what they see in their polished silvers. Then the [armiger]'s soldiers came and the [brigadier] sent him away to pull long furrows in black soil for some [yeoman] brothers. Back then he still believed he'd see her again.
He pulled all day every day and at the end of each the brothers left him bridled to the plow and he leaned away from its cold iron blade and watched the stars pinwheel. He was too tired to hate the [brigadier] for abandoning him. Too tied up. He hated her in his dreams.
When the last seed was sown the brothers unbuckled him from the plow and tied his lead around a stout old oak standing at their property boundary. He stood and sat and slept in its shade. To the length of his lead its floor of leaves and acorns and ants became a home he couldn't leave.
No rain came that summer or autumn. Dust bronzed the heavy cornstalks and hot wind bent them bobbing over the ground like a routed levy returning in shame. When the brothers checked their corn it was black and dry. It fell lightly from their picking fingers. They were afraid because they didn't know what had gone wrong. Because they had nothing to sell and nothing to eat. They blamed Orc. They'd have whipped him for it but they were afraid of that too.
He sat with his bridle tethered to the oak and watched the [bookmaker] come up the brothers' lane as they scythed the blighted stalks. He didn't know her yet. She was just another human. She carried a torn bill rolled in her hand and she showed it to the brothers then folded and stuffed it in her pocket. They brought her over to him holding their scythes before them like spears.
She wore a man's tunic tied up tight over everything and trousers for riding though she had no horse and a thin [blade] looped to a frayed rope around her waist. Cowskin boots worn flat on their bottoms with stitching knotted in places from breaking and mending. She looked at him and turned and spat and looked again. "What's a matter with him?" she said.
"Nothing," said a brother.
"Ya don't want him?"
"No."
"The armiger knowing about him?"
"No."
She slapped the flat of an outheld [scythe]. "And ya didn't put him down?"
"It'd be unlawful."
"Y'all just too scared to try. He's not costing me a thing?"
"What're you offering?" said a brother.
"Just take him away," said the other.
"Awright," she said.
A brother put both hands on his scythe as the other started on the bridle.
"Take a copper," she said.
"He's worth more than that."
"Naw for him. For the rope."
They wound a quick noose in the lead and slipped it over his head and unfastened the bridle. The [bookmaker] took the lead and said gleeful well wishes to the brothers as if departing her own wedding. She walked him down the lane to the place where it met the seaway. He looked back past the half empty field and past the brothers to the gracious shadegiving oak. With his eyes and heart he said goodbye to his second home.
She saw him looking and smiled. "Ya done farming orc. Only the pit now. Only the pit til ya die."
She acted hard in the same way the brother's had acted hard but he could smell the sweat blooming under her tunic and trousers. She drove him past the fork to the [brigadier]'s estate with its rusting iron gate and defaced statues and olives shriveling high on old trees and he made sure to look the other way. She drove him through streams and he scooped water into his mouth as he ran and she drove him past a field of sweet smelling watermelons on the vine and she drove him past the old span and when their shadows were smallest they stopped at a wayside inn with a tankard carved on its board.
Its [barkeep] appeared in the doorway gripping an [iron mace] and he asked why the orc wasn't in the camps with the other filth. She told him to watch his mouth, that the orc was her filth now and folks shouldn't talk about other folks' property. He laughed at her and told her that she was crazy to let him out, that she could come in but the orc couldn't, that she could tie him up with the horses but not where he could reach them cause everyone knew orcs'll eat horses, they'd eat just about anything. She said she'd keep an eye on him and asked what a copper would buy.
"Not much with yon northerly war," said the [barkeep].
"Don't need much. Just a pot of boiling water and a fresh loaf."
The [barkeep] shouldered the [iron mace]. "A cup of well and a day old."
"Done deal. Bring a basin."
The [barkeep] delivered the water in a ceramic cup and the loaf in a wooden bowl. More than a day old. More like a month. The [bookmaker] mushed the loaf in the bowl with the water and let it set a while. Orc didn't much watch her. He listened to the songbirds in a naked old elm and the stillness of its branches. He pretended he could hear the resin inside retract. Readying for winter's chill. Back at the [brigadier]’s they'd be mending baskets and building ladders for olive picking. But he wouldn't think about that.
The [bookmaker] sat on a stair and leaned on the next and kicked her legs out straight with her heels in the dirt. She picked a pinch of the mush out of the bowl with her fingers and thumb and put it in her mouth. She spat it back in the bowl and looked at it and frowned. She passed the bowl to Orc.
He ate slowly and steadily with both hands. He licked his fingers clean. He grabbed her skin of water and drank deep.
"Ya gonna make me rich," she said.
He handed her skin back. "I'm happy for you."
Her eyes widened when he spoke and she dropped the skin and grabbed the handle of her thin [blade] and glanced up the steps to the tavern's door as if help might rush out of it.
She wet her lips with her tongue. "Ya talk mantalk?"
He tossed the bowl on the step where it wobbled around and around and clattered to a stop. "Some."
"How much?"
He looked at her. He didn't answer.
She made herself as big as she could which was still two feet shorter than him. "Ya best not look at me like that. I saved y'alls ass."
"Did you now?"
"Them farmboys was fixing to put ya down sooner than later."
"They weren't fool enough to say so."
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"Hey I didn't mean nothing by that before. Ya make me rich and ya won't die in no pit. Hell I'll even set ya free. What do ya think about that?"
"I think you shouldn't make promises you won't keep.”
"And ya shouldn't hold no grudges over good fortune."
He nodded at the empty bowl. "Buy me another of them and I won't."
"Shit. I ain't rich yet."
She stood him up and drove him along the seaway. His legs were good and his lungs full of the golden air and rich scents of harvest. He could've just yanked his lead from her little hands and gone straight into the folded up hills to live off [coyote] and [calf] and whatever bugs made the mounds of dirt under the cropped grass. To shout with clapped lightning and sleep on silent earth and wait for terrified humans to come with hounds and torches and bows to feather the rampant orc. The marauding orc. The free orc.
But his mind was still shaped like the [brigadier]'s. Full of what humans should be from their books and their songs. Lawful. Doing as they say. He wasn't orc enough to know better.
"Those farmboys called ya Orc," she said.
"They did."
"What'll I call ya then?"
"Orc."
"That ain't no kinda name."
"Tell it to the brigadier."
"The who?"
He shook his head. "It's my name."
She leered at him like she didn't believe him. "Y'alls plain easy. Them farmboys didn't bleed ya did they? Take all the fire outta ya before they took my copper?"
"Thought you said that was for the rope."
"Copper's a copper and there ain't no way to get rich without pinching every one. I'm called Booky. My pit's a day along the way. But we don't got a day so we're gonna run it. I promised Leeroy a fight tonight. Shithead nicked some pups from one of the camps and he's been training em up."
"You want me to fight dogs."
"They're orc catchers. Hotter than hellfire and bigger around than y'alls skinny ass." She looked him up and down and shook her head. "Ya'd think coming off a farm ya'd be fat as a cow. Goddamn lying hicks. They even feed ya?"
"No."
"Well maybe ya'll get some dog tonight. Can't wait to see Leeroy's face after. We'll start ya there and work up to bigger stakes. Squeeze more out of the crowd that way. Run on ahead of me now. Show me I didn't waste that copper."
***
As he waited in the pit he thought about that day and the years that had passed. He looked up at the faces ringing the rim. Their crooked teeth biting and chewing the flesh of a massive [hart]. Their tongues jabbering and their words wavering from drink. He heard their sadness at his imminent demise and their thrill to see a real live ogre.
The ogre was too large to enter through the cell so ten men lifted the ceiling grate and ten more levered them off the rim with a [hardwood plank] the size of a tree trunk. The ogre was naked and pale from however long in a ship's hold, tied up against their bonds, loose skin rubbed raw by the cords. The crowd screamed and threw scraps and forks and spoons at them. Booky pushed a [long spear] through the grate to cut their bonds. Their arms tore free and legs kicked and heads turned toward Orc.
"Big boys," they bellowed.
Booky lowered the [hardwood plank] through the grate on a [rusting chain].
The ogre grabbed it and both mouths howled, "Big club for big boys," and fist and plank pounded on the floor and the sawdust jumped and with every strike a little more chain came through the grate and piled behind them.
Orc went to the spot he always chose where the slanted shadows favored him and the lanterns blinded them and he waited in the dark like a dream of the past and the ogre did just what the [brigadier] had said ogres do. Orc moved as she'd shown him and they went over like the tallest and oldest of trees and he figured a way to wrap two necks with one chain and then wrapped it twice more around his forearm. He tightened it as the ogre's chest shuddered and their faces purpled and he slackened it when they paled. He heard the crowd thumping the rim and shaking the grate and ale showered down on the back of his neck and splashed the ogre's pallid faces and wet thighbones bounced off of his shoulders and he heard them shout brute and monster and animal and orc. They chanted it. Orc. Orc. Orc.
Afterward Booky sat on the rim like always with her feet hanging between gaps in the grate and copper and silver and gold coins stacked beside her. Her big toe stuck through a hole in her boot. The ogre snored where they'd fallen.
"Ya born with that mercy?" she said.
"Come on down here and find out."
She laughed and picked up a coin between her finger and thumb. "Reminds me of when that old huller Fernie threw down his tomcat to see what ya'd do. I won a round silver off y'alls mercy then and I'm grateful for it, but I gots to tell you I make a hell of a lot more off y'alls rage."
She smiled at him.
He didn't smile back. "Aren't you rich enough?"
"There ain't no such thing." She nodded at the ogre. "Plenty more to be made off em fatties, even having to feed two mouths on one body. What a way to live. Almost as bad as getting hitched. Hell, Orc. Maybe killing em would've been the mercy."
"They didn't deserve it."
"Didn't deserve it? They was fixing to beat y'alls face into hamburger."
"It wouldn't have been right."
"And saving em was?"
"It was to me."
"Orc there ain't no right in this world but divine right and thems of property ownership."
"Says the woman who pitted us."
"Hey now that wasn't me this time. The armiger's who sent them ogres here to stick ya. He was supposed to come and watch."
She stopped counting and leaned forward and looked at him over her toe.
"Y'all do something to him I should know about? Naw. Nevermind answering. Best I don't know nothing. You just stay ahead of the sticking. There's a right old pool going on when ya gonna get stuck. I'd rather see ya stick than stuck, so ya just stay ahead of what's coming and stop thinking about what's deserved and what ain't. Least in my pit anyway."
She turned to the ornate chair on the rim she'd dragged out for the [armiger].
"Sheriff says he done run outta villains, but it's a damned lie. There's plenty still flying free as a flock of crooning cuckoos who'll never be caught by no sheriff. They're the ones giving sheriffs orders. Ya come face to face with one of them ya best forget y'alls mercy. Ya stick em."
"Sheriff's not caught you."
She laughed. "I just give em what they wanna see, and ya ain't no different. Don't get huffy on me now. I knows better than y'all what y'all are and what y'all was born to. Notice ya ain't hollering after anymore? Ya got used to it now. Ya almost the water in the veins orc ya was born to be. Last thing that needs forgetting is that old lady's mercy. It's a lie and it always was."
"That's not what I was taught."
"Tell yaself that. Fine by me. But y'all never needed a whipping to fight and ya better not start. The minute ya stop fighting's the minute I'd have to sell ya. Recoup my investment."
"Your copper."
"That's right. Y'all would wind up in one of them armiger’s camps. Them orcs are real orcs. They'd stick ya the moment ya showed up smelling of women and talking like that goddamn great lady who reared ya."
He shrugged. "They could try."
"Course the folks coming to see y'all night after night why they'd still be coming and they'd still be cruel, just like what Fernie done with that tomcat. Cept now they'd be looking for something else to satisfy their cruelness. Something worse than watching ya. Taking it out on their wives and kids or some shit like that sailor ya done. Remember him? Boy that was a sight. The moment that boy's neck popped some of them women bout forgot y'all was an orc and I don't blame em. Guarantee their husbands never brought em back. Guess everybody's a slave to something."
She fingered a copper from her take and tossed into the pit. It bounced off the sleeping ogre and landed in the sawdust glinting orange like the sun he rarely saw.
"For y'alls conscience," she said.
He didn't say anything. He looked past the woman and the lanterns. Very high and very small a buzzard crossed the face of the green moon.
"Y'all act like that coin don't matter but that's only cause y'all are down there. Up here that's all that matters. Y'all will be seeing soon enough. I'll start a little pile of them for ya. Next year if ya still want to quit then I'll pay ya out and ya can go try and find that old lady. Three to one ya won't. There's a reason she left ya and a reason y'all are here. It's cause this is where ya belong. Doing what ya was born to do."
He looked down at the ogre. "That's what I'm afraid of."
She didn't hear him. "This is home now. Has been and will be forever."
"This isn't home."
She nodded. "Ya'll see."
She put her take in her bag and stood up and surveyed the pit. "God damn what a mess. Y'all spared em, y'all square em. I expect em to be oriented fore breakfast. Can't have em tearing apart the goblins cause they can't tell the difference tween scrapping and performing. I'm off to pay off Ray. Ya best grab that copper fore one of them goblins beats ya to it."
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> +2 [Rage] ...I promised to do what I could for him and that is what I did. We are all doomed to raise our children in our own graven images. It is the priests who say all souls have a common paternity. If that is so then who is to blame for wickedness... (3/10).
> +1 [Renown] ...me and my brudders seen him barehanded drop a twoheader... (2/10).
> Gained Item: [Copper Penny] Stamped with the royal personage.